This is the Village pump (all) page which lists all topics for easy viewing. Go to the village pump to view a list of the Village Pump divisions, or click the edit link above the section you'd like to comment in. To view a list of all recent revisions to this page, click the history link above and follow the on-screen directions.
This issue has disrupted multiplethreads on unrelated issues, so I figure I should raise it at a nice central location where we can hash it out once and for all:
Is notifying the relevant Wikiprojects to a discussion ever a violation of WP:CANVASS?
The determination of proper consensus is vulnerable to unrepresentative participation from the community. Because of the generally limited number of editors likely to participate in any given discussion, an influx of biased or partisan editors is likely to generate an improper illusion of a consensus where none (or a different one) would exist in a wider population.
While it is acceptable to notify other editors of ongoing discussions, messages that are written to influence the outcome rather than to improve the quality of a discussion may be considered disruptive. In particular, messages to fora mostly populated by a biased or partisan audience — especially when not public — are considered canvassing and disrupt the consensus building process by making participation lopsided.
No exception is made for if the forum is organized as a Wikiproject; an influx of biased or partisan editors is an issue regardless of whether they came from a non-representative Wikiproject or another non-representative forum.
WP:CANVASS says the same thing; it forbids notifications to a partisan audience, and makes it clear that WP:APPNOTE does not create exceptions to these rules; Do not send inappropriate notices, as defined in the section directly below, and do not send messages to users who have asked not to receive them.
It's important to note that most Wikiprojects are representative and non-partisan; our rules on canvassing only affect a very small number, and even those are only partisan on some topics within their area of interest and can be notified without issue on the rest. BilledMammal (talk) 02:09, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have only a few short things to say:
1. The idea of a "partisan Wikiproject" is ridiculous. If such a thing existed, it would be WP:NOTHERE and get booted.
2. A Wikiproject tending to vote a particular way is not the same thing as a partisan Wikiproject: consider for instance a vote about whether evolution should be treated as true where everyone from WP:BIOLOGY and half of all other editors voted the same way while half of all other editors did (and assuming these groups are roughly balanced). In this case, the Wikiproject members are clearly in keeping with the global consensus and it's a minority of non-members that aren't.
3. The line in WP:APPNOTE that you're quoting was added only about a year ago with little discussion on the talk page. You are in fact one of the people who advocated adding it.
4. Both those lines from ArbCom that you're quoting come from the same case which was about a secret and partisan outside forum. Neither even contemplates the idea of notifications on Wikipedia being canvassing. Loki (talk) 02:32, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We've had a long history of issues with partisan Wikiprojects, recently for example WikiProject Roads which became so hyper-partisan that it ended up forking rather than complying with policy and guideline when all their attempts to destroy those policies and guidelines failed. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 13:59, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If a WikiProject is so problematic/"partisan" that it is causing significant issues and vote brigading, it needs to be taken to Arbcom. A project cannot be considered problematic by definition without at the very least community input through ANI, but preferably an Arbcom case. Curbon7 (talk) 21:50, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, it isn't. I have been accused of selective notification for notifying Wikiproject Quebec about an RfC concerning a Quebec premier, while not notifying other provincial wikiprojects, which is ridiculous. Anyway, the correct solution to perceived imbalances in notifications is always to notify more editors through various means of mass notification; it is never to accuse editors using these mandated channels of "canvassing" - the latter is what is disruptive, IMO.
And concerning BilledMammal's comment on this, the idea that any WikiProject would be a biased or partisan audience is set out here without any shred of evidence. Nor is there any evidence that Arbcom or INAPPNOTE had these public, on-wiki fora in mind when cautioning against partisanship. The fact is that Wikiprojects concern topics, not ideologies (whether on-wiki or off-wiki ideologies) so if you want to be informed on a topic where you disagree with the opinions of the most active contributors, the sensible thing has always been to join the wikiproject or at least to follow its page for updates.
Just for emphasis: accusing editors of bias because they belong to or notify wikiprojects is itself a violation of WP:NPA and disruptive. When I was accused of bias and canvassing for notifying Wikiproject Quebec, I felt both hurt and falsely accused - that is, once I was finished laughing at the absurdly false assumptions the accusation implied concerning my views about nationalism. Newimpartial (talk) 02:18, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
the idea that any WikiProject would be a "biased or partisan audience" is set out here without any shred of evidence.
As I understand it, the intent of this discussion is to determine whether it is theoretically possible for a Wikiproject to be unrepresentative or mostly populated by a biased or partisan audience and thus inappropriate to notify.
Whether any specific Wikiproject is unrepresentative or mostly populated by a biased or partisan audience is a different question that can be addressed elsewhere. BilledMammal (talk) 02:23, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see the question posed in this section as whether it is theoretically possible for a Wikiproject to be biased and notifying it to be canvassing; I think the relevant question is whether this is a practical or relevant concern. What matters isn't the theoretical (how many angels can fit on the head of a pin) but rather the practical (is there an angel on the head of my pin, and if so, does it give me an unfair advantage in discussions to determine consensus of the community on a topic).
What is clearly the case is that these kind of accusations - claims that specific wikiprojects are partisan (always without evidence; always a "theoretical" concern) and that notfiying them is therefore partisan - have had real, and unmistakable toxic effects on-wiki. These effects have included individual editors feeling attacked and misunderstood, and also community time wasted on dramaboards, and to my knowledge the community has not reached consensus that any wikiproject notification was ever canvassing, though efforts have been (correctly) made to ensure that editors having differing perspectives on issues are also notified.
In any event, there is a clear and present cost to the community thanks to toxic discussion when certain editors insist on retaining the accusation of "canvassing by notifying partisan wikiprojects" within their arsenal. Given this evident pain point, it seems clear to me that the onus is on those holding this belief to present evidence that it is a real, not theoretical, possibility. Otherwise we are dragging down the level of civility in the community and wasting the time of editors and administrators just because certain editors believe they ought to be able to make a certain argument - even though, to the best of my knowledge, the community has never reached consensus that this argument was ever borne out in an actual situation on-wiki. Newimpartial (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
always without evidence; always a "theoretical" concern
That's not accurate; the discussions that Loki linked as provoking this discussion included evidence. However, I won't go into it here, both because I don't want to derail this discussion with talk of specific WikiProjects and because you are topic banned and thus can't engage with the evidence. BilledMammal (talk) 02:59, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Before this is closed, I wanted to clarify that when I said, to my knowledge the community has not reached consensus that any wikiproject notification was ever canvassing, I was referring to the act of issuing an appropriately worded, neutral notification to a Wikiproject. Issuing a non-neutral notification, whether to a wikiproject or a dramaboard, can of course be canvassing. The fairly extensive contributions made to this discussion have confirmed my opinion that a neutrally-worded notification to a wikiproject is never canvassing, and that the solution to selective notifications (e.g., concerning Israel-Palestine issues) is always to notify more editors, bringing in diverse views from other relevant projects or through centralized boards. I don't think this is applied Neutonian physics, here. Newimpartial (talk) 14:29, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed with @Gnomingstuff. While I don't deny there have been legitimate and serious issues with canvassing, canvassing is slowly becoming Wikipedia's Stop the Steal. By that I mean, it's a accusation freely thrown out by someone when their idea loses at a !vote or is suddenly drowned out by opposing ideas. The obvious intent is to try for an appeal by mass discrediting any opposing opnion, rather than accept their idea might might have been an unpopular one. So any policy changes, IMHO, should be to clarify what is and is not canvassing and not introduce more confusion and open more doors for appeals and lawyering when ones proposal isn't suceeding.Dave (talk) 14:10, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Disclaimer: As someone who thinks CANVASS is a bad policy ("good intentions..."), I think notifying WikiProject is a good practice, per Linus's Law. That said, as some others have mentioned, it can be a problem if one notifies only WikiProjects related to one side of an argument. The more, the merrier, is a rule of thumb. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here02:57, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I fail to see how anyone could consider any WikiProject to be related to one side of the argument. Such an argument presumes that everyone who has a particular WikiProject's page on their watchlist is of the same opinion and such a presumption has no factual basis. TarnishedPathtalk03:29, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Actually it doesn't presume that. It only presumes that people with a particular interest are more likely to gravitate towards projects matching that interest and less likely to gravitate towards other projects. This is obviously true. The same group of people are able to watch Wikiproject India and Wikiproject Pakistan, but it will not be true in practice that the same group of people do watch them. If an issue regarding a dispute between India and Pakistan is notified to only one of those projects, it is reasonable to suspect an intention to bias the discussion. Zerotalk07:47, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My point is that someone watching Wikiproject India for example may fall either side of being for or against India's interest. It would be a mistake to presume that notifying Wikiproject India in regards to some hypothetical discussion is going to result in an homogenous group of editors all voting along national interests. TarnishedPathtalk07:55, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Theres no such thing as a WikiProject being "unrepresentative", literally any editor can watchlist any WikiProject's talk page. I watchlist, for example: Wikipedia:WikiProject Arab world, Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball, Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography, Wikipedia:WikiProject Egypt, Wikipedia:WikiProject Human rights, Wikipedia:WikiProject Islam, Wikipedia:WikiProject Israel, Wikipedia:WikiProject Israel Palestine Collaboration, Wikipedia:WikiProject Jewish history, Wikipedia:WikiProject Judaism, Wikipedia:WikiProject Palestine, Wikipedia:WikiProject Syria, Wikipedia:WikiProject Terrorism, Wikipedia:WikiProject United States courts and judges. Any notification to any of those I would see. Now there are times where notifying only specific WikiProjects that have an intended audience may be an issue, like only notifying WikiProject Palestine about some discussion also relevant to WikiProject Israel, but notifying WikiProjects that have within their scope whatever is under discussion is not canvassing.
nableezy - 02:31, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Theres no such thing as a WikiProject being "unrepresentative", literally any editor can watchlist any WikiProject's talk page.
They can, but the possibility that they can doesn't mean the forum isn't unrepresentative if they don't. Consider a hypothetical; lets pretend that 90% of people affiliated (watchlisting, members, etc) with Wikipedia:WikiProject Israel are pro-Israel in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Clearly, it would be unrepresentative, and a WP:CANVASS violation to notify unless there is an equally unrepresentative forum in the opposite direction that is also notified (perhaps Wikipedia:WikiProject Palestine).
To be clear, I'm not saying either of these are unrepresentative or mostly populated by a biased or partisan audience; I haven't looked into either of them, and am only using them for the sake of example. BilledMammal (talk) 02:38, 28 May 2024 (UTC) Edited 02:51, 28 May 2024 (UTC) to clarify[reply]
If something is not relevant to WikiProject Palestine, like say an article on some random company in Tel Aviv, then notifying WikiProject Israel and not WikiProject Palestine would be totally fine. If something is relevant to both, then only notifying one would be an issue. I literally just said, in the comment you are replying to, there are times where notifying only specific WikiProjects that have an intended audience may be an issue, like only notifying WikiProject Palestine about some discussion also relevant to WikiProject Israel. But the idea that a page that any and every registered user can watchlist can be a target for canvassing is silly. I guarantee you "pro-Israel" users watchlist WikiProject Palestine, and "pro-Palestine" users watchlist WikiProject Israel. If the notification itself is neutral, it isnt a CANVASSING violation to post to a WikiProject about a discussion in its scope. nableezy - 02:43, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is similar to how I feel about it too: there are times when notifying only certain Wikiprojects says bad things about the notifier's intent, but I don't think there's ever a time where notifying only certain Wikiprojects ever causes provably skewed results.
(Furthermore, not notifying the relevant Wikiprojects is often also suspicious in this way. Sometimes it smacks of not wanting a decision to be scrutinized by people who regularly edit in the topic area.) Loki (talk) 02:48, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You previously discussed your point of view regarding partisan WikiProjects at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 49 § Modifications to CANVASS, and it didn't get much support. As I said then, WikiProjects are just groups of editors sharing a common interest and working together to further the goals of Wikipedia, usually by working on various initiatives. Most of them are oriented around a content area, and thus attract the knowledgeable editors in that area. Notifying the corresponding WikiProjects for related content areas is considered to be a neutral way of reaching the interested editors who are best able to bring greater context to a decision. It's not partisan to be interested in a content area.
There can be groups that, by their nature, have self-selected a set of editors with a specific position on some issue, and thus its members are more prone to make partial arguments for that position. If someone set up WikiProject solely to vote in favour of removing all foreign language names from English Wikipedia articles, for example, then notifying it would result in vote-stacking. However the community has dealt with this by reaching a consensus that the group's purpose is counter to the best interests of the overall project and disbanding the group. isaacl (talk) 03:20, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There have been issues relating to very cliquey Wikiprojects/similar pages. Not a huge number but hard to say "ever". The question says "the relevant Wikiprojects", which is plural, while I assume the issue is usually with a relevant Wikiproject. The common practice of simply notifying all Wikiprojects on the talkpage, with a neutral message the same across all notifications, works fine in the vast majority of cases. CMD (talk) 02:46, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The question at issue here was originally sparked by someone notifying the relevant Wikiproject and all people on the talk page about an AFD for an essay closely related to LGBT issues. The assertion by some editors for deletion, including the person who started the AFD in the first place, was that WP:LGBT was biased such that notifying them at all, even in combination with a group of editors including some editors known specifically to oppose the existence of the page, was canvassing. Loki (talk) 02:52, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, the only thing that would make a Wikiproject notification a violation of WP:CANVASS is if the notification itself was done in a POV manner, such as calling for everyone at the Wikiproject to vote a certain way. Or you might get called out if it was, say, an RfC on a religious topic and the only Wikiproject you notified was Wikiproject Atheism. Though the solution to such a case is just to notify the other relevant Wikiprojects, which anyone can do. The only other case I can think of that would get you some side-eye and comments is if you were notifying Wikiprojects that very clearly had nothing to do with the topic at hand, such as if it was a Biology RfC and you went and notified Wikiproject Football. Though that would less be canvassing and more just...confusion. SilverserenC03:08, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, notifying relevant Wikiprojects about a discussion does not in itself constitute violate WP:CANVASS. To be frank, some of the claims that it does have seemed to necessarily—whether the users writing such claims intend it or not—involve prejudicial assessments, such as the presumption that WP:LGBT is somehow inappropriately 'partisan' in a way contrary to Wikipedia's purpose because—why, honestly? Because of a presumption that the project draws in LGBT editors, and on top of that a presumption that LGBT editors are inappropriately 'partisan' about LGBT-related topics compared to cisgender and heterosexual editors? I really don't see how this claim, either in the abstract or in context, doesn't inevitably hinge on prejudicial presumptions about editors that violate the wmf:Policy:Universal Code of Conduct's tenets about collegiality, good citizenship, and creating a pleasant and safe space for participants. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 06:32, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Notifying a WikiProject cannot ever be a serious canvassing problem, since it's open, widely broadcast message. The issue usually is that some people sitting on a favoured WP:LOCALCON get upset at the extra attention it brings. Bon courage (talk) 07:36, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, the basic assumption is IMO that Wikiprojects can be watched by all kinds of people. Hopefully several of them do so because of a general interest in the topics that can pop up, and not out of a desire to promote whatever every chance they get. Some projects are pretty close to various CTOPS, like Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan and FTN, but that is still my basic assumption. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:40, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In general and in principle, no; but in practice, in the past, certain WikiProjects have been problematic and hard to deal with. For example, Wikipedia:WikiProject Pornography fought a long and historically successful campaign to have their own SNG for pornstars, which allowed sources that weren't independent. The fighting went on for years until the SNG was finally deprecated in 2019 after this RfC; subsequently most of the pornstar "biographies" that Wikipedia used to host got deleted on the grounds that they didn't contain any biographical information at all. Porn performers' names, dates of birth, nationalities, families and career history outside porn are understandably kept quiet, so all the information we had on these people was pure kayfabe. And for another example, although the Article Rescue Squadron isn't a problematic WikiProject, it's certainly had its share of problematic members leading to various tedious Arbcom cases. I think that what history tells me is that where a WikiProject has started to develop their own groupthink and begun to diverge from mainstream Wikipedian thought, then we're going to have a problem; and people getting unhappy about notifying that WikiProject about discussions can be an early symptom of that problem starting to be noticed. To the best of my knowledge, there aren't any WikiProjects at that stage at the moment, but it's worth keeping an eye on.—S MarshallT/C07:47, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Article Rescue Squadron also came to my mind, but that was because how it partially operated historically - a few users were using it to try and vote-stack AfDs with the goal of keeping articles rather than engaging with the arguments for and against deletion and/or improving the article. It took effort but those users were dealt with and that problem has passed. The groups current focus on improving important articles that would otherwise be at risk of deletion is unproblematic. So yes, partisan WikiProjects is a theoretical problem, but unless the OP or anyone else has any actual evidence of WikiProjects attempting to distort consensus then there is no issue here. Members of a WikiProject sharing an opinion is not itself evidence of anything untoward. An editor selectively notifying only some relevant WikiProjects is correctly dealt with by neutrally notifying the other WikiProjects, and, if necessary, separately engaging in dispute resolution regarding that editor. Similarly an editor notifying unrelated projects and/or making non-neutral notifications is an issue with that editor. These are not evidence of a problem with notifying WikiProjects generally or with notifying specific WikiProjects in particular. TL;DR neutral notifications to relevant WikiProjects is almost never canvassing. Thryduulf (talk) 08:56, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think there are cleaner examples. ARS' purpose was to find promising candidates for a WP:HEY response, so it's reasonable for them to talk about current AFDs, even if it did have some problems. Similarly, I think it's usually fair to notify Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard about disputes involving fringe-y subjects, even though the dominant POV there is decidedly anti-fringe.
In other cases, the only possible connection is that you happen to know this group has an opinion. For example, editors should not notify Wikipedia:WikiProject Composers about proposals to change Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Infoboxes, because that group has a history of disputes over infoboxes in "their" articles, and because if you were interested in infoboxes, you would probably not know that. A page about musicians is not an obvious place to look for information about infoboxes. However, it would be fine to notify Wikipedia:WikiProject Infoboxes, because it's an obvious page for anyone interested in infoboxes to be watching. Regardless of whether you are pro- or anti- or something else, and regardless of whether you were actively participating or silently lurking, if you wanted to be involved in infoboxes, you would expect to get infobox-related messages there. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:04, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No. Notifying Wikiprojects is generally fine, and not prohibited as a purpose of projects is to provide all kinds of notice, neutral wording of the notice is key, though. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:25, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. Suppose a project -- let's say it's astronomy -- has people who are used to what's in specialized teaching or publications. Pinging them when the issue is what's best for the general reader -- let's say it's whether to capitalize Universe -- can tilt WP:MOSCAP talks. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 12:52, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, we absolutely want editors familiar with a topic to participate in a discussion. You seem to be saying that editors that are familiar with a topic will be less interested in what is best for the encyclopedia than editors who are not familiar with the topic. Assume good faith until proven otherwise. Donald Albury13:51, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To the question, Is notifying the relevant Wikiprojects to a discussion ever a violation of WP:CANVASS?, you responded "yes", and then said, Suppose a project -- let's say it's astronomy -- has people who are used to what's in specialized teaching or publications. Pinging them when the issue is what's best for the general reader -- let's say it's whether to capitalize Universe -- can tilt WP:MOSCAP talks. How am I supposed to interpret that to mean something other than you are opposed to pinging a project because its participants may have specialized knowledge and would therefore "tilt" (I presume the "wrong" way) the discussion. Can you rephrase your answer to make it clearer to me? - Donald Albury17:38, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I will rephrase the words "Try AGF yourself." thus: You said I "seem to be saying that editors that are familiar with a topic will be less interested in what is best for the encyclopedia than editors who are not familiar with the topic" -- which would be an aspersion against my esteemed fellow editors, so you're making a conduct accusation. Then you suggest I try AGF. I'm hopeful that others didn't interpret my remark as aspersion or lack of AGF, perhaps because they can't read any such thing in them, perhaps because they can read WP:MOSFAQ. I won't engage further with you about this, unless you take it to WP:ANI. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 21:35, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I had a similar interpretation of what your original statement meant. I think this would have been more productive if you'd simply replied "That isn't what I meant; what I meant was..." I still don't know what you meant. Schazjmd(talk)22:03, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I too thought you meant editors that are familiar with a topic will be less interested in what is best for the encyclopedia than editors who are not familiar with the topic when you said Pinging [people who are used to what's in specialized teaching or publications] when the issue is what's best for the general reader -- let's say it's whether to capitalize Universe -- can tilt WP:MOSCAP talks.. You have since stated that that is not what you meant, but you haven't stated what you did mean. Given I misunderstood the first time, I do not think my guessing again is likely to result in my getting the right answer so I will refrain from speculating. Thryduulf (talk) 22:23, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's polite of you. Well, I pointed to WP:MOSFAQ so you know the idea is that Although Wikipedia contains some highly technical content, it is written for a general audience. While specialized publications in a field, such as academic journals, are excellent sources for facts, they are not always the best sources for or examples of how to present those facts to non-experts. When adopting style recommendations from external sources, the Manual of Style incorporates a substantial number of practices from technical standards and field-specific academic style guides; however, Wikipedia defaults to preferring general-audience sources on style, especially when a specialized preference may conflict with most readers' expectations, and when different disciplines use conflicting styles. This sort of argument actually did arise in the series of universe|Universe discussions, and I remember an astronomer participant suggested magazines like Astronomy or Sky and Telescope weren't scientific journals, thinking that mattered. I have a vaguer recollection that the WP:CONLEVEL words ("... participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope.") appeared when another project group thought their rules should apply within their project's articles, but that's not what I had in mind, I was only thinking about and mentioning capitalization of Universe, where I believed that specifically addressing those people would not be addressing representatives of the broader community, and subject expertise is not contested but it's about style not subject. And yes ngrams came up too, and I see that you mentioned a case (maybe a WP:MOSCAPS thread about something in French?) where subject expertise was helpful, ngrams were not. But I believe that in the case I brought up the opposite was true. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 14:49, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, that was very helpful. I agree that it's important to have some sort of feedback to stay connected with the general reader, and I wouldn't want our running text to read like an Auguſtan newſpaper, with Words random'ly Capitaliſed. On the other hand, the improvement to the reader in clarity, meeting "expectations", etc. for MOSCAPS standardizations like the one mentioned, seems to me about epsilon. If these style confrontations significantly deter motivated editors from improving the encyclopedia, it is a net loss to us in terms of how much the general reader is actually able to learn from the encyclopedia in the future. This isn't intended as a declaration that "the WikiProject is always right"; just a reflection that our standing assumption that "the WikiProject is always wrong" may not actually further the goals of the encyclopedia. Choess (talk) 01:19, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There was an issue related to this with capitalisation in the rail transport area a while back. In at least instance the MOS-focused editors had not understood that the same 3-4 word term was being used as common noun in one context and as a proper noun in another context meaning things like ngrams were not relevant (as they have no context). This is not something that would be obvious to most non-specialists but is clear to those knowledgeable about the topic area. Subject-specialist knowledge is, in many discussions, important context required to reach the correct decision - whether that decision is to follow specialist conventions or not. Thryduulf (talk) 15:02, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This touches on something that's puzzled me for years. When a group of editors who are principally interested in interpreting policies & guidelines come into conflict with a group of editors, like a WikiProject, with some subject-matter expertise, we default to treating the latter as parochial fanboys. But it's not clear why this should be so in a broad moral sense: the P&G interpreters are not typically a larger or less hyperfocused group than a WikiProject. I think we tend to assume that because the community at large has ratified P&Gs to embody broadly-agreed upon principles, every statutory interpretation that invokes those P&Gs for a specific case enjoys the same level of broad community support. I'm not convinced that accurately describes the sentiments of the community, though. Choess (talk) 05:01, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. There is a tendency among some (but not all) p&g interpreters to assume that disagreement of their interpretation is disagreement with the policy/guideline rather than disagreement with their interpretation. In the rail transport area this has on multiple occasions manifested itself with sometimes heated accusations about disliking/objecting to/ignoring community consensus regarding e.g. capitalisation of common nouns when the actual disagreement was whether a given term was a common or proper noun. Thryduulf (talk) 07:43, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, neutrally notifying a WikiProject about a discussion clearly within its subject matter is always permissible. It would not be at all helpful, for example, to prohibit notifying WP:MED on the basis that its members are more diligent about applying WP:MEDRS than the average Wikipedian, and thus "partisan". WikiProjects fundamentally are places where editors can be notified of discussions and editing opportunities related to a subject area. If a WikiProject can't reliably be notified of discussions within its subject area, it can't meaningfully function. It would be fairer to take any allegedly problematic WikiProjects to MfD rather than to try and place restrictions that would allow them to exist in name but not function.--Trystan (talk) 13:44, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, the idea that we should view people with an interest in a topic as being a biased set rather than an informed set is to speak against the value of knowledge. An informed person is of more value in a relevant discussion; we want the deletion discussion of the Smoking cures broken legs AFD to have more interest from those interested in Wikipedia's medical coverage in general and not just those who found themselves part of making such a page. The fact that the medical editors will not come up with the same view as whatever other editors choose to involve themselves in that discussion is a plus, not a problem. The idea that we can contact Wikiprojects only if they will respond in the exact same ratio as other editors would make contacting Wikiprojects pointless as it would have no impact on the results. The idea that Wikiprojects having an informed POV makes them a problem would suggest dismantling the entire Wikiproject system. Selectively notifying Wikiprojects with the intent of skewing results is a problem, but notifying all the obviously related Wikiprojects is not. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 16:24, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, I don't believe there's partisan wikiprojects to the extent that notifying the relevant ones is canvassing. In obvious cases (i.e. only notifying WP:ISRAEL for a dicussion about the Second Intifada) selective notifications could be a sign of canvassing, but properly performed WP notifications are not canvassing. AlexandraAVX (talk) 16:48, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Another example is if we are discussing whether Foo (film) or Foo (train) is a primary topic or if Foo should be a dab. Notifying Wikiproject Film but not WikiProject Trains might seem unfair. However, I agree that 99% of notifications to projects do not constitute canvassing. Certes (talk) 17:17, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The contention I'm trying to argue against here is that there are some projects that are biased such that notifying them at all would not meet WP:APPNOTE. So, could you please rephrase? Loki (talk) 13:08, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If there are projects that are so biased that a neutral notification about a topic relevant to their topic area would not meet APPNOTE then the Community needs to have a serious discussion (I guess at AN(I)) about that the problems with it and/or the relevant participants can be resolved. I'm not currently aware of any such groups, but if you are then please present the evidence. If you haven't got any such evidence, then please refrain from casting aspersions. Thryduulf (talk) 13:14, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is notifying the relevant Wikiprojects to a discussion ever a violation of WP:CANVASS? No. Can the language of such a notification be canvassing? Yes. Can there be disagreement about which projects are "relevant"? Sure, but I don't see a way to avoid case-by-case determinations of that. All of this said, it's not impossible that a project could function like a canvassing club, but that would need lots of evidence and again should be handled on a case-by-case basis. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 23:15, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, and saying "yes" is, inadvertently or on purpose, helping along years' worth of reputation laundering of the deletion crusades waged by like 10 editors against topics covered by certain WikiProjects -- cricket players, football players, roads, I'm probably missing a few -- by creating consensus for reasonable, unobjectionable-sounding policies and/or against scary-sounding straw men like "partisan bias." The idea is to make it easier to do this stuff as covertly as possible, without having to deal with the pesky obstacles of the rest of the project. To establish a kind of pre-emptive canvassing where they are the only people who ever find out about deletion requests. Gnomingstuff (talk) 22:03, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I will also say that my immediate reaction to the accusation that started all this was "not giving notification to anyone who might like this essay that you're trying to get it deleted is also unfair for the same reasons as canvassing would be, and it's weird we don't have a policy about it". Loki (talk) 22:20, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
An editor who may wish to draw a wider range of informed, but uninvolved, editors to a discussion can place a message at any of the following:
The talk page or noticeboard of one or more WikiProjects or other Wikipedia collaborations which may have interest in the topic under discussion.
The policy says explicitly "one or more WikiProjects" (my emphasis on the word one). Therefore we can conclude from the actual WP Behavioural Guideline that drawing attention of a discussion to only one WikiProject is acceptable per WP Guidelines. TarnishedPathtalk12:55, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You need to read all of APPNOTE; the third last paragraph makes it clear that it does not create an exception to INAPPNOTE.
I fail to see how notifying any WikiProject could ever be taken as "biased, partisan, or non-neutral notifications" given that there are likely to be editors on varies sides of the coin who have any WikiProjects on their notification list. TarnishedPathtalk01:40, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Per WP:INAPPNOTE votestacking is Posting messages to users selected based on their known opinions (which may be made known by a userbox, user category, or prior statement). Posting to only one WikiProject can not constitute that because an editor has no way of knowing the opinions of every editor who has a WikiProject's page on their watch list. TarnishedPathtalk01:46, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It really depends on the context... Not all wikiprojects are created equal, some are good places where non-partisan experts on a topic can be found and some are toxic slime cultures of fans and die hards. The biggest issue for me isn't really notification or non-notification its selective notification... People seem to want to talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict so lets use that as an example: if when soliciting comments to a discussion involving the war in Gaza a user notifies only WikiProject Palestine but not WikiProject Israel or vice-versa thats a problem. From my perspective if WikiProjects are being solicited then all of the relevant WikiProjects should be notified, but again it depends on the context. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 13:55, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But in that particular example, is it really a problem? Isn't it likely enough interested editors are watching both? But sure, for a Arab-Israeli conflict thing, if you're doing one, may as well do the other. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:00, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That doesn't seem likely, everything I have ever experienced on wikipedia suggests otherwise. Notifying different wikiprojects brings different people to the discussion, I have never encountered a topic area where multiple wikiprojects are made up of the exact same group of people. Anything that has the effect of skewing the discussion towards a specific POV is a problem and thats true whether or not canvassing is involved. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:09, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I infer a couple of different sentiments in play here:
A) "It's just as likely for pro- and anti- users to watch the same WikiProject. It's WikiProject Israel, not WikiProject ProIsrael."
B) "In practice, participants in WikiProject Thing are mostly pro-Thing."
The difficulty is getting a list of participants. The ideal list would be a list of editors who watch a Wikiproject, but that data is not available. Instead, I've created an approximation based on the editors who are listed as members and the editors who have made at least five edits to the projects talk page.
For the purpose of demonstration I have applied to this Wikiproject US Roads in relation to this RfC; I have done so because the RfC is long past and Wikiproject US Roads has forked, so I feel using them as an example will produce less drama and be less likely to derail this discussion than more recent examples.
"Members" are determined by either being listed on the member list or having made five or more edits to the talk page
I didn't review multi-choice questions to keep the analysis simple, and I didn't review low participation questions as they lack sufficient data.
The evidence tells us that for some Wikiprojects there are topics the editors are collectively biased on, but I don't think it is true of the vast majority of Wikiprojects. BilledMammal (talk) 03:32, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
1. Why do you think this approximation is any good? Clearly the list of members is a lot more likely to actually agree with the project of the Wikiproject than the list of watchers, right?
2. Roads is a bad example exactly because they forked. Your argument would be benefited more by a negative example: if you could show some Wikiprojects where the membership does not seem to share similar opinions on topics relevant to the topic area that would at least prove WP:LGBT is exceptional. Loki (talk) 03:38, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
1. The result is the unchanged if I only include editors with at least five edits to the talk page.
2. The question is "can a Wikiproject be partisan", to the extent that notifying them is likely to generate an improper illusion of a consensus where none (or a different one) would exist in a wider population. Roads is a good example of this because they demonstrate that it is possible. If you believe all WikiProjects are partisan, then I encourage you to provide the evidence, but I am skeptical. Alternatively, find a WikiProject that editors would not expect to be partisan, link a few well-attended, centrally-held, binary RfC's that the WikiProject was notified of, and I can do the analysis for you. BilledMammal (talk) 03:55, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is to me a centrally flawed concerned; it basically brings it down to "it's okay to alert a Wikiproject only if they are so in accord with non-members that it makes no difference in the results", which is silly. We want informed people making decisions based on being informed, and information should be something that changes perspective. (It is also impracticable; we cannot be effectively surveying a given Wikiproject for their view in advance of notification, so implementing the idea that notifying a relevant-but-biased Wikiproject is canvassing would in essence shut down notifying Wikiprojects at all.) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:12, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate this data, but I interpret it quite differently from BM. For one thing, I would not regard the population of "non-members" who participate in a discussion as a kind of target for how the members of an "unbiased" wikiproject should be distributed. We have no way of knowing how well "non-members" represent the rest of the community or why they were motivated to participate in the discussion
Also, I want to point to the actual impact of the participation of project members on the four proposals mentioned. The first proposal was supported by members and non-members alike, so the participation of members was not likely to affect the outcome. The middle proposals were supported by members and opposed by non-members, and therefore did not reach anything approaching consensus even though members disagreed.
The most interesting case, though, is the last proposal. The net preferences of members and non-members pretty much canceled out, leaving the discussion seemingly deadlocked. I would argue that this is actually a desirable outcome of member participation; if we assume that members are more likely to be contributing to content development in this area, then it is better to have a non-consensus in which their voices are heard (motivating further discussion and new proposals) than a clear consensus against in which their perspectives are seemingly excluded.
And of course what makes this case relevant is also what makes it unusual: that members of a single wikiproject, sharing similar views, make up such a large portion of those !voting on a set of proposals. The much more typical case is that appropriate notifications of projects with different perspectives, or the use of WP:CENT, dilutes the participation from any one group to a small - if sometimes the best-informed - part of the whole. Newimpartial (talk) 21:14, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think both are true depending on which project we're talking about, there is a large diversity of WikiProjects and no generalization is going to apply to all of them. I will also note that some wikiprojects are strongly "anti-thing" like WikiProject Discrimination and WikiProject Alternative medicine. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:45, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We need to give up the idea that all Wikipedia editors are at the two extremes. Either ideal where the objectives of Wikipedia fully overrule biases, or where where biases are so strong that they overrule the objectives of Wikipedia. In reality most editors are somewhere between those two extremes. Conversely, give up the idea that mere expression of concern of biased-influenced editing is is a severe accusation and violation of wp:AGF. On average, a wiki-project is typically going to be slightly biased. Regarding notifying them on a contentious topic, this should be recognized (and adjusted for by casting a wider net) but IMO it doesn't rise to the level of precluding notifying them or considering it to be a wp:canvas violation. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 16:03, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly disagree with the notion that a WikiProject can be considered partisan or problematic without the involvement of Arbcom or some other discussion venue; otherwise, those are just an editor's personal opinion. I am also concerned with the conflation of specific canvassing cases which occurred in private or semi-private off-Wiki venues (EEML and Tropical Cyclones) with on-Wiki WikiProjects. Curbon7 (talk) 02:47, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think I agree with Thryduulf's point (and Curbon7's too now I guess) here that a claim that an Wikiproject is so partisan that it is inappropriate to notify them of something within their scope of interest is a user conduct issue, an accusation of which should only be made with evidence at an appropriate forum (AN/I, but also AE or ARCA for CTs). Alpha3031 (t • c) 04:22, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is certainly possible to CANVAS via a wikiproject notification … by wording the notification in a non-neutral way with the intent of generating desired support/opposition to an issue. However, that is a flaw with the wording of the notification, not the location of the notification. Blueboar (talk) 22:59, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think neutral notification of relevant WikiProjects is almost never canvassing. Part of the disagreement centers on the word partisan, which has expansive enough of a definition that we can be talking about very different things. BM's analysis of various WikiProjects above has no way of distinguishing between problematically partisan ("we vote differently than the general community because we're non-neutral") and positively partisan ("we vote differently because we know more than the general community"). I think Nat Gertler's thoughts on this are well-stated. A case against a WikiProject needs much more evidence, being essentially a misconduct allegation against a large group of editors. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:32, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think commonly understood best practice is to notify them all if you're going to notify one. I sometimes think it's overkill. For example, I remember at least considering notifying some projects about a dispute related to J. K. Rowling and being torn about whether or not to notify WP:WikiProject Gloucestershire. I certainly wouldn't hold it against someone if they did so, and I wouldn't call it canvassing if someone left it off. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:35, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In cases like that it makes sense to consider whether the specific dispute is relevant to that WikiProject. For example, if it was a dispute about whether Yate (where she was born) should be described as being in "Gloucestershire" or "South Gloucestershire" then the Gloucestershire project is definitely relevant. If the dispute was about which articles to include in her bibliography then the relevance is harder to see.
In general I don't think it should ever be regarded as wrong to notify all the WikiProjects that have tagged the article, or all the ones that are not tagged as inactive. If you think there is a relevant project that hasn't been notified, then the best thing to do is notify them and AGF that not doing so was not an attempt at canvassing unless you have a good reason not to. Thryduulf (talk) 01:59, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
An issue seems to be that the "is relevant to that WikiProject" test can be surprisingly subjective and unpredictable, as far as I can tell. People employ different (often unstated) heuristics to estimate relevance. Regarding "the best thing to do is notify them and AGF", this is my view too. I wonder about the scope of the AGF policy and its relationship to project notifications and the WP:INAPPNOTE guideline. AGF applies to individual editors. Wikiprojects are collections of editors. So, the AGF policy presumably extends to Wikiprojects as collections of editors. In that case, bias/canvassing concerns presumably always need to be evidence-based. Given the scope of AGF, assuming it extends to collections of editors with a shared property (like project membership), allowing people to use their own biases (maybe rebranded as 'common sense') to make non-evidence-based guesses about project bias impacting apparent consensus seems a bit inconsistent. Having said that, the AGF policy probably has its limitations in contentious areas where there is polarization and dishonesty (sockpuppetry), but it is policy, nevertheless. Sean.hoyland (talk) 03:44, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On this question of selective notification: for a certain RfC about René Lévesque (former premier of Québec) at article Talk, I notified wikiprojects Canada and Québec, but I was told that that was somehow canvassing. The editor making the accusation then proceded to notify wikiprojects for the rest of the Canadian provinces that had nothing to do with Lévesque's career.
I didn't formally object at the time - based on the "more eyes" theorem - but the notifications of apparently unrelated wikiprojects did feel to me like canvassing. What is the evaluation editors here would make that kind of (presumably tit-for-tat) notification? Newimpartial (talk) 10:43, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's a big difference between Wikiprojects, though. I can remember some of them listing AfDs for "their" articles on their Wikiproject page and descending en masse to vote Keep - topics that spring to mind were aircrashes, tornadoes (and US roads before they threw their toys out of the pram) - whereas participants from many other Projects treated the AfDs impartially and were quite willing to get rid of articles that didn't meet policy). Black Kite (talk)11:01, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is my opinion that while current policy does allow for the notification of WikiProjects, it is clear that there is a bias for folks involved in them to keep articles that are in their subject area, as no single WikiProject is representative of the overall community, which is why it is considered a specialized community in the first place. While it is an open message available for everyone to see in theory, in reality it will only be seen by a segmented and unrepresented faction of the overall community, and the evaluation of sources is not something that people can't do simply because they aren't in a WikiProject related to the article at question. Even when the wording is neutral, often the notification will come from someone who has already voted !keep, so how is that (or any other vote) a neutral notification? Let'srun (talk) 13:03, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Even when the wording is neutral, often the notification will come from someone who has already voted !keep could not be more wrong. First of all, you're assuming this only occurs for AfDs, when in fact AfDs are probably the one of the fewest things notified to WikiProjects (RMs and RfCs likely being the most). Additionally, your assumption that it is primarily people who have X opinion on the topic are the one's who notify is just not backed up by reality, to the point it seems you are arguing against notifications altogether. I think you are focusing too much on the why question (Why should WikiProjects be notified) rather than the what (What WikiProjects should be notified). Curbon7 (talk) 21:37, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's fair, and my opinion may be a bit biased just because of what WikiProjects I have viewed in the past. I have seen notifications for RFCs and RMs as well, and it should be made clear that the wording is neutral while also explaining why the project deserves a notification. Let'srun (talk) 03:28, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If someone with a strong opinion is notifying in an attempt to sway the discussion (which does happen, but is far from the only or even most common reason) then it's equally likely to be someone arguing to keep or delete if it's going the other way, or more likely from someone arguing for deletion if it looks to be headed for no consensus. It's probably equally likely to come from either side if the trend is merge or redirect. Not that notification in such circumstances is guaranteed to have the desired outcome - I recall one discussion a few years ago where someone arguing for deletion notified a WikiProject with the intent of preventing a no consensus outcome. Several editors saw the notice and showed up to the discussion but were evenly split and it still closed as no consensus. Thryduulf (talk) 21:59, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just because an editor has domain area knowledge doesn't mean they are willing to bend English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. Domain area experts typically know the best reliable sources for their area of expertise, the most reliable indicators that the standards for having an article can be met, and what achievements are actually significant versus those that just sound impressive to someone unfamiliar with the domain. If there are cases where editors fail to adhere to general consensus on the standards for having an article, then I feel the community should deal with these situations individually. If mechanisms like WikiProject article alerts aren't going to be used to notify editors interested in a topic area, there isn't a scalable way for those interested editors to be involved in related discussions. In my view, I think that will reduce the effectiveness of these discussions. isaacl (talk) 01:27, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:APPNOTE is clear that notifying one or more WikiProjects is appropriate notification. The argument that notifying specific WikiProjects may result in an influx of editors who are not representative of the Wikipedia community is not a convincing one because there may be editors who fall on either side of debates who have those WikiProjects on their watchlist. TarnishedPathtalk10:16, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think a lot of the above discussion has gotten fixated on the outcome, but what primarily matters in determining whether something was or wasn't canvassing is the intent. If someone selectively notifies me of an AFD because they think I'll vote keep and I vote delete, that initial message was still canvassing even if it didn't have the intended outcome. Similarly, if someone is posting to WikiProject X and not WikiProject Y because they believe members of project X have a predetermined point of view or opinion supportive of their position, that's canvassing, even if it turns out everyone from project Y watches project X's page, or most of the people watching the X page hate X, or whatever other reason the outcome might not be as the poster intended. Canvassing doesn't have to be successful to be canvassing. Nikkimaria (talk) 16:48, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unless you've determined a method of reading other people's minds, intent is generally determined by actions/outcomes (baring a confession). So if someone notifies WikiProject X, we can generally assume that that someone is a rational actor and would know they can't guarantee who's going to see that notification at WikiProject X or what side of a question they would fall on. TarnishedPathtalk01:45, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm thinking it might be useful to have a reason for deletion that covers a swath of articles that never improve, but are technically just over the bar of notability. To come under this category, the article:
Must be a barely notable subject, or be reasonably well-covered in other articles. A one-off event, a small subset of a main topic, or fancruft, say.
Must have severe deficiencies in citation or bias
No substantial edits in six months.
Has had at least one nomination for deletion a minimum of six months ago.
Will get three months to improve before a final deletion decision.
Huh? So this is for "articles", that have already survived AfD - then what exactly do you want to happen? Do you want AFD's to be able to close with a result of Up or out? Or do you want to make a new policy rationale that can only be argued on second AFDs? Do you even want this to do through a second AFD, or is this some sort of speedy criteria request? — xaosfluxTalk14:56, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Only at a second AfD. AfD currently normally acts as a check for potential. This is for articles unlikely ever to improve, after substantial notice - ones that will never reach the theoretical potential, with terrible quality. The kind of articles where the keep rationales are solely down to sources existing, nothing about the article as it stands being sufficient to keep it. It's also meant to be a very slow series of checks, to give it every chance. Also, preliminary suggestion; workshop at will. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs.18:03, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is not clear to me whether you are seeking to delete these pages so that they never have Wikipedia pages, or you are seeking to delete them with the hope that a healthier and more fertile page will grow in its place. If the latter, I should note that the argument WP:TNT usually is given accepted weight in deletion discussions, even if it's not exactly matched in policy and guidelines. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 20:54, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So we want to delete barely notable articles now? Why? Who decides what is "barely" notable? Notable means notable, if we start deleting articles that are notable but that we don't like, there'll be no point in having WP:N. Cremastra (talk) 20:25, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I am on purpose not going to answer this question, because "what I think" is that it demonstrates what is wrong with a lot of deletion processes (especially AfD) at present, all of which assume the key question to be, "should X topic have an article?" I think this is almost always the wrong question.
I think the right question, almost always, is "does this verifiable information belong in an encyclopaedia?" (content that fails WP:V never belongs). There can be various reasons, set out rather inconsistently in WP:NOT, WP:BLP, WP:DUE, WP:NPOV, WP:FRINGE and even WP:N - which isn't supposed to be a content guideline - why certain content doesn't belong in an encyclopaedia.
For content that belongs in an encylopaedia, the question then is, where should it be placed? WP:PRESERVE and WP:PAGEDECIDE are among the few places that address this question clearly, but unfortunately WP:N has been the tool perhaps most frequently used by editors to argue about decide whether to remove or retain content. I think this is an unfortunate situation - there are very few circumstances in which the encyclopaedia benefits from not having articles on "marginally notable" topics, except when the content of those articles is not encyclopaedic to begin with (WP:POVFORKS, for example).
If we had a way to talk about encyclpaedic inclusion directly, away from Notability, we might be able to defuse some misguided "zero-sum" conflicts and design an encyclopaedia more the way actual editors would design it, rather than allowing the shape of Wikipedia's content to emerge from a series of bar brawls between editors with particular presuppositions about what topic does or doesn't "merit an article". I know that wasn't the question lol, but that is my answer. Newimpartial (talk) 15:40, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say marginal articles are fine if they're of reasonable quality, but if articles are going to languish in a permanently bad state, that's a problem. There are cases where a very bad article is worse than no article. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs.16:08, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I absolutely know the type of article you are talking about, I recentlty nominated an article for deletion that has been a one-sentence stub for fourteen years. However, I don't think "this survived AFD but we're still going to delete it" has much of a chance of ever becoming policy. Just Step Sidewaysfrom this world ..... today17:04, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I just want to give articles every chance to thrive before we do delete them. There's other ways - WikiProject notifications, etc - but AfD usually forces a check of the article's potential: is there sources, etc - that I don't think any other current process does. If it has no potential, it gets deleted at the first AfD. If it's already of reasonable quality, this process shouldn't apply: it has thrived. This needs to be a slow process to have any effect. As I see it, though, this would be an argument to raise in a second AfD that would trigger the countdown to the final review. The review would be one admin comparing it to the state at the time of the failure to thrive AfD (which I think is sufficient given the number of steps before this) Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs.17:50, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A way I think this could work: we make a template for something along the lines of "this article doesn't have enough quality sources in it to establish notability (regardless of whether those sources exist out there somewhere)". Then if X amount of time passes and the situation hasn't changed, that's taken as strong evidence in an AfD that, regardless of whether the sources exist somewhere, they can't actually be used to write an article. Loki (talk) 19:38, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Note that this is just some things I've found by looking through the articles without sources categories, and some fad categories. These haven't passed through AfD, some of them might be handleable with a merge, and some might be salvagable - but the point of this proposal is to try and save the articles first.
Naked butler: It's possible this could be saved, but it's a lot of text, very little of it cited, so the accuracy and verifiability is very questionable. It's probably a thing, but such a weak article on a marginal subject is more likely to put inaccuracies into Wikipedia than to be genuinely helpful.
Campaign desk: Again, subject probably exists, but there's some oddities that make me concerned. The phrase "at popular retailers" makes me wonder about copyright of the text a little bit: it's a weirdly advert-y phrase. Uncited.
List of Fantastic Beasts characters - fancrufty article. Maybe it'll be saved, maybe not, but there's nothing in here that isn't redundant to the films' articles.
Should these be deleted right now? No, the whole point of this proposal is to encourage attempts to salvage articles in this kind of state. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs.13:41, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There were more citations (four) in the article as originally posted (I have made no effort to see if their removal was appropriate.) However, there is more sourcing to be found, such as this Evening Standard article. I'm not sure how the procedure here would help this article (if it were even eligible, which it is not) any more than standard tagging. With articles this old, we cannot assume that the original editors are still involved enough to be aware if the article was threatened by deletion. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 16:36, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And, in fact, finally looking at the talk page of the article, there is (and has been since 2013) a long list of news sources which could be used. Any attempt to delete this article could be quickly laughed away by that list. If there are any good examples to which this proposed procedure should apply, this is not among them; someone who had concern with the quality of the article could improve it much more quickly than creating a deletion argument with the hope that someone else will do so. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 16:44, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For the record, I'd say that the key type of article this would be good for dealing with is minor fads, advertising, or one-off events long past in similar states to those articles. But I'm not sure it's worth trying to find the perfect exemplar. While I do think articles on such things can be encyclopedic, there is a certain point where you have to say that if an article with only minor notability, especially one where the interest peak is long past, is still terrible, that we need to consider if it's ever going to get better, whatever the theoretical potential. If this results in people actively working on these articles instead, that's all the better. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs.16:15, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, were I pressed I would say, yes, as a matter of practice having marginal subject articles is a detriment to the encyclopedia because they are often abandoned junk in practice, at best filled with templates for years upon years, at least telling the reader, "if you have not figured it out yourself, which you may well have, this has been bad since 2010, and Wikipedia does not care about bad articles and bad information" (that's a real detriment to Wikipedia). -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:51, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Improving existing articles slightly is a much lower hurdle than creating a brand new article. If an article is full of irrelevant unsourced text but has a notable core then it should be reduced down to that state, not deleted. There's no deadline for when Wikipedia needs to be perfect, and an article existing in the first place is conducive to improvement. AlexandraAVX (talk) 18:19, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you find an utterly terrible article on a notable subject, be bold and stubify it. I don't see why we need a process specifically for deleting bad articles on notable subjects. If there's no consensus to TNT then there isn't. AlexandraAVX (talk) 18:27, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Let me relate a Wiki tale, although not directly on point to these marginal articles, not too long ago an architect's article was eligible to be featured on the main page for winning an award, kind of like a Nobel Prize, and the article was in poor shape under wiki policies, so seven days it stayed at the news desk while some harried pedians made some effort to improve, and it was not improved sufficient to feature. (and it may still not be good enough). Now, if there were no article and it was written up with the sources that came with the prize and which surfaced in a few days, that would have been easier for the crew, instead trying to source prose and facts when one does not know where it came from. Nor would coverage of the subject have been improved by stubification, certainly not good enough to be in decent shape and probably not good at all (especially when a good number of the world was looking for the topic). So, hope for the more marginal is likely misplaced. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:09, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If the prose is unsourced it can be deleted. There's nothing preventing someone from being bold and with good reason tearing out unsourced and bad prose and possibly replacing it with entirely new text. If the article really is entirely beyond saving, WP:TNT is a recognised option at AfD. AlexandraAVX (talk) 13:03, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Its not about "preventing someone", its about the doing the work by anyone, which we know through decades of practice is not something anyone apparently wants, coupled with the common sense of past is prologue. You say just delete a bunch in the article or just do other work, but cleaning up, if you care, is about significant work. In comparison, it's easier to create a decent article from the bottom up without having to do the cleanup first. Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:58, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Once again, whether it is easier to create an article from the bottom up or easier to create an article based on someone else's work is a matter of opinion. Thryduulf (talk) 11:26, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What do you find easier? To write a decent article you have to research and write, to cleanup you have to delete, try to understand what someone else was thinking, rework, test for cvio, etc. as well as research and write. The first is less work. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:50, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If the existing article lists some sources, then I don't need to spend as much time looking for sources.
If the existing article has some solid sections, I can ignore those and focus my effort elsewhere.
If the existing article has information that wouldn't have occurred to me, then I get a better result.
I usually find it very easy to "understand what someone else was thinking".
On the flip side, if the existing article is really lousy, then a quick little ⌘A to select all and hitting the backspace button solves that problem. Even in such cases, the article 'infrastructure' (e.g., infobox, images, and categories) is usually sound, and keeping the existing ones usually saves time and effort.
I don't pretend that what's easiest for me is what's easiest for everyone, but I personally don't mind working with existing articles. Perhaps you are the opposite. That's okay. My experience doesn't invalidate yours, and yours doesn't invalidate mine (or the experiences of the multiple other people who have disagreed with you). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:35, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You are mostly off-topic as the premise of the proposal is only dealing in really lousy articles, and indeed ones that no-one is even doing your process of deletion or the rest. You think deleting large swaths is easy but it seems from your telling that is not something you spend much time thinking about it. As for your presumption about infobox and images and categories, your basis is for that is just assumption not evaluation. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:38, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WhatamIdoing's point is simply that other people have a different opinion to you. Your assumptions about why that be are irrelevant. What constitutes a "really lousy article" is also a matter of opinion, and yours is no more or less valid than WhatamIdoing's or anyone else's. Do you understand that people can have a different opinion to you about subjective matters and contribute in good faith or are you being deliberately disruptive? Thryduulf (talk) 13:47, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is you who are being deliberately disruptive and you who are trying to prevent the presenting of opposing views. Somehow others can present opinions (who introduced "easiest" or "lousy") but just because you disagree with my view, you label it disputive. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:52, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am not labelling your view disruptive because I disagree with it (see other people whose views I have disagreed with without labelling disruptive), I am labelling your view disruptive because you appear to be either unwilling or unable to distinguish between fact and opinion. Thryduulf (talk) 14:18, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That makes little sense and I see now how why you disrupt things, I am using words as others use them, and your inability to not read my comments as statements of view is your fault, not mine. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:23, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, because Wikipedia does not care. And you are wrong in substance too, it's easier to create a decent article than it is to reform one (and much more enjoyable) . Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:34, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Whether it is easier, and especially whether it is more enjoyable, is inherently subjective and so it is incorrect to say someone with a different opinion to you is "wrong in substance". Thryduulf (talk) 18:43, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is not the first discussion in which you have replied using ad hominems and borderline personal attacks to someone who simply has a different opinion to you. I really would like to believe you are capable of listening and collaborating, but nearly every comment you leave makes that harder. Thryduulf (talk) 18:59, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You came in disruptive, to opine on the finer points of how you believe a phrase on "substance" has to be used. Which is far off-topic. So no, its not me who has shown poor collaboration here, it is you. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:05, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You are objectively wrong on just about everything it is possible to be objectively wrong about in that sentence. Please engage with the topic rather than with ad hominems. Thryduulf (talk) 19:13, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps what we need is a second review process … one that is focused on Non-Improvability, rather than Notability. It would consider articles that are in such poor shape that they (arguably) can not be improved… regardless of whether the topic is notable. Blueboar (talk) 18:20, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that's true, but does your proposal really include a reliable and lasting method for overriding a WP:OWN editor's wishes?
Giving editors less leeway on WP:OWN – by significantly increasing the likelihood that engaging in WP:OWN will result in being permanently blocked – might contribute quite a bit to solving your question as well, not to mention several other ones. TooManyFingers (talk) 16:24, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In principle, we don't want people to get permanently blocked. Also, it's sometimes difficult to tell the difference between "ownership" and "knowing what you're talking about", so some of these would likely be wrong. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:19, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
People who do know what they're talking about, but when pressed cannot show (in the Wikipedia-prescribed way) that they know what they're talking about, are intentionally and specifically excluded from Wikipedia. I don't think that's a good thing, but they are. Isn't that one of the most notable conflicts in wiki history? TooManyFingers (talk) 06:12, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(IMO some of the best content on here is from real experts who quietly disregard certain rules and do the right thing instead. But also some of the worst content is from ownership fanatics.) TooManyFingers (talk) 06:19, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While there may be articles covered by this that should be deleted, I don't think that editing inactivity is of any use in identifying them. And some of the other subjective criteria would be practically impossible to define or implement. Thanks for the idea and bringing it up here but IMO this is not workable and also not a very useful way to find articles that should be deleted. North8000 (talk) 18:58, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was initially torn between liking the idea of having a way to constructively reassess borderline articles that have not been improved in a long while, but also between being a firm believer in eventualism and the importance of recognising that Wikipedia is a work in progress. However, the more this discussion has gone on, the less I'm liking this. Merging, stubbifying, improving articles yourself (including using TNT), and similar activities that are not deletion are going to be preferable in nearly all cases. If you lack the subject or foreign-language knowledge to improve the article yourself use resources like WikiProjects to find people who do have that knowledge, sharing lists of the sources you've found but not understood to help them get started. If you don't have access to the sources (e.g. they're offline) then there are resources like the Wikipedia Library and at least some chapters offer grants to help you get them. Only when all of these options are unavailable or have failed, which is a small percentage of a small percentage, is deletion going to help and I'm not sure we need something other than AfD for that - especially as in a good proportion of these few cases notability is going to be questionable. Thryduulf (talk) 19:25, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What if we have a process for quickly moving such articles to draftspace, and requiring AFC review/approval for them to be returned to mainspace? BD2412T20:00, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that would basically be a backdoor deletion in many cases, a lot of the bad articles I come across are sometimes over a decade old and the original author is long gone. A PROD or AfD will let me and others interested in the subject area see them in article alerts, draftifying won't. AlexandraAVX (talk) 20:04, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@AlexandraAVX: An AfD can lead to draftification, which can lead to deletion for abandonment (or, rarely, revitalization), but at least this resolution avoids keep rationales based on possible improvements that will never actually be made. BD2412T21:13, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure how to ask my question without it sounding weird, but here goes: Who cares if the improvements are never made?
At the moment, the subject qualifies for a separate, stand-along article if the real world has enough sources that someone could improve it past the doomed WP:PERMASTUB stage (plus it doesn't violate NOT, plus editors don't want to merge it away). The rules do not require the article to be "improved", and never have.
So imagine that we have an article like User:WhatamIdoing/Christmas candy. It's two sentences and 100% uncited. Imagine that we all agreed that Wikipedia would almost certainly die before that article ever got improved. Why should that be considered a deletion-worthy problem? Why can't it just be left like it is? Who's it hurting? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:13, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Anyone who reads the article and comes away believing something false or likely to be false?
If there's something false in the article you can delete that. If the subject is a hoax then that's already a speedy deletion criteria. If it isn't a hoax you can remove any information that can't be verified. If the subject is notable then there inherently must be coverage that makes something about it verifiable. AlexandraAVX (talk) 09:09, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. This seems like an ornate process for which the problem it would address has not been actually identified; the OP came up with no examples that would qualify for this treatment. The standard processes allow for re-AfDing if the material is not notable under current guidelines, or stubbifying if it is. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 20:22, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One structural note. Since the suitability of the article to exist in main space technically relates only to the subject of the article, technically, the subject of the article should be the only reason to remove it from mainspace. North8000 (talk) 20:32, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's not quite true, as there other things that are relevant in some circumstances - copyvios are the most obvious, but also articles not written in English or written by socks of banned editors. However, other than newly discovered copyvios I can't think of any that are likely to be relevant to articles being discussed here (and with old articles the chance of suspected copyvios turning out to be plagiarism of Wikipedia are of course greater). Thryduulf (talk) 20:47, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Thryduulf: Well copyvio is a problem with content, though if you have an article that is 100% copyvio there's really nothing to save. North8000 (talk) 13:38, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can understand this frustration. All the time I see articles that were poor quality get sent to AFD, the commenters there say that the existing article is crap but (minimal) sources exist, so the article should be improved rather than being deleted. It gets kept, then...nothing happens. 10-15 years later, the article is still very poor quality and essentially unchanged. Whatever original sources existed might not even be online anymore, but a second AFD probably won't get a different result. Sometimes I can stubbify/redirect, if there's gross BLP violations I can sometimes just delete it, but most just exist in this limbo indefinitely. If nobody cares to make a halfway decent article, then maybe we shouldn't have one. I would like it if there was a shift at AFD, especially for long-term poor quality articles, from "should this topic have an article" to "is this particular article worth showing to readers". In 2005, the best way to help Wikipedia was with a pen (writing new articles). In 2024, the best way is with pruning shears (removing bad articles, or trimming irrelevant bloat within articles). I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this, but some sort of draftification for these articles might be a good idea. 6 months is probably too soon, but setting it at 5 or 10 years would cut out a lot of crud. The WordsmithTalk to me21:25, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The OP ignores fundamental principals like no time limits, deletion is not cleanup, preserve, before etc.. it would be political and contentious. And I'm not sure it would do much to improve Wikipedia, plus alienate and piss off editors. The whole idea of keeping a crappy article on a notable topic is that someone will find it and work on it, "hey look at this crappy article I can make it better". -- GreenC22:54, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
He's not ignoring those ideas, he's trying to gain support for changing them. Sure, it would be contentious but that's not a reason to not discuss it. And yes, ideally someone will find a crappy article and work on it. But for many thousands of articles, it's been years and that hasn't happened. It probably never will. So the few people who stumble upon them are left with an unvetted, unsourced, incomplete or even misleading article about a topic. Jimbo had the right idea in this post[1], which became the foundation of our BLP policy but can apply elsewhere too. It's better to have no information about a topic than bad information. The WordsmithTalk to me00:26, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have a single sock that is 30 years old. Nobody makes or sells those ones anymore, and I myself have no others like it. I have a policy of keeping single socks until the matching one is found, so the sock sits there.
Adam, I started a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Ready for the mainspace the other day, on what it means for an article to be "ready for the mainspace". This seems to be an idea that some editors have adopted. Back when we were new, the general idea seemed to be that you determined whether something's ready for the mainspace (and almost all of us created everything directly in the mainspace back then) with a two-part checklist:
Is the subject itself notable (e.g., if you spent time looking for Wikipedia:Independent sources, then you could find enough to write several sentences, even though nobody's bothered to do that yet)?
This could, and did, and was meant to, result in articles that said little more than "A campaign desk is an antique desk of normal size which was used by officers and their staffs in rear areas during a military campaign". (BTW, ProQuest374234967 might be a useful source for examples that article, as will this one, if you'd like to add them, and https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/15/archives/now-on-the-home-front.html will be particularly useful if you'd like to generalize from the desk to any sort of purpose-built furniture for mobile military officers.) However, I think that a minority of editors want to expand this checklist to look a bit more like this:
Is the subject itself notable?
Does the current version qualify for speedy deletion?
Would I be embarrassed if someone I respected said "Hey, I was looking at this short Wikipedia article the other day..."? (e.g., the article has fewer than x sentences, fewer than y cited sources, fewer than z links...)
If requiring a certain volume sounds nice, what I think would be more practical is if we talked about what percentage of articles we were really willing to sacrifice to the spirit of "immediatism because I'm embarrassed that someone hasn't already WP:FINISHED this old article". If you're willing to delete, say, 1% or 10% or 50% of all articles to artificially raise the average quality of Wikipedia articles, then we can calculate what x, y, and z would be. NB that I don't think that deleting articles for problems that could be solved by ordinary editing would be a good idea, because I've found some of those old, neglected, even uncited substubs to be of immediate value to me recently, when often what I wanted was an easy way to figure out what the official website was, or a quick definition of an obscure term (19th-century furniture and clothing has ranked high in my searches recently, so Campaign desk is exactly the kind of article that I have been finding helpful). But if you're bothered enough to want to WP:DEMOLISH articles because they're not being developed to your standards, then let's talk about how much is the most you could imagine destroying, and see if we could figure out what we'd be losing as a result. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:57, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Of the three example articles given early in this discussion, viewing them outside of this discussion: #1 Would fail wp:notability #2 is good enough as is, and #3 is in Wikipedia's Twilight Zone: there is no system / mechanism that really vetts list articles. North8000 (talk) 13:50, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Paul Majendie. “Butlers Buff Up Party Scene Forget the Quintessential Image of the British Butler as the Epitome of Discreet Decorum -- the Latest Fad on the British Party Scene Is Half-Naked Waiters.” Townsville Bulletin.
