User talk:BrownHairedGirl/Archive/Archive 065

click here to leave a new message for BrownHairedGirl
BrownHairedGirl's archives
+ Cumulative index

This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on my current talk page

August Editathons at Women in Red

Women in Red | August 2021, Volume 7, Issue 8, Numbers 184, 188, 204, 205, 206, 207 Online events: New: Indigenous women | Women's leadership & empowerment Contest (Jul/Aug/Sep): Latin America contest Continuing: Olympic & Paralympic Games | Women's rights | #1day1woman See also: Interwiki Women Collaboration Other ways to participate: Join the conversations on our talkpage. Help plan and coordinate future events. Become a member. You can always opt-out of notifications. Follow us on social media: Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 22:24, 23 July 2021 (UTC) via MassMessaging

The Signpost: 25 July 2021

• News and notes: Wikimania and a million other news stories

• Special report: Hardball in Hong Kong

• In the media: Larry is at it again

• Board of Trustees candidates: See the candidates

• Recent research: Gender bias and statistical fallacies, disinformation and mutual intelligibility

• Traffic report: Football, tennis and marveling at Loki

• News from the WMF: Uncapping our growth potential – interview with James Baldwin, Finance and Administration Department

• Humour: A little verse

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:10, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Systemic bias

I have been doing a lot of WP:AWB-driven list-making, to feed Citation bot with articles with bare URLs. (It makes useful progress, with about 20% of articles wholly cleared of bare URLs on first pass, and more on subsequent passes).

This morning's lists were of biographies.

• People born in the 1940s to 1990s: 862,221 articles
• All biogs of sportspeople by nationality and sport: 577,154

I then intersected the two:

• Sportspeople born in the 1940s to 1990s: 424,965 articles
• Non-sports people born in the 1940s to 1990s: 437,256 articles

So 49.28% of our biogs which specify a date of birth in the last 6 decades of the 20th century are of sportspeople. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:03, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

• Interesting, thanks. I suspect that it's usually easy to find an exact date of birth for a sportsperson from sports stats databases, and often much less easy for an artist, musician, writer, activist, politician etc. So there may not be quite such a strong systemic bias (she says, optimistically!). A lot of interesting people will be in the "Date of birth missing/unknown" categories. Perhaps. PamD 15:56, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

  Thanks, @PamD.

  After doing the checks above, I then checked those with no date of birth. Adding Category:Year of birth missing + Category:Year of birth unknown +Category:Year of birth uncertain gave me a total of 52,249 articles with d.o.b. unspecified ... of which 5,844 are sportspeople.

  So 11.1% of biogs with d.o.b. unspecified are sportspeople.

  That suggests that you may be right that sportspeople have a lower incidence of unknown d.o.b, but a direct comparison is also a invalid because d.o.b. unspecified includes people from several millennia BC up to the present, whereas my initial comparison was only part of the 20th-century.

  The incidence of d.o.b. unspecified is low enough that I don't think it has much impact on my initial figure of ~49% of biogs of people born 1940–99 are sportspeople.. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:24, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

• Thanks for these, fascinating numbers! Sadly not unexpected. Johnbod (talk) 22:59, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

  Thanks, @Johnbod. To be honest, I was torn between unsurprised horror at the almost-half figure, and mild relief that it was slightly less than half.

  However, I think that if birth dates were more recent (say 1970s to 1990s), the sportspeople would be in a majority --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:04, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

  Maybe, but you might have a stronger showing from "arts and entertainment" (broadly construed), thanks to the proliferation of media. Of course, gender breakdowns would be interesting..... I'm not aware of a replacement for the Demelzeh (?) stats, which is a great pity. Johnbod (talk) 23:09, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

  Oops, apparently not: "we have a whole set of reliable statistics available through Humaniki, Denelezh and WDCM." - WiR talk today. Johnbod (talk) 12:38, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

  @Johnbod: i don't have the energy to run tests for the arts, but I did break the sportspeople down by decade:

  • 1940s births: Total 126,666. Sportspeople 31,529 (24.9%)
  • 1950s births: Total 139,239. Sportspeople 37,545 (27.0%)
  • 1960s births: Total 145,314. Sportspeople 53,516 (36.8%)
  • 1970s births: Total 147,489. Sportspeople 73,375 (49.7%)
  • 1980s births: Total 167,725. Sportspeople 115,590 (68.9%)
  • 1990s births: Total 136,042. Sportspeople 113,366 (83.3%)

  To some extent, that distribution reflects the fact that most sportspeople peak in their 20s and fade towards retirement in their 30s. By contrast, careers in non-physical occupations usually peak later in life, so notability comes at a later age.

  But even so, 83% sportspeople in the 1990s is wildly excessive. . --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:29, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

  Yes indeed - many thanks. Johnbod (talk) 12:38, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

• Btw, I've been mentioning and linking this at User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Gender_gap:_what_should_our_percentage_of_articles_about_women_be?, and the discussion of the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Women_in_Red#WIR_on_Jimbo's_user_talk_page. Hope you don't mind. Johnbod (talk) 14:40, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

  Many thanks, @Johnbod! It's good to see the data getting a wider audience. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:44, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks to a link from Johnbod, I was able to see these interesting analyses. I don't know if this is a one-off attempt to put things in perspective or if you have undertaken similar breakdowns in connection with other occupations. In any case, if you have time, I think it would be useful to post a short summary of your findings on the Women in Red talk page.--Ipigott (talk) 16:25, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks,@Ipigott. Unfortunately, this data is just a one-off byproduct of other work, and I have nothing more to add.

For the last two months I have been working almost exclusively on cleaning up bare URL references, which are subject to WP:LINKROT. For the last few weeks, my method has been to use https://petscan.wmflabs.org to make huge lists of hundreds of thousands of articles, and then use WP:AWB to scan them for bare links. Then I feed the lists of articles-with-bare-URL-refs into Citation bot, which for technical reasons only does a randomly through job, so it takes multiple passes of the list to get good results. See e.g. the bot's current edits to my partial list of German topics with bare URL refs.

(There is a Women-in-Red specific aspect to this which I will post about in the next few days).

Anyway, yesterday I decided to make a list solely of biographies of people who have been active in my lifetime, so I made a list of people born in the 1930s to 1990s. I didn't want to waste time on the sportspeople — because they are not my area of interest and this is my volunteered time and the huge number of sportspeople would make the job much bigger — so to eliminate the sportspeople I just used Petscan to make a list of sportspeople. Then I used AWB's list comparison tool to compare the two lists.

As I saved the list of non-sportspeople, I looked at the ratios and thought that the numbers deserved some attention, so I left a note on my talk. Then in response to Johnbod's figures I did another hour's work this morning to break them down a bit.

This method isn't great for generating sophisticated stats, because it relies on the en.wp category system which in many cases is heavily polluted. I have high confidence that the set of sportspeople above is relatively clean, but for example the women categories are heavily polluted.

So while I am open to request for more such data, I may have to decline some examples (or maybe most of them) unless the relevant category trees look clean. In general, Wikidata is better venue for such searches, but I have never really mastered its powerful search tools.

Hope this helps a bit. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:01, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

• Thanks for these clarifications. Am I right in thinking that the 862,221 articles on people with a d.o.b. born 1940s to 1990s are all the articles for this period (and not just those with bare URLS)? Ditto for sportspeople and the intersections? And in your later figures, e.g. for 1990s births, do sportspeople really represent 83.3% of all biographies with d.o.b. in the 1990s? From the profession/occupation section of WDCM: Biases, it certainly looks if sports (e.g. assocation football) are responsible for the largest discrepencies between male and female but not to the extent you have found. On the other hand, the Denelezh stats by year of birth actually indicate that for 1990 to 1999, 28.7% of bios in all language versions of Wikipedia were on women and Humaniki shows that ca. 24% of the bios in the English Wikipedia for the 1990s were on women. Maybe one of our Wikidata experts Tagishsimon or MarioGom could take a look at your findings and possibly undertake further pertinent queries on Wikidata.--Ipigott (talk) 09:41, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

  @Ipigott: Thanks for checking. It's good to be clear what we are talking about, so:

  • All the figures I have produced in this section are before any checking for bare links or other attributes. They are simply the set of all articles in these categories", and then intersected with another category-based set. (These counts are of the input which I feed into into AWB's scanning, where the bare URLs are checked.None of the output figures are mentioned here).
  • The births-by-time categories are very clean, i.e. they do not have any extraneous sub-categories.
  • My list of sportspeople consists from Category:Sportspeople+subcategories-to-a-depth-of-about-7. I had not checked that category tree for leakage, but assumed from experience that it was fairly clean.
    In response to your questions, I just ran https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?psid=19633227, which produces a list of the categories where we used to make my list of articles on sportspeople. The first 10,000 results look very clean; the only glitch is that a lot of racehorses are included because Category:Individual animals in sport is a subcat of Category:Sports competitors, but that doesn't matter because the horses don't intersect with the births-by-time categories.
    If you want to do a more thorough check of all 124387 categories, open https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?psid=19633227 query, go the "output" tab, and in the first line (format) select "plain text", then press the "Do it!" button. I find that a few quick scans of such a set usually reveals any major glitches.

  However, Wikidata searches are much more accurate than this crude method, so please take my figures as rough data to be used as a pointer for more rigorous checking. It would be great if there are other editors wiling and able to do that more rigorous work.

