User talk:SMcCandlish
Status: Busy 
 | Welcome to SMcCandlish's talk page. I will generally respond here to comments that are posted here, rather than replying via your talk page (or the article's talk page, if you are writing to me here about an article), so you may want to watch this page until you are responded to, or let me know where specifically you'd prefer the reply. |
watched by friendly talk page stalkers , which means that someone other than me might reply to your query. Their input is welcome and their help with messages that I cannot reply to quickly is appreciated. |
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| Updated as needed. Last updated: 19:03, 1 May 2024 (UTC) |
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Currently, there are no requests for arbitration.
| Case name | Closed |
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| Conflict of interest management | 13 Apr 2024 |
| Request name | Motions | Case | Posted |
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| Amendment request: Conduct in deletion-related editing | none | (orig. case) | 30 April 2024 |
No arbitrator motions are currently open.
News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2024).
Guideline and policy news
- Phase I of the 2024 requests for adminship review has concluded. The proposals for creating a discussion-only period on a trial basis (2), administrator elections on a trial basis (13), creating tenure requirements for candidates (25) and participants (14) have all passed outright, and will now proceed to the implementation phase. The proposals for creating a reminder of civility norms (2), administrator recall (16 and 16c), putting named administrators and bureaucrats on call (17), requiring links for claims of specific policy violations (9b), and creating a better mentoring system (24) have all passed, but will undergo further refinement in phase II before proceeding to implementation. Proposals that have passed outright, but on a trial basis, will be discussed at phase II after their trials have concluded.
Technical news
- Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks. T280531
Arbitration
- The arbitration case Conflict of interest management has been closed.
Miscellaneous
- This may be a good time to reach out to potential nominees to ask if they would consider an RfA.
- A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in May 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 15,000 articles awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!
- Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is open until 9 May 2024. Read the voting page on Meta-Wiki and cast your vote here!
Most recent poster here: SMcCandlish (talk)
Mini-toolbox:
- My Wikimedia Library (journal access, etc.; to get your own, see WP:LIBRARY)
- WP:AWB access and JWB installedor is just a normal redlink)
- Special:LintErrors
- Hunt down abuse of
{{em}}for non-emphasis italics [1] — and<em>[2] - Move and redirect articles with slashes in their titles when feasible (i.e. when not proper names that require them)
- NAC-at-ANRFC geekery to remember
- NAC-at-RM geekery to remember
- Ref consistency checker (use in preview or sandbox):
{{ref info|Manx cat|style=float:right}} - Reliably regex match a single linebreak in wikicode (or elsewhere):
(\r\n|\r|\n) - Helpful links related to WP:SPECTRUM
- All WP:CUE project participants should watchlist this alerts page.
Featured article candidates
- 08 Apr 2024 – 2023 World Snooker Championship (talk · edit · hist) was FA nominated by Lee Vilenski (t · c); see discussion
Good article nominees
- 24 Apr 2024 – World Women's Snooker Championship (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by BennyOnTheLoose (t · c); start discussion
- 16 Mar 2024 – Reanne Evans (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by BennyOnTheLoose (t · c); start discussion
- 14 Jan 2024 – 2024 Masters (snooker) (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Lee Vilenski (t · c); start discussion
- 14 Dec 2023 – 2023 UK Championship (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by AmethystZhou (t · c); see discussion
- 07 Aug 2023 – 2022 Northern Ireland Open (talk · edit · hist) was GA nominated by Lee Vilenski (t · c); see discussion
Other:
- MW Editing team e-meetings, /wikimedia.org/edit-tasktriage via Google Hangouts (Tuesdays, noon–12:30pm PDT = 20:00 UTC during DST, 19:00 otherwise, but often half an hour earlier).
- MW Tech Advice e-meetings, via IRC at #wikimedia-tech connect (Wednesdays, 1–2pm PDT = 16:00–17:00 UTC).
- meta:Talk:Spam blacklist – global blacklist requests
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As of 2024-05-01 , SMcCandlish is Active. 
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Old stuff to resolve eventuallyCueless billiards Unresolved
Some more notes on Crystalate Unresolved
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No one has actually objected to the idea that it's really pointless for WP:SAL's style advice should go, and SAL page should move back to WP:Stand-alone lists with a content guideline tag. Everyone who's commented for 7 months or so has been in favor of it. I'd say we have consensus to start doing it. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 13:13, 2 March 2012 (UTC) ]
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You post at Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Copyright
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That page looks like a hinterland (you go back two users in the history and you're in August). Are you familiar with WP:MCQ? By the way, did you see my response on the balkline averages?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC) ]
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Hee Haw
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Yeah, we did get along on Donkeys. And probably will get along on some other stuff again later. Best way to handle WP is to take it issue by issue and then let bygones be bygones. I'm finding some interesting debates over things like the line between a subspecies, a landrace and a breed. Just almost saw someone else's GA derailed over a "breed versus species" debate that was completely bogus, we just removed the word "adapt" and life would have been fine. I'd actually be interested in seeing actual scholarly articles that discuss these differences, particularly the landrace/breed issue in general, but in livestock in particular, and particularly as applied to truly feral/landrace populations (if, in livestock, there is such a thing, people inevitably will do a bit of culling, sorting and other interference these days). I'm willing to stick to my guns on the WPEQ naming issue, but AGF in all respects. Truce? Montanabw(talk) 22:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
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Redundant sentence?
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The sentence at MOS:LIFE "General names for groups or types of organisms are not capitalized except where they contain a proper name (oak, Bryde's whales, rove beetle, Van cat)" is a bit odd, since the capitalization would (now) be exactly the same if they were the names of individual species. Can it simply be removed?
There is an issue, covered at Wikipedia:PLANTS#The use of botanical names as common names for plants, which may or may not be worth putting in the main MOS, namely cases where the same word is used as the scientific genus name and as the English name, when it should be de-capitalized. I think this is rare for animals, but more common for plants and fungi (although I have seen "tyrannosauruses" and similar uses of dinosaur names). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:17, 3 May 2014 (UTC) ]
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Note to self on WP:WikiProject English language
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Finish patching up WP:WikiProject English language with the stuff from User:SMcCandlish/WikiProject English Language, and otherwise get the ball rolling. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 20:22, 17 August 2016 (UTC) ]
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Excellent mini-tutorial
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Somehow, I forget quite how, I came across this - that is an excellent summary of the distinctions. I often get confused over those, and your examples were very clear. Is something like that in the general MoS/citation documentation? Oh, and while I am here, what is the best way to format a citation to a page of a document where the pages are not numbered? All the guidance I have found says not to invent your own numbering by counting the pages (which makes sense), but I am wondering if I can use the 'numbering' used by the digitised form of the book. I'll point you to an example of what I mean: the 'book' in question is catalogued here (note that is volume 2) and the digitised version is accessed through a viewer, with an example of a 'page' being here, which the viewer calls page 116, but there are no numbers on the actual book pages (to confuse things further, if you switch between single-page and double-page view, funny things happen to the URLs, and if you create and click on a single-page URL the viewer seems to relocate you one page back for some reason). Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
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WP:MEDMOS
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You had previously asked that protection be lowered on WP:MEDMOS which was not done at that time. I have just unprotected the page and so if you have routine update edits to make you should now be able to do so. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 06:42, 25 January 2020 (UTC) ]
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Ooh...potential WikiGnoming activity...
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I stumbled upon WikiGnoming activity for a template editor such as yourself. I'd do it, but I'm not a template editor. Not sure if that's really your thing, though. ;-)
Cheers,
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Note to self
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Don't forget to deal with: Template talk:Cquote#Template-protected edit request on 19 April 2020. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:48, 20 April 2020 (UTC) |
Now this
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Not sure the ping went through, so noting here. Just spotted where a now-blocked user moved a bunch of animal breed articles back to parenthetical disambiguation from natural disambiguation. As they did it in October and I'm only catching it now, I only moved back two just in case there was some kind of consensus change. The equine ones are definitely against project consensus, the rest are not my wheelhouse but I'm glad to comment. Talk:Campine_chicken#Here_we_go_again. Montanabw(talk) 20:14, 25 June 2020 (UTC)
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PGP
UnresolvedFYI, it looks like your key has expired. 1234qwer1234qwer4 21:57, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
- Aiee! Thanks, I'll have to generate a new one when I have time to mess around with it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:32, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
Unresolvedde:Rapport (Textil) is an intersting approach, and we don't seem to have a corresponding sort of article. Something I might approach at some point. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:11, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
Current threads
Capitalization after a hyphen
Hey there. In 2020, you moved Three-Fifths Compromise to
Collapse-boxing a long thread so I don't have to keep scrolling past it
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The following rules apply to hyphenated terms appearing in a title capitalized in headline style [...]
- Always capitalize the first element.
- Capitalize any subsequent elements unless they are articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions ([...]), or such modifiers [...] following musical key symbols.
- If the first element is merely a prefix or combining form that could not stand by itself as a word (anti, pre, etc.), do not capitalize the second element unless it is a proper noun or proper adjective.
- Capitalize the second element in a hyphenated spelled-out number (twenty-one or twenty-first, etc.) or hyphenated simple fraction (two-thirds in two-thirds majority).
The examples that follow demonstrate the numbered rules [...]
- [...]
- Record-Breaking Borrowings from Medium-Sized Libraries (2)
- [...]
- Anti-intellectual Pursuits (3)
- A Two-Thirds Majority of Non-English-Speaking Representatives (3, 4)
- [...]
APA:
In title case, capitalize the following words in a title or heading:
- [...]
- major words, including the second part of hyphenated major words (e.g., "Self-Report," not "Self-report")
MLA:
When you copy an English-language title or subtitle [...] use title-style capitalization: capitalize the first word, the last word, and all principal words, including those that follow hyphens in compound terms.
[...]
Do not capitalize the word following a hyphenated prefix if the dictionary shows the prefix and word combined without a hyphen.
- Theodore Dwight Weld and the American Anti-slavery Society
AMA:
In titles, subtitles, and text headings, do not capitalize the second part of a hyphenated compound in the following instances:
If either part is a hyphenated prefix or suffix (see [...])
- Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs for Ankylosing Spondylitis
If both parts together constitute a single word (consult [...])
- Reliability of Health Information Obtained Through Online Searches for Self-injury [...]
- Short-term and Long-term Effects of Violent Media on Aggression in Children
- [...]
However, if a compound is temporary or if both parts carry equal weight, capitalize both words.
- [...]
- Low-Level Activity
- Drug-Resistant Bacteria
- [...]
In titles, subtitles, and text headings, capitalize the first letter of a word that follows a lowercase (but not a capital) Greek letter (see [...]), a numeral ([...]), a symbol, a stand-alone capital letter, or an italicized organic chemistry prefix, [...]
AP makes no mention of capitalization after a hyphen, but "The Star-Spangled Banner" is given as an example of a title (which we also capitalize, would you look at that).
InfiniteNexus (talk) 18:48, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Post-holiday followup
@InfiniteNexus: More research of the above sort is needed. To just dive in and do one bit of it, I find that MHRA Style Guide [15] has a ridiculously inconsistent rule to capitalize after a hyphen, even when it's a prefix that cannot stand alone, except when that prefix is specifically Re-. There is no rationale given for this weirdness. I think it would be worthwhile to look in other major style guides and see whether anything like a largely consistent pattern actually emerges. Your four American ones (at least two of which, APA and AMA, have been moving over time to be increasingly consistent with Chicago on many points) don't cover enough ground for us to be certain of this. And AMA is trying to be meaningful but failing dismally. "Short-term" and "low-level" are both the same kind of term; same goes for "self-injury" and "drug-resistant". They can all be split up without hyphens, without losing meaning: "A low level of drug resitance was observed over a short term in a study of patients admitted for self injury". (I guess this is what happens when medical people with no linguistics background try to write material about English-language structure and usage.) The unitary hyphenated compounds below cannot be split up this way (though some are sometimes colloquially written as hyphenless closed compounds: "knowhow" and "runnerup", but not "fatherinlaw").
In title case, capitalize after a hyphen when the compound is temporary (usually a multi-word modifier that would be written without hyphens if not used adjectivally): Real-Estate Demography, Remote-Control Operation, Common-Sense Guidelines. Do not capitalize after a hyphen if the term is a compound with:
- a prefix (Pre-eclampsia, Anti-establishment), unless what follows the hyphen is a proper name Neo-Aristotelian;
- a suffix (Dada-esque);
- a compound with a synergistic meaning separate from that of its parts and which is almost always hyphenated (Father-in-law, Know-how, Runner-up).
A construction like this would avoid AMA's categorical confusion; avoid highly debatable ideas like "constitute a single word", "if both parts carry equal weight", "principal words", "major words"; avoid "the dictionary" nonsense (there is no such thing as "the" dictionary, but lots of dictionaries which often conflict with each other and have different levels of prescriptive versus descriptive approach); and avoid nitpicky geekery no one is apt to care about, like musical key symbols and italicized organic chemistry prefixes (we should not address minutiae like that unless long-term dispute arises about it, per
However, I find the "the second element in a hyphenated spelled-out number" very dubious, and same with "-century" constructions; I have seen many titles of things that use "Twenty-two", "Fifty-third", and "Fourth-century"; this is one of several cases that needs more investigation in more style guides. And in the end, we are not required to do what a loose preponderance of other style guides seem to lean toward, especially when they contradict each other as to details and rationales; they are just duly informative with regard to what we decide. But we do need to decide something, since the extant material at
PS: Your "The Star-Spangled Banner" is given as an example of a title (which we also capitalize, would you look at that)
smirking isn't constructive. You know as well as I do that WP content is not a source, and that editors doing stylistically questionable things at a particluar article has nothing to do with whether a style rule we have should be changed. More to the point, the style guides you quoted are not in agreement on it, and AMA for one would have it as "The Star-spangled Banner" because "star-spangled" is not a temporary compound but a poetic 18th-century neologism that is a unitary term and appears to have nearly no existence without the hyphen. MLA would also lower-case "-spangled" because of its dictionary rule [16]. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
- If you are still interested in looking into this, feel free to so, but right now I do not have time to continue delving into this matter. The four (five, if counting AP) style guides I looked at are probably the most widely used in the U.S., so it seems safe to assume that this is the norm among most external style guides. I don't have access to style guides from other countries. InfiniteNexus (talk) 07:35, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Getting rid of {rp}
Applause! Now tell me how to get round
- @WP:CITEVAR, some people are probably apt to try to argue against this, but I think their case will be weak and easily deflated. That said, probably the only path to total cleanup is going to be really fully documenting how to convert]
{{Rp}}into other formats, and why it is a good idea, and why{{Rp}}is bad, and then have a follow-up RfC or TfD to formally deprecate{{Rp}}and mandate its replacement (mostly by AWB and sometimes even by bots for simple cases), so that it is no longer considered a valid "citation style" for CITEVAR purposes, no question about it. And I think the work in doing that documentation is going to be in my lap, though I'm not over-eager to wade into it right this second. It gives me a headache just thinking about it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:04, 18 December 2023 (UTC)- The stonewall response was much as I expected though I had hoped that time and the offer of a ladder to climb down might just do the trick. AFAICS, the only way forward is to formally propose that {{harvid}} method way back, I found it hostile. I persisted and matters much improved when I found {tl|sfnp}}. But other editors may have had their fingers burned and will resist, based on their bad experience way back when. So preparing the ground with explanation and education may be needed? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 20:00, 20 December 2023 (UTC)]
- Took me "a minute" to figure it out, too. I've started the slog of fully documenting how to replace
{{rp}}, at User:SMcCandlish/Replacement of Template:Rp. Still needs some more info in it, and proofreading for any markup errors that mess up any of the code examples. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:46, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- Took me "a minute" to figure it out, too. I've started the slog of fully documenting how to replace
- The stonewall response was much as I expected though I had hoped that time and the offer of a ladder to climb down might just do the trick. AFAICS, the only way forward is to formally propose that {{
Incremental updates
Update: This is going very slowly, but I'm committed to working on it. It's going to require a bunch of very well-tested regular expressions, used in series in a JS user script, to catch and clean up a large number of content use cases, so that it produces uniform citation formatting (and without breaking anything). My earlier-documented work toward that at the page mentioned above has already been surpassed, in code I'm developing off-site. I'll start building the regexes I'm working on into a JavaScript pretty soon and start testing that against real content and refining it. After it reliably works for all valid and most sane but invalid test cases, then we'll be able to do search–replace operations against {{rp}} that will have predictable results with minimal errors. This is going to be a big project. It was more difficult than I expected because XML syntax (much less XML mixed with a {{...}} syntax!) is incredibly difficult to parse accurately with regex (or anything else for that matter) reliably. I've been using advanced tools like regex101.com with complex blobs of valid and invalid test-case input, and using ChatGPT to try to work out particularly thorny matching failures, and so on. As an example, just one of the regexes developed so far looks like <ref\s+name\s*=\s*(?:"\s*([^"](?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*"\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*"|'\s*([^'"](?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*'>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*'|([^"](?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*))\s*(?:(\/)|)>, and even this cannot yet handle <ref name=foo group=bar> to normalize the name= part, only to avoid breaking a ref that has a group= part (and it does not do anything to normalize the latter part yet, only the former). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:06, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
- It now parses even stuff like
<ref group="bar's > / bar" extends=baz name='foos > / foo' follow="quux quux" />(and some of the code it's accounting for is only in the beta of mw:Help:Cite and not deployed on en.WP yet), though this one regex only fixes up thename=parameter; other passes with similar regexes would handle other attributes likegroup=to normalize their formatting. Then another pass to fix spacing that shouldn't exist between citations. And so on. And of course a pass to replace{{rp}}with{{sfnp}}or whatever. Like I say, a multi-step process that'll be done by using the regexes in JS. The regex in question is now the monstrous<ref\s+((?:group|follow|extends)\s*=(?:(?!name\s*=).)*)?name\s*=\s*(?:"\s*([^"](?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*"\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*"|'\s*([^'"](?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*'>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*'|([^"](?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*))(\s+(?:group|follow|extends)\s*=(?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*>).)*)*\s*(?:(\/)|)>. I'm suprised I pulled this off. Its one failure is that it can't gracefully handle the XML-valid (but technically ref-invalid) formname='foo "bar" baz'(single-quoted value with nested double quotes) or the completely invalidname="foo "bar" baz">; that's something that'll need to be handled by an earlier cleanup pass that looks just for those specific problems. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:02, 28 December 2023 (UTC)- Regex upgraded again, to handle line-breaking between
<ref>attributes, as well as > inside quoted attributes aftername=.- The new regex (just for handling
namewith or without other attributes present) is:<ref\s+((?:group|follow|extends)\s*=(?:(?!name\s*=)[\s\S])*)?name\s*=\s*(?:"\s*([^"](?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*"\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*"|'\s*([^'"](?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*'>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*?)\s*'|([^"](?:(?!\s*\/>|\s*>|\s+(?:group|follow|extends)).)*))(\s+(?:group|follow|extends)\s*=(?:(?!\s*\/>|"\s*>|'\s*>)[\s\S])*)*\s*(?:(\/)|)> - It is already sophisticated enough to handle input as awful as:
<ref group= "bar's > / bar" extends= baz name= ' foos > / foo ' follow= "quux > quux" />
- Even
<syntaxhighlight>can't deal with the above, but what I'm writing can. This one just cleans upname(toname="foos > / foo"from the above mess, and gets rid of the line break before the closing/>while we're at it); similar regexes in later passes will deal withgroup, etc., then eventually{{rp}}replacement. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:27, 29 December 2023 (UTC) - Reminder to self: At some point, the script will also have to account for
{{#tag:ref |Citation content here. |name=... |group=... |follow=... |extends=...}}(with parameters in various order and with or without linebreaks and extraneous spacing). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:37, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
- The new regex (just for handling
- Regex upgraded again, to handle line-breaking between
- It now parses even stuff like
Intervene?
