{{od}} <u>A passing comment:</u> this report fails on a number of important respects. It's too long. It presupposes reviewers would view evidence which the [[User:Pofka|OP]] maintains is "clear," erm, ''clearly.'' I suppose it's clear to them (and Ymblanter and possibly [[User:Kazimier Lachnovič|Kazimier Lachnovič]]), but otherwise presupposing such familiarity for a subject of relative obscurity (in Anglo-American culture, etc.) is very much an unrealistic expectation. Finally, the egregious and the recent do not really seem to meet in the overall diff evidence. There's some egregious diffs presented, but they're from a June 19 conversation. Then, there are recent diffs, but they do not appear to be that egregious in nature. Whatever fault these represent (ethno-national POV pushing-wise), was something I wasn't able to immediately parse. Possibly, there are reviewers of this board who would be able to peer deeper into this — that is, without too much study into what the mainstream and scholarly consensus is for this matter (matters?). Lastly, [[User:Ymblanter|Ymblanter]]: you keep saying that Kazimier Lachnovič called you a "Nazi," but have provided no diff evidence to support that claim. If it's on a Wikimedia project, there should be diffs, no? Just so a reviewer can get a sense of what was said, the context, etc. ''[For fun, no paragraph breaks!]'' [[User:El_C|El_C]] 11:19, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
{{od}} <u>A passing comment:</u> this report fails on a number of important respects. It's too long. It presupposes reviewers would view evidence which the [[User:Pofka|OP]] maintains is "clear," erm, ''clearly.'' I suppose it's clear to them (and Ymblanter and possibly [[User:Kazimier Lachnovič|Kazimier Lachnovič]]), but otherwise presupposing such familiarity for a subject of relative obscurity (in Anglo-American culture, etc.) is very much an unrealistic expectation. Finally, the egregious and the recent do not really seem to meet in the overall diff evidence. There's some egregious diffs presented, but they're from a June 19 conversation. Then, there are recent diffs, but they do not appear to be that egregious in nature. Whatever fault these represent (ethno-national POV pushing-wise), was something I wasn't able to immediately parse. Possibly, there are reviewers of this board who would be able to peer deeper into this — that is, without too much study into what the mainstream and scholarly consensus is for this matter (matters?). Lastly, [[User:Ymblanter|Ymblanter]]: you keep saying that Kazimier Lachnovič called you a "Nazi," but have provided no diff evidence to support that claim. If it's on a Wikimedia project, there should be diffs, no? Just so a reviewer can get a sense of what was said, the context, etc. ''[For fun, no paragraph breaks!]'' [[User:El_C|El_C]] 11:19, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
: A quick answer: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/User_problems&diff=541077004&oldid=541073498 This is the Nazi diff], this was their response in the same thread when challenged: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/User_problems&diff=541122462&oldid=541092166]. Both diffs are on Commons. Now, here they made in total 727 edits, and a great deal of these of these are file renames on Commons, so obviously there are not so many ecent edits. However, I do not see many good recent edits. Essentially, they edit-warred with the topic stater at [[Pahonia]], starting from [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pahonia&diff=1015842622&oldid=1015763606&diffmode=source here], and made, if I count correctly, six reverts in two days, which is the continuation of [[Talk:Coat of arms of Lithuania#Merging the Belarusian Pahonia and Lithuanian Vytis together?|this discussion]], which featured gems like [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Coat_of_arms_of_Lithuania&diff=1011754435&oldid=1011749859&diffmode=source this] (this one is from a month ago). My conclusion is that they are only here to push pro-Belarusian POV (their idea, which they talked about multiple times, is that only Belarusian Tarashkevitsa, which is not in use in Belarus, is a "true" language, and Belarusian which is in use in Belarus and which has a separate Wikipedia is contaminated by Russian and is not a true Belarusian). --[[User:Ymblanter|Ymblanter]] ([[User talk:Ymblanter|talk]]) 15:59, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
: A quick answer: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/User_problems&diff=541077004&oldid=541073498 This is the Nazi diff], this was their response in the same thread when challenged: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/User_problems&diff=541122462&oldid=541092166]. Both diffs are on Commons. Now, here they made in total 727 edits, and a great deal of these of these are file renames on Commons, so obviously there are not so many ecent edits. However, I do not see many good recent edits. Essentially, they edit-warred with the topic stater at [[Pahonia]], starting from [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pahonia&diff=1015842622&oldid=1015763606&diffmode=source here], and made, if I count correctly, six reverts in two days, which is the continuation of [[Talk:Coat of arms of Lithuania#Merging the Belarusian Pahonia and Lithuanian Vytis together?|this discussion]], which featured gems like [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Coat_of_arms_of_Lithuania&diff=1011754435&oldid=1011749859&diffmode=source this] (this one is from a month ago). My conclusion is that they are only here to push pro-Belarusian POV (their idea, which they talked about multiple times, is that only Belarusian Tarashkevitsa, which is not in use in Belarus, is a "true" language, and Belarusian which is in use in Belarus and which has a separate Wikipedia is contaminated by Russian and is not a true Belarusian). --[[User:Ymblanter|Ymblanter]] ([[User talk:Ymblanter|talk]]) 15:59, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
::'''My assessment:''' [[User:Ymblanter|Ymblanter]], thanks, but a diff for {{tq|I do not have time discussion with Nazis, bye}} is what I really was after. Regardless, [[User:Kazimier Lachnovič|Kazimier Lachnovič]], my impression is that you are engaged in promoting some sort of ethno-national supremacism and, worse yet, doing so using inflammatory rhetoric and [[WP:NPA|personal attacks]]. Also, you repeatedly quote [[WP:5P]] above as some sort of a defense for some reason, but is of course far too vague to to be of any real use for our immediate purposes here, in any substantive sense, at least.
::Anyway, I'll give you a day or so to respond, but at the moment, I'm leaning toward sanctions of some sort, up to and including an indefinite block. Still, by all means, feel free to try to explain your position better — specifically, by addressing Ymblanter's points in his comment directly above this one. Needless to say, I urge brevity on the part of any and all participants. [[User:El_C|El_C]] 16:43, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
I had an IBAN imposed in October of 2019 and I am requesting the removal of it.
The details are at: Wikipedia:Editing_restrictions#Placed_by_the_Wikipedia_community.
I admit that the IBAN was imposed correctly and to avoid disruption and I was 100% at fault in that case. However, I am asking that the IBAN be removed at this time. I don't believe I had any recent interaction, even tangentially but it is hard at times to keep to the IBAN due to the nature of the details.
I am not sure about notifications or comments, but I would request that any discussion I have here be sanctioned by BANEX.
Thank you. Sir Joseph(talk)23:19, 11 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I am inclined to keep an interaction ban that has been successful, not only in keeping Sir Joseph away from TonyBallioni but in keeping Sir Joseph on-Wiki (see the ban discussion: Sir Joseph's very survival on Wikipedia counts on it as the patience of the community is wearing thin). Perhaps Sir Joseph could enlarge on how the ban is preventing him from editing Wikipedia and how he would interact with TonyBallioni if it were lifted. --Malcolmxl5 (talk) 14:19, 12 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, as you see in the interaction analyzer, we edit lots of the same administrative pages and there are times when I want to comment on a discussion but I can't. I also feel that there is no more need of an IBAN and we shouldn't keep it just to keep it. It's been well over a year and we shouldn't be punitive. Sir Joseph(talk)14:26, 12 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
OK, you want to be able to comment in discussions where TonyBallioni has commented. I would support lifting the IB for that with the advice that I think you would wise to continue to avoid commenting on, about or in response to TonyBallioni; just comment directly on the topic being discussed. --Malcolmxl5 (talk) 01:12, 13 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support removal - SJ is aware of the issue and knows to avoid interaction with TB. He has demonstrated that it's possible for him to do so as a mature adult. It's easy enough to restore it, so what's the big deal? Realistically after 6 mos, t-bans and i-bans become punishment to those who have to carry the full responsibility of that ball and chain. They should never be forever anymore than PP should be forever on an article. Atsme💬📧14:44, 12 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support reduction per WP:ROPE. Would it be possible to reduce the IBAN to merely avoid direct interaction (i.e. addressing directly or responding directly to comments) rather than merely avoiding pages/sections where the other is active? If not, I would also support a full elimination of the IBAN (pending TB's comments regarding the issue) as a second best option. --Jayron3215:16, 12 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
*Support reduction I think Jayron makes a good argument and we should allow SJ a rope and if there will be a slight problem the ban could reinstated again. --Shrike (talk) 19:36, 12 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I reread the arguments one again and I now Support removal but I urge SJ to minimize his interaction to TB to absolute minimum --Shrike (talk) 08:01, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support removal. Both his admission and the time that has passed with no further events suggest that SJ has learned from the experience, and could interact productively with TB. François Robere (talk) 20:20, 12 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I guess this has started while I've been away from Wikipedia for a bit. I oppose removal and ask that this be kept open a bit after my response of Sir Joseph's IBAN with me. There is literally no reason to remove it. What does it accomplish? Sir Joseph and I do not edit the same topic areas. I actually can't think of a time where I have come into contact with him recently just through going through the normal pages that I go through. My experience with Sir Joseph is that he harbors grudges and would likely use lifting this as an opportunity to go through my contributions to bring me to a noticeboard at the drop of a pin over something that's not an issue, comment negatively at me for no reason elsewhere, or generally make my life unpleasant on Wikipedia.I'm also going to point out that my concerns here have some merit as it was made while I was on a wikibreak for a few weeks. Sorry if I'm being overly cynical, but I suspect Sir Joseph looking through my contributions for no reason, noticed I wasn't around, and then decided to ask for this because he knows that the community is usually unwilling to remove a 1-way IBAN if the other party is opposed. If he's already looking through my contribution history while under an IBAN, forgive me if I assume that he's going to do the same when he's not. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:57, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You're expressing a lot of ABF in that response and I hope you rewrite it. More helpful than sharing your assumptions would be sharing if you've had any problems with SJ in the last 17 months or not. Because if the answer is "not", it may be you who is holding a grudge here. Levivichharass/hound14:37, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Assume good faith is not a suicide pact. I don’t comment on or interact with Sir Joseph because of the IBAN: its not fair to him. I’m not going to pretend that I think he is going to behave any differently towards me today than he did when the IBAN was placed. That’s not an assumption of bad faith or holding a grudge, that’s having an extremely negative experience with someone and not wanting to be subject to it again.The community traditionally does not lift one-way IBANs if one party objects. I’m simply asking that the community give me the courtesy of considering my request that SJ keep from interacting with me. There’s literally no reason for him to do so since we don’t edit the same areas and he’s at no risk of violating his ban on accident. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:15, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
"I'm not going to pretend that I think he is going to behave any differently towards me today than he did when the IBAN was placed" is the very definition of holding a grudge. I'm not suggesting you need to assume good faith, I'm suggesting you should not assume bad faith, like don't assume he went through your contribs, and let go of your grudge. Levivichharass/hound16:23, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think that’s an odd definition. I don’t wish Sir Joseph any ill will. I’m not asking he be banned from the site. I’m asking that he continue not to talk about me. By your definition you’re suggesting, anyone who has experienced someone behaving overwhelmingly negatively towards them should have their concerns dismissed as a grudge or as assuming bad faith. That’s not particularly fair—it means that people who have legitimate concerns with the way others have treated them simply to have those concerns ignored. The community already decided that Sir Joseph was acting inappropriately towards me. I don’t have to demonstrate that. My concern that Sir Joseph will continue acting that way is a real one, and I think I’m within behavioural norms to express it. I also don’t think I need to defend every word choice I made from in-depth analysis and reframing of arguments when expressing that, so I’m not going to continue engaging in this thread since you appear to have made up your mind, and I am also fairly resolved that I continue to not want to have to worry about Sir Joseph interacting with me. I’ve made my request known. The community can decide, and I’ll accept the result. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:47, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I do not support the concept of lifting sanctions just because "it's been a long time." The IBAN appears to be working, so why would we lift it? Just for the hell of it? I do not see how it is limiting SJ from doing anything except interacting with Tony, and that's a good thing that we should want to continue. Beyond My Ken (talk) 07:32, 21 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
would likely use lifting this as an opportunity to go through my contributions to bring me to a noticeboard at the drop of a pin over something that's not an issue, comment negatively at me for no reason elsewhere, or generally make my life unpleasant on Wikipedia. - I guess a verbal commitment to not do these would be a positive step. starship.paint (exalt)16:49, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose removal as the other party opposes the lifting of the ban, and also WP:IBAN says Although the interaction-banned users are generally allowed to edit the same pages or discussions so long as they avoid each other, they are not allowed to interact with each other, so I don't see how Sir Joseph's stated reason for lifting the ban, we edit lots of the same administrative pages and there are times when I want to comment on a discussion but I can't is valid as he can still comment on a discussion, just not directly to TB.-- P-K3 (talk) 18:02, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It prevents him from commenting on discussions started by TB, and it might be understood by some admins as preventing him from commenting on points previously addressed by TB. François Robere (talk) 17:18, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
No it doesn't. It prevents him from commenting on me (directly or indirectly) or replying to me. WP:IBAN does not say that he can't comment on RfCs or the like started by me. Shrike (replying to you here), my view is that WP:ROPE is a really bad essay for IBANs: it'd force me to gather diffs and write out a long explanation of why SJ's behavior towards me is continuing a long trend of thinking everything I do is wrong and going out of his way to comment on me in other forums. I didn't request the original IBAN myself because I thought it'd look bad for an admin to request one from someone who has criticized them, and I'd be pretty unlikely to request it again for the same reasons. That being said, it was very much a relief when someone else proposed it, and I'd rather not have to go back to worrying about him showing up out of the woodwork to say negative things about me.To Jayron32's point, my understanding of WP:IBAN is already in line with what he is calling a "reduction". SJ is not prevented from commenting in or on discussions I have already commented in. He has done so on multiple occasions since his IBAN: he opposed the RfC I recently started on community based desysop. He has supported an RfA where I was one of the main opposers. He commented in the anti-harassment RfC last year, where I also participated before him. He opposed and RfA where I was the nominator. He made this comment at AN after I had blocked the person who started the thread and commented in the thread. He made this comment on a thread about the SashiRolls ban that I had proposed after it was enacted. He made this comment in a block review thread I had already commented in.I would be fine with a clarification to Sir Joseph that he is free to take part in discussions that I take part in or start so long as he does not directly or indirectly reference me or reply to me, but he already seems to be aware of this as he's been doing it pretty regularly. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:16, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@TonyBallioni: I too would like to know under what conditions you would consider supporting the IBAN being lifted? Or a theoretical other one-way iban with you if that is easier to answer. I'm finding it difficult to interpret your view, and thus the merits of the request, without knowing this. Thryduulf (talk) 00:40, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Thryduulf: sorry for only getting back to you now. I'll answer it theoretically since I think it's easier to explain that way. I would be open to lifting a one-way IBAN if the the party consents the overwhelming majority of the time, if not always. In cases where the other party doesn't consent, my analysis would go something like this: has an issue been identified where the IBAN is causing undue difficulty for the party who is under it to edit Wikipedia productively? If yes, would it be better to extend to two way? If not, does it seem likely the issues would return?If you want me to apply my logic above; it'd stop after the first question. The things Sir Joseph says this IBAN prevents him from doing (commenting on administrative discussions I am present in) is both not actually in line with what IBAN says, but as I pointed out above with diffs, he does regularly anyway, oftentimes disagreeing with where I stand, which is fine.My conclusion based on that is that he wants the IBAN lifted so he can directly comment on me. Given my past experience with Sir Joseph, I'm not exactly confident that he'd do so in a way that wasn't combative/hostile and containing personal attacks. That's something I'd like to avoid. I hope that makes sense. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:08, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes that does make sense, thank you. I still need to think a bit before opining on this request but you have made that easier. Thryduulf (talk) 00:12, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose removal - I hadn't !voted until now because I was waiting to hear from TonyBallioni. Not knowing that TB was on a Wikibreak, I interpreted his apparent silence as his being OK with removing the IBAN, and since the !voting was going in that direction, I didn't see any purpose in !voting myself. But now that I know that Tony is opposed to removing the ban, I also oppose it, as I would for almost any one-way IBAN in which the victimized editor objects to its being lifted. Beyond My Ken (talk) 07:27, 21 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support removal - 17 months with no issues seems long enough for another go. Not a fan of indefinite sanctions with no clear reason why they need to continue. Also not a fan of 1 way ibans either, but that is more a in general thing and not specific to this instance. PackMecEng (talk) 13:18, 21 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose removal 1 way IBANs should only be removed with the blessing of the user who the affected user cannot interact with, with limited exceptions in case of abuse.Jackattack1597 (talk) 23:06, 24 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose removal per TB. I'm a very firm believer that sanctions for harassment should not be lifted, ever, over the objection of the victim. Sir Joseph's relentless harassment of TonyBallioni was beyond the pale, and did not stop after many warnings until the moment they were formally sanctioned. Many editors were calling for Sir Joseph to be sitebanned. As TonyBallioni has explained, the sanction is not actually preventing Sir Joseph from doing anything, so why is he asking for it to be lifted if not to resume his harassment campaign? Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 15:08, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose removal per above. We should not remove a 1-way IBAN against the will of the affected editor; that is a recipe for disruption. If SJ plans to not harass Tony, then the TBAN shouldn't matter. If he does plan to harass Tony, then we should keep it. We don't know for certain which one the future holds, so keeping the TBAN is the best option to limit damage. It may be hard for SJ to comply, but it will be harder for us to deal with problems should they recur. — Wug·a·po·des01:24, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Guy, it's my understanding from the last time we interacted that we were not going to comment on each other or to each other. I've been keeping up my end of the deal and I'd like to know if that gentleman's agreement is no longer applicable. Thanks! Sir Joseph(talk)00:39, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose removal: Wikipedia badly needs admins such as Tony Ballioni who are willing to handle highly contentious matters. The community in return has the obligation to protect them, per their request, from continued harassment by a disgruntled editor. Otherwise admins would have a strong disincentive to get involved in settling disputes. The iban should continue. NightHeron (talk) 13:17, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Split the distance proposal
IBANs are annoying because you do have to worry about checking each time to see if the other person is involved in the thread/topic/whatever. Each and every time. Tony doesn't have a distinctive signature (which is fine, I don't either) so it makes it that much harder to check. And because it's one way, SJ has to check each time, even if it's someplace he's edited recently. That said, Tony's response here is quite reasonable. But even in the real world, restraining orders (or prison terms) are rarely truly infinite, and this one has already run for ~18 months I believe. So how about we give just a little WP:ROPE by reducing it to "SJ is not to comment on or directly interact with Tony subject the normal exceptions. SJ is expected to avoid other interactions normally associated with an IBAN. If any uninvolved admin feels that SJ is intentionally interacting with Tony or otherwise trying to create friction with Tony they can restore the full IBAN on their sole judgement." Still should get the same impact without having SJ having to check each and every edit. SJ would need to agree to this for at least a year before coming back to ask for it to be removed. Hobit (talk) 19:15, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hobit, I guess my confusion with the various suggestions about updating the IBAN to be along the lines of what you're saying is that that's already what WP:IBAN says, and Sir Joseph appears to know it since he already comments on areas I'm I've commented on fairly regularly (I had a bunch of diffs above showing this.) I think I've already said that I would be fine with a clarification that IBAN's do not prohibit him from commenting in discussions I have already taken part in, but this is also something he already appears to know since he's doing what he says he can't do anyway. I guess in my head calling an IBAN something other than an IBAN because we want to clarify something doesn't make much sense to me, especially in this case. But yeah, I'd support making it even more clear that IBAN allows him to comment in the same thread as me so long as he doesn't interact with or reference/comment on me. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:59, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Unblock request by Wikipedia Paid Editor Jacobmcpherson
I'm happy to participate in the Wikipedia community while complying with the Terms of Service. Please let me know what I'd need to do to meet those as a Paid Editor. I remain open to learning more about how to operate this way within the Wikipedia ecosystem.
It is ultimately my goal to help Wikipedia articles remain factual, which is why many people choose to work directly with me.
It would be helpful for me to get clarification on some points around how Wikipedia operates so I can better follow guidelines going forth. Here's some initial ones:
Why wasn't this article (Draft:Neil Krug) considered notable by Wikipedia standards?
Can you also please clarify what Wikipedia considers as a consensus and how many editors need to be involved before one is reached?
Lastly, there has been at least 8 articles I’ve participated in that have now been nominated for deletion – one of these going back to 2011 (of which my involvement was minimal). What’s the reasoning here?
I mean your questions don't seem directly relevant to why you were blocked (although I'd also note that the block reason doesn't seem either fully accurate or fully complete). Not all of your work was "advertising or promotion", however, you were also repeatedly not complying with utilising AfC etc. After you not using it was disputed once, then it would move from the "very strongly advised" to "required". The AfDs (which I would imagine did come from the nom looking at your additions in the listed thread) do have their reasoning provided. Mainly notability, with some excabating factors like promotional content, which alone I wouldn't view as sufficient to delete. Nosebagbear (talk) 20:10, 16 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
One suggestion is to stop using buzzwords like "ecosystem" instead of writing precise sentences that don't use cute euphemisms you read somewhere and thought it would be fun to adopt. I am a volunteer editor here in large measure to try to eradicate this kind of marketing-ese PR balderdash from encyclopedia articles that students and other people who aren't professional writers look to as exemplars of acceptable common parlance. "Silo", "solutions", "pivot", and "ecosystem", used outside their specific agricultural, chemical, physics, and biology contexts, are the first examples that are immediately jumping into my mind, along with "impact" as a substitute for the verb "to affect" and the noun "effect" that apparently people have decided are too difficult to use correctly. (If there's not a physical striking, there's not an "impact"; there's an "effect." It's not that hard.) I don't believe I'm alone in this philosophy. Thanks for taking this to heart. - Julietdeltalima(talk)20:27, 16 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
What about the "Environmental Impact Statement"? [2] The OED says "The phrasal verb impact on, as in when produce is lost, it always impacts on the bottom line, has been in the language since the 1960s. Many people disapprove of it despite its relative frequency, saying that make an impact on or other equivalent wordings should be used instead. New formations of verbs from nouns (as in the case of impact) are often regarded as somehow inferior." [3] I think the water is well under the bridge on the use of "impact" in the way that you disdain, considering it's been going on for about 50 years now. And, yes, the rules about "affect" and "effect" are difficult to remember, so avoiding them to avoid pedantic criticism is reasonable.Your larger point is sorta valid, but I see no reason that "pivot" can't be used about a corporation in the same way that it's often used about a second baseman, or as an instruction to a dancer. Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:31, 17 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
These are perfectly reasonable points. Re: the "environmental impact statement": I have no problem with that usage; an impact is physical, and dumping a bunch of paraquat into a wetland is as physically impactful as a meteorite strike. Re: "pivot", the dancer and second baseman are indeed physically making turns on an axis; a business entity, though, which by definition is not a natural person capable of engaging in a physical action, may take up a new business strategy very quickly, but it doesn't have quadriceps and the only way it "pivots" is in a TED Talk. And re: the positive effect this talk has had on my affect, anybody who is capable of recognizing more or less instinctively, e.g., what happens when a baseball gets lodged in the ivy at Wrigley Field, or alternately in a catcher's mask or other paraphernalia, and/or of explaining the infield-fly rule, has more than enough candlepower to learn "affect" and "effect"... It's the uncritical American-business-school-ese, and the privilege-loaded baggage that goes along with it, that makes me tetchy. Wikipedia editors are, possibly, on the precipice of becoming the de facto "usage panel" of some international agglomeration of national English varieties, simply because we are free (and ubiquitous, thanks to Google, augh) and hence more accessible in, e.g., Odisha and Eswatini and Tristan da Cunha than is the OED. But this must necessarily be a conversation for another day (and forum). Onward and upward! Thank you, BMK! Holy cow! - Julietdeltalima(talk)00:51, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Convert Block to Site Ban
Having read the discussion on the appellant's talk page, I have come to the unpleasant conclusion that the appellant either doesn't understand and isn't about to understand, or does understand and thinks that our rules are for other editors. I recommend that the community convert the administrator block to a six-month Site Ban. The question about why Neil Krug isn't notable illustrates exactly why we insist that paid editors use Articles for Creation. Notability isn't the only concern; neutrality also is. Allowing paid editors to move non-neutral articles into article space would show non-neutral articles to our readers, who trust that neutral point of view is the second pillar of Wikipedia, and would create extra work for volunteers to clean them up. This editor is creating too much work to clean up their mess.
