Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 12:30, 25 September 2012

RFC/discussion of article National Union of General Workers

A request for comments has been filed about the use of anonymous sources in reliable publications. The RFC can be found by the article's name in this list, and the actual discussion can be found on Talk:National_Union_of_General_Workers#Request_for_Comment_-_Use_of_anonymous_sources_in_reliable_publications in case you wish to participate. Thank you for your contributions. Sparkzilla 06:59, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

April 2010

Welcome to Misplaced Pages. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to the encyclopedia, one or more of the external links you added to the page HTML do not comply with our guidelines for external links and have been removed. Misplaced Pages is not a collection of links; nor should it be used as a platform for advertising or promotion, and doing so is contrary to the goals of this project. Because Misplaced Pages uses nofollow tags, external links do not alter search engine rankings. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page before reinserting it. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Adrian J. Hunter 04:10, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Doesn't look so bad on review. Adrian J. Hunter 13:56, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hello, LittleBenW, and welcome to Misplaced Pages! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like this place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• Introduction
• The five pillars of Misplaced Pages
• How to edit a page
• Help
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. If you need help, check out Misplaced Pages:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there.  Again, welcome!

Adrian J. Hunter 04:25, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Tokyo Electron and Horiba

Thank you for your contribution to the Horiba article. Keep up the good work!

As for Tokyo Electron, I downloaded two images, the company logo and the corporate slogan, from the official site and converted them to SVG with Inkscape. Can we upload them to Wikimedia Commons? I'm worried about copyright issues because both of them are TEL's trademarks.

I think that TEL's Annual Report 2009 is a good source of information on the company.

Regards,

--Shinkansen Fan (talk) 08:17, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

> As for Tokyo Electron, I downloaded two images, the company logo and the corporate slogan,

> from the official site and converted them to SVG with Inkscape. Can we upload them to Wikimedia Commons?

> I'm worried about copyright issues because both of them are TEL's trademarks.

Sorry I'm not an expert on such issues. I recommend that you as about this somewhere like User talk:QwerpQwertus

Re: HTML e-mail link deletion

Sorry LittleBenW but that was a long time ago and I can't remember my reason for removing the link. Looking at the site again I can't see any obvious problem (has the site changed since then?)... It has more advertising than most good external links but looks permissible per WP:ELYES point 3 or WP:ELMAYBE point 4. If I made a bad call then I apologise, and I don't object to you re-introducing the link. You might consider removing some of the dated links, being sure to state why in the edit summary and not marking the edit as minor. Adrian J. Hunter 13:56, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Re: Misplaced Pages 10th Anniversary

There was a Japanese Misplaced Pages 10th Anniversary get-together in Kyoto!? Damn. Wish I'd known. Organizing a similar event in Tokyo would be a great idea, and I'd consider making the trek up there to attend it. I'll be in Tokyo on the 11th of February if you care to discuss things in person. Shoot me an email via my talk page if you're interested. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BrianAdler (talk • contribs) 15:34, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree. Please contact me at bryan@mackinnon.org Bryan MacKinnon (talk) 12:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

Monty₈₄₅ 16:12, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

An invitation...

Hi. I invite you to join the Outline Wikiproject. Your enthusiasm and initiative are greatly needed there. The Transhumanist 19:31, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Outline traffic

LittleBen,

Thank you for your interest in improving outline availability.

The search engine blindness issue will probably have to be dealt with at the search engine level (bugzilla, etc.).

In the meantime, there is a lot we can do to improve access to outlines.

First and foremost is to finish their initial development phase by cleaning them up.

1. Reformat the lead sections of the regional (country, state) outlines (the leads in the non-country outlines have already been reformatted). Country outline lead paragraphs need to be trimmed or condensed down to a single paragraph of one or two sentences.
2. Remove redlinks that are unlikely to turn blue.
3. Place the links from "general concepts" into the rest of the outline, and remove the general concepts section. (It's a temporary holding bin).
4. Place the links from "lists" into the rest of the outline and remove the lists section. (It's a temporary holding bin).

