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Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Greetings! I noticed you've been adding maintenance tags, such as {{ More citations needed}}, and downgrading articles from, e.g. Class B to C. You haven't really been participating or starting discussions on their talk pages, and you haven't even left notes justifying what exactly you object to, or how it could be improved. For example, Eastern Orthodox Church includes 255 footnotes and I can't really find poorly-sourced sections in particular. With reference to WP:DRIVEBY, I'd like to question whether you are going to participate in discussions and make efforts to improve these flaws you're finding. Elizium23 ( talk) 02:13, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Of course, I am more than happy to show why I demoted the article to C-Class. However, it would be very inefficient if I have to leave a message for every article in the Vital Articles list – it's just not very good use of my time. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 02:15, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Please, then, I encourage you to start discussion in a centralized location and link to it for people who wish to follow up on it. Elizium23 ( talk) 02:21, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. I will make a dedicated thread at the Vital Articles talk page right here, at the "Reassessment of Vital articles" thread. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 02:27, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

You are frequently rating articles within sixty seconds of the last rating. I don't know how this can possibly be accurate, especially in reference to WP:ASSESS, which does not dictate C-class articles having extensive referencing. Urve ( talk) 02:36, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Well, people rating new articles usually also took less than 60 seconds, so... As for extensive referencing, the B-Class criteria said that The article is suitably referenced, with inline citations. It has reliable sources, and any important or controversial material which is likely to be challenged is cited. Yes, the wording is a bit vague, but I interpret that to be having little to no uncited material, since all material in vital articles are inherently important or controversial. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 02:44, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Well, yes, initial ratings are slapdash because start/c ratings don't matter at all and one can almost flip a coin or blindly trust ORES and be confident that nobody will care. But you are going around and reassessing them at a fast clip, and I don't know how that can possibly be accurate (even if initial ratings are also not accurate). I didn't say anything about b-class. You moved Euclid to start class over missing content, but WP:ASSESS says c-class articles can require "considerable editing ... to close gaps in content" and can be "missing important content". My concern is that this is a potentially inaccurate mass editing event that doesn't really serve a purpose. Urve ( talk) 02:53, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

I have been following along with this vital article project and I share Urve's concerns about potentially inaccurate mass editing [...] that doesn't really serve a purpose. In addition to the tagging/assessment issues mentioned above, you are making undiscussed, large-scale changes to a variety of long-standing articles for unclear reasons. I just reverted your edits to Particle physics as they removed 20k+ of wikitext without any clear reason given in the edit summary or on the talk page. picked a picture is not an appropriate summary for an edit that blanks out 12k of content [1] and even if the original text was poorly sourced or badly written, leaving the article in this state [2] is hardly an improvement. I have similar concerns about these edits: [3]. I suggest that you slow down and that if you want to make large changes to these articles, you prepare your edits in a sandbox first. Spicy ( talk) 03:09, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. I may have bitten too much than I can chew. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 04:02, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

July songs

Thank you for improving articles in July, and your FAC! - I was away, for hiking in the Swiss Alps and a funeral, more on my talk. Gerda Arendt ( talk) 14:07, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks a lot Gerda! CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:25, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks a lot Nikkimaria! CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 09:49, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

	The Million Award
	For your contributions to bring Solar System (estimated annual readership: 3,851,137) to Featured Article status, I hereby present you the Million Award. Congratulations on this rare accomplishment, and thanks for all you do for Wikipedia's readers! SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:03, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Sandy! CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:14, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

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An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Colonization of Earth and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 August 9#Colonization of Earth until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. MB 13:59, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

I think we will get there :-) Wakelamp d[@-@]b ( talk) 12:28, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Not if we keep doing the same thing. This mindset has completely decimated a lot of things, and will do the same for Wikipedia if we don't change. That's why I endorse your experimental approach at the idea lab. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:44, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

	The Resilient Barnstar
	Thank you for your energy, enthusiasm, and not giving up on your goal to make the project better. Andre 🚐 17:07, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 17:07, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Standing up for something is difficult, especially when most feel something needs to be done but don't know how to do what really needs to to be accomplished and so, in turn, elect to do nothing. The reality is that most of us, despite differing political, social, cultural or philosophical viewpoints, are really drive for the same goals in life and we all are most definitely the same inside. Yet we overlook the beauty that is the same in us and choose to cling to those minor differences that won't matter in the end. We can be a better example of humanity than we are. I commend you for taking a stand and trying to do something. I also appreciate your Song and the beauty of your Colors. -- ARose Wolf 19:39, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you ARoseWolf for your compliments, CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 00:14, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you - I didn't know what to think of you leaving us. Did you expect more from our company? -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 12:20, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

No, not really. I do understand why people are resistant to change and I don't blame them for that. The opposers are almost always are right – it means that the proposal is not good enough and there's more work needed to be done. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:27, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Please point me at the discussion. What I tried to ask is why you left WP:QAI to which ARoseWolf and I belong. We like you! -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 13:19, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Ah, I am referring to the ANI reform proposal, sorry :) I actually don't really remember leaving the QAI for whatever the reason so I added back my name. Thanks for being so caring about project members! That's something that I should learn to do as well. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 13:25, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! I am reluctant to even go to WP:Great Dismal Swamp, so missed the reform plans. Vacation, people dying in real life and around the world, articles missing and in need of corrections: no time left for ANI. -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 13:43, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Hello, thank you for the image in Lake Victoria! I had a question about how Alt works. I noticed you wrote 'See caption' and the caption you added is an wonderful description of the image. For some reason I have been under the idea those who are visually impaired had the caption replaced by the alt. I have no idea why I thought this, but had added Alts to several of the Great Lakes for this understanding. Maybe I read it somewhere? Very possible my mind just made the idea up! Anyway, was curious of how alt works mechanically for visually impaired readers/listeners. The caption you gave was very good description, just want to make sure they can experience it. Amani kwako! BevoLJ ( talk) 13:12, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

BevoLJ, the reason I write "see caption" is that the alt text would provide very little or no use for the image. Else, you would have a ridiculous alt, such as Earth's alt " Photograph of Earth, taken by the Apollo 17 mission. The Arabian peninsula, Africa and Madagascar lie in the lower half of the disc, whereas Antarctica is at the top." Imagine having a screen reader reading through this... Anyways, personally, I think that having the description at the alt text is not a good approach and should have better been placed at the caption instead. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 13:51, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

That makes sense. I have added such descriptions, although never quite so long. I have even explained the clouds... Thanks for the reply! Amani sana kwako, BevoLJ ( talk) 14:06, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

August songs

Thank you for improving articles in August! -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 13:50, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you Gerda! CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:18, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Hey Cacti, love your enthusiasm and work towards the Vital articles. But could you please start giving better summaries, and splitting large edits up? On the drive vitals, I frequently see large edits with vague summaries, e.g. clean up layout (−1,356‎), fuck the spams (−4,344), rewrite lead (−1,100), etc. Most of these edits are fine, but a lot of them, I have no idea why you did what you did. Also, it's harder to review the edits and to revert them if needed, since you have to do it partially. For example, in this edit, you removed that table from Day for no apparent reason. The table is relevant to the subject of day, and is properly-sourced, (and also very interesting). But I have no way to discern why you removed it outside of outright messaging you. I know a lot of trimming in vitals is needed, but you need to start giving more in-depth, robust summaries when removing or rewriting, due to all the collaborating in the WikiProject, and so outsiders understand what's going on.

Personally, I try to give as in-depth summaries as I can when blanking / removing content. For example, on this edit on Bill Wurtz, my summary explained what I changed, why I did it. I usually try to include policies or essays to back up what I did as well if necessary (e.g. WP:BOLD, WP:MINREF, WP:INDISCRIMINATE, etc.). I also made at total of 12 large removal edits to Bill Wurtz, since it was about 30kb bytes of removal and I had complex rationales. Another example of a long edit summary is here. Or when I wrote an essay ( WP:EDWS) to explain a common rationale, since it was easier this way: [4]. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 20:07, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

On another note,

On another note, I would like to aid in coordinating the closure of the drive, if you'd like. I think each article's improvements should be checked, so we're not endorsing poorly-sourced or lazy additions to articles. (e.g. watch out for WP:GAMEing). Also, bytes and articles need to be added up, to award barnstars. To help you out, you could do the former and I could do the latter, as well as award the barnstars. If you'd rather do it yourself, no worries. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 20:09, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

PerfectSoundWhatever, I agree that I should give more detailed summaries. I'm terrible with them to be honest... that's something that I've need to work on. About the drive, feel free to work on the closure of the drive if you want to, I did the "award barnstar" bit already so there's less work needed to be done between the two of us :) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 22:05, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

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Please help me sir 103.157.123.224 ( talk) 09:57, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Ok. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 09:58, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your edits to the Design article. They improve things quite a bit, but don't overcome the 'too much original research' (i.e. opinion) problem, and the section on 'Types' is not actually about types of design. Please see my recent comments in Design:Talk. I am proposing to delete the section altogether. Designergene ( talk) 14:50, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Do it if it leads to the improvement of the article, I don't mind either way :) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:44, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for nothing. It was pretty fucking obvious Musk wasn't going to pass at FA - I even told you so on the talk page. I have never had a FA pass on its first nomination. After opening a peer review to which no one responded, all I wanted were some broad pointers and tips from a few different editors. That's all I needed to know how to go about the final polishing to get up it to featured status. Yet you come along and start expressing your "concerns" (you've been involved at Musk—why don't you fix them yourself?) and demanding withdrawal. What do you think that does? Does that make editors more inclined to give a review? So much for " making it work". I’m fucking done with promoting Musk. I’ll maintain it, I’ll update it, but I’m not going to expend effort to promote it if editors like you sabotage it. ~ HAL 333 12:59, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

