Candelaria Rodríguez[edit]

I find the Cuban copyright page extremely confusing. I mean by that, does - "The period of validity of the copyright in a work created by a procedure analogous to that of the photograph, or on a work of the applied arts, extends to twenty-five years from the use of the work" - mean that the term for a photograph is 25 years? And then there is this "Photographs are in the public domain in the United States if first published in Cuba without compliance with US copyright formalities and used in Cuba before 20 February 1972". Does that mean that they had no mark and weren't copyrighted in the US? What I have found are:

Neither of them are fabulous, but they are what I could find. Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated. SusunW (talk) 17:49, 29 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Template:PD-Cuba makes it clearer. 25 years for photos in Cuba, and then before 20 Feb 1972 for the US because Cuba joined the Berne Convention on February 20, 1997 (25 years after 20 Feb 1972). So both those photos should be good. Uploading... --GRuban (talk) 15:41, 2 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Muchas gracias, mi amigo! I appreciate you. SusunW (talk) 15:51, 2 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I apologize, but am not sure which of the photos in the 1952 link you want. Is she the leftmost of the two female speaker images in the middle of the page? Or do you just want the top image of a dozen or so women? (And if so, which one is she?) --GRuban (talk) 16:56, 2 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I like the last one for the lede photo. On the other one she is indeed the leftmost woman in the middle of the page. I'd like it, but also the top one "Congreso de FDMC" if that's possible. SusunW (talk) 17:08, 2 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Uploaded. Where in the newspaper does it say that this is her, though? I admit it might be, it looks similar to the other image, but since neither one is the clearest... --GRuban (talk) 20:43, 2 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Look at the very last sentence above "Foto Raú". It says "En el centro, una vista de la masa asistente [illegible word]. Más abajo, las oradoras Dra. Candelaria Rodríguez y la Dra. Caridad Sánchez". Basically in the lower photo Rodríguez and Sánchez. SusunW (talk) 21:37, 2 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

2024[edit]



Die Zeit, die Tag und Jahre macht

Happy New Year

2024

Same location pictured as 2019. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:54, 2 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Can you help me updating Tamara Milashkina? Anything else in Russian? Some review perhaps? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:53, 15 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thank you for the image for the person who made the pictured festival possible! - In the singer's article, two 1973 performances at La Scala are commented out for lack of a reference. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:40, 16 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

story · music · places

Today a friend's birthday, with related music and new vacation pics --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:41, 30 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

A challenge[edit]

I am working on a series of biographies on African women and am hoping you can help me with photos. Ruth Neto and her sister-in-law Maria Eugénia Neto are both still living. As the sister and wife of Angola's first president, it seems to me that having their photographs would be extremely beneficial for the encyclopedia. Sources say Ruth has not been in the best of health for the last few years, but "Jenny" is globe trotting. Since she is a writer I wonder if a publisher could get us in touch with her to get photos of them both? I also know that Jenny's daughter Irene Alexandra Neto lives in Lisbon and possibly could help. Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated. SusunW (talk) 22:27, 13 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

And if I haven't already imposed on you too much, what is the status of UN photos? I just finished Marcela Pérez de Cuéllar who served two terms as first lady of the UN. There are photos of her on their website and perhaps there might be photos on the US government site of the infamous luncheon? SusunW (talk) 18:12, 16 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

