User talk:Jimbo Wales

(Manual archive list)

Template:Fix bunching  

Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(use_English)#Specific_proposals_to_change_the_wording_of_the_policy

I believe this page could attract the attention to the discussion about a proposed change in an important Wikipedia guideline. Thanks for any suggestions. --Vejvančický (talk | contribs) 14:46, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I am very strongly opposed to this, as it is a move in the wrong direction. We should be strongly moving away from using excessive diacritics, as they are unhelpful and confusing for English readers. I see people saying "that the public doesn't understand them doesn't matter" - that's 100% wrong. We are here to write for the public, in English. Article titles should be in English and while some deviation from that can be a good thing, it should always be undertaken with caution.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:56, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your opinion. What about the proper names of people who are not English? --Vejvančický (talk | contribs) 15:06, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Jimbo has answered your query with a clear and concise response. Asking the same question in a different way will not change his initial answer. The policy as spelled out at Wikipedia:Article titles requires that the article title is to use the name that is most frequently used to refer to the subject in English-language reliable sources. This applies to the title of the article – but within the text of the article, pursuant to WP:MOSBIO, the person's legal name should usually appear first in the article. I trust that explains the current Wikipedia policy as it relates to this issue. Dolovis (talk) 15:32, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

You know copying and pasting the exact same statement over and over isn't useful either. His question was a valid question to ask as a follow up. He is asking about people where there aren't English sources, which happens a lot. -DJSasso (talk) 15:39, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Um, have you looked into Britannica or Encarta recently, with this question in mind? The current debate is about proposed page moves such as Julia Görges -> Julia Goerges. There is a wide range of practices concerning diacritics, ranging from the tabloid press and sites that publish sports tables (no diacritics at all), via the quality press (typically diacritics for a small, explicitly listed number of European languages) to academic publishing (all diacritics). Should we really move Gerhard Schröder to Gerhard Schroeder (Britannica), Selma Lagerlöf to Selma Lagerlof (Britannica) and Søren Kierkegaard to Soren Kierkegaard (Britannica)? (Note how ö, ö, ø becomes oe, o, o.) Do we really want to move François Mitterrand to Francois Mitterrand even though façade is the most common spelling of a normal English word of French origin?

So far we have had a de facto consensus that among the many alternative English spellings for foreign names (in Latin-based alphabets) we almost always use the original one, as it is the most 'correct' one and the one with the most prestige. Recently a small number of people have started to fight vehemently against this based on the theory that one can translate names into English simply by dropping diacritics. These disputes are often about the kind of names (French, Spanish, German) which newpapers such as the New York Times or the Guardian routinely spell with diacritics, even if they get their news via newswires that drop or transcribe them as a matter of policy.

When you read English newspaper manuals of style you generally find the following four concerns:

• Names should be spelled as 'correctly' as possible, and that includes diacritics.
• Can we get the name right? (It's easier in French or Spanish than in Vietnamese.)
• Are there technical problems? (More likely with Đặng Hữu Phúc than with Gérard Depardieu)
• Consistency. (For the same language, either drop all diacritics always, or never drop any diacritics.)

Basically the only points where they differ is in the lists of English words that are spelled with or without diacritics (some spell façade but nee, others facade but née, reflecting similar variations in which spelling comes first in the various dictionaries) and in the lists of languages for which they preserve diacritics. We have the time and qualifications to get all diacritics right, and technically we are limited only by Windows Glyph List 4 as the greatest common denominator of reasonable modern computer environments. Hans Adler 16:12, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

(response to Jimmy Wales). Bless you Jimbo, bless you. I too agree, the pro-diacritics side has hijacked English Wikipedia (via their numbers) & are hell bend on not loosening their control. GoodDay (talk) 18:46, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

To answer a bunch of specific questions above in one go: yes, all of those renamings to use English rather than foreign languages should happen immediately. I don't care what Britannica and Encarta do; they are resources for the 20th century, which is behind us now. I think moderation is in order, but I think we are very far from moderation. Đặng Hữu Phúc is a brilliant example: this is an absolutely ridiculous thing to have in an English encyclopedia as a title. What appalls me about this most is the weirdness of assuming that if something sort of looks like an English letter, we should have it, while if it doesn't sort of look like an English letter, we shouldn't. Shall we move Japan to 日本? Of course not, no one disagrees. But we have somehow, wrongly in my view, gotten to the point that Đặng Hữu Phúc is remotely plausible, since it sort of kind of in some weird way looks a little bit like English.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:11, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

What makes matters worst is a majority of editors want the diacritics in the article titles. Some of the pro-dios crowd accuse myself & others of being basically simple minded & sorta xenopohobic 'cuz of our opposition. Of course, I see many of them as pushing dios, due to 'old country' pride. GoodDay (talk) 19:17, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Agree. Which part of en.wikipedia.org is so complex? There is nothing racist or xenophobic about the practice of anglicising terms - if maintained consistently it's a methodology that alows people to easily search and navigate the enyclopedia - thus finding out information... which I assume is the point of the work after all. Pedro :  Chat  19:36, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Yup, include me in the 'anti-diacritics' crowd too. I think the 'pro' crowd are forgetting that Wikipedia is supposed to assist its readers, not cater to the predilections of editors. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:47, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

(ec) There are actually two important differences between 日本 and Đặng Hữu Phúc:

• 日本 is a Japanese name for a country that has an English name. Đặng Hữu Phúc is a Vietnamese name for a Vietnamese pianist and composer who has no English name and apparently no direct connection to an English-speaking country.
• 日本 is written in Chinese script. If we wanted to use the name here in its original form, we would transcribe or transliterate it. Until recently, Vietnamese was written in a variant of Chinese script, but nowadays they only use a Latin orthography that was first introduced by Catholic missionaries in the 17th century. Đặng Hữu Phúc is already the transcription/transliteration.

I have given you this name as an example of where we may be overdoing it. We seem to be handling Vietnamese names inconsistently, and I can see why. On the other hand, given that English dictionaries contain several words with French accents (often as an alternative spelling, but in some cases such as exposé, resumé and façade usually as the preferred spelling), it would be absurd to drop accents from French names – and then in the (rare) worst case use them in English words in the same text!

Also, in many fields it's just standard for high-quality typesetting to use diacritics as appropriate. As a mathematical logician I am used to reading English texts that mention Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Łoś's theorem. While Łoś looks a bit unusual, most people who are exposed to the theorem know that the name is pronounced wash, and to these Los's theorem would look very jarring. I really cannot agree with the notion that English is so xenophobic that the use of diacritics is automatically un-English. This is a misconception that I have found debunked in various style manuals and in the Oxford Companion to the English language. Hans Adler 19:53, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a specialist encyclopedia. Do you know how "Ł" is pronounced? It sort of looks like an "L" in English, but it isn't. Addendum: Jerzy Łoś is a perfect example of how we are not appropriately serving our readers on this issue. Nowhere in the article do I learn how to pronounce the man's name. Yes, we do have the (incomprehensible to 99.99% of all readers) IPA pronounciation guide. What we should do is have an appropriate and user-friendly explanation of his name *in Polish* (as we would for a Chinese name, for example) with an explanation of how it is Anglicized and how to pronounce it. Instead, we have a pseudo-intellectual snobbishness that we refuse (at least implicitly, I am not accusing the authors of this article of anything, just pointing out the consequences of weak policy o this point) to explain the main thing that a math student might need to know for class, i.e. how to say the man's name to talk to friends about his ideas.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:01, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

You're aware that "Los" is pronounced nothing like "Łoś" right? This'd be a bit like having an article on a Iimbo Valęz on Polish Wikipedia (pronounced as you think it'd be pronounced), whoever that may be. Or maybe Dzimbuś Waleski or something (ok that one is made up). You would have people under names which are nothing like their actual names, which have only a superficial relationship to English and which would probably end up confusing a lot of people. It's really omitting relevant diacritics that does a disservice to the reader, not vice versa. Same goes for place names of course too.Volunteer Marek (talk)

• For the record, I used to be opposed to the use of diacritics. I now believe that 26 letters are simply not enough.

  I'm sure it's not out of "pseudo-intellectual snobbery" that a pronunciation of 'Łoś' isn't offered in the article, but more likely oversight because it's something the assembled authors may have taken for granted. As Wikipedia is a work in progress, that is surely an issue that can and will be addressed by the authors, now that this has been pointed out. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 07:11, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Did you know that Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, and the answer is just a Ł away? Thanks to hyperlinks, Wikipedia needs less dumbing down than other encyclopedias. For those who need it dumbed down, there is the simple English Wikipedia. —Kusma (t·c) 20:06, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Except, see above, we don't do that, we don't explain at all, and frankly, you are simply wrong about something important: using English in an English encyclopedia is not "dumbing down" - that's an anti-reader attitude that we should kick to the curb as quickly and strongly as possible. Our job is to educate the reader, not to be snobby pseudo-intellectual obscurantists.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:13, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Precisely: we educate the reader by giving Polish names in their correct spelling, and then teach them how to pronounce that correctly using IPA plus ideally a sound file. And the entire text can be in English even if foreign words are not horribly misspelled. —Kusma (t·c) 20:27, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Currently in Wikipedia, many foreign words are horribly misspelled - in English - by including things that aren't even remotely close to English letters, but which happen to be shaped similar to English letters. There is no problem with "giving Polish names in their correct (Polish) spelling" as long as we also give the correct English spelling - particularly in the title. What we do today is the worst possible choice: we spell things wrongly in English, misleading and confusing the reader, with no explanation other than the indecipherable IPA. That's just not helpful. I advocate that we use English primarily in titles, making exceptions in a handful of cases when there are good reasons, and that we give the local representation (whether it is Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Polish, etc.) and explain it to the reader. Giving people something completely wrong and misleading because Unicode allows us to be snobbish is just wrong.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:33, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Most high-quality modern English-language scholarly sources about foreign people and affairs use diacritics. That you suggest to deviate from good scholarly practice is quite disturbing to me, but fortunately you don't make the rules around here. —Kusma (t·c) 20:49, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

For the vast majority of Polish names the most correct English spelling is the correct Polish spelling, because no English version of the name exists. Other than the stupid method of just dropping them, there is no systematic procedure for getting rid of diacritics. Because none is needed, since everyone who cares about spelling foreign names correctly simply uses the diacritics. Hans Adler 19:49, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

But you are right that Wikipedia is not a specialist encyclopedia. It is many specialist encyclopedias all in one, combined with a general purpose encyclopedia. —Kusma (t·c) 20:11, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

No, you are mistaken. Wikipedia is not at all any specialist encyclopedia, at all. It is an encyclopedia for everyone.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:13, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Did Jimbo really mean move them all to"English"? Quite frankly, François Mitterrand is more familiar than Francois Mitterrand, the latter really would confuse because you just don't see it anywhere. Surely, WP:COMMONNAME has got to apply. DeCausa (talk) 19:57, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I think all should be moved to English. I disagree with you completely with respect to Francois Mitterand, it's an empirical question though, and I'm willing to be proven wrong. An important point here is that I don't know how to type "ç" and I bet 99.99% of English speakers don't either. That's relevant. Why? Because "ç" is not a letter in English. And this is the English Wikipedia.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:59, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

That's not true. As you can easily verify by taking any English dictionary and looking up the words façade and soupçon, ç is a letter that does occur in English words. They are loanwords that come from French, but now they are English. Hans Adler 23:34, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, that's what I mean by WP:COMMONNAME. It is an empirical question, and if it's provably more common to see diacritics in French names used in English (and some other languages eg Spanish), which I suspect it is, then there shouldn't be a diktat saying they can't be used. DeCausa (talk) 20:07, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

This is very similar to style and language registers. Some practices are OK and in fact perfectly standard when you are writing emails or technical documents at work, but are not OK for prestigious, professionally typeset publications. Concerning practicalities: About 3 years ago I got rid of all my German keyboards. Since then I am using British and US keyboards exclusively because I can type German umlauts and ß with them almost as easily, and it's much easier to type the diacritics in the most important other languages. I just have to switch my keyboard layout from US to US-International. I have never had a problem with that on any operating system, or any language version. Hans Adler 20:14, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

(ec) I think it's also worth noting that for Vietnamese names our usage is so far divided, while for names in (non-Cyrilic, non-Greek) European languages we almost universally use the diacritics. I am pretty sure that if we were going to change this we would have to rename hundreds of thousands of articles, and we would sometimes have to take non-obvious decisions such as whether to transcribe a Swedish person with the German last name Müller as Mueller (German style transcription) or as Muller (Swedish style transcription). We would also get thousands of new name clashes that would require the rethinking of many disambiguation pages. I just clicked Special:Random 20 times and got 2 articles with diacritics. If we are really talking about 10% of our articles, then this should certainly not be decided on a whim.

Oh, and as just one example of the problems we would face: Do you want to rename Fianna Fáil to Fianna Fail? Hans Adler 20:07, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I think there can be a case to be made in some cases for including diacritics. My point is that this case does need to be made, and we've gone completely off the rails in terms of making the case. We have proposals that are absolutely wrong, to default to including diacritics in all cases: that's just wrong, a serious disservice to readers. I do agree that for a handful of English words, and a handful of names in a handful of languages, including some diacritics is the right thing to do. But we should always subject this to very strict scrutiny, particularly considering how badly wrong we have it today in so many areas.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:16, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

But those accent marks don't help me in anyways & they're just annoying. GoodDay (talk) 20:11, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Jimbo, I agree with that. You seemed to be going further with the "move them all to English". Just to be annoyingly repetitive, if we stick with WP:COMMONNAME on this it should deliver a reasonable solution on a case-by-case basis. DeCausa (talk) 20:19, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, to be clear, I meant the examples that I had seen up above. I do think in some (relatively rare) cases, WP:COMMONNAME and common sense will drive us to accept the diacritic. However, I think that even in cases where WP:COMMONNAME via some simple metrics (google news searches, etc.) sends us in one direction, clarity and our sincere desire to connect with an educate our readers (rather than look down on them) may suggest a different course. Thoughtfulness is always required. My primary concern tonight is to strongly object to the suggestion, which I regard as disastrous, that we should have a default starting point of using non-English letters. That's a really bad idea.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:24, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I fear that English-language Wikipedia will be pushed to morph into Multiple-language Wikipedia. GoodDay (talk) 20:30, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Well Jimbo isn't going to rule by decree on this, so those "pro-dios" who have "hijacked" Wikipedia can sleep easy. GoodDay, your fears are unfounded and are a hysterical flying leap from the use of diacritics. Jimbo, we do make mountains out of molehills and this debate is no exception - is the use of diacritics in article titles really "disastrous"? That's hard to believe, it's easy to get entrenched in minutiae. I fear that we are deciding the colour of the bike sheds here. Can anyone point to a discussion outside Wikipedia of the use of diacritics on Wikipedia? (other than our Metal umlaut article). We offer redirects for people searching with unadorned lettering and any English speaker can readily read Latin letters even if they've got funny twiddly bits on them. And if we do go down the path of not including twiddly bits in titles we can still include the foreign spelling in brackets as is common practice for non-English alphabets so all is not lost if the heathens win :)

If you think we need to do better in explaining pronunciation than the frankly impenetrable IPA then what should we use? Spelling out phonetically is clumsy and misses varying pronunciation across English dialects. Fences&Windows 20:56, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

If feasible, it would be nice to have a MediaWiki extension that automatically turns IPA into audio files. Hans Adler 21:01, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Apparently the Google Translate text-to-speech uses eSpeak, which is open source. Could use that? Fences&Windows 23:39, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I think I can sum up my frustration as follows. When I see this name: Đặng Hữu Phúc I have no idea how to pronounce it. Up above, it was argued that I can just look up these symbols. Well, they aren't linked, but let's imagine that I am energetic enough to do so. My favorite unpronounceable symbol that I have never seen before in this name is ữ. What is that? It looks like a 'u' but it has a tilde on top and a bit of last nights dinner stuck to the side of his face. Fine. Let's look him up. ữ. Neat, it turns out that: "It is pronounced [ɨ].". Wow, one unpronounceable character that I have never seen turns out to be pronounced as another unpronounceable character that I have never seen. What's worse is that now my confidence is even more shattered. It looks sort of like a 'u' with some stuff stuck on it, but it turns out to be pronounced like an 'i' with some slash through it. Great. So, being more diligent than anyone could be reasonably expected, I click on that... and I get this article: Close central unrounded vowel. This tells me some stuff about how my tongue should be positioned... "the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel."