I based my comments #1 based on a quick guess. The question is coverage of sources on the specific topic. Which in turn needs the article to be about a specific topic. My first guess is that that isn't there. But the overall point is evaluating articles based on things other than lack of development activity, and that the latter is not much of an indicator. North8000 (talk) 16:49, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that's one of the problems with the proposal: it encourages people to seek deletion not on the basis of what sources might be available, such as this article in the Evening Standard (page 2 here) or this Herald-Tribune piece, but rather on their guesses of how the page will develop in the future. I see nothing in the OP's proposal that indicates that the goal is to try to save the article first, it makes no call for the implementer to try to save the article, just allows for the possibility that someone else may do so. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:10, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Huh? When something goes to 2nd AfD it could be "saved" like any other time, indeed that's when people often work on such (yes, yes, 'not cleanup', but that does not mean cleanup by hook or by crook is not good) the 2nd delete participants basically have to agree 'yeah, no one cares' for it to go. Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:39, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it could be saved then, but it would take an odd interpretation that the goal of an AfD filing is to save an article, when the very point of an AfD filing is to request its destruction. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 18:56, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed starting an AfD with the aim of doing something other than deleting the article could (arguably should) get the nomination speedily kept (WP:SK point 1). Thryduulf (talk) 19:08, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I did not say goal, I said it is regularly the outcome (including everytime there is no consensus or keep), the conversation is still about the suitability of having this article, nonetheless. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:03, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You appeared to be saying "Huh?" to a statement about the goal; if you were not "Huh?"ing that statement, I don't know what you were saying. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 21:09, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I did not think you were speaking about the goal of AfD, the proposal is for a new multi-factored rationale (like is this adequately covered elsewhere, etc.) that the AfD participants can either agree in or not. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:35, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I would call it additional rational but yes, when the alternatives given are delete large swaths of the article or just let it continue to sit there in bad shape for more decades. Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:28, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly suspect that #2, Campaign desk, is a copyvio, and has been so since it was created 20+ years ago, but I cannot yet prove so beyond any doubt. If it is determined that the original text, which is 95% of the current article, was a copyvio, then the article will have to be deleted. Donald Albury16:36, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It was written by an admin, AlainV. While it's not a perfect indicator, generally speaking, if I were looking for a copyvio, I wouldn't start by suspecting something written by an admin who wrote ~150 articles. It's at least as likely that the article was original here, and got copied over there. We have a copy from 2004; the Internet Archive has a copy of the Wikipedia article from 2005; the Internet Archive has a copy on a different website from 2006. I would not assume from this information that our article is the copyvio. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One reason that I haven't acted on my suspicions is the possibility that the website copied from AlainV's articles (all 48 or them, with only three or four desks listed on the website that AlainV did not create an article for). I left a message on his talk page, but he hasn't edited in two years.
Looking more closely at Cylinder desk, I see that AlainV and others modified that article after he created it, and the website matches the state of the article in April 2006 rather than the original state when AlainV created it in November 2003. Given that, I withdraw any suggestion that AlainV copied from the Arts and Crafts Home website. Donald Albury00:08, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose There is no such thing as an article on a notable topic that will never improve. They always improve eventually if they are left for long enough. We have many articles that were massively expanded after more than a decade of inactivity. If a topic satisfies GNG, there will be people able and willing to improve it. The proposal is incompatible with the policy WP:ATD. James500 (talk) 04:19, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
General Comment I think that the advice at WP:NOPAGE is far too often neglected, and in many cases we would be better off upmerging content. By the same token there are definitely some encyclopedic topics that would be undue detail for a parent article, but will never expand beyond a few paragraphs because there isn't anything else to say about them, and that really isn't a problem either, those type of articles exist in traditional encyclopedias; people who are interested in the niche information can still find it, and it doesn't get in the way of everyone else.At some deeper level of course this is a request to rethink WP:N, especially WP:ARTN, and maybe shift the current consensus a bit as to when no article is better than the existing content. Much more specific criteria than failure to thrive will be needed for that to happen, and in the end we have to confront the fact that most articles simply do not meet the theoretical baseline standard (the small percentage that do become WP:GAs after being checked), and if history is any guide, changes will considerably increase the disruption associated with deletion, at least for a time.That isn't to say the underlying concern is without merit, and we all want better written articles, I'm just skeptical this is the best approach to get there. 184.152.68.190 (talk) 04:01, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Rethinking
I think we should refocus the discussion away from AFD… we DO have a problem with articles that are about notable topics, but are seriously problematic in other ways. I am thinking that we might need to create a NEW process to deal with such articles. Perhaps (for lack of a better name) we can call it “GAR” (for “Gut And Rebuild”)? Please discuss. Blueboar (talk) 14:41, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would be for a policy making it clearer that stubifying and similar are acceptable for badly sourced and very poorly written articles. But we already have several projects for rebuilding and restoring bad articles: WP:CLEANUP, WP:REFCHECK and WP:GOCE. I don't think creating a new process for it would help. We already have the BOLD, revert, discuss cycle for that. AlexandraAVX (talk) 14:50, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The "problem" is no one is doing it, whether it is because it is relatively harder or just not interested, someone still has to do the research and write, I suppose this GAR could draw attention to what no one is doing and it could help but doubtful it will make the article itself decent, what it could do is produce a list of sources which would certainly be better. It is better to direct readers to RS than whatever so-called "lousy" article we have. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:50, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So, here’s the crux as I see it… when the issue is notability, we have a fairly clear threat (deletion) we can dangle in front of editors to force them to address the problem (or at least make the attempt). We also have a clear solution (supply sources).
But for other issues we don’t have a threat to dangle in front of editors to force (or at least strongly encourage) them to address the problem. We simply hope that, some day, someone might get around to it.
The question is… IS there some sort of threat (other than deletion) that would achieve the goal? The closest I can think of is: “Gut it back to a stub”. Blueboar (talk) 15:48, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure "threat" is the right word, but it seems to me that criteria for compulsory draftification - and a dedicated noticeboard for that - could serve the intended purpose. Heck, it could even be accompanied by a proposed or a speedy draftification process as well. The trick is to come up with a word that starts with a letter other than D (or B). Articles for Transformation (AfT)? Newimpartial (talk) 16:17, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with non-notable articles is that they are, well, not notable, and shouldn't be included in the encyclopaedia.
What is the problem with notable articles that are short that we are trying to solve? We can already remove unreferenced information (after looking for sources and either adding the sources you find or remove it as unverifiable if you can't find any). Why do we want to force people to expand this notable article under threat of deletion after a week (AfD) or six months (draftifying)? What does the encyclopaedia gain from this? Thryduulf (talk) 16:31, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Again, I’m trying to take deletion off the table here, and yet still convey a similar sense of urgency to editors (fix this “or else”). The only “or else” I can think of is: “We will pare this article down to a stub”. Blueboar (talk) 17:03, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Which editors? If we're dealing with old rot articles like discussed above, they are likely not editing Wikipedia any more. If we're dealing with newer problem articles, we're asking the editors to suddenly become competent? If you get into a war over paring something down, yes there are live editors and you can ask for a third opinion or somesuch., but in general, problem articles are better addressed by improving or paring them than in creating another system that relies on others. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:24, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@NatGertler, what if I don't want to do the work? What if my goal is to make other people do the work? I'm a WP:VOLUNTEER. I don't have to do anything I don't want to. But maybe I'd like to force "you" to do the work that I don't want to do. Threatening to take away basically accurate, appropriate information works on a timescale that humans can recognize. Either nobody cares, and the ugly article goes away, or a volunteer drops everything to save the article. I get to congratulate myself on prompting improvements without lifting a finger to do the work myself.
Waiting for someone to notice the problem and feel like fixing it doesn't feel like it works. Sure, some of them might get improved, but I can't see the connection. AFD forces people to do something about the specific article that I don't like. m:Eventualism just says – well, maybe some articles will get improved and maybe they won't, but I'll never know which ones, and it probably won't be the ones that I care about. I feel helpless and like there's nothing I can do, especially if I don't want to (or am not competent to) improve the articles myself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:52, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Blueboar, "gut it back to a stub" won't work, because for the most part, the articles that are disliked are already stubs.
I think the desire is to force other people to do this work. "My" job is just to complain that your work is sub-par (sending it to AFD requires three clicks and typing a sentence); "your" job is to put in whatever work is necessary to satisfy me (could be a couple of hours of work, especially if I dislike the subject and so demand an even higher level of activity).
Consider Campaign desk, given as an example above. It's a long stub (10 sentences, 232 words according to ProseSize). Two editors easily found sources for it. It's at AFD now. Why? I don't know, but I will tell you that it's quicker and easier to send something to AFD than to copy and paste sources out of this discussion. I also notice on the same day's AFDs that someone has re-nominated an article because the sources that were listed in the first AFD haven't been copied and pasted into the article yet. Why not copy and paste the sources over yourself? I don't know. Maybe adding sources to articles is work that should be done by lesser beings, not by people who are trying to "improve Wikipedia's quality" by removing anything that hasn't been improve to my satisfaction by the WP:DEADLINE – the deadline apparently being "whenever I notice the article's existence". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Part of an editor’s job is to highlight problems that the author needs to fix. I do get that we ideally wear both hats at the same time, but… sometimes we can only wear one. It is quite possible for editors to identify problems with an article that they can not fix themselves because they don’t know the subject matter well enough to do so. We need something that tells those who DO know the subject matter: “hey, this urgently needs your attention”.
As for why there is urgency… we simply have too many articles flagged as having with serious problems that have never been addressed. We need something that will push those who can be authors into actually authoring. Blueboar (talk) 17:48, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That model of "editors" and "authors" is based on a hierarchical professional structure that does not exist on Wikipedia. Everyone is an "editor" on Wikipedia; that word doesn't hypothetically grant you power over me. Toughpigs (talk) 17:51, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Blueboar, a while ago, I dropped everything to save articles such as White cake. (Please do not blame the innocent AFD nom; he, like 99.9% of people, didn't know the modern white cake is a technological wonder, and finding high-quality and scholarly sources about everyday subjects requires more than an ordinary search.) I had fun doing it, and those articles are much better now. (I'll deal with the complication that is fudge cake later).
I think @Thryduulf is on the right track when he asks why we have such urgency. There was no urgency whatsoever about White cake. There were no errors in it. It had sources. It was, admittedly, much less awesome than it is now, but there is nothing seriously wrong. Ditto for Campaign desk, and almost all of the other "ugly" articles. So: Why should fixing that have been urgent? Did we really need something to push me into improving the article? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, but you did not need the article to do the research and write on white cake, and why it matters, is we are not showing our research, after sometimes decades, and thus adding value, rather we are suggesting that someone shared their thoughts on white cake on Wikipedia, when you can look at the rest of the internet and google for people's thoughts on white cake. The reader would have been better off, in the reliable information department, by finding reliable information on their own, then reading the unsourced, unexamined decidedly unreliable by Wikipedia's own disclaimer article. Anything that said in effect go, read this stuff, it is a good source, would have been better. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:17, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, sorry, I thought your story was about it being AfD'd for lack of sourcing, was it that the sources cited were unreliable or irrelevant meaning with no evidence in them of notability? (so yeah, the rest, of my comment would apply to the unsoured parts). Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:42, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, such AfD nominations are always hard to understand, as the inner logic of the nom is 'this is part of a notable topic' (here, cake). That's similar to the campaign desk example, the salient issue is whether to redirect to campaign furniture. Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:28, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict × 2) That doesn't explain why there is urgency. It identifies that you (and some other editors) dislike there being lots of articles that haven't been improved to your satisfaction yet. It does not explain why that many articles needing improvement is a problem, why nominated articles need fixing more urgently than the other articles, why you can't or won't fix it yourself, nor why you get to decide what articles other people need to prioritise. Thryduulf (talk) 17:55, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Honestly, just the fact that you're considering "threatening" people in order to "force" them to do what you want suggests that this may be more about you than it is about the articles. The AfD process isn't about "threats" and "force", it's about identifying and deleting articles on non-notable subjects. Toughpigs (talk) 18:14, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I’m just being realistic. “Force” may not be the intent of the AFD process, but it is certainly a product of that process… because we “threaten” to delete articles on non-notable topics, lazy article authors are “forced” to provide sources to properly establish that the topic is indeed notable.
In any case, what I am fumbling around trying to envision is a process that would be “about” identifying and fixing seriously flawed articles on notable topics - a process perhaps similar to AFD, but not AFD. Blueboar (talk) 10:59, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The only things such a process could bring that existing policies, processes, task forces, collaborations, etc don't are a deadline and consequences for failure and nobody has yet identified why we need either of those. Thryduulf (talk) 11:09, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OK… let’s break it down into more bite sized chunks… first: let’s consider articles with serious WP:NOT issues (That might be a clearer example of where the topic might be notable, but the article, as it currently stands, is problematic). Do we have any sort of process that would help us better identify and therefore fix such articles? Blueboar (talk) 11:51, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In other words… eventually, someday, maybe, someone might get around to fixing the article. But until that eventual day comes (perhaps years after it is identified) we are apparently OK with Wikipedia continuing to contain content that a (somewhat core) policy explicitly says Wikipedia should NOT contain?
I’m sorry, but if that is our “process”, I don’t think it is effective (or at least not effective enough). I think we need a better process. A process that will incentivize our authors to fix WP:NOT issues sooner rather than later. Blueboar (talk) 14:00, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As I stated the only things our processes lack is a deadline and consequences for failing to meet that deadline and you still haven't identified how having either of them will benefit the encyclopaedia. Policies and guidelines already allow you to remove policy violations when you see them. Thryduulf (talk) 14:13, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Looks to me, Blueboar has done so, 1) effectively disincentivizing long term-policy violations; 2) effectively. reducing long-term policy violations. 3) Wikipedia taking effective responsibility for long-term policy violations concerning the central reason Wikipedia exists, its content, because we can't/don't insist on individual accountability (no one can make an editor source that article they wrote 10 years ago) we need to make process for entire-project accountability, when individualist work has over the long-term failed, concerning its central mission. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:51, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I thought the whole point of this proposal is to deal with articles that aren't policy violations? Articles that are policy violations should have the policy violating parts fixed or removed, or (if that would leave nothing viable), nominated for deletion as soon as someone sees them. Thryduulf (talk) 15:54, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What you're suggesting is a "double AfD" -- if an article has been at AfD and it's been demonstrated that the subject is notable, but you personally still don't like the current state of the article, then you want an extra do-over that gets you the result that you want. Toughpigs (talk) 15:55, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And that someone else has to do the work, because if the only point was to fix the article, you could do that yourself. There is nobody in this discussion who is incapable of remedying serious policy violations in any article, including subjects we're unfamiliar with. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:00, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
With English Wikipedia's current consensus being that stub creation is encouraged, and with Wikipedia editors being volunteers, I think the only scalable way to continually improve articles is to build up groups of editors interested in various topic areas—which in the context of English Wikipedia, are WikiProjects—who can work through the queues of stubs. I realize that with most WikiProject talk pages being dormant, this isn't easy. Now that new editors each have their own personal newcomer homepage with an assigned mentor (though at present on English Wikipedia, due to a shortage of volunteers, only 50% of newcomers are shown a mentor on their homepage), perhaps mentors can help point new users to active WikiProjects. (Building a new consensus to manage the quality of new articles is an alternative, but personally I don't foresee a change being feasible in the intermediate term, given the most recent discussions amongst the editors who like to weigh in on this matter.) isaacl (talk) 16:09, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You know the answer to that already: it's up to each person to decide what they want to work on. A group of interested persons can discuss situations, of course, and that may influence individual decisions. isaacl (talk) 16:23, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Our choices about which backlogs to "advertise" affect the choices people make. If we say "Stubs are bad, so please prioritize expand stubs", then we'll get more stub expansion. If we were instead to say "Improving popular articles is more important than ignored ones, even though they're less likely to be stubs", then we would expect to get more focus on popular articles. Each person will make their own decisions about what to work on, but people will also take official recommendations and nudges into account when making their individual choices.
Some years back, Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine set an official goal of getting all Top-importance articles past the stub stage. (These tend to be rather generic subjects, like Burn and Infection.) I think that was valuable, but I'm not sure that there is similar value in encouraging the expansion of the least-read 50% of Wikipedia's articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:45, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, that's up to the interested editors to decide upon. For better or worse, I can't keep other editors from discussing queues of interest to them. I can raise my concerns about their relative priority, and thus try to influence whatever decisions are made (whether that's tasks undertaken or text on a WikiProject page). isaacl (talk) 16:59, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Blueboar, could you give me an example (preferably hypothetical) of an article about a notable subject that has serious NOT violations? None of the examples above (e.g, Campaign desk) seem to be NOT violations.
I feel like the common objections behind these discussions (which have been going on with some intensity for a couple of years now) don't involve serious policy violations at all. Instead, the objections appear to be:
WP:ITSUNREFERENCED, and I want someone else to add sources right now. We couldn't get a rule adopted to require sources in non-BLP articles earlier this year, but I want this non-BLP article treated as if we did adopt that rule.
It's an WP:UGLY little article. Personally, I prefer that articles be Start-class, or at least long stubs.
Sure… Suppose an article about a relatively obscure regional restaurant chain that does nothing but list every franchise outlet and its address, thus violating WP:NOTDIRECTORY. The chain might well be notable and thus worth an article… but the article we currently have is problematic. It probably needs a complete rewrite, not deletion… So… let’s say someone stumbles upon this article. They can identify the problem, but they don’t know the topic well enough to write about it (and perhaps they don’t really care enough to do so)… so they simply tag it and move on… And then… nothing happens… nothing changes… the article just sits there, tagged as violating policy, potentially for years. I don’t think that is in the best interest of WP. Surely there is some way to better incentivize fixing the article. Blueboar (talk) 18:43, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The person who needs incentivizing is you. You are the one who's bothered by the article's existence. You can be the one who fixes it. Take out the addresses, look for reliable sources (probably in newspapers, for a restaurant chain). If you don't find any, then put it up for deletion. If you do, add them to the article. The problem is solved. You solved it! Toughpigs (talk) 18:46, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm… Nope… I’m not in a position to fix the problem myself. I don’t live in the area served by my hypothetical restaurant chain, I have never eaten there, I know nothing about it, I don’t even know what sources would help me to write a proper article. All I know is that the article (as it currently stands) is a directory of franchises (a WP:NOT violation). I DO care enough about WP to alert others to the problem, but I am not qualified to fix it myself. The best I can do is tag and move on.
So, I ask again… THEN what? Do we (as a community) continue to just ignore the problems with the article I have identified?… because that is what is currently happening! Surely we can do better. Blueboar (talk) 19:44, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Then you nominate it for deletion. We already have a process for this. If the article is kept, then at least a couple of sources have come up, and glaring problems like the addresses have been fixed. Toughpigs (talk) 20:43, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nah… If I nominate for deletion, I get told that the topic is notable (apparently there are reliable sources, even though I personally don’t know which are reliable). I get told that AFD isn’t for article clean up (so the WP:NOT violation persists), and I am scolded for wasting people’s time. Blueboar (talk) 21:32, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So... you don't want to use AfD because you'll be told that you're wrong. Instead, you want a separate AfD process that will tell you that you're right? Toughpigs (talk) 21:36, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not at all… I want a new process that will better draw attention to problems and do more to incentivize editors who CAN fix the problems to actually DO so. That new process might (or might not) be modeled on AFD… I’m still very open to suggestions and inspiration on that. I simply know that our current “tag it and hope that someone eventually fixes it” system isn’t working. Blueboar (talk) 21:59, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is fixing that the right goal for Wikipedia?
I think this point needs to get some direct attention. I agree that the hypothetical article described above is a WP:NOT violation as written.
But: Is this really a "Oh my goodness, that actually violates a policy! Please, somebody do something, quick!" situation? Or could this be more of a "That's unfortunate, but not actually harmful, and frankly an article that only lists the locations is not as important as other problems I could be fixing" problem?
Most of what we do is being done by about 10K experienced editors each month. The available volunteer hours do not expand to accommodate someone's desire to have this fixed on the m:immediatism time line. Incentivizing the editors who can clean up that article "to actually DO so" means incentivizing those editors to leave other problems unaddressed. So – is this really worth the cost? Are you glad that I expanded Cottage Inn Pizza when it was prodded a few months ago? Can that question be fully answered, if you don't consider what else I didn't do, because I spent an hour or so on that "relatively obscure regional restaurant chain"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:34, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If there isn’t any urgency, perhaps we should downgrade WP:NOT to an essay?… or rename it to: “What Wikipedia arguably shouldn’t be.” Ok, snark there… but yeah, I do think dealing with violations of major policies should out weigh a lot of the other, pettier things we obsess about as editors. Blueboar (talk) 00:20, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Blueboar, you asked, "Do we (as a community) continue to just ignore the problems with the article I have identified?" And for me, the answer is that I would rather have lots of imperfect articles than give you and X other people the power to mass-delete articles that would pass AfD but you still think are kind of "meh".
(Note that you have already said that the articles would pass AfD and that you would be accused of wasting editors' time if you nominated them.)
If your proposal is (paraphrased), "Let's have a system that 'forces' people to improve random articles on notable subjects at my personal instruction or they get deleted whenever I want," then I vote for the system that we currently have. Yes, that hypothetical chain restaurant article is absolutely hypothetically fine with me. Toughpigs (talk) 01:25, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I don't think I'd describe the hypothetical article as "fine", but I also don't think that fixing it is urgent. If it gets done sometime before the heat death of the universe, then that would be great. But if we have more important content to work on, then I'm okay with it still being in its harmless but WP:UGLY and nominally policy-violating state when I die. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:28, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Toughpigs… I’m not sure why you keep bringing up deletion… I opened this section by removing deletion as an option. But just to be clear - I am envisioning a new process to fix problematic articles… and NOT delete them. Blueboar (talk) 10:29, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So this new process highlights that it is vital that someone drops what they are doing and fixes this article to your satisfaction right now. What happens if nobody does? It's already a stub, so gutting the article isn't an option, and deletion is apparently off the table, so we can't do that. What else is there? Do we pick an editor and stop them doing anything else until they've fixed this article? How do we choose which editor? What happens if they walk away from the project instead? Or do we just leave the article with a different banner on it to let people know that not only is this article is in a bad state but we disapprove of it being in bad state and we were unable to force anybody to fix it in time? Thryduulf (talk) 10:56, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thryduulf, part of the problem in my hypothetical is that the article (as it currently stands) ISN’T “already a stub”… it’s a directory of franchises and addresses. I could definitely see “stubify” being a step in the process (the “Gut” part of my suggested “Gut and Rebuild” name for the process) but what we really need is the next step… something that will incentivize editors to rebuild. That’s what I am searching for… and I don’t have the answer yet. I am hoping that I will become inspired as we continue to discuss. Blueboar (talk) 11:39, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fixing the Policy Violation™ 😱 requires ten seconds. You open the editor, blank the list, and save it. Fixing that would be faster than manually tagging it, and approximately the same amount of time as using Twinkle to tag it.
Now we have a substub with less information, which presents two problems:
Nobody who hates having an article with two sentences and a list of locations is going to be satisfied with an article that contains only the two sentences. It's still WP:UGLY and it's still irritating to all the people who want only high-quality articles right now.
"Less information" can itself be construed as a different Policy Violation™ 😱, because the Wikipedia:Editing policy says that Wikipedia should generally have more information instead of less.
@Blueboar, what if it's not so petty? The next major edit I made after that pizza chain was to expand Mastitis. I don't think we have an official policy that says "Improve health-related articles by providing accurate, well-sourced facts about common medical conditions, particularly if misinformation is spreading about that subject on social media", but I do consider that more important and more urgent than nominal compliance with a policy about whether Wikipedia should or shouldn't contain a list of locations for a restaurant chain. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:26, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, there are things that are more important… but there are a lot of things we (as a community) obsess about that are less important. Perhaps we should adjust our priorities? Blueboar (talk) 11:44, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem isn't "somebody do something quick!", but more that an article can be tagged as "somebody do something eventually", 5...10...15 years pass, and it is still tagged "somebody do something eventually". Meanwhile while the topic itself may be notable, we have had this article where every version wholly or substantially violates WP:V or other core policies. The article could contain wrong information, misleading our readers for years on end. As we grow, the numbers of them are just increasing which is why the problem is becoming more important to fix. This is the exact same circumstance that led to the 2009-2010 BLP mass deletion sprees and WP:BLPPROD, just without the urgency of living people being at risk which is why the issue has quietly crept along. The WordsmithTalk to me16:51, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@The Wordsmith, here are a few points I'd like you to consider:
The number of completely unsourced articles is declining each month. It is not true that As we grow, the numbers of them are just increasing. Category:Articles lacking sources is down to 88K. The total number of articles was more than double that five years ago, and triple that 10 years ago. That's also fewer articles total, across all time, than were once in Category:Articles lacking sources from December 2009 alone.
We do not technically have any policy that requires articles to be sourced. WP:V only requires citations under specific circumstances. None of those circumstances apply to a significant fraction of the unsourced stubs that we still have (e.g., stubs that contain very little information).
What's actually wrong with 10 years passing? There is never actually going to be a moment when adding a source to some low-traffic, low-risk stub is a better or more urgent use of my time than updating a high-traffic, high-risk article. If I spend 10 years cleaning up important articles instead of spamming a source into an article about a regional pizza chain, we should rejoice. This is not a failure of anything; this is proof that we are correctly prioritizing our work away from "there's no source in Lake Wobegon Water Agency, which says that it's the municipal water agency for Lake Wobegon *yawn*" and towards "Worldwide, 25 million women will get mastitis this year, so it'd be nice if the article wasn't outdated".
I think what you're aiming for is literally impossible. Not difficult, but actually impossible, without fundamentally changing what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia is not a publication (like a traditional encyclopedia), it is a content platform. There is no way to get the users of a content platform to all work towards the same goal (any goal). The only rule that a content platform can impose -- what you call a "threat" but is more accurately described as an enforcement mechanism -- the only enforcement mechanism available to a content platform is to not allow particular content to be published (what we call "deletion"). If you want to improve the content on a content platform, literally the only possible way to enforce any standards, is to delete (or not publish) content that fails to meet those standards. So: draw a line, delete anything that falls below that line, that's all we can really do. If the content meets the minimum standards, there is no real way to require or even encourage it to be improved beyond those minimum standards. Real money won't work, and nothing else matters to people in the end. You can hope people make better content, you can help them, you can encourage them, but you'll never be able to require it--all a content platform can do is remove substandard content. As analogies, consider how could YouTube possibly get people to make better videos, especially without paying them? How could a community garden get its members to plant "better" flowers? They can rip out substandard flowers, but beyond that...? I think there's nothing. Levivich (talk) 21:40, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Notable topics with advert/COI "failure to thrive" issues
One thing that I have noticed that I think should be discussed here is the situation with articles tagged as advertisements, COI, or the like. There are some clearly notable topics that have been tagged as such (and indeed, may well have been written as such), for which — in my humble experience — improvement of the article is difficult precisely because editors may be dissuaded from working on the article at all out of concern that adding anything positive about the subject risks accusations of being involved in the advertising/COI issue, even where there is reliably sourced information that could be added. BD2412T03:22, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikimedia Movement Charter ratification vote! How should we spend a billion dollars?
section break 1, charter topic
I am writing to request feedback on the meta:Movement Charter by 25 June to publish as community reactions in the next issue of The Signpost.
Hi I am Lane Rasberry / user:bluerasberry. I am an editor for The Signpost. I also organize wiki stuff off-wiki in lots of ways, including in-person Wikipedia meetups and professionally as a Wikipedia researcher at my university.
I am writing to share the news that somehow - perhaps as an endpoint to 10 years of strategic planning - wiki governance has produced a draft Movement Charter. There will be a global ratification vote on it 25 June through 9 July. Lots of people have lots of views of this. My view is that this document would greatly influence and justify how the Wikimedia Movement spends the US$1,000,000,000 (billion dollars) which the Wikimedia Foundation is likely to collect over the next 6-8 years.
I'm concerned the statement "The Wikimedia Movement is based on and embraces a factual, verifiable, open, and inclusive approach to knowledge-sharing", while full of good things, foregoes "ethical" or any other terminology that would be fight against justifying a pirate site. -- Nat Gertler (talk) Nat Gertler (talk) 18:51, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This 'movement' is, needless to say, a fiction. People who edit stuff on WMF-hosted websites are no more a 'movement' than Redditors, or people who use X-that-used-to-be-Twitter. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:16, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A movement for X That used to be Twitter From reading the posts Must be named Xitter Burma-shave
@AndyTheGrump[3]: The “Wikimedia Movement” refers to the totality of people, groups, and organizations who support and participate in Wikimedia websites and projects. It includes all of those who operate within the policies, principles, and values of the movement. It's a thing but still you point that it is really a fiction. — Iadmc♫talk 21:14, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am well aware of what the WMF claims in regard to this supposed 'movement', when trying to justify their funding efforts. I have seen precisely zero evidence that anyone has done any research into the extent those who use WMF websites actually subscribe to the 'principles' and 'values' claimed, or that they consider themselves a part of any particular 'movement'. There is nothing whatsoever in the terms of use that describes such particular beliefs, and it would be grossly improper to require them. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:02, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This just reads like meaningless marketing jargon to me, like calling a shopper doing some price comparison "the client's purchasing journey". That's not what a "journey" is, and this is not what a "movement" is. JoelleJay (talk) 18:17, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The 5Ps only apply to the English language Wikipedia, and while we adhere to them, there is no shortage of evidence that not everybody agrees with them. Hawkeye7(discuss)18:59, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe the WMF should spend that money employing people in developing countries to digitize their print media rather than using it to create more and more ideological focus groups that have nothing to do with building an encyclopedia. JoelleJay (talk) 18:24, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The WMF's flight of fancy took off long ago, and it has completely lost contact with Wikipedia or any other real-world activity. It now exists mainly to deceive donors who think they are supporting Wikipedia into financing unrelated activities. I often consider making a constructive edit but do not bother, knowing that it would be abused in this way. I am not part of any so-called Wikimedia movement, and it does not represent me in any way. Certes (talk) 19:18, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
God, how good would a developing country media digitization effort be... and the WMF has the means to make it happen! ꧁Zanahary꧂05:27, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This would be the single most effective method the WMF could employ in its claimed campaign against "systemic bias", it would naturally stimulate Wikipedia involvement in underrepresented regions in addition to providing relatively cheap-to-WMF employment, the cost for digitization tools and webspace would be minor, the optics would be fantastic...but nope, gotta spend millions of dollars giving grants to special interest groups with limited Wikipedia relevance or to clueless initiatives to write articles on topics that neither proposers nor reviewers noticed already had articles... JoelleJay (talk) 02:55, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
initiatives to write articles on topics that neither proposers nor reviewers noticed already had articles... Has this happened? ꧁Zanahary꧂03:17, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Jesus Christ lol. WMF please, a developing world digitization project. University of Burundi is digitizing their theses right now and it's incredible the knowledge they're opening to the world. And they're doing that with University of Burundi funding. Imagine the good that could be done! ꧁Zanahary꧂03:24, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the Movement Charter is not a good idea. the voting process gives it the illusion of a formal new legal structure and government system. imho, it has the drawbacks of both a core formal government process, and an informal grassroots process, and none of the benefits of either one. Sm8900 (talk) 01:32, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Who the hell are the "stakeholders"? Does the W?F think we care about this corporatese nonsense? I know they're out of touch, but still...
And there are of course sneakily vague bits. Take, for example,
All contributors and other volunteers must follow Wikimedia Movement policies applicable to them while contributing and undertaking volunteer activities.
“policies applicable to them” is as open a loophole for the W?F to ban a few people they happen to not like for whatever reason as I've yet seen. How about
All contributors and other volunteers must follow the policies of the Wikimedia community (e.g. English Wikisource, French Wiktionary) they are contributing to.
They can make up arbitrary rules for me to follow, but they won't change my current behaviour which I believe to be perfectly reasonable. Of course, they can office-block me for pointing out their deficiencies. However, if they do that to everyone, they will soon find themselves with no community and a stale encyclopedia that no longer generates the donations that pay them for watching us write it. Certes (talk) 17:35, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Cremastra, you have already individually agreed, on at least some twenty thousand separate occasions, that you will follow those policies. Have you ever read the foundation:Terms of Use? I suggest that you do so, paying particular attention to ==Resolutions and Project Policies==, which says "The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees releases official policies from time to time. Some of these policies may be mandatory for a particular Project or Project edition, and, when they are, you agree to abide by them as applicable."
While I'm here, I'm always surprised to see people, even editors who have been around for a while, claiming that "the movement" is something that was created by the WMF and has nothing to do with us. The idea of 'the Wikimedia movement' was created by volunteers. It dates back to at least 2004, when the WMF had zero paid staff. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:48, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've had enough and reluctantly decided to retire, but I hope others will continue to restrain the WMF tail from wagging the Wikipedia dog. Certes (talk) 16:46, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
section break 2, charter topic
Hi all - wearing my Movement Charter Drafting Committee hat here for a minute. I can quite reassure you that the WMF was not directive in what is contained in the Movement Charter that will be voted on starting next week. In fact, getting the opinion of the WMF on various topics was really difficult, especially in the early days as we started the process. The content of the Charter is largely reflective of recommendations from the 2030 strategy initiatives, which were released back in 2019 (it was released just as the world came to a screeching halt with the pandemic). We have no idea on the Drafting Committee how the WMF Board of Trustees will vote when it comes to the Charter; we'll find out at the same time as the broader community does.
The ballot has two sections: a support/--/oppose section (with the "--" taking the place of the word "neutral" as it's hard to translate into some languages); and a comment box. People can vote any way they feel is right, AND they can include an extensive comment on their reasoning. Several people in this thread have expressed opinions; I hope they will vote and include those opinions in their ballot. A summary of all of those comments will be published, regardless of whether or not the Charter is ratified. If it is ratified, we have a Charter. If it is not ratified, we will have a much better idea of how individual community members are thinking, and that will definitely help in determining next steps. We have had so few individual community members participating in the discussions leading up to this ratification vote that there's no way to predict an outcome. We just hope that people will participate in the vote itself, and tell us what they're thinking. What do you like about the Charter? What do you not like? What made you decide to vote the way you did? We really look forward to finding out more.
I know you'll see more about this ratification vote in the coming days and weeks, and I hope a lot of people participate. Takes off MCDC hat and goes off to eat dinner. Risker (talk) 04:43, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If it is not ratified, we will have a much better idea of how individual community members are thinking, and that will definitely help in determining next steps.
@Risker Under what circumstance will the Movement Charter be considered "dead"? There is a non-zero part of the community which considers the Movement Charter efforts structurally flawed enough that it needs to stop. I personally think the efforts so far are underbaked and overly convoluted at once; but am not sure if that requires more effort to fix things, or the charter should just go away.
Community fatigue is a thing (with so many elections and ratifications happening over the last few months) and I'd like a bit more clarity on what circumstances would lead to either outcome. Soni (talk) 17:30, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Soni, there isn't a good answer to this question. A lot of it is dependent on (a) the actual results of the vote and (b) the nature of the comments received. We will have to wait and see. Risker (talk) 20:55, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough. I guess pre the actual charter vote, my main question is just... "What's the point of all this?" I've tried to follow the entire discussion in meta, here and elsewhere. Nowhere can I find a clear simple articulated "Here's why we're doing this", as opposed to "People in this meeting back in 2021 recommended it" and "We've been working on this for N years, here's a timeline".
Why is the MC a thing? What does it change for day-to-day work in the projects/top level decisionmaking? Will the movement charter be binding over WMF? The community? How is this different from ToU/UCoC/WMF's Annual Plans? Similiar question for GC/GCB but with U4C/WMF BoT? Will the decisions of GC/GCB be binding over anyone?
I can probably think of a few more adjacent questions. It's not that none of them have been answered if you carefully read between all the lines, it's that the entire process could really use a "Simple answers FAQ" instead of a "Here's all the ways you can help the MC" style FAQ page we have. I remember giving this feedback to someone from WMF/MCDC working on this, but the FAQ continues to be as unhelpful as ever. Soni (talk) 22:15, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Soni I agree, that level of clarity and simplicity is needed. A Charter and Council tend to help movements with coordination, something we do need and expend many head-desks trying to work around in its absence. In particular, even our own Foundations have a hard time coordinating with the communities they are designed to support. I tried to motivate a few specific goals here.
Zanahary and JoelleJay, digitization of sources and archives is indeed one of the greatest ways we can advance knowledge and fill gaps in coverage. It's not always clear where we can have that impact, but a project to identify such initiatives and what they need would be promising and could help better direct funds. The 'special interest groups' you mention that got WMF grants in the past were just chosen from the pool of knowledge projects nominated for consideration, after a public call. I don't know if that will happen again, but a) this is the sort of thing that is clearly aligned with our mission that we can do now, and b) a Global Council is imagined as the community-run body that could prioritize and act on that, more meaningfully than disparate community feedback on sporadic calls for nominations or requests for comment. – SJ +14:41, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have voted no to the Movement Charter, for two reasons. The first reason is because the text is not in Norwegian bokmål (my native language). Such a document must be available on all Languages used in projects. When the text is only translated into major languages, that says a lot about the views inside Wikimedia Foundation regarding the volunteers that is the core of this project.
The second reason is that I do not see the need. Such a text will, in the best of circumstances, provide nothing to the party, but more likely add to the bureaucratization of Wikipedia, which we do not need. We allready have a lot of functioning projects and local chapters, we do not need the kind of formalisation or funding law that this seems to be. Ulflarsen (talk) 10:03, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have voted "No" as well. for me, nothing is defined clearly enough.
@Soni, the crucial answer is that the movement charter people consider themselves a counterweight to the wmf. however one problem is that the mcdc is just as legalistic and formalistic as the wmf bureaucracy that they are claiming they wish to counteract, imho. Sm8900 (talk) 01:40, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
section break 3, charter topic
if the global council was really meant as an active dynamic pipeline for new ideas and empowerment, then there would have been active efforts already, to move ahead with those ideas, in my opinon.
also, my real concern on this is that if this is voted into being, then those serving as the global council can decide they need to be a major governmental body, even if the community never intended for that to happen.
if this had simply been implelemented little by little without a vote, then their role could have evolved naturally. so therefore I feel that firstly this process of voting for approval for this is superfluous. and also it might give the illusion of awarding the global council some major legislative powers.
one problem in my opinion is that the mcdc think there is an obvious justification for the Global Council as a counterweight for the wmf . so there has been little communication about how it would actually work. so because of that, I feel we really need to put the brakes on this idea.
Here is a video call from the page shown below. for me, this video raises a lot of questions, and doesn't provide the answers we need. and even if it did provide the answers, then it should have been displayed to the community much more prominently.
here is a screenshot fromthe 26-minute video above. imho, this illustrates the problem, the proposed goals for the "global council" might or might not be okay. but why are we being asked to ratify them as one of the top governing bodies? who would advocate for this?
what are we being asked to agree to? what would be the agenda and the policies of this new body which will have immediate authority, with very little discussion previously for the community as a whole? and also, this will be the council for the whole movement? the whole thing? ALL of the foriegn wikipedias?? that's a whole lot of stuff!!
and if that's the case, then why does the English language wikiedpia take precedence? and if the council only meets once per year.... then who do you think will be running the committtees, and setting the entire agenda? that's right! the English Wikipedia!!
screenshot of Charter April call screenshot, major changes overview slide
Hello, when I was discussing Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/2-Pyridone_(data_page), some one noted that there are lots of datapages on Category:Chemical_data_pages, much of them are created by Edgar181 (talk·contribs) who was banned years ago. These pages are in different styles, and some of them lack references. We may need a policy for such pages, for example, should they merged to main article of the related chemicals? Should they moved to Wikidata? Is there Any additional requirements for such pages since they are not an article?
Count me out. It is 20 years since I was a chemistry academic and I was more into physical chemistry and not individual chemicals. Bduke (talk) 05:04, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think I was the someone in that discussion. I am by no means an expert in chemistry but as an outsider I would assume that people who need such information have a better source for it than Wikipedia pages. I suspect that most of the pages are pretty-much unused but I would be happy for any deletion/merge decisions to be made on a case-by-case basis in case some some of them are considered useful.
I would suggest changing the line If using the full Chembox, a supplementary page should be created as soon as time allows on WP:CHEMBOX § Supplementary data page. Even if some data pages are useful, I don't think it is useful to encourage indiscriminately creating them for all chemicals. Mgp28 (talk) 07:25, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Much of the info on the datapages are in the main articles under chemboxes. I never even knew these datapages even existed. They seem to be miscellaneous pages or partly redundant compared to chemboxes that are found in main chemical articles which provide up to date info. And some that I looked at don't seem to be updated for years on chemicals properties. Some carry interesting documents like Materials Safety Datasheets (MSDS). Ramos1990 (talk) 08:08, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We should discourage datapage creation. Instead articles should be made if the information is too detailed for the main article. I like the idea of "Properties of chemical". The banning of Edgar181 really has no bearing on the quality. But the main issue with the datapages is the lack of references. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:58, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I like this idea. I would be much happier with any extra information being presented in properly-sourced articles. Mgp28 (talk) 11:03, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikisource seems like the most appropriate place to include additional data that is beyond the scope of an encyclopedia article. Masem (t) 12:30, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I vaguely recall AFD for the lot of them a few years ago, that did not get consensus to delete. Can't find the page at the moment... DMacks (talk) 03:08, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
MOS on date format by country
Hello. Recently I learned by observation that Wikipedia tends to use DMY date formats (except for US subjects). Can someone please cite that policy? MOS:DATETIES applies to the use of English by country, as does MOS:TIES. I cannot find an applicable policy for subjects from non-English-speaking countries in MOS:NUM. I searched your archives and found mainly arguments, not really a useful pointer, sorry. Thank you for your time. -SusanLesch (talk) 14:21, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
*The date format chosen in the first major contribution in the early stages of an article (i.e., the first non-stub version) should continue to be used, unless there is reason to change it based on strong national ties to the topic or consensus on the article's talk page.
Thank you for the quote. That's exactly what I need. However the administrator who corrected me thinks MOS:VAR doesn't apply. He says MOS:DATETIES covers Italian subjects. I have read, and re-read MOS:DATETIES and conclude that no, it relates to English usage by country. Where does MOS offer guidance on date format by country? -SusanLesch (talk) 14:38, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you again. I read the entire recent discussion. Exasperating. The result was an upset stomach, not answering the question, and instead reminding me that Wikipedia does not even know whether or not it should use citation templates. (If someone were to advocate for the metric system, to do away with daylight savings time, to prohibit pharmaceutical advertising on television, and to adopt the DMY date format, they'd have my vote in the US November elections.)
Publications, including Wikipeda, use whatever date format is called for in their style manual. Would-be authors who don't want to follow the style manual are likely to get rejection letters or the equivalent. Looking outside the rules of the publication to see what is or isn't "correct" is the wrong approach. But if you want to change the rules, that's a different matter. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:40, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
True. That said, MOS:DATEVAR simply says unless there is reason to change it based on strong national ties to the topic with no mention whatsoever of English-speaking, so either GiantSnowman's reasoning is correct, just filed under the wrong MOS shortcut, or if national ties in DATEVAR was meant to apply specifically to English-speaking countries, it needs its wording adjusted. AddWittyNameHere21:26, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Since MOS:DATEVAR immediately follows MOS:DATETIES, it could easily be that "English-speaking" was omitted from the latter because "strong national ties to the topic" was considered a reference to the previous section titled "strong national ties to a topic". When the language was originally added in December 2007 the two were even more closely associated. Checking Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers/Archive 92 for contemporaneous discussion, I see some discussion over "English-language" along the lines of GiantSnowman's argument but it doesn't seem to have resulted in its removal at the time. Anomie⚔21:57, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just a note here that the "height of bad manners" is supposed to refer to me. I came here for information, and when a break occurred I went back to post on the original thread. Another editor had entered the conversation at length. -SusanLesch (talk) 22:16, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:DATETIES is good for English speaking countries and their 2 formats (DMY, MDY). For countries that do not align with the 2 English formats (eg, most of Asia) then DATETIES is also fine with first come, first served. But for non-English countries such as Italy that do align with DMY or MDY, then I say we should honour that that format. It is for the same reasons that we let Yanks have their format and Brits have theirs - to align with the most likely readers and editors of those articles without constant edit wars. It is only for articles tied to YMD countries (typically Asia) and articles not tied to a specific country that should be first come, first serve. Stepho talk08:01, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Which "most likely readers"? Wouldn't Italians be more likely to read the Italian Wikipedia, since that's in their own language? Unless maybe they're wanting to practice their English or think their own language's coverage is lacking, but do we really want to be in the position of deciding which non-English Wikipedias aren't "good enough"? Anomie⚔11:06, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As you are specifically talking about non-English speaking countries, what they do is absolutely irrelevant. How they write the dates is no more important to us than what word they use for "dog". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:12, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's reasonable to think most of the edits in the English Wikipedia will be made by editors who's first language is English. Although most editors may be able to look at a few dates in most European languages and figure out what the format is, they likely will not know what reference works best represent editorial practices in non-English speaking European languages, nor are they likely to possess copies of those works unless they're free. Requiring editors to figure all this out is an undue burden on editors. I know if I have a English-language date format question outside of Wikipedia, I'd look at, perhaps, the Chicago Manual of Style or the Associated Press Stylebook, and I know which shelf I keep them on. If I had a similar question about Polish, I would have no idea where to look. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:08, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A place to look is the Italian Wikipedia, it:Aiuto:Manuale di stile#Date which permits only DMY ordering. This concurs with Date and time notation in Italy, the sources used in that article, and every relevant hit (reliable and unreliable) I found on the first three pages of a google search for What date order does Italy use?. In other words, every relevant bit of evidence suggests that articles about Italy should use DMY. Thryduulf (talk) 19:19, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to enforce the Italian Wikipedia's manual of style you can go and do so on Italian Wikipedia. There is and should be absolutely no requirement for English-speaking Wikipedians writing in English on English Wikipedia to know or care what it.wiki's manual of style says. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 14:11, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You have completely misinterpreted my comment. I am not advocating applying the Italian Wikipedia's MoS to the English Wikipedia, but for using the Italian Wikipedia's MoS as one point of evidence regarding what Italian style guides state is correct usage in Italian/in Italy. Jc3s5h stated they wouldn't know where to look to find what is correct in Italian, I simply pointed out places to look to find the answer. Thryduulf (talk) 14:29, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I personally think it's pretty silly to have MDY set on articles whose topic doesn't touch North America. It's just awkward to work with when most quotes and literature will be in the other format. Remsense诉17:59, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, we could solve all of this by uniformly using metric dating (largest to smallest, or year-month-day-hour-minute-second, etc). That would be the international standard, but of course I'm just stirring the pot here. Risker (talk) 22:10, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Looks to me like User:EEng edited MOS:DATEVAR to clarify it as a result of this discussion, User:GiantSnowman decided to edit war over it because it clarified that his interpretation wasn't what the guideline intended, and then someone started a discussion about the edit on WT:MOSDATE which quickly shifted to discussing whether "English-speaking" should be removed from both MOS:DATETIES and MOS:DATEVAR. I'm not sure "merging" this discussion would be appropriate, but notifying that people here who have something useful to contribute there (and aren't afraid to get into a MOS-warring discussions) should do is. Anomie⚔11:26, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would like European date format incorporated into the MOS, e.g. 19 June 2024 becomes 19th June 2024. It actually a British date format as well, that I use on a daily basis. The last time I tried to introduce it, the pushback from the MOS gang was tremendous, yet is used by millions of folk daily across Europe. scope_creepTalk17:58, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I would like to know the policy on translation. I don't mean translation of entire articles, I mean translation of specific quotes, such as for example the lyrics of a song. Should there be a) only the original language text, b) only our translation, or c) both? My concern is that a) prevents some people from understanding the article, b) in a way misquotes the sources, and c) ends up with a lot of [original text] (meaning [en text]), or similar, that clutter the article a bit. I didn't manage to find this as most translation-related page are about translation of full articles. Thank you, — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 18:47, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Both… If the lyrics of a song are significant enough to quote, they are significant enough to include a translation. Consider a footnote if you think it would clutter the article. Blueboar (talk) 20:38, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately that all looks rather odd unless your using a standard desktop resolution, as it's trying to force a specific formatting by using spaces. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°19:29, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are you talking about the part where each half-line is separated by three spaces? That's actually conventional formatting for Middle English alliterative verse. But what I meant was the part where the translation is side by side with the original.—S MarshallT/C22:46, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I mean the side by side doesn't line up properly, as new line placement is all over the place. These are better handled by tables, so the lines match the correct placement for each other however it's viewed. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°14:26, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, that's interesting. It uses {{verse translation}} so you're describing some kind of problem with the template rather than the article. It looks fine to me, on my laptop, desktop, tablet and phone.—S MarshallT/C15:19, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The policy says that we should provide translation… it does not (and in my opinion, should not) specify how to do so. There are lots of different ways to provide translations… all are acceptable. Which to use can be left up to consensus at the article level. Blueboar (talk) 14:38, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How the understanding of due weight affects the application of NPOV
This is an attempt to continue here a "great and important topic" that started in the talk page of NPOV. In short, North8000 started by saying that the section on due weight was "obsolete on two fronts in the post-journalism era and the current media-are-now-partisan-advocates era", Philomathes2357 agreed and asked how would you rewrite it and Masem mentioned "the need to value sources far separated in both time and relationship to the topic at hand than those that are very near the topic in both ways."
Here is my reply, but it is long. I will find the way to insert it in the discussion
Here is my reply. I do not disagree that the above points are real issues. However, unless I am misunderstanding them, they are about which sources to use, which, in my understanding, seems complementary to due weight: due weight enter into consideration after we have chosen the sources that must be taken into account. I believe I can explain why this happens. Why we discuss reliable sources when the subject is due weight.
I suggest that the issue is that "weight" have never been a well explained concept. So, it became a "fourre-tout" (cath-all) for any new concern we might have with any content rule of Wikipedia. In particular, "weight" suggests a total order: every content has either more weight or less weight than any other content, that is, we could order the different possible contents on a line, those on the left side having less weight than those on the right. But, this total order corresponds to nothing in reality. Knowledge is not organized in this way. It creates a fictive world: we speak of less or more weight, but it's not real. Nobody, for example, will count the number of sources that support a given content. It is always more complicated than that. Not more complicated in the sense that evaluating the weight is technically complex, but in the sense that the notion of weight itself is too simplistic and has no practical value. Yet, we somehow convinced ourselves that we can correctly order the possible information on a subject using weight. This creates false dilemmas.
Again, because it's not a concept that matches with reality, the request for due weight becomes a "fourre-tout" or catch-all for any practical concern we might have with the policies. It is especially the case with concerns with sources, because they can easily, but yet in a fictive manner, be turned into a less dichotomic notion of weight on the content. I am not saying that the concerns mentioned by North8000, Philomathes2357 and Masem aren't real. I am saying that we should perhaps stop placing them in the context of a fourre-tout or catch-all, because that is not a good organization of the rules.
Most importantly (perhaps I should have raised this earlier), this distracts us away from other important aspects of the neutral point of view. Really, some people even argue that NPOV is essentially the same as due weight. That is the real problem.
Discussion about whether this discussion should happen here
I think that a real in depth discussion of wp:weight would be beneficial. But if we scatter it amongst many different places we really aren't going to have it. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 12:42, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but this page is the right place. Please, read what it says at the start: "The policy section of the village pump is used to discuss already proposed policies and guidelines and to discuss changes to existing policies and guidelines." We should only use the talk page of NPOV when we have some concrete change to propose. Dominic Mayers (talk) 13:10, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
[we don't have a sufficient point on the NPOV page to even start that type of discussion here. Once we have a proposed wording change on NPOV it then makes sense to call on more voices from VPP. — Masem (t) 13:54, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Any discussion to find a proposed wording should happen here. This is the right place. If it not, then I don't know where is the right place. It is not the NPOV talk page. Dominic Mayers (talk) 14:01, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I see two issues that I see needing to be addressed. The first is that people too often jump right to UNDUE to exclude viewpoints instead of using DUE to weigh how they should be included. The second is an over reliance on breaking news coverage. This type of coverage, by its nature, omits nuance… and we need nuance to properly weigh what is DUE. Blueboar (talk) 15:20, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is a subtle aspect that should not be neglected. The way you present it, the viewpoints considered already exist. In practice, this means that the statements already exist. In that case, DUE is simply the opposite of UNDUE: if a statement is proposed and it is not rejected, this means that it is accepted. This is why there is a single rule "Undue and due weight..." But, achieving the neutral point of view often requires to provide new contents, such as the arguments or simply a neutral attribution, that are not yet under consideration. This is not at all simply DUE, as the opposite of UNDUE, at the least not the way it is stated now, because it refers to a known statement or viewpoint. In contrast, the neutral point of view often requires that we think out of the box to find what must be added. This means that the notion of weight as a total order (see my hidden comment above) is not useful. The knowledge that we must read and understand is not at all organized in this manner. Dominic Mayers (talk) 15:41, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How is this different than arguing for a FALSEBALANCE? If we happen to know there are alternative views out there than what RS already cover, but otherwise not covered in RSes themselves, how are we supposed to include them? — Masem (t) 17:06, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am not talking about alternative views out there than what RS already cover. I am restricting the discussion to views that can be found in reliable sources. I think you greatly underestimate what is required in a synthesis and what is the role of the editorial process. Once we are presented a given article and we have read and understood the reliable sources, we can judge whether or not there is FALSEBALANCE or undue weight, but that does not give you any method to avoid it. This method is the editorial process and the synthesis. My point is that the difficult part to achieve the neutral point of view (and avoid undue weight) is finding out what must be added. More attention is needed on that side. Just saying that the goal is to avoid FALSEBALANCE is not sufficient and, more importantly, only focalising on NOR, V and RS only tells us what to reject and that is, even more clearly, not sufficient. Dominic Mayers (talk) 17:21, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'mn a hypothetical situation, we can collect all the RSes about a topic ever written. From that, we could make a survey to catalogue all viewpoints given and tally the number of sources that support that viewpoint. We would the have a good measure of what are significant viewpoints and insignificant ones with which can use DUE, UNDUE and Fringe to properly present the most important st neutral POV as reported in RSes. However we do not have that ability to collect all sources. So what I have recommended is to do a sources survey, gather like 100 RSes on the topic, randomly select say 25 or even go through all 100, to do a source survey as to estimate the weight of viewpoints and then proceed to apply DUE, etc. — Masem (t) 18:47, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You are proposing to completely change the way of writing articles in Wikipedia and what you propose seems to greatly underestimate the challenges in doing a synthesis and in the editorial process. It's difficult to further argue about that, because the process that editors use to understand sources, do a synthesis, etc. cannot really be explained and should be a shared background on the basis of which a discussion can occur. Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:49, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We are supposed to summarize viewpoints without bias. I can't see how this approach isn't good towards that. There is no invalid synthesis used. This is what editors should be doing as they write articles. Instead more commonly these days, editors have a preset goal they want to write for and only seek out sources to support that, and then often use that to assert what the majority POV is having not done a properly neutral evaluation of sources. — Masem (t) 09:53, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Again, the complexity of the editorial process (synthesis being a part of it) does not show in your description. The fact that it says 25 reliable sources are used is not the issue. The mention of the abstract notion of weight is not so wrong in itself either. Your description is wrong because of what it does not say, not because of what it says. I will illustrate a very small part of what it does not say. A notorious source says "Life is great". The name of that source is Joe Blow, but it does not show when you read the statement. It is only mentioned in the cover page. A simple editorial process could result in the inclusion of "Life is great" in the article, with the source as a reference, just as if it was a fact that life is great. I suspect that you will stop me and say that it is not what you mean and that we should, in that case, include "Joe Blow says life is great". But, even if you understand that an attribution is required in that case, it still remains that it is not mentioned at all in your above description. That is a small part of what I mean by the complexity of the editorial process does not show in your description. This small part is emphasized in the policy nowadays, but it used to say more, for example, that arguments must be provided. Regarding the arguments, you might again stop me and say that, yes in some cases we must provide the arguments. It is great, if that is the case, but it is not true that there is no need to have the concepts of arguments in order to do that and that a mechanical simplistic process will automatically extract the arguments only by counting occurrences of sentences. So, again, your description of the editorial process says nothing about key aspects of the process. As in the case of attributions, the description of the editorial process will not and cannot provide a simple criteria to determine when the arguments must be provided, but the fact that in some cases arguments must be provided should still be a part of the description. Ideally, simple examples should be provided and explained. The serious issue, not only in your description, but also in the current text of the policy, is the emphasis on the abstract notion of weight as if it was enough to cover the essential of the process. Dominic Mayers (talk) 11:09, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:YESPOV is how we know or determine when attribution should be required to a statement that appears to be a statement of opinion rather than fact. There is a grey area here and there's no way we can set down exacting standards to when attribution may be used or not, though as I've talked before, when you see agreements in sources far distant in time and independence from the topic on a seemingly opinioned statement, that's when we can start treating it as more factual and drop attribution. But there is a lot of middle ground here, far too difficult to distill into any guideline, and instead, we do have to rely on editorial concensus. I would only think the key aspect is that if there is any serious question of whether unanimity of a subjective statement has been reached, we should always default to assuming some type of attribution is needed. Masem (t) 20:58, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with all of that. The idea of the NPOV policy is to convey the idea how some method, in this case attribution, works to achieve the neutral point of view. Once the idea is understood, how and when to apply the method is to be determined on a case by case basis. Some simple non polemical examples could be needed. However, in the case of attribution, I think experienced editors already understand the concept. But, as I said, attribution is only a small part of what might need to be used to achieve the neutral point of view. Other times, we need to provide the arguments. There is no telling in advance what might need to be added to achieve the neutral point of view, but the policy would benefit from more examples that convey the general idea. I am repeating my last sentence here: The serious issue, not only in your description, but also in the current text of the policy, is the emphasis on the abstract notion of weight as if it was enough to cover the essential of the process. In the discussion below, I expand on this point. Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:33, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think this misses the point... Neither of those eras actually exist. There never was a time when the media didn't engage in partisan activism, it only seems that way to white men with money because thats the only POV which was presented before the current golden age of journalism (yes, we currenly live in a golden age of journalism, it has never been better). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:39, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm all for improvements to NPOV, but we've been trapped for a little while now in a cycle of unproductive discussion. Pick any random section currently at WT:NPOV and you're likely to land on an illustrative example. If anyone has a concrete change to the policy to suggest, I hope they'll do so, here or at the policy talk page. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 18:10, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have a concrete change to the policy that is basically entirely unrelated to this thread. :P
(It's "rename it". Specifically, rename it to Consensus Point of View or something similar, to avoid the common misconception that it endorses a view-from-nowhere.) Loki (talk) 18:28, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
NPOV also is used to write and structure articles as to write in a neutral voice, and that should not be consensus driven compared to identifying sources are determining where the apparent viewpoints sit in terms of weight. — Masem (t) 18:32, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Discussion about terminology in terms of the impression it creates on the public, which is different from a request for the meaning of a term for our own personal need in the discussion, is also not productive unless we have already an agreement about the concepts themselves. Dominic Mayers (talk) 18:36, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I only propose to try sharing our understanding. It will succeed at the least partially among rational people and that should result in a more interesting consensus. Dominic Mayers (talk) 22:07, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would strongly object to shifting to a “Consensus Point of View”. One of the core elements of NPOV is that we don’t omit significant views, even if they are minority views. How we include them is open to discussion… whether to include them is not. Blueboar (talk) 18:50, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would add to this that the problem that the suggestion tried to solve is not an important one. The problem arises only when we use the definite article "The" before "Neutral Point of View", because the question is then what is this unique point of view that seems to come from nowhere. It is a moot issue, because it is easy not to do that. It is only done once in the text of the policy and, if that is a big issue, it could be modified. I see the use of the definite article as a reference to some unity among rational people, some unique point of view that is a stance to adopt when we write the articles. We could replace "the neutral point of view" by "the policy", but we would lose the feeling of unity. Dominic Mayers (talk) 20:15, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Huge difference between “The” neutral POV and “A” neutral POV. In fact, the entire POINT is that there often isn’t one single POV, so we must discuss several. Blueboar (talk) 00:41, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The article must present all relevant points of view. These are sources' points of view that are described in the articles. But when the policy refers to the neutral point of view, it refers to something else. It refers to an editor's point of view, a point of view that is used to describe the points of view in sources. The use of the definite article in that case, only indicates a unity among the rational editors. It does not conflict at all with the POINT that there often isn't one single POV in sources. This can be explained by an example. Joe Blow, a source, says "Life is great". "Life is great" is a source point of view. The neutral point of view is "Joe Blow says Life is great". If there are many notorious and pertinent points of view in sources, the neutral point of view includes them all. Dominic Mayers (talk) 01:07, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is why we use overview sources like books and literature reviews. If it's not in an overview source, you shouldn't include it unless you have a very good reason to. If there are no overview sources for the subject, then reconsider whether it needs an article. News media should be the last sources we consider after we've gone through the overview sources and academic journals and there are still gaps. If you're making heavy use of news media sources in your articles, then your articles might not be very well-sourced. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:05, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Or the articles could be about something which while recent is notable... And the expectation is that in time the original news media sources will be replaced by higher more recent quality ones. There has never been a requirement that there be "overview sources" in any notability standard I am aware of. The opposite in fact... WP:NOTNEWS says "Editors are encouraged to include current and up-to-date information within its coverage, and to develop stand-alone articles on significant current events." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:27, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thats going to come down to what you think "a half decent article" is and I think you and I are likely in different neighborhoods there. For me a stub is half decent, a start is decent and it goes up from there. I would also note that because our current standards are based solely on existing coverage you could have a GA which used zero overview sources and academic journals if none then existed... But I don't think you actually meant by the consenus standard, I think you meant by your own ideosyncratic standard. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:42, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am not going to take the time to read those essays today, although I may in the future. Was there something I said which suggested that I was advocating for original research or is that a non-sequiter? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:52, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was looking at "you could have a GA which used zero overview sources and academic journals". If I was reviewing something like this at GAN, one of the first things I would check would be weight issues and whether the sources were used appropriately. It's certainly possible to have a well written article using only newspapers, but it's much more difficult, and I'd be looking to see whether the nominator used primary sources as an indication of weight, as opposed to just verifiability. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:59, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
...have you read our biographies? We likely have hundreds of thousands of articles on people sourced exclusively to news sources. It would be great if "4-sentence blurb from 1918 in local paper #1" + "5-sentence blurb from 1918 in local paper #2" wasn't a GNG pass, but that's exactly what gets through AfD all the time. JoelleJay (talk) 07:41, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is a related discussion in the NPOV talk page. I think the NPOV talk page should be left alone until we are closer to some concrete changes. Here is the right place. North8000 proposed, as an example of a misuse of DUE, that the mention of a "Help Starving Children" program not discussed in secondary sources, should nevertheless be not rejected using WP:DUE from an article in which that program is alleged relevant, even though some editors feel it is a way to promote the current government. Following this, WhatamIdoing, avoiding the polemical aspect, said that, in general, we should be allowed to add normal information expected from an encyclopedia, i.e., ordinary facts (e.g., when and were a person was born) even if sources [centred on the topic] don't dwell on them at great length. Firefangledfeathers commented I agree about ordinary encyclopedic facts, though maybe it's a common enough caveat that it doesn't need to be mentioned here. There was then an emphasis on the distinction between not so basic info such as that one day when the factory exploded or the a company's product line and some basic information about when it was in existence, etc. Then Blueboar added that it depends on the topic of the article: Is it an article about a company, or an article about an explosion?. Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:11, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Here is my reply. A central point in that discussion is the distinction between basic and not basic information in the context of a given topic. The goal is to make sure that DUE cannot prevent us from adding basic information from reliable sources: we should not have to show that they have the required weight. This is an issue with DUE, but only a small part of a more global issue with DUE that I explored a bit with Masem (see above). The notion of basic information is not the most fundamental one. We must also consider attributions, arguments, etc. The reason why basic information are OK is that they are neutral. They do not take sides. Attributions, arguments, etc. are also ways to not take sides. Let me illustrate with an example, how the editorial process, which makes use of these added informations, is very important to create a good article that is coherent and not confusing. In the sources, we see that ExpertA says the number of immigrants is 10,000 and we also see that ExpertB says that it is 50,000. If the article stupidly says "The number of immigrants is 10,000[1]. The number of immigrant is 50,000[2]" that is just confusing. A good editorial process will carefully read the sources and find the arguments, etc. so that the whole thing is informative, factual and there is no contradiction. After having read more carefully the sources, the editors might write: "Using method A of evaluation, the number of immigrants is 10,000,[1] but using method B it is 50,000[2]". This is writing on the stance of the neutral point of view. Let me emphasis that weight has not entered into consideration in that process. More weight can be given to one side than the other in the final result, but the process itself is just a rational process that does not take sides. The process is not taking sides, even if at the end a method is shown factually to be less good. Even if one side is entirely dropped, after it has been given due weight in the editorial process, this is not taking sides. The key point is that the process often requires to add information and at that stage, as illustrated in the above example, the process should not be discussed only in terms of weight. There is way too much emphasis on weight in the current text of the policy and not enough on the need to add arguments, attributions, etc. Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:36, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Please Dominic, step out of the drivers seat on this. You've started so many non-concrete NPOV discussions across two separate pages, and now you're sabotaging one concrete one started by another editor. I welcome your thoughts, even when I can't understand them, but why not let other participants lead the way for a while? Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 17:00, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think I am saying something very important in terms of the NPOV policy here. As far as my opinion regarding where the discussion should occur, it is just that I really cannot discuss in the NPOV talk page, because I do not think it is fine to have these long discussions over there, and therefore I reply here to say what I think is very important. And I am not sabotaging any discussion. On the contrary, I participate in the discussion here and I publicize it by making a summary, etc. Dominic Mayers (talk) 17:15, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I’m not sure I understand very well what’s being discussed here; but I found the language / words used in the “summary” above not very neutral ... --Dustfreeworld (talk) 20:44, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I did my best to be neutral. Please tell me how it can be improved. I have no interest in not making a good summary: it is so easy to get to the original with the link provided. Also saying we understand nothing is not helpful in the discussion and it cannot be true. I don't buy it. It sounds more like a fallacious way to win the arguments. Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:40, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Question: When we talk about the DUEness of “basic information” are we discussing RELEVANCY (ie, should article X mention factoid Y?) or are we discussing situations where sources disagree on relevant facts (source X says “sales = 5 million”, but source Y says “sales = 7 million”)? Blueboar (talk) 16:51, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I generally understand people to mean everything under the WP:NPOVHOW heading when they say "due". WP:DUE is technically one subsection of that, but people generally use it to many any or all of those things. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:07, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And that may be part of the problem here… we all mean different things when we say something is DUE/UNDUE. Perhaps it would help if we coined new wiki-jargon terms to help us differentiate what we are talking about. Lumping it all under DUE is just confusing everyone. Blueboar (talk) 18:25, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is not terminological. The concepts themselves need to be better understood. I want to point out something that might shed some light on the problem. The expression "due weight" is also used to describe how a judge in a court of law must consider the facts and arguments. In many cases, if not all cases, it does not refer to the final ruling. It refers to the attention given to the facts and the arguments. So, when a judge does not accept the conclusion of an argument, it does not mean that the judge did not give due weight to the argument. Of course, there will be a ruling in some direction, but due weight refers to the process, not to the final ruling. I feel this is a much more realistic concept, because the ruling itself is way too complicated and depends on so many factors. The important is that it is the outcome of a process that gave due weight to the arguments and facts. In Wikipedia, if my understanding is correct, it refers to the weight given to a POV in the article. It is also a useful concept, but it is not sufficient, because it does not deal enough with the process, including what information might need to be added. That is why I feel we put too much attention on that concept in the policy. There is a lot of distinctions, BALANCE, BALASP, etc. but the fundamental difficulty remains: how to evaluate the weight? it does not cover the process, including what kind of information might need to be added. Dominic Mayers (talk) 18:45, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It certainly applies to situations where sources disagree: we must give due weight to both. Relevancy is certainly a factor to consider to give due weight: the editorial process must give due weight to every point of view and the outcome will depend on relevancy to the topic. I think your question is what if there is only one point of view and we ask if it is relevant. Is this an aspect covered by DUE ? I think DUE applies as well in this case, for the same reason, because there is this point of view and the rest of the article. Dominic Mayers (talk) 18:24, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ok… I have to bow out for a while here. We all (including me) seem to be discussing different things. It’s clear that we all think “something needs fixing at WP:DUE”… but I don’t see any agreement on what that “something” actually is. If I’m confused, my continued involvement will just add to the confusion. I will rejoin once I am clearer on what we are actually discussing. Have fun storming the castle! Blueboar (talk) 22:21, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, we are discussing different things. Some want to discuss due weight within some view of what it is. I am not rejecting that view, but I am questioning the need to further discuss and expand on due weight under that view, because the policy has already way too much expanded on it with all its subsections. Dominic Mayers (talk) 22:55, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Blueboar: Rest from this thread as much as you need, but I inform you that it is not true anymore that people are discussing different things. North8000 just added a brief summary of the issue I raise, which I copy and paste here. @Masem: that may interest you too.
