User talk:lethargilistic

Welcome!

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February 2017

Please do not add or change content, as you did at Lake Angelus (Michigan), without citing a reliable source using an inline citation that clearly supports the material. The burden is on the person wishing to keep in the material to meet these requirements, as a necessary (but not always sufficient) condition. Please review the guidelines at Wikipedia:Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. Thank you. John from Idegon (talk) 02:46, 28 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome to Wikipedia: check out the Teahouse!

Hello! Lethargilistic, you are invited to the Teahouse, a forum on Wikipedia for new editors to ask questions about editing Wikipedia, and get support from peers and experienced editors. Please join us! John from Idegon (talk) 17:31, 28 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

U.S. Supreme Court cases work

Hi. Thank you for all your help with U.S. Supreme Court cases! I was especially impressed to see that you are creating redirects such as 191 U.S. 267 with the appropriate categorization and sort keys. Very neat.

Are you using the reports? I see that you're a GitHub user. Maybe we could collaborate on these reports sometime; they're just simple Python and SQL. Or maybe you'll be the person to finally kill off that awful "SCOTUS" template parameter and its associated "Court composition key" section. That would be so nice. I just had to use it again for an edit (mentioned below) and boy is that composition key still terribly cumbersome.

Regarding Perris v. Hexamer, it looks like the year was wrong. I updated it in this edit. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:54, 31 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! Thanks for those corrections.

I have been using those reports. I get bored doing the same thing over and over again, so I'll switch to another batch task like those redirect corrections. I'm not familiar with the issue with the SCOTUS parameter, though. Is it just that looking up the key in the list is annoying? I'm a professional software developer and I know both Python and SQL, so if you want to give me a more detailed idea of what the issue is, I'd be happy to collaborate.

One question about your recent edits like this, too: why remove the {{scite}}s in the text? I thought the purpose of that template was to format that data automatically, although now I'm seeing that I forgot to remove the external link and such. lethargilistic (talk) 20:42, 1 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding article leads, I created {{scite}} and tried to spread its usage, but lots of people didn't really like the complexity of the markup or the linking behavior. They preferred just plaintext instead, so that's what we're now trying to standardize on, I think. The relevant discussion is here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_U.S._Supreme_Court_cases&oldid=833147838#Case_lead_sentences>.

Regarding the "SCOTUS" parameter, I think the "Court composition" section should be automatically filled out based on the decision date. Yes, the current system is needlessly annoying to use. It's yet another step to take when creating a new stub article, unless you have the particular date range memorized (e.g., I know 1994–2005). The "Court composition key" has kludges like "1969b" for disambiguation and it has/had an expanding list of acceptable ranges for the latest court (2016–2017, 2016–2018, etc.), since the latest court has no fixed end year. This system is silly when we have the decision date and can just know the exact court composition at that point in time. I started to do this at User:MZMcBride/Sandbox using <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Succession_of_the_Justices_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States&oldid=788515472> and {{if between}}, but then got distracted and bored and still haven't finished. At some point I was like "oh, I could just write a Python script to do this for me," and I started but never finished. If you're familiar with Scribunto/Lua modules, that would also be an option for storing and/or calculating this data.

I just uploaded <https://github.com/mzmcbride/wikiproject-scotus> to GitHub. Hopefully I didn't include anything too embarrassing. Most of the code is from 2012, I guess, though I think I've worked on the scripts subsequently on a different host, so I may update some of those files with presumably newer versions. Time flies, man. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:51, 1 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that makes sense. I found the courts page for the SCOTUS parameter, so I can take a look at making that procedural. In the meantime (and in case I get distracted, myself) I would address the update problem you mentioned by changing the current court key to, for example "2017-CURRENT." Wouldn't have to be updated yearly, the next current would be "20XX-CURRENT" so there would never be any conflicts with the outdated 2017-CURRENT key, and it would be trivial for a bot to change that text to "2016-20XX" on all of the old court pages without breaking anything.