  Note too that my figures above do not include anything on women, because Category:Women+sub-categories are heavily-polluted. With some crude filtering and selectivity I managed to do a Petscan search for women which is clean enough to use for bare-URL checking, because some straying in that list just means that my cleanup has wider scope; but I wouldn't want to cite its counts as even rough evidence of anything.

  Hope that helps. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:28, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

• Just to warm up, I have gathered Wikidata statistics on the female/male ratio per decade, and plotted the series for all biographies and all biographies excluding association football players. Results are... interesting. See them at the bottom of [1]. For date of birth between 1970 and 2000 there is a wild difference in the ratio depending of whether association football players are included or not.

  Maybe there's some venue, at Women in Red or elsewhere, where we can share some ideas about things to look for, and then share results? MarioGom (talk) 09:29, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

The last big discussion there was about exactly 2 years ago at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Archive_67#Sports,_sports,_sports_(Jun-Jul_2019), which covered all sports, & I think really brought that issue to the fore, where it should remain. Johnbod (talk) 14:55, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

@Johnbod, MarioGom, and Ipigott: it seems to me that after so many discussions of the problem, it has been well-described. There are plenty of academic papers to support the view that that there is a structural problem, and now Wikidata allow some shocking patterns to be set out with high accuracy by those such such as MarioGom who have the relevant technical skills and are kind enough to use them.

(BTW, Mario, sorry that in my heat-melted addlement I didnt thank you for your post above: that info is very valuable, and you clearly put a lot of work into it).

So I mulled over this, I recalled Marx's 1845 comment “Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world; the point is to change it.”

It seems to me that those of us concerned about en.wp's capture by a narrow group are at a similar point. The problem has been well-analysed ... and what we now need to focus on is how to change it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:18, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I see. Thanks for the pointers to previous discussions. So it's a well-known issue. I didn't know about this gap in sports and football before, since these fall way out of my area of interest. I would be interested in tracking ratios of non-sports and sports, in addition to the global ratio. It seems we might be progressing much faster on non-sports than what some of us perceived. It's not like this will make much of a difference objectively in our efforts, but it might be encouraging for those of us working on it. I see it like the gender imbalance per country statistics, where you have a better perception of your local impact in reducing bias for a given country, even when it's negligible in the global statistics. MarioGom (talk) 15:46, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Various points:

• So far the academic studies have not afaik explored the impact of sports people on the gender gap at all - I wish someone would. That goes for media coverage too.
• I sense, from many straws in the wind, that general annoyance in the community with the masses of sports stubs, & the blatent by-passing of the GNG, is reaching some sort of climax, and the sports defenders may not be able to resist for ever.
• The impact of sports numbers on the content gender gap is a partial explanation of the gap, in fact it explains a large part of it. But many people do not want the gap to be explained, preferring the undoubted impact that the raw (almost) 19% of bios figure has on people who have not examined the problem carefully (ie almost everyone).

Johnbod (talk) 15:55, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

More data

@JohnBod, Ipigott, and PamD:: some fresh numbers, if they is of interest.

Thanks to some kind help from @MarioGom, I have advanced a little in my use of Wikidata (roughly from idiot grade to newbie), and now have a better count of the number of en.wp articles on women. This data is from a list of sportspeople using categories, and a list of women using Wikidata:

All women	309,187
Sportswomen	82,996	26.8%
Non-sports women	226,191	73.2%

--BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:58, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Bottom right figure should be 73.2 I think? PamD 20:47, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Ooops! Yes, it should. Now fixed. Thanks again, PamD. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:50, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, BHG. Very interesting. So for those who can't remember figures, we could simply say that in the English version of Wikipedia over a quarter of the women covered are sportspeople. Perhaps now you could put together a summary of your findings, together with some of the data presented by MarioGom and post it on the Women in Red talk page. It might lead to a better appreciation of how women's coverage is progressing while encouraging initiatives to reduce the gender bias on how articles about sportspeople are accepted or rejected.--Ipigott (talk) 08:19, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Tagging bare links

I have looked at a few articles (basically they were later additions to articles I had improved to GA and watchlisted, but not kept on top of) and fixed up some of the references. I agree that refFill (and IABot) would improve the encyclopedia better, as it would allow readers to more easily verify the text given, where as a note saying "this is a bare URL" doesn't indicate how it might be fixed.

I appreciate The Rambling Man is not everyone's cup of tea, but if we can't discuss it quietly here, it might have to go to a noticeboard, which I don't think any of us want. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 15:40, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

@Ritchie333: I am v happy to discuss here with editors who AGF, as you have done.

Obviously, the actual fix is better than tagging. The point of tagging is to identify articles where the fix is needed, and with these inline tags to also identify where in the article the fix is needed. So this tagging run is a step towards the fix.

As I noted above, I can tag articles 50–100 times faster than I can fix the refs, so the tagging gets us closer to a solution faster, by alerting more editors to fixes needed. That's the same principle as any other use of cleanup tags.

And you are factually wrong to say that as a note saying "this is a bare URL" doesn't indicate how it might be fixed. See e.g. my edit[2] to Birmingham Boys; the tag generates a linked note after the ref of the form '[bare url]', which links to Wikipedia:Bare URLs. The explanations are there. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:02, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Note too that the opening worlds of the edit summary used in all of these edits is WP:Link rot, which also explains the problems. I am surprised that you seem to have missed both of these indicators. When I do a big AWB run, I take care to try to make the edit summary as helpful as possible within the constraints of the character limits for AWB edit summaries. In this case, I think that WP:Link rot: tag bare link references with {{Bare URL inline}} is very informative, but of course I am open to suggestions. Do you want to suggest ways of improving these edit summaries? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:14, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

High-volume tagging of bare links needs to have consensus because there are millions of such cases. In fact there is already a bot that does the tagging : Template:Cleanup_bare_URLs#On-demand_search_and_tag - which anyone can run, and for which I got consensus to deploy. It's designed so you can't add too many before fixing them first. Precisely for this reason, adding tons of these tags creates unmanageable large tracking categories. This is a special case due to the sheer volume and commonality of bare links. It is controversial high-volume auto-tagging vs. fixing. -- GreenC 18:29, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Comment by User:The Rambling Man deleted. He had been asked not to reply further, but repeatedly ignored my requests.

@GreenC: I am not aware of any other cleanup tag where application of the tag is throttled to the rate of fixing. There are several other very widely used cleanup tags, as can be seen e.g. at Category:All articles with unsourced statements and Category:Articles needing additional references.

Please can you point me to any RFC which established a consensus to throttle this one? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:38, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Comment by User:The Rambling Man deleted. He had been asked not to reply further, but repeatedly ignored my requests.

Spree??? Sheesh, TRM, try a little AGF. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:46, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Comment by User:The Rambling Man deleted. He had been asked not to reply further, but repeatedly ignored my requests.

PS I don't see any evidence to support the assertion that there are millions of such cases. My scans before tagging have been finding that about 10% of the articles scanned have bare URLs. It varies from set to set, but 10% seems to be about average, and that's about the same rate as the categories I mentioned above. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:44, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Found my way here from WT:ReFill, and in these last two sections, I dont think it has actually been clearly stated to BrownHairedGirl that the true concern appears to be stemming from the tag making it more difficult to fix the bare url problem. (Per my understanding at the ReFill talk page at least.) Posts seem to focus on edit frequency or the how as opposed to the technical problem being introduced without an identified root cause at the moment. -2pou (talk) 18:50, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Comment by User:The Rambling Man deleted. He had been asked not to reply further, but repeatedly ignored my requests.

@The Rambling Man: not so. You repeatedly assumed that I was acting in bad faith. You didn't take the opportunity to strike your slurs and to AGF, and you ignored my request to stop posting here.

Your confrontational approach is not helping build a consensus. So for the third time of asking, please stop posting here, --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:08, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

@2pou: Thanks for your comments.

However, I don't believe that the the tag making it more difficult to fix the bare url problem. In my usage, I find that reFill very rarely produces a result that needs no further tweaking, so manual editing is needed. Since the wikicode has to be edited anyway, it's trivial issue to remove the tag.

And we really shouldn't be letting a broken tool impede identifying a problem. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:16, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

• AWB is a WP:SEMIAUTOMATED (assisted editing) tool. "Contributors intending to make a large number of assisted edits are advised to first ensure that there is a clear consensus that such edits are desired." It goes on to say "semi-automated processes that operate at higher speeds, with a higher volume of edits, or with less human involvement are more likely to be treated as bots. If there is any doubt, you should make an approval request." - reports can be made to Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard. The combination of the controversy, preexisting similar tool that had to go through BRFA, and high volume editing, make a case that at a minimum it should stop right away until discussions are worked out. -- GreenC 18:52, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

  @GreenC: OK, with regret, I will stop this run.

  I think it's a great pity. The tagging I did at the end of last month has been very useful to me in identifying articles which need attention. I use the cleanup tags in conjunction with Petscan to clear sets of similar articles. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:01, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

  Comment by User:The Rambling Man deleted. He had been asked not to reply further, but repeatedly ignored my requests.

