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Page	Protected	Expiry	Type	Summary	Admin
Watermelon (Palestinian symbol)	2024-05-03 02:51	indefinite	edit,move	Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP and ARBPIA	Daniel Case
Ze'ev Jabotinsky	2024-05-02 23:28	indefinite	edit,move		Yamla
Khwaja Naksh	2024-05-02 19:21	2024-05-09 19:21	create	Repeatedly recreated	Liz
Colombia–Israel relations	2024-05-02 19:14	indefinite	edit,move	Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP and ARBPIA	Daniel Case
Template:R animal with possibilities	2024-05-02 18:00	indefinite	edit,move	High-risk template or module: 2524 transclusions (more info)	MusikBot II
Template:Malay name	2024-05-02 18:00	indefinite	edit,move	High-risk template or module: 2503 transclusions (more info)	MusikBot II
Tiger Reth	2024-05-02 14:17	2025-05-02 14:17	create	Repeatedly recreated	GB fan
Palestinian self-determination	2024-05-02 11:26	indefinite	edit,move	Arbitration enforcement	ScottishFinnishRadish
Antisemitism in US higher education	2024-05-02 09:16	indefinite	edit,move	Arbitration enforcement	ScottishFinnishRadish
Antisemitism in Columbia University	2024-05-02 09:15	indefinite	edit,move	Arbitration enforcement	ScottishFinnishRadish
Somaliland	2024-05-02 05:29	indefinite	edit	Persistent disruptive editing: per RFPP; going back to ECP and will log at CTOPS	Daniel Case
Battle of Ocheretyne	2024-05-02 04:49	indefinite	edit,move	WP:RUSUKR	Daniel Case
2024 University of California, Los Angeles pro-Palestinian campus occupation	2024-05-02 04:40	indefinite	edit,move	Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP and ARBPIA	Daniel Case
Draft:MC Stan (rapper)	2024-05-01 17:40	2024-11-01 17:40	edit,move	Persistent sockpuppetry	Ponyo
Lisa Fithian	2024-05-01 16:48	2024-05-15 16:48	edit,move		Dweller
Brizyy (Singer)	2024-05-01 14:53	indefinite	create	Repeatedly recreated	Randykitty
2023 in Israel	2024-05-01 14:50	indefinite	edit,move	WP:PIA	Ymblanter
Cliff Cash	2024-05-01 11:14	indefinite	move	Persistent sockpuppetry	Ohnoitsjamie
Effect of the Israel–Hamas war on children in the Gaza Strip	2024-05-01 06:08	indefinite	edit,move	WP:ARBPIA	Johnuniq
Thomas Kaplan	2024-04-30 20:37	indefinite	edit	Persistent sock puppetry	Moneytrees
Nothing	2024-04-30 18:18	indefinite	edit,move	Persistent WP:ECP due to disruption from multiple confirmed accounts	El C
2024 Israeli protests	2024-04-30 18:12	indefinite	edit,move	Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP and ARBPIA	Daniel Case
École Des Navigateurs	2024-04-30 03:14	2024-05-07 03:14	create	Repeatedly recreated	Liz
L'histoire juridique des paris sportifs au Canada	2024-04-30 02:50	2024-05-07 02:50	create	Repeatedly recreated	Liz
Island Rail Corridor	2024-04-30 02:47	2024-07-30 02:47	edit,move	Persistent disruptive editing: per RFPP	Daniel Case
Lil' Cory	2024-04-30 02:23	indefinite	create	Repeatedly recreated	Liz
Michael D. Aeschliman	2024-04-29 06:44	2024-05-13 06:44	edit,move	Violations of the biographies of living persons policy	Anachronist
Wikipedia:Free encyclopedia	2024-04-29 03:24	indefinite	edit,move	Drop prot	Pppery
White Colombians	2024-04-29 03:17	2024-05-20 03:17	edit,move	Persistent WP:ECP due to involvement also of several confirmed accounts	El C

Fake referencing

I am usually deep down in the mines digging for information to improve articles with, so I may have missed this topic being discussed here. I frequently come across OR, or POV-pushing where the sources referred to either don't contain the information at all, or actually say the opposite of what they are claimed to say. I am getting more and more concerned by this and I wonder what kind of administrative sanctions that would be suitable for editors who are caught adding fake references or change referenced information in non-trivial ways.--Berig (talk) 08:04, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Fictitious references suggests that users found to be deliberately adding false citations should be warned suitably and blocked if the behaviour persists. I agree with that approach; the {{uw-error1}} series of warning templates seems to cover this. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 08:10, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks!--Berig (talk) 08:11, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I personally have very little patience with users who falsify content or lie about citations. Unlike obvious "lol penis lol" vandalism, this has the potential for lasting harm, and blocks should be made quickly. —Kusma (talk) 08:35, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. I am tempted to just give these editors indefinite blocks.--Berig (talk) 08:37, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I see no point in warning a user that intentionally corrupting articles with false references is wrong, this is something people already know is wrong. I do see the need to determine if it was intentional though. HighInBC ^{Need help? Just ask.} 09:26, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Tend to agree. An immediate indef seems more appropriate. If some kind of "good reason" exists, this can then be used for an unblock. Martinevans123 (talk) 12:18, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there was recently such an incident where I could assume good faith due to the circumstances involved.--Berig (talk) 10:17, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Berig, can you elaborate? I believe you, I just can't myself come up with a scenario under which deliberately adding information not included in the source could be good faith. I can see misinterpreting, but that wouldn't fall under 'deliberate'. —valereee (talk) 13:14, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Valereee:, in this case, it was a long time editor in good standing who tried to fix a few broken references, believing they were from a particular source that was already in the bibliography, and there were other issues about it. The result was unfortunate, but it is fixed now with the intervention of other editors. I think the editor who did it is embarrassed about it, and I am certain it will not be repeated.--Berig (talk) 13:28, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It is edits like these that make me really concerned. The last source doesn't even mention the topic.--Berig (talk) 13:42, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I see -- so certainly not deliberate falsification, just a misstep anyone could make. And, yes, it's often nationalistic POV-pushing where I see this, and it's especially difficult when the source is in another language and isn't available online in a translatable form. I've definitely had occasion where AGF seemed like it might just be credulousness. —valereee (talk) 14:06, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

talk) 10:56, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

I try to be fairly tough regarding warning and blocking editors who falsify references. Wikipedia is built around principles based on trust and honesty such as

WP:V, and people who make stuff up in the hope of tricking readers and other editors have no place here. Nick-D (talk) 11:20, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

I'd be OK with an immediate indef if you were certain that the person was doing it intentionally. I was trying imagine situations where it could be done inadvertently, when a warning might be more appropriate - say someone finds a bit of information in one article with a source, and ports it over to another article, citing the same source but not actually checking it. That's bad practice, but it's not intentional deception if it later turned out that the source was a dud. Similarly, if someone read something in the Daily Mail, which referenced some bit of scientific research, I could imagine them repeating whatever the DM said about it, but citing the original source without reading it - again, bad practice, but not intentional deception. But yeah - if they've set out to deceive, they have no business editing here. Girth Summit _(blether) 18:42, 28 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It's also more than possible for someone to read one source in a series of citations,^{[7][8][9][10][11][12]} verify that it contains some other bit of info they're seeking for some other article, and then accidentally Ctrl-C on the wrong cite in the series. Reyk _YO! 09:28, 30 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This happens all the time in articles that are of interest to children. IP editors, mostly. Basically, they use citations as decorative elements to give their edits more credibility. What sometimes happens is that a reliable source says that a cartoon first aired in 2018. Our IP editor knows this is untrue because they clearly remember watching that cartoon in 2017. However, they're savvy enough to know that someone using Huggle will insta-revert them if they change the date without a citation. So, they replace the existing source with some random citation, preferably one that goes to a paywalled website. Voila! The correct information is now on Wikipedia, and it's even sourced. Outright vandalism is rarer in my experience, but it definitely happens. I tend to range block those as I find them. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 09:08, 30 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

An example: LouisAlain

Let me give an example of a prolific editor (whom I'll notify directly) who does this (the mild version).

Fram (talk) 15:48, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

I regularly improve new translations by LouisAlain which show up on my watch list, and have not noticed what you call "fake referencing" recently, examples Leo Kestenberg (there was a long passage without refs, now commented out, - please look in the history if you can help sourcing it) and Josef Friedrich Doppelbauer which came with few references. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:24, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There are also articles that are at best lazily translated without checking the sources. Roman Sadnik (from 2021-09-01): second ref, although claimed to have been accessed on the same day, does not mention the article subject. (If you accessed the page, why did you not read it?) Third ref: dead link, marked as dead on dewiki more than two years ago. LouisAlain, I am shocked to see that you have been here 10 years and have 60000 edits but still make this kind of mistakes: why would you ever cite an irretrievably dead link with no known archive, and not even tell people that you know the link is dead? —Kusma (talk) 23:31, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that not only don't they check the sources, but they pretend to have checked them anyway. In

Fram (talk) 08:20, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

Sung-Hee Kim-Wüst has an interesting history: The German article was originally copied from [7]. The text was donated, see de:Diskussion:Sung-Hee Kim-Wüst. So while it is not copyvio according to that talk page post (can't check the OTRS), it relies only on a single self-published source, and the English version now does so as well. (The "Institut-fuer-bildnerisches-denken" ref is just a copy/paraphrase of that). This is nowhere close to acceptable sourcing for a new BLP. —Kusma (talk) 09:05, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Kusma, I've removed the website autobiography from that article and sent it to AfD. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 13:36, 8 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going through his last 100 creations one by one (bottom up), and nearly all of them have these issues. Typical examples are

Draft:Hans Robertson or Draft:Friedrich Schirmer, see [8]

) where LouisAlain so far refuses to edit. 08:50, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

I was reviewing several of these articles over the last few days on npp. They are very very poor articles. The referencing was dire. I found many of them had damaged refs, incomplete, dead links and so on, whole bits not ref'd. Its like there is no time to slow and that is at the expense of quality. I think it is a good idea to make the articles go through afc. scope_creep^Talk 12:07, 20 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal on article-creation for LouisAlain

Proposal: LouisAlain must create all new articles in draft space, and they can only be moved to the mainspace by AfC reviewers.

