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<noinclude>{{Villagepumppages|Miscellaneous|The '''miscellaneous''' section of the village pump is used to post messages that do not fit into any other category. Please try to post within ], ], ], ] or ] rather than here.|]}} <noinclude>{{short description|Central discussion page of Misplaced Pages for general topics not covered by the specific topic pages}}{{pp-move-indef|small=yes}}{{Village pump page header|Miscellaneous|alpha=yes|The '''miscellaneous''' section of the ] is used to post messages that do not fit into any other category. Please post on the ], ], or ] sections when appropriate, or at the ] for assistance. For general knowledge questions, please use the ].
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Discussions older than 7 days (date of last made comment) are moved ]. These discussions will be kept archived for 7 more days. During this period the discussion can be moved to a relevant talk page if appropriate. After 7 days the discussion will be permanently removed.
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== How to handle ]? ==


Hey all, hope everyone here is doing well. Today I woke up to discover that a podcaster I follow had plagiarised part of an article I wrote, as well as parts of some other articles (some of which I had contributed to, others not). The podcaster did not cite their sources, nor did they make it clear that they were pulling whole paragraphs from Misplaced Pages, but they ran advertisements and plugged their patreon anyway. This is not the first time an article I wrote for Misplaced Pages has been plagiarised and profited off (earlier this year I noticed a youtuber had plagiarised an entire article I had written; I've also noticed journalists ripping off bits and pieces of other articles). Nor is this limited to articles, as I often see original maps people make for Wikimedia Commons reused without credit.
==Admin Stalking==


Obviously I'm not against people reusing and adapting the work we do here, as it's freely licensed under creative commons. But it bugs me that no ] is provided, especially when it is ]; attribution is literally ''the least'' that is required. I would like attribution of Misplaced Pages to become more common and normalised, but I don't know how to push for people off-wiki to be more considerate of this. In my own case, the 'content creators' in question don't provide contact details, so I have no way of privately getting in touch with them. Cases in which I have been able to contact an organisation about their unattributed use of Misplaced Pages/Wikimedia content often get ignored, and the unattributed use continues. But I also have no interest in publicly naming and shaming these people, as I don't think it's constructive.
I have been online for over 10 years 'playing' all through the ether. In that time I have never had my ip blocked once though I have come across all types in some programs. I have never been targeted online for anyhting apart from a couple of gentle 'boots' from one galah who wasnt viscious or kept it up night after night after night after night. In the last couple of weeks here my ip has been blocked several times when I objected to admin vandalism of stuff I had posted where meaning etc were changed making what I put up a heap of lies. I have made a lot of contributions to wik. I did make some errors as I had no idea what I was doing to start. They were not intentional. I cite most posts immediately, with references on the way in next couple of days re those I dont have the reference immediately to hand. (I have an arm injury so can't pull my cardboard box other filing cabinet off the top of the cupboard to get a couple of things out.) Since I have been on wik I have been continuously stalked by an admin who has been very rude, keeps vandalising stuff I put up, seems to be very fixated on following me around the ether and trying to control my every moove. Of course I told that admin to get lost. I am a former professional stalking/violence worker so have seen how it happens and where it ends up, and dont have regard for that sort of rot. I have never seen it to the extent that I have seen it happen on wik. I will tell any stalker to get lost. Its behaviour that isnt needed anywhere and if I am targeted to the point I am continuously being harassed and my health affected then it needs to stop. WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? IS IT ALWAYS LIKE THIS? I was going to put a heap of valuable stuff up but given how here is then its best to steer clear of the palce for the sake of my personal wellbeing.


Does anyone here have advice for how to handle plagiarism from Misplaced Pages? Is there something we can do to push for more attribution? --] (]) 13:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)


:Sadly there are plenty of lazy sods who think that copying directly from Misplaced Pages is "research". This has happened with some of the articles that I have been involved with. It's rude, but hard to stop.--'''''] <sup>]</sup>''''' 14:13, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
== Trigger Happy ==
::I would start by writing to the podcaster and politely explaining to them that they are welcome to use the material but are required to provide attribution. They may simply be unaware of this and might be willing to comply if properly educated. Failing that, I assume the podcast was being streamed from some content delivery service like YouTube. You might have better luck writing to the service provider demanding that the offending material be taken down.
Dear Wikipedians:
::Realistically, crap like this happens all the time, and there's probably not a whole bunch we can do to prevent it. ] ] 14:37, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
I, like you, am an editor; I create articles and make edits.
:::To support RoySmith's point, for those who may not have seen it, here is a very long youtube video about youtube and plagiarism . (Works just having it on as background audio.) ] (]) 14:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
But, many, I am sure many other people out there, are tired, frustrated and angry with the behavior of many Administrators. I am certain that it is appallingly easy to revert and article, that someone has undoubtedly spent allot of time and effort writing. I have, in the past spent hours, researching, planning, writing, checking and revising an addition to an article only to have the whole lot deleted forever three minutes afterwards.
::::Funnily enough, plagiarism from Misplaced Pages comes up a couple times in that video. ] also made a , which I think was a useful addition in the conversation of crediting Wikipedians. --] (]) 15:10, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
:::::Thanks, I'll give that a listen. ] (]) 15:18, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
:::Aye, I figured it be an uphill battle trying to accomplish even minor changes on this front. As I can't find a way to contact the creator directly, sending an email to the hosting company may be the best I can do, but even then I doubt it'll lead to anything. Thanks for the advice, anyhow. --] (]) 15:12, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
::::If it's a copyright violation (e.g., exact wording), rather than plagiarism (stealing the ideas but using their own words), then you could look into a ] notice. ] (]) 03:25, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
:::::@]: It was more-or-less word for word, with a couple tweaks here and there. I don't want the episode pulled, I really just want Misplaced Pages cited, but I can't figure out any way to get in direct contact with any of the people involved. --] (]) 10:16, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
::::::It's possible that the way to get in touch with them is a DMCA takedown notice. Having your platform take down the whole episode tends to attract attention. You could make it easy on them by suggesting a way to fix the problem (maybe they could add something like "This episode quotes Misplaced Pages in several places" to the end of the notes on the podcast?). ] (]) 18:33, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
:::::::I'm curious as to what the plagiarized article in question is. Often there is no majority authorship of an article (in terms of bytes added), which might complicate DMCA claims. ''']]''' 18:35, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
::::::::Anyone who contributed enough content to be copyrighted can issue a DMCA notice. The glaring problem with this approach is that the DMCA only applies if the copy is published in the United States. ] (]) 18:51, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
:::::::::What about servers or companies based in the States (perhaps I've misremembered what little I know of copyright law)? ''']]''' 18:56, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
::::::::@]: It's an article I wrote 99.9% of, minus minor copyedits by other users. I'm cautious about revealing which one as I think it would make it easy to figure out the podcast in question, and I'd still prefer to handle this privately rather than go full hbomberguy. Also, having now gone through more of the episode, it's not just that one article that got text lifted from it; text was also copied in whole or in part, without attribution, from other Misplaced Pages articles I have contributed to (but didn't author) and an article on another website that publishes under a CC BY-NC-ND license. I don't know how I would handle notifying the other parties that got plagiarised either. I haven't combed through the entire episode yet, but already a sizeable portion consists of unattributed text, either identical to the source or with minor alterations. --] (]) 19:29, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
::One man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame... ] ''']]''' 00:42, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
:Hmm... would ] be of help? ''']]''' 01:17, 30 December 2024 (UTC)
::@]: I hadn't seen this until now, I think I assumed a while back that this thread had already been archived. Thanks for letting me know about this! I'll keep it on hand for future cases. --] (]) 13:56, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:Unfortunately, you're talking about a medium where many people's understanding of copyright law, even when they do demonstrate an awareness that it exists and is applicable, is largely demonstrated by videos posted on YouTube of clips from movies and TV shows with the note "Copyright infringement not intended". Which, I sometimes leave a comment pointing out to them, is akin to dashing out of a clothing store with an armful of unpaid-for merchandise while shouting "Shoplifting not intended". ] (]) 14:10, 2 January 2025 (UTC)


I've found Misplaced Pages plagiarized in scientific journal articles. I have no tolerance for that and I contact the publishers directly. But little to nothing comes of it. In the one instance, I waited almost a year but nothing really happened. Upon pushing the matter, the publishers allowed the authors to make some trivial changes but there was no retraction. (See my banner notes at the top of ] if you are interested in this example.) Fortunately, this kind of plagiarism may be common in less prestigious journals and by less prestigious authors from universities in countries that may not care about plagiarism of Western sources. ] (]) 08:39, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
I know that deletion of material is essential in a free-to-edit encyclopedia, but if you see an article that someone has anonymously devoted their time to writing, why could you not revise it, change it or give a reason for you action? They deserve one.
::@] Wrong section? You wanted to post below? <sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">]&#124;]</sub> 17:03, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
:::Yes, it was. Sorry about that. I moved my comment (along with yours) to the proper spot. ] (]) 21:12, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
:::@] PS. Make sure to use ] and comment on those articles! <sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">]&#124;]</sub> 17:04, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
::::I'll check it out. ] (]) 21:12, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
:::::Looks like ] has a ... somewhat questionable reputation to put it politely. ] (]) 10:10, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
:Some years ago, we found a source saying that the 20% of lowest-ranked journals had a higher risk of copyright violations. (They did tend to be journals from developing countries or otherwise with limited resources – think "Journal of the Tinyland Medical Society".) I have discouraged using journals from the lowest ranked quintile ever since. ] (]) 04:42, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
::As an aside, I'm pretty sure I've been the "benefactor" of scholarly citogenesis several times—uncited additions from a decade ago that I'm scouring for cites and pondering whether to rewrite from scratch, when I find a passage that pretty much has the same structure and specifics (uncontroversial stuff, mind) and I smile. I do wonder if I should be so happy, but I figure they're qualified to conduct original research and this isn't likely to introduce poor quality infomation. <span style="border-radius:2px;padding:3px;background:#1E816F">]<span style="color:#fff">&nbsp;‥&nbsp;</span>]</span> 04:48, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
:::When the plagiarism is substantial, please remember to tag the talk page with {{tl|backwardscopy}}. ] (]) 21:49, 27 December 2024 (UTC)
:Copyright infringement of Misplaced Pages by other people is not immoral, so I don't believe it's in anyone's best interest to try to police it at all. We write this stuff with the hopes that it is accurate and that it will be shared. The podcaster in question shared it. Presumably, if you are proud of it, you also consider it accurate. Big Success. No Stress.
:Additionally, it does not do to mix complaints about plagiarism and copyright infringement together. Copyright is law, and plagiarism is not law. Just like us, the podcaster is fully within their rights as the users of text to copy it without attribution when their use ''isn't'' a copyright violation. If it was enough text for you to notice this, I'll trust you that it was a lot of text. But, just FYI, if someone copies a little from an article (or even a little from several articles), they would not ''need'' a license to do that and their lack of compliance with the unneeded license would not constitute copyright infringement. ] (]) 08:37, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
::I disagree, plagiarism of Misplaced Pages content is immoral, as the plagiarizer is (at least implicitly) claiming authorship of someone else's work, and is also a violation of the licensing terms (attribution is required). As an editor who has seen their contributions to Misplaced Pages plagiarized, I do not expect widespread recognition of my work, but I do resent some else taking credit for it. ] 17:10, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
:::I wouldn't go so far as to call it immoral, which implies deliberate malfeasance. Copyright law is complicated. There are a myriad of permissive licenses in use, some of which require attribution, some of which don't. It's unrealistic to expect most people to understand anything beyond "Misplaced Pages is free".
:::What bothers me more is when you explain to somebody that it's OK that they're using your stuff but they need to add an attribution and they argue with you. That's when it crosses the line from ignorance to deliberate. ] ] 17:22, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
::::On your first point {{greentext|Misplaced Pages is free}}, ] doesn't explain that Misplaced Pages's content is copyrighted (unless you go into one of the policy links), and the footer is the kind of thing I'd ignore on any other website. I wonder if it could be reworded to something like{{silver|You are free to reuse text under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply}}.
::::<br>
::::Though with most of the instances of plagiarism there are no measures we could take to prevent plagiarists. ''']]''' 18:07, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
:::::enwiki gets about 400 million page views per day. ] gets about 4500 per day. So, to a reasonable approximation, nobody reads it. ] ] 18:27, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
:::100% agree with Donald. --] (]) 13:53, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
::I would call it immoral. It's not just wronging the people who put the labour into writing an article, who are having their hard work done for the commons repackaged for private profit without even the slightest acknowledgment, it is also wronging the people that read/watch/listen to the creator, as they are being intentionally deprived of the knowledge of where this information is coming from and where they can go to verify the information. I also disagree that what they did is "sharing"; they didn't link to this article or say they got their script from here, but instead took the credit for it and profited off it. That's not sharing, that's appropriation. Honestly I find the idea that I should be grateful that someone ripped off my work rather insulting. --] (]) 13:51, 9 January 2025 (UTC)


== Query to find uncategorized Commons images used on a Misplaced Pages ==
I know all Administrators are not all Drunk-With-Power-Trigger-Happy-Nazis, many of you do an excellent job and you know who you are.


Hello, before I added a category, file was uncategorized on Commons, but was used on a page on the Greek language wikipedia. Maybe using Petscan?, is there a way of searching say all pages in the category Museums in Greece, and its subcategories, to list images used on those pages that are uncategorized in Commons? Thank you, ] (]) 08:06, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
In closing: Create, don’t Destroy. Make a distinction between “what is right, and what is easy”. Be enriched and enrich others with the knowledge of other people.


:{{ping|Maculosae tegmine lyncis}} Something like this seems to already exist: ]. ] (]) 18:21, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
And keep that finger off the trigger.


== Moving another user's essay to project space ==
(If I don't cop flack for this one, I will climb the Reichtag Bulding in a Spiderman outfit).
<!--]]]-->


I'd had it in mind for quite some time to write an essay in project space about announcements. I've seen entire sections consisting of sentences with the word "announced" in them, giving the impression that the subject's history consists not of events and actions at all but only of announcements that such events or actions were planned, leaving the reader to wonder whether any of them ever actually happened. I wanted to exhort people who add to an article, in November 2024, "In November 2024 it was announced that X would be joining the series as a regular character in the new season" to return after the new season begins and ''replace'' the text about the announcement with "In April 2025, X joined the series as a regular character" or, if X didn't join the series after all, to remove the sentence as probably irrelevant, unless some mention is to be made of why X's addition to the series didn't come to pass.
] 07:28, 29 June 2006 (UTC)


So one day recently I sat down to begin such an essay, but first checked the status of the obvious shortcut, ]{{emdash}}and found that it already existed as a redirect to ] belonging to ]. That essay is quite thorough and covers most of the ground that I had had in mind, and I think it would be useful to have it in project space. So, while noting that that user hadn't edited in over two years but thinking the might see and respond to a ping if they even ''read'' Misplaced Pages while logged in, I went to their talk page to leave basically the same message that I've written here, to ask if they would be averse to having their essay moved to project space.
* See also ], begun 6 June. User:Ceyockey (<small>'']''</small>) 23:33, 27 June 2006 (UTC)


That was four weeks ago, and there've been no edits in that time by the user. I was wondering whether it would be reasonable, without express permission, either to move or copy the essay to project space and retarget ] there. Also, if that were to happen, I'm seeking a good title. Floating around in my head:
== Misplaced Pages and "Information Drift" ==
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
] (]) 17:35, 30 December 2024 (UTC)
:What a good notion! That type of language in articles irks me too. Especially personal life sections that read "they announced they were engaged, they announced the wedding date, they got married, they announced they were expecting, they had a baby" and so on. (Sorry I don't have an answer to your questions, but I do like the idea.) ]&nbsp;] 23:25, 30 December 2024 (UTC)
::Articles about companies, particularly finance companies, drive me crazy in that way. You'd think from some of their articles that they're more noted for their announcements than for what they've actually done. "In October 2018, ABC announced that they were acquiring at 30% share in GHI. In February 2019, they announced the coming release of version 5 of their product." Did the GHI buy-in ever happen? Did they ever release version 5? Who knows??? The article doesn't say! ] (]) 00:02, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
:::Even more annoying is when media happily passes on announcements, but fails to pay any attention when they actually happen, so we're left sourceless. ]&nbsp;] 00:20, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
::::To go off a bit on a tangent, this is like when the media report someone's arrest (which goes on to be covered here) and then never follow up (leaving Misplaced Pages readers in the lurch). ] (]) 00:39, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
:I wouldn't mess with someone else's user space without asking them first (with the obvious exception of reverting vandalism), there might be a reason they didn't want it in project space. I do agree that this is an issue in articles though. ] (]) 19:42, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
::The question appears to be about whether it's okay, after you have asked them, waited a month, and still not gotten a response. ] (]) 02:50, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:I would also suggest not moving people's userspace essays to mainspace. Looks like the shortcut did a good job here of directing you to the correct location. Hopefully that happens a lot in these types of situations. –] <small>(])</small> 22:39, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
::I would agree that moving things out of someone’s userspace without their OK is bad form.
::That said… no one “owns” the topic (whether that topic is for an essay or for an article). Consider writing your own essay/article on the topic (in your own userspace), and moving ''that'' to Mainspace. Then notify the other editor so they can amend your work if they want to (that is up to them). ] (]) 14:03, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
:::People have been trying to get me to move ] to project space for years. I keep refusing because it's my own personal opinion and I don't want people editing my opinion (which they do anyway, but at least I feel justified reverting those in my userspace). I once had somebody hijack the ] redirect and point it to their own essay (quickly reverted). I once had somebody put the redirect up for deletion (quickly closed as keep). ] ] 15:11, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
::::meh… Personally, I think personal essays should be marked as “User” and not “WP” (even for a shortcut) but whatever. ] (]) 20:35, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
::::You had a good idea that's been linked by lots of people, including me. Surely the Misplaced Pages way is to share it with the rest of us? ] (]) 20:59, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
:I like the Stuff finally happens title. Either rewrite so you're not using the userspace version, or move it (I think since you've asked, this can count as being bold) ] (]) 19:14, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
:It usually is considered a bit rude to move something without receiving permission. At the same time since they haven't edited more than minimally in nine years that really is not that big a concern, and ultimately all pages belong to the community. Since content is licensed under CC BY-SA and the GFDL, you could also both move the page and then copy-back an archived version to the original location under ] that they would retain more control over <small>this has been done before</small>.
:Unless you think updates are needed though it probably isn't necessary since the primary distinction between user and projectspace essays is the degree of control exerted over the contents of the essay by the original author. Granted, projectspace is a little more restrictive compared to userspace, but that distinction is not really important to this case. ] (]) 20:13, 6 January 2025 (UTC)


== How do I make a separate "userpage" ==
A friend of mine who was considerably older would remark on how the dictionary had changed. He had me go to a 1920s edition of a dictionary and look up several words and then to a current version and look up certain words. The definitions had changed, sometimes to a meaning almost opposite the older one. When looking at the ] Talk page, there was a comment made about relying on information from someone you talked to on a bus vs a ''roomful of experts''. It occurred to me that Misplaced Pages, with its roomful of experts, can be a force to slow societal information drift. There is some drift that has to occur, such as in technical and scientific areas... who would trust the 1920s encylopedia on that kind of information? However, prior to this democritization of knowledge, a single, concerted, player could mold definitions and meanings to turn them around, as in the novel ]. It appears to me that Misplaced Pages, with its "roomful of experts" could slow that process and make it more difficult for disinformation merchants to peddle their wares. Of course, without the diligent editing and tracking that is being done by the community at this time, it could be a force for quite the opposite.


