Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard

Welcome – post issues of interest to administrators.

For urgent incidents and chronic, intractable behavioral problems, use Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. If you are new, try the Wikipedia:Teahouse instead. Do not report breaches of personal information on this highly visible page – instead use Wikipedia:Requests for oversight. For administrative backlogs add {{Admin backlog}} to the backlogged page; post here only if urgent. Do not post requests for page protection, deletion requests, or block requests here. Just want an admin? Contact a recently active admin directly. When you start a discussion about an editor, you must leave a notice on their talk page. Pinging is not enough. You may use {{subst:AN-notice}} ~~~~ to do so. Sections inactive for over three days are archived by Lowercase sigmabot III.(archives, search) Start a new discussion

Open tasks

XFD backlog

V	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Total
CfD	0	0	12	29	41
TfD	0	0	0	2	2
MfD	0	0	0	2	2
FfD	0	0	0	0	0
RfD	0	0	8	20	28
AfD	0	0	0	1	1

• 10 bot-reported usernames for administrator attention
• 2 user-reported usernames for administrator attention
• 2 bot-generated requests for intervention against vandalism
• 1 user-generated requests for intervention against vandalism
• 154 sockpuppet investigations
• 20 Candidates for speedy deletion
• 1 Fully protected edit requests
• 0 Candidates for history merging
• 34 requests for RD1 redaction
• 34 elapsed requested moves
• 5 Pages at move review
• 20 requested closures
• 142 requests for unblock
• 0 Wikipedians looking for help from administrators
• 24 Copyright problems

Pages recently put under extended-confirmed protection

Report

Pages recently put under extended confirmed protection (22 out of 7739 total) () WATCH Page Protected Expiry Type Summary Admin Future of Honor 2024-05-23 03:55 2025-05-23 03:54 edit,move restore ECP Daniel Case Israel-related animal conspiracy theories 2024-05-23 03:51 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP and ARBPIA Daniel Case Justin Stebbing 2024-05-22 22:39 indefinite edit,move Persistent disruptive editing: Substantive COI editing - propose changes on the talk page Anachronist Proximus Group 2024-05-22 13:44 2024-08-22 13:44 edit Persistent sock puppetry, COI editing, or both NinjaRobotPirate International Criminal Court investigation in Palestine 2024-05-22 12:55 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: WP:PIA, WP:ECR El C Wokipedia 2024-05-21 23:50 2024-05-23 23:50 edit,move Shenanigan precaution. BD2412 Draft:Zard Patton Ka Bunn 2024-05-21 20:22 2024-11-21 20:22 create Repeatedly recreated: targeted by Nauman335 socks Yamla June 2024 Ukraine peace summit 2024-05-21 18:38 indefinite edit,move Community sanctions enforcement: WP:GS/RUSUKR El C Template:English manga publisher 2024-05-21 18:00 indefinite edit,move High-risk template or module: 2500 transclusions (more info) MusikBot II Draft:S S Karthikeya 2024-05-21 13:27 2025-05-21 13:27 create Repeatedly recreated Yamla Talk:Sexual and gender-based violence in the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel 2024-05-21 01:18 2024-05-28 01:18 edit,move Arbitration enforcement ScottishFinnishRadish Draft:Roopsha Dasguupta 2024-05-20 21:26 2029-05-20 21:26 create Repeatedly recreated Yamla Gaza floating pier 2024-05-20 17:36 indefinite edit,move Arbitration enforcement ScottishFinnishRadish Science Bee 2024-05-20 15:26 2027-05-20 15:26 create Repeatedly recreated Rosguill Wikipedia:Golden Diamond Timeless Watch 2024-05-20 06:54 2024-05-23 06:54 create Repeatedly recreated Liz Screams Before Silence 2024-05-20 04:56 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: per RFPP and ARBPIA Daniel Case Tyson Fury vs Oleksandr Usyk 2024-05-20 03:49 indefinite edit,move Persistent vandalism: per RFPP Daniel Case Atom Eve 2024-05-20 02:53 2024-08-20 02:53 edit Persistent sock puppetry NinjaRobotPirate Ebrahim Raisi 2024-05-19 22:02 indefinite edit,move Arbitration enforcement: WP:ARBIRP; upgrade to WP:ECP, 2024 Varzaqan helicopter crash-related; aiming for the short term (remind me) El C 2024 Varzaqan helicopter crash 2024-05-19 21:15 2024-06-19 21:15 edit Contentious topic restriction Ymblanter Koli rebellion and piracy 2024-05-19 21:08 indefinite edit,move Persistent sock puppetry Spicy Khirbet Zanuta 2024-05-19 12:15 indefinite edit,move Contentious topic restriction: WP:A/I/PIA ToBeFree

Clarification on lifting of BLP ban

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

• Jabbi (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log)

Good day editors

Just over a year ago I wrote about sensitive aspects of Belarusian politics and did not provide acceptable sources for some of my statements. I appealed my ban about a third into it which was not well received. I understand that any statements, regard living persons especially, in all namespaces, need to be appropriately sourced and not contain a non-neutral point of view. I want to stress that I am a long term contributor to Wikipedia, having focused the majority of my contributions to the Icelandic Wikipedia, but have increasingly switched to the English one. I do understand BLP policy, I made a mistake and furthermore in trying to defend my original mistake rather than accepting criticism. I see that clearly with distance on it. My suggestion for anyone sceptical of my integrity would be to look at my edits to 2011 Minsk Metro bombing, a sensitive topic but you could also look at Alexander Lukashenko, Constitution of Belarus.

I have adhered to the ban for the past year. Mostly contributing around the important Belarusian historical figure, Konstanty Kalinowski with one accidental breach, see Talk:Soft_Belarusization.

Pinging @Nick, @El C, @Bbb23, @Robert McClenon, @HighInBC, @Deepfriedokra, @Ncmvocalist, @Celestina007, @Jackattack1597, @Meters, @Cullen328, @Pawnkingthree, @Isaacl

My question is simply if the ban can be lifted and I am allowed to edit BLP.

Thanks for your time, Jabbi (talk) 12:35, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

@Jabbi: You edited Alexander Lukashenko? -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 12:42, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Now I remember . . . -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 12:48, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

I support lifting the topic ban. BTW, couldn't you have started off with "Hello editors"? GoodDay (talk) 12:53, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

• Support lifting the topic ban, regardless of whether it is about to expire anyway. There have been no new issues in about a year. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:09, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
• Support lifting the topic ban. It has been more than one year, and the user's limited editing on English Wikipedia during that time shows no problems. Meters (talk) 19:47, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose per my original reasoning in the ANI thread that resulted in the ban. I don't see any engagement with other editors wrt solving conflict and minimal edits in general during their ban. PRAXIDICAE🌈 19:54, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
• Not so sure The problem is, you haven't done anything here or on the Iceland Wiki to judge by. 20 edits in the last year? That isn't enough of a measuring stick to feel warm and fuzzy about it. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 20:07, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose at this time. I, too, feel that 20 edits in the last year isn't a good enough measuring stick to confidently tell whether we'd be spared another episode. I suppose that, practically speaking, since the ban is gonna expire soon, anyway, it doesn't really matter. But I still think this point needs to resonate. El_C 20:39, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
• Neutral I was pinged, but there is not enough to go buy.-- Deepfriedokra (talk) 02:13, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
• Procedural questions. I'm not sure why I was pinged, but, more important, I don't understand the ban. The only thing formal I've read was that Jabbi was banned until "at least July 26, 2022". Isn't that kind of odd ban language? What happens after July 26? Why do editors say that the ban is going to "expire soon"? Just in case anyone is curious, today is August 22. :p I guess I must be missing something.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:20, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

  The closing statement suggests that the ban is an indefinite one appealable after one year, but reading through the discussion it seems pretty clear to me that the proposal being supported is Jabbi is banned from making any edits anywhere on Wikipedia that concerns a living person or recently deceased person for one year (which you proposed, incidentally!) There's an alternative proposal for an indefinite ban appealable after nine months, but that doesn't seem to attract any support. (And Wug's message on Jabbi's talkpage notifying them of the re-imposed ban says I closed your AN appeal having seen consensus to essentially reset your one year topic ban.

  So my understanding is that the ban has expired, and Jabbi is free to make edits relating to living people once again. (The alternative interpretation would be that Wug's ANI close statement is the canonical sanction, the ban is indefinite and therefore will not expire soon. But either the ban has already expired, or it won't at all; I can't see any reading by which it will expire soon!) Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 14:37, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

• Moot The best I can tell is that they were under a 1 year ban, violated the ban in july of 2021 which reset the clock on the 1-year ban. But it is now August 2022, and unless there was another extension of the ban, the ban has already expired. --Kyohyi (talk) 17:32, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

  Normally, the violation of a ban results in a block or at least a warning. It doesn't automatically reset the ban unless the administrator formally states that is the sanction for the violation.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:37, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

  That is correct, from what I saw of the discussion they chose to reset the ban in July 2021. --Kyohyi (talk) 17:49, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

• Unless someone shows up in the next 24 hours to argue that the ban has not expired, I will close this as moot (AmEng sense). -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 07:49, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

WPWP photo contest again

Just a heads-up that #WPWP is coming to a close (ends Aug 31) and so we’re seeing an uptick in submissions. Might be worth keeping some eyes on filter 1073 lest we get any more… er… pickle images. firefly ( t · c ) 21:29, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

• Here we are, yet again, having to clean up after a poorly run and poorly executed contest. Can we just ban this already? I've removed dozens of copyvios and there are several examples of badly placed images, images added to BLPs that aren't of the person in question and just general bad BLP images that are outright creepy and/or useless. PICKLEDICAE🥒 21:40, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) A contest that requires volunteers to review an abuse filter to ensure incorrect, BLP-violating and copyright-violating images are not shoehorned into articles in order for editors unfamiliar with our local policies regarding images to win prizes should be banned from the project. You can make a bunch of rules for participation but if the organizers don't actively monitor the additions then what's the point of making the rules? It's a drain on local resources and the cost/benefit ratio is wholly unbalanced. -- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 21:49, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  More to the point: they should be banned, at least here. There is almost no benefit to this contest, as shown year after year. PICKLEDICAE🥒 21:54, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

