User talk:Besieged/Archive 2

Maybe we need to talk.

I reverted your reversion on The Washington Post. What specifically was not constructive? Reverting multiple good faith edits in whole is not appropriate behaviour on WP - it means that every single change I made was "not constructive", a position you couldn't possibly support. If one or two things are not to your liking, just revert only those few things. I'm opening a talk page entry so you and I can discuss what specifically you are objecting to. Thanks 65.102.187.47 (talk) 02:40, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Nope, apologies, my fault! I looked at the edit, and saw some misplaced capitalization as well as what looked like mangling of ref links (like this one: "ref name=fahri2013a") and reverted what seemed to be vandalism. I had actually been in the process of reviewing *my* edit to see if I was correct when I noted you edited the article again. After a more thorough review, I determined my marking of the edit as un-constructive was clearly incorrect and was going to look for your talk page when I noticed you had sent me a message here. No hard feelings I hope, I'm just patrolling for vandals more than anything else, and when they come streaming in as fast as they do sometimes, back to back, it occasionally happens that a complex edit isn't analyzed quite as thoroughly as it perhaps ought to be. Sorry, only human! besieged^talk 03:00, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for taking a closer look and replying. Definitely no hard feelings, but please take the time to carefully look at each edit and I'll commit to not to mangling things. Just out of curiousity, what misplaced capitalization? If I need to improve something, let me know. Thanks. (Edit: The system is going haywire and put your signature here in place of mine, so I'll try one more time to sign it.)65.102.187.47 (talk) 03:02, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

No worries, as with the rest, I was incorrect, I saw "Step Down As Editor" and didn't immediately note it was a reference title... it was more the seemingly mangled reflinks (again, my mistake in pattern recognition) that tripped me to hit the revert button than anything else, on top of the massive wall of changed text. Again, my apologies, sorry if I caused you any headache, and thanks for being a patient good sport! besieged^talk 03:06, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

OK, I understand, its not a problem. Thanks again. 65.102.187.47 (talk) 04:10, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Happy ending! Everyone acted appropriately. Good outcome. But... why do I have this worry, that similar events happen all the time, but end up differently, sans any talkpage communication?

TLDR version: False positives are deadly. For every brave editor that puts up a note on the admin's talkpage, nine other not-so-brave editors leave wikipedia forever. This is a vicious cycle: admins do not have time to carefully review before they hit the revert-hammer, because there are not enough admins to help patrol, and the revert-hammer drives away editors[1], which means there never *will* be enough admins to help.[2] Reducing false positives is easy: for every admin we have on patrol now, give them 5 buddies to help them patrol, give them 5 backup-buddies to review the borderline cases, and give them 5 community-buddies to deal personally with any leftovers. All we need, to implement this wonderful plan, is to have a *lot* more editors, and a lot more semi-admins. (You can flag something as suspicous without being an admin, and you can revert vandalism without being an admin, but those are usually considered 'admin work' and not enough people are doing that work.) But getting a lot more editors, and a lot more admins, is hard: first we have to break the vicious cycle, retain the editors we have, and (for the cases where semi-admins are not sufficient) fix the RfA process. Even more basically, we have to recognize that the vicious cycle exists! 74.192.84.101 (talk) 17:00, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

