User talk:SandyGeorgia/arch106

"Suitability for inclusion" vs "deletion" for new editors - request female senior editor input

Hi SandyGeorgia. Thanks for your edits to social media addiction sorting out the importance ratings. I was hoping for your opinion on this proposal if you were interested or had time. Thanks a lot! E.3 (talk) 04:23, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Telesur

Hi! I noticed that a discussion was opened in the reliable sources noticeboard regarding the reliability of Telesur. I thought you might be interested in participating. --Jamez42 (talk) 13:02, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

I already had participated, before you pinged. We probably both saw it on Zia's talk page. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:09, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of Guaido challenge for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Guaido challenge is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Guaido challenge until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. power~enwiki (π, ν) 21:08, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Power~enwiki ... I was going to do it myself, since there was no logical reasoning provided in the merge discussion, so the community can decide, but I feared that would be pointy. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:14, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

While there is clear encyclopedic value in documenting the use of social media in geopolitical events, contemporaneous coverage of it on Wikipedia itself is generally impossible. power~enwiki (π, ν) 21:16, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Power~enwiki Even more so in the Venezuelan realm, where most experienced editors have given up! Anyway, thanks again, and I am fine with whatever consensus comes from the wider community. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:18, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Today's Wikipedian 10 years ago

Awesome

Ten years!

-- Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 00:06, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Those were the days...

Had someone how missed that you'd resigned from FAC. What a shame. I used to lurk & contribute a little there back in 2009 /2010. Had aspirations of taking Lord Keynes all the way to FA, untill I decided FA standard was probably beyond my skills. I was in awe of you back then, the subtle way you got all the big ego artist types working together productively. Such a shame things have to change. They talk about rose tinted glasses and all that, but seems to me there really was a golden age, not so long ago... ( Hope you don't mind a reply here, wanted to say this but it's totally off topic for the RFC. ) FeydHuxtable (talk) 21:26, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

I appreciate the reply here, because I prefer to avoid the COI page, which IMO was rendered useless by tribalism. I only posted there because you pinged me, and again today, because I got a thanks for that post. Your kind words are most most appreciated; it still stings that I seem to have made the wrong choice, because both FAC and WPMED have gone to pot. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:30, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Spanish articles

Hi Sandy. Sorry to be intrusive, but I couldn't help and notice that you mentioned Spanish bios have mistakes. Please let me know which ones you find, I'd like to see if I can fix them. It's also good to know you're editing about Venezuela again. Best wishes! --Jamez42 (talk) 22:35, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Darn, I didn't keep track of the problems I found, but I recently worked on so looked at:

• Carlos Vecchio,
• Gustavo Tarre, and
• Juan Andrés Mejía.

Generally, when checking sources, they didn't always verify the text, so I couldn't just translate the articles, and decided just to write from scratch, since I am basically only creating stubs anyway. Keep up the good work! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:38, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Re: edit.

Concerning this edit: [1]

Could we possibly add by most standards or something similar to clarify that there is a set of standards being applied here, and most of the Maduro/Chavez administration has failed it? ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 22:13, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

could you go ahead and do it? I am swamped ... maybe first see the talk page discussion, trying to avoid sounding weasley ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:42, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

SandyGeorgia, sounds good. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 02:45, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Sorry about how all this has turned out

Hey, I got angry that he went through the article and cut everything, then I felt he was disrespectful in what he said which essentially precipitated the rest. I'm sorry about dragging you in to this, and how this has ended up on the admin page. Hope everything is alright, and that you get home safe. Alcibiades979 (talk) 02:26, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Oh, what a kind person you are! Not to worry; there is nothing to feel bad about. Edit warring is usually just the tip of the iceberg that goes along with other problematic behaviors, and such editors either learn, or they end up being taught the hard way. We shall see. I am not worried, and hope you are not, either. It is almost impossible to keep an article up to any standard on Wikipedia, and I like to think we find out what other editors are made of in kerfuffles like this one.

I am home safe, after a 12-hour odyssey. Who knew that in a multi-car crash, when the police can't get enough tow trucks but need to clear the road for safety, they can just load all the wrecked cars on a flatbed and send them off to the impound yard! And then you get to worry about how to get your car out, when all towtrucks are busy with bad weather. Not a fun day, but finally got my car un-impounded and fixed enough to get home, and glad no one was hurt! Bubble bath and bed. Thank you for the kind words; I know you meant well. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:27, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Recruiting?

I would like to see the tweet about possible recruiting, if possible.----ZiaLater (talk) 13:24, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

I would rather not make it public; when recruiting is possibly affecting articles, it is better to keep an eye on it until evidence is overwhelming of cabalistic disruption :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:30, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

hello

Not that you might need it, but just in case you visit any new page requiring review, I've added the new page reviewer flag to your bits. Warmly, Lourdes 03:26, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you so much, @Lourdes:| Is that a new thing? I thought I already had something like that ... Best regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:37, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Hello again. You could read WP:NPR for more information; and probably use the PageCuration script to review new pages. Thank you for your wonderful contributions, Lourdes 15:49, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks again, Lourdes-- I was fairly inactive for several years, so missed that, and appreciate that you noticed. And thanks for the kind words, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:12, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Please remove report

I promise to cooperate. I will just put it on the talk page. When you sent the message, I removed it from the official page.Fenetrejones (talk) 18:01, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

I will let admins decide if they want to give you a break. I seriously gave it my best effort, to help you understand WP:RS, and I feel that you abused my good faith effort to help you. And this has gone on for weeks; I am not convinced you understand what you have caused in sapping other editor time. What might help your case is that you go to the AN3 report and explain to admins that you promise to never again revert or add content without gaining consensus-- they may decide to give you a break. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:05, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Time Wasted? What was this? Original research or random predictions that I made up? No. It is something that is actually sourced even if it is not excellent sources. I also did not use the same website every time that I sourced it, so I was researching the topic and found many sources. If any wasted time, than it was me, and not other users.Unlike other edit other people's edit wars, I looked for multiple and DIFFERENT sources.Fenetrejones (talk) 18:10, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Fenetrejones, you are certainly free to state your case there. (talk page stalker)―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 18:40, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Just filed a report on RBL2000 at AN/I

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. It's about RBL2000, and I thank you for showing a great amount patience with this user. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 18:51, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

I saw that and responded; thanks for getting that ball rolling. I would MUCH rather be generating content than dealing with disruption. I do enjoy giving a lot of effort to helping new editors, and my good faith efforts are not unrarely abused of ! (My husband hates it when I say "abused of"-- well, that's what you say in Spanish, so there !) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:56, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

March 2019

Please remember to assume good faith when dealing with other editors. Thank you. Being critical of newsmedia doesn't preclude somebody from advocating for the appropriate application of Wikipedia policy. Simonm223 (talk) 17:06, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Simonm223 please remember WP:DTTR. The appropriate application of Wikipedia policy in this case means that we should not have to spend hours on talk pages repeatedly explaining what are and are not reliable sources, and you most clearly have a pony in that race. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:10, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Venezuela

I have noticed the comment you made at the "Current events noticeboard" RFC, pointing that many users are not familiar with the background of the Venezuelan crisis and how does that have an effect over the edits. Something you can do to mitigate the problem would be to add a FAQ at the talk page (we have Template:FAQ for doing so), with the common questions and misunderstandings and the required explanations. It will not solve the problem of POV pushers (who are usually well aware of the other point of view and simply ignore it), but it will solve the problem of well-intentioned editors who simply did not understand well what was going on. Cambalachero (talk) 13:08, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Cambalachero, that is a great idea-- if only I had time. I am quite busy this week, but next week, I will try to start a sandbox page where we can begin to rough out something. Best regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:07, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Note to self: best post of the day

No wait, the month, no wait, the year ... just happened across this and laughed out loud, since it describes everything this month! @ZiaLater:. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:55, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Tutelage

Re: Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Proposed_editing_restriction

I was 'stuck' with "tutelage" as a fancy word for "guardianship", not knowing it also means "instruction" (not quite, but, in english, synonims are all "not quite"). I've learned something new, today, for which I wish to thank you. 79.43.127.98 (talk) 08:11, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Piacere ! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 08:40, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

The Man

Happy memories; one of the ones who had "it"; in terms of talent. I have to admit his last stands, here and on WR, were truly heroic. And boy could he write a TFA blurb. Ceoil (talk) 23:11, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Ceoil, what made you think of him today? Pending 1 April ... we did used to have quite a good time in here, didn't we?!?!? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:24, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

I want to be just like TFMWNCB when I grow up. I well remember the 1 April blurb; I think it took about 6 weeks to put my jaw back in place. Reason I though of him was from listening to a Stewart Lee routine. Have a fondness for the sardonic. Ceoil (talk) 23:55, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Don't grow up-- it's a trap! Darn, Ceoil, you are going to make me cry for remembering him :( SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:02, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

My best memory of him was when he was knee deep on AN/I, "discussing" with a series of newly minted admins, all now long gone, and battling for his life with people who had no idea of his content work here, and he asked rhetorically "can I have my socks back please". Of course there were no socks, but Ye Gods. Ceoil (talk) 00:24, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Can you imagine today's crop trying to cope with him?  :) And now I'll start missing the Yo-man, too ! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:31, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

To which we could add Outriggr, George, Moni, Filiocht, Rurfisch, Yannismarou, Maria, and countless other fine people (Yo-man still pops up occasionally, bty; usually when you least expect him). I sometimes get bothered that its all for nothing and nobody cares, but then again get hopeful that there is a cumulative influence; for example your work on establishing FAC criteria has had a longer effect than you might have imagined. Ceoil (talk) 00:42, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't think so, Ceoil ... every time I peek in there, I see stuff being promoted that shouldn't even pass GA. So, I stopped peeking. I guess you remember the last time I saw Yo-man? He was jovially adding his typical inline commentary about my sucky prose at dementia with Lewy bodies, when a now-banned jerk reverted him and pretended to tell him off. Ha. Someone trying to tell off Yo Man. Seriously. So, I seem to spend my days now editing around people who would have a hard time sorting out where to find the men's room, rather than the likes of Yo Man, Outriggr, you, or our porcine friend. Mr. Lewy went nowhere after that ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:54, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

The two people I miss especially from FAC are Eric and Tony. Precisely because they had balls and were unafraid to oppose. That stuff comes with a cost however, as we all know. Anyways, "Someone trying to tell off Yo Man" is a brave someone indeed. He also tends to haunt articles on 15th century oil paintings, leaving that wiki community, ie me, rather quaking in my boots. "Arch" the nice word; god bless him, but sometimes I think he would make Larry David blush! Sepreatly, I am still flummoxed that Lewy hasnt been put up. Its especially good, and would be a fine example of a medical FA. Wot? Ceoil (talk) 01:18, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

They killed the desire. And every exquisitely chosen word from Tony at Tourette's was killed years ago by bureaucrats, so why bother. The way the medical people treated YoMan got under my skin. Are you still writing beautiful stuff? We want to come visit you two some day ! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:36, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Obviously the general manner that Yo-Man was treated there been deemed intolerable by the community, and that particular editor, Jydog, and his editing style and tone, and is now non-gracias. Killed the desire indeed. I have to admit I found that talk page rather intimidating; it got real dark there real fast, a point at which I though....no thanks. Ceoil (talk) 02:00, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Jytdog had a thing that hovered over his editing around me. He reinstated blatantly inaccurate text about prostate cancer after I corrected it, and he knew I knew that the MED project had furthered information that affected men's lives. Because all they care about any more is making videos, with no concern for writing entire articles. He tried to pull COI on me because of my husband's cancer, which was just ridiculous. And those articles are still a mess. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:44, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

PMID 27042904

Hi Sandy, I noticed early last year you tagged a number of neuro articles requesting they be updated with this PMID. Could you tell me the general gist of what you were getting at? Also, it seems like the impact factor of that journal is 0.782 if I am looking it up correctly. I enjoy sandwiches (talk) 17:44, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

I enjoy sandwiches ... if I recall correctly (I may not :), the issue is that we have only one article, which discusses only one type, when there are many different types of frontotemporal dementias. That one journal may have a low impact factor, but I believe this is explained in several other places. Hope this helps; don't hesitate to ask for clarification if my memory is faulty. I quit editing that suite of articles because of a hostile environment there. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:57, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, appreciate the quick reply. I enjoy sandwiches (talk) 20:29, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

FYI

I just saw you mentioned my tocayo Oscar in here, just a quick FYI to put an space and a dot to find the correct Oscar (_.), cheers and thanks for your amazing job this past few months, --Oscar_. (talk) 21:10, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Ack ... no sabia! Que susto. Ok, got it ... Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:30, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Censorship in Ve 2019

Hi Sandy, when you are available, check the new half of the lead of Censorship and media control during the Venezuelan presidential crisis, better wording and proofreading might be necessary.--MaoGo (talk) 11:15, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

@MaoGo:, minor changes, looking good! Saludos, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:34, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

1000 thanks! --MaoGo (talk) 13:44, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for April 22

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Freddy Bernal, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Department of the Treasury (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 12:33, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

DYK for Fabiana Rosales

On 22 April 2019, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Fabiana Rosales, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that Venezuelan journalist Fabiana Rosales (pictured) has assumed the role of international ambassador, soliciting support for her husband's opposition party and the crisis in Venezuela? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Fabiana Rosales. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, Fabiana Rosales), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

— Maile (talk) 00:02, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Busy ...

