Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 15:23, 23 October 2018

Notification about notification

I hope I didn't step on anyone's toes with the referral to this talk page in this MediaWiki discussion where I've referred a developer (?) seeking comments on mw:JADE. The reason being that in my experience people with presumably little interest in a certain topic and a lot of background knowledge tend to have the best eye for spotting potential problems. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:42, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

I'm probably not the best one to be asking about this; I was skeptical of ORES, am skeptical of the WMF's paranoia that bots and AI are threatening to undermine Misplaced Pages's integrity (human stupidity is doing that just fine without assistance, but the notion of automated systems to detect bias I consider potty) and am even more skeptical of any further attempts to get a computer to decide between right and wrong in the context of a multicultural project. The person who would probably have the most useful input to make would be Gurch if you can winkle him out of wherever he's hiding, as IMO he's the first and only person ever to write a "potentially problematic edit" detector that didn't cause more problems through false positives (and the equally problematic false negatives; I'm already seeing a lot of "ORES didn't flag this so it must be OK" crap slipping through) than it solved.

Personally, I think it would be a much better use of time and money to have a handful of paid professional moderators monitoring Special:RecentChanges, regularly dip-sampling edits from all active editors, and investigating more closely if anything problematic were found and flagging any potentially problematic editors for admin attention. Yes, the WMF is paranoid about losing §230 protection if they take a more active role in directly patrolling content, but the big social media and blogging firms directly employ moderators and their worlds haven't imploded. If anything, a "we recognized that even though we didn't have a legal obligation we had an ethical responsibility to know what we were disseminating" now would probably stand the WMF in good stead when the rising tide of backlash against perceived corporate irresponsibility and Wild West attitudes on the internet—which is currently destroying the viral content farms, washing over Facebook, lapping at Twitter's feet, and headed steadily towards Misplaced Pages and Google—finally reaches us. (If WAID is still watching this page from a couple of threads up, her opinions would probably be worth hearing here; even if she isn't, it would probably be worth asking for her input.) ‑ Iridescent 12:12, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Today's officially another holiday. I can take a break from this week's AFD fun, trying to convince someone that a centuries-old philosophical shouldn't get WP:INTEXT attribution to a still-living encyclopedia author, and trying to figure out what promotionalism actually is, to say that I think the AI question is a good one. That system will have GIGO problems, and the only real solution is to get the garbage out of it. JADE might make a useful way to do that. That last discussion is highly relevant: If people who do NPP and AFC work regularly reject direct, factual statements as {{db-spam}} rather sending the articles to AFD on the grounds of non-notability, then we're going to end up with an AI system that believes articles about average companies are spam, and that only those with long sections about scandals could be considered "neutral". There needs to be some way to say that yes, it was deleted as "spam", but it isn't technically spam.

Personally, and noting that I probably know less about §230 than anyone who has actually read the relevant Misplaced Pages article, and noting that the people who think that "They have more than X stores" should be counted as unambiguous promotionalism are all volunteers, I would rather have this moderation done by editors than by WMF staff, and it sounds like that's the plan. Providing a tool that lets volunteers correct the ORES database doesn't sound like controlling content to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:38, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

The parable of the shitty early-2000s website

@WhatamIdoing: "Moderation done by editors" is fine in theory, but in practice that means "moderation by self-appointed busybodies who see it as their mission to purify the site" as they're the ones who'll devote their time to patrolling, so you end up introducing a huge systemic bias against anything that anyone, anywhere, might consider controversial. (If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading this thread to get a feeling for just how broad a range of articles the self-appointed Defenders of the Wiki consider 'inappropriate'.)

Way back before the dawn of time, I did some work for an early dating website. We discovered early on that we needed some kind of moderation system to filter out the dick-pics and inappropriate profile comments, and we also discovered early on that such a process couldn't be automated as it needed people with a good knowledge of popular culture both to spot people using celebrity photos, and to differentiate between genuinely offensive comments and jocular banter and youth-culture references. We also discovered that when you're running your site on a free-registration model, you'd need to hire a small army to moderate the flood of profiles being created.

The solution seemed obvious; offer people who'd been members of the site for a few months the opportunity to become volunteer moderators, on the grounds that these people obviously had too much time on their hands, and that human nature being what it is many of them would jump at the chance to work for free for anything that made them feel important and gave them a position of apparent authority. It was set up such that any new profile or newly-added photo would be passed in front of multiple moderators, and those moderators whose opinions were regularly out of step with consensus would have their opinions disregarded without their even knowing it, until such time as it was obvious that they were voting in line with consensus again.

The whole thing worked stunningly well at first, with some of the moderators literally reviewing tens of thousands of uploads per day, independent online communities growing up where the moderators would chat and exchange tips on what was and wasn't acceptable and problematic users to watch out for, the moderators recommending the site to their friends which in turn generated more ad traffic, and so on. With minimal staff costs the site boomed, and became a multi-million dollar business.

Then things started to get out of control. The volunteers became increasingly worried about the risk of being the one that let something inappropriate through, and more and more legitimate profiles started to be rejected. The offsite message boards became breeding grounds for paranoia with the moderators posting increasingly lurid speculation about the employees. As the site grew in popularity, religious groups who were opposed to the site on general principle began to figure out that if their members signed up en masse, they could systematically disrupt the system and block anyone they thought looked slutty from posting. Within a year, the volunteer-based system had to be abandoned, and a bunch of low-paid but paid interns took their place, as even though it cost the site more it was the only way to keep it functioning without either allowing a bunch of cranks to determine what was and wasn't hosted, or abandoning moderation altogether, trusting to §230, and developing a reputation as the cesspit of the internet.

The moral of this story is, the kind of people who want to act as volunteer moderators aren't always the people you would want as volunteer moderators. Misplaced Pages is still to this day suffering from the after-effects of the early days when Jimmy was handing out admin bits to his friends; allowing the small handful of people who see themselves as Fearless Spam Hunters to set the tempo for Misplaced Pages's attitude towards what constitutes promotion could do irreparable damage, but because they're by and large the only ones who care enough to have input into what ORES et al consider inappropriate (the silent majority are writing articles, not prowling around looking for good faith new editors to harass with A7 and G11 tags), these automated systems are handing the policy agenda to a tiny clique of Free Culture cranks who don't want Misplaced Pages to host anything that doesn't coincide with their particular view of what it ought to be. This is the point where I ping SoWhy who can probably articulate this better than I can. ‑ Iridescent 02:32, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

I think you articulated that very well 👏 I myself was active in the early 2000s in a number of message boards as a moderator and admin, I even ran a German support board for two major message board softwares. Moderation on such pages always hinged on the fact that it was people with too much free time doing most of the work, which logically included my teenage and tweenage self. Luckily for Misplaced Pages, the user base is still large enough to not fall into the same patterns but I do see the risks. Regards SoWhy 07:37, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

As always, I feel that switching to a Git style system (or really any semi-modern source control system) with revision control for individual pages would help this problem. Right now it's nearly impossible to tell whether any semi-competent editor has reviewed a version of a page; pending changes has too many problems to be a feasible site-wide solution. I estimate it would cost at least $100 million/year to have paid staff review every change; the Foundation does not have that kind of money. So we make do with free labor. The most disruptive forms of vandalism (fake references, BLP violations, and the like) will not be detectable by AI anytime soon. power~enwiki (π, ν) 02:42, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

In a paid-moderation model, paid staff wouldn't need to review every change, any more than Facebook's or Instagram's paid moderators are inspecting every restaurant review or photograph of your cat you post. They'd do random dip-samples of edits, and whenever they found something problematic would look into that editor's other contributions in more detail, and they'd pay particular attention to edits that added, removed or changed large blocks of text on topics on which that editor hadn't previously worked. This is what already happens, we'd just be making it less haphazard and ensuring that unfashionable topics that aren't on the watchlists of multiple editors also get monitored for problematic edits. There are legitimate grounds for arguing against paid moderation, on the grounds that it would potentially demoralize unpaid admins and RC patrollers to know that other people are being paid to do identical work and that some people were receiving formal training to do a job in which other people were just being thrown in at the deep end and expected to pick it up as they go along, but cost isn't an issue; it would probably take no more than ten full-time-equivalent posts to have a significant impact on Misplaced Pages's quality, and those posts could be anywhere and wouldn't need Bay Area—or even Biloxi Area—wages. (The WMF is sitting on roughly $30 million surplus cash and the figure rises every year—we quite literally have more money than we know what to do with.) ‑ Iridescent 02:59, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Ten FTE = 2.5 people concurrently, which is the lower end of being able to patrol Special:RecentChanges for vandalism (even with AI aids); in my experience a single person can watch IP edits, or can watch non-ECP edits, or can watch ECP edits and do something else. Doing that for 8 hours straight is borderline-unreasonable at any wage level; I don't think even the top Huggle-users manage that. And then you need other people (or "the community") to manage things that aren't insta-revert vandalism. If the WMF were willing to pay for such a thing, I'd rather them deal with patrolling/verifying references on articles on Indian films, rugby players, Chinese cars, etc. first. power~enwiki (π, ν) 03:10, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Again, they'd not be expected to review everything. RC patrol—with or without semiautomation—is a staggeringly inefficient method; the hypothetical reviewers would be dip-sampling a couple of edits from each editor with a slight bias towards newer accounts and a stronger bias towards newer accounts making large changes. This isn't some kind of crazy blue-sky thinking; virtually every major social media site, blogging platform, advertising site, information site including user-submitted content (e.g. Google Maps) etc with the exception of Misplaced Pages already does this. ‑ Iridescent 03:19, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

This seems like the class of problem where the good Rev. Bayes could help. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 04:05, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

​As I understand it, that's what they're aiming for. The issue with all these machine-learning approaches is that Misplaced Pages is too complex a system to model well—if an IP removes a large block of text, are they a driveby vandal who should be summarily blocked and reverted, or an expert copyeditor who's realized that the point can be made far more elegantly, in which case blocking and reverting will likely drive away someone who could have gone on to do great things? With ORES and edit filters in particular, we also have blowback from what it doesn't detect; any WP:LTA case worth their salt can figure out how to word things such that an edit won't be flagged as potentially problematic, and if the RC patrollers are relying on the automated systems to decide what warrants further attention, the next Morning277 could be active for years before anyone even notices there's a problem. When even the human volunteers can't always agree on what is and isn't problematic, trusting in machines is unlikely to end well. ‑ Iridescent 13:37, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

In theory individual revisions can be reviewed (meta does this). On Iri’s point, while I’m certainly more on the “Self-appointed defender on the wiki” end, re: promotion, I also largely agree with his point on this more broadly: any stroll through SPI or AIV when both are crowded and you’ll find a fair number of “why do we care about this?” And “no. I will not indulge your bloodlust for blocks 11 months after the fact.” cases. I call it Misplaced Pages-the-videogame, and CAT:CSD probably suffers from the similar issues. Part of the problem is that very few admins feel like getting yelled at by the person reporting/tagging/requesting action because it’s not worth the hassle of spending 48 hours on your talk page explaining in explicit detail on how their interpretation of the policy/guideline in question is either wrong or controversial. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:02, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

This one is the worst example I've ever come across of "I haven't heard of it so we should delete it". ‑ Iridescent 03:19, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Oh, I remember that one. The worst I’ve seen was an A7 on an Indian Catholic bishop who was the driving force behind translating the Bible into Kashmiri. Also trying to delete the elections of the Holy Roman Emperor (I think I’ve bitched here about that one.) TonyBallioni (talk) 03:28, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Since I'm feeling grumpy (hmm, maybe it's bedtime? No, I'll post on your talk page first), I'm going to say that we can't even get support for proper version control for the actual software we're all running (i.e., JS/CSS; see phab:T165981 and related requests), so I'm not going to think about it for content.

I want to add another item to the list of problems: The problem is not just that edits are reviewed by bored busybodies (like me). The problem is also that the subset of bored busybodies who review RecentChanges in general have approximately zero incentive to support the addition of content. And perhaps even more importantly, a change gets reviewed, and re-reviewed, and re-re-reviewed, until someone reverts it. So if I happen to review a change, and I happen to believe that it's a net improvement to an article, that doesn't stop someone else from wandering by and reverting it anyway. The way most editors handle their watchlists is to check the net changes, rather than stepping through each change individually, so a change–revert cycle becomes invisible to them. I believe that we lose a fair bit of desirable (if perhaps not perfectly presented) content that way. Each change is subject to repeated review by people who "don't want to be the person who approved that" and whose only significant form of feedback is being Special:Thanked for things that they reverted (but never, ever thanked for things that they correctly accepted or ignored, because nobody knows about that).

