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Article Feedback Tool - notes and office hours

Hey guys! Another month, another newsletter.

First off - the first bits of AFT5 are now deployed. As of early last week, the various different designs are deployed on 0.1 percent of articles, for a certain "bucket" of randomly-assigned readers. With the data flooding in from these, we were able to generate a big pool of comments for editors to categorise as "useful" or "not useful". This information will be used to work out which form is the "best" form, producing the most useful feedback and the least junk. Hopefully we'll have the data for you by the end of the week; I can't thank the editors who volunteered to hand-code enough; we wouldn't be where we are now without you.

All this useful information means we can move on to finalising the tool, and so we're holding an extra-important office hours session on Friday, 6th January at 19:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office. If you can't make it, drop me a note and I'll be happy to provide logs so you can see what went on - if you can make it, but will turn up late, bear in mind that I'll be hanging around until 23:00 UTC to deal with latecomers :).

Things we'll be discussing include:

• The design of the feedback page, which will display all the feedback gathered through whichever form comes out on top.
• An expansion of the pool of articles which have AFT5 displayed, from 0.1 percent to 0.3 (which is what we were going to do initially anyway)
• An upcoming Request for Comment that will cover (amongst other things) who can access various features in the tool, such as the "hide" button.

If you can't make it to the session, all this stuff will be displayed on the talkpage soon after, so no worries ;). Hope to see you all there! Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 04:49, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Alert message on biography page

Hello,

I am trying to get rid of the alert on top of Regan Cameron's page. I have added verifiable citations where it was asked and yet the alert is still there. What else can be done to remove this?

Thank you — Preceding unsigned comment added by 53025fp (talk • contribs)

Hi 53025fp, I'm afraid it is a manual process and can take a bit of time. But having looked at the first link it does look overly similar to the source; Please remember that we write our own words - citations are to show where we found facts, not where we copied sentences from. Also I'm not sure that all of the sources that the article currently uses are ones that we would count as reliable. If in doubt ask yourself whether the source you are citing is has a factchecking process behind it. ϢereSpielChequers 17:37, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Ad hominem and Delicious Carbuncle

WereSpielChequers, in my opinion, your comment implying Delicious Carbuncle is motivated by homophobia in engaging in dispute resolution ("But running an RFC on a gay editor whilst simultaneously campaigning against them on a site that allows Homophobia, and doing so after you've posted their phone number seems to me in breach of our policies on Outing and Canvassing.") I have listed in this section in relation to the Fae RfC constitute an ad hominem attack. Since ad hominem arguments attack the character of the person (in an attempt to damage the credibility of their message), I believe such debate tactics violate WP:NPA. Also, an ad hominem argument is a logical fallacy, and thus provides little help in addressing the validity of the issues raised in the statement of dispute. Please refrain from ad hominem arguments in the future. Thank you. Cla68 (talk) 11:27, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

I have raised the issue of this "warning", which Cla68 is spamming to multiple editors, at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Cla68 now posting "warnings" to editors. Please feel free to comment on this issue on that page. Prioryman (talk) 11:13, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi Cla68 welcome to my talkpage. I disagree with your interpretation of my statement. I mentioned two policies that I considered to have been breached, Outing and Canvassing. The Outing breach seemed to me quite clear, the phone number, real name and postal address had been acquired by sleuthing rather than by it being published on wiki. As for the reference to the subject of the request for comment being Gay, and the relevance of the site where this took place being rather more tolerant of Homophobia than we are, well one of the things that differentiates canvassing from publicising is the neutrality of the audience. Asking a bunch of editors who are interested in Martial Arts whether they think that a particular Martial Arts competition is notable or even genuine can be done within the rules and spirit of our canvassing policy; Asking a bunch of editors who've argued for deletion in a similar debate would not. Criticising a Gay Wikipedian and telling people you are going to launch a request for comment on him on a site whose community includes Homophobes is IMHO encouraging a non-neutral audience to participate in a discussion, and therefore a breach of our rules on canvassing. From my experience of that site I'd be suspicious of any intervention on this site that was planned there, but one this struck me as more egregious because some of them would be more prejudiced against Gay Wikipedian admins than they would be against someone who was only one or two of those things. Hope that clears things up for you. Feedback welcome from you and others, I don't remember ever previously being accused of making a personal attack on this site, I do take your criticism seriously and I'd be interested in your view on this as well as the views of others. ϢereSpielChequers 16:55, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

MSU Interview

Dear WereSpielChequers,

My name is Jonathan Obar user:Jaobar, I'm a professor in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University and a Teaching Fellow with the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program. This semester I've been running a little experiment at MSU, a class where we teach students about becoming Wikipedia administrators. Not a lot is known about your community, and our students (who are fascinated by wiki-culture by the way!) want to learn how you do what you do, and why you do it. A while back I proposed this idea (the class) to the community HERE, where it was met mainly with positive feedback. Anyhow, I'd like my students to speak with a few administrators to get a sense of admin experiences, training, motivations, likes, dislikes, etc. We were wondering if you'd be interested in speaking with one of our students.

So a few things about the interviews:

• Interviews will last between 15 and 30 minutes.
• Interviews can be conducted over skype (preferred), IRC or email. (You choose the form of communication based upon your comfort level, time, etc.)
• All interviews will be completely anonymous, meaning that you (real name and/or pseudonym) will never be identified in any of our materials, unless you give the interviewer permission to do so.
• All interviews will be completely voluntary. You are under no obligation to say yes to an interview, and can say no and stop or leave the interview at any time.
• The entire interview process is being overseen by MSU's institutional review board (ethics review). This means that all questions have been approved by the university and all students have been trained how to conduct interviews ethically and properly.

Bottom line is that we really need your help, and would really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. If interested, please send me an email at obar@msu.edu (to maintain anonymity) and I will add your name to my offline contact list. If you feel comfortable doing so, you can post your name HERE instead.

If you have questions or concerns at any time, feel free to email me at obar@msu.edu. I will be more than happy to speak with you.

Thanks in advance for your help. We have a lot to learn from you.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Obar --Jaobar (talk) 07:26, 12 February 2012 (UTC) Young June Sah --Yjune.sah (talk) 22:07, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Special report

Thanks for the look-through, I should be able to finish it soon. ResMar 16:31, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome. My own views both of the nature of the NPP problem and of the patrollers are very different to those in your article. I've made one point on the talkpage, and I may make more. ϢereSpielChequers 18:29, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Well that's understandable I suppose; personally I have no opinion, and didn't even know this was a problem until I came up and went through the literature, so to speak. ResMar 18:46, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

OK two things you might want to look at The last few months have been marked by a degradation of the process. and Coupled by a need to "get it right the first time," I'm not convinced that NPP is any worse now than it has been for years - back in 2009 we often had the queue run to thirty days and some articles reach the end of the queue unpatrolled. So there has been a shortage of patrollers for years. We've reduced that by running drives to appoint Autopatrollers, and there are other ideas that would help. But many of them require changes to be made by the Foundation. ϢereSpielChequers 19:09, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

War of the three kingdoms

Thanks for the copy edits to Western Association (Scotland)‎ and William Govan‎. If you have time the related articles Western Remonstrance and Archibald Strachan would probably benefit from similar treatment. -- PBS (talk) 23:49, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

Happy to do so, I was eradicating a particular typo when I found those two but stayed to read the rest of the articles. My knowledge of Scottish history is woefully sketchy with a huge gap between Montrose and Darien, and one day I'd like to really learn more. ϢereSpielChequers 00:03, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Me too! I only got involved in these because I wanted to clean up the "Others" section in List of regicides of Charles I. It had been copied with minimal alterations from David Plant's "British-civil-wars: The Regicides. The question that needed answering was "why was the Marquis of Argyll in the list?" This lead to finding out about the Scottish Restoration. This lead me to the men executed for treason at the Restoration in Scotland, and that lead to these articles to try to make sense of the politics of 1650 north of the boarder (as it was the events during 1649-1651 and their part in them that marked these men as traitors and of course it was Restoration politics that determined which of them should be hanged). I'm glad that at least one other person found them more interesting than watching paint dry! -- PBS (talk) 03:05, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

{{talkback}} v/r - TP 14:26, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you so much for the feedback!

Hi WereSpiel. You are one of the first "celebrity wikipedians" to comment on our ideas, so it's exciting. Your reputation proceeds you, and it's a good reputation :) I'd invite you to edit the essay in ways you suggested (if you think it merits your time).

More generally, it's been suggested that we pick "one" recommendation to focus on. For me, the cosmetic changes seem more difficult (ala bikeshed). My main insight is that this is going to take serious leadership to fix. We need a "safe space" where so long as contributors follow a VERY simple unambiguous "terms of service", their contributions are never deleted. Their contributions may not be incorporated in to Wikipedia proper, but they will exist at least in that "safe space", so long as they are legal, moral, and a good-faith attempt at a positive contribution.

I recognize you as the the most 'senior' Wikipedian on site, and I ask your advice: If we were to create a "safespace", how should it be implemented? As a namespace in EnWP? As a new project under WMF? As a unaffiliated projects?

Or is the idea of a "safe space" just the wrong way to think about this? --HectorMoffet (talk) 01:55, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi Hector, firstly I wouldn't describe myself as the most 'senior' Wikipedian on site, whether you measure seniority by age, tenure, Featured content or even wiki hierarchy I'm not really senior. I'm just one of over 700 admins here, and as far as audited content is concerned I'm probably not in the top 700. That said I have been heavily involved in the discussions about our deletion processes. If by legal moral and a goodfaith attempt at a positive contribution you accept that overly promotional stuff isn't considered a positive contribution, plagiarism isn't considered moral and copyvio isn't legal then you already have a safe space in your userspace. You can develop pretty much any article in your own sandbox other than an unreferenced biography of a living person. We could broaden that further by the simple expedient of allowing people a draft pace in their userspace which only they have access to but where wikimarkup works. Categories and links would need to be one way - you can link out but not inwards from the rest of the project. What I doubt would be acceptable to the community or the WMF would be an area that was reserved for logged in editors.

