Talk:Phineas Gage/Archive 7

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Version 4.0 (color tags for categorization of sources)

I'm not going to tell anyone to fasten their seatbelts, but I would like editors to take a look at a new idea in my sandbox, at User:Tryptofish/sandbox#Fourth version. Insofar as I can tell, EEng is correct that it's a losing battle to try to get the numbering of references to change, or to try to use anchors to highlight all of the references in a given category. So I've tried to come up with an alternative approach to categorizing the sources, that would be immediately visible to readers at the top of the References section, and would visibly highlight every source within each category, but that would also allow us to have a single list of references without any fancy numbering. I came up with using template:fontcolor with the default value for the font itself, but with specified background colors. We have four source categories, and per Help:Using colours#Wikipedia, the four colors I selected are the four that are agreed to for use on the Main Page – so I'm working within some well-established boundaries of consensus for which colors to use. (The codes for the four colors are listed at the top of my sandbox.)

I don't know how the rest of you feel about the colors, but you'll tell me. What is in my sandbox looks more rainbow-y than it will look on the page, because on the page, the categorized sources will be interspersed amongst the uncategorized ones. I simply made the bullet list at the top of the References in plain font (no linking or anchoring), but with the backgrounds as a key. Any reader who looks at the References on the page will see it right away. Then for each source, I enclosed the "cite book", or whatever sourcing template was used, with the fontcolor template corresponding to the category. This makes it possible to use < ref > for all of the sources in the reference list. And any editor wanting to add a new uncategorized source can just add it, and it will have the default background like all the other uncategorized ones (and it isn't too difficult for someone to copy and past the fontcolors if they want to do more categorizing). --Tryptofish (talk) 00:00, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

PS: If we decide that we don't like background colors, then colored borders would be an alternative. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:15, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

PPS: Or, just apply the background to the beginning of the reference, such as just to "Macmillan, Malcolm B. (September 2008)", instead of encasing the entire reference with it. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:50, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Now this is a really promising idea. Here are two more extensive mockups (in two difference color schemes), combining text tags and color, since information must never be transmitted through color only (WP:COLOR):

Version 4.1

Extended content
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Sources Certain references are designated as further reading:  · For general audiences (Gage)  · For general audiences (portraits)  · For young readers  · For researchers and specialists References

Version 4.2

Extended content
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Sources Certain references are designated as further reading:  · For general audiences (Gage)  · For general audiences (portraits)  · For young readers  · For researchers and specialists References

Since there's just a strip of color in each entry (not the whole entry) V4.2 uses more stark colors, and I've forced that strip to always be on its own line so they all line up down the column.

Much as I'd hate to mothball {ranchor}, this might do it. But I think it will depend on how it looks with all 120 sources, when the colored entries are more scattered. EEng (talk) 03:35, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

You actually said it is "a really promising idea"! Whoopee! Mothballing ranchor or not, at least we can mothball rancor. Now I'm probably not going to have to drag you through an RfC after all. Tryptofish does an obnoxious victory dance. Oh, and "blah, blah, blah" is a very good paraphrase of the page. (OK, now that's just giddy.)

Your point about accessibility, and using text along with color, is a very good one, and I agree. It also lends itself very well to being used by other editors who come new to the page. So I agree that doing it with tags at the end of each reference is a better way to go. Let's continue to work with that.

I have some concerns about using the more saturated colors, as in 4.2, relative to 4.1. With the darker colors, there is less contrast of the text, making it more difficult to read. On the other hand, we don't have to go all the way as pastel as 4.1. Below, I'm showing how it looks when one shade darker than 4.1, and that should make references easy to find within the list. Also, I'll continue to put in a plug for basing the color choices on those at the Main Page. It will tend to ward off complaints from drive-by editors: tell them it's based on the Main Page, and it becomes awkward for them to complain.

As I've been thinking further about it, I'd like to tweak the order in which the colors are used. Also, I'm not seeing a reason to create a Sources section, with a References section within it. So my current preference for the top of the section would look like:

Extended content

References Some references are designated as further reading: For general audiences (Gage) For general audiences (portraits) For young readers For researchers and specialists --Tryptofish (talk) 21:51, 20 August 2015 (UTC) These are the colors I like. Very, very good. By the way, when you say "portraits", do you mean actual paintings? Because a portrait can be formed with words, too. Corinne (talk) 23:49, 20 August 2015 (UTC) It's EEng's terms, not mine, but Phineas Gage#Portraits. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:53, 20 August 2015 (UTC) Oh, yes, now I remember that section. I'm curious as to why the references for that section have to have their own section in the categorized list. Corinne (talk) 00:30, 21 August 2015 (UTC) That's a very good point. I imagine that, under the existing page format, it made sense not to have an overly long section of For general audiences, so it was subdivided into two groups. But if we implement this new approach, that issue becomes moot. In that regard, I'll modify what I just said as: References Some references are designated as further reading: For general audiences For young readers For researchers and specialists --Tryptofish (talk) 00:44, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm happy with three groups. EEng (talk) 02:39, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

And I'm happy that you're happy. --Tryptofish (talk) 02:59, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

Version 4.3

Using Tfish's "one shade darker". Also removed References, which was an accident.

Extended content

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Sources Certain sources are designated as further reading:  · For general audiences  · For young readers  · For researchers and specialists At this point the exact colors aren't the central issue--we can always adjust those. (There's a thingamajig somewhere for checking the readability of text color C1 against background C2. I'd bet Mirokado is an expert on that.) I think the next step is to mock up the whole ref section. I'd also like to see what it looks like with some kind of bordering (left and right only, I think, not all four sides -- so essentially it will be a "bar" down the left and right -- or maybe just the left?); but I fear that will involve some ugly markup. EEng (talk) 02:39, 21 August 2015 (UTC) This is looking very good to me. But I'm curious why "Sources" and not "References"? It's References on the page now. Also, please: "Certain Some sources are designated as further reading:". One way to do those left and/or right borders without too much complication is to use the character | from the Special characters→Symbols menu, or ǁ or ǀ from Special characters→IPA, and fontcolor it as desired. --Tryptofish (talk) 03:12, 21 August 2015 (UTC) PS: About those borders, it would probably be best to stick with the Main Page colors, and thus use Help:Using colours#Wikipedia, the colors given for borders on the right-hand side. --Tryptofish (talk) 03:16, 21 August 2015 (UTC) Sources, references, whatever. Probably References. (Astonishingly, MOS doesn't care: 'Editors may use any section title that they choose. The most frequent choice is "References"; other articles use "Notes", "Footnotes", or "Works cited"...' Can't use | for the borders because there's no way to know where the linewraps will be. I think this would require one of the zillions of box or quote templates, or maybe a fake table, with various parameters set to color the border on certain sides. As always Mirokado would be the man for that. Meanwhile I"m gathering inspiration to implement V4.3 on the full article. EEng (talk) 03:27, 21 August 2015 (UTC) Yes, you are right. Maybe it's best to just forgo the borders. Please don't forget Certain Some. I wish you abundant inspiration! --Tryptofish (talk) 03:36, 21 August 2015 (UTC) Certain some what? EEng (talk) 03:43, 21 August 2015 (UTC) "Certain Some sources are designated as further reading:". --Tryptofish (talk) 20:30, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

• Mocked up at [1]. EEng (talk) 22:16, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

More thoughts

Like Thank you! I think that the new References section looks great! I made a minor tweak in the sandbox version, by adding a small indent. It seems to me that readers will have no problem finding the sources they want to find. At some point, as this version moves onto the page, I would request that the main-text citations of these references be converted entirely to < ref >, and consequently that all the reference markup in the References section be removed. Thus, the References section would consist of the "key" at the top, and then "reflist|30em", and nothing more. Within the main text, you can use "ref name=" for the selected references, because they are cited repeatedly: for example, the current reference M1 would be cited as "< ref name=M1 >". --Tryptofish (talk) 23:00, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm sorry, let me make sure I understand. You want to change

Code example E1

Gage was strong{{r|H|p=5}} according to his doctor.

to

Code example E2

Gage was strong<ref name=H/>{{rp|5}} according to his doctor.

(in the case of sources used repeatedly), or change

Code example E3

Some said Gage was a nice guy.{{r|nice|p=62}} Others said he was a mean{{r|mean|p=73}} and nasty{{r|nasty|p=238}} person.

to

Code example E4

Some said Gage was a nice guy.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|last=Moffat |first=Gregory K. |year=2012 |page=44 |title=Fundamentals of Aggression|editor-last=Browne-Miller |editor-first=Angela |work=Violence and Abuse in Society: Understanding a Global Crisis|publisher=ABC-CLIO |isbn=978-0-313-38276-5 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=A-GXM9MFaB4C&pg=PA44}}</ref>{{rp|62}} Others said he was a mean<ref>{{cite book|last=Tow |first=Peter Macdonald |year=1955 |location=London, New York |publisher=Oxford University Press|title=Personality changes following frontal leucotomy: a clinical and experimental study of the functions of the frontal lobes in man. With a foreword by Sir Russell Brain}}</ref>{{rp|73}} and nasty<ref>{{refn |name=yakovlev |{{cite journal|title=The "Crowbar Skull" and Mementoes of "Phrenological Hours"|pages=19{{ndash}}24 |work=Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin|volume=33 |date=October 1958 |number=1 |last=Yakovlev |first=Paul I.|url=http://archive.org/stream/harvardmedicalal33harv/harvardmedicalal33harv_djvu.txt}}</ref>{{rp|238}} person.

in the case of sources used just once? Isn't your goal to make the article easier to edit? EEng (talk) 00:16, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

I guess I spoke too soon, when I thanked you at your user talk for working with me to find a good outcome. I think I've been saying all along what I propose here, so there is no reason for you to act like you have to ask me. Nor should you be caricaturing what I said, by presenting misleading representations of what the edit windows would look like. The first example, with "Gage was strong according to his doctor", is correct. Now, let me present correctly what I actually said, about the second example:

Change:

Code example T3

Some said Gage was a nice guy.{{r|nice|p=62}} Others said he was a mean{{r|mean|p=73}} and nasty{{r|nasty|p=238}} person.

References

{{Reflist |30em |refs=

{{refn|name=nice|{{cite encyclopedia|last=Moffat |first=Gregory K. |year=2012 |page=44 |title=Fundamentals of Aggression|editor-last=Browne-Miller |editor-first=Angela |work=Violence and Abuse in Society: Understanding a Global Crisis|publisher=ABC-CLIO |isbn=978-0-313-38276-5 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=A-GXM9MFaB4C&pg=PA44}}}}

{{refn|name=mean|{{cite book|last=Tow |first=Peter Macdonald |year=1955 |location=London, New York |publisher=Oxford University Press|title=Personality changes following frontal leucotomy: a clinical and experimental study of the functions of the frontal lobes in man. With a foreword by Sir Russell Brain}}}}

{{refn|name=nasty|{{cite journal|title=The "Crowbar Skull" and Mementoes of "Phrenological Hours"|pages=19{{ndash}}24 |work=Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin|volume=33 |date=October 1958 |number=1 |last=Yakovlev |first=Paul I.|url=http://archive.org/stream/harvardmedicalal33harv/harvardmedicalal33harv_djvu.txt}}}}

to:

Code example T4

Some said Gage was a nice guy.<ref name=nice>

{{cite encyclopedia|last=Moffat |first=Gregory K. |year=2012 |page=44 |title=Fundamentals of Aggression|editor-last=Browne-Miller |editor-first=Angela |work=Violence and Abuse in Society: Understanding a Global Crisis|publisher=ABC-CLIO |isbn=978-0-313-38276-5 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=A-GXM9MFaB4C&pg=PA44}}</ref>{{rp|62}} Others said he was a mean<ref name=mean>

{{cite book|last=Tow |first=Peter Macdonald |year=1955 |location=London, New York |publisher=Oxford University Press|title=Personality changes following frontal leucotomy: a clinical and experimental study of the functions of the frontal lobes in man. With a foreword by Sir Russell Brain}}</ref>{{rp|73}} and nasty<ref name=nasty>

{{cite journal|title=The "Crowbar Skull" and Mementoes of "Phrenological Hours"|pages=19{{ndash}}24 |work=Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin|volume=33 |date=October 1958 |number=1 |last=Yakovlev |first=Paul I.|url=http://archive.org/stream/harvardmedicalal33harv/harvardmedicalal33harv_djvu.txt}}</ref>{{rp|238}} person.

References

{{Reflist|30em}}

And, importantly, the reference section is no more than that, much unlike the unchanged version above. I remember when you made the "seatbelt" comment about the passage from Evolution, but I hope that you, in turn, remember what Corinne and I said to you in response. Even though those citations take up space in the main text in the edit window, and the display on this talk page draws attention to the space that they take up, particularly because you chose an unrepresentative example that is a single sentence with three callouts interspersed through it, this is something that happens on well-sourced pages all over Wikipedia, and editors are well-accustomed to it. And if you don't want to take my word on it, I would still be happy to have an RfC about it.

Then, when a new editor wants to add more material, all they have to add is:

Code example T5

Various authors have analyzed Gage's personality, and found that he had a hole in his head.<ref name=nice/><ref name=mean/><ref name=nasty/>

--Tryptofish (talk) 20:03, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

You didn't speak too soon, but as so often before you've flashed to anger just because I'm trying to clarify what you seem to think is obvious, when in fact what you're saying has contradictions and vagaries of which you're not even aware. This conversation has turned suddenly bizarre, in so many ways:

• I had no idea you wanted anything like this; how would I?
• There's nothing misleading about my examples. The idea is to make the article easier to edit, which 90% of the time means minor changes to wording and so on (what Corinne was most concerned about, BTW) and so I focused on what the edit window looks like when doing that. My point was simply that with WP:LDRHOW ("list-defined references"), article text isn't interrupted by bulky cites, but corralled separately elsewhere. You, I, and everyone else knows that the cites have to be somewhere; do you really think I was trying to "mislead" by not actually showing them in their corral? And it doesn't matter whether the text is long or short: full-cites-with-templates-and-all drown out text wherever they appear, and that's worth avoiding no matter how often or seldom it happens.
• "And, importantly, the reference section is no more than that, much unlike the unchanged version above." Why is that important, or even desirable? Like it says at WP:LDRHOW, list-defined references were "implemented in September 2009 as a way to make referencing articles easier and with less clutter"; old ways change slowly, so it's not surprising you don't see them used much. So what? For extensive articles it clearly makes the markup less cluttered. (And though they ease things for later editors‍—‌which I thought was your goal‍—‌they're more trouble for the initial editor, and that's another reason you don't see them much.)

Do you really worship the tyranny of the majority over what should be the true order of priorities: first and foremoest, what the reader sees; second, editor convenience; and (distant) third, what happens to exist in the vast majority of underdeveloped, half-baked articles?

• The only difference between my E4 and your T4 is that you've put back some of the internal, non-reader-visible linebreaks which Corinne wanted me to take out, and which you thanked me for taking out! Will you make up your mind?
• As for your T5, your code omits the page numbers; it should read:

Code example T5X

Various authors have analyzed Gage's personality, and found that he had a hole in his head.<ref name=nice/>{{rp|62}}<ref name=mean/>{{rp|73}}<ref name=nasty/>{{rp|238}}

Or one could code:

Code example E5

Various authors have analyzed Gage's personality, and found that he had a hole in his head.{{r|nice|p=62}}{{r|mean|p=73}}{{r|nasty|p=238}}

Anyway, I don't get your statement that under your proposal "when a new editor wants to add more material, all they have to add is" T5T5x, since both T5x and E5 work under the current system (list-defined references), and both T5x and E5 work under your proposal (non-list-defined references).

