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February 2020

Infobox Nationality

The RFC look like it is headed for no-consensus. I started writing this in the discussion section:

Pius Fasinu and Viet Pham are two examples I just ran across, while fixing other things, that misuse |nationality=. In the first case, there are no sources that discuss his birth or nationality. He went to college in Nigeria, then South Africa, then worked in the US. He was probably born in Nigeria, but to say his nationality is Nigerian-American is unsubstantiated. Viet Pham says his nationality is Vietnamese, but he was born in Malaysia and lived in the US since age 5. He is probably an American. |nationality= is rarely used with sourced information. There are usually sources for a person's birthplace. When nationality is used, it is usually wrong or WP:OR (derived from birth place).

Which got me thinking... while it safe to say where a person was born (with a source), why should we permit nationality to be used without a source. If we can't expect a reader to infer nationality from birthplace, why should we allow an editor to infer nationality from birthplace and put it in the nationality field. So instead of saying don't use it when it is redundant with birthplace, shouldn't we just say don't use it without a source. This would disallow its use in most cases, except when it is discussed in the article (usually when it is different than birthplace). Your thoughts? MB 03:11, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Two examples of obvious nonsense which can simply be fixed doesn't equate to anything like "When nationality is used, it is usually wrong or WP:OR". If we have so few sources on someone that no consensus exists between them on what the person's nationality is even in a general sense, then that person probably is not notable and shouldn't have an article here. No one said anything about permitting anything to be added without a source. You seem to be mixing some basically unrelated concepts like "Do we have a reliable source for this claim?" (which is about inclusion in an article anywhere, and has nothing to do with infoboxes in particular) and "is it sensible to use a particular infobox parameter?" which is going to have more to do with context than with anything else.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:05, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Those were two more egregious examples that certainly can be fixed by just removing the field. But the common case is Joe Politician is born in Columbus, and |nationality= is filled out with American, or Andre Author is born in Paris, and nationality is filled out with French. While there is usually a source for the place of birth, there usually isn't for nationality - it's just inferred by the editor (a form of OR). Isn't this another reason to discourage using the parameter in the infobox. I'm trying to say that if we emphasize and enforce existing policy on sourcing, nationality can be removed from most infoboxes today anyway on that basis. Or is it OK to make assumptions about nationality from birthplace and use the field in that way? Fields in infoboxes should be concrete and not based on interpretation - which is why I don't think it should be used if all we really have sourced is birth place. And if existing policy on sourcing/OR suggests |nationality= should rarely be used, we should state it more clearly. MB 03:51, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Then the template documentation should be updated with an instruction to not add things for this parameter (or for |citizenship=) without reliable sources. The problem is lazy editor behavior, not the template. That said, "nationality" has multiple meanings, and is clearly the easiest to source. (And is very, very easy in some cases; e.g., it is not possible in most US jurisdictions for someone who is not at least a legal permanent resident, and usually a citizen in particular, to hold elected public office). I think there's been some confusion here though, in all this discussion of "can be inferred from birthplace". It wasn't about "can be inferred by editors from birthplace, and filled in as nationality". It was about "can be inferred from birthplace by the reader, whose common sense we need not try to contradict unless sources tell us the obvious inference is wrong". By way of analogy: in almost all cases, the reader can infer that a biography subject has a nose (or did while living). We do not need a parameter stating that they have a nose, nor do we need to state anywhere that they have/had a nose, nor address the question at all, except in the rare case that someone was born noseless or lost their nose through some kind of medical issue, violent incident, etc. Rather (though not perfectly) similarly, if someone was born in France and is notable for "stuff" in France, and lives and raises their family in France, we need not state that their nationality is French. If we're going to do it anwyay, then yes we should have a source somewhere that says they're a French singer or French botanist or French serial killer or whatever. In most cases it should not take longer that 30 seconds to find one via Google, and only a couple of minutes to properly format it as a source citation.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:51, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

PS: I just remembered an NAC I did in 2017 that gets to pretty much the same stuff, and my take on it hasn't changed (not so much my personal views, but my assessment of the community's and its lack of patience in continuing to dwell on and squabble about such matters): permalink to discussion and closure The article text (including lead and i-box) still comply with it, with almost surprises me.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:34, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

OK, what about this twist. Jack Edmonds lead says he is American, where he was born and lived/worked for 35 years. But the WD short description says he is Canadian, where he lived the next 50 years. Hard to say both in 40 characters (while keeping the more notable stuff). At least no one has used |nationality= in the infobox yet. MB 03:53, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Probably best to do something like "an American-born foo working in Canada since YYYY".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:17, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Want to do some clerking at MfD, SMcC?

Hey SMcC,

I don't know how often you usually assess the consensus and close RMs or XfDs (probably more the former), but as an experienced editor, would you mind clerking the old business at MfD that can be closed as anything other than delete? It's been fairly neglected by the administrators, and we've got old business piling up for nearly two weeks in some cases.

I would, but am involved in all of them, and I'd to see my closes go to DRV by an opposing editor and be overturned or relisted on that basis.

Comment: I've requested closure on one of the MfDs over a week ago, and yet it sits, and sits...

Thanks,
--Doug Mehus T·C 01:23, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Not my usual thing, but I've been uninvolved in MfD lately, so I guess I can take a look at it. Most days I'm backlogged myself, on one cleanup job or another.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:38, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Yeah...I know you don't usually close XfDs, but honestly, I see you being excellent at it because of your knowledge and application of our policies. You can (usually) accurately assess and apply our policies correctly and see who is just vaguely pointing at policy shortcuts. ;-) Doug Mehus T·C 01:48, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

So one hopes. I'm in middle of patching up a pool-league article right now, though.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:12, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Okay, no worries. Maybe admins just don't likely to touch userbox and userspace deletion requests because they're somewhat controversial.

Anywhoo...I'm sooo upset with ArbCom today. Doug Mehus T·C 02:52, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure "today" belongs in that sentence, ha ha. Seriously, I have not been paying attention to that WP:DRAMA firehose lately, so I'm not sure what pooch has been screwed lately. To badly mix some metaphors.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:22, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I did one of the MfDs (the "toy portals" essay); that was pretty cut-and-dry from a policy reasoning standpoint, even if the headcount was split. I'm not touching the Bryan.Wade one, since opinions are very divided (i.e., an NAC would likely be controversial). I tend to agree that there's a commingling of ANI conduct stuff in there, while the actual deletion case appears to be IAR-only, with a tinge of IDONTLIKEIT and SURMOUNTABLE problems, but I don't care enough to comment (at MfD; I think I would at ANI, on WP:SPA, WP:NOTHERE, WP:NOTWEBHOST, WP:OWN grounds). I !voted in the BNP one, which was also split and about which I feel strongly (so, controversial + supervote if I closed it). John Eben/Books is nearly a 50/50 split, and I don't know about about "WP Books" to weigh the arguments well (it's a feature I've totally ignored, other than noticing that its existence has badly polluted Amazon, by leading to a firehose of bogus "books" for sale that are simply WP content with covers on them). If anything I'd be biased in a delete direction because of that. Gabbie Hanna: I can't close that, since the only valid result is history merge but only an admin can perform that action; I !voted instead. Sebby Frazer would have to close as delete, but only an admin can do that, and it appears to qualify for CSD anyway. What's with these weird names? I half expect the next one to be "Pooki Frufru". Anyway, I think that's the entire backlog, so there wasn't much for me to do.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:17, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm on a short break now, demmit

