User talk:WhatamIdoing

If you expected a reply on another page and didn't get it, then please feel free to remind me. I've given up on my watchlist. You can also use the magic summoning tool if you remember to link my userpage in the same edit in which you sign the message.

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Vibe check: summary style

Since this is coming up in the WT:GAN discussion. I have the uneasy feeling that actually following WP:Summary style at scale would precipitate a confrontation. The WP:AVOIDSPLIT section notwithstanding, I feel that if people were routinely spinning off large, detailed sub-articles, this would run headlong into current attitudes about notability–they'd be accused of piecing the subarticles together out of "trivial" mentions and so on. It feels like one of those guidelines from earlier and more optimistic days that have gotten out of date, perhaps because it's so rare for editors to build up an article large enough for summary style, and to actually summarize and spin off sub-articles. Curious if you have the same vibe. Choess (talk) 06:19, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Choess, I have indeed wondered whether we need to create an Official Rule™ that says splitting an article (and especially a list out of an article) does not require full GNG compliance. For example:

• Obviously notable sports team → split off list of players, split off list of seasons, maybe split off each individual season, definitely split off each individually notable player. Create redirects for non-notable list entries.

Do we really need to prove that Notable Team's 1978–1979 sportsball season is notable? How will the "SIGCOV IRS or bust!" editors reconcile themselves to the ones saying "WP:N says that Editors may use their discretion to merge or group two or more related topics into a single article, and I'm using my discretion to un-merge these"? (Maybe "merge or group" should say "merge or group or split".) What about the situation in which there are fifty seasons, and most are demonstrably notable, but a couple aren't? Do we need to have a section in WP:N, or even within the WP:GNG itself (which I'd kind of like to split to a separate page...), that ==Use common sense== or ==No, seriously, Wikipedia is WP:NOT a place for mindless bureaucratic enforcement of 'teh rules' just because you personally dislike WP:UGLY little stubs sourced to perfectly adequate primary sources ==?

WP:NBOOKS had a discussion along these lines last year, with common sense triumphing: if individual books in a book series are notable, then that notability 'transfers' to the broader subject of the book series. Or, in other words, it's stupid to say that the coverage of each individual Harry Potter book doesn't help us decide whether the Harry Potter series/franchise is notable. If you are evaluating the notability of the series, you are not restricted only to sources that include phrases like "Considering the whole Harry Potter series..." or "The whole franchise, when considered separately from the individual components..."

The other problem I've been thinking about (and invite your thoughts as well as any talk page stalkers) is the overlapping bit:

• Bob Ballplayer, of no particular importance (though if someone found the newspaper morgue for his hometown, there'd probably be something), played for Notable Team in 1978–1980 and for Almost Famous in 1981. Do we:
  • Put him on the List of Notable Team players and the List of Almost Famous Team players? (Which one does the redirect point to? How do readers discover that he played on multiple teams?)
  • Create a separate and probably very short article for an athlete who might not technically qualify for a Wikipedia:Separate, stand-alone article, saying that he played for two teams, with the player lists for both teams linking to this central article?

This question is really caused by Wikipedia's format, rather than anything inherent to the subject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think the response from that quarter would amount to "You should be deleting that information from Wikipedia, it bloats the main article and isn't notable on its own". While I disagree with that in general, I do find respectable the argument that Wikipedia is fundamentally a prose encyclopedia, and we shouldn't be creating large numbers of articles that are purely tabulations of data (although they have some use, and the FishBase discussion was a pretty radicalizing experience for me in terms of what some editors would dismiss on those grounds). I think it's very difficult to define a priori what is or isn't an appropriate child article in terms wholly independent of the subject. For instance, for a given plant species X, I could make up an enormous list of places where the species has been collected, sourced to independent peer-reviewed etc. etc. It's possible that in many cases, I could even argue that this complied with WP:NLIST, by producing some articles discussing "The distribution of species X". I'm not sure WP:TOOBROAD forbids such a list; that's just a rationale for breaking the list down into smaller geographic chunks. Now, I don't make those lists, and if someone proposed to do so, I'd find reference to WP:NOTDB appropriate: such lists are impractical to curate. But that judgment is mostly based on pre-existing subject matter expertise, not on careful exegesis of comma placement in WP:NOT.

