This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

July 2018 Information

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Milwaukee Bucks. Legobot ( talk) 04:28, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

 Fixed

There's an oddity in the {{ Alexandre Dumas}} template, which shows the visible title fine, and how it appears on the Alexandre Dumas page. You broke Wikipedia. Randy Kryn ( talk) 22:41, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Damn, my vandalism got caught! It was the new-ish requirement to add |nocat=y to the {{ lang}} template when it's used inside a container like a link, an image caption, etc. Pain in the butt. I guess it's an okay trade-off, given the other improvements (e.g. auto-italicization of foreignisms in Latin scripts). I want to see if there's some way to get around this problem. I note that collapsible navboxes have a way to detect the presence of more of them on the same page and auto-collapse when several are present. I would think that the same technique could be used to detect whether a category has already been applied or at least whether the same template is already in use on the page. Also thought of a more robust bot solution; have raised this issue at Template talk:Lang.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:09, 1 July 2018 (UTC); revised: 23:26, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Comma-Jr. again

PS: I see you're back on the warpath for "comma-Jr." I'm trying not to be too harsh about this, but it's really getting tiresome, especially now that you're trying to inject the comma into names that don't use it, e.g. at James Gordon Jr.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:09, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Your tech post lost me early on. Tech and myself quit speaking to each other long ago. Nope, not me on warpath. I'm not the editor insisting on keeping the comma off of fictional names, and on the Gordon page (editors are popping into a new comma skirmish's elsewhere too) the wait now is to see if any of our comic wikiproject editors can say if James Gordon, Jr. was presented in the comics with a comma or without. Yes, tiresome, because I thought it was settled long ago that MOS:JR is for biographical naming, not fictional names, which was the last and safe refuge of the comma. So will see what the experts say about the Gordon name. Randy Kryn ( talk) 00:24, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia doesn't care if someone (even lots of someones) used to use a comma in that name; RS are not consistent on it, and the publisher of the Gordon comic doesn't do it, so that's the end of it. Your idea that "fiction = gets a comma" is nonsense that you made up. So it is "MOS:JR is for real biography only"; you're confusing "doesn't apply to spelling of titles of published works when they consistently include the comma" for "never applies to anything but bios". It's just not true. The only comma-Jr. disputations I've encountered in months are the ones you are generating. We also don't care what the comics project editors (I am one!) in particular want; we have site-wide guidelines for the specific purpose of stopping the bifurcation of (and fighting over) style on a topical basis. And, "the last and safe refuge of the comma" is clear demonstration that this is a warpath; you're right back on the same WP:TRUTH / WP:GREATWRONGS / WP:NOT#ADVOCACY campaign to "correct" Wikipedia and "save" the "comma-Jr." style.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:37, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

Nope, Dicklyon is pushing this one by objecting to the name change-back which shouldn't have been moved in the first place. But that needs further input of information. More serious is the discussion at the Steamboat Bill, Jr. talk page, where it seems you and others want to remove the comma from the film title itself (correct me if I'm wrong, maybe I'm mistaken on that). Characters with the ", Jr.", it seems like that issue will have to be discussed somewhere to settle the question, but film titles being allowed to contain the comma are certainly a finished topic, no? Enough for today in either case. You are a comic project editor, that's cool. My editing on comics has tended to be just italic runs. Randy Kryn ( talk) 00:55, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

You're already starting the WP:IDHT stuff, right off the bat. If the publisher doesn't use "James Gordon Jr." and the RS don't consistently impose the comma, then WP doesn't either. The attempt to move the article to a comma version is tendentious "give me comma-Jr. or give me death" nonsense, trying to impose it where even the copyright holder doesn't put it. It's ass-backwards. The Steamboat case shouldn't have the comma, because a) the majority of the copyright holder's own marketing materials didn't use it, and RS that discuss the film don't consistently use it. Same standard we'd apply to anything else. This has been explained to you, today alone, on four different pages.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:00, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

 – I ended up WP:SNOW closing that one.

Hi. I noticed your opinion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 July 2#Category:Anatolian peoples. There is a related discussion here which might be of interest to you. Krakkos ( talk) 11:08, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Will check it out. Thanks.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:29, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Moved to Talk:Sylmar, Los Angeles#Geography boxes

Hello. You once commented on the use of Geographic Nav boxes on the [Pico Union, Los Angeles] talk page.

There is a user who insists on adding them, writing on my talk page: "Hi. I would appreciate your cooperation in retaining the geographic boxes in the logical place where they belong; that is, under Geography. They are not WP:Navboxes as much as they are indicators of where the communities exist in relation to others."

I have once again removed the box from the Sylmar, Los Angeles page. If you could perhaps provide your opinion on the Sylmar Talk page, it would be appreciated. Yours, Phatblackmama ( talk) 16:56, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

This template is for adjacent communities only. Deets at the article talk page.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:53, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Hello SMcCandlish. Your recent edits to Template:Tag are certainly nice improvements. It happens that I was in the midst of working up some coding for an edit request that is now completely broken. I'm not complaining, and will re-work it soon enough, if needed. I thought maybe I could tell you about it, and maybe it's something you could do very easily. It would actually be very appreciated. Right now, {{tag|!--|content=comment}} renders as <!--comment--> where it should, IMHO, render as <!-- comment -->. I had come as far as Template talk:Tag#Template-protected edit request on 29 June 2018 indicates, in case it matters. So if you can actually fix that, with ease, I am asking if you will. If you don't want to do it, that is also fine, I really don't mind re-working it. I enjoy editing templates, but it's not something that I would call easy to do, I'm hoping that it is for you? based on the changes you recently made, I am definitely impressed with the finished product. Thank you.-- John Cline ( talk) 00:49, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

@ John Cline: Before I dig into it, I'm not sure if you're saying a) my change invalidated some of what you're trying to do in earlier work/requests (i.e., broke something); b) my blowing away of the template sandbox to test this clobbered your in-progress work; or c) it's just unrelated and you're asking because I'm active and know that template. In the interim, I'll go look at what you pointed me to.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:54, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Quick test 1: <!--comment-->

Quick test 2: <!--comment-->

Quick test 3: <!-- comment -->

 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:56, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

That's the results I expected; 1 is correct because we didn't tell it to put any spaces there. 2 is lame and annoying, but predictable, due to how our templating language works. There might be some kind of "whitespace preservation wrapper" that can be used to force it to not trim off the whitespace from the submitted parameter; I'm not sure if that happens upon submission or upon receipt of the input. 3 works exactly as expected, but is of course a wee bit tedious.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:59, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Everything you did looks great, and seems to work great. I think it would just mean that I had to modify the coding I had worked up, which I wanted to look at more thoroughly anyway (that's why I placed it on hold), I am not calling a foul in any way. I am only throwing it out there that your skills and knowledge of the template appear to be far ahead of my own, and it may be something that you see as quite easy; which I say, please do. I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if you are already finished doing it. And if you don't want to fool with it, for any reason, it's no problem at all, I don't mind doing it. It just takes me a while to get it done, but that's half the fun. I appreciate you very much and don't mind saying so. Best regards.-- John Cline ( talk) 01:19, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

I'm trying to see if we have some kind of magicword for "preserve whitespace". So many templates have converted to Lua now that the ones I'm checking that do that are no longer in Mediawiki code. Maybe there's a module for doing this.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:22, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

@ John Cline:. No dice so far. On the sandbox page, I put in the 2017 version, saved that; then reverted to your last one. So there's a clean diff between them. (And it's presuming that the code you were working on in the sandbox was only your changes against the 2017 version, i.e. against the version I just added the |link= parameter to). That said, I don't think this is the approach to take, since it would force whitespace where none was submitted in the input, and thus produce incorrect example output when the intent is to be literal. We need to instead figure out how to get it to accept:

{{tag|!--|content= comment }}

and output:

<!-- comment -->

I'll ask around for the best way to do this.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:46, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

@ John Cline: I asked about it at Wikipedia talk:Lua/Archive 7#Preserving whitespace in submitted parameter value.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:57, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much. I agree that the template should faithfully render its output consistent to the input being called through the template. My take on that rendering correlates with the rendering achieved when inserting code from the bottom of the page being edited which I believe uses <charinsert>. If you highlight the word comment, with no whitespace on either side and then click <!-- --> you end up with <!-- comment --> and when you highlight comment with no whitespace on either side and then click <code></code> you end up with <code>comment</code>. This leads me to believe input with no whitspace would render with whitespace. If we highlighted comment with one space on each side and clicked the comment tags we would have two spaces on each side when rendered. I appreciate everything you have done and did not mean to impose on you in any way. I hope that I have not imposed? thank you again.-- John Cline ( talk) 02:47, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

No worries at all. I had actually been wondering about forced whitespace retention in another context anyway, and had forgotten about it, so this was a good memory-jog.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:06, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party. Legobot ( talk) 04:28, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Just a friendly note that <br>, <br/>, and <br /> are all valid in HTML5. See Help:HTML_in_wikitext#br. Cheers! Kaldari ( talk) 23:42, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Kaldari: Using the <br> form breaks syntax highlighting and causes other problems, so it should be avoided anyway. If either version is permissible one but one works better, the latter is preferable and a valid reason to change it.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:14, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

I wasn't aware of any problems caused by the other versions. All 3 work for me with the regular syntax highlighting. Are you using a gadget for that (like wikEd)? Might be worth fixing there rather than in thousands of articles. Kaldari ( talk) 17:35, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Remember the dot's chokes on non-XHTML. WikEd's might also. -- Izno ( talk) 17:57, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

In answer to the question, I use the syntax highlighter available under Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets, along with WikEdDiff, but not WikEd itself. There are multiple SH approaches, some of which are listed at WP:HILITE. The fact that HTML5 has been tweaked to support some lazy syntaxes doesn't mean that WP should use them when more complete ones produce better results. Same goes for our own xtag stuff; e.g., <ref name="Foo" /> is both more usable by more tools (anything that can parse XML) than <ref name=Foo/>, and more future-proof. If someone changes the ref name to <ref name="Foo 2009" />, the refs don't break, while <ref name=Foo 2009/> does. Extreme "compression" of our wikisource is not a goal in and of itself. Not when it affects human readability of the code, editor (or editor-tool) use of the code, or WP:REUSE of it.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:32, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Kaldari and Izno: PS: To clarify, the syntax highlighter problem isn't that <br> isn't detected at all, it's that it's detected as an open tag for which there is no closure, so everything that follows, even the entire rest of the page, is marked up as if it's content inside a container that starts at that <br>. Now that the recent parser/renderer change has happened, we're seeing new, similar problems, even in the rendered markup. E.g., if you look back in edits on this page you'll see me fixing a missing </small> up near the top of the page. Under the previous engine, MW auto-terminated that (and just about any other unterminated markup) after encountering any markup it didn't think should be inside it, such as ===Subhead. This has suddenly stopped. Any unterminated markup can booger the entire page from the error point on down, and we likely have thousands of actual articles to repair in this regard, nor any easy way to detect them that I know of. For reasons like this, I'm very harsh on "We don't have to code well 'cuz MW will just fix it on the fly for us" arguments. They're specious, lazy, and the the furthest thing from future-proof.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:52, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Hi SMcCandlish. Thanks for your edits on Jimmy White's 2: Cueball. I appreciate the work done (And, I apologies for my poor original editing of the article!) I've recently tried to do some work on the WPA World Nine-ball Championship; as I have been watching back some old Steve Davis matches, and found myself getting quite interested in 9-Ball. The articles are really suffering from a lack of sourcing, mostly due to az billiards being stuck behind a paywall for older materials.

