User talk:WhatamIdoing

If you expected a reply on another page and didn't get it, then please feel free to remind me. I've given up on my watchlist. You can also use the magic summoning tool if you remember to link my userpage in the same edit in which you sign the message.

Please add notes to the end of this page. If you notice the page size getting out of control (>100,000 bytes), then please tell me. I'll probably reply here unless you suggest another page for a reply. Thanks, WhatamIdoing

A barnstar for you!

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	Just wanted to take a moment to say how much I appreciate your contributions! Helping me find my feet in medical topics, always standing up for new users in community discussions, keeping an eye on a large swath of important medical articles. Thanks for all you're doing :). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:41, 31 July 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words. I am always happy to see what you're doing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:41, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

I will second that, Cheers · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 17:04, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

Some tasty poutine for you!

Poutine from Windsor, Ontario, made by Canadians at a local a diner.	Poutine
	In Canada, where I live, poutine is very common and tasty. ~Rafael! (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects

~Rafael! (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects 21:19, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:35, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

How may we strengthen guards against PGAMEd EC accounts?

I see you recently attempted to get some consensus on adding two months to the EC criteria. The US Senate article has lately been hit with a series of vandalism episodes each conducted by a single Pgamed EC account. I'm in agreement with those who felt the extra time would not help, but I totally agree with your apparent premise (that ec accounts are too easy to obtain via gaming). Are there any existing tools we might use to filter various kinds of Pgaming activity? BusterD (talk) 13:36, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

As a general rule, "gaming" edit counts doesn't worry me too much. Few enough folks reach 500 edits at all, much less quickly. The behaviors that concern me are:

• 500 rapid edits (e.g., semi-automated typo fixes), followed by an immediate turn on edit #501/day #31 to obvious vandalism/CTOP/abusive activity – This suggests a level of deliberateness that we would expect from Wikipedia:Long-term abuse or even the Wikipedia equivalent of an Advanced persistent threat ("when your opponent has a budget").
• 500-ish edits over a couple of months, followed by a less sudden shift from popular innocuous subjects (e.g., video games) to arguing on CTOP articles.

The first type of account could probably be detected through an automated report. That would basically give any interested admin a note saying "Hey, keep an eye on User:X and User:Y this week". It might be possible to leverage m:ORES predictions in a Special:AbuseFilter to disallow some edits by the flagged accounts (basically, set up something so that a slightly suspicious edit, which would normally be accepted, could be disallowed because it's a suspect edit from a suspect account).

The second type is more of a timesink than an immediate article threat. I'm not sure what to do with that, though I've spent a lot of time thinking about whether the Wikipedia:Balanced editing restriction could be developed. Imagine that you have to make 500 edits to touch the articles, and now, for every time you edit the article/comment on the talk page, you also have to make two edits to unrelated pages/subjects. That raises the 'cost' of arguing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:24, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

I don't want to give free specific advice to Pgamers, but based on anecdotal evidence I believe there's a thriving small business creating and pgaming EC accounts and selling them for crypto. A look at the last few days' United States Senate page history will show you a small raft of batch created ECs, all with just over 500 edits. In each case, the account was created a month or so ago, and then at 30 days the account does repetitive micro edits to get auto-promotion. Which makes me curious--roughly how many extended confirmed accounts are automatically granted in a given day? Is there a report of such grantees which might be extracted for daily observation? Is the number significant enough to allow us to manually approve each EC request? I'm not expecting an answer here. Just raising the questions. Mathematically, it seems unlikely to be more than 100 per day (365.25 x 100=36,525 total--more than the number of regularly active contributors). If we should be manually observing each EC permission grant, 100 is a manageable number. BusterD (talk) 22:25, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

@BusterD, I think it's about 15 per day (so, ~100 a week, because you want to watch them for more than the exact day), but you could also narrow the list down to those that achieved EC through rapid editing and/or in an unusually short timespan, which would make the list even shorter. After all, 97.5% of EC accounts don't make 500 edits within 30 days, so in the course of a month, we're looking at ~10 accounts that very rapidly achieved EC status, of which we expect 3 or 4 to be socks/bad actors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:57, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

I like the idea of someone gaining EC rapidly and that requiring those accounts to manually request EC at PERM for an admin to review if the volume indeed is manageable. I could even see that such a review-role could be designated to editors with strong experience in CVU work (similar to the new temp-ip-viewer requirements, but a higher threshold) if the software allows non-admins from handing out permissions?

