User talk:Radiant!/Goodbye: Difference between revisions

I have been stricken with the horrors of end-of-term exams. So no wiking this week. I'll probably drop by whenever I have time again. Radiant_>|< 20:27, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Can you clarify for me whether, when you made this edit [1] you intended to suggest that meatpuppets on an AfD should be treated as one user for dispute resolution, or if that was just you adding an important sentence to the end of the page and not looking at what section you were adding it to? Phil Sandifer 08:12, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

When and if exam pressures ease, please come and voice an opinon at Wikipedia_talk:Websites#Straw_poll regarding the facts of "syndication" indicating notability.
brenneman^(t)(c) 03:26, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, would you mind enabling an e-mail address? I have a question I'd like to ask you via e-mail. Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 00:49, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to move it to speedy delete, I'd support.

Thanks for the tips. Flcelloguy (A note?) 17:21, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I agree. Why not participate in the discussion? I put that poll together because I am trying to get opinions out on the table, and that's a bit hard to do. It's very easy for you to say that polls are evil, but how willing are you to help build consensus? I've tried to be very clear that nothing is being decided with the poll in question. Please help on the talk page, in a more concrete form than repeating a "polls are evil" mantra. -GTBacchus^(talk) 01:33, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Cool, sorry for jumping the gun. See my replies there. -GTBacchus^(talk) 01:41, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Polls are not evil. Discussion and attempts to build consensus are helpful, but having a poll is also a helpful way to get a sense of how different opinions are represented, numberwise. For example, if five vocal users support an idea, and 18 less vocal users oppose it, the fact that one side has a clear majority is more obvious with a poll than with trying to sort out lines upon lines of discussion. A poll is simply an easy way of saying "Ok, so who and how many people support this idea, and who is opposed to it?". Ideally, we can have both polls and quality discussion to go with them.Ëvilphoenix ^Burn! 02:12, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the dude hit me as I was closing MFDs... I immediately went into bot rollback mode and reverted all the junk he made. Thanks for blocking the sock! That's good teamwork. :) Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 02:40, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings.

I have just been gandering at your recent changes to WP:CSD, and overall I feel they're top notch. The removal of the "instruction" creep for the attack page criteria, in particular, had me chuckling.

One change I wanted to hopefully discuss with you, however, was your change to G4:

Recreation of deleted material. A substantially identical copy, by any title, of a page that was deleted according to the deletion policy, except if it is in user space, or undeleted per the undeletion policy. Before deleting again, the admin should ensure that the material is substantially identical, and not merely a new article on the same subject. In case of a speedily deleted page, the admin should ensure that the material still meets some othercriterion[sic] for speedy deletion.

The "ensure that the material still meets some othercriterion[sic] for speedy deletion" passage is a bit confusing. It reads as though the admin is supposed to make sure that the article meets some other criteria for deletion besides G4 if the article is to be deleted under the auspices of G4.

I'm wondering if you would be willing to revisit that particular phrasing or, alternately, let me have a go at it?

All the best.
→ Ξxtreme Unction|_{yakkity yak} 13:37, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

After some reflection, I believe you are correct. The sentence is better off left out of the passage entirely. Either the article in question is a recreation of substantially identical content, or it isn't. And if it isn't, don't use G4 to justify the deletion. Makes perfect sense.

Thanks for the reply and the sage counsel.

→ Ξxtreme Unction|_{yakkity yak} 14:31, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

