User talk:NSH001#top

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I appreciate your comments on Oliver Kamm's talk page. Although I have other pressing tasks to attend at the moment, I'll eventually return to the discussion. Also, don't let TJive intimidate you. He's nothing but a bully. Sir Paul 06:24, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

:It's ironic, though. I have long regarded Kamm as a pretentious fool who isn't worth a minute of anybody's time trying to read him -- which is why I've been reluctant to get drawn in. Yet I'm still wasting time on him...--NSH001 15:07, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

:update: (after 12 years!) Kamm is so ludicrous I find it hard to take him seriously. The trouble with Kamm goes back a long, long way – long before I was on Wikipedia (can't remember when, exactly, but it was in the days of dial-up modems that blocked your phone line, and might give you download speeds of 5 Kbytes/sec if you were lucky). I still think it a waste of time dealing with him, but I suppose it was only a matter of time before Kamm's malign influence would [https://wikipedia.fivefilters.org/evidence/ blow up so spectacularly on Wikipedia and lead to an Arbcom case (June 2018)].{{efn-lr|For the avoidance of doubt, I am clear that Kamm is not Philip Cross, although he has certainly influenced the latter.}} Worth reading [http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/11/oliver_kamm_mar_1.html Brian Leiter's classic piece from November 2005]. --NSH001 (talk) 10:47, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

:more: There are many sources on Kamm's foolishness that can easily be found in a google search. I note the following two only because Philip Cross has been working hard to keep them out of Kamm's page:

:* [https://mronline.org/2010/01/22/the-oliver-kamm-school-of-falsification-imperial-truth-enforcement-british-branch/ The Oliver Kamm School of Falsification]

:* [http://mondoweiss.net/2016/02/chomsky-and-his-critics/ http://mondoweiss.net/2016/02/chomsky-and-his-critics/]

:--NSH001 (talk) 17:00, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

:{{notelist-lr}}

::A non-entity publicly, intellectually, and yet he has a wiki page. One can't edit it appropriately because he is under the radar that captures serious things.Nishidani (talk) 19:17, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

:::I decided to keep those few sentences from 2006 at the top (i.e., tell the bot not to archive them) partly because it's nice to have a record of when I started editing Wikipedia (well, not quite - it's the first ever message on my talk page, though) and partly because I quite like having a mildly derogatory remark about Kamm at the top of my talk page. He deserves a much more serious condemnation, but WP:BLP wouldn't allow it (rightly so, I think) and in any case posting negative stuff tends to be counterproductive. Plus he's really not worth the effort. --NSH001 (talk) 20:12, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

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{{hatnote|see also the discussion at: User:Nishidani#Citation tools, archived at User talk:Nishidani/Archive 22#Citation tools}}

{{hatnote|see also the discussion at User_talk:Primefac#Bizarre, archived at User talk:Primefac/Archive 8#Bizarre}}

{{hatnote|see also discussion on this page (in part): – archived at /Archive 3#Fucked up again + some more on how to get rid of LHTs }}

{{hatnote|see also discussion on this page: #sfn - archived at /Archive 3#sfn }}

{{hatnote|see also the essay at WP:Basic citation concepts, shortcut WP:BCC (recommended) }}

{{hatnote|There is no substitute for looking at examples to see how ETVP works. See examples.}}

Consensus at WPMED is to keep refs generally over one line. Please do not switch them to over many.[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Levothyroxine&type=revision&diff=733258719&oldid=733224113] Best Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:13, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

:{{u|Doc James}}, I am thinking very long term here. Most larger wiki articles are effectively rendered uneditable by the presence of numerous long, horizontally formatted templates (LHTs{{efn|"LHTs" may also be read as "long horizontal turds", to reflect the revulsion they induce.}}); the only edits feasible on such pages are trivial changes such as spelling corrections, or automated edits where the script/bot doesn't care about the formatting.{{efn|name=impossibility}} Of course this is just my opinion, but I do know several other editors share my dislike of long, horizontally formatted citation template clutter (LHT clutter). As well as making the wikitext unreadable, such templates also make it very difficult to find and correct errors in the citation templates, or indeed in anything else.

:It doesn't surprise me that the Wikimedia Foundation finds it necessary to spend large sums on things like Visual Editor, given that the mess resulting from long, horizontally formatted templates makes directly editing wikitext so user-hostile. I want to see a wiki that is clear of all this clutter, but that is going to take several years to achieve. In the meantime I am effectively banned (without having commited any offence) from many, perhaps most, articles because of citation clutter. Hence I am (slowly) developing a private script to help in this task. I call the script "ETVP" for "Easy To Visually Parse", because wikitext should be nice and easy to read. I aim eventually to make it easy, using the ETVP script, to switch to short-form referencing, or to LDR, or to some combination of the two, or indeed to anything else that will reduce or eliminate citation clutter. It was not originally my intention to leave ETVP templates in-line, but when I first tried it I was surprised at how much more readable the wikitext became, so my current thinking is to retain it as an option (the main disadvantage appears to be that it is too easy to turn it back into horizontal formatting, as you have demonstrated!).

:I am relaxed about not edit-warring with you on this, although I do think making the wikitext harder to read is irrational. Partly this is because the ETVP script is still a long way from being finished, but the main reason is that my focus is on the long-term, and edit warring on individual articles is of no benefit in that aim. I have always anticipated there will be some resistance to in-line ETVP templates, simply because people don't like change, or just get upset by unexpected change, or by anything surprising. I note that most WPMED articles are of a scientific or academic nature, where short-form referencing is the natural style. Once I've got the ETVP script working for that style, then I believe it could be very useful for the WPMED project.

:--NSH001 (talk) 21:18, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

::The majority of the editors at WPMED like the references over one horizontal line rather than over dozens of lines.

::Yes there is a minority who like it over dozens of lines. I find having it over one horizontal line is easier to edit not harder.

::What we need is an option / gadget so that those who want it over one line when they hit edit get it over one line and those who want it over many lines get it over many lines. That means win-win for everyone as everyone gets the way they find makes it easiest for them to edit. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:27, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

:::Look more carefully. ETVP is not "dozens of lines" (per cite). I think you might be referring to the (not very wonderful) "vertical" format that you get in the template documentation; even then (provided you eliminate the blank parameters), it rarely amounts to "dozens" of lines. The ETVP script has been carefully thought through to give you what it says on the tin: it uses the minimum number of lines and white space while still maintaining clarity. Roughly, items that logically belong together go on the same line, important items go at the top (title, authors) and references (for example, identifiers) go at the end (a bit like wikipedia article layout). The aim is to take advantage of the human visual system, which works orders of magnitude faster than the rest of the brain. This makes it very easy to spot errors, often instantly; in addition, you'll often spot errors you weren't even looking for in the first place. This is impossible to do if the template is strung out over two or more lines (by lines, I mean lines on the edit window, not the single line you're referring to), buried in a mass of other wikitext. I think one reason why cite templates are so badly infested with errors is precisely this difficulty of spotting errors in the horizontal layout. But what makes the horizontal layout even more annoying is the difficulty of spotting the beginning and end of the same template, especially if there are large numbers of horizontal cites buried within the same paragraph. With the ETVP format, the eye can again spot the beginning and end of a template instantly. So not only does the horizontal format make it difficult or impossible to spot errors in the cite templates, it also makes it difficult or impossible to follow the "flow" of the article text itself. To see this, try an experiment: (a) open in edit mode the version of the article before my edit, and try to read out loud the article text from the wikitext, then (b) do the same with the wikitext after my edit. Notice how much easier (b) is!

:::Take a look, in edit mode, at Muhammad Najati Sidqi#Sources and Khazars#Bibliography. These are examples of the the work of the ETVP script on articles that were already using short-form referencing. Notice how easy and pleasant it is to read the citation templates there. Although I intend to implement LDR first, my aim (eventually) is to make it easy to switch articles to short-form referencing, with all templates in ETVP form. This is my preferred referencing style, and the most natural for scientific, technical and academic articles. But basically, the ETVP script will eventually let editors use any referencing style they like, as long as it doesn't involve long, horizontally formatted templates.

:::Note that ETVP is not the same as "vertical". Short templates are actually easier to visually parse if they are "scrunched up" (eliminating all unnecessary spaces) and kept on the same line. The ETVP script recognizes this, using a cut-off of 50 characters (this seems to work well so far, but it could be easily tweaked if necessary). Perhaps the fans of horizontal templates are aware of this, but then wrongly assume that it applies regardless of length. The general principle is that short templates are fine if they're kept on the same physical line, but the longer the template, the stronger the case for a vertical or ETVP format. For an extreme example, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Balochistan_conflict&diff=712673937&oldid=711851148 this egregious edit], which I don't think anyone would want to defend.

:::One might also note the contrast with infoboxes, which are already, mostly, more-or-less in a vertical format, with one parameter per line. Editors don't have any problem editing infoboxes. So in my view, the difficulty some editors say they have with editing ETVP or vertical format is imaginary, not real. Probably they've just gotten used to the default that they get when they click the "cite" button on the edit window or from using most of the standard cite-generating tools. And why should they care? For most editors, adding cites is just a tedious but necessary chore, to be done with minimum effort; they care about the info they're adding, not the errors they're creating or the messy wikitext they're leaving behind.