Suffice to say, this is an insult to the reader, incredibly pretentious and of zero value. What I really need is a straightforward anglicization of the name according to some standard and comprehensible rules, preferably ones used by media that I know about and understand.

Anyone who says that Wikipedia should look down on me for not really wanting to spend a few hours studying linguistics to get a basic idea of how to say this name in English is mistaken.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:52, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I have the same problem with this name. But I guess anyone who looks up a Vietnamese pianist and composer who is mostly unknown outside Vietnam is much more likely to have a rough idea what to do with these diacritics than you and me. Hans Adler 20:57, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Some food for thought
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
English may or may not keep the accentuation in such words as élite, café, pâté, fête, gîte, rôle, pied à terre, pièce de résistance. They are often dropped for typographic convenience, especially in AmE, even when they offer strong visual contrast: pâté may be shown as paté or even pate, despite possible confusion with pate (head). – Oxford Companion to the English Language, under "Accent as diacritic" Exposé has been used in English since the early 19th century. [...] Exposé can be written either with or without an acute accent: [...] Both forms are widely used. The accented form is the more common of the two, possibly because it clearly indicates how the word is pronounced [...]. – Webster's Dictionary of English Usage You may also have noted that the unaccented cliche is sometimes used but the accented cliché is much more common. – Webster's Dictionary of English Usage Template:Blockquotebottom And the following, from the Economist Style Guide: Template:Blockquotetop accents On words now accepted as English, use accents only when they make a crucial difference to pronunciation: café cliché communiqué exposé façade soupçon But: chateau decor elite feted naive If you use one accent (except the tilde - strictly, a diacritical sign), use all: émigré mêlée protégé résumé Put the accents and diacritical signs on French, German, Spanish and Portuguese names and words: José Manuel Barroso Federico Peña Françoise de Panafieu Wolfgang Schäuble Leave accents and diacritical signs off other foreign names. Any foreign word in italics should, however, be given its proper accents. names As with all names, spell them the way the person has requested, if a preference has been expressed. Here are some names that cause spelling difficulties. [The following is an excerpt, including only accented names] Joaquín Almunia José María Aznar José Manuel Barroso (no need to include his third name, Durão) Cuauhtémoc Cardenas Jean-Pierre Chevènement José Cutileiro Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (Mr Giscard d'Estaing) Felipe González Juan José Ibarretxe Franz Müntefering Karl Otto Pöhl Wolfgang Schäuble Gerhard Schröder José Sócrates Adolfo Suárez (Spain) Tabaré Vázquez (Dr) José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero placenames Use English forms when they are in common use. [following list originally with 36 entries] Zurich without an umlaut [...] some spellings [again shortened drastically] Baden-Württemberg Côte d'Ivoire, Ivorian Dusseldorf (not Düsseldorf) Guantánamo Quebec, Quebecker (but Parti Québécois) São Paolo (Brazilian city) detente (not détente) mêlée Template:Blockquotebottom Hans Adler 20:57, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

"Straightforward anglicizations" won't tell you how to pronounce it either, so your preferred option is not a solution to your problem. Fences&Windows 20:58, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Precisely. Let's compare Łoś and Los. For most people both spellings carry more or less the same amount of information, except the first also tells them it's from some Eastern European language while the second leaves that open. But those who have once seen the correct spelling will recognise it, may even know it's pronounced wash, and will be glad that they don't have to guess whether we are talking about the Polish guy they have heard of or a German whose name really happens to be Los. (3 hits in the phone book of Berlin, all with German first names.) Hans Adler 21:11, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I appreciate the marks here, because without them I might pronounce it like the first word in "Los Angeles" and sound like an idiot. At least with the marks I have a clue that I need to figure out how it is pronounced. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 17:51, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Why do you want to say this name in English? It isn't English, and saying it "in English" will mean pronouncing it wrong. Many of the sounds used in the name do not exist in English, so no "straightforward" system can give you the answer. As Vietnamese is tonal, it is probably impossible to convey the sound of the name without really listening to it (or really studying about the linguistics). That does not mean Wikipedia looks down on you: it just means that the world is complicated. Wikipedia isn't looking down on you when you don't understand intersection homology either. —Kusma (t·c) 21:04, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Why do I want to say this name in English? Because I speak English. The point is, I want to say the name out loud, and Wikipedia not only gives me no guidance on it, it insults me by writing the name in a character set that is not English. You might just as well tell me that the capital of 日本 is 東京. Why might a person want to say a word from another language? There are dozens of reasons. Possibly I have seen the film A Far Time Past and I really enjoyed the score. I want to ask my friend who knows a lot about music about this composer, but I feel a little shy. He's sooooo knowledgeable, and I want to not embarrass myself by butchering the name. I'm a worldly guy, I travel the world, I'm comfortable with appoximations. The point is: Wikipedia doesn't even give me anything close to a usable approximation. I can't even type the name, I have to cut and paste it.

In reality what I'm likely to do is to go to the only source in the article, IMDB, and find the name there, and conclude that Wikipedia is written by wonky jackasses rather than people who care about the reader.

We could do better. Intersection homology is an entirely different kind of case. Even in this case, I argue that we do our readers a disservice when we don't include a basic explanation that more people could understand. But that's not why I say it is an entirely different kind of case.

Our composer friend here, however his name is spelled or pronounced, writes music for movies. One need not be an expert in linguistics (or the complex IPA system) to hear some music and like it and want to learn more. Arguably, one simply cannot grasp intersection homology without a lot of background. But I totally understand what this guy does: he writes music for movies. Asking me to learn Vietnamese, or IPA, just to be able to casually say to my friend, oh, hey, I heard this music in a movie the other day and I really liked it, I remember you know a lot about Asian music, do you know about <>?

The argument here is that we could give better explanations of how to say things. I say we should make that mandatory by insisting that outside of some clearly defined and highly limited exceptions, we absolutely ought not to be using characters that English readers will not understand.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:50, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

OK, we call him (or her?) Đặng Hữu Phúc, and IMDB calls him Huu Phuc Dang. We are putting the family name first as seems to be the custom in Vietnam, and the given name last. Which makes sense because where we would just say the family name, they just say the given name. IMDB puts the family name last. Both schemes make sense. As far as orthography is concerned, they have merely stripped off the diacritics. The result may look a bit more familiar, but surely you can do that in your mind as well? Of course when you are doing it yourself you are aware that you are doing something dubious. But it's not really better if someone else does it for you. It's the difference between a sausage whose composition and production process you know, and one where you are just trusting the butcher.

As far as I'm concerned, I have no idea how Vietnamese phonetics works, but I just read it's tonal like Chinese, I see tone marks that look like those in Pinyin, and that allows me to at least make an educated guess at the tones of the syllables. (Which consists in making the pitch follow the curves of the diacritics on the letters.) Therefore even if I get the vowels and consonants mostly wrong otherwise, I would have a better chance of being unterstood by a Vietnamese speaker.

And that's with Vietnamese. I am not even sure that we want the diacritics for Vietnamese, necessarily. But dropping them in French names and writing "Francois Mitterrand" in a relatively formal context such as an encyclopedia would be a sign of relatively extreme anti-intellectualism – at least on this side of the pond, where English speakers are used to having neighbours who speak different languages. Hans Adler 23:43, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

...pronounced "Dang Who Fuck"...no problem. We have neighbors who speak different languages, too. Mexico, Quebec, New Jersey...
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 03:16, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

:Đặng Hữu Phúc is an article originally written in Vietnamese, including the name of the article. When the article was translated (and greatly shortened), the English-form name was in the lede, followed by the Vietnamese name in parentheses. Then the English-form name was dropped, and the Vietnamese name moved out of the parentheses. The IMDb template has a 'name' field, to be used when the IMDb name is different from the Wikipedia articles name. Well, that field was filled with the article's name, NOT the IMDb name (I've now changed it). So, no English-form name is available anywhere in the article - in the (purportedly) English language Wikipedia. iow, the writers do NOT want "ordinary readers" to read these articles, just the "enlightened ones". Except anyone vaguely "enlightened" would click on the Vietnamese language version, use Google Translate, and see a much more extensive article. So what exactly was achieved here? If we were discussing where the English-form name should be in the article, vs. where the original language form should be, that would make sense. Instead, the goal seems to be to 'cleanse' all articles of all English-format names, even though those are in common use elsewhere. Sounds like a STATUSRULES or IMBETTERTHANYOU argument. We're supposed to be the accessible and welcoming encyclopedia, so imo this makes no sense. Wild guess: the composer is more interested in people listening to his music than trying to say or spell his name. So let's make it easy for them. I've noticed the lists of alternate-language articles for various people, and those articles are 'translated' into each language, as one would expect. See Bashar al-Assad and Barack Obama. So, this discussion isn't really limited to the English language Wikipedia. Flatterworld (talk) 00:52, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

• Đặng Hữu Phúc as an example (above) seems to me to be used in 'tabloid' or 'scare' fashion. Let's not concern ourselves with diacritics use in scripts that use diacritics for intonation. As I pointed out at the centralised discussion, the über-colonial English language is, in this day and age of globalisation, showing its limitations. Despite its widespread use, English is highly idiosyncratic, pronunciation is irregular; there are numerous variants in use around the world – most notably the two versions on either side of 'the pond'. The 26 letters of our alphabet are woefully inadequate when trying to capture pronunciations of even many other languages with Romanised characters and standardised pronunciations, such as French and Czech, both of which I speak. English officially recognises hundreds if not thousands of new loan words each year, and it is time to welcome loan letters too. At least three have already made it into daily English usage – the e-acute, the u-umlaut and the c-cedilla – and are in widespread use. These, and other letters with diacritics have no substitute in English. Pity poor Jiří Novák, English people seeing the bare 'Jiri Novak' would undoubtedly call him "Jerry Novak" instead of pronouncing his name as it should be – "Yirzhi Novaak". I won't burden your talk page any more. You know where the centralised discussion is. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 06:51, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

**Own goal. That's why "Yirzhi Novaak" would be his English-form name. As I said before, look at what the Wikipedias in other languages do. If other sources have decided to use Jiri Novak, that's not Wikipedia's problem. otoh, many Wikipedia articles include both the pronunciation AND an audio recording of it. Example: (/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/ Use those. As for Đặng Hữu Phúc, the problem is clearly that the article was purposely cleansed of all instances of the English-format name, including the External link. That's true of other articles as well, he was simply an example already used. Flatterworld (talk) 15:49, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

• Interestingly, I have my own to cent to offer here, completely 180° from Jimmy's: My given name is Marc-André. It's not "Marc-Andre", nor is it "Marc" and if I magically became notable, an article titled "Marc-Andre Pelletier" would be, simply, erroneous. I do not have a name in English, though I conventionally accept being called Marc for simplicity's sake, and I would be very much insulted at the suggestion that I should pretend that some random sequence of letters that resemble my name are my name to assuage some naming convention. "Marc-Andre" is no closer to my name than "Xarc-André" would be, and just as incorrect: in both cases you'd be randomly substituting some incorrect letter. — Coren ^(talk) 14:44, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
  • Why do you think your position differs from mine? I think that "André" is a perfectly good example where the diacritic should be used.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 05:40, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
    • Perhaps this a diplomatic way out of an ideological position? or perhaps your opposition is to the intimidating rending of Vietnamese script, compared to the "more familiar" Latin-based scripts from European countries? --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 06:55, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
    • Then I don't understand your position right, because I can't see what the distinction is. Why would "é" be okay in my name, but "ł" iffy in another? Like Piotrus's name below, it could be approximately transliterated "Broniswav", but using a "l" instead of a "ł" would be just wrong.

      I can see why you'd feel it confusing about how to pronounce a word if you're not familiar with the letters, but substituting some visual approximation for the right letter doesn't actually help with that. Part of the problem is perception: "é" isn't just an "e" with a funny squiggle on top of it, it's a different vowel altogether. — Coren ^(talk) 15:54, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

      • My basic answer is tied to the core ideas behind WP:COMMONNAME. Basically, André is completely familiar to English speakers, one of a handful of words like it (others have given good examples in this discussion). Right now, the de facto rule in Wikipedia, the rule which best explains the empirical results we see in Wikipedia, is this: "If a letter sort of looks like an English letter, but with some funny bits added on, then use it. Whether readers understand it or not is irrelevant. Whether other sources do it or not is irrelevant. It's the RIGHT THING TO DO. However, if the letter doesn't sort of look like an English letter, then don't use it." That's not a very sensible rule, but it is in fact what we do.
        • So yes, we can say that 'é' is a different vowel from 'e'. But it's also one that English speaking people know well enough in many contexts.
        • What I advocate is to look at whether or not the usage is so common that people will expect it. Interesting debates can be had, for example, as to how to write Francois Mitterand's name, and although I would say type it without the squiggle, I could be persuaded if the preponderance of sources do it. Where I think there is no legitimate argument, outside of sheer snobbery or the pseudo-rule that I outlined above ("It sort of looks like English!"), is for letters that we know full well most English speakers won't get it at all.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:29, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
          • Jimbo, I definitely agree with you that we need to deliver answers to our readers, and that current practice with diacritics often fails to do so. In the case of Đặng Hữu Phúc and other articles, I'd like to throw out another way to look at it: Yes, your average English speaker will have no clue where to begin pronouncing Đặng Hữu Phúc. However, that's an important fact and a truism: Even if we provide a transliteration, the reader will still have no clue how to pronounce the name properly. That's not so bad with the Romance languages; you may mangle someone's name, but it will usually be understandable. With highly tonal languages like Vietnamese, said reader is likely to pronounce some other thing entirely, and could wind up causing offense or great confusion. So, I wonder if it would be a bad thing for the formal title of such an article to be Đặng Hữu Phúc, and the first use to be Đặng Hữu Phúc, with the romanization Dang Huu Phuc used throughout the article thereafter for readability. For languages where normal English phonetic pronunciation suggestions won't sufficiently disambiguate one word from another, the diacritical marks serve as an intuitive warning sign: "If you don't understand the language, or at least these marks, you are going to seriously mispronounce this, because it isn't really 'Dang Huu Phuc'." It might actually be doing a service to our readers. (And it beats adding a "don't embarrass yourself" template...) // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 17:03, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
          • See, that's where we differ. Changing the "ç" to a "c" in "François" is doing exactly the same thing (in spirit) that you object to: you're using some letter because it sort of looks like the right one.

