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How do they know?

From time to time some of our more, shall we say, control-minded contributors delete questions, or complain about others treating them as legitimate, "because they were posted by a banned user". How do these people know this? (This is not an accusation that anyone is going off half-cocked; I'm assuming good faith and asking for a citation, or more precisely, asking what a citation would look like.) --69.159.61.172 (talk) 09:36, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

A question which has been asked repeatedly by many editors, and has never been answered. DuncanHill (talk) 11:17, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Recent questions which have been deleted have all been submitted by a well-known troll who likes to ask "questions" that are merely racist or antisemitic attacks. They're rather blatantly so, and easy to identify given the rather similar pattern. --Jayron32 11:28, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

A great number of removals of questions and answers do not fall into the "obviously racist" category - or even the "cunningly worded, subtly racist" category. It is those for which a proper explanation would be appreciated. DuncanHill (talk) 12:05, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Do you have an example? I can't provide any commentary unless you have a removal you're questioning. --Jayron32 12:08, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

@Jayron32: @DuncanHill: How about here [1]? Anyone else can find a few similar removals from science desk on Feb 18. Perhaps it's my scientific biases toward skepticism and desiring evidence-based reasoning, but I find it hard to believe that one banned user is the only explanation for some posts about gum trees, apothecaries, and funnel web spiders. I also think the removals are needless and disruptive even if the are from the same banned user, but that's a different matter entirely. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:38, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

That's an excellent example, and I agree that the removals are disruptive. DuncanHill (talk) 15:43, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I was not involved in that removal, so I cannot comment intelligently on it. You will have to contact the administrator who did that and ask him. --Jayron32 17:05, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

We're discussing it on the talk page. This thread is not exclusively about you Jayron32. DuncanHill (talk) 17:07, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

If you have actions you have objections to, you need to directly name the person whose action you object to. People who were not involved cannot provide rationales for those that were. --Jayron32 17:11, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

No-one asked you to. DuncanHill (talk) 17:13, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Banned users, who are not permitted to edit Wikipedia, can normally be easily identified through a combination of WP:LTA, WP:SPI cases, ban discussions, repeated blocks, ban-evading edits, and the users' original accounts and many sockpuppets. A citation would normally look like WP:LTA, but it could be any of the alternatives or none of the above. If in doubt, ask the user removing the post. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 13:56, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

I asked this question recently after I was accused of responding to a known troll. Evidently the "decision" in that case came down to a somewhat common spelling mistake that had been made once before by a known banned troll and appeared multiple times in the suspect's question. The IP address of the questioner didn't match any known addresses for the known-evildoer - but they did geolocate to the same (large) city and the same (very popular) internet service provider - narrowing it down to a group of about 700,000 people. In all other ways, the question was perfectly reasonable, non-abusive and very answerable - and multiple people answered it. Personally, I find the evidence only somewhat convincing - spelling mistake + fuzzy-geolocation versus perfectly-reasonable question. I didn't get a clear statement about that evidence from anyone - I basically had to infer it myself.

The question here is not that different to the standards of proof in a court of law. Do we require evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" or merely "reasonable suspicion" or something between those two extremes? Since we're not locking someone away for life - only preventing them from asking a question here - I conceded that "beyond reasonable doubt" is a higher bar than we need. I would say that "Preponderance of the evidence" might be an appropriate choice here. The spelling mistake, by itself wouldn't be enough to convince me, and the geolocation evidence certainly doesn't convince me - but perhaps, the two together rises to the "preponderance of evidence" standard? I dunno...it's marginal at best when you have a completely reasonable, non-abusive, answerable question. If a vandal isn't vandalizing - do we care?

In the case above, neither question nor answers were removed or hatted...which, IMHO, was a reasonable outcome from spotty evidence and zero actual abuse. But there is absolutely no way we can apply that degree of investigative 'depth' to every question we have here so we're somewhat reliant on "gut feel" from self-proclaimed troll-hunters.

However, my real problem with all of this is that we seem to have arrived at a point where just anyone here feels OK with finding some evidence, making a judgement call and imposing a penalty - and all without discussion. This is a classic case of being "judge, jury and executioner" - and with the persons doing this not even having passed the relatively easy test to gain admin privileges - this amounts to vigilantism - and that leaves us with the rough justice of the wild west. That doesn't sit well with me. At least if an admin takes that kind of action, we have recourse to various WP:GBU mechanisms to call them to task and there are firm standards to which they are expected to adhere.

SteveBaker (talk) 14:43, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree with User:DuncanHill that it often isn't easy to identify a post by a troll. I think that some editors are too quick to assume that a particular post is by a troll. It isn't always obvious "out of the box" what is a troll post. I would ask that other editors, first, be cautious in removing posts other than based on their content, and, second, that other editors absolutely refrain from scolding other editors for not recognizing "obvious" troll posts based on supposedly subtle clues. Sometimes, as noted above, a troll post doesn't start off as racist; sometimes the hate speech comes in later, and can be dealt with then. It may be that we have gotten to the point where we need to shut down these Reference Desks, not because of trolls as such, but because some of the regular editors disrupt these Reference Desks by over-reaction to trolls in one way or another. I don't think so and hope not, but I would suggest that in non-obvious cases we err on the side of assuming good faith. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:20, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Do you have any recent examples that we have to deal with? Without concrete examples, we're just taking people's word for it that this is a currently active problem. --Jayron32 19:19, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

At "Summary and Discussion" above, there was a lot of discussion, some of it not pleasant, about how to recognize "obvious" trolls. Maybe that isn't your question. My point is that it isn't always obvious what posts are by trolls, and that good-faith editors should start with the assumption of good faith. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:46, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree. If a question is reasonable - I'll answer it if I'm able. If it happens to be from a person who is occasionally ill-behaved, but I have no way to know that - then I'm not sure I care. I've known of several vandals and other miscreants over the years who have reformed and quietly sneaked back here and done good work. In the end, we don't block people as a punishment - we block them as a matter of self-defense for the encyclopedia. If you get the idea of "punishment" out of your head and substitute "self-defense" - then there is no reason not to allow reasonable posts no matter who they are from. Abusive posts are a lot easier to spot than abusive people. SteveBaker (talk) 21:04, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, there is one reason, of course: the belief that if a banned user is able to get away with even one post that persists, this will embolden him to vast new vandalistic efforts which we will then have to defend against. Instead, therefore, we must systematically delete every one of his posts, no matter how reasonable, so that perhaps he'll go away. (Needless to say I don't personally agree with the hyperzealous application of these beliefs in all cases, although it's true that the "give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile" concern does have some validity.) —Steve Summit (talk) 19:27, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

The question is only reasonable if there is evidence to support its reasonability. If I have removed a post incorrectly, ask me here on the talk page why I have removed it. If you cannot tell me which removal of mine was unacceptable, then you need to stop accusing me of incorrectly removing posts. I have asked repeatedly for you to bring forward a specific example for discussion. No one has done so yet. --Jayron32 02:09, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

See my diff link above for an example of about 10 IP posts removed at once, one within minutes of its posting, as I was typing up my referenced reply. (I posted the diff where first relevant, before finishing this thread). For the record, I don't think I've ever seen you make a removal that I personally disagreed with. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:42, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Miscellaneous#Global_Marshmallow_production seemed a bit heavy-handed to me. The question was a bit silly - but we have no rule against silly questions. There were some reasonably good efforts at coming up with estimates. Heck, it might even be properly answerable. It was one of those questions that I chose not to answer (the effort in coming up with a good answer seemed to exceed the value of giving it) - but I don't think a hatting was warranted. We're supposed to WG:AGF - and it's possible someone had a reason for asking it. It's no sillier than questions that resulted in a best-selling book being written (http://whatif.xkcd.com/book/) - and if I were writing such a thing, I'd expect to be able to ask questions like the marshmallow question here on the refdesk. SteveBaker (talk) 15:48, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

So corrected. See, that wasn't hard, was it? Feel free to provide him with the references you have found regarding the usual consumption of marshmallows by Ethiopian elephants, since you clearly have those. I apologize for assuming you would not find such references. --Jayron32 16:58, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

The inability to answer a question because there don't happen to be any references is NOT grounds for hatting a question. Furthermore, how do you, personally, KNOW FOR SURE that nobody will come up with a reference in this case? I wouldn't be at all that surprised to find someplace in the vastness of the Internet where an elephant owner in India remarks that none of his elephants will eat marshmallows...so the answer might well be able to include a reasonable reference that says that the answer for Ethiopian elephants is almost certainly zero. I don't know that such a document exists - but I can't say with any confidence that it doesn't...and neither can you. You can't prove a negative - so you can't prove that no decent answer is possible - so you shouldn't have hatted this one. Also, there are MANY questions (many of which you, personally have answered) whose best answers don't have references. We very often come up with answers that are a synthesis of multiple sources - or some simple, commonsense logic is sufficient to answer them. In this case, we have a Fermi problem - that can probably result in a ballpark estimate - which is all our OP could possibly expect to get. Even article-space contributions do not require reference for facts that are obvious or unlikely to be disputed. SteveBaker (talk) 17:17, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

You're not going to get me to disagree with you, SteveBaker. You're still going to be correct, I am still going to have been in error, and I am still going to have both apologized for and corrected by mistake. No amount of trying to start an argument by you is going to get me to change my position on my own incorrectness, nor I am going to rescind my apology for it. I'm not sure what you are trying to gain here. --Jayron32 19:15, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

@Jayron32: - did anyone in this thread accuse you of incorrectly removing posts? DuncanHill (talk) 15:45, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

You said "A great number of removals of questions and answers do not fall into the "obviously racist" category - or even the "cunningly worded, subtly racist" category. It is those for which a proper explanation would be appreciated" I asked you directly underneath that statement for an example of such a post. You have not, as yet, provided that. --Jayron32 16:56, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

See above, where I agreed with SemanticMantis's example. And will you please answer the question - Has anyone in this thread accused you of incorrectly removing posts? DuncanHill (talk) 17:00, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, when you said "A great number of removals of questions and answers do not fall into the "obviously racist" category - or even the "cunningly worded, subtly racist" category. It is those for which a proper explanation would be appreciated". You said that. I asked you to provide one example where I did "a great number of removals", or even one. You have not done so. SteveBaker had a specific example I was involved in, and I fixed his concerns. So I ask you again, using your words, which of these "great numbers of removals" do you wish me to provide a "proper explanation". I will gladly do so. --Jayron32 17:03, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I never mentioned you, and did not make such an accusation against you, as is clear to anyone who reads the words. DuncanHill (talk) 17:09, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

You responded to a comment I made directly. If you wish to involve someone other than me into the discussion, you need to name them and invite them to comment. If you directly ask a question of me, as you did above, I can only answer it for myself. I cannot answer it for other people. --Jayron32 17:12, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I did not make any accusation against you. The thread was not about you. Please stop being disruptive. DuncanHill (talk) 17:14, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Which administrator is it about then? --Jayron32 17:16, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

It is, as is obvious, about some general concerns shared by some editors about a pattern of removals. DuncanHill (talk) 17:18, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Yeah sorry Jayron I never thought this was about you or any particular user. I only supplied a diff that I thought was relevant to OP's question and an example that fit Duncan's form, and you did ask for an example, I did not think you meant about you, only the general concept of removing material of a banned user that is not obvious racist trolling. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:41, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree that most removals need some justification listed in the edit summary, not just "troll". We have a right to know why the person who removed them thinks they are a troll. For example, there should be a link to where the user was previously banned for trolling, along with reasons for thinking this is the same user. Any user, Admin included, who removes a post as trolling without any explanation given should be immediately reverted, with exceptions for truly obvious trolling like "Why did Jews make up the Holocaust ?".

Note that the "punishment" aspect of removing a troll is much greater, if good faith answers are removed along with it, as all the time those people spent on finding an answer, which may well be of use to others than the OP, has now been wasted. And I also agree that punishment shouldn't be the goal here, just protection of the Ref Desk. When the removals do more harm than good, they aren't protecting it. Silly questions can just be ignored, they don't need to be removed. StuRat (talk) 18:42, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. Which is why I didn't answer the "Marshmallow" question - and didn't react when others did. As it happens, I learned something there - that a Marsh mallow is not only a real thing, but actually is the origin of marshmallow making! Wow! So even if the question was junk, there was value in the answers. SteveBaker (talk) 16:28, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

How for Idealists to Go Forward

I would like to restate concisely a few previous observations on how the "idealists", who think that the Reference Desks provide a necessary service to unregistered editors, so that periodic semi-protection is unacceptable, can go forward. There are two ways that they can go forward. First, Option A, they can offer an RFC at the protection policy talk page to state that the Reference Desks are exempt from the protection policy and should never be semi-protected. (This is not the place for such an RFC. We cannot create a local consensus that overrides the global consensus on the policy.) Second, Option B, they can offer an RFC here (not just another straw poll) asking whether a redesign of the Reference Desk, so as not to use ordinary Wikipedia pages which are user-edited and so subject to protection when necessary, is needed in order to ensure that unregistered editors are not locked out of the Reference Desks. In my opinion, those are the two ways that the "idealists" can go forward. Does anyone else have a different opinion? Robert McClenon (talk) 01:17, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Option C: Revert and block repeatedly until the trolls get bored. --Jayron32 02:05, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

...or until the ref desks die of starvation...whichever comes first. SteveBaker (talk) 17:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

This is a fine option, and I can agree with it almost unreservedly, but in the current climate there is yet a further wrinkle.

Typically, when a troll/vandal shows up, someone will revert, and the tro/ndal will revert, and someone will revert, for anywhere between 2 and 50 cycles. At some point, the defenders get bored, and an admin shows up, and temporarily protects the page, let's say for 2 hours. That's fine, we just about all agree that temporary protection is reasonable and justified in an emergency.

But suppose the trondal is not deterred, and patiently waits 2 hours for the block to expire. The question then becomes, who is more patient and zealous, the trondal or the defenders?

Case C1. The trondal is more patient and zealous. He waits 2 hours plus one minute, and reinserts the vandalism, but no one notices, so it sits there for another N hours, during which time the page is (a) visibly vandalized but (b) usable by everyone who either doesn't notice the vandalism or doesn't care. Eventually, someone does notice the reinserted vandalism, and rereverts it. If by now the trondal has gone to sleep the cycle ends, otherwise it repeats.

Case C2. The defenders are at least as patient and zealous. They wait 2 hours plus one minute for the vandal to reinsert the vandalism, and pounce on it immediately. A new cycle is guaranteed to begin immediately, leading shortly to another bout of protection.