I saw your post... just ... busy. We close on the new place on 30 April. (Email for details - note that the email has changed so you'll want to use "email this user" rather than saved old emails). Hoping to get back into non-gnomish edits on Wikipedia by fall... Ealdgyth - Talk 16:54, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for being one of Wikipedia's top medical contributors!

The 2018 Cure Award

In 2018 you were one of the top ~250 medical editors across any language of Wikipedia. Thank you from Wiki Project Med Foundation for helping bring free, complete, accurate, up-to-date health information to the public. We really appreciate you and the vital work you do! Wiki Project Med Foundation is a user group whose mission is to improve our health content. Consider joining here, there are no associated costs.

Thanks again :-) -- Doc James along with the rest of the team at Wiki Project Med Foundation 17:41, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	You deserve this by now. I've not spoken to a single editor who deserves this more than you. Your work on 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis‎ has been a massive contribution to this project. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-☖ 22:31, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Oh, Matthew ... how ever so kind of you. Thank you so much! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:02, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

It's nothing compared to the work you do! I think I just saw 20 edits from you fly by on my watchlist. Seriously some good work right there. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 03:07, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Be careful about counting my edits ... they are usually trivialities, and I often take three edits to accomplish what I should in one! Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:09, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Nah some of these are pretty substantial though. Seriously. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 03:15, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Some baklava for you!

Thank you for your constant striving for reliable sourcing of medical articles on the Wiki, keep it up, proud of you Mchan12345 (talk) 22:27, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, Mchan12345; that is most kind of you, and I love Baklava! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 08:43, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Talk page stalker request

Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia/Assessment appears to be defunct; if I still have any TPS, is anyone willing to assess the following articles for quality ?

Now listed as C-class

• 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis - done
• 2019 shipping of humanitarian aid to Venezuela
• Censorship and media control during the Venezuelan presidential crisis
• Colectivo (Venezuela) - done
• Crisis in Venezuela - done
• International sanctions during the Venezuelan crisis
• Juan Guaidó - done
• Responses to the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis
• Venezuelan crisis defection - done

Now listed as start-class

• Roberto Marrero - done
• Statute Governing the Transition to Democracy - done
• Troika of tyranny - done

Done some - I usually self-assess these days. Johnbod (talk) 15:58, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Thank you so much Johnbod; it seems like assessment has died out, but I hesitate to assess work so heavily my own :) I appreciate the attention! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:11, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Done them all now - pretty much everything to B. Johnbod (talk) 21:21, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Ancient FAC history question

I'm guessing you're the most likely person to be able to answer this. I've been gathering statistics on old FACs, and indexing multiple FACs by the archive number -- these three: Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/61_Cygni/archive1, Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/61_Cygni/archive2, and Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/61_Cygni/archive3, for example. Looking at the April 2009 featured log, I see that not all the archives have the number. For example, Magic Johnson's successful FAC is at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Magic Johnson, but the prior unsuccessful ones are at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Magic Johnson/archive1 and Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Magic Johnson/archive2. So is it the case that the rule used to be that the current FAC always had no "archiveN" added to it, but a new FAC required you to move the last FAC to an archive page? That would account for what I'm seeing.

Hope you're doing well, by the way; I don't bump into you here often but I'm glad to see you're still around. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:22, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

Hey Mike! I am just heading out for about an hour, but will look at this as soon as I'm home ... good to "see" you! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:44, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi, Mike Christie, the short answer is yes, exactly as you called it. The long answer is: it used to be that we only moved a FAC to an archive when a subsequent FAC presented. That system was a WRECK, since the nominators weren't always the same, and they didn't know what to do with the old FAC when the subst's submission brought it up, and I was always having to call in an admin to fix messes. One day, Gimmetrow had a stroke of genius combined with the coding skills to fix the problem, and he changed the system to one where the subst for submitting a new FAC would automatically assign the next archive number. I thought we had gone back and fixed all the old FACs that had no archive number, but I guess we didn't. Does that answer the question?

The crisis in Venezuela drug me back :) Take care, and keep up the great work ! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:12, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

That does answer the question; thanks. For my purposes I can just assume that any unnumbered archive is the latest in the list, and I can make my lists work with that. Whatever the reason, I'm glad you're editing; good luck with that article, though I suspect you won't be bringing it to FAC any time soon! All the best. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:30, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

The incident

As Tony recently posted that he was going to bed, this is the incident he's referencing. ‑ Iridescent 16:44, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks so much, Iri, settling in to read now, Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:50, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Working back through the whole thing. First thing I encounter is: QUOTE

• Second paragraph beautifully written. Except for this: "those who thought him an original genius and those who thought his music lacked form and coherence". The grammar's a bit arch, and jerks the reader when they get to the second "thought", which is very different grammatically. "regarded him as an. 16:13, 2 November 2018 (UTC)"?

• Happy to change if a consensus agrees with you on this point. Tim riley talk 16:13, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

• Commenting as requested: disagree. A matter of personal stylistic preference. Tim riley talk 21:59, 2 December 2018 (UTC) UNQUOTE

Of course, I still have lots to read, but a) Tony was polite and complimentary, b) Tony was right about the awkward construct, and c) original nominator stalled and didn't apparently correct the awkward wording. Still reading, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:10, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Still reading: this is after all Tony's field times three (copyediting, music and psychology) QUOTE

• "A romantic in his personal life as well as in his art,"—I'm slightly uncomfortable about using this association, presumably between a flush of oxytocin in the brain, and the complex social, political, and technical aspects of romantic style in music. Makes for cute wording, but it's misleading.

  Happy to change if a consensus agrees with you on this point. Tim riley talk 16:13, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

  Commenting as requested: other reviewer comments concur, so have changed. Tim riley talk 21:59, 2 December 2018 (UTC) UNQUOTE

And so on it goes. The nominator ignores what started out as well argued and polite prose concerns (Tony then descends into some unacceptable retorts), unless others concur. The crux of the matter here, in case no one wants to admit it, is who are "the others". SarahSV eventually, and not uncharacteristically, brings the discussion around to that point. Since certain people only review certain kinds of FACs these days, this kind of approach at FAC can lead to closed-circuit reviews and less than independent reviewing. It is always good for FAC delegates to know a) who are knowledgeable or expert reviewers in given content areas, and b) what editors are known to always review nominations for each other, so that c) you can prioritize topic experts and give appropriate weight to friendly supports. Goes with the territory, but that has become a bigger problem in today's FAC, as there are fewer and fewer independent reviewers like Tony1.

A telling comment comes from a previous FAC delegate:

• Oppose. Tony made some reasonable and actionable comments, which were dismissed in an offhand way by the nominator who implied that they require a consensus. Tony even offered a solution to one of the problems. The nominator's response was deplorable; He wrote "Oh, get you!", which to my ear is tantamount to homophobic - all that was missing was "ducky". Since when have actionable positive, critical comments required a consensus? Never in my tenure as an FAC delegate. The nominator should address Tony's comments directly, and apologise to him. This is not the way we conduct a FAC! Graham Beards (talk) 05:02, 23 November 2018 (UTC)

OK, so having read the FAC, I see Tony responded quite inappropriately after he was treated quite rudely. I'm more worried about what is happening otherwise at FAC, and what I see is the very trend that has become a problem there; nominators stalling on addressing legitimate issues because others will support them regardless. Now, on to the Talk Discussion.

A discussion closed by an involved participant two days after it started. This is the kind of thing we find in the FAC process, where there is no longer a director. One of the delegates should have stood up to that non-independent close. Why didn't they? No wonder I missed the discussion: it was over in two days. Laser brain asked questions that should have been answered. Tony thinks the system is being gamed (I think he's got a point).

Further in, we again find an FA process coordinator who gets it: QUOTE

• I am not concerned by Tony's approach to reviewing. He is allowed to oppose. Tim is allowed to say he disagrees with the suggested changes and refuse to make them unless consensus shows otherwise. The comments in their discussion on the nomination page as of now are all fine up to 16:43 on the 3rd, when Tim mocked Tony and called him arrogant. The mocking tone adopted against Tony from that point is unhelpful. Other reviewers should judge the prose and comment on the article's quality. Coordinators then judge the consensus of those comments and close nominations with either promote or archive based on the consensus of such comments. I see no evidence that Tony's comments are any worse than those directed at him or those made by others in the discussion. DrKay (talk) 17:55, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Further in, plenty of respected knowledgeable people defending Tony, plenty of others not, and yet ... the discussion is closed by one involved editor in two days? Weird. Reinforcing my concern about who is running the process.

Not atypically, SV gets to the point, QUOTE:

• What we need is data. We've had several discussions about groups who appear to support each other's nominations with minimal review. (Indrian, I haven't seen you take part in those conversations, so I don't know which concerns you're calling nonsense.) Mike's figures only go so far. Rather than engaging in online shaming of one individual, let's gather data so that we don't have to rely on anyone's impressions. We have this table from Brian, showing that promotion was 53–55% in 2008–2011 and 73% in 2017. So something has changed. We could ask one of the bot operators to write a script to find out more, including whether there are patterns of support. We could pay the bot operator if necessary, and maybe the Wikimedia Foundation would help. SarahSV (talk) 23:07, 8 November 2018 (UTC) UNQUOTE

Well d'oh something has changed :) And we don't need a bot, when previous delegates can tell you exactly what that is. If the current delegates (or whatever they are called these days) are paying attention, they know the answer to this as well as I always did and still do. The solution to this age-old problem at FAC is to be aware that cliques are kind of a natural thing that happen in any social endeavour, and to make sure every FAC gets independent review, and to give priority to independent topic area experts over people who always support each others' nominations. Tony1 is an independent reviewer; chasing independent reviewers out of FAC is not a good thing. (Laser offered some ideas about Tony's behavior that might have been addressed had the thread been allowed to run.) Tony1 is an editor who simmers down as quickly as he simmers up: yes, the simmering up needs to stop, but I don't believe that is what drove this problem this time, especially since the first person to simmer up was the nominator. I understand respected participants called for the discussion to be hatted, but that was done by an involved participant without feedback from two of the three coordinators, when it could have been done by one of the FAR cords. Leadership issues. My sense is that SV was getting to the heart of the matter just before the topic was closed, and the close was premature, because solutions to the lack of independent reviewing that predominates FAC today should have been addressed, every bit as Tony's response should have been addressed.

Why is SV's account a red link (what else have I missed)? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:04, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

The incident: break1

It's still SlimVirgin. Only the sig has changed. Agree with your assessment above btw, though that's not a surprise. I'm thinking about posting to AN/I but can't at the moment and don't know when I'll get back. I do have lots of thoughts, though. And, belated welcome back! Have been thrilled to see you editing again. Hope all is well. Best, Victoriaearle (tk) 18:13, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) SV=SlimVirgin. Regarding Tony, that FAC incident is just what he's talking about when he refers to his "show trial" last year, and isn't connected to the current issues (other than that some of the same people have commented). He's recently been lashing out at all and sundry (I gave some recent examples on the ANI thread, but you can find plenty more just by looking at his contributions). I stand by my comments at the ANI thread last week and my talk page last year; this new incarnation of Tony's is almost a different person to the Tony of ten years ago and is incredibly unpleasant to anyone he remotely sees as questioning him (see Talk:Olympiacos CFP (men's water polo) for his taking offense at I wish you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and responding with I don't wish you your christian commercial celebration. You're the insulter—assuming that I'm a christian. Don't. Keep your greetings non-ideological.). I recently described him in his current incarnation as one of the most arrogant and aggressive people I've ever encountered and stand by that. I have almost no involvement in FAC these days and can't really speak for how he acts there, but from what I've seen of him on various talkpages recently the only other editor I can think of who flipped between such extremes of helpfulness and viciousness was Mattisse, and I assume you remember how that ended. ‑ Iridescent 18:22, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

After a long gap he had reappeared at FAC and started doing some reviews, but got excessively abrasive pretty quickly, leading to that incident; I'm pretty sure he has not been seen there since. Can't remember any noms he reviewed offhand. Of course most of his points were useful, but many were delivered very fiercely, and no discussion was allowed over them. Johnbod (talk) 18:29, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi Victoriaearle! Iri and Johnbod, I gotta disagree with both of you a little bit; Tony1 is the same Tony1 he has always been:) You don't have to give me examples: he aimed them at times at me, too! He does, though, have the ability to self-correct, which is something I admire compared to the oblivious and unaware among us. His prose is incomparable, and I think it worth it to try to work to bring him back. He does simmer down quickly, and does respond to reason. But for integrity in the process (which is now quite seriously lacking), the value added by convincing Tony1 to reign in those tendencies is worth it. Particularly when compared to the level of review that is driving FAC these days. On one hand, I understand Tony1's thorough disgust at having to watch what is happening to FAC; it is no longer driven by the overall value of the star, rather is now driven by the "I want my time on the mainpage, and my circle of friends will help me get it, and we don't care if no one ever improves deficient FAs at FAR and if no one ever opposes the deficient FACs so the delegates can move them off the page, as long as WE get OUR bronze stars and day on the mainpage". That sums up the FA process today-- is is being driven not by quality, but by a desire to be on the main page. Tony's reviews simply strike nerves, because people have become unaccustomed to writing at a level once demanded. Of course what is coming out of there has to disgust Tony1, and did he go way over the top in those responses, yes ... but FA coords called out the nominator as they should have, and the stalling tactics trouble me. Seriously, ONE oppose in an entire month, according to Mike Christie and you can't get bad stuff corrected because opposes are ignored, and WBFAN chock full of people whose prose is worse than mine (and that's saying something LOL !!!!).