If all the edits are of the gnoming variety of adding links or cats, then it is questionable why an editor suddenly urgently needs EC, they can just continue gnoming away happily without EC. But if a legit editor who's new to Wiki and found it to be their calling comes here and requests EC because it allows them to actively contribute to articles that they may have raised edit requests for and such, then those can easily be approved.

One more thing to keep in mind - some (many?) accounts are sleepers, they don't gain the EC within 30 days of account creation, but will first register, sit around and then months later start editing and then gain EC over a short period of time, so I think rather than the current criteria being account age>30d & editcount>500, it should be editage of 500 edits>30d.

This would slow down things a lot and could also be an easy spot, say an account does get created, does 500 edits and then sits stale (e.g. to be sold like @BusterD: called out, and after that then suddenly activates and pops into a ctop - that is a lot easier to spot. I could very well see that say raising the requirement to 60d alongside switching it to editage could actually work - as I'd imagine if we see an account do 500 edits, then be stale for 2 months and then suddenly having an epiphany of waking up and switching into a total different (and by pure coincidence ctop) area typically raises most WP:CVU's spidey senses. Raladic (talk) 23:32, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) - relatedly, Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/TenBlueEagles#31 July 2025 just concluded, which resulted in some meatpuppetry t-bans, several of which also engaged in PGAME acivity to reach ECP before they then bounced into the CTOP area. So just adding it as a piece of data.

What they shared in common pattern wise was a lot of small edits of adding a single link to something (+4) by wrapping some text that wasn't a link already, or adding a single category to a page. And then repeating that.

Some a bit faster than others, but the second one you pointed out fits most of them of taking a few weeks or months for the of 500-ish edits and then a shift into the CTOP where they then remain and cause disruption.

So maybe an observation of the "what" the first 500 edits of an editor are may be worthwhile to build a filter for those kind of accounts, e.g. if say 90% of your first 500 edits are basically adding a category or just a link - that's pretty WP:DUCKy. Raladic (talk) 23:14, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

What I find remarkable about this batch of dedicated vandal accounts is the pure brazenness. They are aware they're going to be caught and blocked, but they keep on revealing new EC socks as if they have a large pocketfull. BusterD (talk) 00:11, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

I'm not being overly flippant when I suggest we start teaching a bot (or an LLM) to recognize signs of PGAME and flag each such account for closer observation. At rates a good deal greater than 15 a day, it wouldn't take much volunteer time to observe suspicious gaming and simply not promote the new user... BusterD (talk) 00:21, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Confusingly due to those editors only now having been topic banned, despite me pointing out my hunch that they're meat-puppets back in December 2024 based on the fairly obvious PGAME behavior, somehow this is suggesting that their editing history is now somehow legitimized including the use of their disruption possibly being used against editors that tried to protect Wikipedia against it?

Or am I misunderstanding it? I don't know if there's some misunderstanding due to the fact that I also actively edit in the topic area, but I continue to maintain a 100% track-record of identifying and tracking down SPI's in and outside of the topic area and my report back in December was to that effect as my editing outside of the topic area is primarily spent calling AIV, RfPP and SPI my home and clerking RMTR since last year. In retrospect, it's possible my experience dealing with vandals and socks wasn't given its due weight back when I filed the ANI report as I happened to have identified them in a topic area I also edit actively in. I guess I should have just filed the SPI report, but alas, that is a missed opportunity of the past. Raladic (talk) 05:20, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I don't have the capacity to follow the current ArbCom mess. I wish the Arbs lots of luck with it, but overall I'd guess that no matter what they do, we will continue to struggle in this area (though perhaps a Wikipedia:Balanced editing restriction would have some small benefit).