HAL333, fine, me and you will make the article a FA. Let's do it. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:34, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

@ HAL333: Just coincidentally came across this comment; you're being extremely uncivil. Whether or not who's in the right or wrong, we're never going to "make it work" by communication with other editors in such a manner. Cacti has every right to oppose promotion in an FA review, what's the point of a review process if you get mad and blame those who object? Blaming an editor of "sabotaging" an article for posting a comment on the FA review feels a personal attack to me. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 01:12, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

You undid an IP's edit here, where he corrected an obvious misstatement. The mass of a SpaceX Raptor is around two tons (down to 1.6 tons for Raptor 2) each, not 66 tons. I suspect the mass 66 tons came from multiplying 2 tons times 33 engines. The IP was making the point that 66 tons multiplied by the number of engines would result in a mass far larger than the total specified for SuperHeavy. Tarl N. ( discuss) 05:23, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Tarl N., I think that the number should be get rid of outright. The uncertainty is just too great. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 09:41, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. Just reference the Raptor page which has the description of the mass. Which isn’t 66 tons :-) Tarl N. ( discuss) 22:15, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Whack! You've been whacked with a wet trout. Don't take this too seriously. Someone just wants to let you know that you did something silly.

You have been trouted for : Templaet:MassMessage invisible. I think you might want to make a request at WP:RM/TR to move it to the template namespace. CollectiveSolidarity ( talk) 03:54, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Ouch, that hurts! Thanks for your reminder :) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 03:55, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Hello I saw that you had nominated the NASA launch for ITN and it was closed. I have no experience in that area, but I am wondering if it was approved for tomorrow's expected launch? Bruxton ( talk) 14:38, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

I think it is de facto yes by this point. I'm sure that we will get instant posting by the time SLS launches. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:39, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Cool, there is also a rocket appearing in the DYK section beginning tonight. Sometimes we get it right around here! Bruxton ( talk) 17:33, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

More space = good, hopefully we can lift the public's chin a bit with this. I'm not a biggest fan of SLS, but I certainly prefer that than war. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 17:35, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

𝙷𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚘𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚝 ⋅ 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚔⋅ 02:42, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Moral support, but let's be real here – it is near damn unachievable. I would love to hear your plans though. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 07:01, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

I gotta be honest, I don't really like what you're doing. You come in to the project and demand that everything be done exactly your way and immediately, and get upset when people like me say, "Hey, wait a minute!" You also haven't taken the time to understand the perfectly logical reasons we did things at VA the way we did. You're trying to undo in a few weeks process that took years and many discussions to craft. p b p 15:09, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Purplebackpack89 I agree that the way that I approach with these VA processes are too harsh. I should have slowed down and listen to others more. However, I fail to see why a lot of stuff at VA are ideal either: threaded discussions at talk Level 4 and 5, insanely slow and bureaucratic votes, the constant swapping, etc. But most importantly, these VA lists are useless if no one uses it to improve articles. It feels to me that this project is becoming the 2nd WP:Esperanza: solid aim and intention but horrible execution. I hope that this explains why I have to make such drastic changes. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:19, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Hello, CactiStaccingCrane,

On August 8th, you tagged this category as being discussed on a CFD page but you never completed the nomination. Please either start a discussion with your proposal or remove the CFD tag from this category. Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:10, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Oops, I almost forgot! I'm completing the nomination now. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 03:11, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

		The Original Barnstar
		you stuck to Artemis 1 like it did to the pad. Thx! ArtfulSinger95 ( talk) 16:41, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks a lot ArtfulSinger95! I like the humor :) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:43, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

The first ever Vital GA Drive by the WikiProject Vital Articles has begun. The drive aims to improve Coffee and Land to good article status within 45 days, from 1 September to 15 October 2022. The Vital GA Drive is WikiProject Vital Articles's first step at achieving its ambitious goal: all Vital articles achieving good article status by 2032.

You've received this message because your name is on Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles and Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/30 kB drive. If your name only appear at the 30 kB drive page, you won't receive any more future messages from the WikiProject. If you don't want to receive such messages anymore, you can remove the template {{MMsgI|user=YOURUSERNAME}} at the project's member list. MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 15:30, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Nice CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:39, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

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Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. Constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, but a recent edit of yours to the page Milky Way has an edit summary that appears to be inadequate, inaccurate, or inappropriate. The summaries are helpful to people browsing an article's history, so it is important that you use edit summaries that accurately tell other editors what you did. Feel free to use the sandbox to make test edits. Thank you. Polyamorph ( talk) 07:47, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

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September songs

Thank you for improving articles in September! Yesterday, we sang old music for two choirs at church, pictured, scroll to the image of the organ of the month of the Diocese of Limburg (my perspective), and if you have time, watch the video about it. And today I wrote an article about music premiered today, Like as the hart. -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 15:10, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

I love it! CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 23:33, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

thank you! - travel and strings sound -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 13:44, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

		Editor of the Week
		Your ongoing efforts to improve the encyclopedia have not gone unnoticed: You have been selected as Editor of the Week in recognition of your great contributions! (courtesy of the Wikipedia Editor Retention Project)

User:DMT Biscuit submitted the following nomination for Editor of the Week:

I nominate CactiStaccingCrane to be Editor of the Week for their initiative. Wikipedia editors are by nature passionate, if often droll, but I've seldom seen such enthusiasm coupled with openness, coordination and realism. It's rather remarkable. Active participant at Wikipedia:WikiProject Rocketry, WikiProject Spaceflight/SpaceX and SpaceX Starship fan. Time will decide any outcome, but, even if the moon is missed, one falls among the stars.

You can copy the following text to your user page to display a user box proclaiming your selection as Editor of the Week:

{{User:UBX/EoTWBox}}

Interplanetary Transport System

CactiStaccingCrane

Editor of the Week for the week beginning September 25, 2022

Enthusiasm coupled with openness, coordination and realism is rather remarkable, An active participant at Wikipedia:WikiProject Rocketry and WikiProject Spaceflight/SpaceX. Time will decide any outcome, but, even if the moon is missed, one falls among the stars.

Recognized for

outer space enthusiasm

Notable work

SpaceX Starship

Submit a nomination

Thanks again for your efforts! ― Buster7  ☎ 14:53, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

Woo! Very well deserved. DFlhb ( talk) 16:47, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliments! I really do appreciate it. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:59, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

You might be amused to know that one of your edits was discussed on a podcast by the subject of the photo you picked, if you hadn't already heard about it. Lord Belbury ( talk) 15:14, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi Cacti, I think that next initiative you should do for getting 1,000 vital articles' status to GAs is getting the United States to good article status. Given the amount of views this article gets each year, I think it should be a priority to improve this article and hopefully this brings us one step closer to our goal. Interstellarity ( talk) 12:03, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi @ Interstellarity. Both Cacti and I discussed taking United States to GA a few months ago, but we've have both seen firsthand that that task is sadly impossible at this time. That article is a hotspot for debate and disruption, and the talk page is embroiled with debates on a weekly basis. It would be a very difficult task to take that article to GA, not to mention the need to maintain it to standard if it is promoted. There are probably some easier vitals to do, but perhaps we'll get to the United States eventually. ‡ Night Watch ω (talk) 15:58, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

I noticed you are trying to reduce a description under 40 characters... The 40 character limit isn't absolute: "This should be limited to about 40 characters" says the template. I believe a more accurate description is better than a shorter one. PS: I was pondering the short description on the article '0 (number)'... it's difficult to find a description that doesn't use zero is a synonym... So, good job on that. Dhrm77 ( talk) 16:51, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Well, personally I found that a long description is useless if it is cut short because of its length. It is pretty glaring in the new Vector skin. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:56, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

You probably have a point, but what is Vector skin? I noticed that most of the SD changes you made have been reverted or changed (at least in the math articles). Editing wikipedia can be frustrating. Dhrm77 ( talk) 19:02, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi CactiStaccingCrane,

firstly, thanks for all your efforts to bring Wikipedia articles up to GA status! It's much appreciated. I just wanted to leave a message here since I've reverted or edited a few contributions you've made around Wikipedia, mostly short descriptions, and I didn't want you to be alarmed. I just saw a few grammatical issues with your new short descriptions and a couple of other contributions. For example, at Gambling, you changed the short description to "Risk something of value to chance". This sounds like an imperative, like I'm being told to risk something of value to chance! This sounds wrong because short descriptions generally need to sound like nouns - in this example, achieved by making the verb 'risk' into the noun 'risking' and (optionally) inserting 'of' to form 'Risking of something of value to chance'. Even this sounds a bit clunky, so I reverted to the previous shortdesc, which honestly didn't have anything wrong with it.

Also, this is completely unrelated, but at Rocket you claimed that defining a rocket as a vehicle powered by a rocket engine is a circular definition. I dispute this. A rocket engine can be defined as an engine which works by expelling mass at high velocities. A rocket thus can easily be defined as a vehicle fitted with such an engine with no circularity problems.

