Essays Low‑impact | ||||||||||
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"Just pointing" at a Policy, Guideline, or other Wikipedia: namespace page is something best avoided.
It's possible to search for AfDs where WP:OUTCOMES was cited, or precedent was invoked:
The number of ways of stating "(keep/delete) per outcomes" vary so much that the above can't indicate how many of the total number of AfDs mentioning WP:OUTCOMES may do this. E.g. "keep per Wikipedia:articles for deletion/common outcomes" prefix:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion (7 results as of 17:30, 20 December 2009 (UTC)), etc.
Whether people did do more than just point, or whether just pointing or making use of WP:OUTCOMES was criticized (and/or defended) would require more manual investigation. E.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Montenotte, Ireland, closed 3:35, 24 January 2008 (UTC), actually mentions that WP:OUTCOMES was tagged as unreferenced at one point.
might involve vague invocations of consensus as precedent as well, but the word is so often used in closing regarding the consensus within the AfD (usually much easier to determine, but not without occasional controversy) that this search is not very useful. The ability to search AfD nominating statements, discussions, and AfD closing statements separately or in combination would be a helpful feature. Шизомби ( talk) 17:30, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
WP:ESSAYS can offer "opinion or advice of an editor or group of editors, for which widespread consensus has not been established." One may find essays which recommend the deletion or keeping of certain kinds of articles. While logical arguments and evidence may improve the quality of such essays, it's within the authorial prerogative not to do so. On pages that are Policy, Guidelines or other non-essay pages that a consensus exists for X, this may be a form of weasel wording that should be avoided.
In the interest of providing context and avoiding jargon, what is meant by "the consensus" or "the common outcome," etc. should be explained in enough detail to be comprehensible to and verifiable by even a newcomer, though still as concise as possible. Anybody can make a good faith attempt to work out what the consensus is on a given topic. In order to present the consensus as objectively as possible, the best practice would be to "show your work," i.e. share the process, the reasoning by which the consensus was determined. A reader should be able to say, "I understand how this consensus was determined and I am not left with any questions." In the interest of verifiability, facilitating the reader's ability to independently verify the statement is desirable. Creating a Template:Search link utilizing refined searches would keep the reader's amount of work and specialized knowledge of Wikipedia tools to a minimum.
It may be necessary to tweak Wikipedia:POLICY#Not part of the encyclopedia. On the one hand, it states regarding policies, guidelines, and process pages that it is "not necessary to provide reliable sources to verify Wikipedia's rules, or to phrase rules in a neutral manner, or to cite an outside authority in determining Wikipedia's own rules and procedures." On the other hand, it states "they do not generally need to conform with the content standards" (emphasis mine) and "content of these pages is controlled by community-wide consensus, and the style should emphasize clarity, directness, and usefulness to other editors" (emphasis mine). If it were the case that leaving policy, guideline, and process pages unreferenced and unverifiable (or relatively unverifiable), "generally" indicates this is not always the case. Clear statements, showing work, and linking by search or directly to discussions are consistent with the principles of "clarity, directness, and usefulness." Additionally, another look at the first statement indicates ways these statements are not as opposed as they might initially read: it is "not necessary [i.e. but not prohibited] to provide reliable sources to verify Wikipedia's rules, or to phrase rules in a neutral manner, or to cite an outside authority in determining Wikipedia's own rules and procedures." And while Wikipedia itself does not meet the definition of a "reliable source" for articles and there is not likely to be an "outside authority" regarding, e.g. AfDs on schools, there is no reason why Wikipedia cannot be a reliable source for itself in the Wikipedia: namespace except that some editors might not care to take the time to do it, which is not an especially good reason. It states it is "not necessary to provide reliable sources to verify Wikipedia's rules" (emphasis mine); there would be something circular about a Wikipedia rule citing a Wikipedia rule to verify Wikipedia's rule. What is being addressed by this essay is not the verification of statements about rules but statements about other aspects of Wikipedia such as "common outcomes." It states "determining Wikipedia's own rules and procedures," but something like a statement regarding a consensus or outcome is a product of studying the product of a procedure, not a procedure in itself. Шизомби ( talk) 18:42, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