Unfortunately, I feel like we've undergone a shift that I think parallels a broader one in open culture (I have not been able to get through Eghbal's "Working in Public" yet because I find the contrast with what I remember so depressing) where the original optimism about giving lots of correct information to people so that they could make correct decisions and make Progress! has largely fizzled out. (This may be a parochial perspective, but would sort of date this to somewhere in the Obama presidency when the word "skeptic" inverted its moral valence.) But perhaps the more important influence is internal. We're no longer a small community of autodidacts where AGF wasn't just a meaningless catchphrase, but a load-bearing piece of the noosphere under constant attack by the self-interested. In contentious topics (broadly speaking) deferring slavishly to secondary sources is the only way to defend yourself from enraged partisans, but trying to run the whole encyclopedia in that frame of mind is sort of like trying to run your whole country as an armed camp. The cheerful recursion of WP:DETAIL reads to me like a fossil of those earlier times.

Your final question is something I've thought about for years: it's one of the conceptual sticking points in converting perma-stubs to lists (sort of the inverse operation of summary style). One thing I stumbled across is Help:Labeled section transclusion. If the lists in question give each player a line or two of description as opposed to just their name, in theory we could pick one list as the redirect target and use transclusion to feed that line into the other list. As with list-defined references, the big sticking point would be whether new editors trying to change that line would be able to navigate the transclusion back to the source. It might still be a maintenance improvement over the current Oort cloud of sports stubs, though. Before that, I'd theorized about making the concept of "Article" less atomic, so that just as some "articles" redirect unless you make an effort to get at their source, you could have ones that you can't readily get at as a stand-alone article, but get transcluded into other articles as list entries. But I can't imagine the changes to do that and the resulting software and social breakage would be practical. Choess (talk) 20:19, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Acknowledging that I'm personally biased towards mergeism, I wonder: What's wrong with having two million one- or two-sentence stubs? Traditional encyclopedias had many brief articles. Sometimes (perhaps often) all you want to know if the correct spelling of the name, or basic information like which team(s) the person played for. In wikijargon, we would say that a tiny bit of information is really all that's WP:DUE. I have trouble grasping the case for "It's worse for Wikipedia to have two sentences than to have zero." WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:42, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well, that's Diderot's Aguaxima. He frames it in more or less those terms, but I wonder if what he isn't really describing is the disappointment brought about by the gap between what you hope to find in the article (what could be written) and what has actually been written. On the one hand, I don't see that permastubs are objectionable on an individual basis. Arianis tells you what there is, which isn't much. (Actually, that could be expanded by a few sentences. Hm.) On the other hand, in aggregate, having a million tiny stubs of a related nature suggests that we're making some kind of mistake in choosing the format of individual articles for displaying this information. There probably is some additional maintenance drag at really large scale, too. Maybe it's not so bad if the stubs are really tiny, but the frobbing and template changing that goes on even on articles that are basically complete does use up attention on people's watchlists. IIRC both volume and the incomprehensible character of the changes played into the negative reaction to WikiData on watchlists. Choess (talk) 03:17, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Urena lobata disappoints me because of reality: It has a beautiful flower in the infobox, and yet people think it's a weed. (If you have a source saying how big the flower is, that would be nice information.)

The format question is kind of awkward. The first constraint is that all information is displayed to the reader on "a page"; therefore we have to decide "(separate) page" or "no (separate) page". For merging infobox-focused pages, you might look at User:WhatamIdoing/Journals, which was something I threw together for a discussion at WP:NJOURNALS a while ago. Perhaps it could inspire an idea for you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:44, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

brd warning error

You and Valjean (talk · contribs) seem to've been the most-involved editors at {{uw-brd}} recently. Can you take a look at template talk:uw-brd#first variable? — Fourthords | =Λ= | 16:06, 27 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

MEDRS sources

Hi WhatamIdoing, as discussed [1]. If you can take a look at some point. I didn't want to state a definitive link between Ehlers–Danlos syndrome and mental health issues, hence 'some evidence'. Please do alter any of my text as needed. This is the first time I've edited using doi sources. It turns out it is even easier than other referencing. Knitsey (talk) 15:11, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I'm happy with the way that @Mvolz and her teammates handled DOIs and similar source id numbers, too.

