User talk:SMcCandlish/Archive 112

Archive 105

←

Archive 110

Archive 111

Archive 112

Archive 113

Archive 114

Archive 115

March 2016

Daniel Horvath (actor) article

First of all thank you very much for your time and determination for the community of wikipedia I have translated the page of an Actor Daniel Horvath ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Horvath_(actor) ) from his Spanish version and really put all the useful references in order to give the best quality for wikipedia I could, therefore please check the bio of this actor and hope that you will approve and be able to arrase the tag of multiple issues because there is all related information is given already. The Russian version of this actor is also approved. I also add all the likes from the related articles for the page is not to be orphan anymore. Thank you very much for your consideration, if you have any question please do not hesitated to contact back. I really hope that you can help me with this.--Anonimoushh (talk) 16:35, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

That's probably better addressed at that article's talk page. I don't know enough about Horvath to comment very meaningfully. I think it's sourced well enough to survive as an article here, but I'm not certain the concerns in the templates are all settled; I wasn't around when they were added, so I haven't seen what the arguments are.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  13:32, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice

Hi, thanks for the advice! I'll be more careful in future. Kind regards, DanBCDanBC (talk) 19:40, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

@DanBCDanBC: You're welcome. I like to see less rather than more drama. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  13:29, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 9, 2016)

Hello, SMcCandlish. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Music of Africa Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Molecule • Cold Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:07, 29 February 2016 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI •

MEDRS guideline discussion

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) § Still confusing secondary and primary sources

Hi. I'm sorry if my participation in your proposal for improving WP:MEDRS complicated it. I probably would not have mentioned GMO's as I did if I had known it would go the route that it did. I was utterly shocked the other editor responded rather than just ignoring that part of my comment. If I had expected that response, I would have posted here instead.

I really support your idea and am not sure what to do now with all the drama. It may just be a distraction to derail any changes to the guideline. I know those who use the MEDRS guideline are very protective of it (just look at the part about not rejecting sources based solely on country which went through one or more RfC's and remains unresolved), which is why I thought your idea of an RfC was the only way to get it changed. But I do think it is great that you are trying to talk it out there. I hope you don't give up. Let me know what I can do so as not to interfere with your efforts to improve the MEDRS guideline as you propose. I thought your proposed language was close to what we want, but I did think political context is important too. --David Tornheim (talk) 10:42, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

@David Tornheim: I didn't expect this to work right off the bat this time. It didn't last time, either. While from one point of view, this needs to be fixed and needed to be fixed yesterday, from another it's probably too soon, after too many big disputes. But substantial progress has been made this time without much hair-pulling – more progress than I expected. Despite the crankiness of some of the input (e.g. from CFCF, who is seemingly angry at me for this old ArbCom-related thing), most of it's actually been productive. If CFCF hadn't made a confusing dig at my lack of brevity in the talk discussion, when everyone else was talking about guideline wording, I wouldn't have done the redundancy analysis I did on the three back-to-back sections, nor noticed that the "In short" in the footnote was unneeded). Sunrise's wording suggestions have been useful, as has Peter's conversion of one of Boghog's comments into wording we can also use. Even if this particular discussion falls over, it's probably getting close enough to something everyone can live with that it'll work next time. Because so many of the current participants on the page are recent "survivors" of multiple ArbCom cases, and not such great pals, I would probably do it as a WP:VPPOL RfC, to get broader input that can't be drowned out by a handful of the same old personality conflicts.

I'm also compromising. While I personally feel that all organizational position statements are by nature, and should be treated by default as, primary sources, inside and outside medicine, I can see that the consensus is not going to go that way about all medical/science position statements, so I'll be happy enough with a distinction between socio-political stands and assessments of the science. When the science part is "off", other sources will tell us so. CFCF is mistaking my compromises for "incoherence" and changing my mind without cause, but of course it's with the obvious and exact cause of working toward a consensus outcome that addresses the central problem. That is: falsely using AMA, etc., statements of a politicized nature as if they were statements of scientific fact. The problem at MEDRS is that it's mostly written by, and written as if for, medical people, when it has to be written for average editors. It's not "legislating WP:CLUE" to make certain that a guideline is properly parsed in the policy context by everyone, not just by doctors, nurses, medical students and professors, and bio-med researchers. A tremendous chunk of our medical articles' content is written by pretty random people.

All that said, I'm not really coming from entirely the same place you are on this, from what I can tell from what you've posted so far. I think my views are actually much closer to Jydog's.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:20, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. It's good to know the context, and I agree that compromises help, which is why I wish there were more neutral 3rd parties involved in such discussions to help craft something everyone is more likely to agree on by someone who has no strong opinions either way.

I did not see you respond to my example of the Enola Gay exhibit, which I thought was an excellent example of how politics affects authoritative statements from reputable organizations or agencies. (I need to look more at what is being discussed now.)

I am about to raise another similar example that relates to medicine: claims about Saccharine and cancer. I like this example better than tobacco, because with tobacco the causation was fairly conclusively established--not so with Saccharine. With Saccharine the FDA changed positions a number of times as new studies came out and from public and probably Congressional pressure (see Saccharin Study and Labeling Act of 1977#Research Perspective, [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5]). If Wikipedia existed during these changes in FDA position, consider how the proposed version of the guideline would handle it. The new version would (correctly) require the regulatory position which was influenced by politics to be stated as primary and attributed to the FDA (and possibly dated). But let us try to apply the remaining language of the new version to the FDA statements:

Where they contain summaries of the evidence..., they are ideal secondary sources for the claims in that material. Distinguish between a regulatory position about X and a finding that the research demonstrates that X cause(s) cancer, which may be stated in Wikipedia's voice and cited.

According to this, prior to the FDA's Press Release in 1972, an editor could safely state the science the FDA used to justify the GRAS position in Wiki-voice. But immediately after the press release, the Wiki-voice would need to change to reflect the science the FDA referred to in their new position. The proposed policy seems to allow the FDA to determine what the science is based on their announcement of their regulatory position, so that if the FDA takes a new position on a regulation, the science changes concurrently and the Wiki-voice has to change because of it. That does not seem right to me. And then what is one to do when the National Academy of Sciences in 1974 "reviewed available data and stated that saccharin itself could not be identified as the cause of tumors due to impurities and problems with research."? [6]. Did the science change because of the Academy's report on the science? Could one put the NAS position in Wiki-voice when the FDA's position at that time contradicted it? [I'm leaving out the rest of the history and flip-flops of the FDA's position.].

It seems to me the science is not determined by these agencies but interpreted and reported by them with a somewhat subjective filter influenced by politics and the organization's mission, which is most subjective when there is political pressure. I do think publication of studies in scientific journals does indeed change the science, unlike a press release by the FDA or NAS that is advocating or defending a particular regulatory position. (Note: one could safely argue that the publication of secondary sources can be influenced by money and politics as well.) So, that's my main concern with the language, that pronouncements of these agencies (or organizations) regarding a regulation can effectively change the science. I would like to get your take on this before reporting it there. --David Tornheim (talk) 01:29, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

David Wikipedia follows the mainstream consensus whatever it is. Yes science moves, and so consensus moves, and so Wikipedia moves. However hopelessly corrupt or relative you think that is. We would have reported that the world is flat, back before it was accepted that it was round. Please stop trying to import your post-modernist sociopolitical pretensions into Wikipedia; our role as editors is not to critique the consensus. You will keep wasting your own time and everyone else's as long as you keep trying to do that. And for pete's sake artificial sweeteners on the market do not cause cancer at the expected doses. I can't believe you are dredging up that old conspiracist crap. Jytdog (talk) 01:56, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

David, editing your comment after someone has responded to it, is tacky. Again this is WP:TPG 101 stuff. I can only shake my head. As for the back and forth on toxicity that you added in that dif, that was primarily resolved by the NTP report in the late 1990s that delisted it as a carcinogen, (NTP is a major scientific body; btw - its reports are our gold standard source for tox stuff. if you want to see rigor, check out their review of BPA - 321 pages of rigor. amazing ) so I don't know why you are talking about things that happened 20 years before that, like it is some big deal. Jytdog (talk) 04:12, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

I'd rather let the larger discussion play out at the talk page (and agree mostly with Jytdog above; for me, this really has nothing to do with whether the scientific consensus is sometimes wrong; rather, it is that position statements often do not reflect scientific consensus, but political posturing). I'm not alone in drawing the distinction I'm trying to draw, and some have commented with the same as my original position, that org. statements should not be treated as secondary and "ideal" at all. At this point, I think my compromise positions, to either specifically call out socio-political position statements, or just drop "position statements", leaving "guidelines", is kind of a bargain for MEDRS status quo fans; either of the variations is certainly less of an adjustment than considering all organizational statements including guidelines to be primary or tertiary and to be used with caution. Thanks for the NTP link; I may have to look at that BPA thing, just for my own edification.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  13:28, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

That BPA review is amazing. What I love about it, is the care they took in evaluating the papers that have been published, and being very clear/transparent about whether - and if so how - a given paper is useful for tox considerations. The detailed report by Chapin et al has most of this. See for example the introduction to 3.0 "DEVELOPMENTAL TOXICITY DATA" spanning pages 235 and 236 of the printed page numbers. So much care is taken throughout this paper to make sure that the published data is useable, and to use it appropriately. This is real tox work, which is so, so different from some biologist dumping a bunch of chemical X directly onto cells in lab, finding some harm, getting that published, and then generating press pieces screaming "X is toxic OMG!" - and so many editors want to add crap content to WP based on sources like that. This is one of my biggest, longest-term concerns about our health content. We really need a MEDRS for tox. Jytdog (talk) 22:03, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jytdog: I don't doubt it. It may be that we more generally need a rubric for distinguishing different types of scholarly publications better; the same kind of problem arises in other areas. And it's closely related to my concerns about labeling "position statements", as a blanket category, to be "ideal" and "secondary" sources when they're often not.