The end result is that as long as the defenders are at least as patient and zealous, we are more or less guaranteed to get multiple back-to-back two-hour protections, which might as well be merged into a two-day protection, or two months, or two years -- the end result is the same. This is the autoimmune disorder which dooms us if we try too hard. —Steve Summit (talk) 19:58, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Option D: Declare a moratorium against all reverting, blocking and hatting - and let the idealists see how well it works. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:10, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

You've offered this before and I'm willing to try it but I don't think it will ever get even close to consensus. Even if we could get consensus, that puts us in this messy situation: User A removes a post as trolling, and it's an obvious bad racist post. User B knows we have consensus to let things stand, as an experiment. So user B is now reinstating bad faith posts to follow consensus. So even though I like the idea, I'm pretty sure it can't be tried. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:55, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

The one most likely to put it back is the original poster. And, as usual, pre-empting it by saying "it won't work", without actually trying it, is the unfortunate norm here. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:56, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, we'd need consensus against a more nuanced set of guidelines - some sort of metric for success - and some agreed period for the experiment to run - but under the right conditions, I think it's a valid experiment. SteveBaker (talk) 17:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Which is why nothing ever happens. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:06, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Don't poison the well, Bugs. I said I agree that it would be interesting to try, and gave an opinion that it would not get consensus. Below, Guy is considering posting another RfC on exactly this topic. So why not encourage that effort rather than grouse about my prediction? After all, I hope I'm wrong :) SemanticMantis (talk) 22:43, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Maybe something will happen this time. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:57, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Option E: Work together to come up with some other solution. SteveBaker (talk) 17:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Good luck. You'll need it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:06, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Let the RfC above close, it's only got a few more days right? Or perhaps someone wants to request closure form an uninvolved editor? It looks to me like consensus is to support both proposals, and I don't think there's any real problem with the claim that this local consensus in any way changes higher-order WP extant consensuses. :I'm not so extreme as to think we should never semi-protect the desks. My contention from the start was that a three-month protection instated by one admin could stand so long against apparent consensus that it was not necessary. If the RfC passes, any admin can and should immediately change long-term protection to 48 hour protection. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:55, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

For "periodic" see "almost always". For "until the trolls get bored" see "it ain't happening". It's hardly idealist to try to uphold the fundamental tenet of Wikipedia being an encyclopaedia "anyone can edit". Try solving the problem rather than continually bludgeoning the symptoms. The Rambling Man (talk) 16:06, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Robert's assessment of the situation is way, WAY off. I don't think anyone is saying that we need a rule at arbcom type levels saying that admins are forever barred from using semi-protection on this page. Sure, that's an idealist position - but I don't think anyone here holds that position. What we need is a way to provide an alternative solution to the vandalism problems that do not require us to lock half of our users out from our service. If the only tool we have is semi-protection, and if admins are over-using it - then we need to provide a better alternative because for 100% sure, what we're doing now ain't working...and it's actually killing the ref desks. Fine, leave semi-protection as an emergency measure - if it's used for a few days a year - fine, no problem. The practical problem is that it's being WAY over-used. It's the classic case of "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail". We need more tools in the toolbox.

When you persist in trying to hammer screws into fine antique furniture - you damage it. Please stop doing that.

We need people here to open their minds - use those gigantic brains that can come up with answers to almost everything - and find some more tools for the toolkit. SteveBaker (talk) 16:51, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

How about some limit on the number of days a Desk can be protected ? 3 days per calendar month ? (We could put a limit on how many days each Admin can semi-protect a Ref Desk, but then they might just call in their buddies to do it for them.) Of course, how we would get this to be official policy and enforce it is still an open Q. StuRat (talk) 19:03, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Option F. -- Apostle (talk) 19:11, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I am not sure why User:SteveBaker says that my analysis is off the mark. Steve Baker did complain at the RFC, which is still running, that never semi-protecting the Reference Desks was not one of the options. He then proposed a redesign of the Reference Desk in order to avoid the need for semi-protection. My comment was that Option A, never semi-protecting, would require an RFC to change to the Protection Policy, and that Option B, some sort of redesign, should be done by an RFC. I was only saying that those were the only two options that I saw that were consistent with the idealistic position. Steve Baker may be softening his opposition to ever semi-protecting. If so, he is still in the idealist camp, but less so. Option C, revert and block until the trolls get bored, doesn’t say whether also to use semi-protection, in which case it is a pragmatic position. Option D, to declare a moratorium on hatting, deleting, and blocking, is not consistent with Wikipedia policy that disruptive editors should be blocked. Guy Macon appears to have proposed a moratorium on hatting and deleting. Option E isn’t a defined option but a suggestion to define another option. Steve Baker hasn’t said why my analysis is off the mark. So far, I only see two ways forward for idealists, either a policy change or a fundamental redesign. Other ways forward are pragmatic. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:41, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I personally don’t see that the Reference Desks need to be treated as a special resource to unregistered editors, because anyone can register, but that is my opinion. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:41, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Would you approve a rule that only registered users could read wikipedia articles? I don't think so.

I don't like the "editor/reader" distinction - I prefer to think in terms of "content-creator/content-user". In article space, that's exactly the same thing as the editor/reader distinction.

But here in the ref desks, the clunky mechanism we have for asking questions forces content-users to become editors. And *THAT*, right there, is the problem we have here.

In article space, a troll has to become a content-creator (ie, an editor) in order to disrupt - so we can block the content-creator pathways to stop tolling without disrupting content-users in the slightest. Semi-protection works by shutting down the content-creator pathways to IP users - but doesn't disrupt the content-users at all.

In WP:RD By having content-users having to edit WP:RD in order to ask questions and thereby consume our content - we arrive at a situation where trolls can behave like content-users - and using our only tool, we have to block editing to stop them - which in turn screws up other content-users.

That's why semi-protection is such a major PITA here - whilst being a fairly elegant and effective tool in article space. SteveBaker (talk) 16:47, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected etc.

In WP:RD/L#Person + wanderlust, please add this below the comment dated 00:37, 27 February 2016:

Wanderlust guy may not be an expression that would be used in general conversation, but it could come up if there was prior context. ("Okay, there are three of them and I've looked into what they all like. Smith is into pretty young women (specifically, he's a leg man), Jones is after power for its own sake, and Largutroyd-Jacksville has a serious case of wanderlust."—"What did you say the wanderlust guy's name was again?") Here wanderlust guy means guy with wanderlust.

Also note, in that last example, that leg man doesn't mean man of leg, but something like man who evaluates women based on the appearance of their legs. --69.159.61.172 (talk) 19:51, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

 Done [2] clpo13_(talk) 20:03, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 27 February 2016

On the Science page, for the question "Science papers with photographs of the authors on the first page", please add the following response:

It depends on the field and journal, to some extent. Generally speaking, I've found it's rare to see it on research papers, but it does sometimes happen with review and perspective articles. For example, Angewandte Chemie (a highly respected journal in chemistry) doesn't do anything like it for its research papers, but all of its review articles have photographs and short biographies of all the authors as part of the article itself. (As does ChemBioChem, from the same publisher.) Chemical Society Reviews and some of the other journals from the Royal Society of Chemistry do this as well. ACS Chemical Biology doesn't attach pictures and biographies to the papers themselves, but does have a separate "Introducing Our Authors" section, which has selected pictures and bios for both review and research authors. In contrast, the Journal of the American Chemical Society (by the same publisher as ACS Chemical Biology) normally doesn't provide any sort of biography or photographs at all. - To make an unsupported generalization, I'd say including photographs and biographies on reviews tends to be more prevalent in European journals, and less so for American ones, though that's not hard-and-fast. -- 160.129.138.186 (talk) 20:22, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

160.129.138.186 (talk) 20:22, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

 Done ―Mandruss ☎ 20:36, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

archiving instabilities likely

I am once again traveling, with sporadic Internet connectivity, so archiving may be intermittent for the next 3-5 days. Feel free to add date headers if you see them missing. I doubt anything will get so overloaded that manual archiving will be necessary. —Steve Summit (talk) 03:17, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

How do they know?

From time to time some of our more, shall we say, control-minded contributors delete questions, or complain about others treating them as legitimate, "because they were posted by a banned user". How do these people know this? (This is not an accusation that anyone is going off half-cocked; I'm assuming good faith and asking for a citation, or more precisely, asking what a citation would look like.) --69.159.61.172 (talk) 09:36, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

A question which has been asked repeatedly by many editors, and has never been answered. DuncanHill (talk) 11:17, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Recent questions which have been deleted have all been submitted by a well-known troll who likes to ask "questions" that are merely racist or antisemitic attacks. They're rather blatantly so, and easy to identify given the rather similar pattern. --Jayron32 11:28, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

A great number of removals of questions and answers do not fall into the "obviously racist" category - or even the "cunningly worded, subtly racist" category. It is those for which a proper explanation would be appreciated. DuncanHill (talk) 12:05, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Do you have an example? I can't provide any commentary unless you have a removal you're questioning. --Jayron32 12:08, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

@Jayron32: @DuncanHill: How about here [3]? Anyone else can find a few similar removals from science desk on Feb 18. Perhaps it's my scientific biases toward skepticism and desiring evidence-based reasoning, but I find it hard to believe that one banned user is the only explanation for some posts about gum trees, apothecaries, and funnel web spiders. I also think the removals are needless and disruptive even if the are from the same banned user, but that's a different matter entirely. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:38, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

That's an excellent example, and I agree that the removals are disruptive. DuncanHill (talk) 15:43, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I was not involved in that removal, so I cannot comment intelligently on it. You will have to contact the administrator who did that and ask him. --Jayron32 17:05, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

We're discussing it on the talk page. This thread is not exclusively about you Jayron32. DuncanHill (talk) 17:07, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

If you have actions you have objections to, you need to directly name the person whose action you object to. People who were not involved cannot provide rationales for those that were. --Jayron32 17:11, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

No-one asked you to. DuncanHill (talk) 17:13, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Banned users, who are not permitted to edit Wikipedia, can normally be easily identified through a combination of WP:LTA, WP:SPI cases, ban discussions, repeated blocks, ban-evading edits, and the users' original accounts and many sockpuppets. A citation would normally look like WP:LTA, but it could be any of the alternatives or none of the above. If in doubt, ask the user removing the post. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 13:56, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

I asked this question recently after I was accused of responding to a known troll. Evidently the "decision" in that case came down to a somewhat common spelling mistake that had been made once before by a known banned troll and appeared multiple times in the suspect's question. The IP address of the questioner didn't match any known addresses for the known-evildoer - but they did geolocate to the same (large) city and the same (very popular) internet service provider - narrowing it down to a group of about 700,000 people. In all other ways, the question was perfectly reasonable, non-abusive and very answerable - and multiple people answered it. Personally, I find the evidence only somewhat convincing - spelling mistake + fuzzy-geolocation versus perfectly-reasonable question. I didn't get a clear statement about that evidence from anyone - I basically had to infer it myself.

The question here is not that different to the standards of proof in a court of law. Do we require evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" or merely "reasonable suspicion" or something between those two extremes? Since we're not locking someone away for life - only preventing them from asking a question here - I conceded that "beyond reasonable doubt" is a higher bar than we need. I would say that "Preponderance of the evidence" might be an appropriate choice here. The spelling mistake, by itself wouldn't be enough to convince me, and the geolocation evidence certainly doesn't convince me - but perhaps, the two together rises to the "preponderance of evidence" standard? I dunno...it's marginal at best when you have a completely reasonable, non-abusive, answerable question. If a vandal isn't vandalizing - do we care?

In the case above, neither question nor answers were removed or hatted...which, IMHO, was a reasonable outcome from spotty evidence and zero actual abuse. But there is absolutely no way we can apply that degree of investigative 'depth' to every question we have here so we're somewhat reliant on "gut feel" from self-proclaimed troll-hunters.

However, my real problem with all of this is that we seem to have arrived at a point where just anyone here feels OK with finding some evidence, making a judgement call and imposing a penalty - and all without discussion. This is a classic case of being "judge, jury and executioner" - and with the persons doing this not even having passed the relatively easy test to gain admin privileges - this amounts to vigilantism - and that leaves us with the rough justice of the wild west. That doesn't sit well with me. At least if an admin takes that kind of action, we have recourse to various WP:GBU mechanisms to call them to task and there are firm standards to which they are expected to adhere.

SteveBaker (talk) 14:43, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree with User:DuncanHill that it often isn't easy to identify a post by a troll. I think that some editors are too quick to assume that a particular post is by a troll. It isn't always obvious "out of the box" what is a troll post. I would ask that other editors, first, be cautious in removing posts other than based on their content, and, second, that other editors absolutely refrain from scolding other editors for not recognizing "obvious" troll posts based on supposedly subtle clues. Sometimes, as noted above, a troll post doesn't start off as racist; sometimes the hate speech comes in later, and can be dealt with then. It may be that we have gotten to the point where we need to shut down these Reference Desks, not because of trolls as such, but because some of the regular editors disrupt these Reference Desks by over-reaction to trolls in one way or another. I don't think so and hope not, but I would suggest that in non-obvious cases we err on the side of assuming good faith. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:20, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Do you have any recent examples that we have to deal with? Without concrete examples, we're just taking people's word for it that this is a currently active problem. --Jayron32 19:19, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

At "Summary and Discussion" above, there was a lot of discussion, some of it not pleasant, about how to recognize "obvious" trolls. Maybe that isn't your question. My point is that it isn't always obvious what posts are by trolls, and that good-faith editors should start with the assumption of good faith. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:46, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree. If a question is reasonable - I'll answer it if I'm able. If it happens to be from a person who is occasionally ill-behaved, but I have no way to know that - then I'm not sure I care. I've known of several vandals and other miscreants over the years who have reformed and quietly sneaked back here and done good work. In the end, we don't block people as a punishment - we block them as a matter of self-defense for the encyclopedia. If you get the idea of "punishment" out of your head and substitute "self-defense" - then there is no reason not to allow reasonable posts no matter who they are from. Abusive posts are a lot easier to spot than abusive people. SteveBaker (talk) 21:04, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, there is one reason, of course: the belief that if a banned user is able to get away with even one post that persists, this will embolden him to vast new vandalistic efforts which we will then have to defend against. Instead, therefore, we must systematically delete every one of his posts, no matter how reasonable, so that perhaps he'll go away. (Needless to say I don't personally agree with the hyperzealous application of these beliefs in all cases, although it's true that the "give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile" concern does have some validity.) —Steve Summit (talk) 19:27, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

The question is only reasonable if there is evidence to support its reasonability. If I have removed a post incorrectly, ask me here on the talk page why I have removed it. If you cannot tell me which removal of mine was unacceptable, then you need to stop accusing me of incorrectly removing posts. I have asked repeatedly for you to bring forward a specific example for discussion. No one has done so yet. --Jayron32 02:09, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

See my diff link above for an example of about 10 IP posts removed at once, one within minutes of its posting, as I was typing up my referenced reply. (I posted the diff where first relevant, before finishing this thread). For the record, I don't think I've ever seen you make a removal that I personally disagreed with. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:42, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Miscellaneous#Global_Marshmallow_production seemed a bit heavy-handed to me. The question was a bit silly - but we have no rule against silly questions. There were some reasonably good efforts at coming up with estimates. Heck, it might even be properly answerable. It was one of those questions that I chose not to answer (the effort in coming up with a good answer seemed to exceed the value of giving it) - but I don't think a hatting was warranted. We're supposed to WG:AGF - and it's possible someone had a reason for asking it. It's no sillier than questions that resulted in a best-selling book being written (http://whatif.xkcd.com/book/) - and if I were writing such a thing, I'd expect to be able to ask questions like the marshmallow question here on the refdesk. SteveBaker (talk) 15:48, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

So corrected. See, that wasn't hard, was it? Feel free to provide him with the references you have found regarding the usual consumption of marshmallows by Ethiopian elephants, since you clearly have those. I apologize for assuming you would not find such references. --Jayron32 16:58, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