Fram (talk) 08:50, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

Support, although I don't care too much who does the moves as long as it is not LA. The responses to concerns (sometimes promises, sometimes just attacks against the editor pointing out problems) like this look like LousAlain either doesn't understand the problem or chooses to ignore it. In either case, things can't just continue like this. —Kusma (talk) 09:16, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think we have two problems, one is adding references that don't reference, and another is to detect that an article written in a foreign language is a copyvio. The first can be avoided by LouisAlain not adding any references, and for the second, Fram would be a good help. All in draft would make it very difficult for me to detect the new ones, - please spare me that trouble if it can be avoided. I'd have to follow contribs, which means several articles per day. I'm just grateful he does it! Many of his creations have been rescued from draft space where nobody watches and nobody is invited to improve. I suggest we help each other. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:26, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
LouisAlain not adding references would definitely solve the problem of fake references, but then these pages clearly won't be in a state acceptable for mainspace. Having his page creations in draft space wouldn't necessarily have to mean more work for you: I think there could be easy ways to alert you and other interested people of LouisAlain's new drafts (say, a page where announces them to a WikiProject or to all interested people). —Kusma (talk) 11:54, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't want to be alerted 5 times a day, having my own work. I notice new articles on my watch list, and then look if I will expand. I do one article per day, and can't keep up with the speed. Isn't this Wikipedia, where all can help. You see an article without refs, and decide to tag it or find one. I can't help thinking that finding one might be easier. In German articles, often making a further reading (Literatur) a ref and cite it inline does the trick. - LOOK. Two DYK articles today, and both created by LouisAlain. We'd miss a lot without him. How about more thanks on his talk. I fail to see how admins could help at all in the process of making this corner more collaborative. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:08, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

LouisAlain's response

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

-- Hey, I just discover I have the honour of a whole paragraph on the administrator's notice board. Thanks so much to all who've made it possible. Now, this will be an all out confession : I'm bad ! I'm very bad and I apologize for the chaos and mayhem I have brought to the English wikipedia. Oh the sinner ! oh the criminal ! oh the bloody beastard ! He creates articles that are not perfect when put on the main. Be he and his family damned until the 40th generation !

Hadn't I lost my autopatrol rights some three years ago (didn't know what they were, didn't ask to be granted them, they were presented to me after 50 articles which I suppose were deemed in lign with this Wiki policy), I wouldn't figure on the list of "users to follow step by step", they present a very suspicious figure in our books. Why did I lose my A.P rights ? Well, you know her name...

Of course I won't answer to the informer who took at least half an hour of his life to research in the archives examples of my misdeeds. Besides, he once again shows his true colour (for those who didn't know) by evoking sanctions ! (rest assure Mr. informer, this won't fail to happen and you'll have the sadistic pleasure to have another victime on your "user to get rid of" list. My memory may fails me but User:Richard Nevell wrote some three years ago that you were harrassing me. Nothing new under the sun). What a friendly atmosphere to work in when one is surrounded by hunters whose ultimate goal is to kill their prey.

I notice that two of the guiding principles of wikipedia are regularly ignored and even stomped on : Supposedly Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia, hence help and support are (at least that's my understanding) expected, not the opposite. Suppose good faith. That one takes the cake ! I'm spoken of here as if I were delibaretly and voluntarily ignoring messages and advice I receive. Duhh ! I've already answered several times to this one but of course to no avail : executionners never listen to those they want to behead. They stubornely pursue their ultimate enjoyment : destroy the other. See fr:Perversion narcissique

So I repeat once again : I am bad at finding references. I suck at this exercise. So you may tell me one trillion times to better this part of my translations, you can threaten me with whatever your wild imagination may invent, even cut my wrists or my arms, it won't change my unability to find decent references. I don't know how others do but I can't, I simply can't though I'm doing the research on Google.de. I try my best and all I find are most often very poor references. For crying out loud, what part don't you understand in what I write ? Is my English so poor that I'm even uncapable to be understood ? I repeat once again : I am bad at finding references. I suck at this exercise.

Since the discreet intervention of Boleyn three years ago, all my translations are supervised by reviewers (about 4,500 of them since her intervention) who every now and then add the {{refimprove|date=July 2021}} tag. What's the point of being rewieved (mostly by John B123 who I thak here for his education and good manners) when some of my fellow Wikipedian friends insist my translations need more stuff ? As for not reworking the articles sent to the deep freezer, I simply profondly object to the unceremonious handling by some people who lack the basic manners of politess. You see, I belong to the old school and stick to the old fashioned way. Scuttling an article whose completion may have taken one or two hours of work irks me a littel it to say the least. All the more when no explanations are provided. I've reworked some of them before, submitted the new version and it was rebuked. Oh well... The funny thing (kind of) is that the fate of many an article depends on the person who performs the move. Talk of consistancy here ! How amateurish !

I notice there are hundreds of hundreds thousands articles with no ref. (or possibly one or two, including dead links) but obviously nobody cares about them. I've linked to some of them on my homepage (and yes, the informer once spent some minutes to better one of them). Other than that, I can only hear the sound of cricket regarding these so-called "articles". Speaking of so-called articles, the most prolific creator (whose name of course I won't mention) with something in the range of 95,000 articles, seems to benefit a green light for all his stubs of stubs (one sentence or possibly two, one ref or two ad that's it). What is the secret of this user to keep on publishing his botched job ? (Oh, I know about the Pokemon argument which I consider the perfect pretence to not change anything at all).

Since it crosses my mind right now, I thank Kusma (who I gather is German) for helping me understand I don't do enough to propagate Germanic culture on the English Wikipedia. I'm shoked here, Kusma, very shoked !

So, to put an end to a long entertaining monologue, I've decided that from today (yesterday actually) I won't translate any article from German, French, Italian, Spanish etc. if is not accompanied by sufficient online references. Here they are :

Horst-Eberhard Richter
Jeanne Barbillion
Armin Thurnher
Elfriede Hammerl
Brucknerfest
August Bauer
Willy Spatz
Max Martersteig with references found haphazardly on the net.

As far as I'm concerned, only Gerda Arendt and Grimes2 actually play the game according to the rules implied by the collaborative thingie. May they find another expression of my gratitude here.

Again : I suck at finding good references. I can't like I can't read Chinese. Not to mention my many shortcomings with the HTLM code.

Now if you want to castigate and to threaten me even more, You know my name LouisAlain (talk) 00:50, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

LouisAlain, sorry, I have no time to read all this (but hope writing it was good for you), because today it's not only one of your articles but also a violinist who died and has a miserable article - all referenced but not doing justice to what he meant to the world - and there's RL. I like your list of articles, - how about putting just the names of those you plan to do on your talk, and Fram can make a tick if copyright free, and I can make a tick for "will expand", and others can comment as well. - Please, everybody: don't use "<br>", ever, it ruins the colours in edit mode. Alternatives: a blank line, bullets, or close it: "<br />". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:05, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Gerda Arendt:: the corrida goes on ! LouisAlain (talk) 08:36, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

