Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee

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Ramey, Corinne (May 7, 2018). "The 15 People Who Keep Wikipedia's Editors From Killing Each Other". Wall Street Journal.

Notice to arbitrators about IRC notices that may come in[edit]

Hello Arbitration Committee. I was advised to write a message here informing you of some cleanup work I started doing for the pre-2009 cases that ... I did not realize generated a lot of IRC messages until it was brought to my attention.

Long story short, after noticing that there were several old cases that were not subpages of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case but rather Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration, I found this edit summary that hints in 2009, the case requests page was renamed. To me (and my cleanup-ish, somewhat OCD-mind and one of my goals to make all aspects of Wikipedia simple to find for everyone of any technical level ... with one being making sure parent pages match whenever possible/necessary), as well as noticing that there was not functional change in how the rest of the subpages of the cases were organized after that move (such as "proposed resolution", etc), I started making moves from cases in the Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration space to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case.

However, after I started making some of these moves, I was almost immediately informed on my talk page that the moves I was making caused IRC notifications, and I was unaware that there was such notification functionality to the arbitrators (or any other interested parties) that when a subpage is created somewhere in the "Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests" space (not sure which page exactly), a bunch of IRC notifications get sent out.

So, here's what I found ... there's about 600-800 subpages of "Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration" (main case pages and the respective subpages) that look to be compatible to be moved to subpages of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case. What this means is ... for all these pages to be moved, from my understanding with how IRC works in these subpages, there is the potential for 600-800 notifications to be produced with these moves. As pointed out to me, this can be annoying since these notifications do not represent cases being created and/or added to.

Since I am able to move a page and its subpages all at once, I can be able to get this task done rather quickly, making it so this burst of notifications would last for maybe 1-2 hours tops (maybe not even that, maybe even 30-45 minutes). I have been advised as well that maybe it is better to do these moves in small chunks; in my perspective, this means that the streams of potentially false notifications via IRC will happen more than once while these moves are occurring.

In a nutshell, this is what I have been doing, and I know everyone has their lives, and if I continue to do this task, I would, I guess, like to know how quickly I can do this task (provided there is no opposition to me continuing this) as I think that provided I continue with this task, everyone who gets the IRC notifications would prefer this happen as quickly as possible. This will allow true notifications to come in without all the false notifications about the page moves mixed in with them. I'm not trying to cause issues here as I thought I was doing uncontroversial cleanup ... and then was informed it's not as uncontroversial as I thought, primarily due to the notifications.

Provided there are no stopping concerns presented, I'm planning on getting back to this at some point in the next few hours (just got hit with a real life interruption). I'm open to feedback and advice on this. Thank you all for your time and understanding. Steel1943 (talk) 21:44, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, given the discussion below, I'm holding off performing any additional page moves for the time being. Steel1943 (talk) 00:57, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

At this point, I have reverted all of the moves I did and restored any redirects that existed prior to me making the moves which pointed at the original titles. At this point, my interest level in pursuing this cleanup I found is nonexistent, and everything is back the way it was before I started any of these moves. Cheers. Steel1943 (talk) 01:42, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

All arbitration cases before 2009 were headed under the old style, until Kirill reorganized arb-space 15 years ago. As you point out, these cases have hundreds of subpages (the Committee used to decide dozens of cases each year). I assume these moves would break thousands of links, although presumably the page-moves would leave redirects. I'll of course defer to the current arbitrators and clerks, but frankly I'm not convinced that this massive set of moves is worth making. The short-term burst of IRC notifications is probably the least of it. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 00:18, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Newyorkbrad: For what it's worth, the moves would not break links, as long as their former names remain as redirects towards the correct pages. Steel1943 (talk) 00:45, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

My first thought matches Newyorkbrad's. The archive searches at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index and Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Cases (and possibly elsewhere) have been set-up with two search boxes for pre- and post-July 2009 case naming structure. Assuming the counts at the top of the yearly index pages are correct there were approximately 397 cases before the naming scheme changed, with each having a main page and typically 3 subpages, all of which have a talk page - or just under 3200 pages. All of these will need to be examined for broken links, all the index pages will need to be checked for broken links - even if redirects are left. I'm not convinced that there is benefit to this task, and certainly not without an explicit consensus from the current committee. Thryduulf (talk) 00:40, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Thryduulf: What you stated regarding the "old" versus the "new" styles, as I see it, are problematic since they cause a bit of unnecessary effort by the searchers to find what they may be looking for. It also requires any editors, arbitrators, etc. to have a vague understanding of when old cases occurred, especially if they occurred before 2009 ... which, quite frankly, I'm sure there are some arbitrators who were either not actively editing then and/or did not even have their account created yet by 2009. Merging all the archived discussions under one parent page configuration makes it so only one search has to be accomplished to look through the archives that is time-agnostic. Steel1943 (talk) 00:49, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

(Individual opinion, not a collective one) I left a comment at Steel1943's talk page saying that I was fine with the moves. My issue with the current split system is that it causes issues finding cases, especially when I'm going to them directly from the URL bar. For example, I always have issues finding the Ryulong case, which is housed at Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Ryulong and does not have a redirect from where it would be as a modern case. Now, is this convenience and consistency worth making so many moves? I don't know, which is why I didn't propose internally that we (clerks/Committee) did it. But given that Steel is willing to do this tedious work, I currently lean towards carrying this out. Sdrqaz (talk) 00:56, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds like an argument to create a redirect from the modern form. Either on mass or, less disruptively, individually when the need arises. Another alternative would be to create a shortcut (e.g. WP:ARBRYULONG) for cases you refer to frequently. This achieves the same aim with (at most) a tiny fraction of the disruption (and in a lot of cases none at all). Thryduulf (talk) 01:22, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The way the wiki software works actually prefers subpages to be married to their parent pages as live pages, not redirects, so that the appropriate subpages can be moved and/or deleted whenever applicable, which is why I did what I did (now reverted, of course). Steel1943 (talk) 01:44, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh please don't do this. There are sufficient mitigations in place that have been successful for 10+ years. This is not solving any problems. This is not improving the encyclopedia, or even the Wikipedia space; there will still be the same number of pages, all of which will require redirects to prevent broken links. In fact, it is making Wikipedia space worse, because of all the redirects cluttering up the place. There is zero benefit to this action. Tens of thousands of accounts are going to be pinged, hundreds of pages are going to consume peoples' watchlists, and for what? There's no good reason to do this, and lots of good reasons to not do it. Risker (talk) 01:08, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]