Crap articles

[lonza leggiera]

There's already a bot which does this (InternetArchiveBot (T-C-L)), and if it can find a copy of the link's former target on the Wayback Machine, it will even replace the dead link with one to the Wayback Machine's copy.

I really love the Internet Archive and use constantly and am grateful for the Wayback Machine. Like every time I edit Wikipedia.

But I have to say that the InternetArchiveBot is a real PoS / waste of time. On the pages I follow there's a notification. It's bloated, confusing, and annoying. ….

Piece of Shit? I don't think it's nearly as bad as that. I agree that the message which it posts to talk pages after it has supposedly recovered a copy of a dead-linked page in the Wayback Machine is rather off-putting, but as far as I can see, the bot does about as good a job of actually dealing with dead links as one could expect of a relatively simple piece of software.

…. I suspect also it doesn't serve its purpose, which is making sure there's no linkrot ….

Its user page claims it has been designed "to combat link rot", not to ensure that there is none. The only way Wikipedia could do the latter would be to ban the use of external links altogether.

… -- and if there is providing resources or guidance on how to fix it. ….

As off-putting as the talk page message is, it seems to me to give an accurate description of what the bot has done, and it does provide links to information—admittedly inadequate, in my opinion—about dealing with link rot. Its instruction to merely "take a moment to review" its edits, however, seems to me to be somewhat problematic. What it means by this is explained in an FAQ, to which the message provides a link: "It means you should check to see if the archive URLs [the bot] added are in working order and/or if the original URLs are dead in the first place." In my opinion, if one of the original URLs really is dead, then merely checking to see if the corresponding archive URL added by the bot is "in working order" is insufficient.

The problem here is that not only do links die, but the contents of the pages they point to can change drastically over even quite short periods of time. Consequently, the page pointed to by the archive URL added by the bot might well be a far from faithful copy of the one pointed to by the original URL when it was added to the article, and so might not support the assertions for which the original page was cited—even if this latter had done so, which, of course, is far from certain in any case.

Do any of you go back and fix the links? ….

I used to try and fix dead links quite regularly whenever I ran across them, regardless of whether they had been tagged or not. I rarely do so these days. As for checking archive links added by the InternetArchiveBot, I did this perhaps the first two or three times I ran across one of its talk page messages, but rapidly got sick of doing so, and haven't bothered since.

[BrillLyle]

There's already a bot which does this (InternetArchiveBot (T-C-L)), and if it can find a copy of the link's former target on the Wayback Machine, it will even replace the dead link with one to the Wayback Machine's copy.

I really love the Internet Archive and use constantly and am grateful for the Wayback Machine. Like every time I edit Wikipedia.

But I have to say that the InternetArchiveBot is a real PoS / waste of time. On the pages I follow there's a notification. It's bloated, confusing, and annoying. ….

Piece of Shit? I don't think it's nearly as bad as that. I agree that the message which it posts to talk pages after it has supposedly recovered a copy of a dead-linked page in the Wayback Machine is rather off-putting, but as far as I can see, the bot does about as good a job of actually dealing with dead links as one could expect of a relatively simple piece of software.

If it doesn't fix the actual link rot, and puts a long confusing message on the talk page, then how exactly is it meeting the needs of editors?

Sorry, not going to agree on this.

- Erika

[Poetlister]

If it doesn't fix the actual link rot, and puts a long confusing message on the talk page, then how exactly is it meeting the needs of editors?

Sorry, not going to agree on this.

- Erika

I think the point is that it alleviates the problem because it sometimes manages to find the right archive link. It just doesn't manage it all the time. Does anyone have an estimate of how often it works?

[Botto]

Talk:University of Washington station/GA1 (T-H-L)

Four hours in and I already got four WikiCup points for phoning in the review?! Yeah! Go, me!!!

[Poetlister]

Talk:University of Washington station/GA1 (T-H-L)

Four hours in and I already got four WikiCup points for phoning in the review?! Yeah! Go, me!!!

"24.2% confidence of copyright, not a big concern though." Surely, if there is reasonable doubt about copyvios, the artilcle needs fixing, whether or not it deserves FA status.

[Botto]

Talk:University of Washington station/GA1 (T-H-L)

Four hours in and I already got four WikiCup points for phoning in the review?! Yeah! Go, me!!!