What might be helpful is if more editors in this area got better at differentiating between "disagrees with my POV" and "actually disrupts Wikipedia". This is ancient wiki-history, but at one point back in the day, Homeopathy had two determined pro-homeopathy POV pushers. One was what you'd expect from someone pushing pseudoscience, but the other was actually quite skillful at finding appropriate compromises. The result was that while none of our FRINGE folks agreed with them, they were able to work constructively with this second editor and to WP:Write for the enemy. I don't see that happening on wiki very much. The mere fact that an editor holds the Wrong™ POV is now usually taken as proof that the editor is WP:Disruptive, and if they don't change their POV quickly, then continuing to disagree with "me" is evidence of Wikipedia:Tendentious editing.

A simple Thought experiment that might illustrate this is: Imagine a hypothetical editor who holds quite the opposite POV from yours. Imagine that the editor is polite but firm and persistent about their POV and the need for their POV to be appropriately represented in relevant articles per WP:YESPOV. What would that editor's behavior look like, if that editor is not engaging in DE or TE? If the answer sounds like "That's not really possible: in practice, any editor who persistently pushes for articles to include a POV that I believe is transphobic [or pro-trans, for anyone holding the other POV] is automatically violating DE and TE", then I suggest that ArbCom is actually being asked to issue a content ruling, rather than a behavioral one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:30, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, those are some good thoughts there. I think the fact that often it's a fine line between some editors who are arguing in good faith, even if their POV may be opposite to someone else's, but also other editors who will make changes purely DE or TE and when those intermingle, it gets real messy.

In the former case, we do often indeed come to a compromise, but the latter of course is the crux. Over the past few years there has definitely been an increase in the disruption side, the socking and meat are testament to that. I think it's particularly prevalent when some editors forget that we are writing a global encyclopedia and not what first comes to mind.

I do hear you that the lines can often get so blurred that it's sometimes very difficult to see the forest for the trees.

Thanks for taking the time for your thoughtful response :) Raladic (talk) 01:34, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

I think that's part of it. I also think that when you're facing a real-world threat, then behavior that you would normally accept as ordinary on a non-threatening subject gets reinterpreted as dangerous behavior. I think we've seen that in WP:ARBPIA and climate change articles: There seems to be a part of their brains screaming that this is literally going to kill people, so why would any basically decent human being want to debate fiddly details about whether the joopleberry shrub always is a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet or if that's "only" the case in a clear majority of cases? Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of the cause – whatever the cause is – and make sure that Wikipedia has the Right™ answer. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:10, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

I think it makes most sense to watch for rapid editing and then expect a percentage of them to have a rapid shift in behavior.

I don't think that we can assume that (e.g.,) adding a link is a reliable indicator. As soon as we focus on that, then the sockmasters will discover a different thing to do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:31, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

I agree that merely altering conditions won't stop a dedicated disrupter like this one. I count 30 EC accounts boldly thrown away on US Senate since July 7 (when EC protection was applied). Each account used and disposed of like a paper towel. It appears each of the accounts was created in June or July. Only one had more than 550 edits, based on my cursory reading. This looks like vandalism of a rather pointy sort, apparently intended to increase admin workload. BusterD (talk) 00:46, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Sure, but there have always been a few people who think it's fun to create work for Wikipedia's admins.

It's possible that Wikipedia:Pending changes (What? You mean nobody gets to see my cleverness?) would be more of a deterrent for this user. I don't remember whether PC stacks well with EC; we'd want the most restrictive combination. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:07, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Ann Diamond

Hi. All the hullabloo about Ann Diamond got me curious, and I thought you might be interested to know that all that stuff about CIA experiments and "MKUltra" might actually not be entirely hogwash. See Montreal experiments - also covered on The Canadian Encyclopedia. Whether or not she was actually involved, who knows. This blog post (obviously not a source; just for interest) seems to cover her story, but she offers little in way of evidence to support her being there. I find the campaign to take down her article really quite strange... Must be the deep-state! All the best, MediaKyle (talk) 01:45, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

From the Wikipedia side of things, what concerns me is someone trying to remove a Wikipedia article because it allegedly contains certain claims (e.g., people with videographic recall) even though those claims are not actually present in the Wikipedia article, or at least not present in any way that can be detected by reading the words on the page.

