User talk:GTBacchus

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The Department of Musicology at the Palacky University Olomouc

Hello,

some time ago, you moved Palacký University, Olomouc to Palacký University of Olomouc. I would like to ask you to do the same with The Department of Musicology at the Palacky University Olomouc. I propose to rename it into Department of Musicology (Palacký University, Faculty of Philosophy), putting it into the same line with Centre for Clinical Legal Education (Palacký University, Faculty of Law). I am not sure whether the latter is the best way to name an article, if you have any better idea, please change both the Musicology department and the Clinical Centre.

I merely write on Wiki, the technical things like renaming articles are beyond my capabilities. I would be thankful, if you could help me with that.

Best Regards Cimmerian praetor Cimmerian praetor (talk) 15:29, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

(same text at User talk:Propaniac)

Thank you.Cimmerian praetor (talk) 17:31, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Talk:Owsley_Stanley#Steely_Dan

I see you've met Dlabtot. I've had to remove several articles from my watchlist because of him. You got off easy. Viriditas (talk) 21:47, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Incubation project

I see from the discussion there that you have an interest in the Incubation project. You may be interested in this: Wikipedia_talk:Article_Incubator#Use_of_incubation_outside_stated_guidelines. Regards, TRANSPORTERMAN (TALK) 18:18, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Abortion - death

Take a look at the Abortion lede. Someone is trying to change it again. 67.233.18.28 (talk) 16:50, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

67.233.18.28

You're probably just as frustrated as I am with the IP user 67.233.18.28. The reason I haven't responded to your points is not because I am unwilling to discuss, but because I don't want to be dragged out into a long WP:IDHT argument with him. Obviously I'm involved, and I guess you are as well, but is there anything at all we could do about his conduct? NW (Talk) 17:55, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm probably not. I just entered the discussion, and I get the impression you've already gone twelve rounds with him. It looks like an uninvolved admin has arrived on the scene though; let's see how that plays out. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:04, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Tomáš Kubalík move closure

I don't necessarily disagree with your closure, but it might be helpful to address the proposal, which noted that Tomas Kubalik was just moved to Tomáš Kubalík. So, if there's no consensus, then maybe it should stay at Tomas Kubalik. As the ip !voter, 65.94.47.63, put it, "As this looks like it would never pass a WP:RM, so it should be reverted." I'm not saying I necessarily agree with this line of reasoning, but it might be worth addressing it in your closure. Thanks, ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 20:54, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I've made an extra paragraph in my closing rationale, which I hope addresses the concerns that you're bringing up. -GTBacchus^(talk) 00:04, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Hey, thanks! ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 04:23, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Talk:Bash (Unix shell)#Requested move

Really? One of the opposes is, well, invalid because it isn't true, and the other is from a user who outright admitted that the naming guidelines agreed with the move but who opposed it anyway. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) - talk 10:28, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, really. The discussion was a week deep into the backlog, and there was very little input from the community. If a few more people care to weigh in, then the page can be moved without having to go through the whole RM process, and I'd be totally willing to help with that. When I'm closing these things, I've got to make a call one way or the other, and it's pretty much guaranteed that someone will disagree with my decision each time.

It doesn't seem to be an urgent matter, so if it gets moved in a week rather than today, no big deal. If it doesn't get moved at all, that's also no big deal. Why not drop by a relevant WikiProject, see what people say there, and then let me know? -GTBacchus^(talk) 15:51, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Meh. WikiProject Free Software has about three significantly active members and two of them contributed to the discussion. It's purely an issue of following the naming guidelines: you don't have to know anything about the program to follow the argument. How about a relist? Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) - talk 20:03, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

If thumperward's comment about the "user who outright admitted that the naming guidelines agreed with the move but opposed it anyway" is a reference to me, as it appears to be, that's a dishonest misrepresentation. My actual remark was that the name change "would allow us to obey the guidelines according to your interpretation" which is not exactly the same as saying that's MY interpretation. Frankly, I have pretty much had it with thumperward. As I also remarked, "Notably absent is any claim this would improve the article." For the life of me, I cannot figure out why thumperward is behaving like this, starting with his unnecessarily difficult behavior at User_talk:Thumperward#Moving Bash. I think he should give it up and move on. He's welcome to think he's right and that all the rest of us are idiots; who cares. But he's not welcome to think he should get his way even in the absence of support from a consensus. And he's definitely not welcome to misrepresent my position. Msnicki (talk) 05:47, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I didn't think I was misrepresenting your position. If I have done then I apologise. As for why I'm "being like this", it's because I occasionally get annoyed that I can do things like huge reorganisation of floppy disk without any hassle, and yet I find myself spending days and weeks jumping through red tape for the most trivial page moves regardless of what the naming convetions say. I know that Parkinson's Law of Triviality tells me to expect this, but it still gets my hackles up. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) - talk 10:55, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

The reason you're getting pushback is because the singular reason you're offering is that it's your interpretation of the rules and because you seem insensitive to what this does to the article. It's possible that your reorganization of floppy disk is wonderful and that even a curmudgeon like me would love it. But I don't like this proposed change and I've told you why. I also dislike having my legitimate disagreement dismissed as "red tape". And again, your only response is that YOU think this is what the rules require (misrepresenting your own opinion also, in this case, not as your opinion but as TRUTH). Well, look at those rules: One of the examples disambiguates with "set theory"; if your interpretation was ironclad, why didn't the example disambiguate with "mathematics"? There IS no answer. It is a judgment call and your judgment in this case is poor. Msnicki (talk) 13:27, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Hey, guys: I don't care who said she said he said what. I don't care what you think of each other's judgment. I'm not believing or disbelieving anything in particular, and whatever issues you may have with each other, I think you should pursue somewhere other than my talk page. I've posted a couple of notes around to get more input on this naming dispute, and no decision will be made based on either of you telling me anything about the other. Let's let it drop, okay? Please. -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:15, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Absolutely. Cheers. Sorry for the talk page noise. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) - talk 07:49, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Move of Miguel Angel Pantò

Hi GTBacchus, I saw that you had doubts about moving "Miguel Angel Pantò". You wrote that you are not sure about the reason of the move; I see from your user page that you understand Spanish, so you probably know that in Spanish all accents are acute: since Pantó was born in Argentina, he had an Argentinian name, with acute accents. The grave accent is a misleading Italian way of writing Spanish, since Italian language doesn't have as many acute accents as Spanish does. As you can see here, I personally moved the page on it.wiki about two years ago. This move is a mere linguistic issue. Excuse my mistakes while formatting the request, it's completely different on it.wiki. :-) I see that you are on a Wikipause: you can find me here on en.wiki, but if you need to talk with me with hurry, or for any other reason, feel free to contact me on it.wiki. --Triple 8 (talk) 21:06, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Indeed, that makes perfect sense about the accents. When I processed that page, I didn't even really look at what the issue was with the name, because I was just trying to adjust the formatting so that the bot tending the page at Requested moves would know where to list it. Of course, there are no grave accents in Spanish, and I'm sure there won't be any problems moving the page when its requisite seven days have elapsed. Thanks for the note. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:34, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

About your remarks at Talk:Côte d'Ivoire in the now-closed RFC / RM

You don't like the word "idiocy". So many people don't like the word. Many people don't like many things. I don't like someone who has nothing better to do than mock and insult those in disagreement. That is what Fyunck(click) was doing when i was bothering with that discussion. Somehow my responses to him buried his comments which instigated the responses. When you start an RFC on a topic which already has a failed RFC on the current revision of the talk page i wouldn't call that an intelligent move. Those who dismiss all instances which do not support their desire and claim they have thus found a dominant common name are where the idiocy comes in. Claiming the USA calls it Ivory Coast while dismissing the CIA use of Côte d'Ivoire is not a particularly wise move to make. Basing it on what the majority of the US media goes by is equally dismissive of the rest of the world including the country at the centre of the issue. Repeated requests to move the article when throughout the English-speaking world it is about equally split is at best frustrating. If one looks to more than just the English-speaking world i have a feeling the dominance would go to Côte d'Ivoire but policy is to dismiss all non-English sources in matters such as this.
The "anti-English only" comes from fighting over whether it is appropriate to link to an article about a company whose business is conducted in French when the article where the link would be is found on English Wikipedia. The article being linked to is also on English Wikipedia but apparently linking to it is a no-no. Calling something inherently non-notable and inappropriate to link to because it isn't English but is worthy of its own article is where my "anti-English-only" comes from. Also i thought declaring a personal bias would be a good thing rather than hiding it. That being said i am not at all fluent in anything but English.
As to telling that person, "you can go back under your bridge now", it was in direct response to their calling me a troll despite my having previous legitimate involvement in the matter being discussed.

I'm glad you found a couple uses of the name cote divoire but Ivory Coast is so overwhelmingly used in everyday English and the press that if we start to list these silly types of items as you did we'd run out of bandwidth here. Fyunck(click) (talk) 03:34, 20 June 2011, Monday (13 days ago) (UTC−6)

Got this from moi:

I'm not glad that you have nothing better to say than dismissive insults and mockery at those whom you disagree with. I personally find not one item in the list to be silly. I happen to agree with the position of the one who made the list but to stoop to calling the World Trade Organisation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the CIA, Chinese news, and the United Nations silly types of items which presumably are worthy of instant dismissal while claiming an obvious overwhelming use in presumably American everyday English for Ivory Coast does nothing beneficial for anyone. The usage in international media is generally about evenly divided. Ignoring that which you don't like is an example of why i voted as i did, which you subsequently commented on. Wikipedia is neither American nor yours personally. delirious & lost ☯ ~hugs~ 04:04, 20 June 2011, Monday (13 days ago) (UTC−6)

and this a few minutes after (though it was placed before on the talk page):

So besides calling people who disagree with you "silly" and "trolls", do you have anything to contribute to your own move request? It seems that you want to change the country's name because you can't even write it properly. Laurent (talk) 04:18, 20 June 2011, Monday (13 days ago) (UTC−6)

Laurent's comment is also directed at Fyunck(click) somewhat in my defence and in defence of a few other people who were denigrated by Fyunck(click). You can threaten to block me. You can block me. It won't make me think better of Fyunck(click). There was a very long comment on the content; posted in 3 or 4 parts to minimise potential edit conflicts. If you and Fyunck(click) openly declare your refusal to read it and then blame it on my use of the word idiocy then that is your choice. I don't agree with it as i tend to read it all but you are free to decide such for yourself. Oddly enough you presently find yourself at odds with Fyunck(click) over the closure of the RFC. "I'm tired of seeing this article come through WP:RM. Doesn't it get old for everyone else, too? There are a million articles that need improvement, and people would rather spin our tires in this same old mud pit? Why?" is a more jovial visual but holds about the same meaning as "idiocy" in my understanding. delirious & lost ☯ ^~hugs~ 03:30, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for your comments. I'm not sure what to say in response. The more you use inflammatory language, the worse your chances are for dispute resolution. The more you use inflammatory language, the less chance that people arriving upon the situation will take you seriously. The same applies to me. When I sound more intemperate, I'm less effective as an editor.

I never declared a refusal to read anything. I read your entire comment, and I commented on the part that stuck out the most to me. That kind of thing sticks out to people.

If someone calls you a troll, the best response, and the one that will make you look the best, is to rise above it, not to hit back. This is useful knowledge for you; think about it. -GTBacchus^(talk) 18:02, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

List of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero episodes

Just wanted to thank you for finally performing the move. Much appreciated! Fortdj33 (talk) 15:59, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

You deserve a barnstar!

		The Wikiproject Lepidoptera Barnstar
		For your work on Sphingid moths. AshLin (talk) 04:02, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you so much! :D

I don't really know anything about Sphingid moths, but I was able to figure out the sub-families and tribes well enough to sort a lot of stubs. The work was fun, and it's a good reminder to pay more notice to my Lepidopteran neighbors. There might be Sphingids on my front porch even as I type! Maybe I'll do some more in-depth reading. :)

Thanks again. -GTBacchus^(talk) 04:13, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you GTB for your contribution to Fossil fuels lobby.