My own preference is to keep things simple, especially for newbies and to try to work with the grain of the community. My belief is that articles belong in Mainspace, but that we need a way to make mainspace more welcoming to goodfaith contributors (this will of course leave a gap for articles that are goodfaith but insufficiently notable). Currently the most promising development is at mediawiki:New_Page_Triage as the Foundation has assigned developers to improve the newpage patrol process and we can make quite fundamental suggestions at this stage in the process. My own preference is that all unpatrolled articles are automatically {{NOINDEX}} and that newpage patrol shifts from a binary system to triage. New pages can be tagged for deletion or marked either "goodfaith" or "ready for mainspace" and the "goodfaith" ones would then have rather longer to be improved and collaborated on before being patrolled as ready for mainspace. I suspect this would give you something fairly close to your safespace idea, but it wouldn't exclude IP editors from the process and crucially it would be less snarky in the way it treated the newbies whilst at the same time being more efficient at screening out the badfaith stuff. ϢereSpielChequers 09:37, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

New Page Triage engagement strategy released

Hey guys!

I'm dropping you a note because you filled out the New Page Patrol survey, and indicated you'd be interested in being contacted about follow-up work. This is to notify you that we've finally released both the initial documentation about the project and also the engagement strategy, which sets out how we plan to work with the community on this. Please give both a read, and leave any comments or suggestions you have on the talkpage, on my talkpage, or in my inbox - okeyeswikimedia.org.

It's awesome to finally get to start work on this! :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:49, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Request for advice

There is an old issue tangentially related to new page triage (in that I think the articles in question were from a review queue) that I'd like to ask for your advice on. The latest post I've made about this issue that I want to ask you about is here. It will take a bit of digging and clicking through links to get the full picture (best summary is here), but essentially there is a list of over 3000 articles that may (or may not) need re-reviewing after some of the reviewing the first time round was found to be not ideal (some copyvio got missed and the editor who passed these thousands of unreviewed articles said they didn't know they needed to check for copyvio). Unfortunately, since then, a combination of various factors meant not very much got done, and I get the feeling that even now getting anything else done will be very slow. My question is whether it is worth trying to get all those articles to be re-reviewed again or not, or whether it is best to trust any mistakes to be found eventually? A mid-way option would be spot-checks to see whether there is a big problem or not. For some of the articles, some of the problems will have been fixed or tagged. For others, the problems will still exist. For still others, there will not have been any problem in the first place. What would you suggest be done here? Carcharoth (talk) 01:27, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

There is a general issue here and a specific one. The general issue is how much do we expect people to check before marking an article as patrolled or a new article as reviewed? I'm not familiar with AFC, but at newpage patrol we focus on stuff you can see in the article, Wikipedia:Newpages encourages people to check for copyvio in "articles that show suspicion of text copied from other sources should be checked manually." I suspect that different patrollers operate very different standards as to how much should be checked before marking an article as patrolled. Personally I would rather that all new articles were at least checked for G10 and G3 than have some checked to a high standard and others not at all, if we can make NPP more efficient and maybe more user friendly then in my view the time to raise minimum standards is when the new higher standard is attainable. As for your specific example, do a few spot checks and see how big the problem is, if the problems are as rare as in some of our other huge backlogs like unreferenced pages then I'd be inclined not to target those pages. If the problems are more frequent then maybe it is worth targeting. ϢereSpielChequers 17:49, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. Would you be able to suggest where I could ask for help in doing spot-checks on that list? Ideally (in general) there would be a way to flag what revision of an article was checked for copyvio, as if that doesn't happen then you have to assume that an article is suspect when you start work on it and it is not good when people do good-faith work on an existing article without realising that they are building on top of a copyright violation. Carcharoth (talk) 14:50, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Page Triage newsletter

Hey guys!

Thanks to all of you who have commented on the New Page Triage talkpage. If you haven't had a chance yet, check it out; we're discussing some pretty interesting ideas, both from the Foundation and the community, and moving towards implementing quite a few of them :).

In addition, on Tuesday 13th March, we're holding an office hours session in #wikimedia-office on IRC at 19:00 UTC (11am Pacific time). If you can make it, please do; we'll have a lot of stuff to show you and talk about, including (hopefully) a timetable of when we're planning to do what. If you can't come, for whatever reason, let me know on my talkpage and I'm happy to send you the logs so you can get an idea of what happened :). Regards, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:53, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Yamaguchi opening rule - question

Hello. Could you please answer a question on a talk page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yamaguchi_opening_rule — Preceding unsigned comment added by Renju player (talk • contribs)

Yes of course. ϢereSpielChequers 14:17, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Is it OK now? 4 refs, is it enough?Renju player (talk) 17:00, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

4 external links is great, but a reference to an independent source from outside the Renju community would help, especially with notability. ϢereSpielChequers 08:54, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

People outside the Renju community don't care about rule details. Renju notability may be measured by independent sources, not Yamaguchi opening rule notability. As an example: being a scientist, I've made a research concerning helicoidal antiferromagnetic structures and showed theoretically that its properties depend on Fermi surface's nesting. Is it notable? Yes, there were a couple of articles in physical journals, it was proved to be a correct model - now there is a lot of articles on this matter. Does anybody from the outside know about it? Of course no. Try to google it, you'll see. Only Physics community. Do you see the similarity of these two cases? Renju player (talk) 11:10, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

One more Wiki example is en_passant - it's a rule from chess, so only chess-specific sources are available. People know about queen's power, they know how does knight move, but some deeper rules like en passant or castling possibility in details are game-specific without significant sources outside the community. Renju player (talk) 07:32, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi Renju, there is a difference between "would help" and "must have", and yes there is a grey area in notability where people have long debates and some articles get deleted. My advice would be to add the most independent reliable source that you can find. ϢereSpielChequers 10:18, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

New Page Triage newsletter

Hey all!

Thanks to everyone who attended our first office hours session; the logs can be found here, if you missed it, and we should be holding a second one on Thursday, 22 March 2012 at 18:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office. I hope to see you all there :).

In the meantime, I have greatly expanded the details available at Wikipedia:New Page Triage: there's a lot more info about precisely what we're planning. If you have ideas, and they aren't listed there, bring them up and I'll pass them on to the developers for consideration in the second sprint. And if you know anyone who might be interested in contributing, send them there too!

Regards, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 00:23, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Special:NewPages bugs

here you pointed out the two existing bugs, which are being fixed :). Any chance you can point me to the specific bugs so I can poke the bugmeister to say "we're fixing these, these should probably be closed up"? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:35, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Sent you an email

• A gentle reminder sir :) Wifione ^Message 15:51, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

A big NPT update

Hey! Big update on what the developers have been working on, and what is coming up:

coding

• Fixes for the "moved pages do not show up in Special:NewPages" and "pages created from redirects do not show up in Special:NewPages" bugs have been completed and signed off on. Unfortunately we won't be able to integrate them into the existing version, but they will be worked into the Page Triage interface.
• Coding has been completed on three elements; the API for displaying metadata about the article in the "list view", the ability to keep the "patrol" button visible if you edit an article before patrolling it, and the automatic removal of deleted pages from the queue. All three are awaiting testing but otherwise complete.

All other elements are either undergoing research, or about to have development started. I appreciate this sounds like we've not got through much work, and truthfully we're a bit disappointed with it as well; we thought we'd be going at a faster pace :(. Unfortunately there seems to be some 24-72 hour bug sweeping the San Francisco office at the moment, and at one time or another we've had several devs out of it. It's kind of messed with workflow.

Stuff to look at

We've got a pair of new mockups to comment on that deal with the filtering mechanism; this is a slightly updated mockup of the list view, and this is what the filtering tab is going to look like. All thoughts, comments and suggestions welcome on the NPT talkpage :). I'd also like to thank the people who came to our last two office hours sessions; the logs will be shortly available here.

I've also just heard that the first functional prototype for enwiki will be deployed mid-April! Really, really stoked to see this happening :). We're finding out if we can stick something up a bit sooner on prototype.wiki or something.

I appreciate there may be questions or suggestions where I've said "I'll find out and get back to you" and then, uh. not ;p. I sincerely apologise for that: things have been a bit hectic at this end over the last few weeks. But if you've got anything I've missed, drop me a line and I'll deal with it! Further questions or issues to the usual address. Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:06, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

4 Million Pool

At the current rate it looks like you are going to win the Four Million Pool. I really can't wait to see how it turns out! Brightgalrs (/braɪtˈɡæl.ərˌɛs/)^[1] 00:09, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Cool, just hope people won't think I have a COI when declining incorrect speedies in the next few months ϢereSpielChequers 07:29, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Hehehe Brightgalrs (/braɪtˈɡæl.ərˌɛs/)^[1] 09:34, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

you would have to be declining a WHOLE lot of speedies to alter the flow enough to game the system. good luck, though:) (Mercurywoodrose)50.193.19.66 (talk) 16:49, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Nice scripts

I just came across your monobook.js and found some wonderful scripts there. Actually, I think you asked me to have a look at it as soon as my RfA got over; I must learn to take your advice! Lynch7 15:21, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Glad you find them useful, I should point out that I didn't write any of them, but I do try and encourage others to use them as they do make some things much easier. ϢereSpielChequers 13:22, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Guide to requests for adminship

You might be interested in this discussion.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:14, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

It's been a few days since my last post and I didn't want to bother you figuring you probably had just a few other things to do, but if you would respond to my latest proposal, I'd appreciate it.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:33, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi, I will get back there, Unfortunately someone declared a drought over here and introduced a hosepipe ban. So at the moment I'm dashing in and out to use any gap in the rain and trying to fit this sort of thing into the longer rainshowers. Will respond soon. ϢereSpielChequers 15:51, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Jean-Paul Maddou

Do you really think a meaningless peacock phrase like "renowned" is enough to decline a speedy? That's nothing but peacockery, plain and simple. It's like "award winning". I got first place in a spelling bee in 6th grade, so I'm award winning, so I'm not A7 material. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 22:10, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

