April 6 - May 8, 2005


Request for comments (no, not that kind of RFC)

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If you'd be so kind as to leave your signature somewhere on Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion#Straw poll: are our current deletion tools working well enough? and, if you really feel like wasting time, going over Wikipedia:Countdown deletion, I'd be grateful. (The former is actually more important than the latter, though.)

The reason I'm asking you (and only you, incidentally) is twofold. First, you are as proud a member of the ADW as I am of the AIW. I need the opinions of deletionists especially, because at present it looks like people hold my proposal to be another nefarious inclusionist plot to make matters worse. It's not intended as one, but if it's seen as one, I'd like to know what the problem is and how to fix it.

Second, you're a careful thinker who expresses his thoughts clearly. I'm sure Wikipedia has lots of them, but I'm not personally acquainted with many. I could use your input. JRM 00:49, 2005 Apr 4 (UTC)

speedy deleting "hoax" pages

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Hi, please use extra caution when speedy deleting pages, and remember to check page history. Beware of anons with agendas. -- Curps 17:53, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Anon with agendas? Curps, you fucking asshole. You know full well the genre "Power violence" doesn't actually exist. Stop. Moron. 141.154.234.84 21:09, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It's about Power violence? Sheesh. That article requires citations before it's beyond VfD range, folks. I, personally, am dead set against separate articles for every single micro-genre and, essentially, a listing of one's favorite bands therein. Genres should not get articles unless they are so well known and commonly used as terms that people will know and need an explanation of the term without associating it with its overarching genre. I.e. people need to have heard "Slo-core" so often that they won't know to look in "No Depression" for it or "Country Music." For a micro-genre, one needs to demonstratate that this isn't a neologism, that it is in use, and that it covers a substantially broad group of artworks that are not overlapping with other generic terms. If Power violence meets all that, cool. Otherwise, it really should be on Votes for Deletion, and, when Google doesn't turn up any usage at all, it can well be on Speedy Deletion. Geogre 22:11, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You can take your comment above and cut and paste it into the VfD page, if and when. All of your arguments above are applicable to VfD voting, not at all for speedying. It is not a candidate for speedy deletion, full stop. It's not an obvious hoax; in fact, it almost certainly is not a hoax at all. Do your Google search again: it certainly does turn up usage.
What we have here is an exceptionally obnoxious anon who has repeatedly ignored invitations to take it to VfD, and who has engaged in vandalism, personal attacks, and has lied repeatedly (the latest deletion nominations falsely claimed an April Fool's joke, although the article long predates April 1, as he's perfectly aware, since he first started vandalizing it months ago).
I don't wish to criticize you, but you should have checked the article history to see what this anon has been up to, including anger management issues [1] and the fact that two other admins have also agreed it's not a speedy candidate. You seem to be arguing above that it's OK to speedy a non-hoax non-patent-nonsense article as long as you apply your own one-person VfD vote. It doesn't work that way. Actually, I don't think it did work that way... I think the anon simply tricked you. We need to be careful about POV warriors with agendas... actually stealthily getting an article deleted is the ultimate way to win an edit war. -- Curps 00:58, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