No good news about UN photos, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_rules_by_territory/United_Nations says their photographs are restricted. Similarly I couldn't find any free images of the Netos. I don't even see contact information for Maria Eugenia, her foundation URL http://www.agostinhoneto.org/ seems dead. I do see some photos for Marcela Pérez de Cuéllar on Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Marcela_P%C3%A9rez_de_Cu%C3%A9llar and there is more from the Reagan library, give me a few hours... --GRuban (talk) 15:00, 17 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I couldn't find any free images of them either. Drat! On the facebook page for Fundação Dr. António Agostinho Neto it gives an email "fundagostinhoneto@gmail.com", but I have no idea if it works? I like this one of Pérez de Cuéllar and her husband, but who is the dude on the right? I thought there might be images in the presidential collections, but wasn't sure. Thank you SOOOOOO much for helping. I appreciate you. SusunW (talk) 17:41, 17 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Got the last image (though now see it might not be as useful as I thought). You'll need to click through to see it at full magnification for its full glory. At first I thought the upper right hand image would be perfect, but now see our subject has her eyes closed. The three in the second row center could be good, if we can figure out who the short blonde lady in the checked coat is; I don't think it's either Leonora Annenberg or Helena Shultz, but could be wrong. One more reason you might like one of these is that they're by Mary Anne Fackelman, first ever female White House photographer. --GRuban (talk) 21:53, 17 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

These are great and I'd love to have photos by Fackelman! The green dress one is perfect for the lede. I had the same thought about the blond in the coat. Maybe someone on WIR will know? I am not good at identifying people by sight. I also like the one with the blue square around it which gives the whole group. I truly appreciate you and your skills. SusunW (talk) 15:10, 18 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

So the Ronald Reagan photosheets are not the highest resolution, but very varied in terms of images. --GRuban (talk) 21:46, 23 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Muchas gracias, mi amigo. You are truly magic. SusunW (talk) 22:25, 23 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Maria Pia Fanfani

It'd be lovely to know if any of them identify Maria Pia Fanfani. She looks like this p. 1 but I don't think I'll be able to use the US flipped version because it would be a derivative work first published abroad and not out of copyright. Sigh. SusunW (talk) 13:47, 19 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I finished Maria Pia Fanfani. I am thinking that if none of the white house photos can be identified as her I am probably going to have to go with fair use because of the time period in which she lived. SusunW (talk) 19:36, 20 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Ian found this lovely photo of Fanfani, which I don't know how to crop since it's already on WP. My concern is that it is marked author unknown and for the life of me, I cannot figure out then, how it can be CC 4.0 as who gave permission and regular copyright requires 70 years from publication, i.e. 70 + 1980 = 2050. The uploader seems to have found a photo album of pictures of Giuseppe Manacchini and uploaded all of them and then ceased to be active. But that said, can it be cropped and used as fair use even if it is on commons? SusunW (talk) 16:06, 23 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Again, low resolution I'm afraid. There should be more, but I haven't found better yet. --GRuban (talk) 23:56, 23 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thank you. I wonder if either Perez de Cuellar or Fanfani have images in the George H. W. Bush collections too? I have no idea how you found these, but you are magic and I appreciate the help. SusunW (talk) 05:49, 24 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Same resolution problems. No luck for Fanfani yet. --GRuban (talk) 19:15, 24 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thank you so much! You are amazing. SusunW (talk) 21:48, 24 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

A Stupid Tagging Dispute?[edit]

That looks like a tagging dispute, and tagging disputes are fundamentally stupid. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:24, 6 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

No harm, no foul. That basketball bounced off the board and through the hoop six months ago, and the two points should be left on the scoreboard. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:26, 6 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Oda Gasinzigwa[edit]

Madame Gasinzigwa Oda, President of the Rwanda National Women Council, at the Women’s Legal Rights Initiative conference, 2006

I've copied you in on an email I sent to her, as if she asks me any questions about adding a photo to her article I will likely not know the answer. I appreciate your magic. Hope all is well with you. SusunW (talk) 17:01, 7 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Ala-kazam! Of course if she responds, she will probably have a better quality image, but if not, this is from a document by the USAID. --GRuban (talk) 14:51, 8 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
You are magic. Sorry, I've been struggling lately with pretty severe allergies and have only been working a little bit each day. That and the million messages that are popping up on my watchlist because of that project to reconfigure all the WIR templates have made me miss a lot of messages. Just saw that you found this. I appreciate you. Don't suppose your magic could find images of Scholastica Kimaryo, Anne Shongwe or her sister-in-law of Susan Wakhungu-Githuku? Perhaps it is best to ping me until they finish this template project, at least. SusunW (talk) 16:17, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Anne Shongwe in 2012
Nothing for Kimaryo, but plenty for Shongwe: however, for some reason UploadWizard is not letting me upload them all at once. Looking for alternative methods. Here's probably the best one. --GRuban (talk) 01:52, 22 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
You are the best. Thank you sooooo much! I pinged you on the GA review on Gasinzigwa. All I found as other images were literally crap. LOL Mayhaps your magic will work better. SusunW (talk) 14:58, 22 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

