User talk:SMcCandlish/Archive 116

= July 2016 =

Another CITEVAR issue
CITEVAR is interpreted to mean that although the MOS is opposed to smallcaps, this doesn't apply to citations. Sigh... Peter coxhead (talk) 05:57, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeah, we seem to have given up on that, and I guess logically we have to. If we accept that CITEVAR permits people to exactly mimic particular external citation standards (and that does appear to be the consensus, even if it's been heavily steered by WP:LOCALCONSENSUS lobbying), as long as they do it consistently in the article, and some of those specs use that style for certain elements of the citation, it necessarily means there's an MoS exception for in that case.  And that's okay; MoS makes various exceptions for various things (including even some other uses of ). I detest that citation style, but it's not worth fighting over.  The ironic thing is that the anti-MOS PoV-forking campaign over at WP:CITE was created and fuelled almost entirely by that specific dispute, and the MoS regulars just gave up on it several years ago and today really DGaF, but the WP:CITE-focused editors still act like there's a war on. It's like those Japanese soldiers found in Pacific island jungles decades after the end of WWII who did not want to believe it had ended (except it's even more daft, since the CITE crew actually got what they wanted; it's more like a bunch of Londoners in a Picadilly park who still think ze Germans are coming, listening for the air-raid sirens). I've just written off the matter for the next few years. If it has to be raised again, I would do it via WP:VPPOL where the !vote can't be so easily stacked.  The only thing I would go to bat about right now would be if someone tried to use CITEVAR's tolerance for a made-up citation "style", that just randomly came out of one editor's head, as an excuse to do anti-MoS things in that "style", then that would not be acceptable, and it would furthermore be a good rationale to do away with permitting fake citation styles, limiting them to either WP's own or any modern, RS-published one like Harvard, AMA, MHRA, etc.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  16:05, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

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Please comment on Template talk:Infobox company
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Tone in Cary Grant
I suggest you watch your tone in edit summaries. You come across as a nasty asshole in your Cary Grant summaries. Edit constructively without snarky comments and you're more likely to get somewhere.♦ Dr. Blofeld  08:50, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Fair enough, though people should also try to grow a sense of humor; when someone makes a joke about big-dick contests it's pretty obviously a joke, albeit a pointed one. When it comes to civility at that page, I'm hardly the principal problem. It (along with others) is being abused as an anti-MoS WP:SOAPBOX by a tag team (see diffs at, and I'm just getting started) whose verbal viciousness knows nearly no bounds, as even a brief stroll through the top pages of their contributions shows. There's a difference between a) suggesting that a discussion is unproductive territorialism and that trying to use random article talk pages to change guidelines is quixotic, versus b) a constant river of direct personal attacks and aspersion-casting at specific editors, including me,  ,  , and many others (I'll save the diff pile for a noticeboard).  I may be a curmudgeon in a diffuse "youse guys all need to knock it off" way, and sometimes a direct "I know policy better than you do" way, but that's not really comparable to "go fuck yourself"-attitude, ad hominem nastiness.  My goal is to get people on the same page, even if I'm poor at it; theirs is to keep anyone from touching "their" articles or contradicting their roving, two-person pseudo-consensus.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:01, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

MOS concerns
Read the discussions on the article talk page where I raised MOS concerns over and over . Skilled GA writers don't need no MOS bollocks. ([])  I fear you will find this attitude a tad pervasive (sigh). Just be glad there is no "shaming campaign" yet. Collect (talk) 11:58, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Not worth any further effort or attention, unless the hostility escalates. It is curious to me that one of them likes to cite MoS all the time in his edit summaries, then blow off anyone else's MoS concerns if it doesn't line up with his personal style preferences. It's the same thing as the common "traffic laws don't apply to me, but that guy who just did a rolling stop in front of me is a total asshole" attitude.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  14:21, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