Ive seen people make separate pages that are still attached to their user, like this one: ] and I never knew how to make pages like this. Can someone please tell me how?
] 15:51, 28 June 2006 (UTC)


==Misplaced Pages and the ]==
]
I found this cartoon on Wiki Commons. 3 members of the KKK under a wiki logo... is this funny? ] 20:58, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
:While I can't speak for the creator, I believe that it may instead be a depiction of a Nazareno ; the other symbols are clearly based on the ], so the allusion is probably to the Misplaced Pages 'cabal' as a conspiracy theory. ] 00:47, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
:The captions are in French. Translated, they read:
::A cabal? What cabal?
::Have you heard of any cabal?
::Of course not, there isn't any cabal.
:This is of course a reference to ] and more specifically ]. ] 04:15, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
:Frankly, I find this a little sad. Hell, used to be that people could discern between perfectly acceptable complex secret societies with mysterious, yet undeniably sinister intentions, and a bunch of barely literate loudmouth rednecks with bad teeth, decked up in crumpled bedsheets sheets stained with specks of tobacco juice and moonshine. What's the world coming to? -- ] 19:08, 27 June 2006 (UTC)


Thanks, ] (]) 16:46, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
== Wikimania information: self-reference? ==


:Easy, peasy. Just type "User:Tenebre.Rosso.Sangue995320/whatever" into the search box and hit return. That'll take you to a page that says "Misplaced Pages does not have a user page with this exact name" with a "Start the User:Tenebre.Rosso.Sangue995320/Whatever page" link. Click the link and off you go. ] ] 16:51, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
My apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere, but I have issues with how the Wikimania announcement is displayed. First of all, I think it's unattractive, imposing quite a bit of white space. Second, since it appears on the article page itself, I think it might be a violation, in principle, of ]. Even though it's only a temporary posting, is there a better way to announce it?--] 02:13, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
::Thank you! ] (]) 16:55, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
::As an alternative, you could put a link on your user page that looks like <code><nowiki>]</nowiki></code>. That'll show up as a redlink. Click it and you'll be in the same place you were before. ] ] 16:57, 3 January 2025 (UTC)


== Misplaced Pages 25th anniversary ==
:] applies only to article content, not to the interface. If you would like to suggest it be removed, try asking at ]. (Note that it only displays for the small percentage of our audience that's actually registered.) —] (]&nbsp;•&nbsp;]) 04:12, 26 June 2006 (UTC)


As English WP is coming up to this in a few days - are preparations being made?
== Vital categories which I have created were deleted! ==


Who are the longest serving Wikipedians (ie contributing regularly enough to be so considered)? A check shows there are presently 156 members of the ] (and, I assume, some more who do not choose to join or are unaware of it), so the 25 year equivalent will be smaller still (and the various higher-year groups always will so be, and increase more slowly than the shorter timespan ones). ] (]) 13:31, 4 January 2025 (UTC)
Recently, most categories which play a vital role in Misplaced Pages in terms of the number of edits made by users were deleted. Please view this page ] under sub-section 1.8. Moerover, please view the comments which I made about this ]. I hope to receive positive feedback about this as I strongly believe that these types of categories should make a return to Misplaced Pages. There is absolutely no harm in including these into the project. --<font style="background:gold">]]</font><sup><font style="background:yellow">]</font></sup> 05:15, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
:With the caveat that the account creation info stored in the database may not be accurate for the oldest accounts (as I understand it, they may be even older if they transitioned from the pre-MediaWiki software, or the information might be blank), see ] for a list of the oldest accounts who have made an edit in the last 30 days. ] (]) 18:54, 4 January 2025 (UTC)
:Actually, most people seem to think that those categories '''didn't''' play a vital role in Misplaced Pages. They don't seem to have helped build an encyclopedia at all.-] 05:37, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
:We're coming up to our 24th anniversary ... ] (]) 14:38, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
::I agree. They were quite unnecessary. If users want to say how many edits they've made on their user pages, which many - including me - do, they certainly don't need categories to do so. As to them playing a vital role in Misplaced Pages, well... that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. The deletion of these categories will not harm Misplaced Pages. ]...''<small><font color="#008822">]</font></small>'' 09:08, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
:The 25th anniversary is in a year, Misplaced Pages was founded in 2001. ] (]) 16:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:I personally don't think that edit counting is a productive activity and it is quite misleading. Quality of edits is not related in any meaningful way to quantity of edits. How much you contribute is not important but rather whether contributions can be built on by others and have a lasting nature as encyclopedic content. User:Ceyockey (<small>'']''</small>) 10:46, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
:Misplaced Pages was founded in 2001. It’s almost been around for ''24'' years. ] (]) 04:10, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
::Again, I agree. It might be interesting for the individual to know "hey, I've just made my 5,000th edit!" - which is why so many do ike to keep track - but it can misleadingly lead to the assumption that more = better, i.e., "editcountitis". If number of edits alone was indicative, I'd be one of the best editors on WP, but there are editors with fewer than 1000 edits whom I'll readily admit are far, far better. Unfortunately, there's no way to quantify quality. ]...''<small><font color="#008822">]</font></small>'' 00:56, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
::Even in a year's time I don't think we should be doing much to celebrate. Maybe do that if Misplaced Pages is still going strong when all of the people who were around at the beginning are dead. That would be after a lot more than 25 years, and would show that Misplaced Pages has life of its own apart from the people that make it up. Many institutions have been around for a lot more than 25 years. ] (]) 10:57, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:Personally I don't mind the categories, and if you don't want to use them, don't use them. CFD, by nature, gets the least exposure while under debate, as people don't often look at the actuall category page once they've categorized something; so it's possible further consensus building could be helpful. The CFD was properly closed, and a ] would not be useful at this time, btw. — ] <sup>]</sup> 13:51, 24 June 2006 (UTC)


== Year in review sources ==
== so... um... i'm sitting here and i party all by myself... ==


I'm trying to fill out a list of "year in review" publications and I'm finding it difficult. I wanted to reach out and see if anyone knows any sources that come out annually (whether discontinued or still in publication) that summarize the previous year in a given field. The list so far is at ] and I'd really appreciate any suggestions or additions so we can get more scholarly and high quality sources on articles about years. ] (]) 02:01, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
and i wonder... is wikipedia a place where partyesque peeps hang out?! being a swede and stuff i'm celebrating "midsommar" today and well, to be honest: i'm bored to tears!


:I wonder if ] covers what you want. ] (]) 02:52, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
--] 19:37, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
::I checked a few and there are a lot of articles about different subjects like you'd expect in a journal, but it doesn't look like they have anything to the effect of "here are the main takeaways/developments from this year". ] (]) 18:14, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:There’s a French series of this I’ve encountered but I’m not sure how useful that would be. ] (]) 17:30, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::Depends on what it covers. If it's comprehensive and covers a global scope, that would be incredibly useful. If it's specifically about France, I'm also interested in finding some that are country-specific for articles like ]. ] (]) 18:16, 8 January 2025 (UTC)


== Red flag? ==
Yeah, um… I was wondering, would it help Misplaced Pages, if I donated blood? I mean… would you accept it?


{{archive top|1=] is now ]. There is nothing more to do here. ] (]) 19:57, 6 January 2025 (UTC) }}
] 00:03, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
] : red flag?
:I'm sorry, but we can't accept your blood. It's bad for the hard disk drives.-] 04:02, 26 June 2006 (UTC)


] (]) 07:32, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
::but if you're in the UK, your blood would be welcome at ] 10:59, 27 June 2006 (UTC)


:What makes you think there is a "red flag"? Every edit they have made seems to be reverting blatant vandalism. ] (]) 09:34, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
== Dutch language typo ==
:69.181.17.113, I think anyone looking at this report will find it too cryptic to take any action. All I can see is that this user could use edit summaries more, but I've no idea if that's the red flag that you mention. ] (]) 09:55, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
{{archive bottom}}


== How do I know if this user uses Misplaced Pages for self-promotion? ==
I don't know in which category this fits, so I'm bringing it up here. I've set my preference language to ]. This means that the user contributions also show up in Dutch. There's a typo there. It says "niewere 50" (newer 50), whereas it should say "nieuwere 50" (with a ''u''). Is there a way to fix the typo? ] ]]] 21:30, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
:Yes, there should be. I suggest you file a bug report at ]. —] (]&nbsp;•&nbsp;]) 04:14, 26 June 2006 (UTC)


This user's contributions are very strange. He only adds references to food articles, always recipes from the same website. In fact, I think he writes the recipes himself, since both the recipes and the user are E. Joven. I don't want to accuse anyone, but it also seems suspicious to me. He sometimes replaces pre-existing references with his own. How do I know if this user uses Misplaced Pages for self-promotion? The user: {{u|Emjoven}} – ] 🐒 <small>(])</small> 05:54, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
== Lists ==
:Please provide links to examples. Thanks. ]] 07:03, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
::The links are to a site which says it's run by Ed Joven. The wiki account name is Emjoven. This one's not hard to figure out. ] ] 16:57, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
:::I've reverted the most recent additions (in places where there was already at least as good a ref) and replacements. ] (]) 17:27, 6 January 2025 (UTC)


== Is there a minimum edit count for ArbCom? ==
I want to see if anyone has opinions on good rules for whether lists should be allowed on Misplaced Pages. I think it is a popular quote that categories make lists redundant. Anyone have any opinions?? ] 02:15, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
*Note that this subject was brought to my attention when I saw ]. ] 02:26, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
**Regarding the general comment of '''This list is made redundant by a category''', there is one possible objection someone might make '''depending on what the list is''', which is that '''categories sort pages alphabetically''' while the '''list sorts the items in a special order, such as the Presidents of the United States in the order they served'''. A thing you could do '''theoretically''' is to make the category sort the items in the special order. Note that if a random list is sorted in an order like this and you want to look an item up by name, you could simply use the '''Control+F''' option. ] 02:42, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
:Generally, I think a list is more appropriate where it can provide context, ordering, and details about each list item that can't be expressed in a category. It might also be appropriate if adding each article to a category for that purpose would be really strange. ] 04:11, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
* There are a number of lists which probably are made redundant by categories, and perhaps these should go. However, as well as the reasons listed above there is the issue that lists can include items which do not have articles. --<font color="blue">]</font><font color="#0080A0">]</font><small> (])</small> 08:24, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
Lists should only go if they contain no information which is not in the category (which means only the dregs of the lists) ''and'' they are no longer being updated. Otherwise, leave people free to choose which to use. Just because they might not make the same choice about how to access information as you would, that doesn't mean their preference is misguided. ] 22:20, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
::A relevant guideline is at ], although it focuses on when they're useful, not what to do when they duplicate each other. ] 22:26, 26 June 2006 (UTC)


And where do I ask questions like this?
:::It's perhaps worth noting that many Misplaced Pages mirrors do not implement categories. IMO, this leads to a fairly compelling argument in the other direction. -- ] <small>(])</small> 23:07, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
] (]) 16:39, 7 January 2025 (UTC)


:Hey there @]. You can ask simple questions like this at the ] if you want. As for the requirements to run as a candidate in the yearly arbcom elections, there's surely a list of official requirements somewhere on one of the ] pages. I'd highly recommend becoming an admin first though, and the practical minimum edit count for becoming an admin based on who has passed recently is around 8,000 edits. Hope this helps. –] <small>(])</small> 16:43, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
::::<s>lists are also very useful if there are lots of red links showing articles that need to be created in cases where there are people actively expanding a topic (like a wikiproject). <small><i><font color="#990000">]</font> - <font color="#555555">]</font></i></small> 23:51, 26 June 2006 (UTC)</s> oop. just realised MarkS already said that. <small><i><font color="#990000">]</font> - <font color="#555555">]</font></i></small> 23:55, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
:] and ] are probably better venues for questions like that. ] covers your question, {{tq|'''Candidates''': Registered account with 500 mainspace edits that is not prevented from submitting their candidacy by a block or ban, meets Foundation's Access to nonpublic personal data policy, and has disclosed alternate accounts (or disclosed legitimate accounts to Arbcom). Arbitrators may not serve as members of either the Ombuds Commission or the WMF Case Review Committee while serving as arbitrators. Withdrawn or disqualified candidates will be listed in their own section on the candidates page unless their candidate page can be deleted under WP:G7.}} ] (]) 16:43, 7 January 2025 (UTC)


== ] intending to "identify and target" editors ==
== Further evidence that Misplaced Pages is #1 in college plagiarism ==
{{tracked|T383236}}
Not sure where to post this, or whether I'm overreacting, but I find this recent article by '']'' very concerning. . It outlines how the ] is going to (or is already) attempting to identify editors who are {{tq|'abusing their position' by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic}}. Methods of identification include:
* facial recognition software (not sure how this would work, considering most don't post their faces here) and a database of hacked usernames and passwords
* creating fake accounts to lure editors into revealing personal information or clicking malicious tracking links
* checking for resuse of usernames/passwords in breached databases
* more found in their slideshow for this
] (])<sup><span style="color: green"><small>Ping me!</small></span></sup> 23:28, 7 January 2025 (UTC)