Have you seen Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 92#Automating conversion of REF-plus-Rp to Sfn((m)p)? Do you want to launch a teaser trailer? Your call. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 18:22, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
- @JMF: Done. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Vauthors
Possibly telling people how to write harv citations is out of scope but I thought I should flag this one for you to include or ignore, your call. I've only just found the {{ref={{sfnref|blah blah}} }} facility and it is a lot more convenient that adding first=/last= to each and every name, just so you can write {{sfnp|last1|last2|last3|last4|2024}}. Here is a test example:
- Wang T, Mo L, Mo C, Tan LH, Cant JS, Zhong L, Cupchik G (June 2015). "Is moral beauty different from facial beauty? Evidence from an fMRI study". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 10 (6): 814–23. PMID 25298010.
Up to you. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:56, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
|vauthors= in the documentation and scripting eventually. But |vauthors= should not be used except in an article entirely done in Vancouver-style references (or it's against Here is a claim in the article.[1]
Wang T, Mo L, Mo C, Tan LH, Cant JS, Zhong L, Cupchik G (June 2015). "Is moral beauty different from facial beauty? Evidence from an fMRI study". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 10 (6): 814–23.
Just using the automated {{{{sfnp|Wang et al.|2015}}. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:23, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
- Ah, I didn't realise that {{sfnp}} was able to deconstruct a vauthors list. I could have saved myself a lot of hassle. Now I've given myself some more hassle to redo it properly. ;-^
- (I too prefer to change a vauthors list to
|first1= last1= first2= last2=etc. Generally I avoid using it when creating a citation except when the authors are Chinese or Japanese but the article is in English: how do I know if it is last=Mao first=Tse Tung or vice versa? I confess to using it too when ten authors are listed, for example on IPCC papers.) --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 17:18, 30 December 2023 (UTC)- Well, like I said at the other page, no one's ever going to be "punished" for mixing citation styles. :-) Someone else just might rearrange it later. It can be a hassle. I got pretty irritated in fixing a vauthor instance stuck into an otherwise non-Vancouver article, as it had over 30 authors. I've seen someone reduce this to the first four last/first pairs then do
|display-authors=etal, but I'm a little down on that because we had more author information and doing that deleted it. I think I'll whip up a script to convert from vauthors to last/first, at least for my own convenience, but probably after doing this big ref-cleaner and rp-replacer job first.As for Asian names, I would guess just go by what the publication says; if it's "Chaudhary, C.; Richardson, A. J.; ...", and had a "Hua, X." or rarely but sometimes in Sinological material "Hua X" with no comma, in the author list, that already indicates the family-name order. But if the paper's author list started with "Chetan Chaudhary, Abigail Richardson, ..." and included something like "Hua Xiang" then it could be ambiguous; did they keep the same order, or give the Chinese names in surname-first order? I'm not sure vauthors would help here, since you wouldn't be sure whether to use "Hua X" or "Xiang H". Some familiarity with East Asian naming patterns helps. A name like "Hua Xhiangshu" or "Hua Xhian-shu" or "Hua Xiang-Shu" (orthography varies) would be family-name-first. People with more experience at it than I have can figure out Japanese names just by familiarity with which are usually given and which family names. Korean I'm generally at a loss with, unless it follows the Chinese pattern ("Lee Joon-gi" or "Lee Joon-Gi" or "Lee Joongi" is surname-first). It helps a little that a few Korean family names are overwhelmingly common, like Park/Pak/Paik, Lee/Li, Jun/Joon/June, Song/Sung, and Kim. When I'm unsure, I usually just Google around for other works by the same person until I can figure it out. If I could not at all, I would probably do
|author4=Hua Xiangusing the name order I had found (at all or most commonly) and leave it for someone with language/culture-specific experience to figure it out later. Maybe put in an HTML comment to this effect. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:52, 30 December 2023 (UTC)PS: As I understand it, the vauthors to sfnp/harvp "translation" uses the author names up to the first four. I'm not sure what happens when someone has a main cite with
|vauthors=Chaudhary C, Richardson AJ, Hua X|display-authors=etal. I'm not sure if the latter is just a visual injection of "et al.", or whether it counts as a fourth author name and would require{{sfnp|Chaudhary|Richardson|Hua|et al.|2023}}. I suspect not, but something to test in a sandbox. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:04, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
- Well, like I said at the other page, no one's ever going to be "punished" for mixing citation styles. :-) Someone else just might rearrange it later. It can be a hassle. I got pretty irritated in fixing a vauthor instance stuck into an otherwise non-Vancouver article, as it had over 30 authors. I've seen someone reduce this to the first four last/first pairs then do
Games
S, I know you're into games and their capitalizations, so take a look at List of abstract strategy games. I downcased a whole bunch of games listed there already, but there are a few I'm not sure what to do about, such as Connect Four, that might be trademarks, or might be generic. Do you have any insights or advice on those? Dicklyon (talk) 07:25, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
- Will have a look-see, but am in middle of some detailed thangs. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:29, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Score Four" (trademark of Funtastic in 1968, AKA "Connect Four Advanced" by Hasbro later); there doesn't appear to be a generic name for that variant. And I'm skeptical it is a valid stand-alone article instead of a section at Connect Four, anyway; looks like it would not pass a GNG test at AfD.I didn't look closely at other examples. Were there some other iffy ones? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)]
- Sure, lots of potentially iffy ones. Like what I did here. You concur? And what about things like Five Field Kono that are usually capped in sources, for no apparaent reason? Dicklyon (talk) 05:51, 29 December 2023 (UTC)]
- The cleanup at WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. But in no way is "Go" some kind of "capitalize all Asian folk games" excuse. So, kono/gonu. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:20, 29 December 2023 (UTC)]
- Thanks, I fixed some more of those. There's still a ton of over-capping in games generally though. Dicklyon (talk) 18:27, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
- Yes there is. Probably still in a lot of dance articles, too, though I cleaned up a lot of those. Sports mostly look pretty good, but I still run into obscure ones over-capitalizing stuff. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:24, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks, I fixed some more of those. There's still a ton of over-capping in games generally though. Dicklyon (talk) 18:27, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
- The cleanup at
- Sure, lots of potentially iffy ones. Like what I did here. You concur? And what about things like
Dahua Technology
DoneHi SMcCandlish, I noticed that you are part of the category of Wikipedians willing to provide third opinions [17]. I have been working on Dahua Technology and am hoping you may be interested in reviewing an ongoing discussion on the talk page regarding specific terminology used in the article. I'd be grateful for your feedback and assistance in implementing the edits as you see fit. Thank you, Caitlyn23 (talk) 19:23, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
- Will try to look into it tomorrow, but it's been a long day for me already. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:31, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
- More like the next day or day after; have a lot going on. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:00, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
- Hi SMcCandlish, just checking back to see whether you may have time to review the discussion on the Dahua Technology talk page. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and would appreciate assistance with the edits. Thanks again, Caitlyn23 (talk) 18:22, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Caitlyn23: This isn't really a Wikipedia:Third opinion matter, because it's not a dispute between two editors; rather, there has been a series of consensus discussions with unclear resolution. It would be much more appropriate for me to simply weigh in as one of those editors, than try to do what amounts to arbitrating between one editor (you) and a bunch of other editors (of differing opinions but some of them against yours). I have done that now, suggesting a compromise approach both sides hopefully will find workable. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
- Hi SMcCandlish, just checking back to see whether you may have time to review the discussion on the Dahua Technology talk page. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and would appreciate assistance with the edits. Thanks again, Caitlyn23 (talk) 18:22, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
- More like the next day or day after; have a lot going on. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:00, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
Artistic billiards
Hi! I've done a little bit of work on
- @WP:CFORKS. The meat of the material should be merged to the former, with the latter reduced to a compressed summary, with]
{{Main|Trickshot#Artistic pool}}at the top of it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:13, 27 December 2023 (UTC)- I thought as much. I am in the process of merging, although I don't really see how Trickshot would be the main article of the two. Perhaps I don't know enough about the subject. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 09:21, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Artistic pool (on a six-pocket pool table) is not a subtopic of Artistic billiards (on a pocketless carom table). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)]
- @
- I thought as much. I am in the process of merging, although I don't really see how Trickshot would be the main article of the two. Perhaps I don't know enough about the subject. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 09:21, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
Happy New Year
|
Happy New Year! | |
| Wishing you and yours a Happy New Year, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free and may Janus light your way. Ealdgyth (talk) 14:45, 31 December 2023 (UTC) |
Happy New Year, SMcCandlish!
SMcCandlish,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
Abishe (talk) 14:17, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.
Abishe (talk) 14:17, 1 January 2024 (UTC)Speed pool
Do you know if Speed pool is actually a thing? It's been unsourced for a decade and I couldn't find much about it aside from a few tournaments of the same name. Seems non-notable to me, but thought I'd check first. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 23:52, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
- It's definitely a thing, a professional competitive discipline. Jeanette Lee was big into it, back before all her medical issues. AZBilliards and such probably have good coverage of it that we're not citing yet. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:19, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
Post-holidays note to self
Something to deal with quickly:
Need to stop putting this off; will probably only take 10 minutes.
Ongoing:
- Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#"Acronyms in page titles" is mis-placed in an MoS page
- Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Make Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer science/Manual of style into Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Computer science
- MOS:TOOLTIPmay also need an update
- Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (lists)#Fixing disambiguation confusion
Several things appear to have stalled out over the holidays:
- Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#JOBTITLES simplification proposal
- Wikipedia talk:Verifiability#Merge WP:SELFSOURCE and WP:BLPSELFPUB to WP:ABOUTSELF
- Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (companies)#Use of comma and abbreviation of Incorporated
- Wikipedia talk:Bot policy#Systematic mass edits to hidden category dates
- Template talk:Infobox person#Placement of "Sir"
- Template talk:Infobox person#Death cause parameter
- Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility#Making redundant table captions screen-reader-only
- Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#A worsening MOS:DASH issue (causing mounting WP:CONSISTENT problems)
Some of these may need to be restarted as RfCs.
See also:
- WP:CONLEVELfailure).
Forgot about this one for a long time (need to merge the NC material out of
An article still using deprecated
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:14, 7 January 2024 (UTC); updated: 02:52, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
Dicing
Hello. You'll see that my edit was a typo, as I ' Claimed ', as inexpicably I'd typed ' qs ', not ' Vide ', and corrected it.
I'd say that this being an online dictionary, people who read it, by their nature, have an interest in what they don't understand; that not to use words, (though it wasn't my intention), that '...more than a few...' (sic) understand should be persuasive only if we weren't writing in English: to use that for a guide now, (not that that's contravening any Wikipaedia rule), should mean that at some past time somebody declared it is one, anyway; and it must have been sometime between one of the forms of Celtic speech used in Britain and today, since we're using English, here; words which, at one time, '...not more than a few...' knew, meaning we might still be uding Anglo-Saxon. So when did excluding the unfamiliar become a rule ? Dictionaries are still being published to explain both new and unfamiliar words; a pursuit disallowed, now, by this guide.
It's true I could have made ' Vide ' a link; but what's conversational for some is as abstuse as others' reasonings.
Yes, it was mentioned above ; but not all sections and sub-sections are read, and the re-emphasised words occupying the space of an old ink blot might very well, (for the majority, not ' The few ', who skip through what they read), have been the harmless ones that conveyed the distinction between tartan and dicing.
Anyway, regards to you. Heath St John (talk) 19:46, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
- @Wikipedia is not paper). If the mention was right there in the same block of text (as it was in this case), there is no reason to tell people where it is; and if it's widely separated, in a different section, the thing to do, if a cross-reference really seems needed, is to link to that section, e.g. with]
{{see below|[[#History|below]]}}or whatever, which produces output like . The usual purpose of q.v. is to refer to a headword, such as is found in a glossary; and vide is generally used in academic material to refer to a specific passage (and your use of it didn't provide such specificity). Anyway, the lead section at Sillitoe tartan is now even clearer than it was, with the terminological quibbles consolidated, so there's little if any room of confusion any longer. PS: Wikipedia style for abbreviated Latinisms like "q.v." and "i.e." and "e.g." and "et al." is to use the dots, and the ones that are well-assimilated into non-specialist English don't take italics, while the more obscure ones like "q.v." and "p.m.v" and "op. cit." (lots of them are legalisms or academicisms) are italicized. "Et al." is actually an edge case with regard to the italics; there is or was recently a discussion open about this, though I forget where. (Frustrating, since I was going to comment in it.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:55, 8 January 2024 (UTC)- Very clear.