When the quality rises, repeat visits and word-of-mouth communication about the outlines will increase. Speaking of quality, the main enhancement lacking in most of the outlines is annotations. For outlines with annotations, see Outline of chess, Outline of forestry, Outline of cell biology, Outline of basketball, and Outline of tennis.

Another thing we can do is place links to the outlines wherever they are relevant. There are plenty of places to put links to outlines:

1. See also sections of the corresponding subject articles
2. See also sections of the articles corresponding to outline subheadings (section links)
3. Navigation footers, which can in turn be placed where they are relevant
4. Infoboxes
5. Series boxes
6. {{Main}} links

The placement in Misplaced Pages's search engine's results varies. For geography, Outline of geography comes in second (right after "Geography"). For the United States, Outline of the United States is not in the first couple of thousand results.

For another example, take a look at Special:WhatLinksHere/Outline_of_chess.

There are still a few hundred chess articles that don't yet have the {{chess}} navigation footer.

But, the same day links were placed leading to the outline of chess, its traffic increased significantly, and it has remained at an increased level ever since.

Now in Google title searches of Misplaced Pages, it shows up 122nd. In a normal site-specific Google search of Misplaced Pages, it shows up 130th. It didn't used to show up at all.

Let's see what more we can do to improve its rank. Then the same methods can be used on the rest of the outlines. The Transhumanist 19:31, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

P.S.: I hope you join the Outline WikiProject.

Preview button

Hi!

• I noticed your work on Cascading style sheets required a great number of edits.

Are you aware that you can see a preview of the work you're doing (to check everything looks good, and check spellings and punctuation etc.) before submitting the work as a finished draft?

Just to the right of the Save page button, you'll see the Show preview button. By using this to check our work before saving the page, we can save a lot of space on the Wikimedia database servers, and other editors a lot of bother trying to keep track of the page history. Please try to get into the habit of using it.

• Also, it's good practice to always leave a short comment about what work we did in the edit summary (the text entry field just above the Save page and Show preview buttons.)

This helps other editors tell at a glance what you have done. Sometimes, without an edit summary, your work may be considered thoughtless, and be undone.

Whatever you choose, happy editing!  fredgandt 19:05, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

June 2012

Thank you for your contributions. Please remember to mark your edits as "minor" only if they truly are minor edits. In accordance with Help:Minor edit, a minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. Minor edits consist of things such as typographical corrections, formatting changes, or rearrangement of text without modification of content. Additionally, the reversion of clear-cut vandalism and test edits may be labeled "minor". Thank you. SudoGhost 22:29, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Does anybody care?

Hi, Ben. This is in response to a post you left on the article titles talk page.

Lack of an edit summary can be a good reason for reverting an edit. As you say, "the spirit of Misplaced Pages is to cooperate and communicate with other editors" and I hope you can see how someone might view an unexplained edit as uncooperative and uncommunicative and delete it rather than attempt to start a conversation first. At least they gave a explanation (inadequate perhaps) for their deletion. Perhaps you can also understand that complaining to a general audience about specific poor treatment does little to improve cooperation and communication. I suggest you start a calm and polite conversation wherever the edits were made and see if you can come to an agreement about the issue. You also might review guidance on the BRD process. Jojalozzo 16:36, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the BRD link. Most new editors don't know about watchlists. When a new editor finds that somebody has been following them around and reverting all their work without saying a word, he or she will — in many cases — conclude that any attempt to contribute to Misplaced Pages is wasted time. Even for editors who have been around for five years, repeated reverting — by people who admit that they don't understand the content but are reverting solely because there was no edit summary or discussion that they could understand — is very disconcerting. A Dilbert-office environment where you have to devote a large part of your time to watching your back is not a welcoming or productive environment. Vindictive, obstructive people who keep hit lists and who brag that their opinion will never be changed — that they can argue the legs off a table — are surely not an asset to Misplaced Pages, regardless of their English grammar skills. The survival of Misplaced Pages surely depends on maintaining a welcoming and civil environment, free from hit squads. LittleBen (talk) 17:46, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