:May I suggest only clicking those two external links if you have a VPN on. They are very clear in these documents that they plan to harvest Wikimedian IP addresses using bait links that they control. –] <small>(])</small> 23:57, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
"Katherine Tredwell, history of science professor, turned in 16 students for plagiarism on their final papers for her spring class, History of Science Since the 17th Century. '''She said nine of the cases''', all of which are still being investigated, involved misuse of Misplaced Pages, the popular online encyclopedia. Tredwell said that, while Internet plagiarism is hardly new, the faculty as a whole should take notice of the incident." UWire, 6/21/06
::Actually, I think those two links are to the newspaper that did the investigative reporting, rather than the Heritage Foundation. So not as risky as I thought. –] <small>(])</small> 00:10, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:::Yes, those links point to the website of ''The Forward'', a 127-year-old publication known in Yiddish as ''פֿאָרווערטס'' and formerly known in English as ''The Jewish Daily Forward''. Definitely not a Heritage Foundation property! ] (]) 03:09, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::::True, but to be fair to the Heritage Foundation, The Forward also harvests "", the bait being interesting and informative articles by sensible reporters. ] (]) 09:11, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:Suspected IP-grabber domains are eligible for the ] (and the local one as well). Suspicious links can be opened with tools like https://urlscan.io/. Make sure your password is long, strong, and unique, and if you don't have access to two-factor authentication you can request it at ]. You should also use a Misplaced Pages-specific (or at least Misplaced Pages-identity-specific) email address. This advice also applies to other places where you talk about Misplaced Pages or use the same identity. If you see something suspicious, report it to an administrator/functionary/steward/arb/etc. ] (]) 00:41, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::Maybe all this should also be noted in a more visible place like ]? (I have now done so). ] ] 04:08, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::Here's the deal, they don't plan on throwing the malicious links in (only) contentious articles. They are going to identify "targets", and then edit other topics the "targets" are interested in. That is when the bad sources will enter pages with fewer watchers (to discern which GET to associate with the suspected user).
::Potential targets should click links on one device with a vpn, and edit on a different device.
::This isn't new, one of our CUs had to step down because they were doing the same to try to catch UPE a few years ago, and I assume other groups have been doing so for awhile. ] (]) 06:51, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:::I was thinking that they were probably going to pose as editors on talk pages, and engage in debates where'd they post links, partially hidden like this: , which looks like it goes to an AP News site, which would be common on these sort of talk pages, but actually goes to example.com. (replacable with a tracking link). Most editors wouldn't think to hover over it to check the address. ] (])<sup><span style="color: green"><small>Ping me!</small></span></sup> 16:39, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:*If they're going to be using domains they control for this, should we start adding Heritage Foundation domains to the spam blacklist? This might require going to ] to deprecate their website, which is currently used on and is probably deprecable on its (dis-)merits in the first place. A few of their other domains are listed on the page for them. That wouldn't prevent them from creating additional honeypot domains, of course, but I don't see how we can continue to link to their website if they're using it in this manner. --] (]) 13:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:*:It would be safe to assume that their main domains would also participate in the cookie tracking, especially seeing as it is so heavily linked. I agree that their known domains should be deprecated as likely malicious. ] (]) 15:52, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:*::Deprecating and blacklisting the link globally will protect editors and readers from accidentally clicking the links. This is a serious privacy concern if the Heritage Foundation collects data from visitors. ] (]) 03:45, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:*:Heritage Foundation seems to be making not only a threat against our ] policy, but threatening retribution against wikipedia editors for building consensus on perrenial source reliability. I think blacklisting HF domains, and any subsequent honeypot domains is a sensible idea ] (]) 17:10, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:Sigh. Nice work by Forward. ] (]) 05:45, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::@] that is a useful site, I revert a lot of spam 'cunningly disguised' as a genuine link.
::I'm in the UK. Honestly, if they want my ip they can have it. I'm moving soon lol. ] (]) 08:02, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:I'm not familiar with US law, but is something like {{tq|creating fake accounts to lure editors into revealing personal information or clicking malicious tracking links}} legal? ] (]) 09:19, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::@] I'm wondering if those companies, proudly displayed at the end of the document, are aware of their connection with this 'plan'? ] (]) 09:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:::Yeah, I just had to re-read ] to make sure it's definition hadn't changed... ] (]) 09:31, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::::Honestly I don't want to wait on US law to (maybe) protect our editors. We should be proactively blocking Heritage Foundation domains from interacting with en.wp using whatever means are necessary. ] (]) 14:31, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:::::All Wikimedia wikis too. We can't let everyone accidentally access that data-collecting nonsense. ] (]) 08:35, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
::Considering they're the people behind Project 2025, and Trump is coming to power, I do not have too much trust in relying on US law. ] (])<sup><span style="color: green"><small>Ping me!</small></span></sup> 16:19, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::It's probably a misuse of computer systems (what ] was charged with) and violates the TOS. WMF can and should sue Heritage if they try to pull this kind of shit. ] (]/]) 21:00, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:I'm not worried for myself - I edit with my real name and am pretty sure I have freely given away enough information to enable anyone to distinguish me from anyone else who shares my name - but I'm worried for those who live under more repressive regimes. Some of those are in prison because of what they have said on Misplaced Pages, and many live under regimes that the Heritage Foundation would be vehemently opposed to. ] (]) 14:33, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::Yeah kind of the same situation here. While my username is not directly my personal name it's the same one I use on literally all platforms and is easily connected to my real-world identity. I don't consider myself as an anonymous editor. But we do need to protect anonymous editors. And not just in what we conventionally see as "repressive regimes" either. I'd say that there are considerable threats to the safety of anonymous editors in the United States from such a mass dox. ] (]) 14:36, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::On the contrary, this doxxing campaign, apparently led by a former FBI agent and organized by a US-based organization, is specifically targeting editors in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict topic area, who are likely to face threats from the "democratic" regimes of the western world, namely those with expansive antisemitism definitions and where anti-Palestinian sentiment is rampant among the media, political and corporate class. It is the editors based there who everyone should be worried about. ] (]) 15:07, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:::Sigh, take caution North American editors, you will need to arm up & watch your backs with these people. There's a clear agenda being pushed to shut down those who would combat disinformation / advocate fact checking, and that's either via ballot box or the ammo box. ] (]) 15:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::::Arming individual Wikipedians does not seem like a particularly effective response to what is being threatened here. <sub>signed, </sub>] <sup>]</sup> 16:35, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:::::Arming the community with information is more our schtick. "Be afraid!" may work for click media, but a check at RSNP is always a wiser place to start. ] (]) 17:55, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:With regards to the facial recognition software, it is probably simple enough to run it through the many meetup photos we conveniently provide and categorize on Commons, sometimes even helpfully linking faces to usernames and perhaps even real names already. ] (]) 15:46, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::I'm sure these guys are not totally clueless, but probably best if we don't give them any ideas they hadn't allready thought of. ] ] 15:52, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:::I considered that, but this one seems obvious enough for them given facial recognition is already mentioned in their document, and yet also probably something worth making editors more aware of. ] (]) 15:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::::Maybe it isn't a good idea to match those faces to usernames? ] (]) 16:56, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
* My real name is Pat Sajak and I live in LA. ]] 15:54, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*:]. ] (]) 15:57, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*:Easy there fuzzy little man-peach. Ever drunk ] from a shoe? ] (]) 16:04, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*::I'm Old Gregg! ] (]) 17:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)


:Facial recognition...
:Maybe by the camera of ur devices？--] (]) 14:45, 9 January 2025 (UTC)


A range block is in order, at the very least, lets be preventative. ] (]) 15:57, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
9/16 is pretty damn good.
* The report says that they're going to use a "database of hacked usernames and passwords". Do we know whether this is from other websites who have been hacked, or whether there's been a data breach at Misplaced Pages itself? ] (])<sup><span style="color: green"><small>Ping me!</small></span></sup> 16:21, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*:There is also a possibility they're making at least some shit up. ] (]) 16:23, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*::Yes, or it's sloppy reporting. As far as I can see it's the only place where passwords are mentioned. ] (]) 16:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*::The combination of malicious tracking links (fairly clever) and facial-recognition technology (rather useless for what they're trying to do here) suggests that they have some people who know what they're doing, but that their leadership (or at least their communications lead) is easily fooled by buzzwordy tech and has no idea what they're doing. <sub>signed, </sub>] <sup>]</sup> 16:32, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*:::It's a pitch deck to potential donors who are presumably not super tech savvy, so things were probably kept simple and buzzy to both not overwhelm an be attractive. -- ] - <sup>]</sup>/<sub>]</sub> 16:35, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*::::Sure, but it seems like a red flag that facial recognition technology is anywhere near the slide deck. They may as well threaten us with "the blockchain". <sub>signed, </sub>] <sup>]</sup> 16:38, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*:::::I don't think that's right. If they can use facial recognition successfully to de-anonymize an editor they may be able to use various pressure tactics against that editor. I think their goal, whether through facial recognition and tracking links is to de-anonymize. They will meet with varying success but I definitely can imagine (with one way already listed above) ways facial recognition could be a threat to otherwise anonymous editors. Best, ] (]) 16:50, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*::::::My sense is that the overlap between editors that they are trying to de-anonymize and editors that can be meaningfully linked to images of themselves is near zero. <sub>signed, </sub>] <sup>]</sup> 16:53, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*:::::::The plan is to learn enough about "targets" through web tracking and comparison to stolen user data to identify potential Facebook or Twitter accounts. They will then attempt to match personality profiles of editors with what they learn from these other sources - including pictures. ] (]) 17:07, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*:It would not be particularly difficult to see if someone's username is also their email, if an email is listed on their userpage, or to obtain an email if they reply to a Misplaced Pages email (IIRC your email is kept anonymous as long as you do not reply) and then comparing that to emails in publicized data breachs and trying any associated passwords. People should be checking https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and/or using any in-built tools for this in their password managers to see if this might apply to them and changing passwords as required. -- ] - <sup>]</sup>/<sub>]</sub> 16:30, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*::Also, editors should not respond to Misplaced Pages emails that look like spam or nonsense out of politeness (e.g. "I think you have the wrong email?") if they want to be extra cautious. -- ] - <sup>]</sup>/<sub>]</sub> 16:33, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*:::Also, editors can choose to reply on someone's User talk page instead of replying by email. ] (]) 18:21, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*:There were recent ] on the Internet Archive. Many editors here often use their book loaning service. I urge them to change their email address and password if it is similar to that of the archive. ] (]) 10:48, 9 January 2025 (UTC)


:Are T&S aware of this? ] (]) 16:30, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
| 19:53, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
::Do they have an on-WP "place"? ] (]) 16:33, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:I'm impressed that they'd turn to us first for their plagiarism. Seriously, Misplaced Pages's complete content is available for download and processing by standard plagiarism detection software systems. If they'd bothered to run these submissions through such a system then all Misplaced Pages-based plagiarisms would have been detected easily. ] 22:00, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
::An email was sent by RoySmith a couple minutes ago, see the phab task. ] (])<sup><span style="color: green"><small>Ping me!</small></span></sup> 16:36, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::Yes, I've already informed them of it. ]&nbsp;(she/her&nbsp;•&nbsp;]) 19:57, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*Is there a way to poison link harvesting? ] (]) 16:47, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*:Click through using a different device on a vpn. Send various other IPs through to muddy the waters. Realistically, if they create a fake publisher with a fake book about an obscure topic that they think a "target" will argue about, only a few hits will exist to the link, and the IP of the editor will be exposed. Misplaced Pages really should provide a proxy that disables Javascript when clicking through to links. This would hide all editor IPs. ] (]) 17:10, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
*::I like the idea of being able to open links through wikipedia so to speak. ] (]) 17:20, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
I think we should put a note about this on ] to make more people aware. ] (]) 17:49, 8 January 2025 (UTC)


:It's on Jimbo's talk, AN, ANI and VP(m). T:CENT seems way overboard at this point. ] (]) 17:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:That could be Misplaced Pages's new slogan: "More college cheaters plagiarize from Misplaced Pages than from any other source!" ] 22:23, 26 June 2006 (UTC)


=== Maintaining anonymity on wikipedia ===
::It's certainly the case - in the 101 course I was a T.A. for, we caught probly about 30 students cheating off wikipedia because they had all copied the same (fairly nonsensical) sentence. So when the same phrase showed up a bunch of times, but didn't really mean anything, we became suspicious and then found the same phrase in Misplaced Pages. ] 16:58, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
Is there any essay with tips to protect anonymity/privacy on wikipedia? I know about ] but proactive tips could also be helpful.
In general, don't think this heritage slide deck is that useful and unlikely to work, but after other similar issues (see the ] case), it would be nice if we have useful tips to make sure bad actors can't target folks who wanna keep their wikipedia lives separate from their other life. ] (]) 16:54, 8 January 2025 (UTC)


:@] has a good section on her user page ] ] (]) 16:59, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
== Yay ==
:{{ec}}The problem with that would be that bad actors could read it too to work out ways round it. Personally I work on the principle that anyone determined enough can find out who I am anyway so I don't even try to be anonymous, but I understand why that doesn't work for everyone. ] (]) 17:02, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::Same here, if they can be arsed they will manage it. Especially (referring back to the India crap) if you have a government on your side. ] (]) 17:15, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:::Yes, making it more difficult at an individual level to identify you makes it more difficult, and therefore costly, at a global level to identify editors. Best, — ''']''' <sup><small style="border-bottom:1px solid">]</small></sup> 19:13, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:I think an important thing to understand here is that the baseline risk of being outed, even if you do absolutely everything right, is higher than a lot of people realize. There are over 100 volunteers with the ability to view your IP, and an order of magnitude more who pose subtler but equally dangerous risks ]. All of these people are vulnerable to bribery, coercion, threats, deceit, and violence, same as anyone else. Now, a difference here is that most of those attack vectors are actual felonies in the US. Heritage, despite its willingness to engage in mustache-twirling levels of evil scheming, probably does not want to have its people go to prison, and get its own ] pierced. They do have that reference to cracking accounts, which is a crime, but it's not clear how serious they are about it; they could also mean it in the sense of not cracking but correlation attacks, e.g. matching a username to someone's Facebook URL. But most of what they're talking about is, essentially, the maximally invasive strategy that doesn't blatantly violate any criminal laws.{{pb}}There are people out there who don't give a fuck about violating criminal laws. Because they're ideologues, because they're unstable, because they're foreign agents, whichever. There is no way to mitigate that risk. Even completely abandoning the system of volunteer access to private information would just reduce the risk, not make it go away. So people who are reading this news and are really scared, who are thinking "My life would be over if I got outed like this", should understand that even if we came up with technical steps to mitigate every idea Heritage has, their IP is still no more secure than the weakest link in the entire cross-wiki system of privileged accounts, and that's not something we can fix, because vulnerability to money, lies, and violence is a bug in human.exe, not in MediaWiki. Remember that ] offers only two 100% effective strategies: Out yourself, or don't edit. Anything else is taking a gamble. <span style="font-family:courier"> -- ]</span><sup class="nowrap">&#91;]]</sup> <small>(])</small> 17:59, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::@], maybe the strategy all along, is to scare people into abandoning editing Misplaced Pages? All they need to do is produce a low quality PDF, throw in a bunch of scare quotes, link to their partners that will help them dox, and bobs your uncle. Job done. They could even open some throw away accounts and make it obvious they are trying to trap people, without actually doing any trapping. ] (]) 19:41, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
::I completely agree with Tamzin here. As one of the reportedly top pro-Hamas editors who hijacked Misplaced Pages's narrative, or whatever it was, and someone with no expectation of online privacy, I think maintaining a "fuck those guys" stance towards these kinds of efforts to interfere with Misplaced Pages helps to keep your eye on the ball. If someone is afraid of being outed, don't edit in the PIA topic area. Anyone who follows policy and guidelines in the topic area and simply summarizes the contents of reliable sources etc. will be targeted by someone at some point, labelled pro-Palestinian, or pro-Hamas, or antisemitic etc. by easily manipulated credulous fools, racist ultranationalists, radicalized youth, sociopathic POS MFs who celebrate violence and destruction, offensively polite inauthentic extremists etc. It has always been like this. The volume has been turned up a bit recently, presumably to distract from all the death and destruction and/or monetize it via online attention or donations to ridiculous projects camouflaged as righteous missions. But I encourage people to edit in the topic area without being afraid. Where else are you going to encounter so many interesting people and have a chance to be casually defamed by the world's richest man? ] (]) 04:25, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:::Not being able to create a non-gambling scenario doesn't mean we shouldn't try to weigh the games in our favor. Let's not just say fuck those guys in a way that means we don't bother making them try a little. ] (]) 05:58, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
::::Oh absolutely. Make them work hard. They might come up with some good ideas. I would even say try to be understanding because for many of the people who support these kinds of efforts, I think this is their happy place where they can come together and think of themselves as good guy victims fighting the good fight against demons, play at being part of the intel community chasing Nazis etc. rather than having to look at and document reality. What's the phrase, mistaking an idea for the world or something. ] (]) 08:13, 9 January 2025 (UTC)


:This may be useful. ] ] (]) 19:31, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Can't we at least redirect it to ]? --<font color="blue">]</font> <sup><font color="orange">]</font></sup> 13:04, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
:Also see ]. ]&nbsp;(she/her&nbsp;•&nbsp;]) 19:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
:It used to do just that. It was deleted by ], apparently out of process, as a "cross-namespace redirect". It was subsequently re-deleted by db-repost after posting on RfD at ]. If you care about this, I suggest that you confront ]. ] 00:13, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
::It was not out of process. Cross-namespace redirects are quite obviously proper speedy deletes. ]|] 03:01, 30 June 2006 (UTC)


Some more media:
== This is confusing - article discussion pages ==
*
* ] (]) 19:29, 8 January 2025 (UTC)


:One would think that reportedly soliciting donations to pay for a project that would violate the WMF's TOU in multiple ways (and maybe the law), would be the kind of thing that would put a 501(c)(3)'s nonprofit exemption at risk. ] (]) 23:20, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Why do the newest discussions on a talk page for any article go to the bottom of that page. Wouldn't you want the newest discussion at the top? The way wikipedia is set up, old discussions which are sometimes irrelevant to the article now that it has changed often get seen first. I think it'd make more sense to put the newer discussions at the top of the page. Of course, that would probably take a lot of work, so maybe it's not worth it.
::It would if the IRS wanted to go after them (they won't). ] (]/]) 23:31, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
--] 16:26, 27 June 2006 (UTC)