  Thank you, BrownHairedGirl. You are a good trusted editor doing what you think is best/right. One idea, without knowing your work flow, is run in small batches, say 20 articles tagging then soon after 20 articles Petscan. -- GreenC 19:14, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

  @GreenC: doing small batches like that would entirely defeat the object of the exercise :(

  1. Tagging lots of articles allows lots of editors to fix any that fall within their area of interest. That massively improves the cleanup rate vs leaving editors to manually scan articles. It also increases the likelihood the fixes will be done by editors who know the topic area and the sources, rather than by script jockeys who save whatever junk reFill emits (it's average output is mediocre, and in a significant minority of cases its output is abysmal. It' still a valuable tool, but as its own guidance says, it needs to be used with care).
  2. Tagging lots of articles allows cleanup to be done by selecting sets using Petscan, intersecting categories with cleanup tags. That means that a lot of work can be recycled, e.g. the article names and location of newspapers, and often complete references.
     Doing small batches break that, because instead of starting with all the articles under a particular WikiProject, I'd need to wade through squillions of categories one at a time. That would be pointless overhead.

  Anyway, I now face a lot bureaucracy before I could resume. Given that you have not even acknowledged my comparison above with other cleanup categories, it looks like an uphill battle to even establish why you adopt this strange 20-at-a-time stance.

  So maybe I won't bother doing a BRFA. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:33, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Just another data point, I don't understand why Ian Pattison was tagged as having bare URLs. Unless I'm missing something obvious (always possible), I don't think the article has any. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:31, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

@Ritchie333: The regex which identifies bare links is very simple and reliable. It's not possible for it to generate false positives.

In this case, just scroll to the bottom of that diff you posted[3], and you'll see a bare link to https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000skd9.

You removed the bare link a few minutes ago, in this edit.[4] --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:38, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

As suggested, I was missing something obvious :-) Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:39, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:2019 European Parliament election results templates

A tag has been placed on Category:2019 European Parliament election results templates indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself. WikiCleanerMan (talk) 19:49, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

User:BrownHairedGirl/biogdashes.js

Can you please fix your script so it doesn't cause errors in the time zones of places. It changes −04:00 to − 04:00 and the link UTC−04:00 becomes UTC− 04:00. Thanks. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 23:26, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

@CambridgeBayWeather: sorry, but probably not gonna be fixed, 'cos the regex for that sort of check would slow the script massively. but I will try to keep an eye out for that in future. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:30, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. That's just as good. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 23:33, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

≥ 1000 pageviews

I have taken your advice, and my latest run consists only of articles with ≥ 1000 pageviews a day. Abductive (reasoning) 01:13, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2021).

Administrator changes

BusterD

Kees08 • Nickshanks • Protonk • Schissel • Ultraexactzz • Wknight94

CheckUser changes

TheresNoTime

Oversighter changes

TheresNoTime

ST47

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC is open to add a delay of one week from nomination to deletion for G13 speedy deletions.

Technical news

• Last week all wikis were very slow or not accessible for 30 minutes. This was due to server lag caused by regenerating dynamic lists on the Russian Wikinews after a large bulk import. (T287380)

Arbitration

• Following an amendment request, the committee has clarified that the Talk page exception to the 500/30 rule in remedy 5 of the Palestine-Israel articles 4 case does not apply to requested move discussions.

Miscellaneous

• You can vote for candidates in the 2021 Board of Trustees elections from 4 August to 17 August. Four community elected seats are up for election.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:17, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Helpdesk send me here

Greetings BrownHairedGirl,
I've opened a discussion on Category talk:Establishments about the suitability of having a country's TV series debuts categorised under that country's esablishments. I was told by the helpdesk (see here) to do that. I was also told that you were the editor who set up the relevant categories and templates, and I should let you know about this. If it's true you set this up I'd love to hear your opinion on this. And, assuming both you and the talkpage discussion agree with me, I would also love it if you could fix it because this goes way beyond my wiki-editing skills. Regards, --Dutchy45 (talk) 20:45, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Many thanks for the notification, @Dutchy45. I strongly disagree that any "fix" is needed, and I have explained my reasoning in the discussion which you started at Category talk:Establishments#Exclude_TV_series_debuts_from_Establishments_in_countryname. It would be helpful if you would also comment there to explain why you think a "fix" is needed, and what fix" you believe should be applied. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:02, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

New BHGbot bot proposal re Template:Bare URL inline

See Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/BHGbot 8

Function

• remove all uses of {{Bare URL inline}} from a page, and add {{Cleanup bare URLs}} unless it is already present. This is because both User:Citation bot and WP:reFill skip bare URLs tagged with {{Bare URL inline}}. So the inline tag identifies bare URLs, but impedes a fix. The banner tag {{Cleanup bare URLs}} does not impede the tools.

Background

• The primary reason for creating this bot is to cleanup after myself. The TLDR is that while doing mass-tagging with {{Cleanup bare URLs}}, I responded to concerns about its intrusiveness by switching to applying {{Bare URL inline}}. Problems with that tag were drawn to my attention only after over 10,000 pages had been tagged.

Any comments on the bot should be made at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/BHGbot 8. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:31, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

Container Category ?

What is a container category? Is it a category that only has other categories in it? If so, containerizing the category of political prisoners makes the question of Bobby Sands become Someone Else's Problem, which renders it almost invisible. I had been about to refer to containerizing political prisoners, but they are already in containers, and there is always controversy about whether to de-containerize them. A category for persons on lists of political prisoners is a different matter, but that isn't the question at DRV. I personally would like to make the question of whether someone is a political prisoner orthogonal from whether they should be imprisoned, but that isn't the question at DRV. Also, a category with some sort of fuzzy logic would be useful, but that isn't the question at DRV. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:44, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

A truck for you

	Keep on trucking
	DLTBGYD! DuncanHill (talk) 01:09, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

• Many thanks, @DuncanHill. I needed that right now! --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:13, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Disruptive comments at BRFA

Could you please stop this sort of stuff? If you have an issue with another editor, you know where to take it up. ^{!ɘM γɿɘυϘ}⅃ϘƧ 00:42, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

• @SQL: I put a lot of work into making a BRFA in good faith, and has chosen to use it as a venue for pointless sniping. Please don't blame me for being sniped at by a troll. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:45, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

  I can tell that you did, and I can understand being frustrated. All I'm asking is that you please take those issues to the correct venue. It's really not related to the BRFA, and isn't helpful to any of us. ^{!ɘM γɿɘυϘ}⅃ϘƧ 00:51, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

  Again, SQL, I only agree that I would be delighted for this stop, and suggest that you if you want it to stop, then the only way to do so is to ask the troll to stop disrupting the BRFA with his trolling. At the end of June, that editor spent a whole day being a boorish bully trying to stoke conflict rather than problem-solving. I am sick and tired of his malicious trolling, so he is banned from my talk ... and now that he is trolling the BRFA I am very displeased that you have come here twice to reproach me rather than the troll. Your approach is completely back-to-front. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:02, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

  I collapsed the conversation, and left a note indicating to both parties that BRFA isn't the right place for your argument. The Rambling Man even indicated that they understood. I'm here now because you decided to continue. ^{!ɘM γɿɘυϘ}⅃ϘƧ 01:11, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

  @SQL: you are taking a bizarrely selective view of the history. I collapsed it two days ago[5], but TRM uncollapsed it[6], and trolled again.[7]
  So I ask again: please direct your reproaches to the boorish (his own term) troll, rather than to the person who he trolled at huge length on 30 June, and who he has now decided to troll again at BRFA. Your posts here amount to harassment and victimisation, and I am sick of it. Please change tack before I have to escalate. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:00, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

  You need to rescind your accusation of harassment immediately. I have done no such thing. ^{!ɘM γɿɘυϘ}⅃ϘƧ 02:03, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

  Retract? No way.

  I stand by my statement that you have been engaged in harassment and victimisation, and I am now even more sick of it.

  I have been trolled at length by a notorious troll, and you have bizarrely chosen to reproach me but not the troll. You ignored the diffs, and are now taking offence at being called out. Now go away from my talk and stop wasting my time and stop being a troll-enabler. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:09, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

  PS @SQL: just for the record, here again is the diff of TRM's first post to the BRFA: [8]. Note that it does not in any way address the desirability of the bot or issues about its function. TRM's comment is pure snark, i.e. classic trolling. Coming to the BRFA for the sole purpose of malevolent trolling is classic WP:BATTLEGROUND conduct, designed to re-stoke a conflict. I have no idea why you choose not to reproach TRM for that disruption, but your choice instead to repeatedly reproach me is both bizarre and indefensible. I cannot know your motivation and I will not try to guess, but the effect of your actions has been to be a force-multiplier for a troll. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:47, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

  I have no intention to communicate with you further until you retract the personal attack that you made against me, please stop pinging me. ^{!ɘM γɿɘυϘ}⅃ϘƧ 02:57, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

  As above, there was no personal attack, and there will no retraction.

  Your response to overt trolling of me was to reproach me but not the troll, so I repeat: you have been engaged in harassment and victimisation and in enabling a troll.

