User talk:Iridescent

My first arbitration

My second arbitration

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The Chord

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/arts/music/o-come-all-ye-faithful-christmas-chord.html says there is a single notable (and possibly WP:Notable) chord in British choral circles, called "The Chord" or the "Word of the Father Chord", after its use in the Willcocks setting of O Come, All Ye Faithful.

I post this here in the hope that a talk-page stalker will take be interested and give me something new to read about choirs singing Christmas carols next Christmas. Wishing you all four calling birds, or whatever else your hearts desire, on (what I think is) the fourth day of Christmas, WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:47, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

Not that I ever heard of (and the British choral tradition fits squarely into a broader European tradition, it seems unlikely a choir in Lincoln is musically substantially different to one in Leipzig), but This Is Not My Field. You might want to ask around among the opera and musical theatre projects; we may not have a specific choral group of editors, but I'd imagine there's huge crossover between the fans of musicals/operas and choristers.

I wouldn't consider the NYT after c. 2010–15 ever to be a reliable source for anything to do with Britain. The inaccuracy of their reporting on the UK in recent years is legendary (there's a slew of Reliable Sources for their UK bureau just making shit up and hoping their editors on the other side of the Atlantic won't fact-check). ‑ Iridescent 06:07, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

The chord—which is iii7ø (a b-minor half-diminished seventh chord)—doesn't have much distinguishable about it like say the Tristan chord or the Farben chord. That is, it's largely analyzable and explainable in traditional Western analysis, so there is probably no scholarship on it. I do like the chord sequence right after on "of the father. Now in the flesh appear...", which is a lovely backwards deconstruction of that moment (with tonicization) so that leaving the chord is much more gradual than its sudden arrival.

If you're looking for an explanation: the long held chord during "giv'n" (3:32) is setting up a return to the main chord of the piece (a perfect cadence) but instead ends on an unexpected chord (a deceptive cadence). Unlike typical deceptive cadences though, the "Word of the Father Chord" (on the "Word", specifically) is the combination of the "unexpected chord" and the "expected chord" (modal mixture-ish), which is part of its appeal, I'm guessing. Some of its awe might just be the sudden departure from the straight forward chorale harmonies preceding that moment.

The English choral tradition developed pretty independently after inspiration from Italian music (probably via the spy-composer (!) for Elizabeth I, Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder) in the 16th century and has always had its own special flare. Aza24 (talk) 07:45, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

Well, #TIL about deceptive cadences. Thank you for this lovely explanation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:26, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Random thoughts

Well, not completely random thoughts - they were prompted partly by the realisation that I had not posted on your talk page for a very long time (for good reasons, not bad, been very busy)!

Anyway, the random article-related vignette, which I thought you and your talk page watchers might appreciate, is that Patrick Barrington, 11th Viscount Barrington, the great-great-great-great-grandson (I think I counted right) of Robert Adair (surgeon) (the article I wrote yesterday and today) presented the portrait of his 18th-century ancestor to the Hunterian Museum (the one in London) in 1969. It got me wondering why he did this, after the portrait had been in the family for nearly 200 years. And then I read that he died childless and all his titles became extinct (he sensibly disposed of the portrait well before he died). That might seem a bit of a morbid comment, but I was struck by both the large-ish family tree at Viscount Barrington and the reason in his early career he did not find favour as a diplomat at the British Embassy in Berlin: "his unstoppable flow of conversation and untidy appearance" (it got me wondering if there might have been a medical or psychological reason behind the constant talking, one also associated with untidy appearance?).

The final thought was related to the family tree. I know this sort of thing is (rightly) discouraged on Wikipedia in article space (less so in project space), but I was wondering if (probably on Wikidata) there have been efforts to map all the family linkages between articles about people (and, more tricky, between people with articles and relations without articles)? It would be a Sisiphyean task, but probably quite doable with various computational approaches. Would produce some nice mappings of big data (some 'family trees' would be completely populated, many would not). One reason I am curious about this, is that it might help with a big project that I never managed to properly work out how to do. The other thing it might do is see how closely related you were to someone with a Wikipedia article. I am guessing nearly everyone would be only a few 'steps' away in their family tree, but maybe that is being optimistic, as most people don't have 'famous' relatives (either now or in the past). Carcharoth (talk) 22:51, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

I'd guess that the data set would be so fuzzy, the approach would break down within a couple of generations. All it takes is someone whose father is potentially one of two different people, someone who changed their name at Ellis Island, or someone whose family records were bombed out in a war, and the whole spiderweb unravels. (There are still real-world legal disputes over hereditary titles, and those are people whose lives are literally defined by tracking their ancestry and who live in countries with robust record-keeping systems.)