=== Spam blacklist? ===
:Misplaced Pages's discussion system is in the process of being rewritten. I suggest you comment at ] if you would like to make suggestions. —] (]&nbsp;•&nbsp;]) 00:41, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
A section was created at ] (]) suggesting that the Heritage Foundation website be deprecated and blacklisted, but it was closed with a message that that was the wrong board. Let's figure out if we want to do this and what the right board is. I think the right board might be an RFC at ]. The text of the RFC could be something like {{tq|Due to , should all known Heritage Foundation URLs, including <nowiki>https://heritage.org/</nowiki>, be added to the ]?}} This section can serve as the ]. Thoughts? –] <small>(])</small> 08:53, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
*Yes, but perhaps the wording should be broadened to include any other domains which might reasonably be believed to serve as part of the Heritage IP-harvesting plan. ] (]) 09:08, 9 January 2025 (UTC)


:] is ongoing. ] (]) 09:15, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
== Misplaced Pages Youth Foundation ==
::That discussion appears to be purely about reliability. I was thinking we might need a discussion somewhere approaching the blacklist / editor safety angle of having hyperlinks to their website. –] <small>(])</small> 10:57, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:::Please describe the potential danger from the links which are currently on Misplaced Pages and which would ostensibly be removed following blacklisting—is it connected to the "controlled links" and "redirects" discussed in the pdf?
:::{{tqb|'''Technical Fingerprinting (Controlled Domain Redirects):'''{{blist|Controlled Links: Use redirects to capture IP addresses, browser fingerprints, and device data through a combination of in-browser fingerprinting scripts and HTML5 canvas techniques|Technical Data Collection: Track geolocation, ISP, and network details from clicked links|Cross-Session Tracking: Follow device or browser sessions through repeated visits by setting cookies.|User is only on domain for < 2 seconds prior to redirection}}{{pb}}'''Online Human Intelligence (HUMINT):'''{{blist|Persona Engagement: Engage curated sock puppet accounts to reveal patterns and provoke reactions, information disclosure|Behavioral Manipulation: Push specific topics to expose more identity related details|Cross-Community Targeting: Interact across platforms to gather intelligence from other sources.}}}} —] 11:56, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
::::Yes. Most websites won't do anything with our IP information when we visit. It'll go in a log somewhere and never be looked at again. But a bad actor such as these guys might look at the ], see that it's from wikipedia, maybe even see the exact page you were on before you clicked the link, then do bad things with that info. For example they could cross reference timestamps of edits to a wiki page to their IP server logs and make some educated guesses about whose username that ip is. Then they could do geolocation on the IP to determine a city. Then maybe they already have some information on you in their database from one of the other techniques mentioned in that slide. So now they can use all that together to confirm exactly who you are and harass you. –] <small>(])</small> 12:33, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:::::Noting that links on Misplaced Pages have the set. Modern browsers tend to respect this attribute and do not set the Referrer header for subsequent requests. ] (]) 12:48, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:::::: Do they? Checking just now, I see the pages set <code>referrer=origin</code> but there's no <code>noreferrer</code> in sight. This means sites will get <code>https://en.wikipedia.org/</code> as the referrer, but no information on the specific page. OTOH, if the attacker placed the specific link on only one page, they could use that as a signal. ]] 13:11, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:::::::I am concerned that would require quite a lot of scrutiny to prevent if a referrer can be set within a specific link. This is definitely, in my eyes, a point in the yes blacklist column. ] (]) 13:30, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:::::::@] The <code>noreferrer</code> attribute It is set on a individual link level and ''should'' be set for all external links generated through wikitext on Misplaced Pages. You can kinda verify this by setting up a netcat server <code>nc -lvp 1337</code> and then clicking on to see what headers your browser sends.
:::::::@] Custom referrers cannot be set for a specific link, you can disable referrers for specific links (which is already done for all external links by our MediaWiki installations) or to influence how much information is sent by the browser to other websites (Misplaced Pages chooses to only send origin information, which is the industry standard since it doesn't leak too much PII, however, we could probably raise a ticket on phabricator to set the per-page directive to <code>same-origin</code> to prevent third-party sites from getting any information at all). ] (]) 14:06, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
::::::::Would there be any negative impact to the project for us setting the per-page directive to same-origin? ] (]) 14:14, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:::::::::I don't think so, but there might be tooling that depends on the presence of the referrer header that I am unaware of. The best approach would be to file a phabricator ticket to find out. ] (]) 14:39, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:According to ], there is precedent for "some sites which have been added after independent consensus" (which I read as sites added for sui generis non-spam reasons), and all four linked discussions are from RS/N so it might not be a bad location per se. Whatever the case, if there is an RfC, I think it should authorise a braoder scope as Johnuniq states, to allow the addition of further dox harvesting urls without needing to hold another RfC or similar. ] (]) 09:19, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
::All those discussions started with the question of whether the source is unreliable and the answer was that it is not just unreliable, it is spam. Basically normal RS/N discussions. The discussion I closed started with the question of computer security. And if and when heritage.org and possible other domains are blacklisted it will not be because of simply "spam". —] 10:24, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:What happened to ]? —] 10:16, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
::I don’t care one way or the other on this (as I avoid political articles like the plague). But to play “devil’s advocate”, it strike me that blocking them is exactly what they want… it just feeds their narrative. And it won’t stop them from doxing our editors in response. So it’s kind of pointless, and may cause more harm than good. Have fun storming the castle! ] (]) 15:14, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
:Given the threat to Dox, and use of links to phish for data, yes all links to them might be spam (or in fact malware). Yes, this might well go someway to prevent abuse. ] (]) 15:07, 9 January 2025 (UTC)


== Xavi Simons ==
Me and ] where thinking about creating the Misplaced Pages Youth Foundation. Youth (everyone younger then 17) are a minority among active wikipedians and we are thinking of making a "group", this group will have it's own catagories and userboxes (maybe guidelines). It will also serve to encourage them as wikipedia would benefit from some younger members.


Can somebody answer me at ]. Thanks ] (]) 22:45, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
So what do you think? Do you support or oppose the idea?

] 17:27, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

:I like the idea. It would give younger people a chance to work with other younger people and could increase their participation. My only worry would be whether we want to have a clearly identifiable group of young people. I might result in older users dismissing their ideas and it might attract undesirable users who can hide their identity. If we are confident we can get round these issues I'm all for it. --<font color="blue">]</font><font color="#0080A0">]</font><small> (])</small> 19:46, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

* If I am not mistaken, you have the ''right of assembly''. A variety of voluntary organizations currently exist (see ], ], and ]).
: From what I gather, Misplaced Pages neither endorses nor opposses any of these causes. If you want to start another one, I doubt they can deny you that right (perhaps even for hate speech?) --] 19:52, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

* Just don't call them the .

::Haha, of course not. One of the purposes of the foundation is to stop children from vandalising.

::] 12:36, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

].

] 18:57, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

== Thank yous ==

Do we have any developped "thank you"s? I'd like to have something that I can quickly paste into a forum post or email to someone when I see them cite or refer to Misplaced Pages. Replies here & on my talk please. - ] ] 15:23, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
:Not as far as I know, no. Arguably, this might even discourage further citations, as people think we're making a big deal out of it - I think the best strategy is to follow up with some other relevant Misplaced Pages links of your own. Oh, and please keep discussions in one place only. ] 22:55, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

== Fight vandalism with a smile ==

]
I couldn't help but think of Misplaced Pages when I read on BBC News. Basically, it's a scientific study showing that people behaved strikingly more honestly when they were exposed to an image of human eyes. Perhaps it is this lack of the "human element" that makes us so susceptible as a target for random, pointless vandals. I have no specific ideas of how to implement such a thing, but perhaps if we had more images of friendly faces around, it would discourage this sort of behavior.--] 02:03, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
*Interesting story; it seems Orwell's Big Brother was well aware of this in 1984... --] 02:36, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
* Maybe all we need is a picture of some eyes staring down at the top of the edit screen to remind editors that other people will see what they have done. --<font color="blue">]</font><font color="#0080A0">]</font><small> (])</small> 08:41, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
:This is an interesting study, and one that can be clearly seen and supported by what we experience in face-to-face discussion and on Misplaced Pages. However, I don't see any logical way human eyes or a more human element can be used at Misplaced Pages. Any ideas? --] (]) 18:20, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
::Well, Mark's suggestion of putting something on the edit screen is certainly technically possible; we could have a banner with eyes and something like "Please be careful in editing." Or maybe we could use some sort of cartoon mascot. Or maybe something else altogether: any more thoughts?--] 08:44, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
::Great idea, I think the mona-lisa would work well, or maybe we could create a wikimascot. Then we could put it at the top of every type of edit notice (including longpage, protected page etc.) then have a banner next to it saying "think before you click Save page". ]''']''']]''']''']''']'''] 07:00, ] ] (UTC)

.... What happend to being bold? Why do we want to cow our editors into being cautious? --''']]]''' 07:22, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
:I would not at all want to discourage people from ]. The point of this would just be to reduce blatant, pointless vandalism like "]" by putting a human face on the editing process.--] 21:50, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

== American States ==

What state touches the most other states?
:] and ] tie, each with 8 neighboring states. -- ] <small>(])</small> 13:37, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

== A question about policy ==

What is the policy about writing an article about someone you know? Is there a policy about asking them questions in person for information? How would you cite that? Thanks. ]-] 16:46, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
:I don't think there's an explicit policy about writing about someone you know although aspects of ] pertain, in particular ] (unless you are able to keep to a completely neutral point of view, don't write it). Asking questions in person is not a verifiable source, see ]. -- ] <small>(])</small> 18:42, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

:: It is also possible to run afoul of ] when interviewing someone for an article. The rules can be summarized as "verifiable facts and well-accepted conjectures are OK; most conclusions, analyses, opinions ''etc''. are not" (but read the actual policy!). ] 23:40, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

:::Ok thanks. I think I can write an article completely NPOV, but many vital facts are missing, like his parents names and date of birth. ]-] 00:01, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

== The colour red ==

At one time, wasn't the colour red associated with communism?
If so, why is it associated with the conservative states of the USA? <small>—The preceding ] comment was added by ] (] • ]) {{{2|}}}.</small>

: Have you tried Misplaced Pages's ]? They specialize in knowledge questions, and will try to answer any question in the universe (except how to use Misplaced Pages, since that's what this Help Desk is for). For your convenience, here's the link: ] (when you get there, just select the relevant section, and ask away). I hope this helps. ] ] 02:22, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

:Red is also associated with blood, love, sunsets, heat, Christmas, "stop", and a few thousand other things. See ]. ] 00:17, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

== English articles ==

The English Misplaced Pages obviously has more than double the number of articles than the language in second place, German. Are there any articles written in any other language that are '''not''' written in English as well? I've always been curious. ] 08:00, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
:Yes. See ] for some of these.-] 08:30, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

== Avoiding cut and paste between Misplaced Pages articles ==

I get the general impression that the need to avoid cutting and pasting between Misplaced Pages articles (it loses the attributions that are stored in the page history) is something that it is easy for people to not learn about until rather late in their Misplaced Pages experience. It there a way to make this clearer and to re-emphasise this point?

Also, can someone point me to a '''single''' guideline that covers: splitting and merging articles, the need to preserve page histories, and how this is difficult when splitting and merging articles, the need to preserve redirects as a link to page histories (and not to just delete them), and to '''not cut and paste large chunks of text between Misplaced Pages articles'''? At the moment, this all seems spread around several different pages, which maybe why people don't always realise that this "cut and paste" method contravenes the GFDL for moving pages, and so it also contravenes it for splitting pages. The specific example here is the discussion ]. I would really appreciate it if others could confirm and support what I have said there, or, if I am wrong, to correct what I've said. Thanks. ] 10:04, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
:There is nothing wrong with cutting and pasting large chunks of text where this is necessary for good presentation. However, you should always provide a link back to the place where it was copied from in your edit summary. This way a person who wishes to discover the original authors can still do so. If that page is going to be deleted, the edit history should be pasted on an appropriate talk page. These are just the ad hoc rules that I use, but I think they're adequate. ] 00:13, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
::something else i do if im merging one person's new stub into an existing long article and making the stub into a redirect is add a link to the former stub in the edit summary. <small><i><font color="#990000">]</font> - <font color="#555555">]</font></i></small> 00:31, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

::How would you paste the edit history onto a talk page? Is it just the edit summaries that you are talking about, or all past versions of the page?--] 01:48, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

This is all well and good, but my point is that I sometimes see people '''not''' putting these links in the edit summaries. This completely '''breaks''' the attribution system. As an example, please see ]. What I think would be even better than just providing a link to the article, is to provide a link to the specific break point in the history of the article you have copied the text from. In other words, the edit summary should go something like:
:''"adding text cut from ] during "''
That makes it even clearer what has happened.

The alternative is something like . How on Earth can someone five years from now know where that block of text was cut and pasted from?

I mean, '''I''' know it was from , but that is only because I was aware of the names and histories of the articles. It would be much more difficult for anyone else to trace the history of the large chunk of text that parachuted into ] with what is, quite frankly, an inadequate edit summary.

What made it worse was that there were serious proposals to delete ] along with all the page history! Though your proposal to paste the edit history onto a talk page seems OK, I don't think that is ideal. Is there any guideline that says pasting a page history onto a talk page is an adequate addressing of the problems involved in such cut and paste operations?

The other thing is, once an unlinked edit summary appears, how can it be corrected? Currently, the only way to do it is to revert, and then redo the cut and paste and remember to put the link in the edit summary.

It is all very messy, and I wish more people were aware of how to do such cutting and pasting properly, or to avoid it if they are not sure what to do. How about adding something to the boilerplate warning along the lines of:

''"Content must not violate any copyright and must be based on verifiable sources. If you are moving text between articles, please state this and link to both articles in your edit summary. You agree to license all contributions under the GFDL."''

Though, of course, no-one reads that bit anyway.

I think my basic point is that there is the possibility that the GFDL is broken because there are large chunks of Misplaced Pages where the attribution is no longer possible because a significant minority of Misplaced Pages editors have been editing without being aware of these issues. ] 01:27, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
:I guess the question is really, what can you do about it? It seems technically infeasible to distinguish these edits from legitimate mass removals or additions of content that aren't copy-paste-without-attribution. ] 07:07, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

::Well, I guess you are right, there isn't a lot that can be done about it if you arrive several major edits later. If only a few minor edits have taken place, it might still be feasible to do an edit that correctly attributes the cut-and-paste. Otherwise, I think a note on the talk page is the best solution - maybe a big colourful template box at the top of the talk page saying "This article's edit <history> includes a <copy-paste-without-attribution>. This took place on <date> and can be seen <here>. This text originally came from <here>, and the edit history for that text can be seen at that page's <edit history>. Please see <here> for details of when such copying and pasting is acceptable and when it is not, and the correct format for the edit summaries." (The bracketed stuff would be links to the relevant pages and diffs). Once a few of those templates appeared on talk pages, people might start to get the message.
::Also, could those patrolling RC be made more aware that unintentional damage like this needs to be caught as well as just simple vandalism? I want to make more editors aware of the damaging nature of such well-intentioned efforts. Is there a way to do this? Is there a place where I can get approval for a template like I propose above, and even get someone to design it (I know very little about putting parameters in templates) and also to check something similar doesn't already exist?
::And I second GregRM's question - how exactly does this "putting the edit history on a talk page" work? And I'll repeat my question: is there a Misplaced Pages guideline that approves of this method of putting the edit history of such copy-pasted text on a talk page? It seems very unorthodox. ] 10:38, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

One more point: above you say ''"a person who wishes to discover the original authors can still do so"'' - but it is not a case of doing this to be helpful to someone who might just happen to want to find the original authors - this attribution is '''a requirement under the GFDL'''. See ]:
:''5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS In the combination, you must combine any sections Entitled "History" in the various original documents, forming one section Entitled "History"''
] 10:44, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

I also found ]. ] 11:09, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

:And it is on that page that I found an answer to both my question and Greg's question: ''"you can archive the duplicate page to Talk: space (i.e. by moving it to some suitable title, such as Talk:RandomArticle/OldVersion)."'' So in this case, I think the idea is that if a page needs to be deleted (for whatever reason) the article page and its edit history (and also the talk page and its history, if a talk page exists) can be moved, using the "move" tab, to a subpage of the talk page of the place where the text was moved to. Since the edit history has been preserved, the article can be safely deleted - usually because the name is needed for something else. ] 12:11, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

== Anons flooding AfD ==

] was flooded today with Anon IP comments after an announcement about the AfD was posted on an external website. An Admin suggested sorting through the Anons and posting notes about which ones represented first edits (people who came to ] strictly to influence an AfD). I began to place notes on the page but then realized there might be a problem. Aren't some IP adresses dynamic? Does that mean that some of those Anon IPs might actually be long-time contributors? I want to make sure this page gets a balanced review, not unduly weighted either way. And yes, I know this isn't a vote, but whoever closes this AfD is going to have to wade through tons of material and the idea was that this would help the closing Admin. Can someone shed some light on this? --] 02:16, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
* I was going to suggest using {{tl|AfdAnons}}, but I see that someone else beat me to it. As long as the anonymous contributors are aware that their opinions don't count for very much &mdash; especially given the context within which they got involved &mdash; I say let them be. ] 06:12, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
:Thanks, that works for me. --] 06:14, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

== Computer Help Wiki ==

I work for a charity called U Can Do IT (see ) which provides computer tuition for disabled people in the UK. I am currently trying to start up a wiki at which will fulfill various functions for the charity. Perhaps the most important of these is the provision of a set of Instructions and Course Notes for U Can Do IT students to use while they are taking the course.