I think you've improved that article. Congratulations, and thanks for making that edit! WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:00, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you so much for checking it. And you did most of the work by providing the sources. Knitsey (talk) 22:10, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	Just wanted to take a moment to say how much I appreciate your contributions! Helping me find my feet in medical topics, always standing up for new users in community discussions, keeping an eye on a large swath of important medical articles. Thanks for all you're doing :). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:41, 31 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the kind words. I am always happy to see what you're doing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:41, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hovering vs clicking

Moving from here as it's getting off topic. Feel free to move back. I'm not sure why you mention that most users are not on the desktop; this is also true for clicks (4x more common on desktop). The paper accounts for intentionality by only counting events as a hover if the reference panel is displayed for a second. There are also other strong indications that at least a subset of hover events are intentional, and that makes obvious sense. Given this, do you believe "299 out of 300 times, readers don't care" or "readers are at least 300 times as likely to read the sentence you wrote than to read the source you cited" are appropriate? Rollinginhisgrave (talk | contributions) 03:34, 2 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I do. So does the 2020 paper, which says "about one in 300 page views results in a reference click (0.29% overall; 0.56% on desktop; 0.13% on mobile)".

Two-thirds of our page views are on mobile. That means you need 750 page views on mobile to get one reader to (attempt to) check the source. It's "only" 1 in 175 page views for desktop users, but desktop users are declining.

I believe there are some circumstances in which merely glancing at a citation might be informative, especially for someone who is familiar with a subject area (e.g., wants to know whether a partisan source has been cited). But the one-second cutoff doesn't prove anything; most editors have had experiences with the hovercard getting stuck, or just not being worth the trouble to click off. Also, they can't differentiate between hovering over a citation vs reading an Wikipedia:Explanatory footnote anyway, so they're overcounting the "glance at the citation". WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:32, 2 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like you're trying to describe two things: what the median reader is doing with references, and how likely it is a reference will be checked. The median reader is on a mobile, and isn't hovering or frequently checking the citation, so simply referencing the CTR of 1/750 page views for mobile users is sufficient for expressing this.

But it is not sufficient for expressing how likely it is a reference will be checked. I didn't intend to say the authors resolve the issue of determining intentionality by requiring the hover be open for one second, merely that they aren't ignoring the consideration. So yes, how often readers hover will not tell you how often they are checking a citation, but if we accept that any readers hovering are checking the citation, then we recognize that 299 out of 300 times, readers don't care is an exaggeration. Rollinginhisgrave (talk | contributions) 13:44, 2 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

People on a mobile device (not the mobile site/Minerva skin, but e.g., an iPhone) can't "hover" in the first place. "Let's care most about a metric that two-thirds of the target audience is physically incapable of using" is not a compelling argument for me.

I think an interesting analysis could be done with the data in "Figure 4: Relative frequency of citation-related events". If we assume that readers are readers (i.e., that desktop readers are not a significantly different population with dramatically different behaviors), then we should start with the hypothesis that readers, regardless of platform or device, are approximately equally interested in the sources.

The stories I'd want to explore from this data sound something like this:

• Everyone is equally likely to click the little blue clicky number. (It's twice as many mobile events, but there are twice as many mobile users.)
  • This fact suggests that mobile users have no replacement for hovering (which mobile users can't do).
  • This fact suggests that hovering behavior has limited relationship to interest in the ref.
  • Either desktop readers are dramatically different from mobile readers, or it's just that easy to have your mouse pointer accident align with a little blue clicky number on a desktop system. To explore this, I opened Queen Victoria on my laptop just now, in a private/incognito window as a reader, positioned my pointer in the center of the screen, and simply scrolled from the top of the article to the end, without changing the mouse position. I "hovered" over 13 little blue clicky numbers in that article merely because of their location on the page. (None would have been counted in the study, because I was scrolling quickly, but if I were reading the article, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these events just happened to last long enough to get counted.)
• There's a 2:5 ratio of mobile:desktop click-throughs to read a source, which means a 1:5 ratio of users clicking through (again, because there are twice as many mobile users vs desktop). This suggests that the readers-are-readers hypothesis may be wrong. Maybe desktop readers care basically nothing about sources, and mobile readers care even less than that. If that's true, then reality is that growing mobile use = declining interest in refs.
• Looking at desktop alone, there are more desktop click-throughs to read a source than there are desktop clicks on the little blue clicky numbers. That suggests two patterns: Hover–Click–Go to source, and the simpler Hover–Go straight to source.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:00, 2 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not really interested in opposing other stories you would like to tell. I like that you do. My only comment here was that, perhaps inadvertently, you are telling a story about how likely it is a source will be checked on a page. That's how I read your comment at least.

