User talk:NSH001

Oliver Kamm
I appreciate your comments on Oliver Kamm's talk page. Although I have other pressing tasks to attend at the moment, I'll eventually return to the discussion. Also, don't let TJive intimidate you. He's nothing but a bully. Sir Paul 06:24, 7 July 2006 (UTC)


 * It's ironic, though. I have long regarded Kamm as a pretentious fool who isn't worth a minute of anybody's time trying to read him -- which is why I've been reluctant to get drawn in. Yet I'm still wasting time on him...--NSH001 15:07, 7 July 2006 (UTC)


 * update: (after 12 years!) Kamm is so ludicrous I find it hard to take him seriously. The trouble with Kamm goes back a long, long way – long before I was on Wikipedia (can't remember when, exactly, but it was in the days of dial-up modems that blocked your phone line, and might give you download speeds of 5 Kbytes/sec if you were lucky). I still think it a waste of time dealing with him, but I suppose it was only a matter of time before Kamm's malign influence would blow up so spectacularly on Wikipedia and lead to an Arbcom case (June 2018). Worth reading Brian Leiter's classic piece from November 2005. --NSH001 (talk) 10:47, 22 June 2018 (UTC)
 * more: There are many sources on Kamm's foolishness that can easily be found in a google search. I note the following two only because Philip Cross has been working hard to keep them out of Kamm's page:
 * The Oliver Kamm School of Falsification
 * http://mondoweiss.net/2016/02/chomsky-and-his-critics/
 * --NSH001 (talk) 17:00, 22 June 2018 (UTC)
 * A non-entity publicly, intellectually, and yet he has a wiki page. One can't edit it appropriately because he is under the radar that captures serious things.Nishidani (talk) 19:17, 22 June 2018 (UTC)
 * I decided to keep those few sentences from 2006 at the top (i.e., tell the bot not to archive them) partly because it's nice to have a record of when I started editing Wikipedia (well, not quite - it's the first ever message on my talk page, though) and partly because I quite like having a mildly derogatory remark about Kamm at the top of my talk page. He deserves a much more serious condemnation, but WP:BLP wouldn't allow it (rightly so, I think) and in any case posting negative stuff tends to be counterproductive. Plus he's really not worth the effort. --NSH001 (talk) 20:12, 22 June 2018 (UTC)
 * I decided to keep those few sentences from 2006 at the top (i.e., tell the bot not to archive them) partly because it's nice to have a record of when I started editing Wikipedia (well, not quite - it's the first ever message on my talk page, though) and partly because I quite like having a mildly derogatory remark about Kamm at the top of my talk page. He deserves a much more serious condemnation, but WP:BLP wouldn't allow it (rightly so, I think) and in any case posting negative stuff tends to be counterproductive. Plus he's really not worth the effort. --NSH001 (talk) 20:12, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Introduction
Consensus at WPMED is to keep refs generally over one line. Please do not switch them to over many. Best Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 13:13, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * , I am thinking very long term here. Most larger wiki articles are effectively rendered uneditable by the presence of numerous long, horizontally formatted templates (LHTs); the only edits feasible on such pages are trivial changes such as spelling corrections, or automated edits where the script/bot doesn't care about the formatting. Of course this is just my opinion, but I do know several other editors share my dislike of long, horizontally formatted citation template clutter (LHT clutter). As well as making the wikitext unreadable, such templates also make it very difficult to find and correct errors in the citation templates, or indeed in anything else.


 * It doesn't surprise me that the Wikimedia Foundation finds it necessary to spend large sums on things like Visual Editor, given that the mess resulting from long, horizontally formatted templates makes directly editing wikitext so user-hostile. I want to see a wiki that is clear of all this clutter, but that is going to take several years to achieve. In the meantime I am effectively banned (without having commited any offence) from many, perhaps most, articles because of citation clutter. Hence I am (slowly) developing a private script to help in this task. I call the script "ETVP" for "Easy To Visually Parse", because wikitext should be nice and easy to read. I aim eventually to make it easy, using the ETVP script, to switch to short-form referencing, or to LDR, or to some combination of the two, or indeed to anything else that will reduce or eliminate citation clutter. It was not originally my intention to leave ETVP templates in-line, but when I first tried it I was surprised at how much more readable the wikitext became, so my current thinking is to retain it as an option (the main disadvantage appears to be that it is too easy to turn it back into horizontal formatting, as you have demonstrated!).


 * I am relaxed about not edit-warring with you on this, although I do think making the wikitext harder to read is irrational. Partly this is because the ETVP script is still a long way from being finished, but the main reason is that my focus is on the long-term, and edit warring on individual articles is of no benefit in that aim. I have always anticipated there will be some resistance to in-line ETVP templates, simply because people don't like change, or just get upset by unexpected change, or by anything surprising. I note that most WPMED articles are of a scientific or academic nature, where short-form referencing is the natural style. Once I've got the ETVP script working for that style, then I believe it could be very useful for the WPMED project.


 * --NSH001 (talk) 21:18, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * The majority of the editors at WPMED like the references over one horizontal line rather than over dozens of lines.
 * Yes there is a minority who like it over dozens of lines. I find having it over one horizontal line is easier to edit not harder.
 * What we need is an option / gadget so that those who want it over one line when they hit edit get it over one line and those who want it over many lines get it over many lines. That means win-win for everyone as everyone gets the way they find makes it easiest for them to edit. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 22:27, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Look more carefully. ETVP is not "dozens of lines" (per cite). I think you might be referring to the (not very wonderful) "vertical" format that you get in the template documentation; even then (provided you eliminate the blank parameters), it rarely amounts to "dozens" of lines. The ETVP script has been carefully thought through to give you what it says on the tin: it uses the minimum number of lines and white space while still maintaining clarity. Roughly, items that logically belong together go on the same line, important items go at the top (title, authors) and references (for example, identifiers) go at the end (a bit like wikipedia article layout). The aim is to take advantage of the human visual system, which works orders of magnitude faster than the rest of the brain. This makes it very easy to spot errors, often instantly; in addition, you'll often spot errors you weren't even looking for in the first place. This is impossible to do if the template is strung out over two or more lines (by lines, I mean lines on the edit window, not the single line you're referring to), buried in a mass of other wikitext. I think one reason why cite templates are so badly infested with errors is precisely this difficulty of spotting errors in the horizontal layout. But what makes the horizontal layout even more annoying is the difficulty of spotting the beginning and end of the same template, especially if there are large numbers of horizontal cites buried within the same paragraph. With the ETVP format, the eye can again spot the beginning and end of a template instantly. So not only does the horizontal format make it difficult or impossible to spot errors in the cite templates, it also makes it difficult or impossible to follow the "flow" of the article text itself. To see this, try an experiment: (a) open in edit mode the version of the article before my edit, and try to read out loud the article text from the wikitext, then (b) do the same with the wikitext after my edit. Notice how much easier (b) is!


