User talk:Rhododendrites/2021a

Welcome to the 2021 WikiCup!
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File:Ceiling mosaic in the Surrogate's Courthouse (32325)a.jpg scheduled for POTD
Hi Rhododendrites,

This is to let you know that the featured picture File:Ceiling mosaic in the Surrogate's Courthouse (32325)a.jpg, which you uploaded or nominated, has been selected as the English Wikipedia's picture of the day (POTD) for January 19, 2021. A preview of the POTD is displayed below and can be edited at Template:POTD/2021-01-19. If you have any concerns, please place a message at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day. Thank you! Cwmhiraeth (talk) 12:14, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Category:Republic of Venice encyclopedists has been nominated for merging
Category:Republic of Venice encyclopedists has been nominated for merging. 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 the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Rathfelder (talk) 11:59, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

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Discussion on Growth team "add an image" idea
Hello ! I'm Marshall Miller; I'm the product manager for the WMF's Growth team, which works on features to help retain new editors. Lately, we have been working on this set of ideas called "structured tasks", which break down editing workflows into steps that make sense for newcomers and make sense on mobile devices. We're currently thinking about an idea for a workflow in which newcomers would be recommended images from Commons that might be a good fit for unillustrated Wikipedia articles. One of the community members participating in the conversation recommended you as someone who has a particularly strong grasp on the usage of images in articles. Since this project is in its beginning phases, we really depend on community members to help us think through the feasibility, opportunities, and pitfalls. If you have time, it would be really helpful to us if you could check out the project page and weigh in on the discussion. Thank you! -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 05:38, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for reaching out. I'd be happy to help in any way I can, though I've been really busy with some off-wiki projects in these last few days so haven't had time to read through those pages. If there are specific questions/elements that would be more helpful for me to jump into than others, let me know; otherwise I'll try to take a look at the general topics soon.
 * In general, I think there's an incredible opportunity not just to "harness the crowd" but also as a low-investment way to bring new people in. My sense of the other data "games" relating to images have had rather mixed results (suggestededits in the wikipedia app and the one that invites people to add "depicts" statements), so my initial reaction from a Wikipedia standpoint is that there's some risk involved. We'd want articles that don't already have images, probably would want to omit all BLPs, and could use a flag that makes third party review easy as a sort of maintenance tag. SuggestedEdits has an edit filter so I could go through and fix a batch of the problematic ones a few weeks ago, for example, but maybe something even more visible in the article? Just first thoughts -- I look forward to learning more. &mdash; Rhododendrites  talk \\ 18:05, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
 * thank you for giving this a bit of thought. I'm glad to hear you think the idea has potential.  This idea was, in fact, inspired by the "suggested edits" in the Android app, and we're working with that team on ideating around this.  They may wind up building something similar.  And the Growth team is actually in the middle of building our first "structured task" for adding wikilinks to articles (note that our team deploys everything on smaller wikis first, and we haven't brought any of our features to English Wikipedia yet).  Thinking back to the Android context, I think that something that would set this image task apart from some of the other suggested edits is that they would be edits to Wikipedia, rather than to Commons or Wikidata (e.g. depicts statements).  This may be more engaging to newcomers, since they would immediately be able to see and show their impact on real articles.  But, as you say, it also comes with risk because the visibility is higher.


 * We would plan to only offer articles that are totally unillustrated, so that newcomers would be adding the first/only image to the article. And we would also include a tag so that people could monitor and patrol them if needed.  I like your idea about excluding BLPs -- I presume because a higher level of care is needed for those articles.  I can check to see if it's possible to filter our BLPs without filtering out all biographies (there are a fair number of unillustrated historical biographies with good images in Commons).  I definitely look forward to when you have time to check out the whole project page and participate on the discussion page (we're hoping to have the bulk of the discussion in the next four weeks or so).  But these are the questions that are top-of-mind right now:


 * What rules to use around placing the image into the article? For instance, perhaps we should do something like: if there is an infobox that has a slot for an image, put it in there, otherwise put it below the templates and above the body.  But I'm concerned that there would be many edge cases or reasons such a set of rules wouldn't work.
 * How could we help newcomers write good captions for the images?
 * Given that most metadata from Commons is in English, how might we make a similar experience that could work for people who don't read English in other wikis?
 * What other pitfalls should we be concerned about? Where can newcomers go wrong here, so that we can help them?


