User:Wnt/Archive/5

This is an archive from January 2019 to June 2019

On clandestine efforts by a competitor to shut down the refdesks

Hi Wnt,

you know, it's not impossible. But you can't prove it, I'm pretty sure. As long as you can't prove it, I don't think it's going to win many hearts and minds. The discussion is trending very heavily "oppose", hopefully enough to get a close that says "consensus not to close" rather than "no consensus to close" like last time. So I don't see any need to go there. Just a friendly suggestion; I'm on your side. --Trovatore (talk) 05:37, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

There is still a troll out attacking the Refdesk. There is still the problem of new users being prevented from asking questions (no matter which way that other RFC goes ... I'm not sure it even matters). And there will be a fourth call to shut the Refdesks a few months after this one, and another after that. The only way I can see to get the situation back to normal is if we get a little inquisitive, a little suspicious, and try to get some clues who is behind the attack. If the pointless ritual of "revdeling", so antithetical to Wikipedia's crowdsourcing ideal, weren't already out of control, there's a chance we could already have riddled it out looking at the old edits. Wnt (talk) 13:47, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

I just read that list you posted earlier of reasons why Quora sucks

Some of those factors potentially militate against others, as when the closed nature of Quora keeps the privacy violations from being as big a deal as they otherwise might be.

But another problem with Quora, besides those mentioned, is that there are just a lot of people posting unverifiable stories. Sometimes the Quora mods verify people's accounts using, e.g., LinkedIn, which I guess they could use to figure out if someone was LARPing as a cop or a soldier or an astronaut or whatever. It doesn't keep them from making up stories just for the heck of it, or to prove whatever point they want to make.

Another problem with Quora is that the character limit on questions is too brief to allow for a very elaborate premise to a question. That prevents people from posting polemical speeches masquerading as questions, but it also can be very limiting in scenarios where, say, you may want to provide a quotation or anecdote, or explain a complicated concept, and get people's thoughts on it.

In those situations, you pretty much have to go to a web forum and start a thread instead. That's okay, but the downside is that you won't have features like the ability to upvote the best response to the top so that they'll be more prominent. A thread might go on for, say, 20 pages and people will have to dig through it for the most highly-upvoted posts.

Q&A sites are a lot like wikis -- there's a lot of potential there for the format to be put to greater use than what we're seeing now, but the keys are, good policies, good moderation, good implementations, etc. And there's only so much talent and other resources being directed toward making that happen. So, there's some potential going unrealized.

Another problem that is infesting the entire Internet, and even society as a whole, is that SJWs are taking over everything, so that those who dissent are reduced to joining bands of ragtag rebels, discredited by the mass media, and mostly deplatformed and otherwise economically and socially ostracized to the fullest extent possible. They're not able to take advantage of infrastructure that can leverage network effects and economies of scale, so the available viewpoints and narratives are skewed to the point that we're just in a giant echo chamber of leftist propaganda unless we venture outside of the big Silicon Valley sites.

Because of that, in a lot of cases it may not even matter if we build beautiful and elegant software, and design great sites, since the necessary human element for an open and frank discourse is missing. MW131tester (talk) 07:58, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

@MW131tester: My first feeling is that this is kind of useless since I don't use the site, but then again it is intel I don't otherwise have for the same reason, so thanks. Honestly though, I think that the forums were technically broken first and the SJW plague (and other plagues, like harassment without a political excuse) are the consequence. A key factor in my mind is that a forum needs to have a low Gini ratio, i.e. everybody gets read about the same. Once you start talking about upvoting (and worse, downvoting) now you're in a battle for eyeballs that only a professional marketer deserves to win. The corporations jumped on the voting thing early on, probably for precisely that reason. If some insensitive soul thinks a girl looks like a beached whale in a video that gets 100 views, he can make an idiot out of himself saying so if he wants but it doesn't go far. If the same thing falls all over the net in a snowball of upvotes by people who have never had anything of their own good or bad given that kind of attention until 3 million people have read it, the outcome is going to be very different. After 10 years of that the people who have learned the bullies' law of the jungle get into political scheming (less Jefferson, more Survivor) and the outcome is comparable. Wikipedia is better than most sites on the Web mostly because it was written earlier, before any of the upvoting crap became standard, and the site's anarcho-bureaucratic characteristics hinder the imposition of Progress. This is a good thing! Wnt (talk) 21:41, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Before the SJW religion became dominant, we had regular religion. But then people got smart and decided, "We don't believe anymore in outdated metaphysical ideas that have no basis in science. So instead, we're going to use leftist doctrine as our new dogma, and punish political incorrectness as blasphemy, and excommunicate any heretics, and persecute any heathen. We're also going to dismiss anyone who puts forward alternative ideas as cranks, cultists, reactionaries, etc. and define progress as a doubling down on what we already know to be true, and a more complete exiling of all who disagree, and a burning of any manuscripts that deviate from the orthodoxy. This is what it means to be a skeptic." MW131tester (talk) 19:37, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

