User talk:SMcCandlish/Archive 88

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March 2014

GAN March 2014 Backlog Drive

The March 2014 GAN Backlog Drive has begun and will end on April 1, 2014! Sent by Dom497 on behalf of MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:01, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Discretionary sanction notification

I was already on notice, and this attempt to replace Sandstein's accusatory version didn't work, because the notifier here is not an admin.
 – Moot

This is to notify you that the arbitration committee authorized discretionary sanctions for article titles and capitalization. NE Ent 18:04, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Noted! I shall not forget any time soon.  :-) — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 19:29, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
If this actually sticks, I'll be shocked (Sandstein reverted the last attempt to do something like that, someone's removal of Neotarf being listed there even after Sandstein admitted they didn't deserve the warning), but one can hope. Appreciate the effort, regardless. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 19:36, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

ANI Sandstein thread

Resolved
 – Moot - that ANI request closed without fixing anything.

I have refactored the discussion so as not to discourage participation by more editors. [1] (They already know what we think, we want to know what they think.) This means I have left only a one- or two-sentence statement after the !vote. I hope I have chosen the most representative and neutral statements to represent your views, if not, let me know. —Neotarf (talk) 15:17, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

That's fine. I'm interested in resolution much more than venting. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 06:00, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Great to see you back here

Resolved
 – Just a chat.

Even if under difficult circumstances, WP without you is like having a major piece of furniture missing from the living room. :-) Tony (talk) 15:50, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Appreciated, but I'm about 80% decided to leave again, and 20% decided to try one last time to resolve the Sandstein dispute, via RFARB. I give that low odds of success because of pro-admin bias, and already-declared prejudice against the case by one of the Arbs (I'll demand his recusal of course). If I don't receive satisfaction that way, I'll probably just walk permanently. I've given the community about an entire year to fix this, and nothing's come of it. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 16:35, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
Actually, I just noticed that NE Ent put back their version of WP:ARBATC#Log of notifications, not Sandstein's (except for Neotarf). If it stays that way, that actually effectively voids my main complaint (a false accusation against me, by Sandstein, appearing in that log, and nothing I or anyone else said ever getting it removed despite it being defamatory). The 1-month MOS topic ban by Sandstein is still an issue, but as it came during US tax season and I was too busy in meatspace to appeal it before it expired, it's kind of moot except as evidence if he pursues any grossly WP:INVOLVED action against me. I guess I'll sit on this a while and see if the ARBATC log changes stay as-is. if they do, I might return to editing. I have a couple of articles worth working up, would like to finish MOS:ORGANISMS, and have a few other things I could be interested in doing here. I'm still bitterly disappointed, however, in the admin community's abject failure to do anything to resolve this matter for an entire year, no matter how many times it was raised. My confidence in this project as a whole has not magically been restored. I still think there are massive problems with how Wikipedia is being administered. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 17:34, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
@Tony1:Looks like I'll stick around for a while. :-) — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 22:35, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
Might want to remove yourself from Wikipedia:Missing Wikipedians, then . Adrian J. Hunter(talkcontribs) 17:36, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
Right! Thanks.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  19:55, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

ARCA

Resolved
 – Noted, and I participated there.

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification_and_Amendment#Clarification_request:_Article_titles_and_capitalisation NE Ent 02:15, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

ARCA edit

Resolved
 – Moot; ARCA request is closed now.

I'm a brand-new clerk for ArbCom, and stilling learning how to do things. One of the clerks task is to make sure that statements don't get too long and that the tone remains civil. There is a 500 word limit for statements; your original statement was well within the limit (so thank-you). I've confirmed that succinct responses to questions from the arbs should fall outside that limit, as would make sense. However, I note that a single section added by you is over 700 words, and I sense an increase in the intensity of language. I appreciate that you collapsed the section, which helps with page management, but presumably you expect it to be read by all arbs, so the collapse doesn't achieve much in terms of brevity. I plan to coordinate with other more experienced clerks for counsel, so at this time I'm not planning to take any action other than to urge you to take a deep breath. You are trying to make some points, a wall of text with strident language will undercut your points.--S Philbrick(Talk) 21:04, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Noted. It is just frustrating that after a year the same party keeps trying to make the same logically and factually invalid points as always. I'm amenable to whatever you recommend, and will right now go reduce the size of that section. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 21:34, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
PS: My actual intent/expectation was that Arbs would NOT want to read it, because it's not germane to "what to do to resolve this dispute"; it's just a "for the record" response to Sandstein's questionable statements. This is one place, finally, where Sandstein can't actually close the discussion himself against me, despite being WP:INVOLVED in my view and that of many others. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 22:17, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
I haven't had to live it, so I won't insult you by saying I totally understand, but I have seen many legitimate complaints derailed when the main point gets lost. I appreciate that it wasn't intended for the arbs, but we expect our arbs to read what is presented, and while they may realize they didn't need to read it when they get to the end, it is kinda too late. I appreciate your willingness to dial it back. If you read carefully, I think you will see that many arbs are sympathetic to the issues, I hope you make their life easier by letting them focus on the main issues. Thanks for your understanding.--S Philbrick(Talk) 23:51, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
Noted! — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 04:23, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the advice. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 22:35, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Hey Stanton

Resolved
 – Just a chat.