Iri, the Mattisse thing may have ended differently than you think-- she has been behaving decently for several years now. "Vicious" isn't the main word I would use for what was driving those behaviors, and remember, there were lots of players encouraging the problematic behaviors. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if she hadn't had enablers; she seems to be doing sort of fine these days. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:54, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

There's simply no reason to lash out like he does. Whether or not that's always been the case is kind of besides the point. It doesn't actually address any issues at FAC and just makes it less productive a process, not more. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs^(talk) 19:21, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't disagree. But I'm looking at other angles of a bigger problem. First, AN/I shouldn't be deciding who gets topic banned at FAC, because that opens a door to the sensitive running to AN/I when they get a critical review, which affects reviews, which affects whatever quality is left at FAC. I can understand blocking someone for personal attacks, but I hope the notion that AN/I decides FA-process topic bans does not advance. Let the FA process make those decisions. Second, the SV points; there has been a lack of critical and independent review for several years now. We don't need data or bots; we need to shine a light on the issue. Third, it only takes archiving a few FACs where the nominator got unnecessarily snippy and rude with a reviewer to get that business to stop. It has always been a problem that some nominators forget that "their" stars come on the work of uninvolved reviewers who are willing to take the time to help improve their articles, and delegates/coords who spend hours daily reading through and checking FACs. (One day, I woke up and realized that about 90% of the nominators had zero appreciation for all the work that all the women at FAC were doing for them!) We should have as little tolerance for rude nominators as we do for rude reviewers. You all may be saying this problem has been going on longer than the FAC linked above in this thread, but in THAT FAC, the first unacceptably rude commentary began with the nominator. A bold coordinator would close that FAC down, right there, and say, come back when you're ready to respect the work that FAC reviewers do for YOU. FAC delegates/coords have discretion that they can and should use for the integrity of the process. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:46, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

I certainly agree that nominators' respect for reviewers has declined badly, despite the fact there are fewer of them. A vicious circle may be developing. Johnbod (talk) 21:10, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

And that circles back to the other issues I see. If you no longer value the entire FA process (that is, in the "olden days", all of the FAC regulars also worked at FAR to save stars or demote deficient FAs), and if you know your wiki-friends are going to support your FAC anyway, then appreciation for the selfless reviewer who digs in to make sure overall quality is maintained across the board, or for the overworked FAC delegate who can't do a thing about the problems because nobody is doing real reviews, is going to be lost. The whole process is lost and awash in egoism.

I always rejected expansion of the rules, but these days, one can see the need for them. Like at DYK (you have to review another DYK to have your DYK promoted). How about, coords say, "OK, your article is approaching promotion. So, now go nominate a deficient article at FAR, and shepherd it through, because your star is only as good as the worst FA out there." Or do a serious FAR review. Or something to address the overall declining standard. Too many selfish nominators, only wanting their star and their day on the mainpage, but doing nothing about the thousands of deficient FAs that need to go to FAR. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:20, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Last summer Sarah and I had the dubious pleasure of being involved with Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Black Friday (1910)/archive1 (very long, plus loads of stuff moved to the talk page, so I don't necessarily suggest reading it). Aside from being un-freaking-believably sick at the time and not knowing when to get myself away from here, my frustration levels went sky-high and I ended up striking all my comments. I've really not edited much since, and wonder whether I'll ever get back here in any meaningful way. Yes, a vicious cycle is developing because there does seem to be an attitude of not taking comments on-board, alienating reviewers, and lots of pushback, which causes frustration. How people respond to their frustration varies from unacceptable outbursts to simply walking away. Neither is good for FAC, but I think FAC might be a lost cause. Victoriaearle (tk) 21:22, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

oh, my. now there's something you don't see every day. not archived by a coordinator. wth. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:55, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

I looked. Troubling. Looking back wistfully on the five Catholic Church FACs! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:07, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Exactly. Catholic Church seemed like so much trouble, and it was, but more of a competence issue than what's been happening recently. I opposed George Washington in December, and have been watching the talk page since because there are hagiography and neutrality issues a la Catholic Church – sort of a long-term review when I'm able to be around – but no else is interested and you don't get "credit" for a long review or for an oppose. Anyway, thanks for letting me vent here and sorry about not getting around to welcoming you back earlier. I'm still deciding whether to wade into the AN/I mess. Victoriaearle (tk) 23:19, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

The incident: break2

Uh, the editor who shut down the FAC talk "discussion" may have been me; I saw it as an aboration and a self-reinforcing pile on, and could only have imagined how upsetting it was to Tony. So tried to shut it down[2] Ceoil (talk) 01:01, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know, Ceoil. I can see so many areas where a productive discussion of "how can we make this situation better" might be had, and I trust that both Laser brain and Mike Christie are the persons who have the history, knowledge, temperament and skill to guide FAC back to a useful place, but I sense that we are beyond the point of there being anything salvageable, and discussion now would be a timesink.

I do wish Tony1 had understood—when he launched the FAC to do away with a director of the entire prcoess—this all was the inevitable outcome, as so many of us knew then. This is what held at bay these kinds of problems; this is where the current predicament was assured. The goal now is just mainpage exposure-- not overall quality and not the integrity of the process. Not sure talking with Mike or Laser about ways to address the current problems and environment (no opposes, once an FA always an FA, and little respect for reviewers) is a productive use of time and effort. People always misunderstood what they labeled and perceived as Raul's "inactivity"; Raul trusted Wikiprocesses to work, and stepped in only when he was needed, maintaining neutrality. Now we have no one to step in, and pieces of the process that no longer work together. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:34, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

@WP:FAR coordinators: My view: until/unless a) we find a way to get FAR going again, and b) we reinstate the flexibility to schedule unannounced TFAs, we can't hope to address the current environment that is driving problems at FAC. I launched a big effort to get FAR evaluations re-started a few years back, went to Cayman Islands for a nice week at the beach, and came back to find I was being attacked by the usual, and so decided this place wasn't worth my time and left that work unfinished. I don't even remember what page I left that work on ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:54, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Three things - (1) none of the supports of the 2013 RFC were ever involved or beneficial to FAC; my impression at the time was that it was a proxy battle in a larger content vs admins war (In part - lets break the one process thats working, so we dont look so bad, but its deeper than that) (2) There is a lot more institutional knowledge outside of Mike and Andy; in particular Sarastro1 and Sarah get it about opposing, and I think the phrasing "Your last FA is only as good as the worst FA" is a credible and rather lovely, catchy meme that could get traction in a reform push, (3) There is no longer any "FAC criteria" - those days are long gone, and they are just an obscure link on the nom page (Why not list them!). The FAC header is now really just about button pressing and process, very little guidance as to expected quality - thus spawning an entitled culture that gave us what happened to Tony (though I don't think he chose his battles wisely...I agree with him 100% on sentiment). Ceoil (talk) 16:14, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the wisdom, Ceoil; you are always right. Ah, the benefit of hindsight. Looking back at that RFC, knowing what we know now, it is easy to see what drove it. And it suffered form the get-go in that Tony put it up without warning or prior discussion, so that even those who opposed were opposing different things. It was poorly designed.

But still, is there any way now to undo the damage? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:01, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Hindsight yes, although it was pretty, pretty clear at the time also; you and Moni made a number of very striking impassioned pleas. But, sigh, its a vicious circle in many ways - the process is only as good as the people working on it, and the further it is eroded the less attractive it becomes to those people. My experience has always been the higher the barrier the more valued the the reward. Hence why I was concerned to see Tony chased off. Ceoil (talk) 19:35, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Right, one of the problem with me being tapped on the shoulder for FAR coordinator is that it hamstrings me somewhat for nominating and commenting directly on an article's fulfilment of criteria. I'd be more than happy if some people did more nominating of articles. Regarding flexibility, I have found all the people currently involved in FA and TFA coordination thoughtful and open-minded. No-one will know unless we find an article at short notice. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:01, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

A few years back, when I started that FAR list, the goal was to first identify those FAs that were still being watched by the original or another FA editor, on the idea that those were likely being maintained to standard and the abandoned were more likely to need attention. Next would be to set up a list of abandoned FAs and begin to process those through FAR if deficiencies were found. We were making fairly good progress on identifying the watched FAs (I think that was about the time you were tapped, Cas), and had that work continued, maybe we'd be nominating those slowly through as we did in the uncited days.

But you can recuse to comment, since there are other coords, Cas; you shouldn't be hamstrung as long as the others are still active ... ??? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:23, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

The incident: break3

So. I just did a full "sit down and read through all of FAC", just to get a renewed sense of the issues. I was relieved to find some pieces working well, generally related to Brainy Brianboulton and Nikkimaria. It is troubling to see the number of FACs sitting there for three to four weeks with negligible feedback, but that seems to be a cultural change that took over there and may not be reversible. Then there is the whole group of nominators who review and support each other's noms, but don't often venture out to help deal with the backlog of non-promoteable FACs by entering an Oppose.

The one undeniable problem is ... prose quality. Just, wow. Everywhere. Substandard to a point of being even less than GA, and that reviewers should not be missing. What happened? Was it the Tony1 "finger in the dike" effect? If Tony1 is gone, where is Eric Corbett? Every article I checked—even many with multiple supports and close to promotion—had glaringly substandard and problematic prose. Issues of the sort that in the past would have warranted a fast, Suggest withdrawal and get an independent copyedit, expect to support this next time if you get a new set of eyes on it. So, I see the problem: in the current environment, one is reluctant to oppose, most of the ones I checked already have multiple support, and if you oppose now, you'll be struck going line-by-line pulling through deficient prose. I used to do those kinds of opposes, to keep the page moving, but in a culture where you are attacked for opposing deficient prose, is it worth it? Multiple articles that I looked at have entire paragraphs that are gibberish. And many of those nominators have multiple FAs already, so opposing and getting them to adapt to standard could be an uphill battle. So, I see the concerns being raised. That's all. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:48, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for placing Maduro's accussattion to Argentina and Colombia of being puppets of the United States of America. I didn't know where to put it. Thank you for your kindness and Happy Worker's Day. --LLcentury (talk) 14:27, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

And thank you for all your effort !! I was a bit concerned that Argentine text was overwhelming the rest :) Saludos y felicidades, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:28, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Dear Sandy, sorry for bothering you again, but on Live TV in my country is saying that my nation Argentina is breaking apart relationships with Venezuela but there are still no newspaper article. Should I wait? Thank you again. --LLcentury (talk) 14:55, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes, probably ... I have a very busy day, so perhaps @Jamez42 and ZiaLater: will help you figure out where to put that content as it develops. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:57, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Sorry

Sorry for putting so much of Argentina but I just wanted to contribute as I watch closely TV here. Feel free to delete innecesaria information. Happy Workers Day and again thanks for your patience. --LLcentury (talk) 23:09, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

15 minutes ...

... of non-fame. "Controlling the narrative: Six editors account for the overwhelming majority of edits to Wikipedia articles covering current events in Venezuela" on reddit. @Jamez42, ZiaLater, Kingsif, MaoGo, Cyfraw, and Smartse:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/bjsi0j/controlling_the_narrative_six_editors_account_for/

This exposure explains the sudden rash of red-linked-account interest in Venezuela topics. Reading the thread, you'll see there are posters who have explained how Wikipedia works, and you do have to speak Spanish and know the local sources to stay abreast of Venezuela topics, because of the freedom of press problem in Venezuela. But you know something like this is out there when you have to suddenly deal with a lot of uninformed edits. It's only borderline for WP:RECRUITING, but it has an effect.

