This is an archive of past discussions with User:John Cummings. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
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Hi Robby.is.on thanks, I was not using the Daily Mail as a source for information, I was quoting someone's writing in the Daily Mail as an example of someone spreading the conspiracy theory, how are you supposed to quote things from the Daily Mail or other unreliable sources e.g books by Daily Mail columnists? John Cummings (talk) 10:15, 29 September 2020 (UTC)
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A tag has been placed on Alliance of British Drivers requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G4 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to be a repost of material that was previously deleted following a deletion discussion, such as at Articles for deletion. When a page has substantially identical content to that of a page deleted after a discussion, and any changes in the content do not address the reasons for which the material was previously deleted, it may be deleted at any time.
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here. Alex Sims (talk) 12:27, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for the notification, I've contested the deletion on the talk page. Also I think there is an issue with this deletion criteria in general, currently it doesn't provide editors with evidence of it being a 'sufficiently identical copy', I'll ask for this to be included in future. John Cummings (talk) 12:42, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
I think the issue is more that the article was deleted because of the lack of notability of the subject and that hasn't changed. The point about the sufficiently identical copy is an interesting one, as the structure and content to me looks similar to what I remember the article was when it was deleted. This may well be an artefact of the deleted article and the current article are about the same subject. Not sure how or if it is even possible to get the source of a deleted page back. I was under the impression that once they are deleted they are gone. Anyway let's see what happens. Alex Sims (talk) 12:48, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply @Alex Sims:, my understanding is admins can still see the deleted pages. I wrote the article from scratch so yes, if its similar then its an product of the topic. I'm not sure how people are expected to make a fair assessment of it is similar under this criteria, unless its mainly used by admins? Just to make a note for others reading this that most of the references I used from national newspapers are from 2020 because they've decided to take legal action against the Mayor of London for installing cycle lanes, this happened after the last deletion discussion, I am pretty sure that other references will become available soon as its an ongoing case. John Cummings (talk) 12:57, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
I think it's all sorted now an admin has come by and said not G4. Not sure about whether the original deletion criteria needs to be looked at in terms of notability. But I'm an non/weak-deletionist I think so I'll leave that to someone else. Alex Sims (talk) 01:48, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
November edit-a-thons from Women in Red
Women in Red| November 2020, Volume 6, Issue 11, Numbers 150, 173, 178, 180, 181
Sweden report: Librarians learn about Wikidata; More Swedish literature on Wikidata; Online Edit-a-thon Dalarna; Applications to the Swedish Innovation Agency; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Librarians and Projekt HBTQI; GLAM Statistical Tool
USA report: American Archive of Public Broadcasting; Smithsonian Women in Finance Edit-a-thon; Black Lunch Table; San Diego/October 2020; WikiWednesday Salon
Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
Hello John Cummings! I'm Marshall Miller; I'm the product manager for the WMF's Growth team, which works on features to help retain new editors. Lately, we have been working on this set of ideas called "structured tasks", which break down editing workflows into steps that make sense for newcomers and make sense on mobile devices. We're currently thinking about an idea for a workflow in which newcomers would be recommended images from Commons that might be a good fit for unillustrated Wikipedia articles. One of my colleagues recommended you as someone who has a particularly strong grasp on the usage of images in articles. Since this project is in its beginning phases, we really depend on community members to help us think through the feasibility, opportunities, and pitfalls. If you have time, it would be really helpful to us if you could check out the project page and weigh in on the discussion. Thank you! -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 21:51, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
A New Year With Women in Red!
Women in Red| January 2021, Volume 7, Issue 1, Numbers 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188
Hi John Cummings, you're probably already aware of this – I'm just adding it to the talk page of everyone involved in a recent dispute at Zhang Zhan to make sure everyone knows about this.
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For additional information, please see the guidance on these sanctions. 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.