At this wiki, anyway. Smaller wikis don't have this problem. There's too much work to be done, and changes are normally reviewed by only one or two people, who review all edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:43, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

I totally agree with every word of the above. The way our software is set up creates a huge inbuilt systemic bias towards action over inaction; as well as "changes keep getting reviewed until someone either reverts it or makes another change so it ceases to be the most recent", there's a serious problem (on which I've commented before) at the admin boards, in which it doesn't matter that a dozen admins have decided that no action needs to be taken if another admin comes along afterwards and decides that protections or blocks are in order. It might be a lingering collective memory from the early days; on Nupedia (and its successor Citizendium) articles were marked as drafts until Larry or one of his cronies signed off on them and pronounced them "ready" whereas on Misplaced Pages the articles were live from the moment someone clicked "Save Changes", and it's something of an article of faith among the old guard who still largely determine policy that anything Nupedia did was wrong (uou presumably remember how much shouting and arguing it took even to get such a thing as the Draft: namespace to exist, which was surely a no-brainer), so there's maybe a cultural subconscious opposition to any form of "I approve this change".

Ultimately, we're limited by the fact that despite 15 years of additions and enhancements, MediaWiki is at its heart the same software that was designed for use by a small community of friends and colleagues in which everyone knew each other (it's not that long since the 'blocking mechanism' was to leave a polite notice on the editors talkpage that if they made any further edits, consideration would be given to reverting them), and it's never really scaled to an anonymous community with thousands of active editors at any given time.

Because removing stuff—in the sense of "come revert vandals" and "come nominate stuff for deletion"—is one of the key routes en-wiki has traditionally offered to people who want to get involved but don't really feel confident writing their own content, the cynic in me says nothing will change. (This is not to belittle the bored busybodies in any way; I was one myself and still from time to time fire up the RecentChanges patrol scripts or the mass typo search-and-replace tools,* or go prowling around Special:Random looking for things to nominate for deletion.) Community Engagement can scream until they're blue in the face that constantly having time wasted with nonsense like Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Fownes Hotel or with constantly reviewing the actions of trigger-happy admins is a disincentive that drives editors away, but the rest of the WMF ultimately probably won't listen—the quick-buzz of "I reverted/tagged something and it disappeared! Something I did made a lasting change to the Sum of All Human Knowledge and it took minimal effort!" is one of the tools that keeps the new account registrations and the donor funds flowing.
*I was present at the birth of semiautomation—the sudden spike to 15,000 edits in a month in May 2007 and this talk thread mark the birth and growing pains of Huggle, the first credible attempt at a "likelihood that this edit is problematic" based system for reviewing recent changes. It's only with a decade of hindsight, watching people try and fail to come up with something better, that I truly appreciate what a work of genius Gurch's original incarnation of Huggle was.

Other than you and Maggie/MRG, most of the WMF staff, board and the volunteer devs don't actually have much experience with Misplaced Pages/MediaWiki as a writing medium (just gonna put this here), and even those who do have experience editing Misplaced Pages tend to do so from the revert-and-report admin-hurling-lightning-bolts-at-the-peasants-below perspective rather than from the perspective of someone trying to create and improve content from the bottom up—our supply of Doc James's is limited. If you hold your nose and try to read discussions at Meta and Phabricator, it's obvious that the prevailing attitude is towards technical rather than social fixes to problems, and towards a raw-participant-numbers social network approach in which a new account who does nothing but make hundreds of posts on talkpages is worth more than a new account who sits quietly in the background writing articles, because the editor who's made a thousand trivial posts to talkpages is more "engaged" in terms of raw metrics than the editor who's made fifty long contributions to articles. (Since these are your official statistics, it's reasonable to assume that they're the statistics you consider important, and you don't even differentiate between edits to talk and edits to articles.)

To be honest, as long as Jimmy Wales remains in post I don't see the problem ever being addressed, as he creates a huge chilling effect from the top down that freezes the life out of any serious "what do we want to be and how are we going to get there?" discussion from Board level down, especially since the Knowledge Engine farce burned his fingers. The WMF really needs people with the nerve to say "the existing model is ultimately going to reach the point where we can't keep patching and making do, what will Misplaced Pages 2.0 look like?", but his sitting in the center dismissing any suggestion that the sites aren't perfect as "trolling" means that anyone with a vision that goes beyond "more of the same" doesn't last.​ ‑ Iridescent 15:15, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

(ec) I must say I don't see too much excess reversion, with an insanely large watchlist, but mostly of relatively low-view articles. I try to look at the previous edit(s) if recent, and if such a reversion seems a net negative will of course revert, without knowing if it is a reviewer or not. Regarding Iri's points (which in general I agree with), it would help if WMF had a board with editorial/academic backgrounds, rather than just techie/activist type ones. AFAIK none of the "outside" board members has ever had such a background. Johnbod (talk) 15:24, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

I believe there have been a few journalists/media folks on the board, and a couple whose day jobs were in the education industry. I'm not sure that, say, a Professor of Education would be all that valuable. The board sets the budget (total amount + how much to spend in each of several major areas), and they set the overall direction ("Let's develop a strategy!" or "Give more attention to developing countries"), but none of them are involved in the day-to-day operations of the WMF, and the WMF is only involved in content tangentially (e.g., processing a DMCA takedown) or accidentally (developing software that increases or decreases the likelihood of a particular kind of content being created). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

On the topic of stats, we do have a breakdown of edits to talk versus edits to articles HERE

Have considered the idea of having medical / nursing students systematically review edits to medical content. We are looking at about 500,000 article edits on EN WP per year which would not be impossible. Was thinking to trial with a summer student if I could find interest. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:50, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I'm not sure either that a Professor of Education would be all that valuable, but what would be valuable would be a few textbook writers, museum curators, librarians and people with a background in "summarize current thinking for a mass audience" periodicals like Natural History, New Scientist and History Today; basically, people who reflect what Misplaced Pages actually does, rather than people who reflect the "better living through science" fantasy that any problem can be solved by throwing programmers at it. Because of the unique nature of Misplaced Pages, the WMF board has always had a tendency to reflect the values of the libertarian and Randroid lunatic fringe from which it came, and the influence of Silicon Valley types and sycophantic journalists is a negative, not a positive. As a great thinker once said, My ideal recruits to Misplaced Pages would be the people who write travel guidebooks, museum catalogs and children's nonfiction; they all understand the "absorb a lot of information and summarize the salient points in brief and neutral form" and if the WMF really want to spend money reaching out externally they'd do much better trying to recruit the people who write children's books and the people who write museum labels, as it's the ability to summarize material for people with little prior knowledge of the topic, not the ability to defend a point logically, that Misplaced Pages needs. (The ideal Misplaced Pages editor would be the authors of Cliff's Notes and the For Dummies books.); that goes just as much for the board as it does for the editor base, as it's that disconnect between the incompatible mentalities of "what can we do to get more readers and editors?" on the one hand and "what should we be doing to ensure we're as useful to readers as possible?" on the other that's at the heart of pretty much every systemic problem on Misplaced Pages and the other large WMF projects. It's no good having a board on which at most two members actually understand what it is that Misplaced Pages does. (I make no apologies for conflating Misplaced Pages with the WMF in this context. When it comes to the big policy issues, the big Wikipedias are the only games in town; no policy decision no matter how drastic made on Commons, Wikidata etc would have any significant impact on us other than a temporary inconvenience. Despite their protests to the contrary, the other projects exist to be a support mechanism for Misplaced Pages.)

@Doc James: The content/non-content ratio as a raw figure isn't that valuable—when I racked up c. 20,000 edits in a few days a few years ago search-and-replacing "and and" (something that needs human supervision as there are some instances in computing and logic articles where the term has a legitimate use) then in terms of raw edit count I must have appeared to be Misplaced Pages's greatest asset, whereas someone like Newyorkbrad or Moonriddengirl who don't make many article-space edits but do a lot of behind-the-curtain necessary stuff appear a total waste of space; likewise, a recent changes patroller who always stops to explain to each editor why they've been reverted and what they need to be doing differently is of considerably more value to Misplaced Pages than some human-bot hybrid running STiki and mindlessly machine-gunning the 'revert' button with one hand with 90% of their attention on the TV, even though the former will appear in terms of raw statistics to be someone treating Misplaced Pages as a social network (since each mainspace edit will be accompanied by multiple talk edits as they talk the new editor through what they should be doing).

I quite like the idea of picking a small field and getting people to regularly conduct systematic reviews, but medicine might be too broad a field, as well as too atypical a field if part of the aim is to conduct a genuine quality assessment of Misplaced Pages. (There are some absolutely fucking awful medical articles, but they're rarer than in most other fields because they tend to be more heavily patrolled and the standards more strictly enforced.) It might be better to start with relatively small and specialist fields in areas where Misplaced Pages already has good working relationships with relevant academic institutions (there must be some museums we haven't managed to piss off yet), and once we have the assessment and review processes up and running for teratology, 18th-century German porcelain or the comparative linguistics of Mediterranean island dialects, we then start rolling it out to broader fields like "medicine", "painting" and "astronomy". ‑ Iridescent 02:02, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

arbitrary editing convenience break: medical articles

There you go again, with all that high-minded stuff about being useful to readers. Intelligible, even.

Since enwiki's medical articles are the subject I know best, I'll use them as my example. What exactly does "useful to readers" mean for an article about a disease?

I have one simple answer, and it pretty much means that when you get a note from your friend saying "We just left the doctor's office, and it turns out that she has scaryitis", you'll be able to find that in Misplaced Pages and easily calibrate your response on a scale that runs from "What a relief" to "I'm so very sorry". But (a) that's not the only answer I have, and (b) not everyone agrees, even though a ==Prognosis== section is officially recommended.

Here's another simple answer I have: When you read about scaryitis in the news, you should be able to find out what the patient experience of that condition is. We do this in a very few articles. Off hand, Hyperhidrosis says (or at least used to) that severely sweaty palms make it inadvisable to take certain jobs, because knives slip out of wet hands, and Cancer probably still says that patients have a lot of emotional stuff around it. But with the exception of a few big subjects, such as cancer, our sourcing guidelines push us firmly away from that kind of content. You can get a good meta-analysis on whether drug A or drug B reduces cholesterol more. You can't get a good meta-analysis on whether sweaty palms is a disabling condition for a butcher, or whether parents of premature babies are just "really stressed" or "practically going insane from worry".

That's only two of the answers I would give, and neither of them are things that we're handling well.

BTW, WT:MEDMOS a while ago had a discussion about reading levels that might interest you. Since I've given up on my watchlists (both accounts, all wikis), I tend to wander in and out of discussions based on whether I remember them (pings help  :-), so I have no idea what it ended up like. At the point I last read it, though, we had some reasonable consensus that articles ought to have a range of information (e.g., simpler introductory sentences, but still leaving room for jargon-filled paragraphs later). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:45, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

​Interestingly, I'm exactly the same with regards to watchlists—I tend to use my recent contribution history as a mini-watchlist. I do still keep my big watchlist, but treat it as I would a social media feed, occasionally dipping in to it when I'm bored rather than checking it top-to-bottom on a regular basis. (And after months of grumbling about Echo when it was introduced, I now completely see the point of it; not just the direct pings, but the thanks and links notifications serve as notices that someone else has taken an interest in something I've done so I probably ought to have a look and see why.)