We could probably do a better job of explaining the difference between true self-published and true non-independent sources, and sources (e.g., newspaper articles) that are neither self-published nor non-independent but that report information from the subject. This mostly becomes a problem with corporate earnings reports. We'll see people mistakenly claim that obviously reputable business sources, such as The Wall Street Journal, are non-independent because the newspaper reported that Microsoft's quarterly revenue was $75B, and the reporter got that number directly from the company. (What exactly are they expecting? The reporter to hack into the corporate financial system to see whether the CEO is lying?) The fact is that when an ordinary daily newspaper quotes the subject of an article, that does not make the subject in control of the newspaper. But this is difficult for some editors to grasp. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

Confused of your Village Pump comment

Hi WhatamIdoing, how are you going?

I noticed this comment from you at the Idea lab and I am a bit perplexed by it. What were you trying to ask? It may be a software issue that went over my head. Commander Keane (talk) 04:53, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

It's more of a product issue than a coding issue: The OP says "I have to change the text", but doesn't explain why anyone "has to" (=must) change that text. The OP had previously been asked to explain the use case and ignored the question. The reply today indicates that when the OP wrote "I have to", they actually meant they just "want to", and there is no actual need.

Obviously, if there had been a true need, we should consider whether that's something affecting more than just the OP. (Imagine if the response had been "I need to change it, because there's a typo" – we'd want to fix that at the source, not just for the one editor!) If people just want to change things for fun, then that's fine, but not something they really "have to" do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:54, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Maybe

Maybe join us over at Talk:Zak Smith. Not my area of expertise. Polygnotus (talk) 21:21, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

I don't think that I can help with that mess. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:59, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

OK, thank you. I am not sure I can either, and this rabbit hole is real deep. Polygnotus (talk) 22:01, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

WP:LISTGAP

You recently removed the wikitable formatting I was using to create an indent with {{Reflist-talk}}, and only wrote "WP:LISTGAP" in your edit summary.[1] Could you clarify how the wikitable fell afoul of WP:LISTGAP? Also, would you know of an alternate way I could add an indent on {{Reflist-talk}} in a way that would be acceptable? — AFC Vixen 🦊 13:38, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

Anything that breaks up the consecutive flow of lists (all * or all : in a row) is a LISTGAP problem. Unfortunately, AFAICT that includes {{reflist-talk}} pretty much no matter how you stick it in the middle of a discussion. When you're just listing sources, I'd suggest just listing them (i.e., remove the <ref>...</ref> and just make an ordinary list). When you're using them to discuss same article text – well, we're probably just going to have to tolerate a LISTGAP.

The main reason that I removed the table formatting is because there's no benefit to having a single long, narrow column of refs that everyone has to scroll past. On desktop/laptop devices, that leaves most of the screen empty. On a mobile device, it may not align with the amount of space on the user's screen (e.g., if they have a narrow screen and a large font size). As a general rule, it's best to minimize width-related formatting and let each person's browser figure out how to display it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:28, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

Would using an {{Outdent}} like this

and putting an asterisk before both of these lines still violate WP:LISTGAP? I'm thinking I could simply force a discussion back to the left of the screen to avoid a full-width {{Reflist-talk}} being placed in between three-, four-, five-, ect. indent messages, and confusing the order of discussion and making who's replying to who unclear. "[Leaving] most of the screen empty" was purposeful to avoid this, for the record. — AFC Vixen 🦊 03:36, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Screenshot of Wikipedia talk page with narrow column of references

Here's what it looked like. Why did you think that this huge expanse of empty space was going to help people figure out who is replying to whom?

