User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 207

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Chinese relations

I read today in a recent financial report, "TPO is delighted to announce that it has signed an exclusive agreement with one of the most experienced super recruiters in the People's Republic of China to supply TPO SIM cards to students coming from the PRC to study at colleges in the US." No wonder we saw Jimbo go to China in December 2015, despite passionate calls for him to boycott the conference. This note will get censored quickly, I'm sure, on the "free, open, and transparent" project that sets itself above the Chinese government, because we don't censor the truth here. Right? - 2001:558:1400:10:CCE7:9A6:F0E8:3725 (talk) 16:26, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Boy, that's a pretty silly stretch of the imagination, even for you, Mr. 2001. To be clear, my visit to China was to lobby the minister there to unblock Wikipedia and to further discussions to that end. I didn't on that trip do anything having to do with selling phone service to Chinese students coming to study in the United States. I'm not sure why you would link the two, nor what your point is meant to be. It is wrong to sell mobile phone service to Chinese students coming to study in the United States?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:26, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I believe when similar "stretches of imagination" regarding your affiliation with WikiBilim in Kazakhstan were mentioned to you, your initial response was to say that an "older encyclopedic work has been liberated by donating it into Wikipedia", to describe the systematic transfer of the autocratic state-approved encyclopedia into Kazakh Wikipedia. You then closed the discussion, saying it had "reached the point of the absurd". You said in a speech that you had spoken with the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan, which you then later expressly denied. Later, you did finally concede that if you knew in 2011 what you later came to find out about Rauan Kenzhekhanuly, you would not have selected him as your "Wikipedian of the Year". Apologies if your December 2015 trip to China included zero contact or confirmation with the "super recruiters" your firm is hiring in China. May we also assume that in your recent discussions with GreatFire (where Charlie Smith went from "loud-mouthed rhetoric" to "personal hero"), no part of that conversation discussed GreatFire's involvement or cooperation regarding anything related to The People's Operator or with the Jimmy Wales Foundation? - 2001:558:1400:10:FC:6F58:DB43:DB40 (talk) 19:15, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

You're just trolling on so many fronts here that it's not really worth responding. In the case of Kazakhstan, older encyclopedic work has been liberated by donating it into Wikipedia. I did misspeak once - I met with someone from the Prime Minister's office (to lobby them for change), but did not meet the Prime Minister himself. (I would do so, by the way, if the opportunity arose, again to lobby them for change.) No, there was no discussion with Charlie Smith about TPO. Yes, I met him with Orit Kopel of the Jimmy Wales Foundation, and we discussed ways that we might cooperate going forward. We had a frank discussion about our differences in the past, and resolved them satisfactorily. I fully expect to see future co-operation with GreatFire on issues in China. I also think they are unlikely to issue unfair claims about my views. This is how adults work together and move forward.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:51, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your response, Jimmy. That was some pretty intense trolling (or at least "trawling"), for which I apologize. Sometimes my "spidey senses" get the better of me, and I think that because there are two or three dots, they're worth trying to connect in some way. Lesson learned... I'll try to gather much more solid evidence before attempting any zingers. - 2001:558:1400:10:F9EC:3657:B897:C54C (talk) 13:31, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson

I just watched the April 17 edition of Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson. The first story was about Wikipedia, and was critical of Wikipedia for various issues. Attkisson interviewed a founder of Wikipediocracy (among others) and presented a lopsided view of Wikipedia. She stated that Jimbo and representatives of the foundation declined her interview requests. Etamni | ✉ | ✓  14:35, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Transcript here, should anyone feel the urge. ‑ Iridescent 18:12, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

The idea that "Most people don't know ... Wikipedia is often edited by people who have an agenda" seems so absurd to me. WP:DUE, part of the NPOV core pillar policy, is all about how the key to creating balanced articles is including multiple perspectives. How is it possible that most people wouldn't know that people have differing agendas stemming from their situations and perspectives on matters of opinion and their goals? Most people certainly know that all source materials including reference materials including open collaborative works including Wikipedia are created by people who have an agenda, because everyone has their own agenda. EllenCT (talk) 23:23, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

I saw this segment this morning, and I didn't find it lopsided, except that the view of "in favor" Wikipedians was absent -- because they all refused to be interviewed, apparently. Jimmy, was there some reason you were not interested in expressing your POV with Attkisson? - Frugal fisherman (talk) 23:01, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Kohs is a PR guy working for the most hated ISP in America who pays people to scrub controversies from his corporate clients' articles. What do you think the Foundation should say in response to that? That the guy whose entire business model goes against the first of the core content policies should be taken seriously as an objective critic? Why even try to dignify the constant badgering with a response? EllenCT (talk) 23:23, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Worse: Kohs is a man who saw the awesome thing that is Wikipedia, and his first thought was: how can I make money from this? And when he was stopped, he tried to get Wikipedia's charitable status revoked. What a prince. Why would no Wikipedians share a platform with him, I wonder? Oh, wait: it's the same reason that most scientists in Australia now no-platform antivaxers. Kohs' claim that he was banned for challenging policy is self-serving bullshit. He was banned for abusing a volunteer-run, charity-funded project by selling articles. There is pretty strong community consensus against that. That consensus has strengthened over time, if anything, to the point that CorporateM, who IMO was doing it right in as much as it can be done right, was eventually stopped. Sure, a bunch of people who tried to make money out of Wikipedia are pissed off that they got stopped - somewhere, the world's tiniest violin is playing, but very very quietly. Guy (Help!) 08:26, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

JzG, you say that Kohs' "first thought" when he saw Wikipedia was "how can I make money from this?" Do you have some explanation for the fact that he seems to have discovered editing Wikipedia in March 2005, but didn't issue any communication to the outside world about a paid editing service until May 2006, when he registered "Mywikibiz" as a Pennsylvania entity? It appears to me that he had logged about 540 edits to Wikipedia prior to registering his business name with the state. Are you suggesting, JzG, that some or most of these edits were not voluntarily offered? Regardless, how do you know what his first thoughts were when he saw Wikipedia? Is his reaction documented somewhere reliable, or are you merely spouting opinion and positioning it (repeatedly here, now) as a "fact" that we must believe. Thus far, I'm seeing a lot of guilty-looking people scurrying around about why we shouldn't trust a multi-Emmy-winning investigative journalist, when "our side" elected repeatedly not to present its side of the story, instead relying on some friendly librarian to defend Wikipedia for how handy its reference sources are. The mind boggles. - Frugal fisherman (talk) 14:07, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Now, now, Mr. Fisherman, it was JzG/Guy that blocked Kohs' User:MyWikiBiz account MORE THAN 9 YEARS AGO, leading to a community ban by a massive 8 to 0 margin, of which JzG/Guy was one of those 8 voting for a ban. You need not preach the history of this to him, he was an involved player. Carrite (talk) 03:57, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT, JzG - You've both got it wrong. Greg Kohs invented paid Wikipedia editing, attempted to negotiate a "best practices" program, got banned off for his trouble, and — unintended consequences alert — has been engaged in a decade-long crusade against WP as a result of his mistreatment. He doesn't "pay other people" to edit WP, he is a Wikipedia editor himself, generally in a paid capacity, I presume. He is also a consultant for those who want to do (COI) editing of Wikipedia without running afoul of general site practice. He's not a demon, only someone who saw and attempted to commercialize the edit-for-pay industry ahead of the curve. If he didn't invent it, somebody else would have. Kohs remains a paid editor of WP and the fact is that his comparatively few paid jobs (he himself provided his small potatoes dollar volume as a paid editor on this page within the past year) are rarely if ever deleted because he follows basic site rules (if not the TOS, which he regards as suicidal given the inevitability of retaliatory deletions by anti-paid editing extremists). I used to see him as a nemesis when I started editing at Wikipedia Review and Wikipediocracy; now I'm proud to regard him as a friend. —Tim Davenport, Corvallis, OR /// Carrite (talk) 09:14, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I think you have been drinking the Kool-Aid. If he was so concerned about doing it right, why did he hang up his shingle before even attempting to negotiate with WMF, or at least find out if it was acceptable? And I do not suppose for one minute that he "invented" the idea of taking money to write Wikipedia articles, he just has the biggest sense of entitlement. His significance to Wikipedia is negligible. Guy (Help!) 09:50, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Let's see here... "There was absolutely no policy against it, so why did he start doing it?" Are you grasping the defect in your reasoning here? He did start doing it and then engaged JW as to a set of "best practices" for those engaging in paid editing — which got him the ban-hammer, which was how some people felt and feel that paid editors should be dealt with here. Fortunately, we've come a long way since then and those with such draconian views are a small minority of WP editors — there is now a "right way" to do paid editing at WP. That didn't help Greg Kohs, however, he is still a banned unperson. It is a great injustice. Carrite (talk) 09:57, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

People with agendas edit Wikipedia all the time. That said,in my view Attkisson is a sloppy-thinking anti-vaccination hack and not worth an iota of anyone's time here. Jytdog (talk) 02:14, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Attkisson has won four (4) Emmy awards over the recent years for her investigative journalism. How many similar awards have you won, Jytdog? There's a delicious appropriateness that Attkisson described a "dark side" to Wikipedia that most outsiders don't ever consider, and here we see exactly how that dark side is manifested -- with personal attacks that are not supported by reliable sources, even while the WP:BLP policy gets plowed over like the freight train that Mike Wood described in the news segment. This is really embarrassing for Wikipedia, and the response here just adds layers of shame on our project. High-level Wikipedians actually tracked an editor's holiday travels to visit his family?! The Wikimedia Foundation actually took time out of its mission to get a person fired from his job as a casino inspector?! We're just supposed to gloss over these abuses because we don't share a journalist's personal position on vaccines? Wow. Just, w-o-w. - Frugal fisherman (talk) 13:49, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I didn't find it lopsided either, and don't know what anti-vaxers or Australia have to do with this. If either was implied, I missed it. Kohs quoted a well-known editor saying that it's impossible to block anyone, then went on to demonstrate that by editing while he was on the air (the interview was ten months ago). Attkisson did get at least one minor point wrong – the editor who reverted his Morgellons edits isn't an administrator. But they didn't elaborate on the rationale for reverting his cited addition. Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) § Searching for sources says that "PubMed is an excellent starting point for locating peer-reviewed medical literature reviews". I don't understand why this is "not reliable". Mayo Clinic says there is uncertainty, and further study is needed. But Wikipedia, rather than stating that it's a controversial topic where there are two polarized views, states just the "delusional belief" view as if it's a settled fact: Although it has been suggested by Morgellons advocacy websites that Morgellons is related to an infectious disease, such as a tick-borne disease or from plants, these claims have not been substantiated by available evidence or corroborated by physicians independent of these advocacy websites. Attkisson also interviewed a research expert who was positive about Wikipedia, and a guy who was fired by his employer, apparently for unauthorized editing while on the job, for which he was outed by the WMF. wbm1058 (talk) 04:20, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

You could start with the conflicts of interest: "MJM, PJM and RBS serve without compensation on the scientific advisory panel of the Charles E. Holman Morgellons Disease Foundation." That's a foundation dedicated to proving that Morgellons exists, classic pathological science. The CDC mounted an extensive investigation into Morgellons and found no evidence that it is a distinct disease. It is always self-diagnosed so it is inevitable that those who believe they have it will actually have a variety of conditions, but the most common is delusional parasitosis, according to sources. Wikipedia is a reality-based encyclopaedia, and Morgellons is not a reality-based diagnosis. Guy (Help!) 08:12, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

So the opinion that "delusional parasitosis" is the cause results in patients typically getting prescriptions for one of several antipsychotic drugs. Are you sure that those promoting this POV don't have a financial interest in the antipsychotic drug industry? How can they prove that it's all delusional? Are there microscopic fibers under the skin or not? Surely there would be some imaging techniques that could find the fibers if they were there. I'm skeptical. University of New Haven is supporting Morgellons disease research, and they don't seem like a "fringe university". Also the Schwartz Foundation. wbm1058 (talk) 13:16, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

'Delusional parasitosis' is not a 'cause' of Morgallons any more than any other mental illness is. The 'diagnosis' (and lets get this right, this is a diagnosis by medical professions both psychiatric and otherwise) is not that DP causes Morgallons, its that people who tell themselves they have Morgallons actually have DP, some other mental illness, or a skin condition. University's will research literally anything anyone wants to fund them with. Even respectable ones. It is unsurprising that one is researching a disease that has been found repeatedly to not be a legitimate condition. When looking for evidence, its either threads from clothing, self-inflicted lesions, or another actual skin issue. It is unsurprising a lyme disease specialist is looking at it, I suspect their results will end up 'Oh look, its lyme disease'. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:35, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I wondered why this name rang a bell, I had to take a look at Atkinsson's talkpage to realise I previously participated in a conversation about her spreading of anti-vaccine misinformation. Call me unsurprised to find out she is also involved in the dissemination of info about a completely made-up disease. If I was a member of wikipedia (who isnt a crank) or the WMF, I wouldnt go near her with a ten foot bargepole. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:51, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm not a doctor and don't play one on TV, but when the Mayo Clinic's website doesn't unambiguously indicate that Morgallons Disease does not exist, one does suspect some pretty heavy POV ownership of the WP article is taking place... Carrite (talk) 19:00, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I agree, though I had never heard of this before, and have still only scratched the surface (this story gives a good introduction). Comparing ledes:

• English Wikipedia: Morgellons... is a condition in which people have the delusional belief that they are infested...
• French Wikipedia: Morgellons... is a French name applying to a disease whose existence has never been proven.

Two radically differing points of view, within Wikipedia itself. The French have the more neutral POV, while the English version essentially implies that it's been proven to be a delusional belief. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:37, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes --- the problem is that we have far too much "deletionism", by which I mean broadly, the willingness of editors to remove sourced material simply because they don't personally like it or agree with it. For example, in the article (Talk:economic growth) people were discussing last week, I found people removing well-known theories and economists from the article based on some ad hoc justification. It often seems that editors simply take sides and want anything that supports the other side out. But that's not the way to a comprehensive article, and from my point of view it rather spoils any effort to show one side victorious. How can you know that if you don't see the opposing arguments given their best shot?

In the case of Morgellons, I don't doubt that it is generally delusional parasitosis. For example, [1] found that the lesions usually spare a dumbbell-shaped region of the back. On the other hand... usually doesn't mean always, and how do you account for those exceptions? We should keep an open mind and be as reserved with our summary as the original authors usually are with theirs.

The beautiful thing about biology is, it doesn't know theory. By which I mean no theory is completely true and, conversely, no theory is completely false. This means that even highly discredited ideas like Lamarckism and spontaneous generation come back respectably as the epigenetics of transgenerational inheritance and abiogenesis... and sometimes you have the embarrassment that people go back and do the sort of experiments Trofim Lysenko wrote about and get the results he was talking about. So you can't tell me the symptoms are impossible; you can only try to rule out a physical mechanism in most patients. Most of them are deluded, but sooner or later, one way or another, I bet we'll find somebody who was right all along. Wnt (talk) 22:39, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

@Jytdog - A breathtakingly classic ad hominem attack. Lucky that this is a BLP-free zone, eh? Otherwise Sharyl Attkisson might object. Carrite (talk) 09:23, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

a) "in my view"... and b) oy, wasting iotas. :) Jytdog (talk) 09:29, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Well she did object previously about her biography, supposedly contacting OTRS quite a bit. Given the number of IP-socks that were banned that came from CBS - I am also [sarcasm] unsurprised she is giving airtime to people banned from wikipedia, she does not at all strike me as someone who might hold a grudge. Of course it is also completely irrelevant that her guest has a monetary interest in publicising how bad it is here, it does not at all serve their paid editing business... [/sarcasm] Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:58, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

The paid editing aspect is disclosed conspicuously, multiple times in the segment, so it is hardly treated as irrelevant. That in itself does not make the criticism invalid. If such are the criteria, a lot of the trials done on drugs, which are funded by the drug companies would also make them invalid. One has to compensate for the tendency to spin the matter, which of course exists, and look at the facts. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 11:14, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Added sarcasm tags for you Kings ;) Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:54, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

The Bicholim Conflict

Hi, do you know where I could find a coppied version of the deeleted hoax "Bicholim Conflict", I googled it and found a website that showed me a userfied link to another hoax war artice called the Upper peninsula war. Does anything like this exist for the Bichoim Conflict?Spidersmilk (talk) 17:34, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Is this what you´re after? Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia/Bicholim conflict Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:55, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Not that it's especially relevant to this, but we have got to find a better word in the English language than belligerents; except in military situations I almost always see the words "drunk" or "child" next to that word and I can't keep that out of my mind. Obviously nothing we at Wikipedia can do about that, though... The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 23:15, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Article quality: "final chapter"

Jimmy,

This is my 4th and "final" posting on this page about my series of article quality investigations.

Using a sample of 80 articles, quality as measured by modified ORES scores for previously created Wikipedia articles increases slowly, on average increasing only at a rate of 1 point (e.g. from stub to start) per 20 years. The tendency to increase is consistent however and holds for

• articles in different categories
• articles started in different years, and
• articles in all page view quartiles.

The tendency for the quality of newly created articles to be better than the quality of the previous year's newly created articles is less consistent, but more than twice as large as the tendency for previously created articles to increase.

• 
  Quality scores by category over article age
• 
  Quality scores by starting year over elapsed time
• 
  Quality scores by page view quartiles over article age

See User:Smallbones/Quality4by4 for details.

I say this is my final posting here, as I think all the easily examined questions that interested me on article quality are now answered (at least to my satisfaction) and any other questions that I have will be much harder to address. However, there is a nice 1000 random article data set now that other folks can use to help answer their own questions. See User:Smallbones/1000 random. If anybody has any questions on how this data set might be used, or even if you want my help in gathering a bit more data, please just ask.

There's a research project listing over at meta that I might post to, but my feeling is that I'd have to up my game quite a bit to make it worthwhile, e.g. larger data sets and actual significance testing! If anybody here is familiar with bots and APIs and wants to help me out, please let me know. Probably my first study there would be along the lines of an event study. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:08, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

So a one line takeaway would be: "Wikipedia is gradually getting better." ??? Carrite (talk) 02:08, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

How about "Old articles are very gradually getting better, newly created articles are getting better each year, apparently at a faster rate." Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:18, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

[Removed content from banned editor] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Smallbones (talk • contribs)

The last time this issue was raised, an answer was given about the correlations of the measure used to manual article classification (a lengthy, labor-intensive process at GA and FA levels) to which you did not respond. @Smallbones: can you please make a correlogram plotting ORES scores against article class for recently passed and failed GA candidates (so as to not be using stale article class assessments)? EllenCT (talk) 15:45, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't answer questions from the usual banned editor - only from people who want to know the answer to their questions. The best place for you (EllenCT) to start would be to look at ORES scores. It's a machine learning project and has all the usual advantages and disadvantages. The new GA decisions would be an interesting study and it would take a fair amount of time. One of the usual disadvantages of machine learning is that a computer will be looking at a fairly limited number of factors, so that "fine points" won;t be considered. One of the usual advantages is that computers are consistent but humans can be all over the place, e.g. give an article to 3 people it's possible that they'd come up with three different ratings. So I think I'd need a way of determining whether the computer or the human rater was more likely wrong when they disagree on the GA rating. Any ideas on how to do that? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:01, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

It would be interesting to hear more about the degree of confidence that the ORES edit quality model and article quality model bear out appropriately when actually assessed by intelligence experts. Was there any verification or confirmation that having people like "Epicgenius", "MrX", "Coretheapple", and "ONUnicorn" training a bot to understand 20,000 randomly sampled edits was a rigorous methodology? Looking at the Talk page of the ORES training project, it looks like there was a lot of confusion at first about what constitutes "damage" to the encyclopedia. In one case, the volunteers who trained the model were told, "Do not worry too much about 'making the wrong decision' - just stick to your best judgement even if it appears to be 'too close to call'." That's not a strong system, if it's based on personal discretion and not worrying too much. - Frugal fisherman (talk) 03:35, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

"Intelligence experts"? Do you mean those skilled in understanding and applying the reliable source criteria? EllenCT (talk) 10:05, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

I was referring to experts in artificial intelligence. - Frugal fisherman (talk) 17:09, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Hey folks. I do have a PhD in computer science. We publish a lot of evaluation criteria. See m:ORES/wp10#enwiki for the stats on the current article quality model. This model was trained and tested using article quality assessment templates left by Wikipedians. An earlier version of the model was vetted through a peer review process. See work by Warncke-Wang et al. (PDF). Generally, it's harder to make predictions about "B" and "C", but predicting "GA", and "FA" is very easy. My guess for the difference is the robust process for FA/GA candidates. --Halfak (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: why would measuring the correlation between ORES scores and recent GA decisions take time? What would I need to do if I wanted to to it myself? EllenCT (talk) 10:08, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

I encourage anybody with the time to play around with the ORES scores to see how they work.

• 1st define a sample you want to use. In the GA case I'd suggest the most recent 50 or 100 decisions made at GA
• 2nd go to https://ores.wmflabs.org/v2/scores/enwiki/wp10/##### and replace the ##### with the permanent ID for the version of the article you want to use (probably the permid on the date of the decision)
• record whether the final GA decision was positive or negative for each article, and what the predicted ORES value was for the article on that date. You'll end up with a 2x2 table something like
  • (ORES GA, Human not GA) (ORES GA, Human GA)
  • (ORES not GA, Human not GA) (ORES not GA, Human GA)

and this will be the data that you'd use for most tests

• The real question I have is what you want to test, or how you'd interpret the table. I would expect that the cells where the 2 methods agree would be more numerous than the cells where they disagree, but there certainly will be items in the cells where they disagree. What would convince you that there is a reasonable match between the methods?
• based on your previous question about correlograms I'm guessing that we are using different terminology or that you need to brush up on your stats. I'll suggest that you take some time with somebody you know who knows stats to decide what exactly you want to test. You'll probably end up using a non-parametric correlation coefficient like Kendall's tau or maybe even a Chi-squared test, but it really depends what you're trying to test. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:16, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

A correlogram is an image of correlation statistics, such as a scatter plot, one of the Seven Basic Tools of Quality. See [2] for more information. We want the Matthews correlation coefficient of the ORES score against the GA pass/fail determination, which is related to the 2x2 chi-square test, but first I need to know: how do you come up with a score for the entire article from a service that appears to be scoring revisions/diffs? EllenCT (talk) 03:09, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Find the permanent id for the version of the article you want. You can click on the version in the article history and in the little box at the top it will give you the permanent id. Plug the permanent id into https://ores.wmflabs.org/v2/scores/enwiki/wp10/##### (in place of the #####). That will give you the ORES score for that entire version, not just changes or anything like that, but for that version of the entire article. Have fun with your scatter plot, What axes are you going to use? I use the word correlogram for something else. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:21, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

I'll start going through [3] now that I see at meta:Objective Revision Evaluation Service#Article quality models that an ORES wp10 GA revision score is indeed for its permalink instead of its diff. EllenCT (talk) 16:02, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: I started in at User:EllenCT/ORESwp10GA but, which revision should I use for failed or held articles? The revision as nominated or the revision after GA feedback? Clearly for passed articles I need to use the revision as passed after feedback. EllenCT (talk) 16:39, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

I checked out User:EllenCT/ORESwp10GA and it looks like a good start. I'd use the rejection date (it's on the talk page). Of course if there is no article revision on that date, use the 1st earlier revision. I don't think you should use the GA probability score, but whether the ORES prediction is GA (or FA - obviously if ORES think that the article is FA level, it would pass it for a GA). The output comes out

"scores": {
   "enwiki": {
     "wp10": {
       "scores": {
         "711273556": {
           "prediction": "C",
           "probability": {
             "B": 0.16612192754042912,
             "C": 0.28881231895659715,
             "FA": 0.18657915633315258,
             "GA": 0.25403102426394586,
             "Start": 0.09340397235809957,
             "Stub": 0.011051600547775799

Look at the 7th line "prediction":"C" - take that as ORES predicts it fails GA. The "prediction" is based on the probabilities (you used the GA one) which all add to 1. It just picks the class with the highest probability.

I'll make any further comments on the your data collection talk page there. I know it's a lot of work recording all of these, but don't worry - you'll get the hang of it. It's something like a zen exercise - concentrate on your breathing or your hand movements. Drop me a note when you get to 100. Good luck. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:51, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

100? I'm pretty sure it's worth automating if you want that many. I agree with using the rejection date and whether the class prediction is GA or above. EllenCT (talk) 23:29, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

If you can automate it please show me how! If anybody has been interested in this thread knows about those bot thingies and APIs, *please* let me know! Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:59, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: here is pseudocode: for each nominated article in [4] if it is a GA then get the ORES wp10 article class prediction of the revison prior to the GA template being added, else get its ORES wp10 article class prediction of the first revision on or before the date sepecified on the talk page GA or article history template. Do you use Windows, Mac, and/or Linux? What language(s) do you program in? EllenCT (talk) 23:27, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I use a Mac. I haven't programmed anything for 10 years or more. On everything I've done so far, I've gathered the data by hand. The pseudocode is fine, but the step to get the articles at [5] looks like it could be difficult for a bot to do. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:32, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: it's easy with regexps and the API, but check this out, ORES has built-in validation statistics. @Halfak (WMF): can you confirm that the "table" in those test_stats for enwiki ORES wp10 can be used to calculate the Matthews correlation coefficient for GA classification? I see the same data is at [6] but I am not exactly sure which columns and rows represent true and false positives and negatives. EllenCT (talk) 13:49, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes it is a very good idea to ping Halfak (WMF) here. I thinks ORES is his baby, I'm just a user of that service, but have used it enough to say that I have basic confidence in its predictions. Collecting data by hand does have its advantages: i see the article versions rated and most often agree with the rating prediction if I skim through the articles. But other than that and the work I've presented on this page I haven't tested the accuracy of the service.

That said the test stats check you link to, I believe are from training data. There's more training data than I thought would have been available, so maybe they did get this from "the wild" of actual Wikipedia ratings on the rating dates. I would have thought that would be real hard to do, rather than have trainers rate the articles. The training data should be a closer match than newly generated "wild" data, but it looks very impressive. I too am confused though - do the columns or the rows show the actual or the predictions? Once you know that you can summarize the table into a 2x2 table and you can use the Matthews correlation, or you can use a different non-parametric correlation coefficient for the current table. Though with so much data and the spread of the data over 6 classes, just about any correlation coefficient will work "pretty good". Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:53, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

The validation data is likely smaller than the training data. @EpochFail: can you answer the table row and column labels question, please? EllenCT (talk) 22:10, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

So. is that showing that the later editors bring more articles to quality standards? That'll spook the ole respect-me- as-I've-been-forever fogies. AnonNep (talk) 15:13, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Actually, it's might be more the other way around - that the improvements are pretty slow in coming (though they do obviously come sooner or later for most articles) and that the original article quality is the most important factor in determining article quality - say 2 years after the article was created.

But first, I have to say that I've gone to some lengths not to over-interpret what I've done here. Have you noticed that many folks (especially on this page, it seems) like to go beyond the straight facts and try to draw conclusions that are just not there yet? Let me give my overall interpretation of what I've learned by doing all 4 investigations I've presented on this page. It's basic observation at this point, not full scale statistical research with competing hypotheses tested. Warning - these are just my interpretations or opinions, caveat lector.

There are a lot of pretty poor articles on Wikipedia. Using the ratings from editors about 65% are rated stubs or are unassessed. Most of the rest are rated "start". But this doesn't mean much because almost all the ratings are out of date. We need a method that we can use to rate articles in a consistent and timely manner. ORES seems to do this pretty well.

I think most active editors and most readers tend to ignore the low quality articles, so overall people have a pretty distorted view of Wikipedia's quality.

There is a type of article I call "forgotten sub-stubs" - probably something over 500,000 of them. The 20% of articles with the lowest page views (that is the 1,000,000 least viewed articles) get in total less than 1% of all page views. Most of these articles are substubs or stubs, they are much worse in quality than those with higher page views (see graph above, on the right). IMHO many but not all of these forgotten substubs could be deleted to improve the quality of the encyclopedia.