The inability to answer a question because there don't happen to be any references is NOT grounds for hatting a question. Furthermore, how do you, personally, KNOW FOR SURE that nobody will come up with a reference in this case? I wouldn't be at all that surprised to find someplace in the vastness of the Internet where an elephant owner in India remarks that none of his elephants will eat marshmallows...so the answer might well be able to include a reasonable reference that says that the answer for Ethiopian elephants is almost certainly zero. I don't know that such a document exists - but I can't say with any confidence that it doesn't...and neither can you. You can't prove a negative - so you can't prove that no decent answer is possible - so you shouldn't have hatted this one. Also, there are MANY questions (many of which you, personally have answered) whose best answers don't have references. We very often come up with answers that are a synthesis of multiple sources - or some simple, commonsense logic is sufficient to answer them. In this case, we have a Fermi problem - that can probably result in a ballpark estimate - which is all our OP could possibly expect to get. Even article-space contributions do not require reference for facts that are obvious or unlikely to be disputed. SteveBaker (talk) 17:17, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

You're not going to get me to disagree with you, SteveBaker. You're still going to be correct, I am still going to have been in error, and I am still going to have both apologized for and corrected by mistake. No amount of trying to start an argument by you is going to get me to change my position on my own incorrectness, nor I am going to rescind my apology for it. I'm not sure what you are trying to gain here. --Jayron32 19:15, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

@Jayron32: - did anyone in this thread accuse you of incorrectly removing posts? DuncanHill (talk) 15:45, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

You said "A great number of removals of questions and answers do not fall into the "obviously racist" category - or even the "cunningly worded, subtly racist" category. It is those for which a proper explanation would be appreciated" I asked you directly underneath that statement for an example of such a post. You have not, as yet, provided that. --Jayron32 16:56, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

See above, where I agreed with SemanticMantis's example. And will you please answer the question - Has anyone in this thread accused you of incorrectly removing posts? DuncanHill (talk) 17:00, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, when you said "A great number of removals of questions and answers do not fall into the "obviously racist" category - or even the "cunningly worded, subtly racist" category. It is those for which a proper explanation would be appreciated". You said that. I asked you to provide one example where I did "a great number of removals", or even one. You have not done so. SteveBaker had a specific example I was involved in, and I fixed his concerns. So I ask you again, using your words, which of these "great numbers of removals" do you wish me to provide a "proper explanation". I will gladly do so. --Jayron32 17:03, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I never mentioned you, and did not make such an accusation against you, as is clear to anyone who reads the words. DuncanHill (talk) 17:09, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

You responded to a comment I made directly. If you wish to involve someone other than me into the discussion, you need to name them and invite them to comment. If you directly ask a question of me, as you did above, I can only answer it for myself. I cannot answer it for other people. --Jayron32 17:12, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I did not make any accusation against you. The thread was not about you. Please stop being disruptive. DuncanHill (talk) 17:14, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Which administrator is it about then? --Jayron32 17:16, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

It is, as is obvious, about some general concerns shared by some editors about a pattern of removals. DuncanHill (talk) 17:18, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Yeah sorry Jayron I never thought this was about you or any particular user. I only supplied a diff that I thought was relevant to OP's question and an example that fit Duncan's form, and you did ask for an example, I did not think you meant about you, only the general concept of removing material of a banned user that is not obvious racist trolling. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:41, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree that most removals need some justification listed in the edit summary, not just "troll". We have a right to know why the person who removed them thinks they are a troll. For example, there should be a link to where the user was previously banned for trolling, along with reasons for thinking this is the same user. Any user, Admin included, who removes a post as trolling without any explanation given should be immediately reverted, with exceptions for truly obvious trolling like "Why did Jews make up the Holocaust ?".

Note that the "punishment" aspect of removing a troll is much greater, if good faith answers are removed along with it, as all the time those people spent on finding an answer, which may well be of use to others than the OP, has now been wasted. And I also agree that punishment shouldn't be the goal here, just protection of the Ref Desk. When the removals do more harm than good, they aren't protecting it. Silly questions can just be ignored, they don't need to be removed. StuRat (talk) 18:42, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. Which is why I didn't answer the "Marshmallow" question - and didn't react when others did. As it happens, I learned something there - that a Marsh mallow is not only a real thing, but actually is the origin of marshmallow making! Wow! So even if the question was junk, there was value in the answers. SteveBaker (talk) 16:28, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

How for Idealists to Go Forward

I would like to restate concisely a few previous observations on how the "idealists", who think that the Reference Desks provide a necessary service to unregistered editors, so that periodic semi-protection is unacceptable, can go forward. There are two ways that they can go forward. First, Option A, they can offer an RFC at the protection policy talk page to state that the Reference Desks are exempt from the protection policy and should never be semi-protected. (This is not the place for such an RFC. We cannot create a local consensus that overrides the global consensus on the policy.) Second, Option B, they can offer an RFC here (not just another straw poll) asking whether a redesign of the Reference Desk, so as not to use ordinary Wikipedia pages which are user-edited and so subject to protection when necessary, is needed in order to ensure that unregistered editors are not locked out of the Reference Desks. In my opinion, those are the two ways that the "idealists" can go forward. Does anyone else have a different opinion? Robert McClenon (talk) 01:17, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Option C: Revert and block repeatedly until the trolls get bored. --Jayron32 02:05, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

...or until the ref desks die of starvation...whichever comes first. SteveBaker (talk) 17:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

This is a fine option, and I can agree with it almost unreservedly, but in the current climate there is yet a further wrinkle.

Typically, when a troll/vandal shows up, someone will revert, and the tro/ndal will revert, and someone will revert, for anywhere between 2 and 50 cycles. At some point, the defenders get bored, and an admin shows up, and temporarily protects the page, let's say for 2 hours. That's fine, we just about all agree that temporary protection is reasonable and justified in an emergency.

But suppose the trondal is not deterred, and patiently waits 2 hours for the block to expire. The question then becomes, who is more patient and zealous, the trondal or the defenders?

Case C1. The trondal is more patient and zealous. He waits 2 hours plus one minute, and reinserts the vandalism, but no one notices, so it sits there for another N hours, during which time the page is (a) visibly vandalized but (b) usable by everyone who either doesn't notice the vandalism or doesn't care. Eventually, someone does notice the reinserted vandalism, and rereverts it. If by now the trondal has gone to sleep the cycle ends, otherwise it repeats.

Case C2. The defenders are at least as patient and zealous. They wait 2 hours plus one minute for the vandal to reinsert the vandalism, and pounce on it immediately. A new cycle is guaranteed to begin immediately, leading shortly to another bout of protection.

The end result is that as long as the defenders are at least as patient and zealous, we are more or less guaranteed to get multiple back-to-back two-hour protections, which might as well be merged into a two-day protection, or two months, or two years -- the end result is the same. This is the autoimmune disorder which dooms us if we try too hard. —Steve Summit (talk) 19:58, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Option D: Declare a moratorium against all reverting, blocking and hatting - and let the idealists see how well it works. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:10, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

You've offered this before and I'm willing to try it but I don't think it will ever get even close to consensus. Even if we could get consensus, that puts us in this messy situation: User A removes a post as trolling, and it's an obvious bad racist post. User B knows we have consensus to let things stand, as an experiment. So user B is now reinstating bad faith posts to follow consensus. So even though I like the idea, I'm pretty sure it can't be tried. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:55, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

The one most likely to put it back is the original poster. And, as usual, pre-empting it by saying "it won't work", without actually trying it, is the unfortunate norm here. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:56, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, we'd need consensus against a more nuanced set of guidelines - some sort of metric for success - and some agreed period for the experiment to run - but under the right conditions, I think it's a valid experiment. SteveBaker (talk) 17:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Which is why nothing ever happens. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:06, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Don't poison the well, Bugs. I said I agree that it would be interesting to try, and gave an opinion that it would not get consensus. Below, Guy is considering posting another RfC on exactly this topic. So why not encourage that effort rather than grouse about my prediction? After all, I hope I'm wrong :) SemanticMantis (talk) 22:43, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Maybe something will happen this time. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:57, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Option E: Work together to come up with some other solution. SteveBaker (talk) 17:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Good luck. You'll need it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:06, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Let the RfC above close, it's only got a few more days right? Or perhaps someone wants to request closure form an uninvolved editor? It looks to me like consensus is to support both proposals, and I don't think there's any real problem with the claim that this local consensus in any way changes higher-order WP extant consensuses. :I'm not so extreme as to think we should never semi-protect the desks. My contention from the start was that a three-month protection instated by one admin could stand so long against apparent consensus that it was not necessary. If the RfC passes, any admin can and should immediately change long-term protection to 48 hour protection. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:55, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

For "periodic" see "almost always". For "until the trolls get bored" see "it ain't happening". It's hardly idealist to try to uphold the fundamental tenet of Wikipedia being an encyclopaedia "anyone can edit". Try solving the problem rather than continually bludgeoning the symptoms. The Rambling Man (talk) 16:06, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Robert's assessment of the situation is way, WAY off. I don't think anyone is saying that we need a rule at arbcom type levels saying that admins are forever barred from using semi-protection on this page. Sure, that's an idealist position - but I don't think anyone here holds that position. What we need is a way to provide an alternative solution to the vandalism problems that do not require us to lock half of our users out from our service. If the only tool we have is semi-protection, and if admins are over-using it - then we need to provide a better alternative because for 100% sure, what we're doing now ain't working...and it's actually killing the ref desks. Fine, leave semi-protection as an emergency measure - if it's used for a few days a year - fine, no problem. The practical problem is that it's being WAY over-used. It's the classic case of "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail". We need more tools in the toolbox.

When you persist in trying to hammer screws into fine antique furniture - you damage it. Please stop doing that.

We need people here to open their minds - use those gigantic brains that can come up with answers to almost everything - and find some more tools for the toolkit. SteveBaker (talk) 16:51, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

How about some limit on the number of days a Desk can be protected ? 3 days per calendar month ? (We could put a limit on how many days each Admin can semi-protect a Ref Desk, but then they might just call in their buddies to do it for them.) Of course, how we would get this to be official policy and enforce it is still an open Q. StuRat (talk) 19:03, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Option F. -- Apostle (talk) 19:11, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I am not sure why User:SteveBaker says that my analysis is off the mark. Steve Baker did complain at the RFC, which is still running, that never semi-protecting the Reference Desks was not one of the options. He then proposed a redesign of the Reference Desk in order to avoid the need for semi-protection. My comment was that Option A, never semi-protecting, would require an RFC to change to the Protection Policy, and that Option B, some sort of redesign, should be done by an RFC. I was only saying that those were the only two options that I saw that were consistent with the idealistic position. Steve Baker may be softening his opposition to ever semi-protecting. If so, he is still in the idealist camp, but less so. Option C, revert and block until the trolls get bored, doesn’t say whether also to use semi-protection, in which case it is a pragmatic position. Option D, to declare a moratorium on hatting, deleting, and blocking, is not consistent with Wikipedia policy that disruptive editors should be blocked. Guy Macon appears to have proposed a moratorium on hatting and deleting. Option E isn’t a defined option but a suggestion to define another option. Steve Baker hasn’t said why my analysis is off the mark. So far, I only see two ways forward for idealists, either a policy change or a fundamental redesign. Other ways forward are pragmatic. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:41, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I personally don’t see that the Reference Desks need to be treated as a special resource to unregistered editors, because anyone can register, but that is my opinion. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:41, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Would you approve a rule that only registered users could read wikipedia articles? I don't think so.

I don't like the "editor/reader" distinction - I prefer to think in terms of "content-creator/content-user". In article space, that's exactly the same thing as the editor/reader distinction.

But here in the ref desks, the clunky mechanism we have for asking questions forces content-users to become editors. And *THAT*, right there, is the problem we have here.

In article space, a troll has to become a content-creator (ie, an editor) in order to disrupt - so we can block the content-creator pathways to stop tolling without disrupting content-users in the slightest. Semi-protection works by shutting down the content-creator pathways to IP users - but doesn't disrupt the content-users at all.

In WP:RD By having content-users having to edit WP:RD in order to ask questions and thereby consume our content - we arrive at a situation where trolls can behave like content-users - and using our only tool, we have to block editing to stop them - which in turn screws up other content-users.

That's why semi-protection is such a major PITA here - whilst being a fairly elegant and effective tool in article space. SteveBaker (talk) 16:47, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected etc.

In WP:RD/L#Person + wanderlust, please add this below the comment dated 00:37, 27 February 2016:

Wanderlust guy may not be an expression that would be used in general conversation, but it could come up if there was prior context. ("Okay, there are three of them and I've looked into what they all like. Smith is into pretty young women (specifically, he's a leg man), Jones is after power for its own sake, and Largutroyd-Jacksville has a serious case of wanderlust."—"What did you say the wanderlust guy's name was again?") Here wanderlust guy means guy with wanderlust.

Also note, in that last example, that leg man doesn't mean man of leg, but something like man who evaluates women based on the appearance of their legs. --69.159.61.172 (talk) 19:51, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

 Done [4] clpo13_(talk) 20:03, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 27 February 2016

On the Science page, for the question "Science papers with photographs of the authors on the first page", please add the following response:

It depends on the field and journal, to some extent. Generally speaking, I've found it's rare to see it on research papers, but it does sometimes happen with review and perspective articles. For example, Angewandte Chemie (a highly respected journal in chemistry) doesn't do anything like it for its research papers, but all of its review articles have photographs and short biographies of all the authors as part of the article itself. (As does ChemBioChem, from the same publisher.) Chemical Society Reviews and some of the other journals from the Royal Society of Chemistry do this as well. ACS Chemical Biology doesn't attach pictures and biographies to the papers themselves, but does have a separate "Introducing Our Authors" section, which has selected pictures and bios for both review and research authors. In contrast, the Journal of the American Chemical Society (by the same publisher as ACS Chemical Biology) normally doesn't provide any sort of biography or photographs at all. - To make an unsupported generalization, I'd say including photographs and biographies on reviews tends to be more prevalent in European journals, and less so for American ones, though that's not hard-and-fast. -- 160.129.138.186 (talk) 20:22, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

160.129.138.186 (talk) 20:22, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

 Done ―Mandruss ☎ 20:36, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 28 February 2016

Re: Volatility as a term in Chemistry. Bear in mind that until about 1700 all academic work from most countries in Europe was produced in Latin, as the universal language of scholarship. 109.150.174.93 (talk) 18:22, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Maybe I'm being dense, but I can't tell where you intend this to go. "Volatility" does not currently occur on the Science desk, and all instances of "chemistry" seem unrelated to terminology, history, and language. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:43, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

 Done Language desk. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:51, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Concrete proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

OK. It's time for a concrete proposal here. Talking around each other has been solving nothing. We must come up with some way to reach an agreement on how to handle trolling. I'm going to put forth two proposals to an up-down vote. We need to have a clear path forward from the interminable conflict over protecting the ref desks. Please vote only in the voting sections, and leave the threaded discussion for the discussion section. I'd like to see just these three proposals voted upon before coming up with alternatives. If any of these fail, THEN we can move forward with alternate proposals.--Jayron32 20:33, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Proposal 1: length of protection

Proposal: The Reference Desks and Reference Desk talk page shall only be protected for a maximum of 48 hours at a time, and shorter protections should be tried first during periods of heavy abuse.

Rationale for proposal

It is clear that there is no strong support for long-term protections of the ref desks or this talk page. We should start with very short protections (a few hours at most), and we should never see the desks protected for longer than 48 hours, and they should spend more time open than closed.