Been meaning to watch that new-ish Terminator movie (crappy as the reviews say it is). WP has sucked out all the blood it's going to get from me today. [slurrrp] PS: Actually, I have a lot of Things 'n' Stuff^™ going on until ca. 3 February, so I'm not sure how much I'll be checking in.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:24, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Wow, what a strange Terminator flick, and that's saying a lot given what several of the intermediary sequels have tried. Had its moments as an action flick, and some of the curveball ideas were "interesting", but I tend to agree with the criticism cited toward the bottom of our own article, Terminator: Dark Fate.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:43, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, as a result of that movie I am thinking of initiating my personal Skynet Activation Protocol and bringing civilization to a close........ William Harristalk 06:31, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I kinda knew it was over when they cancelled that badass TV series without even resolving the plot. [sigh] Lena Headey and Summer Glau in one show? Day-um. At least Picard is back. And The Expanse gets at least one more season. All is not lost. >;-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:49, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 37

Hiding the projectspam.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:15, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
The Wikipedia Library Books & Bytes Issue 37, November – December 2019 #1Lib1Ref Wikimedia and Libraries User Group Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:10, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Template:R from subsidiary

 Done

@SMcCandlish:

In an unrelated RfD discussion, I noticed you created the {{R from subsidiary}} template redirect for the overly broad {{R from subtopic}}. It's already got 50 built-in transclusions, and, in the spring, I would undertake a large-scale project to retag various redirects from current and former subsidiaries of notable companies with this rcat. We've got literally thousands of potential redirects that could be appropriately tagged with this redirect. In short, it's wasted as a redirect, and with the dab talk page header now finalized, I was wondering if you wanted to create this rcat? It's certainly within your level of expertise (i.e., you could probably do it blindfolded)

We'd have to let the creators of various rcat tagging scripts like Archer, Capricorn, and Sagitarrius (are there any others?) to add this rcat to the script, but that's not overly problematic.

What do you think?

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 16:58, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm all for it, but don't want to deal with it all myself. I pay no attention to any of those software tools, so you already have a better handle on who to tell about it. I can certainly create the Category:Redirects from subsidiaries subdirectory (and we need a lot of other split-offs of Category:Redirects from subtopics and a few other excessively vague ones). If you want to deal with talking to the tool authors, let me know and I'll go do the subcat. PS: You need not wait for a subcat. while rcat tagging; I regularly apply the more-specific rcat names (redirects) to the applicable redirects, on the expectation that they'll eventually fork off and instantly populate the applicable subcats).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:14, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

+1. Sounds good; I'll take care out of the outreach to the script creators. And, there's no rush since we have no deadlines...can work on it over the next few months amongst other things either us might be doing or editing. Doug Mehus T·C 22:51, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

@Dmehus: [Gasp! He used ping!] I'm done with template, documentation, category, yadda yadda. Kinda got sidetracked for a while; there's a whole lot of mess in rcat space. I'm not done with CfD/CfM and TfD/TfM on that stuff yet, but am running out of steam for the day.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:39, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

PS: There's also a new {{R from subdivision}} (from neighborhood, from borough, and various other redirs) and category. Also, {{R from subsidiary}} has various redirs now.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:52, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for February 5

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Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kudpung/Proposed decision

Hello SmCCandlish. I'm Cameron11598 and I'm one of the Arbitration Committee Clerks I hatted your section on the Kidpung Proposed Decision talk page as it didn't pertain to the proposed decision. Note this page is not for re-litigating your point of view, but is to ask for tweaks and changes to posted proposed decisions. This phase is not for the introduction of additional evidence. Please note this was done as a clerk action and should not be reverted without the permission of an Arbcom Clerk or a member of Arbcom. Feel free to reach out to myself or any of the other clerks. Additionally you can contact us at clerks-lwikimedia.org --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 01:49, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Cameron11598: If the workshop phase is closed, does that mean the workshop talk page is also closed? That was my assumption, and is why I moved to the final talk page. I found it disconcerting that the workshop was closed while the "desysop" option under proposed remedies was completely devoid of any Arb comments, pro or con. I did not participate in the case at all, so I was not "relitigating" anything, just providing some rationales for "no" on the open question of desysopping, and also indicating support for another proposal, about user-talk behavior, since the final draft has not been posted. It would be good if there were a clearer indication of where to comment on what the final draft should say, if the workshop page is closed but the final draft is blank or incomplete.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:17, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Your Venn diagram is broken

[It] is not an anti-X sentiment to wonder whether someone identifying as X is bringing an anti-Y viewpoint that is demonstrably common among those identifying as X.

Some gay women may be misandrists, just as some Southerners might be racist, some tobacco smokers might be fat, and some Wikipedians might be crazy. According to your argument, it is “demonstrably common” that crazy people edit Wikipedia, fat people smoke cigarettes, people from the South are racist, and gay women hate men. Your claim is demonstrably false. Might as well claim that Jews are greedy and black people are thieves while you are at it. “All gay women hate men” is a stereotype, and is logically fallacious. Is there a good reason I need to tell you this? Viriditas (talk) 02:22, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Viriditas: But this isn't about "gay women", it's about lesbian feminist activists, who are an affinity group with a socio-political viewpoint, whose well-documented history (both as that slice in particular and as the broader feminist activism group) includes a good deal of anti-male messaging, which began seriously, turned satirical, then humorous, and in some subsections (especially TERFism) has turned serious again (nastily so). See thread below for details and some easily findable sources. I applaud you for focusing on reason and fallacies, but I'm not making the argument you thought I was, and your analogies are not actually analogous. It isn't besmirchment-by-stereotype to wonder whether someone from the Tea Party/alt-right movement – a cis-hetero and overwhelmingly white socio-political viewpoint and affinity group – shares the well-documented anti-feminist-leaning, anti-minority-leaning, and very firmly anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-immigrant viewpoints common to participants in alt-right activism. It may not be a great idea to publicly air such a question on Wikipedia about another editor, but doing so doesn't make one a cis-hating, het-hating, white-hating bigot. PS: Since I actually confused GW's complaint and related backstory with someone else's in the evidence/workshop stuff, in this case it isn't even a X/Y Venn diagram involving lesbian feminism, but simply feminism.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:08, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. My time is limited (and I’m assuming, so is yours), so I’ll keep it short and sweet. You are welcome to disagree with my reply and adhere to a vastly different opinion. I will not try to deplatform you for it. :-)

1. Feminism is human rights. There’s no debate.

2. Treat people as individuals, not groups. We are not talking about organized groups of lesbian feminist activists who hate men. We are talking about individual Wikipedians who have their own thoughts and minds of their own. Anything less, is a stereotype. Thanks. Viriditas (talk) 07:23, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't disagree with the spirit of either point, but have quibbles with their on-site implementation. One point 1, "feminism" has splintered repeatedly, and doesn't just mean one very specific doctrine. For this question, that mightn't've mattered even a few years ago, but the recent-ish TERF fork is deeply divisive, with both sides convinced they are making a "human rights" argument (one for broad acceptance and tolerance of apparently innate differences, one for protection from infiltration and subversion by members of the dominant patriarchal class). Only one of them can be right. On Facebook or whatever, I have no problem vocally siding with the former, but WP isn't the place to do that. It's not even the place to take up the more general proposition in point no. 1, though we can take some measures, like excluding typical far-right sources. as unreliable because they ignoring basic standards of integrity and fact-checking; and we can cite lots of high-quality sources coming to the conclusion in your point no. 1. We are not bound to give an UNDUE level of weight to right-wingnut material, including anti-feminism, but nor are we in a position to treat feminism (under one definition or another) as excempt from WP:GREATWRONGS and WP:NOT#ADVOCACY (and the community doesn't always fail in this regard; it's just that the level of activistic disruption has to get very, very high for the community do anything about it if the messaging is left-of-center, while it will crack down almost instantly on right-of-center PoV pushing).

