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December 2013

GAN December 2013 Backlog Drive

Hello! Just a friendly reminder that the GAN Backlog Drive has begun and will end on December 31, 2013! If you know anyone outside of the WikiProject that may be interested, feel free to invite them to the drive! If you have any questions or want to comment about something regarding the drive, post them here--EdwardsBot (talk) 00:03, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library Survey

As a subscriber to one of The Wikipedia Library's programs, we'd like to hear your thoughts about future donations and project activities in this brief survey. Thanks and cheers, Ocaasi ^{t | c} 15:56, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Great work

Resolved

 – The non-neutral changes there have been fixed.

The work you did on MOS:ORGANISMS was outstanding. I really hope you come back sometime soon. Spicemix (talk) 15:26, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, but fat chance. The more disruptive parties in that editing space, who are here as a gang to force everyone in the world to do what their specialist journals do, no matter what, at all costs, are half of why I left. MOS:ORGANISMS obviously should be tweaked and labeled a guideline at this point (more like a year ago!), but it's not my job. If someone runs with that, I'll be glad to log back into and voice support for it (and against efforts to derail it), but I can't seriously consider devoting any more real time or energy to this project. I no longer have much faith in its long-term viability except as something that's an unholy chimera of propaganda machine for crafty social-engineering e-politicians, and a juvenile multiplayer game. I don't mean to imply that you must be juvenile or a propagandist to continue here, you just have to have have way more faith and time to gamble with against the propagandists and juveniles than I do.

PS: Someone is already doing violence to MOS:ORGANISMS, e.g. deleting all reference to the term supragenus, which is a real taxonomical term in some fields and was very much included on purpose (cf. journal results from https://www.google.com/#q=%22supragenus%22 ). It's a case probably of someone assuming that because it's not used in their field it doesn't exist or shouldn't exist. I.e., it's PoV-pushing "my specialization is more important than yours" crap, as usual for this crowd. Those edits need to be reverted. So should addition of the link to Birds of the World: Recommended English Names by the usual suspects; the "See also" section there is not for activistic promotion of one particular organization's specialist publications, it's for links to other Wikipedia-internal resources. If the BotW thing is important enough to Wikipedia to mention in the guideline at all, it should be in the main text of it, in the proper context. That's dubious, because the consensus for over 5 years at WT:MOS has been that WP really doesn't care that most-not-all bird publications prefer to capitalize bird name, it's just not a typographical practice we're all comfortable with forcing on all readers and editors of this general-purpose encyclopedia. The camp that just will not let this go is trying to push that capitalization convention by explicitly linking to it in the guideline draft's "See also" section, as if it had official guideline imprimatur, which it does not and certainly would not after this is a guideline. – SMcCandlish 22:03, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Notification of change to templates

This is to notify you that the templates Template:IPSite, Template:BDMag, Template:IPMag and Template:PBMag, which all seem to have been created and edited almost exclusively by you, have been modified. In accordance with the deprecation of |month= they now no longer accept the month and year parameters. Use |date= instead. Please note that all articles that transclude these templates have been updated accordingly and now use the date parameter exclusively. Debresser (talk) 05:25, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Your two cents requested

Would love to hear your opinion on how your essay (WP:SSF) has been wielded as a hammer or a thought-terminating cliché to compel MOS title capitlisation compliance on composition titles (MOS:CT) despite all the reliable sources indicating otherwise and contributing to WP:IDHT mentality in such debates, see: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#The curious case of Remember not, Lord, our offences. Please ping me when you respond.--ColonelHenry (talk) 19:14, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

It's not in userspace; if there's something wrong with a point that it raises, anyone can work to resolve that and improve it. The essay does not magically control how other people write and think. If someone is applying the logic in it fallaciously, call them on that fallacy.

Most opposition to that essay (other than to its perhaps long-winded and somewhat aggressive writing style, both of which are things that others might want to moderate with some cleanup editing) comes from people who are advancing a patently SSF argument and engaging in the fallacy of special pleading - somehow their particular little WP-external consistency bugbear must be exempt from the WP-internal reasoning in WP:SSF. But it's not special, and it's not exempt. WP:SSF is not a policy or guideline (though by this point a guideline in more neutral wording can certainly be derived from it and integrated into MOS). It simply a collection of logical arguments. If someone disagrees with them, or with any of them, they're welcome to try a refutation. Every attempt I've seen so far has dismally failed. The "thought-termination" and "I didn't hear that" is happening from the other direction - people have already stopped thinking and arrive with an agenda to force their preconceived way, no matter what, when they attempt to impose here some encyclopedia-irrelevant stylistic quirk from specialist publications that don't do what the rest of the English-writing world does. Here, it does not serve our readers' needs, and they push for it so doggedly just because it's what they're familiar with and they think their specialization trumps other concerns.