I came up with a method to put articles into mutually exclusive categories. Biographies, Culture and Arts, and to a lesser extent Geography dominate our articles, and this basic breakdown has been pretty much stable since the start of the encyclopedia. Quality does differ across categories, especially for articles on Geography (especially for geo articles on the Eastern Hemisphere). Other than that there don't seem to be huge differences in quality or quality improvement across categories, but this area could use more work.

Biographies on women seem to have a lower starting quality than bios on men, and the quality improvement for women's bios is somewhat lower. I interpret that as caused by a lack of source material.

Articles that have been marked Vital by editors tend to have been started very early (i.e. 2001-2002). They started at fairly high quality and improved rapidly. A small matching sample of non-vital articles started at lower quality an improved slowly (0.10 point per year on average), until they reached start quality, when they improved three times as quickly (0.30 points per year). The determinants of the rate of quality improvement obviously needs more work. Compare these results to the 0.05 points per year rate in the graphs above, using a larger sample.

Quality improvement is pretty slow for articles that have been previously created, but at least it is consistently positive across article categories, page view categories, article age, and year of creation. The improvement in the quality of newly created articles for one year compared to the quality of newly created articles for the previous year, seems to be much larger than for the previously created articles, but is not consistent over time.

That last paragraph is the most direct answer to AnonNep's question. But please view that answer in context - lots of other stuf is going on, and lots more work needs to be done to understand the dynamics.

Caveat lector. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:25, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: on File:4by4 page views.tiff are the quartiles ordered from most to fewest pageviews or by fewest to most pageviews? Would you make that more clear in the file description and captions where you use that graph? EllenCT (talk) 15:40, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

1st quartile is the 25% of articles with the fewest page views per month. Not surprisingly, this quartile also has the lowest average quality. Details are at User:Smallbones/Quality4by4 . Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:06, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: would you please replace the text I replied to about the correlation between the measure you used and recent GA passes and fails? Removing the text of banned editors trying to criticise Jimbo as a means of propping up the monopolistic conglomerate from which they hope to win kudos if they are successful in their quest to change our policies to forbid both positive and negative information in articles about their botique PR consulting clients is fine, but not when it is questioning your work to quantify the basis of their critiques. EllenCT (talk) 10:05, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Banning policy#Bans apply to all editing, good or bad and also WP:BANREVERT which says "Anyone is free to revert any edits made in violation of a ban, without giving any further reason and without regard to the three-revert rule." I take the phrase "without giving any further reason" very seriously. That stops the usual "let's talk this thing to death, until you say something that some folks find offensive" tactic that is often used by Wikilawyers. But in this case, I've already stated the reason - I just don't believe in wasting my time answering questions from people who don't care about the answers.

Now if you want to know something that was stated in that question, all you have to do is state in your own words what you want to know, and I'll do my best to try to answer it. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 13:53, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

You are free to keep crossing the street at the same corner for an hour, too, but that doesn't mean that it's something which you would ever want to have done, even if for some reason it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was just thinking of the readers. No big deal. EllenCT (talk) 03:11, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

• Using my own "sampling", which is entirely led by my own interests (somewhat varied) but includes a far larger sample than this seems to do, I would say this is roughly on the right track. The long tail of "unpopular" articles doesn't improve, but perhaps doesn't need to. Our great weakness remains popular and "important" articles on topics rather than things (people, places, events, species). These often remain extremely poor quality after well over 10 years. I'm entirely sure this is because they are much harder to improve without good specialist knowledge than articles on discrete subjects, and because by and large our editors include fewer experts than in the 2000's. Indeed an increasing and rather alarming proportion of our regular editors hardly ever add text in any quantity. Johnbod (talk) 17:40, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
  • I'm tempted to say something about "objective vs. subjective", but we all know that "measurable" isn't quite the same thing as objective and has its own problems. Let me just say "different stroke for different folks. This is one way of seeing where we are and getting at the problems. BTW, I left you a copy of File:Size of English Wikipedia (1000 vol).svg on your user page, please revert if you don't like it, but it goes with the series. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:38, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Editor of the Week : nominations needed!

The Editor of the Week initiative has been recognizing editors since 2013 for their hard work and dedication. Editing Wikipedia can be disheartening and tedious at times; the weekly Editor of the Week award lets its recipients know that their positive behaviour and collaborative spirit is appreciated. The response from the honorees has been enthusiastic and thankful.

The list of nominees is running short, and so new nominations are needed for consideration. Have you come across someone in your editing circle who deserves a pat on the back for improving article prose regularly, making it easier to understand? Or perhaps someone has stepped in to mediate a contentious dispute, and did an excellent job. Do you know someone who hasn't received many accolades and is deserving of greater renown? Is there an editor who does lots of little tasks well, such as cleaning up citations?

Please help us thank editors who display sustained patterns of excellence, working tirelessly in the background out of the spotlight, by submitting your nomination for Editor of the Week today. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 07:47, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

HELP Please

moving from the other page. With respect of the many good works that this group http://guerrillaskepticismonwikipedia.blogspot.com/ is doing, they are running rough over good faith editors here. I am appalled at how they have infiltrated normal editing policy, and they don't play nice with good faith editors. See Talk:Vaxxed. I don't even know if I am allowed to say that as I have been topic banned, but that is where I met this group who call themselves guerrilla editors. They need to work with us (editors) not against us, and they seem to have privileges that are unlimited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rS92GguJwU&sns=em (youtube lecture)TeeVeeed (talk) 09:40, 22 April 2016 (UTC) movedTeeVeeed (talk) 12:35, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

In answer to your question, you have been topic banned from Vaxxed and the topic area vaccination. So you are not allowed to talk about it anywhere on wikipedia except in the context of an appeal of your ban. See WP:BANEX for specifics. Suffice to say, an 'appeal to Jimbo' to lift the ban would qualify under BANEX, but you would need to actually word it as such. If you are appealing to Jimbo to 'do something' about the other people at the article, that would be a violation of your topic ban (soliciting proxy editing on your behalf). I am assuming good faith and explaining this now to prevent you being banned in the future. I suggest you read BANEX very carefully before posting further. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:40, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Furthermore, contrary to your claim, no-one editing that page has identified themselves as a member of the group you claim we identified as belonging to. On top of that, while I can't speak for anyone else, I myself am not a member of any organized group of WP editors. I simply care about having a good encyclopedia that isn't suffused with populist, anti-scientific POV. A quick look at my editing history will show that I have, in fact, fought against efforts to over-push a skeptical POV into certain articles. Successfully, I might add, due in no small part to the fact that I don't go around using third-grade rhetoric and threatening to "troll" those who argue with me into submission. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 13:44, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Ty Only in death does duty end. They are following the stated agenda of the group, seeding entertainment and other articles with mention-of Gorski and other (her quote, not mine 12:15 in the video) of their "spokespeople" unquote, to provide wider exposure and attention for their cause and ultimately non-profit organisation. MjolnirPants-Big deal, I used the word troll. You were trolling me on that talk page. What you said in one place made zero sense with your actions. You finally agreed, after accusing me of a bunch of nonsense, and/or trying to make Gorski look bad by saying that he used a screen name, (he does-the ref was signed with the screen name), you finally said, what looked to me like-Oh-Ok, put that he posts under another name, and then when I added the edit you started a bunch of drama with me. TeeVeeed (talk) 14:24, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

First off: You didn't "use the word troll" you straight up said you intended to "keep trolling [us]". Second: No, I wasn't trolling you. I responded directly, honestly and in good faith without every doing or saying anything disruptive. Finally, What I said was different that what you interpreted it to mean, I made a point of clarifying what I meant later, but you ignored that and continue to assert that I meant something I never said. That's extremely dishonest. Finally, the drama is entirely of your own making. If you would have discussed your desired edit after the first time it was reverted instead of edit warring it back in, you wouldn't have ended up at AE when you did. From what I can see, you'd have ended up there eventually, but again, that's due to your own editing practices. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 18:05, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

• @Only in death: I, at least, am not going to sanction TeeVeed for posting on Jimbo's page, and I've told him so. Other admins may feel differently, but I take it as a kind of preparation for appealing his topic ban. Indeed, when I noticed he had mistakenly placed his post on the little-read page User talk:Jimbo Wales/Unprotected, I advised him to move it here.[7] But TeeVeeed, you're not doing yourself any favours by continuing the same time-wasting minor squabbles here, of all places. You don't have to answer everything. Why don't you just write up your appeal? If you're going to appeal. Or drop the whole thing if you're not. Bishonen | talk 15:53, 22 April 2016 (UTC).

I'm glad Jimbo keeps an open door policy, because this seems interesting. What do you think of the article Susan Gerbic? Can a person be notable for the work they do on Wikipedia, without that work representing a conflict of interest? Wnt (talk) 16:13, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Edit wikipedia administrator rights abuse

Abuse of authority is wanton hang speed delete{{G3}}（mark G3. Pure vandalism and blatant hoaxes），Repeatedly violated WP: CSD （mark:Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion）guidelines in zhwikipedia. see:

1. [8]; [9]--Odfgl9412 (talk) 15:02, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Odfgl9412 Admins on this wiki have no jurisdiction over other wikis: you haven't made any edits to zh.wikipedia.org, or to meta.wikimedia.org, which you could mention this at if you don't speak Chinese. It's not clear what you're saying. Content disputes don't need to be taken to tis talk page, but thanks anyway. --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 20:10, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 April 2016

• News and notes: Lunar project; steering group formed to search for next executive director

• Op-ed: Knowledge Engine and the Wales–Heilman emails

• Special report: Update on EranBot, our new copyright violation detection bot

• Traffic report: Two for the price of one

• Featured content: The double-sized edition

• Arbitration report: Amendments made to the Race and intelligence case

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:42, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Looks like you have some explaining to do. --SB_Johnny | ^talk✌ 15:29, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

• So the WMF *is* building an external search engine? By this, I mean 'search engine' as is understood by 99% of the world, an engine that takes answers from the web/net - rather than specifically only wikimedia sources (an internal search engine) - and displays them in some form of browsable list? Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:56, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

A Fan For You!

		Fan!
		Spidersmilk has given you a Fan! Fans are good for two reasons: They blow air and allow hot wikipedians to cool off, and also cheer them on when they need it, Just like a fan of a football or basketball team. Cool off, and enjoy the cheering and the breeze. Hopefully this one has made your day better. You can spread "WikiLove" and "wikicheers" by giving someone else some a fan, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or someone who just needs a some fan to cheer them on and/or a good, refreshing breeze. To spread the goodness of fans, you can add {{subst:fan}} to someone's talk page with a friendly message, or enjoy the breeze or cheering on the giver's talk page with {{subst:Breeze}}!

Spidersmilk (talk) 00:38, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Micropedia on the Moon

Just thinking about the chance to preserve Wikipedia at off-World sites, where a Micropedia might perhaps fit within a spacecraft's budget. At the very least, launch with Simple English Wikipedia and perhaps the top 10,000 pages in the other top-10 languages. It is an agonizing "Wikipedian's Choice" as in, "If only a million articles could be launched, then what would you take on the spaceflight?". I spent months working to expand Wikipedia's basic core articles, only to realize the amazing racehorse Secretariat (horse), who won Belmont by 31 lengths, would likely never make the list, where other cultures had limited interest, to also exclude numerous excellent films, songs, or paintings (etc.) which would fall outside the core limits. -Wikid77 (talk) 21:29, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-April/083839.html

http://imgur.com/EZZiWhP

67.6.190.217 (talk) 15:34, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm a little confused here, but maybe there's just a joke that I'm not getting. :-) I don't think the entire text and images of Wikipedia are really likely to physically weigh materially more than a subset. There is now such a thing as a 16 terabyte 2.5 inch hard drive (see this article for some details) and although I'm not certain that all of Wikipedia including images would fit in that space (I don't know the most convenient place to find a current estimate of total compressed size in bytes), it'd be far far far more than just 10,000 pages in top-10 languages.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:47, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Some technologies are not resistant to radiation. Someone at the talk page pointed me at this article - a glass disc that resists 1000 F and is supposedly stable for millions of years should be much more likely to stand up to some time on the Moon, I think. I wrote my comment on the project's discussion page that I think it's a waste of time to try to pick and choose data - we should try to enlist the makers of that for what would be a high-profile ad from their point of view, or if they don't go for that, take up a special collection to buy a Wikipedia disc from them. Wnt (talk) 12:18, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The best physical storage medium has already been worked out. See rosettaproject.org. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:19, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Thats not a link to Vinyl. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:36, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: That is only 13,000 "pages". I don't know how much a page is but I would doubt this is even gigabytes, much less terabytes. And the disc is supposed to last 2,000 years, which is very impressive, but not as impressive as the 13.8 billion years claimed for the glass disc. Simply put, it is a nice try but no cigar. I say we get the real thing, put all of Wikipedia on it, and that way it's around for however long it takes the archeologists to get around to trying to figure out what happened to Earth. (If Venus is any guide, they may not have much unstirred surface on the planet to work with) Wnt (talk) 20:19, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Personally, I'd rather see it on the next Voyager style probe than on the moon, on the ground that once through the inner system, there's much less chance of something destructive happening to it.--Wehwalt (talk) 11:27, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

@Wehwalt: There's no exclusivity here - you wangle us a slot on one of those and you'll have no complaints for me! But when you've actually been given a slot on a spacecraft, you're really being challenged to put forward the very best package you possibly can. Wnt (talk) 16:22, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

New study says WP is like a "corporate bureaucracy"

According to Gizmodo, the study shows that Wikipedia has changed from, according to the study's co-author Simon DeDeo, "a tiny Thomas Jefferson libertarian fantasy" to something more like "a university system, or like General Electric, or AT&T." What seems especially interesting to me, though is the concern expressed in the article about "editing inequality" where a small % of editors exert a much larger % of control over how WP works--this seems like an important issue to me, like income inequality must seem to Bernie Sanders. Was wondering what other editors (esp. Jimbo himself) thought. Everymorning (talk) 02:42, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

lol. Wikipedia is so bureaucratically complicated, it makes "corporate bureaucracy" look like a children's playground. Imagine a new hire at a company hears about the "open door policy" and decides to ask HR a question about an editor harassing them with reverts and the HR person whips out the 10,000 page employee manual, yells "boomerang!" and every manager at the company dogpiles them with the end result being an old arbitration enforcement warning involving people that left the company years before he started. Not trusting HR or even undertanding what "boomerang" means or any of the TLA jargon, they ask another editor about the AE warning and they are slapped with a topic ban because the wording was forbidden on page 5,326 and they were properly warned with a pretty notice with traffic and bio-hazard symbols. After following the myriad of renamed and transcribed pages related to "ArbCom", they find The Attic where people report to answer (the question is not provided because everyone already knows it because it's "in the log"). At ARCA, the new user inquires about what the ruling means and suddenly finds a new template that such questions are a violation of his ArbCom topic banhe must answer charges at Arbitration Enforcement which is a lot like the dogpile at ANI except instead of a Rugby scrum, the admins form cheers and complicated formations like human pyramids. Exasperated, they go to twitter to ask what did they do wrong. A kindly veteran editor, identifiable only by his dead eyes and hollow, soulless expression says" "You made an edit to comedian born in London and spelt 'humour' without the extra 'u'. The Brits consider it a µ aggression. It's clearly written in the manual of style and all three ArbCom cases." --DHeyward (talk) 10:54, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, many corporations do not have the time (or money) to afford all the hours of bickering about tiny details, and I know no corporation with guidelines for leading zero "0" in decimal numbers to avoid ".38 caliber" and such. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:02, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

If there were a better way I'd go for it, but for all the concerns Wikipedia seems to be holding its own as is. Anyplace this size can seem onerous, and there are always malcontents who drag everyone around them down; human nature has this nasty habit of manifesting itself in every endeavor, including this one. I'll take the things that have come my way of the year any time over the issues I run into in real life, anytime I start to worry about something here that brings me back to remember it's just a website and nothing to spaz about. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:29, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

It's the exact reason I wrote the byzantine above as humour. It's amazing that such a chaotic place has lasted. Actually, the more (or less)I think about it the chaos and drama is the human nature that likely keeps it going. --DHeyward (talk) 04:44, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Ha. OK, I came here to read the other thread, but I have to admit this is funny. But you forgot the part where someone redirected WP:ARBµ to the first arbcom case and caused an edit war over whether it was a WP:RFOREIGN violation. Opabinia regalis (talk) 04:59, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• "It's like a university system" is a pretty sharp blow below the belt. I'm hurting. It's fighting words. But that university systems are like university systems is not the fault of the professors or the students, it's the cowardice of administrators, the greed of politicians who sit on the board of trustees, and the general lameness of HR. We have a different system here where--I'm sad to say--much of the lameness comes not top-down, but bottom-up. ArbCom wouldn't exist if the Jeffersonian, libertarian users could solve shit by themselves. DYK this is one of our most heavily-used boilerplate answers? "I've taken a very quick look at this issue (which by-and-large appears to be a content dispute), and it seems that the editors involved are mostly adhering to the consensus-based editing model and, as such, this issue would probably not be accepted at the arbitration level of dispute resolution at the present time." (Opabinia regalis, I copied from the ArbWiki--is this worth a shot to the back of the head?) One of the recent ones was 52734 characters long. I read it. I mean, we have Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars, and to cut through some of those disputes you can either have a somewhat democratically elected committee which gets bogged down at every turn, or a Trump-like authoritarian who cuts Gordian knots with their Wu-Tang sword. Take your pick--but I think the community has already chosen. Drmies (talk) 14:39, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

@Opabinia regalis: I believe the final compromise was to call it WP:µARB after much vigorous debate regarding WP:µARB#µSCOPE :) --DHeyward (talk) 23:39, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

DHeyward, is that the same "community" which decided--foolishly--at Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2013_February_12#WP:ANI_2.0? Drmies (talk) 00:06, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

No , that was a "micro" community, this is a µ community. One is a group of WP:RFOREIGNers. --DHeyward (talk) 01:55, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Is worse than corporate bureacracy but needs US Govt standards

At this point, English Wikipedia (enwiki) seems more like a government bureaucracy gone awry, but without the basic rules to ensure common sense. In the U.S. Federal Government, there are useful standards, such as, "The delete-key 'del' shall be used to delete 1 character" or "The insert-key shall be used to insert characters" or "The 'A' key shall be used to enter the letter 'a' for input" (etc.); otherwise, some people will want to redefine the keyboard, from page to page, to act like video-game control buttons or such. Some U.S. software standards limit coding line length to within 100 characters, with no tabs because the tab stops often vary between devices; instead, some of the WP Lua templates have line lengths exceeding 400[!] characters, with little documentation or have procedure sizes exceeding thousands of lines. With so many thousands of users, WP will need to define coding standards for wp:wikitext and Lua script usage so that more users can edit those pages on various devices. More wp:RfC discussions are needed to steer decisions into broader consensus, plus involving the needs of the readership. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:02, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Full Measure episode about Wikipedia

Never mind, this has been discussed here already. Reopen if you want to discuss it again. Everymorning (talk) 03:13, 28 April 2016 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
This certainly seems like bad publicity (assuming that really exists--from what I've heard it may not). Probably nothing to any of it (e.g. Morgellons stuff ignores MEDRS), but not sure, so posting here to see what others think. Everymorning (talk) 01:20, 28 April 2016 (UTC) Previous discussion archived at User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 207#Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson. Stephen 02:01, 28 April 2016 (UTC) Ah, thanks for pointing me to that, Stephen. I didn't know it had been discussed here already. I will hat this section now. Everymorning (talk) 03:13, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

career with wikimedia...

Dear Sir, It is a honor for us that the person like you is among us to bring innovation and knowledge through the fastest source. I want to be part of this organization. I want to ask that how can I be a part of your organization. I am really looking for a job in wikimedia as I am a good writer and have passion to write just give me a platform to show me talent. I know you welcome newcomers. So guide me..................

Thank you Gaurav Khare — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kharegaurav (talk • contribs) 13:00, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Just follow this guidance and advice:Wikipedia:Tutorial/Registration and you can become a Wikipedia Editor. More information now on your talk page --Aspro (talk) 20:09, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations, study finds

Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations, study finds FYI. wbm1058 (talk) 13:03, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Wow, that's super interesting.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:39, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• Was that around the time WP forced most users into "https" secure-protocol URL addresses, to conceal their pageviews, but Google-related pageviews dropped due to a pageview-traffic log bug? -Wikid77 (talk) 16:59, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't know for sure - but that would be a reasonable hypothesis for a short-term dip in all page views. What is interesting here is the relative drops: "The traffic dropped even more to topics that survey respondents deemed especially privacy-sensitive. Viewership of a presumably “safer” group of articles about U.S. government security forces decreased much less in the same period." I have only read the news story, not the actual study - presumably it will give more details.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:14, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Isn't the use of HTTPS supposed to prevent snooping on which pages on Wikipedia a person is visiting? As far as I can see, HTTPS is now the default connection to Wikipedia. In theory at least, all that a snooper should see is that a person is visiting the Wikipedia website, and not which pages are being visited. Correct me if I am wrong (this happens sometimes).--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 17:27, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

That's correct. Of course it is not clear that most readers would know that, nor even that most readers would even notice that Wikipedia is now https by default. So they still might be nervous about visiting pages about terrorism-related topics, if they think the NSA is watching, and that it might end them up on a list. I think the similar drop by 5% of google searches on terrorism-related terms is similarly interesting.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:56, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

This is a bit tongue in cheek but maybe much of the prior traffic was coming from members of the NSA themselves, looking and hoping to find something added by some editor in the know slipping in a juicy tip-bit (the NSA is vastly over-staffed and they have to fill their time some how). When the Snowden revelations broke they suddenly had that to focus upon and the interested John Doe's had the news paper reports to distract them away from WP. It seem reasonable to me that there was a drop.--Aspro (talk) 21:58, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm drawing different conclusions than just "chilling effect" (though I suspect terrorist groups stopped using sites that were being monitored). 1) capabilities now had a "different source" and google likely hit on Snowdens papers for simple searches like "NSA terror capabilities" in the months following. 2) the number of articles on the topic are not static so we now have articles on Snowden and more articles on NSA programs. Without seeing how traffic changed to outlets that covered it with high google scores and traffic to newly created articles that were more narrowly defined. What was the "traffic" to Eric Snowden Edward Snowden before and after the release? If I were to bet, I'd say "more than the difference between 2.3 and 3.0 million page views." People would be naturally drawn to the controversy and that becomes a self-fulfilling trending search score. Were people afraid to look up Snowden? I doubt it. If we were to take "chilling effect" to it's logical conclusion, sales of Encyclopedia Brittanica, paper edition, should have soared. --DHeyward (talk) 22:34, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Here are the page views for Eric and Edward Snowden.[10], [11]--Aspro (talk) 22:53, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

So that put's about 1.6M page views to Edward Snowden in June 2013. Up from 0. I hope they took that into account. Doesn't seem very chilling. --DHeyward (talk) 20:58, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Another mention. Wnt (talk) 19:07, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

People can always use Tor (anonymity network) if they want to look up search terms like "car bomb" and "al-Qaeda". Then again, the authorities might think that they were looking for child abuse material.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 19:15, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Transcribed without comment from your meta talk page

Requesting comment again given past pledges

Now I am even more curious to get a comment from you on my ArbCom ban appeal. During another discussion about an unrelated case on the English Wikipedia someone linked to this old RfC. I know it was eight years ago, but your statement there in closing that RfC discussion was pretty absolute:

I think the important statement has been made: no secret trials, and no convictions without giving the opportunity to present a defense. That's just basic justice, and I will overturn any ArbCom decision to the contrary. (Although, I should point out, there is ZERO chance of the ArbCom doing this in the first place.)

That is a lot of emphatic insistence that not only are secret trials where the accused has no chance to present a defense verboten but that ArbCom would never do such a thing in the first place, and that you would overturn any ArbCom decision of that nature. It is pretty clear my case has been exactly that kind of trial. Only after my ban came down was I even aware that I was being considered for a ban and I have not yet been told what it is that supposedly led to my ban, making it essentially impossible for me to present a defense as I can only guess at the reasons.

Why then have you allowed this ArbCom decision to stand despite your previous pledge to overturn what you thought was never a possibility in the first place? Are you not getting my messages? Did you not see any of this discussion on the ArbCom mailing list when it was brought up? If you have adjusted your stance regarding this despite what ArbCom's own arbitration policy states then I think this warrants an explanation. This especially warrants a response as a community discussion related to my case has reaffirmed overwhelming opposition to this kind of proceeding.--The Devil's Advocate (talk) 23:31, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Requesting_comment_again_given_past_pledges

Rhoark (talk) 15:34, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Not having much idea what this was about, I looked it up. [12]

In remedy 8.5 of the GamerGate case, The Devil's Advocate was 'strongly warned that should future misconduct occur in any topic area, he may be banned from the English Wikipedia by motion of the Arbitration Committee.' Accordingly, for continuing harassment of other editors, The Devil's Advocate is banned indefinitely from the English Wikipedia. He may request reconsideration of the ban six months after this motion passes, and every six months thereafter. 02:50, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#The Devil's Advocate banned (now archived, and TL;DR)

I still don't know much about this "GamerGate" thing, other than it seems to be the Wikipedia equivalent of the Middle East. Never ending, unresolved suicide-bombing conflict. What they're actually fighting over, I don't know. Surely not just "games"??

Would I be correct in assuming:

1. The allegation is that this editor harassed one or more people online, but off-site
2. A private trial was held, so as not to "out" the victim(s)
3. Not even the accused was allowed to attend (trial in absentia)?
4. Making this roughly equivalent to a Guantanamo trial of an alleged terrorist
5. But even terrorists get to attend their military trials?