I have publicised the wiki amongst other U Can Do IT tutors, but I don't think many of them are particularly experienced in editing wikis. Would any experienced wikipedians be able to provide any help in building the UCanWIKI? Accounts are by invitation only, but there's a link on the main page of the wiki from which you can email me an account request. Even if you don't want to contribute, any general advice (e.g., already-extant sources of computer instructions, general design tips etc etc) would be great.

Thank you! --] 10:49, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

== More cut-and-paste stuff ==

I've added warning and information boxes for one such cut-and-paste series of edits that I caught. Please see ], ] and ]. Does this sort of thing look OK and is it clear? Would a template involving this sort of thing be useful? ] 11:56, 1 July 2006 (UTC)


== How do you browse Misplaced Pages? ==
I often browse Misplaced Pages just for fun and to help improve it with a tweak here and there, but I have gotten tired of browsing via watchlist, I'm not as far advanced a ] to browse recent changes. The Main Page is nice, but what other methods do people use? Random page is a little too random for me. Categories show promise. ] 15:11, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

:It depends what you like doing. If you want to focus on formatting issues, ] is a good place to go. If not, there's all kinds of pages needing different sorts of attention in ]. ]] 15:23, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

::Thanks, Angela. But as usual, an answer breeds another question. In looking at cleanup categories, for instance, there is an underpopulated category American agnostics. A good source is List of agnostics, but what is the current thinking on lists versus categories? Maintain both? Seems like a lot of opportunity for conflicting information and high maintenance. ] 19:32, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

:::Yes, both are generally maintained since they serve slightly different ]. ]] 04:30, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

== Open content animal closeups needing to be classified ==

At http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcodede/sets/72057594099874712/, a Brazilian photographer is making available a great number of stunning animal closeup photographs under a Misplaced Pages-compatible ] Attribution licence. I'd add them to ], but he's not identified the animals. Maybe our resident taxonomists would be interested? These images would be great additions to our articles on animals.

I've added this notice to ] and to ]. Anyone is invited to cross-post it anywhere else where it might be noticed by knowledgeable Wikipedians. ] 15:17, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

== illustrating articles ==

Hi. I have written an ugly script that finds articles without images in our Misplaced Pages, but the quid is that script links to a Commons article with images for to illustrate. ] contains some errors, sorry. Does someone work? :) --] 16:52, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

== Vandalism ==

I know that you're not supposed to vandalise and all that, but us vandals want to and don't want to get blocked. Do you think that you could just post a page that us vandals could vandalise?(y'know, like you could paste the text from a serious article in it every day.)--] 20:33, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
:You could try ]. ] 21:45, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

:You already know about ], and I see you have a ] too. You can put pretty much what you like in your personal sandbox, so long as it's within the law, and if you don't get ridiculous on use of our bandwidth. We would hope that you'll use the experience you gain from editing in such places to make useful contributions to articles too.-] 21:48, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
::if your vandalism takes the form of adding silly "facts" rather than just replacing words with swearing you might alo like to look at ]. <small><i><font color="#990000">]</font> - <font color="#555555">]</font></i></small> 22:55, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

== One of the many reasons I love Misplaced Pages ==
What other reference work has a category for Fictional Chickens? Incredible! ] 21:52, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
:] - agreed! Misplaced Pages truely is a god among men. You made me smile :) - ] <small>]</small> 12:36, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
::And with a listing of 28 Fictional Chickens we have a better selection than ] :) --] <sup>]</sup> 14:21, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
:::Misplaced Pages: the Inherently Funny Website. ] 00:59, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
::::Ref ]. ] 17:38, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

==Where is wikipedia?==
Where exactly is wikipedia? Where are the servers? But more importantly, where are the hard-drives?? I hope they are protected in an underground bunker surrounded by 17 feet of concrete! Not having wasted all this time (along with thousands of other people) only for the databases to be wiped by an earthquake or an attack or similar occurance. Please tell me our hard work is safe - ] <small>]</small> 12:36, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

:Not to worry, the servers are very safe. They would be threatened only in the unlikely event that Florida gets hit with a hurricane...--] <sup>]</sup> 14:18, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

:Like any good business, I'm sure the Wikimedia Foundation makes regular offsite backups in remote locations. Natural disaster might destroy a few days of work, but not years. ] 15:00, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

:There are hundreds of copies of Misplaced Pages's content on the internet, and probably thousands more in private hands. Because Misplaced Pages is licensed under the ], people are free to copy and republish it under the license's terms. There are more instructions at ] for individuals interested in having a dump of the entire Misplaced Pages database. Even if the entire Wikimedia Foundation and the whole state of Florida were destroyed, there would still be copies of Misplaced Pages all over the world. ](]) 15:45, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

== Trivia ==

Of the nearly 200 countries in the world, which one do Wikipedians consider the '''least important''' country for Misplaced Pages to satisfy?? ] 16:36, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
: None, they should all be treated equally, otherwise we launch ourselves on the slippery slope of indifference. Perhaps a country with no internet users, if one exists, but otherwise, my previous answer remains firm. Why do you ask? -- ] 17:27, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
:Looking at your recent contributions, it appears you may well be asking about a specific situation. You'll get a much more useful response if you ''say so'' in future... ] | ] | 17:34, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
:Oman. I mean, really, when was the last time OMAN was in the news? Sheesh. Might as well say "O man, nothing happens here!" And don't get me started on Paraguay. <!-- This response is a joke. --> --] 21:26, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

== Copyright status of 30+ year old found photos ==

A man finds a photo album laying around on the street. He looks in it for contact info, none is found, besides the name of the woman who created them. She appears to have been 70 or so in 1967, so is likely dead. What is the copyright status of these images? Can the finder release them as PD? -- ] 17:26, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

:Congratulations, we have a textbook case of the ] dilemma... They're unpublished in any real sense, so you can't go by expiry of copyright from publication, and have to go from date of death... which will be too recent. And you have no way of contacting the copyright holder - because it'll have passed to an unknown heir - so you're screwed whatever you do. ] | ] | 17:30, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

:Yes, you're pretty much screwed. You can look at the photos, or scan them into your computer, but you have no rights to publish, distribute copies of, or create and publish derivative works of the photos. This is precisely the reason why the U.S. Copyright Office has recently been , and Congress may consider related legislation in the near future. If you want to make your voice heard, now is the time. ] 17:46, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

:: Bleck. Thanks both. -- ] 13:16, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

== Longer articles = more important? ==

I recently had a look at the Windows Vista article and what I noticed is that even if it's not out yet, the article is bigger than the ones of other operating systems that are lesser known or older. The same goes for many articles about persons. People that are popular and active in this internet age get a bigger article, even if what they do isn't that much relevant for humanity.

To me it seems now that you can copy & paste information off other websites and press releases (in the case of software), you can bloat an article. I'm not saying that the information by doing this would be irrelevant or false.

I'm aware that this is kind of inevitable, but a longer article about a thing that's currently trendy and in the news distorts the person or thing being written about making it seem more important.

Taking operating systems for example. I think BeOS is/was a very interesting OS, but the article is very short. Of couse I could add informations, but there's not much to copy and paste about it on the internet. On the other hand, Windows is being marketed aggressively and therefore you'll find more information about it that you can copy and paste (a list with the features, requirements...).

In the end, as Misplaced Pages gets older, some articles about not-so-famous, but interesting things will get forgotten, defaced or stay as stuble, while hyped things will make history because they are written by "fanboys" or even the people who were involved in that thing themselves/knew the famous person. ] 19:31, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

:First of all, copying and pasting material from the web is in violation of copyright law and against our policy. The articles you mentioned don't do it (although sometimes they may perilously paraphrase such material). It is true that topics receiving more attention will generate more detailed articles; this is just another side to Misplaced Pages's inadvertant selective bias which also, for example, generates longer articles on operating systems than on modern dance. The bias exists, but unlike material within a single article it should not be construed as espousing the relative importance of the topics. A more real danger is that the articles may fall into disrepair for lack of interest - but really even a not-so-great article is better than none at all, and ''every'' article should be regularly reviewed for vandalism. ] 19:55, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

== Georgia (country) being moved to Georgia ==

For the past 2 years, the evidence that ] will be moved to Georgia is '''increasing more and more'''. Somebody please explain why the evidence is not staying as little as it was 2 years ago. ] 20:11, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand your question, but I'm going to try to answer what I think your question is. If you are asking about moving the page ] to ], it seems unlikely that the move would be possible. If you click on ] it leads to a ]. That page lists 19 different articles
about "Georgia"...many different Georgias. The Disambiguation page isn't really a ''ranking system'', it's a way for people to find the specific article they want out of the many named "Georgia". Does that help? --] <sup>]</sup> 04:51, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

:I don't know if it is happening, but I think that it would be a bad idea. We have a lot of contributors from the U.S. and when they think of "Georgia" it is the state, not the country. Having the links go to a disambiguation page is much better than them going to the wrong article. Also, it would be a pain to change the links to the right page because everyone has to check all of the articles each time they go through "what links here" to correct the links. When it goes to a disambiguation page, you don't have to go through pages that have already been checked, resulting in less wasted effort. -- ] 05:04, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

::I concur. Georgia the U.S. state is better known in North America, and Georgia the country is better known in Europe, especially the eastern half. Indeed, I suspect most American editors (myself included) would support having the U.S. state at ] because of the "common names" policy guideline. But many European editors would object. There is no easy solution. We have to keep ] as a disambig page. --] 09:55, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

:If it gets moved, it won't stay that way for long. ]|] 03:59, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

== Added a template on how-to articles ==

You can see it ]. It just crossed my mind that not all instructional content needs to be edited out, but it might just require a proper introduction. Anyone willing to check the reasons, discussion and the layout of this newly created template and the relevant category? ] 09:40, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

==Misplaced Pages and Metal Bands==
Ok I have no idea where to bring this up so I thought I'd leave a note here. Increasingly as I browse the wiki I continually am running into references, and pages to metal bands. Perhaps this extends outwards to other generas, but to date I have only noticed with in metal. These articles tend to be short and reasonable, but the problem centers on the fact that there are TONS of them generally for bands that have released 0-1 albums. These articles tend to use technical terms which aren't clear (though admitly I suppose there could be a difference between the countless ways they string death, metal, and one or other two words into what they appear tto regard as some type of sub genera) and come off as the type entries you'd expect in a more more intrest specific encyclopedic source (such as a metal encyclopedia). The real problem with this though is the clutter, the metal pages have a number of huge list pages, and the bands themselves continually are cluttering the less policed sections of pages such as pop culture references (cthulhu mythos comes to mind), or creating unnecessary disamiguation pages. I've run into this metal clutter from a wide variety of places, lovecraft related topics, comic book pages, film pages, and most recently when looking for information about the bit torrent tracker demonoid.com. I don't know what can be done, but I'd certainly appreciate others looking at this phenomena and making any suggestions they can.--] 14:33, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

: Give up and do something more useful on wikipedia, is my advice. Let them clutter away; nobody cares, nobody will see their work except other fanboys, so just ignore it. Concentrate on writing/editing/creating good articles, rather than raising your blood pressure over bad articles. This is advice, by the way, from somebody who spent his first three years on wikipedia diligently deleting piffle; I've decided it's not really accomplishing anything, so now I ignore the bad and only work on the good. - ] 15:56, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

== ] ==

Sorry if this is the wrong place, but I figured I should bring this up. I'm questioning the authenticity of ] image. The soldier in it looks alot like actor ] from the movie ]. I haven't seen that movie in a while, but I do believe there was a scene that was similar (if not the exact same) as that picture. Does anybody concur?--]] 15:59, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

== U.S.-centrism ==

U.S.-centrism is complained about a lot in Misplaced Pages. Anywhere '''besides Misplaced Pages''' where U.S.-centrism is widely complained about?? ] 21:38, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

* In my experience, pretty much everywhere outside the US. :-) -- ] 22:21, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
* The easist way around it is to just create a "______ in the United States" article (or some variation). I would suggest renaming the original article "______ in Miscellaneous", but I think that wouldn't fly --bah, philistines... --] 00:04, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
* I don't know how much the word "centrism" is used, but the arrogance, ignorance, self-centredness and pomposity of Americans are complained about millions of times every day all over the world, and complaining about it will only increase the heat. What you need to do it to become a little more modest and engaged. ] 04:56, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
* Alas, modesty is not one of our defining characteristics. We tend to take great pride in our positive accomplishments, while pretending that our "mistakes" happened to someone else. While I will cheerfully admit to being arrogant and self-centered, I really must take exception to "ignorance" (we've actually built several schools here in the Colonies, and one or two have good reputations). Regarding the idea that Americans are pompous, I'm forced to assume that you've never been to France :) (and now I duck quickly to avoid the flaming Frenchmen who will doubtless descend on me.) --] <sup>]</sup> 17:29, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
*There is a considerable amount of US-centrism on Misplaced Pages, but that's par for the course. By that, I don't mean that there is a natural tendency for US-centrism to exist among Americans any more than Foo-centrism exists among Fooians, although there does seem to be somewhat of an excess of it. Part of the reason there is so much on Misplaced Pages, though, is simply that so much of Misplaced Pages is edited by Americans, and as such there is a natural systemic bias towards the US. There also seems to be a very insular approach among a proportion of Americans - reflected on Misplaced Pages - which tends to deal with items in the US as though this automatically means that the whole world has been dealt with - I've seen several items of the form of "Most important X which are really "Most important X in the United States" (My rcent edits to the article ] hopefully fixed the problems that article had in this regard). In my own work for Misplaced Pages, which involves a lot of sorting of geography stubs, I see Foo-centrism from several countries, though, notably the US, UK and - perhaps surprisingly - India. Many many stub articles about palces say things like "Nawaral is a small village 25 kilommetres west of Inkantimbi famous for its temple.", with no mention whatsoever of where Inkanthimbi is - everyone is expected to know where it is and place it alongside London, New York and Moscow in our list of best-known cities in the world. A similar but more subtle thing is (and this ''is'' more American than anything else) an automatic assumpton that a two-letter state abbreviation can only possible mean a US state, leading to articles with names like "Newport, WA", which could refer to Washington, Western Australia, or Wales. To the best of my knowledge, Nashville is not in Tunisia and Minneapolis is not in Mongolia. Um... I seem to have strayed from the point... ]...''<small><font color="#008822">]</font></small>'' 05:14, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
:I think you'll find that ] redirects to ]. If it doesn't, it's got the wrong name. ]|] 04:01, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
::heh - That example was made up on the spot. I had no idea there even ''was'' a Newport in Washington. It's something I see on articles about once a week or more, though. ]...''<small><font color="#008822">]</font></small>'' 06:05, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

== WP missing articles ==

I came across a WP page entitled "Orphaned Articles" (the G section). There was nothing on the page to give me more info on what this means, or to direct me to someplace where I can read up on it. So I decided to put in a request for it. But then I had trouble finding a page to put in the request; is it just me or is there a problem here :-). Oh, BTW, I also had trouble finding a better place to post this. So, I guess I would have 2 requests: a main page for "Orphaned Articles", and a section in the new article request page for a Misplaced Pages procedures page (or maybe there is such a page and I couldn't find it). Thanks. TheLostOne --] 20:26, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

:You're talking about ], right? At the very top, in a smallish sort of font there's a link to ]. Is this what you were looking for? In general, most pages have an associated talk page, accessed from the "discussion" tab at the top. And help is available from the "help" link on the left (in the "navigation" frame). From the main help page, "where to ask questions" is a list of places for asking questions. The ] and the ] are both meant exactly for questions like yours. Just out of curiousity, how did you end up at ] and here? -- ] <small>(])</small> 21:21, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

:Well... thanks but none of your suggestions got me to a definition... until I thought of searching for "Orphan", which did explain what it was. To answer your question, I was looking at ], and clicked on "what links here" and found a page link to ], along with several other links (I think I would like to edit ] to give the definition). From the definition in ], it's obvious that the "Gerber File" article is no longer an orphan... if I understand it correctly. So the ] page should be edited to remove any articles that have links coming in to them, correct? Apparently the last audit was 2 years ago, which is internet ancient history. Funny thing about these orphans, I thought--once an orphan, always an orphan (à la Pirates of Penzance) :-). Well, at WK, apparently it's the other way around; when an new article gets started, it's usually an orphan, but as it grows, it no longer is. Thanks for your help. --] 01:49, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

==Did I see really see this template?==
I recall seeing a message on a user's talk page which said something like '''"This User does not respond to unsigned messages"'''. Is there a template saying this? ] 22:50, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
:I can't find one with google (no templates like what you recall with both "this user" and "respond" or "this user" and "unsigned"). Trawling through user pages, perhaps you're thinking of ] or ]. It would be trivial to create such a template if you want one. -- ] <small>(])</small> 17:25, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