Glad to see you're back (even if only for a short time). Just wanted to let you know while your eyes are here, that I for one certainly appreciate your edits over the years! Btw, in your absence blah.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 21:46, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! I agree with you on the navbox issue, and glad it wasn't deleted. There's a conformist tendency here to assume that "different" means "bad" and must be suppressed. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 04:22, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
@Fuhghettaboutit:Looks like I'll stick around for a while. :-) — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 22:51, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Request for clarification

Resolved
 – That resolves 1 of the 3 major issues with the WP:ARBATC enforcement and notification logs (this took care of another one), and it took over a year, for no reason. It's just enough progress on the issue that I will tentatively end my wiki-retirement over the matter and see if things improve with the allegedly forthcoming DS review. They'd better or more people will leave in droves, including me, permanently.

The clarification request involving you has been archived. The original comments made by the arbitrators may be helpful in proceeding further. For the Arbitration Committee, Rschen7754 22:06, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Good news

Resolved
 – Just a chat.

Glad to see this! Bishonen | talk 23:12, 21 March 2014 (UTC).

Yeah, it only took over a year, to resolve only 2/3 of the issues that led up to my leaving. Better than nothing! — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖכþ Contrib. 23:18, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Reference Errors on 23 March

Resolved
 – Fixed.

Hello, I'm ReferenceBot. I have automatically detected that an edit performed by you may have introduced errors in referencing. It is as follows:

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, ReferenceBot (talk) 00:38, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

You are now a template editor

 – Just a notice.

Your account has been granted the template editor user right, allowing you to edit templates and modules that have been protected with template protection. It also allows you to bypass the title blacklist, giving you the ability to create and edit edit notices.

You can use this user right to perform maintenance, answer edit requests, and make any other simple and generally uncontroversial edits to templates, modules, and edit notices. You can also use it to enact more complex or controversial edits, after those edits are first made to a test sandbox, and their technical reliability as well as their consensus among other informed editors has been established.

Before you use this user right, please read Wikipedia:Template editor and make sure you understand its contents. In particular, you should read the section on wise template editing and the criteria for revocation. This user right gives you access to some of Wikipedia's most important templates and modules; it is critical that you edit them wisely and that you only make edits that are backed up by consensus. It is also very important that no one else be allowed to access your account, so you should consider taking a few moments to secure your password.

If you do not want this user right, you may ask any administrator to remove it for you at any time.

Useful links:

Happy template editing! — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 03:47, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Nice to see you back making improvements to templates. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 03:47, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
Thanks. It's nice to be back. I wish this template-editor access stuff had come about around, say, 8 years ago when I and various others were suggesting it. Lots of "the sky is falling" nonsense along the fallacious lines of "we trust admins to do everything, and only trust admins to do anything" kept it from happening for years and years. Sorry I wasn't around for whatever proposal finally succeeded. My two abortive RfAs were actually pretty much entirely about a need to edit protected templates; I didn't really want to do much of anything else administrative. Heh.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ⚞(Ʌⱷ҅̆⚲͜^)≼  04:31, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

A tip

 – Just a notice.

If you're tagging a redirect, make sure the tag goes above the REDIRECT code. If it goes below, the redir still works, and the admin will get go to the target (and think the problem, whatever it was, is sorted). Anything above the redirect code stops the redir working. Peridon (talk) 16:44, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Okay!  — SMcCandlish ¢ ⚞(Ʌⱷ҅̆⚲͜^)≼  16:47, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Glossaries talk v404.23

Stale
 – Discussion petered out, with no clear action items.

Hi Stanton, I know a lot of this has been discussed on various pages and been re-hashed before, however, I would like some clarification as to the issues and how to address this going forward before I try to assist in any way and break or re-release any bugs into the system(s).

Firstly, my overall impression is that your contributions are numerous, greatly admired and in the most part very effective and that glossaries have a life of their own and can be used in two main ways, that is; 1. Interwiki links and 2. Links or parsed through to any other site using wiki as a resource.