Sourcing is at the core of of wp:verifiability and wp:nor. This policy moves that into a totally different area. Which is to have editor assessment of the amount of coverage in sources completely dominate over editorial decisions regarding inclusion/exclusion of material. This leads to numerous specific types of problems.
I totally agree. We must give examples that illustrate the need to add different kinds of information (arguments, methods, what is at stake, attributions, etc.), depending on the context, to achieve NPOV. But examples alone will not do the job. The general principle must be well explained too. The problem with examples is that, even if they are hypothetical to avoid polemic, they are interpreted in terms of an existing polemic. It is important to see them as illustrating instead a general idea, which does not lead to any specific decision until we face a real case: it is always applied on a case by case basis. Dominic Mayers (talk) 13:25, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sigh… could we please start with a basic breakdown of what the problems are? … we can discuss examples of these problems later. Blueboar (talk) 14:11, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What you want might not exist or it is yet to be discovered, but when we see examples (attributions, arguments, methods, etc.), we appreciate that there are various problems. Dominic Mayers (talk) 14:58, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Here I further comment on the difficulty with examples. North8000's example and the subsequent examples by WhatamIdoing illustrate the difficulty. These are examples about adding "basic information" to achieve NPOV. The key point to understand these examples is to accept that the information is only added for completeness, purely for a good encyclopedic purpose. I prefer WhatamIdoing's examples in that respect, but the idea is the same in all of them. Let us take the case of the original location of a company in an article on the company. This banal information is found in the company's website, which is reliable for that purpose. Let us assume, just to make it more robust, that the info is also mentioned in another reliable source not about the company, but in a paper about the history of the location.[1] Some might consider this as a secondary source for that particular information. This banal information has low weight, because it is not extensively discussed in sources. Nevertheless, it is added in the article on the basis of these two reliable sources, respecting common practices in Wikipedia and the concept of a synthesis of reliable sources. We could add the argument that UNDUE should not apply to basic information, but to viewpoints. Now, John the POV warrior wants to say that the company is not a US company, but is actually a Chinese company that was originally located in China and he has a conspiracy theory that it is a way for China to invade the USA.[2] So, he argues that this information should be rejected because it is not found in secondary sources on the topic, which are necessary, he says, to show that the information was properly analysed by the sources in the context of the topic. He claims that his dubious sources are secondary sources centred on the topic and should have priority. This example is drafted in the hope that it will be understood that it is a violation of NPOV to reject in this manner that simple basic information. Nevertheless, I claim that the challenge remains and that even that example, even a better drafted example, even with the extra argument, because of the current domination of UNDUE (and BALANCE, BALASP, etc.) will not have its place in the text of the NPOV policy, simply because it does not explain UNDUE, but a case where info must be added, and thus could be misinterpreted against UNDUE. Dominic Mayers (talk) 18:41, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In that example, it would be up to John the POV warrior to demonstrate why the reliable sources that say it is a US company, in the absence of any other reliable source that says it is Chinese, should be ignored and not included. The national origin of a business is standard for WP articles so to argue against its inclusion because of a unverifiable conspiracy theory is absolutely not going to fly. This actually has nothing to do with NPOV in your example since NPOV deals with viewpoints; fighting over facts by claiming conspiracy theories is not covered by NPOV. Masem (t) 15:47, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You repeat what I wrote. I insisted that the example was constructed so that it is obvious that the information must be added. I also mentioned that it is standard practice to include basic (factual) information and I even mentioned the argument that UNDUE applies only to viewpoints. Still, read the text of the policy and tell me where it is explained with an example that the information must be added. I disagree that it has nothing to do with NPOV. Certainly, the general case about adding info (arguments, methods, what is at stake, attributions, etc), which is my main concern, has everything to do with NPOV. Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:04, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For personal reasons related to my duties outside Wikipedia, I will have to stop participating in Wikipedia for about a month. This has nothing to do with this discussion per se or with whatever comments were made about it. I might reply to Masem's eventual reply, because it is not nice to close discussions too abruptly, but it will be more an acknowledgement that I read his point and that I will be thinking about it. Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:36, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Notes
^The addition of this other reliable source in the example illustrates one difficulty with examples. In practice, we want that the general idea applies to less obvious cases that require judgment on a case by case basis. But, when we give an example to illustrate the idea, it is necessary to move away from these practical cases that require some judgment and build a case that is obvious, for example, by adding an extra reliable source. The general idea, the need to add a basic information to achieve the neutral point of view, is still illustrated by the example, even though it is not a case where there will be an issue in practice. Again, it is on purpose that the example is obvious in this manner.
^This also illustrates a difficulty with examples. The example presents the extreme case of a conspiracy theorist. It should perhaps add that many secondary sources point out that he is a conspiracy theorist and that it is not a judgment of the editors. Again, the idea is to make the example obvious. Yet, those who worry about UNDUE will still not like the example, because it does not explain UNDUE, but the need to add basic information. They will complain that the example is artificial and bring out that John could actually be reasonable and his secondary sources more informed.
arbitrary break
I find a lot of this discussion bewildering, rather meta, much talking cross-purposes or even agreeing or disagreeing about whether people are discussing the same thing, and like trying to grasp a greased pig which constantly eludes you. Also, it seems very similar in nature to the other discussion about this. Most of all, I don't see bits of ideas coalescing into cloudlets of agreement, that might someday reach a consensus about something, or really any concrete progress towards a goal at all. Am I the only one who has this impression? Mathglot (talk) 23:16, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Anyone could obstruct a thread and try prevent it from being pursued with that kind of comment. I am not saying that it is what you want to do, but please realize that, if we were to accept that kind of comment as a way to prevent a thread, then any majority, assuming that a majority would even give support to that kind of comment, could obstruct a thread because they don't like where it is going. The situation is simple. The thread is relevant to this page, but if nobody is interested or can understand anything useful in the thread, it will stop by itself. Nobody will pursue a monologue here. Dominic Mayers (talk) 23:41, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Mathglot. You alone have written thousands of words in this discussion, and we may actually be farther away from figuring out the question than we were before, let alone the answer. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:12, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nothing more to add to what I already said. I mean, if there was a genuine question or even some criticisms of my comments that I could respond to, I would, but here I have nothing to say. Dominic Mayers (talk) 00:42, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have no wish to obstruct, and I cannot say that I don't like where it's going, because I do not understand where it is going. If by elucidating my lack of understanding I can give enough of a jolt to the discussion to get it back on track such that I, and perhaps others, understand it better, then that will be a service to you so you will be able to reach the conclusion you desire with greater understanding, wider agreement, and more rapidly. Yes, I'm interested, and no, I don't understand much in this thread. If it's just me, then I suggest you ignore this, and carry on with your discussion as before. You don't need my vote, and you give me too much credit to think that I can somehow "prevent a thread" (whatever that means) even if I wanted to. Does that help any? Mathglot (talk) 02:12, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is no right track on which we must return. From my perspective, this discussion has accomplished a lot and, if there is no more questions or criticisms about the content that is in direct relation with the policy, it's great. Some times, a discussion just help some people, may be just one or two, to improve their understanding. Even when someone don't understand the thread, but still questioned some aspects of what he understand of the policy, it is a progress. Dominic Mayers (talk) 04:37, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unnecessary delay in publishing articles translated for $$ by an NGO
So, I just stumbled upon Wikipedia:WikiProject Intertranswiki/OKA. TL;DR, there is an NGO sponsoring translating high quality articles between Wikipedias. But on EN due to our COI/PAID policies they are required to use AfC, which means that their articles, which usually are very good, are delayed through AfC backlog, to which they also contribute. I think this is an excellent initative that however needlessly clutters AfC due to our current rules, and I'd like to suggest we consider giving it exception from the COI requirement to use AfC. It makes sense to direct paid-for spammers to AfC, as their articles are often problematic (notability, etc.) but what we have here is very different (translations of good quality articles from other wikis - ex. current drafts include Draft:Renaissance in Ferrara, Draft:Spa Conference (2-3 July 1918), Draft:Formal procedure law in Switzerland, etc.), yet this stuff is caught in the same "COI" net. (See project page linked above for links of articles already published, links to drafts waiting for review, and their instructions to translators) Thoughts? (Courstesy ping project founder @7804j). PS. A question to 7804j - how are articles chosen for translation? How is the system designed not to be abused by spammers? Perhaps if an exception is granted on en wiki, it should not apply to articles about companies, products or living persons? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here02:27, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would dispute that "this is an excellent initative" or "that their articles, which usually are very good". They have caused a lot of work; mostly these are machine translations by people whose English is rather poor. The titles chosen are often completely ungrammatical (Greek Classicism Sculpture was a typical one) or inappropriate, & in the past they have chosen often subjects we already have. The texts are just whatever the language taken - usually Portuguese, Spanish, French or Italian, has on their wiki, & the quality of the original is often poor, & errors introduced by machine translation go uncorrrected. There have been numerous complaints. They have got slightly better, but I think still don't publish a full list of articles they have paid for, whicgh they should. The Open Knowledge Association isn't really "an NGO" - as far as I can see it's a single Swiss guy with a bit of money to spend, who you have rashly decided to endorse. Johnbod (talk) 02:51, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that the principle is sound: high-quality articles can and should be translated into languages where they're missing. Doc James ran a similar program for certain medical articles a few years ago (e.g., during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks), to public acclaim. However, he was working with pre-screened professional translators, and OKA seems to have struggled with quality control. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:19, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately the ODA model makes absolutely no attempt at quality control. As will be clear to anyone who reads one of them, they are just machine translations dumped onto en:wp with no aftercare. Many that were forks were just turned into redirects, which the ODA doesn't appear to have noticed. The ones that are left take a lot of cleaning up, when some regular editor can be bothered. Johnbod (talk) 01:52, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am afraid that your anecdotal analysis above is different from mine. The articles from OKA I've seen seem pretty decent, at start+ class, and would survive AfD if nominated. Can you recall which articles were redirected - and prove that they are a rule, and not an exception? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here02:50, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Whether they would survive Afd is almost all about the notability of the subject, and that is not usually an issue - the quality is. In fact the worst issues arise when they tackle very prominent subjects. I never claimed that redirected ones were the "rule" - I make no attempt to search out OKA efforts, but then clearly neither do you. Draft:Crow-stepped gable is a recent creation, objected to, for which we have a redirect already in place. Not much of it will survive, I'd imagine. If they kept proper lists of their articles on wiki I would be able to find some, I imagine. Johnbod (talk) 03:12, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, but I don't think that is at all complete. The template was only set up in October 22 (by 7804j), well into OKA's project. Stuff may have been added later. You used to able to access an off-wiki spreadsheet 7804j maintained, but I can't see that you can now. User:7804j? For example, the earlier efforts of User:Racnela21, one of the most prolific OKA editors, are not templated - see the 48k bytes of Brazilian Romantic painting (typically, initially called Brazilian Romanticism Painting). Johnbod (talk) 13:08, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This list contains all articles created by OKA after the template was created. Oka was created relatively shortly before the template was created, therefore there are not many articles without it (probably 90+% have the template). The off wiki tracker is still at oka.wiki/tracker7804j (talk) 13:24, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also, I'd like to highlight that quality is not really the topic of this discussion, since this is about whether COI should require all paid editors to go through AfC and, as you pointed out yourself, AfC's goals are not primarily to check quality. I'd suggest moving the OKA discussions somewhere else such as our talkpage in the intertranswiki project7804j (talk) 13:27, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Piotr brings up "would survive AfD" because that's the standard AfC uses. If OKA articles typically have quality issues that wouldn't be enough for deletion, then there's no point insisting they go through AfC – assuming reviewers are doing their job properly, they'll just send them right through. – Joe (talk) 11:00, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Things that would make them fail Afd include repeating articles we already have under a different title, a perennial problem with OKA, which reviewers don't always pick up, but sometimes do - as currently at Draft:Crow-stepped gable. Besides, some reviewers (perhaps not "doing their job properly" - how shocking) insist on minimal standards of coherent English, etc. Johnbod (talk) 14:31, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for initiating that discussion! I am fully supportive of such an exemption, as I see this AfC requirement as additional red tape that consumes a lot of time for OKA translators and AfC reviewers.
Our core principle is that our translators are free to work on anything that interests them. We provide them with a monthly stipend, some training on how Wikipedia works, but we then see them as volunteer contributors on whom we impose some process to ensure they do not abuse the grant and provide overall value (eg, quality checks, quantity checks). To help them find articles to translate, we curate an optional backlog (at oka.wiki/tracker). Articles of this tracker primarily consist of "Featured" and "Good" quality articles from other Wikis, as well as red links from these articles. We also complement this with articles that we find important, eg, about geographical features such as lakes, mountains, etc. The broader principles for articles prioritization are described at oka.wiki/overview
Note that there was a similar discussion in the Interwiki talkpage, which can provide useful additional context.
Regarding Johnbod's response, I would like to bring 3 points of context:
1) While overall quality is good, it may vary. Because we have many different translators, with difference levels of experience, the quality will not be uniform. We are providing them with training, and we have observed their quality improved over time. We stop providing grants to translators wjth recurring quality issues. Overall, I do not agree with Johnbod's characterizarion of a high degree of quality issues. Often, the issues raised with OKA's work were not due to the quality of the translation, but because of the source article itself. We have published several thousand of articles, most of which are still live with very minimal change vs their original published version.
2) This discussion is not about assessing the quality of the work, but whether the COI requirement to go through AfC should apply to OKA. The only reason why our translators go through AfC today is because of the COI policy, which was not created primarily to check quality of paid translations but to eliminate bias. Therefore, I don't think such arguments are appropriate in the current discussion.
3) Our funding comes from many different private individuals, but it is true that currently I am the main donor. That being said, this should not make any difference as to whether we can be called an "NGO". Would the Gates Foundation not be called an NGO just because most of its funding comes from Bill Gates? We have over 15 full time translators who agree to do this work with a very small stipend, much smaller than what they could earn in a regular job, so the work of OKA is much more than that of a single person 7804j (talk) 08:46, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would prefer not to couch any action in terms of "an exception" for a named user or group. Rather, I would prefer to see an adjustment to WP:PAID to make a modification to allow "philanthropic paid editing" where the articles in question and the content added are chosen by the paid editors and there is no oversight by the payer. At that point, individual articles and editors would be subject to the same kind of oversight as any other. It seems to me that philanthropic paid editing to expand the encyclopedia is within the scope of WP:HERE, and this should not be formulated as an "exception" as if something were wrong with it in the general case. Mathglot (talk) 09:14, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But that's the thing, OKA editors don't have a financial tie to the subject. They're paid by an organisation to edit Wikipedia, but the selection of topics is independent. It's basically paid editing without a COI, which is a bit of blind spot in our current policies. – Joe (talk) 09:30, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Actually I would be interested to understand what are the requirements for projects such as the ones you mentioned to *not* qualify as paid editing. As you pointed out, Wikipedians in Residence do not need to go through AfC -- what are the formal criteria/policy allowing them to be compensated without being considered paid editors? 7804j (talk) 20:17, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Isaacl:, yes, but as I read it, they are free to make edits of their choice without even disclosing their paid status, as long as they are not making specific edits about the payer institution. The way I read it, is that GLAM employees do not need to disclose because: "Disclosure is only necessary where compensation has been promised or received in exchange for a particular contribution". That section recommends a simple disclosure for W-in-residence, but only in the case where they are "specifically compensated to edit the article about the archive at which they are employed". Paid status need not be disclosed for general edits unrelated to that. Do you see it differently? Mathglot (talk) 02:20, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes they do fit it if compensated for a *particular contribution*, and the Paid FAQ linked by the foundation Policy you cited above specifically calls out the circumstances when paid editors do *not* need to disclose their contributions. Those circumstances match those of paid OKA volunteers, who, had they been a Wikipedia-in-residence or a GLAM-paid instead of OKA-paid, would not have had to disclose their status, according to the wmf policy FAQ itself. Mathglot (talk) 06:39, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On the English wikipedia we do require that disclosure "If you receive, or expect to receive, compensation for your contributions to Wikipedia, you must disclose who is paying you to edit (your "employer"), who the client is, and any other relevant role or relationship." Even if the foundation FAQ says that per the foundation they don't per English wikipedia they do. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 06:44, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The FAQ is giving specific examples, and is non-exhaustive. As explained in the first paragraph of the section, you are only required to comply with the disclosure provision when you are compensated by your employer or by a client specifically for edits and uploads to a Wikimedia project. This is in accordance with the actual Terms of Use: if you are being specifically compensated for contributions, you are a paid editor, but this does not extend to your contributions that are not within the scope of your compensation. If you are being paid to edit about your employer, that's within the scope of your compensation, and so the relationship has to be disclosed (and the example is about this specific situation). isaacl (talk) 13:24, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So in the same line of thought, this means that all articles created by Wikipedians in Residence in the context of the organization that pays them need to go through AfC (as @Horse Eye's Back suggests in the comment below), is that also your understanding? 7804j (talk) 16:21, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Note that "Wikipedian-in-residence" is just a self-described title, without any oversight from anyone involved with the WMF or Wikipedia, so the scope of their role is entirely decided by their employer and them. Some of those who have participated at Wikipedia talk:Paid-contribution disclosure have said that they do not edit Wikipedia as part of their role; they provide education and support to the institution's staff. isaacl (talk) 16:56, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Do we require AfC from Wikipedians in Residences?" The outcome of the recent case involving the BYU library's Wikipedians in Residence clarified that the community does in fact expect Wikipedians in Residence to use AfC. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 03:54, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is one reason I prefer the term financial conflict of interest. "Paid editing" focuses on a transaction—being paid to edit—but the real issue is the tendency to bias created by some financial relationships. Wikipedians in Residence are the paradigmatic example of people who are literally paid to edit but don't have a conflict of interest; it seems like OKA translators are another. If we shifted the guideline to talk about FCOIs instead of paid editing, the need for an exception for philanthropy would disappear. – Joe (talk) 11:24, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you can make xxx$ out of a full tims job and only half of that when editing Wikipedia, it becomes more a hybrid role than pure full time job. Our translators usually give up much better paid opportunities for being able to work on Wikipedia. 7804j (talk) 06:10, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
7804j, I would not pursue this line; it's a distraction, and a loser. Volunteering/working is binary, there is no hybrid, in-between, or threshold of payment so low that it is not "working". Mathglot (talk) 06:18, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the context of Wikipedia I agree with you that there should be no distinction in the policy. I just wanted to call out that many of these paid editors do so not because they are interested financially but because they care about Wikipedia and just need some money to pay rent and food (thus why we call it a grant/stipend). Sometimes people are being overly harsh on them, so I think it's important to highlight they also do some personal sacrifices to do that job. 7804j (talk) 06:22, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Everyone has significant conflicts of interest, primarily in relation to their employers. The issue is whether they make edits in those areas or not. If a WiR at the Museum of Nowheresville was editing Museum of Nowheresville, there'd be a problem. If an OKA translator was editing Open Knowledge Association, there'd be a problem. But that's not what we're talking about here. – Joe (talk) 10:49, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not able to square "Wikipedians in Residence are the paradigmatic example of people who are literally paid to edit but don't have a conflict of interest" with "Everyone has significant conflicts of interest, primarily in relation to their employers" Horse Eye's Back (talk) 07:05, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So OKA has been on my radar for some years now due to off-wiki reports sent to the paid editing queue. I was extremely suspicious of it at first and (along with others active in UPE patrolling) worried it would be a sort of front for the usual abusive paid editing. However, I have to hold my hands up and say that it's been c. five years and nothing like that has come up. From what I've seen, the selection of topics is genuinely made based on what's missing on enwiki, and the quality of the translation are at least no worse than average. @7804j: You perhaps made an initial strategic error in structuring/talking about this as "freelancers" doing "paid editing", because this puts you in a category of people that the volunteer community, for good reason, have come to be very sceptical of. Essentially identical activities that are framed as grant-making or residency do not raise the same eyebrows, especially if you can get some sort of buy-in from the WMF (which is not hard).
Quality is a separate issue and something that pretty much always causes friction when people who aren't very familiar with Wikipedia are incentivised to contribute to it en masse. There is no easy to solution to this. Specifically, making them go through AfC isn't going to help – AfC reviewers don't have the time to do a close reading of drafts to look for translation issues. They'll take a look through for major problems (which OKA drafts don't seem to have) and for notability (virtually guaranteed because these are substantial articles on other Wikipedias) and then pass it through. So we'll end up with the same outcome as if they were created in mainspace directly, just with some extra volunteer time wasted within an already backlogged process.
As to whether OKA creations need to go through AfC, I am usually the last person to point this out, but technically this is a request not a requirement. AfC is broken by design because generally we don't want to encourage paid editors by giving them an efficient route to publication, or encourage volunteers to do work that someone else will get paid for. As Mathglot says, Neither our COI policy or the AfC process was designed with 'philanthropic paid editing' in mind. I think it's fine for OKA editors to bypass this and create directly in mainspace. This isn't an exception our a change to the rules, it's just applying WP:IAR and recognising that forcing good faith creations into a broken process because their creator got a stipend while writing them, or because they might have some translation issues, is not in the spirit of WP:FCOI. – Joe (talk) 09:25, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Initially, I also thought that the AfC requirement for paid editors was a request and not a requirement. However, @Seraphimbladeraised in my talk page that any OKA editor creating an article in the mainspace without going through AfC would be blocked. Hence why we started requiring all our translators to go through AfC since early May.
I agree with you that it was a mistake from my end to have initially used the term "freelancer". Our translators are volunteers receiving a grant to cover basic costs of living (~400 usd per month for the ones working full time). Going forward, I will make sure to always use the more accurate terms of "Grant/stipend recipients". I did not want to use the term of "Wikipedians in Residence" as it seemed to me that this requires that the work be related to the institution itself. I wasn't aware that there are options to get buy-in from the Wikimedia foundation, but I will explore this avenue as it will indeed help with acceptance of OKA among the community.
In general, I strongly with the idea of introducing a broader exemption to the AfC requirement of the COI policy to either philanthropic institutions that do not target specific topics and give high degree of freedom to grant recipients, or to payments that are too low to represent full wages (e.g., <xxx$ per month/ per hour).
Whatever avenues you explore, I would not get into proposals related to trying to find a threshold where a payment is "too low" to make a difference, and thus presumably not trigger a PAID concern. Experience with paid crowd-sourcing platforms such as MTurk shows that micropayments may attract volunteers for certain tasks, even sometimes for a larger than average task such as a translation. Mathglot (talk) 18:04, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This might be a dumb question, but I'm tired and can't find it: where in the policies do we require paid editors to use AFC? (please do notping on reply) Primefac (talk) 22:05, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, so here's this month's OKA thread, I thought I'd miss it!
If an organization of this sentiment really wanted to help the English Wikipedia, they would be working exclusively on poorly developed vital articles. Then there would be no AFC necessary. The English WP is far past the point where creating new articles is an effective way to make meaningful improvements. Unless, of course, this creation targets areas of systemic bias where there is a genuine dearth in coverage.
To me this appears much like the organizers have gone so far in one direction that whether or not their effort is actually worthwhile is no longer a consideration. Even with their current infrastructure, it would be considerably more effective to take EN FAs and translate them into other languages. Aza24 (talk)07:29, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The English Wikipedia does not need new articles nearly as much as it needs improvements on existing ones. As I said, the only exception is to fill systemic bias gaps, which yes, includes a woman poet! Comparing a single editor with an entire organization does not track.
I should add that if I'm being overly critical, it's because this organization should be held to a high standard. Sine it is under the guise of effective altruism, the former "effective" qualifier needs to take more prominence. I can't see anywhere that it's even been considered how to most effectively help Wikipedia. Otherwise, the OKA would have approached the community before founding, to identify what is actually needed. Since they didn't, now we find ourselves in these same threads, time and time again. Aza24 (talk)17:35, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Your argument appears to be about your opinion on how work on Wikipedia ought to be prioritized, and is a red herring. One of the central features of a volunteer organization, is that volunteers work on articles of their choice, not articles of your choice, or some committee's choice. Thank goodness I didn't have to listen to you, or I never would have had the opportunity to translate that article about a medieval Catalan peasant uprising, when there were no doubt many hundreds of thousands of tasks more urgent than that one at the time. The OKA volunteers who translate articles of their choice in their own manner should be held to the same standard I was, namely, Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and nothing else. Mathglot (talk) 19:14, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Aza24 I do not think this is the right place to discuss this. This thread is about whether to make changes to the AfC requirement of COI, not about how OKA prioritizes articles. So I would suggest moving that discussion for example to the OKA taskforce talkpage.
That being said, we (OKA) already operate along the lines of what you seem to recommend. Many if the articles our translators work are are about neglected topics in EN wiki, for example, articles about geographical features of non-English speaking countries (eg, Spain, Latin America) or non-English speaking historical figures. I would actually argue that improving coverage on these topics is much more important than extending already extensive articles on important topics. But most importantly, it takes different skill sets to translate vs expand articles. The editors who receive our grants would not necessarily be sufficiently familiar with these topics to be able to expand them starting from scratch.
Regarding your recommendation to translate from English to other languages: we do that already. We published thousands of articles in the Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedia, with a strong focus on under represented topics in these Wikipedia such as mathematics, computer science, etc. There's been a lot of off Wiki analysis of opportunities to maximize impact on donation that went on before we decided to set up OKA the way it is, and I'm happy to share more detail about the rationale if there is interest 7804j (talk) 19:41, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to retract my comments. Given your response, I don't think I'm nearly as informed as I should be on the organization to be casting such aspirations/critiscms. Also, my comments seemed needly inflammatory; my apologies. – Aza24 (talk)20:54, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Aza24 I just wanted to say that it is quite rare to see folks backtrack and even apologize in Internet discussions (and that includes on Wikipedia). Regardless of the issue at hand, I would like to say I very much respect and appreciate you for what you have just said above. Cheers, Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here02:47, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that paid editing is fishy due to the presence of inherently non-encyclopedic motivation, which may ultimately lead to poor quality translations of selection of poorly referenced source articles. As I see, OKA is fairly new and it is probably not flooded with quick buck seekers, but things may quickly change when rumors spread on how to earn some extra easy cash off google translator. I took a quick look at OKA articles submitted in AfC and all my random picks seem to have good quality. So here is my suggestion: How about vetting decent contributors to bypass AfC? - Altenmann>talk19:19, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I could see creating some sort of “fast-track” for reviewing these articles, but some sort of review is still necessary. If for no other reason than preventing duplication of topic with existing articles. Blueboar (talk) 19:51, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
HEB, Can you expand on what you mean by the idea of "a separate lane"? I wouldn't favor a change that referred to OKA by name (except at best in an explanatory note as an illustration of a general point in line that requires an example). Plenty of generalized guidelines have logical carve-outs that need to be explicit, for example, the guidance that strongly discourages external links in the body of an article specifically states that it doesn't apply to inline citations. We could follow that approach.
But there may be even a better way to deal with this. Currently, the first line of WP:FCOI says this:
Being paid to contribute to Wikipedia is one form of financial COI; it places the paid editor in a conflict between their employer's goals and Wikipedia's goals.
In my view, this is the crux of the problem, because it *assumes* that an employer's goals are in conflict with Wikipedia's goals. But what if that is a false assumption? I believe the general problem we are addressing could be handled without any specific carve-out, by altering it as follows:
Being paid to contribute to Wikipedia is one form of financial COI; it places the paid editor in a conflict when their employer's goals and Wikipedia's goals differ.
If the goals of an organization do not differ from Wikipedia's goals, then no separate lane or carve-out is required elsewhwere. This somewhat leaves open the question of what we would define as Wikipedia's goals, but Wikipedia:Purpose (info page) says this:
If a philanthropic organization's goals are the same as Wikipedia's, and there is no organizational oversight of payees' output, then it seems to me no special lane is required. (edit conflict) Mathglot (talk) 20:35, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The practical question is who's going to decide which edits do or do not need independent review? If in practice this can only be done on an article-by-article basis, then I don't think much is gained by setting up a new decision branch that comes before using the articles for creation process. isaacl (talk) 22:39, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The lane or whatever isn't me idea so I don't want to speculate on it, in general I think what we have now works. In terms of the hypothetical unless they themselves are wikipedia how can their goals be the same as Wikipedia's? Generally organizations have self promotion as a goal and that is forbidden per WP:PROMOTION. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 05:52, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Question: do we actually have some specific consensus that these uniformly awful translations should in fact be submitted through AfC? That would be such a good thing! Every one of them I've seen so far (mostly relating to horses) has been created directly in mainspace, and requires an amount of clean-up that seems to be far beyond the editor resources we have – with the result that overall this project is making the encyclopaedia worse, not better. I've asked myself several times why these pages were not being submitted as drafts, but not until now seen any discussion of them; if there's an standing consensus that they should go through AfC, I'll be draftifying several of them in the near future. Sorry, but oppose any kind of AfC exemption for the moment. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 20:42, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think enough concerns have been raised about poor translations here that the argument to skip the AFC process is quite weak. I will also add that unedited machine translations are an extreme drain on experienced editor time, resulting in diffs like this one from 2021. If unedited machine translations are occurring here, this could turn into a big problem and big cleanup effort, and once sufficient evidence is gathered, we should attempt to communicate these concerns to the event organizers. –Novem Linguae (talk) 02:19, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed - 7804j has never denied that these are machine translations, and they normally appear on en:wp in a single edit, & are not edited further except for a couple of tidies. There is no evidence that they are edited machine translations when OKA bow out, and they should be treated as "unedited machine translations" - what other evidence of absence would there actually be? Other volunteers are left to do things like categories and links, which they normally lack. Very rarely does anyone do the complete rewrite that ones like Draft:Renaissance in Ferrara need just to be comprehensible to an average English reader. To anyone who think OKA texts are "generally good" or "decent translations" I would say: just try actually reading that one - which btw will probably get far more views than most OKA efforts, as there is a real topic there. It covers our existing School of Ferrara but that is so crap I don't object on WP:FORK grounds, though it is typical that OKA haven't addressed this. Johnbod (talk) 15:11, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think you're applying a really high standard here. For example, the original title of Brazilian Romanticism Painting, and yes of course that's not perfect English, but does it impair the reader's ability to understand that the article is about Romanticism in Brazilian art? No. I see the same kind of thing reading through the rest of the article and other OKA articles: uneven English, yes, but perfectly comprehensible and, more importantly, sourced encyclopaedic content. The rest will be ironed out with time, like how you corrected the title of Brazilian Romantic painting a couple of weeks after it was created.
It's actually quite easy to verify whether a machine translation has been edited or not: just run the original through the same translator. For example, here's how DeepL handles the first paragraph of the first section:
The Este court in Ferrara was one of the most vital in northern Italy from the end of the 14th century, when Niccolò d'Este started the university and initiated the construction of the castle[1]. The courtly connotations were pronounced, as evidenced by the interest in the world of fairy tales of medieval heritage, as evidenced by the numerous novels of chivalry that enriched the famous library, in astrology and esotericism[2]. On an artistic level, Pisanello, who produced various medals for Lionello d'Este, was highly appreciated, as was the illuminated production, both of an international nature, in which Belbello da Pavia (author of the Bible of Niccolò d'Este) stood out, and updated to humanism, such as that of Taddeo Crivelli (Bible of Borso d'Este)[2].
Again, it's not perfect, but it's not somebody just acting as a conduit for automated translations, which is what the practice of draftifying these is supposed to filter out. OKA editors are using a machine translation as a base and then proofreading it, which in my experience is what practically everyone that works in more than one language does these days. – Joe (talk) 15:41, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure what you think this demonstrates. It could be that they used a different translator. If you are suggesting they used the same one, then manually touched it up, the effect of their changes has on the whole made things worse, no? To someone who doesn't know the area, both versions of the passage are basicly gibberish in the details. To bring either up to even mediocre WP standards, a total rewording is needed. This is typical (ok, this example, which Piotrus selected, is worse than most of theirs these days). Johnbod (talk) 15:02, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Including estabilished and experienced editors like myself. (I machine translate and proofread my own articles between en and pl, for example). Nothing wrong with using MT as long as one knows how to proofread stuff (and if the original article of course is of decent starting quality to begin with). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here02:53, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Novem Linguae, one of the points of this discussion, I believe, is that there is a difference between poor translations in general on the one hand, and translations by paid OKA editors on the other. Can you confirm that the translations in your 2021 link above as added to Cemetery of San Fernando were from OKA editors? Because if they weren't, everyone, I think, is in agreement that there are very many poor translations by new editors. The question at issue here is whether that applies to OKA editors as well, to such a degree that Afc is necessary for their contributions. Mathglot (talk) 11:21, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Can you confirm that the translations in your 2021 link above as added to Cemetery of San Fernando were from OKA editors? They were not OKA editors. That link is just a generic example of how much work machine translations are to clean up. –Novem Linguae (talk) 16:13, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Justlettersandnumbers: I'm not sure if you're asking about this specific case or translations in general. If it's the specific case of OKA, it sounds like you've found a bad run of horse-related translations, but myself and others have seen a lot of decent translations from them too. The reason some are asking OKA translations to go through AfC is because they're paid for them, not because they're translations.
If you're asking whether there is community consensus for draftifying poor translations in general, I'd say the answer is no. Unedited machine translations are fair game (a legacy of the WMF's failed experiment with auto-translation, I believe), but if it just needs copyediting then draftspace will not help. AfC reviewers don't routinely do anything about translation issues, as long as it's a viable article. Instead there's the {{Cleanup translation}} family of templates and an active patrol that deals with them in mainspace. – Joe (talk) 11:22, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The WMF has never attempted to do anything with auto-translation. They accidentally (and briefly) enabled exactly the sort of "machine translation as a base, but then proofread it and clean it up" system that many good editors use themselves, from Spanish to English (only that language pair) here, and then turned it back off when the error was pointed out to them.
In the meantime, one (1) editor dumped a bunch of unedited Spanish mis-translations in the mainspace, and we panicked and created Security through obscurity restrictions on all editors ever since. Which is to say: I can, and have, used machine translation to English in the Wikipedia:Content translation tool, but most editors, including those with far better translation skills than me, won't be able to figure out how to do that on their own. In the meantime, most editors are pasting the contents into machine translation in another tab, and thereby screwing up links, templates, categories, and formatting. Anyone who's been paying attention will know that this is typical of our community. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:05, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing Indeed. My students do translations for class assignments, and I often tell them not to bother with the official Wiki translation tool because it doesn't work due to the reasons you discuss (i.e. their work can't be easily published). Then, of course, they struggle with code etc. eating our class time, so instead of having let's say a discussion about free culture or such I have to spend time doing activities about how to add hyperlinks or templates or such. On the bright side, they eventually learn the code, at least some of it. But it is still embarassing that I have to tell them "don't use the official tool, it is not friendly enough". Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here09:50, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that's what I was referring to. A promising tool that was killed by a botched deployment – typical of the WMF in that era! – Joe (talk) 06:30, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you are referring to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/CXT, then your summary is extremely misleading, as it was about the extremely poor translations from many editors, with that Spanish editor as the most visible example. But upon rereading that discussion, I see that you were trying to muddle the waters and defend the indefensible by providing wrong numbers there already, so I guess hoping that you will change now is rather useless. Fram (talk) 08:58, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I moved Draft:History of Caraquet back to draft space yesterday. It would be nice if such articles didn't start with presenting speculation by one local amateur historian and genealogist as if it was accepted truth, even though it disagrees with nearly all actual historians and the available evidence. The remainder of the article isn't much better. Fram (talk) 08:58, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:ATD, why? The topic is probably salvageable, the article is largely rubbish, so the paid editor can make sure they write a decent article which at least follows accepted science, instead of blindly copying what another Wiki has produced. Fram (talk) 10:07, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I do not see draftification listsed as an acceptable ATD. Sure, the article needs various fixes, but I don't see why they cannot be done in the mainspace. If you think it should not be in the mainspace, we need a community consensus (i.e. through AfD) on whether it should be de-mainspaced. Single editors do not have the power to delete (hide) articles - this is a task we relegate to the community (outside CSD-level garbage) and this is hardly at that level. See also WP:DRAFTNO. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here08:13, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Policy on the fair use of photos of children who are only notable for their deaths
Killing of Jonathan Lewis, with that adolescent iPhone selfie becoming the permanent encyclopedic representation of this tragically deceased child, has compelled me to raise this idea:
No "fair use" photographs of children notable only for their deaths. Often these photos surface because the families allow local press to use them—often to raise awareness of their loved one's disappearance or death as they seek resolution or justice. The allowance of this use, for the fleeting cycle of news media, is meaningfully quite different from allowance for permanent use in an encyclopedic project. Additionally, these articles, which are about deaths (not people), do not actually need photos of the victims, who are not the article topic themselves. Another source for photos may be online obituaries—there's one up for Jonathan Lewis, and it is more flattering than the article's photo. I think that would be just as violative to use‚ functionally no different from the news-issued ones.
I think using such photos for an encyclopedia, bringing a private child's face into the public eye to illustrate the worst thing that has ever happened (or could ever happen) to them, is violative, and the apparent "fair use" supposes the granting of a moral right that isn't really there (since these photos are almost always justified as fair use, having been provided by families to the news, but not licensed for everyone to use as they wish). In the absence of a real educational need, and in the presence of a moral violation, I think uses like these shouldn't be allowed.
This particular person was 2.3 months short of his 18th birthday, and likely would have objected strenuously to being called a "child".
Adding a photo helps readers recognize that it was a person who died. Yes, we should all be able to tell that from just the words, but A picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes the visual helps people understand it better. (As for whether this one is "flattering", the article says he was interested in photography, and he might have thought it was artistic. If the family released that one to news media, they probably had a reason for choosing it.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:27, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. Discretion is required. If they are only notable for dying then a photo smacks of WP:Memorial. If the family object then the photo should be removed immediately, obviously — Iadmc♫talk 07:50, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think it would depend on the child. In this case, (a) where the family have released a photograph of a (b) 17 year old victim, and (c) the family aren't suspects or implicated in the crime, I think it's straightforwardly appropriate to use the image. My answers for other variations of a, b and c might be different.—S MarshallT/C09:17, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think this is a case where a one-size-fits-all policy is useful, and I believe our WP:BLP / WP:BDP policies already cover it to the extent that it's necessary. Obviously we want to be somewhat cautious about having articles about children, or pictures of children; there is no reason why we would be more cautious with deceased ones (and in fact if they've been deceased for long enough that WP:BDP no longer applies, I'd argue that - well, obviously we should be more cautious for children who fall under BLP / BDP, since the risk of harm is higher. For the historical ones listed above there's no reason for extra caution; neither the Lindburgh baby nor their surviving relatives are likely to be harmed by a fair-use photo of them here. And ultimately, whether we use an image (like the question of whether we have an article at all) has to be decided based on coverage. A lack of WP:SUSTAINED coverage might be a reason to limit what we say overall, but I don't think we need another policy for that; that's already the case. Note that in the example you gave, WP:BDP would apply anyway - by the time BDP expires, it should be more clear what images make sense. --Aquillion (talk) 10:48, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Whether minor or adult, adding a picture of the deceased victim to these type of pages does beg on sympathy and empathy, particularly if there is little else that can be said about the victim (as in the above case). The article is about the crime, not the victim, so the usual NFC allowance to use an image for identification of a nonliving biographical subject doesn't automatically apply. — Masem (t) 11:55, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know who you are referring to with the word "child" -- the article you linked is about a 17-year-old. Maybe the genetic makeup of Homo sapiens has changed significantly (space alien lasers? quantum consciousness DNA crystals? chemicals turning the frogs gay? etc) but when I was 17 I had a beard and drove a forklift and smoked Pall Malls and would have blown smoke from them directly in the face of anyone calling me a child. jp×g🗯️18:53, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Haha seconded. Still, on a serious note, genetic makeup did not changed, but the the laws did. There is a legal definition of child/minor and I guess Wikipedia sticks with it. - Altenmann>talk17:25, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fair use policy isn't the appropriate place for this. Images of these children should either be allowed or not allowed, regardless of copyright status. Jruderman (talk) 09:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We have generally not concerned ourselves with censoring morally "violative" content, especially when it serves an encyclopedic purpose (if not a *need* as you put it) Horse Eye's Back (talk) 07:13, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
RfC: Titling of European imperial and royal monarchs?
In the absence of a need to disambiguate, how should we title the articles of European imperial and royal monarchs?
Now and then someone tells me something like "What proof do you have that J. Random was not a Christian?" I know this is a logical blunder, but I cannot remember any rule against this in our WP:V rules. Neither I remember the name of the fallacy. Can someone remind me? - Altenmann>talk17:20, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I assume you're talking about this for statements within an article context, in which case I would need to see an example statement in which it's a problem. If the article on Judy Random states that she was a Christian, I would expect that to be sourced, as well as any statement that she was not a Christian (which is a sourcable thing.) If you're talking about in discussion, that seems quite allowable thing to ask, depending on what was being discussed. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:55, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It does not matter. Talk pages are not an idle chat: they are about article content. Of course you can say in talk page anything you want, but if the implications are to change article content, then the arguments must be based on reliable sources. Of course, there are discussions where opinions of editors do matter, such as article titles (heck, take AfDs), but still, they must involve arguments, not opinions, and arguments boil down to shat is said in "real world"- Altenmann>talk18:01, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OK, the point is, if an article wants to claim that Random was not a Christian, you do actually need a source that says Random was not a Christian. I don't see what's hard about this. WP:V requires verifiability for all claims, including negative ones. --Trovatore (talk) 18:04, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely it does matter. Your initial post seemed to be seeking a rule against it, and you're on a page for discussing policy. The verifiability policies already cover this for article content, and there's no particular need for a rule against it elsewhere. The example is weak, as it seems quite possible to source a statement that Judy Random was not a Christian or to specify that she held some other religious belief. But if someone is asking that on the talk page, it seems quite a reasonable response to a talk page statement that she was not a Christian. It should not be disallowed to ask that as a response for a claim. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 18:08, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I stated my question incorrectly. Let me set it closer to the issue: Someone added Category:Buddhists to a bio. I removed it and I was reverted because I didnt provide an evidence that a person was not a Buddhist. What would be my proper counter-argument. WP:CATV didnt enlighten me. Sorry for my fussy brains. - Altenmann>talk18:13, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The above collapsed discussion does raise a point that sometimes troubles me. Category links don't have footnotes. In theory they're supposed to be justified by sourced material in the article, but you can't necessarily tell which cite justifies the category. Of course in most cases this is not that much of a problem, but it can become one when someone adds a category that makes a potentially contentious claim. I remember this specifically over someone wanting to add category:Whitewashing in film to The Last Temptation of Christ (film), which struck me as an uncited criticism of the casting. --Trovatore (talk) 21:46, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps one way to resolve this for categories without an clear justification in the prose (or which might do if prose is removed from the article for any reason or perhaps even just reworded) would be to put a hidden comment next to the category link with a source or explicit link to the relevant section of the article (e.g. "see criticism from XYZ Group", "source: P.D. Michaels, 2024", "Ref name=BBCNewsApril29"). Thryduulf (talk) 23:02, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(A distinct but related concern is that categories can appear to make assertions in Wikivoice, which we have to be careful about.) --Trovatore (talk) 23:23, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Categories are supposed to be for defining characteristics. If it's a defining characteristic, it really should be in the prose (although with the way we create categories like "Left-handed Inuit arcwelders from Texas", it may be a combination of different sections of prose.) Per WP:CATV, "It should be clear from verifiable information in the article why it was placed in each of its categories."-- Nat Gertler (talk) 02:01, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Something else related to the collapsed part of this discussion, but not mentioned there, is that sometimes justification for a category can be implicit. For example if a person is verifiably Swedish and verifiably a member of an organisation that requires members to be Buddhists, you don't need an explicit citation to add Category:Swedish Buddhists to the article unless there is evidence they are/were not Buddhist (perhaps they renounced that religion later in life). Thryduulf (talk) 23:10, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think someone adding a category which casts the subject in a negative light, most especially if a BLP, ought to be prepared to defend the addition if challenged. Wehwalt (talk) 01:26, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Everybody who adds anything needs to be prepared to defend it if challenged. In the example above the defence would be exactly as I've laid out - they are/were Swedish, are/were a member of an organisation that requires members to be Buddhists and there is no evidence the person adding it has seen to the contrary. Thryduulf (talk) 08:37, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, so out of curiosity I took a look at that category, which has only two individual bios at the top level, one of which is Malin Ackerman. Ackerman's bio categorizes her as both a "Swedish Buddhist" as an "American Buddhist". However, the body asserts that she was raised Buddhist, and mentions her "Buddhist upbringing", but does not assert that she is currently Buddhist.
Not sure there's a broad policy conclusion here, but I think it's worth noticing that articles are not always entirely careful about these things. Thryduulf, this is arguably similar to the case you mention. She was raised Buddhist, with sources (I haven't checked them, but that seems not on-point in this discussion), and we have no active assertion that she decided she wasn't a Buddhist anymore. Is that enough to put her in the cats? My intuition is no, not when the article uses language that seems noncommittal on her current status. --Trovatore (talk) 17:38, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Disraeli is not even an edgecase - the lead of the article makes it very clear that that category is incorrect and so should not be on the article. Thryduulf (talk) 17:56, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Trovatore: I picked the category out of thin air, so it's interesting you found an edgecase! Reading Ackerman's bio (but not the sources), I'd say that if the standard is "on the balance of probabilities" then the category is correct but if the standard is "beyond reasonable doubt" then it isn't (not because it's necessarily incorrect, but because there is reasonable doubt). When it comes to BLP anything contentious or potentially defamatory absolutely needs to have the higher standard of proof, something innocuous is usually fine at the lesser standard (although obviously better is always preferred if possible). A person's religious beliefs are something that can be contentious and some people would regard some mischaracterisations as defamatory, but not everybody and not always. Given the content in the article I am completely confident that describing Ackerman as Buddhist would not be defamatory even if correct, and I'm not seeing anything to suggest it is contentious. My gut feeling is that they are probably nominally or casually Buddhist - someone who doesn't actively practice the faith but would tick that box on a form. Thryduulf (talk) 17:54, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So the analogy with legal burdens of proof could get a bit strained, but I'd kind of suggest that the (underused) clear and convincing evidence might be a better way of thinking of it. "Eh, it's probably true" doesn't strike me as good enough to add a cat, particularly to a BLP, even if we think the subject probably doesn't mind being called a Buddhist. --Trovatore (talk) 22:33, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think categories are (or should be) limited to current status. Babe Ruth is not currently a baseball player, but he's probably properly in those categories. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:56, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, new one on me. I did not know that Babe Ruth was a Swedish Buddhist.
Anyway I think that's a bit of a different issue. Ruth's profession was ballplayer, until he retired. That's what he was known for. Ackerman is not particularly known for being a Buddhist, as far as I'm aware.
It does raise some interesting questions. Eldridge Cleaver became a conservative Republican, but is most known for what you could call "far left" activism, to the limited IMHO extent that that terminology makes sense. Does he belong in e.g. "socialist" categories? I really don't know. --Trovatore (talk) 22:51, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the idea that categories should be a single-moment snapshot rather than reflecting the wide range that has been noted is wrong. We have a list of American politicians who switched parties in office -- which party's categories should they be under? Both! There may be some categorization that only applies to non-notable periods of their life -- Jane was baptized but declared herself an atheist when she was 12, long before she became a professional cat juggler, so she certainly doesn't belong in Christian cat jugglers and perhaps not even in Christians at all, but if she switched from atheism to agnosticism mid-career, then she does belong in both atheist cat jugglers and agnostic cat jugglers. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:14, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Categories are fundamentally for navigational purposes. If someone is looking for articles about ____, then they should find the articles related to _____, even if occasionally that article says "Well, you might have thought he was a ____, but the truth is rather more complex and interesting than that". WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:21, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm aware of that viewpoint but I don't really agree. The problem is that an article's presence in a category often appears to be an assertion (in Wikivoice no less) that the subject of the article satisfies the category's defining criterion. If there were a way to make it clear to readers, including casual ones, that that is not the case ... but there isn't. --Trovatore (talk) 17:21, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's the biggest problem imo, with cats. I stopped paying attention to them for that reason, as long as people are not using cats to enforce or contradict content in actual articles, fine with me. Selfstudier (talk) 17:30, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In some cases it can be mitigated by renaming the cat to make the criterion more objective. For example I happened to see that the category I called out, category:Whitewashing in film, is actually at CfD. I think a lot of the problem would go away if we renamed it to something along the lines of category:Controversies over whitewashing in film. It's reasonably objective whether there was a controversy; you can support that with one reliable cite. Whether the film is actually an example of whitewashing is much more fraught. --Trovatore (talk) 01:20, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Trovatore, the second sentence of the Wikipedia:Categorization guideline literally says "The central goal of the category system is to provide navigational links to pages in Wikipedia within a hierarchy of categories".
That might be the goal, but it doesn't trump V or NPOV. I sharply disagree with the idea of providing categories that might appear to make contentious claims just because they might help someone find something. --Trovatore (talk) 19:34, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Species notability
I don't think this has been formally proposed before. Why do we not have an official policy surrounding species notability? WP:NSPECIES is a de facto policy because all species that verifiably exist (i.e. have a correct/valid name) are always kept at AfD. This is somewhat confusing because everyone seems to have agreed that all species are notable, but no official policy is written anywhere. It's an unwritten SNG.
I think, given how this is our current policy in practice anyway, a new SNG needs to be written specifically about species ― species that verifiably exist (published in a reliable academic publication; can be checked through reputable taxonomy databases like CoL) are inherently notable.
Agreed. It is de facto long standing policy because, so long as the species is officially recognized and categorized by the relevant authorities, there is inherently significant academic coverage of the species itself, which was required for it to be officially recognized in the first place to describe it. SilverserenC18:18, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Clearfrienda There's currently a discussion at WT:Notability about this; to keep discussion in one place you might want to join there. I proposed a similar thing at WT:TOL last year (see this discussion), and I agree with you, but lots of people are interested in this topic and it can difficult to come to a consensus. For example, I have concerns about sub-stubs, which I think should be up-merged per WP:PAGEDECIDE, but some editors are very opposed to that, so it remains a bit of a controversial topic. Cremastra (talk) 13:27, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Controversy is a strong word... in practice, we have hundreds of thousands of standalone articles for individual species and they are rarely, if ever, even challenged at AfD, let alone deleted. And that has been the status quo for as long as I've been editing. That a few people have lately decided to make taxonomy the next front in their Great War on Stubs is completely insignificant compared to that level of implied consensus and shouldn't be a barrier to accurately documenting the existing practice in a guideline. – Joe (talk) 14:27, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Would it be possible to start an RfC on the matter? I don't imagine a proposal promoting NSPECIES to official policy would be that controversial ― as Joe said, this has always been the status quo. In practice, articles — even stubs — are never deleted at AfD. This whole process seems overly bureaucratic when this has been the uncontested policy forever. CFA💬15:03, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support, to be recognized as a species inherently requires significant scientific coverage in the form of complex description upon the species being published, and there is also always the potential to add a meaningful picture of the species. This is in no way giving something an article in which there is nothing encyclopedic to say, like for non-notable astronomical objects regarding which almost all of them have almost no unique details and nothing worth photographing (contra a comparison made at WT:Notability). Deleting or upmerging stubs disincentivizes people from expanding these articles. Crossroads-talk-00:46, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are estimated to be literally trillions of species of microbes alone. Theyareconstantlybeingdiscovered (56 new species reported between January 1 and March 1 2024, and that's only looking at the ones in Western Anglophone journals that got press coverage on the first page of my google results). Across all domains about 18,000 new species are discovered per year. Are we seriously going to consider every single one of them inherently notable? What makes a new species so much more encyclopedic than, say, a new strain of C. elegans or new minor astronomical body if they're both the subject of significant primary discussion in a research article, get officially recognized and named by an international scientific org, have their (primary) descriptions and potentially hundreds of individual attributes curated in international databases, and then receive zero secondary attention forever after? Why would we afford notability to a new species based solely on its entirely-primary-source discovery article but not to literally any other scientific discovery, the rest of which are required, like every other GNG topic and especially anything STEM, to be the subject of multiple independent sources of secondary SIGCOV in order to have standalones, and in fact are supposed to have secondary coverage to even be mentioned anywhere on WP? JoelleJay (talk) 05:19, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Very often a C. elegans variant will actually have some secondary coverage in dozens of papers as well as continuous new observations from primary research that get added to professionally curated databases. See example phenotype "generally disgusting worm" (assigned to eat-3 null ad426). This isn't enough for the topic to meet NOR, so why would something with even less secondary coverage be acceptable? JoelleJay (talk) 06:04, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is no such thing as presumed notability. Period, end of story. If a species is the subject of significant coverage in reliable sources, then it is eligible for a Wikipedia article. If not, then it isn't. For sake of efficiency, it is often useful to cover multiple closely related species in an article about their genus. This is normal. As for the assertion that there are trillions of species of microbes, I care about that fact (if it is true) as much as I care about the fact that there are trillions of individual grains of sand and trillions of individual leaves of grass. If one of those trillions of microbe species has received sufficient coverage in the scientific literature, then so be it. Write an article. If the other 99.999999999% of microbe species lack that coverage at this time, then so be it. Don't try to write those articles at this time. Wikipedia is, after all, a work in progress. Cullen328 (talk) 06:27, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Cullen328 So if, say, there was a species of rare worm which was described in considerable detail in its original, open-access description in 1995, but was only mentioned once in the literature since then, and only as part of list of worms found in Myanmar, do you think it would be OK to write an article about the worm? Cremastra (talk) 12:55, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why is it a problem to have a guideline that confers inherent notability to potentially trillions of subjects without any evidence that the vast majority are likely to have received the required secondary (=not the original discovery paper, not automatic database listings) independent (=no shared authors with original paper) coverage? JoelleJay (talk) 16:40, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Normally when we use independent in this context we mean of the topic, can you explain what you mean by indepedent if you're contending that its based on the relationships of the sources to each other? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:43, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How can an author ever be "multiple" independent sources? The discoverers of new scientific results are clearly covered by the sentiment of The barometer of notability is whether people independent of the topic itself (or of its manufacturer, creator, author, inventor, or vendor) and by the fact that such people would have an indisputable COI with those results (Any external relationship—personal, religious, political, academic, legal, or financial (including holding a cryptocurrency)—can trigger a COI.. How could someone who has a COI constituting significant vested interest in the subject also be an independent source on the subject? JoelleJay (talk) 17:08, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What Cremastra said, but also it is very common for the authors of scientific papers to refspam their work on Wikipedia. One of my labmates created an article on the phenomenon my lab discovered in order to elevate its profile while he was looking for jobs; this was on the advice of another student in the department who had done the same thing. Self-promo in science is a huge problem. JoelleJay (talk) 18:15, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, they can't be considered independent of the results... But the results are not the topic of the wikipedia article in this context. The results are their published work, so its only non-indepedent if the wikipedia page is about the published work. Anything beyond that would be outside what has historically been understood as consensus on the issue. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:27, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But the context we're talking about is the independence of an author to the subject and their ability to count towards the "multiple" part of GNG. Once someone has written on a topic, additional works on that topic by the same person are not considered independent of each other: Lack of multiple sources suggests that the topic may be more suitable for inclusion in an article on a broader topic. ... Several journals simultaneously publishing different articles does not always constitute multiple works, especially when the authors are relying on the same sources, and merely restating the same information. Similarly, a series of publications by the same author or in the same periodical is normally counted as one source.JoelleJay (talk) 18:53, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The quotes only seem to speak about "their ability to count towards the "multiple" part of GNG" not the independence of an author from the subject. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:09, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure I see how someone being a discoverer of a species equals being non-independent and their works being unable to contribute to notability for that species? Would this also mean that, for example, those who do extensive research about previously 'unknown' historical figures would be non-independent for those historical figures? What about a plain journalist who writes an in-depth article about someone previously not having significant coverage? Would that significant coverage be disqualified because the author was the 'discoverer' of that notable person? BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:42, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The "independence" I am referring to here is in two contexts, the first of which being a scientific paper author's relationship to their research discoveries or novel theories. Because they have a vested interest in promoting their own findings/interpretations, we would not consider a secondary review article that they write on that topic to be an example of "independent attention". For example, someone who discovers a new calcium signaling pathway X would not be an independent source if they wrote a review article (or lay summary, or book) on that particular pathway, even if they were also citing other researcher's results, because their interest in the subject is inextricably linked to their own self-interests. However, if they wrote a review article on calcium signaling in general that happened to include discussion of pathway X, that review article would be sufficiently independent for the topics it covers that don't involve X. I am not familiar enough with non-science research to know how much this would apply to other fields. The second context is the common guideline-supported practice of treating multiple articles by the same author as not independent of each other. JoelleJay (talk) 19:28, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think we're ever going to have trillions of articles, for many reasons. But if we did, it would be a tremendous achievement. Even putting aside your highly original interpretations of the words "secondary" and "independent" here, I don't think you need a secondary, independent source to write an acceptable stub on a species and I think that's amply evidenced by the existence of hundreds of thousands of such stubs which are practically never deleted. – Joe (talk) 16:50, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What part of our policy that scientific article findings are primary is a "highly original interpretation"? And why have secondary and independent source requirements at all if the only criterion that really matters is "can you write an acceptable stub based on RS"? Do you think someone couldn't write a substantial article covering the results of any other scientific research paper? Do you think the journals that publish species discoveries have more rigorous peer review -- to the extent that an identification is being formally validated by someone independent -- than any other journal? If not, why do you think the initial announcement of a species and its acceptance by the governing nom code makes the discovery not need critical analysis or contextualization of its claims when the journals are just as likely (actually, far more likely, given that a discovery does not need to be reliably published in order for its name to be officially adopted) to suffer issues of accuracy, data falsification, etc.? JoelleJay (talk) 23:05, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Because this isn't a new idea. Notability on Wikipedia, in practice, is not always based on independent sources — maybe it should be, but that's a different question altogether. For example, WP:NPOL recognizes all politicians with national/state office as presumed notable. There are tens of thousands of politicians on Wikipedia where their only coverage is a mention on the government's website, but are considered notable anyways (i.e. they are not deleted at AfD). We're saying species should also be designated as such, because the discovery of a species requires enough coverage to write an article (there is always significant coverage). CFA💬13:26, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But what exactly is a primary research article? I would argue that a paper describing a new species is still secondary; the primary source would be the lab results, field notes, etc. Cremastra (talk) 16:36, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That is explicitly not what our policy says. a scientific paper documenting a new experiment conducted by the author is a primary source for the outcome of that experiment. and a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research. Our policy is based on the academic designation of research articles as primary sources--see, e.g., our citations to Ithaca College which states In the natural and social sciences, primary sources are often empirical studies -- research where an experiment was done or a direct observation was made. The results of empirical studies are typically found in scholarly articles or papers delivered at conferences, so those articles and papers that present the original results are considered primary sources.JoelleJay (talk) 16:44, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, and I assume "at least a brief description" would be carried up to the SNG. However, the vast majority of species (if not all) will always have enough coverage to write an article. Even your example, Acidobacteria bacterium, which was identified computationally, still has significant coverage outside of the taxon database [4][5][6]CFA💬17:17, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, this is true. My earlier reply was a bit misleading. Do I believe all of these unclassified species should have independent articles? No, and I think an AfD would result in a redirect because there just isn't enough description. But I don't think this changes anything about this discussion. If we were to turn NSPECIES into a policy, we would most likely state species are "presumed" notable if there is a brief description. This does not apply to these unclassified species, and I doubt anyone would bother creating them because of how little there is to write. CFA💬18:14, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But why should a brief description in a primary source, with demonstrably no coverage in secondary independent sources, afford us even a presumption that IRS SIGCOV exists? It doesn't work that way for any other topic, since in all cases where notability is presumed the presumption rests on this sourcing actually currently existing. JoelleJay (talk) 18:29, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This comment seems to elide two different senses of "presumed". In cases like the NSPORTS SNG, the presumpton is that GNG sourcing exists. Other SNGs, like NPROF, create a direct presumption that a topic merits an article. A SPECIES presumption of notability could be the latter kind, not the former. Newimpartial (talk) 20:37, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
NPROF is also based on the presumpton is that GNG sourcing exists, it is not a direct presumption that a topic merits an article but a recognition that almost everyone who meets NPROF is going to have sufficient sources even if they're not available digitally. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:19, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that is true either in the wording of the guideline or in its practical implementation at AfD. In terms of wording, I take the key paragraph of WP:NPROF to be:
This guideline is independent from the other subject-specific notability guidelines, such as WP:BIO, WP:MUSIC, WP:AUTH, etc., and is explicitly listed as an alternative to the general notability guideline ... failure to meet either the general notability guideline or other subject-specific notability guidelines is irrelevant if an academic is notable under this guideline (emphasis added).