I don't know what the answer is, but the optics of this don't look good. wbm1058 (talk) 19:43, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Suffice to say for the moment, this summary is one-sided and misses the essence of the situation. I'm looking into it and discussing it with ArbCom and will try to say something useful soon.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:02, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

How can it be "one sided and misses the essence of the situation" when the facts are, well facts... First a trial took place where the accused was not allowed to attend, see the evidence, defend himself, or even able to learn what he was accused of, beyond the blanket claim that it was offsite harassment. That's a fact. Then he was banned, but still haven't been told what he was accused of, and since he does not know what he did, he has no way to appeal it. That's also a fact. This is a trial where the every fundamental right of the accused were ignored. It's not even original, it's basically the plot for Kafka's "The Trial." There are some issues where the lines are blurred, this is not one of them. (I am reading the archived the AC/N thread retroactively and I'm shocked how can this stick. There should be a community outrage but I guess it's who you know and who you... know.) This is simply unacceptable.Darwinian Ape ^talk 21:14, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

If all of those things were facts then you'd have a stronger point. Can you send me a link to the archived AC/N thread you refer to?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:34, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

I think that's this Arkon (talk) 21:44, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

I actually saw it on your talk page above in this section. I believe the facts are not in dispute, you can see that if you care to read the thread Darwinian Ape ^talk 22:05, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

This and this may also be useful. Evangeliman (talk) 02:29, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Risk of outing participants requires a secret trial

In cases where off-wiki harassment involves on-wiki victims, as attacks on a group of editors, the investigation cannot risk publicly confirming the identities of the people involved on various websites. Instead the investigation must conduct a secret trial to confirm the intended attacks were attempted even if the victim usernames were not exactly the actual Wikipedia editors, based on secret witnesses, as similar to a classified government case where witnesses cannot be identified to the aggressor for risk of outing some undercover agents by cross-checking their statements of where they were during certain events by which the accused person could deduce usernames or personal information. Such off-wiki cases of hounding editors can be exceptions beyond the "face-the-accuser" rights of the accused, because the risks of outing people who might be editing contrary to their public lives or professions demands a secret trial, as an unfortunate result of attacking fellow editors who are also co-members of off-wiki sites. Perhaps editors should be warned if they attack a fellow editor, then they could be subjected to secret trials for off-wiki attacks attempted against other WP editor(s), with no chance to defend their treatment of users or identify related usernames at other websites or job sites. Beware how hateful attacks are not productive and could risk secret investigations. -Wikid77 (talk) 02:07, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

EVEN IF one accepts that such a situation existed and that a secret hearing was appropriate — neither you nor I nor anyone knows whether or not this is the case — it is still fundamentally unfair to have a hearing without notification to the person at the center of it, with no opportunity granted to learn the charges and to present exculpatory evidence. Carrite (talk) 03:57, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

• If the issue is so severe ArbCom can not address the matter with the accused then the issue is beyond their remit and should be addressed by the WMF. Nothing else should be acceptable to the community. If Jimbo does not address this then it is time to bring ArbCom under full community control via RfC as the "Jimbo check" on their power has become symbolic only and therefore functionally useless. Jbh^Talk 11:35, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

The above rationale assumes that it matters if the "outing" information is true. But there's no reason why we need to specially protect an editor's right to "out" another editor falsely, saying he's someone he isn't. So while there are other issues at play, I don't see any need to confirm that an outing is correct in order to make an administrative decision. Wnt (talk) 13:44, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

At this point, the people involved know the charges, so just have them e-mail the ctte with their defense - not bureaucracy. In the future, when there is a delicate issue, just have ctte treat it as an injunction, until the person addresses it to the ctte , or the ctte can just tell the person they are looking into it under whatever policy. Although some of the concern is perfectly understandable, perspective should be kept in mind, we are talking about editing or not editing a website. Also, what does 'full community control' mean?Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:52, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

It means that, at a minimum, ArbCom should be bound by decisions the community makes via RfC with respect to its powers/processes and remit. If an RfC says "no secret trials" then no secret trials. Jbh^Talk 14:10, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Here, the trial was in the open, the post-trial motion was in camera, and community policy allows for those to be held off wiki in delicate circumstances (indeed, that's an express reason the committee exists at all). Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:13, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Let me rephrase... If the community says the "accused" must be able to address the "charges" and evidence then they must be allowed to do so - evidence may be secret from the community but not from the person who it is being presented against. This is a deeply held community value and the community should be able to compel ArbCom to not violate that value by binding RfC. Jbh^Talk 14:20, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

And so is apparent naming and shaming[13] where it can be found to be WP:harassment - so, there is always a balance to be struck with what revelation is appropriate. As I suggested, if potential injury is found to be serious enough have the hearing after a preliminary injunction (and at all times be circumspect). -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:54, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

In other words, even if such a hearing would definitely identify the victim and leave them open to further harassment, such identification should be made? I just want to be clear about what is being requested. Doug Weller talk 14:59, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

If the issue is so sensitive that the "accused" is not allowed to know the evidence demonstrating their "guilt" then the matter is beyond what ArbCom should be addressing and it needs to go to the WMF as a ToU violation or to WMF-legal. That is what SanFranBans are for. Jbh^Talk 15:17, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, Doug, I would not recommend that you confirm anything in the harassing statements, themselves (true or not, they look like harassment - and even in the off-wiki hearing you should generally avoid mention of individuals - eg., focus on statements -even sometimes use redaction of names), but don't you have to accept the sad fact that regardless of what hearing you hold (again, I am assuming it is off-wiki, as you have to do in some situations), the abuse may well continue, and even get worse, and the same could happen with no hearing and no action by the ctte? In the end, you are merely upholding the site social contract -'if you participate, no wpharassment', and 'if you wpharass, don't participate.' Hope they stop doing that, perhaps your action will cause them to reconsider but you will never be able to count on that. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:46, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

There is a lot that could be said here, but for now what I'd like to say is that there's a lot of missing information in some of the more dramatic characterizations of this situation. Alanscottwalker is right to point out that the trial was in the open. That trial explicitly resulted in a statement that he could be banned by a further motion, which is what happened, as a direct result of a email that the banned user himself sent to the ArbCom. There was no secret trial here, and the issues involved in a longtime problematic editor being finally banned are, as far as I can tell, very technical in nature and not a matter which raises concerns about the fundamental values (such as our policies against harassment of other editors). I think notification could have been handled better, but this isn't a case involving a "secret trial" and a user being bewilderingly banned for reasons he can't understand. More to come in due course.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:04, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for looking into this. Am I reading correctly that the cause of the banning was not harassment, or else the alleged harassment took the form of an e-mail to ArbCom? Rhoark (talk) 16:30, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

No, neither of those. The harassment was confessed to in extensive detail by the now-banned user, in an email to ArbCom. The idea that ArbCom didn't let him speak his side of the matter is simply not true - he spoke it in volumes. Printed out, it is 7 pages of wall-to-wall text detailing a campaign of harassment over an extended period of time (over a year), including detailed investigations into another users personal life, repeated threats to that user to out him, "opposition research", etc. It's really ugly and exhibits the worst kind of battleground mentality.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:50, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

TDA has said he sent an e-mail about a suspected conflict of interest. Was he not doing the right thing in forwarding what he had learned to ArbCom rather than, say, Wikipediocracy? ArbCom is supposed to be the body equipped to deal with suspicions too delicate for COI/N, so doesn't this indicate a de facto policy of "see no evil, hear no evil?" The fact that ArbCom responded using a kill-switch they put on TDA as a sanction in an unrelated content dispute rather than out of the blue does little for the optics. Rhoark (talk) 20:31, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

The act of sending the email was not what was problematic. Did I in any way suggest that the sending of the email was the problem? No, I didn't. It was the behaviors outlined in the email.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:40, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Okay that is confusing. First of, trial may not be in secret but it was private and accused was not allowed to attend, hear the evidence against him and defend himself.(these are unequivocal facts) The arbcom stated that the reason they did not reveal the evidence to the accused was because "that would make the accused harass the victim even more." Now you state that he had sent an e-mail that directly resulted the "problem editor" to be banned. It is more than unlikely that the accused would not be aware of the e-mail he had sent was the reason for his ban. And the stated reason not to disclose evidence to the accused does not stand. Aside from that, an evidence so damning that the arbcom could not disclose it to the public to protect the victim, yet so unforgettable that the accused could not remember. Or does the committee imply that the accused is a serial harasser and could not keep track of his victims! The whole thing does not stand up to scrutiny. And also the facts stand that a person was tried and convicted without knowing the crime or being able to defend himself. This is an unjust procedure pure and simple. Darwinian Ape ^talk 17:38, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

The accused not only was allowed to appear - he testified extensively in a 7 page email detailing his own misconduct. You are very much right that it is "more than unlikely that the accused would not be aware of the e-mail he has sent was the reason for his ban". The main question is why he has pretended otherwise. I agree, by the way, that the notification was less than ideal. I would like to have seen an email saying something like "Thank you for detailing to us your longterm misconduct. Per the restriction you are already under, you're banned."--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:50, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Darwinian Ape, rather than accepting the version of what happened that Wales is telling you, you seem to be taking it on faith that the editor had NO idea why they were banned. You are not even questioning his version of the story and making a lot of assumptions about how ArbCom operates. A discussion on email list is not a "trial". Can you even accept that your understanding of the facts might be biased or based on a partial knowledge of what occurred? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:27, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, to be fair, to an outsider looking in, it's not hard to reach the wrong conclusions when you only have one side of the story. But this is why it is important to assume good faith, to remember the stature of the editors elected to ArbCom by the community, and to hold off on drama in situations like this.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:40, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Liz I did not take what the accused editor said "on faith," I looked at the discussion and drew my own conclusions based on the evidence provided by both editors and arbs who attended to that discussion, neither did I refused to accept the version of what happened that Mr Wales told me, since he just told his version here and now, and I am not a psychic. There are, though still some pieces of this drama that I can't quite place. Mr Wales, you implied that the editor was deceptive and pretended to not know the reason he got banned, if that's the case why didn't the committee explained that he did in fact knew the reason for his block? This whole thing could have been avoided by a simple statement that would not be in any way harmful to the victim. Why would the committee facilitate the deception of the accused editor? If you read the AC/N thread it is clear that multiple arbcom members stated that they did not disclose the evidence(to him) which they found him guilty of. The gist of that AC/N thread was this: One editor asks "So we are now banning people without even telling them why..." Another editor replies: "...That's the point. It's intentionally designed that way, because if they told TDA what he did, he would tell others,..." You can't read that thread and not conclude the accused was not allowed to see the evidence and thus defend himself. So I again ask why did the arbs made a ridiculous statement that they could not disclose evidence to the accused when the evidence was in fact brought by the accused himself? Darwinian Ape ^talk 00:50, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I think their stature is precisely why these conclusions have been made. For example, Gamaliel deleted a comment on this page a month ago ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=710240860&diff=prev ), and then blocked the user globally, for trying to get you to look at this topic back then. Nothing to hide - but all the actions say otherwise. 67.42.181.170 (talk) 20:45, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm glad to hear Jimbo is looking into this and I'll be watching for an update. This case has bothered me for some time since I've observed Devil's Advocate to be precisely the kind of editor wikipedia needs - just not the one some of the power-craving and abusing Arbs want. Arbcom shouldn't have this sort of power and this current Arbcom (filled with "social justice" fanatics who put feelings over logic and evidence) especially shouldn't have this power. 67.42.181.170 (talk) 17:51, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Why am I not surprised that a Gamergate advocate who uses terms like "social justice fanatics" thinks we should allow this kind of behavior to go unchecked. Think again.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:53, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

I didn't say anything about Gamergate. If you think the term "social justice fanatics" has anything to do with Gamergate then you'll find that the term has been in use prior to Gamergate ( https://www.google.com/#q=%22social+justice+fanatics%22&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1999%2Ccd_max%3A8%2F1%2F2014&tbm= ). It is certainly clear who is informing your mindset though, which is troubling since I know for a fact that some of the sitting Arbs are untrustworthy - as the recent Arbcom case demonstrates. 67.42.181.170 (talk) 20:19, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Just to be clear, here, no one, ever, "appears" at any "trial" having anything to do with Wikipedia. You write things to one another, that's it, that's all, public or not. Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:46, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

As with the Gamergate comment from Jimbo, I never said anything about a "trial." A trial is open with a focus on providing justice while Arbcom is secret and focused on social justice (i.e. not justice). 67.42.181.170 (talk) 20:51, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Wrong. Arbcom is focused on behaviors outlined in site-policies. Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:58, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Sure. :) 67.42.181.170 (talk) 21:10, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, confusing. The issue isn't the previous "GamerGate" trial that was held in the open, as I understand it. As I said, I don't know much of the details of that, except that it's a war zone that innocent bystanders risk life-and-limb if they wander near it. The issue is the in camera (a euphemism for "in private", as I see it) "motion" that was held in lieu of a proper trial. It's like someone was charged with drunk driving, the judge lets them off with a warning that "the next time you drive drunk, there will be consequences", and when the next time allegedly happens, the guy is sent directly to jail for five years without a trial because he had previously been warned by the court. I'm also struggling to understand how this action will deter further harassment, rather than lead to escalated harassment in retaliation. The more effective response would seem to be going after the site operator that is hosting whatever this is, or where the emails originated from. I'm also confused about why we're in this grey zone where the issue is bad enough to merit an ArbCom ban but not a SanFran ban. wbm1058 (talk) 18:25, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't think the analogy is apt. It's more like probation (in the US system, I'm not sure how other places handle it). Someone's been convicted of drunk driving and is placed under probation with the understanding that if it happens again, the probation officer can send them to jail. And then the person drives drunk into the side of the police station. You don't get a brand new trial in a case like that. The restriction said that he could be banned by a motion from the ArbCom - that's what happened. And, by the way, quite rightly. We have to take harassment seriously and not let spurious ideas based on incomplete facts override doing the right thing.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:50, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

FindLaw says "Probation officers have broad discretion to issue a warning, or require you to appear in court for a probation violation hearing. Generally, you have the right to: (1) receive written notice of the claimed violations against you, (2) be heard by a neutral judge in court, (3) attorney representation, and (4) to present evidence and witnesses to support your case, or refute evidence against you." I realize that ArbCom doesn't entirely operate like a court, and there may be some valid reasons not to, though I'm not sure what they would be. wbm1058 (talk) 21:57, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, what you said before was very good: "no secret trials, and no convictions without giving the opportunity to present a defense. That's just basic justice, and I will overturn any ArbCom decision to the contrary." But now, when this has actually started happening, you're equivocating. I'm sorry, but there just isn't any room for argument: It was a secret trial without notification or opportunity for a defense; the ArbCom itself said so, and no one has even tried to suggest otherwise until now. Have the courage to stand behind your past statements. Everyking (talk) 23:48, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

He's getting lied to and conned behind the scenes by the very people who did this. And since it isn't out in the open we can't prove they are lying except by proxy. 67.42.181.170 (talk) 01:56, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

If the user in fact testified, provided the evidence and knows the charges, why did Arbcom basically defend themselves by saying "sure, we admit we didn't tell him the evidence or charges, and we're proud of doing that"? Ken Arromdee (talk) 05:19, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

• I don't remember us saying that, basically or otherwise. Speaking for myself, this was a difficult case--not the decision per se, but the rest of it, and we knew there would be significant or at least vocal resistance. But the trial analogy is pushed too far here: TDA had already been tried, if you will, and I think that anyone who had seen the evidence would have agreed there was only one solution. It's just that this was not the kind of evidence we wanted to show anyone; that's the nature of some of the evidence we deal with. We cannot award the harasser by publicizing or recognizing their harassment. Drmies (talk) 15:06, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

• I said this back on ACN so I may as well say it again, how is it "publicizing" to inform a harasser what they've been banned for. If they are actually harassing someone, surely they'd be aware of the fact that they are doing so? What privacy could possibly be protected, by not informing someone why they'd been banned? Furthermore User:Jimbo Wales with his "7 page email" comment above, seems to have given the game away and told everyone watching the most watched page on Wikipedia what TDA was banned for. So what was the point of not telling him privately through email why he was banned? Cos now you've gone and told absolutely everyone anyway. Brustopher (talk) 15:27, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Unintended consequences

If Wikipedia follows a policy of making it harder to sanction abuse when doing so will expose innocent third parties to real-world abuse, then abusers will start routinely including whatever information shields them from sanctions. Countermeasures against abuse do not occur in a vacuum. They result in counter-countermeasures by the abusers. Thus a simplistic "you must always publicly reveal all the details or do nothing" rule would result in gaming the system. On the other hand, a simplistic "always let the person who is investigating the wrongdoing decide what to reveal" opens up the possibility that in some cases the evidence is not revealed because it isn't very good. On way of dealing with this is to allow a trusted independent third party to examine the evidence and post an opinion as to whether secrecy was justified in this particular case. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:15, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

It was.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:50, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Real-world abuse is a matter for law enforcement to deal with and making credible threats to do something that amounts to abuse is also illegal in pretty much all jurisdictions. We need to protect our editors against abuse, but the means we have available to do that ourselves are severely limited, in principle there can be offsite harassment by someone who isn't even an editor here. So, I think we should not focus primarily on dealing with any alleged perpetrators ourselves, instead we should assist any victims by letting ArbCom or the WMF look into the matter to see if we can actually take effective measures ourselves or if it's best to consider this as a legal issue and then assist the victim with any help he or she needs to pursue such a case. Count Iblis (talk) 18:03, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

In this case, I doubt very much it is a legal issue. But the standard for being a Wikipedian in good standing is higher than just "didn't do anything to justify calling the police". I know you agree, so I'm just saying this to clarify.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:50, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

In light of the response from the accused editor

TDA responded to your comments in the meta site, and his statements are at odds with your understanding of the events. Either him or the arbcom are not telling the whole truth, I don't know which. I assume you did not read the entirety of TDA's e-mails and got a refined version of it from one side, if not I apologize and withdraw the following.

The fact that the arbcom was unwilling to state that the reason behind his ban was the e-mail he had sent them is very suspicious and at the very least warrants an investigation as to the merits of the accusation of harassment. I understand if you think this does not worth your time, I imagine it would be time consuming to examine all that evidence and you may be trusting the people in the arbcom enough to take their words for it. I am not a friend of TDA, nor am I hostile to any of the arbcom members, my only aim is to clarify the situation and remedy any injustice there may have been. (why do I care? I detest injustice in any form, also I've read the entire discussion at the ac/n, and now I feel invested.)Darwinian Ape ^talk 23:56, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't see any contradiction really in the facts presented, although obviously the evaluation is far different. I believe, as I have said, that the notification was not handled well. I believe that eventual reinstatement is likely under the usual norms if behavior is good in the meantime.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:41, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

I think that's a laugh. Once you're on the outs with the administrative sector you're always on the outs with the administrative sector. Because it's a lowest common denominator affair where any one of them that's watchlisted your talkpage will be ready to sabotage any move you make to be reinstated. From what I read above, TDA emailed information about what he says was COI editing. Because making this case involves knowing the identity of the editor (an admin) he's sending the email instead of posting openly. This is what he's supposed to do, according to policy. But because the editor is an administrator and in the good old boy network, Arbcom bans TDA. It's discouraging that it's Arbcom 2016 doing this. Nothing ever changes.

Let's face it Jimbo, your past statements saying you will overturn obviously unjust and non-policy banning are farcical. You don't live up to your word. You promised to help me get unbanned if I advised you my prior account, and you broke your word there as well. I was perma-blocked in 2012 on an allegation of sockpuppetry, which was a lie then, is a lie now, and hopefully will remain a lie into the future. I content edited Wikipedia without incident for five or six years, made an heck of a lot of solid content. Wikipedia would probably have a dozen or more decent articles by now if I hadn't been falsely banned. But Jimbo you're no good for any of this, you don't serve as a check on Arbcom and administrative abuse, you only back them up on ever occasion. Colton Cosmic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.211.221.178 (talk) 13:24, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, I've never been banned or blocked, I don't know any of the participants, and I've been here for 14 years (admittedly not very active). I hope you'll listen to me. Just looking at what has been shown publicly, I find this very disturbing. Read the Arbcom's decision and their own justifications in their own words. They're not describing your scenario. They're admitting that they banned TDA without being notified of the charges or evidence, and they argue that banning him without charges or evidence is justified. Ken Arromdee (talk) 14:57, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Diff please to someone making the argument that " they banned TDA without being notified of the charges or evidence, and they argue that banning him without charges or evidence is justified"?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:30, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

That would be here. Where I (and others) explicitly made that argument, and *multiple* members of Arbcom (and ex-arbcom) stated they felt justified in banning TDA without notifying him of a)why, b)the evidence, c)allowing him a right of reply. Selected quotes below that illustrate Arbcom's opinion:

• DQ - "Was TDA notified of the proceeding? no. Was it reasonable to notify him in this case? No."
• Doug Weller - "Telling TDA anything would almost certainly have been the same as identifying the victim."
• Gamaliel (as justification for not following ARBPOL requirements) - "The harasser knows who they harassed already, but telling them which victims complained opens those victims up to retaliatory harassment and may cause the harasser to escalate their harassment in some way."
• Keilana (as justification for not following ARBPOL requirements) - "I also speak in my personal capacity but I agree with my colleagues that we have acted in order to protect those being harassed."
• Drmies (again as justification for not following ARBPOL) - "We have discussed this at length, and we understand there are serious concerns particularly about transparency--but the concerns of the victim outweigh the others. We are not going to give the abuser or the peanut gallery more fodder."
• DQ again (admission not following ARBPOL) "My problem is putting the text in front of TDA. TDA would be able to connect the dots as to where he could (not saying he would) harass the person who filed the claim of harassment. That's my issue with following ArbPol on this."
• Doug Weller (admission of not following ARBPOL) - "I know no one is asking us to name the victim publicly, and I'm sorry that the way I worded it encouraged that belief. We believed that we had very good reasons not to tell TDA."
• Then we have comments by the likes of Roger Davies - "Yet, extraordinarily, you suggest that, prior to any action being taken, editors should always be confronted with the evidence of their wrongdoing and be given an opportunity to confront their accusers." Yeah, we do actually require that people who are accused publically of a crime (harrassment *is* a crime in most modern countries you know) be able to at least see and hear the evidence against them. Even in the most awful of abuse cases where the accused is unable to directly question the victim, they are still presented with the evidence and given the opportunity to defend themselves.
• (Roger again) "ArbPol doesn't require the committee to use only certain procedures nor are those procedures set in concrete. In fact, this section authorises the opposite: "The Committee may create or modify its procedures, provided they are consistent with its scope". It's a kind of WP:IAR clause, I suppose. But, as this is longstanding practice, it's now de facto policy." my reply to which I will repeat here "ARBPOL requires certain actions to take place. Any modification of ARBPOL is subject to ratification by the community. If Arbcom want to take actions that are prohibited by ARBPOL, they need to get it changed. I would dearly *love* to see you make the argument that an amendment to ARBPOL that would allow unilateral banning of any editor arbcom chooses without some due process is 'consistent with its scope'. Seriously, feel free to go propose that amendment. 'De facto policy' does not supersede written and ratified policy." Well someone actually did that and it was soundly rejected. Snow_rise's close there sums up pretty well not only how the community feels about amending ARBPOL to give Arbcom the powers (it claims) it already has, but also the general mood about recent actions (the banning of TDA and Cla68 being the most prominent). "However, as with any community discussion, the most important result is found not in the numbers but in the perspectives provided, and the Arbitration Committee will hopefully take note of the deep concerns expressed here with regard to lack of transparency and proper process. Those concerns have been raised especially high with regard to the wording of this proposal but respondents have also expressed a more general unease with regard to the Committee's recent actions in the area of 'private hearings', with numerous users expressing the opinion that the exercise (as utilized of late) already strays from the principles of open community review of important decisions and bottom-up oversight that are generally-accepted cornerstones of Wikipedia's process." Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:48, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

In other words, the short answer to my question is this: No, no one argued that he could be banned without charges or evidence. Arbs have argued that the standard notification process could be waived in this case, due to particular sensitivities around the harassment involved. While I don't agree and would have voted differently myself, I think that this sort of decision is well within the scope of the proper powers of the ArbCom. (Remember, I don't overturn ArbCom based on a mere disagreement, particularly not a mere disagreement on a procedural detail.) I think they should have notified him first with an email saying, in essence, "Thanks for your 7 page rant detailing your ongoing bad behavior towards another member of the community. Per the terms of your probation in the GG case, you're now banned." They discussed it and decided against. As I say, I believe I would have decided differently on the notification point. But on the fundamental point - the ban is valid.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:38, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Firstly the question you asked was "Diff please to someone making the argument that "they banned TDA without being notified of the charges or evidence" not "Diff please to someone making the argument that they banned TDA without charges or evidence." No one argued he could be banned without charges or evidence. In fact everyone assumed there were charges and evidence otherwise why would a group of people ban someone? The argument was that he was not notified or given a chance to defend himself as required by ARBPOL. The other issue is that ARBPOL explicitly lays out how privacy-related issues are due to be handled and Arbcom did none of it despite claiming it was done as a privacy issue. Now you are saying that his own submission of a COI issue by email is what resulted in his ban - this statement is wildly at odds with Arbcom's entire justification of their actions. They stated they did not notify him of the nature of the evidence against him or where it came from because it would allow TDA to identify the person who he was harrassing and risk further harrassment. You are now saying that the evidence and source was TDA himself. This is frankly nonsensical. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:04, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

The situation is that everyone who has seen the evidence (Arbcom members and I infer Jimbo) has concluded that the outcome is reasonable, while the commentators here and elsewhere who have not seen the evidence think Arbcom has arbitrarily picked a victim to knock off, presumbably for sport. Is that really likely? Johnuniq (talk) 10:31, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Actually the the general commentators opinion was that ARBPOL process was not followed and banning someone without a right-of-reply goes against both the core policy under which Arbcom derives its authority, and the universal concept of justice and fairness. We dont disappear someone. It actually makes no difference regarding the evidence (not presented), the outcome is unreasonable due to the manner in which it was dealt with. "Trust us, he is guilty" was the only defense offered. The opinion (which is borne out by Arbcom's replies both individually and as a group) is that Arbcom didnt think it needed to follow Arbpol. So it didnt. When an amendment to Arbpol was tabled that would make Arbpol read exactly as Arbcom have stated they feel they are able to act, it was rejected. Multiple people actually explicitly stated they did not want to see the evidence, but that Arbcom are required to notify TDA in advance that he was being considered for a ban and provide him with the evidence, and an opportunity to defend himself. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:40, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

TDA has posted the redacted email chain on meta. From that it looks like he did what WP:OUTING requires in the case of COI and personal information, he mailed the evidence to ArbCom. It would have been best if he has not contacted the admin in question but three polite emails over more than a year trying to resolve the issue is not over the top. The fourth saying the matter had been raised in the press and assuring the person that their name had not been released to the press seems to be gauged to decrease fear of outing rather than harassment.

