Wikimedia Affiliates Association AfD

Or will our Excellency deserve another swift and sweet GenderDesk note yet again? O, let its (T)RUTH femalesplain us all also there by stealing groping our idea or two in turn; we nicely beseech thee, o gentle lady of the voting booth…[source]

Try to imagine this with genderdesk silhouette superimposed.

Okay, that looks like a bat signal.

The Wikimedia Affiliates Association has been nominated for deletion. Unfortunately, this page is on the talk page of Hillbillyholiday Unfrozen, so this means, in essence, that the user’s talk page is also nominated for deletion.

Also, this is the account of Wikipediocracy’s newest mod. As I understand, the announcement was made something to the effect of “this is our new mod, God help us all”.  So they knew what they were getting into and they welcomed the circus. And I have to say, they have gotten good return on their investment in terms of unusual research.

TLDR:  Dude, archive it. Post cats.

But back to the task at hand.

Why are these people annoyed?

Well, what is on this page?  Trying to skim the thing, I find that I can’t. This is even more cryptic than Sashi, who you may remember upset the some Wikipediocrazies with his puns, many of them cross cultural, or incorporating sound word play and double meanings in multiple languages.  They were fun, to be sure, but they required quite a bit of googling to get the punch line, and maybe some knowledge of esoterica as well. People don’t always want to do that on a Wikipedia criticism page. Many of them just want to get up to date quickly on any controversies, because they have so many other things on their schedules.  But this page has sonnets, it has Hesse, it has witty repartee, that no one can understand, except the participants.  And I think it has more than a little Dadaism.  There is a fine line between Dada and insanity, and with Wikipedia, you don’t want to leave people in doubt, since it has such an overabundance of the latter.

But it is also a talk page, and is being used for talk.

And it’s not mean, or political, or Machiavellian.  It’s just people having fun. So it might be hard for Wikipedians to relate to.

So what are the rules and what are the precedents.  And what on earth is the purpose of that page.  Where is Nancy Drew when you need her.

First, you have to deal with the criticism.  The page has been nominated for deletion, but it is a user page.  Traditionally, wide latitude has been given in what people use their personal pages for.  Those are the policies you need to look for.  Think Bishonen, and the extensive sock drawers that have resulted, not to mention the hoax article pages (now userfied) and all the timeless scrotum jokes.

Personally, I would archive the page. Now.

Then I would post cats. This will buy time, so you can give it some thought. And not ‘Art History of the Existentialists’ type of cats either.  I’m talking cheesy cats.  Tacky cats. Cutesy cats that are lacking in any artistic merit whatsoever.

“Who is number one?”

Think of what kind of people Wikipedia is made of.  Autistic people, people who get their cues about human interaction from watching porn.  So ditch the existentialism, unless you want to post memes from The Prisoner. But I think even that would go whoosh. Lose the ASCII code.  Lose the Chaucerian English. At least for now.

Then think of what you want to use the page for, and how much it would go against your principles to change it, in which case you would have to attempt to defend it, in more or less plain English.  Is it meant to be a parody of something?  Or just a placeholder for something yet to be developed.  Or maybe a Wikipediocracy annex for extended chat.  You don’t want people to get the idea it’s a serious project that people can really join if it is meant for satire. Maybe you need to create a subpage, or even separate socks for those interactions, and link them from the talk page, or however they do it over there. In any case, it is Meta, you need to put on some Meta camo, at least for now.  You can always go back to the literary criticism later, more gradually, once you have your objectives firmed up.

Or maybe you should just ask them what is their objection.  It might be something really simple.  Maybe I’m overthinking it.

After all, I’m not really a cat person or even a Cuteness Association person.  Like Isarra, I’m more of a goatification sort of person.

01001001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 00101110

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UPDATE: ooooooh, a “keep” vote. Because “sheer absurdity”. Also “is in scope”. Do I see a “keep, no consensus” result shaping up? https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta:Requests_for_deletion&oldid=22403858#User:Hillbillyholiday_Unfrozen

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ANOTHER UPDATE: Just when it looked like the page would be kept–and the page does seem to be some kind of parody about the project funding process — it looks like Hillbillyholiday has decided to pull the plug on his own joke.  https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta:Requests_for_deletion&diff=prev&oldid=22407820

Oddly enough, or maybe not that oddly at all, the discussion has brought some unusual characters out of the woodwork.  User:NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh has reverted this edit of Hillbillyholiday no less than four times. [1,2,3,4] Does Meta have “edit warring”?  Apparently so, Dung Khong reports Hillbilly to some notice board somewhere and is told to stop. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta:Requests_for_help_from_a_sysop_or_bureaucrat&oldid=22407922#SPA

But you will notice that Dung Khong only reports the blocks, not that the reason was about safeguarding of minors, and how could they, when the edits themselves have been deleted.

“In short, this user was indeffed on Commons after 2 edits and is now requesting for deletion of it (the project in a whole). Does that really look like a serious request? NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 12:46, 4 December 2021 (UTC)”

This is the drawback of junior patrollers in general, and junior patrollers who do not speak English in particular. And why it is so easy for convicted criminals and fetishists to dominate a project. You will notice the admin who did the controversial block was also non-English speaking, and made no mention of the safeguarding issues, even though someone mentioned it in a discussion thread, and this recurring theme with this particular user seems to be particularly germane to the discussion. The theme, of course, cannot be discussed, so it must be discussed without discussing it.  This has been very tidily placed in a now-deleted edit by Hillbillyholiday, so only those with the capability to see deleted edits can see it, and not the general public. But it is exactly the “general public” i.e. junior patrollers, who are making the decisions, filing the complaints, and i-voting.

The second odd account that appeared would be User: not that jimmy who seems to have some kind of obsession with WMUK personage Monisha Shah, not to mention Hillbillyholiday.  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/NOT_that_Jimmy

Is that you, Crow?

For posterity, fwiw:

• http://web.archive.org/save/https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Hillbillyholiday_Unfrozen
• http://web.archive.org/web/20211026122840/https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Hillbillyholiday_Unfrozen

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ANOTHER UPDATE: unblock request. something looked weird about this, and sure enough,

“I have delivered to my conscience; I pray God you do take those courses that are best for the good of the kingdom and your own salvation.” -King Charles I of England, aka King Charles the Martyr, trail and execution 1649, led to the reign of Cromwell, who iirc turned out to be one of England’s worst villains.

Ah here is the image of ‘Saint Charles King and Martyr.’ [Source on Internet Archive, thank you Kahle Brewster]  As usual, this thing is encrusted in layers of referential UK metaphors, but perhaps this is it, sentenced to death by the “Rump Commons”, consisting of Cromwell followers, that abolished the House of Lords, and was in turn abolished by Cromwell?