== Regarding the Pokemon test ==

Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia, am I right? An encyclopedia not bound by physical limitations. So why are some articles considered "too long", such as the ] Pokemon? Articles in an encyclopedia, as long as they're written properly and provide useful information on the subject, should never be called too long. The Karen Pokemon article is written very well (as far I know - I'm not into Pokemon) so why is it so bad to have so much detail in a seemingly relatively unimportant article? I bring this up because of my article ] "barely passing the Pokemon test". Sure, a bombtrack is not nearly as important as lots of things, that's obvious, but that doesn't automatically mean that its encyclopedia article shouldn't be detailed. Yes, of course, the article on ] should be a hell of a lot longer than Bombtrack, but length does not go hand-in-hand with detail, and likewise, the levels of detail should never change between any article. And, again, this is an '''encyclopedia'''. There is no such thing as too much information. ] 06:41, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
:It's not so much the length or detail that's the issue. As I just noted at the Talk page for that article, the real problem is that your article borders on original research because that term is so obscure. Otherwise for all we know you could be trying to popularize a term ''you'' coined. You need to get a citation (preferably several) showing that the term "bombtrack" is actually being used by professional musicians to refer to that type of sound. For example, academic music journals or even ''Rolling Stone'' magazine would suffice. --] 09:51, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
::I don't imagine would work? ] 18:19, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

:::no.] 18:32, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

:I wasn't aware that there ''is'' a Pokemon test. This sounds like an article-specific content debate to me. ] 19:22, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

::Yes, Virginia, there is a ]. ] 01:49, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

== Misplaced Pages logo ==

I wanted to bring to the attention of Misplaced Pages community an error in ]. The leftmost jigsaw piece along the equator of the globe in the image has text written in ]. However the way it appears in the logo, it seems that it was created on a software that did not have Indic Language Support. Hence, what should be ] appears as ]. For technical details of such support, please refer to ]. I noticed it long back, and had tried to correct it by giving a ] to {{user|Angela}} and {{user|Anthere}}. Because of technical issues and probable lack of drive to fix it, it remains unfixed. I bring it here so that if the community consensus is with the proposal, we should start pushing for the change. I know that it means a lot of work, but shouldn't we make a stitch in time? Also, it will create a bad impression if there are errors in the logo of an encyclopedia. I want to know what the community thinks. Thanks, &mdash; ] (]) 04:32, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

:I would suggest you obtain a high-quality version of the logo and change it (or find someone to change it for you). Once the hard work is done it'll be relatively easy to change the site logo. As we are not centralised, producing just a petition doesn't do much - someone still needs to do the work. I would predict that few (if any) people would object to such a minute change. --] ] 12:59, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

== Misplaced Pages Integration ==

]

For the last month, myself and 1-2 other individuals have been jumpstarting a massive cleanup project as an attempt to bring order to Misplaced Pages. I think I have the methodology sorted out: now we need participants. There are more details on the project page. Thank you. ] 12:29, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

== Need word for grouping ancestry, ethnicity, and nationality ==

I need a word that would cover ancestry, ethnicity, and nationality to create a category name. Any help would be appreciated. I do not want to create three categories for these closely related and overlapping topics.<br/>&#151;<i>]</i> <span style="font-size:7pt;vertical-align:super;">]</span>/<span style="font-size:7pt;vertical-align:sub;">]</span> 19:01, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
:heritage?-] 21:39, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
:Perhaps some variation of "identity" as in ]? Please be a bit more specific as to the case you're considering.--] 02:25, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
::I am desperately trying to clean up ], and there are separate userboxes for ancestry, ethnicity, and nationality. I would like to lump them together in one subcategory. - ] @ 05:58, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

== ] or ]? ==

Both categories exist, and I don't know which one to use. Anyone who knows? ] 12:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

:] is for members of ]. I'm not sure where the line is drawn for ]; I think it is meant to include all countries with a significant French-speaking population, whether that country is a member of the Francophonie or not. ](]) 14:54, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

== Trademark dilution ==

{|
|] ]] 15:52, 10 July 2006 (UTC)]]
|}

:Yeah, you're right. This use of the Misplaced Pages logo is a violation of trademark law, conveying the false impression that their site is affiliated with Misplaced Pages. I think there's some place where you can contact our legal department for follow-up. ] 19:20, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

::] is the Wikimedia Foundation's lawyer. You might pass it on to him. I suspect that a politely-worded request from him would set things right. ](]) 13:40, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

:::I left a message for Mr. Patrick. Incidentally, the site's not responding for me right now (doesn't bode well for impressing their future clients, eh?). — ] ] 03:15, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

== School teachers ==

This is the golden age of Misplaced Pages; the age when school teachers (mine, at least) still think it's acceptable to cite Misplaced Pages as a direct source of information. :-P ] 21:28, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
:That age is still to come. Just wait for ]. --] ] 12:52, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

== Need help with ongoing Anaheim Hills mess ==

I got fed up with the mess surrounding ] and filed a request for arbitration. If you're interested in the long-running conflict over how Misplaced Pages should treat neighborhoods that have no official status and no defined boundaries, I encourage you to join the fray at ] and ]! --] 00:22, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

== AFD ==

I'm usually more involved in ] so I'm always amazed, how comparatively civil AfD debates are conducted here. Particularly, it appears as if hardly anyone comments on other people's delete or keep arguments directly (basically creating a little sub-discussion about a lot of things not related to the question at hand). Is there some guideline people follow automatically or are there others running around moderating the discussions? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. ] 11:12, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
:AfD, civil? You must only be looking at the boring deletion nominations. I'm sure someone can supply a link to a much more involved deletion argument, such as the recent ]. ] 17:52, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
::Apparently, I must have. Thank you for that link, that was very enlightening ;-) ] 18:03, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
:::I think that AfD's reputation is much worse than the reality of what goes on there. Also, I think that it is better than it was last year. I don't know about before that since I wasn't here. I think one of the most common causes of uncivil discussions on AfD is when sockpuppets or meatpuppets are used by one or (rarely) both sides. This really gets people angry. Another problem is when someone accuses another editor of bad faith, like using sockpuppets, making a nomination or "vote" in revenge, stalking and such. However, I think that the vast majority of nominations are civil. If you want to see people get nasty, you could try ]. It's kind of depressing, though. Deletion Review participants tend to be veteran editors and I've seen many of them behaving very poorly there. -- ] 18:50, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

:If there is any difference in civility here it could be a size factor. One article in a million seems less of a big deal than one in ten thousand on a smaller Wiki. ]...''<small><font color="#008822">]</font></small>'' 02:09, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
::We have about 420,000 articles, which should be about one third. But there still might be some truth in that. It may also have to do with the fact that the attitude in the German WP is in general much more Deletionist. ] 06:52, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
:::Another related thing is that the more articles there are, the more likely that a new one will be on a less encyclopedic subject. By 400,000, though, I'd have expected that the german WP would be approaching the level of that that exists here. ]...''<small><font color="#008822">]</font></small>'' 05:21, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
::::Oh, we do. We get about 100 AfD per day, most of which with "Notability?" as the argument for deletion. ] 06:43, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
: I start several AfDs a week, and have had few problems. Mostly they're from RC patrol, where the article creator removed a "prod" and we have to go to AfD to get rid of an article about their non-notable garage band or favorite minor character from some popular culture work. These usually go to deletion without much trouble. --] 17:35, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

== Symbol Name ==

We are in need of the name of the symbol that is over the e as in Crepe or over the u as in Ragout. Anybody know it?
:I think you mean ]. ] 15:05, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

== What does this mean?? ==

Sometimes, when I enter a Misplaced Pages page, for a while the links to my user page, talk page, preferences page, watchlist, and contributions page are on the upper right corner, but then they move to the upper left corner after I move the mouse arrow over them. Any way to fix this?? ] 17:34, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

:This happens to me too, sometimes. I am using IE6. I don't know what causes it or how to fix it, however.--] 01:23, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

:: Same here. Although it only happens with me after I visit the Commons wiki. ] ] 02:26, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

== Link style violation observed ==

How come question marks are showing up after red links and exclamation marks showing up after stub links? -- <span style="border: 2px solid #ba0000;"> ]] </span> 18:22, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
:You have modified your link style in your preferences. Change it back. ] 23:22, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

== Categories for renaming ==

Do we use subst in Cfr?? When I put a template like this on ] I substed, but a few other Cfr's didn't subst. ] 23:22, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
:It appears per the guides that we '''do not subst'''. So I fixed the template to a regular Cfr template. ] 23:41, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

::Rule of thumb - use ''subst'' if a template
::*is never going to be updated
::*is permanent
::*or leads to a subpage (like Afd)
::''don't'' use ''subst''
::*if a template is likely to be edited
::*if it's temporary (like a stub template)
::That works 95% of the time. Since a cfr template is temporary (it will be removed upon the completion of a discussion), you don't use subst. ]...''<small><font color="#008822">]</font></small>'' 05:25, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

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How to handle plagiarism from Misplaced Pages?

Hey all, hope everyone here is doing well. Today I woke up to discover that a podcaster I follow had plagiarised part of an article I wrote, as well as parts of some other articles (some of which I had contributed to, others not). The podcaster did not cite their sources, nor did they make it clear that they were pulling whole paragraphs from Misplaced Pages, but they ran advertisements and plugged their patreon anyway. This is not the first time an article I wrote for Misplaced Pages has been plagiarised and profited off (earlier this year I noticed a youtuber had plagiarised an entire article I had written; I've also noticed journalists ripping off bits and pieces of other articles). Nor is this limited to articles, as I often see original maps people make for Wikimedia Commons reused without credit.

Obviously I'm not against people reusing and adapting the work we do here, as it's freely licensed under creative commons. But it bugs me that no attribution is provided, especially when it is required by the license; attribution is literally the least that is required. I would like attribution of Misplaced Pages to become more common and normalised, but I don't know how to push for people off-wiki to be more considerate of this. In my own case, the 'content creators' in question don't provide contact details, so I have no way of privately getting in touch with them. Cases in which I have been able to contact an organisation about their unattributed use of Misplaced Pages/Wikimedia content often get ignored, and the unattributed use continues. But I also have no interest in publicly naming and shaming these people, as I don't think it's constructive.

Does anyone here have advice for how to handle plagiarism from Misplaced Pages? Is there something we can do to push for more attribution? --Grnrchst (talk) 13:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Sadly there are plenty of lazy sods who think that copying directly from Misplaced Pages is "research". This has happened with some of the articles that I have been involved with. It's rude, but hard to stop.--♦IanMacM♦ 14:13, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
I would start by writing to the podcaster and politely explaining to them that they are welcome to use the material but are required to provide attribution. They may simply be unaware of this and might be willing to comply if properly educated. Failing that, I assume the podcast was being streamed from some content delivery service like YouTube. You might have better luck writing to the service provider demanding that the offending material be taken down.
Realistically, crap like this happens all the time, and there's probably not a whole bunch we can do to prevent it. RoySmith (talk) 14:37, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
To support RoySmith's point, for those who may not have seen it, here is a very long youtube video about youtube and plagiarism . (Works just having it on as background audio.) CMD (talk) 14:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
Funnily enough, plagiarism from Misplaced Pages comes up a couple times in that video. MJL also made a very good response video, which I think was a useful addition in the conversation of crediting Wikipedians. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:10, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll give that a listen. CMD (talk) 15:18, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
Aye, I figured it be an uphill battle trying to accomplish even minor changes on this front. As I can't find a way to contact the creator directly, sending an email to the hosting company may be the best I can do, but even then I doubt it'll lead to anything. Thanks for the advice, anyhow. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:12, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
If it's a copyright violation (e.g., exact wording), rather than plagiarism (stealing the ideas but using their own words), then you could look into a DMCA takedown notice. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:25, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: It was more-or-less word for word, with a couple tweaks here and there. I don't want the episode pulled, I really just want Misplaced Pages cited, but I can't figure out any way to get in direct contact with any of the people involved. --Grnrchst (talk) 10:16, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
It's possible that the way to get in touch with them is a DMCA takedown notice. Having your platform take down the whole episode tends to attract attention. You could make it easy on them by suggesting a way to fix the problem (maybe they could add something like "This episode quotes Misplaced Pages in several places" to the end of the notes on the podcast?). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:33, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
I'm curious as to what the plagiarized article in question is. Often there is no majority authorship of an article (in terms of bytes added), which might complicate DMCA claims. JayCubby 18:35, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
Anyone who contributed enough content to be copyrighted can issue a DMCA notice. The glaring problem with this approach is that the DMCA only applies if the copy is published in the United States. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:51, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
What about servers or companies based in the States (perhaps I've misremembered what little I know of copyright law)? JayCubby 18:56, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
@JayCubby: It's an article I wrote 99.9% of, minus minor copyedits by other users. I'm cautious about revealing which one as I think it would make it easy to figure out the podcast in question, and I'd still prefer to handle this privately rather than go full hbomberguy. Also, having now gone through more of the episode, it's not just that one article that got text lifted from it; text was also copied in whole or in part, without attribution, from other Misplaced Pages articles I have contributed to (but didn't author) and an article on another website that publishes under a CC BY-NC-ND license. I don't know how I would handle notifying the other parties that got plagiarised either. I haven't combed through the entire episode yet, but already a sizeable portion consists of unattributed text, either identical to the source or with minor alterations. --Grnrchst (talk) 19:29, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
One man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame... JayCubby 00:42, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
Hmm... would Misplaced Pages:Standard CC BY-SA violation letter be of help? JayCubby 01:17, 30 December 2024 (UTC)
@JayCubby: I hadn't seen this until now, I think I assumed a while back that this thread had already been archived. Thanks for letting me know about this! I'll keep it on hand for future cases. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:56, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Unfortunately, you're talking about a medium where many people's understanding of copyright law, even when they do demonstrate an awareness that it exists and is applicable, is largely demonstrated by videos posted on YouTube of clips from movies and TV shows with the note "Copyright infringement not intended". Which, I sometimes leave a comment pointing out to them, is akin to dashing out of a clothing store with an armful of unpaid-for merchandise while shouting "Shoplifting not intended". Largoplazo (talk) 14:10, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

I've found Misplaced Pages plagiarized in scientific journal articles. I have no tolerance for that and I contact the publishers directly. But little to nothing comes of it. In the one instance, I waited almost a year but nothing really happened. Upon pushing the matter, the publishers allowed the authors to make some trivial changes but there was no retraction. (See my banner notes at the top of Talk:Semi-empirical mass formula if you are interested in this example.) Fortunately, this kind of plagiarism may be common in less prestigious journals and by less prestigious authors from universities in countries that may not care about plagiarism of Western sources. Jason Quinn (talk) 08:39, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

@Jason Quinn Wrong section? You wanted to post below? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 17:03, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
Yes, it was. Sorry about that. I moved my comment (along with yours) to the proper spot. Jason Quinn (talk) 21:12, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
@Jason Quinn PS. Make sure to use PubPeer and comment on those articles! Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 17:04, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
I'll check it out. Jason Quinn (talk) 21:12, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
Looks like the publisher has a ... somewhat questionable reputation to put it politely. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:10, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
Some years ago, we found a source saying that the 20% of lowest-ranked journals had a higher risk of copyright violations. (They did tend to be journals from developing countries or otherwise with limited resources – think "Journal of the Tinyland Medical Society".) I have discouraged using journals from the lowest ranked quintile ever since. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:42, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
As an aside, I'm pretty sure I've been the "benefactor" of scholarly citogenesis several times—uncited additions from a decade ago that I'm scouring for cites and pondering whether to rewrite from scratch, when I find a passage that pretty much has the same structure and specifics (uncontroversial stuff, mind) and I smile. I do wonder if I should be so happy, but I figure they're qualified to conduct original research and this isn't likely to introduce poor quality infomation. Remsense ‥ 论 04:48, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
When the plagiarism is substantial, please remember to tag the talk page with {{backwardscopy}}. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:49, 27 December 2024 (UTC)
Copyright infringement of Misplaced Pages by other people is not immoral, so I don't believe it's in anyone's best interest to try to police it at all. We write this stuff with the hopes that it is accurate and that it will be shared. The podcaster in question shared it. Presumably, if you are proud of it, you also consider it accurate. Big Success. No Stress.
Additionally, it does not do to mix complaints about plagiarism and copyright infringement together. Copyright is law, and plagiarism is not law. Just like us, the podcaster is fully within their rights as the users of text to copy it without attribution when their use isn't a copyright violation. If it was enough text for you to notice this, I'll trust you that it was a lot of text. But, just FYI, if someone copies a little from an article (or even a little from several articles), they would not need a license to do that and their lack of compliance with the unneeded license would not constitute copyright infringement. lethargilistic (talk) 08:37, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
I disagree, plagiarism of Misplaced Pages content is immoral, as the plagiarizer is (at least implicitly) claiming authorship of someone else's work, and is also a violation of the licensing terms (attribution is required). As an editor who has seen their contributions to Misplaced Pages plagiarized, I do not expect widespread recognition of my work, but I do resent some else taking credit for it. Donald Albury 17:10, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
I wouldn't go so far as to call it immoral, which implies deliberate malfeasance. Copyright law is complicated. There are a myriad of permissive licenses in use, some of which require attribution, some of which don't. It's unrealistic to expect most people to understand anything beyond "Misplaced Pages is free".
What bothers me more is when you explain to somebody that it's OK that they're using your stuff but they need to add an attribution and they argue with you. That's when it crosses the line from ignorance to deliberate. RoySmith (talk) 17:22, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
On your first point Misplaced Pages is free, Help:Introduction to Misplaced Pages doesn't explain that Misplaced Pages's content is copyrighted (unless you go into one of the policy links), and the footer is the kind of thing I'd ignore on any other website. I wonder if it could be reworded to something likeYou are free to reuse text under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.

