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RfC: sister projects in search results

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T165464
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T165465
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T165468
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T165470
The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Summary:- There has been a rough consensus to include results from sister projects in the search results on enwiki on a per-project basis.
Rationale:--While the supporters of the proposal on a per-se basis have outvoted the opposers 2:1, the argument raised by the opposers make good points:--

  • There is a valid concern that the results of enabling such a broad-scoped search contains content not suitable for the general audience.
But, that the multimedia search is not included in a general search seems to somewhat allay the fears.
  • It's a fact that there exists a massive difference between guidelines followed across different sites.For an example--policies dealing with violation of copyrights are quite strong at en.wiki and is strictly enforced but standards and implementation of the same varies widely across sister-wikis.
No satisfiable answer has been posed regarding redressal of the above question.

Overall, the staus for implementation of the cross-wiki search on a per-project basis is as follows:--

  • Commons--Snow oppose.The lesser said, the better! Primarily due to NSFW content and fair use images.
  • Wikibooks--Strong consensus to oppose.Almost every work is seemingly incomplete.A garble of poorly thought out info at best!
  • Wikinews--Near Snow oppose.Primarily a immensely struggling project project with heavily outdated content.
  • Wikiquote--Strong consensus to support inclusion.Still, concerns of copy-vio remain.
  • Wikisource--Snow support for inclusion.Search-results ought to be improved.
  • Wikiversity--Snow oppose.Violates core policy of no original research.
  • Wikivoyage--Strong consensus to support inclusion on conditions of only exact title match-es appearing on a search.
  • Wiktionary--Snow support for inclusion.
  • Wikispecies/Wikidata--Clarified by WMF to be not under the purview of the project.
Signed by-Winged Blades Godric 06:38, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Which sister projects should appear in the search results on enwiki?

Background

User:CKoerner (WMF) announced in WP:VPT that Cross-wiki Search Results would be released soon: "The release date is expected to be near the end of April 2017 on all Wikipedias." [1] His post has further explanations and useful links to older discussions. The new tool can be easily tested by using this URL and replacing "rainbow" with the search term you want to test (remember to add the underscore for multi-word searches!).

When testing and discussing this further in Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Sister projects search results, the possibility was raised to use this selectively on enwiki, by disabling or hiding the search results from some sister projects for all searches. Reasons for this might be that the content returned by some projects is too often irrelevant, problematic, outdated, spammy, or in some other way contradictory to the aims and purposes of enwiki and not really what we want to send our readers to.

Some examples of common search terms (taken from the 100 most popular articles) with potentially unwanted results:

Other searches either gave no results (apart from enwiki) or at first glance no problematic results. Note that at the moment, this search has a serious layout bug when searching for a term which doesn't have an enwiki page, like this. Fram (talk) 10:19, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

RfC structure

As different arguments and end result may apply to each sister project, I have listed them separately, in alphabetical order. Please give a reasoned support or oppose or join the discussions!

General discussion

I think this is too early. Why not first make sure people experience and then discuss it like 4 weeks in ? That will give people a much better chance for an accurate assessment. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:25, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Everyone can experience it with the links provided, everyone interested can search for whatever they like. This RfC will normally end weeks after the planned deployment of the tool anyway, so starting it now means that we can react relatively swiftly to the deployment, without having this RfC really prematurely. We have had too many instances of new tools being deployed where the problems were only found after months (the wikidata descriptions on mobile, or something like Gather). Here we can test it, we know it is coming very soon (before the normal end date of this RfC), and we have the ability to take action if necessary, so why wait? Fram (talk) 10:36, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

@Fram: Any objection to adding a section above those below that is simply should we enable Cross-wiki Search Results or not? That way, if there are individuals against the implementation of this as a whole, they don't have to oppose each individually. Then the other sections would be contingent on if we choose to enable this. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 12:26, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

No problem. I notice you also added Wikispecies, I didn't include that one (nor Wikidata) because they never showed up in any of my tests, so I presume they are not included in the tool. We can disable some or all, but we can't add any technically... Fram (talk) 12:32, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
I didn't realize that, removed. @Fram: How's this? — Godsy (TALKCONT) 12:46, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

The mentioned layout bug in this depends on details like zoom level and window width. The bug is that Wikipedia results may be displayed to the right, and Sister projects below all the Wikipedia results and to the left. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:48, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

I have made User:PrimeHunter/Search sister projects.js. Install with this in your common JavaScript: 

importScript('User:PrimeHunter/Search_sister_projects.js'); // Linkback: [[User:PrimeHunter/Search sister projects.js]]

It adds a "Sister projects" sidebar link under "Tools" on search pages. If you have already made a normal search then click it to repeat the search with sister projects added. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:48, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Question. Will individual users be able to select which projects to search? (like now with namespaces) Ruslik_Zero 19:55, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Not like namespaces, but users will be able to permanently exclude projects in their personal CSS. If MediaWiki:Search-interwiki-caption accepts links then it could have a "(customize)" link to a page with CSS for each project and for removing everything. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:04, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

A few notes from the folks working on this

The Discovery team appreciates the feedback and discussion around the functionality of the sister project snippets on the search results page. A few clarifying points for folks discussing this feature.

There is quite a bit of research with new readers that has shown that many people around the globe do not know what Wikipedia is, or that the Wikimedia movement has other projects, or the overall mission of the movement. The idea behind displaying snippets from the sister projects in the search results page is to encourage discovery into the Wikimedia movement by showing interesting results that are gathered across the whole of the knowledge of Wikimedia. 

The Discovery team has been investigating, creating and testing the sister project results display since the summer of 2016. We’ve completed numerous tests—back end, front end, and with real people. Here’s a recent quote from a user testing the new display (in their own words):

“I know now that sistersearch will give me more ideas with my searches in the variety of articles that cover the same topic from so many and different angles. I feel encouraged to learn more and broaden my horizon, and I mean it.  Sisterseach has a less scholastic approach to searches and therefore pulls a multitude of articles related to my key words I myself have not dreamed of getting.  It's like a brainstorming for the writer that I am. I am sure students find this web site very useful and fun.”

The availability of the sister projects that can be displayed, per Wikipedia, is based on this matrix; Wikidata and Wikispecies are not included in the sister project snippets on purpose. Wikispecies actually uses a different indexing schema and it’s not an easy thing to bring those results in at this time, but we have a ticket for it (T156254).

As we've worked though the design of this feature, we recently moved the multimedia images to the bottom of the project list. We had made this design change because we found that sometimes the images loaded last which caused the page to move unexpectedly. This latest change puts the images ‘below the fold’ so if something is returned that might be of questionable nature, the image won’t be seen immediately. However, we’re also open to using just a link to the multimedia results, rather than displaying them on the search results page, as displayed in this feature draft sample image.

The current view of the sister project snippets (using the self-guided testing url) is a bit out of date, due to deployment schedules. You can view a more up-to-date version on wmflabs, please note this version is in a draft state and the project icons are not displaying properly, due to complexities with wmflabs.

Regarding the aforementioned layout bug: this is not significant—as in, it will not take much to be fixed. It's not well explained here, but the search results appear in an incorrect position when no local results are found when your browser window width is greater than about 1830px wide. I’ve added a ticket to address this issue (T163137) and linked to a short video showing the issue as it’s quite hard to reproduce.

If this RfC concludes with consensus to remove Wikiversity from the sister project snippets, we can do so for this Wikipedia. DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 22:24, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Should cross-wiki search results be enabled on enwiki?

Yes

  • Yes, but with per-project approval: The Wiktionary results certainly are useful for me. The Commons results with Multimedia search on the other hand are questionable. I expect various projects to have different quality. So I approve, but some projects may need their quality improved. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:36, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support with conditions that I am opposed to including Wikiversity and Commons at present. Generally I think this is a good idea worth implementing now if those two projects are left out for the time being. Chris Troutman (talk) 16:42, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support as above. Wiktionary in particular would be very useful displayed in search results. I also object to commons being linked. There is a large amount of distasteful material and I think it would run counter to our mission to shock readers by displaying it in search results.--Tom (LT) (talk) 23:38, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support. I think having Wiktionary and Wikiquote results displayed will be a big improvement. Wikivoyage could be good for title-only matches. Some of the other sites, like Wikinews and Wikiversity, are certainly more questionable inclusions. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:49, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support, but only with separate per-project approval. The issue with surprise NSFW Commons images needs to be sorted out before we give approval for that, for instance. Lankiveil (speak to me) 05:57, 19 April 2017 (UTC).
  • Support conditionally as above. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
    to reply to me     06:54, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support when relevance of search results needs has been improved. The examples shown in this (premature) RfC show that the results are often terrible. —Kusma (t·c) 09:58, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • If the per-project concerns expressed in this RFC are addressed this is going to be a great feature. Max Semenik (talk) 21:46, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support for selected projects only, as this feature could certainly provide additional useful information. BethNaught (talk) 11:44, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support for Wiktionary, and Wikiqoute results only. KGirlTrucker81 huh? what I've been doing 23:07, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support for only approved search terms from other sister projects per below votes. --George Ho (talk) 01:09, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support for selected projects: display other Wikipedias' results if you're considering mainspace pages, Commons results if you're considering pages in filespace, and both if you're considering both mainspace and filespace. Also, edit whatever MediaWiki page governs the top of the search results by adding text saying something like "Search for this phrase in other wiki projects" and linking it to a page that searches Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, etc. Nyttend (talk) 00:52, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

No

The problem isn't so much that it returns images that could be considered NSFW or returns results of questionable relevance (I cannot determine why the first Commons result for "homosexual" is a picture of a man not used in any article, with no mention of homosexuality, for example). The bigger problem is that it highlights the way in which search results communicate the most relevant material Wikimedia sites have to offer on a given topic. It's not dissimilar to the image used at the top of an article. Obviously not all of the images linked above are problematic (I just wanted to link the three I saw for each case), but the most relevant pictures of women are naked, with emphasis on body parts; men are typically not naked, but represented by a close-up of masturbation. Unless the search is sophisticated enough that it does not undermine our standards for content quality (for example, prioritizing content directly used/linked on Wikipedia for a search on Wikipedia, such as images taken from infoboxes), this should not be turned on. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 13:33, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
To clarify, I understand that these images appear under "multimedia" search today. Multimedia search is not "the" search when looking for a topic (in fact I don't know if I've ever used it outside of Commons). Search of images is still something that could use addressing, but the issue is more about displaying problematic search results beyond articles to everybody when they're looking for information rather than media. While I didn't mention it above, the same applies to e.g. WikiVoyage and other sites; not just Commons. If it degrades the quality of information you get from Wikipedia, it seems sub-ideal. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:14, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Opposed to mixing images/multimedia with normal searches as I explained below in the section regarding Commons, but I'm currently neutral if images/multimedia are kept separate. Alsee (talk) 22:55, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Not yet:
  • Surprise NSFW images are an automatic no.
  • Multimedia searches return fair use images, see here. This is another automatic no.
  • After removing the two fair use images, only 1 of 10 of results in the previous search is relevant. This isn't an isolated case: 4/10 with 1 fair use, 3/10 with all three images being fair use...
  • Context is important! If I search for a place, I may want to see Wikivoyage results. Wikivoyage shouldn't appear if I search for, say, "economist".
I agree with the concept behind this and would like to see a much improved version go live, but right now the execution is sorely lacking. MER-C 04:13, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
MER-C, The WMF has been overeager for software to blindly grab and include images everywhere, but a mediasearch is a legitimate exemption. That's how our normal old multimedia search works. If you're explicitly searching images then you pretty much need to see the results. But it should be separate from the normal default search. Alsee (talk) 06:38, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
There may be an exemption, but I consider it against the spirit of our non-free content policy to return fair use images. MER-C 13:28, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose primarily due to a lack of consistency with respect to guidelines and policy as well as adherence or enforcement. When people come to us for information there is at least a good to very good chance that what they are going to get will be accurate with no violation of copyrights and the like. If we start doing cross wiki searches my confidence level is going to go way down. I'm not trying to knock some of our sister projects. But the reality is that some them have different standards, some of which may be much lower than ours. -Ad Orientem (talk) 16:02, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Some of the other sisters have different standards. (Judge not lest ye be judged.) I see two distinct reasons for content on another sister to not match Wikipedia's standards: either the sister content has had fewer eyeballs, or the purpose of the sister is different. Imho the second might be a valid reason to consider omission from search results here, but the first is not. One ought not deprive eyeballs to content simply because it hasn't had enough eyeballs on it yet; that would be undermining the strategy Wikipedia itself uses for content improvement. Different purposes are another matter. The purpose of Wikiversity, for example, is profoundly different from that of Wikipedia, to the point where I could understand how some some Wikipedians might reasonably worry about Wikipedia readers being confused by intermingling of Wikiversity pages in Wikipedia search results (I've nothing against Wikiversity, but I acknowledge the potential for confusion). One could imagine arranging the presentation of search results to avoid that sort of confusion. --Pi zero (talk) 19:03, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Discussion

  • Is the section above concerned with cross-wiki search in general or just one particular project? FTR, commons:Special:Search gives me a relevant page for "woman" as the first hit. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:26, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
    • I'll add "on enwiki" to avoid misunderstanding. Whether other projects and/or WMF will use our findings to decide what to do elsewhere is not for us to discuss. Fram (talk) 14:35, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
      • Sorry, should have been clearer: Does the above section discuss one particular project being searched or the use of cross-wiki search on enwiki in general? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:41, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
        • Ah, I see. The intention is "should we have it at all (in its current form)." The sections below this are for more nuanced answers (e.g. "yes" for commons, "no" for wiktionary, ...). I originally only had the per-element sections below, but it was felt that a more general question for the "no, not at all, not one bit of it" and "ys, bring it all on" opinions would be more useful. Suggestions to improve the RfC are welcome, it's not easy to keep it nuanced and practical at the same time. Fram (talk) 14:47, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
          • I've put in a somewhat nuanced "yes" !vote then, since I expect that I'll support most options. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:37, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
            • Thanks for everyone who has commented on this RfC. We want to demonstrate that without doubt, we’ve been listening to you all. Based on the feedback provided, we’ve completed several code updates to take into account the concerns raised about displaying the sister projects in the search results. To that end, we’ve updated the algorithm for searching multimedia/commons to use boosted images—this allows for better quality and more relevant images to be shown in the results. We’ve also changed the search query to be title only for the Wikivoyage and Wikiversity projects, rather than full text searches. Please know that not every search result for a particular query is perfect and a reminder that we don’t censor—but—in order to lessen the possible shock value of inappropriate images being shown immediately on the page, we’ve moved the multimedia/commons images to display at the bottom of the sister project snippets. The testing for the sister projects can be done using the self-guided testing instructions on Mediawiki. Or, by manipulating this url by changing the search=_____ parameter. The newly updated page design of the sister project snippets can be viewed using the wmflabs site. However, please be aware that not all data (to include articles and images) is loaded on wmflabs, as it is a beta site, so the result content could be very different than on enwiki. We request that you examine the wmflabs site for overall page appearance rather than actual search result contents. We hope that the folks that have participated in this RfC will take another look and review some of the search queries that were posted earlier. We feel that these improvements are a really good addition to the search results page and provide many more relevant snippets and images from the Wikimedia sister projects. Thanks, DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 21:56, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
  • We've updated the look and feel of the sister project snippets in the search results page, please take a look. Here's a url for James Comey that shows recent activity from Wikinews. Or, use 'french elections 2017' for another recent news example. Cheers, DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 12:46, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

If enabled, which sister projects should be included?