The first essay there makes an interesting point, and definitely one I believe in, but I don't agree with the author on everything. For example, Islam could be compared to his hypothetical Hitler cult, given its origin in conquest and government, but we seldom see it done. Even so, the belief in "religion" isn't actually delineated by religion -- the same people who would feign great reverence for Muhammad despite not believing in Islam would scarcely even imagine that an American or Briton who extols obedience to Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is practicing a 'valid religion', despite the appalling extent to which the latter man tried to model his abuses on the former. In this regard I am reminded of descriptions of the Roman Empire's distinction between religion and "superstition", with religions being longstanding and superstitions (what we would call cults) being of more recent origin. That distinction was at the root of the persecution of the Christians, and later affected the ways in which they were pushed at the Council of Nicea, for example to adopt the Old Testament as part of the state-funded Bibles. So there is deep-seated bias and careless thinking going on, yes. But where the author goes wrong is then to carelessly commend the idea of banning Naziism as a philosophy. Even if the conquerers of Germany felt it was a practical way to suppress resistance, I'm not particularly convinced -- Naziism was never stopped because of the books being banned, but because the victims from other countries fought back at a time when Mein Kampf was in every house or else. Today, people such as myself have skimmed through Mein Kampf and not found it to be particularly effective at turning us into Nazis; a book like that needs a big carrot and a big stick behind it to work, and if they have sufficiently large carrot and stick in hand they don't need the book any more. In the end I think that a failure to believe in freedom of expression will inevitably lead to grievous errors of all sorts, just as thinking that 4=5 is sure to cause any number of additional math mistakes. Wnt (talk) 14:28, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:FileData

Module:FileData has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 21:36, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Talk pages consultation 2019

The Wikimedia Foundation has invited the various Wikimedia communities, including the English Wikipedia, to participate in a consultation on improving communication methods within the Wikimedia projects. As such, a request for comment has been created at Wikipedia:Talk pages consultation 2019. You are invited to express your views in the discussion. ~ Winged Blades^Godric 05:23, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

On wikitext list markup

In case it might help, I thought I would offer a brief summary on how the wikitext list markup works. I realize this is unsolicited, so feel free to ignore any or all of it, particularly if you already know what I'm saying and I've misunderstood where the gaps are in your knowledge.

The *, #, or : characters introduce a new list of a specific type—bulleted, numbered, or unbulleted—as well as a specific item in that list. (Technically, it's more complicated than that for unbulleted lists, but I'll ignore that for this description.) So a string of these characters defines a nesting of lists. For example, *:# means (reading from right to left) a third-level numbered list item nested in a second-level unbulleted list item nested in a first-level bulleted item.

To keep the result tidy for screen readers, it's best to avoid changing the nesting of lists in the middle. So if responding below a comment that starts with **:, if you want to preserve the same indent level, this corresponds to adding another item of the same type as the current list, and so you should use **:. If you want to add an additional indent level, then you should copy the current prefix, and add the character corresponding to the new type of list you want to have. So with this example you could use **::, **:*, or **:#, depending if you wanted to add a fourth-level unbulleted, bulleted, or numbered item.

To expand on the issues with screen readers: if you switch from, say *** to :::*, as many people do, then this closes the three levels of bulleted lists, and starts four lists, all nested within each other. As I understand it, the screen reader describes the end of the first three bulleted lists and the opening of the next four. This introduces a lot of extraneous noise when trying to follow the threads of conversation. I hope this is helpful. isaacl (talk) 16:55, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

@Isaacl: Thanks -- we should have a more prominent instruction on this ... but at this moment I'm not sure it's worth writing if it's all about to be changed. Also, you make me think that we need to have a "screen reader simulation mode" for our pages. To be sure, I don't mean simply listening to a reading, which no one who doesn't have to would have the patience for, but rather the quixotic but not so impossible task of explaining blindness to a sighted man by showing a text transcript, with convenient formatting (unavailable to the blind) to make it easier to parse for those not used to parsing it as they hear it in their mind. Some creativity may be required. Wnt (talk) 18:46, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

I could have sworn I'd seen guidelines like these before, but I can't locate them at the moment. Help:List#List basics of course covers the basics, and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility#Lists provides guidance on not leaving extra blank lines between list items, nor switching between list types unnecessarily. I wouldn't count on the use of lists in talk page discussions changing any time soon; there is a large existing base of users who wish to continue using wikitext on talk pages.