Technically if the Community denies the appeal it automatically converts to a siteban unless we specifically exempt it. I don't see any particular reason why this can't be handled under an admin block, however Nosebagbear (talk) 12:13, 17 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The difference is that unless determined specifically to be a site ban, another admin can unilaterally lift the indef block if they deem there is an exigent reason for doing so - whether or not the appeal was denied.--WaltCip-(talk)16:04, 17 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think Nosebagbear's point is if this appeal received due consideration from the community and fails, it is a site ban unless we specifically say it shouldn't be treated as such. WP:CBAN is quite clear that 'Editors who are or remain indefinitely blocked after due consideration by the community are considered "banned by the Wikipedia community".' Nil Einne (talk) 17:16, 17 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The section above is appealing a partial block: does a denied or no-consensus result convert into an indefinite ban from the affected portion of the block? –xenotalk17:27, 17 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say yes; I think that passage is meant to say that admins shouldn't unilaterally lift a block that the community has specifically said it thinks is correct. I think that interpretation also jives with how we've been applying it here recently where we've considered and retained blocks but also found a consensus to not apply this clause for whatever reason. I'll dig through the archives later, but I think that happened in the case of some quasi-third-party appeals. — Wug·a·po·des18:59, 17 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure why moving to site ban would be required where the editor is already constrained from article space in the status quo - Robert McClenon: are you suggesting the incident editor's contributions to non-article namespaces should also be banned by the community? –xenotalk17:27, 17 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose This seems moot, given that an unsuccessful block appeal to AN becomes a ban anyway, but ignoring that I'd rather give the editor time to show that they understand and can abide by editing restrictions. Blocking paid editors who follow rules is counterproductive, as it only creates demand for those who don't.I'm far from convinced from Jacobmcpherson's responses that they will follow them, but I would have liked to have had time to find out. - Bilby (talk) 01:55, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - My reason for proposing a site-ban was to ensure that this single-admin block is not subsequently lifted by a single admin acting in good faith on a bad-faith request. I will also comment on two points by User:Bilby. I may have overlooked or forgotten the rules that an unsuccessful block appeal is a de facto ban, and that makes my concern less urgent. Second, Bilby says, and I agree, that blocking paid editors who follow rules is counterproductive. Jm has been ignoring the rules for years, either through ignorance or because they are for other people, and I have no reason to believe that they suddenly want to be a good paid editor. (I personally think that there are no good paid editors, only neutral ones and bad ones, but that is only my opinion.) Robert McClenon (talk) 16:18, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose site ban as inappropriate (and at least premature): All new editors require guidance to develop adherence to site purpose. If the practice is to move to banning disclosed paid editors because they took a few missteps and need assistance complying with site purpose, the obvious result will be an increase in undisclosed paid editing. The problem with shifting the balance to undisclosed paid editing is it causes a much greater editorial and administrative overhead. Edits by disclosed paid editors can be very easily monitored and tracked. Addressing undisclosed paid editing requires off-wiki sleuthing, trawling microwork sites, issuing take-down notices, administrator and Arbitration Committee involvement, editor investigations of contributor's personally identifying information, and a custom checkuser queue almost no one wants to work (with a backlog that often breaks 100 -
Per Xeno's request - there are currently 95 tickets in the "Paid editing" queue on OTRS. Without researching or commenting on the specifics of this matter, I agree with Xeno that driving paid editing underground completely is not really in the best interests of the project. Further, given the fact that the Terms of Use specifically envision a process whereby paid editors can and should disclose, it seems pretty obvious that banning paid editing outright would be an issue in and of itself. Remember that we do have respected users who would meet the definition of paid editing by virtue of their publicly revealed work as a Wikimedians in residence or in similar roles. It's not particularly helpful to drive paid editing completely underground, because then everyone (and I do mean everyone) becomes a suspect. Risker (talk) 17:45, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, this is a kneejerk reaction. He's only partially blocked as it stands and we allow paid editing. He is discussing proper editing and disclosure. Fences&Windows00:25, 23 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
*Oppose site ban The paid editing policy is quite complex, and that it isn't very visible. A new editor could easily miss it. Either way, we allow paid editing, and they already disclosed on their userpage after the unblock. I see no reason why we should site ban, unless if they continue to edit with a COI. ThatIPEditorTalk · Contribs05:12, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Never mind, I did not actually realize that it was a partial block from mainspace, and that it was unsuccessful. But either way, I still think that a site ban would be too much. ThatIPEditorTalk · Contribs05:14, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Appeal of partial block from article space by Wikipedia Paid Editor Jacobmcpherson
I'm afraid I didn't give the original blocked editor clear enough guidance. This section should hopefully be more focused.
Jacobmcpherson is currently blocked from editing article space by Justlettersandnumbers (who had given leave for me to modify the indefinite block to partial).
Presently, the user is requesting the ability to edit article space again. A no-consensus result will result from them remaining blocked from article space with a block remaining modifiable by administrators. A strong decline would (theoretically) result in a community restriction from article space requiring a consensus at AN to reverse.
Thanks for the ping, xeno. I also oppose a site ban, and suggest that as a matter of priority we establish a procedure for (a) warning anyone who requests an unblock here to be advised that the outcome may be a community siteban, and (b) allowing withdrawal of that request within a reasonable time of being so advised.
In this specific case, I indeffed the editor because of extensive failure to make proper paid-editor disclosure, aggravated by an WP:IDHT attitude to our paid-editor guidance. I had no intention that the block should be permanent – provided of course that the editor agreed to comply in full with our policies and guidance for people in his position. He's had plenty of time to do that, but has chosen not to. Instead he has continued to ignore policy – this statement, for example, is demonstrably less that 100% transparent and clearly in violation of the WP:TOU. Xeno, with your agreement, I suggest that the original site-wide indef-block should be re-imposed until and unless this person (a) makes full and complete disclosure of the actual client (who made payment, and on whose behalf) for all paid edits to date and (b) agrees to comply from now on with our paid-editor guidance as if it were policy. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 18:22, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Jacobmcpherson, what Justlettersandnumbers is saying is in order to fully compliant with paid editing disclosure, one needs to disclose both the client as well as the employer. It seems only an employer is listed on your user page. Are you able to comply with that understanding? –xenotalk18:50, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. In case it's not 100% clear from my reply to xeno above, or lost in my general wordy blether, firmly oppose unblock from article space, and recommend re-imposition of the original indefinite block until and unless the editor provides full and honest disclosure of all paid edits and the related client and employer. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 19:05, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
If the editor resumes paid activities before providing proper disclosure I will undo my modification, or you may. –xenotalk19:10, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I tried my best with the format provided by Wikipedia, since the clients listed on my user page all came through the company listed. Please let me know how I can better generate the list. The current parameters don't seem inclusive of all possible paid editing scenarios. I remain open to finding a solution Jacobmcpherson (talk) 19:44, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Jacobmcpherson: To help clarify, the client that paid for the editing for each article listed on User:Jacobmcpherson was the subject of the article? Perhaps something like
* [[Subject Inc.]] (Client: Subject Inc.)
Please also note you must disclose any affiliate partners involved, such as freelance sites.
Jacobmcpherson, You have to disclose where the money came from. For example: I'm Joe Smith, and I form Joe Smith Inc. for my Wikipedia business. Joe Smith Inc. gets contracted by 'StarBizPR' on behalf of Bill Actor. I need to write something like 'I edited the 'Bill Actor' article for payment on behalf of StarBizPR via Joe Smith Inc.' MrOllie (talk) 20:25, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Jacobmcpherson, Right, but if you were for example an owner of that company, you would not put in your disclosure that you were paid by that company. You'd write where the money came from - if it was directly from the article subject, you would write that. MrOllie (talk) 20:56, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I see, this wasn't 100% apparent to me in the format provided by Wikipedia - as there's various types of organisational structures, and I tried my best to accurately depict my particular scenario / relationship as a paid editor. The other issue, is there doesn't seem to be way to list multiple "articles" from the same "employer" in the current template Template:Paid. Hopefully this clarifies my approach to the situation Jacobmcpherson (talk) 21:14, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Nevermind, it looks like the template was updated since I last looked - made changes to my user page. Out of curiosity, where I would I participate in discussions around paid editing on Wikipedia? I'm really interested in providing valuable input that will hopefully improve the relationship between Wikipedia and paid editors Jacobmcpherson (talk) 21:28, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I will definitely work on my neutral TOV and, if in doubt, know to discuss things in a page's talk page first. I also agree to follow the 5 pillars as a guideline for future editing Jacobmcpherson (talk) 21:04, 21 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose While I don't think an indefinite block is warranted, I do think that the current restriction should remain in place at least for the time being. Jackattack1597 (talk) 22:30, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Closure review for 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war RFC on Infobox
Mikehawk10 stated in closing: Some of the sources provided by those who argue Turkey are a belligerent do not seem to strictly indicate anything beyond support, but it should be noted that support does not preclude Turkey from being a belligerent. Future reporting and investigations may change this, and a new RfC may be appropriate at that time, but there does not appear to be consensus at this time among editors that Turkey qualifies a belligerent.
I believe there is enough due WP:WEIGHT to list Turkey as a full belligerent and list the Turkish leaders involved as commanders and leaders. I provided a number of sources for this relating to Turkey deploying Syrian mercenaries (the article infobox currently erroneously lists the mercenaries under Azerbaijan) and fighter jets and also reliable sources confirming Turkish involvement, which I will quickly recap. I have also since come across three more incriminating sources for Turkish involvement that were not included in the RfC (1, possibly 2, were published afterward). These sources include Columbia University, JISS (note that Israel provided support to Azerbaijan), and even an Azeri source, Turan Information Agency.
The mercenaries were recruited by Turkey and transported on Turkish military aircraft.[4][5][6][7] Many major third-party sources also described Turkey's role as "decisive" and "critical".[8][9][10][11]
These sources are currently cited in the infobox:
the transfer of foreign terrorist fighters by Turkey from Syria and elsewhere to Nagorno-Karabakh, as confirmed by international actors, including the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries - European Parliament[12]
The presence of the Turkish fighter aircraft ... demonstrate[s] direct military involvement by Turkey that goes far beyond already-established support, such as its provision of Syrian fighters and military equipment to Azerbaijani forces. - Stratfor[13]
Ankara denies its troops are involved in fighting but Aliyev has acknowledged some Turkish F-16 fighter jets remained in Azerbaijan after a military drill this summer - Reuters[14]
The European Parliament has made an official statement condemning Turkey for its involvement in the war and confirming the Turkish government was responsible for deploying "terrorist fighters" (their choice of words), Stratfor has literally stated Turkish military involvement goes far beyond support and confirmed the presence of Turkish fighter jets, and Reuters confirmed that even Azerbaijan admitted that Turkish F-16 fighters were provided.
And now, here are the three additional sources I have since found:
This page identifies perpetrators of the conflict in Artsakh, highlighting...(ii) Turkish commanders overseeing and advising the operations
1. Defense Minister Hulusi Akar Akar, Turkish Defense Minister since 2018, was one of the first Turkish officials to make public threats against Armenia after Azerbaijani aggression in July 2020. In a meeting with Azerbaijani high command that month, he pledged Turkey's support to the Azerbaijani cause in Artsakh. Following that meeting, Turkish weapon shipments were delivered to Azerbaijan. Akar was in Baku on September 28-30 and played an important role overseeing all operations in Artsakh. His Ph.D was on WWI-era Armenia and American views of the Armenian Genocide, which Turkey still denies.
2. Lieutenant General Şeref Öngay Öngay is the Commander of the Third Army of the Turkish Ground Forces, which is based in eastern Turkey and has responsibility for the Caucuses...The Armenian delegation at OSCE say he “took part in planning and conducting” Artsakh operations. He was also spotted in Azerbaijan on 4 September 2020, as well as October, planning joint operations with the Azerbaijani military.
3. Major General Bahtiyar Ersay Ersay, whose title is officially “Chief of the Operations Directorate of the Land Forces of Turkey,” oversaw the Azerbaijani General Staff in Artsakh following the sacking of former Azerbaijani Chief of Staff Najmeddin Sadikov...Ersay was confirmed to reside in Azerbaijan as recently as March 15th 2021, using the title "Commander of the Turkish Mission in Azerbaijan". Since the Azerbaijani Chief of the General Staff still remains vacant, and Ersay has been seen wearing Azerbaijani military attire, it is likely he is de facto in charge of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces.
Ersay was also involved in Syria and Libya, potentially recruiting and overseeing the mercenaries that fought there. Because of this and his commando past, he is likely the Turkish commander most directly involved with these jihadi mercenaries.
4. Major General Göksel Kahya Kahya is an important Turkish drone commander who heads the Turkish Air Force’s 1st Supply and Maintenance Center. Prior to the Artsakh conflict, he led the deployment of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones in the Libyan Civil War. This drone expertise was then shifted to Azerbaijan, where he was based since July 2020 and oversaw the well-documented use of TB2 drones. These drones both were instrumental for the Azerbaijani victory in the conflict and made possible the devastating human rights abuses against civilians.
5. Adnan Tanrıverdi Tanrıverdi is a retired Turkish general and the founder of SADAT Inc. International Defense Consultancy, a private defense contracting company started in 2012...Tanrıverdi has significant influence over Erdogan, using SADAT against Erdogan enemies in the "coup" in 2016, and helping re-organize and purge the Turkish Armed Forces. As a result, SADAT has been referred to as a shadow military. Reportedly, he and SADAT have played an important role in recruiting, equipping, and transporting about 3,000 Syrian mercenaries to both Libya and Artsakh. Importantly, SADAT is also the primary organization training these Turkish-backed mercenary proxies. Though he lacks any official position in the Turkish government/military, his influence is significant.
All of these figures should be added to 'Commanders and leaders' in addition to Erdogan at the top of them.
Turkey strongly supported the decision by Azerbaijan to begin in September 2020 a military campaign intended to wrest back the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh from Armenia. Evidence rapidly began to accumulate that Ankara was maintaining a similar pipeline of Syrian client fighters to the battleground, as had been the case in vis Libya. The components and tools of this strategy were familiar. Again, official denials from Ankara and Baku were rapidly belied by reports from the battle zone.
Once again, the Syrian fighters were recruited by the SNA, in cooperation with SADAT. The fighters were offered monthly fees of $1,500-2,000 for agreeing to serve in the southern Caucasus. The contracts, again, were for three to six months. The main recruitment centers were in the cities of Afrin, Al-Bab, Ras al-Ain, and Tel Abyad. The route taken out of Syria, according to fighters’ testimony, was also similar. Fighters crossed the border at Kilis and were then transported to the Gaziantep Airport. From there, SADAT-chartered A-400 transport aircraft flew them to Istanbul Airport, and from there they boarded flights to Baku, Azerbaijan.
The specific SNA-associated militias used for this deployment differed from those who provided the manpower for Libya. The main pools of manpower for this deployment were the Sultan Murad, Suleyman al-Shah, Hamza and Failaq al-Sham brigades. The first two of these brigades draw their support from ethnic Turkmen populations in northern Syria, and hence may have been assumed to have had a greater natural affinity for the Turkic Azeris than would Syrian Sunni Muslims of Arab ethnicity.
But in its general contours, the deployment in Nagorno-Karabakh resembled the blueprint established in Libya. In both cases, the role of SADAT was paramount in the recruitment, organization, and transport of the fighters; the SNA was the chief pool of manpower; and the deployment took place alongside the use of specialists from the official Turkish armed forces.
One of the Turkish commanders died in a helicopter crash earlier this month, and Azeri news agency Turan Information Agency confirmed his role:
As a result of a plane crash with a military helicopter, which occurred on Thursday, March 4, in eastern Turkey, Turkish General Osman Erbash, who was at the origin of the creation of the Bayraktar combat drones, was killed.
The son-in-law of Turkish President Erdogan, the owner of a company that produces Turkish drones, Selcuk Bayraktar, wrote about this in his Telegram channel.
Their cooperation consisted in testing developments for the combat use of drones.
In addition, General Erbash in Turkey is called one of the authors of the strategy used by Azerbaijan to succeed in the Second Karabakh War.
I trimmed everything not directly related to my argument. And if you bothered to look at my discussion with the closer, you would know he suggested there was "significant additional information or context was left out of the discussion" and encouraged making a closure review. --Steverci (talk) 23:43, 23 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
User:Steverci - You will recall that you brought this dispute to DRN in December 2020. When I began the moderated discussion that ended in my launching the RFC on 14 January 2020, I wrote, on 22 December 2020: "Be civil and concise". I have often written that overly long statements may make the poster feel better, but they do not clarify the issues or help resolve a content dispute. A 1460-word closure appeal does not clarify the issues. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:40, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Admins and editors: I made a long unsuccessful attempt to resolve this dispute in December 2020 and January 2021 that ended in composing and posting the RFC. This is another area where there is battleground editing because there have been battles, and where ArbCom has imposed discretionary sanctions. My sympathies to anyone who tries to help resolve it. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:40, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Responding to a talk-page message from Steverci, who asked me to provide comment given that I was the closer. I think that there is room to review the closure anew following the closure of the WP:RSN discussion on Kommersant. The reason for this is that, in the closure, I found no local consensus on the reliability of Kommersant, though if the community finds a consensus at the reliable sources noticeboard that Kommersant is reliable, then this would overrule the local consensus, which in turn would require the closure to be revisited. For now, however, I would restate what I said on my talk page I don't see significant additional information regarding Turkey's involvement, at least as far as reliable sources are concerned. As a result, I don't see a need to further modify the closure at this time. If Kommersant is indeed a reliable source regarding Turkey's involvement, then this would change, though it's not clear to me that the community has come to a consensus on that issue yet. As such, I would advise that we wait until the WP:RSN thread is closed until this closure review is itself closed. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 18:33, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Mikehawk10 Have you taken a look at the above extended content? It contains sources from the Columbia University Institute for the Study of Human Rights, the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, and even the Azeri source Turan Information Agency, all providing additional information regarding Turkey's involvement. --Steverci (talk) 18:44, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Steverci:I have. The lattermost source says that the general was instrumental in creating the strategy that was used, which would be consistent with the support designation as well as with the belligerent designation. The middle source provides evidence that militias/mercenaries had been supported by Turkey to fight in the region. This is something that the RfC concluded (and it was noted that mercenaries should be included as belligerents). But, the source doesn't actually say that Turkey's role went beyond logistical/financial support for these militias. As I stated on my talk page, there appears to be a weak consensus among editors in the discussion that the fighting of these Syrian Mercenaries with logistical support from Turkey and payments from Turkish companies does not constitute the Turkish state's direct involvement in the conflict as a belligerent, so while this is information that I did not see upon reviewing the discussion, it doesn't have a bearing on its closure. The first additional source listed gave me a bit of pause, since it points to a much tighter coordination between Turkish brass and Azerbaijani forces than other reliable sources had reported, and because it is an academic source independent of the conflict entirely. It would also call into question the veracity of some of the claims that had been made by some of those favoring a designation of support, particularly those who stated that Turkish military personnel were not spotted in the conflict zone during the war or that the support was merely diplomatic in nature (though there was already strong consensus that there was military support being given). That being said, it's not 100% clear to me if this would have changed overall consensus, though as I noted in the close, future reporting and investigations may change this, and a new RfC may be appropriate at that time, but there does not appear to be consensus at this time among editors that Turkey qualifies a belligerent. I think the close should stand for now, though it might very well be appropriate to have another RfC on this (particularly after the Kommersant RSN thread closes), if you believe that this is significant new information that would affect consensus, in light of the arguments made in the previous RfC. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 19:31, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Mikehawk10: Even if this is not enough to change the consensus for the time being, can we change "alleged by Armenia" to just "alleged" if I also add the Columbia University Institute source in the infobox? And how would you feel about the Turkish leaders listed in the Columbia source being added to the 'Commanders and leaders' list in the infobox? --Steverci (talk) 04:46, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Steverci: Since MOS:ALLEGED states that although alleged and accused are appropriate when wrongdoing is asserted but undetermined, such as with people awaiting or undergoing a criminal trial; when these are used, ensure that the source of the accusation is clear, we need to be explicit is to who the alleging party is. And, to restate the above, the Columbia source gives me pause, but also since I'm not sure it would have changed local consensus. For both of these reasons, I would advise against changing "alleged by Armenia" to "alleged" in the infobox for the time being. I would also advise against expanding "alleged by Armenia" to something along the lines of "alleged by Armenia and by [Columbia source author]", since, while the source shows closer military coordination between Turkey and Azerbaijan than any other independent source provided in the article, it's not clear that the local consensus would find this to be an accusation of belligerence rather than one of support.
Again, community consensus on what constitutes a "belligerent" would be helpful here in clarifying if there is something to judge this against, but I can't find any and it doesn't appear to me that such a consensus has been fleshed out. If you are interested in assessing community consensus on a particular (general) articulation on what constitutes a "belligerent" for purposes of the infobox, perhaps opening a thread on the relevant template talk page would be helpful, as this consensus would probably be best defined in a general sense rather than in the sense of specific application to Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. If you choose to do this, I would recommend you leave a note on Talk:2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war page and/or notify each and every editor that participated in the survey/discussion 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war RFC on Infobox, so that they could be informed of your attempt to get community consensus on a proposed general guideline in a manner that does not constitute canvassing. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 03:48, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I for one think Mikehawk10 did an excellent job of weighing up the consensus at the RfC. It was a thankless task carried out diligently. While the current consensus on Turkey's status doesn't precisely match the stance I held at the RfC, I think it's a solid, supportable compromise. @Steverci: the administrators' noticeboard isn't the right place to ask for a review of this content dispute, the correct place is back at the talk page where it was previously discussed so editors familiar with the topic will participate. There's currently a section on precisely this issue, you could add your concerns there and try to build a new consensus to overturn the previous one. Perhaps a new, narrower (neutrally worded) RfC will make some headway on this in the future. However, it's probably better to let some more time pass first, even if you're unhappy with the status quo – as the previous consensus was only thrashed out recently and received a lot of input a dramatically different outcome isn't particularly likely. Jr8825 • Talk20:47, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Large batch deletion probably needed
For some background, see User_talk:Carlossuarez46/Archive_12#Please_don't_create_any_more_articles and User_talk:Carlossuarez46#Places_in_Iran. The former link involves the discovery of large quantities of misinterpretation of a source an original research to create a couple thousand place stubs in California that largely turned out to be barely verifiable, false, or non-notable, probably well over 1,000 have been deleted, created by a single user, Carlossuarez46. It is the latter one that is causing this report, though. It was found that something similar happened with creating short stubs from a directory of abadis in Iran - an abadi is a very generic term that in Iran can refer to everything from decent-sized cities to wells, farms, individual buildings, and even gas stations. At Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mazraeh-ye Dariush Baharvand Ahmadi, it was found that Carlossuarez46 created over 5,500 stubs for abadis that are uninhabited. While some abadis are notable, given the background of these, it seems unlikely that any of the ones that are uninhabited are notable, which is the consensus of that AFD. There's no way that 5500+ articles can reasonably be processed through AFD and PROD, so it's looking like a batch deletion of this mess is the best call. I believe there's a list of the relevant ones in existence somewhere. Hog FarmTalk00:58, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The list of articles to be deleted (linked at the AFD) is at User:Hog Farm/C46 population not reported. I removed the three pages I found that had additional content beyond the original creation, and others with further information may also be exempted from such soft deletion. Carlossuarez46 altogether made about 70,000 articles (pages 2–8 here) on places in Iran from 2011 to 2014 using the 2006 census, and I did not find any approval to do so in accordance with Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 66#Proposal: Any large-scale semi-/automated article creation task require BRFA. While the discussion linked above indicates half of these tens of thousands of places with are not actually "villages" in Iran (may include e.g. neighborhoods and census tracts) and their status and notability are likewise questionable, these 5,500+ pages have no population reported and are not conceivably auto-passes of WP:GEOLAND. Reywas92Talk01:37, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
(Non-administrator comment) I've noticed a lot of stubs about misidentified populated places, usually in California, in WP:PRODSUM for several months now. Based on the aforementioned evidence, I recommend that Carlossuarez46 be banned from creating articles about places. Thoughts? –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 02:32, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Mass creation seems to have stopped in April 2020 with a run of stubs for ancient sites, so I'm not sure that an article creation ban would be necessary. Hog FarmTalk03:01, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There are large blocks of items beginning with the same word, which likely identifies what they actually are; for instance, place names beginning with Chah-e are most likely wells. I'll ping... Paraw (talk·contribs), the only active user who is fa-N, to scan the list and identify such prefixes so that they can be processed in bulk AfD or mass PROD. Which items on the list reported a population of 0 in the 2016 census, like the farm named in the AfD? –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 07:10, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete all 5573 article I think we have explained all in a/m talking and we ask and recommend the mess deletion of no notable, no village and no populated articles. Please Delete all 5573 article. In FAwiki, as last talking there is Consensus that Abadies there aren't notable.@4nn1l2Shahram08:38, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have no objection to a mass deletion (we did the same in the past for other similar issues with 1000s of articles by other editors), but an alternative may be to mass-move them to draftspace: that way, people have six months to rescue ones which are mistakenly moved or which they have edited. After six months, the remainder will get deleted anyway. Perhaps other groups of articles by the same editor need to be looked at as well, something like Alīābād, Yardymli gives little confidence, so perhaps all 233 articles with the sentence "suspected that this village has undergone a name change"[15] should be deleted or draftified as well? These are in Azerbaijan and Artsakh, so not duplicates of the above proposal. Fram (talk) 08:40, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I can delete the articles no problem, but I do not have capacity to go through all of them to see what it salvageable and what is not. If there is consensus that all of them have to be deleted, no problem, but I remember that with Sander v Ginkel articles, which I also batch deleted (after time was given to improve them) people were still unhappy with the deletion. May be just move them to draft and let sit there for six months before getting deleted?--Ymblanter (talk) 08:53, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
We have come a long way since it was alright to mass-create articles for places, and experience has taught us some lessons about cleaning up the resultant inaccuracies. It's not completely clean-cut, though and I point to Robert, California (AfD discussion) as a counterpoint. For safety, I recommend restricting any mass deletion to articles that don't tell the reader anything beyond the shaky claims about being villages. If the statement that "X is a village" is shaky in the first place, then an article that says "X is a village and nothing else is recorded about it" isn't particularly useful. Although Robert, California did start out that way, as you can see at Special:Permalink/288124514.