Commons

Support (Commons)
  • Support in principle, but the current implementation is terrible. I see no problem with a search for "penis" resulting in images of a penis. However, many of the search terms presented here had unexpected results, and as long as that is true, the image search needs to be turned off by default. —Kusma (t·c) 10:01, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support I was hesitant at first, but after the algorithm changes, this seems to be working much better. There's definitely room for improvement, but I don't see any reason to oppose this feature outright. Sam Walton (talk) 10:30, 5 May 2017 (UTC) Nevermind, still seems like we have a not-ideal quantity of NSFW images showing up. Sam Walton (talk) 13:10, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Hi User:Samwalton9 - can you share the queries you used - after the change to use boosted templates? Thanks! DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
@DTankersley (WMF): From the discussion section below, the two that were flagged were Whipped cream (I've just now realised this is actually "whipped_cream", not "whipped cream"; the former is unlikely to be a search term and seems to be a mistake of BethNaught's URL creation. "whipped cream" (or "whipped+cream" in the URL) does not show that NSFW image. Fruit loops, however, still does. Sam Walton (talk) 16:00, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
@Samwalton9: We recently updated the UI treatment for the multimedia section, and the multimedia images/files are now at the bottom of the sister project snippets. We still have several more updates to do, but with our team offsite and the Hackathon imminent, we won't be able to do more updates until the week of May 22nd. Cheers, DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 12:53, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
Oppose (Commons)
  • Still oppose: the new algorithm is better, but not good enough. Pearl necklace continues to return surprise NSFW results and the fair use problem still exists. MER-C 10:56, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
  • @MER-C: Is pearl necklace really a good example? If you search that term on Wikipedia you'll end up on Pearl necklace (sexuality) with one extra click. Given that it's a possible legitimate result (that's precisely what the NSFW act is called), and it only shows up when you search with quotes around the term ([2]), I'm not convinced. Sam Walton (talk) 11:01, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Discussion (Commons)
  • I'm not opposed to Commons generally, I think it absolutely makes sense in theory, but it's just not working well from the tests I've done. Images are frequently unrelated (often by being Wiki-community related) or NSFW. Sam Walton (talk) 23:45, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
    If the search were mined via Wikidata, then the resulting images would be chosen to be entirely representative. --Fæ (talk) 23:49, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
  • I was literally typing a ping to everyone about this exact issue, when I fell asleep last night. The WMF's proposed changes clearly do not resolve the unanimous concerns raised. I propose that Commons only appear when images are already being returned. That would be when when Multimedia search is clicked, when Everything search is clicked, or an Advanced search where the user adds a check mark for the File: namespace. (Edit: Ooops. Image pages are returned on 'Everything' and 'Advanced' searched, but only Multimedia search actually displays them. Alsee (talk) 14:02, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Adding pings to Kusma and DTankersley (WMF). Alsee (talk) 14:04, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
  • We recently updated the UI treatment for multimedia results, and the images/files are now at the bottom of the sister project snippets. We still have several more updates to do, but with our team offsite and the Hackathon imminent, we won't be able to do more updates until the week of May 22nd. Thanks for all the notes, @Alsee: and @Swarm: Cheers, DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 12:57, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
    DTankersley (WMF), sorry, I wasn't careful enough when I read your earlier comment.[3] I was concerned when saw the part about moving images to the bottom, and I guess it distracted me from the following part: However, we’re also open to using just a link to the multimedia results, rather than displaying them on the search results page. That should resolve the issue. Having multimedia link at the bottom seems redundant to the multimedia search at the top, but I can't imagine anyone would actively object to that.
    We don't want to get into filtering/censoring images, so an important part of the compromise is that we're really careful not to have controversial images where they aren't necessary. Any machine-gathered images presumptively include our most troublesome religious/sexual/gore content. If a school blocks Wikipedia because they consider our articles too informative and thorough, that sucks, oh well, their fault. We don't need parents or schools or newsmedia attacking or blocking us over images popping up in basic search. Alsee (talk) 01:43, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Wikibooks

Support (Wikibooks)
Oppose (Wikibooks)
  • Oppose, this seems like the weaker bastard child of enwiki and wikia, where people an post their original research (e.g. long, very disputable lists of suitable "character names" for "adolescent fiction", recipes (endless recipes, random book gave me 80% cookbook pages or so), information on how to diagnose paraphiliac behaviour, ... Very few pages seem to be in any way finished (books consists mostly of redlinked chapters), and sending our readers there seems like a disservice in most cases. Fram (talk) 07:17, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose hodge-podge of poorly thought out info. Dlohcierekim 21:52, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
  • oppose - no need. Nothing complete enough, serves a different purpose, unlike e.g. Commons (which I oppose for different reasons), does not lead to more info. --Dirk Beetstra T C 13:21, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Discussion (Wikibooks)

Wikinews

Support (Wikinews)
Oppose (Wikinews)
Discussion (Wikinews)

Isn't Wikinews dead? Unless there is a reasonable proposal to revive it (unlikely, as the main problem with Wikinews is that Wikipedia has always been a better news site that Wikinews, no matter what WP:NOTNEWS says), it is only going to be embarrassing to send people there. —Kusma (t·c) 10:04, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikiquote

Support (Wikiquote)
Oppose (Wikiquote)
Further comment WP:CV forbid linking to copyvios. Dlohcierekim 13:44, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
Discussion (Wikiquote)

Wikisource

Support (Wikisource)
  • Support If we have open source literature, why not present the reader with it? Chris Troutman (talk) 16:40, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Support per above. Would be very useful to turn up the original document or related originals for some searches. --Tom (LT) (talk) 23:40, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Weak support. Often has useful information, but also returns weird results, e.g. searching for Fax gives the "Traffic Signs Manual/Chapter 3", which is a copyright violation (it may only be reproduced for non-commercial research, which contradicts the wikisource copyright rules). So not only not a useful result for this search at all, but a problematic link to boot. Fram (talk) 07:17, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Fram, the Open Government License allows commercial use. Fences&Windows 16:24, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
Oppose (Wikisource)
  • Oppose - I sympathise with the 'weak support' !votes above, clearly this could in principle be helpful, but in practice it is very far from clear that Wikisource has broad enough coverage or quality to assist materially in the vast majority of searches. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:08, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
Discussion (Wikisource)

Wikiversity

Support (Wikiversity)
Oppose (Wikiversity)
Discussion (Wikiversity)

While I don't see "this project allows original research" as a problem per se, I have difficulties thinking of searches where Wikiversity will be what the reader wants. Are there any good examples where this works? —Kusma (t·c) 10:08, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

@Kusma: I would guess that persons actually wanting to learn topics, such as calculus, science, engineering or some other such item, come first to Wikipedia, and then discover that an encyclopedia is not a very good way to learn how to apply such topics (and in fact, we of course have a policy saying that we should not teach at WP:NOTHOWTO). There may be less academic subjects of the same sort. --Izno (talk) 13:10, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Isn't that more in the scope of Wikibooks? BethNaught (talk) 11:44, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
Uhhh, yes! :D --Izno (talk) 12:32, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
Kusma, I believe that Wikiversity includes teaching materials and similar resources. The current featured project is about learning web design. The organized course description page at wikiversity:Web Design/About the web design learning project probably is the best place to get an idea of how it works. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:21, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
The Discovery team has changed the search query to be title only for the Wikivoyage and Wikiversity projects, rather than full text searches. We feel that these improvements will provide more relevant snippets from the Wikimedia sister projects. DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 22:01, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikivoyage

Support (Wikivoyage)
Oppose (Wikivoyage)
  • Oppose (perhaps support for exact term, i.e. the search term has to be (part of the) title of the Wikivoyage article). Wikivoyage is a promotional tool in many, many cases, not a useful source of travel information. Linking to a poor site only because it is a sister project is spamming a sister project for no good reason. See e.g. the ox search given above, it gives the Wikivoyage link for Bemidji, "Bemidji is a beautiful, medium sized city with interesting people." (text shown on the search here). The Facebook search gives the page for Baliuag, as it has the facebook link for a restaurant there, with phone number, email, address... That page has nothing but this information. They will be happy if everyone searching for "Facebook" gets their phone number as well :-) Fram (talk) 07:17, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • oppose no benefit to doing this. Info is too often either banal, spammy, or both. Dlohcierekim 13:48, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
Discussion (Wikivoyage)

The Discovery team has changed the search query to be title only for the Wikivoyage and Wikiversity projects, rather than full text searches. We feel that these improvements will provide more relevant snippets from the Wikimedia sister projects. DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 22:02, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Wiktionary

Support (Wiktionary)
Oppose (Wiktionary)
Discussion (Wiktionary)

Wikispecies (once it's available)

Support (Wikispecies)
Oppose (Wikispecies)
Discussion (Wikispecies)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Bare URLs when adhering to common citation style guides

There is a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#"Bare" / "Raw" URLs in common style guides regarding whether URLs appearing in citations formatted in accordance with several common citation styles (eg. MLA, Chicago style, Vancouver style) are considered "bare URLs" and thus impermissible on Wikipedia. AHeneen (talk) 19:50, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Looks like you're forum shopping having posted here, at the DYK nom, at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources and at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Linking. No-one said your raw URLs were "impermissible on Wikipedia", just far from best practice, and certainly against the rules of DYK (for example). Please be more precise when making such claims, and also try to centralise discussions rather than spam as many pages as possible. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:42, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
Forum shopping is Raising essentially the same issue on multiple noticeboards and talk pages, or to multiple administrators, or any of these repetitively. Linking to an existing discussion from other relevant talkpages and/or the village pump is specifically allowed behaviour (see WP:APPNOTE), and is not at all the same thing as forum shopping. And there are at least three other posts on this page currently doing the same thing: WP:VPP/RfC discussion at WT:NFC, WP:VPP/Renaming to emojis in global rename policy, and WP:VPP/Ongoing dispute re duplication in child and parent categories (WP:SUBCAT). Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 07:23, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

WP:CANVASS

In Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Dane#Oppose, there was a debate whether pinging is canvassing. In the page , WP:CANVASS I couldn't find that pinging is canvassing, but in AFD or any other deletion discussion, one editor pinging other editors sharing the same POV is considered canvassing.

There should be a consensus whether pinging the Delete voters or Keep voters is considered canvassing. --Marvellous Spider-Man 15:00, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

  • I think pinging is canvassing. I also think that it can be acceptable sometimes in discussions. DGG is frequently pinged or asked to comment on things to see his view whether they pass WP:PROF. Diannaa is pinged or left messages for thoughts on copyvio situations. So long as the ping is neutral and is asking for an analysis of the situation by a user that might have something of particular value to contribute, I don't think it wrong, but I also think one should explain why the other user was pinged. I think pinging someone from either RfA side should probably be avoided, because it looks bad even if it isn't intended that way. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:57, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
  • If you are being brought to a discussion because you are trying to bring people that you know will agree with your point of view, that is canvassing. It doesn't matter if that is done via talk page message, ping, email, or smoke signals. If you are simply notifying people that such a discussion exists that is not canvassing. Seeing as RfAs are so widely advertised nowadays I don't see how that ping was anything but canvassing. --Majora (talk) 21:03, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Conversely, a ping is often used as a courtesy to inform an editor that you have mentioned them in a discussion. If that is the rationale for the ping, then the fact that RfAs are so well advertised makes it more likely that the pinged editor already knew about the RfA, so making a nonsense of any suggestion of canvassing. --RexxS (talk) 21:31, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
    • Without getting into criticism, as Coffee pointed out on the RfA talk, many users have the pings set up to email, and if it was a user who had not been active in a long time, pinging them when you reasonably suspect that they might feel a certain way does look a lot like canvassing. At things as contentious as RfA, the look isn't good, even if the intentions were. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:53, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
  • I agree with the idea that ping notifications can constitute inappropriate canvasing, just as any other form of notification can. However, if you are going to canvas, pinging is actually a good way to avoid the potential pitfalls of notifications. It is public, and doesn't provide a detailed message designed to influence the person being pinged. I think it is important to also remember that when deciding whether particular pings are inappropriate canvasing, we need to consider a bunch of factors case by case, how many people were pinged, how they were selected, and what their impact could be based on the size of the discussion. Monty845 03:10, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
    • ^ This. Any given link to a user's page may or may not be appropriate, but "canvassing" means so much more than that. If you actually read WP:Canvassing, a public, unbiased notification to a single user is quite low on the list of things that we worry about. In fact, it's lower than a {{Please see}} note on an editor's talk page, because (a) some editors have notifications turned off and (b) none of the editor's wiki-friends can see it. If (b) doesn't sound important, then you probably aren't remembering that some of us have talk pages that are watched by dozens or hundreds of people, and the watchers tend to be people with similar interests/POVs. As an example, a note at SandyGeorgia's talk page is probably still an efficient way to contact experienced FAC people; a ping to her account would, at most, result in contacting only her. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:24, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
      @WhatamIdoing: But, I think that is the problem. There is a list of things to worry about, not a clear cut "this is ok, this is wrong", this places the burden of the value judgment solely on the closer and allows for large amounts of ambiguity. Additionally, how can one prove that other users haven't been notified in private without outing or even illegal hacking? This lack of evidence biases the policy to punish the "lesser" "crimes". Additionally, I think the harms this policy attempts to prevent are better covered by wp:meatpuppet, Wp:sockpuppet, and by the various closing policies. Endercase (talk) 18:01, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
      Sure, you're never going to have certainty. But you never did have certainty: You never could prove that nobody sent private e-mail messages, that nobody discussed it on WP:IRC, that nobody shared links on Facebook, that nobody telephoned another editor (quaint idea, I know, but I've got phone numbers for a few editors, so I assume that others do, too) – the list goes on. You will never have complete certainty that private communications haven't happened. We seem to have muddled through pretty well despite this.
      Fortunately, we don't need complete certainty about whether people are occasionally discussing things in private, much less certainty about whether those private discussions had any practical effect on the outcome. We are (mostly) adults here, and we can and should use our best judgment. If your best judgment happens to disagree with someone else's best judgment, then the usual dispute-resolution processes are open to you both. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:58, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
AGF means that, unless there is evidence to the contrary, we must assume that stealth-canvassing has not occurred. Most editors, if they get an email out of the blue requesting that they way in on a discussion, will disclose that information unless they have good reason not to. Conversely, if a whole bunch of new accounts show up and !vote in an AFD, it's pretty safe to assume that off-site canvassing occurred, even without engaging in any kind of "outing". Closers will typically disregard the !votes of SPAs, and this is very easy to do as such !votes are normally tagged. !Votes that were canvassed should also, typically, be tagged, as for instance happened here. This means that !votes that were stealth-canvassed in bad faith will normally disregarded as the !votes of SPAs or editors who hadn't contributed in years and then suddenly showed up again, so specifically tagging them as having been canvassed would be unnecessary. I can't recall a single discussion where there was a serious concern that a large number of long-term contributors had received off-wiki contact asking them to weigh in on some discussion, and none of them disclosed this information. There's nothing to be worried about here, as far as I can tell. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 23:47, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
Well, they would of course disclose if they were stealth canvassed per AGF. That is a good point. @WhatamIdoing: My major point wasn't that we can never prove if the most harmful portion of the policy was violated (though I do agree with you there). It was that Wp:sockpuppet (which includes wp:meatpuppet) along with closing policies better cover the harms of canvassing than the canvassing policy itself. Additionally, the canvassing policy is often misinterpreted to discount "canvassed" votes, which is against policy (IMO) as the proper action would be to evaluate the !votes based on logical merits not on vote number (per closing policies). Endercase (talk) 02:47, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
Also that the policy itself is not clear on what to do in various cases of canvassing and is not clear on what is acceptable canvassing and was is not (more examples would be helpful IMO). Endercase (talk) 13:24, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Canvass is the most misguided policy we have. It is often used to attack people for sending an email, leaving a message, etc. We all do it all the time, and so it can always be used against someone - just a little bad faith is needed, and that is always in plentiful supply. Anyway, with regards to this particular question, of course pinging is canvassing. Everything is canvassing. Did I say this policy was bad and the sooner it is retired, the better? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 08:01, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
    • I believe that the rule that you mention is a little more complicated than that. In full, it runs something like this: "Everything that I do is fine, or at most an unimportant and easily forgiven honest mistake. Everything that you do is canvassing if, and only if, you disagree with me".
      If we share the same opinion, then I am quite certain that everything you do to promote our shared opinion is acceptable under any reasonable interpretation of any policy or guideline. ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:09, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
  • I should preface my argument with that the notice that I have a little over 1000 edits so I am an extreme lightweight when it comes to these policy discussion. I think many issues arising out of wp:Canvass is that the policy refers to both acceptable and unacceptable behavior and there is not a clear example based differentiation between the two, IMO it is relatively ambiguous. I suggest that it needs to be split to something like Wp:inappropriate notification and wp:appropriate notification so that issues such as these can be hammered out and clearly represented (this suggestion only gets very weak support from me). And so that when the policy(ies) are cited it is clear what type of message the citing editor intends to convey. I often see claims of inappropriate canvassing, but I rarely see these claims supported by clear consensus. I can easily see how the current policy can be abused. Endercase (talk) 01:01, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Pinging someone to inform them that you are talking about them is not, in and of itself, canvassing. Doing so in a cherry-picked manner (mentioning a bunch of users but only pinging those on one "side") with the intention of vote-stacking is canvassing. Per AGF, calling a ping or two "canvassing" without specific evidence that vote-stacking was the likely intent is inappropriate. I have not read the whole discussion as it was moved to the RFA's talk page, but the comments that were left that mentioned "canvassing" did not present clear evidence of this kind, but that evidence not having been specifically requested either makes it a grey area. Vote-stacking is both counter-policy and bad, in general.
(The rest of this is general, and not specifically relevant to what Ritchie did in that RFA.) There is a caveat that, at RFA, the majority of !voters seem to assume good faith based on the answers provided to questions, without doing extensive research on the candidates' backgrounds. If one is aware that a candidate has a checkered past that hasn't been noted yet in the RFA, notifying users that are aware of it might in theory be acceptable, and I'm reluctant even to say that cherry-picking editors on "one side" is inherently bad. Per AGF, the majority of !voters (and bureaucrats!) are not looking do not need to be told "but some other users thought this behaviour was appropriate", and (also per AGF) the one doing the "canvassing" should be taking as sincerely believing that the candidate's behaviour was inappropriate, and those who supported it were wrong on the policy, especially if there was a formal close that said as much.
And of course, informing any party that is not already involved in any way but is likely to be symptathetic that "Hey, I'm in trouble -- could you help me out?" is always wrong.
Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:45, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