Anyway, I'll bother you no more :)

Happy editing — Jumbo T ( talk) 09:26, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Jumbo T, I tried to shorten the shortdesc to under forty characters, and it looks like I've tried too hard. Thanks for all of your reverts that cleaned up my mess. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:38, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Don't worry about it, your edits were well intentioned and in many cases did improve things. I only left the message above because I didn't want you to think I was mass reverting you or anything :)

As for the 40 character thing - sometimes even a short description needs to be a bit, well... long. Some topics are hard to summarize well in such a small space. Personally I would take it as a target - good if can be reached, but if it takes sacrifices in readability or accuracy to get there, then I'd forget about it.

Happy editing — Jumbo T ( talk) 15:49, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Oh, and one more thing - I was taking a look back at some edits you made from the 5th October, and I noticed you made a lot of changes to short descriptions like how, at Joseph Stalin, "Leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953" was changed to "Leader of the Soviet Union (1924-1953)". This is not a good change to make in general (as some people who reverted a few of these changes pointed out), since when you write dates like "(1924-1953)" after a person's name or occupation, they appear to be birth/death dates.

Also, I appreciate your attempts to improve Physics-related shortdescs but describing the concept of a 'force' as "Property that can influence motion" is confusing at best, and inaccurate at worst. A 'property' is a characteristic, something that belongs to something else. 'Colour' is a property of a shirt, for example. In Physics, properties are things like charge, mass, etc. A force is not a property, since (as Newton essentially described in his Third Law) it is something that arises in an interaction between two objects. Thus it cannot be a property of an object, rather, it is something that exists independently of (but yet is intimately linked to) the two objects that interact. Deep stuff. Anyhow, my point is that you cannot really get away with calling a force a 'property'.

(I'd also say something that I was trying to get at in my original message without being too blunt: you don't need to change every short description you come across! Some of them are just fine and written by people who understand the nuances of the subject that they describe. That doesn't mean that all short descriptions are fine - far from it - but not all of them are in need of a rewrite :))

Happy editing — Jumbo T ( talk) 08:58, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

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Hi CactiStaccingCrane. Please don't do this. It has no effect on the rendered page, and it just invites religious wars about the number of spaces after a period. -- Trovatore ( talk) 17:08, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Trovatore, and I always thought that it does effect the rendered page... Now I know that these double spaces are automatically converted to single spaces. I should have realize this sooner. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 23:39, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

I came here to say the same thing when I saw this edit. It's really annoying when you do this because it is problematic to revert you. Manual restoration is difficult and time consuming because of the presence of ref and other tags. Outright reverting is a bit extreme for such a trivial issue because it wipes out other potentially useful edits. But note that I'm prepared to do that to repeat offenders. Spinning Spark 16:53, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Spinningspark I won't do that again and I won't made any more cosmetic edits. I should probably stick to finding and replacing images instead. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:58, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi CactiStaccingCrane, just came across your question at Talk:Pakistan. I don't have article specific suggestions, but I thought I might make some general comments here. Country articles tend to steadily lengthen over time, as various bits and pieces are tacked on. This is simply due to the nature of the topics, being both very broad and very well-known. On one hand this is great as getting new text is good, the downside is without focused maintenance the articles entropy a bit. In most cases the content isn't problematic by itself, it's just undue at that level of article, so a lot of shifting to subpages is usually called for to keep everything in WP:SUMMARYSTYLE. (This can be great for subarticles, look at the state of Demographics of Pakistan and Culture of Pakistan compared to the relevant Pakistan sections! History sections are another common undue magnet.) Figuring out what is due on the main page is not simple and a bit of a judgment call, but it's much easier if everything has been copied to the relevant subarticle, as then it is much easier to look at what you're trying to summarise. Anyway, they're big jobs! Are you looking at all the level 3 vital ones? CMD ( talk) 20:10, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

You're right about that – these articles are a pain to deal with. I'm just gonna look through the discussion history before doing any big rewamps and such. And yes, my (and many others') goal is to get all Vital level 3 articles to GA. It is ambitious, but it's no different from Wikipedia's 100,000 articles goal in 2001. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 03:08, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Well I'm pleased to have contributed Malaysia to those efforts all those years ago. Recently I've been working on East Timor (almost there I think!), however I note this is only a level-4 vital article. If you specifically target a lv-3 vital country article, please feel free to let me know. Best, CMD ( talk) 03:40, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

While we're on the topic of Country vital articles, I just want to give you a heads-up that level 3 vital Russia is having a GA reassessment, and it might be good to monitor that article to see if it can be salvaged. ‡ Night Watch ω (talk) 15:25, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Ouch... CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:27, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm not a fan of the state of the Russia article (which I expressed on the previous GAR), but I don't find the current GAR that convincing. Probably not an article worth working on right at this moment though.

On the topic of GARs though, should Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/Article alerts be made more prominent on the WP:VA page? I also wonder if the alerts can be trimmed to just lv3 and above, but I'm not seeing a way on the description page. CMD ( talk) 15:53, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Transcluted the template, but I'm just as dumbfounded as you at how to limit it to just level-3 articles. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:55, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Hello, CactiStaccingCrane. This is a courtesy notice that the copy edit you requested for Elon Musk at the Guild of Copy Editors requests page is now complete. All feedback welcome! Dhtwiki ( talk) 01:16, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

October songs

Thank you for improving articles in October! - Look for mine: two favourite concerts were on DYK, and too many on RD (three yesterday). -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 12:21, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks a lot Greda! CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:17, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

who shall separate us -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 14:33, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Hey there, I saw that some of the changes had been reverted: /info/en/?search=Special:Contributions/92.233.90.249 for being counted as "dubious" references. All these contributions are based on academic cited work from top-tier conference. Not sure how they count as "dubious" citations! All relevant bits and pieces to improve those pages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Caringtechuser ( talk • contribs) 16:55, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

What do you think? Could you revert back the changes?/unblock the IP's changes? Caringtechuser ( talk) 08:31, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Pinging you since you did comment on the second FAC, in case you have suggestions for resolving the issues noted there. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk) 09:02, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Please don't remove content without a proper explanation. Also, once reverted, make sure you follow the BRD process. Thanks. M.Bitton ( talk) 16:36, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

Fair enough. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:37, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Algeria. This means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be although other editors disagree. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus, rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement.

Points to note:

1. Edit warring is disruptive regardless of how many reverts you have made;
2. Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.

If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes and work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. M.Bitton ( talk) 16:39, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

Ok, so what? Piling on warnings to get me blocked? This is not BRD. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:40, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

Reverting while leaving a BS edit summary (as you did) is not BRD. M.Bitton ( talk) 16:42, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

You may be blocked from editing without further warning the next time you vandalize Wikipedia, as you did at Ancient Rome. Roundish ⋆ t c) 15:16, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Roundish, what? Is removing britannica.com source in the lead about a list of Roman kingdom – where we have sources below – banned nowadays? CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:18, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

The only explanation you gave for removing it was that "We are more reliable than Wikipedia". And there's no reason why sources can't be included in the lead. -- Roundish ⋆ t c) 15:24, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

That's because it is true. Do Britannica list its sources? No – it relies on the experts' credibility. We on the other hand do list the source, usually at the body of the article. A good reliable secondary source always triumph a good tertiary source, since it is closer to the information itself. We only cite sources at contentious statements when there is lots of debates internally, not as a de facto standard. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:28, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

	Whack
	For making cosmetic changes to forces beyond our understanding. CMD ( talk) 02:56, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Further to that, even if your edit had not caused such a stink, it is extremely poor practice to change the rendering of a page to your own personal preference. Specifying specific fonts will only work for those users with those fonts loaded and it may force a change for users that don't want it. You need to consider the effect it is going to have on users with a different browser, skin, or operating system. You need to consider mobile users and mobile app users. That means an awful lot of testing under different conditions. As you were told at ANI, you can change the rendering of pages for you personally with custom css and javascript. You can find links to those pages under the "Skin" heading at Preferences/Appearance. Don't ask me how to do it, I'm not a coding expert (although I have tinkered a little bit on my own pages). If you need assistance I've found the guys at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) to be very helpful in the past. There is also Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing you can go to for more general questions. Spinning Spark 09:09, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

		The Destroyer of the Wiki Bot Barnstar
		OH MY GOD WHAT DID YOU DO THERE'S MONKEYS AND FISH EVERYWHERE SOMEONE HELP!! This is for breaking Cewbot by attempting to change a font to your personal preference. As Spinningspark said above (and also as I said in the ANI post) you really should not have done that anyways since it can cause accessibility issues. If you need help figuring out how to get a specific font to display across the entire wiki via your common.css feel free to ask me. ― Blaze Wolf TalkBlaze Wolf#6545 17:55, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Please read MOS:FONTFAMILY. Thanks. — kashmīrī  ^TALK 01:01, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Alright, got it. No more custom fonts. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 02:14, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Your recent editing history shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war; that means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be, when you have seen that other editors disagree. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war; read about how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in you being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you do not violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly. ~ HAL 333 04:13, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

You have been reverted on the lead multiples times and been told to discuss. It's not a bold edit if there is no clear talk consensus for the change. It's called edit warring and I will take you to the noticeboards if you continue this disruptive behavior. ~ HAL 333 04:13, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

I won't touch the Elon Musk article anymore. Too much trouble. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 04:14, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

What you just did is not cool or conducive to improving the article. It's disruptive. Also, this page is viewed by a massive amount of readers, many of whom just saw this nonsensical gibberish. Please be more careful. ~ HAL 333 18:22, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Moon, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Corona.