Delete all Native Farsi speaker here. Please just delete them all. No more discussions or hesitations. I checked User:Hog Farm/C46 population not reported with Petscan, and all of them should be gone, except Sharafabad, Markazi. You can check it yourself. Go to the Templates&links tab and insert "User:Hog Farm/C46 population not reported" in the field All of these pages: from the row Linked from. Then go to the Page properties tab and specify a size Larger or equal than 3000, 2900, 2800, ... 2000 respectively and check it for yourself. 4nn1l2 (talk) 09:08, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I wondered why we didn't ask Carlossuarez46, an active editor and admin, to help clean up his own mess and to go through his creations and delete G7 or draftify all problematic or potentially problematic ones. Turns out that he was contacted about these specific articles (which follow the many similar deletions of US locations he created), at User talk:Carlossuarez46#Places in Iran. His responses there are extremely disheartening though, and the callous disrespect he shows for basic collegiality, sourcing requirements, ... is rather concerning in an admin. He could save us all a lot of work (he should have done so when the first deletions started to happen), but he doesn't seem to care about this at all. Fram (talk) 09:18, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely subpar responses. It isn't realistic to expect individual review for each page of such a massive number of pages, when an error rate for these reaches a certain threshold. El_C13:21, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Not to be "that guy", but if you don't understand that a Census tract is not automatically notable, perhaps you don't need to have the Autopatrolled bit, no less the admin bit. At this point, I'm forced to agree with mass deletion as I don't think our Draft: system needs to be flooded. Seeing the discussion on his personal talk page did not fill me with hope that he is willing or capable of reviewing these articles himself. This would make me also support a sanction to prohibit article creation outside of draft space, which is very problematic for someone with the admin bit, but seemingly necessary. Dennis Brown - 2¢15:00, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
So, to summarise, so far we have mass creation of California place stubs based on the GNIS database, a lot of which have now been deleted as misidentified railroad sidings/ponds/post offices, a mass creation of Iranian place stubs based purely off the census records, thousands of which appear to be misidentified farms/gas stations/isolated buildings, and looking at the recent edit history of Azizkend and it's associated talk page it looks like there may be issues with their Armenian place stubs as well (again this is an article created using only a place name database). I think this is going to need a major clean up effort - we are dealing with potentially thousands of hoax geography stubs here. Kind of reminds me of the Neelix case from a few years back. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 15:23, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support deletion Having spot-checked the list, these articles don't meet Wikipedia's standards for verifiability and should be deleted. I also agree with Dennis Brown that based on their comments on their talk page on this topic, Carlossuarez probably should not be auto-patrolled. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 16:15, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support mass deletion of User:Hog Farm/C46 population not reported. They don't need to be checked further. When Carlos writes "population not reported", it means the census data said less than 3 families – so obviously not a "village" as claimed. Spot checks by multiple users have confirmed that they are not remotely close to meeting WP:GEOLAND. The problem is that the Iranian census describes both populated and unpopulated places with the same word, abadi (see this comment from 4nn1l2 for useful context), and according to one source up to 25% are "non-residential".[16] The tens of thousands of other articles also need to be dealt with, but this list is a good first step. Thanks to Hog Farm and Reywas92 for compiling it. – Joe (talk) 16:52, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
On the broader issue, I was really hoping that Carlos would be more receptive to helping clean these up. We all make mistakes and if you're mass-creating articles (which I think is usually a very valuable contribution), it's understandable that a simple mistake can create a big mess. As an admin, he could easily have acknowledged the problem and G7'd them all, saving everyone all this trouble. Instead he flat out refused to listen, insisting that other editors laboriously "prove" that each place wasn't notable individually, even after he'd been presented with ample reliable sources showing that they were not notable as a rule, and it had been explained that the burden is on him to substantiate his claims. I don't want to drag anyone to ArbCom over something like, but yeah... autopatrolled is bundled with the sysop bit, so it technically is tool misuse, and I worry about him going on another stub creation spree with no oversight. – Joe (talk) 17:00, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support mass deletion I have participated in a few Afd's for these articles, It's about time that someone brought this to administrator attention. I would even support some sort of block for disruptive editing.--Kieran207(talk-Contribs) 18:12, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This is an odd can of worms we've opened. If this were not an admin, I would have already removed the autopatrolled bit from the editor without discussion. Because they are an admin, only Arb can authorize a bit change, and since autopatrolled is automatically included with the admin bit, they would have to remove the admin bit. Without further evidence of gross incompetence or abuse of the admin bit, I don't see this happening. The same for sanctioning an admin. Conventional wisdom has always been that if you can't trust an admin to operate without being under sanction, you can't trust them with the admin bit. Carlossuarez46 is walking a very fine line here, and if I were them, I would be volunteering to never create articles outside of draft space, rather than risk a sanction and possible Arb case to review their bits. If one of the "community desysop" discussions had ended with the community being granted the ability to desysop someone because they lost in faith in them, this would be a textbook case, although I don't pretend to know the outcome in either case. Dennis Brown - 2¢21:21, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The more I think about this, some sort of sanction on creating articles is needed. See their responses to the questions about them in the California place names one I linked in the starting post here, or in the places in Iran one. They went on a CFD editing run per their contribs after I notified them about starting this AN discussion. And these 5500 are just the tip of the iceberg. There are tens of thousands of stubs they created that are still dubious, just not quite as bad as this batch request. And they won't provide helpful answers to basic requests about this. IMO this is a WP:ADMINACCT issue. Given the sheer amount of poor quality article creation and lack of communication to questions about it, there should be a restriction on creation of geography stubs - a requirement to send new geography articles through AFC sounds reasonable to me. Hog FarmTalk21:55, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think that a AFC requirement or removal of autopatrolled are fundamentally incompatible with being an administrator, for an administrator being trusted to be able to write articles is the bare minimum we should expect. I also don't think the proposed restrictions really get to the crux of the issue: the problem here was the mass creation of stub articles based only on database entries. I think a better set of restrictions would be a ban on article creation using automated or semi-automated tools and a requirement that any new articles they make have multiple substantial sources in them (as in sources containing a significant quantity of prose). 86.23.109.101 (talk) 22:33, 26 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support batch deletion - I was initially against this idea but I now can't see any alternative. Having reviewed and PRODed many of the offending articles, I now see that it will take several weeks to getting around to properly looking at them all. Since they make no valid claim to notability, the chances of any of them actually being notable is low enough that I think the positives of batch deletion outweigh the negatives significantly. Spiderone(Talk to Spider)00:32, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Speaking as the person who just fixed Escalle, Larkspur, California, I point out that the problem is not notability, and there is a significant likelihood that some of these places are notable. The problem is that we have one-sentence articles hanging around for years (almost 13 years in the case of Azizkend (AfD discussion)) where that one sentence is an outright falsehood, because the source databases were not properly filtered and everything was labelled "populated place" or "unincorporated community". I think that you'll get wide agreement on mass-deleting one-sentence articles whose dodgy mass-creation makes them likely false. Don't make it about things being "just a mill" or "just a railway station", and about notability, though, especially if arguing in the same breath about how great a burden it is to evaluate notability of all of these subjects. You will not get agreement from people like me about "just a" anything. But you will get consensus on long-standing one-sentence likely falsehoods with shaky foundations. Uncle G (talk) 11:53, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Concerning community restrictions: It is true that only ArbCom can currently desysop (the last community desysop proposal is still open, but is certain to fail, like its predecessors). However, if needed, we can just impose a ban on creation on the articles. A ban violation would be a solid ground for a desysop. However, I do not see any issues with the recent article creation, and I do not see why such topic ban would be needed, In fact, Carlossuarez does not now create any articles, for the last year I only see one, which is a dab and is completely uncontroversial. All the articles we are talking about are from the 2000s, and I do not see any current need of a ban.--Ymblanter (talk) 07:08, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support sanctions on Carlossuarez46. He made a big mistake and now even cleaning up his mess gives us headache. I PRODed 100 farms and wells (mazraeh and chah) but got reverted by another contributor who claims these abadis pass WP:GEOLAND. Being unwilling to clean up his own mess, Carlos has wasted a lot of valuable volunteers' time. The fact that he has not contributed to this thread so far means a lot to me! 4nn1l2 (talk) 10:26, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The PROD reasons were probably unclear as the articles say "village" and give the population from a census, which would make them notable. Some of them seem to be hamlets or something similar, but others are only farms. Peter James (talk) 15:02, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'm the PROD remover@4nn1l2 and Peter James: indeed all the articles that I de-proded stated that they were villages and they also had a number of families. If they are an exception to the general rule that legally recognized places are notable then probably needs to be discussed at a bundled AFD nomination not PROD. I think its fairly likely the rest of the PRODs will be contested by Necrothesp or Phil Bridger or someone else anyway. In any case although we may make an exception that a place that is just a well or petrol station isn't notable even if its legally recognized if we assess that its an exception there's no requirement that a place has people living there to be notable under GEOLAND. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:28, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think that you've missed the thrust of the argument here, possibly because those Proposed Deletion nominations didn't give it. It's not whether these places are notable. It's that the articles have been mass-created as bad stubs that give incorrect context, because everything has been translated to "village". The problem is that editors do not have the correct context to even begin working on the articles. Tolombeh-ye Mehdi Shariati is actually a pump, for example. But an editor looking to do cleanup or expansion won't know it from the bad stub at hand, which says that it's a "village" and leaves it at that. There are over 5000 articles in this class. Uncle G (talk) 19:44, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
If these articles contain false information then I support whatever is needed to fix this even if this means moving them to draftspace or even deleting them however this is generally not allowed but perhaps we can do it per IAR since checking 5000 article is far too much of a job to do oneself. Zero information is better than incorrect info. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:53, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support mass deletion and topic ban on geo article creation I support mass deletion of the articles, and I also think that Carlos deserves some sort of sanction. I'd be in favor of a a topic ban on creating new geography articles because of the degree of disruption that the non notable stubs have caused, and I think that that would be the minimum that we would be considering if this were a regular user and not an admin. ( I have to imagine that a new user would get a disruptive editing block for creating this many non notable articles and refusing to clean them up.) Jackattack1597 (talk) 13:27, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Alexis Jazz, you have certainly become old, man! You used to be a Commoner and are well aware of Petscan. The Alexis Jazz I knew didn't need some hours (days[!]) to check the status of these articles. He wasThey were able to be done with it in less than 10 minutes. According to the English Wikipedia, the UK has only 3700+ hamlets[17], but Carlos has made 70,000+ articles on Iranian ābādīs! Both Iran and the UK belong to the Old World, so what Carlos flaunted about the New World does not apply here. 4nn1l2 (talk) 15:46, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@4nn1l2: Getting vilified causes one's hairs to turn grey. I have rarely found Petscan to be of any use over CirrusSearch, personally. I can't use it to do a history check. The kind of checks I ran on Commons also often took a while. I agree that likely 90%+ of Hog Farm's list should be deleted, but I'd like to filter out the <10% that should be kept or discussed. Btw, feel free to use something from Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 17:03, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed. I always use neutral pronouns on Commons. I don't know why I switched to "he" on the English Wikipedia. Sorry for that! 4nn1l2 (talk) 17:17, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. I'm running the thing now. It takes hours because a) of the sheer number of articles (dealing with 5000+ pages wasn't a common occurrence, even on Commons) b) I'm doing a history check, which is slow. c) There are other things I have to do, I'm spending somewhat less time on wiki nowadays. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 00:34, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support sanctions and mass deletion I'm glad to see interest in addressing disruptive mass stub creation, and admin status should be no barrier to the article creation restrictions which are clearly necessary here. It's unfair for an editor who mass-creates thousands of articles from tables (which are specifically excluded from establishing notability per WP:GEOLAND) to demand that others do the work of searching exhaustively to disprove notability. Mass-created geography stubs are a widespread problem [18][19] and a huge time sink since some editors insist on article-by-article deletion instead of PROD or batch work. In my opinion we should have a general rule or process that allows geo stubs to be deleted immediately, with no WP:BEFORE requirement, if they are sourced only to databases. The few notable articles that may exist are useless as long as they're buried under a massive pile of crap. Any editor who would like to search for these hidden gems is welcome to look through the easily-accessible databases and recreate them with better sourcing. –dlthewave☎05:08, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I show up a lot in a lot of page histories. Support batch deletion, since these are rather unfortunately widely untenable as articles. BD2412T17:53, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I show up in a lot of page histories, but I don't use batch. I primarily fix typo's, broken links, etc. I Support batch deletion. Quebec99 (talk) 18:57, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support batch deletion and sanction - I came to this as someone who is far from a deletionist. Indeed I have been accused on more than one occasion of being some kind of inclusionist. The thing was I started seeing lots of California location articles showing up at AFD that were by the same creator, and written using the same unreliable sources. My efforts to try to save these articles quickly turned into a conclusion that every one of them had the same problem - the editor who created them basically hadn't cared about even the most basic rules of notability and verifiability, and had systematically mischaracterised what a source they had regularly cited (Durham) was actually saying. Diving deeper I saw that the creator was one of Wiki's most prolific article-creators and had created many other location articles all around the world many of which appeared to have similar problems. Reaching out to the creator I saw that they were basically dismissive of any requests for help with dealing with the problems that they had created. Further checking showed that, as a direct result of their negligent editing, some counties of California had more "ghost town" articles (places that they couldn't find population data for ended up being labelled this) that inhabited places - a clearly ridiculous situation.
The Iranian articles are a very extreme case of this negligence. Carlos claims to be able to read Persian, yet they did not notice that they were creating thousands of places with names like "Well no. 3" and "Mechanic Hoseyn Sohrabi", each of which blatantly says that is not populated and may never have been populated according to the sources they relied on to write the article. These articles simply have to go - the only thing I'd like to do is just to check that these are only the articles where Carlos was the creator, since he has edited his phrase stating that the location is not populated into a few GNG-passing articles he did not create.
We should not forget that this negligent editing can have real-world consequences. Wiki's location data gets mirrored onto e.g., Google Maps and you can end up with people going to places thinking they are populated but which are in reality open desert. For this reason, although many of these articles were created some time ago and Carlos has not created any recently, as their negligent editing in 2009-2014 is still having an impact today which they refuse to do anything about it, I support sanctions against Carlos. Frankly, I would support Desysoping him due to a failure of accountability (WP:ADMINACCT), but if this is not possible I would support removing autopatrolled from them. If an Admin without autopatrolled is somewhat unusual, this can be raised with Arbcom.FOARP (talk) 07:49, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Note: Carlossuarez67 seems to give permission to delete qualifying articles per WP:CSD#G7("withdraw all my contributions...Please make it so.") (I notice the relevant WikiProject was notified also). –xenotalk02:47, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Now that I've thought about it, I think a new CSD is needed to hasten deletion of low-quality mass-created articles. For some of these large batches, we do not have the patience to check that every page meets WP:V and WP:GNG. A user recently closed this ANI about cricketers and populated places in Turkey mass-created by Lugnuts (talk·contribs) from an unreliable database. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 22:38, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Just to clarify, a reply to a red-dot notification, that ANI was not about "cricketers AND populated places in Turkey..." (my emphasis), but just the latter. The cricketers do have a RS, while the places apparently do not. With regards to that, I am working my way through all of them to replace that source. Thanks. LugnutsFire Walk with Me17:12, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Alexis Jazz has raised what to do about the article creator on another noticeboardbelow, so I'd like to focus back on the original request by Hog Farm and Reywas92, which is what to do about the articles in the list at User:Hog Farm/C46 population not reported.
Summarizing the above so far:
It appears that we have 9 people supporting mass deletion of the articles on that specific list; and 1 wanting to do more checking xyrself.
The Proposed Deletions that there is disagreement over, such as Special:Diff/1014460959, appear to have been of articles not on this list.
Ymblanter has offered to do the mass-deletion if there is agreement.
Any people opposed?
Any more people wanting to do some checking for themselves?
Obviously, there's no rush to closure here; we give AFD discussions a week, after all.
I'm just trying to keep focus on the original proposal and whether there is consensus supporting an administrator doing this.
Uncle G (talk) 08:10, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Uncle G: I would like to confirm your second point. For PRODing 100 articles, I went after specific articles with special conditions. First, all of nominations have the terms mazraeh and chah (farm and well respectively) in their names. Second, they had some population, because I assumed and still assume the 5000+ "uninhabited" abadis are definitely gone sooner or later, so I spared them. Third, I nominated those with a population of less than 100 people and 20 families, because Iranian villages must have a population of at least 100 people or 20 families according to the law. See my comments here and there to become more familiar with Iranian villages. We don't have the concept of hamlet in Iran (except in Mazandaran and Gilan which have a Mediterranean climate). Generalizing this Anglo-Norman concept to arid Iran is a kind of Eurocentrism. Settlements in Iran are basically of two kinds: 1) cities [شهر]; 2) villages [ده، روستا]. We don't differentiate between towns and cities. We don't have communities or concepts such as incorporated, chartered, etc. Everyone should read this academic article about Iranian villages. The following paragraph is of interest:
The basic statistical unit. Much of the available information about rural areas in Persia and, to a lesser degree, in Afghanistan has been collected at the village level. As delimitation of villages varies according to different government sources, however, that is not a guarantee of accuracy. Uncertainty is greatest in the Caspian lowlands and Ḡilzay country, where the so-called “villages” are generally artificial groupings of maḥallas (see, e.g., Bazin, 1980, I, pp. 100-01) and qalʿas respectively. In other areas, too, it is often difficult to ascertain whether a small settlement is an independent village or a mazraʿa attached to a larger village nearby (see, e.g., Patzelt and Senarclens de Grancy, p. 225). Gazetteers of inhabited places in Persia thus include from 14,721 (Mofaḵḵam Pāyān) to 80,717 names (Pāpolī Yazdī, 1989), and estimates of the total number of villages range from 42,000 to 58,000. A figure of 48,592 was used by the Persian government for purposes of land reform (McLachlan, p. 686). In Afghanistan conflicting figures have been published: In 1339 Š./1960 the Ministry of agriculture and irrigation enumerated 14,205 villages (Survey), a figure that was increased to 15,270 after the agricultural census of 1346 Š./1967 (Natāyej); the Ministry of interior, on the other hand, listed 20,753 villages, of which 15,599 were classified as “independent villages” and 5,154 as “associated subvillages” (Aṭlas). Although the Ministry of agriculture’s figures for villages and the Ministry of interior’s enumeration of “independent villages” are similar, they only partly coincide. Combining both lists would produce a total of 22,425 inhabited places (computed from Aṭlas). It is thus necessary to use the data from gazetteers with caution.
The article is a bit old. It dates back to 1994. According to the latest data, Iran has 45,926 villages. Now Carlos should explain how he managed to create 70,000 articles on Iranian "villages". 4nn1l2 (talk) 09:34, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Not in this section. ☺ Let's keep it just to the articles and getting a consensus on what we do to them. It looks like there's a case to be made for Hog Farm et al. creating another list. But Proposed Deletion rationales would need to explain all of that and not just be "fails WP:GEOLAND". Because if people don't get a decent rationale they will not know all of that and will work from what the article says on its face. I suggest that you work with Hog Farm et al. on another list, for a second discussion, and we focus here on the "population not reported" one initially. I also suggest that you update any still active unchallenged Proposed Deletion rationales of yours to at least point to Special:Permalink/1014651141#The articles, specifically. Uncle G (talk) 11:23, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Some of the places are groups of houses separate from other groups of houses; if these places are not hamlets, are too small to be villages, and "farm" is inaccurate, what would they be described as? Peter James (talk) 07:25, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Akili: extensively vandalized (I filtered a bunch of vandalism, but unfortunately the "Reverted" tag was not made available retroactively. The list could have been shorter otherwise.)
We should take a closer look at these 528. Some additional filtering may be possible. (please ping me with suggestions)
If someone who is normally a WikiGnome actually added a source in some instances, sadly I couldn't realistically differentiate between that. I filtered all edits from known WikiGnomes. There's other theoretical issues (every edit before a revert was also filtered, but someone adding a source right before someone else reverts an earlier edit is probably extremely rare), but the lists should mostly be accurate. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 20:06, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Alexis Jazz: I have indeed editedAhmadabad, Avaj, but what does that mean to you? New counties/townships (شهرستان) get created in Iran by splitting, etc. Avaj County was created in 2011.[20] Carlos has used the data of the 2006 census when this abadi was in another county. I just updated the data in 2017. Why didn't I react back then? See my comment here near the facepalm and you will understand why this topic matters to me now. I was not and still am not an editor of the English Wikipedia, so why should I care? 4nn1l2 (talk) 20:37, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@4nn1l2: It could indicate that there's something special about the article, but in this case you were a WikiGnome. I'm thinking of some better/other ways to filter. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 21:18, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have two questions:
Hog Farm, Reywas92, 4nn1l2, et al.: Is this list of 528 articles small enough for you three (and whomever else) to review by hand?
Alexis Jazz: Do you think that Hog Farm's list should be reduced by these 528 articles?
I ask because I looked through some of the ones that you mentioned and I'm not yet convinced that we have a case for removing them. That Darafsh used the same prose wording for the likes of "the water beneath Haji Ali" and called it a "village" with "population not reported" only emphasizes the robotic nature of these contributions, and that this is boilerplate wording constructed from a problematic source database. And the source cited at Special:Diff/300106952 is a WWW page that gives a Google Maps reference to a farm, emphasizing the fact that there's an echo chamber of bad information on the WWW that we at Wikipedia are part of.