I'll get into that for one paragraph (in a hopefully new way), then give it a rest and move back to the more general matter: I phrased it poorly at your talk page, like it was some kind of personal issue, but I think that WP collectively leans in this direction because it's a simplification that's easy for non-expert editors, combined with the feeling that things should not be changed lest some unforeseen crack appear that FRINGE types can drive a wedge into, even if that's not a likely result of a particular change (or a more particular change to fix the problem at hand, even if the first proposed one wasn't quite it). But the "there are 'scientific' position statements on 'medicine' and then there are genuinely scientific position statements on medicine strictly" distinction is pretty much the same as "there's 'medical' data on 'toxicology' and then there's medical, not just vaguely scientific, data on toxicology in a meaningful sense" one that the BPA review authors were drawing, or so it seems to me. Some others in the discussion over at WT:MEDRS also seem to be making a distinction along the lines of "there are guidelines 'based' on a 'review' of medical research, and then there are guidelines very closely based in a rigorous literature/systematic review of medical research".

Back to more general matters: These kinds of questions can also come up in even social science and humanities research, in their own ways ("there's 'archaeology' in the interpretive sense, and then there's archaeology in the actual, rigorous lab work sense", etc.) It may just be that WP is still too immature as a work to get these finer points right. It might take another 5+ years before: a) we get enough articles in tight enough shape that these distinctions really frequently make a big difference in article content and quality; and b) we have enough academic-source-experienced editors who can figure out what, exactly, kind of academic source they're dealing with. The latter seems to be the main part of the problem. I can't tell you how many times I encounter people here who are convinced that every single word between the covers of any academic journal (or any newspaper for that matter) is a reliable, secondary source, and of exactly the same kind and quality. Partly this is the fault of our own definitional wording at PSTS, which seems to imply that certain kinds of publication are secondary sources, rather than that certain kinds of content produced by certain editorial processes, often found in certain kinds of publications, are secondary sources. It's thorny, but we'll get there eventually.
(A recurrent exchange of this sort goes something like: That newspaper op-ed from Republicans for a Pure America isn't a reliable, independent, secondary source. What?! You think The New York Times isn't a reliable secondary source? Of course it is! So, it's okay to cite the horoscopes, fashion advice columns, family-authored obituaries, and classified ads in it as RS? Uhh.... There's a journals version that uses the inter-colleague bashing on the letters page as an example.)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:25, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Hm. Not sure how to reply all this.

First, there are fields where I generally don't edit, like politics and popular culture, because there isn't a body of literature, and major organizations that issue statements, that have authority. As you say there is no agreement on where to find "accepted knowledge" in many fields - and on top of that, as you note, the lack of basic research skills that many editors bring to the project only adds to the problem). But with sourcing itself a free for all in those fields, editing is too, and Wikipedia is too close to the Mad Max world for me - too irrational and bullshitty. I don't know how to solve those editors' problems about authoritative sourcing. I stick mostly to science and medicine.

I think MEDRS has real stature in the community now, which is a great thing - people generally "get it" that health content needs extra care, and they "get it" pretty quickly that the there are genres within the scientific literature - which includes statements by major health organizations. MEDRS does a pretty good job of explaining that, too.

I still don't have a sense that you are grappling with the messiness of medicine. "Accepted knowledge" in medicine is often based on best practices arrived at through tradition, anecdote, discussion ... but are in any case not evidence-based - not based on reviews of the literature. It cannot be 100% based on published studies, as not everything has been studied, studied well, etc. And even on things that have been studied all kinds of judgement comes in - medical judgement. Is approach X with risks Y and benefits Z better than approach S with risks T and benefits U for a given kind of patient? This sort of thing. Major health organizations matter - they actually have authority to define and communicate accepted knowledge, and society needs that. This is where in my view the epistemology of WP is very cool. We don't seek to know the Truth. We just need to identify where society produces and deposits accepted knowledge. While in most of our culture, there is widespread relativism and distrust of information-producing institutions (e.g. "mainstream media), in science and medicine there still are institutions that have authority. There are, Mercola and his fans notwithstanding. And that is where we in WP turn to find accepted knowledge. Reviews in the literature and the institutions that are the pillars of our scientific/medical establishment. What do you say about that? Jytdog (talk) 06:53, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree with it pretty much word-for-word, just not with the inferred conclusion. The fact that much of the organizational authority isn't based on studies but on professional impressions of things that "have [not] been studied, studied well, etc." – a field-specific meeting-of-minds on something, based on "tradition, anecdote, discussion", and clinical experience, surveys of practitioners, and other not quite so subjective things. It's an authority of professional agreement, not an authority of fact-based evidence, frequently. This is of course necessary, and it's hardly limited to medicine. But it means there's a definable difference between those things and stuff like systematic reviews, a difference that matters here, for our purposes. They're quintessentially primary. That doesn't make them "weak" or "low value" sources; many primary sources can be very authoritative. The only "costs" at all to correctly identifying them as primary are a) attribute don't just state in wiki-voice, and b) do not use for WP:AEIS claims, again when they are stated in wiki-voice. This is essentially zero cost at all, certainly worth being clear on the distinction. Precisely because MEDRS is [otherwise] so well done and so influential, it's very likely to be copied, first in additional science sourcing guidelines (I would like to see a WP:BIORS for the biological sciences next, and this is one of my primary reasons for involvement in MEDRS, because of the overlap). It will be an increasingly serious problem if this primary/secondary confusion is perpetuated in new WP:*RS pages, especially the further the matter gets from a) somewhat hard sciences and b) topics that people take so seriously (i.e. they'll be more and more tolerant of confusion between source types). The whole matter could be resolved in any of the ways already proposed, and another would be to cut that part out of the "ideal secondary sources" statement, and move it into a separate one, like "Also of great value are the guidelines and medical position statements of [the organizations, I forget the exact wording]; although they are primary sources, they are high-value, reliable ones we can use with attribution."  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:49, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't know what to say to you. You act like "major health organizations" spit out guidelines like my dog shits. They are consensus documents produced by authoritative bodies, synthesizing best practices. They are essential secondary sources where we find "accepted knowledge" in a given medical field. Essential. sources. of. accepted. knowledge. Ideal. Jytdog (talk) 09:18, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

The other respondents at the discussion at WT:MEDRS are making it pretty clear why they're (except sometimes, in particular parts) not secondary, but a mixture of primary and tertiary, and why they're not ideal. I think the problem here is that you're failing to distinguish one level of "consensus" from another. A statement by the AMA is a consensus (based sometimes tightly sometimes loosely, on what the actual research says) among specific individuals in working groups within that organization, filtered through overly politicized internal layers; it's not an unexpurgated consensus across the entire medical profession. For that, we turn to multiple systematic reviews and see what they conclude in common. WP would actually do just fine if it never cited citing a medical organization position statement for anything, ever. There's no problem with citing them if they're attributed. There's a big problem citing them as something they are not. Anyway, I don't see any point in re-re-rehashing this stuff here on my talk page. WT:MEDRS is the venue for this, at least for now, though it seems clear to me that WP:VPPOL will be eventually.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:08, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply on Template:Closed down

Thanks for your reply on Template:Closed down.

I admit I was frustrated with my inability to accept/understand your post of 05:15, 24 February 2016. I really did read to me as a kneejerk post. I did make more than minimal effort, and did fail to comprehend the thoughts behind the post.

NB. I generally quite like your views, including as described there, and I found your post 10:12, 29 February 2016 very helpful.

I am pleased to see that your WikiStress has returned to "Just Fine" since the last time I posted here. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:37, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: It's all good. I apologize for being testy over there. I was being savaged by CFCF for my "verbage" (yes WP:VERBAGE, not verbiage) at WT:MEDRS at the very same time my attempts at brevity were falling flat at TfD, so it seemed "damned if I do, damned if I don't". If it's any consolation, I really did mean the first post. My initial reaction to learning of that template's existence was "how did I miss this?", and to open the userspaced location of what used to be MOS:REGISTER to put that template on it, and in another window to start drafting a list of things with {{Historical}} or {{Rejected}} on them that would be "better" with {{Closed down}}, and to start it with both of the anti-WP:CRITERIA "concision" essays that were spared outright deletion by a hair .... Then I realized my blood pressure was rising, in anticipation of disputes breaking out over most if not all of the envisioned taggings, and how much XfD, etc., documentary support it would require to prove each case, and etc. So I didn't save the one tag, or the list. Days later, I saw the TfD and posted. I agree that some things have effectively been shut down, but I think it will spell trouble to label them that way, especially absent a formal process by which the community kills the power and cuts the cord on something; there's no dividing line in policy between a closed-down thing and something that the community doesn't want right this moment.

Anyway, sorry it wasn't clearer. I am pleased to agree with you so often as well, and was not trying to burn a bridge. Sometimes I forget momentarily that I'm posting to people not to a faceless system (my user pic on my own page is really mostly intended as a self-reminder in this regard). Jytdog and I had a good e-mail exchange, and I dropped a line to CFCF, too, to try to work past our momentary loggerheads.

WikiStress: Definitely much lower of late. My primary sources of it for the last two years were two individuals, one of whom I've made a modicum of peace with since mid-2015 (I'd earlier actually mostly-quit editing for a month or more at a time, more than once, to get away from disputes with that person and their one-time ally), and the other of whom showed unproductive enough stripes in our area of conflict to be put in a different part of the zoo for a while. It's been amazingly refreshing to be able to dig into my piles of style guides and other language references to actually do sourcing runs for article improvement instead of just to put out constant wildfires (usually from the same source) at WT:MOS for a change. Some of that sourcing is being used incidentally for MoS stuff, like the , Jr., → Jr. proposal at WP:VPPOL which someone launched after I posted all that source material to Talk:Comma, but I'm trying to encourage people to source language questions in a way that can be used at articles first and foremost. I think I will focus on improving English-language-related articles this year. It's kind of embarrassing how poor many of ours are. I've started drafting User talk:SMcCandlish/WikiProject English Language, because it's just damned weird that we have no such project – it goes a long way to explaining the state of these articles.