So you are bad at finding references. OK. One of the things we've been talking about is that your new articles come with <ref> tags and external links that do not work or that (no longer) link to anything related to the article subject. Can you tell whether a link that somebody else (for example, an editor on the German Wikipedia) has suggested supports the content preceding it? —Kusma (talk) 21:01, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Kusma. I used to delete dead links on the German Wikipedia until someone over there told me not to. So, What am I supposed to do ? I thought I had answered all of your remarks but of course, as is usual, to no avail. Intellectual dishonesty runs deep among some administrators. I raise the issue of the point of my articles being submitted to rewievers. What was your answer (as well as other close friends I have on this site) ? None. Zilch. Zero. The sound of cricket. And I'm supposed to take you seriously ? Comme on. LouisAlain (talk) 08:36, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Not to be mean, but if you can't find good references, you shouldn't be writing a wikipedia article. I get that you're translating, but asking others to find the references is going beyond collaboration and into making things more difficult for the other editors. The way to write a wikipedia article is to find the good sources, read the good sources, and THEN write the wikipedia article from the sources that you find that are good. If you're translating an article, presumably those non-English articles have sources - in which case you should read THOSE sources, make sure they support the information in the article you're going to translate, and then translate the article, using those sources over here in the English wikipedia. It's immeasurably harder for other articles to take unsourced wikipedia articles and then have to find sources that support the unsourced information - because it's not the best way to make sure that the information is sources and paraphrased properly. What you seem to be expecting is that you translate the article, and then some other editor comes along, goes out and finds the sources that support the information you've added, and then they have to make sure that the way you translated things actually fits the sources they found. Do you see how that's a lot more work? Whether there are other articles that don't cite sources is immaterial - we shouldn't be ADDING to that number of articles that are going to make folks have to work harder to find sources and then shoehorn them in. Please don't expect other editors to clean up after you... that's not collaboration. Ealdgyth (talk) 01:11, 5 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ealdgyth. You shouldn't be writing a wikipedia article. Now we're going further in the process to eliminate me. A simple thing to do is to delete all my translations; sorry about having polluted the project with my filthy contributions. Also, I raised the issue of hundreds and hundreds thousands articles without the slightest reference and with no substance at all. What was your answer ? The sound of cricket of course! What you are suggesting is that participating to the project requires an intellectual scope well above mine. Can one be more discrimating ? LouisAlain (talk) 08:36, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not saying you shouldn't be here, I pointed out the correct way to write a wikipedia article. And how to properly translate one. I get that you're trying to improve Wikipedia - what I'm trying to do is improve your editing so that you don't feel like folks are harassing you and following you around. So... for example - Tag des offenen Denkmals, which you just translated today. In it, it has the sentence "In 2006, the Tag des offenen Denkmals was awarded as an "Excellent Place" of the Germany – Land of Ideas campaign." with the source here. I note that you included the source because it was in the German article. All well so far. When you translated the article, you said that this source was "365 Orte 2006: Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz. In: land-der-ideen.de, retrieved 6 September 2021." When you put in "retrieved 6 September 2021" you are implicitly saying that you checked that source and it supports the information you're saying it sources - that "In 2006, the Tag des offenen Denkmals was awarded as an "Excellent Place" of the Germany – Land of Ideas campaign". Unfortunately, this is not the case. The solution to this is not to quit wikipedia, but to change your workflow in translating. You should check the sources in the articles you're translating before you bring them over to the English wikipedia. If the sources in the German (or whatever article) do not support the information ... you should NOT attach them to the English translation. This is the problem. You're falsifying references ... even if you're taking the "good faith" approach and assuming good faith on the part of the editors who originally added them in the non-English article. If you'd just not do that, a large chunk of your problems would be gone. You'd still need to find sources for the information, but at least you wouldn't be misleading others that there ARE sources that support it, when they do not. Ealdgyth (talk) 12:52, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Support restricting creating new articles in mainspace (but I don't agree with requiring afc; any editor should be allowed to move them to mainspace). I just can't wrap my head around someone saying they are bad at finding good sources but are still creating articles. Finding sources is Step #1 for creating an article. If you skip that step and still create the article, you're only creating a problem. Levivich 13:46, 5 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Levivich And now I'm learning I am creating problems on the en. Wikipedia; Thanks for the recognition of all the work I have done here. With friends like you...

Maybe they should be required to provide sources before they are even allowed to create an article.... Rgrds --
talk) 14:37, 5 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

Who's "they" ? When I started learning English some 60 years ago, the pronoun for the first person in singular was "he or him" The times, they are a'changing... No wonder I'm lost in this jungle.

Bison X

. But what a good idea ! Creating second rank users who will beg for the possibility of participating to the project. And I thought even correcting a typo was worth intervening. But Bison has his own criteria mind you ! You also show you haven't even read my former answer: So I'll repeat it: I decided two or three days ago I won't translate any article from German, French, Italian, Spanish etc. if it is not accompanied by sufficient online references. Here they are :

Horst-Eberhard Richter
Jeanne Barbillion
Armin Thurnher
Elfriede Hammerl
Brucknerfest
August Bauer
Willy Spatz
Max Martersteig with references found haphazardly on the net.

My last 25 artices:

It's references that you want ? There they are. Now, I'm sure you all guys won't be deterred to attack me on other points some wicked people never fail to find. At least, have the courage and honesty to write you want me to be banned. Also I have

Bison X

have the magnanimity to allow me to take my chances ? Some minds are inebriated with hubris as soon as they smell an opportunity to devour their next.

John B123 : Please, no need to keep on rewieving my publications, some nice fellows here are showing me the way out. Fram has already showed them the way (blocked twice for peccadillos, and simply ignoring the "Suppose Good Faith" mantra). They don't read my answers, don't take them into consideration, ignore my questions and will pursue their drive to crush me until I'm given the boot. I've been here before and nothing can surprise me from people I'm no match to, intellectually speaking.

The lengh some people with an ounce of power will go to assert their will on others is simply flabbergasting ! Homo Homini Lupus. Of course we're all equal on Wikipedia except for those who are more equal than the others.

Plato had a perfect quote for this kind of interlocutors but it would take too much time to unearth it; Too bad, but if you insist (knowing perfectly well you won't) I'll will deliver. In the meantime I have this : Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughter house and thinks : They're only animals (Theodor W. Adorno)

Forgive them Lord, they don't know what they're doing. LouisAlain (talk) 08:36, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've just clicked on the 'random article' button only to immediately land on Archaeologia Polona. 2 references repeated twice. I'm sure the bright minds associated against me will rush to correct the situation (Actually, I don't hold my breath. Nothing will be changed : I'm their target, and nobody else). How pathetic and morally corrupt some people are. LouisAlain (talk) 09:03, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- I've reverted it as a copyright violation. I don't think insulting people left and right is your best way forward here. What also won't help is simply continuing with the problematic behaviour: you created
  Fram (talk) 09:14, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
  ]
- In
  Fram (talk) 09:19, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
  ]
- Susanne Scholl, created by you two days ago: In this edit, you claim that the statement "Her temporary arrest by the Russian authorities while reporting from Chechnya caused a sensation." is supported by this. Not there (apart from the fact that this isn't a particularly good source). If you can't read French, you should not use French sources. —Kusma (talk) 09:59, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@LouisAlain, if you do not address your own behaviour, you will not get anywhere here. This is not because anyone is out to get you, it is because the quality of the sourcing you use is consistently terrible, and you regularly present wrong references that do not support what you claim they support. If you are unable to tell that, well, Wikipedia:Competence is required from all editors here, and those unable to read the references they cite should be shown the door. —Kusma (talk) 10:09, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As I wrote before : a dialogue of the deaf. I've alredady wasted too much time on this thread which shows how biased some here are. It's blatant that my translations are under fire (probably rightly) but not the other horrors I find everyday on the main. Why am I singled out when thousands other users do far more worse than me ? I'll never know since questions aren't answered here. Does Fram intervened. Fram, if you're unsatisfied with Gerda Kratz or Susanne Scholl
, please delete, delete, delete. It won't take you more than one second. And since you're at it, delete also all the crap that are on the main (it will take you several month now) and at least 4,000 of my translations. Kusma, please, spare me "your competence is required from all editors here" whereas it is obviously an all-out lie. I've lost complete trust in the way Wikipedia is run by people who behave like Chief human resources officers treating users like their employees to whom orders are given. I now know for a fact that whatever the quality of the sources and references, some will always find something to object to. I'll have to find this quote from Plato which fits so perfectly with someone's behaviour here. It's an everyday psychological mindset around the world.

you claim that you retrieved the 6th source yesterday. I doubt it. I affirm I did, now of course only me make mistakes. And you once again spit on one of the founding principles of Wikipedia : Assume good faith by suggesting I'm a liar and a cheater at that. The man is frontly insulting me and nobody cares. Ô the confort of being part of a corporation where "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" is the keywod at the expense of good faith editors.~Withour Jimmy Wale's support on my side. This whole business is so, so, so amateurish and dishonest.

I thought the point was moot since I announced that I had changed my tack (my "behaviour" in Kusma's parlance) and will translate uniquely articles with correct sourcing in the first place. Is Tag des offenen Denkmals to your taste or do you still want to pursue this silly escalade to more an more references? I wasn't born last year, been around for some decades now and when I see a profile like yours, I know who is adressing me. Have a look at fr:Perversion nacissique (with a translating machine at the handy). I'll translate the French one (yes, I can read French) even if the 36 references are all in French (probably).

I've started translating de:Lorenz Cantador with 27 references. Please all you folks, tell me it's useless, the English version has already it's place in the paper shredder. I don't know about your "competence" Kusma (I wouldn't have had the crass audacity of using that term à propos you. A matter of education perhaps) but I admit you're a virtual Olympic champion at discouraging others. Rest assure you're not the only one. LouisAlain (talk) 12:34, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@
WP:INVOLVED instead of doing so as you have started insulting me. —Kusma (talk) 12:58, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

Kusma, dear fragile carebear. Don't bother to banish me. I've left volontarily. I'm not up to your intellectual level. LouisAlain (talk) 13:32, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Time to indef block them, I think. Apart from source I highlighted above, and the one from Kusma (where LouisAlain claims in both cases that they were working just a few days ago, quite a coincidence), see e.g. also
Fram (talk) 13:51, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
I agree. We have to be hard on fake referencing, especially if the person has been warned before. I can take care of the indefinite block.--Berig (talk) 13:57, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No, please. LouisAlain translated all Bach cantatas to French, DYK. And was banned there. Now he created thousands of translations into English. And you come with this proposal?? I thank LouisAlain, and would miss him. Just look for his name in Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany/DYK 2021 and its archives. If an estimated 5% of his translations cause problems, why not fix them, but thank him for the 95% others? Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:05, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
If it were just 5%. Even now, with the articles he created during this ANI discussion, we get these issues on many of his creations (e.g. with the sources he "retrieved" during translation, but which are mysteriously unavailable days later, or with sources he added which don't support the preceding text). Perhaps the question should be why he was also banned at frwiki instead?
Fram (talk) 14:11, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
Agree with an indef. He responded to the concerns raised here by making personal attacks and continuing to add false access-dates to references. Not to mention creating an article without checking the references. It's not acceptable. It's not helpful, it's unhelpful. He needs to stop making articles, and clearly he won't on his own. A block is the only way to prevent disruption such as giving false information to the reader and wasting other editors time. Sorry but not everyone who volunteers their time here is actually helping. We just don't need someone to translate articles without checking references; that must stop one way of another. Levivich 14:16, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If you have any influence on LouisAlain that can prevent him from deliberately trying to get himself blocked, please use it. Unfortunately I can't agree with your estimate of "5% cause problems"; there seem to be far more, and the deliberate lies about access date don't engender any trust. I didn't go out of my way to search problems, I opened just a few of the pages LouisAlain himself linked to and found that the sources did not work. Reading his French talk page, LouisAlain seems to have a way of being his own worst enemy (and of painting himself as a victim of an abusive system). The ban on mainspace creation proposed above looked to me as if it could provide a way out where LouisAlain does not need to change his way of referencing, with others helping. Sad to see this not working out. —Kusma (talk) 14:29, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@LouisAlain: Why am I singled out when thousands other users do far more worse than me ? We do have thousands of terrible articles, yes. Hundreds of thousands, actually. But you are not being singled out, you are standing out by yourself: If you would add to the number of terrible articles slowly, you would probably pass unnoticed. However, you have created 1400 pages in the last year. Please name any of the thousands other people who create four pages per day that require substantial cleanup regarding sources and prose. —Kusma (talk) 10:14, 12 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose ban I protest a ban of LouisAlain strongly. He is good in translating, with a little weakness in referencing. Maybe there is a solution. I can do the referencing part (timeconsuming, please not so many articles). He can create an article in his sandboxes, I do the referencing. After that, the article can be released to mainspace. Grimes2 (talk) 14:48, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It looks to me as if he is strongly opposed to any such solution, all similar suggestions have been dismissed. If you can get them to agree to such a condition, then that may be a possible way out.
Fram (talk) 15:07, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