The plain reading of this paragraph, I think, is that a topic meeting NPROF does not have to also meet GNG.
In terms of practical implementation, articles about people who are found to meet NPROF are routinely kept at AfD whether or not GNG sourcing (or NBASIC sourcing, which is typically the relevant guideline rather than GNG and which sets a slightly higher bar for sourcing) is available. Newimpartial (talk) 17:53, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That just seems like a frustrated explanation of what a subject-specific notability guideline is, all SNG are technically independent of each other and the GNG. Can you name a case where a subject was kept under NPROF where the presumption that GNG exists can't be made? Remember that even under GNG the sources don't have to be available, there just has to be a reasonable belief that they exist. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:59, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To answer your question, I'm not going to pretend to be able to prove a negative, especially if you meant "the presumption that GNG exists can't be made even if the decision to keep made no mention of or reference to GNG sourcing". I don't think that kind of proof is epistemologically available.
I was, however, quite readily able to find this discussion, resulting in a clear keep result, where no presumption of GNG sourcing was made by any participant in the discussion and when the resulting article lacks GNG sourcing of the subject. To interpret this discussion as presuming that GNG (or NBASIC) could be met would be a rather tortured reading of the discussion, I think.
As far as your interpretation of the language of NPROF, you aren't really articulating the community consensus about what it means. A wide range of editors from quite varying perspectives on article retention have all agreed that NPROF represents one kind of presumption of notability (independent of GNG) and NSPORT represents another kind of presumption (a mere presumption that GNG sourcing exists). Please see, for example, the extended discussions on this topic that produced the current text of WP:SNG. If your view is that NPROF and NSPORT function in the same way and offer equivalent indicators of notability, I dare say that is not a widely-held view. Even NPROF-skeptics typically accept that the presumption of notability it offers is not, under most circumstances, rebuttable if its criteria are clearly met. Newimpartial (talk) 19:46, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not asking you to prove a negative. The participants in that discussion don't seem to have explained themselves to the point where you would be able to know whether they thought that there were presumptions about sourcing being made and the subject is borderline even under GNG (especially as no check appears to have been made in the native language of a person not born in an English speaking country nor was it listed in Taiwan related deletion discussions). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:09, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What I'm saying, about the discussion I linked above, is that I don't see any reasonable interptetation of it that would conclude that the decision was made based on a presumption of GNG sourcing.
In fact, the only way I could see anyone even venturing that interpretation would be if they made the a prori assumption that all SNG decisions involve a presumption of GNG sourcing - an assumption that is rebutted directly both by P&G language and by what most editors say when they interpret or propose to change P&G language. Newimpartial (talk) 19:06, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We don't have enough information to conclude that the decision was not made based on a presumption of GNG sourcing either. I'm saying "We don't know" and you're saying "We do know, and we know because you can't prove that we don't know" Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:40, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
HEB: that's an interesting set of statements, but it doesn't really reflect what I'm saying. I'm not saying "we know nobody presumed GNG sourcing exists" which, given that people don't always communicate their thought process, would be a lot like proving a negative.
I'm saying, "we don't have any evidence that anyone in that linked discussion presumed that GNG sourcing exists" and that, without evidence, it is unreasonable to reach the conclusion that anyone made that presumption. No, this isn't an answer to your original challenge - essentially, "show me a case where nobody made that presumption" - because I don't think that threshold is germane. If there isn't any evidence that decisions are made on that basis for this set of cases, the scholastic postulate that maybe they could have been made that way (without leaving a trace in the discussion) doesn't really tell us anything about how editors understand P&Gs or what they mean.
More relevant, perhaps: I'm also saying, "we have a lot of evidence, from WP:N itself and discussions around it, that many editors interptet NPROF as being satisfied without making any assertions or assumptions about GNG sourcing." That claim isn't influenced one way or another by how many presumptions fit on the head of a pin. Newimpartial (talk) 16:56, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
HEB, I agree with Newimpartial. NPROF is actually based on the idea that GNG-type sourcing will never be available for most worthy/deserving/desired academics, so an exceptional process needs to be carved out that does not require either (true) independent or secondary sources.
"notability in academia comes from influence of one's academic work on the research of other scholars... Academics, even very prominent ones, are rarely written about personally..." [link]
"the WP:N/WP:BIO requirement that the academic be the subject of those reliable sources...would eliminate virtually all truely influential (but not newsworthy) thinkers" [link]
The idea is that if enough people cite your work (e.g., by H index), then the "About Prof Alice Expert" page on your university website should be enough to write the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:53, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I hear what both of you are saying... But nobody has been able to point to a case where we have a clear NPROF pass and a clear GNG fail. Even if we're describing outcomes and not intentions if on the ven diagram 99% (well within the "presume" standard) of those who pass NPROF also pass GNG what is the difference between the two statements? On its face "the idea that GNG-type sourcing will never be available for most worthy/deserving/desired academics" is false, the vast vast majority of such academics on wikipedia meet GNG. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:10, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To answer your question: the difference, of course, is whether the GNG is - as a certain reductionist interptetation holds - a "universal" rule that underlies the rest of WP:N, including the SNGs. Or, by contrast, can an SNG (like NPROF) offer a strong presumption of meriting an article, rather than a weak presumption that can be rebutted by a strenuous search for "GNG" sources?
If you don't like my linked example because nobody seems to have looked seriously for Chinese-language sources, fair enough. But I could just as easily have pulled up an NPROF AfD where all relevant sources would be in English. The fact remains that articles are routinely kept at AfD based on the NPROF criteria without any GNG (or rather NBASIC) sources being looked for or used in these articles - because that isn't the way most of the community understands NPROF to work. Its presumption to merit an article isn't rebuttable in that way. Newimpartial (talk) 17:22, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
All SNG presumptions are rebuttable in that way "Therefore, topics which pass an SNG are presumed to merit an article, though articles which pass an SNG or the GNG may still be deleted or merged into another article, especially if adequate sourcing or significant coverage cannot be found, or if the topic is not suitable for an encyclopedia." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:26, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Horse Eye's Back, consider Glenn Lipscomb, sourced – and as far as a quick WP:BEFORE search indicates, can only be sourced – entirely to media controlled by his past and present employers.
They're not even trying to find SIGCOV; they're only saying things like "held this post, therefore automatically notable" or "the H-index is this, therefore automatically notable". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:24, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The passage HEB is quoting actually says that any presumption to merit an article - whether based on SNG or GNG - can be outweighed by other factors. It certainly doesn't say that an SNG presumption can be refuted by a failure to find GNG sourcing, and there are two kinds of reasons for this:
GNG sourcing may not be sufficient to write an appropriate encyclopaedia article.
Sourcing that doesn't necessarily meet GNG may be sufficient to write an appropriate encyclopaedia article.
The passage quoted reflects both of these scenarios, and a typical PROF biography that relies largely on non-independent and ABOUTSELF sources - to add detail about someone who unambiguously meets the criteria of professional standing NPROF requires - may be one of the best examples of the latter case.
I will also point out that as one of the two or three editors most responsible for drafting the sentence HEB is quoting, leading up to to the SNG RfC, I have a reasonably good idea what editors were thinking when it was proposed and then achieved consensus.
Also, to take up an earlier comment by HEB: while I haven't done a systematic survey, I would be very surprised if 99% of academic biographies satisfied GNG/NBASIC sourcing requirements. This certainty isn't true of of the unrepresentative sample discussed (and often kept) at AfD. I am equally convinced that, if we applied to PROF articles the rebuttable presumption (and requirement for independent, non-ROUTINE sourcing) we apply to NSPORTS articles, many, many articles on academics would have to be deleted. Newimpartial (talk) 19:18, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Clearfrienda, I dispute the claim that there is always SIGCOV; there are species identified merely by applying an algorithm to genetic sequencing data that may get no more than a mention among many others in one paper. And anyway even if a species does get SIGCOV in its discovery paper, per policy that coverage is not secondary, and per policy articles cannot exist if they can't be based mainly on secondary sources. Also our notability guideline does in fact require that independent sourcing exists for all article subjects, even the ones that are presumed notable through SNGs. JoelleJay (talk) 16:30, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't doubt there are some obscure computationally-identified species that just aren't described enough, but the vast majority of species will have enough coverage to write an article. I don't think it's a problem that some of those articles will be stubs for a long time — Wikipedia is a work in progress. So perhaps species should be "presumed" notable instead of "inherently" notable. As to your other point, essentially all species will have some independent coverage to show notability. In other cases, in practice, secondary sourcing is not always needed to prove notability. Species, politicians, and other SNG-applicable articles are kept all the time at AfD even when there's only primary sourcing. CFA💬17:31, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Secondary sourcing is required for a subject to be notable. Policies always trump guidelines. And politicians are kept because meeting NPOL presumes notability-conferring secondary coverage exists; the overarching WP:N guideline still asserts that to actually be notable secondary independent SIGCOV must exist. JoelleJay (talk) 17:44, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What do you think of the article Esculenta created, Astrothelium chulumanense, which relies entirely on the primary discovery paper? If this turned up at AfD, should it be deleted? I've seen many articles like this at AfD that rely entirely on primary sources, but are still kept based on their "presumed" notability. CFA💬18:17, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe we should send it to AFD to gauge community consensus on the issue? It seems to be a good example of the "only a single primary source exists" problem. Esculenta (talk) 18:37, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would !vote to redirect it to Astrothelium. Articles should not be based on a single primary research paper. AfDs don't represent global consensus, even when there are many going a given direction. There were thousands of AfDs that were kept for sportspeople based on the presumptions of notability of a few dozen editors who !voted at every AfD, but those presumptions were later strongly determined not to align with global consensus and were deprecated. JoelleJay (talk) 18:38, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Am wondering why you would !vote to redirect rather than deletion? Leaving a redirect would result in a bluelink in the species listing, leaving the incorrect impression that an article exists when it does not. Merging the content into the parent genus article also doesn't make sense, as it's much more detailed than what a genus level article should cover. Esculenta (talk) 18:49, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The species listing in the redirect target would not show the species as a blue link. And you're right, merging all the content would not be appropriate as it would not be WP:BALASP. However a full article on the subject is also not appropriate if it can only be based on the one primary paper, since it does not demonstrate that people independent of the topic itself ... considered the topic worth writing and publishing non-trivial works of their own that focus upon it (it shows only that the authors who first described it have written about it) and the information it provides has not been filtered through secondary analysis determining which aspects are the most relevant (how can we say one particular character described in the original paper belongs in the encyclopedia but another does not? we generally need a secondary independent source to highlight specifics from the primary source to show that its inclusion is warranted, and ideally to provide further context on it). JoelleJay (talk) 19:53, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So we can't put the content in the genus article, because you claim it would violate NPOV, and we can't have an independent article, because you claim it is not notable. How very convenient, then; the article is deleted de facto. I have to congratulate you, JoelleJay: I used to consider myself an "exclusionist/deletionist", but you have managed to convince me otherwise, back over to "inclusionism". Deleting the article, for the information it provides, is a disservice to the reader who relies on Wikipedia to reliably summarize knowledge on a given topic. Deleting the article is putting policy before the reader.Cremastra (talk) 20:05, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't say no content should be merged! I said it would not be appropriate to merge all the content! And anyway why do you believe material only found in a single primary source is inherently worthy of being included on wikipedia? Can you articulate why info on a species is so much more encyclopedic than info on an astronomical body or protein homolog or literally anything else? Can you explain why the guideline text I quote is incompatible with building an encyclopedia but only for species? JoelleJay (talk) 20:16, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not to mention that you know I support @BilledMammal's proposed treatment of content on non-notable species, including the incorporation of certain basic facts into the genus article, so why you would suddenly escalate to this level of hostility after I've made every effort to be respectful and impersonal in this discussion makes zero sense. JoelleJay (talk) 20:29, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My apologies; my tone was not suitable. I will strike the inappropriate parts of my comment.
In fact, if I've gotten to the point where I can't respond civilly, then there is no point in me contributing to this discussion. I've said all I want to say. This isn't out of bitterness or a "rage quit". Cremastra (talk) 20:31, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, yes, this was partly why I started this discussion. I've noticed editors will frequently use "Keep: per WP:NSPECIES" in species-related AfDs. This doesn't make much sense because NSPECIES is just a sentence saying they "generally survive AfD," so citing it in an AfD is circular and unhelpful. Sourcing is rarely looked at; they are usually just kept without any debate. The point of this discussion was to hopefully gather broader consensus on the matter, instead of continuing with the default-to-keep status quo. I think a global RfC needs to be started, but I'll wait a bit before opening one. CFA💬19:05, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
JoelleJay, while it's possible that over a trillion species exist, this 2017 source from the Quarterly Review of Biology states that most [estimates] project around 11 million species or fewer. They do go on to argue it is higher, dominated by bacteria, but this 2019 study says that there exist globally about 0.8–1.6 million prokaryotic OTUs (or operational taxonomic units; for unaware readers, bacteria are a subset of prokaryotes). It's also possible we could say that only eukaryotic or multicellular species are presumptively notable, similar to how WP:NASTRO uses cutoffs based on things like visual magnitude, though I don't even think this is necessary.
They are constantly being discovered - so? New current events are constantly happening, new people are becoming famous, new movies, video games, and so on are getting made, and so on forever. In fact, these things are theoretically limitless while the number of species on Earth is sadly going down.
and in fact are supposed to have secondary coverage to even be mentioned anywhere on WP? - to be clear, are you saying that species that have never been discussed in a scientific review article should not even be mentioned on Wikipedia? Whether this is a requirement for coverage or for separate articles, I think mandating review articles would be incredibly destructive to our coverage of life on this planet. Zoology, botany, etc. are massively underfunded and under-researched compared to stuff like biomedicine, covered by WP:MEDRS and its strict review article rules. Crossroads-talk-21:53, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Even if the total number of species is "only" in the tens of millions, that should still be an indication that "new species" is not necessarily a precious designation of supreme scientific interest, but rather can in many situations amount to routine gene sequencing discoveries. I absolutely do not think we should be using a single notability criterion for all species across all kingdoms, especially considering the fundamental differences in how species are even defined by the many independent bodies tasked with "recognizing" a species in a particular clade. There is no globally accepted taxonomic list of species, and this paper suggests that while such a database is critically needed, it requires an authoritative consensus on species definitions and taxonomic governance across multiple disciplines that does not yet exist. The paper also references a Nature article that highlighted a major problem with how policy/the general public view "species" and how taxonomists and biologists view them:
Policy assumes that species are unambiguously definable, discrete, fixed entities that can be readily and straightforwardly listed for protection or management. However, in the sciences of species delimitation and classification (i.e., taxonomy and systematics), species are hypotheses that are mutable and contestable in the face of new knowledge and are often based on subjective interpretations of existing knowledge. This is because taxonomy is essentially a two-step enterprise—first, biodiversity and groups are quantified, described, and delimited by means of the best scientific methodology available, and then these results are translated into names and ranks. While the first step is strictly scientific and produces testable hypotheses, the second additionally depends on executive decisions about where to draw the line (e.g., between subspecies and species), and these decisions necessarily depend on subjective preferences such as one’s preferred species concept or the nature of discordance among different data types.
The paper further notes For example, a single authoritative global species list would have in-built quality control protecting users from the confusion resulting from names created through what has been called taxonomic vandalism, referencing this paper discussing the harm created by improperly-maintained species lists. That paper also emphasizes the fact that the "species" designation is not a discrete, stable taxonomic unit and the significant issues out-of-date info present:
It has been understood for many years that inadequate or ambiguous taxonomy and nomenclature for species can have negative impacts on conservation, medicine, and other fields ... This happens in part because taxonomic names are often used as though they are stable hypotheses, when in fact taxonomies often have a degree of uncertainty and flux. Changes to species names or, often more importantly, changes to the concept of what a name means can have far-reaching implications for decision-making, regulation, and policy development. While taxonomic inflation (Isaac et al., 2004) or vandalism (Rhodin et al., 2015) can exacerbate these problems, even the normal growth of taxonomic knowledge can cause problems when not treated carefully. Problems can also occur when new taxonomic information fails to reach some users or when different users interpret taxonomic names, knowledge, or uncertainty in different ways. For some taxonomic groups, this can lead to multiple variants or competing taxonomies in different national jurisdictions or regions or even multiple competing global lists.
If even professional taxonomic orgs have significant problems with lack of quality control, duplicated effort, conflicts of interest, lack of currency, and confusion in the scientific use of taxonomic information, how can Wikipedia hope to curate a gigantic database of mostly primary data that are constantly changing?I'm also not saying a species needs to be discussed in a review article -- only that it must be discussed in a secondary independent context somewhere. This can be in background sections of other primary articles, lay media, or anywhere else that would normally be accepted for every other scientific topic on WP. JoelleJay (talk) 17:01, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would oppose such a SNG being enacted. Every species name should be a blue link of some sort, but it may be appropriate at times to redirect to a higher level taxonomic class per WP:NOPAGE. Mach6115:51, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This discussion is very interesting to me, because one of my long-term goals is to create a page for every lichen species. Many of the articles I create lack the "independent secondary coverage" that seems to be at the root of this argument. Two recent examples (of many): Astrothelium chulumanense, described as a new species in 2023, has not been been mentioned in any other sources (AFAICT), and so has only the single (primary) source; Aggregatorygma lichexanthonicum (new in 2022), has also not been mentioned in any secondary publication, but is "accepted" by the nomenclatural authority Species Fungorum, and consequently, is listed at the Catalogue of Life, which is used as the second source in the article. According to our current rules, the first article shouldn't exist on Wikipedia (and maybe the name of the species shouldn't be mentioned in its genus article?), and it's unclear if the second would pass a completely rules-based AFD. So I would like it if we could assess community support to make WP:NSPECIES a policy; it would help me evaluate if my objectives align with Wikipedia's. Esculenta (talk) 17:51, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for this helpful, collaborative, non-defensive comment. I also hope that the community will eventually be able to answer your question. JoelleJay (talk) 18:00, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that a quality, in-depth article based on a "primary" source is possible is evidence that WP:NSPECIES makes more sense than WP:GNG here. Deleting it would be clearly counter-productive, and we put readers, not policy, first. Cremastra (talk) 18:03, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A quality, in-depth article could be created from any scientific research paper (or autobiography, or live newscast). Yet we still have policy stating articles must be based on secondary sources. JoelleJay (talk) 18:43, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Does a paper about the discovery of a new species really qualify as a "research paper" though? It's not as if they're studying the species' reaction to anything, it's just "hey look we found a thing" Sock-the-guy (talk) 19:22, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Um... yes. They did research to find and describe the thing, and in doing so increased knowledge. See research: "creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". Cremastra (talk) 19:30, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
By claiming I'm "making a point", by extension ("Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point"), you are claiming I'm being disruptive. How is it being disruptive to determine if an article I created should actually be on Wikipedia (and by learning so, determine if I should continue writing these articles or not?) Esculenta (talk) 20:12, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You explicitly nominated this article not because you believe it should be deleted, but because you think its outcome will "demonstrate a consensus" that you can use as evidence in this discussion. That is disruptive! JoelleJay (talk) 20:23, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How exactly do you know what I believe? I want to know if I should continue making similar species articles (I have a couple of hundred similar ones on the backburner that I intend to publish, or not, depending on how that discussion goes). I think your accusations are disruptive. Esculenta (talk) 20:31, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Even if you "don't know what the community consensus is on species notability", bringing something to AfD just to answer that question for yourself is already inappropriate; nominating something for the explicit purpose of using an outcome as evidence in a dispute you are involved in is objectively POINTY and bad-faith. JoelleJay (talk) 20:49, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nonsense. Bringing to AfD an article of questionable notability is exactly what that process is for. Re: "nominating something for the explicit purpose of using an outcome as evidence in a dispute you are involved in"; I'm not involved in a dispute, but it seems that you are, and you are attempting to shut down discussion about the type of edge-case article discussed above. That appears to be objectively bad-faith. Esculenta (talk) 20:57, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If articles like these get deleted because of legalistic application of rules, then those rules are not fit for purpose. WP:GNG wasn't handed down from heaven. We have tons of extremely specific and detailed articles on outdated current events that had a burst of editing years ago but that essentially no one cares about anymore (take a deep dive into the cruft in the Category:COVID-19 pandemic tree for an example), that will never be deleted because they were covered in the news back in the day. The thought of keeping and proliferating the sort of ephemeral junk that technically meets WP:GNG and deleting articles on biodiversity is the most compelling case for WP:IAR I have ever seen. Crossroads-talk-22:05, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But the problem with WP:IAR is that it's subjective and open to interpretation (unlike the actual rules). What if I believe a species article created with only a single source (and no others are available) is "bad" (using Wikipedia's guidelines on significant and secondary coverage), and that removing it improves the encyclopedia? In this case, my IAR conflicts with your IAR, and the established rules take precedence. Esculenta (talk) 22:21, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think any even mildly contentious content discussion shows that the "actual rules" are very often both subjective and open to interpretation. And regardless, IAR is policy, superior to GNG as currently written (which is changeable if we deem it to demand undesirable outcomes, and is only a guideline). What happens when one person's IAR conflicts with another is that consensus develops, and that has resulted in the status quo described at WP:NSPECIES. Crossroads-talk-22:29, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, if it's that blatantly obvious that we make an exception to WP:SIGCOV for species, and that consensus has built up to do this, can we put put this down in "official" writing, and link to this and similar discussion so as to not use up the communities' valuable time in the future? (This is directed to the community in general, not to you specifically, Crossroads). Esculenta (talk) 22:42, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the best course of action from here is to start an RfC. Too much of this discussion has gone off-topic. I'm just not sure about how it should be worded. Should it be kept simple, with a Support/Oppose question like "Should WP:NSPECIES become an official SNG?" or "Should all species that verifiably exist be presumed notable?", or should it have multiple options based on the discussion above? CFA💬23:28, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Before doing this, based on how much microbes are a sticking point in this discussion and the fact that WP:NSPECIES specifically justifies itself based on zoology and botany, there might need to be more attention to how microbial species definition works and if they get published in the literature without saying anything encyclopedic we can meaningfully relay (e.g. if they're just a genetic sequence, that seems too flimsy). Would NSPECIES apply to single-celled eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and even viruses? A codified NSPECIES could be sunk, backfiring on botany, zoology, and mycology, if it doesn't account for relevant differences in how those simpler organisms are published, if there are such differences. Crossroads-talk-02:44, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I agree. I think the proposal should focus primarily on zoology and botany (as that is what is described in WP:NSPECIES). But I imagine since this proposal refers to "Notability (species)," microbes should be mentioned somewhere. Perhaps they should be subject to a sub-guideline inside of "Notability (species)" that accounts for the microbes with minimal-to-no coverage? CFA💬03:19, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, it's becoming evident that a simple upgrading of the current NSPECIES won't work. I think if a full NSPECIES guideline is desired, the various biology and taxonomy Wikiprojects (like WP:TOL) should collaborate on developing a new, more detailed NSPECIES that (1) satisfies editors in the field that it won't result in purging or deletion of encyclopedic content, and (2) is thought likely to pass an RfC to become a proper guideline. WP:NASTRO could be a model - another scientific field with a vast number of known objects of study, not all of which have encyclopedic things to say about them. I'd suggest specifying guidance for everything biologically classified, leaving no gaps in the tree of life. Guidance for viruses, bacteria and archaea, single-celled eukaryotes, multicellular fungi, non-plant multicellular algae (like red algae and brown algae), plants (botany), and animals (zoology), with dividing headings as needed. Paleontological species should be covered too. Crossroads-talk-04:29, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am not convinced that "there are species identified merely by applying an algorithm to genetic sequencing data" is true, at least not in a way that's relevant to this discussion. Genetic data can be used to identify operational taxonomic units that could be described as species, but the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes requires a cultured type and a description to describe a valid prokaryotic species. As in eukaryotic taxonomy, the description provides important context to define the species and diagnose it in relation to others, and creating these descriptions is a major bottleneck in the recognition of species. To quote from the code, "A proposal to allow the use of gene sequences as type material for the naming of prokaryotes was rejected by the ICSP in 2020." So while we may be able to estimate that trillions (billions and billions?) of species exist, the vast majority are not valid, published species under the appropriate Code, due to lack of description, the criterion invoked in WP:NSPECIES, and hence irrelevant to this discussion. Choess (talk) 04:21, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Being identified algorithmically doesn't mean a type culture doesn't exist. It can mean new methods of quantifying genetic identity have been applied to samples in an existing reference library of accepted cultures that affect their species designations. JoelleJay (talk) 18:42, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The type culture is a side point; the key is the description/diagnosis, which provides the basis for a meaningful article. That said, having dug on my own for a Pseudomonas taxonomy paper I vaguely remembered, the descriptions provided are very pro forma compared to what I'd expect for a eukaryotic species. The current wording of NSPECIES only applies to eukaryotes, and I'd be OK with keeping that scope if it were elevated to an SNG (that is, excluding prokaryotic species). Choess (talk) 19:32, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, we definitely should exclude prokaryotes. But what makes eukaryote species recognition by its governing nomenclature codes an automatic stamp of scientific acceptance and reliability of the discovery and its described characters? The ICZN recognizes as valid species identifications reported in non-peer-reviewed, self-published journals, with the assumption that eventually other researchers encountering those species may individually decide to ignore their official entry in the taxonomic registry and resubmit the species under a new name, and the scientific community will decide which version is "correct" by whichever nomenclature they use in practice. Does that mean Wikipedia articles can be based solely on descriptions in these non-peer-reviewed SPS that may dramatically conflict with existing taxonomic organization and formulation, and may contain egregious errors? What if no other researchers encounter the species or comment on inaccuracies it introduces? If we were to reject such sources as unreliable, why is it that we would draw a line with the RS guideline but not observe the policy requirement for secondary sources? And what level of scrutiny should editors apply to ensure an ICZN-endorsed species was described in RS? JoelleJay (talk) 20:27, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just in case anyone is trying to figure out where the policy requirement for secondary sources comes from, since notability rules are all guidelines:
The only problem is that when this "requirement" (which is a "should", not a "must", BTW) was written, the main definition of secondary sources in use was "secondhand accounts", which includes, e.g., breaking news and gossip and other things that we would consider independent but primary now. Read more at WT:N if you want a little more history, but our definition at NOR has changed since that sentence was written, and all of WP:N was written with the original definition. It might be appropriate to interpret the policy rule with the definition that was in force at the time this sentence was written. See, e.g., the policy as it stood in 2010.
That is not (only) "where the requirement" comes from. As mentioned numerous times in discussion with you, I am referring to the much stronger policy statement Policy:Do not base an entire article on primary sources, and be cautious about basing large passages on them. Your claim that "secondary sources have a different definition now, therefore all the PAGs demanding we use them must be ignored" is based entirely on what you think one editor who added the language in the location you quote considered a "secondary source", while conveniently eliding the fact that surely someone would have realized that our repeated, explicit statements requiring secondary sources, across multiple different PAGs, conflicted with the "new" definitions of secondary sources, especially things like a scientific paper documenting a new experiment conducted by the author is a primary source for the outcome of that experiment. that were being incorporated directly adjacent to those statements. JoelleJay (talk) 23:26, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, we've (I've) "realized that our repeated, explicit statements requiring secondary sources, across multiple different PAGs, conflicted with the "new" definitions of secondary sources". I have been talking about it for years, especially wrt to the GNG. The decisions we make in practice (e.g., AFDs accepting recent news articles as proof of notability for current events) do not align with the written rules (breaking news is WP:PRIMARYNEWS). The community sometimes chooses to be aspirational in its written rules rather than accurate. This is an instance of that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:25, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Exclude prokaryotes? Prokaryote nomenclature has more rigor than botanical and zoological nomenclature, and deals with some of the issues JoelleJay is complaining about. Prokaryotes must be published in a specific journal (IJSEM) that is peer-reviewed. Peer-review was not a thing in the early days of nomenclature; there is a specific list of approved names of prokaryotes published prior to the adoption of a requirement to publish them in a specific (peer-reviewed) journal. Prokaryote types must be deposited in multiple institutions in multiple countries. Botany and zoology do not have a list of approved names nor a requirement to disseminate types widely.
While NSPECIES has a link to correct name (botany), that is a redirect and the actual article has a section Correct_name#Prokaryotes (prokaryotes use the same terms for status of names as botany does).
There are not trillions nor even tens of millions of prokaryotes that have "correct names". There were about 20,000 prokaryote species with correct names as of 2021. There are ~2.5 million species that have correct/valid status that NSPECIES calls for. While Wikipedia does not have an editor base that is capable of creating non-stubs for 2.5 million species (or 20,000 prokaryotes) and keeping them up-to-date, citing high number estimates of all species that exist on earth (most of which are undescribed) is a total straw man. Plantdrew (talk) 19:45, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I revised my opinion on prokaryotes after reading this paper] on taxonomy of the Pseudomonas putida complex. These names have subsequently been validated in IJSEM (e.g., this one), but I think the case for presenting them in tabular format is a stronger than for the morphological descriptions I'm used to under the ICNafp, which are more difficult to "parameterize" and place in tables. On the other hand, looking at this species described directly in IJSEM, I feel that the description would form the core of a reasonable article, so maybe the information in the first journal article could be digested into encyclopedic prose in the same way as a FishBase entry. I'd be interested in perspectives from editors focused on creating strong articles on prokaryotic taxa; it's unfortunate that your discussion last year didn't draw more interest. (edited to fix my link, thank you) Choess (talk) 21:48, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What goes into IJSEM's "validation" of names announced via other journals, especially ones by predatory publishers like (as linked above) MDPI? Also here is the proper link to that archive. JoelleJay (talk) 23:34, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
FYI there is al a 19,000 word (so far) 32 day discussion on this same topic in progress at WP:Notability North8000 (talk) 20:29, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That discussion isn't really about what's being asked here though, North8000. There, BilledMammal is trying to get support for a much more restrictive NSPECIES guideline that would result in a large amount of articles being deleted/merged. And the consensus in that discussion is very clearly in opposition to the idea (though it looks like BilledMammal is trying to force things through despite being against consensus). What is being proposed here is much more straightforward and, due to this broader location and with enough editor involvement, would supersede and override what is being discussed over there anyways. SilverserenC23:15, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'll just note that the impression I formed many years ago when I was very active at AfD is that the community had decided what types of articles should be in WP by watching which articles survived AfD. Again, my understanding is that the notability guidelines were developed to codify what had been decided at AfD. We do have policies that are set in stone. I don't think "notability" is one of them. - Donald Albury23:47, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Species notability you mean? In that case I agree. In many areas we should settle on articles at a higher taxon level, with species with a line or two each, unless some have more to be said. That is already the actual way we do things over large areas. New soil micro-organisms get bar-codes not names - we're not set up to handle that. Johnbod (talk) 01:47, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, if there is a taxon, either it or some higher taxon in the tree must be notable, so the question in each case is where is the notability bar crossed: not necessarily right at the bottom with species or sub-species. Chiswick Chap (talk) 05:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Acknowledging that "notability" decisions take into account considerations other than wp:notability..that we slightly weigh: 1. degree of enclyclopedicness of the topic 2. A bit of wanting articles with real content and deference towards real work towards building them, with real content 3. avoiding deletion fests of long standing articles. 4. We don't want mass created articles. 5. Included sources counts more than a search for un-included hypothetical sources: Here's my "out of the box" proposal for an SNG, in shorthand. For new articles, presumed notable if it meets all of the following criteria:
Has enough suitable sourcing included to have developed the article to a bit more than a stub. E.g. a few sentences or a species-specific image
Not mass created
This leaves the undocumented status quo in place for existing articles. For them, no new restrictions, and no new SNG "green light". I could make several structural critiques of my proposal (#2 and #3 are not normal SNG material or acknowledged to be "notability) which is why I called it "out of the box" but which aligns with "notability" decisions in practice. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 12:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In my head, this is not a case where we are trying to keep out articles about garage bands that have played a few school or party gigs, or run-of-the-mill CFAs. Now, I am opposed to creating sub-stubs from database entries, but every recognized species has at least one article/chapter in a scholarly publication somewhere describing it, and I think a WP article with content citing such a scholarly source should be allowed to stay in WP. This does mean holding off on creating the article until a scholarly source (either the original description or a review article, not just a database) has been found and read (not always an easy task). There is no great rush to create an article for every recognized species, but I think requiring multiple independent sources would an unnecessary restriction for articles about recognized species. Donald Albury14:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, and I think that your idea is close to mine and maybe less unusual than mine. Need a supplied source which is more than a database entry. North8000 (talk) 15:58, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Donald Albury, given that policy considers the results sections of research articles to be primary sources, which are not acceptable to base an article off of and are especially discouraged for science topics, why should species be given an exemption? I see a paper reporting a "new species" as being not much different from any other biology paper accepted for publication -- it undergoes editorial analysis and peer review to assess the quality of data (in this case, how much support there is for the subject being a new species), but the results are still ultimately reliant on the primary observations of a single group which may or may not be accurate or accurately interpreted. The discovery may or may not have any biological or ecological relevance outside of a niche subfield. I'm approaching this as a molecular geneticist familiar with works reporting new microbial species, which are routine and require more than simply "being discovered" for them to get published (e.g. medical consequences, evolutionary importance, particularly novel characters/diagnoses). In many circumstances "species" is an inconsistently-defined and sometimes arbitrary concept that has no more inherent importance than any other topic, even among animals. The romantic idea of each species discovery being a Big Deal probably stems from the era where species distinction was based on significant morphological differences that the general public could appreciate, rather than what it often is now for many taxa: barcoding samples and considering something a new species if a particular genetic region differs by some percent (a cutoff of 97% is common) from anything in the reference library. JoelleJay (talk) 18:06, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So, it is in your opinion, I presume, that this article, which I added in 2019, should not have been allowed? (It has since been expanded by another editor using a second source, which, it turns out, was available at the time, I just didn't find it.) In what way did adding that article harm the encyclopedia? We are not dealing here with a self-promoting person or organization, with someone pushing a fringe theory or an unproven therapy, or with an attempt to prove the experts wrong. Donald Albury18:45, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't matter what I think about a given article, what my questions is is why a class of articles should be exempt from the rules we have for all other science topics. The same argument could be made for creating a new page for any scientific discovery based on the primary paper describing it, so why do our rules explicitly state this is not sufficient for a standalone? And it's not only self-promo or fringe ideas that reliance on secondary sources is supposed to prevent; it is also critical in showing a topic is notable enough for its own article (regardless of whether the topic might be prone to promo/NPOV issues) and is a major facet in enforcing NOTINDISCRIMINATE. But even if it was the only reason, what makes you think the authors of a species publication are any less likely to engage in self-promotion, or that their publication (or the journal's rigor, or the formal acceptance of their taxonomic nomenclature by governing code) is any more reliable for its data and interpretations than any other singular research paper in STEM? What about the Raymond Hoser case, where the ICZN formally stated that it did not reject ridiculous nomenclature and taxonomic theories from Hoser's self-published journals (i.e. it accepted his new species names and classifications as validly published and officially recognized) and merely suggested researchers just voluntarily and individually "ignore" and overwrite his nomenclature as a way to "correct" the many issues in taxonomy he introduced. See the description in this article:
In addition to naming well over 100 supposedly new snake and lizard genera, this individual has also produced taxonomic revisions of the world’s cobras, burrowing asps, vipers, rattlesnakes, water snakes, blindsnakes, pythons, crocodiles and so on. But, alas, his work is not of the careful, methodical, conservative and respected sort that you might associate with a specialised, dedicated amateur; rather, his articles appear in his own, in-house, un-reviewed, decidedly non-technical publications, they’re notoriously unscientific in style and content, and his taxonomic recommendations have been demonstrated to be problematic, frequently erroneous and often ridiculous (witness the many new taxa he has named after his pet dogs; I’m not kidding, I wish I was). In short, the new (and really terribly formulated) taxonomic names that this individual throws out at the global herpetological community represent a sort of taxonomic vandalism; we’re expected to use these names, and – indeed – they’re supposedly officially valid according to the letter of the law, yet they besmirch the field, they litter the taxonomic registry with monstrosities, and they cause working herpetologists to waste valuable time clearing up unnecessary messes...
Should we really be writing articles on species based on their reports in un-peer-reviewed, self-published sources just because the ICZN accepted their nomenclature (even when it literally anticipates members of the scientific community will eventually "re-discover" these species and ignore the principle of priority by renaming them)? JoelleJay (talk) 19:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is probably as good a time as any to remind lay readers of the distinction between biological taxonomy (deciding how to divide organisms into groups and expressing criteria for that division) and nomenclature (deciding what label to put on each group). The Codes govern nomenclature, which is a largely mechanical and somewhat legalistic process. Taxonomy is rather more subjective and decided by the consensus of scientists. That consensus is expressed in different ways in different taxonomic groups. Sometimes it is very centralized and explicit (e.g., The Reptile Database). In other fields, acceptance is more implicit, and we might do more of our usual tests of source reliability (is this a peer-reviewed journal that specializes in the group of organisms, or a self-published source by an expert?)
In practice, this works out fine. If someone self-publishes a monograph describing three new species of gecko from Papua New Guinea and the experts at the Reptile Database accept them, those descriptions reflect the current state of expert consensus, which is the point of RS. If some crank claims to have found hundreds of new plant species in the Irtysh basin (looking at you, Charitontcev) and describes them, those names will be ignored or placed in synonymy. That's taxonomy. The significance of the nomenclatural codes is that they require a description to be furnished, so that if a species is accepted by taxonomists and has a name under the appropriate Code, material exists to form the basis of an article here. Choess (talk) 00:12, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Crossroads But if the official nomenclature code is accepting species names from what are essentially the personal blogs of amateur collectors, and continues accepting and listing them even when the discoverer is literally Wiki-notable for taxonomic vandalism, why should acceptance by that code be given any credence at all? Clearly if it does not evaluate the legitimacy of taxonomy recommendations or even indicate in any way that a given submission/discoverer has been flagged elsewhere as problematic, its endorsement of a name is not evidence of even implicit secondary analysis. And since that's the case, what is the justification for declaring that a species discovery published in any RS journal is inherently far more taxonomically valid, properly characterized, ethically researched, and rigorously peer-reviewed than any other research result for any other topic, including ones published by the same journal? Our policy discourages even mentioning on other pages a physical chemistry result published in Nature that has received no secondary coverage; its conclusions have not been analyzed by any independent secondary source, so we have no indication that they are important to anyone beside the discovers and our summary of them would be strictly from the POV of the people promoting it. And yet for a species we should permit a whole standalone article based on unverified assertions of its existence and taxonomic relationships that no one else will ever find interesting enough to even mention? JoelleJay (talk) 00:23, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree with this. I don't think there's a problem with species stub articles because they are always able to be improved as more research comes out (which will always happen with species). Merging them up and leaving a redirect, even "temporairly," makes people less inclined to improve them over time. There aren't really any disadvantages to stubs. I also don't see a problem with mass-created articles as long as they are approved beforehand (WP:MASSCREATION). I think as long as a species verifiably exists and has at least a brief description, it can be presumed notable. This is especially easy to check with taxon databases like CoL. CFA💬15:26, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(which will always happen with species) Citation, please. This might be true for some taxa, but it definitely is not for all of them, and Wikipedia articles must be based on existing references, not on the expectation that new ones will appear someday. If we know a subject has no other documentation than the paper it was described in and its automatic entry into a database, the "presumption" of notability afforded to species by NSPECIES fundamentally differs from all other SNG presumptions of notability where the term refers to the presumption that coverage currently exists. Also, who is going to be maintaining all these millions of stubs? Considering how fluid a species designation is and how often nomenclature or status changes, and the very real harm reported from improperly-curated species lists, why should it be acceptable to host millions of individual articles that we know will not be reasonably updated? It's also much easier to adjust relationships between lineages or add updates about all members of some clade in a higher-taxon article where you can just switch around some objects in a template than it is to edit each of possibly hundreds of stubs individually. JoelleJay (talk) 18:30, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was previously an advocate of up-merging but now I've somewhat reversed myself. The individual entries would probably end up having redirects anyway (which isn't much different from a stub), and/or the reader would need to understand the overall organizational structure/taxonomy in order to find/navigate (or depend on the search tool to find it within the article). And when the editors aren't knowledgeable on taxonomy, they will be creating a lot of errors. Finally, while the upmerged article is ostensibly about the larger category (e.g. genus) it will be common to have one that is only 5% complete (e.g. listing just one species) in which case the article isn't what it purports to be.North8000 (talk) 15:52, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think at times it comes down to how much effort it takes to maintain articles. One example that I briefly touched last year is Ichetucknee siltsnail, created in 2007 by a bot from a database. Today, after 38 edits over 17 years, the article is still a stub of 37 words of text. All of the information in that article is also available in the article about the genus, Floridobia. If someone thinks the "Ichetucknee siltsnail" article is too "stubby" and should be upmerged, it would be simple enough to copy content from the Floridobia article to bulk up the species article, but I'm not sure how either upmerging the species article or expanding it with content from the genus article would improve Wikipedia. I think that creating a new stub that has no content that is not also available in an article about a higher taxon would not be an improvement of the encyclopedia. I do think that, if I could gain access to the publication which described the species, or to any other reliable source that discusses the species in some detail, and added content to the article, even if just from one such source, it would justify a stand-alone article for the species. Donald Albury17:17, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Arbitrary break 1
I would to state the OP in different words to try to move forward. In the fuzzy wp:notability ecosystem, for species, the community has generally decided to set a lower wp:notability requirement than it's only official current one which is GNG. IMO this is because consideration is given to species being a highly enclyclopedic topic (as with ngeo, but it is not documented like ngeo). IMO we should codify it as a new SNG. For folks that have concerns that it might be overly inclusive, I would respond that the conditions of the SNG would make it at least slightly more exclusive than the current defacto standard. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 19:07, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I genuinely don't think all species are notable, or have enough material written on them for an article. Often, the only records of some species will be in the publication article listing several or even many new species, with only short descriptions for their respective identifying characteristics. In this case, there isn't really much material for a species article that wouldn't be repeated in the taxobox, and the little material that is present would fit better in the genus-level article (for instance, what I started to do with List of Cladonota species).
But these possibly non-notable species aren't even the biggest issue. A lot of the time, one-sentence species microstubs will be created without even reliable sources, only referenced to a database entry. These usually consist of a boilerplate Genus species is a species of treehopper in the family Examplidae, accompanied by an automatic taxobox. This is even the case when the species has been discussed more extensively in literature, which the microstub will not hint at.
Having these virtually content-free blue links misleads readers, while discouraging editors who might otherwise create a better-sourced article (for the same reason we have WP:RETURNTORED for redirects). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 03:16, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
They also clutter google results due to Wikipedia's significant impact there, taking time away from those who are trying to research said species. CMD (talk) 01:05, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A lot of the time, one-sentence species microstubs will be created without even reliable sources, only referenced to a database entry.Yes, and I really wish we'd get more discussion about the fact that the governing bodies that officially endorse a species name (i.e. accept a new species discovery) don't require it to have been published in a peer-reviewed or even legitimate journal, apparently do not perform much, if any, independent evaluation of its accuracy, and strictly leave adoption or rejection of the name to the individual preferences of researchers. For every other topic that would be unacceptable, and yet here the proposal is to allow the unreliable publications themselves to be the sole sources in articles. JoelleJay (talk) 01:22, 28 June 2024 (UTC):[reply]
My mistake, I meant it as a shorthand for "significant coverage in reliable sources", the kind of coverage we look at for GNG, where databases are usually not considered acceptable. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 18:11, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In that case, it will depend both on the database and on your definition of SIGCOV (which, despite multiple efforts, we've never managed to define).
JoelleJay has made a determined argument in the past for only counting prose/paragraphs in determining SIGCOV, with only words strung together personally by a human being acceptable. Wikipedia:One hundred words also assumes that SIGCOV is measured only in text.
OTOH, if the point of SIGCOV is that you can actually write a decent encyclopedia article from it, then sometimes 100 words [or any other arbitrary word count] won't have the desired result, because the source could go on at length about content that is irrelevant to an encyclopedia article, so a word count can indicate notability when the source is functionally useless.
A word count also implies that the only way to get information from a source is for the source to be written in sentences and paragraphs. I obviously did write a decent article with just the Fishbase entry, even though the database entry does not contain a single grammatically correct sentence. This problem has made me wonder whether SIGCOV should be determined by the amount of Wikipedia article content we could write from it, rather than from a mechanical measurement of the source itself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:36, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This ignores the places where our PAGs implicitly and explicitly restrict notability-contributing coverage to content directly on the topic and individually written by a human in their own words, e.g. people ... have actually considered the topic worth writing and publishing non-trivial works of their own that focus upon it or provides thought and reflection based on primary sources or rely on primary sources for their material, making analytic or evaluative claims about them.. If SIGCOV could be met by any RS from which "one could write a decent article", we would have zero reason to reject millions of non-notable sportspeople and billions of non-notable astronomical objects with reliable database entries. We would have zero reason to reject articles built from stringing together any number of unrelated facts. Because how could one possibly argue that any given collection of data couldn't somehow, by someone be proseified into something someone would consider "decent"? "Coverage from which one can write a decent article" should only factor into SIGCOV as an exclusion criterion, wherein prose IRS coverage has already been deemed "significant" in length, but what it covers is decided by consensus to be non-encyclopedic. JoelleJay (talk) 01:27, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't believe anyone thinks that "coverage necessarily to write an encyclopaedia article" is a guarantee of SIGCOV, not without factoring in the key elements listed at WP:SIGCOV itself such as source independence, secondary sourcing, and depth of coverage. Being able to write an encyclopaedia article is the purpose of SIGCOV, not a shortcut to meeting it.The formulation underlined is incorrect, as WAID points out; I offer a reformulation below. I don't think this imprecision affects the rest of my comment.
However, SIGCOV is part of the WP:GNG, and in spite of the post-hoc rationalization offered in WP:WHYN, GNG considerations do not necessarily apply to article retention under SNGs, like NPROF, that offer a path to notability based on verifiably meeting specified criteria. If a consensus is reached that a version of NSPECIES should operate as a "standalone" SNG, that wouldn't change anything about how notability works in any other area, and it would align the rules offered under the WP:SNG system with actual WP:OUTCOMES in this area. WP:N (and NOT) already point to more than one set of criteria for deciding whether an an encyclopaedia article can, or even should, be written on a topic.
extended content
So it seems that JoelleJay is raising a red herring when she cautions against new mountains of articles on sportsmen and sportswomen seemingly lurking behind databases to threaten encyclopaedic integrity. The enwiki community has decided that mass-creation of articles is not OK unless pre-approved, and has also decided that articles on athletes must meet a "GNG" sourcing standard that is interpreted in a rather strict way. Nothing the community decides here about species (and SPECIES) is going to change that.
The community also believes, either as a general consensus or as a large strand of opinion among interested editors, that articles about academics, and articles about legally-recognized populated places, and articles about species do not necessarily need to "meet GNG" so long as their claim to fall under the relevant SNG meets WP:V. While some editors would prefer an ironclad requirement that all articles "meet GNG" at some lower or higher standard of proof, there is no general community consensus or support for a new requirement of this kind. And every recent discussion of this topic at any reasonable scale, in any public forum onwiki, pretty clearly shows that there is no clear backing that a new, de facto higher, standard be applied in these areas.
The 2017 NSPORTS RfC was probably the high water mark of this "GNG everywhere" sentiment. Subsequent discussions have made clear that said RfC did not achieve community consensus that academics, species and geostubs should be treated the same way as athletes - nor could the RfC have done so, because academics, species and geostubs were out of scope for that discussion and editors interested in those topics by and large ignored the NSPORTS RfC as irrelevant to their editing interests.
Finally, I'd like to point to a statement JoelleJay made that might seem hyperbolic but which seems significant to me: if SIGCOV weren't applied widely or stricltly enough, We would have zero reason to reject articles built from stringing together any number of unrelated facts. But that ignores both WP:NOT and the purpose of building an encyclopaedia. No article built from "unrelated facts" will survive serious scrutiny under NOT. The positive tool I would rather use for this, a credible claim to significance backed up by a reliable source for the claim, hasn't come into vogue or achieved consensus as a yardstick of encyclopaedicity. However, reassuringly, the negative tool we have at NOT - knowing what isn't an encyclopedia article when we see it - seems to work quite well in excluding anything adjacent to "unrelated facts". This aspect is, frankly, a good example of something WP:N itself isn't very good at - except (ironically?) for the guidance offerered by some of the SNGs. So the idea that the GNG can save us from non-encyclopaedic topics seems to me to illustrate the hammer-nail theorem more than anything that relates to building an encyclopaedia. Newimpartial (talk) 17:13, 29 June 2024 (UTC) Small comment added by Newimpartial (talk) 19:27, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have one minor disagreement. SIGCOV says, in its entirety:
"Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.
The book-length history of IBM by Robert Sobel is plainly non-trivial coverage of IBM.
Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton, that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band.
Words like source independence, secondary sourcing, and depth of coverage do not appear anywhere in it. These "key elements" are not part of SIGCOV; they are part of the GNG.
WAID is entirely correct here. I dont know when or how I got into thinking of SIGCOV as covering all of the GNG criteria - it might be an accidental result of repeatedly contrasting SIGCOV vs. WP:SIRS, where SIRS (for ORGs) places a depth requirement as a minimum applying to each source while SIGCOV applies to all sources presented to fulfil GNG, taken together.
Anyway, that isn't an excuse: my specific formulation at the head of my last comment was wrong. I should have said something like, I don't believe anyone thinks that assembled "coverage necessarily to write an encyclopaedia article" counts as SIGCOV without factoring in the other elements listed at WP:GNG, such as source independence, secondary sourcing, and depth of coverage. Being able to write an encyclopaedia article is the purpose of the GNG, not a shortcut to meeting it.Newimpartial (talk) 19:23, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If by "assembled coverage" you mean taking a bit from this source and a small piece from that source, or only counting bits taken from independent sources that are also secondary, then it's settled at WP:ORG (i.e., SIRS bans it), and I agree that it's an open question for the GNG/all other SNGs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:28, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Outline of proposed SNG: (probably needs more details added):
A species is presumed notable if it meets both of these criteria:
Its article has an included wp:reliable source which establishes that it has some recognition as a species by the scientific community
Its article has an included wp:reliable source which has content on the species which is more substantial than a typical database type listing
These criteria refer to the state of the article, not the characteristics of the topic. That's not usually how notability guidelines are worded. More generally, the proposal as I understand it is to recognise the current long-standing consensus (WP:NSPECIES) as a notability guideline, not come up with a new one. – Joe (talk) 16:34, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not some much "state of the article" but more the "find a source" work has already been done. And this is deliberate. Without that, anyone can create a zero sources zero content article on any of the millions of aalleged species and then volunteers would have to take it to AFD and prove a negative. So it is is deliberate. `The GNG route remains available, the SNG (with it's additional conditions) is merely a way to bypass the GNG route. North8000 (talk) 00:39, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm. I definitely share some of the sentiments expressed above in finding one-line microstubs disappointing, and I think we need a way to deter them if we're going to try to write a guideline based on NSPECIES so that it doesn't provide carte blanche for creating large numbers of them. On the other hand, I also share Joe's unease about intermingling article quality with notability guidance, which could have downstream effects in many other subject areas.
It seems to me that most of the trouble with microstubs comes from their mass creation. Our system can absorb a few of them a month coming from random newbies; it's the editors creating them in WP:MEATBOT-like fashion that really create difficulties. (I should know, having helped clean up after User:Starzoner.) Could we say something like "Mass-created articles invoking this guideline are expected to include text that describes or diagnoses the species."? The 2022 RfC provides for articles "not required to meet WP:GNG", and that implicitly suggests to me that SNGs can set mass-creation standards for those types of articles. (I'm also in favor of some language in the guideline that the species is taxonomically accepted; I would think you would need a source for that if challenged at AfD.) Choess (talk) 01:49, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's not necessary for a notability guideline to determine what proposals will be accepted through the MASSCREATE process. I don't think that any of the others do this (e.g., NGEO doesn't). I think that any guideline proposal should say that mass creation requires prior approval, but if you wanted to expand beyond that simple statement, you could perhaps add a hint about how to write a proposal that's likely to be successful, e.g., "proposals that do not do A, B, and C are not expected to be approved". WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:00, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Because I focus on creating articles for plant species and I am not involved in almost any AfD discussions I do not know about consensus regarding notability. If the current long-standing consensus is that we keep stub articles that are not being expanded to be able to give a useful description of the species, then the consensus is wrong. Stub articles about a species should be deleted because they are not useful and detract from the project. Species should have articles only if, as North8000 suggests, reliable sources establishes that if has recognition by the scientific community and content such as a description or other information about the species. The standard should be to encourage good article creation and to discourage the creation of large numbers of stubs or placeholders to game Wikipedia and get lots of credit for creating articles that are not in fact articles like stubs or redirects. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 21:54, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have argued that if mass-created stubs are to be mass-deleted exceptions should be made for those that have a significant number of pageviews. Let's take for example, Anthurium. POWO says that there are 1,325 accepted species, and Wikipedia has articles on 190 of them. A massviews report shows that the very stubby Anthurium superbum gets about 5 pageviews a day, while the equally stubby Anthurium rhizophorum gets 0.27 pageviews a day. Both of these were created by Polbot long ago. But for some reason (it is a houseplant, with some presence on the internet), Anthurium superbum is much more popular. Deleting it would go against the whole point of creating stubs, which is the hope that someone will come along and improve them. It is known that casual editors are far more likely to improve a stub if one already exists than create one from scratch. Abductive (reasoning)23:30, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@MtBotany, what exactly do you mean by "they are not useful"?
I've looked up some plant and found the very short stubs to be useful to me. Some people, including me, sometimes just want to find the family name (which is in the infobox), so the article itself doesn't even need to exist for me to find the page useful. Other times, I'm looking for what part of the world it's from. Again, a very short stub is enough to meet my actual needs.
We have a rule at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion that says Hint: If someone says they find a redirect useful, they probably do. You might not find it useful—this is not because the other person is being untruthful, but because you browse Wikipedia in different ways. Perhaps you don't find stubs useful for your purposes, but that's not quite the same as nobody finding them useful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:54, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The existence of other websites with similar information does not mean that it's useless for us to have an article – especially for the majority of readers who don't know about those databases.
NOTDATABASE doesn't mean that we can't have articles whose facts can also be found in a database. NOTDATABASE means that we should write encyclopedia articles instead of database entries. That means we should write something like:
They kinda look alike, until somebody improves the stub. By the way, because you didn't italicise the name of the species, I now know you took very few biology courses. Abductive (reasoning)18:30, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One general note, I'm guessing that most people would agree that overall what is happening with new species articles is not problematic. I think that the biggest trigger for this discussion is that the current practice violates wp:notability and that we should reconcile wp:notability with that without upsetting the apple cart. And maybe concern about what could happen given that there are millions of species which don't have articles. Right now someone making a new species article is probably going to be careful about having some decent sourcing because they are technically violating wp:notability or else operating in the gray areas of actual in-practice wp:notability. A new guideline has the possibility of upsetting the apple cart in either direction. One would be triggering a deletion fest of established articles, the other would to green light too many new stubs....if not by mass creation, then by completionists. One good hypothetical thought question is: Would we want 2,000,000 new legit stubs on legit species? My answer is that in order to officially bypass GNG, it should be a teeny bit more than a stub or have have a bit more sourcing than a database entry. And IMO, that is the current practice for NEW articles.North8000 (talk) 16:49, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
At the current rate of article creation, Wikipedia will never have articles for every legit species. For most groups of organisms the rate at which new species are being described outpaces the rate at which Wikipedia articles are being written. The main exceptions are birds (we have articles for every species), mammals (we have articles for every species except those listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mammals/Missing mammal species (and any others described since that page was last updated in 2023)), non-avian dinosaur genera (we have all of those I believe). I think the article creation rate is sufficient to eventually have articles for all the other vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles) in coming years. The article creation rate for plant species exceeds the rate at which new species are being described, but it will take more than 100 years to have articles for all plant species at the current rate.
For just about everything else, species description rate outstrips article creation rate (I'm sure there are a few families and genera scattered around the tree of life that have articles for every species and there is at least one small phylum (Onychophora with 200 species) that has articles for almost every species).
The thing is, we have many articles on species that nobody is reading (<10 page views/month). Most of them are stubs, which makes sense; readers don't visit them, and editors don't visit them to expand them. But there are occasionally well developed articles for species that reader's just aren't interested in (Ichneutica ustistriga got 4 page views in the last month). And yet, there are still articles for species we don't have that would attract a lot of readers if the article existed. Aureolaria grandiflora was my go to example of a conspicuous native plant in my region that didn't have an article. An article was created in December 2023, and it's getting 38 page views/month now, but I expect it will get hundreds in August when it is in peak flower. Plantdrew (talk) 21:40, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Another exemption to 3RR and 1RR
I think an exemption should be if the content had a strong consensus from an RfC as it would've most likely received community wide input from editors who don't necessarily have the page watched. So the only way to remove or significantly rewrite the content would be through another RfC Alexanderkowal (talk) 17:29, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The point of 1RR is to prevent disruptive edit wars. If something like this is happening, then the person making the inappropriate edits should be asked to undo their second revert. If they refuse, then they should be reported at WP:AE and an uninvolved editor can fix the offending edits. The main issue here is that AE is super intimidating and bureaucratic, even for experienced users, which discourages taking the "correct" path here. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:13, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While reading this page about WP:CANVASS, a question popped up in my head. Several times I saw a situation when there is a !vote on a subject which was previously discussed and someone pings previous participants. Very often the previous discussion has a very srong favor of one side, and obviously bringing prev !voters will introduce a strong bias into the new discussion. Should this be considered canvassing? - Altenmann>talk17:40, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, as long as the previous discussion had not been canvassed, and all the non-blocked participants of that discussion are notified, and an attempt is made to notify for all such previous discussions. This is in effect a continuation of a previous discussion, and those people already involved. To view otherwise would encourage the constant restarting of discussions in particular venues with the hopes of avoiding the previous participants. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:49, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia also has an article on Human. Wikipedia:Conflict of interest is the relevant guideline, and it really depends how close you are to the topic, whether you can derive personal benefit from editing, and whether your edits are in the interests of creating encyclopaedic content. If in doubt about specifics, ask for advice. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:07, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You cannot make an autobiography about yourself in Wikipedia, except if you are an international famous person, the entire world doesn't know you. And also includes making an article about your friend, your boss or your wife, and you can write about something you're close to, tho don't write as the "best thing in the entire world" or like an ad Emicraftnoob (talk) 22:21, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
True, but the question is approximately like "Why can't Microsoft employees write the article on Microsoft, but Wikipedia editors get to write the article on Wikipedia?"