TDA could have handled things better but, based on the policies and guidance we give editors re COI and outing, his steps, based on what has been published, are not unreasonable. If he was completely wrong I see no evidence that had ArbCom simple respoded by saying We have investigated your claims and have found nothing wrong. Please do not contact this person again that the matter would have ended there. If he had continued - then ban. Jbh^Talk 12:44, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

In the old days what he did was called "sleuthing", and the cabals of the time (including Jimmy) generally approved of it depending on who the sleuther and sleuthee happened to be. The current committee might do well to revisit Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Durova (and the evidence page in particular), and reflect upon both TDA's ban and the ban of Cla68. --SB_Johnny | ^talk✌ 13:17, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

"In other words, the short answer to my question is this: No, no one argued that he could be banned without charges or evidence." Jimbo, as has already been pointed out, it's not that there weren't charges and evidence, it's that the user wasn't told of the charges or evidence. Arbcom admits, and tries to justify, not telling him the charges or evidence against him. You can't raise a defense when you aren't told the charges or evidence against you--that's Kafkaesque, and directly contradicts your statement of "no secret trials, and no convictions without giving the opportunity to present a defense". Ken Arromdee (talk) 13:03, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Two separate issues: Method and COI

It' clear the method TDA used was undesirable. It's not clear to me whether the 7 page email was solicited or unsolicited by arbcom. But leaving aside the ban, it appears serious allegations were made regarding COI. Were those addressed in any way? We don't have have a "fruit from the poison tree" policy and we shouldn't. Independent of the methods, was the COI investigated? Considering the COI noticeboard operates on "the duck test," no outing has to occur for a consensus decision at the COIN noticeboard and ArbCom could handle COI in the same manner as the ban but there has been no announcement on the validity of the charge. It is relevant for the project to determine whether they are baseless or have merit regardless of how that information ran across ArbCom's desk.. --DHeyward (talk) 10:05, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Do you really think that everyone on Arbcom is nuts? That no one there can think? Johnuniq (talk) 10:25, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Indeed. I have not personally reviewed the allegations in the document, but understand that several arbs from both the outgoing 2015 arbcom and the incoming 2016 reviewed the allegations and found them, and I quote, "baseless".--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:32, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

So by your own admission you did not review the e-mails which was used as the evidence for harassment and got TDA banned. A COI investigation, by its nature, requires a certain level of personal information, and to obtain that one may give the impression that they were stalking the person with alleged COI. Now, TDA may have been overzealous and stepped some boundaries, and that may have resulted with his ban, that's perfectly reasonable. But the actions of arbcom both in notifying the community, and later in the discussion at ac/n suggests another possibility. That TDA's actions may have been within the bounds of a COI investigation, and the committee used it as an excuse to get rid of him. The fact that TDA did not go public with his evidence and followed the procedure gives some credibility to TDA's good faith, and considering the arbcom's comments in regards to this whole situation(perfectly outlined above by Only in death ) suggests the latter scenario may be just as likely. And since the committee would be the culprit of any wrongdoing if that's the case, trusting them to give a neutral summary of the situation wouldn't be wise. That's why I suggested that it should be investigated further and in detail. Darwinian Ape ^talk 13:12, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

"So by your own admission you did not review the e-mails which was used as the evidence for harassment and got TDA banned." - no, I did not say that. Please stop jumping to evidence-free conclusions to push your false agenda. I reviewed the email which was clear evidence for harassment and which got TDA banned. What I did not do is personally conduct a separate investigation into the allegations his rant was putting forward.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:51, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

You said you didn't review the "allegations in the document" I thought the allegations were the evidence for harassment, but since then TDA released a redacted version of his e-mails and it seems the aggressive nature of those mails(to the redacted person) may very well be construed as harassment. And given that TDA was under some sort of probation, the block does make whole a lot of sense now. My only aim was to help correct the injustice I perceived there were. I guess as anyone I too have an agenda, mine was to make sure there were no injustices done to a powerless editor by a committee that has the most power in Wikipedia.(I don't think that's a false agenda though) I admit that does require for me to play the devil's advocate(no pun intended) and consider the possibility that the committee may not be acting in good faith. Also one should remember there was a cause for me to suspect, namely the committee's handling of the whole situation and the Kafkaesque appearance of the trial. Had the committee released the information that we have now, I probably wouldn't even hear about this case, and I imagine neither would you. Darwinian Ape ^talk 13:36, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I think that's fair enough. I hope you'll pause, though, to review how aggressive your language has been at times. I hope we can generate a stronger atmosphere of trust at Wikipedia. I agree with you that notification (both to TDA and the community) could have been handled much better - and I think the ArbCom basically agrees (I can't speak for them of course). I've been giving a lot of thought to how things work at another website where I participate as an end user, where transparency is quite low (i.e. it's pretty typical with company moderators making decisions) but where, equally, trust is quite high. There are some bad side effects possible in that kind of environment, so I don't support it for us, but I will say that the level of drama is significantly lower, which means that people who are being blocked are much better able to simply walk away with dignity.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:42, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I certainly didn't mean to come off as aggressive, I would say I was overly inquisitive but not aggressive. Although, it is hard to convey mood in written discussions and I'm not the best at prose. So I can see why you'd think that, especially since I am a stranger and a relatively new editor. I just wish to say it was not my intention to offend anyone, if I seemed harsh it was because I really see the potential in this kind of open collaboration which Wikipedia offers to mankind, and I don't want it to be tainted by power structures that was designed to moderate the project. Also, I had noticed another arbcom decision which made me very concerned for the future of Wikipedia and I saw this on your talk page while I was trying to formulate how to protest to that.(Perhaps you should look into it as-well since it is very much against the spirit of open and free collaboration adopted by Wikipedia.) I admit, it may have contributed to my "aggression" on this issue.Darwinian Ape ^talk 21:42, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Uh no, I don't. That's a rather strong conclusion based on what I asked. 1) Was the email solicited as a defense or was it just sent out of the blue (I think that has been answered now by TDA, it wasn't clear before) and 2) were there any other actions taken? I would hope that the ban didn't depend on the truthiness of the material and I certainly don't think they are nuts. Masochists maybe, but not nuts. He submitted material privately to ArbCom, unsolicited where he outlined his actions. The actions stand quite separate from whether the allegations are true. If he had been 100% correct, I'd expect the same result for TDA and also an action for the COI, if one existed. I had not heard whether there was any other actions. --DHeyward (talk) 17:12, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

My first question arose because I have heard two versions: one was the ban was generated by a complaint and releasing details would identify the complainant in addition to details about the victim, the second was that it was generated by his email. I still have some questions about how a complainant surfaced that is separate from the victim but that's just curiousity based on different emphasis from various Arbcom members, not an inication they are "nuts" or did anything wrong. I do think they could have directly asked TDA about his methods and why he thought threats of public exposure were okay. --DHeyward (talk) 17:26, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

• There was nothing to the complaint, nothing whatsoever. It was investigated, in detail; TDA's charges are without merit, and their reading of the history and of policy are simply wrong. Drmies (talk) 19:44, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

I suppose if someone's word has to be taken for it, I'll extend more credence to Drmies than anyone else who's known to have read the unredacted letter. Rhoark (talk) 20:06, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

• Rhoark, I hate to play the authoritative "take my word for it" kind of game, and I am bursting at the seams (my ArbCom colleagues can confirm that I've been wanting to say more), but that is the way it is. I don't like it, and I wish it were different. (The charges in the unredacted email depend on an all-too liberal reading of COI/INVOLVED, without real evidence of a COI.) If we had a real Ombudsperson kind of position, I would have no hesitation whatsoever sharing this with them. I feel strongly about a bunch of things, openness being the first of them--and this happens to be one of those cases where openness has to make way for privacy. Not only is the privacy of [redacted name] at stake, but also of a BLP which was part of it, a BLP of a subject who--and so here I'll give you another nugget--has been the victim of smearing themselves. I do not know what TDA knows about that and it doesn't matter for his case, but it confirmed for me and my colleagues that we needed to be, well, secretive. Drmies (talk) 02:01, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

@Drmies: I am puzzled by your comment that If we had a real Ombudsperson kind of position.... We do have an Ombudsman commission. It's not clear to me that this falls within their scope, but then I am not really familiar with their work. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 18:49, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• That was the last sentence of my statement. Found it odd that Jimbo seemed to be disagreeing and then quoted my exact word "baseless". I had seen all the process stuff, just nothing on the merits. He deserved to be banned on process alone. Even if he had rock solid, substantive evidence, it shouldn't change that. --DHeyward (talk) 00:23, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• DHeyward, I've had dealings with TDA before, and I'm sure he's still pissed about the short block I gave him one time (I understand how that's upsetting), but if we could have done anything but ban I would have opted for it. I know plenty of people strongly dislike him; I'm not one of them. I also think all of us knew that this ban would cause us to catch some serious flak from all of y'all, but it was a price worth paying.

  I understand TDA has chosen not to let it all hang out in an unredacted fashion, and I really, really appreciate that. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 02:01, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• Oh, so have I. I know I still have a special place on his list when he successfully lobbied, at his 11th hour, to get an admin he opposed topic banned along with him. It was obvious the banning admin wanted to look "fair." In a comment on that decision, I said in general I was all for letting the condemned prisoner choose their final meal, but that doesn't mean I would let Jeffrey Dahmer choose his last meal. I think I have pointy elbows. He kinda lit up a few noticeboards over that but the community was done with that topic. The blocking admin "retired", the topic banned admin on principle wouldn't appeal his ban so I waited 30 days and got the community to overturn it (unfortunately, that would not be possible today). TDA's TB remained and he still occasionally says I called him Jeffrey Dahmer. I didn't mind opposing him except for the shear volume of words he could dump with diffs and repetition. I can't block anybody so I have to work harder at being disliked :). --DHeyward (talk) 05:07, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• FWIW, I believe Jimbo used the word "baseless" because I did in a summary email. That is indeed my opinion of TDA's complaint, which should surprise no one since I voted for the ban, but in my capacity as a Sane Person I am echoing Drmies' evaluation of the situation here. Opabinia regalis (talk) 05:39, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I've read your comments in the past. I don't trust your judgement on anything you even slightly perceive to be gender-related. If Jimbo is getting his opinions from you and your ilk then he is assuredly being misinformed. 67.42.183.211 (talk) 06:28, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I feel very similarly about your comments, and am tempted to interpret your use of "ilk" as a generic sexist insult and ask some cleverer admin for a range block. I'm also getting the feeling that all this trolling is hampering your efforts to improve the encyclopedia, your neighborhood, and the world in general. Drmies (talk) 14:29, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Arbcom has spoken! "Ilk" is now a sexist insult! Thanks for proving my point. 67.42.178.147 (talk) 16:11, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I was echoing Opabinia's words. The baselessness of the allegations has been confirmed by other ArbCom members. I'd be happy to review that as well, but it seems kind of pointless and would not impact on TDA's ban at all.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:54, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

All of this is stuff isn't particularly relevant to the real matter at hand, which is that TDA was banned contrary to policy in a secret trial without notification or opportunity for defense. This discussion about the emails and whatever else should be had as part of a hearing—you know, a real one, where the accused can respond to accusations. Everyking (talk) 01:02, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

"I agree with you that notification (both to TDA and the community) could have been handled much better"... Jimbo, if that's what you think, surely you could remedy that now. Just give him a complete list of the charges and evidence against him, that he can point at and try to refute, and give him a chance to try to refute them. Doing it late sucks, but it beats not doing it at all. It's not as if once you've decided not to tell him of the charges against him you're committed to never doing so to the end of time.

I also feel that "could have been handled much better" is a severe understatement. Notifying suspects of the charges and evidence is important. Failing to do it isn't a minor procedural problem, it calls in question the integrity of the entire process. Ken Arromdee (talk) 23:15, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

I haven't seen the full emails, but I can at least picture a situation in which the emails constitute their own evidence. The threat to disgrace the target of the emails reads a lot like blackmail to me, though it is by no means clear "any thing of value", as required by U.S. law, was demanded. But "I requested that you reverse several actions you made on [redacted details]" at least potentially could reach that standard. I fear that the more scandals we have about paid editors arranging for things to happen and not happen on Wikipedia, the more we all could find ourselves at risk for claims that simply winning an edit war/policy debate or getting an article deleted/undeleted could be alleged to be a "thing of value". So I could at least understand if Arbcom takes a hard line and says that the outing policy bans outing anywhere, even in threatening emails sent to the original person in question, and the only acceptable thing to do in that situation is to send the evidence to Arbcom straight away without "negotiation". That may be going too far, but some sort of policy is necessary. Wikipedia's trouble with unethical paid editors sooner or later is going to bring extortion or blackmail investigations to its doorstep, and when it happens, we need to make sure that prosecutors who file broad subpoenas don't find a trove of borderline cases by more sincere users waiting to be taken up in court. Wnt (talk) 11:27, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

If the emails are their own evidence, then Arbcom can tell him "the evidence is the following emails sent by you, and they indicate that you have violated the following rules". Telling him what the evidence and charges are is not the same as using the emails as evidence behind the scenes for charges behind the scenes without actually presenting an accusation that can be challenged.

Even just saying "we can't tell you the evidence because of X" would be better than what we have now. Right now, Arbcom is purely speaking in hypotheticals--giving reasons why they might in some hypothetical situation be unable to provide evidence or charges--without actually saying that is true for this case. Ken Arromdee (talk) 14:18, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

If the decision was based on TDA's own email, ArbCom could have posted a motion on wiki such as:

TDA was warned in CASE that a ban could be imposed for further inappropriate actions. TDA has contacted ArbCom and disclosed actions which we consider in violation of the harassment policy. Consequently, ArbCom is imposing the following ban: etc.

Instead the long series of statements quoted above were made implying the situation was quite different. Arbitrators were emphatic that disclosures identifying a target must be avoided, which is reasonable in principle but ridiculous when the evidence is TDA's own words. Jimbo's comments defending ArbCom have a credibility question mark following the Doc James mess. In the circumstances, it is sadly unsurprising that editors remain unconvinced about the present situation. EdChem (talk) 14:51, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

One of the things that notifying the user of the evidence and charges does is pin this down. Jimbo thinks Arbcom banned him for his emails, but it doesn't sound like they banned him for his emails and their own statements are vague about exactly what they banned him for. Nobody knows; all we have is some guesses, and perhaps private statements made to Jimbo which Arbcom could at any time retract or claim to have been misunderstood. Ken Arromdee (talk) 15:24, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Considering they won't disclose the reason, I think it's fair to assume that the reason is so ridiculous that absolute secrecy, no matter how unpopular, is a better option. Everyking (talk) 19:05, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

So, ArbCom can ban anyone, at any time for any reason (disclosure of reason is optional), by a simple !vote without discussion (we don't even know whether they bothered with an internal discussion), to enforce "broadly construed" previously-imposed sanctions. Does this have a "chilling effect" on editing in controversial topic areas, or a "chilling effect" on reporting possible wrongdoing (cf. WP:BOOMERANG). But they only police behavior, and not content. Right. wbm1058 (talk) 15:44, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, by policy they can't, but in practice that's what they are doing. Apparently policy and overwhelming community disapproval is not enough to dissuade them. But it's OK! 15 people can't all be malicious, misinformed, and/or crazy, right? Especially given the ArbCom's long history of making well-meaning, well-informed, and thoroughly sane decisions, right? Everyking (talk) 18:59, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Per the announcement, it only took seven votes to do this, and only seven, not 15 voted. So where are the others on this, I only see two recusals, it seems that six voters are missing in action. Were they gaslighted or threatened with being voted off of ArbCom if they didn't conform with the party line? I've got this uncomfortable feeling just noticing the correlation in names between this vote and those who are apparently behind banning Kohs from Wikiconferences... wbm1058 (talk) 20:06, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

i love you

I AM THE ONE WHO EDITS (talk) 21:15, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

A cookie for you!

I might as well give my first WikiLove to you! Have a cookie, thank you for your work on Wikipedia :D Blue Adventure (talk) 23:17, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia @Blue Adventure: :)--5 albert square (talk) 16:18, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks @5 albert square: I'm happy to start editing here! Blue Adventure (talk) 20:21, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 May 2016

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* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Should we try to merge clearly notable, substantial articles from inactive wikia sites and other wikis into draft space here?

I hope the headline is clear enough here. It does seem to me that some of the now inactive wikia sites probably contain quite a bit of reliably sourced, notable, material we don't yet. When one such site becomes inactive, as many or most of them do within a few years, would it make sense to try to transfer some, many, or most of the articles acceptable by our standards on those sites into maybe draft space here? John Carter (talk) 15:30, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Also, is there any way to get together a basic list of the extant wikia sites/communities? There are more than a few, like the Zoroastrianism wikia, which have had very, very little activity, and in that case only 2 articles. It might be possible that some of those minor wikias might either have information that would be useful here, or, perhaps, be a good site to place at least some draft space articles here which might get deleted for inactivity or poor sourcing. That might be particularly useful for articles which would reasonably be most extensively covered in sourcing not easily available in English. John Carter (talk) 18:46, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

About feature articles

Hello Jimbo, We are having a pretty interesting discussion in Spanish wiki on the template that goes on the talk page of feature articles, such as this one in this wiki. In es.wiki, the template also includes the name of the "principal editor", that is, the one who submitted the article and who is considered its main editor. Problem is, there are usually many editors involved, correcting, adding, etc. before an article can be considered good enough to deserve the distinction and be featured in the frontpage. Part of the es.wiki community believes that this is fine, credit where it's due, etc. whereas another part of the community believes that wiki is a collaborative project and, as such, the name of the main editor should not be mentioned in the template (it stays there forever, even if the article suffers so many edits over time that perhaps it no longer deserves the distinction and more edits have been made by people other than the original "author"). Articles, once approved as featured articles, are constantly being edited by users and IPs, making positive contributions during the review and post-approval. Part of the es.wiki community believes that the current template used, which mentions the name of the principal editor, should be modified and the name of the editor should be removed since it is easy to see the statistics of the article and its history of edits (many of these have been translated from this wiki and no mention is made of the original author here and only the name of the translator appears). Would appreciate your opinion on this. Regards, --Maragm (talk) 15:54, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps you could change "principal editor" to "nominator." It's likely more factually-based and avoids the appearance of article ownership. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:51, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

I agree with Smallbones on this, and think too many individuals contribute for a single one to be given credit. Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 11:02, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

It's generally unsatisfactory to ascribe authorship of a Wikipedia article to a particular person, even if one person has done a lot or even most of the work. The editing process is too dynamic, as stated above.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 17:57, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

I can edit?

? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.57.101.47 (talk) 02:26, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes you can. Zappa24Mati 02:41, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

I object to the article about Iran and their treatment of Americans on American soil in the mid 1970's. I went to school at the University of Oklahoma in the mid 70's. My experience with both male and female Iranians going to school with me was either belligerent and hostile(females) or sexually aggressive ( males). They all spouted hate for my country and yet were in school in conservative Oklahoma. One female aggressively lambasted me for my country supporting the Shah when I asked her an innocuous question about her home. My experience with the males (I guess because I wore shorts or pants) was to assume I was a whore and accosted me physically. I wish my experiences Would be reflected in your article about Iran. I had no good experience with any Iranian student at OU in the mid 1970's. Deborah Robinson — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.208.144.177 (talk) 04:08, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing your perspective, Deborah. However, Wikipedia isn't really the right place to express personal anecdotes or opinions, as we try really hard to work for verifiable information from reliable sources. I would recommend that you start a blog to publish your thoughts.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 04:14, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Article in need of help

Jimbo, I'm mentioning this problem here in hopes of getting more eyes on it, and because of your personal relationship with the subject. I'm talking about the article about Ensaf Haidar. It's been "up" on English Wikipedia for over a month, with about 700 page views, but it's still in this sad, mistranslated state: "after a great love story", "he added that «Barrak» issued a fatwa b «atone Raef», accusing him of «apostate»", and "Emphasizes fairness she agrees with her husband". Could you comment and bring some attention to this mess? - 70.192.137.81 (talk) 22:21, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

I agree with you that the article is in a sad shape. Many good editors read this page, and I hope that some of them will take notice and improve the entry according to Wikipedia standards. As I have been an outspoken supporter of Raif Badawi, including appearing at the request of Ensaf Haider to accept the PEN Pinter prize on his behalf, I might be perceived to have a conflict of interest, so I won't edit the entry myself.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 04:19, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Interesting idea

A recent study found that (according to the Atlantic) "most books (71 percent) cited on Wikipedia are only partially viewable online; while many others (17 percent) are not viewable online at all. (About 12 percent were fully viewable.)" According to one of the study's authors, Michael Evans, Wikipedia "needs to meet its own standard for verifiability.” Evans and his colleagues have an idea for how Wikipedia could begin to do this—and it’s a proposal that, if executed well, could dramatically improve access to information on the Internet. “You could just give some kind of meter about verifiability, actually on the Wikipedia page,” said Dan Rockmore, the director of the Neukom Institute and a co-author of the study. “That could be automated in a fairly simple way.” All quotes can be found here. Thoughts? Everymorning (talk) 23:12, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

That is, to put it politely, one of the most ridiculous proposals I have ever heard, even by Atlantic standards. Where on earth has the idea that "available online" has any relationship to reliability come from? Even when it comes to online sources, many of the most reliable are (notoriously) behind the Elsevier paywall, while for print sources "available online" effectively translates to "digitized by Google", which has a huge (and acknowledged) systemic bias towards pre-1923 works and works published in the US. ‑ Iridescent 00:16, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Note, the Atlantic article does not mention the word "reliability". - 2001:558:1400:10:3C48:CC71:E858:D9FB (talk) 14:45, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

That is a red herring, to quote (again) from the report where the article is based upon: "As we use the term here, “verifiability” means the extent to which information can be checked for reliability, truth content, or accuracy." Karst (talk) 14:56, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

"Can be checked" is not the same as "is determined to be". - 2001:558:1400:10:3C48:CC71:E858:D9FB (talk) 15:50, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

The Atlantic misunderstands what verifiability is. Not surprising that some journalist would half-ass their job and then complain about Wikipedia as a reliable source. Verifiability means that something can be verified. It says nothing at all about the ease of the verifiability. As long as the citation is to a reliable source, that source can be online, in print, in audio recording, etc. There should be enough information in the citation to find the information that supports the content. But it's not Wikipedia's job to spoon feed the citations to the audience.--v/r - TP 01:15, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

The article isn't complaining about Wikipedia as a reliable source, and it doesn't disagree with what you've said. Its focus is on the desirability for more publishers to make sources readily available. isaacl (talk) 23:16, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

In practice, ease of verification does matter to Wikipedia. Readers coming a 'fact' that seems dubious might well check the relevant citation - I know I do sometimes - and then fix it. If the citation is to an obscure book that's been out of print for twenty years, that's never going to happen - only very dedicated editors might look it up, and probably only if they happen to have the book in question. Many notable hoaxes have relied on that fact, along with plenty of minor vandalism. FLHerne (talk) 13:10, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Elsevier should follow Nature Publishing Group's example. Recently Nature has allowed access to its articles that are linked to via the BBC and some other news organizations, but you then cannot save a PDF copy of the article. Count Iblis (talk) 01:18, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

I wonder if it's an attempt to leverage Wikipedia to promote the access movement—no more click juice for your journal unless you're OA. Choess (talk) 05:33, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

This section from the report stood out for me: "Almost 85% of book references and 87% of journal references contain valid, standardized identifiers such as ISBN, Google Books ID, DOI, or direct links to known open access journals. However, many of these references are not practically verifiable, with only 12.8% of journal citations confirmed as open access in arXiv or PMC, and only 12.4% of Google Books links confirmed as fully viewable." I would agree with Iridescent that the fully viewable aspect has little to do with reliability. To give an example, I used three reference books on the Carlos Alexander article that has limited access but which I was able to verify myself. Karst (talk) 13:01, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

I don't much like it either. When editing it is a "win" for readers and editors if a great source is free online, but not a requirement by any means. Long live the library! Jytdog (talk) 02:05, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, appalling idea, truly a step in the wrong direction. The last thing we should encourage is deprecating off-line sources. How easy it needs to be to verify "verifiable" sources has been discussed many times, and "not practically verifiable" certainly does not mean accessible to anyone anywhere without lifting a finger or spending a cent. Johnbod (talk) 14:32, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

If that quote is correct and complete, the researcher does not understand the standard of WP:Verifiability (which seems odd, given what was said to be studied). That's not to say, I would oppose a bot that collect statistics on "availability", "copyright", dead link, etc. (perhaps linked to the talk page) but to put those metrics above others on the article is rather nonsensical. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:18, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

There is something of a point to it. The references given uniquely specify the resource, but they are not a route to the resource. In theory, each citation could include a link to a library that has the resource on hand and is willing to provide it to interested parties via interlibrary loan. Additionally, to facilitate handling of the ILL requests from so many interested Wikipedia readers, third parties might be enlisted to help complete the loan - a person might send the request to the library named, but with the individual's and library's permission, a third party, which retains a cached version of the scanned paper solely for purposes of ILL requests, transmits it immediately to fulfill the request. WMF might want to keep such a role at arm's length, leaving it to a third party like Sci-Hub to handle these requests. In terms of technical editing, it would be quite straightforward to include an ILL field in existing templates that links an existing Sci-Hub entry for many papers of interest. Wnt (talk) 16:21, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

OCLC numbers, of course, go some way towards fulfilling this. Indeed click on an ISBN and you are very close to world-cat, google, the major on line book markets, and many libraries. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:43, 5 May 2016 (UTC).

Underreported stories

Thomson Reuters Foundation (http://www.trust.org) publishes underreported stories (http://www.trust.org/under-reported-stories/). Another source of underreported stories is http://www.undertoldstories.org.—Wavelength (talk) 18:19, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

@Wavelength: what is their criteria? Is it based on some utilitarian metric of productive years of life lost, inconvenience to unchallenged power centers, or both? EllenCT (talk) 14:16, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia NL and Wikimedia NL both are a corrupt, stupid mess!

Dear Jimbo, I think I will be blockt here also very quickly, but your project in the Netherlands has failed. The sysops are absolute corrupt and incompetent, arbcom is real crazy, it is a complete madhouse, everybody who is critcal will be blockt, and the last thing is that Wikimedia is giving a party for 15.000 euro for its members. I ask you as the founder of Wikipedia for a independent investigation. Best regards, Graaf Statler (talk) 22:09, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

• FYI: This user is the subject of numerous arbcom-cases on Dutch Wikipedia and has been recently been blocked indefinately on Wikiquote, the Dutch wikipedia and on meta for harassment. Seems to be applying for a similar treatment here. It's a repeating pattern: as soon as this user gets blocked permanently on project A, he goes to project B to continue his rants. Don't bother giving him the attention he so desperately seeks - his intentions have nothing to do with writing an encyclopedia. CaAl (talk) 08:11, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Can you tell your college Trijnstel (Personal attack removed) Chris? By advising a boy I think 15years old who is making a fals copyvio claim to ask for a global block? And I am calling you Chris because you are user Chris, (Personal attack removed), something you didn't deny till today. And yes, if you continuing by blocking me on every project with your sokpuppeds I end up her. By the founder of Wikipedia. By the way, you only blockt usefull users and never, never wrote one article.......Best regards. 09:08, 9 May 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Graaf Statler (talk • contribs)

He got what he seems to have wanted. BethNaught (talk) 09:30, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

• As an aside, as he is now blocked on 4 projects, are they not ripe for a global block request on meta? Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:50, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Easter?

Thoughts on easter? Retartist (talk) 03:25, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Easter, while relating the more-or-less mainstream Christian history and controversies of the certainly Passover-associated festival from e.g. [14], also cites [15] which says, "The widely-known historian, Will Durant, in his famous and respected work, Story of Civilization, pp. 235, 244-245, writes, 'Ishtar (Astarte to the Greeks, Ashtoreth to the Jews), interests us not only as analogue of the Egyptian Isis and prototype of the Grecian Aphrodite and the Roman Venus, but as the formal beneficiary of one of the strangest of Babylonian customs . . . known to us chiefly from a famous page in Herodotus: Every native woman is obliged, once in her life, to sit in the temple of Venus [Easter], and have intercourse with some stranger'" (wikilinks added.)

On the other hand, Easter Bunny says, "In his 1835 Deutsche Mythologie, Jacob Grimm states 'The Easter Hare is unintelligible to me, but probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara'. This proposed association was repeated by other authors including Charles Isaac Elton (Charles Isaac Elton (1890), Origins of English History.) and Charles J Billson. (Charles J Billson (1892), Folk-Lore vol 3 issue 4.) In 1961 Christina Hole wrote 'The hare was the sacred beast of Eastre (or Eostre), a Saxon goddess of Spring and of the dawn'. (Christina Hole (1961) Easter and its Customs.) The belief that Ēostre had a hare companion who became the Easter Bunny was popularized when it was presented as fact in the BBC documentary Shadow of the Hare (1993). (Attenborough, Sir David (Presenter) (April 12, 1993). Wildlife on One Easter Special Shadow of the Hare (Television). United Kingdom: BBC.)"

See also the relatively new Emojipedia entry which suggests correspondingly distinct categories of symbols, i.e., ✝, ⛪, and 🙏, as well as 🐰, 🐣, and 👯.

This is typical of false dilemma category errors surrounding many aspects of religiosity in general. I recommend avoiding these areas until such time as non-self contradictory categories for religiosity become available in the peer reviewed literature reviews, but don't hold your breath. EllenCT (talk) 19:40, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Here is Sir David Attenborough and the BBC's 1993 Shadow of the Hare making the claim, and apparently explaining the connection to Easter eggs. Astute readers may recognize Attenborough as recently prevailing in some civil servant's research ship naming competition which might as well be as good as any other reliable source criteria on religiosity issues. EllenCT (talk) 09:56, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

How do you feel 😐 😊 😃 😒 about MoodBoxes?

Jimbo, if meta:Grants:IdeaLab/MoodBoxes has the potential to attract only a sixth as many of the 216 additional editors per year that the MoodBar did, isn't it worth a try?

Given that the information would generally be confidential, do you think it is ethical to try to use the Hawthorne effect to increase the number of editorial contributions?

I am still certain about my my assertion in March that it is ethical to use MoodBoxes response data to tailor fundraising messaging. And I remain convinced it is not only ethical, but should be collected to aid content curation and review because it supports the Foundation's Mission.

@Wnt: is it possible a standard user script to submit confidential data via HTTPS to, say, a wmflabs server for confidential logging? EllenCT (talk) 15:37, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm sure there are many more knowledgeable people reading this... for example, if you really need something figured out, you should ask @Mr. Stradivarius:. :) Also, I'm not entirely sure whether you are thinking of a user custom Javascript that is installed by the user for his own account, or something else like a Lua script on a page or a Javascript svg. With the caveat that I may be talking out the wrong end of my tract, my thought is, especially in the second case, if the answer is yes, then that's a bug, not a feature, since you don't want user scripts relaying your confidential data to every spammer/hacker site on the planet. Even in the first case, there seemed to be some sort of countermeasure in place to prevent me from easily weaponizing a Javascript file like File:Animated analog SVG clock.svg, but I never really looked into it much. The same origin policy limits some of these things, and other security software you may run like NoScript may filter others.

