The current date and time is 27 June 2022 T 14:02 UTC.
Discretionary sanctions alerts
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You can email me from this link but in the interests of Wiki-transparency, please message me on this page unless there are pressing reasons to do otherwise.
Comments which I find to be uncivil, full of vulgarities, flame baiting, or that are excessively rude may be deleted without response. If I choose not to answer, that's my right; don't keep putting it back. I'll just delete and get annoyed at you.
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Welcome to my talk page! I am an administrator here on Wikipedia. That means I am here to help. It does not mean that I have any special status or something, it just means that I get to push a few extra buttons to help maintain this encyclopedia. If you need help with something, feel free to ask. Click to start a new topic.
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First, please remember that I am not trying to attack you, demean you, or hurt you in any way. I am only trying to protect the integrity of this project. If I did something wrong, , but remember that I am human, and I do make mistakes. Please keep your comments civil. If you vandalize this page or swear at me, you will not only decrease the likelihood of a response, your edits could get you blocked. (see WP:NPA) When posting, do not assume I know which article you are talking about. If you leave a message saying "Why did you revert me?", I will not know what you mean. If you want a response consisting of something other than "What are you talking about", please include links and, if possible, diffs in your message. At the very least, mention the name of the article or user you are concerned with. If you are blocked from editing, you cannot post here, but your talk page is most likely open for you to edit. To request a review of your block, add {{unblock|reason}} to your talk page. (replace reason with why you think you should not be blocked.) I watch the talk pages of everyone I block, so I will almost definitely see you make your request. If I am making edits (check Special:Contributions/Doug Weller) and I do not answer your request soon, or you cannot edit your talk page for some reason, you can try sending me an email. Please note, however, that I rarely check my email more than a few times a day, so it may be a couple of hours before I respond. Administrators: If you see me do something that you think is wrong, I will not consider it wheel-warring if you undo my actions. I would, however, appreciate it if you let me know what I did wrong, so that I can avoid doing it in the future. |
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I don't use irc often, but my account name on Libera is DougWeller.
Hopeless
Re this, I’m not sure there’s any point. He’s seems too disengaged with reality. DeCausa (talk) 08:00, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
- @DeCausa amazingly so. But I guess we can let him rant on this talk page, he's only proving why the block is necessary. Doug Weller talk 08:42, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
- Hi folks. One thing that puzzles me is that if he has great difficulty with non-verbal communication, as he has said numerous times when trying to get people to talk to him by phone... what does he think Wikipedia is? Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:56, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
- Only one thing that puzzles? I think there’s just too much about that situation that can’t be figured out in a medium like Wikipedia. I have a suspicion it’s in his own best interest not to be here. DeCausa (talk) 16:41, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
- Definitely, yes - he's not good for Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is not good for him. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:46, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
- @Boing! said Zebedee@DeCausa I’m not sure what he’s actually published. (Redacted) Doug Weller talk 17:34, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
- Definitely, yes - he's not good for Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is not good for him. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:46, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
- Only one thing that puzzles? I think there’s just too much about that situation that can’t be figured out in a medium like Wikipedia. I have a suspicion it’s in his own best interest not to be here. DeCausa (talk) 16:41, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
okay gesture
greetings: i have replied on the article talk page. aside from the misuse of the accessdate parameter, i stand by my edit and request that it be restored using the correct parameter for the archive link, or the prose corrected to reflect the change in the ADL statement. .usarnamechoice (talk) 18:02, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
- But there’s a revised version now and that’s what we should use. Doug Weller talk 18:12, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
June 23, 2022. Important Notice.
Thank you for adding a section on my Wikipedia (talk page). I see that you have been adding false claims. This behavior is strongly discouraged on user pages. Please remove these claims. Thanks in advance.
Specific false claim - "You have shown interest in abortion."
