User talk:Jimbo Wales: Difference between revisions

Jimbo welcomes your comments and updates – he has an open door policy. He holds the founder's seat on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees. The current trustees occupying "community-selected" seats are Rosiestep, Laurentius, Victoria and Pundit. The Wikimedia Foundation's Lead Manager of Trust and Safety is Jan Eissfeldt.

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Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic. New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help. Assume good faith Be polite and avoid personal attacks Be welcoming to newcomers Seek dispute resolution if needed

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This talkpage has been mentioned by a media organization: Matthew Gault (8 December 2021). "Wikipedia Editors Very Mad About Jimmy Wales' NFT of a Wikipedia Edit". Vice Media. The trouble began when Wales posted an announcement about the auction on his user talk page—a kind of message board where users communicate directly with each other.

I would be happy to have help with this subject if you or any of your page watchers are up to it. Happy New Year. FloridaArmy (talk) 18:35, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you check the talk page of the article, I think you will find what I found to be very interesting and useful. Let me ask you - do you have access to an online resource similar to what I used? I find it very powerful at researching articles about this kind of topic which is in the modern world quite obscure. Much of the pushback you get from people can be easily defeated, I think and hope, if you are able to produce citations and quotes from a large number of newspapers.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:08, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(talk page watcher) @FloridaArmy: Huh, weird, my hometown(ish) on Jimbotalk. I have no idea when I'll next be in Swampscott (sometime between April and never), but if you'd like me to check the library and/or a giant book of old newspapers my mom has, I'm happy to next time I'm in town. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 20:22, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks

WP:Before process for Aritcles for Deletion, but for draft submissions (that would never even be taken there) common sense and basic core values and guidelines go out the window. It's a travesty really. So much is missing and we're not making it easy to fill in the gaps. I will add some additional examples from my experience if anyone wants to comment or make a suggestion. FloridaArmy (talk) 21:21, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

• Draft:Robert T. Bess
  ), a lawyer and civil rights leader. Not only deleted repeatedly but now there's a refusal to restore it unless I promise I can work it up.
• Draft:Okporo (may be alternative transliterations?) a historic and culturally significant region in Africa
• Draft:Charles Henry Alston (lawyer)
  ), another lawyer and civil rights activist. Keep in mind African Americans were barred from most elections and public offices in much of the U.S. for decades so our politician standard is inherently discriminatory. We've also made it very hard to add notable schools and cultural institutions from their communities.
• Draft:Russell Duncan (professor)
  ), scholar and author on some of this subject matter
• Draft:David Silberman Gurovich
  ), notable for his disappearance and the legal struggles that followed (Chilean)
• Draft:Reese DuPree
  )

I am only one person so I don't think it's okay to put all the onus on me. I acknowledge my many flaws as an editor. Still, I think we as a community should ask why we omit these subjects and reject them as drafts and how we can do better. FloridaArmy (talk) 21:34, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sprague, Alabama (Draft:Sprague, Alabama) is another example. I came across Sprague working on another subject. It is noted as a place where numerous enslaved people labored. It turns out it where one of the largest cotton ginning operations in Montgomery County, Alabama. The area, outside the state capitol, later used convict labor. We've documented it had a post office, telegram station, railroad station, and was home to many African Americans but still it gets rejected. Okay, sourcing is a little thin, but I add an extensive article from a historical society discussing Sprague and the corton ginning business, one part of a theee part series. But still it's rejected. So Wikipedia doesn't cover this community or any of the people who were enslaved there. And we know the schools are also difficult to include. So all of those people and their history is excluded from Wikipedia. I hope you can see how Wikipedia's policies and procedures work to exclude and discriminate against African American subjects: politicians, schools, cultural institutions, artists and musicians, and even their communities. It's a shame really. Again I know my failings as an editor are many, but even when these subjects clearly meet Wikipedia's inclusion criteria, subjects about African Americans, as well as Africans and other minorities, are deemed "not notable". It's a big problem we need to work on. FloridaArmy (talk) 10:28, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And as each one of these subjects is rejected it makes it that much harder to include the rest of them. If we included Sprague then it would be easier to include its schools, its political leaders, its cultural institutions, people who are from there. So it's a mass exclusion, a historical ethnic cleansing. And it's a wiping out of much of an entire peoples' history. And it doesn't help that related subjects like