:::--NSH001 (talk) 11:10, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

:::P.S. The idea of a gadget seems like a good one, except I'd want it to appear in an ETVP format, not the vertical one.{{pb}} In the four years since this thread first started, it has become crystal clear that a gadget is never going to be a solution to this problem. There is, however, a partial solution, namely a change to the wikitext editor, which I outline at Update, August 2020 below, which will immediately (once implemented) meet some of the objections raised by fans of the turd format, as well as being a useful adjuct to the operation of the ETVP script. {{small|(updated 17:03, 13 August 2020 (UTC))}}

{{u|Jonesey95}} [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Primefac&diff=767932001&oldid=767926751 has suggested] the [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Remember_the_dot/Syntax_highlighter syntax highlighter gadget] as a possible solution to the near-impossibility of reading and editing pages full of LHTs.{{efn|name=impossibility|In my experience, there are three small but important exceptions where it is sometimes possible to edit such pages, despite the presence of LHTs:

1. trivial changes, such as spelling corrections (but this can still be difficult, slow, and unpleasant)
2. all automated and most semi-automated edits. This includes, for example, edits made via a script, or by pressing an "undo" or "rollback" button.
3. if there are substantial parts of an article that are free of LHTs. For example, it is sometimes possible to edit the lead or Infobox, since these can be relatively or completely LHT-free. Similarly it is possible to edit categories and navboxes at the end of articles (a place where LHTs almost never occur).

}}

Initial thoughts:

• The default setting is far too cluttered; in particular, there is no need to highlight wikilinks. However it is possible to customise it so that only templates are highlighted. This works, and is actually quite useful.
• However, this is moot for those who, like me,use an external editor for most of their editing.
• It doesn't distinguish nested templates, in contrast to the ETVP script, which indents templates to mark the depth of nesting.
• In any case, this problem is so fundamental that we shouldn't need to depend on a gadget to fix it.

Conclusion: better than nothing, but not really a solution to the problem. By providing a makeshift patch that papers over the problem, it reduces the pressure to get the problem fixed properly. It does mark the beginning and end of templates clearly (very good!), but the ETVP script also does that. The ETVP format also makes it easy to spot errors instantly, and the highlighter is of no help in that regard. --NSH001 (talk) 21:51, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Further thoughts:

• The gadget doesn't work on diffs (and wasn't intended to), but templates in ETVP format are still easily distinguishable in diffs.
• Not distinguishing nested templates is a major drawback, especially in Infoboxes where cite templates are common. Not a problem when using ETVP, as the script uses indentation to indicate nesting.
• There is no need to highlight short templates (that's just unnecessary visual clutter). In my view only templates EITHER longer than about 100 characters OR which wrap around lines in the edit window need to be highlighted. Of course, the ETVP script takes account of template length, but it has no way of telling when a template is going to line-wrap. But note that templates in ETVP format are designed so that they usually won't line-wrap, except for long URLs or long quotes or exceptionally long article or chapter titles. Even then, the line-wrapping is restricted to the long piece of text, and does not affect the readability of the rest of the template.

I vaguely remember trying some sort of highlighter or edit-helper several years ago,{{efn|From memory, this was wikEd, which I think was the only available tool at the time to offer syntax highlighting.}} and rapidly rejecting it as too cluttered and too distracting; if my memory is correct it also suffered from a lot of bugs. In contrast, I can see that I might sometimes use this highlighter, even though most of the time I will have it turned off. The author of this highlighter, {{u|Remember the dot}}, deserves some thanks and credit for the thought and effort he or she has put into this script. It's obviously useful to many editors, but it's not a solution to the problem of LHT clutter.

--NSH001 (talk) 09:44, 1 March 2017 (UTC) and NSH001 (talk) 10:32, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

I have seen other editors (not just Doc James), when talking about this infuriating problem, use the phrase "over one line" to refer to horizontal cite templates and "over many lines" to refer to other formats.

Yes, it is true that the annoying LHT format only occupies one physical line of the computer file. But to use "over one line" in the context of a discussion of the merits of the different formats is very misleading. On the actual edit window that real-life editors use, it also occupies many lines. The difference is that the LHT format will line-wrap at unpredictable positions, depending on where in the text it occurs, what font size is being used and the width of the edit window, among other factors. At least the line-breaks in the "vertical" format are predictable (making it more readable than the LHT format), while the ETVP format is specifically designed to make it as readable as possible.

Incidentally, this problem of line-wrapping is one reason why, generally, I don't mind manually formatted citations; as long as they don't contain long URLs, or other long items, they will usually fit into one line of an edit window, so they don't disrupt the readability of the wikitext in the same way that LHTs do. (I have mentioned elsewhere that there are compelling reasons for preferring templated citations, of course.) There is another reason why manual citations are generally acceptable in the body of an article: they are still in a narrative format, so (unless they contain a long URL) they fit in quite naturally with the rest of the article. Very different from cite templates, where the important task for the editor is to visually parse the argument-value pairs ({{small|updated December 2017}}).

--NSH001 (talk) 15:53, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

{{hatnote|See also the entire discussion above for additional reasons why LHT clutter is unacceptable.}}

• It puts off new editors from joining Wikipedia. See self-selection below, and my responses to Doc James above.
• It violates every principle of sound coding practice. Any professional computer programmer who wrote code like this would soon be out of a job, or more likely, would never be taken on in the first place.
• It obfuscates everything. Similarly, at school I was taught how to write English properly. If I had written an essay in such an unstructured, amorphous form I would have received a big fat ZERO as my mark for such an essay. If you (generic) write English without any structure, the result is incomprehensible. The same applies to wikitext.
• It causes errors because errors are so difficult to spot and to correct in LHTs.
• It causes even more errors because LHT clutter makes it difficult (almost impossible) to follow the natural flow of the article text within the wikitext.{{efn|Syntax highlighters can alleviate this problem, but using ETVP formatting is a better approach.}}
• It makes diffs hard to follow. It's bad enough trying to read wikitext cluttered with LHTs, but the problems are multiplied when you (generic) are trying to establish who has added or deleted what in a diff.
• It sets a bad example. New editors will usually just copy the techniques they find already being used, so, not surprisingly, the result is a cancerous expansion of the usual steaming heap of unreadable and uneditable text.
• Summary: it makes editing Wikipedia difficult, slow, error-prone and very, very unpleasant. The problem is so bad, so annoying and so infuriating that either LHT clutter has to be gotten rid of (preferably completely), or {{red|I will leave Wikipedia}}. The reason is obvious: how is it possible to edit anything cluttered up with LHTs, when this clutter, apart from the exceptions footnoted below,{{efn|name=impossibility}} makes editing impossible?
• Conclusion: LHT clutter should be  Dalek.{{efn|I am old enough to remember the first broadcast episodes of Doctor Who. On a black & white 405-line TV set receiving analogue signals broadcast on Band I VHF, no less. Anyone remember those big H-shaped aerials that marked out the houses of those families who could afford to buy a television?}}

Well, I really don't know. It baffles and perplexes me that anyone could possibly tolerate this mess. But any strategy for getting rid of LHTs needs to address this paradox. Some possible explanations:

1. Self-selection.{{anchor|self-selection}} The WMF has been worrying for years about the long-term decline in the number of active editors. Not that surprising really, when someone new to Wikipedia opens up a page in edit mode and discovers an amorphous, unstructured, smushed-together, incomprehensible and almost unreadable heap of steaming LHT doo-doo. So the small minority that's left, and which heroically persists in trying to edit Wikipedia, has, for the most part (not all, and certainly not including me), self-selected as those who can somehow tolerate LHT clutter.
2. False perception of authority. People assume that, simply because it is so common, LHT clutter must somehow be "right", or "officially approved", or the "standard" citation and referencing style, although per policy (WP:CITESTYLE), there is no one, single, standard citation style on Wikipedia. All this despite the fact that LHT clutter is the worst possible citation and referencing style.
3. Lack of exposure to better citation styles. Some editors are simply unaware of better alternatives: they may dislike the clutter, but just assume it's something thay have to put up with. Or they may be aware of better alternatives, but then find it takes a lot of time and effort to change the citation style (plus they may then have additional battles based on WP:CITEVAR).
4. Unfamiliarity with academic citation styles, especially among editors who haven't had a university-level education.
5. Poor citation-generating tools. These have plenty of faults and shortcomings. Among their faults is that they offer only the LHT clutter style, or if they do offer a choice, it is between so-called "vertical" and LHT, with LHT clutter being the default. The "vertical" form, as given in the template documentation, isn't that great either, but it's still a huge improvement over LHT clutter. None of them offer an ETVP form as a choice, of course, since ETVP is a new concept. Since the default option is the easiest one to choose, the result is that the LHT dungheap just keeps on growing.
6. Poor citation template documentation (in fact, most of the citation template documentation is quite good; I'm referring here to the distinction between "vertical" and "horizontal"). The "vertical" style offered as an alternative to the LHT clutter format in the template documentation is very poor (but still a huge improvement on LHT clutter). It obviously hasn't been properly and thoroughly thought through though.{{efn|Sorry, I couldn't resist the alliteration!}} I will discuss this in more detail in the ETVP documentation, but see my responses to Doc James above for a brief outline. This may partly explain why editors (bizarrely) choose the LHT clutter format instead.
7. Syntax highlighters. My first reaction to Doc James' request above was simply bewilderment and perplexity, since trying to edit LHT clutter is a physical impossibility{{efn|name=impossibility}} (well it can be done, but only at the cost of a phenomenal amount of time and effort). Note that for serious editing, I use an external editor (but I do use the standard wikitext editor for small changes, and to preview edits made in the main, external, editor). So I pay little attention to developments in the standard editor or its gadgets. Well, syntax highlighters (if properly configured) do solve one of the most infuriating problems about LHT clutter, namely the extreme difficulty of spotting where an individual LHT begins and ends. I think it's clear that without syntax highlighters, LHT clutter would never survive as a citation style;{{efn|For the avoidance of doubt, I am not interested, even with the availability of syntax highlighters, in the survival of LHT clutter as a citation style; I want it to disappear completely.}} otherwise editing a page full of LHT clutter is physically impossible. But that still raises questions about what newbies do, since they won't be aware of syntax highlighters. And as I explained above, syntax highlighters still have some drawbacks, and in any case, the ETVP style renders them unnecessary.{{efn|Editors may still, of course, have valid reasons for wanting to use a syntax highlighter. The point is that ETVP means that syntax highlighters are no longer needed to deal with long templates, but syntax highlighters may still be needed for other reasons.}}{{pb}}Conclusion: syntax highlighters are like a medication that alleviates (some of) the symptoms, but doesn't cure the underlying disease.{{pb}}
8. Inadequate wikitext editor. The wikitext editor needs to properly support separation of long citation templates from their inline antecedents, whether it be list-defined references (LDR), parenthetical referencing or short-form referencing. In one click{{efn|name=click|possibly a click or double-click together with a control key, or combination of control keys}} it should enable an {{tl|sfn}} template, or any of its siblings, including any of the harvnb family, to be inserted in the article body and at the same time the corresponding long cite template added, if not already present, in correct alphabetical order, to the relevant bibliographic listing. Similarly for named references and their corresponding entry in LDR.{{pb}}As an alternative my ETVP script effectively does this already by transforming a whole article all at once (it still needs polishing, though). The wikitext editor should also allow a single click{{efn|name=click}} on an {{tl|sfn}}/{{tl|harvnb}} or named reference to bring up the corresponding long template in a popup for easy editing.{{pb}}I guess the first suggestion is too difficult and impracticable to be worth the effort, especially if we already have a script to do the job. So I'd like to limit myself to just two small suggestions, that should be possible without too much effort:{{small|(updated, December 2017)}}
9. * A popup to show the corresponding full citation when a short-form cite is "clicked"{{efn|name=click}}
10. * Toggle the size of the edit window (edit box) between the standard size and full screen, or full screen with only minimal menus and toolbar.{{efn|This should reduce the incentive for editors to use the LHT clutter format, since the reason usually offered for preferring LHT clutter is that the "vertical" form takes up too much screen space. Well, the ETVP format uses less screen space anyway compared to the documented "vertical" form, but let's give editors more space when they need it.}}
11. Perhaps the most obvious explanation. Amazingly, Wikipedia, through its HELP tools, actually teaches the LHT clutter style to beginners. So does the WMF through its volunteer editors who help newbies come to grips with how to edit Wikipedia (very useful work, apart from this one aspect). This needs to change, so that newcomers are made aware of the problems created by LHT clutter, and of the available alternatives. {{small|(added, June 2019)}}

--NSH001 (talk) 07:39, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

{{hatnote|For examples of how ETVP formatting works, see User:NSH001/ETVP/examples}}

This section has been prompted by the this discussion on the talk page of Actuary (a featured article), and the simultaneous discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Deprecate parenthetical citations (archived here). In addition, my private ETVP script has been under near-constant development since most of this thread was first written, so an update is needed anyway.

The ETVP script now allows the choice of four different ways of getting rid of LHT clutter:{{efn|LHT clutter is the unreadable and uneditable mess caused by the proliferation of long, horizontally formatted templates (LHTs). Please read the whole of this very long thread from the start, in order to better understand this problem.}}

1. Switch all citation templates from the LHT clutter format (also known as the "turd" format) to ETVP format, but leave them in place. This was the first option to be developed (because it was the easiest), and the one that Doc James complained about above. It might have been possible to have left it there, but I found that whenever I changed turd templates to nice, pleasant, in-line ETVP templates, I kept getting reverted; such a change also prompted the complaint from Doc James above. I note below a couple of proposed changes to the wikitext editor, which I hope should remove these objections. So I went ahead with providing all the remaining options.
2. Switch to list-defined references, WP:LDR, so that the "turds" are all moved out of the article text, and are listed (having, on their way, been transformed into ETVP format) using the {{para|refs}} parameter of the {{tl|reflist}} template. This was the second option that I developed. It succeeds in getting rid of the turds, but it also comes with some disadvantages, notably the difficulty in handling page numbers (which can still be done, but not very easily).
3. Switch to short-form referencing, making use of {{tl|sfn}} and {{tl|harvnb}} and all their numerous siblings. This was the third option I developed, and is the one I use most frequently. The main advantage is that the citations are listed – of course, in the pleasant ETVP format – in a neat, alphabetically-ordered bibliographic listing at the end of the article.
4. Switch to parenthetical referencing. This is the most recent option that I have developed, and is similar in many ways to short-form referencing, notably the use of a neatly formatted and sorted bibliographic listing at the end.{{pb}} It has the advantage over short-form of not requiring a separate section to hold the short cites, and of reducing the number of clicks to get to the full citation. Like Option 3, it offers the advantage over Option 2 of handling page numbers properly.
5. The fifth option is independent of the others. It has been far and away the most difficult to write (but I like a challenge!), namely to automatically convert manual citations to templated ones. Options 3 and 4 rely heavily on the existence of CS1/CS2 citation templates, so this is an essential prerequisite in many cases. It will never be possible to reliably convert everything, but it is possible to do so for well-written manual citations, and to get quite close for many of the rest.
6. The sixth option mostly doesn't exist yet. So far, the emphasis within this script has been to provide options to move from the dungheap citation style to one of the options listed above. There are, however, valid reasons why it may be desirable to move from one non-turd citation style to a different non-turd citation style. It can often happen that, for small articles, Option 2 (list-defined references) is the best way of getting rid of the turds. Then, once an article expands, Option 3 becomes the best solution; it's no accident that Option 3 is much more common at the Featured Article level.{{pb}} Thus, at the time of writing, the script provides some limited support for moving from Option 2 to Option 3. In future, it may offer support for other possible switches, but that is a low priority for now. Another, more likely possibility, is to offer a combination of citation styles. It should, of course, go without saying that switches of citation style remain subject to WP:CITEVAR and WP:CITESTYLE. {{small|(updated 08:43, 12 August 2020 (UTC))}}

{{anchor|turd epithet}}

In practice, I find that I use option 1 as an interim stage before using one of the other options. Option 1 is very helpful: firstly because it automatically corrects many of the errors that you find in citation templates, and, secondly, having the templates in ETVP format makes them much easier to edit. Any solution (and my script) has to take account of the vast amount of crap that editors type into citation templates. You won't believe the amount of crap that you find in citation templates. Not just editors, most of the citation-generating tools generate crap citations too, notably Visual Editor (VE), which was one of the worst, although it seems to be getting a bit better recently.{{efn|The only citation-generating tool I've come across that does a reasonably good job is {{u|Citation bot}}, and even that isn't perfect. At least the authors of Citation bot have demonstrated that they understand the massive problem of crap in citation templates.}} A huge amount of the effort that has gone into my script has been writing code to correct this mountainous pile of crap. One of the reasons that there is so much crap in citation templates is that the LHT clutter style makes it very difficult to find errors, and even if you do find one, the LHT format makes it hard and time-consuming to correct. {{red|So the epithet "turd" is indeed appropriate to describe this style.}}

Anyway, for now, option 1 is used only as an interim, preliminary stage. I save the result on my own computer (it would be easy to save it on Wikipedia, but that carries the risk of another editor coming along and messing up my work) and then examine it manually. Firstly, to correct the usual crap. Then to check the changes option 1 has offered; the most common of these is the | ref = {{harvid|...}} it generates if there are no authors or editors, or no date/year is specified.{{efn|This process can be very time-consuming, as the turds dumped by the various citation-generating tools often omit, or get wrong, vital details, so I usually have to go back to the source to check. Editors using these tools are supposed to check the generated citations against the source, but in reality they don't.}} Of course, this stage may not be needed if I'm already familiar with the page and its history; on the other hand it's essential if someone has been dumping LHTs ("turds") using VE or one of the citation-generating tools. Once I'm satisfied with the results, I run one of the other options to generate the final result.

{{anchor|proposed wiki text editor changes}}

I still believe using in-line ETVP formatting (option 1) is a valid and useful option (it keeps the citation next to the text it's supporting), but before that can win general acceptance, I think two changes are necessary to the wiki text editor (I refuse to go anywhere near the VE editor):

1. The display of all instances of ........... should be changed so that what you see in the edit window looks something like this:

   blah blah,{{background color|#FFCCCC|[ref 23]}}{{background color|#CCFFCC|[ref 3]}}{{background color|#FFCCFF|[ref 24 name{{=}}"Smith"]}} blah blah.{{background color|#CCCCFF|[ref 11]}}

   where the coloured [ref]s are clickable, resulting in either a pop-up that can be edited, or expanded in-line for editing.
2. Make it possible to toggle the edit box between its standard size and full-screen (or full-screen, less a little bit for menus/toolbars). One of the excuses made for the turd format is that "it keeps the refs from taking up so much screen space in a heavily referenced article", so this will help to remove this excuse. Of course the first change also does that, but in any case it's nice to have the option to edit full-screen.