I think it can be trimmed a little bit. Akbarabad-e Olya is just Carlos, bots, a gnoming edit, and somebody adding a hatnote. Mazraeh-ye Afzalabad is Carlos, two bots, a AWB run, and a gnoming edit. Mazraeh-ye Kaleh Chub is Carlos, the same AWB run, three bots, somebody changing the spelling in a category, and somebody reverting said change. There's a few others like those. The 528 list looks pretty close, although there's some false positives in there. Hog FarmTalk22:55, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I personally am still persuaded by your argument that a collection of articles calling things like "the best farm" and "Wood Head farm" (fa:مزرعه) a "village" are bad stubs with falsehoods as their context. ☺ So perhaps that 528 article list can be re-filtered, at least for the obvious groups with falsehoods revealed by their titles. Uncle G (talk) 23:46, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Hog Farm:Akbarabad-e Olya is on the list because of Prana1111's edit. (I already filtered M.k.m2003 as a WikiGnome) Mazraeh-ye Afzalabad is on the list only because of the edit by SACRED. Mazraeh-ye Kaleh Chub includes a manual revert, if Bearcat had reverted NikolayEfesenko (or the "reverted" and "manual revert" tags would be available everywhere) it wouldn't have made the list. I can probably filter small edits (like these -4 overlinking edits, edits marked as minor were already excluded but these were not marked as minor) and I think there are some other ways to get that 528 further down. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 03:41, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Would it be possible to exclude anything with the AWB tag, as well? Anything done with Auto Wiki Browser is likely to be gnoming, formatting, or something minor like that. Hog FarmTalk14:55, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - "Never edited by Carlos. But it follows the same style. So... wut?" - It is not a surprise to see other editors creating articles in the same style as Carlos, people learn how to write articles from other editors on Wiki, particularly admins. This is why this behaviour is so harmful. FOARP (talk) 14:36, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Uncle G: There doesn't seem to be any objection other than making sure the list is proper. If you need someone to complete the technical step once complete, please let me know. –xenotalk02:47, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I personally would like to see Alexis Jazz take another pass over xyr 528 articles to be taken out list with respect to the article titles that (as noted earlier in this discussion, with transliterations) clearly identify pumps (fa:تلمبه), wells (fa:چاه), farms (fa:مزرعه), mechanics, and so forth; as I strongly suspect that having been edited by someone else has not fixed the problem of these things falsely being categorized as populated places and called "village" with "population not reported". Uncle G (talk) 06:51, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Uncle G: I'm working on filtering the list another way, am making progress and it looks fairly promising so far. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 07:02, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I've edited 95 of the unchecked articles (two of these edits have been self-reverted) which just means I have added info and reference on ethnic composition. The fourth village on that list (Abza-e Dudera) is stated to have a non-reported population according to the 2006 census used on Wikipedia, but was reported to have had a population of 24 according to the 2011 census[21]. A settlement like this one, I believe, should not be deleted. (Since this area is Luri-populated it could be a case of nomadism but that's just my guess.) Now my reference does also have the note "(less than 3 households; population not specified in 2011 Census for reasons of privacy)" on some of these settlements, but I frankly ignored this and carried on with adding the info. Perhaps these are the settlements that should be put in group 4? --Semsûrî (talk) 20:59, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
As aforementioned in this discussion, there are lots of articles that you can immediately include by their titles. Since we know that this list is a list of things where the prose says "village" and "population not reported"; all of the "chah-e" articles about (water) wells (fa:چاه), for example, must be factually wrong. And there are several such title groups in that list.
@Uncle G: I'd rather not automatically exclude pumps or wells, even if the odds of collateral damage are quite low. The "chah-e" on the list are false positives due to entries that don't use {{IranCensus2006}}. I've moved them. There was only one "Mowtowr-e" in the list of 398, cases where at most a few entries exist are not worth automating. I went over the list of 398 articles by hand, one by one, moving obvious false positives to the relevant section. This leaves us with 164 articles that I think we should take a more fine comb to. @Semsûrî: How does the list look to you now? — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 22:20, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Uncle G: I moved the false positives due to redirects. I've also moved all entries that link iranatlas.net (edited by Semsûrî) to the section for articles that shouldn't be mass deleted. If anyone wishes to challenge those, I believe they should go to AfD. There are only 65 entries left now. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 23:17, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think that that is a more manageable size for manual review. Several are on your list only because (like Jahangirak and Tolombeh-ye Hajjiabad, Anar for examples) people have tried to make them verifiable by citing Wikipedia mirrors or aggregators that use Wikipedia. Let's see what other people think.
Thanks. I have some more work to do anyway. You just can't trust Visual Editor not to produce garbage. It's a reasonable assumption that {{For}} appears on its own line, but with VE all bets are off. Not too many articles are affected (probably just a handful), but playing fast and loose when filtering always comes back to bite one in the arse. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 00:23, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Let's say you save one article or two out of this mess. Is the English Wikipedia with over 5M articles thirsty for an article on an Iranian abadi? Of course, not. With all due respect, Alexis Jazz, I think you are just wasting your time and other volunteers'. Just delete the whole batch as soon as possible. There are more important things to do, such as going after abadis with an actual population (but less than 100 people). 4nn1l2 (talk) 07:39, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@4nn1l2: There's always something more important to do. But checking thousands of something is what I do. And I think we should be thorough, show that we aren't ruthless. Even if we end up deleting everything, we can show we didn't trash anything of value. If these badly sourced stubs had been detected and proposed for deletion shortly after creation, we could have blindly deleted them. But years have passed, so now we need to check if others have contributed to these stubs. I didn't waste our time - Carlos did. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 01:55, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I am planning on reviewing all of these edits of mine. Where should I make the potential list of articles that I believe can be deleted? As I mentioned above, two of the articles I have edited, I have self-reverted but have been moved to 'Manually checked articles that may not be eligible for mass deletion'. --Semsûrî (talk) 10:51, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Semsûrî: Dump it here, dump it on my talk page, move them to garbage pile yourself. I take it you misidentified some? Just for clarity, being saved from mass deletion doesn't mean these articles (currently 44 remaining unchecked plus 97 with iranatlas ref) are saved forever, just that they shouldn't be blindly mass-deleted. (which is a fairly low bar, far lower than WP:GNG) Discussions might be started from some anyway. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 01:55, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Semsûrî: Can you please move the entire line unchanged (this makes it easier to review the diff) and move it to the "Manually checked articles (Vandalism, etc" section? The last section with 5000+ articles was created by running a filter, these were not looked at one-by-one. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 16:25, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Semsûrî: Nevermind, I see your second batch was already the final batch and I've moved it the way I wanted. I just want to be sure that nothing gets accidentally broken, that's easier to check when lines are moved unchanged. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 16:55, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think the 5227 stubs at User:Alexis Reggae/Articles for locations oh my what a mess#filtered garbage (which is a subset of Hog Farm's list) can be deleted. I have done another check to make sure I haven't missed anything that includes "http" (which might be a ref), and nothing was missed. (unless somebody quietly added links in the past few days, which seems unlikely)
I have my doubts about Fram's suggestion to maybe move to draftspace: after all the filtering I did, saying that 99% of the stubs on Hog Farm's list is rubbish isn't all that far off. And moving them wouldn't contribute to making draftspace more manageable.
The 242 stubs at User:Alexis Reggae/Articles for locations oh my what a mess#garbage pile can be deleted as well I think. For the list of 5227 stubs I tried to filter in way that would avoid having stubs wrongly marked as not containing any additional contributions. The changes (as included on the list) for those 242 were all checked manually. It's a combination of false negatives (because the 5227 were filtered conservatively), some vandalized pages, pages that only had a citypedia.ir ref added which appears to be completely unhelpful, a few with a citypopulation.de ref which doesn't appear to go beyond county level (so doesn't mention the abadis) and a bunch with an iranatlas ref that Semsûrî (who added those refs to begin with) has reviewed and found they had misidentified. [22][23]
The articles in the two top sections (44 "unchecked" and 54 with an iranatlas ref that Semsûrî hasn't marked as misidentifications) should not be mass-deleted, I think. These have references or additions of some sort. They can still go to AfD or get PRODded where appropriate.
Are the other articles okay? I can't read Farsi but "Woolen Goods Prairie Pumping Complex" doesn't sound like a village, and (at a skim) there's not many results on Google (that aren't just based off our article) for either the English or its Farsi translation. Yet when you search "Woolen Goods Prairie Pumping Complex", Google (based on Wikipedia's article) seems to believe that's a village. I guess it's reasonable that a small Iranian village might not have results on Google and that'd meet WP:GEOLAND, but if all these are mass-created from an Excel document and some of the creations are dubious I feel like it's worth making sure the rest are reasonably accurate before closing the thread?
Also, just curious, how does Wikipedia do transliterations for places without English names? The Excel document has no English names for that article I linked or the others, but isn't it borderline original research to just use Google Translate and come up with an English/romanised translation and title the article as such? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:19, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@ProcrastinatingReader: I think it's not uncommon for multiple different transliterations to exist, 4nn1l2 may be able to say more about this. I understand your concern, but this discussion about mass deletion concerns User:Hog Farm/C46 population not reported and my list which is just a filtered version of C46 population not reported. For the other lists, we'll need another discussion. There is no consensus for deletion of the articles on the other lists because that hasn't been discussed yet. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 19:48, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@ProcrastinatingReader and Alexis Jazz: Bad translation by Carlos. Sigh. Apart from passing off âbâdis as villages, another aspect of original research by Carlos is his translations. The correct translation into English would be "Pashmine-zâr Farming Pumps Complex". Pashmine-zâr is a proper name here and should not be translated. By the way, the English Wikipedia has an article on Pashmina. Carlos has translated this word into "woolen good". He has also wrongly translated -zâr (Persian suffix) into "prairie". I can understand why he got it wrong, but this suffix only denotes the concept of "multitude". Pashmine-zâr means a lot of pashmine, not a prairie of pashmine! Anyway, the article should be deleted.
@4nn1l2: What's normally good practice for notable (per GEOLAND) places that have a name in the local language but no sources exist for the place and hence there's no Romanised name to use? If a Wikipedian does the translation, even if it were 'correct' linguistically speaking, that's still surely OR? This seems to apply for pretty much all of these articles - the census Excel file doesn't have English names for any of them. My feel/guess is that we wouldn't create the article at all? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:22, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This list isn't complete, it's just a quick spot check. It would be helpful to bring in some people who are familiar with those wikis to bring the issue to their attention. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 22:57, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Bad idea which only escalates the situation. I'm sure the English Wikipedia knows very well that it has no jurisdiction over other WPs. Some of these WPs that you cited are failed projects which only try to boost their number of articles by creating whatever that can be created regardless of quality. Arabic Wikipedia and Persian Wikipedia are engaged in a contest! (See also Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict.) Egyptian Arabic (arz) is just another Cebuano or Waray-Waray. Leave these projects alone and let them be busy with their own games. 4nn1l2 (talk) 07:50, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I thought it would be responsible to inform them, but seeing as it's mostly bots and I have pinged them here, I suppose that's enough. And Wikidata is forced to keep anything that has a translation, which is nearly everything. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 04:35, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Suggested edit restriction for Carlossuarez46
[Note: The section below was originally posted on ANI. Since it concerns a proposal for a sanction, it should have been posted here on AN. Since there is an ongoing discussion about the editor in question here on AN, it should have been connected to that discussion. For these reasons I have moved it here. Beyond My Ken (talk) 08:15, 28 March 2021 (UTC)][reply]
I suggest an edit restriction is put in place that requires Carlossuarez46 to inform the community before mass-creating articles and give the community a reasonable amount of time to respond, Carlossuarez46 should explain based on what they will be creating articles and how they can ensure that the articles they create will be accurate and about notable subjects. Carlossuarez46 should also respect the comments on these announcements.
I have kept the details deliberately vague, as is usual to avoid gaming the system. We're all grownups (right? right?) and the goal of this restriction is simply to make sure we won't suddenly have another 5000+ dubious stubs that may require mass deletion.
I am aware Carlossuarez46 is an admin, and as usual, I don't care. Adminship doesn't make one immune from edit restrictions. If they stop being an admin in the future for any reason, that wouldn't affect this edit restriction. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 03:10, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Carlossuarez46: Absolutely baffled by your comment. I genuinely forgot. I did mention your username so unless you disabled notifications, which no admin should do under normal circumstances, you were alerted to the existence of the thread. That would make this a rather shittily executed conspiracy wouldn't you agree? I initially thought several commenters below were a bit harsh, but now I think maybe I've been far too kind. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 20:32, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support stronger sanction: no article creation outside of AFC - Normally, I would not support sanctions on edits this old, but this is the type of action that might go unnoticed for years, and it indicates a lack of understanding of our general policies on article creation. Personally, I think this sanction is too weak. That they are an admin only makes the point stronger that a sanction is needed. Admin are supposed to know better. I would support this sanction, the stronger sanction I am recommending, or even stronger sanctions. The fact that they have been editing yet refused to participate in this discussion, thus avoiding all accountability for their actions, makes me think they shouldn't be an admin at all. Dennis Brown - 2¢11:56, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support stronger sanction I would prefer Dennis Brown's stronger sanction to the originally proposed ones, but if Dennis' don't pass then I would support Alexis Jazz's sanctions because something needs to be done about this, and Carlos shouldn't get off scott free just because they are an admin after causing this much disruption through creation of thousands of articles and refusing to clean them up. Jackattack1597 (talk) 12:26, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support stronger sanction: no article creation outside of AFC - The question is can we trust them to create articles that are not formally reviewed? Since almost all of there article creation is this sort of stub, and discussions have been going on on their talk page for months about there mass-created articles, in which they have not recognized that any of this creation is problematic in any way, I don't think I can trust them to create articles that then sit around for years and spread false content. To show the full extent of this mess, compare this Wikidata entry to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Snow Bend, California. Thanks to mass creation, azbwikipedia and zhwikipedia now have articles claiming that an obvious non-community Carlossuarez46's mass creation of stubs has essentially polluted the entire internet with false content. Hog FarmTalk18:10, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support. He has created lots of 1 or 2 sentence stub articles and many of them are suspected hoaxes and are getting nominated for deletion. He only uses 1 source, from the GEONet server and most of the time doesn't cite sources, and when he does they are unreliable like this pdf source in Azerbaijani (feel free to translate it) that was politically biased. I think we should prevent him from making articles or even de-adminship. Cupcake547Talk. Thanks, 20:48, 28 March 2021 (UTC).[reply]
Lately I've been adding information on the composition of hundreds (if not more) of settlements in Iran. I can see that I have also edited some of the settlements where the population varies from 0 to 3, which just means that a reliable reference have not only recognized their existence but also their composition. --Semsûrî (talk) 20:50, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You edited "the well of Abbas Ali" (c.f. Special:Diff/1014289529) and called it a "village", citing an aggregation WWW site that cites Google Maps, and hence Wikipedia, as one of its sources. You seem to be making the very same errors as Carlossuarez46, just more indirectly, and should probably take a lot more care. Uncle G (talk) 22:55, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Uncle G I'll take a look at the edits I made at these troubled pages (User:Hog Farm/C46 population not reported) and try to verify the 'village'-ness or revert my edits. I can see that I haven't edited that many of them. Regarding Cham-e Abbas Ali, I will revert my edits made since I must have mistaken it for another settlement in the area. I can't seem to find it in the source either. --Semsûrî (talk) 10:14, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I found Abza-e Dudera (or Owzā Dudarā[24]) and it is stated that it has a population of 24. Searching its coordinations ('31.36302, 50.81570') on Google Maps gives this result[25] which to me does look like a populated place. --Semsûrî (talk) 10:21, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Let me formally oppose per my reasoning above. The real problem here is not that Carlossuarez46 created a bunch of purely sourced stubs in 2006. At that time, we still did not understand very well what can be done and what can not be done, and whereas there is no way someone would create such stubs today, it was not uncommon at the time (you know, eventualists, article rescue squadron and so on). The problem is not that Carlossuarez46 continues to create stubs of doubtful quality, because he does not. In the last year, he created only one article which is a dab, and the quality is ok. Ban for article creation is not going to solve any problems. We could also propose a topic ban for Iran, we have even general sanctions in the are, and such topic ban would equally not solve anything, because Carlossuarez46 is not editing in the area. The problem is that currently Carlossuarez46 refuses to discuss the issue and do something about this. On top of this, Carlossuarez46 is administrator, and I see here breach of ADMINCONDUCT. I think the only issue to be discussed here which solves a real problem is a desysop, and then someone should prepare and file an ArbCom case. May be we are not yet ready for arbitration, then this thread must be closed with a formal warning, or may be a block if people think it is acceptable (I do not see why we need a block here, but I understand that other opinions are possible), but I do not see why we need a topic ban on article creation in this situation.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:05, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The Iranian stubs have been created in 2014 using old data from the 2006 census while the data of the 2011 census was available. 4nn1l2 (talk) 21:12, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Respectfully, Ymblanter, I think the fact that this activity lasted for almost a decade, during which time the person concerned was an Admin and expected to be familiar with WP:GNG (already a guideline in 2007) and WP:GEOLAND (created as an essay in 2008, promoted to guideline in 2010), and which many times the problems with their articles were pointed out to them (see e.g., here). One of the worst periods for Carlos's article creation activities appears to have been in July 2009 after the creation of the leaderboard for who as created the most Wiki articles - I don't think I am breaking WP:AGF by saying that their article-creation activities were likely motivated in part by a desire to score highly on that board rather than being here to create an encyclopedia (i.e., they have been WP:NOTHERE for more than a decade). FOARP (talk) 08:35, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support stronger sanctionsAs far back as 2009 Carlossuarez46 has been completely dismissive of anyone who suggested that his article creations were questionable, consistently refusing to acknowledge that his mass-productions include errors or fail to demonstrate verifiability and/or notability. His continued rebuffing of those who have put in far too many man-hours cleaning up his mess is callous and unbecoming. Looking at the logs, Carlos has not used admin actions in many years, other than to delete pages to make way for moves of his mass-creations, so perhaps he doesn't need those privileges! Very sad to see downright false information not just here but on Wikidata and other languages that is even harder to fix due to his sheer incompetence and refusal to conduct adequate verification before mass-spamming of articles, even after being informed of the problems! Reywas92Talk21:08, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I would like to comment on the possibility of an Arbcom case here. I would support anyone proposing a possible Arbcom case request in addition, but not in place of, community sanctions, for the purpose of determining if this is enough for a desysop. I doubt that Arbcom would ultimately decide that a Desysop is warranted since the misuse of article creation occurred years ago, but I think it's worth a case request to investigate further. Jackattack1597 (talk) 21:33, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The simplest way to get arbcom to deal with this if needed is to establish a mainspace article creation ban . A subsequent violation of such a ban by an admin would be probably fall within their view of ADMINACCT. And if there are no subsequent violations the problem is solved. Sanctions are for prevention. If similar things happen with other editors, the ban is a good precedent. DGG ( talk ) 21:40, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support stronger sanction - Ban on mainspace article creation per DGG. If Carlos restricts themselves to their present work on categories this is harmless, but anything beyond this they simply cannot be trusted to do. For more than a decade they abused their position as admin to create vast number of articles that they must have known (because, as an admin, they are expected to know) failed WP:GNG and WP:GEOLAND. This was done with the apparent goal of simply boosting their article-creation stats to score higher on this board (i.e., WP:NOTHERE behaviour). We all may make mistakes, but most of us don't simply keep on making them even after they've been pointed out to us. Most of us will try to fix our mistakes. Most of us won't simply be dismissive and refuse to help as it becomes apparent that we have created an immense problem for others to clean up. Admins are expected to be accountable per WP:ADMINACCT yet Carlos shirked any accountability for their GEOFAIL stub creation. Yes, it will be a novelty to have an Admin who isn't even trusted to create articles, but here we are. FOARP (talk) 08:46, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Response Let's see the lynch mob wants to punish me for things done ten or more years ago - before WP:GEOLAND was established without WP:BEFORE to determine notability of anything? and most of these comments being basically unWP:Civil. Wondering whether a non-Latino would face this... Wikiracism at its worst. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 18:02, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This response convinced me to withdraw my opposition and encourage someone to file an ArbCom case. We have a clear breach of ADMINACCT here.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:10, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Go ahead. I'm sufficiently pissed off at the blatant racism and attacks that I really don't care what more you do. You all have sullied WP. I would like to withdraw all my contributions here as you all don't want them. Please make it so. I'm gone. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 18:22, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I also take objection to the accusation of racism - since I'm the OP and was involved in the deletion of a lot of these articles, I think it's reasonable to assume this is at least partially directed towards me. I've seen no indication that anyone was connecting this to your ethnicity before you comment, and this really comes across as a WP:NPA violation. Really starting to think that ARBCOM may be necessary - agree with Ymblanter that this is very concerning from an ADMINACCT perspective. Hog FarmTalk19:19, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Where? Freaking where? Glad to sanction any blatantly racist commenters but you're just trying to play the victim. Thanks for finally changing your mind, every other time you've just stonewalled, so now G7 applies! Reywas92Talk19:00, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Reywas92: G7 has to be "requested in good faith" which this arguably isn't as they just requested indiscriminate deletion of all their contributions, which would be highly disruptive. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 02:47, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Reywas92 and others have discussed elsewhere the strain that this would put on the speedy deletion or proposed deletion system, so I doubt that this is a course that any of them is seriously considering. Just in case: I recommend that no-one do this; and that we continue discussing what to do with the articles calmly, without reference to the high-jinks surrounding their creator. Uncle G (talk) 06:27, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
LOL We've done HUNDREDS of before searches on your California crap, and that's likewise what we've been doing here, more so than your making one every few seconds. It doesn't take more than a glance at the wall of notices on your talk page to see how much of a burden this has been for us, yet you haven't once provided more substantive sources to establish notability and accuracy or otherwise indicate why any or every thing we've done is wrong. Heck, GEOLAND lowers the bar for places, so since this was before it was approved, GNG would have been the controlling guideline and these are even more blatant failures of that! Moreover, 2009's Wikipedia:MASSCREATION was also ignored – this is exactly the reason we have that. The number of falsehoods you wrote in the California places that are inconsistent with what the Durham book says (e.g. calling hot springs or other names described only as "places" communities) is astounding. Piss off with your BS accusations of racism, an evidence-free personal attack itself here. I don't give a darn what your ethnicity is, and these articles and the response to their inaccuracies have nothing to do with the Latino world or people or your background. Reywas92Talk19:23, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Carlossuarez46. you have truly jumped the shark with your claim of racism here. You need to strike that attack on the editors here, which I consider a personal attack, and worthy of a block. So far, you have done nothing to fix the problem, and are instead attacking the messengers. Dennis Brown - 2¢02:10, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose for now, looking at the 3 articles Carlossuarez46 has created in 2020/2021 (ignoring DABs and redirects) I only see 3 in April last year on Greek former settlements (Lagos (Phrygia), Takina and Lysinia) and all seem fine so given the small amount of article creation in the last year and that those seem OK I don't see any reason to ban. Regarding mass creation I think we need more of it namely for things like municipalities, districts, settlements (with a population figure) and islands which should probably be done with a bot or tool after consensus to make sure that they are both correct and notable. Perhaps the abadis that claim to be a village created by Carlossuarez46 claiming to be a village etc could be changed by a bot to simply be a abadis? since zero info is better than incorrect info. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:24, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support INDEF block I was planning to oppose sanctions if Carlossuarez made a reasonable statement; the behavior was so far in the past that a block would be punitive, there are almost no recent page creations, and community views on this type of creation have shifted over time. Instead, Carlos has baselessly accused everyone here of "racism", claimed this is a secret conspiracy, and placed a rage-quit {{retired}} banner on his userpage. This is incompatible with ADMINACCT. As Ymblanter suggests, the personal attacks are blockable, and a block is probably simpler than a full ARBCOM case (though I wouldn't object to someone else doing so). User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 19:19, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose sanctions, per WP:NOTPUNISHMENT. I realize that Carlos's behavior in this discussion has rustled a lot of feathers, but Carlos has not created any pages in quite some time, and has given no indication that they plan to mass-create community pages in the future. Many of the reasons others have given for sanctions are ultimately based on unwritten rules of courtesy (such as preferring immediate mass deletion per G7) that Carlos was under no obligation to follow, and may have had legitimate reasons not to do so, such as if they were planning to review the articles on a case-by-case basis on their own.--Molandfreak(talk,contribs,email) 00:42, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Let's back away from the brink for a second. Carlos hasn't created articles in quite some time--years it seems--so I really don't see how this restriction would do anything. His response leaves a lot to be desired, but looking through the discussion, we don't seem to have been particularly kind either. Given that the problem doesn't seem to be ongoing, I'd really rather we try to de-escalate and take time to cool off. — Wug·a·po·des02:15, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support I was the first to propose sanctions for this user, and I still stand by it based on evidence presented here. The sanction I proposed was a ban on articles about geographic locations, but I can support a ban on mass-creation of articles. But ArbCom will impose sanctions that are deemed necessary, if we fail to reach a consensus. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 22:38, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support Desysop and block per above. His response to all of this isn't what I want to see from an admin and such behavior prior to an RfC would pretty much guarantee its failure. ♟♙ (talk) 18:54, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose I would support this as advice, not as a restriction. The articles were in Special:NewPages and if they were not autopatrolled would have survived new page patrol without these errors being noticed when they were created (and it's possible that they still would). If creation of articles such as these resumes and there are similar problems then I would support a restriction. Arbcom can make the decision on whether to desysop. Peter James (talk) 12:34, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Comments copied from above that have frankly gone beyond the scope of the original suggested edit restriction (which, to be absolutely clear, also remains on the table):