I've always joked that I'm a famously inefficient editor. I do tons of minor cleanup edits that cause an exaggerated edit count, and make 10 edits to any other editor’s one. I have a high edit count on any article I touch: see WP:EDITCOUNTITIS. Edit count is also inflated on current topics, where some editors plop in crap text that we then have to copyedit, format, merge for flow, all that stuff. Something missing in the articles? Bring a reliable source !

The good news is that, even if editing is more challenging when you have to educate new accounts, it sure beats the alternative (the days when the media didn't pay any attention to events in Venezuela). Saludos, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:40, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

So this is were the hell break loose? I guess I avoided a bullet there, or I am not working hard enough :-(. The redditer seems to be a propaganda warrior. It has another post about Guaidó's article. --MaoGo (talk) 07:32, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

The user gave us a name too [3]. --MaoGo (talk) 07:48, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

He's building tools to analyze us ... don't you feel important ?? Funny, all he has to do is ask :) The data is heavily influenced by the fact that I do the splitting and merging, so that I end up being credited for almost all the content, even if I didn't write it, rather just copied it over. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 09:37, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

"Regarding the relatively few accounts: Most likely if this is government-sponsored activity, it is subcontracted out to a PR agency that specializes in Wikipedia editing." Allright, now I'm mad: who's been withholding my paycheck ???? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 09:44, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

I want my paycheck too :( --Jamez42 (talk) 11:44, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Posted to AN for more eyes: [4] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:20, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Should we answer in the Reddit thread? I feel it would give the impression of more transparency. --Jamez42 (talk) 11:45, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

My recommendation is no; when you are dealing with POV warriors (whether on or off Wiki), trying to reason with them usually doesn't work. And it would just give them undeserved attention. And it's better to observe from afar ... then you can recognize off-Wikipedia recruiting to articles. One of the reasons I pinged Smartse on this post is that I see a Reddit editor in that thread named Smartse, and I'm guessing they may be the same. If Smartse wants to clue them in as to SandyGeorgia's typical editing habits, they will :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:53, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

@EllenCT:, here is some info for you:

• Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/archive55#FAC delegate resignation (a bit about who I am)
• The paid editing thing needs to be dealt with right away; that dog won't hunt anywhere, because I've been around too long and know too many editors, and have too much of a consistent editing pattern (where I end up with a high edit count on every article I touch, because of how I edit) for anyone of substance to believe it. Besides that. It is false.
• From being WP:FAC delegate and heavily involved at WP:FAR, if you look at any article I edit, you will find I have gazillions of cleanup edits, even if I add little. You will find the same thing if you look at any of the Venezuela articles. I clean up citations. I clean up MOS stuff. I do gobs of little edits. It's because I am used to working on articles written at the WP:FA level, and I hate working on crap articles, so I clean them up. People with WP:EDITCOUNTITIS are going to come to false conclusions about my edits quickly if they use the editcount tools.
• Here's one of my favorite examples: Samuel Johnson. I can't remember for how many years I've watched that article and maintained the little crap. So I end up being the top editor in edit count by a long distance, even though I have only 6% of authorship.[5] That Reddit ninny has no idea how to use the tools he's found. You will find similar on almost every article I touch.
• Another factor is that we have had to constantly split articles in the Venezuela suite because the main presidential crisis article has grown so much. Other editors have trusted me to do that work. And we've merged some. When you split or merge an article by copy-pasting text, you end up with 100% credit for the authorship, even if you wrote none of it. Best example of that is an article that MaoGo maintains, Censorship and media control during the Venezuelan presidential crisis. I show as having 73% of the content in nine edits;[6] that's because I copied the text from the main article to there when we split it, so it looks like "my" article, even though I wrote almost none of it. The tools don't give the information that Mr. Reddit thinks they do.
• Do six editors do most of the work on Vzla articles? Yes. (Curiously, not the six identified; I have no idea who one of them is, and a couple of very involved editors on Ven topics don't show on that chart, and that again, is a function of HOW they edit. Maybe they get it right in one edit, where I take 10). Is six editors on an article atypical for a situation where you need to speak Spanish and know something about Venezuela to keep up? No. Does that mean a single one of us is paid? Have you looked at whether we accurately reflect reliable sources? Do you think someone who dedicated most of her Wiki career to the FA process would do shit editing and not reflect high quality reliable sources?
• Do I do more of the editing than most? Yes ... I'm a bit of a take-control type, and have WP:FA standards, and I get seriously irritated when people don't format their citations completely and little things like that, so it is entirely common for others to propose things on talk and then wait for me to add it.
• Not all of the editors on Venezuela topics are as fluent as I am in both languages, so they often make edits that I have to spend a lot of time cleaning up. I have no idea of the nationality of any of them (wait, not true, I do know one is Venezuelan because they said it somewhere), but I am absolutely certain none of them are paid editors. The pattern is just not there. We struggle to find the best sources, and to reflect them correctly. I am not going to take the time to dig it out now, but everyone knows I busted a Venezuelan paid editor once, rather spectacularly, at ANI. I can't remember his name: he was editing e-cigarette topics and Derwick Associates. If you had bothered to ask, you would know (like everyone) that I take pride in my work, that I would not do this for pay, and that I have a high edit count because I work to get it right. I also happen to speak fluent Spanish, so I can get a lot done on the Venezuela suite.
• Ask people who have edited with me for YEARS if they think I am a paid editor. @FAR: @Ealdgyth: @Newyorkbrad: @Risker: @Laser brain: @Colin: @Mike Christie: @Doc James: (medical editors always had to put up with me asking them for sources, 'cuz I couldn't get them-- do you think a paid editor would have to get sources from others, or might they not have PAID access?) Look at my edit count on my top edited articles and explain to me who paid me to write those? You know how to use the tool to find my top edited articles? Mr. Reddit doesn't; he has succumbed to WP:EDITCOUNTITIS while having no knowledge of the tool he is using.
• That article has run on the mainpage for three months; I am fairly certain that is quite unusual, and keeping an article that is on the mainpage up to snuff takes a huge effort. We did it. No good deed goes unpunished. We became the subject of some sophomore class conspiracy project, in a person who has no idea even how to actually look at Wikipedia edits relative to policy. Even better, we have Wikipedia editors falling for it and going irrational in their reasoning.

What else would you like to know? Feel free to ask. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:13, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

No one that matters or with any knowledge of Wikipedia thinks you are a paid editor... Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:03, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Agree completely. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:05, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

I can't say I'd ever thought you could possibly be a paid editor. Years ago, I learned to NOT try to edit something when you started editing, because you make so many small edits and typos that it's safer to wait til you're done... If you are a paid editor, you'd better be getting paid by the edit rather than by the amount of prose added... Ealdgyth - Talk 23:10, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Bwaaaahaha ... you pegged it, Ealdgyth :) I have the worst edit count to final quality ratio on the project! Thanks for making me laugh, because this situation is kinda disgusting. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:16, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Doc, and Mike for showing up. But we know that-- it's the articles that are being affected. That Reddit wannabe statistician has caused a Move discussion, and another utterly trivial discussion, to turn into debacles, because editors who know nothing of the topics have shown up to oppose anything I say, because they fell for this crap. So, people believing a Reddit thread caused two of the most outlandish, non-policy-based discussions I have ever seen at 2019 Venezuela uprising, and I don't know how those discussions can be closed now without admin intervention, because the non-policy reasoning used there to oppose ME is just wild, and can't be used to close a discussion that has been based on Reddit speculation. Thanks for showing up, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:10, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

• Oh good grief. I can't imagine any context in the wiki-world where anyone who understands the project could consider you a paid editor. Wow. Boy have they missed the mark. Risker (talk) 23:20, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

  Thank you, Risker. You should see what's been happening to my watchlist all day. People I have never heard of, and have never before touched my articles, are combing through them ... and finding wayward apostrophes. I might as well take a few days off 'til this dies down. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:24, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Sandy, I never said or implied you were paid, or linked to anything that did. I think the issue here is WP:OWN. Do you care to respond to [7] at the move discussion? EllenCT (talk) 23:26, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps then you didn't bother to even read what you posted here, where the paid editor charges are made. It appears that you jumped to conclusions based on very little information. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:13, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Where? I posted FAIR.org and Imugr links. Neither of them has any accusations of paid editing. EllenCT (talk) 02:41, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

@EllenCT: I am not fluent in Reddit (as this is my first unpleasant foray into there), but it seems that getting the threads to load correctly is tricky. Perhaps you're not getting it all: I get something different every time I look at it (besides nauseous). The commentary is there. I quoted a piece above, about being sub-contracted to a government PR firm, or some such thing. So the sophomore wannabe statistician on Reddit doesn't know anything about Wikipedia or its tools for looking at edits. But you do. And you can find that data yourself, and you could have checked this. Why would you look at a pie chart showing I have most edits (which I do on everything I touch because I'm such a famously inefficient editor, ref Ealdgyth above, who nails it), and use that as a basis for forming an opinion about my editing? (Which everyone who suddenly appeared on that page did because, oh LOOK, a scandal!) Editcount-- it's fair to call me a PITA for all my typos and edit conflicts, but arguments based on an editcount piechart are lame. Yes, I also show a high percentage of authorship on those articles: because I do a lot of the copying back and forth between articles, as does ZiaLater, and that doesn't mean we wrote all the content. I also do a lot of minor ce, grammar cleanup because most editors aren't native English speakers. Mr. Reddit wants to complain about my editing, he should find an actual edit that I made and we'll talk. They might be surprised to find that I have no problem admitting when I'm wrong and adjusting. Bring a quality source, and I'll work with it. But my editing will not prioritize the Boston Herald over the kinds of sources I prefer and typically use. I try very hard to be a thoughtful editor: certainly we should all be self-aware and recognize that we all have biases, and a nincompoop on Reddit doesn't bother me as much as seeing experienced Wikipedians fall for an argument based on editcount, and then going after me. I knew that was the deal there; thank you for being the first to admit it. But you've been around a very long, and I think you might have known to come and ask me, as others did. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:08, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

I did not link to Reddit, I did not find the charts on Reddit, and I did not form an opinion about you when I saw the charts. A friendly acquaintance who I've never met but have had some email exchanges about Wikipedia sent the Imgur link to me asking why there are so few editors on the topics, probably not realizing the total number of editors in "other". I did not know they had been posted to Reddit until you pinged me from this page. The only opinion I formed from the charts is that maybe I could look at the articles and their talk pages to explain it. EllenCT (talk) 03:28, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

And ... your explanation was OWN. Well, thank you for telling me that (doesn't make anything better because I think you still formed an opinion of me without actually examining my edits ... I wasn't steamed til you claimed OWN based on a piechart). The chart originated from a conspiracy theorist wanna be statistician on Reddit. We are accused of being a paid PR firm, hired by the government (gawd, this is so patronizing, like All Things Venezuelan MUST Be Driven From Washington because, ya know, hispanics are so lazy and stupid and they couldn't POSSIBLY be doing this kind of prolific editing <barf>). So, tell your friend, yes ... the topic was mainpaged for THREE months (which is rather an unpleasant experience), still is, and there really are about six of us holding down the fort there. The mainpage has a quality article to showcase, and our reward is criticism. Based on not a single valid ... anything. And ... that really is the situation on most Wikipedia topics. At least everything I've ever edited, and holy cow, I've edited. No difference in any of the medical topics I edit: too much to be done and not enough editors to do it. Here's the last article "I" wrote: check out THAT embarassing edit count! [8] Because that's how long it takes me to do it. And yes, there were about six of us there, too, except that I pulled in at one point all of my old FA buddies to help clean up my crap prose. So ... the uprising article got clobbered because of a Reddit ninny. Maybe he can read dementia with Lewy bodies and offer some criticism about, you know, my actual editing, because clearly, only a hired professional can generate that. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:40, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Claiming WP:OWN based, quite obviously, on editcountitis is no different than a Reddit editor claiming it based on knowing nothing of how to use Wikipedia tools. No, I don't plan to look at that discussion again just now; what has happened there for two days, since the Reddit thread, is ridiculous, and the policy-based reasoning is already so clear that I do not see what is to be gained by looking at one more individual source. It is obvious that the discussion there is about something people believed about me, not Wikipedia policy. I am aware you did not say I was paid, but you did post a speculative and offensive Reddit thread to an article discussion, when you most easily could have posted it here to my talk. So NOW I have to address the entire thread, which does allege that I am a paid editor. I doubt it will happen, but should you ever find yourself barging in to an article/topic you have never edited before based on Reddit speculation, you might consider the courtesy of asking me directly AS MANY DID (which is why I knew about the thread quite a while ago). Bringing that to an article page discussion is, though, kinda good, because now it is clear why we have this sudden influx of editors entering commentary that has zero to do with Wikipedia policy. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:35, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