On its own no, but in that context yes absolutely. Some sculptors are notable some aren't, it is entirely credible that a sculptor could be award winning and therefore an article that asserts that is not A7 material. A renowned local dinner lady would be A7 material, unless of course she was renowned for something else such as her previous career as an Olympian. That particular one is at AFD and it may well be that the renowned bit is a hoax. But remember the test for A7 includes The criterion does not apply to any article that makes any credible claim of significance or importance even if the claim is not supported by a reliable source. The same thing applies to Award winning. An award winning 6th grade speller would qualify for A7, an award winning spelling book would not. ϢereSpielChequers 22:41, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I still think it's not a "credible" claim, as words like "renowned" and "award winning" are mere puffery that get thrown around so often as to be meaningless. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)}

Not in my book they aren't. Award winning in particular is an unambiguous assertion. The award itself may turn out to be bogus, but if so the article is a hoax - G3 not A7. If you wouldn't consider it credible for a sculptor to be "renowned" or "award winning" what would you accept as sufficient to avoid A7? ϢereSpielChequers 23:56, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Something that objectifies the "renowned". Like, if some famous person in the field (i.e., someone with an article) mentored them or said "they're the best". Or a link to the award's Wikipedia article showing it to be a notable one. Awards are handed out like Sam's Club samples anymore, so unless the award is notable in its own right, I'm not buying it. "Renowned" has no meaning unless you show how they're renowned; otherwise, it's just a word people throw into their bios to sound like they're hot stuff. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 00:00, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

At that point you are in AFD territory. Though you're nearly right about ""Renowned" has no meaning unless you show how they're renowned" - but to avoid a speedy you need to assert, you don't have to show. I.e. "Renowned" has no meaning unless you say how they're renowned. So back to the case in hand, saying someone is a renowned sculptor is an assertion of importance. Please remember in future that to avoid A7 an article requires an assertion of importance, and that that is a lower standard than requiring that it show importance. ϢereSpielChequers 07:49, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

I still think the word "renowned" is meaningless and not an assertation of importance. It's just a word people throw around to sound important when they're obviously not. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 20:53, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Well the word does have meaning and it is an unambiguous assertion of importance. The real issue is that to you it isn't a credible assertion of importance and to me it is, provided that is the subject is renowned for something which it would be credible for someone to be sufficiently notable for that they merit a Wikipedia article. One interesting way to resolve this would be to persuade someone to do a study on words used in new articles and how predictive they were as to the subject being notable. I suspect we'd both treat "most amazing ...... in the world" as a not being a credible assertion of importance, and I'd hope we'd both treat Nobel prize winning as a credible assertion. If the conclusion was that renowned was a good indicator of someone not being genuinely renowned then we could make it an example of a non-credible assertion. However I would be surprised if we got such a result and rather expect that we'd find that a substantial proportion of editors use the word correctly. ϢereSpielChequers 08:30, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Pedro's recall criteria

You may care to reconsider your position.[1] Malleus Fatuorum 03:23, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh **** that doesn't look good. I don't know what if anything provoked that comment, but no-one deserves to be described like that. I'm afraid that I'm not around sufficiently for the next 72 hours to look into this, but I hope to be back on Friday and will look into this then. ϢereSpielChequers 08:54, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

It was the result of fallout from this RfA. Malleus Fatuorum 13:23, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

• Who doesn't like a good Malledrama!--Milowent • ^hasspoken 18:42, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

  If you're referring to me then don't. Malleus Fatuorum 20:54, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi Milowent, from what I can see Malleus is the victim in this, so unless I'm missing something Malledrama is a tad inappropriate here. ϢereSpielChequers 23:26, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Malleus can dish it out better than anyone I know and I fully enjoy it when I see it. He can surely never be a victim, its aMalleus Fact.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 00:41, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

I have dished nothing out in this case. But the hypocrisy I've seen in some of the comments made about this issue, which basically boil down to "well, it's only Malleus, anyone can say anything they like about him", really does put the civility policy into its proper context. Malleus Fatuorum 00:55, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi Malleus, I've suggested to Pedro that he owes you an apology for that edit summary. Pedro hasn't edited in four days now, and seems to be taking a little break. I'm not intending to take this further at this moment in time. Your perspective on this is not an unreasonable one, and you might well wonder why at this stage I'm only asking for Pedro to apologise. It isn't because I'm in a ""well, it's only Malleus, anyone can say anything they like about him" camp, and I can promise you that is not how I think of you. I suppose its more that as an admin I model myself on Mr. Barrowclough rather than Mr. Mackay. ϢereSpielChequers 13:05, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

A whole new perspective! I hope you will let us see you in uniform one day. Johnbod (talk) 15:23, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Now that would be a perfect one for a fancy dress party! Maybe at a UK Wikimania? ϢereSpielChequers 17:16, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

New Pages update

Hey WereSpielChequers :). A quick update on how things are going with the New Page Triage/New Pages Feed project. As the enwiki page notes, the project is divided into two chunks: the "list view" (essentially an updated version of Special:NewPages) and the "article view", a view you'll be presented with when you open up individual articles that contains a toolbar with lots of options to interact with the page - patrolling it, adding maintenance tags, nominating it for deletion, so on.

On the list view front, we're pretty much done! We tried deploying it to enwiki, in line with our Engagement Strategy on Wednesday, but ran into bugs and had to reschedule - the same happened on Thursday :(. We've queued a new deployment for Monday PST, and hopefully that one will go better. If it does, the software will be ready to play around with and test by the following week! :).

On the article view front, the developers are doing some fantastic work designing the toolbar, which we're calling the "curation bar"; you can see a mockup here. A stripped-down version of this should be ready to deploy fairly soon after the list view is; I'm afraid I don't have precise dates yet. When I have more info, or can unleash everyone to test the list view, I'll let you know :). As always, any questions to the talkpage for the project or mine. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:25, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Appreciate your patience

In regard to the DC thread, your answers have been thoughtfully considered and polite. It's much appreciated. -- Avanu (talk) 16:23, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, though hopefully almost any Wikipedian would be the same. I often leave the Drama boards for weeks at a time, most of the rest of the pedia is far more positive. ϢereSpielChequers 17:14, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikimania 2012 GLAM panel

I see the GLAM panel proposal got rejected. That's disappointing. Raul654 (talk) 02:56, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and I'd thought the intention was to have GLAM as a major theme for this year. I might put in a submission for Hong Kong next year, everything I've suggested or been involved in has been rejected for this one. But thanks for your support, and apologies you didn't hear about it from me first. ϢereSpielChequers 06:00, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I thought it was a pity too; there is really very little on article content at all in the programme so far. Johnbod (talk) 13:05, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Between the rejected scholarship applications (three or four over the past few years), the rejected panel here, and my new job, the chances that I'm going to make it to Wikimania at all this year have decreased substantially. Raul654 (talk) 21:15, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Oof, well if even you are getting turned down for scholarships then I'm in no position to grumble. Perhaps we should propose an alternative to Wikimania, a conference focussed on content creation and improvement? ϢereSpielChequers 23:03, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

If London ever gets it, that would be a good opportunity to make content king, for 3 days. Johnbod (talk) 23:43, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I might even consider attending that one myself. Malleus Fatuorum 00:14, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

That would be good, would you be interested in making a presentation or running a masterclass? One possibility would be to have a fringe to Wikimania, with Hoxne challenge type events at various Museums, and maybe a photo session at Kew gardens or the V&A. Those sort of events need a lot more time than the presentations and panels of the core three days, but it would be a waste to have an event in London and not do that sort of thing, especially as a lot of international visitors will actually come for more than three days. I'd also like to see more cross fertilisation ideas - when I presented the Death anomalies project last year I got four languages signing up during or just after Wikimania, and I think some of those who signed up in the Spring were people who'd seen the submission idea on the draft program. There is a real risk that the different language versions will drift apart, and it would be good to at least discuss those differences. For example there may be others who've already hit our problems with DYK and found a different solution. ϢereSpielChequers 01:04, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

I'd be prepared to consider it, but I doubt that either Jimbo or the WMF would like to hear what I had to say. Malleus Fatuorum 01:21, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Each Wikimania creates its own program committee, and ultimately they set the agenda, not Jimbo or the WMF. So there should be room for a thought provoking and controversial presentation. ϢereSpielChequers 09:19, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

User talk:Mtotin

Would you help with this user? They've created Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Trauma Plate, and the submission has been rejected by two users. They're claiming that this page is different than ceramic plate, that ceramic plate can be a type of trauma plate. I was hoping you could help me provide some solutions to this user. The AfC page has also be slated for a third review. SwisterTwister talk 20:21, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi Sister Twister, thanks for asking, but this isn't my subject area at all, Reading the two articles my head can certainly see his point, ceramic plates sound like trauma plates of a particular material. But as a fullyfledged patchouli smoking hemp clad hippy, my heart isn't in trying to sort this one out. May I suggest a request at Wikiproject Milhist? They are likely to have interested and knowledgeable editors who know about contemporary military body armour. ϢereSpielChequers 20:35, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

New Page Triage prototype released

Hey WereSpielChequers! We've finally finished the NPT prototype and deployed it on enwiki. We'll be holding an office hours session on the 16th at 21:00 in #wikimedia-office to show it off, get feedback and plot future developments - hope to see you there! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 03:35, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Illuminated Manuscript rogue student group

As I've just archived it, I'm sending the link to the discussion on my talk about thing we discussed, just FYI. Any other ones spotted by anyone would be very welcome. User_talk:Johnbod/22#Congrats.21_and_manuscripts_MANUSCRIPT_CLEANUP

Johnbod (talk) 16:51, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Vandalism experiment

I read the discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Vandalism experiment. You made the comment:

The ridiculous thing is that we have heaps of vandalism available if anyone wants to study it. All you need do is take a random batch of edits from a year ago, check which were good and which were vandalism then track through to see which have been resolved.

I agree with you that this would be more ethical than actually doing vandalism and measuring it. I also agree that it would be a valid method of study.