• Every time this runs it causes problems. When we have to have an abuse filter for a contest, we shouldn't permit it. Hog Farm _Talk 22:03, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  The rewards should go to the editors who revert the most image additions. -- ferret (talk) 22:07, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  well sign me up. PICKLEDICAE🥒 22:09, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  I can donate a box of old RadioShack CueCats as rewards. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 22:30, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

• Serious question, can't we just set the filter to disallow all these edits? It's the nuclear option, but it's more and more clear it may well be necessary to prevent sustained disruption from these contests. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 22:16, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  Filter 1158 (hist · log) enforces a limit of 25 images per day. It was enabled after this discussion. Straight-up disallowing would require a new poll. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 22:26, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

• Anybody know how many good additions this contest brings? Picklivich 22:23, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  I'm struggling to find any. PICKLEDICAE🥒 22:26, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

• Huh? I just checked the most recent edit by the last ten people flagging that edit filter, and they all appeared constructive. Sometimes the formatting is wrong, in one case they used an already existing image that's since been tagged for deletion (they didn't upload it), and sometimes it's just rearranging, but they seem to be consistently doing what they're supposed to do: using already-uploaded photos on Commons in Wikipedia articles. Friendly reminder that nobody here is obliged to clean up, and newbies don't have to get it right. This kind of noticeboard panic seems to happen for every contest, absent any sort of systematic analysis, based on a subset of problematic edits. Oppose any sort of kneejerk intervention. Has anyone actually pinged the organizers to ask what their process is for review? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:34, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  The problem is in between their ok edits, there are a lot of really bad ones, which are also BLP violations, including adding photos of people who are not the subject, blatant copyvios and creepy candids or blurry photos to the point it's worthless. We've been going through this for more than a year now and nothing ever changes. PICKLEDICAE🥒 22:36, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  Also the bulk of the people participating (particularly the ones making problematic edits) only edit for these contests. That alone imo is problematic on the same level as paid editing since they're doing it for a monetary outcome. PICKLEDICAE🥒 22:43, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) This isn't an image upload drive. We already tell people -- all new users -- that if there are free images available (especially on Commons), then use them in the article! That's what these users are doing. If there are bad images, it's because someone else, unrelated to the contest, uploaded it. Yes, ideally they'd all learn all about copyright, check for copyvios, and improve the articles to FA while they're at it, but that's not the scope of what's happening.
  Here's the point: if the majority of these edits are indeed bad (not just imperfect), then yeah, we have a problem that needs intervention, but there needs some systematic evidence of that when we're talking about this kind of scale. So let's answer this: what proportion of edits in a contest/drive/campaign need to be positive and how do we measure it to avoid weighting for, say, one or two bad actors? [after edit conflict]: If contests with prizes that engage people who aren't already really experienced Wikipedians are inherently problematic, that needs its own discussion. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:46, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  I'm not talking about uploads. I'm talking about users finding any random image on commons that matches a word in an article and using it, without care as to whether or not it's acceptable or useful to readers. There's a problem here. It's been discussed endlessly, that you are not agreeing with or seeing it is not the problem nor does it mean it doesn't exist. As far as pinging the organizers, I believe that was done in the past when this was discussed, but it isn't the job of volunteers to make sure a prize/paid campaign that values quantity over quality is up to snuff when the organizers can't be bothered to communicate with the community in the first place. PICKLEDICAE🥒 22:48, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  Simply: If you want to ban a contest, provide a systematic review of contributions, along with evidence the organizers aren't going to be involved with cleaning up. Do that and I'll be right there with you calling for a ban or some other intervention. What I'm not going to do is support shutting down a large outreach event based on anecdotal catastrophizing without systematic evidence. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:06, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  This was put together by somebody who can't clean up, because they're topic banned from working with images on enwiki. MrOllie (talk) 23:11, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) In the same thread where you chided us for a complaint - a valid one that has been discussed for years and provided multiple diffs in past discussions, you also demand all the diffs, instead of looking for yourself while asking us why we're not reaching out to a banned organizer who is responsible for many of the issues from WPWP and WPNG. Irony. PICKLEDICAE🥒 23:14, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  I started this with my own spot check. Not systematic by any means, though, no. I dare say the burden is on those calling for a ban to substantiate it properly. Valid point about the organizer being banned. My hope is they have non banned users doing maintenance, because certainly we can't have banned users solely responsible for bringing people to enwp. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:45, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  omfg til WMF gives grants to sitebanned editors wtf, they're actually paying sitebanned editors to edit, how is this happening. Levivich 23:37, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  They've given him multiple grants, as well as this user, @Levivich who is arguably much worse with respect to T Cells since his ban from bnwiki and bnwv was about basically taking funds in the name of BNwiki without their knowledge and misusing/taking money improperly. But you know, we totally need #WPWP. PICKLEDICAE🥒 23:56, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  I'm reading and just whaaat. The WMF paid T Cells $7,200.00 to run WPWP2021 (click through to the expenses documentation). Let's see them put THAT in the fundraising emails! Levivich 23:57, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  Maybe for the next WPWP we can ask Lugnuts to coordinate for all the footy photos. PICKLEDICAE🥒 00:01, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

  If we're talking about WPWP generally rather than WLA specifically, is a "Plaque award & WPWP Souvenirs + Certificate" really more of a "monetary outcome" than barnstars or whatever recognition Wikicup is giving nowadays? The only question seems to be what those souvenirs are since I'm far from convinced a plaque award and certificate are more monetary just because they're physical. Nil Einne (talk) 23:42, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  @Nil Einne there's money involved. PICKLEDICAE🥒 23:57, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

  @Praxidicae: but that's only for WLA as I already acknowledged. Anyone who isn't participating in WLA, including anyone who does not use the WLA hashtag (Meta:Wiki Loves Africa 2022/WPWP) is not eligible for those prizes. If the problem is specifically with WLA then we should talk about WLA rather than WPWP generally. We need to be clear since the pickle example does not seem to be WLA, nor was Deogratias20. And we could for example ban the WLA hashtag without banning the WPWP one. And indeed the premise of your claim, that people are solely after the prize and do not contribute anything else seems faulty, since you need 300 mainspace edits to some Wikipedia before 1 June 2020 to eligible for WLA. 300 edits is not a lot, but it's enough that it's questionable to say they've contributed nothing else. If editors are making botlike edits to some project to become eligible, this should be something that someone can document to demonstrate the problem but I don't see anyone has. Instead there just seems to be an assumption people are after the gift card without any real evidence and when the examples people throw out don't generally seem to be eligible. Nil Einne (talk) 14:08, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

  Also as I understand it, the images must have come from some year's WLA and the pickle image doesn't seem to have. Note this also means people cannot be adding their own photos unless they uploaded these photos earlier (I think the main WLA ended on 15 April 2022 or of course some other year) to take part in WLA and are now trying for the WPWP WLA part. Nil Einne (talk) 14:33, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

• I've just indeffed User:Deogratias20 for adding their own uploads at Commons which clearly weren't their own work. Black Kite (talk) 12:59, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

  Thank you. For this user particularly, they're not even eligible to participate in the campaign in the first place. – Ammarpad (talk) 14:25, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

• Courtesy ping for @Deborahjay:, the "Campaign Communities Liaison" for this event.[1] – Joe (talk) 13:55, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

  And other active enwiki editors listed there as having some responsibility for it: Sadads, Anthere, ToniSant, Camelia.boban, علاء, Jamie Tubers, Romaine, Ammarpad. I don't think it's right that, year on year, uninvolved volunteers are having to clean up after this, while so many of you are silent. – Joe (talk) 14:09, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

  I am completely uninvolved in WPWP. Apparently someone had added me to the list of organisers... :-( Romaine (talk) 15:22, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

  Well, that's not a great reflection on the level of organisation... – Joe (talk) 09:13, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

  I was on the international committee for WPWP last year but I too am completely uninvolved now. Not sure how and why I or any community I formally represent still appear in any list for WPWP 2022. From an AFG perspective, the organizer's intentions are good, as are the complainers' on en.wp about cleaning up. Respectfully, the community I work with and I have other priorities. -- ToniSant (talk) 18:18, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

  Per @Rhododendrites-- I just spot checked 15 from different users, and they all looked reasonably good content, based on the descriptions in Commons. Blocking individuals that don't following warnings, and doing the work to educate users on formatting seems like the right step -- but as someone who supports organized activity across the movement: even with experienced editors, there is rarely a guarantee contributions will be consistently perfect. All newcomers have a learning curve, even you when you first started editing; our rules aren't intuitive and formatting and standards for quality are complex, Sadads (talk) 14:46, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

  No one is asking for perfection but encouraging mass editing where the only time said users contribute is during contests isn't usually helpful. For an example, there were a lot of errors from this user, who I'll note, has an editing history of only editing during contests and quite a few others that were also bordering on BLP violations but also lacking in common sense. I'm with Joe here, we're doing a lot of clean up and way too much checking behind them when it should be the coordinators ensuring that their edits are correct (and you know, not adding copyright violations even if they aren't the ones uploading them. This is common sense stuff.) I think a lot of the people saying it isn't disruptive are missing a key point here too. Something can still be in good faith but disruptive. This is very much the case for this contest and a fair amount of users participating in it, in particular

  What is the point of WMF funding these things if the bare minimum of guidance isn't even being given? What is the money actually going to? This is less of a concern overall (for me, but still a question I have regardless.)

  But I honestly don't expect this discussion to go any different than the last few, I expect the status quo of concerned editors being blown off as being "bitey" or not understanding, so this is all probably moot anyway. PICKLEDICAE🥒 14:58, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

  @Sadads All newcomers have a learning curve, even you when you first started editing; our rules aren't intuitive and formatting and standards for quality are complex. I entirely agree. And this is why I am dubious about a contest that has cash prizes for the volume of added images. While your average newcomer can probably make basic edits, images are often more complex - involving issues such as the biographies of living people policy and copyright. The fact that people can win prizes for 'adding the most images' seems to lead to people shoving images haphazardly in order to make 'number go up'.