If he doesn't agree, a partial block from mainspace is another option, short of a sitewide block. Levivich 16:29, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

LouisAlain agrees. Important for him is, that he has the ability to release to the mainspace. Grimes2 (talk) 11:06, 7 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Grimes2 Maybe there is a solution. I can do the referencing part this is exactly what can be done if they're creating articles in draftspace. Other users can improve references before it goes into article space, which would be better than having undersourced/incorrectly sourced articles in mainspace. Joseph2302 (talk) 11:15, 7 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
My experience is, that an article is forgotten in Draftspace, and after 6 month it is deleted. What's wrong with an article that is well referenced. The article is only released to mainspace, if referencing is done. Grimes2 (talk) 11:25, 7 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@
Draft:Nicolas Mahler today, where LA had added an obvious non-source to his translation of the dewiki article. (Great Austrian comic artist by the way, I love his work and am slightly ashamed on behalf of the English Wikipedia that we don't have a decent article yet, but I don't see LA's first draft helping much). In the absence of a concrete agreement, the proposed mainspace creation ban still looks like the weakest sanction we can consider here, and we can't just continue to ignore this. —Kusma (talk) 16:56, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
Nicolas Mahler was my fault. This has been fixed. Please take a look at the article now. It can be released to mainspace now. Grimes2 (talk) 17:16, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Support ban on creating directly into article space. Forcing them to create articles in draftspace means that if they are undersourced, other editors can help fix them before they go "live" in article space. Or if they don't get fixed, they don't get published. Joseph2302 (talk) 17:15, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment An editor hasn't just had problems providing sourcing--they've been providing false sourcing, lying about it, and are deflecting when caught and insulting the editors who are raising concerns about this. How are we even talking about partial blocks, or accepting people arguing that LouisAlain is a productive editor with "some" sourcing issues? This is a major behavioral fail, which is causing, has caused, and will cause significant amounts of work and rework for other editors to clean up the "productivity". They should already be blocked. Grandpallama (talk) 15:34, 8 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

AFC is not a solution. AFC reviewers won't be checking citations to see if they confirm the text. What is needed is an Apprenticeship with an extremely diligent fact-checker who will take it upon themselves to check every single citation in anything LouisAlain produces. And since he is apparently largely unable to produce even an accurately cited draft, he should do all these mock-ups in his userspace (subpages and sandboxes), and await the fact-checker who is mentoring him to do anything further. Lastly, If he sucks at citing, he should not be writing articles. It's just that simple.
WP:V is the cornerstone of Wikipedia and indeed any encyclopedia. Softlavender (talk) 08:10, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
It's not just sourcing issues, the quality of the translations is also poor. The recently created Dietrich Meinardus, Ludwig von Milewski, Moritz Geisenheimer will all take more time to clean up than rewriting from scratch would, and it's less fun to do for most people. There's a recent warning by @Shirt58 about this on the talk page. LouisAlain creates far too many such articles; we'd need to clone Grimes2 and Gerda a few times to fix them all. —Kusma (talk) 10:01, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that AFC is not a solution. AFC is not at all suited to handle the issues raised here. AFC generally does not involve looking closely at source material, and there are not sufficient multilingual reviewers in any event. Calliopejen1 (talk) 18:17, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose editing restrictions.
(written yesterday, trying to not participate in the "judgement" but adding information:) Today's pictured DYK was created by LouisAlain, DYK? He began working in a sandbox. I enjoy the work with him. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:19, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Today's DYK has Leo Kestenberg, created by LouisAlain, and its that type of article I'd miss much if he left. I believe that articles don't have to be perfect when created, - actually I believe that no article will ever be perfect. But together, we can do our best to make them good. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:52, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

My mistake.
Fram (talk) 08:05, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

No improvement

Yesterday, they created
Fram (talk) 07:28, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

I DO. Mister Fram, you're so eager to fulfill your dream of killing me after 5 five years of stalking me that you make a fool of yourself in the eyes of everybody. The link still works, just scroll down a little bit and you'll find the content of the site. Now, what's next? Will you reproach me to not have indicated it was necessary to scroll down a bit? Or to not have modified said site so that the content pops up on top of their page ? A 9,719 ko.s article in one shot, and all you come out with is another wrong accusation. How other supposed intelligent administrators followed you to this point baffles me.

Today, I've just finished Ludwig von Milewski (one shot). Search, search, you may find a wrong placed coma or whatever.

But rest assure, sooner or latter you'll succed in your drive to ban me. LouisAlain (talk) 08:02, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, it does, my apologies.
Fram (talk) 08:05, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

Comment I previously spent more time translating but have since moved on to other activities, in part because of the difficulties posed by translating articles that are not well-referenced (including inadvertently translating copy-pasted content and introducing translation copyright violations, which are fairly difficult to detect and remedy later). Is there any way that LouisAlain could concentrate his efforts on featured articles or similar, to minimize these issues occurring? I think that translation of poorly referenced or unreferenced articles is often unhelpful because of the higher standards at en.wiki, and presumably there are enough well-referenced articles that could be translated to keep LouisAlain busy for some time. Calliopejen1 (talk) 18:17, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Calliopejen1, I previously decided not to take part any longer to this thread but your recent comment (one of the smartest of them all if you allow me) that I just discover, calls for an exception. This advice should have been given to me years before. Anyway, I took the decision some 8 days ago to do exactly that: Pick up articles with a minimum of five verified references in the original German or French (or other European languages) articles. My latest Carl Ernst Bernhard Jutz had 8 references including one dead link. That one has 14. To no avail ayway, some here will be too happy to find one single typo to crucify me. LouisAlain (talk) 23:03, 16 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

LouisAlain, this seems like a constructive way forward! good luck! i disagree with others below who are expecting you to personally check references (especially those that may not be available to you) -- as long as some editor has vouched for the content of the reference, i don't personally think it's the translator's job to do so again. but i may be in the minority here... also, it seems like people care deeply about the access date listed, so be careful with that. Calliopejen1 (talk) 23:09, 16 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I was invited to participate in this discussion, and here are my thoughts:

LouisAlain, you should always double-check and read your sources of information. Writing a new article is a fairly significant amount of work, which requires reading and understanding your source material completely and comprehensively. Indeed, you get the message "Encyclopedic content must be verifiable'. Any work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone—subject to certain terms and conditions" every time you make an edit. This, incidentally is why you can see offers to write articles on my talk page that I politely decline because I don't feel sufficiently qualified on the subject matter. I don't think getting excessively snarky with people who are pointing out mistakes is at all helpful, and will just make other people think you're not a net positive to the project and should be blocked. Sure, I can think of some examples where somebody points out mistakes in my writing in a not-amazingly-polite manner, but usually I remind myself that it's not personal and manage it accordingly.

I'm pleased to see that Grimes2 has offered to help look at some of these articles and improve the verification and sources on it.

I'm writing this message in good faith in the hope you're recognise there's a problem, and that I'm not saying any of this to be mean, but just trying to make sure the encyclopaedia is factually correct.