However, in experimental design, what you have described would be known as a "pseudo-experiment", not an "experiment".--Toddy1 (talk) 04:23, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I assume you mean my alternative rather than the original? If so what would be the problem for a researcher if they were to measure using actual data rather than creating data? In my view it would be a form of non-invasive testing, more ethical and avoids the pitfalls of not necessarily looking like the real thing. For example, we are more effective at detecting vandalism by vandals who go on a spree and vandalise multiple articles than we are at detecting vandals who hit one article and then change account or IP, we are even more effective at detecting vandalism by known problem editors such as educational IPs that have multiple previous warnings. But since we don't know how much undetected vandalism there is on the pedia at any one time, a researcher wouldn't know what proportion of their test vandalism should be of each kind. But if they were to measure actual vandalism that had taken place anyway then it would be more robust and ethical. ϢereSpielChequers 06:07, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

The theory is that in an experiment, you can control all the variables. In a pseudo-experiment you can attempt to control variables either through sample selection or by analysis of the data - but this only works for variables you know about.

• In an experiment to see the benefits of sun-cream, you could expose randomly assign people to 8 equal size groups. Four groups C1-C4 would have sun-cream, and four not N1-N4. Then you could expose C1 and N1 to no sun, C2 and N2 to 3 hours sun a day, C3 and N3 to 6 hours sun a day, and C4 and N4 to 9 hours sun a day. You could then plot some graphs showing how in N1-N4 sun-burn incidence is higher with increasing sun exposure, and compare with C1-C4 to see the benefit of the sun-cream. You could also try having groups P1-P4 with a placebo sun-cream - i.e. the cream does not have the key ingredients, but you lie to the subjects and tell them it does - maybe the act of putting it on, or the psychological effect of the cream will have as big an effect as sun-cream? Placebos are difficult - I read a report of a study of the effect of ascorbic acid on sick people where they used citric acid as the placebo - there was no difference in effectiveness - but one of the supposed benefits of ascorbic acid was that it dealt with free radicals - and citric acid will also do this - a poor choice of experimental design.
• In a psuedo-experiment you could collect data on this - but maybe people who do not naturally sun-burn would be less likely to use sun-cream. This would distort the results. Similarly there might be people who had habits that allowed them to be exposed to the sun but not to burn so much (e.g. choice of clothing and wearing a hat with a brim all round) - again this would distort the results, because they would be less likely to use suncream for a given exposure to the sun.

In dealing with how people react, pseudo-experiments have the advantage that the experimenter does not affect the behaviour of the subjects.

I do not think the experimenters with Wikipedia have much ability to control variables, so a pseudo-experiment would be better. Unusually, in this case, the advantage of an experiment is that it involves less work than an pseudo-experiment. Usually psuedo-experiments are cheaper to run.--Toddy1 (talk) 07:10, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

I think you are close to the nub of it there. Researchers will prefer what seems to them to be the cheaper or easier solution, and if they value their time as being as valuable or even more valuable than our volunteers, then there is going to be a temptation to do lower quality but cheaper research even if it seems to us to be unethical. Vandalising a random group of articles is always going to be easier than identifying all the vandalism in a random group of edits (identifying most of the vandalism would be fairly easy, you just look for use of rollback and edit summaries of rvv, but there's more than that - I may not bother to label an edit as vandalism if it is an old edit by an IP). ϢereSpielChequers 10:21, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi!

Thanks for patrolling a few of the pages I made. See this. Thousands left! --Tomtomn00 (talk • contributions) 16:19, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

New Page Triage/New Pages Feed

Hey all :). A notification that the prototype for the New Pages Feed is now live on enwiki! We had to briefly take it down after an unfortunate bug started showing up, but it's now live and we will continue developing it on-site.

The page can be found at Special:NewPagesFeed. Please, please, please test it and tell us what you think! Note that as a prototype it will inevitably have bugs - if you find one not already mentioned at the talkpage, bring it up and I'm happy to carry it through to the devs. The same is true of any additions you can think of to the software, or any questions you might have - let me know and I'll respond.

Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:17, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you! (2)

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	For patrolling a few of my 700+ articles! (See this) --- Thine Antique Pen (talk • contributions) 16:22, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! BTW as you are in the UK perhaps we'll meet at one of these some time? ϢereSpielChequers 07:54, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, possibly! I may be able to make a meetup in August, if there are any. --Thine Antique Pen (talk • contributions) 18:01, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

meta:Meetup/London/60 12th August. Though there is a chance that I may not be available on that second Sunday - things will firm up in the next month or so. But if I can't make it there are others who will be there. ϢereSpielChequers 22:44, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Isobel Waller-Bridge

Dear WereSpielChequers

I hope you are well. Thank you for reviewing the article on Isobel Waller-Bridge. I understand the proposed deletion is due to her resume not being large enough, and being unable to source enough references for her work? Isobel has worked extensively for the institutions credited on the page, and for the people referenced, which can all be confirmed on her agents website. I'm not sure why the agents website has been deleted? I am unsure as to why King's College London has been detagged? Isobel officially attended this institution. I have taken the liberty of reducing the information, but would be grateful if you would allow for her agents website to be published here, as well as past and future information on her work.

Many thanks and kindest regards

Noeline1984 (talk) 12:34, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi Noeline, I've linked King's College. To link to another wikipedia article you just put it in double [[square brackets]]. To ensure a neutral point of view and to make sure we only have articles on notable subjects we aim to reference Wikipedia article from reliable independent sources, the theory being that anyone can create their own website and proclaim their version of reality, but if the BBC writes about them then they exist and are sufficiently notable for a Wikipedia article. So to avoid that article being deleted, all you need do is link to a few reviews of here and her work, the classical music press or the press should do the trick. ϢereSpielChequers 10:00, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Noeline1984, could you please state whether or not you have a conflict of interest regarding Isobel Waller-Bridge or her agent(s)? What is your motivation for writing the article? Thank you. -- Trevj (talk) 12:11, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

{{talkback}} I remarked it with Madlamark skole with A2 The Determinator p t c 17:04, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Article Feedback Tool, Version 5

Hey all :)

Just a quick update on what we've been working on:

• The centralised feedback page is now live! Feel free to use it and all other feedback pages; there's no prohibition on playing around, dealing with the comments or letting others know about it, although the full release comes much later. Let me know if you find any bugs; we know it's a bit odd in Monobook, but that should be fixed in our deployment this week.
• On Thursday, 7th June we'll be holding an office hours session at 20:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office. We'll be discussing all the latest developments, as well as what's coming up next; hope to see you all there!
• Those of you who hand-coded feedback; I believe I contacted you all about t-shirts. If I didn't, drop me a line and I'll get it sorted out :).

Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:47, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

The discussion about Bell-Pottinger

I did a google search on "Bell Pottinger" wikipedia OR Dahashiil. I was surprised to read about a discussion between Bell-Pottinger and "wikpedia administrators". You and User:John Vandenberg were mentioned by name.

Would it be possible for you to provide a link to that discussion? I drafted the passages in the article on Dahabshiil that Bell Pottinger employed shills to excise, and I can't help wondering whether I could have offered useful input -- or alternately, received important feedback, if someone thought there was a problem with my role.

Is this discussion or discunssions over?

Thanks Geo Swan (talk) 17:58, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi, for some reason it is on the UK wiki. here The UK chapter director who started the dialogue got voted off our board at the AGM a few weeks ago, and I don't see that this dialogue is going to do much for relations. I think it is still going and fairly civil, so please pile in. The PR folk have been quiet of late, so we may have upset them, Though they might take up my suggestion to "please give us photos",...... ϢereSpielChequers 18:29, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Notification

WikiThanks

I have mentioned you at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fæ/Evidence#Reply to questions by Fæ. If you wish to comment please take note of the guidelines at the top of the page and either the same page or Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fæ/Workshop may be suitable. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 09:43, 7 June 2012 (UTC) Fæ (talk) 09:43, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Would you mind helping with refunding articles?

Hello there, WSC. I'd like to thank you for being part of our project here at enwp. I really appreciate the work you been doing with NPF/NPT/NPP and the new interface over the last year or so. I'm also very grateful for the work you've done with new editors and editor retainment. I think it's very important for the future of our project and I thank you very kindly for that.

Anyhoo, as you're part of CAT:RESTORE, I was wondering if you'd be willing to help with a big task. I've recently asked Moonriddengirl for a bunch of deleted articles (see discussion here) and I was wondering if you would be willing to help. Either way, I'd like to thank you for all the work you done for our project over these many years. Best regards. 64.40.54.81 (talk) 16:44, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi, thanks, I've done a couple, including one temporarily moved to my userspace. Please tell me when you've transwikied it so I can delete it again. ϢereSpielChequers 22:47, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you so much. I've grabbed the article from your userspace here, so it can be deleted again. I really appreciate your generous support. All the best. 64.40.54.100 (talk) 16:29, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

		The Shining Star Award
		There are certain people that make our community shine. These are kind and gracious souls that not only improve our encyclopedia, but they also help others with their generous support. Although their number is small, they shine so brightly that they make the whole project glow. WereSpielChequers, you are certainly one of those shining stars and I am very grateful for the support you have given me. Thank you so very much for your help. 64.40.54.160 (talk) 22:05, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, much appreciated. ϢereSpielChequers 23:00, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Isobel Waller-Bridge

Dear WereSpielChequers, I hope you are well. I was wondering whether you had any more thoughts on the article for Isobel Waller-Bridge. I have updated her page with references which correlate with the work she's completed. I noticed the proposed deletion was logged around 3 weeks ago, and so i wondered about progress? Huge thanks and all the best, Nicholas — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.157.70.133 (talk) 23:43, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. The Edinburgh Evening news is a reliable source, but it is only a passing mention, it doesn't concentrate on her or her work. I suspect that to meet the inclusion criteria here you are going to have to wait until she wins a major award or is profiled in a significant publication. Sorry about that, but that's the problem with Wikipedia being a tertiary source - we need the secondary sources to cover a subject first. ϢereSpielChequers 09:10, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

AFT5 release coming up - help us design a banner!