One does not find a Wikipedia policy citing itself, e.g. the WP:V policy does not say "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. The proof for this is WP:V." However, in e.g. an AfD an argument stating "delete per policy" would be unverifiable. What policy, where, how does that policy fit? It has to be named and ideally wikilinked in order that others can verify for themselves that the policy in fact says what the person says it does (and further, quoting the relevant portion and explaining its relevance is often desirable and makes for a stronger presentation of evidence and argument). One could not say "delete per WP:V, which states that articles must be entirely the opinion of Wikipedians and have no sources." That would be verifiably false; the text of WP:V is the proof that it is false. Thus something like "Schools are frequently nominated for deletion. Most elementary and middle schools that don't source a clear claim to notability are now getting merged or redirected in AfD, with high schools being kept except where they fail verifiability. Schools which do get merged are generally redirected to the school district which operates them (North America) or the lowest level locality (elsewhere)." is substantially similar. Each of these statements is given as a fact, and as such is something that can or can't be proven. If it isn't sourced, there's no merit to citing it. Шизомби ( talk) 19:12, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
As I think about the statement that it is "not necessary to provide reliable sources to verify Wikipedia's rules," I realize in fact it may not be saying that citing Wikipedia is incorrect in the Wikipedia: namespace. If that were the case it would say something like "it is not necessary to wikilink to Wikipedia policies, discussions, etc. so that the readers may verify them for themselves." It's saying that it's not necessary to provide WP:reliable sources to WP:verify Wikipedia's rules; in effect despite the "or" in the sentence, this appears to be synonymous with saying it's "not necessary to provide [...] an outside authority in determining Wikipedia's own rules and procedures." That is, the text of the rules, etc. the primary sources are in fact sufficient evidence of the rules when it comes to the Wikipedia: namespace; a secondary source to verify them is not needed. Similar perhaps to how a lawyer or a judge would cite directly to a law when it is unambiguous and only go to a secondary source (law article, prior court decision) to back up the primary source when the law has some ambiguity. In a sense, a page like WP:OUTCOMES is an unreliable secondary source, where the AfDs are the primary source. Thus, if you wanted to cite precedent, you're best off citing to the primary sources. However, if Wikipedians want to create a secondary source so that people don't have to keep completely reinventing the wheel by figuring out how to research precedents and what outcomes were common, then this ought to conform to WP:V in a way that renders that page as reliable a secondary source as is possible.
To return to another point above, "Who determined what the consensus was?" In an AfD, the statement regarding the consensus is attributed. Theoretically, the signature of the closer and even the signatures of the nominator or additional participants are not needed since they are recorded in the edit history. The information is provided for ease of access; it could be time-consuming to keep checking diffs to see who said what. That who said what would appear to be important is testified to not just by the practice of using signatures, but by the fact that it is possible to create named user accounts and that IP information is recorded for those who do not. If it didn't matter who contributed what, then all edits could in effect be made by a single account with no way of telling who did what or even how many people were participating.
I'm coming close to saying that a statement regarding what was the consensus across multiple AfDs should be signed the same way the statement regarding what the consensus was within a single AfD is signed. I don't think that's necessarily necessary. If the people who worked out what the consensus was show:
and it can be verified by anyone reading it, there's no real issue with who did it. If how it was worked out is not indicated, and it's not easy to verify, then who did it becomes more important. If an unsourced statement that "X articles are usually kept" was written by an inclusionist or "X articles are usually deleted" was written by a deletionist, I'd probably want to know that. (To digress a moment; I do wish one could highlight text on Wikipedia and then get an edit history for just that highlighted text, rather than only be able to get the edit history for an entire article. It would be easier and quicker to attribute old vandalism, ask questions of people who added things, etc.) However, using the five tildes to automatically sign the date of when it was done might be desirable.
Compare how the consensus within an AfD is handled versus how the consensus across multiple AfDs of a single category are handled. In a single AfD, all the different opinions and the statement as to the consensus are in one place, easily verifiable. Across multiple AfDs, the statement as to the consensus and each relevant AfD is in a different place. Imagine if a single AfD were handled this way, with the nominator's statements, each contributor's statements and the closer's statements on different pages, unlinked! Following the model of a single AfD might be the way to go with a statement regarding the consensus across multiple AfDs:
Elementary schools are usually deleted. ~~~~~
Such work could be presented in other ways, by tables or whatever. One might choose to include additional information such as how many people participated, etc. The wikilinks are to my mind essential. Right now, your (Noraft's) sample "best" statement:
Is indeed the most specific one and thus the most instructive, but it is not sourced and thus not easily verifable.