( Opt-out instructions.) -- DPL bot ( talk) 06:03, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi, on WP:RSP I see that the History Channel is considered "generally unreliable" but you are also removing it to be replaced by {{ citation needed}}; where is the call to deprecate it in this way? Elizium23 ( talk) 07:15, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

I am currently mass removing these depreciated sources to make way for the future sourcing drive in WP:PVITAL project. Some of them I've replaced with more reliable sources. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 07:16, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Where is the consensus to deprecate it? Elizium23 ( talk) 07:18, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Well, no... I will try to replace all of these history.com sources with better ones now. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 07:21, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

If the source isn't deprecated, we don't have blanket approval to just remove it on sight. The worst thing you can do is remove it as the only source and leave "citation needed" in its place. I think you should seek consensus about this if it's going to affect a lot of articles. Elizium23 ( talk) 07:31, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Would recommend keeping the refs but adding {{ bsn}} next to them. Aza24 (talk) 08:03, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Contributors to the most recent discussion of History at RSP agreed that it was counterproductive to systematically remove their citations without replacing with a better source. I think that is generally our position except for the very worst sources. Spinning Spark 11:02, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

I have messed up hard using it. Please forgive me for any mistakes that I make – some of my edits are made in highly visible and controversial pages. I'm still getting hang to it. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:42, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi CactiStaccingCrane. Don't mass remove wordpress and blogs using a script. Self published sources can be reliable sources if published by recognised experts, see WP:SPS. Each one needs to be judged separately and due care taken in their removal. One of the ones you removed was actually a reference to a published book, the WordPress URL was only providing an online link. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆ transmissions∆ ° co-ords° 14:44, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Yeah... I realized that I fucked up hard just after stopping JWB. I'm currently reviewing all of my wordpress removal to make sure I'm not throwing away any good source. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:45, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi, I notice you are purging the word 'simply' from a large number of articles. This kind of thing has attracted hostile notice in the international press before now, most notably when the editor running the 'is comprised of' campaign was featured (i.e. was fried) in multiple newspapers. The rationale you are giving for removing 'simply' is quite weak, as it plainly isn't an error; the argument you are giving is (ahem) simply that it might be misconstrued by the small-minded if they delicately read an article while sipping their dainty tea and perhaps nibbling a simple biscuit (aka cookie) while unknowingly stretching their simple mind a fraction beyond its minimal limits. I don't think this is sufficient justification for an all-out purge; of course, like the comprised-of fraternity, you are free to waste your time on anything you choose. I would simply point out that 'simply' is used idiomatically in some varieties of English, including the British English that I am familiar with – but perhaps not the variety that you use? – to serve as a connecting link, a smoothing phrase that avoids the clunking abruptness of charging straight into an action verb, and both in colloquial speech and in written explanations, to make a statement comfortable and approachable. Thus 'He wrote simply that' is plainer and more legible, to British taste at least, than 'He summarized the matter as' or some such phrasing (I saw you chose 'summarized' in at least one case). It is noticeable that without the 'simply', one feels obliged to select a more mechanical verb, as is usual, even necessary, in other Germanic languages, but generally thought ugly in English: thus those languages would say 'He plucked the handkerchief from the pocket' where we write 'He took his handkerchief from his pocket' or just 'He took out his handkerchief'. In short, 'simply' simplifies the grammar and the choice of verb in many cases; it does not directly imply that what follows will be written in some simplified form. To sum up, the campaign against the usage is, I suspect from your oft-repeated edit comment, based on a misconception from a limited view of the function of 'simply' in a sentence that it is one person's assertion of how easy a statement will be to understand, when that's not what it's there for at all. I note, too, that your user page is headed with a bold statement about getting 1000 top articles to GA status. That is a most worthy goal that I'd heartily endorse; but the 'simply' campaign does not contribute towards getting any article to GA. All the best, Chiswick Chap ( talk) 09:44, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Chiswick Chap I agree. I've sidetracked. I should've create content instead of this mess. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 10:04, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

November songs

Thank you for improving articles in November while I was on vacation. -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 14:20, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanksgiving in the U.S. - Bach said it in music for peace -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 09:36, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi CactiStaccingCrane, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like it here and decide to stay. Because I saw you are working on spaceflight-related articles, I thought the general intro, spaceflight collaboration and the Artemis program pages would be helpful to you. Happy editing! Starship 24 ( talk) 15:08, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 01:00, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Your welcome. Will you join @ CactiStaccingCrane Starship 24 ( talk) 22:27, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article SpaceX Starship you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Timothytyy -- Timothytyy ( talk) 05:44, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

The article SpaceX Starship you nominated as a good article has failed ; see Talk:SpaceX Starship for reasons why the nomination failed. If or when these points have been taken care of, you may apply for a new nomination of the article. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Timothytyy -- Timothytyy ( talk) 08:04, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Bot is super confused right now... CactiStaccingCrane ( talk)

As I noted on Mike Christie's talk page, I can assist with prose and text-to-source integrity stuff; if you have Discord maybe we can work on it more efficiently there. I can also be a co-nominator for GAN/FAC. Ovinus ( talk) 03:31, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

The Elon Musk page has become a complete shitshow lol. I've almost had enough -- it's reaching Trump levels. ~ HAL 333 04:51, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

If you guys thought the Trump article was bad—it's worse. They're not even linking things in the lead anymore... Aza24 (talk) 05:17, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Ugh, that's horrible. Why are they doing that? ~ HAL 333 06:12, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Not really sure. I tried to read the talk page conversations but quickly realized I could better use my time elsewhere :)

My optimistic guess is that they were originally linking things in the article (i.e. linking "travel ban" to Donald Trump#Travel ban instead of Trump travel ban) and that was removed but nobody has re-added the original links. And my pessimistic guess is that its a result from a cabal of confused editors who edit only that page (for example: for a while, there was a "local consensus" to exclude a caption for the lead image). Aza24 (talk) 06:22, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

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. ― Buster7  ☎ 07:33, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Template:X Challenge has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 18:25, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Well, it wouldnt be the first time Elon backtracks on a topic.

But he talked about that already in 2012:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16681/elon-musk-interview-1212/

https://www.askmen.com/entertainment/right-stuff/elon-musk-interview.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20140802011449/http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2014/07/28/elon-musk-tells-me-his-secret-of-success-hint-it-aint-about-the-money/

December songs

Thank you for improving article quality in December! Best wishes for a joyful season! -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 15:55, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Mars Society you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Unexpectedlydian -- Unexpectedlydian ( talk) 23:40, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello, CactiStaccingCrane. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Particle physics, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.

If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia. FireflyBot ( talk) 06:01, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

The article Mars Society you nominated as a good article has failed ; see Talk:Mars Society for reasons why the nomination failed. If or when these points have been taken care of, you may apply for a new nomination of the article. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Unexpectedlydian -- Unexpectedlydian ( talk) 16:22, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Very happy new year to you, Cacti! And thank you for your hard work and priceless contributions! DFlhb ( talk) 02:56, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

About this edit. Per WP:SDNONE, articles like Cinema of India don't need short descriptions because the title is sufficient enough. Just letting you know. — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 22:27, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

I'm just trying to make the shortdesc like those in Cinema of Germany and Cinema of China. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 00:10, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't see how those descriptions are at all helpful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — PerfectSoundWhatever ( t; c) 00:37, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

The article SpaceX Starship you nominated as a good article has failed ; see Talk:SpaceX Starship for reasons why the nomination failed. If or when these points have been taken care of, you may apply for a new nomination of the article. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Timothytyy -- Timothytyy ( talk) 00:01, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for uploading File:X.com logo.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. -- B-bot ( talk) 18:55, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Please avoid such comments where you comment on people's supposed characteristics. Also, please avoid discouraging people from discussions, especially new users as that's quite bite-y. Nemo 12:47, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

@ Nemo bis I'm in the wrong here. I shouldn't have said that in the first place. CactiStaccingCrane 14:10, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

After discussion the RfC has been reorganized into "support", "oppose," and "neutral" subsections with numbered lists instead of * lists, and a "RfC discussion" subsection. A numbered list didn't work right with your paragraph "A lot of the support comments are made by people[...]", it broke the numbering, so I added one : of indentation to that paragraph. Is this acceptable? -- Kiz o r 01:05, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Feel free to do so! CactiStaccingCrane 01:06, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! -- Kiz o r 01:09, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

How is it that you people can even live with your crooked asses ! 173.207.72.185 ( talk) 22:23, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Hallo ? -- Vivien0706 ( talk) 10:14, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

@ Vivien0706 Hi CactiStaccingCrane 12:04, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Regarding this revert: MOS:BOLD says that use of boldface "is also done at the first occurrence of a term (commonly a synonym in the lead) that redirects to the article or one of its subsections, whether the term appears in the lead or not". This is also mentioned at WP:R#PLA. You can see the list of redirect terms for Reason by clicking on "Link count" at Special:WhatLinksHere/Reason, which shows that all the boldface terms that you removed in the aforementioned edit were legitimately boldface redirect terms. When in doubt, you can find a list of redirect terms for any article via the "Link count" link at Special:WhatLinksHere. Per Wikipedia guidelines, please do not remove boldface from legitimate redirect terms in the future. Thanks, Biogeographist ( talk) 14:18, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