Hey all :). First-off, thanks to everyone for all their help so far; we're coming up to a much wider deployment :). Starting at the end of this month, and scaling up until 3 July, AFT5 will begin appearing on 10 percent of articles. For this release we plan on sending out a CentralNotice that every editor will see - and for this, we need your help :). We've got plans, we know how long it's going to run for, where it's going to run...but not what it says. If you've got ideas for banners, give this page a read and submit your suggestion! Many thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:23, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Year of birth/death categorisation

You might want to have a quick look at WP:VPR#Category:Births by year and Category:Deaths by year and leave a comment - I don't know if this proposal would affect the death anomalies checking (or if it might even help, for that matter...). Andrew Gray (talk) 17:05, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Birkbeck

Thanks for this and excuse any further blunderings I may make to your own spaces Erica McAteer (talk) 15:18, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Jagged 85

Hi,
not sure those additional usergroups are a good idea, two years ago the user very much /didn't/ know how to reference properly as was shown in this RfC/U. Maybe he has learned from it, but I would at the very least recommend a very thorough look first.
Cheers, Amalthea 16:37, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the warning. I didn't go back two years, but I did trawl through some of the more recent stuff. However I didn't read the 2010 RFC so I didn't pick through and look for recent continuation of the same behaviour. I'm not sure that NPP is the right place to pickup on the sorts of things that the RFC focussed on. Maybe it should be, but currently I'd only rely on NPP to spot attack pages, spam, vandalism, the blatantly unnotable and the completely unsourced. ϢereSpielChequers 17:27, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Ok, I mainly wanted you to be aware of it. Cheers, Amalthea 09:18, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

No problem, appreciate the feedback. On a broader note, what do you think about former copyviolaters and Autopatrol? How far should one go back in their talkpage history and how effective is NPP at dealing with copyvio? Up to now I've been very cautious about such editors when I come across them. My thinking being that if they don't know that I've found them on the list of active article creators and checked them out for autopatrol then they aren't going to be aware let alone miffed that I've skipped them and moved on to the next on the list. But there is the argument that new page patrol is not currently very good at picking up copyvio, and if it is checked for at a different stage then they might as well have autopatrol.... ϢereSpielChequers 20:11, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Project-specific image filter

Hi. I saw your recent comments on a WikiEN-l thread about Fox News's kind offer. Can I point you to this proposal and invite you to comment? --Anthonyhcole (talk) 08:55, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for asking, I'm slowly getting back up to speed after the summer hols and hope to visit that next week. ϢereSpielChequers 08:19, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Great. No hurry at all. There's nothing happening there. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 14:49, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

done ϢereSpielChequers 09:36, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

I appreciate you taking the trouble here. I'm thinking and will ping you when I post a response. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 05:51, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

dbpedia

Following our conversation in the pub, here is the source of the query for people with a birth date after their death date. You can simply paste it into dbpedia.org/sparql. The URL to SPARQL results are copy-and-pasteable, so that query is [2].

There's plenty of queries you can do like that. I may run some queries tomorrow that look for birth dates and death dates in the future, birth dates that are more than 150 years before death date. I'll have a look to see if there's any other similar predicates (the Semantic Web translation of infobox properties) we might use to find more anomalies. There's also dbpedia for other versions of Wikipedia, so we might be able to use it to start up some anomaly hunting elsewhere. —Tom Morris (talk) 21:35, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Most of these are Persondata errors, some are clear vandalism. The worry about these infoboxes and templates is that they replicate info giving opportunity for error, and they are less visible, so the vandalism that gets through sticks. ϢereSpielChequers 15:01, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

PC

FYI. And FWIW, on a slightly different note regarding NPP, although I am not entirely in favour of creating a right for NPP, I fear that the question may become inevitable when the NewPagesFeed is finally released for general use and has been monitored for a while. The reviewer right (whatever that will be) could be a possible guideline, and might incorporate both if need arises. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:12, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi Kudpung, I've kind of drifted away from newpage patrol after the new system succumbed to bloat and made patrolling multiclick. I've not been as keen as you were on making newpage patroller a right, but I see no harm in the German proposal, mainly because I doubt if many potential patrollers would fail to meet the automatic criteria before they found newpage patrol. What is your concern re this? ϢereSpielChequers 10:02, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

I think the new NewPageFeed is a brilliant tool - in the hands of the right people; but my fears are that some may mistake it for a video game console. I always felt that NPP requires a greater degree of knowledge of policies and tagging than Rollbacker which needs a user right. It remains to be seen what happens during the first few weeks of its final release. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk)

Thanks

Thanks for your comments on User_talk:Homunq/WP_voting_systems#Strong_Oppose. I think you've misunderstood how the proposed voting system works, though. Could you respond to [3] and [4] over there? Homunq (talk) 15:30, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Responded further. Thanks again, Homunq (talk) 17:07, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Wikimedia Medicine

I haven't forgotten about your image filter comments, and will get back to you on that, but nothing will be moving on that front for a bit so I've been triaging my time a bit. Meanwhile, can I point out the current discussion at the top of User talk:Iridescent? We're forming a new m:Thematic organization and this is one of the pre-incorporation discussions. One concern raised is the potential for undue influence from pharmaceutical companies and quackery. You were active in this COI discussion so I was wondering if you might be interested in commenting, or at least keeping an eye on things. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 03:16, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Wow that's one from the vaults. I think my views on paid editing have somewhat moved on from there, at least as far as commercial entities are concerned. I'm very happy with paid editors from the GLAM sector, provided they are writing about the sort of objects they are curating and not about the institution they work for. Otherwise I'm no longer sure that I'd accept any edits from paid editors and I'm increasingly a convert to the idea that "don't ask, don't tell" would actually be useful in this context. A corporate PR person who is covertly editing Wikipedia and consciously trying to write in such a neutral way that they won't be spotted is probably going to do a much better job of writing neutrally than if they'd declared their COI and feel they are entitled to edit. If they've got any sense they will also do a bunch of uncontentious and unrelated good edits, so we'll get the benefit of those as well. It would also make their life easier with their colleagues, as they can always respond to suggestions that they whitewash something by saying that it would blow their cover and be reverted and locked.

As for my getting involved in some medical taskforce, you need to remember that this was one of the key events that scuppered Citizendium. They set out to be a Wikipedia but with greater control by experts, and then appointed as their expert for the healing arts someone from outside the ambit of conventional western medicine. My suggestion would be that if you want to set up a thematic organisation for Medicine you restrict the membership to people qualified in mainstream medicine, and that excludes me.

I'm in no great hurry for the image filter either. I think that you, I and Jimmy are coming at this from completely different perspectives. I found it an interesting challenge to design a filter that would resolve the concerns of as many as possible of the opponents, and came up with an option that would be expensive in cash, but few opponents of filtering would object to. Jimmy seemed to think that the objections were price related and proffered a solution that annoyed even many of those who are willing to see a filter introduced. You are designing a system that would work best for mainstream native speakers of English, but you are hoping to get the foundation or someone else to overrule those who oppose your design, rather than trying to understand and where possible accommodate their concerns. In trying to amend your proposal I'm really trying to alter your whole approach, as I don't intend to try and persuade the community to support a system that isn't designed to try and get consensus support from the community. ϢereSpielChequers 10:37, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the trouble. I know nothing about Citizendium. Perhaps I should read our article on it. WM:MED will get experts to contribute but I hope we won't have to pay them for it. I and Blue Rasberry, and several others I think, are aiming at conversion rather than employment. We won't prevent non-experts or anonymous editors from editing such articles either. The present en.WP editing model works fine for the vast majority of decent med articles which are quite stable. The outer fringes are a bit iffy but that's a tiny minority and the boundary riders such as WLU, Yobol and others seem to have the upper hand there, though they could always use more help. So, no one's proposing a new restricted editing model for med articles. Mainly we'll be (a) persuading / teaching / helping experts to write a GA/FA, and (b) supporting their translation as they reach GA/FA.

I don't know what to do about commercial COI: drug companies and the like. I personally wouldn't rule out en.WP at some point revising (downwards) the strength or validity of all efficacy and safety claims in out articles - for at least the psychiatric drugs, and probably a lot more - while they're suppressing negative trial results. Along with James on Iridescent's page, I'd feel very, very icky about any kind of formal embrace there.

We may not be that far apart on our approach toward an image filter: one or two things you've said lead me to think you may have misread me; but for above-stated reasons, if it's not too rude of me, I'll address that later. Again: thank you, and sorry if I'm being a pain. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 13:14, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure that anyone currently has the right answer on COI, paid editing and expert involvement. I'm not active in our med articles, but I've heard that we have quite a few experts already editing anonymously, and after recent events that I've seen people go through I'm tempted to advise against anyone editing here under their own name; Both of which would rather make it awkward to involve named experts - you certainly don't want to start paying some people when you might have equally qualified experts already volunteering for free. As for the image filter, I'm happy to wait and when you are ready see if we can come up with something that we can both endorse. ϢereSpielChequers 14:25, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Cool. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 14:55, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

PC RfC

Hi. The instructions in the second section ask participants to endorse one of three options. Of course, anyone is free to reject all three and propose an alternative; however, if everyone adds his or her proposal as an additional option, it likely will result in unnecessary confusion, if not quite utter chaos. Therefore, I wonder if you'd mind removing the number 4 from your addition and moving it down to the discussion subsection. Please? Rivertorch (talk) 11:15, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

There is a balance to be struck between over and under managing RFCs. In my view there was a big gap there and a fourth option was relevant. I would be surprised if there was room for many more options without them becoming slight permutations on each other, and I doubt that many more will be added. ϢereSpielChequers 14:13, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

All right. Helping to set up this RfC has been a learning experience for me. If nothing else, it has confirmed the old adage about the best-laid plans going awry. Thanks for explaining your reasoning. Rivertorch (talk) 09:08, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Question about Edit conflict

Hi,

Thanks for writing on my talk!! I have a question. I recently edit a music band article and provide two source (one is their offical website and a different source). For some reason, someone undo it. How do I go about seeing what I did wrong, because I don't think I did anything wrong. Thanks S2nancy (talk) 18:28, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi S2Nancy, http://www.crunchyroll.com/group/Shinee is a not the sort of source we can use here, as far as I can see it is a site for their fans to write about them. We should only use wp:reliable sources, especially when writing about living people. As for their "official site", I'm afraid it didn't work on my PC. But yes if that is their own site it could be used to verify uncontentious information about them. as it is a primary source you just need to watch for it being overly promotional, and of course the article as a whole has to have secondary sources as we don't create articles on people unless they have already become notable enough for others to write about them. ϢereSpielChequers 14:08, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Modification to May PC be applied to pages to protect against violations of the policy on biographies of living persons (WP:BLP)?