  I also agree that many (possibly most) of the image additions are individually net-positive - unfortunately the sheer scale of the additions makes the error rate problematic. In the past ~3 days or so around 500 additions have been logged by the filter. That's 166.66.. per day, or 10,000 over the ~60 days of the contest. That's a lot of additions to sift through - and a lot of the pages edited are low-traffic ones (naturally, as high traffic ones will probably have images) where issues might take longer to spot.

  I really want to like this initiative - adding images to articles is worthy work and we need people to do it, but I'm not sure a contest judged on scale is the way to do it. firefly ( t · c ) 15:26, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

  Thank you @Joe Roe:. We have revised the rules as well as made several other changes for this year to mitigate these issues. I believe most of the problems are arising from users who are not even eligible to participate in the first place (we are checking this now); just like the Deogratias20 and Ogunwele examples that are mentioned above. – Ammarpad (talk) 14:47, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

OK. I am running a check on the impact of WLA WPWP over the English Wikipedia. If I look through the hashtag tool between July 1st and August 24 [2], I find 62 revisions to 57 pages by 6 users. Unless the hashtag tool is buggy again, the damage can clearly not be huge.
Users concerned are

• User:Accuratecy051, quick look... did not see anything wrong at first sight
• User:Tarih, - I do not see anything wrong here...
• User:Afí-afeti - the user used cp images, but none of those images were uploaded during WLA (though he used the WLA hashtag). But 4 images altogether...
• User:Acaalexaca - nothing wrong there (and pictures not from WLA...)
• User:Kwameghana - main contributor. I checked 1/5 of them. I saw nothing wrong at all (except I could complain most are tagged WLA even though they are NOT from WLA). The positioning is logical, the description as well.
• User:Mijesty (all good).

I do not really see reasons for the fuss with regards to those pictures tagged #WLA. Anthere (talk) 15:43, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

This is not limited just to WLA though. PICKLEDICAE🥒 15:53, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Good. But at least, it is not related to the WLA tagged ones. And WLA above was pointed at because it offers a small prize (when the person is joining a wikimedia event, typically data gift card for attending wikiindaba). So please... I fully understand that some people are doing it wrong in some cases, and that’s upsetting, but I do not think money is the key responsible here. Anthere (talk) 16:06, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

• New editors face a steep learning curve, no doubt, and it's difficult to navigate all the various requirements, such as BLP and copyright, no doubt. So why are we encouraging new users to add as many images in 60 days as they can? Is speed and volume really something we want to encourage from new users? Last year, over 1,000 WPWP participants added over 250,000 pics, which means we will never have any idea how many are "good" or "bad". All of the samples we've looked at are tiny and unrepresentative, and we'll never go through and check 250k edits. So: let's get people who have never done this before to try and do as much of this as they can, incentivized by cash and other prizes, and never quality-check their work, and never be able to quality-check their work, because there are too many pics added. Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Levivich 16:18, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
  • The above is essentially my view on this as well. WPWP inherently stresses quantity over quality, which is never good, as the goal of adding the most essentially incentivizes doing things hastily without checking. This is basically the image equivalent of all those mass-produced geostubs we've been cleaning up for years. Hog Farm _Talk 16:24, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

    @Hog Farm@Levivich @Firefly you have to remember that a bulk of the images being added, are images that were already added on one language Wiki and taken to another language wiki. These images often already have been checked for context by at least one or two other contributors, and it is a very low complexity task to add it to a low visibility Wikipedia (i.e. <200 pageviews a month). The risk for mistakes is relatively low, and if someone is demonstrated to be consistently putting bad content on the wiki, you should feel free to slow them down or stop them. There are a number of different ways in which newcomer edits are patrolled and reviewed, its not on any one person or one system to catch all the mistakes, Sadads (talk) 19:58, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

    No, it is not on any one person or system, but in this case it really ought to be the contest organizers who bear the brunt of the work. The mess wouldn't be there without the contest. MrOllie (talk) 20:04, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

    Just want to make one point here: spreading the work around is part of why these contests are good -- because the contest participants are who "bear the brunt" of it. "The work", after all, is improving Wikipedia. Just like it's not any one person's responsibility to participate in clean-up tasks, it's not any one person's responsibility to build up articles with illustrations. Adding illustrations is just as much a part of "the work" as cleaning up when people try to do so and fail (or spam/vandalize). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:52, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

    @Sadads: re a bulk of the images being added, are images that were already added on one language Wiki and taken to another language wiki, so how many images were not already added on any language Wiki? 50k? More? re The risk for mistakes is relatively low How do you know? Relative to what? The risk for mistakes is high for new users, we all agree on that, so what makes it relatively low for the tens of thousands of images that new users are adding for the first time to any article on any project as part of WPWP? Levivich 21:23, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

    @Sadads:, I think part of the problem is that a lot of the catching of mistakes is getting pushed onto a project that isn't organizing this and who has actually banned from images on enwiki. There are a decent number of legitimate edits here, but too much junk. I remember before the filter was instituted last time, I'd frequently find duplicate images added to articles I was watchlisting, as well as copyvios and irrelevant images. Proper image licensing and relevance (not to mention layout) can be hard, and the project is basically telling newbies to go forth and massively edit in what's a hard area. The enwiki project overall hasn't felt that it was properly consulted with these, and even if more edits than not are good, a lot of editors still resent that we're stuck with a lot of cleanup when an outside contest is telling editors with minimal knowledge/training to do something that has a high error rate if you don't know what you're doing. I'm not inherently against image-related contests, I just see sizable issues with the way the current one is run. Hog Farm _Talk 23:55, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

• A couple things regarding money. Any event organizer should know that money makes things more complicated. Putting aside the motivating factor, it can easily make volunteer Wikipedians skeptical/resentful. In this case, though there are several mentions of "cash prizes" above, the prizes are plaques, souvenirs, and certificates. The prizes with a monetary value are limited to Wiki Loves Africa and take the form of a pretty small ($80/$50/$30) scholarship to a Wikimedia conference, not cash. The other thing: I didn't even realize the WMF granted funds for project managers for something like this. Given that's the case, it seems entirely reasonable to expect a quality review at the end. It would be unreasonable to say organizers should go through each and every edit as they happen (or even afterwards), but we should wind up with some big picture statistics beyond "images added". It would be good to know how many hundreds or thousands of articles are illustrated now, and weren't before, thanks to the WPWP participants, but also do a systematic spot check to see many edits were reverted or otherwise look bad? The key for something like this (as with any contest, upload drive, edit-a-thon, class project, GLAM event, or outreach campaign) is to make sure people are set up for success to the extent possible, evaluate the results to make sure it was effective, and modify based on feedback from both the community and participants. I'm not convinced that's not happening, but we could use more information from organizers here, too. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:52, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites: - I think the whole cash prize thing is a mixup related to the original 2020 edition offering $500, $400, and $300 USD "gift vouchers" as prizes, which seems to have been (IMO wisely) changed in the more recent running. Hog Farm _Talk 23:57, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

$200/$150/$100 in 2021. This year it's a "scholarship" to a Wikimedia conference, but I'm not sure what that means. (A discount on the ticket price? A reimbursement?) I guess we'll see if that change has an effect on the contest. Although honestly, the WMF can easily afford to give an $80 scholarship to all 1,000 participants, and frankly to anyone else who wants to attend, so I'm not sure why they're being so stingy. The point is: either we're giving something of value to a person for adding the most images, to incentivize people to add a lot of images, or we're not. I think it's a bad idea to do so, whether the thing of value is cash, a scholarship, a thing, or whatever. Levivich 00:19, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

To put things in perspective, this is the page where all scholarship requests to participate to Wikimania are listed. Wikimania 2022/Scholarships. A data voucher is usually appreciated by African participants in particular as few of them have communication contracts with big amounts of data. There are three conferences before the end of 2022 to which many regular wikipedians interested in WLA might join, wikiindaba, wikiarabia and wikiconvention francophone. Anthere (talk) 10:58, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

The editors I see who are particularly problematic and participating in this only participate during contests. But putting that aside, I have no issue with awarding scholarships to people - just do it. I (and I think others here) have issue with awarding scholarships/prizes to people for low quality, disruptive editing with no meaningful cleanup or supervision and the expectation, because despite claims otherwise in this very thread, I can't imagine anyone would believe that other editors would just let these poor edits rot away in mainspace. PICKLEDICAE🥒 11:10, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

I second that... Anthere (talk) Anthere (talk) 15:57, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

• The 2021 contest report mentions things that didn't go well including "Inability of campaign participants to adhere to campaign rules" and "Hostility from Wikipedia admins" among others. I haven't found the grant proposal for 2022 to see how these points were addressed for this but it strikes me that any future grant application should be pushed back against if it doesn't have some robust proposals on how to achieve quality, not just quantity. I don't know if proposals can be commented on by community members but (re)acting at the outset, rather than once the competition is announced should be the way to go. I'm not against these types of contexts in principle but they shouldn't be happening if they don't have quality standards defined. That means that objections to proposals also need to be quality based as well and not just anecdotal. Nthep (talk) 08:23, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

  I found the 2022 grant application and it's disappointing to see that none of the issues raised by the organisers of the 2021 event were addressed or even mentioned. Did either the organisers of this year or the people giving the grant ever look at previous contests to see what happened? Nthep (talk) 11:59, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

  @Nthep not sure if you saw the talk page which outlines more of the funding and...it leaves me with a lot more questions. PICKLEDICAE🥒 12:01, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

  Despite two years of issues, someone managed to write a project proposal without a single mention of actually checking any edits made. That's remarkable, even on its own merits as a project proposal. The entire data evaluation seems to be "we can collate the overall pages improved with photos using the hashtag tool", which is purely quantitative and promotes spamming. CMD (talk) 12:25, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

  Those damn hostile Wikipedia admins, always getting in the way of people trying to make some money. —Cryptic 12:15, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

  @Cryptic and totally relevant selfies! PICKLEDICAE🥒 12:20, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