wall of text: analysis of the revert-hammer in terms of the police motto

Meta-discussion. This false positive at the Washington Post article is the sort of case-study-stuff that I'm trying to document, and someday 'fix' by growing the editor-count and the admin-count. Why are you in such a hurry? Why do you mash the revert button and then move on? (These are rhetorical but if you want to answer them I'd appreciate it.) Well, partly because it's fun to be a sharpshooter. You're good at it. You're racking up anti-vandal points, anti-spammer points, protecting wikipedia, pumped on adrenaline... and alllllll aaalllloooonnneeee. There are not enough admins.[3] You are in a rush, quite simply, because you are under too much time-pressure, if I may be so bold as to put feelings into your lymphomatic system -- which I'll note is a bit more challenging but only slightly more gross than putting vibrational patterns into your larnyx. You know that wikipedia needs you to protect her... but you end up rushing from bank heist (spammer) to arson (vandal), and do your best to respond to collateral damage (washington post article) when some civilian is brave enough to file a complaint at the police department (bring it up on your talkpage). Most civilians aren't that brave, in real life or on wikipedia. If some admin reverts them, they'll just leave. If they even noticed you did it... most people just make an edit when they see the need, and then go on with their browsing or research or whatnot (the whole point of wikipedia for most people is passive consumption as our reader-to-editor ratio proves -- and the long tail of rarely-active editors double-proves).    Anyhoo, I'm not trying to tell you that you're doing it wrong. You're doing it right, given the time you have, and the challenges you face. 100% right... as far as fighting the bad guys is concerned. But if we want to have enough editors in five years, and enough admins in five years, we better figure out how to grow those numbers. I'm trying to tell you that we (meaning you if you have time slash interest -- and myself and people that care about wikipedia staying viable like kudpung and WSC) need to start figuring out how to give you More Time, and/or More Help. Instead of rushing around putting out fires, the only cop on the beat, it would help if you have fifteen other wiki-warriors helping you beat down the vandals and the spammers. Obviously, this can be taken the wrong way: please don't. I think you and the other wiki-warriors are doing great. I pretty much never even *see* vandalism or spam on wikipedia nowadays. Awesome. I suggest we need fifteen more people helping you personally, with the tasks you currently complete all alone, not because I think that you are only stopping 10% of the spammers and vandals (sarc: OH EM GEE besieged u r ssoooooo LAZY endSarc), but because I think that stopping spammers and vandals is only part of the mission. The first part, in fact: to Protect... and to Serve.    (Warning handwaving about statistics ahead.) For the sake of argument, assume you are stopping 90% of the bad guys within five minutes of them vandalizing wikipedia. If we had five more good people helping you, probably we could boost those to 99% within 1 minute (say). That would be awesome, right? What is the point of adding ten *more* people helping, then? Easy. Because stopping the bad guys is only the 'protect' portion of the slogan. False positives like the Washington Post article thing, where you mistake a good productive citizen as a vandal, are Bad For The Reputation Of The Police Force... but even worse, they're bad for wikipedia herself. In real life, when a cop does the wrong thing by mistake, the civilian they miffed does not pack up their stuff, gather their family, and leave town forever. They gossip with their neighbors, and badmouth the cop that miffed them, and probably vote for The Other Guy next time a sherriff election is held. But they keep paying property taxes, sending their kids to the local school, working at their local job, and contributing to their community. No biggie. In the wiki-world, false positives are awful.[4] The good productive wiki-citizen you just reverted perceives that 1) you look down on them cause you're an admin, 2) you reverted them with some terse jargonic explanation... or worse, with 'vandal' or maybe 'spammer' as the explanation, and 3) all their hard work just went into the wiki-trash. That's the top three things that discourage people from editing wikipedia, all rolled into one little accidental revert-hammer. In real life, the only way a real-life cop can make a mistake that causes a good productive citizen to *permanently* leave town is if the cop shoots them. In the wiki-world, the revert-hammer is nearly equivalent to the 38 special, and a false positive can mean the gunshot editor quits forever, no talkpage notice, nothing.    The conclusion seems obvious to me: we better quindecuple the number of admins on patrol, so that they can work as a team. That will improve our spam-n-vandal fighting stats, but more importantly, reduce false positives. In particular, I think every non-utterly-obvious revert you make should be either post-verified by another admin, or better, pre-verified by another admin. When the wikipedia homepage is replaced with the two glyphs 'FU' the revert-hammer is obvious... but in any case where there is doubt, I want you to have your *other* trigger finger on the flag-for-my-backup. Then, one of your fifteen buddies can come by, and check the piece out. If it is too much for them to make a quick call on it, instead of defaulting to their own revert-hammer, I want them to use *their* other trigger finger and hit the flag-for-manual-investigation. With five people doing scouting, and five people acting as backups, that leaves five people to do the community-service work: go to the talkpage of the assume-good-faith-civilian-in-question and send them a question about the wall of changes, or better yet, just do the hard thing, read the wall of text, and then *themselves* do the work of making the needed corrections to the wall of text. That's not interesting work to every admin, of course... but surely we can find five gladhanding public relation community is everthing types (like me) for every ten gunslingers like you.