Support

1. --Jayron32 20:33, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
2. -- SemanticMantis (talk) 20:37, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
3. —Steve Summit (talk) 20:47, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
4. Per my opinion that virtually any consensus is better than none. ―Mandruss ☎ 20:53, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
5. —Especially the talk page. Deor (talk) 21:13, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
6. - Tevildo (talk) 21:22, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
7. - Partial agree, as to the talk page. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:23, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
8. Agree with the caveat that I read this to mean that this proposal is limiting protection lengths, but not authorizing protection in the first place. Protection has been pushed on us as a fait accompli, but I think we can do without it entirely, and this should not be taken as an authorization or acceptance of it in any way - we're just agreeing to limit it as a first step to action. Wnt (talk) 22:18, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
9. It's abundantly clear that the current "protection regime" is not working in way. The bizarre hope that the vandals will suddenly disappear after 72 hours or 168 hours has been already shown to be bullshit. By removing access to the areas of Wikipedia that IPs are most likely to access is like watching ISIS destroy historical architecture, and those that continue to advocate such a stupidly unimaginative and regimental approach to this are destroying Wikipedia more than the vandals. The blocking and protection that FPAS (for example) has indulged in has achieved nothing. The IP can continue to add comments at will. In fact, the results are negative, the IP continues to control the Ref Desks, good faith editors cannot because of the prefect admins, and FPAS continues to protect himself. It's a joke. The Rambling Man (talk) 23:05, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
10. Yes. A couple of hours means he might get bored and be elsewhere for a bit.Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 07:34, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
11. — Ched :  ?  13:44, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
12. Support with caveats SteveBaker (talk) 15:32, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
13. Support - Better still why not get rid of IP editing altogether ? .... It would probably solve 90% of all our problems!, Anyway a few hours is a start & at the moment is better than nothing, If the trolling continues by the same person then bump the hours up. –Davey2010^Talk 23:29, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
14. Support - - the reference desk is a major part how the world sees our site; we pride ourselves as being an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit", so protection for these pages must be as short as possible. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 18:14, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
15. Support I can't see most trolls hanging around the RD longer than 48 hours. Miniapolis 23:03, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
16. Support -- œ^™ 06:08, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
17. Support puts trolls off if it's protected. Tom29739 ^[talk] 16:55, 25 February 2016 (UTC).
18. Weak support, wit caution. I leaned "oppose" at first, per FPaS's note, but this explanation by Trevildo is satisfactory: 'this proposal does not contradict or modify WP:SEMI in any way. All it does is to change the definition of "short period" in WP:ROUGH (which, I'm sure nobody needs to be reminded, is not official policy) from "a few days or a week" to "48 hours maximum".' I do think there's a potential slippery slope problem, however; what happens when WikiProject Medicine what special, particular time limits, and someone else wants templates to have different ones, and policies still different ones? Why is this case special and different? (Yes, I read the one-person essay on this below, but don't find it convincing, especially since the some of the people it attempts to characterized as over-involved and LOCALCONSENSUS are contradicting what it says about them and their views and motivations).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:48, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose 48-hour rule on Reference Desk pages, but would support a limitation to 5 days. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:25, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
2. I concur that 5 days would be a better upper bound. You don't want to make things too easy for the trolls. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:38, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
3. Manifestly invalid proposal in principle. Protections on the Refdesk will continue to be handled according to the same principles as everywhere else on the project, following WP:Protection policy. No "consensus" here can restrict the application of that policy or exempt this page from it, per WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:59, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
4. This RfC is invalid as it based on false premises. No local consensus among people who dedicate themselves to freely speaking at ref desks can limit admin discretion on handling disruption to the project. Further, proposing a limit completely misunderstands the nature of trolling and DENY. It's a bit BEANSy to spell out the details—suffice to say that the problem would be resolved soon if not for the actions of those ref desk contributors who amplify and enable the disruption. Johnuniq (talk) 23:28, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
5. Fut. Perf. and Johnuiq said it. --Akhilleus (talk) 01:13, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
6. Per FPaS, Johnuiq and BB. Handle as with any other protection, based on need. BMK (talk) 01:25, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
7. Support the feels, oppose the proposal. Discretion, not rules. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:45, 14 February 2016 (UTC).
   
8. Oppose per the above. Admin discretion is adequate. WP:RFPP works fine if you think an admin did too little or too much protection. Adding more rules will just cause problems the first time an admin protects 50 hours, then it is a debate. There has been no argument provided that says why we should treat the Ref Desk differently than any other page on Wikipedia. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 19:20, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
9. I support the proposal on paper, but as mentioned above, 48-hours might be a bit too short in certain cases. I would very much prefer trying 48-hour protections in most cases, but 48-hours should not be the limit; maybe at most up to a week (any longer should require some kind of consensus). Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 01:35, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
10. Oppose. Protection is a judgment call based on particular circumstances. This is unnecessary one-size-fits-all policycruft. Gamaliel (talk) 15:55, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
11. Oppose as a policy. I'd a support a guideline that says it should generally not be protected for more than 48 hours in the first instance without good reason, but administrators need to be free to protect for as long as is necessary based on the circumstances of each situation. A hard and fast rule, of any length, is not appropriate. Thryduulf (talk) 08:44, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Discussion

I'd like to see just these three proposals voted upon - I appear to be missing one proposal. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:04, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

I have taken it on myself to put a formal RFC template on this proposal. I was about to prepare a similar but slightly different RFC, but am willing to just let this one run its course, because any reasonable RFC with formal closure, and this is a reasonable RFC, is better than either endless back-and-forth or straw polls that don't clearly result in consensus. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:27, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

In response to FPaS' comment, this proposal does not contradict or modify WP:SEMI in any way. All it does is to change the definition of "short period" in WP:ROUGH (which, I'm sure nobody needs to be reminded, is not official policy) from "a few days or a week" to "48 hours maximum". Tevildo (talk) 22:14, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

^^^^ This. Thank you for stating this clearly and succinctly. SemanticMantis (talk) 23:05, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

In response to FPaS' comment, an RfC is not a local consensus. Any reasonable reading of Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines suggests that a community consensus trumps policy for a specific case or situation. I also don't care for your overbearing tone. ―Mandruss ☎ 22:18, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

That's what FPAS does, like some kind of overlord, he knows best, and despite the fact that most of the IP traffic relates to his misbehaviour, he continues to call foul. The Rambling Man (talk) 22:53, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

• Comment - I agree with User:Tevildo and with User:SemanticMantis in respectfully disagreeing with User:Future Perfect at Sunrise. On re-reading of WP:Protection policy, about protection in general and semi-protection in particular, the policy states that admins may impose semi-protection when necessary. It does not specify the length. We may indeed be trying to establish a local consensus, but, if so, it is a local consensus to guide the global consensus as to the length of the semi-protection. What the policy cited by FPAS on local consensus is that local consensus may not override global consensus. The global consensus is a policy authorizing semi-protection. Stating that the Reference Desk and its talk page should never be semi-protected would be a local consensus to override global consensus. This is only an effort to guide the implementation of the global consensus. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:26, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
• Comment - I will note that this proposal was originally written by another admin, User:Jayron32, who is just as familiar with the protection policy as FPAS. I then put an RFC tag on it, because, as I said, any RFC is better than no RFC, or better than one of these empty straw polls. What I infer is that, in response to disruptive editing, FPAS decided to impose a very long period of semi-protection. Jayron32 appears to think that the semi-protection is too long, but he is constrained against shortening it unilaterally, because that would be wheel warring, so that he did the constructive thing to try to get local consensus defining reasonable periods for semi-protection for the Reference Desks. I respectfully disagree with FPAS, who states that any discussion that would restrict FPAS's judgment, with which others disagree, is improper. In other words, FPAS appears to be saying that the policy is simply that the first admin gets to specify the length, and there is no way to constrain that judgment. Maybe I misunderstand FPAS; if so, please clarify. I thank User:Ian.thomson for being willing to shorten the semi-protection here. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:36, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
• Comment - I thought, until now, that I was much closer to FPAS, in favoring semi-protection, than to most of the Help Desk regulars, some of whom think that semi-protection is never appropriate (but who can't agree on the alternative). I think that some of them are compromising in supporting a two-day limit (with which I disagree). However, it appears that I may be more nearly aligned with them, in merely thinking that there should be reasonable limits on semi-protection, than with FPAS, if I understand. Maybe I misunderstand FPAS. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:36, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
• Comment: We have to understand what there are two things that make places like this different from Article space:
  • In article space, shutting down edits - even with full protection - inconveniences hardly anyone. Sure, someone may want to fix something and can't - but the article may still be read by anyone - and serves it's purpose fully. In ref-desk space, shutting down edits with any protection level whatever, makes the page unusable to whomever the protection locks out. The analogy in article space was that if, in order to prevent trolling, we blanked out the page so it could no longer be read by IP users. If such protection levels existed for article, we'd be unbelievably cautious in applying them - even for one hour, yet here on the ref-desks, that's happening routinely.
  • In article space, most people who want to use Wikipedia - but who aren't interested in editing it don't create accounts - why would they? But in order to use the Ref Desks, they have to "edit" the page in order to ask their question and add followup information if they need to. That means that we get far more innocent IP "editors" than most other pages. So semi-protection impacts a larger slice of the population than in a regular article-space page.
  1. We should NEVER semi-protect both the content page(s) and the talk page simultaneous - because that amounts to shutting out innocent IP users entirely with no means to even ask why or to request a non-IP user to ask a question on their behalf.
  2. I don't believe that even a short span of semi-protection is useful because imposing it rewards the troll by disrupting the ref desks. We have to understand that the troll craves recognition - and allowing them to shut out 80% of our potential users is victory for the troll. Applying semi-protection is feeding the trolls.

  I supported this masure because I believe that limiting the period of time for which the troll is effective at disrupting us is better than letting them disrupt us for much longer periods - but zero would be a better limit for me. SteveBaker (talk) 15:47, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

meta: This last para is a display of two very important editor traits which are both in very short supply all over the project. First, that consensus requires give-and-take. Second, the understanding that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Thanks, Steve. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:58, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

It's true that these desks are by no means equivalent to article space, thus I recently logged out when this talkpage was not protected and did so again when it became semi-protected and the latter case appeared more intuitive since it directs to this page, thus I've thought of advocating the exact opposite: for admins to semi-protect this talkpage whenever any of the desk pages are protected. And with that, a few hours of inconvenience isn't shouldn't be a huge price to pay, but it needs to be a measure of last resort. And looking at that page again to follow through, I can't find the instructions for making a request: apparently they are supposed be somewhere at the top of that page I linked to, but if they there then they must be buried somewhere within the protection request instructions which is not helpful. So lets keep this page unprotected at least until these instructions are fixed. --Modocc (talk) 16:19, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

• Procedural Note: When the results of this !vote are tallied - everyone needs to remain clear that it is a consequence of the way that this question (and the subsequent question) were asked, that at no point was anyone asked "Would you like to be rid of semi-protection completely?" or "Are there better solutions we should consider instead?". Consequently, consensus on this question is entirely limited to asking what the span of semi-protection should be, if (hypothetically) we wanted semi-protection at all. Please let no-one consider EITHER outcome of this !vote as an endorsement of the policy of semi-protection in the first place. SteveBaker (talk) 02:33, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

User:Davey2010 - See WP:Perennial proposals and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Prohibit_anonymous_users_from_editing. I happen to agree with you that unregistered editing was a mistake from the inception of Wikipedia, but we are apparently in a minority. I personally don't see why editors who want to be anonymous can't register pseudonymously, but we are in a minority. In any case, at these Reference Desks, there are editors who think that our mission is to serve the community of unregistered editors, and that any limitation on that mission, even by short-term semi-protection, defeats the purpose of the Reference Desks. I disagree with that, but those of us who would prefer to eliminate IP editing are getting nowhere, especially here where some editors think that our mission is largely to serve the IPs. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:50, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Exactly it takes what 5 minutes the most to create an account.... Not really rocket science, Personally I consider registered editors "the community" and that's it .... I couldn't care less about the IPs but I know I'm certainly the minority on that, I'm extremely surprised the proposal was ever rejected but I'm even more shocked by the statement "Reasons for previous rejection: A large portion of our good edits come from IP addresses" ..... Now I sit here and actually wonder "What good edits?" ...., So it looks like IPs are here to still for an extremely long time then .... Shame really!. –Davey2010^Talk 18:15, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

I do see good edits from unregistered editors. I also occasionally see constructive participation at dispute resolution from unregistered editors. At the same time, I don't see any solid reason why they don't register. Also, it doesn't take 5 minutes to create an account and edit a semi-protected page. It takes 5 minutes to create an account. It takes four days to create an account and edit a semi-protected page. You, User;Davey2010, and I disagree with some regulars here that this Reference Desk has a special mission to serve the unregistered editors, because we don't see unregistered editors as the community. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:30, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

The question of whether anonymous users should be able to edit articles is not relevant to this discussion. I support the idea that you should need to create an account in order to create content - but I'd fight tooth and nail to reject a proposal that people have to have an account to read our content. I doubt anyone would support such a proposal.

But that's my issue here. Stop thinking about "EDITORS" and "READERS" - start thinking about "CONTENT PROVIDERS" and "USERS". It's a semantic difference elsewhere in the enyclopedia - but NOT here on the ref desks. Here, our users are editors - not because they create content - but because the bizarre mechanism where to ask a question, you have to edit an entire page of text. If you could allow IP users to ask questions without "editing" - we wouldn't have a problem here. We could semi-protect to our heart's content and almost nobody would object.

So, my position is that content creators should have to have accounts - but users shouldn't - and that means that users with IP accounts should be able to ask questions - but you might need an account in order to be able to create content by answering them. Questions that we choose not to answer would never become 'content'.

SteveBaker (talk) 15:27, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

In response to Rich Farmbrough and Dennis Brown, the problem we have at the moment is lack of agreement among the admins who regularly patrol the desks as to the appropriate duration of semi-protection and the threshold for applying it. This RfC is (as I understand it) intended to establish a formal consensus on these issues, as informal reliance on administrator discretion is not apparently working. Tevildo (talk) 22:05, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Proposal 2: Reasons for protection

Proposal: The reference desks should only be protected for a) manifestly abusive, obscene, or disruptive attacks which are b) repeated and for which c) other methods such as reverting and blocking are not working. If the content of the posts are not objectionable, the desks should not be protected, even if the posts are made by banned users.

Rationale for the proposal

It is rarely contentious to remove posts or to protect the reference desks for posts which everyone recognizes as abusive or trolling. It is always contentious where the content of the posts is unobjectionable, but where it is found that some banned user has posted. There is little agreement that we need to lock down the desks just to make someone go away, where their posts to these desks wouldn't be recognizably wrong, except for that they are banned.