 * Thank you for any time you can take on this! -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 22:10, 22 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Out of curiosity, is there any research which estimates the number of opportunities there may be. To demonstrate beyond anecdotal evidence that there is a large enough number of clearly relevant images that need to be placed in respective articles? I'm more often hunting down images off-wiki and uploading than searching Commons for what's already there (or it's possible I just do that without thinking!), so don't have a very clear idea. Those figures would, of course, vary by project/language. As for your questions:
 * Rules: When there's no image currently in the article, except with a rare BLP case I've never seen it be controversial, no matter the quality or whether it directly or obliquely depicts the subject. That placement sounds fine with me, but some people have their own personal preferences that I don't think you need to worry about. Worst case scenario is an image that isn't actually a good infobox photo (so a person in a large group photo for example, or an unknown interior room rather than the exterior of a building), then someone who isn't new can just move it out afterwards. In short, if there's no image at all and the image found does in some way depict the subject, I don't think you need to worry much.
 * Captions: It might be nice to have some variable caption advice, perhaps based on the "instance of" whatever the image "depicts" (or perhaps Wikidata won't be involved as much?). So advice for a person, a species, a building, etc. But of course we have a whole long MOS page for captions (because of course we do) which is probably better to summarize than anything I'd say.
 * Languages: It seems like a useful starting point would be just to see what images are in the corresponding English article? But I guess I'm not sure which data set you're working with. While captions are language-dependent, of course, I wouldn't have thought you'd be using those much. Even in English many captions on Commons are missing or poor. Depicts shouldn't be a problem with language, right?
 * Pitfalls: Based on what you said to my initial comments it sounds like you've already thought about the major "what can go wrong" stuff. Working only with unillustrated articles, removing BLPs, and having an edit filter/tag/whatnot on the edit to make it easy to review them removes a lot of the concerns I'd have. The rest (captions, placement, etc.) is IMO relatively minor and easy for other people to fix if necessary. I'd be curious about the research into suggestededits, though, because if that's any indication, getting people to understand the task at all and engage with it in good faith seems like the challenge. Anecdotally, when I did a spot check more than half of the edits were wrong/low quality. That kind of error rate kind of defeats the point. I raised it on the suggested edits talk page and at AN there, but didn't get much of a response. FYI. &mdash; Rhododendrites  talk \\ 15:44, 26 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi -- I'm sorry for the delayed response; I lost track of your reply over the holidays, but I'm glad I rediscovered it.  Here are my responses and follow-up questions:
 * Number of opportunities: Yes, this is something we looked into early on to make sure we were in the ballpark of having a sufficient number of tasks to offer in any given Wikipedia. You can see some of the rough estimates here, and we're going to make a fresh set of more accurate estimates here.  Using English Wikipedia as an example (though we would first try out such a feature on smaller wikis), there are about 2.9 million unillustrated articles, and the algorithm would be able to propose images for something like 300,000 to 400,000 of them (about 10% of the unillustrated articles), with about 36,000 coming from Wikidata's P18 and the majority coming from the images used in the same articles on other language Wikipedias.  With hundreds of thousands of images available, I think that's enough opportunity to build a feature for, and enough suggestions that it won't run out quickly.  What do you think?
 * Captions: That's a good idea, to have variable advice for captions, more tailored to the type of article. Or perhaps we could show example captions from images placed on similar articles.
 * Languages: In running some user tests with our prototypes, it seems like the workflow people go through in doing the task is they look at the unillustrated article (e.g. "St. Paul's Church in Chicago") and see if the image could presumably be that entity (e.g. "yes, this is a church"). Then they look for the title of the article somewhere in the image's metadata to confirm that the image is that specific instance (e.g. "Good, the filename is StPaulsChicago.jpeg").  In these user tests, it looks like the most useful metadata fields from Commons for matching an image are the filename and the description, because those are the ones that have the highest coverage.  The Commons captions and depicts are also useful, but are populated a lot less often than the description.  And since the Commons image titles and descriptions are usually in English, this causes the challenge in other languages.  The main idea I have for this right now is to only offer the task to people who can read English, similarly to how knowledge of two languages is needed to use the Content Translation Tool.  This is unfortunate, because it would be best if everyone could use this task, regardless of their language skills.
 * Pitfalls: I'm glad you have feedback about the Android app's suggested edits. That team has a new product manager who wants to hear community thoughts  on how to improve suggested edits.  I'll start a new thread on your talk page to introduce her.