• This is the sort of thing that is causing issues. Article = A city in Nigeria. Image which was addded = A tree in the countryside somewhere near the city. It's obvious that some editors just search Commons for something vaguely relevant and bung it in the article, often with no caption or explanation. From the same editor, this is a building in a completely different city from the article, but it would appear in a search because of the name of the road it's on. It's just sloppy work, yet that editor has a number of good additions as well, which makes it far more tricky to identify the bad ones. Black Kite (talk) 10:53, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

  I can provide at least 50 more examples of such things, and worse if you give me a few hours. This isn't a small margin of error that's happening. I'll note again, that a lot of people here seem to be confusing the complaints with us implying bad faith. No, I think these are good faith editors but incompetence and disruption doesn't require malice. Good faith editors can still be disruptive. PICKLEDICAE🥒 11:08, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

• Related to this discussion, I have opened a thread at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)#Should the WMF have rules or policies for when banned users apply for or are part of the team that administers grants?. I think banned users getting money is a serious problem and I solicit others comments. -Indy beetle (talk) 00:32, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Comment - I reviewed the campaign project page last night and it does look like the organizers have revised the eligibility criteria, and this has impacted on the volume of contributions this year. This year less than 3,000 contributions have been made, as against last year where more than 28,000 contributions were made to enwiki. This year, only existing users who have been around for at least one year are eligible to participate in the campaign. This means that new users are not eligible to participate at all. Since many of the users that are being disruptive, including the ones listed in this thread, are newcomers or new editors, we can adjust the edit-filter to disallow participation from new editors. Other changes made were restricting the gift items to plaque awards, souvenirs, and certificates. This is not different from the barnstar we give to users here on a daily basis. I understand the concerns about having User:T Cells to coordinate the contest on enwiki, but the campaign is multilingual and does not focus on enwiki only. It does not look like T Cells is solely responsible for coordinating the campaign in all languages, at least not on enwiki. I reviewed past threads, and I haven't seen a single thread where T Cells commented on this campaign on enwiki. They have a co-coordinator, liaison officers and other members of the organizing team who are active contributors to enwiki, and are probably responsible for managing the campaign here. This year, the coordinator was also revised, partly due to the concerns raised here the previous year. User:T Cells stopped coordinating this campaign last year, and the new coordinator is User:Ammarpad who is another active enwiki editor. No one has deemed it fit to leave a note on this user's talk page. Calling out T Cells when it's pretty clear from the campaign project page that he no longer coordinates the campaign is unfair, and close to mockery. SuperSwift (talk) 08:05, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

• Hi all, I am Ammarpad and I am the central coordinator for this year's Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos Campaign. I'd like to note that, we are aware of this thread and have taken note of all the issues raised. However, I'd like to make some clarifications.
  1. On the issue of the referenced user who is banned from English Wikipedia, please note that he's neither the grantee for the 2022 edition of the project nor actively involved in the implementation of the project.
  2. On the issue of users adding wrong images and other infractions, we acknowledge that the campaign is not perfect and we did anticipate this risk and clearly explained mitigation plans both in the grant and I further elaborated on this when Redrose64 asked on Meta in May before the program begun. Among the changes we made, to mitigate thse issues, we raised the eligibility bar to disqualify account that are less than a year old. This is not a perfect threshold but we found it good enough to start with since from the previous edition evaluation report we found majority of the issues to have to do with users that are relatively new or created accounts with the sole purpose of participation in the campaign. For instance with the revised rules, Deogratias20 (talk · contribs) who is now blocked by Black Kite in relation to this campaign, is not actually even eligible to participate in the campaign.

     We communicated these changes (and other organizing team changes) early to the local organizers of the program and hoped it would work. However, in restrospect now we understand that neither we, the central organizers (nor the local organizers) have the technical mechanisms to enforce this eligibility rule. We innocently hoped it would work, and that local organizers would educate their participants to not participate if they're not qualified (and people would oblige). This is our fault and we regret it. We will surely learn from it and work to make amends.

  3. Then the issue of prizes and effect on inducement. We have substantially reduced these too to the minimum now. Some of the examples of hundreds of US$ gift vouchers quoted above were all for the previous editions. For this year, the 2022 edition, the main WPWP campaign is only giving souvenirs, plaques and certificates. No direct monetary reward to any participant. Thank you. – Ammarpad (talk) 08:53, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

  Is there a good place to report editors adding images without adequate research on if those images are appropriate for the article? Obviously here or ANI is an option (and AIV for obvious cases), but I'm kinda hoping there's an amazing option I haven't considered that will get editor ignoring warnings to change their ways. (And yeah, I've got a bridge to sell ya as well... Ravensfire (talk) 13:29, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

• I appreciate the changes this year's organizers have made to address issues from prior years. Is it possible to set the edit filter to disallow #WPWP-tagged edits from ineligible editors (less than 1yr account age, I guess)? Levivich 18:19, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Criticism of Buddhism

This article is now a useless stub, following the deletion of most of the content by TrangaBellam. It was subsequently restored by دانيالوه, and promptly deleted again by WikiLinuz. I have today restored it, and TrangaBellam has again deleted it, with the comment "Criticism removed", as if criticism is inappropriate in an article with the title "Criticism of Buddhism".

I think there might be a colourable case that the article shouldn't exist; I'm in favour of deletion, provided a home is found in the main article for the most notable criticism.

I'm an experienced editor, but I'm not experienced in dealing with editors that repeatedly delete 90% of an article without discussing it.

I wonder if someone could come along and suggest how we might proceed?

MrDemeanour (talk) 15:30, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

HandsThatFeed wrote a month ago,

Looking through the removed text... honestly, it's probably better gone. The vast majority of it was "This one person said this about Buddhism, and then this other person said this about Buddhism..." It was a mish-mash of various complaints, rather than a coherent description of academic & religious critique. It really read like a holdover article from Wikipedia's early days when standards were lower. I'd assume there's enough reliable sources available to make an article which fits modern Wikipedia article standards, but we'd have to build it from the ground up.

Which part of this did you fail to understand?

Further, can you link to the edit-summary wherein I had deleted your restoration with the comment "Criticism removed"? TIA, TrangaBellam (talk) 15:58, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

So, first of all, MrDemeanour needs trouted and/or warned for WP:NPA. From the article's Talk page:

I fully expected you to revert my revert, and I didn't expect any talk-page comment from you to be constructive.

This entire issue should have been resolved via discussion on the article's Talk page. Instead, MrDemeanour has decided to climb a prominent building in a superhero costume in a misguided attempt at forcing the issue, then insulting people who point out that this is poor behavior.

This article needs rewritten from the ground up. I personally do not have the time, due to my other life obligations. But that doesn't mean the old, poorly written article needs immediately restored to its former inglorious state. It can be a stub for now until people have time to write a decent article.

Or it can be deleted and started from scratch. Either way. I simply do not agree that it should be restored into its former state, as noted above. Regardless, aside from MrDemeanour's PA above, this is not yet a matter for Admins to resolve. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 19:46, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

@MrDemeanour: This is a WP:CONTENTDISPUTE and you must try sorting it out on the talk page, or consult dispute resolution processes if you're not contented. You describe yourself as an experienced editor but you haven't done the preliminaries prior to opening a thread on Admin's noticeboard. --WikiLinuz {talk} 🍁 20:49, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

• Let's stop with the petty squabbling and please take this to the article talk page. Please. Snippy remarks aren't the same as personal attacks, although neither are helpful here, so lets just focus on setting some standards and rebuilding using scholarly sources, or leave it as a stub. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 21:24, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
• Removing inappropriate material from an article is a perfectly legitimate way to edit; if there is a disagreement over whether or not it belonged in the article or not, the article talk page is the correct place to discuss that. That the article is left in a stub-like state is irrelevant. (saying that, I am not saying that it actually should have been removed. I am saying it is possible. Not everything currently existing at Wikipedia really belongs, and removing the bad stuff is as important as adding new good stuff.) If none of the existing text is appropriate, then that's just where we are. If it is possible to have appropriate text in the article, go an add that. If the text really belonged as it was, establish consensus on the article talk page The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content. Establish first that it belongs, then re-add it. If consensus cannot be established that it belongs, then leave it out. You can also always just add things that are appropriate. That's always encouraged and rarely controversial. --Jayron32 12:20, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

  On this point, this is generally why we discourage "Criticism of X" articles or sections, as they tend to draw minor conflicts (like opinions of one or two people, which likely are undue, or situations and editor wants to treat as criticism but really isnt). Criticism should be integrated throughout the text of a topic. Removal if these trivial criticisms is completely correct and if that leaves a stubby page with only a couple actual criticism, then consider merging that content. That is not saying there cannot be a criticism page but it really be based on good academic scholarship for a topic like Buddhism. Masem (t) 12:28, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

  And that objection was why the article got stubbed, it was not based on good academic scholarship. The goal is to eventually build up an article based on those sources, but for now there's no reason to leave the poor quality article up.