Keep in mind I actually am a specialist, of more than one kind, and am intimately familiar with jargon. I also have a degree in anthropology and communication. I didn't arrive at SSF because I'm some uneducated schlub who doesn't understand how jargon works and what purposes it serves. I'm actually deeply steeped in all of that. Because my specializations cross boundaries I have the hardly unique but contextually important perspective of someone who has seen how frequently the stylistic demands of one specialization conflict with those of a different specialty, leading to the obvious conclusion that we cannot pander to specialist style demands here or we inevitably have to play this-speciality-is-more-important-than-that-one favorites, a blatant violation of policy (at WP:NPOV and elsewhere).

Very early in the specific debate you highlight, SchreiberBike got it right:

"I think the question might be: Who do we want to look slightly stupid to? The article and its title could match hundreds of years of usage, or it could match all the other works in Wikipedia. No one will have trouble identifying it either way. The people who are familiar with the work in partial caps might see it capitalized in our style and think that must be the way it is done in Wikipedia. Alternatively, people seeing the work in Purcell's idiosyncratic style would think there must be something different about this work from all the others in Wikipedia. I don't have strong feelings, but generally I favor following Wikipedia's style in Wikipedia. Many songs, bands, companies, etc. capitalize in odd ways and usually we follow our standard style. SchreiberBike talk 20:21, 20 December 2013 (UTC)"

Furthermore, the number of musicians and musicologists familiar with that composition is a tiny, tiny droplet in a very huge bucket of WP readers. Of those, the number who remember how it was originally capitalized – before English had capitalization standards, mind you – is even smaller. How many actual readers of Wikipedia? A few dozen? Of those, how many are so dense they cannot understand that WP, like most major publications, has a style guide that it follows which sometimes conflicts with other style guides and conventions? Probably zero. Also of that same group, how many have never encountered the work capitalized the way WP and nearly everyone else familiar with the English language would capitalize it? Again zero. Basic reasoning, therefore, suggests that the people raising hell about this are doing it for precisely the reasons outlined and skewered at WP:SSF, need to rethink what their priorities are here, and basically need to stop abusing WP as a place to get into geeky, we're-more-special-than-you fights simply for the "joy" of arguing and wasting other people's time. Some people with that approach are a curse to the entire encyclopedia, and directly inspired other highly critical essays, including WP:DIVA and WP:NOTHERE (I could even tell you the specific individual from one of the biology projects who inspired the former, but am prohibited by WP:ARBATC from doing so).

As ScheiberBike hints at but didn't spell out, there are other WP reasons to not capitalize that title weirdly against standard English conventions, such as the principle of least astonishment for the largest number of people, and the fact that we do not engage in weird typographic shenanigans to satisfy anyone expectations about what the "official name" of something is, nor to emulate artists' preferred style (e.g. a large number of modern pop song and album titles have "TiTleS CaPiTaLiZeD WeIrD" like that just for kicks, and WP emphatically does not honor those style choices, no matter how many music magazines/sites and other topically-reliable specialist publications do so. Bottom line: If if conflicts with what you'd normally find in a newspaper, another (non-specialist) encyclopedia/dictionary, or other totally generalist work, don't do it here. To the specialist editor raising hell about some typographical quirk here: Get the hell over yourself and your specialty's tiresome "preciousness". It's really quite simple.

The only actual misapplications I've ever seen of WP:SSF are attempting to apply it to cases where specialist style does not actually conflict with normal, everyday English usage, or where the style conflict has nothing to do with specialists. For example, I've seen someone wrongly make an SSF argument against spacing initials in human names (J. R. R. Tolkien vs. J.R.R. Tolkien), on the basis that the unspaced version is actually more common, by a wide margin, even, and wrongly cite this essay in their argument. That's not an SSF concern, both because the spaced-apart style doesn't lead to any sort of cognitive dissonance for typical readers, and because (more pointedly) no one is defending the run-together style on the basis that their oh-so-damned-important specialty demands it that way, against the expectations of the rest of the human race.

At this point, I don't really give a damn other than to clarify my own reasoning in that essay. WP is going to hell in a rocket-powered hand basket. I post occasional requests for corrections on some article talk pages (not under this username), because I need them as a reader, not editor, but that's it. I don't work here any longer (I don't even edit articles to fix typos), and never will until the ArbCom or the community more broadly reigns in the rampant, authoritarian, PoV-pushing admin abuse that is driving Wikipedia down the drain.

– SMcCandlish, 21:35, 14 January 2014 (UTC)