hi, i hope u don't mind me contacting u like this. maybe i'm misinterpreting the situation, or maybe i'm just a bit stupid, but i don't think the argument to remove is coming across clearly. i'd genuinely like to understand why you want them removed. if you have time, could you add more detail? Veej 14:03, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I like your changes to A8, it's much more readable now. One question though: in your change, the 48 hour restriction got dropped. Was that intentional (and do we have consenus on it)? At least for me, this would be a welcome change — there have been many times I've wanted to {{db-copyvio}} a particularly blatant copyvio, but it's a little bit too old. Jamie ^{(talk/contribs)} 14:19, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• Cool. I hope we have broad enough consensus on that. (I think original point in the 48h thing was to make it more likely that the "source" of the copyvio cited was not in fact a mirror.... otherwise the deleting admin has more work to do making sure that the speedy is legitimate.) Anyways I'd be glad to see the 48h restriction gone, because there have been some copyvios (esp. on WP:PNT and WP:NEG) that are blatant copies, with a single edit from an anon or redlink editor... but were too old to speedy. Jamie ^{(talk/contribs)} 14:33, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • You may be right about the GFDL thing. Well I'm gonna be on wikibreak for a bit after tonight. If by the time I come back, nobody has reinstated the 48h restriction I will be glad... and I'll start tagging obvious copyvios for A8 rather than WP:CP, if they have no significant edit history. Jamie ^{(talk/contribs)} 14:43, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

sorry Radiant. i should have said in my original message, could you put you comment here, so that it adds to the debate? perhaps if you start with "comment", your comment won't be misconstrued as a double vote. thanks Veej 15:40, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, one of the reasons, that i've asked you to put your comment in Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2005_December_18#Category:Wikipedians_by_politics is that i'd also like my reply to be part of the overall debate. i thought i'd better come clean. Veej 15:51, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• my reply will be along the lines of; The factionalizing issue seems unfair. Wikipedians can have opposing viewpoints without being hostile, surely? shouldn't we Assume good faith? i'm a relatively new wikipedian. are my expectations of other wikipedians naive? i was tagged by a like-minded person to join this debate. i don't believe i've shouted down the opposition. hopefully, i've added to the debate. Veej 16:12, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Radiant, i may come across as patronising. i don't mean to. i don't think you should be too disappointed about the lack of support. effectively, this is about the use of categorization of wikipedians in general. removal of that, is bound to be an uphill struggle because of the sheer number of wikipedians that have categorized themselves. however some excellent points have been made and serious problems highlighted. how do we deal with POV fuelled mis-application of categories? how do we deal with factionalization? regardless of which side has most support, these problems still need solutions. the debate has stalled of late & become one sided, which is a shame because that brings us no closer to solutions. i totally disagree that further comment is pointless. Your vote has been cast, but your debate can rage on. Veej 00:50, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. Thanks for your quick reply to my query. --Whouk (talk) 16:00, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please unprotect Template:Album. It is a todo list for that wikiproject and is used only on talk pages. -- Netoholic @ 17:06, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, I have already blocked him. If this was terribly out of process, feel free to undo. Appears to be an "abusive sockpuppet" from my observations. — FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 20:20, Dec. 20, 2005

Hi Radiant. Whilst your two sets of changes to the CSDs are certainly bold, I don't think they are the right set of changes. Some of them are fine, but you've removed the 'mistake' criterion from G7 twice, and it's been put back in twice. It's important, since it otherwise grants license to irate authors to have their pages removed just because they fancy it, when that's not how we do things, nor does the GFDL allow retraction. The explicit nature of A7 is, I am sure, going to run into trouble by nature of its explicitness and failure to include any number of other types of groups. "...or persons" was simpler and captured everything. (Plus, I'm not aware of any discussion that approved your form of words, as implied in your edit summary.)(Ok, that VP poll did, in part, but you paraphrased it, and it was never an actual poll, so I think it's pushing its luck, especially seeing as it already has been extended without ceremony.) Then, the previous version of G4 had been reworded into its then-current form after some careful consideration rather than the rather twisty phrasing it has at present.