I've promoted articles to Featured Status with "pull boxes" as have others so obviously the "traffic laws" which you claim to exist are invented as they'd not have passed FA status otherwise. That none of the people at FAC have a problem with it says it all. You have how many featured articles been you both? You're the ones claiming to be technical experts here, not me.♦ Dr. Blofeld  17:11, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Everything in all WP policies and guidelines is "invented"; God did not show up in a flash of thunder and impose it all. But to move on to what I think you're trying to convey: FAC is not the Guideline Enforcement Bureau, and individual reviewers care anywhere from tremendously to not one whit about compliance with any particular guideline, or line item in one, that they're familiar with (and usually toward "not one whit" if they're not familiar with it).  FAC's principal concern is WP:CCPOL compliance, and regardless what any particular reviewers individually care about, it's essentially a wikiproject, a coming-and-going group of editors forming a consensus to praise or not praise an article, by giving it an icon and a new category.  The principal purpose of FA is editorial encouragement; the vast majority of our readers never notice the icon, and they don't know what the criteria are, so it is basically meaningless to them.  FA is not a WMF-official "guideline and policy exception bureau", either, and it does not freeze one byte of any article. Any editor is free to improve the MoS- or other WP:POLICY-compliance of any FA at any time, and this is in fact a constantly ongoing and necessary process, since our P&G are not static.  All that aside, most FAs abusing pull-quote boxes for block quotations (or worse, for short quotes that should be inline and in-context in the prose) pre-date MoS having anything to say about the matter. You're simply making a WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS argument of the least convincing sort: My' article doesn't have to comply with guideline X because articles Y and Z didn't comply with it before it existed."  Does not compute. Virtually no one ever, ever makes an argument like that about FAs when it comes to other guidelines or policies; it's almost invariably petty, stand-offish, insular "down with MoS" soapboxing, from either over-controlling wikiprojects, or over-controlling individual would-be page owners, who don't seem to understand that WP:OWN and WP:LOCALCONSENSUS are policies, that WP:IAR does not mean "ignore what you disagree with", and WP:MERCILESS applies to them just like everyone else. To wrap up, I don't recall claiming to be a "technical expert" about anything under discussion here.  I simply see what the guideline says, and that the FAC in question does not comply with it (nor does the Cary Grant GA to which that FAC discussion led me).  You wouldn't be razzing me about this if it were a RS, MEDRS, CITE, SAL, SPAM, or other guideline concern; you just have an issue with a guideline you don't want to apply to you. It requires no FA badge-holding to observe whether an FAC complies with a guideline or not.  And we're not all interested in FA work. I don't knock it, but plenty of editors – probably a majority of them, judging by what people actually work on here – consider it more important to the project to improve embarassingly crappy stubs to basic encyclopedic quality, than to re-polish the chrome of already-shiny GAs.  Some of us don't even care about GA labeling; I only took William A. Spinks, of which I wrote about 99%, to GAN because someone else pestered me to (it's been GA quality since the year I wrote it, and this has always been self-evident simply by reading it).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:51, 3 July 2016 (UTC)


 * It's disappointing to see trying to involve themselves in this bullshite. There is enough drama here without someone else coming along to stoke the fire.   Cassianto Talk   17:20, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
 * It's even more disappointing to see you stoking fires by trolling my talk page. Not interested.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:51, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Accompong
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Notification of RFC for Korean MOS in regard to romanization
Hello! You contributed in some capacity to at least one of the recent discussions concerning romanization of Korean for historical topics. Should we use McCune-Reischauer or Revised for topics relating to pre-1945 Korea? If you are inclined, please contribute here. Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 06:27, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Fixed shortcut bug on policy templates
While editing WP:LAWYER today I noticed that the 4th shortcut was duplicated and the 5th one wasn't displayed. I traced that to your syntax changes to Essay of 23 June and fixed the typo. Applied same treatment to Guideline and Policy which had the same bug; didn't touch Information page and Wikipedia how-to which allow just 3 shortcuts. Just FYI — JFG talk 17:00, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Ah! Thanks. Sorry 'bout that.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  18:26, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

ARCA errata
Note that here I believe you wrote "Collect" in three places where "Coffee" was intended. alanyst 18:14, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Fixed, thanks.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  18:27, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style
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July 2016
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 * in France, including in the courts of Henry II in the 16th century and [Louis XIV] of the 17th. At least one version of it, rouët ('wheel') was a multi-