Mirokado, can you lend a hand here, please? EEng (talk) 23:21, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

If I appear angry (and it's not so much anger as exhaustion and exasperation), it's because you keep asking for my advice and then arguing with me over every last detail of it. Please let me draw your attention to what Corinne and I already told you at #seatbelt. I'll make this very simple: I'm in favor of using <ref></ref> to cite sources, consistently throughout this page. Period. The need to do anything different went away when we, apparently, reached consensus about a way to no longer divide the References section into subsections. And I'll be happy to have an RfC over it. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:13, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Side discussion between EEng and me, more about editors than about the content of the page. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:43, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Tfish, years ago I asked for your help in dealing with an editor-on-a-mission who felt it his calling to rework the article according to his crackpot ideas. I feel you were way too indulgent of his nonsensical self-certainty, but your participation was essential nonetheless to bringing that insanity under control. Since then, you've continued to participate, which is of course fine, but I don't recall specifically asking you to, other than the general encouragement and thanks all good editors give to others. And your presence has been appreciated; there have been many small items on which we've worked together to find good solutions‍—‌wording, layout and image placement, all the little unglamorous things that need to be attended to for an article to improve. But no, I haven't been asking you here over and over, and even if I had been, it would be canvassing if I invited someone I knew would agree with me all the time. EEng (talk) 02:18, 24 August 2015 (UTC) No, that's rewriting history, just as you did when you claimed utter surprise at my being interested in < ref >. You posted numerous "bumps" on this talk. And within days of my return to Wikipedia after my mother's death you came to my talk page and asked me to return here. I don't think I was any more indulgent of that other editor than I am indulgent of you, which means that I've been pretty indulgent of you both. Now, that said, I'm glad to hear you say that my "presence has been appreciated". I thank you for that, and I ask you to please continue to keep that in mind. I, in turn, respect you too. And a big part of what keeps me from taking this whole stinking mess off of my watchlist is that I care about you not getting sanctioned again. I worry that you will anger another editor (not me) and get topic banned from this page. Whether you believe it or not, it is a real danger. I'm trying to prevent that from happening. And you are not making it easy for me. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:23, 24 August 2015 (UTC) Well, since you insist on the point, the entirety of my messages to you after your bereavement (and it pains me to even remind you of it again) was this [2]: Not to press, but if you'll give your assent to the resolutions of issues #A4, A5, A6a, and A7, plus the discussion at [link] (which should be easy) then the only things left will be [link]. For both of those the ball's in your court, and I'm not sure you still care about them. After that we're done! So yes, I asked you to come back (and hesitated to do even that, given your situation) but only because I wanted a definitive close to the issues I listed, lest you-know-who claim I took advantage of your absence to close them myself, or whatever might pop into his WP:CIR head. That you stayed on for new issues was your own choice. Again, I wouldn't be saying this except that you said I "keep asking for [your] advice". Your advice is valued, even if I often disagree, but if you don't like giving it anymore, I'm not begging for it. I got sanctioned? Nuh-uh. I got blocked because a self-satisfied roving enforcer of his personal preferences, who happened to be an admin, didn't like being called a self-satisfied roving enforcer of his personal preferences. That's not being sanctioned, it's becoming the target of an abusive admin anguished by being confronted by the following description of himself: One area the hit and run editor gets involved in is the formatting ... The quality of work has increased in some areas, which makes it harder to contribute without good knowledge in the subject matter and sources. Fiddling with the formatting seems to be a suitable alternative passtime. [3] I wish you'd stop bringing this up, because every time you do I have to explain it all over again lest passeersby think I actually got "sanctioned" for doing something wrong, which I didn't. Please don't feel you need to stick around to keep me out of trouble. If you're worried about me getting topic-banned (which can happen to just about anyone not prepared to cower on demand, WP being full of people trying to prove something) then please just promise me the following: if called to testify about what you've seen here over the years, answer fully and honestly. (I'd expect nothing less from you, so this is just to make clear I don't feel I need more.) Except where one sees, now and then, the occasional retraction or apology, I stand by everything I've done here and elsewhere, and fear no scrutiny as long as its full and fair. I then have no doubt that level heads such as these will prevail: [4] [many other editors] have acted like bulls running through this china-shop, doing mass-/automated-'cleanups', without first discussing the issue on the talk page, or doing so in an aggressive fait accompli manner. [5] Their sole contribution appears to be undoing EEng's formatting style to substitute their own preference and its really for no benefit to the article. I dunno guys, there are plenty of really badly formatted articles out there but this isn't one of them. It may be idiosyncratic but it works and it works well - the article looks fantastic in WikiWand. I think some people are forgetting that wikipedia is first and foremost an exercise in writing an encyclopedia. So if your only interest is in formatting it "differently" I would suggest you find something better to do - like writing. [6] If this edit be at all typical, we have substantial violations of WP:CITEVAR going on, among other things — people attempting to take the article away from the standardised citation style used by its major author. Let me remind you that not all citation standards use the {{ndash}}, among other things (example), and that the placement of {{shy}} permits the article to be formatted like a professional print publication. In real life, when amateurs tell professionals that they're right and that the professionals are wrong, without solid factual evidence, they get ignored and forced out of the way if necessary. Kindly step aside and stop preventing this professional from permitting this article to be written to a professional standard. Tfish, I am not lumping you with the amateurs‍—‌far from it. But you worry too much about placating them. (The last quote above is precisely mirrored by Mirokado's post below). EEng (talk) 05:50, 25 August 2015 (UTC) OK, so be it. But based upon what I'm seeing here, please let me tell you honestly what "if called to testify about what you've seen here over the years, answer fully and honestly" means to me. I'd have to say that you have shown more WP:OWN and WP:IDHT than I would like. I've spent more effort placating you than I have "placating" the other editors. And I don't see it as me staying on for new issues. You asked me here to make sure that the complaints by Chris had been adequately addressed, so that others in the future would not be concerned that you had failed to consider them. Although issues that I've raised subsequently have not actually come off of the list of things Chris said explicitly, I believe that they are logical consequences of the complaints that he and others have made. As long as you continue to resist what I have suggested, you remain vulnerable to criticisms of OWNership. I think your characterization of your block history would boomerang if you said it publicly. Sorry, but that's me being full and honest. I'm hatting this out of consideration for you, but please feel free to reply inside the "hat" or at my user talk. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:43, 25 August 2015 (UTC) Being blocked by an admin who can't stomach criticism of his own immaturity, or for labeling a chronic liar a liar, is no shame. I'm afraid I must insist on distinguishing between the actual intelligible content of you-know-who's word salads, and anything you might kindly have read into them in order to give them intelligibility. We've dealt with and closed the former, which was a critical goal in my mind, to get that nonsense off the talk page. Your concerns, though possibly inspired during your reading of his LSD trips (though this in no way prejudices them in my mind) are separate. When people like this [7] show up to make OWN and IDHT accusations, I'm not worried. You I'm happy to work with, but when I (and Mirokado too, don't forget) resist your suggestions because we think they reduce the quality of the article, that's not OWN or IDHT. EEng (talk) 06:27, 26 August 2015 (UTC) And I'm happy to work with you (and Mirokado) too – and I both like you and respect you, which, were it not the case, I would have been outa here long ago. Despite what you say you think, I really have not been placating or indulging the other editors who have come to this page. I've just listened to them civily, and agreed with them some of the time. But I really am placating and indulging you, to great lengths that will come abruptly to an end in the event that a new dispute emerges in the future. I will put the best interests of this page ahead of your best interests when that day arrives. As much as I like editing with you, I find that you have an odd lack of self-awareness. Perhaps my efforts to try to get you to recognize that is a lost cause. I fully agree that when you and Mirokado have different opinions than mine (and Corinne, and Vsmith), that's not OWN or IDHT. But when it gets to be a rigid disagreement, and when you revise history to make it fit a nice picture of what has happened, it gets to feel like you are standing at the "door" of this page like a guard, not merely like an editor with high standards. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:18, 26 August 2015 (UTC) Stewardship is not ownership If you're placating and indulging me, please stop immediately. I don't want any favors along those lines. Now can we get back to talking about what's best for the article, please? EEng (talk) 03:46, 27 August 2015 (UTC) What I see here goes beyond stewardship. And if you want me to stop placating, so I will. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:39, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Tryptofish, you appear now to be requesting that the referencing style be changed so that the citations are embedded in the source instead of defined in the reference list. You also again say you will start an RFC unless you get your way. This change has as far as I know never been mentioned before and I certainly will not agree to it (of course if a change is forced on us by the community as a whole I will, as you correctly point out, have no choice). The community decided long ago not to support contested arbitrary changes to referencing style since that would lead to substantial article instability. We have sfn-lovers and sfn-haters and there have been edit wars and ill-natured talk-page spats over that issue. We have people who prefer cs1 to cs2, or cs2 to cs1, for various reasons. We have no-citation-templates-at-all-they-are-too-confusing supporters and always-use-citation-templates-for-the-metadata supporters, and heaven knows what other kind of Wikipedia-would-be-much-better-if-only-everyone-did-it-my-way editors. Using list-defined references or not is another of those arbitrary preference things where there are arguments both for and against and it is well known that people won't agree about the relative merits of the arguments. In cases where the active editors don't agree to a change (and of course sometimes they do) the decision is likely to be to leave the article as it is. So I am confident that an RFC to move citations from the list to the article body would fail.

In this particular case, an awful lot of the half-a-megabyte or whatever of dicussion over the past year or so has been about removing clutter from the article source. It is obvious from the example you give above that we would clutter the source further by embedding the full citation definitions in the body of the article. --Mirokado (talk) 20:43, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

This isn't about me "getting my way". Please look carefully, both of you actually, at what I have been saying all along as we have discussed the "color" idea, and previous suggestions that I have made, about referencing. I've been saying that a big part of the reason that I wanted to do away with the division of the References section into subsections based on categories was that I felt that it would be good for the page to switch to "ref" referencing. And I understand what Corinne and Vsmith have been saying as agreeing with me about it. No one who has been paying attention should be acting surprised now because I am continuing to recommend it. But, that said, I'm about to suggest a possible way of peacemaking. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:53, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Looking back, I do see that you said "If we do X, all referencing could be via < ref>". But that was always in the context of junking the {ranchor} system so that all referencing could the done via the normal, default referencing system. However (and here's the rub is) you seem to think "normal default referencing" has to mean use of < ref>; to me and to Mirokado (and anyone else who's seen a wide variety of reference formats and syntaxes) it could mean use of < ref> or {r} or any of several other trivially different (syntactically) ways of getting the same result: one big unordered pile of refs with -type callouts, making no use of the {ranchor} system of manual ordering (reader-level groups etc.) with manually-assigned -type callouts. It would never have occurred to us that you literally were insisting on < ref>, to the exclusion of {r} or other syntax.

And why would it? It's one thing to junk {ranchor} and go to the colors and so on, which could be done just as well using {r} or < ref>. It's quite a different thing, and a completely independent question, to change the very compact and easy (to read, to type...) {{r|smith|p=55}} to the visually intrusive and keyboard-acrobatic <ref name=smith/>{{rp|55}}.

You don't seem to have absorbed, or at least acknowledged, that the {{rp|55}} will need to be tacked on to each < ref> under your proposal‍—‌or will you now be urging the elimination of the page numbers, too, in the name of project-wide markup consistency? This is exactly the sort of thing I meant when I talked earlier of "what you seem to think is obvious, when in fact what you're saying has contradictions and vagaries of which you're not even aware."

Apparently, since only 5000 (0.1%) of English WP articles use {r}, it shouldn't be used because it's unfamiliar to a lot of editors. OK, so we switch to < ref>. But < ref> has no way of showing the -style page numbers, so for that we'll tack {rp} onto each < ref>, as already mentioned. But only 0.4% of articles use {rp}, so that's too unfamiliar too. OK, then I guess we'll not use < ref> after all, and switch to {sfn} for everything‍—‌everyone knows about {sfn}, right? Well, actually, only about 1% of articles use {sfn} either, so that's a no-go too? Well, we'll just go back to plain < ref>, like 99% of articles, and forget the page numbers, like 99% of articles...

Above you say, "...a big part of the reason that I wanted to do away with the division of the References section into subsections based on categories was that I felt that it would be good for the page to switch to 'ref' referencing." Apparently, no matter what might be best for readers of a given article, you're willing to select what the reader sees by the principle that the markup of all articles should look the same. I consider that crazy. Your priorities are mixed up. What the readers sees comes first.

EEng (talk) 02:18, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm going to try to respond point by point.

Well, at least I'm glad that I don't have to show you diffs of all the previous times that I talked about < ref >. Yes, I said that over and over, indeed. Apparently, you and maybe Mirokado read what I plainly said, and understood it to mean something other than what I intended, because you saw it through the lens of your own experiences with this page. Please think about what that means. It follows that there are a lot of editors who see it through the lens that I use, and not all of us are drive-by cranks. Yes, part of what I was thinking was about removing the need for ranchor, but I also made it very clear that ranchor was one part of a much larger sum of what I see as complications that I recommend simplifying.

Where you contrast {{r|smith|p=55}} with <ref name=smith/>{{rp|55}}, I honestly disagree. I don't think that the latter is more difficult to read in the edit window or to type. I'm just fine with rp for the page numbers. I'm unpleasantly surprised to see anyone regard the difference as a contentious matter.

Instead of speculating about what I have or have not absorbed or will or will not decide to raise as issues in the future, I'd like to say it, as clearly as I can. (And if you are worried about what I might advocate in the future, please just ask me. I'm not here with some kind of evil hidden agenda.) I strongly support this page's provision of specific page numbers. It's a feature, not a bug. I see many other pages where editors add a "page number needed" tag after a citation, and I consider the sourcing here to be very good in this regard. I cannot imagine me advocating for removal of page numbers. I cannot imagine me agreeing with some proposal by a future editor to remove them. I expect to be a consistent defender of page numbers. I'm fine with the rp template, as I already said just above. About sfn, it's not a fighting issue for me, but I agree with you that sfn would be less desirable than what we get with either r and p= or with rp, so I am not going to suddenly turn into an advocate for sfn. So: you can now rest assured that I support having the page numbers appear as superscripts in the main text, and that I am neither Dr. Jekyll nor Mr. Hyde. Please don't dream up some future horror that I will inflict on you; just ask. (I feel more strongly about getting all of the references into a single list than I do about retaining the categories, so I am likely to advocate loss of the categories if the "color" plan or some alternative solution are rejected.)

So again, I will say what I recommend for this page: < ref >, with use of rp to indicate page numbers. If we go to the "colors" idea, which I strongly recommend, then we no longer need ranchor and its colleagues. If we go to < ref > and rp, we continue to provide page numbers, and I'm pretty sure that what our readers will see will look pretty much the same as with r and p=. And please understand that I'm telling you the truth when I say that I edit a lot of pages around here, and I find < ref > and rp quite familiar, quite unsurprising, and I'm pretty sure that a large majority of other editors do too. This has nothing to do with "tyranny of the majority". It's about working with other people on a collaborative Wiki. As I said above, I respect the work you have done on this page, and I am worried about the next time other editors show up shouting about WP:OWN. What I'm advocating for is not going to harm what our readers will see, and it won't harm you, either. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:56, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

I've never suggested you're here with a hidden agenda; I was merely showing where your "unfamiliar markup" logic might lead.

That you object to {r} but accept {rp} shows the extent to which one's ideas of what's familiar and conventional depends on accidents of editing experience. The figures I gave earlier were real: {r} and {rp} are used in about 0.1% and 0.4% of articles, respectively [8][9]. There's no way you can say that {rp} is familiar to editors and {r} other isn't‍—‌they're qualitatively indistinguishable, so if that's your impression it's just because you happen to have worked on articles that use {rp}.