No apologies for banging on about usefulness; too many people seem to see Misplaced Pages as an exercise in how much obscure knowledge they can show off, and forget that our readers in most cases just want to know more about insert topic without feeling that they're unwelcome because they don't know all the jargon. Years and years ago when I first started, something Giano said stuck with me; assume that every reader is a bright 14-year-old with no prior knowledge of the topic but who's interested in learning. In my experience, other than a few very technical subjects which are usually subsidiary to something else, that rule works consistently both in terms of how articles should be targeted in terms of reading comprehension, and in terms of how we format articles to try to keep readers engaged (mention anything that sounds particularly interesting or unusual in the lead even if it's relatively unimportant so readers keep reading after they've skimmed the lead, top-load the most attractive or interesting images at the beginning of the article, stop to explain anything that might not be obvious to every reader even if it means a footnote section that's as long as the article, if a word has synonyms always use the one that a child is most likely to understand unless you absolutely need to mix them up to avoid repetition).

I agree with you about medical condition articles—we can scream and shout as much as we like that readers shouldn't be using Misplaced Pages as a medical source, but I've seen enough people using it in the wild to know that Misplaced Pages is one of the most trusted medical websites in the world no matter how many disclaimers we post. (For most illnesses and medications, the top hits are Mayo Clinic, WebMD, CDC, Misplaced Pages and the NHS; whether fairly or not, the 95% of the world that isn't the US have spent their entire life hearing horror stories about the American medical system so will automatically discount CDC and the Mayo Clinic, WebMD looks and feels like a dodgy commercial outfit with its "click here to subscribe" popups and adverts everywhere, and the NHS is so specific to England and Wales that it's not necessarily useful to people in other countries.)

As a very-long-term project a lot of the medical coverage should probably get a two-level approach with separate articles aimed at patients and aimed at practitioners/students, at least with regards to common illnesses and commonly-used medications—if I wake up with a sniffle, stomach cramps and aching limbs and wonder if I have flu and if so whether I need to be worried, I don't want the lead of the article to include the terms "polymerase chain reaction" or "neuraminidase inhibitor oseltamivir". (I also am going to be seriously misled and upset by an article whose lead gives the strong impression that influenza has a 10% fatality rate, since if I'm a typical reader I'm going to parse three to five million cases of severe illness and about 250,000 to 500,000 deaths as "one in ten of the people who get it die" and not understand that what Misplaced Pages means by "severe illness" almost certainly doesn't include whatever I happen to have.*) It's been tried experimentally on a few broad topics like Virus and Genetics, but with limited success as in both cases the specialist technical article has been given the primary title and the non-specialist article hidden away at ], meaning the search engines are driving readers to the technical rather than the non-technical articles. ‑ Iridescent 14:22, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
*I'm hating on the Influenza article because this is a featured article and consequently considered to be one of the best articles Misplaced Pages has to offer, as determined by Misplaced Pages's editors and used by editors as examples for writing other articles, but the same points could be made about almost any article about a medical condition. In particular, the unnecessarily traumatizing language about mortality/recovery rates without putting it in context front-and-center that for most conditions the risk of death or long-term disability are heavily weighted towards people with already-compromised immune systems, is a particular bugbear of mine. (I don't know if figures exist, but any primary care physician, 911 operator or ER admissions staff can confirm anecdotally that "but I read on the internet that this might be fatal!!!" is a significant driver of people seeking unnecessary treatment and diverting services away from people who actually need them.)

Huh. I do make thorough passes through my not particularly long watchlist. I wonder if the issue with making articles interesting is that a) many dedicated editors can't tell when writing that they are using unnecessarily dense language (something people have said about my articles, most recently on Wōdejebato) and b) not all topics can necessarily be made interesting (Ita Mai Tai has an interesting etymology but Taapaca, Tutupaca and Ubinas don't have much to offer in kind) with the source material available. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:40, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

As a quick-and-dirty way to bring the volcano articles more in line with Giano's guide:

1. Avoid words like "Holocene" in the lead and instead say "last erupted around 2300 years ago"; the former makes readers give up after just reading the lead and go find something that looks less like geography homework, while the latter conjures up images of comely Inca peasants fleeing the oncoming ash cloud astride their trusty llama steeds, even though they're semantically identical;
2. Although most of the volcanoes in northern Chile are far from towns and inhabited areas, nowhere is entirely uninhabited; search round for some photos of people who live on the slopes or in areas at risk from pyroclastic flows, preferably attractive women in colorful native costumes, handsome men with wistful expressions, or cute children, and put it near the top. They're encyclopediacally justified, and adding a human element can transform a boring technical article into something that engages the reader. If you have trouble finding anything on Commons, Flickr is usually a good bet (nudge); whatever the license, Flickr users are almost always happy to CC BY-SA relicense a photo if you point out that an appearance on a Misplaced Pages TFA will generate between 20,000–200,000 views, at least some of which will be interested enough in the image to click through and view the rest of that user's Flickr photostream. Even interesting looking buildings would do; the historic town of Putre is likely to be destroyed if Taapaca erupts makes it clear that this is a story with a human impact rather than a technical article about magma flow rates;
3. Even if this volcano hasn't erupted recently, that doesn't mean other similar volcanoes haven't; find some volcanoes of the same type and upload images with lots of impressive-looking lava streams and steam venting, to give the reader an idea of what it must have looked like when it was active.

Basically, what you need to remember is that your primary audience isn't "I am writing a history of the volcanoes of South America and want to know about all of them", it's "I went to Chile on vacation and saw this really cool looking mountain and want to know more about it", and if it does wind up at TFA it's "I have absolutely no idea what a Tutupaca is but I've learned from experience that if I click this link in the middle of the main page I sometimes see something interesting". The technical stuff needs to be there, but bury it at the bottom; despite what WP:LEAD may tell you the purpose of the lead isn't an introduction to the article and a summary of its most important contents (although it needs to be that as well), but as a sales pitch to convince people landing on the article that reading it will be worth their while (and equally importantly, to notify people who've landed on the article that this isn't a topic in which they'll be interested to save them wasting their time). ‑ Iridescent 15:18, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

Really on these, which mostly get fewer than 10 views a day, you are preparing for the day they blow up and get 50,000 overnight. Then you have provided the world's media with stuff to repeat confidently to camera. Ubinas looks promising. Johnbod (talk) 15:39, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

arbitrary break: page view spikes

Har. I did find some good images of Putre for Taapaca and added one of them. Now I got sidetracked by the spectacular imagery of the landscape... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:38, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

It's not just preparedness for the day they blow up; all it takes is one high-profile event to happen there. (My shitty and ill-maintained Broadwater Farm article, which normally gets only a few page views a year, was briefly the most-viewed article on Misplaced Pages during some unpleasantness in 2011.) It doesn't even take anything interesting to happen; all it takes is a celebrity to take an interest in a Misplaced Pages page and tweet a link to it, and the page can go viral within seconds. Tarrare is my usual go-to example of the power of Twitter to affect Misplaced Pages page views; it normally gets the deservedly low page views you'd expect from an article on a case study of a patient with multiple metabolic digestive disorders in 18th-century France, but with metronomic regularity some celebrity or other finds the story interesting, tweets a link, and it becomes one of the most popular articles on Misplaced Pages for a day or two. (During his last spike his pageviews for that single day made him more popular over the entire week than China, Michael Jackson, World War II or Elvis Presley.) ‑ Iridescent 01:44, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Ha. I am familiar with the "high profile event" thing since 1257 Samalas eruption - one of the most popular articles I've written with several translations - got a little more attention in 2017 during the eruptions of the neighbouring volcano of Agung.Too bad that the eruption was only discovered in 2013 and that there is no review source analyzing its region-by-region impact; if there was one it might stand a chance at FAC. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:44, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

It would probably stand a chance at FAC regardless, provided you can demonstrate that you looked for a review source analyzing its region-by-region impact. WP:What is a Featured Article is one of the more misunderstood pages on Misplaced Pages, even by experienced editors, and the neglects no major facts or details language is a little misleading. To be an FA an article doesn't need to say everything there is to know about the article subject, it needs to reflect the state of current scholarship on the subject, so if something hasn't been covered in the literature it's perfectly OK to omit it. (The "neglects no major facts or details" wording means that we don't omit the findings of Researcher A just because we prefer the conclusions of Researcher B.)

In general, don't get too hung up on complying with the letter of the law of WP:WIAFA, except for 1d (NPOV); criteria 1a, 1b, 1e and 4 are purely subjective, 1c is an impossibility to comply with for any but the narrowest topic so is disregarded, while 2 and 3 are just common sense with which every article should be complying. In reality, the FA criteria are "is this confusingly or badly written?", "is there anything obviously missing that ought to be there?", "does it fairly reflect the various schools of thought?", "are the images correctly licenced?" and "do the sources say what the articles claim they say?". ‑ Iridescent 13:27, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Jo-Jo, have you seen any readability discussions? I'm partial to http://hemingwayapp.com/ (which requires copying and pasting plus removing the numbers leftover from the ref tags), but other people prefer http://readabilityofwikipedia.com/ (which sometimes gives nearly random results if there's a parsing error due to unsupported wikitext constructions; check its reported word count to see if it "lost" most of the article). In the case of Taapaca, Hemingway says that the lead rates as the last year of high school, and the whole article as the first year of university, and it highlights almost half the sentences as being "very hard to read". ROW says that only 28% of Misplaced Pages articles are more complicated to read that this one, and that it is "difficult" (but not the most difficult category).

On the subject of medical articles, figuring out that 98% of people survive non-melanoma skin cancer, even if you have one of those, isn't medical advice. "You personally should use ____" is medical advice; "Overall, the most effective treatment is ____" is medical information. I think that we need to provide much clearer medical information.

A solid training program on how to write might be useful. For example, most people understand that "98% of people with non-melanoma skin cancer can be completely cured", but they don't necessarily make the leap from that to "2% of people with non-melanoma skin cancer die from it." And while 98% is fairly well understood as meaning "practically everyone", it's sometimes clearer to write "one person out of 50" than to write "2%".

If you want to get even more complicated, then there are subtle effect. 98% is a simple number that everyone on this page grasps easily – we're not talking about something complicated, like the possibility that the used Barbie doll in the neighbor's garage sale will be one of the few that says "Math class is tough" (about 0.0003%, if you're curious) – but presentation matters, because "2% eventually die" is more salient than "98% are cured". For an affected person and their loved ones, it's not a simple math equation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:46, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Regarding the 98%/2% thing, "98% of people can be completely cured" and "2% die from it" aren't at all the same thing. "98% of people can be completely cured" could just as well mean "2% of people will suffer mild headaches occasionally for the rest of their lives as a side effect of the treatment". For cancers it's not such an issue as for most of them the prognosis splits between "full recovery" and "dead" without much in between, but for something like neurological disorders, where the result is a dice-roll on the spectrum between "full recovery within a few days" to "dead within weeks" and the full range from "minor inconvenience" to "lifelong debilitating disability" in between, making it crystal clear whether we're talking about "the percentage who make a total recovery" or "the percentage who survive" is of utmost importance if you (rightly) see a significant function of Misplaced Pages's medical coverage as letting people know how worried they ought to be. ‑ Iridescent 03:06, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Sidetrack within a sidetrack on readability scoring

I don't think I've seen thorough readability discussions, although "hemingwayapp" rang a bell. I am guessing that it might be harder for me since I am ESL and learned much of it from academic text too. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:13, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Warning; hit nerve alert. I know from previous discussions at WT:MEDMOS that you (WhatamIdoing) are less skeptical than I, but I find the application to Misplaced Pages of Flesch–Kincaid and similar schemes that claim to assess readability to be very misguided. As with standard IQ tests, F-K doesn't actually measure anything that's particularly useful to Misplaced Pages, it measures how closely something conforms to American cultural expectations. (The very fact that its results are given in "grades", something completely meaningless in the rest of the world, is a giveaway.) As one very obvious case in point, the syllable and word counts are absolutely key to F-K, but all it takes is a couple of mentions of "laboratory", "Israel", "military" etc to send the syllable counts differing wildly between dialects, and that's before you get to the joys of English place names—want to see what a computer readability program makes of "from Hunstanton to Godmanchester via Costessey and Wymondham" (13 syllables, if you're counting)? If the article happens to include a foreign language quotation, does glasflächenreinigung (one word, five syllables) really improve the readability whilst nettoyage de la surface en verre (six words, nine syllables) wrecks it? The whole "short sentences are always better" thing is a cultural construct rather than an actual rule of writing; Dickens—the absolute exemplar of English language populist writing targeted at people who weren't necessarily avid readers—had an average sentence length just above 20 words and seems to have survived. "If the typical reader is likely to have forgotten how the sentence began when they reach the end, consider breaking it" is the only real rule of good writing when it comes to sentence length that isn't just snobbishness, and even that depends on the reader; if the reader finds a topic interesting, long sentences can increase comprehension as they're easier to focus on than a barrage of staccato short bursts.