And. The article was on the main page for three months—I don't follow the main page, but I'm pretty sure that is almost unheard of. So we kept it in tip-top shape because of mainpage exposure, with hundreds of edits; with hundreds of thousands of hits over that time, no one found problems, but suddenly a wannabe statistician on Reddit says there's a problem based on an editcountitis pie chart... and you call it OWN. Have you ever tried to maintain an article that ran on the mainpage for three months? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:11, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

I brought up WP:OWN because of the way you keep saying that "we have no examples of a reliable source calling it a coup" after many people have shown you several. You obviously have a stellar reputation but I doubt you earned it doing that sort of thing. EllenCT (talk) 02:41, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

I didn't earn my reputation by prioritizing click-bait headlines in the Boston Herald over serious reporting from BBC, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, Reuters, Asociated Press ... well, basically every major news outlet who actually has a reporter in Caracas. Not ONE source of the quality of the sources we used has been presented yet. But let's be honest: the discussion there was never about policy. It was about a pie chart. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:46, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

During the miserably cold winter, I remember being in the car one morning, hearing the news about Venezuela, and I thought to myself, "boy does Wikipedia need Sandy right now." And then there you were, doing what you do best. Hang in there and keep it up. You've been working those pages as long as I remember. Own? Pfft! Stewartship is a different matter. Victoria (tk) 01:37, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

What a winter it was, huh? You are always so encouraging; how nice of you to think of me. I had ignored Venezuela articles for more than a few years because decent mainstream media coverage just wasn't there, but when the news hit in January, I came back to have a look. There was only a handful of editors on Venezuelan topics, trying to keep up with a major geopolitical event, featured on the mainpage for months ... seriously, TFA x 90 ... but you get hit with a steady stream of poor quality edits while trying to build content because its a current event and every dork is an expert. There really were probably only six editors doing all this work! That the sophomore conspiracy theorist and those who bought it are basing criticism on an editcount pie chart ... well ... there you go. "[S]ubcontracted out to a PR agency that specializes in Wikipedia editing" indeed; so it appears we edit like pros. Well kudos on us; now where's our paychecks !?!?! Thanks for the encouragement, you are a dear. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:27, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

You're opinionated, have high standards for quality, are willing and more than able to argue your position, and you genuinely care about the topics you edit. That's going to look like OWNership no matter what data or statistics one looks at, and especially if all ongoing discussion is regarding contentious issues (i.e. where there genuinely isn't any room for compromise). One key difference between ownership and stewardship is that one can violate OWN instantly and in a single dispute, but stewarding is inherently something that happens over an extended period of time. If we ignore the egregious and obvious cases, telling the two apart based on a snapshot over a brief period of time is impossible: the interpretation of the evidence exhibited in that snapshot will depend entirely on what your expectations are. If one goes looking because one suspects there may well be a problem there, one will find signs of OWN rather than STEWARDSHIP. And that's not really a failing of the eyes that see, it's just the nature of the beast and the limits of (all) human beings. [insert clever and erudite joke about paid editing and chocolate that makes this message sound less pretentious] --Xover (talk) 06:36, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

<joke insert= Save Time. See It My Way!>

CHOCOLATE !!! That's what's missing. (Don't tell Mannanan51, who gave me a beer just as the Reddit thing was getting cranked up, so I gulped it :)

How nice to "see" you Xover and how very nice of you to stop by and give me such cheer. Now that I have fallen from grace to the depths of paid editing (for the gov't no less ! oh my gosh, for the Trump government, no less !), I hope you will continue to befriend me. Seriously, your words are very kind, and are salve to the soul; being accused of being a PR schill feels cruddier than I imagined it would. Thanks, and all my best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:55, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

I could probably count on one hand the groups I would less like to be associated with, but as the object of my idolatry has already decreed who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, I guess we'll just have to hold our nose and wait until our turn comes. I'm sure lots of people have legitimate complaints about this, that, or the other thing you've done over the years; but schilling for Trump is so absurd it really should cheer you up rather than bring you down. It certainly gave me a good chuckle. Cheers, --Xover (talk) 07:56, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

So there start the consequences. "Paid editor" = tag articles she has worked on based on ...nothing. Gratuitous tags going up on Venezuelan articles, and for text I never touched. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:09, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Apology

@EllenCT:, please receive my sincere apologies; being accused of paid editing was (still is) quite unnerving, and I certainly took it out on you as the person who brought up the piecharts on article talk. My responses were unhinged, and I'm sorry. I also see now that those charts have legs, and are posted other places, so that you were able to come across them without seeing the associated commentary from the author, so that I attributed to you things that were not the case. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:51, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. I just want to say how impressed I am with your decades of work, which I only learned about after I had the chance to look more closely than the naming dispute. The guy who emailed the graphs to me did learn about them from Reddit, by the way, but he thought the discussion there was unhelpful at best, so he only sent me the link to the graphics without commentary. I told him how to look at how vastly more editors were in "other" and why some people (like both of us) tend to make lots of small edits, distorting the count. EllenCT (talk) 21:13, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

@EllenCT: thank you for graciously accepting my apology for the temper tantrum. I do understand that the commentary of the Reddit thread is easy to dismiss, but I also understand that my editing now is forever affected. Every time I see a correction that needs to be made, I am thinking now, "let someone else do it", so my edit count won't go up. And that's no fun. And I suppose I will have to put up some sort of message on my user page saying I am not a Trump shill. It's a bummer. Well, I'll get over it! Thank you again, Ellen. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:18, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Off topic

Never Ask A Gringo A Simple Question. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:56, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

"Liberty" vs. "freedom"

You've mentioned this in a few separate discussions now, so I wanted to address it with you directly. Feel free to ignore or delete this message if this conversation is unwanted.

My point about the nuances of "liberty" vs. "freedom" was not meant to stall editing, be a distraction, etc., as you seem to have interpreted it. I am generally in favour of bold editing and was fine with the article reading "freedom" until discussion concluded. My goal was just to argue that the nuances do exist, contrary to some of the claims in the preceding discussion, and that they ought to be taken into account as we attempt to come up with an ideal solution (given that RS are divided for no discernible reason). I am sorry that this may have come off as pedantry, which I generally detest. — cmonghost 👻 (talk) 22:37, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

I didn't interpret it that way at all. (??)

What I did interpret had nothing to do with you. What was happening at that article yesterday (and I don't actually know how we are going to solve this now) was an influx of rubberneckers because of the Reddit claim of paid editing. (I am guessing you've read that mess above.) Editors who would never have visited those articles and know nothing of the topic came over in search of a scandal, and if I said the sky was blue, they would say it's pink, just because "oh, LOOK, paid editor-- she must have a hidden agenda!" I tried over and over to indicate that I didn't care between liberty and freedom; that got nowhere. Almost none of the feedback there was useful (yours has been), just as almost none of the feedback on the naming issue was useful (yours was). We had an influx of people who thought they had happened upon a juicy scandal, and we're left with a mess, and unclear consensus on anything. How would you like to be the admin who had to close the naming issue for the article? Someone has to make a decision based on a discussion that was about "let's get the paid editor" rather than policy, and most of the people entered reasoning that a good admin will ignore because it's not based in policy.

Besides being called a paid editor, and dealing with that circus all day ... well, yesterday just ended on a very discouraging note. I think your editing at that article was very helpful. That I lost it when I got to the sanctions article ... well, as I said, fruitless, discouraging day and I'm sorry you felt I was concerned about the linguistics. I just wanted the same concern to "Effects". And ... now every time I have to clean up text in an article, I have edit count trauma, which was driving my frustration last night at the sanctions article. I suppose I'll get used to editing under a shadow.

Thanks so much for popping in so we could talk about it. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:08, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

BEER

		A beer on me!
		I only came upon the problem when I stumbled upon a weird transclusion. You identified the issue and immediately addressed it. Good Catch! Mannanan51 (talk) 19:27, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

oh boy, that beer is going down fast ! Could not come at a better time :) Great work there, best regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:42, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Videos again

FYI, Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Video Namespace.

James is still pushing these robot-narrated slide-shows on medical articles and now wants a namespace to host these article-forks. -- Colin°^Talk 13:27, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

@Colin:, my apologies for the delay. I have had a crazy busy few weeks, and just now looked at this. Reading that stuff gives me a headache; I just don't understand why we must expend any effort on it. It seems to have taken care of itself; did I miss something? The community seems to see all the problems you see. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:26, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

The namespace suggestion was obviously premature and snowball opposed. But James is still determined to create hundreds of these appalling robot slideshows. I fear editors will still have them imposed on their articles and find WP:MED acolytes edit warring to force their retention like before. Currently MEDMOS is being abused to permit POV pushing at Methylphenidate, and personal attacks by WP:MED regulars go unnoticed. -- Colin°^Talk 19:59, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

@Colin:, in other words, business as usual. That's why I signed off there. I returned to Wikipedia to edit Venezuela topics, find I need to make an update to TS, find dear Casliber digging in to help at dementia with Lewy bodies (the page that finally convinced me the MED project was full-on dysfunctional), so I will have to respond to his kindness, and other than that-- really hope to vanish again once my interest in editing Venezuela topics subsides. The MED project is a trainwreck; I finally really got it when I tried to write the dementia article and saw how long-time FA collaborators were chased away. The days of ... whatever they were ... are gone, I miss them, but I have little interest in engaging the crowd or the tactics that dominate WT:MED any more. Ping me any time, but I'm not touching methylphenidate because I've seen what is driving editing on those articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:29, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

I might dive into more editing after the sobering reality of our federal election on the weekend....sigh...Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:40, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Lovely mess at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Medicine-related_articles#Placement_of_addiction,_dependence_and_withdrawal

But for perspective, view this sentence just added at methylphenidate (worthy of an entire copyediting lesson from Tony1):

• Immediate release form of methylphenidate is added as an adjunct to the daily regimen along with longer-acting form in order to achieve full-day efficacy coverage for symptom control nowadays.

and take into consideration the level of debate. If you try to write a medical article on Wikipedia, this is what you encounter "nowadays". We no longer value writing; perhaps that's why we prefer videos and formulaic approaches to article structure. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:27, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Eeeuuuw, that green sentence. I've already said negative things about the frightful bot voice at Facebook's Wikipedia Weekly page, where James was promoting the vids with an example. Tony (talk) 12:57, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• I'm not sure that good writing isn't valued so much as that relatively few editors have the skill to write well, despite Tony's best efforts. Eric Corbett 16:01, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• How wonderful to "see" you Eric Corbett! I overgeneralized" good writing of entire articles, and collaboration, is no longer a goal of medical articles. The goals of late are to write oversimplified leads that can be translated to other language Wikipedias and used to generate videos, and that are basically just regurgitating what NIH or NHS has. This is done even when the rest of the articles are a dangerous load of crap. The medicine project has taken on formulaic approaches, with goals that have no relation to writing good, comprehensive, top quality articles. The halls of WT:MED were once filled with medical scholars. Now we are driven by agenda-pushing at psychostimulant articles; just watch what our resident FA-writing psychiatrist will have to answer to in there :) :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:11, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• I can't speak to the medicine project as I usually avoided it, with very few exceptions, mainly because it seemed potentially dangerous to me. Mistaking the facts in an article about a 17th-century uprising in rural England isn't likely to harm anyone, but psychoactive drugs ... plus the facts aren't always as clear-cut as even doctors may believe. I suffered very badly from the effects of a drug called omeprazole, nearly killed me, but the majority of doctors I've spoken to since about what happened are very sceptical, and are completely unaware of the very serious effects it can have on your pancreas. It's not their fault of course, they don't always have the time to keep up with the latest research, and so I'd far rather rely on regulatory authorities and even the pharmaceutical companies themselves for information about any drug.