Hello. Because the "Yes" section was split between one group in favor of applying protection to all articles and one group in favor of applying protection to articles only when there has been a problem, I have split the section to reflect this difference. Please go back to that page and make sure that your vote is still in the section that most closely reflects your views. Sven Manguard Wha? 16:16, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

A request

Hey,

I'm aware it's slightly outside your remit - I've been doing a bit of work on the COI noticeboard for a little while. I'm aware that I'm very much at the low end of editor experience, and feeling a bit out of my depth on a few occasions - so I've asked for an editor review. The reason I'm dropping by on you particularly is because you have quite a lot of experience vetting editors at a high level and I'd like to be held to a high standard on this - I think COI is too important a place to let any mistake slide. The other reason is that I don't think we've had any on-wiki interaction so it's easy for you to be impartial. The good news is that I've got pretty few edits and I'm only looking for a review on a small range of them. Fancy it? Fayedizard (talk) 09:58, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi Fayedizard, much as I'm flattered to be asked I'm afraid I'm going to have to swerve this one. When I do editor or nomination reviews I tend to focus on editors who have specialised in areas that I know well, and though I've reported stuff to the COI noticeboard I'm not active there as an admin. At present I'm not even sure if my views in that area even reflect consensus. Plus I'm a bit busy in real life. Sorry, perhaps one of my esteemed stalkers might step in? ϢereSpielChequers 17:54, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

That's no problem - thank you for your reply - any stalker of yours is a welcome stalker of mine ;) Fayedizard (talk) 19:49, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

How to report dbpedia.org parsing issues

Great work on sorting out issues located through dbpedia.org

To report issues with dbpedia's parser, you need to get an account on Sourceforge.net and then post the issues on here. Alternatively, if you don't want to report the issues or you want me to have a look over them before reporting them, feel free to email them to me and I'll report them. —Tom Morris (talk) 07:31, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

For-profit projects managed from within Wikipedia

Hi WereSpielChequers. I've started a discussion on for-profit projects managed from within Wikipedia at Jimbo's talk page that may be of interest to you, using Gibraltarpedia and WP:Communicate OER as examples. The latter is, as far as I understand, a non-WMF, privately coordinated and for-profit project, funded by an external grant, that in some ways is similar to Gibraltarpedia.

Are you still planning to draw up an RfC on place-pedia projects? If so, it might make sense to utilise a more generic definition, to include paid projects like the OER project in the RfC's scope as well. Please have a look at the discussion. Best, JN466 18:06, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Page Curation newsletter - closing up!

Hey all :).

We're (very shortly) closing down this development cycle for Page Curation. It's genuinely been a pleasure to talk with you all and build software that is so close to my own heart, and also so effective. The current backlog is 9 days, and I've never seen it that low before.

However! Closing up shop does not mean not making any improvements. First-off, this is your last chance to give us a poke about unresolved bugs or report new ones on the talkpage. If something's going wrong, we want to know about it :). Second, we'll hopefully be taking another pass over the software next year. If you've got ideas for features Page Curation doesn't currently have, stick them here.

Again, it's been an honour. Thanks :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:03, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

DYKers going for some sort of prize

You realize that in this case, they literally are, right? Gigs (talk) 02:19, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and that is not the first prize scheme to have included DYK. It may be the first to offer a tangible prize and specify a topic at DYK, the British Museum ran an FA scheme a couple of years ago but their prize was less generous and more relevant - some books from their shop. WikiProject Bacon ran a themed contest but their prize was honorary. So most of the Gibraltar DYK will be in that contest, and all the people submitting Gibraltar related DYKs who would be caught up by my proposal can be presumed to be in the contest. But here's the difference between my proposal and Jimmy or others that involve a topic ban at DYK. Under my proposal a complete newby can come to DYK and submit a DYK about anything without having to consult some list of topics banned at DYK. If they like it and start doing a string of them on their pet subject then at some point someone will point them towards the throttle and suggest that they diversify their topic choice. Under Jimmy's proposal a complete newbie could come along in four years time, write an article about Ceuta and get badly bitten because of something that by then will be ancient history. The 12 month proposal is less silly, but still risks biting some newbie. ϢereSpielChequers 09:40, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Jimbo never seriously meant 5 years. Gigs (talk) 06:28, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Didn't he? If so has he retracted that or is that your interpretation? In any event that's a shame for those who wanted to set an example by cracking down on Gibraltarpedia. I can't speak for others on this, but if I hadn't been worried by some great overreaction catching out a bunch of goodfaith newbies then I might not have bothered to get involved. There is a great risk in this community of overreaction, escalating things to RFCs without first trying to resolve things. Apologies if there was a discussion at Gibraltarpedia about not awarding points for DYKs, but I couldn't find that and have concerns about an RFC that skips such a stage. ϢereSpielChequers 08:37, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

From memory, not a single person in the RfC has advocated a five-year ban, which I agree is over the top. As for the genuine noob, an exception could always be made (as Jimbo told Dr. Blofeld would be made). As for the withdrawal of the extra two points, my feeling is that this will have zero effect on the number of Gibraltar DYKs reaching the main page. Even if an author doesn't nominate an article, someone else will. Main page placement has always been a part of "selling" this business model, and I doubt it will be abandoned for the remainder of the project's duration. Cheers, AndreasKolbe JN466 02:13, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

The problem with such exceptions is that if they happen they tend to happen after someone has been bitten. Minor get out clauses are useful for those who like exploring the rules and taking advantage of arcane ones, but they add to the complexity that bedevils our rules. Better, much better to design something simpler and more effective. As for whether the change in the points system will make a difference, well time will tell. But crucially this is how Wikipedia is supposed to work - people have concerns about something and they raise those concerns with the people doing it and work towards consensus. Remember a large part of the problem here has been people ignoring the early steps of dispute resolution and escalating things to Jimbo or even going to the press before trying to resolve things internally. So in that sense if we now have a dialogue in which people are discussing concerns with the team behind Gibraltarpedia and getting changes made then things are at least moving back onto the right track. ϢereSpielChequers 14:23, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

There were really two stories: the first – and major one – was the conflict of interest. This was never going to be resolved within Wikipedia, using on-wiki discussion and dispute resolution, simply because it wasn't an on-wiki problem. The second – and minor one – was that the product placement was resumed once the press weren't looking, and as far as that is concerned, there were copious discussions about it, initiated by a number of different people at WT:DYK, which led nowhere, before it went to Jimbo. AndreasKolbe JN466 16:53, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

As for whether we are likely to have less Gibraltar articles on the main page in November, please go to the DYK nominations page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Did_you_know and then look for occurrences of the word Gibraltar in your browser. I make it 29 nominations at present, including a few more Australian landscape features named after Gibraltar ... AndreasKolbe JN466 17:09, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi Andreas, Wikipedia does have well worn processes for dealing with conflicts of interest. They don't work so well when people are concealing the COI, and especially when accusing someone of COI breaches outing, but that obviously didn't apply in this case. So I see no excuse for sidestepping the on wiki processes on that one. As for the discussions that took place and which you consider lead nowhere - as I understand it the decision included a throttle of no more than one Gibraltarpedia related DYK per day. You obviously don't agree with that result, but the question now isn't whether that was an adequate response - by saying that the discussions which resulted in that throttle "led nowhere" you invite a response that you are simply wrong, the discussions about Gibraltarpedia have resulted in several changes including a one DYK per day throttle on that project. If in a future scenario you consider that a community decision is insufficient I would suggest that you be very clear as to why you disagree with the decision and that you are aware of the response but you consider it insufficient. Otherwise you risk having people simply correct your mistake and point you to the decision that was taken. As for the Australia issue, if someone has a DYK about a Gibraltar outside the geographic scope of Gibraltarpedia I would suggest you ignore that when criticising Gibraltarpedia. Places in North Africa that could be reached from Gibraltar if one hired a helicopter are one thing, but if you broaden your criticism of Gibraltarpedia to DYKs that couldn't be reached without a return trip of more than 24 hours flying from Gibraltar then you weaken an already damaged case. ϢereSpielChequers 19:15, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

First, the WMUK problem was not something that could have been addressed at COIN (and by the way, no one I know of had anything to do with the Violet Blue article in CNET that broke that stoy, beyond having posted on Jimbo's talk page). Next, papers unanimously criticised there being 17 Gib DYKs in a month (that's what Jimbo called "absurd"). How does a one-a-day throttle address that? The rate was always less than one a day already. It's like establishing a spending ceiling of £500 a day when the most you ever spent was £250 a day and you got criticised for spending as much as that. And the ferry to Morocco takes 35 minutes; you do not need a helicopter. And the only reason the Australian Gibraltar DYKs are being written surely is as pushback against the criticism of the product placement. Any four-year-old would understand that – in fact, four-year-olds would be particularly well placed to understand it. :) The fact that they are written by someone who's been criticised for writing dozens and dozens of DYKs all on the same topic is just icing on the cake. AndreasKolbe JN466 22:37, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi Andreas, I have no idea why you think that the Gibraltarpedia conflicts of interest couldn't have been dealt with via our internal processes. If there is an obvious flaw there then I'd suggest you raise it at the COIN talkpage. Of course hindsight is 2020, but it seems to me that this a case where our processes were bypassed rather than one where they failed. As for whether one per day was a sufficient response, well that's a very different issue than whether there had been no response. I suspect that if you'd challenged the community response as insufficient then you'd have had a very different reaction. As for Gibraltar articles that relate to Gibraltar, Australia, I'd repeat my suggestion that you ignore them in your analysis of Gibraltarpedia. Including them in your criticism simply leaves you open to the rebuttal that Australia is not a day trip from the pillars of Hercules. ϢereSpielChequers 15:23, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