"24.2% confidence of copyright, not a big concern though." Surely, if there is reasonable doubt about copyvios, the artilcle needs fixing, whether or not it deserves FA status.

Several people- myself included- already pointed out the bullshit promotion, but the WikiCup panel this year that defended it are also involved in the GA project. So, it's another, "Yeah, sure, whatever; have the award. Best article."

[lonza leggiera]

Talk:University of Washington station/GA1 (T-H-L)

Four hours in and I already got four WikiCup points for phoning in the review?! Yeah! Go, me!!!

"24.2% confidence of copyright, not a big concern though." Surely, if there is reasonable doubt about copyvios, the article needs fixing, whether or not it deserves FA status.

This 24.2% figure constitutes negligible evidence of any copyright infringement. The description of the figure produced by the "copyright violation detector tool" as "the likelihood that a given article is a violation of a given source", by the tool's author in this blog post, is an abysmal misuse of statistical terminology. It is not a proper likelihood of anything, let alone of the hypothesis that the article being tested is a copyright infringement of the hypothetical source it's being compared with.

According to the description of the tool's operation, it carries out a form of Fisherian null-hypothesis significance test. But the null hypothesis being tested is not that the article being examined is free of any copyright infringements of some other, but that the two articles are no more similar, according to a certain measure of similarity described in the blog post, than would be expected if they were statistically independent. The difference is crucial.

If the test is applied to a comparison of the article Ivan III of Russia (T-H-L) with this text, for instance, it returns the result "violation suspected, 90.6% confidence". But since the latter text, from the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, is in the public domain, the similarities between the two texts provide not a jot of evidence for any copyright infringement by the Wikipedia article.

The labelling of the tool's similarity measure by its author—which he calls C(A, Δ)—as a "likelihood" seems to indicate, as does the rest of his exposition, that he thinks the measure is a reasonably good approximation to its own distribution function—i.e. that under the Markov models he constructs for the article and hypothetical source texts, Prob(C(A, Δ) < x) ≃ x. If he has carried out any calculations or Monte Carlo tests to obtain evidence for this, he provides no indication whatsoever in his blog post. But even if it's true, the choice of p = 0.25—corresponding to C(A, Δ) exceeding 0.75—is an absurdly high confidence level for even suspecting that the null hypothesis should be rejected.

P.S: It has later occurred to me that if the function C(A, Δ) is not a decent approximation to its own distribution function, then Prob(C(A, Δ) < 0.75) may well be quite a bit larger than 0.75. If it were, in fact, 0.99, say, then a value of C(A, Δ) in excess of 0.75 would be significant at the 1% level, and the hypothesis that the two texts are statistically independent could then be rejected with a 99% level of confidence. Even then, however, that wouldn't necessarily mean that one text was likely to be a copyright infringement of the other, since any statistical dependence between the texts could well be explained in other ways—by the fact that they were both dealing with the same topic, for instance.

[Renée Bagslint]

...If the test is applied to a comparison of the article Ivan III of Russia (T-H-L) with this text, for instance, it returns the result "violation suspected, 90.6% confidence". But since the latter text, from the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, is in the public domain, the similarities between the two texts provide not a jot of evidence for any copyright infringement by the Wikipedia article.

That is disputable: if a given text is not similar to any other text, then the probability that it is a copyright violation (ie a copy of a text still in copyright) is zero, since it is not a copy of anything. If, on the other hand, there is a non-zero probability that is a copy of some pre-existing text, then the probability that it is a copyright violation is non-zero, since some pre-existent texts are in copyright, and so the probability that the text that it is (potentially) a copy of is in copyright is non-zero. Hence there is some evidence that it is a copyright infringement, although the weight of that evidence is hard to determine. One would need to know things about prior distributions and all that Bayesian stuff.

[Poetlister]

For the experts, note thst in statistics likelihood is not the same as probability.

[lonza leggiera]

...If the test is applied to a comparison of the article Ivan III of Russia (T-H-L) with this text, for instance, it returns the result "violation suspected, 90.6% confidence". But since the latter text, from the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, is in the public domain, the similarities between the two texts provide not a jot of evidence for any copyright infringement by the Wikipedia article.