   Surely? Citation needed? The key problem, if we want to go forward with my extravagant plan to have *fifteen* times the number of admins, is that admins are declining. So are editors. Most of my focus, therefore, is on the WP:RETENTION side of things. I want to improve the tools, in a way that helps improve retention. Once retention is improved, and we have tons of editor-growth, the next step is to improve the RfA process -- which almost certainly means unbundling the vast powers of adminship ... or maybe Jimbo was right, and adminship is no big deal, and the correct solution is just to have a fixed percentage of all editors given the admin-bits. We could do it by elections, using approval voting, plus maybe some kind of 'disapproval voting' that would automatically act as a recall (if some admin has less than 10-to-1 ratio between their approval-votes and their disapproval-votes for longer than a week then they lose the mop). Or, we could go all Aristotle-in-the-modern-age, and give out admin-bits to a *random* selection of 10% of all editors, regardless of edit-counts or length of service or anything else. (People that did not *want* to be admins could refuse the mop, at any time, and the system would randomly pick a replacement.) If adminship is really no big deal that crazy scheme just might work. We could also weight the randomness, by edit-count or approval-vote-count or whatever. Anyways, hope you enjoy this new wall of text. From time to time I'll prolly drop in on your talkpage, and leave you a mini-essay. If you'd rather, I can put the mini-essay on my own talkpage, and just leave you a pingback. And of course, if you have little interest in such topics, they just tell me -- I won't be offended, I'll just find some other folks to bother over at the teahouse or wp:retention or whatever. <grin> 74.192.84.101 (talk) 17:00, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

As a quick note (I'm at work at the moment and don't have a lot of time), I should point out that I'm not an admin, I merely have rollback rights. As another, I might suggest you consider downloading a copy of Huggle, which I think you should still be able to run even without rollback rights: change the drop-down on the top left to "filtered edits" which will show only the most questionable edits, and then watch it for a few minutes to see the scope and scale of what vandalism patrollers are up against. If you're able to run it, you can hit spacebar to skip to the next edit in the list, and note that reverting an edit still takes a few moments, even if it is a click of a couple of buttons, and then, depending on the day and time and how heavy vandalism is, you might have a better idea of why mistakes happen: the vandal edits flood in too fast fix, even with tools like Huggle or STiki and the automated bots that are in place: I might counter that for every editor who leaves because of a revert, we have just as many editors and readers who leave because of unrepentant vandalism and gross innacuracy (usually created by said vandals). besieged^talk 18:11, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, you are not an 'admin' in some pedantic sense. But for certain you are a wikiCop.  :-) That is a good thing to be.[5] At your current rate, you will be one of the top 10k wikipedians by edit count sometime during summer 2014,[6] and an 'official' admin as early as February 2014,[7] if you so wish. Please accept my congrats in advance! But seriously -- you are awesome, and you should know it. I thank you, and wikipedia thanks you, if she could speak... she can speak, kind of, in her articles that are free of garbage due to your efforts. Keep up the good work, so long as you enjoy mashing them thar vandals.

   I looked over the Huggle docs, and to use it on Linux I have to install beta v3... have you tried that version, or do you still use v2 only? They say to "be very careful when using v3 on production wikis" and mention they are trying to implement software-simulated-rollback, so that even an anon like me will prolly be able to perform rollback-equivalents with one click. Should I give v3 a spin, or is the beta not something I should point at en.wikipedia.org just yet?