 * Take a look, in edit mode, at Muhammad Najati Sidqi and Khazars. These are examples of the the work of the ETVP script on articles that were already using short-form referencing. Notice how easy and pleasant it is to read the citation templates there. Although I intend to implement LDR first, my aim (eventually) is to make it easy to switch articles to short-form referencing, with all templates in ETVP form. This is my preferred referencing style, and the most natural for scientific, technical and academic articles. But basically, the ETVP script will eventually let editors use any referencing style they like, as long as it doesn't involve long, horizontally formatted templates.


 * Note that ETVP is not the same as "vertical". Short templates are actually easier to visually parse if they are "scrunched up" (eliminating all unnecessary spaces) and kept on the same line. The ETVP script recognizes this, using a cut-off of 50 characters (this seems to work well so far, but it could be easily tweaked if necessary). Perhaps the fans of horizontal templates are aware of this, but then wrongly assume that it applies regardless of length. The general principle is that short templates are fine if they're kept on the same physical line, but the longer the template, the stronger the case for a vertical or ETVP format. For an extreme example, see this egregious edit, which I don't think anyone would want to defend.


 * One might also note the contrast with infoboxes, which are already, mostly, more-or-less in a vertical format, with one parameter per line. Editors don't have any problem editing infoboxes. So in my view, the difficulty some editors say they have with editing ETVP or vertical format is imaginary, not real. Probably they've just gotten used to the default that they get when they click the "cite" button on the edit window or from using most of the standard cite-generating tools. And why should they care? For most editors, adding cites is just a tedious but necessary chore, to be done with minimum effort; they care about the info they're adding, not the errors they're creating or the messy wikitext they're leaving behind.
 * --NSH001 (talk) 11:10, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
 * P.S. The idea of a gadget seems like a good one, except I'd want it to appear in an ETVP format, not the vertical one. In the four years since this thread first started, it has become crystal clear that a gadget is never going to be a solution to this problem. There is, however, a partial solution, namely a change to the wikitext editor, which I outline at Update, August 2020 below, which will immediately (once implemented) meet some of the objections raised by fans of the turd format, as well as being a useful adjuct to the operation of the ETVP script. (updated 17:03, 13 August 2020 (UTC))

Notes on the Syntax highlighter gadget
has suggested the syntax highlighter gadget as a possible solution to the near-impossibility of reading and editing pages full of LHTs.

Initial thoughts: Conclusion: better than nothing, but not really a solution to the problem. By providing a makeshift patch that papers over the problem, it reduces the pressure to get the problem fixed properly. It does mark the beginning and end of templates clearly (very good!), but the ETVP script also does that. The ETVP format also makes it easy to spot errors instantly, and the highlighter is of no help in that regard. --NSH001 (talk) 21:51, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
 * The default setting is far too cluttered; in particular, there is no need to highlight wikilinks. However it is possible to customise it so that only templates are highlighted. This works, and is actually quite useful.
 * However, this is moot for those who, like me,use an external editor for most of their editing.
 * It doesn't distinguish nested templates, in contrast to the ETVP script, which indents templates to mark the depth of nesting.
 * In any case, this problem is so fundamental that we shouldn't need to depend on a gadget to fix it.

Further thoughts:
 * The gadget doesn't work on diffs (and wasn't intended to), but templates in ETVP format are still easily distinguishable in diffs.
 * Not distinguishing nested templates is a major drawback, especially in Infoboxes where cite templates are common. Not a problem when using ETVP, as the script uses indentation to indicate nesting.
 * There is no need to highlight short templates (that's just unnecessary visual clutter). In my view only templates EITHER longer than about 100 characters OR which wrap around lines in the edit window need to be highlighted. Of course, the ETVP script takes account of template length, but it has no way of telling when a template is going to line-wrap. But note that templates in ETVP format are designed so that they usually won't line-wrap, except for long URLs or long quotes or exceptionally long article or chapter titles. Even then, the line-wrapping is restricted to the long piece of text, and does not affect the readability of the rest of the template.

I vaguely remember trying some sort of highlighter or edit-helper several years ago, and rapidly rejecting it as too cluttered and too distracting; if my memory is correct it also suffered from a lot of bugs. In contrast, I can see that I might sometimes use this highlighter, even though most of the time I will have it turned off. The author of this highlighter,, deserves some thanks and credit for the thought and effort he or she has put into this script. It's obviously useful to many editors, but it's not a solution to the problem of LHT clutter. --NSH001 (talk) 09:44, 1 March 2017 (UTC) and NSH001 (talk) 10:32, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Let's get the terminology right
I have seen other editors (not just Doc James), when talking about this infuriating problem, use the phrase "over one line" to refer to horizontal cite templates and "over many lines" to refer to other formats.

Yes, it is true that the annoying LHT format only occupies one physical line of the computer file. But to use "over one line" in the context of a discussion of the merits of the different formats is very misleading. On the actual edit window that real-life editors use, it also occupies many lines. The difference is that the LHT format will line-wrap at unpredictable positions, depending on where in the text it occurs, what font size is being used and the width of the edit window, among other factors. At least the line-breaks in the "vertical" format are predictable (making it more readable than the LHT format), while the ETVP format is specifically designed to make it as readable as possible.

Incidentally, this problem of line-wrapping is one reason why, generally, I don't mind manually formatted citations; as long as they don't contain long URLs, or other long items, they will usually fit into one line of an edit window, so they don't disrupt the readability of the wikitext in the same way that LHTs do. (I have mentioned elsewhere that there are compelling reasons for preferring templated citations, of course.) There is another reason why manual citations are generally acceptable in the body of an article: they are still in a narrative format, so (unless they contain a long URL) they fit in quite naturally with the rest of the article. Very different from cite templates, where the important task for the editor is to visually parse the argument-value pairs (updated December 2017).

--NSH001 (talk) 15:53, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

What's so bad about long horizontal template clutter (LHT clutter)?

 * It puts off new editors from joining Wikipedia. See self-selection below, and my responses to Doc James above.
 * It violates every principle of sound coding practice. Any professional computer programmer who wrote code like this would soon be out of a job, or more likely, would never be taken on in the first place.
 * It obfuscates everything. Similarly, at school I was taught how to write English properly. If I had written an essay in such an unstructured, amorphous form I would have received a big fat ZERO as my mark for such an essay. If you (generic) write English without any structure, the result is incomprehensible. The same applies to wikitext.
 * It causes errors because errors are so difficult to spot and to correct in LHTs.
 * It causes even more errors because LHT clutter makes it difficult (almost impossible) to follow the natural flow of the article text within the wikitext.
 * It makes diffs hard to follow. It's bad enough trying to read wikitext cluttered with LHTs, but the problems are multiplied when you (generic) are trying to establish who has added or deleted what in a diff.
 * It sets a bad example. New editors will usually just copy the techniques they find already being used, so, not surprisingly, the result is a cancerous expansion of the usual steaming heap of unreadable and uneditable text.
 * Summary: it makes editing Wikipedia difficult, slow, error-prone and very, very unpleasant. The problem is so bad, so annoying and so infuriating that either LHT clutter has to be gotten rid of (preferably completely), or  . The reason is obvious: how is it possible to edit anything cluttered up with LHTs, when this clutter, apart from the exceptions footnoted below, makes editing impossible?
 * Conclusion: LHT clutter should be E . X . T . E . R . M . I . N . A . T . E . D.