That is disputable: if a given text is not similar to any other text, then the probability that it is a copyright violation (ie a copy of a text still in copyright) is zero, since it is not a copy of anything. If, on the other hand, there is a non-zero probability that is a copy of some pre-existing text, then the probability that it is a copyright violation is non-zero, since some pre-existent texts are in copyright, and so the probability that the text that it is (potentially) a copy of is in copyright is non-zero. Hence there is some evidence that it is a copyright infringement, although the weight of that evidence is hard to determine. One would need to know things about prior distributions and all that Bayesian stuff.

I'm not sure I've properly understood this, but I suspect your reply was prompted by a misunderstanding of the poorly worded final clause of the text of mine that you've quoted. By "copyright infringement" there, I meant copyright infringement of the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. I was also assuming that the public domain status of that work was 100% certain, and that no amount of similarity between it and any Wikipedia articles could cast any doubt on that fact. Under these assumptions, the prior probability that the Wikipedia article infringes a copyright of the Britannica text, and the posterior probability of that event given the outcome of the test are both zero, so the outcome of the test provides no evidence for any such infringement.

I will concede, however, that:

• No empirical fact can ever be truly 100% certain (In connection with copyright issues, the case of the song 'O sole mio is quite instructive). Putting on my subjectivist Bayesian hat, I would estimate the prior probability of the event that the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica is still subject to copyright to be somewhere in the vicinity of minuscule, and surmise that the event itself would be statistically independent of the outcome of the test I carried out. Under these assumptions, the prior probability that the Wikipedia article infringes a copyright of the Britannica text is indeed likely to be smaller than the posterior probability of that event given the outcome of the test, in which case the test would have provided some evidence for the postulated infringement. Nevertheless, since both probabilities are smaller than the minuscule prior probability that copyright has survived, I would contend that any such evidence is negligible.
• It's certainly conceivable that there exists some text T for which the prior probability that the Wikipedia article infringes a copyright in T is significantly less than the posterior probability of that event given the result of the test I carried out. If such a text exists, the outcome of the test would then indeed constitute good evidence that the article has infringed the copyright in that text. The weight of the evidence provided by the test in favour of the hypothesis that the Wikipedia article is a copyright infringement of some unspecified text will then depend on the probability that such a text as T really does exist. As you imply, that is rather difficult to evaluate, but I would expect it to be pretty small.

[Poetlister]

I suppose we should use the word "plagiarism" rather than "copyright violation". Even there, if an article is quoted verbatim from a published out of copyright source (as many are or were), it might not be plagiarism if this is explicitly acknowledged. O fcourse, if the source is not online the program can't compare it. A source still in copyright is less likely to be online than an out of copyright source.

And of course, due to weird American copyright law, many things that are out of copyright there are still in copyright elsewhere, and indeed vice versa. People in other countries should be warned in case they innocently copy a wikipedia article.

[Renée Bagslint]

Single bow (T-H-L): three sentences and five pictures of cars. Unsourced.

[Renée Bagslint]

Digital agency (T-H-L). One sentence (dictionary definition). Unsourced. An exciting history for such a short article, consisting mainly of attempts, purely disinterested no doubt, to get particular companies names or websites mentioned.

[Renée Bagslint]

Michael Jones (historian) (T-H-L). Unsourced BLP.

[Renée Bagslint]

Moshood Abiola (T-H-L). Bizarrely, much of the article is devoted to explaining how disappointed Nelson Mandela was when General Abacha executed Ken Saro-Wiwa: this was inserted two years ago.

[Renée Bagslint]

I clicked on the random page button until I had seen 10 BLP. Two of them were unsourced:

• Robert Dean (handballer) (T-H-L) (no references, one external link now dead)
• Park Won-jae (T-H-L) (external links only)

On the way I happened to spot some more unsourced articles:

• Young Nation (T-H-L)
• Chakri Vakilan (T-H-L)

Clearly not a scientific study, but suggesting that among the biographies of living people, the articles most sensitive to sourcing requirements, the proportion that are unsupported by any reliable source at all could be around 10-20%, no better than the article space as a whole, and woefully short of what Wikipedians claim.

[Poetlister]

Single bow (T-H-L): three sentences and five pictures of cars. Unsourced.

I'm not at all convinced that "straight through" is a term ever used in this country as the article claims.