I was just looking at the rating table on WikiProject Vital Articles and noticed Salting (food) which is currently stub class. It looks like the pages Salted fish and Salt-cured meat could nicely be merged to create a much fuller page with the option of splitting again in the future as appropriate. I don't have sufficient time to shepherd it through so I thought that I would suggest it to you as both the salting and fish pages are L5. There may also be other pages that could be merged into it. Gusfriend ( talk) 07:50, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

@ Gusfriend Agreed, let me just do that now. CactiStaccingCrane 07:51, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Where is the discussion and consensus on the Salted fish talk page about this controversial move? Why have you DELETED the article? Why are you claiming you merged it somewhere else - when for the most part you didn't? —– Epipelagic ( talk) 22:16, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

@ Epipelagic Most of it is just duplicated content from the Salting (food) article and don't talk a lot about the specific of salting a fish (see Method section for what I'm talking about). Also, I had assumed that it is not a controversial move since there is very little amount of unique content and that these articles are not being watched by many. CactiStaccingCrane 03:09, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

January songs

happy new year

-- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 09:39, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

I want to publish an article about a personal narrative that people in the public will become aware about. How do I proceed with (lack of) citations? Thank you. -- Decognition ( talk) 19:53, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

@ Decognition Can you clarify this further? CactiStaccingCrane 00:55, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

I noticed [5] and so I've made a small change to make it easier to modify the different levels. DatGuy ^Talk _Contribs 11:09, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

@ DatGuy Thanks mate! I love it. CactiStaccingCrane 11:42, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Hello, CactiStaccingCrane. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, " Particle physics".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:51, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

2023 WikiProject Organized Labour/Online Edit-A-Thon

Hello, CactiStaccingCrane/Archive 2! During the entire month of February there will be an ongoing edit-a-thon on all labour related projects across English Wikipedia and sister projects. Register to track your edits and sign up on the edit-a-thon's project page as a participant. To invite other participants paste {{ subst:WPLABOR/2023}} on their talk page! This event is organized by WP:WikiProject Organized Labour

CactiStaccingCrane 02:02, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Regarding this edit: I think it's always good to have initiatives to get more users editing. However I'm unclear what the call to action is in your posting. Are you organizing an edit-a-thon and looking for participants? If so, I suggest setting up a project page for the activity and pointing people to it. isaacl ( talk) 22:08, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

This edit-a-thon would have a huge impact on a lot of WikiProjects and I want to iron out any concerns that they have with the edit-a-thon proposal first. If there is an implicit consensus about the edit-a-thon then the drive would begin. CactiStaccingCrane 23:39, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

It would be helpful for you to clarify in your village pump message, then, what you're looking for. There doesn't need to be a consensus to work on improving citations, since this is standard best practice already, as long as all the usual best practices are followed (edit-a-thon participants, for example, won't have any special powers to decide what is an unreliable source). "Would begin" is very passive voice; do you mean you'll start the edit-a-thon? If there's interest, I encourage you to take the lead. isaacl ( talk) 00:17, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

I initially posted this on WP:AN (with zero prejudice; that was only due to my poor reading of WP:CLOSECHALLENGE). I'd support this discussion being reopened. See my WP:AN diff with the rationale, as well as my reply on the LLM talk page. Also courtesy pinging User:The_Transhumanist. DFlhb ( talk) 09:58, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

@ DFlhb Feel free to do so; I just want to centralize discussions about LLMs to one page to make it a lot easier to follow them. CactiStaccingCrane 13:40, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks; I've reopened it. Hopefully it'll pick up its momentum again. DFlhb ( talk) 13:47, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

I hope so too. CactiStaccingCrane 13:54, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping.

The thread is dead. There's no harm in closing out the topic on VPP. It's TL;DR in scale for most people. The next step is to comb through it to determine unresolved matters, and open a new discussion on each one in the relevant forum (with a link to its previous discussion).

I like how JPxG expressed (over at LLM) our main objective pertaining to chatbots: "permitting LLM output while preventing a tsunami of piss".

LOL. Indeed. A tsunami of piss is probably on the way. And all we are doing so far is building a sea wall made out of text. LOL.(pause)

Excuse me, I visualized us all drowning in piss, and was laughing so hard I had to catch my breath.

There's no way to prevent such a tsunami in discussions at Wikipedia, because the wave will come from outside of Wikipedia. Here, we can only control what is done to the wave once it has hit here.

Preventing a tsunami of chatbot-generated piss from hitting Wikipedia would entail having the chatbots not pee in the first place. So, somebody would have to affect the source. Nobody in the Wikipedia community seems interested in pursuing that approach.

Fortunately, some people out there are complaining or providing feedback about ChatGPT in the press. See:

• ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references
• ChatGPT is OpenAI’s latest fix for GPT-3. It’s slick but still spews nonsense
• ChatGPT maker releases AI detection tool after school districts complain of cheating

This type of news coverage catches developers' attention. But, not a peep out of the Wikipedia community or the WMF. Which is why the developers can't hear us.

But, their solutions might not be entirely consistent with WP's standards anyways. See number 5 in 5 Big Problems With OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Therefore...

Maybe the Wikipedia community needs its own chatbot, funded and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, designed to be used by editors working on Wikipedia.

I don't know what that would entail, but it sounds huge.

A smaller step on the way might be an ai search engine, like perplexity.ai, but designed to assist Wikipedians.

I've been testing and researching perplexity.ai, and came across a discussion on the web that shared that it is an overlay on top of ChatGPT/GPT3, and someone there called designing the underlying instruction for GPT "prompt engineering". That sounds like something we could do. See Perplexity.ai prompt leakage.

What would the components for a perplexity.ai-like NLP search engine be?

I look forward to your replies.   — The Transhumanist   10:23, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

P.S.: @ DFlhb: "I forgot to ping" So, here it is.    — The Transhumanist   10:27, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Deputy currently doesn't support page-only cases. Please be mindful when making edits to cases which aren't the direct output of the contribution surveyor (such as the WPTC case). Thanks. Chlod ( say hi!) 16:13, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

@ The Transhumanist I actually thought of this before: make a custom LLM that's has already being pretrained and then train it on a portion of quality articles for brainstorming. Instead of hiring Kenyan workers with minimum wage for labeling the data, we would be the one that would do it. In fact, we already has something called meta:Wiki labels in order to label data easily and mw:ORES to provide framework for the LLM, and it helps that Wikipedians aren't primarily composed of Africans doing menial work on minimum wage. If the WMF is willing to spend a million dollars for compute time and motivating Wikimedians from all backgrounds to label Wikipedia's data, we can beat ChatGPT out of the water for our purposes, just like what we've done with Britannica years ago.

Here are just some of the potential uses for such a WMF-backed LLM:

• Brainstorming, identifying possible missing information
• Detecting more subtle context-dependent vandalism
• Generate SQL queries to Wikipedia's database without the user needing to know SQL
• Make templates without needing to know complex wikitext and Lua (probably the easiest to do)
• Copyediting, identifying prose issues
• Recommending known sources and further reading resources to a topic (can be done right now with ChatGPT, but the recommendation would be much more effective if the AI is trained on article references)
• Quickly make stubs on a large scale ( Abstract Wikipedia wink wink)
• and more...

CactiStaccingCrane 11:09, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Btw, should we make a meta:Meta:Babel thread about LLMs just like what we've done in the village pump? This issue is far larger than the English Wikipedia, though it will be the one that will got hit first. Things can get extremely irky in the next few years when LLMs are used to vandalize small wikis or when Wikimedia Commons is flooded with fake animal pictures that's generated by Stable Diffusion. CactiStaccingCrane 11:13, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Not yet. We need to spearhead this thing a bit further, to set an example and lead the way for the rest of the organization.

Though, I placed an invite at meta:Wikimedia Forum 3 days ago, to let the folks over there know about our discussions at VPP and LLM talk, and about the LLM policy draft.

Before we take the discussion organization-wide (on to meta), we should let LLM gel a bit, and organize the issues that we all discussed better – as the VPP thread turned into a mess and we don't want to repeat that debacle at meta.

Meanwhile, the next step here at English Wikipedia is to gather some programmers to put their heads together to flesh out the LLM idea above in greater detail. If a project can be formed to build the thing, then a proposal to WMF for them to fuel the thing (pay for compute) has a much greater chance of being approved.

So, for the programmers, we need to write up a statement of the problem we wish them to solve. Something along the lines of your description above, without reference to any ethnic group, and with more detail and some questions.

Once we have that, I know exactly on who's talk page to post it.