I can also see all kinds of legal and ethical issues with a de facto ancestry database which anyone can edit. There's the obvious issue of people trying to create spurious links between celebrities and of malicious editors trying to slip in (e.g.) a family relationship between the Trumps and the Putins. There would also be broader issues regarding profiling people who don't necessarily want to be profiled—remember the crazies a few years ago who were going through every BLP trying to flag every person they thought had Jewish blood? Wikidata doesn't have the administrative numbers nor the collective competence to monitor its own data on any kind of medium to large scale, and I presume the WMF doesn't have any particular desire to be implicated in a future pogrom or genocide. ‑ Iridescent 14:13, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

(adding) Another thought: even if our dataset were based on the best possible data—which is decidedly not currently the case with Wikidata—we'd still be causing serious issues. Every time we refuted an article subject's claim to be one-eighth Cherokee, or a direct descendant of Louis XI, we'd be implicitly calling them a liar in Wikipedia's voice. I wouldn't want to be on the OTRS queue for that particular wave of complaints. ‑ Iridescent 14:39, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the thoughts. It probably works better the other way round, using reliably sourced and curated databases to check where Wikipedia is (sometimes) getting it wrong. I'm still a bit taken by the contrast between the professional life of Robert Adair (surgeon) (including the rather severe portrait) and the romantic context depicted at Robin Adair (bettter described here). Maybe Georgian times really were like that. :-) A (slightly) early Happy New Year to everyone. Carcharoth (talk) 23:07, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: The crowd-sourced genealogical database you are looking for already exists -- on Ancestry.com. It was there I discovered some determined soul's work allowed me to trace my paternal ancestors back to a Midlands community in 1635, which is not bad considering they comprised generations of "farm laborers". (My earlier attempts to trace my British ancestors failed due to some immigration clerk on the East Coast misunderstanding his British accent & adding letters to his last name that did not exist.) Then again, there are a number of warnings that some shared research is not as reliable as other -- as evidenced by contradictory significant dates for these individuals. -- llywrch (talk) 22:54, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

There's also FamilySearch - here which has the same issues as the trees on Ancestry.com - they are just about as reliable as wikipedia (perhaps less so, actually). Much like Wikipedia, ALWAYS check against the sources listed. Ealdgyth (talk) 23:09, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

All very true (and thanks for those thoughts). I do think there is a place for using Wikimedia linkage and data to cross-check and cross-reference. I might as well mention the 'project' I have been pondering for a while, as it is a subset of all this. It essentially involves matching known casualty details in the database of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (from both World Wars) to relevant Wikipedia articles. I have several excellent examples, some of which I shouldn't really mention as I may publish something elsewhere on that in the next few months, and some I can dredge out of my editing history (I think I used a standard edit summary enabling me to find them again later). Wikidata is actually set-up so it is possible to use it to generate suitable lists from properly referenced Wikipedia articles. The missing bit is the work to add the data to Wikipedia in a careful manner so it is actually correct (this often needs careful checks). The ultimate goal would be to be able to see how many people with Wikipedia articles could be considered to have been directly affected by the two World Wars in terms of either dying directly or by close family bereavement. The main problem is that the outcome is 'obvious' in the sense of "lots" (well, duh!), but there are nuances which are interesting. The main motivation for me is to link relatively unknown names in the CWGC database with the often more well-known relatives. Here is one example (and there you see the epitaphs that are sometimes heartbreaking in their poignancy) and another and another. Some pages, such as Pen Tennyson, give the CWGC reference for a relative (here, his brother, Julian Tennyson) but fail to give the CWGC reference for the article subject. I will give one final example that I came across more recently, the son of Labour politician Stephen Walsh, whose CWGC details are here. That is an example where the name is relatively common and the connection is not immediately obvious "Son of Stephen and Annie Walsh, of 8, Swinley Rd., Wigan.". When you look at the Wikipedia article, you only get the minimal information that one of his sons died. It took a bit of digging for me to uncover the name (rough-and-ready source, better ones available) and then the right CWGC entry. I have no idea what the numbers would be if all the possible links could be established. Lots of sons and brothers and fathers and so on (and some daughters and sisters and mothers as well). Carcharoth (talk) 03:15, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

My main issue here is with so it is actually correct, which is a huge issue when it comes to wikis in general and Wikidata in particular. As Ealdgyth says, any kind of ancestry database is only as good as the data that's fed into it; "anyone can edit" and "ancestry" aren't really a good fit IMO.