Three of the five pictures are of Rolls Royces, which are far from typical cars.

[Poetlister]

Digital agency (T-H-L). One sentence (dictionary definition). Unsourced. An exciting history for such a short article, consisting mainly of attempts, purely disinterested no doubt, to get particular companies names or websites mentioned.

Deserves a speedy. Wikipedia is not a dictionary.

[Renée Bagslint]

Fifty clicks on random article found:

• Pasteur (Milan Metro) (T-H-L) - unsourced
• Q-Tee Spy (T-H-L) - unreferenced, external link is to a fan website
• Minister of Justice and Attorney General (Manitoba) (T-H-L) - unsourced
• Adomaitis (T-H-L) - asserts derivation of this surname, unsourced
• Jakob Anton of Dietrichstein (T-H-L) - sources are self-pubished genealogy websites
• Myanmar at the 2014 Asian Games (T-H-L) - unsourced
• Carl Gustaf Ekeberg (T-H-L) - unreferenced, further reading is his own book, external link is dead
• John W. Riely (T-H-L) - unreferenced
• Coleophora changaica (T-H-L) - reference is a search link, now dead
• Strange Objects (T-H-L) - long article, references support only existence and award won

The rough estimate of 20% unsourced or inadequately sourced is holding up ...

[mynameisnotdave]

Digital agency (T-H-L). One sentence (dictionary definition). Unsourced. An exciting history for such a short article, consisting mainly of attempts, purely disinterested no doubt, to get particular companies names or websites mentioned.

Deserves a speedy. Wikipedia is not a dictionary.

Doesn't appear to be CSD'able, so I sent it to AfD.

[Renée Bagslint]

Another fifty trials.

• Room acoustics (T-H-L) - fails to explain or even link to the crucial concept RT60 (T-H-L).
• 1961 Pittsburgh Steelers season (T-H-L) - unreferenced
• Bahraini Ambassador to France (T-H-L) - sourced only to the French Journal Officiel, a primary source, which does not support the assertion of also being ambassador to UNESCO and the Holy See, nor the names of the Prime Ministers of Bahrein at the time. The first entry on the list is Jassim Mohammed Buallay (T-H-L) but the source spells this Kassim Bu-Allay, who is not obviously the same person.
• Penny Riffkin (T-H-L) - BLP sourced only to a personal web site which is 404, others references are by not about her
• Chinaz District (T-H-L) - unsourced
• List of Provosts of Peterhead (T-H-L) - unsourced
• Mouvielo (T-H-L) - reference is 404
• Nadrupe (T-H-L) - sourced to Portuguese Wikipedia, which is unsourced, with comment that a non-existent website "proves it exists"; hoax?
• 2012 Wolverine–Hoosier Athletic Conference Women's Basketball Tournament (T-H-L) - external link to website only
• Cư M'gar District (T-H-L) - reference is a link to a personal website
• FS Class E.412 (T-H-L) - unsourced
• Jean Karakos (T-H-L) - reference for date of death is Twitter
• The DO School (T-H-L) - sourced only to own website

[Renée Bagslint]

Digital agency (T-H-L). One sentence (dictionary definition). Unsourced. An exciting history for such a short article, consisting mainly of attempts, purely disinterested no doubt, to get particular companies names or websites mentioned.

Deserves a speedy. Wikipedia is not a dictionary.

Doesn't appear to be CSD'able, so I sent it to AfD.

That's nice. By my estimation I clicked on fewer than 50 random articles to find this, so there are probably about 100,000 entries as bad as this, and bad in this particular way, in the so-called encyclopaedia. I hope the denizens of AFD have plenty of spare time.

[dogbiscuit]

Single bow (T-H-L): three sentences and five pictures of cars. Unsourced.

I'm not at all convinced that "straight through" is a term ever used in this country as the article claims.

Three of the five pictures are of Rolls Royces, which are far from typical cars.

FWIW, I can confirm that in 58.95 years, I have never heard the term "straight through" in relation to car design. The only place the term is relevant is in exhausts (mufflers for the confused of Detroit). "Straight through car design" does not appear to produce any relevant Google hits.

Nice bit of manufactured knowledge there Wikipedia. It's like reading a Tom Clancy ghost written novel where the American writer is trying to show off how well he knows England by explaining that the best place to buy fish and chips is in a pub.