The proposal to change lead wording and titling occurs at Wikipedia talk:Canvassing#Issue with lead wording, and possible improvements. I invite you all to comment there. --George Ho (talk) 16:04, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

I haven't investigated this yet. However, a violation of CANVASS would be one which is excessive, aimed at users who will agre with you, worded in a way designed to convince you of one specific opinion, or done stealthly. Use of ping in the primary discussion clearly doesn't violate the last 2; as to the first 2, it should be treated the same as neuterally-worded comments on the users' talk pages. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:20, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Removing "Did You Know" from administrative responsibility

In the course of the recent Cwmhiraeth RfA, it became clear that the connection between full admin rights and the ability to move prep sets into queues and edit/update the DYK queues and the Main Page "Did you know" section was, well, let's just say "tenuous". Items in this section appear after they have been added to the Did You Know template. That template has been fully-protected since 2005 to prevent vandals from being able to make changes automatically which would then be presented on the most-visited page on the project. That made sense in 2005.

In 2013, however, a new protection level of Template protection was created as a result of this discussion and a Template editor user right was created. An editor such as Cwmhiraeth, who is clearly trusted in the DYK space and has already been granted other extended user rights, should be able to edit the DYK template without needing an admin's assistance or needing full admin rights.

Just to be clear: I am not suggesting further unbundling of admin tools and responsibilities. That has already been done when the template editor right was created. The only change necessary is changing the protection level of the DYK template.

Is it time, therefore, to carry out this change and allow experienced DYK editors to assist the process without the need for a full RfA?

Thank you.Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 20:43, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Proposal obviously has too many problems as proposed and so Withdrawn but see Alternate Proposal below. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 12:29, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Endorse

  1. As proposer Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 20:43, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  2. I think that this is an excellent idea, just so long as the permission is restricted to template editors, and not extended in such a way that inexperienced editors can get away with changing the main page, which is clearly a bad thing. It also needs to be restricted only to the DYK template, and not the rest of the main page, of course. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:02, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
    I'm learning from the discussion below that there are significant technical obstacles to enacting this proposal, so I just want to say that I don't mean by my support that I want to blow up the wiki. Please think of my support as supporting finding a feasible way to make the proposal possible. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:18, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  3. Endorse - thank you Eggishorn for bringing forth a great idea...not implying that it's your only great idea, just that it's a great one, nonetheless. Atsme📞📧 21:04, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  4. Endorse - There are trusted regulars at DYK who are not admins, and this protection change, and their applying for Template Editor permission, would be a benefit to the project. — Maile (talk) 21:26, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  5. Support with the understanding that this also applies to all the other main-page features, like in-the news and other images there. Template editors are trusted with critical components of Wikipedia, and the main-page is such an item. However the DYK queues do not have to be in the cascading protection system of the main page anyway and could be separately cascaded protected if others object to including other main page components. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:27, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  6. Endorse in principle, but we need to be clear that this proposal by itself is not going to get anywhere. As I understand it, the nature of the cascading protection is such that it really requires as to move the main page and all its support pages to template protection from full protection. This is an additional 153 users at last count, so it would increase the total number of people able to edit the main page by about 12%; and probably slightly more than that, as most of the experienced users that this proposal is aimed at do not currently have the template editor right. Obviously, this number represents a slight decline in security, but personally I would be okay with it. I think it's probably a less significant security issue than all the old timers who have been grandfathered into having the admin toolset, at least a few of whom probably would not pass an RFA today. Vanamonde (talk) 04:26, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
  7. Support, although to avoid removing the cascading protection template editors could edit a separate page which an admin bot automatically copies to the main page template. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
    to reply to me     08:07, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

Decline

  1. There isn't any way to do what is requested here without making the whole of the main page less secure. The main page is subject to cascading protection, which means all templates, images etc on it are automatically full protected. This means we don't have to worry about accidentally forgetting to protect one of them, which has happened in the past before the feature was introduced. We would have to turn it off again to implement the proposal. Furthermore this proposal is for non-admins to make direct edits to the main page. Don't fool yourself into thinking that it's only part of the main page, a technically sophisticated vandal could use that to replace the entire main page with whatever they wanted. Given the problems we've had with compromised admin accounts recently I'm hesitant to hand this permission out to a load of other accounts. If anyone has a suggestion for increasing non-admin involvement in the DYK process which doesn't involve non-admins making direct edits to the main page I'd be happy to hear it though. Hut 8.5 21:24, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  2. This cannot be done unilaterally for DYK. If it were to be done for DYK, it would require a massive downgrade to the protections in place for the whole of the main page, simply to make life a little easier for a couple of people at DYK. As Hut 8.5 explains, that is a bad idea. BencherliteTalk 21:40, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  3. Oppose per Hut 8.5, who put it quite well. There is no reason to allow template editors to edit just this part of the main page and not others because opening up just this piece allows most of the possible damage to be done. If we wish to allow the ~150 template editors to edit the main page, we might as well let them edit all aspects of it. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 03:01, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
  4. Oppose, without diminishing the value of Cwmhiraeth to the project and my full faith in him to do this job well and reliably, but the control on the Template Editor right is not equivalent to control of the Admin package, and while there are individuals that I would trust to run this service, there is no practical way to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. That is, since we have no way to restrict this ONLY to people whom we identify as trustworthy to manage DYK, and not keep out other Template Editor rightsholders, I begrudgingly have to oppose this. --Jayron32 11:00, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
  5. Oppose (as currently suggested) - As one of the primary admins active with promoting queue sets at DYK I would certainly appreciate having extra sets of hands to help spread out the burden (DYK has number of experienced editors/regulars who could certainly be trusted to edit the queues). However, as we have seen with compromised Sysop accounts, the Main Page is the magnet and first stop for attacks and I am concerned (in the similar vein as Hut 8.5 above) about this undermining Main Page security and increasing its attack surface. To make this work effectively we would likely have to remove cascade protection from parts of/or the entirety of the Main Page which is not something I would feel comfortable supporting. That being said I would not be opposed to having something like this if we could find a technical way to not undermine the Main Page's security and think SoWhy's suggestion below (permalink) might be a good idea for implementation or at the very least an idea of what a compromise between security and utility could look like. Mifter (talk) 03:03, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
  6. Oppose per Hut 8.5. The main page is the most visible part of the entire project. It is the part of the project that could really damage any semblance of credibility that Wikipedia has with the outside world. Allowing anyone to edit it (directly or otherwise) that is not an admin is a non-starter in my book. Sorry. --Majora (talk) 23:32, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
  7. Oppose As currently written. I think my proposal below (permalink) could serve as a better - if slightly more complicated - way to achieve the goal of having more people help at DYK without compromising the Main Page more than necessary. Regards SoWhy 09:55, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Neutral

  • I like the spirit of this idea but given he remarks in the oppose and discussion sections it appears it can't be done as proposed due to cascading protection of the main page, and as removing that protection is not part of the proposal (and probably a non-starter) it would seem that this just isn't possible at this time. Beeblebrox (talk) 05:55, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

Other discussion

I do not have enough knowledge to recommend it apply to any other section of the main page. I only propose this for DYK. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 21:08, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  • (edit conflict) The main page has cascading full protection, which fully protects all templates transcluded onto it. The same is true of Wikipedia:Main Page/Tomorrow. So {{Did you know}} cannot be reduced from full protection without also altering the level of protection of those two pages (and all the back-up pages that protect them). Given the difficulties we have had in keeping all admin accounts secure, extending the ability of non-admins to edit the most visible page we have seems to me to be very unwise. BencherliteTalk 21:07, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
    • I did some reading about how cascading protection works (and I'm terrible at technical stuff, so my idea may be a bad one), and I see that there is a bot that takes images from Commons and temporarily applies the cascading protection to them as the images are added to the main page. Would it be possible to modify the bot so that it does the same for the DYK template? If so, perhaps it would be possible for template editors to edit the template, and then have it protected. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:27, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
      • What you are thinking of is rather different - an adminbot at Commons that detects which images are about to appear on the main page here, and adds protection to them at Commons, not here. It saves admins uploading copies of images to this project so that they can gain the benefit of the main page's cascading protection. BencherliteTalk 21:42, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  • The template editor tool was not unbundled; it remains part of the admin toolkit. All admins can edit templates and Lua modules. Extending it in this way seems to be extending it beyond its intended use. Hawkeye7 (talk) 21:45, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
    • Yes, template editor tool is part of the admin toolkit. But "Template editor permission" is listed on WP:PERM which looks like it can be granted as a stand-alone tool. What am I missing here? Actually, you are listed as having the permission, and you are currently not an admin. — Maile (talk) 21:51, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  • As I understand it (and I recognise that I may not be correct), an admin moves completed sets (hopefully after suitable checks) from the preps like Template:Did you know/Preparation area 6 to the queues like Template:Did you know/Queue/6. These are cut-and-paste moves of the set of hooks, image, and credits, not moves of the pages themselves. A bot, DYKUpdateBot, which has admin permissions then moves the relevant queue to Template:Did you know with edits like this one and then gives user talk notifications, updates article talk pages, and then finishes the update by clearing the relevant queue template page. Assuming I am understanding correctly:
    • Can an editor with template editor rights edit Template:Did you know, which is the one transcluded to the main page, or is that prevented by it being fully protected?
    • If the answer is yes, then the security issue makes this proposal a non-starter on the grounds of protecting the main page from vandalism by compromised accounts, etc. However, if the answer is no, then can a template editor edit the queue pages, or are they protected? If they are fully protected, can they be moved to template protected to allow template editors to edit them?
    • I realise that the bot moves the content to a main-page transcluded template, but could it not check that the format of the material moved matches a DYK queue set, and notify WT:DYK if the queue is not in a format for transclusion, thereby needing an admin or template editor to fix the queue before the bot carries out the update? @Shubinator: as the operator of the DYKUpdateBot to comment on the technical side (and any other aspects of the proposal that they wishes to comment on, of course).
    • Or, have I just not understood how DYK templates, main page protection, and template editor rights interact?
    • Assuming it is possible to make a template editor of a DYK regular to edit queues but not the main page transcluded template, would the granting of this right need consensus (and if so, where), or would it be at the discretion of a single admin? I can see that granting the template editor right to non-technical editors might be controversial if accessing the myriad of technically complex and highly trafficked templates was not restricted by suitable undertakings or at least the risk considered? EdChem (talk) 23:03, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
    • Here's what it says when a Queue template is in the edit window:
  • "WARNING: This page has been protected so that only users with administrative rights can make edits."
  • "WARNING: This page has been protected so that only administrators can edit it because it is transcluded in the following pages (which are protected with the "cascading" option enabled). Please ensure that you are following the protection policy."
  • Wikipedia:Main Page/Tomorrow
  • Wikipedia:Main Page/1
  • Wikipedia:Main Page/2
  • Wikipedia:Main Page/3
  • Wikipedia:Main Page/4
  • Wikipedia:Main Page/5
  • Main Page
  • Wikipedia:Cascade-protected items/content
  • Template:Did you know has the same message as above, but in addition to the above cascading, it also includes:
  • Wikipedia:Cascade-protected items/Main Page
  • Wikipedia:Cascade-protected items/Main Page/2
  • Wikipedia:Cascade-protected items/Main Page/3
  • Wikipedia:Cascade-protected items/Main Page/4
  • Wikipedia:Cascade-protected items/Main Page/5
— Maile (talk) 23:31, 10 May 2017 (UTC)
  • I made a similar proposal at Cwmhiraeth's RfA, so I think this is a good idea in general. However, I understand the problems with the cascading protection. Maybe there is another way, which is a bit more complicated but might just address those problems:
    We already have an adminbot who handles the actual filling of the DYK template from the queues. My proposal would thus be to create a new queue, let's call it "emergency queue", that can be edited by template editors instead of admins. The DYKUpdateBot can check all Q's and iff it does not find any full Q, it will update the template from the emergency queue instead. That way we wouldn't compromise the protection and still allow select editors to update DYK in cases of emergency.
    I'm not fit on the technical side of things, but maybe an edit filter can disallow edits to the emergency queue (EQ) for editors not specifically tasked with this task. We could have WT:DYK decide who should be allowed to do so and add them to the EF (or maybe the bot can check whether the EQ was filled by certain editors and only update the template if that was the case?)
There are just general ideas on how to reconcile allowing trusted editors to fill DYK while preserving the protection of the Main Page. Regards SoWhy 09:27, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Possibly a stupid question - but is the full cascade protection of the Main Page hardwired, or could it be dropped to cascading template editor protection? Obviously we would need a strong consensus in a very public place to change anything on the Main Page itself, but what would be the most obvious downside risk in giving Template Editors the full run of the MP layout? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 10:50, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
    There is no such thing as "cascading template editor protection"; by default the ability to protect pages and to edit cascade protected pages are jointed since the ability to do the latter allows one to do the former (by transcluding a page on a cascade-protected page). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:08, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
@Maile66: That category is optional, there are actually about twice as many - still not a huge number. — xaosflux Talk 01:51, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Alternate proposal: Protected Page Editor right

It seems clear from the above discussion that making the main page, or templates transcluded onto it, subject to only Template Protection is not going to be accepted, because as Jo-Jo Eumerus put it above "There is no such thing as 'cascading template editor protection'...". Requiring the main page team to return to manually protecting each page involved is a non-starter. There is too much risk of missing one and leaving the Main page vulnerable. Therefore I propose a different solution, a new Protected Page Editor right. Users with this right will be able to edit fully protected pages, but not to protect or unprotect them. If it is technically possible i would deny such users the ability to edit template protected pages unless they also had the template editor right, but i suspect that is not technically possible without significant refactoring, so i don't insist on it.