The paradox: if LHT clutter is so bad, then why are most articles using this style?
Well, I really don't know. It baffles and perplexes me that anyone could possibly tolerate this mess. But any strategy for getting rid of LHTs needs to address this paradox. Some possible explanations:

--NSH001 (talk) 07:39, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
 * 1) Self-selection. The WMF has been worrying for years about the long-term decline in the number of active editors. Not that surprising really, when someone new to Wikipedia opens up a page in edit mode and discovers an amorphous, unstructured, smushed-together, incomprehensible and almost unreadable heap of steaming LHT doo-doo. So the small minority that's left, and which heroically persists in trying to edit Wikipedia, has, for the most part (not all, and certainly not including me), self-selected as those who can somehow tolerate LHT clutter.
 * 2) False perception of authority. People assume that, simply because it is so common, LHT clutter must somehow be "right", or "officially approved", or the "standard" citation and referencing style, although per policy (WP:CITESTYLE), there is no one, single, standard citation style on Wikipedia. All this despite the fact that LHT clutter is the worst possible citation and referencing style.
 * 3) Lack of exposure to better citation styles. Some editors are simply unaware of better alternatives: they may dislike the clutter, but just assume it's something thay have to put up with. Or they may be aware of better alternatives, but then find it takes a lot of time and effort to change the citation style (plus they may then have additional battles based on WP:CITEVAR).
 * 4) Unfamiliarity with academic citation styles, especially among editors who haven't had a university-level education.
 * 5) Poor citation-generating tools. These have plenty of faults and shortcomings. Among their faults is that they offer only the LHT clutter style, or if they do offer a choice, it is between so-called "vertical" and LHT, with LHT clutter being the default. The "vertical" form, as given in the template documentation, isn't that great either, but it's still a huge improvement over LHT clutter. None of them offer an ETVP form as a choice, of course, since ETVP is a new concept. Since the default option is the easiest one to choose, the result is that the LHT dungheap just keeps on growing.
 * 6) Poor citation template documentation (in fact, most of the citation template documentation is quite good; I'm referring here to the distinction between "vertical" and "horizontal"). The "vertical" style offered as an alternative to the LHT clutter format in the template documentation is very poor (but still a huge improvement on LHT clutter). It obviously hasn't been properly and thoroughly thought through though. I will discuss this in more detail in the ETVP documentation, but see my responses to Doc James above for a brief outline. This may partly explain why editors (bizarrely) choose the LHT clutter format instead.
 * 7) Syntax highlighters. My first reaction to Doc James' request above was simply bewilderment and perplexity, since trying to edit LHT clutter is a physical impossibility (well it can be done, but only at the cost of a phenomenal amount of time and effort). Note that for serious editing, I use an external editor (but I do use the standard wikitext editor for small changes, and to preview edits made in the main, external, editor). So I pay little attention to developments in the standard editor or its gadgets. Well, syntax highlighters (if properly configured) do solve one of the most infuriating problems about LHT clutter, namely the extreme difficulty of spotting where an individual LHT begins and ends. I think it's clear that without syntax highlighters, LHT clutter would never survive as a citation style ; otherwise editing a page full of LHT clutter is physically impossible. But that still raises questions about what newbies do, since they won't be aware of syntax highlighters. And as I explained above, syntax highlighters still have some drawbacks, and in any case, the ETVP style renders them unnecessary.Conclusion: syntax highlighters are like a medication that alleviates (some of) the symptoms, but doesn't cure the underlying disease.
 * 8) Inadequate wikitext editor. The wikitext editor needs to properly support separation of long citation templates from their inline antecedents, whether it be list-defined references (LDR), parenthetical referencing or short-form referencing. In one click it should enable an sfn template, or any of its siblings, including any of the harvnb family, to be inserted in the article body and at the same time the corresponding long cite template added, if not already present, in correct alphabetical order, to the relevant bibliographic listing. Similarly for named references and their corresponding entry in LDR.As an alternative my ETVP script effectively does this already by transforming a whole article all at once (it still needs polishing, though). The wikitext editor should also allow a single click on an sfn/harvnb or named reference to bring up the corresponding long template in a popup for easy editing.I guess the first suggestion is too difficult and impracticable to be worth the effort, especially if we already have a script to do the job. So I'd like to limit myself to just two small suggestions, that should be possible without too much effort:(updated, December 2017)
 * 9) * A popup to show the corresponding full citation when a short-form cite is "clicked"
 * 10) * Toggle the size of the edit window (edit box) between the standard size and full screen, or full screen with only minimal menus and toolbar.
 * 11) Perhaps the most obvious explanation. Amazingly, Wikipedia, through its HELP tools, actually teaches the LHT clutter style to beginners. So does the WMF through its volunteer editors who help newbies come to grips with how to edit Wikipedia (very useful work, apart from this one aspect). This needs to change, so that newcomers are made aware of the problems created by LHT clutter, and of the available alternatives. (added, June 2019)

Update, August/September 2020
This section has been prompted by the this discussion on the talk page of Actuary (a featured article), and the simultaneous discussion at Village pump (proposals) (archived here). In addition, my private ETVP script has been under near-constant development since most of this thread was first written, so an update is needed anyway.

The ETVP script now allows the choice of four different ways of getting rid of LHT clutter:


 * 1) Switch all citation templates from the LHT clutter format (also known as the "turd" format) to ETVP format, but leave them in place. This was the first option to be developed (because it was the easiest), and the one that Doc James complained about above. It might have been possible to have left it there, but I found that whenever I changed turd templates to nice, pleasant, in-line ETVP templates, I kept getting reverted; such a change also prompted the complaint from Doc James above. I note below a couple of proposed changes to the wikitext editor, which I hope should remove these objections. So I went ahead with providing all the remaining options.
 * 2) Switch to list-defined references, WP:LDR, so that the "turds" are all moved out of the article text, and are listed (having, on their way, been transformed into ETVP format) using the refs parameter of the reflist template. This was the second option that I developed. It succeeds in getting rid of the turds, but it also comes with some disadvantages, notably the difficulty in handling page numbers (which can still be done, but not very easily).
 * 3) Switch to short-form referencing, making use of sfn and harvnb and all their numerous siblings. This was the third option I developed, and is the one I use most frequently. The main advantage is that the citations are listed – of course, in the pleasant ETVP format – in a neat, alphabetically-ordered bibliographic listing at the end of the article.
 * 4) Switch to parenthetical referencing. This is the most recent option that I have developed, and is similar in many ways to short-form referencing, notably the use of a neatly formatted and sorted bibliographic listing at the end. It has the advantage over short-form of not requiring a separate section to hold the short cites, and of reducing the number of clicks to get to the full citation. Like Option 3, it offers the advantage over Option 2 of handling page numbers properly.
 * 5) The fifth option is independent of the others. It has been far and away the most difficult to write (but I like a challenge!), namely to automatically convert manual citations to templated ones. Options 3 and 4 rely heavily on the existence of CS1/CS2 citation templates, so this is an essential prerequisite in many cases. It will never be possible to reliably convert everything, but it is possible to do so for well-written manual citations, and to get quite close for many of the rest.
 * 6) The sixth option mostly doesn't exist yet. So far, the emphasis within this script has been to provide options to move from the dungheap citation style to one of the options listed above. There are, however, valid reasons why it may be desirable to move from one non-turd citation style to a different non-turd citation style. It can often happen that, for small articles, Option 2 (list-defined references) is the best way of getting rid of the turds. Then, once an article expands, Option 3 becomes the best solution; it's no accident that Option 3 is much more common at the Featured Article level. Thus, at the time of writing, the script provides some limited support for moving from Option 2 to Option 3. In future, it may offer support for other possible switches, but that is a low priority for now. Another, more likely possibility, is to offer a combination of citation styles. It should, of course, go without saying that switches of citation style remain subject to WP:CITEVAR and WP:CITESTYLE. (updated 08:43, 12 August 2020 (UTC))