You may have seen me tinkering with the code by now. Are there any specific issues with these reports as of now? Are there any other reports you'd like implemented? Feel free to open issues over there. lethargilistic (talk) 21:27, 2 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah... I "solved" the latest court issue in this edit by doing what I want to do for all courts, but specific to the most recent court. It had the side effect of removing some of the rudimentary input validation and categorization in Category:Flagged U.S. Supreme Court articles, but oh well.

I can't remember any issues with the current reports. There are lots of inconsistencies and minor issues we could flag in U.S. Supreme Court wiki articles. For example, we could generate a report of articles where there are unitalicized links to cases. Or we could generate a report of articles where case names are never linked to. Usually at least the first reference should be linked.

We have an existing index of United States Reports volumes at Lists of United States Supreme Court cases by volume, but the volume pages themselves could probably use love. They're somewhat inconsistent. Plus all of them are technically somewhat mis-named and need to be moved at some point. There are also more front-end-y ideas we've had, such as making the tables at 2015 term opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States easier to view and/or edit.

A report about the number of red links on each of the volume pages would also be good to have. I think I may have already done some of this work. And then we need to make it easier to start new articles, since there are still thousands of fill out. For new and experienced wiki editors, there's still quite a bit of barrier to entry to create a new article. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:23, 2 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I started working on the SCOTUS issue and here's a gist of the output thus far. You'd know how to test it here better than I would, right now. These are the Chief Justices, and I intend to get them right before adapting the script for the associates. I didn't have data on redirects and such, so we'll have to go through and clear up disambiguation links and such manually. How do you feel about the formatting? Do you want each judge on one line? lethargilistic (talk) 06:30, 3 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Neat! You can compare against User:MZMcBride/Sandbox if you'd like.

We currently do two associate justices per line I believe, with a hard break after each pair. Here's an example: Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr. For the linking, I wouldn't worry too much about it. We can extract the correct links from a page such as List of United States Supreme Court Justices by time in office if necessary. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:40, 3 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Doing a quick comparison with <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:MZMcBride/Sandbox&oldid=740159661&action=edit>, I think we should account for vacancies explicitly. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:42, 3 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, added the vacancies to that gist. You seem satisfied so far, so I'll work on the Associates. Something else we'll have to take care of is the overlapping of dates. {{If between}} is inclusive, so every single "vacant" overlaps with the surrounding entries. To be completely honest, I'm not writing this code to last, so adding a thing to do that automatically would be annoying at this stage. Maybe I could write another script for that or just come back to it later, though. lethargilistic (talk) 18:35, 3 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hold on, it seems like there's discrepancy between the Succession article and the individual judges' articles. For example, John Rutledge's dates are completely different from the table linked earlier. I'm not sure which is correct, but the dates in the earlier version of the Succession article are still there on the current revision of that page. lethargilistic (talk) 18:57, 3 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