- Thanks very much. Heath St John (talk) 21:03, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
Pushing beans
Hi there! In the future, I hope you can take a beat and consider
- There is no AGF failure or gatekeeping in anything I said, or in reverting something I didn't (at least at the time) consider an improvement. I get the feeling you've not actually read or understood WT:CS1 later, I already said I saw your viewpoint on it and you should just feel free to undo my revert [18]. I guess you didn't see that, but it's a little weird to get a hostile-ish note about some old revert from a few days ago. It's not like I have some magical power whereby a revert from me is permanent and unquestionable. :-) Anyway, I do see your point about documenting that parameter in a more general-editor-facing way, since there might after all be a reason for any given editor to do something with it. Just don't think it should be redundantly documented, when linking to existing documentation is fine. Even that I don't feel terribly strongly about, though. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:48, 10 January 2024 (UTC)]
Alternative to rp
Hi. In your archive Page-ception you have two paragraphs that outline ref= use as an alternative to Template:rp. Is that still current? Any chance there is a standalone description I can point out for others?
(I use rp primarily because it is much shorter. ref= has the same problem as sfn, additional points of failure. In <ref name=McNuttsIR2006/>{{rp|131}}</ref> vs <ref>[[#McNuttsIR2006|McNuts, I. R. (2006)]], p. 131.</ref>, the string "McNuts, I. R. (2006)]], p." isn't checked by reference failing.) Johnjbarton (talk) 19:31, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
- @deprecated by community consensus entirely in 2022. It separates part of the citation data from the citation and clogs up the text. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:50, 12 January 2024 (UTC)]
- Context: over at talk) 21:21, 12 January 2024 (UTC)]
- @WP:CITEVAR and all 'at). Some folks prefer to have the multi-cited sources be under their own subheading after]
==References==, such as===Sources===or===Bibliography===, instead of between{{refbegin}}and{{refend}}(or even both at once). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:35, 12 January 2024 (UTC)- Thanks for the fix (at least @XOR'easter will be happier ;-)
- I can't understand multi-cited in a separate section. Change the number of citations and fiddle with the sections. No thanks. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:05, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
- If it comes to it, just go back to the older format or pick a new one; I wasn't trying to "impose my will" by that change; it was basically a demo, and I half-expected it to be reverted. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:04, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
- PS: Another approach is WP:LDR, in which the multi-cited sources would be put inside a]
<references>...</references>structure or an extended{{reflist|...}}tag, directly under==References==, each wrapped in<ref>...</ref>, but this strikes me as unnecessarily complicated. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:37, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
- @
- I don't want to relitigate the decision, but for me the exact problem with sfn is that separates the citation data (in References) from the citation (in Sources). Or in the case of Electromagnetic field, "Reference" contains some blue links that point to otherwise-formatted citations and some blue links that point outside the article. Looks sloppy.
- Now that I know that
sfnpcan be mixed with<ref>I'll try it. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:04, 13 January 2024 (UTC)- Well, at least all the citation data is in the "References" section; this is clearly an improvement over (less sloppy than) having some of it there and some of it stuck in mid-sentence in the article (where for some readers it's probably not even clear what it is). At any rate, it is not possible to have all citation information on the same line, somewhere on the page, without entirely duplicating every
{{cite journal}}or whatever for every page at which it is cited. This really is about as good as it gets. The whole site seems to be moving this direction. PS: I used{{sfnp}}instead of{{sfn}}because it produces the same "(2018)" date output as the main citation templates;{{sfn}}produces "2018" without the consistent parentheses/round-brackets, for no good reason. People only use{{sfn}}because it has a shorter name and they think it's "the default" or what is "normal", but it should really not be used unless the article has a citation style that is consistently using "2018" format, which is only possible if they're all non-templated, manually formatted citations, which is pretty much no longer done in any article on the system except old junk no one's touched since the 2000s. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:12, 13 January 2024 (UTC)- Is there any documentation other than Template:Sfnp? I'm sure it is completely obvious to you, but don't understand how to use it.
- In
{{sfnp | <last1*> | <last2> | <last3> | <last4> | <year*> | p= <page> | loc= <location> }}- there are an indefinite number of parameters (how many authors last names?) with ambiguous definitions (2002abcde?) ("de Broglie" vs "DeBroglie" etc). As I understand it these have to match a
{{cite}}template correct? All of the parameterslast1...yearare essentially an identifier forced to match a function of the cite template as far as I can tell. - (None of this is an issue with
refbecause thenameonly needs to match, the authors and date are only given one place. Seems to me that a solution where the point of citation entry is an arbitrary string and page number likerpbut which renders as the consensus desires would be nicer). Johnjbarton (talk) 16:47, 13 January 2024 (UTC)- For others and future reference: the information about how to use
{{sfnp}}is in Template:Sfnp, in the "Possible issues" and "Implementation" sections. Johnjbarton (talk) 22:16, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
- For others and future reference: the information about how to use
- Well, at least all the citation data is in the "References" section; this is clearly an improvement over (less sloppy than) having some of it there and some of it stuck in mid-sentence in the article (where for some readers it's probably not even clear what it is). At any rate, it is not possible to have all citation information on the same line, somewhere on the page, without entirely duplicating every
- Context: over at
- A filled-out "maximal" example would be something like:
{{sfnp|Chen|Jones|López-Garcia|Le Fevre|2021|p=99|loc=footnote 7}}. - The
|loc=parameter is optional and can also be used in place of instead of along with|p=or its plural form|pp=(those two are mutually exclusive with regard to each other):{{sfnp|Chen|Jones|López-Garcia|Le Fevre|2021|loc=errata sheet}} - The author surnames must match those (in numeric order) given in the CS1template, e.g.:
{{Cite journal |last1=Chen |first1=Amy B. |last2=Jones |first2=C. D. |last3=López-Garcia |first3=Carlos |last4=Le Fevre |first4=Jean-Paul |last5= ... |date=2021 ...}}to match the above example.- Spelling must be the same ("De Broglie" and "DeBroglie" and "de Broglie" are not equivalent).
- The surname matching also works with the generic WP:CITESTYLE (and at this point, the vast majority of uses of CS2}} are inconsistent injections of this sort into CS1 articles; the number of articles consistently templated in CS2 is decreasing all the time).
{{Citation - Surprisingly, it also works by extracting individual surnames out of the lossy and "reader-hateful"
|vauthors=mess, as long as it's actually coded in the proper format:{{Cite journal |vauthors=Chen AB, Jones CD, López-Garcia C, Le Fevre J-P, ... |date=2021 ...}}
This format, too, should be replaced on-sight with CS1's standard|last1=, etc., if|vauthors=is encountered in a article that is not consistetly usingWP:CITESTYLE). - It's also smart enough to treat
|editor1-last=, etc. as author names for this purpose if there is no|last1=, etc. If there are one or more specified authors, then any editor names are ignored (they do not concatenate onto the author(s) list). |last=,|author=, and|author1=(and the rare|author-last=,|author1-last=, and|author-last1=) are all aliases of|last1=, and so forth.|editor-last=,|editor=,|editor-last1=,|editor1=are all aliases of|editor1-last=, and so on.
- For multiple authors, the maximum is 4, not "an indefinite number". If you put in 5 or more, the template will throw a red error message. (This applies to
{{, and all their variants.)harvp}} - All the authors up to 4 must be included if specified in the full-length citation. For the above example, doing
{{sfnp|Chen|Jones|López-Garcia|2021|p=32}}will not work because|Le Fevreis missing. - The CS1/CS2 special parmeter
|display-authors=etal, to output "et al." after the last specified author name, is not detected or supported. If the citation is{{cite book |last=Adebayo |first=Mohamed |display-authors=etal |date=1997 ...}}, this must be short-cited like{{sfnp|Adebayo|1991|p=23}}. - Dealing with two publications the same year by the same author(s) [or, technically, authors with the name surname]: This is where
|ref=comes in. If you have{{cite book |last=Tāwhiri |first=Koa |date=2023 ...}}and{{cite journal |last=Tāwhiri |first=Moana |date=2023 ...}}, the solution is this:{{cite book |last=Tāwhiri |first=Koa |date=2023 ... |ref={{sfnref|Tāwhiri|2023a}} }}and{{cite journal |last=Tāwhiri |first=Moana |date=2023 ... |ref={{sfnref|Tāwhiri|2023b}} }}, each short-cited as{{sfnp|Tāwhiri|2023a}}and{{snfp|Tāwhiri|2023b|p=42}}, respectively.- An alternative when there are two authors with the same surname is to be more specific about the author names:
{{cite book |last=Tāwhiri |first=Koa |date=2023 ... |ref={{sfnref|Tāwhiri, K.|2023}} }}and{{cite journal |last=Tāwhiri |first=Moana |date=2023 ... |ref={{sfnref|Tāwhiri, M.|2023}} }}, each short-cited as{{sfnp|Tāwhiri, K.|2023}}and{{snfp|Tāwhiri, M.|2023|p=42}}, respectively. Doing both forms of disambiguation at once is not helpful. The name disambiguation is often helpful any time there are two authors by the same surname in the same article, even if the publication years do not collide. - The formerly recommended practice was to "harvid}}) inside a}}. NB: Using
{{ref|date=instead of|year=is universally better, because|date=also handles bare years along with fuller dates, and editors who encounter a|year=2023but see a full date in the cited work when verifying it are apt to improve the citation by giving the full date;|year=is simply obsolete.
- An alternative when there are two authors with the same surname is to be more specific about the author names:
- Dealing with excessively long author names (usually organizational ones): Another job for
|ref=. If you have{{sfnref|...}}{{cite report |editor1-last=Yi |editor1-first=Xiu-Yīng |editor2=Committee on Reptile and Amphbian Nomenclature |date=2023 |publisher=World Herptological Society ...}}, you can add|ref=, and cite it as, e.g.,{{sfnref|Yi|CRAN|2015}}{{sfnp|Yi|CRAN|2015}}. - Vancouver-style citation templates (
{{Vcite journal}},{{Vcite journal}},{{Vcite book}}, etc.), which are rare but still occationally found, cannot be used at all with{{sfnp}}, etc., without adding|ref=to them. Yet another reason to not use that citation style.{{sfnref|...}} - Author names used by
{{sfnp}}and related templates have nothing to do with what is in<ref name="...">, only the surnames specified inside the citation template. If you have<ref name="DeBroglieMacDuff2019">{{cite web |last1=De Broglie |first1=Matt |last2=MacDuff Samuelson |first2=Jennifer B. |date=2019 ...}}, this would be short-cited like{{sfnp|De Broglie|MacDuff Samuelson|2019}}.- It's helpful for everyone's sanity to make them consistent and clear, e.g. use
<ref name="DeBroglie & MacDuff Samuelson 2019">. Note that the quotation marks are mandatory because of spaces and non-alphanumeric ASCII characters. The lazy practice of doing<ref name=DeBMacDS2019>with very simple ref names that do not contain spaces, punctuation, or other special characters is a terrible idea because someone else is reasonably likely to clean up such messy refs later and may forget the quotation marks and break the citation. Even doing<ref name=DeB-MacDS-2019>is technically invalid markup, though few editors realize it (MW seems to generally handle it okay, but this cannot be guaranteed in future versions because it's againstWP:COSMETICBOT).
- It's helpful for everyone's sanity to make them consistent and clear, e.g. use
Regarding "a solution where the point of citation entry is an arbitrary string and page number like rp but which renders as the consensus desires would be nicer", I'm not sure that's technically feasible to do within this wiki (but see note below about future features of <>'s name the {{magicref}} would break. It also has the issue that, as with {{snfp}}/{{harvp}}, it would be generally desirable to put the full-form citation at the bottom of the page. If there were community appetite for this, someone else would have to implement it, because I can't Lua-code may way out of a paper bag.
If this is really just about speed/ease of entry, an interim approach but basically a messy one is to just put the full-length citation into the article body at first citation of the source. The templates really don't care where they "live". It would not technically be invalid to do Here is some article text.<ref>{{cite book |last=Adebayo |first=Mohamed |display-authors=etal |date=1997 |page=123 ...}}</ref> ... This is more article text much later.{{sfnp|Adebayo|1997|pp=289–290}} It's still citing sources, and doing it inline, just not in an ideal way (because the long citation has a page number "fixed" in it, and it will be mixed into the main <references> or {{reflist}} output. If you did this at a new article, no one would likely care, but if you did it at an article with already-established citation style someone might object to it as a change in citation style, or at least change it to put the long cite at the bottom and without an permanently embedded page number.
Two further notes:
- I'm in the process of slowly writing up a
{{rp}}replacement guide, with user script tools for making it easier (the scripting requires a boatload of testing and tweaking because parsing XML mixed in with{{...}}markup usingregex is very difficult, even when just parsing for a single> tag and its limited parameters like<refname=andgroup=). - The ability to directly cite different pages in the same source within the
<ref>tag itself is (allegedly and very slowly) coming. The format will look like<ref extends="Miller 2019">Miller (2019), p. 42.</ref>, and such a short cite will have a clickable ↑ that links to the full citation (hopefully they'll pick another character, since in many cases the full cite might be below all the<references>/{{reflist}}output, not higher up inside that section). It's already in beta testing, and the preview documentation is at mw:Help:Cite#Citing different parts of the same source. It could be years before we get this functionality, though. MW development is slow, and deployment to here even slower. That feature was first documented as being in beta on 2 December 2019 [20]! FFS.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:22, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
- Wow, that's excellent thanks! It's much better to have the exceptions as indented sub-bullets. You should publish this or edit the template doc; let me know if you want feedback.
- I probably use ProveIt for 90% of my references (mostly via DOI and ISBN), which is one force that pushes me towards in-line refs. Seems like tooling to adapt ProveIt to sfnp would include:
- ProveIt to continue to insert inline
- it may only see one section in the edit window so it can't insert in Sources/Reference/Notes
- Inline-inserted
citetemplates could be bot-moved to Sources/References/Notes.- After user edits, as part of one of the citation clean bots.
- Does this exist?
- ProveIt could offer sfnp insertion from cite sources parsed out of full article as alternative to cite insertion.
- This would reduce the matching-4-author-names drudgery.
- Does something like this exist?