A greater understanding of how screen reader users navigate the web would indeed be helpful. Once when I explained to an editor that using "here" as link text was not best practice (as per WCAG and numerous accessibility guidelines), since screen reader users often tab quickly from link to link to decide where to go, the editor replied that users using screen readers should learn not to do that. The person didn't seem to appreciate that screen reader users employ all kinds of techniques to reduce the tedium that would otherwise ensue from listening to entire pages being read. (As I understand it, they typically speed up the reading rate and act quickly on small cues to decide where to go.) isaacl (talk) 19:46, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

I don't know if I ever noticed that help file! It sure does lay it out there. The problem is, I always remember seeing :s described as "indentation" and *s as "bullet points", and I wouldn't have thought "Help:List" had anything to do with these. The idea that a semicolon isn't just a title? Never heard of it! Wnt (talk) 13:09, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, I just looked up Help:indent and got WP:Indentation, an essay that leads via a redirect to Help:Talk pages, which says "Some pages (deletion discussions, for example) use asterisks (*) rather than colons for indentation. Generally colons and asterisks should not be mixed; if you see asterisks are being used in a page, use them as well. " Which is about the state of what I knew on the topic! Wnt (talk) 13:12, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, for simplicity, I skipped over the details of semi-colons and colons generating definition lists. The upshot is that unless you're making a glossary or some other list of definitions, the resulting HTML from a colon-prefixed list item is semantically wrong. I think wikitext predates the introduction of style sheets that allows you to control how an unordered list is rendered by a browser, so there was no other way to avoid a bullet being shown than to misuse description lists. Nowadays, the wikitext parser could be modified to output an unordered list with the appropriate styling to omit the bullet for colon-prefixed items. However any semantically-correct use of definition lists would have to be altered to a new syntax. I'm skeptical that enough people could be convinced of the benefits (and to be honest I'm not sure there would a lot of practical impact).

I think this illustrates another point: if long-time editors aren't aware of the semantic meaning of this extremely common markup, I think it is a fair criticism to say the current threading convention is always going to cause problems. I know there's a big base that likes the status quo, and in many ways I count myself among them. But I don't think documentation alone is going to make things better. isaacl (talk) 21:00, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Well, HTML "semantic meaning" sounds rather philosophical. Most people just want HTML code to look right. In any case, you make it sound like it might be possible to fix the semantic-meaning problems at the HTML level without most people ever noticing there was any change at all! Wnt (talk) 05:05, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

In theory it's possible to change the meaning of the colon and semi-colon prefixes, but then of course new syntax would have to be developed to replace them, for the few places where they were being used in accordance to create definition lists. All Wikipedia pages would then have to be checked for any pre-existing uses of the new syntax, and appropriate fixes applied. Semantic markup just means the page is composed of elements with specific roles, so something like "a paragraph followed by another paragraph", rather than "five lines of text, followed by vertical blank space, followed by three lines of text". Using the right elements based on their semantics makes it easier to parse the page, whether it is by screen readers, search bots, Wikipedia tools, or anything else. It also makes it easier to have consistent formatting of each type of element. Because HTML uses opening and closing tags to surround elements on a page, it can specify element boundaries and nesting very precisely. Wikitext, on the other hand, relies a lot more on the parser interpreting the editor's intent, which is why some layout choices are impossible to specify or are awkward to specify, like multi-paragraph list items. isaacl (talk) 07:11, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Isaac.it is my impression that the use of definition lists in enWP is very rare--perhaps the solution for them is to deprecate them at least here (they might be useful in project like Wiktionary, but I don't work there). They were a convenient syntax which I used back at the beginning of html, but I've seen little point in using them since at least in WP. Similarly, since semicolons mess up screen readers (if I understand that correctly), we could deprecate them also. I do see them used here, but used primarily in promotional articles by people unfamiliar with WP , and they have the net effect of introducing excessive segmentation oand overemphasis for their typical use for the different project of an organization. DGG ( talk ) 20:26, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