Because a single page addressing the common outcomes of multiple types of things would get extremely long if all the statements were that specific and all the relevant AfDs were linked, probably it would be desirable to have the summary information above just include a wikilink to the sources on a separate page. Thus the above "best" would end with something like [WP:Articles for Deletion/Common outcomes/elementary schools] which would be a page containing information something like I indicated above, following the model of a single AfD but for multiple ones. That page could have the specific statements of fact following your model appearing as the header.
This all would also be a lot easier if my idea Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#add categories from articles to AfDs were implemented, but it could still be done without it. Шизомби ( talk) 06:37, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
I think that you need to spend a little time refining this essay. For example, the last sentence is "If it isn't sourced, there's no merit to citing it." This could be reasonably interpreted as "If it isn't already sourced, then it doesn't need to be sourced," which I understand is exactly the opposite of the point. Perhaps you meant to say something like, "Adding citations to archives or other supporting material doesn't harm a policy-related page." WhatamIdoing ( talk) 18:16, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
I've cleaned up the essay A LOT. In addition to condensing the language, I've removed some wikilinks, given some more practical advice for dispute resolution, better rationales for documenting consensus at the time a discussion happens. The change I expect to be most controversial is nuking the last section, but I just can't find a point to it; it seems to be philosophical soapboxing rather than specific directions or encouragement of how to fix things. Fundamentally, the "not a dictionary" thing seems to me to fundamentally be an effort to tie the essay to a policy and thus anchor it against MfD. Well, the MfD is over, the essay stays, and I'm not going to renominate it. I like the new name better, and the essay contents now much more closely match the name. Jclemens ( talk) 08:18, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
Decided to go through them one by one anyway (→Incorrect “Facts” in Wikipedia Namespace: What to Do?: The statements listed are NOT opinions--opinions and unsupported facts are entirely different)
(→Incorrect “Facts” in Wikipedia Namespace: What to Do?: ce, trim examples, remove expansion to comments, reorder)
(→How can we keep pages in the Wikipedia namespace accurate?: ce clarify/strengthen)
(→How can we keep pages in the Wikipedia namespace accurate?: trim one sentence that's not really necessary)
(→How can we keep pages in the Wikipedia namespace accurate?: rm link to V, which isn't applicable to Wikipedia space. Replace generalities with specific actions.)
(→Avoid making nonspecific statements of fact: Show your work.: rephrase and strengthen--positive statement vs. avoiding the negative)
(→Identify unverified and/or unsourced statements of fact where they occur.: This section has been mooted: the Unreferenced WP template has been deleted, and there's no consensus to use fact.)
(→If whole pages are problematic, discuss on their respective talk pages.: expand this one to make up for the other. ce the existing material a bit. Give detailed instructions)
(→But WP Namespace is Not Part of the Encyclopedia!: remove this section as unneeded. There might be a call for a separate userspace essay on this, but this section is philosophical soapboxing,)
(rm scare quotes: facts are not facts or "facts"; they're instead correct or incorrect facts.)
Three versions of a line are proposed. The versions are numbered, set in italics and follow the previous statement, which is included here to give the line context:
Editors (in good faith) make statements about:
(1) These statements, when not asserted along with quantitative verification, are opinions, based on the editor's own prior experience. These statements are made in good faith, but suffer from three major problems:
(2) These statements of alleged fact are made in good faith, but suffer from three major problems:
(3) These statements, when not asserted along with quantitiative verification, are alleged facts, based in the editor's own prior experience. These statements are made in good faith, but suffer from three major problems:
Note that the third version is a compromise proposal between Jclemens proposed revision, and the original. ɳorɑfʈ Talk! 01:36, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
A couple editors are seeking larger consensus on which line is most appropriate for an essay that deals with editors making unsupported claims on talk pages, at WP:OUTCOMES and other places. —Preceding unsigned comment added by User:Noraft 00:35, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
Essays Low‑impact | ||||||||||
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"Just pointing" at a Policy, Guideline, or other Wikipedia: namespace page is something best avoided.