In practice, I find that I use option 1 as an interim stage before using one of the other options. Option 1 is very helpful: firstly because it automatically corrects many of the errors that you find in citation templates, and, secondly, having the templates in ETVP format makes them much easier to edit. Any solution (and my script) has to take account of the vast amount of crap that editors type into citation templates. You won't believe the amount of crap that you find in citation templates. Not just editors, most of the citation-generating tools generate crap citations too, notably Visual Editor (VE), which was one of the worst, although it seems to be getting a bit better recently. A huge amount of the effort that has gone into my script has been writing code to correct this mountainous pile of crap. One of the reasons that there is so much crap in citation templates is that the LHT clutter style makes it very difficult to find errors, and even if you do find one, the LHT format makes it hard and time-consuming to correct.

Anyway, for now, option 1 is used only as an interim, preliminary stage. I save the result on my own computer (it would be easy to save it on Wikipedia, but that carries the risk of another editor coming along and messing up my work) and then examine it manually. Firstly, to correct the usual crap. Then to check the changes option 1 has offered; the most common of these is the  it generates if there are no authors or editors, or no date/year is specified. Of course, this stage may not be needed if I'm already familiar with the page and its history; on the other hand it's essential if someone has been dumping LHTs ("turds") using VE or one of the citation-generating tools. Once I'm satisfied with the results, I run one of the other options to generate the final result.

I still believe using in-line ETVP formatting (option 1) is a valid and useful option (it keeps the citation next to the text it's supporting), but before that can win general acceptance, I think two changes are necessary to the wiki text editor (I refuse to go anywhere near the VE editor):
 * 1) The display of all instances of   should be changed so that what you see in the edit window looks something like this:"blah blah,[ref 23][ref 3][ref 24 name='Smith'] blah blah.[ref 11]"where the coloured [ref]s are clickable, resulting in either a pop-up that can be edited, or expanded in-line for editing.
 * 2) Make it possible to toggle the edit box between its standard size and full-screen (or full-screen, less a little bit for menus/toolbars). One of the excuses made for the turd format is that "it keeps the refs from taking up so much screen space in a heavily referenced article", so this will help to remove this excuse. Of course the first change also does that, but in any case it's nice to have the option to edit full-screen.

I believe the first change will be welcomed by all editors (even those who are fans of the turd format), since it makes the wikitext much more readable.

The purpose of the ETVP script

Worth reiterating:

The purpose of the ETVP script is to get rid of LHT clutter. That was its original motivation, and will always remain its primary function. In doing this, it provides options to switch from the dungheap citation style to any of the citation formats mentioned above.

But its purpose remains to get rid of LHT clutter. Of course it can be used to switch citation style, and I hope to support every reasonable citation style, but it will never allow a turd-formatted citation to remain in place.

I am always open to reasonable requests for improving the ETVP script. But the one thing that is, and will always remain, non-negotiable, is its fundamental, basic purpose, which is to get rid of turd-formatted citations.

--NSH001 (talk) 14:13, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

It's not just me

 * 1) From "So I just finished re-formatting Lead into the format that I think is clearly and objectively superior: cite books etc in a separate section at the bottom of the page, sfn in body text. [I would go farther than that and use various harv formats in Notes, but that is irrelevant to this question.] Before that, it was all all splashed like buckshot across body text. That is a common referencing method, and it is quite inferior. First, it's a maintenance nightmare for editors to search and find all those citations everywhere in the body text. It is a confusing jumble of metatext mishmash blobs that break the actual displayed text up into near-incoherence when you look at the raw editing version;  a n00b does not deserve to face that. Second, it jumbles all the displayed cite text into an unorganized blob of cite info in the References section, making  spotting errors in them an exercise in serious eyestrain. Third, the absence of sfn (or something comparable)  makes it prohibitively difficult to add specific page numbers."User:Lingzhi is talking here mainly about page numbers, but he also makes clear the problem with LHT clutter.
 * 2) From User_talk:Dsimic (edited for clarity):
 * Hello! Regarding  on the Power supply unit (computer) article, IMHO there's no reasonable excuse for favoring a much less readable format of the Wiki code under the unification umbrella.  Consistency is good, of course, but it actually isn't that good when it makes things worse.  Each "slice" of better Wiki code readability counts, and we should aim toward consistency-related changes that improve the overall Wiki code readability.  Hope you'll agree. &mdash; Dsimic (talk &#124; contribs) 08:52, 4 May 2016 (UTC)
 * (redacted)
 * Quite frankly, there's no way that, for example, this Wiki code snippet:
 * is better or more readable than its nicely formatted equivalent:
 * It's pretty much obvious to anyone who had spent at least some time editing Wiki code manually or doing some other source-level computer programming. &mdash; Dsimic (talk &#124; contribs) 23:03, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
 * 1) From User:Monkbot/task_18: cosmetic cs1 template cleanup: "Editors commonly complain that inline references make it more difficult to read wikitext." [ Note from NSH001: "references" in this context means LHT clutter. ]
 * 2) From Village_pump (technical)/Archive 186:
 * The thing that irritates me the most, as a WP editor, is how nice, legible citations, such as (within braces that I'm omitting)
 * are collapsed into illegible goo, as in -- complaint by User:Deisenbe
 * 1) (more quotes to be added)
 * are collapsed into illegible goo, as in -- complaint by User:Deisenbe
 * 1) (more quotes to be added)

Documentation
I'm aware that I need to produce a full set of documentation about ETVP – the underlying principles, the ETVP script, and why it does what it does, and a full discussion/tutorial of the merits and demerits of each of the options it offers. I've been slow in doing this because for the foreseeable future the script will remain private, so that only I can use it. In the meantime, the long thread here provides a good description of the motivation for writing it, and you can find examples of its use at User:NSH001/ETVP/examples. --NSH001 (talk) 14:13, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Definition
A turd template is another name for a Long horizontally formatted template (LHT) as defined above. As explained above, LHTs make editing difficult or impossible (with some exceptions), in addition to being undesirable on general grounds.