Well, thanks for reaching out, and I apologize again if I was tooth-gnashy.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  13:45, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

No worries. Verbage would be verbiage where the problem is excessive verbs, without concern to ps and qs, and is? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:21, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

The micro-essay isn't even cogent. It's confusing two attested but unrelated pop-culture usages, and mixing them with the editor's own neologism bent, then it tries to address a whole bunch of things that are not really related, like conservatives and their beliefs, inability to formulate a point, being more wordy than is necessary, bad-faith text-walling with meaningless posts just to dominate a page, filibustering (i.e. stonewalling), and the grievous sin of changing one's mind. He says he wrote the essay about me, and is clearly angry with me over not taking his side in an e-cigarettes debate, but of his list of random complaints, only being more wordy than necessary and being capable of changing my mind in response to a debate are traits of mine, and only the first of those is actually any kind of problem, since the second is why we have consensus discussions instead of votes. It's one of the least sensible things I've read here, and its lack of coherency in the course of taking a stand, it says, against incoherency, is amusing projection. I think the editor just has trouble with or a lack of patience for complex arguments, and everything that's ever irritated him about any complex argument or anyone making one is all the same thing, you see, all traits of an imagined Archetype up to no good (which sounds an awful lot like conservative caricatures of everyone to the left of them).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:08, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Anna Sui Cleanup

Resolved

Hi Scott, thank you for your extensive feedback on the Anna Sui article. Do not have much experience on writing articles and the guidance was very clear. Made extensive changes to the article and appreciate further comments and support from you. MargaritaPoppa (talk) 02:41, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm not a "Scott", but okay. :-) Good cleanup work. I posted a note at the article talk page, and left you some citation formatting details and such at your talk page.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  13:09, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

So Sorry, not sure why I thought so! Saw your feedback, thank you for your support on the formatting / citation details, extremely helpful! MargaritaPoppa (talk) 09:43, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

YW. It's geeky stuff, but it becomes section nature after a while, like learning a foreign (or programming) language.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:31, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Penny

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Penny. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Darkfrog24

Resolved

I can think of 1–2 good things that might come of you posting on Darkfrog24's talk page, and many, many bad things. Enough said, hopefully. --Laser brain (talk) 06:01, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

@Laser brain:. Noted! I did not get the attempted ping at the 3rd AE round, and did not know DF24 was blocked until after I posted that (and it was genuine constructive advice for the essay, which I thought could be a useful piece if written without baggage; guess it'll be a moot point for a long time, given the indef). Hell, I didn't even know about the earlier block! Shows you how much I'm "stalking". I only went to look at the essay draft because someone mentioned it to me.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:01, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Reference errors on 1 March

 Invalid

 – Um, no, there ain't no cite error on that page.

Hello, I'm ReferenceBot. I have automatically detected that an edit performed by you may have introduced errors in referencing. It is as follows:

• On the Anna Sui page, your edit caused a cite error (help). (Fix | Ask for help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, ReferenceBot (talk) 00:23, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Verb tense

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers § Referring to past events (e.g. sport victories) with "the years are..."

No point arguing with someone who is here to WP:WIN.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
I'm not going to join your edit war, but you're wrong. Those are, not were, the years they won. That's present tense. If the years they won were revised, the old list of years would be past tense. ―Mandruss ☎ 03:45, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Now you're adding POINTy editing to edit warring. I made them footnotes because I believe that is a good application of footnotes. The fact that it also avoided the tense question was merely a beneficial side effect. Since you insist on edit warring to force your opinions on an article, and I refuse to engage in that kind of behavior, I will leave it with you. Edit warring wins, once again. ―Mandruss ☎ 04:19, 2 March 2016 (UTC) @Mandruss: Being reverted once doesn't make it an "edit war". Please actually read WP:EDITWAR. Please also read WP:POINT; someone disagreeing with you, and spelling out exactly why, is not "disrupting Wikipedia to make a point". Tone it down a notch. Someone not being agreeing with you and your own revert does not mean anyone is doing terrible things to you or the project. As I said, without any finger-pointing, at your own talk page before noting this angry post by you here: Another idea (which I edit-conflicted on) was to just move the years into a parenthetical. Anyway, I raised the question at WT:MOSNUM since it's liable to come up elsewhere. Either the parenthetical option or the footnote option is probably good enough for the specific case.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  04:26, 2 March 2016 (UTC) WP:EDITWAR leaves ample room for disagreement. it is perfectly possible to edit war without breaking the three-revert rule, or even coming close to doing so. As far as I'm concerned, BRR begins an edit war. B R R. My R notified you that your B was disputed and it should have gone to article talk at that point, despite being more trouble. We don't discuss by edit summary. I don't know why you would go to WT:MOSNUM with this, as it's a matter of English grammar that has nothing to do with numbers. Perhaps WP:RDL would be better. ―Mandruss ☎ 04:37, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Skipping all the "how dare you revert me, I'm going to rant at you forever" stuff. Let's try this again: You implemented a footnote solution, at the same time I was implementing a parenthetical one, both of us with an eye to writing around the dispute. Either will work fine. The version you put in is in place right now (I reverted my own edit-conflict). So I have no idea what you're continuing to rage on about. Perpetuating a dead dispute is just petty. I don't need to address whether your beliefs about how editwars are defined actually match consensus here, since the dispute was over the moment you came up with the footnote idea. At some point you have to figure out that you already got what you want and can drop the WP:MASTODON act. As for the underlying grammar question, it's specifically about dates, and MOSNUM covers dates. I have no interest in RDL's amusing but mostly original research, only in what MOS wants done with references to past event dates. I actually already know what the answer is, but opened the discussion as a courtesy to you (one you've not exactly earned).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  05:46, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Your hypocritical, superior tone is all too common among editors with your years, but I expected better from you based on my limited experience with you. Too limited, apparently. Happy editing. ―Mandruss ☎ 06:02, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Wow, agism now? [The funny thing is, I can't even tell if you think I'm some lame old fuddy-duddy a damned young whipper-snapper, so your attempt at an insult was a dismal failure.] Go troll someone else.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  06:07, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

RfA

Resolved

Try not to get drawn into senseless or irrelevant arguments at RfA. Pldx1 has a propensity for this kind of thing. I fought a 6-year battle to get RfA cleaned up. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:42, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I didn't realize he was a gadfly. Anyway, I already refactored his attempt to engage in in mid-voting extended discussion and moved it to the talk page.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:16, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Some baklava for you!

To fortify you in your marathon task of finding an acceptable form of words to use in our MoS. I admire your patience and stamina and am thinking of proposing you as a Middle East peace envoy... BushelCandle (talk) 00:25, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Opa!  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:42, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Placement of refs

This edit to WP:CITEVAR made a significant addition, relevant to the discussion of the placement of references in wikitext. Where was the consensus for it? I can't find it, but you follow these things more closely than I do. If there was no discussion and consensus, the current version of it should be removed. (And then wait for the reaction!) Peter coxhead (talk) 13:13, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

None that I know of.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:30, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't see it in there now. Maybe I reverted it myself (it seems to ring a bell), or someone else did. I think I did it, or reverted something similar, since the wording I was going to use, something along the lines of "this is not what WP:CITEVAR is for; it's about citation *styles*, but this is technical *formatting* of citations across various styles" seems familiar. Then again, I've reverted more than one "no one can ever change anything about my citations, dammit" insertion before.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:35, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: Update – it was still in there, in different wording. I removed it. Guess I'd better go put on the asbestos suit.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:41, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Yep, I was just telling you it was still there with different wording when we had an edit conflict. You'll have my full support; there needed to be a proper discussion and consensus for such a change. I fear there might be a consensus since some editors seem to think they WP:OWN every minor feature of reference they insert, but we'll see. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:48, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Per Nikimaria's revert, the relevant archived discussion is Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources/Archive_38#CITEVAR, where a few editors agreed with the change. --Izno (talk) 20:06, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@Izno: Yeah, I know. A handful of individuals who feel proprietary about "their" citations cannot trump multiple policies though a WP:FALSECONSENSUS. I know for a fact that multiple editors are surprised by and opposed to that "land-grab", so the addition is definitely disputed. That means revert to the status quo ante.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:48, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Sure, just pointing out the relevant discussion. --Izno (talk) 12:35, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

@Izno: Right-o.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:36, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Friendly reminder

Resolved

 – I don't see that there is an open issue of any kind.

Note there has been an ArbCom case that included this remedy:

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Infoboxes#Editors reminded

All editors are reminded to maintain decorum and civility when engaged in discussions about infoboxes, and to avoid turning discussions about a single article's infobox into a discussion about infoboxes in general.

At Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Somewhat related discussion the only infobox mentioned (thus far) is the one at Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam, BWV 7, yet I find your edit here somewhat provocative (containing e.g. "Infoboxes cannot even be relied upon to continue existing at all at such articles; the WP:CLASSICAL camp above all know better, since editwarring to remove infoboxes from composer articles turned into a WP:ARBCOM case that did not go well for the anti-infoboxers in that project, though some of them continue to lobby against their inclusion" – there's no "camp" in this sense apparent from the preceding edits to that page, and it pigeonholes me and other editors in camps where they certainly don't belong).

Infoboxes were brought up in that discussion before, and afaik I was very diligent in not taking the bait to let it turn "into a discussion about infoboxes in general", but I think it best the baiting would stop.