I find this a bit indirect and obtuse, I think you're attempting to say something specific is happening but instead presenting it as a general problem. Are you describing your own or someone else's experience, something you've heard about, seen happen or experienced first hand? As I understand it, you haven't been editing Misplaced Pages for long. If you've made enemies already, I suggest you consider your own approach to the project as well as that of others. That said, harassment as you describe is unacceptable whether you mis-stepped or not and there are procedures for dealing with it that will be much more effective and constructive than bringing it up on a policy talk page. Jojalozzo 20:24, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

I've been around for a couple of months more than you, it seems, but almost certainly your contributions are more awesome.

The reason for my Does anybody care? rant was:

On 28 June, I added links from Misplaced Pages:Manual_of_Style#Foreign_terms to Regional MOS guides, but my self-evident edits were reverted by User:Noetica for lack of edit summaries.

On 1 July, I edited Misplaced Pages:Article naming, and User:Dicklyon reverted my edits. So I clarified my edits, to make it obvious that I was just creating a logical link between Recognizability in the Deciding on an article title section and the criteria for Recognizability in the following Common names section, and he again reverted my edits.   I made similar edits to Misplaced Pages:Categorization/Naming and he reverted those as well.

I explained my reasons on Misplaced Pages talk:Article titles#Deciding on an article title: Consistency and he jeered at me for not being able to find Misplaced Pages:Article titles, as mentioned in Misplaced Pages:Village pump (idea lab)#Research guidelines.2Ftutorials for new editors.

I then discovered that I was being discussed at Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style#Edit summaries.

In the end, only User:Darkfrog24 felt that edits should be judged on their merits, not automatically reverted for lack of edit summaries and lengthy discussions. But finally User:AlanM1 chipped in to support Darkfrog24.

The position of User:Noetica and others is that "lack of an edit summary wastes my precious time, which is far more valuable than that of any mere Misplaced Pages contributor. Why should I treat contributors kindly? They deserve to be reverted". The position of User:Darkfrog24 seems to be essentially, "Why should lack of an edit summary waste your time? The existence of an edit summary doesn't guarantee that the edit is correct, appropriate, or not malicious. The only way to evaluate an edit is to read it".

Noetica implies that she is going to continue to revert even simple and self-evident edits that lack edit summaries, and she even tries to intimidate Darkfrog24 with I can talk the legs off a chair if called upon to do so. Do not call upon me to do so. She is not going to listen. She is going to continue to punish anyone who doesn't leave an edit summary. And she is going to continue to keep a hit list of such people that she is going to get even with.

The Pageview numbers that I cited here suggest that few people are finding Regional MOS guides, but when (on 28 June) I tried to remedy this by adding links, my edits were all reverted by Noetica. My latest edits have not yet been reverted. I won't try to fix the problems with Misplaced Pages:Article titles again until Dicklyon has had time to cool off. LittleBen (talk) 05:19, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for message.

I had a look at the 28 June links from Misplaced Pages:Manual_of_Style#Foreign_terms to Regional MOS guides, and saw where self-evident edits were reverted by User:Noetica for lack of edit summaries. Noetica is a good chap and I can understand his reverting for lack of edit summaries - remember WP:MOS is not a normal article - the header on talk page says so, I wish the page itself also said so. But Noetica is a good chap who quite probably would agree with that edit once you tee it up on the talk page and then do it slowly. As I said it looks like one I'd support.

I haven't quite got my head around your search engines edit yet as its not an area I'm familiar with - but the same Talk first then edit will work wonders. And Jolazzo is giving reasonable advice above, to make what I'm sure will be useful contributions more welcome. Feel free to leave links to where you're editing/talk on my talk, I'm very happy to look. :) In ictu oculi (talk) 12:00, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

-- John of Reading (talk) 16:40, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Heads Up! New Reply!