How it's done is to check what independent sources have to say on the topic and base the article on those, rather than what you know or feel about it. Perhaps every one here has a COI with Wikipedia, but you can check it yourself to see if it is biased, undue, or unreferenced. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:29, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikiproject procedures for WP:NOTNEWS in reference to active storms
So this is spinning off of an ANI thread that started out as a discussion on the use of external links but further moved on to a talk about what, if any, information on the current status of a storm should be included in its article and/or the relevant season article (e.g. 2024 Atlantic hurricane season). This led to several templates being nominated for deletion. For a good number of years, if there was an active storm, the storm article and its section in the season article would include current storm information such as intensity, location, motion, size, an image of the forecast cone, and any active watches or warnings. However, at least some editors opined that, per WP:NOTNEWS, this information should not be included. Some editors (myself included) did not entirely agree. I figured there should be a separate discussion on this matter. Now, I have not been entirely sure on where to have this discussion. A couple editors suggested taking it to ArbCom, but I don't think it rises to that level of seriousness. I then suggested having an RfC on a WikiProject talk page, but others thought it should be held elsewhere to get more commentary from non-project editors and minimize bias. One suggested taking it to Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard while a couple others suggested here. While I understand that this page is mainly for discussing changes to policy rather than their application, this discussion will impact long-standing practices (which may even predate the applicable policies) within a project so it sorta fits? If this is not the appropriate venue to have this discussion, could an editor experienced in these matters please direct me to the appropriate place? I'm kind of at a loss since nothing quite seems to fit. If this is an appropriate place, I'll give my opinions on the matter at hand in a subsequent comment. Also, should I WP:APPNOTE the relevant wikiprojects? TornadoLGS (talk) 02:24, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While anything with a handily-worded shortcut like WP:NOTNEWS gets the most attention, regarding existence of a a separate article, Wikipedia:Notability (events) is important. IMO only when it's WP:Snow that a current event will meet that is it allowed to have a separate article when it's still current. IMO, once it passes that test, there's no reason to exclude information (that would otherwise be appropriate for the article) solely for being very current North8000 (talk) 19:14, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@North8000: So one matter that comes up is that all tropical cyclones, even if they aren't notable enough for an independent article, get sections at the season article (e.g. Tropical Storm Alberto at 2024 Atlantic hurricane season) so the issue of current information comes up. @WhatamIdoing: Not sure how long it would be. I might host it on a separate page just in case it does go long. TornadoLGS (talk) 21:35, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
IMO, now you have moved into the territory of editorial discretion. IMO nobody should argue that policy/guidelines categorically prohibit such current info. And we should acknowledge that things like templates can distort such decisions towards inclusion. And we should also acknowledge that the current emptiness of such a "will doubtless be wp:notable in the future" article might tend to distort inclusion discussions. But with all of that said, my own "editorial discretion" opinion would be to include the latest info on included storms, which are presumably named storms. North8000 (talk) 22:53, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going talk about my present concerns down here then. So it seems that, currently, the procedure is that we should not list any kind of information on the current status of a storm. While I am fine with most of the formerly included information such as active watches and warnings, being included, I do have concerns about the current approach to storm intensity. Right now the going practice is to display the maximum intensity a storm has attained thus far, as we would for a system that has dissipated. My concern here is that this is likely to confuse readers if that intensity does not match the current intensity. If I were to read something online about a current storm, I would assume it wast talking about the storm's intensity as of its publication. In this instance alone, I suggest that there should be some means of indicating a storm's current intensity. Now, one of the points that WP:NOTNEWS makes is that we should not include information that will not be included at a later time. I would argue that intensity information is retained later on, since a section or article on a storm will have a summary of meteorological history, including when a storm moves up or down a category on whichever intensity scale applies. If we don't include any information on current storm intensity, then it should be clearly indicated that the intensity given is the maximum rather than the current intensity (perhaps it could be incorporated into Template:Current weather event).
Aside from that issue of intensity, there are three other matters that should bed addressed.
Articles on active storms have historically had phrasing along the lines of "[Storm Name] is an active tropical cyclone over the Caribbean Sea." Considering the new approach to active storms, how should this be phrased going forward?
Season articles have also included mention of potential tropical cyclones, systems that prompt advisories but have not (yet) attained tropical cyclone status. Should these systems simply be excluded?
Season articles have a list of storm names indicating which names are used, which are unused, and which apply to active storms. It seems this should be changed to simply indicate whether or not the name has been used.TornadoLGS (talk) 23:15, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I believe that all of these should be included. Point one is valid because we also treat wars like that. PTCs are included in the other storms section so they meet the ten year requirement. For the third, without psychic powers we cannot rule out any names from being used. ✶Quxyz✶23:33, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:OWN should be merged
WP:OWN activity is, always and without exception, done with the deliberate intention of obstructing or defeating the purposes of Wikipedia. There is no such thing as a good-faith instance of WP:OWN; the aim is simply to prevent other editors from editing, and WP:OWN behaviour is not a viable or plausible strategy for safeguarding good material against loss (there are other methods for doing that). Therefore, engaging in WP:OWN should not be dealt with as a separate category; it is a type of vandalism and should be treated the same as other vandalism.
Certainly it's possible for an editor to plead ignorance, once; many people don't read rules before they start. But in this case, as in the case of all vandalism, there is no way to justify pleading ignorance a second time. "You don't in any way own or control anything written here, not even if you wrote it yourself" is not a complex or confusing idea. TooManyFingers (talk) 04:54, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is very common to have good-faith instances of editing that could be considered WP:OWN. It is easy to imagine it coming into play against WP:RANDY, or as part of normal content disputes. Sometimes we as a community even protect pages to stop other editors less involved in the community from editing. Where is the proposed merge to anyway? CMD (talk) 05:10, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
TooManyFingers, vandalism has a very narrow and specific and widely accepted definition on Wikipedia: deliberate, unambiguous attempts to damage the encyclopedia. Commonplace efforts to control an article about oneself or ones business is a natural and understandable response in many cases. Such editors need an explanation of our content policies, not a block for vandalism. Cullen328 (talk) 07:27, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect many users who OWN articles do this for the purpose of "protecting" the article from users who want to "harm" it (just to clarify--the quotes represent what the user in question believes which is not true). As such, it's good-faith behavior in many cases, and calling it vandalism is incorrect. Animal lover|666|20:30, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I know some editors who have shown OWNership behavior. Very often they have strong opinions, but are nonetheless acting in good faith. TornadoLGS (talk) 20:59, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Vandalism (as it is currently defined in practice on Wikipedia) has nothing in practice to distinguish it from WP:OWN. Both sets of editors act as they do in order to impose their preferences on everyone else, both deliberately evade communication and consensus, both deliberately hinder or prevent good-faith behaviour by other editors, and both end up damaging the project by frustrating and overloading the good editors and by deliberately impeding the project's ultimate success. The aims and attitudes of each are the same, namely to get their own material onto everyone's screen regardless of the aims of the project; I would argue that, unlike OWNers, at least those who we currently call vandals are transparent and up-front about their intent to cause damage. To use a team sports analogy, fans who tie up the coach and take control for themselves by instructing the team to play in a different way are just as disruptive and just as harmful (if not more so) than fans who keep throwing trash onto the playing field. TooManyFingers (talk) 04:20, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you would like to link a particular talk page, we can have a look and consider the situation. However, there is no merit to a suggestion that vandalism is similar to reverts performed by someone accused of OWN to an article they have developed. Johnuniq (talk) 04:28, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To state that there are exactly zero times when someone showing OWNership tendencies isn't acting in bad faith vandalism is so far off the mark. Indeed, most OWN issues are done in good faith and overegerness.
I hope I'm asking this question in the right place.
I'm preparing to edit Au Pilori, not as a translation of the French-language version, but as a complete rewrite with more sources. The French version has a source that is a mémoire de maîtrise , a master's thesis, but the link is dead. I tracked down the author and emailed him, asking for the current link to his thesis and he sent me the thesis instead. (His old university recently merged with another, and I assume the theses are not linked yet.) I could, of course, not cite it, but it seems to be a very good source. I could cite it with no link, but that leaves English-speaking readers worse off than I was.
The person who mailed it to me holds the copyright, so how can I contort myself to both respect his copyright and yet make the source available to future readers?
You can't link to an external source that violates the author's copyright. You don't strictly speaking need a link, but you could ask the author for permission to publicly host it somewhere. AlexandraAVX (talk) 06:24, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would not use this per WP:SCHOLARSHIP, Masters dissertations and theses are considered reliable only if they can be shown to have had significant scholarly influence. Masters theses vary greatly in quality and there's no real way to judge which are and aren't reliable without doing original research. If it hasn't been published, it's not going to have had "significant scholarly influence", even if it's available from the university library and can technically be cited there. – Joe (talk) 07:18, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A line I often here from people who don't want to follow a rule from a policy or guideline is that it's "not forbidden" or similar. Most often it's in relation to WP:COI ("strongly discouraged" apparently reads as "go right ahead" if you have sufficient external motivation), but I've heard it with other policies too. I've always considered this is a non sequitur because read in the context of WP:PAG and WP:IAR, all our rules are guidelines that can sometimes be ignored. And curiously you have guidelines that are written in a very soft, conditional way, but which are treated as ironclad rules anyway – when was the last time you heard someone try "writing articles about non-notable subjects isn't forbidden"?
But coming across it again recently made me wonder, that notwithstanding, is there anything that a policy or guideline explicitly forbids? – Joe (talk) 08:16, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The word "forbid" doesn't show up a lot, but equivalents like "must" and "must not" (frequently bolded) sure do. —Cryptic09:06, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On a more serious note, the reason why few of our policies and guidelines expressly forbid everything is that they are not written by highly-paid lawyers, so nearly all of them allow for exceptions based on common sense. That many COI editors take "strongly discouraged" to mean "please go ahead" is simply due to a lack of common sense on the part of those editors. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:02, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For most Wikipedians, it's obvious that a line exists and they can figure out where it is. Anyone who isn't sure where the line is should generally err on the side of caution; those who repeatedly cross the line will get warned, and eventually either blocked outright or topic banned. Animal lover|666|18:28, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It will change on 22 May in some skins (Timeless, Modern, CologneBlue, Nostalgia, and Monobook). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in all other skins. The developers are also considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
Based on a quick search, it looks like the heading change will affect almost 300 scripts, many of which have inactive maintainers. Some arbitrary highlights from the top of the list include:
A quick way to test these scripts right now, is to enable the Parsoid beta option (which already uses the new html structure) and to disable DiscussionTools, which uses a partial form of the new heading structure. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:39, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, you can already see it in Parsoid mode (but note that there are other differences – e.g. Parsoid output has <section> tags around each section, which may require a separate set of updates in some scripts).
Disabling DiscussionTools doesn't actually change anything though. The HTML structure is the same whether it's enabled or disabled, only the styles are different. Also, note that it uses a "hybrid" heading structure currently when using the default parser, as you say, but it uses the new structure when using Parsoid.
So in short, you can just use Parsoid mode to test these scripts today here on English Wikipedia, but beware that there may be extra issues. But if they work with Parsoid, they will work with the new headings too. Matma Rextalk11:25, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The technical 13 script was blanked, so we don't have to worry about that one.
Will the fact that they're rolling this out for only some wikimedia-deployed skins at this time make the patch more complicated? If I'm reading it right, the scripts may temporarily have to support both heading styles. –Novem Linguae (talk) 09:16, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm assuming ~ and feel free to correct me if i'm wrong ~ that something about this deployment is why headings no longer have numbers (for me)? Will it be possible to go back to that at some point? I find long pages almost impossible to navigate around without numbered headings, so will have to learn a new way of working if it won't be possible. Thanks, Happy days, ~ LindsayHello16:24, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you're speaking about the table of contents, Vector 22 does not provide numbering. Vector, Monobook, and Modern do.
If you are speaking about each actual heading, then indeed the preference is gone and indeed there is a gadget for it now. You have correctly identified that gadget as needing to be updated for this change. It looks like the necessary change to the snippet (documentation) has already been made, so someone needs to port that here. Izno (talk) 19:59, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, Izno, helpful. I'd assumed it was a script/gadget, as so many appeared to be affected above. I shall patiently wait in hope Happy days, ~ LindsayHello11:51, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Did you try all the old skins such as Timeless and Monobook? Vector isn't affected at all yet, and editing likely uses the API, but I can imagine the location of the header links this script places being possibly broken in old scripts. I fixed this kind of thing in 2 gadgets so far. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:15, 5 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
New h2 headings use serif font even when the "Vector classic typography" gadget is enabled
Vector classic typography is a gadget that forces all text to use sans-serif fonts, but even with the gadget enabled h2 headings on articles use a serif font. Incorrect behavior seen on both Firefox and Edge. TomatoFriesLAN (talk) 18:51, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I usually spend part of the day closing AFD discussions but none of the XFDcloser options are showing up. Not even the ability to relist. I've uninstalled every installation, unchecked the XFDcloser gadget, returned everything to normal but nothing works. Do I have to reboot my computer or something? Log out and log back in? This rarely happens so I'm not sure what happened today. I've posted a message on the XFDCloser talk page but it doesn't get much activity there. LizRead!Talk!23:26, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Izno, I see you've moved this section, and it does appear to be mentioned in the original post of this threading, but why would it only appear now? I seem to recall closing discussions earlier this week (and I suspect Liz has as well). Primefac (talk) 01:17, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I thought this thread was deleted until I found it reposted up here.
It's odd because XFDCloser was working fine this morning and then this afternoon, it just didn't load at all. But I see other editors closing discussions so I hope it isn't just me. I've had ongoing problems with XFDCloser not loading on CFD pages but it hasn't been a problem on AFD daily logs until today. Thanks for checking Novem Linguae, there are usually over 100 AFD discussions daily so if this is happening for other closers, they could pile up pretty quickly. If it matters, I use a laptop with Windows. LizRead!Talk!03:17, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I figured out the cause. I should have a fix deployed soon.
For the record, it looks like WMF deployed mw:Heading HTML changes to old skins (monobook, timeless, modern, cologneblue) last week, vector (2010) this week, and probably minerva and vector-2022 in the coming weeks. All breakages we see today will probably be vector (2010) only.
This staggered deployment has pros and cons. It means that if someone like me does fix a bunch of gadgets today, I'll just have to go fix them all again next week when they break on vector-2022.
It would be nice if there were an API for inserting header links. phab:T337286. APIs like mw.util.addPortlet(), mw.util.addPortletLink(), etc are great for multi-skin support and for keeping HTML changes from breaking gadgets and user scripts. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:43, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I don't understand all of this jargon but I am FOREVER grateful that their are editors who do. Thanks for looking into this. LizRead!Talk!06:33, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, and I don't like the left-side menu. But thanks Novem Linguae, it looks like things are now back to normal. I can go back to my old skin! Many thanks. LizRead!Talk!07:24, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Novem Linguae, XFDCloser disappeared again! I think you said this might happen. It came back when I changed to Vector 2022 but, ugh! I guess I'll use that skin when working in AFDLand and then change back when doing regular editing. LizRead!Talk!22:15, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Very strange. I haven't done any work on XFDcloser since the last deploy on Thursday, and I don't see any relevant backport patches at wikitech:Server Admin Log that might have changed MediaWiki behavior this weekend. This is all quite mysterious. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:56, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What's the user script or gadget that puts a ¶ symbol next to headings, and when you click on it, it opens a modal with links to that section that you can copy/paste? It broke for me today and I want to fix it, but can't remember what it's called. Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 03:35, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The function showCommentLinks() (starting on line 73) adds the links. The section of code starting at line 84 finds headings in the HTML document structure previously generated by MediaWiki (which I believe is the same across skins). The section of code starting at line 93 finds headings in the currently generated HTML document structure. isaacl (talk) 15:27, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was hoping you'd just tell me where the links are. lol. Anyway, I put a breakpoint on line 75 and the breakpoint is not getting hit when I refresh this page. I'm missing something. –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:33, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were asking about the interface. As described in the documentation, you have to select the "Toggle link2clipboard" item in the tools menu (the location of the menu depends on your skin; for Vector 2010 it's in the left sidebar). </> is prepended to the start of each comment. For headings, <h/> is also prepended. Most of the time I don't want to see the links, so I chose to require an extra step to display them. Another difference from the other script is that for the major non-Safari browsers, the link text is automatically copied to the clipboard (always without surrounding square brackets; the other script can be configured not to do that if desired). isaacl (talk) 20:51, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nice, that worked. Thanks a lot. Feature idea: Add a way to copy it as an external link. I do this a lot when writing GitHub or Phabricator tickets, for example. –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:59, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As my personal frequent use case is to link to comments or sections in wikitext, I wanted a way that would provide easy access to the link without underscores ;-) (And I chose to avoid square brackets as it's easier to add them when needed than delete them, and I like to use {{section link}} when feasible.) I'll take it under consideration, though; thanks for the feedback! isaacl (talk) 21:08, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
new CSS selectors needed because of the layout changes. <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6> no longer get CSS class .mw-heading. Hmm 🤔, is that intentional or a bug?
target.append instead of target.after to handle pages with non-conventional ways of adding headings, like Wikipedia:Community portal and Main Page Main Page is still a bit awkward because of the comma treatment (diff1, diff2). Though it seems better than in original version, which caused some glitches (pilcrow wrapping to a new line or something like that), requiring workarounds.
font-size: initial to counteract font-size: small of class .mw-editsection, which we now have to deal with because of #2.
I just noticed that section headers in articles are now using a serif typeface on both Vector and Vector legacy. Sorry I couldn't find information about this elsewhere but when and why was this change made? I do not like that it uses Oldstyle figures and would like to change it in my settings or .css page to be the same sans serif font used in other headers. Thanks! Reywas92Talk17:23, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Reywas92 Vector headers have actually been using serif fonts by default for a long time, but you have user CSS which was overriding that. It no longer works due to some changes to heading HTML. You can either change that part of your user CSS to:
Very handy gadget for manual-archiving - User:Evad37/OneClickArchiver.js - but it isn't showing up today on any talk pages for me. Don't know why, the script is still sitting on my common.js page. Has it been disabled/usurped by a better gadget? Why isn't it showing up?... Help please & thanks, Shearonink (talk) 14:48, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ok so after posting the above query I have now read through some of the other threads about archiver scripts... Is there a present script or fork that works on individual sections/posts/threads like Evad37's used to do? Shearonink (talk) 14:54, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For anyone who is as much of a non-adept at code & tech stuff around here and has Evad37's one-click oneclick one click archive script installed, and wants the same functionality, do the following:
See User:Elli/OneClickArchiver listed there? It is an updated 2024 script that is maintained and fixes some issues with Evad37's script (having to do with the 'Heading markup changes' mentioned at the top of this page.
Follow the instructions at the User:Elli/OneClickArchiver page.
@TheDJ and Jdlrobson: On Elizabeth II, using Vector 2010, the script highlights links in the lead section which shouldn't be highlighted, as they're not repeated in the lead section, and highlights links (in red) that are the first instances of those links in the article body. This does not occur in Vector 2022. ‑‑Neveselbert (talk·contribs·email) 22:49, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Real life has kept me away for the better part of a fortnight; I really shouldn't be taking the time to write this...
I have a script User:Trappist the monk/HarvErrors.js that is a tweaked copy of User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js. Some of those tweaks were my own to turn down the glare of the red error messages that Ucucha's script produced. At some point someone asked me for further tweaks. What I know about javascript can be put in a thimble so I had to rely on the expertise of other more javascript fluent editors.
My script may have become broken because of the mw:Heading HTML changes. I suspect that the broken code is at lines 46–48. The code is supposed to make three separate lists of references found in each of an article's §External links, §Further reading, and §Publications sections. The purpose of that is to suppress the error messaging that would occur if any reference in those sections duplicates or can be linked from a short-form reference ({{sfn}} and the like).
With my script installed for example, this version of Rudolf Roessler (permalink) shows Harv error: linked from CITEREF... for every reference in (§Bibliography (permalink)). Those were 'fixed' by renaming §Publications to §Works (diff).
Is there anyone out there who would be willing to show me how to fix the issue? Because I'm not really here for the time being, a post on my talk page will find me via an email notification from MediaWiki.
@Trappist the monk I'm not sure if I understand exactly what the script should do, however, I think it may be enough to add .mw-heading2 to the selectors in those 3 lines, like this:
varfurther_reading=$content.find('#Further_reading').parent().nextUntil('h2, .mw-heading2').find('.citation').get();// get all cites inside a Further reading sectionvarexternal_links=$content.find('#External_links').parent().nextUntil('h2, .mw-heading2').find('.citation').get();// get all cites inside a External links sectionvarpublications=$content.find('#Publications').parent().nextUntil('h2, .mw-heading2').find('.citation').get();// get all cites inside a Publications section
The HTML nesting of headings changed recently. The fix done above is to check for both the old and the new selector (h2, .mw-heading2), until all skins are switched over in a couple weeks, at which point just the new selector can be used. –Novem Linguae (talk) 21:02, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
more efficient watching
Each day I download my watchlist page, filter it for the "mw-changeslist-watchedunseen" tag, open the histories for the unseen pages; I have scripts for these steps. But then, on each of these history pages, I have to click by hand to get the diffs from the last "seen" version to the current version. Is there a more automatic way to get those diffs? (The links I want are in the mail notices, if I choose to receive them, but again that's a couple of clicks for each.) —Tamfang (talk) 21:18, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Link to existing script? Figuring out what language it's in and what it's doing will help with figuring out if you can just add code to it or need to explore a different option. What do you mean by "mail notice"? I assume you just want the diff of last time you viewed it compared to the newest revision, right? –Novem Linguae (talk) 04:04, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The scripts are on my own computer, in Vim and Python. I could in principle write a script to combine these and then curl the history pages and then examine these for the last unseen version; but I'd rather use an existing script native to WP, if possible!
I used to get a notice by mail whenever a watched page was changed, if I had seen it since the previous change. (I turned that off; now I cannot find it in Preferences.) That notice included the link I want, but again only one at a time. —Tamfang (talk) 03:42, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Click "n changes, n days" and check "Group results by page", or check "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" in Preferences. But it seems the links only appear when there are seen and unseen edits made within the same day, so it might not totally satisfy your needs. Nardog (talk) 03:53, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a prohibition for newer users from being able to email another user? I'm trying to assist a newer wiki user (autoconfirmed, but not yet extended confirmed) who can email some users but not someone who is blocked. I can email blocked users, though. There is nothing in WP:Emailing users describing restrictions. So I'm wondering if the newer user is [undocumented] unable to email a temporarily blocked user. Any insights? ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 21:34, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are you able to confirm that the blocked user's account can be emailed? (I'm thinking unauthenticated email or just no email)
The API documentation lists some possible errors (for the API, no idea what the UI says) and links to various generic ones (mw:API:Emailuser#Possible errors), but I didn't notice any that seemed like what you described.
Yes, it was the first thing I checked. I also see "Email this user" on the left margin under "Tools" for those users, and was able to successfully send a test email to one of them. The error message they had gotten was something like "You cannot email users on this Wikipedia (or en.wikipedia)", which made no sense, especially when they just turned around and successfully emailed someone else (who was not a blocked user). Users with their emails turned off, or without an email in the wiki system, don't display the "email this user" option under "Tools". However, I am an extended confirmed user (they are not), which is the only thing I could think of as an explanation for the fact they could email me (I'm not blocked), and one other not-blocked user, but could not email those other two users (one is indef blocked, the other is temp blocked). 500 edits would be a steep quota for a new user just to send an email (they have less than 100 so far) especially if there's no error message telling them that's what they need. ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 23:46, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Grorp, the other users might have "Allow emails from brand-new users" off in settings? I can't tell if brand-new means autoconfirmed or extended confirmed. — Qwerfjkltalk15:23, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:Emailing users says "You can also prevent users without the autoconfirmed permissions level from emailing you by un-ticking the 'Allow emails from brand-new users' option", so that's not it because this user is autoconfirmed. I'm beginning to think 'blocked' and 'not yet extended confirmed' might be the reality of the situation. It would just be nice if someone could confirm and then fix the documentation. I think I'll post the issue to the talk page of WP:Emailing users and hope someone familiar with the behind-the-scenes-code will be able to confirm. ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 16:52, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The only similar message I can find is MediaWiki:usermaildisabledtext which says "You cannot send email to other users on this wiki". Based on a very quick look at the source ([9][10]) that message should only appear on a wiki where email is disabled entirely. Can you double-check that your emailer is using a WMF site, and not some third-party wiki? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 00:01, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
They were on en.wikipedia.org, and yes that is the error message they told me. But then they turned right around and emailed me thru wiki. So yes, they can send emails, just not to someone who was blocked. ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 00:11, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This could be many reasons, like hitting a throttle, an underlying IP block of some sort, etc. Troubleshooting by having you provide somewhat vague information isn't very useful. At this point, advise the third party to engage the larger community directly. — xaosfluxTalk10:40, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"The form shows" wasn't mentioned before and I didn't want to mail a random blocked user. I have blocked my alternative accont PrimeHunter2 for a week and can reproduce the issue. PrimeHunter3 can mail my main account PrimeHunter normally but cannot mail the blocked PrimeHunter2, and it has "Allow emails from brand-new users" enabled. PrimeHunter3 gets an "Email this user" interface link on User:PrimeHunter2 and a mail form on Special:EmailUser/PrimeHunter2, but clicking "Send" gives a page which still shows the mail form and in red "You cannot send email to other users on this wiki". PrimeHunter can mail the account. Others may try for testing but I may not read the mails. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:02, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Xaosflux: Matma Rex later said below that it's caused by T341908 and he will make a note there. I don't have permission to view T341908 and will not open a bug without knowing what is happening. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:35, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Primehunter: Thank you for reproducing this error. It didn't occur to me to create some alt-accounts (properly declared to avoid socking claims) in order to test this. I think I will for future instances. ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 17:20, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I asked. They said they would prefer not to be mentioned. I think with two other users having reproduced the problem, their username is not really needed. ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 23:16, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oh certainly, but it could be related to a root cause. Someone should create this bug in phab with all the documentations, screenshots, etc. This doesn't appear to be an "English Wikipedia" problem, but something in software. (i.e. we can't fix it here). — xaosfluxTalk19:51, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have a feeling that if the message were more accurate ("You cannot send email to this user" rather than "You cannot send email to other users on this wiki") then we'd document the restriction and move on. Anomie⚔02:02, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps, but why would an autoconfirmed user not be allowed to email a blocked user when an extendedconfirmed user can? Why the difference? If you display a generic message like "You cannot send email to this user", it is inadequate for the sender to understand why he cannot, or how to solve his problem. Either provide a better message ("You cannot send email to blocked users until you reach extended confirmed status") or simply allow them the ability to send such emails. ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 02:08, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's a confusing message but the restriction is apparently specific to Wikimedia wikis and not coded in the general MediaWiki software so maybe they didn't have a good way to make a new message. I don't have permission to view T341908 so I don't know exactly what the restriction actually is. I wonder whether it also caused Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2024 January 22#Email where we never found an answer. We could make a localized version of MediaWiki:Usermaildisabledtext but what would it say when we don't know why the message is served to a user? PrimeHunter (talk) 02:54, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Presumably the same reason we protect pages to autoconfirmed and if that's not enough to extended confirmed, i.e. it's more time consuming to reach extended confirmed without scrutiny so abuse with extended confirmed accounts happens less often.
I honestly wouldn't have thought anyone would have the need to email blocked users before this - and seeing as this phab has been a thing for almost a year now without major complaints it's probably actually a rare occurrence. – 2804:F1...2D:8B49 (talk) 03:59, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OK - so there is a temporary measure that may be causing this upstream in phab:T341908, the devs/security teams are reviewing some options. We are not able to share the details of the situation. No additional user troubleshooting is needed at this time. — xaosfluxTalk08:29, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The private WMF config has been removed now, as it was found to be no longer needed after discussion in the task (the abuse it protected against happened more than a year ago). Sending emails in this scenario should work again. Matma Rextalk08:26, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Tech News: 2024-26
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Editors will notice that there have been some changes to the background color of text in the diff view, and the color of the byte-change numbers, last week. These changes are intended to make text more readable in both light mode and dark mode, and are part of a larger effort to increase accessibility. You can share your comments or questions on the project talkpage. [11]
The text colors that are used for visited-links, hovered-links, and active-links, were also slightly changed last week to improve their accessibility in both light mode and dark mode. [12]
Problems
You can copy permanent links to talk page comments by clicking on a comment's timestamp. This feature did not always work when the topic title was very long and the link was used as a wikitext link. This has been fixed. Thanks to Lofhi for submitting the bug. [13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar). [14][15]
Starting 26 June, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link at English Wikipedia, making this feature available for you to use at all wikis. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they were linked to, even if this comment has since been moved elsewhere. You can read more about this feature on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [16]
This started a few days ago I think. My browser (Opera on iPhone, latest version as far as I know) is telling me (I think) that the signed certificates for Wikipedia pages are invalid? The 'https' in the URL is red with a line through it and a red warning sign. When this started I got redirected to a different page, telling me that the URL wasn't safe or something, and I had to click 'proceed anyway' a few times. I'm in the UK, in case that makes a difference. Thecolonpagesaretoocomplicated (talk) 18:23, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Big Duck Screenshot with house iconBig Duck Screenshot with building icon
In Big Duck, I've got a mapframe in the infobox. There's a building icon on the map, but sometimes it shows up as a home icon. I've been noticing this for at least a few days and a few cycles of going back and forth, but now I've finally captured screen shots in both states. It's quasi-stable, but I can't pin down exactly what's going on. Right now, Special:Permalink/1231017752 has the home and Special:Permalink/1231002261 has the building. Viewing the pages in an incognito window makes no difference. Viewing them in a different browser (Firefox vs Chrome) makes no difference. Special:Purge doesn't change anything. Force reloading the browser window doesn't change anything. Clearing my browser cache doesn't change anything. I'm into serious WTF territory here, but it smells like some kind of cache botch at a lower level than what Special:Purge touches. Anybody have any ideas? RoySmith(talk)00:42, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I always get the building icon . If I change mapframe-marker = building to mapframe-marker = home in Big Duck then I get a different home icon which is listed at mw:Help:Extension:Kartographer/Icons. The icon in your screenshot is not listed there. If I remove mapframe-marker then I get a pin with no icon. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:42, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Good morning! I need a little assistance. Currently I created the page User:ToadetteEdit/styles.css for use in my userpage; however the content model is CSS and not sanitized CSS which is somewhat required to use TemplateStyles. Can someone change the content model to "sanitized-css"? Thank you! ToadetteEdit!09:24, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the RfD template causes the page to stop being a redirect right now, which is why it's listed as a regular link instead of a redirect. If you compare it to for example F1 2025 in the same list, it says "(redirect page)" after the link, showing that that link is an actual redirect. --rchard2scout (talk) 10:09, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Module:RfD has code to display "This title is currently a redirect to ...", but use of the module deactivates the redirect code so it's currently not an actual redirect. That's admittedly confusing and maybe the module should change the wording. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:42, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For a page to be a redirect, the #REDIRECT must appear at the start of the first non-blank line. Even a HTML comment <!--...--> on that blank line will break it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:47, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not getting the curly apostrophe message at page creation
This is an interesting example of a large number of concepts piling up on each other to create a mess.
First concept: most non-critical permission checks only check the basic permissions (i.e do you have the rights to edit this namespace at all, is the page directly protected against creation) and not more complicate checks (is the page transcluded in a cascade-protected page, is the page on the title blacklist, etc.).
Second concept: ?action=edit&redlink=1 redirects to the base page (without action=edit) if the user does not have permission to create the page (intentional per mw:Manual:Parameters to index.php#Optional additional data, checking the full permissions).
Fourth concept. That goes through MediaWiki:Noarticletext. If you pass the basic permission check, it currently does an extra check if it's on the title blacklist via Module:Title blacklist, displaying "This page is on the title blacklist, so only administrators, template editors, and page movers can create it." if it is. This logic probably could instead display the custom error message if it exists, but when I wrote this part of the chain per Template talk:No article text/Archive 1#Protected edit request on 15 January 2024 I didn't think about that situation. The curly quote error didn't exist (I added it to the blacklist in May 2024) so this issue was much less likely to trigger. If you then click the create tab, it would show the error. And title blacklist error messages are generally large blocks of text that don't fit in the {{no article text}} format.
If you fail the basic permission check, it goes through Module:Effective protection level, which treats the title blacklist the same way as templateeditor (since "templateeditor + pageover" is too complicated to be expressed there), and says "This page is template-protected from creation, so only template editors can create it.".
One possibility would be to special-case curly quotes, so instead of saying "is on the title blacklist" for that specific case mention why. I already do that with {{new page DYM}} if the page with the straight quote exists to fix the reader experience, but page creators are left SOL.
Hi everyone, for the past year, the Web team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been working on dark mode. This work is part of the Accessibility for Reading initiative that introduces changes to the Vector 2022 and Minerva skins. It improves readability, and allows everyone, both logged-out and logged-in users, to customize reading-focused settings.
Since early this year, dark mode has been available as a beta feature on both the mobile and the desktop website. We have been collaborating with template editors and other technical contributors to prepare wikis for this feature. This work included fixing templates and ensuring that many pages can appear with dark mode without any accessibility issues. We would like to express immense gratitude to everyone involved in this. Because so much has been done, over the next three weeks, we will be releasing the feature to all Wikipedias!
Deployment configuration and timeline
Tier 1 and 2 Wikipedias: wikis where the number of issues in dark mode when compared to light mode is not significant. These wikis will receive dark mode for both logged-in and logged-out users. Some small issues might still exist within templates, though. We will be adding ways to report these issues so that we can continue fixing templates together with editors.
Tier 3 Wikipedias: wikis where the number of issues in dark mode when compared to light mode is significant. These wikis will only receive dark mode for logged-in users. We would like to make dark mode available to all users. However, some wikis still require work from communities to adapt templates. Similar to the group above, these wikis will also receive a link for reporting issues that will help identify remaining issues.
Week of July 1: mobile website (Minerva skin) on the Tier 1 Wikipedias (including English Wikipedia)
Week of July 15: desktop website (Vector 2022 skin) on all Wikipedias; mobile website: logged-in and logged-out on the Tier 2 Wikipedias, logged-in only on the Tier 3 Wikipedias
How to turn on dark mode
The feature will appear in the Appearance menu alongside the options for text and width. Depending on compatibility and technical architecture, some pages might not be available in dark mode. For these pages, a notice will appear in the menu providing more information.
How to make dark mode even better!
If you would like to help to make more pages dark-mode friendly, go to our previous message and see the section "What we would like you to do (template editors, interface admins, technical editors)".
Just a note that there will still be LOTS of pages and templates etc that will still have some sort of problem in dark mode. We simply have a lot of content that never assumed something like dark mode would exist (and even though multiple gadgets for dark mode have existed over the years, many of these problems were never solved in those years either). While those who can make these fixes will likely be happy to help, I expect a bit of a torrent of requests on this page in the first days, so some patience might be required to fix all issues that people will find —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:22, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As a user of dark mode for the past year and a half or so, I've learnt that the quick fix for invisibility / illegibility in templates is to add class="mw-no-invert" inside the offending tag like <span class="mw-no-invert">. Apologies if this is widely known and feels condescending. Folly Mox (talk) 10:59, 28 June 2024 (UTC)edited 14:49, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As I understand it, this version of dark mode (as opposed to the dark mode gadget) doesn't invert existing colours. It defines a different palette of colours for the skin. Thus problems with legibility due to choices in colour would have to be fixed by changing the colours. isaacl (talk) 05:45, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On Talk:Said Nursî something has gone wrong with the archiving bot: only two archives exist for the page, Archive 1 and Archive 7. No archives between them exist, which means the list of archives at the top of the page does not show the most recent archive. Meluiel (talk) 18:32, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like when the auto-archiving template was added in revision 605280857, presumably copied and edited from some other talk page, that the current archive counter was set to 7 - the person who added then manually archived all the talk page comments into archive 1 in the next edit.
To make things worse in the very next edit someone restored it all by reverting and didn't remove the restored threads from archive 1, and in the edit after that the bot archived half of the talk page again into archive 7 - so basically the first archive is just full of duplicates.
I feel like the correct course of action would be to delete the first archive and move archive 7 in its place without creating a redirect, and also change the template so it starts counting from 1 again. I or anyone could fix the template, but I'm not going to risk doing that until the rest of the problem is fixed. – 2804:F1...2D:8B49 (talk) 19:10, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yet, the LTA's sock Vinuraj Solanki (talk·contribs) was able to effectively recreate the article in Jun 2024 by moving the completely unrelated redirect Annexationist Movement to the Devi Movement title and then over-writing its contents. The sock was not extended confirmed at that, or any, point.
This LTA has used this strategy numerous times; see this for a small fraction of affected articles.
Am I missing something or this indeed a way to overcome salting? And is there a way to counter it?
Aha, I had missed that two-step. So it's social engineering rather than a purely technical loophole. I'll start salting this LTA's recreations at admin level to make it less likely to be overlooked. Other than that, I don't believe there is anything to be done here for the moment and so we can consider this resolved. Thanks. Abecedare (talk) 23:21, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is a fairly frequent issue, not just with creation-protected pages but blacklisted titles. Since the lack of a warning isn't going to get fixed anytime soon, maybe it should get stuck into Mediawiki:Movepagetext. It would do a lot more good than the warning about not suppressing the redirect breaking links to the page; I doubt any admin or pagemover has read that without thinking "Duh?", but the only time silently overriding salting and blacklisting doesn't take you by surprise is when you never notice you've done it. —Cryptic08:53, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would actually file a MediaWiki bug about this, it would make sense to display a warning about this that requires an override before the move goes through (in a similar manner to the one you get if you e.g. try to block yourself). Matma Rextalk00:44, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We did that ten years ago, but fixing security vulnerabilities in the administrator toolset is considered a feature request, so there has not and I'm betting there never will be any developer action on it. —Cryptic02:01, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hola mis amigos. I don't know if it is coded in User:Dr. Blofeld/monobook.js or another one but I have an A-Z article browser at the top of pages with arrows. The problem is it is inconsistent, I'll click a few pages and the alpha order navigation stops. Can somebody tell me how to fix it? ♦ Dr. Blofeld17:43, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To start with, Gawaon, could you please define what you mean by a broken section anchor, starting with anchor? The term anchor is overloaded and can mean either the starting point or the ending point of a link. Most typically at Wikipedia it means the endpoint, but given you said "pointing to some article" you must mean the starting point, better known as a section link; is that what we are talking about?
Secondly, what do you mean by broken—are we talking about syntax errors or other noncompliant link formats or characters, or do you mean a section link where the section identifier (URI fragment) does not match the name of any section at the destination page; or something else? In the former case, it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a regex that would match malformed anchors, and maybe after creating one you could then use AWB or possibly an advanced search to find them (if alternation is not required, which it probably is). If you mean the latter case (no matching section name), you might need a user script of some sort.
I assume you have seen something before that prompted your question, and it would be good to have some concrete examples that could be looked at. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:42, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Excuse the sloppy wording. What I meant is the latter case, that is, "finding links from other articles to a section (or other anchor) in this page that doesn't exist anymore". Take the article Human cannibalism, which is very old, has lots of incoming links (more than 2000 from the article namespace), and has seen a lot of content reorganization over time, including lots of historical stuff moved into continent-specific articles. So I'm sure that many incoming links point to sections that don't exist anymore, because they were renamed or moved elsewhere. I would like to go through these broken section links and fix them, but that would mean finding them first. So what I'm looking for is like "What links here", but with an additional "Show only broken section links" option. Gawaon (talk) 09:49, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This does not exist as a feature of MediaWiki. MediaWiki doesn't even track the fragments in the pagelinks table. See T18561 for the request for the feature. Anomie⚔11:10, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's a great idea, I'll use it! Something like that had already crossed my mind when Mathglot added the tip about searching for individual section links, but I had stupidly assumed sections links would be much more frequent than they actually are. Gawaon (talk) 12:02, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Bot required
A bot is required for another language Wikipedia section to correct spelling in articles. Who can I contact? With respect. Smpad (talk) 08:49, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Colleague Graeme Bartlett, in Talysh Wikipedia there are also many articles that do not have interwikis or categories. I would like one bot both for correcting spelling and for finding articles without interwikis and categories. Is this possible? With respect. Smpad (talk) 09:24, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Smpad, in my experience, it is best to have a solution that does one thing well, and then search for other solutions for other problems, rather than trying to find a jack of all trades, that does nothing very well. Mathglot (talk) 09:31, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Change in URL for the George Washington Papers held at UVA
FYI to anyone editing any George Washington connected articles. This resource is probably one of the ultimate reference sources for Washington facts about dates etc. It has his papers plus various articles about the man.
The old URL was http://gwpapers.virginia.edu (etc).
URL has been changed, the NEW URL is https://washingtonpapers.org/ (etc).
I already posted about this at the GW main article because I ran into an URL warning when I tried to access a reference using the old URL. Don't know if a script for correcting the outdated URL is necessary or even possible, I just wanted people to know. Shearonink (talk) 14:04, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
At this writing Special:LinkSearch finds 172 instances of http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/; 13 in user pages; 3 in user talk; 64 in talk pages; 7 in Wikipedia; and 1 in wikipedia talk (88). So, 172-88=84 instances across 75 articles. That doesn't seem to me to be sufficient to code a bot or even an awb task (unless the lowercase hyphenated title works for all – don't hold your breath).
Trappist the monk - The "not private" warning is what concerned me. I've run into occasional instances here on WP where a previously great resource website was abandoned and then was usurped by a bad actor/scamming website, so yeah...didn't go any further than the warning.
That special link search is very helpful, thanks. I think I'll just go through all the instance of the errant URL in WP articles and manually correct them. Might make up a notice about the change to leave for any editors that have it on their talk etc. Yay Wiki-Gnoming ahead! - Shearonink (talk) 13:54, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was wondering, does there exist any way to quickly find pages with broken templates? This often happens with bracket imbalances, for example this edit, which was missing a closing bracket for the wikilink. This results in the template not being transcluded, with the raw template code being displayed on the page instead of the template. However, I don't know of any ways to find such instances without (a) using Google to search for the template name showing up on a mainspace article, or (b) using Wikipedia's search of the template name and comparing it with the list of articles transcluding a template. I was hoping there would be an easier way. Thanks, S.A. Julio (talk) 21:16, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are a couple of open tasks about 0x0 pdfs on Phabricator. Not sure if those document "permanent" issues, which this apparently was not (which may be a separate problem, of course). IznoPublic (talk) 19:40, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As noted above, this is to signify that it's clickable. It's the same light gray shade used for section links in edit summaries. By the way, if you purge one of these older pages, the timestamps will turn into links. Nickps (talk) 23:17, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done about this. Perhaps an optional setting that turns the links blue? Nickps (talk) 23:18, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I mentioned this in a section higher up on the page, but it may be worth noting that the color contrast of the timestamp with the background, at least on a skin like Monobook, is lower than the WCAG contrast accessibility standards for text of its size. This discussion did make me realize the color is the same as sections in edit summaries, but I wonder if I never had a problem with those because I tend to skim over them, as opposed to me reading the timestamps... (Then again, I don't usually have issues with low contrast. Maybe this is the year where I start turning old...) - Purplewowies (talk) 04:23, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In Vector 2022, I'm getting #FFFFFF for my background and #757A80 for this gray text. That shows as 4.32:1 contrast ratio in the WCAG test, which is a Fail for normal-sized text. Unless I have some special CSS settings installed, which is quite likely, this seems like an accessibility failure that might be worth a site-wide workaround. [Edited to add: I see that the actual color specification is #72777D, which passes the contrast test at 4.51:1, but almost all of the pixels in the text are rendered for me in lighter shades of gray by the operating system's text smoothing function, or whatever makes it look nice in 2024. So the contrast appears to be failing in the real world rather than on paper.] – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:48, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the second link should be #72777D. In any case, if we decide to change the color, I think we should also change the edit summaries' section links, since they are supposed to be the same color. Other than that, I have no objections. Nickps (talk) 16:15, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If I recall correctly, the color was chosen to de-emphasize the links/timestamps in relation to the text of the comment, while still highlighting them as a separate interface component. The color is a standard one from the Wikimedia Codex color palette. There is some discussion about the color at the end of T275729, with some ambivalent comments. Matma Rextalk01:08, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Really? To de-emphasise? I found the grey made the timestamp stand out much more, being a different colour from the text, which is why i hastened to implement the solution given above. Different strokes for different folks, eh? Happy days, ~ LindsayHello06:07, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, to de-emphasize it compared to regular link styling. The idea was to indicate that the timestamps do something now and that they’re not just plain text, but also not have them jump out in the same way that them being bright blue would. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 12:38, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm curious as to why Gray500 was chosen in particular. Apparently it was chosen [a]fter discussing with Design Systems team members but if you ask me, Gray600 was a better choice. Compare 18:06, 30 June 2024 (UTC) (Gray600) and 18:06, 30 June 2024 (UTC) (Gray500) with 18:06, 30 June 2024 (UTC) (the non codex color originally used). Gray600 would still achieve the desired style consistency since it's a Codex color while being closer to the original color and more accessible. I wish we could get some insight as to why the Design Systems team made this choice. Nickps (talk) 18:06, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Speaking solely for myself looking at it on the current monitor I'm using, I can barely see that there's a difference between Gray600 and the regular page text. Gray500 looks closer to the original color to me than Gray600 does. (The joys of subjective design issues!) DLynch (WMF) (talk) 00:25, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I definitely like Gray500 better, it de-emphasizes the timestamp much more than Gray600 (at least on my monitor). I know people don't like changes like this, but I'm reminded of something a forum webmaster once said when he redesigned the entire forum, and all the regulars were complaining: "Give it a week." As in, don't immediately go looking for a way to change things back, take a week to get used to it. If it still bothers you after a week, sure, go implement those CSS fixes, write a plugin to change things back, etc. But you will probably find that you get used to things very quickly, and won't even notice it anymore. --rchard2scout (talk) 07:37, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have no reason to doubt that it looks closer to you. But at the same time the delta E of Gray600 to the original color is lower than that of Gray500, so I'll defer to that instead of just saying that my subjective experience is different. Nickps (talk) 09:05, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You'd also want to add color: #000; inside that block to change the grey text back to black. (By the way, at least on Monobook, the color of the link is below WCAG standards. I don't know how best to bring this up, but it felt worth mentioning somewhere.) - Purplewowies (talk) 04:18, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I thought about describing what I meant and then didn't for some reason. I mean on a new line (or even the same line) inside the curly brackets, like so:
I should have been clearer! Sorry! (And I also think it might be better if it were a preference or gadget--it would be less confusing for people less comfortable with CSS.) - Purplewowies (talk) 05:14, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Your code has fixed this most of the way, but date-text is still generating a cursor upon hover instead of an I-beam, and despite my tinkering I can figure out how to repair that. Any suggestions? Is there any code that just disables this new beta gadget outright? — Fourthords | =Λ= |18:18, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's really a shame. What about just disabling the gadget's code entirely before it renders anything? Is that possible? — Fourthords | =Λ= |04:53, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On Vector the text color is technically not quite black (plus this will not work with dark mode, or if the text itself has color, like the occasional green talk page quotes). I would recommend color: inherit; instead. That said, try out the feature first, you might end up liking it :) Matma Rextalk00:42, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd think this should obviously be a preferences toggle. Is there any reason it isn't? (By the way, your wikitext here breaks compliance with MOS:ACCESS, though I don't know how to fix it. Just a heads-up!) — Fourthords | =Λ= |04:25, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, an editor's draft. These are even more fluid than a Working Draft, and it even says Editor's Drafts are works in progress inside a W3C Group and are not required to have the consensus of the Group participants. These drafts have not received formal review and are not endorsed W3C. These drafts MUST NOT be cited as W3C standards and may or may not become W3C standards. Software MAY implement these drafts at their own risk. Implementation is neither discouraged nor encouraged but can contribute to proposals for further action on a specification. In other words: don't rely on it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:28, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
W3C's work on CSS standardization doesn't make sense to me anymore. There are a ton of properties supported for a half decade or more at working draft or earlier recommendation stage. As such, I think it's completely fair for developers (n.b. not necessarily Wikipedians) to turn to on-the-ground understanding of support for properties (i.e. caniuse.com). Asking such developers why it is what it is seems like the wrong target for your question on the point, and even unnecessarily hostile. IznoPublic (talk) 19:53, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
W3C's work indeed doesn't make much sense (see WHATWG). Personally, I don't know and I don't care why it's never been a "working draft". But I know that the people writing the draft specs are the same people implementing the browsers, so the browsers follow the drafts, and I follow the data that tells me whether the browsers I need to support implement the properties I want to use. Matma Rextalk21:18, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Local time gadget makes a textbox appear at the center top of my screen?
I have the "Change UTC-based times and dates, such as those used in signatures, to be relative to local time" gadget activated, and it's worked fine overall. However, I've lately noticed that if I click the timestamp on a comment on any talk page (such as WT:RFA), I'll end up with a small textbox appearing on the top of my screen. I'm running Google Chrome version 126.0.6478.127. As far as I know this is the first time this has happened, but I can't find any recent changes to the gadget's script that would cause it to act like this. EggRoll97(talk) 07:30, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, didn't know if this was related to the light gray change or was just a general issue. As far as I know this wasn't a problem before the rollout, because the timestamps just appeared in all-black and weren't clickable. EggRoll97(talk) 12:48, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Nthep: No, but the "link copied to clipboard" does appear when I click a timestamp link after disabling the gadget. When the gadget is enabled, it just jumps down to the comment, and creates a small textbox in the center top of the screen that allows me to type (?) in it, but it doesn't seem to actually do anything. EggRoll97(talk) 12:46, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was trying to fix the archive bot. I eventually got it archiving again with this version, however, now it is archiving to Archive 2 without filling up Archive 1. Prior to that edit, I am pretty sure the code was the same as the 2023 season (besides the year change) and it was working fine there last I checked. ✶Quxyz✶13:12, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello! I usually log in at Commons and then, if I've understood correctly, I am supposed to be logged in to all Wikipedia projects automatically. If I then go to French Wikipedia, for example, I am indeed automatically logged in, the same goes for 5-6 other lanugaes, except, recently, here at English Wikipedia, where I now an asked to log in especially, and keep getting "wrong passoword" messages over are over. I can sneak in, though, like I did just now to be able to write this, by using my Watchlist at French Wikipedia, going to a few other language watchlists and then Engish, where I get in like in the good old days, no problem, provided I use that tedious method. Seems to me this should be technically impossible. Any suggestions? SergeWoodzing (talk) 13:50, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if this is related, but I just tried to go to Xtools to look at a user's contribution record, and received a message that I had to log in, which I did by clicking the button. I just have never seen that behavior before. No problem switching to Commons, however. Donald Albury14:57, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Pretty sure something in that set of happenings isn't supposed to. But WMF is currently working on overhauling authentication due to how browsers have changed how they deal with the technology underpinning our current login experience, a symptom of which you may be experiencing presently. IznoPublic (talk) 19:47, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Requests for unblock page not updating
I've noticed that the CAT:UNB page is several days out of date. Normally users that use any of the {{unblock}} templates on their talk page have their request listed here, but as of today, the newest one is dated 25 June 2024. It also shows who last updated the user's talk page; I know of one where I was the last user who edited the page, but it displays as the last edit being from the user themselves (the edit prior to mine). It's not a cache issue either, already cleared mine and refreshed the page. Was a change implemented that might have caused something to break? --Drm310🍁 (talk) 15:23, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have stumbled upon a weird issue with getting the red outline to appear around the mapped object in infoboxes. It apparently make a difference whether one uses "|coords=" or "|coordinates=". For example, see this edit that I just made to Scottish Parliament Building. This is also the case with other infobox templates, such as infobox park (and might well be the case for all such infoboxes). Note that the red outline appears with the field or parameter "coords", but not with "coordinates", which is, or course, what the vast majority of infoboxes currently use. Is there any way to get this error fixed at its source? Abductive (reasoning)05:50, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is not much help regarding the issue but FYI, editing that article, then previewing it, currently shows an error at the top: Page using Template:Infobox building with unknown parameter "coords". The docs at {{Infobox building}} show only "coordinates" as an allowed parameter although it takes {{coord}} as its value. Johnuniq (talk) 06:17, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I just did a test where I replaced "coords" with "bonkers", which broke the infobox but somehow the map survived with the red outline. So, and I'm just guessing, "coords" has long been accepted as an alternative to "coordinates" in infoboxes, and then a change was made which breaks the red outline functionality only for the exact string "coordinates". Abductive (reasoning)07:13, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No. Templates can have different parameters but {{Infobox building}} hasn't been edited since April 2023. It only accepts |coordinates= while |coords= is an unknown parameter and ignored. If there is no or empty |coordinates= then the infobox automatically pulls data from the Wikidata item Scottish Parliament Building (Q2746031). That works on Scottish Parliament Building where you get a map with a red outline even with {{Infobox building}} without any parameters. If you set |coordinates= to something non-empty then you override the Wikidata pull and may get a different result. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:18, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
|coordinates= should always work in any infobox that would reasonably accept latitude and longitude data, per the massive project we did at Wikipedia:Coordinates in infoboxes in 2016–2017 following a 2016 RFC to standardize on that parameter name. |coords= will work if it was retained, but most other coordinate-related parameters in infoboxes were deprecated, converted, and removed. It was a fun project. If you find an infobox that does not support |coordinates=, feel free to ping me or drop a note on my talk page, and I will fix it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:23, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But here's the thing; nearly all articles that have infoboxes are following the documentation that says to put the coord template after the = sign, and that apparently kills the red outline. Abductive (reasoning)20:19, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Whenever I attempt to save my settings (both on mobile and laptop) it instantly resets as soon as I leave the settings page, regardless of whether I have clicked save. Has anyone else experienced this? The main issue for me is the email settings and I am considering just removing my email address so I am not constantly receiving emails, however it does mean that if I forgot my password I will be locked out of my account. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Longhorncowfish (talk) 20:32, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Over the next three weeks, dark mode will become available for all users, both logged-in and logged-out, starting with the mobile web version. This fulfils one of the top-requested community wishes, and improves low-contrast reading and usage in low-light settings. As part of these changes, dark mode will also work on User-pages and Portals. There is more information in the latest Web team update. [18]
Logged-in users can now set global preferences for the text-size and dark-mode, thanks to a combined effort across Foundation teams. This allows Wikimedians using multiple wikis to set up a consistent reading experience easily, for example by switching between light and dark mode only once for all wikis. [19]
If you use a very old web browser some features might not work on the Wikimedia wikis. This affects Internet Explorer 11 and versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari older than 2016. This change makes it possible to use new CSS features and to send less code to all readers. [20][21]
Wikipedia Admins can customize local wiki configuration options easily using Community Configuration. Community Configuration was created to allow communities to customize how some features work, because each language wiki has unique needs. At the moment, admins can configure Growth features on their home wikis, in order to better recruit and retain new editors. More options will be provided in the coming months. [22]
Editors interested in language issues that are related to Unicode standards, can now discuss those topics at a new conversation space in MediaWiki.org. The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the Unicode Consortium, and the coordination group can collaboratively review the issues discussed and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium.
I'm not the most familiar with how the search on Wikipedia works, but I had a question with a recent query. This search (at the time of posting) says there should be 3,381 results, however it appears that only 3,380 pages show up in the results. I was wondering what might be causing this discrepancy (and which page is missing), I'm not sure if it has anything to do with how pages are indexed, if it's the result of page moves/deletions or something to do with cross-namespace redirects. I decided to sort the pages by creation date and return the results in increments of 5, with this page highlighting where the discrepancy occurs. I would be appreciative of any insight into this. Thanks, S.A. Julio (talk) 05:14, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wrong venue. Copied from the edit request at Template talk:Para#Add nowrap for para, which was rejected as "consensus required". April 2023 attempt to seek said consensus received no response. That system leaves a lot to be desired.
I used {{para}} and got a line break after the pipe character. This looked ridiculous and makes little sense. I assume other line breaks would be possible, such as after a hyphen in the parameter name. Adding {{nowrap}} or equivalent would make far more sense than requiring editors to code, e.g., {{nowrap|{{para|archive-url}}}}. While Note 2 below the table at "General-purpose formatting" speaks of nowrap options, I'm at a loss to see how they help my situation. In any event, I don't see how automatic, unconditional nowrap for all uses of {{para}} could be the slightest bit controversial. At the very least, an option could be added to suppress the default of nowrap for cases where horizontal space is limited, such as in tables.
See also Template talk:Para#no line-breaks in output, where a request for this was ignored (or never seen) 13 months ago. As to If the proposed edit might be controversial, discuss it on the protected page's talk page before using this template., well, we've seen how effective that was. ―Mandruss☎21:53, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's unfortunate that the edit request was declined, when this seems like a fairly straightforward improvement and there seems to be a silent consensus to implement. I will plan to implement unless there are objections (courtesy pinging @Redrose64 as edit request responder). (Yes, coming here for this is a little POINTy, but the frustration at the edit request is understandable, and in any case let's not get bogged down by process concerns. Next time, though, I'd suggest replying to or talk page messaging the edit request responder.) Sdkbtalk22:05, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I did reply to Rose, with a ping, a mere four minutes after her rejection. When she hadn't replied after another 25 minutes, I surmised that she wasn't going to. Mea culpa: If I had checked her contribs, I would've seen that she hadn't made an edit after the rejection, so it's likely she left the site during those four minutes. Now self-flagellating for one hour. In any case, Rose doesn't change her mind much in my experience; she's that good.I fail to see any POINTiness here; I'm just playing the cards I was dealt. ―Mandruss☎22:22, 5 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm generally against adding nowrap, and would rather see it's use curtailed. It's causes endless formatting issues for those not using desktop screens, where the auto-formatter would do a better job. Nor do I see how not having 'para' wrap is an improvement, wrapping won't lead to any misunderstanding and may not even be wrapped on different screen aspects. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°01:46, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From a usability standpoint, |archive-url= should all be on one line, not wrapped, because "archive-url" is a single concept (the parameter name) and should not be split in any way, despite the hyphen. I do not find broader ideological opposition to nowrap persuasive if it is applied reflexively to this circumstance without considering the particular situation here. I would find examples of instances in which parameters should be wrapped much more persuasive. Sdkbtalk02:36, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. Applying nowrap to anything longer than a word is really bad practice and causes many issues for mobile, and situations where width is restricted. if you are going to apply it, apply it just to to the param= part, not to values (which can be giant urls) and definitely not to the entire line. A lot has changed in 11 years. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:30, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One of the problems here is that people give examples of common usages of this template. The problem is that those are NOT the only usages of the template. Even the doc page of the template itself has examples of pretty long values that basically form an entire sentence. Making an entire line not wrap is bad. Htm has to be flexible for many situations and if you set a very strict css option on a very generic template block that has very differing uses, you will run into problems like this. Solutions are to make the css more targeted (which in this case means being more strict about what the parameters can be, instead of just wrapping the template around a block of arbitrary text) or applying the css more targeted. |archive-url= for instance is ok.it just requires more thought by those writing the uses. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:57, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@TheDJ: Looks like a limited-participation agreement, but I don't see any edit activity to the template. And this is due to fall off the page in three days. At the least, this comment will keep it for another nine. ―Mandruss☎20:01, 12 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Surely |quote=Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. should be wrapped, although "|quote=" should not be. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 09:59, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support nowrapping the parameter-name, per Sdkb. The left side of param=value is a specific string of characters, not ordinary text, so it's best that it stays unified so it can be recognized or discussed correctly. DMacks (talk) 20:54, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support binding the leading pipe with the first alphanumeric string of the first argument passed to the template. I don't much care if |chapter-url-access= wraps on a hyphen, and certainly the "value" passed to the template should be able to wrap (think |title=Dictionary of Law, Containing Definitions of Terms and Phrases of American and English Jurisprudence, Ancient and Modern: Including the Principal Terms of International, Constitutional and Commercial Law; with a Collection of Legal Maxims and Numerous Select Titles from the Civil Law and Other Foreign Systems 1891), but it's disorienting to receive as output | date=. Folly Mox (talk) 12:11, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Redrose64 (as original declining admin), I count here five editors including myself supporting adding {{nowrap}} to the "parameter name" ($1) of {{para}}, with one editor neither supporting nor opposing that specific implementation, and all of us expect possibly the OP opposing nowrapping all arguments to {{para}}. Is that sufficient consensus for change? Folly Mox (talk) 12:29, 6 June 2024 (UTC)updated 13:39, 6 June 2024 (UTC) per below[reply]
OP (me) supports nowrapping the whole parameter name, including the pipe character, no matter how long the parameter name is. For longer parameter names at the ends of lines, we can waste a little space without costing me any sleep. OP does not support nowrapping the parameter value, if any. ―Mandruss☎12:39, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think consensus has been generated here, although of course I'm involved. Maybe it would make more sense to rerequest the edit at Template talk:Para with a link to this thread, rather than continuing to bump the thread every week and a half to prevent archiving. Folly Mox (talk) 11:31, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Mechanism for requesting a neutral facillitator for RfCs
A mechanism where editors sign up to do this role and get selected/pinged randomly by a bot to make an RfC where the involved editors feel they wouldn't be able to be neutral or facilitate discussion and target common ground. The botched RfC I've done at Talk:United States is what propels me to ask for this, I'm too passionate about it and can't find neutrality/respectful constructive discussion. I'm sure this issue is commonplace and I think this would be a good solution, similar to 3O. Alexanderkowal (talk) 11:59, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's certainly true that there are a lot of RfCs that waste a lot of time or affect results with the way they're initially presented, so there could be something here. We could create a 3O for RfC development, but I'm not sure how often it would be used and I'm not sure how many people there are who loves developing RfCs on topics they have no interest in and would actually be good at doing so. At the end of the day, I think what could be accomplished through such a process could probably get just as much pre-RfC buy-in from just using the talk page to workshop it first. Then if people object to your framing, well they shouldn't helped you to write it. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 13:21, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Alexanderkowal Intermittently I have been trying to play a role of discussion facilitator for an example at Talk:Jinn. IMO Probably three type of experienced users can play such role WP:3O volunteers, WP:DRN moderators and substantial experience in RfC closing. Bookku (talk) 07:28, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
presently #Responding to an RfC says "..If you feel an RfC is improperly worded, ask the originator to improve the wording, or add an alternative unbiased statement immediately below the RfC question (after the {{rfc}} tag). You can also ask for help or a second opinion at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment. ..".
I have seen Robert McClenon play this role at WP:DRN a few times. When filing a DRN case, you fill in a field asking "How do you think we can help resolve the dispute?". It would be reasonable to say "I would like the dispute participants and the moderator to work together to craft a brief, neutral statement and start an RfC."Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 12:19, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am ready to perform this role again when requested. If the other editors do not want to participate, then I will consider whether I can write a neutral RFC based on working with one participant. It takes a minimum of one involved editor and a facilitator. Mediation requires that the principal involved editors be willing to work with the mediator, but facilitation can be done by the facilitator and one involved editor. It is true that one disruptive editor can gum up the process, but one disruptive editor can gum up many processes, and that is what topic-bans are for. It is also true that one really disruptive editor can ignore a topic-ban and break things, but, unfortunately, that is what indefinite blocks are for. Robert McClenon (talk) 13:12, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you need help writing an RFC question, whether it's because you feel you won't write it neutrally or for any other reason, just ask for help at WT:RFC. We're mostly even nice folks over there, and between us, we have many decades of experience with the RFC process. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:01, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Mention drafts after redirects
I propose showing a notice similar to {{Draft at}} to visitors who are being redirected from an article that has a draft, as such: "(Redirected from X; there is a draft at Y)" This proposal was previously added as an idea here, where another editor commented it could technically work and would be useful to have. --Talky Muser (talk) 05:43, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting idea! I'd definitely support having this be an optional option for experienced editors, who might have an interest in improving the draft. I'm a little more wary of showing it to readers, given that they may not understand what draftspace means and how article there may be unvetted. (If we design a notice to appear on all draftspace pages, that could alleviate that issue.) Cheers, Sdkbtalk14:54, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd agree with Cryptic that this shouldn't appear on the article the reader is pointed to, as drafts are not checked for their content like articles are, and things that would never be kept in the reader-facing mainspace are tolerated in drafts. However, I would definitely support this being an option for experienced editors that can be enabled in user preferences (here, the criterion for "experienced editor" only being "knowing that Special:Preferences exists"). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 02:40, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
City Vector Maps in SVG format
I invite the community to consider the following question:
Do articles about cities need vector maps of cities in SVG format - editable, with a full CC-0 license, for free use in any media, publications, presentations, projects, etc.