Support prop. 2

1. --Jayron32 20:33, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
2. --SemanticMantis (talk) 20:38, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
3. —Steve Summit (talk) 20:47, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
4. ―Mandruss ☎ 20:54, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
5. —Deor (talk) 21:13, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
6. - With caveat. Tevildo (talk) 21:22, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
7. -Support Robert McClenon (talk) 21:24, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
8. Support with caveat - I am reading "only" to mean that this proposal bans other reasons for blocking. I do not want posts removed for "obscene" content, and I do not read this proposal as a specific authorization to do so; so for now I will support stopping the other removals, with intent also to stop removals of "obscene" questions. Wnt (talk) 22:18, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
9. Those acting as "prefect admins" are destroying the core principles of Wikipedia. It's absolutely clear that their approach is not working. Something new needs to happen here. The Rambling Man (talk) 22:49, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
10. —Dbfirs 00:12, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
11. — Ched :  ?  13:45, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
12. Support, again - with caveats SteveBaker (talk) 15:49, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
13. Support. –Davey2010^Talk 23:31, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
14. Support - the reference desk is a major part how the world sees our site; we pride ourselves as being an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit", so these pages must be unprotected unless disruption is really too bad for this to work. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 18:12, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
15. Peter James (talk) 11:56, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
16. Support - Pretty much my opinion above. The semi-protection is becoming too long that it's affecting even good-faith editors, and with the exception of the troll(s?), we need to assume good-faith on the IPs and new users, as not all of them may be familiar with Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 01:42, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Oppose prop. 2

1. Manifestly invalid proposal in principle. Protections on the Refdesk will continue to be handled according to the same principles as everywhere else on the project, following WP:Protection policy. No "consensus" here can restrict the application of that policy or exempt this page from it, per WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:00, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
2. The false premise here is that disruption at the ref desks would not spread to other areas and cause wider disruption. Wikipedia is not the place to exercise free speech rights. Johnuniq (talk) 23:32, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
3. What they said. --Akhilleus (talk) 01:14, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
4. Again, protection as warranted, as per the needs of the situation. BMK (talk) 01:27, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
5. WP:LOCALCONSENSUS does seem to be a problem here. Setting up rules that hamstring admin isn't the solution to ongoing troll problems. Using WP:RFPP effectively is. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 19:21, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
6. Per FPaS. In addition there is no benefit to be gained from making this page any different to the rest of the encyclopaedia in terms of when admins may protect. Thryduulf (talk) 08:47, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
7. Per FPaS, basically. There's a legit slippery slope problem inherent in this proposal. I might want special protection rules for MOS pages, and you might want them for football articles.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:38, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Discussion belongs in the discussion section of the RFC, not in a separate section. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:36, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

==General Public?== I am opposed to any of the immediately above suggestions, as they are based on at best arbitrary suppositions. This "either 48 hours or nothing" BS is Bee Ess. The first matter is to hold a Wikipedia-wide RfC as to whether there is a problem (at least, an ANI) and then to ask about a solution. To present a 48 or nada solution is to present a fait accompli, and to ask reasonable users to oppose it, proving their lack of reason. μηδείς (talk) 01:21, 12 February 2016 (UTC) Medeis, I'm puzzled why you need a separate section to !vote oppose on the proposals. Each proposal already has a Discussion section, if the Survey sections are not enough. A separate section would only seem to give your viewpoint more prominence than others. A minor point, maybe, but I'm puzzled. Educate me. ―Mandruss ☎ 02:34, 12 February 2016 (UTC) Applying nowiki to section header, collapsing discussion. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:36, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

Discussion

• It should be noted that IP users cannot currently !vote on this proposal, and that IP users are still currently considered WP:HUMAN by WP and are considered by default to have full editing rights, including !voting. If any IP user is reading along and wants to !vote or discuss this proposal, please leave an edit request anywhere you can, including my talk page. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:43, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

• It would be good to more precisely characterize/quantify what we mean by "not working". (For example, a few days ago this talk page was protected after two (2) reversions failed to stop the troll.) —Steve Summit (talk) 20:47, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

• I do have a slight reservation on this proposal as stated, in that it might, if taken literally, mean that semi-protection was _never_ acceptable in the case of frequent repeat postings by identifiable banned users, if such postings aren't objectionable individually. I support the basic principle that semi-protection should not be the first response in this sort of case. Perhaps if we make it clear that "disruptive" can include re-postings of such frequency that the desks become effectively unusable? But I appreciate that the literal meaning may be the intended meaning, in which case I'll change my !vote to Oppose. Tevildo (talk) 21:22, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Suppose Wikipedia has one person who is dedicated to flooding us with nonsense nonstop. If we protect one location, why couldn't he go somewhere else, and somewhere else again, and cause greater disruption, because we don't know where he's going to strike next? Nay, if other methods of blocking fail, it's better to have some people watching and revert his edits at a fixed target page. Additionally, if people insist on these 48-hour semi-protections, there is no reason why a Wikipedia administrator can't let the semi-protection expire each 48 hours and wait a bit before deciding to renew it. Seriously, it's one action to put a new 48-hour semi-protection - we shouldn't act like admin time is so precious, and the value of our pages so small, that it is better for people to be driven off for weeks on end than to make them put in a couple of minutes every other day. Wnt (talk) 22:24, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

It might in fact be a good idea to quantify a minimum value for Wnt's "a bit" and put it explicitly into the rules if the basic proposal is accepted. Tevildo (talk) 22:32, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, it's hard to quantify. You would let the protection expire and see if the troll comes back. If he does, I doubt the administrator is going to wait for too many tries before acting, and I'm not really eager to argue otherwise. So the use of defining "a bit" is to say how long it takes with no vandalism before the admin treats the desk as fresh, and decides it will take more than one comparable vandal posting to create a pattern of abuse that requires new protection. Which depends to some degree on instinct whether it is the same troll checking in or a random passerby. In any case the existing proposals don't address the question of what pattern is needed in any specific way. All things equal, if we've specified the 48-hour limit as something we can at least agree on, then this small flexibility left to the admins is probably a minor issue. Our main problem right now is really long protections that maximize the collateral damage per troll served. Wnt (talk) 23:11, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

On the issue of "obscene", I would interpret it to mean something like "inappropriate use of bad language", rather than "sexually explicit". But this can be clarified if necessary. We, of course, are not permitted to allow legally obscene (Miller v. California) material to remain available. Tevildo (talk) 22:46, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

The thing is, when is it "inappropriate"? The way I see it, a poster can have a valid reason to use any word in Wiktionary. The time when we want to delete posts is when there isn't a question, just some abuse. If someone's cup is already full, how can we fill it? But if that's the case, it doesn't matter if it's not obscene. So the 'obscene' bit is two parts confusion, one part censorship, no part necessary to consider in this situation. And of course, the Miller test can be applied to images per se, not involving the Refdesk at all, so we don't have to worry about that in this conversation. Wnt (talk) 23:04, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Concur with Wnt, on every word of that (IANAL, but I did ten years as a First Amendment policy analyst).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:51, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

• Besides the possibly missing third proposal highlighted by Mandruss above, there seems to be an extra T at the end of this proposal. Is part of the proposal missing or is the T unintentional? Nil Einne (talk) 21:23, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
  • I have boldly removed the mystery T. Subject to BRD of course. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:43, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
• As I explained in the discussion of the first question - if a troll wishes to disrupt the ref desks, for most of our users, all (s)he has to do is to trigger semi-protection. Since semi-protection locks out a bunch of people from using the reference desks to ask questions (it's raison d'etre), the troll gets their kicks from locking people out. This rule simply forces them into posting obscene questions in order to trigger the protection rather than something else. I supported this rule (with extreme reluctance) for the slightly arcane reason that I believe that forcing the troll into making more distinctively trollish edits makes it easier to recognize them than if they can cause grief with relatively innocuous questions. SteveBaker (talk) 15:56, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

I think you're on to something in your last sentence. And honestly I think if our admins will adhere to the forming consensus here, then the more obvious trolling will be less reason to close, since that is much easier to spot and deal with. The proposals clearly state that RBI is preferable to closing, and any admin who seeks to close too soon without much effort at using the normal tools will perhaps earn a trouting and revert for going against express consensus. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:10, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

• Procedural Note: When the results of this !vote are tallied - everyone needs to remain clear that it is a consequence of the way that this question (and the previous question) were asked, that at no point was anyone asked "Would you like to be rid of semi-protection completely?". Consequently, consensus on this question is entirely limited to narrowing the categories for which semi-protection is to be permitted - at no point does it ask whether semi-protection should be used even in these narrow cases. There was no option to !vote "None of the above". Please let no-one consider EITHER outcome of this !vote as an endorsement of the policy of semi-protection in the cases outlined here. SteveBaker (talk) 02:33, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

  Comment - No to User:SteveBaker. On that point alone, User:Future Perfect at Sunrise is correct. An RFC, here, on getting rid of semi-protection completely, would indeed be invalid. There is a global consensus, embodied in WP:Protection Policy, that semi-protection can sometimes be used when necessary. I am aware that some editors here think that the mission of the Reference Desks to serve unregistered editors is so special that the Reference Desks should never be semi-protected. Policy says that semi-protection is sometimes necessary. Therefore, any editor who wants to get rid of semi-protection here completely should go to WT:Protection Policy with an RFC to modify the policy to provide that the Reference Desks are exempt from the protection policy and should never be protected. I would oppose such a rules change, but that is what you need to do if you want to get rid of all semi-protection here. There is a policy. We can't use a local consensus here to override the policy, only to guide and clarify it. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:27, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Semi-protected edit request on 1 March 2016

Sorry if this 'request' is in the wrong place. I really just wanted to put a new question on the reference desk. But when I click the 'ask a new question' button, I get a page that says its semi-protected, and I can't ask a question. I created a new account, and still can't ask a question. This seems a pretty significant change, and I've been a pretty regular, if unregistered, question asker in the past. Can't anypost a question? Is this a policy change? I'll be very disappointed if the posting of questions on the reference desk becomes a restricted activity. Thanks if you can email me back with some explanation.

Davin Bremner (talk) 16:48, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Hey @Davin Bremner:: We're quite sorry about that. We've had a problem with a specific person trying to disrupt these desks, unfortunately their attacks require us to occasionally protect the desks to stop them. If you just post here what you intend to ask, I or someone else will copy-and-paste your question to the appropriate desk. Alternately, you could wait until your account is auto-confirmed. This happens automatically once it is 4 days old and has made 10 actions at Wikipedia. Once you are autoconfirmed, you'll be freely able to edit through semi-protections. --Jayron32 17:13, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

So...back to thinking of something new.

The two RFC questions (above) have pretty much played out (dunno why they aren't formally closed) - we've only had one new !vote in the last week. I had made a suggestion (also, above) for a way to handle our problems. It was dismissed by many as "Please don't derail the RFC" - but that excuse for not discussing it has now gone away.

I've thought very hard about this one - and I firmly believe my proposal has value - and should be carefully considered.

So, here again is the point I want to get across:

• IP editors can be a pain in article space. So we have to shut them out sometimes - and it's generally considered to be no great loss because they only rarely provide important content to our articles. I'd support a "named-account-only" rule for editing articles...but Wikipedia only skirts around that measure.

• Neither I, nor almost anyone else, would support a measure to require named accounts for READING Wikipedia! I'd hope we could all agree that this would be A Very Bad Thing.

• The difficulty here is that the software mechanics by which questions are asked is to allow people to edit this page. That's a simple thing to implement given the way MediaWiki works - but it's ugly in so many ways!

• The consequence is that it produces a bunch of IP "editors" who aren't trying to add content - they are requesting content. By giving them a mechanism where they are forced to "edit" in order to request content - we're forcing them into the mold of becoming editors...and that means that we have to give them more power than they need. Trolls can exploit this failure of mechanism...and they do. When the only tool you have is a hammer - every problem starts to look like a nail - so we remove editing privileges by semi-protection - which is overkill.

• My position is that asking a question on WP:RD should be a similar operation to reading an article...and so it shouldn't require one to create an account as one might require for someone who is writing an article. This requires that we change the mechanism by which questions are asked.

If we could find a way to change the mechanism so that users could ask questions WITHOUT adding content - we could allow continued access to IP users, even if we have to use semi-protection for people who add content by answering them.

My proposal (and I went into it in, perhaps, too much detail above) - is to divorce question asking from the editing operation.

If we have some kind of a question submission form - where anyone can ask a question, IP or not, semi-protected or not - and only push that out to the outward-facing part of WP:RD when a response is added - then we are in control the situation.

• If nobody wants to answer the question - it quietly vanishes after some amount of time. Trolls don't get recognition.
• If someone answers the question - it goes public. Normally, anyone can answer questions and thereby make them public - but we can semi-protect the answer-giving page - indefinitely, as far as I'm concerned - so that only named-account users can promote a question from invisibility to the public-facing page. If named users repeatedly promote trollish questions - then we have a means to complain and block them just like anyone else who misbehaves.

I think this is a reasonable compromise. It fixes the problem of semi-protection crippling the desks. It prevents IP-account trolls, unless their questions are so reasonable and convincing that they might as well not be trolling. It holds troll-enablers to account too.

The precise mechanism can be as simple as having the question-asking form add the question inside a 'hat' section (not my preference) - or it could be that it goes off to some other queue that's not obviously 'public facing' or widely advertised - or it could be sent out to people who have subscribed to a "question feed". But the key idea is to have questions be asked by filling in a form - so we have control over what questions are visible and to allow ref desk respondent to bear the responsibility of deciding whether to 'promote' a question to the public-facing page - and only when it's been deemed "answerable".

SteveBaker (talk) 16:07, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

• on the first point. I stopped reading after that, because it made a claim which purports itself to be accepted, but does not actually provide any evidence to back up its assertion. Do you have any article statistics that show that unregisterred editors are not a significant benefit to Wikipedia article content? --Jayron32 16:20, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Please don't stop reading there - it's tangential to my proposal.

FWIW: I did do a study, a few years ago (and for my own curiosity), where I picked 100 frequently-edited articles and looked at the percentage of IP vs. non-IP edits - and the percentage of reverted IP edits versus reverted non-IP edits. The results were pretty conclusive. I should probably go find my data and results.

I do get that from a philosophical perspective, IP edits are here to stay...and nothing I propose rules that out. SteveBaker (talk) 16:44, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

WP:Requests_for_comment#Ending_RfCs says that they last for 30 days by default. You can request closure from an uninvolved editor per WP:CLOSE. So I will still be waiting to see how that goes after the RfC closes and takes effect. As for your suggestion, it seems very similar in spirit to Wikipedia:Pending_changes. Rather than hand roll a new specific system for the ref desks, I suggest we could try that if necessary after the RfC closes (i.e. if we still have problems with keeping the desks more open than closed). SemanticMantis (talk) 16:45, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

That's an interesting idea! We should definitely consider that too. I haven't been a big fan of that for regular articles - but it might actually work rather well here. SteveBaker (talk) 16:46, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

I also think that it is an interesting idea, I'm not sure at what level the wiki software would have to be changed to allow that. It sounds like the easiest (though in some ways ugliest) is to have different things transcluded onto the reference desk depending on whether the user is registered or not. Registered users get all of the transclusions, IP users only get those which have been approved. Also, since we aren't in article space, any unanswered questions can be dropped into /dev/null if they aren't answered in X days.

It's a common misconception that IP editors are a net negative for the project but research doesn't bear that out. Take this survey for example [5]. Some quotes:

The bulk of the original content on Wikipedia is contributed by tens of thousands of outsiders, each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site.