Looking on the rest, I think it sounds credible enough. My only comments there would be it may be worth considering the impact of readers getting the information from a hover and so deciding it is unnecessary to click through (FnHover eating FnClicks), and the paper's description of hovers as "a less cognitively demanding form of engagement with citations." I do wonder how most of our editors being on desktop impacts disparities. Rollinginhisgrave (talk | contributions) 21:49, 2 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The paper excluded all editors (logged-in + IPs that had made edits). I would be very interested in seeing the similar numbers, except for editors, or even for experienced editors. Humans have a tendency to think that everyone is (more or less) like "me", and this is completely wrong when it comes to experienced editors vs readers. There is almost nothing "normal" or "median" or "average" about how I interact with this website vs 99% of the world. Refs are important to me, because I have specific uses for them (e.g., deciding whether to revert a contribution). @HaeB would probably know if anyone's done any comparisons of editors' use of refs vs readers'.

Another thing I could wish for, if I were granted a magic research wish, is to figure out whether the behavior varies by {{sfn}} vs {{efn}} vs plain refs. When I scrolled down Queen Victoria, there were a lot of short citations, which I was profoundly uninterested in following up on. I thought "Eh, some book, probably" and moved on. If someone had a goal of getting readers interested in reading the sources, then {{sfn}} might be hurting the cause. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:56, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I missed that editors were excluded. It would definitely be interesting to look at that difference. On the broader point of "why do we put so much emphasis on how the refs look", in my unfounded, naive speculation, I imagine that it serves as a screening step; if a contributor can format a ref "well", they also likely have some understanding that we need sources to credibly verify claims.

I also share your assumptions on sfn. I have been considering whether to change the refs in melanzane al cioccolato from sfn; doing so in the first place was pretentious and in-groupy rather than serving the reader. Rollinginhisgrave (talk | contributions) 06:40, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't recommend sfn for that article, but if you want to change it, then I suggest following the letter of the law at WP:CITEVAR (i.e., mention it on the talk page first, and wait to see whether anyone objects).

In the meantime, is it actually possible for an eggplant dish to be a dessert? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:55, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I thought it was okay to make those unilateral changes if I was that pretentious and in-groupy first major contributor.

I think it sounds delicious. I would try to make it if I had a better frying setup and the sources didn't all insist that it's a huge hassle. Rollinginhisgrave (talk | contributions) 01:34, 4 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Unilateral changes means that some bureacratic-minded person who disagrees with you can claim you did something wrong. For the most part, if you post a note on the talk page, it'll get ignored, and then, hey, nobody objected... WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:58, 4 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Some tasty poutine for you!

Poutine from Windsor, Ontario, made by Canadians at a local a diner.	Poutine
	In Canada, where I live, poutine is very common and tasty. ~Rafael! (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects

~Rafael! (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects 21:19, 5 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:35, 6 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

How may we strengthen guards against PGAMEd EC accounts?

I see you recently attempted to get some consensus on adding two months to the EC criteria. The US Senate article has lately been hit with a series of vandalism episodes each conducted by a single Pgamed EC account. I'm in agreement with those who felt the extra time would not help, but I totally agree with your apparent premise (that ec accounts are too easy to obtain via gaming). Are there any existing tools we might use to filter various kinds of Pgaming activity? BusterD (talk) 13:36, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As a general rule, "gaming" edit counts doesn't worry me too much. Few enough folks reach 500 edits at all, much less quickly. The behaviors that concern me are:

• 500 rapid edits (e.g., semi-automated typo fixes), followed by an immediate turn on edit #501/day #31 to obvious vandalism/CTOP/abusive activity – This suggests a level of deliberateness that we would expect from Wikipedia:Long-term abuse or even the Wikipedia equivalent of an Advanced persistent threat ("when your opponent has a budget").
• 500-ish edits over a couple of months, followed by a less sudden shift from popular innocuous subjects (e.g., video games) to arguing on CTOP articles.