February music[edit]

story · music · places

The image, taken on a cemetery last year after the funeral of a distant but dear family member, commemorates today, with thanks for their achievements, four subjects mentioned on the Main page and Vami_IV, a friend here. Listen to music by Tchaikovsky (an article where one of the four is pictured), sung by today's subject (whose performance on stage I enjoyed two days ago). -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:16, 20 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

more music and flowers on Rossini's rare birthday --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:16, 29 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

COI[edit]

To keep the metaphor going, you joined the dark side, and you don't even get paid for it. Please come back. Polygnotus (talk) 12:26, 25 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Er... I never left. What would "coming back" entail in your metaphor? GRuban (talk) 13:53, 25 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Stop doing COI work. Join the light side. We are your friends; not your corporate overlords. Consider it a failed experiment and move on. Polygnotus (talk) 14:01, 25 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I appreciate your friendship, but if you have the impression that I somehow "left" to become a primarily COI editor, I don't think you read that page you linked to. --GRuban (talk) 15:05, 25 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Polygnotus: That was unintentionally curt, sorry, I had a limited Internet connection. Let me expand, besides the explanation on the COI page you linked to. (I admit I had written specifically to explain just such questions, but I guess it didn't work; if you can explain why it didn't work, and how I could rephrase it so it does, that would be great!) Anyway, if you look above you on this talk page, you will see me helping out a much better and more prolific editor with her articles (I seem to have gotten good at finding free licensed images over my years here). If you check my talk page article archives, linked to above, last year's for example, or any of the several before that, you will see that has been going on for some time. If you check that same Wikimedia Commons page I link to, you'll see I found and uploaded just under 1000 images in 2023, for other people's articles, as I come across them. No different. No move to any dark side. But if you ask about articles, I guess that's less clear, but only because I'm not a very fast editor. In the 16 or so years I've been here, I've been the primary author of just over 100 real articles. Here are the last 5, all in 2023:
(Come to mention it, it's early 2024, and it's about time to write another; I have some ideas, but not actualized yet.) No change to any dark side. I wrote them because I ran across news about them in one way or another, realized they didn't have Wikipedia articles, and thought they would qualify; be interesting; and be fun to write. I write articles strictly for that reason. Any COI makes them more difficult to write, which does, I admit, reduce the fun, but no less - or more - inherent interest. OK? Again, thanks for your interest and concern - and nice to meet you! I could always use more wiki-friends. --GRuban (talk) 02:30, 26 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Your articles are a joy to read, and well-written and researched.
Only a sociopath could write a neutral article in an dry dispassionate impartial encyclopedic tone about something he/she cares about. You are clearly not a sociopath.
What makes this worse, in the case of Kessel Run, is that this success-story was created for political/commercial/PR reasons and has little to do with reality.
The claimed justification for the hype, that they introduced agile to the DoD, is not true (and not supported by sources). But even if that was the case it would not justify the hype because everyone was using agile & scrum at that time. Something like the Fast Company will publish any press release you throw at it, provided you have enough money. "Smaller team is faster and more flexible than giant bureaucratic corporation" is a great underdog story. It is also utterly banal.
Usually I don't mind scrapping and rewriting parts of an article when its badly written/sourced, but here that feels almost like vandalism. Like demolishing part of something you like.
Problem is, the article isn't great, even though it is well-written, and in an ideal world it would be returned to draft status and rewritten by someone who doesn't care about the topic and does not believe in the hype.