- ProveIt to continue to insert inline
- Johnjbarton (talk) 01:47, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
- @regex (if you're geeky enough for it) in the advanced search feature built into the default desktop editor or the similar one that is part of wikEd, can be used to speed up a lot of stuff when doing conversion/cleanup (but copy-paste the article into a text editor between regex operations; if you mess one up, ctrl-z (Mac: cmd-z) doesn't work). I also find it exceedingly helpful to use a multi-clipboard utility. Windows 10 onward has this already built in (use Cmd-V to see a list of recent pasteables). For Mac, I can recommend the third-party utility iClip, though there are several good competitors. Anwway, to stop rambling, and get back to the subject, another alternative to the matching-4-author-names drudgery is to do]
{{cite journal |last=Smith |first=J. |last2=Jones ... |date=2021 ... |ref={{sfnref|Smith et al.|2021}} }}then use{{sfnp|Smith et al.|2021|p=92}}. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:51, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
- @
A request
Howdy. I believe Dicklyon respects you greatly & not just because you support his 'lower case' stance. Maybe, if you were to 'suggest' directly to him, that he stop making such page moves while a related RFC is on going? he'll comply. I know it's not your responsibility to do that. But, it might help prevent Dicklyon from being reported by an editor (not me) to WP:ANI. GoodDay (talk) 21:18, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
- Didn't realize it was him. Yes, I'll do that; he probably has e-mail enabled, and it might be better to get his attention that way. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:43, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
- @GoodDay: Done. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:49, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
- OK, no more gridiron-related moves or edits by me until the RfC resolves. Dicklyon (talk) 00:16, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- National Football League Draft and other NFL Draft pages stand separate from other draft pages as proper names, and it will take another RM to resolve that, an RM separate from the others (that's how Amakuru got "civil rights movement" lowercased, by mixing it up in an RM with other civil rights movement pages which had nothing to do with the 1954-1968 Civil Rights Movement so the issue was diluted, and I request that you or others don't try that tactic with the NFL Draft RM, thanks). Randy Kryn (talk) 01:05, 15 January 2024 (UTC)]
- Keep repeating that "nothing to do with the page moves", and maybe someone will be convinced. But thanks for admitting that I'm at least sometimes right. I can't see any evidence for the NFL draft standing out as more "proper" in sources, but I do see a lot people repeating it. Dicklyon (talk) 01:08, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- You are often right, and you know that I think that, so I'm not "admitting" anything. But I do think that you are damaging the purpose of both WP:RM and the Village pump (policy) page by this divisive RfC, purposes which will not get straightened out easily if you happen to get your way in substituting one page for another. I don't know why you can't take the location opposition into account, just close the RfC, move the NFL Draft question to an RM at the NFL Draft page, and then ping everyone who has commented at the RfC to haul their main comments and evidence to that one. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:14, 15 January 2024 (UTC)]
- The "location opposition" is utterly contrary to WP:OWN policy shouldn't exist, at least not for my pet topic" manner any chance they get. It doesn't mean there's a lack of consensus on any of these guideline or policy matters, it just means certain individuals will beat their dead horse straight to the center of the earth. Because it's a style matter and people are tired of tedious style debates, no action will ever be taken to put a stop to their antics, or even do anything about it when they engage in direct personal attacks, as they do against Dicklyon on a very frequent basis. If this were any other subject of any kind, this years-long tendentiousness and organized, programmatic incivility would never be tolerated. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:35, 15 January 2024 (UTC)]
- I don't know how much of that is meant for me, Dicklyon knows I respect (most) of his work here. The point made is that this adds another layer to a requested move and its appeal process. WP:MOVEREVIEW, then to WP:Village pump (policy). This major change makes Village pump (policy) the Supreme WikiCourt for requested moves, and if that's what you and Dicklyon intend to do I think it's fair to voice opposition without being unduly criticized. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:43, 15 January 2024 (UTC)]
- There is no "change" of any kind here. It is not only perfectly fine to seek additional community input when consensus on a P&G question is [allegedly] uncertain, it is a very good idea. It is why WP:CCC might apply so the question should be asked again). We have no broader-input venue for assessing community consensus. The entire purpose of it is to get as broad as possible a range of input on a question of P&G interpretation, application, or change, especially when it may affect a substantial number of articles and/or the question is mired in a tug-of-war between two opposing viewpoints without sufficent input from middle-ground Wikipedians who are not partisans in the dispute. It is completely routine to use RfC or other processes to arrive at decisions that might otherwise be handled at RM, if RM is not a good process for it in that particular case. (Just one of numerous examples: templates are often renamed via multi-template TfDs in which various templates need to be deleted, some merged, and one or more renamed. See also other examples already posted in the VPPOL discussion. There are many more.) Your notion that the only possible way to arrive at article titling decisions is through an RM is simply patently false. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:41, 15 January 2024 (UTC)]
- Just to be clear, you are fine with any "no consensus" decision endorsed at WP:MOVEREVIEW being brought to Village pump (policy), even many months after the close? Randy Kryn (talk) 14:19, 15 January 2024 (UTC)]
- Any time there is "no consensus" on something (and it is something people are going to continue squabbling about), a consensus does eventually need to be reached on it. There are numerous ways to do this, including waiting a long while and asking the same question again (e.g. repeating the RM in this sort of case); waiting or not waiting a while but asking a different question (e.g. propose a move to a different name than one of the ones about which consensus could not be reached); opening a stand-alone RfC on the matter (generally only it's a broad question, like a swath of articles, and in which there is some kind of fundamental dispute like "the rule does not apply to this topic" or "this is/isn't a proper name", not just a routine "my sources say this" vs. "my other sources say that" routine dispute about some specific article); opening an RfC of that sort on a guideline talk page; opening an RfC of that sort on a noticeboard that is pertinent; or, if it's a P&G matter, opening such an RfC at VPPOL. Using VPPOL would not be appropriate if it were not a P&G question. But in this case it is one.
Doing it "many months after the close" would actually be preferable, for the same reason we strongly discourage re-opening the same RM shortly after it closed with no consenus, or re-opening the same RfC shortly after it came to no consensus. No one [or, no one who should get their battleground wish granted!] wants to continue the same unproductive discussion that recently failed. What we do want to see is either quickly a different, refining discussion that may get past the original roadblock, or much later a re-asking of the same question to see if consensus can be reached among a different pool of presently-active editors. Or, for that matter, asking the variant question but later instead of soon. There is no bureaucracy to follow here.
PS: The reason MRV exists is because it is a (not the only) possible way of questioning a closure result, by asking for review of it by univolved admins (and doing so at
WP:ARBPOL is subject to community consesus review and revision.) It's also important that MRV exists for one purpose and one only: to determine whether the closer erred in summarizing the RM debate they closed (in this case a decision of "no consensus"). It is expressly not for re-examining any (or adding additional) rationales for whether pages should move and to what names. But the VPPOL discussion is about exactly that (it is a "mega-RM" in a broader venue than RM makes possible), based on what P&G arguments and sourcing apply.]PPS: Yet another example of how other processes than RM are used to arrive at article titles: if an RfC about a rule change or a new rule comes to a clear consensus, then pages are simply manually moved (or RM/TRed if blocked by an edited redirect) to comply with it. That's how the species over-capitalization mess was cleaned up. It required no additional RMs at all (though in theory some could have come up if some particular instance had been disputed). It's especially interesting that: a) the lower-case decision was reached by RM in the first place, b) MRV upheld it as not a faulty close, and c) the community re-examined the question via RfC (based on the claim of upper-casing fans that the RM and MRV had an insufficient consensus level). It's an exactly parallel case, other than it trying to overturn a disliked consensus instead of trying to resolve a failure to come to consensus. You were around for all of that, but did not raise any such bogus "wrong venue" or "wrong process" claims. It's obvious why: because those trying to use the RfC to overturn an RM decision were trying to get an exception from MoS (and AT and NCCAPS), and you consistently support topical "rebellion", ignoring all policy and other considerations to champion the cause of subject- and wikiproject-specific special pleading for exceptions even when they provably cannot be justified by usage in sources independent of the subject. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:06, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- A nice essay/summary (why don't you do more essays, lots of them can just be copy paste with a little editing). You were going good on the personal front until the end there. I didn't know about the species RfC and don't know which way I would have gone. When I agree with a lowercasing (you may or may not have noticed) I probably just won't comment or disagree. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:26, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- Here I thought I put out more essays than I should already. I'm not trying to make this be "all about you". But if your last sentence means that because you feel put-upon by me that you are now going refuse to support MoS/NC/AT-complaint moves you agree with and are only going to oppose those you don't, I can't see that being constructive and it would just increase a perception of "always defending MoS defiance". But maybe you meant something completely different. Yes, I have noticed that you sometimes agree with a lower-casing; I don't think anyone's suggested you want to capitalize everything, just that you have a history of supporting capitalization when it is wanted (even in absence of independent source usage) by people focused on a particular topic (and relatedly of making or supporting claims that something "is a proper name" when there's insufficient sourcing to reach that conclusion). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:51, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- No, I don't spite edit. Seems an odd way to go about Wikipedia. I meant that if I see a move request for lowercase that I agree with, more often than not others have already chimed in enough to pass that RM so I move on. Only so many hours in an hour. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:00, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
- Gotcha. I'm the same way about this. My RM time has been dwindling, especially as I take on bigger stuff. I have too many irons in the fire already. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:11, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
- No, I don't spite edit. Seems an odd way to go about Wikipedia. I meant that if I see a move request for lowercase that I agree with, more often than not others have already chimed in enough to pass that RM so I move on. Only so many hours in an hour. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:00, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
- Here I thought I put out more essays than I should already. I'm not trying to make this be "all about you". But if your last sentence means that because you feel put-upon by me that you are now going refuse to support MoS/NC/AT-complaint moves you agree with and are only going to oppose those you don't, I can't see that being constructive and it would just increase a perception of "always defending MoS defiance". But maybe you meant something completely different. Yes, I have noticed that you sometimes agree with a lower-casing; I don't think anyone's suggested you want to capitalize everything, just that you have a history of supporting capitalization when it is wanted (even in absence of independent source usage) by people focused on a particular topic (and relatedly of making or supporting claims that something "is a proper name" when there's insufficient sourcing to reach that conclusion). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:51, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- A nice essay/summary (why don't you do more essays, lots of them can just be copy paste with a little editing). You were going good on the personal front until the end there. I didn't know about the species RfC and don't know which way I would have gone. When I agree with a lowercasing (you may or may not have noticed) I probably just won't comment or disagree. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:26, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- Any time there is "no consensus" on something (and it is something people are going to continue squabbling about), a consensus does eventually need to be reached on it. There are numerous ways to do this, including waiting a long while and asking the same question again (e.g. repeating the RM in this sort of case); waiting or not waiting a while but asking a different question (e.g. propose a move to a different name than one of the ones about which consensus could not be reached); opening a stand-alone RfC on the matter (generally only it's a broad question, like a swath of articles, and in which there is some kind of fundamental dispute like "the rule does not apply to this topic" or "this is/isn't a proper name", not just a routine "my sources say this" vs. "my other sources say that" routine dispute about some specific article); opening an RfC of that sort on a guideline talk page; opening an RfC of that sort on a noticeboard that is pertinent; or, if it's a P&G matter, opening such an RfC at VPPOL. Using VPPOL would not be appropriate if it were not a P&G question. But in this case it is one.
- Just to be clear, you are fine with any "no consensus" decision endorsed at
- There is no "change" of any kind here. It is not only perfectly fine to seek additional community input when consensus on a P&G question is [allegedly] uncertain, it is a very good idea. It is why
- I don't know how much of that is meant for me, Dicklyon knows I respect (most) of his work here. The point made is that this adds another layer to a requested move and its appeal process.
- The "location opposition" is utterly contrary to
- You are often right, and you know that I think that, so I'm not "admitting" anything. But I do think that you are damaging the purpose of both
- Keep repeating that "nothing to do with the page moves", and maybe someone will be convinced. But thanks for admitting that I'm at least sometimes right. I can't see any evidence for the NFL draft standing out as more "proper" in sources, but I do see a lot people repeating it. Dicklyon (talk) 01:08, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
- OK, no more gridiron-related moves or edits by me until the RfC resolves. Dicklyon (talk) 00:16, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
"regarded/considered as one of the greatest/best"
Hi, thanks for your contributions on the discussion of "regarded/considered as one of the greatest/best of all-time/his (or her) generation" in
- @WP:VPPOL. There were a number of issues raised, and a striking point was that some editors think it is better (when there's sourcing to back to up) to state outright "is/was one of the greatest whatever" than to hedge with "is considered one of the greatest whatever", and that is not what I anticipated. All the arguments presented so far need to be accounted for in drafting an RfC on this. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:17, 16 January 2024 (UTC)]
School outcomes
Hi, I have a weird request that basically involves asking for further context on a comment you wrote in this 2017 RfC. The reason I'm asking you in particular is because as far as I can tell, you are the only one who mentioned school districts at all in that discussion that is still an active editor here.
So, the the story starts with me coming across a school district article that likely would not meet GNG and looking at
- @Clovermoss: Hmm. Okay, we have:
- WP:NGEOfor short.
- The latter (at WP:Nand WP:NORG]. School districts are "educational institutions" (they were legally instituted, and they entirely pertain to education). WP:NORG also explicitly covers schools, and it also covers divisions of municipal governments (as a subset of divisions of organizations), and all organizations generally, though it does not happen to mention school districts in particular. Pertinent material from NORG, by sectional shortcut:
- it exists.... "Notability" is not synonymous with "fame" or "importance." No matter how "important" editors may personally believe an organization to be, it should not have a stand-alone article in Wikipedia unless reliable sources independent of the organization have given significant coverage to it.
- substantial verifiable evidence of coverageby reliable independent sources outside the organization's local area. Where coverage is only local in scope, consider adding a section on the organization to an article on the organization's local area instead. It is very difficult to interpret this as not also applying to school districts, especially since the recommendation is to merge NN schools into articles on the local area (town, etc.) instead, not to the school district, though I would do the latter if the district were notable, as being a more pertinent and specific target.
- Same section:
Local units of larger organizations: In some cases, a specific local chapter or sub-organization that is not considered notable enough for its own article may be significant enough to mention within the context of an article about the parent organization. If the parent article grows to the point where information needs to be split off to a new article, remember that when you split off an article about a local chapter, the local chapter itself must comply with Wikipedia's
This was written clumsily with fraternities in mind, but it is not actually limite dto them, and there is no reason this would not apply also to school districts, which are highly local units of a larger city government organization.notabilityguidelines, without reference to the notability of the parent organization. Take care not to split off a section that would be considered non-notable on its own. - Same section:
Aim for one good article, not multiple
This clearly includes "division, departments, and other sub-units", and is not specific to any particular organization type, so would include municipal governments.a brief listin the main article on the organization. - WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES) This only mentions schools specifically, but the reasoning in it is not a new rule, it is an explication of existing rules and how they already apply, and they do already apply to school districts as well.
- I have no idea what the full history is of these pages, but WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES (and all the rest of WP:POLICYFORK on districts, because it incorrectly cites WP:GEOLAND as the controlling guideline when it is necessaryily WP:NORG, since school districts are definitely organizations but rarely conceived of as places, and only for administrative purposes serve a jurisdictional function, thus are exactly parallel to the census tracts that are ruled out as "places".}} (each of those templates has to be on it own line). Then lay out an RfC proposition something like the following:
In short, I think this is cause for another RfC, to remove the incorrect presumptive-notability claim from WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES and to have districts treated exactly the same as any other local subdivision of any (in this case governmental) organization. If that were repaired, some other advice would have to be tweaked, to suggest merging non-notable schools to notable school districts or to the city/town article in the absence of one of the former, because a lot of school districts (probably most of them) are non-notable and should themselves merge to cities/towns in a subsection under government.
The previous RfC appears to have flopped because it did not provide enough of the contextual material. What I would recommend is using the material above (neutralizing some of my editorial arguments) in a collapse box like
{{collapse top|left=y|Pertinent guideline and other material:}}...{{collapse bottom
The essay
Options for addressing the issue:
- Option 1: School districts are not presumptively notable, and are subject to WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMESto agree.
- Option 2: School districts are presumptively notable, are subject to WP:NORG. Update both guidelines to state this.
- Option 3: Some other approach (please specify).
[Do the collapse box of guideline and essay quotations here.]
NB: A previous RfC on this was opened in December 2023, but closed as too unclearly worded to reach a consensus.
[Sig here]
[Then create a "Comments (school districts)" and a "Discussion (school districts)" subsection, disambiguated from other such sections on the VPPOL page.]- As a separate comment (since it's non-neutral), perhaps as part of your own !vote, maybe add: "The closer noted:
it is not necessary to have a school district article in order to capture all the schools in a given area: they could be captured under another geographical article, such as the local town or city
; and further that:common sense dictates that when a school district that otherwise does not merit an article more or less covers the same area as a town or city, or even a county or township, both the district & its schools should then be captured in that article.