For clarity: nothing bad happened yet, just a friendly reminder not to lose that ArbCom remedy out of sight for your future editing. No need to reply (I don't have your userpage on my watchlist so probably won't see it), and as far as I'm concerned you can remove this message here ASAP, in order to avoid attracting more attention to this than necessary. --Francis Schonken (talk) 13:56, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@Francis Schonken (also pinging Gerda Arendt as directly involved): I didn't say anything about infoboxes being involved in this particular matter; I'm indicating that the WP:CLASSICAL wikiproject has a case history of WP:MOS-related WP:CONLEVEL problems, and this seems to be closely related to the ongoing pseudo-dispute. If those involved would just follow the extant guidelines like everyone else, then there is no dispute; the whole thing is illusory and a waste of WP:VPPOL editors' time; there is nothing ineffably different about the Classical music topic or wikiproject than exempts it from compliance. "Camp" is just vernacular for "group", with an implication of territorial defensiveness against encroachment by other groups, which perfectly describes most wikiprojects. If you think I'm implying WP:FACTION editing, I am not; I would have linked it explicitly. (You should know by now that I have no fear of doing so when I'm certain something like that is going on, and would be able to back it up with quite comprehensive diffs. (MoS is a lot more stable and has a lot less disruption on its talk page of late, because of the kind of case I'm prepared to make when it's needed, though I'm not apt to start one myself other than to stop ongoing editwarring.) The Classical-and-style conflicts are not a conspiracy; it seems to be something more like "our wikiproject is just so mega-important that the rules don't apply to us, and everyone has to site up and take notice when we internally argue ourselves into confusion about a guideline" chutzpah.

I actually agreed with most of your position in that thread (but not playing two parts of MOS:LEAD against each other), so I'm not sure what your point is. It seems like you simply don't want any discussion to refer to the wikiproject's troubled history and how that may relate to ongoing dispute in and around its scope. I think it's actually central to the matter at hand in that thread. So, no, I won't be hiding this off my talk page, and am only too happy if more attention is drawn to the question, to remind the wikiproject's participants that this kind of special pleading against site-wide guidelines or policies has already been found impermissibly tedious and disruptive by the community and its Arbitration Committee, with regard to style-WP:BATTLEGROUNDing behavior by participants in that same wikiproject. My whole point in bringing it up in that discussion was essentially to deliver the same kind of reminder you're dropping off here. Expressing concerns about what looks like a long-term CONLEVEL issue is not an #Editors_reminded civility breach; your desire to not involve Classical infobox disputes history and resolution in that discussion doesn't transmute into an obligation on my part to pretend I don't see a relationship, nor is it some kind of personal attack. That said, it's not a point I need to belabour. I made it once, and then devoted the rest of my commentary there to guideline rationale.

PS: If you're trying to imply that the #Editors_reminded wording can be used to punish mention at WP's general-issues discussion forum of an ArbCom case about infoboxes in general just because you only mentioned one infobox yourself so far, in a discussion that is a general one about style matters of multiple sorts, and is not actually about a specific article's infobox, that would be really contorted, transparent WP:WIKILAWYERING and WP:GAMING. Any request at WP:AE (which is where ArbCom case instructions like #Editors_reminded is enforced) based on such a litigious theory would be WP:BOOMERANGed on the spot as vexatious and frivolous, but I'm sure you know that, so I must be misreading your intent in quoting that material.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:28, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

The cat in the edit notice says it all ;) - I will not add to two walls of text. The discussion on the village pump is not a discussion about infoboxes, not even "broadly construed". The mentioning of the link to BWV in it doesn't make it one, imho. Most Bach cantata articles have one, undisputed, including all FAs and GAs on the topic, the GAs making more than half of all GAs on classical compositions. Recommended reading today BWV 23 (shameless advertising) ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:16, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

ps: just for fun I played the "find the second occurence of BWV"-game. Search for BWV:

1. title
2. infobox (linked)
3. infobox (related BWV 22)
4. lead, bolded
5. in History and words, but linked as a complete name to a cantata
6. in Structure and scoring: finally a free BWV, in the header of the table

You will not tell me that a link at this point will help the reader who doesn't know what BWV means. Needless to say: the search function has the infobox first,- where the link is ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:28, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Glad we're agreed it is not in fact an "infobox discussion". It's an article style discussion, covering various things including boldfacing and linking, and infoboxes incidentally. As for infoboxes and search/linking, I already covered that at the VP page; they don't count as the first mention in the article because any logged-in user can put them anywhere or eliminate them, and many do.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:10, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

I can agree with that, didn't even mean to say don't link because it's in the infobox, only "it's in the infobox". What the discussion is about, I don't know. For a while already, we have bolded BWV 7 (part of article title, redirect, frequently used term when referring to the work). I like the aesthetic of having the title and the catalogue separated by the translation, so you see at a glance that they are two entities, but in the same bold style, to make the connection. Why that was ever questioned, I fail to understand. - Now what about the footnote? (It has a shorter history than the bolding.) First question: do we need any explanation of BWV? It's sooo normal to have a catalogue number behind the title of a classical composition (K. D. TrV, WAB). If we really need something, I think I clarified that a link on second occurrence would look rather ridiculous. Also loading of the article in question takes about as long as loading of this talkpage ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:16, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

"Why that was ever questioned, I fail to understand." Exactly. Re: Acronym: Yes, we need a link, per MOS:ABBR. It's not just a random part of a catalog[ue] number, but a reference to a work. It's like writing "CMoS § 8.5.3." (in reference to The Chicago Manual of Style) in an article on English punctuation, but not explaining what CMoS means; readers are going to immediately, not eventually, need to know what the acronym refers to it, and it is to something notable and important in the context. Links, which are "cheap" in usability terms, not distracting footnotes, are how WP handles these needs. BWV isn't "normal" (i.e. already understood) to anyone other than people already steeped in Classical music, which is not WP's target readership. The fact that we should link to an explanation of BWV is already covered by MOS:LINK. Anyway, I don't want to "relegislate" the entire set of issues by moving them to my talk page; it's covered well enough at the original discussion. The point was that existing guidelines already answer all the questions of what to do with that article's, and similar articles', leads. PS: Yes, I know I need to archive old threads off this talk page, thus the big note-to-self atop it already. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:06, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Template talk:Infobox officeholder

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Template talk:Infobox officeholder. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

March 2016

 Fixed

Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to The Big Blue may have broken the syntax by modifying 4 "[]"s. If you have, don't worry: just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.

List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:

• on TV cost him a competition ban. He entered politics in the 1990s, and became a member of the [[Italian Senate[[ for a time. For many years, he resisted public showing of the film in Italy, as he considered it

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 06:02, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 10, 2016)

Eugene Delacroix - Liberty Leading the People Hello, SMcCandlish. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: People Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Music of Africa • Molecule Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:08, 7 March 2016 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI •

Please comment on Talk:Fajr decade

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Fajr decade. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Landrace

Hi Mac, thanks for the THANKS for my distantly-past edit on Landrace. Landrace is a term that is well-applied to agriculture but I am not convinced that it fits with animals. There appears to be one or two writers associated with the cattle industry - no doubt with an agricultural background - that have tried to apply it to cattle. Then to everything. Given that we are now aware of post-domestication gene flow from wild into domesticated animals, and introgression across all animals, it appears their development unlikely. PS: Have a look at my latest mind-blower: Gray wolf#Domestic dog Regards, William Harris • talk • 22:23, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

I encounter it plenty often in zoological sources. It just means a population of domesticants adapted largely through post-domestication, naturally selected adaptation to their local environment, instead of having all their traits shaped carefully by selective breeding.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:27, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Time Person of the Year

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Time Person of the Year. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 11, 2016)

A typical Swedish school lunch. Hello, SMcCandlish. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Lunch Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: People • Music of Africa Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:06, 14 March 2016 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI •

Sorry

Resolved

Hi. Sorry that was an unintentional edit that I made. Whenever I see a SA related page I click rater to see what projects it has been added to. And I couldn't remember if I had made any changes so I clicked save to be on the safe side, hence the trivial edit. I promise I don't make edits like that unnecessarily :) Gbawden (talk) 06:34, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

We all good; sorry again I thought you were a new editor because of the short talk page (and I really need to archive mine...)  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:41, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for March 14

 Fixed

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Indentation (typesetting), you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Em (unit). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 11:55, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