At least one new reply has been posted in this thread Talk:Gmail#Renewed_Official_Help_Center_and_Official_Product_Support_Forums --Tito Dutta ✉ 17:18, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Heads up again! At least one new message has been posted in the same thread! --Tito Dutta ✉ 05:45, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

My account is set to "watch" the Gmail article, so I will notice if you post something even if you don't send me a heads up, thanks ;-) LittleBen (talk) 07:09, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Capitalization of titles

Please also see here. --Sundostund (talk) 10:40, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

See this too - Talk:List of Presidents of Brazil#Requested move. --Sundostund (talk) 09:53, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Also see WP:CANVASSING. You don't need to recruit votes like you did here, especially from people to whom I have already advertised the RM via a page (Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters) that they have a long-standing interest in. And if you care about such things, you might consider making comments relative to existing policy or guidelines, or data in evidence, instead of just pure opinions that are out of step with consensus. Dicklyon (talk) 04:13, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I simply notified him of the discussion. I didn't threaten to have him blocked if he didn't see things my way. I didn't make his life miserable by rigid and inflexible application of my rules such that he quit Misplaced Pages. Misplaced Pages needs fewer Grammar Gods and more Tolerant and Cooperative Contributors. LittleBen (talk) 04:37, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

?? what's with the tantrum? Dicklyon (talk) 05:04, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I don't think Misplaced Pages is a good place for starting pointless political wars, crusades about creeds or (honorary / job title or article) capitalization. Wars turn friendly, fertile and productive countryside into barren wastelands. I think that Misplaced Pages should be more about ease of use / ease of participation, inclusiveness and diversity than about imposing complex rules. Just my opinion, of course. LittleBen (talk) 05:52, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

LittleBen, you're completely right. --Sundostund (talk) 09:55, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

French bios

Hi. I was welcoming to you when you appeared and supported some of your suggestions re search engines, so I am somewhat surprised with you going into a forum and saying "caught" when there have been a whole series of RMs on French names, on whether or not we should follow WP:FRMOS or not, do you want the links to the French RMs? French is not Japanese, and François Hollande is not 野田佳彦. Can I ask, who told you "caught", did you get that in an email from someone or is that your own personal wording? In ictu oculi (talk) 06:30, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi. The link to the Admin. Noticeboard archive where you were discussed was in my post. I have also explained there (in my post) why I think the rammed-through decision to use foreign names in article titles in English Misplaced Pages looks very dumb to me. I agree that French is not Japanese—and Spanish and Vietnamese are also not French. I think that the best way to handle international naming issues is to defer to the regional MoS, and to reach out to involve local people in decision making, rather than arbitrarily imposing naming rules on all languages without involving people with local knowledge. I would leave decisions on minor issues, e.g. whether to link foreign and English-version names at the head of articles (like the tennis articles)—to the people involved in creating and maintaining them. But no "absolutely required" or "absolutely forbidden" universally, please—I don't see why everything has to be hammered down to the same level. I don't see any problem in handling the naming of sports figures, who are known by nicknames, differently from the way presidents, or historical figures (from an era with different style "rules") are handled. I would not want policy decisions to be imposed on and interfere with creation of useful new content—so I'd really have wished that you had involved others (working on tennis articles) in the diacritics-in-titles issue rather than upsetting them by ramming it through and then presenting it as a fait accompli. The objective of Misplaced Pages is not to upset as many other editors and users as possible by sneaking through or forcing through one's own viewpoint and disregarding other people's opinions. Regardless of a person's knowledge, if that person cannot create (or always destroys) a friendly, inclusive atmosphere where everybody feels that they can contribute, then that person is a huge liability to a diverse community like Misplaced Pages, and Misplaced Pages would benefit from his removal. If he insists on winning every time on hyphens versus en-dashes, or capitalization, "NO EXCEPTIONS", and all the productive contributors and editors get fed up and quit Misplaced Pages... As I have said repeatedly, maintaining Misplaced Pages as a respected and trustworthy resource depends more on verifiability (ability to research the optimum title and category, and get facts right) than on minor points of style (en-dash vs. hyphen, capitalization of emperors and presidents) and here is where I tried to add links to make the importance of research and the "how" (process) clear, but was repeatedly reverted. LittleBen (talk) 14:31, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