Are you up for it?    — The Transhumanist   16:02, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Let's do it :) If it fails, then at least we've tried. CactiStaccingCrane 16:04, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

You can get things started by explaining this in greater detail: "make a custom LLM that's has already being pretrained and then train it on a portion of quality articles for brainstorming." Pretrained, on what? How do you further train an LLM? What portion of articles? (What's the selection criteria?) And, what did you mean by "for brainstorming".    — The Transhumanist   18:15, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Brilliant idea. Another good application I can think of, is to keep our software version numbers accurate (so as soon as Apple releases an update, all the relevant articles get updated, which legit can waste 1h+ of human time if done manually due to our total stone-age non-reliance on structured data). DFlhb ( talk) 07:16, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

That thing has already existed, called Wikidata. CactiStaccingCrane 10:22, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

The use of Wikidata for enWiki tables is intensely controversial, due to concerns over accuracy and ease of editing; and it's tables, rather than infoboxes, that take lots of time. I might just move all these tables out into templates, and transclude them all on a single page at the WikiProject, but regardless, going back to our point: LLMs alleviate the need to have structured data, beyond initial labelling; once computers understand unstructured data, the overhead of demanding that humans manually structure data no longer makes sense. That's why, IMO, Abstract Wikipedia is dead in the water, and our Wikipedia-LLM idea is much more realistic, despite being more technically challenging. DFlhb ( talk) 11:14, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

@ DFlhb Agree with you too. CactiStaccingCrane 14:37, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Please explain in greater detail

CactiStaccingCrane, you definitely know more about this stuff than me, so, you're up! Please start with your description, and elaborate on it. @ DFlhb: feel free to join in. Here is the concept again, for convenience (I've removed ethnic references, and edited for tense and other grammar):

make a custom LLM that has already been pretrained and then train it on a portion of quality articles for brainstorming. We would be the ones that would do [the labeling]. In fact, we already have something called meta:Wiki labels in order to label data easily and mw:ORES to provide framework for the LLM.

Here are some questions/issues for you to incorporate the answers to into your expanded description:

• What did you have in mind with "custom LLM"? Build our own, or layer on top of an existing one (like perplexity.ai does)?
• You mentioned it would already be pretrained — Pretrained on what?
• "and then train it"... — how would we further train the LLM?
• "for brainstorming" — I didn't catch the context in which you were using this term.
• Are all LLMs' training data labeled? It's not just a data lake? What is involved with labeling?
• What would the framework of the LLM be?
• How would ORES be used to provide framework for the LLM?
• How would this LLM differ from other LLMs?
• What would make it particularly useful for Wikipedia's purposes?

Let's do some more back and forth.

Once we've gone as far as we can go with fleshing out the concept, we can then pull in some experienced developers to analyze its feasibility and refine it into actionable design specs.

I look forward to seeing your expanded description.    — The Transhumanist   00:42, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Respectfully disagreeing with you, I deleted the "too technical" banner you placed on that page in Dec 2021. Among many WP scientific pages, this is hardly too technical, much of the text is in plain language and it compares favorably with other similar biochem/biomed pages, i.e., it's about average. Lapabc ( talk) 21:27, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

Feel free to remove it then! CactiStaccingCrane 13:48, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

February songs

my daily stories

music today: the regional festival - DYK of 13 years ago ;) -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 22:30, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

[6] -- Tamzin ^{cetacean needed} (she|they|xe) 07:27, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

I quit mentorship. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 13:34, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

My story on 24 February is about Artemy Vedel (TFA by Amitchell235), and I made a suggestion for more peace, - what do you think? - Did you suggest a article to collaborate? What did I miss? Where did I disappoint you? -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 14:54, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

So ends the first round of the 2023 WikiCup. Everyone with a positive score moved on to Round 2, with 54 contestants qualifying. The top scorers in Round 1 were:

• Unlimitedlead with 1205 points, a WikiCup newcomer, led the field with two featured articles on historical figures and several featured article candidate reviews.
• Epicgenius was in second place with 789 points; a seasoned WikiCup competitor he specialises in buildings and locations in New York.
• FrB.TG was in third place with 625 points, garnered from a featured article on a filmmaker which qualified for an impressive number of bonus points.
• TheJoebro64, another WikiCup newcomer, came next with 600 points gained from two featured articles on video games.
• Iazyges was in fifth place with 532 points, from two featured articles on classical history.

The top sixteen contestants at the end of Round 1 had all scored over 300 points; these included LunaEatsTuna, Thebiguglyalien, Sammi Brie, Trainsandotherthings, Lee Vilenski, Juxlos, Unexpectedlydian, SounderBruce, Kosack, BennyOnTheLoose and PCN02WPS. It was a high-scoring start to the competition.

These contestants, like all the others, now have to start again from scratch. The first round finished on February 26. Remember that any content promoted after that date but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Some contestants made claims before the new submissions pages were set up, and they will need to resubmit them. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed.

If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Sturmvogel 66 and Cwmhiraeth. MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 19:36, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Rest in peace.      — The Transhumanist   07:26, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Hello there, I reccomend you read the link above to an important policy on Wikipedia. Always make sure that whatever addition you make is supported by reliable and verifiable sources. Your edits such as this one are original research that cannot be used on Wikipedia. If reliable sources say something, unless you have another reliable source saying something different, then you shouldn't remove it. Feel free to ask any questions if you need help and I'll try to answer as best I can {{u| Gtoffoletto}}   ^talk 08:00, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

April songs

my story today

Thank you for improving articles in April! - Today is the 80th birthday of John Eliot Gardiner. -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 17:27, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Some content that you added to the Starship Flight Test article has been moved to the article's talk page due to them lacking WP:RS. Please provide reliable sources for that content in the talk page discussion before restoring it to the article. Thank you. Rainclaw7 ( talk) 19:13, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm the one who removed it, not knowing that Cacti added it. It gives me pause, since I trust his judgment. Will continue discussion at Talk:SpaceX_Starship_orbital_test_flight#Temporarily_removed_uncited_material DFlhb ( talk) 20:43, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

@ CactiStaccingCrane, I notice you've previously removed Nelson's comments as "promo", and described the launch as a failure. That seems intuitive to me (though I have zero domain knowledge), but most media sources seem relatively positive (e.g. CNBC's today’s launch was no less remarkable, and AP's Despite the abbreviated flight, congratulations poured in from NASA chief Bill Nelson and others in the space industry). I'm wary of respecting NPOV, so do you know of any less superficial/more critical analyses of the launch failure? DFlhb ( talk) 22:28, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

@ DFlhb I think we just need to wait. :) Of course people will congratulate the launch for its achievements, but it does not mean that article such as STS-1 have a reception section, because it's by de facto positive. A more substantive reception of the launch would come eventually when it is looked in retrospect. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 23:31, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

About that third passage, yeah it's original research. I just quickly post my draft to the article and haven't bothered to find source for it afterwards. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 00:24, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

The second round of the 2023 WikiCup has now finished. Contestants needed to have scored 60 points to advance into round 3. Our top five scorers in round 2 all included a featured article among their submissions and each scored over 500 points. They were:

• Iazyges (1040) with three FAs on Byzantine emperors, and lots of bonus points.
• Unlimitedlead (847), with three FAs on ancient history, one GA and nine reviews.
• Epicgenius (636), a WikiCup veteran, with one FA on the New Amsterdam Theatre, four GAs and eleven DYKs
• BennyOnTheLoose (553), a seasoned competitor, with one FA on snooker, six GAs and seven reviews.
• FrB.TG (525), with one FA, a Lady Gaga song and a mass of bonus points.

Other notable performances were put in by Sammi Brie, Thebiguglyalien, MyCatIsAChonk, PCN02WPS, and AirshipJungleman29.

So far contestants have achieved thirteen featured articles between them, one being a joint effort, and forty-nine good articles. The judges are pleased with the thorough reviews that are being performed, and have hardly had to reject any. As we enter the third round, remember that any content promoted after the end of round 2 but before the start of round 3 can be claimed in round 3. Remember too that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them.

If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article nominations, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed (remember to remove your listing when no longer required). Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Sturmvogel 66 and Cwmhiraeth. MediaWiki message delivery ( talk) 08:14, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

For this revert. I accidentally clicked rollback while trying to open the page from the history. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk) 06:36, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

It's ok :) Everyone make mistakes. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 06:37, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, actually, the native Vietnamese minority in China still uses Nôm to some extent, since the orthographic reform passed them by. There are also some revivalists who standardised the script this year (though realistically it's not going to replace the Latin script, I guess they probably know that too). But yeah, I agree with the removal, just couldn't resist the pedantry (and maybe this is a fun factoid for trivia events). :) Double sharp ( talk) 21:53, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Sure, you're right about that. But for me it's a bit like saying there are still English people that speaks Latin, and thus you should put the latin name in all things. Nom script is almost never used by Vietnamese, native or overseas. I saw that a lot of people on Wikipedia put the Nom script as a transliteration of Quốc ngữ script, which is just wrong. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 00:14, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

As I said, I agreed. :) It's not worth including in Wikipedia unless you are explicitly talking about something historical (back when it actually was the original script). Double sharp ( talk) 16:42, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

This reminded me to add a footnote to Planet#Mythology and naming noting that Korean mostly uses Hangul to write those names. Here the characters are mostly being used translingually, because the point is that it's the same word that's been borrowed across all three anyway. Admittedly this space-saving measure makes it difficult to give transliterations, but the point here is what the names mean, not how they sound.

P.S. And this got me to once again look into the Chinese names of the first 100+ asteroids. The first thirteen are Li Shanlan's translations from the 1870s. Though I think many are just "theoretical": they appear in the astronomical dictionary but nobody bothers with them. (Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Hygiea are used of course.) Double sharp ( talk) 18:46, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Hello there. Recently you have engaged in an edit war on the article Andromeda Galaxy with Daviddayag. While I do understand your arguments and stances, we here in Wikipedia want to promote a healthy community of editors that engage in peaceful resolutions for edit conflicts.