On point no. 2, this is much like "address content not contributor"; it's ideal behavior, but failure to do it 100% of the time shouldn't result in desysopping. Ask any Republicans (in the US sense), libertarians, other right-of-center editors, or even centrist Christians who are not extremists, just not secular leftists, if they feel that your principle no. 2 has been extended to them consistently by other editors, and I bet the answer will uniformly be "no". Most of our editors are urban/suburban, at least middle-class, progressive, secular, rationalistic, neophilic, tolerant (except of intolerance :-) people, and it is easy for us to forget that the vast majority of the world's population are rural, pauperized, traditionalist/conservative, religious, driven by reactive emotion and cultural "truths", neophobic, and xenophobic. They're always going to find that our material contradicts their views, on a wide range of subjects (and not just because reliable sources have a tendency to do so). We have a lot of systemic biases even after DUE/FRINGE considerations, so it is natural for some socio-political friction to arise. People don't need to be punished/restricted for it unless they persist in it and will not learn to, as you say, treat people as individuals, not groups.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:14, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Denouement of that ArbCom thread

Since I was asked for sources, explanations, etc. from some of you, I'll ping you here, as the original thread was hatted as not the right kind of discussion for the talk page of that phase of an RFARB. So much for WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY.

@GorillaWarfare and Amorymeltzer: First, apologies to GorillaWarfare for the mis-identication [1]; I must have confused details in one evidence/workshop thread with those from another. Sorry about that. Anyway, I didn't say anything about queer people as a class (which includes me, BTW), nor say the other things either of you suggest I did (including "generalizing for an entire group" [2], which is in essence what I'm objecting to in the first place myself). Please read people's actual words [3] without imagining what they might have meant if you rearranged the words and cut bits of them out to stick with other words, or if they said something different because someone else whom you ideologically oppose wrote something in their place to offend you. [sigh] This kind of willful mis-spinning to create a spectre of X-phobia to attack and to demonize someone with is precisely what I was talking about in the original thread. I don't want be right about Wikipedia having a disturbing trend of people trying to "manufacture enemies" over interpretational and doctrinal-wording questions, without even asking whether one's interpretation bears any relation to actual intent and meaning. Anyway, I'm happy that Lourdes got it, though.

Sources: Spend a minute on Google and you can find more material on anti-male messaging in feminist and lesbian activism than you'll need, including its serious origins in revolutionary first-wave feminism, its use as satire (against men, and first-wave feminists, and "polite" proto- and quasi-feminists) in second-wave messaging, and now outright humor in third-wave/millennial feminism, yet also a renewed actual serious form in trans-exclusionary radical feminism (presently a hotbed of dispute on Wikipedia, and not going away any time soon).

I'll collect some immediate finds and why I think what they're telling us matters here:

A good overview is probably Jillian Horowitz's piece in Digital America [4]; it's worth re-quoting its own pull quote: "Many feminists ... have re-deployed misandry alternately as an elaborate joke, a rhetorical weapon, a model for resistance to patriarchy, and as a survival strategy. Particularly on the Internet, they have done so with all of the inventiveness and strength that man-hating requires." That last bit is tongue-in-cheek of course. Some of the rhetorical/resistance material is less so (e.g. here, in Slate). Another Slate editorial, by Lena Wilson [5] (self-described as a millennial cis-lesbian), ties the anti-male (and anti-transwoman) stances to second-wave feminism ("sex-segregated activism and spaces" ... "these second-wave practices come from lesbian feminists, women who were determined to separate themselves from men romantically, historically, and politically. To many of them, that meant (and still means) defying medical and social abuse against those with vaginas, fighting against male violence, and re-centering women in all narratives."). Scholarly material often focuses on ethnic-minority-specific misandry concerns [6][7][8]; these seems to be the only context in which the exact words misandry/misandrist have much acceptance in that register, due to baggage the terms have accreted. But the more general notion appears pretty often in feminism and gender-studies material, including critiques of modern feminism. A controversial one was Janet Halley's Split Decisions. I'm not finding [legal!] full free text of it, being a 2006 book from Princeton U. Pr., but this review covers the gist [9], and curiously enough relates to TERF vs. trans-inclusion concerns (see reviewer's footnote: CEDAW "should centre on gender not 'women'."), which are deeply tied to the matter, at least inasmuch as WP in 2020 is apt to have internal issues relating to anti-male PoV or perceptions thereof. WP will be wrestling with that for a while, and the heat is enough that RFARB is probably imminent. The intersection of feminism and misandry (as concept more than practice) has received plenty of mainstream media attention, e.g. in Time [10] and with counter-pieces like this one [11]. A good point in the latter: "Misandry has gone mainstream, and unfortunately the irony seems to be lost on men." While it's a shame that's true, it mostly is, and that has implications in the WP environment. I'm not going to trawl through newsy publications or the blogosphere for more like this; that pair is a fully illustrative example. Interestingly, a Journal of Lesbian Studies piece as far back as 2007 [12] remarks on "the strongly anti-male stance of Lesbian Feminism", in a piece on the eroding border between "butch" lesbianism and trans-masculinity (F-to-M), years before the breakout of the TERFwar. This journal in particular is a ripe field for harvesting references to both broad social perception of anti-male stances (especially in second-wave feminism) and narrow feminist and lesbian messaging that explicitly fits the description (albeit often said to be satiric). However, it's almost all paywalled. (I don't presently have WP:LIBRARY-provided access methods through any of those journal walls; forgot to renew them). "Women's Histories of AIDS", a well-known piece by Nancy E. Stoller [13], reprinted since 1995 in half a dozen feminism/gender-studies and AIDS-related anthologies, also suggests there's a generational divide on the matter, between second- and third-wave feminists (specifically lesbian ones in this piece's exact context): "The younger generation of lesbian AIDS activists carries a different psychology, culture, politics, and sexuality from those who came to the movement in the early eighties. These activists are connected to the older women by the term 'lesbian' and by some similarities of sexual practice. Many, however, see their elders as sexually repressed, conservative, and somewhat anti-male." See below for more about a possible "wave split". And feminists have written before about institutions moving away from "women's studies" to "gender studies" from 1970s onward (i.e. shortly after the establishment of such programs) not primarily for trans inclusion but for distancing from already common public association of radical feminism with man-hating. Bell Hooks's Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) doesn't mince words about it: "When contemporary feminist movement first began there was a fierce anti-male faction." While this is a summary work, not an in-depth history, the follow-on material is correct that moving away from this reactive position to a more nuanced philosophy of resistance to patriarchal social structure was an actual doctrinal struggle within the movement and one that did not have a unanimous result, nor perfectly consistent results even among those largely making that viewpoint transition. There is of course the really obvious false-equivalence matter: in a male-dominated and still too LGBT-hostile culture, over-generalized anti-male commentary (and especially "make a point" usages that are intended to provoke reaction and thought) aren't directly comparable to an inverse use of misogynist messaging as a dominance mechanism. And not even all sources we'd think should get this do get it; cf. this 2016 piece in Psychology Today [14] which seems almost stubbornly clueless. But this brings me back to the point I led to in the second bullet in the original post: Supposing that everyday permissiveness toward anti-male (like anti-white, anti-Western, anti-any-dominant-group) sentiment, for false-equivalence reasons, should translate into on-Wikipedia permissiveness regarding internal behavior and content-bias evaluation is itself a false equivalence of a different sort, of equating how matters are argued out there in wild 'n' wooly land, with how they can permissibly be discussed in a collegial environment. Daring to even suggest that anti-male sentiment (serious or satirical) and concerns regarding it can be a factor in on-site behavior, and in our analyses of editorial and sourcing biases, seems to raise umbrage simply because the terms misandry/misandrist tend to be associated with "manosphere" echo chambers [15], at least by people who follow online trends and wallow in social media. The fact that an extreme of misogynist-leaning "men's rights advocates" likes to use the terms doesn't rob them of plain-English meaning (especially since they came into any currency to begin with in feminist writing in the early 1970s; the notion was popularized by Joanna Russ to parody "polite" first-wave feminists and their sensibilities [16]). Nor does that recent connection to online sources of the proverbial "male tears" indicate anything negative about people willing to discuss such matters on more sensible terms. (Some of the academic material [17] is also clear to distinguish between the crazy-MRA scene on Reddit and 4chan one the one hand, and on the other, more rationale men's-issues concerns that co-evolved with mainstream feminism, as a pro-feminist men’s liberation movement in the 1960s–1970s.) That the MRA crowd may exaggerate out of all proportion, and obsess over and verbally weaponize, some concerns doesn't mean the concerns have zero basis and no implication for WP:NPOV or inter-editor behavior on this site (especially when use of anti-man messaging is explicitly being spun as a patriarchy-fighting tool on the other side). WP isn't Facebook, and our output (and internal discourse about it) is necessarily as meta as we can muster about the world we're editorially observing. WP's editorship is surely and rightly dominated by sex/gender-egalitarians, but we still have to separate our causes from our writing about causes and examining of how we're writing about causes. Feminists in particular are in a position to be especially mindful of straw-man/equivocation/guilt-by-association fallacies, being damned tired of having to defend feminism as not meaning "female-supremacism"; so please don't try to suggest that someone raising concerns about anti-male sentiment as an influencing factor is somehow a "masculist" and a "misogynist". Cf. previous material on falsely labeling people "transphobic" simply because they don't buy into non-neutrally using invented recently coined pseudo-pronouns in WP's own voice. This isn't the time or place to get into it in detail (I'm sure it'll be its own RfArb soon enough!), but all of this is tightly bound up with trans-exclusionary vs. -inclusionary feminism today. The TERF debate has given the matter a whole new set of legs, since the root of TERFism is anti-male sentiment in first-wave revolutionaryism and especially in second-wave separatism (on two levels, even: against transwomen for "being men" and against transmen for "abandoning womanhood" – remarkably similar to "separate but equal" and "race traitor" lingo, and to "Christendom versus heathens" and "apostasy" long before that; it's all highly ideological). Given that the "TERFwars" are already rolling over WP in waves of PoV-pushing and ugly battlegrounding, it's essentially inherent in the very observation of it that the underlying overgeneralized male-critical perspective is by very definition a factor in it. Analogy: if there were a wave of emotive promotion of creationism washing over the 'pedia, it would be obvious that faith-based reasoning was part of it. Observing that connection is not equivalent, either, to saying that everyone espousing religious faith is a creationism PoV pusher either, just like observing the (sometimes actually serious) anti-male views of TERFs and some other feminist camps is no way a suggestion that all feminists or all lesbians are anti-male. The mischaracterizations of what I said, like this RfArb itself, and the overall debate that spawned it are rife with affirmation of the consequent.

That's actually enough material with which to write an article on feminism and anti-male messages (especially if replacing Hooks with a more in-depth history of feminism). Or, rather, one-third of an article, the rest being about patriarchal attempts to dismiss feminism in general as "man-hating", plus the recent Internet-enabled MRA "myth of misandry" and its relationship to incels and other online misogyny). But, we already have a page at Misandry, and it is not exactly ideal. I'm not sure the title is either given the baggage of the word. But, I would rather light my own hair on fire than try starting or overhauling any article in this issue-space, due to all the drama surrounding it.

I'll repeat that Kudpung probably shouldn't've wondered aloud whether something like a casually or actively anti-male position was part of the subcultural background of another editor in a particular instance, but that it's not really plausible that Kudpung hasn't learned from this. ArbCom (and desysopping) aren't a punishment/vengeance mechanism, but preventative. Is Kudpung really likely to do it again? Unless there's some other and much more objective reason to desysop Kudpung (wheelwarring, abuse of tools to push a viewpoint, etc.), then that case should close without a desysop. The emptiness, pro or con, of the "Comment by Arbitrators" section under "Kudpung desysopped" in "Proposed remedies" on the workshop page is reason for concern about the outcome; we usually have a much clearer idea where a case is going by now. (And I didn't post to the workshop talk page because the workshop has been closed since 4 February.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:31, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

PS, @Chris.sherlock: The only parts of this you got correct were "Kudpung was [not] disrespectful to deceased editor Brian Boulton", "FAC is a ... clique", "Kudpung has been unfairly labelled a misogynist", and "Kudpung is being “railroaded'". All the other material in your "summary" is distortion, which appears intentional as an attempt at argument to ridicule. See what I said up top about people not reading what others actually wrote while instead taking little parts of what they wrote and combining that with extraneous stuff to manufacture a transparently fake bogeyman.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:31, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