You seem to be forgetting that WP:TENNISNAMES was not accepted by all tennis editors either. In ictu oculi (talk) 17:12, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

• It is often easy to find which rendering of a word or name is most searched for, by using Google Insights for Search like this (note: sports category) or like this. Since articles are unlikely to be read if people don't find them when they search, this is surely one of the strongest WP:COMMONSENSE reasons for generally not using diacritics in English Misplaced Pages article titles. This is why I think that knowledge of Internet research techniques should be a critical part of making verifiable, neutral POV, commonsense decisions—about which article title is most appropriate, for example. LittleBen (talk) 02:01, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Montemayor is a maternal name. es.wp shows them in titles sometimes. We would expect editors editing Spanish names to know that. In ictu oculi (talk) 11:45, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

• We surely CAN'T assume that people who edit articles about France, Mexico/Spain, Vietnam, Japan or China are necessarily fluent in the language and conversant with the customs. If this—or the use of diacritics—is a requirement, then that greatly shrinks an already-too-small pool of editors.
• I think that the Pelé example that I cited illustrates both the problem and the solution. You cannot use the real name in the article title, because almost nobody would recognize it, much less remember it, and the article would probably not be found in a Google search. Although it makes sense to avoid accents where possible, and people are going to search for Pele without the accent (Google Insights for Search data for searches for Pele just in Brazil is very informative), it's probably unavoidable to use the accent in this case—because maybe the name looks stupid, even unrecognizable, without it. So people are forced to research the COMMONNAME, and use COMMONSENSE ;-) How dreadful that there isn't one rule that can be forced on everyone ;-)
• I'd really like to get some stats on the "cost" of redirects, as I'm sure that such stats would prove that redirects of much-searched common terms are very costly. Misplaced Pages seems to have been on its knees many times recently.
• One of the keys to good SEO is "fine-tuning" article titles and section headings so that—as far as possible—they are an exact match or near-match to phrases used in the majority of search queries. LittleBen (talk) 14:46, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Articles aren't written by one person. Have you ever created an en.wp article? In ictu oculi (talk) 15:59, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