I know that further unbundling of the admin tools has been oppose, and indeed i have opposed it, but I think this use case makes a proper exception. One can't unbundle blocking or unblocking because of the trust issues involved, and the same is true of deleting and undeleting pages, and viewing deleted pages. Besides, often the same situations that require blocking also require page deletion, and vice versa. One can't unbundle moving pages directly over other pages with non-trivial history, because that permits sneaky page deletion. One cant unbundle history merges, because done poorly or maliciously, that right can create tangles almost imposible to undo. But the ability to edit fully protected pages does not permit deletion or undeletion. It does not give access to any confidential information. It does not require or imply any other admin power. It does require some trust, but no more than Template editor. In fact, perhaps a bit less. And I don't see the need for more than a few people with this right. I would suggest a process for granting it similar to that now used for Template Editor, but I am not at all rigid about the details of the process, and they might be varied from that model if the community thinks fit. DES (talk) 23:20, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

  • Note: In the current rights model while it is possible to break out (editprotected) to allow editing "full protected pages" - it still does not allow for editing "cascade protected" pages such as main page - that is currently only available to those with (protect) access (which also allows for adding/removing/changing protections). The reason for this is that otherwise a cascade protected page could have another page added to it, thus "protecting" it. Software changes might be possible - just that this would not be a "simple" configuration update. — xaosflux Talk 23:36, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
    We could deal with this with an administrative control (that is a "rule" about what is allowed) and some new group (e.g. a local version of meta:Interface_editors#Rights with what ever permissions we deem fit). The counter argument is "just become an admin - it is no big deal" - except that in practice it really is a big deal. — xaosflux Talk 23:40, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
    That would work, grant them the full right to protect and unprotect pages, as well as to edit protected pages, but limit the circumstances in which they may use this right by a behavioral rule, not enforced by software. DES (talk) 02:16, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
    I don't think unbundling the admin tools is the way to go if there are other ways to solve this very specific problem. I mentioned one such way above (permalink) which could use edit filters to restrict editing to a certain page (the AbuseFilter extension allows to filter by username imho). Regards SoWhy 10:01, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
    A bot could verify if contributions are from someone on its list - I object to using the AbuseFilter as a usergroup (Allow: admins and Alice and Bob ...) — xaosflux Talk 02:05, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

RfC of possible interest

Editors may perhaps be interested in WT:HA#RfC: Harassment of non-editors. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:24, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Vandalism or not: What if an admin doesn't agree with the community?

Hey. So, pretend this hypothetical case: Four different editors patrolling a page revert a persistent IP editor (on multiple IPs) on the ground that the contribution is vandalism.

One of the editors requests page protection. One admin attends, and despite the opinion of four different editors, and despite the IP editor having violated WP:3RR already, refuses to protect the page or block the IP editor's range.

I have two questions:

  1. Is his action correct? (Elaborate, please.)
  2. What now?

FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 21:50, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

The action is perfectly fine as long as the admin does not take any action (i.e. an admin looks on it and says "I won't do that" but without declining the request for page protection. Otherwise, the admin is almost certainly in the wrong, as that would be a violation of WP:TOOLMISUSE, specifically "When a policy or communal norm is clear that tools should not be used, then tools should not be used without an explanation that shows the matter has been considered, and why a (rare) exception is genuinely considered reasonable." The next step, if what I said just now is what is happening, is to leave a note on their talk page, and ask them to reconsider. Past that, it gets scary, and I have no advice. RileyBugz会話投稿記録 22:04, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
@RileyBugz: I'm sorry, but you're a little vague. Are you saying declining the protection request as content dispute is wrong, or are you saying such declination is tool misuse? FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 22:12, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
Well, generally your first interpretation of my answer would be correct, unless the admin was using their tools in this case (i.e. unblocking the IP, unprotecting the page, etc.). Also, I can't get much clearer than that, as you were very vague about the case and did not provide any hypothetical specifics. RileyBugz会話投稿記録 22:20, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
Well...the vagueness might be due to the fact that one has to pretend this might be a hypothetical case....Lectonar (talk) 22:14, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
In the real case, there are multiple reasons to take issue with this edit, but "vandalism" or even "sneaky vandalism" is not one of them. In fact more concerning is the insistence of everyone involved to dispute this through edit summaries instead of proper discussion, and for the first edit to the talk page be to declare it vandalism. "Agree with fleetcommand" is not a requirement for being an administrator. Someguy1221 (talk) 22:18, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
Fun! An editor gets into an edit war over a borderline NPOV statement, and then adds an NPOV statement themself (themselves?).[5] I mean, "Ars Technica commended Microsoft for its unprecedented patching speed... [added underline]" isn't exactly neutral. You could have just built on the IPs edits. Both of you are in the wrong here, in my opinion. RileyBugz会話投稿記録 22:28, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
@RileyBugz: Of course it is POV! I was forced into adding it! As you can see from all my other messages, my true position is that this whole affair lacks due weight. FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 22:37, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
@NeilN and SoWhy: Since your actions are being discussed. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 22:24, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) This is based off a case I handled [6] - note the timestamp. Further discussion here and here. So, a thought experiment. What if the edit was made by:

  • A newly registered editor
  • An editor with 200 good edits
  • An editor with 2,000 good edits
  • An editor with 50,000 edits
  • An admin
  • Codename Lisa

At what point does the edit stop becoming vandalism or "pure stinking filth" and something that should be discussed? --NeilN talk to me 22:28, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

Most admins know that four, five, six established editors reverting an IP address have been wrong about vandalism many times before - many admins are unlikely to even factor this into the decision about whether it's vandalism. What next? look for the policy on edit-warring. -- zzuuzz (talk) 22:33, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
I think that the best course of action would be to revert to the protected state and then full protect the article so that neither party can gain an advantage. Then, hold a discussion on the best wording, and which ever one has consensus gets added. RileyBugz会話投稿記録 22:38, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
That's exactly what Codename Lisa said.
NeilN rejected on the grounds that ... I don't know on what ground. I don't think NeilN had any grounds at all. FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 22:43, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
No, Codename Lisa asked for semi-protection after reverting multiple times and making zero effort to communicate on any talk page. Protection is not to be used to give autoconfirmed editors the advantage in a content dispute. --NeilN talk to me 22:50, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
@NeilN: I am talking about this: [7]. Not the RPP. FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 23:09, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
Given the article was semi-protected by the time I responded, I don't see how I could have rejected anything. When I handled the first PP request (about sixteen hours before the second request) I would have just as likely started handing out edit warring blocks (after explicit warnings) given that no one was using talk pages. Terrariola is the only editor that behaved admirably there. --NeilN talk to me 23:24, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
Oh, yeah? He who did almost nothing did admirably? You should be pretty proud of yourself then because you took up the case but an edit war unfurled before your eyes and you did exactly nothing. A lot of empty talk and juvenile vilification; no action. There is an English word for that: Incompetence. FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 00:24, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
At least (I hope) your view of what is considered vandalism has been corrected. --NeilN talk to me 00:46, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
Since you refused to correct my view, despite my direct request, I have no choice but to fall back to what WP:VAND says:

On Wikipedia, vandalism has a very specific meaning: editing (or other behavior) deliberately intended to obstruct or defeat the project's purpose