Do you know of any good 9-Ball resources, that I might have missed? I've found a lot of the brackets from the German Wikipedia, but they are only barely sourced. Thanks for your time. Lee Vilenski ^{( talk • contribs)} 09:49, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Lee Vilenski: Nah, you do great content work; not everyone's a geeky code formatter or has MoS memorized. :-). I worked it over top-to-bottom (well, other way around, actually) and resolved every MoS and other nitpick I could find. Then did a complete B-class assessment on it (without that, the projects that use the assessments will still categorize a B-tagged article as C-class). Didn't realize AZB was paywalling these days. That's a shame. It was the one professionally-edited "stats site" that I knew of, and that I have tried in years. Category:Cue sports source templates provides some hints, though some of these are for paper sources. Some of those might be doing more online stuff now. One had back-issues available via some "e-magazine" service, but I dunno what they are doing these days. I have a lot of the paper magazines, but they're in boxes in storage. No idea when I might get to them. I had subscriptions to various of them throughout the late 1990s to around 2014, and I also bought a bunch of used lots of them off eBay, but the collection is very spotty, and I don't have immediate access to it (no room to put them, for one thing). The Billiard Congress of America might actually have some basic stuff, but probably not enough to source brackets, just winners and runners up. Maybe the WPA's own site has something. PS: How much does AZB want? If you want to get access, you might actually try writing to them and asking for a donated researcher account, and make a point of how heavily WP relies on them as a source (i.e., how much traffic we are driving to them). The peeps at WT:LIBRARY should have advice on how to get an information access holder to give out a key.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:26, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

They have membership levels, which I believe after a certain date, the information is hidden for "gold" members ever. I'll take a look. azb want's $2.90/month (So, to me, that's roughly £2); which isn't a lot, but more money than I'm willing to put forward for something outside of my big hobbies. I'll take a look into this though.

Is there much going on with the Cue Sports WikiProject? I know the Snooker one is very active, but there isn't much for Cue Sports, when I checked it out. Is the B Criteria for the project tag intentional? Lee Vilenski ^{( talk • contribs)} 11:44, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Very little going on! Sadly. Intentional: yes. It should be for all projects, otherwise people just slap |class=B on every article they like that isn't a micro-stub without any regard as to whether the criteria are met. In this particular sector, we have lots of BLPs, and lots of WP:OR / WP:V / WP:NFT / WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE problems, as well as confusions between similarly named games, and old wives' tales, and so on, plus not-infrequent attempts by pros to edit their own articles. Some actual assessment is a good thing. No one's "enforcing"; one could assess one's own article, and probably no one would notice. Not a huge deal; the B-class stuff is just the pile of "is any of this ready for GA yet?" material, as well as "I can scratch these off the disasters-needing-attention-badly list". Heh.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:05, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, I was a bit suprised. I know over in England, Pool is mostly a parlour game, but Pool is huge elsewhere; so I thought it would be a super active WikiProject. I know there is a topic "to do" list for the WikiProject, but with the recent proposed changes with the WP:PW MOS, I doubt I'll get to many of this. There does seem to be a lot of the BLPs on the German Wikipedia for the Pool players, however.

I agree about the ratings. There is a huge jump between B and GA, but that can sometimes just depend on the reviewer. Lee Vilenski ^{( talk • contribs)} 13:36, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

True; it's a real mixed bag. Germany: Yes, a lot of great players are coming from there these days (if not from China or the Philippines).  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:28, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

- Indeed. I've just put in a request for more information at the Wikipedia Library, thank you for that. I was really surprised by the state of the WPA 9-Ball Championship article, as it basically just a stub. Lee Vilenski ^{( talk • contribs)} 15:37, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

SMcCandlish - Sorry about bumping an old conversation, but I've organised logins for the azbillard website. I've asked for one for myself, and one for you, and also left the door open for the future if anyone would like one.

If you are interested, you simply need to register at the forums, and let me know the username, and Mike Howerton from the site will activate the user with the additional permissions. Lee Vilenski ^{( talk • contribs)} 08:07, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

So it appears. -- PBS ( talk) 10:16, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

@ PBS: I have several things I want to deal with at that page, like the WP:POLICYFORK from MoS to keep favoring "first major contributor" (i.e., to give various WP:OWNy / WP:VESTED individual editors an illegal WP:SUPERVOTE, against WP:EDITING, WP:CONSENSUS, and other policies) instead of the replacement for it arrived at in an RfC: first post-stub revision (do what the content did, not what the editor says). And undo the idea that people can make up their own citation "style" out of nothing but their butts, and impose it and defend it against all comers no matter how stupid and awful it is (either use CS1, CS2, or a defined citation style from external reliable sources). And get general editor consensus to finally make it clear to the WP:FACTION with a stranglehold on WP:CITE that, yes, the community really does in fact favor templated citations, for objective reasons that trump the template-haters' subjective preferences. And get them to accept that tweaks that neither rearrange the overall code layout in the page (e.g. undoing WP:LDR, or making all cites vertical and so no one can understand the paragraphization in the page any longer) nor affect the visual display for readers, are not covered by CITEVAR. E.g., it's helpful to have a space between |url= and the actual URL, for line-wrapping purposes, but it is not helpful to do this to templates: {{ cite book | title = Foo Bar Baz | first1 = Jimmy Q. | last1 = Snorkelweasel | ... }}; that should be compressed to group parameters and their values: {{ cite book |title=Foo Bar Baz |first1=Jimmy Q. |last1=Snorkelweasel |...}}). And so on. I would take these one RfC at a time, and always at VPPOL. But I also have little patience for drama, so I've been putting it off for years.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:21, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Moved to User talk:Netoholic#MoS

When you say "RFC" on the US use, are you talking about this discussion or something else? -- Netoholic @ 10:18, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Probably. There's been more than one discussion with a thick source-pile like that.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:08, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Using an existing section since its the same topic. Several of your recent talk page comments include WP:ASPERSIONS, both against unnamed "American" editors and about me personally. I'm not going to throw the MOS DS alert up, but I advise you to rethink (and revise) how you address others in these discussions. -- Netoholic @ 08:38, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Way off base. I have a lot of diffs to present about your actions at these pages, and that's best done at your own talk page.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:22, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

SMC doesn't need to be alerted anyway as he was party to the case. -- Izno ( talk) 12:25, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Yes, there izno need to alert him again. E Eng 12:31, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Plus, if you deliver a Ds/alert, you are also automatically self-alerted. I.e., if someone left a {{ Ds/alert|mos}} within the last year, then leaving them another one is a violation of the stern commandments in the template docs to not redundantly re-alert people within that span! WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY has died a pauper.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:37, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Essay idea

 Done

You might consider putting together User:SMcCandlish/Style guides based on this recent comment, seeing as I'm pretty certain you've said the exact same thing multiple times. -- Izno ( talk) 13:09, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Izno: Good idea.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:42, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

That section is not about DS awareness criteria but specific page restrictions. We don't normally add edit notices to pages that are just under basic DS. Doug Weller talk 14:07, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Doug Weller: Oh, I get that. It just re-raises the same question though. If editnotices are "awareness" for that kind of DS [aside from the probably fixable mobile bug], how they can they not be for regular DS? Cognitive dissonance again. I've asked about this in more detail at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests#Further community input on suddenly closed "Motion: Discretionary Sanctions". That is, they were "awareness" before the mobile bug was discovered.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:25, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Wow, your talk page is a popular place!

Quick question about the addition of "(not always fallacious)" to false authority. I think that is correct for a broader appeal to authority fallacy, but it is my impression that this situation is one in which an arguer has specifically invoked the fallacy by referencing someone without the requisite expertise. If I understand it correctly, that should always be fallacious.

Squatch347 ( talk) 14:47, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

It's all the free cookies and beer. Sorry! I just ran out. >;-) On the change at List of fallacies, I'm trying to square it with what our articles say, and that one is strong, like slippery slope, about it not always being fallacious. E.g., on WP we agree that multiple independent high-quality reliable sources that agree with each other so frequently as to form an academic consensus are as close to truth as we're going to get, so citing such an off-site consensus is an argument to authority in the non-fallacious sense: we agree they really are authoritative, and we're not going to bother doing our own original research to prove that they're authoritative on this point. While the argument from authority article wasn't written with WP internals in mind, it's a good illustration of what the article it talking about, right in the lead and onward. It's vaguely possible we should split it into "(fallacy)" and "(principle)" or something, and not commingle the meanings in the same page (and we could also do it for some other cases, like slippery slope), but that would probably be a hard sell. As for the entry in the bottom section of the list, maybe it needs to be worded better. The article on the sometime-fallacy doesn't get into it, but much of science works this way. E.g. we accept that various "natural laws" are so close to true that we base everything else off them.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:55, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Another problem with hyphenated cite parameter keywords is fostering use of hyphen "-" error where "=" is intended, as in the revert to "Text "author-link-L. Frank Baum" ignored. I've studied thousands of cite typos, and noticed how editors tend to overuse "-" as if meaning "=" if there are hyphens nearby. This contagious use of hyphens is also seen with other text repeated nearby, such as writing about name "Arthur" and then misspelling parameter "author=" as "arthor=" or such when the focus is on related spellings or punctuation, such as using underbar "_" in nearby text and then putting "author_link=" or similar underscores in the next cite edited. - Wikid77 ( talk) 16:46, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

The templates auto-detect and report this error; you get a clear red warning when you preview. Whether you want to personally use the hyphens or not isn't an issue; just don't delete them when others do. It's a WP:MEATBOT issue, too.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:21, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:John Taylor, Baron Taylor of Warwick. Legobot ( talk) 04:23, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Resolved

• In this edit you changed the indent to make my comment appear to be replying to MapReader when I was originally not.
• In this set of edits, you placed your reply in a way which makes it look, becuase of the outdent, that EEng is replying to you, rather than IJBall as he intended.

I've fixed #1, but left you #2 to fix EEng's proper threading and in whatever additional way meets your needs (and since you also have to sign a part of it). Honestly, this isn't the first time lately, so I'm going to ask you to never refactor my comments or threading, and instead ask me on my talk page to fix anything of that sort. I'd caution you to be more careful in general as well.. -- Netoholic @ 05:08, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

I saw your revert summary, and trust your judgement on the matter. The post about UNESCO supposedly being a straw man appeared to be direct reply to the post above it: "I am pretty sure a lot of editors would blink if some started spelling out acronyms like UNESCO and UNICEF with lots of dots!" If it wasn't, put it where you like.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:24, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

RE - this - replying here since I do not want to derail the AE thread. ARCA has already been recently asked on Israel/Iran (for which there is a much stronger case than Israel/Turkey to include - Iran and Israel being involved in a major proxy conflict in the past 30 years, some direct conflict, and support for various armed groups) - in May 2018. The ruling was that Israel-Iran is not ARBPIA, unless it involves the conflict directly (e.g. Hamas or Hezbollah). In terms of the restriction - I think Israel/Iran would make sense to be in scope (same problems as ARBPIA). Israel/Turkey is different - there has not been direct conflict yet (and Turkey was allied with Israel for many years prior to Erdogan) - it's definitely a weaker case to make than Iran. I'll also note that the whole Israel/Iran topic area (e.g. Iran's nuclear program and related stuff) is filled with ARBPIA edit notices - that are not enforceable at AE. Icewhiz ( talk) 05:49, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Wasn't suggesting a nationalism-based request, but a religion-based one, since it's more central to the conflict on- and off-site that nationality.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:51, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

It's complex. pre-90s/late-80s this was not religion based - it was very much based on Arab pan-nationalism and religion was hardly a factor on the Arab side (and Israel was allied for non-Arab Islamic states - Iran and Turkey). This, has, however been shifting. In any event - ARCA already ruled on this (in regards to Iran) in May 2018. Icewhiz ( talk) 06:01, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

For DS purposes, we have to deal with what present-day motivations are for edit-warring and other disruption, not what people's parent's motivations might have been for pro/con-Israel sentiment before WP even existed.  :-) ARCA ruled on a scope request to include Iran based on nationalism- and national-conflict-related arguments. I'm suggesting a different kind of scope-change request based on different arguments. If you all don't want to try it, that's up to you. I lack the diffs (or the time to spend finding them) to go there myself.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:06, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Well I agree with you - but it probably would have to be an amendment to the ARBCOM case - which is what they indicated at ARCA. Icewhiz ( talk) 07:23, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Sure. That's what the second "A" in ARCA is.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:30, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

We now have 97 participants.