And finally, Fram, we get that there are problems with LouisAlain's editing, and I think your comments are now bringing more heat than light into the discussion, and it would be helpful if other people chipped into the debate. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 10:46, 11 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you @
Fram and myself, but a genuine community concern with his prolific creation of articles looking nice from a distance, but requiring serious cleanup work. —Kusma (talk) 15:33, 11 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

Update: Today's new article Johannes Busmann. "Busmann passed his Abitur at today's Carl-Fuhlrott-Gymnasium [de] in Wuppertal, then studied art, music and philosophy at the University of Wuppertal and obtained his Staatsexamen in 1988 and the degree in 1989" claims this reference, which does not contain any of this information. Those who do not read the references they claim to use should not create new articles. This apparently includes LouisAlain. —Kusma (talk) 14:37, 11 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
See also from the same day
Fram (talk) 12:20, 13 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

Support topic ban at the very least - concerning editing history here. Nice to see others finally recognise that editors repeatedly adding unsourced information to articles is actionable... Giant Snowman 14:55, 11 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

support topic ban ~~Comment~~ - if repeatedly adding fake references is not actionable, what is? I hope everyone here agrees that we are dealing with a very serious type of editing that compromises Wikipedia's reputation.--Berig (talk) 05:31, 12 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If no action is taken here, why should others take
WP:HOAX and WP:verifiability seriously?--Berig (talk) 09:28, 12 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

Question/comment I see a lot of comments about "fake referencing" and "hoax" being thrown around but it seems more likely to me that AlainLouis is translating articles in good faith but it turns out the references in the non-english article he translated don't actually verify the text of the article. (And also that he is using the current date as a default for access-date but he should be copying over the access-date in the original reference.) Is this all there is, or am I missing something? Also, for people who think translators should be personally verifying all content against the listed reference, do you also think people who splice or merge articles should do so? And if not, why not? I view translation as akin to a splice and would not require the translator to verify the content of a reference that the original adding author has already vouched for by adding it. Calliopejen1 (talk) 23:12, 16 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There is a big difference between translating and just executing a merge/split. In a merge/split situation, others can easily check the page history of the original pages. In a translation situation, it is impossible to do without some knowledge of the source language. If you just translate without checking any references, you're not just assuming that the people adding the references checked that it supports the text, but you are also assuming that nobody ever added text to the article that is not supported by the given references. That's a pretty big assumption. Translations done that way should be marked as unreliable, as their source is a wiki, not necessarily the claimed references. (I have translated like that, but that was in the Dark Ages of Wikipedia, before we had a general agreement of using reliable references. It was back when quantity, rather than quality, was our main driver of editing).

If you want to translate properly, you often need to consult the sources at least to check which meaning of an ambiguous word is intended. Otherwise, your translation is likely to be not just unreliable, but even wrong. So yes, translators should vouch for every word they add, just like any article creator. If people don't want to do a proper translation, they can just add {{
ill}} links and let readers take the risk of a poor automatic translation; I find that preferable to a translation that looks nice from far away but hasn't actually been verified by a human. (I've essentially stopped translating and just write new articles from the same sources nowadays, which is much slower but produces better articles that only contain verifiable content). —Kusma (talk) 16:58, 17 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
When you split an article, you are likewise "assuming that nobody ever added text to the article that is not supported by the given references". Splitting an article referenced to foreign-language materials is really no different from translating an article sourced to foreign-language materials. In both cases, it is somewhat harder for a reader to verify the content of the article because the sources are not in English and may be difficult to obtain. I don't think as a practical matter that people go through article histories to compare the text of the article when the reference was added to the text of the article at present. If this happens, I assume that it is vanishingly rare. Calliopejen1 (talk) 16:28, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - If Louis is knowingly "adding" fake references which is what has been described here then I agree that is not a good thing, probably actionable. However, I agree with @Calliopejen1 that the translator, this being Louis, can not be totally responsible for the sources of articles they translate. Ideally, a translator would be fluent in the language of the wiki they are copying from but that is not always the case and realistically can't always be the case. Louis is doing something very few care to engage in for these reasons. I think it's a little disingenuous to call what they are doing "adding" fake references when those references came from the original article on another wiki. If that is not the case then I stand corrected. I am going based on what I see in the conversation here. What I would caution Louis to do is to make sure that they are using the sources from the original article, they are using the access date of said sources unless they have checked the source themselves and can confirm the source is related to the information in the article or where it makes sense to update upon confirmation. I would also caution Louis to remember that not every wiki has the same exact restrictions and what is within the rules for one may not always be within the rules for another. That's true whether there are three, four, five or ten sources for an article. The rules are sometimes bent on even this Wikipedia to include something that may or may not be on the fringe of just over the edge in regards to our policies. Typically that is the case when consensus agrees so we should always follow consensus, even if consensus turns out to be wrong. Bottom line is that Louis can do better but so can we all. Louis can do some things to help alleviate some of the pressure on the community to clean up translated articles by just taking a few extra precautions. The community could do better about not assuming bad faith on the part of an editor that is trying to do a good thing for the encyclopedia in an area that very few actually try to edit. We often confuse civility with personal attacks. Louis has not been attacked though I know they feel that way. However, some of the the comments, the tone, the words used are uncivil and unkind. Louis would do well to understand that the frustration that others feel about these translations are justified. Likewise, the community would do well to understand that the constant piling on of uncivil remarks and unkind references are causing an enormous stress on an editor that is just trying to improve the encyclopedia. In cases like this we need to come together rather than rip each other apart. It's the civil thing to do. It's the kind thing to do and it's the best example of community collaboration we could ever hope for. --ARose Wolf 13:48, 17 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@ARoseWolf:: LouisAlain used to add fake references (not present in the original article), to avoid getting the articles draftified or deleted. He has for now stopped doing this it seems, but he continues with all the other issues, see e.g. one of his most recent creations, Adolf Schill
References "retrieved" by LouisAlain, which don't work or don't support the referenced text (this one doesn't work as presented but another page on the same site has the wanted info; this one has nothing to do with the wanted information, and nothing on that site seems to be of any interest; this one simply doesn't work, and neither does this one)

Very poor formatting, resulting in a "big red" cite error

Machine translations, resulting in things like "Born in Stuttgart, Schill attended the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart from 1864 to 1870, where he was introduced by the eclectic Christian Friedrich von Leins was taught architecture and Adolf Gnauth in stylistics." (first sentence of life section, including the link to the stylistics article which has nothing to do with the contents here, as far as they are decipherable).

All this coupled with a very confrontational attitude towards people who don't simply clean up his mess but try to get him to follow some basic principles and rules (see the above texts or the personal attacks he routinely offers on his user page and talk page). It's not as if this ANI section comes out of the blue; there have been countless discussions on his talk page, from many people, to get him to change his approach. Perhaps this one finally has brought some changes, although the intention to create pages in his sandbox and let someone like Grimes2 approve them first lasted for all of, what, 2 days?
Fram (talk) 14:04, 17 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

I wasn't here from the beginning but I honestly believe that if anyone looks this situation, like most, objectively and tries to understand the position of everyone involved one could see how they would feel confronted and therefore respond in a confrontational way. Louis feels "attacked". Even if that is just their perception it's still valid. The frustration that some in the community feel is valid as well. I don't believe Louis acted maliciously, again, I haven't been here from the beginning but during my brief interaction with them they have been thoughtful and civil. I know it's a pain to go behind someone and clean up mistakes. I still have some of my earliest, I haven't been here that long, created articles and edits watchlisted and people are still fixing errors on them. On a few of my very first I actually used sources that were less than stellar. I went back and fixed them later where I could. On some it was done before I realized. I felt terrible that someone had to go behind me. I still do. I said that to say this, we are all human beings and while I do believe there are limits to what the community should tolerate as far as what we consider disruption, we can always improve how we respond to make sure we are doing so in the kindest way possible. That's all I am advocating for. --ARose Wolf 18:40, 17 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As for "[r]eferences 'retrieved' by LouisAlain" I assume that you are just referring to him using the incorrect retrieved date when he is recreating the translation from the non-English Wikipedia? I view this as basically the most minor issue imaginable. In general, the retrieved date is only used for archive.org purposes, and it is easy enough to find old versions of the website at archive.org even if the retrieved date is incorrect. He should be given a reminder about this so that he ensures that he copies over the retrieval date from the source article as appropriate. This is not a reason to ban someone from article creation. Re: "'big red' cite error" are you seriously proposing a ban because he forgot to put a single </ref> tag, out of 35 references? Because that's what happened at that article.[14] On the machine translation, I agree that sentence sucks. I have no idea whether this is a pervasive issue, however. It may be that he forgot to clean up one sentence while revising a machine translation (which is, by the way, a perfectly fine way to translate if you in fact revise it afterwards). If there is evidence that he is often doing this, I agree it would be a problem. Calliopejen1 (talk) 16:28, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Calliopejen1, LouisAlain has created about 1400 articles in the last year. A large number of these (I would guess between a quarter and a half) have been edited substantially and improved up to standard by Gerda Arendt, Grimes2 and a few other people, while a large number of these articles has not been improved (Richard Gutzschbach, Moritz Geisenheimer are just some examples, see for yourself at [15]). There are many machine translations (or other poor translations). Often, the German article being translated is also not particularly good to start with. Many issues are just small errors, easily forgivable for a newbie. After 6000 articles, I think we can expect a little better. —Kusma (talk) 16:57, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
User:Kusma, I don't see either of those articles as net negatives (unless there are some significant inaccuracies in the text that you can identify for me? I don't speak German). I note that both Gerda Arendt and Grimes2 (those presumably most familiar with his strengths and weaknesses) both oppose the proposed editing restrictions. Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:08, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Calliopejen1: Well, Richard Gutzschbach is a pretty good example: the actual source for the German text is what LA puts in the "Further reading" section. The reference 1 is untranslated, so you still need to know German to understand that you have to look up a different work at an unknown page to retrieve this. Reference 2 does not support the content. Reference 3 does not work. The link to Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber is kind of correct, but to put it in the text like this is misleading, as that name was not used until 1959, so "Dresden Conservatory" is the right name to use. Reference number 4 actually supports the content in the text (it could even be used to reference the entire article). It also shows that the "1840" birth year is speculative, and we don't learn whether the reference 1 has better reasons to assume it is definite. The external link is contained in the AC template and redundant. None of this is visible if you don't actually go and check the references (and that is the reason for this being under "fake referencing"). (Some of the non-working /non-referencing ones were actually added by LA, and are not present in the original de:Richard Gutzschbach). —Kusma (talk) 18:09, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Calliopejen1: I agree with you on refs 2 and 3, that is bad. It's not obvious from the German article that the article was based on the Eisenberg work, so I don't blame him for using it as "further reading" (which I think "literatur" is closer to (?)) instead of putting it as a reference. It's not great that reference 1 is untranslated, but I'm more of a "meh" on things that can be fixed by later editors, which this definitely can be. It's not harming anyone to have an untranslated sentence hanging out that in fact leads readers to a reference (even if not ideal). Other issues I consider minor and fixable by the ordinary editing process. If things like 2 and 3 are a regular practice, I would be concerned. There is so far not enough evidence on this thread that this is a regular practice IMO. Calliopejen1 (talk) 18:24, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Calliopejen1, see #An_example:_LouisAlain above. From recent articles: Hermann Carl Hempel, reference 5 does not work. Carl Murdfield, reference 2 links to a page on how to book tickets for services in Cologne Cathedral. Looks like a regular practice to me. —Kusma (talk) 19:11, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Kusma, those are just old references that he has transferred over that existed in the source article. For both, it was trivial for me to retrieve good versions of the link at archive.org: [16], [17]. Minor imperfections like these are not a reason to put a ban on article creation. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:21, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Calliopejen1, that's the thing: LouisAlain needs a cleanup crowd several people strong just to keep up with this kind of "minor imperfections" in his new articles. I don't mind him creating a few articles requiring such cleanup, but I do mind thousands of them, with new ones created faster than Gerda and Grimes2 can fix them. If the issues are "trivial", well, then perhaps LouisAlain could just fix them? —Kusma (talk) 19:41, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Kusma I agree that it would be better if he could do this. I see three options: 1) we try to work with him more to get him to fix these imperfections himself, 2) we ban him and lose his imperfect articles entirely, 3) we accept that he is what he is and we get the imperfect articles. Given the bad blood between LouisAlain and the community at this point, I doubt we can redirect his efforts to other tasks (which might otherwise be a #4). Re #1, I'm not sure this is possible as a practical matter. It might be. The conversations I've seen linked here have been accusatory and hostile and not the sort of friendly, constructive outreach that might actually lead to behavior changes, and starting this AN thread certainly hasn't been helpful. Though for whatever reason there are always some editors who simply refuse to make simple changes, no matter how nicely they're asked, for reasons that remain a mystery to me. (User:FloridaArmy comes to mind... another frustrating editor who I still believe is a net positive.) So if he falls in this category maybe #1 is impossible. Of course, option #1 is theoretically the best, if possible. Of #2 and #3, I think #3 is the better option. I don't think that his body of work is a net negative, even if it has obvious problems. And when it comes down to bans like this, I think net positive/negative is the correct test to apply. Anyways, my two cents. Calliopejen1 (talk) 20:49, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The idea in this thread was to prohibit article creation in mainspace and to only allow articles to be moved there after the referencing has been checked/redone. That would be a minimal change to LA's workflow (he would need to use draft space or userspace instead of main, but could continue to paste slightly copyedited machine translations), give others time to check his work, and prevent further buildup of a mainspace cleanup problem. —Kusma (talk) 21:45, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think that is the worst option, to the extent we're relying on AFC (which is what was originally proposed). AFC is completely inequipped to do reference checking etc. The workflow at AFC is basically: does it contain copyvio? is it a legitimate topic? is it an ad? if the answers are satisfactory, it gets approved. AFC generally doesn't check whether sources verify text, and there are not enough multilingual AFC reviewers to deal with this sort of thing. Calliopejen1 (talk) 21:55, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Kusma, also, in case it wasn't clear, the reason I say that 2 and 3 are bad is that he has introduced references that don't verify the content, as opposed to just reproducing references already present in de.wiki that don't verify the content. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:23, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, don't see the difference. —Kusma (talk) 19:42, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