And, of course, you should never have protected the page yourself. Page protection of an article by one of the sides in an edit war is out of bounds. Someone else should have done the protecting. It appears that there have been a few people to do the reversion, so one of them might have been good, since you did the ban on the IP user. As for my comment, it was about VfD. I think the article would be perfect for VfD, as, without citation or verification that this term is in use by anything other than home pages as a term for a type of music, it looks altogether like a hoax. (I have repeated the Google search, this time with "power violence"+music, and I did get hits to the babbling brook that is rock journalism, so I believe that there are people using the term. The question of why I had to repeat a search in the first place is open. It might be my shoddy skills, but it is undoubtedly an article that offers no verification or citation. Read wikipedia:cite your sources for why that's important.) Further, I think it should be listed on VfD (once the protection is off) for consideration on significance. Indeed, I almost think you would be interested in having the matter settled that way. As I also said, I really don't care. I don't think that Wikipedia is the place for anyone to ride hobbyhorses, though, and I loathe seeing people so passionate about their personal record collections that they think it's important to multiply articles on their favorite subject, so this is the type of article that I have great antipathy toward (along with all the minutia from anime, science fiction TV, etc.). In other words, I think the article's author was derelict in the extreme by writing an article with no verification, a very narrow subject, and no context, and I don't think the article's subject matter needs coverage, but I'm not interested in prosecuting it. Therefore, you have no need to worry about what I'm going to do. You also don't need to try to wrest a confession that I was "fooled" or didn't look at the article history. I'm happy to admit that I made a mistake in the speedy, and my comment above was about the article's general worth. I'm not sure what agenda the people who've been slapping delete on the page have, though. Hatred of the topic seems as senseless to me as devotion to it. I still think that might be good to get someone else to issue the page protections and to do the page watching, as I fear that you may be too irritated to have objectivity. Maybe not. Geogre 02:38, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I am not one of the sides in an edit war, I am simply protecting the page from vandalism (and stealthily getting a page improperly deleted is surely the ultimate vandalism). If you check the article history, you can see my sole contribution apart from repeated reversion of improper speedy-deletion notices has been a small bit of wikification (link fixing). This is not my article, I am not the original author, I am not "devoted" to this topic and in fact never heard of it before I intervened to stop this obnoxious vandal.
The anon IP user has not been banned, surely you have noticed him posting on this very talk page today, a few paragraphs above?
I don't object to this article being listed at VfD — I told the vandal to do so months ago, with no response. Go ahead and do so yourself if you wish (no need to wait for protection to be lifted, as an admin you can edit a protected page). Sometimes in the past I myself have nominated an article for VfD that was previously inappropriated marked as speedy; I did not do so in this case precisely because the due-diligence Google searching I did leads me to believe that is indeed a non-hoax minimally encyclopedic topic. I have not fully investigated notability — for purposes of disqualifying it for speedy it was enough to discover that it is not a hoax, nor the neologism of one person or some small local group — but based on what I know so far it is likely that I would vote to oppose deletion.
You of course are free to apply your personal criteria in any Vfd vote, but as you have surely noticed by now, Wikipedia has plenty of anime, sci-fi, music and other types of articles that you declare antipathy for. For my part, I shrug off the existence of such articles... if some sufficiently minimal-size non-local community out there cares about something, then let them have their page about it. The only thing I really object to are vanity pages and attempts by people to use Wikipedia as a platform to publicize their personal projects... the only rule is that the world in general has to take some notice of it first before Wikipedia takes notice of it, and not the other way around.
Anyway, this anon has now got us arguing with each other, and must be chuckling over it. But I think there has been some misunderstanding, and since we have both clarified our positions, I hope things have been cleared up somewhat.
-- Curps 03:32, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Sure. I don't want animosity with anyone, and I meant to criticize the author. After checking the edit history, I knew that wasn't you. Anyway, I thought that you did block the guy. I was looking in the block log earlier today, because I had to block someone (who was using one of those damned NTL IP's, so I couldn't block for more than :15), and I thought I saw that you had slapped this particular guy. Oh well. He certainly has earned it, but I gather that it's a dynamic IP. It looks like 3 different IP's have attempted the speedy delete trick on that article. (Why?) Like I said, I don't like the article, but I had figured that you might VfD it to get a definitive "go away and stop bothering us" to go on the article's talk page so that people don't fall for it again. (I don't always check histories, but I do always see if there is a talk page live with an article, because that will live on after a speedy anyway.) Unsurprisingly, I guess (if you've seen my main page), I'm generally with your opinion on prosecuting junk articles. I no longer pay much attention to them, except when doing New Pages patrol and sometimes clearing CSD (which was my mistake this time). I concentrate on writing the kinds of articles I want to read, instead, and let younger and more energetic folks fight the battles. I've retired to my tent. Geogre 03:39, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I was absolutely sure I'd seen blatant self-promotion speedied in the past. I tried double-checking on WP:SD but I think that that page needs a re-write (it says see WP:DP for deletion policy, but that says that for SD criteria you need to look at what's listed on SD... I noticed something similar with WP:AD - there it recommends that in cases of accuracy dispute, you should call for peer review, but WP:PR says that peer review is only for articles close to featured article status!). I will certainly VfD Mr. Harvey instead then. VivaEmilyDavies 02:43, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hang that, I can't find it any more! I think a rather more aggressive administrator got hold of it? VivaEmilyDavies 02:47, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Oops, bigguns