You’ll have to forgive me but there was so much material you wrote that I was struggling to follow your argument. I believe you would have been better if you had participated in the workshop phase though. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 08:01, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Chris.sherlock: I'm sure that's true; I didn't realize the case was going on, due to a general avoidance of dramaboards lately. I had perhaps unwisely trusted that ArbCom would be wrestling with things like grossly uncivil behavior, en masse, in various hotbed topic area (like ... drum-roll ... TERF). Instead I see three back-to-back desysopping cases all of which look at least somewhat dubious and one of which has already closed in a way that almost all observers think is wrong, and which is going to cost us that long-term editor. BrownHairedGirl is someone I've had intense disagreements with in the past, including about things related to this very thread, yet I'm still hopping mad ArbCom blamed BHG one-sidedly for "portal-war" stuff and falsely "Finding of fact"-ized an abuse of admin tools when BHG simply used the tools to do what consensus – what other editors – determined should be done. That this housekeeping also happened to be in agreement with her own views on portal deletion is irrelevant and incidental; she wasn't making the delete decisions. I'm thus quite alarmed at what I see as an "admin shooting gallery" approach, exacerbated by the Arbs' dead silence on the desysop question in this particular case's workshop phase. It's like there's a big secret or something. Argh.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:24, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I wasn’t following that so can’t really speak to it, but it’s highly unlikely that Kudpung will be desysopped. A few people want this, but not myself and the case was inadvertently triggered by me. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 09:58, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I have no desire to continue a largely pointless discussion, but I would prefer if you didn't say I was willful[ly] mis-spinning to create a spectre of X-phobia to attack and to demonize someone. Your exact quote was It may not have been very politic to wonder out loud whether an editor self-identifying publicly as a cis-lesbian is in agreement with general/average cis-lesbian socio-political advocacy viewpoints. Maybe you and I have different definitions of "average" but I specifically used "general" and I find it hard to understand why you'd level that kind of accusation when that is exactly what that line is doing: claiming particular socio-political advocacy viewpoints as the general/average viewpoints for a given group. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 10:43, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Between this thread and the one above it, I believe I've already addressed this multiple times: this has nothing to do with someone's sexual preferences. When examining the history (cf. sources already cited, and there are many, many others, and I mean reputable ones) of feminist activism, and the subset of lesbian feminist activism – as self-selecting socio-political communities with loose doctrines and shared causes and language and approaches – there is a well-documented trend of using anti-male language, originally seriously, later satirically, later still humorously, and, among TERFs, now back to seriously. I've never suggested it's a good idea to question another editor's motives/viewpoint because of identification or self-identification with feminist activism causes; I said rather the opposite. But someone shouldn't be desysopped for doing so off-the-cuff, when WP's editorial pool has an ingrained habit of wondering about viewpoint when other editors wear socio-political hearts on their sleeves. If it's good for the Republican goose it's good for the gander on the left, too. (Not that it is actually good; the point is, rather, that WPians question viewpoints and their effect on neutrality; a view that you and I may align with isn't immune.) It's a poor idea to question someone on whether they go along with every viewpoint that has a history within their social-causes affinity group, but it shouldn't be treated as a hangin' offense, absent evidence of it being defiantly habitual.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:22, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Like Amory, I really do not appreciate your accusations that I willfully misinterpreted your comments. I was one of several people who understood your comment the way I did, so perhaps the issue is not with me? As for Kudpung not repeating his behavior—he has called me a man hater multiple times over the span of more than a year. It does not seem as obvious to me as it might to you that he will be stopping this behavior, especially given that he has not even addressed it, much less assured anyone it won't happen again. GorillaWarfare (talk) 17:39, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@GorillaWarfare: And I didn't like being grotesquely and really obviously straw manned, so perhaps both of us can learn to shift our approach a little. (Though I shouldn't have to say multiple people having the same misperception doesn't transmogrify it into a correct one; that's the bandwagon fallacy. "Negativizing" by leaping, against good-faith assumption, to a conclusion that someone must be sexist or homophobic or transphobic simply for saying something disagreeable or not phrased to one's personal preferences, is at the root of this case on both sides and of a growing number of similar disputes – my central point throughout.)

On your other interactions with Kudpung: fair enough; I can hardly tell you what you experienced! But you've not diffed very much of it, beyond a strange falling-out in 2018 that dragged on a bit afterward (mostly by you, from what I've seen). Given that you misread so much of what I wrote, I had to go re-review the evidence in question, and it does not appear to be conclusive of what you want to conclude. What you take away from what people write doesn't always seem be the message they are actually sending, and you've over-staunchly demanded that your version must be true no matter how many times you're told otherwise by the writer. This is a disturbing pattern in an Arb, though I realize you're not acting as one in this case but as an aggrieved party. I hope it stops there.

I do agree that Kudpung's August 2018 outburst was exaggeratory and weird (the cause is still unclear, and your naming-related request was entirely reasonable, but there's obviously some bit of background that's missing). He appeared to have some kind of personal-conflict issue with you, even if at that time it may've been rather one-way. (The bit about bearing an eight-year grudge could seem to be projection on his part, at least until seeing your comments on his own Arb-candidacy questions page in November, over a year after the original kerfuffle had fizzled out.) But let's pore over your other diffs.

Examination of the deets:

This, whether or not AN would later decide it wasn't block-worthy, was very problematic. Kudpung did unreasonably misconstrue something as "man-hating", for unclear reasons, and it did arguably constitute a personal attack, albeit a diffuse and hand-wavy one with no certain target. He didn't use your name/username in connection with that term in his fit of inexplicable pique in 2018, but seemed to be broad-stroking about why he was pulling out of WIR, with you somehow being the last straw, though it's hard to be sure. At least here you more plausibly claimed it was an "implication" rather than an accusation. But since then you've returned to determining it to have been the latter, and claiming things like a "campaign" on his part, and so on. But that's not a consistent interpretation given Kudpung's more usual behavior (e.g. here, and years of prior participation at WIR, too). If K's outburst in reaction to you doesn't make sense in the context of his larger editing and issue-taking pattern (and it does not), that variance is not itself a pattern but an as-yet-unexplained deviation from one. Regardless, him mistaking your or another's view as "man-hating" or "misandrist" is not equivalent to him being "misogynist". That's affirmation of the consequent. It seems likely K has engaged in the same error (questions at his ArbCom candidacy page are basically making this point to him subtly). But two wrongs don't make a right. It was obviously a personal attack on your part (as various others told you in user talk and in the subsequent AN thread) for you to level "misogyny" and "misogynistic" at him over that, seemingly in tit-for-tat retaliation, or because of the actual content of the Signpost article. It's virtually indistinguishable from that other argument to emotion and appeal to motive smear tactic we've seen too much of, falsely labeling people "transphobic" for resisting neo-pronouns or some other bit of trans/NB activism dogma that the real world does not well-accept [yet?]. TheSignpost article doesn't have a single misogynistic statement in it. The piece calls WMF's chief executive to task for allegedly not fulfilling the role properly, and in very particular for hiring a dubious company with goals directly antithetical to those of the organization and its constituent community. Has nothing to do with being female. It's not an idle concern. I was personally at WMF's quite private 15th anniversary party in San Francisco, and the keynote speaker (more like "main schmoozer", the number of people permitted to attend was so small) was the CEO of another such company, somewhere between Wiki-PR and Go Fish Digital in business model, though I'm forgetting the name of the company right off-hand). It was almost enough to make me resign as an editor. This was very shortly before Tretikov was out and Maher moved up [A move I supported in a letter to the board, though in hindsight ...], which amounted to simply a perpetuation of rather dubious business-as-usual. It was absolutely appropriate to raise this issue in Signpost, though the tone is a little weird and the focus wanders (why is travel for fundraising an issue?). But misogynistic? No. Ritchie333 already explained why in more detail here. Mentioning that someone is "proud" is descriptive and was central not just pertinent to the point K was making here (though whether he was talking about you is not only uncertain but twice denied). While the alleged personal basis behind the point (i.e., the idea that he was wronged by you in some way) appears to be specious/confused, the point in the abstract is perfectly valid: LGBT+ people are in a position to be more sensitive than average to mis-labeling, especially with pejoratives that relate to gender/sex relations and socio-political positioning. I actually made this exact same observation myself, above. Does that make me "misogynistic"? too? It's not any kind of attack on you to correctly identify you as queer in the context. But he didn't actually identify anyone, and used a link to "gay pride" not "queer". I think that's actually how I ended up mislabeling you "lesbian" (I apologize about that again). I took it at face value that he was describing you. K is within his rights to object to being misidentified as misogynist (though probably hypocritical for failing to realize he's apparently misidentified some others as misandrist for some reason). I'm pretty sure some key bit of data is missing, like a lost conversation, perhaps in e-mail. We can tell from contextual clues in at least two places that it has something to do with Megalibrarygirl's RfA and follow-on discussions about what someone else had posted as an oppose there, but I have not trawled through all of that material. K's comment "It depends which one of us is actually doubling down, doing the gaslighting ... and ... rekindling an old feud"[18] is actually quite pertinent. K avoided you just as much as vice versa, yet showed up as his candidacy page not to ask questions but to keep insisting he must be talking about you in particular behind your back, after he twice denied it. This comes across as a belief that AGF doesn't apply to you as long as you feel you're onto something. Your filings at RFARB really are a doubling down, since they raises every specific unproven accusation anew, and still without proving any of them: misogyny, gaslighting, and grudge-bearing. Just because K did some of these things a few years ago is not a good excuse for you to do them now. Finally: I'm dead certain you know better that to speciously argue Kudpung refusing to defend himself in the RFARB is an ADMINACCT failure. He would not be the first, nor will he be the last. ADMINACCT means responding to concerns in user talk, at AN, and other venues by which a particular admin action or series thereof might be clarified, justified, improved, reversed, or whatever. This RFARB is a generalized (not administrative) behavioral examination by others, mostly dwelling on civility and faith-assumption, and isn't something for K to act upon at someone's request or otherwise respond to in an administrative capacity. In the case context, he's just a user under scrutiny (the defendant, not an officer of the court) who happens to have and might lose the administrator bit. It's a distinction similar to that applied in INVOLVED determinations, in content vs. conduct severability, etc. It is not plausible you don't already understand this as a multi-term Arb, so why on earth make such a weak "By the way, desysop him for this bogus reason, too" argument?