            In the end, you're giving dominion to a technological artifact (that incomplete keyboards/fonts used to force substitutions) and extending it to a principle when it never was. It's sort of like how in the early days of printing presses instances of "þ" were substituted by "y" when typesetting English because it sorta looked like it and the fonts imported from Germany didn't have any þ in them. It's a technological accident, not a statement of principle that using y was better English than using thorns. — Coren ^(talk) 20:17, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

  • Indeed. For the same reason I am Piotr, not Peter, even through I tell my American friends to call me Peter. We don't translate names in English, and my second name is Bronisław, not Bronislaw, just like Coren is Marc-André. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:52, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

**If you don't or won't exist in English, even with your 'own' name in the lede, then your article would remain in the French Wikipedia and readers could use Google Translate. Flatterworld (talk) 15:49, 21 June 2011 (UTC) ***None of these are 'wrong', imo, even though they don't match the native-language article. I wouldn't expect them to:

am:ባራክ ኦባማ

ab:Барақ Обама ar:باراك أوباما az:Barak Obama bn:বারাক ওবামা ba:Барак Обама be:Барак Абама be-x-old:Барак Абама bh:बराक ओबामा bi:Barak Obama bo:བ་རག་ཨོ་པྰ་མ། bg:Барак Обама ca:Barack Hussein Obama cv:Барак Обама dv:ބަރަކް އޮބާމާ nv:Hastiin alą́ąjįʼ dahsidáhígíí Barack Obama el:Μπαράκ Ομπάμα myv:Обамань Барак fa:باراک اوباما gan:奧巴馬 ko:버락 오바마 hy:Բարաք Օբամա hi:बराक ओबामा os:Обама, Барак he:ברק אובמה kn:ಬರಾಕ್ ಒಬಾಮ ka:ბარაკ ობამა kk:Барак Обама ky:Барак Хусеин Обама lo:ບາຣັກ ໂອບາມາ la:Baracus Obama lv:Baraks Obama jbo:byRAK.obamas mk:Барак Обама ml:ബറാക്ക് ഒബാമ mr:बराक ओबामा arz:باراك اوباما mzn:باراک اوباما mn:Барак Обама my:ဘာရတ်အိုဘားမား ne:बाराक ओबामा ja:バラク・オバマ mhr:Обама, Барак pnb:بارک اوبامہ ps:باراک حسين اوباما km:បារ៉ាក់ អូបាម៉ា crh:Barak Obama ru:Обама, Барак sah:Барак Обама si:බැරැක් ඔබාමා ckb:باراک ئۆباما sr:Барак Обама ta:பராக் ஒபாமா tt:Baraq Husseyın Obama II te:బరాక్ ఒబామా th:บารัก โอบามา tg:Барак Ҳусейн Обама tk:Barak Obama uk:Барак Обама ur:بارک اوبامہ ug:باراك ئوباما wuu:巴拉克·奥巴马 yi:באראק אבאמא zh-yue:奧巴馬] zh:贝拉克·奥巴马

Actually, almost all of those are wrong. Maybe there is a person named "Барак Ҳусейн Обама", but it's not the president of the United States. — Coren ^(talk) 16:19, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

(To be clear, I'm certain that all of those are reasonable transliterations of Obama's name in the respective languages, and it would make a very great deal of sense to have redirects from all of those to the president's article — but none of those are the president's name, and the articles should not be titled thus). — Coren ^(talk) 16:24, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

:::::So what? The native language name is included in parentheses, as it should be, and I expect there's also a redirect - something for everyone (aka 'inclusive'), but the article name is as close to the local language as possible:

“ Барак Хусейн Обама (инглиз телендә Barack Hussein Obama) — Америка Ҡушма Штаттарының 44-се президенты. ”

But this is a most inappropriate place to discuss what the policy and the style guide should say about diacritics in names. Tony (talk) 16:26, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Jimmy, during the British Library Editathon on January 15, Wikipedians were privileged to be given a guided tour of the the Evolving English: One language, Many voices exhibition. The curator explained that the English language had evolved though absorbing thousands of loanwords. Sometimes these words retained their original diacritics in common usage, e.g. née, fiancée, façade, déjà vu. This practice goes back to Anglo Saxon times, so Modern English does indeed contain diacritics through these loanwords.

I personally believe that a great deal of useful information will be lost, or not be as accurate as it should, if we exclude diacritics from Wikipedia. -- Marek.69 ^talk 18:27, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

“ Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.^* That’s what we’re doing. ” —  Jimmy Wales

^*exceptions include: diacritics, accents and any other unidentified squiggles

- Marek.69 ^talk

An excellent point. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:58, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Jimbo, if "diacritics, as they are unhelpful and confusing for English readers", could you explain to me then why are they used in Britannica ([1]) or Columbia ([2] - scroll down)? Are you saying that one of the "improvements" that Wikipedia is supposed to bring over them is to remove the diacritics? I am afraid this does not sound like helpful improvement to me, this smacks of dumbing down, or at the very list, of transforming English Wikipedia into the Simple English Wikipedia. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:58, 21 June 2011 (UTC) :Are you assuming Britannica is consistent? ;-) (I didn't check Columbia.) Flatterworld (talk) 19:29, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I am not sure what the above link is trying to prove, other than the fact that you don't know how to spell the name of the Polish president (which you could check in our article...). If you look for correct spelling (without diacritics, you added two extra "c"'s...), you end up [3], where you can see the diacritic in the title. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 20:04, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

:::The point was to show that Britannica uses two different spellings about the same person: 1 and 2. One article uses diatrics, one does not. Therefore, Britannica is not consistent. The point of the misspelling was to ensure only one example of each spelling was displayed, to make it easier for you to follow. Anything else you're confused about? Flatterworld (talk) 20:53, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

This is easily explained by the fact that the Lech Kaczyński article is part of the encyclopedia proper, and the "Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Lech Kaczynski" article, an essay starting with the unencyclopedic words "It was not exactly a surprise when" and ending with "Lech was the more outspoken, polarizing figure, capable of riling people with his blunt pronouncements, while Jaroslaw was considered more the calculating diplomat." is signed by "primary contributor" Robert Rauch. This explains what is going on. Reading between the lines: They are learning from us and let their readers contribute! Hans Adler 22:20, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

:::::Congratulations on your own goal. Flatterworld (talk) 22:27, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I fail to see how having shown the difference between professional and amateur contribution, and which one prefers diacritics and which does not, supports your argument rather than ours. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 01:05, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. The more reliable, traditional expert-authored article, uses diacritics. The new wiki-britannica article doesn't. I hope we want to resemble the proper encyclopedia more than the amateurish essay-collection site. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 22:24, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

::Comment This discussion is not about excluding diacritics from articles in total, but their use in article names. Per the example of Barack Obama above (chosen because that article has been translated into just about every language Wikipedia offers), we respect both local and native languages. Flatterworld (talk) 19:38, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

To be fair, Simple English Wikipedia does not dumb down spellings in this way. On Simple English Wikipedia, as on Afrikaans, Asturian, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Czech, Welsh, Danish, Estonian, Spanish, Esperanto, French, Irish Gaelic, Galician, Croatian, Ido, Indonesian, Icelandic, Italian, Kiswahili, Kurdish, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Limburgish, Hungarian, Malay, Dutch, Norwegian (both varieties), Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Albanian, Sicilian, Slovak, Slovenian, Finnish, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, Navajo, Waray-Waray and Yoruba Wikipedia, Gerhard Schröder is "Gerhard Schröder". Apart from Wikipedias in non-Latin scripts, I only found the following conversions of his name: "Gerhard Şröder" (phonetic spelling on Azerbaijani Wikipedia), "Gerhard Schroder" (Basque), "Gerardus Schröder" (funny Latinisation with diacritic), "Gerhards Šrēders" (Latvian; I guess this is phonetic spelling plus Latvian inflections -s), "Schröderi Gerhard" (Võro language). The picture is very similar for other names such as simple:Halldór Ásgrímsson, simple:Raúl Castro and simple:Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Hans Adler 19:43, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Jimbo here. This is the English Wikipedia. English uses an alphabet with 26 letters, and none of them are Ł or ß or any of those other characters. The "local" spelling can be used in the article, but it should not be in the title. I also think it is reasonable to consider "accents" in certain cases, possibly including the title. But dots and circles over letters and various curleycues have no meaning in English, and should not be used in article titles. Neutron (talk) 20:03, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

"Dots and circles over letters [...] have no meaning in English, and should not be used in article titles": so no more Motörhead, Eärendil, ... I'm glad you would at least accept Beyoncé Knowles, but what with Æthelred the Unready? It's too bad if even English kings can't stick your 26 letters of course... Fram (talk) 20:59, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I have no problem with the Æthelred bit, but I wish I were able to do something about the Unready - it should more properly be "the ill readed" - understanding that "read" was a Saxon/Early English word meaning "advised" (and it probably had some squiggles around it, so it sounds neither like a symomym for red nor the riverside plant...) Somehow, though, I don't suppose there will ever be a redirect even for "Æthelred the Poorly Advised". LessHeard vanU (talk) 21:19, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Personally I would be fine with Ethelred, as it is in many sources. Or Aethelred. Those letters are all included in "my" 26, as Fram would have it. "My"? So I invented the modern English alphabet? I may be old, but I'm not that old. As for Beyonce, I don't care whether she gets an accent or not. I'm more interested in possibly allowing words like exposé and resumé, though I don't know whether they are really an issue when it comes to article names. However, if I had to choose between no diacritical marks at all, and the "open season" we seem to have now, I would choose none at all. I do not think it is necessary to make that either-or choice, but if that's how people want it, that's my opinion. Neutron (talk) 21:32, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

So why, exactly, is an é worth keeping, while an ö is not? That seems rather random to me. --Conti|✉ 22:44, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

• I see a lot of discussion about loanwords retaining accents and diacritics here, but that's a demonstrably deceptive debate point. I've used "resume" and "facade", for example, and I have several dictionaries that include them as I use them, without the accents and diacritics. Are you folks saying that I'm intellectually handicapped or something? This is ridiculous. As others have pointed out, the English alphabet includes 26 characters. That there are problems in translating non-English characters to an English equivalent is evident, but Wikipedia shouldn't be the battleground for this sort of fight on the preferred way to translate them (or whether to translate them at all).
  — V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 04:26, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
• At risk of inviting even more Turkish butt stabbings borne out of wikidrama gone bad, I completely agree with User:V=IR. The Macintosh keyboard since 1984 has allowed me to directly type “naïve” and “señor” and “résumé” and a few other things. But some accent-advocates here are proposing we expand the gamut of accents to stratospheric levels unfamiliar to a general-interest readership. Let all wikipedians here remove our powdered wigs and have a moment of silence for our general-interest readership. Remember them? “English” (as if that matters any more) doesn’t generally use the vast majority of the diacriticals some proponents are advocating here. It is verboten in all good technical writing to write in a manner that unduly calls attention to itself. So, just pardon me all over the place for stating precisely what is on my mind, but it appears that we have once again descended into where some wikipedians are trying to Lead By Example To A New And Brighter Future That Is All-Inclusive And We Hold Hands And Sing About Coca-Cola And Will Change The World.©™® Yes, well… Plain English please. Greg L (talk) 02:52, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

  The current conflict started with people who insist on stripping the accents and dots off in the very common 'harmless' cases such as ö and é. It was me who brought Vietnamese in above as an example where it's actually not general practice in English to use the diacritics when available. (Consequently usage in Wikipedia is divided for Vietnamese, while for French and German we use the diacritics practically always.) While I personally have nothing against the Vietnamese diacritics, Britannica also strips them off, and so I can't really oppose doing that. Nobody has argued for these 'extreme' diacritics recently. But if we start systematically removing acutes and cedillas and transcribing umlauts, so that you can no longer tell from an article's title that Goethe and Goebbels are spelled that way even where umlauts are available and normally used, then we become the laughing stock among reference sources. We have acquired a reputation as a somewhat serious reference source, and removing accents that are so common in high-quality English sources that they can be considered part of the language itself would be a bizarre and eccentric decision that would risk this reputation. It would also require renaming almost 10% of our articles. Serious style guides distinguish between languages for deciding when to use diacritics. Serious reference works use diacritics in titles for the most familiar languages. We should do the same. Hans Adler 10:19, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks for the summary, Hans. That all makes sense as to how things started out and how we got to where we are. I 100% agree, in principle, with you; especially this part: We have acquired a reputation as a somewhat serious reference source, and removing accents that are so common in high-quality English sources that they can be considered part of the language itself would be a bizarre and eccentric decision that would risk this reputation. It would also require renaming almost 10% of our articles. Serious style guides distinguish between languages for deciding when to use diacritics. Serious reference works use diacritics in titles for the most familiar languages. We should do the same.

  It is double-tough to get sensible MOS guidelines on Wikipedia and that underlies why so many of our guidelines are compromise solutions that amount to “Do whatever you like ta’.” The proper use of diacriticals for en.Wikipedia will require a nuanced and thoughtful guideline. Invariably, someone will be disappointed that a diacritical used by upper Mongolian yak herders that looks like a stomped on beetle is excluded. Well, most of the diacriticals known to mankind aren’t generally used in English that is directed to a general-interest readership; only some. As you say, serious style guides distinguish between languages for deciding when to use diacritics; that’s the way it must work here to best serve the interests of our readership.

  Things are getting busy for me in real life. I hope that you, Hans, stay firmly in your saddle on this one and help out, as I wholeheartedly agree with your basic approach to the problem. Greg L (talk) 14:59, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

I think that the diacritics per se are a distraction. We should view them as part of a spelling of a word. We should use whichever spelling is widely used when the person is discussed in English; if the person appears only in foreign-language sources, we should use the foreign version because we shouldn't make up one on our own. If I look at a name like "Łoś", what do I transliterate that to? Los? Wash? I don't know - I'd have to look it up. Making the decision on my own would be a poor sort of "original research". So there should be no talk of "stripping diacritics". Either you go out and find a diacritic-free version of the name to use, or you use the name with diacritics, but under no circumstance should you have to get out your scalpel and do the surgery yourself. Wnt (talk) 17:01, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. I'm with Hans and other editors who made some very good points in favour of encouraging diacritics at least in cases where their omission would be widely regarded as a misspelling (e.g. Jørn Lande, André Previn and François Mitterrand are the correct spellings of those people's names). If you don't know how to type them, that's not a problem: that's why we have redirects. Jorn Lande still takes you to the right article. There are some readers for whom diacritics are a useful clue to correct pronunciation, and others who might not know their meanings but will at least be alerted to the fact that the word is not pronounced as they might otherwise expect. Diacritics in titles may be an annoyance to readers who dislike them, but the alternative is deliberate misspelling which may in some cases mislead and conflict with common usage in English language reliable sources, and which reduces the educational value and credibility of the encyclopaedia (or should I say encyclopædia?)

I appreciate Jimbo Wales' frustration with the lack of intelligible pronunciation instructions, but I fail to see how stripping diacritics would be in any way helpful. I do agree that pronunciation information is an area in which Wikipedia could be vastly improved. Ideally, any article whose pronunciation is likely to be problematic should provide IPA and approximate phonetic spelling (where possible) and audio files for maximum accessibility to pronunciation guidance. Contains Mild Peril (talk) 22:49, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Chicago Manual of Style

De facto we use diacritics more or less consistently, with some exceptions such as Vietnamese (usage divided), pinyin (mostly without the tone marks) or Hawaiian (without diacritics per the special guideline for Hawaiian). The main argument for renaming almost 10% of our articles to get rid of them is therefore that it is somehow wrong or not English. I am not sure why simply pointing to the fact that other English-language encyclopedias which actually do use diacritics isn't enough to immediately convince everybody that this is false. There is also Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary, which is full of names with diacritics as the preferred spellings. (It's on Credo, so a lot of editors can access it easily.)

And there is the Chicago Manual of Style, an immensely influential work that is often referred to when we discuss our own manual of style. I am not sure that it says explicitly, anywhere, that one should use diacritics or that it's OK to use them. But it is clear that it's written under the assumption that that's the case. Repeating myself from an earlier post [4]:

• Some example sentences speak for themselves: "He is a member of the Société d'entraide des membres de l'ordre national de la Légion d'honneur."
• But it gets more explicit elsewhere: "Any foreign words, phrases or titles that occur in an English-language work should be checked for special characters -- that is, letters with accents [...], diphthongs, ligatures, and other alphabetical forms that do not normally occur in English. Most accented letters used in European languages [...] can easily be reproduced in print from an author's software and need no coding. [...] If type is to be set from an author's hard copy, marginal clarifications may be needed for handwritten accents or special characters (e.g., 'oh with grave accent' or 'Polish crossed el'). If a file is being prepared for an automated typesetting system or for presentation in electronic form (or both), special characters must exist or be 'enabled' in the typesetting and conversion programs, and output must be carefully checked to ensure that the characters appear correctly."
• The following on typesetting French is particularly interesting: "Although French publishers often omit accents on capital letters [...] they should appear where needed in English works, especially in works whose readers may not be familiar with French typographic usage." (My italics.)
• And on romanization: "Nearly all systems of transliteration require diacritics [...]. Except in linguistic studies or other highly specialized works, a system using as few diacritics as are needed to aid pronunciation is easier to readers, publisher, and author. [e.g. Shiva not Śiva, Vishnu not Viṣṇu] Transliterated forms without diacritics that are listed in any of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries are acceptable in most contexts."