Let me explain. I have been designing vector maps for many years. Now I have the opportunity to provide a large number of my city maps in SVG format.
I am sure that a map of streets and roads of a city is the main and most necessary content in Wiki articles about cities. In most cases - in articles about cities - there are no such maps. I tried to publish some of my maps in Wiki articles.
And I was extremely surprised that my maps were immediately removed.
Reasons for deletion - some users did not like my nickname, some - my user page (and what is written there) - they considered it advertising, some - generally claim that city maps in articles about cities are not needed at all (most users) - and I’m sure that all these claims are unfounded and constitute a form of vandalism.
Discuss. and all the arguments of the parties can be read HERE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Vectormapper#Maps_and_promotion
My family has been involved in cartography since the 17th century. I have a huge archive of geodata. Personally, I have been designing maps for over 25 years. Much was drawn from satellite images. Vectormapper (talk) 02:43, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I know about this application - Kartographer. It is suitable for creating previews, but not suitable for creating maps in vector formats suitable for use in media. And of course, maps created in the Cartographer project cannot be edited in a regular graphical environment. That is, you can look at them, but actually cannot use them. Vectormapper (talk) 16:50, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
People come to Wikipedia to look at things. Wikimedia Commons is for those who edit. Many cities have so-called gallery pages there (like c:New York City), I think that's the best place to put your vector maps for people (professionals like you, I'm afraid) to reuse them. Ponor (talk) 03:11, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And on the page you indicated (gallery c:New York City ) there is also no good map of New York City.
Compare what is there now and what I offer. FREE and unlimited use.
Well, I hope that my city maps will be used by others in the community - which I see already happening. And I'm very happy about it. Vectormapper (talk) 18:12, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Don't you find it strange that a username CANNOT DISPLAY HIS PROFESSION? For example, a COOK, or a MECHANIC, or an ENGINEER, OR a MUSICIAN? This is not a policy, this is a contrived restriction. And this is obviously wrong. If, for example, a COOK edits a page with methods for preparing jerboa meat in his own tears, then it would probably be correct if the user name is still a COOK, and not “CRUEL_TORMORER OF_JERBOAS” Vectormapper (talk) 16:54, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You're very much allowed to have your profession in your username. You're not allowed to have a username be only the name of a company/organization/etc, or a position in a company/organization/etc, that would imply possible shared use and/or doesn't identify you as being a single person. "Cook" is extremely generic, but wouldn't really imply shared use as it doesn't make sense for an account to be shared between all cooks, but "Trade Union of the Cooks of Example-land" would imply potential shared use. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:45, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My company is registered in the USA, and the name is SOLICITY NAV LLC - there is not the slightest coincidence with the name of the company. Vectormapper (talk) 18:02, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I admire your work, @Vectormapper, but at 300px these maps are just abstract paintings in yellow and green. I'd have them printed on A0, but zooming-in to see the labels and streets (and anything) is too painful on Wikipedia. Kartographer is much better suited for that. Ponor (talk) 11:59, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are you joking? These are vector files and can be scaled to any size. 300 pixels is a tiny preview. You can't see anything in this preview. Vectormapper (talk) 16:45, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So they're good for printing, but not for online viewing. Labels (and streets, buildings...) are of a decent size only when the map is rendered at thousands of pixels, and to get there you need to click on your map (served as a ~300px bitmap in Wikipedia articles), click again, click again and click again, only so you'd get the pristine svg in the browser. And then moving around the map is a pain, at least for the users spoiled by non-static Google or OpenStreet maps. Ponor (talk) 03:03, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Google maps and Open Street maps are good for viewing online, and are completely unacceptable if you need to edit the map, use it in media and presentations, and, of course, for printing at any scale. And it is no coincidence that Wiki articles use SVG files for many images - (schemes, district maps, state and district maps, as well as emblems, flags and coats of arms) - their authors thought that someone would use these images in their projects . And this is absolutely correct. Vectormapper (talk) 03:52, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure about that. I make them so they would look better at the scales used in Wikipedia articles, which is anywhere from 220px to 300px. What we see in articles is always a scaled-down bitmap version of an svg, never the svg itself. Readers will never get 20–40+ MB maps on their devices, even if WMF decides to switch to native SVG support. (after some manipulation, your NYC map just crashed my laptop browser!) Ponor (talk) 14:10, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, first of all, there is a large amount of software for viewing and editing SVG files. In the maps of streets and roads I published, the amount of data is reduced as much as possible for large cities. But New York City is a big city. Nothing can be done about this. Vectormapper (talk) 18:10, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
These are impressive maps, I suspect use on article will depend on individual discussion. One note is that given these are so specifically detailed, they should probably have a date (title or description) to note when their underlying data was obtained. Best, CMD (talk) 03:30, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is a valuable point. But in general, the date of creation of the map is on the file description page. In any case, they are all spring 2024. Vectormapper (talk) 03:44, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Checking my city, I see the map is at least a year out of date. So some data used to construct it was old. So I suppose we need newer versions over time. But I think the idea is good. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:37, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Animations are very useful, but also distracting.
As a matter of policy, the animations on Wikipedia pages should be set up so the reader can choose whether and when to run them. Running them automatically when the page is opened is not necessary or recommended, but if it is done, then there should be a simple way to stop (and restart) them. CCDobson (talk) 15:23, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@CCDobson, the problem isn't policy; most of us want that. The problem is technological. Doing this, and making it work for all the relevant file types in all the web browsers, is apparently complicated. I've linked one of the technical tasks on the side here, if you want to read a bit more about the considerations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:04, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
User-info box
Proposal: Move the "user-info box" up.
The "user-info box" is currently found at the bottom of the user contributions page. See image under 22.
Depending on individual settings it's rather cumbersome to navigate to. I have to scroll past 1000 edits to access it. I suggest it's moved up, perhaps between the search box and the edits. Hypnôs (talk) 20:57, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Idea lab
Allowing Master's theses when not used to dispute more reliable sources
WP:SCHOLARSHIP generally allows PhD dissertations and generally disallows Master's theses, unless they have had "significant scholarly influence." I feel that this is really locking us out from a lot of very reliable sourcing. I understand that these are often not quite as polished as something like a monograph or PhD dissertation, but often times they are the highest quality sources available about very niche subject matters. They are subject to professional review, they cite their sources, and they are published by reliable institutions. Can we really say that these are less reliable than an entry in a historical society newsletter or an online news report from an assuredly hurried local journalist?
Just today I encountered a 2022 masters thesis, East Meets West in Cheeloo University (doi:10.7916/scmr-6237). As far as I can tell, this is the most comprehensive source available on the architecture of Cheeloo University. But I can't use it, since it's a masters thesis, and as far as Google Scholar can tell, it has yet to be cited elsewhere.
I feel that people should be allowed to use masters theses in certain fields (I can only speak for the humanities, I'd be interested to know this from a STEM perspective) so long as A) They are not used to dispute something said in reliable sources and B) They are not used to confer notability. I feel this would strike a good balance of allowing us to use these often very useful sources, while still recognizing that a book, journal article, or PhD thesis is probably preferable if you have the choice between them. I'd love to hear other folks thoughts! Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 00:43, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the stem area I would expect that important research would also be published in journals. I would discourage use of Masters theses rather than disallow. One issue is lack of accessability. Even when referenced, may not be accessible. The lack of "peer" review can also mean there are more errors included. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 02:03, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there any public information generally available about the process of publishing masters' theses for a given university? What level of scrutiny or review is generally applied, etc. I think considering whatever information is available there could lend a lot of clarity to deciding whether a given thesis is reliable. Remsense诉02:09, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The rule in question is a counsel of perfection but perfect is the enemy of good and so WP:IAR applies. By coincidence, notice that today's featured article is about a work which started as a dissertation. The main thing I notice about this is that the readership for this topic is tiny. If you're working on a topic like the architecture of an obscure university that no longer exists, then you're mainly writing to please yourself and so should do what you think best. Andrew🐉(talk) 06:49, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I both agree and don't, to the extent that I don't think less popular topics should be viewed as less important as regards our content policies. Of course, I certainly understand the distinction between there being less available coupled with internal motivation, and that. Remsense诉06:54, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd question whether Master's theses are really subject to professional review or published by reliable institutions. By professional review, I assume you mean that somebody examines them. But unlike a PhD examination or journal peer review, which both act as barriers to publication, getting a low grade on a Master's thesis doesn't stop the thesis existing. The author can still put it online – presumably without the grade. Also, and speaking as a university teacher myself, the person who examined it examined it as a Master's thesis, not as a piece of publishable research. A middling or good grade means "I think the student did a good job with this material" not "I think this is a reliable source on this subject". As for publication, in my experience most Master's theses are not published (though those that are, e.g. in a journal, certainly become reliable sources). Some university libraries make archived copies available online, but this isn't really the same thing because again, any Master's theses that meets the formal requirements for submission will be there, regardless of quality. – Joe (talk) 07:59, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough, I didn't think about the barrier to publication angle. I guess if we think about them more along the lines of a newspaper article (which can be of wildly different quality) then we could just evaluate them on their own merits. Just like how there is great journalistic coverage of some areas of history and archaeology, there is horrible, misleading coverage; and if it's not used as a major source in the article, it's pretty easy to spot when it's the latter. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 15:42, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Purely anecdotal, but with respect to professional review, the only person on my master's thesis committee (my director) who understood what I was doing left on sabbatical half-way through. His replacement as chair kept me on the straight and narrow in my use of statistics, but knew no more about what I was doing than the rest of the committee. In retrospect, I can say that my thesis did not add anything useful to the sum total of human knowledge. On the other hand, I have dug into the bibliography section in a thesis to find sources I had otherwise missed, but that is a long shot. - Donald Albury16:20, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If we would accept a blog post from the university itself (which would be self-published, primary, and non-independent) for the same kind of contents, then we should probably accept a master's thesis for it. A source only needs to be strong enough to support the weight of the claims it's cited for. If they're non-controversial (e.g., everyone agrees that there are some buildings on the campus), then the source doesn't have to be ideal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:53, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I believe that you are referring to WP:ABOUTSELF. My understanding of that is that we could cite the thesis for statements about the thesis and the author of the thesis, but not for statements about topics covered by the thesis. Donald Albury22:33, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not really. With the possible exception of contentious BLP matter, I think we should accept it for pretty much all non-controversial content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:50, 17 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that rigid exclusion of master's theses does not serve the project well. The language in WP:SCHOLARSHIP regarding Ph.D. dissertations would seem also to address many of the concerns above: Some of them will have gone through a process of academic peer reviewing, of varying levels of rigor, but some will not. If possible, use theses that have been cited in the literature; supervised by recognized specialists in the field; or reviewed by independent parties. (Of course, this issue would also be solved more efficiently by treating this guideline like a guideline to be applied flexibly in service of the mission rather than as a pseudo-policy that must be followed rigidly except in the most exceptional circumstances -- but that seems to be a bit too much to ask these days.) -- Visviva (talk) 04:12, 8 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have come across some very high quality master's theses and agree that rigid exclusion of master's theses does not serve the project well. I had to work around this on Revolt of the Admirals and it was painful. In the case of my own master's thesis, it was thoroughly reviewed by two external examiners (as well as, of course, by my supervisor). It is available online and widely cited in the literature. The PhD was reviewed by three external reviewers, but is not as widely cited, and while also available online, I never got around to publishing it. Hawkeye7(discuss)04:47, 8 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think there's some regional differences here. In Europe, a Master's thesis isn't examined by a committee and their are no external examiners, just the supervisor. – Joe (talk) 06:34, 8 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that theses provide weak arguments for controversial points, as do other sources often accepted as reliable such as news articles or unreplicated one-off studies (I also think that there are many PhD dissertations that are questionable.) But, in writing research on historical topics, I these can be very useful and informative. They often provide a well-cited overview of a particularly esoteric topic that may not be the focus of a book or major study, which interested readers can read an analyze themselves. I like using them when they can be linked so readers can view them. As others have pointed out, At bare minimum, I'd like to be able to cite them even if they aren't standalone. (e.g., sometimes I can get the point cited by a book by a mainstream press, but it covers the topic in a sentence, whereas the dissertation gives the in-depth detail.) Wtfiv (talk) 20:47, 9 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Theses are a mixed bag. Master's thesis even more so. I can say that mine went through a rigorous review process (I had a former president of the Canadian Association of Physicists as an external examiner on mine) as well as one other physics PhD, and had two physics PhD as my supervisors. The comments/feedback were substantive and relevant, and had to be addressed before acceptance.
But go to a different department, in the same university, and the reviewing standards and requirements for a master's thesis are quite different. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}21:34, 9 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As Visviva said above, if people treat the guideline like a policy that "no masters theses can be cited for anything (or they can only be cited if lots of other people cite and repeat what they say, making it unnecessary to cite them), because we assume no masters thesis has ever been reviewed and made reliable; meanwhile, PhD theses are reliable because we're assuming every one has been reviewed by reviewers who know what they were doing", that's a problem (in fact, it's two problems separated by a semicolon). I think it would make more sense, as Visviva seems to be suggesting, to apply the same kinds of evaluative criteria as are supposed to be applied to PhD theses to both PhD and Masters theses, plus OP's suggestion that we don't use them to contradict a more reliable source; together with the fact that tighter sourcing requirements are already in effect for BLPs, medical topics, and various contentious topics, we'd in practice only cite masters theses when there was reason to think they were reliable for the uncontentious thing we were citing them for, e.g. the architecture of a particular university, which seems reasonable. (As WhatamIdoing said, if we'd accept a passing aside in blog post by the university as reliable for saying the buildings were neoclassical, it seems weird to reject a masters thesis all about the buildings being neoclassical.) Notability seems like a separate issue and it seems reasonable to say masters theses also don't impart much notability. -sche (talk) 00:48, 19 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As per Graeme Bartlett's comment, if the underlying research in a master's thesis is of sufficient quality to source, the author should have or would have submitted it for publication to a journal. If sources used in the literature review are beneficial, then just directly cite those, don't cite the thesis (I've used many master's theses to discover references for WP articles, but I've never directly cited the thesis). My thesis was looked at by external examiners but it was certainly not done with the same critical eye as they would have applied to a Ph.D. dissertation. Opening this door seems like a recipe for disaster. Chetsford (talk) 01:04, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think I agree most with WhatamIdoing here. Master's theses face nowhere near the oversight of that PhD theses do, but it's still generally going to be much more thorough work than the newspaper articles that make up the bulk of Wikipedia citations. signed, Rosguilltalk01:35, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I used to teach a Master's course at the University of Birmingham (UK)aimed at non-college grads. The thesis was just part of the course. There's no way these could have been used as sources for Wikipedia. I've seen a US thesis which was also part of a taught course and not reliably published — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doug Weller (talk • contribs) 14:23, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What Doug said. The only use I'd ever consider appropriate for a Masters thesis not already cited in a published reliable source would be as a research tool for references. The level of scrutiny such material gets varies wildly, and none of it is being examined as material intended for publication. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:06, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would sooner accept an undergraduate research paper/thesis than say, a newspaper story from 1900 (which often seem embellished). There's no such thing as a medium that is universally perfect by nature of how it is created. Even the Voyager Record reflects the biases of its creation and the time it was made, despite the immense cost and effort put into it. Wikipedians who place newspaper articles above master's theses are cherry-picking which forms of subpar scholarship they care about. There are many, many examples or allegations of subpar reporting from A-grade or B-grade news organizations. You could browse through criticism sections on The New York Times or Reuters, or reference the criticism levied by people like Alec Karakatsanis. Master's theses should be allowed like most other "reliable" sources - on a case by case basis, subject to comparison to other reliable sources. Such theses are often the best or only source on obscure topics, and average arrive closer to verifiability than their exclusion would. Anonymous-232 (talk) 20:07, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is not really addressing the issues being discussed, which are more about a lack of peer review allowing basic errors in rhetoric and research to be transmitted, rather than the more abstract cultural concerns you're gesturing to. We can't "use them on a case by case basis" if there's no other sources to check them for errors against. They're not reliable.Remsense诉20:18, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that we have a simple, easy to understand rule against citing Bachelor's and Master's theses, and by overturning it, the doors would be opened wide for abuse. tgeorgescu (talk) 11:13, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've used and seen used master's theses in articles, and agree with a lot of the people here. I'm not sure which if any academic departments fully fact check every claim in the master's theses they go on to approve, but the same is true for most publication media. My position can be summarised as Use cautiously and replace with better source where possible.Also, honestly, have yall seen what's out there in the wild in mainspace? The people who frequent this board tend to be responsible editors, and take our sourcing pretty seriously, but the amount of truly garbage sources cited like they're totally unproblematic is deafening. A master's thesis, despite the potential flaws, is head and shoulders above a blog post, a self-published book, a blog post someone uploaded to academia.edu, a google books search result, ViralFinance.info's "Top 150 Most Disuptive Blockchainers of 2019", an Amazon product listing, a 1930s travellogue published by a popular printing house but cited like it's a legitimate historical source for a period centuries prior, literature that's long been superseded by newer research that's more difficult to access than one-click borrowing from Internet Archive, etc.Sorry I kinda lost the trail there. In most cases, a master's thesis will not be the best source. But I don't think we need to (nor, indeed, do) straitjacket ourselves with a blanket ban if no one else has bothered to publish on some obscuratum that would improve an article to include. Folly Mox (talk) 20:52, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Almost completely unrelated, but if we had something like a Reference: namespace, we could attach things like levels of confidence in a source, and represent that somehow to the reader, like changing the little blue clicky numbers from blue to orange for sources that are not too tier. Folly Mox (talk) 20:58, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I see I somehow haven't registered my written support for that project, despite being aware of it for a year or so. I see the allure of wanting to make a big software architecture like that work all across the Wikimedia ecosystem, and have concerns about how it would translate technically into different spaces, ✂️ [three paragraphs of yelling at clouds trimmed and binned] Folly Mox (talk) 04:14, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm here to solicit opinions about what it means for an article to be "ready for the mainspace". This phrase has turned up in hundreds of AFDs during recent years. Here's the story:
You are looking at an article. You have determined that the subject is notable, and that none of the Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion apply to the article. Another editor says to you: "I don't think that article is ready for the mainspace".
Personally, and this is just my own opinion here, I find this "ready for the mainspace" thing a little ambiguous. As you said, as long as WP:GNG is met, an article that is properly sourced (or at least whose topic does) deserves to be in the mainspace. Not all articles are perfect, and by having an article in the mainspace, more people will see it and improve it, which is exactly the purpose of Wikipedia. It's a work in progress! Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 19:45, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
However, WP:DRAFTIFY clearly states that the aim of moving an article to draft is to allow time and space for the draft's improvement until it is ready for mainspace, so maybe a change to that guideline could be required to make it clearer? Cocobb8 (💬 talk • ✏️ contribs) 20:17, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If I couldn't see for myself why the other editor would say that, I'd ask. For myself, I could see saying "not ready for mainspace" for something so poorly or inappropriately written that it does a disservice to the topic and the reader (although I'd probably say specifically what my concern was). Schazjmd(talk)20:12, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In my opinion, if the articledraft meets all of the following it's ready for mainspace:
Is not being discussed at XfD
Would not meet a speedy deletion criterion in article space
Has no identified copyright, BLP, etc issues
Has sufficient sources to demonstrate notability
Has been at least minimally proof-read (perfection is not required, basic readability is).
Has no in-line editing notes ("need to reword this", "add more info here", etc) (excluding templates and hidden comments).
Has no obviously broken templates (if you don't know how to fix it, ask for help before moving). Thryduulf (talk) 21:22, 28 May 2024 (UTC) ("article" changed to "draft" for clarity Thryduulf (talk) 23:20, 28 May 2024 (UTC))[reply]
I'm not sure why you're asking in this venue. The only way to know is to ask the editor making the statement what they meant. Even if it could be done, I don't think it will be helpful to try to establish a common interpretation. Editors should be specific about their concerns. isaacl (talk) 22:15, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The phrase is useless on its own, as it's not specific. It sounds more like you want to revisit the criteria for deleting an article, to examine what should be considered showstopping shortcomings. Commenters in deletion discussions should be encouraged to list those shortcomings. They can optionally add that as a result, the article isn't ready for the mainspace. isaacl (talk) 22:48, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I do not want to revisit the criteria for deleting an article. Also, if you take a look, this phrase frequently is given as a reason for not deleting the articles (but instead moving them to Draft: or User: space).
Consider Wikipedia:Deletion policy#Deletion of drafts: "If an article isn't ready for the main namespace, it can be moved to the draft namespace". Commenters in deletion discussions can listed specific shortcomings, but the deletion policy itself can't. Is this a matter of pure consensus, in which case it's nearly indistinguishable from IDONTLIKEIT (which sounds worse than it probably would be in practice)? Does it mean, e.g., what @Thryduulf said about "Has sufficient sources to demonstrate notability", in which case WP:NEXIST is no longer valid? Would a visibly broken template count as the sort of IMPERFECT thing that the deletion policy won't countenance? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:09, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To be clear, my criteria are for moving a page from draft space to article space, not for moving a page in the other direction (where such issues as broken templates should simply be fixed). Thryduulf (talk) 23:18, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Articles don't avoid deletion to be moved to draftspace simply because they're not ready for mainspace by someone's measure, but because someone thinks there's promise to demonstrate that the topic meets English Wikipedia's standard for having an article. There's no point in trying to retroactively figure out what others have meant by a non-specific phrase they used in the past. Moving forward, users should be asked to provide specific details, assuming that it's not already clear from context what shortcomings are being considered.
Regarding the quote from the deletion policy, I agree that ideally it wouldn't use a vague phrase. I appreciate, though, that the sentence is trying to be a placeholder to cover any scenario where the participants in a deletion discussion agreed that the best course of action was to move the article to the draft namespace. It's essentially tautological. isaacl (talk) 00:05, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If it means "by consensus at AFD", then it should say that. We could change the deletion policy to say that.
In re no point in trying to retroactively figure out what others have meant by a non-specific phrase they used in the past, I don't agree. This phrase seems to mean something to people. You are the only editor who thinks that understanding what we want to communicate (in about a thousand AFDs, in the deletion policy, twice in Wikipedia:Drafts, in more than forty thousand pages all told). When a bit of wiki-jargon has been used tens of thousands(!) of times, I don't think that figuring out what we mean, and whether we all mean the same thing, is pointless. If it doesn't interest you, then that's fine, but please don't tell other editors that what they've been saying is meaningless.
Also, I suspect that in a substantial fraction of cases, "not ready for mainspace by someone's personal standards" is exactly what is meant. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:10, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To clarify, I mean from my view, there's no point in trying to guess at the meaning in a village pump thread. If we're serious about trying to figure it out, we should be systematic: take a sampling and ask the editors in question if they're still around. We can also analyze the discussion threads to see if there is enough context to understand. isaacl (talk) 05:05, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This phrase is used in WP:DELPOL and WP:DRAFTIFY. The village pump is the normal place to discuss confusion that affects multiple policy/guideline/help/etc. pages.
But I'm no longer hopeful that we can have that discussion. If you look at this thread, five editors thought they had something useful to contribute. Then you started posting that you thought it was not helpful to figure out what editors mean, that it's useless, that there's no point – and nobody else has shared their thoughts since. I think you have effectively discouraged editors from sharing their their views. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:54, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The main thing that it means to me is that most claims in the article are sourced, and that they're sourced to enough separate reliable sources to establish notability by just reading the references. Many topics are notable in the sense that sources exist out there somewhere, but implicit in the notability guideline is that the reason we're looking to establish there exist such-and-such many reliable sources about a topic is to use those sources to write the article. Any article that does not actually do this is half-baked. Loki (talk) 04:30, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm aware that there's lots of bad articles out there, if that's what you're asking. I'd still say that the majority of articles meet that standard, and that the overwhelming majority of traffic to Wikipedia is to articles that meet that standard.
I believe that the complaint tablet has about five times as many sentences as the median article and about ten times as many sources. So if that's the standard, we'd probably be deleting about 90% of current articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:19, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To put it another way: The median article is a stub. You have given a C-class article as an example that should be considered a "small article". A quick look at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team#Statistics suggests that my off-the-cuff 90% estimate is correct. Only about 10% of articles (excluding lists, dab pages, etc.) rate as C-class or higher. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:25, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Stub class articles don't necessarily violate this standard. So for instance, I just found a list of stubs and clicked randomly and found Ty Barnett, which clearly meets my standard. Or have Fred Baxter or William Beavers, literally the next two articles I clicked on. All stubs of obscure people, all definitely meet the standard I laid out. Loki (talk) 04:31, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
ORES says the first is Start-class. I think editors might have different opinions about whether it's a long stub vs a short Start, but at 200 words/10 sentences long, it is at minimum on the long side for a stub.
The second is a four-sentence, four-source stub, which might put it around the median article for length, but I think it is above average for sourcing.
The third is also Start-class. It has 2750 bytes of readable prose and 450 words. This is about twice the length of the maximum described in Wikipedia:Stub#How big is too big? The stub tag was removed from the article during an expansion in 2006. I have corrected the WP:1.0 rating on its talk page.
Number of sources only has to be enough to meet the notability guideline. Otherwise it's fraction of claims that need to be sourced that aren't. Loki (talk) 23:39, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NEXIST says that the number of citations required to meet the notability guideline is zero. (Per that long-standing guideline, the sources have to exist in the real world, but they don't have to be cited in the article.) There are no claims in User:WhatamIdoing/Christmas candy that need to be sourced (nothing about BLPs, nothing WP:LIKELY, etc.). Is that "ready for the mainspace" in your opinion? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:51, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I realize that the notability guideline itself says that the sources just have to exist somewhere, and not be actually present in the article. However, it's pretty clear that the reason the notability guideline says the sources have to exist somewhere is so they can be used to write the article.
My big problem with the example article you linked is that it's not clear that "Christmas candy" is a notable subject separate from specific types of Christmas candy. I also think some of the list of examples is more WP:LIKELY to be challenged than you think. I think that for instance someone who did not know what a szaloncukor was is very likely to start out doubtful that it is Christmas candy. Loki (talk) 02:33, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, but someone who doesn't celebrate Christmas and has lived in a Hindu/Buddhist/Muslim-majority country all their life might need to. WP:V still stands, whether you like or not. Cremastra (talk) 12:05, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:V says that it must be possible to find sources (e.g., at a library). It does not say that sources must be cited in the article, except four types of material, none of which are in this article. WP:V is not violated by having those two sentences uncited. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:31, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would guess the editor means:
The article is completely unreferenced, and/or many of the claims are factually dubious
The article is written in English, but is barely coherent. It can be understood, so isn't gibberish, but is an embarrassment and not very helpful.
First, to emphasize the obvious, "ready for mainspace" is a vague subjective term. Probably the only more objective term that could fall under that is "allowed to exist in mainspace" and the most universal standard for that is "likely to survive a reasonably well run AFD". And for an article (NOT article content) NPP and AFC passage ostensibly follow that. Which in turn (presuming no eggregious speedy or wp:not violations) the main criteria ends up being passing wp:notability. Many people (e.g. at AFC, during mentoring, and in this thread) set a higher standard for "ready for mainspace" which is that the content of the article and the article does not have any significant problems or shortcomings. Yes, this is a double standard, and can make AFC a somewhat rough and arbitrary path. But we need to recognize that it is only human by the person reviewing it. If somebody took an article to you that was allowed to exist in mainspace (usually a wp:notability decision on the topic) but which was in really bad or undeveloped shape, would you be willing to bless putting it into mainspace? Most people would want it to meet a higher quality standard before they would personally say "ready for mainspace". North8000 (talk) 19:21, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If I'm not mistaken the "not ready for mainspace" phrase originated in WP:DRAFTIFY and has since leaked into deletion discussions. As everyone here seems to agree, it is very poorly defined phrase and, far from the low bars proposed above, I've seen new page and AfC reviewers invoke it for things like a draft not being long enough or using plain text references instead of {{cite}} templates. Rather than trying to define it, I think we should purge it from guidelines and templates in favour of listing specific problems in an understandable way. – Joe (talk) 12:35, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Rather than trying to define it, I think we should purge it from guidelines and templates in favour of listing specific problems in an understandable way. I agree with this. U ideally we would not move something out of mainspace or disallow moving it into mainspace unless there are problems that are all of specifically identified, actionable, adversely detrimental* and not trivially fixable (anything that is trivially fixable should just be fixed). *"adversely detrimental" means things like failed verification or no evidence of notability, not merely lacking inline sources, cite templates or being "too short". Thryduulf (talk) 12:44, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose we could try to re-define it as "does not qualify for deletion" (either CSD or AFD), but (a) it'd take a couple years for the usage to shift and (b) there is a strong demand from a minority of the community to have ways to get rid of "ugly" (i.e., short) articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:42, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Following up on what @Joe Roe said about DRAFTIFY, I find this in that page:
2a. The page is obviously unready for mainspace, for example:
2a-i. is not a reasonable WP:STUB (e.g. has very little verifiable information, or is interchangeable with a short dictionary entry, but the definition is not good);
2a-ii. or it would have very little chance of survival at AfD;
This suggests that the definition of "not ready for the mainspace" is:
a very short stub, containing either a bad dictionary definition or very little information in general;
the article is not ready because the subject is non-notable; or
the article qualifies for speedy deletion.
Based on this, I suspect that the definition could be reduced to "contains less than about 20 words of encyclopedic content", because a look at Wiktionary suggests that the mode for dictionary definition length is a mere four words, and 20 words would give you one long sentence or several shorter ones. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:45, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A stub should be defined at WP:STUB, not at WP:Drafts.
A stub is a very short article that is accepted in mainspace, despite not meeting other inclusion guildelines. They seem to be inherently acceptable topics, like natural species, capable of expansion. SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:05, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Per WP:STUB, a stub is any short article. Generally, it is taken to be less than about 250 words/10 sentences. There are no minimum requirements in WP:STUB. Cancer is a disease – a mere four words with no sources and no other content – would be a valid stub per WP:STUB.
WP:IDEALSTUB (perhaps that's what you had in mind?) recommends adding "enough information for other editors to expand upon it" and to avoid a {{db-nocontext}} deletion. Cancer is a disease is realistically enough to fulfill that recommendation.
IDEALSTUB also recommends that you "try to expand upon this basic definition", so we could add something like Sometimes people die from it or It is mostly treated with surgery or drugs.
Finally, IDEALSTUB recommends citing a source (though our policies only require this for BLPs, not for articles about diseases), so we could add a link to https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/ or some similar website.
I don't know what you mean by "despite not meeting other inclusion guildelines". The inclusion guidelines are at Wikipedia:Notability and its friends, and none of them require any length or particular content in the articles. Cancer is a disease, unsourced, with nothing else, meets the inclusion guidelines. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:24, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You’re referring to the sourcing requirement speaking to sources that exist, not sources currently listed. Ok, yes you are right. SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:56, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@SmokeyJoe, I wonder whether this list of "three" items could be shortened to two:
The subject is non-notable (in which case, you should usually send it to AFD instead of Draft:)
The article qualifies for speedy deletion (on any grounds, but particularly for {{db-nocontext}}).
I wonder whether it’s actually not a good thing to attempt to tidy up definitions of edge cases. Edge cases are messy, subjective, and cause emotional disputes. Mistakenly precise language can make this worse, setting up a conflict between rules oriented wikilawyers and new content creatives.
The problem I need to solve is: People use the same words to mean different things, which results in (preventable) confusion.
The problem I want to solve is: People have significantly different ideas of what the minimum acceptable amount/type of content for an article is, which results in some preventable disputes (and some non-preventable disputes).
For example, one editor looks at an article and says "Wow, ten sentences, nicely written, I understand what the subject is, and it's even kind of a cool subject. It's WP:NOTFINISHED, but readers will be happy if they run across it, especially if they only need basic information (which is usually the case)."
Another editor looks at the same article and says "It's soooo embarrassing! WP:ITSUNREFERENCED so the whole thing might be made-up nonsense, and readers hate uncited articles. There's been WP:NOEFFORT to improve it. WP:WEDONTNEEDIT, and we do need to hide that WP:Garbage to protect our reputation. There's no chance of it getting deleted at AFD, but it's obviously not ready for the mainspace!"
Some divergence is a desirable thing, but there's very little overlap between those two positions. If we're going to function well, we need to have most of us mostly agree on what the minimum requirements are for something being "ready for the mainspace".
If "ready for the mainspace" is even a soft requirement, then we need to have a shared understanding of what that means, and it needs to be the same for both going into and getting back out of the Draft: space. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:16, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with WAID that there is a real problem here. If you read the subpoints of WP:DRAFTIFY#During new page review, then it's clear that obviously unready for mainspace is intended to refer to a fairly narrow set of seriously problematic articles: something less than a stub, deletion almost certain, etc. But divorced from that context, "not ready for mainspace" admits a much wider range of understandings, as we've seen above. For example, the draftify script leaves the canned edit summary Not ready for mainspace, incubate in draftspace followed by a selection of prespecified reasons why the article is not ready, which include things like it needs more sources to establish notability and it has too many problems of language or grammar – a far cry from very little chance of survival at AfD. A similar message is given to the creator the explain what happened to the article. If you look at the logs, the vast majority of moves to draft use one of these canned reasons: people take their cues on what they should and shouldn't do from the UI in front of them, not the guideline. Taken out of the guideline and into scripts and other pages, the phrase "not ready for mainspace" itself has taken on a life of its own and is used to systematically circumvent the deletion policy on a daily basis. – Joe (talk) 08:12, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Who are these draftifiers? Are they sufficiently qualified/experienced? My biggest concern about NPR approvals was insufficient expectation of experience at AfD, draftifiers are t performing AfD-like decisions, but unilaterally.
The wording of the script, was there any discussion or consensus behind it.
“Not ready for mainspace”. They are very simple word. I think it might be worth an essay, WP:Not ready for mainspace.
I wouldn't know where to start. I've been reviewing draftifications through WP:PERM/NPP requests, CSD R2 nominations and from the logs for years now and I'd say I come across an egregious example just about every time I look. To be clear, by 'bad', I mean something that clearly exceeds the boundaries set by WP:DRAFTIFY and/or what I understand community expectations to be, not my own. I don't want to unfairly single anyone out, but you could check my contributions to the draft namespace for a representative sample. – Joe (talk) 13:44, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Egregious?
Some brainstorming questions, not having looked at your contribution history yet:
Are reviewers systematically applying a higher standard to new articles than would be applied at AfD? I’ve seen that AfC reviewers do this. Could this be explained by an increased expectation of article standard, and AfD voting lagging this change? I know that some people complain about how hard it is to get article deleted at AfD.
Are bad draftifications being done by editors who are not NPRs? And are they doing bad things randomly?
Is there any sense that draftifications are being done to endorse a reviewers POV bias on what content should be in Wikipedia?
Is the problem with this page’s asserted boundaries, or with poor training of NPReviewers? Or with bias from the draftification script(s) due to them proving an easily option for difficult cases? I don’t think that anything in the fairly heavy NPR and AfC training pages instructions to read WP:Drafts. SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:59, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Egregious meaning systematic enough that I feel I have to discuss it with the user and, if they don't stop, pull their NPR right. I think the rest of your questions are good ones and, although I give my anecdotal conclusion on them, I don't have any data to hand (and unfortunately I don't think anyone does, which is why this issue has been festering for years now). I do think the lack of clarity in the phrase "not ready for mainspace"—taken out of context, as discussed above—has contributed to the problem and that's why I think WAID's original question (what is ready for mainspace?) is a good one.
To suggest a concrete next step, there is a list of specific, consensus-backed things that make a page "not ready for mainspace" at WP:DRAFTYES. We could brainstorm what could be added to those, and/or consider making a separate list of things that don't disqualify a page from mainspace. – Joe (talk) 14:13, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My impression:
Are reviewers systematically applying a higher standard to new articles than would be applied at AfD? – Yes. And it's not just one "rogue" editor; it's anyone who doesn't want to be seen "endorsing" or "accepting" an WP:UGLY article. You have to be willing to expend a lot of social capital to follow the written rules. This is one reason I recently suggested a "three strikes and you're out" approach to AFC: On the third time AFC rejects a submission, a bot should do a procedural nomination at AFD. There is no more reliable method of figuring out whether it will be kept at AFD than to send it to AFD.
Could this be explained by an increased expectation of article standard, and AfD voting lagging this change? – Yes, but I don't think that "increased" is the right word. AFD still operates on the written rules (e.g., sources must WP:NEXIST in the real world, but don't have to be cited in the article). NPP and AFC functionally reject this rule and want notability "demonstrated".
Are bad draftifications being done by editors who are not NPRs? And are they doing bad things randomly? – Yes, overly aggressive draftifications sometimes are done by anyone who believes they are defending Wikipedia against ugly articles, but it's not really random. It is an effort to "raise Wikipedia's quality" by forcing other editors to choose between improving the article or having it hidden from readers.
Is there any sense that draftifications are being done to endorse a reviewers POV bias on what content should be in Wikipedia? – I have not seen evidence of, e.g., editors draftifying articles related to geopolitical disputes. There have been times in which we see editors draftifying articles about, e.g., Bollywood actors or African politicians. This could be due to cultural differences (the normal, everyday ways of describing powerful people in some cultures looks like "pure promotional garbage!" in others) and is probably often due to WP:NEVERHEARDOFIT (with that bias applying both the subject and to the newspapers/standard sources in that country).
Is the problem with this page’s asserted boundaries, or with poor training of NPReviewers? Or with bias from the draftification script(s) due to them proving an easily option for difficult cases? – I don't think that training is the problem, because part of Wikipedia's notion of "training" is to watch what others are doing and follow their lead. The problem that I want to deal with is the problem of nobody knowing/agreeing on what those words mean. If we agree that ugly articles should be accepted, then the script should reinforce that. If we agree that ugly articles should be hidden, then the script should reinforce that (and WP:UGLY should be updated to say that ugly articles can be hidden in draftspace).
If two people argue about whether something is ready, it does seem to be a horribly subjective argument over an undefined and unimportant threshold.
If two people argue about whether something is acceptable, one can say “it is acceptable because I accept it” and the other can say “it is not acceptable because I am not accepting it”. It goes to AfD where the decision will be made, deleted or pseudodeleted, or kept in mainspace, proving one of the two to be right. SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:34, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If two uninvolved editors disagree in good faith about whether something is or isn't ready for mainspace, I think it should be declared ready and moved to mainspace but explicitly without prejudice to AfD (obviously nothing is immune from AfD, but it should be made explicit so the psychological bar to nomination is lower). Thryduulf (talk) 13:46, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If two uninvolved editors disagree in good faith about whether something is or isn't acceptable for mainspace, I think it should be declared acceptable and moved to mainspace but explicitly without prejudice to AfD (obviously nothing is immune from AfD, but it should be made explicit so the psychological bar to nomination is lower). SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:52, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think any new wording is worth a try but I'm not sure that it is sufficiently different from "ready for mainspace" to make a difference. We don't generally encounter problems when editors disagree about drafts, because the obvious course of action then is to discuss it at AfD. The problem is that the vast majority of articles moved to draftspace are only seen by two people: the creator, and the reviewer who draftifies it. Reviewers shouldn't, but unfortunately often do (not least through the wording of the automated script), imply that their 'decision' on an article is uncontestable. Even if they don't, creators, especially inexperienced ones, are often ignorant of the fact that they don't have to go along with what the reviewer says. So unless a third party happens to come across the draft, we don't get disagreement, just a creator trying to meet whatever arbitrary standard a particular reviewer has decided is required for mainspace, or just concluding that their contribution has been rejected and giving up. This is incidentally the precise opposite of what WP:DRAFTIFY and most frequent draftifiers say they want to achieve: to "allow time and space for the draft's improvement". – Joe (talk) 14:01, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that “acceptable” is better defined, via tautology with hindsight, than “not ready”. On reflection, I think “not ready” is suggestive that it is ok to Draftify a topic that is undoubtedly suitable, cf meta:Conflicting Wikipedia philosophies and extreme Immediatism.
I think that draftification should include a mandatory link to WP:DRAFTOBJECT, both in the edit summary / move log entry, and in the message posted to the author. I agree with you concern about content creators not knowing all of the rules. SmokeyJoe (talk) 14:41, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that wording helps much. For one thing, it implies that there is a consensus that some articles are "unacceptable", but gives nobody any idea what is "acceptable" and what is "unacceptable". WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:40, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I’ve been trying to remember what I meant seven years ago with “ready for mainspace”. One thing that comes up was that reviewers were expecting citations in a BLP to be “inline”. I think I was attempting to not engage with dubious reasons reviewers were using. This was then quite a new backwater page. I am disturbed to discover my verbiage to have been copied into deletion policy and to have become common phraseology at AfD.
WP:Drafts is not supposed to rewrite WP:N. Pages that pass WP:N are sometimes deleted. Pages that fail WP:N are sometimes kept.
When a reviewer moves a page to draftspace, the reviewer should be justifying their action, not quoting generic statements. SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:33, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is the rule you have in mind that the subject must not only be notable (e.g., NEXIST) but also demonstrate notability (e.g., cite multiple sources)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:26, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Whatever is necessary to convince a consensus of editors that the subject meets English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. This doesn't necessarily require citing multiple sources appropriate for demonstrating that the standards have been met, though that would be an easier route. isaacl (talk) 18:14, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:V is not in the business of deciding whether we should have an article, in any mainspace. It's about which discrete bits of material require inline citations. Uncited material (WP:ITSUNREFERENCED) is not grounds for deletion under WP:V.
If the article violates BLP, then it can't be moved to the Draft: space, either, because BLP applies to all namespaces. Ditto for COPYVIO and G10, which are reasons for immediate deletion and apply to all namespaces.
You are missing the distinction between whether there should be an article about a topic, and whether any given individual content written about that topic is appropriate. For example, Australia is a notable topic about which we should have an article, but an article reading "Australia is land of criminals and man-eating spiders that is permanently on fire. Citation: My ex-girlfriend" should not be in mainspace. Thryduulf (talk) 20:11, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Possibly (it's definitely not a hoax, vandalism is debatable. Unarguably it would fail WP:V) however these are all matters that have absolutely nothing to do with notability and are relevant to whether a page should or should not be in the mainspace. Thryduulf (talk) 01:08, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Prcicely right. There are a lot of topics that pass GNG or ann SNG, and thus deserve to have AN article. But, that does not mean any specific attempt at creating that article is acceptable. That attempt may have serious issues with other policies and guidelines, and need a complete rewrite. Draftspace is a temporary holding pen where that rewrite can take place. Blueboar (talk) 20:05, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, as you are aware, there are other considerations than those explicitly listed at Wikipedia:Notability. That page does link in its introduction to one of the other key guidance pages to consider, Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. I didn't get into it as I find it hard to discuss the entirety of Wikipedia guidance related to having an article at once, and so I linked to the most commonly referenced guidance page in this area. (It wasn't a final proposal for a different wording, just a starting point.) I appreciate you like to use Socratic questioning, but it feels like you're trying to elicit a response that you can counter with your knowledge of current guidance, rather than bringing up additional guidance to consider.. isaacl (talk) 22:58, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps some of the confusion here stems from the fact that deletion is based purely on notability, while draftification can be based on other criteria. Yet, “not ready for Mainspace” gets invoked in edit summaries as an “explanation” for both actions. Blueboar (talk) 00:39, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder whether the typical claim is actually "unsourced" (e.g., if it were a BLP, it'd qualify for WP:BLPPROD) or if the claim is closer to "does not contain a sufficient volume of sources that, in my opinion, clearly demonstrate notability". WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:04, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My opinion is that in new page review, if the page is unsourced, the reviewer should make some attempt to find sources, and if they fail to find sources, they should PROD the article (or BLPPROD) noting that they cannot find evidence of sources, and they should not Draftify, becuase unsourced content is dubious content that should be considered junk.
Do you really believe that "unsourced content is dubious content that should be considered junk"? If someone starts an article on French Renaissance gardens, and it says "French Renaissance gardens were the style of gardens in France during the Renaissance", do you actually think that's worth a {{dubious}} tag? Is it WP:JUNK?
User:WhatamIdoing, I wrote with a few unstated assumptions. I’m assuming a new article, it is completely unsourced, no external links, a single author who is no longer active, and a new page patrollers has tried to find sources, at least by google search. The content is unverified and possibly unverifiable.
French Renaissance gardens is the sort of article I’m imagining. Doubtless it exists, there were gardens in France during the renaissance, and it seems likely that they had a unique style. The information in the page may be true, but may just as likely be made up, embellished, oversimplified, etc. I consider this dangerous, through the process of citogenesis. Is the risk managed by draftififcation? SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:22, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Template:Dubious would be not applicable. That template refers to “a specific statement or alleged fact that is sourced but that nevertheless seems dubious or unlikely. The unsourced article more likely contains BLUESKY plausible stuff.
The WP:JUNK essay is about notability. I am talking about pages that are unverifiable. I don’t agree with that essay defining junk as stuff that fails Wikipedia-Notability. SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:28, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If it's actually unverifiable (which, as you can see from the books cited in Gardens of the French Renaissance, this is definitely not unverifiable), then the material would have to be removed. All material must be verifiable – that means that it must be possible for someone to check whether a reliable source says the same thing, with "possible" defined as including actions such as "getting help from a reference librarian at your own library" or "finding sources through Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library" – though a sentence such as the one I gave does not require an inline citation according to WP:V. For WP:V purposes, it does not require a source even if it is the only sentence in the entire article.
It is not my experience that uncited content is "just as likely be made up, embellished, oversimplified". About half of all sentences in the English Wikipedia are uncited; in my experience, it is not true that half of them (representing a quarter of our content) is made up, embellished, oversimplified, etc. I generally find that only a small proportion of our uncited content is wrong. My impression is that the proportion of wrong-and-uncited content is not as different from the proportion of wrong-and-cited content as one might wish.
I have given you an example of a definitely verifiable (though presently uncited) sentence about a definitely notable subject. Do we agree that "unsourced content" is not necessarily "dubious content that should be considered junk"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:38, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Contemplation of a Proposal: Mandate edit summary linking to WP:DRAFTOBJECT in every unilateral draftification
Proposal: Mandate edit summary linking to WP:DRAFTOBJECT in every unilateral draftification.
The more I think on this years old idea the more I think it should be done. In practical terms, it is a simple thing to write into draftification scripts. For manual draftifications, these draftifiers are probably not experience and the rule is even more important. For consensus based draftifications, via AfD or informal discussion, they should link the discussion.
I suspect the rule should also strongly encourage including WP:DRAFTOBJECT in the usertalk explanation (automatic by the scripts), but not mandated due to occasional complications such as the first page author being an IP or banned user. SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:33, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, but but would it be a good idea, to make it happen in the scripts, and to encourage it in manual edit summaries? It seems to me to be an easy fix to some of the problems you’ve noted (eg newcomers being intimidated). Would it have downsides? It would not fix everything. Would you support this proposal? SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:37, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is the wrong place for proposals, and I would oppose it anyway, as mandating a link to an essay is a bad idea, as it gives the impression that DRAFTOBJECT is a policy without going through the policy validation process. E.g. the "you can't draftify again" part is being misused by some people to object to redraftification a priori, pretending that it isn't allowed. Often the same people who then object to an AfD because AfD is not cleanup, leaving not much room for other options to deal with very poor articles which, yes, aren't ready for the mainspace. Yes, the drafter could in theory do a complete cleanup of the article, providing coherent prose, sources, ... for a subject they know nothing about, where the sources are in a language they don't speak. Realistically speaking though, the best solution is to move the page to draft again and again until the creator or someone else with the time and knowledge to deal with it turns it into an acceptable article. Fram (talk) 10:03, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wrong place? Yes, I know, actually I meant it as contemplation for formally proposing this. I have learned to not propose something without at least one person agreeing with me. If supported, I would start a new page tagged {{Proposal}}. SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:26, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
DRAFTOBJECT *is*, already, pseudopolicy, and the proposal would be defacto ratification.
Redraftification, excepting for WP:COI, is not allowed. It is move warring. Two people disagreeing should not move war, but should discuss, and the perfect forum is AfD.
AfD is not cleanup? No, it is not. Neither is draftification. Draftification is not for cleanup.
What do you mean by a very poor article that is not “ready for mainspace”, to ask the central question of this thread?
If there is any disagreement, it should go to AfD. I firmly disagree with you if you if you think it is ok for one editor to have the authority over another to send their work to draftspace until it meets the first editors undefined standard. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:37, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Pseudopolicy" doesn't exist. Draftofject isn't only about "one editor to have the authority over another to send their work to draftspace until it meets the first editors undefined standard.", it also means that a second editor may not send a page back to draftspace. And the essay gives the right to "one editor to have the authority over other editors to send their own work to main space", no matter how poor. I see no problem with this nor a reason to burden AfD with it. I moved Draft:2025 Rugby Europe Championship to draft twice because it had no sources about the topic but about different topics, but if it could be sourced to good sources it would be a notable subject. An article with such poor sourcing is "not ready for the mainspace". Jesus Calls was draftified, recreated, speedy deleted, and then recreated as Jesus calls. I draftified that one, is that a redractification? And if so, is it for some reason problematic? I redraftified Air 1 (airline) (another editor did the original draftification), why not? Same for Mangkunegara III.
Taking Draft:2025 in Belgium as the example: Why did you decide that we shouldn't have that page in the mainspace?
There is no question about the notability. It would easily pass AFD, and AFC's mandate is to accept pages that will pass AFD. If Thief-River-Faller submits it to AFC, they ought to accept it immediately (assuming they follow their own rules, about which there has been some doubt).
Whoever would accept that page as is would need their reviewer rights removed. "AFC's mandate is to accept pages that will pass AFD." Among many other things. Accepting pages with almost exclusively blatantly incorrect information just because the topic is notable is making Wikipedia worse, not better. The page at the moment has one correct entry, "7 – 17 August: Belgium at the 2025 World Games"; everything else is either speculation or just factually wrong for the topic. I would urge you to reread Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Reviewing instructions, which contains a lot more than "notable = accept". Fram (talk) 21:28, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
See also the second sentence of the next section: "Article submissions that are likely to survive an AfD nomination should be accepted and moved to mainspace" (bold in the original). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:57, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
All the while ignoring the detailed checklist and workflow, which give further, more detailed instructions than the (by definition) simplified summary. I see no good arguments why this page should be in the mainspace as it is now, and putting it in the mainspace while knowing about the issues (which is what you claim a reviewer should do now, if asked by the creator) is basically vandalism, deliberately and knowingly putting incorrect information in the mainspace. Fram (talk) 07:43, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So, if it is notable, I should keep it in mainspace. If it is not notable, I should nominate it for deletion. And if notability is unclear I should tag it with "notability", even if there are (like here) clearly other problems as well. Is there any scenario where you believe draftifications is an acceptable course? Fram (talk) 21:30, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, there are a couple of scenarios for which I would accept and even recommend draftification. The first and most obvious is when the editor(s) working on it want to take that route. The second obvious case IMO is when the subject is not currently notable but is reasonably likely to become notable within the next couple of months. For example, we know that certain events, such as the US State of the Union speech or the United States census, will continue to happen on a predictable schedule, but future events frequently fail Wikipedia:Notability (events) until shortly before they happen. If an article is created a bit too early, when we don't have enough sources/attention from the world at large, but when we also believe such sources will be forthcoming in short order (e.g., a press conference has been scheduled for an announcement), then I think draftification is better than either deletion or keeping it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:15, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that extremely minimal approach to draftification is shared by many, and would leave many very poor new articles in the mainspace. Something like Draft:Science Centre, Patan has now been draftified twice, which is a good thing. Would the subject survive an AfD? No idea, and as discussed elsewhere, it isn't the job of reviewers to do a WP:BEFORE check. Fram (talk) 07:43, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
the proposal would be defacto ratification if in effect the idea is to make DRAFTOBJECT policy then that should be the proposal, rather than discussing edit summaries. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°19:13, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
...which should be obvious given that the current edit summary used by scripts is a paraphrase of the very same essay (Not ready for mainspace, incubate in draftspace). Apparently it's okay to use a non-policy to justify moving tens or hundreds of thousands of articles out of mainspace, but not to remind the creators that they're entitled to move it back? – Joe (talk) 11:21, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My point had nothing to do with adding anything to the summary of automated edits. It was that if editors wanted to make suggestions for new policy they should do so. The comment I was replying to was suggesting that policy should be made via discussion on another topic. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°14:35, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't use that edit summary either, and if you both want a policy about draftification; WP:ATD-I: Recently created articles that have potential, but do not yet meet Wikipedia's quality standards, may be moved to the draft namespace ("draftified") for improvement. Fram (talk) 11:43, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nowhere probably, just like many things around here. Having reliable sources and intelligible prose, being factually correct, and actually being about the topic as suggested by the title, is what I (and in my experience most others who do new page checking) apply. I don't think any of these can be considered really controversial. Fram (talk) 12:01, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This discussion demonstrates that every one of those is controversial:
The only requirement for sources is that they exist - if they don't exist the article should be prodded or sent to AfD, if they do exist add them to the article, if you don't know then look.
If there is no intelligible prose then the article should be deleted (speedy deletion criteria G1, G2, A1, A2 and/or A3 almost certainly apply)
If the article is factually incorrect then it should be corrected or nominated at prod or AfD (unless it's a blatant hoax, in which case it should be speedily deleted under criterion G3).
Nobody would disagree that those are desirable qualities in an article, but whether they constitute a required standard for mainspace is indeed controversial. As just one data point, the existence of {{unreliable sources}}, {{incomprehensible}}, {{disputed}}, and {{off topic}} would suggest that all of the problems you list have been tolerated in mainspace in the past. The lack of a definition of "Wikipedia's quality standards"—AKA being "ready for mainspace"—is the problem that motivated this discussion and, as the discussion shows, it leaves room for a wide range of understandings. – Joe (talk) 12:17, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Feel free to ping me when a policy proposal is put up for a vote. Until then, I don't think anything useful will come from continuing this discussion with you three. The requirements put up here, basically requesting the reviewers needing to do all the work the creator should have done and can do much easier, are mainly based on misreadings of policy ("The only requirement for sources is that they exist", well, no: "Any material lacking an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports[b] the material may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source. " and "The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material" (bold in original). A completely unsourced article may thus be blanked (which would make it eligible for speedy deletion, not really preferable), or by draftifying it "removed" from the mainspace; and the burden to add sources lies with whoever wants it back in the mainspace, the one who "restores material". Putting that burden on new page reviewers is not acceptable (of course they may do so if they wish, but it should never be a requirement). Similarly, "If the article is factually incorrect then it should be corrected or nominated at prod or AfD (unless it's a blatant hoax, in which case it should be speedily deleted under criterion G3)" yes, it should be corrected by the creator or whoever wants the material in the mainspace. Otherwise it will be deleted. It shouldn't be brought to Prod or AfD as these are not for cleanup. "If it isn't about the topic as suggested by the title, then either rename the article or nominate it for prod/AfD." No, if you actually do new page patrol then you will encounter many cases where someone has created an article for topic X by copying their own previous creation about topic Y, and forgot to change all or most of the text. Topic X is notable, the creator is probably knowledgeable and interested in correcting this, but until then we have a completely wrong article in the mainspace (not incomplete, poorly sourced, just wrong). Speedy deleting this as a hoax is very WP:BITEy and draftifying the much more friendly, gentle solution, the middle ground between keeping the mainspace factual and the editor encouraged to continue working on it.
The approach taken by you three seems to be "we need a policy or you can not do this" (even though we have a policy encouraging draftification in such cases), and "you are not allowed to do things which go against this essay here". Oh, and "all the work should be done by the reviewers, not the creators" or (judging from their contributions) people who never patrol new pages, edit draft space, or nominate pages for deletion (like Whatamidoing and Thryduulf) I'll continue to ignore this until you get a policy that actually supports your positions, or until you get a consensus at ANI or so that I should change my approach. Fram (talk) 12:49, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Most of that is not opposing DRAFTOBJECT, which is about empowering the newcomer to get their week at AfD if they want it. Opposing part of DRAFTOBJECT are a few example of something draftified twice, where WP:ATD-I rolled with DRAFTOBJECT would mean that Fram is supposed to send the bad article to AfD with a nomination to Draftify. Maybe “do not Draftify twice” is a soft rule, maybe newcomers mainspacing a draftified article do not actually mean that they want to debate it at AfD. SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:15, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I find your (Fram's) response interesting, because underneath it, it feels like there is a question about whether Wikipedia is a collegial, collaborative project. Several of the examples you give sound like a Wikipedia-as-a-game model: Any sentence could be required to have an inline citation, so if "you" don't have "enough" (or any) inline citations, then "my" move is to capture your article. If you make the right moves, you can get your article promoted back to the mainspace, but I see my role as fundamentally adversarial: I will prevent you from sharing information until you do so in a way that I believe is appropriate, and I will not help you fix any problems you encounter. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:06, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And here I thought the singular purpose of Wikipedia is to be a factual, verifiable encyclopedia that anyone can edit. But all this time it has actually been a social platform where the real goal is to get more precious users by zealously protecting their right to publish whatever they want to the first page of Google. Editor retention above all else. JoelleJay (talk) 09:11, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How the fuck are we going to maintain a "factual, verifiable encyclopedia" if we don't retain editors? – Joe (talk) 09:27, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Editor retention can still be achieved without militantly assuming every article creation is inherently encyclopedic as a standalone regardless of sourcing and content. JoelleJay (talk) 10:15, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Assuming bad faith, hiding their work in place that nobody will ever find it, and refusing to put any effort into even checking whether what they wrote is correct, let alone making trivial improvements to things new editors cannot reasonably be expected to master is not the way to retain editors. Thryduulf (talk) 10:31, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps not, but frankly speaking, if new editors are not either of the mindset to proactively learn those "things new editors cannot reasonably be expected to master" beforehand or of the mindset to look for help afterwards on figuring out the issues with their creation(s), how to fix them, and then try again? Chances are, you won't retain them long-term with your suggested course of action either.
Instead, you'll likely as not lose them shortly after that newness has worn off just enough that people will start expecting them to have picked up on the basics of "articles need to be factual, non-promotional, in readable English-language prose, with sources", the major policies and guidelines, and some slightly-beyond-basic skills like how to create a reference without scattering CS1 errors all over the page, edit a table or infobox without breaking it, and so on. At that point, people will stop fixing their issues for them and expect them to do it themselves—with skills and knowledge they cannot reasonably be expected to have mastered if other people have silently fixed all issues for them so far.
The solution is not "let them figure it out entirely by themselves" nor "fix it for them without even making them try". It is guidance on where they went wrong and how to do it right. And yes, depending on the severity of the issues and how long fixing it is likely to take (and how likely an editor is to even give it a try), sometimes that guidance is better done outside mainspace. AddWittyNameHere12:39, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But what happens is not "move to draftspace, teach them what they need to know, including where to get help, assist them to improve their article and welcome them as a productive editor" but "move to draftsapce where someone can delete in six months". Thryduulf (talk) 13:01, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, hence my won't retain them [...] either (emphasis added) and [t]he solution is not "let them figure it out entirely by themselves" nor "fix it for them without even making them try" (emphasis), i.e. if the aim is predominantly "retaining editors", then absolutely, the current method does indeed not work well for that purpose. I just do not believe the course of action suggested by you would work any better, for the reasons outlined above (and would come with an additional hidden cost: still no long-term retaining of productive editors, but an increase in workload as a result of these editors leaving a little later)
That said, I don't think the primary intended objective of draftification-as-concept is or has ever been "retaining new editors", it is "guarding mainspace from incorrect, dubiously notable and/or unverifiable, but potentially improvable, new articles while retaining the contents somewhere so that (at least in theory, as we all know that this only rarely happens in practice) someone could work on improving it without the hassle of having to get it undeleted first". It is a slightly less BITEy alternative to deletion, but also only slightly so.
That in practice it ends up being less of an alternative to and more of a delayed form of deletion is exactly where the guidance I mentioned comes in: such guidance is lacking, it should not be, and if it were not, it would work towards both objectives (editor retention/mainspace not getting flooded by New Editor's Clueless First Article) and make it a significantly less BITEy alternative to deletion that produces some actually-mainspaceable articles instead of an almost-as-BITEy-delayed-deletion that produces a heap of stale drafts to be cleared like clockwork. AddWittyNameHere14:09, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And where was it decided that mainspace needed to be 'guarded' from such things? Not to state the obvious, but this is a wiki; we don't need a special place where people can work on things. Our editing policy even explicitly states that poor articles, if they can be improved, are welcome. – Joe (talk) 14:19, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And where was it decided that mainspace needed to be 'guarded' from such things? Among various places, in the WP:ATD-I section of the WP:Deletion policy, which states Recently created articles that have potential, but do not yet meet Wikipedia's quality standards, may be moved to the draft namespace ("draftified") for improvement, with the aim of eventually moving them back to the main namespace, optionally via the articles for creation (AfC) process.; the WP:DRAFTIFY of the WP:Drafts explanatory essay, which states The aim of moving an article to draft is to allow time and space for the draft's improvement until it is acceptable for mainspace; during the RfC which proposed the creation of a Draft namespace and which explicitly described one of its potential uses as a successor of the now-historical WP:Article Incubator; during the various discussions and decisions which led to the existence of said now-historical Article Incubator. AddWittyNameHere20:54, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've heard (but not read myself) that if you want to retain new editors who add content, then one of the best things you can do is add an inline tag like {{fact}}, which they will often fix the next day.
Yes, exactly this. Frankly I don't expect the editors who aren't bothered to do even the bare minimum in making their first article PAG-compliant (citing sources in any format) to have any interest in sticking around long-term. If they don't understand they need citations in 2024, despite all the hand-holding alerts and training modules available for new editors nowadays and the ubiquitousness of "citation needed" in English online discourse, then best case scenario is they're a child or geriatric person who doesn't know any better. More likely they're careless, incompetent, a vandal or amateur self-promoter, and/or don't speak English at all, and would be both highly unlikely to continue editing anyway and not the type of editor we'd want to retain regardless. A person who actually cares about contributing would put in some effort and not be discouraged by the mildest difficulty, and a person we'd want to keep around would be familiar enough with "citations" and "what is an encyclopedia" that we wouldn't need to explain very basic concepts that have been universal in secondary education for 30+ years. JoelleJay (talk) 23:45, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@AddWittyNameHere, I'm struck by your comment about skills and knowledge they cannot reasonably be expected to have mastered if other people have silently fixed all issues for them so far. I have said for years that one of the reasons that I stuck around in the early days was precisely because an editor silently fixed wikitext errors for me. I mastered wikitext despite this (welcome) help. I probably would have quit if everything had been reverted or someone had yelled at me for making mistakes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:57, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(@WhatamIdoing: Apologies up-front for the somewhat lengthy response, but this is about as far as I managed to condense it after four rounds of removing extra verbiage.)