   But whether I run the tool or not, I already believe you that the vandal-mashing business is difficult, and mistakes are going to happen from time to time. Better bots would help, and better anti-vandal-weapons. But methinks at the end of the day, it really just comes down to people. Out of your 33 edits a day, you might make zero mistakes. If you only make one mistake every three days, which is probably too high, then you will have false-positive reverted ten people by the end of the month. If you only make one mistake a *month* which means 999 perfect reverts for every 1 goof, you are still false positive reverting ten people a year. Too many! Some of them will bravely come to your editor-with-thousands-of-edits-here-since-2006 talkpage, and say something polite like maybe-we-need-to-talk. But most will not. My assertion is you need a backup, somebody like me, who will smooth over the mistakes, not just the talkpage complaints, but the *silent* folks that get hard work reverted, decide wikipedia sucks, and go watch teevee instead, or facebook, or play baseball, or whatever.

   We have to balance the desire to zap wikipedia vandalism in the fewest number of seconds after it appears, so that our hundreds of millions of uniques per month do not decide she is too unreliable, with the conflicting desire to encourage *way* more of those hundreds of millions of passive readers to join in and become n00bs, then anons, then registered, then unofficial wikiCops, then official admins, and so on. As the 65whatever anon pointed out, time is the key: if you had time, to take your time, then you would not have goofed here. More people is the only realistic way to make that happen.

   If we can get enough people helping you, vandals will beg for mercy from your army of gunslingers, and false-positives will be quickly handled by my diplomat corps. But we've got to agree there is a problem first, before we can pick a solution. Me acting as your diplomat is not good enough; there are too many false positives for me to field by myself, and there are thousands of gunslingers rushing around putting out fires, so it would not make a dent. If we want to encourage n00bs, I have to convince you... plus several hundred others. But you're getting the rough drafts, because you were nice enough to respond. Sucks, right? That'll learn you to respond nicely on your talkpage! I've had two admins ignore me, one delete my comments and call me a troll stirring up trouble, kudpung respond with faint encouragement, and you *not* kick me out. So I'm doing my best not to wear out my welcome.  :-) Respond when you have time, and as you feel like it. But please, think over the math of false-positives, and think how much less of a rush you'd be in, if you had ten people helping you enforce law and order. Thanks for helping wikipedia. See you around. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 17:36, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Meta-discussion about AC4BF release-date editing saga

[TL;DR: you can totally ignore this message, forever, and nothing bad will happen because of it -- yay! -- so no worries if you are busy with other things.] Hi, sorry to bother you. I am interested in how to improve civility and communication on wikipedia, and have started a topic which uses some of your recent edits (by chance) as a case-study. If you would like to make sure I am not saying anything unfair about you, or mischaracterizing the situation, it is over here. User_talk:Kudpung#Assassin.27s_Creed_Black_Flag_PS4 Please note that this is the talkpage of a reasonably high-level admin, Kudpung, who happened to be tangentially involved in the AC4BF difficulty. The reason the discussion is at their talkpage is because they are also deeply interested in helping improve the quality of adminship at wikipedia. In any case, I hope you are not unhappy that I selected some of your edits to use. I think that your behavior was fine, and I think that the end result was fine, and feel the same about the others involved, too. There are some places where I point out things person $foo might have done something better, but really and truly I'm just complaining about the flaws I see in the process, and the tools -- I think both need improvement, which is something that only high-level admins can help drive. Editors like you are not my reason for complaining; editors like you are my reason to celebrate.  :-) But wanting editing to be better, for myself and for other editors also, means openly discussing specifically where some improvements can be made, and how best to make them: policy changes, structural changes, programmatic bots, new tool design, et cetera. Anyways, if you are interested in that sort of discussion, you are welcome to visit the page above. If you have questions or complaints, you can reach me directly at my personal talkpage, over here. Thanks for making wikipedia better; see you around. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 07:55, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice and the invitation to participate, as well as taking the time to explain the situation so I didn't come in thinking I'd done something wrong: your efforts are much appreciated. I will make an effort to participate in the discussion, though it will probably be some time yet before I'm able to engage fully, as I have work and other obligations I have to see to first at this very moment. besieged^talk 18:12, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Sure. :-) Nobody seems to be biting on my invite, so I'm thinking of moving the discussion to the village pump or something. Basically, I plan on proposing a Shiny New Feature for the lefthand sidebar, that will help prevent many of the miscommunication difficulties explored in the release-date-on-ps4-of-ACBF-videogame that you participated in. Do you have a suggestion for where I might move to, that is more likely to find other editors who happen to already be interested in this kind of meta-editing feature-improvement work? Maybe where people discuss bots, although my proposal is not actually a bot? If I do move it, I'll of course put a note on Kudpung's talkpage saying where it went. Thanks. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 16:29, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