Be sure to welcome our newest members, BrantleyIzMe, Coffeeandcrumbs, and Nolan Perry, with warm regards.

Work is proceeding apace. We have 2 major thrusts right now: converting the intro sections of portals, and building the components of the one-page automated model...

Converting the intro sections

We need everybody, except those building software components, to work on converting intros. If you have AWB, definitely use that. If not, then work on them manually. Even one a day, or as often as you can muster, will help a lot. There are only about 1,000 of them left to go, so if everyone chips in, it will go pretty quickly. Remember, there are 97 of us!

The intros for most of the portals starting with A through F have already been converted to use the {{ Transclude lead excerpt}} template.

The standard wikicode for the automated intro that we want to put into place looks like this:

{{/box-header|Introduction|noedit=yes|}}
{{Transclude lead excerpt | {{PAGENAME}} | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1}}
{{Box-footer|[[{{PAGENAME}}|Read more...]]}}

That works for most portals, but not all. For some portals it requires some tweaking, and for others, we may have to use a different or more customized approach. Remember to visually inspect each portal you work on and make sure that it works before moving on to the next one.

Be sure to skip user-maintained portals. They are listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Portals#Specific_portal_maintainers.

AWB tips

I've started an AWB tips page, for those of you feeling a bit overwhelmed by that power user tool. Feel free to add to it and/or improve it.

Portal automation

We have some very talented Lua programmers, who are pushing the limits of what we can do in gathering data from Wikipedia's various namespaces and presenting it in portals. Due to their efforts, Lua is powering the selective transclusion core of our emerging automated portal design, in the form of selected article sections that rotate content, and slideshows.

To go beyond Lua's limits, to take full advantage of Mediawiki's API, we are in the midst of adding another programming language to the resources we shall be making use of: JavaScript. The ways that JavaScript can help us edit portals to boost the power of our Lua solutions, are being explored, which will likely make the two languages synergistic if not symbiotic. Research is under way on how we can use JavaScript to make some of the portal semi-automated features fully automatically self-updating, in ways that Lua cannot. Like gathering random members from a category and inserting them into a portal's templates as parameters. Once the parameters are in place, Lua does the rest.

If you would like to get involved with design efforts, or just keep up on them, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

When should we start building new portals?

Well, not at the present time, because building portals is quite time consuming. The good news is that we are working on a design that will be fully automated, or as close to that as we can get. And the new design is being implemented in the portal department's main portal creation template. This means, that not only will portals update themselves, their creation will be highly automated as well. That's the nature of templates. You put them in place, and they just... work.

What I'm getting at here, is that it would be better to wait to build lots of new portals until after the new design is completed. Because with it, instead of taking hours to create a new portal, it will likely take minutes.

That does not mean we should be idle in the meantime. The main reason most of us are here is because it became apparent that portals were largely unmaintained and had grown out-of-date. This had become so apparent that a proposal was made to delete all the portals and the portal namespace to boot. That makes our main objective in the short term to improve all the existing portals so that the community will want to keep them—forever.

Building lots of new portals comes later. Let's fix up the ones we have first. ;)

And on that note, I bid you adieu. Until next newsletter, see ya 'round the WikiProject.    — The Transhumanist   11:37, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Julius Evola. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

"the only hint of any involvement in politics is his having been an Conservative MP (which for most MPs isn't a profession but a digression, from what I gather)." Don't know where you picked that up - he was never an MP, and what you "gather" is no more true of UK MPs than Americans in Congress. Johnbod ( talk) 14:32, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

I'll take your word for it. The HoL in particular seemed to have a lot of people in it who have other, broader lives. The US Senate, by comparison, is almost entirely career politicians, moving up from the House of Reps, and later on to a post in the administration, or an ambassadorship, or state governor, or something else in the same vein. PS: I guess "Member of Parliament" only applies to the lower house. I haven't lived in the UK since I was a kid, and I hadn't absorbed all the nuances by that age. :-)  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:30, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

 – WP:CLUSTERFUCK needs to redirect to that page.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Marketing of electronic cigarettes. Legobot ( talk) 04:24, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

	The Original Barnstar
	For your ongoing and unending effort to tidy up the bureaucracies around the English Wikipedia. Jc86035 ( talk) 05:05, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Jc86035: Grazie! Which one in this case? Heh. So many, so many ...  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:49, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

	Hubi, hubow ubare yubou?
	hubellubo, ubextruba Ububbubi Dububbubi. Uball hubumuban bubeings ubare buborn frubee uband ubequubal ubin dubignubituby uband rubights. Thubey ubare ubendubowed wubith rubeasubon uband cubonscubience uband shubould ubact tubowubards ubone ubanubothuber ubin uba spubirubit ubof brubothuberhubood. ! — Frayæ ( Talk/ Spjall) 10:01, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

I could not resist. Please check Barbled brotula because I may have taken you too literally. — Frayæ ( Talk/ Spjall) 10:03, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Schweet.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:18, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

I guess it's not formal Ubbi Dubbi; I grew up with the version that threw in a lot of l as well as b, which is what triggered my "recognition".  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:20, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

There are lots of variations like arpy darpy and obby dobby (mentioned in that image) and others. I don't know them all though. — Frayæ ( Talk/ Spjall) 10:45, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

file from the Wikimedia Commons File:Official portrait of Lord Taylor of Warwick crop 2.jpg This guy has a black skin. Your edits have changed his race. may be if you tone down the brightness a ilttle, it would have been more realistic. I agree the original image is too underexosed. p.s. you look like Robert Downey Jr. -- DBig Xray 21:38, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

I'll give it another pass, but there really isn't much to work with (with the tools I know how to use). The original is washed out; it was over-lit, then under-exposed and this produces the effect that an increase in contrast will require a corresponding increase in overall brightness to keep the result from looking like it was shot at midnight in a tomb when the contrast is raised. Pics of him on Google images are all over the map in appearance. He doesn't have black skin, literally, of course; he has the skin of someone often called "black", meaning "noticeably of some African descent". No idea what his family background is in detail. Even in Africa, people range widely in tone. Other pics of him show him not all that dark as Afro-Europeans go [1], [2], [3], [4], probably due to similar shot conditions. Others, in low light, make him look notably darker, even with the same woman (his wife) [5], [6]. I'll see if I can produce a more medium result. PS: I'd rather look like Downey than Buscemi, and am neutral on Rhys (his smile's a bit naturally sneery!).  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:06, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

@ DBigXray: File:Official portrait of Lord Taylor of Warwick crop 2 adjusted.jpg as it newly stands is about the best I can do. Any further adjustments just seemed to distort it one way or another (whites of the eyes looking green, blue suit turning purpleish, hair getting red, etc.). You may need to flush browser cache to see the difference between the versions.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:19, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Hello Ironman, May I know what software are you using ? I would say, the current version is still over the top. I just openend lightroom and did some minor tweaks, not far from the original. i updated the RFC and I have voted my own version now. To repeat, I agree that your edits have improved the original pic, but IMHO its making it look more unnatural. hence my own version and !vote. thanks -- DBig Xray 14:01, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

GraphicConverter, by LemkeSoft DV. If my latest attempt still looks "over the top", it's probably a big different in monitor gamma or something. On my system, my newer version is pretty much half-way between my first draft and the original washed-out image. I'll go have a look at yours now.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:09, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

I reduced the blue some more. Apparently the subject isn't happy with his new pic (LOL no one would be). see RFC -- DBig Xray 22:20, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

We have 97 participants.

Getting faster

Automation makes things go faster, even portal creation. One of the components Certes made was {{ Transclude list item excerpt}}. I became curious about its possible applications.

So I worked out a portal design using it, the initial prototypes being Portal:Kyoto (without a "Selected pictures" section), and Portal:Dubai (with a "Selected pictures" section). Then I used Portal:Dubai as the basis for further portals of this type...

I was able to revamp Portal:Munich from start to finish in less than 22 minutes.

Portal:Dresden took about 19 minutes.

Portal:Athens took less than 17 minutes.

Did Portal:Florence in about 13 minutes.

Portal:Stockholm also in about 13.

Portal:Palermo approx. 12 minutes.

Why?

To see, and to show, what may become feasible via automation.

It now looks highly feasible that we could get portal construction time down to a few minutes, or maybe even down to a few seconds.

The singularity is just around the corner. :)

Slideshows

When using the {{ Random slideshow}} template to display pictures, be sure to use the plural tense in the section title: "Selected pictures". That's because slideshows don't show up on many mobile devices. Instead the whole set of pictures is shown, hence the section title "Selected pictures", as it fits both situations.

In case you are curious, here is a list of the portals so far that have a slideshow:

Progress on intro conversions

The intros for most of the portals up through the letter "O" have been converted, using this wikicode:

{{/box-header|Introduction|noedit=yes|}}
{{Transclude lead excerpt | {{PAGENAME}} | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1}}
{{Box-footer|[[{{PAGENAME}}|Read more...]]}}

Where the pagename didn't match the article title for the subject, the title was typed in.

Most of the portals that do not contain {{/intro}} or {{{{FULLPGENAME}}/Intro}} have not yet been processed.

About a thousand portals use the method of selective transclusion for the intro section. That's about two-thirds. That means we have one-third of the way to go on the intro section conversions.

Much more to come...

So much has been happening with portals that I can't keep up with it. (That's good). Which means, more in the upcoming issue. Until then, see ya 'round the project. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   08:21, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

 Fixed

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Chinook Jargon, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Indo-European ( check to confirm |  fix with Dab solver).

( Opt-out instructions.) -- DPL bot ( talk) 09:19, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

It appears from the analysis of topics which do/do not have infoboxes over on the MOS/I talk page that articles that are generally suited to infoboxes are the topics are topics about discrete things. As Johnbod put it in the discussion over at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Infoboxes#Toward_drafting_criteria: The articles suited to infoboxes are about discrete things, whether people, places, taxa, events etc, where the important things to know about the subject are a) the same for other members of that class of thing, b) objective facts that are straightforward to verify, and c) clear and easy to state. The types of articles not suited to infoboxes are those where any of these three factors is not the case, which includes most articles on broader topics and concepts, but also some on things (like people of certain types)."

This is perhaps the comment that I find most important in all of the discussion over there and I think actually might have some potential to be drafted into a proposal with similar wording.

Perhaps something along the lines of:

The above proposal would not necessarily require an infobox for every article about a 'thing', but it would provide some guidance on when Infoboxes would generally be appropriate.