And that's from an American style guide. I believe Brits are actually more used to diacritics then Americans and use them more often. Hans Adler 06:31, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

...and then we get the semi-annual (sometimes more) discussions about moving Cote d'Ivoire to Ivory Coast. Isn't it nice that I can write Cote d'Ivoire without the requisite diacritical marks and it still goes through to the correct article :-) (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 13:27, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

• None of this matters, so long as Google finds Jiří Novák when I search for jiri novak, which it does, and something in the lead explains pronunciation, which it does (a sound clip). Using IPA here is useful to language students but for the vast majority of English speakers it is useless. The Australian Macquarie Dictionary includes IPA but also simple English phonetic spelling and a sound clip. I have seen editors here replacing simple English phonetic spelling with IPA, which I equate roughly with vandalism. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 10:46, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
  • English "phonetic" spelling is about twenty different ways of approximating pronunciation that can only represent phonemes already present in English, and which is understandable only by fluent English speakers who will end up with a "pronunciation guide" that is entirely dependent on their regional dialect and completely independent of the word's. In other words, it's a completely worthless and uninformative piece of crap. — Coren ^(talk) 19:10, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
    • Yes, it's regionally dependent and so imperfect, but it is generally useful, as opposed to IPA which is generally useless. For example, the Macquarie's entry for 'encyclopedia' follows the IPA pronunciation with '(say en.suykluh'peedeeuh)'. That's useful. IPA is useful to a small few, so by all means include it, but not to the exclusion of simple phonetic spellings, which are useful to the majority of our users. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 19:55, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
      • I would expect everybody who has ever learned a foreign language with non-regular spelling (e.g. French, and for non-native speakers, English) to have learned the basics of IPA and to have been exposed to it every time they use a dictionary. That means most people in Europe. —Kusma (t·c) 20:33, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
        • • I think you are wrong. Do you have any evidence for this? I am with Anthonyhcole: I think almost no one understands or has been exposed to IPA, and that it is functionally useless for most people, in Europe and elsewhere. At the same time, I totally agree with Coren that phonetic spelling is problematic, although I disagree that it is useless. IPA is useless for most people for sure. Phonetic spelling is flawed.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:57, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
            • • I think you are wrong, too, Kusma, at least as far as language schooling in North America is concerned. I have studied French, Russian and Latin, and have never been exposed to IPA except incidentally in a dictionary. This may be a deplorable state, but I suspect it is true for most of the populations here. I was trained as a teacher of English (both EFL and ESL), and never used IPA either. For the population at large, it is worse than useless, because it is another barrier to comprehension. Bielle (talk) 21:23, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

                Kusma said "most people in Europe." English language dictionaries were unusually slow in picking up IPA. (One can wonder if there is any connection to the similar resistance to the metric system.) This has actually been discussed in reliable sources:

                The situation in 1986: "All the dictionaries on my list, both British and American, use respelling – except for CED, which uses IPA. [...] news [...] that the Oxford English Dictionaries are going over to IPA. But that is the culmination of a development that has been going on for a long time [...] [lists isolated English-language dictionaries using IPA from 1968, 1976] to the big commercial breakthrough of 1979 when CED used IPA as have its subsequent smaller spin-off dictionaries, the Concise of 1982 and the Compact of 1984. Then Oxford weighed in with IPA in their Little Oxford Dictionary of 1980 [...] and Harrap used IPA in their Mini Pocket dictionary of 1983. [...] So we now have Collins and Oxford firmly committed to the cause of IPA. [...] In Australia the big new Macquarie Dictionary uses IPA. // The same change to IPA in native speaker dictionaries happened in France – about fifteen or twenty years ago. The same arguments were heard there that are still heard here, about the difficulties of IPA for a general-purpose native speaker dictionary. But in France the battle was won many years ago and now as far as I know all the major 'trade' dictionaries [...] use IPA. [...] On the other hand in America this development has hardly begun at all." (Lexicography – an emergent international profession)

                And the current (2010) situation: "[American general purpose dictionaries] indicate pronunciation in a 'respelling system' using diacritics rather than the IPA, because 'American publishers identify their market as people who do not know, and will not learn, the IPA'. Only the more recent EFL/ESL American dictionaries have adopted the IPA." (The lexicography of English: from origins to present, 2010).

                The respelling systems with diacritics that many American dictionaries are still using are vendor-dependent and mostly restricted to the US market, and therefore not suitable for a free and international encyclopedia. IPA has been standard in German schools since long before I started learning English and French around 1980. Hans Adler 15:35, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

            • I have no hard evidence (and I'm German, not a native English speaker), but I did learn IPA in high school while learning English (when I was ten or eleven), as there is no way to do phonetic spelling of English in German (German lacks both the voiceless dental fricative and voiced dental fricative sounds you would need to pronounce the English th). Then I randomly checked an English/French dictionary, and of course it used IPA in both parts. Dictionaries for languages with regular spelling (like Spanish) or a well-established specialized phonetic alphabet (like Chinese) typically don't seem to include IPA in the main part. Anyway, the advantage of IPA is that with some work and using the sound samples at Wikipedia:IPA, everybody can figure out what sound is meant, even for those sounds that can't be pronounced by untrained native English speakers (the close front rounded vowel seems to be difficult to most Americans). I don't mind adding "phonetic" spelling where it gives the correct results, but it often fails. —Kusma (t·c) 21:40, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
            • Even if it were "functionally useless" in isolation, if you click on the IPA representation, you get taken to an explanation. For words that use only normal English sounds (e.g. Arkansas), even the mouseover gives you a rough explanation for each sound. And I cannot believe that the vast majority of people reading Wikipedia have never used a dictionary that used IPA.--Boson (talk) 22:24, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

• • • • • • • • Just because somebody has used a dictionary that uses IPA doesn't mean they recognise and understand it. To a huge number of people the IPA characters in a dictionary just look like some bizarre form that they presume means something to someone else but don't really think about it too much and instead get onto the definition of a word. Hans's link "The lexicography of English: from origins to present" contains a quite telling passage:
                • "The British dictionary is an aide-mémoire or source of philological information for the educated user; the American dictionary is an all-purpose reference tool for anyone who needs guidance on usage and on the culture. The British dictionary is for an elite; the American dictionary is for the general public. Th British dictionary is 'scholar-drive' i.e. determined by what the specialists think should feature in a dictionary; the American dictionary is 'public-driven', i.e. determined by what the public wants, or what the lexicographers think that the public wants. [...] The British dictionary is a learned friend; the American dictionary is a schoolmaster." (Page 149)
              • Just because something is included in a British dictionary doesn't indicate the British public understand it or that it's there by public demand. British dictionaries can be quite stubborn on some matters where elite and populism clash - most famously the OED's insistence on ~ize spellings over ~ise - and the IPA usage in dictionaries here is because the lexicographers think it should be there, not because the public demand it.
              • On people's educational experience, I was taught French over eight years in three different British schools (and also Latin and German, each at two of them, for shorter lengths in the same period) ending 15 years ago and never once did I encounter the IPA other than if the dictionaries happened to include the IPA characters in their entries but they were meaningless to me. The language text books used to teach the class as a rule did not use IPA. Timrollpickering (talk) 17:05, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

My two cents (I came here following a notice on WT:MOS:

• WTH would be wrong with "do whatever reliable secondary sources written in English by English speakers usually do"? (If there are several names each used by a sizeable proportion of the sources, just pick one; in any event, the native name, if not identical to the article title, should be mentioned in the lead.)
• Saying that it is wrong for the Russian Wikipedia to use the title Обама, Барак makes as much sense as saying that it is wrong for the English Wikipedia to use the title Dmitry Medvedev.
• Of course the typical English speaker has no idea how to pronounce Đặng Hữu Phúc, but the same applies to Cruithne, and it has no diacritic. I've even heard the (obviously non-Irish) presenter of a documentary about the moons in the Solar System pronounce it in a way which would make any Gaeilgeoir LOL. (No diacritic in Gaeilgeoir, either...) :-) (Should we move it to Crinya, following the example of Enya?) :-) ― A. di M.​_plé​^dréachtaí 23:50, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

This is a break, it is arbitrary

I think there is a repeated assertion in this discussion that bears examining. That "almost nobody understands IPA" is a statement that is a little stunning in its Americanocentrism. I know IPA is hardly ever taught in the Unites States, but that certainly does not apply to most of the European world, and I would expect that most English speakers (including ESL speakers) know at least some IPA (if only because they are more likely than not have used it while learning English). I suppose I'm at the tail end since I can read IPA well enough that, with some hesitation, I could probably recite a speech in any non tonal language if given a good transcription; but I'd be surprised if the assertion that "almost nobody [that reads Wikipedia] understands IPA", or even that "most readers don't understand IPA" were true.

Besides, we have an educational mission. We should strive to give our readers the tools to learn, not stifle learning opportunities by willfully using a crippled fauxnetic system. — Coren ^(talk) 01:05, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Look at your keyboard - the one that the average reader will have

The great majority of people who will use the English language Wikipedia will have a keyboard much like the one I am typing on - which does not have easy access to most of the rather spiffing squiggles, dots and dashes that are the subject of this discussion. Why are we insisting on having all or most articles presented in a style that most readers (you know, the people we are writing this stuff for) cannot reproduce? I realise that the English language variant will exist as a redirect (and that those using phones with multiple characters per button may be able to produce an approximation of the diacretically correct name - but how many times do you want to push that button, only to find you have just missed the correct variant of "O") but it it not more helpful to the student or casual reader to quickly find it with the least amount of keystrokes? Obviously, once they have found the article they can be further educated on how the name is represented in the local language and script - but that is part of the function of the encyclopedia, to explain and example. What the average reader needs is a search name that most closely resembles the one they will find in common use. It really is as simple as that. LessHeard vanU (talk) 01:18, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

That's what redirects are for. I don't see anyone objecting to the common-sense idea that any article with a title that uses diacritics should have redirects from alternate spellings without them, subject to appropriate disambiguation, etc.

As for the keyboard... I guess it all depends on your keyboard. Getting ö on my Mac is an easy matter of typing Option-U (for umlaut) and then "o". On my other UNIX systems, it's the sequence Compose, o, " to get ö. (Granted, many new Linux users aren't aware of the Compose key, or how their system maps that to the "Windows" keyboard—usually the right-hand Windows key.) On my iPad, I hold down "o" on the onscreen keyboard for a second and a popup appears with ö as one of the options. I understand that Windows Phone 7 uses the same technique. Granted, Windows for PC makes it hard: Either hold Alt and type 148 on the number pad, or install the Microsoft English (US-International) keyboard layout and type " followed by o to get ö... but then you need to type " followed by a space to get a quotation mark.

Given that the reader doesn't need to know that if we've set up the proper redirects, perhaps the real question is: is it reasonable to ask that someone editing pages about a foreign topic know how to create the diacriticals appropriate for the topic on their choice of computer? // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 03:26, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

In the event that the editor is competent enough to write the article but is unable to create the diacritics, no doubt, some selfless volunteer will move the page for them. --Boson (talk) 13:12, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Macwhiz, the point is that for many of us your way of phrasing things is just wrong. Let me put it other way around: "Is it reasonable to ask that someone editing pages about a foreign topic know how to write in English without using characters from other languages that sort of look like English characters just because they feel superior when doing so?" That's the real issue. Yes, the typing issue is also important, but the use of characters that are not a part of English, just because they sort of look like English, is just wrong. For the same reason we don't force people to use or read Japanese hiragana and katakana characters to learn about Japan, neither should we force people to use or read Vietnamese characters that aren't in English but sort of look like English. The Vietnamese characters are no more a part of English than are hiragana and katakana. It is wrong to force them on people.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:25, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Why do you pretend this is a discussion about arrogance? And even if it were: "you are arrogant, therefore we don't do what you say, whether it is correct or not" is not a valid argument in the scholarly context of an encyclopedia. —Kusma (t·c) 16:17, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Jimbo, I'm not certain I was understood properly. I agree that we shouldn't use incomprehensible symbols where it doesn't make a difference to pronunciation, or where there's a widely accepted romanization. But there are some languages, like Vietnamese, that use sounds that English doesn't distinguish. You can phonetically spell Mandarin with Roman characters; you can't phonetically spell Vietnamese that way. If you wrote ma referring to a Vietnamese word, with no diacritics you could mean "ghost", "but", "cheek", "tomb", "horse", or "rice seedling". The only thing that distinguishes those words is the tone of the vowel a, which is represented by the diacritic. There's got to be some middle ground where we can make clear to people that such words and names are literally unpronounceable to English speakers, without beating them over the head or making the article hard to read. // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 03:17, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

No, the first line following the bolded article subject should include the native spelling and script, usually within the brackets - same as we do for the Latin names of fauna and flora. We use the common English variant of a subject, and redirect the diacritic spellings to that. We should use the most common searched for spelling as the title - which will almost always be the common English version. Work on the basis that the diacritic representation of the subjects title is part of the learning process, and not the normal search parameter. In short, consider the reader. LessHeard vanU (talk) 15:28, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Mr Wales, how would you suggest the article Jerzy Łoś ought to be titled? LessHeard vanU, if I type Daniel Gildenlow into the earch box it's not because I think that's the correct spelling of Daniel Gildenlöw and it doesn't mean I would prefer his article renamed: it's because I'm lazy and I know that I will be redirected to the correct page. Contains Mild Peril (talk) 16:05, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

For small amounts of diacritics, there's always the character box below the edit box. Diacritics are often easy to type, as MacWhiz notes (I have used only American keyboards for years, and never had a problem with typing whatever I need). And anyway, dashes are hard to type, many people don't care about them or even notice the difference, but WP:MOSDASH still requires their use. I guess that means the MoS emphasizes typographical correctness over "easiness". —Kusma (t·c) 16:17, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

It is possible to use a free program to create custom Windows keyboards that include just about any diacritic you can think of - see [5] for an old discussion about this. Though as far as I know Wikimedia still doesn't have any place that would allow people to exchange these. Wnt (talk) 16:42, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

• I look at my keyboard, and what do I find? It's a British keyboard with the US-International keyboard layout. I am using it on Windows. Nowadays it's the only layout I use for typing LaTeX, various programming languages that also make heavy use of curly braces (which are hard to type on most non-English keyboard layouts), English, German and French. For instructions to change your keyboard layout under Windows, see here. Note that US-International can be found as a variant under English (like the Dvorak layout). What you must get used to: `~^'" are "dead keys" with this layout, i.e. combining characters. You have to press the character followd by space if you want the character. Also, the right Alt key is an AltGr key. Especially for ' and " having to press space as well is slightly annoying and takes a day or so of practice before it becomes second nature. Some examples: ~n becomes ñ. `e becomes è. "a becomes ä. For acutes, use 'a -> á etc., or the abbreviations AltGr-a etc. ç is AltGr-c. Some special characters such as æ (AltGr-z) can be hard to remember. Others, such as ł, are not available at all.
• On my EeePC I use the same layout, even though it has a German keyboard. I just pretend it was American.
• My work PC runs under Linux and has a US keyboard. I use the same layout there. Hans Adler 21:14, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

An interesting little tidbit: In the recent editor survey from the WMF, only 52% of the users said their primary language is English [6]. --Conti|✉ 21:29, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

May I also point out that typing Düsseldorf is at least marginally easier than explaining the General theory of relativity, and yet we have no trouble with letting users read and edit the latter? And I've been typing on UNIX layout US keyboards (or keyboards hacked to be as close to that ideal as possible) ever since the Sun-3.--Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:47, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

WP:BOMB

Further to the recent controversy around campaign for "santorum" neologism here on this page, here is a new essay:

• WP:BOMB / WP:Wikibombing.

Editors are invited to review or improve it, leave comments etc. Cheers, --JN466 15:23, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I did, including a reference to the existing Wikipedia:Search engine optimization. You may want that article to include a reference to your essay at some point. Flatterworld (talk) 15:44, 21 June 2011 (UTC) I no longer have any interest in this or anything else at Wikipedia. Write whatever you like under whatever name you like. I've had it. Flatterworld (talk) 19:10, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Also see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#New_essay:_WP:BOMB; part of the ongoing discussion there focuses on the effect, if any, of navigation templates and other internal links on Google page rank. --JN466 00:52, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I would like to point out I am the sixth long term, featured content writing editor to be retiring over this completely outrageous article. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 12:18, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm loathe to say I'm retiring too, because I've said it before then returned. But the way I feel at the moment, Wikipedia is not a good place to be. It's partly because of the article, mostly because of the ArbCom's failure to deal with the administrator who caused the whole mess. That failure has endorsed this as a legitimate way to use Wikipedia, and that shows contempt for the thousands of editors who try not to use it that way. It has not been a proud few weeks for the project. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 16:28, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

This is interesting evidence that POV-pushers are aware of the usefulness of internal navigation templates to push their points of view, a phenomenon I have seen before here on Wikipedia, and that right after an ArbCom case related to the issue. I'm surprised that it has taken the administrators so long to notice this simple trick. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 17:08, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I suggested an impartial way to rein this in, by setting some limit to the size of navigation templates, above which people should use categories instead. The response was to say that templates like {{The Beatles}} are indispensable (note the special indulgence to use show/hide, so people don't see how much linkcruft this adds to an article!):

So I feel as if those opposed to Cirt are saying, it's right to promote the Beatles but it's wrong to promote Dan Savage. And I'm not willing to accept that.