3RR report

Moot, and the subtopic started by a third party is not a matter for my talk page.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Can you remove your report? It is giving me a headache. The disputed text was reverted. The report won't solve anything. QuackGuru (talk) 18:56, 16 March 2016 (UTC) How is anything not involving you giving you a headache? That's like jumping the fence and attacking the neighbor's dog then claiming it bit you. :-) I'm not even sure I'm allowed to remove a report, and I'm not sure I want to, given that there's no guarantee the editwarring wouldn't resume 24 hours or so from now. I suppose I can try to close it and see if it sticks, and just assume good faith that the same behavior doesn't re-start. What brought you out of the woodwork on this, anyway?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:12, 16 March 2016 (UTC) It happened a short time ago to me and bubbled over at AN/I. QuackGuru (talk) 19:14, 16 March 2016 (UTC) Wikipedia = Craziness. See Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive916#QuackGuru_ongoing_disruptive_behavior_at_Peyton_Manning. QuackGuru (talk) 19:18, 16 March 2016 (UTC) One of the editors who was trying to sack me is this editor. QuackGuru (talk) 19:20, 16 March 2016 (UTC) This is why I stay away from drama boards unless I feel there's no other option, and I use light-weight ones like ANEW before going to ANI, AE, or RFARB/ARCA if I can think of a way to do it (that's why the ARCA filing wasn't "pure", "routine" one; I was trying to use one of the calmer noticeboards rather than one of the "bring me the headsman's axe!" ones. Anyway, I marked the dispute closed as moot, though I don't know if that's SOP for ANEW.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:29, 16 March 2016 (UTC) Thanks. When I reverted I was accused of edit warring. When I discussed the matter on the talk page I was accused of beating a horse. The dispute was less than 48 hours old. Sometimes things never work out the way we want them to. ‎‎User:CFCF can determine if the 3RR report will be reopened if he continues. QuackGuru (talk) 19:44, 16 March 2016 (UTC) I would probably just take it direct to ARCA, for an extension of his sanctions; a short block or topic ban would probably be in order, and would probably have the necessary effect. He is emboldened by his clean block log and lack of serious sanctions other than a warning.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:48, 16 March 2016 (UTC) I don't know all the details for a WP:ARCA report. That is up to you. Or you could discuss it with CFCF to try to resolve the issue. QuackGuru (talk) 19:54, 16 March 2016 (UTC) I've tried. He simply denies everything, even when diffs are put right under his nose proving he said what he said. The time for a meeting of minds was when he felt pissed off enough to write an attack page on me, and it came up again when he was pissed off enough to brag in public about how it was all about me, and I had no idea he was pissed off because he's sat there fuming all to himself and not communicating. I've never had any issue with him other than the COMPETENCE (in the literal sense of not understanding WP operations well enough to know what he's doing) and IDHT displayed at the redirect proposals, which I brought up at the ARBEC case. I figure the competence issue is largely resolved by now (he spends plenty of time in Wikipedia_talk namespace, and on talk pages, and one absorbs quickly "what is what' around here that way). The whole lot of the ARBEC participants have me pretty mystified. They're in violent agreement then violent disagreement from one moment to the next, over matters that seem simlple to me and easily resolved by simply following the sources. I don't have it out for CFCF. I was even going to ignore his essay page as just noise, until he tried to pillory me personally with it. That's a verbal punch thrown, and even after the problems with it were pointed out he didn't change a word of it. He never retracts anything, admits any fault, concedes a single point, with anyone, no matter what the discussion is; he either "wins" or he quietly goes away and gets angry because he "lost", so I don't see any point in trying to have another conversation with him about this stuff. Either he stops making false accusations, or ArbCom or the AE or ANI admins will make him stop. Even if he were right, and I really was guilty of all the accusation in his "essay", it would still be MfD'd as a polemic. It's unconstructive fight-picking for no purpose other than BATTLEGROUND. If he just walks away and drops this shit, I'm done with it as well. Even if his attack page gets userspaced, I won't care, provided he doesn't continue to try to needle me with it. The moment he does, it's going right back to MfD with new evidence against it, and him. If I'm still having problems with him in 3 months, just because he's mad I didn't like his weird redirect proposal about aerosol/vapor and smoke, then a one-way interaction ban is in order.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:14, 16 March 2016 (UTC) I remember things went south at the MEDRS discussion and I stayed way. The Waste essay seems to be pointless. ArbCom often makes bad decisions. Is there a specific page that is a current problem? QuackGuru (talk) 20:25, 16 March 2016 (UTC) If you mean the confusion between primary and secondary sources thread, I expected it to. It did a year ago, but every time I raise the issue, more people understand what I'm getting at, and those who do but don't want to admit a problem (for reasons I can't quite suss out) come closer to having to deal with the matter. I'm torn between launching an RfC next month, and waiting a while and bringing it up on the talk page again, probably after some discussions with those who indicated they agree there's a problem but who didn't like the proposed wording changes, to see if there'a more palatable change. I'll probably go the latter route, because the outcome is more predictable, even if getting there is more work. I agree the newly revised Waste essay is, well, a waste, but if it's no longer a polemic, I won't care. Lots of userspace essays as pointless, and are ignored. They only need to be dealt with if they're used for unencyclopedic fight-mongering purposes. I'm not sure what "Is there a specific page that is a current problem?" refers to. If you mean CFCF essays, the VERBAGE page is one, in that it's still there. I trust that MfD will get rid of it. I will also try to trust that CFCF will back off and just go back to doing productive things instead of grinding axes. I think it would be very, very easy to get ArbCom to extend his remedies to include something harsher, if they're made aware of his sanction-gaming activities. I looked over some of his medical article edits and they looked good to me. That's productive. Trying to get back at me, and trying to "police" Wikipedia's talk pages for posts longer than he likes, police edits for changes that aren't important to him (hey! take pages off your watch list if you get too many notices about them! duh!), is not. No one should spend that much time writing user essays bashing pet peeves about other editors' general editing behavior. That's not collaboration, it's treating WP like some kind of combat game. And he's just not any good at it (neither the essay writing, nor starting disputes he can actually handle).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:55, 16 March 2016 (UTC) There is confusion between primary and secondary sources. New editors are always confused what is reliable source. I have also seen advocates intentionally misuse primary sources even when a review cited the primary sources. The only situation a primary source could be used if there are no reviews on it yet. I think the MFD will resolve the VERBAGE page. I will look into it but not comment or vote. If there are no other pages you have a serious dispute over other than the VERBAGE page then things are not that bad. Minor disputes on other pages can go wrong in a hurry. At least for me it is best to sometimes log off for a short time and regroup. QuackGuru (talk) 21:08, 16 March 2016 (UTC) Primaries are often useful as additional sources to the secondaries, especially in science articles; our academic users want to read the real papers, not summaries of them in lit. reviews. We have to rely on the latter, per WP:AIES, but the primaries being added afterward are often useful. If the research is so new that no secondaries cover it, we should usually not have it in WP at all. Outside med/sci, primaries are often useful for other things (e.g. the source of a quotation, etc.), within the strict limits of WP:PRIMARY. My CFCF-related concern is that instead of concluding "I guess I shouldn't write attack pages or otherwise pick fights; this really didn't go well for me, and I guess I need to rethink what I'm doing here and improve my editorial reputation", me might conclude "damn it, I wasn't crafty and vicious enough. I'm going to have to try 10x harder to get back at that SMcCandlish guy." Oh, I'm all for wikibreaks, and take them when I need them; my longest was about a year, and I've done 1-3 months before, and regularly drop off for a day or three.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  21:41, 16 March 2016 (UTC) PS: I just noticed that CFCF has actually been around for over nine years here. I'm now extra-amazed at the competence problems and the "fight like a noob" behavior, and skeptical that further action won't be needed down the line. No one who has been here almost a decade can possibly think that these kinds of behaviors are acceptable. It's system-gaming and he damned well knows it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  21:41, 16 March 2016 (UTC) The VERBAGE page is so short and is going to accomplish nothing except for wasting time and getting a reaction. QuackGuru (talk) 22:09, 16 March 2016 (UTC) Yes, I know. The concern I have is that if he went to such lengths to get back at me over something like helping him get a warning at ArbCom, what will he try next? Or, hopefully, nothing.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:12, 16 March 2016 (UTC) wtf? @QuackGuru: - Why are you on here pestering some editor into removing a 3RR report that has nothing to do with you? And why are you complaining about me and the ANI that I didn't file? Do you ever wonder why you are this → ← close to being banned from this project? It's because of nonsense like this. Just focus on building the encyclopaedia, without disrupting it. Do you think you can do that? - theWOLFchild 22:36, 16 March 2016 (UTC) Y'all should take that up at User talk:QuackGuru. For my part, I didn't feel pestered. I didn't agree with his objections to the notifications and such, but by the time the discussion at ANEW had gone a couple of steps, others were reverting CFCF's stuff at GAMING, so the ANEW complaint was essentially moot, unless he were to "suicide" by continuing to revert. I'm not really worried about any of this stuff; it's just a minor annoyance I was dealing with.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:46, 16 March 2016 (UTC) I thought it was odd editors supported adding 5 sources at the end of the sentence. I thought I made a reasonable proposal to add a little context. QuackGuru (talk) 23:48, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Adjusting approach

[Refactored out of the parent thread above, since this isn't about a 3RR report.]

There is something else that happened later that involves all of us. QuackGuru (talk) 22:16, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:22, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Editors are suggesting I should be banned and there are socks following me. I cannot tell you about it at the moment on Wikipedia. I can discuss this in private or in a few months. QuackGuru (talk) 23:11, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Might be time to walk away for a while and edit totally different stuff, not even vaguely related, like sportscooking or animals or language articles. I've found various topics much easier to edit, after letting a tagteam have their way for a while, get bored, and move on, allowing me to return to what I was working on without all the heat and interference.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:17, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

I mainly edit controversial topics and I make sure the text is sourced. I noticed some editors are offended when I request V for the text. Editors are both sides disagree about the lede at Deepak Chopra for over a year. QuackGuru (talk) 23:48, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

@QuackGuru: Fringe topics like Chopra tend to lead to results like that. I'm not sure what was "controversial" about the sports figure article that people are trying to ban you over. I note that at both recent noticeboard disputes there were a lot of demands that you be "mentored". That seems both condescending and like it would be a lot of work for someone (it's not like any of them volunteered).

I don't have the time for it, but I can offer some advice, for what it's worth. It's based on 10+ years experience at this, as an editor in high-conflict areas (not solely, but often) in and out of mainspace. Like you, I do not shy away from arguments, and I do not concede that someone has policy correct when they clearly do not (though frankly I'm much more accurate in that assessment than you are yet. >:-) The caveat that comes with this advice (other that it's long; I write stuff like this as draft WP:ESSAY pages and may reuse it later) is that I am not one of WP's best-loved editors. For many people here, I'm one of the locks on the cookie jar they're trying to get into in the middle of the night. And I'm quite content with this. I treat this is as a form of work, in the public interest, not a social-networking pastime; not having a long "friends list" here is of no concern to me (though I have more than my detractors think I do).