This would generally recommend inclusion of an infobox for most articles that are Biogrophies, but the above proposal would only really require a couple of minor criteria and leave any additional criteria up to the consensus of the page. I wonder if there is a short list of criteria that could be filled in for the vast majority of people. Off the top of my head:

• What the subject looks/looked like: A photo of the subject (if available)
• Birth date (Or approximate if not known definitively)
• Death date (if applicable)
• Profession if it is clear and possible to sum up in a few words, otherwise it may be omitted

Any thoughts on this idea? I'd like to discuss it as a possibility that might be workable, but I believe that there are a lot of refinements that might be made, so ideas toward that would be beneficial. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)} 01:20, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Insertcleverphrasehere: Good first draft, to me. It will never pass if it includes "people" followed by "should generally include an infobox". That is the crux of the entire decade+ debate. So, bios would have to be handled separately, and it would have to be clear that they're the main dispute point when it comes to i-boxes. "Are the same for other members of that class" is confusing; it implies that a) the values are the same, or b) every single member of the class qualifies for the parameter – i.e., if there's a single exception, then either b1) the infobox parameter is invalid for all of them, and/or b2) the infobox is invalid at the exception article. None of that is the intent of course, but people will wikilawyer until they keel over dead. Maybe something like "Are typical aspects of the entire class of subjects", or something like that. I'm not entirely sure "objective facts" would work per WP:TRUTH. Maybe "Are simple facts that are straightforward to verify. And "may also be included in the article body" should use "should also be included"; may is apt to be mistaken for the permission-related may. (I.e., people will wikilawyer that the language means they can remove information from the body and lead because it's in the infobox!) We could add a footnote about special-use infoboxes that present some tabular data not found in the article body, like the full phylogenetic tree provided by {{ Taxobox}}, if we thought it necessary.

On your short bullet list of bio i-box features: People vent all the time that, aside from the image, the other details you mention are already in the lead, "thus" infoboxes are redundant. (This of course ignores that i-boxes are a different form of information architecture, and the actual goal is to make the same information available by other means, but it's an argument they press and press and press.) I don't think a list like this would work. One might be developable over time, but probably only long after we already had a basic list of rationales for an i-box in general, and a note that their use in biographies, particular for certain kinds of subjects, is often debated, and that bios are left out of our lists of "things" on purpose. Should also probably indicate that they're usually not suitable for abstract concepts like Cavitation and Culture and Authenticity (philosophy).

In closing, I would say some of the criteria-related points in the discussion don't seem to have been addressed here. They need not be list items, but some of them could probably be worked into the intro sentence, or included after the 1-2-3 list (not that all of them are great and must be included; rather, I would re-skim the discussion and see if any teaks can get an addition good idea or two or three into this concisely and without loopholes). I think with polish it would be the via proposal to try to move forward with. It would not even really be incompatible with the extended "do nothing" proposal someone drafted toward the end of that sub-thread; they're orthogonal to each other. Eventually (soon) it would need some broader discussion at the main thread. I'm trying to act as a moderator not an advocate throughout and to see both sides (and am fairly neutral on most i-box questions these days). While I'm happy to copyedit and point out potential wikilawyer loopholes ( WP:Writing policy is hard), I don't think I should be too directly involved in shaping this in user talk, as it its intent.
 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:59, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

How about:

Some info-boxes are used as a table of information not found elsewhere in the article, so I think it is best to avoid saying that infobox stuff 'should also be in the body'. My general point is that people often argue "its here so it doesn't need to be there", and this should not be used as an argument.

Let me know if you think this wording works.

I agree that we should avoid Bios for now and exclude them from the proposed guideline. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)} 02:58, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

That looks workable, other than it should be "Non-biographical" not "Non-Biographical".  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:04, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I fixed that, and simplified a bit of the wording in the lower sentence. I feel like we should have something here about when infoboxes should not be used. Perhaps: "Infoboxes should not contain indiscriminate information, and should generally include only important facts about the subject. If there are no clear facts to include (based on the above criteria), the article should be left without an infobox." — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)} 07:25, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

That seems reasonable and gets at one of the points from the discussion. However "should not" will be too strong without the note I already suggested, that in a few cases we have "standard" infoboxes for a few things, which provide features that typical infoboxes do not. E.g., all species articles should have {{ Taxobox}} no matter how stubby the article is. That is, the template in such cases actually provides important facts on its own.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:28, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I think that in the case of taxonomy articles the information generally contained in taxoboxes would be considered 'important' and 'not indiscriminate'. Still How about this:

Is something like this what you were referring to with a 'note'? — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)} 20:14, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Probably. Maybe more like "{{ efn|There are infoboxes that are included as a standard feature in articles in certain categories, such as {{ Taxobox}} for species articles, to provide special features.}}" That makes it about the rationale for doing it instead of injecting a "rule". It's probably the only example needed, though there are several others.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:59, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah I like your wording better. I've changed it above. I also added some examples for the first bullet point. Anything else you think from the discussion page that needs to reflected here that isn't? Otherwise it might be time to take this wording over to MOS/I and see what others think. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)} 04:43, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

• While I am delighted to see my text taken up in this way, I certainly don't think there should be any language like "should generally include an infobox", and this is likely to supper scupper any proposal. Much less prescriptive language like "infoboxes generally suit" should be used. And it is important to balance this with mention of the reverse types which are generally not likely to be suited. It may be politic to omit biographies, although this would be a pity, as it is there that disputes are concentrated, and applying these principles helps to understand why some are objected to and others not (understanding sorely needed by some), and might reduce disagreements where this is most needed. I also don't like changing "objective facts" to "simple facts". What is a simple fact, exactly? Some of the terms used for example in pharma drug infoboxes are very far from simple, but are not in doubt and can be given in one or two words (with a link for the many who won't understand those words). Here, I was mainly targeting the subjectivity or over-simplification that is the root cause of so many humanities infobox disputes: "notable works, influences, movement" - typically the stuff filled in here is at best debatable. Simplicity is really covered by 3). - Johnbod ( talk) 03:37, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

  @ Johnbod and Insertcleverphrasehere: Those are all good points, too. Kind of why I've been hinting in the direction of this maybe being better drafted where the rest of the discussion is at WT:MOSINFOBOX. Toward the bottom of the meta-thread were a series of points, some of which are worth integrating carefully. Given how things have been going, some kind of clear-cut default or checklist looks unlikely to emerge (which is about what I expected), but some good ideas for general guidance, based on actual best-practice-after-debate are emerging, and that's what a guideline is for. :-) Whatever does come out of this should surely be brought to WP:VPPOL (even if that's next week, or next month, or three months from now or whatever), so it get a broader consensus discussion than just the regulars at i-box discussions.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:37, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

I think that's right, bearing in mind that the support for "do nothing" may currently be stronger than the support for anything else. I think some general hints are where infoboxes do and don't work might be acceptable. I also think a statement about the importance of accuracy is needed. Johnbod ( talk) 15:35, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

The "do nothing" people are against an inclusion/exclusion default and against a checklist of criteria, but this doesn't amount of a "pre-consensus" against any offering of any guidance clarifications at all, before they've even been examined. Consensus don't work that way.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:50, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Hi SMcMcandlish. As someone who as bumped into you in various spaces over the years with a generally positive impression resulting, I decided to take a closer look at the scope and caliber of your contributions over the last few days because it has occurred to me that your experience and facility with nuanced policy might make you a good candidate for adminship, especially now that we are seriously hurting for skilled mops. I see from looking into the matter that you had a failed run about eight years back, but it seems as if a majority of the opposes came from concerns about the way in which the discussion was promoted rather than fundamental issues with your qualifications. In any event, you have eight extra years of experience and a truly massive amount of edits to your name in the interim. I wonder if I might encourage you take another run? I can well imagine why you were not in a hurry to go through that again, but I suspect you would be good with the bit. Thoughts? Snow ^{let's rap} 07:40, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

( talk page stalker) While I agree with your sentiments, you could benefit by reading this posting, further up the page (until SMC himself answers himself).-- John Cline ( talk) 08:15, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I only answer myself when the question I ask myself is really intriguing. %-)  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:24, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Considering that my next Wikipedia contribution gave counsel regarding an atheistic manner when I meant an aesthetic manner, I may need to ask myself a few questions.-- John Cline ( talk) 10:43, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps your atheist aesthete has become anaesthetized. That would definitely be my excuse.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:12, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

( edit conflict) @ Snow Rise: I appreciate the vote of confidence, and this comes up multiple times per year, but I dodge the nominations. About a year and a half after my last RfA I saw what adminship did to the editorial productivity of several of my favorite editors (namely brought it to a near standstill as they got mired in drama and drudgery). That actually might be less of a concern to me now than it was; doing a lot of template, policy, and other behind-the-scenes work, I think I've found an okay balance and could probably manage it.

As a practical matter, I'm one of MoS's most active shepherds, which means I've gathered quite an "anti-entourage"; many people get unreasonably angry about typographic peccadilloes. This is why my ArbCom bid last year failed. I got more yes votes than at least two of those who did get elected, but the opposes I got from the "angry about some MoS thing" crowd swung it the other way. I don't see why that pattern wouldn't repeat at RfA. I'm plenty qualified and committed, and people in general would support, but it would almost certainly go to a crat-chat at best, because it requires a strong supermajority to pass. Everyone with any style-related nitpick would come out of the woodwork to take their bite out of me for MoS-, AT-, or RM-related "grievances" from last year or ten years ago.

I also had a reputation as a WP:DICK up until around 2014 or so. While I've seriously moderated my tone since then (and wrote WP:HOTHEADS from that learning experience), the general expectation RfA has today is that admins be all smiles and hand-holding, while I'm a bit on the curmudgeonly side. I also don't have much interest in deletion or blocking/banning, the "sexy" admin stuff; just geeky gnome work. I'm not sure that would be what people want out of an RfA candidate (though it is actually what WP needs more of – we have too many "dramadmins", and way too big of an administrative backlog).
 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:21, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I see--well, it's good to have you on gnome patrol and in policy spaces in any event. For what it's worth, I can't recall running into you in a situation when you seemed short, so if that is something you consciously changed in your editorial philosophy, I would say that you were fairly successful. And I say that as someone who I think gets regarded as a bit of a stuck in the mud when it comes to WP:C. Of course, it's all a matter of contrast and lately I've been thinking lately that Wikipedia has a real hothead problem in its culture right now (I've never read your essay but that's exactly the word that has been stuck in my mind recently. But I digress. I do hope I have the opportunity to give you my support in an RfA some day. Snow ^{let's rap} 09:49, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Honestly, I get an inch/cm closer to it every time someone prods me. If multiple well-respected admins offered to nominate, I might finally consider it again. However, I think people wouldn't like my AfD stats, either. I'm more deletionist than many editors like.
[In particular, I think we have way, way too many articles on bit-part actors. These people are not notable because they landed a few minor TV and movie roles and got some entertainment press coverage; they're just competent. The entertainment press are, collectively, basically not a WP:INDY source, but a cannibalistic CoI factory: They have a direct fiduciary interest in writing articles about TV show people because most of their income is from studio advertising, and more often than not they're ultimately owned by the same mega-corporations as the studios whose shows they're covering. They're a giant distributed house organ. It's like the drummer of the garage band declaring that the guitarist is newsworthy.]
Anyway, thanks for the kind words!  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:16, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

It's the small-time business entrepreneur (usually from the U.S. or India) that always seems to be clogging up AfD to me. But to be fair, it is getting increasingly arbitrary what comes in and what doesn't these days. The SNGs are absolutely out of control. Created in isolated talk pages that function as echo chambers for superfans of the given topic matter, with little to no regard for WP:PROPOSAL--either in pro forma terms or with respect to the spirit of community vetting. They are just so subjective as a class of "guidelines" and the community has just turned a blind eye. Consequence of which is that there are certain areas where the standards are so low that every day they introduce thousands of articles every week which wouldn't have a prayer under GNG. Sport, more than anything. WP:NFOOTY is so permissive that if you once looked sidelong at a football when it rolled past you at a distance of 25 feet, you qualify for an article. By 2020, half this encyclopedia will be a football almanac. Snow ^{let's rap} 13:00, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I hadn't looked at it very deeply but it did seem to me that there we too many such articles on obscure soccer/footy players. I'd been reluctant to get into it, on WP:Systemic bias grounds. For all I know, this footballer is the equivalent of Pelé in his come country; I just wouldn't know. Anyway, part of what I was getting at ties into what you're saying: bit-part actors are not clogging up AfD, because the inclusion criteria have become so lax toward them that they'll almost always be kept, so no one bothers.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:34, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