True, Category:The Beatles looks crude and ugly compared to the fancy template, and I understand why people love it. But this is a reason to get the devs working on improving category displays so that they look more appealing, like the template, and are easier to navigate. Fix that and then maybe we could get agreement to limit the template sizes, which would limit SEO to reasonable levels. Wnt (talk) 17:49, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Excuse me if this is a stupid suggestion, or if it has been proposed and answered elsewhere, but perhaps there's a way to set all links in templates to nofollow to limit their effect on SEO ranking. —DoRD (talk) 19:04, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I keep reading comments that all Wikipedia links are nofollow anyway. But then again, Google's method of establishing page rank is a secret, and just because they don't follow links with their webcrawler, does that mean they don't count? I don't know.

Also, I don't know whether we really want to abolish all our SEO as a website. If it were effective to apply a tag to the whole Template namespace, would Wikipedia results drop right off Google altogether? It would be nice to reduce CO2 emissions from the servers by 25%, but not like that!

Finally, my motivation isn't just to reduce SEO here; it's that this little bit of text {{The Beatles}} added 78,260 characters to the HTML source code of this page. Somehow navboxes have gained a policy status rivalled only (as in the santorum debate) by BLP. They can hide text, get by without references, include purely tabular directory material, and copy the same content in hundreds of places, avoid allegations of linkspam... it's as if they're just immune to everything. Even though they could readily be replaced either with a list of X-related topics article or by a category. I know prettiness means a lot when writing an encyclopedia, but there should be a limit on how far these things can go. Wnt (talk) 22:12, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

What is well known is that external links on Wikipedia are nofollow. This reduces the incentive for spammers to add a link to their website. But our internal links are "dofollow". You can see them come up in Google if you search for them. One of the leaked arbitration-l mails from 12 days ago put it like this::

"Regardless of the intention of Cirt and co, this case has exposed a gaping security hole in Wikipedia with no obvious easy means of mending. Every day this saga drags on, we're effectively writing a "how to" guide on how to use templates, DYK (which generates buttloads of automatically created internal links) and strategically placed links on external sites to manipulate Wikipedia's relationship with Google to game the PageRank system. Making Criticism of (insert politician/celebrity/rival product) the first hit on Google for a search on said politician/celebrity/rival product's name is a service for which companies would pay a fortune (if you were a sugar producer, how much would having Aspartame controversy be the first Google result for "artificial sweetener" be worth?), and we've now created a join-the-dots guide ..."

If that is an accurate summary, then we urgently need to make our navigation template links, as well as all non-mainspace links in Wikipedia, nofollow, to prevent internal link spamming. --JN466 22:54, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm curious that they said there is "no obvious easy means of mending". Applying some simple logic, perhaps that solution is either not obvious, not easy, or doesn't mend the problem. If we made everything "nofollow", wouldn't that render google unable to give useful page rank results to anything on Wikipedia, basically wiping Wikipedia off the google map? That's a lot of collateral damage. - Wikidemon (talk) 02:37, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Facepalm Look, mate, if we make --

1. Navigation template links

2. Non-mainspace links, i.e. links from talk pages, project pages, etc.

"nofollow", but leave all other blue links within mainspace as "dofollow", then the number of in-bound links to the majority of our 3 million articles that do not carry navigation templates remains unaffected. And nothing we do affects the impact of existing links to our articles from third parties, which is the honest way of earning a page rank. Look at an article like Baby, Baby I Need You. It still comes top in Google if you search for its title. It has no nav template, and less than ten in-bound links from other WP pages: [7], all of which are bona fide links from mainspace articles. So by making nav templates and project pages nofollow, all our articles would be like that one. Mainspace links only, as far as Google is concerned, and zero incentive for editors to suddenly go off and create three new navigation templates, other than genuine usefulness to the reader.--JN466 08:26, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

It sounds as if that would be an effective mediawiki software solution, although I doubt there's an easy way to distinguish between navigation templates and other templates. In fact, it may be a nontrivial coding problem to distinguish between links that arise from templates and links that arise from the body of an article, as my recollection of the code is that the transclusion of templates into WML happens in an earlier pass through the rendering of a page than the translation of wikilinks to XML hyperlinks. Not rocket science, but more than flipping a switch. As that would mend the problem, perhaps they considered that less than obvious or easy. Changing the code is out of the purview of editors, which gets to my point below that this may be a Foundation issue. If we fix that it's still possible to make spam through list articles, "see also" links, and patiently adding regular wikilinks. Those are easy to detect if you're vigilant. I'm wondering if, without a software change, we could just raise the bar for creating and populating templates, or for adding wikilinks to spamworthy topics that are not directly relevant and of due weight to the subject at hand. It's hard to know what google cares about, and that's subject to rapid unnanounced change. - Wikidemon (talk) 13:10, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

IMO this raises a policy issue that the Foundation or management may want to take a look at. Does Wikipedia want to take steps (or can it) to modify how its articles appear in search engine results so that subjects of relatively lower importance don't get unduly elevated? That could be treated as a community content decision as well, but perhaps the way to fix it is a policy directive or behind the scenes change to the mediawiki setup. I'm also of the opinion that we can address this without singling out any particular editor or being concerned whether they've crossed the line (or even where the line is) between enthusiastically adding material about a subject they're interested in, versus doing so to promote an agenda. Most people's agenda here is to increase and improve Wikipedia's coverage of all subjects, but doing so in a disproportionate fashion on minor subjects gives us the Pokemon problem, and now Santorum. - Wikidemon (talk) 21:00, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

SEO at Santorum (neologism) would not have been a problem if the article hadn't been a disgrace. After a great deal of effort on that page, and thanks largely to SlimVirgin and JN466, it is no longer such an embarrassment to the project or so complicit in a political campaign, though it'll need watching. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 21:43, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, assumptions of bad faith and Chicken Little "Wikipedia is a travesty" alamers miss the issue. A lot of people are working hard to build this project. Sometimes the result isn't what everyone would wish, sometimes it is. This is a question of adjusting expectations. - Wikidemon (talk) 05:37, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

I think it is you is you who might be missing the point. Articles like that are a total disgrace. That is why this topic appears nowehere in print media or broadcast media. And only "reliable sources" that cover it are partisan quais-news websites (like Huffington Post). If our article, as it existed just a few days ago, was printed in a mainstream publication, like the New York Times, or National Review, it would so damage their reputations it would likely destroy the careers of some people. (Why have the old versions of this article not been redacted?) No matter how you want to twist these things around, it is WRONG to print garbage like this, and the overwhelming majority of mainstream people would agree with that - not because it is censoring something, but because to print it is unethical. For all the policies we have crafted to try and guard against things like this, our chief problem is that when consensus endorses unethical behavior, then it is permitted. To even be associated with an attempt to smear a person at this level can destroy the careers of even the most highly respected figures, even if there were not directly involved (ie rathergate). As someone who occasionally has works published in mainstream publications, just being associated with something like this could destroy any chance I have of getting something published again. It is like a large section of this community just completely does not understand or grasp the level of journalistic malpractice we are participating in here. There is a reason that so many sources call this topic "unfit to print". This is why you are never going to get significant expert and professional support that is desperately needed on this project. For an expert or professional to be associated with such utter garbage is destructive to their career and credentials... I digress. I have received kind words from some editors, and I appreciate them, but so long as this article remains on wikipieda, I articles of this type are permitted by policy, I cannot continue to participate as I have in the past. Once-upon-at-time the common sense editors were the majority around here. I've been editting off an on here since 2003, and have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, but common sense has always prevailed in the past. I hate to say it, but some of the worst predication about wikipedia are coming true, and it because this community has been unable to come to grips with some of the structural issues that have been plaguing the community for many years now. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 17:20, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

How is our article - in any form - any more "disgraceful" than [8] or [9] or [10] or [11]? Wikipedia is not a Newspaper of Record known primarily in its "discretion" about not printing anything offensive to its advertisers (however otherwise important it would be to allow voters to make good public policy decisions). If Wikipedia were a newspaper, it might be the sort of free newspaper you find in almost every city that includes a column by Dan Savage. Or it might be like the Huffington Post, or Indymedia, or the Drudge Report, or The Smoking Gun, or any number of modern media outlets which promise, sooner or later, to bulldoze aside the remnants of Old Media. But it would not be that special kind of newspaper which is run by a hierarchy of frightened conformists whose careers hang on not what they can tell the reader but what they leave out. Wnt (talk) 21:42, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Sadly it is that opinion that will prevent wikipedia from becoming viewed as authoritative on anything. The "frightened conformists" are unfortunately the overwhelming majority of academics, experts, and professionals (not to mention our readers). (Of course you will likely deny reality and say thats just my opinion) Furthermore, read the very article you posted above [12] - it is an indictment of wikipedia for publishing this garbage, and describes its existence here as a "flaw in the medium". And the fact that you, or anyone else in the community, would look at the mainstream as "frightened conformists" because they dare follow a common sense code of ethics, demonstrates just how far off the path of reality you have went on his topic. When you look at the original article in the history, its clear drivel. The creators very username demonstrates his improper intentions. (Again, I know you will say I am assuming bad faith) But not only are those early versions of the article are BLP violating falsehoods and are unredacted, that editor is not banned, nor topic banned, but in fact still participating in the discussion on the talk page!! There is no point rehashing this entire argument here. Please don't take this as a personal attack, I have nothing against you. But your position is outrageous. My reason for posting this is to drive home the point that a large swath of editors here refuse to acknowledge this for the highly unethical trash that it was, and to a large degree still is. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 00:41, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

In order to dispute your claim, I need to know what date you think has falsehoods and/or what you think the falsehoods are. All I see, even in very early versions of the article, is the standard story that Dan Savage made up the term and a whole bunch of people commented about it. None of it looks particularly likely to be anything but an honest description of what happened.

As for the Register article, I can't explain it. The authors of that article say the same sorts of things as the Wikipedia article - then criticize Wikipedia for saying it. They jeer at Wikipedia's "haughty commitment to its new-age notion of democracy". Well they can jeer all they want, but Yankee Doodle is an anthem played with pride. Wnt (talk) 07:46, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

To be clear: it was a disgrace because it made the neologism out to be significant, when there is no reliable evidence that it has been taken up by a significant portion of any community. It mentioned a dictionary of slang had discussed the attempt at floating the neologism but failed to say the dictionary had declared the word was not worthy of note and had not included it in its alphabetical listing; i.e., our article misrepresented the only serious secondary source on the neologism's noteworthiness. I could go on, and have elsewhere. Savage's prank, though, is notable and deserves to be covered in this encyclopedia. Such a topic needs to be handled with subtlety and discernment, not blind submission to the will of Dan Savage or oversensitivity to the feelings or career hopes of Rick Santorum. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 12:43, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Oh, piffle. I remember using the word "santorum" about a lab vacuum pump in 2004. I'm not even a steadfast reader of Savage - I doubt I've read 1% of his columns over the past two decades, but this one was famous. The word is all over the place in lots of reliable sources. Even SlimVirgin's recent chopping spree at the article leaves 15k of stuff that was admitted to be important, and I don't agree with that. It must be hundreds of times more common in usage than real but obscure words like "porphyrogene". Why won't you accept that it can be a genuine neologism without becoming a household word? Wnt (talk) 19:04, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Wnt. We can neither confirm nor disprove your anecdote about usage. Can you please base your argument on something else? I've seen this claim now repeated in almost every venue you've commented on the subject. Where is the evidence of commonality in usage? And by that I mean in the manner you claim yourself to have used it, as a slang word meaning what Savage's campaign wanted it to mean, and not simply stated in reference to this controversy.Griswaldo (talk) 19:12, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Believe it or not, people in the city actually pick up those free newspapers and look through them to see what's happening. And Savage's column runs in just about all of them. And when people read something like that, they remember it. Wnt (talk) 02:03, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

"Santorum" is the wrong kind of word for that kind of thing anyway, so it's never going to take off, no matter how the issue is forced. It's like "Citizendium": it just has the wrong mouthfeel somehow. Mind you, I thought that about Kindle, but they seem to be flying off shelves anyway. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 19:33, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

• Further to these issues, please note Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Cirt. Best, --JN466 13:40, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

There is a problem with the Arbitration Commitee

Jimbo, ArbCom, stalkers, random-passers by, whoever. I'm frustrated, but please don't dismiss me because I'm frustrated, please hear me out. My confidence in the Arbitration Committee has taken a few serious dents recently, and I have a feeling that others' confidence in that Committee might also have suffered in recent weeks and months. So, I've identified what I think are the problems and how I think they can be solved. I may be completely wrong, but it can't hurt to hear me out.

Over the last few months, I've noticed what, to me, seems to be a dangerous trend from the Arbitration Committee. I hold most of the 18 individuals who make up that Committee in the highest esteem, one or two of them, I have the honour of being able to call friends. But collectively, something seems to have gone wrong. The Committee has become very good at implementing and adjusting its procedures and policies to its liking and at passing motions on obscure details on the wording of pages that, while of course valuable, spend most of their time gathering dust. There is nothing deeply wrong with this, per se, but I would suggest to you, Jimmy, and to anyone who might be reading this (since this seems as good a place as any to say what I have to say), that this has become more important to the Committee than dispute resolution.

Dispute resolution is the defining purpose of that Committee, yet its noticeboard is full of relatively minor adjustments to its policies and procedures (like a slight update to the procedure on handling motions) and its members seem pre-occupied with issuing secret instructions to clerks. Almost all of its business is done on its private wiki or its mailing list (I assume) and all the "dirty work" is passed either to its clerks, who are charged with maintaining and supervising the case pages or to administrators in the form of discretionary sanctions. This all contributes to my impression that it is out of touch with the community and has become too wrapped up in making sure people obey its rules (for arbitration pages) and rulings (for the result of a case or motion).

The specific events that prompted me to post this are this notice, which I'm certain was ordered by an arbitrator, but I have no idea which one or where, since the Committee leaves no on-wiki paper trail, and the broader MickMacNee case, but I've felt there's a problem for a while. A week into the case and four arbitrators have made any sort of comment at all, out of the 10 who voted to accept the case and the 16 who are active and not recused. As each day passes, my confidence that arbitration will solve the problems, or at least not make them worse, decreases. This is an important case. There are things that need to be dealt with and issues that need to be resolved where RfCs and and other dispute resolution fora have been tried and failed, but arbitrators don't seem interested. In fact, my prediction is that it will turn out to be very much like the Arbitration Enforcement sanction handling case, where nothing new or useful arises and the disputes only get worse and the damage to various people's reputations ranges from shrapnel wounds to the irreparable.

There are, however, other examples. One from the top of my head that illustrates my point perfectly is this motion. The dispute was not resolved, questions about administrator misconduct (which the Arbitration Committee is the only body with the power to deal with) and the Committee hugely exceeded its powers by effectively re-writing part of the protection policy and lumbering admins with more unneeded red tape.