I thought I said it somewhere already, but I guess not: yes, I agree definition lists are very rarely used. Glossary of poker terms uses them with the semi-colon/colon syntax; a few other glossaries I checked use templates to wrap the underlying HTML. Whether the functionality is completely deprecated and removed or modified to a new syntax, the current uses have to be located and changed. isaacl (talk) 04:21, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

I still am not seeing a need for this "reform". It is one thing to add new functionality to add new functionality, something else to take away old functionality just to take away old functionality. I think the biggest problem is that Help:List is a practically unknown page. Other editors (even myself) might have used that format more often if we'd thought of it. Wnt (talk) 12:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Not sure if you are replying to me (as the indent level would nominally indicate) or DGG, since I already said I don't think there would be a lot of practical impact in transitioning the : syntax to output different HTML, and I didn't suggest taking away old functionality. As for greater use of definition lists if the format were more widely known: the semantics are so narrow that there's really no use for definition lists other than glossaries and the like. isaacl (talk) 20:28, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Alert

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

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Merely a formality as it does not look like you've been notified in the past 12 months. --K.e.coffman (talk) 18:39, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

If this ruling affects an article about a web browser plug-in, I should ask what it doesn't affect. This is an "interstate commerce clause" for the Arbitration Committee to override any doctrine of enumerated powers. Wnt (talk) 18:42, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Plotter

Template:Plotter has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 18:49, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 03:11, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

One comment in the thread inspired me to write a small user essay: WP:NOTTHOUGHTPOLICE. Regards, --Pudeo (talk) 12:48, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

That's a nice essay, but it is something of a different issue. The people I ran into weren't content that I'm not actually a racist -- they simply could not tolerate a link to racists even on a talk page, or any concession that they might be able to write well. Given their chance they would "clean up" i.e. censor even the main links for articles about websites. So I see this more as a pure freedom of expression issue. Nonetheless, it is also true that actual racists do get a much more hostile treatment ... problem is, that argues that despite your optimistic title Wikipedia really is thought police. The situation is muddled. But I suspect the clarity behind it is that censors in a range of European countries have, as a matter of practice, made it dangerous for them to post or follow links, and they have internalized this prohibition. I haven't actually tried to figure out who lives in what country with which hate-speech law though. And at this point it seems scarcely worth bothering to figure out, because with the new EU copyright and censorware policies that tax or criminalize news aggregation, these editors may start to be the same way about any kind of news link at all. Wnt (talk) 13:18, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

Assange

Thanks. – Sca (talk) 15:12, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

NewsGuard

My comment on Jimmy's talk page was unsurprisingly removed, i'm guessing because i mentioned Qorvis which i think is still a sore spot for him, but since you seem to be aware of the reasons why an app like NewsGuard is problematic, you might be interested to know that it does, indeed, track browsing history, as has been documented by (security researchers). i don't need to connect the dots between "browser add-on that tracks history and evaluates Wrongthink" and "advisory board staffed by ex-NSA, ex-DHS, ex-CFR." frankly, the RT article Smallbones posted doesn't go far enough in raising the alarm. Microsoft is packaging this with all new machines. it's installed on public libraries in Hawaii and Illinois. this is not the direction we need to be moving. i don't expect much from Jimmy, but i know from experience that if the media or a large enough number of Wikipedia editors throw a fit he'll do something. Gnarly charlie ate some barley (talk) 22:16, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

I offered a response based on your edit. I think the MintPress story seems to hinge a lot on a Twitter posting, but it doesn't seem unlikely especially as the given link does work. I almost missed the link to Qorvis but found it: according to the MintPress story, investments by the Publicis Groupe. Monopolization of news and attacks against competitors do go hand in hand, so this deserves further investigation. Wnt (talk) 23:18, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Rama Arbitration Case

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Previous listing as a party

My apologies for the above section stating that you are a party. You are not, I made a mistake with the template. -- Amanda (aka DQ) 19:51, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

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Wages for Facebook

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Proposed deletion of File:Article used in capital case.gif

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Well that's odd... the user nominated the template for deletion two years ago, [1] but left my crappy graphic. The best of my 'art' would not be worth fighting for, and this is not it. Perhaps it was too much to react to [2] in the first place ... but Wikipedia has disclaimers now, at least where New Zealand's sole Founding Father is concerned. Wnt (talk) 02:25, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

New Founder, Jan Eissfeldt

Regarding that phrase, no, not new. I read a post on his German user talk which fits the current situation exactly, only - it's from 2014. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:55, 24 June 2019 (UTC)