John Rutledge is a very strange case. The chart I linked to is probably most correct. There's some discrepancy between when the Senate confirmed (or not) a justice versus when the judicial oath was taken. Sometimes this is the same date; sometimes it isn't. If you want a more "authoritative" source, there's <https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/members_text.aspx>. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:25, 3 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I think I have this sorted, then. Here's the gist with the markup and you can currently see it live on {{X20}} until that gets sandboxed. Thoughts? There aren't any error messages because I'm not sure how those work and I'm not sure they would ever be relevant. Someone would have to put in a date that's before the founding of the Court or in the future. lethargilistic (talk) 21:47, 5 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Very neat. We'll need to wire this up to work with Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/sandbox and then compare the output of the the current template and the sandbox template to make sure everything looks okay. I do think we'll need some kind of sane fallback behavior if the decision date is invalid or not provided. Omitting the "Court membership" section altogether in these cases probably makes the most sense. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:19, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, then. I used {{X19}} for the infobox testing and {{X20}} for the /courts. Error detection happens in /courts and is marked with a comment. Let me know if you have any questions. lethargilistic (talk) 03:05, 11 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a little puzzled why you're using these transient "X" templates instead of the dedicated sandbox at Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/sandbox. :-) I mean, it's fine to use {{X19}} and friends, but you're then battling the bots and other users. We can make a /courts sandbox subpage if needed for testing. I was just personally hoping to sample a few dozen cases and check that the output looks good before (Template:Infobox SCOTUS case) and after (Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/sandbox). Then we can update the main template code and rip out those horrible lists from Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/doc#Court composition key. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:35, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Because I didn't know that was a thing, hahahaha. I'll do a more complete test with that later. lethargilistic (talk) 04:15, 12 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Check out Template:Infobox_SCOTUS_case/testcases, then. At this time, it seems like it's lacking the name redirects (William Orville Douglas -> William O. Douglas) and a sensible way of designating that the current court should be shown. There's no decide date if the case has not been argued yet. I'm trying to think of options. Maybe we could use the argument date as a fall back (but what about the current articles that don't have that listed)? Maybe setting DecideDate/Decide year to "CURRENT" (but that would auto-update and that wouldn't be great)? Maybe default to showing the latest court (but what about cases in the past that don't have DecideDate/DecideYear yet)? lethargilistic (talk) 19:23, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I made it fall back to the ArgueDate/ArgueYear if DecideDate/DecideYear isn't specified. It won't auto-update to the DecideDate court, but the court that heard the argument should be a sensibly informative alternative. Now all that's left is the redirecting. lethargilistic (talk) 16:38, 15 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Very nice! I think relying on the argue date and year if the decide date and year are missing is fine.

Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/sandbox has a convenient "(diff)" link since "/sandbox" subpages are fairly standardized on this wiki. I made some minor edits to Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/sandbox and Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/courts/sandbox.

We'll still need to fix a few links, such as William Paterson --> William Paterson (jurist). I can do these updates if you'd like.

Skimming Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/testcases, everything looks just about ready to me. Are there any other changes to make (other than the link fixes) before we push this live? --MZMcBride (talk) 05:13, 17 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yeas, the redirect fixing is the only remaining thing. Feel free to fix whatever ones you'd like. I'm probably far less familiar with these articles than yourself. lethargilistic (talk) 00:59, 18 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I expanded Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/testcases a bit earlier today. At least one "edge" case, North Carolina v. Pearce, has the wrong court membership currently when using the sandbox code. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:42, 29 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That's what they get for replacing the Chief Justice on the same day they announce a bunch of decisions. I fudged the day up and left a note in the code. lethargilistic (talk) 23:51, 29 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@MZMcBride: I fixed all the redirects and shortened all the extra names, so it's ready whenever you want to implement it. Let me know if you find another timeline issue, of course. lethargilistic (talk) 05:26, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've been running this script to find discrepancies. In some cases, the newer code is better (woo!), but in other cases, we may want to tweak the sandbox code a bit. Thanks again for all the work on this, I think it's really close to ready and I'm very excited to do away with this "SCOTUS" template parameter for good. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:41, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts is another "edge" case. It looks like Associate Justice Tom C. Clark assumed senior status on the same day the case was decided. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:55, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, try looking using your script now. I found New York ex rel. Cutler v. Dibble, which poses a problem because the case doesn't have a day more specific than "December Term, 1858." Not sure what to do about that. Could write in a special case for it, of course, but that strategy might get messy if there happen to be a lot of cases like that. lethargilistic (talk) 05:14, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This PDF will have specific dates: <https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/datesofdecisions.pdf>. Yeah, for cases where there's an incomplete decision date, we'll regress a bit with this new code. I think that's probably fine. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:50, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Another option, which doesn't needs consideration until we actually see a case with no known decision or arguement dates (or inexact decision date with a different court makeup than the argument), is making fields for the infobox with higher precedence than Decide and Argue. Hidden from the infobox visually, of course. ForceDate and ForceYear, maybe. Totally unnecessary right now. lethargilistic (talk) 03:44, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sidenote, Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. seems like it will have a vacant Chief Justice slot. Do we want to add a category for cases decided in the absence of a Chief, in addition to (in this case) Stone's Court category? lethargilistic (talk) 05:31, 24 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

On the general point, we've mostly not done automatic categorization with this infobox template, though perhaps we should reconsider that decision. By which I mean, we've had some basic input validation that would automatically categorize some articles in a "flagged" category, but we don't automatically populate Category:United States Supreme Court cases or Category:United States Supreme Court cases of the Roberts Court or Category:2014 in law, even though we could. Currently we've been relying on database reports to sync and cross-reference these lists, but perhaps we should revisit automatic categorization.