We are probably talking about different things. The process that led to Roger's resignation – which was necessary – could not have taken place at COIN; it was a WMUK governance matter rather than a matter of Wikipedia editing. Andreas JN466 19:06, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

As for the five year thing, this was the posting that set the scene for the reopened debate. If you as the author of that hadn't wanted to have much of the response be a reaction against the idea of a five year moratorium then it would have been better not to have mentioned Jimbo's statement. As it was I and I suspect others were reacting against your first point rather than responding to your second one. ϢereSpielChequers 19:51, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Everybody was free to define their preferred length, and people by and large did. No one opted for anything as long as that. Jimbo said what he did: I guess the real story here is how much he and the community do not see eye to eye on this. Meanwhile, the press hear far more from him than from the community. Cheers, AndreasKolbe JN466 22:37, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Jimmy is almost a constitutional monarch, I think of him as a bit of a Prince Charles figure; Whether or not one agrees with him on modern architecture or organic agriculture, his word is not law. Jimmy is of course a trustee of the WMF and therefore has a voice and a vote at our top table. But that is a top table in a decentralised structure where much is decided at different levels of the organisation, and while his voice is far more influential than mine, he also probably has more opponents. So one shouldn't be surprised if no one was willing to support a position that Jimmy himself might consider an overreaction, or that starting a debate by quoting such a statement from Jimmy was going to weaken your own case. My advice if such a situation were to recur would be not to quote a position that you weren't prepared to defend. There is an argument that one could quote such a position and make it very clear that you disagree with it, but misunderstandings are easy on the Internet, so if you weren't going to propose a 5 year ban it would have greatly strengthened your argument if you'd simply not mentioned Jimmy's comment. As for Jimmy's role as an Ambassador for the project, my view is that he does a very good job of that even if he occasionally says something I disagree with. ϢereSpielChequers 15:23, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Prince Charles is quite a good comparison. :) But the reason I mentioned the statement was simply because it was "news" for our constitutional monarch to make such a statement. And while I disagreed about the duration, I agreed with the principle. Frankly, I don't think there was much of a reaction against the five-year duration: the reaction was against a "ban" of any sort. Wikipedians don't like anything that limits their freedom: they want to be able to do what they want (e.g. get 50 DYKs on Australian paralympians on the main page, or 200 DYKs on Bach cantatas ...), even if that means that others are free to do stuff that hurts the project. Andreas JN466 19:02, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Hello, WereSpielChequers. Please check your email; you've got mail!
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Congratulations

		100000 Edits
		Congratulations on reaching 100000 edits. You have achieved a milestone that very few editors have been able to accomplish. Ever since you designated me as the Official 100K Award Dispensor, I have watched your name rise up the list toward the 100K plateau. Of all the awards I have handed out, this one gives me the most Joy. The Wikipedia Community thanks you for your continuing efforts. Keep up the good work!

If you like you can add this userbox to your collection.