So now to the crux, preamble..

  1. Definitions should be to the greatest extent possible be simple and easy to understand preferably even by the general public, to that end, if the definition extends to more than one, clear and concise sentence this goal has not been met and should therefore be re-worded.
  2. The wiki mark up works perfectly for interwiki uses.
  3. The errors in parsing are somewhat self inflicted, by either inconsistent mark up or too long a definition, see Glossary of cue sports terms#training template.

Crux, questions, possible solution and the way forward, attempted in a top to bottom approach..

  1. Make use of the main article on wiki, i.e. each glossary has a main article link at the top of page to reduce any and all lead sections to the essence of what this glossary is trying to achieve and not explaining the subject matter.
  2. To the greatest extent possible avoid self referencing, so that each lead section and definition can stand alone.
  3. A consistent TOC, that promotes best practice, is concise for the purpose of each individual glossary is defined.
  4. The wiki mark up "Anchor|anchor name*(*=term and variants of term)|term" is used on all singular defined items. I believe this method has no known issue for single sentence definitions.
  5. XML stanardised mark up is avoided if at all possible and promoted in its simplest form if not.
  6. Multiple definitions are avoided if at all possible, making use instead of tags to split the terms, i.e. US, UK etc., include a see also where appropriate.
  7. Definitions that have their own main article are linked to such.
  8. All pictures are removed to reduce size to increase the speed of load time.
  9. The default sort and category mark up is detailed.
  10. MOS updated to reflect agreed best practice.

This should assist in the general editors, (non-programmers etc.) to have more buy-in and ability to expand any glossary. I know this is not a quick fix and I am more than happy to assist in any way, I have spent some time reading the current MOS, issues log, bug reports etc. etc. and a lot of the issues and fixes are inconsistent and confusing. Despite the length of this section, believe it or not, I think I have missed something, lol.
Going forward, 1. I believe I could write up a TOC best practice section relatively quickly. 2. If you could provide a parsing error that corrupts wiki mark up, where the above conditions are met, so that I can start working on a solution. and finally 3. Can we start some new categories to track and monitor performance and issues effectively.
Kind regards
The Original Filfi (talk) 23:54, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

It's unclear to me what concerns you are trying to address; the above seems to be a mixture of technical and editorial concerns that are not particularly connected, many are solutions in search of problems that aren't clearly demonstrated to exist, and some of it doesn't make sense to me, as-given (e.g. "XML standardized markup is avoided if at all possible..." - why would we avoid doing standard things?) I also don't understand what "Glossaries talk v404.23" refers to; Wikipedia talk:GLOSSARIES has no thread that seems to involve these numbers. Perhaps most importantly, I feel you're sorely confusing an encyclopedic glossary with a dictionary; glossary entries here should be precisely as long as they need to be to properly inform readers. An arbitrary one-sentence length limit is what would ensure failure at meeting our encyclopedic goal with such entries; see previous debates on the survival of Glossary of cue sports terms, the "flagship" glossary article, for well-articulated debates about this. In fact, I would kind of insist on you reading all of that.  :-). Anyway, I'm sure there are in fact entries that are too long-winded in some glossaries here, but that's an editorial problem precisely the same as any other content verbosity issue, e.g. in a paragraph on a non-glossary page, and hasn't anything to do with glossaries in particular. Please try to articulate separately what you see as issues that need to be addressed, and we should look at them to see which are problems to do with glossary markup and structure, and which are not, which can be addressed by technical changes, which by guidance changes, which are not valid, which are more general and not tied to glossaries at all, etc. This should probably be done at WT:GLOSSARIES. PS: The fact that it's complicated is not all that big a deal. Nothing requires anyone to use the richer form of glossary markup, just like nothing forces anyone to use our painful wikitable markup, or geeky template language. Editors who have such WP:COMPETENCE do well at that kind of work here, those that don't do not, and so something else, while those that do reformat after them. No one is mandatorily made to use our headache-inducing citation templates, for example. Just add facts and mention the sources, and someone later will handle the coding. It's the same here, with glossaries. We don't dumb-down the technical capability of features here on the basis that noobs can't understand them. We just accept that they don't *yet*, and work around it.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ⚞(Ʌⱷ҅̆⚲͜^)≼  15:54, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Hi Stanton, I certainly was not trying to authoritatively tell any glossary editor or potential editor "This is the way, and the only way".
The approach I was using was listing all issues on glossaries specifically and creating a listing of all MOS requirements to enable educated debate and therefore a standardised and a "as simple as possible" guide to all editors, the listing was supposed to be holistic, covering the whole approach and communication of such to assist any future editors, which is why it mixed technical, editorial and guidance aspects.
To address your points above, one at a time