+1 for support to run. I see you around a lot and while there might have been occasional issues in the past, what I see now is that you are usually sensible and generally able to see both sides of an issue and highlight the fundamental underlying issue. I don't always agree and sometimes I feel quite strongly about it, but I have never seen an argument that I couldn't follow or respect the basis for the point. We need more diversity in the admin corps and your viewpoint would be valuable. Whether your opponents would gang up against a nomination I don't know but I'd co-nominate in a heartbeat if you ran. 12:01, 16 July 2018 (UTC) Spartaz ^Humbug! 12:02, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I appreciate that, and I guess that's one admin in the nom camp. PS: If we've bickered and argued about 'oo killed 'oo in the past, I don't recall any details of it, and it wasn't personal. I tend to mentally flush disputes after a few days, and the only ones that stick in my mind are ones that become recurrent.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:20, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Hello, recurrent here. Do you really want to be an admin? For some reason I think you are here quite a bit anyway, and doing the work of 10 admins without-the-badge, yet have the talents to continue doing what you've been doing on a daily basis while not needing the title. We wrote of this above somewhere when it came up last time, and if you go for it I'll back you 100 percent (until the absolute power goes to your head, which it may in the first 20 minutes once you get a look at the tools in the toolbox). I only ask one thing: that as an admin you destroy that new thing that's popping up every time the "Watch" page is opened, which adds a few seconds to every time it's looked at (see, that's the kind of stuff people will come to you with, and then the moaning about someone-or-other calling someone a bad name, and you'll have to start thinking about the good old days, before-admin). Anyway, nobody can do it better, and you've proved yourself as someone who cares for the encyclopedia above and beyond, and if you ever decide to be an admin I pity the poor fools who try to block you from that new learning curve. And if you do take it on, good luck, and lots of us will have your back. Randy Kryn ( talk) 20:37, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, and I do have User:Sue_Rangell/userboxes/Notadmin on my userpage for a reason. >;-) I'm honestly surprised you feel this way, given the frequency of our clashes on a few matters, but I suppose that my efforts to make MoS/AT matters be about policy/guidelines and sources and not the usual personality clashes that led to things like WP:ARBDATE, WP:ARBATC, WP:ARBINFOBOX, and WP:ARBINFOBOX2, have been working at least a little. I agree with the watchlist problem. I'm trying to figure out which Preferences option is causing it.

As for the bit: I've been resistant to the idea for a cluster of reasons: RFA being a hellhole, adminship seeming to suck the productivity out of editors (though there are some who manage to just do particular, narrow admin things and remain encyclopedists), not wanting the bit just to have it, not needing it for most of what I do (though it would useful for certain things), aversion to dramaboards, lack of faith in the idea that slapping bans and blocks on editors (aside from vandals and trolls) is a good idea except as a last resort, little interest in deletion process, the freedom to call it like I see it without being keelhauled, and the non-admin, everyday-editor perspective of what this site and community are about (being a non-admin was actually part of my "speak to the common Wikiperson" platform as an ArbCom candidate).

I would have to trade off some things to pick up the mop. I consider the idea at all only because there actually is something of a growing administrative crisis, and people prod me about it several times per year.
 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:52, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Glad to hear it's not a done deal, although if you need any new or shiny tools then they should just give them to you without the title. That watchlist gif is getting annoying, and has made my "chemical self" work up the emotion of not wanting to click on the watchlist (which I then work on as an emotion until it dissipates). If we both have it maybe it's not a preference option but a new "improved" feature on all watchlists, in which case somebody has overestimated its usefulness compared to its irritation-factor. No need to be surprised at my support of your work, we've had our go-arounds and will again but an editor would have to be unconscious to be hanging around the back rooms of Wikipedia for awhile and not realize your dedication and contributions to the project. Can't imagine what it would be like without your work (every long-time editor has that "secret knowledge" of what the encyclopedia would be like if their edits never occurred), and someone who has traveled the Wikipedian road you have of course would be an excellent administrator, just that you'd have to judge the trade-offs. Randy Kryn ( talk) 12:39, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Randy Kryn: Well, I have always been a supporter of unbundling more admin tools. Every time we talking about doing it, the opponents scream that all Hell is going to break loose, then we do it, then nothing bad happens. On the watchlist thing: is it just the event-advertising banner at the top of the page? (I think we see different ones; e.g., I see one about a meetup in San Francisco since I live near there). Adding (on a line by itself) #watchlist-message { display:none !important; } to Special:MyPage/common.css (and flushing browser cache, or doing a logout/login) will nuke it (and any future ones). The banner I'm getting has a "[hide]" link, and that also made the current one go away, presumably without affecting later ones. But they keep adding features to the watchlist code, and I'm not convinced all of them are efficient, so some of those may also slow down loading. RfA: I've solicited some badassadmin input below.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:36, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

• Aah, more hounding toward Saint McCandlish about seeking adminship. I remember bothering you about this a while back. North America ¹⁰⁰⁰ 10:19, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

  >Ahem< that's Anti-Pope McCandlish. Heh. I get tapped about this a few times per year. My "Hell no" position on it has been eroding.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:32, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

You may want to look into the Church of the SubGenius for further inspiration, but I'm guessing that you may have already done so. North America ¹⁰⁰⁰ 10:51, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Damned heretics! May Eris bless them.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:56, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Well, if you do decide to give RfA another shot, I strongly recommend first going to a place just like that pictured right and spending a long night of drinking and contemplation there. This will clear out the pipes, so to speak, before any potential RfA stressors. If you go to the bar, you can ponder whether or not adminiship is a "big deal"; "it's no big deal", "well, it is a big deal", "it's sort of a big deal", "nowadays it's a big deal", "it wasn't a big deal before, and isn't now", "it wasn't a big deal before, and is now" ad nauseam. Actually, some RFAs today remind me of the atmosphere at a biker bar.

On a more serious note, I consider adminship to be a relatively big deal nowadays, particularly compared to the early times when all candidates had to do is run, without really having to qualify themselves much. I always exercise deliberate contemplation, caution and forethought before using the tools. For me, it's about precision and performing as accurately and fairly as possible. North America ¹⁰⁰⁰ 11:36, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

I quit drinking entirely about 5 years ago. Reminds me of this sequence. Anyway, yeah, I intend to do a bunch of page-mover and NAC work in the interim.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:17, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Swiss sovereign money referendum, 2018. Legobot ( talk) 04:25, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Seeing yet another issue of The Signpost dwell on the administrative crisis – and perhaps I've just had too much coffee and cookies today – I find myself considering the option for the first time in years.

I might step up if a few of the mega-active admins I've interacted with (in and out of topical agreement) frequently and/or for a long time were in agreement that it'd be a good idea and likely to succeed. If any thought it was a silly and doomed idea, I'd take that into consideration, too. I'm thinking of (in alpha order) Anthony Appleyard, Bishonen, Dweller, EdJohnston, Fuhghettaboutit (mostly on the content side), Kudpung, Nihonjoe, Nyttend, Oshwah, Thryduulf, TonyBallioni, and probably half a dozen others. Do you want me to work with you on that level?

I think I'd focus on particular processes and backlogs like RM-related stuff, WP:RFPP, and especially WP:ANRFC which just drags and drags. While my policy-oriented interests are seen as a detriment by some ("He doesn't have any FAs and his Wikipedia_talk edits are too many"), it would be a solid strength in such areas. I have little interest in "the usual", like deletion and blocking as a regular-editor disciplinary matter (versus vandals and PoV trolls).

I keep trusting that the admin crisis is going to turn out like the alarmist Y2K fears did. It seemed like just some organizational lifecycle hiccup. But it's been going on for years and shows no sign of improving.
 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:09, 17 July 2018 (UTC); clarified: 21:45, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Ad Orientem: PS: I also saw your "we need admins!" post at WT:LEGAL.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:25, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

• I'd personally support. In terms of success, unsure: you're pretty well respected, but also have some old spats from before my time that I'm not as familiar with (and some recentish ones). I'd say it depends on who shows up. Sorry if that isn't more help in terms of odds. TonyBallioni ( talk) 06:13, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
•  Comment: and I thought that you were. Not that I overly hang out in that moshpit anymore, just do my running repairs. I'd support you for your thorough knowledge and level head. People have got to get over spats, and focus on the appropriate, fair use of the tools to carry out the community's consensus. Hopefully we can get to the experience of "they are just tools" for people to do a little more. — billinghurst sDrewth 08:11, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
• I'd support you, despite disagreeing with you on occasion. You can come over a little strong from time to time, but I do not doubt your sincerity or care for Wikipedia and Wikipedians. Your policy knowledge is, from what I've seen, strong, you understand the need for consensus and you clearly have clue. I think an RfA will be uncomfortable for you - you'll get some opposition, maybe substantial opposition - so only go for this if you promise you won't be downhearted if it goes badly, and take the opposes as constructive criticism. If you can assure me on that point, I'd be happy to nominate you. -- Dweller ( talk) Become old fashioned! 08:26, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

  I'll take no offence if you prefer another nominator. My last attempt failed. But this still applies -- Dweller ( talk) Become old fashioned! 08:51, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

  @ Dweller: Thank you, and I can handle it; I just went through an ArbCom election, after all. :-) I think it's an RfA that would require a little management. I'd expect people with some (probably MoS/AT/RM-related) grudge to vent about an argument from 2013 or so, who'd need to be asked if they have issues to raise from within the last year or so. Someone(s) or other who got a {{ Ds/alert}} from me are likely to claim I "attacked" or "harassed" them, and it will need to be pointed out that it's just an awareness notice that isn't even a warning. Or I'll be accused of "not being a content editor" or even being "against content editors" because I was critical of anti-guideline, OWN-ish grandstanding behavior at WT:FAC in late 2016. That kind of thing. The people that don't like me are wiki-political about it, not just fringey spammers or PoV pushers, but largely editors with a very different philosophical position, toward local-versus-community control of content. Anyway, I'll still sit on the idea a while. Not rushing into anything. I just feel a little more each year like I'm not quite doing my part.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:08, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

• It's been a while since I spent much time at RFA but my gut feeling is that your candidacy would be a close-run thing. I suspect you'd get opposition on the grounds of why do you need it if you don't want to do blocking or antivandalism work (not that I'd agree with that opposition) as well as the issues you note. I can't recall OTTOMH seeing many NACs from you, which given your desire to work on ANRFC backlogs would be something people will want to pay close attention to. If you have some, make a list of them to refer to and if you don't get some more under your belt before standing. Thryduulf ( talk) 09:00, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

  I haven't done many lately, though I've been barnstarred for some of them. :-) It's been something I've been meaning to get back into.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:08, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

  Definitely get back into it before requesting the mop - a couple of really good recent ones will do a lot of good. Thryduulf ( talk) 09:25, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

  Should do it anyway, even if I do come to my senses. Heh.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:39, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

  I'll have to hope against sensibility's reign. Your virtue already far exceeds the bounds of sane ability, and cogent rationale. I find it best, for me, to count blessings than try to explain. I don't know where you could find more to give, but you have my trust and support already, either way. Best regards to you.-- John Cline ( talk) 19:58, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

• I see no issues working with you if you were to pass an RFA. ··· 日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 18:24, 17 July 2018 (UTC)
• ENWP doesnt need more admins (although I would support your application). What's needed is 1)the unbundling of certain admin-only tools (not talking about blocking here), b)the editor base to stop running for an admin for stuff that already doesnt require admins. Only in death does duty end ( talk) 09:39, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

  I quite agree, being one of the main champions of unbundling for a decade or so. But we seem to have hit the limit of what the community is presently willing to unbundle, at least for this year. There was a proposal just a month or so ago, and it failed. Not by SNOW, but still pretty solidly.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:44, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

• Should you pass an RFA, I'd be happy to work with you in the areas that I work in... should you be interested :-) ~Oshwah~ ^{(talk) (contribs)} 06:56, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Clarifying... I'd be happy to help you regardless :-) ~Oshwah~ ^{(talk) (contribs)} 06:57, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm sure I would lean heavily on those who know what they're doing better. :-)  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:00, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

I got overwhelmed IRL (in real life) during the production of issue #12. So, here is a catch-up issue, to help bring you (and me) up to speed on what is happening with portals...