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Hey, I just e-mailed you a couple of photos of spring flowers (the early ones are just coming out), and then realized I should maybe have resized them first, they were fresh out of the little old digital camera, meaning they were about half a MB each, two together in the same message. If you think they'll explode your dialup, avoid downloading 'em and I'll send you more manageable versions tomorrow. --Bishonen|Talk 23:58, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

If you haven't been round here (perhaps on account of exploded dialup connection? :-() since I wrote the above, I guess you checked your e-mail instead. Could we have a note on how it went, please? --Bishonen|Talk 05:29, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

issues over school articles

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In November 2003, there was a VfD debate over Sunset High School (Portland). The debate was archived under Talk:Sunset High School (Portland). What to do with the article is still being contested and has been recently re-nominated for VfD at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Sunset High School (Portland).

I am writing to you because you have participated in such debates before. There still does not exist a wikipedia policy (as far as i can tell) over what to do in regards to articles about specific U.S. public school. My hope is that a real consensus can come out of the debate, and a real policy can take shape. Take part if you are so willing. Kingturtle 02:21, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Chen Deming

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new stuff's added in Chen Deming, although still a stub, more will be added later. No need to delete. Colipon+(T) 05:02, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Maybe Katie

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Salve, Geogre!
We haven't communicated in a while and I hope this message find you well. Lately I've not fared well with my FAC nominees, some failing to win even one support vote. I wonder if you would look at Katie Holmes (even if it is a bit out of your usual ambit) and its nominationhere and offer your comments. PedanticallySpeaking 15:54, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)

All those Roberts

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Can we talk about that list you copied onto Robert? I just don't see the reference value of lists of people named "Robert"? ---Isaac R 21:05, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

My mistake. I misread the change list. Real culprit is Marksie531. ---Isaac R 23:39, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Speedy deleting Mary Ramsey

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Why did you speedily delete Mary Ramsey? In your comment, you said that it lacked a subject to the sentence, but you could have easily added it. Just by looking at the pages it linked to, I made the article into a stub. I think a stub is better than nothing. LDan 02:43, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

On line?

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How about getting offline already so a person has a chance to phone? Or onto IRC?--Bishonen | talk 21:10, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

And there I was looking for you on IRC. :-( Geogre 21:15, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Comment on the RfA

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"(But remembering someone else's grudge only sustains it.)"

Is this in reference to how I responded to Everyking's vote? JRM · Talk 23:37, 2005 May 1 (UTC)

I've answered you on my talk page, in order to keep the discussion in one piece. JRM · Talk 07:46, 2005 May 2 (UTC)

Armory plated

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Pesumably Pound used long hall flights? I'll see what, if anything, I can dig up. Thanks for catching the typos and for prodding me to get a little NPOV about late Victorian versifiers; with the sole exception of Yeats, poetry in English had all but died. I'll leave it on PR for now.

Nice to see Bish marching on to glory on RfA. What will she do with these strange new powers? I wish I had been as rude as you were to the objector, but I'm trying to be nice to people after last week's accusation of rudeness from someone whose idea I praised! Filiocht | Blarneyman 15:16, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

When Nothing Is Better Than Something...