• And returning to the good writing theme, I seem to remember a time when Wikipedia had rafts of good writers with whom it was a pleasure to collaborate: Karanacs and Moni3 spring immediately to mind but there were many others as well. Perhaps the question is why does Wikipedia find it so difficult to retain good writers, and why doesn't it seem to care that it can't? Eric Corbett 16:33, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• I think both are true, speaking relative to, say, a decade ago. And I think the two are related: the less the project values good writing the harder it is for those few standing on that barricade, and the sooner they either burn out or flame out. And the worst part is… We now have the widest coverage of any encyclopedia. A lot of the articles have been expanded to some reasonable size. Which makes quality of information and quality of presentation ever more critical. Both aspects require good, "even brilliant", writers. --Xover (talk) 17:32, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• @Xover:, I was unaware that change to WIAFA had been made :( :( How discouraging that the likes of Colin, Tony1, Eric Corbett and I wasted so many years building standards that are ... just gone now. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:37, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• To be fair, the discussion was reasonable enough and the change had support from several voices that carry a lot of weight on that issue, but, still… To me this is symptomatic. The current phrasing is something that belongs in the MoS, written as a general guideline for the wide variety of article. At FAC, if FAs are to showcase the very best of the project, the standards should be higher, and should always strive for that unattainable ideal, including, even, "brilliant prose". It's the difference between FA being a hard-won achievement that cost blood and heartache, and FAC as a slightly run-down factory producing new blurbs to fill up the TFA slots (probably to improve the engagement metric or somesuch). That factory may be a necessary evil, but nobody wants to live next to it, much less work there. My FAC scars from back in the day, on the other hand, are something I'd brag about! --Xover (talk) 18:12, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• Well, you took on such a light topic :) :) :) I don't recall encountering Anne Delong ever, but yes, important voices weighed in there. Nonetheless, "brilliant prose" was the last stand against the formulaic, dull, plodding, cookie-cutter FAs that dominate FAC these days! Here I am, dragging myself through updates to Tourette syndrome, which I was proud of when it had Tony1 prose, but now ... why do I bother? There is no pride in it anymore ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:28, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• I agree. FACs these days tend to be worthy enough efforts, but somehow soulless. Maybe the goal of "brilliant" was just too high a bar. Eric Corbett 18:40, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Freely avaliable

https://n.neurology.org/content/92/19/896

Best Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:40, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Doc James; I hadn't checked yet. I may not get to it today, but I will get to it this week. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:42, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Preventing automatic talk page archiving

Hi SandyGeorgia, a couple of weeks ago, you asked, "Could someone please explain why the bot keeps archiving this RFC, and how to make that stop?" I don't think anyone answered your question, so I'll do my best to explain.

The source of Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard has a {{User:MiszaBot/config}} template near the top that defines the automated talk page archiving settings. In the template, algo is set to old(5d), which means that any discussions (including RfCs) on the noticeboard are eligible to be archived after 5 days of no new comments.

If you don't want the discussion to be automatically archived before it's formally closed, the easiest solution is to insert a {{subst:Do not archive until}} tag (or the {{subst:DNAU}} shortcut) somewhere in the discussion. For RfCs, it's best to place the DNAU tag immediately after the signature of the RfC statement to prevent the tag from being transcluded into the discussion lists.

I hope this helps! — Newslinger talk 06:09, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

It should be possible, not that I understand these things, to lengthen the period - 5 days is pretty short. Probably there was no discussion when it was set up. Johnbod (talk) 13:33, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Johnbod, I think higher-traffic noticeboards tend to have shorter archive periods. For example, WP:ANI is set to 72 hours and WP:AN is set to 6 days. The best place to discuss changing the value would be WT:RSN. — Newslinger talk 17:36, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks so much @Johnbod and Newslinger:. I believe I eventually figured that out, as I was trying to sort that RFC started by ZiaLater. Thanks for the help, and thanks for responding! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:34, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Responses to the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis

Sandy:

Please check the article in the subjest (Jamaica and St Lucia). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lavelletta (talk • contribs) 10:51, May 25, 2019 (UTC)

Hi, Lavalletta I am traveling and barely keeping up with Wikipedia. Independently, I don't believe Wikipedia should be tracking responses by country in articles, so I do my best to avoid those sections, which I consider unencyclopedic, UNDUE (they are often a compilation of primary sources). Sorry I can't help, but the grouping of country responses is not my cup of tea, and I had my druthers, we'd delete the whole mess. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:03, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Can o Worms for you to open...(or the BBC isn't always neutral or accurate)

Like I've complained to my Twitter friend at BBC Global Pod and to PBS News Hour email and Twitter; "If you aren't covering oil politics: US high cost oil production and the cheaply extracted Orinico Basin reserves 1100 miles to Houston refineries; you aren't covering the Venezuelan political crisis." John Bolton already tipped his hand and the price of gas can topple an American President. Ask Carter.

Here the NYT goes in depth about the value of the oil field to US companies, but do you own reading about latest developments. Check out how China and Russia have moved to control the Orinco oil as production has slumped from Venezuela's economic crisis. Understanding oil (and increasingly rare earth) extraction politics can give you a major understanding in why the various large players choose to interfere in smaller countries' elections and economies and you can easily see why some wars are being fought. 174.86.46.86 (talk) 12:59, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Sectorial VP of Venezuela

Hi

I think we should have one article and add lists for all offices of SVP.--Panam2014 (talk) 02:14, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Peer review request

Hi Sandy, I know you've gone off the Venezuela topic a bit, but I'd really like to ask if you'd look at Un célebre especialista sacando muelas en el gran Hotel Europa - the first Venezuelan film. I already asked for a peer review looking particularly at the style because I know that's where it's lacking; the review was quite positive, and some edits were made, but the FAC still picked up on, yes, style. I know you have substantial FAC experience so even a few pointers would be really appreciated; I really want to learn how to make quality articles for everything I contribute to, and with my interest in Venezuelan film, making this article the best it can is something I'd like to achieve. Thanks for consideration, Kingsif (talk) 14:57, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

WP:CEN is now open!

To all interested parties: Now that it has a proper shortcut, the current events noticeboard has now officially opened for discussion!

WP:CEN came about as an idea I explored through a request for comment that closed last March. Recen research has re-opened the debate on Wikipedia's role in a changing faster-paced internet. Questions of WP:NOTNEWS and WP:Recentism are still floating around. That being said, there are still plenty of articles to write and hopefully this noticeboard can positively contribute to that critical process.

Thank you for your participation in the RFC, and I hope to see you at WP:CEN soon! –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 17:12, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

15 minutes of non-fame (Paid Editing)

... of non-fame. "Controlling the narrative: Six editors account for the overwhelming majority of edits to Wikipedia articles covering current events in Venezuela" on reddit.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/bjsi0j/controlling_the_narrative_six_editors_account_for/

Posted to AN for more eyes: [9] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:20, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

So you saw a thread on Reddit, claiming I am a paid government shill. My 15 minutes of non-fame I guess. Please do ask me anything you want to know; I am happy to chat with anyone and personally deny the charges, that come from someone who may not understand how to use or interpret the Wikipedia tools they found, and help you understand how and why Mr. Reddit got it wrong.

And yes, there typically are about half a dozen top editors working on just about everything I edit here, whether medical, Venezuela, or as part of the articles I follow as a result of having served as a delegate for many years for Wikipedia's featured article process. There are also typically dozens to hundreds of others, doing a bit of this and that, but the quality articles on Wikipedia are usually shepherded by very few editors, doing all the work. There aren't enough editors in any area, and there are almost always just a few editors holding down the fort.

Although I have never showcased my Featured article work, or my barnstars (as you see on the userpages of many Wikipedians), now that I wear a false tag that has been spread thoughout the internet, I have had to put together some information about who I really am. Some information about my edits:

• Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/archive55#FAC delegate resignation (a bit about who I am)

• The paid editing thing needs to be dealt with right away; that dog won't hunt anywhere, because I've been around too long and know too many editors, and have too much of a consistent editing pattern (where I end up with a high edit count on every article I touch, because of how I edit) for anyone of substance to believe it. Besides that. It is false. (And creepy, cruddy and disgusting.)

• I am fluent in Spanish (for listening, reading and speaking, but not for writing), but a native English speaker. Some of the Venezuela editors sometimes need help with grammar cleanup, so that also adds to my editcount. I strongly deny that any of the Venzuelan editors are paid; that stuff is too easy to recognize. I busted a Venezuelan paid editor once, rather spectacularly, at ANI. (ANI archive)

  That doesn't mean I am naive to the topic of paid editing in Venezuelan articles. When Hugo Chavez was alive, and the Venezuela Information Office was a thing, it was a widely and well known fact that he controlled the entire suite of Venezuela articles, and attempts to recruit Wikipedia editors happened. I know. Personally. It's why I stopped editing the topic for many years, only coming back when I heard of the January 2019 crisis. No one was complaining when a blatant and pronounced pro-Chavez bias dominated the suite because Chavez was media savvy and put his best people on the job. I am completely unaware of any such effort during the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis, and considering the approaches I used to get, I think if there were a current effort to control the content on Wikipedia, I would have been approached. My observation is that we are dealing with a small group of editors, like me, who either by birth or other life circumstances, are familiar with Venezuela.

• From being the Featured article candidate delegate and heavily involved at Featured article reviews, if you look at any article I edit, you will find I have gazillions of cleanup edits, even in the cases where I add little content. I clean up citations. I clean up MOS stuff. I do gobs of little edits. It's because I am used to working on articles written at the featured article level, and I hate working on crap articles, so I clean them up. People with an edit counting obsession are going to come to false conclusions about my edits quickly if they use the editcount tools.

• Here's an example: Samuel Johnson. I can't remember for how many years I've watched that article and maintained the small things. I am the top editor in edit count by a long distance, even though I have only 6% of authorship.[10] Every article I touch is similar, because I do so much repetitive cleanup work.

• A factor in the Venezuelan presidential crisis suite of articles is that we have had to constantly split articles (as the grow too large) into smaller sub-articles. When you split or merge an article by copy-pasting text, you end up with 100% credit for the authorship, even if you wrote none of it. Best example of that is an article I hardly edit, Censorship and media control during the Venezuelan presidential crisis. I show as having 73% of the content in nine edits;[11] that's because I copied the text from the main article to there when we split it, so it looks like "my" article, even though I wrote almost none of it. The tools don't give the information that Mr. Reddit thinks they do.

• Have I mentioned that Mr. Reddit has an edit counting problem while having no knowledge of the tool he is using? Yes, I edit like a banshee, and yes, in spite of my infamous number of typos, I can generate that much content without being paid for it. I should be paid in typos. I wonder if Mr. Reddit even knows how to look at actual edits.

• If you've come by to find out more about me, I hope you'll read Featured article Tourette syndrome, dementia with Lewy bodies, or a little gem like bespoke, which was a fun rescue with Johnbod from Articles for deletion. Ima Hogg was pretty much everyone's favorite April Fools FA collaboration; I didn't do most of the work there (that was Karanacs), but I corralled everyone at WP:FAC into working on it, and we had a blast with the main page blurb on April 1, 2008.

• I am proud that together with other Venezuelan editors, we have kept 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis readable during the three grueling months it has been on the mainpage. (I am not a mainpage follower, but I am pretty sure that being subjected to an onslaught of edits from mainpage exposure for three months is highly unusual.) After my brush with internet Reddit fame, I doubt I will stay involved there. May be time to write another neuropsych article, since I gained so much experience dealing with psychopathologies while the article was mainpaged.

• I am proud of the work I headed up here: {{FCDW}}

• This post from old friend Tim, a medical editor, always tickles my funny bone:

Who is Sandy Georgia? - "Sandy is a complicated person in real life. She passes her time in simple surroundings, trying to deflect the worship of those who know her and use her gifts to help others. She has been hunted as a fugitive, cursed as a tomb-robber, and is renowned as a lover and duelist. She is a worshiped as a God in Honduras, but is an outlaw in Peru. No living man knows her real name, as she only whispers it into the ears of those she is about to kill. All love her and hate her, she is SandyGeorgia." -- Tim Vickers 17:19, 3 December 2007 (UTC) [12] [13]

• That's about all I can think of to share publicly about myself. Except one last thing. You couldn't pay me to be a PR shill for the Trump administration. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:30, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Keep up the good work. Wow - 845 views a day for Bespoke! Johnbod (talk) 03:38, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Wow, I had no idea ... can't believe people read a topic like that! Cool beans, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:52, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Thought I should give you this

	An arepa for you!
	I don't think I personally have ever given you a barnstar, and it took quite some time until we met in the same articles that we were editing. I realized that this may be the perfect way to show how grateful I am for all of your effort, and I'm sure I also speak on behalf of other paisanos. I hope you enjoy it :) Jamez42 (talk) 22:39, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

@Jamez42:, I have been remiss in thanking you. I was caught a bit speechless at the time you delivered it, and this kindness was so meaningful, coming in the midst of the Reddit dreadfulness. An arepa always warms the soul and spirit, and I so appreciate this delicacy! Saludos, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:15, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Don't sweat it! I imagined :) I'm really glad I sent it at a good moment. Pabellón arepas one of my personal favorites. Take care!! --Jamez42 (talk) 15:04, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	Thank your for your painstaking efforts to cover the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis with reliable sources. Your work is appreciated by many readers who seek accurate information on this significant political event. — Newslinger talk 03:11, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Dear Newslinger, I am "pleased to meet you" and honored to receive this barnstar! A fan, I have been watching your diligent work on reliable sources for some time now, and finding this from you during a real low time for me (Mr. Reddit) was such a pleasant surprise that I was rendered uncharacteristically speechless! I will treasure this barnstar, and want to also let you how much I appreciate your work that creates the backbone of all we do (reliable sources) on Wikipedia. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:33, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Medalla tricolor

	Medalla tricolor
	Just saw the attack on your work in Reddit and I felt the need to give you an online barnstar. Those people don't know the amount of volunteer time you've put in those articles, just keep up the good work Sandy! Oscar_. (talk) 01:46, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

Thank you so much, Oscar_. ! After so many years on Wikipedia, and so many unpleasant experiences, it was surprising to find that a false accusation of paid editing could be such a demotivating factor, but that it has been. There is so much clean up work to be done on all of the Venezuelan articles, and I dug in to help because the articles were on the main page. And got dinged for doing that. Perhaps my interest in editing Venezuelan topics will come back ... it is most kind of you to think of me! Saludos, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:57, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

Doc James

It has been suggested that my proposed topic ban on Doc James wrt Drug Pricing, would be better coming from your keyboard than mine. Assuming of course, you agree with it, etc etc. See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Propose topic ban on Doc James wrt Drug Pricing. -- Colin°^Talk 12:21, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

FAC promotion cheat sheet?