Creating correlations between military casualties and an ancestry database is probably more or less workable for the British and French officer classes, because we're dealing with people in a culture of good record-keeping (and who were generally wealthy enough to have wills). It gets a lot less straightforward with the lower ranks—there are people with similar names, people lying about their identities, people who got their date of birth wrong or whose name is spelled differently on their enlistment papers and their birth certificate… And those are the straightforward cases; once you start trying to disentangle colonial units, refugees etc it gets very messy. Because of mass migration in the immediate aftermath of both wars and in the 2004–2020 window, a huge proportion of the UK population has at least some family members whose history is literally untraceable because the records were destroyed in WWII.

(Directly affected by the two World Wars in terms of … close family bereavement would be problematic as well. We can establish that Alice had a brother named Bob who died at Gallipoli; without digging into a lot more detail we can't establish whether Alice and Bob were inseperable and Bob's death had a lifelong impact on Alice, or whether Alice had emigrated to Tasmania before Bob was even born and she'd never met him and was barely aware he even existed.)

I know this all sounds like I'm being negative-for-the-sake-of-negativity, and I'm not trying to be; if it can be made workable I can completely see how such a thing would be a valuable tool and one that could be rolled out to a lot more applications. (A tool that could take a name and generate-to-order a list of family members who'd benefited from slavery; who'd migrated from overseas; who'd perished at Auschwitz; etc etc etc would be a valuable teaching aid.) My issue is that in an "anyone can edit" environment the whole thing would be incredibly vulnerable to malicious misinformation and to good-faith errors, since the whole interlocking nature of family trees would mean any given error would propagate outwards through multiple families; and because of the incomplete nature of the dataset, it would be really difficult to stop errors creeping in. (And unless we're going to DNA-test the entire human race, the dataset is always going to be incomplete. The British royal family is literally the most-researched genealogy of all time, but all it would take would be for William and his kids to be involved in a car crash and about 75% of the family tree would have asterixes next to their names.) ‑ Iridescent 07:07, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

Even if you had a perfect family tree, there would be other challenges. Did the children of Sally Hemings, whose father was a slave owner, "benefit" from slavery? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:50, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

That's possibly a US–UK cultural thing. In BrEng, "benefitted from slavery" typically means "can any family member be demonstrated to have been involved in the slave trade". (That's not an artefact of 21st-century Guardianism either; it's a distinction that goes right back to Victorian times.) ‑ Iridescent 19:51, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the thoughts on the 'project' I described. I may return to that over the next year or so, depending how other (off-wiki) projects go. For now, I am wondering whether there is a real need to re-familiarise myself with Wikipedia if I am going to edit more again at some point (I am thinking probably not - I mean probably no need to familiarise myself, not that I probably won't edit more again!). It would only involve more editing in article space again (I seem thankfully to have turned away completely from the, er, unpaid management(?!) side of things). It is far more likely that I will stay in the same holding pattern I have been in for a number of years now (essentially dabbling an incredibly small amount, and mostly watching and lurking), but I have noticed with interest some of the more obvious recent changes, such as the interface/layout redesign. I wonder what else I have missed (I did see the Universal Code of Conduct discussed, so am vaguely aware of that). Penny for your thoughts (and those of anyone else reading)? :-) Carcharoth (talk) 21:04, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Speaking as someone who's largely been in that same holding pattern since the pandemic started, I haven't noticed any change so substantive it would require a complete re-acclimatisation. The main change I'm seeing is that the culture is becoming much more rules-based; decisions seem to be being made much more on the basis of "can I dig out a precedent or a written guideline that permits/forbids this?" rather than "is this decision justifiable in terms of overall benefit?". One could certainly make the case that this is a strong positive and that IAR in practice meant rule by whoever could shout the loudest, but equally it's a massive cultural shift and is giving too much authority to the people who write the policies (the whole UCoC land-grab just being one incarnation of this).