[Poetlister]

Dorothea Baird (T-H-L): This omits the crucial fact that her mother did not want her to become an actress, and she was only able to because Lewis Carroll persuaded her mother. (This is confirmed by Dorothea's son, who quotes the correspondence between Lewis Carroll and his grandmother.) It also refers to her father as "Sir John Forster Baird"; he was never knighted.

The article about her daughter is called Elizabeth Irving (T-H-L) but for most of her life she was known by her married name of Elizabeth Brunner so that should be the name of the article.

[Ming]

Single bow (T-H-L): three sentences and five pictures of cars. Unsourced.

...and deleted: hello, Mangoe.

[Renée Bagslint]

Amusing though it is to see how effective a comment on this thread is, there are two lessons to be drawn. One is that crap articles are easy to find: probably about 10-20% are crap in a variety of ways that are immediately obvious to the casual observer. My guess is that a similar number are crap in more subtle ways: sources being misunderstood or misquoted, tendentious, internally inconsistent or inconsistent with ther articles, out-of-date, misunderstood, lunatic or just plain wrong. They must number a couple of million. The second follows on from the first. There is no process for preventing this crap getting into the would-be encyclopaedia, no process for finding them, and no process for fixing them. Pointing them out and fixing them one-by-one cannot possibly be effective, and pointing out the handful of articles that are occasionally fixed is beside the point: people who wave their hands airily and say NOTFINISHED and SOFIXIT are fooling themselves and the world.

[Ming]

Howland and Baker islands (T-H-L) survived one deletion attempt, to be padded by Unscintillating (T-C-L) to the point where the references are as long as the text. Note also the list of ten "synonyms". Ming expects it wil survive the second deletion attempt.

[Poetlister]

Amusing though it is to see how effective a comment on this thread is, there are two lessons to be drawn. One is that crap articles are easy to find: probably about 10-20% are crap in a variety of ways that are immediately obvious to the casual observer. My guess is that a similar number are crap in more subtle ways: sources being misunderstood or misquoted, tendentious, internally inconsistent or inconsistent with ther articles, out-of-date, misunderstood, lunatic or just plain wrong. They must number a couple of million. The second follows on from the first. There is no process for preventing this crap getting into the would-be encyclopaedia, no process for finding them, and no process for fixing them. Pointing them out and fixing them one-by-one cannot possibly be effective, and pointing out the handful of articles that are occasionally fixed is beside the point: people who wave their hands airily and say NOTFINISHED and SOFIXIT are fooling themselves and the world.

Yes, this is not helped by people suggesting that editors should remove good content from articles because the reference is to a printed book.

[CrowsNest]

Amusing though it is to see how effective a comment on this thread is, there are two lessons to be drawn. One is that crap articles are easy to find: probably about 10-20% are crap in a variety of ways that are immediately obvious to the casual observer. My guess is that a similar number are crap in more subtle ways: sources being misunderstood or misquoted, tendentious, internally inconsistent or inconsistent with ther articles, out-of-date, misunderstood, lunatic or just plain wrong. They must number a couple of million. The second follows on from the first. There is no process for preventing this crap getting into the would-be encyclopaedia, no process for finding them, and no process for fixing them. Pointing them out and fixing them one-by-one cannot possibly be effective, and pointing out the handful of articles that are occasionally fixed is beside the point: people who wave their hands airily and say NOTFINISHED and SOFIXIT are fooling themselves and the world.

Yes, this is not helped by people suggesting that editors should remove good content from articles because the reference is to a printed book.

Nor by pretending this content even existed in Wikipedia in the first place, to be hypothetically removed using this tortured reimagination of the things said in a different thread, in a different context, for a different purpose. If highlighting specific examples of crap articles has any usefulness at all, it probably helps to give full account of the supposed problem. I for one am struggling to see how this information was crucial, based on the small amount of information that you've provided. Nor am I seeing why you couldn't simply have said the article fails to mention anything about her life before her first acting job at all. You post implies you know enough about this subject to state these things with some certainty, you just chose not to. Lack of time, perhaps. Or focus. But hey, you have your standards, and I have mine.