 * Thank you for your help. -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for following up with this information. I'd love to test it out if/when it gets to that point. Just one more question to follow up: I've noticed, of course, that descriptions on Commons are in English by default (the major exceptions being some subset of featured pictures -- POTDs, POTY finalists, etc. -- and even then only a handful of languages). Is it worth making description-level translations more of a priority? Or is the idea to use Wikidata captions/depicts statements as an alternative? &mdash; Rhododendrites  talk \\ 03:42, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * about the testing, we actually have a new plan for how people like you can try it out. The Android team, the same team as  below, is going to use the existing suggested edits feed to build an image recommendation feature for learning purposes.  Importantly, this "minimum viable product" won't save any edits to Wikipedia.  It's just for us to gather data, improve the algorithm, and learn.  It will be made clear to users of the app that their work is only being used for learning, not for edits.  We'll let you know when you could try it out (if you have an Android device).  About the descriptions: we actually recently calculated some numbers around local-language metadata on Commons.  In general, local-language descriptions and local-language Wikidata captions are quite rare at this point.  When we look at the images we're able to recommend, in most wikis fewer than 5% of them have local-language descriptions or captions.  I agree that there's an opportunity there for some "upstream" tasks to encourage people to increase the coverage (like how the Android has a "translate image captions" task), and then that goodness would flow down into the task to put the images on articles. -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 02:26, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * about the testing, we actually have a new plan for how people like you can try it out. The Android team, the same team as  below, is going to use the existing suggested edits feed to build an image recommendation feature for learning purposes.  Importantly, this "minimum viable product" won't save any edits to Wikipedia.  It's just for us to gather data, improve the algorithm, and learn.  It will be made clear to users of the app that their work is only being used for learning, not for edits.  We'll let you know when you could try it out (if you have an Android device).  About the descriptions: we actually recently calculated some numbers around local-language metadata on Commons.  In general, local-language descriptions and local-language Wikidata captions are quite rare at this point.  When we look at the images we're able to recommend, in most wikis fewer than 5% of them have local-language descriptions or captions.  I agree that there's an opportunity there for some "upstream" tasks to encourage people to increase the coverage (like how the Android has a "translate image captions" task), and then that goodness would flow down into the task to put the images on articles. -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 02:26, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Thoughts on suggested edits
like I mentioned in the other thread, I'd like to introduce you to, who is the new product manager for the WMF's Android app team. I know you had some thoughts and concerns about suggested edits, and I think Jazmin may want to ask you about your experience as she gets onboarded to the team in the next couple weeks. -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 00:57, 16 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi its nice to connect with you. Thank you for taking the time to flag so many important things about how we should reexamine Suggested Edits and the disruptions it creates for experienced Commons Volunteers. I am new to the Android team but have been at the Foundation for almost 3 years and have always greatly valued volunteers that give us feedback on how to improve. I want to apologize that there has been such a delay in response. I have made improvements to Suggested Edits a priority for the team. Feel free to collaborate with us and follow along as we tackle improvements to this feature https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T271727. I hope to continue to partner with you in improving this experience. JTanner (WMF) (talk) 21:40, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Hello, and nice to connect with you, too. Thanks for the update. I've subscribed to the Phabricator ticket. What's been said there so far looks spot-on.
 * One comment, though: I wouldn't consider the Commons "Depicts" page set in stone. As far as I can tell, it was written/discussed by only a few people and can very likely be changed with some thoughtfully framed discussion/proposals. It seems like discussions about structured data outside the walls of Wikidata (on Commons, on enwp) are often complicated by incomplete or incorrect information, which causes people who have trouble understanding to throw their hands up or err on the side of what's familiar. There are plenty of people more knowledgeable than me, but just in case it would be helpful, I'm happy to help with the community communication stuff. :) &mdash; Rhododendrites  talk \\ 04:35, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * This is very helpful! I will add this nuance to the Phabricator task so that we can include it in our discussions. We would actually love the help, thank you for offering. I'm going to ping, our team's Community Relations Specialist, who expressed interest earlier this week in connecting with you to discuss community consultation and partnering to get this right. Thank you again for being so helpful as we truly seek to improve this experience. JTanner (WMF) (talk) 01:09, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