~~Also, I'm going to register my view as formally oppose ban.~~I'm changing back to officially neutral (possibly even weak support? not sure) in light of various issues that have arisen below as well as LouisAlain's refusal to engage in good faith discussions about the real issues that others have raised. Calliopejen1 (talk) 21:36, 24 September 2021 (UTC) I think we should try to work constructively with LouisAlain. He has already committed to only translating well-referenced articles, and I believe that he will easily fix the issues with access-dates that others are complaining about. If there are issues with the quality of his translations generally, I think that should be revisited in a separate thread that is not confused with these other issues that hopefully can be easily addressed and resolved. Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:17, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
He is translating articles that look well-referenced, which is quite different from well-referenced articles, which is something that is impossible to tell without looking at the sources. What he needs to do is very simple: just check whether at least the easily accessible online sources (in languages that he speaks) actually are related to the content they are supposed to support, and not add additional references without checking whether they actually support the content being referenced. If he did that, maybe we'd get two reliable articles instead of four unreliable ones per day, and I'd happily shut up about this. —Kusma (talk) 18:20, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Kusma, I disagree that the burden is on translators to go back to all of the sources used in articles to check that they verify what they purport to verify. We don't ask people who copy-edit articles to do this. We don't ask people who reorganize articles to do this. We don't ask people who merge or splice articles to do this. Is it that we think so little of German Wikipedians that we believe their footnotes are significantly more likely to be bad than en.wiki footnotes? Calliopejen1 (talk) 18:28, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@
WP:V (Remember that we don't accept wikis as sources!) The German Wikipedia has a very different approach to sourcing and footnotes from ours. They traditionally used to have "Sources" or "Literature" sections that list all the works used while writing the article (and usually also several works not used while writing the article) and often have no inline citations, so you don't know what comes from where. For a typical example (I just clicked "random article" a couple of times): de:Thomaskirche (Mannheim), where three books are given and no inline citations. The German Wikipedia still asks people to name their sources in the edit summary: de:Hilfe:Zusammenfassung und Quellen, so if you translate an article without importing its history, you can lose some references. This doesn't mean we think so little of German Wikipedians, it just means that we need to understand what the information we translate means, and we as translators need to answer the question why we think the text we write is true. If we don't do that, we might as well go for machine translation instead. —Kusma (talk) 18:53, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]
Kusma, I understand that the referencing culture of de.wiki is different, though one would think their footnotes reference the text to which they are appended... no? Assuming that is the case, I still don't understand how this is different from someone who splices an en.wiki article sourced to online foreign-language sources. That is no more "relying on a wiki" than the translation of footnoted text is. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:00, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

WP:HOAX are irrelevant if it is translated from a Wikipedia article? How can translating a WP article with fake sources be acceptable?--Berig (talk) 19:06, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

Berig, If someone takes the article History of Ghana and sees it is too long and breaks it into Colonial history of Ghana and Post-independence history of Ghana, we don't expect them to go back and verify all the sources at the time they create those new articles. If Colonial history of Ghana now contains a bad reference because there was a bad reference in History of Ghana, we don't blame the editor who spliced the article and say they created a hoax. We blame only the person who introduced the bad content/reference. Another way of looking at this is that we rely on the vouching of the person who originally added the sourced content (i.e. their vouching that the content reflects what the source says). I don't see how taking content across languages (as opposed to between articles in the same language) is any different. One Wikipedia author has looked at the source and vouched for the text of the article as consistent with that source. Once that has happened, subsequent editors can rely on the original vouching. Of course, it is good practice to periodically check back on sources to ensure that no detritus has accumulated that's inconsistent with the source. But this has nothing to do with an article being translated/spliced/etc. The accumulation of this detritus can happen anywhere. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:13, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I consider myself and everybody else responsible for the information and the references written into an article. I don't even borrow references from reliable professors with tenures because I know they can make mistakes and consciously or unconsciously misrepresent information. I have learnt this the hard way by verifying sources as I write.--Berig (talk) 19:22, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Berig, so you think no one should splice an article unless they personally look at every source in what they're splicing and verify it? i think that would be a slim minority view, and one that would hinder rather than help development of the encyclopedia. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:24, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
WP:RS.--Berig (talk) 19:28, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply
]