The language used in Misplaced Pages articles should be as simple as it's possible to make them without losing meaning and not one step further. There's a legitimate argument to be had about when we should be assuming the reader has the background knowledge, when we should be explaining terms and background that might not be familiar,* and when we do stop to explain jargon and background whether it's better to do so in the footnotes where people might not notice it or inline where it disrupts the flow of text and risks appearing patronizing to those who are already familiar with the topic—but largely arbitrary scoring systems shouldn't be playing a part in it. (If you want more of me flying off the handle at Misplaced Pages's culture of 'improving the readability' of articles at the cost of losing the meaning, see User talk:Johnbod/36#Problems?.) ‑ Iridescent 02:11, 15 October 2018 (UTC)
*On an article that mentioned a railroad—I can't remember which—I remember once being quite surprised when Ealdgyth called me out for using "track lifting" instead of "removed or demolished the railroad-related structures". In hindsight she was quite correct, as even though "track lifting" is simpler in terms of readability, it's a false economy as enough readers will need to stop and look up what that means that it disrupts more readers than it helps.

One of the reasons that I prefer the Hemingway app is that the "grade level" score is just shiny chrome (added last year, I believe), and the core function is actually in evaluating the structure of individual sentences. "Go from Hunstanton to Godmanchester via Costessey and Wymondham" is high school reading level, but who cares? What is more important is that that sentence is not highlighted as being very difficult to read. Also, the Hemingway app provides sentence-by-sentence information, rather than an overall score. If you write a lengthy FA for this Misplaced Pages, and you don't get any sentences highlighted in red, then you probably have not accomplished "brilliant prose". The point isn't to have no difficult sentences; the point is to put your complex sentences where you want to have them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:43, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

​I still can't really see the point of scoring in the context of Misplaced Pages. It makes sense for things like school textbooks, political pamphlets and news reportage, where you're trying to ensure that you communicate the pertinent points to readers who lack interest in the topic, before they lose attention. On Misplaced Pages, except for a very few limited exceptions such as material linked from the main page, readers are reading only what they've chosen to read, so if they've ended up at Guillain–Barré syndrome, it doesn't matter that the lead says In those with severe weakness, prompt treatment with intravenous immunoglobulins or plasmapheresis, together with supportive care, will lead to good recovery in the majority rather than If it's serious, injections and replacing ooky blood with clean blood will probably help, since the reader is obviously interested enough that provided they actually know what the words mean, they'll make the effort to understand. IMO, oversimplication is generally more of a problem on Misplaced Pages than overcomplication, particularly in talk pages; especially on hot-topic or high-traffic subjects there's a tendency to oversimplify, which means that particularly on medical and legal topics, where accuracy is more important than legibility, people tend to cut corners and change the meaning of things. For instance, although our Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is correct, you try explaining to Jimmy Wales that the European Parliament has no legislative powers and their voting to support it has no impact on whether the individual countries of the EU will introduce it into their legal systems. As I said somewhere above in this wall of text, Misplaced Pages articles should be in as basic a wording as it's possible to get them without losing meaning (until someone discreetly removed it a few months ago, it was a source of irritation to me for years that an article supposedly distinguished by professional standards of writing, presentation, and sourcing included the word "decollated", defended and regularly re-added by the author on the grounds that intentionally using obscure words was advancing people's understanding and knowledge of the English language), but not simplified the slightest bit further. (Paging Newyorkbrad, who I know has had strong opinions in the past about balancing readability and ambiguity, in the different-but-related field of how Misplaced Pages's internal policy pages and arbcom sanctions are worded.)

I know there are good reasons we got rid of the Article Feedback Tool, and I'd never advocate its return, but if you (with your WMF hat on) want an idea for something on which the WMF can spend money, which isn't very glamorous but likely to be far more useful in the long term than adding another member to the 45 "Community Engagement" staff (at least three of whom I wouldn't trust to count their fingers and get the same answer twice), commission and publish the results of some in-depth polling of what readers do and don't like about Misplaced Pages's articles and in particular Misplaced Pages's Featured Articles. I don't mean pop-up "did you find what you were looking for?" yes/no boxes displayed to readers when they leave a page, or "How would you improve this article" feedback boxes at the end of pages for readers to express their desire for more tits. I mean commission some paid, independent focus groups that represent the actual population (not the somewhat undiverse community that makes up the editor base), give them a big stack of printouts of Featured Articles and high-traffic articles, and ask them whether they found the articles easy or difficult to read, comprehensive, unbiased, interesting… and why. Then, start an equally independent group at the www.wikipedia.org search page on a database dump stripped of any indication of article assessment, ask them to independently navigate Misplaced Pages reading topics they find interesting for a few hours, and discreetly note whether they spend more time on and are more likely to follow internal links from articles with higher quality assessments. And then, use that same database dump stripped of quality assessment (maybe omitting the obvious one-line stubs), give people a genuinely random selection of Misplaced Pages articles and ask which they thought were the best-written, most readable, most comprehensive, and see how closely that correlates with Misplaced Pages's own article assessments.

While the wording and formatting has changed over the years, WP:Featured article criteria is still largely based on the arbitrary rules Raul made up in 2004 (in turn based on some equally arbitrary assumptions inherited from Larry Sanger), and carries with it a huge stack of assumptions that "articles meeting these criteria are what the readers are looking for". Because FAs are pushed as a model for other articles to follow, these assumptions leak through into the rest of Misplaced Pages; because Misplaced Pages is—rightly or wrongly—seen as a model for other websites to follow, those assumptions leak through into the rest of the internet; because the internet affects so much of the news agenda and everyday life nowadays, those assumptions leak through into reality. AFAIK these assumptions as to what readers want and what readers find useful has never been empirically tested among actual readers. While it might bruise some egos, it would be good to have an empirical list of "things readers want in articles" and "how technical should the language be?"; my gut instinct is that while there might be some surprises about how detailed readers feel articles should be, readability would rank fairly low as a concern. (Also paging @FAC coordinators: @FAR coordinators: @TFA coordinators in case anyone can think of a reason this is actually a Really Bad Idea, or can point out somewhere that it's already been done.) ‑ Iridescent 17:27, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Are we sure that we can treat "readers" as a bloc? I suspect that there are distinct groups of readers with different priorities and interests and that if you drill deep you'll notice some granularity. Also, at the risk of hijacking this talk page further, I shall apply some of the advice offered here to the Samalas article. Of course, the seamount articles have priority in terms of any FAC nomination. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:43, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

I've felt for a decade that Misplaced Pages would be better served if content contributors were provided better data about how readers use articles, and if such things were the subject of discussion from time to time at the FA talk pages.--Wehwalt (talk) 18:51, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Yeah I'd agree with that too - get a bunch of folks who'd never edited wikipedia, bribe 'em with some money or beers and get them to peruse articles. Not too fussed between either printing them out or just reading them online and posting comments somewhere. You could do a bunch of college students in one batch, a group of high school kids in another batch, and (say) a group of senior citizens another day etc. BTW although the FA criteria are arbitrary, they strike me as pretty sensible and generic. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:03, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

I agree that they seem sensible in general (although you know my feelings on it is a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature—you're not going to convince me that the editors who took Islam or Sea through FAC actually thoroughly read all relevant literature, much less included it in the bibliography). However, in both my and your case it's a gut feeling; we might well find that readers consistently don't want comprehensiveness and would rather have three short articles instead of one long one (or conversely that they find sub-articles confusing and would rather have a single enormous Banksia article rather than 179 individual articles on the species, even if it meant a megabyte-long page), or that the articles we consider our best work are consistently judged less readable than the rest—we have no way of knowing. We might even discover the shocking fact that readers don't care if citations are formatted identically, whether we use dashes or hyphens, or if an article with below 15,000 characters of readable prose has more than two paragraphs in the lead, provided the article is interesting and accurate. ‑ Iridescent 19:49, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) We have some that information, and it's basically discouraging. People generally read the introduction, or they're looking for a very specific detail (so they look in the infobox, and then skip to a relevant-sounding section). So if "write what readers want" is the goal, then 99% readers want much shorter articles, and the other 1% want all the possible infoboxes and lists and trivia about exactly which wrestling-entertainment-actor had which colors and theme songs and whatever else in which seasons. Also, a quick way to find out the name of that TV show that Joe Film had that six-second cameo in.

It's not exactly all about pop culture (e.g., people look things up for work), but the idea that lots of people are excited about spending half an hour (or more) reading about breast cancer awareness and its social effects is not exactly realistic. Even though this is the month for peak page views, I'd be surprised if more than a dozen people actually read it from start to finish. I'm not sure that ever I've done that, and I wrote the thing.

Other research has indicated that users want more media, and especially more interactive media. A timeline that you could swipe through and zoom in on areas that interest you the most, in-article calculators, or infographics would be popular.

I don't think that reader motivation is the key factor. Motivation does not turn you into a fluent reader of English. The writers of patient information leaflets are usually advised to assume that the reader has a functional grasp of English equivalent to what 13-year-old students are given in English class. This recommendation does not change when you think that the patient is "motivated", e.g., you are writing about a life-threatening condition. If anything, you try to write in simpler language in that case. Women who are "motivated" to read about DCIS do not need a bunch of complicated language. They need a sign that says "NOBODY DIES FROM THIS. YOU ARE GOING TO LIVE."

The Simple Measure of Gobbledygook, which I link because of its delightful name, is the recommended standard for pharmacy labels. I think my favorite study on on pharmacy labels was from 2010. It took a reasonably representative sample of Americans, showed them labels on drug bottles, and concluded in a very upbeat tone that all the prior studies were wrong and the old style of prescription labels were perfectly fine. The only little caveat, barely worth mentioning, was that you might need to make some changes to accommodate "special" populations of patients, like those who didn't have a university education (i.e., most people).

With a glance at my staff hat, I'm not sure about the practical utility of any such research. We (the experienced editors) are attached to long-form articles. We like writing them. We idealize them. Making those is Why We Are Here. And if the research says that long-form articles don't get read, or they don't educate readers, or that most readers really need, want, and benefit from infoboxes, then we think the problem is with the readers, not with our beautiful articles. The WMF has talked about encouraging other approaches, and the core editing community at this wiki has not been receptive to this idea. We (the editors) are a bit like the authors of that paper: Everything's fine with our current practices, unless you're trying to accommodate a few "special" groups of readers ...like 99% of them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:59, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

"Actually I put that typo there intentionally as a tripwire, kind of like the monolith in 2001, to notify me when intelligent life on Misplaced Pages had evolved to the point of reading articles all the way through." EEng 01:38, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

That wasn't really what my research (when at Cancer Research UK) suggested. Most of the 30 subjects asked to imagine that someone they slightly cared about had developed pancreatic cancer, and then find out about it on the web, went first to the top hits, namely specialized charities, or the NHS. Some later looked at WP, & if they didn't they were asked to at the end, but they had already got the infobox stuff elsewhere, and on the whole rather appreciated the extra depth on WP. Johnbod (talk) 21:13, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I'd go along with that. Someone looking up Cancer might only skim the lead, but someone interested enough in a particular variant is likely interested enough to want detailed information. The same goes in all fields including pop culture; someone looking up The Beatles might just want to know when they split up or who their manager was, but someone looking up You Know My Name (Look Up the Number) probably wants detailed information about this song, why it came to be written and what it's about. To repeat, my point is we don't know how people use Misplaced Pages and consequently whether we're wasting time doing things readers don't want. ‑ Iridescent 15:35, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes, the one thing all 30 subjects had in common is that they looked at a range of sites (but nearly always from the first page of results); of course in this case there were actually plenty of very good sites in that first page. Johnbod (talk) 17:26, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, could you link to the research you called discouraging? I'd be interested to see what the questions were. What would help a lot would be knowing how many unique visitors each article gets, which section headings readers click on, and how much time they spend at the article. Then we'd have some data. You wrote that people look at the lead and infobox, then skip to the section they care about. But you conclude from that that they want shorter articles. A shorter article might not contain the section they decided to skip to. SarahSV 16:21, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I'd agree it would be interesting to see the raw data or at least a summary, if the WMF is willing to release it. When it comes to WMF research, there's something of a history of the WMF concluding that the data supports whatever the WMF party line happens to be (remember the huge support the WMF claimed there was for Flow and Winter, or the search engine unpleasantness?); while things may have got better since the Wikimedia Civil War had the side-effect of purging the noisiest Anything-We-Do-Is-A-Force-For-Good-And-Thus-Anyone-Opposing-Anything-We-Do-Must-Be-Evil cultists from the WMF, I haven't seen enough of the new regime to know if old habits have continued. Given that it's not that long since the WMF was producing stuff like this and twisting research to claim it's "what people wanted", I can believe that it's possible that they've listened to the Wikidata/Reasonator clique claiming "short articles and lots of infoboxes" are what people want and decided in advance that this is what the research will conclude. ‑ Iridescent 21:51, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

I assume Google Analytics data is available for Misplaced Pages articles. Kaldari, is this something you can help with? We're wondering what research is available about how readers behave when reading Misplaced Pages articles: how many unique viewers, how long they spend on each page, etc. SarahSV 17:08, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Responding to the ping (way) above, there's always a trade-off in writing anything between a simple, straightforward presentation (that will eliminate some facts and details), and a more complicated one (which will be "more accurate" but will take longer to read and be harder to understand).