I believe the first change will be welcomed by all editors (even those who are fans of the turd format), since it makes the wikitext much more readable.

The purpose of the ETVP script

Worth reiterating:

The purpose of the ETVP script is to get rid of LHT clutter. That was its original motivation, and will always remain its primary function. In doing this, it provides options to switch from the dungheap citation style to any of the citation formats mentioned above.

But its purpose remains to get rid of LHT clutter. Of course it can be used to switch citation style, and I hope to support every reasonable citation style, but it will never allow a turd-formatted citation to remain in place.

I am always open to reasonable requests for improving the ETVP script. But the one thing that is, and will always remain, non-negotiable, is its fundamental, basic purpose, which is to get rid of turd-formatted citations.

--NSH001 (talk) 14:13, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

{{hatnote|This section is a list of quotes from other editors expressing disapproval of the turd citation format and of the LHT clutter citation style. If you would like a quote to appear here, please post a note at the bottom of my talk page (not here), or simply ping me.}}

1. From {{pb}}"So I just finished re-formatting Lead into the format that I think is clearly and objectively superior: {{tl|cite book}}s etc in a separate section at the bottom of the page, {{tl|sfn}} in body text. [I would go farther than that and use various {{tl|harv}} formats in Notes, but that is irrelevant to this question.] Before that, it was all {{cite book | lotsa distracting/confusing text here }} all splashed like buckshot across body text. That is a common referencing method, and it is quite inferior. First, it's a maintenance nightmare for editors to search and find all those {{tl|citation}}s everywhere in the body text. It is a confusing jumble of metatext mishmash blobs that break the actual displayed text up into near-incoherence when you look at the raw editing version; a n00b does not deserve to face that. Second, it jumbles all the displayed cite text into an unorganized blob of cite info in the References section, making spotting errors in them an exercise in serious eyestrain. Third, the absence of {{tl|sfn}} (or something comparable) makes it prohibitively difficult to add specific page numbers."{{pb}}User:Lingzhi is talking here mainly about page numbers, but he also makes clear the problem with LHT clutter.
2. From User_talk:Dsimic#Power_suppl unit (computer) (edited for clarity):
3. : Hello! Regarding {{Diff|Power supply unit (computer)|717719178|717517325|my edit}} on the Power supply unit (computer) article, IMHO there's no reasonable excuse for favoring a much less readable format of the Wiki code under the unification umbrella. Consistency is good, of course, but it actually isn't that good when it makes things worse. Each "slice" of better Wiki code readability counts, and we should aim toward consistency-related changes that improve the overall Wiki code readability. Hope you'll agree. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 08:52, 4 May 2016 (UTC)
4. : (redacted)
5. ::Quite frankly, there's no way that, for example, this Wiki code snippet:
6. :: Although a power supply with a larger than needed power rating will have an extra margin of safety against overloading, such a unit is often less efficient and wastes more electricity at lower loads than a more appropriately sized unit. For example, a 900-watt power supply with the 80 Plus Silver efficiency rating (which means that such a power supply is designed to be at least 85-percent efficient for loads above 180 W) may only be 73% efficient when the load is lower than 100 W, which is a typical idle power for a desktop computer. Thus, for a 100 W load, losses for this supply would be 37 W; if the same power supply was put under a 450 W load, for which the supply's efficiency peaks at 89%, the loss would be only 56 W despite supplying 4.5 times the useful power.{{cite web | url = http://www.anandtech.com/show/2624/3 | title = Debunking Power Supply Myths | date = 2008-09-22 | accessdate = 2014-10-07 | author = Christoph Katzer | publisher = AnandTech | page = 3}}{{cite web | url = http://www.coolermaster.com/xresserver01-DLFILE-P130218025925ba-F13032500212140.html | title = Cooler Master UCP Product Sheet | year = 2008 | accessdate = 2014-10-11 | publisher = Cooler Master | format = PDF}} For a comparison, a 500-watt power supply carrying the 80 Plus Bronze efficiency rating (which means that such a power supply is designed to be at least 82-percent efficient for loads above 100 W) may provide an 84-percent efficiency for a 100 W load, wasting only 19 W.{{cite web | url = http://www.anandtech.com/show/4908/silverstone-strider-plus-500w-modular-power/4 | title = SilverStone Strider Plus{{snd}} 500 W Modular Power | date = 2011-10-10 | accessdate = 2014-10-11 | author = Martin Kaffei | publisher = AnandTech | page = 4}}
7. :: is better or more readable than its nicely formatted equivalent:
8. :: Although a power supply with a larger than needed power rating will have an extra margin of safety against overloading, such a unit is often less efficient and wastes more electricity at lower loads than a more appropriately sized unit. For example, a 900-watt power supply with the 80 Plus Silver efficiency rating (which means that such a power supply is designed to be at least 85-percent efficient for loads above 180 W) may only be 73% efficient when the load is lower than 100 W, which is a typical idle power for a desktop computer. Thus, for a 100 W load, losses for this supply would be 37 W; if the same power supply was put under a 450 W load, for which the supply's efficiency peaks at 89%, the loss would be only 56 W despite supplying 4.5 times the useful power.{{cite web

| url = http://www.anandtech.com/show/2624/3

| title = Debunking Power Supply Myths

| date = 2008-09-22 | accessdate = 2014-10-07

| author = Christoph Katzer | publisher = AnandTech

| page = 3

}}{{cite web

| url = http://www.coolermaster.com/xresserver01-DLFILE-P130218025925ba-F13032500212140.html

| title = Cooler Master UCP Product Sheet

| year = 2008 | accessdate = 2014-10-11

| publisher = Cooler Master | format = PDF

}} For a comparison, a 500-watt power supply carrying the 80 Plus Bronze efficiency rating (which means that such a power supply is designed to be at least 82-percent efficient for loads above 100 W) may provide an 84-percent efficiency for a 100 W load, wasting only 19 W.{{cite web

| url = http://www.anandtech.com/show/4908/silverstone-strider-plus-500w-modular-power/4

| title = SilverStone Strider Plus{{snd}} 500 W Modular Power

| date = 2011-10-10 | accessdate = 2014-10-11

| author = Martin Kaffei | publisher = AnandTech

| page = 4

}}

1. :: It's pretty much obvious to anyone who had spent at least some time editing Wiki code manually or doing some other source-level computer programming. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 23:03, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
2. From User:Monkbot/task_18: cosmetic cs1 template cleanup: "Editors commonly complain that inline references make it more difficult to read wikitext." [Note from NSH001: "references" in this context means LHT clutter.]
3. From Wikipedia:Village_pump (technical)/Archive 186#My pet peeve: collapsing citations:
4. ::The thing that irritates me the most, as a WP editor, is how nice, legible citations, such as (within braces that I'm omitting)

cite book

|editor-link=Robert W. Watson

|editor-first=Robert W.

|editor-last=Watson

|title=White House Studies Compendium

|volume=2

|first=Harold

|last=Holzer

|authorlink=Harold Holzer

|isbn=9781600215339

|chapter=New Glory for Old Glory: A Lincoln-Era Tradition Reborn

|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mFDl3fo9iEQC&pg=PA316

|year=2007

|publisher=Nova Publishers

|pages=315–318, at p. 316

1. ::are collapsed into illegible goo, as in

cite book|editor-link=Robert W. Watson|editor-first=Robert W.|editor-last=Watson|title=White House Studies Compendium|volume=2|first=Harold|last=Holzer|authorlink=Harold Holzer|isbn=9781600215339|chapter=New Glory for Old Glory: A Lincoln-Era Tradition Reborn|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mFDl3fo9iEQC&pg=PA316%7Cyear=2007%7Cpublisher=Nova Publishers|pages=315–318, at p. 316

-- complaint by User:Deisenbe

1. (more quotes to be added)

I'm aware that I need to produce a full set of documentation about ETVP – the underlying principles, the ETVP script, and why it does what it does, and a full discussion/tutorial of the merits and demerits of each of the options it offers. I've been slow in doing this because for the foreseeable future the script will remain private, so that only I can use it. In the meantime, the long thread here provides a good description of the motivation for writing it, and you can find examples of its use at User:NSH001/ETVP/examples. --NSH001 (talk) 14:13, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

{{notelist}}

{{Pin message}}

A turd template is another name for a Long horizontally formatted template (LHT) as defined above. As explained above, LHTs make editing difficult or impossible (with some exceptions), in addition to being undesirable on general grounds.

Opening, in edit mode, an article full of LHTs is like entering a house where every previous visitor (editor) has left a "deposit" all over the floor. Hence the name.

--NSH001 (talk) 22:28, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

:For a full understanding of why they are called "turds", follow the link to the long thread above. But if you just want a one-paragraph explanation, click {{anchor|turd epithet}} here (updated 08:16, 2 September 2020 (UTC)).

The dungheap citation style is another name for the LHT clutter citation style. Note that I am being too kind to LHT clutter here: dungheaps can be composted into useful, sweet-smelling fertiliser that can be used by farmers to help produce healthy, nutritious organic food. By contrast, the stink of LHT clutter is permanent until the turds are flushed away, or otherwise disposed of.