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"|via=Google Books" ??
Hello, SMcCandlish. Thank you for your edits on Rye. The cleanup you've done plus the imposition of a citation style have definitely improved the article. I'm curious about one change you made. You added the parameter "|via=Google Books" to a book citation, which results in "– via Google Books" being displayed prominently at the end of the citation on the page. If one adds "|via=JSTOR", the reader is at least warned that he will be able to read only the abstract if he is not a JSTOR member. What is the purpose of the "|via=Google Books" parameter? If one clicks on the link involved, one will immediately recognize that the information is "via Google Books", so why is it part of the citation? Those more immediately cynical than I am might venture the opinion that adding "|via=Google Books" amounts to advertising for Google Books (which, by the way, advertises sellers for the book). However, I hesitate to form an opinion until I have more information. What is the purpose? Is this now formally a WP policy? Thank you very much for your attention. Akhooha (talk) 16:02, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
 * WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT, basically. The parameter exist for the explicit purpose of identifying the intermediary supplier of a digital copy of something when one does not have the physical, paper copy at hand, and the site from which one obtained it is not the publisher (e.g. if you cite a public domain film, but are using the YouTube-hosted copy of it as your source, you put Youtube in via, in case it differs in some way from the version available on DVD or direct from the producer's own site).  It also prevents people from mis-identifying Google Books (or YouTube, or Project Gutenberg, or whatever) as the value of the publisher parameter, something I have to fix dozens of times per week (would be hundreds, if I actually searched for it instead of just fixing it when I run across it randomly).  One should not have to click and load a link to find out that the source cited is one of a zillion high-speed scans at Google Books, which are not always accurate (I've found plenty of them with missing pages, or – since they're usually old library books – defaced pages with illegible bits in them.  The OCR is also often incorrect; someone may have cited what the OCR says, based on search results not a close examination of the actual scanned print.  People re-use WP content, sometimes in print form; the fact that the source is available free at Google Books is valuable information to preserve when the article is printed out and links to sources are neither functional nor visible.  If I'm reading a printed (or reused-elsewhere, without all links and formatting preserved) article, and it cites an 1847 source, I'm liable to be skeptical, but less so if I see that the work was found via Google Books, not in a trunk in the attic of a Victorian mansion.  :-)  For much newer works, all the Google Books cites are actually to snippet views, which often do not provide full context, or even complete quotations, so an editor here may actually be misciting, and its important to know in such a case, at a glance, that the cite is to Google Books, again.  PS: We should probably have a bot track down every single citation that has a Youtube URL but does not have YouTube (or some variant thereof, like youtube.com), and have it add the parameter.  We could then use this as a flagging mechanism for checked YT content that is known to not be a copyvio (about 90% of material on YT that isn't some silly person's cat videos is copyvio material ripped from TV, DVDs, or some other commercial source).  By doing something like YouTube&lt;!--cv checked: legit, 2016-07-16--&gt; we could obviate the need to re-check YT content, and if it's not legit, we could remove it, or if uncertain, do    — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  07:50, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your informative reply. I hadn't considered many of the issues you've raised. Akhooha (talk) 16:06, 16 July 2016 (UTC)
 * No prob. Oh, I forgot to mention that many of the journal search sites (Highbeam, etc.) that provide limited numbers of free accounts to us through WP:LIBRARY expect us to use the via to credit them. (We should also use applicable parameters about accounts and paywalls if the URL isn't something the average reader can reach).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:55, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the additional information. I recently got JSTOR access through WP and have been crediting it in my citations. --Akhooha (talk) 00:34, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
 * prevents people from mis-identifying Google Books as the value of the publisher parameter, something I have to fix dozens of times per week This is actually the result of a (at least previously) bad implementation in WP:Citoid. --Izno (talk) 11:45, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Lawdy. Wonder if it's still doing that, and what else it's doing wrong?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:13, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I raised a question about this at Wikipedia talk:TWL/Citoid. I don't see anything problematic at User:Salix alba/Citoid.js, but I'm not sure what the total codebase of Citoid is.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:59, 24 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm not entirely sure why TWL has taken 'ownership' here for Citoid, but mediawikiwiki:Citoid is probably where you want to start. --Izno (talk) 02:13, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