In any case, I'm not fond of the idea of WMF trying to scrape every last dollar of fundraising it can. An attitude of wei wu wei seems more useful here, since the true source of funding is WMF's noble purpose, not its cunning; also because for WMF to have the confidence that it could raise more money at any time that it really feels it needs to would seem more valuable than the money itself. Money actually raised goes to pay for executives, innovators, and decision makers whose activities here are often controversial; but the money not raised can buy the confidence that the people at WMF can stand up against an entrenched interest without facing layoffs. If you encourage people to say they're feeling good as honest self-expression, and then they realize that was used to try to hit them up for money, I think that costs more trust than the money was worth. Wnt (talk) 16:41, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Speaking from the peanut gallery, and putting aside my strong sense of correlation does not imply causation with respect to your 216 new editors claim, I can't say that I would see adding 30 new editors - which would represent nothing more than statistical noise - is worth the further Facebookization of Wikipedia. Resolute 22:24, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm just curious to inquire what you mean by "further Facebookization of Wikipedia". That's a cute expression, but my concern is that it generates more heat than light. Quite obviously, we should have no desire whatsoever to turn Wikipedia into a Facebook clone - and I've never heard of anyone on staff, the board, the community, anywhere really, who thought we should. But at the same time, a lot has been learned about good user interfaces and good user experience since the basic framework of Wikipedia was set down, and I'm quite sure you don't mean to imply that if Facebook does something, that means that it is bad without any further analysis!

I'm not personally that awed by the MoodBar concept being proposed here, but I think we should give the Foundation permission to test things, particularly when there is a solid analytic framework for understanding the data generated by such tests. Let me give an example of an idea that I think is quite compelling for us, and which is inspired in part by things that Facebook does.

Most editors feel strongly that they want their efforts to be useful to the readers. Most active editors are big users of the watchlist feature (I think, although here I think actual data is important) but it is pretty limited. Imagine making that feature more prominent in the UI, and making it more intelligent. It could algorithmically be a feed which suggests things to edit based on a number of factors, including manual watchlisting, what I've edited in the past, which articles are similar to those (as measured by links or common editorship or inclusion in a wikiproject), which articles are considered to be not very good (by length, by wikiproject editing, by reader feedback), which articles are popular, etc. The exact details would be unknown at this time, because doing it well would require an iterative process of testing and tweaking.

The end result, if done well, would be a very popular feature that would very likely improve new editor retention, as well as having other obvious benefits in terms of helping active editors find interesting projects to work on. Consider the new editor who logs in and makes a handful of edits to articles relating to, let's say, Alberta, Canada. The next time that editor logs in, the feed would tempt them to edit other articles in that topic area, articles which are popular and need help.

This is just a feature idea, not a new one, and it is inspired by the general concept of a 'feed' which is algorithmically curated - something that Facebook has mastered. There are many many reasons that someone might plausibly oppose such a feature (though I'm not sure what those reasons are right now), but surely "Facebookization" would be a very weak objection, no?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:29, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Well, to restore the idea to the public domain, let's call it "prosthetic culture". Real culture involves people selecting the works that interest them, but prosthetic culture replaces their decision-making with machines. I would say that prosthetic culture works about as well as prosthetic limbs, which is to say, not very. On Wikipedia we have unregistered users posting questions about "J----s" rather than Jews because of some kind of edit filter overriding what they want to say. In the corporate world, people are learning to write their job pitches with keywords to pass some machine, a journalist's main skill is his SEO, and politicians string together babble out of words with particularly positive associations, irrespective of content. It is the greatest travesty against language since the days of Nimrod. Meanwhile, companies want AI chatbots spouting their propaganda (though it doesn't always work out so well^[16]). I'm not eager to see Wikipedia go this way - I'd rather see tools that make it more appealing for real users to collaborate and share things to be done. Wnt (talk) 00:49, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Prosthetic or exoskeletonic, as in automobiles? Does a hearing aid make you a cyborg any more than eyeglasses or contacts? You aren't going to restore the exercise opportunities people are missing to improve themselves and culture without some way to get people's entire central nervous system engaged, otherwise they get just as less exercise as they miss when they drive when they could walk. But I have already said too much about my next editing support proposal, the Virtual Reality Full Body Workout Multidimensional Ontology Navigator (avatar with VR helmet and joystick shown). I am afraid that project is on hold pending consensus on the name of foot-operated joysticks. EllenCT (talk) 13:57, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Well, there are tools you control and tools that control you, and there's a difference. An old-fashioned search engine, the only truly useful kind, can spit out every known instance of a term you type in. A hearing aid faithfully reproduces sounds according to a scheme that you know and control, or at least, which you have selected as reliable and isn't prone to change. An automobile goes where you drive it. But automobiles cannot be viewed so innocently in a future age when the self-driving car checks on the internet to see whether it is allowed to drive past Barbara Streisand's house, or whether you need to explain yourself to some authority before entering a rich neighborhood, or a run-down drug neighborhood for that matter. By "prosthetic culture" I mean that the aspect of choice by an individual known human has been replaced by a black box that can make those kinds of decisions for you. But to put it more simply, I suspect certain people would figure out how to game such lists to convince users to work on requested product advertisements. Wnt (talk) 15:36, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

We agree that consent of the governed means informed consent, and on the frequent utility of verbatim search over concept clustering and morphological stemming, even if the latter produce superior results in the typical case of unsophisticated users. Asking people how they feel while they are editing, and keeping the results only available to a restricted set of researchers, should not produce lists that can be gamed. Are you suggesting that people who offer others money to advocate biased points of view would likely ask that the editors always report happiness with their certainty? Those kinds of patterns would be helpful in weeding out such paid advocacy.

Or were you referring to the filter bubble that Jimbo's enhanced watchlist suggestions might cause? Wikipedia is already struggling with comprehensiveness issues from WP:NOTHOWTO and WP:NOTDIRECTORY which I see as much larger problems. I have been active in designing watchlist alternatives and I have great hope that some day the pageview APIs and other article statistics like ORES scores will be available from Quarry SQL. When they are, I will certainly share Jimbo's enthusiasm for such measures.

You can control a pedal keyboard, and there are theoretical advantages in that your legs are less likely to develop blood clots if you do. Engaging your entire body while you edit may be sufficiently beneficial that you (or your descendants, if natural selection becomes involved over time) may edit more, but that doesn't mean you would ever actually prefer to edit with your feet. For the same abstract reasons, people like to drive even when walking less is clearly causing profound harm. As automobiles lose their pedals and steering wheels to robots which the wealthy can pay to keep away from their houses, whether perimeter fences increase or decline (see Fence#History) has more to do with whether the editorial policies of independent sources weaken or strengthen socioeconomic equality than the programming in self-driving cars, which will frequently need to be overridden because of non-emergency construction hazards and the like.

However, making sure that the parts of your brain associated with empathy are involved while you edit, instead of just your cerebral cortex and language centers, is not likely to affect your personal health -- except to the extent that additional editing improves your and society's abilities because of what you have learned and taught -- but there are very well-founded reasons why it makes people want to edit more, and no alternative hypothesis for the MoodBar's success. There are perfectly good reasons why that is likely to make editing more rewarding on both personal and social levels, and along with the removal of MoodBar's redundant, time consuming, administratively difficult, confusing, and mandatory aspects from MoodBoxes, that is why I believe the MoodBoxes will result in attracting and retaining far more editors than the MoodBar. As Jimbo says, there is only one way to find out. EllenCT (talk) 15:51, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: It is easy to get into misunderstandings on-wiki. To clarify, I took your comments about "tailoring" or "assisting with" fundraising to mean that a user who self-reported a good mood would see fundraising appeals that people in other moods would not be exposed to, and that they might not necessarily realize that. If all you mean is that you want people to tell you if they're happy so that you can make them happier, then we may have gotten into a somewhat unnecessary digression. Though the general potential of AIs to wrap people up in personal delusions online should not be underestimated. Wnt (talk) 19:34, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Well, I did mean something like that. If someone is happy in general and happy with Wikipedia, they may be receptive to more detailed appeals than someone who is unhappy with Wikipedia and/or in general. I don't think it's unethical to show them different appeals. EllenCT (talk) 18:29, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: You can use a feedback mechanism like this as a sensor or an effector, but not both. For example, if a national polling firm were to offer a chance at a gift certificate to everyone who likes a certain candidate, they would soon be predicting a landslide. And if Wikipedians find out that saying they're happy means they get more spam on their screen, they'll soon be the most morose set of characters ever to take a survey.

But the damage here would go deeper, because Wikipedia's whole shtick is that it is an impartial representation of fact. Objective fact, in the abstract, supposedly the consensus of reasonable editors, not Democratic facts or Republican facts like on the TV media, but just plain facts. And if you break that and decide, in a non-obvious way not directly controlled by the user, one person's view will be different from another's, whether that is a moody fundraising appeal or a fancy AI telling you what articles you might like, the sense of objectivity fractures. And once fractured, it can fracture much further. So I think we need to beat on the camel's nose from the moment the first whisker pokes into the tent. We could do little things, awful little things, like serving up more articles about women to people who declare female in their profile, or pushing country-specific articles based on IP location. No. We always need to distinguish what you want from who you are, and never in any way confound the two. If you're happy, great, we're glad to know that. But if you want more fundraising appeals, you have to click a box saying "I want more fundraising appeals". And if you want more articles about women or places in Austria, then it is great to have those options, but they too should be boxes you check, in some sense or other (including entering via a specific Portal, of course). But what you simply tell about yourself should never affect your treatment here. Wnt (talk) 19:47, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Fundraising appeal banners are already being tested on accessed content.[17] Language is already detected from browser preferences, if I'm not mistaken. I am more interested in MoodBoxes' effect on the number of active editors than what the fundraising team may do with the data if they get access to it. EllenCT (talk) 08:36, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: At least that is done after the fashion of putting an ad on a page - I think we would see a line had been crossed if WMF kept track of who had accessed Game of Thrones and hit them with content later. Even so, it seems like that could go wrong. If someone gives money in that appeal, is there now a permanent record, even a financial document accessible by a bank, to show that he read the Game of Thrones article? You can easily undermine privacy that way. And if the article is specifically targeted for fundraising, can that affect whether any Fair Use in it or trademark issues would be noncommercial vs. commercial? I think people could get too darned clever chasing after a penny. Wnt (talk) 10:06, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

@Yuvipanda: any idea when pageview APIs and other article statistics like ORES scores will be available from Quarry SQL? EllenCT (talk) 15:51, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

This discussion inspired me to write an essay on Facebookization. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:48, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Special criteria for Jews on Wikipedia?

Jimmy, I wanted to inform you of something that is extremely disturbing and insensitive. Apparently in order for a Jewish person to have their religion listed as Jewish in the infobox they need to reach almost insurmountable proofs, much more than what is there for a non-Jewish person. Apparently a Jewish person who had a bar-mitzvah, a Jewish wedding ceremony, a circumcision, his kids circumcised and bar-mitzvahed and is a member of a Jewish temple is still not Jewish enough for some editors and they claim that just means he's "culturally" Jewish and they use Christian standards of theology and belief and apply it to the Jewish religion. They also claim that in order to be listed as Jewish, the subject needs to be a practicing Jew, which is not how the Jewish religion works. When I point out how disturbing this is, I get threatened with a block for "almost calling people anti-semites" or something along those lines. Is there really a policy that a Jew needs to be a practicing Jew? Is there really a policy that Wikipedia feels that religion in infoboxes has such convoluted ideas? There is an RFC at Talk:Stanley_Milgram#Request_for_Comment:_Should_the_parameter_.22Religion:_Jewish.22_be_included_in_this_article.3F where editors are making up policy and using BLP on a dead guy for one thing. I would love your opinion since it is indeed disgusting and insensitive to have double standards. This is not a person who denied his Jewishness. He just didn't walk around saying "I am Jewish as per Wiki standards" nobody does that. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 14:52, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Just a few points at this time. First, I don't think our standards for including such a parameter should be materially different for different religions (or any other categorisations, for that matter). Second, I have heard complaints at times from BLP subjects of Jewish heritage that, from their perspective, we tend to go out of the way to point out Jewishness, so at least to some people the problem in general runs in the other direction. Third, I think that there is a reasonably good argument for not including such a parameter in infoboxes at all due to the endless debates that arise from it. Or, at least, restricting the use to some fairly extreme cases - the Pope, for example, is Catholic, as are Cardinals and Priests and the like. But that's not current policy, so please don't take that as a suggestion that anyone in particular is wrong (or right) in the current discussion. The point is just that if policy were different, we'd not have to waste time on this discussion.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:54, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

I agree and that is one inherent problem with religion on the box, but for a case where the user didn't "deny" (for lack of better word) their Jewishness, it appears to me that in order to have Jewish listed is far different than having other religions listed. And I am now facing a block by some admins for questioning that. Apparently asking for a policy is called not dropping the stick. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 20:03, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

I recommend remaining calm and pleasant, as it is always beneficial to do that. You may wish to calmly and pleasantly object to the name-calling that you are being subjected to, for example "dim-witted". I also recommend not assuming what theory others are operating under, as that seems to be a significant source of heat in the argument. You're said to be saying that Wikipedia has to slavishly follow what a particular religion believes in determining the infobox paramater, which I doubt is what you actually think. You seem to be accusing others of holding a double standard for Jews versus Christians, which I doubt is what they actually think. For me, the question should be kept to much simpler matters. It might be useful for both sides to post a new summary of their own position, including direct links to sources so that others can get up to speed on the debate.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:32, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for that, I will try, but one thing is that when I do ask for sources, all I get is "I already provided" User:Bus stop and I already provided summaries but it's ignored and when questioned, I get threatened with a ban from Bishonen or Coffee for not dropping the stick. I think the RFC should be closed possibly and everyone posts a summary. One major issue is that Guy is saying that if a Jew is not religious, they are not a member of the Jewish religion, but that is not how the Jewish religion works. It might work like that in others, but I don't know. In Judaism, no matter how religious you are (and there are many twice a year Jews) you are still a member of the religion. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 20:36, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

I think, for any individual, we should rely on self-identification or reliable sources (per WP:CAT/GRS). I know there are likely political candidates who declare themselves a particular Christian denomination but it's in name only but we, Wikipedia editors, do not place ourselves in the position of judging whether or not they are a practicing Presbyterian or Methodist. I can see not including the religion parameter at all but Wikipedia editors should never be judging the depth of someone's religious identification or beliefs. Meaning, if X says he is an Episcopalian but never attends church, his article, if it includes religion, should still say he's Episcopalian. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:09, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

• I would note that what Sir Joseph characterizes as "in order for a Jewish person to have their religion listed as Jewish in the infobox they need to reach almost insurmountable proofs" is actually multiple editors asking and failing to get a citation to a reliable source that establishes that the person's religion is/was Judaism, as opposed to being culturally or ethnically Jewish. See our article on Who is a Jew? for details about the difference. --Guy Macon (talk) 21:22, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

I see a lot of "talking past each other" and a focus on irrelevancies. Given the cultural/religion distinction, we have to make a sensible editorial judgment call. In order to do that, we'd want to look at factors including public statements and actions, such as for example getting married in a religious ceremony, belonging to a particular church or temple, sending children to a religious school or not, engaging in religious family ceremonies, self-identification. We'd also look for disconfirming factors in those public statements and actions, such as an explicit rejection of a faith. As I see it so far, we have a fairly large amount of evidence on the one side, and none on the other side. I am quite sure that "they need to reach almost insurmountable proof" is an exaggerration, but I fail to see how you can easily dismiss the multiple facts in the citations which establish the matter pretty cleanly. What am I missing? Are you saying that we don't have sources which say he married in a religious ceremony? That we don't have sources confirming his membership at a temple? Is this doubt about the quality of the sources or are you really arguing that even sources as good as all that isn't enough, and we need a source which says very specifically that his religion was Judaism, as opposed to merely saying that he was a member of a temple? That latter seems to be a much higher standard than necessary.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:42, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

We don't have sources confirming his membership at a temple. If we did this conversation would not be happening. Sir Joseph has claimed that Millgram was a member of a temple, but refuses to provide a citation or even to explain how he knows this. In fact, I and several others have asked repeatedly for any citation of any kind that would indicate his religion with no result. I don't know about "married in a religious ceremony" but I do know that many people get married in a religious ceremony despite one or both of the parties being wed not belonging to that religion. I am one of them. Non-religious Jews do this all the time; for an Orthodox Rabbi, the rule is that if your mother was a Jew you are a Jew and can be married in a religious ceremony in a synagogue. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Guy Macon (talk • contribs) 01:00, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Guy Macon—I don't think it is absolutely necessary to have a source that Stanley Milgram was a member of a Jewish house of worship. Are there any sources saying anything that detracts from Stanley Milgram's Jewishness? The sources available support that his religion is Jewish or at least are consistent with a hypothesis that he is Jewish. Even if he were a member of a synagogue it doesn't prove he was observant. All sources that are available show that he is Jewish, including the one that shows that he was born to a Jewish mother. Additionally, he speaks of its relation to his work: "It was only after my training in social psychology broadened my perspective on human behavior that I came to the realization that my question, in a more general form, was one of the primary psychological puzzles underlying the mass destruction of European Jewry: What psychological mechanism transformed the average, and presumably normal, citizens of Germany and its allies into people who would carry out or tolerate unimaginable acts of cruelty against their fellow citizens who were Jewish, resulting in the death of six million of them?" If all sources are affirmative of his Jewishness then why should we not indicate in the Infobox that his Religion was Jewish? The Infobox parameter for religion is not a scientifically arrived at conclusion. It should be the result of the perusal of all of the relevant sources. From a Jewish perspective Stanley Milgram is undeniably Jewish. Our encyclopedia should not follow the Jewish perspective if we find indications of Stanley Milgram repudiating his Jewishness, but no such source has been presented. Bus stop (talk) 19:02, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Please provide a citation showing that being Jewish is evidence of being a member of the Jewish religion (Judaism). All available sources, including several written by Rabbis, indicate that "Jewish" may refer to ethnicity or culture. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:35, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Let me get this straight. Because you think that Jewish could mean ethnicity, religion or culture, you automatically disallow religion and accept ethnicity as normative and require documented proof that someone who says they are Jewish is religiously Jewish? But you assume if someone says they are Jewish that they are ethnically Jewish? This is a standard that doesn't exist for any other religion. If I say I'm Methodist but I never practice my religion, never go to church and am not a member of a church, it would still say in an infobox on an article about me that I was Methodist. Do you really think that Donald Trump is a "practicing" Presbyterian? Why don't we require a reference on his article that "proves" that he is religiously Presbyterian and not just culturally Presbyterian? Where are the demands for citations of his religious practice? And if religion isn't relevant for political candidates, it should be removed from all of the candidates' articles.

Why have a different, higher standard for individuals who self-identify as Jewish? It's like you are not imposing additional burdens of proof and I can't figure out why you are so obstinate about individuals who are Jewish being identified as Jewish. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:14, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Do you have a diff showing where I ever had a problem with people who are Jewish being identified as Jewish? If someone self-identifies as Jewish Wikipedia should only report that they are Jewish. Wikipedia should not automatically report that those Jews are ethnically Jewish (some Jews aren't). Wikipedia should not automatically report that those Jews are culturally Jewish (some Jews aren't). Wikipedia should not automatically report that those Jews have a Jewish mother (some Jews don't). Wikipedia should not automatically report that those Jews pass a DNA test of Jewish ethnicity (some Jews don't). Wikipedia should not automatically report that those Jews are eligible to immigrate to Israel under the Israeli Law of Return (some Jews aren't). And Wikipedia should not automatically report that those Jews are members of the Jewish religion, AKA Judaism (some Jews aren't). The is basic Wikipedia policy: report what the sources say, without drawing conclusions that are not found in the sources. Of course if we can find a source that says that they passed a DNA test, had a Jewish mother, or belonged to Judaism, we can they report that. We cannot, however, assume any of those things from a source that only identifies the individual as being Jewish. See Who is a Jew? -- and I don't mean skimming it. Read it carefully, asking yourself what we can and cannot assume about someoine who is Jewish and what we need sources for. Where the sources are silent, Wikipedia should be silent. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:36, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Not sure who posted this, as the signature seems to have been lost, but this is a very relevant objection. I was married in a religious ceremony myself, although the minister did note my lack of belief as a part of the ceremony. So I'm with you on that not being definitive. And so it sounds like we agree on the basic point, including that a source showing that he was a member at a temple/synagogue/church would be sufficient evidence. (I'm not sure we agree that it is necessary, but since Sir Joseph says there's a source, I think the ball is in his court at this point. I'll just repeat my previous request: if those in favor of adding his religion to the infobox can provide sources for the relevant evidence, in one concise place (on the talk page, although a note dropped here to notify people would surely be appreciated), that would be very good.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 04:26, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

It was Guy Macon per the history. Graham87 13:12, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Sorry for the error. (Note to self: Next time, smoke crack after editing Wikipedia...) --Guy Macon (talk) 14:36, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

• There is a difference between ethnic Jews and religious Jews, and in at least some cases like Geza Vermes, at least for a while, one does not necessarily equal the other. There is a bit of a problem regarding the existing categories and descriptions of ethnic and religious Jewishness around here, and how if at all to identify them in templates, and the sometimes problematic issue of differentiating between the two, particularly in more historical persons, but I don't think this is one of those instances. John Carter (talk) 21:41, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

John Carter—reliable sources use terms such as "nonobservant Jews" or "secular Jews". We don't find reliable sources referring to people as "ethnic Jews". Perhaps you can find a rare exception. More likely you will find the occasional use of terminology such as "ethnically Jewish", but the emphasis there is different. Good quality sources virtually never speak of "ethnic Jews". I think you should use the standard terminology as found in reliable sources. Bus stop (talk) 15:31, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, I'm with you on all of that. Unless there is some point that I've missed, I think the very valid point that there is a difference between ethnicity and religion is a very valid point in some cases, but doesn't appear to be one in this instance, given the preponderance of the evidence put forward so far.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:44, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia policy focusses on "beliefs". WP:BLPCAT: "Categories regarding religious beliefs (or lack of such) or sexual orientation should not be used unless the subject has publicly self-identified with the belief or orientation in question, and the subject's beliefs or sexual orientation are relevant to their public life or notability, according to reliable published sources." WP:CAT/R: "Categories regarding religious beliefs or lack of such beliefs of a living person should not be used unless the subject has publicly self-identified with the belief in question (see WP:BLPCAT), either through direct speech or through actions like serving in an official clerical position for the religion. For a dead person, there must be a verified consensus of reliable published sources that the description is appropriate." This is all well and fine for identifying Christians because "Christians believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the savior of humanity whose coming as Christ or the Messiah was prophesied in the Old Testament."[18] But Judaism works differently. There are no beliefs essential to Judaism. A Jew is a person born to a Jewish mother. The only other way a person can become a Jew is through conversion. There is the incessant demand that a person considered as possibly Jewish enunciate beliefs supporting that he is Jewish. This often cannot be done. There are workarounds for this particular problem. A Jew can demonstrate that he is a Jew by being a member of a synagogue, being Bar mitzvahed, having his children Bar/Bas mitzvahed, getting married in a Jewish wedding—and enunciating that he is a Jew. But some editors argue that this is not good enough. At some point an element of judgement has to be exercised. Alternatively, at some point the above two policies have to be rewritten—to include all religions. I think the majority of editors are most familiar with Christianity. But there are a lot of religions out there. They are not all predicated on beliefs. Judaism is not. In rewriting policy we should aim to determine whether a person embraces or rejects a given religion under consideration. All sources should be considered, if they are relevant. We cannot only be looking for belief. And we cannot only be looking to see if it is reliably sourced that a person was born to a Jewish mother. A multitude of relevant sources should be weighed to reach any conclusion as to whether a religion is applicable to a subject of a biography or not. Bus stop (talk) 22:02, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

You keep posting this crap, but it doesn't get any more true each time. Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:16, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Please feel free to articulate one or more points of disagreement, Only in death. Bus stop (talk) 22:22, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

It has been done. Repeatedly. You and Sir Joseph don't care, or listen. The issue is already settled. So unless you have a new point to make, neither you or Sir Joseph will tag BLPs with a religion unless it's policy compliant. Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:55, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Only in death—you mention BLPs, but Stanley Milgram is not living.[19] Notice, in that 1984 obituary, that the funeral was held at Riverside Memorial Chapel[20]. This does not indicate that he was an observant Jew, but it does strongly suggest that he was Jewish. I really do not know his level of observance/nonobservance, but in this case I don't think it matters. That is because there are no sources which show him distancing himself from Judaism. I think these sorts of criteria matter for Wikipedia's purposes, concerning all religions. I think we should not focus on any one criteria but should consider all criteria if they are relevant. Bus stop (talk) 00:06, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

I would also take exception to Sir Joseph calling a good-faith attempt to ask for citations and an unwillingness to accept inserting unverifiable claims into Wikipedia "extremely disturbing and insensitive" (on this page) and "anti-semetic" (elsewhere). --Guy Macon (talk) 23:17, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

In response to Only in death above, I think one option might be a greater development of pages like Wikipedia:WikiProject Judaism/Prospectus by inclusion of additional works. I don't think anyone would necessarily object to any article talk page being tagged with any WikiProject banner provided that WikiProject had clear evidence from such prospectuses that the topic/individual has already been described by other published reference sources as being broadly related to a topic. It would also, presumably, allow for tagging of, for instance, Christians who are critics of Judaism, by both the Christianity and Judaism WikiProjects, provided such is supported, and I would think that reference works from any such perspective which offer significant discussion of individuals would be considered reasonable by most editors involved. John Carter (talk) 23:23, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

John Carter—I am reminded of something Ellen Pao says about 7 minutes into this interview with Emily Chang. She says "When you have problems, they scale with your company." If I am correct, and Jews are sometimes depicted through a Christian lens on Wikipedia, it would be very hard to change that without a great deal of effort. (For those with a limited attention span, myself included, click here for a very brief excerpt from that interview. Click and enlarge the video window.) Bus stop (talk) 13:45, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

On a tangent - and speaking in generalities - I have found that a concerted effort to promote the Jewishness of people over the years could be partially responsible for what you view as a negative push the other way, Sir Joseph. I can even think of one article I wrote where a BLP subject specifically stated that he was non-religious and grew up in a secular household, but at least one person fought a war to try and make "subject is Jewish" as literally the first sentence of the article body because his mother is Jewish. That fact that was already very clearly noted alongside the fact that his father is Italian. Resolute 23:33, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

This is a ridiculous characterization by Sir Joseph. (I even voted together with them on the RfC on Bernie Sanders, which was similar, but this is rather hard to stomach). The discussion was whether Sanders can be described as a religious Jew rather than a ethnic Jew. Everyone accepted the latter; for the former, there was some disagreement. Also the disagreement is whether the religion should be specified in the infobox at all. It is ridiculous for Sir Joseph to claim that this is some evidence of some higher bar for Jews on Wikipedia. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 04:05, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

In my opinion Sir Joseph should be commended for his positive contributions to the project. Unfortunately he is now blocked. Bus stop (talk) 13:19, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Dear Jimmy, thanks for trying to calm the waters at the Milgram page. Had I known the discussion would become so rancorous I wouldn't have started it in the first place. These vituperations do ill to Wikipedia, and the future of Wikipedia does not hang on whether or not the Religion parameter is included in Milgram's bio. Ravpapa (talk) 06:07, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Is there another discussion we ought to know of besides the one here and at talk Milgram? You obviously didn't start those two.--TMCk (talk) 15:55, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

I meant the RFC. I thought that bringing more editors on board would calm things down. Wrong! Nuff said. Ravpapa (talk) 16:17, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

While less than 4% of Americans identify as agnostic, a large majority of those expressing faith describe doubt as a struggle with faith, and atheists are unable to defend the logic of being able to have evidence about a being capable of hiding evidence. Therefore, because of the inherent contradiction, the categories of religiosity are incorrectly constructed, and there can be no reliable sources using such insufficient categories supporting semantic statements about religion, and WP:NOTHOWTO forbids explaining how to practice any religion. Therefore, we can only have episodic statements indicating what people said and did, and not about the religious categories to which sources may or may not claim they belong until such time as consistent categories are available. Any statement about membership in the current available set of religious categories in the literature is technically a false dichotomy. EllenCT (talk) 15:58, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