  If any retraction is due here, it is by you ... but it seems clear that will not be forthcoming. Your choice not to communicate further is a blessed relief after your terrible behaviour, so please make your non-communication permanent until you repent of being a force-multiplier for a troll. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:05, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

ANI report about your personal attacks

I am sorry but I don't like being called a troll. I asked the community to review your recent comments: [9]. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 15:45, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Query

Hello, again, BHG,

Another category question. I was going through some maintenance categories and came across Category:Dibba Al-Fujairah Club which is a category redirect to an article. I didn't think this was supposed to happen, at least I've never seen it before. But when I went into the recent page history, it looks like the page has existed like this for a while. Should I leave it be, nominate it for CFD or do something else with it? Thank you! Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:18, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) @Liz: Looks as if it should redirect to Category:Dibba FC? But the botched move was the work of a blocked sockpuppet. PamD 06:56, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, PamD. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:50, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Block

I've said elsewhere I think the block was stupid and cruel. Perhaps best to sit it out and let some of the rest of us take the heat for a bit. You are valued. DuncanHill (talk) 22:58, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Deleted Potential RfA

Hi BHG. As you've not transcluded the RfA in nearly a year, and given recent events, I've boldly deleted Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/BrownHairedGirl 2. If you disagree, I'd be happy to undelete, though I'm sure the nominations will need updating. Worm^TT(talk) 08:56, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

@Worm That Turned: Thanks. I had already decided not to proceed with another RFA, so there was no no point in keeping it or keeping the bile which my stalker had added to the page history. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:12, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

August 2021

You have been blocked from editing for a period of 1 week for personal attacks and major breaches of civility. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions.

If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please read the guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text below the block notice on your talk page: .  GeneralNotability (talk) 22:45, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who accepted the request.

BrownHairedGirl/Archive (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

---

Request reason:

GeneralNotability, you made it explicitly clear at ANI[10] that you were planning to block me because of my description of the vindictive conduct of an editor who has been waging a long-term vendetta against me and others, and has done so for years. In this case, that editor broke an IBAN against me on at least half-a-dozen occasions within 24 hours, and stoked two other editors to give me grief. My account of that editor's conduct was endorsed[11] in the same ANI section by another of the victims of the vendetta-man.
I have spent most of the last 24 hours dealing with the fallout from Chris.sherlock's decision to reactivate his vendetta, and I am exhausted. Your decision to punish me for describing what has been done is pure victimisation, and a de facto vindication of Chris.sherlock's strategy. Shame on you. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:14, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Accept reason:

This block is premature. Discussion about BHG is ongoing at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Piotrus'_concerns_about_User:BrownHairedGirl is ongoing & incomplete. Let's finish the discussion there before passing judgment. -- llywrch (talk) 00:01, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

@GeneralNotability: I have a lot of respect for your work here, but I think you got this one wrong. HighInBC ^{Need help? Just ask.} 23:26, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

I don't agree with a week either but I wanted to note to BHG that GeneralNotability also indefinitely blocked Chris.sherlock for major violations of his IBan. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:47, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

@Liz: GN also left a personal attack and IBAN violation by AAW against BHG on AAW's userpage after being notified of it, and acknowledging it as such. DuncanHill (talk) 23:50, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, Liz. I was aware of that, but it was kind of you to notify me.

Still, it's bizarre behaviour by GeneralNotability. Block an IBANned editor violating their IBAN on a spree of shot-stirring, be aware that the IBANned editor has a long history of vendettas ... and then punish their target for describing the misconduct bluntly, after the target has been set upon by proxies who were unwittingly stoked by vendetta man.

Can you imagine what the local courts would be like if that sort of approach was taken by the district judges?

"Now, BHG, CS is locked away. But the fact that CS has waged long vendettas against you and others is absolutely no excuse for your appalling conduct in stating that he has waged vendettas. You were warned that not to say that, so I am giving you a week in jail for speaking the truth, you appalling woman". --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:58, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

• Generally an unblock request would be expected to address the subject's own behavior, of which many diffs are given at that ANI thread. Pointing fingers at the other side or at the blocking administrator does little to convince me that the incivility and personal attacks will not recur. ST47 (talk) 00:00, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

  Thanks, ST47. I am well aware of the conventional requirement that an unblock request be a grovel.

  But in this case, GeneralNotability was very very clear about their intention to block me for describing the way that I and others have been targeted for years by that particular menace. See the diffs in my unblock request.

  I set out early in the ANI thread how the vendetta man had not just broken his IBAN, but set two other editors up to unwittingly become his agents, creating an opening which Piotrus tried to exploit.

  CS's vendetta tactics are very nasty and deeply destructive, but they are very effective. Not too that are very persistent: C must have be talking me like a pro to spot the opportunity he found to go to TRM's talk and start stirring, and then carry on at SQL's talk. The fact that he was still at this nearly a year after the IBAN is highly alarming. I am very glad that i have protected my anonymity carefully.

  So no I will not in any way give any such sort of assurance to GeneralNotability. Instead I will give the opposite assurance: that I will continue to avoid CS as much as possible, but if they resume their vendettas against me or anyone else, I will describe their appalling track record without censoring myself. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:18, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

  Many users who are not CS have expressed that they have felt harassed or attacked by your comments. While I certainly share your hope that that one will remain indef blocked this time (fourth time's the charm, eh?), he was hardly the only subject of the diffs that were raised at ANI, and so it doesn't seem like his blocking is enough to dismiss the complaints raised by other users. ST47 (talk) 00:44, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

  @ST47: The block by GeneralNotability was explicitly based on my comments about CS. That is what they threatened to block me for, and that is what I was replying to when they did block me. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:48, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

  The block log says Major breaches of WP:CIV and WP:NPA toward many editors, and reading through the various diffs on ANI again, hardly any of them relate to CS/AAW. I would be interested in your response to your attacks on the other users who have spoken in that ANI thread, and specifically whether you have any plans to adjust in your future interactions with them. Otherwise I fear we will be back here again in a few weeks. ST47 (talk) 01:01, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

  @ST47: you words here are very civil, but you are doing something very uncivil.

  You are entirely ignoring the fact that GeneralNotability explicitly promised to block me for criticising Chris.sherlock,[12] and you are responding as if that never happened and had never been mentioned by me. Why?

  You are also ignoring the fact that I was in the midst of a situation where CS had set two other editors out to wind me up.

  So I will try to ask as openly as I can: why are you so resolutely disregarding the context, and talking past me? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:18, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Blocks? Big ANI thread? I've not really read the latter to know why the former took place. Hope everything is OK BHG - email me if you need anything. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 16:35, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Arbcom notice

You are involved in a recently filed request for arbitration. Please review the request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#BrownHairedGirl and, if you wish to do so, enter your statement and any other material you wish to submit to the Arbitration Committee. As threaded discussion is not permitted on most arbitration pages, please ensure that you make all comments in your own section only. Additionally, the guide to arbitration and the Arbitration Committee's procedures may be of use.

Thanks,

I want to emphasise that although I perfectly appreciate this feels like I'm throwing you under a bus for no good reason, I am doing this because I can't think of what else to do, and I believe all our interactions to this point have been civil and in good faith. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 14:26, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

I know taking things lightly is not your defining characteristic (intended as a true compliment)

The deliberate insult/pointy behavior from CS on your RFA2 was inexcusable and deliberate; I consider this a violent assault by an editor with whom you disagreed, an editor who held a grudge. Their RFA2 edit was mean spirited and against all civility norms and processes we all agree to as followers of rough consensus on Wikipedia. The edit seemed intended both to violate directly the interaction ban and to poison your potential RFA well (simultaneously sacrificing the account(s)). Any discussion of other recent matters (in context or meta) must be prefaced with an acknowledgement of this way out-of-line personal attack on you intended to do long term damage to the user rights of the User:BrownHairedGirl account, and thereby the person using that account.

With this in mind, I urge the following:

User:BrownHairedGirl, we have disagreed in good faith before, but I will never dispute your energy, diligence, or dedication to the project. I urge you to step back a bit here and allow the process to work. Your stridency, detail and work ethic can come across as combative.

It is appropriate for an editor under stress to make themself less stressed. As a friend of mind used to say: "if you find yourself on fire, get off the fire." A very wise person can do this by themselves; I usually need help from my friends to see the blaze.

There are many others who support you. I support you. Call on me personally or on other editors who know and love you. Please take a day or two and just take care of yourself. BusterD (talk) 18:52, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Many many thanks, @BusterD. Yes, I and several others (esp TRM and SQL) have been very successfully manipulated by CS, and that RFA2 post was clear evidence of malice.

Thank you two for accepting our disagreements in the spirit I have always seen them; as a healthy part of the discussion and dialectic which helps us build an encyclopedia.

I will take your wise advice and step away from the fire. I had already withdrawn from the ANI drama, and had reached the limits of my patience with arbcom. There is nothing more I can do for now ...and if arbcom does take the case, I have no confidence in the process.

I will probably continue using citation bot to fix thousands of bare URL links per day, and make the huge lists I feed to it; but that involves only a few edits per day. And after that, we'll see.

Meanwhile, it's to up others to try to head with the lynch mobs, if they have the energy.

Go raibh maith agat. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:07, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

FYI I'm drinking Nambarrie these days because I like a full body flavor. Any suggestions? Too presumptuous? BusterD (talk) 19:31, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Haha. The name isn't long enough to be presumptuous. Besides, it's Norniron tea, and that place is all about where extremes meet.

I also like full-bodied tea. I have been through most of the shop teas, but this year I became hooked on chai, and started making my own, based on tons of finest Assam. Addictively wonderful.