It's possible to search for AfDs where WP:OUTCOMES was cited, or precedent was invoked:
The number of ways of stating "(keep/delete) per outcomes" vary so much that the above can't indicate how many of the total number of AfDs mentioning WP:OUTCOMES may do this. E.g. "keep per Wikipedia:articles for deletion/common outcomes" prefix:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion (7 results as of 17:30, 20 December 2009 (UTC)), etc.
Whether people did do more than just point, or whether just pointing or making use of WP:OUTCOMES was criticized (and/or defended) would require more manual investigation. E.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Montenotte, Ireland, closed 3:35, 24 January 2008 (UTC), actually mentions that WP:OUTCOMES was tagged as unreferenced at one point.
might involve vague invocations of consensus as precedent as well, but the word is so often used in closing regarding the consensus within the AfD (usually much easier to determine, but not without occasional controversy) that this search is not very useful. The ability to search AfD nominating statements, discussions, and AfD closing statements separately or in combination would be a helpful feature. Шизомби ( talk) 17:30, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
WP:ESSAYS can offer "opinion or advice of an editor or group of editors, for which widespread consensus has not been established." One may find essays which recommend the deletion or keeping of certain kinds of articles. While logical arguments and evidence may improve the quality of such essays, it's within the authorial prerogative not to do so. On pages that are Policy, Guidelines or other non-essay pages that a consensus exists for X, this may be a form of weasel wording that should be avoided.
In the interest of providing context and avoiding jargon, what is meant by "the consensus" or "the common outcome," etc. should be explained in enough detail to be comprehensible to and verifiable by even a newcomer, though still as concise as possible. Anybody can make a good faith attempt to work out what the consensus is on a given topic. In order to present the consensus as objectively as possible, the best practice would be to "show your work," i.e. share the process, the reasoning by which the consensus was determined. A reader should be able to say, "I understand how this consensus was determined and I am not left with any questions." In the interest of verifiability, facilitating the reader's ability to independently verify the statement is desirable. Creating a Template:Search link utilizing refined searches would keep the reader's amount of work and specialized knowledge of Wikipedia tools to a minimum.
It may be necessary to tweak Wikipedia:POLICY#Not part of the encyclopedia. On the one hand, it states regarding policies, guidelines, and process pages that it is "not necessary to provide reliable sources to verify Wikipedia's rules, or to phrase rules in a neutral manner, or to cite an outside authority in determining Wikipedia's own rules and procedures." On the other hand, it states "they do not generally need to conform with the content standards" (emphasis mine) and "content of these pages is controlled by community-wide consensus, and the style should emphasize clarity, directness, and usefulness to other editors" (emphasis mine). If it were the case that leaving policy, guideline, and process pages unreferenced and unverifiable (or relatively unverifiable), "generally" indicates this is not always the case. Clear statements, showing work, and linking by search or directly to discussions are consistent with the principles of "clarity, directness, and usefulness." Additionally, another look at the first statement indicates ways these statements are not as opposed as they might initially read: it is "not necessary [i.e. but not prohibited] to provide reliable sources to verify Wikipedia's rules, or to phrase rules in a neutral manner, or to cite an outside authority in determining Wikipedia's own rules and procedures." And while Wikipedia itself does not meet the definition of a "reliable source" for articles and there is not likely to be an "outside authority" regarding, e.g. AfDs on schools, there is no reason why Wikipedia cannot be a reliable source for itself in the Wikipedia: namespace except that some editors might not care to take the time to do it, which is not an especially good reason. It states it is "not necessary to provide reliable sources to verify Wikipedia's rules" (emphasis mine); there would be something circular about a Wikipedia rule citing a Wikipedia rule to verify Wikipedia's rule. What is being addressed by this essay is not the verification of statements about rules but statements about other aspects of Wikipedia such as "common outcomes." It states "determining Wikipedia's own rules and procedures," but something like a statement regarding a consensus or outcome is a product of studying the product of a procedure, not a procedure in itself. Шизомби ( talk) 18:42, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
