User talk:BilledMammal

Sometimes this user has the attention span of a squirrel. If you were expecting a reply or follow-up to something and this user never provided one, you are invited to ping them or leave a message on their talk page reminding them to do so.

User:BilledMammal/SPI Edit Counts

Hello, BilledMammal,

I found this page interesting and I wanted to encourage you to update it every few days or maybe once a week, taking off SPI cases that have been closed. I'm not sure how much work it takes to put this together but I found it useful. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:21, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Liz, I've updated it.

I'm going to be retiring from Wikipedia soon, so won't be able to continue doing so for long, but if you are interested I can provide the code that produces the table - it's very little effort to run. Send me an email if you are. BilledMammal (talk) 09:53, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Liz: Is this still something that would be helpful? If so, I'm back and can resume producing it, and maybe make Platybot do it automatically. BilledMammal (talk) 01:50, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I want to just say Hello and Thank you to Billed Mammal. If there's something you would like me to say, I would be happy to. ~2026-29416-95 (talk) 20:01, 16 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi User:~2026-29416-95, you're welcome. Can I ask what this is about? BilledMammal (talk) 04:02, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Move+ RM/TR requests

Hi BilledMammal, glad to see you're back. When Move+ makes an RM/TR request, its rationale ("per consensus at Special:Permalink/1234567890...") always gives the last permalink before the closure, which makes it difficult to just click the link and see what the result was. (See here for examples.) Would it be possible to have it instead give the permalink that includes the closure? Thanks, Extraordinary Writ (talk) 03:56, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It's something I've been planning to fix for years now; I'll make it a priority. BilledMammal (talk) 04:01, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Extraordinary Writ: Done! However, this does now mean the page has to be edited twice; for example, the RM close and the addition of the old moves template. BilledMammal (talk) 01:48, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I guess it doesn't really matter, but you could probably still do it in one edit by using "next": for instance, Special:Diff/1346680076/next#Requested move 1 April 2026 will work even if you don't know the diff number for the closure itself. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 02:11, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Does everyone know about the self-citing diff trick except me? According to leek, there is some issue that prevents that from working? Otherwise, would be a good solution. BilledMammal (talk) 02:27, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Heh, great minds think alike. The issue is that it doesn't work for Special:PermaLink, but you can still make a pseudo-permalink with Special:Diff, as in the example I gave above. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 02:54, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That makes sense. I just looked into doing that and unfortunately it won't be a quick change. At the moment, I handle moves where the page the move is taking place on is not the page listed at the top of the move template by treating the closure of the move and the addition of the "old moves" template as separate events. If I combine these into a single event again then that will require quite a bit of code to properly handle; I'll add it to the todo list, but unless the double edit really bothers some editors, or I find additional reasons to combine them into a single event, I probably won't make it a priority. BilledMammal (talk) 03:07, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Page Mover

I thought you had the page mover perm. Can you please request it as you're obviously experienced enough. Cheers for closing those RMs. TarnishedPath^talk 05:04, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I asked for it to be revoked before leaving; I've asked for it back, but I've been told to show some more editing first. BilledMammal (talk) 05:59, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Page mover granted

Hello, BilledMammal. Your account has been granted the "extendedmover" user right, either following a request for it or demonstrating familiarity with working with article names and moving pages. You are now able to rename pages without leaving behind a redirect and move subpages when moving the parent page(s).

Please take a moment to review Wikipedia:Page mover for more information on this user right, especially the criteria for moving pages without leaving a redirect. Please remember to follow post-move cleanup procedures and make link corrections where necessary, including broken double-redirects when suppressredirect is used. This can be done using Special:WhatLinksHere. It is also very important that no one else be allowed to access your account, so you should consider taking a few moments to secure your password. As with all user rights, be aware that if abused, or used in controversial ways without consensus, your page mover status can be revoked.

Useful links:

Wikipedia:Requested moves
Category:Requested moves, for article renaming requests awaiting action.