The first type of account could probably be detected through an automated report. That would basically give any interested admin a note saying "Hey, keep an eye on User:X and User:Y this week". It might be possible to leverage m:ORES predictions in a Special:AbuseFilter to disallow some edits by the flagged accounts (basically, set up something so that a slightly suspicious edit, which would normally be accepted, could be disallowed because it's a suspect edit from a suspect account).

The second type is more of a timesink than an immediate article threat. I'm not sure what to do with that, though I've spent a lot of time thinking about whether the Wikipedia:Balanced editing restriction could be developed. Imagine that you have to make 500 edits to touch the articles, and now, for every time you edit the article/comment on the talk page, you also have to make two edits to unrelated pages/subjects. That raises the 'cost' of arguing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:24, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't want to give free specific advice to Pgamers, but based on anecdotal evidence I believe there's a thriving small business creating and pgaming EC accounts and selling them for crypto. A look at the last few days' United States Senate page history will show you a small raft of batch created ECs, all with just over 500 edits. In each case, the account was created a month or so ago, and then at 30 days the account does repetitive micro edits to get auto-promotion. Which makes me curious--roughly how many extended confirmed accounts are automatically granted in a given day? Is there a report of such grantees which might be extracted for daily observation? Is the number significant enough to allow us to manually approve each EC request? I'm not expecting an answer here. Just raising the questions. Mathematically, it seems unlikely to be more than 100 per day (365.25 x 100=36,525 total--more than the number of regularly active contributors). If we should be manually observing each EC permission grant, 100 is a manageable number. BusterD (talk) 22:25, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@BusterD, I think it's about 15 per day (so, ~100 a week, because you want to watch them for more than the exact day), but you could also narrow the list down to those that achieved EC through rapid editing and/or in an unusually short timespan, which would make the list even shorter. After all, 97.5% of EC accounts don't make 500 edits within 30 days, so in the course of a month, we're looking at ~10 accounts that very rapidly achieved EC status, of which we expect 3 or 4 to be socks/bad actors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:57, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I like the idea of someone gaining EC rapidly and that requiring those accounts to manually request EC at PERM for an admin to review if the volume indeed is manageable. I could even see that such a review-role could be designated to editors with strong experience in CVU work (similar to the new temp-ip-viewer requirements, but a higher threshold) if the software allows non-admins from handing out permissions?

If all the edits are of the gnoming variety of adding links or cats, then it is questionable why an editor suddenly urgently needs EC, they can just continue gnoming away happily without EC. But if a legit editor who's new to Wiki and found it to be their calling comes here and requests EC because it allows them to actively contribute to articles that they may have raised edit requests for and such, then those can easily be approved.

One more thing to keep in mind - some (many?) accounts are sleepers, they don't gain the EC within 30 days of account creation, but will first register, sit around and then months later start editing and then gain EC over a short period of time, so I think rather than the current criteria being account age>30d & editcount>500, it should be editage of 500 edits>30d.

This would slow down things a lot and could also be an easy spot, say an account does get created, does 500 edits and then sits stale (e.g. to be sold like @BusterD: called out, and after that then suddenly activates and pops into a ctop - that is a lot easier to spot. I could very well see that say raising the requirement to 60d alongside switching it to editage could actually work - as I'd imagine if we see an account do 500 edits, then be stale for 2 months and then suddenly having an epiphany of waking up and switching into a total different (and by pure coincidence ctop) area typically raises most WP:CVU's spidey senses. Raladic (talk) 23:32, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(talk page stalker) - relatedly, Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/TenBlueEagles#31 July 2025 just concluded, which resulted in some meatpuppetry t-bans, several of which also engaged in PGAME acivity to reach ECP before they then bounced into the CTOP area. So just adding it as a piece of data.

What they shared in common pattern wise was a lot of small edits of adding a single link to something (+4) by wrapping some text that wasn't a link already, or adding a single category to a page. And then repeating that.