  MrDemeanor has submitted the article to AfD now, so we'll see how that goes. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 16:56, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

  Well, it got snow-closed as keep. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 14:13, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Most every criticism of a religion can be written off as one person's view if the focus is on the writer of the piece relating it. Hyperbolick (talk) 09:49, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Repeated Harassment

Myself and some other editors have been repeatedly harassed for supposedly supporting Israel in a vote on the Jerusalem talk page, trying to intimidate us into stopping our edits. [3] four IPs and one account have sent threats to my page, all stating they will kill me because I'm a Jew, or because Israel is full of Jews who are "apes and pigs", and how they will rape every woman and girl who survives after they slaughter every Jew they see, among other things. Obviously these people are not going to lay a finger on me, I hope, but they have also spammed other editors with threats (you can check their contribution histories) including the IPs whose threats were deleted from view. An additional fifth IP mass reverted my edits [4] and the same might have occurred to other editors. Bill Williams 15:48, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Many claim to support Hezbollah, but regardless, I think it is very abusive to try and change votes on consensus needing issues by harassing any editor that these harassers believe supports Israel. Bill Williams 16:04, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

(Non-administrator comment) Most likely it's just Icewhiz, Yaniv or some other pro-Israeli LTA having fun with new proxy. Real Lebanese militants have other things to do than intimidating some random guys on the English Wikipedia. Arado Ar 196 (C✙T) 16:12, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

I hate this for you, but I'm not sure what we can do. Playing whack-a-mole with disruptive IPs is a continuous problem for admins, dedicated trolls can (and do) overwhelm the system, and what we can really do is limited: We can block the IPs when they poke their heads up, we can institute some edit filters to try to catch certain editing patterns, we can semi-protect pages to keep them from overwhelming specific discussions but to pre-emptively stop this from happening at all, I'm not sure what can be done. I don't know if any other admins have other ideas to help ameliorate this problem, but other than responding after the fact when another of these trolls shows up, I don't know what can be done to make Wikipedia a more collegial place when someone like this gets a bug up their ass and decides to make an enemy of someone like yourself. On behalf of all of the good people around here, I apologize that you've had to deal with this, and I also apologize that I don't have a solution that's any better than what is already being done. --Jayron32 16:23, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Well, these activities should absolutely be reported to meta:Trust and Safety insofar as they involve repeated and unambiguous threats of violence against community members. . Actually, probably also emergency@wikimedia.org, per WP:EMERGENCY ("Many threats are empty, but leave that evaluation to Wikimedia Foundation staff.") I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this will not be the first time they will have seen similar threats on that particular talk page, and their technicalability to prophylactically guard against this is not much deeper than administrative/oversighter tools, I'm sure--but there's still a huge multitude of reasons why they are meant to be informed. So, Bill Williams, I'd really encourage that, or to request than an admin report it, if for whatever reason you are not 100% comfortable with making the report yourself.

As for what we can do preventatively, I actually do have an idea here: pending changes could be applied to the talk page so that comments from IPs/non-autoconfirmed users have to pass clearance from regular editors. It's a pretty aggressive step for a talk page, and could create lag and issues in the flow of discussion, but this is an extreme situation and I dare say, probably cause for an exception. Obviously this is a deeply important article we're talking about, that attracts (almost bar none) more controversy than any other, thus making it a dubious target for an exception of the standard approach to page protection on talk pages, in terms of even semi-protection. But pending changes could really thread the needle, and this is not garden variety disruption: putting aside the fact that people's actual safety and mental well-being could be at stake here, this kind of thing could also have a deeply chilling effect on the collaborative process. I think it's worth considering. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 00:12, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Pending changes protection is unavailable for use on talk pages or anywhere within the user space. -- Malcolmxl5 (talk) 13:18, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Regardless of any protection I reported it to the emergency email address, they also threatened my Wikimedia account talk page [5]. Bill Williams 16:41, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

[6] and eighth account mass reverted edits of the same people who were harassed by self declared Islamic extremists. Bill Williams 16:47, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure if you review my post you will see that I noted that is typically the case. However, the page protection policy does expressly contemplate the exceptions in edge cases, and if ever there was a scenario where it would be justified, this would certainly be it. Also, pending changes protection would substantially mitigate the downsides while completely arresting this atrocious behaviour. I'll say again, I think it's very much worth considering as an exception. I'm actually struggling to see a very good argument against it. These are threats against the lives of community members, which even if just noxious cowardly keyboard threats, can be expected to have a profound impact upon the discussion. I almost never invoke WP:IAR as a matter of principle. But if not here, I don't know where it might be valid. In any event, I for one wouldn't mind hearing a more principled reason for not to do it than "we don't do that".SnowRise ^{let's rap} 02:28, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Pending changes is literally not available. Compare Special:Protect/User talk:Zzuuzz with Special:Protect/X. It would require a phab ticket at least. However, that's not a solution: If threats are the purpose, pending changes will not prevent the threats. I say just semi-protect stuff where it repeats. BTW, it might be useful for someone to compile a list of socks and IPs for the purpose of implementing range blocks and filters. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 13:19, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

@Snow Rise. It’s not technically possible. -- Malcolmxl5 (talk) 13:32, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Ahh, I see: apologies--I was unaware of that quirk. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 04:00, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

• What Jayron32 said. There isn't much that can be done preemptively. Sorry. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 20:34, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Is there a way to hide the discussion page (i.e., talk page) from the general reader's view (for encyclopedic readers only need the article, not the talk page discussions) for articles on controversial topics like this? Only editors actually ever need access to the talk page for taking part in the discussions to improve the article, not the IPs or general readers. This may sound a bit weird, but just checking since this, I presume, could solve the problem to some extent. Rasnaboy (talk) 17:06, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

The talk page, and its visibility and availability to all, including the casual reader and the IP editor, is a vital part of how this website operates. This kind of garbage is the price we pay for that accessibility. --Orange Mike | Talk 17:15, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

The problem appears to be less to do with the article talk page and more to do with user talk pages where the threats are being left. In extreme cases, we can semi-protect the user talk page and create a sub-page for non-autoconfirmed users linked from the user talk page. It would at least prevent the orange bar lighting up each time a post was made. -- Malcolmxl5 (talk) 18:31, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

[7] [8] [9] [10] a ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelth account/IP harassed me and other editors in anti-semitic and anti-Israeli threats claiming to want to murder/harm me, saying they would rape my family etc. in supposed support for Hezbollah. There is clearly a massive amount of sockpuppeting that is occurring (I reported this to the Trust and Safety Team as well). Bill Williams 12:43, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

What I did on my talk page was request protection from IP users. It didn't help fully, but at least I'm not getting harassed by IP users. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 16:36, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

I dealt with similar for years, and it stopped when semi-protection was put in place on my talk page (and I am grateful for that). I dont know of many reasons why an IP or brand new account needs to comment on my talk page, Im not an admin, and any dispute with an IP can be handled through pings on their own user talk or at the article talk page. Same for all these users, if any of them wants it I dont see why an admin should not extend indefinite semi-protection to their user talk pages. Can create a subpage for IPs if they want, but that doesnt even seem all that necessary. nableezy - 18:33, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Talk:Zabukh

Why I can not express my opinion on the Talk page of the site in the subject. 194.135.153.161 (talk) 18:03, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

See WP:NOTFORUM, which specifically addresses this. --Yamla (talk) 18:08, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Zabukh 194.135.153.161 (talk) 09:16, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

@Ad Orientem: notified as (partial) blocking admin. Favonian (talk) 18:10, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Did I break AIV?

Not sure if I did something I shouldn't have. But after going through a backlog at AIV and coming back a bit later, I am seeing the backlog still there. -Ad Orientem (talk) 18:23, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

I removed all of the user-submitted reports and the bot appears to be working again. — Ingenuity (talk • contribs) 18:40, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

I think this report might have something to do with it -- they used the Vandal template wrongly by including "example user": {{Vandal|M Hasnain Mirani|Example user}} — Ingenuity (talk • contribs) 18:43, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. My command of tech peaked with the electric pencil sharpener. -Ad Orientem (talk) 18:47, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Is there something that's even better at sharpening a pencil (younger readers may not know what that is) and easier to use than the manual pencil sharpeners that I have always used? I thought we had reached the limits of technology when they replaced the pen-knife. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:36, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Of course they know what a pencil is @Phil Bridger - it's one of those rods used to control tablets for people who don't like using their fingers! Nosebagbear (talk) 19:45, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

I remember a time when everyone had a pencil sharpener mounted somewhere in their house. They were the Amazon echo of their time. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 20:02, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

We still have! (my partner is an artist in her spare time). Black Kite (talk) 18:25, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Our kids still use the yellow #2 pencils and a mounted hand crank pencil sharpener. The school board association recommended going to mechanical pencils last year but we kept the standard #2's. They are a little easier to get here and we can use them for other purposes if we have to. --ARoseWolf 18:35, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

File uploader is requesting it be removed from servers

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Can an administrator take a look at User talk:Spookcentral#File:Blackorwhite comparison.jpg and see whether they can help this user out? Basically, they've uploaded a derivative work they created as non-free content and now want it removed from Wikipedia's servers. I'm not sure whether that's possible and posted that I would ask an administrator to look into things. -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:38, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

@Marchjuly seems like they already have the advice, they can tag it for CSD or FFD, or at this point just wait and it will get scooped up in orphan non-free cleanup. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:56, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you Xaosflux. The seem to want to the file removed from the servers. Is that possible? -- Marchjuly (talk) 23:59, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

@Marchjuly operationally, no. But once it is deleted it will no longer be published for everyone to be able to download (which will include all of the versions seen at File:Blackorwhite_comparison.jpg). However, please note that this file is also no longer orphaned. If you want to help that user out at this point, opening a FFD on their behalf is probably the best way to get this dealt with. I wouldn't delve in the technicalities of the differences between being 'deleted' / 'suppressed' / 'physically removed' - for practical purposes deleted would suffice here - and I certainly wouldn't invite them to start a DMCA proceeding or go to WMF legal -- if they wonder their on their own so be it. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:23, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you Xaosflux. I will pass that information along. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:36, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

User:Olatant2!