One does not find a Wikipedia policy citing itself, e.g. the WP:V policy does not say "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. The proof for this is WP:V." However, in e.g. an AfD an argument stating "delete per policy" would be unverifiable. What policy, where, how does that policy fit? It has to be named and ideally wikilinked in order that others can verify for themselves that the policy in fact says what the person says it does (and further, quoting the relevant portion and explaining its relevance is often desirable and makes for a stronger presentation of evidence and argument). One could not say "delete per WP:V, which states that articles must be entirely the opinion of Wikipedians and have no sources." That would be verifiably false; the text of WP:V is the proof that it is false. Thus something like "Schools are frequently nominated for deletion. Most elementary and middle schools that don't source a clear claim to notability are now getting merged or redirected in AfD, with high schools being kept except where they fail verifiability. Schools which do get merged are generally redirected to the school district which operates them (North America) or the lowest level locality (elsewhere)." is substantially similar. Each of these statements is given as a fact, and as such is something that can or can't be proven. If it isn't sourced, there's no merit to citing it. Шизомби ( talk) 19:12, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
As I think about the statement that it is "not necessary to provide reliable sources to verify Wikipedia's rules," I realize in fact it may not be saying that citing Wikipedia is incorrect in the Wikipedia: namespace. If that were the case it would say something like "it is not necessary to wikilink to Wikipedia policies, discussions, etc. so that the readers may verify them for themselves." It's saying that it's not necessary to provide WP:reliable sources to WP:verify Wikipedia's rules; in effect despite the "or" in the sentence, this appears to be synonymous with saying it's "not necessary to provide [...] an outside authority in determining Wikipedia's own rules and procedures." That is, the text of the rules, etc. the primary sources are in fact sufficient evidence of the rules when it comes to the Wikipedia: namespace; a secondary source to verify them is not needed. Similar perhaps to how a lawyer or a judge would cite directly to a law when it is unambiguous and only go to a secondary source (law article, prior court decision) to back up the primary source when the law has some ambiguity. In a sense, a page like WP:OUTCOMES is an unreliable secondary source, where the AfDs are the primary source. Thus, if you wanted to cite precedent, you're best off citing to the primary sources. However, if Wikipedians want to create a secondary source so that people don't have to keep completely reinventing the wheel by figuring out how to research precedents and what outcomes were common, then this ought to conform to WP:V in a way that renders that page as reliable a secondary source as is possible.
To return to another point above, "Who determined what the consensus was?" In an AfD, the statement regarding the consensus is attributed. Theoretically, the signature of the closer and even the signatures of the nominator or additional participants are not needed since they are recorded in the edit history. The information is provided for ease of access; it could be time-consuming to keep checking diffs to see who said what. That who said what would appear to be important is testified to not just by the practice of using signatures, but by the fact that it is possible to create named user accounts and that IP information is recorded for those who do not. If it didn't matter who contributed what, then all edits could in effect be made by a single account with no way of telling who did what or even how many people were participating.
I'm coming close to saying that a statement regarding what was the consensus across multiple AfDs should be signed the same way the statement regarding what the consensus was within a single AfD is signed. I don't think that's necessarily necessary. If the people who worked out what the consensus was show:
and it can be verified by anyone reading it, there's no real issue with who did it. If how it was worked out is not indicated, and it's not easy to verify, then who did it becomes more important. If an unsourced statement that "X articles are usually kept" was written by an inclusionist or "X articles are usually deleted" was written by a deletionist, I'd probably want to know that. (To digress a moment; I do wish one could highlight text on Wikipedia and then get an edit history for just that highlighted text, rather than only be able to get the edit history for an entire article. It would be easier and quicker to attribute old vandalism, ask questions of people who added things, etc.) However, using the five tildes to automatically sign the date of when it was done might be desirable.
Compare how the consensus within an AfD is handled versus how the consensus across multiple AfDs of a single category are handled. In a single AfD, all the different opinions and the statement as to the consensus are in one place, easily verifiable. Across multiple AfDs, the statement as to the consensus and each relevant AfD is in a different place. Imagine if a single AfD were handled this way, with the nominator's statements, each contributor's statements and the closer's statements on different pages, unlinked! Following the model of a single AfD might be the way to go with a statement regarding the consensus across multiple AfDs:
Elementary schools are usually deleted. ~~~~~
Such work could be presented in other ways, by tables or whatever. One might choose to include additional information such as how many people participated, etc. The wikilinks are to my mind essential. Right now, your (Noraft's) sample "best" statement:
Is indeed the most specific one and thus the most instructive, but it is not sourced and thus not easily verifable.