I even told you exactly what kind of vandalism I think it is.
In fact, you can't hope anything having happened as a result of you, because you did nothing and said nothing of consequence. FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 12:10, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
It's fine if you want to ignore me. But note that not one of the multiple uninvolved editors in this thread has called the edit vandalism. You can ignore what they say too, but it won't help you if you're edit warring in a similar situation in the future. And as I said previously, repeatedly characterizing content disputes as vandalism could lead to blocks. --NeilN talk to me 12:31, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
(edit conflict) When a page is protected due to disruptive editing or edit warring, it is protected in whichever version it is in at the time the protection is applied. It is specifically not reverted to the preferred version desired by someone in the dispute. See WP:SEMI for more details (since the page was just semi-protected in this case). ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 22:54, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
Both "the preferred version desired by someone in the dispute" and "whichever version it is in at the time the protection is applied" are wrong answers. WP:STATUSQUO specifically says "During a dispute, until a consensus is established, the status quo should remain (except in biographies of living people, where contentious material should be removed)". The status quo is typically the last stable version before the edit war started. --Guy Macon (talk) 00:35, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
@Guy Macon: That's an essay, but yes, I occasionally find a stable version, revert, and fully protect, especially if there's discussion continuing on the talk page. --NeilN talk to me 00:43, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
The status quo was the version that was protected. Thus, to avoid giving an advantage to one party, the version when protected should be the version used. RileyBugz会話投稿記録 01:33, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
I have no problem with that, but only in cases where the state of the article at the moment of protection is the stable, status quo version. What I am arguing against is the idea that some policy says that the article should stay in the state that the last edit warrior left it in even if it contains a new and highly contentious change. That sends the message "keep edit warring and revert quickly so your version is the one that gets protected". --Guy Macon (talk) 14:25, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
Guy Macon's interpretation of the meaning of "status quo" in that essay is peculiar to him, and not in line with established policy. From Wikipedia:Protection policy, and I quote (bold mine): "When protecting a page because of a content dispute, administrators normally protect the current version," the same page also allows for administrator discretion as to whether or not to revert to the last stable version or not; there is no requirement to do so, and clearly states best practice is usually to protect the current version, allowing for the fact that not every situation is best served and thus allowing some discretion. --Jayron32 01:43, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
Please stop quoting part of the policy out of context, especially with the false "Guy Macon's interpretation of the meaning of 'status quo' is peculiar to him" accusation. The policy clearly says:
"When protecting a page because of a content dispute, administrators normally protect the current version, except where the current version contains content that clearly violates content policies, such as vandalism, copyright violations, or defamation of living persons. Since protecting the most current version sometimes rewards edit warring by establishing a contentious revision, administrators may also revert to an old version of the page predating the edit war if such a clear point exists."
I am far from being the only person who thinks that protecting a contentious change to an article which had a stable version for years just because someone managed to get in the last bit of edit warring before the admin arrived is neither desirable nor fair. --Guy Macon (talk) 13:29, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
(Note that I have purposely expressed no opinion about the underlying dispute being discussed here. If you think I have, read again.) --Guy Macon (talk) 13:29, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
Please stop ignoring the parts of my responses which are inconvenient to your position. When I said "the same page also allows for administrator discretion as to whether or not to revert to the last stable version or not; there is no requirement to do so," what I meant by that was "the same page also allows for administrator discretion as to whether or not to revert to the last stable version or not; there is no requirement to do so" I'm sorry that wasn't clearer for you. I never said that admins should never revert to an earlier version, merely that 1) it is not the first recommendation to admins and 2) admins have discretion as to whether to revert or not, based on the particulars of the dispute in question. If one dispute showed evidence of gaming the system as you note, it would be perfectly proper for an admin to revert the attempts to game the system and protect a stable version. However, there is no requirement that admins do that every time, instead guidance at the protection policy page clearly indicates that the usual practice is to protect the current version. The words actually say that, which is inconvenient for your thesis here. If you would like to remove that practice, you should probably start an RFC to change the protection policy, requiring admins to revert before protecting. You will however note that I never once said that the policy did not allow admins to revert if the particulars of a situation call for it. You seem to be arguing against that point, one I never made. --Jayron32 14:44, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
Your "it is not the first recommendation to admins", like your earlier "[policy] clearly states [that] best practice is usually to protect the current version" is wrong as can be clearly seen by the reaction (so far) by your fellow administrators when I asked for a wording clarification at Wikipedia talk:Protection policy. If you insist on claiming that Wikipedia policy favors protecting the current version over a previous stable version (the actual policy is that neither is a "first recommendation" or a "best practice" and that no policy or guideline tells you to favor one over the other) I fully intend to seek some sort of dispute resolution, most likely starting with an RfC which is very likely to close with an overwhelming consensus against your position. I would much prefer that you make your case at Wikipedia talk:Protection policy while the wording clarification is being discussed. --Guy Macon (talk) 13:56, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
Now at Wikipedia_talk:Protection_policy#Clarification_needed.3F --NeilN talk to me 16:23, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
  • This all goes back to why we have admins in the first place. It is not uncommon for some users who are too close to a subject to see a good-faith but poor/controversial contribution as vandalism. That's why an uninvolved admin is the right person to make the decision to protect or not. Page protection is not there to help one side win a dispute, it is there to stop disruption of content. We select admins specifically to make these types of determinations. Sure, one admin might see it different than another, and mistakes are sometimes made, the world is an imperfect place. Many of Wikipedia's rules are deliberately a little vague specifically to allow for administrative discretion, and that's as it should be.
So, what is it that is being looked for here, exactly? Clarification? New rules? One particular admin =tarred and feathered? What? Beeblebrox (talk) 00:28, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
Clarification of the existing policy, as is being discussed at Wikipedia talk:Protection policy#Clarification needed? and Wikipedia talk:Protection policy#Proposal for new text at Wikipedia:Protection Policy#Content disputes. I am really hoping that the "One particular admin tarred and feathered" option does not happen, but that is up to Jayron32. He doesn't have to admit error -- he can blame the about-to-be-changed-by-consensus policy wording, which was unclear, or he can simply go silent and stop restating his "[policy] clearly states [that] best practice is usually to protect the current version" misinterpretation using new wording like "it is not the first recommendation to admins". The best-case scenario would be for Jayron32 to make his case at Wikipedia talk:Protection policy#Proposal for new text at Wikipedia:Protection Policy#Content disputes, other editors and admins weigh in, and then at the end either he or I acknowledge that consensus is against us. --Guy Macon (talk) 13:56, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
@Beeblebrox: No. That's not why we have admins. That's why we have 3O and DRN.
Admins are supposed to do things like preventing damage, de-escalate lockouts and intervening in the event that bright lines were breached. This certain time, bright lines were breached four times and NeilN did nothing. Does it matter if it really wasn't vandalism when it actually was a breach of the bright line anyway? WhySo seems think an action was due there.
FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 05:22, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
@FleetCommand: Actually, you're wrong again. 3O and DRN discussions don't determine what is vandalism - wherever did you get that idea? As Beeblebrox said, admins look at reports made in such places like AIV and RFPP and make an uninvolved determination if the edits truly are vandalism. And I'm not going to reward poor behavior by registered editors by a semi-protect. Codename Lisa reverted four times as well. Should I block them too? What would have protection done to solve the issue since both of you were incorrectly saying it was vandalism and had this attitude. If you want an admin to semi-protect in a content dispute then at least make a token effort to discuss the dispute. Especially if you're doing such things as reverting and calling the BBC an "unreliable source". As for SoWhy, I'm not sure why you're still ignoring the fact that their protection came sixteen hours after I handled the initial request. Read what they wrote (emphasis mine), "At the time of my decision, unlike when Neil first considered the request, there was already a discussion on this talk page but the IP-hopping editor adding the material resisted all tries to discuss the matter or accept that multiple editors disagreed with your edits" --NeilN talk to me 06:55, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
  • 3O and DRN discussions don't determine what is vandalism I didn't say that... But don't bet on them not doing it either. You might lose bet.
  • I'm not going to reward poor behavior by registered editors by a semi-protect. But you are okay with rewarding the poor behavior of unregistered editors by letting them revert war, and think they are entitled to breach all our policies just to have some Microsoft-bashing fun. Full protection was always an option, if you wanted to reward neither.
  • Codename Lisa reverted four times as well. Should I block them too? That four time is one of the four breaches of the bright line. There were four breaches, i.e. sixteen reverts. And you did nothing. Of course, if you had blocked the first four reverts (the first breach), i.e. the IP editor, the other three breaches would have not happened. Like I said, full protection was always an option.
  • ... and calling the BBC an "unreliable source". I never did that.
  • I'm not sure why you're still ignoring the fact that their protection [~snip~] Oh, I am not ignoring that at all. Actually, I came to this page for a totally different purpose in the first place and you are the only person who does not get it.
FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 09:27, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
All right, in order:
  • Beeblebrox: "This all goes back to why we have admins in the first place. It is not uncommon for some users who are too close to a subject to see a good-faith but poor/controversial contribution as vandalism." You: "No. That's not why we have admins. That's why we have 3O and DRN."
  • Leaving the article open for anyone to edit is not rewarding unregistered editors. It's an indication that all editors should be engaging in dispute resolution before other steps are taken. And, up to that point, the behavior of unregistered editors was certainly no worse than yours or Codename Lisa's (subsequently, Codename Lisa's approach to the situation improved; yours did not).
  • One editor breaching 3RR does not excuse other editors breaching 3RR. And I'm disinclined to fully protect topics "in the news" that might attract new editors here or editors that might improve the article after they read through it. I'll probably look at blocking editors who aren't discussing first. Finally, your comment here and characterizing the edit as "pure stinking filth" shows you had little interest in discussing the content dispute even if the article had been fully protected.
  • It was Codename Lisa who did that [8] but I was using the generic you.
  • You came to this page trying to frame this situation as a hypothetical event. Other editors figured out what what triggered your question and soundly rejected your assertion that the edit was vandalism. Then you started complaining about how I "did nothing" and according to Codename Lisa, that makes me incompetent. [9] I don't have much more to say except that when faced with a similar situation in the future, I would make the same decision.
--NeilN talk to me 08:48, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
  • E.X.A.C.T.L.Y.
  • Oh, yeah. It was far worse. He lied. He reflexively reverted 13 times. He neglected consensus. He refused to start a discussion, and later to participate in it. I, on the other hand, started a talk page discussion and I wrote a revised version with his lie reversed. And so far, I am the only person to have commented on the contribution. Of course, if there is any consolation, the IP's behavior was much better than you.
  • "One editor breaching 3RR does not excuse other editors breaching 3RR". Since you didn't stop, punish or condemn any of the 3RR violations, it is taken all of them have been okay. You should make up your mind before trying to make me ashamed of something your signals say wasn't wrong. "Finally, [blah blah] shows you had little interest in discussing the content dispute even if the article had been fully protected." You conveniently skip the fact that you never told me that your verdict, as an admin, was that it was not vandalism. Yes, I would have. (Evidence: I did start a discussion.)
    • Update: Neither I nor Codename Lisa have violated WP:3RR, even if we agree we weren't reverting vandalism. Surprised? I tell you how. Clause 3 or WP:3RRNO states that "reverting actions performed by [~snip~] sockpuppets of banned or blocked users" "are exempt from the edit-warring policy". CL reverted 3 edits against that Internet vigilante. I also reverted 3. The remaining one revert by CL and the remaining two by me was done against 2601:5C2:280:*, a famous previously blocked vandal, stalker and harasser, who has no right to edit Wikipedia because he has disrupted many times and has harassed users and admins alike. The interesting things is, I have already told you this. But of course, since your agenda here is to harass me, you conveniently ignored it. FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 07:14, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Exactly what I thought, to your discredit. And while we are at it, you seem to like to drag Mrs. "Best Regards" into this discussion for no reason at all. (And simultaneously, I see your discussion devoid of all those WP: links.) What's with that? Make no mistake, she is the coolest Wikipedian I have ever met, but I find her naive and sometimes without backbones. The way she absolutely complies with the whim of every admin and the way she simply assumes good faith to anyone who so much as defends himself doesn't agree with me. I, on the other hand, go by firm rules, firm beliefs.
  • "You came to this page trying to frame this situation as a hypothetical event." No. I came to this page trying to find a rule by which I can abide and avoid such unpleasant situations in the future. "[~snip~] and according to Codename Lisa, that makes me incompetent". According to me. Don't you steal my sentences just yet. She didn't say anything that indicates she disagreed with me, but saying nothing isn't a feat to be proud of. "I would make the same decision." Oh, now you are threatening me with doing nothing? I am trembling in fear!
FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 06:10, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

As a reply to an earlier statement ("Terrariola was the only one who behaved admirably there") I was simply good-faith reverting something which didn't fit into the article, just commenting. Terrariola (talk) 12:07, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

  • ENOUGH- this has turned into a personal dispute about individual editors' actions instead of a policy question... take it to the admin noticeboard if you must, but please STOP with the personal attacks here. Blueboar (talk) 10:32, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Alright. Since I clearly won't be getting a clearer answer here, I'll take my leave. (Unwatch and disengage.) And since the unregistered editor is now designated as an LTA sock, I believe the matter is completely concluded. FleetCommand (Speak your mind!) 00:14, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

RfC about time in articles

I have started an RFC here on the topic of how time should be given in article text. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 14:07, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Creation of articles by IPs?

I know this was prohibited some years ago by a technical fix some years back as a result of a BLP scandal, but I've noticed a work-around that seems really easy to exploit, in that non-notable topics often get included in "lists", someone with autoconfirmed privileges creates a redirect, and then an IP or new account expands the redirect into a full article. The example that inspired me to come here was J'son (comics) (which has essentially no secondary or tertiary sources, probably never will, and all the real-world information looks very much like OR), but I'm pretty sure there are a whole bunch of them.

Has this come up before? Is it a problem? The original rationale for the ban on non-autoconfirmed editors creating new articles doesn't seem to have been related to notability, but ... yeah. If it is a problem, would permanently semiing redirects to lists be a viable solution?

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:16, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

There is no perfect solution to it. Currently any redirect that is converted into an article is put into the New Pages Feed. As of writing that backlong is at exactly 22,222 pages. The good thing about this is that most of the redirects recreated as pages are older than 10 December 2016(the current end of the actual new pages). That means they should be relatively quickly reviewed by one of the more experienced reviewers that tend to start from the end of the backlog. The page you pointed out was recreated from a redirect in 2015, when Special:NewPagesFeed might not have done this (I'm not familiar with the technical background here, only the current status of converted redirects).TonyBallioni (talk) 06:37, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
(edit conflict) You're giving me the impression that it isn't so much the creation of articles that's forbidden as the creation of BLPs (with restricting article creation being the only real way to ensure that). That narrows down the field considerably. Although an IP could (properly or improperly) expand a redirect page into a fuller article, it's still not quite full article because an autoconfirmed user had to confirm that the page title is necessary for some reason or another. Ignoring BLPs, there's at least as much room for improvement as trouble from allowing IPs to expand redirects, so I'm inclined to leave them unprotected. If we focus specifically on BLPs, then we really only need to worry about WP:POVFORKs of WP:BLP1E subjects. Other BLPs, if properly sourced, would become stand-alone articles or else not meet GNG at all and so need to be deleted anyway. But, I've not actually dug through the archives to see the original discussion that removed the ability for IPs to create articles. Ian.thomson (talk) 07:00, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
Just as a point of reference, it is currently possible for any registered user, autoconfirmed or not, to create a page. I'm not sure if there is general confusion where people think that page creation is AC restricted, or if both of the above references were just shorthand for registered users, but I thought it worth pointing out. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:54, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

RfC: Alternative language articles

Proposal withdrawn due to overwhelmingly negative consensus. THE DIAZ talk • contribs 09:08, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Here is a new proposal that would amend the Manual of Style's National varieties of English policy and the format of some articles' titles. While I find nothing prohibiting my proposal, I still seek authorization.

I propose a new way to include any dialect of English in Wikipedia for anything. In other words, we could make certain articles in certain varieties of English and we could note that in the article's title.

For example, World War II could have two articles, one in American English (using the mdy date format) and one in British English (using the dmy date format). We could note this by making the article's titles look like: World War IIUS and World War IIUK respectively. Searching "World War II" would take the user to a dialect selection page that could read:

For American English, click World War IIUS

For British English, click World War IIUK

For Canadian English, click World War IICA

We would only need to put the small abbreviation on the title if there was another article with a different dialect of English. We could also put a message on the top of the article saying: "This article is written in _________ English. For a different dialect, click here."

I invite anyone to share their opinion and encourage any editor thinking of opposing my proposal to suggest a way to make it acceptable in their eyes. THE DIAZ talk • contribs 15:01, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

Survey

  • Support as the maker of this proposal. THE DIAZ talk • contribs 15:01, 27 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose for practical reasons (the difficulty of maintaining two forks), but the real motivation for my oppose is the fact that one of the great educational features of Wikipedia, IMHO, is that people are exposed to stuff they might not be familiar with, including the horror that some people spell "color" as "colour", and that some even write dates in the wrong order! It's a big world. Johnuniq (talk) 02:26, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose Unworkable for the reasons noted above. Also, entirely unneeded as the varieties of English are not so far apart as to cause any confusion.--Jayron32 03:21, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose I might consider the idea of having a "national-level" Wikipedia for English-speaking countries (where all the articles on sports matches, sub-national politicians, and high schools can be put) but this isn't a way to do that. Power~enwiki (talk) 04:21, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose as written, would be a content attribution nightmare moving between all the versions - if this were to be pulled off it should be with the translation extension - but I still don't think that is appropriate here. — xaosflux Talk 04:42, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose. If you think your language is different enough to need separate articles, the correct way to handle it is to make a separate Wikipedia with separate articles, as for instance the Scots and simpletons (um, is there a more politically correct term for this group?) have done. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:41, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose as being a maintenance nightmare (keeping multiple articles on exactly the same topic up to date). Also, as Johnuniq points out, there is merit in exposing readers to different variants of the language rather than encouraging the readers to think that (for example) Australian and US English are mutually unintelligible. That being said, see my comments under "Discussion" below about a "browser-lang" template. Mitch Ames (talk) 06:20, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
Oppose - just keeping these articles synchronized correctly will be a pain. It can't be done by a bot, since the bot wuld need to know every ENGVAR issue or else it would mess things up when a new one enters the article; and it's too much work for a human. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 09:32, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose. As per previous contributors, this is both impractical and wrong. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:21, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The proposer neglects to suggest how their proposal would constitute an improvement, and small wonder: even if it were feasible (which it almost certainly isn't), it would be no improvement at all. One of the best things about en.wp is that it takes our readers—and us editors—outside their geopolitical-linguistic comfort zones, encouraging them to learn about the vast but often mysterious intersection between language and culture and enhancing even native speakers' literacy within their own language. Why would we want to discourage that? RivertorchFIREWATER 16:01, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose; unworkable. The Chinese Wikipedia already does this semi-automatically without requiring six different versions of every page. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
    to reply to me     04:52, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Discussion

I'm very tempted to put this in the form of an "oppose" but I thought that I'd ask first: If these are different versions of the same page, i.e. three articles with the same title but different language variants, they would each be subject to being edited independently. How would you propose to keep the content, other than the differences due to language, constant between the articles? Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 16:36, 27 May 2017 (UTC) PS: And just how far would you want to go with it? How about regional varieties of English? We here in Texas have a variety of English which is, perhaps, more different from the variety spoken in California or Maine as the general-American version is from the general-Canadian version. How about For Texan English, click World War IITX? How about East Texas vs West Texas, they're pretty different, too, y'all? — TransporterMan (TALK) 16:46, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

@TransporterMan: That would be tricky, but here's what comes to my mind right now, we could have a WikiProject dedicated to making sure the articles are the same or at least similar, we could have a bot that copies edits from one article to another, or (in my mind the simplest way) we could create a template telling the editor that they are encouraged to add their edit to all articles and put the template on top of the editing page. Regarding how far we would go, in my mind we'd just divide it by spelling. In other words, there would only be American English with spellings such as labor, traveled, realize, analyze, defense and center, British (or Commonwealth) English that would use labour, travelled, realise, analyse, defence and centre, and Canadian English which would use labour, travelled, realize, analyze, defence and centre. We'd avoid regional slang terms present in only minor regional dialects of English, (such as y'all, mema, and tonic). Other English-speaking countries already use British spelling so naming other countries wouldn't be necessary in my opinion. Hope that clears it up. THE DIAZ talk • contribs 17:01, 27 May 2017 (UTC)
Hi The Diaz I'm sorry but this is totally unworkable. That is, putting aside whether we would want this for other reasons, even if we did it is not feasible. Let me start at copyright – for which this would be a nightmare. As a baseline, one page would have to be the base article, containing the page history where the copyright owners are listed, and the other, satellite, variety-of-English pages created would then have to have notes on their talk pages, and in the edit summary upon creation, directing people to that base article where the page history was held – in order for a barest form of copyright attribution under our licenses to be met. But this would still be very poor attribution, attenuating the copyright in a manner that is really unsustainable. The only possible way to make it work would be some new type of facility that when the page was split into its variety versions, there would be duplications of the page history for each variety article. Even if we agreed to that strange redundancy scheme, after the duplication, every time an edit was made to one page that was then placed in the others but not by the same person, we would need to go through the attribution ritual of placing an edit summary stating the attribution and hyperlinking the source, or naming the user who made the edit. This would have to be done assiduously, with a bureaucracy set up just to monitor it and provide attribution repair compliance constantly, as it inevitably was not done by the original user (probably most of the time). As these pages were created for thousands of topics, the bureaucracy to fix the copyright attribution would need probably fifteen or so people to do nothing else eight hours per day (but we're a volunteer project...). I go through that detail because it's emblematic of a base problem that is transportable to multiple other aspects that this would require be done, e.g., the Wikiproject you speak of that would be tasked with keeping the pages in sync.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 19:43, 27 May 2017 (UTC)
@Fuhghettaboutit: Perhaps we could have a bot do all that instead of a Wikiproject? Or maybe the articles could be allowed to be different from each other, but place a template saying "This is the article written in American English. This subject has other articles written in different varieties of English that you are encouraged to edit as well.". Or something like that. THE DIAZ talk • contribs 20:00, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure that this is a good idea, but I'll mention it anyway...