Pursue important goals intelligently, not trivial ones randomly

(There are game-playing and warfare metaphors about this, like "be strategic not tactical", "choose your battles wisely", "don't win the battle to lose the war", "take the high ground", etc., but per WP:GAMING and WP:BATTLEGROUND that can send the wrong message.) My honest impression is that you have a bad case of WP:WINNING. I you're a competitive person like I am, this can be a hard instinct to suppress, but it needs to be done. You might try taking "no" for an answer more often; if there's more than token resistance, just drop it and move on, because time is precious. Start judging consensus on your own as if you were a neutral admin with no view on the topic (i.e., figure out what the probable outcome will be, not just what you want to see happen). If multiple editors on any page are against you, and you don't already have more backup from others agreeing with you, it is probably a lost cause no matter what it is. Just let it go, or add it to a to-do list and come back in a month or three months and see if whoever is paying attention then is more receptive. WP will not fall apart if one article has some nonsense in it for a while. If it's clearly a WP:TAGTEAM of editors pushing an unambiguous fringe, politicized, promotional/attack or otherwise bogus PoV and the matter is important, then build a case about it, and take it to the appropriate content-policy noticeboard (NORN, NPOVN, etc.). But never about trivial things. WP doesn't need noticeboard disputes or RfCs launched about whether to include the word "some" or "sometimes". There's a balance between just being a reverter on the hand, and, on the other, launching trivial RfCs and other "process" to "win" petty disputes. Because people get irritated by petty RfCs (which are advertised site-wide by WP:FRS), they tend to vote against whatever the proponent of a trivial one wants, even if it made sense. I know I suggested earlier that you need to use RfC more and revert less; I did not mean RfCs like the ones you opened at that sportsperson talk page (I was thinking more about the disputes that led to WP:ARBEC). Every time you launch an RfC that is trivial and/or which flops, it adds to a mental list of black marks in minds of other editors. "Oh, no, not another one those QG RfCs" is a reaction you don't want people to have. As a practical matter, RfCs should be opened because consensus is unclear and the community needs to form one; or because consensus is clear and some people will not accept it until the community tells them so; or policy or the real-world facts have changed and a local consensus or false consensus needs to be overridden by the community to conform better to reality. There is no sensible fourth reason, and the third requires a great deal of evidence preparation. This also applies to proposals, noticeboard actions, and other things that may arouse controversy. A regular talk page discussion: open that for whatever reason, including questioning current consensus and the rationales for it. I usually do not open one without doing the "homework" necessary to make my case and I often front-load it with that evidence. This puts the onus on people who habitually just resist change for the sake of resisting change to actually have to come up with a rationale for once, other than WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Use can use talk page discussions of this sort to gauge the reasoning level of who you're dealing with and what evidence they have (and it might even be enough to change your own mind, or shift you stance a little; always be open to that idea).

Remind yourself you're dealing with real people, and try to work with them

It also helps to try to picture yourself sitting at a table having a conversation with these people, instead of fighting against faceless names who are full of nonsense. They're not all idiots, and have real reasons for taking the positions they do. Sometimes they're poor reasons, and it can take a lot of patient and non-aggressive work to get them to change their minds or at least yield because they've painted themselves into a reasoning corner (I take the logician approach to this, and it works fairly well, though it doesn't make me a lot of friends). But sometimes their reasons are better than yours. You can make friends quickly by conceding "I hadn't thought of if that way, good point", and can build on common ground: "OK, if if we take your point, and my idea, how about this compromise that would address most of what I'm concerned about, without undoing the part you care about?" Never fixate on exact wording. Something the answer to a problem in one sentence is to rewrite two entire paragraphs; sometime the problem with two who paragraphs is one wording in one sentence. Simply moving material around, and rewriting a sentence from scratch works. Don't feel proprietary about your wording. If someone reverts or makes major changes to something you wrote, forget that it was your wording, and look at the current wording as if you'd never seen it before. Does it still need work? If their objection was to your wording, try a different version, and make a point in the edit summary that you're trying to resolve their concern.

Summarization and description of our sourcing isn't OR

Be mindful that not every word has to be sourced, every fact asserted about the topic (and topics intersecting it) has to be sourced. We are instructed for plagiarism and copyright reasons to summarize the sources in our own words. Sources are their own sources for what they say and, in the aggregate, for their interaction with other sources we use. The source review and summarization we do is necessarily an slight "OR-like" process in a sense – it involves analysis, evaluation, interpretation, and synthesis, but only about how to configure the information input (sources and what they say) to produce accurate and concise output (encyclopedia text), and how to characterize the nature of the input and how we're using it so we don't mislead readers about our content's level of source support (i.e. how much we're attenuating the signal, if you like). It's absolutely not OR to say that so-and-so is sometimes referred to as X, when we have a bunch of sources that use the term "X" for the topic, and some that do not. So, your RfC about "sometimes" at the sport article was off-base. The OR policy is about using OR to come to novel conclusions about the world, not conclusions about what our sources are saying; otherwise we would not be able to do anything but quote every single source verbatim, with no integration, just a collection of quotations. So, try to avoid wikilawyering over words like "some" or "many" and statements that X, Y, and Z sources agree on point A; we do not need a statement in source X "we agree with source Y and Z", we only need consensus that the statements in the three sources are in agreement. Also avoid lawyering over hair-splitting distinctions that are not meaningful to the reader (especially in leads). Your second RfC at the same page was also pointless and it was OR – you were arguing to include something from one source and attribute it to all of them. To me it looked like a WP:POINT exercise: "Well, if you think it's OK to include 'sometimes' even if the sources don't converge on using that word themselves, I'll show you how stupid that is by proposing we include a clarification only found in one source that the others don't agree with, so when you vote that down, you'll be proving me right on the first proposal! Gotcha!". That's game-playing. We definitely should stick to a strict approach to OR if people are trying to make the sources say something they clearly don't. Observing that only some sources sometimes use a term doesn't qualify; that's meta-observation about sources.

A case study in OR

This all reminds me strongly of something resolved recently (by the pursuer of the OR getting topic-banned and eventually indeffed). You can gloss over some of the examples of what the OR was (I'm writing this all out as a reminder of what to cover at the affected article). An editor was advancing the view that one punctuation style is uniquely American, that another is intrinsically British, and that using the second style in the context of the first audience or vice versa is "wrong" or "incorrect", and proceeded to push this view at multiple articles here and in MoS (we're still cleaning up after this). Their basis for this was that some stye guides and grammar manuals would say things like "The traditional US practice is to ...", "Many British publishers use ...", "In American style ...", "Another style, common in the UK", etc., etc. On its face, this seems almost like a reasonable conclusion. But the editor, having seized upon this idea, ignored all evidence to the contrary, and there was a shipload of it: Some of the OR problems Those statements, despite the superficial similarity of mentioning American/US and British/UK, are all of different sorts (generalizations, descriptions, labels, observations), are not comparable to each other, and do not make any of the claims the editor is making (not in any individual sources, and not in the aggregate) There are more varieties of English and styles within them than just those two There is no actual single style among British publishers on this matter, but at least 6 different ones There are three, not two, general groups of styles on this particular point (not just "American" and the "British" cluster), though not all sources bother to note this, and come confuse the third with British Some American publications use one of the allegedly British styles (or the third one), and vice versa Certain fields and genres prefer a certain style, regardless of nationality Historical sources showed there had once been one style, and that a new one arose in particular fields for logical reasons having nothing to do with geography, tradition, dialect or nationalism, it spread to other fields and publishers, and from it other styles later branched Various style guides treat the different styles as equal options and observe their usage patterns as simply demographic statistics (what is more common where) and make no assertions about dialect or correctness While some prescriptive style guides do make assertions about "correctness" (in varying terms – "correct", "proper", "standard", "always/never", etc.), zero found to date say anything about dialects (or "national varieties of English", to use the made-up WP:MOS nonsense phrase) From a linguistic standpoint, there is no such thing as correctness, just differing levels of acceptance No linguistic source ever published supports the idea that dialects are determined by the styles chosen by commercial publishers (i.e. business decisions made by them, for complex reasons that often have nothing to do with language) Formal style is set largely by professional organizations and universities who issue style guides with varying reputability and levels of acceptance, and these again have nothing to do with dialects No RS have ever even suggested that punctuation is a dialectal function at all, much less a determinant of dialect The same major American style guide orgnanization issues style guides recommending two completely different punctuation styles Various publications by the equally eminent British organization that is a major style guide source also publishes mutually contradictory works Even cursory analysis shows that these conflicts are differences of register (i.e. formality level and intended audience) Various publishers have their own house style not found anywhere else Uusage is always changing, not a fixed set of rules Uusage on this particular point has been shifting since ca. 1900, and rapidly shifting since the late 1990s The very sources the editor was relying on acknowledged many of these things, in sections the editor ignored or used more OR to try to wave away Aand many more besides. You'll probably note how familiar all this is: It looks exactly like the tortured paths taken by OR/PoV pushers in MEDRS topics who mischaracterize and mis-extrapolate from what sources actually say, fail to distinguish one source type from another, mix-and-match statements that use the same words but have different meanings for those terms in different fields or contexts; draw connections that aren't there; assume that superficially similar statements in different sources are the same statement; etc., etc. I know you have the skills to detect such b.s. when others are doing it in your fields of interest. The trick is to not become one of them in other topics.

Hopefully that's helpful.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:09, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

See "I believe that by working together and encouraging cooperative behaviors on Wikipedia -- that all of this bitterness online can grow a little more productive. Wikipedia, let's work it out together. See you on the page!"[7] COI and/or advocates were topic banned and/or indeffed. Chopra said see you at the talk page and now there is a new account who knows a lot about policy. It appears Chopra admitted to recruiting people to Wikipedia. I just finished improving the lede. I could gather the diffs if the counterproductive edits continue, but I do not have faith in ArbCom. The Current RfC is irrelevant because the question about the specific text was rewritten and improved. If the source does not make the claim and editors ignore my request for V and editors claim I was beating a horse then they are creating a distraction and violating a core policy.

