User talk:Mandruss

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Welcome! If you post here, I'll reply here; no point in scattering a conversation across two pages. I may ping you when I reply, or not, depending on how much I want to be sure you see my reply. If you want to be sure you see a reply, please add this page to your watchlist. I don't use Talkback.(Dontcha wish we could agree on one way to do this, and eliminate all the unnecessary confusion? I do.)

RfC: Guidance on commas after Jr. and Sr.

Following the closure of a recent RfC you participated in, I have started an RfC on the separate but related issue of commas after Jr. and Sr.. Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § RfC: Guidance on commas after Jr. and Sr. and feel free to comment there. Thanks! —sroc 💬 06:03, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Diary of a Man in Despair

Thanks for your reply to my entry on the help page, but what happened was that I was writing a new article about a book with the above name. I don't know what I did, but suddenly it disappeared. Can you really find no trace of it in the ether?

Sardaka (talk) 10:38, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

@Sardaka: If you were writing it in one of your sandboxes, my guess is that you somehow canceled out without saving it. If you click the Contributions link at the top of any Wikipedia page while you are logged in, you will see a list of the edits you have made (saved), most recent first. If you saved this content anywhere while logged in, it would be listed there. It's also possible you saved this while logged out, but I don't think you would have a sandbox while logged out, and in any case we would need to know what IP address you had then in order to find those edits. ―Mandruss ☎ 10:44, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-22

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• VisualEditor was broken for 30 minutes on Tuesday. The problem was due to a tool it uses. [1]
• Some Labs tools had issues last week. [2] [3]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 20. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 27 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 28 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can add your ideas of new tools to help active users like you. [4]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:19, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

100, then 1,000, then 500

The point wasn't to make the cops look bad, it was to let readers know there's a history of getting the numbers very wrong, so they should take the 320 figure with a grain of salt. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:02, May 27, 2015 (UTC)

@InedibleHulk: Yeah, it occurred to me after the fact that it might be something besides anti-cop POV. I decided we were probably trying to be a rumor clearing house, saying to the readers who have seen those other numbers, "Yes, we know, and they appear to be wrong based on latest information". That would also be improper, but I've seen people try to do it before. Anyway, as I said, people get shit wrong at first, so the astute reader takes all such details with a grain of salt anyway. They understand that neither Wikipedia nor its sources are Truth, especially only nine days after the event. There are plenty who aren't that astute, sure, but it serves neither them nor Wikipedia to cater to their ignorance. ―Mandruss ☎ 02:14, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I hear you. And yeah, it was originally to dispel rumours, too. Not going to fight it the way I would have then, because the buzz around this is dying down, so there'll be less people to potentially misread/misbelieve things. I also figure it's safe to assume even horrible counters would get it about right the fourth time. If it's actually 339 or 303, doesn't really matter. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:36, May 27, 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Conversion therapy

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Conversion therapy. Legobot (talk) 00:05, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Reference Desk hatting

I had my reason for hatting that thread and ignoring many other threads that are requests for opinions. I acknowledge that my reason was less than forthright and honest, and was based on the principle of deny recognition. I don't believe that opinion requests should be hatted. The problem with that post is that it was racial trolling, and hatting of trolling is desirable, but it should not be labeled as trolling, which draws more attention to it. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:25, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: Your first sentence makes me think maybe you misunderstood what I said. My issue is about regulars routinely giving opinions where none is requested, and how toleration of that is inconsistent with so much concern about requests for opinions. I'm generally silent about it myself, but it hasn't always been so (I've largely given up, not caring to be a lone voice on this), and I have relatively little influence at RD anyway. ―Mandruss ☎ 02:16, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Okay. That is a valid point. In this case I appeared to be objecting to a request for opinions as an unsuccessful attempt to hide the troll post. The troll is temporarily blocked, but is likely to cause more trouble when he comes off block. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:21, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

FYI

Hello M. I wanted to let you know that, to the best of my knowledge, the ping system does not work for IPs. I had noticed you using it on a couple pages so this might be a reason that you haven't gotten a reply. I should also add that I was told about this several months ago so things might have changed but I have not seen any updates indicating that it has. Enjoy your Sunday. MarnetteD|Talk 04:08, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