On the specific point, creating a Category:United States Supreme Court cases decided with a vacant Chief Justice seems a bit pedantic and esoteric, even by Wikipedia standards. While not strictly necessary, I don't think this phenomenon has been studied very much, if at all, academically, so having a category or article about it seems a bit too synthetic or original research-y to me. That said, there are many interesting bits of trivia from U.S. Supreme Court cases that it would be fun to collect outside of the article namespace, in my opinion. --MZMcBride (talk) 07:25, 26 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Arizona v. California and similar infoboxes that use the /court template directly would need manual updating. Also, it is confused by dates like "2 April," see Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy Corporation in /testcases. That's a limitation of {{If between}}. lethargilistic (talk) 06:02, 24 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Arizona v. California article is a fucking mess and has been for a long time. --MZMcBride (talk) 07:25, 26 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@MZMcBride: OK, it's worth taking another look now. I haven't seen any more mistakes in the output. Just lots of fixes, haha. lethargilistic (talk) 06:32, 24 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at the diff between the sandbox version and the current version of the infobox template, will the removal of that {{#if:{{{Outcome|}}}| branch have any impact? Otherwise, I think we're ready to go live. --MZMcBride (talk) 07:25, 26 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That {{#if:{{{Outcome|}}}| was redundant. It was handling date errors before passing them into /courts. It was working fine until I swapped in helper functions to make the code clearer, but the helper functions didn't allow the text styling that made the error text noticeable. I removed it and relied on the error handling in /courts, which is more informative anyway. Here are examples. lethargilistic (talk) 07:39, 27 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I also wanted to thank you for your work on Supreme Court cases. I'm glad I found this conversation - I didn't know about the WP:SCOTUSWORK reports. LegalSkeptic (talk) 01:59, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! It's fun! lethargilistic (talk) 05:31, 24 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

DISPLAYTITLE

On your user page, DISPLAYTITLE should have a colon after it, not a vertical bar. I fixed it on this user talk page, where it also occurred. However, I don't think I am able to edit your user page. HotdogPi 15:01, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. lethargilistic (talk) 15:59, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

May 2018

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. You appear to be repeatedly reverting or undoing other editors' contributions at Star Athletica, LLC v. Varsity Brands, Inc.. Although this may seem necessary to protect your preferred version of a page, on Wikipedia this is known as "edit warring" and is usually seen as obstructing the normal editing process, as it often creates animosity between editors. Instead of reverting, please discuss the situation with the editor(s) involved and try to reach a consensus on the talk page.

If editors continue to revert to their preferred version they are likely to be blocked from editing Wikipedia. This isn't done to punish an editor, but to prevent the disruption caused by edit warring. In particular, editors should be aware of the three-revert rule, which says that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Edit warring on Wikipedia is not acceptable in any amount, and violating the three-revert rule is very likely to lead to a block. Thank you. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 19:59, 16 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for July 15

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Star Athletica

No offense, but if you can't tolerate my good faith contributions, then I suggest that either we either have a conversation about conduct, either here or on my user talk, or you move on. Complaining about my conduct at article talk is only going to disrupt article development. The way I see it, you're not particularly receptive to my feedback, perhaps for good reason, perhaps not. But accusing me of gaslighting and wikilawyering isn't going to accomplish anything. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 23:07, 19 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to take this to dispute resolution, fine, but I stand by what I said and the evidence all over that talk page of your wikilawyering over the past week. I'm the only one of the two of us actually contributing to the article, so it is laughable for you to come here and suggest that I "move on" when I have been addressing your rudeness and prodding all week. lethargilistic (talk) 23:19, 19 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You said you were sick of my conduct, that's all I was responding to. If you're actually ok with it then let's resume editing without cluttering the article talk with that sort of sniping. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 00:40, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