If my time on en.wp comes to an end (as seems likely), I think I should use the spare time to set up as a chaiwala on my local border crossing. Peace through tea. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:51, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Tea sounds wonderful and peace even better!! I'm seeing rainbows and sunshine! --ARoseWolf 20:18, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

That's a nice vision. The chaiwala. Peace through tea. A vision worth sharing. I'd be a regular. I know the Nambarrie is kind of a Scottish thing. But I only really learned to taste tea in NYC. So I'm not a deeply experienced tea drinker, just widely experienced. The pedia isn't through with you but you can step away anytime you feel you need to do so. If you can keep a low profile and do only like a quarter-million edits in the next six months any of these "sanctions" will simply disappear. Wanna bark at somebody? Choose a small circle and bark at us. We appreciate your grit, and don't want to get on your bad side. BusterD (talk) 20:14, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Are you guys participating in the online Wikimania this weekend? BusterD (talk) 20:21, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Sent you an email suggestion but you are way ahead of me. BusterD (talk) 20:41, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:IrelandPoliticsDecade

Template:IrelandPoliticsDecade has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 16:23, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:YearInIrishPoliticsCat

Template:YearInIrishPoliticsCat has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 16:26, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:IrelandElectionsDecade

Template:IrelandElectionsDecade has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 16:30, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Reading suggestion

Wittgenstein's Poker on how two good faith individuals with undeniably first-rate minds almost came to blows as they found each other's positions unreasonable & annoying. Moral being no matter how smart someone is, there's always a chance there's something they're not seeing, other than the possibility the antagonist is malicious, dishonest, or stupid.

Btw, I still sometimes listen to your man Luke Kelly and the click song, thanks again for those tune tips. FeydHuxtable (talk) 15:33, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, Feyd. Luke was a rare treasure.

I wish that those with whom I had the bruising encounters which have caused recent drama had taken that view, rather than accusing me of lying or inventing, and then complaining when I snap. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:38, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Is was it was?

Your arbitration statement includes, "is was it was." I urge you to edit your statement for clarity and after sleeping on it. You will be glad you did. Jehochman ^Talk 19:46, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

@Jehochman: Thanks. Now fixed.[13] --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:03, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Comment

Please, please take Newyorkbrad's advice to heart. I value you greatly. Krok6kola (talk) 22:55, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Notice of editing restriction

I have closed a discussion regarding you at the incident noticeboard. The consensus of the community was to place the following editing restriction on you: Should BrownHairedGirl behave uncivilly or make personal attacks, she may be blocked first for twelve hours and then for a duration at the discretion of the blocking administrator. Blocks made under this restriction must not be reversed except by consensus of a community discussion. If you have any questions regarding this, please contact me on my talk page. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 06:07, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Moving forward

Following this I remain unimpressed with your hesitation to take responsibility for what that spiraled into and generally, your rather gross incivility regardless of if or not you were deliberately baited, goaded, and triggered. Name calling is simply unacceptable, calling someone a “thug” is violation of NPA. This is an unsolicited advice but I want you to see every ANI as a learning curve. If you feel an editor here is deliberately trying to trigger you, please avoid as much as possible any personal commentary, rather just report the incident. Following the concluded ANI, what I can see is that you are being handed a rope and I believe now more than ever you would be antagonized deliberately, please avoid this pitfall. It would be a great blow losing one of our most productive editors over trifling issues such as hesitation to say “I’m sorry” or incivility. Honestly I’d expect a higher conduct from one who has been a sysop in the past and ought to know better. Celestina007 (talk) 21:17, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

@Celestina007: Odds of this going well are not good.--v/r - TP 21:45, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

@Celestina007: I was going to write a brief reply saying that I would try to make time to reply properly.

But actually, I would find it deeply at odds with my understanding of civil discourse to attempt to try a discussion under such a pejorative headline.

So, please replace the heading with something less prejudicial. If you do that, we can have a discussion. Otherwise this section gets deleted. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:54, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

@Celestina007: Thank you for the change in heading. An apology would have been nice, but there we are.

I will try to reply properly tomorrow, but the rest of the week looks set to be v busy, so I will see how it goes. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:02, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

I concur and I’m sorry about that. The apology was made but their was an (EC). I believe this current title best reflects the message. In any case, I respect an editor whose body of work speaks for itself regardless of their flaws, with over 2 million edits your passion for the collaborative project is overt and your legacy? Forever solidified. You’d note despite my comments at ANI and the ArbCOM case I always spoke in your favor. I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t let anyone trigger you. Celestina007 (talk) 22:08, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Editor's Barnstar
	For over 2.1 million contributions to Wikipedia I present you the Editor's Barnstar HighInBC Need help? Just ask. 22:13, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, @HighInBC. That is very kind. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:15, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

I have about 63k over 15 years, very impressed. HighInBC ^{Need help? Just ask.} 22:18, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

• Respect BHG.A worthy star, hugs, covid safe of course. Govindaharihari (talk) 01:28, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
• Well-deserved barnstar BHG. Djm-leighpark (talk) 02:26, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Arbitration case request declined

Dear BrownHairedGirl: The BrownHairedGirl arbitration case request, to which you were a named party, has been declined. For the Arbitration Committee, KevinL (alt of L235 · t · c) 07:46, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

• (talk page stalker) which is a very good decision by the arbs. Celestina007 (talk) 11:54, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

New BHGbot proposal to remove Template:Cleanup bare URLs from pages with no bare URLs

Proposal for a bot task to remove {{Cleanup bare URLs}} from pages where there no WP:bare URLs.

See Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/BHGbot 9, where any comments should be made. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:48, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

hi BrownHairedGirl, with all this heavy stuff here on your talkpage, reckon its time for a kitten

Coolabahapple (talk) 02:58, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Bless you, @Coolabahapple. That is v kind, and much needed. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:00, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

A Gift of Flowers

Some flowers to cheer you up, after the bruising experience of the past week. I'm delighted to see that you're still editing after it all and wish you well for your future editing. Sorry I didn't chip in to the discussion at ANI/AC: it was all rather overwhelming to a non-ANI-regular (especially when viewed on mobile phone, I was away from my PC). Best wishes, and hang on in there. Illegitimi non carborundum. PamD 12:32, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:MEPs for England 2018–2019

A tag has been placed on Category:MEPs for England 2018–2019 requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done for the following reason:

This is a navigational aid cat created before {{Navseasoncats}} was able to find & follow irregular seasons. It's now interfering with & preventing better navigation (see Category:MEPs for England 2014–2019 vs. Category:MEPs for England 2019–2020).

Under the criteria for speedy deletion, pages that meet certain criteria may be deleted at any time.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  23:27, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice, @Tom.Reding. I trust your judgement that it has served it purpose, so please delete it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:35, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

@Fastily: thank you for the speedy speedy!

BHG, there is a related category, MEPs for England 2019–2024, which was correctly moved to MEPs for England 2019–2020, but the redirect now at MEPs for England 2019–2024 is no longer necessary for navigation, and causes a mild inaccuracy on MEPs for England 2014–2019 and prior cats, showing a 2019–2024 term which didn't happen. There are no meaningful links to it either. Ok to CSD?   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  00:09, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

@Tom.Reding: in current usage, it's just a pain, so best to zap it. I will tag it myself. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:28, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

Maclean Chieftains

An editor has added Sir Robert Charles McLean of Alford OBE BT, 5th Baronet of Breda as a Chieftain of Clan Maclean. I have removed this twice, but suspect that the editor might re-enter it.
There is no Maclean (or McLean) of Alford branch of the clan. There is no McLean (or Maclean) of Breda barony.
I would be grateful for your assistance in policing this. Shipsview (talk) 12:10, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

Rex fixes

Hi. I've reverted your recent edit to Battle of the Bulge, where you changed a couple of citations from the {{citation}} template to {{cite encyclopedia}}. There is no "fix" there, because {{citation|encyclopedia=...}} is a documented correct usage of the template (see the template documentation section Template:Citation § Parts of books, including encyclopedia articles).

Also, changing from {{citation}} to {{cite xxx}} changes that citation's style from CS2 to CS1 (unless you specify mode=cs2). But the article consistently uses CS2, so I don't see a need to change the CS in those two cases.  — sbb (talk) 04:10, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

@Sbb: I edited the page solely to remove it from Category:CS1 errors: unsupported parameter, by fixing only the refs which were triggering error messages, --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:25, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Ah, I see. It looks like you maybe did a search/replace for any ref that used |encyclopedia=. It looks like only the {{cite book|last=Clodfelter...}} ref was broken (because |encyclopedia= isn't a valid parameter to {{cite book}}). The {{citation|last=Axelrod|encyclopedia=...}} reference wasn't broken, because |encyclopedia= is a valid parameter to {{citation}}.

The page ended up on the list to begin with because the edit before yours, Citationbot made a non-fix to two references, one of them changing Clodfelter from {{citation}} to {{cite book}} (thus causing the CS1 error). I caught that when I reverted your edit (I actually undid both, not just yours). I scanned the references in the current version (post 2-revert), I don't see any CS1 errors in them now.  — sbb (talk) 04:45, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

@Sbb: No, I didn't do a search/replace. I went straight to he two refs which showed errors, and fixed them manually.

Quick and dirty fix to make the errors go away and all the fields get displayed. Then move on.

Feel free to tweak it further of you want to. I am busy clearing the rest of Category:CS1 errors: unsupported parameter. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:17, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

I don't know what to say, but...