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Olatant2! seems to only be making disruptive edits on this encyclopedia. It is probably best to block them. TheFishDude539 (talk) 21:48, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Already indeffed, by Dennis Brown. Deor (talk) 22:23, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

• Ah, I meant to come back and say that, got sidetracked with a customer call. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 23:12, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Deceased banned users

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Good morning,

I apologize in advance if this is the wrong place for this - please don't hesitate to move it to a more appropriate place upon replying if necessary. Anyway, I would like to seek clarification on what the appropriate procedure/policy is for banned users who are deceased (full disclaimer: I'm a relative of a recently deceased but also banned user). Obviously most of the stuff at WP:RIP doesn't apply, since "memorializing" user pages etc should only be done for users in good standing. However I was curious if perhaps there is a more subtle way to indicate a banned user as being deceased, primarily so that any active investigations can be closed and to prevent any other accounts from being blocked as socks of the deceased user? (Since any accounts that were blocked as socks of a deceased user are obviously socks of someone else in actuality). I fully understand if this isn't possible, though I would assume that there has to be at least a way for admins to privately document such a situation in order to avoid new blocks under the deceased user's name. I thank you for your time. God Bless. 2601:18C:8B82:9E0:3805:7DDA:30F2:5C0F (talk) 11:16, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Unless you can provide convincing proof that a username was linked to a person, and convincing proof that the person is deceased, it's probably not going to happen. If you want privacy, as you seem to already know, contact Arbcom. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 12:28, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Violence against men AfD could use additional eyes

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Looks like the AfD for violence against men has attracted a lot of SPAs recently, and has led to edit warring on the article itself. Posting here instead of RPP because it looks like both pages could use additional eyes (and perhaps a snow close of the AfD to avoid further disruption). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:04, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

It's also led to a considerable improvement in the article, which is a win. I'm not sure a SNOW close will be helpful here, though there does seem to be a strong consensus at this point (disclaimer: I've !voted in the discussion). I'm a bit concerned at the way the nominator (User:Tambor de Tocino) is policing the discussion - this might well be removing WP:FORUM violations but it's still not a good look for someone who is clearly INVOLVED. GoldenRing (talk) 16:24, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the article is no longer under AfD, the discussion was closed as speedy keep. JIP | Talk 23:47, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

TTP1233 Unblock Request (unarchived)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

The following is an unblock request placed on behalf of - @TTP1233:. It is an unblock request that has now been open for a considerable length of time and warranted additional community consideration. The user was blocked for socking in November 2021. When the most recent appeal in May was made, they were given a clear checkuser so that (technical) aspect is already concluded. I would also advise participants to take a look at their user talk page for a broader context. Nosebagbear (talk) 13:00, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Appeal Text

Greetings Sir/Madam, I do like to re-apply for unblock in Wikipedia. It is to inform you that after reading blocking policies and conditions of Standard Offer, I have, Not did any sock puppetry on my any blocked accounts mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_sockpuppets_of_NS_Dibyojyoti for 6 months since my last edit of TTP1233 on 11:01 hrs.; 25 November 2021 (UTC). Neither created accounts for further sock puppetry nor for illegal use. Also, I made productive edits on Simple English Wikipedia. I have created around 30 articles (3 deleted due to my interest) and over 1000 edits before and during block on this account, since created. Explanation how I was blocked:- A year ago I opened an account named TTP1233 in simple.m.wikipedia.org but I never edited in risk until I confirm that admin Ninjarobotpirate blocked that as well. But after some months past, I started editing Wikipedia and after months I got encouraged to edit here. Moreover no one suspected me. But creating Sujit Bose (politician) and Indranil Sen was the biggest blunder I made. Though they are notable but since I made it, I feared if anyone knows. Second thing I made identified is shortening my original name, Dibyojyoti Roy Chowdhury to Jyoti Roy. And I live in same place (As mentioned in my bio in both the accounts). This is the truth I can say. And I have realized that sockpuppetry is unlawful and useless also I'm not willing to create anymore account. So I had decided that until six months has over, I refrain from editing Wikipedia. To continue, I think I have aware myself of my misbehavior to the community and I will not continue to do so, henceforth. I also want to assure you that if I be unblock, then I will be working on the basics, means what a normal editor usually do. I will fully focus on creating, editing and updating articles that are completely based on India-related topics. When I will gain experience on the user rights, I will apply but after few years, as my unblocking immediately will not grant me that right. To conclude, I want to contribute many things and not to spoil the community. I will try my best to get back trust everyone. I hope you will not abandon me. I would request you to please consider my review and then unblock me. If any conclusion comes regarding my un-block, please inform me. I look forward to your response regarding the request. Thanking You, Yours sincerely, --Jyoti Roy (talk) 12:06, 29 May 2022 (UTC)}} [Addendum by TTP 19th Aug] "Extraordinary Writ advised me in an e-mail to get involved in other wiki projects to convince other users that I'm worthy to join or not. Currently I'm working in Simple English Wikipedia as rollbacker. Also I made almost 1800 edits by now and created over 45 articles. My aim in working there is to fight against vandalism and create articles (when the activity in editing is low in simple wiki)."

• Just because May was a while ago, I did run a new check and do not see any new activity. So checkuser remains all clear. Barkeep49 (talk) 21:12, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
• Regarding the username being used for the appeal, they've noted: "I cannot access my master sock account User:NS Dibyojyoti because I have forgotten the password of it. I have tried to reset the password but it failed anyhow. So I chose to request here." Thus any appeal would unblock this specific account. Nosebagbear (talk) 14:14, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
• Unblock per Simple Wiki.-- Deepfriedokra (talk) 02:16, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

bloody sigmabot keeps archiving-- Deepfriedokra (talk) 08:13, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

• Unblock per Standard Offer. --Malcolmxl5 (talk) 10:32, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
• The unblock request has been open since May and this discussion has been open for more than a fortnight. Neither have garnered much attention, to the point that this discussion has been archived at least twice. Where we are at now is that there are a couple of administrators who seem to be in favour of unblocking and no user explicitly against it. My thinking, in this case, is that the user has met the criteria to be unblocked per standard offer, has been waiting for a good while and, in any case, reblocks are cheap. So I'm boldly about to unblock him. In the end, should he edit disruptively again, he can be reblocked swiftly and, on the other hand, if he doesn't, we gain a productive editor... Salvio 16:59, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Request for lifting topic ban user Wickey

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Hereby, I request to lift the topic ban on the Arab-Israeli conflict. As I have never used a sockpuppet to evade the rules – which has falsely been suggested and for which you will nowhere find any evidence – and only wish to contribute to Wikipedia in a positive way, I have no problem with promising that I will abide all the rules. Wickey (talk) 09:57, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

I would appreciate an overall review and valuation of my contributions to articles, not stick on a single incident. I have been editing for more than 10 years on WP in several wiki's, without being blocked. So, what I ask is to give it a try.--Wickey (talk) 13:00, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

• Weak Oppose Not editing when blocked is a rule, and the public note on your UTRS appeal notes that you accepted the tie between the two accounts when in your AE case you stated User:Wickey-nl is another user. So to be holding the position that you weren't even now discourages me to remove the restriction. Your content work over the last six months, however, seemed reasonable to me and not in the field. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:28, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

If I want to use a sockpuppet for abuse, I will not choose a sockpuppet name that you will easily recognize, right? I had the two accounts from the time I started on WP, which anyone can check. Just to explain. --Wickey (talk) 13:20, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

• I guess this is the link to the topic ban. There is more detail at user talk:Wickey. I don't see where this request addresses the original issues. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 10:32, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose. Thanks User:Deepfriedokra for posting the links. Wickey's topic ban was mainly on the basis of a combative attitude, with accusations of bias/corruption and elements of edit warring thrown in. So to overturn it, we'll need to be convinced that this attitude has changed. On that basis I decided to take a look at their edit history on talk pages, and the very first page I looked at, completely at random, was Talk:ThorCon nuclear reactor. There I see all sorts of accusations flying around concerning bias, promotion, edit warring and an editor being hounded away from the topic; I'm not seeing any evidence that the required lessons have been learned. WaggersTALK 11:14, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks. seems quite the opposite. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 13:02, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose The combative, uncollaborative attitude on display at Talk:ThorCon nuclear reactor shows that it would be a mistake to permit this editor to return to the Israel/Palestine topic area. Thanks, Waggers. Cullen328 (talk) 17:26, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

  In this revealing 2018 conversation, Wickey wrote User:Wickey-nl is another user, who is not even active. Moreover, I do not have any intention to edit in an area which is terrorized by a pack of mad dogs. So, we have overt lying combined with a terrible attitude about the I/P topic area. Cullen328 (talk) 17:38, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose Wickey was not a constructive editor last time they were allowed to edit in the Israel/Palestine topic area. Number 57 18:56, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose In order to remove any editing restriction with regard to our perhaps single most contentious content area, the community should expect to see rather a fulsome acknowledgment of why the TBAN was found necessary in the first place and a decent explanation of why the restriction is no longer necessary. That's the baseline for the determination, before we even add the additional concerns raised above of continued combativeness and borderline (at least) disruption in other contentious areas. But though these reasons would have been sufficient in and of themselves for me to oppose the request as a concerned community member, it is Cullen's discovery of statements that directly indicate that the user is lying in regard to statements regarding socking in this very thread that really seals the deal. That is deeply concerning and leaves no question about our inability to trust any assurance the user gives us here for the purpose of assuaging concerns. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 19:19, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose @Wickey:Please describe how your edits merited a TBAN and what you would do differently. Setting that aside, you have claimed to be unconnected with Wickey-nl, claimed to have stopped using that account, and now claim to have had two accounts ab initio. Can you reconcile these divergent statements in a manner that would regain the Community's trust? You are quoted above as having written, "I do not have any intention to edit in an area which is terrorized by a pack of mad dogs." What has changed? Do you still regard editors in that content area as before? Are you now happy to edit in such an area? Can you answer the concern in a prior post that you continue with a, "combative, uncollaborative attitude?" Thanks.(fixed ping) -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 23:09, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

• One time, no more, I wrongly denied the two accounts are connected. That was when two users were hounding me, trying to get rid of one more editor they don't like (one of them is indefinitely blocked). IMO, a single lie does not justify a permanent block or TBAN.
• It may be surprising, but claiming or suggesting that I broke a TBAN is just a hoax! Both accounts were blocked. Even more, I did not use the other account any more, though it was not blocked.
• I said things in the proces of blocking out of frustration, that I should never have done. I apologize for that.
• I acknowledge that my behaviour ThorCon nuclear reactor was wrong, apart from the question who was technically right or wrong. I am not proud of that incident. I want to change my combative, uncollaborative attitude and give polite discussion priority over my own opinion. I should prevent escalating discussions.--Wickey (talk) 12:08, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  Thank you. RE:" I should prevent escalating discussions." Yes, and till you can show you are doing this, I'm afraid I cannot agree to you editing in this topic area. One should not set oneself up for failure. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 14:27, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  @Wickey: Am I missing something here? Above you say "claiming or suggesting that I broke a TBAN is just a hoax". Yet you were topic banned in from the Arab-Israeli conflict in August 2014 [11]. This topic ban seems to be the ban you are appealing. Yet the entirety of your 15 edits in 2016 and 2017 under the Wickey-nl [12] account look like they probably violated this topic ban e.g. [13].