I apologise for the length of my post, and for putting it here, because I know you're a busy man, Jimmy, but where else can I take a dispute with the highest dispute-resolution body? What I would like to see is:

• The Committee conducting its business and, where practical, its discussions on the wiki, except where privacy is concerned.
• An increased focus towards dispute resolution, giving it the highest priority behind whatever urgent privacy concerns etc it has to deal with; that also means attempting to find the root cause of a dispute and dealing with it (even if that means attracting controversy) rather than passing the buck through discretionary sanctions
• All active, non-recused arbitrators actively partaking in cases. Not just voting, but actually making an effort to comment in discussions about proposals and evidence and being seen to work suggestions from parties and passers-by into the final decision.
• Raising issues with parties, such as evidence length, on their talk page in person, instead of secretly ordering a clerk to do it. And, more importantly, being more concerned about getting the best, yet most concise, evidence instead of forcing evidence into an arbitrary word limit.
• Monthly (or at least quarterly) reports to the community on what the Committee has done in that time and a collegial discussion between community members and arbitrators on how anything could have been handled better.
• Clearly defined scope to cases, to be determined before the evidence phase opens, and the removal of any evidence outside the scope of the case.
• It would also be nice to see one arb a fortnight spend that fortnight on the "front line" as an admin (since all are currently admins) dealing with vandals, closing AfDs, answering RfPP requests and doing what admins do. I think, with one or two exceptions, those arbitrators who had significant experience of day-to-day admin work have forgotten their experiences there and some had very little before they were elected arbitrators (and I mean that not as a criticism; I understand being an arb is not easy and the job has a high burn-out rate).

I love Wikipedia, so I'm not posting this because I need to vent, though my experiences will inevitably be reflected in my opinions. I'd like to hear what you and others have to say, and if the consensus is that there is no issue and I'm just bitter about my recent experiences surrounding arbitration, then I'll shut up. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 03:12, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Personally, I feel arbcom is given too much power. Whoever came up with the idea that all members must have CU and Oversight access by default, and keep it indefinitely? Wikipedia shouldn't be, and isn't, a bureaucracy.Jasper Deng (talk) 03:25, 25 June 2011 (UTC

That may have been the case in the past, but as far as I know, the only former arbs that retain the checkuser and oversight tools are the ones that are actively using them to help out, or who held the tools before they were arbs. The impression I get (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that former arbs relinquish those tools if they have no need for them - that is what I did when my term expired. Also, as far as I am aware, there are periodic reviews of the CU and OS teams to ensure those with the tools are actually using them and helping out. Carcharoth (talk) 23:02, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

• When I saw this pop up on my watchlist, I assumed you were talking about this. Is there a Deep Throat on arbcom? Maybe we should find out and close the hole, as this should never be able to happen. --John (talk) 03:30, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
  • John/Jimbo: See WT:AC for what's going on with the hack/theft of mail.

• • HJ: I can say this. I was the one who requested a clerk remove the yelling at sandstein, and I'll stand behind that. However, as far as I can tell, no one requested AGK do what the rules tell him, arb, clerk or whatever. I do know that we had people getting frustrated that we weren't enforcing word/diff limits on other cases/requests (the latest one is still on WT:RfArb, so in general, they're being hard-line in enforcing the word/diff rules that have been in place.. I think everyone needs to abide by them. Also, as one of the drafting arbs on this, I can assure you I'm paying attention to this case, I do so on every case possible. A lot of my fellow arbs have other duties and can't monitor cases 24/7, for example, Roger Davies spent the last few months shepherding through the latest version of the ArbPolicy.. As for your request to more narrowly delineate scopes, I think that's counterproductive. The Committee needs to go where the evidence (and its own review of the situation takes it). Sometimes, this gathers in related events (for example, MMN is primarily focused on MickMacNee's editing actions, specifically how he interacts with others, however, as a related issue, Sandstein's lengthening of the block (and your undoing) becomes part of the case. SirFozzie (talk) 03:56, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
    • And why did you make AGK do it? Why not do it yourself? Why is it all done cloak and dagger? I'm not an unreasoanble guy, even when I'm angry. You could have said something to me. As for the word limit nonsense, how can I possibly conduct a proper defence against Sandstein's accusations in 500 words? But the point is that ArbCom cares more about whether its procedures are followed and whether the evidence is within some arbitrary limit than it does about the substance of the evidence. With the exception of AE, which was spawned from ArbCom, arbitration is the only place on Wikipedia where the letter of the rule is so rigidly enforced over the spirit. I know the Committee has a difficult job to do, and I hold you and most of your colleagues in the utmost esteem, but collectively, you've got so wrapped up in procedure that you've forgotten you're there to resolve disputes. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 14:48, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
      • I think you may have misread, because SirFozzie said that "no one requested him to do what the rules tell him" (emphasis added). As a matter of routine, I periodically evaluate evidence submissions in cases I am clerking, and request the redaction of submissions that are overly length; by my count, your submission ran to 2000 words. Had I not asked you to reduce the length of your evidence, I am unsure whether an arbitrator would have prompted me to do so later, but that is a less important point because the rules on evidence submission are clear. As we are discussing the ArbCom generally here: I am always mindful that the clerks must not contribute to opaqueness. If an arbitrator had asked me to request redaction, I would have said "By arbitrator request [or, request of arb X], please reduce the length of your evidence". AGK [•] 23:02, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

(OK, edit conflict with above) There's a lot to digest here, HJ Mitchell, but you kind of lost me at "The specific events that prompted me to post this are this notice, which I'm certain was ordered by an arbitrator, but I have no idea which one or where, since the Committee leaves no on-wiki paper trail...". There's a rule requiring a 500-word limit on submissions, and you made a 2000-word submission, is this correct? Well, what did you expect would happen, and what difference does it make if you were upbraided by an arbitrator, a clerk acting on her own, a clerk acting at the direction of an unnamed arbitrator, or the Swiss Minister of Tourism? If your submission had been 503 words you could claim pettifoggery, but 2000? It's a perfectly reasonable rule -- people are busy -- and I'm still wondering what your problem is with that particular diff. Herostratus (talk) 04:00, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

If you can't be bothered to read and comment on my entire post, that's fine, but you should say so instead of skim-reading it and dismissing my concerns. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 14:48, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

This decline show the importance of dispute resolution over conduct review (WRT roles the committee has), well that was my interpretation of it was, and this as well. So I think we are doing both. Casliber (talk · contribs) 05:20, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree with most of HJ Mitchell's systemic criticism and strongly support his suggestions. Seen from the outside, the Committee as a body seems to spend too much time administering itself and trying to run a government of sorts, rather than actively resolving arbitration cases, which is its job description. Even simple cases last for months with ill-defined scopes and little arbitrator activity (on the WP:AESH case, several active members did not even vote!), while arbitrators are busy micro-managing and dabbling in the community's feuds and soap operas via e-mail (at least that's the superficial impression one gets from the e-mails being leaked on external websites). Arbitrators should focus on their main job (resolving the cases before them), do their work onwiki and refrain from accepting or sending e-mail unless really necessary for privacy reasons, come up with a sensible division of labor (an 18-strong committee can't do much as a body), and stop wasting time on complex "rehabilitation" projects of disruptive editors instead of just banning them and letting the rest of us get on with their work. Of course, there's little that Jimbo can do about that.  Sandstein  06:18, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Jimbo, when I read HJ Mitchell's post, I was in the process of writing one myself, and wondering what to focus on, and where best to post it. The recent leaks show an ArbCom that seems to spend its time gossiping about editors, running people down, and obsessing with trivial issues and who-is-saying-what on Wikipedia Review. In parallel, they are turning down or failing to deal with important cases. It's so incredibly depressing that I currently feel I just don't want to be associated with this project anymore.

What is extremely worrying is that they are archiving these posts, and making the archives available to every new member, so inevitably someone has gained access and downloaded the lot. The ArbCom's response has been to discuss increasing security, which completely misses the point. The Foundation should not be hosting and retaining material like this in the first place. Even without the risk of leaks, it fosters a "Self and Other" atmosphere within the ArbCom, which is elected by everyone and should therefore serve everyone. And it gives new members permission to behave the same way, so it's not something that's likely to be self-correcting.

I've been a member of various private mailing lists, and it's unfortunately human nature for them to devolve into this kind of nastiness. As HJ Mitchell says, each of the Arbs alone may be someone we'd admire and want to support, but collectively something has gone badly wrong. It's no-one's fault, but it does have to be fixed. Suggestions:

• I echo HJ Mitchell's request that the Committee conduct most of its business on Wikipedia, and not on secret ArbCom wikis or mailing lists.
• That when writing to mailing lists, they copy their posts to the people they are writing about, except in circumstances where real harm could be caused by doing so.
• That they remove from their archives as a matter of urgency material that could damage editors. Even though it seems the archives have been downloaded by the leaker, it still makes sense to stop them becoming available to anyone else. In fact, it would make sense in future not to retain archives. Why are they really needed?
• That they focus exclusively on arbitration, and stop acting as though they're a mini-government.
• That they do everything in their power not to allow an Us and Them situation to develop, and to clamp down on it internally when they see other members doing it. In other words, the more sensible members have to be willing to speak out, to stop the ArbCom from being just another clique.

As others have said, I'm writing this because I love Wikipedia (or loved it, I'm not sure which), and I respect individual ArbCom members. But as a group it just isn't working. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 07:27, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

As one who isn't always known for agreeing with SlimVirgin, I'd like to echo her above sentiments 100%. --Kotniski (talk) 14:46, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Sandstein's post above is probably the best comment I have ever seen about the ArbCom. I agree with it 100%. I've had similar thoughts for years, and hope this comment will be used to guide ArbCom reform in the future. Nanobear (talk) 09:12, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

• Arbcom members are well intentioned. However, they are serving as what amounts to a governing body for a major website. Perhaps it is time for the Foundation to hire a consultant to issue a report on what Arbcom does well, what it does not do well, and what it should look to be doing in future. I apologize if this has already been done, it is not something I am aware of.--Wehwalt (talk) 14:03, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

• <sigh>... I don't know. I mean I really do love Wikipedia and all. But to be honest? ... As much as I might disagree with some of the Arbcom results? .. (throwing out the baby with the bathwater things) ... I really do think that for the most part they do what they're asked to do. They approach things very cautiously, try to keep in mind what the whole community wants of them,,,and they try their damndest to do what's best for the project. It's not like they're getting paid for the crap they have to read through. Damned good folks trying to do an impossible job that is for the most part pretty thankless. But I suppose we all feel that way at times here. We all (for the most part) invest our real life time to trying to "improve" this noble effort, and at times it can get frustrating. In the end? ... Do what you can to make things better, .. enjoy your time here ... enjoy life. When it gets to the point where you're feeling upset by something here - turn the computer off for a bit and walk outside and smell the roses. There's only one life we're given. Best to enjoy it while ya can. Just sayin. — Ched :  ?  15:43, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly agree with folks on the committee editing and being involved elsewhere on the 'pedia, and have stated this both times I was elected. I also agree with conflict resolution and figuring out ways to grease the axles and keep the 'pedia developing is critical as part of that process, and yes, I have a strong compulsion to go outside but it is middle of winter here...brrrr... :( Casliber (talk · contribs) 21:03, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Responding here to SlimVirgin's point about purging of the archives. That stops people gaining accessed to WMF-held archives of the list, but it does nothing about personal copies of mailing list correspondence kept by individual arbitrators. There are some arbitrators who have been on the committee for years (much longer than I was), and if archives are purged then any personal archives they may hold would be the next logical target. There are ways to make that attack vector less vulnerable, though, and purging the archives would ensure that new arbitrators only have access to what they get while on the committee. So on balance, I think purging of the archives is something that should, and likely will, be done. Trouble is, it looks like it is a bit late now, and it also raises the problem of verifying the leaks. How can you verify that a "leak" is genuine if the mastercopy has been destroyed? Carcharoth (talk) 23:11, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, but I have to make this comment: Does this mean that we have a Wiki-leaks problem? :) Ronk01 talk 23:13, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Carcharoth, the problem with the archives is that every year a new group of people is invited to read and download them. This means the correspondence is being read by people other than the original email recipients, people the original correspondents were not addressing. That is manifestly unfair, particularly as the ArbCom invites editors to write to it privately.

As for how to verify that a leak is genuine, why would that really matter, compared to the above? SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 21:57, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I have to echo HJ Mitchell, Sandstein and SlimVirgin here, and have little to add beyond the fact that it is depressing to see how often ArbCom tries to become GovCom. Truth be told, I think they create as many disputes as they solve at times. Resolute 23:27, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Somewhat arbitrary break

• There's some disgruntled admins (above) not happy about certain specific decisions, but from which they appear to have drawn some general conclusions. WP is (sadly but inevitably) a hierarchy (new editors, then long-standing editors, then admins, then various cliques within the admins, then arbcom). Each bitches about the ring of the hierarchy just above them (exclusiveness, clique, "Self and Other", disrepect etc). Those who complain about the hierarchy above them are surprisingly unaware of the irony in their complaints. More to do with amour propre than anything else. Nothing new here...move on. DeCausa (talk) 21:20, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
  • Oh, some long-standing editors are far more influential than any admins, make no mistake about that. You really don't need the admin tools to have any kind of status around here. Oh, and I think the bureaucrats and stewards and developers (and a few other groups) feel a bit left out from your hierarchy. Carcharoth (talk) 23:13, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I would wholeheartedly agree that the Arbitration Committee is in need of significant reform so as to return the body to the purpose for which it was chartered. Perhaps, as above stated, an outside consultant could review the actions and efficacy of the Committee and produce a report with recommendations for positive reform. However, I do concur that the following reforms are direly needed:

• Greater transparency in communication. Specifically, limiting all non-public discussion to that which contains private information that should not be made public.
• Greater transparency in decision making
• Re-dedication to conflict resolution, and less emphasis on developing a massive bureaucracy (Arbitration Committee policy etc.)
• Elimination of pointless bureaucratic nonsense (such as using Arbitration Clerks unnecessarily)
• Establishment of a system to select a diverse, knowledgeable, and unbiased temporary panel to review the actions of the Arbitration Committee in cases where case participants or community members raise legitimate concerns regarding Committee actions. The panel must be given the ability to reverse decisions it feels to be improper, and to sanction individual Arbitrators. (Perhaps to be selected by lottery from a pool of volunteers with at lease 3,000 edits and a year of service.)
• Establishment of a two year term limit for Arbitrators to prevent stagnation of the character of the Committee.