We have the {{convert}} template to cater for variations in measuring units. Consider a template that displays a word (or phrase) in the reader's preferred spelling, as determined by browser or operating system settings. (My browser, Pale Moon, allows me to specify my preferred language, eg En-AU vs En-US, as does my OS, Windows 7 although I don't why the browser just doesn't default to "get language preference from OS".) We actually have an {{engvar}} template that looks like it might do something similar (on a bigger scale) but dependent on the article language preference rather than the browser language preference.

Imagine a simple template; call it "browser-lang" for the nonce. In the article, you put 

Smith's {{browser-lang|favourite}} {{browser-lang|colour}} was red.

and it would display "Smith's favourite colour was red." or "Smith's favorite color was red." based on the reader's browser settings (independently of any article engvar setting). Rather than forcing the editor to list all the possible variations each time (eg as I think {{engvar}} does) we could have a global list of the variants, to which editors could add words as necessary - Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Spelling § English spelling comparison chart would get the list started. (The template would accept any variant of a word.)

Presumably this may require some technical work to happen, and I'm not sure that it is worth the effort. Per comments in "Survey" above I think we may do a disservice to our readers by hiding the variations, but it doesn't hurt to mention the idea here. Mitch Ames (talk) 06:20, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

@Mitch Ames: That is a great proposal. My initial thoughts are that the default display should be in American English (since that's where the majority of English speakers come from) until the editor selects his or her preference, or Wikipedia could check the IP address that the viewer is visiting from and set the preference from there. Could that work? THE DIAZ talk • contribs 15:42, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
No, just unworkable. It potentially adds ridiculous amounts of code to pages for no real gain. What next, {{punctuation-lang}} that moves the period from inside to outside quotes depending on whether you are a US or UK English reader? Unless or until there is EN-US WP and an EN-GB WP and EN-CA WP etc then just accept the differences and has been mentioned above lets educate readers that there are variations around the world. Nthep (talk) 16:57, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
Also, when converting words like license and practise to British English, how will this template know whether to convert to the noun (practice/licence) or the verb (practise/license)?--Ykraps (talk) 21:20, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
{{Engvar}} is just as bad an idea as this proposal, and I have just nominated it for discussion. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:24, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
You may want to withdraw that, Engvar is a legitimate (and fairly old) template used for a different purpose, per the comment on your discussion. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:53, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

The Diaz, may you please withdraw the proposal? The whole consensus opposes it, and I expect more "oppose" votes when the discussion continues. George Ho (talk) 00:47, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Awards in article?

Hi!

I'm writing an article about a person who has been awarded several times for his works/profession. Can I write it in the article or will it be suggested as "G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion" ?

Thanks in advance! Strongline123 (talk) 13:27, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

There's no way to answer that in the abstract. Context is everything. If the award is the Nobel prize, then it's clearly relevant; if it's a amateur football league participation award, not so much. It also depends on what else can be established through reliable sources about the person. Instead of trying to create the article in the live, main part of the encyclopedia, consider using the article wizard so that your work will go into a draft space where other editors can review it and suggest changes before you take it live. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 15:34, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
Thank you so much for the answer! I will do that!

Strongline123 (talk) 06:53, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Edit warring

This is just to clarify :Who is obliged to open the talk page thread for discussion. The one who first inserts content or the one who reverts it first? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Forceradical (talk • contribs) 10:51, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Both parties are obliged to discuss... and either party can start the discussion. If "you" are involved in a potential edit war, don't wait for the "other guy" to start a discussion... it is up to "you" to stop the revert/counter revert cycle by starting a discussion. Blueboar (talk) 11:43, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Labeling illegal (or undocumented) immigrants correctly

Consensus is not to have a policy or guideline requiring the use of "illegal alien" or "illegal immigrant".

The terminology should be decided on a case by case basis, and the argument should be about what term reliable sources use to refer to the persons in question and not based on the terms used in law.

And there is a weak auxiliary consensus against using the word "alien".

Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 02:25, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

This has been a term that has been debated heavily on Wikipedia forever. Whether or not to call them "illegal immigrants" or "undocumented immigrants". I propose that we settle this debate by creating a policy or a guideline that requires all pages to either use the term "illegal alien" or "illegal immigrant" given that this is the term used by the US government. as seen in Arizona v. United States. Federal district court Judge Andrew Hanen of the Southern District of Texas was quoted as saying: The Court uses the phrases ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘illegal alien’ interchangeably…The Court also understands that there is a certain segment of the population that finds the phrase ‘illegal alien’ offensive. The Court uses this term because it is the term used by the Supreme Court in its latest pronouncement pertaining to this area of the law. See Arizona v. United States, 132 S. Ct. 2492 (2012). I am open to amending the details of my proposal and encourage anyone to think before opposing it and suggest how to make it acceptable. THE DIAZ talk • contribs 12:52, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

See Antonio Vargas history and this now-removed comment on my Talk page. On the merits, this proposal is fatuous as what term to use depends on the article and the context. It would be impossible to have even a guideline creating a presumption as to what term should be used.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:03, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
@The Diaz: Snarky but not snarky question: You are aware that Wikipedia exists outside of Texas or indeed the United States, right? --NeilN talk to me 13:42, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Illegal immigration to Australia cause some debates in Australia about what to call the people. And Wikipedia has a whole Category:Illegal immigration by country on the topic of other countries. Mitch Ames (talk) 13:58, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
  • The BBC has actually gone into this (language RE migrants) in some detail in the past, both covering others and how they use it themselves. You will often find disclaimers about why they use a particular phrasing on their online articles in the area. One of the related articles is here. FYI - almost no one uses the word Alien anymore except the US. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:08, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
  • The pronouncement of one court in one case should have little if any bearing on Wikipedia, which should be based on the usage demonstrated through a preponderance of reliable secondary sources. What term is used by newspapers, journals, magazines, reliable books, etc. on the subject? If there is a single term which the preponderance of them use, we should go with that. If there appears to be interchangable terms, then we default to WP:ENGVAR guidance. --Jayron32 14:13, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
The BBC does it depending on their (confirmed) status. They are otherwise 'migrants'. (eg, someone jumping off the boat from Cuba may be an economic migrant, a refugee/asylum seeker, an illegal immigrant etc, if there is no confirmed status it just reverts to 'migrant' as a neutral word to denote someone crossing borders - migrating from country to country. It does mean they tend to get blasted from both ends of the political spectrum, the right have a go at them for not labelling them the filthy illegals they are, whilst the left complain they are not labelling obvious refugees as such. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:25, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
Whether to use "illegal immigrant" , "undocumented immigrant", "migrant", etc, is as Jayron points out something that should be determined topic by topic based on the common usage in reporting sources. However, I would agree we should avoid "illegal alien" and use "illegal immigrant" instead. "Alien" is not as wrong but has the same negative connotation as something like "negro", as well as for non-native English speakers, potentially confusing, and "immigrant" works as an equivalent replacement without loss of meaning. --MASEM (t) 14:33, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
I think the word "alien" applies to the legal documents/status. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:38, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
I do know it is a term defined by law in some areas (US for example it is anyone not a citizen or national), and not meant derogatorily there, but I've seen it used in media opinions in a more derogatory way. More often, though, when we are talking what the media says about these cases, it is a very uncommonly used word over "immigrant". --MASEM (t) 15:06, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
  • I am in agreement with Jayron32 on going by what the reliable source calls them. For comparison there is also Native Americans, American Indians, or just Indians. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:36, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
  • The first post in the thread says in part "Whether or not to call them "illegal immigrants" or "undocumented immigrants". [Emphasis added]. The correct term all depends on who they are. A person who goes illegally to a country with the intent of staying indefinitely is a illegal immigrant. The term "illegal alien" would cover illegal immigrants, and also those who only intend to stay for a brief visit, and those who's intent can't be determined. An undocumented immigrant could be an illegal immigrant, but cold also be a foreigner who is entitled to be in the country, but who's documents are lost, stolen, in transit, etc.
As a notary, I've dealt with a substantial number of undocumented persons. These persons give the appearance of being not only citizens, but members of families who have been living in my state for many generations. But they couldn't get regular driver licenses and had to settle for driving privilege cards instead. I'm sure nearly all of them could cure their undocumented status if they put their mind to it; if they're citizens, they are under no legal obligation to possess evidence of citizenship (although such a lack is inconvenient from time to time). Jc3s5h (talk) 14:54, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Best to have no rulebook on this whether it's the Wikipedia or Political Correctness rulebook. E.G. calling drug dealers "undocumented pharmacists"  :-) Since the PC rulebook rears its head by default, a positive "use the most accurate, descriptive term" statement would be good. Then the most accurate relevant term for the context will be used which is "illegal". And usually the actual context for the second word would dictate "immigrant" and only occasionally "alien".....the distinctions on that second terms are minor enough to give flexibility there. For all of the other wilder stuff we don't censor, we should certainly not PC ness to informally censor the most accurate, informative terms. North8000 (talk) 15:10, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
    Odd. Who are you arguing with? No one here mentioned political correctness as a rationale before you brought it up. The most accurate, informative term is the one used in a preponderance of reliable, independent, secondary sources. --Jayron32 16:56, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
    It's also a straman since no one has ever suggested using terms like undocumented pharmacists to describe drug dealers.--64.229.167.158 (talk) 19:56, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
  • My "undocumented pharmacists" was a sidebar chide on the choice of words. On the main thread, I think that nearly all of the time the "undocumented" term is used, it is in a sentence is about illegal presence. Generally something that is illegal is called illegal (especially if that status is germane to the statement of the sentence) even it were possible to make it legal by the right permit or paperwork. My point is what, what in this case would dictate many to avoid the more direct, informative term and substitute a vague euphemism?... and I think that the answer is the PC rulebook. North8000 (talk) 18:21, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

How about just making it a policy or guideline for any topic relating to illegal immigration in the United States? THE DIAZ talk • contribs 15:44, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Instruction creep... not needed. Blueboar (talk) 18:19, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
@Blueboar: What is an instruction creep? THE DIAZ talk • contribs 21:10, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
See: WP:Avoid instruction creep. Blueboar (talk) 21:30, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Actually, a/c general BLP principles, we can't use "illegal" unless there is a RS that they have been found to be illegal by a court of comp tent jurisdiction. That they are expelled from a country (much less not admitted) does not necessarily mean that a court has formally ruled. "undocumented" avoids some of the possible difficulties here. DGG ( talk ) 19:16, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
@DGG: Actually, the term "illegal immigrant" or "illegal alien" are the terms for an alien who enters the U.S. illegally. It's a fact that the Supreme Court uses that term regardless of any immigration court ruling, as their purview is only to declare an immigrant or alien "removable". THE DIAZ talk • contribs 21:10, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
  • No, let's not codify our contributions to the marginalization of The Other. When we're directly quoting a source, we obviously go with whatever terminology the source uses. In Wikipedia's voice, "migrant," "immigrant", and "emigrant" are all reasonable choices, depending on context, but "migrant" is safest because it works in either instance, coming or going. "Alien" is either legal jargon or pejorative, so that's definitely never optimal (except in a direct quote). In many cases, I suspect that preceding it with an adjective, whether "undocumented" or "illegal", is quite unnecessary. Both are primarily used in American English and may be confusing to readers abroad, but if one or the other must be used in Wikipedia's voice, "undocumented" should be preferred because it lacks the negative connotations of "illegal" (which, when used by itself as a noun, is derogatory). RivertorchFIREWATER 04:45, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
  • "Illegal alien" just sounds weird, That aside we should use whatever the sources state which would be the easiest way of doing it (Personally I prefer illegal immigrant" however it's not about preferring it's about what sources etc use). –Davey2010Talk 16:51, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Appel de décision administrative de blocage

Hello,

I'm really sorry for my middle-level english language, it is enough to read and good enough to write basic sentence but for this question I need a better accuracy than I'm able to be in english language, so I will write in french language, with the hope and expectancy that some people will help translating my words.

Le problème est le suivant : je pense avoir été la victime d'une sorte de complot. Non réellement un complot, plutôt la coalition provisoire de contributeurs qui, par esprit de groupe et par solidarité, ont réalisé une série d'actions qui font que je ne suis plus en moyen de me défendre, étant complètement bloqué, au point qu'un robot automatique à fonctionnement permanent a été activé pour réagir instantanément si un contributeur se connecte à partir d'une certaine adresse IP. La question n'est pas de savoir qui a raison ou qui a tort, cela peut se régler après, si j'ai la possibilité de mettre le problème sur la place publique.

Voici mon interrogation: la présomption d'innocence ne fait-elle pas partie des principes même de Wikipédia, et en ce cas mettre en place un mécanisme automatique de blocage préalable d'un IP dont la communauté n'a pas décidé qu'elle devait être bloquée, n'est-ce pas une violation d'un principe intangible? Et si c'est le cas, est-ce que quelque personne lisant cela pourrait, en quelque sorte, se faire mon avocat non pour le fond mais pour la forme, la demande du respect des formes pour décider du blocage d'une IP. Quoi qu'il en soit, merci d'avance pour les réactions à ce message. Olivier Hammam (talk) 15:36, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Anyway, I will try to translate myself (it's easier than writing directly in a non-native language :-) If somemone can improve this translation, je remercie d'avance cette personne.

(translation)
Here is the case: I think I have been a victim (more or less in the meaning of patsy) of a kind of plot (more or less, a conspiracy). Not really a plot, something like a temporary trust where, with an "esprit de groupe" (I think you know the meaning) and in a spirit of solidarity (more or less, interlock), they chained several actions that leaded to a complete lock and now I really can't do nothing to try to defend myself. The point is not to know who is wrong or good, this will be decided later, but to obtain the ability to get explanations about this.