[Renée Bagslint]

Mister Splashy Pants (T-H-L) is a humpback whale, being tracked by satellite as part of some experiment. This is what the article says about the whale:

Mister Splashy Pants, or Mr. Splashypants, is a humpback whale in the South Pacific Ocean. It is being tracked with a satellite tag by Greenpeace as a part of its Great Whale Trail Expedition, which was working to raise awareness about whales threatened by the Japanese Fisheries Agency's hunting of 50 humpback whales annually. ... The movements of Mr. Splashy Pants and other tracked whales may be followed on Greenpeace's website.

So much for the whale. The remainder of the 12,838 byte article is about the social media campaign around the name of the whale. We learn nothing about the whale: not even its sex. Still, I'm sure Greenpeace is grateful for the publicity.

[Poetlister]

Amusing though it is to see how effective a comment on this thread is, there are two lessons to be drawn. One is that crap articles are easy to find: probably about 10-20% are crap in a variety of ways that are immediately obvious to the casual observer. My guess is that a similar number are crap in more subtle ways: sources being misunderstood or misquoted, tendentious, internally inconsistent or inconsistent with ther articles, out-of-date, misunderstood, lunatic or just plain wrong. They must number a couple of million. The second follows on from the first. There is no process for preventing this crap getting into the would-be encyclopaedia, no process for finding them, and no process for fixing them. Pointing them out and fixing them one-by-one cannot possibly be effective, and pointing out the handful of articles that are occasionally fixed is beside the point: people who wave their hands airily and say NOTFINISHED and SOFIXIT are fooling themselves and the world.

Yes, this is not helped by people suggesting that editors should remove good content from articles because the reference is to a printed book.

Nor by pretending this content even existed in Wikipedia in the first place, to be hypothetically removed using this tortured reimagination of the things said in a different thread, in a different context, for a different purpose. If highlighting specific examples of crap articles has any usefulness at all, it probably helps to give full account of the supposed problem. I for one am struggling to see how this information was crucial, based on the small amount of information that you've provided. Nor am I seeing why you couldn't simply have said the article fails to mention anything about her life before her first acting job at all. You post implies you know enough about this subject to state these things with some certainty, you just chose not to. Lack of time, perhaps. Or focus. But hey, you have your standards, and I have mine.

Have you looked at the Dorothea Baird (T-H-L) article? Have you read carefully what I said? Yes, it does have something to say about her life before she became an actress. Yes, I know enough to state with absolute certainty what I did in fact state with absolute certainty.

[Renée Bagslint]

More on Mister Splashy Pants (T-H-L). The bulk of the article appears to have been written by Sloggerbum (T-C-L), a sock puppet of banned user MusicLover650 (T-C-L), accused of paid editing. Perhaps Greenpeace was one of his customers. He certainly seems to have caught the tone of what Wikipedians really go for pretty well.

[CrowsNest]

Amusing though it is to see how effective a comment on this thread is, there are two lessons to be drawn. One is that crap articles are easy to find: probably about 10-20% are crap in a variety of ways that are immediately obvious to the casual observer. My guess is that a similar number are crap in more subtle ways: sources being misunderstood or misquoted, tendentious, internally inconsistent or inconsistent with ther articles, out-of-date, misunderstood, lunatic or just plain wrong. They must number a couple of million. The second follows on from the first. There is no process for preventing this crap getting into the would-be encyclopaedia, no process for finding them, and no process for fixing them. Pointing them out and fixing them one-by-one cannot possibly be effective, and pointing out the handful of articles that are occasionally fixed is beside the point: people who wave their hands airily and say NOTFINISHED and SOFIXIT are fooling themselves and the world.

Yes, this is not helped by people suggesting that editors should remove good content from articles because the reference is to a printed book.

Nor by pretending this content even existed in Wikipedia in the first place, to be hypothetically removed using this tortured reimagination of the things said in a different thread, in a different context, for a different purpose. If highlighting specific examples of crap articles has any usefulness at all, it probably helps to give full account of the supposed problem. I for one am struggling to see how this information was crucial, based on the small amount of information that you've provided. Nor am I seeing why you couldn't simply have said the article fails to mention anything about her life before her first acting job at all. You post implies you know enough about this subject to state these things with some certainty, you just chose not to. Lack of time, perhaps. Or focus. But hey, you have your standards, and I have mine.