Please don't let this discourage you, it is great that you are not some unfeeling robot. But please don't do COI articles. Polygnotus (talk) 05:57, 26 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Aww, that's wonderful! OK, that's another reason I write articles, to hear that they bring someone joy. Thank you so much!
But I'm not sure for the reason for what seems to be your main objection, that Kessel Run did not essentially introduce agile software development to the DoD, despite the extensive references. Why do you think so? Your own knowledge? If so, I'm afraid we aren't able to write articles based on that. We are supposed to write articles based on reliable sources. And the sources aren't just Fast Company, [1] though that is the first and probably the greatest used single source in the article, there is also the second one, the NPR article,[2] which is only slightly smaller, and says exactly the same story, and the many, many other reliable sources in the article, like the 3rd one, the MIT paper, also generally considered a very respected reliable source ... I'm just going down the list of references in the article now. And there are 74 of them. And they do all say essentially that same thing. I can't vouch that it's true personally, I wasn't there in 2016, I was at either Microsoft or Google then, I had only been at Kessel Run a few months when I wrote most of the article, and have been there less than a year now. I can, however, tell you that Kessel Run goes deeper into Agile than either Microsoft or Google, stricter sprint periods, more formal scrums, formal pair programming, less upfront design. And I can also tell you that in the months I've spent there, that the old guard at the DoD is still, even now, fighting tooth and nail against it, as multiple higher ups that get brought in from the Air Force military and civilians have been regularly trying to cut away at bits and pieces of the culture, get back into big design upfront, enough so that I would not be surprised if it were only a hollow shell of its original premise soon. Really. But, again, all that's just me. We at Wikipedia aren't supposed to write articles from personal experience, only from sources, and all the sources do say that same thing, which is why I wrote it that way. I did look, honest. You can see that in the history of the article, I found the sources first, and wrote the text from what they said.
Ah, you can see that there, the first source I used for the first text I wrote wasn't any of Fast Company, or NPR, or MIT, it was The Boston Globe, and it says "Typically, it can take five years for a branch of the US military to develop and deploy new software. The Air Force-Pivotal team built the refueling app in four months."[3] That's what the sources say, all of them, in their own words each time, but basically that same thing, every time, so unless we find better sources saying different, that's what we have to say. I could not find sources saying different, and I looked. Hard. I would welcome a partner in finding those sources. Please.
You may also have a philosophical objection to anyone writing WP:COI articles. Which is certainly a point of view, but it is not our, Wikipedia, policy, which allows it, though making it difficult with many hoops to jump through. Which hoops I tried really hard to jump through! (I imagine that's because people thought that if it were banned outright, it would still happen, just this time without the writers revealing their COI. In any case, that's what the policy is.) Or maybe you're just saying, I, George, should not write COI articles because I, personally, am terrible at it. In which case, ouch. I guess I can't say much about that except that I do the best I can, and in my opinion at least, whatever that's worth, Kessel Run is a solid B-class article, as much so as any of the other solid B-class articles that I've been writing in the past few years and list on my user page. --GRuban (talk) 14:00, 26 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Polygnotus: All that said, I will be happy to address the specific issues you seem to mention, one at a time. Since I can't edit the page, I'll suggest things, and you'll need to put them in. We won't reach "perfect", but that's not the standard; hopefully we'll meet halfway. Thanks! --GRuban (talk) 21:55, 26 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Arbitrary break

What I am saying is that you should not write COI articles because you are good at writing articles and I feel bad when I have to remove parts of a well written article because of undue weight, pov, lack of proper sourcing and attribution, promo et cetera.

Which exact quotes from the Fast Company, NPR and MIT links do you think support the claim that Kessel Run introduced agile software development to the DoD (more than 15 years after the Agile Manifesto)?