Thank you GTB for your contribution to Fossil fuels lobby (Energy lobby).  :-) 99.181.136.35 (talk) 04:01, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Bad move of Joseph Smith

You appear to have screwed up a recent move so that Joseph Smith is now an infinite loop. It is beyond me to resolve this, can you do so? PatGallacher (talk) 11:10, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Joseph Smith

Hi, I'm not sure what happened, but the recent move of Joseph Smith, Jr. to Joseph Smith has resulted in a self-redirect and the entire edit history being deleted. I tried restoring the article and edit history but go a wikimedia error. older ≠ wiser 11:47, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

I've asked another Admin to see if they can do anything with it. Padillah (talk) 13:09, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Oh dear, I'm sorry. I was moving the page, and I got a "session data lost" screen, and I hit "refresh", and I think I ended up making the same move twice, with the second overwriting the first one. It might need a steward to fix it, because the revision history has over 10,000 versions in it. :/ -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:10, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

The article does not work

I can not access the Joseph Smith article, it does not work.79.209.37.150 (talk) 12:47, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Admin's Barnstar
		For relentlessly encouraging other editors to pursue the betterment of the project, for humbly stepping in to resolve conflict in high-stress areas, and for simply using the admin tools for niceness instead of evil, I award you this barnstar. Neelix (talk) 13:42, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! It's true, I try not to be evil (and sometimes succeed). Thanks for noticing. ;) -GTBacchus^(talk) 16:58, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Grumble

Do try harder. You should not have closed Talk:Jakub Petružálek#requested move, especially with an argument that it's the Wave of the Future. Admins should not use a crystal ball, any more than article writers, and you are involved in the issue. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:32, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

There was no crystal-ball gazing there. I said the present is much more accepting of diacritics than the past has been. Nothing at all about the future. I certainly don't see how I'm involved in the issue. Am I pro- or anti-diacritic? I've closed plenty of moves in both directions, you know. I've certainly tried to read consensus on the issue, over the years, but I don't care one way or the other. I just do my best to read consensus accurately; I've observed it grow steadily more supportive of diacritics over 5 years.

Since you've questioned this decision, I've posted to WP:AN#Request review of my actions for review of my actions. I will always defer to the consensus will of the community.

In general, Pmanderson, if you have an issue with any action of mine, you're welcome to bring it up at the time. You needn't wait until someone gives me a barnstar to let me know I've screwed up. I'm actually very receptive to constructive criticism. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, anyway. -GTBacchus^(talk) 20:57, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

I didn't wait, I just found this section at the bottom. Whatever ANI does, feel free to remove the thread. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:19, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Nah, I never remove things on my talk page. It's a record of who said what, and where, until I archive it. I still don't understand your allegation that I'm somehow "involved". If you want to explain that, I'll eagerly listen. I'm willing to try harder, but the more specific you are, the more responsive I can be. -GTBacchus^(talk) 21:25, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

I have seen you in these discussions (although your example is more visible than you are); I may have made more of it than there is. I have made a proposal at AN. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:48, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

My "example is more visible" than I am... I am very curious what this means. Specific examples would be awesome. -GTBacchus^(talk) 04:54, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

For example, the use of the closure linked to in this section of a current RfC. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:18, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Fascinating. Thank you for that link. -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:51, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Old fooian and related category nominations

In looking at some of the latest comments for a series of CfD nominations on July 19, there is some rather odd timing that hints of WP:CANVASS. While the notices posted by User:Ephebi about these discussions are neutral, they appear to only be posted on user talk pages of those opposed to the change based on the opinions added. This topic of the Old Fooian form for school attendees has been discussed over the years with, as I recall, results being for both sides. I don't know how much you have been following CfD or if you have any interest, but I believe you have been doing some difficult RM closes, so that may qualify you as an uninvolved administrator here.

My current leaning is to close the lot as a tainted discussion. I'm also concerned since some of the responses are just being added to discussions solely on the topic and not really considering the merits of individual discussions. That further suggests a negative impact to the discussion in violation of WP:CANVASS. Please respond on my talk page since you are not the first admin I've asked for advice. The best outcome would be a clear untainted close of keep or rename. But if process has issues, then that is not going to happen. Thanks. Vegaswikian (talk) 19:30, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Jimo in China

You renamed/moved Jimo and closed the discussion about it, imho a bit prematurely. I agree the rename/move is correct, but we should have waited until some more facts about Jimo are added to the article. Right now, administrative importance (top article name) and contents are out of balance. To reach a new balance quickly, I suggest to put Jimo on the list of articles needing improvement. Shenhemu (talk) 01:16, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for commenting. You are articulating a perspective that I have never before heard or considered in article titling questions, and I find it intriguing. We agree that speedy article improvement should be a goal for Jimo. I'll look into that now, and I'll be thinking about the "balance" you refer to. That's very interesting. -GTBacchus^(talk) 01:28, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

RE:Thanks for catching that

Thank you for the warm message GTBacchus! I appreciate your contributions to the article as well :-) Cheers mate. - Fedayee (talk) 15:25, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

St David's and the Cathedral Close

You deleted the redirect at St David's and the Cathedral Close. That is the official name of the city of St Davids. Even though it has no internal links it should be there for external links. Agathoclea (talk) 07:05, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

The redirect is still there. I only deleted its talk page. -GTBacchus^(talk) 07:06, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

I just noticed when I posted that here. Misread the logs - sorry. Should stick a WP Wales banner on that one anyway. Agathoclea (talk) 07:08, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, if you like. I don't know how standard it is to put project banners on redirects, but I have no objection to it. -GTBacchus^(talk) 07:10, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

It is a very low priority task as it is not normally seen, but useful when a RfD gets filed the project gets notified. Agathoclea (talk) 07:14, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for closing Gandhi

Thanks for taking the time to read through and mull over the many arguments in the Gandhi move. I enjoyed reading your Sandbox comments, especially the small print about Victoria and Gandhi. I'm amazed that you can do all that and so much more in a day's work. Regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 07:49, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Echo Fowler. I don't agree with your close decision but I've closed enough move discussions to know that there is always someone who disagrees :) I think your sandbox summary was excellent and you did an outstanding job in examining all the arguments in what was a contentious move, way beyond the call of duty. Thanks. --rgpk (comment) 19:32, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

I appreciate the kind words. It was a very interesting case, that really made me think about all that goes into deciding an article title. I think the table was awesome; it would be hard to overstate the power of that strategy. Somehow stripping the names away from the arguments just makes everything clearer, and I think that people rise to the occasion. I'd like to see that technique applied more often when we've got tough decisions to make.

Anyway, this wasn't a situation where it would be possible to please everyone. I hope everyone at least feels their arguments were taken into account, and that there was some fairness to the process. That's ultimately what makes these things stable, so I guess we'll see.

Cheers. :) -GTBacchus^(talk) 07:17, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

All points considered

You have not considered all points in the "For"- "Mahatma Gandhi" section in your sandbox? I think you missed them inadvertently. Please consider them and update the sandbox. 167.219.48.10 (talk) 12:16, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

What have you got in mind? -GTBacchus^(talk) 12:25, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

1. A basic websearch results test or "ghit test" is overwhelmingly slanted towards Mahatma Gandhi. "Mahatma+Gandhi" 39,200,000 results vs. "Mohandas+Karamchand+Gandhi" 1,820,000 results (1:0.046)
2. Mahatma Gandhi is a world figure. Is this move about popular nationalism? List of roads named after Mahatma Gandhi is an example of the popularity of the title in India as well as the rest of the world. Other examples, Mahatma Gandhi District, Houston, Mahatma Gandhi Memorial High School (Fiji), Mahatma Gandhi Market, and various other institutions
3. Here is a counterpoint to point 8 ("For" Mohandadas Karamnchand Gandhi). In 2008 when there were no 'search suggestions', the traffic for Mahatma Gandhi was significantly higher than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

167.219.48.10 (talk) 12:29, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I took all of that into account.

1. I know about "ghits", and how worthless they are. Good use of Google restricts to Google Books, or Google Scholar, or Google News, to filter out a lot of the unreliable sources. Even in those searches, "Mahatma" comes up more often, and that's why I said it is preferred under recognizability.
2. The "popular nationalism" argument is a canard and a red herring. No decisions here are being made based on nationalism, no decisions are made to avoid the appearance of nationalism, and I never suggested that anyone was motivated by nationalism. Arguments such as this should never even be made on Wikipedia. HOWEVER, I explicitly took both sides of this argument into account, down at the very bottom, under "Other arguments". I give the whole "nationalism" tangent almost zero weight.
3. This is just a restatement of how much more common "Mahatma" is, and I took that fully into account.

I hope this clarifies matters. No points were ignored, although not everything was copied and pasted to my sandbox. I read it all, and I thought about it all. -GTBacchus^(talk) 12:37, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Puzzled

I did not participate in this discussion, but I just read your sandbox analysis and I am deeply puzzled. I don't have time for a full response right now, but I must mention that your interpretation of concision seems especially contrived to favor some predetermined preference in this case. I mean, concision is clearly defined to mean that shorter titles are preferred. Among those being considered, how this does not favor the one that is clearly the shortest, Gandhi, is beyond explanation. Of course "a full name is 'concise' too", but just a surname is even more concise. Come on!

There are other similar problems in your analysis, but that's probably the most obvious. --Born2cycle (talk) 17:17, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Nothing is "contrived to favor some predetermined preference", because I have no predetermined preference. Therefore it's impossible that I would contrive something for that reason. If you think I'm a biased closer, please say so quite directly, and I'll request review of my close at WP:AN, as I always do when challenged.

The point of "concise" is not that we choose the very shortest title available. It's that titles not be overly long. A person's full name is not overly long. Before you go quoting the text of WP:AT to me about conciseness, remember that I'm in a very privileged position regarding knowledge the original intent of the authors of the Principal Naming Criteria.

What you may consider an "obvious" "problem" in my analysis might be your own opinion, you know? That's a dangerous word, because once you say something is "obvious", you're calling anyone who doesn't see it somehow dumb. To me, none of this is "obvious", because there are obviously intelligent people disagreeing about it. -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:54, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

I've requested review anyway, because this is the second challenge to my close. Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Review of controversial move request?. I hope you realize that this would have happened no matter how I closed the thing. -GTBacchus^(talk) 18:01, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I chose my words carefully. In particular, I did not say anything actually was contrived. I said "seems especially contrived". Seems means "gives the impression", and that's the impression I, for one, got.

When you say "concision" means titles are not supposed to be overly long, I believe you're thinking of WP:precision, which says titles are not to be overly precise (which, by the way, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arguably is).

It's true that "the point of 'concise' is not that we choose the very shortest title available", but that's a straw man since that's not what I said. Concision says, quite simply, "titles are expected to be shorter rather than longer." "Gandhi" is shorter. "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi" is longer. We expect the shorter (all other criteria assumed equal). That is obvious.

That's the point of weighing the criteria. No criterion alone is decisive. But when we evaluate how any one criterion applies to the choices being considered, we must look at it alone. Regardless how much weight we give concision, it weighs in favor of the shorter one. That doesn't mean other criteria don't weigh more and indicate an alternative, but to deny that concision favors the shorter (especially the much shorter, as in this case) is not giving concision any weight; it's ignoring it altogether. --Born2cycle (talk) 18:19, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

No. I was certainly not thinking of precision, I was thinking of concision. You seem to be giving the weight of law to the words "titles are expected to be shorter rather than longer". Those words are just something we wrote down one day. They were not handed down to Moses, and it's almost entirely certain that they're not the best way of expressing the principles involved.

To me, it is extremely "obvious" that our policies should not be read legalistically. It's very "obvious" that a full name is not a problem under "concision". It's "obvious" that I didn't ignore concision, but that I think of it in a less strictly by-the-words way than you do. It's "obvious" that my thinking of it that way is reasonable, and in line with the intent of the policy.

Regarding the relative weights of criteria, those vary from situation to situation. In this case, none of the titles was a problem under concision, so concision weighed nothing. Also in this case, "Mahatma" won under recognizability. However, the weight of that criterion is diminished by the fairly high level of recognizability of "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi", which is very familiar to a large proportion of educated people on this planet. -GTBacchus^(talk) 18:32, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict)P.S. Your warning, " remember that I'm in a very privileged position regarding knowledge the original intent of the authors of the Principal Naming Criteria" smacks of WP:OWN. I shouldn't need to remind you that whatever was the original intent, consensus changes, and it says what it says. Here is an example from last October where another editor clearly interpreted conciseness to simply mean what it says, shorter titles are expected, since he says conciseness favors "Queen Victoria" over "Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom" and "Victoria of the United Kingdom".

By the way, I'm not asking for a review, at least not yet. I'd like to finish my analysis first. At that point, if I feel your decision is in error, I suspect I'd first try to persuade you to reverse, before appealing for a review. --Born2cycle (talk) 18:35, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't "own" it, B2c, I just know what happened. I was there. I know that consensus can change, but it's not clear that it has changed in this case! One person interpreted concision according to a strict reading of the words. That doesn't mean that consensus favors a strict reading of the words. It could just mean that people are easily led by overly rule-looking language. We certainly know that to be true.