--NSH001 (talk) 10:23, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

First, some remarks copied from above:

(Sorry to wander off the topic, but the whole thing is so outrageous I'm finding it difficult to think of anything else.) At this moment, I'm wondering what to do about [https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/10/assange-in-court this kangaroo court], reminiscent of stories coming out of the USSR when I was a boy growing up some 60 years ago. The (mis-)treatment of an innocent man, amounting to torture, breaks every fucking legal rule in the book, but our so-called "mainstream" media is remarkably silent on the massive human rights abuse of a good man, yet they are fully capable of pointing out human rights abuses in countries they don't like. It's crystal clear to me that the time has come to revise Wikipedia's rules on "reliable sources"; taking account of the propaganda function of the media would be a good place to start. Jeez, even [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQEri7m1ZaM RT] is more reliable on this farce. --NSH001 (talk) 01:18, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

{{/Sources on Assange}}

: Agreed that you need to read outside the commercial media if you want to get a full appreciation of what is happening with Assange. Luckily el pais and la republicca are covering some aspects of the case so that we can get some of the information into Wikipedia. Burrobert (talk) 14:26, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

I suggest writers call the growing number of Western democracies who are going back to the third world model 'hamburger republics'. 'Ham' as in ham actor,etc. Best wishes for the new, even if probably more digusting, year.Nishidani (talk) 13:18, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

:Interesting (coincidence?) that you should mention "hamburger", as I've been contemplating expanding the (new) Helen Steel article, and other articles associated with the McLibel case. Unlike most peace activists/dissidents, there are some decent sources available on Steel.{{pb}}The accounts of visitors to Assange in Belmarsh remind me of visiting Brook House, the larger of the two immigration detention centres at Gatwick, the same dehumanization – just more extreme. And I can also see similarities with the psychological effect on my father of three years as a Japanese PoW in the Second World War. But at least my father had the moral support of his comrades, not isolation, as is the case with Assange. --NSH001 (talk) 14:16, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Well, it looks like this country (England at any rate, but possibly not Scotland) is doomed (Friday 13 Dec 2019).

In the 1930s in Germany it was anti-Jewish racism (=antisemitism); today in England it's anti-immigrant racism.

• [http://movie.thegreatnhsheist.com/ The NHS is going to be destroyed], and people still don't realise it.
• [https://www.itv.com/hub/the-dirty-war-on-the-nhs/2a5959a0001 more] on how the NHS is being slowly and deliberately destroyed
• (4 years later) {{smallcaps|The bastards}} have already succeeded in making it almost impossible to see an NHS dentist: [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/30/pliers-abscesses-and-agonising-pain-britains-dental-crisis-as-seen-from-ae With ‘dental deserts’ all over the UK, hundreds of thousands of people now flock to hospitals or GPs each year for treatment. And the problem is only getting worse]. Doctors (starting with the GPs) are next on their target list. They changed the law to allow unqualified medical staff to pretend they're really doctors, and there's nothing the General Medical Council can do about it. See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-mFR3DjieE Your right to an NHS doctor is being scrapped to suit big business] and [https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2024/03/18/physician-associates-royal-college/?__s=7krxzps61tprvngryah8 Physician Associates scandal deepens as a Royal College (Royal College of Physicians) is caught MANIPULATING data for the Tories. It's a "massive fraud"]. My comment: a mistake to blame it on "the Tories", BOTH major parties are now firmly under the control of the neocon nutters (aka {{smallcaps|the bastards}}); neither genocide party deserves anyone's vote. Same applies to the Republocrats and Democritans in the US. In the UK, following the 4th of July 2024 general election, the LibDems have become a semi-major party with 72 seats; they are also effectively under neocon-neoliberal-nutter control, hence also a genocide party that deserves nobody's vote.
• (24 June 2024) {{smallcaps|The bastards}} are at it again, in the persons of Starmer and Wes Streeting. See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf9fuJX-lts THE DANGERS OF A LABOUR NHS]
• More poverty, more homelessness, more distress, and people don't realise it's coming.
• More lying and smearing {{harv|Johnstone|2019}}.
• The end of genuine hope for a better society.
• We had a chance of a Prime minister with honesty, compassion, empathy and integrity.
• Instead we get a toxic, repulsive, Prime Minister, a repeated, flat-out liar, incompetent at everything he does except his own self-advancement, regarded as a bad joke by politicians overseas with only a few exceptions, possibly including Donald Trump (actually, I suspect Trump thinks he is a joke, but won't say so until the USA is finally able to cash in on the NHS, causing millions of premature deaths in the UK) {{harv|Oborne|2019}}
• The system is rigged to destroy politicians of compassion and integrity.{{efn|"This was an election of two illusions.{{pb}} "The first helped persuade much of the British public to vote for the very epitome of an Eton toff, a man who not only has shown utter contempt for most of those who voted for him but has spent a lifetime barely bothering to conceal that contempt.{{pb}}[...]{{pb}}"We on the left didn’t lose this election. We lost our last illusions. The system is rigged – as it always has been – to benefit those in power. It will never willingly allow a real socialist, or any politician deeply committed to the health of our societies and to the planet, to take that power away from the corporate class. That, after all, is the very definition of power. That is what the corporate media is there to achieve." {{harv|Cook|2019}}}}
• Now watch the bogus antisemitism smears switched off like a light bulb, while real antisemitism goes on unchecked

Given the extraordinary vicious, unprincipled campaign of lying, smears, deceit and deception against Corbyn and the Labour Party, it would not be surprising to find these liars using every dirty trick in the book. Hard to imagine that they would have any scruples about rigging the vote-counting process, probably focussing on the postal votes in about 50 to 100 marginal constituencies. Unfortunately it takes time and effort to dig up the evidence to prove it, but some people are working on it. Watch this space.

Quite a good analysis from The New York Review of Books{{efn|" The country is now being governed by a hard-right government placed in power by its oldest citizens, in the face of the active hatred of its increasingly socialist-inclined youth. It’s fairly clear that for the Johnson team, Brexit was never anything but an electoral strategy, and that they don’t have the slightest idea how to translate it into economic prosperity." {{harv|Graeber|2020}}.}}{{efn|"Margaret Hodge, Labour MP for an East London constituency, really set off the summer’s conflagration in 2018 when she denounced Corbyn in Parliament as (in her words) “a fucking anti-Semite and a racist” over a purely technical quarrel over whether all the examples would be included when Labour adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism; but Corbyn supporters were quick to point out that the two had first tangled over Jewish issues in 1987, when Hodge was head of the Islington Council, and Corbyn, then a young local MP, had joined with Jewish activist groups to stop the council from selling the site of an Orthodox cemetery to property developers. Corbyn actually had a long history of supporting Jewish causes and had worked especially closely with the Haredim community." {{harv|Graeber|2020}}.}}{{efn|"Accusing Corbyn of being personally indifferent, or even sympathetic, to what happened when the floor was opened to everyone was a textbook application of Karl Rove’s famous principle of swiftboating: if one really wishes to discredit a political opponent, one attacks not his weaknesses, but his strengths. Until then, even Corbyn’s enemies had admitted he was an honest man and a dedicated antiracist. Suddenly, he stood accused of being himself, personally, anti-Semitic, and of being a lying weasel for denying it." {{harv|Graeber|2020}}.}} by David Graeber.

• See the report on disinformation during the election campaign.

  In summary, the evidence suggests that the current regulatory framework for political advertising and campaigning during elections is not fit for purpose and wholly inadequate for the digital terrain on which elections are increasingly fought. There is no greater threat to democracy than disinformation, especially when it is produced and disseminated by an incumbent government and reinforced by the bulk of the mainstream press. As well as fact checking claims in real-time, broadcasters should provide viewers with regular updates and data on the scale of falsehoods put out by rival parties. As for online advertising, it seems clear that the current policies and enforcement operated by the platforms is nothing more than minimal and feeble given the scale of the problem. Unless and until the major platforms are able to implement a robust fact checking approval system before publication, there is an unanswerable case to ban all political advertising online during election periods {{harv|Schlosberg|2021}}.

Quotes and notes

{{notelist}}

Sources

• {{cite web| title = Corbyn’s defeat has slain the left’s last illusion

| last = Cook | first = Jonathan

| author-link = Jonathan Cook

| website = Jonathan Cook's Blog

| url = https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2019-12-13/corbyns-defeat-slayed-the-lefts-last-illusion/

| date = 13 December 2019

}}

• {{Cite news| title = The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’

| last = Graeber | first = David

| author-link = David Graeber

| newspaper = NYR Daily

| url = https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/13/the-center-blows-itself-up-care-and-spite-in-the-brexit-election/

| date = 13 January 2020

}}

• {{Cite web| title = Someone Interfered In The UK Election, And It Wasn’t Russia

| last = Johnstone | first = Caitlin

| website = medium.com

| url = https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/someone-interfered-in-the-uk-election-and-it-wasnt-russia-b98700a4a12

| quote = it is also undeniable that the election was affected by a political smear campaign that was entirely unprecedented in scale and vitriol in the history of western democracy. This smear campaign was driven by billionaire-controlled media outlets, along with intelligence and military agencies, as well as state media like the BBC.

| date = 13 December 2019

}}

• {{Cite news| title = Boris Johnson is a shameless pathological liar who will let you down

| last = Oborne | first = Peter

| author-link = Peter Oborne

| newspaper = The Daily Mirror

| url = https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-shameless-pathological-liar-21077915

| quote = I have voted Tory all my life. But I have become so repelled by Johnson’s endless lying that I will be voting for Jeremy Corbyn when I enter the polling booth this morning.

| date = 11 December 2019

}}

• {{Cite web| title = GE2019: A post mortem on truth

| last = Schlosberg | first = Justin

| author-link = Justin Schlosberg

| website = Truth Defence

| url = https://www.truthdefence.org/disinformation

| date = February 2021 | access-date = 7 February 2021

| quote = What was particularly striking about the Conservatives' false or misleading ad campaigns was the degree to which they were concentrated on the last week before polling day. On Google, the party ran nearly 50% of all their false advertising during this single crucial week. Given that the average time lag for Google to remove ads deemed in breach of its policies was 7 days, this strategy ensured that any such removals would have a negligible impact on the campaign. Indeed, five of the ads that were banned by Google were only removed on polling day itself.

