Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/SEWilco

I wrote in the RFC:


 * [Note: In my opinion SEW's skepic contributions to climate change were unhelpful in the past; they are not being raised in this RFC because SEW seems to have stopped editing the substance of the climate pages.]

Jmabel asked "whose" because perhaps with several certifiers its no longer clear. "My" is WMC, though others may agree. All I meant by this was that the issue of SEWs skeptic contributions has merely died down rather than been solved; this RFC is without prejudice to that. Since the issue of dredging up old problems *is* one of the issues, I'll add that I would not RFC/A him based only on whats past. William M. Connolley 21:26, 25 November 2005 (UTC).

Nothing in this RfC diminishes William M. Connolley's need to abide by the remedy in the Arbitration Case
...says Splash. Which is fair enough. But the terms of the parole are unclear. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/Admin_enforcement_requested#William_M._Connolley.27s_parole_-_enforcement. My assumption (given there) is that the arbcomm intended to be reasonable. So far the arbcomm have declined to clarify their meaning. I still wish they would. William M. Connolley 19:21, 26 November 2005 (UTC).

SEW has finally got his ban
Note: SEW has finally got the ban he was looking for:. William M. Connolley 19:21, 26 November 2005 (UTC).

Policies used in this RFC are currently part of the dispute and care should be taken
I'm not yet sure about the background of this RFC, and I'm just starting to study. However, one piece of evidence is used is breach of citations policies. The sections which disagree with SEWilco's actions have been changed recently and talk page consensus (as opposed to consensus reached by maximum number of reverts) seems to be with SEWilco's interpretation. (here's the edit ).

Even if this policy is going to be accepted (and it currently isn't in the Cite Sources page) then I don't think that SEWilco could be expected to accept it as consensus. No comment on other accusations such as revert warring.

Mozzerati 22:26, 26 November 2005 (UTC)


 * I haven't been following that. Your section heading is definitely wrong: I inititated and wrote this RFC, and I haven't edited that CS page. Neither have N, SS, Vs or G.


 * Correction accepted (I changed the title and probably will again). I've now looked through edit histories and realised I had misunderstood when and where different people became involved.  Thanks/sorry if anyone was offended.  Mozzerati 22:26, 27 November 2005 (UTC)


 * But the text If contributors differ as to the appropriate style of citation, they should defer to the article's main content contributors in deciding the most suitable format for the presentation of references. If no agreement can be reached, the style used should be that of the first major contributor. predates the diff you give: its there on 8th Nov. By 15th Oct it said An article's content contributors decide on the most suitable format for the presentation of references. . So it was all in place before.


 * William M. Connolley 22:57, 26 November 2005 (UTC).


 * Mozzerati, I don't know why you think there's no consensus on the talk page for that. There's a consensus on the Cite sources talk page against just about everything that SEWilco has proposed or tried to insert, because his editing of the page has almost invariably led to a deterioration. Also, the first-major-contributor rule is taken from the MoS, and has strong support within the community regarding all kinds of issues, when other ways of reaching agreement fail. SlimVirgin (talk)  03:29, 27 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Unlike changes between British English and American English, some changes of reference style do have real functional effect. Citation styles are currently subject to many experiments.  For example, my own Footnote4 is now obsolete due to changes to footnote3 (which has now become the standard footnote based citation style at Footnote).  Articles using it should definitely be updated; there is no need to consult the original author.  Manually footnoted articles should definitely be changed to use templates.
 * Coming to the current dispute. Direct links without references are functionally deficient; they do not provide author information, for example, and pure numbered links are unacceptable since. apart from the general inconvenience for normal users, they cause serious problems on screen readers and other accessibility systems.  It is possible to correct this by using direct links backed up with a reference section underneath.
 * I think that in this dispute, we have to be clear about what good SEWilco has been doing (providing reference information) and that that should be supported by the policy. Reverting him in ways which didn't destroy added information becomes more a matter of taste (see this Kyoto Protocol revert); on the other hand, this revert to Global cooling clearly destroys important citation information.  This is no longer a matter of citation "style", but rather a matter of providing citations properly or not.   Such edits are against the Editing policy which says "whatever you do, try to preserve information".
 * If we look at the manual of style before recent changes by yourself and SEWilco we see that "URLs as numbered links [...] should be converted to have a link text". Further, the consensus from village pump discussions, unfortunately accidentally deleted, appears to be that updating direct links to other styles is preferred.
 * If we try to look through the history of cite sources, we see that precisely the points being used against SEWilco have been the subject of a slow revert war over the last year, with about thirty explicit reverts and many more complete rewrites in the last 500 edits. The talk page shows very limited consensus building.  This is not a policy which can reasonably be used against SEWilco.  More importantly, a good outcome of this RFC would be a serious attempt at consensus building.  Something which preserves everybody's information whilst trying to allow people to have articles which look good to them.  Mozzerati 22:26, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Mozzerati that a good outcome would be a serious attempt at consensus building. And I would hope that "URLs as numbered links [...] should be converted to have a link text" (about 10 lines above) would be able to get a consensus. It is unpleasant for me as a newcomer to not even have that much nailed down. For7thGen 06:25, 29 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Mozzerati, I'm not quite sure what you mean. There is a consensus on Wikipedia talk:Cite sources regarding embedded links, and you only have to look at articles to see it in action. Embedded links in articles are not converted to have a link text when used in the body of the text &mdash; like this &mdash; but they are converted to have a link text when placed in the References section as part of the full citation, like this &mdash; An answer in Africa. It was only SEWilco and one other editor who tried to get that changed as part of a campaign against embedded links, but they were not successful.