EEng (talk) 05:50, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Oh, I don't doubt the numbers on r versus rp. But that's because there are so many pages that fail to provide page numbers, and I consider the page numbers on this page to be a very good thing. But I think the numbers on r versus ref would be another matter altogether (and rp is just an add-on for ref). As far as I can tell (and please correct me if I'm wrong), once one eliminates the subdivision of the Reference section into subsections, then there is no difference between r and ref with respect to what our readers would see. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:50, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Well, yes, there is something you seem to misunderstand here -- you seem to think that eliminating the subdivision/categorization is a prerequisite for changing {r} to < ref>, and that's not true.

(A) Any time we want, every instance of {r|smith|p=22} could be turned into < ref name=smith/>{rp=22}, with no effect on the subdivision/categorization of sources. This change does nothing to what the reader sees, either.

(B) Completely independently, any time we want we could eliminate the subdivision/categorization by changing every {ranchor|H|p=22} into {r|H|p=22} or into < ref name=H/>{rp|22} (whichever we like -- they do exactly the same thing -- though of course we'd pick the one which matches whatever's going on in (A) ). Of course, this does change what the reader sees.

EEng (talk) 06:27, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Actually, I understand a lot better than you are giving me credit for. Yes, what you said here is correct, about the effects of those potential changes, and the ways that they are each independent of the other. We agree that a change from r to ref-plus-rp would have no effect on what readers see. And we agree about two things concerning the categorization: that it would be a simple matter to eliminate it entirely, and that (although you didn't mention it just now) we would both prefer not to eliminate it entirely. Now if we were to agree to use the color plan, as it is now in your sandbox, we could go entirely to ref-plus-rp, with no adverse side-effects. We would not be forced to, but we could. Insofar as I am aware, if we were to keep the subdivision of the Reference section, based on categories, as the page is now, we would continue to need ranchor or something like it. And it sounds to me like you do not have a rebuttal to what I said above: that the numbers for Wikipedia pages using them are quite different for r versus ref. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:33, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

All correct, except at the end re "no rebuttal". The rebuttal is that it doesn't matter that the overwhelming majority of pages use < ref> and very few use {r}, because there's no requirement, or even preference (except when all other things are equal) for the more common markup to be used. (And anyway, if that were an argument for dispensing with {r}, then it would also be an argument for dispensing with {rp}, which you have no problem with.) EEng (talk) 03:56, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

If the use of the present formatting were to discourage other editors from editing this page, leading (intentionally or not) to a de facto "ownership" of the page, then it most certainly would matter. (And that's a testable hypothesis.) My point is not to arbitrarily restrict this page only to the most widely-used formats for some arbitrary reason having to do with a count of the page usage. The reason for preferring widely-used formats is to make page editing easier for a wider population of editors, so long as it does not interfere with the quality of what our readers see – thus, there is nothing illogical with endorsing the use of rp, because ref+rp is just as good for our readers (identical, in fact), and much better for editing. I am glad that we agree that ref is overwhelmingly more familiar than r. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:48, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Back to the colors

I have a suggestion. We have consensus for what is at User:EEng/sandbox, where the reference "tags" are marked by colors. I hope that, for now, we can implement that into this page. Then, I suggest that we all take a bit of time to look at it, see how it looks, and evaluate how we each feel about where things are at. Only after that, I would like to come back to what we have started to discuss here. Peace! --Tryptofish (talk) 21:58, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

I hope you're sitting down, Tfish, but there's no such consensus. I said it was a promising idea, did a series of mockups, then said "I think the next step is to mock up the whole ref section", and then did that. I don't know what I think of it yet. I'm still trying to convince myself it serves the reader as well as the current system. EEng (talk) 02:18, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Then take as much time as you need to think about that, first. I'm not in a hurry here. But you are making it sound as though, after being friendly with the colors idea (you certainly did not tell me that you had doubts about the colors when I thanked you at your talk page), you may now be holding it hostage to the r-versus-ref issue. Please don't do that. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:01, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Tryptofish, really! "You may now be holding it hostage to the r-versus-ref issue"‍—‌will you please stop it? As usual, I'd like to hear what the redoubtable Mirokado thinks. (In case he's gotten lost, we're talking about this mockup [10], with the "further reading" items tagged by colored notes rather than being gathered into special sections of their own.

(Please note, everyone, that per our discussion somewhere above, in the live article I eliminated the "General readers (portraits)" section, moving one of those sources into "General readers" -- now renamed from "General readers (Gage)" -- and the rest to "Researchers & Specialists".) EEng (talk) 14:57, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Well you've heard already what Corinne and I think about it. I appreciate what you did with the General readers consolidation, thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:55, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

@Mirokado: I too am eager to find out your answer to EEng's question (about the color-based idea displayed in EEng's sandbox). --Tryptofish (talk) 21:36, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the pings, and thanks to EEng for implementing that thoroughly so we can see it realistically. While this indicates the target readership of these sources it offers a rather less convenient experience to the reader. By "less convenient" I mean that the reader cannot see all the general reading references together at a glance, for example (the scattering is clearer in the full sandbox that in a brief example). There are also the very long backlink lists for a few of the citations. Thus I prefer the status quo and see no motivation for the change to colours. --Mirokado (talk) 23:33, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

I was really, truly hoping Mirokado would come up with some reason the color system is better, but unfortunately he didn't. And that means his assessment is exactly what I would have said. For the reader to be able to say, "I see,mhere's an online source I can look at right now, but if I want the full treatment here's a big book on the subject that I'd have to get at the library (but can preview a bit online), and ..." is key. EEng (talk) 04:04, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Following up on that, per the section that EEng started immediately below, how would you feel about the following two options (for the moment not including the status quo): either the color scheme at EEng's sandbox, or what I think EEng is asking about below, which is to use a lot of sfn as at Genie (feral child), but to have a Sources and further reading section that would be divided into the categories of sources? As an alternative to the status quo, which of those two would be your second choice, and which your third? --Tryptofish (talk) 23:46, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

My order would be (1) current presentation, (2) Genie system (clarified below in a second), (3) colors. EEng (talk) 04:04, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

I would also go with that order: (1) current presentation, (2) Genie system (but see the next section and how that discussion continues), (3) colors. --Mirokado (talk) 06:35, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Thank you both for those very helpful answers. And that order, at least with respect to ranking (2) and (3), is fine with me. So for now, I'm happy to put the color idea on the back burner, and focus on a comparison between the current presentation and some sort of variation of the Genie system. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:51, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

I dream of Genie

Tryptofish, suppose we were to switch to exactly the system seen in Genie (feral child) except that "Sources and further reading" would be divided into General, Young, Specialists, and Other, how would you feel about that. This would use {{sfn}} in the article text, and {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}} and so on in "Sources and futher reading", nothing else. How would you feel about that? I'm not proposing this right now, because I'm not sure I can stomach the prospect of 500 little notes like Harlow (1868), p. 12 over and over and over and over and over and over, but I'm interested in your reaction. EEng (talk) 06:27, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

That's a good question, and I'm happy to discuss it. It's fine to feel things out about various alternatives without actually being ready to support them, because it's a good way to find new paths to consensus. Thanks!

First, I have a question. Do I understand your question correctly, in that the References section here (corresponding to the Citations section at Genie) would not be subdivided – instead, this page (Gage) would have a Sources and Further reading section, and that's where the subdivision would be? If so, I'd be fine with that. I don't have a problem with having those full citation listings in the Sources and Further reading, to which the brief citations in the References section would link.

Now setting that question aside, here is what I think. I agree with you that it's not particularly desirable to have such a very large number of Harlow (1868), p. 12 cites resulting from sfn. It would not be a deal-breaker for me, but I'd express a mild preference for ref-plus-rp, instead of sfn. Aside from that, I like the way it is at Genie. I tried opening the edit window for various sections of that page, to see what editing would look like, and I strongly prefer it over what I see when I open the edit window here at Gage. So I would definitely see that as a significant step in the right direction. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:57, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Come to think of it, regarding I don't have a problem with having those full citation listings in the Sources and Further reading, to which the brief citations in the References section would link, that could be a very nice solution to what we were trying to solve with the "color" scheme, and I would be happy to support that in lieu of "colors". --Tryptofish (talk) 23:12, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Oh, but is the problem then that doing that would require sfn (in order to indicate page numbers of the sources that are in Sources and Further reading) and preclude rp? --Tryptofish (talk) 23:26, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

You hit the nail on the head with your followup post. Follow along with me...

To keep the discussion clear, let's say there's a "Citations" section and a "Sources and further reading" section. "Sources" would be divided into General, Young, Researchers, Other.

V5.0

So first imagine Gage V5.0, which is exactly like Genie in appearance and markup except that in Gage we divide Sources section into groups, which Genie does not do. Markup looks like this:

Gage was mean.{{sfn|smith|1992|pp=22-33}} Also rude.{{sfn|jones|1982|pp=44-55}} And horrid. {{sfn|smith|1992|pp=66-77}} And bad.{{sfn|smith|1992|pp=88-99}}

{{fake heading|Citations}}

{{reflist}}

{{fake heading|Sources and further reading}}

;General audiences

*{{cite book|ref=harv |author= Jones, Alice| title=A book on Gage |year=1982}}

*{{cite book|ref=harv |author=Smith, Bob|title=Psychology |year=1992}}

;Young readers

*{{cite book|ref=harv |author=Fleischman, X. |title=Gory Gage |year=2001 }}

Gage was mean. Also rude. And horrid. And bad.

Citations

1. ^ Smith 1992, pp. 22-33.

2. ^ Jones 1982, pp. 55-55.

3. ^ Smith 1992, pp. 66-77.

4. ^ Smith 1992, pp. 88-99.

Sources and further reading

General audiences

• Jones, Alice (1982). A book on Gage.
• Smith, Bob (1992). Psychology.

Young readers

• Fleischman, X. (2001). Gory Gage.

Notice that {rp} is obviated because it's built in to {sfn}. Before we move on, imagine how this would scale up to the whole article: "Citations" would have 500 entries, one for Smith 22-33, one for Smith 66-77, one for Smith 88-99, one for Jones 44-55, etc.

V5.1

However, we actually could use {rp} to advantage, as follows:

Gage was mean.{{sfn|smith|1992}}{{rp|22-33}} Also rude.{{sfn|jones|1982}}{{rp|44-55}} And horrid.{{sfn|smith|1992}}{{rp|66-77}} And bad.{{sfn|smith|1992}}{{rp|88-99}}

{{fake heading|Citations}}

{{reflist}}

{{fake heading|Sources and further reading}}

;General audiences

*{{cite book|ref=harv |author= Jones, Alice| title=A book on Gage |year=1982}}

*{{cite book|ref=harv |author=Smith, Bob|title=Psychology |year=1992}}

;Young readers

*{{cite book|ref=harv |author=Fleischman, X. |title=Gory Gage |year=2001 }}

Gage was mean. Also rude. And horrid. And bad.

Citations

1. ^ ^{a b c} Smith 1992.

2. ^ Jones 1982.

Sources and further reading

General audiences

• Jones, Alice (1982). A book on Gage.
• Smith, Bob (1992). Psychology.

Young readers

• Fleischman, X. (2001). Gory Gage.

Notice that the three Smith citations (in V5.0) have now collapsed together, because the page numbers are back in the text as and and , so there's only one kind of Smith in the Citations. In fact, no matter how many times Smith is cited, it will appear only once in Citations. Same for Jones, who will appear just once in Citations, no matter how many times it's cited in the article. In fact, in 5.1 Citations will have exactly the same number of entries as "Sources and further reading" (but in a different order‍—‌Citations will be in a random order).

When the user clicks on any of the Smith callous in the article text e.g. , he's first taken to the Citations entry i.e.

1. ^ ^{a b c} Smith (1992)

Then he has to click again to get to the real bibliographic information in "Sources and further reading" i.e.

• Smith, Bob (1992). Psychology.

Thus in 5.1 Citations have become a kind of lame steppingstone between the article proper and the "Sources and further reading": all three Smith callouts funnel into the single "intermediate" in Citations, which really has no function except to be something the reader clicks on to move down to the "real" Smith entry in "Sources and further reading". (Kind of like a maitre d': doesn't really do anything, but you have to go through him to get to a table, where the actual waiters are.)

With me so far? EEng (talk) 06:13, 27 August 2015 (UTC) Mirokado, feel free to debug the eye-crossing mockup above.

sfn by default prints author date with no parentheses and terminating full stop. Please just accept that rather than adding parameters to each callout to diddle the display format. With this method we would have the big advantage that the "other citations" list could be alphabetical too, which is what we have always really wanted. The need for a second click to arrive at the citation is not a big deal because readers will be (or become) used to doing that in lots of other articles too. I have also been thinking about this (completely independently from yourself) for some time. I hesitated to suggest it because it is yet another "creative" solution, and vulnerable to someone insisting that we are using sfn incorrectly by adding rp instead of the p= etc parameters, but we have good reasons for doing so in this case and can justify the decision if necessary. If you and Tryptofish can agree to take this further I will be happy to support it too. If either of you decides not to support it, then I would not want to push for it against your opposition. --Mirokado (talk) 07:07, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

I wasn't trying to diddle anything, just misremembered sfn's output format. (You and I have fixed it now, I hope.)

My purpose in the above wasn't to propose using such a scheme (at least not unless we think of some new ideas to fix its various drawbacks, or talk ourselves into accepting them) rather to show Tfish, step by step, how you and I ended up with the current scheme. Recall from Talk:Phineas_Gage/Archive_7#Continued_discussion that an explicit goal of our work last year was to eliminate those sfn "intermediates" seen in the V5.1 case, where they're one-or-one with the "real" entries below them in Sources. It's actually remarkable how thoroughly our discussion anticipated questions coming up again now e.g. you'll see in there...

• "I've thought about having just one big alpha order with some kind of designator that tells you which group the source is in, but that sprinkles the seven 'For general readers (Gage)' sources among 100 other sources." (i.e. something like the color scheme)
• "Other works cited ... just use the usual < ref> machinery for these -- they won't be in alpha order but this isn't a 'Suggested reading' list like the other groups, so it doesn't matter. Any new source added by a casual editor will end up in this group; if need be, it can be 'promoted' to one of the other groups, and given a custom tag." (Unhide the "Tag1 and Tag2B" box to see this comment‍—‌bottom of the box.)

Anyway, Tfish, you with me so far on what happens between 5.0 and 5.1, the intermediates collapsing together, etc.? EEng (talk) 15:38, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I have gone through it very carefully, and I'm pretty confident that I am with you entirely. I consider 5.1 to be a good starting point from which we might be able to come up with something that I would be happy with. In fact, if purely hypothetically we were to change this page to 5.1 right away, I would see it as an improvement. I also see some advantages to 5.1 over 5.0, for much the same reasons that you have already explained.

Here is my take on some of the pluses and minuses raised just above. I get the point about the maitre d', and it does not bother me unless we were to modify the system so that all cited references were in the Sources and further reading. (Put it another way: if we consider some select sources to be "important" enough to be categorized, then a formal table service is appropriate for them, but the many riff-raff uncategorized sources can sit at the lunch counter.) I'm also not bothered by a second click to get from Citations to Sources and further reading. Nor am I bothered by the issue of it being "incorrect" to use sfn followed by rp.