If you do not want the page mover right anymore, just let me know, and I'll remove it. Thank you, and happy editing! Toadspike [Talk] 13:40, 7 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! BilledMammal (talk) 00:55, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

WP:ANI

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Jack (talk) 20:20, 7 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I started the ANI discussion without realising you have apparently returned, unless it was a flying visit. I'm copying the text from there so that you can see what the issue is, and we can discuss it here instead:

At WP:CRIC, we have just been informed that a discussion has begun about an RfC called User:BilledMammal/Lugstubs3 (Olympian stubs), and that it will be followed by User:BilledMammal/Lugstubs4 (cricketer stubs). I have no objection to a discussion about whether mass-created stubs should be redirected to a team/club list. In fact, I support the idea.

What I do object to is the way that Lugnuts is still being pilloried by BilledMammal's RfC titles. There's another one which names me, but I'm here to defend myself if I want to (I don't). Lugnuts is not here, and he should be treated with respect. Whatever Lugnuts may have done that was "wrong", he was a good writer of sports and film articles who got his facts right. What is more, when he joined Wikipedia, the emphasis was on quantity, not quality, and creation of stubs was viewed favourably, because we were creating articles that were placeholders for development. Okay, it did get out of hand, and the goalposts shifted.

All of BilledMammal's RfC titles need to be renamed. This Lugstubs3 thing should be called something like User:BilledMammal/Olympicstubs# and the forthcoming Lugstubs4 should be User:BilledMammal/Cricketstubs#. These alternatives are descriptive of the RfC scope, which means they are both relevant and respectful. Something BilledMammal should have considered as an alternative to being vindictive.

I'll leave this here a few days. I've asked for the ANI to be put on hold. Jack (talk) 21:01, 7 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

When I open the RfC, it will be with a title like "RfC on draftifying a subset of mass-created Olympian microstubs". I use the creators username in my userspace so that it's easier to identify what the subject is. For example, User:BilledMammal/Cricketstubs could refer to either you or Lugnuts.

I do understand your concern that the current title may focus too much on Lugnuts, and so to partially address it I've renamed User:BilledMammal/Lugstubs3 to User:BilledMammal/Boilerplate Olympian stubs (Lugnuts).

However, since we are discussing, I would ask you to avoid personal comments on editors including myself like "Unlike some people I could name including BilledMammal, Lugnuts was actually a good editor" and "Lugnuts, for all his alleged faults, was an infinitely better writer of articles (he did much more than stubs) than you could ever be". I don't think this is aligned with WP:CIVIL. BilledMammal (talk) 00:28, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, thanks, that's fair enough, and I will tone down my comments.

By the way, I'm happy for any cricket stub to be redirected if there is no short-term prospect of its expansion. Apart from rare exceptions, our biographies are about people who played in top-class matches. We have always dealt with the exceptions ourselves, via AfD. I agree that people who made a handful of appearances should be in a club/team list, but there is nothing wrong with them having a redirect too. For example, there have been numerous cases of a cricketer piece being expanded because it was discovered that they were notable in another sphere.

I've recently built up some 18th century bios by using multiple book references. Cricket has a vast literature, more than any sport except chess, and it is always possible that a player will have coverage if we can find it, but that's the hard part. Jack (talk) 09:21, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you.

Regarding cricket stubs, if there is any thing I can do to help let me know. I'm more conservative with your stubs than with Lugnuts, because yours tend to rely on offline sources, though I believe in many cases they are cricket almanacs? BilledMammal (talk) 02:12, 10 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Wisden and Playfair are annuals. Both contain a certain amount of statistics, but it's minimal compared with the narrative content. There have also been some weekly and monthly publications. Again, the vast majority of content is narrative.

The online sources are the only questionable ones, and they should be used with caution. For example, if the article is pre-1860s, I will only refer to CricketArchive for a scorecard, and sometimes basic profile info like full name and dates of birth and death. The issue is incomplete data, because CA treats what is available as final, so anyone using one of its statistical tables is uploading false information. I regard CA as fully reliable from 1864, however. Jack (talk) 08:47, 10 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Michael Jackson ArbCom

It wasn't clear to me whether I thought ArbCom should accept the case until I started writing about it, and saw that it has two aspects of ArbCom cases. First, it requests an overview of a topic that is already a contentious topic, to see whether existing remedies are working. Many contentious topics need to be reviewed periodically. We know that Palestine and Israel is the worst, but we also had a recent review of the South Asian topic area, and before that we had a review of Azerbaijan and Armenia. Second, there has been a long-term low-level pattern of misconduct that usually stayed under the WP:ANI radar. The Maghreb case was an example of that.