Some a bit faster than others, but the second one you pointed out fits most of them of taking a few weeks or months for the of 500-ish edits and then a shift into the CTOP where they then remain and cause disruption.

So maybe an observation of the "what" the first 500 edits of an editor are may be worthwhile to build a filter for those kind of accounts, e.g. if say 90% of your first 500 edits are basically adding a category or just a link - that's pretty WP:DUCKy. Raladic (talk) 23:14, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What I find remarkable about this batch of dedicated vandal accounts is the pure brazenness. They are aware they're going to be caught and blocked, but they keep on revealing new EC socks as if they have a large pocketfull. BusterD (talk) 00:11, 13 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not being overly flippant when I suggest we start teaching a bot (or an LLM) to recognize signs of PGAME and flag each such account for closer observation. At rates a good deal greater than 15 a day, it wouldn't take much volunteer time to observe suspicious gaming and simply not promote the new user... BusterD (talk) 00:21, 13 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Confusingly due to those editors only now having been topic banned, despite me pointing out my hunch that they're meat-puppets back in December 2024 based on the fairly obvious PGAME behavior, somehow this is suggesting that their editing history is now somehow legitimized including the use of their disruption possibly being used against editors that tried to protect Wikipedia against it?

Or am I misunderstanding it? I don't know if there's some misunderstanding due to the fact that I also actively edit in the topic area, but I continue to maintain a 100% track-record of identifying and tracking down SPI's in and outside of the topic area and my report back in December was to that effect as my editing outside of the topic area is primarily spent calling AIV, RfPP and SPI my home and clerking RMTR since last year. In retrospect, it's possible my experience dealing with vandals and socks wasn't given its due weight back when I filed the ANI report as I happened to have identified them in a topic area I also edit actively in. I guess I should have just filed the SPI report, but alas, that is a missed opportunity of the past. Raladic (talk) 05:20, 13 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, I don't have the capacity to follow the current ArbCom mess. I wish the Arbs lots of luck with it, but overall I'd guess that no matter what they do, we will continue to struggle in this area (though perhaps a Wikipedia:Balanced editing restriction would have some small benefit).

What might be helpful is if more editors in this area got better at differentiating between "disagrees with my POV" and "actually disrupts Wikipedia". This is ancient wiki-history, but at one point back in the day, Homeopathy had two determined pro-homeopathy POV pushers. One was what you'd expect from someone pushing pseudoscience, but the other was actually quite skillful at finding appropriate compromises. The result was that while none of our FRINGE folks agreed with them, they were able to work constructively with this second editor and to WP:Write for the enemy. I don't see that happening on wiki very much. The mere fact that an editor holds the Wrong™ POV is now usually taken as proof that the editor is WP:Disruptive, and if they don't change their POV quickly, then continuing to disagree with "me" is evidence of Wikipedia:Tendentious editing.

A simple Thought experiment that might illustrate this is: Imagine a hypothetical editor who holds quite the opposite POV from yours. Imagine that the editor is polite but firm and persistent about their POV and the need for their POV to be appropriately represented in relevant articles per WP:YESPOV. What would that editor's behavior look like, if that editor is not engaging in DE or TE? If the answer sounds like "That's not really possible: in practice, any editor who persistently pushes for articles to include a POV that I believe is transphobic [or pro-trans, for anyone holding the other POV] is automatically violating DE and TE", then I suggest that ArbCom is actually being asked to issue a content ruling, rather than a behavioral one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:30, 13 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, those are some good thoughts there. I think the fact that often it's a fine line between some editors who are arguing in good faith, even if their POV may be opposite to someone else's, but also other editors who will make changes purely DE or TE and when those intermingle, it gets real messy.

In the former case, we do often indeed come to a compromise, but the latter of course is the crux. Over the past few years there has definitely been an increase in the disruption side, the socking and meat are testament to that. I think it's particularly prevalent when some editors forget that we are writing a global encyclopedia and not what first comes to mind.

I do hear you that the lines can often get so blurred that it's sometimes very difficult to see the forest for the trees.