That's an interesting analogy. But I would regard someone copying content as incurring more personal responsibility for the validity of that content than if they were moving content. For example, I would not copy-paste a sentence from Ashanti Empire to History of Ghana without reading it over carefully, checking references, and making sure it generally passed the smell test. Whereas if I were doing a simple split, I would be fine with more or less doing a blind ctrl+x, ctrl+v. By copying "bad" content (whether from a different article, a different wikipedia, or a different wikiproject), you're increasing its reach; you're increasing the net "badness" of the project. The same is not true when moving bad content around within the project. (Also, I would say copying from a different wiki requires even more care than copying within the wiki, since different wikis may have different content policies.) Colin M (talk) 21:08, 21 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material. This is Wikipeda policy, and it means that an editor is personally responsible for the text they translate from another Wikipedia. Why does it appear to be more acceptable when LouisAlain adds hoaxes and effectively unreferenced material? Or is this a case of an editor having enough friends to do it?--Berig (talk) 15:45, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Berig There is no prior consensus that this is the appropriate way to interpret that sentence. If you think it should be a policy/guideline that you have to personally verify the references of content that is already in Wikipedia in another language before translating it and bringing it to this edition of Wikipedia, please start a discussion to establish that consensus. Your proposal would mean that it is forbidden to translate the impeccably referenced fr:Ancien tramway de Rouen unless you personally have the obscure French books and periodicals on which it is based in your possession. Is that seriously what you are proposing? Calliopejen1 (talk) 18:37, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that if we borrow references we vouch for them being correct, don't we? Maybe we should not use obscure French references if we cannot verify them to begin with. I would never translate articles from Swedish Wikipedia without painstakingly studying every reference simply because I know that Swedish Wikipedia is not reliable.--Berig (talk) 18:51, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Middle ground? There's got to be some interpretation of the existing guidelines, or some way in which they should be amended, to prevent this scenario: A prankster wants to create fake articles. So the prankster identifies the Wikipedia for another language where patrolling is really lax, or else the guidelines are, and a friend who's fluent in that language. The friend adds the articles, with fake references, in the other language to the other Wikipedia. Then the prankster "translates" them to English Wikipedia, where the prevailing presumption is that if it came from another Wikipedia, it must be fine already, with little or no need for scrutiny. Largoplazo (talk) 18:57, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Largoplazo, the thing is, that is not the scenario we're faced with here. What LouisAlain is doing is simply translating articles from de.wiki that sometimes have footnotes that are either deadlinks or (as it turns out) don't actually support the text. I don't think we should ban him from doing translations because of this, or (even worse) require that his translations go through AFC where reviewers are completely unequipped to evaluate articles for this issue. Of course, people can create hoaxes through translation just like they can create hoaxes through mis-citing difficult-to-access sources. But there is no "hoaxing" here, only the translation of imperfect articles. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:02, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Calliopejen1: Suppose I find a CC0 licensed English blog post on the Ancien tramway de Rouen. It's written in an encyclopedic tone, and includes footnotes to cited works which appear to be reliable sources, but there's no evidence the author of the blog is a recognized subject-matter expert. Is it okay to copy this content into an en-wiki article (with appropriate attribution and formatting adaptations), including the footnotes, without verifying any of the citations? If not, why? And why does the same reasoning not apply to copying material from fr-wiki? Colin M (talk) 19:10, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Colin M, I'd say no because I draw the line between non-Wikipedia and Wikipedia. That's because trust in Wikipedia editors' vouching for sources cited is inherent in this project. You can also follow up on the person who originally added the content and see what their contribution history is, unlike with a blog post. On a semi-related point, forbidding translations except if you personally verify the sources (i.e. making translations significantly more difficult) will only contribute to the systemic bias that's already a problem here. Translations are a way of amplifying the work that other Wikipedians around the world are doing and getting content here that covers the entire world, not just the Anglosphere. [Side note re: your point about increasing the "reach" of bad content, above-- every time you add a link to an article you're increasing the reach of that content, but you're not going to be blamed if you link to an article that contains incorrect content...] Calliopejen1 (talk) 22:10, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'd draw the line at the project. If someone translates or otherwise transfers a page from another project onto this one, they need to check that it meets this project's global consensus, which may be different from another project's. That means making sure links work, content is verified, no BLP issues, not copyvio, etc. It should be just like creating any other mainspace page. When copying within this project, like splitting a page, one can rely on the page history, but not when taking material from outside the project. (Or even from outside mainspace, I'd say.) Levivich 04:42, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Arbitrary break

I think I'd support a ban in principle, but am indifferent about whether it needs to be a formal logged restriction. Grimes2 volunteered above to do review and referencing, which is fine IMO, so long as that agreement is adhered to. Bottom line is, there are several articles with content cited to sources that don't verify the information and probably never did (e.g. Spotify links can't verify extended prose). If Louis isn't going to check the references then they should not be in mainspace until someone checks them. The featured articles suggestion above probably makes life easier on the reviewer, but is not a solution to the underlying problem (as featured articles, after being reviewed, sometimes have unverifiable content added into them). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 22:47, 22 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That agreement lasted all of two days, I believe. Nothing is checked before LouisAlain puts in the in the mainspace, and few things are checked afterwards. In general, not even the most friedly advice gets results. @Calliopejen1: nicely asked them to stop using the "retrieved 23 September 2021" addition to sources (as it would be slightly less problematic to simply add links that don't work, instead of pretending that they checked the link and it worked and confirmed the text at the time of translation), but to no avail.

His most recent article,
Degenerate Art
were confiscated." or (from the second article) "His children, including Martha Leiffmann, born in 1874, who married doctor Peter Janssen in 1904. married and gave birth to the later painter Peter Janssen in 1906, he was baptised Protestant." (contrary to what one might think after deciphering this sentence / these sentences, the original German article doesn't indicate that Peter Janssen II was baptised Protestant, but that the children of Moritz Leiffman got a Protestant baptism).

Too often his poor translations introduce such factual errors: in the second article, "[...] was acquired by the gallerists Alfred Flechtheim, Hugo Helbing and Georg Paffrath by public auction": no, the auctioneeers Flechtheim, Helbingand Paffrath sold the items, they didn't acquire them for their galleries. Whether this is carelessness by rushing through too many article creations, or is caused by LouisAlain simply not understanding German, is not clear.

Fram (talk) 07:59, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

This reminds me of Wikipedia:Unblockables. Some editors are simply "allowed" to keep acting in a problematic way.--Berig (talk) 08:22, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@LouisAlain: Can you please explain why all the online references in the article you created today, Hugo Helbing, say "Retrieved 22 September 2021"? Did you access each of these links on 22 Sep (yesterday)? Levivich 17:12, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Levivich: As pertains Hugo Helbing, I wrote "Retrieved 22 September 2021" because I check all the references the day I translate (very badly I concede) articles from German. I've just finished Raquel Camarinha from French and you'll also find the "Retrieved X/X/X" line because today is the day when I retrieved and checked the references (and added 3 or 5 since there were many dead links on the French original. Maybe "retrieved" isn't the right, proper and appropriate word, in which case the drama can be solved by telling me what I should write. This thread has been unfolding for nearly three weeks now which makes me think some people have time on their hands. I feel like Josep K. in Kafka's the Trial, wondering what do all these nice people calling for my banning are accusing me of. In 2021, there still exist people ready to send their next to the gallows (or under the guillotine); humankind will never evolve.

I recently translated

Surroundings of Cologne Cathedral

(with 48 references) expecting the issue of wrong, dead etc. references would at least be over. To no avail apparently.

Out of good faith, I've been working here for 5 and a half year, 4,500 of my translations have been checked by at least 40 rewievers, without any of them raising the issue of the quality of my translations or the references question. Am I invited to think all these people did a botched job with my output and should better have abstain from engaging in a job they weren't up to ?

In the process that led to my banning from the French Wikipedia, a sharp mind suggested all my nearly 8,000 articles should be rewritten (I don't speak French) while another genius accused me of racism, no more no less. I nearly escaped the anti-Semitic accusation. The mind boggles. In a Christic move I forgive you all for reasons that are mine only. Ban, ban, ban.

LouisAlain (talk) 18:35, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

In the article Hugo Helbing, Ref #7 ""Provenienzrecherche - Franz Stuck von". Bundesamt für zentrale Dienste und offene Vermögensfragen. Retrieved 22 September 2021." the link [21] is dead, it goes to a 404 page. I'm assuming it did yesterday as well. So why are you writing "Retrieved 22 September 2021" when, obviously, you did not retrieve this source yesterday. I mean what does "check the references" mean if a 404 page is passing your check? And if this was once or twice I wouldn't even say anything, but this is what we've been talking about for weeks here and there are still multiple errors like this, just today, and every day it seems, not just for weeks but for years, and maybe across multiple projects? How are you still repeating this mistake? I just don't understand, how are you making this error over and over again? Don't you see it's a 404 page? How do we fix this so that you are never marking a 404 page as "Retrieved [today's date]". This particular little issue which really isn't that big of a deal except you seem to be doing it hundreds if not thousands of times, has me flummoxed, and yet it is just one of the issues raised here. I wish there was a way to resolve these issues without banning you from making articles. But there is an active discussion about banning you from making articles in mainspace and you're still repeating the same mistakes with new articles while the discussion is going on. This tells me you just don't care, that you're not trying to do better because you don't think these complaints are important. Please tell me I'm wrong. Tell me you can go like a week without making articles with dead links, etc. Levivich 19:00, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"4,500 of my translations have been checked by at least 40 rewievers, without any of them raising the issue of the quality of my translations or the references question. " Your talk page history is one long list of people moving articles to draftspace or proposing them for deletion because of (mainly) referencing issues, but also people having serious issues with the quality of your translations, e.g.

Fram (talk) 10:06, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

I'm confused about this reference to machine translations. LA says "my translations". Is LA translating or are these Google translates? Levivich 13:21, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Most (if not all) are very similar to the Google translates.

Surroundings of Cologne Cathedral certainly is derived from Google's translation of de:Domumgebung (Köln), as you can easily check if you browse using Chrome. As I understand it, the use of Google translate was part of the conflict leading to LouisAlain's ban from the French Wikipedia: [23]. —Kusma (talk) 14:29, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

LA is translating articles from a language he doesn't speak??? Levivich 14:45, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I looked and jogged my memory with Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1001#User Fram and User LouisAlain... I thought the outcome of that thread was that everyone agreed that using machine translations to copy articles from another language wiki to enwiki was not OK? I was under the impression this stopped after Fram's block of LA two years ago? Levivich 15:18, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Let me just state here clearly that machine translations are harmful. They usually look nice from far away, but often contain wrong statements. Cleaning them up is a lot of work that requires specialist human translators do to properly (the relevant section at

ill}} mean static machine translation is at best useless). —Kusma (talk) 15:38, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

As one of the regulars over at

PNT: I fully agree with the statement above. Lectonar (talk) 17:59, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

WP:MACHINETRANSLATION, which I think has been around for 10+ years and has the heading, "Avoid machine translations", states: Wikipedia consensus is that an unedited machine translation, left as a Wikipedia article, is worse than nothing., bold in the original. If any editor is posting to mainspace machine translations from another language wiki, when they do not have fluency in the other language and aren't checking the accuracy of the translation themselves, that's a serious problem. Frankly any editor who continues to do this after being asked to stop should be pblocked from mainspace forthwith because the cleanup is going to be a lot of work and we don't want that pile of work getting bigger. Levivich 17:37, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply

]

Did I say 10+ years? It's at least 18 years.