A question that I see arising next is whether we would also use sfn for all of the sources in the "other" category, in order to be able to place that category in alphabetical order, just as the named categories would be in alphabetical order. I am inclined to oppose doing that, and here is why. On the page now, the categorized sources are, numerically, a small percentage of all the sources; the large majority of sources are the "others". If we were to use rp as in 5.1, that ratio would look/appear the same. Consequently, we have a choice: use sfn for all sources, so that the "others" can be alphabetical, or use sfn only for the characterized sources, and omit the "others" from the Sources and further reading (just as they are omitted from it at Genie). I think the latter is far preferable. If instead we have everything in the Sources and further reading, the maitre d' issue gets increasingly salient and the value of the Citations section diminishes to being just a matter of making Wikimedia happy. (In my mind, I'm actually thinking References and Sources, instead of Citations and Sources and further reading.) Also, something that I like at Genie is that, when I open the edit window there, I find it straightforward to envision editing – unlike the page here, as it is now. So I would want to do things somewhat similarly to Genie, in that we would use sfn-plus-rp for the categorized references that qualify for table service, and ref-plus-rp for the many "other" references that sit at the lunch counter. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:34, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

EEng, I keep seeing you use "klar" as an edit summary. I'm just curious: what does that mean? --Tryptofish (talk) 23:37, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

German for "clear" and (by some weird logic) therefore "clarify". I think there was one time I sort of slipped trying to type "clarify" and it came out that way, and for some weird reason I got in the habit of typing that when I mean "clarify". I realize that makes little sense. EEng (talk) 04:23, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Okay, that makes it klear. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:53, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

• Spent some time making the Genie conversion in my sandbox, almost but not quite done. Take a look if you want, but might be better to wait, some touchups still to do, gotta run. EEng (talk) 18:30, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, take your time. I took a look, and what I saw reinforces my view about what I said above. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:55, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

I agree that alphabetizing the "Other sources" is of little value (and creates a maintenance headache whenever a new source is added).

I've created a Genie-like version (call if 5.1, permalinked here [11]) with the right side of the diff showing the markup changes. (Did this quick and dirty, so in "Citations" not all the old letter codes, or letter-number codes, have been converted to name + year e.g. M8 should be Macmillan 1996.) I think it looks awful, especially the useless "steppingstone" intermediates with their long lists of backlinks.

Feel free to tinker, please just use clear edit summaries. EEng (talk) 02:19, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the hard work you are putting into this! I haven't tried to analyze the diff of the changes, because to do so would give me a headache, but I have examined the resulting version in your sandbox. I like the direction in which this is going, but it still has a way to go, and I am cautiously hopeful that the things that look awful to me are the same ones that look awful to you. I'll neither tinker nor diddle, but I'll summarize what I think is the most needed, in order to go from 5.1 to 5.2:

1. Get rid of the alphabetized "Other sources", per my comment above.
2. No longer refer to sources by capital letters, so that, in "Citations", we see listings in the form of "Name and name, year", rather than "M1".

Those two things are what look awful to me, and they should be easily fixable. If they are fixed accordingly, I'm likely to be very supportive of the change. I also think that making those fixes will result in the backlinks for the most-cited sources look less conspicuous. I can also envision a few subsequent tweaks, but I'll leave them until subsequently. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:15, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

To your points 1. and 2.:

1. I don't understand. The "Other Sources" aren't alphabetized.

2. I mentioned this above. In this sandbox demonstration V5.1 permalinked above, in the Citations section, numbers "1." through "7.", and also "17.", look as they actually would should the article be converted to this scheme. The rest do not; for example

11. ^ ^{a b c} K.

should read

11. ^ ^{a b c} Kean 2014.

Fixing the rest of these would be a tremendous pain in the ass, so for the purposes of discussion we're just going to have to imagine what they'd look like in real life. (You can find out what each letter, or letter-digit, code stands for by clicking on it.)

Unfortunately I don't think we agree on what looks awful. Here's what I think looks awful:

1. The entire "Citations" section is a fifth wheel. If you click on in the article you get taken to "Citations" 1. a b c d e f g h ... bz ca cb Macmillan 2000, and then you have to click on that to get down to the "For general readers" where you find the actual bibliographic information Macmillan, Malcolm B. (2000). An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage. MIT Press. [etc etc]. In the current article, the reader clicks on and gets taken straight to the bibliographic information.

2. Because sfn insists on using the numeric callouts etc., we're forced to assign the "Other sources" to uppercase alphas‍—‌running all the way from to ! Thus we still have one of the things you said you wanted to eliminate: a mixture of numbers and alphas in the callouts for sources.

3. The markup is way more complex than it was before‍—‌what Mirokado called the current article's "disciplined and efficient" syntax e.g.

{{ranchor|M|p=346-7}}{{r|fowler|p=6}}

has become

{{sfn|Macmillan 2000}}{{rp|346-7}}<ref group=upper-alpha name="fowler"/>{{rp|6}}

I'm sorry, but I see no advantage at all in any of this, though as mentioned before perhaps Mirokado sees some way to fix these problems. Barring that I'll be surpised if he doesn't agree with my evaluation.

EEng (talk) 04:12, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

V5.2

I am now realizing from what you said that I made some mistakes in what I said, so please bear with me as I clarify. I actually continue to agree with you about most of what you find objectionable, which is all the more reason for my thanks to you for working so hard at this.

Please strike what I said about the Other sources being alphabetized. My mistake. Rather, what I should have said is that the Other sources should be removed from the References section entirely. In other words, the References section should be subdivided into the following subsections: For general readers, For young readers, and For researchers and specialists. The end.

OK, this is done in V5.2, linked here [12] (the diff being versus the current article, not versus V5.1 -- as before, to show how the markup compares to the current article). EEng (talk) 23:32, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Do that, and it is no longer necessary to use sfn for those Other sources. They would be absent from the References section, but would appear in full in the Citations section. They could be cited using ref, and there would be no problems when new editors show up and add new sources with ref. There would also be no reason to use capital letters (A–CK) to designate those Other sources.

That's also in V5.2, but not quite for the reason you think. The fundamental reason is changing <ref group=upper-alpha name=foo/> to <ref name=foo/> for all the citations to the "other sources", causing them to collapse into the Citations, where they join the "steppingstones" like

1. a b c d e f g h ... bz ca cb Macmillan 2000

i.e. in V5.1 there were 32 "Citations" (steppingstones) and 89 "Other sources" entries, and now there are 32+89=121 "Citations", and no "Other sources".

EEng (talk) 23:32, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

That is what I was getting at in my earlier comment, where I talked about "formal table service" and "sitting at the lunch counter". Please look at that again, and let me know whether or not I am explaining myself clearly enough.

Yes, I think that we both agree that, in the event of full implementation, designations like K would need to change to Kean 2014. You said this first, I agreed with you, and we still appear to agree.

Right. I'm just not going to invest the time doing this in a mockup -- way too much trouble. EEng (talk) 23:32, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

About what you call a fifth wheel, I hope that my clarification about the Other sources will help address that. For the Other sources, which are the large majority of all the sources cited on the page, it would be a single click from the main text to Citations. As for the smaller number of categorized sources, Mirkado said in his comment of 07:07, 27 August, that a second click "is not a big deal", and I agree with him entirely.

A smart editor like you should know by now that you can't quote the timestamps of edits, because editors in different timezones see different timestamps on edits -- for me Mirokado's edit was at 03:07. The best thing, always, is to give a permalink. EEng (talk) 23:32, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

And a smart editor like you should be able to simply read this talk page, where there are timestamps following every editor signature. See here. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:07, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

When I read this talk page, I don't see the same timestamps you do, because I'm in a different timezone from you‍—‌or, more precisely, my account settings specify a different timezone than do your account settings. If you see 07:07 on Mirokado's comment, then your account is set for UTC. Mine is set for US Eastern, so I see 03:07, because Wikimedia automatically adjusts the timestamp to my timezone. The only way I would see your 07:07 would be if I opened the page for editing and searched for that string. Thus my recommendation to smart editors such as yourself either to use a permalink, or to provide a unique search string. But referring to a time and date is a guaranteed source of trouble. (You actually did provide a search string, which is how I found the comment, but only because I'm such a smart editor. The timestamp was thus superfluous and, had you been dealing with a less-smart editor, confusion might have resulted. Thus, I repeat, a unique search string, without the timestamp, would have been better.) EEng (talk) 21:29, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

I just changed my user preferences to a different time zone, and then looked again at this talk page (refreshing the view). It still says 07:07. I'm not talking about diffs, and I'm not talking about edit history. I'm talking about the text that appears on the talk page. Beyond that, I don't know what you see, but perhaps we have different histories with mind-altering substances. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:36, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Nothing so exotic. More likely you've got Change UTC-based times and dates, such as those used in signatures, to be relative to local time (on Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets) unchecked. (However, the timestamps in e.g. edit histories and watchlists are adjusted to you timezone no matter what.) Like I said, always use either a permalink or give a quick search string, or if you insist on copy-pasting the time, at least add UTC to put your readers on notice. EEng (talk) 01:07, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree with your criticism of the sfn callouts for the Other sources, but I think I've explained how to fix that.

The Other sources never did use sfn. (See my interpolated comment above.) Only the categorized edits use sfn, which is what creates the steppingstones. EEng (talk) 23:32, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

In your point number 3, I again agree with you that the sandbox markup is awful. But, based on the Genie page, I would suggest doing it like this: In the References section, have the full citations of the categorized sources; at Genie, they are set up with "Citation"-type templates. Just put each full citation in its proper category: under the correct header, such as For general readers. Where you put it is where it will appear on the page, within the References section. Then, cite them in the main text, similarly to how Genie does it. At Genie, the first source is cited as: {{sfn|Reynolds|Fletcher-Janzen|2004|p=428}}. Here, you would do it instead as {{sfn|Reynolds|Fletcher-Janzen|2004}}{{rp|428}}. I'm pretty sure that that's all you need. You can cite these categorized sources anywhere on the page, using whatever page number applies. And the other sources can just be cited with ref. In either case, the citation links simply to the Citations section. And for the categorized sources, one further click goes directly to the References section, under the category header where you placed it. That's not complicated.

Yes, now that we've collapsed "Other sources" into "Citations" the markup is not as uglified as before, but it's still uglified (see below). EEng (talk) 23:32, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

--Tryptofish (talk) 21:03, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

OK, so here's what's different between the current article and V5.2 (linked in my interpolated comments above):

• What used to be called "Other Sources" is now in Citations, mixed in with the 32 steppinstones, which weren't there before.
• All citations have numeric callouts e.g. instead of a mixture of numbers and letters e.g. in the current article. Clicking on an "other" source takes you directly to the bibliographic info in Citations, whereas before it took you directly to the same info in "Other sources" (so there's no change here). Clicking on a "References/Further reading/Categorized" callout takes you to a steppingstone in Citations, on which you click again to get to References. You're right that's not complicated, at least not very complicated, but it's a definite detriment, however minor; in the current article, clicking on a Ref/Further/Categorized callout (indeed, any callout) takes you straight to the bibliographic information.
• The markup, though not as awful as in V5.1, is still more complicated i.e.

{{ranchor|M|p=346-7}}{{r|fowler|p=6}}

in the current article is

{{sfn|Macmillan 2000}}{{rp|346-7}}<ref name="fowler"/>{{rp|6}}

in V5.2. (Because it made an easier conversion, my {sfn}s don't have the little | pipes between the author and year, but that's a minor detail.)

You mention that in V5.2 "you can cite these categorized sources anywhere on the page, using whatever page number applies"; that was true in the current article too, using the syntax above. You say "And the other sources can just be cited with ref." That was also true in the current article too, since {r} and < ref> can be mixed freely. [Later: To illustrate this, I added a new paper on Gage in a way a random editor might do it, using the common < ref>< /ref> syntax [13]. ]

Honestly, if the article simply arrived from outer space in th first place with V5.2, I wouldn't know any better and wouldn't complain‍—‌there's nothing really bad here, though the whole steppingstone thing is so silly. But we do have the current article, with no steppingstones and simpler markup. (I gather you think the V5.2 markup is somehow less threatening, but IMHO it's as perplexing as the current article markup, and probably more.) I've gamely gone through this exercise because... well, because it's in my nature, but I'm still afraid I don't see at all what this change achieves, either for readers or for editors.

EEng (talk) 23:32, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

I've made two edits to rename the sections in the sandbox version: [14] and [15]. That should be pretty clear, I hope. More importantly, I can see that I still have not been clear enough in explaining what I meant, and perhaps that is why you still do not see what is in your sandbox as being an improvement. As it is now, I'd agree that it's not that much of an improvement, but that's because there are still fixable problems. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:22, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

(interjection) I have not abandoned this conversation but I certainly don't have the necessary time for careful contributions at present. I hope I will have more time again from later this week. (please carry on...) --Mirokado (talk) 20:51, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

V5.3

If we regard 5.2.1 as this: permalink (or diff versus current page, provided by EEng), then there are still some things that I actually attempted to communicate above, where I appear not to have been sufficiently clear, and I think that is why 5.2.1 continues to not look good enough. I again thank EEng for your hard work on this, and I ask you to please bear with me.

When I look at 5.2.1#References in the edit window, I see {{Reflist |30em. So far, so good. But then, where I want to see }} right after that 30em, I don't, and that's where a problem begins. Instead, I see |refs=, followed by a long list of refn templates. That is not what I was trying to tell you, and of course it works out badly. I'm saying the References section should consist of Reflist|30em and nothing more. The references should be cited in the main text using either sfn or ref, and should be compiled under the References section entirely by the reflist template.

(Although it's comparatively trivial, in the Sources section, one would eventually not need the "ref=CITEREF" parameters, once one does away with naming sources by upper-case letters. I think you already know this. I'm pretty sure that sfn will take care of linking "Name, year" from the References to the Sources.)

--Tryptofish (talk) 20:50, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Also, one can see what I just said at Genie (feral child), where it is done in the way that I just suggested. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:18, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

• You say that because {reflist} has a refs= parameter, "of course it works out badly", and you want the contents of the refs=‍—‌i.e. the various {refn}s‍—‌distributed into the article proper. You do realize, don't you, that this will have absolutely zero effect on what the reader sees? Just what is it that "works out badly" because the article uses refs= per WP:LDRHOW?
• The presence of e.g. ref=CITEREFHarlow 1868 has nothing to do with the "naming sources by upper-case letters"‍—‌they'd still be there even if I went to the trouble of converting all those uppercase letters over to actual author+year. The ref=CITEREFs are there because the harvard/snf system has an extremely rigid and fragile way of concatenating bits and pieces of the citation template into anchor text, and it gets especially complicated when the same author(s) published more than one paper in the same year (requiring e.g. Ratiu 2004a etc.). Furthermore, because of the very specific ways you felt the bundled citations, and citations within footnotes, should be handled, we're stuck with a [[#CITEREFHarlow 1868|Harlow 1868]] syntax for those, and that can't ever by changed as long as you want sfn in the mix. ref=CITEREFHarlow 1868 simply makes explicit, and guesswork-proof, the anchor links that sfn would otherwise put together in its secret confusing way. It's got nothing to do with anything else.

Is there anything else you would want changed, because as it is all my comments in my last post still apply, plus moving the refs= material into the article proper would make the markup even more cluttered. Mirokado, the sooner you can rejoin us, the better. EEng (talk) 00:26, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

OK then, please set aside what I had said in parentheses in my previous comment. I said it was unimportant anyway, and I was just trying to be helpful.

The important part of what I said was about the References section, and what I am saying is to handle that aspect of it as it is done at the Genie page. You seem to have dismissed that as making "the markup even more cluttered". I don't find the markup at Genie difficult to edit. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:38, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Re the References section and |refs= and so on, I can only imagine there's some serious miscommunication here. Maybe Mirokado will be able to bridge the gap.

In the meantime, since a new paper on Gage just appeared, I added it [16] in the way a "naive" editor might add it, using < ref>< /ref>, to illustrate that the techniques used in this article don't prevent anyone from diving in and adding material, and even sources, "the old-fashioned way". (I haven't been sure, Tfish, whether you think that the use of {reflist |refs= somehow prevents new sources from being inserted directly in the article text.)

(And just to be clear, at this point we don't have a V5.3, just some talk about what it might look like. The last version is V5.2.1, linked above in bold.)

EEng (talk) 16:22, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that 5.3 hasn't materialized yet. I was simply trying to designate that I was suggesting what should change after 5.2.

And I agree with you that it is entirely possible for a new editor to add a new source as you just did, by using ref, without breaking the page. Of course, that presupposes that the editor had no difficulty finding the place in the edit window where they wanted to make the edit, and were not confused about how to do it. I smiled when I looked over the edit history, and I saw that you, the undisputed world's champion of editing this page (no, that's not worth a gold metal, nor even a plastic one), had to make a corrective edit after adding that source. It is, indeed, a challenge to edit this page.

That's silly. In copy-pasting between edit windows I unthinkingly picked up the old version of something I had made a tiny adjustment to hours earlier i.e. I accidentally changed Nathanael West back to [[Nathanael West]]; the "corrective edit" was to drop the links again. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything, unless you now are claiming that wikilinking is one of the page's abstruse complexities.

EEng (talk) 23:45, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Struck. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:37, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Click here to get struck by lightning. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:04, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Hitting solves nothing. EEng (talk) 23:14, 2 September 2015 (UTC) Struck. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:31, 3 September 2015 (UTC) [17] EEng (talk) 01:07, 4 September 2015 (UTC) Struck Struck Struck Struck Struck Three strikes and I'm out! --Tryptofish (talk) 19:04, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

But I do understand, and have understood all along, that the existing markup does not prevent additions using ref. My point isn't that it would break the page, but that it would give most editors (including me) a headache trying to sort through what appears in the edit window. Of course, the source citations are not the only eccentricity of this page that complicate the edit window, but they are one of the causes, and they are what we are discussing now.

And I also understand, and have understood all along, that the page will look the same to our readers, whether we use ref, or the markup currently in use. What I have said about |refs= and so on isn't about changing the look of the page. It's about making the page easier for more editors to edit, without damaging how the page looks.

What I'm trying to communicate is that I'd like this page to cite those sources that are not in the categories (like "For general readers", etc.), in other words, the "other sources", the same way that they are cited at the Genie page (except that, here, we could use rp for page numbers). The Genie page is much easier to edit, when one opens an edit window, than this page is.

What I'm talking about isn't a simple matter of using the briefest markup. I fully understand that something like {{r|nice|p=62}} involves many, many fewer characters to type in the main text, than does something like <ref>{{cite encyclopedia|last=Moffat |first=Gregory K. |year=2012 |page=44 |title=Fundamentals of Aggression|editor-last=Browne-Miller |editor-first=Angela |work=Violence and Abuse in Society: Understanding a Global Crisis|publisher=ABC-CLIO |isbn=978-0-313-38276-5 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=A-GXM9MFaB4C&pg=PA44}}</ref>{{rp|62}}. I've understood that all along.

Like you, I'd welcome it if Mirokado (or any other editor who might show up) could help us sort this out. But it sounds to me that you, EEng, very clearly have the sincere belief that the existing page markup is acceptably easy to edit, and that the kinds of changes I suggest would if anything make it worse. And I trust that you, in turn, understand that I'm saying what I say in good faith too. Although we could continue to each state our views back and forth to each other, I think that we are reaching diminishing returns. Let's give this discussion a few more days, but then, I think I'll seek advice from a larger group of editors. But thanks again for your patience in discussing these things. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:06, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree this is all Mirokado's fault. He'll probably say he had something to do at work or some other lame excuse. But while we're waiting for him to mosey on by (and may I suggest that he start with the 5.2.1 permalink above, which shows the markup change from the current article, and then peruse the discussion) why don't you do this: pick a paragraph from Gage, and one from Genie, which are comparable in content (do/don't have a footnote, do/don't have a blockquote, do/don't have a bundled cite, whatever) and which illustrate your contention that Genie's easier to edit. (You don't have to explain why you think that, just identify each paragraph by an opening phrase.) EEng (talk) 23:47, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I already know that I will say one is easier than the other, and you will disagree. But that's an excellent question for an RfC. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:38, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry but I have had various real-life competitions for my time recently. I hope things start easing off now. I've looked at the v5.2.1 diff and permalink. Generally I agree with what EEng has been saying. If that (completed) were already the chosen citation style for the article it would be fine. But it isn't, and no argument I have seen above convinces me that there is the slightest point in putting in the considerable amount of work necessary to complete the changes. Mixing up the citations with the article content would be particularly pointless. --Mirokado (talk) 01:03, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, both of you. That's a pity, not least because it was the two of you who first raised the possibility of doing things similarly to what is at the Genie page. I can understand how the thought of putting a lot of work into a change in formatting can be unattractive. However, the beauty of Wikipedia is that there is a potentially unlimited supply of editors who can help.

I've already agreed to EEng's request not to show him any special considerations. In the near future, I'm going to enlist the input of more editors, and when I do, I will be very serious about it. In that regard, I want to caution EEng against filibustering or refactoring. End of sermon, and thank you both again. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:10, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

An Odd Kind of Fame - open access?

An Odd Kind of Fame has an symbol on it, but the link provided doesnt appear to be an open access edition. It is a Google Book preview, but that isnt 'open access'. Is there another version of it available that is really open access? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 13:40, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

It's a gbooks "limited preview", which means the notes and images are never visible, but the rest is visible, up to some limited # of pages per IP per day (or something like that). So while overpromises, I thought it was better that the reader give it a try‍—‌he might get it, or might find he'll have to look elsewhere‍—‌than to put , which discourages him from even trying. There doesn't seem to be a "limited preview" icon.

There's no open-access version of the work. If people think misleads, we could just have no symbol at all. EEng (talk) 18:46, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

I suspect that symbol is for the more strict interpretation of 'open access', so I have removed the {{open access}} template, and opened a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Open Access/Signalling OA-ness#Google Books Preview. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 22:00, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Yep, better to remove the OA symbol. See also Definition of open access. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 23:14, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

I agree. I also went to remove any other similar examples -- turned out there was just one. EEng (talk) 05:05, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

Photo by William Bell

A headshot daguerreotype by William Bell of an unidentified male presenting with ptosis of the eyelid in 1852. (Subject shown laterally reversed; his "bad" eye was actually his right.)

Phineas Gage, as seen in life; his "bad" eye was on his left.

I'm surprised it hasnt been discussed here yet, as far as I can see. As far as I can see, it would be undue weight to even mention this, but bringing to the talk page, just in case. This is the same year Phineas goes to Chile.

This page shows the similarity, with varied responses presented on a different webpage, but pretty uniformly rejecting the suggestion that it is Gage. A personal webpage on http://usi.ch doesnt seem very viable as a source, and I didnt find much else about this, so it seems no useful sources exist. But maybe I have missed something.

It is now held by the National Museum of Health and Medicine according to http://bottledmonsters.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/new-bell-daguerretoype-acquired-and.html and http://www.medicalmuseum.mil/assets/documents/collections/archives/bell_collection.pdf

John Vandenberg ^(chat) 00:56, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Nah, you didn't miss anything. The portrait was taken in a city (Philadelphia) there's no indication Gage ever visited, the subject looks as much like Gage as Buster Keaton looked like Charlie Chaplin, and the wrong eye is injured. Other than that there's no doubt it's Gage, but unfortunately without a source our hands are tied. (See here for an explanation of the left-right issue. The Bell image, as shown here, has not been re-reversed, so while it seems to show the left eye injured, it's actually the subject's right eye that's injured.) EEng (talk) 03:18, 5 October 2015 (UTC) JVDB is from Austrailia, where water goes the other way round the drain, so maybe eyes are reversed there too...

The search for a portrait

Is there a good source for people in recent years, before 2009, looking for a portrait of Gage. I've seen more than a few references indicating that finding one was a bit of a game-changer, but nothing clearly proving that people were seriously looking, and failing to find, a portrait before it appeared. Is this perhaps covered in Face to Face with Phineas Gage? If so, I'll grab a copy tomorrow.

Or, put another way, how could two photos have existed in the family and not been found if there was a concerted effort being put into finding one?

I feel the story about the Portraits isnt developed very well in the article. There is some useful titbits in the notes which could be pulled into that section, but there are a few gaps that need filling to turn it into the flowing interesting subplot that it is. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 11:21, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Public appearances being withheld

In the RFC above, ChrisGualtieri says "the actual advertisement for Gage's public appearance in NH is being withheld still".

What does that refer to? It sounds like something nefarious has been going on, and I missed it. It seems it hasn't been resolved.

I had a look through the archives, and the closest I could find was Talk:Phineas_Gage/Archive_7#Ready_for_GA? where Chris says "there is still an issue of the omission with his known appearances and return to New Hampshire." Was this aspect discussed in more detail on the talk pages somewhere?

I also found on Talk:Phineas_Gage/to_do that there is a note "report was discovered calling Gage mentally unimpaired during his last years in Chile ... and since then a description of what may have been his daily work routine there as a stagecoach driver, and advertisements for two previously unknown public appearances". Is that related? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 10:42, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

The article section 'New England and New York (1849–1852)' includes:

"Unable to return to his railroad work (see § Early observations, below) Gage appeared for a time, with his iron, at Barnum's American Museum in New York City (not the later Barnum's circus—​there is no evidence Gage ever exhibited with a troupe or circus, or on a fairground). Advertisements have also been found for public appearances by Gage—​which he may have arranged and promoted himself—​in New Hampshire and Vermont, supporting Harlow's statement that Gage made public appearances in "most of the larger New England towns". (Years later Bigelow wrote that Gage had been "a shrewd and intelligent man and quite disposed to do anything of that sort to turn an honest penny", but had given up such efforts because "[that] sort of thing has not much interest for the general public".)

But is there a specific advertisement of one of Gage's public appearances that is being "withheld"? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 01:53, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

RfC: What is it like to edit this page for the first time?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Is this page more difficult to edit than other Wikipedia pages, or not? If so, is that something that ought to be corrected, or not? Please open the edit window for any section of this page, of your choosing. You don't need to save an edit; the idea is just to take a look at what the edit window looks like. Please compare what you see with what you usually see when you are editing pages. (It would also be helpful if you compare edit windows at this page with edit windows at Genie (feral child).) --Tryptofish (talk) 20:06, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

In about two days, the bot will remove the RfC notice and the RfC will be over. After that happens, I'm going to request a close by someone completely uninvolved at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure. I think that it's best if the close is not made by anyone who has edited this page or talk page in recent history. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:38, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Request for close made: [18]. Thank you to everyone who participated in the RfC, which is now awaiting closure. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:12, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

This page is relatively difficult to edit, and that is a problem.

1. Yes, the markup in the edit window is considerably more complicated and idiosyncratic than that at most Wikipedia pages. As such, it is discouraging to editors who are new to the page, to edit. Although not intended to be this way, the practical effect is similar to ownership, because it limits the number of editors who edit. I say this recognizing that the page is well-written and looks good, and that's what matters to our readers, but I also know that it is possible to maintain the quality of the page without such idiosyncratic markup. Editors have recently discussed whether the format for citing sources here is better or worse than the format at Genie (feral child), and I would suggest that the edit window at the Genie page is vastly easier to work with than this page is. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:06, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
2. Yes, the markup on this page is so idiosyncratic that editors are effectively being asked to learn a new markup language to make any change to the page, and there's no particular advantage to the system in use that justifies such a departure from Wikipedia norms. Parts of it are also virtually incomprehensible in VisualEditor, which will increasingly become a problem as VE is now becoming the default for new editors. ‑ iridescent 20:33, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
3. Yes, this has been a problem for a while. --John (talk) 22:40, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
4. Yes, as I noted back on 13-14 August (somewhere in the vast walls of text above). Vsmith (talk) 23:46, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
5. YES. Brought by bot. I couldn't edit this page if I wanted to and I've been around for a few years. I can't see the problems the excessive mark up solves but I'm sure even without knowing them that there are more elegant solutions. SPACKlick (talk) 10:13, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
6. Yes I do felt that there is problem here. Rest of relevant comments I made below and I do think that this article needs clean-up and window view of this article should become normal like any other article.--Human3015^TALK  14:19, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
7. Yes.  And it's not just the wiki code that seems weird and unfamiliar; it's the article too. I don't understand what all those strange superscripts are (capital letters, colons, etc.). I'm talking about superscripts like: ^[B1][M].   I suppose it's probably all valid and legitimate; but I'll bet at least nine out of ten Wikipedia editors aren't familiar with it.
   Richard27182 (talk) 04:56, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

   Clicking on them will show you immediately what they do. EEng (talk) 09:43, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

8. Yes. The section I looked at ended with {{'"}}{{px1}}{{r|accident_excerpts}}. I can guess what the final one does, and maybe the second one, but I have no clue about the first. I hope someone will be able to go through the article and translate it all into everyday markup. Maproom (talk) 06:57, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

   In all fairness {{'"}} is a quite common template currently in use in over 2000 articles—it's used when an apostrophe and quotation mark are side-by-side, to put a slight space between them so they don't blur together. ‑ iridescent 09:11, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

   ...as well as preventing a linebreak between them, which could happen if a simple space or {{thinsp}} is used to separate them. EEng (talk) 09:43, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

9. Yes. I understand maybe 30% of the templates in use here and of the other 70%, 65% are unneeded or could be replaced with something more usable. It's not just off-putting to new editors, its off-putting to anyone that doesn't know every template in the history of WP. KieranTribe 09:35, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
10. Yes. I've been around a while, and have never seen so many templates in use. MANY instances of adding 1 pixel, of {{shy}}, etc. Difficult to edit. Plus many html comments embedded.... I say {{sofixit}}.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk)

    ...and PS the referencing system is very, very intimidating. Intimidating excessive complexity is superabundant here. Chop. Please.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 03:22, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

11. Yes - I remember that there was at least 60kb worth of markup that did not do a darn thing other than making it entirely uneditable. The "Shy" templates are grossly misused and much of it is to firmly hold what Eeng personally finds to work on his computer. More so, I still do not know why the actual advertisement for Gage's public appearance in NH is being withheld still, but I've since given up on the content and markup of this page after dealing with EEng. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 03:48, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

    Hi ChrisGualtieri , could we continue this at #Public appearances being withheld. Thanks. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 10:47, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

12. Yes, I agree with Tryptofish on all counts and with Iridescent's first sentence. In particular, I think the reference format is contorted, unnecessary and unintuitive and should be adapted to one of the standard formats. Most if not all instances of {{shy}} should also be removed; from its documentation and use on other pages I gather than it is (and IMO should be) for very long words (like those listed in its documentation) and in captions, not for short words like "mistreatment" in prose. Also, re {{px1}}: iff references look sufficiently better spaced slightly away from quotation marks (and presumably anything else raised, like l or !) that it's necessary/desirable to bring about such spacing, surely it is desirable in general and should be adjusted by CSS, not by applying a hack to only 20 of Wikipedia's 4.9 million articles. -sche (talk) 02:13, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

    Hi -sche, wrt {{shy}}, you'll be pleased to know there has been only one {{shy}} for about a week, and I removed it only eight minutes before your edit to the wikitext. ;-) Did you encounter any problems editing the page with VisualEditor? (there is a discussion section below about VisualEditor, and it would be great to know if there are still problems to be fixed.) John Vandenberg ^(chat) 03:12, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

    It would help if you could explain a bit about what you find unintuitive in the referencing system. Also, which of the standard reference formats would you suggest? EEng (talk) 23:23, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

This is not a problem.

1. If you like curly brackets it's a real hoot. Haven't had so much fun since I was lost for a week in Hampton Court Maze. "lol" When I summon up enough courage to actually make an edit, I'll report further. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:23, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

   Martinevans123, could you summarize your subsequent experience here, since the discussion is about to close? (And for once‍—‌just once‍—‌in your life, please don't speak in riddles.) EEng (talk) 06:55, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

   I'd say that to many inexperienced editors the markup for this article must look like a real riddle. But the article receives such a close level of attention, from at least one very dedicated editor, that's it's very unlikely that any edit or attempted edit will ever go unnoticed. I'm sure any request for help, from any newbie who struggles to edit here, would be met with a very positive response. (I also think the referencing scheme looks a little unwieldy. But so much has already been said on this subject above, that I feel even one more sentence from me would be like a strawberry for a donkey). Martinevans123 (talk) 21:14, 5 October 2015 (UTC) non-riddled version available here

   I don't know why I keep thinking the leopard will change his spots. EEng (talk) 21:42, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

   A fitting contribution to the ongoing debate over Gage's mental state in later life, I feel. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:59, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

2. I don't see it as a major problem. Most editors will be content editing it using Visual Editor. Also, when using the Edit source function, it's clear to me that most of the unusual markup is used in the references. If they are reliable references (which can be checked by clicking on them), these don't need to be changed anyway. If a new editor comes in and needs to re-write or add a section, he/she will simply add the content in the same way they always do, either by using the VE or a more common markup. I would be concerned that a major overhaul of the markup in this article would result in lost or mangled content. --Iamozy (talk) 22:39, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

   I just edited the article to improve readability here and here and did not find the unusual formatting to be a hindrance in any way. --Iamozy (talk) 23:14, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

   (the subsequent discussion was moved to RfC discussion continued, Part 5 by User:Tryptofish). --Mirokado (talk) 22:06, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

3. Brought here by bot. I had to look up some of the templates used because they're new to me but that's not something that I think makes the article especially difficult to edit. Whenever page numbers are involved in sourcing, markup gets complicated, and that's going to be true for this or any other similar page. In this case, there's the additional goal of separating sources by target audience (which I'm not convinced is the way to go but I understand why it's being done, given that there are so many sources of varying levels used), and with no easy way to separate out the references, markup gets even more complicated. Note that I did make a small edit to the text, I'm using WikiED, and I had no trouble. Also, I have a tech background, if that matters. Ca2james (talk) 01:46, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

   There is discussion higher on this talk page about how there are alternative ways to obtain the exact same results in terms of providing both the page numbers and the categorization of sources. In #V5.3, there's a possible way of doing that, where the page would look the same largely the same to readers, but the proposal was rejected because "no argument I have seen above convinces me that there is the slightest point in putting in the considerable amount of work necessary to complete the changes." --Tryptofish (talk) 22:01, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

   "The page would look the same to readers" -- Huh? That discussion culminated a series of changes you proposed which made the References section look like this (with the huge unusable strings of backlinks) not to mention significantly increasing the length and complexity of the markup at each point in the text where there's a cite. EEng (talk) 23:25, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

   I forgot about the backlinks, so you are correct about that – so much more of why this page gives me a headache. But it's pretty much just the backlinks as a change from the current page appearance, and though you clearly dislike them, they don't bother me. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:51, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

4. Per WP:CITEVAR if consensus demands changes to the formatting of this page, then EEng and others need to accept it. However, I respect and appreciate the diversity of editing styles, so I am not bothered or troubled by the barrier to editing that this could present an editor who might be confused by this style, any more than an editor who might encounter citation template variations of one kind or another. Viriditas (talk) 23:35, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
5. For experienced editors, this article's template use is certainly noticeably different from the usual dialect of WikiText. However, I just gave editing a try [19] and found that it was quite possible to get a decent idea of how the page works, especially once I figured out where the <ref></ref>s had gone. I actually think that an excerpt like

   irresponsibility and untrustworthiness;{{r|irresponsibility}} aggressiveness and violence;{{r|aggressiveness}} vagrancy and begging;{{r|vagrancy}} plus drifting,{{r|drifting}} drinking,{{r|drinking}} bragging,{{r|bragging}} lying,{{r|lying}} brawling,{{r|brawling}} bullying,{{r|bullying}} [[psychopathy]],{{r|psychopathy}} inability to make ethical decisions, loss of all respect for social conventions, acting "like an idiot",{{r|idiot}} and dying "due to a [[wiktionary:debauch#Noun|debauch]]".{{r|northcarolina}}

   is easier to navigate in sourcetext than usual practice. I would have a hard time adding a source to the page at this point, at least if I cared about making is match the current formatting, but given the apparently exhaustive content I'd want to raise major additions on the talk page first anyway.

   Overall, it's not what I'm used to, but in all probability reasonable, or even easier, for somebody who didn't know wikitext very well. I can see significant benefits for readers, and I don't think it's unreasonable to ask editors to understand {{ran}} before making big changes. FourViolas (talk) 01:50, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

6. Hmm. Viriditas's comment made me realise that this RFC could have been designed to be a 'WP:CITEVAR style change consensus' discussion. If so, this RFC has been very bad designed to provide that consensus. As noted in a section below, I have felt that I have no standing to participate in an RFC titled "What is it like to edit this page for the first time?", as I have been editing it on and off since 2007, way before the introduction of the wikitext style some have campaigned to be rid of for years, making me the oldest editor of this article who is still regularly editing the article. However several of the people participating in this RFC calling for change also have no standing for that question, as their first edits were bot/bot-like edits and/or editwarring, so I doubt the style has limited their ability to degrade the article with their first edits, so I guess I had also participate in this RFC.
   I have never had a problem editing this page. Neither have the silent majority of anon/newbie editors who have edited this page over the years. When I am lazy, which is pretty common, I drop in a ref using the incorrect citation style and a gnome magically makes it beautiful. I find it a pleasure to engage in discussions about finer details on this article, either on the talk page or through edit summaries, and the result is always better than I could have achieved on my own. I respect the effort put into making this page useful for the reader, as it achieves that result in spades and not typically found on Wikipedia - the Genie article is not a similar pleasure to read, and is insufficiently supported by citations to be a GA IMO, so I don't understand why it is being used as an example to follow. Also the Genie article has not seen many constructive anon/newbie edits as Gage. Btw a big thank you to user:Mirokado for their assistance in making the citations in this article so well organised. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 02:48, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

   There are a couple of issues that I'd like to reply to. Somewhat similarly to what I said in #RfC discussion continued, Part 7, below, just as this discussion can, in principle, arrive at a reasoned consensus to change per MOS, it could likewise do so per CITEVAR. However, I intentionally did not frame the discussion narrowly in terms of citation style, although I was aware that I could have, because I wanted to determine editor opinion about all aspects of the page – including citation, but not limited to citation. Consequently, I find it a bit unfair to say that the RfC was badly designed. Rather it was designed for the purpose that I intended, rather than for the unintended purpose of exclusively examining citation format.
   

   As for the issue of "for the first time", I credit experienced editors with enough good faith to be able to assess what it is like to edit this page, even if that means remembering back to the first time that they did so. And I specifically wanted input from editors who are new to the page, which is the point of the RfC system anyway. Of course there have been editors who have successfully edited for the first time, as you have noted. But that misses the point. What about editors who might have attempted to edit this page (or in contrast Genie), and gave up? I think that's a serious concern, and a difficult one to measure accurately, but the RfC responses do, I believe, give some evidence to work with – even if it's a problem for some editors, but not for all.
   

   Also, there is something I want to point out to whoever closes this. I'm someone who hangs out a lot at EEng's talk page for the very funny stuff there, and I'm there in a (usually) friendly position. Martinevans123 and FourViolas are regular talk page friends there, too, for whatever that may be worth. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:44, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

   This is true (w/r/t myself). Further notes about my perspective: I have very little coding experience, but work with symbolic abstract math a lot, so I'm comfortable with confusing notation. I was trying to remember my newbie experience, and I thought some of this would be less confusing than more common practice; that said, I answered most WT questions for myself by comparing confusing bits to other pages, and that wouldn't work here. FourViolas (talk) 18:46, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
   

   The RFC was brilliant in getting new editors to edit the page ;-) And if one of the goals was removing {{shy}}, that alone would be an admirable goal, well achieved. The wikitext page is generally much cleaner now as a result, and works well with VisualEditor now. But if the goal was to change the citation style, and I didnt believe that was a possible goal until Viriditas suggested it, I don't think CITEVAR is meet by the opinions gathered thus far, of people complaining about varied syntax issues (many now resolved) who are unlikely to be sustained contributors to the article, along with a few people with various grudges. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 21:20, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

   I'll take "brilliant" however it may be posed, so thank you. And now, I think it's time for an uninvolved closer to ascertain what conclusions may or may not be indicated. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:26, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

   "regular talk page friends"?! How very dare you. As if I'd ever wish to be seen consorting with such a scurrilous editor. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:33, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

   I don't even want to consort with myself! --Tryptofish (talk) 21:49, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

7. Tryptofish worries about "editors who might have attempted to edit this page (or in contrast Genie), and gave up" but as John Vandenberg points out, in fact this article gets more edits (excluding, of course, edits by their respective primary contributors), by more different editors, than does the Genie article Tryptofish holds up as a paragon. And this despite the fact that Genie is 4X as long, and gets about 30% more page views, then does this article.
   The vague question posed by this RfC generated mostly vague complaints (often on topics, e.g. the citation system, outside the scope of the question) in which it's impossible to discern what's being complained of. Repeated requests for specifics went unanswered. [20][21]
   A far better approach would have been to list the unusual techniques used here, with an explanation of why they're used, and asked for opinions on whether each is or is not worth the trouble. Tryptofish himself, who initiated this RfC, refuses to say what he would like to see changed to make the article easier to edit. [22]
   Even where complaints are concrete, many are about things recommended or even required by MOS e.g. {{' "}}; or are standard WP practice e.g. indicating page numbers with a colon, as in ; or don't actually exist in the article [23]. Statements such as "I can't see the problems the excessive mark up solves but I'm sure even without knowing them that..." are obviously self-indicting‍—‌certainty combined with unembarassed incomprehension rarely results in wise counsel.
   In the one case in which concerns were expressed that could actually be acted on, they were, so that the article is far different now than it was when the RfC started. Unfortunatley, the complaining editor has refused to say whether his concerns were resolved [24]. Almost all negative comments were made before these and other improvements‍—‌see #Advanced_editor_tools‍—‌were made.
   EEng (talk) 06:53, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

   EEng, I really do hope that you will accept the close decision, whatever it may be. About Genie, I'm not "hold[ing] it up as a paragon", so much as referring to a page that you first drew to my attention in this talk as a comparison with this page's format. --Tryptofish (talk) 14:26, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

   I also want to note again that I asked October 4, after the bot removed the RfC template, for an uninvolved close, so I think that the time has come to await that closing decision, rather than to extend the RfC discussion. --Tryptofish (talk) 14:48, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

   Closes aren't "decisions". I drew your attention to Genie in hopes it would help you understand why this article uses the citation system it does (though entertaining the vague hope that the discussion might lead to some new and even better system than we have now). My words were:

   Suppose we were to switch to exactly the system seen in Genie ... I'm not proposing this right now, because [reason] but I'm interested in your reaction.

   And while we might argue the connotations of the word paragon, you clearly were referring to it with approval when you formulated this RfC question:

   Is this page more difficult to edit than other Wikipedia pages, or not? ... Please compare what you see [here] with what you usually see when you are editing pages. (It would also be helpful if you compare edit windows at this page with edit windows at Genie.)

   EEng (talk) 05:13, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

8. There clearly was a problem with excessive markup in the original state of this article, but that seems now to be corrected, so I am placing my answer in the "This is not a problem" section now. I had a look at the Convalescence section of the article in the edit window and it looks perfectly clean. This rfc question was clearly designed to address such excessive formatting and not to address directly the above extended discussion about changing the citation style. However, since this has been mentioned: The citations are called out by a template whose usage is basically identical in form to {{r}} which is clearly accepted by the community. {{sfn}} has been suggested as an alternative, but the usage of sfn is far more tricky for newcomers than {{r}} or {{ran}} (the template used here), to the extent that some respected contributors to featured articles refuse to accept it, so using sfn is presumably excluded by the very concerns that are the headline of this rfc. Mixing up the full citation sources with the article text would clearly make the text itself more difficult to comprehend or edit in the editing window, so is also not an acceptable option within the terms of this rfc. None of the suggested changes would retain the current reader experience which I regard as excellent. Apart from all that, a change of citation style falls clearly within the scope of WP:CITEVAR. We would certainly need an explicit rfc about imposing a change to citation format, if anyone still wishes to persue that. My opposition to any change in citation style (as so far suggested) is very clearly stated above. --Mirokado (talk) 00:52, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Other

Discussion

Not now. I opened edit window and I found everything normal with this page. Rather I'm curious to know how it was earlier. Is there another page with complicated window?--Human3015^TALK  00:35, 8 September 2015 (UTC) struck comment as I realized problem now--Human3015^TALK  14:19, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I guess people could just use Visual Editor? Any alleged mark-up horrors are then completely hidden? Martinevans123 (talk) 07:34, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

@Human3015: Really?

Code sample

{{nowrap|Long known as "the}}<!--<<force text below img when window is very narrow--> {{shy|American Crowbar Case"{{mdashb}}once termed "the case which more than all others is calcu|lat|ed to excite our wonder, impair the value of prog|no|sis, and even to subvert our [[physiology|physiolog{{shy}}ical]] doctrines"{{nowrap|{{px1}}{{r|campbell}}{{mdash}}}}{{zwsp}}Phineas Gage influenced nineteenth-century discussion about the mind and brain, partic|u|lar|ly debate on [[cerebral localization|cerebral locali{{shy}}za{{shy}}tion]],{{ranchor|M|p=ch7-9}}{{ranchor|B}} and was perhaps the first case to suggest that damage to specific parts of the brain might induce specific person|al|i|ty changes. }}<!--<<end SHY-->{{ranchor|M|p=1}}{{ranchor|M3|p=C}}

(the wikicode for a single sentence of the lead) doesn't seem potentially confusing or off-putting to new editors to you? ‑ iridescent 09:49, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Well, don't you think this (the wikicode for the lead paragraph of Genie) isn't potentially confusing or off-putting to new editors as well?

Code sample

'''Genie''' (born 1957) is the pseudonym of a [[feral child]] who was a victim of severe [[Child abuse|abuse]], [[Child neglect|neglect]] and [[social isolation]]. Her circumstances are prominently recorded in the annals of abnormal child psychology.{{sfn|Reynolds|Fletcher-Janzen|2004|p=428}}<ref name=Waltz>{{cite book|last=Waltz | first=Mitzi | authorlink=Mitzi Waltz | title=Autism: A Social and Medical History | chapter=Bedlam, Behaviouralism, and Beyond | page=96 | location=Basingstoke, Hampshire, United Kingdom | publisher=Palgrave Macmillan | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EC0RYUtuXgsC&pg=PA96 | year=2013 | isbn=978-0-230-52750-8 | oclc=821693777}}</ref> When Genie was a baby her father decided that she was severely [[Intellectual disability|mentally retarded]], causing him to dislike her and withhold care and attention. At approximately the time she reached the age of 20 months Genie's father decided to keep her as [[social isolation|socially isolated]] as possible, so from that time until she reached 13 years, 7 months, he kept her locked alone in a room. During this time he almost always strapped her to a child's toilet or bound her in a crib with her arms and legs completely immobilized, forbade anyone from interacting with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished.<ref name=abcnews/><ref name=nova/>{{sfn|Curtiss|1977|pp=1–6}} The extent of Genie's isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech, and as a result she did not acquire [[language]] during childhood. Her abuse came to the attention of [[Los Angeles]] child welfare authorities on November 4, 1970.{{sfn|Reynolds|Fletcher-Janzen|2004|p=428}}<ref name=abcnews>{{cite web | url=http://6abc.com/archive/6130233/ | archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/20130423023727/http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/national_world&id=6130233 | archivedate=April 23, 2013 | deadurl=no | title=Wild Child 'Genie': A Tortured Life | last=James | first=Susan Donaldson| date=May 7, 2008 | accessdate=March 4, 2013 | publisher=ABC News}}</ref><ref name=nova>{{cite episode | title=Secret of the Wild Child | publisher=PBS | accessdate=February 12, 2009 | series=[[Nova (TV series)|NOVA]] | network=PBS (United States), [[BBC]] (United Kingdom) | airdate=March 4, 1997 | season=22 | number=2 | url=http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2112gchild.html | archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/20121109103309/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2112gchild.html | archivedate=November 9, 2012 | deadurl=no | oclc=57894649}}</ref>

EEng (talk) 10:22, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

New editors editing the lede? That's the last thing you want! Martinevans123 (talk) 10:29, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

@Martinevans123 Well, Iridescent said parts are "virtually incomprehensible" in visual editor, so to look into that I made my last dozen edits in VE -- no problems. (They've really pulled VE together in the last year. It's pretty good now.) Since you've made edits to the article the old-fashioned way, and that seems to be Tryptofish's complaint, it would be helpful if you would report whether you had any problems doing that. EEng (talk) 10:08, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Ah, yes the old fashioned way. But I edited so long ago that Gage hadn't even had his accident. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:14, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Apparently you didn't get the memo [25]‍—‌no humor allowed in this discussion. EEng (talk) 10:28, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I think Iridescent is right, I didn't see it carefully earlier time. I think article needs clean-up if it is getting difficult to edit this article. We can remove all unnecessary markups or codes. Or can we find out who exactly done this by observing edit history?--Human3015^TALK  10:35, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

The question is, what constitutes "unnecessary". If a particular piece of markup isn't worth the trouble it should be removed, but what I find weird is that no one seems to be talking about what this does. EEng (talk) 10:49, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I have seen so many featured and good articles, but never seen such type of thing yet. If any featured article can live without such codes and markups then this article can also live without it, so I think all codes in this article are "unnecessary". We can simply make it simple to edit. I think those who are regular watchers or editors of this article should take up this responsibility because they are well aware about this subject, I came here via bot. Obviously I will also help to clean because article is too long, we all can take responsibility of cleaning up "one section each". --Human3015^TALK  11:10, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes. Who exactly done this? I think we should be told. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:14, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

"Can live without it" is not an appropriate criterion. The purpose of Wikipedia is, first and foremost, to produce comprehensive, accurate, and attractive articles. "Simple to edit", while desirable, is not a goal in and of itself. Just because you haven't seen it before doesn't mean it's not appropriate in some cases. Furthermore, everything you see now in many articles was once a new idea in one article; without deviation from the norm there is no progress.

So let's start with Iridescent's example. Do you see understand what it does? EEng (talk) 11:22, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

@Human3015: do your later comments indicate that you changed your mind? If so, would you want to change where your RfC comment is? --Tryptofish (talk) 13:56, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

@Tryptofish: Yes I changed my comment now. I also want to say that claim by User:EEng that "everything you see now in many articles was once a new idea in one article; without deviation from the norm there is no progress" is really just trying to make some situation emotional. This is not really good rationale to keep such type of window, I have nearly 9,600 edits as of now but I'm also feeling it difficult to edit this article then forget about IPs and new users. Wikipedia is for everyone including IPs, it should be simple and clear, it is not for some specialized editors.--Human3015^TALK  14:19, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

So do you want to discuss what should be changed, or not? EEng (talk) 14:34, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I moved the discussion above from #This is not a problem. to here. --Tryptofish (talk) 14:51, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

RfC discussion continued, Part 1

@EEng: I don't know what any of it does, or why you feel you need it to produce good looking and reliable wiki. What is the advantage of the piping, the bizarre referencing style, the use of template mdashb rather than a hyphen. The endless shy templates? Why use
Long known as "the American Crowbar Case"‍—‌once termed "the case which more than all others is calcu­lat­ed to excite our wonder, impair the value of prog­no­sis, and even to subvert our physiolog­ical doctrines" —​Phineas Gage influenced nineteenth-century discussion about the mind and brain, partic­u­lar­ly debate on cerebral locali­za­tion,^[M][B] and was perhaps the first case to suggest that damage to specific parts of the brain might induce specific person­al­i­ty changes.^[M][M3]
over
Long known as "the American Crowbar Case" – once termed "the case which more than all others is calculated to excite our wonder, impair the value of prognosis, and even to subvert our physiological doctrines" – Phineas Gage influenced nineteenth-century discussion about the mind and brain, particularly debate on cerebral localization, and was perhaps the first case to suggest that damage to specific parts of the brain might induce specific personality changes.
Yes I know I didn't put some of the references in there's only so much effort I'll expend on this. SPACKlick (talk) 16:09, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

References

• Per WP:SHY, {{shy}} (soft hyphen) is used in image captions and footnotes to break up large words, plus in one particular passage (not a caption/footnote) which is dense with very long words. In addition, they're used (also per WP:SHY) in three places where the layout is narrow due to two images being opposite each other, one on the right and one on the left.
• Also in those three places (i.e. where there's two images right and left, with text between) {{nowrap}} is used so that, if the window is very narrow and there's only a little room for text between the images, the text is forced below the images. (This is what the comment "<!--<<force text below img when window is very narrow-->" tries to explain, but perhaps you missed that.) You can see this in the lead if you make the window narrower and narrower until the text between the two images suddenly jumps below them. If you and other editors think this isn't worth the trouble we can take it out.
• The referencing was carefully discussed and agreed upon at Talk:Phineas_Gage/Archive_7#Together_again.21.

EEng (talk) 17:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I know what Shy is for and I saw your note about nowrap. That said, most pages work fine, even on narrow screens, without the excessive number of nowraps and shy's. Why does this page need so many? Is it because the images are misused?

I don't have strong feelings either way on the references but if that discussion was re-opened I'd argue that "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" would lead to preferring consistent referencing, where possible, across the wiki. Which would lean in the direction of <ref /> style rather than template style. The actual page looks cluttered in the way it's currently referenced as well. SPACKlick (talk) 00:45, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• If you know what it all does, why did your comment open, "I don't know what any of it does"? If you do understand, please explain why you think a particular technique is or is not worth the trouble in the context in which it's used.
• Your desire that all articles use the same referencing style runs directly counter to the dictum given at the top of every page of MOS ("style and formatting should be consistent within an article, though not necessarily throughout Wikipedia") as well as to WP:CITEVAR: "Editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style merely ... to make it match other articles..."

EEng (talk) 09:43, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

EEng, I know what the templates physically do, I know what they are for. I don't know why they are used here. This page looks like it could be marked up relatively simply without the riduclous excess of templates and odd mark up styles. On references, I'm again aware that there isn't a call for consistency across articles and were this article not so riddled with excess templates already I wouldn't lean towards changing them, except maybe to make them less cluttered in plaintext. SPACKlick (talk) 11:13, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

RfC discussion continued, Part 2

(edit conflict)@EEng: We can discuss that what should be kept in article. I think reference template <ref>source</ref>, links to other articles like [[XYZ]] and some notes like [[Note]] should be kept and rest of all markup thing or codes should be removed , specially things written using {{ }}, also those references written using {{ }} should converted to <ref>source</ref>. There is no need of using words like [[physiology|physiolog{{shy}}ical]]. And I sincerely don't know what is this thing {{nowrap|{{px1}}{{r|campbell}}{{mdash}}}}{{zwsp}} and what is significance of it writing in article. As I said earlier only <ref>source</ref>, [[XYZ]], [[Note]] should be kept. Thank you. --Human3015^TALK  16:19, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

• I don't know what you mean by "notes like [[Note]]"
• You're going to have to be more openminded about the referencing. There's no way this article can be effectively referenced using only < ref>< /ref>; some combination of {ranchor}, {r}, {rp}, {sfn} is unavoidable. (Tryptofish will back me up on this, I think.)
• [[physiology|physiolog{{shy}}ical]] appears (as mentioned above in the discussion with SPACKlick) per SP:SHY at a point where there's limited text width. Anyway, it's in a direct quote‍—‌do you really think someone's going to want to edit it?
• The {{nowrap}} and {{zwsp}} in {{nowrap|{{px1}}{{r|campbell}}{{mdash}}}}{{zwsp}} solves a stupid problem in which the text sometimes comes out like this:

Phineas Gage‍—‌long known as "the American Crowbar Case"

—is blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

which looks awful. The problem comes up in that particular place because of the narrow width available. (The {px} has nothing to do with it and is explained at #px.)

Again, we should discuss which techniques to use and which aren't worth it, but just saying that only markup you've seen before is acceptable is a nonstarter. EEng (talk) 17:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC) P.S. I may be without internet access from sometime today until sometime tomorrow.

No, not accepting that other people's opinion's count is what's a non-starter. You're dangerously close to WP:OWN territory in this discussion. SPACKlick (talk) 00:45, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

I have ready answers to people's concerns because I've thought about these issues carefully already. See WP:OAS. Fresh eyes are valuable, but only if they're willing to discuss issues in the context of the needs of the particular article, and in light of policy/guidelines. EEng (talk) 09:43, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Fresh eyes, indeed. We wouldn't want you to do anything foolish, EEng. Martinevans123 (talk) 09:53, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Well, better than a thumb in your eye, saith the Philistines. EEng (talk) 10:06, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Hey, who are you calling a Philistine, buddy? Martinevans123 (talk) 10:14, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

RfC discussion continued, Part 3

I'm perfectly willing to accept an explanation, if you have one, but you need to explain why "the needs of the particular article" are so unique that they require both markup coding and displayed-page formatting markedly different to every other article on Wikipedia. If you want particular issues, some from me to start with would be (a) why the ridiculously excessive use of the {{shy}} template (currently used 39 times on this article; to put that in context, it's used on 221 articles at the time of writing, and on a dip-sample none of them use it more than once or twice and almost exclusively for the special case of long words in the captions of narrow images)?; (b) why the use of 10 separate invocations of {{zwsp}}, a template with virtually no legitimate uses outside a few specialised cases to do with caption and cell formatting (currently only used in 29 articles on the whole of Wikipedia)?; (c) Why the need for a references section sorted by reading level, which would probably be excessive on genuine general-interest articles like Sea or Animal and is certainly inappropriate on a low-traffic specialist article like this, and in any case constitutes original research unless you actually have sources that a given source is "for young readers", "for specialists" etc? (d) Why the truly bizarre image formatting, with images apparently each at a different random size and placed along both sides of the page with text running between them?
As has been said above by virtually everyone except you, whatever your good intentions this has the effect of making a page whose format is so different to every other Wikipedia article, and whose markup is so convoluted and idiosyncratic as to be virtually incomprehensible to even the most experienced editors, that you've effectively erected a huge barrier to entry to anyone but yourself ever editing the page. This may be justifiable if there is a genuine reason why this provides a benefit either to readers, but as best as I can tell (I haven't read the talkpage archives) you've yet to demonstrate any benefit from doing it this way that outweighs the obvious negatives. (To put the "too many templates" issue in perspective, this article currently uses 121kb of markup to produce 36kb of text. A dip-sample from articles in User:The ed17/Featured articles by prose size with a similar prose length gives Rosetta Stone (77kb markup), Rambles in Germany and Italy (52kb markup), Introduction to general relativity (70kb markup), Talyllyn Railway (56kb markup)—in terms of total wiki markup, this page is roughly the same size as whoppers like John Lennon or Charles Darwin.) ‑ iridescent 10:55, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Until my lawyer comes to bail me out I'm stuck with only my iPhone, so I'll respond later tonight (assuming the judge grants bail). EEng (talk) 16:32, 9 September 2015 (UTC) Just kidding about the bail. I'm actually babysitting my 5-y.o. nephew for the day. Exhausted already.

Now then... Using your letter designations above:

• (a) Most people don't know about {shy}, so no surprise it's little used. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be used, and as mentioned already it's used in the places MOS recommends. But just to see I've removed them. Perhaps after taking a look you could tell me where you think they could be usefully restored.
• (b) You're wrong about places where {zwsp} is useful. Many/most browsers won't put a linebreak between a citation callout (e.g. and the preceding text. Usually that's desirable, but in an image caption it's not. Again, just to see I've removed them.
• (c) MOS (WP:FURTHER) specifies that "Editors may include brief annotations" to sources, and indicating which sources are appropriate for which audiences is no more OR than is selecting a list of "Further reading" in the first place. However, this is independent of the markup and I'd like to suggest that, in the interests of keeping the conversation focused, we take this up later.
• (d) The images are sized according to the amount of detail they contain, and in three places images are opposite each other (left and right) to keep them near related text. But as with (c) this isn't related to the markup.
• Your comparison of source sizes is misleading, because "prose size" excludes block quotes, captions, notes, and everything in the References (or Bibliography, or whatever) sections. To get an apples-to-apples comparison, I removed all that stuff from both Gage and Rambles in Germany and Italy (originally 121k and 52k, resp.), which drops them to 51k and 42k. In addition, Gage has 504 in-text citations to sources, while Rambles has only 103; deleting 3/4 of the cites from Gage drops it further to 44k i.e. the difference disappears entirely.

Please take a look at the current version [26] updated as mentioned in (a) and (b), and let me know what you think. EEng (talk) 19:19, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

<bump> EEng (talk) 00:07, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

<bump> Any chance of telling us whether your concerns have been addressed? EEng (talk) 22:14, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

<bump> Again, it would be very helpful if you could say whether changes since you commented have addressed your concerns. EEng (talk) 14:25, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

RfC discussion continued, Part 4

I'm well aware of WP:OAS EEng and I'm making the comment that your refusal to elaborate on the benefits to the wiki or its readers of your idiosyncracies in both mark up and plain text are moving you, imho, towards ownership. I'll note that to all the items people have mentioned you've said "this is what the template does" not "why this template is beneficial enough here to outweigh the cost of idiosyncracy". SPACKlick (talk) 11:10, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Ok, I am also busy in real life little bit, but anyway, I will check edit history of the article, we should find out who done all this mess in article, if that editor is active then we can ask for explaination from him/her, we can check his/her contribution to see how many other articles are affected by him. We should discourage such editing, we can ask for sanctions on that editor. Even without any such markups editing wikipedia is tough job for new users. I remember when I was new, I was not able do many simple things in editing which now we do routinely. Editing article even with normal markups is really challenging for new editors then markups in this article will not only discourage new editors but also discourage experienced editors too. --Human3015^TALK  13:04, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm familiar with the page history, and the way that it is written and formatted is in very large part the work of EEng, assisted with some technical aspects by Mirokado. In fairness, I want to point out my opinion that EEng has done an excellent job of researching and summarizing the subject, regardless of what editors may think about the formatting. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:43, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

For the avoidance of doubt I'd like to second Tryptofish's comment that from looking at the history it's clear EEng has done a job worthy of recognition in the crafting of the content and sourcing of this page. My only area of concern is the form/format of the markup and to a significantly smaller degree plaintext. SPACKlick (talk) 15:59, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Side note, EEng, please stop refactoring the discussion, it makes points difficult to follow and link back to and in doing so you are editing the formatting of others comments, a policy violation. SPACKlick (talk) 17:08, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Keep your pants on. I was just trying to make it easier to edit on my iPhone, and adding neutral arbitrary breaks and adjusting indenting is no violation of anything. Feel free to adjust as you see fit. EEng (talk) 17:57, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

It is ok if EEng made new sections here for ease of editing on his/her iPhone. That is not issue here, section breaks are common in long discussions. But our main issue is markups in article and it seems EEng is not willing to take even a single step back from his/her stand though so many editors are opposing him. According to Xtools EEng has record 1839 edits to this article and 600 comments on this talk page as of now. So it is obvious that this topic is very much near to EEng, when someone has so many edits to particular article then that person can't stop himself to make claims very near to WP:Ownership. Nearly 2,500 edits to one article (mainspace+talk, 1839+600) is amazing thing, many editors have 2,500 edits in their entire work on Wikipedia. We can see similar kind of markups in other articles mostly edited by EEng like Widener Library, Sacred Cod though it seems it is not big problem there as it is in this article. And yes I do appreciate EEng's contribution to this article for making this article more informative. But our only concern is about markups in articles, there is no doubt or question regarding content of the article from my side. If EEng thinks that some markups are really necessary then we can keep those but as per my experience so many markups are not necessary, maybe these markups are suitable for iPhone while editing, but most of people do not edit from mobile phone, and those who edit from mobile, not all of them have iPhone. --Human3015^TALK  19:44, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

I would avoid condescension when your point boils down to "I was changing your work to make it easier for me and what you want be damned" particularly when this discussion is "In this article there is an idiosyncratic style that's good for EEng but everyone else be damned". I don't like direct replies to comments being separated from the comment I made them to because it changes the meaning which is directly against policy and I have now made my firm objection so I don't expect to see it happen again. I don't like following 4 tracks of discussion when it's all about the same thing because that means points relevant to several parts have to be cross-referred or repeated neither of which makes it easier for editors to follow the discussion. Also EEng, despite several edits you haven't responded as yet to any of the reasons people have given for not liking the current style. In particular the question of why it's necessary here. What benefits it provides that outweigh the cost. SPACKlick (talk) 20:45, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• EEng is a named author whose work is cited in the article and is the coauthor of the principal cited source. I have more issues with what that results (omission of cited errors in the text, etc.) than with the markup of the page. Though this page was actually once even worse than it was now in terms of mark up.... ChrisGualtieri (talk) 03:57, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

No, the two papers I coauthored are cited 29 times, out of more than 500 citations total in the article‍—‌hardly "the principal cited source". EEng (talk) 13:25, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@EEng: as a side note, may I ask why you have a strong preference for —, ‍—‌ and  – over "-" and " - "SPACKlick (talk) 13:36, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

You didn't add markup to your post that would allow people to understand what you're asking without looking at the source, so here is that source:

may I ask why you have a strong preference for {{mdash}}, {{mdashb}} and {{snd}} over "-" and " - "

On top of that, the characters in the quotes are both hyphens - even though the discussion is about endashes and emdashes. You didn't mean to do that, did you? I'm guessing you meant to write

may I ask why you have a strong preference for {{mdash}}, {{mdashb}} and {{snd}} over "—" and " – "

(where the first quoted character is an emdash, and the second quoted character is an endash with a space on either side). OK, assuming that's your question, here are the answers:

• MOS:MARKUP recommends against literal em- and endashes because they're hard to distinguish in the edit window; thus {{mdash}} is preferred over —, so that you can see immediately that the right character is in use.

Click here ({{mdashb}}) to see the advantage of {{mdashb}}. I prefer it over {{mdash}} because of that advantage.

• MOS:NDASH explains what {{snd}} is for. My use of it instead of <space>–<space> (by <space> I mean a literal, regular space) isn't a preference, because <space>–<space> should never be seen in an article‍—‌in a "spaced ndash" the lefthand space needs to be a hardspace, not a regular space. (The alternative would be to code {{nbsp}}{{ndash}}<space>. Note that here as with mdash, MOS prefers symbolics over literals so that it's clear when editing that the right dash is being used.)

EEng (talk) 04:19, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

<bump> EEng (talk) 00:07, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

RfC discussion continued, Part 5

I just edited the article to improve readability here and here and did not find the unusual formatting to be a hindrance in any way. --Iamozy (talk) 23:14, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

You have a goddam lot of nerve commenting on what it's like to edit the article after actually editing it. You're supposed to speculate on what it's like without actually trying it, and (ideally) with no interest in doing so.

Adding to this outrage, with a relatively modest 1100 edits [27] you resemble, far more than anyone else commenting here, the timid novice it's claimed is frightened and discouraged by any flavor not vanilla. EEng (talk) 03:31, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Your response here is laughable for so many reasons. First, I don't need your permission to edit the article to make it more readable. Second, my edits have nothing to do with how the article is formatted. Third, your attempt to discredit my actions using the number of my edits is illegitimate and asinine. FOURTH, are you drunk when you're reading this talk page? I literally said that it isn't hard at all to edit. I'm not "frightened and discouraged" by the unusual markup, nor am I intimidated by your absurdly aggressive response to my comment on this RfC. --Iamozy (talk) 05:04, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Um, I guess I should have enclosed my post in <irony></irony> tags. My point was that you're the only person commenting (other than Tryptofish) who has actually edited the article and yet‍—‌defying the predictions of those who haven't edited but are certain that to do so would be intimidating and confusing (see This page is relatively difficult to edit section)‍—‌you had no problems. That you are a relatively inexperienced editor (at least, as measured by your edit count compared to those of everyone else here) makes the contrast between the handwringing speculation about "intimidation of novice editors", and your actual experience in editing, even more striking. Apologies for any unintended offense. EEng (talk) 05:50, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Okay, Jeez. You really threw me for a loop there. Not knowing what to expect, I guess I prepared for the worst. Probably my lack of experience showing through. Sorry for the misunderstanding! --Iamozy (talk) 06:21, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, you novice editors often get the wrong end of the stick. But hang around and you'll soon learn that I'm unfailingly gracious. Re "speculative editing", see "Have you tried it in the water, sir? EEng (talk) 06:40, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

".. the only person commenting (other than Tryptofish) who has actually edited the article"? How very dare you. I edited on 21 June (and without any problems at all, I might add). Martinevans123 (talk) 22:14, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Shame on me for taking your for granted. EEng (talk) 22:55, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Shame indeed. My eyes have obviously been opened by this discussion. Martinevans123 (talk) 07:33, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

EEng, please do not cast aspersions on the editors who have commented in the RfC section above. Implying that these editors "have no interest" in editing the page is inappropriate. Nothing in the way I wrote the RfC characterizes editors new to this page as "timid" or "frightened". Having already edited a page does not set an editor up as having a more valid opinion than other editors. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:48, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Certainly it does. Presuming to answer "What is it like to edit this page?", without ever having edited it, is like answering "What is it like to read this page?" without ever having read it. EEng (talk) 05:04, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

You are overlooking the fact that the RfC specifically asks respondents to open edit windows. And that certainly does not justify "timid" or "frightened". (And you certainly do have an interesting way of finding fault with small things that other editors say, while feeling free to say comparatively large things in response, even if you say them intended as humor.) --Tryptofish (talk) 7:56 pm, Today (UTC−4)

No, I'm not overlooking that. Just opening the edit window and looking, without actually doing anything, is like looking at the water, but not getting in, and declaring the breaststroke really difficult. EEng (talk) 00:16, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Then you are framing the issue as if responding editors had never before looked at Wikipedia editing windows. Experienced (or even relatively new) editors can indeed evaluate what the RfC asks, based on examining edit windows, without needing to actually go on to save the edit. I am concerned about what you are saying here, because it sounds to me like you are trying to lay the groundwork for claiming that the RfC is not valid, in the event that it does not go your way. Please understand that such an approach will not work out well for you. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:26, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm not "framing the issue as if" blah blah blah. Just because swimmers have been in the water doing the crawl doesn't qualify them to comment on the breaststroke -- unless they get in the water and try it. The fact remains that the one person who has actually edited finds no problem, and this article has had more edits in the last year, by more different editors (including IPs), than the Genie article you hold up as a paragon, and this despite the fact that Genie is 4X as long and gets 30% more page views. (Obviosly here I'm excluding edit by me here, or by Genie's principal author there.)

Meanwhile, please cut out the highhanded, ominous advice about how things will work out for me. I'm really tired of it. Maybe things won't work out so well for you. The problem with this RfC is that it invites vague complaints which don't specify what the perceived problem actually is, or what should be done about it. My attempts to elicit specifics have met with silence, or where something specific has been said, my response to that has met with silence.

You, Mirokado, and I could easily have made a list of the unusual techniques used here, and invited comment on whether each is worth the trouble and complexity, or not. Instead you barreled forth with this meaningless question inviting vague drivebys.

EEng (talk) 03:15, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

If you seriously think that I did not spend enough time discussing things with you first, before opening this RfC, then you are incorrect. You do not own this page. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:27, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Oh boy, here we go! About a year ago you complained [28] that the page is "overwhelmingly confusing to edit". Since then...

• we've had a colloquy with an editor who finds linebreaks confusing, so I took them all out, and
• you and I and Mirokado made a long exploration of your ideas for changing the referencing system, motivated by your desire "to make this page more like other pages", or to make it simpler to edit. When Mirokado and I opined that the former is not a valid desideratum (per WP:CITEREF) and that your changes would work against the latter goal, you suddenly opened this RfC.

To my recollection, other than the above you‍—‌like those complaining here, with minor and abortive exceptions‍—‌have never said what you don't like about the markup, or taken any initiative to discuss what to do. Where in the last year did you say, "I don't understand what Markup M is there for... I find it confusing... Do we need it?" (Or if you did, I suspect I responded and you dropped it.)

EEng (talk) 00:52, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm sincerely sorry that you feel that way. Just above, you complained that other editors have stopped responding to you in this RfC discussion, and I would speculate that it is because there comes a point of diminishing returns when you refuse to take no for an answer. Let me suggest that you wait and see what the result of the RfC ends up being, and that you accept whatever consensus emerges, rather than fighting it. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:00, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

It's not how I "feel"‍—‌it's facts. I challenge you, now, to give diffs showing you making any concrete inquiry or suggestion about the markup, other than the two bullets above. EEng (talk) 01:28, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Except EEng, I have tried to edit this page. Following the attraction from the RFC bot I spotted some formatting that looked like a simple fix. Tried to fix it, it didn't work because it was very difficult to work out which bits of the surrounding mark up were doing what. The page is intimidating to edit. Please have faith that when other editors say something seems difficult to edit they've taken the time to work that out. SPACKlick (talk) 08:35, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Your original post opened "I couldn't edit this page if I wanted to", which very much implies you hadn't tried, so you'll pardon my misunderstanding. What were you trying to fix? EEng (talk) 13:37, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

It would be helpful to know what the formatting was that you say were stymied in fixing. For your convenience here's [29] the article at the time you first commented. EEng (talk) 22:14, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Not that I would suggest such a thing myself, but if you can't be bothered to say what it is you were trying to fix, some observers might conclude it didn't actually exist. EEng (talk) 14:25, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

RfC discussion continued, Part 6

I will do another request to EEng that, this is your favorite topic, you edited it most, you inserted markups with which you are familiar or used to. But please don't insert such markups in any other article, specially in those articles in which many people have interest in editing. For example, don't put such markups in any city article, or sports or alcohol and other beverages articles. Also don't use it any film article. Keep this to your favorite article, and even here also many people seem to be against keeping this markups here, we can see it in this RFCs, still thanks for removing some of them. But again, please don't use it in any other article. I respect you as you are an author. Thank you. --Human3015^TALK  02:29, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

At least one of EEng's other "favorite articles" has even attained WP:GA status. So somebody must have at least read it. You might want to have a look at Widener Library and see if you think the source mark-up is equally impenetrable. One kind reviewer even thought the mark-up was "interesting." I don't think anyone has really complained about it over there (yet)? Martinevans123 (talk) 22:08, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

I did the "edit window test" for a couple of sections there, and for me, that page is confusing too. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:54, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

RfC discussion continued, Part 7

Am I correct in thinking that the choice of wikimarkup used is never directly addressed in Wikipedia's guidelines? The WP:MOS does say that "Where more than one style is acceptable, editors should not change an article from one of those styles to another without a good reason." However, I believe that refers to the outward formatting of the article, not the unseen wiring/plumbing. If WP does not expressly state that the unusual markup shown here shouldn't be changed, I see no reason why any individual editor couldn't change it if they wanted to. --Iamozy (talk) 22:14, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

That's a very good question, and I've been half-expecting that quote from MOS to be asked about. Here is my read on it. I think that it does indeed apply to all style considerations, whether seen or unseen by non-editor readers. However, I think that the intended point is that some drive-by editor should not go changing a page from a well-settled consensus style to a personal preference whim. And I agree that such a change is unhelpful. However, I think that it is very important to understand that a drive-by change is vastly different than a careful discussion amongst editors that leads to a consensus that style should be changed. What MOS says should not be misrepresented to imply that ownership is acceptable, in which editors who have already edited a page set themselves up as the veto-ers of any further discussion. Indeed, my intention in opening this RfC was to establish whether or not any such consensus would result after a careful and considered discussion. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:41, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

RfC discussion continued, Part 8

It's now over two years since the last WP:GA/N. I wonder would an independent Good Article review help to settlement this matter? Or does GA/N consider only how the article appears to the reader? Martinevans123 (talk) 07:36, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

The GA criteria include nothing the reader can't see‍—‌and only a small part of that. A serious problem in the last GA nomination (which I didn't make, BTW) was the appearance of the self-appointed roving enforcers insisting on their personal stylistic and markup fetishes, calling them "MOS compliance", when (a) none of what they were doing had anything to do with MOS, and (b) general MOS compliance isn't a requirement of GA anyway‍—‌just a few sections of MOS which are enumerated in the criteria. EEng (talk) 14:06, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Oh well, just a shot in the dark, Clutching at straws, really. I can see we've touched another nerve there. Never mind. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:19, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

You misunderstand. I think a GA would be great, after the current contretemps is over. In fact, you could do it, since you've made only scattered edits to the article. An unusual aspect of GA is that it's an intentionally lightweight process, to be carried out by one editor on his/her own‍—‌it's not a consensus process. EEng (talk) 14:52, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

"Quelle surprise". I'm busy arranging a long holiday, due to start just after "the current contretemps" is over. What a coincidence! Martinevans123 (talk) 15:04, 23 September 2015 (UTC) p.s. couldn't I fail it for havimg "an overly idiosyncratic referencing system"?

Nope. Wouldn't be part of your brief. If you want you could start your review now so you'd have it all ready when the formal nomination comes. I suggest you get started so as not to interfere with your long holiday. EEng (talk) 16:51, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

That's very considerate of you. But, as luck would have it, my travel agent has found a bargain last-minute deal to a intriguing resort in Arizona. So I'm actually packing already! I'm not sure the accommodation there has full internet access, but I'm sure just being there will remind me of this article. Maybe you could get a "ghost writer" in? Else I fear a GA review might get easily railroaded. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:47, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Railroaded is right. But your remedy is backwards. To avoid railroading, I would have to be the ghost writer, with some other editor The Front. EEng (talk) 18:38, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

"Fellas... I don't recognize the right of this committee to ask me these kind of questions. And furthermore, you can all go fuck yourselves." - Howard Prince. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:47, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.