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Hi Geogre, Erin here. We haven't come accross each other in editing, but I saw something you wrote on user Bishonen's page, which has brought me here. I'm trying to find out if there is a wikipedian out there who may actually agree that what I'm trying to achieve is a good thing. Basically, I dislike the fact that every time I click "Random page" I come up with "Random @x!*". If you look at featured articles you will note that they are very, very big! I think they should be the standard that all articles aim to emulate. I know many won't ever, and still deserve to be here. My aim is, to find little articles that have a main unifying topic I.e albums by band X. At the moment, every single album has it's own article. If a band only came out with 5 albums, and there isn't much to say on the band, why can't all the information be on the one article under the name of the band? It can always be broken up at a later date if it becomes too large. But that means for now, there is one good, informative, organised, good sized article instead of 5 stubs. And all the individual articles can just be redirected there, so the information is never lost, and is easily un-done. Anyway, I won't say more for now, this is getting long. Please see this article I've worked on my version compared to it's original state: Mark Garcia version, which it's just been reverted back to. I'm having trouble convincing the original editor to reason with me. Note the talk page. Anyway, sorry if I've troubled you. I would really appreciate your view, even if it's to disagre with me. --Silversmith 16:50, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

  • Thanks so much for your response and help. It's nice to know I'm not the only one with such views here. I just noticed that you're an admin. Mike has broken the 3RR, it was listed hours ago, is there any chance you could look at that? Here it is. Thanks again, --Silversmith 21:58, 7 May 2005 (UTC)


Quelle wit!

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"All seems infected that the infected spy As all seems yellow to the jaundiced eye."

Nice! I wished I had paid more attention to poetry when young it would be such an asset now in my advanced and declining years Giano | talk 22:08, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Oh, hey, that was you, Geogre? Nice indeed, thank you! It wasn't signed, but I should have figured. Of course.--Bishonen | talk 22:56, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I didn't want to sign it, figuring that I was sick of shoving peanuts between the bars of his cage and thereby giving him yet another excuse to fling offal, but when he accused Giano of not showing wikilove, of all things, I simply couldn't resist quoting two of my favorite lines from Essay on Criticism. That guy had a way with words that few have had before or since. Geogre 02:12, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

RfA reasoning

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Hi Geogre: Please could you explain how you knew the basis of the two oppose votes that you received if the voters refused to explain. Enquiring minds need to know ... --Theo (Talk) 14:55, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Well, Kate was eventually drawn out to say that she had had a conversation on IRC with me that indicated that I was against splitting articles as often as (s)he did, and she didn't want anyone to have the impression of authority who had such views. (No, I think this is a fair summary.) The one who would say nothing was Blankfaze. Turns out, someone else, who I didn't know, asked him on his talk page why he opposed, since he didn't know me and I looked solid. Blankfaze said that he thought that everything I had done had been good stuff, but he just had a feeling that in the future I would be "dangerous." This is all ancient history, nearly a year old by now, but both oppose votes came from 2-3 times that I had been on IRC. I had argued with Kate that things should not be split off if they will not be sought. E.g. you shouldn't write an article about an EP that a minor band made, if no one will have heard of it or want to know about it; it makes more sense to discuss that in the band's article (see above for an ironic instance of this same issue coming back alive). Well, Kate had written individual articles about her/his favorite club performers and was outraged that someone would oppose that kind of thing. As for Blankfaze, I haven't a clue. He never would be more specific than thinking that I might be "dangerous" at some unspecified time in the future, so no one could figure out what that was about, least of all me, but he had only ever encountered me on IRC. I hope those inquiring minds are sated now. Geogre 18:11, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
Sated, indeed. Thank you. --Theo (Talk) 19:23, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Hi. I saw you "speedy" deleted my article Kennedy Fried Chicken with no explanation but "Wow, what trivia! Non-encyclopedic, as it is no more than a statement of a negative." As far as I can tell, that's not a reason for deletion according to the "speedy" delete criteria, so I've rewritten the article and put it back up.

Who are you to judge what is and isn't "trivia," anyhow? You've obviously never lived in NYC, or at least not lived here long enough to have heard of Kennedy Fried Chicken. The existence of the chain, and its relationship to the "real" KFC, is certainly more significant than a lot of the other trivia on this website. Maybe if you're so confident it's "trivia" you wouldn't mind putting it to a vote next time? You know, as outlined in those pesky RULES.

On an unrelated note, both the articles I wrote today disappeared with NO explanation other than "NONSENSE," which is rather insulting (and a lie--it's not like I was writing gibberish). You better hope your condescending attitude doesn't drive away other potential Wikipedians.