Because a single page addressing the common outcomes of multiple types of things would get extremely long if all the statements were that specific and all the relevant AfDs were linked, probably it would be desirable to have the summary information above just include a wikilink to the sources on a separate page. Thus the above "best" would end with something like [WP:Articles for Deletion/Common outcomes/elementary schools] which would be a page containing information something like I indicated above, following the model of a single AfD but for multiple ones. That page could have the specific statements of fact following your model appearing as the header.
This all would also be a lot easier if my idea Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#add categories from articles to AfDs were implemented, but it could still be done without it. Шизомби ( talk) 06:37, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
I think that you need to spend a little time refining this essay. For example, the last sentence is "If it isn't sourced, there's no merit to citing it." This could be reasonably interpreted as "If it isn't already sourced, then it doesn't need to be sourced," which I understand is exactly the opposite of the point. Perhaps you meant to say something like, "Adding citations to archives or other supporting material doesn't harm a policy-related page." WhatamIdoing ( talk) 18:16, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
I've cleaned up the essay A LOT. In addition to condensing the language, I've removed some wikilinks, given some more practical advice for dispute resolution, better rationales for documenting consensus at the time a discussion happens. The change I expect to be most controversial is nuking the last section, but I just can't find a point to it; it seems to be philosophical soapboxing rather than specific directions or encouragement of how to fix things. Fundamentally, the "not a dictionary" thing seems to me to fundamentally be an effort to tie the essay to a policy and thus anchor it against MfD. Well, the MfD is over, the essay stays, and I'm not going to renominate it. I like the new name better, and the essay contents now much more closely match the name. Jclemens ( talk) 08:18, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
Decided to go through them one by one anyway (→Incorrect “Facts” in Wikipedia Namespace: What to Do?: The statements listed are NOT opinions--opinions and unsupported facts are entirely different)
(→Incorrect “Facts” in Wikipedia Namespace: What to Do?: ce, trim examples, remove expansion to comments, reorder)
(→How can we keep pages in the Wikipedia namespace accurate?: ce clarify/strengthen)
(→How can we keep pages in the Wikipedia namespace accurate?: trim one sentence that's not really necessary)
(→How can we keep pages in the Wikipedia namespace accurate?: rm link to V, which isn't applicable to Wikipedia space. Replace generalities with specific actions.)
(→Avoid making nonspecific statements of fact: Show your work.: rephrase and strengthen--positive statement vs. avoiding the negative)
(→Identify unverified and/or unsourced statements of fact where they occur.: This section has been mooted: the Unreferenced WP template has been deleted, and there's no consensus to use fact.)
(→If whole pages are problematic, discuss on their respective talk pages.: expand this one to make up for the other. ce the existing material a bit. Give detailed instructions)
(→But WP Namespace is Not Part of the Encyclopedia!: remove this section as unneeded. There might be a call for a separate userspace essay on this, but this section is philosophical soapboxing,)
(rm scare quotes: facts are not facts or "facts"; they're instead correct or incorrect facts.)
Three versions of a line are proposed. The versions are numbered, set in italics and follow the previous statement, which is included here to give the line context:
Editors (in good faith) make statements about:
(1) These statements, when not asserted along with quantitative verification, are opinions, based on the editor's own prior experience. These statements are made in good faith, but suffer from three major problems:
(2) These statements of alleged fact are made in good faith, but suffer from three major problems:
(3) These statements, when not asserted along with quantitiative verification, are alleged facts, based in the editor's own prior experience. These statements are made in good faith, but suffer from three major problems:
Note that the third version is a compromise proposal between Jclemens proposed revision, and the original. ɳorɑfʈ Talk! 01:36, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
A couple editors are seeking larger consensus on which line is most appropriate for an essay that deals with editors making unsupported claims on talk pages, at WP:OUTCOMES and other places. —Preceding unsigned comment added by User:Noraft 00:35, 11 April 2010 (UTC)