Yes, I think that's a common thing for a decent portion of the editors we actually retain: autodidacts and adjacent, to whom seeing someone else do it (or reading the documentation) is enough to pick up on what to do. But that's not the way everyone learns best, or finds comfortable, or has the time and energy to spare for to engage in what is a voluntary internet hobby. "cannot reasonably be expected" was meant to be read as "not a reasonable ask of all or most new editors", not as "impossible for any and every new editor".
"Revert everything/yell at" are certainly not better, but I am not advocating for that, and I am a little puzzled that every response I have gotten in this conversation so far seems to assume I must be in agreement with the status quo simply because I see issues with a specific alternative presented. Rather, I am saying "hey, instead of assuming these are the only options, let's look at what other options might exist. How about, say, Z: neither silent fixing nor silent draftifying, but actual personalized guidance."
(The hows of that are a separate matter. On account of this message already being lengthy, all I'll say about it here is that imo, it's probably best done through a different process than (but if possible, working closely with) NPP/AfC, both because of pre-existing chronic AfC/NPP backlogs and because of different personal inclinations and skill sets between "check large volume of articles for compliance with core content policies" and "guide individual newbies through creating a single core content policy compliant article, tailoring approach to said newbie".) AddWittyNameHere09:24, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As a matter of efficiency (i.e., getting both decent-ish content and not scaring off the newbie; NB that this is different from the fastest way to hide imperfect content), I think that silent fixing will prove better when the newbie is in the first few edits. Most newbies don't manage to make three edits, or to edit on two different days. Purely as a practical matter, then, I wouldn't routinely attempt any personalized guidance at that stage.
I also think that it's supposed to be a verifiable, factual encyclopedia. However, that's not a full and complete description. Consider:
A verifiable, factual encyclopedia produced by people working together collaboratively (e.g., if you created an article by copying/pasting a previous one, and you forget to remove something from the old article, I could blank that off-topic content for you), versus
A verifiable, factual encyclopedia produced by people working adversarially (e.g., instead of fixing an obvious problem, I'll hide the whole thing in the Draft: namespace).
What is this "pseudopolicy" and why is it exempt from actual policies, like Policy and guideline pages are seldom established without precedent[3] and require strong community support. Policies and guidelines may be established through new proposals, promotion of essays or guidelines, and reorganization of existing policies and guidelines through splitting and merging. [...] Proposals for new guidelines and policies require discussion and a high level of consensus from the entire community for promotion to guideline or policy status. Adding the {{policy}} template to a page without the required consensus does not mean the page is policy, even if the page summarizes or copies policy. and Wikipedia has a standard of participation and consensus for changes to policies and guidelines. and The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material and Because a lack of content is better than misleading or false content, unsourced content may be challenged and removed.? JoelleJay (talk) 08:39, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I’m not sure what the point in the green stuff is, but pseudo policy is something that is in practice as policy but without being documented. The most obvious pseudo policy is the guideline WP:N, which is not policy, but is enforced as policy through WP:DEL#REASON#8 (used to be #6). SmokeyJoe (talk) 13:56, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The thing that bothers me about quoting "The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material" in this context is that it seems to mean "Editors are supposed to magically know that I wanted an inline citation for that, even before I saw the page, so they should have provided one in advance of me actually WP:CHALLENGING the content, but since they didn't read my mind, the content should be hidden until they (a) find where I've hidden it and (b) fix it up well beyond the level of adding a source, but so that an AFC reviewer will feel comfortable publicly endorsing it".
"Not ready for mainspace" is pure "I don't like it"-ism
if an article is:
in some form of English
has at least one citation
meets notability guidelines
is not an attack page
is not vandalism
is written in good faith
it *is* ready for mainspace. it does not need to be draftified.
It can be tagged to the skies. It can be ignored in NPP for months or years. It does not need to be put into a box labeled "go away you suck". New articles and new users are awkward teenagers that need a little patience and encouragement and many of them *will* grow into beautiful competent adults. Sending them away to reform school in the mountains is just avoiding dealing with our own discomfort with our own flaws and imperfections.
NPP should ideally be a "gates wide open come on in" group of greeters who are there to welcome new articles and new users to the party. "Hi here's a cocktail. It's crazy up in here. Here's the syllabus and another cocktail and a cookie and also a kitten. Don't mind them, that's a WikiProject, they're kindly fanatics."
Shitty articles are good actually. Shit is fertilizer. Shit is rich in nutrients and promotes growth. Scrubbing the world of shit reduces cholera transmission but also increases the prevalence of autoimmune disorders. There's got to be a balance.
Anyway, IMHO, "not ready for mainspace" is mean and vague and more harmful than helpful. Even the worst article that meets the standard above should be greeted with a compliment sandwich: "Thank you so much for contributing to Wikipedia! Your passion for this topic is so evident. I wanted to let you know that that according to our current guidelines, this article may be [list top 3 problems here]. Let me know if you need any help resolving these issues. We really appreciate you contributing to the sum of all human knowledge. There's so many topic domains that still need attention and we so appreciate your participation in growing the project."
I would very much like all Wikipolicies to be presented as a series of (increasingly unhinged?) rambunctious garden metaphors, and would like to be pinged at the creation of each entry in the series please and thank you. :) jengod (talk) 18:57, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keukenof, said to be the most beautiful garden in the world, requires an awful lot of maintenance. The best Wikipedia articles, in terms of maintaining volunteer sustainability, are spontaneously maintained and updated by passing readers. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:30, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is operating under the assumption that a primary purpose of Wikipedia is cultivating a social community that effusively courts all potential new users, even when it comes at the expense of encyclopedia quality and requires established editors to take time away from editing to mentor newbies. That's fine for the people who want to do that, but a huge proportion of editors are mainspace-only and so would not know about or care to participate in any kind of newcomer-welcoming behavior regardless of whether "building a community" was an actual WP goal, and would interact with newcomers the same way they always would with any other editor they encounter. Meanwhile I would guess a large percentage of those who do get involved in Wikipedia-space are only there for reasons directly related to improving the specific pages or topics they're working in rather than a desire to be part of a broader "Wikipedia movement" or to socialize or do outreach. These are the editors who have their individual motivations for expanding articlespace, enforcing content rules, molding the PAGs, etc. towards what they think the encyclopedia should be; why should they be forced into additional social roles, beyond what is needed for civil discourse between colleagues, in furtherance of the WMF's or other people's agendas for "Wikipedia the Institution", that are not actually backed up by empirical evidence showing they'd have the intended effect, and for which it isn't even clear how the intended result would improve the encyclopedia? JoelleJay (talk) 01:52, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For User:WhatamIdoing especially, I was coincidentally listening to a radio program interviewing an academic horticulturist, who was asked for the definition of a weed: “A weed is a plant that you don’t like”. SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:08, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@JoelleJay, I think you have identified two key points of tension.
The first is that some people are doing things that don't meet their stated goals. For example:
They say that their goal is to comply with policies, but they take actions directly against the Wikipedia:Editing policy, which says Wikipedia is better off when it has more information instead of less.
They say that they want more citations added to articles, but they take actions (e.g., moving pages into Draft: space) that reduce the likelihood of that happening, and don't take actions (e.g., adding {{fact}} tags to newly created articles) that would increase the likelihood of that happening.
The second is that some people are preventing other editors from doing the work that they'd like to do. This, I think, is why we have discussions such as this one. For example, if Alice moves the page into Draft: space without a redirect, that reduces the chance that Bob has for mentoring the new editor, because when articles disappear, new editors are less likely to edit again. If Bob's going to be able to do his work, Alice needs to be a little slower at hiding the WP:IMPERFECT and WP:UGLY articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:17, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know how you're getting any of that from what I said, at all. 1. Per our editing policy, Because a lack of content is better than misleading or false content, unsourced content may be challenged and removed, so just no to the first bullet point. 2. This is a nonsensical dichotomy that isn't worth addressing. 3. Literally every edit is "preventing other editors from doing the work that they'd like to do", just because YOU have decided it's "worse for the encyclopedia" if "Bob" doesn't get a chance to mentor someone doesn't mean this is objective fact, and it certainly doesn't mean it's objectively better that "Alice" doesn't get to remove unsourced and potentially false or misleading junk from the encyclopedia, or that it's "better" if we prevent her from "doing what she wants to do" by forcing her to do more than "consider" options other than removing the material. The author of the content certainly wasn't prevented from "doing what they wanted to do" despite failing to comply with core content policies. If Bob is so worried about draftification hurting a new editor's feelings, then it's up to him to be faster at NPP, or to watch Alice's contribs, so he can insert himself as a mentor for this hapless noob; it's certainly not Alice's responsibility to prioritize Bob's goal of "retaining editors who didn't put even minimal effort into reading our rules" over her own immediate goal of "improving encyclopedia quality". JoelleJay (talk) 00:44, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Per the start of the paragraph from which you quote, Wikipedia summarizes accepted knowledge. As a rule, the more accepted knowledge it contains, the better. NB that "uncited" is not the same thing as "misleading or false content".
What is a nonsensical dichotomy?
I never said that it's better for Bob to get what he wants. I only say that the conflict between Alice's actions and Bob's desire result in these conversations. Alice might be right. Bob might be right. Probably both of them are right sometimes and wrong sometimes, and probably they even agree that Alice really ought to draftify some (worse) pages and Bob really ought to mentor newcomers on some (better) pages. What we won't get is Alice and Bob conflicting with nobody ever starting these l-o-n-g and repetitive discussions about whether the line is drawn in the right place. This symptom (the discussions) indicates that not everyone in our community has the same idea about what's best. This symptom does not mean that either Alice or Bob is wrong.
Note that I never said anything about the quality of the article Alice is draftifying; there is no reason to believe that it contains any "false or misleading junk". Most unsourced pages don't, and many long, heavily cited pages do. Citations are not a magic incantation that protect articles from containing false and misleading junk.
Your proposal that Bob "be faster at NPP" is non-functional. Nothing Bob can do – whether seeing the article first, or editing it, or contacting the original author – can prevent Alice from draftifying the article whenever she thinks that's the best action.
WP:Nobody reads the directions. If your baseline for promising new editors who are "worthy" of mentorship is that they read all, or even some, of the directions before WP:Being bold, then Wikipedia will not outlive you.
I made a diagram that visually translates my understanding of what the phrase "not ready for mainspace" means. What do you think about it? (The boundary between the "not ready for mainspace" and the implied "not unready for mainspace" is the line between the grey and greenish block in the background.)
"Raw LLM" is not a reason to do anything and doesn't belong in this discussion or on this diagram. If it has no problems then it belongs in the article space, if it is a copyvio then it needs to be deleted, if it has other problems (bad grammar, no reliable sources, etc) then it needs to be treated identically to a human-written page with those problems. Thryduulf (talk) 22:00, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that 'Raw LLM' means the ordinary dictionary definition. I'm assuming it means 'Whopping great mess of nonsense, usually including made-up citations to non-existent sources'. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:14, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A page that is a "Whopping great mess of nonsense, usually including made-up citations to non-existent sources" should be fixed (if possible) or deleted (if not). Whether it's in that state because of a human author, an LLM-author or a combination of both is completely irrelevant. The problem is that it's a mess, not who authored it. Thryduulf (talk) 23:35, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I agree, but I understand that many reviewers believe that it's expedient to shift the mess out of the way while you figure out whether it can be (or will be) fixed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:05, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's not currently possible to use an LLM to generate text that doesn't have problems from Wikipedia's point of view. The available models are incapable of generating citations to real, relevant reliable sources, incapable of fact checking, and all their output is of legally ambiguous copyright status. Therefore, if someone uses LLM output without taking steps to address those problems (hence "raw"), it is automatically not mainspace-worthy. If the technology ever improves to the point where it could plausibly generate something we could use directly, then I agree we should evaluate it as if it came from a human, but since that's currently science fiction I think the practice of moving unedited LLM output to draftspace is sensible. – Joe (talk) 10:01, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Add a timeline to Wikipedia pages
Hi,
More than 10 years ago I thought about improving Wikipedia pages, but I was convinced that Wikipedia would logically end up integrating it over time. However, I note that this was not the case even though it would certainly add value to the presentation of the information.
In fact it involves adding a horizontally scrolling timeline in each Wikipedia page in which the topics of the page are located, accompanied by a bunch of events of all types from the period, where each event listed in the timeline would be clickable to go to the relevant Wikipedia page.
This timeline could be enhanced with a zoom to go into more or less detail, as well as filters such as: Characters, History, Politics, Science, Sports... so that its presentation is not too busy.
Clicking on a date or event could also refocus this timeline on the period concerned.
For students, journalists and anyone doing research, this would provide a temporal view of information.
And for all other WEB users another way to navigate your encyclopedia.
In my opinion, this is interesting work which would enhance the encyclopedia by making it evolve qualitatively in terms of ergonomics.
For any clarification if you have not understood the concept, I will be happy to clarify my suggestion with the hope that it will eventually succeed. Htordj62 (talk) 14:54, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is a good idea, but I am afraid that it might not necessarily work when different timelines are considered. For instance, taking something like Dinosaur, would we show the timeline of dinosaur evolution from the Triassic onwards with events such as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, or the timeline (at a completely different scale) of dinosaur research, with the discovery and classification of fossil species and events like the dinosaur renaissance? Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:58, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's right but the scale could be not linear and if you can zoom in/out you can select what you want to see, the idea is not to see complete timeline at first view but to see on page an interesting period.
There is many things to do around this graphically for instance on mouse hover it could break the timeline in several popup timelines depending on different subjects.
What I see in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Horizontal_timeline this is a text textline not a graphic so it is limited, and the idea is not to force the page creator to manage it. I see that like a task of server which extracts dates of the page to build the graphic time line and add it on page.
I see it's easy to make a robot using ChatGpt API to extract from a wikipedia page interresting dates in a JSON file for TimeLineJS. So this kind of robot could parse all Wikipedia page to extract it JSON files then the timeline could be construct for TimelineJS. Htordj62 (talk) 14:58, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"text": {"headline": "Birth of Christopher Columbus", "text": "Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, Republic of Genoa (now part of modern Italy)."}
},
{
"start_date": {"year": 1476},
"text": {"headline": "Columbus Shipwrecked", "text": "Columbus was shipwrecked off the coast of Portugal and swam to Lisbon, where he settled for a while."}
},
{
"start_date": {"year": 1484},
"text": {"headline": "First Proposal to King John II", "text": "Columbus presented his plan to sail west to reach Asia to King John II of Portugal, but it was rejected."}
},
{
"start_date": {"year": 1486},
"text": {"headline": "Proposal to the Spanish Court", "text": "Columbus proposed his plan to the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, who also initially rejected it."}
},
{
"start_date": {"year": 1492, "month": 4},
"text": {"headline": "Capitulations of Santa Fe", "text": "Columbus was granted titles and funding by Ferdinand and Isabella for his westward voyage."}
"text": {"headline": "First Voyage Begins", "text": "Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera with three ships: the Santa María, the Pinta, and the Niña."}
"text": {"headline": "Second Voyage Begins", "text": "Columbus departed on his second voyage with a fleet of 17 ships to explore more of the Caribbean."}
"text": {"headline": "Return from Second Voyage", "text": "Columbus returned to Spain after exploring several islands in the Caribbean, including Hispaniola and Cuba."}
"text": {"headline": "Arrest and Return to Spain", "text": "Columbus was arrested by Spanish authorities in Hispaniola and returned to Spain in chains."}
I'd like to propose some kind of reminder/checker that automatically runs at AN/I, in the style of [187]. Actually reading it back to the user is good, but a given user's computer probably doesn't have the sound turned on all the time, so a pop-up dialogue box, with a five-second delay before the user can click "continue" would probably work too. Something like this:
Here's what you just posted to AN/I:
“
And what the hell is that supposed to mean? You're being very unconsructive here, in fact, you're being a bit of a jerk. Go away, because you are SO not helping. — Swanky Signature (talk :: contribs)
Having a delay for every single reply can really make things really annoying. You also have all the different userscripts for replying (CD, Factotum, etc.) that to make that warning appear to every one of them would be really hard. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:41, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Forced preview was a feature(?) in the early days of the visual editor. However, it previewed the entire page, which would be a terrible experience at ANI.
There's another Wikipedia (Korean, maybe? I can't remember) that does something like this for all posts to their village pump. I don't think it shows your comment. It's more like a message that says "This is the village pump, which is not for random chatting". I don't know for certain how they set it up, but it might be implemented with the 'warn' setting in Special:AbuseFilter. That method would probably work on (almost) all tools. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:24, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:MOS on Music / Song Track Listing Credits
I was reading Let_It_Be_(album) #Track_listing and perplexed to find the tracks credited to Lennon–McCartney. While this was the mythos at the time, later scholarship has done a great job distinguishing many of the Beatles tracks as predominantly or entirely written by Lennon or McCartney. I can't seem to find the style guideline on this, but I assume it's something like "song credits should be as written on the original release."
This is unencyclopedic and ahistorical. While most song credits will line up neatly with later scholarship, some rare cases exist where listed credits were chosen for political or business reasons.
The style guide should default to credits as printed (except in cases where artists changed their name later), but allow for those to be de-emphasized in favor of newer research. For example, Let_It_Be_(album) #Track_listing's writer credits should be almost the same as the lead vocalist credits. Anonymous-232 (talk) 20:16, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The MOS is a style guide that really doesn't deal with what sources are best to use in a given situation, which is why you couldn't find such guidance in it; it's possible that WikiProject Music has some sort of established norm for this, but Wikipedia policy (see WP:V) already greatly favors information in reliable, secondary sources. If such consensus in scholarship exists, and it's cited, I doubt anyone will have an issue with changing the credits of songs to fit that consensus. ~Adam (talk · contribs)02:55, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My gut feeling is that the track listing should match the credit listed on the actual release. Later discussion (whether scholarly research, notable speculation or something in between) is something that should be discussed in prose (maybe accompanied by a list in some cases) that explains the background, why this is a thing that has been researched/speculated about and what the basis for assigning different authorship to each track is. Thryduulf (talk) 09:07, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I find the re-use citation tab to be of limited use, because it only allows using the exact same citation, pages and all. If then I try to edit just the page numbers in the new instance, it will change the page numbers in all instances of that citation, which I do not want. Instead what I'd like to see is the ability to just edit the page numbers in the new instance. I've encountered this use case hundreds of times, when I want to cite the same source but different pages in various places, thus it would greatly ease the burdensome tasks of adding citations. I have yet to encounter a case where i wanted to edit page numbers simultaneously in all instances of a citation. If the latter use case exists, then an option could be provided to change just this instance, or all instances of same citation.
I'd recommend using {{rp}} instead of the page parameter. Using the same source with a ton of different pages multiple times clogs up the reference list IMO. Or you could also use {{sfn}} if you're going to reuse the same page from a source that has multiple pages cited as well. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:09, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I prefer using rich-text edit to source edit, since former is more convenient and faster for me. Instead I now have to use sfn which is a pain, and to get around that very often I use multiple automatically generated citations, via link, of the same source. But that too requires me to go to Google books or a similar source to get the same link again, so again more effort, plus it generates duplicate entire citations of same source. 95%+ of my citations from the same source are for different pages, and I do not need each one of these in the reference list, instead just the last referenced page could be kept in the list Thhhommmasss (talk) 06:22, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, VE is indeed slower if you're working with templates. I find the 2010 Wikitext editor to be the best. It loads fast, has syntax-highlighting, and works with templates fast. You can use WP:ProveIt to autogen cites in source mode. Aaron Liu (talk) 19:40, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The issue isn't the extra second or two that it takes VE to load vs. wikitext, instead t the considerably greater time it takes to to manually type out the wikitext citation template, vs. just clicking to select a source in VE from the reference list, and as noted below, input the new page number into a dialog. Plus, new editors are much less likely to be familiar with wikitext, so this could be another hurdle to participating Thhhommmasss (talk) 22:13, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I do not doubt that the current workflow in VE has things to be desired. However, what I'm saying is that in the meantime, you can use the 2010 Wikitext to edit the pages faster than what you probably currently do. You can use a clipboard manager (including Windows's default, ⊞ Win+V) to copy the parts of the sfn templates right before the page number, and all you'll have to type is e.g. 41}}. While WMDE works on the wish, someone might be able to make a userscript. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:38, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When using Word or gmail, I also prefer their VE, instead of having to use Word markup or html, no matter the templates or other features they may have. I suspect the vast majority of users do too. I know some prefer different, and the proposal has no impact on current wikitext edit, it's only intended to help those who prefer VE. Believe change outlined below should be relatively easy Thhhommmasss (talk) 00:51, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Another approach would be not to save the pages to the reference list, since it is much more common that one wants to reference different pages in the same source, instead of wanting to repeatedly reference the same page. Then when user selects the source from the re-use list, a dialog could pop-up to let the user input the page numbers and save. As noted, I generally use the GUI edit since it is much faster, and I find having to switch to source edit for wikitext templates, just to reference a different page, to be one of the greatest pain points in WP usage. Citing in general is the biggest, most time-consuming chore, probably one of the main reasons people are less likely to edit and why many articles lack sufficient in-line citations, The issues with re-use make this worse Thhhommmasss (talk) 18:38, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A confusion disclaimer should be added to the top of the page for cisgender
[section originally titled: "A confusion disclaimer should be added to the top of the page for cisgender to avoid confusion with the Russian military pact Commonwealth of Independent States often abbreviated as (CIS)"]
i tried searching for CIS Commonwealth of Independent States and i received the page for Cisgender. if somebody who maybe was unaware of the full name of the commonwealth of independent states attempted to search for the frequently used acronym CIS the full page maybe be hard to reach.
Indeed. I did a quick test by searching for CIS with 3 search engines:
Wikipedia's internal search engine:takes me directly to the disambiguation page
Google: First hit was the Center for Internet Security
DuckDuckGo: First hit was the Wikipedia page for Cisgender
So based on that HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC test,;) the search results aren't consistent and likely vary based on the search engine's profile of the user. It also appears Google's algorithm differentiates between CIS and Cis while DuckDuckGo's does not. However, the only one we directly control lands on the disambiguation page. So I'm not convinced there's much we can or should do. Dave (talk) 15:27, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What to do with near-empty lists of names of obscure asteroids?
At Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Meanings of minor planet names: 500001–501000, it was suggested to start a broader discussion about what to do with these lists. We have now 568 (and counting) such lists (Category:Lists of meanings of minor planet names, and while the lower-numbered ones are about notable subjects where the lists are perfectly acceptable as is, the higher-numbered ones are a collection of explanations of the names of obscure asteroids, named after obscure people (e.g. the great-grandfather of the discoverer of the asteroid, Meanings of minor planet names: 623001–624000). Should these be deleted, merged, ...? Simply keeping something like Meanings of minor planet names: 618001–619000, a one-entry list sourced to a primary source, seems to go against all notability guidelines and what is accepted for other topics. And where is the cutoff between the notable ones and the non-notable ones? All ideas to help write an RfC or other proposal about this are welcome. Fram (talk) 07:51, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One problem here seems to be that the structure of the lists that makes sense for the first 20k or so entries is extended to 700k entries. Aggressive merging into larger lists covering 10k-100k asteroids each would already substantially improve the usefulness of these. —Kusma (talk) 09:09, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The number of minor planets actually covered is: two (2). On the whole page. There are nine empty sections with nine empty tables, and one section containing a table that has information about two of them.
I'm okay with the page only having a couple of entries; presumably some others will m:eventually get added. But I would like to consider a rule that says there should not be so many empty sections. IMO sections should be added when they're needed, not merely because the page exists. So that's one thing that could be discussed in an RFC: Should the structure be set up before there is content? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:27, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe empty lists could be removed, and the pages consolidated into larger ranges (say, 500001–600000) with only named minor planets discussed in reliable sources? Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:19, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
These lists of every documented asteroid seem like great to include at Wikisource or Commos, leaving lists of notable ones here for easy navigation Masem (t) 21:41, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is raw published data. Both sister projects can absolutely include them since there is no notability aspects of concern, and there are no copyright issues. — Masem (t) 04:11, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Possibly but Wikidata is more about Metadata to help in computerized searching and linking content. You are not really going to have usable lists there. Masem (t) 05:42, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Meanings of names in general would be notable, so I would support merging until there is about 100 names on a page. THat is so that the page is worth opening. All the empty sections and tables should be removed. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 08:15, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Many of them seem to be non-notable though, sourced (and sourceable) only to the naming institution and not remarked upon elsewhere. There are of course exceptions, but among the higher-numbered ones, these seem to be rare. I don't think either of the two entries here is a notable one. Fram (talk) 09:47, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why do we have lists of non-notable objects sourced to primary databases in the first place? They serve no navigation purpose and so clearly fail NOTDIRECTORY, which would supersede any LISTPURP "informational" rationale. If these objects didn't have a predictable numbering system I doubt even the named ones would be in lists, much less the unnamed ones. JoelleJay (talk) 17:42, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We have discussed putting policies in a separate hyphenated namespace as we do with the manual of style..... but to no avail yet. Pls see WP:GOVP for a whole bunch of different search boxes as seen down below..... that can be found on the namespace pages. You can also select this by the magnifying glass see Help:Searching.
Because the MOS are subpages organized like Wikipedia:Manual of Style/search term you can narrow down a search to just the manual of style (as seen in the box below). If policy pages or guidelines were set up in the same manner it would be an easy search. ....like Wikipedia:Policy/search term. But one of the problems is the MOS is a guideline.... so the search parameter Wikipedia:Guideline/search term maybe confusing and give a multitude of results that aren't actually part of the MOS. It's a conundrum that has never really been solved. It is odd that it's easier to search for Wiki projects then our policy pages because of the hyphenated name setup Wikipedia:WikiProject/search for a project you're interested inMoxy🍁 02:19, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The writing could be “Feel free to search some key words to start reading policy. Editors intimate with Wikipedia policy will usually link relevant policies in discussions.” Alexanderkowal (talk) 05:30, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ingest of SEC EDGAR data into Wikidata for Companies?
I have recently noticed that many company infoboxes are frequently out of date, even though they draw from Wikidata for information like yearly results because it is only updated manually. All of this data is available online through the SEC's EDGAR system, at least for publicly traded companies in the US, so I was wondering whether it would be worthwhile to write a bot that would read SEC data and update Wikidata with it.
Most editors exclusively use a desktop device. They make their additions or changes, preview the result to check appearance, save and move on.
But 75% of Wikipedia traffic comes from mobile devices and only 25% from desktops [189], so the appearance of an article on a phone is much more important than its appearance on a larger screen. The techies have done an excellent job of making the mobile interface attractive, but there is nothing they can do about the content. Long paragraphs and tables with many columns are hard or impossible to read on the phone. Short sections with two or three lines on a desktop may look odd, but work well on a phone where the sections fill half the screen.There are probably many other ways in which content looks good on a desktop, but bad on a phone, or vice-versa.
This is to suggest that
A group of editors work out broad principles for the way articles should be structured so they look good on a phone, which is much the most important reader interface, and if possible also look good on a desktop
The group then systematically reviews the Wikipedia guidlines to make sure they encourage best practices.
I don't think paragraph length should be considered, and I don't see much else to do other than just splitting excessively-wide tables. (And even these have the easy fix option of using overflow:auto.) Aaron Liu (talk) 14:17, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As someone who almost exclusively uses my phone to both read and edit WP… my reaction is: “meh”.
Paragraph length is not a problem. Very wide tables can be annoying, but I can deal with it. Plus, I can always switch over to “desktop” mode if need be. Blueboar (talk) 14:29, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But If our readers have trouble viewing an article, would they scroll to the foot of the article and click that link? They might click on "settings" to see if there is another way to view it. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:20, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I find very large paragraphs hard to read even on a laptop. I get lost in them. The news sites I read (BBC, Economist, Washington Post etc.) consistently keep paragraphs below half a screen long. I assume they have style guides that recommend that as easier on readers.
I've started a thread at VPT about adding scrollbars. I don't think any policy change for shorter paragraphs will happen. There's a lot of hardliners that insist Wikipedia being an encyclopedia means we shouldn't have decoration and shouldn't be comparing ourselves to newspapers. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:17, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Form factor is a consideration in improving readability with paragraph length. Newspapers, with their narrower column width, use shorter paragraphs than books, for example. Text aimed for phones would very much benefit from shorter paragraphs to break up the text column. Appropriate guidance is tricky for web pages due to the wide variety of viewing devices. I do think that editors ought to keep this in mind, though, and lean towards making paragraphs shorter than they might otherwise. isaacl (talk) 15:54, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose, maybe, we could add support for a new markup element like <mb> (mobile break) that would be ignored in desktop mode, but start a new paragraph on a mobile. I don't know if anyone would use it though. We will never get acceptance on any fixed limit to paragraph size, but should ask editors to at least check how their articles look on phones.
That is straying beyond the point of this idea, which is just to get a working group together to discuss ways editors could improve the appearance of their articles on phones, and to adjust our guidelines accordingly. There must be a number of things that would help. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:03, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's not just a matter of inserting paragraph breaks – paragraphs should be constructed to have smaller scopes. The key issue is as you've stated: there are practical limits to how many different devices editors are willing or able to check. The design problem is that a scalable responsive design needs to constrain the layout possibilities in specific ways, but this goes against decades of English Wikipedia tradition. For example, historically, editors position elements as they see fit based on their limited testing. To improve display on narrow width devices, there should be strict rules to follow on floating elements left or right, with size and spacing specifications. I might be mistaken, but my instinct is that there isn't sufficient support for this amongst those who like to discuss these matters. isaacl (talk) 22:19, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(Tapping this out with one finger on my phone) If Wikipedia ignores advances in UI design it will slowly die. I know there is a lot of inertia, but am inclined to be optimistic. Maybe there are three separate threads.
1. Guidelines for editors to make their articles more readable on phones,
2. Technical fixes to make them more readable,
3. Ways to make editors more concerned about how the 75% of readers will view their work.
The last may be the most important. If the buttons at the foot of the desktop edit panel were "Save . Preview . Mobile view . Diffs", and Mobile View showed a window with the article in a typical-sized mobile phone frame, that could do a lot of good. I am sure others who are interested in the future of the mobile Wikipedia will have better ideas, maybe some radical ones. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:11, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikitext at present doesn't provide a way to automatically constrain layout – say, with target slots for floated elements with specific sizes and spacing. Introducing this would be theoretically possible, but would be a very large effort in converting existing articles. So I suspect the existing approach of just relying on editors manually identifying problematic layout and making ad hoc corrections will continue. That has its limits, but probably has the best benefit-cost ratio for now.
The Vector 2022 skin follows responsive design principles, but they aren't enabled due to community resistance. If at some point the community is convinced to allow it to be switched on, there is the possibility of unifying the default mobile skin with the default desktop skin. This will make it easier for editors to simulate the narrow width display of any device, since they will have roughly (though not necessarily exactly) the same appearance as on a narrow desktop window. In the meantime, I agree that a "Preview with default mobile skin" could be helpful.
Regarding general writing guidelines: it's hard to give specific advice when the device display widths can vary so much. I think editors won't want to write for the narrowest width, which would lean towards many small paragraphs, and less dependence on images or other inset info. For better or worse, the reaction to the Vector 2022 skin revealed there are many vocal editors who will remain unconvinced without specific A-B testing performed with a wide sampling of the Wikipedia audience (and maybe not even then). Thus I can only think of broad guidance such as "keep in mind that narrower displays will have less room for floated elements", "paragraphs will take up more vertical space on narrow displays, so keep them a bit shorter", and "avoid really wide tables". I'm dubious, though, that a significant number of editors would find this advice and remember it. It could still be helpful for editors who go around fixing up articles, of course. isaacl (talk) 01:01, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think we will have to rely on editors doing the formatting, rater than trying to enforce it. Most editors will not read the advice, let alone follow it, but it can be useful as something to refer to during discussions, even if it has to be a bit vague. Editors doing clean-up may find it useful. I find that images generally work quite well on the mobile. I use thumbnails with default properties, not too many or they stray far from the text they illustrate. On a mobile, they appear in front of rhe text, which is fine. They should never be more than illustrations, obviously, because blind people cannot see them. That is another subject... But what it we proposed the following at the foot of the desktop edit window?
Publish changes
Mobile preview
Desktop preview
Show changes
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
That is, strongly encourage editors to look at the 75% view before saving. Of course, some will pay no attention to how the page looks on a phone, but more editors may start considering it. Would there be violent pushback from the editor community if this were done? Aymatth2 (talk) 12:55, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"The techies have done an excellent job of making the mobile interface attractive," Sorry, but this statement makes me distrust anything you say. The mobile interface is a hideous, godforsaken monstrosity. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 11:43, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
An imperfect approach would be to have a preview link with &useskin=Minerva at the end. Update: &useformat=mobile is used by the mobile preview gadget. Editors would have to adjust their browser window width to test different sizes. This could be implemented in a user script or gadget to test it out. isaacl (talk) 13:44, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am not sure that many different sizes are important. If it looks ok on a 40-character wide phone/window and on the editor's full screen desktop, it probably looks ok on other sizes too. But the Mobile preview should open in a window that can be resized. That is detail though. The big question is whether a change like this, affecting all editors, has a hope of being accepted. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:22, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The imperfect approach I am thinking of would just be a link similar to the existing preview link, so it would appear in the same window in the same way. You can resize the window to check any width you want. (I don't really agree that a page can just be checked with one smaller size, but that's a finer level of procedure.) I suggested implementing it as a user script or gadget first, so people can try it out and then its usefulness can be gauged. isaacl (talk) 16:50, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's a gadget "Mobile sidebar preview: show page in mobile view while browsing the desktop site" which shows the mobile view at the side when on the desktop site. I feel like there used to be a gadget/script to do something similar only when editing/previewing, but can't find it now. the wub"?!"17:06, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think "Mobile preview" needs to open a separate window about 2.5" text width plus horizontal and vertical scroll bars . It should not be a gadget that editors have to install, and should not fill the edit window. When I use mobile preview on a page after saving, it shows just a bit narrower than the desktop view, otherwise not much different. Images and infoboxes float as usual. I do not get the effect of viewing on the phone. I can resize the window, although I cannot get it quite as narrow as my phone, but I don't think editors will bother to resize. They will glance at the mobile view, looks fine, move on. When they click on "Mobile preview" they should see it the way it will look on a typical phone. They can then resize to see, e.g., a larger mobile screen.
That said, if we bring this to a formal proposal, we can encourage editors to try the gadget and try mobile preview and resizing. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:35, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would caution against treating your typical experience as being typical for everyone; there are a lot of different devices out there and conditions vary in different countries. That being said, I enabled the mobile sidebar preview (thanks, User:The wub!) and I think it does a reasonable job. If it could be enhanced to support preview during editing, that would be great. isaacl (talk) 17:56, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Assuming a separate window opens, default the size of a typical phone, we could give it a menu (maybe drop-down or icons) to let the user select other common formats. Aymatth2 (talk) 18:49, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Personally, I think just something ~400px wide is enough; the height doesn't really matter much, and the iPhone SE is 375px wide. Aaron Liu (talk) 20:02, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can.t find the gadget. Maybe it has been disabled. I used to have the script that did it while editing, but got rid of it recently. I had not used it for years, and it was acting up.
I don't think this is triggerable from site JS and I'm not saying that a "Mobile preview" button should be abandoned, but most desktop browsers have a responsive-viewport mode. You open DevTools (usually with F12 or Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+i), and click on the button with a phone and a tablet. Aaron Liu (talk) 17:20, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am sure there is a way. If we got agreement, which may be very tough, we should be able to get the MediaWiki software changed to support it if need be. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:46, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, I think it would be a security vulnerability if a web site could trigger your dev tools to launch. I'm aware of this functionality, but I think something like the existing mobile preview gadget is much more likely to be used by a broader segment of editors. isaacl (talk) 17:50, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also note that opening up lots of windows is a common ad spam and malware technique, so browsers started to block that behaviour. isaacl (talk) 18:30, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can't see the browsers blocking Wikipedia when it opens a second window within the first. But maybe it could be done with some sort of <div> floating on top of the edit window, and displaying the visible part of the mobile rendering of the edit box content. I have great faith in the ability of the techies to find a way. Assuming it can be done, what would the more conservative editors object about? They still have the "Desktop preview" button, but now they can see the mobile 75% view. Aymatth2 (talk) 22:54, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In this case the new window would, I presume, be from a click on a link. The target url would return a window the right size and position. But the real question is whether the editors who think mobile phones are just a passing fad will reject the idea out of hand. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:20, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I believe we should reject editors who believe phones are a passing fad instead. Anyway, I feel like the approach of the gadget—adding a button that makes the mobile version show up at the side—would be better than necessitating the editor to switch to another window or unfullscreen the previous one. Aaron Liu (talk) 00:54, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't commenting on a specific implementation for either the existing gadget or a new gadget/script. I was just responding to your reply to my comment on the security concern with opening new windows. Changing the page layout to add a sidebar, which is done by the current mobile preview gadget, sounds more like what you mean by a "sub-window" (there is no sub-window concept per se in HTML, leaving frames aside). isaacl (talk) 01:08, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Publish changes
Mobile preview
Desktop preview
Show changes
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
The important thing, I think, is
The editor sees a line of buttons at the foot of the edit window something like the crude mock-up above
"Mobile preview" is placed before "Desktop preview", since it shows what 75% of readers will see
When they click "Mobile preview", the editor sees the edited page in mobile format, the same size as on a typical phone, with horizontal and vertical scroll bars if needed.
It would be nice, but inessential, to be able to resize the preview to see the appearance on smaller or larger phones or tablets.
If the cleanest way to achieve that is to open a sidebar, no problem. We should stay receptive to other techniques. As I type this reply, I see a preview that shows how it will look on the desktop below. I don't know how that is done. Maybe a sidebar is just a variant.
My main concern is resistance to adding yet another button to the editing interface. I wish we could anticipate the objections. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:05, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, you've already mentioned your concern, and I stated how implementing the feature in a gadget or script would allow feedback to be collected.
Have you tried the current mobile preview gadget? It adds a preview off to the side of the main text flow. You can close it and then there will be a button in the horizontal menu bar below the article title that lets you re-enable the preview. I think using the same interface would be a good way to go. isaacl (talk) 14:28, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I found the problem. Not using the default skin. Yes, that looks good, although it needs sideways scrolling.
I agree. A good first step would be to get a version built for the edit window, and get feedback. Once any problems were cleared, it could be launched from the new "Mobile preview" button. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:55, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think it would be better to just reuse the existing mobile preview button that appears in the horizontal menu bar when the preview sidebar has been collapsed. isaacl (talk) 15:19, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Do you mean the menu bar right at the foot of the page?
Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers Contact Wikipedia Code of Conduct Developers Statistics Cookie statement Mobile view
No. With the mobile preview gadget enabled, there is a sidebar with the mobile preview, which has an "X" button that lets you close it. As I mentioned, this causes a button to appear in the horizontal menu bar below the article title that lets you re-enable the preview (next to the watchlist star). If the gadget were extended so it supported previewing the page during editing, then editors could just turn on the preview using the same button. This re-uses their experience with the mobile preview gadget. isaacl (talk) 16:17, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The little button at the top right. I see it now. That is good when editors are testing out mobile preview, but as long as the gadget is optional, few will see it. Once it is enabled by default, some may click on it. But until a "Mobile Preview" button is enabled beside the "Save Changes" button, editors are much more likely to preview the desktop version and not the mobile version. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:04, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Getting people to try out an optional gadget is how we can gain feedback before changing defaults (such as enabling the gadget) for everyone. isaacl (talk) 22:15, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fully agree. The first step is to get the gadget written. I assume it will be an adaptation of the current gadget, adapted to use the edit window text. Then it is optional for a while until fully proven, then default for a while, then the last step is the "Mobile Preview" button. It could take quite a long time. What would be the right forum to ask for development of the gadget? Aymatth2 (talk) 22:34, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For example, on the pages for “Eating Disorders” and “Anorexia Nervosa” include a section about what hotlines and organizations are available for eating disorder treatment in predominantly English-speaking countries. It’s very likely that struggling individuals may come to wikipedia to learn more about what they’re dealing with, and how someone can access information about treatment is objectively relevant to the topic. Ju1c3machine (talk) 09:34, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm often one to call out "that's not what Wikipedia is for", but I actually agree. Considering it purely from the perspective of building an encyclopedia, treatment and how people seek it is a legitimate aspect of its coverage, and an article is incomplete without it. I'd also say that these sort of resources are relevant external links that would be appropriate to include at the bottom of their article—maybe even in their own subsection under external links if applicable. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 22:52, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One question is, who would be responsible/liable if a reader suffers harm from following a no-longer valid or malicious link from such a page? That is why we have disclaimers on pages about medical topics. Donald Albury23:09, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If a link becomes invalid, how is that any different from other links being caught and updated by editors? Wiki isn't providing services so there's no liability issues- same as if the Yellow Pages contained a hotline that went out of order. Ju1c3machine (talk) 13:49, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
section break 1, mental health topic
Personally, when seeing this, I was curious what other encyclopedias that exist in part/whole online do regarding this, so I went to a few to check. Let me preface this by saying I don't think it's a valid comparison to compare Wikipedia to a print encyclopedia for something like this, because we aren't ever complete and that's okay in part because we are online and perpetually being improved and updated. My opinion and analysis of policies/guidelines is after the list:
Encyclopedia Brittanica - suicide suicide resource box on the side of the page, depression (psychology) crisis information within the first paragraph, no information on article "bipolar disorder", no information on article "schizophrenia".
Encyclopedia.com - suicide basics discusses suicide hotlines existing but no specific links/numbers, depression again discusses their existence, and recommends checking "telephone books' [...] Community Service sections [... or] calling emergency services (911 in most places) but this is at the bottom of this long page. Has an article on "crisis intervention" that doesn't list specifics or how to find. Nothing on article "substance abuse". Of note, however, is that some of these articles have "resources" sections that do list specific phone numbers and/or websites for organizations providing hotlines.
The biggest issue people have with us including them is "scope" or similar. These arguments necessarily reference what Wikipedia is not - either directly or through essays/etc. Relevant policies, guidelines, and essays that have been referenced before or likely to be referenced now are below - along with my analysis of why they don't preclude mental health information from being provided on pages:
From WP:NOT: Advertising, marketing, publicity, or public relations... or issuing public service announcements - nobody's asking for "public service announcements" style of information. What people are asking for seems to be similar to what The Canadian Encyclopedia publishes on their articles directly about suicide. Also from WP:NOT: Simple listings without contextual information showing encyclopedic merit. Listings such as the white or yellow pages should not be replicated. - this is referencing actual lists that are not encyclopedically relevant, not what's being requested here.
From WP:ADVOCACY: Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia which aims to create a breadth of high-quality, neutral, verifiable articles and to become a serious, respected reference work. - as shown above, many encyclopedias do publish resources as part of their encyclopedic mission. Also from Wikipedia:Advocacy § Identifying advocacy: Some editors come to Wikipedia with the goal of raising the visibility or credibility of a specific viewpoint. It may be a hypothesis which they feel has been unduly dismissed or rejected by the scientific community; it may be alternate or revisionist interpretation of a historical event or personage; it may be additions to an article about an organization to portray it in a positive or negative light. The essential problem is that these goals conflict with Wikipedia's mission. Wikipedia is not a venue to right great wrongs, to promote ideas or beliefs which have been ignored or marginalized in the Real World, or to be an adjunct web presence for an organization. Wikipedia cannot give greater prominence to an agenda than experts or reliable sources in the Real World have given it; the failure to understand this fundamental precept is at the root of most problems with advocacy on Wikipedia. - resource information is not advocacy by any definition. The only applicable part of this could be "an adjunct web presence for an organization", but even that doesn't really apply, since nobody is advocating for any specific organization to be represented, but general information. The potential for the resources to be used to advocate for specific organizations can be handled through guidelines on how the specific information displayed is to be selected, where it is to be displayed on the page, and carefully selecting which pages they do display on.
No Righting Great Wrongs is also commonly referenced - but it doesn't apply here. You might think that Wikipedia is a great place to set the record straight and right great wrongs, but that is absolutely not the case. While we can record the righting of great wrongs, we can't actually "ride the crest of the wave" ourselves. - there is no "record" attempting to be "set... straight", and in fact, we wouldn't be "rid[ing] the crest of the wave ourselves". Many encyclopedias that are online include these resources already, and in fact many non-encyclopedia websites do too. We would be following, not leading, in that sense.
The 5 pillars - Wikipedia is an encyclopedia - Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. - again, as showed above, encyclopedias do contain this sort of information sometimes.
Wikipedia:No disclaimers - A disclaimer in a Wikipedia article is a statement or warning that the article is not appropriate, suitable, or guaranteed for some specified purpose. - again, not what's being requested here. While some may desire for these notices to include a statement about what is included in the article, that is not what the basis of this is about. Again, see The Canadian Encyclopedia - a simple statement To reach the Canada Suicide Prevention Service, contact 1-833-456-4566. would suffice, even without the first sentence they include about the content of the article.
Wikipedia:External links - External links normally should not be placed in the body of an article. Nobody is proposing they be placed in the body of the article, but instead in a header or infobox style. And to note, infoboxes already allow external links in them, so there's a huge precedent for external links not being relegated to the bottom of the page when placing them at the top is more useful to our readers. Some acceptable external links include those that contain further research that is accurate and on-topic, information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy. Pretty clear that this is "further research..." and is "other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in the article".
Arguments are also made that the information may become outdated, become malicious, not work when a reader clicks them... but these sorts of arguments don't affect our ability to put other external links in articles, even in the infobox. As always, Wikipedia is never finished, and these notices could be crafted in a way that allows (trusted) editors to update them when necessary. And that's actually the benefit of an online, everyone-can-edit encyclopedia over a print one - a print encyclopedia would not be able to be updated on the spot if/when resources change. Hence why I do not think comparing us to print encyclopedias here is reasonable - because they do have this as a valid reason to not put information into their print versions.
Last thing I'll address in these bullet points is the question of liability that Donald Albury brings up above. To make a slight correction, we do not have disclaimers on medical articles - but the reason we don't is the general disclaimer at the bottom of every page on the wiki. We also have the medical specific disclaimer, but that isn't actually linked directly from the bottom bar, and per our guidelines on disclaimers, shouldn't be linked in specific articles either. If those disclaimers suffice to protect us from liability from pages that explicitly detail current medical practice, and even more so, pages like crisis hotline, rape, suicide, and more to have external links to, phone numbers for, information about, and images that reference them now... then those same disclaimers will protect us if the same information is presented in a different manner/place on the page. If this sort of proposal is further developed, it would be prudent to confirm with legal the wording/etc to ensure they're aware - but they've really never prior regulated the wording of content in that sort of way.
To be quite honest, this is a stylistic decision, and only a stylistic decision. Not an issue of whether it's encyclopedic or not, because other online encyclopedias do include this information at least sometimes (and again, we follow, not lead). Not an issue of whether a link would violate our policy on external links, because such links would meet the three criteria listed there: Is the site content accessible to the reader? Is the site content proper in the context of the article (useful, tasteful, informative, factual, etc.)? Is the link functioning and likely to remain functional? (emphasis mine). It's not trying to right a great wrong, because there is no "great wrong" being righted, this would be purely informational in nature. It's not a disclaimer, because nobody's suggesting this be simply be a warning about what follows in the article (which would be a disclaimer), but to more prominently place relevant and helpful information towards the top of the article in some way. Not advocacy, because nobody is suggesting we advocate for anything - providing this information at the top of the article(s) in question would serve an informational purpose for our readers. While it's certainly within us editors' discretion as a community here to decide "we don't want to provide this information", there's really no policy reason that we can't. And even if there was, If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. Wikipedia exists to be an encyclopedia - "A comprehensive reference work (often spanning several printed volumes) with articles" - and to provide useful articles for readers... in a way that the reader will understand and find interesting. Whether we want to admit it or not, some readers will be directed to Wikipedia when they are searching for information about suicide, mental health, rape, etc. and currently, the primary place they will see it is the very end of articles in External Links - which does not serve our readers who will in a time of distress see a long article and likely never make it to the EL section. For all of the above reasons, I support further discussion, and workshopping of an infobox or top-banner style notice to be placed on pages that would provide this information. I would be happy to workshop some examples of formatting if it would be beneficial to this discussion or an eventual RfC, but I would need others to input on the best way to provide geographically relevant information - is it that the banner links to a separate page (whether in article space, project space, or elsewhere) that contains resources by country/location? Or is it the use of geo-notices as proposed here? Or is there another way that wouldn't require the user to click through to a separate page? -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 01:00, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Whether we want to admit it or not, some readers will be directed to Wikipedia when they are searching for information about suicide, mental health, rape, etc. and currently, the primary place they will see it is the very end of articles in External Links" That's funny. I would have thought that the primary place they would find such information is the articles themeselves. If I were looking for help, therapy, treatment, etc for such things, I wouldn't go to the article about them. I would do a search for "suicide helpline" or "rape crisis center", etc. Sorry, but you still fail to show that WP:NOT doesn't apply. User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:26, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's completely reasonable that someone that suspects they may have a mental health problem may do research about it to see if it really does line up with what they're experiencing. Providing this information in no way detracts from the usefulness of Wikipedia- the only possible effect is positive. Ju1c3machine (talk) 13:47, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am the original poster- I'm saying that if someone is researching a condition, it might be because they're thinking they have it, so including resources would be helpful. Ju1c3machine (talk) 14:31, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Which are you looking to add 1) details about the disorder to "see if it really does line up with what they're experiencing" or 2) places to go for an actual diagnosis, because these are different things. The first is encyclopedically relevant, the second isn't. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:46, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm asking to add resources such as official government sponsored hotlines, because if someone is on the page for a mental illness they think they might have, where to find treatment is relevant and helpful information. Ju1c3machine (talk) 17:57, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, the most likely effect will be that more people will rely on Wikipedia to give them information about helplines, etc., rather than on more relevant and more complete websites. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:32, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As mentioned before, news sites commonly include hotlines at the end of articles about suicide- I don't think anyone has drawn the conclusion that they should head to the NYT for mental health information. Ju1c3machine (talk) 17:58, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see an issue with making a cat hall page to list "recognized" resources for mental health type issues, with "recognized" being either official govt resources (like 988 for the Suicide hotline) or from expert, well known medical organizations in that area. Since these can vary by country, a separate page makes sense, and which could be highlighted by a color keyed navbox. Masem (t) 14:21, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I definitely agree that we might want to limit resources to those that are official/government funded instead of random organizations. Ju1c3machine (talk) 14:32, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How many official/government contact points are we talking about? There are 193 members of the UN plus a few other generally recognized sovereignties, some breakaway states, a number of dependent territories, and many sub-territories (states, provinces, etc.), each of which may have their own resource contact points. So, do we concentrate on providing contact information only for political units with large populations? Sending people to on-line contacts which do not have a local presence will often not be enough. In some places, directing people with problems to official contacts may not be the best way to help them. Maintaining all of that information (protecting it from link-rot, vandals and well-meaning but ill-informed editors) is going to require work from volunteers (edit-protection or pending changes may help, but is not perfect). I am afraid that, based on the typical level of maintenance in Wikipeida projects, a page such as proposed here will end up giving unusable or even harmful information to people seeking help. Donald Albury16:28, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For article content, when the full list isn't feasible, we usually focus on large English-speaking countries plus anything with significance (the oldest, the biggest, etc.).
If this is on a separate list page, there is no reason not to include them all. One or multiple tables (organized by continent) can make for easy navigation. Subpages could be made for North America (US states and Canadian provinces) and any other country where there is such significant lower level govt involvement. — Masem (t) 16:44, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I like the idea of a separate page or a template similar to a navbox, but I think that should only be a partial solution. Again, many articles already include resources (of varying quality and number) at the bottom of the page in the external links section. So adding more resources even further down on the page doesn’t really improve anything here. Maybe I misunderstood you? But I’d prefer it to be an info box style template (whether above, below, or incorporated into the info box if the article had one) with a sentence inviting people to click a link if all they want to see is the resources without having to scroll the article. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 18:56, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On the original idea, of having a section (or paragraph) in articles about various organizations/crisis lines, I think it's a good idea. If the article is organized along the suggested WP:MEDSECTIONS plan, then it would usually go under ==Society and culture==. For example, an article about suicide could mention 1-800-273-8255 (song).
In terms of ==External links==, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles#External links has recommended for years that local/city organizations be excluded (because even if we think it's great that one city has a support group meeting on Thursday mornings for that kind of cancer, that's really not useful information for the rest of the world), and that either a small number of national/international groups be considered for inclusion, or a link to a good Web directory (which does not have to be Curlie, and often shouldn't be). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:37, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is becoming a WP:Perennial proposals issue, but I have several reservations about this practice, however well-intentioned. The evidence of the effectiveness of suicide hotlines is inconclusive.[1] Any endorsement of this health intervention is non-compliant with WP:MEDRS. The inclusion of such resources could a) be taken as condescending by people who have these conditions or b) could encourage faulty self-diagnosis, which would be very problematic. Encouraging the reader to think of their subjectivity as a potential victim of an illness can have deleterious psychological effects. Further, as Donald Albury notes, the work of actually verifying that any given hotline, even if government-sponsored, is actually sincere in its mission and serves to help those who call it represents a massive amount of volunteer effort on a global scale, with a very real risk of sending people to crisis lines that will cause them harm (due to insufficient patient privacy protections, due to inadequately trained personnel or ideologically rather than scientifically-driven therapy practices, etc.). The framing of this entire question feels like a response to a school-assembly PSA: why depression and anorexia? Why not schizophrenia, or BPD? What about illnesses that are not primarily mental, but which almost certainly see a significant amount of traffic from people who suspect that they've contracted them, such as gonorrhea or COVID? Crisis hotline disclaimers are a feel-good solution in search of a problem, and we will certainly find a can of worms' worth of problems if we implement it. signed, Rosguilltalk17:09, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OP here- you might note that the original post uses anorexia as an example- if there are help lines for BPD and schizophrenia then I think those should be added as well. I"m not weighing in on physical illnesses because that's very clearly a matter for doctors, and it's a bad-faith argument to compare the two. "Here's where people that have this can get help'" is in no way condescending or encouraging self-diagnosis, and I'm pretty confused on how you drew that conclusion from what I said at all. Ju1c3machine (talk) 18:06, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that it needs more discussion on what article(s) or topics this would display on. But the mere fact that discussion and hashing out are needed shouldn’t preclude a proposal from moving forward. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 18:57, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think it was warranted after the previous discussion in April, following the two in September2022, following the one in 2019. I just didn't get around to it then. But once this one goes the same way with respect to banners or notices in the lead, we can re-add it. 🤷 Anomie⚔23:03, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But will it? So far, I see nobody objecting to adding some information about the existence and work of support organizations in the body of the article. I think that means there is support for including that information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:51, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't reply under section break 3, but I am very much not opposed to adding information about support organizations in a verifiable and WP:DUE encyclopedic way. What I take issue with is a list of miscellaneous external links, but that's something else. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 04:23, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Whoops, sorry, just woke up and operating pre-coffee over here. I do think that having a separate page of resources sorted by country is the best solution at this point, but I do feel like it's going to spiral into me creating wiki articles for each organization and their work/history eventually... Ju1c3machine (talk) 04:37, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The idea needs some workshopping and refinement, but I support in principle. The page/template would need to be 30/500 protected at minimum, but full or templateeditor protection would be preferable because it would be a definite target for trolls. It might also be worth opening a dialogue with the Foundation to see if they or Trust & Safety might want to give some input. They might even have some resources or a grant for maintaining it. The WordsmithTalk to me17:19, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Pages aren't protected preemptively, and trolls are virtually never extended-confirmed so I don't see what full protection would bring in this case, except making it much harder to add new entries assuming the proposal goes through. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:25, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Articles are usually not pre-emptively protected, though there are some exceptions like Today's Featured Article when it's on the Main Page. Other high-risk pages like the Main Page itself are protected, and we have an entire guideline allowing high risk templates to be pre-emptively protected on a case-by-case basis. Regarding the WP:NOT argument, I think there's a valid WP:IAR exemption that can be justified on humanitarian grounds. The WordsmithTalk to me17:42, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Today's Featured Article is only preemptively protected because previous TFA were repeatedly targeted, and is still only semi-protected. The only preemptively full or template-protected pages, high-risk templates are protected because they are transcluded on tens of thousands of pages and can cause immediate widespread damage to the encyclopedia, while not needing regular updates. A list of information on many organizations will definitely need regular updates, while not being transcluded to the same scale as citation or infobox templates, so full protection is very much not needed. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 18:20, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, but this still falls under WP:NOT. You have still not demonstrated why Listings such as the white or yellow pages should not be replicated. does not apply here, especially with the proposal of making separate pages for this information. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:29, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Information on organizations that treat or provide assistance with a disease is objectively relevant to the Wiki pages aimed to provide information about that disease. Even if that were not the case, I also agree with The Wordsmith on there being a valid exemption to the rule for humanitarian reasons. Ju1c3machine (talk) 18:10, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
See WP:NOTIAR. As pointed by multiple people above, it is not even clear that this would be an improvement to begin with, let alone an improvement to our purpose of being an encyclopedia, and making an exception for "humanitarian reasons" would open the door to a lot more non-encyclopedic stuff that could be justified on the same grounds (humanitarian fundraisers, advocacy groups, etc.) Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 21:02, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like to point out the post from bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez above- I agree that is is an improvement to our purpose of being an encyclopedia, given that other encyclopedias include this information. Ju1c3machine (talk) 10:05, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I addressed this in my comments above. Encyclopedias exist to serve their readers. And sometimes this means we bend the “not a white pages directory”, whether in lists with links to our own articles or lists with external links. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 18:59, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While, yes, encyclopedias exist to serve their readers, that doesn't mean that anything that is potentially useful has to go in an encyclopedia. Lists with links to our own articles aren't anything like a white page directory, and I don't think anyone here would object that a list of notable helplines wouldn't be encyclopedic. But a standalone repository of phone numbers/external links, while useful for some readers, wouldn't be more encyclopedic than a software changelog. WP:USEFUL is not an argument for IAR. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 19:59, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Anything can be an argument for IAR - if it's an improvement. You say it's not encyclopedic, then why do other online encyclopedias generally include them on at least some pages - see above? Further, nobody is suggesting that the list be put in mainspace. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 20:33, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly oppose including any kind of out-of-band helpline links, both for the practical reasons already identified (vetting that they are legit; keeping them up to date; normalising the expectation that Wikipedia is a place to get medical advice) and because there is very limited evidence these things are helpful, and the possibility that they are actively harmful, causing ideation that may not otherwise have crystallised. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 19:41, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can see your point behind causing ideation for something like suicide, but don't see how that relates to other topics, like eating disorders or bipolar disorder. Seeing a phone number for either of those isn't going to make someone 'start' being bulimic or bipolar. Ju1c3machine (talk) 09:46, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not saying that a phone number is going to cause a mental illness, just that mental illness, generally speaking, is a complex phenomenon and its contributing factors are not well understood. I think it is at least plausible that reading an article which is written in a dispassionate, detached, neutral tone, will have a different psychological impact to reading a warning notice that personalises the interaction by suggesting that you might want to call this number if you are affected. This isn't a peer-reviewed comment. It may be an unfounded concern. But this proposal is a public health intervention, so I'd want to have a steer from a medical authority of some sort that it isn't going to cause more harm than good. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:20, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Note - I sandboxed the easiest method of doing this at the top of the page - adding to the infobox either above the image or at the bottom of the infobox - I don't really like either of these ideas since I think that it makes the statement less prominient than it should be, but you can see them here. Of note, I didn't expect WP:Mental health resources to be a blue link. It's a soft redirect to meta:Mental health resources. So it appears that Trust and Safety has already gotten rid of any liability concerns through the normal disclaimers/etc. And obviously it can be maintained, as they are doing it. I think the mere fact this page exists and has been approved by Trust and Safety means that any argument based on "we can't keep it updated" can be put to rest permanently. It would be ideal to have a version of that page adopted to the English Wikipedia however. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 20:31, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I like the sandboxed version (and think at the bottom of the box looks better than at the top from an aesthetic point of view), but that then raises the issue of having to create another page to link to for each illnesses' resources- instead of this just being acceptable to add to a page, it would require creating an entirely new page and linking it, which seems like a bit bigger of a project than I originally intended for. That being said, I really do like the way that Wikimedia's page is formatted, and wonder if it would be possible to create one page for helplines and link to individual sections that are relevant for each topic. Ju1c3machine (talk) 20:44, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In this case, it could be good to have it outside of mainspace (possibly in projectspace instead), and a hatnote at the top of the page would be a more elegant solution than an infobox, as the latter is intended to summarize information. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:47, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A hatnote would be an option, but then you run into issues of "what if a page already has a hatnote"? I know some pages have long hatnotes, but this should really be separate from a hatnote for disambiguation, redirect, etc. reasons, as it's completely separate. I was going to try to sandbox a new "infobox" similar to the topic navigation boxes that show on suicide and other topics, but after everything moved to modules (which is great, don't get me wrong) I really can't be arsed. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 21:29, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm happy for anyone to edit it to be better, but I don't think a simple link to a list without a sentence isn't going to be what is ideal here. If that's all people are okay with it's better than nothing I guess. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 00:52, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose I support anyone applying for money at meta:Grants:Start to develop this idea. Here and every other time this has been proposed, I feel that the early ideas are more harmful than good. Problems include
English Wikipedia is a global service, but there are no crisis support services that are global. There are not even enough regional support services to be satisfactory.
Services are not neutral. Many of them take positions on ethics and values. For example, some crisis hotlines may advise people that their lives will be better if they quit being LGBT+. We should not recommend an external service without having a process to report and evaluate them.
Wikipedia is not prepared to recommend products and services. If we start doing this, then certain organizations get government, foundation, and other funding and while others do not. Organizations will pay staff to persuade Wikipedians, sponsor Wikipedians to travel, send their staff people to conferences, talk about the partnership in the media, and advise the wiki community with expertise that is difficult to evaluate. Managing endorsements requires staff, and the first step is not to make endorsements to see what happens.