... few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.149.218.171 (talk) 17:42, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

First, User:SteveBaker asks why the RFC hasn't been formally closed yet. Read the RFC policy. Do any of the conditions for a snow closure apply? I don't think so. Normally, an RFC runs for 30 days, during which time a bot continues to invite editors randomly to comment. Let the RFC run its course. Second, can the above post be summarized to a few paragraphs? It is too long, and can't be parsed by humans. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:59, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

1. From WP:TLDR "Being too quick to pointedly mention this essay in an exchange with a wordy author will come across as dismissive and rude. Preferably, create a section on their talk page and politely offer advice there."
2. At an average human reading speed, my 732 words will take you about 2 minutes to read. If you can't be bothered to spend that long to respond to a carefully thought-out proposal, your opinion is unimportant to me. SteveBaker (talk) 18:15, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

My concept of TLDR is a mass of unbroken text with no regard for organization, paragraph breaks, etc. We're grownups and can read at above grade 4 level. Even I read it and understood most of it, and I have a focus problem with large comments. ―Mandruss ☎ 18:24, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

My error. After the question about why the RFC hasn't been formally closed yet, which I considered and still consider a silly question, my brain shut down parsing the rest of the post, which is not silly. I will reply below. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:40, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

(ec)I've read your 732 words and here are my two cents: 1. I can see how separating submission of questions from responses helps to keep the RD accessiable to anons, but what it does against trolls is stopping them answering questions (see point 2). Is that really the problem? 2. Separating the submission of questions from responses would not work particularly well against troll questions, as it depends on people recognising trolls and then not responding to them. 3. Conversely, if a legitimate question is not answered because it is too hard, it also will not appear to anon users. But if a question is too hard for regulars to answer, perhaps precisely what it needs is an anon user knowledgeable in an obscure field to answer it. If they can at least see the question, they can request an edit to answer it, but they need to see the question first. A possible solution to this problem is for registered users to volunteer to moderate questions, and approve legitimate ones even if they can't answer them. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 18:30, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

SteveBaker: sorry, but I can't really see this working, except as a hugely convoluted way of achieving something similar to what "pending changes" is meant to do – short of rewriting the entire wiki software. As long as this is MediaWiki, there is no piece of readable user-submitted information on this website that isn't technically a "page"; there is no way of entering information into the system that is not technically "editing a page", and there is no way of making any page visible only to some users and not to others. What you envisage sounds like some moderated bulletin board user surface. That would mean writing an entirely new user interface with an entirely different content model – a new website hosted somehow inside the wiki, but one that wouldn't itself be a wiki. I don't see this happening, certainly not for the sake of an issue as marginal and specific as the Refdesk.

As for ways of approximating it with the existing wiki software, we already have a "form" that allows you to submit questions: it's called the edit window. No new form that we might design on top of MediaWiki could possibly do anything other than what the edit window (on a new blank section) does already: post the user-submitted contents onto some wiki page. This wiki page would have to be unprotected, otherwise IP users couldn't run the form. Then, to make your idea work, a bot would have to transfer the question to another page, where it would await initial answers/endorsements, and which would have to be semiprotected so that only regulars can post those. Then it would have to be transferred to yet another page, which would have to be unprotected again, so that IP users could participate in answering or in discussions of their own questions. Hugely complicated. In all of this, nothing would stop a vandal or troll from simply sidestepping the whole process and post on the final target page directly. Nothing would stop vandals or trolls from flooding the question queue, to the point of making it unuseable (who would want to browse through hundreds of re-postings of the same nazi spam, just to find the one legitimate question that might have gotten lost in between?) Nothing would stop trolls or banned users from disrupting the process not by asking questions but by participating in discussing them, as some of our present disruptors do. Questions from banned users (people who the community has decided are not allowed to use the site for any purpose, but nevertheless ask questions that might look legitimate enough to attract good-faith answers) would still have to be removed manually. Questions that contain hate speech, harassment or other gravely disruptive content would still have to be removed manually. I just can't see the benefit in it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:53, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

I disagree with FPAS about some matters having to do with the Reference Desks, but I agree on this matter. I don't really see the benefit to creating a special interface for Reference Desk questions. I think that User:SteveBaker and I have a philosophical disagreement about the Reference Desks, as to whether the Reference Desks are a special service that Wikipedia provides to the world that require special engineering. I don't see the need for special engineering for the Reference Desks. If the Reference Desks have to be semi-protected against trolls, that is a price that unregistered editors pay for choosing to be unregistered editors. I think that the current interface works well. (To be sure, unregistered editors who don't choose to register are inconvenienced by semi-protection, but they can always register.) That is my opinion. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:51, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

If we're in broad agreement about separating out the mechanism by which questions are asked from how the answers are displayed - then we can think about techniques that will allow us to achieve it without demanding new MediaWiki software features.

I believe that this separation is the key to solving the semi-protection problem. Being able to hand admins the power to semi-protect the pages that are "public facing" while not needing to protect the question-asking system seems to me to resolve a large fraction of the grief we get around here.

As for an actual mechanism - it's possible we could have questions asked in sub-pages or use a script or have questions and answers moved around with bots or have them transcluded into the answers page or something. We already have a 'bot' to archive the page for us - this is a not-dissimilar problem.

SteveBaker (talk) 20:34, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Proposal using Pending changes

Extending the concept of Pending changes... Would the following be anywhere near the original idea?

• Each new question for WP:REFMATH (to pick one) is created on its own subpage, each page is set to having "pending changes"
• When it is answered, that counts as the pending changes no longer applying since someone has marked the pending changes as being reviewed.
• All WP:REFMATH question pages are transcluded to WP:REFMATH, so established users *will* see questions which are vandalism, but the vandals (and other IP editors) won't (so a Vandal who *really* knows what they are doing can leave vandalism, but there will be no instant gratification)
• A Bot will remove after 3 days any subpages that have not been reviewed.

It has the following limitations.

• Only people with the reviewer rights would be able to answer questions.
• Vandalism *can* be seen by users, but not by the Vandal.

Naraht (talk) 20:04, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

I'll let Steve answer regarding the spirit and scope of his proposal. I will only add that I'm not the biggest fan of relying more on special privileged classes of users to solve a problem that I think comes about in part because of special privileged classes of users. And my reservations persist even under the assumption that I am personally first in line for a newly-expanded list of reviewers :) SemanticMantis (talk) 20:10, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

I think this is a useful mechanism - I'm just not sure this is the way to use it. I'd point out that requiring someone with reviewer rights isn't as bad as it first seems if the reviewer only has to tag the question as 'acceptable' - once that's done, anyone would be able to add to the reply. That said, I'm also not a fan of privilages - although the "right" to edit a semi-protected page is already a privilage of sorts. I suppose the "pending change" switch would be a thing that wouldn't have to be turned on all the time. It might be switched on only when an admin sees active trolling - and would provid e a more nuanced approach than semi-protection.

I'm not sure. I've spent a long time thinking about the approach I've proposed and it's going to take me a while to assimilate the implications of this proposal. SteveBaker (talk) 20:41, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Oppose all use of pending changes. I don't see any benefit to Pending Changes, but it has substantial drawbacks. The troll is only seen by a few people now before he gets reverted, and most of them quickly ignore. This way, some random person responding to the desk would have to read what he says and decide about it. More important to me is the "conspiracy" concern I raise below. With Pending Changes, some random poster from who knows what country has to take responsibility for accepting the previous change - or else reject it. Which puts them in the position of potentially being liable/prosecutable for what someone else asked in a different country. Plus, the mechanism has a bad reputation on heavily used pages, which this is. And IPs might post a question, then not see it, post it again, think something's wrong, go away, or complain, whatever ... it would lead to unneeded confusion. No, let's not. Wnt (talk) 17:42, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Extra strong oppose requiring reviewers to answer questions. I think we get good answers from all classes of users, including IPs. I personally don't have the reviewer right, because I once suggested we should have a Fair Use photo in an article (long, silly story, but let's just say as an early tester of the mechanism my verdict was against). Wnt (talk) 17:45, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

If we were to somehow leverage the pending changes mechanism to implement this - then you'd be prevented from providing the INITIAL answer to the question - but you'd be allowed to provide additional responses later. There is also the option of having someone with reviewer privs tag the question as "answerable" without actually providing an answer in order to 'unlock' questions that are obviously reasonable. I'm not sure that helps you very much. Also, I suppose we could only turn on the pending changes mechanism for the page when we're under troll attack...the rest of the time, we could leave it wide open.

I'm not sure pending changes is the right mechanism to use here though...I agree that adding new privilege levels is not a good thing...and I dislike pending change restrictions on articles too. SteveBaker (talk) 19:48, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Why Do We Need Something New?

User:SteveBaker has proposed, as have a few other editors, that we need to implement a new approach to how to host the Reference Desks that will involve new software development, new classes of privileges, or something else new. The question that I would ask first is: Do we need to change the way that the Reference Desks are implemented? They are currently implemented simply as Wikipedia pages that can be edited by anyone who can edit, subject to the restrictions that usually anyone can edit, but occasionally semi-protection is needed. A few of the regular editors here seem to think that is unacceptable. It seems that the basic perceived problem with semi-protection is that the accessibility of the Reference Desks to unregistered editors is seen as an essential part of their mission, and that semi-protection is seen as "shutting the Reference Desks down to the general public". I disagree with that view, because I haven't seen a reason why registration is such a burden that we need to provide a special service to well-behaved unregistered editors when there are also badly behaved unregistered editors. Earlier User:Medeis had said that we needed two RFCs, the first being whether something is wrong with the Reference Desks, and the second, conditioned on the first, being what to do. Most of the other regular editors here disagreed, saying that we knew that something was wrong, in particular, trolling. Maybe she was right, if she had stated her question differently. Maybe the real question is: Do we need to redesign the way the Reference Desks are hosted? User:SteveBaker evidently is one of those who thinks that we do need to redesign the Reference Desks. I don't. I think that the current design, simply as Wikipedia project pages, subject to semi-protection, is satisfactory. (I do think that sometimes the length of the semi-protection has been excessive, but that is a detail.) Maybe we do need an RFC on whether we need a new design for the Reference Desks. I would defer to the thoughts that the complexity of development would be substantial, and would add that there is no fundamental reason why we need to provide a special service to unregistered editors (who have the privilege of registration) that requires special software or special privileges. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:13, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

I have a question that is applicable to any proposal to redesign the Reference Desks. Should original posters (whether registered or unregistered) be able to engage in dialogue with responding editors? Currently they can, if they were able to post the question in the first place. I ask because the most recent trolling event involved the troll asking what seemed like a reasonable general knowledge question, getting an answer, posing another question, getting an answer, and finally making a hateful comment. If questions are to be accepted via some special interface so that semi-protection never blocks the questions, will questions addressed to the question-answerer be accepted, and how? Any particular approach to avoiding semi-protection for questions may have unintended consequences. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:49, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

There are certainly times when we need clarifications. I know that on occasions when I ask a question (yes, I'm a user as well as a responder) - I almost always need to offer some clarifications. I agree that this represents a loophole through which a troll could sneak. If we're talking in the abstract (no specific implementation in mind) then it might be enough to limit the OP's ability to respond to either entering a followup through the same mechanism that they post the original question - or perhaps only let them chime in again if one of our respondants asks for a clarification. The latter seems more complex and less user-friendly though. SteveBaker (talk) 19:42, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Okay. As I stated above, toward the beginning of the month, there are three positions on the Reference Desks, the idealistic, the pragmatic, and the despairing. As a pragmatist, I submit that any idealistic solution involving software redesign needs to be elaborated in detail before it can be seriously considered. As a pragmatist, I don't think that the Reference Desks are so special as an outreach mission to unregistered editors that a special software solution is needed. Your opinion may vary. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:50, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

As a "realist" - I fully understand that it's unlikely that we'd get software changes made to Wikipedia's version of MediaWiki to solve our problems here...even though there are well tested & secure MediaWiki extensions out there that would let us do this (forms entry, for example - which I use on some of my own MediaWiki web sites). So we'll likely have to figure out something that could be made to work with a combination of existing mechanisms such as bots, semi-protection, sub-pages, transclusion and reviews - and I'm optimistic that a 99% solution could be made that way...and let's not make the perfect be the enemy of the good. I'm definitely not in the "despairing" category - I'm actually reasonably convinced that all we need to fix this is to end all efforts to defeat non-obvious troll edits and to ask regulars to work aggressively to avoid feeding the trolls by just ignoring posts that fail the 'duck test'. Does that get me into the "idealist" category? I don't know...maybe. SteveBaker (talk) 15:19, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, since you proposed a redesign of the way the Reference Desk is implemented in order to avoid semi-protection, you definitely are not a "pragmatist" by my standards. Pragmatists, by my standards, recognize that semi-protection is a price that we have to pay due to the trolling. I see the idea that a redesign is needed in order to provide a special service to unregistered editors as idealistic. Your definitions may vary. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:09, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Ah, OK - I think you're using a non-standard definition of the word "pragmatist". Per wiktionary: "One who acts in response to particular situations rather than upon abstract ideals; one who is willing to ignore their ideals to accomplish goals.". One can react to this situation without using abstract ideals and still hate the shit out of repeated use of semi-protection! The pragmatist might well say "Starving WP:RD of questions will eventually kill it - so semi-protection has to be either replaced or used only exceedingly sparingly". That's perfectly pragmatic. An idealist says "All of humanity has a right to ask questions anonymously on WP:RD an anyone who ever stands in the way of that is wrong - so semi-protection should never, ever be allowed under any circumstances". I'm all in favor of a pragmatic solution that doesn't make the reference desks utterly useless to about half of our users for so much of the time. I don't require that 100% of people have access 100% of the time (that would be idealistic). I do require that we don't toss out the baby with the bathwater - which is what we're doing right now - and a pragmatic solution to that is just fine with me. SteveBaker (talk) 16:23, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

• I am very busy in the real world, but the only thing I have suggested is that the archives somehow be protected. That could be done most easily by automatically protecting every archive as it is archived, and placing a banner saying that if a change is necessary, the OP can ask an admin to make the change. μηδείς (talk) 06:53, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

  I don't see a problem with doing that - it wouldn't inconvenience anyone to any measurable degree. But I don't understand why you think it would help. Trolls get their kicks from recognition - and since very few people ever look at the archives, why would they find that an exciting target? Is there evidence of attacks on the archives? SteveBaker (talk) 15:19, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree. On the one hand, locking down the archives sounds harmless. On the other hand, locking down the archives doesn't sound necessary. Why do it? Robert McClenon (talk) 17:21, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

I oppose locking down the archives. Sometimes I read a breaking science news article months after a question, and I go back, ping the OP (in the rare instance it's not an IP, since they used to ask many of the good questions), and add that answer there. I think we might provide a general warning about the archives to revert vandalism if found and check the page history if something is missing, and I think it would be highly useful to set up an edit filter to flag revisions to the archives (even mine) for someone to look at them. Wnt (talk) 20:03, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Here is an example of the sort of edit I mentioned above. Wnt (talk) 17:50, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Shell shock (WW1)

How did shell shock psychologically damage individuals? Were their identities as men and as soldiers diminished? --Milloanard (talk) 17:24, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Milloanard (talk) 17:24, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

 Done SemanticMantis (talk) 17:55, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Why, exactly, can't we try a completely different approach as a limited-time experiment?

Our primary problem is that certain individuals insist on trying to control the behavior of others. That never works. We need to put a stop to that kind of behavior, because it has a long history of generating increased trolling everywhere anyone has ever tried it.

We need to stop feeding the trolls. We need to either ignore posts we don't like, reply to posts we don't like with a deadpan serious answer to the question asked as if we never noticed that it was an attempt to disrupt the helpdesks, or report posts we don't like at ANI for the admins to deal with.

We need to stop responding to trolls. We need to stop hatting or deleting comments by trolls. We need to stop talking about trolls. We need to stop talking about each others responses to trolls. We need to stop making trolls the center of attention. We need to stop making regulars who respond to trolls the center of attention.