It's not at all clear that consensus has changed to demand strict literal readings of rules here, i.e., that the lawyers have won. It has never been consensus to treat our policies as statutory law, because IAR still stands.

As far as the review, I always ask for review when my closings are challenged - no matter what the challenge looks like. It's not an escalation, and it's not a big deal. It's just what I always do. -GTBacchus^(talk) 18:43, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Can you provide evidence that someone else, somewhere, at some time, interpreted concision to not mean that shorter is preferred (all other factors held equal), but that "titles [are] not [to] be overly long?" That when none of the titles in contention are "overly long", even if one is significantly longer than the others, that concision does not indicate the shorter title is preferred. Heck, can you provide any evidence that even you ever interpreted it that way before this case? --Born2cycle (talk) 18:54, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

No, I don't know of any evidence like that. Maybe I'll think of it or find it later, but I don't know when this has come up before. This experience will provide some evidence of what the community thinks of my reading of the spirit of the policy. So far I know that one editor finds it reasonable, and one disagrees with it. No more have commented yet on that particular point. -GTBacchus^(talk) 18:58, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, by the way, for motivating me to fucking quit working in Requested Moves. I won't, because I'm one stubborn bastard, but that's what I'm getting from this interaction right now. I think you should close about a thousand move requests, deal with all the static that comes up, and then come back and tell me I'm fucking everything up. Spit.

Wikipedia is not made of "rules", and it never will be. That is a beautiful thing, and one day, you'll understand this. For now, just think about how your words come across to other people. Nobody here is just a screen name; we're human beings, and we react in predictable ways. Think about it. -GTBacchus^(talk) 10:19, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Regardless of the argument, and despite the profanity, Nobody here is just a screen name; we're human beings is a profound statement. Yesterday I too was wondering about the same thing, are we just virtual beings with a username? Yogesh Khandke (talk) 15:19, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

I've reread this section and I honestly don't understand how I became a bee under your bonnet, or what this has to do with whether WP has "rules". I simply question your interpretation of the Concision criterion to mean that "A person's full name is concise" (your rule), and, thus the full name Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is no less concise than Gandhi. By that reasoning George Herbert Walker Bush is no less concise than George H. W. Bush, Wladziu Valentino Liberace is no less concise than Liberace, and Madonna Louise Ciccone is no less concise than Madonna. Is that how you really see it? --Born2cycle (talk) 18:45, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

I see that none of those titles present a problem in terms of concision. I'm not talking about concision in a vacuum, I'm talking about it as it meaningfully applies to article titles here, and the difference in concision between "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi" and "Gandhi" is not anything we need to be concerned with. Neither name falls afoul of the concision criterion. I look at "Gandhi" and ask, "is this concise enough?", and I answer "yes". I look at "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi", and I ask, "is this concise enough?", and I answer "yes". The point of the concision criterion is not to distinguish between cases like those; it's to distinguish wordy titles from reasonable ones. A full name is not "wordy" to an extent that we need to be concerned about at all. I didn't say that "Gandhi" is no more concise than the full name, if all we care about is the definition of the word "concise". However, I don't care one bit about the definition of the word "concise" except insofar as it applies to article titles on Wikipedia. In that sense, the criterion does not, to my mind, based on my observations of community decisions, distinguish between those two choices. If you had never seen a "concision criterion" written down, would you look at a person's full name and say, "oh that's too long". The point of the criterion is to avoid things that are too long.

The other examples are, of course, each their own thing. "Madonna Louise Ciccone" is considerably less recognizable than "Madonna"; same for Liberace. Both names for Bush are fine. None of these options that you've presented falls afoul of the concision criterion, to my mind, based on my observations of community decisions.

When we wrote that criterion down, we weren't making a rule; we were making an educated guess about de facto naming standards that we were trying to abstract from a thousand varied experiences. We, with 100% certainty, got it wrong. Those criteria are guaranteed to be wrong. Neither you nor I nor anyone has ever actually seen a correct set of naming criteria. What I was trying to abstract when I wrote "concise" on that page was not the difference between "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi" and "Gandhi". It was the difference between wordy titles and titles that just get to the point. The letter of the law is a terrible approximation of reality, and that's why reading policy pages around here is like huffing rat poison: it's a bad idea. If you literally ignore them, like the policy recommends, and read the community instead, then you'll be much more on the right page. -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:41, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

This helps. This not a case of literal interpretation, which I abhor. I'm just trying to establish what the words means. I suggest the current descriptor -- "titles are expected to be shorter rather than longer." -- is overly simplistic, inadequate and misleading. I'm sure we could do much better. Even "avoid wordy titles" is much better, I suggest. --Born2cycle (talk) 19:49, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't notice this while posting below. I agree that the criterion could use re-wording. Now we're playing the right game. Use your knowledge of community standards to correct what the rules say, and then try not to believe too strongly in what you just wrote down. -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:55, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Born2cycle, you said, at WP:AN: "We really have to agree on what Natural and Concise mean and how they are to be applied -- and state that clearly at WP:CRITERIA -- or we're never going to get consensus on anything." That is entirely incorrect.

We need to read community decisions, notice consensus where it happens, and then abstract principles from it. We do not reason top-down; we abstract bottom-up. If you're trying to use the letter of the rule to understand what the rule means, then you've got it backwards. The letter of the rule is pretty much always wrong. If you take it as an approximate guess made by a fallible human who was trying imperfectly to express real criteria that we don't yet understand, then you're on the right page. There was not a consensus for the one-word name; if those criteria hadn't been written down yet, would people be arguing that a person's full name is somehow too long? Since I've never seen people making those arguments, I say that's not a de facto standard. The only reason someone would make that argument is if they read the criteria and then tried to apply them literally. It's a bad idea; you really shouldn't read policy pages at all, until you're ready to start correcting them based on your knowledge of de facto community standards. Then you'll realize just how thin and insubstantial those pages are. -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:54, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't understand how what you said explains how what I said is "entirely wrong" (or wrong at all for that matter). I agree with everything you said, except for the part about what I said being entirely wrong. I think you're conflating "We really have to agree on what Natural and Concise mean and how they are to be applied -- and state that clearly at WP:CRITERIA" with something like "literal rule following". Understanding what something means, and being clear about it, is quite different from literal rule following, which, again, I abhor. Understanding what it means and being clear about it also does not mean top-down rather than bottom-up. We determine meaning bottom-up, but then reflect it in the rules as clearly as possible. --Born2cycle (talk) 20:46, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

We also have to remember that the reason we have policy and guidelines is so that those who do take the time to determine meaning bottom-up can convey that knowledge and information to those who don't take that time. For them, we need to try to be as clear as we reasonably can. --Born2cycle (talk) 20:48, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Hmm. I seem to have some kind of knee-jerk reaction when I see people talk about policy in certain ways. This is something I could think more about before I tell more people that they're "entirely wrong". Interesting... -GTBacchus^(talk) 20:53, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Moving

I’ve created the article Index of Ottoman Empire-related topics on 24 June, 2010. On 11 October 2010 somebody proposed to remove the article to Outline . But the proposal was not supported and the notice was removed on 26 June 2011. Now I see that you have moved the article as a result of a second discussion. Well, wouldn’t it be better if I was also notified of the discussion. Cheers Nedim Ardoğa (talk) 13:36, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Another article move

There is another article move proposal. Please look at it (I hope I am not breaking rules). We can see another demo of how consensus is judged. Perhaps. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 15:13, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

? Yogesh Khandke (talk) 17:51, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I wouldn't worry about "breaking rules". You're supposed to be ignoring those anyway. I'm going to click on your link now and see what's there. -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:26, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Ah. It looks like I got there too late, and someone else closed it. I was visiting a friend who was in town from South Korea for the last day-and-a-half. I only get to see him every couple of years, and I've been offline accordingly. Many move requests come and go, though; I'll be checking on the backlog before long, and we'll have plenty of examples to look at. -GTBacchus^(talk) 20:04, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Use English

You wrote "On the English Wikipedia, article titles are written in English." That is not entirely true. WP:EN advises using the name most commonly used in English sources not that it necessarily always use English. Luftwaffe is the accepted English common usage of the German Air Force. Marcus Qwertyus 22:25, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Good point. I've cut that sentence, as it didn't really add anything. -GTBacchus^(talk) 22:32, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Hi

I appreciate your concern, and I do agree. Trust me, I do not always use profanities in my edit summaries, you could check. I admit I was upset in real-life at the times of my reverts, and it mirrored here. Thanks for the care :)--CallMeNathan • Talk2Me 07:46, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

No worries. Hope you're having a good weekend. :) -GTBacchus^(talk) 20:34, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Suggestions?

Suggestions? --Born2cycle (talk) 09:50, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Also, you should know I purged an uncivil comment [1]. --Born2cycle (talk) 23:59, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Talk:2008_Mumbai_terrorist_attacks#Requesting_Move_2

Can you close or relist? Thanks!--Cerejota (talk) 19:11, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Nice timing - I'm reading that discussion right now. -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:12, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Hahhaha sorry, and thank you.--Cerejota (talk) 20:32, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Help with China

Hi; you appear to be quite experienced with contentious article naming disputes.. do you have a recommendation on how to proceed in the one going on at Talk:China? I asked about this at Wikipedia talk:Requested moves. Thanks, Mlm42 (talk) 18:57, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Well... I can't make any promises, but I'll have a look. -GTBacchus^(talk) 20:20, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't know how far you are willing to involve yourself with this, but if you are willing to informally mediate (or whatever you would like to call it!) then would it be a good idea if you laid done one or two rules and ask people to follow them? I ask because there's an obvious issue that points some people see as redundant may not be so to others, which causes issues if involved editors are changing arguments in the table. I'm not excusing myself from anything, but in my opinion it would be useful if you told editors to let you deal with repetitive points or something similar to that, just on procedural basis. I've been part of one longrunning dispute, about organisation of the List of sovereign states page, which finally got somewhere when our mediator started to actively moderate our discussion, redacting parts of our posts which slipped into personal attacks or were unrelated. If you don't wish to take that sort of role, that's your decision of course, just a suggestion on my part from that experience. As another point, what is the next step in the process? Will each point be discussed with yourself (or another uninvolved editor) concluding each debate individually, before brining all the salient points together again? Thanks for you time, Chipmunkdavis (talk) 16:13, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for this suggestion. I've just added a section to the talk page regarding the removal of points from the table, and addressing the handling of uncivil statements.

As for the next step... that's trickier. These things are kind of unpredictable. Sometimes, once the arguments are all on display in their "Sunday best", someone think of a previously un-considered solution, and that's great. This doesn't seem super-likely to happen in this case.

When the table settles down, I'm going to read the whole thing carefully, and then post my comments about it. Also at that time, it would be good to post a few notes around the Wiki inviting uninvolved editors to peruse the table and also make comments. Then I expect I'll propose a solution, and we'll see what people think of that. I believe that allowing everyone to have their perspective considered and seen by all will give us the best chance at stability, whichever solution we end up choosing. -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:02, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

I've taken the liberty of copying from your statistics question and adding green font to the notes about the points, as otherwise they may be confused with the brackets that are part of the points. Chipmunkdavis (talk) 17:32, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Any advice on what to do next? I feel like we've started going in circles again. Benjwong has insisted a source showing the PRC flag was using China to talk about something other than the PRC, T-1000 seems to regard all external sources POV. No doubt I and others are being as repetitive back. As your idea seems to have not gained acceptance, do you have any other thoughts? Chipmunkdavis (talk) 09:27, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

I think we just need to wait until the primary topic RFC is complete and then you suggest a merge request between China and PRC. Given at that point PRC meets WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, WP:COMMONNAME, WP:POVTITLE and all of WP:CRITERIA except possibly precision (but as China is always used to refer to the PRC that is highly dubious) for the term China and WP:CONCEPTDAB is irrelevant as the current China article isn't the primary topic. There is also the Freeloader's point which is very strong.

Probably the merge discussion should be listed on WP:CENT which will get a lot of outside interest - it is about one of the world's most important countries after all - and given the overwhelming evidence I think that discussion should be pretty one-sided.

Continuing the discussion in the meantime has some use as someone might bring up a more compelling argument as to why the merge is unacceptable, but as they haven't so far I think that's unlikely. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 09:42, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Requested moves...