I have raised a discussion here at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Astronomy#Lead picture for Andromeda Galaxy and hence you are invited to join the discussion and resolve this matter, as well as engage with a wider audience since I think this is an important topic to touch on, regardless. Don't take this as something personal or a means to offend you, but still take this as a warning to avoid such behavior in the future. Regards! SkyFlubbler ( talk) 14:40, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your polite response :) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 03:08, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Hey CactiStaccingCrane, you reverted the page move on Starship twice already. That's a big page with a lot of moving parts and several editors have already edited it after the merge that was 2 days ago. So please seek WP:CONSENSUS before making such a big move or it will disrupt editing of the article. {{u| Gtoffoletto}}   ^talk 15:09, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

You have consensus, but you haven't done the job properly. The reason people want to merge SpaceX Starship development in is because the article's content is horrible, and I was among them that agree that this is the case. Therefore, your merge must reflect that consensus: by making sure that the content that you are adding back to the article is high quality. Hopefully you have understood my reasoning. I urge you to revert your revert and perform the merge slowly. There is no rush to make stuff worse. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:14, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

You cannot undo a merge that happened 2 days ago and that other editors have already edited with no issues without any discussion or without pointing out the issues on the talk page first. I understand you don't like the merge. Point out the issues on the talk page so we can fix them. Or propose an alternative if you think there is one. Don't just revert the last 2 days of editing by several users without any discussion or it won't be possible to edit the page efficiently. {{u| Gtoffoletto}}   ^talk 15:19, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Massive archival of discussions

Why have you massively archived the discussions on the Starship page? Was it an error? Those were large ongoing discussions [7]. Please self revert those changes and watch out. Such big changes can be highly WP:DISRUPTIVE {{u| Gtoffoletto}}   ^talk 15:32, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

I've restored them myself but this was a big waste of time. Please be more careful in the future. {{u| Gtoffoletto}}   ^talk 18:16, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Like you I've been a long-time editor of Falcon 9 and Starship related pages. How are you feeling of late with all that's going on with the Starship page. I feel like it's been getting torn away from people who've been editing the page for a long time. Ergzay ( talk) 21:46, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I feel the same thing too. It is just disgusting. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 01:08, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your contributions to Supergenus. Unfortunately, it is not ready for publishing because it has no sources. Your article is now a draft where you can improve it undisturbed for a while.

Please see more information at Help:Unreviewed new page. When the article is ready for publication, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page. BoyTheKingCanDance ( talk) 03:47, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Sorry if I bit your head off at WT:MOS, and I appreciate the revert and the opening of specific discussion about specific changes. Even seemingly minor changes to MoS can spark unbelievable amounts of WP:DRAMA, including WP:MOVEWAR chaos. A constant problem we have (and why WP:DOCTCAPS is so detailed and specific, as are several other main-MoS sections, and entire MoS side pages, especially MOS:NUM and MOS:CAPS), is that there is a strong tendency for people with some tedious style pecadillo (almost always a WP:Specialized-style fallacy when it isn't a WP:Common-style fallacy or nationalism-based) to go to war at WP:RM or elsewhere to enforce their personal preference.

They will WP:WIKILAWYER everyone to death over the technicality that their personal style bugbear isn't covered specifically by name in whatever MoS section was clearly (to a reasonable person) intended to apply. Thus so many specifics and examples; they are loophole closures of things people keep fighting over. Wording like "including but not limited to" seems like it should solve the problem, but it doesn't not. Trying to just say "Capitalize things that are proper names, and do not capitalize those that aren't" seems like it should work, but it does not. People do not at all agree on what "proper name" means, especially since it has widely divergent meanings in linguistics versus in philosophy (MoS always means the linguistic sense, and this is why we link to it so often). Many people are convinced that "whatever I see capitalized in what I like to read must be a 'proper name'". (Circular reasoning: capitalize because it's a proper name, and I know it's a proper name because I saw it capitalized. It's a fallacy that is in play literally every day at RM.)

All this becomes really evident if you spend a long time monitoring RM discussions that pertain to sports, games, dance, and other activities; anything to do with government or military; anything involving "doctrines" (religious, vocational, etc.); and anything with an obsessive fandom (from trains to anime). Some of the disputes that have arisen have been very destructive to editorial productivity and morale, e.g. the bird species common-name capitalization fiasco, which was a grossly uncivil WP:BATTLEGROUND for longer than a decade. Some of the drama surrounding every little word of MOS:GENDER has been nearly as bad (one of the longest and most awful RfCs in WP history was about that, at WP:VPPOL several years ago).

Trying to revise MoS is a real minefield, and it can take a long time to get consensus for changes that are substantive (while changes that don't seem substantive often turn out to be because of the nested layers of interpretation precedent, dependencies on the wording in other P&G pages, etc., etc.).  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:30, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

I have never been aware that such drama exists on WP:MOS. Perhaps that's why in the talk page there's a pic of a mosh pit... In my view, this is why Ignore all rules is so important: these policies and guidelines should not be interpreted letter by letter, and those that do should be warned sternly, because what they are doing is essentially practicing elitism and driving newbies away. That's also one of the reasons why the general public hate lawyers and found editing on Wikipedia so cryptic. It all comes down to common sense really. Good common sense = less technicality pushing/wikilawyering = shorter rules = more people following the rules. When me, a person that has edited Wikipedia for 3 years, found reading the MOS extremely difficult, then why should we expect newbies to do the same? CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 13:42, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

We don't expect newbies to actually read through all of MoS, but to absorb it slowly if at all. For newbies is Wikipedia:Simplified Manual of Style. The main MoS pages exist almost entirely for settling recurrent disputes between longer-term editors. It's a conflict-resolution reference work to resort to when necessary, and for WP:GNOMEs doing cleanup work to conform to; not a to-do list to memorize. MoS isn't normally read top-to-bottom, but cited to a specific shortcutted line-item.

Your reference to lawyers and technicality-pushing is on point, but the tendency to wikilawyer by well-meaning editors of all sorts who just want to get their preferred way on something is the very reason that MoS exists and is so long and detailed (though it is actually quite short compared to major off-site style guides like Chicago Manual of Style, New Oxford Style Manual, and AP Stylebook, and even some in-house ones at single publishers like The New York Times; we intentionally leave out of MoS anything that hasn't been the subject of extensive on-site warring; cf. WP:MOSBLOAT).

It should be the case that editors use common sense and don't try to interpret P&G pages letter-by-letter, but they certainly do it in reality (common sense is not actually common), and we just have to work around that.

Anyway, no one actually has to follow MoS to edit here; they just have to follow actual policies like WP:NPOV and WP:V – and not disruptively battleground against other editors who bring their material into conformity with policies and guidelines (including MoS). The expectation is that experienced editors will stylistically clean up after new ones, and that newer editors will gradually write in WP style as they become more familiar with the work-flow here.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:22, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

I've reverted your complete rewrite of the Wikipedia lead and hatnote. Your edits occurred even after the MOS edits which SMcCandlish has been trying to educate you on. You have a habit of going into the most major and discussed articles on Wikipedia and rewriting the entire leads. Editors have been blocked or topic banned for far less, so please, it is often best to step away from the keyboard. Randy Kryn ( talk) 14:16, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

Randy Kryn, I understand that these articles often has a long standing consensus, especially at the lead. However, I don't found such a consensus here, when the current lead for the Wikipedia article disproportionately focus on how popular and good Wikipedia is, and it lacked focus on how Wikipedia operates. That's why I rewrote the lead. With all due respect, please tell me why this lead is better than the lead that I've written. I would love to hear your feedback and improve on it. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:21, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

You didn't think the lead of the article Wikipedia has consensus after being essentially the same for months and probably years? Just please stop "improving" long-term leads. If you have brief or long edit suggestions please bring them to the article talk page and not on your talk page. Randy Kryn ( talk) 14:25, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

To be honest, the reason why I edit these articles directly is because I found that getting a consensus for these articles takes forever (as in no one responds to it) and many times I have to awkwardly make the edit afterwards a few weeks later, when I could have already made them in the first place. Generally I found that the WP:BRD cycle to be more appealing, because if a person reverts, I could discuss with them immediately and try to work out a solution. Granted, what I've done in the MoS is not justified at all, and I shouldn't have done that in the first place. But I hope you understand the rationale of why I might perform more bold edits than usual. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 14:34, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

A methodology that can work well is drafting such rewrites in a sandbox, trying to anticipate objections and issues, and revising it a lot, then pasting it into the real article. And then self-reverting for discussion. You open a discussion on the talk page, with links to the the old (now current again) version and your rewrite version, and a WP:DIFF of them so people can more analytically see what changed, plus some explanation of why you made such changes and what you're trying to achieve. That tends to promote constructive discussion and get toward consensus. Takes some preparation and patience, but this is a tried-and-true method.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:40, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

The Core Contest—Wikipedia's most exciting contest—will take place this year from April 15 to May 31. The goal: to improve vital or other core articles, with a focus on those in the worst state of disrepair. Editing can be done individually, but in the past groups have also successfully competed. There is £300 of prize money divided among editors who provide the "best additive encyclopedic value". Signups are open now. Cheers from the judges, Femke, Casliber, Aza24.

If you wish to start or stop receiving news about The Core Contest, please add or remove yourself from the delivery list.