Maybe you could summarize some of what you wrote and add it to the user essay. I will ping you over on the talk page. QuackGuru (talk) 16:36, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree with you that there are multiple serious problems going on at that Deepak Chopra page, and that seems like a good place for you to do what you do. But the sports figure disputation, all of it, was totally counterproductive and silly. If you target your tenacity at actual problems – like externally-controlled campaigns to push COI PoV stuff with a WP:FACTION – not at winning pointless micro-battles over words like "sometimes", then a lot of the objections to you will go away.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  17:16, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

To be honest, editors on both sides have caused problems with the Chopra page. But the COI/advocate problem is the main problem. I have moved on from the dispute at the Manning page. QuackGuru (talk) 17:24, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I understand. I'm just urging you not to repeat it. The kinds of objections you were raising and demands you were making are sensible when applied to something that actually has to be sourced (alleged facts about the real world which are challenged or potentially controversial – remember that WP:V requires that non-controversial, non-challenged material needs only to be verifiable not already verified). When you apply this technique to something that does not have to be sourced – common knowledge (the sky is blue), the obvious (someone stopped writing novels after they died), internal consensus (this source is reliable, or primary, or agrees with this other source, or is one of several that make this point while some others do not) – then it will be a WP:BATTLEGROUND, WP:LAWYER, WP:GAMING, WP:DE, WP:TE, WP:COMPETENCE problem all at the same time, and this will (as you have seen and felt) produced a large amount of negativity in your direction. Editors like me who appreciate the tenacity you bring to real and serious WP:CCPOL problems at various articles cannot keep defending you if you misuse the same tactics to pester people with bullshit. That's the clearest way I can put it, and I'm confident you can handle this truth without taking it the wrong way.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  17:35, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Editors were not saying that the words failed V and it is okay to include text that is unverifiable. They were saying it is sourced. There is a difference. If editors said it is unsourced and we want to IAR then that would of been a different story. I thought it would of been better to simply follow the sources. QuackGuru (talk) 17:44, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Even if you're right on that nit-pick, being right on a nit-pick when people are pissed off at you for nit-picking will not stop them from taking action against you. Cf. above about "Pursue important goals intelligently, not trivial ones randomly".  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:01, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

At the top of the article it says "Encyclopedic content must be verifiable." when you click to edit. Many editors think V is not relevant. If editors were trying to add an unsourced non-controversial sentence that would be different. When there is a reliable source at the end of the sentence then there is a problem when editors think they can put words in the author's mouth. From the very beginning editors constantly rewrote neutral text and then blame me the text was misleading. It is like they programmed me to make sure the text accurately reflects the sources. QuackGuru (talk) 20:38, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Repeat: "remember that WP:V requires that non-controversial, non-challenged material needs only to be verifiable not already verified)". "If editors were trying to add an unsourced non-controversial sentence that would be different." Except the "sometimes" RfC you launched was editors trying to add an unsourced non-controversial statement, and you went after it anyway. Saying that some sources say X or that sources sometimes say X is not putting words in the mouths of the source authors, it's meta-analysis by Wikipedia consensus about what the sources as a whole are indicating to us. We've already been over this three times now. I feel like what I'm trying to convey to you is not sinking in. You seem to be trying to defend your actions no matter what, to perpetuate your dispute with those people or the high you got off it, and to win an argument with me, when I'm trying to advise you how to still have an account her next month. I give up.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:47, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

They were not trying to add an "unsourced non-controversial statement". They are trying to add an "unverifiable statement" when the source at the end of the sentence failed to verify part of the claim. QuackGuru (talk) 20:54, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I've explained 4 times why your interpretation is very obviously incorrect. This appears to be a WP:NOTGETTINGIT problem, so I'm done. Good luck. You're going to need it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:10, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

ogg file display

Sorry to trouble you, but you've always struck me as a knowledgeable and helpful chap.

Do you have any idea if this is a widespread problem and, if so, how to fix it? BushelCandle (talk) 02:16, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Not right off hand. Chipmunkdavis have to provide basic configuration information for us to know what he's on about.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:00, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for taking a peep. I've tried to reproduce his complaint using Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Edge and IE versions without success. If I wasn't trying to relentlessly assume good faith I would begin to assume that this was a spasm revert without checking whether the additional line spacing I introduced solved the mild obscuration of the descending part of characters where there is only one line break present... BushelCandle (talk) 07:22, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Seems like a reasonable assumption if details are not forthcoming.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:13, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:African-American Civil Rights Movement (1865–95)

Moot

 – It's already a WP:SNOWBALL.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:African-American Civil Rights Movement (1865–95). Legobot (talk) 04:23, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

List of cat breeds

Hi. Just a quick apology for my edit on List of cat breeds. This was a direct transfer of content from the Cat article and I did not realise it contained an unreliable source. I hate creating work for other editors, so I'm sorry for doing that, but thankful that you picked it up. Oh, and I agree with your idea about "standardising" lists of domestic animal breeds. DrChrissy ^(talk) 15:54, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

@DrChrissy: No worries; I didn't assume any nefarious faith or anything! It's better probably that we have a poor source that needs to be replaced but which doesn't seem to have an agenda, than no source.

What do you think about the broader WikiProject Breeds idea?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:57, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I think it sounds like a good idea. I am generally in favour of some standardisation of "list" articles because we are almost certainly looking them up as reference articles. So, knowing where to look on a page can be very useful in navigation. I've just looked at List of sheep breeds for the first time, and that seems quite a useful arrangement. Of course, a project would be more than just list articles, but I think it would definitely benefit the encyclopaedia. DrChrissy ^(talk) 16:23, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

@DrChrissy: I'll probably start the project. I've done it before, so I know how to do it (the proposal process, the templates, the categorization, etc., etc. It's a lot of work to fire one up properly). I have WikiProject English Language half-drafted now (can you believe that project was missing?!), so I'll do this one next. I had originally thought to do this about two years ago, but there was a lot of WP:DRAMA between various parties about nomenclature, and it was short on the heels of a huge amount of drama about common names of species (not a domesticants thing, but still just a lot of "fighting about animals"), so I just dropped the idea for a long time until tempers cooled sufficiently. I think it's really important to organize on this, because frankly our treatment of breeds mostly is at about the level of a fancier blog site, not an encyclopedia. There are of course some stellar individual articles, and some categories of them are in better shape than others, like the horse articles are mostly better and with more support materials than the goat ones, and the dog ones mostly better than the cat ones, etc.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:41, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

That sounds great! I'm already aware that sometimes in discussions about breeds, things can get heated. Quite a while ago over at Mustang, I innocently raised the subject of whether the mustang horse should be upper-case "M" or lower-case "m". This quickly erupted into a volcano of polarised debate about whether the mustang is a breed or not. Let me know if I can be of any help. DrChrissy ^(talk) 21:25, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I remember that one. Much of the problem is that the article at Breed is a big FAIL. It needs to be a WP:CONCEPTDAB since the word has more than one meaning. I can think of at least 7. When people argue for capitalization of breed names they're doing so usually on one of two theories: 1) A standardized breed is theoretically a proper name, being "official" and in a published standard. This is not a ridiculous view, but it has plenty of opposition. 2) All things anyone thinks of as a breed in any sense should be capitalized just because this is "traditional" or "a convention" among a certain set (who also capitalize all sorts of non-breeds, like hair color variants, groupings of breeds to what they're used for [Milk Goats vs. Milk Goats], etc., etc.). This is a specialized style fallacy and will never fly here in a million years. I myself remain strictly neutral on #1.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:11, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Reference errors on 18 March

 Fixed

Hello, I'm ReferenceBot. I have automatically detected that an edit performed by you may have introduced errors in referencing. It is as follows:

• On the List of cat breeds page, your edit caused a URL error (help). (Fix | Ask for help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, ReferenceBot (talk) 00:22, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Felis silvestris catus

Found this, thought of you - doi:10.1073/pnas.1410083111 The genetic analysis is very tedious, bypass it and go straight to "Results and Discussion", below Figure 2, the putative genes that differ in a domestic cat from a wild one. (They only did this for dogs last month, so cats have had a 1 year advantage - no more complaints from you about why dogs receive favourable treatment!) My take: the genes that differ affect the same "processes" as those that differ the dog from a wolf, as we would have expected but now it has been indicated through research. Regards, William Harris • talk • 08:18, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

@William Harris: Woo, hoo! I'm almost surprised by the verisimilitude of the results, given that the prevailing theory has been that we essentially forced the domestication of the wolf into the dog, but that the cat essentially domesticated itself because we, by way of our grain and thus our rodent infestations, were a bounty for it. Thanks for this, I had no idea; I had not been looking for over a year due to having nose buried in other stuff. Did you integrate the equivalent dog news into an article yet? I should probably follow your lead on how to do that (feline biology and natural history is an interest of mine, not a professional specialization; my degree's in anthro, and even that's not may actual career).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:25, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Crickey Mac, now that I see that you can talk Australian at an intermediate level - stone the flaming crows! - I should reveal that I am an accountant; this is just a hobby of mine, nothing professional, so you should go for it for the ankle-nippers. Yes, I have put a para from Cagan in the Origin article but it is very heavy going and so I have given it only the lightest of treatment. And now for some more feline horror: DOI: 10.1126/science.1139518 If you cannot access it let me know and I will "arrange something". Regards, William Harris • talk • 08:37, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

PS - I don't think we forced the wolf to become domesticated. Our take: "For too long we have huddled in our huts with our fires in fear of the Cave Lion, Cave Hyena and the Scimitar Cat. Now we have found more teeth and now we fear them not!" Wolf take: "Every time one of these other big predators sneaks around after dark we howl, and this lot comes out of their huts with torches, spears and bows in response. Lets set up around their huts, rebadge ourselves as dogs, and let them do the hunting which they will do for free anyway. These people are idiots, so let's just outsource all the work to them!" What the cat thought? - I don't even want to go there! William Harris • talk • 08:45, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Of interest, have a look at the expanded Gray wolf#Domestic dog, in particular the last paragraph. Regards, William Harris • talk • 08:57, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I'm kind of slap-happy from such a long day, but too much coffee to sleep yet, and I have rambled and rambled below, sorry. Hopefully it's interesting, and I close with WP balance issue that you might have some insight on, since you've had to deal with a lot of similar balance and supposition problems in the dogs area.