"The Milgrams were not religiously observant, although their cultural identification was strong and their home resounded with the melodic cadences of Yiddish whenever uncles and aunts came to visit. The religious holidays—such as Passover and Rosh Hashanah—were observed, but more as an occasion for family gatherings than for their religious significance. Stanley attended afternoon Hebrew school for a few years until his Bar Mitzvah. When it came time for thirteen-year-old Stanley to give a little speech at his Bar Mitzvah celebration, which took place the year after the war ended, he showed a concern over recent events":
"As I come of age and find happiness in joining the ranks of Israel, the knowledge of the tragic suffering of my fellow Jews throughout war-torn Europe makes this also a solemn event and an occasion to reflect upon the heritage of my people—which now becomes mine. I do not know whether I shall be able to cherish this heritage in the same way as my parents did throughout their lives. But I shall try to understand my people and do my best to share the responsibilities which history has placed upon all of us. This is a period of transition—when the whole world undergoes tremendous changes. Perhaps this 13th year of my life will be even more significant as marking the beginning of a new era for the Jewish people, an era of justice and liberty and a homeland Eretz Yisroel. . . . May there be an end to persecution, suffering and war and may Israel be established in Zion bimhareh beyomanu [speedily in our day]. Amen."[21] Bus stop (talk) 16:01, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

"During the summer of 1944, the Nazis, under the direction of Eichmann and with the assistance of their Hungarian allies, were in the process of rounding up the Jews of Budapest for deportation to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Budapest is split by the Danube River into two parts: Buda and Pest. One day during the roundups, a Jewish mother and her two-and-a-half-year-old child were taking the trolley from Pest, where they had been visiting relatives, to Buda, where they had recently found an apartment. Unlike most of her fellow Jews, this woman believed the rumors about what “resettlement for work in the east” really meant. So rather than remaining in Pest, she obtained forged Christian identity papers and moved to Buda, which was largely non-Jewish. The trolley was crossing the bridge between the two parts of the city when the rhythmic clatter of the car’s wheels was interrupted by the insistent sound of the child’s voice: “Mommy,” he asked, “why don’t I wear a cap like other Jewish boys?” This was within earshot of many of the other passengers, including members of the Nyilas, the Hungarian Nazi militia. With a resourcefulness spawned by desperation, the mother quickly turned to her child and said, “This is our stop,” grabbed his hand, and got off the trolley—right in the middle of the bridge, quite a distance from their destination. Miraculously, no one stopped them. I was that little boy on the bridge. As I grew into adulthood, my mind would occasionally drift back to that precarious moment on the trolley—when time seemed to stand still, enabling my mother to act quickly—and I would ask myself: What was special about that moment? Surely, if I had made the same remark before the war, my mother would not have taken evasive action. So why did she feel so threatened then? It was only after my training in social psychology broadened my perspective on human behavior that I came to the realization that my question, in a more general form, was one of the primary psychological puzzles underlying the mass destruction of European Jewry: What psychological mechanism transformed the average, and presumably normal, citizens of Germany and its allies into people who would carry out or tolerate unimaginable acts of cruelty against their fellow citizens who were Jewish, resulting in the death of six million of them?"[22] Bus stop (talk) 16:41, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

"Stanley Milgram was born in the Bronx on August 15, 1933, to Samuel and Adele Milgram, both Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe."[23] Bus stop (talk) 16:54, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

@Bus stop: Doesn't the text, "The Milgrams were not religiously observant, although their cultural identification was strong," suggest to you that they identified as Jews but didn't see the Jewish religion as an important part of their lives? Remember that we are not debating here whether to describe Milgram as "Jewish"; no-one disagrees that that's an appropriate description. The disagreement is whether we should set "religion=Judaism" in the infobox. GoldenRing (talk) 13:57, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

For me, too, that's the best evidence so far that we should not set religion=Judaism in the infobox. This is why looking to sources is so important.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:35, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

The Infobox should read Religion: Jewish. He was born to a Jewish mother. He is amply supported by reliable sources as being Jewish. No source suggests that he might not be Jewish. Do we find any source which shows him distancing himself from Judaism? No, we don't. Every source shows an affirmative relationship between Stanley Milgram and Judaism. We should just be mimicking sources and abiding by common parlance. We should not be inventive. We should not be engaging in the original research of teasing apart what we may see as separate strands of Judaism. The problem is one of seeing Judaism through a Christian lens. A Jew is literally a person born to a Jewish mother. That is the basis for the religion of Judaism. It is not a matter of believing something. That is Christianity. The religions have similarities but there are also discontinuities. We should respect Judaism when it is Judaism under consideration and we should respect Christianity when it is Christianity under consideration. We also have to understand the shades of meaning of words and how they shift in meaning depending on how they are used. I don't think the sources are unclear. We can try to misconstrue the sources to promote a personally-held agenda. But is that in the interest of intellectual honesty? "Religion" is a commonly noted attribute of a person. In this instance, and in common parlance, the individual's religion is Jewish. Bus stop (talk) 16:25, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

We don't go by theoretical criteria some religious fundamentalists wish it to be. We distinguish between ethnic and religion and try to apply the correct "label" as presented in approbiate sources (if at all). Religious views on this have no weight and are of no concern here.--TMCk (talk)

You say we "don't go by theoretical criteria" but indeed we do go by theoretical criteria, TracyMcClark. Whenever policy requires a statement of belief, it is going by theoretical criteria. This may be invisible to you if your perspective is a Christian perspective. WP:BLPCAT and WP:CAT/R are predicated on beliefs. Christianity may be predicated on beliefs but Judaism is not. You are telling us what we don't go by. We should not be dogmatically blocking out some sources. Our aim should be to accommodate all religions. Therefore we should be taking all relevant sources into consideration. Bus stop (talk) 19:02, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Re-read my post re. who's theoretical criteria and don't try to assume my perspective.--TMCk (talk) 19:35, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

TracyMcClark—you say "We don't go by theoretical criteria some religious fundamentalists wish it to be." But our policy language requires statements of "belief". Isn't this a "theoretical criteria"? Bus stop (talk) 19:51, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

"...theoretical criteria some religious fundamentalists wish it to be." Again, please pay a little bit more attention to what people actually write.--TMCk (talk) 20:12, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

TracyMcClark—give me an example of what theoretical criteria you have in mind. Maybe I am misunderstanding you. Bus stop (talk) 20:18, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Theoretical criteria from religious groups that claim even non-religious people as one of their own. Trying to claim every person of ethnic xx to a religion is one example. (A quite common reason with groups in general is to inflate their numbers with such inclusion criteria).--TMCk (talk) 20:39, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Belief is a theoretical criteria particular to Christianity. Birth is a theoretical criteria particular to Judaism, TracyMcClark. The encyclopedia attempts to accommodate all religions. To do so, it evaluates all relevant sources. You say "We don't go by theoretical criteria some religious fundamentalists wish it to be." To implement that would be to rule out some relevant sources. Are religious fundamentalists personae non gratae around here? Do we only adhere to the findings of enlightened religious people? Bus stop (talk) 21:33, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, we do rule out some sources when we state facts in wp-voice. Welcome to WP.--TMCk (talk) 21:58, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Here is a source: "Stanley Milgram was born in the Bronx on August 15, 1933, to Samuel and Adele Milgram, both Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe."[24] In considerations as to whether or not the Stanley Milgram article reads Religion: Jewish in the Infobox, we discard that source? Bus stop (talk) 22:11, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Plain ignorance cannot be resolved by debate. Maybe you should be joined with Joseph.--TMCk (talk) 22:24, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

I don't get into slinging personal insults. I'm on my best behavior because I respect the potential for the project and I would not want to be responsible for lowering the tenor of any discussion transpiring on Jimbo Wales' Talk page. Bus stop (talk) 22:39, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

One personal yardstick of the importance of this project is how often I use it to get information on a wide variety of topics. I may check other references suggested by a search engine but I am often especially interested in Wikipedia articles on a topic. Some, I end up editing. In my areas of interest, I take a more active role. You and I should be having a cerebral conversation. Especially as there seems to be a problem worth addressing. Bus stop (talk) 22:50, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

• We had much the same problem concerning atheism and a British politician, whether she should be listed as "atheist" in the infobox. In the case of Sanders, there had been much discussion concerning him being Jewish or not. I was bot-summoned to that RfC and I think I favored inclusion because it had been widely discussed in the press. However, given the controversy that constantly erupts over religion in infoboxes, since "religion" is not always a question that can be answered simply and in one word, why have such a parameter in the infobox at all? Coretheapple (talk) 16:40, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Judging from my experience with the Bernie Sanders article I certainly do pray for the day that religion will be eliminated from the infoboxes. In life we can be sure of death and taxes--the Sanders's article can be sure that the debate about his religion listing in the infobox, or not, will go on for ever as well. When the debate first started so many months ago I thought about it and decided, "why even have it in the infobox" but I soon learned to not even bother to read the discussion because it was a waste of time. Sometimes I wonder if Wikipedia has become something like our American congressional debates -- just a lot of talk and no real progress ever being made. It would be encouraging to me to make this one little decision: Do not list religion in the infobox and move on. Gandydancer (talk) 17:23, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

I would suggest that religion should be utilized more sparingly in general, as it is rarely relevant in BLPs. It is definitely relevant to Sanders. Madoff too, given that he ripped off Jewish charities. But I recently edited an article about a writer, one mainly known for a whopping mistake, a very brief article that mentioned her religion. She is barely notable and her religion was totally irrelevant to her notability. Some Wiki editors seem to be obsessed with religion and seem to go out of their way to add it. It seems to keep coming up in articles about Jewish people, as I don't often see article about non-Jewish people in which religion is added gratuitously, with no relation to notability whatsoever. Coretheapple (talk) 00:08, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Coretheapple—you say "Madoff too, given that he ripped off Jewish charities".[25] Seriously? With all the policy everybody brings to bear on this, why should "Religion: Jewish" be in the Infobox of Bernard Madoff? Do you understand my concern? Here is the edit accomplishing that. It is from March 29, 2016. Is it compliant with WP:BLPCAT? From what I can see this is accomplished by an active editor, who probably should know better. Can you understand the concern of editors such as Sir Joseph and myself? Bus stop (talk) 17:29, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Have I missed something here?

I could have sworn I only just closed an RFC with an overwhelming consensus to deprecate the "religion" field in infoboxes altogether. Why is this discussion even happening? ‑ Iridescent 16:52, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Please see "Revisiting my close of Religion in infobox RfC". The results of the RfC to which Iridescent refers are applied to Bernie Sanders. The results of the RfC to which Iridescent refers are not applied to 24 other US presidential candidates. Bernie Sanders is Jewish. The other 24 presidential candidates are Christian. Bus stop (talk) 17:08, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

More WP:IDHT behavior from Bus Stop. The "RfC to which Iridescent refers" is the one in Wikipedia:Village pump (policy), not the one in Talk:Bernie Sanders. Just because Bus Stop and Sir Joseph have lost by an overwhelming consensus on at least half a dozen RfCs that in one way or another involved them trying to label someone with a religion despite a complete lack of sources, that is no reason to fire off a reply to Iridescent without bothering to click the link to the RfC that Iridescent helpfully provided.

To answer Iridescent's question, of course we should not be having this conversation. The RfC you linked to[26] was a definitive answer, and the other half dozen or so RfCs gave us the same answer in different ways. Alas, for some here the results of RfCs are simply obstacles to be ignored along with our policy that claims must be supported by citations to reliable sources. See Wikipedia:Tendentious editing#Righting Great Wrongs and Wikipedia:Advocacy. --Guy Macon (talk) 21:17, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Guy Macon—I am aware that Iridescent is referring to the RfC at the Village Pump. I was never under any misunderstanding about that. I am sorry if I was in any way unclear. Bus stop (talk) 21:29, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

And I supported removal! I totally forgot. Agreed, this conversation should not be happening. Coretheapple (talk) 17:08, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

It may be time to remove this field from the infobox if people are going to wear out the keyboard with arguments whenever it is used. WP:BLPCAT already advises caution before stating a person's religious beliefs in the categories or the infobox. As for Bernie Sanders, "Although Sanders had a bar mitzvah growing up in Brooklyn and spent time in his 20s living on a kibbutz in Israel, he isn’t observant and has shied away from discussing his faith."[27] This is exactly why WP:BLPCAT encourages caution.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 17:20, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Ianmacm—you point out that WP:BLPCAT "encourages caution". Sanders says "I’m proud to be Jewish"[28] and his press package reads "Religion: Jewish". I don't know what you are being cautious about. And you say that "he isn’t observant and has shied away from discussing his faith." Where is the requirement that a Jew must be observant and discuss their faith? Bus stop (talk) 15:59, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

We've been through this before. Who is a Jew? points out that there are various different definitions. I've never said that Bernie Sanders isn't Jewish, but now believe that the field for religion in the infobox is more trouble than it is worth.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 16:47, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

I took a count a month or so ago and found over thirty places where Bus Stop asserted that being Jewish establishes a person's religion, got a response much like the one above, then ignored the response only to make the claim again elswhere. I didn't keep a count on him but Sir Joseph (currently blocked) kept doing the same thing. I am now preparing an Arbcom case. Assigning a religion to someone who has never stated publicly that he is a member of that religion is disruptive -- and accusing those who ask for citations to reliable sources of antisemitism is extremely disruptive. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:19, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Guy Macon—the sources are consistent with a hypothesis that Stanley Milgram's religion is Jewish. We don't probe the hearts of people as a prerequisite to using the religion parameter. Even an Orthodox rabbi who is the head of a congregation might not embody piousness in his soul. It is none of our business. We report information as it is supplied to us. If individual editors have questions about the nature of Judaism, they take that inquiry up elsewhere. Wikipedia isn't a forum for individual editors to raise their doubts about the nature of the Jewish religion. Bus stop (talk) 17:37, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, but we don't do "the sources are consistent with a hypothesis that..." here. See WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. You say that "Wikipedia isn't a forum for individual editors to raise their doubts about the nature of the Jewish religion", but the overwhelming majority of editors who oppose you in RfC after RfC want to say nothing about the nature of the Jewish religion. They want Wikipedia to be silent where the sources are silent. You and Sir Joseph want our pages on Stanley Milgram and Bernie sanders to say that they are members of Judaism despite the fact that they never claimed to be members of Judaism and the fact that no reliable secondary sources say that they are members of Judaism. That isn't going to happen, ever. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:10, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

If this parameter is removed from the Sanders article (among others), then it should be removed from every political candidate unless the identification is sourced. My concern is that the POV that there is one standard for Jewish identification and a different one for other religious affiliations. Removing the parameter entirely isn't the best option but is preferable to having different standards. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:49, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

(EC) If you look at the Richard Nixon talk page, you will see an example of me asking for sources for religion in the infobox. If anyone knows of any other politicians where the sourcing fore religion is questionable, I will be glad to inquire, and if no sources are found, to remove it. Just drop me a line on my talk page. --Guy Macon (talk) 21:17, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Iridescent, although I formerly supported including "Jewish" in the Bernie Sanders infobox, I accepted the consensus against it and also agree completely with your close of the more general April RFC. There, you wrote: "How to implement this removal while ensuring that those cases in which the religion is significant to the article subject is adequately covered either in the body text or in a custom parameter will potentially require a second RFC if a discussion can't agree on a mechanism for an orderly removal of the parameter". It seems to me that the only way to implement your close of the RFC effectively is to edit the template to remove the religion and denomination parameters. I see no evidence that the religion information is being removed systematically from the infoboxes for American politicians (other than Sanders) or anyone else. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 20:50, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

When I closed that RFC I intentionally didn't remove the parameter from the infobox template, as it will need someone to go through the articles (or at the very least, a notification of the change somewhere) so those special cases where religion needs to be included but isn't currently mentioned on the article other than in the infobox can be fixed. (I don't believe there actually exists a single example of a biography where the religion is significant enough that it absolutely needs to be mentioned, but also isn't mentioned anywhere in the body text, but this being Wikipedia you can be certain someone will complain.) ‑ Iridescent 21:14, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure that the Human Events blog is a reliable source for information about Donald Trump's religious practices. I mean, I don't see evidence provided that he is a practicing Presbyterian. Just like Sanders can say he is Jewish but Wikipedia doesn't accept he is Jewish, how can we know that Trump isn't just a cultural Presbyterian, born into it but not religious? We obviously aren't accepting a candidate's self-identification. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:51, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Well, obviously Presbyterian is not his ethnic and he seems to publicly identify with the religion.--TMCk (talk) 23:57, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Trump says "It’s very important. I am a Protestant. I am a Presbyterian within the Protestant group and I go to Church as much as I can. And I am a believer. Now I don’t know if that makes me conservative or not, but I am a believer."[29] He doesn't say a believer in what. But would a Jew ever say "I am a believer"? Wikipedia policy language requires statements of "belief". That is one reason Jews more often than Christians fail to meet the requirements found at WP:BLPCAT and WP:CAT/R. Bus stop (talk) 00:30, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

So why don't you just go to the talk page of the policy and make your case that it needs to be changed? Saying that you disagree with the existing policy and insisting that others ignore the policy on individual biagraphies isn't working out very well for you. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:19, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Iridescent, it was I who initiated the RFC. I originally posted a query at the Village Pump about this and you pointed out the decision to deprecate the religion parameter. It was my impression from reading the close that, while there was a decision in principle, there were a number of issues to be resolved before the parameter could be removed, and that it wouldn't happen any time soon. Because the discussion on the Milgram page raised a number of issues of principle, and because it was my impression that, despite the decision, the religion parameter would be hanging around for a while, I thought it appropriate to initiate the RFC. In retrospect, I think it was probably a mistake, especially since, with all the shouting, the issues of principle were never seriously addressed. All of which raises a number of philosophical musings about collaborative editing, and where Wikipedia is heading, musings I will eschew from writing because of the high cost of ink. Ravpapa (talk) 07:19, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Is it so important not to follow sources in these two instances (Bernie Sanders and Stanley Milgram) that we have to consider scuttling the functionality of representing religion in the Infoboxes of tons of biographies? Here is another excerpt from Blass: "But now, during the last few years, he moved beyond what had been a largely cultural identification with Judaism. He never turned into a practicing, observant Jew, but he became increasingly interested in the more religious and spiritual aspects of Judaism. For example, he began to study the Torah from time to time."[30] His religion is Jewish, in common parlance. Sources determine these things—not the musings of passionate editors. Concerning the living person, Bernie Sanders, we have the all-important "self-identification". Bus stop (talk) 13:06, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

For example, he began to study the Torah from time to time."

Um - I have studied material which would fall into that broad category, and, amazingly enough, it does not mean I am Jewish by religion. How did you arrive at that bit of "logic"? Collect (talk) 16:43, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Collect—Stanley Milgram's religion would be Jewish even without a source telling us that he studied Torah. We don't put on blinders when examining sources—discarding some and keeping others. Do you have any sources to bring? The reason I ask is because of the complete absence of sources showing Stanley Milgram distancing himself from Jewishness. When all sources point in the same direction, why would we doubt them? We have no sources even intimating Stanley Milgram rejecting Judaism in any way, to any degree. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. Bus stop (talk) 16:59, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Is there a reason why this is being discussed here? Cassianto^Talk 17:46, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

@Cassianto, I'll go with "because a single tendentious user thinks we've forgotten why he was community banned last time" as a working hypothesis. ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

That works for me. I'm afraid to say that I know the user of whom you speak very well indeed, Iridescent. Cassianto^Talk 18:24, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

In fact, @Bus stop:, has your You may not edit any articles having to do with cultural or religious identity of individuals, living or dead. This should be construed broadly. Should you try to WP:GAME the edges of this ban, you will be blocked again. restriction ever been lifted? If not, that suggests a solution to this problem straight away. ‑ Iridescent 18:36, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

@Bus stop: that's absurd. If there was a source stating that you studied Buddhism, would your religion be Buddhist? Endorse the RFC deprecating religion in infoboxes until such time as someone proposes a non-contradictory set of religiosity categorizations. EllenCT (talk) 14:12, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Bus stop has clearly realised that they are in breach of their restrictions, hence their absence from this discussion. Cassianto^Talk 17:54, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Because there are no actual RFCs or binding policy discussions on this page, and it advertises an open door policy that even completely banned editors sometimes make use of (though it seems inconsistently applied), my preference would be not to see retaliatory action against @Bus stop: or other posters solely for participating in discussions here. At least, not unless Jimbo tells them to stop and they don't. Wnt (talk) 19:38, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

I would urge any banned editor who has something to say in a polite manner to Jimmy to use the page User talk:Jimbo Wales/Unprotected to post his message. I do not like folks grandstanding on this page, posting just to see their own words on a computer screen, insulting and misleading people, i.e. trolling. The advantage of that page is that Jimmy watches it, so that messages can get thru, but there is no point in being belligerent for its own sake there. In other words, posting there shows that you are not trolling. I originally suggested it in response to an editor who wanted strict patrolling of this page. With that page in place, everybody wins, except for the trolls. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:51, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

The issue isn't Bus stop's posting here, it's insistence that the article on any person he suspects of being Jewish—regardless of whether they are or not—mentions the fact. This is an issue which has been ongoing for literally a decade. He was still at it as of yesterday, despite it being a clear breach of his the conditions under which his community ban were lifted. (I can find no evidence of said conditions ever having been rescinded.) ‑ Iridescent 19:55, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: That page was only just started, after some discussion, and it was created as a technical workaround for the abomination of a (semi) protected talk page. The idea of using it, nay, mandating it as a ghetto for topic banned editors is, as far as I know, novel, and rather disturbing as a very fast-paced slippery slope.

@Iridescent: I don't mean to discourage you from going after violations of the topic ban (if it is in place) on any page other than this one. But an unreliable open door policy is dangerous because it will get editors in trouble unnecessarily. Wnt (talk) 20:25, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Implementing the results of the infobox RfC -Guy Macon (talk) 08:17, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Fall in active administrators

I updated Wikipedia talk:List of administrators after a few months neglect, and a bit surprised to see the big fall in the number of active administrators. It will be even worse at end of May (currently 551). Feel free to check my work.

I can’t say I am surprised. I have always thought the purely administrative side of the work was awful, which is why I never volunteered (not that I would have been remotely acceptable, ever). Would the WMF ever pay for this work, or is there some difficult legal issue that would have to be overcome? By 'this work', I mean not writing stuff, but doing the painful work like fighting vandalism, link maintenance, categories, AfD closure and all that good stuff. Peter Damian (talk) 15:44, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

The WMF maintains much more than just enwiki. If they paid for admins here they would have to pay for them on almost 300 other wikis. Also, I highly doubt the community would ever cede administrative control to the WMF. We expect admins to be volunteers just like the rest of us. Having them paid just increases the "us versus them" mentality that has made adminship so far removed from the original "no big deal" it once was. There is also the issue that the WMF explicitly stays out of the day-to-day maintenance of the various projects. I believe this has to do with their safe harbor status but I am not entirely sure as I am not a legal expert by any means. --Majora (talk) 15:54, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

I am sure that a 'scale' argument could be applied in the case of Wikipedia. On whether 'the community would ever cede administrative control' I am envisaging a needs must situation where the number of admins has fallen to such a level that action has to be taken. Noting here the conflation of 'administrative control' with 'community', which I have always suspected. Peter Damian (talk) 16:00, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

If the WMF paid admins (or any other category of editors) it would become legally responsible for the content of articles, which is obviously unacceptable. If admin numbers do fall to a really unsustainable level the pressure to appoint new ones would of necessity mean that the process would become easier. Wikipedia is a self-correcting system. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:08, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

The actual fall has not been in active administrators but in good administrators. There are far to many idiots with the bit around here. Cassianto^Talk 16:13, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Well, imagine a world of needing less admins. The idea is that every good User can and many do participate in admminy stuff. (We should generally be able to regulate ourselves individually (and those who can't should find something else to do) - the self-regulation idea was probably one of the implicit things behind, everyone-should-be-an-admin, where NoBigD comes in). Then too, bot's do bot things, unbundle, etc. What the WMF could do, perhaps, is pay for an organizational and work-flow report: What should admins do and why? What is getting done and not getting done? Why aren't current admins doing them? What numbers of admins would make sense?, etc.

Currently we say, 'raise your hand if you want to be an admin, if you survive the gauntlet then it's fine for you to basically not admin but at least you have a title, and hopefully someone else will go into the gauntlet, so they can get a title, and not address the work-flow' (Not blaming them but there just is no sense of what the workflow should be, and no organization, and no accountability for getting it done). . . . Or, possibly, it's just ok the way it is 'a machine that would go of itself' as they say. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:20, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

RfA is currently a flawed process and has been for years. Too many incompetents have been allowed to progress forward based on stupid reasons or if they are a friend of a friend. Most of those who vote simply say "support" without actually taking the time to research the nominee first. Cassianto^Talk 16:39, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Does it matter? Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:46, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes. Why would it hurt asking for a reason behind the support vote, even if that reason was as simple as: "as per xxxx". If someone were to say: "Oppose -- xxxx", then they would be questioned why. Surely it should work both ways, no? Cassianto^Talk 02:01, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

@Peter Damian: I don't see anything obvious in Category:Administrative backlog which suggests a serious shortage of administrators, but I probably last looked at it years ago. You mentioned fighting vandalism, link maintenance, categories, AfD closure. Have you noticed issues at WP:AIV or AfD closures? What can admins do about links that ordinary users can't? Category:Categories for discussion is backlogged, but when I look at the specific discussions involved, in most cases I think I generally agree with admins who have seen those closures as lower priority than other work. EllenCT (talk) 16:44, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Well, the problem isn't just having fewer RfAs, it is also admins burning out and either doing fewer admin actions, moving to non-controversial admin activity or moving back to being a content editor rather than focusing on admin work. This is just a guesstimate, but when I compare when I started regularly editing Wikipedia (summer 2013) to the present day, I think the number of admins who patrol ANI has fallen to less than half the number of admins than three years ago.

I believe in admin accountability because admins, since they are human beings, make mistakes like everyone else. But it is also can get exhausting having to frequently justify your decisions, not because the wrong decision was made but because someone didn't like the decision. It can result in admins developing a very thick skin or simply choosing not to make difficult decisions that will inevitably bring conflict back to their talk page.

In RfAs, I've seen candidates opposed because they were involved in noticeboards/"drama boards". But what Wikipedia is lacking right now are more admins willing to wade into drama and make tough decisions which are bound to make some editors mad and unhappy. And many aren't simple vandalism but involve tough areas like multiple editors pushing nationalistic POVs where there are complaints, counter-complaints and counter-counter-complaints, where closing one ANI case just results in a new ANI case a week from now. This is as frustrating to admins as it is to the editors involved in the disputes. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 16:49, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

+1...definitely. Lectonar (talk) 14:15, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Also people move on. There simply is a natural decline to be expected if there is no influx, since folks need to have the luxury of time to participate, but as some get kids, new jobs or become ill or just find different hobbies. Few people are contributors let alone admins for life. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:37, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

I don't think RfA will become a fairer process if you pay people who pass RfA. It might become a fairer process if you pay randomly selected jurors to carefully evaluate admins and vote in RfA. But I'm thinking money is the last refuge of the incompetent here - we ought, as a community, simply be able to fix the processes both to elevate and to revoke admin status. Wnt (talk) 19:43, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Looking over this discussion, I see several empirical questions, the answers to which would shed a fair amount of light on what ought to be done. Some of these are explicit and some are implicit in arguments put forward:

1. Alanscottwalker: "What is getting done and not getting done? Why aren't current admins doing them? What numbers of admins would make sense?"
2. Cassianto: puts forward repeatedly the argument that (stripped of nasty rhetoric which is unhelpful to say the least) RFA allows through too many people, or anyway too many of the wrong people, so that admin quality is not as high as it should be. It should be noted that this is not necessarily in tension with what most people view as the problem, which is too few admins. A process could select for too few people and for the wrong people at the same time - meaning that loosening up the process make make for a better admin corp overall.
3. EllenCT challenges the notion of an admin shortage by inquiring about backlogs - this is a clean empirical question... have backlogs grown and which backlogs are they? But I note that not all admin actions, and in fact not even the most important ones, have "backlogs" - coming in to calmly mediate a dispute, helping parties to climb down gracefully from an edit war, but with the implicit threat of a block available, is a key admin activity not readily amenable to backlog measurement.
4. Liz wonders about something else straightforwardly measurable: admin actions per admin - has it declined? How many admins patrol/post to ANI? Has it declined? (As a side note, while I'm focusing on trying to list out the empirical questions we have raised, I think that Liz is spot-on with her diagnosis of the problem at RfA.)
5. TheDJ ties the adminship situation to an overall decline in editorship, which raises for me another empirical question - admins per editor, or admin actions per edits, something like that, could be a very interesting metric to look at and analyze.