I have no idea what set off Kudpung in 2018, what exactly he thinks was misandry directed toward him or by whom (and it seems reasonably clear that wasn't just you in particular he had mind). But vaguely complaining about it back-when doesn't make him a misogynist or an adminship abuser. Nor does, when acting as a wiki-journalist, criticizing instead of praising WMF's exec. dir. in the wake of the organization taking on a "partner" with ties to Wikipedia whitewashing. We know from his longer history that he's the opposite of misogynistic (though he's self-declared as both elderly and a pedant, which may have something to do with these communication problems – he sure seems to have willfully misinterpreted some things himself). However, he's not been talking about this "misandry" stuff at all any time recently that I know of, except when repeatedly and pointedly goaded into doing so, and it doesn't relate to what the RFARB was opened about (questionably civil user-talk posts with no connection to the culture war). I think your diffs say more about your involvement in the dispute than they do about any alleged misogyny or administrative wrongs on K's part, even aside from his 2018 antics having been problematic (which in ArbCom and AE terms are actually too stale to be an actionable matter anyway, if not directly relevant to the cause of the case, and they're not).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:24, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Commenting here to let you know that I've read your points. But quite frankly the workshop phase of this case ended a week ago. I'm not sure if you didn't notice it until just now, but I'm not willing to effectively reopen it on your talk page by responding point-by-point—especially when I've addressed most (all?) of them on the workshop page already. GorillaWarfare (talk) 16:04, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Fair enough. Yes, I did miss all three of these back-to-back desysopping cases. While I know the workshop is closed, it's been worth addressing this with you because a) the first of these to close has been considered a closure error by almost everyone in the community who has looked at it (generally ascribed to too many "green" Arbs in this batch), and b) you are still a sitting Arb, so having you take another look at your own evidence and interpretation is worthwhile. I'm certain you don't agree with every counterpoint I provide about, but I've also trusted you enough as an Arb to be pretty sure that you'll mull over the overall gist – that people leaping to the most negative possible interpretation of something (especially something that seems completely out-of-character), and then making loaded accusations like "misogynist", "transphobe", etc. without actual proof of it, is poisonous to civil dialogue and inter-editor relations. That Kudpung did this earlier, with "misandrist"/"man-hating", isn't a reason for others to escalate it. And the principle that we hold admins to higher standards than just-editors carries forward: we hold Arbs to higher standards than admins.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:41, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

New Page Reviewer newsletter February 2020

Hello SMcCandlish,

Source Guide Discussion

The first NPP source guide discussion is now underway. It covers a wide range of sources in Ghana with the goal of providing more guidance to reviewers about sources they might see when reviewing pages. Hopefully, new page reviewers will join others interested in reliable sources and those with expertise in these sources to make the discussion a success.

Redirects

New to NPP? Looking to try something a little different? Consider patrolling some redirects. Redirects are relatively easy to review, can be found easily through the New Pages Feed. You can find more information about how to patrol redirects at WP:RPATROL.

Discussions and Resources

• There is an ongoing discussion around changing notifications for new editors who attempt to write articles.
• A recent discussion of whether Michelin starred restraunts are notable was archived without closure.
• A resource page with links pertinent for reviewers was created this month.
• A proposal to increase the scope of G5 was withdrawn.

Refresher

Geographic regions, areas and places generally do not need general notability guideline type sourcing. When evaluating whether an article meets this notability guideline please also consider whether it might actually be a form of WP:SPAM for a development project (e.g. PR for a large luxury residential development) and not actually covered by the guideline.

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16:08, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Applicability of MOS:ACCESS

SMcCandlish, was it you who recently cited the example in a discussion of MOS:ACCESS being one of the parts of the MOS that applies beyond article pages? I remember someone mentioning it in a discussion, and it being more of a foundational point about the MOS than actually about MOS:ACCESS, but, trying to remember, it struck me as consistent with the thoroughness of one of your opinions. Anyway, I'm having a bit of an issue with that precise point right now, and I went looking for but was unable to find anything explicit on it. Don't suppose you could be of any help? --Bsherr (talk) 21:53, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

@Bsherr: Possibly me, though I'm hardly the only one to have made the point. All of MoS (as contextually meaningful) applies beyond article pages, really, to the extent that the community treats it as applicable (which is very, very broadly). We regularly move project pages, categories, even templates to comply with it (or, someone could tediously argue, to comply with overall WP style, conceding that the style derives from the MoS without considering that MoS directly applies to their pet page), and so on. Sometimes people try to argue that MoS shouldn't apply to citations, yet it clearly does; our citation templates are careful to comport with it down to tiny details, and we routinely clean up citation messes to comply with MOS (e.g. titles in SCREAMING ALL CAPS; initials given as "A.B. Ceesdale" or "Ceesdale, A.B" instead of MoS-compliant "A. B. Ceesdale" or "Ceesdale, A. B."; dates in non-acceptable formats like "Aug. 23rd, 2019"; and so on. There's WP:CITEVAR leeway for using a real-world citation style that mandates something different (e.g. "Ceesdale AB"), but it's an exception we permit, not a norm, and not proof that MoS doesn't apply (any more that an exception by consensus for k.d. lang proves that MOS:CAPS and MOS:INITIALS are void). It basically comes down to this: if there's not a serious, WP:IAR-level rationale in a particular case to not follow a guideline or policy, in the actual spirit in which it was intended, even if you think you can WP:WIKILAWYER / WP:GAME your way into an excuse, a loophole, for why it might supposedly not be applicable, then just follow the rule and stop wasting other editors' time warring over trivial nit-picks. >;-) I don't put it that way to anyone's face, of course, but it's the WP:Common sense and WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY position to take.