Though with most of the instances of plagiarism there are no measures we could take to prevent plagiarists. JayCubby 18:07, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
enwiki gets about 400 million page views per day. Help:Introduction to Misplaced Pages gets about 4500 per day. So, to a reasonable approximation, nobody reads it. RoySmith (talk) 18:27, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
100% agree with Donald. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:53, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
I would call it immoral. It's not just wronging the people who put the labour into writing an article, who are having their hard work done for the commons repackaged for private profit without even the slightest acknowledgment, it is also wronging the people that read/watch/listen to the creator, as they are being intentionally deprived of the knowledge of where this information is coming from and where they can go to verify the information. I also disagree that what they did is "sharing"; they didn't link to this article or say they got their script from here, but instead took the credit for it and profited off it. That's not sharing, that's appropriation. Honestly I find the idea that I should be grateful that someone ripped off my work rather insulting. --Grnrchst (talk) 13:51, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

Query to find uncategorized Commons images used on a Misplaced Pages

Hello, before I added a category, this file was uncategorized on Commons, but was used on a page on the Greek language wikipedia. Maybe using Petscan?, is there a way of searching say all pages in the category Museums in Greece, and its subcategories, to list images used on those pages that are uncategorized in Commons? Thank you, Maculosae tegmine lyncis (talk) 08:06, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

@Maculosae tegmine lyncis: Something like this seems to already exist: commons:Category:Media needing category review by usage. MKFI (talk) 18:21, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Moving another user's essay to project space

I'd had it in mind for quite some time to write an essay in project space about announcements. I've seen entire sections consisting of sentences with the word "announced" in them, giving the impression that the subject's history consists not of events and actions at all but only of announcements that such events or actions were planned, leaving the reader to wonder whether any of them ever actually happened. I wanted to exhort people who add to an article, in November 2024, "In November 2024 it was announced that X would be joining the series as a regular character in the new season" to return after the new season begins and replace the text about the announcement with "In April 2025, X joined the series as a regular character" or, if X didn't join the series after all, to remove the sentence as probably irrelevant, unless some mention is to be made of why X's addition to the series didn't come to pass.

So one day recently I sat down to begin such an essay, but first checked the status of the obvious shortcut, WP:ANNOUNCED—and found that it already existed as a redirect to a user-space essay belonging to User:HuffTheWeevil. That essay is quite thorough and covers most of the ground that I had had in mind, and I think it would be useful to have it in project space. So, while noting that that user hadn't edited in over two years but thinking the might see and respond to a ping if they even read Misplaced Pages while logged in, I went to their talk page to leave basically the same message that I've written here, to ask if they would be averse to having their essay moved to project space.

That was four weeks ago, and there've been no edits in that time by the user. I was wondering whether it would be reasonable, without express permission, either to move or copy the essay to project space and retarget WP:ANNOUNCED there. Also, if that were to happen, I'm seeking a good title. Floating around in my head:

Largoplazo (talk) 17:35, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

What a good notion! That type of language in articles irks me too. Especially personal life sections that read "they announced they were engaged, they announced the wedding date, they got married, they announced they were expecting, they had a baby" and so on. (Sorry I don't have an answer to your questions, but I do like the idea.) Schazjmd (talk) 23:25, 30 December 2024 (UTC)
Articles about companies, particularly finance companies, drive me crazy in that way. You'd think from some of their articles that they're more noted for their announcements than for what they've actually done. "In October 2018, ABC announced that they were acquiring at 30% share in GHI. In February 2019, they announced the coming release of version 5 of their product." Did the GHI buy-in ever happen? Did they ever release version 5? Who knows??? The article doesn't say! Largoplazo (talk) 00:02, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
Even more annoying is when media happily passes on announcements, but fails to pay any attention when they actually happen, so we're left sourceless. Schazjmd (talk) 00:20, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
To go off a bit on a tangent, this is like when the media report someone's arrest (which goes on to be covered here) and then never follow up (leaving Misplaced Pages readers in the lurch). Largoplazo (talk) 00:39, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
I wouldn't mess with someone else's user space without asking them first (with the obvious exception of reverting vandalism), there might be a reason they didn't want it in project space. I do agree that this is an issue in articles though. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:42, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
The question appears to be about whether it's okay, after you have asked them, waited a month, and still not gotten a response. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:50, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
I would also suggest not moving people's userspace essays to mainspace. Looks like the shortcut did a good job here of directing you to the correct location. Hopefully that happens a lot in these types of situations. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:39, 2 January 2025 (UTC)
I would agree that moving things out of someone’s userspace without their OK is bad form.
That said… no one “owns” the topic (whether that topic is for an essay or for an article). Consider writing your own essay/article on the topic (in your own userspace), and moving that to Mainspace. Then notify the other editor so they can amend your work if they want to (that is up to them). Blueboar (talk) 14:03, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
People have been trying to get me to move User:RoySmith/Three best sources to project space for years. I keep refusing because it's my own personal opinion and I don't want people editing my opinion (which they do anyway, but at least I feel justified reverting those in my userspace). I once had somebody hijack the WP:THREE redirect and point it to their own essay (quickly reverted). I once had somebody put the redirect up for deletion (quickly closed as keep). RoySmith (talk) 15:11, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
meh… Personally, I think personal essays should be marked as “User” and not “WP” (even for a shortcut) but whatever. Blueboar (talk) 20:35, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
You had a good idea that's been linked by lots of people, including me. Surely the Misplaced Pages way is to share it with the rest of us? Phil Bridger (talk) 20:59, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
I like the Stuff finally happens title. Either rewrite so you're not using the userspace version, or move it (I think since you've asked, this can count as being bold) Newystats (talk) 19:14, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
It usually is considered a bit rude to move something without receiving permission. At the same time since they haven't edited more than minimally in nine years that really is not that big a concern, and ultimately all pages belong to the community. Since content is licensed under CC BY-SA and the GFDL, you could also both move the page and then copy-back an archived version to the original location under WP:CWW that they would retain more control over this has been done before.
Unless you think updates are needed though it probably isn't necessary since the primary distinction between user and projectspace essays is the degree of control exerted over the contents of the essay by the original author. Granted, projectspace is a little more restrictive compared to userspace, but that distinction is not really important to this case. 184.152.68.190 (talk) 20:13, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

How do I make a separate "userpage"

Ive seen people make separate pages that are still attached to their user, like this one: User:Littleghostboo/Story and I never knew how to make pages like this. Can someone please tell me how?


Thanks, Tenebre_Rosso_Sangue, Editing with SSStyle! (talk) 16:46, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Easy, peasy. Just type "User:Tenebre.Rosso.Sangue995320/whatever" into the search box and hit return. That'll take you to a page that says "Misplaced Pages does not have a user page with this exact name" with a "Start the User:Tenebre.Rosso.Sangue995320/Whatever page" link. Click the link and off you go. RoySmith (talk) 16:51, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
Thank you! Tenebre_Rosso_Sangue, Editing with SSStyle! (talk) 16:55, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
As an alternative, you could put a link on your user page that looks like ]. That'll show up as a redlink. Click it and you'll be in the same place you were before. RoySmith (talk) 16:57, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages 25th anniversary

As English WP is coming up to this in a few days - are preparations being made?

Who are the longest serving Wikipedians (ie contributing regularly enough to be so considered)? A check shows there are presently 156 members of the Misplaced Pages:Twenty Year Society (and, I assume, some more who do not choose to join or are unaware of it), so the 25 year equivalent will be smaller still (and the various higher-year groups always will so be, and increase more slowly than the shorter timespan ones). Jackiespeel (talk) 13:31, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

With the caveat that the account creation info stored in the database may not be accurate for the oldest accounts (as I understand it, they may be even older if they transitioned from the pre-MediaWiki software, or the information might be blank), see Misplaced Pages:Database reports/Active editors with the longest-established accounts for a list of the oldest accounts who have made an edit in the last 30 days. isaacl (talk) 18:54, 4 January 2025 (UTC)
We're coming up to our 24th anniversary ... Graham87 (talk) 14:38, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
The 25th anniversary is in a year, Misplaced Pages was founded in 2001. QuicoleJR (talk) 16:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Misplaced Pages was founded in 2001. It’s almost been around for 24 years. 1.158.154.238 (talk) 04:10, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Even in a year's time I don't think we should be doing much to celebrate. Maybe do that if Misplaced Pages is still going strong when all of the people who were around at the beginning are dead. That would be after a lot more than 25 years, and would show that Misplaced Pages has life of its own apart from the people that make it up. Many institutions have been around for a lot more than 25 years. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:57, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

Year in review sources

I'm trying to fill out a list of "year in review" publications and I'm finding it difficult. I wanted to reach out and see if anyone knows any sources that come out annually (whether discontinued or still in publication) that summarize the previous year in a given field. The list so far is at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Years/Resources and I'd really appreciate any suggestions or additions so we can get more scholarly and high quality sources on articles about years. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:01, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

I wonder if Annual Reviews (publisher) covers what you want. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:52, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
I checked a few and there are a lot of articles about different subjects like you'd expect in a journal, but it doesn't look like they have anything to the effect of "here are the main takeaways/developments from this year". Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:14, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
There’s a French series of this I’ve encountered but I’m not sure how useful that would be. PARAKANYAA (talk) 17:30, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Depends on what it covers. If it's comprehensive and covers a global scope, that would be incredibly useful. If it's specifically about France, I'm also interested in finding some that are country-specific for articles like 2010 in France. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:16, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Red flag?

User:Yak is now blocked as a sock. There is nothing more to do here. EdJohnston (talk) 19:57, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Special:Contributions/UserYak : red flag?

69.181.17.113 (talk) 07:32, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

What makes you think there is a "red flag"? Every edit they have made seems to be reverting blatant vandalism. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 09:34, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
69.181.17.113, I think anyone looking at this report will find it too cryptic to take any action. All I can see is that this user could use edit summaries more, but I've no idea if that's the red flag that you mention. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:55, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

How do I know if this user uses Misplaced Pages for self-promotion?

This user's contributions are very strange. He only adds references to food articles, always recipes from the same website. In fact, I think he writes the recipes himself, since both the recipes and the user are E. Joven. I don't want to accuse anyone, but it also seems suspicious to me. He sometimes replaces pre-existing references with his own. How do I know if this user uses Misplaced Pages for self-promotion? The user: Emjoven – El Mono 🐒 (es.wiki account) 05:54, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Please provide links to examples. Thanks. PamD 07:03, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
The links are to a site which says it's run by Ed Joven. The wiki account name is Emjoven. This one's not hard to figure out. RoySmith (talk) 16:57, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
I've reverted the most recent additions (in places where there was already at least as good a ref) and replacements. Largoplazo (talk) 17:27, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Is there a minimum edit count for ArbCom?

And where do I ask questions like this? Another Wiki User the 3rd (talk) 16:39, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Hey there @Another Wiki User the 3rd. You can ask simple questions like this at the WP:TEAHOUSE if you want. As for the requirements to run as a candidate in the yearly arbcom elections, there's surely a list of official requirements somewhere on one of the WP:ACE pages. I'd highly recommend becoming an admin first though, and the practical minimum edit count for becoming an admin based on who has passed recently is around 8,000 edits. Hope this helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 16:43, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
WP:HELPDESK and WP:TEAHOUSE are probably better venues for questions like that. Misplaced Pages:Arbitration Committee Election/Rules covers your question, Candidates: Registered account with 500 mainspace edits that is not prevented from submitting their candidacy by a block or ban, meets Foundation's Access to nonpublic personal data policy, and has disclosed alternate accounts (or disclosed legitimate accounts to Arbcom). Arbitrators may not serve as members of either the Ombuds Commission or the WMF Case Review Committee while serving as arbitrators. Withdrawn or disqualified candidates will be listed in their own section on the candidates page unless their candidate page can be deleted under WP:G7. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 16:43, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Heritage Foundation intending to "identify and target" editors

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T383236

Not sure where to post this, or whether I'm overreacting, but I find this recent article by The Forward very concerning. Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Misplaced Pages editors. It outlines how the Heritage Foundation is going to (or is already) attempting to identify editors who are 'abusing their position' by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic. Methods of identification include:

  • facial recognition software (not sure how this would work, considering most don't post their faces here) and a database of hacked usernames and passwords
  • creating fake accounts to lure editors into revealing personal information or clicking malicious tracking links
  • checking for resuse of usernames/passwords in breached databases
  • more found in their slideshow for this

ARandomName123 (talk) 23:28, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

May I suggest only clicking those two external links if you have a VPN on. They are very clear in these documents that they plan to harvest Wikimedian IP addresses using bait links that they control. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:57, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
Actually, I think those two links are to the newspaper that did the investigative reporting, rather than the Heritage Foundation. So not as risky as I thought. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:10, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Yes, those links point to the website of The Forward, a 127-year-old publication known in Yiddish as פֿאָרווערטס and formerly known in English as The Jewish Daily Forward. Definitely not a Heritage Foundation property! Largoplazo (talk) 03:09, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
True, but to be fair to the Heritage Foundation, The Forward also harvests "IP addresses using bait links that they control", the bait being interesting and informative articles by sensible reporters. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:11, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Suspected IP-grabber domains are eligible for the m:Spam blacklist (and the local one as well). Suspicious links can be opened with tools like https://urlscan.io/. Make sure your password is long, strong, and unique, and if you don't have access to two-factor authentication you can request it at m:SRGP. You should also use a Misplaced Pages-specific (or at least Misplaced Pages-identity-specific) email address. This advice also applies to other places where you talk about Misplaced Pages or use the same identity. If you see something suspicious, report it to an administrator/functionary/steward/arb/etc. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 00:41, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Maybe all this should also be noted in a more visible place like WP:AN? (I have now done so). Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 04:08, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Here's the deal, they don't plan on throwing the malicious links in (only) contentious articles. They are going to identify "targets", and then edit other topics the "targets" are interested in. That is when the bad sources will enter pages with fewer watchers (to discern which GET to associate with the suspected user).
Potential targets should click links on one device with a vpn, and edit on a different device.
This isn't new, one of our CUs had to step down because they were doing the same to try to catch UPE a few years ago, and I assume other groups have been doing so for awhile. 166.205.97.61 (talk) 06:51, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
I was thinking that they were probably going to pose as editors on talk pages, and engage in debates where'd they post links, partially hidden like this: AP News, which looks like it goes to an AP News site, which would be common on these sort of talk pages, but actually goes to example.com. (replacable with a tracking link). Most editors wouldn't think to hover over it to check the address. ARandomName123 (talk) 16:39, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
  • If they're going to be using domains they control for this, should we start adding Heritage Foundation domains to the spam blacklist? This might require going to WP:RSN to deprecate their website, which is currently used on 5000 pages and is probably deprecable on its (dis-)merits in the first place. A few of their other domains are listed on the library of congress page for them. That wouldn't prevent them from creating additional honeypot domains, of course, but I don't see how we can continue to link to their website if they're using it in this manner. --Aquillion (talk) 13:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    It would be safe to assume that their main domains would also participate in the cookie tracking, especially seeing as it is so heavily linked. I agree that their known domains should be deprecated as likely malicious. 166.205.97.61 (talk) 15:52, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    Deprecating and blacklisting the link globally will protect editors and readers from accidentally clicking the links. This is a serious privacy concern if the Heritage Foundation collects data from visitors. Ahri Boy (talk) 03:45, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
    Heritage Foundation seems to be making not only a threat against our WP:NOTCENSORED policy, but threatening retribution against wikipedia editors for building consensus on perrenial source reliability. I think blacklisting HF domains, and any subsequent honeypot domains is a sensible idea Bejakyo (talk) 17:10, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Sigh. Nice work by Forward. Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:45, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
@AntiCompositeNumber that is a useful site, I revert a lot of spam 'cunningly disguised' as a genuine link.
I'm in the UK. Honestly, if they want my ip they can have it. I'm moving soon lol. Knitsey (talk) 08:02, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with US law, but is something like creating fake accounts to lure editors into revealing personal information or clicking malicious tracking links legal? Nobody (talk) 09:19, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
@1AmNobody24 I'm wondering if those companies, proudly displayed at the end of the document, are aware of their connection with this 'plan'? Knitsey (talk) 09:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Yeah, I just had to re-read Phishing to make sure it's definition hadn't changed... Nobody (talk) 09:31, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Honestly I don't want to wait on US law to (maybe) protect our editors. We should be proactively blocking Heritage Foundation domains from interacting with en.wp using whatever means are necessary. Simonm223 (talk) 14:31, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
All Wikimedia wikis too. We can't let everyone accidentally access that data-collecting nonsense. Ahri Boy (talk) 08:35, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Considering they're the people behind Project 2025, and Trump is coming to power, I do not have too much trust in relying on US law. ARandomName123 (talk) 16:19, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
It's probably a misuse of computer systems (what Aaron Swartz was charged with) and violates the TOS. WMF can and should sue Heritage if they try to pull this kind of shit. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:00, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
I'm not worried for myself - I edit with my real name and am pretty sure I have freely given away enough information to enable anyone to distinguish me from anyone else who shares my name - but I'm worried for those who live under more repressive regimes. Some of those are in prison because of what they have said on Misplaced Pages, and many live under regimes that the Heritage Foundation would be vehemently opposed to. Phil Bridger (talk) 14:33, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Yeah kind of the same situation here. While my username is not directly my personal name it's the same one I use on literally all platforms and is easily connected to my real-world identity. I don't consider myself as an anonymous editor. But we do need to protect anonymous editors. And not just in what we conventionally see as "repressive regimes" either. I'd say that there are considerable threats to the safety of anonymous editors in the United States from such a mass dox. Simonm223 (talk) 14:36, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
On the contrary, this doxxing campaign, apparently led by a former FBI agent and organized by a US-based organization, is specifically targeting editors in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict topic area, who are likely to face threats from the "democratic" regimes of the western world, namely those with expansive antisemitism definitions and where anti-Palestinian sentiment is rampant among the media, political and corporate class. It is the editors based there who everyone should be worried about. Makeandtoss (talk) 15:07, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Sigh, take caution North American editors, you will need to arm up & watch your backs with these people. There's a clear agenda being pushed to shut down those who would combat disinformation / advocate fact checking, and that's either via ballot box or the ammo box. TheTechLich (talk) 15:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Arming individual Wikipedians does not seem like a particularly effective response to what is being threatened here. signed, Rosguill 16:35, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Arming the community with information is more our schtick. "Be afraid!" may work for click media, but a check at RSNP is always a wiser place to start. BusterD (talk) 17:55, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
With regards to the facial recognition software, it is probably simple enough to run it through the many meetup photos we conveniently provide and categorize on Commons, sometimes even helpfully linking faces to usernames and perhaps even real names already. CMD (talk) 15:46, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
I'm sure these guys are not totally clueless, but probably best if we don't give them any ideas they hadn't allready thought of. RoySmith (talk) 15:52, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
I considered that, but this one seems obvious enough for them given facial recognition is already mentioned in their document, and yet also probably something worth making editors more aware of. CMD (talk) 15:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Maybe it isn't a good idea to match those faces to usernames? QuicoleJR (talk) 16:56, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Facial recognition...
Maybe by the camera of ur devices？--Jason2016426 (talk) 14:45, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