"So, I guess that's doing most of the work already, though I don't think I want to "run" this one myself. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:11, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
- You gave me a lot to think about. :) I don't have much experience with RfCs, so I really appreciate your detailed reasoning here. The only thing that jumps out to me immediately as a possible issue with the options is that I worry #3 would lead to arguing about minituae that would derail a new RfC. For example, there was a decent chunk of people in the previous RfC who opposed the concept of school districts even being required to meet GNG (acting like it was an SNG?) and arguments about the differences (if any) between school boards and school districts. The latter argument could lead to a stronger emphasis on GEOLAND if theoreotically there are school districts that are not under the jurisidiction of school boards (which are organizations). Do you think I should change the options any to reflect these concerns or do you think I'm overthinking it? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:59, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
- Would have to sleep on it. School boards are kinda-sorta organizations, but are bodies of officials not entire organizations in the usual sense; they are basically like unto a board of directors, an advisory board, etc. That is, the distinction between a school district and a school board is illusory; some districts are administered by school boards and some are not (e.g. controlled directly by the town council, or by some other means). But I didn't pore over the original RfC, so I would have to read it all to look out for "gotchas" that the above draft did not account for, and that might be one of them. Though it also needs to be concise. PS: an "option 3: name your poison" (often resolving to "do nothing") might as well be included since people will make up their own options anyway and may be antagonistic about it if it wasn't already in there. Ultimately, people who want to try to split weird hairs will try to do it anyway. They'll definitely want to in some cases, because if option 1 prevailed, it would mean a lot of AfDs or at least hurried merges to avoid AfDs. This is an RfC I would expect a lot of FUD about. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)]
- I think the idea of a name your poison option is a good one, my train of thought was more maybe there'd be a strong enough recurring poison that would make a fourth option from the start worthwhile. I'm going to sleep on all this, too. Unfortunately, I work full time overnights, so the actual sleeping part will be a bit delayed. You don't need to worry about rushing to read it all, I'm just glad you're willing to give feedback at all. Get back to me anytime you're willing to. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 02:42, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
- Would have to sleep on it. School boards are kinda-sorta organizations, but are bodies of officials not entire organizations in the usual sense; they are basically like unto a board of directors, an advisory board, etc. That is, the distinction between a school district and a school board is illusory; some districts are administered by school boards and some are not (e.g. controlled directly by the town council, or by some other means). But I didn't pore over the original RfC, so I would have to read it all to look out for "gotchas" that the above draft did not account for, and that might be one of them. Though it also needs to be concise. PS: an "option 3: name your poison" (often resolving to "do nothing") might as well be included since people will make up their own options anyway and may be antagonistic about it if it wasn't already in there. Ultimately, people who want to try to split weird hairs will try to do it anyway. They'll definitely want to in some cases, because if option 1 prevailed, it would mean a lot of AfDs or at least hurried merges to avoid AfDs. This is an RfC I would expect a lot of
- You gave me a lot to think about. :) I don't have much experience with RfCs, so I really appreciate your detailed reasoning here. The only thing that jumps out to me immediately as a possible issue with the options is that I worry #3 would lead to arguing about minituae that would derail a new RfC. For example, there was a decent chunk of people in the previous RfC who opposed the concept of school districts even being required to meet GNG (acting like it was an SNG?) and arguments about the differences (if any) between school boards and school districts. The latter argument could lead to a stronger emphasis on GEOLAND if theoreotically there are school districts that are not under the jurisidiction of school boards (which are organizations). Do you think I should change the options any to reflect these concerns or do you think I'm overthinking it? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:59, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
Subantarctic vs. sub-antarctic
Do you have a view on the hyphenation of "subantarctic" or is there anything I've missed in the MoS? List of Antarctic and subantarctic islands and Subantarctic are internally inconsistent. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:02, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
- @WP isn't written in news style, which is obsessively driven by concision and expediency. The spelling anti-Semitism clearly dominates in books [22]. Usage in journals is very mixed [23] (first page of results is mostly the compressed form, but going through subsequent results pages shows about a 50:50 mixture). The sub-Antarctic case is complicated by the fact that various sources are apt to treat this a capitalized (Sub-Antarctic or Subantarctic) proper name of a region of the earth, like Western Hemisphere and Arctic and so on, so there are really four options: sub-Antarctic, Sub-Antarctic, subantarctic, and Subantarctic. There are other geographical disagreements like this, e.g. Transcaucasus (a.k.a. Transcaucasia, now South Caucasus) has also been written by sources as Trans-Caucausus and Trans-Caucasia (capitalized as a place name; I'm not seeing use of trans-Caucasia, transcaucasia, etc.). For your case, it's probably a matter to ask in an RfC about what spelling to use across our articles, or in an RM to just move the article and then impose spelling consistency in text afterward. Some links: [24][25][26] — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:33, 18 January 2024 (UTC)]
WP:CONVENUE
@Thebiguglyalien, Snow Rise, and Levivich: I'd forgotten about it, but what was discussed at some length at "
All of that is central to the whole problem of "topical rebellions" against our
As I recall from the original discussion, the first idea was to revise
I'm not certain how to proceed, but think this should proceed, even if takes some time and work. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:31, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
- Like I said at the darts discussion, this is still something I think should happen. And I agree that it would be ideal if we could get any potential changes down to a single paragraph or shorter. And I'm just spitballing now, but I also remember suggesting a year ago that WikiProject talk pages could have a banner to the effect of "This page serves as a noticeboard for the topic and for discussion about the project itself. If you want to discuss changes to the articles in this topic, do so at their respective talk pages or at the WP:Village Pump." Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:19, 19 January 2024 (UTC)]
- Something like that might be a good idea, other than suggesting VP for that (it is not for discussion of changes at particular articles). But we'd probably need to get the policy adjusted first, so that such wikiproject-talk-templating was per that policy. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:38, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
- Hi SMc, thanks for the ping. My 2c: I'd be hesitant about introducing a new major concept (CONVENUE) in addition to the existing concept (CONLEVEL) at the policy level, because the fewer concepts, the conceptually simpler the policy, the better.
- I also think the same result could be achieved just by making a change to the existing policy section at WP:LOCALCONSENSUS, but the actual policy doesn't contain the phrases "local consensus" or "global consensus." It should.
- The second paragraph of CONLEVEL should be moved in its entirety to WP:PGCHANGE, leaving room for a new 2nd para that explained more explicitly the idea of levels of consensus.
- The new 2nd para should explain the relationship between "consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time" and participation, venue, advertisement (it should explain the importance of {RFC} and FRS, CENT and VPP/VPR). Levivich (talk) 06:02, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
- Good feedback. Sounds like a reasonable approach, but I've about run out of energy for the day. Will ponder upon it soon. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:11, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
- My concern is that, ultimately, some level of cultural change will have to accompany a policy change. Most editors generally agree that global consensus beats local consensus, but being willing to do something about it is another matter. ANI regularly sees cases where editors are causing disruption but it's overlooked because it's "not that big of a deal" or "this is overblown", and CONLEVEL seems like exactly the sort of issue that would fall into that trap. It's not until we get into a WP:DARTS type situation where several editors without much "social capital" are being incredibly uncivil that it gets any sort of attention. We can get the wording changed, and that's all well and good, but I worry that things would keep on going the way they have been other than having one more all caps link to use. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:14, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
- Yes, this bears some thinking on. Getting community culture to shift is always a challenge. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:55, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
- To get my brain moving on this, I reread the discussions and wrote up a quick outline of the points that we considered:
no discrete group of editors gets to make and enforce rules outside of established process, and thereby sidestep the normal community vetting of proposed guidelines
– Snow Rise's summary of what we want to accomplish- All articles are subject to WP:WEIGHT, WP:POV, and WP:OR regardless of topical considerations. Editors who frequent one topic cannot decide that "their" articles follow separate standards.
- Something's importance or significance should be determined by its coverage in sources, not by the evaluation of one or more editors. Editors must not create their own metrics or rules to determine the significance of a topic.
- The media and other sources being biased for/against covering certain topics is not a valid argument for giving them more/less weight.
- WikiProjects may not dictate content or create any other rules that must be followed. They operate in a purely advisory capacity. There is no such thing as "WikiProject consensus".
- Groups of editors, including WikiProjects, are still subject to WP:OWN. WikiProjects and their members do not own any articles or any other pages.
- Consensus on one article does not apply to another article. The talk page of one article cannot be used to dictate rules for a series of articles.
- Suggested changes to multiple articles should be widely advertised to the entire community, not confined to one WikiProject or group of editors.
- The number of editors supporting a local consensus and the length of time it has stood do not give it additional weight.
- This is already expected practice and we are simply codifying it. ARBCOM has also made rulings to this effect (I don't know which cases off the top of my head).
- Ideally we can weed this down and condense the main ideas into a few sentences that would fit somewhere under WP:DETCON. Also pinging Snow Rise and Levivich. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:05, 15 February 2024 (UTC)]
- Ehhhhxcellent as Mr. Burns would say. Thanks for the effort to summarize that long thread, and produce a good summary, and I've taken the liberty of numbering the points for easier reference. I can already think of some ways to condense and wordsmith on it a bit (e.g. merge 5 and 6 and the second half of 2), but will hold off and think on it longer. One thing that strikes me is that the first half of 2, and 3 and 4 are really WP:WEIGHT and WP:NOR concerns, and better addressed elsewhere. They're very good nutshell ecapsulation of principles, but not really directly germane to CONLEVEL and "CONVENUE" matters. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:25, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
- Hey all, sorry for my being slow to join the discussion. I was vaguely aware of it, but late January and early February were among the most difficult weeks of my entire life, with some very serious emergencies and personal loss, and I just didn't have the bandwidth/ability to so much as pipe up.
- Ehhhhxcellent as Mr. Burns would say. Thanks for the effort to summarize that long thread, and produce a good summary, and I've taken the liberty of numbering the points for easier reference. I can already think of some ways to condense and wordsmith on it a bit (e.g. merge 5 and 6 and the second half of 2), but will hold off and think on it longer. One thing that strikes me is that the first half of 2, and 3 and 4 are really WP:WEIGHT and WP:NOR concerns, and better addressed elsewhere. They're very good nutshell ecapsulation of principles, but not really directly germane to CONLEVEL and "CONVENUE" matters. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:25, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
- To get my brain moving on this, I reread the discussions and wrote up a quick outline of the points that we considered:
- Yes, this bears some thinking on. Getting community culture to shift is always a challenge. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:55, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
- My concern is that, ultimately, some level of cultural change will have to accompany a policy change. Most editors generally agree that global consensus beats local consensus, but being willing to do something about it is another matter. ANI regularly sees cases where editors are causing disruption but it's overlooked because it's "not that big of a deal" or "this is overblown", and CONLEVEL seems like exactly the sort of issue that would fall into that trap. It's not until we get into a WP:DARTS type situation where several editors without much "social capital" are being incredibly uncivil that it gets any sort of attention. We can get the wording changed, and that's all well and good, but I worry that things would keep on going the way they have been other than having one more all caps link to use. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:14, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
- Good feedback. Sounds like a reasonable approach, but I've about run out of energy for the day. Will ponder upon it soon. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:11, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
- That said, and as you know, I feel this is an issue that's time has well come. Moving what is essentially well-established policy regarding the proper methodology for forming multi-article consensus (that was merely codified in a peculiar place because of the idiosyncrasies of how community consensus developed) to a more appropriate namespace would have immense benefit for short-circuiting a lot of needless conflict that otherwise arises due to a lack of understanding of the limitations of WikiProjects (and small cohorts with their own preferred rules generally). Those issues are unambiguously a direct result of the established limitations not being properly elaborated on in the major policies on consensus, leading to these principles being underappreciated--sometimes even by fairly experienced and conscientious community members.
- I know that all I'm doing here is stating the obvious and preaching to the choir, but it's my way of saying my silence since TBUA revived this issue is not from lack of support or appreciation. I've reviewed the above summary by TBUA, and find it essentially accurate, and any little caveats that I have about creative ways members of WikiProjects have sought to do their due diligence in terms of advertising discussions to the broader community while still holding the discussions at WikiProjects and attempting to have the results operate as binding consensus on multiple articles, we can discuss as we get along and try to incorporate into the new proposed wording. I personally am somewhat agnostic on the location of the new policy verbiage, but lean a little towards their being their own 'CONVENUE' section within DETCON. But that too we can work out as we go. I'll drop a more substantial bit of feedback on the more particularized points in a few days, as soon as I am able. Thanks for picking up the ball and running with this, TBUA. SnowRise let's rap 22:45, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
- +1, I basically agree with everything Snow said, especially thanks TBUA for advancing this. (Sorry to hear about the loss and rough patch, hope spring will bring you some relief.) Levivich (talk) 19:27, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
- Yep. I think we are onto something. I just noticed User:Scribolt/Levels of consensus which is at least closely adjacent to some of the things we've been (slowly) talking about. Scribolt, care to join in? The summary above is probably good enough to go through (the original discussion was quite long). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:35, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks for the ping. I think I see things a little differently in some areas, maybe some of these (slightly disjointed) thoughts might help. I should point out that I'm sympathetic to what you're trying to achieve.
- Philosophically, I'm not sure that I agree that an editing consensus impacting multiple articles that should be "respected", if not enforced, cannot develop outside of P&G pages or central noticeboards, which is where a lot of the numbered points above seems to imply. For me, the level of consensus something has (no matter what namespace it occurred in) is a product of participation x correct advertisement x correct venue x how well the scope of discussion applies to the new situation. You can overcome a deficit in one element if the others are in place and are high.
- This is very much in line with the first part of Levivich's comment earlier in this thread, but for me trying to define local vs global consensus is a bit of a dead end. You're never going to find a definition that everyone will get behind and for me it's much more valuable to make this a relative term (i.e. the consensus for doing X is bigger than doing Y, because we consider A, B & C when thinking about how much consensus something has). You're never going convince many (including me) that there is a genuinely "global" consensus for doing almost anything.
- The "respected" if not "enforced" piece is relevant when something is not well covered in existing P&G. Pointing out to an editor that there was a discussion before on the topic at another article or WikiProject is legitimate and the editor can choose whether to go with it or seek a new and greater consensus (and in these cases the new consensus formed, whether at the article itself, central noticeboard, or even by simply making and justifying their edit) would almost certainly be greater than the original.
- In terms of mechanics of multi-page consensus, I'm not sure that something like this was such an awful way of working through things, would we really want every discussion like this to occur on a centralized notice board or P&G page? It might be worth distinguishing between discussions with open ended application vs those with a defined scope.
- In terms of any language, while I agree that P&G by definition are likely to represent high levels of community consensus, this is clearly more applicable for some pages than others, so please consider the policy principles that define P&G as follow editing best practices and not the other way around.
- Not sure if that was in any way helpful, but I'm glad at least someone read my essay. Scribolt (talk) 13:40, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
- It is good food for thought. "would we really want every discussion like this to occur on a centralized notice board or P&G page?" Probably not, and the idea of establishing to a consensus to do/not do something at a particular article is laced throughout our P&G. However, this applies when the question is legitimately open, when an option is available. The problem arises when some topically-focused editors decide to defy a broad consensus (most frequently WP:CONLEVEL policy should have been enough, but it has proved ineffective at curtailing this sort of thing. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:55, 7 March 2024 (UTC)]
- Oh, I agree with the sentiment. But when thinking about what to do, I think it's worth remembering that there's Policy, Guidelines and guidelines. Purely looking at this in terms of consensus is probably the wrong approach. The vast majority of actual policy pages are widely watched. Something like MOS:CAPS is also well stewarded, and it's fair to say it's current state has enjoyed enough oversight to mean that doing something differently should really mean updating the guideline or discussing more centrally. How much community consensus would you say MOS:PK actually enjoys? Based in pagewatchers and edits, I'd say you wouldn't need a hugely attended or advertised discussion elsewhere to have difficulty saying that MOS:PK is the consensus between a limited group of editors. Now, you could say that because it has guideline status it automatically applies, but then the argument becomes that if a rule exists, then it's followed until changed, which is a strengthening of the status of guidelines.
- A possible approach would be to a) provide some better tools so that someone uninvolved can asses the strength of a consensus, and b) do something in the behavioural and or RFC closing guidance area to embed this Scribolt (talk) 16:59, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
- There's not a WP:CREEP that didn't serve an encyclopedia-building need. Contrast with WP:Manual of Style/Computer science which dated to the same era (as a PROJPAGE) and recently passed a PROPOSAL to become part of MoS; that was a page with significantly more community input, by people who knew better what they were talking about, to address actual encyc.-writing needs instead of impose personal-preference style pecadilloes, and subject to considerable revision after community input. Big difference. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:52, 7 March 2024 (UTC)]
- There's not a
- It is good food for thought. "would we really want every discussion like this to occur on a centralized notice board or P&G page?" Probably not, and the idea of establishing to a consensus to do/not do something at a particular article is laced throughout our P&G. However, this applies when the question is legitimately open, when an option is available. The problem arises when some topically-focused editors decide to defy a broad consensus (most frequently
- Thanks for the ping. I think I see things a little differently in some areas, maybe some of these (slightly disjointed) thoughts might help. I should point out that I'm sympathetic to what you're trying to achieve.