I know about WP:NOTTRUTH but I also know you are not stupid. When you started the article you were already working there. It would really surprise me if you did not know when you read some sources before writing the article that this was going to look bad for a COI editor because all the sources are extremely positive. It is surprising to me that you decided to go through with it; it is clearly a notable topic so someone without a COI would've written it anyway. Every code monkey knows that the hype surrounding agile & scrum is 95% cargo cult and the remaining 5% is based on plagiarism or common sense. You also know that these stories were planted in the media for a reason. Those media companies aren't going to send a jaded senior dev to debunk the claims made; they just publish what amounts to little more than a press release. Journalists are underpaid and spread thin so they don't have time to do serious research and they lack the decades of experience in IT required to ask the hard questions and discover what is actually happening. People in IT can fool any journalist with Star Trek level techno-babble. The DoD employs quite a few people, including 100,000 software devs. I know that you know that the DoD was familiar with agile before 2017; no matter what the press releases/planted "news" articles say. Am I wrong? Before you answer, google it and you'll find documents like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Polygnotus (talk) 02:37, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thank you! I admit it, compliments are nice, and I'm floating on air here. Great to meet you! Want me to find an image for a Wikipedia article for you? Can't guarantee, my "hit rate" is only about 10-20%, but that's not nothing, will gladly try! May even write an article on a Wikipedia-notable topic for you, if you want, though as above, I'm slow. But, anyway, time to come back to earth.
"Introduced" doesn't mean "DoD, this is Agile, Agile this is DoD, shake hands". It means "added to the system from another place": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/introduced; https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/introduce#English, meaning 3. It doesn't mean the DoD hadn't ever heard of Agile. It means the DoD wasn't using Agile in any reasonable way before Kessel Run. I'm sure many hackers in the DoD had heard of Agile, played with it in their spare time, maybe even used it before coming to the DoD; they just didn't use it in the DoD at any level anyone decided was worth writing about. The DoD has also heard of catapults, and war elephants, and longbows, but it isn't using them at any reasonable scale. Many military have historical weapons as their hobby, so I'm quite sure there is a military engineer setting up a catapult somewhere for fun, and several soldiers shooting longbows at targets in their spare time, and yet if a US Army troop starts officially using catapults and longbows or riding on war elephants in combat, not just as a hobby, people will also consider that very notable and will write about that!
Specific quotes that Kessel Run essentially introduced the multiple modern software industry practices generally referred to as "Agile" to the DoD, which hadn't really been using them before, are basically throughout the sources, on nearly every page.
  • Fast Company "...But can’t you just go fix this? And the answer was basically, no.” ... Standard DoD procedure requires systems like the AOC software to be competitively bid, and for the winning contractor to design, build, certify, and test the entire system before delivering it to users—and then to go through the entire process again each time any appreciable amount of code needed to be changed."
"The latest in U.S. Air Force technological advances can be found in an unlikely place: the WeWork coworking space on Portland Street in downtown Boston. "
" “Four months from start to in production, in use in combat operations,” Oti says. The average DoD software project takes almost three years, according to a recent study."
"The name Kessel Run has now become part of a culture that the team’s leaders knew would have to differ markedly from how the military normally does business. ... “we have these natural tendencies around command-and-control style organization, and we need the exact opposite of that.” In addition to the name, the team chose a hashtag for its project that is a nod to both agile software development, and the fact that Kessel Run’s culture is more startup than strictly military: #agileAF"
"That’s nothing more than best practices for modern software development, but at the DoD, such agility would normally be impossible. Specifications commonly take years to write and then more years to deliver on before code can even be tested in the field—often making systems obsolete by the time they’re delivered. “The DoD violates pretty much every rule in modern product development,” Schmidt told U.S. Congress recently." (Note that's Eric Schmidt there, chairman of Google, not benefiting from the KR project in any way, and often considered rather knowledgeable on modern software development projects. Also, of course, one of the wealthiest people in the country, so not someone who can be influenced by any amount of money that could be conceivably thrown around by a small military detachment's public relations department.)