We need to put all of the above in an RfC as a limited-time experiment, achieve an overwhelming consensus that this is what we want to do, put it in our guidelines, and report anyone who refuses to follow the consensus at ANI so that they can be blocked for being disruptive.

What we are doing now is not working. Why, exactly, can't we try a completely different approach as a limited-time experiment? --Guy Macon (talk) 22:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I have one comment and two questions (one of which is actually a meta-question). First, I agree with User:Guy Macon that certain editors are trying to control the behavior of other editors, and that does not work, and has been shown not to work. The first question is whether Guy is saying that the racial rape question at the Science Desk should have been left standing, and either ignored or responded to with advice as to how to Google to get the information. The second question, a meta-question, since Guy is trying to persuade other editors to change their behavior, is for Guy to explain the difference between persuasion and control. I think that I know the answer and agree with Guy, but would like him to explain. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:18, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

(ec) If my proposal passes, all editors on the helpdesks will (for the duration of the a limited time experiment) have several choices as to how to respond to racial rape question at the Science Desk:

1. Ignore the question and move on.
2. Post a warning template on the poster's talk page without any mention of it here.
3. Answer the question asked with a deadpan serious answer to the question asked, acting as if we never noticed that it was an attempt to disrupt the helpdesks.
4. Take it to WP:ANI or WP:AIAV and let an administrator decide whether to delete it, whether to remove it from the history, whether to block the user, and whether to protect (full, semi, or PC) the page.
5. Post a warning template on the talk page (without any mention of it here) of any regular who does anything other than the above.
6. Take any regular who does anything other than the above to WP:ANI for not following consensus.

Note: Some of the above can be combined.

If my proposal passes, all editors on the helpdesks will (for the duration of the a limited time experiment) be absolutely forbidden to respond to racial rape question at the Science Desk in any of the following ways:

1. Responding other than with a deadpan serious answer to the question asked, acting as if we never noticed that it was an attempt to disrupt the helpdesks.
2. Deleting any other user's comment.
3. Collapsing any other user's comment.
4. Discussing the refdesk behavior of any other user -- troll or regular -- of the refdesks or on this talk page, Such discussions are suggested to be taken to WP:ANI, WP:AIAV or the user's talk page, but this proposal only specifies "not here." This will be a place to discuss improving the help desk or our answers, not a user behavior noticeboard.

If my proposal passes, all of the above will be supported by an RfC and written into our guidelines, and enforced by uninvolved administrators with blocks for those who refuse to comply. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:58, 26 February 2016 (UTC) (Minor edit for clarity 00:26, 27 February 2016 (UTC))

Your proposal is a perfect example of what you called "certain individuals insist on trying to control the behavior of others." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:30, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Wrong. You are pretending the "run an RfC and gain consensus" bit doesn't exist. Unlike you when you collapse or delete another editor's question, I am asking the Wikipedia community to decide what to do. --Guy Macon (talk) 09:23, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

I haven't collapsed sections very often, and I've stopped deleting altogether as a self-imposed fulfillment of my Option D. Meanwhile, you complain about trying to control other editors, while your RFC intends to do just that. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:50, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

while your RFC intends to do just that - Yes, if every consensus about anything in the project, whether about policies and guidelines, or about article content, has been nothing but a way of controlling other editors. Bugs, I have to say it, and I do so only with the hope that it might do some good. You have a remarkable tendency not to hear what has just been said, or to choose to ignore it, for what purpose I can't fathom. ―Mandruss ☎ 00:08, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Then he should scratch out the complaint about editors trying to control other editors. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Baseball Bugs (talk • contribs) 00:56, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

No, he should not. He is referring to people acting WITHOUT CONSENSUS, something entirely different. ―Mandruss ☎ 01:18, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

He didn't say "without consensus", he said "certain individuals insist on trying to control the behavior of others." And speaking of consensus, consensus is that banned users are not allowed to edit. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:56, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Wait, what, they're not? Are you sure? Since when? Why didn't you say so? You should make this point several more times to make sure everybody sees it, I'm sure there are plenty of other people who don't realize this. —Steve Summit (talk) 16:18, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

So it seems. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:47, 28 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes - we are absolutely trying to control the behavior of others. Why not? We're trying to control the behavior of those whom we label "trolls", "vandals" and "sock-puppets". We also control the behavior of people who either ask or answer legal and medical questions. The concept that Wikipedia is the home of freedom and free speech simply isn't the case. So, what's so terribly wrong with encouraging our respondents to act professionally and to follow community-imposed guidelines? Wikipedia does that everywhere! IMHO, contributors have a special responsibility to maintain the standards of this website - but users of the website (readers of articles and questioners at the RD) have a much lower bar to surmount. There are many unprofessional things that people do here - and if we decide that answering inappropriate questions, or harassing our users is not in the interests of this website - then some degree of control may be required. I don't think I want to call it "control" so much as "requesting a degree of professionalism" and "maintaining community-agreed standards of comportment and decorum". SteveBaker (talk) 19:05, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

I will support the RfC with language similar to that of your third paragraph. I've been trying to be an example of that for five years. Here [6] is a recent example of me giving deadpan answers that some of you may have noticed. Let me be abundantly clear:if that user thought he was trolling me, I don't care and it doesn't matter. I saw a question that was interesting to me, and I knew how to find references that would lead to an answer. I will not get upset if an OP is pleased by my referenced response, and I think it's clear that neither the question nor response caused any disruption. SemanticMantis (talk) 22:40, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Exactly the sort of deadpan serious answer to the question asked, acting as if we never noticed that it was an attempt to disrupt the helpdesks, that I was talking about. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:00, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

The question of trolling aside, I wouldn't have gone to all that trouble to answer the question. In my opinion, it's hardly a subject worthy of that much attention even if sincere. No amount of persuasion by SM is likely to change how I feel about that. How typical am I in that respect? How many people reading this would have been willing to devote that much of their life to researching and answering that question so well? The question sat for 3.5 hours before SM's first response, and he is still the only responder. The OP isn't satisfied yet, and at some point even SM is going to tire of that thread and say enough is enough.
So, with SM as arguably the sole exception, what we're mainly talking about is ignoring such questions, which is fine with me. All we have to do is say that in the guideline, train all occasional responders about it, and expect compliance from regulars. ―Mandruss ☎ 23:24, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Ignoring it would still still be an option. No harm is done if you ignore the question and SemanticMantis answers it -- just ignore SemanticMantis's answer as well. --Guy Macon (talk) 09:23, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, of course. Ignoring a question completely or answering it deadpan are just fine with me. The problem with answering at all is that some people then can't resist the temptation to say something stupid, make a joke or whatever. That then starts to feed the troll. That's exactly what we need to prevent. I don't feel it's necessary to punish that. I'd prefer that we foster a climate of cool professionalism - and quietly ask those who cannot maintain our standards to please do so. People who do repeatedly violate those standards despite many warnings can be reasonably accused of disruptive editing. I know it seems bad to let the trolls get away with posting crap while we don't tolerate responders who post crap in response - but both parties are feeding off of each other, and both are equally guilty in my mind. SteveBaker (talk) 19:05, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

As part of gaining consensus for any such experiment, it will be important to gain consensus on some description of what success and failure of the experiment would look like. (And, perhaps, on whether success at some level would or wouldn't imply that the experiment should become more permanent.) —Steve Summit (talk) 00:14, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

I am not a big fan of doing that. I think that every limited-time experiment should end when it`was promised to end. Then we can look at the results and decide whether to turn it back on, leave it off, try another experiment, etc. A lot of us still have a bad taste in our mouths about the Pending Changes "limited time experiment" which was made permanent, thus breaking a promise to the many many editors who only !voted for it because it was supposedly a limited-time experiment. --Guy Macon (talk) 09:30, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that we need some kind of a fixed timescale for the experiment. The idea of agreeing "conditions of satisfaction" up front seems valuable to me because (for example) nobody should expect trolling to simply end completely. SteveBaker (talk) 19:05, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

I wish to mention that the actual real-life response to questions like this that I have to deal with on my real-life reference desk is to attempt to answer the question as asked. What's better here is that if the question is outrageously inappropriate, we can ignore it. In real life we have to go to the hassle of throwing them out. Mingmingla (talk) 04:17, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, and that's a good model for what we (historically) did here. If you go back and look at the archives around 2009 or so - that's what it looked like. SteveBaker (talk) 19:05, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

So, should I post an RfC and see if my suggestion gains consensus? Are there any parts of it that should be changed before posting an RfC to make it more acceptable? How long should the experiment run? --Guy Macon (talk) 16:10, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: 1) Sure 2) Maybe 3) One month? I'm happy to edit/discuss wording via sandbox if you'd like some help. Keep in mind unless you solicit early closing from an uninvolved admin, it will take a month to close the RfC, and we have only 9 days or so until the last one will be closed. I'm personally curious to see if we can manage to keep the desks unprotected more often than they are semi-protected, as seems to be our consensus. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:40, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Refdesk Phase 2

I have always though of the Refdesk we have as one phase of a two-step process - where the second step is to go through the archives, identify some of the better questions, and produce a polished Q-and-A that includes the good references without the sidetracks or dubious content. The revised question-and-answer sets might be hosted on a different WMF project, like Wikibooks or Wikiversity, or even totally offsite. They should include keywords and some sort of hierarchical index, I think; in any case, the idea would be this would produce a resource that you can browse or search. Finally doing this would help to justify the phase 1 we have now, and if worst comes to worst, so long as we have a mirror of the archives to work with, developing this resource would provide a new and separate collaborative project that the people who enjoy answering questions might continue to take interest in developing in the future ... whatever happens here.

Would people be interested in this if it were started? And where do you think would be the best place to do it? Wnt (talk) 20:13, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

It would certainly be an improvement on the current archive search process, which is right much useless. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:17, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Improving the search is more like Phase 1.01, but FWIW I did request this. Wnt (talk) 21:29, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

That's one problem, though I would just be happy if the results came in some semblance of order, such as reverse date order. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:44, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Sounds fun and interesting. It's not terribly unusual for me to spot one of our archived threads when doing unrelated searches, there's some good stuff in there and we have very high pagerank. I agree that a non-WP WMF site might be a good place - we already have some weirdos here telling us that the ref desk is getting in the way of making an encyclopedia (?!). On the other hand, wikibooks and wikiversity I think don't share our privileged WP pagerank... Anyway, if you start something, I'll contribute. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:46, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Yeah - data-mining our archives for content that's useful in other ways is a superb idea. Dunno whether it's a WP:RD thing - or some other kind of WP: thing - or a WikiCommons/Books/Versity - or some external-to-WMF website/wiki. First see what content can be extracted - figure out how much effort it takes to sort the wheat from the chaff, how good the results of doing that turns out to be - and which of those steps can be automated. When we get a slice of the content then figuring out how to present it - and then, ultimately where to present it can be a separate decision. SteveBaker (talk) 16:57, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

@SteveBaker: I actually made a very small beginning toward that back - wow! - three years ago, with Module:RDIndex, which allows a brief text ("{{#invoke:RDIndex|month}}") put under a title like Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Lua/Science/January 2013 to create an index of what the questions were and who edited them. For that particular page I did some markup on the actual archive to allow categorizing by field. At the time I didn't get a lot of feedback and so I balked at spamming a bazillion pages in this fashion to create a complete index of the archives, especially since there's already a bot doing something similar. (I did a few more though; you can see them in "what links here" at RDIndex) Unfortunately, it's not really possible to pick out the best questions by looking at how many people edited them, because sometimes people pile on to the more dubious entries to argue while sometimes a good answer knocks a question right out of the park on the first try. Wnt (talk) 16:03, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Yeah - I can see how that would be a problem. But perhaps you can look at other aspects of the answers - such as the length of each reply or the number of links it contains? You might have to manually tag a statistically significant sample and then play with ways to analyse good versus bad questions and answers. It's definitely possible that you could come up with a rule that would work maybe 90% of the time. SteveBaker (talk) 16:32, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

@SteveBaker: @Wnt: This is a cool gizmo. I don't think anything like this can ever be fully automated, but maybe we can do this in two (or more passes), passing off to human editors for the final product. Already, the output of Wnt's RDIndex is very useful for facilitating curation/editing/re-mixing of archive material. I can't help with the programmatic side of things but it might be fun to make a few pages' worth of proof-of-concept material, and I'd be happy to help with that manually. Maybe time to move this to a sandbox? If the three of us get something going, it will be easier to recruit more helpers with a demo product. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:43, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

I suppose that the path of least resistance here is to make something like Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Questions/Science/Index and then replace "Index" with specific question names, and start from some arbitrary spot (perhaps 2013, since I indexed some of those pages presently). I say Science because the three of us tend to like that desk. (If you look up the featured cookbook at Wikibooks, it has very much a similar structure there, so that is also a possible site) There is a page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire where we might register this "curation" idea if we do it in the next few weeks; possibly we might get some involvement that way. Anyway, I'll probably go ahead and make this trial run over the next few days unless there's further feedback. Wnt (talk) 00:47, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 4 March 2016

2A02:FE0:C911:A3E0:B95C:3D9D:3C30:EB75 (talk)Why is not Adolf Hitler on the list of austrian Painters, or artists? He is the only one people know, this is history whith washing at it`s very best.

- Misplaced + same question by same IP already answered at Wikipedia:Help desk#Austrian painters - please do not WP:FORUMSHOP - Arjayay (talk) 22:13, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

RFCs on Semi-Protection

The RFC on semi-protection has run for 30 days but has been archived. I have posted a formal request for closure to Administrators' Noticeboard, Requests for Closure. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:13, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Closed. Convenience link: Wikipedia talk:Reference desk/Archive 122#Concrete proposal ―Mandruss ☎ 00:22, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

It was closed as No Consensus. I had thought that there was consensus. If anyone feels strongly enough that there was consensus, they can request closure review. I won't ask for that. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:34, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't see much of a consensus view emerging. The "yays" out!voted the "nays" - but there wasn't remotely a consensus. I strongly support your closure conclusions. SteveBaker (talk) 14:32, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Maybe you should have closed it yourself? Too late now. My understanding is that there is no requirement that the closer has to be uninvolved. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:18, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, there is a requirement that the closer of an RFC should be uninvolved. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:36, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

That's not how I read WP:Requests_for_comment#Ending_RfCs, but it's entirely possible that I'm reading it in way that contradicts practice. I thought it meant formal closure via request for closure usually involves a previously uninvolved admin, but that any of the involved editors can also close the discussion if they think they see consensus. Also in this case I think the closer may not have followed this: "The desired standard is rough consensus, not perfect consensus.", from WP:Closing_discussions#Closure_procedure Especially for the second proposal, I think that we clearly had a rough consensus. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:52, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

The whole RFC seemed to disregard the fact that a local consensus does not override a larger one. I suggest those who wish the protection policy be different in regard to their little corner of Wikipedia address the protection policy itself. We try not to have special rules for special places. HighInBC 16:31, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I did say that those who think that the Reference Desks should never be semi-protected, and some editors have expressed that view, should address the protection policy. The purpose of this RFC was to clarify what the consensus was for application of the protection policy. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:36, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your insight Chillum. The Rambling Man (talk) 16:33, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Your words seem to disregard the clear rebuttal to that idea that was clearly articulated in the RfC. I suggest those who wish to criticize our discussions about how to run the reference desks would get more respect for their words if they spent any notable time volunteering at the reference desks. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:18, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

User:SemanticMantis - To whom are you replying? Robert McClenon (talk) 17:36, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

My comment "Your words..." was in response to User:HighInBC, indented one indent more than their comment, per WP:INDENT. It gets confusing because they did not follow WP:INDENT, in that they used no indent, though it's fairly clear they are replying to your note on closure. That is problematic, because then all one-indent responses become responses to HIBC, and nobody is able to reply to your opening statement unless they put in the comment above HIBC's. So I was left with a few poor options 1)changing HIBC's indent level or 2) guessing at how to indent so as to cause least confusion. I chose option 2) this time, apparently the wrong choice :) SemanticMantis (talk) 17:45, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I read the rebuttal SemanticMantis. I disagree with it. The fact is that the proposal wanted to make restrictions that are not supported by the protection policy and represent a significant departure from our best practices. HighInBC 17:50, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Ok, fine, but why talk about it now? Just to kick at a past proposal while it's down? You had 30 days to !vote or discuss as you saw fit in the RfC. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:57, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I just noticed it now. My comments were more related to this thread right here where the closure was questioned. HighInBC 21:00, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't want to get in to this discussion (as some may know, I ended up not really participating in the RfC) but while it would be a bad idea to have extensive discussion about the RfC it doesn't mean some resonable commentary is unwelcome. Besides what HighInBC has said, it's worth noting that future RfC should hopefully be informed by the previous RfCs. In particular, since the RfC was closed as no consensus (rather than consensus for or against) there may be even more impetus to attempt a future RfC to resolve the issues and try and achieve consensus. That being the case, it would help if all possible participants understand the problems that are seen by the differing parties.