Hi , GTBacchus.As you know, this use completely ignores Wikipedia:Requested moves and Wikipedia:Article titles. I want explatin to him these rules, but unfortunately my English is poor. Could you explatin to him ? Takabeg (talk) 12:52, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree

I just finished reading your comments about civility on Jimbo Wales' talk page. I completely agree with you. An admin said that I had coprophilia and never found anything wrong with it. Two recent examples are when I brought an editor to ANI for telling someone to f off. The admins made comments like "sigh" and "Seriously, Joe. Chill". They also told me that it was alright for the editor to tell the person to f off because the other editor was being disruptive. The same editor that I reported told me to f off also after I filed the report. When an admin did not discuss an MfD calmly, I said "Sorry for getting on your bad side". His response was, "Not my "bad side", my "you appear not to understand WP rules" side.". He also told me to read three policies which I already read. I explained to him that I understand Wikipedia policies since I participate in AfD, speedy deletion, create notable articles, am an autopatroller, expand articles, create and expand articles for DYK, am working on an article for Good Article status, revert vandalism, and nominated many user pages for deletion that were successful. One of his final comments was, "Whether or not you have appreciated WP policy elsewhere is irrelevant." Wow. Joe Chill (talk) 14:10, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Hey, I've taken forever to respond, but I want to thank you for posting this here. This is an important issue, and it's very difficult to address. In a way all of my work here is about proving that defenders of antisocial editors are wrong, when they use the fact that someone deals with a lot of conflict to excuse their battleground mentality. I know that we can deal with conflict in better ways, but proving that claim on this website is a serious project.

There's an AN/I I've just been participating in today that arises from a editor we've been protecting and enabling in his persistent battleground mentality. We as a community persistently protect and enable lots of destructive behavior, and it's a pathology that we're suffering from. We should form some kind of Dumbledore's Army, but not an army. We need The Beatles. -GTBacchus^(talk) 08:20, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Requested Move closing at Climate Research Unit

Thank you for a thoughtful, well-constructed closing argument. I specially think it was important to make the point of systemic/principle issues versus the specific content issues. I often found myself in that discussion having to address issues of principle, rather than content, and that leads me to believe that a wider systemic issue is at hand. That is beyond the POV warrior phenomena of only interpreting policy to support one's POV, I mean literally good faith differences on what policy should be being discussed. That the conversation can get derailed so easily is the policy's fault - the role of policy, IMHO, is to focus and narrow discussion and diminish such meta-discussions to accelerate and facilitate editing. It often fails spectacularly in this sense. I am begining to think that the whole policy system is broken - but things like the massive overhaul of WP:RS are positive signs. --Cerejota (talk) 14:25, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Closing Crêpe

GTBacchus, many thanks for attending to that difficult second RM, and especially for your closing remarks. (It took some considerable time and effort for me to do what I did, I must tell you.) That pair of RMs will make an excellent precedent for future reference. I'm also glad that you mentioned Erik Haugen; I have now posted something at his talkpage myself. My best wishes to you. Noetica^Tea? 06:45, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

I admit I did not read the new commentary, but there were over 25 comments today alone. That is a highly active discussion, and comments you made previously about this move indicate you are not uninvolved. I've reverted the close, and would appreciate it if you would move the page back and let an uninvolved admin close it after the discussion has settled. Thanks. --Born2cycle (talk) 07:14, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Born2cycle, if you are concerned about some anomaly in the closure of this RM, why were you not concerned about the closure of the first RM, which was based in large part on manifestly flawed evidence from you? Why have you said nothing in answer to my painstaking refutations of that false evidence, absenting yourself from the present RM for the last five days or so? Why do you feel free to inconvenience so many of us so much, over such a tiny issue as a hat on a pancake? Please adopt a more mature and less disruptive attitude. Through your unanswerable carelessness, you have been the immediate cause of my losing a day's full-time real-life work, while you stayed silently away. Don't do that!

The closure of the present RM was a straightforward matter to be achieved expeditiously, once that faulty evidence was exposed. Please leave a good outcome alone.

Noetica^Tea? 08:06, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

I haven't seen anything you posted, Noetica. I did not have that article on my watch list, apparently. No idea what you mean about flawed evidence from me, but I would like a chance to look at it and respond. If it's compelling, great. I'll check it out. I've been very busy in the real world and unable to keep at WP the last few days. I did just check in a bit earlier and I noticed this seciton on GTB's talk page and the close despite a huge flurry of edits in the last few days, especially today. It's highly unusual to close a discussion while it's still so active, no matter how long it has been open. I'm not asking for a reversal - just time for the discussion to settle down before it's closed. --Born2cycle (talk) 08:16, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

GTB, thanks for the kind words; and thanks for your huge effort to keep the RM backlog so small. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 16:26, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

ANI Notice

Unfortunately, my revert of the close was reverted. So I opened an ANI: [2]. ---Born2cycle (talk) 08:35, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

I've replied there. Just because people are still actively beating it, doesn't mean the horse is alive. -GTBacchus^(talk) 14:21, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Maybe not, but it's a strong indicator - the strongest we have - that consensus is still developing. --Born2cycle (talk) 16:40, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Let's discuss this in one place at a time. Due to your initiating a thread there, that place is ANI. Okay? -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:14, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

		The Anti-Flame Barnstar
		For staying as cool as the proverbial cucumber during the dramafest whipped up by a dissenter, I would award you this barnstar. You work in general at RM is appreciated, and how you resolved this case (including the rationale thereof) is especially commendable. Ohconfucius ¡digame! 01:47, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Wow. That's one I've never seen before. Thanks very much! -GTBacchus^(talk) 04:44, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Complaint

You have been duped by a cabal of our worst editors. Noetica, Tony1, Ohconfucius, and Dicklyon should be banned; your closure is unacceptable. Please stop. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:48, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Stop what? What am I doing? You disagree with my close at Talk:Crêpe? Then reopen it. I've said I'd stay out of the way. What is my ongoing disruption that you're trying to stop? -GTBacchus^(talk) 22:08, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Your close is appalling. Please stop closing moves if you're going to do it like this; in fact, please restore article to its state before your close. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:28, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

I disagree. Can you at least provide some evidence, or something to convince me other than a curt request? Can you show me your side of the issue, or are you expecting me to just do what you say without question? Why should I go against my own judgment? -GTBacchus^(talk) 22:35, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

And you want me to stop using my best judgment to close moves according to my understanding of consensus and policy? If you want that, you should at least cite more than one example of something I've done that you disagree with, and I hope you're willing to pick up the slack. Before I increased my move-closing activity recently, the backlog was two-thirds of the whole page, and now we're keeping up. I think I'm doing a lot of work - hundreds of moves - and I must make mistakes, being human, but nothing I've seen has led me to believe this was one of them. -GTBacchus^(talk) 22:39, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

• Quite simple;
• there was no consensus; one editor changed his mind (a rare, but not extraordinary, event).
• Kauffner's argument (that dictionaries are divided, and tend to use crepe, was at least as strong as any argument made for change; in particular, it expressly disproved the ENGVAR argument: if some British dictionaries prefer crepe, crêpe cannot be the specifically British spelling.
• That should have been enough. There was no ground to close early, no ground at all to close as you did. I had confidence in you until now. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:45, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

PMA, I'm sorry that you feel your confidence in me is destroyed by one close that you perceive to be bad. I still disagree with you, and I'll tell you why.

• Consensus isn't always the threshold in move discussions, because we've got to use one title or the other, so we generally choose the better, more well-supported one. In this case, I was restoring a title that had been adopted on weak evidence, because I saw much stronger evidence in the other direction, and I still haven't seen that refuted.
• Kauffner's evidence lacked the detail and rigor to show that it truly reflected use in reliable sources. Those arguing for dropping the circumflex have cited numbers from Google searches without analyzing them source-by-source, and I still have seen no refutation offered of Noetica's extremely detailed analysis. He went through source-by-source, and I believe he showed (A) that serious cookbooks on any side of the pond tend to use the circumflex, which also matches my own observations in cookbooks, of which I've got a good handful. (B) Many dictionaries use the circumflex, and the most detailed seem to highlight the distinction between different meanings of "crepe" or "crêpe", and point out that the circumflex is particularly common when talking about the pancake, and not when talking about crepe paper or crepe myrtle trees. Noetica set a pretty high bar here, as far as standard of proof, and if I see anyone match or exceed that in the other direction, then we've certainly got something to talk about.
• I already explained (on ANI and possibly elsewhere) that ENGVAR was not a consideration at all, so I don't know why you bring it up. Authoritative American cookbooks tend to use the circumflex.
• I've said repeatedly that if anyone re-opens the discussion, I won't get in the way. I don't know why you haven't done this.

Now, I'm still using my best judgment, and I am absolutely open to being convinced that I erred, but there's a standard of evidence that's been set, which nobody has matched to show that Noetica was wrong. My judgment says that I should go with the best evidence that I've seen, and I'm doing that.

If you're not willing or able to put up the evidence, but you still want me to stop closing move requests, then I'll do so at the request of, gee... five Wikipedians in good standing. Heck, I've always been on the list of those willing to give up my admin bit at the request of the community; if you want to stop me, it shouldn't be too hard. I'll hear a call of no confidence, but I'd like to hear five distinct voices. Then I won't close moves any more, and someone else can handle the hundred or so I do each month, with a very low rate of complaints.

I think it would be better, however, if you either produce evidence for your preferred title, or accept that the best evidence has been presented by someone who disagrees with you. I'm about to go away for several hours, so I won't see new messages for a few hours. When I check back in, I'll look for that orange banner, and see what your reply is. For now, I wish you a good evening. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:45, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

"Kauffner's argument (that dictionaries are divided)" was as strong as any argument made for change, in the sense that it was shown to be incorrect, like the incorrect assessments of Google page hits and book hits. No actual dictionary was shown to omit "crêpe". And even if it had, it would not have made up for the gross error that was the basis of the first move that this simply un-did. The "pack of dosruptive and dishonest editors" in favor of repairing this were motivated (speaking for myself only) by the need to hold the line against this kind of senseless google-driven naming chaos. It's less clear what your interest in it is. Dicklyon (talk) 23:37, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

The article should never have been moved in the first place, so your action to close was an obvious response to overwhelming evidence (provided by some of the best and hardest working editors on WP). Now that the status quo has been rightfully reestablished, there's nothing to stop editors opening a fresh Crêpe → Crepe discussion (but that's something that they don't seem keen to do). Congratulations on your common sense action on this. Please keep up the good work. GFHandel ♬  22:44, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, there was a pack of dosruptive and dishonest editors. A useful admin would have ignored them all, once their arguments had proven to be fallacious. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:49, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Where is the refutation of Noetica's detailed evidence? Please show it to me. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:49, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

FYI, I filed at complaint at ANI, (perma‑link, here), over PMA’s behavior here on this page; in particular, his 22:49 post. Claiming that a cabal of other editors are “dishonest” shows PMA is getting way out of hand. And, though I know admins are supposed to take it on the chin, merely closing an RfC like you did shouldn’t subject you to this sort of haranguing with suggestions that you aren’t useful. Wikipedia is supposed to be a fun hobby engaged in by volunteers working collaboratively in a collegial manner. PMA is making that tough and seems to be intent on making himself even more of an annoyance as of late. No one should have to put up with so much crap from a single disaffected editor. Greg L (talk) 01:09, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

I see the cabal is at work.;-> I don't see any "detailed" discussion by Noetica; what discussion there is is refuted by Kauffner's citation of dictionaries: both forms are used on both sides of the Atlantic. If you want me to answer some particular post, please supply a diff. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:49, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

You keep saying "both forms are used on both sides of the Atlantic." We didn't need Kauffner to prove that, as it was a point on which there was no disagreement, especially after Noetica's detailed report from looking at a range of books. Maybe you need to go back and read the mess that you amplified. Dicklyon (talk) 15:14, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

Nevertheless this same editor claimed that there is an ENGVAR difference. If both forms are commonly used on both sides of the Atlantic, that claim is fallacious, and !votes based on it are WP:ILIKEIT. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:45, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

The earlier proposal of it being an ENGVAR issue was based on refuting the claim that the circumflex was not much used in Britain; later, it became clear also that the claim that is was not used in the US was equally bogus. In the end, nobody was claiming that either form was rare on either side of the Atlantic. As Noetica pointed out to you there, you were swinging at an already-downed strawman; just noise, really. Dicklyon (talk) 19:57, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm currently composing a detailed reply, but I'll mention for now that Dicklyon is correct. ENGVAR was not a consideration in this move at all. That turned out to be a false alarm, a red herring, and apparently now, a straw man. What a lot of metaphors for one poor guideline. -GTBacchus^(talk) 20:00, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

Detailed reply to Pmanderson

This is a reply to Pmanderson's posts above stamped "14:49, 18 August" and "15:45, 18 August", and is an edit conflict with everything after the latter, including my own comment above.

