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News and notes: Responsibilities and liabilities as a "Very Large Online Platform" Op-ed: Beeblebrox on Wikipediocracy, the Committee, and everything Opinion: Graham87 on being the first-ever administrator recall subject In the media: Delhi High Court considers Caravan and Ken for evaluating the ANI vs. WMF case From the archives: Where to draw the line in reporting? Recent research: "Misplaced Pages editors are quite prosocial", but those motivated by "social image" may put quantity over quality Humour: Backlash over Santa Claus' Misplaced Pages article intensifies Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols Traffic report: Was a long and dark December
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Overqualified?

Here's a first: my years of writing and reviewing FAs disqualifies me from making MoS fixes to articles owned by the "little people". Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:24, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Did you know...

...that aikido, kendo, and to a lesser extent judo and karate all originated in Asia but are now practiced primarily by westerners? That's the impression I get from the (distribution of) photographs in our articles on them, anyway.

Seriously, it's really weird that the infobox of the aikido article lists famous practitioners who are all but two Japanese, and Japan has won the kendo world championships something like ten times as often as every other country combined, but our articles make it look like they have since the nineteenth century been primarily non-Japanese phenomena. The judo and karate articles are a little less problematic (primarily because few of the faces are visible), but the photos there come across as vanity picks taken by the parents of the subjects. (Yes, I know the faces are all concealed in the kendo article, but the European names of the subjects, who appear to be non-famous private individuals, are all visible.)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 07:54, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

It's unsurprising. Most of those editing these articles—and taking and uploading images—would be Westerners, wouldn't they? Compounded by the fact that ja.wp perhaps is less active than it could be—from what I understand, de.wp is more active with a smaller population of speakers, for instance. That's not the type of "bias" that deserves finger-pointing, but still requires correction. I'm surprised you even mentioned karate, though—the only photo of non-Japanese in that one is from the Philippines.

I don't know how much of a photographer you are (I'm pretty shitty), but this could be an opportunity to not only correct the bias, but add some appropriate photos to the articles—say, a gallery of the various techniques. Or enlist a helpful friend willing to donate their work. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:36, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for January 7

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Matsudaira Katataka, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Mino (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)

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If I may take the liberty of some unsolicited advice...

As a completely uninvolved editor, can I make the suggestion that whatever your viewpoint, and however aggravated you might be, knock it off at EEng's Place. Rightly or wrongly you seem to be committed to a headlong charge at the line... Slow down, back off and cool down before you happen to cross it. Have an otherwise lovely night, --Jack Frost (talk) 09:58, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

• It would be nice if the editwarrior would fix his fuckups after having admitted they were fuckups, instead of going off the hinges with bizarre mind games. Maybe a completely uninvolved editor could step in and fix it? He's made it clear I'm not allowed to touch the article. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:51, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	ō! Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 08:12, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

• Ōōōm! Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 08:42, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 26

The Misplaced Pages Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 26, December – January 2018

• #1Lib1Ref
• User Group update
• Global branches update
• Spotlight: What can we glean from OCLC’s experience with library staff learning Misplaced Pages?
• Bytes in brief

Arabic and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!
Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Misplaced Pages Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:36, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Your edits at Ran

That was quite a sequence of edits on the film Ran which you did. Any interest on your part to possibly review it if I do the GA nomination. JohnWickTwo (talk) 02:49, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

• JohnWickTwo: I could maybe go over the text, but I doubt I could work up the motivation to do a proper GAN review. A couple things: the plot synopsis is really long. WP:FILMPLOT calls for a synopsis of between 400 and 700 words or readable prose—the current one is 1050 words. Another thing is that there are still a lot of unsourced statements—it'll never pass GAN with unsourced statements (except for the plot). Another: I don't know how best to handle this, but I don't think it's a good idea to gloss 乱 as "chaos", partly because the title is obviously supposed to have multiple meanings ("chaos" as well as "war"/"rebellion"). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:53, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Apologies

Hi Curly, I just wanted to offer a quick apology for this edit. I was moving too fast and misclicked the rollback button, I undid it but with errors like that I'd prefer to apologize personally. Best wishes.--Church 08:58, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Church—don't worry about it. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 09:36, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedians who like Black Mirror

Hey! I saw that you edited the article Black Mirror and thought maybe you would be interested in this new user category I created?-🐦Do☭torWho42 (⭐) 12:01, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

• Heh! Actually, I only watched the one episode after reading about parallels with the new system going in in China. Maybe someday! Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:53, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Tamahime

If you want the page to be removed, ask for it.Xx236 (talk) 11:52, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

• It's being linked to from Japanese articles for a historical figure named Tamahime, so there should likely be an article for it—but it shouldn't be redirecting to a film with a different title. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:54, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

O Canada!