May songs

my story today

Thank you for improving articles in May. - I had a good story on coronation day: the Te Deum we sang that day. And the following day we sang it for the composer ;)

I nominated Soňa Červená for GA just to give her a bit more exposure, and I took some pics of bright scenery - click on songs. -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 19:37, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

@ Gerda Arendt Good luck on your GA :P CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 19:39, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! - Pentecost was full of music, and my story today is that 300 years ago today, Bach became Thomaskantor, with BWV 75, writing music history. -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 19:31, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Per Special:Diff/1156135612 - if you want configuration for one click archiver without automatic archiving, {{ Archive basics}} might be a better choice. Otherwise, if you do want auto-archiving, you'll need to specify an archive parameter in {{ User:MiszaBot/config}} or the bot will refuse to do any archiving. I haven't used one click archiver before myself so I'll let you fiddle with the setup yourself to figure out what works. Aidan9382 _{( talk)} 10:44, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

hmm... CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 18:54, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Hello CactiStaccingCrane. I don't see much of a reason to change the lede photo for the Anthropology page to the one you chose. But if you want to find consensus for making the change, please do create a new section on the talk page to make your case. -- Pinchme123 ( talk) 15:29, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

To be honest, my colored photograph thingy is a bit self-referential and not the most ideal first pic for the article, but I'm not fond of the current low res pic either. People do use images from Wikipedia for their personal uses as well (making school presentations, etc.) and I think that a good and high-res picture should accommodate that well. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 15:33, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

FWIW, I did some cleaning up of the really rarely used symbols (on the grounds that if the Unicode proposal says there's no broader use, it's probably not worth including on WP). There's essentially three classes of them that I left, which are exactly what Astronomical symbol now contains:

• The Sun, the major planets, and the Moon. You'll still find these in serious astronomical texts today, although less commonly than in previous centuries. Pluto may be counted with them, since it was thought to be a major planet for so long. These are the most common symbols (though Pluto got rare since its demotion).

Following at a long distance are:

• The original asteroids before people decided that it was getting a bit impractical to make a new symbol for every one of them. Even here it gets a bit awkward: the original four (Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta) received four decades of uncontested use, but once a fifth one was found in 1845, people got tired of making symbols really quickly. The symbols up to asteroid 9 (Metis) were generally adopted as soon as they were announced, bringing us up to 1848. But the numbering convention was first suggested in 1850 and first applied the next year, so from 10 Hygiea onward (discovered 1849, symbol only announced 1850) some astronomers were already using numbers instead of symbols. They were still getting proposed (mostly in description rather than actual drawing, although the latter was seen a bit), and reference books in the mid-19th century continue to mention them and occasionally even draw them, but hardly anyone actually used them. The last few are mostly from the diehard Robert Luther who kept on giving symbols to his discoveries until 1855 while almost nobody else bothered (even John Russell Hind, who had still been defending iconic symbols in September 1852, had given up by the same November; incidentally, September 1852 also marks the first asteroid whose discoverer never gave it a symbol). Though there's a transition period where sometimes the first four or even first nine kept their symbols while the rest were just ignored, and as I said; many of them continued to grace the pages of reference books like Webster's dictionary (1864 edition) as "ghost" symbols that never actually got used in practice. Oh, and in the 20th century some astrologers revived the first four symbols for use again, and made their own symbols for Astraea and Hygiea that are somewhat standard among them. Nowadays I can't find any astronomers who use any of those symbols even when plotting asteroid data in their figures (except that NASA resurrected the Ceres symbol once while discussing dwarf planets).
• The other dwarfs. Their symbols were invented indeed by a software engineer in Massachusetts because the IAU wasn't going to give them any ( seriously). Some astrologers, however, were quite happy to take them up: some have started incorporating them into their "predictions", on the grounds that if Pluto was really astrologically important, and now it was demoted to be a dwarf, then maybe those other dwarfs are actually equally important too (which I suppose is at least internally consistent in a way). Well, down to Orcus. He made symbols for a few more that are a bit smaller, but astrologers don't use those much. But it seems that NASA and the makers of this astronomy infographic similarly felt the frustration that two DPs have historical symbols and the others don't because they were discovered too late, and so there is nonzero but slight astronomical use of Moskowitz' symbols now, and Unicode decided to call them astronomy symbols since they can be and are used that way too. (FWIW, their discoverer Mike Brown seemed to be happy about it on Twitter.)

You will also find a bunch more symbols floating around the internet, but mostly no one but their inventors use them. Including Moskowitz' symbols for the planetary moons, which are cool, but hardly used (astronomers won't adopt new symbols these days, and astrologers wouldn't find much use for the planetary moons because they'd always be in about the same place as their parents).

I think there's a legitimate argument that the second and third classes of symbols shouldn't get so much prominence. Astronomers don't use them (well, OK, neither do they use Pluto anymore), whereas they still sometimes do use the Sun + Moon + planets. And most astrologers have not gotten on the bandwagon of including asteroids and dwarf planets. But I think that their new location solves that, though maybe a remark "(historical)" or "(rare)" might be apropos. What do you think? Double sharp ( talk) 23:09, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

I think that any symbols that was invented after 1950 should be marked as "(astrological)" because that is exactly their current usage. The IAU doesn't even encourage using them anymore except for historical cases like M_☉. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 04:00, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, mostly yes, except for one-offs. But since one of the one-offs was NASA, maybe I'd be more comfortable with "(mostly astrological)".

That said, how should the first four asteroids be handled? They were the standard astronomical symbols when they were invented in the 19th century, but their present (as opposed to 19th-century) usage is almost exclusively astrological. Maybe "(historically astronomical, now mostly astrological)" for Ceres and "(historically astronomical, now astrological)" for the other three? Or in the case of asteroids 5 and up, they were the standard astronomical symbols for a few years in the 19th century, but are now not actually used by anybody. Perhaps for those "(historical)"? Double sharp ( talk) 10:20, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

@ Double sharp Hmmm... Maybe we should ask at the Village Pump (because WPSOLARSYSTEM is inactive) for help? CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 12:12, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, I thought about it and then decided to be WP:BOLD and do it anyway. :) Double sharp ( talk) 22:52, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

@ Double sharp Nice :) CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 02:01, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

LOL I just realised that I forgot to mention the centaurs. Well, they simply make a fourth class: only astrological, absolutely no astronomical use that I've ever seen. And so I labelled them purely as "(astrological)". Double sharp ( talk) 13:29, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

It occurs to me that one reason it might keep showing up is people getting into Vietnamese from interest in the Sinosphere as a whole. Well, primarily this would come from Chinese or Japanese, so it becomes a natural urge for people to look for the analogue of Chinese characters. (Would explain also why zh.wp has a lot of Nôm provided glossing Vietnamese texts.) And if you are a Vietnamese learner who already knows Chinese, then I think Nôm actually becomes a very helpful personal memory aid for acquiring vocabulary. It works that way for me.

But it's still wrong-headed unless you're actually writing about something so old that Nôm was the historical script, like the famous Quang Trung speech. So as understandable as it is, I'll continue to remove it when it doesn't make sense. I just thought you might be interested in my hypothesis on why it keeps getting added (because I suspect this must be the reason). And of course, as much as I like using it as a memory aid for building vocabulary, the language must be taken as it is, not in a way that will make it easier for foreigners, so I wouldn't write actual texts in it when my Vietnamese becomes good enough. :D Double sharp ( talk) 23:48, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm ok with stuff before the early 20th century to use Hans and Nom script because it is still somewhat common, but anything after that is just anachronism. It's kinda like spelling Kyiv's name in Russian. Personally, I have a grandfather that knew how to read Hans and Nom script because at the time that's still fairly common, but he doesn't write Vietnamese in it frequently and only practically use it when translating the text to modern Quốc ngữ script. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 03:57, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I completely agree that it's anachronistic for anything post early 20th century. Just wanted to share my hypothesis about why people keep adding it despite the anachronism. Double sharp ( talk) 10:22, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

It's a common practice to merge articles by fist copying content verbatim, producing an absolutely abhorrent result. Then editors decide how to trim, summarize, and reorganize the content to make it sane. In the end it may very well be that 0 of the originally merged content has remained unchaged. Not even a single sentence. It sometimes comes to pass that, after an incremental editing process, the outcome is the same as if the "merged" article had simply been redirected, with no merged content being recognizable. All of that is normal. You shouldn't give up. A consensus to merge article A into article B is not a consensus to keep article B in a certain state.— Alalch E. 17:57, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for your encouragement (context: SpaceX Starship). I don't think that these editors are acting in a bad faith, but more that they don't listen to others. I will wait for a few months for activity to cool down and then start performing the great revert. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 18:09, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Keyword: incremental. It will make your desired end state infinitely easier to justify (harder to challenge and less likely to be challenged). Don't think of it as a revert. Sincerely — Alalch E. 18:34, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

You're right. Thanks for your advice. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 02:01, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi, I've posted an RFC at Talk:Glass. Feel free to adjust the wording, I've tried to make it as neutral as I could. Polyamorph ( talk) 07:55, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Nice CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 16:20, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Please do not attack other editors, as you did at WP:ANI. Comment on content, not on contributors. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Thank you. Bbb23 ( talk) 14:59, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I needed this warning. CactiStaccingCrane ( talk) 03:19, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

CactiStaccingCrane, you should not have shifted [8] my close of the WP:ANI discussion on Scottywong. I only meant to close the part regarding ArbCom, and you shifted it such that it seemed that I closed the entire thing, including the IBAN discussion. I voted on the IBAN, and the result wasn't clear, so it would not be appropriate for me to close it. This was not cool, do not shift other editors' closes, even if you want the entire discussion closed. [9] [10] [11] starship .paint ( exalt) 14:27, 4 June 2023 (UTC)