  • NPR (click the Transcript button, hamburger-ish menu to the right) "He gives me this example. ... Look, there has been no progress in nine months. We could have built, deployed and had this thing scaled across your whole enterprise in, like, a month. This is just not going anywhere. And quite frankly, after the 10th meeting, we just stopped taking meetings. The Pentagon was just too hard of a customer."
"Enrique leads them into an office unlike any Air Force office Steve has ever been to. ... Beyond the blue hair, he sees a team that's doing so much less advanced planning and so much more just making things and patching up vulnerabilities quickly. WERT: And it took me, I would say, less than an hour to realize that this is what we should be doing for software, not what the Department of Defense have been doing for many, many years. LAWRENCE: He was sold. He went back to his air base a convert. WERT: Two weeks later, I'm back here in the office, and a software program's in front of me telling me, we're going to do a year or two of development followed by a year or two of tests. And four years from now, we'll deliver something. And my answer was, no, we're not going to do it that way anymore."
"And Kessel Run has inspired spinoffs in other parts of the Air Force and other branches of the military. Steve Wert now runs Kessel Run, and when people from the Pentagon come to visit, he's the one who gives them the tour.... And then, invariably, those tech tourists leave, and they don't necessarily support the budget. Kessel Run's been nearly zeroed out a couple times. WERT: That's the frustrating thing, is realizing how much visibility it's getting and how supportive senior leaders are versus the sort of budget process. That disconnect is frustrating. LAWRENCE: The old way of acquiring software is still the norm in the military. That disconnect between the military and Big Tech...OTI: I'll be honest - I don't think we've crossed that divide yet."
That last thing - it's something I've seen personally in the last months, as I wrote a few days ago, just above. Not only is KR's agile strategy innovative in the military, it may well not be around forever, there is noticeable ongoing pushback from the military higher-ups. But, back to the sources:
  • MIT paper page 3 "...‘Kessel Run,’ the U.S. Air Force’s novel approach to software acquisition, which resulted in a hybrid acquisitions and internal software operations capable organization. In short, Kessel Run began acquiring and internally building software solutions using modern industry practices. Kessel Run adopted methods and practices that MIT refers to as stages of experimentation, including agile principles, user�centered design (UCD), lean product management, and DevOps."
page 6-7 "This research illustrates the struggle of the Air Force’s predominantly waterfall acquisition methodology.16 Its rigid, requirements-based approach often results in solutions and systems that do not meet their original intent, or are no longer fit for purpose. More ‘agile’ techniques are better designed for rapid software development."
"The story of ‘Kessel Run’ is also about how tackling one small operational element (in this case refuelling as part of wider air operations) can introduce innovation – even if only of a little ‘i’ type – and expose an organization to new ways of doing things, changing the organization, its staff and its ‘culture’. "
That last bit even uses "introduce". But if that word, "introduced", is what troubles you, and you want to change it to something that says "made it so that the USAF starting using Agile modern software development at any reasonable scale", without also having the "handshaking" meaning, please do. I couldn't think of another single word that means that other than "introduced", but maybe you can.
Or, if you want to write a section that says "However, other sources say the DOD used Agile before", using the sources you found, feel free to do so. You're right, I didn't find them, because I was looking for "Kessel Run", and those sources don't mention it. I do notice that they each say "DoD now using Agile" and they are over a span of years, and don't really mention each other, so I suspect they may have all been test projects that went nowhere. The military is known for doing that. But, again, that's not a reason to put a bias tag on the Kessel Run article because there are sources that disagree, that's a reason to write the alternate point of view into the article. That's what we do at Wikipedia when there is a disagreement, we write what the sources say, all the sources. --GRuban (talk) 18:41, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
No, we write what reliable sources say.
They didn't introduce agile to the DoD; at most you can say they used it. But that is not a bragworthy achievement to include in the lead section.
That is 8,900 bytes in response to 2 pretty simple questions I know that you know that the DoD was familiar with agile before 2017; no matter what the press releases/planted "news" articles say. Am I wrong?