  As for this Wickey account, your 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th undeleted edits which were in 2017 seem to be a violation of your topic ban [14] [15] [16] [17]. With an edit history like that, whyever you originally ended up with 2 global accounts, I don't think you're going to convince me that bringing the Wickey account here to en was perfectly innocent [18]. And no, the fact you were simultaneously violating your topic ban on both the Wickey-nl and Wickey accounts is not enough to convince me. More importantly even if it really is true, this still doesn't excuse your topic ban violations.

  You seem to branched out a bit with the Wickey account after that but still it was enough for the 2018 ARE case which was partly about the fact you did not have the 500/30 edits to edit in the area. There were concerns you were not properly notified about the 500/30 restriction but it ended up a moot point as it reflected that you were still editing in violation of your topic ban. [19] This is where you told the lie that the accounts were unconnected [20].

  Maybe it was only one time you lied, but now in 2022 you're excusing that lie because you were being hounded. I'm not going to investigate in detail but as problematic as IceWiz is, claiming you were being hounded seems highly questionable when the edits you were being "hounded" over seems to have at a minimum been a violation your topic ban, and regardless of whether and when these alleged "hounders" knew of this, you should have. In fact, if we take things further, while we do not allow editors to clean start and edit in areas where they were topic banned from, if we did it seems the concerns you weren't properly informed about the 500/30 restriction go out the window as noted in the 2018 ARE since as someone who was topic banned from the area at ARE, you should have been well aware of the restriction.

  I'll further note that you even did technically use the Wickey account to edit while your Wickey-nl was blocked for 3 months from 9 August 2017 [21]. It was only 3 minor edits which didn't violate your topic ban [22] [23] [24] but still not something which should have happened and also goes against your suggestion above 'Even more, I did not use the other account any more, though it was not blocked.'.

  Note that all these edits are quite a while ago and frankly normally they wouldn't matter that much. The primary reason they do here is because you've made it out like you didn't really do anything wrong but my analysis suggests this is far from the truth. And I'm very unwilling to trust editors who are unwilling to admit their wrongdoing in their appeal to safely edit an area they were topicbanned from. This isn't even complicated stuff, it seems largely technical of what happened when.

  Nil Einne (talk) 14:37, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

  Wow. Thanks for that in depth review. Were I not so lazy, I'd switch to strong oppoose. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 15:57, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

  This would seem to refute the not abusively socking claim. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 15:58, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Article neutrality

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Why is article neutrality not being upheld? Standards are being allowed to slip and it is not acceptable and I want to complain.

Rules explicitly state that all article information must be factual and none-biased, therefore opinions regardless of source are not relevant or required. If an author has given an opinion on a subject this can be referred to via the relevant link or citation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C8:AB80:8001:85CA:64C7:5D2:E5F1 (talk) 11:29, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Specifically this page:

Wepwawetemsaf

It is not ok and it is not needed they are biased opinions and the article reads fine and dandy without them. Breach of neautrality! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C8:AB80:8001:85CA:64C7:5D2:E5F1 (talk) 11:32, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

IP, you'll need to discuss the matter on the article's talk page. It is not yet something that needs admin intervention. Primefac (talk) 11:53, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Admin have already apparently intervened that is why I am complaining about it and bringing it to attention.

Those opinions are not necessary or needed the article reads fine without them only neutral facts are needed. Opinions can be viewed by clicking the link. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C8:AB80:8001:85CA:64C7:5D2:E5F1 (talk) 11:55, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Debates amongst academics are absolutely fine for an article. Regardless, this doesn't require admin input. Secretlondon (talk) 11:58, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

This is not a debate among academics this is the writing of none-neutral opinions that are not necessary or needed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C8:AB80:8001:85CA:64C7:5D2:E5F1 (talk) 11:59, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

WMF account holder blocked for vandalism through sockpuppet accounts

This is being discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)#ABorba (WMF) blocked. Since it seems appropriate that the wider community be aware of the circumstances, I am posting a link here. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:24, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Muhammed images Discretionary sanctions

Remedy 8.1 of the Muhammad images case ("Discretionary sanctions") is rescinded two months after this motion is enacted. Any actions previously taken in accordance with the discretionary sanctions authorization remain in force and are governed by the discretionary sanctions procedure.

Support: Barkeep49, BDD, Donald Albury, Enterprisey, Izno, Maxim, Wugapodes
Opposed: CaptainEek, WormThatTurned

For the Arbitration Committee, Barkeep49 (talk) 20:29, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard § Muhammed images Discretionary sanctions

pre-RfC mass-article creation discussion has begun

As part of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case, the Arbitration Committee decided to request community comments on issues related to mass nominations at Articles for Deletion in a discussion to be moderated and closed by editors appointed by the committee.

Workshopping for the first of two discussions (which focuses on mass article creation) has begun and feedback can be given at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Requests for comment/Article creation at scale. As previously announced, Valereee and Xeno will be co-moderating these discussions.

For the Arbitration Committee, –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 22:08, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard § pre-RfC mass-article creation discussion has begun

Request to lift topic ban

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

On April 2019 I was placed under a topic ban in the ARBPIA area, as shown here, and on 18 August 2020 tried unsuccessfully to repeal my topic ban, as shown here, although given an ease of strictures whereby I was then permitted to edit pages carrying the ARBPIA tag, allowing me to edit on subjects related to pre-1948 Arab-Jewish history, geography, and even on post-1948 culturally related issues, farming, adding photographs, etc., but not to divulge on topics of the Arab-Israeli war, extra-judiciary killings, terrorism, etc. In short, I have been unable to edit in the Israel/Palestine conflict area for more than 3 years! This limited topic ban brought me into trouble on 28 January 2022, as shown here, when I was cited for violating my topic ban by writing “State of Israel” in an article describing Jerusalem, being a set of 740+ outlines listed at Portal:Contents/Outlines. Wikipedia outlines are a special type of list article make up one of Wikipedia's content navigation systems and which Outline makes use of a pre-set format. During this last infraction, where I was remiss in that I did not realize the sensitivities felt by part of the community at using the words “State of Israel” when requested by the format of the same article to list the name of the government under which the city of Jerusalem lies, I beg your forgiveness. I should have known that writing such, under my limited topic ban, would elicit a response. At the time, however, I honestly did not think that I was stepping beyond the limitations of my topic ban by mentioning the name of the government over the city, as it is not the same as saying I support that government’s actions. Moreover, I did not even initiate the edit, but the format in the article called for the name of the government, and I felt obliged to fill-in the void. Now that I realize my misstep, given the limited topic ban that I was under, and how that I should have been more sensitive to this issue, I am asking for another chance to help improve this worthy encyclopedia and to renew editing in the ARBPIA area, without limitations. As everyone can see, my limited topic ban created some confusion as to where to draw the line. Altogether, I have been under the ARPBIA area topic ban for 3 years and 3 months, with only this one infraction. Removing this topic ban completely will allow me to:

1) Edit lists, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Palestine/Books, which I have been wont to do in the past.

2) Edit Historical pages, such as City of David (historic), and King's Garden (historical), among many others, which I have been wont to do in the past.

3) Upload images to Historical pages, which I have been wont to do in the past, such as Dayr Aban, Khirbat al-Tannur, Kafr 'Inan, and many others.

4) Help with showing how certain place-names have changed in this country (Israel/Palestine) because of the 1948 and 1967 wars, such as what I did in the article Hebraization of Palestinian place names.

5) Engage with other editors in the ARBPIA area on matters of Wikipedia policy and of maintaining a neutral point of view (NPOV).

6) Give Wikipedia the unique experience of research conducted by an Israeli editor that has access to rare books in the Israeli public libraries, books that treat on the Arab-Israeli conflict and its past wars, government decisions taken in those wars, etc., the history of Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as of Muslim institutions in the country, subject matters not otherwise known or readily had by editors who do not live in this country or who do not have access to its libraries

Having the opportunity to edit anew in these important fields will be commensurate with the good judgment and magnanimity of Wikipedia editors, who were kind and considerate with other editors who had made similar mistakes in the ARBPIA area, some blocked and some banned for their offences, and, yet, were permitted to return to edit in this category.

We say in Hebrew: האהבה מקלקלת את השורה‎ = (paraphrased) “He falls into folly who loves [a thing] too heartily.” I guess you can say that my love and enthusiasm for this project sometimes override my better judgment. Still, we all learn from our mistakes.

We all have a certain base of experience which lends itself to certain topics, as well as a certain background which lends itself to our perception of different things. As editors, we can neutrally convey those binary opinions to our readership, without trying to advocate a certain political or ideological cause, in accordance with Wikipedia’s policy that prohibits WP:ADVOCACY, such as by trying to sway public opinion one way or the other. And while the Arab-Israeli conflict has possessed many of our dear friends and fellow co-editors so fully of the subject, perhaps also those who level their harsh criticisms against me, I can assure you that what my opinion is on this subject can have but the least consequence upon any of the living, since I am not interested in aggravating an already bad situation, and because I truly love both peoples.

And while I am an Israeli and I share a common fate with the people of this country, this does not mean I cannot have empathy towards my fellow Arab citizen whenever he is oppressed. I hereby give my reassured commitment to good editing on Wikipedia, and with full compliance to Wikipedia's policies. Asking for another chance. We're here to serve and I've come to miss editing in the fields that I love the most.Davidbena (talk) 03:19, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose. The description of the January 2022 incident makes it sound so innocent, while in reality it was not some forced error but a blatant deliberate one-sided "outline", giving only the Israeli position and not even mentioning Palestine once. An inability or unwillingness to accurately describe what happened then (and which already came hot on the heels of a 9 week block in late 2021) means I can't support lifting this topic ban. Fram (talk) 06:15, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
• Oppose. The January sanction was clearly not for writing the words "State of Israel". How can we trust someone back into a contentious topic when they can't even be fully honest in their unblock request? Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 07:47, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  I'll just add that, having reread the previous ban/unban discussions, I can believe that Devidbena actually didn't see how controversial that Jerusalem outline would be. But, with this subject to close to him, his judgment has been poor on a number of occasions. With no shortage of contributors to the ARBPIA area, we really don't need someone who has shown repeated poor judgment working there. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:07, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose. It seems to me that the narrowing of the topic ban in August 2020 gives David leeway for quite a bit of editing in the area he loves. And this AE discussion clearly shows that his description of the January 2022 incident is specious. Bishonen | tålk 08:19, 1 September 2022 (UTC).