}}

• Full report (PDF): https://2f8283e3-ada7-492e-a67f-c276f0e760e2.filesusr.com/ugd/3a3360_bedd1ada47d8464da93ed59b2a7733f7.pdf

I strongly recommend this book:

• {{Cite book| title = Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn

| last = Winstanley | first = Asa | year = 2023

| author-link = Asa Winstanley

| publisher = OR Books | location = New York

| isbn = 978-1-68219-381-5

}}

This book is the definitive work on the bogus-antisemitism smear campaign that destroyed Corbyn. Winstanley has had the help of dozens of people, and they have gone to great lengths to ensure that everything has been accurately sourced and verified. I used to think that I knew everything about the smear campaign, having watched, with horror, its progress, but this book is an eye-opener. Everything about the smears has been based on lies, from top to bottom and beginning to end. To a much greater extent than I had imagined. One point surprised me, and that was the extent of Corbyn's capitulation, towards the end of the campaign, under the intense military-Zionist pressure. At first sight I had thought this was a good thing (it's always good, in peace-making, to look for compromise), but he started apologising for telling the truth. It's fine to apologise for making a mistake, but never, ever apologise for telling the truth. Once you start on that path, the military-Zionists will never stop. Just like blackmailers, they will come back again and again, asking for more and more. You absolutely cannot, and should not, appease them. An important lesson for the future. -- 11:06 (UTC), Friday 13 October 2023.

Another source: not my style of argument (he argues very trenchantly, and his pieces lack the polish that you would expect in a conventional publication), but Tony Greenstein is very well informed on the whole anti-Corbyn smear campaign, well worth reading. See

• https://tonygreenstein.com/the-media-blackout-on-al-jazeeras-labour-files-says-everything-about-britains-free-press/
• https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-media-blackout-on-al-jazeeras.html

Take your pick (they're basically the same, but the different platforms format them differently). He makes a very strong argument that Corbyn capitulated far too easily to Zionist pressure, much worse than I had thought. The message is clear: never, ever give in to Zionist pressure; like all blackmailers they will never be satisfied, and will always come back for more. --NSH001 (talk) 01:41, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

Hello :)

I am writing my MA dissertation on Wikipedia Wars and the Israel-Palestine conflict, and I noticed that you have contributed to those pages. My dissertation will look at the process of collaborative knowledge production on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the effect it has on bias in the articles. This will involve understanding the profiles and motivations of editors, contention/controversy and dispute resolution in the talk pages, and bias in the final article.

For more information, you can check out my [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Wars_and_the_Israel-Palestine_Conflict meta-wiki research page] or my [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sarabnas user page], where I will be posting my findings when I am done.

I would greatly appreciate if you could take 5 minutes to fill out [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdriEAkTQCq5Us26lxEqbjfw4jh3ktqTLaE8FN7fYY7Eph1Fw/viewform?usp=sf_link this quick survey] before 8 August 2021.

Participation in this survey is entirely voluntary and anonymous. There are no foreseeable risks nor benefits to you associated with this project.

Thanks so much,

Sarah Sanbar

Sarabnas ^{I'm researching Wikipedia} _Questions? 20:51, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

:{{u|Sarabnas}}, sorry for taking so long to reply – I still have my hands full with recovering from the sudden death of my old laptop, plus some medical problems (oh, the joys of getting old!).

:

:I do have reservations about surveys (too much depends on how they are framed), but I might still have a go at your survey in due course. Doing so might of course prompt a few more thoughts, in which case I will record them either here, or on your page. My first thought, on receipt of your message and looking at your page and contribution list was that you seemed to have missed out a lot of editors; however you seem to have mostly remedied that on 24 July. I have been around here a very long time, and it is striking how so many editors who caused me so much trouble in the early days have since been blocked/banned, mostly for sockpuppetry. Re people being blocked/banned, you might like to take a look at Nishidani's user page for the story of how he got himself banned and reinstated. Israel/Palestine wasn't originally among my concerns before I encountered Wikipedia. But I am interested in peace activists (very difficult to get these right on Wikipedia, because the so-called "reliable sources" are, in their case, about as unreliable as you can get), and I soon came accross Rachel Corrie (whose dad, by the way, is – like me – a retired actuary) and was horrified by what was being done to her article. It all seemed so totally bizarre (as does mainstream US politics, since the propaganda being pushed in mass media is both so powerful and so counter-factual).

:

:That got me looking into more sources on Israel/Palestine, and I began to appreciate the horror of what was happening to the Palestinians. I already had an inkling from reading Noam Chomsky, though at the time I was more interested in Latin America, having spent 3 weeks with a Quaker group in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and later 2 separate visits to Bolivia working with a Quaker charity, also Costa Rica, a country that decided to abolish its army. Nowadays I tend to leave Israel/Palestine to a small team who are very good at what they're doing (much better than me), but I still do some technical edits there, and will occasionally offer support when needed. The use of language also bothers me – I don't think those who describe themselves as "pro-Israel" are for the benefit of Israel at all, they're pro-something, but not Israel in the natural sense of the word. I regard Israel as a tragedy. I grew up, like most of my generation, with a huge sense of sympathy for Jews, their long history as the victims of persecution, pogroms, racism and bigotry, and above all the Holocaust. Present-day Israel feels like a betrayal of that history: partly because of interference by outside military powers, and partly because Israel has been taken over by militarists and militarism, exemplifying the moral corruption that always accompanies militarism. Quakers have a long history of helping Jews (there's a little about that on my user page), also other groups who have been similarly victimised, but overall, probably Jews more than any other group. It's a tragedy, when it could have been a "light unto the nations".

:

:I think Wikipedia is hopeless at covering the horrors being perpetrated all over the world by the US military (and sadly, the UK also), and sooner or later something is going to have to be done about what qualifies as "Reliable Sources"; perhaps the worst example is Syria, and the activists working on the ground there. You might want to take a look at my user page, which has something to say about Syria. But the horror is ubiquitous. Still, there's reason for optimism – Wikipedia's treatment of Israel/Palestine today is much, much better than it was 15 years ago. That's partly because of the persistent hard work being put in by some editors, and partly because there do exist "Reliable Sources" which are in fact accurate, not the case for many other topics or geographical areas. --NSH001 (talk) 15:52, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

::Hi NSH001 - thanks so much for your message! I greatly enjoyed reading it. I completely understand your reservations re: surveys, and I share them. My hope with the survey was to gain more insight into the personal motivations of editors (which isn't always shared on the user page) and help illuminate some of the meta-level dynamics I am finding through edit history. I have been making my way through the editor list, which is slow work that requires a lot of copy-pasting...I'm getting there, though! :)

::Wikipedia feels like a never ending rabbit hole, and each day I open my laptop to work on my dissertation I find another interesting nugget. Unpacking the politics has been curious as well, especially comparing the way people are treated or sanctioned and the ways that mirrors inequalities in 'real life' as well. Exactly as you said as well, it's been interesting to see how certain editors/sockpuppets have been banned and weeded out. I think it raises some interesting questions about the power of norms in the Wikipedia community and the extent to which it's able to self-govern in a way that promotes collaboration over competition. The Israel-Palestine case in particular is interesting because in many ways it's an exaggerated microcosm of the dynamics happening elsewhere. Wikipedia is fantastic in so many ways, but it has a lot of weaknesses - some of which are structural - that need to be addressed if it's going to protect itself from mis/disinformation, coordinated editing campaigns, accuracy, neutrality and so on. As the world (and Google!) relies on Wikipedia more and more, pointing out and working to fix those weaknesses becomes even more important. Hopefully my dissertation will be a step in that direction, and thank you for your efforts to do the same!