By the way, we still have 97 participants. (Tell all your friends about this WikiProject, and have them join!)

Panoramas!

One cool feature of some of the geographical portals is a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section.

Check these out:

• Portal:Kyoto
• Portal:Miami
• Portal:Seattle
• Portal:Houston
• Portal:Tokyo
• Portal:New Orleans
• Portal:Brisbane
• Portal:Calgary
• Portal:Moscow

The Portals WikiGnome squadron is busy adding panoramas to geographical portals that don't yet have one. Feel free to join in on the fun. See task details at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Add a panorama or skyline to a geographic portal.

Caveat: avoid super-huge pics, as they can cause portal scripts to time-out. Please try to keep picture size down below 2 megabytes. Thank you.

Auto-populated slideshows

Speaking of pictures...

We now have two slideshow templates. You may be familiar with {{ Random slideshow}}, in which the editor types in (or copies/pastes) a list of pictures he or she wants it to display.

Well, now we have another template, courtesy of Evad37, which accepts one or more page names instead, and displays a random image off of the listed pages. So instead of listing dozens of files by hand, you can include a title or three to be scanned automatically. It even lets you specify particular sections.

The new slideshow template is {{ Transclude files as random slideshow}}.

Here's a sample, that grabs images from a single page:

New Template:Box-header colour

Speaking of new templates, here's another one!

Also from Evad37, we have a new component for starting section boxes, that is color configurable, and that bypasses the need for box-header subpages altogether. It is {{ Box-header colour}}.

For color support, see Web colors.

For the discussion in which this was inspired, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks#Colour combinations for accessibility.

(In case you didn't notice, the slideshow box above uses this new template).

BTW, don't forget to close your box with {{ Box-footer}}.

Where are we on the redesign?

The answer to this question is quite involved, and would fill this page to overflowing. Therefore, this subject, including a complete update on where we are at and where we are going with portal design, is covered at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Where are we on portal conversion?

An AWB pass to convert intros on the portals has been completed. The pass couldn't convert them all (due to various formatting configurations, etc.).

All but about 170 portals now have introductions selectively transcluded on the base page. Not counting manually maintained portals, that leaves about 70 portals that either need their intros converted, or they need an intro.

Next, we'll be converting the categories sections!

What's the plan, man?

The course of action we have been taking goes something like this, with all steps being pursued simultaeneously...

1) Design a one-page automated portal model

2) Convert existing portals to that design (except those being manually maintained)

3) Remove subpages no longer needed

4) Develop further tools to empower editors working on portals

Later, when the tools are up to the task, filling in the gaps in coverage (with new portals) will also become practical.

Are we caught up yet?

Probably not.

Who knows what our programmers and editors have dreamed up while I was writing this.

See ya again soon,    — The Transhumanist   10:51, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

 – Also closed the withdrawn RM and pointed it to the new discussion thread.

SMcCandlish: I have withdrawn my previous nomination for a move to "Captain James A. Baker." It was going to fail anyway. I have posted a new discussion about alternative moves: Talk:James A. Baker, Sr.#Why the current article title is untenable. Would you mind weighing in over there? Thanks, Oldsanfelipe ( talk) 20:56, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

Per Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 June 30#Bplus-Class articles can you fix all the templates now that the articles have been moved? TIA! Timrollpickering 10:16, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

I think I got 'em all, other than I had do to two editprotected requests, for full-protected pages.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:08, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

I just wanted to say that it's a pleasure to collaborate there (I remember seeing you around but we've had few interactions before if any). I wanted to sort my sources list and present it today but it may take a few more days: just patrolling my watchist took a while and I must leave, I may not be around for a few days (major surgery in the family tomorrow morning). If it can serve meanwhile, feel free to copy/rework this that I just copied in a sandbox. See you around the article, — Paleo Neonate – 17:35, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

You, too. And no hurry. That article's been a two-train trainwreck for a long time. I kinda need a break from it for a while. I've reached out in user talk to the current main SPA, in considerable detail about sourcing policy. Probably will have no effect, but seemed worth trying, since the party is a bit more reasonable than the last one.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:49, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Yes, and who knows, maybe future non-SPA editing is possible (first steps are often in relation to topics we care too much about). — Paleo Neonate – 17:58, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Right; that's what I was thinking. Someone who was deep into Hinduism and understood that we can't report miracles as facts, or use primary sources for WP:AEIS, would be in good position to knock some holes in the WP:Systemic bias wall. There are numerous notable Indian historical figures we have no or little information about at en.WP.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:47, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

 Fixed

Your move of Mist Twst had caused many links to that title to become broken. I have fixed that for you by moving Sierra Mist RR to the former title. Per WP:NOTBROKEN, this is simpler and requires fewer edits than having to fix all the redlinks to point to Sierra Mist instead. Please be careful not to make broken links again when moving pages, or else, you would need to have your page mover permission revoked. GeoffreyT2000 ( talk) 19:02, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

@ GeoffreyT2000: Sorry about that. I'm not sure how I messed up a routine round-robin move process. Will look into it. I was trusting the double-redir bot to "just handle it"; it often works so quickly that attempts to manually fix redirects are already done by it before one even tries, and I didn't think to follow up and make sure that all was well.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:39, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Looks like the breakage was primarily due to Template:PepsiCo still looking for Mist Twist. I had in fact manually updated that page to point to Sierra Mist [7] before the bot did anything with it. I think what may've happened in the bot acted upon a temporary move during RR operation and then started pointing things to that temporary location, but didn't undo this later, though it's a little difficult to be certain at this point.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:08, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

The Writer's Barnstar

Whenever I am perusing the Wikipedia namespace, I often find your username in the recent history and, more often than I expect, as the creator of a given essay. Just to name one among many, Wikipedia:Advice for hotheads is an excellent essay and great complement to WP:TINJ. The WP:CAPITULATE section's analysis of Wikipedia in particular is something I think is seldom done but sorely needed. There are so many other kinds of contributions I notice from you, such as your prolific participation in discussions, meticulous copy editing, and commitment to dispute resolution, but I want to highlight your essaying because it deserves recognition of its own. — Nøkkenbuer ( talk • contribs) 01:36, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Nøkkenbuer: Thanks much! I am particular fond of that essay. If more people, who just have hotheaded moments, were to follow its advice, this would be a much more pleasant place! I'm actually thinking of splitting CAPITULATE out to a separate essay. It really affects PoV warrior behavior and many other things, while the relevance to HOTHEADS could be compressed to a sentence or two.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:45, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Cooler heads will prevail. North America ¹⁰⁰⁰ 10:35, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Disregard

 – That's my own RfC.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography. Legobot ( talk) 04:25, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

Hi. Maybe you can be of assistance. I'm having a futile discussion with a user at Talk:List of people from Sardinia#Vandalism and summary cancellations. I think this user needs to hear opinions from other editors, as just me and one other have contributed. I'm also trying to ask at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Lists. Thanks. Vaselineeeeeeee ^★★★ 01:54, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

I didn't even pay attention to who argued what, I just provided the answer: "people from X" articles and categories are limited to people literally from there, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with ethnicity.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:41, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. And that's exactly what I was trying to convey to him as well. He tried to change the page to "List of Sardinians", but it doesn't change who should be included on the page in my opinion anyway. Do you? I doubt he will listen, still, because he keeps saying it's like this on other pages and won't get past that. I'm going to wait a bit longer if people from the Lists project say something, revert, and if he continues, report him. He is above 3RR already, but wanted to assume good faith. Vaselineeeeeeee ^★★★ 02:48, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

We don't use titles like "List of Sardinians" in any case where it can be confused with an ethnic label, for the very reason that it will be confused with an ethnic label.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:53, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Well, we do see List of Italians, List of Greeks...is it different because it's a country? I mean, if you're born in Canada and don't have any connection to Sardinia other than ancestry, you're still not Sardinian, you'd be Sardinian Canadian. Then he shows me List of Basques, List of Catalans... Vaselineeeeeeee ^★★★ 02:58, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Those are pages that probably to be moved. If you look at the grand totality of the articles and categories of this sort, they're almost all "people from". "Canadians" aren't an ethnicity in any sense, so there's low potential for confusion (there are indigenous peoples of Candada, but they're all separate ethnicities with their own names). List of Italians and List of Greeks should almost certainly move. Basques and Catalans should probably move to List of ethnicity people, to distinguish between the ethnicity and happening to live in the Basque country or Catalonia. Or move to the "people from" pattern if they're intended to serve a human geography purpose. I've started some RMs.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:49, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

PS: The categories are more consistent because they tend to be dealt with in groups, rather than argued about page-by-page.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:58, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for going one by one. Hopefully it removes the other editor’s notion that we’re doing this only to the one article. What do you think about the articles that use the form List of Polish people or List of Portuguese people? Again, I don’t think it’ll change who is included, but for consistency one form should be used as you’ve said. The only issue is after all these moves presumably go through, is removing the names of people with ancestry that were listed previously. Vaselineeeeeeee ^★★★ 04:31, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

It raises the same problem. I could see maybe using that form for articles that are explicitly "List of Ethnicity people" with no tie to human geography, but such a list would be questionably encyclopedic in almost all cases (the exceptions would probably be very small ethnicities with little diffusion due to endogamy, and the title would still be ambiguous for any case in which the ethnicity coincided with a present or former geographical name, which is going to be most cases. If we needed such an article in such a case, maybe use "List of ethnic Ethnicity people", or "List of ethnic Ethnicitys", e.g. "List of ethnic Serbs". I think have such articles is a terrible idea, a PoV- and OR factory. The problems at the extant confused articles are almost always related to OR and PoV about ethnicity, not human geography. The only time a "List of Ethnicity people", or "List of Ethnicitys" isn't going to be ambiguous is when there's no coinciding of the ethnicity with geographical name, e.g. List of Navajos, List of Apaches, List of Navajo people, List of Apache people. The redlinking patterns suggests we've been avoiding the short form, though I'm sure other examples will turn up besides the Basque and Serb cases now listed at RM. I've not RMed the purely geographical List of Canadians yet, because I want to see how the other clearer (OR/NPoV) cases go, then make a WP:CONSISTENCY move in that case, against the WP:CONCISE argument some will want to use to try to keep the current title.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:51, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

 Fixed

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Mrs Chippy, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Hudson ( check to confirm |  fix with Dab solver).

( Opt-out instructions.) -- DPL bot ( talk) 09:12, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

Just in case you're interested, I have made a new proposal at Talk:James A. Baker Sr.. Cheers, Oldsanfelipe ( talk) 11:25, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Cathy Newman. Legobot ( talk) 04:25, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Hi, re this note: before even the thread at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Railways#Chains RFC, there was Talk:East Croydon station#Chains and before that, there was Talk:Darlington railway station#Distance from London. -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 10:29, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Blargh. Jan.'s probably going back too far, but it's worth noting the other July one. Will cross-reference.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:36, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

I've asked WP:ANRFC to close these discussion, as a set.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:28, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it's been on my watchlist for months. -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 18:47, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

I'm working over Chain (unit) a bit right now.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:48, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Moved to Talk:Trap–neuter–return

 – Airing this out in user talk isn't going to serve much of a purpose; this is a content not behavior matter.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:49, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Regarding your revert (and edit summary)You replace stuff that's factual, and some stuff that might be OR, and might not be, and stuff that's a WP:DUE balance between competing claims, with your own "stated like WP:TRUTH" decision that "there is no scientific basis". That's the original research here. We don't say one side of a sourced dispute is correct.