Clinton J. Calloway (Draft:Clinton J. Calloway) also deemed not notable. For some reason his entry in an encyclopedia on prominent African Americans and the other sources aren't enough. FloridaArmy (talk) 12:29, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings Jimbo, it's me again. Do you think subjects like this one are notable? A 687 acre preserve of endangered habitat. I don't understand why we would want to exclude subjects like this. Seems insane. FloridaArmy (talk) 18:39, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Jimbo has no special powers to declare things notable. No one does, actually. Notability is not decided by what people think or feel about a subject, it is determined by whether or not people have written substantial text about the subject outside of Wikipedia and itself. The article in question does not show any independent writing about the Middlefork Savannah; most of the references in the article are written by the organizations that manage the park. What we need are in depth sources that are independent of the park or the organizations associated with it. As soon as you find those, you're good to go. --Jayron32 18:43, 6 January 2023 (UTC) [reply]

One thing I will add; while the Middlefork Savanna itself may not be notable enough to support a stand-alone article, that doesn't mean that Wikipedia doesn't contain information about it. A good solution is to add the information about the Savanna to another article. --Jayron32 18:45, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Jayron32, I am afraid I'd like to ask you to not be so confrontational. FloridaArmy asked me my opinion, not for some kind of royal ruling. I'm perfectly allowed to give my opinions and people are perfectly allowed to ask for them. You are also allowed to give your opinion, which you have, but as I say, in an unnecessarily confrontational way. FloridaArmy has been around for many years, as I think you know (but if you didn't know, well, a newbie is also worthy of kindness).--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:12, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I apologize, Jimbo. It was not my intent to be confrontational. I was trying to provide some advice to them with regards to what sorts of things are likely to help with the notability concerns they had. I withdraw my advice, and apologize both to yourself and to FloridaArmy for the trouble I have caused. I will try to do better. --Jayron32 19:22, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

WOW. That's really awesome. Totally accepted. *hugs*--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:09, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

From a five second Google Books search, the place looks notable. If you spend half an hour on Google Scholar and at

WP:TWL you should have no problems replacing the current citations in the article by reasonably high quality independent sources. —Kusma (talk) 19:57, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

Yes, official nature reserves (as long they're not tiny) tend to have sources. I've written a couple about UK ones myself, though I did need dead-tree sources for them as well. The problem is often sifting through to find the sources, as Googling the place tends to throw out lots of list-type results, such as "X, Y and Z are some of the places you can visit in ABC county". Black Kite (talk) 11:49, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've added some sources to the draft which I think should be sufficient.

It does seem odd that articles created though AfC are required to meet a much higher standard than those published directly to mainspace. This article is an interesting case study. It was moved to draftspace by

G13. So the outcome of this process is that we may have driven away a good content creator, and we almost lost an article on a notable subject. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 13:49, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

It is not just odd, it is very bad. There are two major problems: (1) the bar to pass AfC is higher than that for surviving in mainspace for a new article and (2) new articles are generally held to a higher standard than existing pages. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of good faith newbies leave after their first attempt at creating an article. Unfortunately Wikipedia is far too successful and popular to allow for easy solutions. —Kusma (talk) 16:06, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

[This is a reply to the above section, too]. There are the standards for

Experienced users, in addition to being on the whole competent at starting decent quality articles, know NPP/AfC are largely toothless because you can just opt not to use AfC or move an article back to mainspace if an NPPer moves it to draft. Anyone doing so should anticipate it being nominated for deletion, but as Sojourner points out, that's a different debate. AfD typically evaluates the subject; AfC/NPP typically evaluate the article. That does mean we impose a higher bar for content on brand new users, users who think they're binding/mandatory (an impression many seem to want to cultivate), and users whose history led to them being required to go through AfC.