and Which exact quotes from the Fast Company, NPR and MIT links do you think support the claim that Kessel Run introduced agile software development to the DoD (more than 15 years after the Agile Manifesto)?
I don't like WP:WEASEL words (e.g. "essentially introduced" which is a very weird way of saying "didn't").
It means the DoD wasn't using Agile in any reasonable way before Kessel Run. That's not how the average reader would interpret that sentence. And it is also incorrect, the 10 sources I posted are clear about that. If you wanted to make that claim you would've googled it.
FC, NPR and MIT also do not claim that KR introduced Agile to the DoD. I had read those sources before asking for the quotes, so I knew you would not be able to provide me with quotes that support the claim you made in the article.
want to write a section that says "However, other sources say the DOD used Agile before" No, that is not how it works. The reason I asked you is because I wanted you to confirm that you knew you were writing something that is not true and not supported by the sources you mentioned. Thank you, Polygnotus (talk) 19:03, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
OK. Do you agree that the sources say that the Pentagon was not using Agile? And that Kessel Run used Agile? And that this was the KR secret sauce, the KR golden bullet, the KR value added, the KR overused mixed metaphor? --GRuban (talk) 22:03, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I'm pretty damn nitpicky with sourcing (can you tell?) and I believe the only creative license we have is avoiding copyright problems by reordering words a bit as long as the meaning stays the exact same. The sources I've read say that the DoD used agile before KR existed. There is no evidence to believe that agile was KRs secret sauce. "Smaller team is faster and more flexible than giant bureaucratic corporation" is a great underdog story. It is also utterly banal. As a code monkey, I know not to trust "%current buzzword% gave me superpowers". Polygnotus (talk) 22:12, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Unfortunately, you'll have a strict disagreement from the plagiarism enforcers on your first sentence. They will specifically say that reordering words is still a violation. But OK. Give me a few days (I'm slow) and I will try to come up with an alternative phrasing that includes the first two statements, and strict source for the third, and we'll see if we can reach agreement. --GRuban (talk) 22:58, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I cut this article in half and I didn't feel bad because the article was not well-written. But I feel bad when I criticize and scrap a bunch of text on a well-written article because I know how demoralising it can be when someone takes an axe to something you worked hard on.
Perhaps a bizarre counterproposal but, instead of trying to "undo the damage" I've done (aka the improvements I made), we could work together to get rid of everything that could even remotely be considered promotional and create a boring but well-sourced and factually correct article. There are already quite a few webpages trying to promote KR. Polygnotus (talk) 23:59, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Sure, give it a shot. (When I say I'm slow, that could also be pronounced "lazy"!) As you know, my COI means I have severe issues editing the article, so if you go and delete things, I can't very well revert you. I do admit, I would prefer it if you kept in the funny parts - the agileAF (did you notice that's not just a double but a triple meaning?), the "never name child Alice" - but that's just me, they probably aren't that necessary to the article as such. Among the articles I enjoyed writing most of all are Cthulhu for President, and Chaz Stevens, because they were inherently funny; I didn't need to look for humor, I just told the facts straight and they were funny. Well, I think they're funny; many of my best friends think I'm just strange. (It's also not at all the request of my "corporate overlords" - who are, of course, not corporate but military overlords, and so notoriously lack any sense of humor; and honestly, they don't care that much about the article, no one has mentioned it to me in months.) Anyway, take out what you need to take out to make you feel comfortable removing the promotional tags, and if there's something that truly rips at my soul, I'll say, and maybe we'll work it out. At worst, I'll say "so it goes". The offer to help you with an article you are interested in still stands; it's not a bribe as much as a recognition that you're a well meaning fellow editor, even if you do sacrifice my deathless prose. --GRuban (talk) 02:39, 29 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Code monkeys are never lazy, we spend days automating tasks that could be done in a couple of hours. I am also working on another article Efrat (organization) and it is so deeply unfunny that it may be wise to collaborate on something patafysical after that. Do you have anything in mind that is funnier than the Chair Force? Polygnotus (talk) 10:21, 29 February 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]
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