The interface change, I genuinely loathe. Usually I try to keep my settings as vanilla as possible, in order that when I write something I'm seeing it as the general reader will see it, but the new design is so clunky and unusable I ended up having to turn it off. One gets the impression it was designed purely with tablets in mind, and they never even bothered to test it on phones or computers. It's not just the big unexplained changes like the forced column width which is too narrow for desktops but too wide for phones; there are so many little changes that unnecessarily confuse readers, such as getting rid of the TOC so there's now no visible cue for where the lead section ends and the body text begins. (I really don't think this is just me, either. I know this is pure anecdata, but since the change I'm consistently seeing people being confused by Wikipedia articles and moving on to the next item in the google search. Once the dust settles, I'd be interested to see if there's any shift in the reader engagement metrics such as how many people go on to click on links in the body text, and how many read to the end of the text.) ‑ Iridescent 06:20, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Elvira Yankovskaya

Hi @Iridescent! I saw your decline of CSD for Elvira Yankovskaya and wanted to just say that page went through CSD two days ago through A7 and was immediately recreated, which is why I was hesitant as to whether I could even renominate it in the first place, though it does appear as spam attempt at this point. I wanted to ask your opinion and see if would you still advise AfD as the appropriate course of action? Thank you so much! Ppt91 (talk) 15:31, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Looking at the original speedy deletion (courtesy ping to MelanieN), it shouldn't have been A7'd; given that it has a section listing the awards she's won, that's pretty much a textbook example of a credible claim of significance. (This is not a dig at MelanieN, who's one of our most competent admins; every admin working CAT:CSD—including me—occasionally fails to spot these things, especially in cases like this where the CCS is buried near the bottom of the article.) In those circumstances, I'd just see the re-creation as a slightly unofficial version of a deletion review.

Feel free to AfD it, as whether she's actually a notable topic isn't something on which I'm qualified to comment. Current Russian biographies are always tricky to judge, as Russian culture recently has gone down such an erratic course that topics which would be considered trivial elsewhere are sometimes a big deal there and vice versa. (Plus, for obvious reasons the number of Russian editors on Wikipedia has dropped significantly recently so there are fewer people in a position to comment on this kind of thing. A substantial part of the Russian-speaking editor base are now either expats who aren't necessarily familiar with current Russian popular culture, or hardline nationalists who see absolutely anything coming out of the country as inherently important.) ‑ Iridescent 16:43, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

@Iridescent Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. As an NPP in this case, I should preemptively apologize to @MelanieN for causing this A7 confusion in the first place. Perhaps the awards were not explicitly listed earlier and, despite my very strong doubts as to their notability, I realize that the inclusion automatically eliminates A7 grounds.

With that in mind, I am quite determined to ensure the page doesn't slip into review approval without due process. Maybe it would be a good idea to give the author more time to establish notability but I am not even sure how WP:DRAFTIFY rules apply now given a previous CSD and another CSD decline? Otherwise, I am happy to move to AfD promptly. The article seems to be intentionally overcited with non-English sources in order to give it an appearance of WP:BIO verifiability and taking clear advantage (if not outright manipulating) of the criteria regarding WP:NOENG sources. As long as the notability can be actually verified, I'd be happy to move to mainspace, though in my opinion we are certainly not there yet.

I think what you said regarding Russian BLPs is important to keep in mind, although as someone who is deeply engaged in Central and Eastern European subjects on both academic and personal levels, I am particularly sensitive and committed to thoroughly verifying BLP pages from the region. In any case, I am sorry for this whole back-and-forth. I hope it's clear my motivations were only based on merit and, notwithstanding my error, proper NPP protocols. Ppt91 (talk) 17:16, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Because of the harassment of Wikipedia in Russia itself—and because those people who are still active on Russian topics are obviously somewhat distracted right now—Wikipedia:WikiProject Russia is largely moribund right now, but it might still be worth asking there, to try to get a better idea of whether these are the kind of awards that confer notability by Wikipedia's particular definition, or whether these are the Russian equivalent of Fellowship of the Royal Society of the Arts.

My personal inclination would be to give it a month or so, and if nobody's improved it by then, then nominate it for deletion. Even if she is notable in Wikipedia terms, realistically there is literally zero possibility that any reader of English Wikipedia is ever likely to be interested in the topic, since she's exclusively of interest to Russian-speakers who will presumably be reading the Russian language version. As such, us continuing to host it just leaves a page that will gradually drift more and more out of date and be a magnet for vandalism and potential libel.

Re your last comment, I have absolutely no doubt you're acting in entirely good faith—as I say, this is a mistake everyone makes. When we designed our processes, Wikipedia was a much smaller site with a much smaller audience—it's an open secret that our processes for dealing with 'technically notable but nobody will ever care' ephemera are inadequate and confusing in the current situation where people actively want to get their name onto Wikipedia because they feel it helps with search engine optimization. ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

recent deletions on User talk:GalliumBot subpages

Hey there! I was hoping you could delete the user subpages themselves as well :) theleekycauldron (talk • contribs) (she/her) 06:58, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Damn, I thought I had—both done ‑ Iridescent 14:33, 15 February 2023 (UTC)