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Hello, I noticed that you responed to an edit request at Talk:Zhang Zhan, and completed it. Please remember to close requests by setting |answered=yes with the request template. There are also template responses and userscripts available such as {{ESp}}. See WP:ERREQ for more. Thanks Terasail[✉]01:26, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
UNESCO POV issues
Hi John. I hope your new year has got off to as good a start as possible in the circumstances. I just wanted to let you know that I'm still encountering issues with editors who work for UNESCO pasting material from their open-source publications into articles without reworking them to properly attribute UNESCO's POV. The latest example is this, which I reverted yesterday. I took another look at Wikipedia:WikiProject United Nations/Open Access text and the section on converting and adding open license text to Wikipedia seems pretty good, so I wonder if the editors are just not reading this (perhaps because it's collapsed when the page opens)? I don't know if you have any ideas about how to get this important message across to them, but I think more does need to be done, otherwise this is going to keep happening. Cordless Larry (talk) 09:50, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
Hi @Cordless Larry:, to help resolve this could you explain:
Exactly what the issue you have with the text is, you've only said POV here and in the edit summary, not which parts you think are POV or how they are POV.
Why you chose to revert it rather than eg adding a tag like Template:POV which is used 'when you have identified a serious issue of balance and the lack of a WP:Neutral point of view, and you wish to attract editors with different viewpoints to the article'.
Thanks for the reply. The reason I reverted is that the issue is really beyond something that can just be tagged with a template, in my view. Take as an example the very first sentence: "Member States, regional and global stakeholders are called upon to develop activities on the five priority action areas". Wikipedia articles shouldn't be calling on anyone to do anything. Then we have "Policy-makers have a special responsibility in bringing about the massive global transformation needed to engender sustainable development today", which is clearly an opinion. "Policy support is equally important for the formal, non-formal and informal sectors, as well as for the creation of synergies between the sectors" - according to whom? "To encourage learners to become change agents who have the knowledge, means, willingness and courage to take transformative action for sustainable development, learning institutions need, themselves, to be transformed" - it goes on... Hopefully this makes clear what the problem is here and why I reverted. Cordless Larry (talk) 12:38, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
Thanks @Cordless Larry:, I've tried to write some things in the instructions about 'voice' to try and cover this stuff but I've found it quite difficult because there are a lot of things that can go 'wrong' and the rules which cover this sort of issue are spread over a lot of policy pages or just aren't written down. Are there any additional things you think should be added to the help page which isn't covered? John Cummings (talk) 13:24, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
Presuming you're referring to the page I linked above, I think the "Adapt the style" guidance there is good, which is what makes me wonder if people from UNESCO are actually reading it. Perhaps it could be improved through the addition of examples of something not requiring in-text attribution and something that does (using a fact and an opinion, both from a UNESCO source), but I'm not sure if this is the problem here. Maybe it would be worth checking with a few people if they've actually read the guidance or if they missed it? Cordless Larry (talk) 13:36, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
My first problem with a bunch of the articles that I ran into is, as Larry suggested, the writing of text in article space in the wrong voice. But the second problem for me is that so much of the material reverted by Larry, the kind of material found in all the articles on the individual goals, simply isn't sourced to secondary publications. And even in the reverted version, there's stuff like this--what is this? This doesn't clear it up. What we have in the articles I looked at a while ago is a ton of material that is copied from those UNESCO documents that essentially renders these supposedly encyclopedic articles into programmatic points, as if we are Wikisource. That's not just POV, that's more.
Look at Sustainable Development Goal 12. It looks, from the list of references, that we have a number of secondary sources here, but on closer inspection it's clear that references 27-30 are just there to support a SYNTHesis of material to argue the programmatic point, that "It is of utmost importance that we..."--and that sentence, of course, is unacceptable. I was going to delete it, and it needs to go, but I decided to keep it in for demonstration purposes. Once you take that section out, there is NOTHING in there that is verified by secondary sources (this is deceptive: Medium (website) is not a secondary source, and the page is just a list of the SDG12 indicators). So what is the notability of material that lacks all secondary sourcing? The real answer is, there is none. I had nominated one of these for deletion and essentially got laughed out of court, but I think that page is a very good example of the kind of problem that plagues these articles. It's no different from a page listing the product numbers and descriptions of LEGO kits (look at Lego Modular Buildings), sourced to LEGO or to fansites that merely parrot the LEGO catalog. Drmies (talk) 15:04, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
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Canada report: Branding Toolkit released by the Canadian Museums Association for GLAMs
Finland report: Hundreds of thousands of new photos released
Germany report: The Karl-Preusker-Medal 2020 goes to Wikimedia Deutschland e. V.