- Yep. I think we are onto something. I just noticed User:Scribolt/Levels of consensus which is at least closely adjacent to some of the things we've been (slowly) talking about. Scribolt, care to join in? The summary above is probably good enough to go through (the original discussion was quite long). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:35, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
- +1, I basically agree with everything Snow said, especially thanks TBUA for advancing this. (Sorry to hear about the loss and rough patch, hope spring will bring you some relief.) Levivich (talk) 19:27, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
- I know that all I'm doing here is stating the obvious and preaching to the choir, but it's my way of saying my silence since TBUA revived this issue is not from lack of support or appreciation. I've reviewed the above summary by TBUA, and find it essentially accurate, and any little caveats that I have about creative ways members of WikiProjects have sought to do their due diligence in terms of advertising discussions to the broader community while still holding the discussions at WikiProjects and attempting to have the results operate as binding consensus on multiple articles, we can discuss as we get along and try to incorporate into the new proposed wording. I personally am somewhat agnostic on the location of the new policy verbiage, but lean a little towards their being their own 'CONVENUE' section within DETCON. But that too we can work out as we go. I'll drop a more substantial bit of feedback on the more particularized points in a few days, as soon as I am able. Thanks for picking up the ball and running with this, TBUA. SnowRise let's rap 22:45, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
Château
Regarding your edit here, don't you think "château" is a well assimilated loanword? Jean-de-Nivelle (talk) 13:14, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Disney move
Why did you want the
- @Disney where it belongs, though I'll leave it to someone else to get that done. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:38, 20 January 2024 (UTC)]
- It should not. Disney should be a DAB page in my opinion. GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 16:45, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
- Not according to WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and WP:DAB (and WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT for that matter). We don't just get to make up our own opinions to suit our personal preferences on such matters; they are governed by policies and guidelines (pretty much explicity to prevent particular popular topics being given special treatment by their fans). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:49, 20 January 2024 (UTC)]
- WP:NATURAL read these as an user said on the RM. GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 16:52, 20 January 2024 (UTC)]
- Those both go to the same place, so you seem to be the one not reading the material. In particular, read the entire WP:TITLEDAB section in which this is found: nothing in there is invoked unless disambiguation becomes necessary, and it is by definition not necessary for a page if it is the PRIMARYTOPIC; that's what PRIMARYTOPIC even means. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:55, 20 January 2024 (UTC)]
- Users could also be looking for not limited to: Walt Disney himself as I stated, Disney theme parks, Disney Channel, Disney Studios etc.! This seems to be the primary topic over Disney by usage but not globally. GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 17:15, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
- That's why we have Wikipedia is not a debate forum. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:28, 20 January 2024 (UTC)]
- PS: Actually, I now see that you've only been here three weeks; I thought you were a long-term editor already, so that might have come off as unreasonably dismissive, given how long it takes to absorb all of WP's complicated rules and procedures. Article titling on Wikipedia is complex, but the nutshell is that we use the most common name for a subject by default, and disambiguate it only when necessary (on a per-page basis, not on an "everything ever called by this name" basis, and only to the extent necessary). We do not use a longer name than necessary. If something is overwhelmingly the primary topic for a name, it is not disambiguated, and takes that short and recognizable name as the article title, with the disambiguation page being at, e.g., Disney is an abberation not a norm, and it will not last indefinitely. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:39, 20 January 2024 (UTC)]
- PS: Actually, I now see that you've only been here three weeks; I thought you were a long-term editor already, so that might have come off as unreasonably dismissive, given how long it takes to absorb all of WP's complicated rules and procedures. Article titling on Wikipedia is complex, but the nutshell is that we use the most common name for a subject by default, and disambiguate it only when necessary (on a per-page basis, not on an "everything ever called by this name" basis, and only to the extent necessary). We do not use a longer name than necessary. If something is overwhelmingly the primary topic for a name, it is not disambiguated, and takes that short and recognizable name as the article title, with the disambiguation page being at, e.g.,
- That's why we have
- Users could also be looking for not limited to: Walt Disney himself as I stated, Disney theme parks, Disney Channel, Disney Studios etc.! This seems to be the primary topic over Disney by usage but not globally. GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 17:15, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
- Those both go to the same place, so you seem to be the one not reading the material. In particular, read the entire
- Not according to WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and WP:DAB (and
- It should not. Disney should be a DAB page in my opinion. GabrielPenn4223 (talk) 16:45, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
Books & Bytes – Issue 60
The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 60, November – December 2023
- Three new partners
- Google Scholar integration
- How to track partner suggestions
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --13:36, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
January music
 | |
| story · music · places |
|---|
Thank you for improving articles in January! I remember Ewa Podleś on the Main page, and have - believe it or not - two musical DYK. Shalom chaverim. On vacation, with something for your sweet tooth --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:41, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
Today: the performance of Anna Nekhames --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:56, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
Today a friend's birthday, with related music and a few new vacation pics --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:17, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
Category:Language preservation organisations has been nominated for deletion
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Must
Well, we don't or shouldn't be using "must" anywhere in MoS or any other guideline unless describing a policy or technical requirement.
@SMcCandlish, this is wrong. Here's a list of five statements in the main MOS page that use the word must. Notice the absence of policy and technical requirements:
- Infoboxes, images, and related content in the lead section must be right-aligned.
- The heading must be on its own line, with one blank line just before it.
- If a sentence includes subsidiary material enclosed in square or round brackets, it must still carry terminal punctuation after those brackets, regardless of any punctuation within the brackets.
- Where such a word or phrase occurs mid-sentence, new terminal punctuation (usually a period) must be added at the end.
- Names not originally written in one of the Latin-script alphabets (written for example in Greek, Cyrillic, or Chinese scripts) must be given a romanizedform for use in English.
Do you see any here that ought to be presented as mere "should" statements – like, you "should" use proper punctuation at the end of a sentence, but it's sometimes okay if you don't? I don't.
Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines#Content says:
- Be clear. Avoid esoteric or quasi-legal terms or dumbed-down language. Be plain, direct, unambiguous, and specific. Avoid platitudes and generalities. Even in guidelines, help pages, and other non-policy pages, do not be afraid to tell editors directly they must or should do something.
If something is actually required, even if it is "only" required by the rules of proper English grammar, then it should be indicated as a "must", not a "should". It is unfair and needlessly confusing to tell editors that something merely should be done this way when we are actually requiring it. There has never been a rule relegating the use of words like must to pages that say "policy" in a box at the top. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:41, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
- I said "shouldn't" for a reason. All of those things need to be revised. 1. "in the lead section are always right-aligned" (we don't appear to have any exceptions, and if one were found in some single-editor stub, other editors would fix it, so this is true). 2. It is correct that it must be on its own line, as a technical matter, but one blank like just before it is not a technical requirement, just a recommentation (and often ignored when a subheading immediately follows a heading or a hatnote after a heading), so needs to be reworded. 3. Should read "it will still carry terminal punctuation after". Just state it as a fact instead of a demand. 4. Should read "is added at the end." 5. Should read something like "also needs a a rule we do not need to record, and when so close to zero of our guideline material says "must" that you can only find 5 examples, that is clearly an overwhelming consensus on the matter. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:58, 29 January 2024 (UTC)]
- What's your underlying worry with the word must? It seems to be particular to the word itself, because your suggestions have the same level of force, just using other words. I don't think we should tiptoe about in a way that suggests we have people with Pathological demand avoidance in mind. If editors must do something, then they must; there's no benefit to trying to cover that up by saying "always" or "have to" or any of the other synonyms for must.
- PS: What I want is for editors to stop saying that guidelines should not use words like must, out of the mistaken and misguided belief that only policies and technical requirements "deserve" to make firm demands on editors. If the community is making firm demands, then those firm demands need to be communicated with clarity and accuracy on every page, not just on pages that have a certain label at the top. (There are a lot more than five examples available, if you want to see them. Here's a list of 108 guidelines using the word must. That's 40% of the guidelines – far too widespread to suggest that it's the work of just one opinionated editor, and far too accepted to pretend that there isn't community backing for this.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:27, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
- What's your fondness for it? The concerns are that to anyone familiar with the norms of technical documentation, the word "must" indicates an asbsolute, inflexible requirement, and there is no such thing coming from a style guideline (any policy or technical requirement such a page happened to be contextually reminding editors about comes from an authority external to the guideline, either the policy in question or the technical specs of MW). To anyone not familiar with tech-writing norms, the term still indicates a policy-level requirement, which nothing in MoS is, and it produces basically a "micro-WP:SNOW in favor of making them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:40, 29 January 2024 (UTC)]
- I like it because it's clear. Style guidelines do have absolute, inflexible requirements. See, e.g., the placement of the lead image or infobox. It will absolutely, inflexibly, invariably be placed on the right.
- I don't think that "must" should be conflated with "enforced in software" ("something will break if it isn't done as advised"), and it's wrong to think of breaking a policy as resulting in sanctions. People get sanctioned for violating essays all the time. There are more block log entries citing the essay Wikipedia:Tendentious editing than there are blocks that happened because of violating the policy Wikipedia:Verifiability or the Wikipedia:Editing policy – and we know that both of those policies are violated every day of the week.
- I think you would be surprised by the response to your hypothetical RFC. A clear question would be "Shall we first repeal the long-standing policy statement that says guidelines are permitted to use the word must, and if so, shall we then change the wording of all sentences in the Manual of Style currently using the word must, such as those declaring that punctuation "must" be added at the end of sentences, so that they no longer use that particular word?"
- That sounds like a loser of a proposal to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:31, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
- If you phrased it that way you would be yelled at for making a non-neutral pseudo-RfC abusing argument to emotion by making fake claims of a "repeal", when nothing at issue about the term "must" would be actually be raised about anything beyond a handful of usese when it does not actually refer to a "must" situation (requirement by policy or technical limitations). I have no idea why you're picking a silly fight about this trivia; we usually seem to get along, but you are coming off as excessively aggressive about this one particular thing, and I'd like that to stop. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:51, 29 January 2024 (UTC)]
- "Must" situations are not limited to technical limitations and policy requirements. This is not true in the tech doc world; this is not true on Wikipedia. It may be your personal preference, but it isn't true. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:53, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
- This is just turning circular. Let's stop. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:57, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
- As for why I care: When good editors say "Oh, guidelines can't say 'must'" – even though they have policy-level authorization to do so, with none of the limitations you have assumed – then POV pushers and wikilawyers say "When it says 'must', it means 'optional'" when they don't like what the guidelines say, and they say "Well, it says 'should' or 'may', but it really means 'must', because we're just too polite to use hard words like must in a guideline". We lose coming and going when you say that guidelines can't or shouldn't communicate hard requirements, or that certain words are taboo when communicating that requirement.
- The placement of the lead image on the right is a hard requirement. There are lots of ways to communicate that, and I don't honestly care which one is chosen. I want you (and anyone else) to stop telling other editors that it's taboo to communicate that hard requirement with the word must. The other options can be better, prettier, nicer, clearer, more alliterative, more concise, more parallel, or any other virtue you can think of; I just don't want you to keep telling people that it's wrong for a guideline to use the word must when communicating a hard requirement that arises from no source higher than the community's views of what that guideline needs to tell people. Editors really must place lead images on the right; we should not be telling them that this is a bad way to express that hard requirement. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:01, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
- I'm not sure what part of "This is just turning circular. Let's stop" sounded like an invitation to repeat your viewpoint yet again in two more paragraphs. If "There are lots of ways to communicate that, and I don't honestly care which one is chosen", then you're contradicting yourself in demanding "must"-or-bust, and venting at me for no reason about material your profess to not care about the wording of. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:55, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
- (Check the timestamps; you posted while I was writing.)
- I'm not demanding "must or bust". I'm demanding that you stop telling editors that "must" is not permitted or appropriate in guidelines. Write whatever you think will be most helpful in the guidelines themselves, but:
- So long as we have a policy explicitly saying guidelines are permitted to use the word must, don't tell other editors that we can't use "must" in guidelines. It's officially permitted, even if you don't like it.
- When 40% of guidelines currently use the word must, don't tell other editors that we don't actually use "must" in guidelines. We don't need any more misinformation going around about that fact.
- WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:31, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
- Well, I don't respond to "demand that you stop telling editors" anything. You don't control what I say. Please just drop this; it's starting to irritate, a lot, and you should have picked up on that some time ago. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:37, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
- I'm not sure what part of "This is just turning circular. Let's stop" sounded like an invitation to repeat your viewpoint yet again in two more paragraphs. If "There are lots of ways to communicate that, and I don't honestly care which one is chosen", then you're contradicting yourself in demanding "must"-or-bust, and venting at me for no reason about material your profess to not care about the wording of. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:55, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
- This is just turning circular. Let's stop. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:57, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
- "Must" situations are not limited to technical limitations and policy requirements. This is not true in the tech doc world; this is not true on Wikipedia. It may be your personal preference, but it isn't true. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:53, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
- If you phrased it that way you would be yelled at for making a non-neutral pseudo-RfC abusing
- What's your fondness for it? The concerns are that to anyone familiar with the norms of technical documentation, the word "must" indicates an asbsolute, inflexible requirement, and there is no such thing coming from a style guideline (any policy or technical requirement such a page happened to be contextually reminding editors about comes from an authority external to the guideline, either the policy in question or the technical specs of MW). To anyone not familiar with tech-writing norms, the term still indicates a policy-level requirement, which nothing in MoS is, and it produces basically a "micro-
Why I'm opposing the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee Charter Ratification
A note for my talk-page stalkers – here's my opposition vote comment:
The "even those which would not normally be in the scope of the U4C" portion of this is not acceptable at all: "Movement government structures may also refer UCoC enforcement cases or appeals, even those which would not normally be in the scope of the U4C, to the U4C." Nope. U4C has to stay within its scope or this will just turn into a "forum-shop my buddies to get a result the community denied me" kangaroo court. This even directly contradicts previous rulemaking in the same document: "The U4C will not take cases that do not primarily involve violations of the UCoC, or its enforcement."
This is also problematic (aside from the grammar error in it): "Provides a final interpretation of the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and the UCoC if the need arises, in collaboration with community members enforcement structures". This "collaboration" is undefined, and too vague to be meaningful.
There may be other issues with it as well, but these two parts alone were enough to trigger my immediate opposition. Policy writing is hard, and the drafters of this are not trying or thinking hard enough yet.
The vote is somehow only open until 2024-02-02. Can anyone say "rush job" and "ramrod"?