Have you looked at the Dorothea Baird (T-H-L) article? Have you read carefully what I said? Yes, it does have something to say about her life before she became an actress. Yes, I know enough to state with absolute certainty what I did in fact state with absolute certainty.

Well if you know it with absolute certainty, I guess there's no more to be said. I always carefully read what you say, I wish I was afforded the same courtesy by you.

[Zoloft]

I may have to start throwing all the bickering into the Oubliette, our Recycle Bin.

My advice to Crowsnest and Poetlister is that they use the handy 'Foe' tool:

User Control Panel > Friends and Foes > Manage foes > Add new foes

[Renée Bagslint]

Monte Santa Maria Tiberina (T-H-L) is crap in three different ways. Firstly it's a two sentence stub. Secondly, its references read "All demographics and other statistics: Italian statistical institute Istat" which is hardly verifiable. Thirdly it's a BLP violation, as it makes an unsupported assertion about a former Belgian prime minister having a holiday home there.

[AndyTheGrump]

Monte Santa Maria Tiberina (T-H-L) is crap in three different ways. Firstly it's a two sentence stub. Secondly, its references read "All demographics and other statistics: Italian statistical institute Istat" which is hardly verifiable. Thirdly it's a BLP violation, as it makes an unsupported assertion about a former Belgian prime minister having a holiday home there.

Unfortunately, two-sentence stubs about places meet Wikipedia guidelines. Which makes most articles about smaller places crap more or less by default. I'm glad (or possibly disappointed, given the popcorn potential) to report though that Guy Verhofstadt isn't going to sue Wikipedia over the unsupported assertion regarding his holiday home. Apparently he owns a vineyard there, and the results are good: http://www.winetasting.be/news/eerste-w ... -gebotteld

(Andy's new word of the day: 'gebotteld'. If only other languages were as easy as Dutch...)

[Renée Bagslint]

William Villafañe (T-H-L) is a senior government officer in Puerto Rico. "It is unclear, however, if Villafañe is a certified public accountant or an attorney-at-law. Regardless, Villafañe worked in the past as a legislative advisor ..." It being unclear is not sourced and hence presumably simply an admission of ignorance by the originator, Ahnoneemoos (T-C-L). Since those qualifications do not appear to be relevant to the posts he occupied in the past, its function here is simply some kind of put-down.

[Renée Bagslint]

Salsa suelta (T-H-L), only reference is a link to a page on a travel agent's website which is 404.

Paul-Lincke-Ufer (T-H-L), unreferenced.

Found witihin ten clicks on "Random article".

[Poetlister]

Paul-Lincke-Ufer (T-H-L), unreferenced.

It also has loads of redlinks. I'm surprised that "American Sector" is a redlink, unless it has an article nder a different name.

The article should also link to Paul Lincke (T-H-L), if only for the pun vslue.

[Renée Bagslint]

Moscow–Brest Railway (T-H-L), sourced only to the novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, in which it appears. So, is it real, or fictional? Who can say?

[Poetlister]

Moscow–Brest Railway (T-H-L), sourced only to the novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, in which it appears. So, is it real, or fictional? Who can say?

There undoubtedly is a railway line between Moscow and Brest. Does that mean that it should have an article? There is a railway line from London to Plymouth. So what?

[Renée Bagslint]

Moscow–Brest Railway (T-H-L), sourced only to the novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, in which it appears. So, is it real, or fictional? Who can say?

There undoubtedly is a railway line between Moscow and Brest.

There may well be. But this article is not sufficiently well written to make it clear whether the railway mentioned in this novel is real, or whether it is on a par with the North Western Railway, as described in that other classic, Thomas the Tank Engine by the Revd W. Audrey. I think that explaining whether or not the subject of your article actually exists is one of the first things a Wikipedian might reasonably be asked to achieve.

[Poetlister]

There may well be. But this article is not sufficiently well written to make it clear whether the railway mentioned in this novel is real, or whether it is on a par with the North Western Railway, as described in that other classic, Thomas the Tank Engine by the Revd W. Audrey. I think that explaining whether or not the subject of your article actually exists is one of the first things a Wikipedian might reasonably be asked to achieve.

It seems to me that the author believes that there is, although there is no reference to substantiate the assertion. Many (far too many) articles have "In popular culture" sections, with no implication that the object exists only in popular culture and not in reality. But the article should be deleted because the topic is not notable.