With my Citoid.js tool it does show the full data which the citoid server returns. It a little small at the bottom of the window. Looking at the data returned for the URL https://books.google.com/books?id=HEQ9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA11 the Citoid server returns In that there is a   item. My code could potentially convert that into a  parameter for cite book. It would require a bit more testing to see exactly what the libraryCatalog parameter produces. --Salix alba (talk): 06:59, 24 July 2016 (UTC)
 * That would likely be useful,, at least for certain values (Google Books, PubMed, and other full-text sources). I'm glad it's not mistaking that for publisher.  I would surmise at this point that someone else's Citoid-using tool is mis-parsing   as publisher, or that the Citoid is sometimes passing "Google Books" as the   value for some reason, otherwise  would not have seen "  " output from Citoid. Without having seen it myself, I dunno.  I'm kind of acting as a "so, I hear there's some kind of problem ..." intermediary, with second-hand reports.  :-)  (My interest in it is that I very frequently encounter the "  " error in actual citations.)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  07:42, 24 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I've now added the via parameter. --Salix alba (talk): 20:35, 24 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Huzzah!  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  04:31, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

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Please comment on Talk:Hilton Worldwide
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Nomination for merging of Template:Interwiki redirect
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I thought that you might like this
In breaks between edits, you may enjoy listening to Wikipedia as it is being created and destroyed. Regards, William Harris  •   talk •   12:28, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Kind of soothing. Not sure what the chords represent yet. Maybe someone creating an account.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:19, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
 * http://techland.time.com/2013/08/09/like-a-nerdy-wind-chime-real-time-wikipedia-edits-set-to-music/ Being a thinker, I thought you would find it interesting. Regards, William Harris  •   talk •   20:50, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it doesn't say what the occasional long, dramatic chords are, though. There might be even more than one kind (at a guess I would think page deletion, page creation, and account creation). 20:45, 23 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Very cool. I have copied this conversation to my user page (User:David_Tornheim), referring back here.  I hope no one minds being quoted.  If so, let me know... --David Tornheim (talk) 21:12, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
 * — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:54, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Korean romanization bs again
So ... yeah ...

After over two weeks, our little misadventure has led to exactly one more outside contributor commenting on the issue. Of course that user took our side, but still...

What's the next step in attempting to form a consensus?

Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 12:43, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't think one is going to form at this time. I would drop the matter for 6 months and try again with an RfC at WP:VPPOL, noting that two previous discussions failed to attract enough commentary to produce a clear consensus.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:21, 21 July 2016 (UTC)


 * I took a look at the RfC. Interesting. I think you need more background material--I didn't look at the previous RfC's.  Maybe two high quality articles from academic journal articles, each arguing for or against each standard?  Do they exist? I always find it a bit odd that nearly every language has a different name for every country, creating almost O(n^2) names for O(n) countries.  Seems like for respect we should call countries (and the people) by the name they call themselves; but at the same time, I understand there are problems with that, especially if the name is unpronounceable in the other language, we lack the character set such as Cryllic, and that a name like Schmidt in German really means Smith in English, or Peter has a different spelling in different languages .  With strong reasons for one method or the other, I can see why you are having trouble getting many people to vote, unless they know the subject well.  --David Tornheim (talk) 02:19, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

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Category:User templates about userboxes
Hi, following the discussion about Category:User templates about userboxes, I've purged N-Z. Will you do the rest soon-ish? Otherwise I'd post it at WP:CFDWM. – Fayenatic  L ondon 15:56, 30 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I will try to get to it soon, but I've been taking a kind of forced wikibreak for the most part (had a tooth problem, turned into jaw infection, and cost me two weeks of real-world work, so I'm focused on working extra to make up the lost income). Later this week I can probably find the time.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  13:10, 1 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Update: I've identified all the miscategorized ones (about 40 of them), and have them open as a series of tabs in a window; just need to figure out what userbox categories they do belong in, and recat them. Also, there are many that do belong in the category that are listed at Userboxes/Userboxes but are missing from the category. I don't have the heart to update the list with infoboxes in the category that are not in the list, since it doesn't seem like a good use of editing time, even if cleaning up confusing categories (arguably) is.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  21:11, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Update: Done about half of them.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  04:34, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Update: Done about 3/4.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:47, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Hi again. I just removed one more. Looks like we finished that task between us. – Fayenatic  L ondon 20:52, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Yay! That was a real pain (well, it was to me, because I was re-categorizing them all where they belong, and further cleaning up stuff as I went along – rather slow going).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  23:23, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Gruffudd
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