::Very cool about the Quakers by the way - I used to work for an NGO founded by Quakers :) I really enjoyed working there, and really resonated with a lot of Quaker ideas and principles as well, especially the emphasis on nonviolence and social justice. Sarabnas ^{I'm researching Wikipedia} _Questions? 17:47, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

:::{{u|Sarabnas}}, hope you're not having too many problems with your dissertation. I was very impressed by this interview with Ken Loach:

:::*{{Cite interview| title = 'The left is at a unique moment post-Corbyn - but time is running out for real change': Film director KEN LOACH speaks to Morning Star editor Ben Chacko about the state of the movement ahead of Labour's 2021 conference

| last = Loach | first = Ken

| subject-link1 = Ken Loach

| interviewer = Ben Chacko

| newspaper = Morning Star

| url = https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/left-unique-moment-post-corbyn-time-running-out-real-change

| date = 17 September 2021

}}

:::Loach is [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVP6PlX_UUA calm and collected], despite what is being done to him by the nonentities currently running the Labour Party, and in my opinion his analysis of what needs to be done to stop {{small caps|the bastards}} is spot-on. And just like Rachel Corrie, Ben Chacko's dad is an actuary! Probably retired by now, but I'd have to check to be sure. Yet another coincidence, the company he (Chacko père) worked for, Eagle Star offered me a job when I finished university, but I turned them down for another company. I was very tempted to take the job, because Cheltenham is a very pleasant place to live and work. I particularly remember the job interview because when I mentioned that I would have studied French at university if I hadn't done maths, we conducted the rest of the interview in French. Best wishes, --NSH001 (talk) 18:05, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Those html comments will stop CB from editing those parameters? Or are you expecting humans who run the bot to read them? If the former, cool! I didn't know that. If the latter, I don't think it'll work because the whole problem (in my view) is editors run the bot on articles without ever checking to see if the bot made any mistakes afterwards. Either way, I hope your solution works -- if it does, I'll probably adopt it in the future, so thanks either way. Levivich (talk) 16:55, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

:It's all documented at User:Citation bot. The devs can't monitor all the changes, but I know they do try to look at as many of the "deny Citation bot"-type comments as they can. --NSH001 (talk) 17:23, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

I consider WP:REFVAR to include the headings and organization of the references. I have put them back to the way they were before you started editing the article Tell (archaeology). If you want to change them, get consensus on the talk page, do not continue to edit war over it. Skyerise (talk) 21:54, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

:You cannot possibly have read the essay WP:BCC I linked in my edit summary, before reverting so quickly. In fact this citation style has gradually been developed bit-by-bit over many years between myself and a small group of editors, including most notably Nishidani, who is the major contributor to this article. In fact I have not broken REFVAR or CITEVAR, but merely restored the style and layout used by the major contributor to the article. I think this is the first occasion that I have not applied my ETVP script shortly after a (usually longish) series of contributions by Nishidani, which has thus understandably caused you to inadvertently break CITEVAR/CITESTYLE (because you couldn't see my user name in the contribution list). But it is still worrying that you are reverting so quickly, and without giving the matter any thought.{{pb}} This is even more strange, since I was responding to the request made within the "citation style" tag, which I now note that you yourself posted on 2 September 2023. Note also that I didn't simply revert your addition of the "References" header, but I took the time to consider why someone might not like that particular layout. I could see that the level 2 header line after only two items in the note list looks ugly, so I combined them as level 3 headers under a single level 2 heading. I think that is considerate, thoughtful editing, resulting in a much nicer appearance. Of course the biblio listing is sufficiently important that it merits its own level 2 header.{{pb}} More generally, the most "correct" layout is to have "citations" as a subsection (with a level 3 header) under "Notes", without even having a separate header, since citations themselves are a subset of notes (see WP:BCC). The trouble with this approach is that some well-intentioned editor will often come along and insert an additional header for the notelist, and it's not worth the bother of arguing over. It's difficult to find a solution that satifies everone and that also complies with WP:BCC, so I have to thank you for promping me to think of another possibility.{{pb}} --NSH001 (talk) 23:39, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

:PS. Re your edit summary "this is the way it was before you started editing here", I may not have actually physically edited this article until today (which is yesterday by BST), but I have been following it for many years. --NSH001 (talk) 23:48, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

::Yes, everyone has their personal opinions as to what is "correct". And WP:REFVAR clearly gives the existing editors of the article have a right to say "no" to a newcomer's changes to conform an article to their own personal preference, regardless of how long they have been watching the article. And no, I don't have to read your essay. Essays are neither policy nor guidelines. If you like to read essays, try WP:BRD, which says that if you are bold and are reverted, you should start a discussion on the talk page and get consensus, and that whenever there is a dispute between two editors about a bold change, the article should be left at the previous status quo until the bold editor shows a consensus for the disputed changes on the talk page. Since you like to follow essays. Skyerise (talk) 10:44, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

but for the fact that the Tories won the election again, with an overwhelming majority this time, only under an alias, as they did with Blair. Best wishes and auguries nonetheless. Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

:Indeed, it baffles me that people will vote for one Tory party (namely, Starmer's Genocide Labour) because they're fed up with the original Tory Party. It shows just how terrifyingly powerful the MSM still is. See my notes about Democritans and Republocrats above. A moment's reflection shows that Genocide Labour have to be even worse than the Tories, otherwise they wouldn't get the financial backing from the oligarchs, billionaires, arms manufacturers, and predatory corporate interests they need to survive. Genocide Labour is all about appearing to be better, while doing the opposite. A bunch of liars. At least the Tories are more honest about what they are, and they do have a few people on the libertarian wing who are against starting wars. --NSH001 (talk) 04:00, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

::They only had 30% of the vote, to achieve a massive majority of 412 seats. This also happened in Italy, where a (barely) post-fascist party with risible numbers, came to power with 30% of the vote of 48% of the electorate. Idem for Le Pen in France.Two things consoled me. Bernie Sanders' congratulating Corbyn for taking a seat from the standard Labour stooge, and Liz Truss (famous for herTen Years To Save the West book, written after she'd nearly managed the opposite by coming close to bankrupting GB) being kicked out. Sanders, Corbyn old men, with whom one could also strongly disagree about specifics. It's distressing to see that generation pass. Intelligence, passion and, above all, human and humane decency, that, unlike Biden, Trump et al., burns bright into old age, and in that regard one often sighs at the passing of parliamentarians like Gerald Kaufman. We're in a different world. Were I young I would write a book on cognitive dissociation in post-modernity. Nishidani (talk) 16:08, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

:::Well Corbyn was in good form at today's (yesterday's by BST) National Protest against the Genocide. So was Andrew Feinstein, whose book After the Party mentions dozens of people worthy of that generation you mention. I would add Olof Palme to that generation. Corbyn didn't "take a seat", he retained the one he already had, comprehensively defeating the Genocide Labour nonentity, yet another of those who want to destroy the NHS. But overall it's pretty depressing how the Genocide parties have retained control. Bizarre that the ultra military-Zionist Puke Achefart, who has now morphed into a genocide-Zionist ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FS4ra9uamk yes, he really is that bad]), and who parachuted himself into the constituency, with which which he has no connection at all, couldn't be defeated by an anti-genocide candidate. I was expecting Andrew Feinstein to do better against Starmer in HSP. I've written before about Liz Truss. My own constituency, which has always been an ultra-safe Tory seat with the Lib Dems as the main opposition (with a blip when Labour came second thanks to Jeremy Corbyn) has now become a Lib Dem seat, but only because there are/were enough racists among the Tories to vote Reform, and split the vote. The Tory is actually quite a decent chap (except for voting largely according to the Conservative Party line) who, in recent years, has concentrated on being a good constituency MP, and is not a member of Conservative Friends of Israel. I met him a couple of times: once in a hustings, and once when he came to a public event at the Quaker Meeting House. In these circumstances I take no comfort from his defeat.

:::The process of destroying the NHS is accelerating. Went for an MRI scan at the main hospital on Friday, to find that the MRI unit has been taken over by a private company, with its logo plastered all over the unit. At Victoria station there is now a private GP surgery. Plenty of other examples. Leaflets through my letter box every week advertising private dentists. (Should have rescheduled the MRI when I realised it was the day after the GE, as I was very tired from staying up late for the election results.) The result of the privatisations will be the extraction of economic rent, quadrupling costs. So the politicians will be able to claim they're spending more on the NHS, when the reality is that the money is going into private profits and unnecessary administration and overheads, while nurses and doctors lose their job satisfaction, become demoralised, and the actual healthcare gets worse. --NSH001 (talk) 01:54, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

:::Should also mention that these colossal profits are funded by taxes, a huge risk-free return on (non-)investment, violating all the principles held dear by the free-market ideologues. --NSH001 (talk) 08:34, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

::::Michael Hudson has a larger overview of the structural picture. One can take his approach or leave it, but strong evidence has been emerging for some time that the responsibility for this shift of the lower income class to the right lies with centrist government, rights and left. Both the middle and lower classes have suffered quite a degree of immiseration or a growing sense of economic insecurity and precariousness over two decades of predominantly 'liberal' governments, with their almost religious faith in the ideological postulate that 'free markets' (they don't exist of course) can allocate the social goods of a modern society more efficiently and at a cheaper cost than any state. This is really fucking infantile, shorn of any grasp of political history, but if you don't subscribe to it, you won't win power. Ergo Starmer's pathetic pyrrhic victory, as he'll shortly discover. We're testing Michael Polanyi's hypothesis in The Great Transformation(1944) which assigned the responsibility for the radicalization of the right to the failure of imperial liberal policies. It's so easy to lay the blame on the far-right, when the f-r is very much the product of the financialization of all and everything by centrists. You might like to chuck a shufti at Judith Derndorfer and Stefan Kranzinger's, [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/00213624.2021.1982338?needAccess=true The Decline of the Middle Class: New Evidence for Europe,] Journal of Economic Issues, Volume 55, 2021, Issue 4 pp.914-938 which is readily downloadable.Nishidani (talk) 19:59, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