Laserbrain says there used to be a "how to promote FAC" thing in your userspace? You have it still? I find I'm in need of training... Ealdgyth - Talk 14:17, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Laser might be referring to this, found in an old version of my sandbox. [14]. Prob is, I do not know if current bot handling is the same. How about, read through that, and ask me anything you need to know ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:24, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Or I can shadow your first promote/archive to see if you got everything ... ping me. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:26, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Sounds good. Probably tomorrow, given that my schedule for the day has just multiplied... heh. And snow due at some point, but only a little. Just 1-3 inches. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:42, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

I have an event to attend tomorrow night but should be about most of the day ... so ping me well in advance before you start, and I will shadow you. Off the top of my head, what you should know is ... move archived to monthly archive file as a transclusion, and if the bot still behaves as it used to, that's it for archives. (Each month, you have to start new archive and promote monthly files.) On promotes, move promoted to promoted file as a transclusion, add the article to the correct section at WP:FA, and most importantly, don't forget to update the tally at FA. (I used to run a biannual check on the tally at FA, putting all the entries into a spreadsheet and counting them to make sure the tally matches ... I always caught errors ... has that been done recently?) @Laser brain: to doublecheck me. We used to have to keep track at something called GOINGS ON ... not sure if that is still around, or if you have to add somewhere else ... Laser would know ... another thing you can do is go back to Laser's or Ian Rose's last promote/archive contribs and see all of his steps. I could be WELL out of date on what I am telling you !!! I think Laser is right that I had all of this in a file somewhere, but I suspect finding it would take a lot of time (buried in old sandbox), and it could be out of date anyway. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:57, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

note re items

thanks for your replies at Village Pump!! very interesting ideas. I will take a look over all these articles, and think about the points you raised. thanks!!! --Sm8900 (talk) 18:53, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Johnboddie

Sandy, haven't time to join in though I'm reading, but it really is Johnboddie, not Johnbod -- they're different editors. Take a look at the TFA blurb edit histories. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:57, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

ah ha, thanks so much Mike ! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:57, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

Pinging

Hi, it looks like you're trying to fix failed pings simply by re-signing [15] [16]. Per Help:Notifications "if the mention is not on a completely new line with a new signature, no notification will be sent." So simply re-signing an existing line, even if you added some text, doesn't work. (I think this is to stop people accidentally pinging someone several times while editing their comment.) Help:Fixing failed pings has some suggestions involving adding a new line and then reverting it. You can also just add a new line saying something like sorry messed up the ping and sign it and not bother to revert, in most talk pages people are fine with that. Although don't quote me on this, I believe simply removing the message (and saving) then re-adding it is another alternative since when you add it back it's still a new line as far as the software is concerned. BTW, you can turn on an option to receive a notification for successful mentions. So if you don't get a notification, you know your ping didn't work. Nil Einne (talk) 17:30, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Nil Einne, thank you ever so much! My long-time personal style was to follow every discussion I engaged in, so I have always found this pingie thingie to be an irritation, but your information is most helpful! Best regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:29, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Gendered pronouns afloat

In 2013 there was another discussion about this issue. It can be found here. I still hold to my comments there; that our use of gendered pronouns is outmoded and unneeded. I made some edits to one of our FAs that used such pronouns, and I don't think the article suffered. See [17]. Kablammo (talk) 16:46, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Hello Captain Obvious.

Comment I have authored a few ship articles using "her" and "she", and edited many more. I have come to believe that this usage will someday be on the wrong side of history, so to speak, and as archaic as assigning gender to hurricanes. While common usage is important, it is not always determinative (people assign gender and feminine names to vehicles, locomotives, and objects as mundane as a Roomba, a usage which no doubt makes some sexist assumptions). As official usage changes, Wikipedia should too. In the meantime, why not avoid pronouns altogether? It can be done. Kablammo (talk) 16:11, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Some time ago I came across a suggestion from Tony1 to avoid the issue by avoiding pronouns. Hence TS King Edward, written by Dave souza and me, contains no "it", "she", or "her", except in direct quotes. In contrast, some articles on US fast battleships contain between 50 and 90 feminine pronouns. (I don't criticize the writers of those articles, who were following both tradition and convention, as I also have in the past.) Kablammo (talk)

I supposed other ship editors may be concerned about the amount of work correcting their articles will entail, which is understandable. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:57, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Level 4

Tu mama! Level 1 me. Or 1+. Yomangani^talk 01:27, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Y la tuya tambien! Love seeing your around. Felices fiestas! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:39, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis

I notice you have not contributed to this article for a long time and wanted to notify you that editors are considering renaming it as it stretches into a second year. Any thoughts? TFD (talk) 03:09, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know, The Four Deuces, but re-engaging there is not a Christmas gift I would like to give myself. It took such a ridiculous amount of effort/edits just to keep those articles MOS- and citation-clean, marginally well written, and reliably sourced, that adding meaningful content and discussing to come to consensus in conflicted areas was overshadowed. I was sickened by that Reddit idiot suggesting that I was a paid editor because of my high edit count, and the Reddit attention seemed to bring in editors who had no knowledge of Venezuela. The idea of revisiting there, and trying to clean up months worth of inattention to detail, is still unpleasant. "Never say never", but not now and certainly not during the holidays.

My thoughts are … obviously, 2019 pres crisis no longer works as a title, but neither does it work to just drop the date, as there are other pres crises. I am not fond of all the dated timeline articles taking over in there: I believe the In the News attention has led to an unencyclopedic level of detail and desire to track every bit of minutia. A title specific to the events that led to, or are part of, the crisis would be better, IMO. But I can image the debate that will ensue in trying to figure out how to name the article with more specificity … that it was directly related to the contested 2018 election, the contested 2019 inauguration, etc. A specific title is needed, but the level of discussion on those pages so often fails to engage good editing practices, that I can't imagine the discussion of a more precise name unfolding well. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:50, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

You're not wrong, Sandy, I'm avoiding the discussion based on it not containing much by way of encyclopedic reasoning yet. I'll wait at least until they decide whether to change the name at all, but feel it may fizzle to nothing before any consensus. Don't bother yourself; Merry Christmas! Kingsif (talk) 02:27, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Favor...

Can you check over Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Leonardo DiCaprio/archive1 for MOS or prose issues for me? I'd like a non-entertainment editor's views on it. I recognize I do not like entertainment articles so I'd like a second opinion. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:55, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

I looked in there earlier, very briefly, and yes, because other parts of the FAC seem to be moving along, I would not mind doing that as soon as I can get to it. But Ealdgyth, you must remember that I am no longer as on top of MOS as I once was ... I have not followed it closely now for about five years, and significantly, do not know which items may be controversial (meaning, sometimes ignored). I can check the most common stuff, but I may miss some newer things, and I'll have a look at prose.

Also, I have just finished putting my house back together from my Christmas party, so before I can do anything else, I must first get to Jo-Jo Eumerus's FAC, which I promised to review today. Thanks for the patience, Jo-Jo ... I am starting through my watchlist now, and then will settle in to review. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:16, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

I can wait 'til tomorrow. Does your review entail checking some of the Spanish sources, by any way? (I've heard that you can read Spanish). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 21:21, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I speak Spanish ... I usually do look at sources ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:31, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Where to get WIAFA §1a issues resolved...

After seeing your and ComplexRational's responses on Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Coropuna/archive1 I am starting to wonder whether withdrawing it would be better as it looks like it's a fair amount of work ... but before asking for a withdrawal I have to ask, is there a place outside of FAC to get a 1a problem resolved? Peer review and Wikiprojects definitively aren't (and I plan to bring another article to PR so can't run Coropuna there) and GOCE has a very variable output that is not necessarily sufficient for FA standards. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 23:29, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Hi, Jo-Jo. As you know, I haven't been as active recently as I once was; in the past, the GOCE would be the last possible place I would recommend, but Reidgreg did a competent job at another article (even though I criticized the effort as being poorly targeted), and perhaps he would engage? If he won't, it is possible that Ruslik0 would engage after the holiday, if he has more time? Peer review is not what it once was; I don't know what to suggest there. The best advice I can give you is to develop a cadre of good collaborators, such as the names I gave you of editors who did good work in your area in the past. One issue is that it is becoming clear that you have not been getting good review at FAC either, so I'm not sure keeping the nomination up there is the fastest way for you to get things sorted at that article. You could try to engage GOCE, but I fear "you get what you get", and it might not be good. Keep plugging, Jo-Jo; you have a most impressive amount of work and research into that article, but I fear that some FAC reviewers have been "phoning it in" on reviews. A good, tough FAC is the best way to become a top-notch writer, and you're on the right path! Saludos, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:36, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: SandyGeorgia practically said it all – I've seen your work before and this article definitely has potential to reach FA in the near future. If you'd like, I would be willing, perhaps with the assistance of editors more familiar with FACs and the subject, to do a talk page review (more substantial than my FAC comments) along the lines of what I am doing at Talk:Hassium#ComplexRational review after that FAC was unsuccessful. ComplexRational (talk) 00:15, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Manual of Style Discretionary Sanctions

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in the English Wikipedia Manual of Style and article titles policy. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Barkeep49 (talk) 20:20, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Season's Greetings

		Season's Greetings
		Wishing you a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Mystical Nativity (Filippo Lippi) is my Wiki-Christmas card to all for this year. Johnbod (talk) 16:39, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Ambiguity on people/patients

Hello, SandyGeorgia,

I fixed the ambiguity (reverted by you) about who are being informed of the diagnosis. General public being informed about the disease? Patients who weren't told before because of the stigma? It's in fact the patients who are being informed. The reference explicitly said this, and it is clearer in the technical reference than in the "general audience" wikipedia article.

Sincerely,

--Tikmok (talk) 03:47, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

Hi, Tikmok; it is late here, and I am quite tired. I will look at this tomorrow, and respond at Talk:Schizophrenia. I suggest the "patients"--> "individuals" MEDMOS recommendation can probably be fixed in this case by re-casting an awkward sentence, but am too tired to look tonight. Best regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:08, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

Io Saturnalia!

		Io, Saturnalia!
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:38, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Season's Greetings

		Season's Greetings
		May your Holidays and the Year that follows shine as much as this coin still does beneath the tarnish of bygone weather and long use. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 22:24, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

¡Feliz Navidad!

	... ¡y un próspero año nuevo!
	Espero que te encuentres bien y que la pases mejor :) ¡Mis mejores deseos! Jamez42 (talk) 10:00, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Season's Greetings

FWiW Bzuk (talk) 01:04, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Season's Greetings

Hello there! Shearonink (talk) wishes you & yours the very best of the season!

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Diwali, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa,
Festivus (for the rest of us!) or even the Saturnalia,
here's to
hoping your holiday time is wonderful
and that the New Year will be an improvement upon the old.
CHEERS!

Share these holiday wishes by adding {{subst:User:Shearonink/Holiday}} ~~~~ to your friends' talk pages.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2020!