I've written about this before in the context of drafting policies and ArbCom decisions. Do we want or a whatever between a simple and straightforward statement of what the rule is (which will invariably fail to anticipate some possible scenarios), and a more developed and complicated presentation (which will provide specific guidance for a greater range of possible events, but take longer to read and be harder to understand). On the one hand, oversimplification leads to more disputes later on, and at best just kicks the can down the road. On the other hand, it is impossible to anticipate every possible set of facts even in theory, so there's a limit to how hard we should try. We should also remember, that we are writing policies and guidelines for a website, not a criminal statute or a chapter of the Code of Federal Regulations.

The same trade-off exists in articles. If we write "the sky is blue," we're immediately half-wrong on average: unlike the dog in "Silver Blaze" we do things in the night-time. If we write "the sky is blue during the daytime," we're perennial optimists (or drought-lovers) who have wished the clouds away. If we write "the sky is blue during the night time on a clear day," we're astronomical idiots who've never heard of solar eclipses. And if we write "the cloudless sky is blue during most daylight hours except during a total or annular eclipse of the sun," the reader will either be impressed by our attention to detail or bemused by how we can overcomplicate almost anything.

(Now I'm curious: how do we explain it? The lede of sky gives During daylight, the sky appears to be blue.... Thus only one of the (at least) three qualifications is given. But then again, I could push back against including a reference to clouds because when I see a cloud I'm not seeing the sky; I'm seeing an obstruction that's in the way of seeing the "sky." So we need to spend more time defining "sky." The first sentence of sky is The sky (or celestial dome) is everything that lies above the surface of the Earth, including the atmosphere and outer space. That is unclear as to whether the "sky" includes the clouds or doesn't, plus we have the extra bonus distraction of "celestial dome." I think I'll stop there for now, but perhaps I've made my point.)

Another oversimplified example—choose one: "Leap year is every fourth year." "Leap year is every fourth year, except that the years divisible by 100 aren't leap years." "Leap year is every fourth year, except that the years divisible by 100 aren't leap years, except that the years divisible by 400 are leap years." "Leap year is every fourth year, except that the years divisible by 100 aren't leap years, except that the years divisible by 400 are leap years, except that we'll probably skip a leap year one time about 3,000 years from now." Which is the most useful to the reader? Obviously all this information needs to be included in an article, but how to lay it out comprehensibly requires more writing skill than is generally appreciated.

By the way, on a different topic that has concerned both you (Iridescent) and me: I've come to conclude that variable and overcomplicated systems of referencing are one of the major deterrents to gaining and keeping contributors. I've been here however many years by this point, but I was drawn in partly because in 2006-2007 it was easy to add information to an article. If I found Misplaced Pages today I'm not sure I'd stick around after I'd messed up the referencing templates for the seventeenth time. But I digress. Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:11, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Continuing the digression, if one looks at the history of green, blue and red I have had an ongoing difference of opinion with an editor about blue skies, red blood and green leaves.....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:25, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

I like the idea of a naturalistic study - get a bunch of people on wikipedia and track what they read and later ask then what they read and why. NB: if everyone reads bits and peaces of big articles, if they are all different bits and pieces...then surely being comprehensive is a good thing, right? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:25, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

section break: the result of a decade of WP:CITEVAR

(re Newyorkbrad) On the referencing, I've said and will continue to say that we should have a sole house style for references. There would be some grumbling at first but people would get used to it soon enough; it's ridiculous that we expect editors to be familiar with a couple of thousand different templates

(yes, some of those are sandboxes or miscategorized things that shouldn't be there, but most of them aren't; "a couple of thousand" isn't an exaggeration) and chide them for being unfamiliar with every obscure referencing convention in the world. I'd have thought the introduction of Visual Editor would be the perfect opportunity for this; only have it support a single reference template, meaning the only options for the next generation of editors are to comply with the template, manually format the citation themselves if they absolutely must display it in Bluebook for some reason, or use a bare URL.

(Re Casliber) Probably, although my point is we don't know. It might be that all those readers would prefer their bits and pieces spread across multiple small articles (i.e. instead of a single "Rail stations of Dutchess County" article we have eighteen separate and very similar articles), or they might prefer everything be merged into a single article so they only have to look in one place for whichever bit or piece they need (i.e. Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway lists all the paraphernalia, even though the reader is likely only interested in a specific part of it). The point is, we don't know. ‑ Iridescent 23:50, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

courtesy break so further replies don't need to scroll through the above

Because I was here for something else, I have read the above long thread with great interest. There so much that is important, it's really a shame that the discussion is not in a more prominent venue. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:16, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

It's Misplaced Pages and consequently all CC BY-SA—feel free to cherrypick the juicy parts if you want to post a summary somewhere else. This is actually one of Misplaced Pages's more prominent venues; the Signpost may have 256 active watchers whereas I have only 206, but most of those 206 represent the closest thing Misplaced Pages has to an elite. ‑ Iridescent 10:13, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

• Comment and another parable re: paid moderators: Hi, I'm new to this thread, and just now skimmed it. I read Iridescent's parable of his dating site with great interest, as it has many parallels with the saga of the IMDB message boards, on which I was quite active from 2005 through their demise in February 2017. They started out with paid moderators who reviewed each notification of the user-reported system and took whatever action or non-action they deemed appropriate. Eventually people started gaming the reporting system, creating sockpuppets to double-down on reporting people they didn't like, but by and large the system worked well to remove and keep away troll posts. Then IMDB cheaped out and let the deletions become more and more automated, removing the paid moderators; at that point gaming obviously became easier. Then in 2007 IMDB added a buttload of new message boards to the system: boards that had nothing to do with films; unfortunately, many of the new boards were troll magnets, like Video Games and that sort of youth-skewing stuff, and boards on Politics, Religion, and other dens of iniquity. At the same time, so-called moderation became completely automated -- no human moderators. The kids and trolls from the boards like Video Games soon discovered they could wreak havoc not only on their favorite boards, but all over the message boards, with impunity. Automated reporting got overwhelmed and virtually ceased to work at all, because it punished people who conscientiously reported a lot (there was a lot to report!) by ignoring their reports after a certain number. Also, since IMDB allowed people to create an infinite number of sockpuppets, the sockpuppets not only overran the site, they overran the reporting system and fairly easily got anyone deleted or even blocked whom they didn't like. Long story short: By 2012 or so, IMDB was Troll Heaven. Everyone on the internet knew it, so anyone who wanted to troll headed for IMDB. One of Misplaced Pages's most notorious sockpuppeting trolls, with hundreds of socks, abandoned Misplaced Pages to do the same thing on IMDB. Many good people left in disgust, unable to have a civil conversation amidst the barrage of trolling. Finally, when the bad press got too great, IMDB gave two weeks' notice and then deleted all the boards completely. Of course this could have all been prevented had they simply created a subscription service to use the boards; legitimate film fans would have gladly paid $5 or $10 a month to use the message boards. That would have cut out the trolls and socks, and would have provided revenue to return to paid human moderators. But they didn't do that. Softlavender (talk) 04:22, 21 October 2018 (UTC); edited 10:06, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

You know, is it important whether these moderators are paid or not? I am a moderator on the website known as TV Tropes and we do not get paid there. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:10, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

As Iridescent mentioned, it's a matter of size. Once a website becomes one of the largest user-generated sites on the internet, the volume tends to militate against volunteer moderation working adequately. Although TV Tropes is a pretty well-known site, it does not even approach a fraction of the amount of user-generated input as the second-by-second barrage of input that Misplaced Pages gets or that the hundreds of thousands of now-deleted IMDB message boards got. Or Facebook, etc. Softlavender (talk) 09:49, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Go back to where we started, to the kind of people who want to act as volunteer moderators aren't always the people you would want as volunteer moderators. On something like TV Tropes which has a fairly tightly focused remit, and isn't high-profile or controversial enough for outside interests to have an interest in infiltrating or destabilizing it, it's probably not an issue as nobody would ever get to the "become a moderator" stage unless they had a strong interest in deconstructing TV, and consequently shared the site's purpose and values. (You won't even know TV Tropes exists unless you have an interest in the topics it covers; you'll know Misplaced Pages exists if you've ever done a Google search.) For a site like Misplaced Pages, which by its nature attracts a lot of "I don't want to do any of the work, I just like the idea of criticizing other peoples' work" types and is a constant target for spammers, not so much; since people who enjoy or are good at writing, coding, difficult cleanup or important maintenance are more likely to want to devote their free time to writing, coding, difficult cleanup or important maintenance, that means there's a constant tendency for the routine patrolling to be done by busybody "we must clean up all the trash!" types whose values don't really align with the rest of Misplaced Pages. But because the busybody types are the ones who hang round the noticeboards, Meta, RFA, the talkpages of Signpost articles etc, if you're not deeply familiar with the culture of en-wiki—which most of the WMF aren't—they're the ones who appear to be representative of the internal culture of Misplaced Pages, so the WMF assume that the interests of the busybody-patroller types are synonymous with the interests of Misplaced Pages. (We're talking about a situation where the WMF can conclude that "Ping users from the edit summary" and "Allow 'thanks' notification for a log entry" are higher priority than allowing VisualEditor to handle named references.) Hell, as I write an RFA for someone who's openly running on a platform of "I don't care about the content of Misplaced Pages, I just like reverting and deleting" is about to pass. ‑ Iridescent 10:13, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Visual editor not comletely fucking up notifications would be a start, let alone letting it level up: ...via ]{{Sfn|Schöttler|2010|p=417}}]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]] and ]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]]</span>]] almost immediately.{{Sfn|Schöttler|2010|p=417}}...any takers?! ——SerialNumber54129 11:54, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

I believe VE fucking things up falls into WAID's pigeonhole, but I don't really want to ping her as I'm sure she's sick of the sight of this thread. I do support the principle of VE 100%, but honestly if Lila had actively decided to run a feature launch to generate as much ill feeling as possible, she couldn't have gone about it better—"run fast and break things" is a great slogan but a disaster in practice. ‑ Iridescent 12:04, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

If you want me to repeat "sfn is not supported, and won't be" on the clock, then you'll have to ping my staff account. I can tell you that it wasn't just perverse willfulness or personal preference behind the decision; there's some complicated something or another that makes this simple-looking template actually be a royal pain. (They did try to explain once, several years ago, but my eyes glazed over fairly quickly, and I remember nothing of the explanation.) Now, of course, that team is doing little except mobile editing, so no new capabilities are expected there for another year. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:36, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Look up; I agree with the devs that VE shouldn't be expected to support all the variant reference formats. The problem is that at the moment we have two different systems (wikitext editing and VE) which are almost incompatible when it comes to referencing, as they handle them so differently, and there hasn't really been any effort to work towards a single style which both sets of editors can work with. ‑ Iridescent 09:55, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Good point on the last sentence. I found that worrisome as well but didn't want to go against the tsunami of support. People wring their hands about "RFA being broken", by which they mean too hard to pass, but in my mind it's way too easy to pass now, especially when there's peer pressure, unthinking bandwagonism, excessive participation by newbies, and a low percentage mandate. Softlavender (talk) 10:31, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

There are few successful RFAs not because RFA is hard to pass but because there are so many people saying RFA is hard to pass and it consequently discourages people from applying; plus, Misplaced Pages has been around for so long now that most of the active editors have either run at RFA or decided not to so there's a smaller pool to choose from. Looking at Misplaced Pages:Requests for adminship by year, I can't see any obvious miscarriages in the RFAs that didn't pass, whereas those candidates who weren't carrying some kind of problem-editing baggage tended to sail through with extremely high support. (Receiving 200 supports in an RFA was once so unusual that we created a dedicated page to document the phenomenon; this year five of the eight successful RFAs got that number.)