Thanks for taking the time for your thoughtful response :) Raladic (talk) 01:34, 14 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's part of it. I also think that when you're facing a real-world threat, then behavior that you would normally accept as ordinary on a non-threatening subject gets reinterpreted as dangerous behavior. I think we've seen that in WP:ARBPIA and climate change articles: There seems to be a part of their brains screaming that this is literally going to kill people, so why would any basically decent human being want to debate fiddly details about whether the joopleberry shrub always is a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet or if that's "only" the case in a clear majority of cases? Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of the cause – whatever the cause is – and make sure that Wikipedia has the Right™ answer. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:10, 14 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think it makes most sense to watch for rapid editing and then expect a percentage of them to have a rapid shift in behavior.

I don't think that we can assume that (e.g.,) adding a link is a reliable indicator. As soon as we focus on that, then the sockmasters will discover a different thing to do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:31, 13 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that merely altering conditions won't stop a dedicated disrupter like this one. I count 30 EC accounts boldly thrown away on US Senate since July 7 (when EC protection was applied). Each account used and disposed of like a paper towel. It appears each of the accounts was created in June or July. Only one had more than 550 edits, based on my cursory reading. This looks like vandalism of a rather pointy sort, apparently intended to increase admin workload. BusterD (talk) 00:46, 13 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, but there have always been a few people who think it's fun to create work for Wikipedia's admins.

It's possible that Wikipedia:Pending changes (What? You mean nobody gets to see my cleverness?) would be more of a deterrent for this user. I don't remember whether PC stacks well with EC; we'd want the most restrictive combination. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:07, 13 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ann Diamond

Hi. All the hullabloo about Ann Diamond got me curious, and I thought you might be interested to know that all that stuff about CIA experiments and "MKUltra" might actually not be entirely hogwash. See Montreal experiments - also covered on The Canadian Encyclopedia. Whether or not she was actually involved, who knows. This blog post (obviously not a source; just for interest) seems to cover her story, but she offers little in way of evidence to support her being there. I find the campaign to take down her article really quite strange... Must be the deep-state! All the best, MediaKyle (talk) 01:45, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

From the Wikipedia side of things, what concerns me is someone trying to remove a Wikipedia article because it allegedly contains certain claims (e.g., people with videographic recall) even though those claims are not actually present in the Wikipedia article, or at least not present in any way that can be detected by reading the words on the page.

We could probably do a better job of explaining the difference between true self-published and true non-independent sources, and sources (e.g., newspaper articles) that are neither self-published nor non-independent but that report information from the subject. This mostly becomes a problem with corporate earnings reports. We'll see people mistakenly claim that obviously reputable business sources, such as The Wall Street Journal, are non-independent because the newspaper reported that Microsoft's quarterly revenue was $75B, and the reporter got that number directly from the company. (What exactly are they expecting? The reporter to hack into the corporate financial system to see whether the CEO is lying?) The fact is that when an ordinary daily newspaper quotes the subject of an article, that does not make the subject in control of the newspaper. But this is difficult for some editors to grasp. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Confused of your Village Pump comment

Hi WhatamIdoing, how are you going?

I noticed this comment from you at the Idea lab and I am a bit perplexed by it. What were you trying to ask? It may be a software issue that went over my head. Commander Keane (talk) 04:53, 13 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's more of a product issue than a coding issue: The OP says "I have to change the text", but doesn't explain why anyone "has to" (=must) change that text. The OP had previously been asked to explain the use case and ignored the question. The reply today indicates that when the OP wrote "I have to", they actually meant they just "want to", and there is no actual need.

Obviously, if there had been a true need, we should consider whether that's something affecting more than just the OP. (Imagine if the response had been "I need to change it, because there's a typo" – we'd want to fix that at the source, not just for the one editor!) If people just want to change things for fun, then that's fine, but not something they really "have to" do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:54, 13 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe

Maybe join us over at Talk:Zak Smith. Not my area of expertise. Polygnotus (talk) 21:21, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that I can help with that mess. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:59, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

OK, thank you. I am not sure I can either, and this rabbit hole is real deep. Polygnotus (talk) 22:01, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

WP:LISTGAP

You recently removed the wikitable formatting I was using to create an indent with {{Reflist-talk}}, and only wrote "WP:LISTGAP" in your edit summary.[1] Could you clarify how the wikitable fell afoul of WP:LISTGAP? Also, would you know of an alternate way I could add an indent on {{Reflist-talk}} in a way that would be acceptable? — AFC Vixen 🦊 13:38, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Anything that breaks up the consecutive flow of lists (all * or all : in a row) is a LISTGAP problem. Unfortunately, AFAICT that includes {{reflist-talk}} pretty much no matter how you stick it in the middle of a discussion. When you're just listing sources, I'd suggest just listing them (i.e., remove the <ref>...</ref> and just make an ordinary list). When you're using them to discuss same article text – well, we're probably just going to have to tolerate a LISTGAP.