Pmanderson, it's true that I thought, when I relisted the discussion, that there was an ENGVAR difference. It turns out I was wrong about that, and it had absolutely zero to do with my close. Did you not read the previous ANI about this, where I explained this? ENGVAR was completely irrelevant. Above, in this very conversation: "ENGVAR was not a consideration at all, so I don't know why you bring it up. Authoritative American cookbooks tend to use the circumflex." I stated once that I thought there was an ENGVAR issue, I turned out to be wrong. ENGVAR was not a consideration at all.

I did not give any weight to any argument based on ENGVAR. It was not a consideration at all. My American cookbooks, and a large proportion of authoritative American cookbooks, use the circumflex.

Noetica's evidence that convinced me to move the page had nothing at all to do with ENGVAR. ENGVAR was, as it turns out, not a consideration at all. What number of times shall I say this, because I've been clear about it in at least three different places, including earlier in this very conversation?

Now, you ask for a diff with Noetica's detailed evidence. I'm glad you asked, because breaking this down will be very useful. As I said, I'm going to point to this in the future as an example of how to Do It Right. Check it out:

• 1 Here's where he looked at actual pages of actual sources, restricting to books about cooking because it makes a difference, and determined that Google is failing to distinguish the circumflex form from the unmarked form, getting it wrong somewhere close to half the time. He also does a combined search and finds the two forms to be used equally. No ENGVAR claim is made here.
• 2 Here's another critique of Born2cycle's Google results, with more discussion of individual sources that he actually looked at, as opposed to counting them by glancing at a screen full of results.
• 3 Here's where he replied to you, Pmanderson, detailing the differences between your example "role" and the situation with "crepe". He also points out that "morale" never carried a diacritic in English. Is that true? I don't know. If so, then it's a good point.
• 4 There's more here about "morale". I admit that I don't see a direct relevance to the "crepe" question. I'm open to being shown that in some more detail; perhaps I'm being thick. It wouldn't be the first time I failed to grok a comparison.
• 5 This post is a response to someone else, and not evidence. We'll move along.
• 6 Here we've got three points of detailed evidence. There's an extended quote from the OED attesting to the word with circumflex in place. Second, there's a Google books search, producing 22 results where details can be determined. In 18 of those, the circumflex is used. Third, he looked behind another Google search and showed that Google failed to report the circumflex in 15 out of 142 hits.

  That's some detailed evidence, and no mention yet of ENGVAR. Let's keep going.

• 7 This one's not evidence; we'll move on. I'm just including them all because, I dunno. Completeness. I already pasted all the URLs.
• 8 Here, Noetica looked more closely at some of those Google books results, and determined that about 90% of them use the circumflex. That is detailed and compelling evidence, it applies per COMMONNAME, and it makes no appeal of any kind to this red herring, ENGVAR.
• 9 Here Noetica refutes claims about The Montreal Gazette and The New York Times avoiding the circumflex. It turns out they use it a lot. This is detailed evidence that makes no appeal to ENGVAR, as Montreal is in Canada, and New York is in the U.S.A.. I hope to visit both someday.
• 10 No new evidence here, but he's put a lot of work into this by now, hasn't he? Am I right in assuming Noetica isn't a "she"? Hmm.
• 11 Here's more detailed refutation of Kauffner's evidence. It repeats a bit from above, and I can see why. There's also more book-by-book examination of usage, showing a preponderance of reliable print sources using the diacritical mark. Still no mention of ENGVAR.
• 12 Finally, here's one more actual source, using the diacritic.

Now, I'm claiming that this is detailed evidence, and it makes no appeal to our favorite guideline regarding national varieties of English. It's all source-based, it involves looking at actual pages in actual books, and it's pretty overwhelmingly in favor of the circumflex.

If you can refute this evidence in some way, I'm all ears. If you can top this standard and show me that actual sources generally don't use the circumflex, then I will quite happily move the article back, and eat lots of crow publicly.

Now, Pmanderson, have I met your request for a diff to respond to? Pick one. -GTBacchus^(talk) 20:13, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

I'll take 3, for now. Morale (French moral) is an analogy; by analogy, we are not bound to use crêpe because it's correct in French; English uses what is convenient in English, and that makes it correct English. Noetica dismissed this, but did not answer it. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:03, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

Well, correctness or incorrectness in French had nothing to do with my decision. Obviously we base our decisions on usage in English, which is what was addressed by all of the evidence. Are the sources that Noetica used in all those points written in French or in English? I didn't see any French ones, so I don't see the relevance of how words are spelled in French versus English. "Crêpe" is spelled "C-r-ê-p-e" in English, in most of the good sources.

Would you care to address any of the evidence about English-language sources? We're not here to talk about French. -GTBacchus^(talk) 21:12, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

It begins to sound like the only argument to have weight with you is WP:COMMONNAME, and that you interpret as Born2Cycle does: if 53% of the sources use spelling X, it prevails - but disagree with him on the facts. That view is not policy; it certainly was not consensus of discussion - which did go off after ENGVAR and after what's correct in French. If you hold that view, you should relist the discussion, and join it expressly; if you did not, please explain your closure in more detail. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:57, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

I disagree with Born2cycle most strenuously over COMMONNAME. I'm on record doing so, a lot. I'm sure you've seen it.

The only arguments I considered were those offered in the discussion. Kauffner and Born2cycle supported their argument with Google searches. Noetica supported his argument with Google searches that included much more detailed analysis, and in which he specifically refuted the Google evidence presented by Kauffner and Born2cycle. (If I omit any other names it's just that I'm not looking it up right now. I know that more than three people were involved.)

I certainly didn't consider any argument involving ENGVAR or French. I considered one set of searches, and another set of searches, and I saw that the second set was far superior, in terms of thoroughness, detail, and accuracy. No other relevant arguments were offered.

Here's the explanation for my close: I saw strong evidence that a preponderance (waaay more than 53%) of quality English-language sources spell the topic "Crêpe", with a circumflex. Nobody refuted this evidence, and I don't see any other reasons, policy-based or otherwise, that we should drop the circumflex that most reliable sources use.

If anyone can convince me that it's more common for reliable English-language sources to drop the circumflex, I'll listen. However, no one has tried yet, beyond B2c and Kauffner's initial searches, which were frankly torn to shreds by Noetica's detailed analysis.

If anyone can point to a reason that we should break with most sources, and drop the circumflex anyway, I'm open to hearing it. There certainly might be applicable principles besides COMMONNAME, but nobody has cited one yet. What have you got in mind? Show me; name it. All I've got right now is source-based evidence, and it is overwhelming in favor of the circumflex.

If I haven't explained my close to you satisfaction, please let me know specifically which part I can state more clearly. Thank you.

I still would be very happy to see you respond to any of Noetica's analysis of sources. So far you've only explained your point about "morale". There's a whole lot going on in that list that you haven't touched. Nobody has even tried to touch it yet. If they have, then please show me where. -GTBacchus^(talk) 22:11, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

• Post 1 shows that the usage is about equal. That's not a reason to move; it's a reason not to move.
• Posts 3, 4, 5, 7, and 10 are irrelevant to your stated closure.
• Posts 2 and 9 deal with the ambiguity problem by searching for Crêpes Suzette; finding that that term is still spelled as in French; since it has an unEnglish postpositive adjective which is a French proper name, that's not surprising.
• Post 6 cites the OED, which made its decision how to spell the word in the nineteenth century. This entry is virtually unchanged since 1989, and the change relates to a different sense. Since the rest of this is about usage after 1990, true but not useful.
• It also deals with a Google book search for books with either spelling in the title; no search more devoted to finding specialist sources, which we do not want, could be imagined.
• The remaining point there is that Google cannot be relied on to recognize the difference between the two spellings. Quite true, and that's why you have to look at general usage.
• The rest of these are repetitious. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:54, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

Awesome, thank you. I'll reply now. I'll format my remarks to match yours, bullet for bullet, with a summary at the end.

• Post 1 is superseded by post 8, which revises the percent using the circumflex from approximately 50% to approximately 90%. I should have been clearer about that; good point.
• You say that posts 3, 4, 5, 7 and 10 are irrelevant. Let's see. . . Yes. They're gone now, turned into entropy. Good times.
• In post 2, Noetica uses the phrase "Crêpes Suzette", which he seems to have done in order to restrict to culinary usage. That's something I'll address in a minute. Post 9 is more interesting. I wouldn't say your characterization, that it "deals with the ambiguity problem by searching for 'Crêpes Suzette'," is quite fair. Like I said, I agree that his use of "Crêpes Suzette" to distinguish culinary usage from other usages is worth looking more closely at, but the issue being dealt with in post 9 is not that. The real heart of that post, I'll quote here:

  "First, with regard to books, I don't know why you are against favouring book evidence for "particular words". The experts on crêpes are surely those committed enough to write books about them. Their expert usage will usually trump the preferences of those who publish and edit their work. Second, with regard to newspapers, the evidence on which you based your closure decision is deeply flawed. It is simply not true that Montreal Gazette and New York Times, for example, avoid "crêpe" except in business names. Look at some real evidence: for Montreal Gazette, and for New York Times. Both teeming with crêpes!"

  This seems to me to be substantive discussion about why usage in authoritative sources is given more weight than usage in general sources. Is that what you're disagreeing with? That's a conversation to have, sure.

  Also, I see here a refutation of the claim that those newspapers "avoid "crêpe" except in business names". Those last two links show 65 and 372 links (if you click through to the last page Google gives you) of instances in the Montreal Gazette and The New York Times respectively where we see "crêpe" not in the name of a business. Those numbers are approximate. That part seems to check out. Use of the circumflex in a non-proper-noun sense of "crêpe" is established with some frequency in general-readership newspapers.

  Now let's talk about using "Crêpe Suzette" to highlight culinary usage. There's not much to say here, because if you look at the actual numbers, it doesn't make any difference. Taking a random sample of "crepe" and "crêpe" results (details available on request), I see that among the hits that relate to pancakes, they use the circumflex about 65% of the time. When we include "suzette" in the results, they use the circumflex about 58% of the time. So it looks like it's probably more than 50%, but not by much. Adding the term "suzette" certainly didn't skew usage in the circumflex direction by much, since it drifted in the opposite direction, so I don't really see a problem there. That is admittedly a pretty small sample at that point. I guess crêpes Suzette aren't big news in New York very often.

  This discussion is making me kind of hungry. You know, Pma, if you had approached me in a polite and friendly manner, I would have given you just as much attention and consideration as I'm giving you now, and there wouldn't be a discussion on ANI about banning you, even as we speak. It's a much easier way to work.

• Next is post 6. I think Noetica's reply below about how the OED is updated is sufficient. They've updated other parts of the entry since then, and they've seen no need to update definition #3. That seems to indicate that they didn't see usage change since then, i.e, the circumflex is still in use. In the presence of active updating, it makes sense that lack of updating indicates no change.
• Next is the point about books as specialist sources, versus more general sources. We already mentioned this above, and I do see substance here. We'll summarize at the end.
• I think Noetica adequately addresses your final point below. The way to deal with Google's problems are to look at a lot of actual sources, and look more closely than Google does by default, at least when the technology, or our own inclination to do bricks-and-books research, permits it. If the only alternative is to just base what we do on a handful of online dictionary sites, I think the thorough-research approach is much more appealing, in terms of how reliable we're going to end up being. There's room for disagreement here. Again, we'll summarize in a minute.
• Next, you say the rest is repetition. So the ones you didn't mention are 8, 11 and 12.

  Post 8 is the one that supersedes post 1, revising the 50% figure up to 90%. Granted, there are error bars of uncertain size around both of those, but 50 to 90 is a significant-looking jump.

  Post 12 is just adding one source, a major culinary encyclopedia, that uses the circumflex throughout, although Google reports it as using the unaccented spelling. Further proof that scratching the surface of Google searches yields much more enlightening information.

  Post 11 has substance. There are various searches, and there's some content about what constitutes a reliable source for the spelling of a word in the culinary lexicon. This is that same issue that keeps coming up, it seems.

So, now we get to summarize. It appears that books about cuisine use the circumflex in high proportion, and that more general sources such as dictionaries use it in lower proportion, but it's not uncommon even in those. Dictionaries that address the circumflex directly note that it's particularly common when the word has its culinary meaning. Major newspapers seem to use it a bit more than half the time, at least from what we've seen.

Now, if you want to argue that we should favor usage in general-use dictionaries and newspapers over use in more authoritative dictionaries as well as authoritative books on the subject, then we could talk about that. Is that your main thesis here?