As you know better than me, the CSDs have been constructed fairly gradually over time. I don't think that sudden, un-requested change is necessary or desirable. Kim Bruning's request wasn't a request so much as a complaint, and received no useful support. -Splash^talk 22:38, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I also just noticed an exhortation to not simply use a letter and a number. I'm afraid I plan to overlook that... -Splash^talk 22:39, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Some of them were suggested on the talk page. The specific ones I mentioned above were not or had certainly not reached any kind of agreement. You see, the trouble with trying to rework the wording from an ad-hoc proposal is the current version: we have something that says "organizations" but not "companies". Why not companies? Because of WP:CORP? We have WP:MUSIC to protect bands, then, will be the cry. The CSDs were well thought out before the "flame throwing" that ensued Kim Bruning's complaining. I'm serious considering a brutal revert back to those: they certianly didn't need the kind of re-editing the old-but-new version did. -Splash^talk 23:33, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it's entirely fair to compare the actual changing of scope of CSDs to changing the name of the loser noobface in the attack criterion. There are certainly problems with CSDs, most notably A8 at present which is more broken than a smashed china dish but proving hard to change, but I don't really think they are (or were) in need of a cleaning out; they were the result of fairly iterative construction and consensual by virtue of the fact that they had stood. By resetting the iterations, we would seem to be losing the soft-landing nature of the then-current CSDs. -Splash^talk 23:41, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As for G4, I prefer by far the version before any of the recent changes (permalink). In the version before Extreme Unction's edit, I don't see any instruction to evaluate the deletion, beyond being sure it is, in fact, a speedy which is a necessary part of the process anway. It certainly doesn't demand any evalution of an AfD or even the correctness of the AfD (apart from a ref to the deletion policy). Admins need only be sure that 1)it is substantially identical and 2)if it has previously been speedied, that it is still ok to speedy it i.e. that one speedy does not lead to another. See User talk:Extreme Unction for a suggestion to rephrase it again. If you're referring to the proposal for an I6 for the changes to I1, then I honestly can't work out the correlation, and I'm not just being difficult. I6 was specifically about temp uploads for the main page and, as your comment says, entirely commonsensical. But you just removed a sentence from I1; I don't see how that gives effect to the suggestion. (Anyway, we should speedy such images because they probably break the GFDL attribution needs if nothing else.) The A6 example probably is patent nonsense, yes, although I can understand what it means ok, but it is also an attack. Like I said in a comment on CSD talk, I'd be perfectly happy to see that go. But as a long standing example of A6, I don't think I was somehow wrong to replace it; you're version merely corrects the punctuation...The {nothanks} link works for me in both versions, but I may be getting that wrong. I don't think I got more than I bargained for, but I really didn't bargain for much more than a slowly-but-surely approach. -Splash^talk 00:01, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for watching over the poll that I'd started. I was actually planning to start a formal proposal after the straw poll later this week, but this way works as well. It certainly seems to me that we have a general consensus about the intent of A7. Thanks again. howcheng [ t &#149; c &#149; w &#149; e ] 22:41, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I did a few, but then noticed that Wikipedia:Template substitution says not to subst: it, I think it should be subst:'d though. Martin 14:27, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm dropping you this note, as I'd seen you vote on Emil Christensen that was up for deletion and you probably have an interest (if not in gaming, at least in AfD's). Recently, the article for Sturmgrenadier met with Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sturmgrenadier. I would appreciate your input on the article and comments on the AfD page, whether you see fit to retain it or delete it. --Habap 16:03, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I see you have removed the 'one line summary' headline. Let's discuss it at the Template talk:Guideline one liner page? Stevage 23:02, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

(copied from my talk page -DES):

I don't object to your merging these templates, but would it be possible to have the "importance or significance" link for band pages should point to WP:MUSIC rather than WP:DVAIN? That seems more appropriate. Radiant_>|< 23:05, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Done with a second optiona parameter on {{db-bio}}. See if you like the result. DES ^(talk) 23:27, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Radiant, looking through RFA I couldn't help noticing that you've opposed a lot of candidates with words to the effect of "not familiar enough with policy". I'm not trying to defend any particular candidate here, I'm just wondering how familiar a user needs to be to become an admin, and what a user would need to do to demonstrate this familiarity. This is all just for interests sake – familiarity with policy is one of the most important things for an admin, but many of your opposes come for RFAs that have lots of support, so I'm thinking you have higher standards than most and I'm wondering exactly what they are. Raven4x4x 01:05, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there ... understood. I just want to get this thing moving: the arguments are getting rather circular and we have neither the leadership nor a consensus yet (methinks) to proceed. My 'echoes' are meant more to try to provide support or opposition to notions stated and to move forward.