I don't know for sure, but I have heard that the outdent template doesn't actually help with LISTGAP matters. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:01, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

This might be what's causing confusion, then. Here's how it looked on my end,[1] which honestly makes more sense as the product of the two-column wikitable with a blank, small-width left column that I had wrote up. It appears identical to this on all the browsers and devices I use. — AFC Vixen 🦊 04:47, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

A single-column table with formatting of

| style="width:20px"|

should not be capable of producing a full-width table. {{Reflist-talk|colwidth=20em}} by itself could have done that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:51, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

No, the point was to indent the entirety of {{Reflist-talk}} exactly like in the screenshots I linked, so that it's at the same indentation as my message. The normal : before a message does not work on {{Reflist-talk}}. |colwidth= only creates columns within the reflist. Please understand that I'm trying to achieve what's exactly depicted in the screenshots. — AFC Vixen 🦊 05:02, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

As I said above, I think that if you wanted to achieve that, you shouldn't have used the <ref>...</ref> tags at all. If you had no little blue clicky numbers in your first comment, then you wouldn't have needed a reference block. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:19, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

{|
| style="width:20px"| 
| {{Reflist-talk|colwidth=20em}}
|}

I guess I'm also confused as to why you're describing this as a "single-column table", when it's clearly two columns. If I were to turn on the wikitable class and put just plain text in the cells, you can clearly see it's a two column table:

A

B

— AFC Vixen 🦊 05:20, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Oh, I see. I misread the formatting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:55, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Find

Not sure how I would find these people you talk about. Do you have opinions? Efficacity (talk) 03:11, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Has anybody agreed with you? If so, then that's the person to talk to. If not, then it might be best to just give it up as a Sisyphean task. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:02, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

I don't know what you think of anything other than that you may view yourself as being a yeoman. I think "this task" as you put it is slightly doable with you and one other person. Efficacity (talk) 05:37, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

I think that telling editors not to put the name of a criminal in an article about their crime is a bad idea.

If you want to create a rule telling editors to do this bad idea, you should work with people who think this is a good idea.

You've already had several discussions about this now. If, at this point, you don't know the name of any editor that thinks this is a good idea, then you should give up on this bad idea, because you will do a lot of work, only to find that all the editors reject your proposal and you have wasted all of your time and effort. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:59, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

I think you missed the point. I have said mentioning the perpetrator of these incidents is alright. What is not is emphasizing references to them such as bolding. Efficacity (talk) 17:09, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

And if you don't know the name of any editor who agrees with you yet, then I think you should give up on this idea, because zero support now = failed proposal then. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

I found someone else and there could be quite a number of others. Efficacity (talk) 17:14, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Great. Go talk to them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

If you agree on some of what is being proposed, that would be helpful. It looks like you contribute often at the village pump. Is that right? Efficacity (talk) 21:43, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Edit summaries

Hello! Please keep edit summaries objective and respectful. Saying people are "whining" is not appreciated. Thanks. — W.andrea (talk) 23:55, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

Would you rather that I said some editors "complain in a childish or petulant manner"? I think you've been editing long enough to know that's the reality.

You should go self-revert, because when someone follows a shortcut, they're supposed to be able to see the hatnote for that specific shortcut. Putting the hatnote higher in the page doesn't get the right information to the right person. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:20, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

I'd rather you didn't mention it at all, since it's not relevant to the edit. Your new edit summary is much better, thanks!

I'm fine with keeping the hatnote next to the shortcut, but I still think you misunderstood my original edit. As I wrote, WP:ONUS in fact redirects to the section, not the paragraph. So I moved the {{redirect}} tag to the spot where WP:ONUS actually redirects to (the section). I would have moved the {{shortcut}} too, except that it's specific to that paragraph. Perhaps WP:ONUS should be retargeted to the paragraph (e.g. Wikipedia:Verifiability#WP:ONUS). It doesn't matter to me, I'm just putting it out there.

— W.andrea (talk) 14:03, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

I have retargeted the redirect. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:35, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

PAYRATES

WP:PAYRATES. How do you like me now? :D ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 11:57, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

I like it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:59, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Timeless, forever relevant. Thx for your improvements. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 16:16, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

I wouldn't mind an example pay slip for United Kingdom - Salaried (Americentrism bad), but I wouldn't know how to do that. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 16:19, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

I don't know what the typical UK pay slip looks like, either.