The main reason that I removed the table formatting is because there's no benefit to having a single long, narrow column of refs that everyone has to scroll past. On desktop/laptop devices, that leaves most of the screen empty. On a mobile device, it may not align with the amount of space on the user's screen (e.g., if they have a narrow screen and a large font size). As a general rule, it's best to minimize width-related formatting and let each person's browser figure out how to display it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:28, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Would using an {{Outdent}} like this

and putting an asterisk before both of these lines still violate WP:LISTGAP? I'm thinking I could simply force a discussion back to the left of the screen to avoid a full-width {{Reflist-talk}} being placed in between three-, four-, five-, ect. indent messages, and confusing the order of discussion and making who's replying to who unclear. "[Leaving] most of the screen empty" was purposeful to avoid this, for the record. — AFC Vixen 🦊 03:36, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Screenshot of Wikipedia talk page with narrow column of references

Here's what it looked like. Why did you think that this huge expanse of empty space was going to help people figure out who is replying to whom?

I don't know for sure, but I have heard that the outdent template doesn't actually help with LISTGAP matters. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:01, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This might be what's causing confusion, then. Here's how it looked on my end,[1] which honestly makes more sense as the product of the two-column wikitable with a blank, small-width left column that I had wrote up. It appears identical to this on all the browsers and devices I use. — AFC Vixen 🦊 04:47, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A single-column table with formatting of

| style="width:20px"|

should not be capable of producing a full-width table. {{Reflist-talk|colwidth=20em}} by itself could have done that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:51, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No, the point was to indent the entirety of {{Reflist-talk}} exactly like in the screenshots I linked, so that it's at the same indentation as my message. The normal : before a message does not work on {{Reflist-talk}}. |colwidth= only creates columns within the reflist. Please understand that I'm trying to achieve what's exactly depicted in the screenshots. — AFC Vixen 🦊 05:02, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As I said above, I think that if you wanted to achieve that, you shouldn't have used the <ref>...</ref> tags at all. If you had no little blue clicky numbers in your first comment, then you wouldn't have needed a reference block. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:19, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

{|
| style="width:20px"| 
| {{Reflist-talk|colwidth=20em}}
|}

I guess I'm also confused as to why you're describing this as a "single-column table", when it's clearly two columns. If I were to turn on the wikitable class and put just plain text in the cells, you can clearly see it's a two column table:

A

B

— AFC Vixen 🦊 05:20, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I see. I misread the formatting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:55, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Find

Not sure how I would find these people you talk about. Do you have opinions? Efficacity (talk) 03:11, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Has anybody agreed with you? If so, then that's the person to talk to. If not, then it might be best to just give it up as a Sisyphean task. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:02, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know what you think of anything other than that you may view yourself as being a yeoman. I think "this task" as you put it is slightly doable with you and one other person. Efficacity (talk) 05:37, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think that telling editors not to put the name of a criminal in an article about their crime is a bad idea.

If you want to create a rule telling editors to do this bad idea, you should work with people who think this is a good idea.

You've already had several discussions about this now. If, at this point, you don't know the name of any editor that thinks this is a good idea, then you should give up on this bad idea, because you will do a lot of work, only to find that all the editors reject your proposal and you have wasted all of your time and effort. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:59, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think you missed the point. I have said mentioning the perpetrator of these incidents is alright. What is not is emphasizing references to them such as bolding. Efficacity (talk) 17:09, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

And if you don't know the name of any editor who agrees with you yet, then I think you should give up on this idea, because zero support now = failed proposal then. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I found someone else and there could be quite a number of others. Efficacity (talk) 17:14, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Great. Go talk to them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If you agree on some of what is being proposed, that would be helpful. It looks like you contribute often at the village pump. Is that right? Efficacity (talk) 21:43, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]