Well, for sourcing, I have papers from Nature and Wildlife Biology, and you have Alley Cat Allies. You're calling for false balance between these viewpoints. One is scientific, the other is fringe.

The statement that there 'no scientific basis' that you took particular exception to is sourced.

From the paper in Nature [8].

Claims that TNR colonies are effective in reducing cat populations, and, therefore, wildlife mortality, are not supported by peer-reviewed scientific studies.

From Conservation Biology [9]

First, TNR is often presented to policy makers and the public as a scientifically valid and humane way of controlling and managing homeless and unwanted cats. Proponents of TNR are well organized and push for TNR friendly policies in communities and shelters around the United States, often with little opposition from the conservation biology and wildlife ecology communities. The reasons behind this lack of opposition are unclear, but it may be that conservation biologists and wildlife ecologists believe the issue of feral cats has already been studied enough and that the work speaks for itself, suggesting that no further research is needed. Or, they simply do not want to devote time and energy to the issue and are unaware of policy actions....

When local policies or regulations are put forth that promote the teaching of creationism or intelligent design, the evolutionary biologists have responded in force from across the nation and world. Such responses have been successful in defeating attempts to favor the teaching of creationism or intelligent design and serve to remind the public that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the theory of evolution. We the conservation community should consider the issue of TNR in the same light and challenge such propositions when they are raised. Without such challenges by those who are knowledgeable about the subject, we simply allow the use of TNR to grow and thereby gain further acceptance.

So not only does TNR have no scientific basis, they just compared it to Young Earth Creationism in a major peer-reviewed journal. It's not OR for me to say that it has no scientific basis, and there is no balance issue.

You should self revert. Geogene ( talk) 14:32, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Moved to Talk:Trypophobia § Failed verfication?

 – No point discussing this in user talk.

The other two citations fail to verify the claim. QuackGuru ( talk) 20:25, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Note to self: Catch up on Wikipedia:TemplateStyles and the linked pages on MediaWiki; this now works on en.WP. See Template:Infobox person/styles.css and amended Template:Infobox person/sandbox for a demo.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:27, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

It's bothered me for some time that the capitalization advice in the MoS assumes that it's clear when a word is being used as a preposition and when it's not. In reality, as per your recent comment and reference to Pinker's work, this is often far from clear. (How much time would be saved if only editors who had demonstrated knowledge of modern linguistics applied to English were allowed to comment on MoS matters as you jokingly but accurately suggested!) I doubt that in time references such as "half past four", "past" acts as a preposition, at least in the classical sense: the correctness of "I'll see you at half past" shows behaviour not expected in a truly prepositional context. On the other hand, I wouldn't want such a technical issue to feature in the MoS, so this is just a comment.

Also a comment (I certainly don't want to start a long thread at a MoS talk page!): I suspect that some of the concern over the capitalization of the titles of works comes from treating them as identifiers in a case-sensitive language (to use computing terms). On this view, there would be nothing wrong with, say, a book title being capitalized differently from a film with the same words in its title, if it was clear that the original orthography was being followed in each case. I do think that this is an issue that could be addressed directly – not, of course, using the language I have here, but making it crystal clear that "Four Past Midnight", "Four past Midnight" and indeed "Four past midnight" are one and the same title. (Operationally it would have been simpler to have a rule that all titles of works were converted to sentence case.) Peter coxhead ( talk) 13:31, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

The "is it really a preposition?" thing has plagued writers and linguists for around two centuries. E.g., you look up "as" and "like" in Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries they do not agree on which uses are prepositional and which conjunctive. This is one of the reasons I think a potentially viable compromise is "five-letter rule plus", with a list of exceptions, like "always capitalize Like", but with trade-offs like "never capitalize from or with in mid-title, no matter what, ever, period". The people who don't understand what "follow the sources" means, and mistake it for "mimic the orthography of the news sources I read, even though WP is not a newspaper" aren't likely to buy into such a compromise, so I have little incentive to RfC it myself. I expect that a non-brave or non-policy-cognizant admin will close the Spider-Man thing in favor of "From" on the basis of counting hands, despite all the policy arguments for it being wrong. I'm already drafting a WP:MR.

One problem with "do it as Foo from Bar for this novel but Foo From Bar for this album, based on their 'official' titles" idea is that even the publishers are not very consistent; the next edition of the book, or the UK versus US album cover, frequently do different things. And as soon as a work starts getting non-journalism coverage here comes the lower case, and all the claims that "it's always done as From" fall apart, and we have another RM. Why not just get it at the proper title for WP to begin with? I agree that sentence case would be a much easier approach (which is surely why academic journals favour it), but the level of resistance we get about cases like that movie would be orders of magnitude higher (Star wars? There'd be a riot!). And it could lead to cascading problems, like how to capitalize trademarks relating to the same intellectual property yet which aren't published works, but things like toys and amusement parks. The only way, at a site like this, to get a workable, consistent result is to pick a title-caps system and actually stick to it. We've not done the second half because we have a dozen or so people who are never going rest until they get "Dude Looks Like A Lady", etc. That kind of doggedness eventually tends to end up in topic-ban land, but it can take a really, really long time when it's a style matter. It might actually be viable to switch to the four-letter rule, since this site is overwhelmed with pop-culture stuff and over 9⁄10 of our sourcing, site-wide, is to news. However, a lot of people would hate it, and the amount of work involved to deploy it doesn't seem like it could possibly be worth it. And it still wouldn't satisfy the "mimic the cover" people. Any rule that gets in the way of trying to replicate logos is an evil to them.
 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:27, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Ah, it's so much simpler in German or French!

I mentioned you at Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Proper names versus generic terms re advice on capitalization, where I think absolute clarity is needed, as per the thread that started this one. You may like to comment. Peter coxhead ( talk) 09:52, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Development of design continues, full speed ahead...

Excerpt slideshows are here!

Can you say " paradigm shift"?

Now, in addition to picture slideshows, we have slideshows that can display excerpts. Portals are not just for topic tasting anymore. Now they can be made useful for surveying Wikipedia's coverage of entire subjects. This gives a deeper meaning to their name. Hmmm. "Portals"... Doorways to knowledge.

Portal:Lithuania was redesigned using excerpt slideshows. Check it out.

For those of you who cannot wait to test out these new toys...

We have not one, but three excerpt slideshow components to pick from:

{{ Transclude excerpts as random slideshow}}

For this one, you specify the page names where the excerpts are to be extracted from.

{{ Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}}

This one accepts source pages from where the page names are gathered from list items. Then an excerpt from one of those pages is displayed. The selection of what is included in the slide show can be limited to a specific number from the collection (of the page names gathered), and that selection is renewed from scratch each time the page is purged.

For example, if you specify Template:World Heritage Sites in Spain as a source page, the slideshow will cycle through those sites. Now you don't have to type them in one-by-one. This greatly reduces portal creation time.

{{ Transclude linked excerpts as random slideshow}}

Same as above, but gathers links instead of just linked list items.

Panoramic banners

{{ Portal image banner}} displays a panoramic picture the width of the page, and adjusts its size, so it stays that way even if the user changes page view size. And it accepts multiple file names, so that the picture displayed randomizes between them each time the page is visited/purged.

Give resizing the page a try:

Extended content
Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

You can now balance section boxes

Notice how the box bottoms line up. That readjusts even if you click the slideshow buttons.

The template used for this is {{ Flex columns}}.

By the way, when you include more than one box in a column, any left over whitespace in that column is divided between them.

Box-header colour

You may have noticed the new {{ Box-header colour}} template used above. It lets you pick the color locally (right on the same page). Before, this was handled on a subpage somewhere.

Testing, testing

Now that we have lots of toys to play with for making cool portals...

Don't forget, that the majority of views of Wikipedia these days are from mobile devices. We need to make certain that portals display well on those. So, remember to check your work on portals in mobile view mode...

To see a portal in mobile view mode, insert a ".m" into a portal's url, after "en", like this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Reptile

If you discover problems in a portal you can't fix, report them on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Until next time...

Have fun.    — The Transhumanist   23:47, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Hey there, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks for working with me to sort out the "Foo in films" situation...I know we didn't actively collaborate, but you were very helpful and I appreciate it. Shame we can't hard-block more of those categories from being created by editors going forward, but at least I think it's safe to say we've established a good precedent, and the MoS is at least reasonably clear now that such cats are a no-no. Thanks! DonIago ( talk) 02:26, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Doniago: Didn't realize it had closed in favor. Glad to hear it! PS: I'm usually up for this kind of thing. Anything that increases sanity, and reduces inconsistency and confusion, I will generally be in favor. WP has been transitioning to a new phase of the organizational life-cycle for several years now, and big part of that is normalization/regularization, and a shift away from wild 'n' woolly "do whatever comes to mind for my own convenience and preference [or my wikiproject's]" stuff.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:59, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Well then. I look forward to the red tape crisis. I imagine some would argue we've already hit that point. :p DonIago ( talk) 12:40, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Already have. Ever notice how much drama there is about article titles policy and the MoS? This is "rules-haters", mostly from the old days, reacting against anything that restrains their ability to write Wikipedia as if it's their own personal blog.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:59, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Usually the rules-haters I deal with are of the "why do I have to source this? It's obviously true!!!" variety. DonIago ( talk) 13:39, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah. It's frustrating when they're academics rather than fringe/religious/political cranks. The scientist types also often want to cite primary-research papers. The literature review stuff is boring and derivative to them, never mind popularized science works.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:14, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

In my experience the scientist types are also the ones who tend to insist that technical claims don't need sourcing because they all agree the facts are true, and that if you don't know something's true because you're not a scientist, that's your problem. I got into a bitter argument about that at asynchronous motor once upon a time...

Shame we can't make WP:RS required reading prior to article creation/editing. "I got to hang out with William Shatner at a convention once and he told me about this, so I know it's true!!!" Sure, and I'm the King of Spain. It's not even doubting them per se, it's that anyone can claim anything, and some editors just don't seem to understand that and take it as an attack on their credibility. DonIago ( talk) 14:26, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Yep. For my painful 2006–2007 intro to this problem, see Talk:Albinism in humans/Archive 1#No references, and unspecifics in "Visual and other health problems", User talk:SMcCandlish/Archive 2#Albinism reverts, and User_talk:Morgan Wright#Your recent edits to Albinism (the original article title was Albinism, before the split). The guy, apparently a professional in a relevant field, just would not absorb that he isn't personally a reliable source (on various topics), got blocked for 3RR repeatedly, and eventually indeffed. We'd probably have much better articles on this topic if he'd just absorbed the basics of how this site works.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:42, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeowch. DonIago ( talk) 17:06, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Forgot to finish the thought: We'd have better articles if academics would learn the ropes and stick around and contribute, since they have access to spendy academic source material and the experience to sift through it.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:05, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

It's a shame there's no way to gather statistics as to how many actually do stick around, versus how many find the whole "you need to be able to cite your data" burdensome (see what I did there?) to the point that they bail the first time they're called out. DonIago ( talk) 19:13, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Moved to Template talk:XMLElement

If you haven't noticed yet, please see this edit and adjust the rest of the article as necessary (since you're already copyediting the whole thing). At first I thought it was Template:XMLElement that was causing the problem (extra whitespace), but it seems to be the use of the definition-term markup ;. That's unfortunate. I don't know if you can fix the problem in a way that allows semicolon markup to be used… (No need to ping me.) - dcljr ( talk) 03:17, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

That page needs a WP:LISTGAP fixing, so you should put the semi-colon back and smush them together. That might fix the whitespace problem. -- Izno ( talk) 03:27, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Disregard

 – That's my own RfC. [sigh]

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). Legobot ( talk) 04:26, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

• What is the probability of being notified by the bot of the RfC that you initially posted? Gotta be slim. North America ¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:25, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

  Happens to me quite frequently! Two "Diregard" threads on my page right now are this, and there's probably at least one in most of my archives over the last half-decade. But, I'm an RfC slut, both coming and going, so it probably happens to me more frequently. I open way more of them than average, and I'm singed up for a firehose of them from WP:FRS.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:37, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Interesting. I suppose the probability is what it is, per the above. At any rate, I would have characterized you as an RfC pimp. Ha! Cheers, North America ¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:44, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Resolved

 – Sockpuppet blocked.