• Precisely because they are not written—or edited—just by one person, the rules need to be as simple as possible. For example: a sports person might not be considered "significant" until he or she becomes active enough for them to "acquire" a (usually non-accented) two-word shortened name or nickname: such a COMMONNAME or nickname is necessary because sports writers can't repeat long formal names many times in news articles and broadcasts. If they become really famous, like Pelé, they will often get a one-word nickname, and people will search on that. (Jakob Nielsen, famous for web usability, has published on his useit.com website that the average user takes only about 15 sec. to decide whether a landing page is relevant. His company's seminars typically cost about $1,000 per day.) If a search for Pelé lands the user on a page titled Edson... or Edison... the searcher is likely to leave.
• The most recent article that I've put a lot of work into was deleted by a drive-by deletionist (with obviously no subject knowledge) for a reason like "it's a stub article, and the topic is not important". (Somebody else created the stub, and it was deleted). I've expanded it greatly since having it undeleted in late Jan./early Feb. such that it peaked up to 1800 page views a day in June and (with no new content) 1650 in July. Not bad for an article that had been deleted a few months previously as "not notable". To put that into perspective: it got 35,762 pageviews in 201206, and 34,011 in 201207, compared with 38,186 pageviews in 201206, and 35,595 in 201207 for WP:MoS (which ranked #3,120 on Misplaced Pages). Readers seem to like the writing and the (brief but relevant) content and links so much that there haven't been any edit wars. Other people seem to be protecting the article from spam links. LittleBen (talk) 02:00, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
• PS: I'm an engineer, so I'm pragmatic. If a page gets 1,000 or more daily page views, then it should look good and be accurate and trustworthy, or Misplaced Pages's perceived quality might be affected. However, if a group of enthusiasts create a tennis stub page about a relatively-unknown player called Manuel Sanchez, and it gets between 4 and 8 daily pageviews, I wouldn't see any point in erasing their pride in their contribution by edit warring about style trivia, by trying to impose my POV on style, or by spending weeks and months discussing the wording of related style rules, because so few people look at such articles that it makes no difference to Misplaced Pages's perceived quality. I wouldn't delete stub pages about subjects that I know little about, or without waiting a sufficient time for their creators or other interested people to improve them, either. This sort of behavior is very destructive to motivation and morale. There are more productive ways to spend time—like creating or improving more searched-for articles—that do make a real difference to Misplaced Pages. I don't feel any need to show off my knowledge of Japanese by insisting that articles on Japan have Japanese in the article title, either. Many or most of the editors on Japan-related topics have quite limited Japanese reading ability, and anyone with the ability to read Japanese, French, Vietnamese, Spanish or whatever, is going to prefer native-language sources to English Misplaced Pages. LittleBen (talk) 04:43, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

LittleBenW, I'll paste here what I've just said on WP:VN:

LittleBenW, you may not realise this but you are advancing a version of the view which was thoroughly rejected at WP:TENNISNAMES RfC. I'm sorry but this view is out of the ballpark here. If you object to Spanish names, you are not, I'm sorry, going to add value to a discussion on Vietnamese. In ictu oculi (talk) 16:43, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Apart from that - your personal attacks on other Users have to stop. I, and the others you've been attacking, have been pretty generous up to now, but if it continues people will start keeping a log of them. In ictu oculi (talk) 17:03, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Whacked

Ben you complained that "People who arbitrarily decide naming conventions without following MoS guidelines are likely to get their edits reverted, and be whacked or even blocked by the MoS thought police." While its true that such edits may be reverted, by people who want to help improve conformance to MOS and/or title policy, it's wrong to think of such reverts as getting "whacked" or "even blocked". You've been around WP long enough that by now you should have some idea how it works. So why are you trying to turn everything into a battleground? You keep on complaining about how you were unable to get your search how-to into WP:TITLE, but you never responded the least bit sensibly to the suggestions that were made explaining why it wasn't OK where you put it. Grow up; please; and stop wikihounding my efforts to improve WP. Also please stop cross-posting the same rants to three talk pages (this bit seems to be on 6 now); just because it doesn't get refuted in all three places doesn't mean you've scored points. Dicklyon (talk) 04:35, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Use preview

Please use preview before posting on talk pages; otherwise your minor edits fill up the screen. thanks. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 17:01, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Sánchez

We have been through this before. As before the á in Sánchez and 賽珍珠 are not the same thing. As before WP:OPENPARA is the norm.

You are a new arrival to this subject, so you may not realise that en.wp has 4 million articles, of, which, in discussion I've seen it estimated that at least 10%, 400,000 articles, relate to non-English European Latin-alphabet subjects. Of these 400,000 all carry European accents in title and text where appropriate. The only significant exception were 100 tennis BLPs and 300 ice-hockey BLPs which have now been moved by RM over the last 4 months. Finishing with the last large batch at Talk:Dominik Halmoši two weeks ago. There is no "diacritics war", or if there was, you arrived after it had already ended.
WP:Vietnam is the exception to this consensus. It has a total article stock of around 2,500 articles in the bio/geo categories which could be treated as we treat Czech and Turkish bio/geo articles. 13 months ago these were 100% with Vietnamese in body text, and 80% with Vietnamese titles (i.e. 2,000 with, 500 without) - and had broadly been that way since the fonts were enabled in 2006. Now following 1,600 undiscussed moves from July 2011-July 2012 the only ones left with Vietnamese titles are very small village geo-stubs and a few minor bios, around 400 minor articles, plus 500 didn't have Vietnamese titles anyway. From 80% to about 15%. These numbers are approximate but being reasonably familiar with the them, they are are near enough correct.
Irrespective, you may not realise this but RM results are usually upheld right or wrong. Even if RMs have results we do not agree with it is not okay to make undiscussed moves contrary to them. In ictu oculi (talk) 11:24, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Personal attacks