--The Impartial Truth (talk) 18:50, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
- “ There's a litany of groups that oppose abortion but never are they labeled hate groups solely for opposition to abortion. The Impartial Truth (talk) 7:13 pm, Today (UTC+1)” Doug Weller talk 19:11, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
- I'm telling you I have no interest in abortion and a reply to a reply in a talk section about the SPLC labeling a type of group a hate group is patently not an interest in abortion. This does not even by a stretch hold up to any reasonable standard. In all I have ever written on Wikipedia the word abortion was never used once before today. This is targeted harassment by an authority figure. I am requesting a non-involved and not partial admin to review the actions of Doug Weller. I will do so formally as well. The Impartial Truth (talk) 20:28, 23 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Absolutely unacceptable behavior for an administrator. The Impartial Truth (talk) 20:28, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
- @The Impartial Truth, this is a boilerplate message that can and generally should be delivered to anybody whose edits suggest that they might be subjected to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Abortion rules. It doesn't really mean you're have a genuine "interest" in this subject. It means that you edited something that is at least vaguely related to this subject, and we wanted to warn you that other people have behaved badly around this subject in the past, so you can protect yourself.
- Also: Doug didn't actually write that, so you need to quit blaming him for it. The same wording is used for all the subjects. If you don't like the wording, then you should go to Template:Ds/alert, figure out some wording that you think would be better, propose your better wording at Template talk:Ds. When everyone pitches in, we all benefit. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:12, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
- ^Those are very good points. And I'll add that, if you really aren't making any edits about abortion, then you have zero chance of facing any problems about it. Please just understand it as a boilerplate message that does not imply any wrongdoing. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:18, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
- Absolutely unacceptable behavior for an administrator. The Impartial Truth (talk) 20:28, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
- I'm telling you I have no interest in abortion and a reply to a reply in a talk section about the SPLC labeling a type of group a hate group is patently not an interest in abortion. This does not even by a stretch hold up to any reasonable standard. In all I have ever written on Wikipedia the word abortion was never used once before today. This is targeted harassment by an authority figure. I am requesting a non-involved and not partial admin to review the actions of Doug Weller. I will do so formally as well. The Impartial Truth (talk) 20:28, 23 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Removing archive information from citations
Please stop removing archive information from citations, as you did here and here. See WP:DEADREF for further explanation. —Locke Cole • t • c 15:24, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- @Locke Cole So even when the link is live, not dead, it should still have an archive? I disagree. Did I miss where it says that you should keep archives for live links? Doug Weller talk 15:31, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- @Locke Cole This wasn't the case here, but I'd also argue that if an organisation has removed an article we shouldn't use it in any case, archive or no. There may be exceptions of course, there usually are. Doug Weller talk 15:32, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- That's a separate discussion, and there may already be a guideline or policy on it that I just haven't found yet. Regardless, I suspect the distinction here is important: was it removed or was it simply stale/old (site is down, or organization is defunct and the website was no longer maintained). The archive is proof that the site did say something at that point in time. —Locke Cole • t • c 15:36, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- And just to flesh that out more, I suspect there likely isn't any guideline on archived sources being used in live articles. I expect it's context dependent to some extent, if we're using it in a history section of an article to note that a topic was covered a certain way during a certain point in time, I would expect an archived source to be acceptable. If it's documenting something a website eventually retracted or corrected would be another such acceptable case for an archive URL to be allowable. Basically, it's very likely a case-by-case basis depending on what the archive citation is being used to source. —Locke Cole • t • c 15:45, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- That's a separate discussion, and there may already be a guideline or policy on it that I just haven't found yet. Regardless, I suspect the distinction here is important: was it removed or was it simply stale/old (site is down, or organization is defunct and the website was no longer maintained). The archive is proof that the site did say something at that point in time. —Locke Cole • t • c 15:36, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- First paragraph of WP:DEADREF (edited for clarity)
To help prevent dead links, persistent identifiers are available for some sources. ... [C]onsider archiving the referenced document when writing the article; on-demand web archiving services such as the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/save) or archive.today (https://archive.today) are fairly easy to use (see pre-emptive archiving).