I would think that the Teahouse might be a place to ask about that, though I wouldn't per-se "move the discussion" just yet: these kinds of things often take a little while to gain any momentum and gather good input, especially when it isn't a horribly controversial issue involving multiple editors warring with each other or the like - the simple fact that this has mainly been a series of polite mistakes and misunderstandings, etc., that didn't result in someone getting up in arms and having a fit means it will probably be a little slow to take off, but I wouldn't give up just yet. See what Kudpung has to say first, and then let's see what happens from there. I'll try and get some input in myself tonight.

I would make one recommendation though: as someone who is, himself, prone to dropping huge walls of text on people, I know quite well how often it can put people off from a discussion, and would suggest that you maybe look to see if there is any way you can condense all that text to a paragraph or two, and several bullet points at top, and then move any further commentary/explanation/rationale you might have to another section at the bottom. I think simplifying the subject to something that someone who is not already involved can pick up on in - at most - 60 seconds of reading would go quite a long way to increasing engagement and participation in the discussion. besieged^talk 17:33, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

You were correct -- Kudpung did eventually skim my wall of text, and replied that if the Serious Conflict which I seemed to be discussing needed escalating, I should try ANI or DRN, as opposed to his talkpage.  :-) Anyhoo, I explained to him that there was never a serious problem, and nobody (myself/192/favre1fan/besieged) thought there was, I'm just trying to start a meta-discussion about reducing the frustration in our everyday *normal* minor edit conflicts and editor-communication mishaps, using ACBF as a case study. Kudpung responded well to that. I have located this group with their discussion page over here, and that seems to be a better place to bring up my concerns. Kudpung is already a member of WP:RETENTION, so double-bonus. Once I've honed down my massive-wall-of-text into more of a delicate-stone-archway of text, and added some screenshots of my tool-to-fix-this-stuff scheme slash proposal, I will post version two at WP:RETENTION, and put a link in at the teahouse. Thanks for your good advice, appreciate it. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 14:22, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

p.s. If one were to take your advice literally, in order to generate feedback on one's proposals, one might be tempted to incite some "horribly controversial issue involving multiple editors warring" ... but would that not violate WP:POINT methinks? <grin> I don't think I need to worry about controversial issues cropping up that cause editor-retention problems... the ongoing ArbCom infoboxen fiasco, responsible for several voluntary-retirements and a slew of asinine ban-this-editor-from-creating-infoboxen-and-ban-all-editors-from-creating-infoboxen-that-look-like-they-might-be-ones-the-banned-editor-could-have-wanted will *not* be the last such fiasco. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 14:22, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Robstown, Texas