I also take objection to the accusation of racism - since I'm the OP and was involved in the deletion of a lot of these articles, I think it's reasonable to assume this is at least partially directed towards me. I've seen no indication that anyone was connecting this to your ethnicity before you comment, and this really comes across as a WP:NPA violation. Really starting to think that ARBCOM may be necessary - agree with Ymblanter that this is very concerning from an ADMINACCT perspective. Hog FarmTalk19:19, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support INDEF block (now supporting de-sysop 04:13, 30 March 2021 (UTC)) I was planning to oppose sanctions if Carlossuarez made a reasonable statement; the behavior was so far in the past that a block would be punitive, there are almost no recent page creations, and community views on this type of creation have shifted over time. Instead, Carlos has baselessly accused everyone here of "racism", claimed this is a secret conspiracy, and placed a rage-quit {{retired}} banner on his userpage. This is incompatible with ADMINACCT. As Ymblanter suggests, the personal attacks are blockable, and a block is probably simpler than a full ARBCOM case (though I wouldn't object to someone else doing so). User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 19:19, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
(noting that Hog Farm noted WP:NPA but didn't literally support a block in the above comment)
And frankly I support this. To paraphrase Ymblanter, I do not think I will let an accusation of conspiracy against me for forgetting a talk page notification stand. Admins are a subset of users. Any user would likely be blocked for this, and since Carlossuarez46 is a user, well. Now, how Carlossuarez46 is actually going to use their admin tools if they are blocked, well, that ain't my problem is it? — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 21:44, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The purpose of NPA blocks is to prevent further attacks from happening in the future – either because further attacks are technically prevented, or because the editor wants to avoid another block. Neither really seems to be applicable. An indefinite block of a retired editor could simply be appealed in a few months, with a promise not to personally attack other editors again. It seems likely that such an appeal would happen and be successful. Without block and appeal, the result would be the same (perhaps minus a forced apology with doubtful sincerity – you want that?). An indefinite sanction against the behavior that led to the entire discussion, however, seems to be very effective in achieving exactly the desired effect: Preventing the behavior that led to the entire discussion. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 23:19, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@ToBeFree: How is retirement enforced? In practice, Carlos can simply unretire next week (or maybe next month) like nothing happened. I disagree that someone declaring themselves retired is a reason is skip sanctions. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 00:31, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with ToBeFree that a NPA block wouldn't really have much effect in preventing disruption here. However, I do support desysopping. Clear WP:ADMINACCT issues here. Between mass-creation, the general refusal to discuss and when discussing, refusal to recognize wrong, followed up with the bright-line WP:NPA violation above, gives me very little faith that they should have the advanced tools. Hog FarmTalk23:56, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support desyopping Having read ToBeFree's comment, I don't think a block would do much good, so I am abstaining on that question, but I think the WP:ADMINACCT violations overall are bad enough to warrant a Desysop.I hope somebody starts drafting an Arbcom case requestJackattack1597 (talk) 00:11, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Jackattack1597: Why don't you? Everyone seems to hope that "someone" will. My excuse is that I have near zero experience with ArbCom and will probably screw it up, but it seems I may well end up drawing the short end of the stick. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 00:31, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'd be worried about accusations of being a Sockpuppet, or being NOTHERE, because of my limited number of edits and my large proportion of edits on AN, if I posted a request in the cesspit known as ARBCOM. I could try writing up a basic request, but I'd prefer if somebody else submitted it . Jackattack1597 (talk) 00:39, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Also, I don't feel like I have as much to do with this as Hogfarm; I think he'd be a better filer since he has actually had to deal with a lot of Carlos' articles, and I really haven't had any interaction with him.Jackattack1597 (talk) 01:08, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oh goodness. Never been involved with ARBCOM before, no idea how to go about that. Also gonna be somewhat busy with work until after tax day. Hog FarmTalk01:39, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Jackattack1597: Please write up something basic (I can fill in details myself) and any suggestions for the process. If Hog Farm won't, I can submit it. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 02:26, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Hog Farm: He pretty directly accused me of conspiracy, so I think it would be fair to include me. Similar for Ymblanter I think. Beyond that I'm not sure. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 03:51, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support desysopping, hold off on NPA block. I agree with Alexis Jazz when they mention that retirement should have nothing to do with sanctions, and I do think the ADMINACCT violations are bad enough to desysop, but a block seems a bit overkill for now. Obviously we shouldn’t trust the user in question with a mop, but if a non-admin like myself did this, I don’t think we would be indefinitely blocked. After all, all admins are still users, and the mop shouldn’t make them "immune" to blocks/other sanctions, but I don’t think I would be blocked if I did this, so I don’t think Carlo should be blocked either.D🐶ggy54321(let's chat!)02:00, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Doggy54321: It would probably depend on the mood of the admin, but I think this behavior would be blockable. If an unblock request is made with a credible claim that that behavior won't continue, an unblock could happen relatively soon. But at that point the user would have to tread lightly to avoid more blocks, which fulfills the goal of such a block. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 02:26, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Alexis Jazz: Thanks for the clarification. I still stand by my "don't block for now" statement as I’ve read the other comments in this thread and I agree with them, but I’ve struck through some of my text above due to what you told me. Thanks! D🐶ggy54321(let's chat!)12:54, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It might make sense to hold off on further action to give Carlossuarez46 (who has marked themselves retired) time to reflect on their ill-considered remarks (and hopefully withdraw them). Their most recent contribution to this thread allows for any disputed articles without substantial contributions from others to be deleted per WP:CSD#G7. –xenotalk02:47, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
G7 has to be "requested in good faith" which this arguably isn't as they just requested indiscriminate deletion of all their contributions, which would be highly disruptive. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 02:52, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I read it as them withdrawing from the thread and acceding to deletion. Along with the general agreement above, I don't see any barrier to carrying out the deletions once the list has been checked for false positives. –xenotalk02:54, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support desysopping. Wow, I take a few days off and things get busy. I spent many hours along with many other people attempting to clean up a number of non-notable California locations. My hope was that Carlossuarez46 would participate in the effort, but I don't recall that they did, despite many notifications from many editors. If Carlossuarez46 was applying to be a sysop today, I don't think that they would win an election unless they participated materially in the cleanup. On the basis of their lack of effort in cleaning up the mess, I have strong misgivings about why they have any special privileges here. I'm very concerned about possible non-notable places in Iran, but as I have virtually no experience in that area so I'm not sure I can help. A block could help prevent future similar issues and might be useful as an example of how to avoid similar mass edits by other editors. Concerning the suggestion of racism, I've not seen any evidence of anyone being racist towards this user. Perhaps an apology is in order and we can move on? Cxbrx (talk) 03:45, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support de-sysop clearly, no admin is going to block unilaterally for the personal attacks, and one comment doesn't justify a community ban. I think that if a new user had responded to concerns about their editing this way, they would have been blocked; probably not forever, but indefinite blocks are not infinite. But no matter. The violation of ADMINACCT and the personal attacks clearly justify preventing Carlos from using the admin tools. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 04:13, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Without commenting on anything else, and pardon me if I've missed something here, but since anyone can create an article, and even autopatrolled is unbundled, creating an article is not an admin action. So, ADMINACCT does not apply. Usedtobecool☎️04:36, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I think what is being said here is that Carlos wouldn’t have been able to get away with this mass-failing-article-creation if they hadn’t had autopatrolled, which is something they received by dint of being an admin (even if it is unbundled). Additionally, their uncivil, disruptive, and uncollegiate behaviour is simply not that expected of admins. Failing to communicate, failing to follow basic policies, are all potential reasons for desysop under WP:ADMINACCT. FOARP (talk) 05:36, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support desysopping If there is any victim in this scenario (which I think there is none), that is the poor Iran with all those misinformation Carlos spread about all over the internet. No, Carlos, you are not a victim here and you should be de-sysoped now for pretending to be one. 4nn1l2 (talk) 06:55, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support desysop. He creates a lot of articles about villages, not only in Iran, but in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia. He has created way more village articles than in the censuses of these countries. Since, he is spreading all sorts of misinformation and blaming people, I support a desysop. Cupcake547 (talk) 19:23, 30 March 2021 (UTC).[reply]
RogerNiceEyes(talk·contribs·count) is a brand-new user whose editing has been solely concerned with adding images to articles. Since he started actively editing in the beginning of March, he has accumulated some five thousand edits doing this, at a fairly high rate of speed that doesn't seem to leave a lot of room for double-checking. I have no doubt that he is editing in good faith, as many of the images are topically-related and many of the articles lacked images to begin with. Unfortunately, Roger's enthusiasm far outstrips his accuracy. Myself, Ymblanter, and Pjposullivan have all noted instances where Roger has accidentally added images that he seems to believe are related, but are on closer inspection, are not the topic of the article:
There are other issues, noted on his talk page: his captions are non-existent or one-word at best, images are often crammed in randomly, and his edit summary is invariably solely the word "Added". The above examples are cherry-picked from the last two days, and from a limited sample of his edits on those days at that - I'm certain there are more, but his edits are so prolific it would be very difficult for one human to check them all.
I messaged him yesterday about the accuracy and captions, but he carried on making more of the same edits and same errors today. I left him a second message begging him to take more care, and he appears to have stopped editing for today since then, but without a response, it's impossible to know for sure if he's seen it or it was just a coincidence. In fact, he has never responded to any talk page message that I can tell, and he doesn't have email enabled. Roger solely edits from the mobile app, so he may not even know he has talk page messages, thanks to the terrible app interface.
I don't particularly want to stop him from editing entirely - as I said, many of the images are useful. It's just that he's creating a great deal of cleanup work in his wake, and wasting other peoples' time (especially after being asked and warned) is unfair on a collaborative project. Ymblanter suggested that we implement a mass rollback on his edits rather than expecting people to manually review them. I'm bringing this here to get some input on what, if anything, should be done with this. ♠PMC♠ (talk)16:04, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, indeed, I fully support this. I first noticed the user a few days ago, when they added a few photographs which did not conform with the Freedom of panorama requirements (example). Whereas I do not expect them to know anything about freedom of panorama, and I do not doubt they are acting in good faith, the fraction of errors is too large to let this go.--Ymblanter (talk) 16:07, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have also been watching this work and dropping hints about how to do it better. My guess is that it is based on a list of articles which have images in other language equivalents, e.g. the most recent edit adds an image used in fr:Xanthomonadales. It is potentially useful if done well, and some of it is done well, but I agree that the number of errors makes it of dubious benefit overall. Certes (talk) 16:13, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the sheer number of additions makes the accumulation of errors and the necessary response more drastic. Also, not to forget the fact that after thousands of edits, there has been neither improvement nor response from them. Pjposullivan (talk) 16:43, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
So far we have evidence of 4 problematic images among thousands of edits. I would argue that finding an image to illustrate an article and adding it to the article is a positive, even if there's no caption, even if the edit summary could be better, and even if it's positioned awkwardly. Definitely oppose mass rollback of these additions without much more evidence. That said, obviously communication/collaboration is required here, so perhaps a short block will get this person's attention? As for the "how" question, it looks like his Wikidata edits have a WikiShootMe tag, which makes me wonder if the reason for their focus and not seeing the talk page is because of an interface like that. Unfortunately, the tool isn't working so well for me at the moment so I can't test it (and don't remember from my last experience with it). — Rhododendritestalk \\ 18:00, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) After having seen the above discussion, the Commons thread and RogerNiceEyes's block log, I went ahead and blocked the account; as one of the main uses of rollback (#5 at WP:ROLLBACKUSE) is "to revert widespread edits (by a misguided editor or malfunctioning bot) unhelpful to the encyclopedia" and per the discussion above, I undid the contributions for now, noting that I don't object to any of them being restored, and pointing to this thread. I might have to disable revert notifications for a while, as this led to multiple editors (Vinegarymass911, NemesisAT and Ahunt so far) doing individual review and restoration. While this seems to be an acceptable outcome, I'd like to apologize to Rhododendrites and possible other opposers as I saw these concerns too late. Sorry – I'll participate in the verification process and the result will benefit the encyclopedia without the risk of incorrect images remaining in articles. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:16, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see how the encyclopedia is helped by this. I don't know how the mass rollback mechanism works, but if mass unrollback is not as easy as mass rollback, perhaps we can leave a thread open more than two hours before thousands of edits are rolled back mainly for communication reasons (presuming as much, since there are scarce actually problematic image additions above). — Rhododendritestalk \\ 18:22, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It's practically just a script that clicks all rollback links on a page, adding a custom summary to it. It can be imported as "importScript('User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/massRollback.js');" in Special:MyPage/common.js by any rollbacker, and it can safely be used on the following page to undo the entire action: [30], reload after clicking, repeat until empty. I wouldn't do so, however, as I have since also received "Thank you" notifications for reverting debatable additions, such as at Hijackers in the September 11 attacks, where an image not really illustrating the topic of the article itself has been added, and Ancient Diocese of Bergen, where an image without explanation has been taken from it:Diocesi di Bergen which contains a caption. Manual review is probably the way to go here; whether this should happen after or before the addition is debatable and doesn't affect the end result if all images are reviewed. The comment by Dyanega below further seems to confirm the need for a need for manual review. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:48, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Special:Diff/1013386446 and Special:Diff/1013422672 seem dubious ("Ethiopian boubou" vs. Tropical boubou, "Brown deer mouse" vs. Hispid cotton rat). I rarely find additions that are easily restorable – without thorough research or topic knowledge, neither of which have likely been present when adding the images. The burden of verifiability is on the person adding the material; what else than a mass rollback are we supposed to do to enforce verification in such a case? ~ ToBeFree (talk) 20:01, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
As a late update, the reliability of the additions is very dependent on the general topic. Medical articles? Dubious. Animals? Dubious. Buildings? Apparently often correct; most of the revert notifications seem to be about buildings. And I found a topic that interests me: I'm currently reviewing the astronomical "NGC" image additions, which appear to be fine. The reason they're fine is because Donald Pelletier did a very good job at importing them from Digitized Sky Survey and creating the French Wikipedia article about them with correct illustrations. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 20:14, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The technical images are subject to a similar problem as the animal-related ones: They require extra care and research, as seen in Special:Diff/1015327429. They can be used, but they're technically incorrect when added without caption. The astronomical images may have licensing problems, I'm currently investigating this before re-adding more of them. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:04, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'll add that I have manually reverted a fair number of additions which are based upon outdated taxonomic classifications or misidentified images in the Commons; at least a few of these were re-added after they were deleted. It's a small percentage, and otherwise might not be as big a concern, but it's definitely troublesome if erroneous images keep getting re-added. Dyanega (talk) 18:29, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
1 that I don't feel confident evaluating (esterase, for anyone so inclined)
the other 17 were accurate
2 have since been replaced by higher quality images
15 restored to the article
Removing the one I abstained on, we have a success rate of 17 out of 19. This does not change my belief that this mass revert has been destructive (though, granted, it's just a random block of 20 and isn't necessarily representative). — Rhododendritestalk \\ 19:20, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Rhododendrites, the esterase one was also wrong (it isn't an image of esterase as far as I can tell). 3/20 being wrong is an error rate of 15%; across 5000 edits that's 750 images - not exactly a small amount. ♠PMC♠ (talk)20:40, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds like a good reason to review. The question is whether a 15% error rate means we should nuke the other 85%. For a situation like this, I say no. But no, I don't know where the line should be. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 22:23, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Across fifty edits, or even five hundred, I'd say no - wouldn't be so hard to review those. But across five thousand edits, I have to say yes. The sheer weight of volunteer time required to inspect each one for correctness (see ToBeFree's examples in specialist areas like medicine and taxonomy where correctness may not even be obvious to a layman, and again with an expectation that anywhere from 500-1000 will be wrong), applicability, quality, formatting, adding a useful caption... yeah. I hate to do it, but asking for manual inspection of each of these is too much. ♠PMC♠ (talk)23:48, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose rollback and block, support topic ban on uploading images I don't think the rollback should have been done, as only a small portion of the user's images are bad, and not anywhere near a majority. I also think the user should be unblocked, but I would support a topic ban on uploading images. ( If you're wondering why I support a ban on future uploading but not a rollback of the prior uploading, its because I think that the combination of the error rate and the lack of communication justifies a ban on future uploading, but enough of the images are good that they shouldn't be mass reverted)Jackattack1597 (talk) 19:56, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
They're blocked on Commons, so a partial block from the File namespace could indeed prevent uploads entirely. We can't, however, enforce a topic ban using anything else than blocks if we deal with someone ignoring all messages. A topic ban on adding images to articles, for this specific user, needs to be enforced using a partial block from the Article namespace at least, until the user has actually seen the messages on their talk page and this discussion. Neither of which might happen at all, per WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU. This is why I added a link to their talk page to the block reason, hoping that they will at least see that message, and making that a technical requirement for continuing to edit. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 20:08, 29 March 2021 (UTC)e[reply]
Oh okay, thanks for explaining. In that case then I would support a file space block instead of a topic ban, and if that doesn't work due to linking images from commons then I would be in favor of a topic ban to be enforced by blocks.Jackattack1597 (talk) 21:18, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A partial block from file space wouldn't do anything. He doesn't edit in file space at all; his only edits here are to add images to mainspace articles. ♠PMC♠ (talk)01:32, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Jackattack1597, for what it's worth, he's mostly not uploading images here - he's adding links to images that are already on Commons. That being said, from the Commons discussion linked above, he did seem to have issues with uploading CV images there. ♠PMC♠ (talk)20:43, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse block the history of sock-puppetry and not communicating leaves no other choice. Looking at the edits, a substantial portion are bad; others (like [31] at Ford, Buckinghamshire) appear to be on the right topic but don't improve the article. Even the good image additions generally need someone to fix the caption. I'm not sure the mass-rollback was justified, but don't see a reason to mass-undo it. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 20:58, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I reviewed around 100 of these edits today, and restored 15 images; on about 10 pages the image had already been restored. Perhaps another 20 images could have been reasonable editorial discretion. A few (like Atlantic Axis high-speed rail line) I couldn't definitively assess. The rest were either low-quality images (one was a poorly-cropped version of an image already on the page), about the wrong topic, or had other issues. I think the mass-rollback has made review easier. It was also necessary; leaving hundreds of images about the wrong topic (and having no good way to tell which image additions were endorsed by another editor) wasn't a reasonable option. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 03:44, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse block, conditional support going forwards/namespace block - the action was reasonable, they've got to start communicating. Should they do so (adequately), then a namespace block on files should suffice. If not, then it must remain an indef. I've not reviewed the sockpuppetry accusations carefully enough to judge on them. Nosebagbear (talk) 23:55, 29 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse block as more than enough rope has been played out. This sort of behavior is becoming increasingly common and needs to be dealt with firmly. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:01, 30 March 2021 (UTC).[reply]
Comment. RogerNiceEyes' image at WWW Interactive Multipurpose Server was half-right: it was a valid, though old, screen shot of the software, but it was incorrectly placed in the logo parameter of the infobox. A statistical sample of one is not much by which to make a judgment; it motivated me to upload the actual logo. Boud (talk) 01:12, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Removing full protection of old TFA pages
Hello, I am requesting Adminsitrators to consider removing full protection of old Today's featured article pages. While cleaning up Lint errors, I found hundreds of TFA pages older than a decade that are indefinitely edit protected for Administrator only. Two random samples - Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 11, 2008, Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 29, 2007. According to page protection policy, it is no longer necessary to keep these pages under full protection. Protection would have been valid for the day that it was visible in the main page, not indefinitely.
In addition to being against protection policy, most of these pages have obsolete html tags, stripped tags and bogus file option Lint errors that need to be cleaned up. Protection is creating unnecessary hurdles for minor, non controversial gnomery. Currently we would either have to make hundreds of edit requests or RFPP requests. So please downgrade the protection level to Autoconfirmed or remove protection altogether. All the full protected TFA pages can be found among this list. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 09:30, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ, this might be a failure of the imagination on my part, but what non-controversial gnomery would be necessary on a TFA page from 2007? I'm trying to think of changes that would be necessary, and I'm drawing a blank. If a page has been full protected since 2007, and nobody has noticed, there might not be a problem that needs fixing; I appreciate that there may be a technical policy violation, but if there isn't a substantive reason I can't see going through hundreds of historic pages to change the protection level as a good use of someone's time (when RfPP has a long list of pages that potentially need a change in protection level for good and immediate reasons). GirthSummit (blether)09:55, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
But there is a need for it and it has been noticed. I know most people see this kind of gnomery as pointless, but there is group of people who have been tirelessly clearing the backlog in Special:LintErrors from the last few years. We have been cleaning them from high to low priority and namespace by namespace. You can see the progress here. Please see mw:Help:Extension:Linter#Why and what to fix for a detailed explanation as to why this is necessary. Obviously this is not only for TFA pages, I brought this here because so many out of policy full protected TFA pages were clogging the Lint error lists making them difficult to navigate. Unprotecting them is far less work than making and acting on hundreds of repetitive edit requests. Perhaps there is some script that can unprotect these pages in bulk? ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 10:36, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The specific error on the January 2008 page is that there is a closing </div> tag after the prose paragraph, but that div tag is never opened. There is one on every January page, meaning that there are 31 of them on Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 2008. Right now, those unbalanced closing tags are ignored by the rendering software, but there is no guarantee that the rendering software will continue to clean up after our errors forever. That is why gnomes are removing these errors. We can submit edit requests for each page, but it might be easiest for an admin to reduce the level of protection for each of these pages to template editor protection or some other level of protection lower than full protection. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:46, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, this is even easier than I thought. Twinkle's "P-Batch" tool can work on the month page, displaying all pages linked from the month page, highlighting fully-protected pages in red. As they are displayed in an alphabetically sorted list, "Deselect All" + Shift-Click selection do the job. Note: The pages are also indefinitely move-protected, and Twinkle requires an extra checkbox to remove that as well. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 14:03, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Done using LibreOffice Calc's enumeration feature on a cell with the custom date format MMMM"_"D,"_"YYYY, KWrite's replacement feature (remove whitespace, replace \n by ]]\n[[Wikipedia:Today's featured article/), a user sandbox page and Twinkle ~ ToBeFree (talk) 19:40, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Without commenting on whether removing full protection of old TFA pages is the right solution, the idea that "it doesn't affect me personally, so there might not be a problem that needs fixing" is wrongheaded. HTML errors are worth fixing no matter where they occur. If you are using a modern browser on a recent PC or smartphone, you are in luck; a large team of engineers is constantly working on making pages with HTML errors display properly on your screen. If you are visually impaired and use a screen reader browser, not so much. In many cases an HTML error makes the page unusable for the visually impaired, and the rest of us never even know that there is a problem. Other users who are impacted are users in third-world countries who cannot afford the latest PC and are still using an obsolete browser on a 386 PC or an older flip phone, and users of satellite phones, which are notorious for not being able to handle HTML errors. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:00, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Guy Macon, I didn't say 'it doesn't affect me', I said... well, you can read it for yourself. I was asking for clarity about whether there was a problem that needed fixing, and I qualified it by admitting that there might be a failure on my part. Clearly there was, on both counts. Wrong headed seems a bit strong, no? GirthSummit (blether)00:23, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I purposely did not link to your post or mention your name because what you wrote was significantly different -- and far less wrongheaded -- than the concept I wanted to comment on. There really are people who think that their preferred HTML formatting is more important than the needs of blind people, but you are not one of those people. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:19, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I found another 265 pages that needlessly under full protection. Most of them are Picture of the day pages from 2006. Unlike the TFA pages, they did not have syntax errors but nevertheless are out of policy protections. Please unprotect them as well. I have listed them below.