Netherlands report: Documentation of workflows for the ingestion of bibliographic data into Wikidata; Wikipedia & Africa: Why contributing to Wikipedia matters
Hi John: Thanks for the new sandbox organization. Slick, even if it does take up rather more space than it probably needs to. ;) I like it! I've already added it to my sandbox page, and have moved all my current projects into place. Now let's hope it actually makes me more productive!! :) MeegsC (talk) 14:38, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
Thanks MeegsC let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements and you experience in using it. If you think its too big feel free to delete sections, they all work independently from each other. John Cummings (talk) 14:47, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
Thank you for the Sandbox organizer. I imagine it will now lead to an endless cavalcade of half-finished pages that will ramp up my edit count, but which may never see the light of day (*cough* Sputnik 3) :)
First, it doesn't seem to be putting things into the right place if I just click on the "create page" button. It puts them in MeegsC/Notes/filename, rather than User:MeegsC/Notes/filename. I can then move them to where they need to be, but it's a fiddly extra step. Seems like it should know that it should be USER at the beginning!
It would be great if you could just click on the appropriate section (ie. "To do list" or "Bookmarks" or whatever) and just edit that section, rather than having to wade through great mounds of code to find the right bit.
Just a couple of observations! I like the Drafts section particularly — though I'll like it even better when I don't have to move things! ;) MeegsC (talk) 20:24, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
I just figured out the first problem. I added "User:" before {{ROOTPAGENAME}} in front of the /Documentation, /Notes, and /Experiments setups, and it's working fine now. /Articles always worked, so I just copied the same setup! MeegsC (talk) 23:08, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
Thanks catching this and working out the issue, I've now fixed it in the main version so won't be an issue for new users
Do you have any suggestions of how to do this? I'm not sure how I could break these with individual edit buttons because they're not sections, is there any additional comments I could add to the code to make it easier?... What were you thinking for new sections you want to add? I'm thinking there could probably be several versions of this, or maybe a little form you fill in when you create it to chose your draft space names but I'd have to ask a wizard for help with this.
Actually, I wasn't thinking about adding new sections, just populating the sections you already have there. My workaround has been to put a section header into the sections I'm most likely to update regularly (i.e. "To do list"). See my sandbox for an example. It would be great if the fancy banners (the pictures) acted like section headers — click on it, and it opens that section to edit. MeegsC (talk) 23:43, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
MeegsC wow, thats a great use of the to do list. I'm not sure the best way of doing this, let me have a think. Could you explain why its important to you to be able to edit a section rather than use VE for the whole document (how I originally thought about people using it)? John Cummings (talk) 11:23, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
I'll be honest—I've never used visual editor! When I hit "edit" on my sandbox, it just opens in a typical edit window. How do I get it to open in VE instead? MeegsC (talk) 11:35, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
MeegsC oh I think you'd find it a lot easier for this and simple things like adding references and writing text, there's some instructions at the top left of Wikipedia:VisualEditor, personally I have the option of having VE by default, but there are other options. John Cummings (talk) 13:16, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
Very helpful! Thanks. I've added VE, to use with the sandbox. I'll probably stick with wiki-markup for most of my editing (once a programmer, always a programmer!) but it'll certainly be useful with your sandbox setup. Cheers! MeegsC (talk) 13:26, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
Glad it helped MeegsC, if you think of any cool additions to the organiser do let me know. I'd really love to find ways to give people feedback on their work, eg how many people read it, but I can't make the link work properly... John Cummings (talk) 19:17, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
I don't remember her saying much about the code of conduct at all. She very rapidly, as usual, got on to gender issues, where as usual she made mistakes on the basic statistics, though not quiote as bad as her memorable "90% of Wikipedia editors are white males in America" on Women's Hour last year. I realize it it is considered politically useful to keep gender issues to the forefront, but those with high media profiles, who are always asked about them, should take the trouble to keep their knowledge of the basic facts straight. If they don't they should not be surprised to be called out on it. Don't try to bully me in future. Johnbod (talk) 17:25, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
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