Hi, too late for the party because I stay away from Wikipedia as much as possible these days. I'm really sorry to see you constantly being the target for abuse, and every iteration of Arbcom is as corrupt as every other (with the exception of one or two really fine upstanding members, who unfortunately are often outnumbered by their colleagues). If no one else is aware of that miscreant's full history, well, I am. Exposing it, and the vile witchcraft of one or two other editors is what got me desysoped by a committee who refused to understand what was going on. I can't deny that I'm not sad to see him get his comeuppance. Three times ban is not enough, four would be better, and throw away the key, but that obsessive sock master (and would you believe it, former admin of all things) will be back again. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:46, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

I also stumbled into the ANI car crash by accident and towards the end of that pile up and thus too late to usefully contribute anything. I don't want to comment on anyone's behaviour, since that's probably unhelpful, except to say that ANI seems to sometimes bring out the worst, most censorious, silliest and most petty side of WP-editors - and that's just the good ones! BUT, as regards the "political prisoners" category, you were 100% correct in your analysis that the hunger strikers' case was the perfect embodiment of the category (unmoderated in some fashion), being akin to "freedom fighter" and therefore inherently subjective. Take care. Pincrete (talk) 11:16, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Draft:Clear Linux

Intel's container Linux distribution, Draft:Clear Linux article has started, would you like to contribute? .... 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 23:04, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

@0mtwb9gd5wx: No, thanks.

Why did you ask me? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:05, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: just a guess.. 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 23:09, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

@0mtwb9gd5wx: It seems that you asked 4 other editors. Before doing that, it is best to check carefully whether those editors have a history of making substantive contributions to that sort of topic. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:15, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: I asked those who have recently edited other distros. "history of making substantive contributions" what is a good search? ....0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 23:20, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

If I made a recent edit to a linux article, it was only a drive-by ref-fixing edit. Many edits are similarly trivial, and are no indication of enduring interest in the topic.

You would need to study the history of the articles, to see who made significant contributions. I am not aware of an easy search.

A better approach is to leave note on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject, but even that should be done sparingly. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:27, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

September 2021 at Women in Red

Women in Red | September 2021, Volume 7, Issue 9, Numbers 184, 188, 204, 205, 207, 208 Online events: New: Women writers & their works Contest (Jul/Aug/Sep): Latin America contest Continuing: Women's leadership & empowerment | Olympic & Paralympic Games Women's rights | #1day1woman See also: Interwiki Women Collaboration Other ways to participate: Join the conversations on our talkpage. Learn more about our proposed one-day online recruitment initiative in October. Help plan and coordinate future events. Become a member. You can always opt-out of notifications. Follow Women in Red on social media: Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter

--Rosiestep (talk) 22:29, 26 August 2021 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Since you're curious

I mostly "find" work for the bot to do in the following ways.

Categories which the bot has been more or less designed to fix

• Category:Articles with missing Cite arXiv inputs
• Category:CS1 errors: DOI
• Category:CS1 maint: MR format
• Category:CS1 maint: PMC embargo expired
• Category:CS1 maint: PMC format
• Category:CS1 maint: ref=harv

Miscapitalizations via

• WP:JCW/MISCAPS

Which I run once per dump (after filtering most false positives)

And the rest, like the recent |doi-access=free tagging through regex URL/DOI searches (or other pattern matching regex), either on the live wiki, or on WP:DUMPS. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:36, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation, Headbomb. That well-targeted usage explains why your Citation bot jobs have such a high succcess rate.

I have only recently (like 0 days ago) begun using database dumps to find articles with bare URL refs, which have been much easier than I thought, and highly productive: using AWB's database scanner is over 1,000 times faster than using AWB in pre-parse mode. I am annoyed with myself for not having started using them years ago.

Having been using AWB heavily for 15 years, and run several bot tasks, I am used to the fact that big jobs usually require a lot of preparation if they are to be done efficiently and accurately. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:03, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

UK MPs category navigation comparison

I got a bit too carried away adding {{Navseasoncats}} (with its new variable-gap-finding functionality of up to 3 years) to the UK MPs 2017–2019 series before fully appreciating the nuances within it. Namely, 0-length terms such as

• UK MPs 1970–1974 → UK MPs 1974 → UK MPs 1974–1979

I've encountered elsewhere, and handled them via {{Succeeding category}}, {{Category pair}}, {{Preceding category}}, respectively, but they didn't contain a hardcoded template like your {{United Kingdom MPs by Parliament header}}, so 1974 doesn't show in the navbar now with {{Navseasoncats}}, but immediately below it, and only on immediately-adjacent cats. I've seen a decent number of these that I'm pondering whether or not to add this functionality, but no idea how I'd go about doing it. And

• the UK MPs 2017–2019 → UK MPs 2019–present ending,

which I haven't encountered yet, but I was anticipating adding support for this eventually.

So I'm wondering:

1. do you prefer {{Navseasoncats}} (as it is now, without the above potential improvements) to {{United Kingdom MPs by Parliament header}}, or vice versa?
2. what combination of the above improvements would make them equal?

~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  01:41, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

 Done!   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  15:10, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Processing 75,000 to 300,000 or even 450k articles with bare urls

On the talk page of User:Citation bot, you stated that you have discovered 75,000 to 300,000 or even 450k articles with bare urls that need attention. If fed through Citation bot, this would take roughly one year to run through. Considering that Citation bot attempts to make a wide variety of fixes to citations, and it is particularly weak on bare urls, doesn't using Citation bot for this purpose seem inefficient, especially given that the bot doesn't fix some of the articles at all, and makes unrelated fixes to about 40% of the articles without fixing the bare urls? Wouldn't it be better to have a dedicated bot that automatically finds and fixes just bare urls? Abductive (reasoning) 01:23, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

@Abductive:, my summary answer is no.

However, I suggest that you raise this at User talk:Citation bot. I will respond in more detail there, where the discussion will also be be visible to other users of the bot. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:28, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

It has already been raised there. Let's hope that somebody takes mercy on us and allows a second instance of the bot, or allows people to run the bot code from their userspace. Abductive (reasoning) 02:05, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

@Abductive: Nothing there is anywhere near as specific as your post here. I am quite willing to have that discussion, and think it would probably be a good idea ... but this is the wrong place.

So why don't you just post your opening msg here as a new section at User talk:Citation bot? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:17, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

I dunno, I feel like it might be ineffective. Abductive (reasoning) 02:23, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

@Abductive: What do you mean by "ineffective"? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:14, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

To achieve our shared goals and meet everybody's needs.... Abductive (reasoning) 20:29, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

@Abductive: What on earth does that broad platitude mean in the context of a request to post your question on the correct page?

We are supposed to be collaborating to build and encyclopedia, but that evasive reply impedes collaboration. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:57, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Is it not your goal to fix all citation errors on Wikipedia? Or, more precisely, to make it possible for as many editors as possible to use as wide a variety of tools, including automated methods, to fix all citation errors? So, as a very small example, users other than I have requested improvements to remove bottlenecks that have not come to pass. What can be done? And by whom? Abductive (reasoning) 21:10, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

@Abductive: as I asked in my first reply to you: if you want to have a substantive discussion, please repost your question at User talk:Citation bot. That offer remains open.

But I have had more than enough of your messages here being evasive, and your latest reply is yet more switcheroo. Enough: please do not reply again to this thread. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:25, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 August 2021

• News and notes: Enough time left to vote! IP ban

• In the media: Vive la différence!

• Wikimedians of the year: Seven Wikimedians of the year

• Gallery: Our community in 20 graphs

• News from Wiki Education: Changing the face of Wikipedia

• Recent research: IP editors, inclusiveness and empathy, cyclones, and world heritage

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Days of the Year Interview

• Traffic report: Olympics, movies, and Afghanistan

• Community view: Making Olympic history on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:41, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

WikiProject India Tag & Assess 2021 started

Hello,
WikiProject India Tag & Assess 2021 has started. The India WikiProject has a backlog of around 10,000 unassessed articles, built up over the last few years. The time has come for comprehensive housekeeping and that's what this drive is all about. The drive will run from 1 September 2021 to 30 September 2021.

We request you to participate in the assessment drive. Learn more about the event here, learn assessment process and rewards details. Please add your name as a participant here.

Feel free to discuss this on the event talk page or at WikiProject India noticeboard.

You received this message, because you participated in earlier iteration of the assessment drive, or we felt that you may be interested to participate. --Titodutta (talk) 01:47, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

Eight years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:06, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Cuban people of Israeli descent

A tag has been placed on Category:Cuban people of Israeli descent indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 15:38, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2021

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2021).

Administrator changes

Jake Wartenberg

Emperor • Viridian Bovary

Ashleyyoursmile → Viridian Bovary

Guideline and policy news

• Feedback is requested on the Universal Code of Conduct enforcement draft by the Universal Code of Conduct Phase 2 drafting committee.
• A RfC is open on whether to allow administrators to use extended confirmed protection on high-risk templates.
• A discussion is open to decide when, if ever, should discord logs be eligible for removal when posted onwiki (including whether to oversight them)
• A RfC on the next steps after the trial of pending changes on TFAs has resulted in a 30 day trial of automatic semi protection for TFAs.

Technical news

• The Score extension has been re-enabled on public wikis. It has been updated, but has been placed in safe mode to address unresolved security issues. Further information on the security issues can be found on the mediawiki page.

Arbitration

• A request for comment is in progress to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules. Comments and new proposals are welcome.

Miscellaneous

• The 2021 RfA review is now open for comments.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:44, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

You deserve a barnstar. Might as well be me that gives it to you...