[Renée Bagslint]

I quite agree about the non-notability. It is a prevailing delusion among Wikipedians that notability is some sort of reward or accolade. It is in actuality a prerequisite for writing an encyclopaedia article in the Wikipedian manner: without reliable sources it is simply impossible to write an article, because there is nothing to plagiarise refer to. If there are not sufficient sources to establish whether or not an entity exists, then there are certainly not enough to write an article about it.

[Renée Bagslint]

SP-541 (T-H-L). The entire text reads SP-541 is a state highway in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. No references. But wait! What's this? Ah, a friendly suggestion "This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in Portuguese", dated just over nine years ago. Clicking on the link to the corresponding article, we find it's a redirect to "Lista de rodovias de São Paulo", where we read "SP-541 - Rodovia Dr. Plácido Rocha - (Valparaíso)". Well, that's more information, a name, even though the entire Lista article is still unsourced. Clicking hopefully on the link for Rodovia Dr. Plácido Rocha we find it is ... a redirect back to "Lista de rodovias de São Paulo".

[Ming]

Moscow–Brest Railway (T-H-L), sourced only to the novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, in which it appears. So, is it real, or fictional? Who can say?

There undoubtedly is a railway line between Moscow and Brest.

There may well be. But this article is not sufficiently well written to make it clear whether the railway mentioned in this novel is real, or whether it is on a par with the North Western Railway, as described in that other classic, Thomas the Tank Engine by the Revd W. Audrey. I think that explaining whether or not the subject of your article actually exists is one of the first things a Wikipedian might reasonably be asked to achieve.

Ming did manage to find some sourcing, but who knows whether Ming will feel moved enough to do anything about it?

[Poetlister]

SP-541 (T-H-L). The entire text reads SP-541 is a state highway in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. No references. But wait! What's this? Ah, a friendly suggestion "This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in Portuguese", dated just over nine years ago. Clicking on the link to the corresponding article, we find it's a redirect to "Lista de rodovias de São Paulo", where we read "SP-541 - Rodovia Dr. Plácido Rocha - (Valparaíso)". Well, that's more information, a name, even though the entire Lista article is still unsourced. Clicking hopefully on the link for Rodovia Dr. Plácido Rocha we find it is ... a redirect back to "Lista de rodovias de São Paulo".

It is ludicrous to have an article on every road in the USA (which is more or less hte case), let alone Brazil, where sources are likely to be harder to come by. There are tens of thousands of named roads in London. Who wants to help me write an article on each of them?

[Renée Bagslint]

Wherstead (T-H-L), a village near Ipswich in Suffolk. A friendly tag warns the reader This article needs to be updated. Let's see.

A short ride by electric railway through Ipswich streets carries one to Bourne bridge, which marks the boundary of Wherstead parish. ... The village is devoid of stores or public house; the only industry, aside from agriculture, is a modest smithy.

The population figure is sourced to the ONS in 2011, so not too far out of date. The rest is presumably plagiarised, to judge by its stilted language, from the other source, A Merrill Memorial by Samuel Merrill, which, as the article does not reveal, was self-published in 1917. The electric railway -- actually trams -- in Ipswich ran from 1899 to 1926, so the text of this article certainly is out of date, in this case by about a century.

[Renée Bagslint]

John Prentis (T-H-L) reads in its entirety John Prentis served as mayor of Williamsburg, Virginia from 1759 to 1760. It has been tagged as without sources for over ten years.

[mynameisnotdave]

Wherstead (T-H-L), a village near Ipswich in Suffolk. A friendly tag warns the reader This article needs to be updated. Let's see.

A short ride by electric railway through Ipswich streets carries one to Bourne bridge, which marks the boundary of Wherstead parish. ... The village is devoid of stores or public house; the only industry, aside from agriculture, is a modest smithy.

The population figure is sourced to the ONS in 2011, so not too far out of date. The rest is presumably plagiarised, to judge by its stilted language, from the other source, A Merrill Memorial by Samuel Merrill, which, as the article does not reveal, was self-published in 1917. The electric railway -- actually trams -- in Ipswich ran from 1899 to 1926, so the text of this article certainly is out of date, in this case by about a century.

I did a thing with it.