Reprotect? Under which policy would that happen? Any possible justification for having protected them indefinitely in the first place has been proven incorrect by this very thread. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 17:06, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have been contacted off-wiki by an archivist, who wishes to remain anonymous, working for the National Archives & Records Administration about a perceived vendetta by @Future Perfect at Sunrise: against the entire NARA. According to this person, FP has decided that everybody at NARA is either User:OberRanks (long since banned) or a sockpuppet/meatpuppet of theirs, and has openly stated that any edit or e-mail from a nara.gov address is to be regarded as malevolent in intent. Can I get some background here? I thought we had good relations (at least at one time) with the National Archives? --Orange Mike | Talk20:09, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I vaguely remembered reading of some editathons with NARA, so I put that in Google and there seemed to be several over years, some here. Maybe DC Chapter knows more about it? -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:33, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
If anyone at the NARA wishes to make a complaint the I would advise them either to make it non-anonymously and publicly or, if they wish for some reason to conceal their identity, to make it via OTRS or to the WMF. Something doesn't smell quite right here. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:24, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Phil here. I can't take the time to look for it now, but I recall that a previous request that really looked like a good faith innocent user from NARA and started to get some traction at AN or ANI or something turned out to just be OberRanks faking it. Now maybe this is an innocent user, but I trust FP@S's judgement about 98% on OberRanks issues. --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:30, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Might not be a good idea to tell someone to spin a sad oh so convincing story to WMF. Perhaps, you all and FPAS know if there is anything more could/should be done (Arbcom report?), if it this is a never ending drain or even worse kind of WP:HAR. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:08, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I actually misread that discussion when I posted. I had thought it was firmly established that the person contacting Salix Alba was OberRanks. But re-reading more carefully, while this is what FPaS believe, I'm not sure it's what Salix Alba believes and I don't see definite evidence which doesn't mean I don't trust FPaS's judgment. Nil Einne (talk) 00:33, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The details of my contact checks out. The person who contacted me, used an official NARA email address, the name he gave is in the NARA's online phone book. From the details I've been given they run a citizen archivist program and a military history mailing list, which some controversial people like the late Mark Yagers and OberRanks have participated in. FPAS actions have been noticed at quite high levels in the NARA which caused internal investigations and they are now very cautious about revealing identities on Wikipeidia. OberRanks had a long history working with NARA as a paid reference researcher, he has a following in military history circles and some people watch his talk pages so get notified when deletion notices appear there. OberRanks and my contact are different people. --Salix alba (talk): 04:53, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Anyone can send mail to you purporting to be from someone; and someone whose mailbox is in the same domain will not even trip domain checks. I hope that you were instead checking that mail that you sent to someone, and only that someone, got a reply back. Uncle G (talk) 05:57, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I had back and forth communications with the someone who's email address matches the official email address of that person on the NARA website. I have sent email to that @nara.gov email address and got responses, I have checked the message headers and there is nothing out of the ordinary. --Salix alba (talk): 07:10, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The claim that FPAS actions have been noticed at quite high levels in the NARA which caused internal investigations sounds awfully WP:MANDY with OberRank's modus operandi. If it were true, someone "at quite high level" could have easily found their way to UTRS or Arbcom or whatever official channel rather than e-mailing random administrators. No such user (talk) 07:31, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I handled a similar request on the IRC help channel this morning. For what it's worth, the IP who added the original ANI report is indeed from NARA, while the IP of the editor in IRC help geolocated to the same general area (Rockville, Maryland). I feel like declaring all of NARA to be probable sockpuppets doesn't really agree with our GLAM engagements, but that's just me. GeneralNotability (talk) 22:57, 31 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. [32], [33], [34], [35] were obviously him (all from that NARA range, and all trying to restore or prevent deletion of OberRanks material). As for emails, I haven't seen any, obviously, but I know he's active on another non-Wikipedia website (apparently under his real name), where he's openly identifying as a NARA employee, and at the same time quite busy venting his anger about his treatment by Wikipedia. (That website is also where he contacted OrangeMike, and apparently tried to contact other wiki admins too.) Fut.Perf.☼07:47, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Guys, the person who contacted you offline is, of course, OberRanks himself, and everything he says is a lie, as usual. I happen to have been aware of him spewing all sorts of scurrilous accusations against me on that other website (I'm not going to link to it directly, for now, since he's been doing it under what is apparently his real name). At one point he was claiming I made threatening phone calls to the archive; another time he was claiming I paid others for doing so; then he claimed the archives even had me investigated by Homeland Security as a potential terrorist threat or whatnot. All of it is lies, just as everything he's been telling you guys is lies. (Salix alba, that includes what your correspondent told you: if your contact's name has (Redacted)) And yes, all the recent NARA-IP activities here on the site were him too. Fut.Perf.☼ 07:25, 1 April 2021 (UTC) come on, FutPerf, you know better. Primefac (talk) 14:35, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Right now, FPS is accusing an official government employee, who wrote to me using a traceable official government account, of lying. To do that require a quite elaborate hacking system where a military history researcher manages to spoof a government email address, set up some system to that when I send an email to that official government email it does not go to that employee. Further this person has managed to hack the NARA government website so that he appears in their online directory of employees.
As FPS seems to know this guys name, he can look him up himself on the NARA. If anyone else can guarantee they will not reveal the persons identity I can send them my communication and a third party can verify.
There seem to be several scenarios.
1) Everything is an elaborate ploy by OberRanks, who is acting alone, and is not a US Gov employee.
2) There is a government employee who is the same person as OberRanks
3) Its more complicated. There is a government employee who is different to OberRanks, this person knows OberRanks and the late Mark Yerger, there is a mailing list and VPN server with a group of people monitoring FPS's activity.
@Salix alba: If 2 is correct, then it's entirely possible that FPaS is correct about the lying without there needing to be any elaborate hacking system etc (and I'm pretty confident FPaS is correct). Also, I don't know what anyone called Mark Yerger has to do with this (I might have come across the name in my small involvement with the OberRanks case, but if I did I've forgotten). But are you familiar with the OberRanks case? OberRanks was found to have been faking sources (yes, faking them, not just using sources of questionable origin) and blatantly lying about their origins, over a very long period. He's more than capable of doing everything that FPaS indicates. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:56, 1 April 2021 (UTC) - Ah yes, I remember Mark C. Yerger now. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:49, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Also, if it's any help, I'm happy to have a look at one of the emails you have received and examine its provenance - I'd need the full email headers. I would promise to keep the email contents and sender's details confidential. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:05, 1 April 2021 (UTC) Actually, no, strike that - as I was involved in the OberRanks case, it's probably better if I don't. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:36, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps, it's like person(s) who get official research faculty privileges at an institution, and thus get nara accounts connected with the "citizen archivist program", mentioned above (and even have remote access). Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:24, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That is not at all uncommon. Had I bothered to keep them active, I would still have e-mail addresses connected to institutions where I've taught, despite it having been almost two decades since I was actually at a couple of them. Grandpallama (talk) 14:07, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That would fit with OberRank, my correspondent seems to have a job title of "Archivist" and a room number he shares with a number of others listed in the online phone book.--Salix alba (talk): 14:29, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There's no reason to speculate. OberRanks was always quite open about the fact that he worked at that institution, and there's no reason to doubt that he does. So yes, of course, he has the ability to post from nara IPs or write mails from a nara account. Nothing strange about that at all, and no "misuse" of accounts as such. Fut.Perf.☼14:45, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I mean if he's misusing his NARA email account to harass Wikipedia editors and spread lies about what happened here and about you. I know if I used a business/professional email account to pursue a personal vendetta I'd be in big trouble. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:51, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There was an editor back in 2012 who got indef-blocked for off-wiki harassment for calling someone's employer so I am pretty sure doing that is a pretty bad idea.— Diannaa (talk) 15:34, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Presumably this would have to be handled the same way that other cases of continued severe disruption/harrassment by identifiable individuals is done - and would probably need to involve WMF (the legal team and/or T&S) to avoid accusations of harrassment.Nigel Ish (talk) 15:42, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) I wasn't suggesting anyone should take it upon themselves to contact this person's employer. But if they are misusing their employer's resources to harass Wikipedians and to further their personal vendetta, then it is a route that someone official (like T&S) might choose to employ if alerted to it. (or "What Nigel Ish said") Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:47, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Re "my correspondent seems to have a job title of "Archivist"": That job title is a senior one at the National Archives, as can be seen on their organization chart. There appears to be only one "Archivist", and I'm quite sure it's not the person sending these emails. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:00, 1 April 2021 (UTC) Actually, no, there do seem to be other job titles of the form "xxx archivist". Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:10, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Turns out the person who canvassed Orangemike to open this thread hurriedly started deleting his older posts from that website, the ones in which he'd been making all those fraudulent accusations, mere hours after I indicated I'd been aware of them. So maybe let's hope he has wisened up and realized that making libellous claims against others on public websites, in ways that also implicate his own employer in the false claims, was not a very wise thing for him to do. People who've been around long enough to remember the original Arbcom case about him (the "Husnock" case from 2006 or thereabouts) may remember how his propensity for lies always verged on becoming self-destructive, and how he sometimes switched into a mode of panicked back-pedalling whenever he realized he'd been in too deep. Needless to say, I fully agree with Boing and Diannaa above that none of us should be contacting that institution about him. It's just so ironic that this appears to have been his biggest fear all the time, but exactly by making up all those lies about how people were allegedly doing it, he himself has been giving us more and more reasons why somebody might legitimately be tempted to start doing it after all. Fut.Perf.☼18:51, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The original Husnock case was before my time, but I examined it when the OberRanks case came up. I suspect he's been emboldened by what he got away with over the years. Yes, his lies became ever more unbelievable, and his back-pedalling became laughable - but what staggered me most was the Wikipedians who swallowed it, when an averagely smart 10-year-old could have seen through it. Anyway, if OberRanks is following this (which I'm sure he must be), he now knows a couple of things: 1) A number of people here now know his real life identity, and 2) Nobody, surely, will be dumb enough to swallow his lies again. Hopefully that will be enough to make him see sense. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:18, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
As FutPerf noted in one of his posts above, this ANI post from just yesterday, March 31, made by an IP from National Archives and Records Administration, requested undeletion of a file, originally created by OberRanks, and provided a laughably absurd rationale for the request. That this post happened at the same time as OrangeMike, GeneralNotability and Salix alba were contacted can't be a coincidence. That leads me to conclude that FutPerf is correct and that the person who contacted OrangeMike, GeneralNotability and Salix alba was either OberRanks himself or perhaps a colleague he convinced to intercede on his behalf. I am not sure about the extent of the problem, but possibly OberRanks should be added to the Wikipedia:Long-term abuse list and the corresponding protocols should be applied in the future. Nsk92 (talk) 21:02, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that this should be referred to T&S or WMF Legal so that they can contact NARA. If someone is abusing their access to NARA e-mail addresses, or is misrepresenting NARA in some way, that's something that the administrators at NARA should know about, so that some kind of action can be taken, if they deem it necessary. Beyond My Ken (talk) 07:11, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I want to summarize here, not to rub it in, but for editors who were not aware of the background - I think it's important that we don't lose the collective memory, and that more well-meaning Wikipedians will not be caught by plausible-sounding claims if OberRanks chooses to wait a bit longer and try someone new. OberRanks (previously known as Husnock) was extensively fabricating article content, faking sources to support it, using genuine sources to cite content that they did not support, violating image copyright, and lying about it all when challenged. This went on for years. And there were some real doozies. I've linked to the ban discussion, and some key examples of his misdeeds are listed at User:Future Perfect at Sunrise/OberRanks, but I want to point out one example of the extent of the deception. OberRanks uploaded a copy of the top image from this page and claimed it as his own. There is plenty of evidence of copyvio (wrong date, camera that hadn't existed at the time he claims), but the most breathtaking lie was "I also appreciate the concerns about how similar this photo is to others on the Internet; as stated in previous posts, I think this is due to the location from which it was taken, which was a common vantage point from which the entire building could be seen across a public highway, and therefore used by a lot of photographers before this building was torn down." The two "similar" copies of the photo were pixel for pixel identical, exact same cars, exact same clouds, etc. Anyway, this is just to be sure people are fully aware of who we're dealing with and what he's capable of, and to hopefully extend the collective memory. Oh, and I've examined the comments made by the various IPs listed here, and they all read like OberRanks' style to me too. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:56, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I feel that at this point referring the matter to T&S is insufficient. It seems also necessary to develop some kind of recommendations for how future situations in this case are to be handled. Orangemike and GeneralNotability were contacted by IPs "wishing to remain anonymous" and claiming to be employees of NARA. We should have a general recommendation in place for the OberRanks case that future entreaties of this kind should not be reported at AN/ANI but instead the correspondent should be told to file a formal, non-anonymous, OTRS ticket. OTRS should be told to send this info to the arbcrom if they ever receive such tickets. Similarly, if somebody gets a direct contact from a NARA e-mail address, I think they should just forward such communications to the arbcom. Let the arbcom deal with this matter on the WP end. Nsk92 (talk) 10:27, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Normally, I'd be very much in favor of handling things locally via ArbCom instead of going to T&S or WMF Legal, but I feel as if there would be legal ramifications for whatever Arbitrator personally contacted NARA about this, even if they were representing the Committee as a whole. Given that, I think it is better that direct representatives of the Foundation do the contacting, avoiding all questions about outing, harassessment, etc. I would agree with Nsk92's comment directly above if all instances of "ArbCom" were replaced with either "T&S" or "WMF Legal", whichever is deemed more appropriate. Beyond My Ken (talk) 10:58, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Since about two weeks there are 0 administrators active in closing discussions at WP:CFD. The backlog quickly increases, obviously. It would be helpful if a few admins would tackle this together. Marcocapelle (talk) 05:43, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Actually it's only seven years: the oldest unclosed discussion is from late 2014. Either way, the English Wikipedia is doing better. In chronological terms, the CfD backlog is only about two months. * Pppery *it has begun...16:50, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
User Noraskulk is persistently trying to remove the sourced information in the article Slavs (ethnonym) that describes the background of the English word Slave. Help of the administrators is needed. The same thing happens every once in a while. Velivieras (talk) 13:08, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Please note that you must inform the other editor that you've started a noticeboard discussion related to them. I've done it for you in this case AsarteaTalk|Contribs13:52, 1 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
In the description for your edit, you wrote that you were returning the original information, but the original word was "slav", which you replaced with " slave". I also deleted the text that the word "sakaliba" comes from "slav", but this is not the case (see the article "Sakaliba"). After studying your contribution, I realized that you have already started a war of edits about the etymology of the term "slav" (as for example here). So I'll ask you to come to the consesus with me. Noraskulk (talk) 15:01, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Following a request for comment, F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a has been deprecated; it covered immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
Following a request for comment, page movers were granted the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target.
Technical news
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split and it might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. (T278350)
Code to support some very old web browsers is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. (T277803)
Pushing an admin related close on an admin board, to push it to the front of the line, seems out of place and improper, to me. There is nothing in that RFC that requires it be pushed ahead of other closes. Why a user with less than 200 edits would do this, or know about this, I have no idea. Dennis Brown - 2¢00:09, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely, but pushing an admin related RFC to the front of the line is still wrong. It is less important than content related RFCs, and smacks of taking care of our pet topics over content. There are plenty of eyes on that RFC, it doesn't need advertising for close. Dennis Brown - 2¢10:13, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Well, as a new user they probably assumed that a very high-profile RFC that is over a week past the 30-day timeframe and has had discussion die down (exactly one !vote over the past 4 days) would be closed quickly. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 01:49, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Another issue is that some folks think RFCs need to be closed the instant the bot removes the {{rfc}} tag; I even had to revert someone who re-added it (actually reverting the bot) because "the discussion is still open". This has been on my list of things to get to, but the last week was hella busy and I didn't have time for much of any editing, let alone a large RFC like this. Not saying that someone can't beat me to it, but I suspect there are a few non-voters that are eyeballing a close on it. Primefac (talk) 13:46, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
could use additional eyes/help. All of these are *very* overdue for closure, but I can't do the deed because I've either already commented or re-listed. Thanks, FASTILY05:59, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Question to the community: Should Arbcom members be restricted from discussing active cases and participants on forums outside Wikipedia?
Why should e.g. this from 2005 be deleted? What "source" would one expect for a self-created, non-copyrightable simple graphic? It may be correct or incorrect, but "unsourced" seems like a strange reason. Why not simply transfer it to Commons? While it is currently unused, it was used on historical versions of pages([36]), so deleting this will contribute to the slow degradation of old page versions, for no clear benefit. Fram (talk) 10:18, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
From 20052004
Agree with Fram, Keep the 2005 growth graph image. I found it interesting, esp. the time it took to grow to 200,000 articles, and both historically useful and archival worthy as an early Wikipedia document. The 2004 symbol image is similar for Wikipedia history purposes. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:00, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There's been an issue lately with people proposing the deletion of Wikipedia history-related files with an apparent lack of understanding of their context. I've had to deprod a few, mostly from one editor, who I've also seen get chewed out quite thoroughly by some of our more irascible personas. Vaticidalprophet04:53, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think it's intentional, if it was intentional then the maintenance categories wouldn't have been deleted. Also this has happened several times before: 1, 2, 3... -- CptViraj (talk) 12:54, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
phab:T124101#6969820. @Peter James: The Wilderness Society file is available from [38] and when I tried to overwrite it I first got a duplicate warning (makes sense) and after trying to ignore that I got the error "The file "mwstore://local-multiwrite/local-public/b/b2/Wilderness_Society_in_front_of_Kindness_House.jpg" is in an inconsistent state within the internal storage backends" so I can't overwrite it. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 23:42, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
User Engwk engaged in an edit warring in the article Fonblanque, imposing his point of view about a French count title, and using orginal search to support it. He deletes sourced info on the page, including about another subject (the middle name of a Fonblanque family member, Sir John de Fonblanque Pennefather. Administrators help would be useful. Engwk first used the account Newloo. He seems to be the same person as Correcteur21, a banned used who stalked the French wikipedia on pages about French nobility. LuciusAniciusGallus (talk) 15:02, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Additional Information :
- On Talk page I explained to user LuciusAniciusGallus he needs to stop deleting a version which by neutrality indicated that there were no reliable sources for this French title of "count of Fonblanque" given by some English sources to this French family.
- I indicated that an English source cannot be considered as a reliable source for a French title of count in France and that a reliable specialized French source is required to provide this information.
- I indicated that French sources say "sieur de Fonblanque"[1]) that means lord of the manor and not "comte de Fonblanque".
- I indicated that if the French de Grenier de Fonblanque family had been titled count in France, there would be at least one French source who would give this information : There’s none.
I had asked LuciusAniciusGallus many times to stop using unreliable sources to report false information, but he prefers to ignore my arguments and he choices to create a Edit war.
Contrary to LuciusAniciusGallus’s false accusations, I have no connection with Newloo or a userr Correcteur21 (???) It is a poor defence on his part to try to justify an unacceptable behaviour (vandalism, Edit War and refusal to understand what is explained to him). Such behaviour is no acceptable and raises the question if LuciusAniciusGallus is not in a conflict of interest (member of the family?). --Engwk (talk) 16:25, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Strange answer from user Engwk, denying to be the user Newloo, even if it's quite obvious, regarding the fact they both made interventions on the same very specific topics.
Furthermore, Engwk, as easily understood if viewing his actions on Fonblanque article, doesn't behave cooperatively, but instead tries to rule what info may or may not be used, refusing text from reliable sources. Could please an Administrator help this case ? I didn't touch this user last revert on the article, to make the problem easier to understand.
LuciusAniciusGallus, you must respect Wikipedia:Assume good faith rather than continue your accusations to justify your vandalism and your non respect of the the principle of providing reliable sources.
You intentionally use non reliable sources to report falses information about a title ( conflict of interest?)
We are talking about a French title that would have been awarded in France to a French family : so as I asked you to do : find a French reliable source that provides the information the de Grenier family was granted in France a title of "comte de Fonblanque" and we so we could discuss about that.
There is an article about Matt Gaetz created on March 30 that has such an incendiary title that I don't even want to repeat it here because even that could be seen as a BLP violation. It has been submitted for AfD but I don't see any administrator participation there. I strongly suggest the article is exceedingly problematic and needs to be speedily deleted. The section on his BLP is sufficient at this time, IMO. soibangla (talk) 00:20, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
If it's a BLP violation to link to AFDs for BLP-violating articles, a bunch of admins are in a whole lot of trouble. Here y'all go. (Without comment as to whether the article does in fact merit deletion.) -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi.00:55, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The original title was problematic but the current one doesn't qualify for G10 (the only speedy category which applies) as everything is sourced ("libel, legal threats, material intended purely to harass or intimidate a person or biographical material about a living person that is entirely negative in tone and unsourced"). Whether it should be a stand-alone article or part of Gaetz's bio is something for the AfD to determine. I suspect there will be an article about it at some point even if it may be slightly TOOSOON at the moment. Black Kite (talk)01:09, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I see that you left the original title as a redirect. Should we keep that, or delete it as a BLP violation? IMO it is a violation; it assumes the truth of serious, currently unproven allegations. Can we speedy it, or should I take it to RfD? -- MelanieN (talk) 15:46, 3 April 2021 (UTC) @Fences and windows: Sorry, forgot to ping you. -- MelanieN (talk) 16:15, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I deleted redirect 2 and 3 because there were no links to them and they violated BLP. Less clear what to do with redirect 1 as there are between 60-70 pages that link to this page. LizRead!Talk!17:33, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Gah! Would that you had not done that! I've just fixed all of the robot-generated article alerts and quality assessment logs, and now you've gone and got more robots making links because of the RFD discussion. There are right now, until the robots cycle back and undo it, no incoming links to redirect 1 that are not because of the RFD discussion. I wonder whether deleting that redirect right now will stop the robots from re-linking to it. Uncle G (talk) 18:46, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I've closed the RFD as an IAR speedy, deleted it (and removed the entry from all of the new article analysis lists). That should do it, I think. Black Kite (talk)20:11, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you to all involved for your attention to this. I was so focused on cleaning up after the AfD move (which took an hour) that I didn't think enough about the redirect following the article move. Sorry I left the job incomplete. Fences&Windows00:00, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
If a robot has been undoing actions by good-faith human editors then there's surely something wrong with the robot, and it should be stopped from editing until it is sorted out? There seems to be far too much of the attitude that "a bot did it so it must be right" recently. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:41, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Personal and active attack
Hi, I'm complaining to User:Курды - ослы that they sent me a picture of a donkey and made it look like my mother and father[39] and made me Personal attack and Persian language He has distorted me into a donkey and a terrorist![40] Let me tell you why, why? Because I am a Kurd. Please take care of the respected managers. Please, I ask the esteemed managers to take care and follow up. Ahrirrr(talk)13:50, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you DanCherek for closing this user account, if you can please restore and censor this user's changes on my talk page and all seven of this user's changes
I ask the managers to close their accounts endlessly, you as an ordinary person, when your family, region and race are insulted for no reason and you are called a terrorist and a donkey, you will not be upset or from the point of view of a manager all this disrespect and personal attack in one frame It can be ignored for you and you only close that account for a while?!
I blocked the account indefinitely. Nobody should have to put up with personal attacks like that, though I'm afraid they do happen from time to time (and sometimes much worse). --Yamla (talk) 14:11, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you to all of you who care about all races and races, sorry I got it wrong and thought the account was closed for a short time, thank you all dear managers. Ahrirrr(talk)14:23, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The global account seems to have been hidden or deleted. If it was hidden it hasn't worked here; I don't know if it's still possible for global accounts to be deleted. Peter James (talk) 14:08, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Since the users is indeffed on 3 wikis (for similar reasons, if Google Translate is correct), I requested a glock with name suppression two days ago, although as far as I can tell nothing has come of it yet - although CentralAuth doesn't seem to register the username, it's still visible and the mark-glocked script I'm using doesn't show it as locked. Giraffer(talk·contribs)09:04, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
31 Mar : IC picked up the stick again and returned to the SPI report with the "evidence" that one edit by Reiner Gavriel matched another edit also by Reiner Gavriel. This may have been a move in the conflict that resulted in the EW report.
This is no longer (if it ever was) a content issue, it's a behaviour problem. IrelandCork is incapable of WP:AGF toward Goddard2000, and just as incapable of ignoring them. Over two weeks sparring on the dramaboards is enough. The imposition of a 1 way IBAN on IrelandCork wrt Goddard2000 seems the least that can be done here. Cabayi (talk) 15:45, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, reported what I saw. Your diff shows it's not all one-way. Quite happy for a 2-way ban, but this drain on resources needs to be curtailed somehow. Cabayi (talk) 17:10, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Cabayi, Uncle G I added IrelandCork to the investigation report after he updated his report against me with more diffs. I didn't even include him in the original report, you can check the edits. Also the "acting like a baby" comment was long ago, other admins already talked to me and warned me not to talk like that. I apologized for getting too aggressive and from that on i stopped. I did my best to ignore Irelandcork after this despite his accusations against me and reports after he "dropped the stick" in his previous report. Goddard2000 (talk) 17:14, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Cabayi Two-way ban? Only thing i did after we had a truce was add Irelandcork to the report i made long time ago AFTER he accused me of being Lamberd, Gavriel again and making several new edits despite agreeing to stop in the previous report. Maybe you want to check out these comments made by both Krackduck and Irelandcork? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Uchar-hadji
"Congrats on making a laughing stock out of admins here," -Krackduck
"You may be proud with your mastery in deception of admins here" -Irelandcork
Again this was after they allegedly "stopped" and "dropped the stick", i didn't even report them for these comments because i wanted to be done with them but since you are talking about banning me i feel like i have to say something. Goddard2000 (talk) 17:19, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I would like to take this chance and show the moderators a compilation of IrelandCork attacking me/other users or accusing me/other users.