You have been asked before to cease making personal attacks. I understand your very strong sentiment against foreign names, but this is not a license to make personal attacks on other editors who do not share your views. In ictu oculi (talk) 04:16, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

• You are talking nonsense. I attack stupid ideas with neutral logic, I complain about the behavior issues of people who absolutely have to own all the marbles and make all the final decisions, regardless of the cost to Misplaced Pages and to editor morale, but I never make personal attacks. LittleBen (talk) 04:22, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Have you asked a 3rd party to confirm this? For example you could try asking Steven Zhang (below) to have a look at your postings and give you a 3rd party opinion. In ictu oculi (talk) 04:34, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

The Olive Branch: A Dispute Resolution Newsletter (Issue #1)

Welcome to the first edition of The Olive Branch. This will be a place to semi-regularly update editors active in dispute resolution (DR) about some of the most important issues, advances, and challenges in the area. You were delivered this update because you are active in DR, but if you would prefer not to receive any future mailing, just add your name to this page.

In this issue:

• Background: A brief overview of the DR ecosystem.
• Research: The most recent DR data
• Survey results: Highlights from Steven Zhang's April 2012 survey
• Activity analysis: Where DR happened, broken down by the top DR forums
• DR Noticeboard comparison: How the newest DR forum has progressed between May and August
• Discussion update: Checking up on the Wikiquette Assistance close debate
• Proposal: It's time to close the Geopolitical, ethnic, and religious conflicts noticeboard. Agree or disagree?

--The Olive Branch 19:08, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Impartial study of the effects of using diacritics in article titles

Please refer to this.

Template:Linktext

Regarding your question on my talk page regarding the remark in the /doc to the template {{Linktext}}, I think you have it right. You can see by testing examples like the following in a sandbox or preview:
{{Linktext|雲|緑|lang=ja}} yields 雲緑
{{Linktext|雲|緑|lang=zh}} yields 雲緑
Note that the fonts used are somewhat different to reflect the styles of each country. --Kiyoweap (talk) 07:07, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Diacritics testing

Two things:

a) A/B testing of different page appearances is something that's been done in the past, and is less intrusive than (eg) tracking read time of individuals, but this is A/B testing different content, which is something the Foundation is (rightly) skittish about touching too closely. You could make a case, but you'd also have to come up with a way of collecting results and defining relative "success" - the reader is likely to read the page we serve up to them regardless of what the title is, after all! I really recommend you talk to the research community on meta if you're looking to design some kind of testing which will get valid results.

• I have already explained repeatedly that the title of a book is not considered "content" by publishers. Diacritic version or not is more about usability and presentation than content: whether to make the user feel stupid by presenting something that he or she can't read. Content (inside the book or article) is a completely different issue, because both diacritic and non-diacritic versions can be presented, and the reader has a choice.
• Quote: "the reader is likely to read the page we serve up to them regardless of what the title is, after all!" That's not the case at all, if you read the short explanation here. By measuring the percentage of people who "bounce"—take one look at the title and immediately leave the page—and by A/B testing with and without complex diacritics in the title, it should be very easy to show in a very short time that the title (like the title and cover of a book) has a huge effect on the bounce rate. For A/B testing and for bounce rate testing you normally have to set an anonymous cookie—because that seems to be the only practicable way of measuring whether visitors immediately quit the page, or how long they stay on the page, and whether they come back again within the test interval (say one month)—the cookie is given a life of one month in this case. The cookie is also to make sure that the people who get version A the first time they visit also get version A if they come back. Ditto for version B. Anonymous cookies (with a short life of say one week or one month) are also used for (random) opt-in questionnaires, because you don't want the same user to be repeatedly shown the opt-in questionnaire after saying no the first time.