Opening, in edit mode, an article full of LHTs is like entering a house where every previous visitor (editor) has left a "deposit" all over the floor. Hence the name.

--NSH001 (talk) 22:28, 3 May 2018 (UTC)


 * For a full understanding of why they are called "turds", follow the link to the long thread above. But if you just want a one-paragraph explanation, click here (updated 08:16, 2 September 2020 (UTC)).

Definition
The dungheap citation style is another name for the LHT clutter citation style. Note that I am being too kind to LHT clutter here: dungheaps can be composted into useful, sweet-smelling fertiliser that can be used by farmers to help produce healthy, nutritious organic food. By contrast, the stink of LHT clutter is permanent until the turds are flushed away, or otherwise disposed of.

--NSH001 (talk) 10:23, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Assange, the kangaroo court, and worse
First, some remarks copied from above:

(Sorry to wander off the topic, but the whole thing is so outrageous I'm finding it difficult to think of anything else.) At this moment, I'm wondering what to do about this kangaroo court, reminiscent of stories coming out of the USSR when I was a boy growing up some 60 years ago. The (mis-)treatment of an innocent man, amounting to torture, breaks every fucking legal rule in the book, but our so-called "mainstream" media is remarkably silent on the massive human rights abuse of a good man, yet they are fully capable of pointing out human rights abuses in countries they don't like. It's crystal clear to me that the time has come to revise Wikipedia's rules on "reliable sources"; taking account of the propaganda function of the media would be a good place to start. Jeez, even RT is more reliable on this farce. --NSH001 (talk) 01:18, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Comments

 * Agreed that you need to read outside the commercial media if you want to get a full appreciation of what is happening with Assange. Luckily el pais and la republicca are covering some aspects of the case so that we can get some of the information into Wikipedia. Burrobert (talk) 14:26, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

I suggest writers call the growing number of Western democracies who are going back to the third world model 'hamburger republics'. 'Ham' as in ham actor,etc. Best wishes for the new, even if probably more digusting, year.Nishidani (talk) 13:18, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Interesting (coincidence?) that you should mention "hamburger", as I've been contemplating expanding the (new) Helen Steel article, and other articles associated with the McLibel case. Unlike most peace activists/dissidents, there are some decent sources available on Steel.The accounts of visitors to Assange in Belmarsh remind me of visiting Brook House, the larger of the two immigration detention centres at Gatwick, the same dehumanization – just more extreme. And I can also see similarities with the psychological effect on my father of three years as a Japanese PoW in the Second World War. But at least my father had the moral support of his comrades, not isolation, as is the case with Assange. --NSH001 (talk) 14:16, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Friday the thirteenth
Well, it looks like this country (England at any rate, but possibly not Scotland) is doomed (Friday 13 Dec 2019).

In the 1930s in Germany it was anti-Jewish racism (=antisemitism); today in England it's anti-immigrant racism.


 * The NHS is going to be destroyed, and people still don't realise it.
 * more on how the NHS is being slowly and deliberately destroyed
 * (4 years later) have already succeeded in making it almost impossible to see an NHS dentist: With ‘dental deserts’ all over the UK, hundreds of thousands of people now flock to hospitals or GPs each year for treatment. And the problem is only getting worse. Doctors (starting with the GPs) are next on their target list. They changed the law to allow unqualified medical staff to pretend they're really doctors, and there's nothing the General Medical Council can do about it. See Your right to an NHS doctor is being scrapped to suit big business and Physician Associates scandal deepens as a Royal College (Royal College of Physicians) is caught MANIPULATING data for the Tories. It's a "massive fraud". My comment: a mistake to blame it on "the Tories", BOTH major parties are now firmly under the control of the neocon nutters (aka ); neither genocide party deserves anyone's vote. Same applies to the Republocrats and Democritans in the US.
 * (24 June 2024) are at it again, in the persons of Starmer and Wes Streeting. See THE DANGERS OF A LABOUR NHS
 * More poverty, more homelessness, more distress, and people don't realise it's coming.
 * More lying and smearing.
 * The end of genuine hope for a better society.
 * We had a chance of a Prime minister with honesty, compassion, empathy and integrity.
 * Instead we get a toxic, repulsive, Prime Minister, a repeated, flat-out liar, incompetent at everything he does except his own self-advancement, regarded as a bad joke by politicians overseas with only a few exceptions, possibly including Donald Trump (actually, I suspect Trump thinks he is a joke, but won't say so until the USA is finally able to cash in on the NHS, causing millions of premature deaths in the UK)
 * The system is rigged to destroy politicians of compassion and integrity.
 * Now watch the bogus antisemitism smears switched off like a light bulb, while real antisemitism goes on unchecked

The blindingly obvious
Given the extraordinary vicious, unprincipled campaign of lying, smears, deceit and deception against Corbyn and the Labour Party, it would not be surprising to find these liars using every dirty trick in the book. Hard to imagine that they would have any scruples about rigging the vote-counting process, probably focussing on the postal votes in about 50 to 100 marginal constituencies. Unfortunately it takes time and effort to dig up the evidence to prove it, but some people are working on it. Watch this space.

A month later
Quite a good analysis from The New York Review of Books by David Graeber.

Confirmation of the lying

 * See the report on disinformation during the election campaign."In summary, the evidence suggests that the current regulatory framework for political advertising and campaigning during elections is not fit for purpose and wholly inadequate for the digital terrain on which elections are increasingly fought. There is no greater threat to democracy than disinformation, especially when it is produced and disseminated by an incumbent government and reinforced by the bulk of the mainstream press. As well as fact checking claims in real-time, broadcasters should provide viewers with regular updates and data on the scale of falsehoods put out by rival parties. As for online advertising, it seems clear that the current policies and enforcement operated by the platforms is nothing more than minimal and feeble given the scale of the problem. Unless and until the major platforms are able to implement a robust fact checking approval system before publication, there is an unanswerable case to ban all political advertising online during election periods."