Considering all the evidence we're looking at, I judge that if we give more weight to authoritative sources, we have a strong case (80%-90%) for including the circumflex, and if we give more weight to general sources, then we have a weaker case (55%-70%) for using it. We gotta pick one, and there's more weight on the circumflex side.

That's how I called it, that's still how I see it, and I still won't object if someone re-opens it. If anyone does that, they should be very clear what their relevant argument is. Namely, to support removal of the mark, you need to adopt the position that general sources are preferred over authoritative ones, and that we should take a slight preference for the accent as a reason not to use it. Is that the case you wish to make? It strikes me as counter-intuitive, but there's a lot of things I've never intuited.

Again, I stand by my close, but I won't get in the way if someone reverses it. Of course I can't guarantee how anyone else would react. I'm pretty easy-going, because I find it very easy not to actually care about squiggles above letters. I can take 'em or leave 'em; I just do my best to close move requests using my best judgment. I think my batting average is pretty good. -GTBacchus^(talk) 05:56, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Noetica comments

GTBacchus, I think you are doing far more than is reasonably required to explain your decision. As you were closing the RM, I was composing a refutation of the latest "evidence" that had been brought by Kauffner. When I came to post, the RM had already been closed following Dicklyon's rebuttal. Unlike Dicklyon, I focused on Kauffner's claim about WorldCat: its list of titles that include "crêpes" or its variants shows that WorldCat makes no distinction between "ê" and "e", and even the covers illustrated at WorldCat contradict what Kauffner was carelessly asserting. Similarly for his last dictionary evidence.

The essence of all this has been stated again and again: most of the evidence was inept, and soundly refuted; yet it was repeatedly appealed to by those who are not interested in the facts.

First PMAnderson homes in selectively on his point about morale, saying that I "dismissed this, but did not answer it". Wrong. The exchange went like this:

PMAnderson: In general, words (like this one) which are actually adopted into English, lose their accents and are respelt; see role and morale; this is as true of British English as of American.
Noetica: The general point about loss of diacritics in English is just that: a general point. Whether it determines things in the case of "crêpe" (the culinary term) is a specific point. [...] "Role" is much longer established in English (OED: 1606) than "crêpe" (1797). As for "morale", what is the point supposed to be? It has never borne any diacritic.
PMAnderson: The French for morale, in the current sense of "group emotional state", is moral; see the OED. Anglophones have reformed this distinction to what is useful in English, which is what this encyclopedia is written in.
Noetica: Yes, understood. It was not clear from what you wrote. Compare the nouns locale and chorale to distinguish from the adjective and noun local, and the adjective choral, with learnèd influence from Latin neuter -ale endings. Peripherally relevant, at best.

Do I "dismiss and not answer" a point by PMAnderson? He hints at an analogy; I point out that it is a tenuous one. I acknowledge that in English morale makes a distinction in spelling and implied pronunciation from moral; but crepe hardly does that. Does PMAnderson now want more detail? He only has to ask: If either form achieves the needed distinction, it is crêpe, which is less likely to be mistaken for creep, or to be read as a misprint for it. OED duly records the dominant form crêpe. But compare role which is far more common and assimilated; and compare debacle (OED: 1802), not the rarer débâcle (earliest in OED: 1848), for which there is no contrast to make with a pre-existing English word.

Anyone familiar with my work, at WT:MOS for example, ought to concede that it is meticulous. Such work takes a great deal of time, and the use of extensive print, software, and online resources that I subscribe to. PMAnderson does hardly any work of that sort for style or titles; yet he abuses, maligns, and misrepresents me at every opportunity. I have never initiated action against him for this; but he has repeatedly called for me to be banned (!).

Just so you have some context, yes? (More to come concerning PMAnderson's latest post, above.)

Noetica^Tea? 23:35, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

I hope you don't mind that I sectioned you off. I hear you saying that I'm going beyond the call of duty in explaining myself, but I don't mind 'cause it's fun. I'm working on a detailed reply now, and I want to see how this plays out. I'm going to learn a lot, and be better at understanding Google evidence in the future. This discussion may well improve how our titling policy is written, by clarifying and highlighting specific nuances of how we decide on titles. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:43, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

[That's fine of course, Bacchus. Great work! But I'm going to have to stop, as I explain below. I do hope all this will be useful, because it's occupied far too much time for far too many of us. –N]

On PMAnderson's points concerning the posts listed earlier:

• "Post 1 shows that the usage is about equal. That's not a reason to move; it's a reason not to move."
  • That post was explicitly modified later, showing that a stronger claim for "crêpe" was warranted; and in any case, the context was that another RM had already wrongly upset the status quo.
• "Posts 3, 4, 5, 7, and 10 are irrelevant to your stated closure."
  • Not claimed as relevant! But PMAnderson conveniently ignores 10 as modifying 1.
• "Posts 2 and 9 deal with the ambiguity problem by searching for Crêpes Suzette; finding that that term is still spelled as in French; since it has an unEnglish postpositive adjective which is a French proper name, that's not surprising."
  • Post 2 is confined to "crêpes Suzette", sure. But not post 9: "Look at some real evidence: for Montreal Gazette." Go on, look now. What PMAnderson says is flat-out false.
• "Post 6 cites the OED, which made its decision how to spell the word in the nineteenth century. This entry is virtually unchanged since 1989, and the change relates to a different sense. Since the rest of this is about usage after 1990, true but not useful."
  • False and misleading. The description OED gives of itself online is this "Second edition, 1989; online version June 2011". The dictionary is continually updated online. Since 1989 the subentries at "crêpe" have been reorganised, and the entry updated to include a citation from 2006: "B. Pilch Windows on Life x. 97 The bride's going away dress was of periwinkle blue crêpe romaine with a hat to match and a silver fox fur." OED records no change for subentry 3, concerned with cuisine; since it does make other updates in the entry (at least up to 2006), we can take it that there is nothing to record.
• "It also deals with a Google book search for books with either spelling in the title; no search more devoted to finding specialist sources, which we do not want, could be imagined."
  • Too vague to reply to. I can't tell what he means. My searches were carefully designed, and duly analysed beyond the mere results pages; and I presented my findings.
• "The remaining point there is that Google cannot be relied on to recognize the difference between the two spellings. Quite true, and that's why you have to look at general usage."
  • No, that's why we have to use Google with skill, and to interrogate the hits. I did that; PMAnderson did not; Born2cycle did not; Kauffner did not.

Frankly, I've had enough. PMAnderson makes no telling points at all here. If he had been a tenth as diligent in the RM as I had been (along with Dicklyon, and others whom he has wanted banned!), we might not be wasting time raking through the ashes here. It's burned out. Leave it. Move on – as I will now, since I have well and truly run out of time for countering the same scarcely varied inaccuracies yet again.

Noetica^Tea? 00:31, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Missing the point

GT and PM, I think you are both missing the point. This was not an RM to move from one established title to another based on slight majority of usage; that would be inappropriate. It was simply an RM to undo an improper RM that used a totally bogus reason, and had no consensus to move. It was enough to show that neither spelling is rare. The rest is gravy, extra work done because people were not getting the point and kept trowing up more flaky arguments and flaky evidence. The fact that PMA kept returning to a dead rotting strawman makes it clear that he was clueless; what remains unclear is why he came to this fight in the first place. Dicklyon (talk) 06:08, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

It's clear to me that it had to do with a battleground mentality, a set of grudges, and a rotten mood.

As for missing the point, I'll miss whatever points aren't interesting to me, and feel good about it. For me, there are two things going on here, or I hope they're both going on. Pmanderson is - I hope - seeing that flying off the handle was a bad idea. Also, I'm doing some serious, detailed thinking about uses and misuses of Google, which I think will be helpful in my continuing work in Requested moves.

I do intend to continue closing move discussions, according to my best judgment, as I've been doing for close to 5 years. I'll also remember the lessons of today; you can count on that. -GTBacchus^(talk) 06:17, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, thanks, I do appreciate your seriousness in all this. It's just that this one should have been simple (if not confused by the bad google counting and the added noise of PMA). Dicklyon (talk) 06:22, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. I doubt we'll see the move reversed anytime soon. That could easily be wrong; the Wiki hasn't run out of surprises, I'm sure. I think I was right to close the discussion when I did, and I think it will stick. It was a tough call, and I'm certainly considering what lessons I'm learning from it. Somehow, the mess had to happen though. There's straws and there's camels.

I think I've actually gotten better over the years at remaining dull and businesslike in the face of potential drama. The power of sticking boringly to the point never ceases to commend itself to me. Heck, I got my ISP to knock $20 off my monthly Internet bill yesterday by applying similar techniques. It's like aikido, only boring, and sometimes there's money. :)

Of course, the learning has come at the cost of some pretty stupendous failures. There are people I'm glad we're rid of, and there are people still here whom I'm super-leery of interacting with. Whether PMA ends up in in either of those categories is... being determined, I'm sure. There's good support on ANI for at least a month of vacation. -GTBacchus^(talk) 06:46, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Trebizond Vilayet

Hello, I was hoping to have you follow up on Trebizond Vilayet (and other related articles). The changes are still being made despite your request that we hold back. I'd like to get this resolved because so many articles are affected by the decision which needs to be made about name selection. Ordtoy (talk) 14:18, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

The article hasn't moved again, and as far as I can tell, there's no consensus to move it at this time. Do you wish to move the article back to "Trabzon"? The other editor, Takabeg, provided some evidence, which may not be the best available, but I haven't seen any concrete evidence for the other name.

You said on that page that "Google search results are such an imprecise measure, especially when the numbers are so small that common sense must be used in these situations." I agree that raw Google numbers don't mean much, but that means we need to set the bar higher, and produce something more compelling. My common sense doesn't tell me which way the page should be titled, because I'm not familiar with the topic of the article.

If you're familiar enough with the literature to say which spelling is more appropriate and why, then I'll certainly listen, but I'm not going to add another move to the page history simply because other Wikipedia articles spell the name of the modern town that way. How do scholars of the Ottoman Empire spell the name of that historic vilayet? -GTBacchus^(talk) 22:18, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

The nineteenth century spelling of Trabzon in English is and was Trebizond; see WP:NCGN for a parallel case, the Treaty of Nanking.

However rough Google ngrams may be, they are indicative when the difference is an order of magnitude or more. This ngram suggests, accurately, that use of Trabzon before 1950 (and 2000 would be defensible) in English is an anachronism. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:56, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate that. That's helpful. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:50, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi, I missed your reply here, only seeing it just now. I provided several examples of how there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia-wide convention of using historical spellings for one time period and then switching to modern spellings for a modern period. I know I'm repeating myself, but the examples I gave were along the lines of: Beijing/Peking, Tokyo/Tokio, Beirut/Beirout, etc. In all these cases, Wikipedia takes the modern spelling for all historical periods event though the second form was more prevalent or even the only form used in previous eras. I can't find an example of Wikipedia spelling conventions following English historical usages (please correct me if I am wrong). I am also quite sure that such a practice would only hinder people searching for information. Making an English speaker of today know all the historical spellings of geographical entities just to find articles about them seems counter-productive. As for your question about modern academic (emphasis on those two terms!) scholars of Ottoman history, they almost invariably use Trabzon. The common practice is to use Trebizond for the pre-Ottoman period (this is also true for other places throughout the Ottoman Empire). Ordtoy (talk) 06:25, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

There certainly is no uniform practice.