—Locke Cole • t • c 15:36, 24 June 2022 (UTC)- @Locke Cole missed that. My example about not using archives is an article where the ADL revised an article on the OK gesture 3 times. There'd have to be a good reason not to use only the current version, eg another reliable source commenting on it. Saying that in x yr they said this, then change it to this other thing, and now they say x would look like a commentary.
- Anyway, sorry I missed that bit. Doug Weller talk 16:08, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- "Consider archiving" means "Consider leaving Wikipedia and going to some other website to tell them to make a copy of the source you cited." It does not mean that these URLs are required.
- User:InternetArchiveBot adds archive URLs automatically. It also has a tendency to declare working websites to be dead. I believe its (paid) developers take the view that, in case of doubt, they should err on the side of adding as many links to their website as possible. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:45, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- @WhatamIdoing thanks, again. Interesting and a bit concerning. Is the bot actually broken or are the errors unavoidable. @Locke Cole I may not often remove archive links but I shall certainly try to check when I can when the link is marked dead. Doug Weller talk 18:07, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- Both? They had some bugs (so "broken"), but I think some errors are unavoidable. Websites can detect some bots, and refuse to let them load the pages. Internet Archive in particular, and archiving sites in general, are blocked on some websites. And then there's just the usual problem of a website being unreachable for a moment, or unreachable from your country. If the bot is making a one-time check, and something goes wrong with its internet connection, it will mark the link as being permanently dead even when it's not. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:40, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- @WhatamIdoing thanks, again. Interesting and a bit concerning. Is the bot actually broken or are the errors unavoidable. @Locke Cole I may not often remove archive links but I shall certainly try to check when I can when the link is marked dead. Doug Weller talk 18:07, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- Some people add archives with
|url-status=live
, see Special:Contributions/Rlink2 (Rlink2). A theory is that many URLs will become dead in the next few years so having a working archive link in advance is a good idea rather than relying on future gnomes to do the tedious work of finding a working archive link and adding it later. The problem with finding such an archive link is that if the site has, for example, been taken over by someone else, archives with the original information may be hard to locate. Johnuniq (talk) 00:05, 25 June 2022 (UTC)- @Johnuniq I only add archives when the link is dead, that does seem safer. Doug Weller talk 08:10, 25 June 2022 (UTC)
- I'd argue it's actually better to archive before the link is dead so you can confirm the archive and the original are in agreement. As Johnuniq notes, sites can change ownership and if the site wasn't archived by a service, finding a replacement may be problematic. —Locke Cole • t • c 18:18, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
- @Johnuniq I only add archives when the link is dead, that does seem safer. Doug Weller talk 08:10, 25 June 2022 (UTC)
- @Locke Cole This wasn't the case here, but I'd also argue that if an organisation has removed an article we shouldn't use it in any case, archive or no. There may be exceptions of course, there usually are. Doug Weller talk 15:32, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
Oath keepers general dump
Could you please review the links you posted, source code and all? Maybe you posted the wrong one? This is what I see from my end: "How the far-right group ‘Oath Enforcers’ plans to harass political enemies" (2021). SamuelRiv (talk) 18:50, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- @SamuelRiv “As for sovereign citizens, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/06/far-right-group-oath-enforcers this.