As for some explicit rule that MoS applies to this but not that, we don't have one. We have for long stretches had MoS stating that it applied to various things explicitly, including portals, article-category descriptive material, templates used in mainspace, and so on (without any "does not apply to" WP:CREEP in it), but people keep editwarring against it (WP:CIVILPOV very "slow editwar" stuff, where they leave it alone for 18 months then go delete it again without consensus when they hope no one will notice, e.g. when I've been away for several months and Tony1 and other MoS regulars haven't been very active). I will restore it again eventually, since how this site operates every day is overwhelming proof that MoS's broad applicability is in fact the consensus.

On accessibility in particular, ask someone why they think it is okay to do things that intentionally make it difficult for readers and editors with disabilities to access the material. Like, really make them think about and try to answer that.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:26, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at User:Atsme/Atsme's Law

 You are invited to join the discussion see at Atsme's Law.

Hey SMcC,

Thought you might enjoy a good chuckle at this, and the levity brought to a recent MfD discussion.

Cheers,
Doug Mehus T·C 03:16, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Very funny. I actually remember your "Even Atsme" comment in situ.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:30, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

"IVLIUS CAESAR" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect IVLIUS CAESAR. Since you had some involvement with the IVLIUS CAESAR redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Soumyabrata (talk • subpages) 09:54, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Soumya-8974, LOL...I never noticed that SMcC created that redirect. Interesting. Similar to Atsme's Law, named after Atsme, if SMcC created a redirect, it's got to be useful. ;-) Doug Mehus T·C 21:26, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Nah, I really borked that one up; asleep at the switch. Should've been IVLIVS. It is kind of shocking how rarely I get an RfD notice, though, given that I've created over 11,000 redirects. I would guesstimate only 20–50 of them (I think a few were related multi-nominations) have ever been nuked, mostly from when I was green, and before the criteria were tightened.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:52, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish Oh, did we used to not have as tight of criteria for the creation of redirects? But yeah, 11,000 redirects, it's amazing you don't get more of these notices. Oh well, I still think it's not an entirely implausible typo, so am going to stick with my "weak keep" rationale. Evidently, usage suggests you weren't alone in making that typing flub. ;-) Doug Mehus T·C 22:01, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

My desire to punish myself for mangling Latin that badly (when the entire point of the redir was to account for the exact actual Latin that might be found on a period inscription) must be mutating into a desire to burn in typo Hell with anyone else who would do it, as company. It's like Indy Jones almost dying in the IJ and the Last Crusade by forgetting that Jesus's name Latin starts with "I".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:07, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Move of Programmed I/O

I noticed your recent move of Programmed input/output to Programmed input–output. Given the ubiquity of "I/O", doesn't the previous name fall under the "expression or abbreviation widely used outside Wikipedia" exception at MOS:SLASH? It may be slightly less common fully written out, but parallel construction seems important here. As dominant as the abbreviated form is, I'm not sure changing the unabbreviated form is right. --Fru1tbat (talk) 14:05, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

@Fru1tbat: This ended up longer than intended; I wrote it while researching it, and it needs compression. We can have a full WP:RM discussion of the matter, of course, but I think the result can probably be predicted after a bit of digging about and remembering what arguments go over at RM. A consistent principle throughout MoS is to not do something unusual with style (and this would run counter to both MOS:DASH and and MOS:SLASH) unless independent RS are in near uniformity on a particular style for that exact case. But sources are not in near uniformity for "input/output". It's often written "input-output", "input–output", "input output", "input and output", more rarely "input - output", "input – output", "input / output", "input:output", "input : output", etc. The symbolic "I/O" is pretty close to total uniformity though; I would argue for it constituting an exception to MOS:ABBR as a result. But that doesn't "rub off" on related terms and strings. Abbreviations/symbols often have very little to do with how things are represented in plain English words. It's not the kind of "parallel construction" that really is consistently found. Otherwise we might move Base exchange to Base eXchange, and decibel to deciBel. [Actually I just noticed that the former redirects to the obviously over-capitalized Base Exchange which needs fixing; it's a general class of facility, not one facility with a proper name, nor a trademarked franchise. Still demonstrates the point though: "BX" doesn't result in us using capital X in the plain English phrase.] In everyday English, foo/bar and foo–bar (or among those that don't distinguish between horizontal line chars., foo-bar) paired constructions like input and output, or cost and benefit, are directly equivalent. They're not on Wikipedia, where we hunt down and move "/" versions, except where they appear in proper names like titles of works. Even those, we only keep them at "/" versions if they're virtually never found in sources without the "/".

Googling [19], I find the no. three result, when I exclude Wikipedia, is this one, so that's "Input-output", "IO", and "I/O" in the same source. Shortly thereafter is the same sort of mixture of styles in another tech/sci/comp context. Lots and lots of stuff like this. In journals, too, e.g. this one with "input-output" then "input and output". There is no consistency within even the computing-related material. "Input-output" goes back a long way in this context, e.g. journal article from 1969. And it's nearly never with a "/" in combining form ("BIOS", "basic input-output system"), which leads to consistency problems, more so with English phrases that with symbolic abbreviations. Switching over to Google News [20], there's a wash of unrelated economics and other uses, but really quickly you find non-slash stuff and and There is no computing vs. economics split, either; you can find the slash version used in economics right near the top of the search results [21], this figural use is simply a metaphor for the tech sense, and there are cases where it's both at once, e.g. this one on military communications tech issues becoming logistical ones, and using the "-" spelling in this case. [Nearly zero news sources will ever use "–" instead of "-" because most news style sheets use a hyphen for all dash uses other than strongly parenthesizing – like this – sentence punctuation, and most of them go em dash—like this—for that, anyway.] The usage with "/" or with "-" is also pretty common in reference to music equipment, though that overlaps so much with digital tech these days it doesn't matter, and is another descended-from-computing sense anyway.

In short, if it were hard to find "input-output" or "input–output" that would be one thing, but it's quite common, including in the writing of techies, not just people who don't know the subject. The lack of any demonstrable distinction between the "-" or "–" form and the "/" form on a topical basis means articles like Input–output model, which are WP:CONSISTENT with a zillion other X–Y articles, are a "fatal" problem for Input/output in the computing sense since the latter cannot be shown to be a consistent usage even within its own field.