Ronk01 talk 03:22, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

• I dunno. It's not like you're ever going to not have problems running a project like this. It's simply a matter of this: which problems do you want to have? You can have everything be public, and then you have people being publicly hurt, and energy-consuming drama, and charismatic figures holding sway, and so forth. You can have nothing be public, and then you have lack of accountability, and insufficient input, and unreviewed hasty decisions, and alienation of the volunteers, and so forth. You can have some of each, and have some of both kind of problems. That's it; those are your choices. Perfect harmony is not on the menu. Similarly for governance -- if the ArbCom is acting like the senior bosses of an organization generally do, is that bad? I don't know. Maybe it is. It depends on how competent they are at it, I guess. I haven't considered the Wikipedia to be ruled with an iron fist, compared to most other human organizations. Herostratus (talk) 03:38, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I also have a serious issue with disciplining volunteers who are doing the best they can, and that is ArbCom. As for the proposed supervisory body, that inevitably will become the new ArbCom, to be run by random people? Now, we've had some difficult Arbs in my time, imagine what you will get selecting at random from Wikipedians with minimal qualifications!--Wehwalt (talk) 03:57, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

So are you opposed to disciplining corrupt or inept politicians? The board I propose would be formed only when needed, with no one individual serving on more than three boards within the span of five years. The 20 member board would be dissolved immediately upon the resolution of the conflict, and its scope would be limited to the particular case in dispute. Members would be volunteers with at least 3,000 edits and one year of service (Certainly enough experience to gain an appreciation for how the encyclopedia works) Both admins and regular editors who are not active or former Arbitrators or clerks. Said board would make decisions based firstly on Wikipedia policy, then on Arbitration Policy. There would be no input from either the case participants or ArbCom other than to give a position brief (ArbCom would submit one of these to represent the position of all active arbitrators). All discussion between board members would be public (exempting that information which was not made public during the ArbCom case) This approach provides for indirect, truly representative community intervention in cases of alleged malfeasance on the part of the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee. Ronk01 talk 04:30, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

If politicians are volunteers, it's going to come as news to many, and open some questions about where the money they thought was salary came from. Politicians, by the way, in my view are best disciplined by denying them reelection.--Wehwalt (talk) 04:38, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps not the ideal comparison (though, if I remember, Jefferson thought that politicians should be volunteers) Though I would remind you that we are discussing a committee who's primary task is to discipline volunteers. Ronk01 talk 04:46, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Very true. For their conduct. Did you propose to have the new committee discipline arbs for their conduct? If so, what kind of conduct, by existing arbs causes you concern? I did not vote for all of the present serving arbs; that does not mean I cannot say they've done an OK job this year.--Wehwalt (talk) 04:53, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I have no personal issue with any individual Arb. However, to clarify the function of the commit tie: It would have four functions:

• To determine the presence and extent of malfeasance committed by the Arbitration Committee and its members
• To take appropriate action to correct the effects of Arbitration Committee malfeasance
• To sanction individual arbitrators for their actions
• To review those actions of the Committee that, while not overtly malfeasant, are in some way questionable or inappropriate

Again, this committee would have no permanent members, and would only be formed when needed (much like some disciplinary committees here in the US) Possible sanctions against individuals could include temporary suspension, exclusion from upcoming elections etc. The committee would not have the direct authority to remove an arbitrator from the Committee, but could make such a recommendation to Jimbo. This would, of course further devolve power from Jimbo to the community, as per his stated wish. Ronk01 talk 05:08, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Every ArbCom outcome will have "case participants or community members" who will "raise legitimate concerns regarding Committee actions", guaranteed, and they will be, for the most part, good faith complaints, too. Just wading through the presentation verbiage alone will be a lifetime's sentence. And can you imagine volunteering to spend the time an arbitration takes if it is to be carefully done, knowing that some or all of it will have to be done all over again because that guaranteed someone will have a legitimate concern? If there is a problem with an abitrator, don't vote for him or her. If the problem is serious, tell the Board. Creating another level of bureaucracy, however well intentioned, smacks of process for the sake of process. And WP really needs that! I get a headache just thinking about the pages of drama in setting up the committee to set up the committee to determine who sits . . . Bielle (talk) 05:13, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

If legitimate concerns are always raised does this not raise the concern that ArbCom is not doing its job well, and that it needs supervision? Determining who sits is simple, anyone who meets the qualifications may apply, and volunteers are randomly selected from the pool. Using elections to resolve these kinds of issues simply doesn't work, the lag time between an event and an election is often simply too long. And, if we put a limit of the length of position briefs, reviewing them wouldn't be that hard. And don't you think that ArbCom would do a better job if they know that they could be brought up for review? Ronk01 talk 05:21, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

So randomly selected from those who apply, meeting rather minimal qualifications. Bielle, your concern is answered. The pages of drama will spew merrily away, because we will get the people who utterly revel in this sort of thing. And ArbCom is brought up for review on a regular basis, by election, and the community has been known to signal its displeasure with ArbCom in those elections. Indeed, one suggestion that would involve additional review is to plump for annual ArbCom elections of the entire committee.--Wehwalt (talk) 05:28, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

And we don't get pages of meaningless drama that leads nowhere in these situations anyway? Remember, juries work quite well when they have direction and order (perhaps have five of the 20 member board be admins?) With regard to "rather minimal qualifications" We've already tried a group with excellent qualifications, and that happens to be the one who's issues we are discussing right now. Allow the community to have a say in the arbitration process at some point, and you will see a greater lever or editor satisfaction with ArbCom. I do like the idea of annual total elections though. Ronk01 talk 05:40, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

(after 2 ecs) "If legitimate concerns are always raised does this not raise the concern that ArbCom is not doing its job well, and that it needs supervision?" Not at all. If ArbCom were always dealing with black-and-white, we wouldn't need it. All the cases are dozens of shades of gray. Seldom is anyone all right and all the others all wrong. The outcomes are more than a little like WP:The Wrong Version. I don't see how another layer of judges is going to make the process anything except worse. Have you thought about conflicts between certain admins and/or editors and the cases on which they are selected to sit? You really cannot just select from an open pool of volunteers. I have never worked better thinking someone was just waiting for me to make a mistake. Does anyone, from a toddler on up? Arbitrators can be "brought up for review" if the problem is egregious. If it isn't, it is their informed opinions versus our (relatively) uninformed ones. I know which one I'd choose. Bielle (talk) 05:42, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Also, I don't see why having a certain number of admins will provide order and direction. Admins are not chosen for leadership skills. Unless you meant they could "discipline" their own fellow members via the block button?--Wehwalt (talk) 05:47, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I suppose a point by point rebuttal?

• "All the cases are dozens of shades of gray. Seldom is anyone all right and all the others all wrong..." Such a committee would ideally only examine cases in which there is no obvious justification for the actions of ArbCom
• "Have you thought about conflicts between certain admins and/or editors and the cases on which they are selected to sit?"Conflicts would be resolved just like they are in real life jury systems, by exclusion for conflict*
• "You really cannot just select from an open pool of volunteers" Juries work pretty well don't they?
• "I have never worked better thinking someone was just waiting for me to make a mistake" But aren't you better motivated to preform well when you know that you are not practically invulnerable to reproach?
• "Arbitrators can be "brought up for review" if the problem is egregious." How? I know of no such practical process
• "it is their informed opinions versus our (relatively) uninformed ones. I know which one I'd choose." So you like the idea of people making your decision for you? I think that's called a dictatorship
• Wehwalt: No, but admins are more experienced users and can steer discussions to important points etc.
  Ronk01 talk 06:02, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

There is a huge difference between looking at cases where someone has a "legitimate concern" and ones where "there is no obvious justification" for the ArbCom results (which covers every case where privacy is the issue, and all the pedophile matters, for example). In neither case do I see another level making an improvement.

Juries are not volunteers, at least not in any system based on common law. They are also seriously vetted once they are placed in the pool. All of this work in selecting them is done by people who are paid and professional. Whether they work or not depends almost entirely on how any given outcome is viewed.

It isn't a dictatorship because I value informed opinion over uninformed, even if the latter is mine. What possible logical connection is there in your conclusion?

Bielle (talk) 06:24, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

In U.S. common law, juries are composed of non-conflicted randomly selected members of the public who are chosen to sit by both the prosecution and the defense (voir dire). In our case they would be non-conflicted, knowledgeable volunteers randomly selected from a pool of diverse editors serving to represent the community as a whole. Probably more effective than a jury actually. Are juries effective? Well, for every 100 criminal cases presented to the average jury, 90 are decided correctly (i.e. in ten cases it is later verified that the jury gave the wrong verdict) Essentially, this system takes Jimbo's role of oversighting ArbCom and gives it to the community. No one group in any organization should ever have as little oversight as ArbCom has right now. I suppose a better definition of the scope of this committee would be in order, but certain type of concerns should always be addressed, such as legitimate accusations of malfeasance. The willing release of one's own right to affect society to a "better informed" other is, essentially a form of permitted dictatorship. Ronk01 talk 06:45, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

It seems to me that arbcom should be active in non-DR parts of the project. Otherwise they'd lose their grounding in what this is about. The problem is that wiki, as noble as the idea is, will never rise to what it could be until humans rise above what they are in the real world. Wiki is a reflection of our real world, with all its failings, despite its noble and lofty goals and ideas. Users bring their personas, personalities, and biases, good and bad, onto wiki, hence we have our ethnic wars, personality clashes, spelling disputes, etc. Until humans learn to resolve those issues and differences in the real world, wiki will always have these problems too. That being said, admins and arbs have a thankless task. I don't want to be one; I don't need the stress and drama. I imagine the arbs get dozens, perhaps hundreds, of emails a day--they have to slug thru that plus deal with all the complaining and problem cases and users, plus other onwiki tasks--all without pay and yet many users seems to expect them to be perfect and decide things their way all the time. I read some of the DR pages for info, but I try hard not to even comment; again I don't need the stress and drama. I've already seen many threads on users who've been problems for years and it's obvious if a user really wants to be involved here despite being a major pain the butt and not willing to change, there's really no effective way to get rid of them. BarkingMoon (talk) 12:31, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

@BarkingMoon, this has been discussed many a time. If you look through past cases, people do get banned from here at times. Casliber (talk · contribs) 14:58, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

@Cas, you're missing the point. Ban them if you want, but it doesn't actually prevent them from coming back, certainly not under a new name. And even if they get noticed, someone will cry that they never should have been banned, yada yada yada. Ala Betacommand/Delta (who I've seen at least 4 threads on for behavior that's years old, and countless others.BarkingMoon (talk) 18:37, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

He's not the best example of that, but I take your point - this is multifactorial, and features such as anonymous editing don't help this, however others who are banned stay pretty much so. Casliber (talk · contribs) 22:03, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am reading all this with great interest. Some of it is unfair to ArbCom, which I think does a fine job overall, but some of the concerns raised are reasonable and also structural, not complaints about how ArbCom is doing their jobs at the moment. I don't think it makes sense to a have a random jury over ArbCom, but think that random juries do make sense and likely should have a role in our future processes.

One of the problems that we have is that our ArbCom must function both as our Supreme Court and as our only court. What that means is that they really should continue to pay careful attention to precedent and precise wording and follow strict procedures. But it also means that they have to be a practical court which hears cases and finds solutions.

One of the concerns many have raised, and which I think is valid, is that combining those two things together means that, unfortunately, justice is slow - likely too slow in many cases.

I have long thought that a good solution would be some intermediate courts or - as I am now thinking - randomized juries. The idea here is for people to be able to get a quick and binding answer from uninvolved editors/admins. There's are of course a lot of potential problems with this - but I think it is an idea worth exploring.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:30, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Jimbo, you have to deal with the issue of ArbCom members being openly contemptuous and insulting about the editors they discuss, and doing it without their knowledge. That's a feature of private mailing lists—you'll recall that the cyberstalking list unfortunately ended up with the same situation—because it's human nature to form in-groups and to speak differently about perceived outsiders. But it's something that has to be guarded against constantly on the ArbCom list, because it's not a private list. It's run by the Foundation, and the members were elected by the very people they're being contemptous of.

Now the archives are full of this damaging gossip, and even ignoring the issue of unauthorized access, more people are given authorized access to them every year, which damages the editors who've been discussed. People have been complaining about this for years to no avail, but it really has to be dealt with now at Foundation level because it has to stop. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 15:44, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I do like the idea of an intermediate binding DR venue. However, there are three aspects or ArbCom reform that I feel to be important:

• Limiting private discussion to only those matters that would be in some way injurious to a party in the case, other editors, or Wikipedia if released.

• Establishment of a form of oversight for ArbCom. This is critical. Supreme Courts are usually accountable to the national legislature and or the head of government.
• Annual, total elections (And possibly term limits)
  Ronk01 talk 16:26, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

The oversight is crucial, and currently non-existent. And we do need annual elections for each member, with people not allowed to stand again for a certain length of time after serving, so that we have a genuine turnover each year.

Giano suggested last year that he be allowed to stand without identifying himself, with no CU or oversight access, no mailing list access, and just let him resolve disputes onwiki. We all threw our hands up in horror, me included, and said no. Well, what stupidity that turned out to be! That is in fact exactly what's needed now—an arbitration committee that will do only that, and will do it in public. With perhaps a very small separate group (two or three) who will quickly and carefully handle the genuinely sensitive material in private, and who are otherwise not involved in arbitration matters. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 17:06, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

No special rules for Giano, nor anyone else. It's high time Giano stop thinking he's so damn special. He is not God's gift to wiki.BarkingMoon (talk) 18:39, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

• I beg your pardon BarkingMoon, are you talking about me? As far as I'm aware i have not editied for 5 days or since this ridiculous fiasco began! You are quite right slim, but i don't think that is what Mr Wales wants to hear right now. Giacomo Returned 22:54, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I meant that it would be good to have Arbs who only manage arbitration cases in public. I think they're put in a very awkward situation with the current set-up, and it leads to situations that none of them can be held responsible for, yet they have to deal with the fall-out. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 20:16, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Slim, I totally agree that the arbs have too much on their plate and have heaps of undeserved flak fired at them.BarkingMoon (talk) 20:30, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Hence why it is a last resort and why there are proposals about to buff or rejig intermediate levels of dispute resolution. See Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Dispute resolution and Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Summarised_proposal for starters. Casliber (talk · contribs) 22:03, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

For more on the history of some of the suggestions for randomised juries, follow the links provided here. That is me responding back in 2007 to Kelly Martin's blog post on the subject, pointing out that the idea is older than her suggestion back then (hence the idea can't really be credited to any one person), though the proposals over the years have varied in detail and practicality. Of course, pointing out earlier suggestions should be done only to bring forward the better ideas to inform any new proposals. Carcharoth (talk) 22:27, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I do believe that a "lower court" of randomly selected anonymous jurors would be a great help to ArbCom's workload, as it would allow it to focus on those cases where a court capable of generating precedent is needed. I feel that many of ArbCom's current functions could be assumed by such a system, including routine desysop proceedings (which would solve another problem by speeding up the process) This may also help to alleviate some of the tensions created in cases, as the deciding body would be totally anonymous. (Think Rodhulandemu) Of course selection and qualifications required to serve would need to be decided. (I personally recommend 5,000 edits and at least a year of service, or 3,000 edits and a year of service if the editor has some DR experience (i.e. MEDCAB)) Ronk01 talk 22:49, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't think anyone was suggesting anonymous jurors. That would be a bad idea. Carcharoth (talk) 22:51, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

On thinking about that, it probably would turn out badly. Ronk01 talk 22:59, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't think a "lower court" would solve the problem, as IMO, the problem is that ArbCom (as a collective) has gotten to the point of having a God complex. Making the body something closer to a Supreme Court would not alleviate that problem. Considering that ArbCom, theoretically, exists to solve problems that the community cannot, I would suggest that a potential remedy would be to enshrine the community's right to overrule ArbCom when it feels confident that it has developed the ability to resolve said disputes itself. Resolute 23:32, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

This is my opinion as well, basically. My sense is that Arbcom needs a counterweight. Not necessarily something over them, but something that has the authority to override their decisions. Checks and balances, and all that, you know?
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 00:23, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree with User:DeCausa in his/her statement at the beginning of the "somewhat arbitrary break" starting this part of the thread, each "clique" thinks the one that it peceives as being "higher" on the food chain is the one that is dysfunctional, and the ones below it consists of children whose hands need to be held. I have never been a fan of Admins, who as a whole but with notable exceptions tend to treat normal editors as children and see themselves as police, judges, and jury, and at times executioners. It doesnt seem to be normal editors but instead it seems to be Admins that get upset about ArbCom, perhaps because they dont like being overruled. Generally I have seen, in cases like User:Noleander, ArbCom steps up and actually does something about cases where admins at AN/I pawn off the problem and refuse to get involved or do anything. I see the problem more being that Admins do not want to listen and actually do any work that involves actual fair and honest investigation. The problem is not with ArbCom, it with Admins. Does this mean we shouldn't have checks and balances as Ohm's law (V=IR) suggests? No, it is definately something to consider.

But we aren't a republic and we have a decidedly anti-bureaucratic anti-establishment community to work with and in. Could some people come up with some proposals for checks and balances? And since many of our users are not Americans perhaps "borrowing" from US functions might not be the best idea, or at least explaining them for lay people in other countries if your proposal does include borrowing from US federal structure. Above all, remember any type of bureaucracy set up never functions the way it was written, what we set up now may not be end up what we intended, and two/three years from now a new thread may be discussed about "ArbCom oversight committee is too powerful"Camelbinky (talk) 16:56, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Arbcom and WMF

What exactly is the relationship between the Arbcom and the WMF? Does the Arbcom have any kind of corporate standing? Prioryman (talk) 23:11, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Aside from being on the functionaries mailing list and some current or former arbs doing various kinds of work with the organization, nothing official. They have lines of communication that allow them to communicate concerns to the WMF and cooperate on certain issues, but that's about it AFAIK. Throwaway85 (talk) 23:29, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Foundation respects and supports the traditional arrangements of the community, which often predate the Foundation. I don't know what the phrase "corporate standing" means.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:33, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

If I had a guess, I would say they are asking if ArbCom has the ability to speak on behalf the WMF. Or simply, if ArbCom's judgements are to be assumed as having the support of the foundation. I am presuming the answer is no. Resolute 23:38, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Right, so for each of those questions in turn. First, ArbCom does not have the ability to speak on behalf of the Foundation. Second, the Foundation supports our traditional constitutional arrangements (which, in the English Wikipedia, means a whole set of complex institutions and traditions, including my role, the role of ArbCom, etc.) in a general way, but of course these are community processes, not Foundation processes.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:55, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

climate change dysfunction

Dear Jimbo,

I return every so often to see if anything has changed in the climate change pages, but find each time that despite ArbCom's intervention, nothing much has.