- The voting page: meta:Universal Code of Conduct/Coordinating Committee/Charter/Voter information
- The draft charter: meta:Universal Code of Conduct/Coordinating Committee/Charter
- Main page of the UCoC Coordinating Committee: meta:Universal Code of Conduct/Coordinating Committee
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:52, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
Improper close of MOS botany
I recommend you undo your Plant Descriptions thread closure at
Meteorquake was correctly told to check with WT:BOTANY. But as this can be nothing other than a style issue, and as BOTANY has no MOS project set up yet, the thread is improperly closed, and the description and edit summary are inaccurate. SamuelRiv (talk) 00:26, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
- "Meteorquake was correctly told to check with WT:BOTANY" is entirely correct, and that should be sufficient. There is no "improperly" about closing it; if you think otherwise, feel free to point me to the policy that says so. But it's not an admin close; you can just go revert me if you insist on it. The primary concern raised in that WT:MOS thread has nothing to do with article writing style or even article structure in the strict sense (what sections need to exist per WP:MOSBLOAT reasons: We don't need more rules than we already have (actually need fewer of them), most especially style rules, which are subject to more dispute than any other kind. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:01, 31 January 2024 (UTC)]
- Never mind; I reverted my own close and left a more detailed note about why this is off-topic. Nothing was wrong with closing it, but I'm tired of lame arguments. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:03, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:WikiProject_Plants#Article_advice is mostly stuff that should go into a MOS, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Template is guidance about what should go into a plant article (although it is certainly not obvious that "Template" refers to that). Plantdrew (talk) 21:43, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
- — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:50, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:WikiProject_Plants#Article_advice is mostly stuff that should go into a MOS, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants/Template is guidance about what should go into a plant article (although it is certainly not obvious that "Template" refers to that). Plantdrew (talk) 21:43, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
|
The Barnstar of Diligence |
| For noting that unencyclopedic detail was inserted into the Brunswick Corporation and taking prompt action, exemplifying scrutiny, precision and community service! gidonb (talk) 14:39, 2 February 2024 (UTC) |
- Also an opportunity to still thank for your support for the NEC Nijmegen rename! gidonb (talk) 10:10, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- Didn't even remember that one. I comment in lots and lots and lots of RM discussions. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:17, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- Yes, we usually look forward and there is always so much to do on WP. After identifying someone as a good candidate for a barnstar, it can be fun to see how you collaborated. For example. gidonb (talk) 10:41, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- Ah yes! I did come closer to ArbCom election, twice, than any other non-admin candidate. I still think we need at least one non-admin in ArbCom, every tranche, since when it is all admins all the time, it's a "who's watching the watchmen?" problem. But I'm unlikely to run again. Me being one of main shepherds of MoS (and thus a blockader of constant attempts to change it willy-nilly to suit people's personal writing-preference pecadillos) means there will always be a large contingent of editors angry with me, so I'm ultimately just never going to be a suitable candidate. Someone else who does entirely non-controverial work around here should run. Besides, I really don't have time for it now. In that era, I did. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:09, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- Well, at least you tried!!! In my 20+ years as a Wikipedian I have never submitted myself to anything, or any article I wrote, though there were times I ran into cool historical stuff during my research. Belgian province of Luxembourg, you joined me, and we went down in flames. Since then the standards have been changed, making such a move virtually impossible. Over the years at WP, through trial and error, I have learned to put the stuff that does come your way without asking (I was always happy it did) more front and center so people write to you, at least on average, more focused on content and at a more pleasant tone. gidonb (talk) 16:07, 3 February 2024 (UTC)]
- A pleasant tone is rare in style matters, for reasons. Because every single editor detests at least one line item in MoS, and I get in the way of them forcing a change to suit their preferences (which would just turn into years of slow revert-warring with others who have different preferences), some subset of editors are perpetually pissed off at me. It's just how it goes. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:50, 3 February 2024 (UTC)]
- I sure see that you deal with a lot of unpleasantness on your talk page. Take a look how my talk page starts every year and see if this will work for you. I really hated all this negativety poured over me and it has become much less since I use this system. Just a friendly tip of something that works for me, for someone who deserves better! Thanks again for all that you do and until the next collaboration! gidonb (talk) 01:40, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
- Which diff am I looking for? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:25, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
- It's not a diff. Look at your LI and give me a call sometime ;-) Take care! gidonb (talk) 02:36, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
- Ah, I see: big pile of barnstars. :-) LI? LinkedIn? I don't go there very often, but will stop in. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:08, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
- It's not a diff. Look at your LI and give me a call sometime ;-) Take care! gidonb (talk) 02:36, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
- Which diff am I looking for? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:25, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
- I sure see that you deal with a lot of unpleasantness on your talk page. Take a look how my talk page starts every year and see if this will work for you. I really hated all this negativety poured over me and it has become much less since I use this system. Just a friendly tip of something that works for me, for someone who deserves better! Thanks again for all that you do and until the next collaboration! gidonb (talk) 01:40, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
- A pleasant tone is rare in style matters, for
- Well, at least you tried!!! In my 20+ years as a Wikipedian I have never submitted myself to anything, or any article I wrote, though there were times I ran into cool historical stuff during my research.
- Ah yes! I did come closer to ArbCom election, twice, than any other non-admin candidate. I still think we need at least one non-admin in ArbCom, every tranche, since when it is all admins all the time, it's a "who's watching the watchmen?" problem. But I'm unlikely to run again. Me being one of main shepherds of MoS (and thus a blockader of constant attempts to change it willy-nilly to suit people's personal writing-preference pecadillos) means there will always be a large contingent of editors angry with me, so I'm ultimately just never going to be a suitable candidate. Someone else who does entirely non-controverial work around here should run. Besides, I really don't have time for it now. In that era, I did. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:09, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- Yes, we usually look forward and there is always so much to do on WP. After identifying someone as a good candidate for a barnstar, it can be fun to see how you collaborated. For example. gidonb (talk) 10:41, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- Didn't even remember that one. I comment in lots and lots and lots of RM discussions. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:17, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
Hi, I would like to bring this problem to your attention. The behaviour of this user seems strange to me; for example you, and I trust you very much, put vecchio in italics, why then did I, who followed the same logic, according to this user get it wrong? However, I follow the indications of a very famous and renowned English dictionary, so I'm not using italics at random. JackkBrown (talk) 03:24, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- Please use the preview feature before saving. You hit me with ten "new message" notices, to just leave a two-sentence note. I've responded to the issue over at Eric's talk page. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:53, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- @SMcCandlish: sorry for the notifications. And what about my question? The fact that, for example, on the vecchio page, the italics is correct, and on the pages that this user has modified he claims that it's incorrect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Eric), even though I have consulted the English language dictionaries and these foods aren't present? I really don't understand... JackkBrown (talk) 03:59, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- And now four more "new message" notices, for another short comment. Compose what you want to say. Re-read it. Save it when you are done with it. Please. I've already addressed the substantive matter at Eric's page. In short: the italics are not needed in this case, because "Parmesan cheese" or just "Parmesan" for short is an entirely assimilated term in English. Parmigiano Reggiano probably is not, though I'm not certain that would be capitalized that way in Italian; I suspect it owuld be parmigiano reggiano because most Latin-derived languages do not capitalize adjectives derived from proper nouns (I have not studied Italian in any depth, though). Vecchio would be italicized because that is not a term used in English, except in highly specialized material about Italian theatre. And again, "italicized" in this particular context means "marked up with
{{lang|it|...}}which produces the italics and also does language encoding". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:25, 3 February 2024 (UTC)- @SMcCandlish: but I'm not referring to "Parmesan", which was not in italics before, I'm referring to the fact that he deleted all the other italics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Eric; to "pizzoccheri", "tortelloni", etc., uncommon in English language, according to "Collins Dictionary" and other dictionaries). JackkBrown (talk) 04:29, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- "Tortelloni" is also assimilated into English (or most would think so). Pizzoccheri certainly isn't. But I'm not going to get into a big dispute about this. I warned you a while back that you were likely to run into conflict with other editors if you choose to focus your attention on italicizing Italian terms in English, and here it has happened as predicted. And you're still re-rediting and re-re-editing every comment you make on a talk page. I edit-conflicted with you twice trying to respond, and nothing you've added to your original post was necessary in the first place. Please stop doing that. It's one thing if you need to correct an error, but you seem to have great difficulty for some reason in just making your point and posting it, instead of making one third of your point, then posting that partial thought immediately for no reason, only to make another partial point a moment later, then another partial point another moment later, and so on. It's quite frustrating. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:39, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- @SMcCandlish: "tortellini" is assimilated in the English language, but not "tortelloni". JackkBrown (talk) 04:41, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- In any case, he didn't delete my edits because he thought these terms were common, he claimed that "We don't italicize the term that is the subject of the article throughout the article", absolutely NONSENSE (User talk:Eric#Problem), he also deleted the italics that had already been there for some time (on "pecorino romano"); I repeat, he did this for his own interests, not for a question of known or unknown, he didn't speak of this. In any case, yes, it's difficult for me to express my ideas, because I'm not listened to (by you yes, but by others almost never). JackkBrown (talk) 04:47, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- And now seven more "you have a message" notices from you. What is the problem here? Why can you not just compose a message, think about it for a moment and re-read it a couple of times, edit it as needed, THEN post it, and leave it alone? Both "tortellini" and "tortelloni" are common enough in English. "We don't italicize the term that is the subject of the article throughout the article" is obviously not correct for terms that are foreignisms in English. But what he might have been meaning to say is something like "This term has not been italicized throughout the article, so it should not have been italicized by you in this particular spot." I'm not really sure, and do not have a lot of incentive to get involved in this dispute over trivia. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:26, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- @SMcCandlish: that's fine, but it's very bad that every little mistake I make (I make very few and correct them if I can) is made out to be a huge thing, and that instead really problematic users like him are left alone. There's no unequal treatment, I'm fed up. I have given so much, too much, to this encyclopaedia, and in return I have only received criticism, some of it constructive. Good night and excuse me. JackkBrown (talk) 05:48, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- This may not be a good hobby for you if a disagreement about italics or capitalization makes you think someone else is "really problematic". We do not need to have a battleground about such matters. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:04, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- @SMcCandlish: that's fine, but it's very bad that every little mistake I make (I make very few and correct them if I can) is made out to be a huge thing, and that instead really problematic users like him are left alone. There's no unequal treatment, I'm fed up. I have given so much, too much, to this encyclopaedia, and in return I have only received criticism, some of it constructive. Good night and excuse me. JackkBrown (talk) 05:48, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- And now seven more "you have a message" notices from you. What is the problem here? Why can you not just compose a message, think about it for a moment and re-read it a couple of times, edit it as needed, THEN post it, and leave it alone? Both "tortellini" and "tortelloni" are common enough in English. "We don't italicize the term that is the subject of the article throughout the article" is obviously not correct for terms that are foreignisms in English. But what he might have been meaning to say is something like "This term has not been italicized throughout the article, so it should not have been italicized by you in this particular spot." I'm not really sure, and do not have a lot of incentive to get involved in this dispute over trivia. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:26, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- "Tortelloni" is also assimilated into English (or most would think so). Pizzoccheri certainly isn't. But I'm not going to get into a big dispute about this. I warned you a while back that you were likely to run into conflict with other editors if you choose to focus your attention on italicizing Italian terms in English, and here it has happened as predicted. And you're still re-rediting and re-re-editing every comment you make on a talk page. I edit-conflicted with you twice trying to respond, and nothing you've added to your original post was necessary in the first place. Please stop doing that. It's one thing if you need to correct an error, but you seem to have great difficulty for some reason in just making your point and posting it, instead of making one third of your point, then posting that partial thought immediately for no reason, only to make another partial point a moment later, then another partial point another moment later, and so on. It's quite frustrating. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:39, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- @SMcCandlish: but I'm not referring to "Parmesan", which was not in italics before, I'm referring to the fact that he deleted all the other italics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Eric; to "pizzoccheri", "tortelloni", etc., uncommon in English language, according to "Collins Dictionary" and other dictionaries). JackkBrown (talk) 04:29, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- And now four more "new message" notices, for another short comment. Compose what you want to say. Re-read it. Save it when you are done with it. Please. I've already addressed the substantive matter at Eric's page. In short: the italics are not needed in this case, because "Parmesan cheese" or just "Parmesan" for short is an entirely assimilated term in English. Parmigiano Reggiano probably is not, though I'm not certain that would be capitalized that way in Italian; I suspect it owuld be parmigiano reggiano because most Latin-derived languages do not capitalize adjectives derived from proper nouns (I have not studied Italian in any depth, though). Vecchio would be italicized because that is not a term used in English, except in highly specialized material about Italian theatre. And again, "italicized" in this particular context means "marked up with
- @SMcCandlish: sorry for the notifications. And what about my question? The fact that, for example, on the vecchio page, the italics is correct, and on the pages that this user has modified he claims that it's incorrect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Eric), even though I have consulted the English language dictionaries and these foods aren't present? I really don't understand... JackkBrown (talk) 03:59, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
"at 85", "at age 85", "at the age of 85", etc.
@
Probably something to get at a library (perhaps through inter-library loan) unless you have access to such material via some kind of institutional account. It's one of those stupid-expensive academic volumes, at US$138. My own n-grams showed broad usage distribution when it came to the age phrasing. The thread's now archived at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 227#Aged etc, but in summary: it's probably good that we did not get toward instituting some "rule" about this, based on anecdotal speculation about what sounds best to any of us. Best left to editorial discretion at a particular article (even a particular sentence, e.g. one might have an early sentence use the long form and a later sentence use one of the shorter ones to avoid unnecessary repetitive verbiage). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:08, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
- I think you nailed it early on, with your bracketed comment “each of them works better in different sentence structures”. There may well be national differences in which formulations ‘feel’ more natural in different contexts, but if we were able to nail them down precisely at WP, we ourselves would be writing books for $138 a time. MapReader (talk) 05:21, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
- I actually started writing a Style Guide for English with a Global Audience in the 21st Century (among other working titles), and years later it's only fractionally done (60,000 words). Writing a serious book takes tremendous discipline and focus (which would mean largely abandoning WP for a long period of time) to do all the research and then actually synthesize it into something useful. I do have co-authorship of one book under my belt, but honestly it was mostly assembled by the other author, from material I'd already written in the course my "day job". Writing comprehensive non-fiction from scratch is really challenging. I'll probably finish one on the history and politics of tartans and Highland dress before I finish the style book. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:16, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
Title caps question
Greetings, SMcCandlish! Hey, here's a title caps question for you. Shouldn't "
P.S. The reason I'm asking is that I'm planning on creating an article about Sitting On Top of the Blues, an album by Bobby Rush, and I want to use the appropriate capitalization for that. — Mudwater (Talk) 19:54, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
- @Mudwater: It's on, since this is a prepositional phrase with a noun referent (on + top) which in turn is modifying another prepositional phrase with another noun-phrase referent (of + the world/blues). It's not a compound preposition like out of (a chaining of two prepositions into a new meaning; sometimes these completely fuse, as in upon, onto, into, within, without, and the Northern British equivalent of the latter, outwith, picked up from the Scots language, plus some vernacular spoken English novelties like outta; others do not fuse, e.g. "out in[to]", "from around", etc., as in "going out in[to] the world", "reaching from around the side"). Rather, "on top of" (a contraction of on the top of) has top which is a locational noun, not a preposition. That is, it's an obscured prepositional phrase with a noun object, not a compound preposition. There are lots of these (some more common in one dialect than another): "going out back", "moving up front", "coming from behind" (with "behind" in its locational noun sense, not the prepositional use in a phrapse like "stand behind the line"). This particular "on top of" case is confusing because it's become a stock phrase, and may be on the way to evolving into a compound preposition (some fused examples of that process would be inside, outside, alongside, contractions from longer Middle English phrases that used side as a noun). One could say "going out back on Sunday", "moving up front in time with the others", "coming from behind out of nowhere", etc., and similarly juxtapose two prepositional phrases with the first modifying the second, as in sitting on top of the world, but they don't form customary collocations like "on top of". There are a few other such collocations, like "in front of", "at/in the front/rear/back/side of", but treated as any other prepositonal construction in a title: "Go to the Back of the Line", "Alone in Front of the Jury". (In a few hundred years, may have a fused novel preposition, infronta.)