On the earlier point, how a site moderates itself is of great importance—in the current climate, arguably of paramount importance. It's obvious just from reading the news that the wild-west internet is becoming a political issue; when the Federal Communications Commission, the European Data Protection Board or the Information Commissioner's Office decides to call the big companies in for a chat, and Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Bezos point to the army of paid moderators they've hired to clean up the user-generated content and the teams of programmers they have working on scripts to spot fakes and libels before they go live, and Katherine Maher can only say "well, we kind of hoped some volunteers would take care of it", who's going to come out of that meeting worst? ‑ Iridescent 10:56, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Just a tiny note re: number of vote(r)s in RFA: It's so high now because of the watchlist notification. Before that was implimented, unless you had the template on your userpage it was very easy to miss the fact that an RfA was occurring, even if you had WP:RFA watchlisted, because it's just a single blip there; whereas via watchlist everyone sees it, and the fewer pages one has watchlisted the easier it is to see the notice, hence all the newbies voting. Softlavender (talk) 11:09, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

In this particular case I'm not seeing many newbies, just a lot of "I've taken the candidate's word for it regarding his contributions and haven't bothered to check for myself and see that the purported creations were things like this, were all years ago, and that his only content creation this year was this". You can't legislate against laziness, but in this case the laziness is on the part of established editors not eager newcomers who don't know any better. ‑ Iridescent 12:19, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

I mean, as with everything on Misplaced Pages, it only works in practice. So we kind of hoped some volunteers would take care of it sounds bad, but who exactly is doing a better job, of say handling bots, or copyvios - I don't know about Facebook, but Reddit certainly abounds with obvious copyright violations, which Misplaced Pages at-least tries in taking care of. Galobtter (pingó mió) 11:05, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

We're better than the social networks at handling bots, as the format of Misplaced Pages articles isn't as conducive as that of Twitter and Facebook. We're not great at handling the Russian and Macedonian troll factories (who as I speak are duking it out on Jimmy's talkpage), and we're certainly not great at differentiating between constructive and unconstructive editing. (This thread has diverged slightly, but it was originally about mw:JADE and mw:ORES, and the possibilities and pitfalls of AI automating recent changes patrol.) ‑ Iridescent 11:33, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

We're "not great" but Facebook/Twitter seems to be absolutely-awful at dealing with Russian trolls with all the fake news/disinformation/ads/propoganda and so on spread through it. (I've been reading this thread as it pops up on my watchlist, and "diverged slightly" is probably the understatement of the year) Galobtter (pingó mió) 11:50, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Sure, but the point I'm making is that FB, Twitter, Amazon etc are now hiring people to patrol full-time, assess the nature of the problem, delete what they need to and develop strategies for preventing it in future. When the FCC calls the big players in, they're the ones who can point to the positive action they're taking to try to address the issue; we're the ones whose solution is ten paid Trust & Safety staff backed up by 511 volunteer admins of varying degrees of activity, and whose figurehead boss openly tolerates assorted trolls, racists and crackpots on his talk page. ‑ Iridescent 11:59, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Or one could say we're not doing anything because we don't have as much of a problem. Not that I think the FCC is going to do anything as long as this person sits in office. Galobtter (pingó mió) 12:19, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Heh—I'd say the FCC is considerably more likely to do something while this person sits in office; Bush Jr and Obama might not have cared for the press or open internet but had enough respect for the constitution to largely keep their mitts away from them, whereas the current administration is openly hostile to any medium they don't control. If the Republicans hold both houses in the midterms (a big if) I wouldn't give §230 more than eighteen months. In any case, when it comes to the internet it's the EU and UK who largely make the running, as they have the clout, and more importantly the willingness, to enforce rulings extraterritorially, and don't have the American fetishization of free speech above all else. ‑ Iridescent 12:25, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Mediation proposal (and how to resolve content disputes)

This is obviously where all the fun is. I shall need to watchlist your talk page.

There is a proposal at WP:VPPR about the formal mediation process, and it raises questions I coincidentally started pondering soon after my return from break.

I am somewhat concerned at the trends of change we have seen, over the past decade or so, in how disputes unfold and are resolved on Misplaced Pages. As only a project old-timer can do, I have weighed in at the proposal with some thoughts about what unseen effects this particular manifestation of the trend might have on the project.

While doing so, it occurred that it was the type of thing I often see you comment on and enjoy reading. Whichever way you lean (as always, I think I would be happy with the wisdom of the crowd), what do you think? AGK ■ 18:09, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Ha, I often see you comment on and enjoy reading seems like we have something in common then. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:17, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

+1 Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:29, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Hmm Iridescent, up for another 6 paragraph treatise on the failings of Misplaced Pages and reforms needed? Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:29, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

@Galobtter, I don't actually make that much of a habit of lengthy treatises—I tend to save them for occasions where the potential benefits of them are (at least possibly) worth the cost in terms of time. In the cases of the ramblings above; the editor who by day is the mild-mannered User:WhatamIdoing, by night turns into User:Whatamidoing (WMF), so it's worthwhile going into detail; if it's just general sub-Misplaced Pages Review splutterings about how Things Aren't As Good As They Used To Be And Come To Think Of They Never Were, they'll just be lost in the low-level background whining, but this way next time she reports to her insect overlords she can say "here is a detailed list of problems, here is a list of other people agreeing that they're problems, here are suggestions assorted people have made for addressing these problems". In the case of the #Politics thread, it's simply that Yngvadottir and I go back far enough that she warrants a detailed reply.

@AGK, if it's the proposal to shut down the mediation committee I should probably stay out of it, as I've had so little involvement with dispute resolution recently that it's not really fair of me to sit on the sidelines grumbling about how other people do things. I could make a strong case that if the Arbcom workload has really fallen off as much as Opabinia regalis is always claiming—and with far fewer cases and Arbcom no longer having responsibility for ban appeals and for quietly disappearing the kiddy-fiddlers, I've no reason to doubt that—it would be reasonable to rewrite WP:ARBPOL by removing The Committee does not rule on content, but may propose means by which community resolution of a content dispute can be facilitated and have a single dispute resolution committee which initially tried to get the parties in a case to agree on a compromise, and only if that failed moved on to imposing sanctions. If nothing else, it would save everybody having to repeat themselves three times at the admin boards or RFCs, at mediation, and at arbitration; it would also mean that for the first time the title "arbitrator" would have some resemblance to what those bearing it actually do. ‑ Iridescent 01:49, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Until the next GamerGate or Balkans or Gun control or American politics, problems which aren't really suited for mediation... I think it's true there have been fewer big cases, but I don't remember us sitting on our hands very much (well, haha, some of us anyway), but a lot of the things that were handled were things that should never see the light of day. Drmies (talk) 21:56, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

In which case, a unified mediation-arbitration-sanctioning committee would make no difference in how these kind of cases would be handled, since if it felt an attempt at true arbitration would be pointless, it could move straight on to the trial-by-ordeal phase of a case. I appreciate that there's a lot that still goes on behind the curtain that isn't seen in public; I also don't for an instant believe the current arb caseload is still at the level where ever arb had to allocate between one and two hours each day just to skim the 100+ emails that they knew would be in their inbox on even the quietest day, and a single Ottava or Damian could literally mean doing nothing else for a week. ‑ Iridescent 22:04, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks

for making me feel like I haven't lost my mind at the Sir Sputnik RfA. The whole affair has left a bad taste in my mouth, so I'm not sure I'll be !voting at RfA again any time soon. ceranthor 13:55, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

You're welcome. I was considering sitting it out as it's obviously going to pass and in the current culture those who oppose popular candidates or candidates with popular nominators—both of which are the case here—tend to get earmarked for retribution, but in the end felt I couldn't sit on my hands and allow a candidate who appears obviously unsuitable to be waved through without my at least registering a protest. I have absolutely no issue with someone who hasn't written featured content running at RFA—at the time of my own RFA, this and this were my most substantive mainspace contributions—but if someone's requesting the right to sit in judgement on other peoples' work, I expect some indication that they understand the nature of that work, the difference between ownership and stewardship, and when and why Ignore all rules should be invoked, none of which I'm seeing here. We have far too many admins already who cause regular damage owing to a narrow-minded "the role of an admin is to enforce policy" mindset. Courtesy ping to GeneralizationsAreBad and KrakatoaKatie, since I'm publicly questioning their judgement on this relatively high profile talk page. I assume you and I will now get the same Two Minutes Hate treatment meted out to Andrew Davidson and Eric Corbett for questioning the "process is more important than content" consensus of the clique who WP:OWN RFA, but I assume we're both big enough to cope. ‑ Iridescent 14:35, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for prodding me to oppose, both of you. Been busy and it slipped my mind. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:40, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

No problem at all (although I do feel for the candidate, who was presumably expecting to sail through and suddenly started getting this in the final two days). When even Ritchie333—who generally gives the impression he'd support a horse if you nominated it for RFA on "no reason not to" grounds—is saying that he feels unable to support a candidate, something is seriously wrong somewhere. Spoke too soon; with a certain inevitability he's indeed supporting on "no reason not to" grounds. ‑ Iridescent 14:48, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Meant to thank you too, Ealdgyth. I had no problem opposing for similar reasons to you, Iridescent, but I did not particularly relish having to defend myself multiple times and being asked how I was qualified to question someone with 120,000 edits when I only have a measly 30,000 (seems that person missed the fact that I have something like 50+ FAs/GAs under my belt). ceranthor 14:49, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

I'm currently #69 on Misplaced Pages:List of Wikipedians by number of edits (and most of those above me are running bots or scripts on their main accounts) and #18 on Misplaced Pages:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations despite my having withdrawn from FAC long ago; if they want to play that "my edit count is higher than yours" game, bring it on. ‑ Iridescent 14:55, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

I was actually surprised that Ritchie didn't ultimately oppose. I have always found him to be reasonable, and his past opposes at the RfAs of popular users with little content work (this one comes to mind) suggested to me that he would have ended up in the oppose camp. ceranthor 15:00, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

I don't mind your oppose, Ceranthor, it was a reasonable one. In fact, all the opposes and neutrals are reasonable, and as you can guess I was wavering towards it myself. Ultimately I thought, "if he does screw up, will he apologise and not defend himself like a thrashing mongoose?" This RfA reminds me of Liz. Ritchie333 17:38, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict)x2 The badgering of opposers does need to stop. I did eventually move to neutral because of talking to Ritchie and TNT, both of whom I work well with so I don’t mind the discussion, but I was was anticipating less than lucid blowback if I had stayed in oppose. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:01, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

The way to deal with badgering is to ignore it. If I don't feel like replying to someone, its perfectly okay to ignore a ping. I don't have to have the last word... something I learned back in the usenet days.... Ealdgyth - Talk 15:04, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Sitting (comfortably) in support, I have never got the obsession with badgering opposers. Apparently some think that badgering opposers will reduce the acrimony at/unpleasantness of RfA? Somehow adding acrimony to RfA will reduce it? Befuddles the mind. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:10, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

In some cases, it's probably a holdover from the old days. Back in 2006–08 there were some truly stupid opposes (I think this one on BrownHairedGirl's RFA is the all time winner, and every editor of a certain vintage will have unfond memories of this fuckwit). Since in many of those cases it was quite proper to challenge stupid comments, and that's the period in which many of Misplaced Pages's cultural norms were set, we've retained a culture in which it's considered acceptable to harangue someone for opposition but unacceptable to challenge an ill-thought-through support. Kudpung has probably written something about it at some point. ‑ Iridescent 15:18, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