As I continued writing my statement, it became more obvious that it should be a statement asking them to accept the case.

I think you should start rearranging your opening statement into the form of an evidence presentation. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:27, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I am currently working on my evidence, but I'm not sure how best to present it. I'm currently thinking that I'll organize evidence by editor, but that will take a lot of words and result in some duplication of evidence - for example, evidence that Jimcastor communicates off-wiki with Mr Boar1 is also evidence that Mr Boar1 communicates off-wiki with Jimcastor.

I'm assuming I'll have 1000 words, since you were a party for SchroCat and aslivering was a party for Magreb, which will help, but it's still going to be difficult to present everything I need to present. BilledMammal (talk) 05:36, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Vedal RM

Hello, I saw that you closed the RM. I agree that it turned into a trainwreck, and I probably bear the lion share responsibility for that. As nobody actually addressed my second proposal, I think I am going to discard your advice and start a new RM for the second proposal relatively soon. Though, I am going to wait a week or until the AfD closes, whichever later, so that the craziness has passed and I have some distance from it all. Would you mind striking through the part advising to wait a few months? Page traffic is largely irrelevant and so I don't think waiting for it to settle matters, the Chengalpattu village has always been dwarfed by at minimum five-fold by the streamer, by other metrics nine- or forty-fold. I can't imagine it changing in such a way that it aids the Chengalpattu village in retaining primary topic. Perhaps in making the streamer primary topic, but the opposition to that was largely unrelated to pageviews, and I'm fine not pushing it right now. 1brianm7 (talk) 06:44, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome to discard my advice, but I think I will keep it there as I think it will be helpful to have a few months more data. BilledMammal (talk) 05:46, 20 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That's fair. I'm not particularly experienced with RMs to know how the existence of a disambiguation page at (disambiguation) will affect reader traffic when it is my contention that the Chengalpattu village was frequently wrongly given to them prior to the disambiguation page's creation. I think I'm still going to do it, if only because, in the hypothetical scenario where the Chengalpattu village was disambiguated and the disambiguation page was at Vedal, I cannot imagine a RM finding the Chengalpattu village the primary topic, even when assuming that the two other villages receive 0 views/day. 1brianm7 (talk) 05:58, 20 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

AWB restored

All the best, Miniapolis 22:56, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Arbitration Case opened

You were recently listed as a party to a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Michael Jackson. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Michael Jackson/Evidence. Please add your evidence by June 1, 2026 at 23:59 UTC, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Michael Jackson/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Party Guide/Introduction. For the Arbitration Committee, ~delta _{{talk • cont • 🇰🇷 • 🎢}} 22:12, 18 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That's a lot of evidence of coordination .... Robert McClenon (talk) 05:56, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I hope it's enough - Katzrockso's commons discovery will really help here, as the claim that they're not only monitoring each other's enwiki contributions but also their global contributions is difficult to believe. BilledMammal (talk) 06:02, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for proposing Episteme Aletheia as a party. I was weighing whether to do that since I found their editing history suspicious from the get-go, but I first wanted to get confirmation that ArbCom will consider the Commons evidence. Katzrockso (talk) 06:37, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

You may be eligible to vote in the U4C election

I am contacting you because you previously voted in elections related to the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C). You may be eligible to vote in the current U4C election, which is open now and closes on 2 June 2026. You can find out more about the candidates and the election on the election page on Meta, and from there you can access the vote itself. Your participation in these elections is important to the governance of Wikimedia communities, and your time spent learning about the candidates and voting is appreciated.

-- In cooperation with the U4C, Keegan (WMF) (talk)

Keegan (WMF) (talk) 17:16, 20 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Re:Board Rejection of Candidates

I originally posted this at VPWMF but it was tangential to the larger point I wanted to make. Of the little communication the board has given about candidate exclusion, one thing that has been made clear at least to me is the board members felt they had a fiduciary - and thus legal - obligation to exclude who they did. So 2 doesn't really move the needle in that regard. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:39, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't aware of that, but #2 goes further than that; affiliates are able to shortlist the list of candidates. That is something I would like to stop. BilledMammal (talk) 02:43, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. I understand that piece. It's why, despite that note, I still characterized it as the right general ideas. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:46, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]