Besieged,

While the entire post for Robstown appears to be relatively poorly written and lack much of the criteria that Wikipedia strives for in its content, this section is particularly bad in that it does not cite sources, it appears to rely on local colloquialisms at best, and tries to present opinion, not fact. I apologize if I erred in procedure; I just came across the page and tried to correct it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.109.209.76 (talk) 19:37, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Hello! I do thank you for your efforts to improve the Wikipedia, but removal of established content is generally frowned upon, especially when done en masse, and especially when done without specific edit summaries. The best policy, when dealing with questionable or unsourced content that is not extremely controversial (such as libel/slander, inappropriate biographical content, and obvious or easily proven falsehoods), is to tag it with the citation or dubious tags, and then open a discussion on the talk page, and try to reach some consensus with other editors about what to do with the content. If no consensus can be reach, you can then always elevate it by requesting help from an uninvolved admin. Generally speaking, it would be better (and less likely to trip edit/vandalism filters) to replace incorrect content with factual, sourced content that puts the lie to the lie (as it were) and allows the article to tell the whole story from a neutral point of view. Provably false or nonsense material with no relation to or bearing on the article subject should, when possible, be removed one sentence/section at a time, preferably with a short explanation in the edit summary, with the exception, of course, of instances of pure vandalism. besieged^talk 19:55, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

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[[User:Besieged|<font color=#A4A4A4>be</font><font color=#000000>'''siege'''</font><font color=#585858>d</font>]]<sup><small>[[User_Talk:Besieged|<font color=#585858>talk]]</font></sup></small> : besieged^talk

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Respectfully, Anomalocaris (talk) 00:06, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Most users are updating their signatures as requested. We hope you will also. This is accomplished on the Preferences page. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:19, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Er... I did? I followed up on your original post promptly, I thought. I even see it as the last edit I made... Oh. I edited it in the wrong place, it seems. Done. besieged^talk 14:36, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! —Anomalocaris (talk) 19:20, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Broken English Album

I am the original record producer and arranger of the album Broken English. Please explain how I can add historical and verifiable information about how it was made (and promoted) as well correct factual errors that occur in the existing webpage. 80.80.185.68 (talk) 18:08, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

With thanks

Mark Miller Mundy 80.80.185.68 (talk) 18:08, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

@80.80.185.68 and Mark miller mundy: Mr. Mundy, thanks for replying, for your interest, and for your patience with the sometime byzantine editing process here on the wikipedia. I'm (hopefully!) about to leave work for the day, but I'll reply again once I've had a chance to settle in at home and see if I can track down some information and/or guidance that will be helpful to you. besieged^talk 20:02, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

@80.80.185.68 and Mark miller mundy: TL;DR? the Plain and Simple Conflict of Interest Guide should get you started down the right track.

To start with, I would make sure you're editing logged in with the Mark miller mundy account you created, or, if you don't wish to actively edit under your real name - which is totally reasonable - instructions for changing your account name can be found at WP:RENAME. Regardless, it would probably be most helpful to do your editing from a confirmed, registered user account and not an IP-only address: it will not only lend some credibility in editing, you will also be able to edit your user page, where you will want to disclose any possible COI issues (for example, see my user page where I mention my work on Mechwarrior Living Legends, the article for which I too ran into a conflict of interest problem 9 or so years back).

Next, what you'll want to do is engage other editors on the article's talk page, where you can propose content and work with those editors to establish a consensus on what content is appropriate, and how to source and format it in such a way as to meet Wikipedia's standards for neutral point of view, style and formatting, no original research, citing sources, not including the full text of primary sources, verifiability, conflict of interest issues and sourcing to name a few of the number of things that have to be satisfied for a high-quality article, particularly when a primary source wishes to contribute directly to said article.

Finally, probably the best thing I can point you to is the Plain and Simple Conflict of Interest Guide, which will be able to give you straightforward guidance on what you need to do to contribute constructively to the article in a way that satisfies the myriad of requirements that the wiki has and have an outcome you can be satisfied with. It will unfortunately require a little more effort and patience than what might be required for other articles, or editing an article you don't have a direct involvement with, but this is how the wiki protects itself and its integrity on many levels, and it is my sincere hope you will find it worth it in the long term.

If you have any other questions or if I can be of any other help, please don't hesitate to reach out and let me know. besieged^talk 00:17, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

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Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behavior, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. This message is to notify you that sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.

— Coffee // have a ☕️ // beans // 05:18, 20 January 2018 (UTC)