Very good point, especially regarding the non-neutral position that Wikipedia would have to take when recommending services. These are not comparable to external links, which are just showing links where relevant information can be found, without recommending the services provided in these links. It's not even a question of "managing endorsements would be complicated". Managing endorsements would make us fundamentally non-neutral. We shouldn't be recommending products and services to begin with. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:02, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A free-to-use government-sponsored emergency hotline is neither a service nor a product. All of the arguments above can easily be handled by just providing official resources. Additionally, the anti-LGBT hotline falls under WP:FRINGE and isn#t relevenat to the current discussion. Ju1c3machine (talk) 16:07, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A free-to-use government-sponsored emergency hotline is neither a service nor a product. It is, by definition, a service. And anti-LGBT hotlines are relevant to the discussion because, sadly, some countries' official resources are anti-LGBT. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:16, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Some countries consider LGBT people to suffer from mental illnesses. You very likely don't want to call a government hotline in Qatar to effectively turn yourself in for being gay. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}12:41, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:FRINGE or not, if you're recommending government hotlines, that's the kind of stuff you risk having in more than a few countries. And given that the readers we link the hotline to will likely trust it enough to share personal details (even if just for the needed context), some of them will actually risk ending up in that situation, with the hotline possibly blaming their LGBT identity as the cause for their condition, even if they didn't reach the hotline through a specific "homosexuality as a mental illness" page. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:33, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's definitely something to keep in mind, but I think the discussion should surround what criteria we are used to provide resources that are safe for users instead of "here's why we should scrap the whole idea". Ju1c3machine (talk) 21:43, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
section break 3, mental health topic
I agree that if there's interest in the idea, the Foundation should be consulted. Normally I'm very opposed to integrating them further into enwiki processes, but this area seems like it would be a logical place for that. Trust & Safety may have even considered doing this already, and might be willing to share and research or insight they have. Maybe they'd even be willing to take care of maintaining the list. It seems like this discussion is to figure out whether there's some interest in the overall idea that's worth developing further, and I think there is. The WordsmithTalk to me16:41, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Any advice on how to move forward from here? This is my first time suggesting something like this on wiki, I'm not super up to speed on what the correct process is. Ju1c3machine (talk) 17:10, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You wait for there to be a consensus here. IMO it's likely this will turn out much the same as previous times this sort of thing has been brought up: between the questionable impact of helplines and the need to be global, something at the top of the article or in the lead beyond a hatnote like we have on Suicide (pointing to Suicide prevention) is unlikely to be accepted. Similarly, a listing within an article is unlikely to overcome WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not a directory. OTOH, a well-written section in the articles (or standalone article, if independently notable) about types of prevention or support would probably be accepted. Anomie⚔01:52, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think we need to operate on the principle, "first, do no harm". I have not seen any WP:MEDRS-compliant source that says whether such helplines are helpful or harmful or neither. I myself suffer from a mental illess (two in fact) and, though I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself, can see that it is by no means self-evident that helplines, or the promotion of them, actually help. Yes, they provide a nice warm glow to the people that operate them or volunteer for them, but I would probably be adversely affected by the suggestion that I should call one. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:26, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I too have mental health issues (+autism, which in my case brings with it a good few issues that do at times interact with my mental health issues), and while I am also not claiming or attempting to speak for anyone but myself, I can confirm your statement beyond a "would be": suggestions of calling a helpline/crisis line have in the past adversely affected me (by setting off an anxiety attack or flashback, mainly), and my experience with actually using such services a handful of times has varied from "slightly helpful" to "harmful". AddWittyNameHere06:33, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like to reiterate (again) that I'm not advocating for the "random volunteer tells you to not commit suicide" type hotlines, I'm advocating for the "hello I think I need to get help for my eating disorder, can you please help me make an appointment with a provider in my area" type hotline. Ju1c3machine (talk) 06:54, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Ju1c3machine: I know you are. (Though not everyone in this discussion is, on both sides). That said, those sorts of hotlines would still adversely affect me, simply because they break down the barrier between "abstract concept" and "this (could) apply to me", which is what such hotlines/their mentions within the relevant contexts are based on: someone realizing "this applies to me" and which leads to either realizing they need help (the type of hotline you advocate for) or spiraling and needing more acute intervention (which the other type of hotline is supposed to provide, at least).
I can absolutely see how that would be helpful in a lot of cases, but at least for me personally, that "barrier-breaking" is more likely to do harm than good. By turning an abstract, distant concept (which, sure, I know happens to apply to me too) into something about me, first and foremost (that happens to apply to other people too) may bring on the "this is talking about me, remember that time when you [...] oh and that perfectly describes that other time when [...]" spiral of flashbacks depending on my state of mind at the time.
Of course, my experiences are my own, and like I said, I can see how it would be helpful in plenty of cases. But that it can do harm alongside good is something I feel should be weighed into decisions. AddWittyNameHere07:37, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can see your point, but also think that it has potential to do a lot of good- for example, I have ARFID, and a suggestion on the page to get help might have saved me a lot of struggle instead of thinking that my eating disorder was just "how I am" or "picky eating", and something worth getting help for. Not to get too personal, but my delay in getting help has lead to being diagnosed with heart disease, likely as a consequence of malnutrition- something that could have been avoided if I had known where to go to get help for it sooner. Ju1c3machine (talk) 12:03, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Likewise, I can also see your point. It has potential to do both good and harm, alongside what's likely the greater bulk of cases—folks to which the issue described does not apply, particularly—in which it has negligible to no impact at all. I do wish there was a better way to figure out how much harm it would prevent vs cause, but if wishes were fishes...
So, barring that, my main reason for mentioning the point (both here and elsewhere in the section) is to ensure that its potential for causing harm alongside preventing it is taken into consideration, in part in whether this is a good idea, but especially in, if it is decided it is a good idea, what way to implement this and what group of articles to apply it to.
(As for too personal, I think sometimes getting personal in discussions about matters like this and accessibility concerns can be pretty useful by illustrating how a change could be/have been helpful (or harmful) in a non-hypothetical manner.) AddWittyNameHere04:44, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've also added a note to the talk page of the meta page for anyone with experience in how this page is used, or from the WMF, to comment here if they so desire. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 17:43, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Berchanhimez: WMF Trust and Safety is great for what they do. They should not change anything.
However, when resources are scarce and the Wikimedia user community wants something versus the Wikimedia Foundation wanting something different, then T&S is going to side with the WMF. In general, T&S prioritizes protection where the WMF as a corporation could be legally liable. T&S do not prioritize lower level safety issues, and if for example, we had democratic governance, then most Wikipedians would vote to eliminate the common familiar problems and not the rare emergency problems. I am not saying that democracy is good or bad in this case, just that the majority of requests/votes would be for things that T&S does not do.
It is not appropriate for the Wikimedia community to freely edit that page on meta. Some pages on meta are sort of owned by WMF staff, and that is one of them. I support that page being there, but it being there does not indicate universal consensus to endorse driving traffic to it or its contents. When a lot of WMF staff edit a page then editors get scared away from raising criticism or concerns or problems.
Again, I support anyone applying for a grant to document all the social and ethical issues that come from making crisis referrals to organizations outside of our platform, and to just take this seriously. Bluerasberry (talk)18:01, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don’t think we’d necessarily need to edit that page or maintain a local copy - even just linking to that page directly in the hatnote (or whatever is decided) would suffice. I can’t really tell what your opinion is - at first, it was reading as that it’s “not possible” to make such a page, but Trust and Safety already has done so and apparently they’re not concerned with the liability from it at all, nor linking/directing to those specific organizations. I’m not suggesting that page is evidence of a consensus - that’s what this discussion is for - but that page is evidence that Trust and Safety has already thought about the issue of “which organizations” and our liability and decided that they are either non-issues or can be properly managed by them vetting the links. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 18:28, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The WMF can do whatever they want on MetaWiki, but having a corporation-vetted list of services masquerading as an encyclopedia article is not what Wikipedia is for. There isn't even evidence that it would be helpful, let alone that it would be a justified WP:IAR improvement to the encyclopedia. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 19:05, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nobody is suggesting this would “masquerade as an encyclopedia article”, so statements like that are less than unhelpful. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 20:22, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder whether the people supporting this proposal would advise people with cancer or heart disease (or arthritis - I have never considered suicide as a way out of my mental problems, but I would do just about anything to get rid of the pain when my arthritis flares up) to phone a well-meaning amateur rather than seek professional help? Phil Bridger (talk) 19:11, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can see this point being made for suicide crisis lines, but the types of resources I had in mind are the kind where you can call and someone helps walk you through finding professional help in your area. Ju1c3machine (talk) 19:14, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wow! It's almost like that's not the point of the proposal, and that consolidated information should be available from the page itself for easier access to those needing help. You can't argue both "we can't do this because the resources are hard to find" and "we don't need to do this because the resources are already super easy to find somewhere else", that's absurd. Ju1c3machine (talk) 04:18, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The person that replied before you argued that it was hard to find resources, which I disproved, and then you said we don’t need to because it’s easy to find resources. Since when does “you can find this information somewhere else” mean that it doesn’t belong on Wiki? Ju1c3machine (talk) 08:14, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
People with cancer aren’t at risk of dying imminently by suicide if they don’t find another path forward. Your suggestion comes closer to a general “medical disclaimer” that’s explicitly not appropriate on Wikipedia. Offering people an option other than “keep looking at articles about depression/suicide until you do it or get tired of it” isn’t the same thing as “contact your doctor to discuss medical concerns”. Attempting to make that analogy minimizes the urgency of suicide prevention. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 20:24, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
People with cancer aren’t at risk of dying imminently by suicide if they don’t find another path forward. - they well might. Cancer comes with elevated suicide rates, particularly when the prognosis is poor and/or quality of life is significantly, long-term impaired—concerns about the former and ways of hopefully tackling the latter are both better discussed with a doctor than an amateur volunteer without access to your medical information.
Offering people an option other than “keep looking at articles about depression/suicide until you do it or get tired of it” isn’t the same thing as “contact your doctor to discuss medical concerns”. Going to be a little more explicit here about my mental health/experiences with mental health crises than I would otherwise be: in my case, that "offered option" would increase rather than decrease the risk I am at.
From experience, if not actively struggling, looking at [clinical representations of/distant mentions of] suicide and depression with or without mention of hotlines is unlikely to set off my suicidal ideation and related matters.
If I am struggling, however, without such hotlines it makes it a distant and clinical concept, which has helped me distance myself from such thoughts a time or two. On the other hand, with hotlines (and especially when those are directed at the reader) provided, it breaks the barrier that makes it an abstract concept and turns it into "something I might feel tempted to do/could do". Which tends to make my ideation a lot less abstract and my intrusive thoughts more intrusive. (That my experiences with crisis lines are a mixed-leaning-negative bag including two cases that set off my anxiety if reminded of them at the wrong time does very much not help there)
Of course, I am just one person, and my personal experiences don't apply to everyone. I'm not saying "it is harmful to me, therefore it must be harmful in general". But there does seem to be a tendency (in general discourse, not you specifically, nor even this discussion specifically) to gloss over the fact that the presence of such reader-directed hotlines might cause some people harm, too. It might well be that on the whole, that harm of their presence is outweighed by the harm of their absence—but that's impossible to determine without first taking into account that there is harm on both sides of the coin. AddWittyNameHere07:18, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like to ask that that discussion stays on topic to my original proposal, which was to add resources for where someone can find treatment options for mental health problems, not suicide hotlines themselves. My suggestion was prompted by friends of mine with mental health problems wishing there were easier ways to get help- in some countries, there are easier ways to get help, and I believe adding them might help make those options more widely known, especially when (as mentioned before) someone is reading Wikipedia to learn more about a condition that they didn't know was the reason behind their maladaptive behavior. Ju1c3machine (talk) 11:39, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Suicide hotlines are easy: We can link to List of suicide crisis lines, which already exists (for more than a decade), already is sourced, etc., and we're done.
I think the more interesting area is non-suicide social support. So to answer the question from @Phil Bridger, I would recommend a peer-led support group to people with cancer. People with cancer who join peer support groups tend to live longer and have better quality of life than people who don't. Support groups are mentioned, e.g., in Breast cancer#Society and culture. Note that it doesn't say "If you live in Ruritania, contact the Ruritanian Cancer Support Group"; instead, it has encyclopedic information about the earliest support group for breast cancer. Someone could expand that article content if they wanted to; the result would probably say something like some are organized through hospitals and there are a bunch on social media. It might even touch on the practice of having separate support groups for women who are highly likely to survive vs those at risk of treatment failure and death.
I don't know if there are similar groups for heart disease. Part of what seems to make a peer-led support group work is having everyone more or less in the same situation, so it might not be "heart disease", but instead for people with a specific type of heart disease.
Resources that I had in mind when I posted the proposal (not meeting the criteria of 'maybe we should stick to government-sponsored organizations' because I don't have time at the moment to do research and I happen to know of these off the top of my head) would be NEDA and ANAD, whose hotlines connects individuals with treatment options (ANAD was the first ED hotline to exist which I think is also a neat fact to stick in an article somewhere), EatRight, which has a directory of nutritionists and dieticians (who are an essential part of recovery, as people with EDs need a very specific diet to avoid refeeding syndrome), NAMI, which provides general mental health group support, and Eating Disorders Anonymous, which might be a helpful tool for someone who doesn't need traditional inpatient treatment. Ju1c3machine (talk) 04:32, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Slightly more awake addition to this: Eating Disorders Anonymous is also a good resource for those who can’t access inpatient treatment, but it’s an option many in ED communities are completely unaware exists, so I believe linking that one specifically would have a rapid positive impact on those affected, especially for users in the US (where it can be prohibitively expensive and/or not covered by insurance) and the UK (where I’m less familiar with the topic, but believe there are also some issues there with waiting times and quality of treatment facilities). Ju1c3machine (talk) 06:03, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
why I am voting no on the Movement Charter
suggest you vote "no" on the current vote to ratify the Movement Charter. for more discussion,
here is a quote from that page, by someone else there, not myself:
I cannot support a charter that provides for representation of/selected by affiliates (as opposed to community-elected members who happen to also be involved with affiliates) on the Global Council, for substantially the reasons I stated at m:Talk:Movement Charter/Archive 5#Mdaniels5757's thoughts. Ultimately, I am concerned that affiliates, as a group (1) are distinct from the community at-large, and therefore (2) have different interests than the community at large. This causes the potential for a fox-guarding-the-henhouse situation; affiliates should not have a vote in movement-wide funding distribution matters. Although I think the small changes to voting thresholds were a step in the right direction, we are still a far way away from a Charter that I can support: one that centers the entire Wikimedia Community.
I would like to encourage open-minded discussion of this idea. in that spirit, here is a link to enable you to read one relevant section of the proposed charter, yourself. i sincerely hope this will be beneficial to provide helpful discussion amongst different opinions on this issue.
The main point of involving affiliates in high-level decisions is that if it were a direct democratic vote, the English Wikipedia would decide everything for everyone every time. Having affiliates all around the world and engaging them for decisionmaking purposes ensures they get a say. There are also the other arguments in representative democracies vs. direct democracies. For example, following what goes on at the Wikimedia Foundation -- governance, strategy, grants, concerns from individual projects, etc. -- and evaluating the consequences of those decisions/opportunities requires a huge amount of time. I'm not part of leadership in any affiliate now, but when I was and it came time to make a decision on behalf of the chapter, we really put in time to ensure we understood the situation. Like for the affiliate-selected board seats, we actually read up on and researched all of the candidates, took notes, met to discuss, and in some cases even invited them to meet with us. How many individual community members have the capacity to take that time, or to read/follow the whole movement strategy process, or to understand the ins and outs of grant proposals, etc., let alone want to take that time?
There are some, of course, and I would never want to rely on a system that's completely based on representation. Indeed the initial global council is mostly community-elected, and that group can change its composition as it sees fit. But no, it's not some secret club of power-hungry weirdos. Well, maybe weirdos, but it's usually really easy for other weirdos with an affiliate nearby to get involved in that process and have a say -- it's not particularly exclusive.
@Rhododendrites, good to have your reply. everything you just said is totally valid. and in my own personal mundane opinion, this is why we do not need a movement charter.
as you note, leaders of affiliates are already highy active , diligent and well-informed. it is unnecessary to enact a whole legalistic new structure which unnecessarily elevates them to some newly-defined level of statutory authority. they already have some solid influence, mainly due to their own hard-earned efforts and diligent knowledge in the processes that already exist now.
the current processes originated from natural community processes over time. i would much rather keep what we have, and not proceed with any adoption for the movemment charter.
the above is just my own personal opinion. and by the way, I want to publicly thank my fellow editor above and also publicly say that i have spoken to them a few times and they happen to be a genuinely helpful person in real [non-virtual] life. a cup of tea for you. thanks! YSm8900 (talk) 14:20, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
just to reply further and to comment further, if i may. you said: it's not some secret club of power-hungry weirdos. Well, maybe weirdos, but it's usually really easy for other weirdos with an affiliate nearby to get involved in that process and have a say -- it's not particularly exclusive.
I would differ with that somewhat. it is a new council, correct? it has 28 members, correct? and even if it had 128 members, there would still be the same problem. any official hierarchical body, by its very nature, is not something that "anyone" can get involved in. I don't see a need to create a whole new official body, give it some set of vague powers, label it the "global council," and then hope it is helpful.
currently the influence and power resides mostly with the hardest-working editors, including the outstanding folks who help to run various affiliates. i am fine with the existing structure and the existing hierarchy, and i would like to keep it, and i would like to not adopt this particular proposal. thanks. Sm8900 (talk) 14:47, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
it is a new council, correct? - FWIW the "not particularly exclusive" was still part of my response about affiliates, not the global council. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 15:08, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Rhododendrites, ok let's discuss if that's ok. can someone please tell me, what exactly is this "Global Council"? does it have intrinsic top-level authority? who is supposed to run it, and what is it supposed to do? does it outrank all admins? all stewards? what specifically is being proposed here?!! Sm8900 (talk) 18:43, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Sm8900, I haven't read the proposed charter, and I haven't followed this project, but I believe that the overall idea (whether this particular version gets adopted or not) is to shift some power away from the WMF and towards the larger, more established affiliate organizations.
From the POV of the online-only English Wikipedia editor, think of something like "Every year, some organization has to decide how much money has to be raised each December with banners at the English Wikipedia. Do I want the WMF to make that decision, or do I want a committee dominated by [for example] WMDE and WMUK to make that decision?"
In both cases (the WMF's board vs the Global Council), the group making the decision will be mostly made up of people who were primarily voted in by the English Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:18, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing ok, yes, I agree that your comments are accurate, and I agree that that was the underlying idea. however one main question that I have might be, how did we delegate a committee to devise and fomulate a charter document, and instead what we got was a newly-constructed governing body, with overall authority? wouldn't it have made more sense to simply set up some new task forces with a specific scope, and limited roles, for specific goals and purposes? Sm8900 (talk) 03:39, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Creating a "Global Council" was one of the major recommendations from the 2030 strategy discussions. See m:Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Ensure Equity in Decision-making. The task was to Create a Movement Charter to: Lay the values, principles and policy basis for Movement structures, including the roles and responsibilities of the Global Council. This is not a case of saying that we want A and accidentally ending up with B; this is a case of saying that we (or "they", if you prefer) want a newly-constructed governing body with overall authority and doing their best to create a newly-constructed governing body with overall authority.
If you think it would have made more sense to do something different, then unfortunately the time to say that was about five years ago. However, to the extent that the real goal is "take power [or funding, which is its own kind of power] away from them and give it to me", then I doubt that some new task forces with limited scope or roles would be able to achieve that goal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:22, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ok your reply is very informative and helpful. This is why I posted this here. Thanks for those great helpful details. I will look over those items. Sm8900 (talk) 05:46, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WikiProject banners unrelated to the article subjects
Each talk page has banners about the specific WikiProjects it falls under. For example, Talk:Henry VIII includes WikiProject banners for Biography, Military history, and England, among others. These all make sense as the article is intrinsically relevant to these subjects. But then occasionally you also see banners like Template:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors, Template:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia, Template:WikiProject Women in Green, and Template:WikiProject Women in Red. These aren't actually relevant to the subject, and they don't really tell us anything meaningful about the article. It doesn't change the article's status because of where someone got the idea to create it or why someone copyedited it. What they do is contribute to banner blindness. Is there any value in keeping these banners in article-talk namespace when they primarily serve as an "our group was here" notice? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:07, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding banner blindness: these aren't banners that have to be read. They can optionally be read by any interested editors. WikiProject banners enable article alerts to be delivered to interested WikiProjects. isaacl (talk) 01:51, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Talk page contents, including WikiProject banners, are not meant to tell us anything meaningful about the article or to change the article's status. They are meant to tell you where you can get help ("Hey, it says you already copyedited it, but it's still really bad!") and to tell other people (e.g., the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team) some things (e.g., which lower-quality pages to prioritize). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:06, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Category:Wikipedia cleanup by subject
Hi, I was wondering whether there was a way to improve Category:Wikipedia cleanup by subject, at the moment it looks like people have to group articles manually. It doesn't seem like articles are assigned part of a wider topic/s on creation, if I'm not mistaken, which would make it problematic to group based off of subjects and tags. I was just thinking it'd be useful to have subjects like Science, History, Geography, Culture and society, Miscellaneous etc.Kowal2701 (talk) 15:37, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
See wikidata topics with many articles, but no enwiki article
I think some tool through which we can see Wikidata items that have lots of articles and no enwiki article would be a great way to improve the encyclopedia and get important articles written. If something has an article in 25 languages, and none in English yet, that's a good sign that we need to get moving. What do you all think? ꧁Zanahary꧂00:04, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I thought we had this, but I've not been able to find it. Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles exists but has been inactive since circa 2014. The bottom of that page contains links to many other semi-relevant pages (mostly related to redlinks on enwp), including a bot that did what you are asking (but possibly with the pre-Wikidata system of interlanguage links) but which now 404s. Thryduulf (talk) 01:18, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Because I don't know how to exclude items that relate to non-article space pages without querying the individual Wikipedia's, I have excluded all items that have ":" in the page name; this will cause some articles to be incorrectly excluded, but it will get most of them. (Cryptic, any thoughts on a better way to do this?) BilledMammal (talk) 09:15, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The top one is interesting. Radio Studio 54 Network exists in 132 languages... seemingly all created by the same remarkably-polyglot Italian editor. It was deleted on enwiki in 2020 so maybe what this is really measuring is which projects aren't so good at detecting cross-wiki spam. – Joe (talk) 09:43, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not that familiar with the wikidata (sql) schema, but I don't immediately see a better way to do it. (The way wb_items_per_site stores the external wiki page names with localized namespace names is particularly frustrating, given that the local wikis don't have that data anywhere and the hoops we have to jump through to get them to display nicely in queries.) I'd suggest asking at d:WD:RAQ. —Cryptic10:17, 2 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't believe that's true, because @WMFOffice has contributions that are a subset of the above report, so there are some changes that are recorded and some that are not yet accounted for. Tonymetz💬23:28, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What are you talking about? Most of WMFOffice's edits are marking users as globally banned (a process that has nothing to do with anything in the transparency report). None of it's extremely few other edits have anything to do with third-party requests for removal or alteration of content. * Pppery *it has begun...23:36, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
thanks i use a screen reader and the section i was using seemed to show alterations vs deletions. I'll see about the section you were talking about. Tonymetz💬20:14, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin: an experiment
Hi all. We invite your feedback on a proposed way to improve communication from and about the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is an experiment to establish a more standardised format and cadence. It would include headlines and links from the Wikimedia Foundation's technical work; Foundation activities with communities and affiliates; as well as with other stakeholders like readers, donors, regulators, the media, and the general public.
This is an experiment: we want to know what you think, what is missing, what is too much, and whether this is something that we should consider investing more time and effort into. Please post your feedback on the Bulletin talk page - on the concept itself, and suggestions on anything from the design to specific words used would also be helpful. You can also provide feedback in this thread; by email to askcacwikimedia.org; or at the next Conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees on 27 June at 18:00 UTC.
Feedback welcome on community collaboration page for annual banner fundraising campaign on English Wikipedia in India for non-logged in readers (planned for Aug 13 to Sep 10)
what is status of movement charter drafting commission (mcdc)?
what is the current status of the movement charter drafting commission (mcdc)? can someone please post an update here, on the status of this process? I'm somewhat surprised that an update has not been posted here, for the current stage of the process. Sm8900 (talk) 19:37, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's been some news coverage and controversy over the recent RfC on the reliability of the Anti-Defamation League. Regardless of how any editor feels about that consensus, it's always nice that the WMF consistently sticks up for editors and for our editorial process - see their statement here. Their press releases on controversies like this are always accurate, informative to those who are unclear about the WMF:Wikipedia relationship, and unhesitant in their defense of what we do. Never any mealymouthing or backtracking. So as an editor, I wanted to say that I appreciate it, WMF! —Ganesha811 (talk) 14:21, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that's a great statement and applaud the WMF for it. What I do find interesting is they talk about "Wikipedia", not "English language wikipedia". We're always being told (correctly) that enwiki is just one project out of many. It seems odd that this statement blurs the distinction. RoySmith(talk)15:51, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Saw the coverage in the Washington Post, and thought it was a clear and accurate account of how decisions are made on Wikipedia. I'm happy that the Foundation issued their statement, and that WaPo presented it so clearly. Donald Albury18:05, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What I also liked with the WaPo article was the "ADL is on the WP:RSP-page, like these sources:..." comparison, I've seen other coverage on this making comparisons to Newsmax, Russian state media, amazon.com user reviews etc. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:46, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
However, "Wikipedia’s volunteers also added the ADL to a public list of sources to be avoided on certain topics" isn't quite right, but I don't know if any source who mentioned it noticed that ADL was there already:[190]Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:56, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Appreciate the nuance regarding reliability for certain topics too, although I was previously surprised to see a number of external publications had briefly mentioned this (obviously not the ones the WMF is correcting), and hopefully it helps all external sources that the WMF included a slightly longer explanation of the distinction. CMD (talk) 01:09, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The start of this climb in pageviews seems to have been on 24/25 August 2021 ([191]), when daily pageviews climbed from 2 to 410 to 1,717. Perhaps this may narrow the search for what is causing this. Curbon7 (talk) 22:39, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Possibly. Although I've not heard it, I can easily imagine a meme in which "Neatsville" (a redirect to the article) becomes a trendy term of approval. (Compare Coolsville.) Alternatively, someone may be trying to get it into a most-viewed listing. It would be interesting to know how many different IPs have accessed the article (perhaps counting each IPv6 /64 as one), rather than just the number of hits. Certes (talk) 22:20, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the pointer on redirects: I hadn't spotted that. Yes, I assumed it was scripted. It does seem erratic and slightly seasonal, with peaks in spring 2023 and 2024, but does not vary much by day of week. Certes (talk) 22:49, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Admins do not have the ability to block people from viewing articles, this would have to be handled by the system administrators. You would probably be best filing a ticket on Phabricator, though I'm not sure they'd take action. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 22:53, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure what action can or should be taken. This doesn't seem to be a denial-of-service attack (or, if it is, it's an incredibly lame one). Wikipedia's terms of service don't prevent anyone from viewing pages, even multiple times; in fact it's encouraged. I don't know whether the hosting system can, or should, rate-limit a particular IP address or range, even assuming that most of the unusual traffic comes from one IP or a small range. Certes (talk) 23:13, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed. I wouldn't be reporting this as a performance or security issue, but rather a data corruption issue. And I sense this might not be taken very seriously, but I have a thing against the presentation of false data and that in that presentation, the person doing it is getting away with it, possibly encouraging more of this kind of corruption by others. I think it is in our long-run interests to stop it or put some kind of brakes on it. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk23:52, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The internet can be a bit of a wild west sometimes. I don't think calling the police to report a DDOS attack would result in anything. DDOS attacks are usually carried out by hacked zombie computers, and are often transnational. So it's a bit hard to police. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:43, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
An inexplicable steady increase in readership to an article happened one time before, and the explanation was that it had been included as an example/default link somewhere. Will see if I can find the details. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:20, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's tempting to put a banner on the top of the article: "Please tell us what brought you to this article" with a link to the talk page, see if any of the 17,000+ readers answer. Schazjmd(talk)23:49, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Many years ago I found – guess how – that the address anton@pobox.com was used as an example in what appeared to be a guide to email for new users (in Russian, but hosted in Israel). —Tamfang (talk) 22:17, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Mind you, the interesting thing would have been to know where that original link was from (possibly emails? unsure) - both were scanned on the 17th of last month and both articles have an increase in views, but without knowing where that's from and if it always redirects there, it doesn't really mean it's even related with the view count unfortunately. – 2804:F1...99:B28F (talk) 06:42, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Talk page for Kepler's Supernova says Publishers Clearing House for some reason included a link to [the page] in email (promoting daily contests) for awhile. Page view patterns are the same as with Neatsville. Not sure if this IP is relevant either 107.128.181.22 (talk) 08:31, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Publishers Clearing House for some reason included a link to [the page] in email (promoting daily contests) for awhile. This seems like the most plausible explanation so far. –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:10, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It might be very helpful to know how many different IP addresses access the page a lot (say >100 times a day) and whether they're in a single range. Obviously this requires access to non-public information, but it should be safe to pass on a digest with the actual IPs removed. Certes (talk) 11:04, 4 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Physically allowed to, apparently, but rules-wise, I don't know. I'd rather not do it if I'm breaching a protocol. Anyway, I have made a statement in the phab ticket if those administrating don't consider it a security matter and want to take that classification off, that would be fine by me. Then, anyone can subscribe. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk03:44, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The number of views 26k is so low it could easily be explained by a default link somewhere. The Publishers Clearing House explanation given above sounds reasonable, or something like it. These kinds of things are not uncommon. If the popular pages list is important, you could modify the list with another bot. -- GreenC17:20, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't a very recent phenomenon. The views have been skewed off and on since over a year ago (see "Two year pageviews..." link above). Also, the explanation as such doesn't absolve this as not being a problem. There is no excuse for PCH or any entity for sending non-purposeful (junk) links to people. Whether or not it affects our system performance, it is abusive. As far as modifying Popular pages results, if there was a straightforward way to asterisk, strikethrough, hide or shade an entry based on particular criteria, that would suffice, but writing a new bot seems overwrought. I could temporarily strikethrough, hide or shade the top or nth entry via CSS but then that would require monthly maintenance. I think I'll just write a nasty letter to PCH - that may be our real solution (half-joke, half-serious). Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk20:47, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Meh, somebody put a link in an email or newsletter or something. That doesn't strike me as abusive; if people are clicking the links and reading our article that's really no different than anyone who sees one of our articles through a link in a tweet or Discord, that page was popular. It doesn't seem like there's anything to be done. The WordsmithTalk to me21:24, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wait one min-u-ette here. If these are all genuine human visits off an e-mail or promotion, how come I'm the only one to edit the article (once) since September? With the huge amount of visits, that seems to defy reason. For a small rural town, it has a kind of interesting story, having been relocated twice – so it's weird that edits wouldn't have happened. These are highly likely bot hits disguised as human hits. That's not a problem?? Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk22:57, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is it possible for Wikipedia articles to be embedded into a webpage, and if so, is it possible these collect pageview data without people clicking through? Curbon7 (talk) 23:43, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your opinion, but it's not as simple as that. This is systems data used beyond the superficial aspect that you imagine. Note that if views data wasn't important, it wouldn't be collected and stored in the first place. It can be used for various purposes, like for instance, project prioritization. Corruption of data is a real problem. I am not suggesting this specific issue reported here is a huge problem but one that should be addressed lest it really get out of hand. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk06:53, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Through my background in database development and 20 years as a Wikipedian, I insist it's a real (though not currently huge) problem by what I've already stated. Also, there seems to be an insistent assumption these are true views. Based on information that's been made available, the strong suggestion is that these are effectively bot hits. Also, I highly doubt we are getting SEO benefits from distributed junk hits, and who doesn't already know our brand? The bottom line is this has a potential to really bollocks up various processes that use this data if it isn't nipped in the bud. "Fairly minor" is today. But tomorrow? Yeah, let 'em increasingly tarnish our data. Cool, man, cool. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk07:32, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We really need to ask someone with access to private logs whether these views come predominantly from one IP (or a small range) or are widespread. If the latter then they may also be able to tell us (perhaps from the referrer) whether they are predominantly from one webpage, perhaps via an iframe embedded in HTML bulk e-mail. Certes (talk) 09:53, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Even that's not absolute proof. A significant portion of our page views from mainland China come to use through just two (2) IP addresses (used by a VPN service). If you find that most of the traffic comes from a single IP, that does not mean that a single person is reloading the same page every few seconds round the clock. It could mean that a lot of people are using a VPN or other shared service.
I guess my view doesn't count because I have only been editing Wikipedia for 17 years and my background is in systems programming, but I'll state it anyway. It is that the only problem here is with people who place too much faith in reports. Measure what you actually want to measure, not what's easiest to measure, and don't try to change what you're measuring to make it easier. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:47, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Some reports do weed out automated views, sometimes by limiting their scope to articles which have between 5% and 95% of their views from mobiles. (Example: Signpost.) This technique is helpful but not foolproof, especially if someone who reads the report is trying to appear on it in some sort of SEO game. Certes (talk) 21:51, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As someone with a similar background, these are the kinds of arguments you find in IT departments, I suppose. The report isn't the problem but rather the report is indicative of a data problem, and it's the data problem that should be solved, because that problem could increase and cause other issues. And yes, we should change what we're measuring, rather, prevent bad data input (the case here), because you don't want "garbage in". Spending time to assure clean data going into further processing in other systems was a significant part of my IT work. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk17:01, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are lots of people who are interested in how widely shared information on a given Wikipedia page is. That tells us something about which topics are important, which ones need to be taken care of etc. Distributing information is the purpose of a Wikipedia page after all. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 06:01, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This may be related (or unrelated), but my talk page received an unusual number of page views each day from late March to early April: see here. Besides a couple of messages from the bots, there weren't any other activity on my talk during that time [192]. I doubt those page views (at least on my talk page) are genuine. Some1 (talk) 03:40, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Rename the article?
This constant pinging of our article could easily be disrupted by renaming the article without leaving a redirect, if only for a day or two. Of course that might still count as vandalism, and make Skynet very angry. NebY (talk) 19:02, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Neat! And nicely done. I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out; already I've been surprised to find that the iOS app is still giving me the article at Neatsville, Kentucky (but a blank talk page and an "unexpected response from the server" for its history) as well as at Neatsville, Adair County, Kentucky. Maybe I'm the last to learn the iOS app uses a different database, which lags. NebY (talk) 20:38, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Seems a bit odd to let off-site pressures dictate the titles of our articles. Also if the Publisher's Clearing House explanation is accurate, we have now broken this link for regular users. Also may be a violation of WP:PMRC. –Novem Linguae (talk) 01:14, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is effectively an experiment to determine whether moving the article — for one week — resolves the issue that has been reported. It may well be that these views are the result of an internal glitch rather than on off-site one, and this resolves that all the same. It may be that when the article is moved back, the issue will resume. The only way to find out is to perform the experiment and gather the data for analysis. As noted, the correct article is still the number one article that comes up when using the search function, and given the page views prior to this situation arising, actual inconvenience to regular users should be nominal. BD2412T02:50, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would oppose a permanent rename for a flimsy reason like that, but all along, this was set up as a one-week test, and I don't see a big problem there. Anyway, I saw that Neatsville, Kentucky was redirected after this test was started, so I wonder if that defeats the point of the test. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk02:58, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think it will defeat the point, since pageviews of redirects are tracked separately from pageviews of their targets. But then I could be misunderstanding. * Pppery *it has begun...03:04, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes that's true, but now these miscreant/fake hits will be hitting a live mainspace page that happens to be the same page they were targeting before. So, they won't be getting any indication they are hitting a nonexistent page like they would have when the test was first set up. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk03:10, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) The point of moving without the redirect was to see whether the absence of anything at this target would "break" whatever is causing the excessive page views. Perhaps the few hours during which there was no redirect was enough to do that. The test does not have to run for a week, that was an arbitrary time set figuring that whatever process was involved might itself be on a week-long clock. Maybe a few days would do. BD2412T03:11, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's maybe not so clear; I find that if I click "include redirects" then Neatsville, Adair County, Kentucky is receiving 20,000+ pageviews a day[193]. On the other hand, toying with the Agents setting gives me another puzzle. Over the last 90 days, the ratio of "User"[194] to "Automated"[195] views of Neatsville, Kentucky varied from 1:1 to 8:1 and more, but both peaked on 01 June 2024. Even assuming some views misidentify themselves, I can't even start to explain both the variation and the coincidence. NebY (talk) 18:26, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My understanding (and this may be incorrect) is that including redirects merely adds the number of views to the page and the number of views to the redirect. I do not believe it is possible to have a view of the redirect that results in the viewer being redirected to the page, but does not also lead to a view to the page itself, such that pageviews alone should always be higher than redirect views alone (compare pageviews of "FBI" versus "Federal Bureau of Investigation"). BD2412T19:09, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, that it's simple addition does make sense. Still, the FAQ does say If a user browses to a redirect, a pageview is registered for the redirect but not for the target page. That suggests to me that it's technically feasible that ~20,000 human readers went to Neatsville, Kentucky, were redirected, and did read Neatsville, Adair County, Kentucky - but I've little experience of this tool, could be very wrong. NebY (talk) 19:42, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the question can be definitively answered by looking at Meghan Markle versus Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. The page was moved back and forth between titles a few times while her "official" name was being disputed, and the higher pageview count always jumped to the article title at the moment. BD2412T18:03, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Personally, I agree with earlier comments that any improvements should be made in data analysis, and not by rejecting page requests. If the triggers to detect denial-of-service issues haven't been set off, by net neutrality principles, the Wikipedia servers shouldn't be filtering page requests. isaacl (talk) 14:18, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you mean let's have a better way of detecting what are not genuine views by people, then of course that is a useful band-aid for views reports. But the rampant fake access for no discernible reason remains, and who knows where that is going if the systems admins don't know where it's coming from and gets worse and becomes a DOS. Net neutrality isn't a web server matter but an ISP one. Websites can choose to block whoever they want. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk17:00, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not speaking from a legal perspective, but a conceptual one. The Wikimedia Foundation's mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." ([196]) It shouldn't decide what requests to process and which to not until necessary to protect its infrastructure. Triggers can include monitoring incoming flows and dynamically setting conditions. But until the triggers are met, it shouldn't play favourites in deciding what clients get access. isaacl (talk) 15:45, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The infrastructure in terms of data integrity *is* being harmed. Performance isn't a concern, yet, and I haven't pretended that this is the case as of now, but it could become one if something isn't done. Bad data should trigger a response. Also, we're not talking about picking and choosing which access to accept willy-nilly - anything done about this would target a specific access producing said bad data. It's all right to stop access done for nefarious purposes (given it is technically feasible to do so), and I see no way this violates any concept of neutrality. This is not "playing favourites". All traffic is considered legitimate unless it demonstrates that it is not. And these views run-ups are almost certainly illegitimate (of course, to be fully determined in the Phab task). Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk06:14, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The article has now been moved back. Moving the page does not appear to have had any effect on incoming views, but appears to have confirmed that these views were just calling the URL, and not actually looking at it (i.e., not following to the redirect target while it was a redirect). My going theory is that this is itself a test by some outside entity that intends to manipulate page views for some other page in the future, probably for commercial or political ends, and is confirming its ability to do so. BD2412T20:16, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure why people are making such a big fuss over this. The main concern here seems to be that it messes up our internal page view stats. I agree that can be annoying, but it's also inevitable that things like this will happen. It's a truism in the Big Data world that there will be garbage in your data. You need to accept that and be able to deal with it on the analysis side. You're never going to track down and correct all the sources of garbage, so don't bother trying. RoySmith(talk)14:31, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's funny how folks keep coming here to tell us that it's all right for this site to be pummeled with fake visits (on edit: in the process, harming data integrity - my point all along) and just be cool with that. This isn't a few odd hits we're talking about. Sure, we can apply a band-aid to analyze views differently but we can also have the miscreants blocked and/or shut down (as long as that is technically feasible - something yet to be determined). Nobody is talking about chasing down any or all crap views. This is clearly a special case. And if it's not taken seriously, whoever is doing so will be emboldened to go further. If we do nothing, we are inviting worse. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk01:58, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"all right for this site to be pummeled with fake visits and just be cool with that"
Oh noes, some weirdo spends the day pressing F5 on his browser to increase the views on one article. Or that Publishers Clearing House links to that page in promotion or something.
I *am* leaving it up to the people who run this site to make decisions about this. That's why I created the Phab ticket. I'm not the one finding a resolution. My trust is placed in them. If they decide to let it go, that's their decision. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk05:47, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If it was simply "more views", it wouldn't bother me in the least. If one reads above what the issue is about in total, they would see that data that is likely used in decision support, such as in WikiProjects, is being skewed to such a degree as to screw up top rankings. It may not seem so alarming now, but if nothing is done about it, what stops it from ballooning into something that even affects performance? But for me, the harm to data integrity is enough to warrant some kind of action. At the very least, we need a band-aid to look at these kinds of views and recategorize them. I don't think that is close to a complete solution, but I will take that for now. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk05:59, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
TL;DR: A data integrity problem (but not currently a performance problem) is being caused by some entity running up hundreds of thousands of fake views per month of select articles, particularly Neatsville, Kentucky, leading to corrupted presentations in reports based on this views data. Apparent solutions include more smartly identifying such views and recategorizing them (as they highly likely aren't views from real people) and figuring out what exactly is the origin or origins of this access and taking steps such as blocking to handle them. Stefen Towers among the rest!Gab • Gruntwerk06:37, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Doesn't it seem very likely that this traffic is being caused by a client-server botnet that is waiting for instructions?
It's normal for bot-nets to connect to a webserver to get instructions. But that's tricky for the bot-operators, because it has to be a website they have no legitimate connection to, and if the server is shut down, then all their bots are effectively worthless. Instead, If you point your bot-net to an obscure Wikipedia page it not only saves you the trouble of hacking into an unsecured web server, but it also means that sys-admins are unlikely to spot the uptick in traffic.
If this theory is correct, one day the "owner" of the bot net would insert some command into the page and all the infected devices would do some horrible thing. Perhaps the article should be be edit protected before that day comes. ApLundell (talk) 01:45, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia in Fiction
Nature magazine has been running a series of Science Fiction short stories called "Futures". The latest one -- "Plastic-eating fungus caused doomsday:[2][3] A collaborative effort" -- is told as a series of entries to a Wikipedia talk page. Never thought of Wikipedia as a genre. AFAIK, this is the first Wikipedia fiction -- not counting hoax articles, of course.
I'm surprised that I missed Missing Links and Secret Histories, since I've read every issue of the Signpost since its creation years ago. But my oldest daughter was 6 at the time & having children that young limits every activity outside of work, eating & sleeping -- & sometimes the last two are also affected. -- llywrch (talk) 06:57, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I just came across the Moto G54 5G article which has a rather peculiar template at the top of the page, saying it was written with GPT-4. At first I thought it was a new official template I didn't know about, then I looked at the source and noticed it's a template sitting in userspace, which looks like it was made to mimic the design of standard header templates. What is the right way to deal with a situation like this? Do we just remove the template from the page, or do we need to deal with the AI-written content in the article somehow? – numbermaniac18:23, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I did a spot check of some statements in that article and failed to verify them in the cited sources. I think it’s generally undesirable to use an LLM to write an article and then slap on a template saying the article might contain errors and copyvios. Any human edit might contain errors and even copyvios unwittingly, but if you’re going to use an LLM at all, you need to take much more responsibility for verifying these issues aren’t present. The current template reads too much like an excuse: “I took a shortcut and might have created a mess, so if you find the mess please go ahead and clean it up”. Plus, the current version of that template states: has been visited by many readers and is unlikely to include false information or fake references which seems fallacious. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 19:51, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Given the proven unreliability of LLMs, we can not trust anything that is not explicitly supported by the cited sources. Prune it severely. Then remove the template. Blueboar (talk) 20:17, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting. I noticed it in this edit when going through a bit of the revision history later, and figured the template he had replaced it with was a modification of that first, official, template. Didn't realise both templates had been created by the same user! If it's a redirect to userspace, should it be deleted? – numbermaniac13:50, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What a weird coincidence; I came here with my "cyberthriller story". A user asked WPRussia to help with one reference in Assault they found suspicious, but it was to a text in Russian, so they asked for assistance. Indeed, the ref was nonsense and I removed it. At first I thought is was cut'n'paste error, but nasty me decided to find the author for mild trout-slapping. Well, it was a "drive-by editor" Ugwuowo samuel (talk·contribs) and at first (well, at second :-) I just shrugged, but I noticed that the user used the same edit summary "added few words and references" for all its edits. Then I noticed another editor in same page Ifyeke (talk·contribs) with exactly same edit summary, and all of them were the same as well. So I felt something fishy. Then in the page edited by Ifyeke I saw edits by blocked Onyebuchi Echezona (talk·contribs).... Oh people, You have to waste a minute of your time and read its unblock request! It is a poem written on a wall..... by a chatbot.
So, in two minutes I run into three apparently chatbots. In one page the edits of one of them were reverted, but it gives me goosebumps to think how much more of them are roaming unnoticed. I am wondering whether Wikimedia is aware of this threat? The prev section say failed to verify them in the cited sources -and tghat's one of severe issues: the bot generates fake refs (as I explained at the beginning, one was really fake, so the "page owner" (in a good sense) spotted it. But otherwise the texts look legit; Turing test, you know.
Another thing worries me is that I suspect Wikipedia is being (ab)used as a testbench for chatbots at all our's expense. If one may remember, in these gooden olden days of Wikipedia various smartasses loved to insert typos and nonsense into wikipedia to see how quickly they will be spotted. And quite a few had an arrogance to write news articles reporting their findings. Fortunately our antivandalbots became strong. Repeating: are there any "antiChatBots" in development? Or waiting until it hits the fan? - Altenmann>talk05:35, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Easier said than done I imagine. Because it produces natural language, it's kind of hard to know definitively when text has been written by a chatbot. There are some amusing examples where tools made to detect AI writing will say that the US constitution was written by an LLM.
The contribution histories of those 2 accounts look rather spammy - seems like it might be worth reporting to administrators. – numbermaniac15:44, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not just text, but images too. The NY Times ran a quiz yesterday asking readers to identify 10 images as real or AI-generated. I got less than 50% right, and I know some of the things to look for (weird fingers and gibberish text). The tech will only get better and this is not going to go away. RoySmith(talk)15:52, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. The sectkion above suggests to use template that says " may still include false information " - IMO it is an insult to the common sense. AFAIK such texts must be deleted on the spot, not tagged. If a user knowingly adds fake references by whatever means, they must be blocked for disruption of wikipedia. - Altenmann>talk06:41, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Do you think that the people using LLMs actually know that the refs are fake? Maybe they think it's great because (they wrongly believe) it looks up real references. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:52, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There was a situation just like that last year where some lawyers used ChatGPT to do their "research" for them, and it came up with a bunch of fake citations and fake cases that got them in a lot of trouble with the judge. I remember watching a YouTube video about it at the time. – numbermaniac15:17, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Altenmann: Inclined to agree with WhatamIdoing's thinking. I had to think about this when I was trying to work out how to gently warn the user whose edits are discussed above without WP:BITING: there's a meaningful difference between "knowingly adding fictitious references" and "adding references without checking them". Neither is good, but the latter case isn't as clearly malicious. There's a reason warning templates have multiple levels. And as far as the idea that such texts must be deleted on the spot, that's part of the challenge with LLMs. They're unreliable because of their inherent flaws, and have a significant risk of producing incorrect information, fictitious references, and copyvios, but it's not a given that LLM output is complete nonsense and there's nothing in it that could be salvaged. (As opposed to something like plagiarism, which absolutely should just be removed on sight.) Kinsio (talk ★ contribs)17:45, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Kinsio: - I dont see any "meaningful difference" in terms of harm to wikipedia. ChatBot-generated text looks so strikingly real that it takes a real intellectual effort to pinpoint nonsense and it is twice as hard to prove that it is nonsense or WP:UNDUE or WP:OR. One lazy Wikipedian (or, I suspect, a chatBot tester) creates a huge workload on fellow wikipedians who have to verify the contribution of a 'bot. And without this extra scrutiny, as my initial story shows, bot-produced nonsense can sit there for years. I firmly believe it is an intellectual dishonesty and abuse of Wikipedia to pump chatBot texts into the widely read encyclopedia, on par with the abuse by lawyers mentioned above. - Altenmann>talk17:55, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it's bad, but when you're dealing with humans older than preschool age, you need to differentiate between "made a mess accidentally" and "made a mess on purpose". If the former are educated, they might be both willing and able to help us clean up the mess. The latter need to be shown the door. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:52, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The voting to ratify the Wikimedia Movement Charter is now open. The Wikimedia Movement Charter is a document to define roles and responsibilities for all the members and entities of the Wikimedia movement, including the creation of a new body – the Global Council – for movement governance.
Voting commenced on SecurePoll on June 25, 2024 at 00:01 UTC and will conclude on July 9, 2024 at 23:59 UTC. Please read more on the voter information and eligibility details.
After reading the Charter, please vote here and share this note further.
If you have any questions about the ratification vote, please contact the Charter Electoral Commission at cec@wikimedia.org.
Oppose. Respectfully, personally I would recommend that people please vote "No." this is just my own opinion, and I am just an ordinary editor, with no official roles. Sm8900 (talk) 14:11, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
the charter arbitrarily creates a solitary and arbitrary new hierarchical body which is not needed by anyone, called the "Global Council," with a highly questionable role. the rest of the charter is just vague-sounding platitudes.
also the WMF board has some designated liaisons, who have recommended to vote AGAINST the charter. I don't use the board to govern my opinion on most things. but if even the board and the WMF are against this, then how does this serve any purpose in any way???!! who exactly is in favor of this, or even sees a need for this, if even the board is against this??!! Sm8900 (talk) 16:38, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
the link below provides highly valuable data on some of the multiple concerns raised by the board's review process:
The Global Council is the most anticipated aspect of the Movement Charter recommendation. Overall,the proposed Global Council's purpose is not clearly connected to advancing Wikimedia's public interest mission. It lacks a compelling explanation of how it will ensure more equitable decision-making and support the mission of sharing free knowledge. It also does not guide us as the Movement on how to address many of the most pressing issues facing community governance on Wikimedia projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation is willing to delegate some powers to the Global Council. At the moment, we have not read similar statements from other parts of the movement - and without that, the Global Council cannot really act as a body that goes beyond the Wikimedia Foundation.
Would volunteers accept a decision made by the Global Council, even if they don’t like it, just because they had a chance to vote in their elections?
why do we need a Global Council? Who is asking for this to be established? that's my own concern and my own questions on this.
ok here is another comment, from someone connected to two members of the board, from the page below
We believe that approving this version of the Charter, despite the tremendous amount of work and resources already put into it, would not be the right call. Instead, we think it is better to continue pursuing the same goals the draft Charter also sought to pursue in a different way, by identifying key areas where the final draft Charter provides us with guidance on concrete steps that can be taken towards increasing volunteer and movement oversight of certain core areas of responsibility.
addl excerpt: For an all-encompassing document the support required to ratify the threshold -- 55% plus a minimum of 2% of eligible voters participating in vote -- is quite low.
Thanks for that food for thought. I also voted no. My reasoning was it is written in product manager speak, doesn't clearly state who is pushing for it and what problems it is trying to solve, appears to give too much power to affiliates, and creates bureaucracy without clearly stating the upside. I also worry that the creation of top-level movement documents like this puts pressure on folks to express their opinions on talk pages within the frameworks of these documents, and opinions that do not fit within these frameworks are more easily discarded. –Novem Linguae (talk) 17:23, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes! Exactly! And also which governmental body defines the role of the Global Council and keeps them accountable?! It seems no one does! And also why are we enthroning this new hierarchy with no mission or defined role?!! Why couldn't a focused task force or maybe a whole set of them, been enacted here instead of this nebulous new authority??!! Sm8900 (talk) 18:24, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So far, I have seen no independent evidence whatsoever that a significant proportion of people who use the various WMF-hosted websites actually consider themselves to be a part of any single 'movement', let alone that they ascribe to the objectives the WMF seems to think this supposed entity should be pursuing. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:07, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"movement" is simply the term used to refer to the people who actively pursue editing activities, on the entries, items, and contents of "various WMF-hosted websites." so by definition that term would include them. Sm8900 (talk) 17:24, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm torn. I like the idea of a formalized body to move some decision-making powers from the WMF to the broader community and have no problem with the involvement of affiliates for the way doing so means the English Wikipedia doesn't simply decide everything for everyone every time. I also don't want perfection to be the enemy of good enough, with there being no guarantee of a serious follow-up proposal if this fails. But it's also hard to understand exactly what this would do, what the WMF would let it do, and how exactly it would work in relation to all of the other entities. We have affiliates, we have thematic organizations, we have user groups, we have hubs, we have various committees, we have the UCOC folks, we have the Wikimedia Foundation, and we have the body of users on each project; we have meetings just for the WMF, meetings about strategy, meetings about UCOC, meetings just for affiliates, meetings within affiliates, and extensive, splintered discussions about all of this on meta, enwiki, and every other project. Part of me says we don't need yet yet another formal entity thrown in the mix, creating yet more bureaucracy, but I also feel like there's the potential for this to be the organization that actually gets things done on behalf of regular volunteers. The big problem, here and as usual, is this is all simply way too much to fully understand for anyone with a full-time job outside of the wiki world -- especially for people who, you know, are here to write articles or take photos or link data or whatnot.
As an aside, can we please give it a rest with the "there is no movement" tedium? I do not know why a handful of editors jump in to bang this drum any time someone uses a collective noun to refer to the editors, uploaders, museum staff, professors, trainers, casual meetup attendees, researchers, activists/advocates, developers, lawyers, event planners, organizers, government staffers, nonprofit EDs, fundraisers, etc. who work with, participate in, or advocate for wikimedia projects and/or the many projects it intersects with. It comes off somewhere between a sovereign citizen or the jock in the chess club loudly proclaiming he's not really part of that bunch of nerds. You're "not part of a movement" -- that movement "doesn't exist". We get it. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 19:21, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
also, what i would suggest is that even if we need a "global Council," a formalistic document like the "Movement Charter" is NOT the way to do it. just form a Global Council by signing volunteers up up one by one, based on interest. and do so by creating the resources!!! not by imposing an obligation!!! and use a movement "charter" as a means of expression, not as some new type of permanent hierarchy that no one understands and no one wants. Sm8900 (talk) 22:14, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It quite often happens that people dont have much notability outside the duo, i.e., if you write separate articles, there will be a heavy overlap beyond "born and raised" and "died and rests" So it makes perfect sense to have a single page. - Altenmann>talk00:22, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Two academics who co-author are not the same as a singing duo. The article should be split so they each have a separate page. PamD05:21, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
they have separate lives, and teaching careers, and in one case political aspirations. Those elements aren't indicators of notability, honestly. Per WP:N, WP:NBIO, WP:NACADEMICS, and WP:BLP if still living, everything about each of them comes down to what they are notable only for and how notable their own careers are outside the collaboration. Furthermore, the sources you provided are primary, so what about secondary and tertiary ones? George Ho (talk) 08:30, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A contest will take place from July 1, 2024, to July 31, 2024, on Bangla Wiktionary to enrich its content. A central notice request has been placed to target both English and Bangla Wikipedia users, including non-registered users from Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Thank you —MdsShakil (talk) 16:19, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Community Wishlist Survey is now Community Wishlist
Thank you everyone who has participated in the restructuring and rebranding conversations of the Wishlist so far.
Regarding the renaming, based on your feedback, we will keep the 'Community Wishlist' and remove 'Survey'.
Announcing the Product and Technology Advisory Council, and a call for applications
Hi folks - I wanted to announce and invite anyone interested to view and apply to the Product and Technology Advisory Council.
As part of the movement strategy recommendation for "Coordinating Across Stakeholders," the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. The PTAC will meet over a one year pilot; upon its completion, members of the Council will make a joint decision to continue the program, its member base, and purpose.
This council is sponsored by CPTO Selena Deckelmann. Applications are open today, July 1, 2024, through August 10, 2024, and we encourage anyone interested to apply.
I see [subscribe] links on talk pages and noticeboards, but only for top-level sections (H2). On pages such as Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion, I would like to be able to subscribe to specific discussions that correspond to sub-sections or sub-sub-section. Is this possible? Jruderman (talk) 22:13, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, it's not currently possible. I doubt that it will happen this year (and maybe not this decade). Some pages have been rearranged to use fewer ===H3 section headings===; that could be done for RFD. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:19, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Happy days, ~ LindsayHello 11:51, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
Checking... —andrybak (talk) 22:28, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
Facepalm argh, I didn't read past the first sentence. My bad. Thank you, Novem Linguae, for pointing it out. —andrybak (talk) 22:44, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
Resolved
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar). [14][15]
. If I change 
which is listed at mw:Help:Extension:Kartographer/Icons. The icon in your screenshot is not listed there. If I remove 
Done — xaosflux Talk 10:35, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
Not sure
Doing... --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:36, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
Moved to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style
Install scripts without having to manually edit JavaScript files (documentation)
button at the top right. I see it now. That is good when editors are testing out mobile preview, but as long as the gadget is optional, few will see it. Once it is enabled by default, some may click on it. But until a "Mobile Preview" button is enabled beside the "Save Changes" button, editors are much more likely to preview the desktop version and not the mobile version. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:04, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
wikimedia.org; or at the next Conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees on 27 June at 18:00 UTC.
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous) § Voting to ratify the Wikimedia Movement Charter is now open – cast your vote. –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:03, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Agree from me, @Rhododendrites! nice to have you here!! Sm8900 (talk) 22:10, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
![[25]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aarhus_Denmark_Street_Map_vector_svg_free.svg){kind=link}
![[26]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adelaide_Australia_Street_Map_SVG_free.svg){kind=link}
![[27]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albany_New_York_US_Street_Map.svg){kind=link}
![[28]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albuquerque_New_Mexico_US_Street_Map_SVG.svg){kind=link}
![[29]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Allentown_and_Easton_Pennsylvania_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[30]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amsterdam_Netherlands_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[31]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antwerpen_Belgium_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[32]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Athens_Greece_street_map_vector_gvl13_svg_free.svg){kind=link}
![[33]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlanta_Georgia_US_street_map_vector_editable_gvl13_svg_free.svg){kind=link}
![[34]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auburn_and_Lewiston_Maine_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[35]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_New_Zealand_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[36]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Austin_Texas_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[37]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baku_Azerbaijan_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[38]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baltimore_Maryland_US_Street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[39]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bangkok_Thailand_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[40]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Basel_Switzerland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[41]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baton_Rouge_Louisiana_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[42]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beijing_China_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[43]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Belfast_Northern_Ireland_UK_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[44]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berlin_Germany_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[45]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bern_Switzerland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[46]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bismarck_North_Dakota_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[47]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_Center_Massachusetts_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[48]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_Massachusetts_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[49]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_Massachusetts_US_Metro_Area_street_road_map.svg){kind=link}
![[50]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brisbane_Australia_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[51]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burlington_Vermont_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[52]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calgary_Alberta_Canada_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[53]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canberra_Australia_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[54]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charleston_South_Carolina_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[55]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicago_Illinois_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[56]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cincinnati_Ohio_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[57]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cleveland_Ohio_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[58]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cologne_Germany_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[59]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Columbus_Ohio_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[60]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Copenhagen_Denmark_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[61]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dallas_Texas_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[62]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Darmstadt_Germany_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[63]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dayton_and_Springfield_Ohio_US_street_road_map.svg){kind=link}
![[64]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Delhi_India_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[65]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Delray_Beach_Florida_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[66]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Denver_and_Boulder_Colorado_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[67]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detroit_Michigan_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[68]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dresden_Germany_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[69]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dublin_Ireland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[70]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edmonton_Canada_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[71]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Essen_Germany_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[72]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fargo_North_Dakota_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[73]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fort_Worth_Texas_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[74]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fresno_California_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[75]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gatineau_Quebec_Canada_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[76]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gen%C3%A8ve_Switzerland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[77]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gisborne_New_Zealand_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[78]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hawaii_US_road_map.svg){kind=link}
![[79]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heathrow_Airport_London_UK_street_road_map.svg){kind=link}
![[80]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Helsinki_Espoo_Vantaa_Finland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[81]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hong_Kong_China_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[82]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Honolulu_Hawaii_US_street_road_map.svg){kind=link}
![[83]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Houston_Texas_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[84]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iceland_road_map.svg){kind=link}
![[85]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indianapolis_Indiana_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[86]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Islamabad_and_Rawalpindi_Pakistan_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[87]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Istanbul_Turkey_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[88]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jakarta_Indonesia_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[89]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kansas_City_Missouri_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[90]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karachi_Pakistan_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[91]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kelowna_British_Columbia_Canada_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[92]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kemi_and_Tornio_Finland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[93]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kiev_Ukraine_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[94]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kuala_Lumpur_Malaysia_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[95]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kyoto_Japan_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[96]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Paz_and_El_Alto_Bolivia_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[97]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lahore_Pakistan_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[98]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lakewood_Ohio_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[99]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lancaster_Pennsylvania_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[100]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Las_Vegas_Nevada_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[101]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lausanne_Switzerland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[102]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laval_Canada_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[103]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liege_Belgium_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[104]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lille_France_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[105]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lincoln_Nebraska_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[106]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_Center_UK_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[107]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_Greater_UK_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[108]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Los_Angeles_California_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[109]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louisville_Kentucky_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[110]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lugano_Switzerland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[111]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luxembourg_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[112]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luzern_Switzerland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[113]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lviv_Ukraine_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[114]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lyon_France_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[115]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Macon_Georgia_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[116]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manila_Philippines_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[117]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Martha%27s_Vineyard_Massachusetts_US_street_road_map.svg){kind=link}
![[118]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mashhad_Iran_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[119]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Medellin_Colombia_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[120]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Melbourne_Australia_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[121]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Memphis_Tennessee_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[122]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Menlo_Park_%D0%A1alifornia_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[123]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mexico_City_Mexico_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[124]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Miami_Florida_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[125]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milwaukee_Wisconsin_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[126]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minneapolis_and_Sent_Paul_Minnesota_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[127]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minsk_Belarus_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[128]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Montpelier_Vermont_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[129]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Montreal_Canada_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[130]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moscow_Russia_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[131]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mountain_View_California_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[132]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Napier_New_Zealand_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[133]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Braunfels_Texas_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[134]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Orleans_Louisiana_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[135]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_York_City_Greater_NY_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[136]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Olympia_Washington_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[137]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orlando_Florida_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[138]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Osaka_Japan_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[139]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ottawa_Canada_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[140]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paris_France_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[141]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perth_Australia_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[142]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philadelphia_Pennsylvania_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[143]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phoenix_Arizona_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[144]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pierre_South_Dakota_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[145]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pittsburgh_Pennsylvania_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[146]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Port_Arthur_Texas_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[147]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portland_Maine_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[148]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portland_Oregon_and_Vancouver_Washington_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[149]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Porto_Portugal_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[150]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prague_Czech_Republic_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[151]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quebec_City_Canada_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[152]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reading_Pennsylvania_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[153]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reno_Nevada_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[154]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reykjavik_Iceland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[155]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richmond_Virginia_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[156]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rio_de_Janeiro_Brazil_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[157]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rome_Italy_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[158]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rotterdam_Netherlands_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[159]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sacramento_California_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[160]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Salem_Oregon_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[161]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Salt_Lake_City_Utah_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[162]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_and_Oakland_California_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[163]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Juan_Puerto_Rico_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[164]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:S%C3%A3o_Paulo_Brazil_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[165]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seattle_and_Bellevue_Washington_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[166]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shanghai_China_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[167]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sioux_Falls_South_Dakota_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[168]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St._Gallen_Switzerland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[169]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sydney_Australia_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[170]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tampa_Bay_Florida_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[171]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tampere_Finland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[172]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tauranga_New_Zealand_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[173]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tehran_Iran_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[174]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tel_Aviv_Yafo_Israel_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[175]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tokyo_Japan_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[176]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toronto_Canada_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[177]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tulsa_Oklahoma_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[178]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turku_Finland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[179]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vancouver_Canada_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[180]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Warsaw_Poland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[181]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Washington_DC_and_Baltimore_MD_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[182]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Washington_DC_US_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[183]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wellington_New_Zealand_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[184]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winterthur_Switzerland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[185]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yokohama_Japan_street_map.svg){kind=link}
![[186]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zurich_Switzerland_street_map.svg){kind=link}