Speaking of which: in absence of anything definitive, perhaps the open/closed vote, with/without comment dichotomies should be put to a vote ('evil' as it may be)? Anyhow, thanks for helping to keep things on track and expressing concerns about 'puppetry'. :) E Pluribus Anthony 17:15, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your note; understood. Hey: I'm all for Occam's Razor and simplifying things! I only suggested a vote in an attempt to move forward definitively regarding this process. Moreover, this could be prudent since a few object to proceeding with a public vote for whatever reason, justified or not. I do not, but I'm easy.

IMHO, I feel that the current discussion on the talk page has stalled: it is getting rather circular and has detracted away from us resolving important matters of process and implementation (as per Jimbo's fiat). Hence, we're going in circles. To that end, I've dropped another brief note to Anthere requesting her input: she did indicate she would get back to us shortly a few days ago.

As for the moving forward (in any event), I cannot lead the charge and think it futile to comment on the talk page further regarding this, but I support such notions generally and as per last year without the same difficulties. Make sense? How's that for puppetry?  :) Let me know if you've any questions. E Pluribus Anthony 23:00, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Don't forget to add a notice of the ban and your rationale for it on Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Zen-master. When I banned Zen-master from Race and intelligence, Fred Bauder asked me to do this, so I assume the same applies here. --Ryan Delaney ^talk 02:58, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Have you noticed that the {{db-xxx}} tags now have the option of not adding the pages to Category:Candidates for speedy deletion? This creates the possibility of articles being tagged with a speedy deletion tag and remaining tagged indefinitely. Uncle G 10:38, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• It also allowed dependent templates to avoid being categorized into CAT:CSD. Jamie ^{(talk/contribs)} 03:41, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Someone has had the idea of adding a "nocat" parameter to dozens of templates; if "nocat" is specified when the template is put on an article, the article will not be put in the regular category for that tl (e.g. "category:speedy deletions" etc). Do you think this is a good idea, regarding userfriendliness and server load? Radiant_>|< 18:16, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt there's any major server load concern. I don't see the usefulness of it, though, and it seems like an ugly kludge. Why/when would you not want {db} tagged pages to be in the category, except for Wikipedia:Template messages sub-pages? If that's the only reason, I think we can safely say this new "feature" isn't necessary at all and is a minor, minor annoyance. Sometimes, people don't realize that they should be making MediaWiki feature requests rather than kludging. I worry that this implementation may break something unforeseen, either now or in the future. -- Netoholic @ 18:25, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