As far as culture creation goes, actions speak louder than words. It may well be a crappy oppose, but wtf has BOOMERANG got to do with it?! ——SerialNumber54129 15:22, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Would BOOMERANG here mean granting sysop rights to Kolya77? :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:30, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

In my capacity as official translator from Admin to Human, "Boldly striking per WP:BOOMERANG"→"It is in the voter's best interest that this vote be stricken, as they have a problematic history and allowing it to stand will mean more people monitoring their contributions which will potentially lead to them being blocked". In my personal opinion it's a bullshit reason for striking and akin to the police arresting protestors who've committed no crime "to prevent a breach of the piece peaceThank you, EEng" (while I don't agree with it, "this user by far do not deserve to be an admin.he will probably start to ban people for nothing" isn't IMO the personal attack being claimed here, but just a case of clumsy wording no different to "I have concerns that this candidate has not demonstrated the judgement necessary to determine when blocking would be appropriate"), but I don't doubt the striking was done in good faith. ‑ Iridescent 15:32, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

You know, I was somewhat bemused by that striking. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 16:14, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

"Breach of the piece" ... "bemused" ... are you two losing your goddam minds? EEng 16:53, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

I'm sorely tempted to oppose every RfA with "I view wanting to be admin as prima facie evidence of power hunger." Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:35, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Y'know, this thread shows how little has changed. The "circle of life" indeed. Someone with an oppose, badgering, complaining about badgering, complaining about complaining about badgering and so on. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:53, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

The math ref desk used to have a serious problem with a sort of competitive attitude towards being the first one to answer questions, and (correspondingly) lots of garbage answers. Numerous attempts to deal with this systematically, either by rule change or by cultural shift, were completely unsuccessful. Eventually, a topic ban was administered the most clearly out-of-line contributor after an ANI discussion. In the subsequent year or so, the situation has massively improved, beyond the level of disruption caused by that single user. A similar dynamic may be at play at RfA. Instead of trying to solve the problem completely, it seems worth trying to get rid of the most serious disruptors and see what that does to the total level of badgering. --JBL (talk) 23:50, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

I mean, a few opposes doesn't really negate him sailing through, and shouldn't give grounds for Sir Sputnik to worry I'd say. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:10, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Iri, why on earth do you think I would be upset with you for opposing? You're entitled to your opinion, and if you don't feel he meets your standards, you shouldn't support. I'd expect nothing less from you. I am not one to badger anyone who has valid reasons for his/her oppose (or support). Katie 15:58, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

I don't think you or GAB would be upset; the ping was just to notify you that this discussion was taking place, in case other people see it and are prompted to start opposing as well and you wonder where it's suddenly coming from. (This page has shitloads of watchers.) My comments about the Two Minutes Hate et al were just an observation that the editors who see themselves as self-appointed Guardians of RFA are now likely to start trying to bait and attack me (as is already happening to Ceranthor). ‑ Iridescent 16:16, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

<Takes a gander at list/> Oy. The encyclopedia is "already built"? Really? Why is 1669 Etna eruption a redlink and Huaynaputina only ~18000 characters long, then?

Re RfA badgering, I think the problem is that one man's opinion is another man's irrational POV push. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:53, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

And what is there for Huaynaputina - I added a good chunk of that myself in 2011. I haven't found the time to get back to it, though it is on my extended to-do list... maybe a future collab, Jo-Jo? :) ceranthor 17:05, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

My go-to page for anyone claiming "the encyclopedia is complete" is Enid Blyton bibliography. This is one of the biggest-selling authors of all time, writing in the English language, still in print and still enjoying widespread popularity and regular TV and cinema adaptations of her works, yet 90% of the works haven't got any entry and those that do—even seminal books like Noddy Goes to Toyland—tend just to have ultrastubs. Hell, look at the quality of most of the entries on List of works by Vincent van Gogh. ‑ Iridescent 18:48, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Oh, Enid Blyton. I remember reading some of her books as a child.

​ Assuming that Iridescent does not object to a derail on their talkpage: On Huaynaputina I am inclined to wait until you get some free time; I have decided to pause article writing for a bit after the Allison Guyot/Horizon Guyot/Resolution Guyot/1257 Samalas eruption run and also to store up some energy for the Etna article and African humid period but I can probably squeeze some time in for Huaynaputina as well (I don't think that FAC eats up much time given how slow it is). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:38, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Heh. This is possibly not the best day to say that FAC isn't time-consuming. ‑ Iridescent 19:41, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

If only you were getting paid by the hour eh  ;) ——SerialNumber54129 19:46, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Heh, related to isn't it more likely that Rykener was performing oral sex on him (also classed as sodomy under Catholic law)? I'd need to go back to Aquinas (whose sexual ethics are beyond confusing and have basically been replaced in the circles that matter with JP2's baptized Kantianism) but at least with many historical and current moral theologies, the question as to whether oral sex is sodomy or not depends on the exact circumstances.That may have been a later development, but I *think* Aquinas recognized nuance and distinctions here, and if he did, subsequent generations of moral theologians would have as well. Anyway, given the time period if the sources aren't clear, it might be best to talk around it while getting to the main idea that it was a sex act considered illicit. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:58, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

I agree it's irrelevant to get into the details when "a sex act" will do, but surely even though it was centuries before Casti connubii, between Romans 1:27, Genesis 38:9, and Novels 141, the RCC had already decided that oral sex between men was A Bad Thing. At the time we're talking about the dissolution and trial of the Templars was still just about in living memory and the first Inquisition was underway, so the RCC hierarchy would have been very familiar with the dogma around sodomy and fornication. While googling for the right Novel, I came across—if you'll pardon the expression—the endearingly po-faced Christian Oral Sex, which is unintentionally hilarious. ‑ Iridescent 21:42, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

• User:EEng#Museum_of_Discreetly_Left_to_the_Reader's_Imagination. EEng 23:12, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Oh, I agree completely on those points: Liber Gomorrhianus pre-dated it by a few centuries, and while that dealt with the clergy, the point comes across quite clearly. I suppose my nitpicking was that when you're dealing with a system that categorized sexual vices as those that were against nature and those that weren't (where we get such theories as this infamous ranking, speculating as to which unnatural act if the sources don't say matters less: a mutual handjob would have been worse than rape in the system they were working under, so it'd all be pretty unmentionable. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:31, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Unnatural axe with a sheep. Also, tell me more about "Gomorrah Hi Anus". EEng 23:38, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

• Slightly off topic, but on my screen Misplaced Pages:Requests for adminship/Tivedshambo, the bottom half is struckthrough. I see this from time to time in the archives, sometimes the entire archive with be struck out, but I check the history and find no evidence of tampering by vandals. The inital phrase Wheres Kurt? has an improper closing tag, but that should have been solved by the line below, after Sorry Kurt. there is a proper /s. What gives, or is this my older browser having issues again? L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 23:05, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

• See Misplaced Pages:Linter. The TL;DR verison is that in July this year Mediawiki changed, so it no longer works the way you describe; each opening html code now needs a corresponding closing code. AFAIK a bot is steadily working through Misplaced Pages cleaning these up, but with 46,160,798 to work through it will be a long time if ever before they're all done. (See Special:LintErrors if you want to keep track of how many are still outstanding to fix; at the time of writing it's approximately 22,000,000.) ‑ Iridescent 23:12, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

  Well, only ~30000 of page breaking errors like this, since the cause of that is mainly Special:LintErrors/multiple-unclosed-formatting-tags (vast majority of lint errors don't cause issues). Ahechtbot and Galobot fixed a fair few, but there is no bot running currently that I know of at-least, and for low priority lint errors there is no particular timeline on fixing them since they don't cause issues (for now at-least). Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:11, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

• (since I was pinged). I can't remember evrything I wrote about RfA but it would probably fill a door-stopper of a paperback. I've opposed plenty of RfAs that were likely to pass, and some which passed that IMO quite clearly should not have. I have no qualms about experienced editors opposing an RfA, and certainy not Ceranthor, who I hope will continue to support future RfAs with their votes. Serious opposers do sometimes come up with issues that I or the nominators have missed. Some badgering does actually have the effect of some voters changing their position, but RfA has changed since the reform allowing RfAs to be widely publicised: the coments section at the bottom has become a chat room which in earlier times was rarely even used. Many issues now populate the talk page, again which in eartlier times basically only included a copied and pasted summary of the users' activity.

I therefore question whether or not that Dec. 2015 reform has really been productive in the long run. What people tend to forget however, is that it is most definitely the drama that disccourages many editors of the right calibre from coming forward - Ritchie333 and MelanieN are only too well aware of this. It seems also as if my 3-part series of articles in The Signpost has gone unheeded.

I do not belive that there is a clique of people who consider they 'own' RfA, but there is certainly a group of core voters (me included) who take the process seriously and vote on most of them, and some of whom have spent considerable time analysing the situation and trying to find solutions.

I don't belive either that serious bids for the bit are a quest for power. If they were, the many admins who have retired, or rarely use their tools, or have handed their privileges in for a while, would not do so.

What we are seeing now for a while are relatively few RfAs that fail, and an increase in 'crat chats (though the low frequency of RfAs is probably not a good sample period and may not reflect any trends). I think this demonstrates that some of our almost invisible recent measures to prevent trollish RfAs from being transcluded have worked, and that however nasty the process is, overall it is not strictly 'broken' and no one has been able to come up with a viable alternative for it. (FYI: Tony, Jo-Jo, Katie, Ealdgyth, and GeneralizationsAreBad). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:57, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Might want to ping Joel B. Lewis as well. I personally don't think that RfA is "broken" but it still has a reputation problem. And the problem with fixing reputation issues is that you need to convince a lot of people. And that you need to give more consideration to a (vaguely defined) group of people's opinion than on your own. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:17, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

@Kudpung, "clique of people who consider they 'own' RfA" is oversimplifying shorthand somewhat, but I certainly do believe there's a small group who see themselves as the moderators of RFA, see it as their duty to steward every candidate through RFA, and hound and harass anyone (particularly in the oppose section, for reasons documented above) who expresses an opinion with which they don't agree. (The formation of cliques who mob people who don't follow the party line isn't unique to RFA; head on over to WT:MOS if you want to see it in its purest form.) Because I rarely join pile-ons, I tend to be in the oppose column more often than support (if someone is sailing through 200–0 or losing 1–30 I don't see the need for me to waste my time researching them when the result is obvious, and if there's opposition already there there's a better than average chance there's a reason the opposition's already there), so I probably see the mobbing and bullying more than most, but you can see a perfectly good example of it on the currently-open RFA (see also the General comments section).

Incidentally, despite all those opposes I'm not some kind of wild serial opposer—assuming Snottywong's tool is correct, the current RFA will be only the 11th RFA where I've opposed and that hasn't matched the final result, and at least three of the editors I opposed who went on to win anyway became notorious rogue admins. ‑ Iridescent 13:04, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

I think the unintended consequence of Dec2015 is that those who run are more likely to be consensus candidates who pass easily, while those who could still pass (but around 80-85%) are AWOL. To be clear, I do not stand for !oppose-badgering, nor do I oppose your !opposes :) GAB 15:24, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Question/Comment Regarding RFA

First, I wanted to thank you for your well-reasoned oppose of Sir Sputnik's RFA. My general approach at RFA is to support giving the tools to any editor with a track record of being a decent person, and who is clearly editing in good-faith. Your oppose made me wonder, though, whether I should not be more discerning with how I apply my "create good content" rule, perhaps requiring a certain percentage of edits to actual articles, or something to that effect. My basic question is this: where do YOU draw the line? I initially viewed Sir Sputnik as a fairly easy support, but your oppose (which I only noticed after the close) really caused me to reconsider my initial gut instinct.