  1. XML standardized markup is avoided if at all possible - to try to promote the effective wiki mark up that works fine in 90% of the case, using XML only if absolutely necessary, in its simplest and most effective form fit for purpose.
  2. Glossaries talk v404.23 - A number I made up in reference to how much talk has already happened, without clear and concise guidance being agreed and published.
  3. encyclopedic glossary - Totally agreed, however first use should be the main article, extra verbosity on the glossary detracts from its impact and readability, the "one-sentence" approach is to try to ensure the 3 fundamentals (Clear, Concise and Precise) is addressed for each entry as best one can.
  4. Finally "noobs" and "Complicated" was not mentioned, however, "noobs" should be encouraged and over complicating coding, mark-up and templates for a most often self-inflicted issue is in the long term detracting from the whole and the basis of wiki.
    All my clear points above stand true for glossaries, some also apply to other article types as well, so?
    I assume (bad practice I know) from your response, that this is your baby, and any assistance is either not welcome or wanted, unless I have read this wrong.
    Kind regards
    The Original Filfi (talk) 02:17, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
@The Original Filfi: Nothing's my "baby", but it's still unclear to me what particular problems you think are in evidence. Given how much there is to do around here to make a better encyclopedia, I take an "if it ain't broke, don't 'fix' it" view by default. Some of what you're saying doesn't really track for me, like the discussion of XML. We're not using XML, but XHTML, and using it properly - there are features of that markup language specifically designed for things like glossaries. To return to your original list, it seems a mixture of advice, complaints and technical requirements, and is hard to parse for anything with a clear meaning. I'll retair your orignal numbering, through your short list of 3 points, long list of 10 points, paragraph-embedded list of 3 more points, and followup list of yet another 4 numbered things.
First three:
  1. This is a discussion that's not been had yet. I don't think you'll find a consensus to limit glossary entries to one sentence; it's an arbitrary "one size fits all" approach that does not fit all.
  2. What wikimarkup in particular? How broadly are you defining it. "Inter-" between what wikis? Is this an observation, a request, an expectation? Is it an implication that you're objecting to something, desiring to remove code of some kind? Also, you seem to be confused as to what "wikimarkup" means. It's any markup th MediWiki software will parse. This includes MW's own wiki markup language, MW's parser functions, XHTML, CSS, etc. The distinction you seem to be drawing between XHTML and "wikimarkup" does not exist.
  3. What errors in parsing? What "self"? Infliction of what? Definition length has nothing to do with how markup is parsed. Inconsistent markup is a problem that arises with all markup systems on all sorts sites, not glossaries on en.wiki in particular. "Crux, questions, possible solution and the way forward, attempted in a top to bottom approach.." isn't a sentence. Crux of what? Questions about what to whom? Possibly solution by whom to what problem? What is attempted by whom to do what? Top and bottom of what?
The ten:
  1. Sure. Is there somewhere this a big problem?
  2. I don't know what you mean by "lead section" here. Every article, including glossary articles, has one "lead section" in WP terms, so "each lead section and definition can stand alone" doesn't make sense here (and is mixing singular and plural in an odd way). What do you mean by "self referencing"? If you mean WP:SELFREF, that's already covered. If you mean that WP is not a WP:RS for itself, we already know that; nothing to do here. If you mean do not link between entries in the same glossary, you'll never get consensus for such an idea, because linking from one bit of information to another is most of what WP does, and the only possible way to keep a glossary concise is to not re-re-re-explain terms every time they come up, but to cross-reference them.
  3. There is no principle on WP that ToCs have to be "consistent"; we have various ToC templates that produce very, very different-looking ToCs for a reason - some are better for some purposes than others. The draft glossary guidelines already give examples in this regard that should be good for most glossary cases. A ToC "that promotes best practice"? What does that even mean? Tables of content list the contents of an article. It's isn't their purpose to "promote" "practices" of any kind.
  4. That isn't wikimarkup. I don't know what sort of pseudocode it is. I recognize some bits of template syntax in there, but some of it seems to be jibberish. Anyway, we can't have one markup style for single-sentence definitions and a different one for others; that will never, ever be practical, since any given edit, by any editor at any time, may change a definition's length.
  5. Whether multiple definitions are needed in a particular case is a content decision at that specific glossary, and is outside the scope of the MOS, including WP:GLOSSARIES. Also, "making use instead of tags to split the terms" could mean any of about 5 different things. We are in fact using XHTML "tags" (elements) to split the terms, into separate definitions when necessary.
  6. I think you meant XHTML here, but the answer's the same: MW supports XHTML code for a reason, and we use it for what it is best for, especially within templates (i.e. such as the structured glossary templates).