If they've managed to cause this many problems with only a couple hundred edits under their belt, maybe neither is capable of working in a collaborative project. Dennis Brown - 2¢01:38, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I gathered names from some recent AN/ANI reports, see the following table. I have evidence suggesting IrelandCork is Arsenekoumyk but I would prefer to email that to anyone doing a CU. Johnuniq (talk) 07:15, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Previously, Solavirum was blocked for two weeks on 7 March 2021 and was given a warning by the topic ban enforcer El C not to test WP:BROADLY ("Don't even mention the topic area in any way, whatsoever."). Within a week of the block ending, Solavirum violated the topic ban again. --Steverci (talk) 16:19, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A Seljuk prince in Syria is not related to WikiProject Armenia or WikiProject Azerbaijan. I don't know how expanding an article about Turkey and Syria is violation of the topic ban. You can ask about it to more experienced editors in the subject like HistoryofIran and Cplakidas. With this rate, I'm not going to be able to edit any article in Wikipedia. Your application is basically WP:WITCHHUNT. --► Sincerely: Solavirum16:45, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
(talk page watcher) I see nothing in the diffs other than a commendable expansion of well-researched, neutral history. The edit does indeed include a tangential passing mention of a historical Armenian prince, but I think the context of the mention is important here. It's neutral, relevant and supported by the source; the subject of the expansion is clearly outside their topic ban, yet relevant enough to Solavirum's interest in regional history that they're willing to dedicate their time to write about it. With an edit this constructive, I'd encourage the reviewing admin to be generous and fair-minded. I can see how a blanket ban on using the word Armenian in all historical contexts, even when the subject is clearly not Armenia and Armenia is only being touched upon in the briefest contextual manner, could be obstructive to their efforts to contribute to other regional topics. Given that the edit is productive and in clear good faith (rather than an attempt to "nibble round the edges", which is what WP:BROADLY is designed to prevent), I'd be inclined to allow Solavirum to mention Armenia in a contextual manner on articles related to medieval history, provided that they strictly avoid directly discussing Armenia or Armenians themselves. BROADLY has a provision for determining "whether or not a particular edit violates a sanction ... on a case-by-case basis" after all. As an aside, I don't think the comparison with Solavirum's previous violation is accurate here, as that incident was a blatant violation in which they directly discussed a source related to the contemporary Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict on my talk page. Jr8825 • Talk17:41, 3 April 2021 (UTC) (Non-administrator comment)[reply]
Without digging too deeply, and taking the content of this discussion at face value, I would say that a "tangential passing mention of a historical Armenian prince" is indeed a violation, but likely an innocent one so I'm not inclined to slam down the ban hammer. "Broadly construed" means just that, and while sometimes these tangential edits go unnoticed, when they are noticed, we don't have a choice but to remind the editor that this really needs to be avoided. I understand this can be frustrating, but I wouldn't hold this one set of diffs against you in a future request to lift the restriction. As a guide, if there is any question that an edit might breach the topic ban, it is best to avoid it. Dennis Brown - 2¢11:28, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
IABot says I'm blocked, but I'm not
I was trying to use IABot to add archives to a page, and I kept getting the same error message: Analysis error: blocked: You have been blocked from editing. I don't know where this came from, and I am assuming it's a bug as I haven't been blocked. Maybe I've been blocked from using the bot? If someone could clarify what this means, that would be great. Thanks! Update: Just to update, the bug is still there. D🐰ggy54321(the Easter bunny has been summoned...)16:47, 3 April 2021 (UTC) (updated 23:32, 3 April 2021 (UTC)) (please ping on reply)[reply]
@Doggy54321, this has also happened to me but I am able to use it after a few hours. You can drop by my talk page and ask me to run the bot on any page if you want. I will try to respond as quickly as I can. Cheers. EN-Jungwon10:57, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Translation: An editor not using an account, and who thus cannot create content pages, comes along as 81.178.203.235 (talk·contribs) and tries to add a bunch of articles, all of which already say that the subjects got this award, by its old or new names, to a new category. Editors blanket revert because the category page does not exist. The editor without an account comes back as 213.205.242.124 (talk·contribs), and in one edit summary asks why the reverting editors with accounts do not just create the category page, then. It would indeed be akin to Category:Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording. Xe is blanket reverted again, and comes to the administrators' noticeboard. Administrators are then told that this is hoaxery. We have constructed a quite byzantine way of doing things for editors without accounts, haven't we? Uncle G (talk) 23:04, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I've had this same argument before and lost. I really don't get it. There's a general principle that you shouldn't revert an edit just for being imperfect. For instance, if a user adds a readable, well-sourced paragraph, you don't get to revert them just because it needs copy-editing. Hell, our policies even say you can't speedy an article for being written in another language. But apparently categories are exempt from this principle, and it's seen as acceptable to revert a constructive edit because it put red text in the box where there's only supposed to be blue text, when one could just turn that red text blue oneself. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi.09:54, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This seems more like unfortunate confusion than any major problem with the English Wikipedia to me. Yeah sure, the category should exist. But when an IP adds a bunch of articles to a red category, and the article does not mention that award anywhere, it's easy to see why it was reverted. And while I didn't check, I'm fairly sure that the majority by far of our articles didn't mention the Immersive Audio award because it was only awarded for 2 years, whereas it was 14 years under the old name which is likely all those articles mentioned. Should those reverted have searched for any grammy award and then checked out the wikilink? Maybe. Should they have just searched for an award by that name? Maybe. But it's easy to see why someone would just search for "immersive" in one or two articles where the category was added, think it was bullshit since the article didn't mention that and revert them all. Even someone somewhat familiar with all the grammy awards may have never heard of the change from 2019 and at least to me, even if I had heard of the surround award, I wouldn't necessarily think maybe they renamed that when I read "immersive audio" without thinking carefully. And although I mentioned IP, frankly I think the same would often have happened if the editor didn't recognise the other editor or especially if they had limited history. Maybe the biggest issue was more precise edit summaries and messages rather than templates would have been bigger. Rather than saying it was a test edit or a generic comment on how to cat or simply saying it's red link, something like "this category doesn't exist because the award doesn't exist" would have been clearer and maybe helped the IP realise what the problem was so they could explain why there was confusion i.e. the award does exist but was called something else then. (Although should we actually add those surround articles to the immersive cat? This is the sort of thing where to me it seems like it might be better to add the surround article to a surround cat and only add 2019 and onwards articles to the immersive cat.) Nil Einne (talk) 19:24, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Uncle G: What nonsense? Who said it was mentioned in no article? I specifically said 'and the article does not mention that award anywhere, it's easy to see why it was reverted. And while I didn't check, I'm fairly sure that the majority by far of our articles didn't mention the Immersive Audio award because it was only awarded for 2 years, whereas it was 14 years under the old name which is likely all those articles mentioned. You've highlighted one article. So let's look at the actual stats here.
The first article modified, Brothers in Arms (album)said "immersive Latin American imagery". That's the only usage of the word immersive. It does mention the surround award, but as I mentioned above, it's easy to see why people wouldn't associate this award with the immersive album award or even find it if they were just doing a cursory search to see whether the edit could be constructive. The second article Genius Loves Company[44] and third article Morph the Cat[45] no mention of the word immersive. (I could repeat my points on the surround award for a third time, but it seems unnecessary.) The fourth article modified, Beyoncé (album)said "She highlighted the immersive experience of Michael Jackson's Thriller (1982)" and in a quite I miss that immersive experience, but again no mention of the immersive award. The fifth article modified, Love (Beatles album)[46], sixth article Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs[47] and seventh article Amused to Death[48] again all no mention of immersive. It's only when we get to the eight article Early Americans[49] and ninth article [50]Eye in the Sky (album) that we get the two articles which did mention that specific award title, those two years where it was actually awarded under that title.
While I'll admit, the numbers are less skewed than I expected, in big part because we don't apparently have articles on a bunch of these albums, by my definition 7 out of 9 or 77.8% is still a "majority by far". For example, it's more than a supermajority in the majority of voting systems I'm fairly sure.
So no I stick by my point, actually even more strongly now that I think about it more. While it may have been good if editors had just searched the article for any mention of grammy awards and then checked out the surround award article, or searched for the award by name in general; it's entirely reasonable they're not going to. If an editor adds a bunch of articles to a non existent category called about an immersive album grammy award, it's entirely reasonable an editor would check out 2 or 3 articles, see zero mention of an award with this title in the article (probably via a search for immersive since it's an obvious rare word) think not sure what this editor is doing but it's a red link cat plus there is no mention of this in the article, and revert.
While we expect those reverting recent changes to pay a bit of attention to see if the edit may be constructive, it's always very tricky about how much time people should spend. And when the award has such a unique title it's fairly reasonable that the amount of time would simply be searching for this fairly unique title in the article and reverting when there is no mention. And personally, I think 2 or 3 is enough before mass reverting but as my stats prove, it's actually easily possible that an editor could have made an effort in the first seven articles, then have given up by the time of the eight and ninth and not bother. If you check every single article when you're reverting an editor who has made the same edit to nine articles, the first seven of which seem obviously wrong, good on you I guess but I'm not going to say editors need to do that. It's unreasonable.
As I said, the one area where it seems to me we could obviously improve is communication, to better explain to the IP why you're reverting them. This seems to me what we should be discussing. Instead we're stupidly discussing whether editors should have found and realised that maybe the award in the article called "Best Surround Sound Album" was renamed to "Best Immersive Audio Album" when coming across a red flag a series of edits as the immersive audio album isn't mentioned and the cat is red; and whether after failing to find any mention of an award with the unique title Best Immersive Audio Album in the first seven articles, they should have kept looking in the eight and ninth articles.
I should perhaps mention that I'm concentrating on User:Tbhotch here as it seems fairly obvious from their hoax comment above that what happening is something along what I outlined. They looked in at least one, probably more than one of those articles, found the IP had added a red link cat, found zero mention of an award with that title in those articles they looked at, so reverted all thinking that the award clearly didn't exist since surely someone would have added it by now if it did. I admit, personally once the IP actually made it here, I would have searched for the award just to make double sure. Or maybe said something like, please create the article Grammy Award for Best Immersive Audio Album first, then we can discuss a category. And once I previewed or submitted and realised, oh fuck, there really is an award called that the IP was sort of right, apologised and taken effort to correct the problem. But meh, you can see from comments that I do probably but a lot more time into them than others so whatever. It's AN, Tbhotch was wrong, others corrected them.
For User:Binksternet their comments are less clear. If they really only reverted because the category doesn't exist without considering whether it should exist, okay a rap on the knuckles for them. However if they did the same thing as Tbhotch then yeah nah, no rap. And because they could have easily have done the same thing, it's more of a reminder rap than 'you dang screwed up in a series way' rap.
People actively working against those people who are building articles by treating them as vandals, is not right, however fine one chops it. There's also a fundamental flaw, there. Brothers in Armsmentions and hyperlinks to the award page at the beginning of its second paragraph, as do all of the other articles (in various places); and the reason given in Special:Diff/1015778825 (and below) is based upon wanting to impose rules instead of helping people who cannot comply with the rules because MediaWiki doesn't let them.
Honestly, too few people are seeing things from the point of view of other people who do not have accounts, or remembering what it was like for all of us once. And this is making a terrible experience for people without accounts. It's not right to be putting people in this Kafkaesque world where they cannot fix or improve things because they have to fight against a widespread culture of robotically applying rules, always reverting, and not thinking "How I could collaboratively help instead?". Moreover, this goes equally for a recent case I saw (not to get into the specifics for obvious reasons) where multiple people reverted an article subject erasing a clearly false statement (if one read the source) from the article and even warning the article subject about a conflict of interest and saying that it was the rules that the content stays in the article. Indeed, the article subject's interest there actually aligned precisely with ours, having an accurate encyclopaedia, and didn't conflict at all.
Not sure why this award would be different to any other award. Seems like it was just overlooked. It would be quicker just to create the thing than revert a dozen other edits...
It's the same for both of these related categories
Also, yes, what's with people making it a career of having thousands of reverts in their history? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.178.203.235 (talk)
I performed a bunch of reverts on this issue, and I would just like to say that I was considering only one thing: WP:REDNO, an editing guideline. Categories should exist before they are added to articles. That's it, nothing more complicated. I didn't bother checking to see if the notional category did or did not fit the topic – I just saw the red and reverted. Binksternet (talk) 03:32, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Binksternet: in that case, I do agree with Uncle G and Tamzin when it comes to your edits as I implied above. Yes the cat needs to exist. But the IP can't create it. So effectively you're asking them to go somewhere else to get (probably) someone else to create it, for something which seemingly should clearly exist if the award exists. It would be easier for everyone involved to apply a bit of common sense and if the category should clear exist, rather than reverting nine times or whatever, just create the category so you're not forcing everyone to put in a lot more work. (While the IP may not have specifically asked for the cat to be created the first time around, it seems reasonable to interpret adding articles to a non-existent category as request for creation.)
I mean IMO even creating a completely blank category with no description is good enough, the IP or someone else could fix it then. Note that plenty of us don't do such stuff enough to use automated tools. It probably took me about 3-5 minutes to re-add the article to 8 categories. Since it was the most recent edit I think I could have used twinkle more easily if I wanted to, and added an edit summary however the IP clearly can't.
As I also said above, the Tbhotch case shows even if you had put in a little work, it's easy to come to the wrong conclusion and think the category shouldn't exist since there's probably no such award so meh, in this case it's a bit of a wash. But in other cases, maybe no so much. It's one thing to recommend an order to be followed. It's another to waste time forcing stuff to be repeated just because the order wasn't followed when it serves no real purpose.
If this was a case where it was extremely questionable if the category should exist, so as an inexperienced categoriser you're not sure and not willing to create it then fine, but it seems to be very far from that considering I have very little involvement in the field and I was fairly confident the category should exist. (My only question was whether the other articles should be in the immersive cat or a separate surround one. But that's a separate issue from the red link one as if anyone had created the cat it wouldn't be a red link.)
Categories make me crazy, and I touch them as little as possible. (I cannot agree with a system that categorizes a dual-attribute thing as "Thing with X and Y" but the thing will not be found in the categories of "Thing with X" or "Thing with Y", even though the thing plainly has X, and it plainly has Y. I would rather see a great deal of redundancy so that each category page is a complete list.) All that to say I would rather not create a new category. Binksternet (talk) 05:46, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
81, I created both categories. Me and another editor populated the immersive audio album cat. For the engineered album one, maybe the the other editor or someone else will. Alternatively IMO you should feel free to populate it. Nil Einne (talk) 03:51, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much. I'll populate the engineered one.
On that last point, I remember seeing s type of link previously that gave the intersection of two categories. I believe that should be further developed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.178.203.235 (talk • contribs)
The page needs to be deleted quickly due to IP sabotage of the article transferred to another name and the IP is constantly being sabotaged
Please delete it, thanks.--MadD(talk)23:36, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
They are the different teams, so two different pages are needed, not one. Both teams are active now and non-defunct. The wrong renaming in late 2020 was made without consensus and without discussion. 91.124.116.230 (talk) 23:48, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I make that 9 reverts in less that 1 hour at FC Hirnyk Kryvyi Rih from the above two editors, so I've protected it. I notice that neither editor has attempted to use a talk page, although 91.124.116.230 has asserted in 5 edit summaries that these are different subjects. I'm seeing no attempt at all to even answer this on your part, MADdi0X. Is it that hard for you to simply explain on a talk page why you disagree with that statement? Uncle G (talk) 00:09, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
No, that's not an explanation of why you disagree with the statement. That's just a bare assertion that someone is doing something bad with zero explanation of what is bad about it in the face of a contrary assertion that it is not bad. You need to go to Talk:FC Kryvbas Kryvyi Rih (2020) and put an explanation there of why you disagree with the statement that these are different subjects. Then you and the other editor can discuss this. Use talk pages.Uncle G (talk) 00:36, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There appears to be active off-Wikipedia recruitment and canvassing to push ethnic POV on Nur ibn Mujahid. This started following a discussion of fringe additions on Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard#Nur_ibn_Mujahid, to which editors came to consensus of said additions being undue minority views, and thus removed from the article. This was promptly followed by off-wiki canvassing on Somali forums: [51][52], which resulted in two fresh single-purpose accounts registering to brute-force minority POV. Editor CSI99283 registered within hours of canvassing and proceeded to edit war [53], whilst editor Sade Tan registered shortly after and proceeded to votestack on every single discussion involving CSI99283, including on CSI99283's own talk page [54].
Off-wiki canvassing on this specific Somali forum has been done previously by long-term vandal Middayexpress [55]. Given the Horn of Africa project is currently under standard discretionary sanctions, I am hoping something can be done about this clear case of canvassing and possible SOCK/MEAT. --Kzl55 (talk) 10:52, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This is unacceptable. First of all, that is an absolutely wild allegation made in bad faith, simple because you didn't like our propsals. I used to frequent the Nur ibn Mujahid article for a long time before I ever chose to register. I never accused you of cheating or doing something questionable nor did I ever force my opinion on anyone else. These are discussions going on these boards and I kept it there. If I wanted to force it, these discussions might not even be happening. Someone could have forced edit the article, but that's not happening is it? Unacceptable allegations. Sade Tan (talk) 11:17, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict)I didn't follow edits to the article itself other than initially to see what the edits were about, but I read the FTN thread. Just by what was going on there I also suspected sockpuppetry, but then noticed that one editor, CSI99283 was apparently less experienced (canvassed is indeed likely). If I understand, Sade Tan would be 86.18.37.245 who then registered (and stopped IP editing)? —PaleoNeonate – 11:28, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Friendly reminder to any admins reading this that the Horn of Africa is a recently-authorized DS area (and this is exactly the kind of thing those DS were put in place for), so DS-based protection is fair game. SubjectiveNotabilitya GN franchise (talk to the boss) 15:22, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I literally signed on from my phone.
I still don't know what I did was wrong? I didn't edit any articles. Was just having a normal discussion giving an alternative point of view. Is that allowed over here? If it isn't I'll be glad to leave forever. Sade Tan (talk) 11:50, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Disruptive editing takes many forms and is not limited to editing articles, attempting to game consensus is disruptive. Evidence presented above demonstrates off-wikipedia canvassing on part of CSI99283 and yourself. Within minutes of registration, you methodically responded in support of CSI99283 across three separate discussions, including their own talk page (which you had no way of knowing about) as well as Wikipedia:Fringe_theories[56], [57], [58], not the typical behaviour of new good-faith editors. --Kzl55 (talk) 12:10, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Best bet is going to be ECP of any pages that are the subject of canvassing (again, under DS) - Nur ibn Mujahid is already ECP'd as of a few days ago, got any others? GeneralNotability (talk) 01:27, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Request for an article about Ogedengbe Agbogungboro
The title is blacklisted because of the years-long promotional efforts of the Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Vwegba4real sockfarm to promote a Nigerian pastor with a similar name, with many minor spelling variations to evade page-level restrictions. Algomancer, I can't remove the blacklist entry, but if you can start your article as a WP:DRAFT or as a subpage in your user space, and then let me know where it is, I can move it to the correct title and you can work on it freely. The blacklist only prevents creating the page, not editing it. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 18:04, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Algomancer, the title itself is not the WP:COMMONNAME (at least this what it seems like). There's a scholarly article about the subject titled Ogedengbe of Ilesha: an Introductory Note (as mentioned by J.D.Y. Peel). "Ogedengbe Agbógun Gbórò" is the naming variation used by BBC Yoruba. There are some WP:RS concerning the subject, so it can be deemed notable enough. If you want, I can expand a draft article in my sandbox. --► Sincerely: Solavirum18:33, 4 April 2021 (UTC) (Non-administrator comment)[reply]
Actually, my mistake, the blacklist prevents page creation in any namespace, so you'll need an admin to create the page as a draft or userspace subpage anyway. Let me know where you want it and I'll be happy to create it for you, I just don't want to create empty pages in the article namespace. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 19:02, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Nationalistic vandalism, pushing of the Belarusian propaganda to the article of Pahonia
Hello, I have encountered a nationalistic vandalism, pushing of the Belarusian propaganda in the article of Pahonia as user Kazimier Lachnovič persistently removes content about the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Lithuania from this article, and falsely tries to prove that Pahonia is only the coat of arms of Belarus (e.g. this edit clearly shows his nationalistic vandalism). I tried to structure this article in a neutral form, which uses the historical coat of arms of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as the primary illustration and included the Lithuanian, Belarusian and Pogon Ruska coat of arms as its other versions (see this edit of mine), however Kazimier Lachnovič systematically started an edit war with me and pushed the Belarusian variant as the primary illustration (e.g. see this edit of him and pay attention to his explanation of this edit "The Pahonia is Belarusian CoA, the Lietuvan (modern Lithuanian) version is already mentioned and has a separate article").
For those Wikipedians who are not familiar with the coat of arms of Lithuania here is a short explanation in order to easier understand the issue: the Lithuanian coat of arms had a few different names throughout its history, which includes Vytis and Waikymas in the Lithuanian language, however in the Polish and Ruthenian languages it was called as Pogonia, Pogończyk, Pogoń, Pohonia and there already is an extensive article of the coat of arms of Lithuania which analyzes this question from the beginning to the modern times. On the other hand, there are articles of the National emblem of Belarus and National symbols of Belarus which describes the Belarusian coat of arms and also includes the short history of the Belarusian variant of this Lithuanian coat of arms.
As a result, it was objectively and reasonably proposed by user Itzhak Rosenberg (see this discussion here) that the article of Pahonia should be merged into the article of the coat of arms of Lithuania as it is nothing else than one of the names of this Lithuanian coat of arms (e.g. Lithuanian name of this coat of arms – Vytis is a redirect page since 2004). His initiative received the majority support of non-Belarusians, of whom some desperately tries to steal the entire history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and spreads propaganda that its entire history is Belarusian only (crazy idea, which is part of the flawed nation-building of Belarus (White Ruthenia), and reminds the situation when North Macedonia attempted to steal the entire history of Kingdom of Macedonia from the Greeks). The discussion of this merging began on 14 May 2020, so its been almost an entire year already and we finally must take actions to solve it because this pushing of propaganda intensifies every day.
By the way, there was a referendum regarding this Lithuanian coat of arms usage in Belarus (see the article of the 1995 Belarusian referendum) and 78.6% of the Belarusians said that it should be removed (as it shortly was in use since 1991, after the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1990), while only 21.4% supported this Lithuanian coat of arms, so even the majority of the Belarusians clearly do not support its usage as the national coat of arms.
On the contrary, the Pahonia/Pogonia/Pogoń/Vytis/Waikymas coat of arms was accepted in the Republic of Lithuania immediately by the majority of the Lithuanians and there were no concerns regarding it nor in the interwar period, nor in 1990, so it is clear who are the more visible inheritors of this coat of arms. If any Polish (maybe Ukrainian as well) editors of Wikipedia will participate in this discussion, I am pretty sure that they will testify that they call the Republic of Lithuania coat of arms as Pahonia/Pogonia/Pogoń as already in 1551 Polish chronicler Marcin Bielski named the Lithuanian coat of arms as Pogonia, Pogoń, so it is a complete non-sense to separate the name Pahonia from the Republic of Lithuania and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Whatsoever, I see absolutely no problems with the usage of word Pahonia/Pogonia/Pogoń in the articles of the National emblem of Belarus and the National symbols of Belarus to describe these 5-6 years when it was the official coat of arms of Belarus, however Belarus (White Ruthenia) clearly is not the primary inheritor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania history and its coat of arms as this medieval state was created by pagan Lithuanians, not by Orthodox Belarusians (every reliable non-Belarusian/non-Russian source will confirm this fact, so you can check it yourself).