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Editing news 2021 #1
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Reply tool
The Reply tool  is available at most other Wikipedias.


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Undid of my changes of page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_birdwatching_incident
Mr. Rhododendrites,

are you sure that your bird watching hobby, that is obviously true after looking your twitter account, which is publicly linked to this Wikipedia account, has not affected on your decision to revert my changes on this wikipage of titled incident?

It cannot be that challengeable persons, e.g. persons who share the same hobby IN THE SAME CITY, edit pages to favour one side of the discussed incident.

In Finland, the word is JÄÄVI and you are JÄÄVI in this situation. There is a high possibility that you either know mr. Cooper personally OR favour him sharing the same hobby, in the same city.

The risk of Conflict of Interest is too high. You have no other option, but to revert back. If you like to challenge my words in said wikipage, ask some moderator to look it up and write his decision of this, without any possibility of Conflict of Interest.

2001:14BA:16F6:5500:28C2:A665:E20E:EC10 (talk) 23:36, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I have never met either of the involved Coopers to my knowledge and no, birding in the same metropolitan area does not give me a COI when it comes to basic Wikipedia policy. Happy to discuss the specifics of WP:OR and WP:WEIGHT on the article talk page. &mdash; Rhododendrites  talk \\ 23:50, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_disqualification https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteellisyys

The possibility is enough. There is no need to prove or unprove your relationship to mr. Cooper and please do not try to do so, as your personal relationships are not public information. The possibility>0 exists. It is nonzero. See, our local bank had to fire one person from the bank as they married a collague. Nobody even accused them to do anything illegal, but the possiblity had to be eliminated. Two related persons always have a possibility to conspire, but of course they seldom do.

2001:14BA:16F6:5500:28C2:A665:E20E:EC10 (talk) 00:39, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * If you have read the WP:COI policy and those I linked above and feel something is wrong, there is a COI noticeboard where you can make an argument. It's really a straightforward removal though. &mdash; Rhododendrites  talk \\ 00:55, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

One more question: what is your given approximate probability of that mr. Cooper had an own dog beside him. What is is your given approximate conditional probability that a bird watcher from a city undoes a change made by physics professional at other side of the globe in a wikipage of an incident in said city's bird watching and outdooring place and has no personal interest? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:14BA:16F6:5500:28C2:A665:E20E:EC10 (talk) 01:44, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * If you would like to talk about the article, use the article's talk page. If you would like to pursue COI allegations, use WP:COIN. &mdash; Rhododendrites  talk \\ 03:49, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Fleming
Hi Rhododendrites, A couple of things on the Fleming discussion. Firstly, I moved the top of your closed section to leave the note to admin in the open; if you disagree with that, please feel free to move it back to your original position. Secondly, I have !voted in the discussion (at 19:27 UTC today). It is the only !vote I have made, despite the implication made by Hal333. It’s pointless trying to !vote more than once as an IP, as double voting is easily picked up on. As I’ve previously edited as a named account, (and yes, just to be completely open and above board, this is the editor previously known as SchroCat), I know the rules and I’m not so stupid as to try and vote more than once. I’m unsurprised that my !vote has been questioned, particularly by that editor, as I have had problems with them before. Cheers - 213.205.194.6 (talk) 20:17, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi there,
 * I mildly disagree only because the comment above yours is no longer a duplicate !vote, and thus that note and what follows does not [IMO] add much to the main discussion. That said, I also don't think it's a big deal and don't intend to move it back. Sometimes people archive/collapse/close in order to keep things on track or reduce drama, but wind up doing the opposite when there's a back-and-forth over the archiving/collapsing/closing itself, so I'd assume leave it be. :) &mdash; Rhododendrites  talk \\ 21:03, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

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This Month in GLAM: January 2021
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WikiCup 2021 March newsletter
Round 1 of the competition has finished; it was a high-scoring round with 21 contestants scoring more than 100 points. Everyone with a positive score moves on to Round 2, with 55 contestants qualifying. You will need to finish among the top thirty-two contestants in Round 2 if you are to qualify for Round 3. Our top scorers in Round 1 were:


 * Epicgenius led the field with a featured article, nine good articles and an assortment of other submissions, specialising on buildings and locations in New York, for a total of 945 points.
 * Bloom6132 was close behind with 896 points, largely gained from 71 "In the news" items, mostly recent deaths.
 * 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 ImaginesTigers, who has been editing Wikipedia for less than a year, was in third place with 711 points, much helped by bringing League of Legends to featured article status, exemplifying how bonus points can boost a contestant's score.
 * 🇷🇼 Amakuru came next with 708 points, Kigali being another featured article that scored maximum bonus points.
 * Flag of the United Nations.svg Ktin, new to the WikiCup, was in fifth place with 523 points, garnered from 15 DYKs and 34 "In the news" items.
 * 🇧🇼 The Rambling Man scored 511 points, many from featured article candidate reviews and from football related DYKs.
 * Standard of Oliver Cromwell (1653–1659).svg Gog the Mild, last year's runner-up, came next with 498 points, from a featured article and numerous featured article candidate reviews.
 * Bennington Flag.svg Hog Farm, at 452, scored for a featured article, four good articles and a number of reviews.
 * 🇺🇸 Le Panini, another newcomer to the WikiCup, scored 438 for a featured article and three good articles.
 * 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Lee Vilenski, last year's champion, scored 332 points, from a featured article and various other sport-related topics.

These contestants, like all the others, now have to start again from scratch. In Round 1, contestants achieved eight featured articles, three featured lists and one featured picture, as well as around two hundred DYKs and twenty-seven ITNs. They completed 97 good article reviews, nearly double the 52 good articles they claimed. Contestants also claimed for 135 featured article and featured list candidate reviews. There is no longer a requirement to mention your WikiCup participation when undertaking these reviews.

Remember that any content promoted after the end of Round 1 but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is a good article candidate, a featured process, or something else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on WikiCup/Reviews.

If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Sturmvogel 66 (talk) and Cwmhiraeth (talk). MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:27, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

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File:RJ Palacio at BookCon (16102).jpg scheduled for POTD
Hi Rhododendrites,

This is to let you know that the featured picture File:RJ Palacio at BookCon (16102).jpg, which you uploaded or nominated, has been selected as the English Wikipedia's picture of the day (POTD) for July 13, 2021. A preview of the POTD is displayed below and can be edited at Template:POTD/2021-07-13. If you have any concerns, please place a message at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day. Thank you! Cwmhiraeth (talk) 13:51, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