Wikipedia:Translations in 2003

: Never use machine translation to create an article! Also (all emphasis in the originals):

WP:COFAQ#MTRANS

: Machine translation is useful for obtaining the general idea of a text in an unfamiliar language, but it produces poor translations and should not be used on its own. If you want to use machine translation as a translation aid and intend to edit the result, please go ahead if you think it would be helpful. However, please do not paste a machine translation directly into an article.

Wikipedia:Content translation tool#Why machine translation is disabled in content translation: Raw or lightly edited machine translations have long been considered by the English Wikipedia community to be worse than nothing.
Wikipedia:Translation into English
.
Particularly on-point is
Bing Translator can cross-reword paragraphs into another language, but "proper word order often it doesn't". All automatically translated text must be checked before use, as comparing phrases to the original language.
Verbs/phrases omitted: Google Translate

sometimes drops verbs, or whole phrases (even in 2016) in long sentences, or where a verb could have multiple meanings. So a verb gets dropped, rather than risk showing a wrong equivalent verb.

Town names: Google Translate and Bing Translator might translate proper nouns in some town names, but not other instances, even in the same paragraphs.

Wikitext form: Google Translate may garble wiki-text markup coding; for example by showing illegal spaces after the slash in closing wp:reftags (as in illegal "</ ref>").

Short sentences: By hand-splitting long German sentences into shorter parts, some computer-translation programs might generate better wording than others, but all automatically translated text must be revised before use.

Copy as in other pages: Once the first page on a theme is translated, similar pages could copy parts of it, so the translation of idioms can become easier in related articles.

Verification rules: Many articles on English Wikipedia have some awkward, broken English, but German Wikipedia is heavily patrolled by editors to alleviate rough or awkward wording.

@@ Line 330: / Line 330: @@
 * '''Support'''. I encountered LouisAlain four years ago at [[Template:Did you know nominations/François Bott]]. I suppose I didn't think too much of it at the time, but you can see the same pattern: missing references, references that didn't support the text, poor-quality translations, lots of other editors pitching in to address the various issues caused by LouisAlain's editing. Now, to some extent, that's just how Wikipedia works. We're always improving the work of others. There's an inherent expectation that as a result of this process all editors will improve over time, and respond in constructive ways when editors critique their work. Editors that cannot or will not improve tend to be shown the door. I have no personal beef with LouisAlain, but if he's unwilling or unable to improve his approach I don't see any alternative. [[User:Mackensen|Mackensen]] [[User_talk:Mackensen|(talk)]] 22:38, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * '''Comment''' {{u|LouisAlain}}, would you kindly self-evaluate your ability in each language you translate from, in particular French and German, plus any others you habitually translate? Preferably by adding [[Template:Babel]] badges to your User page, but you could, if you wish, just list the languages below, using the Babel levels of 0 (no knowledge) to 5 (professional quality, virtually equal to a native speaker), to N (native speaker)? For example, {{tlx|Babel|it-1|de-2|fr-3|en-N}} would mean you have basic Italian, intermediate German, advanced French, and are a native speaker of English. Thanks, [[User:Mathglot|Mathglot]] ([[User talk:Mathglot|talk]]) 03:37, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
+* {{done}}
+::I am once again summoned before a tribunal presided over by the spiritual heirs of Fouquier Tinville, Roland Freisler and Andrei Vychinski. Yes, this is how one is treated on Wikipedia when one is the weakest link.
+::I have replied I don't know how many times to the friendly accusations made to me concerning -among others- the question of references. For at least the last 15 days, I have only translated articles whose originals have solid and verifiable references. Did anyone check ?
+::I have never ever received a single answer to the questions I have asked about the somehow 40 rewievers for example who never raised an eyebrow regarding the topic at hand or any other issue. What is the point of asking regular users to rewiew new articles if their opinion is considered of no value nor interest ?
+*[[Lorenz Cantador]]
+*[[Düsseldorf Castle]]
+*[[Alte Kunsthalle]]
+*[[Sophie Hasenclever]]
+*[[Kölnisches Stadtmuseum]]
+*[[Surroundings of Cologne Cathedral]]
+*[[Linneper Hof]]
+*[[Zander & Labisch]]
+*[[Clemens Julius Mangner]]
+*[[Johann Josef Scotti]]
+and last year was [[Christian Gottlob Höpner|this one]] wich now may have dead links which were not when translated.
+are among my latest translations. Accusing me of putting unreferenced articles on the main is a deliberate blatant lie and an insult. I have changed my habit following the nice remarks and insults that have been hurled at me since this thread began.
+:: My very first translation here was [[Marguerite Aucouturier]], 5 and a half years ago. See what it was then and what it has become since. That's what I call playing the game of a collaborative encycopedia. Were it for the vast majority of sysops, this article would have been deleted within hours. For whose gain or benefit ?
+:: For the sake of answering guess games, I am a native French speaker and never use Google translate. Never. This answer is written without the help of any translating machine (and I guess it shows). So much for those who suggest I shouldn't use Google translate : I don't, period. As is usual, nobody will believe me since the "Assume good faith" motto is a joke which everyone betrays when it fits their need and prejudice.
+:: There is a drive (and I know where it comes from) to ban me fom this site where apparently most believe I act out of volontary ill-will, stubornness and ontological meanness despite all the "kind" advice that have been given to me by magnaniminous and humanist administrators playing the "good cop/bad cop" game. I wasn't born last year mind you and I'm old enough to be the father and even grandfather of most of you (which of course doesn't grant me any privilege) but I have lived long enough to not fall twice in the same trap ("Fool me once etc.", you know the line). I have gathered a bit of personal experience regarding human nature and the death instinct vis-à-vis one's next.
+:: After I changed my tack as pertains references, I thought the issue was over. What an imbecile I was ! The new accusation now concerns dead links. Well, as opposed to all administrators (whose name are circulating in the Vatican fo a possible beatification and even canonization), I happen to make mistakes, yes I do. This user must be the only one from whom most here expect and even demand immediate, complete and absolute perfection at first shot. We're all equal on Wikipedia except for those who are more equal than the others. Please, don't mistake me for a dork...
+:: I never hid my flaws regarding my weak skills in English (again, see the footnot at [[Marguerite Aucouturier]]) and innumerable corrections have been made to my output by [[User:Gerda Arendt|Gerda Arendt]] first and then by [[User:Grimes2|Grimes2]] plus many other users. Also, being slightly mentally unbalanced isn't a plus in social interactions. Unbalanced yes but not completely imbecile though...
+:: Like in the [[Moscow trials]], the accused stood absolutely no chance, whatever their good faith or innocence and I don't hold my breath as regards my eventual fate here. The dice was cast the day a female informer from N.Y (discreetly, I agree) had my A.P rights removed, hence drawing attention to me for all to see and draw their conclusion : He is a filthy troll ! The load of work of 40 something rewievers was made heavier, to no avail of course. They wasted their time. Now, if there is some consistancy in your accusations, please, please pray and delete '''all''' my crappy translations which are a stain on the English Wikipedia (bet you won't though). Like my salvation depended on the whims and self-esteem of an army of ants. It is not because 1, 2 or even 7 billion people assert the earth is flat that said earth is.
+:: Now, you've made me lose 2 hours that I wanted to spend on the translation of [[:de:Luftangriff auf Magdeburg am 16. Januar 1945]] with 59 references (still to be checked one after the other).
+:: Oh, one last question: Do you allow me to keep on translating whatever article I want from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and other European languages for my personnal private collection or must I ask you first your permission ? What a sinister farce and a riot ! [[User:LouisAlain|LouisAlain]] ([[User talk:LouisAlain|talk]]) 07:50, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
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Category:Wikipedia noticeboards

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 07:50, 25 September 2021

Open tasks

Pages recently put under
extended-confirmed protection

Fake referencing

An example: LouisAlain

Proposal on article-creation for LouisAlain

Arbitrary break

Violation of WP:UNINVOLVED

User: Johnpacklambert

Chart/Sales and user Ss112

Bigredbook.info

I Hate Everything

Extended confirmed restriction omnibus motion

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Iranian politics closed

MJL appointed trainee clerk

Removal of new page reviewer rights

above footer at
WP:RPP

WP:ACERFC
closers

Vandalism that is being passed off as “jokes”

Email contact for creating wikipedia pages for payment by user with multiple accounts.

IP range PBLOCK needed

Period of 1/43 in binary

User:Fomfeider/sandbox

Blocking of User:Xxxxxf

AfD review

Community review:
WP:GS/IPAK
sanctions

Discussion

User:Himynameselijah

Revision as of 07:50, 25 September 2021

Open tasks

Pages recently put under extended-confirmed protection

Fake referencing

An example: LouisAlain

Proposal on article-creation for LouisAlain

Arbitrary break

Violation of WP:UNINVOLVED

User: Johnpacklambert

Chart/Sales and user Ss112

Bigredbook.info

I Hate Everything

Extended confirmed restriction omnibus motion

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Iranian politics closed

MJL appointed trainee clerk

Removal of new page reviewer rights

above footer at WP:RPP

WP:ACERFC closers

Vandalism that is being passed off as “jokes”

Email contact for creating wikipedia pages for payment by user with multiple accounts.

IP range PBLOCK needed

Period of 1/43 in binary

User:Fomfeider/sandbox

Blocking of User:Xxxxxf

AfD review

Community review: WP:GS/IPAK sanctions

Discussion

User:Himynameselijah

Pages recently put under
extended-confirmed protection

above footer at
WP:RPP

WP:ACERFC
closers

Community review:
WP:GS/IPAK
sanctions