Finally, the 1991–1995 variant of the Belarusian Pahonia is nothing else than a copy-paste from the Marcin Bielski's 1567 version of the coat of arms of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which he drawn in a book Kronika Polska (Chronicle of Poland), see this and this, so it is not a Belarusian, but a Polish design. -- Pofka (talk) 19:12, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Kazimier Lachnovič is a highly problematic user who consistently pushes Belarusian nationalistic POV (including pushing their fringe Belarusian Latin alphabet which would, in particular, give Miensk for Minsk). They have blocked here for this. Recently on Commons I came in collision with them, when they gave a file an offensive name, and they accused me in Nazism (and, as expected, they got away with this even without warning, and duly moved the file back to the offensive name). I have never seen them listening to any arguments. The sooner they get long-term blocked here the better for our project.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:22, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Just some information about User:Ymblanter: 1) definite prejudge to Belarusian language (like [59] while it is easy to find in w:en:Languages of Belarus that the statement about 95% of the population with the native Russian has nothing in common with the reality); 2) insulting the community of Belarusian Wikipedia (be-tarask is a project usurped by a group of ultra-nationalists[60]); 3) insulting the Belarusian language by comparing with Pidgin as well as Belarusian scientist by comparing them to KKK members ([61]); 4) the statement about the offensive name is not true, the offensiveness of the mentioned Belarusian scientific term in Belarusian language was never proved by the user. --Kazimier Lachnovič (talk) 20:00, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I said what I wanted to say. All contribution of this user is nationalistic POV pushing. They are not really interested in anything else. And btw it is not me who is the subject of this thread.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:22, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
And I would like to point out for the reasonable users that the statement All contribution of this user is nationalistic POV pushing is just another unproved lie. --Kazimier Lachnovič (talk) 20:33, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Not a good tactic. It worked on Commons, which is an absolutely disfunctional community as far as long-term users are concerned; I do expect the English Wikipedia community to be indeed more reasonable. You better explain how your contributions here are not nationalistic POV pushing. We have enough references in this thread showing they are.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:41, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
No, you haven't provided any sound reference based on Wikipedia:Reliable sources. Just your personal opinion, which has nothing in common with the reality like your previous statement about "Russian is still the mothertongue of 95% of the population of Belarus". --Kazimier Lachnovič (talk) 21:15, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Obviously there are no Wikipedia:Reliable sources saying that User:Kazimier Lachnovič pushed nationalistic Belarusian POV on various Wikimedia projects. For a simple reason that reliable sources do not give a fuck about what happens on Wikipedia. One or two administrators to have a look at your contribution, or indeed to read this thread, would be sufficient. I am unfortunately involved because of your personal attacks on me here and on Commons, otherwise you have been already blocked indef.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:29, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Obviously the definition of someone contribution as nationalistic Belarusian POV should be based on the Wikipedia:Reliable sources not on someone personal opinion that this contribution is nationalistic Belarusian just because someone doesn't like reliable sources in Belarusian language. And you are the one who is haunting me and looks like trying to attack me personally. --Kazimier Lachnovič (talk) 21:37, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Haunting? Really? Are you planning to apologize to me for the accusation in Nazism? Or may be you want to see reliable sources showing that I am not a Nazi first?--Ymblanter (talk) 21:47, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Ymblanter:@Kazimier Lachnovič:Here are some of the finest examples of Kazimier Lachnovič's nationalistic POV pushing: check these edits of him here, here, and here. This nationalistic-propagandic attack of his began before any defensive stances of the Lithuanian Wikipedians. -- Pofka (talk) 11:16, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Not true. Actually, you was informed here (revert, based on the reason provided in the file talk, main article for the history of Belarusian CoA) and here (Pushing the non-consensual edit + rejection of discussion on the talk page, the page protection will be requested). I would also like to point out for the reasonable users that the initiator is the one who push chauvinistic propaganda [62] (The Belarusians destiny from the beginning was to serve the foreigners <...> [you] still kneeing in front of Russia, not able to establish a sovereign country <...> Belarusian lands constantly were a land-locked colony of foreign powers). --Kazimier Lachnovič (talk) 21:15, 4 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Kazimier Lachnovič: Your newly created discussion was nothing else than an attempt to extend this question for another year or two. As I already noted, this question was discussed here and was opposed only by the Belarusian nationalistic propagandists like you and others who uploads pseudo-historical maps (see this discussion here) where Lithuania proper is presented as a historical region of Belarus (which is a pure lie, propaganda, not accepted by anyone outside of Belarus and maybe parts of Russia, therefore this illustration was nominated for deletion). Quote of mine you presented here was a response to your chauvinistic-propagandic statements in which you called the Lithuanians as "Samogitian chauvinistic rubbish" (see these edits: here, here, and here) and it was based on the historical facts as Belarus was under the influence of foreign powers since the very, very early days (and undoubtedly still is). It is not an insult to call the British India as a colony of the British Empire or African countries as colonies of the Europeans as long as it is based on historical facts. Same with Belarus which was under the influence of Lithuania until 1795. The Lithuanians are the reason Belarus exists as of now as otherwise you would have probably ended up in the same way as Principality of Smolensk, which Lithuania failed to hold on to constantly due to the Muscovites invasions, so calling us as "rubbish" is a pure disrespect. After 200 years of the Russian rule, the sovereignty of the Belarusian nation and the language usage was almost completely annihilated and it is the opposite variant of the Lithuanian rule. -- Pofka (talk) 10:44, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Readability improved by the insertion of paragraphs.
You'be got that backwards. Paragraph breaks make long amounts of text more easily readable and allow for "easier development of discussion." Walls-o'text makes for eyes glazing over. Use logical paragraph breaks, please, here, and elsewhere in life -- unless you're writing a stylistic masterpiece that will keep the reader's attention in spite of no visual rests. Beyond My Ken (talk) 13:49, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Beyond My Ken: I just now structured my initial report into paragraphs. I use paragraphs every time I edit Wikipedia, but I was not used to this reporting. Thanks for advices. -- Pofka (talk) 15:18, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Providing additional information about how Kazimier Lachnovič is pushing nationalistic POV in Wikipedia/Wikimedia. Just check out his Wikimedia Commons user page, which has a text in Belarusian: "! ВАЖНАЯ ІНФАРМАЦЫЯ ! Пры выкарыстаньні загружаных мною выяваў вельмі прашу спасылацца не на абстрактавую Вікімэдыю (WIKIMEDIA.ORG) або Вікіпэдыю (WIKIPEDIA.ORG), а на Беларускую Вікіпэдыю клясычным правапісам (BE-TARASK.WIKIPEDIA.ORG). Такім чынам вы дапаможаце папулярызаваць адзіную вольную энцыкляпэдыю, дзе нашчадкі гістарычных ліцьвінаў — беларусы — могуць вольна ўжываць свае традыцыйныя гістарычныя непалітызаваныя назвы (не спаскуджаныя расейскімі ўладамі дзеля маскалізацыі і калянізацыі Беларусі) і распрацаваны беларусамі для беларусаў свой традыцыйны клясычны правапіс (шырэй — норму беларускай мовы) без якіх-кольвек гвалтоўных сталінскіх палітычных перакручваньняў-спаскуджваньняў дзеля штучнага набліжэньня да расейскай мовы з мэтай далейшага зьнішчэньня беларускай мовы і асыміляцыі беларусаў".
I do not read in Belarusian myself, however the Google translate also quite well displays his nationalistic POV pushing as this text translates as: "!! IMPORTANT INFORMATION! When using the images I have uploaded, please refer not to the abstract Wikimedia (WIKIMEDIA.ORG) or Wikipedia (WIKIPEDIA.ORG), but to the Belarusian Wikipedia with the classic spelling (BE-TARASK.WIKIPEDIA.ORG). In this way you will help popularize a single free encyclopedia, where the descendants of historical Lithuanians - Belarusians - can freely use their traditional historical non-politicized names (not distorted by the Russian authorities for masculinization and colonization of Belarus) and developed by Belarusians for Belarusians their traditional classical orthography. ) without any violent Stalinist political distortions for the purpose of artificially approaching the Russian language in order to further destroy the Belarusian language and assimilate Belarusians". Pay attention to the line "where the descendants of historical Lithuanians - Belarusians - can freely use..." as it repeats these Belarusian chauvinistic-propagandic statements he spreads in the English Wikipedia and elsewhere which claims that the modern Lithuanians are Samogitians.
I repeat: check sources from your own country about Lithuania and you will realize that such statements are a pure propaganda, which cannot be tolerated in Wikipedia as it violates the Wikipedia:Here to build an encyclopedia rule. The Samogitians originates from the Duchy of Samogitia and there currently are about 0,5 million Samogitians in Lithuania, so they represent only 1/6 or 1/5 of the population of the modern Lithuanians, living in the Republic of Lithuania (and even less if we include 2,5 million of Lithuanians living abroad - the Lithuanian diaspora). -- Pofka (talk) 14:58, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
So basically you left here and elsewhere a bunch of personal attacks and do not have time to be responsible. Perfectly in line with your general behavior.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:26, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I do not think that first saying "You are a Nazi" and then, when being challenged, to respond "I do not have time discussion with Nazis, bye" is an acceptable behavior. Even if you called me a Nazi on one Wikimedia project and got challenged on another project.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:58, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A passing comment: this report fails on a number of important respects. It's too long. It presupposes reviewers would view evidence which the OP maintains is "clear," erm, clearly. I suppose it's clear to them (and Ymblanter and possibly Kazimier Lachnovič), but otherwise presupposing such familiarity for a subject of relative obscurity (in Anglo-American culture, etc.) is very much an unrealistic expectation. Finally, the egregious and the recent do not really seem to meet in the overall diff evidence. There's some egregious diffs presented, but they're from a June 19 conversation. Then, there are recent diffs, but they do not appear to be that egregious in nature. Whatever fault these represent (ethno-national POV pushing-wise), was something I wasn't able to immediately parse. Possibly, there are reviewers of this board who would be able to peer deeper into this — that is, without too much study into what the mainstream and scholarly consensus is for this matter (matters?). Lastly, Ymblanter: you keep saying that Kazimier Lachnovič called you a "Nazi," but have provided no diff evidence to support that claim. If it's on a Wikimedia project, there should be diffs, no? Just so a reviewer can get a sense of what was said, the context, etc. [For fun, no paragraph breaks!]El_C11:19, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A quick answer: This is the Nazi diff, this was their response in the same thread when challenged: [63]. Both diffs are on Commons. Now, here they made in total 727 edits, and a great deal of these of these are file renames on Commons, so obviously there are not so many ecent edits. However, I do not see many good recent edits. Essentially, they edit-warred with the topic stater at Pahonia, starting from here, and made, if I count correctly, six reverts in two days, which is the continuation of this discussion, which featured gems like this (this one is from a month ago). My conclusion is that they are only here to push pro-Belarusian POV (their idea, which they talked about multiple times, is that only Belarusian Tarashkevitsa, which is not in use in Belarus, is a "true" language, and Belarusian which is in use in Belarus and which has a separate Wikipedia is contaminated by Russian and is not a true Belarusian). --Ymblanter (talk) 15:59, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
My assessment:Ymblanter, thanks, but a diff for I do not have time discussion with Nazis, bye is what I really was after. Regardless, Kazimier Lachnovič, my impression is that you are engaged in promoting some sort of ethno-national supremacism and, worse yet, doing so using inflammatory rhetoric and personal attacks. Also, you repeatedly quote WP:5P above as some sort of a defense for some reason, but is of course far too vague to to be of any real use for our immediate purposes here, in any substantive sense, at least.
Anyway, I'll give you a day or so to respond, but at the moment, I'm leaning toward sanctions of some sort, up to and including an indefinite block. Still, by all means, feel free to try to explain your position better — specifically, by addressing Ymblanter's points in his comment directly above this one. Needless to say, I urge brevity on the part of any and all participants. El_C16:43, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Dear Wikipedia,
Recently, Some groups have been trying to publish the wrong map of Iran (Map without the Persian Gulf, Caspian sea, Oman Sea is not a map of Iran). It is a national concern.
I am wondering how Wikipedia can help to return those maps to the original map of Iran.
One example is the page below:
[64][65]
It seems the map is locked and can not be changed.
This map does not appear to be in use on en-wiki. Any concerns with it need to be taken up at Commons or Farsi Wikipedia which are separate projects. Slywriter (talk) 14:14, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Mass reverting spree
This is a non-issue. Per policy, any edits by sock puppets may be reverted. Please don't clutter ANI with stuff like this. If you disagree with policy, follow procedure to change policy. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 03:08, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Could someone please check recent edits of Archives908 (talk·contribs)? This user is on a mass reverting spree, undoing every edit of banned user CuriousGolden (talk·contribs), who was actually a prolific and useful contributor. The fact that a user is blocked does not mean that his every edit should be undone for no reason. I have no interest in getting engaged in an edit war with this user, but I think the community needs to look into his recent activity. Grandmaster21:07, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A prolific and useful contributor? Nice try but that user was a Sockmaster, and that's why they are banned. Admins, if you look closely to my recent edits, you will notice that I am reverting the mass copyedits of the now banned CuriousGolden. This user has been suggesting that virtually all towns in Armenia once had an Azeri majority and used unverifiable sources to push their POV. Grandmaster, I have done nothing wrong and if I have violated any Wiki policies you cold have taken the time to notify me on my talk page. Regards, Archives908 (talk) 21:15, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Most of the sources you have removed as part of your recent reverting activity, in fact, qualify as reliable (information from state websites and third-party EU-based institutions). Also, when you reverted, you consistently wrote in your edit summary "removal of sockmaster copyedits" without even addressing the issue of source reliability. Furthermore, you have been removing content of a very specific nature, which was there before Curious Golden even became active on Wikipedia. That certainly cannot be justified by their sockmastery and is an alarming sign of bad-faith editing. Parishan (talk) 21:26, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Armenia did have a significant Azerbaijani population, so it is not impossible that many settlements in Armenia had sizeable Azerbaijani population. What you do is a mass reverting without any prior discussion or an attempt to reach a consensus. Reverting so many pages for no good reason is not in line with the rules. I was going to leave a message on your talk, as I did to another user doing the same kind of mass reverting, but I thought I would take it here first due to the sheer number of pages reverted. Grandmaster21:28, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
For no good reason? It seems as if you are almost defending the Sockmaster. Your true sympathies to CuriousGolden (talk·contribs) really shine through. CuriousGolden literally copyedited the exact same 2-3 sentences on dozens and dozens of articles. They were using multiple accounts and as such, I strongly believe the editor was not editing out of WP:GF. Needless to say, if I was violating policy, you had every opportunity to warn me on my talk page. As far as I see it, I was rectifying the POV edits of a Sockmaster. Nothing more. Archives908 (talk) 21:39, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
On a side note, can anyone provide me with any guidelines on dealing with Sockmasters appropriately? Clearly you both claim that I'm editing with ill intent, to which I assure you that I am not. As a sign of WP:GF I have stopped adjusting the Sockmasters edits until I know how best to proceed. Archives908 (talk) 21:50, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
"As far as I see it, I was rectifying the POV edits of a Sockmaster" - The problem is that you were not (a great deal of those edits were properly sourced), and it does not appear to me that this is related to your unfamiliarity with the rules. A simple example (one of many): the Azeri name had featured in this article for many years. Curious Golden added a language template and transliteration. Then once they were banned, you came in and removed the Azeri name altogether, as if it never existed. You did so in over one hundred articles. Yet when reverting their edits on articles that carried Armenian names, you for some reason were not at all bothered that there was an unsourced mention of a supposedly older Armenian toponym, and it did not occur to you to remove it. Could all of this be possibly driven by your concern for bad-faith edits brought about by a banned user? I find it unlikely. Parishan (talk) 22:02, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Archives908. Please see WP:GRAVEDANCE. Taking advantage of someone getting banned to undo all his edits and even previous versions of articles that existed before he joined WP is not acceptable. It would be good if you restored all the articles you reverted to their original versions, and discussed your proposed edits with other involved editors. Grandmaster22:09, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Parishan If you have a closer look, you will notice that the Sockmaster added the translations 9 times out of 10, while not providing a single source. For the other times, I only removed unsourced material and explicitly stated that in my edit summary. How exactly am I (or any reader for that matter) supposed to know if what a Sockmaster added was legitimate or POV? Sadly, I am not a mind-reader. And to be fair, CuriousGolden was using multiple accounts, so their record was indeed tarnished. As such, I concluded that they were not here to build this encyclopedia. Again, I may have gone about it the wrong way but in my defense, I have never dealt with a Sockmaster before today (nor have I ever made so many edits in a single day) and wasn't aware of any protocols. I did try and search for wiki policies before I started this morning but couldn't find anything. Thanks Grandmaster for providing the link, I will thoroughly review it. And I do not have any issues reverting my own edits in the coming days if my actions violated policy. I will have a read through now. Archives908 (talk) 22:24, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I was about to come to the defense of Archives908 and support them in that their removal of a sockmaster's edits is completely acceptable. I have myself been criticized for being too "soft" against sock edits when I have tried to rescue some good elements of the edits. In that case it was admittedly an editor using socks to reinstate edits that had been reverted, but still I would say that sock edits are in general "fair game". Looking a bit closer, however, I see that many, if not most of Archives908's edits with the edit summary removal of sockmaster copyedits actually do more than the edit summary says, systematically removing non-Armenian names. That is not OK. Removing content without explanation under the cover of doing something else is bordering on dishonesty. --T*U (talk) 22:32, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The Sockmaster did in fact add most of the translations in previous edits, almost all of which were unsourced. Again, I assumed that the user was POV pushing, and I took the liberty to remove the unsourced information/copyedits. I realize now that I did go about it the wrong way. Prior to today, however, I had no experience in terms of dealing with the aftermath of Sockmasters and it was challenging for me to know what to keep/what to remove, what was POV/what was legitimate. I assumed that I was doing the right thing by removing the copyedits and the unsourced translations. And my record will show that I have not removed this much information before. Let me be crystal clear, I have no opposition to translations (never did) and don't mind reverting even my own edits. But, I do believe that the Sockmaster's claims/translations should all be properly sourced...unless I am mistaken about that too? Grandmaster provided me with the appropriate link, I would appreciate if the "noose around my neck" can be loosened for a moment, until I've had a chance to review it. Thanks, Archives908 (talk) 22:55, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Alrighty, I have had a chance to review WP:GRAVEDANCE. I wasn't aware of this policy. Quite frankly, if this had been provided to me on my talk page earlier, I believe this could have been avoided. As per my understanding, it is against policy to revert edits without justification. My justification was that the copyedits and the vast majority of translations were added by a blocked Sockmaster and I sought to restore the pages out of GF. I reviewed the sources the Sockmaster provided but many of them did not support the claims. Which further reinforced me to believe that the Sockmaster's edits were done out of bad faith. The remaining translations were unsourced and there was no way for me to know if they were legitimate or added out of POV, yet alone if they were even correct. That was my rationale and justification- which was stated in my edit summaries. Fast-forward- I have thoroughly read the policy and can understand how my edits were perceived by others. I have zero intention to continue to remove content that the Sockmaster contributed, unless it directly violates any Wiki policy. I see that Parishan has already restored the translations and the text the Sockmaster added (with sources). I will not seek to revert those edits, but I will take time to verify that the sources check out because I was genuinely concerned about POV pushing on those articles. I thank Grandmaster for providing me with the policy guidelines to learn and hope to put this matter to rest. If there are any other related guidelines, please feel free to drop them on my talk page, as I'm always seeking to become a better editor. Regards, Archives908 (talk) 23:56, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep reverting the additions.....don't let them think that because of sheer volume we won't do anything. Zero leway.Moxy-00:23, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
As usual, the "revert everything a sockpuppet account has ever done" religious mission of some users continues to damage and make the encyclopedia we work on worse. Nothing new there. If the sockpuppetting was about copyvios, then there would be some reasoning behind such reversion actions, but in other cases, it is almost always just vindictive and not based on actually improving anything. SilverserenC02:11, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This attitude is the reason they will keep being disruptive. Overwhelming the community with sheer volume so a few POV edits stick. The edits are not wanted by the community and should be removed on site.Moxy-02:46, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Except in many, many cases, it is not POV edits that are reverted, but actual encyclopedic additions. There have been a number of users who were banned for non-article reasons and who sockpuppeted to still make articles. There was nothing wrong with the articles, but then when the sockpuppets were found out, all those additions and new articles were removed. And, in many cases, never made again by anyone else. Meaning that Wikipedia was made worse for no reason at all. SilverserenC02:54, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
With full support for the policy that allows reverting block-/ban-evading edits, is this what has happened here? I must be misreading the situation then, and I would long have said what NinjaRobotPirate did in the closure if I had seen that. Or are we talking about reversion of pre-block edits? Moxy perhaps? I'm confused. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 07:18, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, I saw this in passing (where I learned about Golden's ban in the first place) and definitely hadn't expected this close. As someone who was watching the RM drama as it happened, either I'm seriously misreading something or NinjaPirateRobot is. Vaticidalprophet08:29, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
If the edits being reverted were made before their ban—and by the master, not by a sock—then BANREVERT does not apply, and these reverts should be undone as being without a policy basis. There's probably no reason to block Archives908—at the moment, anyway—but they should definitely read up on our banning/socking policies before attempting any more stunts like this. ——Serial09:09, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that's true. The cited policy only applies to the actions of sock puppets made in violation of a block or ban. I was tired when I closed the discussion. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 12:07, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Does that mean that you will be reversing your close, NinjaRobotPirate? Or at least amending it so that Archives908 is aware that such mass reversions did not have a policy basis?Sdrqaz (talk) 14:51, 6 April 2021 (UTC)struck 15:37, 6 April 2021 (UTC) due to responsiveness by Archives[reply]
For what it's worth, I reverted or struck all eligible edits (that is, those made by Golden's sock Gnominite (talk · contribs) in RM discussions) when processing the SPI case, but none of Golden's edits qualify for BANREVERT because there is no evidence that the master account was evading a block or ban. Whether the edits he made are good or appropriate is a question for those familiar with the topic area to answer, but indiscriminate mass-reversion of them is not something that policy allows for in this case. --Blablubbs|talk09:39, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that mass reversion is inappropriate here and I disagree completely with the close. CuriousGolden made a sock account about a month ago and used it to vote on about a dozen move requests that they started, that doesn't mean their other 12,500 edits they made over the last year are suddenly "Sockmaster edits" that require mass reversion per BANREVERT. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 10:24, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
In hindsight, I am aware that the way I went about the edits may not have been the best. I don't know how many more times I can possibly repeat that. Are editors expected to be perfect 100% of the time? Surely, I am not perfect, but I have been more then respectful, open to dialogue, and eager to learn the proper policies this entire time. This was the first situation I encountered dealing with a Sockmaster in my years as an editor. I may have not had the best approach (due to a lack of policy knowledge) but I genuinely believed I was doing the right thing. Again, it is unreasonable to expect all editors to be perfect or know every singe Wiki policy verbatim. I was not even aware of Gravedance until yesterday, if I was, I would have had a better understanding in dealing with this. It also doesn't help that some editors have told me I did nothing wrong, while others are prepared to crucify me. This makes learning what is right/wrong even more confusing. Nonetheless, I have thoroughly reviewed the policies provided to me, have ceased further reversions, and am well aware of how to handle such scenarios moving forward. I have digested the feedback, learned from this, and hope to move forward a more knowledgeable editor. Archives908 (talk) 15:29, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) provides a universal baseline of acceptable behavior for the entire Wikimedia movement and all its projects. The project is currently in Phase 2, outlining clear enforcement pathways. You can read more about the whole project on its project page.
Drafting Committee: Call for applications
The Wikimedia Foundation is recruiting volunteers to join a committee to draft how to make the code enforceable. Volunteers on the committee will commit between 2 and 6 hours per week from late April through July and again in October and November. It is important that the committee be diverse and inclusive, and have a range of experiences, including both experienced users and newcomers, and those who have received or responded to, as well as those who have been falsely accused of harassment.
2021 community consultations: Notice and call for volunteers / translators
From 5 April – 5 May 2021 there will be conversations on many Wikimedia projects about how to enforce the UCoC. We are looking for volunteers to translate key material, as well as to help host consultations on their own languages or projects using suggested key questions. If you are interested in volunteering for either of these roles, please contact us in whatever language you are most comfortable.
Note: Carlossuarez67 seems to give permission to delete qualifying articles per WP:CSD#G7 
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