- As an aside, interesting statement https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/04/american-civil-war-january-6-capitol/ here about Oath Keepers having "effectively infiltrated police forces and the Republican Party." Doug Weller talk 19:16, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- Right. The article is about "Oath Enforcers", starring a completely different founder guy with completely different opinions in a different state, and formulated online. The word "keeper" never appears in the article. The "oath" they refer to is a different oath than that of OK. My hope was that you would review the link instead of just copy-and-pasting from Talk. SamuelRiv (talk) 19:27, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- Why? I was pointing out that the foreignpolicy.com article talks about the OK infiltrating. I was wrong about the Guardian article, that seems obvious and I didn't think I needed to point it out. Doug Weller talk 08:09, 25 June 2022 (UTC)
- I also address the FP article in the main thread. I neglected to mention that it's not an FP editorial piece but rather an excerpt from a 2022 book. I was curious what his basis was for claiming that OK had infiltrated, so I looked it up. In the book itself he only mentions OK once as a background item in a fictional anecdote, once in a list of far-right movements, and a couple times in a section where he explores a Prepper conference. The part about infiltration only talks about "hard right" groups (he uses that term instead of far-right for whatever reason) in general, and specifically in sourcing to interviews about white supremacists. In fact, when he discusses the potential problem of infiltration, he specifically says that the military is more reliable for institutional security because of their oaths. The same oaths that OK proclaims as their raison d'etre. So the FP article can't be used to support a claim of OK infiltration because it only mentions it in passing, and the book that it's based can't be used because it frankly doesn't support the idea that OK are infiltrating at all. I'm sure there's plenty of OK-types who are in the GOP and police, but that's an extreme claim that needs to be backed up with actual sourceable material. Are you beginning to see the problem that we're having with responsible sourcing in general?
- Why? I was pointing out that the foreignpolicy.com article talks about the OK infiltrating. I was wrong about the Guardian article, that seems obvious and I didn't think I needed to point it out. Doug Weller talk 08:09, 25 June 2022 (UTC)
- Right. The article is about "Oath Enforcers", starring a completely different founder guy with completely different opinions in a different state, and formulated online. The word "keeper" never appears in the article. The "oath" they refer to is a different oath than that of OK. My hope was that you would review the link instead of just copy-and-pasting from Talk. SamuelRiv (talk) 19:27, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
- Incidentally, regarding fake news, that selective use of facts can be used to tell lies is no reason to reject the demand that all facts in (especially political) articles be verifiable. Lies can be used just as effectively to tell lies. SamuelRiv (talk) 00:53, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
- @SamuelRiv No, I am not beginning to see the problem. That happened more than a decade ago. You know the old saying about grandmothers and eggs. I simply posted an interesting url to see if it was at all useful. Turns out it isn't and I've never argued that it is. But it is/was always possible that editors might see it and find more useful stuff than a one sentence statement. Have you looked? Doug Weller talk 09:07, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
- Sorry, what happened more than a decade ago?
- I dunno, in general when I browse WP and see a weak-ish-looking statement I check the citation, and sometimes it's OK, sometimes it's not. But in this case it was about as bad as it gets, and in the lead no less. I decided also to check some random citations in the article as well, and most of those were bad in some fashion too. So this brick wall that I hit immediately on removing unsourced content, is, actually tbf, to be expected as part of the overall dysfunction that has allowed this to happen. But I'm still frustrated. SamuelRiv (talk) 15:34, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
- It happens. Worse is when people have added stuff to a source that isn't in the source, sometimes completely changing it. Or the source has been moved away from the text it backs, that happens too often. All I meant is that I've been dealing with sources for well over a decade and have a pretty good idea what is reliable, what is UNDUE, etc. As I said, I didn't expect that to be enough to show that OK members infiltrated, although I'm sure they do. Or often don't have to as they are there anyway. Doug Weller talk 16:19, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
- @SamuelRiv No, I am not beginning to see the problem. That happened more than a decade ago. You know the old saying about grandmothers and eggs. I simply posted an interesting url to see if it was at all useful. Turns out it isn't and I've never argued that it is. But it is/was always possible that editors might see it and find more useful stuff than a one sentence statement. Have you looked? Doug Weller talk 09:07, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
- Incidentally, regarding fake news, that selective use of facts can be used to tell lies is no reason to reject the demand that all facts in (especially political) articles be verifiable. Lies can be used just as effectively to tell lies. SamuelRiv (talk) 00:53, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 June 2022
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