Quotes and notes

Sources
 * Full report (PDF): https://2f8283e3-ada7-492e-a67f-c276f0e760e2.filesusr.com/ugd/3a3360_bedd1ada47d8464da93ed59b2a7733f7.pdf
 * Full report (PDF): https://2f8283e3-ada7-492e-a67f-c276f0e760e2.filesusr.com/ugd/3a3360_bedd1ada47d8464da93ed59b2a7733f7.pdf
 * Full report (PDF): https://2f8283e3-ada7-492e-a67f-c276f0e760e2.filesusr.com/ugd/3a3360_bedd1ada47d8464da93ed59b2a7733f7.pdf
 * Full report (PDF): https://2f8283e3-ada7-492e-a67f-c276f0e760e2.filesusr.com/ugd/3a3360_bedd1ada47d8464da93ed59b2a7733f7.pdf
 * Full report (PDF): https://2f8283e3-ada7-492e-a67f-c276f0e760e2.filesusr.com/ugd/3a3360_bedd1ada47d8464da93ed59b2a7733f7.pdf
 * Full report (PDF): https://2f8283e3-ada7-492e-a67f-c276f0e760e2.filesusr.com/ugd/3a3360_bedd1ada47d8464da93ed59b2a7733f7.pdf

More confirmation of the lying
I strongly recommend this book: This book is the definitive work on the bogus-antisemitism smear campaign that destroyed Corbyn. Winstanley has had the help of dozens of people, and they have gone to great lengths to ensure that everything has been accurately sourced and verified. I used to think that I knew everything about the smear campaign, having watched, with horror, its progress, but this book is an eye-opener. Everything about the smears has been based on lies, from top to bottom and beginning to end. To a much greater extent than I had imagined. One point surprised me, and that was the extent of Corbyn's capitulation, towards the end of the campaign, under the intense military-Zionist pressure. At first sight I had thought this was a good thing (it's always good, in peace-making, to look for compromise), but he started apologising for telling the truth. It's fine to apologise for making a mistake, but never, ever apologise for telling the truth. Once you start on that path, the military-Zionists will never stop. Just like blackmailers, they will come back again and again, asking for more and more. You absolutely cannot, and should not, appease them. An important lesson for the future. -- 11:06 (UTC), Friday 13 October 2023.

Wikipedia Wars and the Israel-Palestine conflict...please fill out my survey?
Hello :) I am writing my MA dissertation on Wikipedia Wars and the Israel-Palestine conflict, and I noticed that you have contributed to those pages. My dissertation will look at the process of collaborative knowledge production on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the effect it has on bias in the articles. This will involve understanding the profiles and motivations of editors, contention/controversy and dispute resolution in the talk pages, and bias in the final article. For more information, you can check out my meta-wiki research page or my user page, where I will be posting my findings when I am done. I would greatly appreciate if you could take 5 minutes to fill out this quick survey before 8 August 2021.

Participation in this survey is entirely voluntary and anonymous. There are no foreseeable risks nor benefits to you associated with this project. Thanks so much,

Sarah Sanbar

Sarabnas I'm researching Wikipedia Questions? 20:51, 20 July 2021 (UTC)


 * , sorry for taking so long to reply – I still have my hands full with recovering from the sudden death of my old laptop, plus some medical problems (oh, the joys of getting old!).
 * I do have reservations about surveys (too much depends on how they are framed), but I might still have a go at your survey in due course. Doing so might of course prompt a few more thoughts, in which case I will record them either here, or on your page. My first thought, on receipt of your message and looking at your page and contribution list was that you seemed to have missed out a lot of editors; however you seem to have mostly remedied that on 24 July. I have been around here a very long time, and it is striking how so many editors who caused me so much trouble in the early days have since been blocked/banned, mostly for sockpuppetry. Re people being blocked/banned, you might like to take a look at Nishidani's user page for the story of how he got himself banned and reinstated. Israel/Palestine wasn't originally among my concerns before I encountered Wikipedia. But I am interested in peace activists (very difficult to get these right on Wikipedia, because the so-called "reliable sources" are, in their case, about as unreliable as you can get), and I soon came accross Rachel Corrie (whose dad, by the way, is – like me – a retired actuary) and was horrified by what was being done to her article. It all seemed so totally bizarre (as does mainstream US politics, since the propaganda being pushed in mass media is both so powerful and so counter-factual).
 * That got me looking into more sources on Israel/Palestine, and I began to appreciate the horror of what was happening to the Palestinians. I already had an inkling from reading Noam Chomsky, though at the time I was more interested in Latin America, having spent 3 weeks with a Quaker group in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and later 2 separate visits to Bolivia working with a Quaker charity, also Costa Rica, a country that decided to abolish its army. Nowadays I tend to leave Israel/Palestine to a small team who are very good at what they're doing (much better than me), but I still do some technical edits there, and will occasionally offer support when needed. The use of language also bothers me – I don't think those who describe themselves as "pro-Israel" are for the benefit of Israel at all, they're pro-something, but not Israel in the natural sense of the word. I regard Israel as a tragedy. I grew up, like most of my generation, with a huge sense of sympathy for Jews, their long history as the victims of persecution, pogroms, racism and bigotry, and above all the Holocaust. Present-day Israel feels like a betrayal of that history: partly because of interference by outside military powers, and partly because Israel has been taken over by militarists and militarism, exemplifying the moral corruption that always accompanies militarism. Quakers have a long history of helping Jews (there's a little about that on my user page), also other groups who have been similarly victimised, but overall, probably Jews more than any other group. It's a tragedy, when it could have been a "light unto the nations".
 * I think Wikipedia is hopeless at covering the horrors being perpetrated all over the world by the US military (and sadly, the UK also), and sooner or later something is going to have to be done about what qualifies as "Reliable Sources"; perhaps the worst example is Syria, and the activists working on the ground there. You might want to take a look at my user page, which has something to say about Syria. But the horror is ubiquitous. Still, there's reason for optimism – Wikipedia's treatment of Israel/Palestine today is much, much better than it was 15 years ago. That's partly because of the persistent hard work being put in by some editors, and partly because there do exist "Reliable Sources" which are in fact accurate, not the case for many other topics or geographical areas. --NSH001 (talk) 15:52, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi NSH001 - thanks so much for your message! I greatly enjoyed reading it. I completely understand your reservations re: surveys, and I share them. My hope with the survey was to gain more insight into the personal motivations of editors (which isn't always shared on the user page) and help illuminate some of the meta-level dynamics I am finding through edit history. I have been making my way through the editor list, which is slow work that requires a lot of copy-pasting...I'm getting there, though! :)
 * Wikipedia feels like a never ending rabbit hole, and each day I open my laptop to work on my dissertation I find another interesting nugget. Unpacking the politics has been curious as well, especially comparing the way people are treated or sanctioned and the ways that mirrors inequalities in 'real life' as well. Exactly as you said as well, it's been interesting to see how certain editors/sockpuppets have been banned and weeded out. I think it raises some interesting questions about the power of norms in the Wikipedia community and the extent to which it's able to self-govern in a way that promotes collaboration over competition. The Israel-Palestine case in particular is interesting because in many ways it's an exaggerated microcosm of the dynamics happening elsewhere. Wikipedia is fantastic in so many ways, but it has a lot of weaknesses - some of which are structural - that need to be addressed if it's going to protect itself from mis/disinformation, coordinated editing campaigns, accuracy, neutrality and so on. As the world (and Google!) relies on Wikipedia more and more, pointing out and working to fix those weaknesses becomes even more important. Hopefully my dissertation will be a step in that direction, and thank you for your efforts to do the same!
 * Very cool about the Quakers by the way - I used to work for an NGO founded by Quakers :) I really enjoyed working there, and really resonated with a lot of Quaker ideas and principles as well, especially the emphasis on nonviolence and social justice. Sarabnas I'm researching Wikipedia Questions? 17:47, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * , hope you're not having too many problems with your dissertation. I was very impressed by this interview with Ken Loach:
 * Loach is calm and collected, despite what is being done to him by the nonentities currently running the Labour Party, and in my opinion his analysis of what needs to be done to stop is spot-on. And just like Rachel Corrie, Ben Chacko's dad is an actuary! Probably retired by now, but I'd have to check to be sure. Yet another coincidence, the company he (Chacko père) worked for, Eagle Star offered me a job when I finished university, but I turned them down for another company. I was very tempted to take the job, because Cheltenham is a very pleasant place to live and work. I particularly remember the job interview because when I mentioned that I would have studied French at university if I hadn't done maths, we conducted the rest of the interview in French. Best wishes, --NSH001 (talk) 18:05, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Very cool about the Quakers by the way - I used to work for an NGO founded by Quakers :) I really enjoyed working there, and really resonated with a lot of Quaker ideas and principles as well, especially the emphasis on nonviolence and social justice. Sarabnas I'm researching Wikipedia Questions? 17:47, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * , hope you're not having too many problems with your dissertation. I was very impressed by this interview with Ken Loach:
 * Loach is calm and collected, despite what is being done to him by the nonentities currently running the Labour Party, and in my opinion his analysis of what needs to be done to stop is spot-on. And just like Rachel Corrie, Ben Chacko's dad is an actuary! Probably retired by now, but I'd have to check to be sure. Yet another coincidence, the company he (Chacko père) worked for, Eagle Star offered me a job when I finished university, but I turned them down for another company. I was very tempted to take the job, because Cheltenham is a very pleasant place to live and work. I particularly remember the job interview because when I mentioned that I would have studied French at university if I hadn't done maths, we conducted the rest of the interview in French. Best wishes, --NSH001 (talk) 18:05, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Loach is calm and collected, despite what is being done to him by the nonentities currently running the Labour Party, and in my opinion his analysis of what needs to be done to stop is spot-on. And just like Rachel Corrie, Ben Chacko's dad is an actuary! Probably retired by now, but I'd have to check to be sure. Yet another coincidence, the company he (Chacko père) worked for, Eagle Star offered me a job when I finished university, but I turned them down for another company. I was very tempted to take the job, because Cheltenham is a very pleasant place to live and work. I particularly remember the job interview because when I mentioned that I would have studied French at university if I hadn't done maths, we conducted the rest of the interview in French. Best wishes, --NSH001 (talk) 18:05, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