All these politically-motivated changes to the national anthem are getting under my skin. We should go back to Weir's original translation—gender-neutral and secular:

O Canada! Our home and native land!

True patriot love thou dost in us command.

We see thee rising fair, dear land,

The True North, strong and free;

And stand on guard, O Canada,

We stand on guard for thee.

O Canada! O Canada!

O Canada! We stand on guard for thee.

O Canada! We stand on guard for thee.

... although cramming the three-syllable pa-tri-ot into two still sticks in my craw. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 08:13, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Suddenly steamrolled AFDs?

Hey, I was looking back at the contribs of one of my alt-accounts for reasons just now, and remembered this for the first time in a long time; it was 3-1 in favour of deletion for almost a full week, and then within a single day five more people suddenly showed up and all !voted to keep and a non-admin closes it having clearly not read the discussion (one of the unambiguous delete !votes became a "maybe" and another was completely ignored, and the timing made it anything but WP:SNOW). And this was apparently the result of a WikiProject that was at least in that case used for the specific purpose of canvassing keep !votes in AFDs: I don't recall ever encountering them again, but the project doesn't seem to have been formally retired, so if it still serves that function it really seems like a problem.

This reminded me a bit of what happened at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Korean influence on Japanese culture; the latter obviously shouldn't be re-opened given the great work you, Nish and others did to fix the article (at least to the point that WP:TNT no longer applies), but I'm really wondering about Mottainai. Apparently no one has done any work in the last five years to fix its problems or demonstrate how it is not a dictionary entry combined with a puff piece to promote a social programme, and I'm really not convinced the original deletion rationales don't apply (and the close was way out of line).

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:50, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Yeesh—I remember when I first came to Japan, it was going around that "there's no word for mottainai in English" ... do people still believe that? It's a meme I haven't heard since the 20th century, anyways. Scanning the article, it looks like horseshit to me, but that's problably mostly the fault of the sources. It'll survive another AfD unless you can be really convincing that the sources themselves are full of shit.

I didn't do any "great work" on the "Korean influence" article—I just did a lot of copyediting. I doubt I ever looked at any of the sources. I was less aware of how bad the nationalists could get with articles like this—I definitely think there should be an article on the topic (in an ideal world), but had no idea what a headache maintenance of it would be.

I lean pretty "inclusionist", even with the bullshit it brings. I might make an exception for political articles—they're all hopeless timesinks. Nuke 'em all. Misplaced Pages's not the place to inform yourself on the Israel–Palestine conflict. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 12:09, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

The night is dark and full of terrors. And terrible shocks. As in ... wow: I nominated an article for deletion five years ago under a sock account I had forgotten about, the AFD was steamrolled due to inappropriate canvassing on a forum that was dedicated to such inappropriate canvassing (which I don't remember noticing at the time) and is still active, and then when I consider asking our most prominent deletionist (whom I'd defended in a bunch of "This user nominated my article for deletion; they should be blocked" ANI threads) if they're familiar with the problem, I find out that a month ago they were blocked for undisclosed socking going back the better part of a decade. I mean -- what!? The whole world has gone topsy-turvy. Is this Star Trek? I'm going to go get crucified upside-down now. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 12:38, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Sorry. Our Acts of Peter article is garbage, but I didn't know that, and I figured linking it would make the meaning of my reference clear. Basically, Peter decides to be crucified upside-down because Adam entered the world head-first, and since Adam's day Sin has been in the world and turned everything on its head, so only by being upside-down can Peter see everything as it is meant to be. Or something along those lines. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 12:43, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

I can't figure out who the sock is ... ?

You won't get the article deleted, even if it is pure bull. It even cites a scholarly article that flatly claims "The word “mottainai” is a part of the Japanese religious and cultural heritage" (even if that has zero to do with the word's contemporary, everyday usage). The idea that it's "a cultural practice" is hard to swallow, but—it's "sourced"! Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:42, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, my latter two comments above had nothing to do with the mottainai article. In fact my first comment above was about weird AFD closures, where there is a clear consensus to delete, until a whole bunch of people suddenly show up and !vote keep, and only then is the discussion closed (by a non-admin who clearly should never close AFDs where the result is anything other than SNOW keep).

Anyway, Daijirin implies the term has a (basically unrelated) Shintoist (not Buddhist) sense that means defiling a sacred space or object, but honestly for all I know (for all Daijirin tells me since it doesn't actually mention Shinto) that's actually a Jewish sense that was used in early Japanese bible translations, since Leviticus and Numbers are full of that stuff. And then we get into the whole "Ancient Israelite religion and Japanese Shinto both have ritual impurity concepts; the Japanese must be descended from the Lost Ten Tribes" mess...