I suspect that over time, we'll continue to see a slow move from an emphasis on quantity to an emphasis on quality, and standards for mainspace will generally continue to increase (unofficially, if not officially). That doesn't seem like a bad thing, even if it's occasionally frustrating. For now, it can seem unfair, but it's worth remembering that the difference between "showing that an article is notable at AfD" and "showing an article is notable through citations that demonstrate notability" isn't actually a huge difference in labor, and the latter is more helpful to readers. YMMV. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:04, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What isn't good enough is our coverage of these subjects. Making a quality argument for subjects we omit is a bit off the wall. Sorry, you draft isn't good enough so we won't say anything about these subjects. That's what our institutional racism has determined. We choose to tell our audience and editors we will continue to exclude these communities, these people, these institutions, and these leaders. We have a massive bureaucracy of rules and regulations that we can choose to apply on such a way that African Americans and other minority groups are excluded. It's grotesque. The quality of our coverage of these subjects is absent. It's shit. We have NOTHING about them. Zero. Failure. They are redlinks. All the excuses and explanations in the world don't make that okay and we shouldn't support obstructing those working to add coverage of important subjects we've neglected and worked at omitting. We are violating NPOV by excluding these subjects. We are supporting bigotry and fostering ignorance by excluding these subjects and pretending they aren't notable. We are discriminating against these subjects. It's not okay. Black Lives Matter. We need leadership from Jimbo and others, and indeed he helped on one of the entries above. We need our admins to step up on these issues and to stop making excuses, engaging in obfuscation, and obstructing. The status quo is not acceptable. FloridaArmy (talk) 20:37, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A Google Scholar search shows that at least seven academic papers have been published about the Middlefork Savanna. I do not see what this topic has to do with institutional racism or exclusion of African-Americans or anyone else. When I contribute well-referenced content about African-Americans, there is never a problem, because it is well-referenced. Cullen328 (talk) 20:43, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We're discussing our processes Cullen not just an individual subject and another editor broadened the discussion started above in this section. Have you used your abundant editing skills to help include these subjects Cullen? FloridaArmy (talk) 20:54, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I am discussing the topic in the section header. I am not discussing other sections on this talk page, which I did not even read. I do my very best to contribute well written and well referenced content about notable topics, including quite a few African American related topics. Cullen328 (talk) 21:32, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

At the risk of beating a dead horse I will give another example. Since 2015 we've had an entry on

If Newbold School went through AfC today, it would absolutely be rejected. The distinction is in when it was created and at the level of the user, not the subject.

At the level of the user: because of your restriction requiring that you go through AfC, you, and not these subjects, are held to a higher standard than others (this is meant as a discussion, not to be critical of you/your work, by the way). Whatever subject you choose to work on would thus be held to that higher standard. The way around that is to appeal the restriction.

As to when it was created: There are absolutely race-based systemic biases at work here, and this touches on the intersection of systemic biases in participation on English Wikipedia (which were perhaps most acute in its early days), and our policies that have evolved to be harder on new content than old content. The various topics that weren't covered back when Wikipedia was more lax about quality will see more impediments to creation/expansion than the material that was "grandfathered in" from the early days, so any biases that existed then will carry forward for some time. Not sure what the best thing to do about that is. Creating articles, to be sure; some people argue for more weeding out of old articles that no longer meet our standards; maybe a wikiproject/task force with an emphasis on lists of topics a la Women in Red? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:18, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What needs to be done is to make it our policy to include high schools that served African Americans. They are notable. It was a struggle to get them established. Their construction and opening was always significant and important for the communities they served. Their operation and type of instruction was always controversial. High schools weren't even allowed for African American students in much of the U.S. for decades. This isn't complicated. These are notable subjects. State-wide officeholders are included, everyone who plays on a pro team, lots of subjects far less notable are welcomed on Wikipedia. Not every one needs its own entry but certainly ones like this one that served entire counties and were landmarks in progress and also monuments to the limitations African Americans faced in the United States are worth including. These schools ARE NOTABLE. Period. We need to welcome them, expand on them, and include more of them. FloridaArmy (talk) 21:34, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