For me, I think one of the current power structure problems is that we no longer have any useful way to "be bold" as a community. We have significant inertia and every proposal has to gain full consensus. I'd like us to be able to experiment, and to have the tools to be able to evaluate those experiments. Let me put forward a flawed first cut at the kind of thing I have in mind, just so people can understand the point I'm making.

Imagine if we had a tool that randomly selected active wikipedians and asked them to review 10 admin actions for the purposes of a study. The actions would be anonymized for the purpose of the survey. (Yes, people could figure out which ones they are rating, so there is a flaw, but I think it a minor one.) We could use this to evaluate admins over time, but there could be a lot of drama if the data were made public, so I'm thinking of this as purely a research study, not a tool for evaluating admins per se. Next imagine that we test some new processes for making admins - for example, randomly giving the bit to active editors for a test period of one month, or giving the bit to active editors who volunteer and complete an online training course, or.. or... or... the point is, we could experiment. Then, we could see what happens. Do the new admins do things that are productive? Do people rate their admin decisions as better or worse than the norm? Etc.

These are the kind of thing that I think the Foundation should be investing in - and the kind of thing that the community should be investing time in.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:58, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

The fact is, Jimbo, and whether you like it or not, some admins do behave like idiots, so if the cap fits... . You opine that allowing randomly picked editors a one-month trial period would be good. I don't, I think it would be a dangerous move. There are some "active" editors who do nothing but cause problems and disrupt the good work of others. If we were to give them the tools then all hell would break loose. Having said that, I agree that the tools should be given to active editors, but in all areas, not just some; i.e, content, patrolling, reverting vandalism, etc... . But that is not what is currently going on with the current RfA process. Someone is nominated; various all-sorts turn up; !Vote based on stupid reasons like "why not", and "I like their signature, so they must be good", and then slope off again. That is not acceptable.

If truth be known, most admins know nothing about how to create content, only to police it in an unfair and unjust way. If they knew about what goes into making a WP:FA, for instance, they wouldn't come under as much scrutiny as they do now. They would then gain the respect of those who are here to build quality articles. If these areas were improved, morale would improve and the idea of becoming an admin would then appeal to people. Cassianto^Talk 21:19, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

I don't see the danger you see in sprinkling the bit around much more liberally on a trial basis. The key is "easy come, easy go" in those cases. People could be given it for a probationary period and it could be taken away in the event of any warning signs. I suspect the danger is much less than you think.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:31, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

I would in general be in support of some sort of Meta-moderation feedback system, perhaps starting small with selected action types that are easier to script (e.g. blocking, protection ) over complicated issues like "closing an afd" or deletion (as deleted text would not be available). Perhaps popping a "would you like to take a meta moderation survey" to logged in extendedconfirmed users? While leaving out admin names during the survey would be fine - being able to provide at least aggregate results during intervals would allow for a deeper investigation. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:49, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

@Cassianto, you are wrong. Some (On Dutch WP most) does't behave like idiots, they are complete idioots and that is a different. It is a crazy idea to make every person,, who can be a troll or a sokpop or has a mental problem sysop. Well, we have seen the result on Wikipedia-NL, a wiki loaded with copyvio and the real editors are blockt. Ore, whishly, have left. What is left is a bunch of idiots who is trying to block everybody who is crashing there Wikimedia party of 15000 euro. Wikimedia_NL is only a job machine for it's members and a complete wast of money with it's director of 60000 euro and it's office. Well, now I am double block on Wikipedia and almost everywhere else, so I am looking for an other hobby. I hope you understand I will not spend one minute more In writing articles one Wikipedia, because they had tenthausends of page views and they called me a troll after all. Many times. So who is writing articles is a troll. And who like the be called a troll? Not me! Best regards, Graaf Statler (talk) 07:51, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Recent empirical evidence indicates that the admin backlogs are completely under control. The next few minion-filled underground lairs we're building out in the Maldives are slated to focus on the lowest quality high readership articles. EllenCT (talk) 14:51, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

• For what it's worth (and it may not be much), my personal take is as follows. The "total" number of administrators is farcically high, the actual number of administrators seems to be in the ballpark of 500, of whom not all are super active. I believe this is about the "right" number for WP, that backlogs are not huge and that basic site administration is being handled more or less expeditiously. I believe that RFA is both eliminating most of the bad actors from gaining tools and is simultaneously overly stringent and keeping good people from seeking tools. I believe the system is not reproducing new administrators fast enough to compensate for attrition and that at some time in the future, medium term, there might be a crisis that develops from lack of administrators — but that that day is not now. I believe there is a phenomenon taking place in which many potential administrators who decline to undergo the RFA process are taking care of administrative functions without the tool kit. For example, it used to be rare to see "Non-Administrative Closures" at Articles for Deletion; now it is very common. These Non-Administrative Closers are more or less doing an administrative task without the tool kit. I suspect there are similar instances of Non-Administrators doing administrative things around the Wiki and that this explains why a relatively small number of active administrators is still managing to get the job done. I don't think this is a bad thing — administration is No Big Deal, but blocking buttons and deletion powers for life really is... I finally believe that while our core volunteer count has not only stabilized but reversed the trend of decline over the last decade, the count of actual, functioning administrators is still in decline and that the situation bears close monitoring. (drops mic) —Tim /// Carrite (talk) 10:34, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

True we have far fewer admins than we once did, but part of the drop is from the various unbundlings. The number of active admins who are active as admins is a difficult figure to measure, and as volunteers you are measuring something very different from staff. I know of two admins who do a significant proportion of the deletion and blocking, so any comfort about the backlogs needs to be in the context that if either of those two left it would take a lot of volunteers doing a couple of hours a week to replace them. As for the point of what the WMF could or should fund, plenty of websites pay for moderators. If we follow the principle that we should pay people to do what volunteers want to have happen but aren't volunteering to do, then at some point we might need to employ people to do the grunt part of adminning; Bouncers if you will, who can block vandals and delete G10 and G3 stuff, but leave judging consensus to the volunteers. I suspect we could obviate the need for this by unbundling "block newbie", and I'm hopeful that RFA is merely a lagging indicator and that now that the core community is growing we will eventually have more RFA candidates. But if the WMF had to appoint four or five paid moderators to do the least contentious Admin stuff on what is by far the biggest WMF site it should not be the end of the world or a significant budget item. ϢereSpielChequers 15:20, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Those people could not possibly come from anyone other than active administrators. And if four or five admins are paid, and the rest are not, I don't think the selectees will be regarded as low-status in the Wikipedia community. I think there would be enough people hostile to the situation that any action taken that can possibly be regarded as contentious, will be.--Wehwalt (talk) 17:06, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

The administrative power is already seen as a perk, as indicated by the unwillingness of even the least active administrators to formally give it up on their own. I imagine there are many people who love to put on their resume that they've been an admin at Wikipedia for the past ten years. Of course, when a position like this has value, it is wisest for them to test its powers infrequently, lest they end up on the wrong side of a purge. Frankly, the bizarre idea of paying admins strikes me as part of the neocapitalist religion - the notion that there's always someone in charge who is somehow responsible for what everyone else does, and by venerating and sacrificing for them more and more, some kind of mystical benefit will accrue to the world. But it never does.

To put it another way, there has been an effort made to create a sort of choke point similar to the limits on access to the medical profession or the Mafia. Once an admin is suitably established, the rules and requirements are minimal; but there is an internship and initiation to get through before he can reach that point, which is made onerous to prevent too many people from coming through and showing up those currently with the perk. A part of this is a deification of things like how important it is that no new person have access to deleted revisions. Originally it was "no big deal", but now the people on top need to kick away the ladder. And above that broken ladder, why shouldn't it rain money? For it not to would seem like questioning Heaven. Wnt (talk) 17:48, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Dear Wnt and Wehwalt, I'd agree that there has been pressure to be more picky as to who can become an admin. But this isn't people kicking away a ladder that they have already climbed. For that to be the case it would have to be admins who were opposing candidates and who were pushing the standards in tenure or experience, my experience is the opposite, and that few admins would oppose a candidate who was more qualified than they were when they got through RFA. As for raining money, and how you mix volunteer and paid staff, well firstly bouncers aren't that well paid, and I doubt that online moderators would need to be either. Secondly as long as you follow the principle thatwe should pay people to do what volunteers want to have happen but aren't volunteering to do, you can mix volunteers and paid staff. The secret is that the volunteers need to be in charge, with paid staff doing the grunt work that is left after the volunteers have done the stuff they want to do. Also I'd reiterate that this isn't my ideal solution, I'd prefer that we fix RFA. But if we can't fix it then ultimately there are other options, this is one that works elsewhere. ϢereSpielChequers 13:54, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Pardon me

Greetings Mr. Wales, I hope all is well in your life. I'd like to challenge you to use the founders flag to mitigate the woes of RFA. Just as the US president as well as each state's governor are known for granting pardons, I think it would be great if you periodically set aside some failed RFAs and appoint them to administrator based on a reasonable criteria of your choosing. There are many editors who would probably be very good administrators, yet they believe, perhaps rightfully so, that they would never be able to pass an RFA. Most of these editors simply will not request adminship; ever. Perhaps some of them would, If there was such a second chance consideration as what I'm suggesting. For example, I am one who has accepted that I'll never pass an RFA. While I am resolved, to never again request sysop under the current system, I probably would try again, if failed RFAs were eligible for an executive second chance. I am curious if there are others who currently won't be an RFA candidate, but they might or would if benevolent appointments were happening under the founders flag. I am certain to hear reasons why such appointments can not happen, or why it's inherently a bad idea, but I am pretty sure that you could do this, and I believe it would be a good thing to do; as soon as you practically could. Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 17:09, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure I would make a big mistake and people would rightly go berserk and strip me of whatever vestigial and theoretical power I might have if I did that. I think a better use of that would be in working with a small group of thoughtful and respected editors to come up with a proposal grounded in evidence for a reform of the process and then to call for a well-publicised election with a threshold for victory set somewhere less than 80%. Possibly even a majority vote would be good enough in the event that we are voting for a test period. (And correcting a mistake a previous time we did this, a clear understanding of what happens at the end of the test period.)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:35, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm one of those who passed on a second attempt, so I would suggest not ruling out a second run. Plenty of people who wait a few months and fix the main issues that the opposers cited have become admins. As for executive decision, I don't see that happening until we have such a shortage of admins that such an extreme measure is necessary. But when and if it becomes necessary, we will wind up with a large batch of hastily appointed minimally checked new admins, most of whom will do just fine. I'm not sure Jimmy would be the right person or entity to appoint them, and I don't know if we are years or decades from such an eventuality so now is not the time to plan for such a scenario, better in my view to keep trying to repair RFA to the point where such a scenario can be averted. One possible partial solution would be to add a not unless close, whereby Crats can revisit RFAs and change the result when opposers concerns have been resolved I've drafted some ideas on it here. ϢereSpielChequers 08:14, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

• @ John Cline - Ooo, really bad idea. If the decline in the count of administrators becomes an actual problem in the future, we as a community can address the matter then. Dictatorial overrides of community processes are not the answer and would certainly create a bigger problem than they would purport to solve. See, for example, the dysfunctionality of the Heilman sacking from the WMF Board of Trustees, which was a single override of community decision-making and is still a pervasive and corrosive political issue, as anyone reading the Wikimedia-l mailing list can attest. Carrite (talk) 16:46, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Your opinion on topics regarding fringe and quackery

There is currently a discussion here regarding chiropractics. The seems to be a sentiment that any article which may have medical ramifications requires sourcing to pass WP:MEDRS specifically MEDLINE sources, as far as I know this is a misapplication of the guideline. My interpretation is that these requirements set the bar much higher than current GNG and that quackery can be notable as things may be notably wrong. What is your opinion on this matter? Valoem ^{talk contrib} 20:18, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

As I said in that discussion, saying that a "technique is considered to be gentle and safe" is a medical claim and requires WP:MEDRS. An IP countered my comment by claiming that "The developer of the technique describes it as gentle and safe" would be fine without MEDRS, however that is exactly the kind of fringe pushing nonsense that an encyclopedia has to resist. Full marks to the IP for a good understanding of how to use Wikipedia to push a product with cues to the reader, but they would say that wouldn't they applies to all fringe claims. Johnuniq (talk) 23:27, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

That comment has been long removed and can be fixed by simple editing not deletion. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 01:03, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

You inserted the text (diff) and did not respond to my comment pointing out the problem at WP:FTN. Johnuniq (talk) 01:18, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

@Johnuniq: There is a huge tendency to mission creep regarding the "medical" claims. I think that if the makers of an amusement park ride or a chiropractic procedure market it as "gentle and safe", we ought to be able to say that. If someone has studied the incidence of projectile vomiting on the Tilt-A-Whirl, then we should showcase that RS to clarify if the thing is safe or not. But if such data is unavailable, we don't black out the article until some hypothetical day when doctors release a report about whether the Tower of Terror causes whiplash or not. You can label pseudoscience using RSes without demanding non-medical procedures have medical sources. Wnt (talk) 02:46, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Does anybody disagree that chiropractic is almost all quackery? If that is our starting point, how much more needs to be said? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:38, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

It's listed here. Count Iblis (talk) 05:27, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Smallbones. I am a Chiropractic skeptic, however when my medical doctor ran out of treatment options for my back I turned to every alternative therapy I could get my hands on. I had five herniated disks. My Chiropractor was 1/3 of a mile from my home and I would walk there, walk home, then ice my back for 15-minutes. The walking home would inebriate the stuff that is broken loose during a treatment. One day I got halfway to the Chiropractor and I could not take another step. I laid down on the sidewalk, then after a while I dragged myself the rest of the way. After the 90-second treatment I walked home pain free. From then on, I thought there might be something to this quackery. After two yeas of conservative alternative treatments my herniated disks were all healed, which the doctors said was impossible, but the MRIs confirmed it. That was 17 years ago. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 08:20, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: the most pro and con mainstream current WP:MEDRS-grade literature reviews on chiropractic therapy appear to be e.g. PMID 21248591 ("Combined chiropractic interventions slightly improved pain and disability in the short term and pain in the medium term for acute/subacute [lower back pain.]"), [31] ("A therapeutic trial of chiropractic care can be a reasonable approach to management of the pediatric patient in the absence of conclusive research evidence when clinical experience and patient/parent preferences are aligned.") and [32] ("Clinically relevant effects of [osteopathic manipulative treatment] were found for reducing pain and improving functional status in patients with acute and chronic nonspecific [lower back pain]....") Do you know of any WP:MEDRS-grade sources agreeing with your assertion that it is "almost all quackery"? EllenCT (talk) 09:36, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: Many people say Christianity is quackery, but that doesn't mean we should merge all the articles about it down to three paragraphs. Wnt (talk) 09:58, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

So chiropractic has been around for about 120 years and this is the best you can come up with as far as providing evidence that it is effective? No offense intended to Checkingfax, but individual stories shouldn't carry much, if any, weight here. Re: Wnt - I think we can deal with religion and medical treatments differently - most people these days do. Re: Elen you present 3 studies

• In the 1st study you left out "However, the effect was small and studies contributing to these results had high risk of bias. There was no difference in medium- and long-term disability." and "there is currently no evidence that supports or refutes that these interventions provide a clinically meaningful difference for pain or disability in people with LBP when compared to other interventions." I think these quotes more fairly represent the study.
• 2nd study - your quote essentially says something like 'for kids, if the parents really want to and the real doctor says it's ok - why not?'
• The 3rd study is on "Osteopathic manipulative treatment" (OMT), not chiropractic "Given the differing comparison groups in the studies of both reviews, it is not possible to directly compare the effects of OMT and chiropractic management."

It's up to the proponents of the practice of chiropractic to show that it is effective - these studies don't do it for me. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 13:23, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Well what do you think a representative WP:MEDRS grade review on the topic is? I see a whole lot concluding, "There is not sufficient evidence to recommend ... but neither is there sufficient evidence to conclude that they are not effective or efficacious," which is what you would expect from a placebo, right? How do you feel about PMID 23086004? It cites [33] quoting it as, "A 2010 review of scientific evidence on manual therapies for a range of conditions concluded that spinal manipulation/mobilization may be helpful for several conditions in addition to back pain, including migraine and cervicogenic (neck-related) headaches, neck pain, upper- and lower-extremity joint conditions, and whiplash-associated disorders. The review also identified a number of conditions for which spinal manipulation/mobilization appears not to be helpful (including asthma, hypertension, and menstrual pain) or the evidence is inconclusive (e.g., fibromyalgia, mid-back pain, premenstrual syndrome, sciatica, and temporomandibular joint disorders)." EllenCT (talk) 15:10, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Placebos are "gentle and safe" and, amazingly, work to a reliably replicable extent, involving effect sizes on the order of 0.2; see e.g. PMID 25762083 and PMID 23880289. Someone please create a WP:PLACEBO essay with advice on handling these cases. EllenCT (talk) 09:36, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

There appears to be more than one question floating around here, so I'd like us to separate them out a bit. First, there's this comment: "quackery can be notable as things may be notably wrong" - this is undoubtably true, and indeed in the spirit of WP:MEDRS and our general and laudable strictness on medical content, we should strive to identify popular bits of quackery and write about it neutrally as a service to readers. If there is a popular pseudoscientific medical term, and when I google it, all I get are 10 websites promoting it, I consider that a problem with the world that a good Wikipedia article could fix - so that at least the general public has a chance to hear the other side of the story. Second, if the promoter of some scientifically dubious treatment calls it "gentle and safe" - I suppose my view depends on the context, and editorial judgment is required. Homeopathic remedies are very much "gentle and safe" - and also useless beyond the placebo effects. I wouldn't be happy from a neutrality point of view if Oscillococcinum started out "Oscillococcinum (or Oscillo) is a gentle and safe homeopathic preparation marketed to relieve influenza-like symptoms." Nor should it say "Oscillococcinum (or Oscillo) is a homeopathic preparation marketed to gently and safely relieve influenza-like symptoms." This is no different, by the way, from my views on whether lots of products should be written about using marketing fluff language - they should not. Let me give a different example: the Chevrolet Corvette. Here's a sentence I got from their website: "With advanced technologies, a race-proven bloodline and a supercharged engine delivering 650 horsepower and 650 lb.-ft. of torque, the 2016 Corvette Z06 is a world-class supercar." As far as I am aware, that sentence is 100% factual. But it would not be the right thing for Wikipedia.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:51, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

I agree with removal of the statement "gentle and safe" which was initially included because the article was completely negative. Even though I despise the technique, NPOV suggests we should include both views if cited, my research shows the technique is "gentle and safe" because it is completely useless and has no effect on anything. I do believe it is better to remove the statement and I agree with the editors above. My main question, however, is regarding the application of WP:MEDRS as guideline for notability. My interpretation of GNG is that this is incorrect. Some editors expressed fear that allowing fringe articles could lead to promotion of the concept, which I interpret as a form of WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Any promotion should always be correctable by basic editing. This was my focus question. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 14:36, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

So - quick question, and this is an issue that I've struggled with and been able to come to no firm resolution in my own mind. I'd be interested in your views on this hypothetical. Suppose there is a pseudoscientific or quack or whatever remedy or cure which has received only uncritical mention but in decidedly nonscientific sources. Popular newspapers and magazines, let's say. And it has not (yet) gotten any attention at all from more serious sources. And yet, in the judgment of reasonable Wikipedians, it's basically nonsense. Do we (a) follow the lead of serious sources and ignore it (b) note that a Google search returns only promotional materials and therefore write something to at least say firmly that it has not been assessed by science as a service to readers (c) go even further than b and note the similarity to other things which have been studied by science and shown to be nonsense. I think my answer is (b) only because (c) runs the risk of us engaging in original research or editorialising. Some would, I think, argue for (a) but I don't really agree (under the stated stipulation that it has gotten some attention in popular newspapers and magazines).--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:19, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

I completely agree and believe that B is the best and possibly only option. I would be quoting you here, if there is a popular topic the public would be interested in reading about it, therefore our job is to provide them with neutral information regarding the subject. Many seem to disagree and have stated any topic having medical implications requires MEDRS sourcing. This greatly narrows the scope of coverage here and seems counter-intuitive to our GNG policies. This article Koren Specific Technique has been reviewed by healthcare insurance companies such as NHS Leeds and Aetna Healthcare both stating "a lack of evidence" regarding the effectiveness of KST. The AfD was closed as no consensus. The second article Gonstead technique whose AfD was closed as keep was merged against consensus due to the application of MEDRS. I then listed sources which I believed passed MEDRS such as "Journal of Physical Therapy Science" [34], a source included in the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health. However arguments suggested a source must be listed on MEDLINE otherwise the article must be delete or merged. The third article Diversified technique has been used by 95% chiropractors [35], I would not mind a merge since it is only two sentences, but going forward I fear that if expanded the article it will be deleted due to mobbing not policy. This brings me to the next issue. Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard has become an anti-fringe discussion group whose primary goal appears to be removing fringe content instead of improving sourcing. DGG responded that in some cases the goal of a merge may be to slowly remove even the most "unimpeachable sources" to delete content they dislike. I've also seen this time and time again. If anything I've learned the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 19:05, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

The point is that "gentle and safe" is a medical claim and would need MEDRS. NPOV includes WP:FALSEBALANCE—articles do not need to include promotional fluff just because the supporters would like it. Johnuniq (talk) 02:07, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Its not there anymore, do you have issues with inclusion now? Valoem ^{talk contrib} 04:54, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Saying it is "safe" is probably a medical claim. Saying it is "gentle" is not medical (what is the scientific standard of gentleness?). Saying it is gentle or safe in Wikipedia voice is however something that needs to be based on secondary sources. Saying "the manufacturer markets it as 'gentle and safe'" is a valid thing to base on a primary source, though I recall policy language somewhere about "unduly self-serving" claims. Generally it can be appropriate to say this though, especially if there is some context: "practitioner says it is 'gentle and safe', as contrasted with (another chiropractic maneuver involving sudden neck twisting) that can cause strokes." Wnt (talk) 12:53, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

NHS Leeds isn't a medical insurance company. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:25, 13 May 2016 (UTC).

EllenCT mentioned the placebo effect. I think that this points to an important problem with these topics. It's no good explaining why X does not work, if people believe that it does work and if no explanation is given for that. The scientific literature about placebo effect is then relevant, you can't just say that X does not work because it's not more effective than a placebo if using a placebo has significant benefits over doing nothing. Take e.g. Parkinson's disease where we know that placebo treatments do work well, and the more expensive the better: "Conclusion: Expensive placebo significantly improved motor function and decreased brain activation in a direction and magnitude comparable to, albeit less than, levodopa. Perceptions of cost are capable of altering the placebo response in clinical studies.". Count Iblis (talk) 20:03, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Is Wikipedia committed to amateurism?

Editors are missing the point. I will give one example for now. The sourced text using reliable sources is at Chiropractic_treatment_techniques#Koren_Specific_technique. The mass original research including the use of unreliable sources is at Koren Specific Technique. See Talk:Koren_Specific_Technique#Violation_of_consensus. Who restored the OR after it was removed per consensus or is there consensus to include OR and unreliable sources? There are a lot more problems with other articles related to chiropractic. QuackGuru (talk) 19:21, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Again, I really think we need a WP:PLACEBO essay for guidance. What other field of science than medicine has problems inherent from therapies which do work effectively but unquestionably have absolutely no reason to do so? The placebo effect is a recipe for editorial disaster in tertiary sources, and ignoring it in policy guidance doesn't help. EllenCT (talk) 20:47, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia is by its very nature is amateur. People who know less than nothing edit our medical topics every day. Very rarely are there real experts editing in their field. Unfortunately, most are pushed away and eventually shunned and banned by non-experts. Where is the oversight to correct and watch over these edits to medicinal fields. If you saw an edit that was made on a very technical article, you'd shy away from it because you don't know if it is verifiable or not, or true or not. As time and time again have proved, vandalism and untruth has a long shelf life on Wikipedia, and on technical topics it extends even longer for the above reason. Pinguinn 🐧 21:14, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

It looks like too much has been removed from that article. For example, someone removed a statement by Koren that Koren Specific Technique is "not a chiropractic technique".^[36] It doesn't matter if you're for it or against it - or at least, it shouldn't. We want to know what beliefs and definitions surround this community. Taking that kind of basic definition by the originator out is like somebody removing information about Shiite religious practices because he thinks they're wrong. We're not talking medicine here, just definition. Our readers are going to see a reference to this thing now and then, and be curious, and we get a shot to answer their curiosity. Wnt (talk) 21:20, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

• Comment This is the exact kind of elitism Wikipedia has fought to avoid. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 00:26, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Diacritics in biographical article titles

Hello Jimmy, what are your thoughts on using diacritics in the titles of biographical articles? There have been a number of bloody battles fought in recent times, such as at Talk:Ana Ivanovic and Talk:Marko Djokovic. There is currently no consistency on diacritics, as some articles have them and some do not, mainly based on local editor consensus. I honestly would prefer that we go for all diacritics, as that is what the majority of the articles use. What are your thoughts? Rovingrobert (talk) 10:34, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Why aren't redirects sufficient for resolving this? When someone decided to replace hyphens with en dashes in article titles, the ability to type article URLs on all keyboards was restored by redirects from the original hyphenated titles. EllenCT (talk) 10:50, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: But that's the thing. There hasn't been one big swooping change. According to one estimate, there are about 300,000 biographical articles which have diacritics in their titles, and a couple of glaring exceptions which continue to generate lengthy debates. Rovingrobert (talk) 13:03, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

@Rovingrobert: have you tried asking for accessibly named redirects on WP:BOTREQ? EllenCT (talk) 13:10, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: Honestly, I think those articles have been moved so many times that a lot of them have a diacritically equivalent redirect. But I would prefer if the official titles followed some kind of convention that was the same across the board. Rovingrobert (talk) 13:27, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

@Rovingrobert: then please do ask there, they will probably agree. Only one way to find out. EllenCT (talk) 13:32, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: Thank you for the tip, but I'm really not sure what you mean. I'm not very experienced at Wikipedian matters. Could you please elaborate? Rovingrobert (talk) 02:47, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

@Rovingrobert: I asked for you at WP:BOTREQ#Diacritics in article titles: mass creation of redirects from unadorned ASCII? Please keep an eye on it, and I will too. EllenCT (talk) 13:18, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: Thank you! I didn't get what you meant at first, but the proposal sounds great. Looks like there is already some support. I haven't bothered to read any replies to this thread below Jimmy's. I take it those people don't agree with me? Rovingrobert (talk) 01:50, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

@Rovingrobert: it turns out there is a WP:TSC policy ("Sometimes the most appropriate title contains diacritics (accent marks), dashes, or other letters and characters not found on most English-language keyboards. This can make it difficult to navigate to the article directly. In such cases, provide redirects from versions of the title that use only standard keyboard characters.") So if any of them actually don't agree with you, you have every right to issue an endless series of sternly worded rebuttals until they see the error of their ways. Nothing can stop the proposed bot now, except the extent to which my immediately previous bot request for the most popular low quality articles soaks up the excess bot author attention. EllenCT (talk) 04:39, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

It's a hard topic. I think the best solution is generally WP:COMMONNAME, but of course how different people are known in English isn't always consistent even in apparently similar cases, so following what the rest of the world does means that we are inherently going to be inconsistent, which I acknowledge is annoying. Mostly I think people should relax and try not to get too wound up about it.