		The Purple Barnstar
		For hanging in there and just heads down getting the work done with the best can-do spirit, I award you this distinctly (somewhere on the spectrum between indigo and violet) barnstar. Your dedication and precision inspire tea-drinking wikipedians to a high quality of performance. BusterD (talk) 19:44, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

Template:UK-Viscount-stub has been nominated for deletion

Template:UK-Viscount-stub has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the stub template guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the template's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. PamD 07:17, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:2020 United States presidential primaries templates

A tag has been placed on Category:2020 United States presidential primaries templates indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:49, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

About this

Nice Hemprasad.M. (talk) 16:34, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

Huh? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:35, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

Anyone you know? --Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:15, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: Thanks for catching that we bit of vandalism. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:23, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

No problem. Wee vandalism from a wee vandal. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:25, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

Categories question

Would you call this excessive/disruptive categorization? I don't delve into the topic of categories often, but my impression was that we apply the most specific category and not additionally apply supercategories of the specific ones. (I've already warned the user re: overlinking). OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 15:40, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

@Ohnoitsjamie: there are few exceptions to WP:SUBCAT, and most articles don't qualify.

I checked some of the edits by Ineedahouse (talk · contribs), and in each case they had done some massive overcategorisation which I reverted. I also left a note on their talk. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:54, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

@Ohnoitsjamie: I went through more of their edits, back to 29 August edits to Zenon Pylyshyn‎. Massive overcategorisation in nearly every case, so I did a lot more reverting.

That's all I have energy for, but maybe you can do more. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:23, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll keep those policy links in mind the next time I see this. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 16:59, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Request

I'm Swagat Dash Mohapatra from India. We the students of Indian institute of science education and research Berhampur have started a science communication platform in odia and english. I have already made a Wikipedia page on our platform. And wanted to make one in English named "Jigyansa: A Bilingual Science Communication platform". I have made a draft as I have no access to make a new page in English Wikipedia. Please make a new page on our platform ( we will edit rest of things). Link to my draft : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%E0%AC%B2%E0%AD%87%E0%AC%96%E0%AC%95/Jigyansa:_A_Bilingual_Science_Communication_platform

Link to our website: https://jigyansaiiserbpr.github.io/website/ For your reference

You can check us on FB, instagram, twitter and linkedin. Please help us in creating a page. You can do it by translating the page in odia ( link is given below) or create a new page linking it to odia page. Link: https://or.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?preload=Format%3APagin%C4%83_nou%C4%83&editintro=Format%3AIntroducere_articol_nou&title=%E0%AC%9C%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%9C%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%9E%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%B8%E0%AC%BE_:%E0%AC%8F%E0%AC%95%E0%AC%A6%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%B5%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%AD%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%B7%E0%AD%80_%E0%AC%AC%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%9C%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%9E%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%A8_%E0%AC%AA%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%B0%E0%AC%B8%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%B0%E0%AC%A3_%E0%AC%AE%E0%AC%9E%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%9A&create=%E0%AC%A8%E0%AD%82%E0%AC%86+%E0%AC%AA%E0%AD%83%E0%AC%B7%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%A0%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%9F%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%8F+%E0%AC%A4%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%86%E0%AC%B0%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%AC%E0%AD%87# Thank you ଲେଖକ (talk) 19:22, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, but no. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:32, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Thanks! Robertgombos (talk) 17:29, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Bare URL as "The Awakening"

I saw your note about the bare URL in the article on the Seward Johnson sculpture "The Awakening." Although I didn't set it up to begin with, I decided to follow the URL and fill out the citation. I tried to ping you when I did it, but got that all wrong. Uporządnicki (talk) 13:04, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

@AzseicsoK: thanks for the fix,[14] and for your msg. That was v kind of you, but it's really not necessary to take the time to do ping me or msg me after fixing an issue I tagged. Best to just apply the fix and move on.

Best wishes, --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:09, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Point taken. After I posted the message, I saw from your talk page that you've made a point of labeling thousands of those. OK, I won't be fixing thousands (too busy redoing half the Category pages in Wikipedia), but I won't feel a need to notify you of every one I do. I have kind of taken an interest in that sculpture; I live not too far from the original. Uporządnicki (talk) 13:40, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Ring saga

I have ring-around-the-color. 😏 --Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:34, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

I fear that it may not be the one ring. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:44, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 September 2021

• News and notes: New CEO, new board members, China bans

• In the media: The future of Wikipedia

• Opinion: Wikimedians of Mainland China were warned

• Op-Ed: I've been desysopped

• Disinformation report: Paid promotional paragraphs in German parliamentary pages

• Discussion report: Editors discuss Wikipedia's vetting process for administrators

• Recent research: Wikipedia images for machine learning; Experiment justifies Wikipedia's high search rankings

• Community view: Is writing Wikipedia like making a quilt?

• Traffic report: Kanye, Emma Raducanu and 9/11

• News from Diff: Welcome to the first grantees of the Knowledge Equity Fund

• WikiProject report: The Random and the Beautiful

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:53, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Runing IABot and adding archives.

Noteiced you've done quite a few runs of IABot on Ireland articles to add archives, e.g. [15] That can increase the amount of cite text around the prose making it harder to edit (I prefer to use Harvard when the cites get this long). Will you be continuing this? (I'm a little tired and I've probably phrased this more bluntly than I intended - Apologies). Thankyou. Djm-leighpark (talk) 15:47, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

@Djm-leighpark: Yes, I will be continuing this. It's a good protection against WP:Linkrot, which in my view more than offsets downside of the extra bulk. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:56, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

I half agree with you, and half don't. Background bots are generally creating the archives in the background, (though its not possible to tell whether the archives are succesful or not), but it either case I have come across instances where the archives were flawed. I have been called up for running this before and upsetting peoples. Anytway thankyou for your response. I was half thinking of mentioning this at WikiProject ireland, but I'm only half thinking of anything at the moment. Thankyou. Djm-leighpark (talk) 16:48, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

Hi BrownHairedGirl! While reviewing Category:CS1 errors: redundant parameter, I see that IABot is adding duplicate parameters when you run it - see this edit, this edit, and this edit for example. Could you please help clean up these edits and temporarily stop running IABot until the issue is resolved? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 16:08, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the headsup, @GoingBatty. That's a bit of a pain, tho mercifully the list at Category:CS1 errors: redundant parameter is fairly short.

I have reported the bug at phab:T291704, and cleaned up those three articles. Hopefully the bot's glitch will be a simple and quick fix.

I will cleanup the others, but I won't stop using the bot. Its error rate is low enough that I will just monitor that category and cleanup any more glitches as I go.

Thanks again. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:37, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you! I should have mentioned that I reported it at meta:User talk:InternetArchiveBot#Bot duplicating archive links, and appreciate that you opened the Phabricator bug. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 16:57, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, @GoingBatty. This is a very valuable bot, and usually very well-polished, so I was a bit surprised that it coukd go wrong at all. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:09, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

@GoingBatty: I have now emptied Category:CS1 errors: redundant parameter, and posted some more examples at phab:T291704. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:27, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

All sorts of things can and do happen with this bot. The bot can save all links automatically, but the community needs to have consensus. The optional user initiated save all links wasn't meant as a back door for saving all of enwiki! If that is what the community wants lets us know the bot can do it more efficiently then running job queues. You added about 65k links in the past day which is considerably more than the bot itself. -- GreenC 02:04, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

@GreenC: I'm trying to say this as politely as I can, and please excuse me if I haven't succeeded: your last sentence makes no sense to me, which makes me doubt whether I understood the rest. Please can you try again? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:26, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

In the past 2 days, your user-initiated runs of the bot have added about 100k archive links. This is more than any user has done (in such a short period of time) in the history of the bot. It's much more than the bot itself added during normal operations (the bot also runs automatically as the user "InternetArchiveBot" ie. not user initiated). I'm going to ask that you get community consensus for this kind of mass addition. -- GreenC 16:12, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

To put it another way, in the past 48 hours, your user-initiated bot jobs have added so many links, it represents about 1% of all links added by InternetArchiveBot in the 6 years history of its existence on Wikipedia. -- GreenC 16:27, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

I blocked your account and canceled the jobs until there is consensus for adding archive links at scale to every URL both alive and dead. If you promise not to do this unless there is consensus I will unblock your account. -- GreenC 16:32, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

@GreenC: that seems like unnecessarily rapid escalation. Your post confused me, so I asked for clarification, and your next step was to block without warning.

In particular, why did you kill my batch jobs? They don't save all links, so they are a separate issue. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:20, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

I can't tell what the batch is doing you'll have to redo it, it was one job not multiple. All you need to say is you won't continue and will be unblocked. -- GreenC 17:32, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

@GreenC: a batch job cannot save all links, because there is no option on the form to allow it do so. See https://iabot.toolforge.org/index.php?page=runbotqueue

I am seriously annoyed about that because you killed batch 8710, which has been queued for almost two weeks because of IA's outages. Killing that job seems wholly unneccesary to your goals, and smacks of some sort of vindictiveness, because you must surely be aware that in asking me to resubmit, I will have to go the back of a very long queue.

I will come back to the other issue, but first I want to clarify why on earth you did that. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:42, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't now the batch job was doing something different. Since it only did 40 articles in two weeks, something was stuck and you'd be better off restarting it anyway. -- GreenC 17:48, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

(ec) @GreenC: if you didn't know, you should have found out. You could have checked, by looking at the web form. You could have asked.