  There's a word not used often enough -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 09:40, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  I'm doing my best to remedy that. See it three times here. Bishonen | tålk 18:15, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  It's like spurious, I guess...? El_C 18:44, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  Specious can be used spuriously. But can spurious be used speciously? GoldenRing (talk) 20:20, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  If you must know, read the famous book by famous author Chuck Darwin: The Origin of Specious. Dumuzid (talk) 20:23, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

  @GoldenRing: I think you just did. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 20:26, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose I'm not seeing much understanding of the problems that led to the sanction here. GoldenRing (talk) 11:18, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
• Absolutely not. Clearly does not understand the scope of the issue, and we will be right back here again when he edits tendentiously in the area. Star Mississippi 00:25, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Administrators' newsletter – September 2022

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2022).

Administrator changes

DanCherek • DatGuy • Femke • Z1720

Aldux • Graham Beards • Nyttend

Interface administrator changes

Mr. Stradivarius

Guideline and policy news

• A discussion is open to define a process by which Vector 2022 can be made the default for all users.
• An RfC is open to gain consensus on whether Fox News is reliable for science and politics.

Technical news

• The impact report on the effects of disabling IP editing on the Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia has been released.
• The WMF is looking into making a Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) system to improve the reporting of harmful incidents through easier and safer reporting. You can leave comments on the talk page by answering the questions provided. Users who have faced harmful situations are also invited to join a PIRS interview to share the experience. To sign up please email Madalina Ana.

Arbitration

• An arbitration case regarding Conduct in deletion-related editing has been closed. The Arbitration Committee passed a remedy as part of the final decision to create a request for comment (RfC) on how to handle mass nominations at Articles for Deletion (AfD).
• The arbitration case request Jonathunder has been automatically closed after a 6 month suspension of the case.

Miscellaneous

• The new pages patrol (NPP) team has prepared an appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for assistance with addressing Page Curation bugs and requested features. You are encouraged to read the open letter before it is sent, and if you support it, consider signing it. It is not a discussion, just a signature will suffice.
• Voting for candidates for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees is open until 6 September.

---

• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:13, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

WMF Board voting closes on September 6

I want to specifically highlight the last bullet in the newletter, that voting for the WMF Board of Trustees closes on September 6. Only 16% of administrators who are eligible to vote have done so, here's the list of admins who haven't voted yet. This seems rather low to me given how many administrators care about or are affected by decisions the WMF makes (everyone, really). I encourage you to:

• Review the list of candidates
• Watch/read answers to community questions
• Vote!

Thanks, Legoktm (talk) 19:58, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Odd, I voted prior to this post and I'm on the list as not voted. When I click the link to vote it said I already have. RickinBaltimore (talk) 17:31, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

There are a few different lists on that page; it looks like you're listed in the "Have voted" section. DanCherek (talk) 17:38, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

...I'll just get my coat. RickinBaltimore (talk) 18:08, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

@RickinBaltimore: indeed, you're all set. Thank you for voting! Legoktm (talk) 21:58, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

RFC at RSN request

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Can the Fox News RFC at WP:RSN please be closed from comments until a formal close can be developed? The discussion is getting longer and longer due to pointless arguing. As pointed out, it’s half a megabyte, with 70,000 words and will take someone nearly five hours just to read. 74.101.118.197 (talk) 14:38, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

People have continued to comment. RFCs don't have a hard deadline. So I don't think it should be closed from comments until a closer is actually starting to close it. Andre🚐 14:59, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Protected user scripts

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Could someone please remove the protection from the user scripts in my userspace? I applied full protection to them when I had the bit and would now like to edit them (some have ceased to work correctly because of changes to the default skin in the meantime). At least User:GoldenRing/wordcount.js and User:GoldenRing/generate-diffs.js. I have a vague recollection that scripts in userspace can only be edited by the relevant user anyway; can someone please confirm? GoldenRing (talk) 15:11, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Itried to unprotect and it said you could edit it. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 15:18, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

I tried, it says only you (no longer an admin bit) and Interface Admin can modify it, but the protection is still in the logs, so you may need an interface admin to lift the protection. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 15:22, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks both. I'll try over at WP:IANB. GoldenRing (talk) 15:26, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

My articles restoration permission

Can any admin restore my deleted articles. During my block most of my created articles were deleted under G5. Jyoti Roy (talk) 03:06, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Hello to TTP1233 posting for some reason with the misleading signature Jyoti Roy. Which specific articles are you asking to be restored and why do you believe that these deleted articles are about notable topics and are well referenced? If you were writing acceptable articles, then why were you blocked and why were your articles deleted? Cullen328 (talk) 07:09, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

See the section above titled "TTP1233 Unblock Request (unarchived)" for further information. -- Malcolmxl5 (talk) 13:25, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

• Looking at their deleted contribs, it would seem they were all Draft: space. The relevant reasons are found at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/NS Dibyojyoti/Archive. The normal process for undeleting articles like this would be Wikipedia:Deletion review as they appear to have been deleted in process and properly. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 07:14, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

  @Dennis Brown, thank you for the advice. :) Jyoti Roy (talk) 08:45, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps best if some people keep an eye on this editor's contributions. I noticed e.g this incorrect vandalism reversal + warning, and the moving of an article from draft to mainspace which was created by an earlier incarnation of this editor, but then moved to draft and declined afterwards. To start like this straight of an indef block doesn´t look good. Fram (talk) 15:44, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

This is a completely wrong addition. I wonder if we aren´t still in the same WP:CIR territory as at the time of the original blocks. Fram (talk) 15:58, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

This edit is really bad. Why did you do that, TTP1233? Cullen328 (talk) 16:09, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

There were no reliable source, so I added one @Cullen328. How would I know, if Fram reverted it. TTP1233 (talk) 16:43, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

That is not an answer to Cullen's question. Adding a source to unsourced material is great, but not if it doesn't support the material. In this instance, it was irrelevant to the material. Fram reverted you; he had not reverted beforehand. There had been no edits to the article since 2020. I'm afraid your response only confirms Fram's contention of incompetence.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:51, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

TTP1233, you added a source about a 2022 beer festival at a castle to an article about an opera written in 1916. Yes, the opera and the castle share a name but they are otherwise completely unrelated. This was an incompetent edit. Cullen328 (talk) 16:54, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Now that's an explanation from an editor. @Cullen328 Thank you TTP1233 (talk) 17:07, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

• Please note that despite the absence of a clear consensus to unblock TTP, the rationale for doing so was (1) that two admins supported it; (2) no one opposed it; and (3) reblocks are cheap. The third point is not something I personally agree with. Generally, unless there's egregious behavior, e.g., new socking after unblocking a sock, reblocks tend to be hard, especially soon after an unblock.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:26, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

  Okay, these edits are rough and not expecting edits. Please revert if you feel it unsatisfied.

  Strict and committed people like @Bbb23 and @Fram have different thoughts about me. But I don't mind. Neither I have potential to achieve something nor do I have to argue. I don't want to show disrespect to them. They are cool.

  I have nothing to say but one thing, that if some admins have faith on me for unblocking me to become a productive editor, they will do convince as well, but after some time. That's all. TTP1233 (talk) 17:16, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Article reverted

An user named TolWol first reverted my edits from Insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and then reverted whole article back to one year without providing any proper reason, I just recently added high profile al-qaeeda and other terrorist killed and captured by they US and and Pakistani forces in info box.

I watched this user talk page this user has a history of engaged in edit wars, please restore article and tell this user if he has any problem related to content or any edit, avoid reverting it and use talk page. 103.141.159.231 (talk) 07:06, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

• The article has been semi-protected by El C. The proper place to request edits would be the talk page of the article, which you haven't used in two years. We don't decide content here at AN. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 07:18, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Discretionary sanctions draft: community comment

The next phase of the ongoing discretionary sanctions amendment process has opened. The drafting arbitrators (CaptainEek, L235, and Wugapodes) have posted a draft of the amendments here, together with draft language, and invite community comments. We would like to note that this public consultation includes a draft of the amendments for the purposes of indicating possible areas for amendment; community comments will be instrumental in identifying what reforms are desirable to proceed on, and whether the draft is missing appropriate amendments. The Phase 2 Consultation will end on October 3rd. For the Arbitration Committee, CaptainEek ^{Edits Ho Cap'n!}⚓ 16:57, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard § Discretionary sanctions draft: community comment

Undeletion request

Hi, Could User:Davey2010/UPTPheader · ( talk | logs | history | links | watch ) · [revisions] and User:Davey2010/Talkpageheader · ( talk | logs | history | links | watch ) · [revisions] be undeleted please ? (Both deleted in 2014 requested by me) - Looking to reuse one or the other but cannot remember for the life of me what either of these pages were), Thanks, –Davey2010^Talk 23:33, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

@Davey2010  Done -Ad Orientem (talk) 23:40, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Brilliant thank you @Ad Orientem, greatly appreciated, Thanks, –Davey2010^Talk 23:53, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Hazaras

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Hello! Respectful admins, I would like to protect the Hazaras page at the admin level because User: KoizumiBS is trying to make unprincipled and racist changes to it.--Iampharzad (talk) 23:42, 3 September 2022 (UTC) Iampharzad (talk) 23:42, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi Iampharzad. Please make this report at WP:ANI. When doing so, be sure to read the instructions at the top of the page, include details of the offending behavior including specific links to disruptive edits (diffs) and any other relevant information. Then notify KoizumiBS of the discussion along with anyone else involved. Thank you. -Ad Orientem (talk) 00:22, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.