• Diacritics/foreign languages in titles is not a trivial issue, because there are many thousands of articles with foreign-language titles on English-language Misplaced Pages. Only WPF can show whether doing this is user-friendly or not. The research community on meta surely already know about public domain open source analytics. But they (and the tech. people in WMF) are surely not empowered to do anything without WMF support and direction. The outward reason for such research can be "usability testing". Likewise arguments about naming—Burma or Myanmar, for example—can be solved easily, fairly, and neutrally by numbers: which of these choices do users show that they prefer? Any search-engine search for these terms that lands on Misplaced Pages carries the term that was used to search for it. Analytics makes it so easy to know what the users want (did somebody use the word "sweet" about analytics?) Just a few high-traffic articles can provide statistically-valid data. Costly, large-scale testing is not necessary.

• "Redirects are cheap" they say, but this is yet another issue the WMF should be able to provide numbers for. Knowledgeable web people never say that "redirects are cheap".

b) however, you will find people a lot more willing to take the question seriously if you don't keep treating it as a matter of to "diacritics pushers" and "mob rule"... this is, first and foremost, a content dispute, and the first rule there is to assume good faith of the people who disagree with you. Andrew Gray (talk) 09:02, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

• The problem is that there is absolutely no good faith being shown on his part. He has surreptitiously added diacritics to the titles of European articles without exception—despite knowing that this is against Misplaced Pages policy—and he has even jeeringly bragged about being able to get away with gaming the system (adding diacritics even when people do not generally use them in some countries) on his talk page, and bragged that he is going to do the same to Vietnamese, whether it is justified or not. He also says that the guidelines should be changed to fit his fait accompli. People who argue that the guidelines should either be followed or changed democratically by an RfC get threatened and intimidated by cronies. At least three or four really capable and dedicated people have been bullied out. It only takes a little drop of poison in the well...
• There will always be politicians like Hitler who want to own all the marbles and make all the final decisions (or let cronies make them) without any regard for whether the decisions are sensible or best for the majority. There will always be cronies who dip their fingers in the cookie jar too. Honesty, transparency, fairness, and accountability are the only way for an organization like Misplaced Pages to survive long term. To illustrate this:
• A British friend visited India, and came back really shocked. "You pay a bribe to get a job". A traffic cop gets his bribe money back by stopping people at random and extorting money—"if you want to avoid a ticket, you will have to buy some (very expensive) bananas at that street vendor"... "How do you get rid of corruption and cronyism once it has dug its roots that deep?" he asked.
• For WMF to do the ostrich act and say, "we only collect the money and take all the credit—we don't accept any responsibility" is surely not a workable long-term strategy. To be perceived as fair, well-informed, transparent, honest, neutral—and accountable—is surely pretty much a necessity for survival. LittleBen (talk) 11:00, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I am sorry, but I am going to step away from this discussion now. If you would like to carry out research on this, then by all means do go and talk to the research group about it - I don't have the ability to make this happen, though if conducted well I'd be interested to see the results. However, with this sort of approach to discussion, it does not seem likely to go very far.

It is completely inappropriate to take what is fundamentally an on-wiki content dispute about writing style and explicitly compare those you disagree with to Hitler! I am sure you have good intentions, but this sort of combative and malicious approach is guaranteed to act as, as you say, the "poison in the well"; treating the dispute in this way will do nothing but ensure people dismiss your arguments, regardless of their merits. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:30, 25 September 2012 (UTC)