DYK for Abolitionist Place
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This Month in GLAM: February 2021
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An enlightening article
Rhodedentrites, I thought you might find this article of interest given the GOP article discussion []. It's an older article looking at the motives behind opposition to school bussing which tries to methodically test the theory that white opposition to bussing was based on symbolic racist, the idea that opposition is based on a fundamental prejudice vs other motives. The paper starts with noting that, at that time, whites were increasingly rejecting the idea of blatant racism (their example, "blacks are less intelligent"). The symbolic racism theory suggests then that whites were rejecting issues like bussing because it was harmful to blacks or because of some other inherent attitudinal predisposition, rather than because they had or perceived they had a self interested motive for doing so. In the end the paper concluded that perceived threat and applied policy predispositions were the strongest indications or white attitudes towards busing. Basically it was a self interest motive filtered by one's one understanding of the situation. Bringing this back around to our GOP related topic, someone may oppose the notion that one group is superiors to another yet be warry of how a policy, say bussing, may impact them thus they are against bussing. If a politician sees this fear or even shares it and crafts a message that says they are against bussing it's not clear that is an attempt to appeal to racism. This paper certainly suggests that some would claim it to be an example of symbolic racism but others would say, no, this is appealing to a voter's own self interest (or at least what they think is in their self interest). The problem becomes how do you decide what the motive of the politician was? If the politician actually felt they were appealing to someone's inner racist yet this gave it a vail of respectability then it was an intentionally coded message. However, if they simply saw it as something that concerned the voters and an issue compatible with their own current views of what government should/shouldn't do then it's not a coded message or even racially motivated even if the outcome is not race neutral. Interestingly, the Southern Strategy spends a lot of time saying Nixon was crafting these coded messages but doesn't say what they are. This study at least would show that Nixon's opposition to bussing (which I recall was one of the alleged coded messages) probably was not resonating with voters due to any dog whistles. That doesn't mean the politicians weren't mistakenly believing in the dog whistle effect but now we have to prove the motive vs just the message. This is just one study and we can't be certain that other possible dog whistle topics would have similar results. Still, if much of the opposition to bussing was based on inherent self interest, is it fair to say an anti-bussing message was a coded dog whistle and thus evidence of the "Southern Strategy"? Is someone who is warry of a bussing program coming to their school system an outright racist or perhaps just fearful of what the change would bring (racially conservative). Sorry this was a bit long winded and certainly it isn't a clean argument for the GOP talk page but I thought you might find the perspective interesting. Springee (talk) 03:35, 12 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the message. Haven't had a chance to parse it yet (busy few days). Just responding here to say I intend to soon. :) &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 01:05, 16 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I was re-reading some of this paper and thought a quote in the conclusion was especially poignant when talking about racially conservative vs racism [emphasis from author]:
 * The symbolic racism researchers set out to establish that the explicitly racial attitudes of whites are related to where they stand on an issue like busing. This is an important proposition that should not be discarded. Nonetheless, to say that racial attitudes help explain opposition to busing is not to say that prejudice is the problem or that realistic group conflict motives are not involved.  On the contrary, whites need not hold blatantly stereotypical beliefs or hostile orientations towards blacks in order to justify to themselves and to others their resistance to black demands for change[sources].  Such resistance appears to them as a simple defense of a lifestyle and position they think they have earned and do not question, not as a rejection of blacks as such.
 * A few things here caught my eye. First is the part about racial attitudes but not "prejudice".  I think that speaks to racial conservativism.  It's not based on ill will towards others so much as a fear that change will be bad for one's self.  Doing a bit more OR of my own, a conservative politician might be against bussing on conservative grounds simply feeling that there have to be limits to what the government should be allowed to do and bussing is the federal government dictating policy at the local level.  Such feelings have motivated conservatives to oppose things like federal laws relating to guns, environment, minimum wage, and parts of education that don't have an a clear racial connection.  The politician can emphasize a range of issues but sees that voters in the south are mad about bussing  Since they are already opposed to bussing they emphasize that message.  It's a "southern strategy" since those are new voters.  It's not so much a northern strategy since the politico doesn't expect a big shift in northern attitudes.  In this hypothetical bussing is not picked because its dog whistle racist.  It's picked because it's something that voters are mad about and the reversal is compatible with conservative ideals.  However, since bussing is meant to address a race related disparity and, presumably, ending it would harm minorities the opposition can rightly say*, "the conservatives are doing something that harms minorities".  Because this harms minorities the opposition can also claim the motive was to hurt minorities (certainly some voters and politicians were motivated by clear racism).  That is a claim that is hard to prove since it involves trying to understand true motives but politically branding the conservative side as "racist" is probably sufficient.  *"Rightly say" does assume bussing was effective.  History has shown it wasn't but is that because it was a bad idea or there was simply too much resistance?  I don't know.  Having spent a lot of time reading up on the subject a few years back I feel that some variation of the above is more realistic than the idea that most politicians were cynical enough to try to think that a winning plan was to appeal to hidden racism vs simply looking at what issues bothered voters and were compatible with their current platforms.  Certainly it has proven great fodder for the other side to claim a stance of anti-bussing is motivated be racism.  Anyway, I've taken up a lot of your time but I hope that helps you understand part of why I think some of the terms used by researchers are important and why we need to be careful about accepting some of the claims of dog whistles at face value.  Take care! Springee (talk) 04:13, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

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User:Suffusion of Yellow/hidetopcontrib.js
Hi, Rhododendrites. Can you please remove the line containing  and uncomment the line containing  in User:Rhododendrites/monobook.js? I did not intend to maintain a fork of that script; that was only for testing purposes and I'd like to delete it. The scripts are identical except for the comments. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 21:36, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ Thanks. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 13:30, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 42
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WikiLoop 2020 Year in Review
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The Signpost: 28 March 2021
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