This user has been awarded with the 100000 Edits award.

```Buster Seven Talk 13:17, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Buster, that's much appreciated I just wish we had someone doing the same thing on Commons...... ϢereSpielChequers 00:03, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

• Yes, Congratulations! Johnbod (talk) 01:10, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

RE: Commons Awards.. I don't know anything about Commons but just tell me what to do and I'll get it done.```Buster Seven Talk 16:09, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

The best place for the info used to be meta:User:Emijrp/List of Wikimedians by number of edits but it hasn't been updated for a while so I've emailed the bot runner. Roughly half the accounts with over 100,000 edits are on EN wiki, and the rest are well scattered. It would be great if there was a cross wiki project so that when someone in any wiki reached 100,000 they got an award. ϢereSpielChequers 12:18, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Anti-Vandalism Barnstar
	Thanks for reverting that on my talk page. Go Phightins! 04:23, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

You are most welcome, and much thanks for the bling. ϢereSpielChequers 15:29, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

This is not a newsletter

This is just a tribute.

Anyway. You're getting this note because you've participated in discussion and/or asked for updates to either the Article Feedback Tool or Page Curation. This isn't about either of those things, I'm afraid ;p. We've recently started working on yet another project: Echo, a notifications system to augment the watchlist. There's not much information at the moment, because we're still working out the scope and the concepts, but if you're interested in further updates you can sign up here.

In addition, we'll be holding an office hours session at 21:00 UTC on Wednesday, 14 November in #wikimedia-office - hope to see you all there :). I appreciate it's an annoying time for non-Europeans: if you're interested in chatting about the project but can't make it, give me a shout and I can set up another session if there's enough interest in one particular timezone or a skype call if there isn't. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:29, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

AFT5 newsletter

Hey all :). A couple of quick updates (one small, one large)

First, we're continuing to work on some ways to increase the quality of feedback and make it easier to eliminate and deal with non-useful feedback: hopefully I'll have more news for you on this soon :).

Second, we're looking at ways to increase the actual number of users patrolling and take off some of the workload from you lot. Part of this is increasing the prominence of the feedback page, which we're going to try to do with a link at the top of each article to the relevant page. This should be deployed on Tuesday (touch wood!) and we'll be closely monitoring what happens. Let me know if you have any questions or issues :). Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:24, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Books!

Hi there,

I've put up a quick outline of the 19th Century Books at Wikipedia:GLAM/BL/Books - please do disseminate it to anyone who might be interested. Unfortunately, Wikisource have hit some technical problems preventing the system from being able to proofread new books, so your other ones haven't gone up yet... Andrew Gray (talk) 14:32, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Talkback: WP:NOUSERS

Hello, WereSpielChequers. You have new messages at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia should not have users.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

—Ahnoneemoos (talk) 02:03, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the contribution

Appreciate your contribution of Ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka to improve the page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.245.172.31 (talk) 10:03, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

You're very welcome, not an easy page there and as a Brit I'm a bit cautious at involving myself - presumably this is one of those conflicts with roots in the British Imperial system? ϢereSpielChequers 10:09, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Doncram opened

An arbitration case in which you commented has been opened, and is located at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Doncram. Evidence that you wish the Arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence sub-page, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Doncram/Evidence. Please add your evidence by May 30, 2013, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can contribute to the case workshop sub-page, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Doncram/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, (X! · talk)  · @811  ·  18:27, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

User talk:Dougweller/reversion

I'm not sure what you meant by your post there. I presume it refers to something I did during this period:[5]. Thanks. Oh - how did you get to that page? Dougweller (talk) 17:17, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi Doug, I got there from your current talkpage which links to it at the top in "Coming here to ask why I reverted your edit? Read this page first...", So I assumed it was a currently applicable statement. I was commenting on the points in that page not on any specific use of them. ϢereSpielChequers 05:43, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

I understand now. I'll be revising it now that you've pointed it out. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 16:15, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome, I thought it might be a little out of date:) ϢereSpielChequers 01:39, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Request to stalkers

Feedback and collaboration would be welcome at User:WereSpielChequers/BotEditSummary ϢereSpielChequers 05:26, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

ipblock-exempt

Hey, how's it going? I was wondering whether you'd mind adding ipblock-exempt to my account? I regularly look at wikipedia on my phone and, while I don't make any major edits when I do, it gets very frustrating when I try to edit an article and it says "this IP address is currently blocked from editing". Most of the IPs my phone carrier uses seem to be blocked. Thanks in advance, — Oli <sup>OR</sup> Pyfan! 05:03, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi Oli, congratulations on being the first to ever ask me for that userright! I had some interesting reading about what was involved, and I've decided that it is probably best to refer you to someone more experienced with these and because they will need to know the offending IP address someone who has gone through the vetting to be a check user. Check Wikipedia_talk:IP_block_exemption#Query or email User:Deskana has offered to help, so Email them or the functionaries list. ϢereSpielChequers 14:35, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Courtesy note

I've linked to a mailing list post of yours here. Andreas JN466 02:05, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

AFT5 newsletter

Hey all; another newsletter.

• If you're not already aware, a Request for Comment on the future of the Article Feedback Tool on the English-language Wikipedia is open; any and all comments, regardless of opinion and perspective, are welcome.
• Our final round of hand-coding is complete, and the results can be found here; thanks to everyone who took part!
• We've made test deployments to the German and French-language projects; if you are aware of any other projects that might like to test out or use the tool, please let me know :).
• Developers continue to work on the upgraded version of the feedback page that was discussed during our last office hours session, with a prototype ready for you to play around with in a few weeks.

That's all for now! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:08, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Might need some salt

One of the greatest persons this world had ever seen is back. Might need some salt this time around. The-Pope (talk) 10:13, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Done, thanks. We really ought to get you your own mop sometime, remember me if you ever want a nominator. ϢereSpielChequers 10:27, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Discussion on the AFT5 Request for Comment

Hey WereSpielChequers - this is to notify you that there is a discussion starting on the Article Feedback RfC talkpage that has ramifications for the RfC itself. Your input is much appreciated :). Thanks! and apologies if I've missed anyone Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:51, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Talkback

{{talkback}}

Talkback

{{talkback}} GregJackP Boomer! 13:53, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

{{talkback}} GregJackP Boomer! 00:59, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Article protection

Hi. Is there a reason you protected Alan Faena indefinitely? —Emufarmers<sup>(T/C)</sup> 13:17, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, there were some IP vandalisms in 2011 including one serious enough to be revision deleted. As it is a Biography of a Living Person that seems like good enough reason to semi protect it. Do you think it time to change that? We now have pending changes so I could reduce the protection to just that. ϢereSpielChequers 13:26, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

I see a grand total of 4 instances of possible vandalism in 2 years; indefinite semi-protection doesn't seem proportionate. Pending changes also doesn't seem particularly justified, but since it really ought to be applied to most BLPs, this is as good a place as any to start. :-) —Emufarmers<sup>(T/C)</sup> 14:30, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

The article has only been in existence for four years and I semi protected it in 2011 less than two years after creation. The lobster pot nature of semi protection is that we cannot now know whether what I did was needed and worked or whether the vandalism was merely coincidental. Unfortunately I can't show you the content of the vandalism that was revision deleted, but in my opinion it tipped the scales sufficiently to justify semi protection. However we now have PC available, and if you are prepared to watchlist the article I would be prepared to try PC. But please contact an admin if future IP vandalism needs revision deletion. ϢereSpielChequers 15:01, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

That sounds fine to me. —Emufarmers<sup>(T/C)</sup> 19:42, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

How are you my friend?

Hope all is well, we haven't spoken in a while. :) ceranthor 00:31, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

By the way, I responded to your comments. ceranthor 00:43, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I'm very very good thanks. Hope life is treating you well. ϢereSpielChequers 01:05, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Excellent! Life is fine. ceranthor 12:10, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Also, I deleted that problematic sentence - let me know if it's still confusing. ceranthor 15:09, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

A poke towards a question

This is just a wee poke towards Wikipedia:Bot_requests#.28Both_of_the_above_tasks.29 =] ·Add§hore· <sup>Talk To Me!</sup> 16:23, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Notification of discussion

A few months ago, you participated in a discussion on Wikipedia talk:Did you know about Gibraltar-related DYKs on the Main Page. I am proposing that the temporary restrictions on such DYKs, which were imposed in September 2012, should be lifted and have set out a case for doing so at Wikipedia talk:Did you know/Gibraltar-related DYKs. If you have a view on this, please comment at that page. Prioryman (talk) 21:55, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Hullo!

Hello, WereSpielChequers. Please check your email; you've got mail!
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Filter

Hey. Regarding this comment and this discussion:

I don't know. I'm having qualms about the whole filter thing, at least for en.Wikipedia. I think a "hide" button on every image (to create a reader-generated offensiveness rating system) would work - but I'm thinking the intrusiveness of "hide" on every image on en.Wikipedia is too high a price to pay, considering the relative lack of problem we have here. Is the offense caused to Muslims on en.Wikipedia by images of Muhammad, or Mormons by images of sacred garments, or prudes by penises worth it? I'm thinking not. And I can't see myself signing up to a filter where a self-selected group of volunteers decides how offensive an image is (the alternative to this reader-generated rating system).

That said, I do think Commons might use such a system - since they're all about visual media and they do have porn in categories where the unwary will stumble across it. But I don't know if I can be arsed trying to argue for it on Commons.

On Commons, I'd propose "report this image" on every thumbnail in a search result. Then, when the ratio of the number of reports to the number of views breaks a certain threshold, visitors who have selected the filtered search option, when searching, say, for electric toothbrush, will be presented with a blank place-holder, a "view this image" button and a warning such as "this image may offend some viewers" where they would previously have been presented with the controversial image.

(My preferred option is for the reader who chooses to filter their search results to be offered a slider, from "no filtering" to "strict filtering", because that would avoid the need for any gatekeepers to select a yes/no filter threshold, but that's a bit complex to explain to people new to the concept.) --Anthonyhcole (talk) 05:56, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi Anthony, I share you distaste for some sort of overreaction such as blanking images by default, though that would be a very useful option for people with slow connections. However we have a global mission, and I fully support the idea of making our content available to all, and if that means finding some way to address the concerns of hundreds of millions of people then I for one would be uncomfortable simply dismissing the concerns of Moslems or other religions. There is of course the argument that image filtering is the first step on a slippery slope that could lead to censorship of articles on religion, sex, evolution and cosmology. However I see a sharp divide between the illustration of information and the information itself, and I'm prepared to compromise on one and not the other.

I share your distaste for a filtering system where people with different prejudices than me decide what I can see, whether that is a self appointed panel of censors or all readers, and I agree with you that if we have a system it needs to vary by user in some way. But I disagree that we simply have a choice between self appointed censors and a reader generated rating. Can I suggest that you have another look at meta: Controversial content/Brainstorming/personal private filters? I think you might find it gets a balance between functionality for those who choose to use it, and not placing an undue burden on our fellow volunteers. More importantly it is designed to be a filter that avoids almost all the objections of those who don't want filters, and achieves what I'd like which is that the images which I see are filtered according to the tastes of people who have similar prejudices to me. OK there is still the position that Fae took, that a filter is antithetical to our scope and a misuse of the funds that we've had given to us. But I think he's reconsidered that and I'm not aware if anyone still takes that line. ϢereSpielChequers 12:12, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for taking so long to respond. I've been too busy and exhausted to pay due attention. I've just read through your proposal again and will think about it for a bit and re-read, then get back. Catch you later. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 16:42, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Gibensu

The article is complete nonsense. Google Translate is by no means totally reliable, but it seems to do the trick here.

"Gibensu, consisting of two people in Turkey, almost 9 year based on friendship, best friends, which is the acronym for this group. Gibensu'nun the expansion; Gibensu'nun have Gi Mystery,-Bensu Bengi Water is the abbreviation for the.

HISTORY

This friendship is based on the year of 2009. And the way a friendship will stay alive all the time yaşansada problems. Despite the Mystery of people trying to get together eliminated. And continue to deal with them. In addition, this friendship Adana, Tarsus and Mersin are renowned for."

But if you think this is an article that Wikipedia needs then fair enough. TheClown90 (talk) 22:32, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi TheClown90, just because I declined a speedy deletion and filed the article for translation doesn't mean I consider it to be an article we need, rather it is an article that isn't in English, and I posted it on the translation noticeboard. Oh and by the way neither A1 or A3 are tags to be used in the first few minutes of an articles creation as they risk driving away the editor before they've had a chance to expand the article they started. ϢereSpielChequers 22:43, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Sheetal Prashad Pal

It has to be a credible assertion of importance. Given that no hits for Sheetal Prashad Pal come up on a Google search, I deemed it not credible without further evidence. Anyone can create a page saying someone is "prominent" but without any evidence of prominence, the claim can't be considered credible and the article should be deleted. Harry the Dog WOOF 15:33, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

It does indeed need to be a credible assertion, but the test for that does not involve Google searches. If you've tried to source an article and failed then it is best to prod it, a prod rationale of "I've looked using Google and can't find anything" will usually result in deletion, if anyone challenges that prod then an AFD would almost guarantee deletion - though with people of that era and part of the world there may well be offline sources which would establish notability. So if an article says someone is a prominent X and X is something for which there probably are prominent people who are notable then A7 does not apply. Please remember that speedy deletion only bypasses AFD for some tightly defined circumstances, and if you find yourself looking for sources then it is unlikely that speedy deletion will apply. ϢereSpielChequers 15:47, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

OK,I've got it. All that is required for an assertion to be credible is for the creator of the article to claim that someone is prominent. Harry the Dog WOOF 15:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Pretty close, but remember that sometimes they are claiming them to be prominent for something that is of itself not notable; and sometimes the claim is simply not credible. So however prominent someone says a particular pet dog is it is only credibly prominent if it is known for something else - like being the First Dog. And while logic tells us that there must be (or have been) one girl in this world who is the most beautiful girl in the world, any such claim lacks credibility unless you also have something like they are a Miss World, top of some magazine's hottest babe's list or endorsed by the Gods. So we delete per A7 "My girlfriend is the most beautiful girl in the world" type articles every day. ϢereSpielChequers 16:08, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Contours

Ta. After the second fight over up or down hadn't reached consensus (or even the right answer!), I called for quiet and held up a small eroded sandstone pebble. They agreed that from the side it looked like a very small hill. I put it on the table. They agreed the eroded layers resembled contour lines. Then little light bulbs started to go on, and they realised what a contour line really was when it wasn't being recited parrot fashion. The course went a lot better after that, as they realised that they weren't just being told things they'd already knew about from school. Peridon (talk) 18:08, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

As a 17 year old studying geology we did a field trip and looked at rocks in cuttings, but I think I learned about contours the hard way walking up and down mountains. I wonder if GPS and similar newfangled stuff have changed teenagers relationships with maps? ϢereSpielChequers 21:07, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

New Article Feedback version available for testing

Hey all.

As promised, we've built a set of improvements to the Article Feedback Tool, which can be tested through the links here. Please do take the opportunity to play around with it, let me know of any bugs, and see what you think :).

A final reminder that the Request for Comment on whether AFT5 should be turned on on Wikipedia (and how) is soon to close; for those of you who have not submitted an opinion or !voted, it can be found here.

Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

You've got mail!

Hello, WereSpielChequers. Please check your email; you've got mail! The subject is When you get a minute....
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Go Phightins! 00:47, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

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~TheGeneralUser (talk) 10:56, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

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A favour?

Could you (being uninvolved) please look into Luis Moreno Fernández? I've replaced a prod BLP previously and it's gone again, without what I consider as a reliable source as a ref. Two external links are to the same profile, which I don't consider independent. I reckon the subject's notable, but I can't get replies when I've explained what's needed. I'm feeling like giving 24, but don't think I ought to... Peridon (talk) 19:10, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

As far as I'm concerned the BLPprod came in to prevent unsourced negative stuff, and that's the stuff I try to delete. The editor in this case seem to be having trouble understanding neutral sourcing, but it's worth giving them a bit of slack. The risk we have on this one is that the bio will be biased towards the subject as the sources are probably under their control. One of the two fields involved is alien to me and the other I consciously try to avoid, but perhaps Google scholar could help? ϢereSpielChequers 20:21, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

Lucien Jayasuriya

Hi, you kindly ruled that my effort on Lucian jayasuriya (misspelled as Lucien Jayasuriya by me as not being one for speedy deletion. however on looking at the talk page of the user asking for AFD it appears to be labelled a sock puppet. Is this afd valid or will it be removed? should I participate in the debate on the afd page if the person asking was a sock puppet? Many thanks for your assistance Liannalianna (talk) 19:34, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi, the sockpuppetry seems to be primarily about copyright violations, if it was dubious AFDs then I'd suggest waiting for the AFD to be closed, but in these circumstances you are best off joining the discussion. If you are in a position to get hold of some off line or Sinhalese sources that cover other important things that he has been up to then that would be a very useful contribution. Just add them to the article and then explain what you've done in the AFD. ϢereSpielChequers 20:21, 21 February 2013 (UTC)