• • • This change also means that the dependent ("daughter") templates also wind up in CAT:CSD. Let's see if we can reach consensus on Template talk:Db-reason. Jamie ^{(talk/contribs)} 04:08, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Radiant. You wrote on Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:if "...the trouble and confusion they cause...". In re "confusion they cause", I wonder if I might explain qif to you, provided you're interested. But I don't know wheather you meant your confusion or the confusion of users of qif. I just thought that it might help to understand that thing well. I do not want to "sell" qif to you in any way and I accept the fact that you are against it. I would also like to make clear that I will not hinder anybody doing what David Gerard decides on that matter. WP:AUM is now fixed. – Adrian | Talk 22:06, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your reply on my talk. I didn't know that you are a computer professional. I agree with you that the implementation of qif is difficult to understand even for the average admin, though I find it's usge is not that difficult to understand. I have been using qif primarily inside template:book reference, where it already was when I came there (in the old form of if), and I inserted book reference and web reference in a few articles to try using it and see wheather it makes sense or not. I think qif was never meant to be used in articles directly. I was not aware of the dangers of these templates when I came to book reference. The sad for me is that I see no way to implement book reference without qif or the logic templates beeing implemented in MediaWiki code. It is also very sad that the server hurting is even that bad that we have to remove book reference and web reference. But I understand that server health is more important than template book reference. An other difficult thing is template:language, which contains a tremendous number of qif calls, but that's used in less than 1000 articles. Interestingly this beast was built by a language expert (Garzo, I think he is not a computer professional) and its structure was so clean that I had not much trouble to convert it from if to qif. There were other templates that had to be fixed first because they were simply not convertable to qif because if allowed some strange use cases that qif no longer supports. – Adrian | Talk 10:32, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Care to take a look at this newest competitor for "Dumb Template Trick of the Week"? -- Netoholic @ 22:43, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've noticed that you've opposed a lot of RFAs citing: "Lack of experience". How do you come to this conclusion, and could you be more specific? Thanks, =Nichalp «Talk»= 14:09, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I notice that you listed Template:Album Infobox 2 as "to orphan" when you cleaned up WP:TFD. I wondering if my counting was off, but it looked to me like the voting was fairly evenly split at 21 to keep and 22 to delete. Shouldn't the result have been "no consensus" as with the first nomination? —Locke Cole 13:15, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Radiant,

Re. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates), I was still waiting if anything would come out of Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Poll, but now I see you removed both from wikipedia:current surveys some days ago diff - I have the current surveys page on my watchlist, but must've missed that your "cleanout" of 20 december included both links. --Francis Schonken 16:24, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it wasn't my poll, but it started around the same time I got started working on Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates). I was just trying to be polite to the other guy. In the sense of not pushing my proposal too much while he was doing a poll on a similar topic.

So, what now? We both had had the idea to do some improvement/widening of scope on wikipedia:naming conventions (years in titles) (which never got beyond the "proposal" stage either). The only part of my proposal that might be controversial would be the bit where I propose for recurring events to use dates between brackets in disambiguation style. I could expand it with what is in the years in titles NC, so that three solutions are available instead of one (that is: including "<year> <Event>" and "<Event>, <year>" as possible formats).

Anyway that was what I was going to do after I read Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Climate change dispute 2#Preferred styles, containing: "Wikipedia does not mandate styles in many different areas; these include (...), date formats, (...). Where Wikipedia does not mandate a specific style, editors should not attempt to convert Wikipedia to their own preferred style, (...)" - which was part of the Arbitrator's decision. That settled the thing for me. For the rest I like the "numbers and dates" NC better than the "years in titles" NC because the "numbers and dates" NC has a broader scope (and fills in where the MoS page on "numbers & dates" doesn't clarify the difference between options in the text of articles, and some specifics about page name conventions).

What do you think? --Francis Schonken 23:02, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I updated Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) as described above. Radiant, would you care to have a look at this new version of the proposed guideline? Especially as I'm no native English speaker... don't know whether language is OK. My idea is to re-propose this guideline via e.g. Village pump (policy) and current surveys, being understood that if, in a later stage, it would be accepted:

• wikipedia:naming conventions (years in titles) would be made a redirect to that page;
• wikipedia:naming conventions would mention this guideline for topics related to dates & numbers (instead of linking to the Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) page that doesn't give the full story on page name titles containing numbers & dates).

tx! --Francis Schonken 11:18, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi - You don't seem to have an email address enabled. I'd like to talk privately about the inactive admin proposal. Suggestions? -- Rick Block (talk) 01:12, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

LOL! Izehar 17:44, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Just nitpicking here, but MFD uses the {{Mfd top}} and {{Mfd bottom}} templates for closed nominations... it's something new we're trying out. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 00:04, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It is mostly trivial, the only difference between {{at}} and {{Mfd top}} is that "article" is replaced with "miscellany page". The other thing is the color, which is unique to MfD (every process has a different color). Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 00:08, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for supporting my successful RfA! Your trust means a great deal to me, and I promise to try my hardest to serve the community. —David Levy (formerly Lifeisunfair) 06:37, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]