So anyway, "Sitting on Top of the World" and Sitting on Top of the Blues are what to use. Broad advice that serves well on virtually all style questions: If there's any doubt, presume it's poorly founded and just follow the most applicable general MoS rule, as a default. (If you think some codified exception to it might apply but are not sure, presume it does not.) If you skirt the rule based on subjective doubt, it invites unnecessary dispute which would likely not arise otherwise. Put another way, if you can imagine some doubt, leave it to someone else with a bee in their bonnet about it to make the case that the doubt is well-founded and that an exception applies or should be made. Don't do the work for them (you'll find it thankless, since such propositions always meet with objection from others). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:24, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
"Template:R from project" listed at Redirects for discussion
The redirect Template:R from project has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 February 20 § Template:R from project until a consensus is reached. —a smart kitten[meow] 00:16, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Nomination for deletion of Template:Blockquote paragraphs
Template:Blockquote paragraphs has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 12:40, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
February thanks
 | |
| story · music · places |
|---|
Thank you for improving quality articles in February. - The image, taken on a cemetery last year after the funeral of a distant but dear family member, commemorates today, with thanks for their achievements, four subjects mentioned on the Main page and Vami_IV, a friend here. Listen to music by Tchaikovsky (an article where one of the four is pictured), sung by today's subject (whose performance on stage I enjoyed two days ago). -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:37, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
more music and flowers on Rossini's rare birthday --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:14, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
Feedback requests from the Feedback Request Service
Notice of noticeboard discussion
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Jessintime (talk) 19:20, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
- Seriously? You're going to start an AN thread and make an evidence-free bad-faith accusation, all because you're not getting your way at an essay about the disrutiveness of style-warrior behavior? Really? Every heard of using the talk page? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:39, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
Spectacles in photograph
They're at least one size too big for you. Tony (talk) 03:20, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
- I like 'em big and nerdy. The frames mostly keep out of my vision. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:26, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
- Reason endorsed. Tony (talk) 04:05, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
- Especially important with an ultra-wide monitor! Mine visually fits more or less perfectly within my periperhally visible frames. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:29, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
- Yer talkin' to someone who did a PhD in perhiperal vision. :-) Tony (talk) 23:00, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
- Ah so! I especiall like this pair for the movies, too; I can get the whole screen in without having to move to the back rows. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:59, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
- Yer talkin' to someone who did a PhD in perhiperal vision. :-) Tony (talk) 23:00, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
- Especially important with an ultra-wide monitor! Mine visually fits more or less perfectly within my periperhally visible frames. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:29, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
- Reason endorsed. Tony (talk) 04:05, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
More for Dahua Technology
Hi, SMcCandlish. Thanks for your previous help with adjusting inaccurate terminology on the Dahua Technology page. In an effort to update the article, I put up a new request on the Talk page and thought you may want to have a look. Happy to hear your thoughts. Thanks, Caitlyn23 (talk) 20:10, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
- Hi, I just wanted to check in again in case you may have missed my message. If you have time to take a look at my recent edit request on the Dahua Technology Talk page, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you, Caitlyn23 (talk) 16:22, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
Notice of Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard discussion
Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at
MOS:LINK question
I know we haven't always seen eye to eye on certain items, but you're easily one of the most knowledgeable editors out there about MOS matters and I respect your point-of-view. My question is about
- @WT:MOSINFOBOX. History that occurs to me is that WP's infoboxes actually originated as a form of navigation, and were first implemented at articles that were part of a series on related subjects. They were only later generalized to other sorts of articles because their features were thought useful. Given the level of discord that arises about infoboxes, I'm hesitant to say more, ha ha. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:41, 24 February 2024 (UTC)]
- Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Yes, this is in regards to linking to a separate related article like Alec Guinness on stage and screen. I don't think it makes sense if the link goes to a section of the article. Nemov (talk) 20:11, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
- Hope it helps one way or another. I know it's not a simple answer, but at least WT:MOSINFOBOX is clear as the venue for where to seek clarification, propose some advice/limits/practices, etc. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:23, 25 February 2024 (UTC)]
- Hope it helps one way or another. I know it's not a simple answer, but at least
- Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Yes, this is in regards to linking to a separate related article like Alec Guinness on stage and screen. I don't think it makes sense if the link goes to a section of the article. Nemov (talk) 20:11, 24 February 2024 (UTC)
Feedback request: Language and linguistics request for comment
DoneFeedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
DoneFeedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment
DoneFeedback request: Resisting AI
Hi, done some work on the page, added more reviews, noted your kind edits, would you please give a second look. I sincerely think this work is noticeable and feed into a very present discussion on AI; the book is very opinionated, and perhaps this is the reason why its Wikipedia page reads as opinionated, though I did my best to maintain a neutral point of view. Thanks Andrea Saltelli Saltean (talk) 17:33, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
- @Saltean: I worked it over a bit more, and removed most of the cleanup tags, since the tone has vastly improved. But nothing's going to resolve the notability issue when most of the sourcing is interviews and non-notable websites written by random schmoes, and what's not is mostly rote reviews that don't indicate the work has lasting significance. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:37, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
MOS:Bio query - naming UK High Court judges in ancillary articles
Hey,
Does
- @WP is not advice on the etiquette of how to best do that (though the form of direct address arguably might be coverable somewhere in the article on the general sort of title). The only way to resolve that mess is probably going to be with a VPPOL-level RfC. I don't relish it, because it's going to be yet another instance of topical specialists in conflict with general MoS rules, and that almost always leads to heat and drama. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:02, 3 March 2024 (UTC)]
"Justice Gwynneth Knowles" or whatever would be appropriate, when it's necessary to indicate that they're a justice, but after that's established, just "Knowles" would usually work.
Awesome, I'll make that change in a moment.- It might be helpful if some direct guidance on this could be added somewhere in the MOS? It's not clear from the plain reading of CREDENTIAL or HONORIFICS how to handle this specific type of name (UK High Court justices) in practice. Quite a lot of them tend to be allowed to use The Honourable or The Right Honourable honorifics, and while those are generally excluded outside of their own biographies it's unclear how that also interacts with the Justice title. Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:13, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
- In theory MoS could be clearer on this, though it may take a little research. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:51, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
Feedback request: Religion and philosophy request for comment
DoneFeedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment
DisregardBooks & Bytes – Issue 61
The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 61, January – February 2024
- Bristol University Press and British Online Archives now available
- 1Lib1Ref results
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:32, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
Nomination for deletion of Template:Lang-ang/doc
DoneTemplate:Lang-ang/doc has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 08:42, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
Reminder
Per this AE report you are formally reminded to remain civil in MOS discussions, that you remain under sanction, and that civility applies everywhere on Wikipedia. I expect that if you end up at AE again the result will be significantly more severe. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 23:45, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
- @ScottishFinnishRadish: Noted, but please beware of presumtion of guilt, which your notice is heavily laced with. Anyone may "end up at" AE, AN[I], or any other noticeboard, with various accusations made against them which may not be true.
In particular, in this case I demonstrated that while I had displayed some civility issues, many of the accusations were false, especially with regard to "assuming bad faith", which I provably did not do, and which is what my sanction actually pertains to, not incivililty. "Assuming bad faith" and "incivility" are not in any way synonymous. I would expect that an AE admin would understand all of this deeply and clearly. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:55, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
Feedback request: Religion and philosophy request for comment
DisregardMarch thanks
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| story · music · places |
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Thank you for improving article quality in March! - I uploaded Madeira vacation pics (from back home, at least the first day) and remember Aribert Reimann. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:57, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
JOBTITLES
Just so I don't get it wrong...I'm fixin' to move
- Definitely lower-case, since it's a generic job-title. The third bullet over there suggests capitalizing a unique role/office/whatever title as the subject itself of its own article (and, one supposes, in sentences in the same vein, e.g. "the office of Minister of Silly Walks was created in 1970"), and even this is iffy, because it's at least conceptually contradictory with everything else in the section. But it doesn't mean to do this with generic job titles like "chief operating officer" or "professor" or "animal control officer". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:12, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Help needed for page Roman Science: Origins, Development, and Influence to the Later Middle Ages.
DoneApologies for intruding - I stupidly created this page with a dot in the title, and do not know how to remove it.
- @Saltean: Fixed that for you. You should have been able to use the "Move" function to do this, as I did. Where it is and what it's called will vary depending on which skin you are using and which gadgets or other scripts you have installed (for me, it is in the top menu, as Page > Move, but I'm not sure that's the default appearance, and in some situations it might be just in the main menu and not under a "Page" submenu, and in some it might be named something like "Move page" or "Rename"). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:00, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks, also for your extensive work on the page. Andrea Saltelli Saltean (talk) 16:21, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
- You're welcome. I do so much grammar, citation formatting, and other minor-cleanup fixing that I have a lot of it on "auto-pilot", pretty much. Various scripts I've installed (and in some cases written) tend to help with it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:17, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks, also for your extensive work on the page. Andrea Saltelli Saltean (talk) 16:21, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
Possible farewell
Hello SMcCandlish. I am about to start an arbitration request. I don't have high expectations and I am even thinking I may get an indefinite block as boomerang, but it is something I have to address. I hope I don't get blocked and I may not get an indefinite but just in case I wanted to highlight my appreciation for the time you have taken in responding to my queries in a detailed and quality manner. Sincerely, Thinker78 (talk) 05:19, 28 March 2024 (UTC)
- @WP:DRAMA doesn't discourage you from continuing. Sometimes it is good to take a break after such things, though. Either entirely, or just mostly. I've done both many times, and am in the middle of one of the latter for the most part, after a recent pillorying at AE. Finding other stuff to keep me busy, including a lot of reading, and baby steps towards learning another language, via Duolingo and some other materials. I've barely been checking in here, for a few weeks now, and it's been a nice change of pace. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:15, 28 March 2024 (UTC)]
- Well, I see that ANI did act (with a community ban), but not on that request so much as all the followup after it. I guess you get a break mandatorily now. I would think that after 6 mo. or so, an appeal would be successful if you do it right. There's no question that you're generally a productive editor; something just snapped recently, and needs repairing. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:05, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
One more academic reference for the page on "Resisitng AI "
Hi! I continue monitoring for new pieces treating McQuillan's Resisting AI as they appear, and one just came out in the International Journal of Communication 18(2024), Book Review 967–970; see the text here.
Could the notability warning be removed? Thanks for your help and Happy Easter. Andrea Saltelli Saltean (talk) 17:22, 31 March 2024 (UTC)
- Will look into it as time permits, but I have a lot going on right now. In the interim, it would not hurt to look for more, via scholar.google.com, scholar.archive.org, and if you qualify for it, by getting an account at WP:The Wikipedia Library (apply at https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/) and using its resources to search through journals that are not available via the other means (see here for a list of the research materials available; it's impressive). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:22, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks, I use Wikipedia Library. I got it after the one thousand edit I think. Good also for research. Best! Andrea Saltelli Saltean (talk) 06:53, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
- Found one more citation and added it. This book really appears to be having an impact. A test: Google Scholar for "resisting AI" for 2023 gives 124 citations, for 2024 40 citations ... wish my own papers has such a rate of growth. Best Andrea Saltelli Saltean (talk) 08:33, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
- ... and two more citations from academic articles added today. Best Andrea Saltelli Saltean (talk) 10:51, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
References in parenthesis
Hi SMcCandlish. Sorry it seems easier to ask than find the relevant sections of MOS, but should reference be in inside or outside parenthesis (when used in article text)? Blah blah (Blah[1]),...
Seems logical but Blah blah (Blah)[1],...
looks more in keeping with the way articles are styled. I'm betting it's covered somewhere, but I couldn't find anything at
- @ActivelyDisinterested: This is covered at Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Punctuation and footnotes. Once in a long while, there is minor dispute about this exact side point, and some editorial discretion is clearly tolerated in practice, though there's a pretty obviously logic to follow. Below, I've tweaked your example text for clarity, by putting distinct text in the parenthetical part. (However, Blah blah (yak)[1],... wouldn't be right, either way; rather:
Blah blah (yak),[1]...
, since superscripted footnotes always come after the comma, or semicolon, or period/full-point.)My personal take on this, and what I seem to observe in frequent use, is to do
Blah blah (yak),[1]...
if the citation covers the entire parenthetical. In such a circumstance,Blah blah (yak[1]),...
andBlah blah (yak),[1]...
are actually logically equivalent, and a lot of editors prefer the appearance of the latter. Also useBlah blah (yak),[1]...
if the citation covers both the parenthetical and the rest of the sentence that precedes it, obviously. When it doesn't, we'd be more expectingBlah blah[1] (yak[2]),...
orBlah blah[1] (yak),[2]...
. But always doBlah blah (yakkety[1] yak[2]),...
, or more fullyBlah blah[1] (yakkety[2] yak[3]),...
, any time the citation covers only part of the claim in the parenthetical.That MoS section should probably be updated to say something like what I just did (but more concisely), to better reflect actual practice, and to not require
Blah blah (yak[1]),...
in circumstances for whichBlah blah (yak),[1]...
is directly equivalent. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:57, 1 April 2024 (UTC)- Thanks SMcCandlish. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:39, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
New Pages Patrol newsletter April 2024
Hello SMcCandlish,
Backlog update: The October drive reduced the article backlog from 11,626 to 7,609 and the redirect backlog from 16,985 to 6,431! Congratulations to Schminnte, who led with over 2,300 points.
Following that, New Page Patrol organized another backlog drive for articles in January 2024. The January drive started with 13,650 articles and reduced the backlog to 7,430 articles. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 1,340 points in this drive.
Looking at the graph, it seems like backlog drives are one of the only things keeping the backlog under control. Another backlog drive is being planned for May. Feel free to participate in the May backlog drive planning discussion.
It's worth noting that both queues are gradually increasing again and are nearing 14,034 articles and 22,540 redirects. We encourage you to keep contributing, even if it's just a single patrol per day. Your support is greatly appreciated!
2023 Awards
Onel5969 won the 2023 cup with 17,761 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 50/day. There was one Platinum Award (10,000+ reviews), 2 Gold Awards (5000+ reviews), 6 Silver (2000+), 8 Bronze (1000+), 30 Iron (360+) and 70 more for the 100+ barnstar. Hey man im josh led on redirect reviews by clearing 36,175 of them. For the full details, see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone for their efforts in reviewing!
WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team and volunteer software developers deployed the rewritten NewPagesFeed in October, and then gave the NewPagesFeed a slight visual facelift in November. This concludes most major work to Special:NewPagesFeed, and most major work by the WMF Moderator Tools team, who wrapped up their major work on PageTriage in October. The WMF Moderator Tools team and volunteer software developers will continue small work on PageTriage as time permits.
Recruitment: A couple of the coordinators have been inviting editors to become reviewers, via mass-messages to their talk pages. If you know someone who you'd think would make a good reviewer, then a personal invitation to them would be great. Additionally, if there are Wikiprojects that you are active on, then you can add a post there asking participants to join NPP. Please be careful not to double invite folks that have already been invited.
Reviewing tip: Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages within their most familiar subjects can use the regularly updated NPP Browser tool.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:27, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
Regarding {{sfnref}}
Hello, I updated
- "The most common templates" are most common simply because they came about earlier; using them in most article is not actually compliant with harvp}} should be used instead, except in an article using CS2 or some other means of outputing full citations that don't parenthesize the dates. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:10, 8 April 2024 (UTC)]
Feedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
DoneParts of speech for MOS:CT caps
DoneWe could use your help with 'what', 'which', 'to' (twice), 'in', 'froissés', 'déchirés', and 'like', and perhaps 'papier', at Talk:But what about the noise.... — BarrelProof (talk) 01:17, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
- That's a thorny one. Did my best. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:12, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
Category:Wikipedians who reject a sexual preference label has been nominated for deletion
DoneCategory:Wikipedians who reject a sexual preference label has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Marcocapelle (talk) 06:41, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
"Pepitos" listed at Redirects for discussion
DoneThe redirect Pepitos has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 April 16 § Pepitos until a consensus is reached. CycloneYoris talk! 06:01, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
Feedback request: Economy, trade, and companies request for comment
DoneFeedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
DoneNew page patrol May 2024 Backlog drive
New Page Patrol | May 2024 Articles Backlog Drive
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Feedback request: History and geography request for comment
DoneFeedback request: Society, sports, and culture request for comment
DoneApril thanks
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| story · music · places |
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Thank you for improving article quality in April! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:32, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
Advice
Since you had some lengthy input
- The first is a little concerning, as it fits the "good ol' boys' club" ownership and wikiproject-control pattern evidenced in the original ANI, a notion that only Castncoot and his close topical friends have input that matters. The second doesn't seem problematic to me, as it provides actual reasoning about the quality of the content in question. I'm skeptical this is enough for another ANI, but if it escalates, then a topic-ban seems like a likely outcome, given the evidence I and some others provided before, if there's good evidence the problem has returned, beyond a one-off diff. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:32, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
Greek verb citation forms
An ancient Greek verb ending in "-izein" has the infinitive ending, while "-izo" shows the first person singular present indicative ending. Traditional dictionaries (Liddell and Scott etc) list verbs under the 1st singular form, while for other purposes the infinitve may be preferred. Not sure it makes much difference. AnonMoos (talk) 08:53, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
- Understood, but most readers won't, and are just going to see a conflict between what WP says and what the source cited so far says, so we seem to need two sources, one with -izein forms and one with -izo forms (or the current -izein source and one that says they're equivalent). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:51, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
Books & Bytes – Issue 62
The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 62, March – April 2024
- IEEE and Haaretz now available
- Let's Connect Clinics about The Wikipedia Library
- Spotlight and Wikipedia Library tips
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:03, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
Feedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment
DoneFeedback request: History and geography request for comment
DoneFeedback request: Society, sports, and culture request for comment
DoneFeedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
DoneFeedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment
DoneI have sent you a note about a page you started
Hi SMcCandlish. Thank you for your work on Kailaasa. Another editor, SunDawn, has reviewed it as part of new pages patrol and left the following comment:
Good day! Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia by writing this article. I have marked the article as reviewed. Have a wonderful and blessed day for you and your family!
To reply, leave a comment here and begin it with {{Re|SunDawn}}. (Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)
✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 07:53, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks. I'm glad to see that redirect finally turn into an article that was WP:COATRACK. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:04, 1 May 2024 (UTC)]