I'm personally more concerned about cases where we insist on writing things with the native spelling when the results are going to be clearly misleading to most readers. Diacritics aren't usually all that confusing.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:55, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. I would agree with your sentiments. In my opinion, diacritics can be helpful for purposes of pronunciation. I'm currently reading The Outsider by Albert Camus, and the original diacritics seem to have been retained in the English translation. I feel that it reminds you you're not pronouncing this in a normal English way. Rovingrobert (talk) 13:03, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Diacritics are a specific case of applying general transliteration rules (and some of them are set in government laws). The world seems to respect the right of individuals to ignore those rules. Hence we have Genndy Tartakovsky, Yasuhiro Nightow, Toshihide Maskawa, Kohmei Halada (Japan does not have "s" and "la", and nobody transliterates "nai" as "nigh" there), and many other abnormalities, because those individuals chose to ignore the transliteration rules. Materialscientist (talk) 03:42, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

That's a nice sentiment, Jimbo, but it doesn't reflect what happens in practice here. Talk:Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson is a good example, which will end as "not moved". Jenks24 (talk) 17:40, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Well, actually, that's a good example of what I've said I'm "more concerned about". "þ" is not a letter in English, and it isn't just a matter of a small diacritic which English may or may not contain and which are perhaps likely to just serve as warnings to English readers that the pronunciation will be different from what you might guess. It's a symbol that for most people has no meaning. We may as well have an article titled 邓小平.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:11, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

That's kind of a funny case, since the "thorn" (þ) letter actually was a part of English writing. In any case, the proposed solution - moving Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson to a version with "th" but retaining all the other diacritics - seems like an unholy hybrid. If you're going to say the original is not in a Latin alphabet, shouldn't you Latinize it completely to something like "Hafthor Julius Bjornsson"?

Something like this argues for case-by-case analysis, but there is one case in which I kind of wish Wikipedia would just enact a standard policy on its own, sources be damned, and let the rest of the world follow. That is with Arabic. We have a ridiculous situation where even now the media can't totally agree if it's Osama or Usama, Hussein or Husayn or Hossein, Muhammad or Mohammed. Every name, every town, every concept in Arabic is a total crapshoot, and if you want to look up two or three or four such words at once, you better write down a table and start putting in permutations like you were trying to pick a combination lock. Wikipedia's built-in search doesn't seem to give very good suggestions. Couldn't we call in some experts, put out a press release, come up with a policy - any policy, as long as it can be consistent - and set a precedent that if you have the spelling in Arabic, you have one and only one preferred spelling in English? Wnt (talk) 18:09, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

I strongly agree in principle, but if it were feasible to standardize Latin graphemes from Arabic, someone would almost certainly have done it. US intelligence agencies, who have a strong interest in doing the same thing, are just as divergent in their Latinized Arabic spellings as everyone else. EllenCT (talk) 20:57, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Hmmm, I doubt it. Intelligence agencies are all about input, not so much about output. Actually, for all I know the CIA World Factbook may have a standard policy. But it's not their job description to help everybody in the world know as much as they do. Wnt (talk) 21:24, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

The great thing about standards is that there are so many of them: Romanization of Arabic#Comparison table. You are saying we should pick one, ideally for reasons but at random if there aren't any good reasons to prefer any over the others, and then move all the nonconforming articles to that one? This sounds like a WP:VPR discussion. Please see also Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive I#Policy on use of Arabic and its transliteration. EllenCT (talk) 04:31, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt: those alternatives may be associated with locales. EllenCT (talk) 12:15, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

• Comment at one point in the past I created all the "Unadorned" redirects. I am quite willing to do so again. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:32, 13 May 2016 (UTC).
  

I'm not going to get you in trouble so I want you to do the lowest quality popular article list, instead, please? If you would get that into WP:BACKLOG then I will figure out how to ask permission about the unadorned redirects. The problem may be that it's difficult to tell when creating impolite ambiguities. EllenCT (talk) 18:38, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikimedia should support Sci-Hub

Sci-Hub has all but destroyed the academic paywall that kept most people from accessing the scientific literature directly. However, Elsevier has launched a vicious counterattack, the founder of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan is in hiding in Russia to prevent being extradited to the US. Now Wikimedia's mission is all about making knowledge available to the World's population, so I think Wikimedia has a role to play in this effort to get rid of the paywalls that are not protecting the right of authors. The academic institutions pay for the scientists they employ, they pay publication costs, they pay for the subscription for the journals they have in their libraries, and the scientists do free of charge refereeing work for the journals. As Elbakyan has pointed out, this is all ultimately paid for by the public via taxes, and it's they who are the most restricted from accessing scientific work.

One can debate whether one should just violate copyright wholesale, perhaps a more reasonable approach would be to make all published scientific articles freely available, say, two years after publication. But it should not be up to Elsevier to block any such moves. Just make the not very recent scientific literature freely available and then let Elsevier make a case against that in court if they think that this is unreasonable. It's not a simple matter of copyright law as there are UN conventions that guarantee public access to scientific knowledge. Count Iblis (talk) 18:36, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

This isn't something the WMF should plunge into without extensive consultation with the community, but I'd think that most Wikipedia editors woul agree that "something should be done' to make academic research freely available to the public. The problem, of course, is that if the WMF made a grave mis-step, they (we!) could get sued out of existence.

Why not get a few ideas and alternatives going here?

I'll suggest first that @Count Iblis: give a general outline of what he'd have the WMF and the community do. I'll even make an off-the-top of my head proposition.

The recent NY Times article, "Should All Research Papers Be Free?" gives a good overview of the issues. They mention "pre-print repositories" that are online. Why couldn't the WMF host a very big simple pre-print repository? Simple as in, "Any faculty member of the following 5,000 universities can upload any research paper that they claim copyright to. We'll assume good faith on this, just like we do for most contributions to Wikipedia." So how many papers per year would that be (estimates please)? Could we afford it? Would it help solve the problem? (My guess is that it could break quite a few logjams, but not be a complete solution.) Well, it's one idea - do people have better ones? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:47, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Preprints aren't particularly controversial, and I think that academics (or others...) can upload preprints to Commons now if they want. And of course Arxiv does that. What we can do now -- as editors in the community, not WMF -- is to agree that Wikipedia user-generated policy about things like "WP:ELNEVER" applies to piracy sites, not sites that facilitate interlibrary loan, provided by individuals who have access to interested researchers. We can also adjust templates to work easily with Sci-Hub. Wnt (talk) 20:24, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Arxiv includes preprints only when they have the right to do so; for this reason, some Arxiv indexing does not include the actual preprint. That all authors ought to have the right to upload preprints is another matter, one that most of us would very strongly support. It's not actual law at this point, very unfortunately. DGG ( talk ) 04:10, 12 May 2016 (UTC) .

Yes, what matters is if we can read the contents of the papers, whether that's in preprint form of in the form of published journal articles. When I first published an article with Elsevier a long time ago, I was puzzled why their website refers to the submitted files as "artwork", as it's just a few plain text files containing the LaTeX source files and some postscript figures. But, of course, this has to do with Elsevier treating their articles as extremely expensive works of art. Count Iblis (talk) 20:10, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

To say this is all ultimately paid for by the public via taxes is rather misrepresentative as funding and budgets at universities can be rather complex with a significant portion actually coming from privately paid tution. Nyth63 20:27, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

Private tuition payers don't get special access to the publishers' products they subsidize, and they share the public taxpayers' interest in having open access. EllenCT (talk) 20:53, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

I feel like this is a diversion. As far as I know, Sci-Hub allows people who have access at a library to share documents with interested researchers. There is no official law that says that a person has to be a member of an exclusive university library to request an interlibrary loan, or that reading a Wikipedia article is not academic research. We should stand up for ourselves! Our readers have as much right to request an ILL as anyone, and Sci-Hub offers an effective way for them to do so. If individual editors provide links to Sci-Hub inside their cite templates that make it marginally easier for readers to make these requests (it's already pretty easy), what is Elsevier going to do about it? If researchers believed everything publishers claim about copyright, they would have been afraid to photocopy Nature articles at the university library because of all those stupid "yours to have and to hold but not to copy" ads that publisher has run over the years. But nobody believes them. The law makes an exception for people passing papers back and forth for research (not preprints, but genuinely copyrighted pages copied straight out the bound journals), because if it didn't, it would be vulnerable to the freedom of expression challenges it deserves. Where the U.S. is concerned, recall that even though copyrights were permitted in the constitution, so was slavery! Just as an amendment abolished slavery, the First Amendment should, in the hands of honest judges, not permit any copyright claim (at least) that interferes with the free interchange of ideas. Wnt (talk) 21:08, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm guessing that any effort to effectively abolish copyright for academic articles on Wikipedia is going to be met with a lot of opposition. If you have a more detailed proposal, please make it, and I will not stand in the way. But I'm sure others will, e.g. the WMF lawyers might be very conservative about this, and tons of editors believe in the idea of copyright as well.

If you want to link to a site that describes itself as a "pirate", then the above probably applies. But you don't need to actually link - perhaps a pure text "available on Sci-Hub" would work almost as well.

A pre-print repository might be the best way, especially for areas arXiv doesn't cover, e.g. sociology, anthropology and other "soft sciences", not to mention history, law, art and music theory, etc. I'd be leary of medicine however. If authors do not want to post on a repository, then there's not much we can do about it - so perhaps the best thing would be to contact researchers in the above fields and see what they want. If it's not a strict copyright problem, but simply Elsevier interprets copyright one way, but some researchers interpret it another way, then there is some room for action. Elsevier might think two or three times before filing DMCA notices against 100's or 1,000's of researchers. There might also be room for action to post articles mandated for free access by the US Federal gov't, where taxpayers paid for the research. Are there sites available to actually post these on, or are the rules too new or ineffective?

In any case, a practical proposal will be better than "let's just throw out copyrights on all academic work." Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:53, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

A lot of people online believe the status quo is what you say it is... but go in a library, and it's not so. You can get copies of articles delivered to you. You can go in and "borrow" music CDs and movies. And when we look up news items for our articles, think of how common it is to find the text shared on forums by other people citing their Fair Use rights. You can tell me that all these things are wrong, terribly wrong, but it looks to me like copyright never was permitted to ban as much as you imagine. Wnt (talk) 02:17, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

I think most people believe in copyright as a principle. There are issues where society ("we the taxpayer" or "we the funders of charities and institutions") are paying for the research to be done, yet do not have access to the results. There are also issues of public safety when, for example, pharma research is not published at all.

Some of these issues are being addressed. For example certain foundations and grant making bodies stipulate that results must be published with an open license. Certainly the Foundation could work with the Open Knowledge movement to find ways to bring more technical, academic, peer-reviewed and scholarly work into the light of day.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:40, 13 May 2016 (UTC).

Under no circumstances should Wikipedia or the WMV or any organization relating thereto, support any website which specifically states:

We advocate for cancellation of intellectual property, or copyright laws, for scientific and educational resources

Such a site is clearly quite beyond the pale for Wikipedia which has strong policies governing illegal use of copyright material. Collect (talk) 14:05, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

@Collect: That reminds me of the smears I heard for so many decades that advocating pot legalization was the same as advocating illegal pot use. If Sci-Hub advocates the repeal of those laws, it does not follow that its claim of Fair Use is invalid. To the contrary, the continued success of the organization suggests that what it does is within the laws of the countries in which it is based. Which is the same as Wikipedia - we know that our interpretation of Fair Use, for example, is not embraced by every country, but are content that it be legal within the U.S. Presumably, the operators of Sci-Hub wish to spread the light of free speech they found shining in Kazakhstan and Russia to other countries that do not embrace that standard, just as Americans will eagerly advocate the repeal of laws in those countries that violate the provisions of freedom of expression that we are familiar with.

Additionally, it is not really the WMF or Wikipedia administrators who can take the lead here; it is the users who can make better use of Sci-Hub references, whether in researching articles or providing citations. Wnt (talk) 22:13, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Congrats on the single worst explanation of why we should destroy the concept of intellectual property known to man.

Comparing it to "pot legalization" is beyond any possible snarky reply - it indicates a total failure to understand the reason why copyright and intellectual property laws exist.

And to state that following the international intellectual property laws subscribed to by about 170 nations is something which belongs only to dictatorial states is "vraiment incroyable." "Ganz unglaublich." "信じられません." And " anghredadwy".

There is no basis whatsoever to have Wikipedia be a party to violation of international law on the scale you deem necessary because otherwise it would be like opposing pot??? Collect (talk) 23:59, 14 May 2016 (UTC) (20:41, 14 May 2016‎ Collect)

@Collect: Yet Kazakhstan and Russia are on the list, and apparently do not find Sci-Hub to be objectionable. Are they less qualified to interpret this treaty and whatever its provisions are for interlibrary loan and collaborative academic research? Also my point about pot is that people tried to treat not only the substance, but political opposition to their law as if it were a crime - as you seemed to be doing. But this law is wrong - not only in those countries that oppose Sci-Hub, but in all 170 who give copyright any credence whatsoever. The sooner we recognize that it cannot and should not be enforced, the larger the number of writers who can stay in their occupation during the transition to a more rational funding mechanism. Wnt (talk) 23:24, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

We all now that you' feel authors should write for free, and companies should develop new products for free and new drugs for free, and that it is wrong to allow patents and copyrights to even exist.

I would like to suggest that without copyright, no one in his right mind would produce a book, or a movie, or a new technology.

And I suggest your desire to impute any ill motives to me is untenable, indeed. Collect (talk) 23:59, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

@Collect: I did not mean to suggest that all the scientists who publish in academic journals work "for free", exactly. After all, some of them have to pay page charges!

We weren't talking about inventing new drugs either, though actually, researchers who come up with new drugs are generally working in academia and rarely see a penny for those either. Then the sort of medical racketeers who turn a $7 vial of snake antivenin into a $14,000 bill for hospital patients go out and file their FDA applications and legal papers (it's what they do) and make all the money. Sometimes they even get lucky lobbying and can do it to an old drug, like colchicine. Oh, how could I dare blaspheme and suggest that society could do without its racketeers, the predators with their just-so ways of thinking and acting who tell us that anything that allows us to do things without giving everything we have to them is unethical! But I didn't, we were talking about stopping copyright, which is a big enough topic.

I would like to suggest that there is a way to pay an author that does not require limiting the distribution of his book. I ended up suggesting a specific mechanism, via a fixed income surtax to be directed by consumer choice to independent funding organizations, on this forum five different times - here is one - and on consideration I'd think you'd remember the argument since you were actually in it in two of those five times. I don't see any speculation on your motives above or in those conversations, however, because they are a mystery to me. The entire field of journalism is collapsing, and creative professionals of all types are feeling the pinch, and there are countless people who "just don't make it" so that a few make too much for things with no special merit above the others based on marketing, and you continue to rant on in bold face about how you need this broken mechanism to survive. You don't. You need a mechanism that works, one that respects the fundamental human rights of man and allows unlimited scholarship and unlimited medicine and does not try to peer into every private conversation looking for "pirates" and which actually pays the creative people and not the middlemen. Wnt (talk) 10:33, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

How in heck does copyright get conflated with abuse of monopoly in the drug industry? I would point out that abrogating the rule of law by ignoring copyright law is quite a bit more likely to cause a collapse of the field of journalism.

Your stated position is clearly: Where the U.S. is concerned, recall that even though copyrights were permitted in the constitution, so was slavery! Just as an amendment abolished slavery, the First Amendment should, in the hands of honest judges, not permit any copyright claim (at least) that interferes with the free interchange of ideas.

And I demur that those who hold copyright on (say) Harry Potter are racketeers and more than Elsevier is a racketeer. And violation of intellectual property laws is not a fundamental human right either. Collect (talk) 14:03, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

You're the one who dragged patents into this; but both create monopolies whose extent is entirely dependent on case-to-case interpretation by the courts.

I used "racketeer" in regard to the medical situation because there the choice is clear: either people pay the holders of patents or other market exclusivity whatever they are asked, or they suffer and die. Being denied the next episode of Harry Potter is not really comparable to being denied effective treatment for hepatitis C, for example. Nonetheless, one can look at a long and lugubrious set of legal games in which everything was attacked from the right of Rowling to have an imaginary band in her imaginary world called the "Weird Sisters" to the right of unknown persons who legally bought a Harry Potter book to read it, let alone say what they read. If racketeering is not quite the right term for that, it is not far away. It should be clear that setting a precedent for an injunction against unknown persons to read a book its subsequent retooling for banning unknown persons from staging an animal-rights protest are not so far different. In general, copyright enforcement means banning people from communicating in private without the government watching, banning them from reading without the government knowing what it is, banning them from writing without having their output checked and any resemblance (coincidental or otherwise) to existing work punished. It is contrary to the basic right of free expression and it must be abolished. Wnt (talk) 18:13, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage

by Richard M. Stallman

"It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—plus a dozen other laws into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely."

"According to Professor Mark Lemley, now of the Stanford Law School, the widespread use of the term “intellectual property” is a fashion that followed the 1967 founding of the World 'Intellectual Property' Organization (WIPO), and only became really common in recent years. (WIPO is formally a UN organization, but in fact represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents, and trademarks.) Wide use dates from around 1990."

"The term carries a bias that is not hard to see: it suggests thinking about copyright, patents and trademarks by analogy with property rights for physical objects. (This analogy is at odds with the legal philosophies of copyright law, of patent law, and of trademark law, but only specialists know that.) These laws are in fact not much like physical property law, but use of this term leads legislators to change them to be more so. Since that is the change desired by the companies that exercise copyright, patent and trademark powers, the bias introduced by the term “intellectual property” suits them."

"The bias is reason enough to reject the term..."

Source: [ https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html ]

--Guy Macon (talk) 14:59, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Also see: [ https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/the-term ]. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:03, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

And editorial opinions and commentary do not veto the law, last I looked. All that is reasonable is that Wikipedia, in accord with stated positions of the WMF, follow the law. The WMF does not have a veto over the law. WIPO defines: "Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce."

WIPO does not appear to have been created by companies with a goal of distorting meanings, nor is the apparent conspiracy theory that this was a deliberate act (The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it.) worthy of consideration here.

Stallman's proposals (10 year copyright expiration) would have meant that (for example) J. K. Rowling would have gotten nothing from the Harry Potter series after 2007 when the first book would have come out of copyright, and anyone could write new Harry Potter books without any violation of her copyright. Movie studios would have had to pay zero for the film versions. This might sound wonderful to people who do not understand that royalties are how authors live.

Perhaps that law might someday come to pass, but until then, Wikipedia has to live in the current world. Collect (talk) 16:22, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

No law forces you to toss copyright, patents, trademarks, etc. into one pot and call it "intellectual property". You can, if you choose, call copyright copyright, etc. WIPO can administer international treaties, but it cannot unilaterally redefine common English words such as "Property", "Theft". etc. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 ] --Guy Macon (talk) 17:11, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

It appears it pretty much has done so. It is not uncommon for those in power to redefine or replace words and ideas. (For example, as "bank fraud" suggests a tiresome obligation of banks to actually figure out who they lend money to, they replaced the term with "identity theft", implying that whoever had their name, birthday, and ubiquitous government ID number written on a form by a con man two continents away is responsible for the money. And to an increasing extent the banks get their victims to believe this in some visceral way.)

Nonetheless, "property" has been abused in worse ways before. I should note that in abolitionist debates, the pro-slavery side inevitably described any government prohibition or regulation of the "peculiar institution" as an unconstitutional seizure of their property, and derided their opponents as "nigger-stealers".^[37] They literally believed that a human being is property, which is of course in all ways the most abhorrent abuse of the term, yet nonetheless not that fundamentally different conceptually from believing that the mind of a human being is property, such as his right to sing a song he heard or carry out a particular sequence of chemical reactions he read. Wnt (talk) 18:28, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

• blah blah blah. WP:RGW not to mention WP:ELNEVER. BWOT. Jytdog (talk) 18:11, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

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* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:33, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Replacing Jimbo's jaguar pic with El_Jefe_(jaguar)

El-jefe-jaguar-fws1

How about we replace the jaguar pic on Jumbo's talk page with a pic of El_Jefe_(jaguar), the only jaguar in the United States who is endangered by a proposed mine here in Arizona? I have searched for a better pic of El Jefe but they are all copyrighted by Arizona Game and Fish Department. Raquel Baranow (talk) 18:11, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

List of multilingual websites

I have produced the article "List of multilingual websites", from selected entries in Category:Multilingual websites. I have used ISO-639 language codes for two reasons: (1) to save space in the display window and in the edit window, and (2) to encourage myself and others to learn the language codes.
Editors who translate articles between different versions of Wikipedia can use some of these websites for references. I am relying on the Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost to keep me up to date about additions to and removals from Wikimedia projects. Also, I can refer to Wikimedia wikis, but some of the data appear to be inconsistent.
Someone may wish to produce an article about Voxeurop, the successor of Presseurop.
—Wavelength (talk) 02:27, 17 May 2016 (UTC) and 19:32, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

For all your hard work making this encyclopedia, A kitten is the least I can do.

Marksomnian (talk) 18:33, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

...and there's me thinking that we, the community, make this encyclopedia! Cassianto^Talk 14:51, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Although I appreciate the sentiment, I am only offering cat emoji until such time as Jimbo burns Ayn Rand and Art Okun in effigy at Davos. 🐱 EllenCT (talk) 04:44, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Given that I had to google to find out who Art Okun is (and the Wikipedia entry is so brief that I don't know much even now), I'm unlikely to feel moved to launch a big public protest against him.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:33, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

Okun was among the first people to use computer-based linear regression on year-over-year data, when longer term causation is involved, which yielded false results that are still being used to support supply side trickle-down austerity abominations in policy. You can see echoes of his mistake and the damage it does to society, on this, the first Google hit for a search on [efficiency equality]. There have been and still are many editors who would like to make Wikipedia look just like that article by Tejvan Pettinger. Many of them are here because of your pre-Wikipedia association with objectivism, and many of them think they deserve special dispensation to hold your 1990s opinions above the conclusions of the unanimity of the peer reviewed literature reviews which reach a conclusion on the question. That you found one literature review which did not reach a conclusion in an attempt to discredit the vast majority which do has convinced me that time spent trying to convince you to help with this situation is far more likely to improve the encyclopedia than time spent arguing with the tag team in support of your 1990s opinions who stalk my edits. It's just like everyone wants to get rid of homeopathy and you find one literature review which says it can't be proven ineffective. Why do you even have a "clearly stated intention of not talking about economics," especially under these conditions? I have great respect for you, but not your bury-head-in-the-sand approach to these problems.

Mainstream literature reviews point out that, e.g., "structural change is shaped by the interaction of differential technological developments on the supply side with demand-side factors ... technological progress drives structural change, but it is frequently the demand side that is crucial for determining which industries grow faster than others and which shrink, and it therefore shapes the direction of structural change" (emphasis added.)

What are the trickle-down echoes of Rand and Okun's mistakes doing to demand? EllenCT (talk) 16:26, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm really sorry that I asked you, because I know that I wasted your time. As I've said clearly in the past, I'm not interested in this topic. Please if this comes up again, don't spend a lot of time gathering links for me on this or any related topics. I just don't have the time nor inclination to read any of it. You seem to be extraordinarily mistaken about my 1990s opinions, by the way.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:48, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

I've already posted the game-theoretic models of cooperation showing the proportion of people who choose to edit is a related topic. Why aren't you interested? EllenCT (talk) 01:47, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Nobody has to justify not being interested in what you have to say. It is up to you to find what interests them and to write interesting things. Also, if someone has looked at your past writing and concluded "you seem to be extraordinarily mistaken about my 1990s opinions, by the way", you have already lost your intended audience. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:46, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Nobody has to justify anything. That Jimbo refuses to meaningfully engage on this subject is a longstanding source of disappointment for me, is clearly harmful to the quality of the articles involved, and makes the project look disreputable in the same way that lack of guidance on placebos makes fringe medicine topics such a minefield. If Jimbo thinks I am mistaken about his opinions, his unwillingness to indicate which of them or in what ways reflects on his ability or willingness to address the central point of the discussion. Am I wrong to ask why he is unwilling to engage on these subjects? If someone has cast doubt on the legitimacy of my questions or the facts behind them, please bring that to my attention. Until then I remain convinced that, as our conflict resolution guidance clearly states, direct engagement with Jimbo on the subject is necessary. EllenCT (talk) 21:06, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Just an observation, EllenCT but you post here a lot, you have almost 500 edits to this page. If I were you, I'd take the hint that Wales does not want to "meaningfully engage on this subject" and I'd find a more fruitful way to contribute to the project. Otherwise, I would guess your continued attempts at direct engagement will only lead to more disappointment and frustration for you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:14, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I have asked for specific suggestions for how to go about doing so below. I note that few people complain when I engage here on other topics. EllenCT (talk) 22:25, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Is it "extraordinarily mistaken" to believe that your 1990s opinions are not far from, for example, your 2003 agreement with the statement that, "a market monopoly -- a single provider resulting from the exercise of legitimate property rights -- *not* a coercive monopoly."?[38] Whether de facto finance sector cartels explain the declining participation of individuals in economic recoveries over time, it's still consistent with the sort of disruptive editing I have to deal with whenever I try to uphold our reliable source criteria against those who cite your opposition to the mainstream position on the relationship between inequality and efficiency.

On the other hand, we certainly agree on your clear anti-cartel stance in your 1997 statement that, "The Mafia-style extortionist says 'Raise your prices by 40% and pay [me] half of your additional profits, or I will hurt you and your children. I am going to cartelize this industry (trucking, the garment district in New York, construction) and we are all going to make a lot of money together....' This is exactly the same thing the government does in, for example, the Medical industry...."

My problem here is that I am simply not skilled enough or patient enough to persuade economics topics editors that second stance is a legitimate issue concerning the proper incidence of public sector taxes and transfers when a government engages in its legitimate defense function against the natural rise of de facto cartels in the secondary economy and tertiary education costs. Am I wrong to try to discuss these issues? What are the alternatives? Asking for sanctions against editors who reject the reliable source criteria? I know that doesn't work, from ANI to Arbcom, admins don't care about policy compliance with the reliable source criteria when advocacy POV-pushers cry "content dispute." Asking for additional input with RFCs? My tag team complains about my use of RFCs but not on any rational basis and they still show up all the time to pile on with objections they can't defend. Someone give me one good reason that I shouldn't be trying to engage with Jimbo on these issues, other than that he doesn't want to. Personality cults have consequences. EllenCT (talk) 22:21, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I send you a kitten and this happens? This is why we can't have nice things. Sincerely, Marksomnian. (talk) 14:33, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

A fine example of WP:COATRACK. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:46, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Yeah. I don't mind it much, but I do wish that I could make it clear that I'm not really interested in economics these days.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:33, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Different strokes for different folks. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 13:34, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

The frozen front line of the science wars runs right through economics. Count Iblis (talk) 21:36, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

People are winning. EllenCT (talk) 22:07, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Is Wikipedia shrinking?!

Few years ago I was reading in Wiki an article about USA history describing anti-interracial marriage laws in USA against Asians, Native Americans etc, it has a map showing difference between different states and so on. But now I could find only Jim Crow laws, an nothing else, no mention of Asians, Native Americans etc. As I guess the article that I was reading was deleted by ashamed racists, or by other kinds of deleters. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.218.23.54 (talk) 06:16, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

It's hard to answer this without more specific information. Maybe the article was merged or deleted. Also, article content changes over time, and some articles are considerably different from how they looked five years ago. It's unlikely to have been because of a racist agenda.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 06:25, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

We have Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. Ghmyrtle (talk) 08:59, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

I also wondered whether this had been mentioned in response to Loving v. Virginia, which is the subject of a new film, Loving (2016 film) which has just been released.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 09:14, 18 May 2016 (UTC)