High schools in general are no longer auto-notable. They used to be in practice, but a series of very long RfCs has added schools to the ever-growing list of things that are not notable-by-fact but rather based on

WP:SIGCOV, etc. There are so many that were created in the days when just existing as a high school meant people would !vote keep, however, that it's another example of whatever was created years ago carrying forward while whatever wasn't covered years ago having a higher bar to creation (including African American school, most likely). The trend is to regard fewer and fewer things as automatically notable because of a particular fact. Even "everyone who plays on a pro team", long a standard source of systemic bias, has been eroded over the past couple years. One could get the impression it's still true by looking at the articles that exist, but there, too, is a higher bar for new articles. I dare say we have seen the end of anything being added as "inherently notable", regardless of whether it helps or hurts our bias. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:16, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

The other solution with high schools is that they can be discussed as part of the town/city/county seat that they are in, as part of a "Educational System" and then use redirects to these sections so that that schools are searchable or appear on appropriate disambiguation pages. There is a general tendency that editors think that not having a standalone article means we can't cover a topic, but when you have a situation where it makes sense to cover one topic within another (a high school within a school system), then why not use that and not worry about fighting article creation? (I know FArmy has a few unique cases of towns that no longer exist that make this a more difficult prospect but those are exceptional cases). In reality, we *should* be reviewing our existing high school articles to this standard and doing merging as appropriate. Masem (t) 15:49, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

FloridaArmy, as a British person I have no background or knowlege on African-American high schools, but if what you say is correct - that "African-American High Schools" are inherently and generically notable - then, if there is supporting

WP:DUE, rather than just asserting your own opinion, to make that claim. DeCausa (talk) 22:52, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

Here's Wikipedia's coverage for Adkin High School in Kinston, North Carolina, the county seat and a 2/3 African American community. FloridaArmy (talk) 09:10, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A simple Gsearch for the subject '"Adkin high school" kinston' brings up 6500 sources, many in books and several directly detailing more than just the walk-out. Tons of RS. I'm not seeing the problem with this particular example. So write the article.

This is unfortunately a pattern with User:FloridaArmy. We write articles based on reliable secondary sources. We decide on notability based on those sources. That the sources themselves may not as of this datestamp collectively reach GNG for a particular subject, well, that's a function of our limited access to sourcing which clearly exists, but might require a secondary work for us to eventually utilize. And so FloridaArmy gets upset that the secondary sources aren't sufficient in case by case tests. And they come to Jimmy's page to complain that our requirements for notability are too stringent. Again.

This is a righting great wrongs issue, and I'm sympathetic to User:FloridaArmy's plight. And judging from past responses, I believe Jimbo is somewhat in your camp as well. We all are. Nobody wants FloridaArmy to stop makinfg the effort. I can see it's frustrating for FloridaArmy.