Regards, Hallward's Ghost 23:08, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

"Percentage of edits" doesn't really count for much; someone who reverts well-intentioned new editors who make a mistake and then patiently talks those editors through why they've been reverted and how they can avoid it in future, will have far more talk than article edits, but will likely make a much better admin than someone who racks up 10,000 article edits a day mechanically scanning recent changes and machine-gunning "revert". If someone has a high percentage of talk and user talk edits, that's generally a good sign; it's a high percentage of Misplaced Pages space edits that's generally the warning signal, as that's typically a sign either of someone more interested in process than in results, or of someone who keeps getting in trouble.

The administration of Misplaced Pages (with both a small and a large "a") isn't about mechanistically applying policy, or we could turn large chunks of it over to bots and scripts. It's about understanding that Ignore all rules isn't just a slogan but is the most important of Misplaced Pages's principles, and that editors are human, that they do lose their temper when they've removed the same error 20 times from something they've written because it happened to be published in a newspaper and well-intentioned editors try to add it; they do have a sense of pride and while the technical side of a block or deletion can be reversed within seconds, the social cost can't as the person on the receiving end is highly likely either to leave Misplaced Pages completely or drastically cut down their editing, and experienced writers aren't something that can easily be replaced; that content writing to a high level within Misplaced Pages's unique atmosphere might look easy but it really isn't, and that series of edits that looks like it's been made in a few minutes with minimal effort may well be the result of months of research, drafting and writing as well as hundreds of dollars of that editor's own money on source materials, and that editor is going to feel rightly aggrieved when someone slaps a big orange {{cleanup}} tag on it because they happen not to like the look of it, or when someone starts hanging around the article whining that they don't like the reference format or that it uses spaced em-dashes.

This doesn't just apply to the seasoned long-term FA writers; plenty of new editors who just like the idea of improving Misplaced Pages choose their own employer or a relative as the subject of their article because every piece of writing advice in every context other than Misplaced Pages begins with "write what you know". There are plenty of admins who will quite happily immediately block these editors as spammers, even though they were only trying to help and never understood even that they were doing anything wrong; likewise, there are new editors who create more than one account with no malicious intent but just because "separate accounts for separate interests" is a fairly common practice on social networking sites, get flagged as sockpuppets and promptly blocked because it's easier for the admin to click "block" and move on than it is for the admin to stop and patiently explain what is and isn't acceptable and how and why Misplaced Pages differs from every other user-generated site on the internet.

There are plenty of people who are editing in entirely good faith but who don't grasp these fundamental principles that breaching policy isn't synonymous with malicious intent, and the "why not?" mentality at RFA (based on Jimmy's "no big deal" comments, which were made in a different time, when Misplaced Pages had only 1408 registered editors of whom only 106 were active and it genuinely was possible for everyone to know each other's strengths and weaknesses) has meant that quite a few of these people have been given the admin tools at some time or another. They do have the potential to cause serious damage with an over-literal application of policy, particularly Misplaced Pages's most misunderstood policy WP:Civility. (This isn't just academic speculation; I could instantly name three admins who are actively damaging Misplaced Pages by their over-zealous use of the 'block' button, and probably a dozen more without much effort. Hell, Jimmy Wales is forbidden from blocking people on en-wiki owing to his over-zealous use of the block button. I could with equally minimal effort rattle off a dozen productive editors who've resigned or near-enough-resigned after being on the receiving end of misplaced admin action, and could probably compile a list of a hundred without thinking too hard.)

Misplaced Pages has a serious problem with admins, arbitrators and soi-disant power users who don't actually understand that without the content Misplaced Pages is just Facebook for ugly people, who try to treat Misplaced Pages's policies as a set of immutable laws, and who end up driving people away. While the decline in the number of active editors (the fourth chart down) has finally levelled off, the churn hasn't. We're still losing experienced editors at a rapid pace (go to Misplaced Pages:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations, check the contribution histories of the names, and note how many have ceased editing altogether or drastically curtailed their activity), and while overzealous admins don't account for all those losses—people get bored, people have kids or get new jobs and are too busy, people get new hobbies, people die—they certainly account for a sizeable chunk of it. If you don't mind losing half-an-hour of your life, I'd recommend reading at least this section of the monster thread a little way above this, in which (albeit in a slightly different context) I set out in detail just why I believe that the people who want to be admins aren't necessarily the people who should be admins.

Regarding a minimum standard at RFA, except in exceptional circumstances (an editor with a long history of investment in time-consuming and complicated process that directly benefit Misplaced Pages and have the potential to be challenged by other editors such as tool design or image creation and editing), I'd say the bare minimum I'd expect to see is at least two substantial articles (say, above 1000 words of readable prose), to which that editor has contributed over 50% of the current text, and which other editors have subsequently edited. Unless someone has had the experience of being frustrated by someone else screwing around with something they've spent their own time and money on (and above all, having something on which they've spent their own time and money blanked or nominated for deletion, although an editor who's never had something deleted may just be an editor who demonstrates a superb knowledge of Misplaced Pages policies on notability and sourcing) there's no way to judge whether that editor has empathy for the content writers, and empathy for the content writers is the single most important quality in a Misplaced Pages admin since the content is the only reason Misplaced Pages exists, and all the technical aspects of administration are something that can be learned but empathy is something you either have or you don't. ‑ Iridescent 00:46, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Thank you sincerely for this detailed and thoughtful reply. It really challenges my base assumptions regarding what adminship is, how the tools should be granted, and who should be granted them. I am a fairly experienced editor (much moreso than the age of this account would indicate), having started as an IP in 2006/7 and created an account in 2008. Over the years, I had come to the conclusion that the tools were far too difficult to get for everyday editors who just wanted to have them to help better the project in some way. That morphed into my belief that "reform" at RFA might include unbundling the tools into "sets" that could be awarded upon request to users in good standing. When similar ideas, proposed by various editors, were consistently shot down, I moved toward a belief that the tools should then simply be easier to get, as well as easier to lose. When the "easier to lose" part was never adopted, I guess what I was left with was "easier to get" which, after reading your response here, as well as the discussion right above it, I feel like a bit of an ingenue.

Honestly, I'm likely going to request deletion of that little "support rationale" page I made in my userspace, as I sort of question the base assumptions upon which I based it. I really appreciate your having taken the time to lay out your reasoning, and to help me think through my own.

Regards, Hallward's Ghost 01:24, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Don't necessarily take anything I say as gospel; I think I'm correct, but there are certainly a number of well-respected editors who feel that "no big deal" still has relevance on today's Misplaced Pages. (User:Ritchie333 is one who springs to mind.) ‑ Iridescent 09:55, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Actually I agree with pretty much everything you wrote there; it spells out my concerns and problems with Misplaced Pages quite well. Ritchie333 15:22, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

I don't actually make that much of a habit of lengthy treatises :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 07:31, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

It's not that long compared to some of the screeds I've posted in the past (just ask at FAC); besides, these are arguments I've made so often that I can type the key points on autopilot. If you want a TL;DR executive summary, "nor do I condemn you, go and sin no more" is more important than "keep his charge, and his statutes, and his judgments, and his commandments, always", and knowing when to forgive and when to condemn is something that needs to be demonstrated through actions, not words. We want admins to be a Peelian police force, not an occupying army. ‑ Iridescent 09:55, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

No complaints here, and I definitely read the whole thing; a good read as always. Galobtter (pingó mió) 10:41, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

It's not just admins who can drive folks away - see Talk:Manchester Baby/Archive 1 where someone who basically exists to nitpick other editors managed to drive one of the more productive (if occasionally uncivil) editors away by repeated rename requests. I will freely admit I don't have as much time for WP right now, but I'm not sure I'll ever nominate another FAC while the insanity that is the "prose focus" remains there without any shred of worrying about the actual research. (Oh, and I agree with Iri's long post above...) Ealdgyth - Talk 11:43, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

@Ealdgyth: Is that what drove Eric away? I thought he was worn down by a number of factors; after all, he did keep editing through the summer IIRC. ceranthor 12:28, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

It was certainly a factor ... he's mentioned it a few times off Wiki as having a strong effect. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:31, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Oh yes, it's not just admins, which is why I cited admins, arbitrators and soi-disant power users as the problem. (Anyone who's familiar with recent threads on this page will be well aware of the particular soi-disant power user I had in mind, although most of his acolytes such as the one currently disrupting whatever title Talk:Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine happens to be at this week are cut from the same cloth.) I agree 100% about the "prose focus" nonsense; it may have been the decision to introduce TFA re-running that drove me away from FAC/TFA, but it's certainly the recent unwelcome re-emergence of the "brilliant refreshing prose" gang (with "brilliant refreshing prose" not meaning "interesting and engaging prose" but "prose that follows all the arbitrary rules me and my buddies have made up") that's keeping me away. ‑ Iridescent 14:45, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Here's a current affair that won't drive off noobs  :) Oh no. ——SerialNumber54129 13:02, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

It could have been worse. The admin who protected the Teahouse initially protected it Edit=Require administrator access. ‑ Iridescent 14:45, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

• Holy shit! What a clusterfuck that move discussion was. And I didn't realize that Eric had left the project. In my 11+ years editing Misplaced Pages, I always considered him one of the really good content creators, alongside folks like Giano, Iri, and many others, of course. Hallward's Ghost 14:28, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

• Eric still pops up very occasionally, but for all practical purposes is gone. I can't blame him; with the Defenders of the Wiki types painting a target on his back and the MOS coterie with their secret off-wiki mailing list coordinating attacks on him, why would he want to stay when there are so many other places—both on and offline—that would welcome him? ‑ Iridescent 14:45, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

There's a secret off-wiki mailing list? I can't say I'm surprised... ceranthor 14:54, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes—I was very briefly added to it before being promptly booted within a matter of days when the editor who runs it felt I wasn't showing him sufficient deference. I don't know who the current members are, although looking at the list of names who pile in whenever its operator is engaged in a dispute one can hazard some fairly safe guesses. ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

• The fact that prolific content creators like Eric no longer have a home on Misplaced Pages is an incredibly sad statement about where the project is right now. Hallward's Ghost 15:02, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

The attitude voiced on that RFA, that people are here to maintain this encyclopaedia that is, arguably, already built isn't an unusual one; there's a strong contingent, supported at the very highest levels in the WMF, who hold that English Misplaced Pages is essentially complete when it comes to content, that the priorities now are ensuring the existing content is kept up to date, and inventing new ways for people to access the existing content rather than add to it (hence the obsession with mobile access and Wikidata), and that those writers and illustrators who remain are dinosaurs obstructing the path of progress. These are the WMFs priorities for last year (the ones for 2018 haven't been decided yet); note that not a single one of the ten that were chosen relates to the improvement of Misplaced Pages. ‑ Iridescent 15:13, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Bummer I didn't get an invite! I suppose I'm too eguor for those corps. ceranthor 15:05, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

If I were a nasty and cynical type, I'd suggest fairly strongly that assuming the mailing list is still active, you can safely assume that this lists its membership fairly accurately. ‑ Iridescent 15:16, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

File source problem with File:Selina Rushbrook (née Selina Ann Jenkins), 1905.jpg

Thank you for uploading File:Selina Rushbrook (née Selina Ann Jenkins), 1905.jpg. I noticed that the file's description page currently doesn't specify who created the content, so the copyright status is unclear. If you did not create this file yourself, you will need to specify the owner of the copyright. If you obtained it from a website, please add a link to the page from which it was taken, together with a brief restatement of the website's terms of use of its content. If the original copyright holder is a party unaffiliated with the website, that author should also be credited. Please add this information by editing the image description page.

If the necessary information is not added within the next days, the image will be deleted. If the file is already gone, you can still make a request for undeletion and ask for a chance to fix the problem.

Please refer to the image use policy to learn what images you can or cannot upload on Misplaced Pages. Please also check any other files you have uploaded to make sure they are correctly tagged. Here is a list of your uploads. If you have any questions or are in need of assistance please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 15:17, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Fuck off, Sfan. Your disruptobot is starting to seriously try my patience; in what way do you think that 19th-century official prison photographs could still be in copyright, even if owing to some unusual chain of events involving all the official cameras being broken and the prison having to get an independent photographer to take the photos on that day, they for some reason weren't Crown Copyright? As pointed out last time you incorrectly tagged this for deletion, "not following the arbitrary attribution format you've made up" is not synonymous with "incorrectly attributed" ‑ Iridescent 15:23, 23 October 2018 (UTC)