  7. What problem are you trying to address here? This is actually another article-level content decision; in some cases it may be more helpful to the reader to link to a glossary entry, one narrowly tailored to the nuances of that term's applications in the topic field the glossary covers, and from that definition also have a {{main}} that links to the separate article. This is actually pretty frequently precisely how it's done, and MOS cannot make content decisions like that; it's up to editors at that article.
  8. Um, no. There is no basis in any policy or guideline or conventional practice here to remove images from glossary entries, any more than from any other type of article or section of an article. One of the main things that makes an encyclopedic glossary encyclopedic instead of a list of dicdefs is illustration.
  9. Huh?
  10. Well, yes, that's what WP:GLOSSARIES is the working draft of.
You continued with another, shorter list of what you saw as action items, inside a paragraph:
  1. "I believe I could write up a TOC best practice section relatively quickly." To articulate what? Maybe if you just do this somewhere and present it at WT:GLOSSARIES, it'll be clearer what you're getting at. This kind of comes back to the theme that a problem must be articulated and evidenced before people will agree it's a problem and how to fix it.
  2. "If you could provide a parsing error that corrupts wiki mark up, where the above conditions are met, so that I can start working on a solution." I have no idea what you're talking about. That's the first half an if-then sentence, with no "then" part. Why would I want to try to break things with errors? Again, what actual, demonstrable, extant problem are you trying to address? See WP:BEANS; it's not our job to try to create problems to solve.
  3. "Can we start some new categories to track and monitor performance and issues effectively." Categories of what? Performance of what? What issues? Categories are for sorting articles and other pages here by topic; not sure how that will help "track and monitor" anything relevant to glossaries. Glossaries are just articles, formatted a particular way. In theory we could get approval for another hidden category type for some sort of WP-internal purpose, but again you're not articulating any kind of actual issue or need here.
Next you replied to me with four more numbered points (hint: lists of numbered things are only helpful when there's one of them; if there's three or four of them, it just confuses things more).
  1. That's just technically incorrect, and doesn't reflect anything about WP standard practice. You're also under the mistaken impression that formatting based on templates that use XHTML is somehow a bad thing because some wikis won't have the templates. The solution to this "problem" is course to create the corresponding templates on the other wiki that wants to borrow our content. The far more important re-use case is re-presentation of WP content in other completely different ways, e.g. on paper, on non-MediaWiki-based websites, etc., and the use of standard XHTML is a major boon to such reuse.
  2. Sarcastic snarking isn't helpful. Very little discussion has happened, actually, because the work on this has been very esoteric for the most part, I was largely gone for almost a year, and most importantly, the structured glossary stuff already works fantastically well, as demonstrated by Glossary of cue sports terms. Other glossaries have been adopting this structure, without any serious problems (other than recent sloppy changes to the code in Template:Glossary link, etc., that I'll try to fix this week. At any rate, it's simply being quietly implemented with no one seeming to have any issues with it other than you.
  3. You don't have, and I firmly predict you'll never find, consensus on any aspect of that point of yours. Again, content decisions, like whether a glossary link should go to a term in that glossary or to a main page elsewhere, is outside the scope of MOS, including WP:GLOSSARIES.
  4. I've already addressed that. See WP:COMPETENCE, and remember that no one is forcing anyone to use any markup here. For all we care someone with (sourced) content to add can just add it sloppily with no markup at all. We'll try to educate them on how to make better contributions, but their contribution won't be rejected.
You wrote, "All my clear points above stand true for glossaries", but your points are not at all clear to me and I doubt they'll be clear to anyone else. I'm not trying to be mean, but I decline to be put on the defensive by your forcefully toe-stepping approach, overlaid with what sound like insinuations of WP:OWNership, when you show up on my talk page with a laundry list of problems that do not seem to be real problems, and talking about some kind of comprehensive overhaul of the glossary code and draft glossary guideline, for which you not only cannot articulate rationales but have not even clearly articulated the details of what changes you're proposing. All indications are that you have some beef with XHTML, which you do not understand, and have an intent to strip this code out of WP:GLOSSARIES and its associated template. You're on notice that you do not have consensus to do that, and that pursuing that course of actions would be very severely disruptive to the off-wiki portability of our glossaries, as well as their internal maintainability. As I said before, proposing any of this stuff on my talk page isn't normal procedure, anyway; this is not the correct venue. Not sure what else to tell you.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ⚞(Ʌⱷ҅̆⚲͜^)≼  05:16, 31 March 2014 (UTC)