Rhododendrites's suggestion above for "a wikiproject/task force with an emphasis on lists of topics a la Women in Red" is an excellent one and I'd join such a group to help. I'm sure others would as well. In a strange way, all wikipedians are trying to right a great wrong (supplying access to somewhat obscure information). BusterD (talk) 15:36, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

FloridaArmy seems to be quite good at identifying notable topics that are missing an article. Unfortunately, many of the drafts mentioned above do not show the notability of their subjects, so they are correctly rejected. Perhaps making lists of red links would be a better way to utilise FA's talents than attempting to write the articles. —Kusma (talk) 15:57, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. There's another factor which FloridaArmy's last example raises: self-selection. Most of us tend to build pagespace (and here I confess I'm in a real slump recently) from an intrinsic interest in subject matter. I tend towards biographies and when I write I tend to choose subjects about which I'm already engaging. The historic community surrounding an influential local high school sounds a subject likely to be found notable, but not really in my wheelhouse or even on my radar until this morning. I'm happy to give an attaboy to the page creator; I never fail to credit FloridaArmy's good faith and impressive number of page creations. We share an equal desire in creating the world's best online encyclopedia. I just wish the user would spend more energy on the somewhat spare quality of the pages they do create. Advice I could give myself, I suppose. The wikiproject/task force is something I could get behind and would support with membership and activity. I do not even follow Jimbo's talk page that much and rarely comment here, but even I can see how often FloridaArmy makes this exact case on this exact talkspace. BusterD (talk) 18:03, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad we all agree these subjects are notable and important. Our focus should be on getting them included and rooting out the issues causing them to be rejected and deleted.

• I suspect that if you had expanded
  Draft:Waters Turpin to actually include the material in Oxford Reference (which is actually reprinted from the Afro-American Newspaper) and from the CLA Journal, it would have stood a far better chance of being accepted. At the moment, apart from some basic biographical information, it simply says "Waters Turpin was a professor and writer. He wrote some novels and plays". Black Kite (talk) 19:40, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]

The article is poorly written and doesn't show the subject's notability. This is not a systemic issue. —Kusma (talk) 19:43, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It seems, FloridaArmy, the reason why your drafts are rejected isn't to do with a problem in the way Wikipedia regards the notability of these subjects - it's just the way you've written them. Maybe you need to think about Kusma's earlier suggestion that you should focus on identifying redlinks and look to others to create the article. DeCausa (talk) 20:04, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Excuse me for saying BULLSHIT. If I used the Oxford source extensively I could be accused of overusing it as another editor was for

Draft:John Wayne Niles). And I believe a newspaper may be quoted in the Oxford reference but that the entry is from their reference book on African American authors. And now were again getting these excuses one after another. Sources are used too much, too little, never quite enough. Which is why we have shit coverage of these subjects. We have Columbia University's entry noting how fond students are of Nutella but nothin about the Dunning School (or Dunning's mentor there) spreading more than a generation worth of distorted white supremacist propaganda passed off as American history. Again and again there's always some issue for exclusion. Does extensive coverage in an Oxford reference work make a subject notable or not? The author is notable. It shouldn't require peacock language or leaning more heavily on any of the sources to establish he's notable. If he's notable he should be included. If you want to expand the entry go for it!!! Right now we have nothing on him of thousands of other notable minorities, their schools, their history, or their leaders because this is what editors who try to add them in face. I'm experienced I know our criteria and STILL there are excuses why in THIs case the coverage or my citing of it and the content I wrote up somehow doesn't pass muster. You want to say more about him have at it. But that's not a policy. What I wrote up is properly sourced, identifies him with the most significant aspects of his career and lists his works. And again, we have another example in the very same list of examples where a notable subject was rejected in part because a good source was used too much!!! So which is it? Too much, too little. Too this. Subjects loke these used to notable now they're not even though they are but the way their written up isn't good enough. Let's just be honest. We aren't going to include these subjects. We don't care about them. We haven't written about them for the 20 or so years Wikipedia has been around and we're not satisfied with how other editors wrote about them. They have to meet totally different standards than the rest of our content. Good luck. Back of the bus. No one has a problem with the unsourced Adventist elementary school but schools that African Americans had to protest for, march for, get jailed for, struggle to get funded, those we have no room for unless they have 50 sources and are finished when submitted. None of this is in policy it's bullshit propping up white supremacism. FloridaArmy (talk) 20:07, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply

]