A troll in the talk page Race (human categorization) has started calling you names, such as "a hypocrite and an intellectual fraud". You might need to take action. Dimadick ( talk) 17:59, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

It's the usual sock-puppeteer. Thanks for the note.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:09, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months. ( Purge)

Hello SMcCandlish, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

June backlog drive

Overall the June backlog drive was a success, reducing the last 3,000 or so to below 500. However, as expected, 90% of the patrolling was done by less than 10% of reviewers.
Since the drive closed, the backlog has begun to rise sharply again and is back up to nearly 1,400 already. Please help reduce this total and keep it from raising further by reviewing some articles each day.

New technology, new rules

• New features are shortly going to be added to the Special:NewPagesFeed which include a list of drafts for review, OTRS flags for COPYVIO, and more granular filter preferences. More details can be found at this page.
• Probationary permissions: Now that PERM has been configured to allow expiry dates to all minor user rights, new NPR flag holders may sometimes be limited in the first instance to 6 months during which their work will be assessed for both quality and quantity of their reviews. This will allow admins to accord the right in borderline cases rather than make a flat out rejection.
• Current reviewers who have had the flag for longer than 6 months but have not used the permissions since they were granted will have the flag removed, but may still request to have it granted again in the future, subject to the same probationary period, if they wish to become an active reviewer.

Editathons

• Editathons will continue through August. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the ' move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.

The Signpost

• The next issue of the monthly magazine will be out soon. The newspaper is an excellent way to stay up to date with news and new developments between our newsletters. If you have special messages to be published, or if you would like to submit an article (one about NPR perhaps?), don't hesitate to contact the editorial team  here.

---

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)} 00:00, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Hey,

I asked another user but did not get an answer on this subject so was hoping you might be able to help me out. On my naming conventions proposal, how do I make it an official request? Someone else started the survey section, but most commented with their opinion on the discussion section. I'd like to move this forward but don't know how to correctly proceed. Thanks! -- Gonnym ( talk) 09:14, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Which page or section is this about? I have like 7K+ pages on my watchlist. Heh.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:23, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

7k :O Didn't even think about that, sorry, here it is Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (television)#Creating a consistent naming convention style for character names across media types. -- Gonnym ( talk) 12:04, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Gonnym: Well, it basically already is an active proposal. I would let it run for the typical 30 days (it looks like no consensus at this point), then take the comments on board and produce a revised proposal. These things can take time. Sometimes even years, though I doubt this would drag out that much.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:45, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Do the comments from the discussion count or only those under the survey? -- Gonnym ( talk) 19:48, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

I guess it's up to the closer. But I wouldn't worry about it. I don't think a consensus emerges from this round, more like this has been a round 1 drafting stage.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:57, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Now that we have lots of toys to play with, it's play time!

Here are some fun activities to use our new toys on...

Fun activity #1 – put the improved panorama template to use

Would you like to travel around the world? Well, this may be the next best thing...

Here's another fun toy to play with: {{ Portal image banner}}

To see what it looks like, check out the panoramas at the tops of the following portals:

• Portal:India
• Portal:Melbourne
• Portal:Perth
• Portal:Monaco
• Portal:South Sudan
• Portal:Thiruvananthapuram
• Portal:Lithuania
• Portal:Brisbane
• Portal:Abu Dhabi
• Portal:Athens
• Portal:Barcelona
• Portal:Calgary
• Portal:Dhaka
• Portal:Dresden
• Portal:Edinburgh
• Portal:Florence
• Portal:Houston
• Portal:Miami
• Portal:Milan
• Portal:Moscow
• Portal:Munich
• Portal:Seattle
• Portal:Stockholm
• Portal:Turin
• Portal:Bermuda

The task: There are many geography portals that lack panoramas. Please add some. Please keep the file size down below 2 megabytes, and keep in mind that you may find quality banners at commons: at less than 200K (.2 megabytes). Good search terms to include with the place name are "banner", "cityscape", "skyline", "panorama", "landscape", etc.

Related task: There are also lots of geography portals that have panoramas used as gaudy banners (with print or icons splattered across them) or that display them in some random location on the page. In many cases, those pages would be improved by displaying the panorama as a clean picture at the top of the intro section, like on the examples above. This works best with banner-like panoramas. Please fix these pages when you come across them, if you believe it would improve the look of the page.

Taller images might be better suited displayed further down the page, or in the "Selected images" section.

Note that {{ Portal image banner}} supports multiple images, and displays one at random upon the first visit, and each time the page is purged.

Fun activity #2 – install "Selected images" sections

That is, image slideshows!

Over 200 have been installed so far. Just 1200 to go. (Be sure not to install them on portals with active maintainers, unless they want you to).

The title "Selected images" reflects the fact that not all images on Wikipedia are pictures, and encompasses maps, graphs, diagrams, sketches, paintings, pictures, and so on.

The toys we have to work with for this are:

{{ Random slideshow}}

and

{{ Transclude files as random slideshow}}

The task: Using one of the above templates directly on a portal's base page, replace static "Selected picture" sections, with a section like one of these:

The one on the left uses {{ Random slideshow}} (which accepts file names), and the one on the right uses {{ Transclude files as random slideshow}} (which accepts source pages from which the filenames are gathered).

The above section formatting is used on many of the pages you will come across, but not all. In those cases, use whatever section formatting matches the rest of the page.

Note that you may come across "Selected picture" sections done with {{ Random portal component}} templates. That template call is the entire section. Replace it with a section that matches the other sections on the page, and put the new slideshow inside that.

For example, in Portal:California, this code:

{{Random portal component|max=21|seed=27|header=Selected picture|subpage=Selected picture}}

was replaced with this code:

{{/box-header|Selected images|noedit=yes}}
{{Transclude files as random slideshow
| {{PAGENAME}}
| Culture of {{PAGENAME}}
}}
{{Box-footer}}

And the new section blended right in with the formatting of the rest of the page. Note the use of the {{PAGENAME}} magic word. Plain article titles also work. Don't feel limited to one or two page names. But be sure to test each slideshow before installing the next one. (Or if you prefer, in batches - just don't leave them hanging). Report technical problems at the Portal design talk page.

Fun activity #3 – upgrade "Selected article" sections

These sections, where unmaintained, have gone stale. That's because 1) the excerpts are static, having been manually copied and pasted, and 2) because they lack automatic addition of new entries.

They can be upgraded with:

{{ Transclude random excerpt}}

or

{{ Transclude list item excerpt}}

or

{{ Transclude linked excerpt}}

All three of these will provide excerpts that won't go stale. The latter two can provide excerpt collections that won't go stale, by providing new entries over time. The key is to select source pages or source sections that are frequently updated, such as root article sections, mainstream lists, or navigation templates.

Where will this put us?

When the above tasks are completed for the entire collection of portals (except the ones with specific maintainers), we'll be more than half-way done with the portal system upgrade.

Keep up the great work.    — The Transhumanist   17:08, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Thinking more about it, Big Bang theory isn't an exception to MOS guidance on theories. If it were, it would be Big Bang Theory. Big Bang is capped because of its status as a major historical event. Like (hypothetically) the Great Flood theory or the Cold War theory. MOSDOCTS, specifically, might apply less here than just good old-fashioned MOSCAPS in general. What's your take on this? Primergrey ( talk) 13:23, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Primergrey: That seems like a viable argument. The universe being in a steady state wouldn't be an event but the opposite of one; it would just be more like the cosmological constant and tidal forces and other, well, steady or at least relatively steady equilibria.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:49, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

That, and the universe will probably experience heat-death before anyone watches The Steady State Theory. Primergrey ( talk) 18:30, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Don't give anyone ideas. There's already a godawful Young Sheldon spinoff.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:01, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Hi, you are awesome. I was wandering being a new user would you be able to mentor me as I do not whish to be a troll. I want to be able to do as you. Denvercoloradoman ( talk) 14:02, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Denvercoloradoman: What did you need help with? You don't see to have made any article edits yet as a registered user. Did someone accuse you of trolling while you were editing anonymously? Anyway, I would start with the links in the welcome post I left on your talk page. Another key bit is WP:Core content policies, which summarizes and then links to the main policies on how we write articles here. The WP:Simplified Manual of Style is also a good thing to check out.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:53, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

No no one said I was a troll. I have made a new word called nuclear shadowing. In a way I use Google's A.I to follow the data. I believe in algorithm. I'm pretty sure you can predict future events by understanding vast amounts of data. Now I'm not a coder like you but I do understand what coding is you seem very intelligent I have nothing but respect for knowledge. What I'm trying to learn is how to describe things or make articles if its only theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Denvercoloradoman ( talk • contribs) 17:07, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

@ Denvercoloradoman: Ah, well, some new idea you've come up with cannot have an article here. See WP:Notability, and WP:NFT, WP:NOR, and WP:NOT#ORIGINAL (some shortcuts to the relevant policies and guidelines). Wikipedia does not publish any form of original thought or primary research, only that which has substantial coverage in independent ( WP:INDY), reliable ( WP:RS), secondary ( WP:SECONDARY) sources. It sounds like you need to start your own website about your idea.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:39, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Resolved

I am not sure what you are doing to Template:Single chart but it is causing havock with the article across Wikipedia. So sort it out quick!. QuintusPetillius ( talk) 20:26, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

@ QuintusPetillius: Already fixed. I accidentally pasted the Template:Single chart/doc material into Template:Single chart (wrong tab); self-reverted it immediately of course.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:28, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Hi,

Thought I'd ask you since your comments on the various discussions indicate that you can actually explain the area in reasonably simple terms.

Is there some particular way to spot DS (short of going to the Talk Page) is in effect? Some of the pages covered flag it if you try to edit, but generally I can't actually see how you can quickly detect it.

The upshot of which is: a) Is there a simple way to detect DS on the "normal route" of viewing then editing an article and b) Could a counterpart icon to the padlock that indicates protection be added in the top-right to indicate it is covered by DS, via an RfC?

Cheers! (Please ping)

Nosebagbear ( talk) 22:44, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Nope! This is one of the whole problems with DS, and it's why we have this stupid {{ Ds/alert}} bureaucracy. Even the talk page isn't sufficient, because many pages to which DS applies don't have the talk page DS banners, and many DS cover subjects, not pages, so a page not about the subject may have material on the subject, e.g. in one paragraph, and doing something naughty with that one paragraph will be within the DS, but no one would ever tag its talk page with a DS banner since nothing else in the page qualifies for it. The whole mess is one of the worst ideas ArbCom ever had (it's also the main cause of adminship becoming a big deal, since we suddenly had to trust admins an order of magnitude more than we did before DS were invented out of nowhere by ArbCom.

About the best you can do is memorize the list of DS-authorized topic. But don't let on that you've done so, or you'll be presumed to be "aware" of the DS and thus subject to them, at least for the year since you self-disclosed your own awareness. If this all sounds like a huge WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY policy violation, you'd be correct. But ArbCom and its corral of pet enforcers at WP:AE are never going to undo it unless the community gives them no choice. That may never happen, because DS works just marginally well enough in a few areas, like "my ethnicity versus yours" stuff, that some editors are okay with it.
 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:50, 31 July 2018 (UTC)