And it's true. You have not been dealing in good faith. You have been pounding your interpretations of the rules and not navigating conflicts any other way than linking to other policies and stating your interpretations as law on the talk page, which is not how content disputes are supposed to go. I recognize that differences between us may be difficult to resolve since there are only two people here to gauge consensus, but you've been rude even when a third person has offered to help us resolve things. The difference between how you responded to @AHeneen: after they cited their own interpretation of the rules to you in good detail and me, someone in an accommodation pattern, is blatantly obvious. They get a passive-aggressive message about how that's just, like, their opinion when you're, in fact, pushing your own opinion without referring to the policy's words. I get a filibuster of citations to whatever rules feel convenient at the time, even when it conflicts what has been previously established about the appropriateness of primary sources for non-interpretive facts. I recognize that your ultimate goal is the improvement of the article, but your self-appointed close supervision role on this is increasingly tiresome, is an unproductive use of both our time, and not to mention is completely unnecessary because the article is under construction, changing all the time, and not every addition is going to be perfect on the first pass. While I concede that I was the first to break the veneer of civility we're supposed to aspire to, it was only after a solid week of tolerating your nonsense over an article you're not even bothering to contribute to, and in direct response to something I do not tolerate: gaslighting. Please start actually assisting in the construction of the article instead of this pointless stonewalling and disruption, or alternatively leave me alone. (Aheneen need not feel obligated to respond here. I felt it would be impolite to not ping after talking about their small part in this.) (Essays linked within are illustrative of my take on the situation's facets, not attempts at thumping policy, even if one happens to be a policy.) lethargilistic (talk) 02:30, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I felt like commenting about DrFleischman's behavior at the same time I wrote the long blurb about use of the decision as a primary source, but was too tired after writing that to be bothered (and kind of hope it would start leading to consensus). I've made my comments on the talk page within the past couple of hours. AHeneen (talk) 08:24, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, truly. lethargilistic (talk) 20:22, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it would be prudent to respond to everything you put there, but this is the third time you've accused me of gaslighting. Doesn't gaslighting require some sort of dishonesty? Can you please identify specifically what you think I was dishonest about? I think you said this edit summary was dishonest, but for the life of me I don't understand how it was inaccurate, let alone dishonest. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 18:06, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I already told you: saying one dubious thing on the edit summary that contradicted our discussions, and then citing two completely different policies like that's what you meant all along when I called you on it is a form of gaslighting. You know what's another form of gaslighting? Feigning ignorance of how your behavior is affecting other people to make them feel like the reaction is unwarranted. It's very warranted, and you're continuing the same dreadful pattern of pounding the table when the rules don't really suit your cause even after AHeneen pointed out several Featured Article counterexamples to your interpretation of the rules. Just take a breath, realize the fact that they passed Featured review means that many people have agreed that it's not OR, and stop. You don't necessarily have to go away, but you can't keep behaving this way. lethargilistic (talk) 20:22, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Your opinions are your own and I'm clearly not going to disabuse you of them. Please don't raise raise the gaslighting thing at article talk again. I am asking you nicely and in good faith. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 22:23, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Don't do it again. lethargilistic (talk) 22:41, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

USCopyrightActs

		The Template Barnstar
		Very nice work on {{USCopyrightActs}}, for which I award you this template barnstar! TJRC (talk) 23:15, 20 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! lethargilistic (talk) 08:01, 21 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases/Reports/A

I wish you would have explained, in edit summaries, what was so problematic about that user's edits, and that you had explained to them, on their talk page, why you reverted them. If those edits are truly disruptive, there really isn't much we admins can do about it right now. Thank you, Drmies (talk) 04:12, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oh. You are testing something? Drmies (talk) 04:13, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]