:::Thanks to the Youtube link re Luke Akehurst. Amazing things crawl out of the woodwork. He was luckier than Meyer Habib in the French legislative elections. The extraordinary thing about Habib is that his campaign featured videos from Netanyahu et al., so that now we even accept that foreign politicians can directly intervene in the elections of other country. The case interests me because it suggested a certain fracture: Habib received 85% of the Israeli French vote, but the French Jews in the rest of the 8th overseas district (from Cyprus to Italy) knew his background better, and the diaspora disowned him. Which reminds me, I should edit that obscure wikibio to update it.Nishidani (talk) 21:19, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

::::By the way, you're probably familiar with Piers Morgan's 'interview' (!!!) with Jeremy Corbyn. It's astonishing, interviewing someone and never allowing them to get a single sentence completed before badgering them with questions, and in the end, after at least 100 interruptions most consisting of repeating the same phrase, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EKGI-XW5hs accusing that honourable man of not answering questions]. It looks pathological but perhaps is just tabloid cynicism, trying to put words into someone's mouth while ensuring they shut up. Nishidani (talk) 22:13, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Hi, I see you've contributed a lot to The Dreaming, would you be interested in a taskforce on oral tradition? Kowal2701 (talk) 12:12, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

:I appreciate the invitation, but it's not really one of my areas of interest or expertise. Basically all I've ever done on The Dreaming is run my ETVP cleanup script from time to time – which I've now done after a gap of more than 4 years, so thank you for the prompt! --NSH001 (talk) 21:55, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Have you time to look at Pangerang talk page. I trust your judgment as completely neutral, so there is no danger of my dragging you into a dispute as support. It's a technical issue. Hope all's well Nishidani (talk) 12:47, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

:Responded on Talk:Pangerang. --NSH001 (talk) 15:46, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Oddly, yesterday i went out for an early breakfast at 7:30. And sitting in the bright morning sun outside a bar, the following rushed at me so quickly I had to ask an elderly woman nearby doing some crossword with a pencil, if she could spare it for a second, several times as lines came.

It's still not a poem in my terms. But it is a little above verse.

''The morning’s golden like a bell of hair

''(I must remember to caress her wig).

''For now I breakfast by an empty chair

''Croissant and coffee over an early cig.

''I flick through dreamwork tatters walking back.

''A search for a missing person; dark that fails

''To yield some light; stumbling on a track

''That leads to nowhere’s bewilderment of trails.

''That [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken must be Frost] in part, but at the end

''There are no forking paths where one must choose.

''The future’s past, and, mean time, one must bend

''To tinker each day regardless of the bruise.

''That chair’s not empty. No. It’s squat with the stuff

''Of memory, and that, my sweet, is company enough.

best regards Nishidani (talk) 16:42, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

:A beautiful and moving tribute to your wife. Thank you. Brings back painful memories of my mother, taken from us some 10 or 20 years before her time. --NSH001 (talk) 15:38, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

::Thanks, N. We share a common grief, as my mother also died very prematurely, at the hour of my birth exactly 20 years later, aged 63 (while I was at Kfar Aza. Thus I can never celebrate my birthday). I'm not happy with it technically. I know something in it points towards poetry, but I never have the patience to spend the necessary time, sometimes months (Larkins et al), to wrestle with an initial prompt and sift out the awkwardnesses that mark it as foetal, healthy but not yet born. ('Bell' as in 'bell of hair' might look odd, but that's not the problem. It comes from a passage in an Aldous Huxley novel I read some 50 odd years ago. The image stuck, though I can no longer recall the book, only that it was midpage on the left hand side of that book's paging). Hope all's well.Nishidani (talk) 15:57, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

:::Desecration [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjwycG_9Ujo here (45 mins)] is a video about a wonderful 61 year old peaceful woman with Crohn's disease who had her mother's ashes desecrated by a team of 16 men, supposedly from "anti-terrorism" police. To her, that was the worst they did, but they also physically – and very painfully – attacked her, humiliated her, wrecked her house, stole her money (including some foreign money), looted other valuables from her house, confiscated thousands of pounds worth of phones, computers and electronic equipment, confiscated her Crohn's medication (even offering her some woman, supposedly a "nurse" or "doctor", who turned out not to be medically qualified), and did everything they could to make life impossible for her. That is bad enough, but she is well aware that that is nothing compared to what is happening to the Palestinians. (quote: "That's why I said there's this real kind of Israeli feel about it, that to descrate the remains of somebody's parents to the point that they can't even retrieve the ashes from the floor and everywhere they've gone is completely unlawful, it's a complete violation of humanity.") Then she had totally impossible bail conditions imposed on her. In my opinion, this attack must have been "authorized" at the highest political level. --NSH001 (talk) 14:20, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

::::Hallucinating. I recognize that what reportedly happened is normal in Palestine, and thoroughly documented, including the theft of money after a 'security' search. Unfortunately, she has not done what must be done in those circumstances: immediately film the inside of your house, with a time stamp, while not touching a thing. A direct video testimony reconstructing what happened will be her version against that of the police. Had she done that, then the journalists' union, and some mainstream papers like The Guardian for one would have had to report it, which they haven't yet done. That itself is very odd. Keep me informed (and it is not that I am sceptical. In 1983 I read Vincent Buckley's memoir and was stopped in my tracks by reading a passage by that mild and genial, apparently middle class man, (he lived near me) that 'the world is far more totalitarian than we imagine'). Nishidani (talk) 16:08, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

::::: Not possible. They immediately handcuffed her, and kicked her son out of the house. They took everything she might use to "document" the raid, and in any case she wasn't allowed to return until late at night, having been raided at 7:30am. Plus the lack of medication meant she was effectively incapacitated. She has plenty of experience of this sort of thing, having been harrassed about 20 times before, though this is the worst. --NSH001 (talk) 16:54, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

::::::I was referring to the day she returned. She should have been in company, and, whatever the regulations imposed on her, she should have disobeyed them to that end. My reservations are just technical. I've been telling people for years who drive that the first thing to do, or think of, in an incident, is to whip out their smartphones and start filming the scene. B'tselem and other organizations' gifting of cameras and handheld recording devices over the last decade or so has had immense value in documenting what is happening, in a way that makes, automatically, 99% of IDF handouts look like the garbage they are.Nishidani (talk) 17:07, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

:::::::The bail conditions are irrelevant, she doesn't have ANY of the tools/equipment necessary, they even confiscated all the phones in the house, which obviously includes her son's. Perhaps she could have arranged for a friend or relative with a smartphone to accompany her, but HTF does she do that late at night, in a medically incapacitated state, without a phone? Bear in mind also, that said friend or relative would need to have a car and be willing to drive quite some distance, at night, on rural roads,{{efn|English country roads can be very enjoyable to drive during the day, but not at night. There is one notorious road near here that takes about 70mins, but at night I would take an alternative route that is mostly motorway. An actuary friend of mine lost 2 or 3 young friends killed in a horrendous crash on that road, many years ago. The driver was young and not very experienced.}} to get to her house. Yes it might be useful to have a film of the wrecked house, but it's not essential evidence. --NSH001 (talk) 13:11, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

::::::{{notelist}}

• I see the Morning Star has picked up the story: . Let's see how long it takes for the Grauniad – or any other paper – to "get" it. --NSH001 (talk) 19:11, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
• Jonathan Cook was very quick to raise this story: [https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-08-30/starmer-jailing-palestine-supporters "Starmer’s purges of Labour have mutated into the arrest of Palestine supporters: Britain’s authoritarian new prime minister is expanding the scope of already draconian laws to redefine his critics as ‘supporters’ of terrorism"].
• This is the Twitter/X feed that the genocide-Zionists didn't like: . One (or more) of her children is continuing to use the X account to get more info out. Not sure yet which one. The huge number of posts/tweets that she posts every day is astonishing; most of them are heartbreaking, it gets too hard to bear after a while. It's a dilemma: read too many and one can become desensitized to the horror, but one still needs to be reminded of the whole obscenity, to keep up the motivation to do something to stop it. I will certainly be going to the big demo this Saturday (7 September), but this really isn't enough. Unfortunately it's probably not a good idea at my age to try clambering over the roofs of Elbit factories. --NSH001 (talk) 05:32, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
• Re Elbit, here is [https://www.youtube.com/live/NtupddupAMA&t=300s an extended interview (65mins) from Dec 2023]. Encouraging that Palestine Action are succeeding in steadily reducing the number of Elbit factories/offices that are still in business. --NSH001 (talk) 06:16, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
• Arms exports to Israel aren't just Elbit. The UK has recently been forced to suspend some export licences, 30 out of 350 (8.6%). [https://x.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/1830682856831762870 Craig Murray] says that "Lammy and Starmer's hand [was] forced by threatened resignation of five FCDO Legal Advisers. BBC know this but won't report [it]." Declassified UK [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COZtzdlVuEA reports] that this is better than it appears at first sight, as "based on its statement to Parliament yesterday they've actually revoked all licenses that are capable of being used in Gaza with the exception of these F-35 licenses that go via other countries but the proportion 30 out of 350 is actually quite misleading because what they've done is said anything that they assess could be used in Gaza is revoked." (my emphasis) It's a good step in the right direction, but what is needed is an immediate ban on all arms sales to Israel. --NSH001 (talk) 13:45, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

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