This is the long and messy version of the argument I would present at RM (with more and better tech examples – these are just what I pulled up in ~2 minutes), probably also mentioning WP:SSF: that geeks prefer the "/" version isn't relevant. I'm one of them, and in off-site writing I would use "/". We have too many "I want an exception" squabbles on WP, and need to just apply the rules as consistently as possible because almost all style is arbitrary, and the value of the rules is stopping the squabbling over trivia so we can get back to work. Being a regular shepherd of MoS doesn't empower me to carve my own pet peeves into it. :-) And redirects exist for a reason.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:39, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate you taking the time to write that long, well-reasoned explanation. I'm not interested in opening an RM case - I don't feel anywhere near strongly enough about the style here to make an issue of it. It's less jarring the more that I look at it, anyway. :) --Fru1tbat (talk) 20:14, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

There'll be an RM eventually, because Input/output still is at that title. I thought it had already moved long ago, along with Input–output model, etc. More people watchlist that, and since you had a concern about it, that's enough to call for a fuller RM on that one. I've learned not to push RMs just because I think I know where they'll go; if there's doubt, it's better to take the RM week to discuss it. WP:NODEADLINE and all 'at.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:14, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

References

Wiktionary

@Dmehus: Moving this from Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 February 18#Homelander, since it's a bit off-topic for the venue. More precisely, I meant that we cannot trust what Wiktionary says as a basis for making decisions about what things mean to users in the aggregate, because there's a low level of integrity to the data. (It's not about whether WP:UGC policy formally applies to talk page discussions, but rather that the reasoning for the policy applies everywhere.) Wikt. is missing a tremendous amount of stuff, and much of what it does have is just someone's opinion. Wikt. does not have a real equivalent of NOR, as I learned the hard way. Someone who eventually got banned on Wikipedia was doing the "slow-editwar" and "civil-PoV-push" thing for years here, in a highly nationalistic reality-bending campaign about the meaning and origins of something (both in mainspace and in WP:P&G material). When stymied here, they tried to push that viewpoint into Wiktionary, largely successfully on that site. My efforts to undo this were difficult and only partial, because the kind of sourcing that Wikt. wants isn't like what WP wants. Unless a whole lot has changed since I last wallowed in policy over there, they are not generally interested in citations to things like other dictionaries, articles on usage in linguistics journals, major style and usage guides on the matter at hand, etc. They just want quotations of illustrative usage in the wild (preferably in high-reputation material), which of course can be cherry-picked like mad, quoted selectively and out-of-context, and interpretation-spun to show pretty much any meaning you want to. It's perfectly fine for a Wikt. entry to have conflicting information in it, as long as there's some faint hint of evidence of usage in that sense; it just becomes definition sense number whatever under part of speech whatever under language whatever. So, what Wikt. says really isn't evidentiary of anything, in any way that WP should ever care about, including internally. It's basically Urban Dictionary without (mostly) the toilet humor by seventh-graders, and with (mostly) better grammar and spelling, and a broader focus than teen slang and office jargon and gamer lingo.

While the "case" made didn't go well for reasons that basically boil down to stubbornness and fallacious reasoning (namely, failure to acknowledge the difference between "usually means A but in special contexts can sometimes mean B" versus "means B so must be treated as a separate category no matter what"), the sourcing method I used here is a better approach on matters like this: Use all the free, online major dictionary databases from long-term reputable publishers (and distinguish between actual publisher, like Random House or Collins, and via, like YourDictionary.Com or Dictionary.com, but be clear about both (WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT is good practice even in internal discussions, not just in inserting a citation into a live article). I use this same approach to such matters and it generally works well, even if in this one case I'm not getting through. Style/usage guide citations can also help, if the term/phrase has an entry in things like Fowler's or Garner's, though modern editions are not available for free online.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:24, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, Yeah, I generally agree with all of that, though had no idea some editors decided to take their POV pushing to Wiktionary. Wiktionary still has a fair bit of toilet humour, though, but I guess that's what you meant by the qualified mostly. I guess, it's toilet humour that's got fairly widespread usage as opposed to a group of high schoolers who coalesce together at UrbanDictionary.com. That said, I could see UrbanDictionary.com being a source of information for creating Wiktionary entries. ;-)

As to your other point on sourcing, if you're saying what I think you're saying, I completely agree. For example, TheFreeDictionary.com, I think it's called, is published by some company called Farlex, which, at first glance, seems kind of, erm, non-reputable. However, they note the sources of all their entries are from generally reliable sources like Collins. It's sort of like the problem I see at the reliable source noticeboards and elsewhere where editors often take WP:RSP as if it's some exhaustive list of the only acceptable sources for verifiability and notability. It's not, as it's practically speaking, impossible to list every possible source. It would be nice if editors looked beyond the domain name of the source and thought about who is actually doing the publishing and also the context in which it's used. Doug Mehus T·C 22:46, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I never cite Farlex's own definitions (which I think they put at page top) in discussions like those, much less in articles; we have no idea where they're getting that information from. while the company isn't disreputable, they don't have any reputability as a publisher/originator of linguistic material. IIRC, they're actually a software company that makes things like dictionary apps. But the site is valuable as an aggregator of freely accessible major dictionaries.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:27, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

PS: RSP is primarily a list of the sources that aren't reputable. There's a strong overlap with the URL block filter, at least for online publications that show up in the negative at RSP.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:49, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Wiktionary redirects

 Done

@SMcCandlish:

As expected, I see you're a New Page Patrol reviewer, and was wondering if you can mark my Wiktionary soft redirects as reviewed now that the discussions have closed as "keep." Deryck Chan was the closer of the discussion, and I had to make a minor change to each after it was closed (to remove the #REDIRECT wikt:word) coding that had to be added in order to properly list at RfD (it seems to be a bug in XFDCloser). Anyway, the soft redirects are as follows:

• Megathread
• I just work here
• Googlewhore

Direct link to Page Curation Tool: Special:NewPagesFeed

Thanks,
Doug Mehus T·C 22:55, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. Doug Mehus T·C 02:41, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

BLP question

@SMcCandlish:

Okay, so something's been bugging me...I noted that Roger Stone has his criminal convictions noted in his infobox, which, thankfully, hasn't been converted to {{Infobox criminal}} (I honestly don't know why we have two infoboxes; can the parameters not be combined into a single {{Infobox person}} template and used appropriately? Anyway...that's another matter). However, Martha Stewart's convictions on related white-collar criminal charges, which haven't been pardoned, as far as I'm able to tell, aren't noted in her infobox. So, my question is, are we giving undue weight in the former? And, if not, should we not be treating all biographies in the same fashion—that is, equally?

What is the "wiki case law" on this?

Cheers,
Doug Mehus T·C 00:31, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

I think it's an open question (or set of questions), and I have noticed this issue as well. I think we possibly should merge the template into {{infobox person}}, unless we have a strong reason to keep it separate, in which case strictly limit it so subjects who are primarily notable as criminals, like Al Capone. But see below; it might make more sense to remove parameters from {{infobox person}}. The bigger UNDUE question matters more, probably. I would bring that matter up as just a discussion at first at WT:BLP or maybe at WT:MOSBIO (since it's not only about living subjects, though the concerns are more important in such cases). Maybe notify WT:MOSINFOBOX,Template talk:Infobox person, WT:BIOGRAPHY, WT:NPOV, WP:NPOVN of the discussion. See what comes out of it. There may arise cause to eventually do an RfC on the matter (probably at WT:MOSBIO, and with notification also at such other places and at WP:VPPOL) about inserting a rule about it, when something like a consensus (or at least a clear question[s] to !vote on) emerges. There are a lot of possible directions and outcomes here, so it's worth general discussion first. One might be not merging the templates and instead actually removing crime-related parameters from {{infobox person}}, as unhelpful (just as we removed |ethnicity= from it, and removed |religion=|denomination= from it and from all other such i-boxes except a few like {{infobox religious leader}} where they're actually important).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:13, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Article improvements

February

Alte Liebe I Will Mention the Loving-kindnesses

Valentine month, thank you! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:42, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Today's Alte Liebe became especially meaningful after yesterday's funeral. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:47, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

If I'm following correctly, it sounds like a personal-life loss, for which I offer condolences.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:05, 3 March 2020 (UTC)