But instead you went ahead and killed the job, delaying that work by at least two weeks.

It was stuck because all batch jobs had been stuck for ages.

If you had some role in creating or maintaining his bot, then you should be aware of the distinction. If you had no such role, then you were reckless to wade in like that.

This is added to your block-without warning, and without request to stop.

When where I am sitting, it seems that you are using your powers arbitrarily: at best without reasonable attempt to check and discuss before using admin tools, and at worst vindictively.

By killing that job, you have now done significant damage to my workflow. The explanation of how that works is lengthy, but if you want I will spell it out for you.

In the meantime, to demonstrate your good faith, please unblock my access to the bot while we discuss. I will refrain from checking the "Add archives to all non-dead references" while we discuss this, but I want to continue to be able to use the bot as part of bare URL cleanup as I follow around behind the batches I submit to citation bot. Let's see where the discussion gets to before blocks are applied. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:05, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

It was an assumption the job was doing this and your right I knew about the limits for job queues but forgot. Multiple people warned this is stretching consensus and you continued doing so at a very high rate it was a preventive action not done in bad faith. I will unblock your account and am monitoring the statistics, however this is not something you can negotiate with me individually it will require consensus for adding this many links this rapidly, if so there are better methods, the bot can do this automatically. -- GreenC 18:38, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

@GreenC: thank you for the unblock. I now urge you to take however much of your time is needed to investigate how you can un-kill my batch job, to undo the damage which you have caused to my workflow.

As to the rest:

1. There was no need to make an assumption. You could have checked, and you could have asked. You should have done both before killing the job, especially if that killing turns out to be as irrevocable as you suggest.
2. Your block was not preventive. It might have been preventive if you had asked me to stop and I had failed to do so, but you made no such request. Instead, you decided to shoot without warning. That is very very poor conduct, and I hoped for a fulsome apology rather than continued excuses.
3. On top of that misuse of your blocking powers, I am very troubled by your unilateral insistence that my almost-complete addition of archive links to a set of about 4,000 articles (there are about 600 left to do) is something wildly controversial which requires prior consensus. There has been only one objection to it (see above), and even that was equivocal and partially-withdrawn. Since my actions seem generally uncontroversial, it seems to me that if you find something problematic about what I am doing, then the onus is on you to start seek a consensus to stop it. Instead of seeking that consensus, you have chosen unilaterally to treat this as some sort of disruption by me. That's a very poor approach to collaborative working, especially when you misuse admin tools to enforce your view. (And yes, I do mean "misuse": your block-without-request-or-warning was a misuse, and your killing of a queued-for-two-weeks job without checking its significance was also a misuse).
4. The final straw for me is that you outright refuse to discus this. In effect, you have unilaterally invented a rule, and are using a big stick to enforce it while refusing substantive discussion. That is bullying conduct, and not at all how an admin should conduct themselves.
5. In view of all that, and in particular of your refusal to discuss, I withdraw my pledge to refrain while we discuss this. That pledge was predicated on the assumption you would act collaboratively and engage in discussion, which you have refused to do. So I may resume use of the "save all links" option, but I will desist if you start a discussion somewhere (and notify me about it), or if other editors ask me to stop.
6. Given your conduct so far, I ask you to recuse yourself from any further admin involvement in this issue. You made a number of serious errors, and you do not appear to be acting impartially. You have a clear conflict of interest here since you userpage says that you are paid by Internet Archive, so instead of unilateral actions you should be exercising great restraint in using admin power in this area. If there really is a problem here, please let some other admin deal with it: there are plenty of other competent admins who do not have a COI and who are willing and able to discuss issues before blocking and before taking apparently-irrevocable actions. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:22, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Seems peremptory. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:51, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Extremely peremptory, unless there is a conversation elsewhere. Oculi (talk) 19:54, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

@Oculi, Deepfriedokra, Djm-leighpark, and GoingBatty: could you clarify in definitive terms if you want BrownHairedGirl to stop until there has been a conversation somewhere? Oculi's comment looks certain. There have also been previous discussions where mass adding of links was controversial and no consensus for it was established. -- GreenC 21:05, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

@GreenC: From my perspective, I do not. I think you need to obtain consensus and be less oligarchical. I think you need the discussion first and then the command to stop, if there is consensus for her to do so. She has spent years doing a lot of great work. I think you should have a consensus before stopping her from doing it. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 21:12, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

@GreenC: so you blocked without warning because there was no consensus in some unspecified previous discussion? Sheesh.
Enough. I have already asked you clearly to leave this to other admins, and now you have found my limit. So get off my talk page.
If you want to take this to AN or ANI, then feel free to do so ... but please be in no doubt that if you do choose to escalate this, then I will escalate your misuse of tools in an area where you have a clear COI. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:15, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

• (edit conflicts) I hate, really hate, making a definitive call. Ultimately a majority of URLs with link rot or get usurped so archives are really needed for almost everything. And overlong {{cite}} make the prose a nightmare, and ultimately painfully to handle in raw editing, but possibly OK in viusal editor (which I don't use). I was going to suggest a pause pending discussion, but am swayed by Deepfriedokra. I think the root cause issue wider regarding longer cites mixed in prose. There may be an issue the archives need to be checked. An option might be if BHG was only to work on articles below a certain size or articles with e.g. Havard referencing while a consensus is formed, or maybe stable articles, but that may be easier said than done. Thankyou. Djm-leighpark (talk) 21:23, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
  • Thanks, @ Djm-leighpark, for that thoughtful reply.
    your second and third sentences describe the issues much as I see them: something like this is ultimately needed for most cite links, but it does make the wikicode harder to read. In my experience, that difficulty is mostly overcome by a good syntax highlighter, but I accept that other may have different experiences.
    Your suggestions don't really work for me: e.g. a) Harvard-style refs are used on only a v small minority of articles, so that you effectively mean stopping work; b) Harvard refs don't work well for articles with a lot of newspaper sources, esp when they are clustered by date (see e.g. 2021 Dublin Bay South by-election, where I archived all the refs manually: authorname/year indexing is unusable because a cluster of journalist each wrote several articles per week over several weeks); c) a size limit for articles would mean that in general, the article with the most links to rot would be the ones left out, which seems to be to be undesirable.
    Ultimately, I think we need a radically different way of handling refs, which doesn't leave them jumbled up in prose, and preferably has them as some sort of sub-property of the page. But that's a wider issue. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:52, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
    • PS @Djm-leighpark: what do you think of the style of referencing I have implemented in in Emma Rogan, where all the refs are in the references section? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:06, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

I actually went through phase of using that style, it has a rightful name I cannot remember, ... or may it doesn't. I particularly was using it when there was a couple of cases a people submitting a swampload of AfD/PRODs circa 50+ at a time over a period of maybe 2/3/4 days. About 1/3+ were rescued, 2/3 were redirects/merges. It cures the I've never mentally recovered. It has an advantage of an option of grouping references by function. From memory at that time I believe the visual editor did not cope well from it. It also needed {tl|rp}} to take multiple location from the same source which is a little ugly in the prose. Ultimately (after much resistance) I switched to Havard due to the neater reference in the prose and the ability to list the sources visibility in a suitable order (e.g. alphbetically). If anyone looks at my Havard referencing they'd probably note I keep an order of cite XXX|(author...)|date=|Title making it easier to pick out the associated {{sfn}}. This may not make much sense. Djm-leighpark (talk) 22:29, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

@Djm-leighpark, it's probably 'cos it's late and I am tired, but I am not sure that I understand what you describe about your use of Harvard refs. Can you give an example of a page where you implemented it? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:39, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Take a look at Robert Coey#Sources ... it actually not the best example. Dublin Broadstone railway station#Sources is one you've recently touched but again not a great example ... Me brains a tad dead. ... But the key is to keep the order the same in the {{cite}} as is needed by the {{sfn}} (excluding first names .... ) 23:45, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

@GreenC: My concern was that the bot was making mistakes and adding redundant parameters, causing articles to be included in Category:CS1 errors: redundant parameter. BrownHairedGirl said she would continue using the bot and cleaning up the errors, which is good enough for me. I use several tools that require a bit of clean up as well.

@BrownHairedGirl: Looks like your edits to Déirdre de Búrca, Dessie Larkin, Francis Beamish still need to be cleaned up. I cleaned up the others that were unrelated to your edits. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 04:59, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Workaround for the IAbot bug

As a workaround until the IAbot bug phab:T291704 is fixed, I have written a wee script to add dashes to cite parameters: User:BrownHairedGirl/CiteParamDashes.js.

Using the script before invoking IAbot will avoid the parameter duplication caused by this bug. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:21, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

October 2021 at Women in Red

Women in Red | October 2021, Volume 7, Issue 10, Numbers 184, 188, 209, 210, 211 Online events: New: Women in STEM New Contest (Oct/Nov/Dec): Women in Oceania contest Continuing: Women's rights | #1day1woman Special event: 12 October: Ada Lovelace Day 24-Hour Global Edit-a-thon See also: Women in Green Good Article Edit-a-thon Other ways to participate: Join the conversations on our talkpage. Help plan and coordinate future events. Become a member. You can always opt-out of notifications. Follow Women in Red on social media: Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter

--Rosiestep (talk) 01:34, 29 September 2021 (UTC) via MassMessaging