Hello SandyGeorgia, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2020. Happy editing, Kingsif (talk) 02:28, 23 December 2019 (UTC) Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

RFC

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles/RFC on lead guideline for medicine-related articles SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:42, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Be well at Christmas

	Have a WikiChristmas and a PediaNewYear
	I'm glad you're still around. Be well. Keep well. Have a lovely Christmas. SilkTork (talk) 16:26, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and yours! I hope you are well, my friend. Mike - Μολὼν λαβέ 18:37, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Mike Searson as well as one can be at my age :) So glad to "see" you again ... I hoped that a seasonal greeting would bring you out of the woodwork for an update. I hope you and yours are well, too ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:42, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Peace Dove

Peace is a state of balance and understanding in yourself and between others, where respect is gained by the acceptance of differences, tolerance persists, conflicts are resolved through dialog, peoples rights are respected and their voices are heard, and everyone is at their highest point of serenity without social tension. Happy Holidays to you and yours. ―Buster7 ☎ 14:40, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Nollaig shona dhaoibh

Have a great holiday season. Nice to see you around, and thanks for everything in the last week or so, including all the MOS fixes, guidance, and such. Best Ceoil (talk) 02:11, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Feliz Navidad!

Merry Christmas! (or Feliz Navidad, as they say where I am) Hope yours is joyful. TomStar81 (Talk) 23:58, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

May interest you

Hi Sandy, given your FAC review of David Hillhouse Buel (priest), I thought you might be interested to know that I've nominated Samuel Mulledy, another Jesuit and president of Georgetown University for FAC (link). If you're so inclined, your comments would be appreciated. Ergo Sum 03:16, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know, Ergo Sum. Your writing is competent, so it should not be necessary for me to engage. The FAC backlog is dreadful, and the number of seriously deficient articles that are getting through is my bigger concern, and I would rather focus on those, and engage the FACs where I can do more to help the coordinators reduce the backlog. I engaged Buel because it looked like a FAC that was almost over the line, that maybe just needed a nudge to give the Coords enough to go one way or the other. If your nomination gets limited attention or is stagnating, by all means post here to my talk (I Hate Pings), and I will engage (if I go inactive, I am more likely to see a talk page post). Too many of our best reviewers are only engaging the easy nominations, but for the overall good of the process, it is necessary for more reviewers (like moi :) to engage the more problematic noms; those are excruciatingly time consuming, so I have to pick and choose. Merry Christmas again ! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:24, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Fair enough. Until our paths next cross. Ergo Sum 03:27, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Season's Greetings!

		Better Ate Than Never
		Happy holidays SandyGeorgia! The last chocolate is for you. Outriggr (talk) 23:53, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Source reviews...random thoughts from a person who didn't get enough sleep last night.

It's been a bit since I did much at FAC - I plead moving. I lost most of this year to searching for and buying and moving, and most of 2018 to trying to get the old place up to snuff and listed for sale. We did manage to sell the old place ... at a rather hefty loss (and I'm not too proud to admit right before it got foreclosed out from under us - luckily it was in mom's name, not mine, so yeah, that was a big stress through 2018-2019. As an aside ... Illinois is going to go bankrupt eventually - it's hemorrhaging people and tax base... the reason we were underwater was purely the incredibly soft market and the resultant loss of value in the house...we sold the place for half its appraised value - which was from 8 years before - but enough whining!)

In the last four years or so, I did do some source reviews - many were uncontroversial, but some... some stick in the mind:

1. Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/HIAG/archive1 - this one "worked" but it was a lot of work and is one reason why I'm so scared to dig into sourcing. I adore Brian, and miss him, but there's no denying he wasn't as inclined to dig deep into sourcing, and I'm afraid most source reviews nowadays take their cue from what he did rather than say ... this as an example.
2. Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Black Friday (1910)/archive1 is not my finest hour, but I find as I get older (I was 50 this year, next month I'll celebrate 51 while out with hubby) that I have increasingly less tolerance for the "pat the little lady on the head when she gets hysterical" thing that happens a lot.
3. Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Jill Valentine/archive2, and it's follow ons (yes, there are more)... I think if I had to pick one FAC that just made me want to stop ever looking at sources, this one was it. (Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Jill Valentine/archive1, Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Jill Valentine/archive3, Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Jill Valentine/archive4 and Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Jill Valentine/archive5 are the variations on the theme).
4. Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Revival (comics)/archive1 this didn't win me any friends... I got sniping for a while afterwards.
5. Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Final Destination 3/archive1 made me ALL warm and fuzzy (not).
6. Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Alfred Shout/archive1 ... this one is another one that worries me about looking closely at sourcing for FACs... it just feels like its the tip of an iceberg. I'd thought I'd keep going with reviews but by the time I racked up these lovelies in 2017 ... I lost heart. And we were getting busier with getting the house on the market (don't get me started on THAT disaster).. so let sleeping dogs lie.
7. Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Alan Bush/archive1 where ... all power to Brian, there were some serious issues with using something so close to the subject.
8. Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/6th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Militia/archive1 this highlights another concern with sourcing - the use of old sources because they are easily available.
9. Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Coloman, King of Hungary/archive1 ... where again, we have issues with older sources. And this one is a good example of the "list every single problem wrong with the prose" school.
10. Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/House of Plantagenet/archive2 another example of where a close sourcing check was needed.

I do plan to get more hands-on at FAC... just need to get shit around the house into order enough to do some. I'm also trying to get my off-wiki projects into order (including a few books I need to get done sooner or later) plus a couple of small side businesses that need to get started back up after the move ... and I want to spend some of my wiki time on actually ... writing articles again - which is why I want my books out of storage!

I also kinda bullied @SlimVirgin: into working on getting The Holocaust at GAN, and she may never forgive me if I don't at least try to carry a bit of the load there...

If you can pick at prose at FAC, that'd be great. I do know that's my one weakness... I can write well enough for GA, but the "brilliant" prose stuff just isn't my main concern (and to be honest, I think it's over emphasized, in case anyone hadn't figured that out yet!) Ealdgyth - Talk 17:54, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

I must get my thank-you notes from the big party in the mail; we gathered significant donations for a charity with the "No gifts please" invitation (to avoid dozens of bottles of red wine that we don't drink :) I will force myself not to look at these yet, so I won't stall on my thank yous! More later, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:00, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

On No. 7, somebuddy needed to type this: WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. Still reading. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:46, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Well, I read all that <sigh>. So, I see you have been digging in, and the overall situation is worse than I realized. So, now we have questionable review practices/trends in 1a, 1b, 1c, all of 2, and on a recent contentious FAC, 4 is in question. I hope Elcobbola isn't going to say there are (3) issues as well. I am sorry you have been taking a beating for doing what was once routine and expected; I did not realize that was happening, or I might have dug myself out of real life sometimes-fun and come to your support. I had it so easy as FAC delegate, because we had built up a corps of amazing reviewers. I tried to always express how much I appreciated the excellent reviewers we had, and I so hope you felt and knew of my appreciation and did not feel taken for granted. One of the things that can happen to you as a delegate/coordinator is that, one day you wake up and realize you are working with a ton of fine people doing fine work, but at the same time, you are working for a few prima donnas who have no appreciation whatsoever for the hours you are spending in helping them get their stars. One day, I finally decided my medical colleagues needed me more (how'd that work out for you, SG?).

My inner Pollyanna hopes that the deterioration and cultural change can be addressed by leading by example. The problem is, seems there is no one who will provide examples of the kind of source review you did, unless you do it.

As to me digging in to help, I can try, but I can't promise to stick around indefinitely. Re, I was 50 this year ... I have increasingly less tolerance for the "pat the little lady on the head when she gets hysterical" thing, wait til you hit 60, and a tree falls on you just as your husband has cancer (with me feeling guilty because I seriously looked at a Wikipedia article, saw that reputable editors had been in there so assumed the info was correct, and we ignored PSA screening and ended up with advanced cancer). I walked away from a neurosurgery unit with seven staples in my head and was fairly well recovered with less than a year of rehab, and glad to be alive. Sometimes I can pat them on their hysterical little heads and walk away now; life's too short for this shit. I can't help but remember the FAC women (you, me, Karanacs, Maralia, Awadewit, Nikkimaria, etc) and how we so often had to face this and keep our cools. Curiously, the same thing is unfolding on medicine issues, with WhatamIdoing, who always keeps her cool. I can't promise to stay around long-term, although if you asked me right now, I'd say I expect to. Remember what has happened to all of my areas of editing. I left FAC to help out with the student editing debacle in medical articles, and now medicine is a warzone and I have unwatched all but maybe a dozen articles (from hundreds). FAC is in complete decline. And in my other editing area, Venezuela, it took such an extreme amount of cleanup just to keep those articles readable that a Reddit editor called me a paid government schill based on editcountitis. To be called a paid editor so demoralized me that I unwatched the lot. I am likely to edit more in the winter, but when summer comes, the lake, garden, boating beckon. What area is fun to edit now?

I am glad the move is mostly behind you now, and sorry to say the same thing happened to the two states I lived in the longest. I hope it doesn't happen where I am now, but politics trend in the direction such that I fear the same things will occur. Be happy, dear Ealdgyth-- I know that, like me, you know that life's too short not to enjoy the time you have left. SandyGeorgia (Talk)

Not a worry. I hope to be busy come spring/summer myself. I have the northwoods to get reacquainted with, a new filly to work with, and about a gazillion projects of my own to do, plus my "day" job with the computer game. The days of me being able to put in as much time as I once did with wikipedia are long gone - they only happened because I was taking care of my mother at home. Now I'm FREE! Ealdgyth - Talk 22:46, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

We could

We could just manually archive whatever we're done with, too, but I thought that it'd be easier to have the bot do it, and some of the sections are too big for a single archive anyway. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:02, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Is the one closed pricing thread too big for an archive? If we let the bot do it, things will get split up, and I'm fond of having protracted things in one archive, for ease of future access. In a case like that, I feel it's OK to have a big archive, no? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:47, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

"I watchlisted your peer review as a reminder to self to have a look when I have more time."

(Regards Wikipedia:Peer review/African humid period/archive1)Thanks, although I suspect this will be a very difficult topic to work on, much more so than Coropuna. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 21:48, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

No prob, I can still tackle the little stuff to give you a hand there! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:51, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Your ping

It took me this long to figure out where you had pinged me on Iridescent's talk page! That discussion seems to have ended. Anyway, thanks for reposing confidence in me. I agree with many of the things you were saying there.

Offering comments to some nominators is a joy. Regardless of what I say, they respond with some poise. Offering comments to others is a nightmare. I can't say they are disingenuous, because I can't be sure of their motivations. But they come close. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 21:53, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Well, sometimes we get rewarded. Jo-Jo has been a joy, and now I suspect we will all dig in their to help! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:22, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Please critique

See what you think.--The Huhsz (talk) 00:32, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Nice start! I'll ask Kablammo to weigh in here; I see a few things that can be fixed, but Kablammo may have better suggestions. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:29, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Hey, The Huhsz, based on talk page interaction there, I think I'll bow out. Carry on! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:02, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! I make that 29 in one fairly easy pass. --The Huhsz (talk) 18:28, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Signpost...

To be quite frank, I don't even think of the signpost as a place to share news or information with other editors. I see it as a small walled garden of a bunch of folks who think they want to be the next Woodward and Bernstein and are out to push their pet theories. Maybe it was once actually useful for sharing information, but sadly, it hasn't been for years. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:48, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Yes, my inner Pollyanna escaped again. It only took a bit of review for me to recall that cesspool (I blame the tree). How I will respond to the followup could be my challenge for the day! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:00, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Done. Some may remember that I used the word asshole once on Wikipedia, and it was in reference to a Signpost person. I decline to go there again. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:23, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Mail

Hello, SandyGeorgia. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

―Buster7 ☎ 18:38, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

• Buster7, thanks for the ping, as I don't often check my email. While I appreciate your intent, I think that, as a humble man, he would probably discourage your proposal. He sought no accolades. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:43, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) @Buster7: If I can, I'd like to support what SG says. Although it's a really nice idea, it might be seen as perhaps—just slightly superficial, perhaps. And the body of work that stands is both accolade and testament enough, surely  :) My my 2¢ only, feel free to ignore/remove. ——SN54129 19:02, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

I felt it might be so. That is why I asked. I honor your circumspection. ―Buster7 ☎ 23:53, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

thank you

thanks for your note I will make every effort going forward to add summaryOzzie10aaaa (talk) 22:44, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Ozzie10aaaa; most appreciated! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:47, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

Thanks for the holiday greetings! Wishing you all the best for the New Year to come! Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 21:18, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Re: Your email

Noting here that I've received it. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:39, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Jo-Jo; Happy New Year! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:41, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

Sandy! Thank you so much for the Christmas wishes :) Here's hoping you'll have a wonderful year! Fvasconcellos (t·c) 01:46, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

So good to see you !!! Thank goodness for the holidays, when old familiar friends resurface. Sure do miss you in here! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:48, 2 January 2020 (UTC)