Extended content

I can buy the wolf self-domestication story, but only to an extent. There is a major difference canine/feline difference: If you take a real wolf pup and raise it like a dog, it will behave to a remarkable extent like a dog, though it may pose some dangers, at least to inexperienced handlers/trainers. It can make a good companion animal under the right circumstances, though usually not an indoor one from what I've read and seen. If you raise a Felis silverstris wildcat from a kitten, by the time it reaches sexual maturity, it's prime interest may be in escaping from you, and while it may tolerate limited amounts of cautious human handling, done just the right way and for short stretches, it will probably frequently do notable violence to you at virtually any provocation, and will shred your house if you try to keep it indoors. Even F1 feline hybrids don't make good/safe pets except for very experienced (with wild & hybrid, not domestic) handlers, though they can be kept indoors. Meanwhile, F1 wolf-dogs often make great indoor/outdoor pets for experienced (dog, not wolf) handlers and are in high demand (too often by people who don't know what they're in for and can't handle it >;-). So, with dogs I think there's likely to have been a broad two-way street in domestication. "We have killed this wolf, and found that she had cubs. We'll take them and raise them as guard-wolves, and kill any that attack our children." (But the mother wolf was probably close by for exactly the reason you gave.) That process of keeping a few and weeding out the ones who acted too wild would by itself easily produce docile dogs in a reasonable number of generations. Closely mirrors plant domestication (carry the ones that taste less bitter back to camp, their seeds grow in the nearby middens, and form a genetic bottleneck).But there's little evidence I've seen to date that humans ever did much of anything to selectively breed cats until well into written historical times (Egyptian temple cats, then a big gap, then the Persian/Angora among the sultans and sheikhs in the Ottoman Empire, then a big gap, then a few isolated cases in early modernity, then all hell breaks loose in the 1880s not long after the first cat show, at the Crystal Palace in London. Throughout most of history cats were barely tolerated (in the West, anyway), and sometimes subject to programmatic persecution (really awful stuff, like slowly burning alive in suspended baskets high above a fire to make the death as drawn-out and agonizing as possible, or crucified on trees and left to hang there until they died of thirst. Meanwhile, the dogs were often curled up inside by the fireplace. The indoor cat (that didn't temporarily sneak in) seems to have been a post-medieval invention, except among the nobility in Egypt and thereabout during certain periods, and in a few places in the Far East, though I can imagine that they might have been kept sometimes as pets not just tolerated as feral vermin hunters in Greece and a few other places. We just don't have a lot of historical source and artifact material on this, and what we do find often has wishful thinking projected onto it. E.g. the 7500 BCE burial of a wildcat with a human in Neolithic Cyprus keeps being billed as evidence of early keeping of pet cats, but it's nothing of the sort. Humans got buried with animals of all sorts, for widely different reasons. It may well have been a sacrifice to some grain god, or it may have been the personal totem animal of the person, or he may have just been a menagerie keeper and they sent him off with the only specimen that would fit in the grave, or maybe his name had a phoneme for "cat" in it, so they though it would be appropriate to include one, or ... There's no evidence of pet status whatsoever, though it's possible. And in Egypt, while some noble families kept cats indoors and even put jewelry on them, they had multiple cat goddesses, so this is probably religious behavior not "I love my cute kitties so much!" behavior. Where are the depictions of pharaohs petting cats in their laps? [8] They've found thousands and thousands of ritually sacrificed cats at one of the cat goddess temples, so it's not like they were loved and there was concern for their welfare; they were used for ritual purposes (and temple profit – cat mummies were sold as blessed charms) with no apparent regard for the cats' lives, just as we still use pigs and cattle as food.

The WP problem for cat history is that there are so many "reliable" sources that make the "a wildcat in 9500 bp neolithic grave = ancient pets" leap (National Geographic is top search result for "cat burial ancient cyprus", for example, and does so for the most part), that it's going to be difficult to keep a balanced and scientific instead of "interpretive archaeology" (i.e. imaginative) view in our key cat articles. And I'm now done yakkin'; I think the caffeine's worn off.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  09:54, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, there are many proposals that should be stated that way and not as fact. I always ask the same question - "what does the data tell us, and what is conjecture?" Sleep well William Harris • talk • 10:49, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

The central problem is that, per WP:OR, we're not allowed to analyze the underlying data ourselves and conclude what it says, only what the sources, balanced in the aggregate, say about their analysis of it (or of other sources' prior analysis of it). As a result, if some questionable sources that have good public reputations say the wrong thing, a large percentage of editors will fight to include it, citing WP:V, WP:RS, and WP:TRUTH. When a whole bunch of semi-RS jump incorrectly or dubiously onto one side of the scale the balance in the aggregate sources is canted badly off-kilter, and this leads to bad encyclopedia writing that people here will defend half to death. As I'm sure you've noticed. If you haven't, wander for five minutes in any contentious medical/health topic like electronic cigarettes or GMOs. It's pretty unbelievable.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:29, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

I have seen this type of thing before, but nothing on the scale of e-cigarettes! Plus, it has 144kb devoted to a First World problem - amazing. Perhaps I should saturation bomb the page with my favourite: William Harris • talk • 09:33, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

I regret having gotten involved. It's a gladiatorial arena of drama and will continue to be one until several more topic-bans happen. But I was also participating on the talk page (I got drawn there in the first place by an RfC). If you just tag some unreliable sources (especially primary ones being used as if secondary, for WP:AEIS), you might not get sucked into the dramasphere.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:22, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Synchronized swimming categories for Brazil, China

Resolved

 – I commented there.

Moved these to a full discussion. Hugo999 (talk) 01:50, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 12, 2016)

Moot

 – Was too busy, didn't get around to it in time.

Too late.

Critic by Lajos Tihanyi. Oil on canvas, c.1916. Hello, SMcCandlish. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Critic Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Lunch • People Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:07, 21 March 2016 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI •

Please comment on Talk:Monarchy of Canada

Moot

 – Snowballed unanimously in one direction before I arrived.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Monarchy of Canada. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Invitation

Moved to User talk:Atsme

 – This TP is not the proper venue for Q&A.

Hi, SMcCandlish - I'm here to extend an invitation to you to review [9], and consider participating as one of the project coordinators. I've been getting guidance from Wikicology regarding presentation of the proposal to WMF, but need more quality editors working with me to build our team. I have received some positive input from two of our most active admins but before I begin an intense promotional effort, I want to perfect the presentation and iron-out as many of the kinks as possible. Your input will be greatly appreciated. Oh, and if you prefer to correspond via email, that's ok, too. I have contacted one other editor, Smallbones, who I believe will be an asset in helping to launch this project. Atsme^📞📧 20:04, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

@Atsme: I might as well answer here, since it probably would involve both of you. I just need a lot more details. An Editorial Review Board sounds like a very interesting idea and could be fun. But actually I think it could easily violate Wikipedia rules, such as forming some sort of exclusive club that others couldn't join without an invitation. If it's just another rating scheme (that anybody can participate in whenever they want) - well this could be done better than it is now, but I think I'd rather not - rating something properly takes a huge amount of time. Working up a consistent rating scheme and the organization to implement it would take a huge amount of time. Right now you're probably saying something like "I didn't mean that at all" so I'll go back to the beginning - I need a lot more detail. Thanks. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:45, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

@Atsme: Potentially interesting (modulo what Smallbones said), but I'll have to look into it when I have some time to devote to it, which isn't right this moment.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:35, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, SMcCandlish. I realize Project Accuracy will be extremely time consuming, and probably a full-time job which is why I decided to go with a grant proposal. I certainly understand time constraints, so when you get some free time, don't hesitate to ping. Smallbones, I will respond to you on my TP. Atsme^📞📧 00:06, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Josip Broz Tito

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Josip Broz Tito. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 13, 2016)

 Declined

 – I avoid religion-related topics.

I'll pass.

The Gates of Hell sculpture by Auguste Rodin, an example depicting the concept of the gates of hell Hello, SMcCandlish. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Gates of hell Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Critic • Lunch Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:07, 28 March 2016 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI •

Please comment on Talk:List of people who have opened the Olympic Games

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:List of people who have opened the Olympic Games. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Could you let us know what you mean by "weird style that doesn't mean anything to anyone". Also why, "use a footnote" for the 2000 line, given that, as explained, none is needed? [10] Qexigator (talk) 09:58, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Done.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:11, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Note from Cebr1979

Disregard

 – Nothing to resolve.

I left a message for you on my talk page but, it got nuked off (by someone else this time, not me). Here's the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Cebr1979&diff=prev&oldid=712549884

Knock yourself out. Love, Cebr1979 (talk) 19:37, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I know. I was watchlisting that page. Nice to see that your anon edits in mainspace remain constructive so far, though your IP is liable to get blocked, for block evasion. Oh well. You brought this on yourself, and it's not my problem.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:00, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

• I don't go around chasing editors who make constructive edits--at least I don't go around reverting them automatically. If editors start calling other editors names, however, that's a different thing. It's bad manners and we simply cannot have that (*wag of finger*). Drmies (talk) 23:15, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

@Drmies: Yeah, I hadn't seen that. LOL. Well, he'll probably tire of the whack-a-mole game eventually. It's hard to imagine anyone with nothing better to do but drive around town to different cafés looking for WiFi to post again another IP address. That would be far too sad.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:45, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Reference errors on 29 March

 Fixed

Hello, I'm ReferenceBot. I have automatically detected that an edit performed by you may have introduced errors in referencing. It is as follows:

• On the Steve Mizerak page, your edit caused a broken reference name (help). (Fix | Ask for help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, ReferenceBot (talk) 00:21, 30 March 2016 (UTC)