@MarnetteD: Your comment does appear to be confirmed at Wikipedia:Notifications. Thanks for taking the time to let me know. I've been wasting time doing this for over a year and you're the first. ―Mandruss ☎ 04:28, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

I am glad I could help. I only wish I had noticed it earlier and saved you some typing :-) Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 04:32, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Mild Disagreement

I mildly disagree with your comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Help_desk&diff=prev&oldid=664808436

I am only making my comment here so as not to get into a quarrel at the Help Desk. It is one of the worse ways, but edit-warring and personal attacks are worse. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:50, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: Agreed, of course, but even that would be short of a really complete answer. One must truncate at some point for the sake of conciseness and time considerations, and we would choose different points of truncation. I rarely have the patience to compose the thorough, thousand-word responses that I see from some other responders, especially given (1) the evidence that many of them are not even being read by the OPs, and (2) the numerous instances of the same answer in the Help desk archives. Both edit-warring and PA would be under the umbrella of "learn about Wikipedia editing principles and policy". To an OP who clearly doesn't know Thing #1 about Wikipedia editing, I think a mention of those negative things in the Help desk setting would do more harm than good. Thanks for the comments! ―Mandruss ☎ 04:47, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

This particular case is a good example of a question type that is asked and answered multiple times a day at the Help desk. It's a major time sink for responders, and the quality of the answers varies widely. There must be a better way. I've seen evidence of a past attempt at a set of templates for the most common answers, but apparently they have fallen out of use because they didn't work well. I think it would be worth trying an informational page for each of these questions (or one page with a separate section for each question). We would spend a little time crafting the best possible answer for each. Then, the response could be simply a link to the page or section with a brief additional comment (e.g. "Please read it and return here if you still have any questions") to humanize the response. All we have now are very wordy and complex policy and guideline pages, which we can link to but still have to summarize and synthesize "on the fly". ―Mandruss ☎ 05:35, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

See User:Mandruss/sandbox3#An article contains factual errors for an example. I think this would be an improvement over both templating and the status quo. I can see one downside in that the page, as with any guideline page, would be another battleground and subject to instruction creep that would defeat its purpose to some degree. It's one of the inevitable costs of leaving everything open to the community. ―Mandruss ☎ 06:55, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-23

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• Many wikis were slow for a few hours on Wednesday due to a code error. Sometimes the pages did not load at all and showed an error. [5]
• Some tools in Labs were broken on Wednesday and Thursday. [6]
• Edit tags added by the software were broken on all wikis from May 23 to May 28. [7] [8]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 3 (calendar).
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [9]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 3 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:39, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Soften the notification number

What was the result of that long discussion? I want the colours of notification must be different. Always getting red notification is not right. Red is the symbol of Danger. Even when someone will post positive message in my talk page, i will get red notification.--Cosmic  Emperor  01:56, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

@CosmicEmperor: We did two rounds of voting to narrow the candidate colors to two choices, the current colors and one other choice. Then we did a runoff vote between those two choices, and the current colors won with 54% of the vote. So a majority of voters are opposed to any change, and the proposal failed. However, it was mentioned that some other software changes are already in the works. If and when they are rolled out, they would include changes to those colors. With one of those changes, the notification number would be one of nine different colors depending on the type of notification; see the discussion at the top of Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Colo.28u.29r_nominations, below the table. ―Mandruss ☎ 07:49, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Mattress Performance

Not again!! That article is a magnet for BLP violations having the character of libel against someone who has not been charged with a crime. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:18, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm glad I'm late to that party. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:20, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Talk:Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)#Graphic "Reenactment"

Anti-Germanism? --89.204.154.76 (talk) 14:32, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Please make an attempt to understand the situation rather than jumping to conclusions. All of the attempts to post links came from Munich, which is why I mentioned Germans. That's all. If they had all come from Beijing, I would have mentioned Chinese. And, as I made abundantly clear in the talk thread, I changed the comment before it was replied to, and no one would have even known about it except that someone made a fuss about the "previous" (left-hand) side of one of my diffs! Sheesh. ―Mandruss ☎ 14:38, 5 June 2015 (UTC)