In particular, it is still impossible to contribute to Wikipedia's climate change pages unless one either shares the majority POV of the clique of climate change regulars, or is willing to press on despite their derision and obstruction.

I have a simple proposal to make: it should be banned to (a) describe apparently skeptical editors as 'fringe theorists' or 'conspiracy theorists'; and likewise (b) describe climate change skepticism or skeptics as fringe theorists or conspiracy theorists in the articles.

In my view it is one of the most recurrent and most disruptive themes of talk pages and yet there is still little an editor can do to stop it. I would like to have that discussion once and for all so that this proposal could be passed into 'law'.

Cheers, Alex Harvey (talk) 15:12, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

But what if these 'skeptics' are described by reliable sources as fringe theorists' or 'conspiracy theorists'? AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:17, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Andy, I think you missed part of what Alex is saying. He's talking about "apparently skeptical editors" being labelled by other editors, as well as talking about how we characterize things in articles.

On the first point, I think editors should basically never call each other unflattering names, and it is particularly unhelpful in a difficult editing area for people to try to minimize others by labeling them. And I think there is a serious problem with this.

On the second point, I think that climate change skeptics should almost never be described by wikipedia as fringe theorists or conspiracy theorists, but of course if that's what reliable sources say (not just editorial slams, but a reasonable number and kind of reliable sources) then we should report on that.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:22, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Jimbo, I take your point about how we describe other editors, though it needs to be said that some Wikipedia contributors do promote 'fringe' theories etc, and it would be rather restricting to never be able to state this: but yes, we should avoid calling each other names. As to how articles describe people, again, I agree that we should generally phrase it as being a description from a source. However, I think that this is already covered by existing policy and practice, and any attempt introduce special restrictions with regard to particular topics would be misguided, and only result in more Wikilawyering and strife. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:36, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Andy, this is not covered by any policy; it is a completely grey area. There is a policy, WP:FRINGE, but no way of deciding which 'theories' the policy applies to. (Not that 'climate change skepticism' is a 'theory' in the first place but this is what they say.) I am saying this problem needs to be resolved in the case of climate change skepticism. Does WP:FRINGE apply to climate change skepticism defined broadly or doesn't it? Clear this up and I'd say it would be a big step towards a sane talk page environment in the climate change pages. Alex Harvey (talk) 17:14, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

"Does WP:FRINGE apply to climate change skepticism defined broadly or doesn't it?" I'd say that if you define it broadly, then some is 'fringe', and some isn't. But why do we need a ruling on this? Even if we could agree to one (which I'd think would be unlikely), it wouldn't (or shouldn't) affect article content - and what goes on on talk pages is already covered by general policy. It seems to me that your proposal is an attempt to impose a particular perspective by fiat, and as such doomed to fail. You cannot prevent disagreements by restricting language. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:38, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Man-made climate change is a scientific fact and is NOT disputed in the scientific community despite attempts to portray it as being in dispute for political purposes. So says the Discover magazine editorial and articles in several issues within the last 6 months. Of course that's the opinion of a popular lay magazine and not a source that can end discussion. But it is indicative of the view of any science-based magazine or organization, this debate exists only in the political arena and among lay people in places like Wikipedia. If Wikipedia, as encyclopedias should be, is to reflect scientific facts and not the opinions of ordinary people then it should reflect current scientific opinion, whether that is determined in the long run to be the correct opinion or not. Just because a significant amount of the American public (and less significant amount of the world's population) decides they believe or dont believe something is irrelevant to what is fact. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and had nothing to do with 9/11, fact. Opinion (which is still high) that it was otherwise is irrelevant and ridiculous. To add to an article that "significant amount of people disagree" is irresponsible and simply encourages people to believe that "hey if significant amount of people disagree then maybe there's something to this fringe idea". Any compromise between science and "not science" is NOT SCIENCE. Encyclopedia's must report science.Camelbinky (talk) 23:21, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a news outlet. We don't report, we inform. Editor behavior is the question above, and not what we put in our pages. We often tell others that Wikipedia isn't about Truth with a capital 'T', but Verifiability. Scientific Truth or not, we need sources. If the sources we have say something, then that's how the article should present it. If our sources contradict each other, editors need to make a judgement call about how to proceed. But lets lay off the 'T' word a little. But to address what the editor said in the opening, Part (A) - Sure absolutely. No one should be in the business in labeling others if possible. Part (B) - I think I addressed that in my paragraph above. We use sources, not our own material. However, what could be addressed and maybe isn't, is the disparity between scientific belief and the layperson's belief, and even how that affects public policy. Despite what Camelbinky has said, I don't think the general public is nearly as sold on climate change being a "scientific truth" as climate scientists potentially are. -- Avanu (talk) 23:53, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

See Public opinion on climate change and Scientific opinion on climate change. Also, this disparity is a particularly USian phenomenon. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 00:04, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Andy, you said, "I'd say that if you define [skepticism] broadly, then some is 'fringe', and some isn't". In other words, you agree that if you define it broadly, 'climate change skepticism' includes some legitimate views which can't be dismissed as WP:FRINGE. It follows that it is completely inappropriate for editors to be wheeling out WP:FRINGE unless an editor really is advocating for a discredited theory. I am proposing that we make the WP:FRINGE policy clear that it does not allow editors to make crass arguments of the form 'skepticism is FRINGE, therefore ____'. Alex Harvey (talk) 03:10, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I was defining 'climate change skepticism' broadly, in response to the question you asked. This is all I was saying - please don't over-interpret my comments. As far as 'crass arguments' are concerned, nobody should be making them about anything. We already have guidelines regarding talk-page etiquette etc, and I see no merit whatsoever in trying to extend them to cover specific cases - this is likely to be counterproductive, as it is yet another excuse to argue about policy and procedure, rather than article content. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:37, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Avanu- for the record I did not say that the general public (in the US) is sold on climate change, in fact I said the absolute opposite and I was showing that that should have no bearing on how we present climate change as a fact and those that disagree with climate change as a fringe theory. Saying "climate change is not real" IS a fringe theory even if over 50% of Americans say "climate change is not real". Science is not a democracy. Being a fringe theory, or being labelled as a fringe theory, or saying "you espouse a fringe theory" is not disparaging or insulting. It's truth. And I agree and disagree with Stephan that this is PRIMARILY an American problem, it is an American and third-world problem, it is fact that (unfortunately) on many statistics (such as belief in global climate change, religious affiliation and church attendance, population increase and number of children) the US on paper looks more like a third-world (or developing if you prefer that word, I dont) than a first world (or developed if you prefer, I dont). What non-experts believe, no matter how many, is irrelevant. Wikipedia should worry about science, not public opinion. As for articles like Public opinion on climate change, they should reflect the inaccuracies of public opinion, not act as if public opinion is on equal par with what is put for on Scientific opinion on climate change which shouldnt exist as a separate article because the scientific opinion is the ONLY opinion that should be presented on the main article for climate change, the two separate articles existing to me seems like a POV fork.Camelbinky (talk) 03:23, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Andy, I am telling you that editors like me are routinely accused of being 'POV pushers', 'Fringe Theorists', 'Conspiracy Theorists', due to the perception that we are slightly skeptical of climate change science. This is helped because it is widely thought that WP:FRINGE applies broadly and even slight skepticism implies promotion of beliefs covered by WP:FRINGE. A recent example was a new editor 'Thepm' who ventured into the fray to note that the 'Climategate' article appeared to be terribly biased. He dared to support some points made by skeptical editors and was subsequently shot down and driven out of the climate change area completely. He hasn't returned and isn't likely to return and as far as I could determine, he wasn't even vaguely skeptical of climate change.
I am presently trying to clean up the hockey stick controversy but I am overwhelmed by editors arguing 'the hockey stick controversy was a purely manufactured controversy' 'everyone knows that!' 'POV pusher!' etc. Well that is not what Fred Pearce found but if I refuse to agree that the article is about a manufactured controversy I am accused of being a fringe theorist. This goes on and on and on and on and on, since I joined in 2009, the same bogus accusations derived from the way the climate change regulars like to interpret WP:FRINGE. You're telling me clarifying FRINGE won't be helpful. Would you like to join me in the climate change arena some time and see if your view changes? Alex Harvey (talk) 04:15, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Alex, my personal view of the climate change issue is that the overwhelming scientific concensus is probably right, and that much of the 'skepticism' is driven by politics rather than by science. So yes, as science most 'scepticism' is fringe, in my opinion. I have no particular wish to involve myself in this debate, and in any case, Wikipedia isn't an appropriate forum for challenging scientific orthodoxy - the skeptics need to win the debate elsewhere, and Wikipedia will surely follow. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:26, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Andy, I didn't ask about 'most skepticism'; I asked about 'all skepticism'. Alex Harvey (talk) 07:27, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Whatever - I don't think you've made a convincing case for changing anything. Not that this is the place to propose policy changes anyway. I'd say that if you have a problem with specific comments by specific editors, you should raise them in the appropriate place. AndyTheGrump (talk) 13:30, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I would like to know of Jimmy Wales's views. Alex Harvey (talk) 15:32, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, Alex. My view is that Wikipedia inherits a lot of problems from the outside world. I am a die-hard fan of science. I really don't like people putting forward wild and politically motivated theories of any kind without serious evidence, and I don't like how the popular discourse, even in quality newspapers and magazines, about many issues is politicized and emotionalized. But that's the world we live in, and it takes real dedication to see past it and get down to work.

One element of contemporary discourse, again even in high quality popular newspapers and magazines, is that any legitimate scientist who raises any question about any aspect of contemporary consensus views of climate change runs the risk of being slammed and attacked with incredible viciousness - not by other scientists, at least not the good ones, because they know that challenge and critique and re-examination is what good science is all about. Rather, what is likely to happen is that the good science will be seized upon as the poster child of anti-climate-change fanatics and thus made a victim of the climate-change fanatics.

Sometimes, and I fear far too often, this spills over into Wikipedia.

This is not just a climate-change problem, of course. And it is not just a Wikipedia problem. It's a human problem; in many ways it is the human problem.

What can we do to help, all of us? Tone down the the rhetoric. Stop trying to find heroes and villains at every turn. Assume good faith and recognize that other editors who disagree with us may simply be, in some clumsy fashion, seeking the truth just as we are, in our own clumsy fashion, seeking the truth.

To give my specific views on this particular issue. Editors ought to gently refrain from accusing either other of pushing fringe views, at least as much as possible. And editors ought to be very careful about using negative rhetoric of critics of anyone, as if they are simple facts of reality - they seldom are. Judgment is always necessary, and always valuable.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:14, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

How about theories regarding fringe? Is it fashionable, appropriate, and does Basil Marceaux like it? -- Avanu (talk)

Dear Jimbo, you say, editors ought to be very careful about using negative rhetoric of critics of anyone, as if they are simple facts of reality. I agree. But if you try to put this into practice, and actually say something like, 'Professor X may be a wonderful authority on climate change and his book Y is undoubtedly a reliable source, but when X in source Y writes, "climate change skeptics are fossil fuel industry funded deniers", he is using negative rhetoric and we should not consider this specific sentence reliable or a fact of reality', you will then be told not to promote fringe theories in Wikipedia. Now, without a statement for the benefit of climate change editors on what is and what isn't an acceptable use of 'fringe', how can this otherwise be stopped? Alex Harvey (talk) 12:49, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

If Professor X is an authority on climate change, and he/she expresses an opinion that "climate change skeptics are fossil fuel industry funded deniers", we can report him/her as saying that: we do not censor sources. Now, whether this comment is necessarily worth putting in an article will depend on the context in which he/she said it, and on much else besides. This, as always, should be decided by talk page discussion, with due regard to general policy - which covers precisely this sort of decision. There is no reason whatsoever why 'climate change' articles need to be treated differently If a policy change is needed, it should be a general one, regarding the use of negative opinions by 'reliable sources' on any subject - making explicit rules for special cases is a Wikilawyers dream, guaranteed to divert attention from the objectives of the Wikipedia project. AndyTheGrump (talk) 14:21, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Andy, would it be okay if Jimbo is allowed to respond, if he wants to? Alex Harvey (talk) 14:32, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree with AndyTheGrump that we ought not to have special separate rules for climate change. At the same time, I agree with Alex Harvey that there is a significant amount of inappropriate name calling in that area, as well as others.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:58, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Climate change, especially that caused by human activity is a theory, not a fact. A computer model does not make it a fact. Remember no matter how many (including me) support it, evolution is theory too, simply because it cannot be 100% proven. AGW has less going for it than evolution does. As a theory it is subject to debate. Both the theory as it is postulated by its supports and its criticisms, even if in a minority, must be treated using the same rules we use for everything else. Speaking of theories, here is another one related to climate. [13]Thelmadatter (talk) 20:42, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Please see scientific theory. Nothing in science is a "fact" in a strict sense. A theory is not a hypothesis or a guess, but a coherent explanation that is self-consistent, non-tautological, and compatible with observations. It is the best science has to offer on anything. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:23, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Um -- minor nitpick. Mathematics is a science, and is not variably based on theories <g>. Cheers. Collect (talk) 00:16, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

The National Science Foundation and National Academies of Science, among other learned bodies, beg to disagree. They treat "science, technology, engineering, and mathematics" (STEM) as distinct disciplines, though they do urge "coordination" in STEM teaching, research and outreach. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 01:09, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

• Hi, Jimbo. Alex appears to be forum shopping, having had an unsourced introduction of a weaselly qualifier removed as discussed on the article talk page, and having raised the same point at the NOV noticeboard without providing any sources to support his original research.
  This is part of a larger pattern in recent discussions at Talk:Hockey stick controversy where Alex and Pete Tillman have used the discussion to discuss their own views without providing sources supporting these views, and have repeatedly asked that the article show their original research rather than accurately reflecting cited sources.
  Alex opened discussions with his long statement giving unsourced justifications for his removing a well sourced statement, including his opinion that "this article should be about the HS controversy, not some political controversy that it intersected with. The heading is giving the very misleading impression that all the following subsections, including the more relevant discussion of MM, are also part of a political controversy. The HS controversy is a scientific controversy, as this very article makes clear".
  The cited sources show political controversy despite repeated scientific support for the main conclusions of the graphs, but Pete joins in with his unsourced view that he thinks that "the Mann et al. "hockey stick" graphs have been rather thoroughly discredited, and that the HSG isn't taken very seriously among most non-political climate scientists anymore." This is directly contradicted by cited sources in the article, but both Pete and Alex have continued to press for changes to reflect their views without providing good sources.
  Looking through the discussion, I've not so far seen any justification for Alex's claim that he and Pete are being called names, but have noticed their accusations that my "POV is showing". By which they apparently mean that I report what I see in good quality mainstream sources, and don't comply with their preferred "skeptic" narrative. As a sceptic myself I find this to be unfortunate framing, and object to his derisory claim that he is being obstructed by a "clique of climate change regulars". More sources and fewer accusations directed at editors would be better. . . dave souza, talk 01:56, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Creating a Wikicracy in Spain

Hello Jimmy, we wanted to contact you about the project we're doing. We are creating a political system that you know, Wikicracy using mediawiki as the main platform.The project becomes a political party, WikiPartido (WikiParty in english), among other things that will put citizens at the same level as politicians, can give a voice to the decisions taken.

Wiki users can create law proposals, edit and criticize them. An organ called Junta Crítica (Critical Team) is responsible for neutral analysis of proposals, for finally will get quality proposals. Once accepted by consensus or vote of the citizens is approved the proposal.

As WikiPartido is open to all peoples not a right, left, liberal or conservative party, we opted to use the sustainable development , seeking a balance between social, economic and ecological ideologies.

To carry out the project we used as a base mediawiki accompanied with different extensions and changes for facilitating the work to new users (eg, Semantic Forms), as well as changes in the skin.

The result of our work is visible through the following website: http://wikipartido.es

Greetings and thank you very much.

--Alberto.eps (talk) 17:31, 28 June 2011 (UTC)