A range block is in order, at the very least, lets be preventative. Slatersteven (talk) 15:57, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

  • The report says that they're going to use a "database of hacked usernames and passwords". Do we know whether this is from other websites who have been hacked, or whether there's been a data breach at Misplaced Pages itself? ARandomName123 (talk) 16:21, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    There is also a possibility they're making at least some shit up. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:23, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    Yes, or it's sloppy reporting. As far as I can see it's the only place where passwords are mentioned. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    The combination of malicious tracking links (fairly clever) and facial-recognition technology (rather useless for what they're trying to do here) suggests that they have some people who know what they're doing, but that their leadership (or at least their communications lead) is easily fooled by buzzwordy tech and has no idea what they're doing. signed, Rosguill 16:32, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    It's a pitch deck to potential donors who are presumably not super tech savvy, so things were probably kept simple and buzzy to both not overwhelm an be attractive. -- Patar knight - /contributions 16:35, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    Sure, but it seems like a red flag that facial recognition technology is anywhere near the slide deck. They may as well threaten us with "the blockchain". signed, Rosguill 16:38, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    I don't think that's right. If they can use facial recognition successfully to de-anonymize an editor they may be able to use various pressure tactics against that editor. I think their goal, whether through facial recognition and tracking links is to de-anonymize. They will meet with varying success but I definitely can imagine (with one way already listed above) ways facial recognition could be a threat to otherwise anonymous editors. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:50, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    My sense is that the overlap between editors that they are trying to de-anonymize and editors that can be meaningfully linked to images of themselves is near zero. signed, Rosguill 16:53, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    The plan is to learn enough about "targets" through web tracking and comparison to stolen user data to identify potential Facebook or Twitter accounts. They will then attempt to match personality profiles of editors with what they learn from these other sources - including pictures. 166.205.97.61 (talk) 17:07, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    It would not be particularly difficult to see if someone's username is also their email, if an email is listed on their userpage, or to obtain an email if they reply to a Misplaced Pages email (IIRC your email is kept anonymous as long as you do not reply) and then comparing that to emails in publicized data breachs and trying any associated passwords. People should be checking https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and/or using any in-built tools for this in their password managers to see if this might apply to them and changing passwords as required. -- Patar knight - /contributions 16:30, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    Also, editors should not respond to Misplaced Pages emails that look like spam or nonsense out of politeness (e.g. "I think you have the wrong email?") if they want to be extra cautious. -- Patar knight - /contributions 16:33, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    Also, editors can choose to reply on someone's User talk page instead of replying by email. FactOrOpinion (talk) 18:21, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    There were recent cyberattacks on the Internet Archive. Many editors here often use their book loaning service. I urge them to change their email address and password if it is similar to that of the archive. The AP (talk) 10:48, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Are T&S aware of this? Ymblanter (talk) 16:30, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Do they have an on-WP "place"? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:33, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
An email was sent by RoySmith a couple minutes ago, see the phab task. ARandomName123 (talk) 16:36, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Yes, I've already informed them of it. GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 19:57, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
  • Is there a way to poison link harvesting? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:47, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    Click through using a different device on a vpn. Send various other IPs through to muddy the waters. Realistically, if they create a fake publisher with a fake book about an obscure topic that they think a "target" will argue about, only a few hits will exist to the link, and the IP of the editor will be exposed. Misplaced Pages really should provide a proxy that disables Javascript when clicking through to links. This would hide all editor IPs. 166.205.97.61 (talk) 17:10, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
    I like the idea of being able to open links through wikipedia so to speak. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:20, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

I think we should put a note about this on T:CENT to make more people aware. QuicoleJR (talk) 17:49, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

It's on Jimbo's talk, AN, ANI and VP(m). T:CENT seems way overboard at this point. BusterD (talk) 17:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Maintaining anonymity on wikipedia

Is there any essay with tips to protect anonymity/privacy on wikipedia? I know about WP:OUTING but proactive tips could also be helpful. In general, don't think this heritage slide deck is that useful and unlikely to work, but after other similar issues (see the Asian_News_International#Wikimedia Foundation case), it would be nice if we have useful tips to make sure bad actors can't target folks who wanna keep their wikipedia lives separate from their other life. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 16:54, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

@Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist has a good section on her user page User:Your_Friendly_Neighborhood_Sociologist#OPSEC Meluiel (talk) 16:59, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
(edit conflict)The problem with that would be that bad actors could read it too to work out ways round it. Personally I work on the principle that anyone determined enough can find out who I am anyway so I don't even try to be anonymous, but I understand why that doesn't work for everyone. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:02, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Same here, if they can be arsed they will manage it. Especially (referring back to the India crap) if you have a government on your side. Slatersteven (talk) 17:15, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Yes, making it more difficult at an individual level to identify you makes it more difficult, and therefore costly, at a global level to identify editors. Best, — Jules* 19:13, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
I think an important thing to understand here is that the baseline risk of being outed, even if you do absolutely everything right, is higher than a lot of people realize. There are over 100 volunteers with the ability to view your IP, and an order of magnitude more who pose subtler but equally dangerous risks that I won't get in to. All of these people are vulnerable to bribery, coercion, threats, deceit, and violence, same as anyone else. Now, a difference here is that most of those attack vectors are actual felonies in the US. Heritage, despite its willingness to engage in mustache-twirling levels of evil scheming, probably does not want to have its people go to prison, and get its own corporate veil pierced. They do have that reference to cracking accounts, which is a crime, but it's not clear how serious they are about it; they could also mean it in the sense of not cracking but correlation attacks, e.g. matching a username to someone's Facebook URL. But most of what they're talking about is, essentially, the maximally invasive strategy that doesn't blatantly violate any criminal laws.There are people out there who don't give a fuck about violating criminal laws. Because they're ideologues, because they're unstable, because they're foreign agents, whichever. There is no way to mitigate that risk. Even completely abandoning the system of volunteer access to private information would just reduce the risk, not make it go away. So people who are reading this news and are really scared, who are thinking "My life would be over if I got outed like this", should understand that even if we came up with technical steps to mitigate every idea Heritage has, their IP is still no more secure than the weakest link in the entire cross-wiki system of privileged accounts, and that's not something we can fix, because vulnerability to money, lies, and violence is a bug in human.exe, not in MediaWiki. Remember that Misplaced Pages:How to not get outed on Misplaced Pages offers only two 100% effective strategies: Out yourself, or don't edit. Anything else is taking a gamble. -- Tamzin (they|xe|🤷) 17:59, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
@Tamzin, maybe the strategy all along, is to scare people into abandoning editing Misplaced Pages? All they need to do is produce a low quality PDF, throw in a bunch of scare quotes, link to their partners that will help them dox, and bobs your uncle. Job done. They could even open some throw away accounts and make it obvious they are trying to trap people, without actually doing any trapping. Knitsey (talk) 19:41, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
I completely agree with Tamzin here. As one of the reportedly top pro-Hamas editors who hijacked Misplaced Pages's narrative, or whatever it was, and someone with no expectation of online privacy, I think maintaining a "fuck those guys" stance towards these kinds of efforts to interfere with Misplaced Pages helps to keep your eye on the ball. If someone is afraid of being outed, don't edit in the PIA topic area. Anyone who follows policy and guidelines in the topic area and simply summarizes the contents of reliable sources etc. will be targeted by someone at some point, labelled pro-Palestinian, or pro-Hamas, or antisemitic etc. by easily manipulated credulous fools, racist ultranationalists, radicalized youth, sociopathic POS MFs who celebrate violence and destruction, offensively polite inauthentic extremists etc. It has always been like this. The volume has been turned up a bit recently, presumably to distract from all the death and destruction and/or monetize it via online attention or donations to ridiculous projects camouflaged as righteous missions. But I encourage people to edit in the topic area without being afraid. Where else are you going to encounter so many interesting people and have a chance to be casually defamed by the world's richest man? Sean.hoyland (talk) 04:25, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Not being able to create a non-gambling scenario doesn't mean we shouldn't try to weigh the games in our favor. Let's not just say fuck those guys in a way that means we don't bother making them try a little. CMD (talk) 05:58, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Oh absolutely. Make them work hard. They might come up with some good ideas. I would even say try to be understanding because for many of the people who support these kinds of efforts, I think this is their happy place where they can come together and think of themselves as good guy victims fighting the good fight against demons, play at being part of the intel community chasing Nazis etc. rather than having to look at and document reality. What's the phrase, mistaking an idea for the world or something. Sean.hoyland (talk) 08:13, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
This may be useful. Misplaced Pages:Personal security practices Ckoerner (talk) 19:31, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
Also see meta:Wikimedia Foundation/Legal/Community Resilience and Sustainability/Human Rights/Digital Security Resources. GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 19:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Some more media:

One would think that reportedly soliciting donations to pay for a project that would violate the WMF's TOU in multiple ways (and maybe the law), would be the kind of thing that would put a 501(c)(3)'s nonprofit exemption at risk. Levivich (talk) 23:20, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
It would if the IRS wanted to go after them (they won't). voorts (talk/contributions) 23:31, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Spam blacklist?

A section was created at WP:RSN (Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Heritage Foundation planning to dox Misplaced Pages editors) suggesting that the Heritage Foundation website be deprecated and blacklisted, but it was closed with a message that that was the wrong board. Let's figure out if we want to do this and what the right board is. I think the right board might be an RFC at WP:VPPR. The text of the RFC could be something like Due to credible threats of attempting to dox Misplaced Pages editors and harvest their IP addresses, should all known Heritage Foundation URLs, including https://heritage.org/, be added to the local spam blacklist? This section can serve as the WP:RFCBEFORE. Thoughts? –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:53, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

  • Yes, but perhaps the wording should be broadened to include any other domains which might reasonably be believed to serve as part of the Heritage IP-harvesting plan. Johnuniq (talk) 09:08, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Misplaced Pages:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#The_Heritage_Foundation is ongoing. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:15, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
That discussion appears to be purely about reliability. I was thinking we might need a discussion somewhere approaching the blacklist / editor safety angle of having hyperlinks to their website. –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:57, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Please describe the potential danger from the links which are currently on Misplaced Pages and which would ostensibly be removed following blacklisting—is it connected to the "controlled links" and "redirects" discussed in the pdf?

Technical Fingerprinting (Controlled Domain Redirects):

  • Controlled Links: Use redirects to capture IP addresses, browser fingerprints, and device data through a combination of in-browser fingerprinting scripts and HTML5 canvas techniques
  • Technical Data Collection: Track geolocation, ISP, and network details from clicked links
  • Cross-Session Tracking: Follow device or browser sessions through repeated visits by setting cookies.
  • User is only on domain for < 2 seconds prior to redirection

Online Human Intelligence (HUMINT):

  • Persona Engagement: Engage curated sock puppet accounts to reveal patterns and provoke reactions, information disclosure
  • Behavioral Manipulation: Push specific topics to expose more identity related details
  • Cross-Community Targeting: Interact across platforms to gather intelligence from other sources.
—Alalch E. 11:56, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Yes. Most websites won't do anything with our IP information when we visit. It'll go in a log somewhere and never be looked at again. But a bad actor such as these guys might look at the http_referer, see that it's from wikipedia, maybe even see the exact page you were on before you clicked the link, then do bad things with that info. For example they could cross reference timestamps of edits to a wiki page to their IP server logs and make some educated guesses about whose username that ip is. Then they could do geolocation on the IP to determine a city. Then maybe they already have some information on you in their database from one of the other techniques mentioned in that slide. So now they can use all that together to confirm exactly who you are and harass you. –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:33, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Noting that links on Misplaced Pages have the noreferrer attribute set. Modern browsers tend to respect this attribute and do not set the Referrer header for subsequent requests. Sohom (talk) 12:48, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Do they? Checking just now, I see the pages set referrer=origin but there's no noreferrer in sight. This means sites will get https://en.wikipedia.org/ as the referrer, but no information on the specific page. OTOH, if the attacker placed the specific link on only one page, they could use that as a signal. Anomie⚔ 13:11, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
I am concerned that would require quite a lot of scrutiny to prevent if a referrer can be set within a specific link. This is definitely, in my eyes, a point in the yes blacklist column. Simonm223 (talk) 13:30, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
@Anomie The noreferrer attribute It is set on a individual link level and should be set for all external links generated through wikitext on Misplaced Pages. You can kinda verify this by setting up a netcat server nc -lvp 1337 and then clicking on this link to see what headers your browser sends.
@Simonm223 Custom referrers cannot be set for a specific link, you can disable referrers for specific links (which is already done for all external links by our MediaWiki installations) or set a per-page directive to influence how much information is sent by the browser to other websites (Misplaced Pages chooses to only send origin information, which is the industry standard since it doesn't leak too much PII, however, we could probably raise a ticket on phabricator to set the per-page directive to same-origin to prevent third-party sites from getting any information at all). Sohom (talk) 14:06, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Would there be any negative impact to the project for us setting the per-page directive to same-origin? Simonm223 (talk) 14:14, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
I don't think so, but there might be tooling that depends on the presence of the referrer header that I am unaware of. The best approach would be to file a phabricator ticket to find out. Sohom (talk) 14:39, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
According to Misplaced Pages:Spam blacklist, there is precedent for "some sites which have been added after independent consensus" (which I read as sites added for sui generis non-spam reasons), and all four linked discussions are from RS/N so it might not be a bad location per se. Whatever the case, if there is an RfC, I think it should authorise a braoder scope as Johnuniq states, to allow the addition of further dox harvesting urls without needing to hold another RfC or similar. CMD (talk) 09:19, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
All those discussions started with the question of whether the source is unreliable and the answer was that it is not just unreliable, it is spam. Basically normal RS/N discussions. The discussion I closed started with the question of computer security. And if and when heritage.org and possible other domains are blacklisted it will not be because of simply "spam". —Alalch E. 10:24, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
What happened to Mediawiki talk:Spam-blacklist? —Alalch E. 10:16, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
I don’t care one way or the other on this (as I avoid political articles like the plague). But to play “devil’s advocate”, it strike me that blocking them is exactly what they want… it just feeds their narrative. And it won’t stop them from doxing our editors in response. So it’s kind of pointless, and may cause more harm than good. Have fun storming the castle! Blueboar (talk) 15:14, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
Given the threat to Dox, and use of links to phish for data, yes all links to them might be spam (or in fact malware). Yes, this might well go someway to prevent abuse. Slatersteven (talk) 15:07, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

Xavi Simons

Can somebody answer me at Talk:Xavi Simons. Thanks Like the windows (talk) 22:45, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Category: