User talk:Tamzin

{{ds/aware}}

I don't like the idea of getting pings over someone putting a box on my page that says I did nothing wrong while vaguely insinuating that I did, so I'm just parking these here instead. {{ds/aware|ap|gg|a-i|blp|mos|tt|ipa}} Update 18:24, 25 October 2021 (UTC): You know what, screw it. Keeping track of which to list is more trouble than it's worth, and I don't need any one-hit immunity. I'm aware of all of them. Even the weird ones like the Shakespeare authorship question or Waldorf education. If anything, I'm more likely to think something is a DS topic when it isn't, than vice versa.

Selected WikiLove

See further at /Nice things.

Defender of the Wiki Barnstar from Joshua Jonathan

	The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
	Absolutely deserved for uncovering the Swaminarayan-sockfarm. A lot of work is waiting, but you did great! Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:14, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Reply

Thank you so much, Joshua Jonathan. It's funny, it started just as this weird feeling based on the RfD !votes... We get weird !vote patterns at RfD all the time, usually when a number of non-regulars wander in and don't understand how the forum actually works. The weird thing, though, was that they did seem to get the basic premise of RfD, but were still !voting for a conclusion that made no sense. But still I didn't have that high an index of suspicion, and also I was rather busy, and was this closed to dropping it. But instead, kind of on a whim, I asked Blablubbs to take a look. I was only suspicious about the four who'd !voted consecutively, and I was frankly surprised when Blablubbs turned up evidence tying not just all four of them, but Apollo too. I had no previous exposure to this topic area, and didn't know any of the players, so I really though I'd just be dealing with a few SPAs, not someone with 2,000 edits and PCR. I think it was also Blablubbs who first suggested Moksha as part of it, as we looked at other players in the topic area. Then I found the comment from the Swami sock accusing them, and there went the next few hours of my life, digging through a history that grew more and more horrifying as the behavioral similarities mounted. I've really never seen something that elaborate fly under the radar, except reading early (pre-2010) ArbCom cases. It's a shame we'll likely never know exactly how many people were behind these six accounts. My personal hypothesis is that it was six people who knew each other off-wiki, with one, perhaps Moksha, ghost-writing some talk-page comments for the others. (If true, that would mean they were done in by that one person's micromanagement, which is a funny thought.) But that's just my guess. So thanks again for the barnstar. :) I kind of hope I never get this particular barnstar again, though, at least not for the same kind of thing. Mass gaslighting is a demoralizing thing to work against. I'm happy to go back to just dealing with vandals and spammers. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 06:14, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Barnstar of Diligence from L235

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	Hi Tamzin, I'm Kevin. Thank you for your diligence on the Moksha88 SPI; had it been a less thorough report, it may have been overlooked or neglected, especially after the negative CU results. We're lucky to have had you looking into this. KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 06:15, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

Reply

@L235: Thank you—for this barnstar and for your own diligence. I was worried that someone would look at this and see it as too complicated, and as involving blocks that were too likely to cause drama, and just punt on it and leave the whole topic area still in disarray. As someone who's always favored making lots of small improvements over a small number of big ones, it's rare that I get the chance to look at something and say, "Here's a way that I really, noticeably, made the encyclopedia better through one single effort." Which I hope I'll be able to say here, depending on how the POV cleanup goes. As I said to JJ above, I just hope that I don't run into another case like this for a while—both because I (perhaps naïvely) hope to never see anything so egregious, but also for the sake of my sanity, and the sake of whichever CU is crazy enough to take on that case. :) So again, thanks for all you've done here. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 17:04, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

Civility Barnstar from Sdkb & Writ Keeper

	The Civility Barnstar
	Without getting into the messy question of whether or not the other editor's professed ignorance is plausible, I think it's clear your calm, non-judgmental efforts to explain why their comments were offensive have been helpful and appreciated by all. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:25, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

I definitely second this. Your essay is excellent, as well. You're doing the (proverbial) Lord's work, and with much more patience than I. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 23:07, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Further kind words

​​Thank you both. <3 While I don't think of myself as an incivil person, I'm not sure this is one I ever expected to get. As someone who both likes to assume good faith and has a low tolerance for bigotry, I always see this kind of thing as a win-win: If the assumption of good faith was correct, then we avert more hurt feelings; and if it doesn't, then people can't plead ignorance the next time. I'm glad that this appears to have been the former. "Lord's work" is a compliment I'll happily (flatteredly) accept, be it meant proverbially or literally. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 00:11, 30 June 2021 (UTC) I see great minds think alike. I wasn't aware of the incident that led to the creation of your essay prior to today, and had only created mine in response to seeing "he/she" a lot around here. I must say you articulate it a lot better than I do, though! Patient Zerotalk 04:11, 1 July 2021 (UTC) I'd just like to thank you as well for your well written essay. I hope this essay helps inform future editors and, in doing so, reduce the instances of misgendering. Isabelle 🔔 02:45, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

mishloach manot for you!

File:Dr Pepper can.jpg

Happy purim, Tamzin! I thought I'd try and throw together a mishloach manot basket to give out :) feel free to pass it around or make your own basket, if that's your thing—if not, cheers and chag Purim sameach! in jewish enby siblinghood, theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/they) 03:27, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Reply

תודה רבה, Claudia! A pleasantly synchronistic treat to find immediately after submitting my first foray into your neck of the woods. Despite my well-known affinity for Queen Esther (Esther 8:6 tattoo pic forthcoming on Commons once I've got the enby and agender colors touched up), I've never done much for Purim. Don't really know why that is, just how it's sorted out. But I'll never say no to something tasty! Chag sameach to you too, friend. i/j/nb/s -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they) 03:51, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Precious

may memories be for a blessing

Thank you for articles such as List of journalists killed during the Russo-Ukrainian War, for your bot and SPI work, for "find me removing things more often than adding them", for paying tribute on your user page in channeled anger, - you are an awesome Wikipedian!

You are recipient no. 2728 of Precious, a prize of QAI. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:56, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

Thank you very much, Gerda. This means a lot to me, especially given the circumstances and given the date (see userpage footnote 2). After years of, as you allude to, mostly working on improving articles by trimming them down, it's been a very eye-opening experience to build a full-length article from the ground up. I'm glad I got to have this experience with a list that's meaningful to me, although the downside of that is being very aware of how quickly this list grows. A small fraction of those killed overall, but as Masaq' Hub says in Look to Windward, "It's always one hundred percent for the individual concerned". -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they) 02:13, 4 April 2022 (UTC) Thank you, this means a lot to me, - see my talk today and 23 March. We have one name in common even, and named victims stand for all the unnamed. - "Stand and sing". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:02, 4 April 2022 (UTC) @Gerda Arendt: Oksana Shvets was on my mind when I suggested at Talk:List of journalists killed during the Russo-Ukrainian War that perhaps a List of artists killed during the Russo-Ukrainian War is in order—also to list Artem Datsyshyn, Brent Renaud, Mantas Kvedaravičius, and perhaps Maks Levin. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they) 20:42, 4 April 2022 (UTC) yes - just working on Maks Levin --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:51, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

An assortment of barnstars from Floquenbeam, zzuuzz, Vami_IV, I dream of horses, and others

Further information: User talk:Tamzin/Archive/3 (RfA special edition)

Defender of the Wiki Barnstar from Pharos, for defending the wiki from Pharos

		The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
		For reverting my accidental buffalo stampede. Thanks for ameliorating the utter state of confusion.Pharos (talk) 00:07, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Reply
@Pharos: Okay, I think that's the last of them reined in, aside from a few buffalo who had already been taken in by loving adopters like Jeremyb. One hopes these buffalo do not feel buffaloed. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they) 03:06, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Admin's Barnstar from Bagumba

	The Admin's Barnstar
	Thanks for being able to make tough blocks, while maintaining the humility to not do so lightly. —Bagumba (talk) 02:24, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Reply
Thanks, Bagumba. :) (Incredibly slow response, sorry.) At some point soon I'd like to write up a self-audit of my blocks to make sure I'm staying true to my stated principles in blocking... We'll see. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she|they|xe) 00:53, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Technical Barnstar from Hawkeye7

	The Technical Barnstar
	For Help:-show classes. Really great work. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:05, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

Civility Barnstar from EducatedRedneck and Special Barnstar from Bradv

Not for the same thing, but conceptually related

		The Civility Barnstar
		For your conduct in the Inverted Zebra ANI thread. I doubt I'd be able to keep my cool nearly as well as you did when personally attacked. Your writing managed to convey being justifiably angry without being aggressive. Major props to you for your conduct there, good Mx; I hope I can be even half as civil if I ever find my own person under attack. I hope it blows over quickly now, so you can get back to editing.

EducatedRedneck (talk) 23:19, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

	The Special Barnstar
	Thank you for all you do to make Wikipedia a more inclusive, welcoming, and safe community. – bradv 21:02, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Replies

Original Barnstar from Mz7 for thankèdness

	The Original Barnstar
	Happy New Year, Tamzin! In 2022, other editors thanked you 1003 times using the thanks tool. This places you in the top 10 most thanked Wikipedians of 2022. Congratulations and, well, thank you for all that you do for Wikipedia. Here's to 2023! Mz7 (talk) 23:44, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Reply

Civility Barnstar from Aoba47, but more importantly the nicest conversation I've ever been in on Wikipedia

		The Civility Barnstar
		Hello again. I wanted to apologize again for my response to the Charlotte York article and my mistakes regarding the page move. You were incredibly kind, especially when the entire situation was my fault, and I wanted to thank you again for that. I am truly happy to see such great and kind communication on here. Thank you. Aoba47 (talk) 20:34, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

@Aoba47: Aww, you're so sweet. You know, WP:CIR gets cited in a lot of horrible and mean-spirited contexts, but there's a valuable lesson in there if one takes the time to read it, which is that no one is competent at everything. I'd like to think of myself as a fairly well-rounded editor—2 GAs, lots of projectspace work, some technical work including a bot—but there's still dozens of areas of this project that I have literally no fucking clue how to manage. And it's really only luck that I haven't in recent years had the pleasure of having some admin show up on my talk page and say "Umm, that's not at all how this thing is done. I've unbroken it for you. Please be more careful." One thing I've never done in 10 years here, for instance, is get an FA. Hell, didn't have a GA till 5 months after my RfA. You have... holy shit, 45 of those. If I live a long life and continue focusing on content maybe I'll hit that number before I die. When I do go for my first FAC, you can bet it'll be with oodles of behind-the-scenes hand-holding from friends who've done it before, to make up for my near-complete cluelessness about that venue. So. If I can summarize this wall of text, it's 🪞 at both you and CT55555 because like... holy fucking shit this site is toxic sometimes. And it's been so incredibly refreshing to see two experienced users be so relentlessly civil to each other and to me over a relatively minor, totally good-faith misunderstanding, to the extent you're following up on it weeks later. I love it. If there were an inverse version of WP:STOCKS I would put you both in it, no ifs, ands, or buts. Thank you for this barnstar, but really it's y'all who deserve it for this truly exemplary conduct. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she|they|xe) 21:25, 12 January 2023 (UTC) Notes Thanks for adding more rays of much-needed sunshine on this site. Peace. CT55555(talk) 21:50, 12 January 2023 (UTC) Thank you for your response and the kind words. I will read through WP:CIR in the near future. I enjoy reading through these kinds of essays, and I agree that no one is great or even competent at every single aspect of Wikipedia because this site is so vast and dense. I think it is good to have a healthy dose of perspective and humility, and I have learned from this experience. I has been a while since I did anything with page moves and the like that I genuinely forgot how to do any of it. Congrats on the two GAs, and I think it is awesome that you've done technical work as well. I have absolutely zero ideas how to even remotely do anything with bots so I am impressed by that. I am proud of my work in the FAC process and very thankful for all the editors and reviewers who have helped along the way. If I ever do it make it to 47, I will let you know if something special happens, and if you ever decide to pursue a FAC, I would be more than happy to answer any questions or provide any pointers. It can be a very intimidating space, but there are also a lot of wonderful editors over there. You are right that this site can be toxic at times, particularly from experienced users, and I've definitely reacted poorly in the past. The best I can do is to try and learn from each experience and hopefully be better for the future. I'd be curious on what the reverse of WP:STOCKS would be. I am glad that this experience ended up in a positive place in the end and hopefully, this will not sound super sappy, but it was wonderful to meet and interact with you and CT55555. I hope you are having a wonderful 2023 (knock on wood though as I do not want to jinx anything). Aoba47 (talk) 22:26, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

Socratic Barnstar from Schwede66 and BusterD

Context: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/theleekycauldron 2.

		The Socratic Barnstar
		Your vote at Leeky's RfA was one of the most reflective contributions I've read in a long time. Thank you! Schwede66 19:54, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

I stopped by to say "What a nice thing to say about a friend!" but I see User:Schwede66 was here first. BusterD (talk) 22:45, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Barnstar of Awesomeness from Diannaa

Earlier comment from Elonka
Thank you for your Guide, I found it very interesting, very thoughtful and reasoned, and I appreciate the time that you put into it. --Elonka 22:49, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

	Barnstar of Awesomeness
	The thing that prompted me to award you this rare and exclusive barnstar was your work in creating User:Tamzin/ACE2023 guide. But don't think that all the other things you do have gone unnoticed! You are an awesome Wikipedian! Thanks for everything. — Diannaa (talk) 23:24, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Reply

Thank you, Diannaa. This means a huge amount coming from you. After a year and a half as an admin there's only a few admins left who feel to me more legend than colleague, but getting a barnstar from Diannaa is one of those things that just... oh I don't know how to finish this sentence without sounding too fangirlish but... well, again, thank you. I'm glad you appreciated the guide, and likewise Elonka above. Although, I must say, I just discovered Teratix' painstakingly researched guide, and it so thoroughly blows mine out of the water that I'm tempted to just redirect mine. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|she) 07:35, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Selected WikiHate

Warnings from the late great Nosebagbear and whoever whomever whoever most recently edited this page

Hello, I'm MediaWiki message delivery. I wanted to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions have been undone because they did not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use your sandbox. If you have any questions, you can ask for assistance at the Teahouse. Thanks. Nosebagbear (talk)

​Block me if you must, but you'll never catch my socks!

(They're very cozy slipper-socks with like a stylized dog face on the top and then little fake ears on the side. Very cozy socks. AND YOU'LL NEVER CATCH THEM!) -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 13:28, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello, people from the future. Confused why your name shows up here? See here. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 05:18, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Toki Pona in the wild? Mute olin!! :D Atomic putty? Rien! Atomic putty? Rien! 16:05, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

@Atomic putty? Rien! "Quantity of love"? :P (For "much love", use olin mute, or more properly mi olin mute e ni 'I love this', although ni li pona mute 'This is very good' is probably more idiomatic, since the colloquial English use of "love" to mean "like a lot" doesn't really translate.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 02:01, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

@Tamzin omg ur so right, sorry I’m rusty. I love finding ppl who speaks Toki Pona outside of the discord server, it’s like a little linguistics easter egg Atomic putty? Rien! 12:30, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@Tamzin P.P.S. Apologies for my English, German’s actually my first language ^-^ Atomic putty? Rien! 12:32, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

---

Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at Special:Diff/1148616329. Your edits appear to be disruptive and have been or will be reverted.

• If you are engaged in an article content dispute with another editor, please discuss the matter with the editor at their talk page, or the [[:|article's talk page]], and seek consensus with them. Alternatively, you can read Wikipedia's dispute resolution page, and ask for independent help at one of the relevant noticeboards.
• If you are engaged in any other form of dispute that is not covered on the dispute resolution page, please seek assistance at Wikipedia's Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.

Please ensure you are familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, and please do not continue to make edits that appear disruptive. Continued disruptive editing may result in loss of editing privileges.
Please note that such behaviour is distinctly unacceptable on Wikipedia. However, I realise you are still new to Wikipedia and learning the rules - please feel free to ask at the WP:TEAHOUSE if you are unsure about making an edit. Nosebagbear (talk) 11:00, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

f u delete this or im gonna tell the mods on u. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 11:19, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm afraid, @Tamzin, that that statement is in breach of rule 1 of this talkpage listed at the top. If you do not retract the comment, I may need to tell this user about the poor behaviour by yourself. Nosebagbear (talk) 14:20, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

tsk, really should have discuss[ed] the matter with the editor at [...] the [[:|article's talk page]] — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 15:00, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Special talk:Diff/1148616329? Sounds like a good place for settling disputes TheresNoTime ;)

Talk pages for special pages when? /j Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 17:19, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Meta-WikiHate against my mother of all people

Re above: by itself, from whomever is correct, if that's the end of the expression, placing 'whomever' in the objective case, due to its function as the object of the preposition from. But, in the longer expression From who[m]ever edited this page, who[m]ever is not the object of the preposition from; rather, the entire noun phrase who[m]ever edited this page is the object, and that is an independent clause, containing a subject (who[m]ever), a transitive verb (edited ), and an object (the noun phrase, this page). In this independent clause, the subject is in the subjective case (a.k.a., nominative case), thus it must be whoever. The object noun phrase (this page) is in the objective case (invisible, because most nouns don't change; but if it were a pronoun, like they/them, then it would be whoever edited them). Upshot for this expression: it must be from whoever edited this page. See the first example here, for example. Moral of the story: Moms aren't always right. Oh yeah, and one other thing... congrats on your election. But, first things first, right? Mathglot (talk) 08:55, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I prefer "whomsoever." --Deepfriedokra (talk) 09:37, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate that you dug into the page history to find that I did originally have it right. My lovely mother, whom I will stress is a published author and editor and taught me everything I know about writing, concedes defeat on the matter, Mathglot. However, for questioning the woman whom brought me into the world, you've still earned a place in the WikiHate section, congratulations or not. (Also thank you. :) ) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 21:33, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Outrageous abuse of power by Tamzin

I have unreviewed a page you curated

Hi, I'm Tamzin. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Opposition to human rights, and have marked it as unreviewed. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.

(Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:08, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Outrageous, Tamzin. I demand you resign your patrollership. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:10, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Why don't you like being called Tammy?

Is there a personal reason for it? 2607:FEA8:FE10:80D0:19BA:6297:7766:A64 (talk) 02:29, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Many brave Tamzins died in the Great Tammy Wars. Some find strength in looking back, but I find it easier to forget. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 02:37, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

RE: Would there be interest in a bot that makes a "watchlist" just for recently-edited pages?

OMG YES! El_C 14:31, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

-- TNT (talk • she/her) 21:12, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree. Watching my watchlist gets boring at some hours of the night. wizzito | say hello! 02:45, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

@El C, TheresNoTime, and Wizzito: Well, currently item 1 on my big-project wiki to-do list is some content work (gasp! I know), and item 2 is the second round of 'zinbot automatic patrol circumstances, which I got consensus for months ago but still haven't run with, but this is item 3. If anyone else would like to take a stab at it (hint, TNT), what I'm thinking of is something like:

{{User:'zinbot/Secondary watchlist
|source_page = <!-- Watch all pages linked from these pages, emulating Special:RecentChangesLinked for them. Separate by newline. --->
|source_user = <!-- Watch all pages edited by these users in provided timeframe. Separate by newline. -->
|user_days_back = <!-- How many days back in a user's contribs to follow. Default: 7. -->
|user_edits_back = <!-- How many edits back in a user's contribs to follow. Default: 200. -->
<!-- Either of `user_days_back` and `user_edits_back` can be set to None, as long as the other has a value -->
|namespace = <!-- Name or number of namespace(s) to watch. Use 0 for mainspace. Separate by commas. Default: All. Prefix with - to mean "everything but" -->
<!-- Days back, edits back, and namespace can be overridden per source page or source user, by appending a # and then `days=`, `edits=`, or `namespace=` to the entry. You can also use a `prefix=` parameter. -->
|always_watch = <!-- Will be watched even if not covered by the above parameters. E.g. Your own talk page, AN/I, etc. ... -->
|never_watch = <!-- Will be ignored even if covered by the above parameters. E.g. your own talk page, AN/I, etc. ... -->
|update_frequency = <!-- A number in minutes, or "auto". At "auto", the bot will update as frequently as possible, with the understanding that after each update you are moved to the back of the queue for updates, and the bot only edits once every 10 seconds. -->
}}

Thus mine might look like

{{User:'zinbot/Secondary watchlist
|source_page = User:Tamzin/spihelper log
               User:Tamzin/XfD log
               User:AnomieBOT/TPERTable <!-- Open TPERs -->
               Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion # namespace=4 prefix=Redirects_for_discussion/ <!-- Only watch active RfD subpages. -->
               User:Mz7/SPI case list <!-- Active SPIs -->
|source_user = Tamzin
               'zin is short for Tamzin
|user_days_back = 2
|user_edits_back = None
|namespace = -Category, File <!-- I don't really edit these namespaces -->
|always_watch = User:Tamzin
|never_watch = Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents
|update_frequency = auto
}}

That would render as {{Special:RecentChangesLinked/{{FULLPAGENAME}}/links}}, while a bot would update the /links subpage in accordance with the {{{update_frequency}}} value.

Should be pretty straightforward to set up, when I get around to it. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 03:34, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

"hint, TNT"—thank you but no -- TNT (talk • she/her) 03:36, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Wait, what do I do? You're not my mom/s! El_C 04:56, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Quick question

Hi, Tamzin! I was rummaging through the NPP archives and stumbled onto this discussion. First, my belated THANK YOU!! Second, please see this redirect which showed up in the NPP queue as a result of: 07:39 · Turtle-bienhoa · ←Blanked the page and then reverted 07:39 · Turtle-bienhoa · Undid revision 1097374915 by Turtle-bienhoa (talk). Is there any way we can get the Bot to recognize that type of activity so that it doesn't remove reviewed status? Best ~ Atsme 💬 📧 14:02, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Example male and Example female

Hi Tamzin—hope you are doing well. I was wondering if you would be able to update User:Example male and User:Example female to use Special:GlobalPreferences to set their genders, instead of setting them locally? As an irrelevant aside, as I was writing this note, I realized I would ping both accounts. This made me curious: how many pings are they currently sitting at? Anyways, happy editing! HouseBlaster^talk 22:51, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

A cookie for you!

For your work on removing BLP non-compliant material from Soa Palalei and Rock Machine Motorcycle Club and calling Wikipedians out for being a bit too quick on the revert button. Cheers! Grumpylawnchair (talk) 01:51, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Article suggestion for talkpage watchers!

Hello, talkpage watchers! If anyone's looking for an article to write, here's one that I think is really interesting, easily notable, and maybe has GA potential, but with which I have a minor COI: Edgar Labat, a Black man wrongfully convicted of rape in Louisiana in 1953. At the time he was freed (1966), he was the longest-serving death row inmate in U.S. history. He was the subject of protracted litigation throughout that time and became a cause célèbre, with lots of coverage. This Time article gives an overview. Newspapers.com^TWL has lots more. And there's scholarly coverage. My COI is relatively small (my grandparents advocated for him and he lived with them briefly), enough so that I'd be fine assisting once written, but I shouldn't be the main author on this. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 18:48, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

bcc

I didn't know {{bcc}} existed. I wish there was a list of semi-obscure and occasionally helpful Wikipedia features. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 09:00, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

'zinbot question

Hey Tamzin. I was curious, would it be much effort to modify task 1 of 'zinbot to also mark pages sent to AfD as reviewed? Hey man im josh (talk) 19:31, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for this essay

I believe we all encounter some form of mental illness in our lives, some all encompassing, some apparently trivial. Nothing is trivial, but we can think it is.

I knew all this, but I know it better now I've seen it written down.

I took my own wikibreak a few years ago, and it was for a few years. It coincided with sudden busy-ness in real life, and I think I would not have handled things well had I continued, 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 19:50, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

A year late, @Timtrent, thanks for appreciating the essay. :) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 07:21, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Some stroopwafels for you!

Hi! I hope it's not too forward of me to drop by to say that I smile every time I see your [cetacean needed] signature. Nothing really of substance to add, it's just improved my day enough times that I wanted to tell you so. — Moriwen (talk) 23:26, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Ambition achieved

User:Tamzin/userboxen/User non-admin someday You finally got there! 😃. JBW (talk) 18:03, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

@JBW: Sadly I forgot to ask the 'crats to use the userbox. But, for whatever reason I'm back in the saddle now, so maybe next time.

Some say my tenure will end in arbies.
Some say in 'crats.
From what I've tasted of ol' ANNIE.
I hold with those who favor arbies.
But if I had to de-mop twice,
I think I know enough of burnout
To say that for desysop 'crats
Are also great
And would suffice.

(With apologies to Robert Frost.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 16:16, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Aah, Robert Frost! I read and very much liked his poems back in my youth, but I can scarcely remember anything about them now. The sadness of the passing of time... Sigh... JBW (talk) 17:11, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

The sadness of the passing of time ← That's more Proust. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 17:36, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I believe so, but I've never read him. JBW (talk) 17:51, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps...

I want to talk to you,

And if you forget me,

You will protect us.

I want to smile at you,

And if you remember me,

You will understand me.

I want to sing to you,

And if you will sing with me,

Our harmony will light up our lives.

I want to understand you,

And if only Google would help...

Only it fucking won't.

JBW (talk) 17:24, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

It was so great to meet you at Wikiconference North America – thank you for allowing me to infiltrate the Cool Kid Inner Circle! Hope to see you again at future conferences/gatherings and around on the wikis :)

Accedie^{talk to me} 22:46, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

reversion

No worries, I was just feeling like it had turned kind of meta and thought we didn't need to include every possible example that could be scraped up. I think you're right about this one. Valereee (talk) 11:41, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @Val. Came upon it while working on Canceling (video essay), which I feel like is one of those links I'm gonna turn blue in either a week or a year. Coming off a series of articles that weren't exactly light stuff, including rewriting parts of Self-harm and of course writing This War of Mine: The Board Game, and I stomach all that just fine, but there's something about summarizing a 100-minute video of someone describing collective emotional abuse, throughout the course of which she gets progressively drunker, and which starts with her drinking King Cobra out of the bottle in a bathtub surrounded by trash bags, that got me questioning whether this was what I wanted to write about for my hobby. So yeah, a week or a year. Anyways, I do agree with the overall removals. It's a really tough topic to write about without perpetuating the victimization. I do recommend the aforementioned video essay if you haven't seen it. (Obligatory and very meta disclaimer that I do not agree with every single thing Natalie Wynn has ever had to say.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 17:37, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm working on incubating something in that vein about fleshing out "morally" motivated networked harassment and a chronology of the phenomenon as a fuller page, just have been busy. lizthegrey (talk) 06:07, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

The Judd Hamilton saga

Hi Tamzin, I have been meaning to contact you for months but in amongst my activities here and in life in general, I keep forgetting to get around to this. Now I understand that some action had to be taken against User:2601:601:D02:2120:2D85:C84E:EE00:4AF0 which is who I believe to be Judd Hamilton. But thinking about it, I believe he had no idea of how things work here, and made the legal threat as he may have not realised it's not permitted. I do really believe he was genuinely upset and felt insulted by the remarks of an editor who basically said that he was a "nobody" and that member now I see had been banned not long afterwards. Given Mr. Hamilton's age (81) and the circumstances that caused him to react in the way he did, is it possible to consider unblocking him a month and 2 weeks earlier than his block expiry?
Regards Karl Twist (talk) 11:02, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) he hasn't requested an unblock, what's the point? ltbdl (talk) 11:09, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

@Karl Twist: Legal threat blocks can be lifted as soon as the threat is retracted. At the same time, don't be misled by the block length: It's only temporary because IPs change over time. If he resumes editing from that IP after the block ends, and does not retract the threat, he will be re-blocked. I appreciate that that may seem unkind to do to an old man who doesn't seem to have any real malice in him. But legal threats are a serious thing, particularly in the U.S., where, due to the way our court system is structured, it's entirely possible to become bankrupt through litigation that never even results in a judgment. When you threaten to sue someone, you threaten to put them through years of stress and to cost them tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. (The WMF may cover the latter, but there's no guarantee, and I don't believe it covers ancillary costs, not to mention the effects of the stress.) So it's no small matter. But if he can retract that threat, I'm very much open to an unblock. (No promises, but definitely not a hard no.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 19:30, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Hi Tamzin. I doubt if the person that Mr. Hamilton threatened legal action towards would be concerned judging by their behavior. Other people would be yes. I'd probably agree with you there. Anyway, he only has a month or two to go. I have no issue with what you say. So we'll leave it as it is and see how he comes back in the new year. Anyway, I hope you have a nice time during this Christmas season and best wishes for 2024. Cheers Karl Twist (talk) 08:01, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Glancing back at this thread during my annual talkpage cleanup... Hamilton appears to still be active elsewhere on 2601:601::/32 (block range · block log (global) · WHOIS (partial)) as recently as July on Special:PageHistory/Judd Hamilton and Special:PageHistory/Caroline Munro. That's a massive range, but given it's just two articles he targets, and that he has done so consistently for years, and that an WP:NLT block on an IP should be reüpped if they continue after the tempblock ends, a partial rangeblock seems like a good idea here. @Elli, since you've been getting good at well-targeted long IP blocks, could you consider the following? Please block 2601:601::/32 from pages <Judd Hamilton|Caroline Munro> with expiry 5 years (anon. only, account creation allowed): self-promotion and legal threats; see https://w.wiki/BwFU (length based on activity since 2018). -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 07:44, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Sorry; was a bit busy. I have done so now. Elli (talk | contribs) 06:47, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Writer's Barnstar
	I just spent a few hours looking through the articles you list on your userpage, and was very impressed, by how interesting the articles are and by how well researched and written they are. Thanks for your valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, and happy end-of-year-month! Eddie891 Talk Work 20:35, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

A very belated thanks for this, @Eddie891! Got seven new articles since then!  Advisory Neighborhood Commission district 7F08 (my least-viewed article but one of the most interesting), F1NN5TER, Ray cat,  When a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they are going to have the last word (the longest GA title by words),  Terminology of transgender anatomy,  Celebrity Number Six, and  Death of Richard Swanson. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 07:56, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Comments on close at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Emoji redirects

Hey, thank you for the greatly detailed and in-depth analysis of the AfC over at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Emoji redirects. Always appreciate when someone goes the extra mile. That was a great summary with good guidance for the future!

Cheers, microbiologyMarcus ^{(petri dish·growths)} 19:40, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Someday you may join the green side!

If you ever find yourself wanting to collaborate with someone on a green side article, I'm your anthropomorphic plant. I'll find a lovely red link or stub with amazing pictures on iNaturalist and maybe even a weird fact and teach you all the "secrets" to understanding the strange language of Botanese. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 06:05, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Not trying to invite the wrath of the evil eye, but...

and maybe there's some reason you want all 142 of these conversations here, but if there isn't, maybe do some archiving? They have bots for that, you know. :D Valereee (talk) 20:40, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Valereee. Your punishment for asking this forbidden question will be getting this whole schpiel in return. Eye (heh) of the beholder as to whether that makes me an agent of the evil eye.

So, when I started to understand my dissociative identity disorder in late 2020, I wound up with a lot of great insights into myself, but also wound up a lot less functional than before. Basically everything I did was on impulse, and it took exceptional energy to plan things out more than a day in advance. In a lot of ways that made life Hell, but that bare-minimum stability meant that I could slowly tug my mental health to where it needed to be, in order for me to be the person my family deserved. And eventually I got to that place, got to create the happy domesticated polycule life I'd dreamt of, but I still was stuck on that 24-hour planning loop.

And so in all that time, about 3 years, responding to messages was the hardest thing. I set a hard rule for myself that any ADMINACCT inquiries got a drop-everything response, because at any slower pace there was no guarantee I'd remember to reply at all. Once something fell off that 24-hour radar, I often forgot about it entirely. Every few months I'd comb through old messages and reply to some, and leave others. But it was always a losing battle.

So, that's the "maybe ... some reason": I've left a lot of messages up because I'd rather respond late than never (and, for ones I've already responded to, or that don't need no response, the same phenomenon's always made it hard to remember to archive/remove). Now, for all my willingness to speak about mental health in the abstract, I generally dislike explaining on-wiki issues with "because mental illness". The reason I'm answering this now is because all of this stopped being true about two weeks ago! And I'm excited about that and wanted to take a moment (at the expense of your reading patience, no doubt) to commemorate it. After three years of figuring out my DID, it turned out that if certain parts of me merged with certain other parts, the result was a combined part with an actual working memory, healthy sleep schedule, and much better disposition. It's pretty awesome! I've spent a lot of the past two weeks doing things like place important phone calls and then get really excited about how I just totally placed that phone call without forgetting for 6 months. On-wiki, I've been working on my "white whale" draft, which I'd wandered away from for the third time in July. (I shan't link. 🪬) And so, this is a fortuitous time for you to remind me about these back messages. I'll try and get to them this week. :) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 04:42, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Hey, T! Well, first, I'm so happy for you that whatever strategy you've found is working so well that you're feeling a true sense of delight with it! That's great. And second, I get it about needing to keep messages "live" (for want of a better term) in order to prevent yourself from forgetting them. I use my email inbox the same way -- if a message needs responding to but I'm not ready to respond, I remark it as unread. It's not a great solution -- I have messages months old that need responding to. Oops, including an invoice that's probably at least that old, yow. :D At any rate, third, I intended more gentle ribbing than anything else, and apologies for getting into mental health territory with that, it hadn't occurred to me that might be what I was doing. Valereee (talk) 11:35, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I take no offense, @Valereee. I just enjoyed the chance to give a brief update on where I'm at, since I don't think I've said much on-wiki about that since August. Also thank you for reminding me I need to pay an invoice. (Got to pay for the new solar panels! Very exciting. We'll see if they pay for themselves before '44 repeats itself.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 18:48, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm very happy to read this, especially the part about the benefits of your internal M&A. (Who says they're all bad?) You were a great person to chat with when I was regularly in the Discord VC, and I miss those days. Come by WP:WMNYC sometime if you feel up to it! <3 SWinxy (talk) 06:46, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

I just assume those with long user/user talk pages are in a contest with @EEng: -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 10:55, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you

It's truly sad to see you resign, knowing how much you mean to the admin team. Your work as an admin has a significant impact, but I completely understand and respect your decision. I'm not asking you to reconsider because I respect your choice. I sincerely hope you'll still be around to offer your valuable advice and continue your great work. Thank you so much for everything you've done as an admin. – DreamRimmer (talk) 17:16, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Tamzin, I'm not going to try to talk you out of resigning, because you know what's best for yourself, but you've consistently exceeded expectations as an admin and your presence on the admin team will certainly be missed. I'm glad you aren't retiring from the project entirely, I'm sure we can expect many more interesting articles from you in the future. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 17:23, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

What the others said. And your frankness in stepping back and evaluating your own behaviour is greatly admired. If and when you are ever ready to work as an admin again, know that you will be well-placed to mentor a new generation of admins and break the vicious cycle. Of course, content work is no mean feat either, and it is integral and central to a complete encyclopedia. Kind regards, Wilhelm Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_{my edits}) 18:59, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I echo what the others have said: you've been a net positive to the project, in all respects. Thank you for your service as an admin, and cheers to many more years of building the encyclopedia. :) sawyer * he/they * talk 21:42, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Most of Wikipedia is a cesspit and the worst part is that it drags down people who are here to build an encyclopedia. Something I've been working hard on for the last couple of years is only engaging in activities that help build an encyclopedia and in being as positive as I can (with things like Challenges). — Bilorv (talk) 09:11, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

<3 You were a good admin, Tamzin. Good on you for continuing on the content side, and all the best, both here and IRL - DFlhb (talk) 12:45, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

You're completely right about the toxic culture here, but Wikipedia is so resistant to change that I doubt it will be fixed in the foreseeable future. It can be very discouraging at times, and there have been multiple times where I've also considered stepping back to focus on what really matters. Thank you for all of your work as an admin, and I hope to see you continuing to build an encyclopedia in the future. — Ingenuity (talk • contribs) 14:41, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Seconding everything said above. You've consistently been one of the few admins willing to speak out and take action when you see problems rather than ignore or perpetuate them. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:23, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

+1 — Callitropsis🌲[talk · contribs] 20:00, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Although perhaps a novice editor, I agree that a lot of editors lose sight of what the point actually is. Thanks for your admin work, Tamzin. _Dial^mayo 14:45, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Burn the candle only at one end, probably wise. Luck. Selfstudier (talk) 15:05, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your service, Tamzin... just noticed your resignation on BN. You have been an excellent admin and editor throughout your wikicareer and I'm sure others will say the same. Prodraxis _(talk) 21:08, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for all of your admin work, Tamzin, and good luck with whatever projects you work on next. QuicoleJR (talk) 13:18, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Tamzin, I only just found out, and I want to let you know how much I appreciate you, and how much I appreciate your work here. Definitely, your own well-being matters far more than mopping up some messes on a website. If you ever feel like talking to me about it, you know where my talk page is. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:09, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, @Tryptofish. Honestly it's not about my own wellbeing. It's about... I don't know, the only phrase I can think of to describe it is the Toki Pona term nasin pona—nasin meaning 'path' and pona meaning any of '[of] correctness', '[of] goodness', '[of] simplicity', or '[of] peace'. Part of that's about one's own wellbeing, sure. But the greater part is about one's place in the world. At a certain point I realized that I was interacting with the world in a way that didn't match my own sense of self. And then recent events solidified my feeling that this was not a space I wanted to be a part of. (More Toki Pona philosophizing: 'want' and 'need' aren't separate things; instead there's only superseding degrees of wile.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 20:33, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

That's a very thoughtful reply. For what it's worth, one fish's opinion is that getting more in touch with one's most appropriate path is very much a part of achieving well-being. But whatever the inner motivation, I understand the dissatisfaction with the culture at this website, and I wish you well. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:32, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

• Some of the stuff we deal with here isn't that nice, but in my experience you were. I'm certainly glad you're not taking off entirely, and hope I'll still run into you. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 19:41, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
• I'd missed this. There has been a lot of loss in the community this year. Heal gently. Glad to see you're still planning to stay around and I look forward to continuing to work with you. Star Mississippi 16:56, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
• Sorry I'm only seeing this now, Tamzin. Echoing others above, it's sad to lose you (for now) from the admin corps, but I'm glad you're still around in a capacity that works for you, and looking forward to working with you on content going forward! Sdkb ^talk 00:02, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
• Thank you for your service, Tamzin. I have only good words to say about your tenure as an admin and have always found you to be a very helpful person. I'm glad to hear you aren't fully retiring, and will certainly see you around! Patient Zero^talk 00:59, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
• I'm sad to see you leave the admin corps, but I hope that it allows you to become a more productive Wikipedian and a happier person. I've mostly quit anti-vandalism work for content creation and I feel like I've actually made a difference. Hope to see you around soon! ❤HistoryTheorist❤ 06:12, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

  Also, how did my name end up in the Wikihate section? How did Nosebagbear/you get a hold of my name and put it there? I'm really confused. ❤HistoryTheorist❤ 06:16, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

  never mind, I get what the trolling means ;) ❤HistoryTheorist❤ 06:18, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

• I only just now saw this. Your resignation comes at a time when I most likely came to the same realization as you. Two months ago, it dawned on me that I should have never been talking negatively about other editors behind their backs. I feel like such a better person.. I am genuinely happy for you. Scorpions1325 (talk) 23:14, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
• +1 all of this. Thank you for your service as an admin and best of luck in your future endeavors. Queen of Hearts talk
  she/they
  stalk 15:25, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
• Only just now saw this, via admin newsletter. But I couldn't not chime in and thank you for your admin work and continuing content work, and also for trying to steer things in a more friendly direction. DMacks (talk) 12:43, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
• Thank you very much for your contributions! Completely understand your reasons for taking a break ( :( ). Hope that you might return to admin work, if you'd like, sometime in the future. Frostly (talk) 19:19, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
• #Content SWinxy (talk) 23:17, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
• I'm surprised to see that you resigned. While we have not seen eye-to-eye on many issues, you were a good administrator and were able to isolate your opinions of what policy should be from your application of the existing rules. That is the most important skill that an administrator can have, because the administrator toolset is for enforcing community consensus and the editor toolset is often for trying to change it. Since I trust your perspective on whether or not you should be using the tools, I won't say you're making a mistake, but if you start another RfA, you can expect my support. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 03:14, 27 May 2024 (UTC)
• I somehow just came across this -- it slipped through my radar -- when I was confused by your lack of an admin flag in a page history, figured a script was on the fritz...boy, was I surprised. I'm sorry to see that you have given up the bit but do understand your reasoning and empathize. Thank you for your work as an admin, Tamzin. It might not have felt like it but it was greatly appreciated by myself and others. I hope to still see you around the 'pedia. ♥ --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 05:42, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	For your diligent edits throughout the encyclopedia, as well as getting to the bottom of a possible misquote at Jo Clifford. I know you're on a bit of a break at the moment, but just want to let you know your contributions and kind words are still appreciated! GnocchiFan (talk) 08:28, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

draft

Would you have any interest in vetting the History section at User:Valereee/ Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender to remove any stupidity or ignorance on my part? (Any TPS also invited to edit.) Valereee (talk) 13:46, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Please Self-Revert

Hello, please self-revert your latest edit to the MfD or I will be bringing this matter to the ANI for violating WP:NPA. Thank you Durchbruchmüller 22:07, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Lol fuck off. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:08, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Tamzin, would you like to go to ANI and dance that dance, or shall I just block them? Drmies (talk) 22:15, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

A sock, Doc? Such a shock. Good block. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:20, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Well that was fun. Nice alliteration. Do you want to go to that MfD and strike out all their comments? Enjoy, Drmies (talk) 22:21, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, I have a previously scheduled trepanation that seems much more pleasant. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:24, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Hmm I'm sorry to hear that. What's for dinner? Drmies (talk) 22:28, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Me, if they do it wrong. Got a 100% discount for agreeing to that. But I trust Fat Sal and his whole team at the auto body shop. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:32, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Acceptable descriptions of a person

Back in February, you told me that a living person's page needed to be more neutral than I had it.

Would it be appropriate to include a description that a company was criticized for being transphobic, if two sources I have (articles from LGBTQ Nation and The Mary Sue) characterize the organization as that?

Article One: Ex-Levi's president launches anti-trans sports clothing brand XX-XY Athletics

Article Two: Former Levi's Exec and COVID Denier Launches First Transphobic Clothing Line Rhino Ryan (talk) 01:58, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Two responses

Today I got around to publishing two responses to things people have been asking me about.

The first is in response to queries, comments, and well-wishes by, among others, @DreamRimmer, Trainsandotherthings, Wilhelm Tell aDCCXLVI, Sawyer777, Bilorv, DFlhb, Ingenuity, Thebiguglyalien, Callitropsis, Dialmayo, Selfstudier, ~delta, QuicoleJR, Tryptofish, Seraphimblade, Star Mississippi, Sdkb, Patient Zero, HistoryTheorist, Queen of Hearts, DMacks, Frostly, SWinxy, TheSandDoctor, The Night Watch, JBW, Valereee, JPxG, Xeno, and RadioactiveBoulevardier. (If you've had something to say and I missed your name, please take no offense.) I recorded this back in March, in response to many of y'all either asking why I'd resigned, saying you hoped to see me back, or equally saying you completely understood. I never got around to editing it down, but was spurred to do that after a conversation yesterday with Vami_IV (Z''L)'s sister, so, here it is: File:On the backrooms.ogg. Transcript available at c:TimedText:On the backrooms (essay by Tamzin).oga.en.srt for those deaf, hard of hearing, or just not that interested into listening to my voice for 22:52—although I do think it works best as audio.

The second is in response to "Wikipedia's Indian problem: settler colonial erasure of native American knowledge and history on the world’s largest encyclopedia" by Kyle Keeler: User:Tamzin/Public response to the editors of Settler Colonial Studies. (CC Gråbergs Gråa Sång.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 21:41, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We share some of the same. I think everytime people scream Cabal/Unblockables (I'm guilty of the latter) they tend to get partially ignored because their behavior is under a microscope for something. However, there's often a grain of truth. I'm a legacy editor and some of us are wonderful, but some legacy editors have burnt out and it comes across and its part of why AN* is a cesspool. Yes, there are the POV pushers and trolls, but there are also a lot of us (I include myself on both sides of this) hashing old grudges and it's not productive. If I'd been AWOL long enough pre COVID I'd likely never have asked for the mop back. I try not to be part of the problem, but I know I'm not always the solution either. I wish you peace with your decision and hope to still see you around. Star Mississippi 01:59, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Well that's the thing, isn't it, Star. The people who have good introspection are never the ones who need to have it. I can't recall ever having a problem with how you handled anything... But either way, like I said, the problem is rarely the individuals, and much more often the system we've all created. And I don't have a solution for that really, other than to back away and hope someone else fixes it eventually. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 02:16, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Same. I always felt your actions or lack thereof in a case were backed up by reason and logic. Star Mississippi 02:33, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

Still thinking, will probably get back to you soon. The Night Watch (talk) 02:09, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

I'm making a recording for you. I've never been a good speaker and it probably won't be as good as yours, but I'll try. The Night Watch (talk) 17:38, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

as a newer editor (i've only been consistently active since last august or so) and an autistic person, and as someone who loves people-watching and lurking around trying to understand the dynamics of human social capital, i've found wikipedia to be well... exactly how you describe. i have a bad habit of reading ANI (i've even got it open in a tab as i type this) & trawling through the depths of past arbcom proceedings purely out of fascination; i could point to several threads on ANI right now that are crystal-clear examples of the double standards you point out. i've even found myself falling into the mindset of "do i have enough social capital to bring this up [to ANI, etc], or should i just hope that someone else more 'senior' than i will see it too and do something about it". i really appreciate you putting this into words, and since joining i've found your willingness to speak your mind, both onwiki & on discord, refreshing.

i've never fully read through Vami's RfA nor yours, and i don't plan on it at this point, but i knew Vami for a few too-short months mostly via the discord server. i was kind of surprised when in january he offered to collaborate with me on Gates of Heaven Synagogue, as in my mind i was a lowly noob with a single GA and he an Experienced Content Writer - i recall finding out about how he'd been treated previously shortly before his death, and i guess i don't have a single solid conclusion to this thought, but it's made me reflect a lot on my short tenure here. i think we can all learn a lot from Vami, and like him, be kind and collegial regardless of early-2000s notions of social capital that still have such a grip on projectspace. ... sawyer * he/they * talk 04:56, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

If i understood it right, you sent that to the journal. I'd be interested to hear of any response you get. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:51, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: I tried at least! I used the online correction request form, about 30 minutes after I published the page on-wiki. But I didn't receive any confirmation of receipt. Maybe T&F doesn't do that? Guess we'll see. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 16:44, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Apparently it did make it through! ... To the help desk for all of T&F, who have now forwarded it to the journal's production team. Will keep y'all posted. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 17:23, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Very thoughtful analysis in both. If you're healthier and happier not being an admin, I'm glad for you that you made that choice. I 100% agree that the effects of social capital on the culture here are often dismaying. Valereee (talk) 13:47, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

I want to thank you for posting this. It was thought-provoking. I took it in, yesterday, and waited a day before deciding how I wanted to reply. Most importantly, I agree with Valereee that what matters is what makes you healthier and happier. As I often say, it's only a website. The other thing that occurs to me is that a while back I wrote WP:DEFARGE out of concerns about drama boards that are at least somewhat similar to your own concerns. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:48, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

I am thankful for your response, Tamzin. There were serious inaccuracies with what Mr. Keeler wrote. I have no doubt he is an amazing professor but he got his research wrong if that was his ultimate summation of Wikipedia and editors here. For a bit of clarity, Corbie and I clashed at times, usually over newbie mistakes I made in haste of trying to improve articles, in good faith, but ending up not doing so. We also clashed on ideas I think were miscommunications that, for my part, I don't think I took in consideration enough. But I loved Corbie being here as another voice. I never had an issue with her position on Indigenous topics as we generally lined up. My issue with her is found in what was discovered or was relayed in the AN discussion you started.

I took part in the discussion on Talk:Reservation Dogs where Revirvlkodlaku was being disruptive and received a block from Mark Ironie. There was never any indication Mark knew Corbie or had any connection or, despite the valid reason for a block, I would have asked for a review. Look, there may be people that don't like me here, that think I make poor arguments or have misguided positions. I accept criticism. Some may even question how real I am about my positions or who I am. But the fact is I try to show in everything, whether I am right or wrong, I am at least genuine and I stand for something. I admire that quality in others. As much as I want Corbie and IG here, and I so do (I miss them), I was floored by the information Corbie and Mark knew each other and in my view that made Mark an involved admin and he shouldn't have made the block.

You made a fine admin and your resignation, though painful to see, was understandable. I appreciated your candidness and thoroughness with what you wrote. I hope there is a response to your open letter. Tamzin, when I say I wish all health and happiness to you I mean ever single word. Thank you for your service as an admin. --ARoseWolf 18:32, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

One of the things that I liked about your on the backrooms statement is it gave an excellent description to something that came up here, where I said It is unfortunate that CTOP often serves to set a minefield for newer editors who don't know how to play the WP:GAME. and caught a ration of shit from Nyb about it. I replied, in part, with I certainly hope that I didn't come across as supporting or aspiring "playing the game" and marching in rigid formation. That's just how editing in CTOPs plays out with the sanctions regime in place, and the long-term editors in those topics know how to toe the line, and often how to get others to flinch over it. That is not good, bad, and certainly not the way things should work. However, it is the way things work. You just happened to explain it much better than I. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 18:56, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for both of these. And thank you from the bottom of my heart for providing a transcript of the audio file! I was very surprised by some of the things you said there. (I would never have thought you shared my distaste for being a hall monitor/prefect!) I may share my thoughts, here or in an e-mail. But I have one serious niggle about your Signpost letter that I'm going to post as a comment there. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:33, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

I joined this site immediately after COVID lockdowns began. My mental model of Wikipedia reminds me a lot of politics and the judiciary in a democracy like in America. Social capital is sowed and reaped to enact changes, and uninvolved people make binding decisions like a judge would. I think it's a useful framework to use. It diverges with the fact that we're not really a bureaucracy or a democracy, but the roles and norms are the same. But lawyers and judges and justices following norms is something great.

No one person is capable of reading all of ANI. Users go in and out inconsistently, resulting in inconsistent outcomes. (I never considered this to present a challenge to some on the autistic spectrum, and it's worth more of my time to consider.) One useful trick I think we ought to learn from circuit courts is the randomization of assigning cases (i.e. threads) to an admin in a pool. Their specialization is to deal with these cases, and dole out decisions consistently. Likewise, some users specialize in being justices, sitting on the supreme court (an analogy I think is unassailable). Specialization matters, even here when power is so evenly-distributed.

But halfway between when I joined and now, around 2022, is when I think I started to see other editors as colleagues. Proper colleagues. I imagine everyone in a discussion as sitting around a drawing room in a mansion, fire blazing, we're all in red robes drinking wine. We're asking each other deep questions and debating to get to some truth, putting on different hats. Other times I imagine them as researchers doing their own research, as a scholar. But still colleagues. My shift to this thinking has been positive: I get less frustrated and more complacent with the wills of other people when things don't go my way. It's all culture and capital, but it's also in the eye of the beholder. I can summarily reject any cultural capital someone has accrued. And we can get more ideal outcomes that way, individually. Maybe. SWinxy (talk) 04:42, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

barnstar

		The Barnstar of Diplomacy
		For an adroit close on a complex RfC Chetsford (talk) 06:03, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

A bowl of strawberries for you!

Thank you for your effort in closing the ADL multi-RFC. It is greatly appreciated. starship.paint (RUN) 15:30, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

A TARDIS for you

A rouge TARDIS (or the closest thing I could find on Commons), for having made a closure so Rouge that its effects travelled through time and were being challenged before you even issued it. . . . But to be serious, I appreciate that you undertook to close, and closed so thoughtfully, such a large and complex discussion even as it was getting international attention and pushback. Someone had to do it; the discussion was open for so long as to suggest no-one wanted to do it; I appreciate you doing it. -sche (talk) 16:08, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

TFA

story · music · places

Thank you today for Capri-Sun, written together, introduced: "Capri-Sun debuted in West Germany in 1969. Since then, it has become a global brand, one made distinctive by its stand-up Doy-N-Pack pouch. Growing up, you could find a Capri-Sun in the lunchbox of that kid you hated. These days you can find them center-stage in French hip-hop culture as "the new ostentatious elixir of French rappers and gangsters". In the United States, Capri Sun is associated with wholesome things like picnics, soccer practice, and having for 16 years been licensed to one of the world's largest tobacco companies, which applied its expertise at both selling products to children and misleading the public about products' health effects, in a marketing strategy so effective that you're probably still thinking about that kid from two sentences ago. Childhood consumption of sugary beverages increased, and so did childhood obesity, but admittedly Pacific Cooler does taste great. - Initially, Tamzin and I thought this was gonna be a quick adventure – we thought we'd quickly flip a good number of soft drink articles, maybe even get a good topic. Capri-Sun quickly proved to be no insignificant task, though – it's the longest article either of us can put our names on, with every word of prose written from scratch. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive independent work on Capri-Sun in existence. We got it to GA in early 2023 after a couple months' work, making it one of two GAs on a soft drink and the only one on a juice beverage. Then, it just sat for a while. But after dusting off the ol' thing and giving it the last few bits it was missing, it is with much pride and added sugar that we finally push this towards the finish line. :)"! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:31, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Hey Tamzin! I did not see until today this was your project. I read Capri-Sun on the front page and very much enjoyed it. Nice stuff! BusterD (talk) 03:20, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Admin's Barnstar
		I stated in the discussion below the vote that I felt quite bad for whichever poor admin got tasked with closing the ADL RfC - props for being one of the ones to do so! The Kip (contribs) 21:40, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

@The Kip: Thanks! Although I've got some bad news for you about your choice of barnstar. 😛 -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:04, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Whoops, my bad haha. I'll leave it as-is, though - thought that counts and all that. The Kip ^(contribs) 22:05, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

I'm glad it was you two helping The Wordsmith performing the close. I can't say I agree 100% with your close, which (by my reckoning) puts your pitch right in the sweet spot. Thanks for taking that responsibility with leek. BusterD (talk) 03:30, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

I'll have you know, BusterD, that according to (an otherwise pretty good piece by) the JTA, The Wordsmith, leek, and I are all a single editor. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 03:51, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Ha hahahahaha. Hahah! Hah! Hah! Huhhah! Hooooooohaaaaaah! Hahahahahahahahahahahaha. Hhahahahahahahaha. Haha. Haha. ha. ha. ah. Ahem. BusterD (talk) 04:40, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

That would put you all in violat.... hahhhahahahahahahahaha! Hoooooohaaaaaaah! Ohhhhhhhh hahhhhhhhh! I'm sorry... BusterD (talk) 04:43, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

First people called me a sock for being more than one person. Now they call me a sock for being less than one! -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 04:47, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Keep: I agree wholeheartedly with Tamzin. Right as always. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 05:05, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

That would be an extraordinary claim. And we all know extraordinary claims have steep sourcing requirements. Mere accusation may have worked for some previously. Here you'd need proof AND a consensus. It's amazing how some people don't realize this almost always works in justice's favor. If ad hominem is all they've got, you've already won the argument. BusterD (talk) 05:08, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you

Hi, Tamzin. I don't think we've ever interacted on WP but there's a first time for everything, right?

Your userpage has frankly given me a lot of pause recently. Especially your "On the backrooms" off-the-cuff essay (I read the captions instead though!) and this: if you find yourself spending more time talking about the people who write wikipedia than being one of those people, remember that you can fix that today

I indeed have found myself in that camp and I'm actually studying sociology at the moment as well... so the "social capital" of WP has taken on a much more sad meaning to me. Knowing that an ugly but I guess inevitable part of society has made its way onto this project is... yeah, pretty sad. petty. Waste of time. Pretty much WP:ANI in a nutshell. There is also literally no reason for us--for me--to not be nice to fellow editors. It's easy to bring out our 'mean' sides when a screen separates us.

I'd like to do better with my article writing and constructive contribution. And thank you for steering me (and I'm sure many others) towards the right direction, towards the things that actually MATTER. Every article makes an amazing impact for crying out loud. I always find myself on here researching things I'm studying, and oftentimes, WP beats any other lame search result Google could give me. And that is thanks to the tireless (and often thankless) hard work of editors like Vami--I'd like to be a completionist, to honor his good name with good editing... not a quarreler. — That Coptic Guy^{ping me!} (talk) (contribs) 05:21, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

heartfelt subject goes here

		The LGBT Barnstar
		hi, i don't really know exactly what to put here but i guess i'll just thank you, tamzin, for inspiring me to edit. you were really an inspiration. and even though i don't edit much i'm forever indebted to you in helping me find a new hyperfixation and transitioning from a wikipedia reader to editor (sometimes) and eepy girl. have a splendiferous day <3 pali sina li pona e nasin mi. pauliesnug (message / contribs) 10:00, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Washington DC

I need to switch to your brand of coffee. Wow! Thanks for that - JohnInDC (talk) 12:16, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

@JohnInDC: A few weeks clean from it, actually! Did have some Wawa store-brand Arnold Palmer midway through, though. Plus maybe I was a little late on my lithium. Anyways, hope the list is of some use plotting a way forward. My schedule's a bit wonky the next few weeks, running up and down the Northeast Corridor to deal with two and a half familial medical crises, but I hope to get some editing time in on the D.C. article, and I think I've found a few people who'll have time to do deeper dives than I can.

On that note, if any talkpage watchers are in D.C.: 1) I will be there from late on the 5th to midday on the 9th, with moderate availability, and am always happy to grab lunch or coffee (well, not actual coffee, see above) with just about anyone, schedule permitting; and 2) feel free to check out Washington, D.C. and its talk page for discussion of what might need to be done to keep it at FA. Or in the latter case if you're not in D.C. but just like a challenge. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 21:07, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Follow up

On your interesting Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-06-08/Opinion

May I suggest linking your work from PubPeer entry on the academic article in question, to give it more visibility? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 14:25, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

@Piotrus: I don't have the fight in me for all that, but if you'd like to, by all means! -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 17:28, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

@Tamzin Done (I left a comment linking to your piece). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:30, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Would this be a useful essay? Or is this topic either irrelevant or sufficiently covered?

Hey, I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to you because of your excellent work on Wikipedia:Hate is disruptive, as well as the discussion at Talk:F1NN5TER about doxxing. The question of how to treat sources that are at least somewhat reliable but are (rightly or wrongly) perceived as prejudiced (either broadly or based on protected class) has been repeatedly discussed on Wiki. Therefore, I think that writing up a „how-to-deal-with-this“ might be useful, titled something along the line of WP:PREJUDICEDSOURCES. What do you think? FortunateSons (talk) 14:48, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Kolkata close

I didn't comment in the RFC, but had been keeping an eye on it. That was one of the most clearly written and well rationed closes I've seen in awhile, so I thought I'd give you a whale to help with your cetacean needs. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:13, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

To be fair, her need for cetaceans is seriously overstated. Elli (talk | contribs) 17:18, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, @ActivelyDisinterested! I may have plenty of cetaceans, but you can never have too many... is something I imagine a B-movie mad scientist character saying. (See also Anderson, M.T. (2005). Whales on Stilts.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 17:32, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

@Tamzin, thank you for the clear and informative close. Would you consider bolding it is not made at the behest of the Supreme Court of India? It's just that the media has been synthesizing together "Supreme Court demands Wikipedia to remove name" and "Wikipedia removes name" together in headlines. Svampesky (talk) 18:07, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

@Svampesky: I actually did have it boldfaced in the first draft, but I decided I didn't want to put too fine a point on that and come off as hostile. I think it's best to let people read the full close and focus on whichever details they want to. But I might be convinced otherwise if there's particularly glaring media misunderstandings. Can you point to ones you've seen? I only see [1], which predates my close. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 18:19, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

The Hindu headline you referenced and Business Standard: Kolkata rape case: SC orders financial probe, Wikipedia to remove names [2]. They are both broadsheets or newspapers of record, so anything printed in them (including synthesized headlines) would be trusted by the general reader. Svampesky (talk) 18:48, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

@Svampesky: But these both seem to be about the order and the WMF's response, not the RfC's outcome? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 20:04, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

The name was preemptively removed before the RfC closed, and the synthesized headlines give the impression that this removal was done in response to a court order. I believe we need to strongly emphasize that we didn't do that, in the case of further misreporting/synthesized headlines. Svampesky (talk) 20:21, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

I see your point, but I'm still not sold that boldfacing that bit would do more good than harm. Imagine a mischaracterizatiom in the opposite direction: "Western Wikipedians reject Indian Supreme Court's authority". It was a delicate edge to walk, and I'm still inclined to let the full close speak for itself. Do others have thoughts? Pings @ActivelyDisinterested & also @Johnuniq, Cabayi, and Chaotic Enby, since they thanked me for the close. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:03, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

I would think boldfacing it could help, as I don't really see that mischaracterization as being equally harmful (we are, indeed, not making editorial decisions based on court authorities), while it might otherwise be missed by journalists conflating our close with the Supreme Court order.

However, you make a good point that we shouldn't have this close appear to be coming from a Western perspective, and input from Indian Wikipedians more knowledgeable with their country's media and cultural norms would be far superior to my own thoughts on that whole matter. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 22:14, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately there's nothing that can be done on Wikipedia about news sources incorrectly reporting the details. The close is clear about the issues involved and the rejection of the court order as a controlling factor. Personally I don't see a need to bold those words. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:17, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

I am fairly confident that, unfortunate though it is, the ship has already sailed on our making the parties to the court case, the court itself, the broader stakeholders, and the world at large aware of the fact that this was in essence a voluntary decision predicated on internal policies and considerations. Bluntly, the community was asleep at the wheel on this one: the ultimate decision was more or less a foregone conclusion, and the time to codify it as such was before Wikipedia was made party to the case--or at the very least, before the ruling was rendered. Now we have left outside institutions in general, and the Supreme Court and government of India in particular, with the possible impression that we acceded to their authority and judgment.

That could very well factor in to a future decision by the court (or any number of other entities) to similarly attempt to force our hand on content they deem actionable under the domestic law of a particular country. With very little guarantee that next time our own eventual analysis of the issue will align our consensus decision with what is wanted by the court/sovereign seeking to enforce its decision on any such future occasion. This is a bad precedent that didn't need to happen, which could play into future tensions between the community, outside parties, and the WMF. I'm not sure exactly what they are, but I am certain there are lessons to be learned from this situation about seeking broader community input in such cases long before the point of such problematic outcomes. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 06:33, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Oh, but the point that brought me here in the first place: I too wish to thank Tamzin for taking on the highly visible close and making a good account of themselves at the task. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 06:36, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Anyone wanting to make a political statement should consider adding something to their user page. This kind of issue will arise again and each case will have to be handled on its merits. Pointing to some bold text on an old talk page won't help. If an article were written like that close, it would get an immediate FA rating. Johnuniq (talk) 00:54, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

• Well done. And my compliments are not given too often, so take it for what it's worth, but you did a truly good job on this close. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 07:14, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

  Thank you, @Seraphimblade, and @The Herald below. I wonder if there'd be any interest in an essay on writing difficult closes? Not the consensus-weighing part—hopefully anyone taking on a high-profile close already knows how to do that—but the strategies of how to phrase things in a way that will leave everyone... maybe not happy, but at least not enraged. Or maybe someone's already written such an essay, I don't know. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 18:10, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

  It's an essay I'd love to read. If there's already one, a link would be so helpful. Thanks. — The Herald (Benison) (talk) 19:00, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

  I do not know of any, but there really probably should be. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 02:19, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your work on that close, quite impressive. I'm looking forward to reading your close on this (so far hypothetical) rfc:[3]. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:16, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: It begins "First, we must consider the arguments raised regarding tenure, neutrality, cross-wiki experience, and representativeness of the global community as a whole", and ends "There being no consensus, but a null outcome not being an option, I find that the least bad solution is to go with the person who satisfies all four of those criteria while having done the least to upset anyone. My first thought, Example, is actually only attached on a few wikis, and for whatever reason is sockblocked on Commons. Instead I select MediaWiki message delivery, albeit with some trepidation given its erstwhile 2-minute block on enwiki, and given the time it added [[Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo|bison]] to a few thousand pages and I had to clean it up. In the highly likely event that this close is overturned but no new consensus is found, my fallback pick is whoever closes the overturn discussion." -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 07:36, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much for writing that, made my day! @Ravensfire, you don't want to miss this, but careful with the soda. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:44, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Tamzin, you might find this [4][5] a bit interesting. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:36, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you

Thriley has given you a pack of Toblerone bars! Chocolate promotes WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Toblerone bars are wonderfully delicious! Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a pack of Toblerone bars, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend.

Fantastic work on Celebrity Number Six!

Spread the goodness of Toblerone bars by adding {{subst:Toblerone for you}} to someone's talk page with a friendly message!

Thriley (talk) 20:01, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

Some baklava for you!

For that brilliant Kolkata RfC close. I was just happy to see your name and edit summary on my watchlist, and I knew it will be an amazing well detailed close. Arigato :) The Herald (Benison) (talk) 02:42, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Deletion to Quality Award for Celebrity Number Six

		The Deletion to Quality Award
		For your contributions to bring Celebrity Number Six (prior candidate for deletion at: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Celebrity Number Six) to Good Article status, I hereby present you The Deletion to Quality Award. Congratulations on this rare accomplishment, and thanks for all you do for Wikipedia's readers! TompaDompa (talk) 14:52, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, TompaDompa, and thank you for the thorough GA review! I actually have a second candidate for this pending at GAN right now, this one a proper AfD save that I was even a delete on initially, Death of Richard Swanson (AfD). -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 18:06, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Invitation to participate in a research

Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation is conducting a survey of Wikipedians to better understand what draws administrators to contribute to Wikipedia, and what affects administrator retention. We will use this research to improve experiences for Wikipedians, and address common problems and needs. We have identified you as a good candidate for this research, and would greatly appreciate your participation in this anonymous survey.

You do not have to be an Administrator to participate.

The survey should take around 10-15 minutes to complete. You may read more about the study on its Meta page and view its privacy statement .

Please find our contact on the project Meta page if you have any questions or concerns.

Kind Regards,

WMF Research Team

BGerdemann (WMF) (talk) 19:27, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

pona tawa sina

	pona
	sina pali mute. sina utala e ike la, sina pona tawa mi. (English translation follows. Section title: Good to you. Barnstar title: Good. Comment: You work much. In the context of you fighting evil, you are good in my opinion.) LesbianTiamat (She/Her) (troll/pester) 05:09, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

WikiCup 2024 November newsletter

The 2024 WikiCup has come to an end, with the final round being a very tight race. Our new champion is AirshipJungleman29 (submissions), who scored 2,283 points mainly through 3 high-multiplier FAs and 3 GAs on military history topics. By a 1% margin, Airship beat out last year's champion, BeanieFan11 (submissions), who scored second with 2,264 points, mainly from an impressive 58 GAs about athletes. In third place, Generalissima (submissions) scored 1,528 points, primarily from two FAs on U.S. Librarians of Congress and 20 GAs about various historical topics. Our other finalists are: Sammi Brie (submissions) with 879 points, Hey man im josh (submissions) with 533 points, BennyOnTheLoose (submissions) with 432 points, Arconning (submissions) with 244 points, and AryKun (submissions) with 15 points. Congratulations to our finalists and all who participated!

The final round was very productive, and contestants had 7 FAs, 9 FLs, 94 GAs, 73 FAC reviews, and 79 GAN reviews and peer reviews. Altogether, Wikipedia has benefited greatly from the activities of WikiCup competitors all through the contest. Well done everyone!

All those who reached the final will receive awards and the following special awards will be made, based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. So that the finalists do not have an undue advantage, these prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field in a single round, or in the event of a tie, to the overall leader in this field.

• Generalissima (submissions) wins the featured article prize for 3 FAs in round 4, and 7 FAs overall.
• Hey man im josh (submissions) wins the featured list prize for 23 FLs overall.
• MaranoFan (submissions) wins the featured topic prize for 9 articles in featured topics in round 1.
• Hey man im josh (submissions) wins the featured content reviewer prize for 110 FA/FL reviews overall.
• BeanieFan11 (submissions) wins the good article prize for 58 GAs in round 5, and 70 GAs overall.
• Fritzmann (submissions) wins the good topic prize for 6 articles in good topics in round 2.
• Sammi Brie (submissions) wins the good article reviewer prize for 45 GA reviews in round 2, and 78 GA reviews overall.
• BeanieFan11 (submissions) wins the DYK prize, for 131 Did you know articles overall.
• Muboshgu (submissions) wins the ITN prize, for 15 In the news articles in round 1, and 36 overall.

Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate; the WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2025 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement!

If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Cwmhiraeth (talk · contribs), Epicgenius (talk · contribs), and Frostly (talk · contribs). MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:49, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Death of Richard Swanson

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Death of Richard Swanson you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of WikiOriginal-9 -- WikiOriginal-9 (talk) 21:05, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Death of Richard Swanson

The article Death of Richard Swanson you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Death of Richard Swanson for comments about the article, and Talk:Death of Richard Swanson/GA1 for the nomination. Well done! If the article is eligible to appear in the "Did you know" section of the Main Page, you can nominate it within the next seven days. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of WikiOriginal-9 -- WikiOriginal-9 (talk) 03:02, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Talkpage expectations

I see you have applied Talkpage expectations,I am intrested of applying some to my own talkpage,but how? UnsungHistory (Questions or Concerns?) (See how I messed up) 18:49, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

@UnsungHistory: You can copy the source code at User talk:Tamzin/Expectations and modify accordingly. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 07:18, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Interesting

[6] Drmies (talk) 15:40, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

@Drmies: Yeah, I noticed that too. Possibly better to leave the ES but yeet the IP, rather than the other way around, to leave a clearer record if anyone ever adds it back? (I'd suggest OS over RD; email me if not clear why.)

But yeah, seriously, at least the sixth time I've seen this with a BLPNAME violation being worsened when it turns into deadnaming someone and/or forcing them to overpublicize a transition. A friend's boyfriend, Seph Mozes, reached out to me years ago about the plight of being deadnamed in his mother's article but not having publicly transitioned. I offered to remove it as a BLPNAME violation but he was worried that, given his mother's fame, celebrity journalists would notice the removal. Not a likely event, given that most journalists can't even find the history tab, but I understand why he was that concerned after a childhood in the spotlight, and he shouldn't have been in that position to begin with. I would have been in the same position, during my 9 months of partial social transition in 2019, if Rms125a@hotmail.com hadn't had the sense to remove my name from my dad's article in 2013. In the past few years I've also run into the non-notable-trans/enby kid problem at Mike Tyson and Eric A. Meyer as you know, and also at Terence Tao, Bob Lee (businessman), and Tony Hawk.

Not sure what to do about this. It's not a trans-specific issue, obviously, just more obvious there. BLPNAME violations are ubiquitous, possibly on more bios than not. Perhaps some cleanup project is needed, especially for minor children. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 20:55, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

I'd love to work on that cleanup project or start it! pauliesnug ^{(message / contribs)} 14:52, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Audio Essay

Hi Tamzin. I came here after seeing your post at the Bureaucrats' noticeboard. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to respond there, so I'm posting here instead. I just listened to your audio essay from when you resigned your admin rights. I was so impressed with it. I thought your reasoning was considered, concise and insightful. The part about the computer game, big circles eating up smaller circles especially hit home with me. Social capital does seem to be prevalent here at Wikipedia, a tiny microcosm of life in general, distilled down to a couple of noticeboards. I'm glad you've decided to go back to admin duties and I hope you can return making the changes we need, no matter how big or small.

If you ever need a change of career, you should think about audio books. Probably inappropriate to say this but what the hell, your voice is so soothing lol.

Good luck, Knitsey (talk) 01:19, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, @Knitsey! At some point I'd like to do a whole treatise on the social economics of Wikipedia—for instance, how opposing at RfA is essentially a ritual sacrifice of social capital, while closing a discussion is a gamble, since more social capital lowers the risk of challenge, but a successful challenge costs you a multiple of what you spent. But for now I'm glad the essay gets the general point across.

And I get that a lot about my voice. The secret is that, just like half-baked cookies taste better, doing only half of transfeminine voice training sounds better. :D It's funny you bring that up, though: Yesterday I woke up with a sore throat, and then toward the end of the day found myself suddenly having to console a stranger who was crying, and doing that without my normal voice was like fighting with a hand tied behind my back. Usually I can just say anything and it'll calm someone down. So, uh, if you know anyone looking for audiobook narration with a soothing androgynous voice, sure, hit me up. :) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 01:35, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Social economics and how we calculate trading is definitely something that might interest quite a few people on here. I think a lot of people do it without realising (I include myself somewhat in that) and recognising that trade could help in a change of some behaviours. Or at least give pause for thought.

Transfeminine voice training - I never even thought about that! Now I've gone down the YouTube rabbit hole of voice training when transitioning. I honestly never knew that was a 'thing' but it make complete sense as part of the transitioning process. The thing is, many decades ago whe I started my career it was male dominated and I found that over the first few years, my voice changed so that I didn't stand out as female. I haven't thought about that in years. Knitsey (talk) 01:57, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

My mother experienced the same thing as a TV news producer in the '80s. She's naturally a soprano but learned to be a low alto to differentiate herself from the secretaries. That's actually one of a number of masculine traits she picked up in that line of work, which led to the funny situation that if I ever think "What would Mom do?" in a situation and try to act like her, that's literally the only time anyone reads me as a "sir". -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 02:13, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

I probably shouldn't have laughed at your 'sir' comment...but I did. The amount of times I would turn up to a job and the look of disappointment because I wasn't the 'hunk' they assumed I was going to be. Much eyerolling and pretending it was still funny to hear that for the umpteenth time. Knitsey (talk) 02:29, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Incidentally, if any talkpage watchers want an impossible sourcing challenge: A while ago someone made a Wikidata item for my mom. I was going to ask someone to add the fact that she co-won an Emmy in 1990 for CBS' coverage of Hurricane Hugo, but this has proven shockingly difficult to find a source for, even though I've seen the damn statuette. The closest I've come is this article that at least verifies that CBS won for its Hugo coverage, but says neither the name of the category nor the producers who were honored. Searching is complicated by the fact that there are five kinds of Emmy award, awarded by three different academies, and the relevant one here, NATAS, doesn't list old winners on its site, while the ATAS' search engine optimization scoops up a lot of search terms even when they explicitly mention the news Emmys. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 03:08, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Few sourcing challenges are impossible when a procrastinating Wikipedian is on the case: official verification here (bottom of page 1); secondary verification here (bottom of page 446). Very glad to see the BN request, by the way! Extraordinary Writ (talk) 04:18, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Well I'll be damned! Ping @AntiCompositeNumber, who's been editing the item. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 04:25, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm going to blame the Internet Archive outage for me not finding that, even thought it had been mostly fixed by the time Tamzin asked me. Bunch of Wikidata edits done, plus a few added citations here too. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:23, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Ayy, and just like that a 14-year-old {{cn}} vanishes at Kathleen Sullivan (journalist). @AntiCompositeNumber: I'm not even sure it'd be a COI for me to do it since I've never met Sullivan, but at least to avoid an appearance of impropriety, at her article could you change to [[Emmy Award for Outstanding Live Coverage of a Breaking News Event|Outstanding Live Coverage of a Breaking News Event]] to [[Emmy Award for Outstanding General Coverage of a Single Breaking News Story|Outstanding Live Coverage of a Breaking News Event]] per source? The former seems to be something Wikipedia just made up (or more likely, someone wrote out from memory and then someone else "helpfully" linked—haven't checked). -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 18:28, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Went with [[Emmy Award for Outstanding General Coverage of a Single Breaking News Story|Outstanding General Coverage of a Single Breaking News Story]]. Maybe in another 14 years someone will decide to write about the News Emmys. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:41, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Reading the stuff above about trans voice training and related issues brought to mind four memories from a very long time ago. Of the first two trans women that I knew, back in the 1970s (which will give you some idea as to how old I must be) one of them just spoke in a very deep masculine voice. I got the impression that she hated doing that, but wasn't able to overcome the problem. She very likely had no idea how to; there was, of course, far less information and support available for trans people then than there is now, though already far more than there had been just a few years earlier. The other one spoke in a really forced and artificial falsetto voice, which sounded totally weird. Very likely she too suffered from the same lack of information and support, but dealt with it in a different way. The third and fourth memories that it brought back were being mistaken as female myself, once in my late teens and once in my early twenties. I was not generally regarded as feminine. If anything, the opposite; for example once at school (an all-boys school) a teacher thought that I was unsuited to take a female part in reading a play, because my voice was too masculine. Nevertheless, twice I was misidentified. The first time, the woman who made the mistake realised pretty quickly, and almost died of embarrassment. She apologised repeatedly, evidently thinking what she had done must be really offensive and insulting to me. I tried to explain to her that I wasn't offended at all, but I couldn't persuade her; evidently she just couldn't conceive of a male person who didn't regard being being thought to be female as insulting. However, I had no problem at all in being taken for a girl; there's nothing wrong with being one, so what's wrong with being thought to be one? The second time it happened, I had a conversation for several minutes with a bank clerk who thought I was a woman. I kept expecting her to realise any minute, but she never did. The strange thing is that she was dealing with my bank account, in my name, and my first name is one of the commonest English male first names. I guess she just hadn't noticed it; she just called me. "Mrs" + my surname. Why didn't I correct her? I'm not sure, after all these years, but I rather think it was just because I found it rather amusing.

A bit more on topic for this section, I read your audio essay shortly after your desysopping, and found it very interesting. I was also glad to see your return to the fold. Welcome back. JBW (talk) 19:59, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: You're sort of scratching the surface of what I wrote at User:Tamzin/Gender—an approach to gender that isn't at all unique to nonbinary or trans people, and in fact was partly inspired by what the cisgender linguist Taylor Jones says in this video essay. For me, if gender is a social construct, then who am I to decide how others construct me? I can do things to my presentation that push the needle in one direction or the other‚ but it's up to another person how to process that raw data. I have an androgynous-to-fem voice and facial features and almost always wear dresses (not because I'm under any impression that most women only wear dresses; I just like dresses), and that means ~100% of people say "she" or occasionally "they", but if someone comes from some cultural background where those things are all coded masculine, and they see me as a "he", very well. Similarly, I've had a few times ever where I was speaking in a particularly assertive way, and someone went with "he", even though everyone else to gender me that day had gone with "she"—and that tells me something interesting about how people see gender. So all I really care is that people are honest with themselves about how they see me, y'know? I know not all nonbinary/trans people see it that way, but that's sorta my galaxy-brain take after a few years of transition. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 20:55, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes. Something which I intended to mention when I wrote that message, but which somehow got left out, is that now, in a culture where such ideas as "non binary" are fairly well known, I'm sure that it would be far less surprising to encounter a teenage boy who's happy to be taken for a girl than it was then, when probably many people, like the woman I mentioned, would not have been able to conceive of it. However, there must have been a lot of us around, but mostly invisible. JBW (talk) 21:30, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Incidentally, my note about pronouns on my user page is vaguely related to this. JBW (talk) 21:32, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Excellent edit summary

Great wording on this. "Low profile" is just the term I was looking for. "Non-notable" (my previous go-to) sounds mean in that context. Joyous! Noise! 23:07, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

@Joyous!: Thanks! Taken from the wording of WP:BLPNAME and WP:LPI (an imperfect essay that works well enough here). I'm trying to do a cleanup of needless kid-naming in bios... 9 down so far, thousands more to go. See § Interesting for backstory on this. Feel free to join me! I'm starting with the results of this search. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 23:35, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

A fox for you!

Welcome back to the admin corps!

— Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 00:41, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

• To say this is shocking is an understatement. Given your comments this year about administrators and administrative work, the last thing I expected is that you would want to return to the admin corps when you didn't seem to have much respect for the position. We can always use more help, I'm just very surprised given your previous statements. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 09:22, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

  @Liz: I have neither respect nor disrespect for the position, because I don't think of positions as something meriting respect, but I certainly have lots of respect for (most) admins as individuals and (mostly) as a team. My issue is with the culture surrounding user conduct matters. Even a decade into better civility enforcement (and I know you remember the bad old days), we're still inconsistent and pick favorites. We still allow a self-appointed peanut gallery at AN/I to be one of the most powerful entities on the site. And most importantly, our system of user conduct enforcement still functions more like a gambling game of social capital than anything approaching a justice system. But I've realized I can still operate within that system, to some degree, despite my reservations about it. I think I had to find a certain degree of both passion and dispassion within me... so in a way, the "radical changes to how I work" that I wrote off in my essay have come to pass. Plus, two of the things that most frustrated me—unchecked RfA incivility and the ability of admins' friends to stonewall legitimate complaints about them at AN(/I)—have been significantly mitigated with this year's reforms, which has been great to see. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 10:25, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

• Woah, welcome back Tamzin! I see you felt like being in the position of using the mop again after a while of careful reconsideration. Great to see you return to taking part in administrative tasks with a new approach! — AP 499D25 (talk) 02:33, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

From the bottom of my heart, thank you

Re: this action. I have personally had an EXTREMELY poor series of interactions where MI, CV, and IG all colluded to block me. When I stated what I'd be working on, IG edited one of the pages I said I'd be working on and then claimed I was stalking them "on a page he'd never edited before". MI and CV naturally jumped on that bandwagon and got me blocked for a month.

You and I appear to disagree on much politically, but it is heartening to see that even "foes" can look at something and agree "yeah, that's wrong". Thank you so much for bringing this to light and doing something about it. It takes great courage sometimes to do the right thing! A million times: thank you! Buffs (talk) 16:38, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

NSPECIES

Thank you for your thoughtful close at that RfC. I appreciate that you recognized the difference between "acknowledging current practice" and "endorsing that practice" and left open the potential for amendments to the language. Would you be willing to look over the newer section I made and advise on the issues I've pointed out, because I am getting a lot of condescension and misreadings by the regulars over what seems like a very straightforward problem: the guideline explicitly states a species "having a valid name" meets the SNG, and also that this is by definition always accompanied by SIGCOV in a reputable academic publication -- this is probably true for all taxa except animals, where a species can get a valid name with an un-peer-reviewed self-published paper. Somehow this is getting dismissed as a non-problem? Or being wildly misunderstood? Am I going insane, or is it still considered "not good" to base articles around SPS from hobbyists?
Thanks JoelleJay (talk) 23:45, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

@JoelleJay: Closing the RfC doesn't give me any special insight on the subject, just the ability to read consensus. All I can volunteer, having read through the discussion, is that y'all have gotten quite abstract and have reached the point of arguing about what you're arguing about. The discussion might benefit from some more concrete examples. And/or it might benefit from waiting for a while for the dust to settle from the RfC close. Also, I'll note that NSPECIES is a guideline, and cannot trump WP:V, a policy that states any claim "must have been previously published in a reliable source before you can add it" to an article. So if your concern is that a specific source or kind of source fail WP:V, that goes beyond the bounds of NSPECIES, and is something you could discuss at WP:RSN among other places. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 17:53, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, Tamzin. I asked you because you're the only editor I know who has read the whole discussion without participating in it. I do think the appearance of "abstraction" is from editors just categorically not understanding what the ICZN is or how valid names work and arguing against positions that don't exist (e.g. "merely having an ICZN listing"). I don't anticipate this area ever becoming more receptive to changes; it's been a walled garden for over a decade.

I did give some concrete examples -- we have 600 articles sourced to the self-published magazine Visaya -- but I think the bigger problem is that the SNG just does not have usable guidance for the animal kingdom in general. I explained this in one of my comments: The guideline does not state that "acceptance by the relevant international body of taxonomists" means "acceptance by certain authoritative databases"; in fact, the only "relevant international bod[ies] of taxonomists" ever referenced on this page are the nomenclatural committees, and we state concordance with their definitions of "valid name" directly satisfies the SNG. So how is it at all intuitive for NPP, AfC, etc. to read this guidance and conclude that "this new animal species description in SPS meets the criteria for a valid name as dictated by the ICZN, thus meeting the SNG section on eukaryotes, but actually we can't use those rules that we link to and instead we should check whichever taxon-specific database requires positive, reliably-published community acceptance before it designates a name as "valid", even though the SNG doesn't even hint at mentioning such databases"? Editors are also arguing that "the standards" in taxonomy regarding publishing trump WP rules on unreliability, and therefore databases that make no claim of editorial oversight or which have clear COIs are acceptable as the sole sources of pages. JoelleJay (talk) 00:09, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

More examples: ~440 articles sourced to Malacologia Mostra Mondiale, a self-pub "edited" by a physician-turned-shell-seller and sold on Poppe's ConchBooks website. Its most recent issues feature new species descriptions by NN Thach (whose taxonomic vandalism has been described in multiple academic papers)... There are dozens (hundreds?) of articles sourced exclusively to this magazine and the species' minimal entry on MolluskBase, apparently all created by GaneshBot around 2010. We've also got dozens of pages sourced solely to Thach's 48HrBooks books and a MolluskBase entry, and sometimes only the former source, e.g. Amphidromus mariae. These are just hits for the first two fake journals I looked up...there are bound to be many more. JoelleJay (talk) 01:53, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

AMP (Any Means Possible)

Hi, looking at the sources, I see a G11, but it's no big issue, I leave it for somebody else to handle. A7 doesn't seem applicable, I think. Cheers. --Randykitty (talk) 20:01, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Toki Pona

Toki Pona has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:35, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Aras War

I'm curious, what makes you think the Draft:Aras War was a hoax? I'm not saying you are mistaken. Or even if you are, I'm very sure several other speedy delete categories would apply. It just keeps on getting recreated and I can't understand what's going on there. Feel free to email me if WP:BEANS applies. --Yamla (talk) 19:17, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

@Yamla: I was going off of JBW's findings at Aras War; see tangentially related Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Nuraddin historys13. But yes, if not G3, it's likely G5—compare to Idkarmenia21's version at Special:Undelete/Draft:Aras War—and definitely a WP:GS/AA ECR violation. Speaking of which, I'm going to go EC-salt the article. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 19:23, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Oooh, that was the context I was looking for. Thanks! --Yamla (talk) 19:25, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

@Yamla and Tamzin: My attention was drawn to the article Aras War when I was investigating an elaborate web of sockpuppetry and hoaxing. I don't remember all the details, but, as Tamzin has suggested, Nuraddin historys13 and their sockpuppets came into it. Anyway, however it was that I came to be investigating the article, I put quite a bit of time into checking supposed references, searching for information about the war, and so on. I found absolutely no reliable sources supporting the claims made in the article, and what is more, it wasn't mentioned in sources which certainly would have mentioned it. I became 100% confident that it was a hoax. JBW (talk) 21:52, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: My suspicion, based on the breadth of this, the fact that it seems more MEAT than SOCK, and the fact that Nuraddin historys13 is (per userpage self-disclosure) a YouTuber who makes explicitly nationalist content that sometimes references these articles [7] [8], is that this is less "something the user made up" hoaxing and more "something that is being taught as ethnonationalist pseudohistory somewhere on the Web" hoaxing, with varying levels of complicity by the people perpetuating it, and maybe a dash of AI-generated "improvement". But, hoaxing either way. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 22:45, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Yeech, what a world we live in. --Yamla (talk) 22:47, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes. Unfortunately I think you may well be right, Tamzin, from what I saw. JBW (talk) 22:56, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

History repeats itself

Hi, Tamzin. A few hours ago I found the user page Lukasnorman65, and decided to post some advice to the editor. I also intended to move the page to draft space, because I foresaw the likelihood that it would be nominated for speedy deletion. As I was writing my message, I was called away, and it was much later that I found time to finish it. When I was ready to save it, I found that, just as I expected, it had been nominated for speedy deletion, which you had declined. I just thought it was rather funny, because, as you know, yesterday you declined a speedy deletion nomination that I was going to decline. Could this become a regular habit? 😏 (I find it astonishing how many editors can't see the difference between misuse of a user page as a personal web page and use of a userpage for a draft article.)

On a completely different matter, yesterday I referred to you as "she", but I have now seen that you ask for they/xe. My apologies, and I will try to remember in future. JBW (talk) 21:31, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: Yes, U5 has been a frustration of mine for a long time. With it no longer being emptied with such... precise regularity, shall we say... I've taken it upon myself to keep a closer eye on the category. I find that most taggings do meet the wording of U5, or fall under G11 while being close enough to U5 that I wouldn't fault the user for tagging as that instead, and indeed I've been deleting more userpages in the past few days than I ever had before... but an alarming number are of things that would be entirely normal to see as AfC drafts, or of basic introductory text exactly along the lines of what WP:UPYES calls for.

This is something I've talked about in the past with, variously, @Elli, @Clovermoss, and @theleekycauldron, among others. Now, inspired by @HouseBlaster's WP:What G6 is not, I've written an essay, WP:What U5 is not. Thoughts welcome!

Oh, and on the pronouns note, JBW, if you click what "they|xe" links to, you'll see I don't care at all what people use, as long as it's authentic to how they see me. That could've been clearer, though, so I've managed to shave off a few bytes from my sig so I could fit in a 🤷 to, I hope, clarify. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 23:19, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) That "precise regularity," is very euphemistic.😛 Glad you are wrangling the U5's. And G11's. They are sometimes over-applied. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 10:58, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

@Tamzin, I thought (without looking closer) that that was a fireplace, lol.

JuxtaposedJacob (talk) | :) | he/him | 06:34, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Seeking a second opinion

I am highly confident that 178.218.129.106 is a VPN server being abused by WP:LTA/BMN123, but before taking the somewhat intrusive step of reverts edits on a user talk page followed by a friendly advisement, I'd prefer someone else double check; frankly it might be better for a sysop to leave the advisement anyway.

As background, BMN123 has a habit of archiving talk page discussions that don't go their way which is to say all of them, and then placing NOINDEX tags on them. As just one example these discussions did not reach the result they wanted so they have been attempting to NOINDEX that page for some time, I suppose so that people are less likely to notice their slow motion edit warring against consensus. This is easily viewable in the page history. All of this is also documented on their LTA page. One of the more recent edits mentions the same user that 178.218.129.106 is attempting to influence. 103.115.17.30 also tried to NOINDEX one of the usual targets, and subsequently created the section 178.218.129.106 added to. The only slightly oddball thing is that 178.218.129.106 has been reused over a longer period than is typical of their non-mainspace use of proxies/VPNs, but that's not enough to cause me to doubt this one.

I think that's enough, but if you have some extra time you can feel free to review the LTA page in full. It's not as compact as say WP:LTA/TVFT, but the detail does serve a purpose and it even got excerpted in the signpost, so there's that. There's actually a lot more that was left off for various reasons, some of which is linked on the LTA talk page (e.g. [9], [10], [11]) along with many pieces that like this old AN discussion, there's other stuff on the LTA talk page too which I've used as a notebook of sorts until there's an edit request worth making, but it's a pretty deep rabbit hole, and I don't think you need to good down all of it to make the connection here.

Sorry to trouble you with this. Sideswipe9th was always the best at sniffing them out and is the first person I would think to ask, but their currently on wikibreak. Softlemonades and GeneralNotability were also at least as good as me, but they're not active either. I know you've managed to follow some incredible faint and confusing scent trails before so I trust your judgement on this.

If you need to follow-up I might be able too, but I really need to put my nose back to the grindstone soon, and the best way to avoid Wikipedia distraction is to go cold turkey, so we'll see. Thanks for any assistance you can render. 184.152.68.190 (talk) 20:07, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Removal of image in obituary

Hi @Tamzin, could you let me know why the image was removed from the obituary I posted, please? As a first time obituary poster, I'm wondering if I have missed a rule somewhere? Thank you in anticipation. AlphaLemur (talk) 09:12, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I responded at Wikipedia talk:Deceased Wikipedians#Adding image to an entry. RIP, a terrible loss here. Graham87 (talk) 09:24, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Responded there. Thanks for the pointer. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 09:32, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

NP. You might want to see my reply to your reply; I don't feel like doing the whole re-add comment/ping routine. Graham87 (talk) 09:45, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

thanks to you both for your help. very much appreciated! @Graham87@Tamzin AlphaLemur (talk) 09:57, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Administrative culture

I have just read the expression "my disdain for a lot of our administrative culture". That exactly encapsulates a lot of my feeling. If you spend long enough searching through my editing history you will see that just very occasionally I mention some of my feelings on this. What you will not see, though, is that on those occasions what I say is a toned-down, censored version of my true opinions. Every so often I seriously consider posting somewhere a diatribe giving something closer to a full account of my thoughts, but so far I have always held back, because I think on balance I will probably achieve more by just doing what I can without stirring things up. Who knows, though, whether one day I will decide to let rip. From things that you have said and written in the past, I know that your criticisms of the admin culture are not identical to mine, but there's a considerable overlap, and I feel that there's a similar overall character to them. (Having said that, I hope when you read this you won't be sitting there thinking "What does JBW mean by posting this crap? They are one of the worst examples of the noxious admin culture that I hate so much". 🥺) JBW (talk) 16:41, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) @JBW: I'd be interested in reading those thoughts. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:52, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: Well, you have already read a "toned-down, censored version" on at least one topic, namely the way that certain administrators (not you, and not Tamzin) are so reluctant to give blocked editors another chance. What really frustrates me most about that is the way the system is stacked in favour of administrators who don't like unblocking: anyone who does not want to unblock can just decline an unblock, and that's the end of it; on the other hand anyone who does want to unblock can't do so without consulting the blocking administrator, and although the policy doesn't say so, in practice most administrators treat that as though it means that one is virtually banned from unblocking unless the blocking administrator agrees. And unfortunately there are administrators who deliberately use that situation to make sure that their decision stays no matter what, not to make sure that their opinion is taken into consideration, along with others, in making a decision.

That's for unblocking. How about placing the block in the first place? Again, the system is stacked in favour of administrators who like blocking. Here are two situations which I have enocountered probably literally thousands of times in my 14 years as an administrator. (1) I review a report at WP:AIV. I see that it is a new editor, and there are problems with their editing, but I think a friendly warning is appropriate for the present, so I go to the editor's talk page to post a warning, only to find that another administrator has got there first, and blocked the editor. I can't override that and impose my preferred outcome, because reverting an admin action merely because I personally would have done it differently is frowned on, and if I did it frequently I would be ArbCommed & desysopped. Maybe you are thinking that's just a matter of which administrator gets there first, and it could have gone the other way? Well, no, because here's the other one of the two situations that I mentioned: (2) I review a report at WP:AIV. I see that it is a new editor, and there are problems with their editing, but I think a friendly warning is appropriate for the present, so I go to the editor's talk page, and this time I'm the first to get there, so I do get to post my warning. Then along comes the other administrator, who, as before, has chosen to block, but this time has been a little slower than me; they go ahead and block. They are under no obligation to accept my prior decision, because posting a talk page warning is not an admin action. So, you see, it's not a matter of who gets there first; it's a matter of the one who likes to block always being able to get their way, if they choose to use the system that way. They don't have to do it that way, they choose to: they know I have chosen not to block (or they should do, because they should have checked the talk page before deciding to block), and have consciously decided to impose a different decision over mine. In that situation in reverse, where I am the one inclined to block an editor but see that another administrator has decided to just warn, I usually defer to that decision, and leave the editor unblocked. However, there's a large body of administrators who don't, and many of those are also the ones who aren't interested in listening to anyone else's opinions relating to unblocking. To be blunt about it, they are happy to use the setup to impose a blockist agenda. I can't help wondering whether the most extreme cases of that are people who impose and maintain blocks for sadistic pleasure, rather than to protect the encyclopaedia. (Yes, I mean that absolutely seriously.) I won't mention any names, but probably I don't need to.

Well, there's just a very small fraction of my anger about just one of the many ways that I think the whole administrator system works. A full account of my thoughts on the matter would take up a hefty chunk of the Wikimedia Foundation's server space, and Tamzin's talk page isn't the place for it. JBW (talk) 21:22, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: MY BROTHER! -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 22:57, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: This is absolutely the place for it! :)

One thing I've thought about a lot is how we have no real case management system here. I moderate a fairly large Discord server, and there, if a user reports something, there's a button I can hit that says "I'm handling this." It's not perfect but it's a lot better than nothing. Right now we have no way for an admin to say that they're composing a response to something, or for that matter that they agree a block is needed but are looking at evidence to decide what kind, or that they've responded and consider a matter resolved. One could imagine restructurings of AIV, UAA, and CSD that would address that, especially if some JS were added to MediaWiki:Group-sysop.js that lets us know "The user whose contribs you're looking at has a new talkpage message" etc.

"Overruling" a no-block decision is tougher. I think I've done it a few times, when an admin seemed incredibly off-base, like giving a gentle username note to someone with a name like I-hate-gays or whatever. Then again, I've also overturned other admins' decisions to block a few times (and only landed at ArbCom one of those times :P). I think the root problem here is with WP:RAAA. It begins Administrators are expected to have good judgment, and are presumed to have considered carefully any actions or decisions they carry out as administrators. I mean. Fucking seriously? Every fucking admin knows that's a lie, because we've all had times where we deleted a page or blocked a user within seconds of looking. Usually entirely justifiably, because some deletions and blocks are just that obvious, but there's no world where that's "consider[ing] carefully". And in other cases, the lack of careful consideration speaks for itself. If an admin blocks two users as sox because they didn't know about the meme both were referencing in their usernames (actual thing I've unblocked over), they obviously did not carefully consider that block. Just like the admin who nolle prosses I-hate-gays (also based on a true story) has obviously not carefully considered that decision, because if they'd carefully considered it and still found no violation of WP:ATTACKNAME, that would mean they are either too bigoted or too clueless to be an admin.

So I think the solution, or at least a major necessary step toward a solution, in all this, is replacing that presumption of careful consideration with something else. I'm not entirely sure what. I'm honestly not sure if we need RAAA-shielding for routine admin actions. If an other admin were to see some routine vandalblock of mine and think I was hasty, and wanted to just unblock, then more power to them, as long as they're the one who wears the responsibility for whatever comes next. RAAA is useful for, say, blocks of experienced users who might have an admin-friend in the wings, or keeping people from fucking with things they mightn't understand the full story behind, like sockblocks, copyvioblocks, and socking-based page protections. But it creates a latch effect on the simplest admin actions, I think often more than even the admin intends. I think the solution starts with fixing that. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 03:25, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

In part this harks back to the recent Graham recall debacle. Perhaps that could have been avoided if I'd voiced my concerns with some of his blocks. Speaking up and speaking out are the only tools we have now, but they are useless when we don't use them. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 03:45, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Goodness, Tamzin, what you have said is very interesting, and raises a whole load of points that I have thoughts about. However, here are just a couple of them.

• You say that you have "Overruled" a no-block decision "a few times". I have done it probably more than just a few times (though of course that depends on what you mean by "a few") but a very small proportion of the number of times when I have decided not to. Most often it's just a question of a different personal judgement, and I accept that they have as much right to decide as I have. There are also very occasionally the "incredibly off-base" cases such as you mention, but far more often there are in-between cases, where I think there's a serious misjudgement, but not completely off the end of the scale. Those are more difficult to judge. I think in that situation I far more often than not leave things as they are, but not absolutely always. It depends on various factors, including what particular administrator it is; there's one in particular who has an astonishingly extensive history of not blocking for reasons which (in my opinion) can only possibly mean that he hasn't actually checked the editing history of the relevant editor beyond the last day or so, and I tend to be less inhibited against taking action in that case. However, this is drifting away from the topic of administrative culture and onto issues of individual administrators' approaches.
• You have said "Right now we have no way for an admin to say that they're composing a response to something, or for that matter that they agree a block is needed but are looking at evidence to decide what kind, or that they've responded and consider a matter resolved." Well, that's true in the sense that there's no formalised way of doing it, but there's nothing to stop one from doing it informally. In relation to AIV, for example, I have quite often thought that it might be worth posting Note: I'm investigating this, and hope to make a decision soon. JBW (talk) 14:16, 4 December 2024 (UTC) while I'm checking a report. There are reasons why I've never actually done that, but they aren't really compelling reasons. Probably the main reason is that far more than 90% of cases just don't need it. I don't know whether you ever look at UTRS, Tamzin, but that does have a button to click for an administrator to click to reserve a report that they are dealing with. (Since Deepfriedokra has taken part in this discussion, I will mention that he knows all about that, being one of the most active administrators on UTRS, maybe even the most active one.) JBW (talk) 14:16, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Just one more thought about blocks. You are of course right in saying that accounts with deliberately offensive names such as "I hate gays" should be blocked on sight, but apart from that kind of thing I absolutely don't understand why anyone would consider using a block for just a username. Someone comes along to contribute to Wikipedia, and, like most of us when we start editing, doesn't know about the username policy, so, in perfectly good faith, they create a username which is against policy. Am I missing something, or is it totally gratuitous biting of the newby to slap a block on them, instead of giving them a friendly message explaining the situation to them and asking them to change their username? As far as I remember I have never blocked an editor for a good faith username policy violation, and if I have it was a long time ago, and I don't expect to ever do so again. However, I see other administrators doing it all the time. Why? I honestly can't understand the mindset of someone who would even consider doing that. If any of those administrators reads this and thinks there is a good reason for it that has escaped me then I will be really interested to be told whatvit is. (To avoid any possible misunderstanding, I'm referring specifically to the situation where a good faith username policy violation is the only reason for the block, not where there is any further problem, such as continuation of editing under the unacceptable username after being told about the policy.) Bizarrely, I have seen these good faith username blocks even from administrators who will refuse to block outright malicious vandals unless they have been warned several times. Why????? JBW (talk) 21:02, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: Lots to think on here, but just to get the easy bit, I feel like the username-softblock situation could be solved with a warning that says "Your current username is in violation of <rule>. Please request a change before you continue editing, or you may be blocked from editing. You may also simply abandon this account and create a new one. Or if you think your username is not a violation, please explain why below." Then have a bot that replies to that message with "User has requested a change" if they request one, or reports to UAA/BOT if they keep editing without doing so. (The bot would have to have global renamer rights to see the queue, but I feel like we could probably get that cleared on Meta if it's read-only, or get a custom group made for it.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 18:38, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, reading this does make me feel less like I might become some kind of bull in a china shop with my developing unblock habit. Or at least perhaps that the china shop delenda est.

As for I can't help wondering whether the most extreme cases of that are people who impose and maintain blocks for sadistic pleasure, rather than to protect the encyclopaedia. (Yes, I mean that absolutely seriously.) I won't mention any names, but probably I don't need to., uh, seems bad? We probably shouldn't be able to joke about and active admin like that, let alone say it seriously. Is there a reason we're ignoring the missing stair? -- asilvering (talk) 03:13, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

It's only an impression of mine. It may not be so, and whether it is or not I have absolutely no evidence that would stand up at ANI or ArbCom, and I have no intention of making what would amount to an unsubstantiated personal attack. JBW (talk) 18:20, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Some of us are much more approachable than others. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 20:49, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

I should really carefully read all the policies and try to memorise their content. I have just discovered that the username policy says the following:

A user who both adopts a promotional username and who engages in inappropriate advertising or promotional edits or behaviors – especially when made to their own user space or to articles about the company, group, or product – can be blocked from editing Wikipedia...

(Emphasis of "both" and "and" in the policy.) I have always thought that blocking for an organisational username and no other problem is not only unjustified but so obviously unjustified as to make it bewildering why so many administrators do it. However, I did not know that policy specifically indicates that the username alone is not justification for a block. Will that now justify me in reverting all these unreasonable blocks when I see them? JBW (talk) 21:13, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Rajshalini

I probably would not have blocked for just the two instances, but whatever works. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 05:59, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: I also usually wouldn't, but when it comes to material that reads like pure SEO material—not "John Doe is an accomplished web developer", not "Acme Inc. is the best place to buy a gun for your coyote", but just keyword-stuffing and a link to a shady website—I tend to treat that as a spambot or someone behaving indistinguishably from one, not someone with any potential for actually contributing. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 06:03, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. That is freeing -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 09:03, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: Oh, and if we're playing "Why did Tamzin leap straight to blocking?", with Butternutsquash911 bruh it was because I don't fuck around with mass-murder hoaxes. I've seen them lead to police involvement before, and I've seen an experienced user in the mass-shooting topic area become a mass shooter himself (according to the OS team I can't say both the username and the killer's name, lest I harass a dead murderer, so let's go with the latter), and so it's a rare case where I'd rather block first and let them prove they're not actually here to incite violence. In this case, seems they probably aren't, but are still a more regular kind of NOTHERE, although that's up to you to decide. :) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 20:14, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Yeah. No. Gotta bad feeling about that one. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 22:06, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

( in my James Earl Jones voice ) the wiki lawyer is strong with this one. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 22:11, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Welcome back to adminship

I am not sure when you picked up the tools again, and you probably remember my initial reservations. But noticing the change, I just want to say thank you for what you do, and welcome back. Cullen328 (talk) 07:26, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

+1 I wish you will soon return to SPI too. Maliner (talk) 20:44, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Salt evasion template

Thanks a lot for your quality of life improvements at User:Chaotic Enby/Salt evasion! For the "verify" part, what I had in mind was the case where a page might have not actually been salt evasion to begin with, and should be kept at its current title rather than deleted or moved (as the previous wording could imply that those were the only two choices). Although I wasn't sure how to word it in a less clumsy way. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 08:25, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I think the word "apparent" does enough there, combined with the fact that "X or Y" doesn't necessarily mean "only X or Y". Or at least hopefully we admins are smart enough to figure out we have the option to just do neither. :D -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 08:32, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! Sometimes I feel like we're never too careful, but you're right that it should be clear enough! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 09:40, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Soft vs. hardblock for obfuscated names

Thanks for you comment about User:Sheolkino; I've gone back over my block logs and also lowered the block level for User:𝓔𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓵0 - it may be that there is some innocent reason for users doing this kind of obfuscation, and it would be interesting to find out what it might be, and where they got the idea/tools to do it from. — The Anome (talk) 09:13, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@The Anome: It's a not-uncommon username style on sites like Discord that allow the full range of Unicode characters in display names. I think a lot of people who do it think they're just "putting their name in italics" and don't realize that they're actually misusing special characters that will be unreadable to screenreaders and scripts. There are even sites like https://lingojam.com/ItalicTextGenerator and https://capitalizemytitle.com/italic-text-generator/ that further that impression. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 09:19, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm baffled by why there seems to be resistance to blocking usernames containing these characters at user signup time. It's easy to generate a list of such mathematical and other 'stunt' characters that look like styled versions of Latin alphabet characters. See User:The Anome#Literal patterns. — The Anome (talk) 09:28, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I've now put in a request for blacklisting them here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Title_blacklist#Non-script_characters — The Anome (talk) 09:39, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

A stupid question

Hi Tamzin! An IPv6 was messing about on Open Orthodoxy and I reverted them, but because I reverted quite a way back I am not sure if good edits got caught in the crossfire. Would you be so kind to check if I did everything correctly? I know very very little about this topic. Polygnotus (talk) 07:52, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm about to go to sleep, but I've blocked the IP three days. @Theleekycauldron may have more knowledge on the content side than I do. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 07:57, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you and sleep well! Polygnotus (talk) 07:59, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Hamsa for you

	Hamsa for you
	I am very happy to see you back. This Hamsa from Morocco will protect you from evil's eye. 👀 Maliner (talk) 20:46, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Admin's Barnstar
		For awesome, saint-like patience above and beyond the call of awesomeness in dealing with Butternutsquash911 bruh -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 21:05, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

And now for something completely different . . . .

Check out the latest request . . . . -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:21, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Well that's sure... somethin'. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 16:24, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Never a clerk around when you need one.😜 -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:32, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

I like being Southron. You get to say things a little bit different. Though living down here amongst all these Yankees, I've lost my accent. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 12:14, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: I've been thinking a lot lately about Southernness. I've never lived in what most people think of as the South, but I would say I'm culturally southern—Dad was from a D.C.-based Louisiana Creole family, Mom grew up in New York but moved to Atlanta at 17. I've been realizing just how much my adherence to pretty basic parts of Southern etiquette causes unSouthern people to read me very differently than how I come across to Southerners. For instance, I never hesitate to offer someone a few nights to a week in my guest room, and to me this is just good manners, like the sort of thing you'd literally offer a stranger, but to Northerners it's apparently a whole thing. My mom ran into a similar problem trying to cook red beans and rice for 40 people, who couldn't fathom someone just doing that like it was nothing.

I feel like there's some connection to your and my adminning style here, but it's left as an exercise to the reader. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 04:49, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Gentility. aka good manners. aka proper upbringing. Our moms should be proud -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 04:55, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

UTRS appeal #97716

Could he have been Joe-jobbed? Meh? -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 12:07, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

told 'm to email the checkusers -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 04:56, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Explanation of U5 nom

Hi Tamzin. I saw your edit summary for declining my U5 nom for the userpage of Elle.Campbell. I did it because it's a copy of the mainspace article Prachin Buri radiation incident, so I believed it qualified because of WP:COPIES. Otherwise I would have draftified it - was I too quick to pull the trigger? --Drm310 🍁 (talk) 16:05, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

(talk page watcher)@Drm310: They might have copied it there to work on it. Maybe sandboxing it would have been better. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:56, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

This one's tough because it had already been moved back to the userpage, so technically speaking draftifying wouldn't have been the usual deletion-avoiding mercy but actually a redraftification. I wouldn't have U5'd it either, but I guess I'd have been stuck with moving it to a user subpage to try to keep future U5-taggers away. -- asilvering (talk) 18:34, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

@Drm310: If I'd realized, at time of declining, that the page was a copy, I probably wouldn't have declined with such strong language, but I still would have declined, because a copy of an article is still generally a plausible draft for the purposes of WP:U5. The solution I took in the end of blanking was actually probably not correct either, since I'd missed that the userpage-copying came after the mainspace edit, not before, but it's still there in the history if the user wants to restore, so I'll leave as is for now.

@Asilvering: As to draftifying, you may be interested in a new template I made the other day, {{Draftified userpage}}. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 20:09, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I like it. I will probably forget about it unless it's integrated into the draftify script I use, because I am lazy like that. Probably needs an informational link in "user subpage", since I doubt most people drafting on their userpage have any idea what that means. Not sure a link would help that sort of editor either, but at least we could say we'd done due diligence. -- asilvering (talk) 02:48, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

I've linked "subpage" to WP:SUB. I could've linked to WP:UP instead, but I think SUB is the more relevant page. --rchard2scout (talk) 08:23, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

UTRS appeal #97742

Best unblock request ever -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 01:33, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Well uh. For their sake, I'm hoping that's an impostor. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 02:17, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

What do we think of this?

• Draft:Lavish_Looks_Salon
• User talk:Lavish Looks
• @JBW:

-- Deepfriedokra (talk) 04:15, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: I mean, there's a good chance they wanted to do something G11able, but they didn't get the chance to, and there's no such thing as inchoate G11, so, I'd decline. As to the block, I would've softblocked, as there don't appear to be promotional edits (CC Rsjaffe). -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 04:41, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

That's what I was thinking, too. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 04:44, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

"without form and void". -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 04:45, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

I couldn’t see that draft as being anything other than the start of a promo page, which was my thought when doing the hard block. On the other hand, I can see your reasoning behind doing a soft block instead, particularly with their COI statement. Probably the best course of action would have been to do nothing until their edits more clearly defined their intentions. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 05:04, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

@Rsjaffe My usual approach for promotional usernames is:

1. Edits comply with WP:COI or at least make a good-faith effort to do so: Warn, monitor, block later if necessary
2. Edits violate WP:COI, but aren't outright spam: Softblock
3. Overt promotion/spam: Hardblock

(There's also a zeroth category here of "Username looks promotional but there's no COI edits", to which the answer is "do nothing".) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 05:09, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. By the way, I’m going to use your {{Draftified userpage}} template, if that’s ok. I’ve been rescuing U5’d userpages that are misplaced apparent attempts at articles and this’ll help. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 05:28, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes of course, that's why I made it! I've been meaning to advertise it more but hadn't gotten around to it yet. May also be of interest to @Deepfriedokra, @Rsjaffe, and @Clovermoss. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 05:32, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

koan of promotional user names

• This brings up several opinions of mine about administrators' approaches to people who come here to promote their businesses. If any of you don't like this wall of text, then don't blame me, blame Deepfriedokra: he's the one who pinged me here. Also ping Rsjaffe.

1. Suppose that we decide that an editor's username is unacceptable because it's the name of a business, but we don't see their editing as problematic, so we choose to let them continue editing under a new username. I have never been able to understand the thinking behind achieving that aim by blocking and telling the editor they can create a new account. We are obviously dealing with someone who has created an account with an unacceptable username in perfectly good faith, unaware of the username policy. Therefore, if we intend to let them continue editing, why not just explain to them, in a friendly way, that their username isn't acceptable, and they can edit with a new one? Why BITE them by throwing a block in their face without any warning? There are administrators who refuse at AIV to block unambiguous bad faith vandals because they haven't been warned, or even because they've only been warned once or twice, but who will throw an immediate block, without warning, at a good faith editor who had no reason to think there was anything wrong with what they were doing, when all that us needed is to ask them to change their username. Why? Why?
2. Now let's add a further feature to that situation. Although their editing has not so far been problematic, we think it looks as though there may be problems to come. To me, it seems obvious that it makes sense to keep a watch on their editing, so that if there are problems we can step in, whether in the form of giving a gentle warning, or a stern warning, or a block, as the circumstances warrant. If we either give a warning about the user name and suggest a change of username, or block without the option of creating a new account but with the option of a rename and unblock, then it's easy to keep a watch on their editing. If, however, we block with a message suggesting they create a new account, then keeping a watch on their editing will be more difficult, or even impossible, because we have no way of knowing what new username they choose. So why do so many administrators so often go for the one option which makes it difficult to monitor the situation? As I see it, either of the other two options is arguably a reasonable possibility, but that one isn't.
3. If you have read the two paragraphs above, you will realise that I am not keen on immediate blocks of good faith editors who have unwittingly violated the "spamusername" requirements. Nevertheless, I frequently do it. That is because in my early time as an administrator I found that if I gave a friendly warning, much more often than not another administrator would soon be along with an inappropriate block and often a totally inappropriate block message, so I decided, very reluctantly, that a less unreasonable block was the lesser of two evils. Some of the blocks were, in my opinion, much worse than those I have already mentioned. The following situation was really common. A new account would appear, named "BlenkinsopWidgetCompany", and would create a user page or a draft telling us in glowing terms how the Blenkinsop Widget Company provides its clients with unique solutions by leveraging their skills... etc etc. So an administrator would block the account, telling them that "the only reason for the block is your username." Please note the word "only". So the editor would request and receive an unblock and would then carry on editing in the same way as before, only to be blocked again. Alternatively an administrator with more sense than the one who placed the block would decline the unblock request because of the promotional editing. Either way, the editor was now blocked for something which a Wikipedia administrator had explicitly told them was not a reason for being being blocked, but which obviously was. I'm sure there are even worse ways of biting a new editor, but that one is pretty high up the scale. That particular type of idiocy is much less common than it was, but it illustrates the kind of reasons why I decided that a less bad block is often a better choice than sitting back and letting someone else make a worse block.
4. I have never been a fan of the interpretation of the policy on promotional editing that even if it's obvious that a page has been created for promotional purposes, we can't treat it as promotional unless it reads totally like blatant marketing copy. Wikipedia's policy on promotional editing is, basically, "don't edit for promotion", not "don't edit for promotion in ways which immediately hit the reader in the eye as promotional". I would not have deleted the page in this case, but that's because I'm a wimp, and find it very stressful and unpleasant to be the subject of concerted criticism from a whole bunch of people who hold to a different intetpretation. If someone else, with a more robust personality than mine, is willing to go ahead and delete a page on the grounds that it obviously exists only for promotional purposes, then I totally applaud them for doing so.

My conclusion from all this is that there is no perfect way of dealing with this situation, but there is no alternative to what was done which would have been unambiguously better, and several other possibilities would have been unambiguoisly worse. JBW (talk) 16:44, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Ah, the koan of promotional user names. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:52, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

For my part, I have in the past, left them a COIUSERNAME warning. For the most part, I get no response. In the past, they would sometimes be blocked despite my attempt to discuss. Perhaps, due to recent events, it will be less of a problem -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:08, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

I feel @Just Step Sideways: might be able to contricute to discussion. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:19, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

The point I resonate with the most here is that our treatment of potentially promotional editors is based too much on appearances and not enough on whether their edits tend to improve the encyclopedia. I declined G11 on a userdraft the other day that had a fair bit of puffery about how important some guy was—but also was clearly a reasonable attempt at an encyclopedia article on someone marginally notable, where the puffery was more like what you put in a college paper to show why your chosen topic is important, rather than trying to sell anything someone. So I cleaned it up a bit, and someone from WikiEd (no surprise there) cleaned it up a bit more, and now we have an encyclopedia article that we didn't before.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have very little patience for anyone being paid to edit who can't do their job well. If I'm having to hold someone's hand through the disclosure steps, while they churn out poorly-written and/or AI-generated SEO garbage, well, I care a lot more about the fact that they aren't here to build an encyclopedia than the fact that their articles might not meet G11. Not that I'll delete the article out of process. My point is just we AGF in all the wrong places. User:AcmeWidgets gets blocked for updating the new CEO; User:GenericUsername gets to make several articles about nobody businessmen before someone finally acknowledges the obvious that no unpaid editor joins Wikipedia to write about the CFO of an obscure tech startup. We just need to think more about why a person is editing, and whether it is going to get us net-positive encyclopedic content. That involves being more lenient in some places and stricter in others. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 19:52, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

P.S. I see Jimfbleak has deleted the draft that started this conversation. Procedurally that's incorrect, since I'd already declined it, but it doesn't benefit Wikipedia in any way to contest that, so I won't. I don't entirely disagree with you, @JBW, in your positive view of deleting in such a situation, but I wish we as a community would handle cases like this by adapting the CSD policy, not by having admins push or exceed the limits of what's canon. In a case like this, I think a CSD D1 for something like "Drafts for a topic that would be covered by CSD A7, A9, or A11 in mainspace, with no prose content other than a statement that the subject exists" would fill a significant gap and avoid this tug-of-war between "Not G11 so don't delete" and "Unencyclopedic and likely meant to be promotional, so delete". -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 00:08, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

I've been working around these issues long enough to have gone ahead and developed a rough guide to how I determine what to do. If the wind is indeed shifting on no-warning ORGNAME blocks I'd certainly be willing to alter my approach as well. I do think that more often than not, these are just people who don't really get what WP is and how it works, as opposed to malicious spammers. As you can see from the guide I do draw a distinction between drafting a spammy article and actually spamming in article space, one is obviously more harmful than the other. And I have also had the past experience of certain admins coming in later and blocking anyway, which may have had some impact on how I tend to do it now. It's kind of a shame that that was allowed to go on for so long.

However I would also note the history here, what we used to do in some cases was drop the discussion template on their talk pages, and then move the report to Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention/Holding pen, hypothetically each report there would be re-reviewed a week later, but in practice they were not. There were times when I was the only admin working on it at all. About six years ago we went ahead and closed it [12].

When I reply to a report that it is worth watching their edits, I intend that to mean that the reporting user should do so. There's way too many reports to realistically watch them all. I just cleaned up my watchlist and the bulk of it was names I put on there back before times watchlisting was a thing, just hundreds and hundreds of them, and they never popped up on my actual watchlist because they never edited again.

When was the last time we had a thorough review of the username policy and how we interpret it? It may have been Wikipedia:Username policy/RFC which was just over a decade ago. Maybe it's time? Just Step Sideways ^{from this world ..... today} 02:14, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Sigh. Since this sort of thing was already under discussion, thought I'd alert those still watching this to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Several admins just standing by interrogating a user who was the subject of an obviously bad block. El Beeblerino ^{if you're not into the whole brevity thing} 22:29, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

WP:BADLOOK

"a fucking bad look" could become a catchphrase after that close, good work. CNC (talk) 23:08, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

In my opinion, it is also a "bad look" to inject passion and supervoting into closes. I would have preferred a factual summary of the discussion with a less emotional tone. I won't close challenge this, but this is not the style of closing I am used to for RFCs. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:01, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae: There is a really bleak irony in an admin complaining about an observation that there is a disconnect between admins and non-admins on admin accountability, in response to a non-admin's positive reaction. I expected to get that kind of pushback from somebody or other, but not from someone who's generally a good, down-to-Earth admin, which you are, so this is at once surprising and disheartening. You're much more the sort of person I'd expect to take this close as a charge to go forth and work on bridging that gap, getting both sides of the divide to better understand the institutional perspectives of the other.

If you do have any questions about the merits of the close, feel free to ask. I always have more to say than I put in a close. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 07:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

I just would have preferred a close that didn't rebuke the other side so much, since I think the position I took in that RFC (of wanting to reduce toxicity in admin areas, which I'd argue is in alignment with the goals of WP:RFA2024) is reasonable. I think the usual advice for RFC closing is that passionate statements should go in RFC comments rather than RFC closes. But I think I've gotten my point across, so I will keep this short. It's nothing personal, but I did want to (hopefully gently) plant this seed. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:48, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Random unsolicited opinion: I think if a closer wants to give their opinion on some related matter at the end of a closing statement, that's fine, as long as it's clear what they are doing. Closers are often in a good position to give fresh insights; I've done that many times before, and I know I'm not the only one. That said, I agree that it's odd for a closer to chide a group of participants in a discussion for something that's not a behavioral problem. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 23:08, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm one of your biggest fans, and I thought the expletive was unnecessary, and certainly undercut the seriousness and relative precision of your close. BusterD (talk) 23:16, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Redirect listed at Redirects for discussion

A redirect or redirects you have created has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 December 15 § Transfem until a consensus is reached. --MikutoH ^talk! 02:27, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Softblock

Tamzin, you made this comment at ANI. I noticed Special:Contributions/Onüç Kahraman yesterday too. That user did turn out to be socking, but your initial {{uw-softerblock}} didn't really make sense, as Onüç Kahraman is a film that came out in 1943, not something subject to any ongoing promotion.

I'm replying here because this seems peripheral to the main issue there regarding my obvious misblock. The account wasn't promoting, so no grounds for a hard block, but I've assumed until now that any account that is the name of a business or product (like a film) should be soft blocked. So if there's an account User:Bloggs Widgets Ltd, I would soft block even if the company had ceased trading. Doesn't happen often, doesn't stop the editor creating a new account, and I've not been challenged on defunct companies/products before, so I'd welcome clarification on why you think it's against policy. I'm not making an issue of this, just asking, cheers Jimfbleak - talk to me? 15:10, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

@Jimfbleak: WP:ORGNAME applies to the name of a company, organization, website, product, musical group or band, team, club, creative group, or organized event. I guess you could call a film a product, but it's quite a stretch if you ask me. If the account were representing itself as the film's production company or rightsholder, that would fall under company or organization; and if it were trying to sell DVDs then that's film-qua-product; but by default, I would think of a reference to a film's name as being about a creative work. I'm happy to request clarification at WT:UPOL, but I feel like, if ORGNAME included creative works, it would say "creative work". -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 02:57, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

OK, makes sense, thanks Jimfbleak - talk to me? 06:28, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

What if the unblock process were good?

Recent events have brought me to return to an idea I've tinkered with on and off since last September: completely overhauling the unblock system. I'm now ready to unveil User:Tamzin/wild ideas/Unsucking unblocks and begin workshopping it. Pings to @Deepfriedokra, JBW, Beeblebrox, Elli, theleekycauldron, Asilvering, Significa liberdade, Chaotic Enby, and MJL. Feedback welcome on the draft's talk page. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 02:53, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Io Saturnalia!

		Io, Saturnalia!
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth (talk) 15:28, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

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