But where it has been discussed, as with the three articles Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul, the decision has usually been to use each name for the city in an appropriate period. In principle, our relevant guideline suggests using the historic name currently used in English for a given period (thus, we do not usually refer to the city on the Bosphorus as New Rome, because English literature generally doesn't); but the most common name for a given place and time is usually the name used at the time. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 13:53, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

The idea of using an appropriate name for an appropriate period is reasonable. However, the periods in question appear to be the Greek period, for which forms of Trapezus/Trebizond are used by scholars. Following the Ottoman taking of the city, the name in literature is Trabzon to reflect the Turkish corruption of the original name. This is the division accepted by academia. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (the most respected encyclopaedia for Middle East history), for example, follows this practice. With Istanbul/Constantinople we are dealing with the name change of a major world city so it is not comparable to Trabzon/Trebizond. If they know it at all, virtually all English speakers of today will be familiar with Trabzon, which is the name of the city today and was the name used in Ottoman times. Moreover, I'm still rather insistent on knowing why the practice of adopting archaic English forms is applicable here but not say for Tbilisi/Tiflis? Ordtoy (talk) 15:00, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Hey guys, would Talk:Trebizond Vilayet be a better place for this discussion to occur? -GTBacchus^(talk) 15:41, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

ArbCom? Oh, that is just so damned much fun

Hello, GTBacchus. You have new messages at Greg L's talk page.
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Red tape

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Sandbox talk page

Just dropping you a note to let you know that there is a previous discussion about ArbCom cases at User talk:GTBacchus/sandbox. Maybe that should be blanked or moved to allow new discussion? Also, does this mean that you do have previous experience of ArbCom cases? Carcharoth (talk) 07:27, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

I have no memory of that discussion, but I'll look into it. My hunch is that it was just a question of enforcement of some previous decision. I'll check; thanks. I've blanked it for now. -GTBacchus^(talk) 07:33, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

This proves to be non-trivial to check on. Is it even possible to see my contributions from April 2008 by expending less than ten minutes? I gotta figure out my median contribution date, and update it regularly. -GTBacchus^(talk) 18:03, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

That conversation related to this edit I made to the sandbox itself the previous day, in which I made a point about ArbCom decisions versus policy, and MartinPhi was questioning the details of that. This arose from discussions surrounding the development of a WP:FRINGE guideline. -GTBacchus^(talk) 22:28, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Glad you found it. Hopefully by now you found the "month" and "year" options in the contributions display page? Your userspace edits for April 2008 are here, to give an example. There are various other tricks to finding contributions from certain dates and giving permanent links to various things. You may need to know some of those tricks. Wikipedia:Complete diff and link guide may be useful. Carcharoth (talk) 23:29, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Good lord that's an easy solution that I stared right past. Would you believe I've never used that feature? Thanks for the link to 1st grade, I'll pay attention this time. -GTBacchus^(talk) 23:32, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Compromised account?

Sorry to bulk up your talkpage with this stuff, but I don't have the heart to add an OT view of my very dull mental processes to the already over-long Pmanderson ANI thread. You can always delete it. (I've put a permanent link to it on ANI, in case anybody wants to come here and wallow in my embarrassment.) In answer to your question about what I meant, then:

Proposal 1: It's not my account, it's my head: I got confused. What I meant to say under the first proposal, but didn't manage to, was that I supported a six-month ban from project space (as suggested by Jayron, to whom I was responding), followed by a longer MOS ban.[3] I added that I wanted to be taken to support any time-limited project space ban + MOS ban — except that I didn't say "project space" that time, either. My emphasis was on opposing an indef ban. I suppose that's why I missed specifying what kind of time-limited ban I thought acceptable. Sorry about that. Very nonsensical of me, especially as the details of the discussion are complex enough without such confusions.

Proposal 2: Then GWH proposed just the ban I'd been requesting [plus a two week block, which I was obviously against]: that PM be indefinitely topic banned from MOS, and banned from project space for three months. The thing is, I had by then changed my mind, through taking in what other people had said, and I had been impressed — somewhat — by PM's own comments, and — largely — by your comments, GTBacchus, which obviously came from much interaction with PM, and much good sense. I now thought the community ought to go with only a MOS ban.[4] (Other sanctions could always be added on later if needed.) I should perhaps have pointed out that this was a change for me; but I frankly didn't think anybody would be fascinated by that info, and I regarded GWH's new poll as the current one (though I see now that people were still contributing to Proposal 1).

Proposal 3, for a 4-month block with lipstick. I'm still against all blocks, and recommend, again, a topic ban from MOS and nothing more.[5]

Pathetic, isn't it? You don't have to tell me. I, too, am better with more sleep. Bishonen | talk 13:06, 20 August 2011 (UTC).

Bishonen, thanks for posting this. That all makes perfect sense, and I hope I wasn't rude to you at AN/I. I was posting fast, and not listening to enough Beatles music, so I apologize if I bashed your name around inappropriately. Now it's morning. Ok, technically it was morning then, and now it's past noon; whatever. :) -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:19, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

ArbCom

BTW, Bacchus. I stumbled across the thread on Tony’s page where you invited him to go before the Inquisition. His reaction was interesting, to say the least. But not surprising. Tony has been to ArbCom before. Most distasteful

In this particular case with PMA, it is about tendentiousness, incivility, and an unwillingness to abide by consensus (i.e. editing against consensus). The trouble with PMA is whenever the community tries to deal with him, he immediately tries to change the metric to one of “14/15 splits” and “I hate the ˆ in ‘crêpe” and points out how a mean bad group of four or five editors are mean to him and said *hateful things* (like “Damn it PMA, please stop disrupting the entire universe and making me hate life and feel exhausted”), and how everyone conspires against him.

If this were to go to ArbCom, I guarantee you that PMA would try to raise all these issues. Conspiracy to ignore valid views of the minority. In his world, his arguments often don't get traction and nearly everything being written on MOS and MOSNUM that is against his wishes is followed up with a quick revert with this edit summary: “No consensus for this. Discuss”. Then you go to the talk page, there is usually only one or two or three other editors who give a dump about the issue, and it is hard to establish that anything is a consensus to PMA's satisfaction if the consensus is not to his liking.

And, mind you; when I write that PMA will revert with “No consensus for this. Discuss”, the circumstances can be one where there were three editors collegially discussing the issue on a thread who came to an agreement. PMA will just ignore all that, start a new thread, and then quote about votes two years earlier in the New Zealand version of Wikipedia that showed their ‘consensus’ is flawed. (yes, I am exaggerating)

I think you might approach Ohconfucius. He is in a “take no prisoners” mood right now with PMA. I have no idea how he would respond. Nearly everyone you contact will have little enthusiasm for an ArbCom do-da with PMA if there isn’t a group of admins who ride herd to keep the discussion on-topic. PMA knows how to press buttons until the heat death of the universe. The result is that everyone who has dealt with him has snapped back at him at one time or another. It is deeply frustrating to go to ArbCom and have some 21-year-old arb write Well, I see that Greg and [insert editor’s name here] both wrote ‘Damn it’ to PMA in their responses to PMA, as was evidenced in PMA’s list of 840 diffs to show how the whole world he opposes is a poopy-head. These other editors can’t expect PMA to conform to conduct expected if they have *hate words* like that for our loving brethren [yadda yadda - go puke].

You’d think that ArbCom’s procedures have been anointed with the holy water of distilled wisdom of all wikipedians and has time-honored traditions that ensure the Right Thing©™® is always done. Ultimately, it is a fluid and evolving thing that is operated by an all-volunteer group of people. The motives of those participating will be as varied as you can imagine. It will take coordination and effort to figure out what the real issue is, figure out what you want to achieve, and keep things on track.

Perhaps the simpler way to go about this is to go back to the ANI thread, demand that some admin grow grow some backbone, and just dish out something appropriate. There was clear support for lots of remedies; it shouldn’t take too much imagination to grok the mix and figure out that a month-long block and a MOS and MOSNUM-wide six-month ban are in order. Greg L (talk) 14:51, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

If Greg doesn't mind me pointing out a few things here: (1) Not all arbs are 21 (some are considerably older and wider, though maybe not wiser), and even the younger ones can be excellent. (2) Others also know "how to press buttons" - Greg's post and verbose style and overblown rhetoric above is an excellent example of pressing buttons (memories are coming back for me here). I'm sure some of the things I say press some people's buttons. The key is not whether what you say presses people's buttons, but what your reaction is when told that your style, or what you are saying, is pressing people's buttons. (3) Greg is right that ArbCom results are not always predictable, but this is ironic when you consider that in the ANI thread, someone (I forget who) made some appeal to authority by lauding Casliber in his role as arbitrator as "one of the most respected members of the community", and hence we should listen more to what he says (he proposed the ban). Most Wikipedians with any sense reject such appeals to authority, but when you go to ArbCom, that is exactly what you are doing - submitting yourself to a binding process with the authority to resolve disputes. Carcharoth (talk) 16:43, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, wow. Greg, thanks for your post. I hardly know what to say. I can't even... that's a lot of adjectives. I've approached Ohconfucius.

Carcharoth, thanks. Let's see... Your point (1) is not a concern for me. (I'm 34, but I usually feel 14 and 200.) As I've mentioned, I know the lay of the land. I look all head-down and dull, but there's not too much getting past me.

Ditto for (2), more-or-less, but the reminder about button-pushing behavior is certainly apropos. I hope someone will let me know when I start pushing buttons, so I can stop. A slippery slope, that one. Your notes on AN/I have been appreciated.

I understand in (3) that ArbCom is a binding process, and I'm not afraid of it. If it's what is necessary, then it needs to be done, and I'm willing to do it. That's why I signed on as a janitor.

If I come out of it exiled to stub-sorting for six months, I'll be the best stub-sorter this side of the Pecos. If I'm de-sysoped, I'll have less stress. If I'm fined money, I'll let it go to collections and move to Africa. If I'm banned, I'll get my Ph.D. faster. It's all good.

If something gets worked out before I get to ArbCom, that's good too. Maybe better. -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:44, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

• Well, if that just doesn’t frost my shorts: having Carcharoth attempting to put my behavior on the same moral and disruptive plane as the colossal disruption and grief PMA causes. I never said I was a fucking Boy Scout; I was saying PMA is a major disruption. Someone learn to see that distinction please.

  I see PMA has his supporters. Either that or just another admin anxious to show to the world how he can pound out There’s room for improvement in everyone’s behavior, M’kay? That art of crafting slogans like that is necessary to become an admin nowadays. Fine. So…

  I’m like Tony here. If you guys can’t get your act together and do something about PMA without dragging everyone who runs into a loggerhead with PMA into an ArbCom—just because block after block after block at ANI won’t change PMA’s ways, then I’ll quit the project if anyone involves me. I will no longer put up with administrative bullshit where an ArbCom action has something like 500 links to edit-diffs and talk about “14/15 splits” just to reign in his tendentiousness.

  And I will certainly not expose myself to an ArbCom process where some arb might write There’s room for improvement in everyone’s behavior, M’kay? and then dish out some stay-away orders as if MOS and MOSNUM needs to be protected from Greg L. The community can have PMA. I’m staying away from all places PMA inhabits. My input isn’t needed there. If you all come calling, my response will be “I have a real life. God speed.”

  For one thing, PMA happens to be advocating positions on MOS I completely agree with—although not to such an extreme in some cases. But the principle he abides by (Wikipedia should follow the way English is practiced and not the way it ought to be practiced), is one I completely embrace. But I could see that the manner in which he went about achieving his ends had a major effect on other good editors I respect and who do good for the project. Good luck to Wikipedia.

  And good luck to you, GTBacchus; when you wrote on my talk page that you couldn’t even become an admin today, I immediately thought “why are guys like this so rare on Wikipedia?” Greg L (talk) 20:53, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Apology and future case

I have commented at length on the nature of any future ArbCom case at ANI. Since the attitude displayed by the quotation from User:Mclay1 is central to the problem, I would make him a party, although the appropriate sanction would probably be that he must quote and discuss it at any future RfA. If he changes his mind, great; if the community wants an admin with this view, we deserve him.

Please let me know what language here has offended you; I will be happy to strike or formally retract anything excessive. I do believe that you are in error on the substance, and (rarely though I agree with him) Born2Cycle has a reasonable objection to your timing; between those, I find your judgment iffy. I intended to say no more. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:15, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

You want to know what "language" has offended me. That's interesting, because I don't care about offensive language. You can call me a motherfucker, and I'll smile. You offended - not just me, but yourself as well - with your actions, and no amount of pretty "language" can hide that.

I'm taking a long time to formulate this response, because I'm trying very hard not to post in anger. Posting in anger is always a bad idea, because it causes problems to take orders of magnitude more time and resources to address than if we were to refrain from posting in anger. That's the number 1 problem.

1. Posting in anger is a Very Bad Idea. It leads to a waste of community resources that could be better spent addressing problems, and not talking someone down from a rage, which goes and spawns five other rages that need talking down, etc., etc. Do you know that Mathsci ended up yelling at Baseball Bugs, because you yelled at me first? That's absurd.

   In my opinion you owe the community an apology for posting in anger, instead of carefully distilling the most important issues and raising them in a calm and respectful manner. That's what I do, you see. I carefully distill the important issues, and I raise them in a calm and respectful manner. At least... that's what I do when I'm doing it right.

   I'm not claiming it's easy; I'm claiming it's right.

2. Instead of asking me to explain my decision, you demanded that I reverse it, while insulting me and four other editors in the process. I am not a "dupe" and I was not "duped". You weren't in a position to know whether I was or not.

   I carefully weighed the evidence, and I made my best call. I read a lot of evidence, and I put a lot of thought into it, as I have by now amply shown. You didn't even give me a chance to show that I had based my decision on a careful weighing of the evidence. I would have given you a chance.