I added a custom hatnote to Wikipedia:Scam warning. If you hate it, then remove it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:41, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

I hate it, so I removed it. It's a humorous essay, and you're killing the buzz with serious stuff. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 19:53, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

"This essay isn't meant to be taken seriously." That would include any hatnotes. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 19:59, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

I had some concerns about killing to buzz, too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:04, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Yeah I think we get each other. Alice's Restaurant. ...he took out the toilet paper so I couldn't bend the bars, roll the toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll, and have an ess-cape. And father-rapers. Still killing me after 55 years and about a hundred listens. Arlo will be missed by many. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 20:22, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

You could set up a whole table of base pay rates, using Wikipedia:Service awards. "Most Plusquamperfect Looshpah Laureate" has a ring to it, doesn't it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:34, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

I'll think on it. Right now it's pure, concise (one-minute read), polished to a high sheen, and damn near perfect (see latest). I've about run out of even the tiny improvements. I'm reluctant to mess with it at this point, but that could change. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 10:55, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

Template:Infobox source reliability

Hi, WhatamIdoing. Just so we don't accidentally duplicate effort, I wanted to let you know I am building Template:Infobox source reliability, per a suggestion of yours at WT:RSP. More fields coming, so I labeled it 'under construction', and the /doc is incomplete. Doesn't mean you can't try it out, just be aware that something might break until it stabilizes. I'm not very knowledgeable about Infobox construction, so I'm learning as I go, but the UX and optics may not be as appealing as one might like. Feel free to add feedback to its Talk page, and after I take down the construction banner, to edit it as you wish. The only page that uses it so far, is Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources/all/California Globe, also under construction. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 05:18, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. I'd been thinking about trying out a direct use of Template:Infobox, with custom labels. I'll look at yours later (today, I hope). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:53, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

It will certainly need more work, but I've removed the 'under construction' tag for now. You can see it in use at four converted landing pages; they are the ones tagged with the ⓘ icon at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources/Index (two B's, and two C's). If you want to play with changes to the template, please use its sandbox. Your feedback would be welcome, either at Template talk, or at WT:RSP, or here.

My next step is probably to create a preload file for an Edit template link, to help streamline conversion of the landing pages from a single table row to whatever the new format will look like through semi-automation. I think your Infobox idea will play a big part in that, so it would be wise to get the Infobox, as well as whatever suggested landing page layout we want somewhat stable, so that when we start converting using an Edit preload, we won't have to go back and change them all again when the format changes. Which isn't to say some format is inviolate, either; but it would be good to have a reasonably stable layout we are happy with as jumping-off point before starting conversion of lots of pages. I recently became aware of Module:Params, which looks somewhere between daunting and scary, but it may be of assistance in creating a more powerful preload page than I am used to, which might allow parameterizing parts of the preload so we could substitute in certain tokens, such as, say, domain names into parts of the preload text. If it can do that, it would speed conversion even more, so it's worth looking into. Mathglot (talk) 09:12, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

As you saw, I put together an example at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources/all/Deutsche Welle. The first paragraph is a simplified version of the article's lead. The simple summary of the discussion is word-for-word from RSP (even though, in that instance, I don't really like it).

Now I'm off to look at your infobox, so I can see what we did differently. (I didn't want your ideas to influence mine.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:10, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Just passing by. Not sure if it is helpful, however the {{Preload}} template uses Module:Params to append preload arguments to the edit URL. So, to treat all positive numeric parameters as preload arguments this should do: {{#invoke:params|sequential|backpurging|0|0|filling_the_gaps|setting|ih|&preloadparams%5b%5d{{=}}|magic_for_each_value|urlencode|QUERY}}. For any other question about the module I should be able to help. --Grufo (talk) 21:18, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

MAHA mayhem

Sorry to trouble you, I'm just a wee editor and I saw a couple of your recent posts. Would you mind having a look over here https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tylenol_(brand)&action=history? Editors big and small seem to be taking a chainsaw to the article in disputes over the recent acetaminophen news, and my call for consensus on talk was promptly ignored by one individual, and I think another may be waving a MAHA study at me. Having recently received a warning for edit warring in a vandalism incident, and with fish much bigger than me involved, I will likely withdraw now. Thanks Patternbuffered (talk) 00:08, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

It looks like the page has been restricted to experienced editors, and that there's an agreement that Trump's sloppy use of the brand name, when he means the drug regardless of what name it's sold under, should be addressed on other pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:32, 28 September 2025 (UTC)