 * Regarding the first-contributor rule, this is implemented when no agreement can be reached on which citation style to use: embedded links, Harvard referencing, or footnotes. If the current editors on the page can't agree, the first citation style used is deferred to, or the preference of the major contributor. See WP:CITE. SlimVirgin (talk) 11:04, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Slim Virgin, you left a note for me on my talk page, so to educate myself I've done as you told Mozzerati to do -- I've looked at your featured article on Bernard Williams. Its embedded links are exclusively links to newspaper or magazine articles, I believe, so you move in a different world (where you don't need footnotes) and your use of such links does make sense, with the augmented citations below in a References section in case the link dies. (I did notice that you did not augment one link, your link [2]= www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=16188, so I presume you'll add its augmented citation in your References.)  See section "Never the twain shall meet", below. And I can help you if you really are unclear on Mozzerati's meaning: namely, in an article that really does need footnotes (as all of mine do, but apparently none of yours), these footnotes need to be numbered automatically both in the text and in the footnote section, so that future maintenance will not be needed. And adding an embedded link which is automatically numbered, without a correspondingly numbered footnote, causes a mismatch between numbers from that point on. But adding an embedded text link (or "link with text" as Mozzerati put it) does not interfere with the automatic numbering of the footnote references in the text. For7thGen 21:23, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

RFA
Notice that the climate change RFA is re-started Requests for arbitration/Climate change dispute 2. SEW is doing his best there to be unhelpful; if he ever settles down then hopefully we could get some consensus-building. But with his current attitude it seems unlikely. William M. Connolley 10:08, 29 November 2005 (UTC).

RFC while a poll...
SEW wrote:


 * Connolley also filed this RFC while a poll in which SEWilco is participating was still under way at Talk:Global cooling.

This is deceptive. Nandesuka started a poll there, to see if anyone agreed with SEWs edits. No one did. SEW has suddenly discovered "participitation" in that poll in a doomed attempt to slow down his RFA. William M. Connolley 19:33, 29 November 2005 (UTC).


 * I concur. The poll and the RFC have, essentially, nothing to do with each other. Nandesuka 21:39, 29 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Look at the poll timestamps again. I was participating before this RFC.  (SEWilco 03:20, 30 November 2005 (UTC))


 * I think the relevant point here is that the answer to the question I asked there &mdash; "Is there anyone here, other than SEWilco, who prefers his citation format?" &mdash; has, so far, been a resounding "no."  And, frankly, I question whether you can be said to be "participating" in a straw poll which, as formulated, specifically says that it is looking for the opinions of people other than you (not because your opinion doesn't matter per se, but simply because your position is well known, due to your constant reverting against the apparent consensus of, as near as I can tell, every other editor of the pages in question.)
 * In any event, the idea that a straw poll on some page somehow invalidates a request for comment is, frankly, very strange. The idea behind an RfC is to gather community consensus and, hopefully, make it clear.  I would hope the fact that you are standing completely and utterly alone might wake you up to the fact that you are going down the wrong path.  Instead of looking for technicalities by which you can ignore the clear consensus the community is forming on this issue, why not try to grow a little and take the constructive criticism that is being offered to you?
 * If you can absorb and internalize what is being offered to you in this RfC, you will become a better editor, a better member of the community, and a better person. If you spurn it, it will surely be to your detriment. Nandesuka 03:58, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Never the twain shall meet(?)
I think a newcomer who has not even seen the articles involved (and can't afford the time to do so), but who has a good overall perspective on the topic of footnotes vs. embedded links, is ideally positioned to give a neutral overview of this latter topic. Yet, I am biased toward protecting my ability to use footnotes because all my articles seem to need them. I certainly am neutral on the RFC, because I don't even know what it's all about. But I do know about this topic, see my entries above. Footnotes vs. embedded links: The two types of articles (the twain) are the articles that do need footnotes to help the reader and the articles that do not. (The readers' needs that are met only by footnotes are well described in both Cite sources and Footnotes. If a dispute arises about whether the article-reader needs footnotes or not, for a given article, then hopefully an arbitration panel could decide that limited dispute.)  When footnotes are not needed, I see a lot of advantage to using the embedded links system that Slim Virgin describes above, especially for multiple references to the same source without any future maintenance. And his system uses automatic numbering which is well-known (I had thought) to be incompatible with the automatic numbering of footnotes within the same article. Never the twain shall meet applies here. But I do not yet see why footnotes can't be mixed with embedded links with a text segment for the reader to click on, rather than a number. Possibly the embedded text links would be harder for the reader to find than the numbered links, but that is not giving up very much if the reader is helped much more by the footnotes, is it? I suppose that some of the disputed articles do mix the twain in that they are technical and need footnotes to help the reader and also use many newspaper and magazine sources which are best handled with embedded links plus augmented citations below in an Other references section. But can't the embedded links be the non-numbered type? Or is the problem that the footnote advocates (SEWilco etc,) insist on all references being only to footnotes? I myself would think the first question to be decided is, are footnotes needed, to help the reader? I'm guessing that everyone agrees they are needed. In which case I'm mystified, what is difficult about using footnotes together with non-numbered embedded links? P.S. I'm "throwing this over the fence" in an attempt to be helpful, NOT because I enjoy the misery of writing this but because I thought I saw a need that I could fill, as a responsible and considerate citizen. For7thGen 23:02, 29 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Links to citations (aka "footnotes") do not have to be numbered, but the original styles used numbered links. Non-numbered Footnotes were also added to  Kyoto Protocol  and were replaced with unlinked citations with assorted errors.  Errors which I mentioned in Talk:Kyoto Protocol, and are impossible with WP:FN or apparent when an editor tries out a newly added WP:FN link.  Errors which remain in the current version.   (SEWilco 04:17, 30 November 2005 (UTC))