   That was rude as hell, but it's a wash by now. Just remember: you can guarantee that addressing people in that manner will generate lots of heat. Unless that's your goal, you should find a way to show some restraint.

3. The worst part is that you hadn't carefully read the evidence. You couldn't possibly have, when you posted, "I don't see any "detailed" discussion by Noetica; what discussion there is is refuted by Kauffner's citation of dictionaries: both forms are used on both sides of the Atlantic." This is so far irrelevant as to be asinine. I've abundantly shown that his evidence was detailed, and your statement shows that you weren't even passingly familiar with it.

   Noetica never mentioned any ENGVAR issue in any of his evidence. Even the "morale" tangent was him replying to your introduction of a non sequitur argument about proper French spellings, which no one had brought up.

   Your claiming that Noetica's evidence had been refuted in terms of ENGVAR was a way of announcing, "I don't know what Noetica's argument was, because I didn't read it." I had to repeat myself - what? three times? - before you began to articulate objections to the actual evidence, when you finally stopped claiming it had been refuted by obvious non sequiturs.

   Only after I took hours and hours out of my day for you did you even start to formulate counter-arguments, regarding general sources, which I'm interested in talking about. Without being yelled at. I might even agree with you, if you were to give me a chance.

   I had put a lot of thought and effort into weighing the evidence in this case, and deciding where the strongest weight lies. You had put in none of that work, and you berated me as a useless dupe for being persuaded by evidence that you hadn't even read, at least not carefully enough to know its basic contents. If you're going to tell someone that their judgment was "appalling" (which you've now dialed back to "iffy"), and question their overall usefulness to the project, then you should at least do the basic work of finding out what the evidence they weighed even looked like.

   In the future, don't do that to someone. I can promise you, I'll even make a blood oath, that I will never, ever berate you for displaying poor judgment when you've invested much more work into investigating the evidence in a discussion than I have. I will approach you with respect, and calmly request an explanation.

   Until you've determined that I didn't examine the evidence, you may assume that I did, because I always do. That means, to show that I'm wrong, you'll have to examine the evidence yourself, without having me walk you through by hand. Do you know how much work I put into explaining myself to you? You caused all that work, because I'm the kind of guy who is not willing to blow off criticism, no matter how poorly informed it turns out to be.

   You owe me a day of my life, but I'll call it even if you just stop treating human beings this way. We're all human beings, and I wouldn't treat you - nor your dog - the way you've been treating me. I'm talking about respect.

Do the right thing, and show restraint and respect. Then we're cool, and we don't need ArbCom. Are we cool? -GTBacchus^(talk) 20:58, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

I hope we are cool. Some of what happened was verbal misunderstanding. When I said there was no detailed analysis, I meant that I saw detail, and I saw some (very little) analysis; but it did not seem to be in the same place. If I had posted after a delay, I might have found those words. I had read; I had understood; I disagreed with your description, and do now.

In particular, I still, having looked at (for the second time) and commented on Noetica's contributions, would not call most of them analysis at all; the long lists of uses for crêpes Suzette seemed then, and seem now, simply irrelevant; it's a different word, and there is every reason to expect to be more French.

The original post, to which you refer below, seems to me reasonably accurate; I hold, still, that it was a reason not to move. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:37, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I look forward to working with you in the future. -GTBacchus^(talk) 21:46, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Timing

Why did I close that move after only two weeks, instead of re-listing it for a third while people were still arguing?

Well, it had been a long time since Noetica's very first post in which he showed - in detail - that the previous move had been based on Google evidence that was completely meaningless. In all that time, nobody had addressed his initial critique in any way.

I saw the same old group of people arguing over a trivially insignificant squiggle on a letter, and it was clear to me that we were seeing smoke from another fire. Since nobody was offering anything that addressed Noetica's detailed evidence for two weeks, I closed the thing in the direction indicated by evidence, figuring that the real issue would come to light, freed from the artificial context of pancakes.

I was right, and I'd do it again. -GTBacchus^(talk) 20:58, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

On consensus (Hathaway)

Regarding this close, I'm a little disappointed that there was a judgment that there was "no consensus" when it seems very clear to me that there cannot be a consensus that overrides common sense. It is crystal clear and demonstrable that Anne Hathaway (actress) receives 16x the hits of Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare), and yet there is a small group of folks who prefer the status quo and support it with the unsubstantiated assertion that the Bard's wife is "obviously" more notable (and some even saying she "always will be"). I'm not making a federal case about this, just commenting that I thought this would have been a more nuanced close because it doesn't seem to me that consensus (or even lack thereof) can or should trump common sense. I'm familiar with your work in the past and respect it, which is why I'm posting here - you may not agree with me, but I believe I can express my thoughts on the matter without you feeling like I'm attacking or threatening or acting in bad faith (none of which I'm doing). (Clearly I had an opposite opinion since I started the requested move, so you'd expect me to disagree, so of course you might take this with a grain of salt...and I get that.) I know we generally default to the status quo, and I see that's the safe thing to have done, and I have absolutely no intention of stirring up drama...just making a comment here. For the record: I don't think you misjudged consensus in the discussion; I just think that the consensus was almost entirely based on personal opinions rather than policies. Thanks for listening.  Frank  |  talk  18:51, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. You're right that I don't perceive an attack, nor doubt anyone's good faith. I think it is seldom common ground in discussion though, as to just what constitutes "common sense".

You're right that I took the safe close. I guess I've seen a lot of actresses come and go, while there's only ever been one Shakespeare's wife. To my mind there's a higher bar for a current celebrity to overtake someone of historically enduring notability as a primary topic. Enough people were saying that bar hasn't been met that I deferred to their "common sense".

If someone named "George Washington" makes really big news tomorrow, most people typing that name will be searching for him... for a little while. The differences here seem to be over how much time constitutes "a little while", and how much to weight enduring historic notability versus the potentially short-lived kind.

We're weighing decades of making films and winning awards, versus centuries of compelling the scholarship and imagination of dozens of generations of historians and novelists. There's lots of room for "common sense" to diverge.

That's why I closed it the way I did, anyway. I can't guarantee that my decision was right for all time, but I did my best. Thanks again for your note. If you have any further questions, please let me know. -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:43, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

The thing that struck me, though, is that the hits to our own pages demonstrate overwhelmingly what people are looking for, so it's inappropriate for us to make a judgment about who has enduring notability (or even popularity, because such a determination could change later). Our own readership makes very clear which page it is looking for and has been for several years (at least). That's the primary reason I wondered about how consensus could trump common sense - I think it's foolhardy of us to try to actually determine who is more notable, because of course the long view does have to come into play in that discussion. It's just that a page naming discussion is (in my view) quite a different thing than a discussion about who is more notable. And, for what it's worth, I have read my (American) share of Shakespeare in my time, and I had no idea he was even married, let alone what his wife's name was. Anyway, thanks for your response. I suspect the actress will continue to garner awards and eventually the fabric of the universe will be rendered properly..... :-)  Frank  |  talk  20:12, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

As long as you claim that something is "common sense", which your interlocutor doesn't agree is "common sense", you will find it very hard to establish common ground in a conversation. Your idea of what constitutes "common sense" is just that: an idea. Consensus didn't trump common sense. One group's common sense failed to gain consensus support over another group's common sense.

To me, it's common sense that a popular actress of the day is of passing notability. The vast majority of the popular actresses of Shakespeare's day - or of the 1700s or 1800s - are less famous now than Shakespeare's wife. Even the ones who won awards.

To me, that's common sense. Remember, too, that very few readers are visiting that dab page. People who want the actress get to her in 1 click, in the vast majority of cases. These are the days of autocomplete, and smart search. Miraculous times.

Try and define exactly which claim you mean when you say "common sense", and try calling it that instead. -GTBacchus^(talk) 21:12, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Point taken: "common sense" is not necessarily so common. Again - thanks for engaging. Regards -  Frank  |  talk  18:28, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Arbcom request

Given I basically wrote a statement at ANI I copied it across to your sandbox, if you do make it live please can you copy it across to the case request? If you don't file an Arbcom case no worries. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 21:56, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, that's fine. Cool. Thank you. -GTBacchus^(talk) 22:01, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Sir Bacchus. Rather than ArbCom, what do you think about the two less draconian proposed remedies here on ANI, as well as the one below it? Greg L (talk) 02:13, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Huh. I was about to say - "that thread's getting long, I'm surprised it hasn't got its own page yet." It's got its own page now."

I'll support anything that looks like it'll get off the ground. Either it works, or it gets us closer to the next step, where we can say, "look what didn't work". -GTBacchus^(talk) 15:49, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

You asked when you !voted “what else has happened?” Nothing else other than a general consensus appears to have been reached. I just did a quick calculation. Assuming editors can write often-complex HTML wikimarkup prose at 21 words per minute, and assuming six editors on average read any given post by someone at 4.5 words per second, the 26,000 words on that page means 30 man-hours have been devoted to this case. Plus the hours spent on individual editors’ talk pages. Plus the hours spent back-channelling. In a way, I think that is unfortunate. But in another way, it is rather heartening that so much effort is willing to be expended by a social community to ensure fairness to individuals comprising the community. Greg L (talk) 16:15, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

...and a chance to practice your arithmetic is never a bad thing. :D I've just started a fun new page, inspired by something in that thread: User:GTBacchus/self-criticism. Maybe it'll start a fad!

I never know how much back-channeling goes on. I'm almost never a part of it. Apparently there's a whole meta-Wikipedia chat-sphere, and I'm totally oblivious to it. Kind of awesome. -GTBacchus^(talk) 16:20, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

I understand there’s some sort of admin blog-o-sphere that requires knocking on the door and giving a password to be admitted to the speakeasy. I can just imagine what goes on there.

As for the self-criticism list, I don’t need a written list; I remember all my mistakes and try not to repeat them. As a mechanical engineer, I usually do just one-each of every type of mistake because the engineering world and the world of physics is so predictable. Social mistakes are a hell of a lot harder to not repeat.

Interestingly, the engineering world is sorta odd. Old electrical engineers in China don’t make dick for pay as they transition from state-owned businesses to private ones. But older (read: experienced) mechanical engineers make a mint during these transitions. You see, experienced mechanical engineers have a mental list of the 1001 ways to screw up and a separate list of the 101 shortcuts to make complex problems simple to solve. Greg L (talk) 16:48, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

It's, to put in into Harry Potter terms, a counter-spell. Useful stuff. I think of it as bug-repellent, in addition to the personal value to myself. I was raised Catholic, you know. -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:07, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

• The back-channels being referred to here may be WP:IRC, something I've never used myself (I don't think the reference to an admin blogosphere is correct, though there is a Wikimedia blogosphere for editors of the Wikimedia projects who blog about their work on those projects). From what I've seen, most of the side discussion goes on at user talk pages (like the conversation above). User talk pages are sometimes used for their intended purposes (to notify editors of centralised discussion elsewhere), and sometimes for their secondary purposes to have side conversations, away from the mainstream and noise of a noticeboard discussion (the key is to transmit conclusions back to the main discussion if that is needed). The number of user talk page side conversations associated with some centralised discussion threads can be astounding (try, for example, tracking down all the user talk page conversations associated with the Pmanderson discussion - as Greg says, there are lots of them and most of them are more interesting and revealing than the main discussion). The third use of user talk pages is as a place to 'hang out' with other editors and make small talk (I call this the 'social bonding' aspect of user talk pages). Someone will no doubt write a thesis about all this one day. And some people also get very annoyed when people jump in uninvited to user talk page 'socialising' threads (this is why some people go off-wiki to discuss things, or ban others from posting at their talk pages - there is a huge amount of social etiquette surrounding user talk pages). And I've jumped in uninvited here, so I'll finish with my apologies if this post raises any hackles. :-) Carcharoth (talk) 18:27, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Thanks for dropping in (from my point of view). I very much appreciate it. Greg L (talk) 19:58, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Babe Carey

Hi, GTBacchus. The above linked article needs fixing again. One of Dane97's sockpuppets cut-and-paste moved it again. Flyer22 (talk) 08:14, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Never mind. I fixed it. Flyer22 (talk) 08:20, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Google books

Hi, GTBacchus. Thanks for your constant contribution. I think maybe you are interested in this topic. Anyway Dohuk is more common. In this situation GeoNames Search is not reliable. Thank you. Takabeg (talk) 09:49, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Help with China part 2

There are some new comments above which you might have missed :). -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 18:17, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Why?

Could you please elaborate on your closure? So far as I can tell, the decision flies in the face of cited facts, guidelines, and policies.LeadSongDog come howl! 04:13, 6 September 2011 (UTC)