magic
Can you work it on Israeli occupation of the West Bank? Copied some refs from another article and made a mess I think.  nableezy  - 14:59, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
 * OK, done. Needed a little bit of work to manually fix the crappy inline cite templates, but otherwise routine. Luckily Asha's 30-day prison sentence has recently expired (more details will be revealed when Nishi returns from his well earned holiday). Sorry to hear you got Covid twice, must have been awful. Thankfully I seem to have escaped it, despite numerous visits to a large hospital where they are treating Covid patients, and having chosen not to be vaccinated. NSH001 (talk) 22:14, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks Neil! Been vaccinated and boosted before both bouts lol, but the second time around was pretty easy tbh, just one bad night of chills. The wife didnt get so lucky with it being her first time with it, had the whole gamut of symptoms from fever to lose of taste, but all better now thankfully.  nableezy  - 03:45, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Glad to hear that your wife is better now, please pass on my best wishes. --NSH001 (talk) 08:25, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Always precious
Ten years ago, you were found precious. That's what you are, always. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:10, 29 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Thank you so much, Gerda, for your kind thoughts. Very much appreciated. --NSH001 (talk) 10:01, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

CfD nomination at
A category or categories you have created have been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at  on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Qwerfjkl talk  09:34, 2 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Responded here --NSH001 (talk) 21:31, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Varoufakis
Defenders of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza have challenged me to offer a ‘chapter-and-verse’ list of war crimes that Israel has committed since the Hamas Offensive of 7th October. Here is an indicative, but not exhaustive, list. There is no doubt: Israel is investing in war crimes to effect its recapture and ethnic cleansing of Gaza while, at the same time, practising similar tactics in the West Bank and East Jerusalem


 * Yanis Varoufakis, 15/10/23, List of war crimes and crimes qualifying as genocide committed by Israel in Gaza between 7th & 14th October 2023. --NSH001 (talk) 10:40, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Citation bot
Those html comments will stop CB from editing those parameters? Or are you expecting humans who run the bot to read them? If the former, cool! I didn't know that. If the latter, I don't think it'll work because the whole problem (in my view) is editors run the bot on articles without ever checking to see if the bot made any mistakes afterwards. Either way, I hope your solution works -- if it does, I'll probably adopt it in the future, so thanks either way. Levivich (talk) 16:55, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * It's all documented at User:Citation bot. The devs can't monitor all the changes, but I know they do try to look at as many of the "deny Citation bot"-type comments as they can. --NSH001 (talk) 17:23, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Please observe WP:REFVAR
I consider WP:REFVAR to include the headings and organization of the references. I have put them back to the way they were before you started editing the article Tell (archaeology). If you want to change them, get consensus on the talk page, do not continue to edit war over it. Skyerise (talk) 21:54, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
 * You cannot possibly have read the essay WP:BCC I linked in my edit summary, before reverting so quickly. In fact this citation style has gradually been developed bit-by-bit over many years between myself and a small group of editors, including most notably Nishidani, who is the major contributor to this article. In fact I have not broken REFVAR or CITEVAR, but merely restored the style and layout used by the major contributor to the article. I think this is the first occasion that I have not applied my ETVP script shortly after a (usually longish) series of contributions by Nishidani, which has thus understandably caused you to inadvertently break CITEVAR/CITESTYLE (because you couldn't see my user name in the contribution list). But it is still worrying that you are reverting so quickly, and without giving the matter any thought. This is even more strange, since I was responding to the request made within the "citation style" tag, which I now note that you yourself posted on 2 September 2023. Note also that I didn't simply revert your addition of the "References" header, but I took the time to consider why someone might not like that particular layout. I could see that the level 2 header line after only two items in the note list looks ugly, so I combined them as level 3 headers under a single level 2 heading. I think that is considerate, thoughtful editing, resulting in a much nicer appearance. Of course the biblio listing is sufficiently important that it merits its own level 2 header. More generally, the most "correct" layout is to have "citations" as a subsection (with a level 3 header) under "Notes", without even having a separate header, since citations themselves are a subset of notes (see WP:BCC). The trouble with this approach is that some well-intentioned editor will often come along and insert an additional header for the notelist, and it's not worth the bother of arguing over. It's difficult to find a solution that satifies everone and that also complies with WP:BCC, so I have to thank you for promping me to think of another possibility. --NSH001 (talk) 23:39, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
 * PS. Re your edit summary "this is the way it was before you started editing here", I may not have actually physically edited this article until today (which is yesterday by BST), but I have been following it for many years. --NSH001 (talk) 23:48, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, everyone has their personal opinions as to what is "correct". And WP:REFVAR clearly gives the existing editors of the article have a right to say "no" to a newcomer's changes to conform an article to their own personal preference, regardless of how long they have been watching the article. And no, I don't have to read your essay. Essays are neither policy nor guidelines. If you like to read essays, try WP:BRD, which says that if you are bold and are reverted, you should start a discussion on the talk page and get consensus, and that whenever there is a dispute between two editors about a bold change, the article should be left at the previous status quo until the bold editor shows a consensus for the disputed changes on the talk page. Since you like to follow essays. Skyerise (talk) 10:44, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