The sock is SwisterTwister (talk · contribs), and I was really surprised and awed at what had happened there, since ST had been a mainstay of the community (particularly AFDs and the various ANI threads people started about him as a result) for years and had a basically clean block log. My having discovered this within an hour or so of my discovering the ARS was really shaking me (to the point where I actually lost sleep; in order to get an extra thirty minutes in bed this morning I had to grab an 朝マクド on the way to work).

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:09, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Japanese-Jewish common ancestry theory—!!!—I see so many MoS fixes I desparately want to make in this article, but ... but ... I don't want my name showing up in the edit history ... Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:48, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

You're right to be careful. I just Googled my own username and found out that as having once made some minor edit to an article on the alt-right, and another on a Twilight film (?), I am now being credited as one of the co-authors of "books" on those topics. I'd hate to think about people who edit under their real names... Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:08, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Ok, I could see how my assertion that I'm on your talk at all is merely because of my interest in how things actually are done here might be taken with some skepticism, but I have to say this made my blood run cold. I hope you don't mind me asking, how prevalent would you say this kind of thing is? Am I just being naive here? What the actual fuck? Gabriel syme (talk) 02:10, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

There are companies out there that put on print-on-demand books of Misplaced Pages content. They come up in Google Books all the time: Here's an example. They sell them on Amazon, etc. It's all totally legal and everything, as long as they credit the contributors. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 02:21, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply, ok, wow. Did I accidentally choose a 'safe' username because the top hundred hits are always going to be about literature? I guess I had a vague implicit idea of printing articles out, with the, yeah, naive notion that it was a small scale thing, mostly used by educators. But damn I should've known there'd be an industry mining it for filthy lucre, why not? It just has terrifying implications. Uh, has it ever ended up in a situation where mass puppets show up, rewrite articles, and then go to press with something that blatantly violates what the community is working towards? This is why I shamelessly scan people's talk pages. Gabriel syme (talk) 02:50, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

I haven't heard of it, but I'd be surprised if it never happened. And you'd still get your name listed as a contributor to such filth! Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 02:58, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

This just went in my pocket as a very compelling argument for me to get people into editing. It's, uh, just alot more actually important that most of the internet. Thanks. Gabriel syme (talk) 03:15, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

@Gabriel Syme: The worst part, though, is that under Misplaced Pages's free license (the same one that allows those books to be published), if someone plagiarizes text and adds it to an article, they are essentially releasing someone else's copyrighted material for anyone to reprint free of charge. This is super-serious and is the main reason COPYVIO text and images need to be deleted and removed from public view, and why it's really concerning that even "long-time editor " don't "get" it. Checking that shit is extremely tedious work, and doing it without the prior consent of either the community or ArbCom essentially leaves one open to being accused of "hounding". Regardless of the actual definition of hounding. I'd be willing to bet that well over 70% of "hounding" accusations are either (a) hypocritical attacks made by bonafide hounds or (b) attempts to shoot down scrutiny on counter-policy actions by either the counter-policy editors or teir friends. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 04:24, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

!!! ... now I'm going to have to try that ... I did once come across a quote from my Comics article in a book. Not "one of those 'books'", but an actual book. That felt good! Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:11, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

... and the first one that comes up is Death Conspiracy Theories. What in the flying fuck did I edit! Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:12, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

...I also noticed some Redditor expressing sympathy for a certain banned editor's (not Til Eulenspiegel's) remarks comparing me to a Nazi, based on a very specific date range during which I made the mistake of fixing some links in an article on a neo-Nazi website roughly a week after I made a bunch of edits to Norse mythology articles and articles on characters in the novels of R. A. Salvatore (with names like "Wulfgar") back in 2005. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:59, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Were you editing any child porn articles that week? If not, you'll just have to try harder to discredit yourself next time. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 07:06, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

"Show Preview" button

Without wanting to be pedantic, and it's likely that you are already fully aware of this, but for the sake of those who check diffs, it would make a "diff" if the number of changes to any given section that appear in the article history and on our watchlists could be minimized....I try to remember to use the "Show Preview" button until I am sure that the changes are what I want. For example, your group of 21 edits to Singular they would have appeared as 10-11 edits instead, much easier to look through. I have sinned against this myself often enough, and it is just a suggestion... Clean Copy 00:31, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

• Clean Copy: I understand, but I often make these edits while I'm between real-life tasks—when I'm called away, I save whatever I happen to have finished. Notice that the edits were made over a two-hour period. But something else to keep in mind (in my experience) is that large numbers of changes in a single edit make for a mess when one needs to revert a small number of the changes, and for this reason I've advised people in the past to break up large edits into smaller chunks. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:37, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

OK, good points. Clean Copy 01:38, 12 February 2018 (UTC)