Here is the thing: is the "presumption of innocence", not in a legal but in a general meaning, a part of Wikipedia fundamentals or no, and if it is, does the activation of a robot (a web "bot") to prevent any connection through another user account than this I use here currently with the same IP address a lack of respect of Wikipedia fundamentals?
(end of translation)

Kind regards. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Olivier Hammam (talk • contribs) 2017-05-29T15:36:26 (UTC)

@Olivier Hammam: I think you are asking about two related topics, the use of alternate accounts - and the use of these as bot accounts. You can read the English Wikipedia policies about these on the following two pages: Wikipedia:Sock puppetry, Wikipedia:Bot policy. — xaosflux Talk 15:40, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
Also if you have a specific alt-account that is blocked, you can use the Template:unblock to request a review. — xaosflux Talk 15:41, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
I really can't understand nothing in your purposes, User:Xaosflux, sorry, and it's not because of my, so said, «mauvais english», I'm fluent enough in this language, as you can see, but I really can't understand your writings. Olivier Hammam (talk) 17:38, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

User:Xaosflux directed you to three English Wikipedia pages that may help you understand how to bring your case to a good end. Please follow these links and read the suggestions.
To be utterly blunt, if your English is too weak to discuss in that language you should seriously reconsider whether you can deliver relevant input into the English Wikipedia version. After all, following another Wikipedia page explains that sufficient control of the English language is required to be a valued editor (see WP:Competence under language issues). Perhaps it would be a wiser choice to become an editor on French Wikipedia rather than having the ambition to be one here. Arnoutf (talk) 17:47, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

@Arnoutf: FYI this user is now blocked for personal attacks after warning; it appears they are also blocked for personal attacks on frwiki - it may possibly be a compromised account. — xaosflux Talk 17:50, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
<edit conflict> Actually, this is about them being blocked at the fr-wikipedia, because of nothere-contributions to the bistro over there (about the same as the village pump here), and now being blocked here because of nothere-contributions to our village pump (Conspiracy!!!!). Kind of a rant actually, interspersed with rather heavy personal attacks (in French) added to their talk-page after the block. When I look at older contributions, this looks like a compromised account. I actually would up the block to a week at least, for them to calm really down. And remove talk-page access to boot. Lectonar (talk) 17:56, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
And yes, they are blocked over there for repeated personal attacks; some edits had to be oversighted in fr-wikipedia. Lectonar (talk) 17:58, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
Je ne comprends rien, mais alors strictement rien aux bavardages stériles des personnes (ou supposées personnes) qui bavassent ci-dessus à propos de choses dont elles ne savent rien et croient tout savoir, et cette incompréhension n'a rien à voir avec mon supposé niveau insuffisant en anglais, beaucoup à voir avec la vacuité de leurs supposés échanges, même s'il me semble n'entendre qu'une voix, celle de l'écho. Je regrette fort que mon intervention ici n'ait, à ce qu'il semble, attiré que des mouches du coche. Triste chose... Je me demande si ces propos anodins et factuels vont encore provoquer un blocage, et me demande encore en quoi le précédent avait la moindre validité. Olivier Hammam (talk) 06:28, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
@Olivier Hammam: Notez que sur Wikipedia Anglais les reglements ne sont pas necessairement les memes que sur sur Wikipedia Francais. La pluspart des utilisateurs ici (incluant moi-meme), nous ne sommes pas necessairement familiers avec les reglements du Wikipedia Francais. Il semblerait d'apres Lectonar que vous ayez ete bloque pour raisons d'edition disruptive ou "POV"/point-de-vue non supporte par les sources fiables ainsi que pour motif d'incivilite (incluant l'utilisation de la page personelle de facon abusive apres avoir ete blocke). Xaosflux evoque meme le fait qu'il serait possible que votre compte aie ete pirate. Nous avons ici WP:APPEAL, WP:OFFER, WP:ABK (autoblock), etc. Il est possible que le Wikipedia Francais aie aussi l'equivalent. Les administrateurs etant egalement differentes personnes sur les differents projets, je doute qu'ici soit la meilleure place pour votre requete. Desole pour le manque d'accents dans mon texte, et bonsoir, —PaleoNeonate - 07:00, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
Merci pour votre contribution, Paleo. J'ai tout-à-fait conscience de ce que vous me dites quant aux différences dans les usages des wikipédias anglophone et francophone, mon problème est l'incapacité où je me trouve de faire valoir mon point de vue, qui est possiblement mal fondé, sut WP:FR, du fait de mon blocage complet. Je sollicite simplement une bonne volonté de WP:EN, non pas pour défendre mon point de vue mais pour l'exposer, tel que présenté ici, sur ma page de discussion francophone et aussi, si elle le souhaite, sur la gage où a été décidé ce blocage. Si donc quelque personne de bonne volonté peut relayer la part de mon premier message qui commence par «Voici mon interrogation» jusqu'à ma signature avec un peu de contexte (lien vers la source du message, si la personne le juge opportun motifs qui l'ont conduite à relayer ma demande...). Merci encore à vous, et merci par avance à qui voudrait accéder à ma requête.
Amicalement. Olivier Hammam (talk) 09:19, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

WP:Citation overkill RfC

Opinions are needed on the following matter: Wikipedia talk:Citation overkill#Should this essay be changed to encourage more citations?. A WP:Permalink for it is here.

Although WP:Citation overkill is not a policy or guideline, it is often treated as one, and the RfC is framed under a policy RfC because it is the only RfC template that fit it. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 01:57, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Do redirects encourage poor spelling?

discussion started by a banned user in violation of ban --Jayron32 04:16, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Our article Street hierarchy is a redirect from street heirarchy, which means that someone typing in the incorrect spelling may never realise that they are spelling the word wrong. Another example - the word "calendar" is often mis - spelled "calender". If you type "Julian calender" you will get the article you want and may be none the wiser. If you type in "religious calender" the search result asks "Did you mean: religious calendar". Should we adopt the second approach to improve readers' spelling? 86.148.116.248 (talk) 09:25, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

I am not sure that it is a Wikipedia's mission to improve reader's spelling. Ruslik_Zero 10:34, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
I agree about not improving reader's spelling, but there is another huge advantage to asking "did you mean...", which is that you can answer "no". Maybe I really did want to search for "heirarchy"[10] instead of "hierarchy". --Guy Macon (talk) 17:51, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
We are supposed to be assisting our readers find the info about the topic, more so than helping them spell. Perhaps redirect from misspelling can cause the title of the target article to show in flashing red with a pop up saying they had a spelling error. But it is just annoying. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:03, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
Google search for "street heirarchy" says "Showing results for street hierarchy" and Street hierarchy is the first hit. Wikipedia search for "street heirarchy" says "There is a page named 'Street heirarchy' on Wikipedia" and Street hierarchy is the first hit. I think readers can find what they want easily enough without deliberately misspelled redirects, and I also question whether benefit exceeds cost here. It is not Wikipedia's mission to teach people how to spell, but it is our mission to spell correctly in articles if we wish to call ourselves remotely professional and seek public respect. If an editor misspells an English word in a link, the red color would be a great way to tell them that they should consult a dictionary (or the target article's title). That said, I know that the chances of a change here are infinitesimal so this discussion is academic. ―Mandruss ☎ 22:35, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
I think that this is fallacious—if the misspelling redirects to the correct title, then most readers should be able to notice that they were redirected, and that the title of the article differs in spelling from the redirect. One can also relate this problem to what some philosophers thought of books in ancient Greece—they claimed that books might endanger our ability to remember things. But, since having memory is useful even with books, the capacity to remember things did not decrease. Same thing here—Wikipedia isn't the only time when people have to spell things, and it isn't the only chance that people have to be reminded of their spelling. Look at Google. They use the system you suggested. So, with that combined with the fact that readers will probably/might notice the fact that the redirect title is different than the article title, there is no benefit in this proposal. But, there are drawbacks. First, the fact that we aren't really in the business of being a spell-checker, we are in the business of giving people general information. Second, it will, although not much, slow down the process of getting to an article by a bit. Third, how would we implement such a system? Since redirects aren't just for misspelling, we wouldn't want to get rid of all the redirects. So, how would we get rid of all the redirects related to misspellings? It would likely require humans to check it, and even if you automatically get rid of the redirects that are categorized as misspellings, there are a lot of redirects that are not categorized. Thus, due to the minimal (or no) benefit and the significant detriment, this is not a good idea. RileyBugz会話投稿記録 23:40, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
Look at Google. They use the system you suggested. I do look at Google, and Google does not go out of their way to facilitate incorrect spelling on their own websites. That is a very flawed comparison. there is no benefit in this proposal except for that silly professionalism thing which, contrary to widespread opinion, is not actually something to be avoided in an encyclopedia. we are in the business of giving people general information. As I suggested, I'm not aware of evidence that deliberately misspelled redirects are needed to help people find the general information; in fact, the only actual evidence presented in this particular discussion belies that notion. As far as I can tell, then, that is an unproven popular myth that probably originated before search engines were as smart as they are today. I'm willing to be corrected with actual evidence. ―Mandruss ☎ 00:16, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
For Google (I'm talking about search here), if one types in "Heirarchy" it says "Showing results for hierarchy". But, for some search results that are further off, it says "Did you mean: term". So, I'm not exactly wrong there. I don't really understand the argument behind about the professionalism thing (I mean that I don't understand where it came up and why it relates to this). Next, whether they are needed or not. The redirects aren't really needed, so it might do good to delete them. But, the argument of them not being needed also brings up whether this is needed. It would be much easier to keep the current system, which might not have any benefit, than implementing another system, which might not have any benefits. I think that whether we should delete these redirects is something for another day, so I think that we should focus on the current debate. RileyBugz会話投稿記録 01:31, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
Note: I just realized something, so ignore most of my previous comments. Basically, I had thought that this proposal was on the implementation of a feature, which is incorrect, so I withdraw my comments. RileyBugz会話投稿記録 01:36, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
Any likely typo, if it doesn't have a different meaning, should exist as a redirect, to make it easier for our readers, Their spelling isn't our problem; them finding the page they're looking for is. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 18:03, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Jayron32 is spitting into the wind here. The person who typed "street heirarchy" into the search box and was redirected to "street hierarchy" was ... Jayron32. 217.34.36.106 (talk) 11:34, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

I would disagree that most readers notice when they have been redirected, at least where the letters in the misspelling are the same. In point of fact, people don't read by picking out each individual letter in a word - they scan the whole word and rely on context. In the case in point [11] Jayron would have read the article "street hierarchy" before linking to it, and the fact that he maintained the misspelling in his post indicates that he didn't pick up on the error. Both method "A" and method "B" lead the reader where she wants to go, but method "B" educates her along the way. It might be useful to mention this discussion at the Teahouse and see whether editors joining for the first time have a preference. Anyway, spell checkers are obviously in demand because all word processors have them. 217.34.36.106 (talk) 12:15, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

All becomes clear. See this statement of intent User:Jayron32/Jayron32's Principles of Vandal Fighting, particularly Principles 3 and 4. 217.34.36.106 (talk) 10:43, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Inclusion of non-encyclopedic pages in mainspace as a technical workaround

There is an AfD here hinging on the question of whether non-encyclopedic pages can be retained in mainspace as a technical workaround. It's not clear yet how the community feels about this, but it is clear that more attention is needed to the matter. —swpbT 12:41, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Should global renamers/stewards be authorized to process requests at WP:CHUU?

Please see: Wikipedia talk:Changing username#Should global renamers/stewards be authorized to process requests at WP:CHUU? –xenotalk 16:47, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Page LGBT conservatism Takeover

Over the last several months the page LGBT conservatism has been modified, a few edits at a time, to characterize LGBT conservatism as alt-right. Although some edits seem constructive, the first edit was to change all words "conservative" to "right-wing" and to try to move the page (change its name to LGBT Right-Wing) which was refused. Links and headings to "alt-right" and "fascism" were added; some users deleted some of the more egregious changes. I was thinking of doing a global change of "right-wing" back to "conservatism" but found that this is a huge task at this point, so, on the advice of another user, before I proceeded I thought I should come here with my concerns. I have three problems: I'm a very junior editor, I have no time or interest in an editing war, and I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the subject matter. The site owner does not seem to be in evidence. The policy issue is editing that replaces normal labels like "conservative" with pejorative labels like "right-wing". -motorfingers- 08:37, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

The best place to discuss this is at Talk:LGBT conservatism. I see you did start a couple of threads there. (I'll reply to one of them presently.) I'd suggest dropping a neutrally-worded note at a couple of relevant WikiProjects, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject LGBT studies and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Conservatism, if you want to get more eyes on this. RivertorchFIREWATER 16:44, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
I did post neutrally toned remarks three times on Talk:LGBT conservatism with no result, apparently. I do notice that the most egregious changes, e.g. references to "alt-right" and "fascism" are gone. I don't recall page watch e-mails for those changes and haven't looked in awhile; perhaps I watch-flagged just the talk page.
I haven't seen LGBT studies. Looking there, I don't see a reference to LGBT conservatism at all. A global search reveals no other mentions of the exact phrase "LGBT conservatism" on any other Wikipedia page. I don't see a good place for a link to LGBT conservatism on the main project page, unless LGBT conservatism has been designated a "good" article or other category there. Perhaps there is another page in the project that should link to LGBT conservatism. -- motorfingers : Talk 06:43, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
If you believe the article is not neutral, you could tag it with {{POV}} or any of the other Wikipedia:Neutrality templates that would be appropriate. —Farix (t | c) 11:23, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
@motorfingers: Not LGBT studies, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject LGBT studies. And Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Conservatism. Follow the links to the talk pages. WikiProjects can be good resources when you want to draw attention to issues at a relevant article. RivertorchFIREWATER 18:47, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

SCHOOLOUTCOMES again

A couple months ago we had an RfC about WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES. About 100 editors participated and it was closed by four editors in good standing. In the closing statement is a summary that includes this text: "Secondary schools are not presumed to be notable simply because they exist."

Today, I was disappointed to come across Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Korea Kent Foreign School, which looks like it's heading towards being kept based almost entirely on arguments along the lines of ~"there's a long-held consensus that we keep articles about secondary schools if they verifiably exist".