I would have congratulated you on the change
but for the fact that the Tories won the election again, with an overwhelming majority this time, only under an alias, as they did with Blair. Best wishes and auguries nonetheless. Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Indeed, it baffles me that people will vote for one Tory party (namely, Starmer's Genocide Labour) because they're fed up with the original Tory Party. It shows just how terrifyingly powerful the MSM still is. See my notes about Democritans and Republocrats above. A moment's reflection shows that Genocide Labour have to be even worse than the Tories, otherwise they wouldn't get the financial backing from the oligarchs, billionaires, arms manufacturers, and predatory corporate interests they need to survive. Genocide Labour is all about appearing to be better, while doing the opposite. A bunch of liars. At least the Tories are more honest about what they are, and they do have a few people on the libertarian wing who are against starting wars. --NSH001 (talk) 04:00, 6 July 2024 (UTC)
 * They only had 30% of the vote, to achieve a massive majority of 412 seats. This also happened in Italy, where a (barely) post-fascist party with risible numbers, came to power with 30% of the vote of 48% of the electorate. Idem for Le Pen in France.Two things consoled me. Bernie Sanders' congratulating Corbyn for taking a seat from the standard Labour stooge, and Liz Truss (famous for herTen Years To Save the West book, written after she'd nearly managed the opposite by coming close to bankrupting GB) being kicked out. Sanders, Corbyn old men, with whom one could also strongly disagree about specifics. It's distressing to see that generation pass. Intelligence, passion and, above all, human and humane decency, that, unlike Biden, Trump et al., burns bright into old age, and in that regard one often sighs at the passing of parliamentarians like Gerald Kaufman. We're in a different world. Were I young I would write a book on cognitive dissociation in post-modernity. Nishidani (talk) 16:08, 6 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Well Corbyn was in good form at today's (yesterday's by BST) National Protest against the Genocide. So was Andrew Feinstein, whose book After the Party mentions dozens of people worthy of that generation you mention. I would add Olof Palme to that generation. Corbyn didn't "take a seat", he retained the one he already had, comprehensively defeating the Genocide Labour nonentity, yet another of those who want to destroy the NHS. But overall it's pretty depressing how the Genocide parties have retained control. Bizarre that the ultra military-Zionist Puke Achefart, who has now morphed into a genocide-Zionist (yes, he really is that bad), and who parachuted himself into the constituency, with which which he has no connection at all, couldn't be defeated by an anti-genocide candidate. I was expecting Andrew Feinstein to do better against Starmer in HSP. I've written before about Liz Truss. My own constituency, which has always been an ultra-safe Tory seat with the Lib Dems as the main opposition (with a blip when Labour came second thanks to Jeremy Corbyn) has now become a Lib Dem seat, but only because there are/were enough racists among the Tories to vote Reform, and split the vote. The Tory is actually quite a decent chap (except for voting largely according to the Conservative Party line) who has concentrated on being a good constituency MP, and is not a member of Conservative Friends of Israel. I met him a couple of times: once in a hustings, and once when he came to a public event at the Quaker Meeting House. In these circumstances I take no comfort from his defeat.
 * The process of destroying the NHS is accelerating. Went for an MRI scan at the main hospital on Friday, to find that the MRI unit has been taken over by a private company, with its logo plastered all over the unit. At Victoria station there is now a private GP surgery. Plenty of other examples. Leaflets through my letter box every week advertising private dentists. (Should have rescheduled the MRI when I realised it was the day after the GE, as I was very tired from staying up late for the election results.) The result of the privatisations will be the extraction of economic rent, quadrupling costs. So the politicians will be able to claim they're spending more on the NHS, when the reality is that the money is going into private profits and unnecessary administration and overheads, while nurses and doctors lose their job satisfaction, become demoralised, and the actual healthcare gets worse. --NSH001 (talk) 01:54, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Should also mention that these colossal profits are funded by taxes, a huge risk-free return on (non-)investment, violating all the principles held dear by the free-market ideologues. --NSH001 (talk) 08:34, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Michael Hudson has a larger overview of the structural picture. One can take his approach or leave it, but strong evidence has been emerging for some time that the responsibility for this shift of the lower income class to the right lies with centrist government, rights and left. Both the middle and lower classes have suffered quite a degree of immiseration or a growing sense of economic insecurity and precariousness over two decades of predominantly 'liberal' governments, with their almost religious faith in the ideological postulate that 'free markets' (they don't exist of course) can allocate the social goods of a modern society more efficiently  and at a cheaper cost than any state. This is really fucking infantile, shorn of any grasp of political history, but if you don't subscribe to it, you won't win power. Ergo Starmer's pathetic pyrrhic victory, as he'll shortly discover. We're testing Michael Polanyi's hypothesis in The Great Transformation(1944) which assigned the responsibility for the radicalization of the right to the failure of imperial liberal policies. It's so easy to lay the blame on the far-right, when the f-r is very much the product of the financialization of all and everything by centrists. You might like to chuck a shufti at Judith Derndorfer and Stefan Kranzinger's, The Decline of the Middle Class: New Evidence for Europe, Journal of Economic Issues, Volume 55, 2021, Issue 4 pp.914-938  which is readily downloadable.Nishidani (talk) 19:59, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks to the Youtube link re Luke Akehurst. Amazing things crawl out of the woodwork. He was luckier than Meyer Habib in the French legislative elections. The extraordinary thing about Habib is that his campaign featured videos from Netanyahu et al., so that now we even accept that foreign politicians can directly intervene in the elections of other country. The case interests me because it suggested a certain fracture: Habib received 85% of the Israeli French vote, but the French Jews in the rest of the 8th overseas district (from Cyprus to Italy) knew his background better, and the diaspora disowned him. Which reminds me, I should edit that obscure wikibio to update it.Nishidani (talk) 21:19, 11 July 2024 (UTC)
 * By the way, you're probably familiar with Piers Morgan's 'interview' (!!!) with Jeremy Corbyn. It's astonishing, interviewing someone and never allowing them to get a single sentence completed before badgering them with questions, and in the end, after at least 100 interruptions most consisting of repeating the same phrase, accusing that honourable man of not answering questions. It looks pathological but perhaps is just tabloid cynicism, trying to put words into someone's mouth while ensuring they shut up. Nishidani (talk) 22:13, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 63
The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes

Issue 63, May – June 2024  Read the full newsletter Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --12:15, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * One new partner
 * 1Lib1Ref
 * Spotlight: References check