While I don't think HighInBC has said anything particular new, it seems clear that there remains a fair amount of disagreement on the issue of local consensus so it's likely to be something that would need to be considered carefully for a future RfC.

Another thing is that I think consensus was closer (I'm not saying there was definite consensus) if only regulars at RD are considered. I believe the RfC was added to the normal places for simple RfCs. If this hadn't happened it may be there would have been less participation from non regulars and perhaps consensus was more likely. But even if that happened, it's perhaps fair to say it's unclear what this would have meant if disputes arose about following the RfC.

Nil Einne (talk) 14:12, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, learning from that RfC is good, and perhaps my tone was too harsh. Sorry to User:HighInBC, and maybe they can participate in the next RfC, or help at the reference desks in the future. I do wonder why they reject Tevildo's explanation of why the proposal would not violate WP:LOCAL, it seemed very clear to me that there was no problem there.

Maybe I've been going about this all the wrong way, and we simply need a few more admins around the desks who don't like long-term protection... maybe I should become an admin; might be easier than gaining consensus on keeping our doors open ;) SemanticMantis (talk) 14:57, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, I'm an admin who hangs out around the desks and who opposes long-term protection of them (and I expressed that opinion in the RfC), but I don't see how that helps. I'm certainly not going to take up arms against another admin about the necessity or length of particular instances of protection. I'll express my opinion to the admin, as anyone may do, but I don't think that anyone wants to see a wheel war. Deor (talk) 15:08, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

I see no argument for adding anything to the protection policy itself about the Reference Desk. What do you propose be added about it? The semi-protection of the Reference Desks is primarily due to sockpuppetry. Do you want to change something? Robert McClenon (talk) 02:40, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Also, the policy mentions "disruption" as a reason for semi-protection. Most of the trolling is both disruption and sockpuppetry. I don't see a need for change. Does anyone have any particular proposals for change?

Next Steps

There has been discussion about a future RFC. It isn't clear to me what would be different about a future RFC, except a different closer who is looking for rough consensus rather than nearly perfect consensus. I thought that the RFC that we had was a good one, and reasonably stated the two issues about semi-protection, its length and its reasons. I would suggest that anyone who thinks that the close was incorrect should request closure review at WP:AN. I think that the close was incorrect, but I personally will not request closure reversal. I recommend against any future straw polls, which accomplish nothing. We need either another RFC, but I am not sure how it should be different, or the same one, or nothing. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:42, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Other than another RFC, I will again point out to "idealists", who think that the Reference Desks are a special service to unregistered editors and should therefore never be semi-protected, that they have two ways forward. First, they can start an RFC on the Protection Policy to state that the Reference Desks are never semi-protected. (I will !vote against it.) Second, they can propose, as was discussed, an alternate design for the Reference Desks. The disadvantages to any alternate design have been discussed. However, I am not an "idealist". I don't think that we have a duty to provide a special service to unregistered editors (who can always register). (The fact that some unregistered editors know beyond knowledge that their privacy is better protected by editing anonymously rather than by using a pseudonym is not important.) Robert McClenon (talk) 15:42, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Again with the nonsense about "idealists" who think the desks should never be semi-protected. The big problem is not occasional short periods of semi, but too frequent and too long periods, too often combined with semi of the talk page which lakes it hard for IPs to ask questions, and a willful failure to add the appropriate protection template, again obstructing IP editors. DuncanHill (talk) 15:48, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

There are two different positions on semi-protection. There are editors, such as User:DuncanHill and me, who think that the periods of semi-protection have been too long and too frequent, and there are "idealist" editors, such as User:SteveBaker, who think that the Help Desk should never be semi-protected. I agree about the need to add the semi-protection template. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:02, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

As I have commented before - I strongly object to you continually labeling me as an idealist. I'm 'NOT an idealist when it comes to solutions to this problem - a pragmatic solution that stops most of the trolling and thereby makes semi-protection unnecessary is plenty good enough for me. I don't think we can or should even try to block the rules and mechanisms that allow semi-protection. I want to make it so unnecessary that it would never have to be used in practice - even though it would be allowed in theory. SteveBaker (talk) 16:36, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

As to occasionally semi-protecting this talk page, that is occasionally necessary (unless you are an "idealist") because, when the Help Reference Desk is semi-protected, the troll moves on to here. An alternative would be to delete the troll posts and block the troll, but the troll may IP-hop or use throw-away accounts. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:04, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

We need to stop just asking the same question in different ways. There was no good consensus on HOW to semi-protect the reference desk because (I believe) most of us don't want it semi-protected AT ALL. Since (as has been explained) we can't override the wider Wikipedia rules that allow semi-protection with a consensus !vote - an RFC on "Do we want semi-protection at all" isn't going to help. A 100% consensus for "NO! Over my dead body!" wouldn't help us an iota in the face of an admin who is troll-hunting and winds up here in pursuit of his/her prey.

What we NEED is for people to start thinking about other approaches. WP:RD is a wildly different thing than almost any other place within Wikipedia...so we need a new solution. I've proposed a couple of ideas - and, quite honestly, I'm horrified at the lack of discussion about them. We need people to start thinking about ways to separate out question asking from answer giving - to provide a filter between the asking and the publication of the answers.

I don't pretend to have a completely thought-through solution (in part because I'm not down-and-dirty with the inner mechanics of transclusion, bots, sub-pages, reviewed versions and other tools that we have in our toolkit here) - what I do have is a strong belief that if people here put their minds to it - we could come up with a way to cut out 99% of the trolling and thereby render semi-protection unnecessary (except, perhaps in some dire emergency) so we don't have to try to buck the system and prevent it. I'm not talking about a 100% solution - and I'm not talking about demanding changes to the MediaWiki software - neither of those things are possible. I'm looking for a 90% or better solution that works with existing mechanisms and a bit of human input.

So I'm begging, pleading - with people here to use their (clearly gigantic) brains THINK about ways to engineer our way out of this situation.

SteveBaker (talk) 16:29, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

If User:SteveBaker doesn't like being called an "idealist", I am willing to let him provide a different term. However, I disagree with his willingness to describe himself as a "pragmatist". Pragmatists, in my terminology, are those who are willing to work within the existing system, that is, by the use of semi-protection, and who don't see the need for a special approach for the Reference Desks. It may be that the reason why we don't brainstorm about special solutions may be that some of us don't see the need for a redesign. Some of us see semi-protection as a sometimes necessary evil, rather than simply an evil. I disagree with Steve when he states that there was no consensus at the RFC because most of us don't want it semi-protected at all. I for one see occasional semi-protection as unfortunately necessary to control trolling. I do think that the length of semi-protection has been excessive at times, but I don't object to semi-protection. If Steve wants to provide different terms for different views on the Reference Desk, please let me know what he proposes, and I may be willing to use them instead. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:31, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Ah - you don't understand the meaning of the word then. Per Wiktionary:

1. One who acts in a practical or straightforward manner; one who is pragmatic; one who values practicality or pragmatism.
2. One who acts in response to particular situations rather than upon abstract ideals; one who is willing to ignore their ideals to accomplish goals.
3. One who belongs to the philosophic school of pragmatism; one who holds that the meaning of beliefs are the actions they entail, and that the truth of those beliefs consist in the actions they entail successfully leading a believer to their goals.

Meanings (1) and (2) apply here. I'm in favor of practical solutions if theoretically perfect solutions are not available. SteveBaker (talk) 12:31, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree that there are ways in which the Reference Desks are different from the rest of Wikipedia, but I don't think that a new solution is needed. I am aware that some editors think that the Reference Desks are different because they are an outreach to unregistered editors and must serve them almost all the time. I just don't hold that view. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:31, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Which? You don't believe that we represent an outreach to unregistered editors? ...OR... You do believe that - but not that we must serve them almost all the time? SteveBaker (talk) 12:31, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't believe that we have a special obligation to serve the unregistered editors almost all of the time, requiring a special effort. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:27, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

My advice would be that those editors who think that the current situation is unacceptable, and that a new solution is needed, they should start by offering a new RFC, asking whether a new design for the References Desks is needed so as to ensure that unregistered editors are not locked out by semi-protection. While the RFC is running, anyone who thinks that a new design is needed can brainstorm solutions. (I don't think that there will be consensus that a new design is needed, but I may be mistaken.) Draft and publish an RFC as to whether a new solution is needed. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:31, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

I absolutely agree that when we have a formal statement of a new means to solve the problem that we should put it to an RFC...doubly so if there is more than one approach that seems popular - and certainly right before we're ready to turn it on. But "design-by-RFC" doesn't work - and we don't need agreement in order to discuss hypothetical design ideas. We also don't need another month of sitting around waiting for someone to close an RFC when the answer was 100% obvious after the first week. RFC's are slow processes. First we design - THEN we request comments on the proposed design. We're nowhere near that RFC point right now. Right now we need people to concentrate on how we could restructure things (within the current MediaWiki 'tookkit') without having to stop for a month for a !vote every time we have a partial fix or some ideas to kick around. SteveBaker (talk) 12:31, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Your point is well taken. However, it appears that you are not having a whole lot of support about the redesign, probably for three reasons. First, some of us have thought about it and haven't come up with a solution, and don't feel like spending a lot of time on brainstorming. Second, some of us don't think that a new design is needed because some of us don't think that extraordinary steps are needed to minimize the periods of loss of access of the Reference Desk to unregistered editors. Third, some of us have other priorities about what needs to be fixed in Wikipedia. Those are my thoughts as to why you aren't getting a whole lot of discussion. Some of us are not "horrified" as to the lack of discussion because some of us are not "horrified" as to the limitations of the current system (with semi-protection). Robert McClenon (talk) 15:27, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Comment

I don't see any responses other than my own to the comment by User:SteveBaker that he is "horrified" that no one is responding to his request that we "start thinking about other approaches". Does that mean that other editors agree with SteveBaker that there is a serious problem with the Reference Desk requiring a new approach (because semi-protection defeats the mission of the Reference Desk or something), or does that mean that other editors agree with me that there doesn't need to be a new approach (because periodic semi-protection, while undesirable, may be the least bad approach)?

Speaking personally, I agree with you that the status quo is acceptable, if not perfect. There are four little letters and a semi-colon that might explain the lack of response to Mr Baker's proposals. Tevildo (talk) 21:56, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Fixing IW link

I want to fix our interwiki link to the Russian RefDesk. The page we currently point to is closed, but this page [7] is where it now forwards. Actually, the link goes all weird when I paste it, though it does work correctly. The title is supposed to say Википедия:Форум/Вопросы. Weird how it fixes itself for the mouse-over... Anyway, I was going to update our side, but I seem to have gotten lost amongst the transclusions. If someone can find the link, could they also please fix it? :) Matt Deres (talk) 02:24, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

The link is actually at wikidata here wikidata:Q3907025. You should see a 'edit links' link at the bottom of the language link list which will direct you there and you should be able to use you SUL account to edit there. I haven't changed this since I get a conflict with wikidata:Q4026300 which is the help desk. I think some wikis merge these two into one but I presume ru no longer have a reference desk equivalent since the page says (as I think Nimur pointed out on the RD a week or two ago "Questions not related to work on Wikipedia would be deleted. Search Wikipedia, Google or Yandex." I don't know what the standards are for such cases where the page is currently basically a delete/merge page placeholder and the page it links to isn't useful; but the actual target is where the page is likely to be if it's ever recreated. I presume it ultimately either depends on community consensus (which would not just be en) or what the ru wikipedia thinks is best. We can override it if we desire, see Help:Interlanguage links and Wikipedia:Wikidata Nil Einne (talk) 21:46, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

BTW in terms of percent encoding of copied URLs [8] has some admitedly outdated info, also [9]. [10] is a Chromium about it. Nil Einne (talk) 22:06, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

User:Bonupton

Does anyone else think a lot of Bonupton (talk · contribs)'s recent RD contributions qualify as "requests for opinions, predictions or debate"? I don't want to bring it up with them when I'm not sure if others agree. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 05:08, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

They're on the fence, leaning one way or another depending on how you read them. Of the questions asked today on the humanities desk, the first is not a matter of opinion, but the second is either a request for opinion or debate or an anthropological question regarding stated beliefs (if simply and somewhat poorly phrased). Ian.thomson (talk) 05:24, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

The two I looked at [11] [12] are both fine. One is asking what a group believes, one is asking about languages used, and both are answerable with references, no opinion necessary. Recall that our current guidelines ask us to sanction responses before questions, though I've rarely seen that happen. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:37, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

The editor was blocked and is a sock of User:Bowei Huang 2 Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Soft skin#17 March 2016 2. (Whatever others may say, this was expected based on many of the later questions.) Nil Einne (talk) 17:12, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

What do you think?

Check this out:[13][14][15] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:04, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I think that is information that should be removed from the reference desk, regardless of intent. WP:NOTAFORUM and WP:BLP may also apply. SemanticMantis (talk) 22:14, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes. So if that IP-hopping Kansas troll posts again, maybe you could help out and revert it? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:19, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I will remove posts like that if I see them in the future. You may not have noticed but I do remove posts sometimes. What often happens is that I get EC on my removal edit, indicating to me that we have plenty of people willing and able to curb this sort of thing. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:10, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

I think loose lips sink ships, and she sells sea shells by the sea shore. In other words, she's spilling someone's beans for a question that's as hollow as the fake ocean in a conch. And you're echoing and amplifying it, causing me to make a mountain out of a molehill. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:20, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Also, the OP should buy her a sea shell. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:21, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

As far as removing personal info, that would only require excising the name, as the other info can't be associated with the person without that. It's also not an appropriate Ref Desk Q, but that doesn't require removal. It could just be boxed up. StuRat (talk) 00:22, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

It really should have been rev-del'd. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:25, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

And I see that it has been. Bravo. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:42, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

I've no problem with boxing it up, now that we've heard from StuRat. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:29, 23 March 2016 (UTC)