Putting aside the specifics of that AfD, if school AfDs are primarily attended by those who see the February RfC as illegitimate or otherwise don't agree with or don't like the close, what purpose did the RfC have? (That's a real question, not simply rhetorical). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 20:15, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

The outcome of that RfC was no consensus to the actual question asked as at least one of the closers (Primefac) has stated when asked about it. The rest of the close was an observation of the implications of no consensus. The close was difficult, and I think muddied the waters, to be honest (not intended as a critique of the closers). SCHOOLOUTCOMES now shouldn't be cited, but you have admins saying that referencing school outcomes and then explaining the reasons behind it is a fine argument since that makes it cease to be circular. From a practical standpoint, this leaves us exactly the same place we were before the RfC, which is what a finding of no consensus is in the end. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:37, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
Economical with the verité or what? Primefac also said that the arguments being used by admins like Necrothesp - which are identical to the ones Rhondodendrites mentions - are a de facto invocation of SCHOOLOUTCOMES and are not valid. This end-running by admins in particular needs to stop. I am particularly appalled that DGG is attempting the trick, even though he does generally have a reputation as an inclusionist (eg: extremely broad application of SYSTEMIC). - Sitush (talk) 20:53, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
Sitush I wasn't trying to give the impression that Primefac was endorsing the SCHOOLOUTCOMES arguments (its why I stated that it shouldn't be cited, which I am in agreement with you on.) I was simply noting that the part of the RfC that is very rarely mentioned is that the close to the actual question asked was no consensus. This basically leaves us where we were before: fighting over the notability of schools in South Asia and Africa on a case by case basis.. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:01, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
Fair enough, sorry. But I'm still pissed that people who should know better are in fact citing it in all but name. It's about time we scrapped all these notions of presumed notability and enforced WP:BURDEN, ie "use it or lose it". - Sitush (talk) 21:17, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again now... instead of a "presumption" of notability our SNGs should talk about the "likeliness" of notability. Blueboar (talk) 21:27, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

Which will just enable even more crap that no-one has time to maintain and which in many cases is fundamentally just promotion. - Sitush (talk) 21:30, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
SCHOOLOUTCOMES isn't even a SNG, the RfC tried to effectively tried to elevate it to one, but that failed. It is a description of the typical outcome of AfDs. I've said this before, but I think there is going to be uncertainty on what to do with secondary schools for a while, and then there will be a de facto compromise reached at AfD, which will then likely cause OUTCOMES to be updated. DGG's argument for that is strong, in my opinion, but the compromise will probably be different than what we had seen pre-RfC. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:38, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
DGG's argument is usually that something might turn up. It's not strong at all. Take that road and we may as well not delete anything on notability grounds. - Sitush (talk) 21:44, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
We need closers of such AFDs to recognize that one clear outcome of that SCHOOLSOUTCOME is that we can't have the Catch 22 of using SCHOOLOUTCOMES as the only !vote reason (WP:ATA was updated to include this). It doesn't meant secondary schools can't be kept, but the strength of argument has to be towards sourcing and notability (but it doesn't have to be fully GNG-meeting) and not just regurgitating SCHOOLOUTCOMES. I wonder if we need a template message for such deletion debates to remind editors that !voting only on a SCHOOLOUTCOMES-based argument should be discounted by the closer. --MASEM (t) 14:27, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

I feel like Wikipedia needs *some* policy regarding SCHOOLOUTCOMES. I am opposed to the status-quo of "ignore this policy entirely". For example, would evidence of notable alumni be sufficient for notability? Proof of enrollment? There are very few online newspapers from Nigeria; a requirement for that type of coverage may cause needless deletions. Power~enwiki (talk) 01:46, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

@Power-enwiki: SCHOOLOUTCOMES is not a policy, nor a guideline, so there is no policy to ignore entirely. Please do not mis-state it as such. --Izno (talk) 03:07, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
@Izno: then what is it? If it's nothing, it should be deleted entirely, or it should be replaced with an actual policy or guideline. Power~enwiki (talk) 03:56, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
@Power~enwiki: The page itself says it is a supplement, but neither policy nor guideline. Why do you think it should be deleted entirely if it is not replaced by a PAG? --Izno (talk) 12:36, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Delete SCHOOLOUTCOMES and replace with an actual guideline - If the school doesn't have reliable and indepth sources of any kind (regardless of the country) then it should be deleted, We're strict with everything else on this site so we should be strict with Schools too. –Davey2010Talk 16:46, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
    • We already have a guideline for schools and other educational organizations; it's at WP:NSCHOOL. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:00, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
      • That's not a guideline for schools, it's a mere pointer to general guidelines. It is also circular, as it includes a link to WP:ORG, the guideline of which it is a section (albeit a single sentence). As far as it applies to schools, WP:ORG does no more than restate WP:GNG. Ultimately, NSCHOOL is a mere informational statement (just like SCHOOLOUTCOMES). We would lose nothing if it was removed. Jack N. Stock (talk) 06:22, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Pre-RfC: Political Memes

Withdrawn; no interest. Power~enwiki (talk) 22:29, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

It seems that every time Donald Trump sneezes, somebody creates an article for it. We have Covfefe (AfD) and Trump orb (AfD) created and sent to AfD in the past week.

I propose that there be a new Speedy Deletion criteria for any pages related to new political memes of the past two weeks. It's somewhat difficult to define what should be included, though. If Congress creates and passes a new health care bill, we don't need to wait two weeks to create an article. For things which are fundamentally noteworthy because people talk about them a lot on Twitter (and a significant portion of the press will cover whatever political gossip people talk about on Twitter), the articles should be deleted (or redirected) as a matter of policy.

If any of these memes or news stories are encyclopedic, they will still have coverage and still get an article in two weeks. If they're not, we discourage dozens of editors from making unproductive contributions. Power~enwiki (talk) 23:28, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

  • No, you can't create arcane policy pages at Wikipedia that will prevent good-intentioned people from creating articles you don't like. There's no impending harm from these articles going through the normal AFD process. Wikipedia is in no rush, and it gets it right eventually. This would be an abuse of the speedy deletion process, which is not for deleting articles like the two cited, and never was. --Jayron32 23:37, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
    • I am suggesting a change to the policy, of course it doesn't fit in the existing speedy deletion process. Perhaps "redirect and protect" is a better suggestion? Power~enwiki (talk) 23:40, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
      • It's not merely that it doesn't fit existing criteria, it completely and utterly violates a core principle of CSD. There's a distinction to be made here, CSD does not exist merely to allow us to delete stuff we can't be bothered to wait around to delete. CSD is entirely and totally about extreme examples of WP:SNOW-level deletions, things like an article which is nothing but a copyvio of another source, or articles which are gibberish, or written about your cat, or things like that. There's no need to hold an AFD discussion deleting an article which consists of someone who blindly smashed their keyboard and hit "save". However, potentially encyclopedic content is never suitable CSD material, even if we find it really annoying. Such content should always be discussed. That the discussion ends up deleting the content does not mean the discussion wasn't necessary in the first place. Indeed, the discussion should happen, because deciding which recent events have met the threshold of suitability for an article is something that requires more than one person's feeling. That was my point, your proposal was not to create a new definition of gibberish, it completely violates a core principle of CSD. --Jayron32 03:42, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Sports-specific criteria and GNG discussed at WT:NSPORTS

The relationship between sport-specific criteria of WP:NSPORTS and WP:GNG is discussed at Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)#Proposal re GNG/SSC relationship. --George Ho (talk) 02:06, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

As this was just discussed, I think it is far too premature to re-open this topic. isaacl (talk) 03:33, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
Many of us did not even see the discussion here. There are too many forums on WP, we can't possibly watch them all. Such discussions will go on, in multiple forums, as long as WP exists, and you can't stifle them just by saying "we already talked about that." Jack N. Stock (talk) 05:19, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
There was a notification placed on the talk page for the sports-specific notability guideline. As you can see from the discussion thread above, there were many participants in the discussion. Should anyone wish to discuss the matter again, they can of course proceed. Just be forewarned that there may well be a lack of receptiveness to continuing a discussion that already took over a month and a half. isaacl (talk) 05:35, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
I guess I didn't visit WP that day, or maybe we had just finished the same discussion elsewhere and I considered this one redundant. Jack N. Stock (talk) 05:58, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
First, I ask everyone to read (or re-read) the previous discussion. The next question is... does anyone have anything new to add to that discussion? If we are simply going to rehash the debate we recently had, then there is no point in discussing it again now... but if someone can raise a new point or concern (something that was not already discussed to death) then it is worth reopening the discussion. Blueboar (talk) 22:38, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Discussion closed against proposal per WP:SNOW. Nothing more to do here. SkyWarrior 18:28, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

For those who watch this page and not WT:NSPORT, there is a related discussion to demote WP:NSPORT from guideline to information page or essay. Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)#Proposal for demotion of NSPORT. Jack N. Stock (talk) 05:58, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The criteria of WP:NSPORT here are too inclusive

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
When closing a discussion Closers are cautioned to: to judge the consensus of the community, after discarding irrelevant arguments: those that flatly contradict established policy, those based on personal opinion only, those that are logically fallacious, and those that show no understanding of the matter of issue. There are a number of statements about inclusion of sports figures that essentially come down to either WP:ILIKEIT or WP:IDONTLIKEIT, none of which are especially useful in evaluating consensus. These statements were partially or fully discounted in our evaluation.

This RFC discussed two related themes. The first theme was whether the subject notability guidelines given at WP:NSPORT are being used and interpreted correctly at AFD. The second theme was whether some of the subguidelines within WP:NSPORT are too inclusive.

The first theme developed a strong consensus that the GNG is the controlling guideline, while the criteria at NSPORT are useful tools to try to quickly determine the likelihood of an article meeting the GNG.

The second theme was the question of whether some of the NSPORTS criteria are too inclusive. Significant discussion only occurred for the cycling criteria. No consensus emerged on any specific adjustment to the cycling criteria, and no other criteria were discussed in sufficient depth for anything resembling a consensus to emerge.

The conclusions that can be drawn at this point are:

  • There is clear consensus that no subject-specific notability guideline, including Notability (sports) is a replacement for or supercedes the General Notability Guideline. Arguments must be more refined than simply citing compliance with a subguideline of WP:NSPORTS in the context of an Articles for Deletion discussion.
  • There is a general unhappiness with the permissiveness of some NSPORTS criteria, but no consensus in this discussion on any specific changes to any of them.
  • There is rough consensus that sources on older athletes are concentrated in print media. Because it is impossible to prove the negative that the sources do not exist to support an article, some intermediate standard is required for determining when an article on these athletes should be deleted due to lack of notability.

Due to the tangential discussion here on some points that have been raised below, there are issues that remain unsettled by this discussion. Follow-up discussion should be held to determine (in no particular order):

  • The appropriate result for an article at AFD about a sportsperson where they verifiably meet a NSPORTS criterion, but various levels of effort have not yielded significant sourcing (especially for older athletes or athletes from non-Anglophone locations)
  • The possible cut-offs for "older" or "non-Anglophone" in connection with the above question
  • Proposed specific changes for the criteria in each sports-specific subguideline

As with the RfC on secondary school notability, this should not be an invitation to flood AfD with indiscriminate or excessive nominations. (non-admin closure)

Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 19:26, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Tazerdadog (talk) 23:25, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Why is a substub like Magdalena Zamolska encyclopedic? Because WP:NCYCLING. I don't agree that participating in some competitions, without winning, or generating any coverage but a mention in the list of participants should suffice. Who decided those and similar exceptions to WP:BIO? Current research shows that 30-40% of biographies in Wikiepdia are of sportspeople. Most of them are substubs like this, people who did nothing except participate in events. Participation should not be sufficient to be in an encyclopedia; we are turning into a sport stat site. I am hoping the discussion here would be more representative of our community's thoughts than one that could happen at the sports notability talk page (where I'll of course leave a ping). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 07:55, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

You didn't notify the cycling project about this (which I have done for you). The answer is that this individual represented her nation at an event that's the highest level for that sport. It's a long established consensus for sporting individuals that it'll pass the threshold for inclusion, along with single appearances at the Olympics, in cricket matches, football matches, baseball games, etc, etc. There's a lot of areas on WP that you could say are "too inclusive". Such as all populated places. How is this stub any better? Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 08:06, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Leaving aside WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS (you are welcome to start your own discussion about possible problem with WP:NCGN), the problem with claiming we have consensus is that it is difficult to prove (citation needed). And when traced, we often find it was a discussion of five users... Anyway, I see some merit in saying that a sportsperson who "represented her nation at an event that's the highest level for that sport" is notable, but speaking as a someone who knows very little about sports - wouldn't that be Cycling at the Summer Olympics? Cycling, to stick to a single example (that is however representative of the problem with NSPORT) lists, in addition to Olympics, five more events: UCI World Championships, UCI World Cups, Grand Tour (cycling), UCI World Tour and Classic_cycle_races#The_.27Monuments.27, for most of those they are in fact several competitions, most of which occur each year. I repeat: it sands to logic to say that competitors at a single top level event are notable. When we get to a dozen of two top level events, we have a problem (of inclusionist creep). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:11, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
The individual in question did compete in the 2008 women's road race, the very top level race for cyclists, organized by the UCI (the cycling governing body). The stub also addresses WP:BIAS, in this case a female athlete from Poland. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 11:40, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
And to answer your first question - encyclopedic means comprehensive, which is a different question to the one you're really asking (I assume about notability). Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 14:17, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
@Lugnuts: Who decided that 2008 UCI Road World Championships – Women's road race is "the very top level race for cyclists"? Again, I don't understand the criteria here. Olympics, yes, but what else and why? You are ignoring most of my arguments - I asked why do we have the 20 or so top level races? Bias is irrelevant, we don't create article about women or other minorities because they are underrepresented, we create them if they are important. Oh, and the subject seems to have placed 89 out of 91 in said competition. I could understand the top 3 medal winners could be notable. Anyone else - I still don't see why. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:41, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
The community decided. Just like everything else around here. UCI events are the top level for the sport of cycling. You've said yourself that you are "someone who knows very little about sports", but you can find out more here. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 06:42, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree, and not just for cycling. All of sports suffers from this junk. Many of these contentless microstubs are so meager that they'd barely fill out a few cells in an excel spreadsheet. The "sourcing" tends to come from websites that indiscriminately aggregate statistics, often with a dubious record of accuracy. Not a word of prose to be found anywhere. In fact, many of these so-called articles rest on sources so poor that it's hard to distinguish two similarly-named people from each other or to determine whether two stat entries with similar names are actually the same person. Of course, these terrible articles get inflated to large sizes with endless infoboxes and templates to mask the lack of content. Wikipedia readers would be better served if this extremely useless clutter was trimmed, or merged into list articles. But no, it's super duper mega important to erect a shiny little shrine to every farmer who once hit a cricket ball around a church backyard in 1834. Reyk YO! 08:15, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Said the person who created this. And this. Chuckle. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 08:19, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Off-topic baiting and snapping collapsed
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
I know better now. Fuckwit. Reyk YO! 08:24, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
I strongly recommend you apologise and retract that last comment. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 08:25, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
No and no. Reyk YO! 08:27, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Hi, got here from Special:RecentChanges. Please, not in front of the children.MikeTango (talk) 08:32, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Yes, I wrote a handful of articles that don't meet the standards I now consider important. So what? It dawned on me what gibberish I was writing back then, so I stopped. Same reason I don't participate at DYK anymore; it was encouraging me to write trash in exchange for baubles. This tactic of digging through ancient edits hunting for a "gotcha" is neither helpful nor particularly honest. And if in future you want to try that again in hopes of getting me to lose my temper, save your energy. I know what the game is now, and it won't work a second time. Reyk YO! 09:09, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Everyone made mistakes in their early wiki career, I also created a lot of entries on non-notable fictional topic that I am not often nominating for deletion, because geek fancruft is not notable. If anything, this only drives home the point that sport geeks need to raise the threshold; currently it is really hard to be a non-notable sportsperson on Wikipedia. We should not be a catalog of sport stats. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:14, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
What makes you so sure the early stubs created were "mistakes" rather than the deletionist current perspective being espoused? Carrite (talk) 03:59, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
Because I am saying it was a mistake to create that kind of article in that state. Reyk YO! 22:57, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree. "The answer is that this individual represented her nation at an event that's the highest level for that sport. It's a long established consensus for sporting individuals that it'll pass the threshold for inclusion" simply isn't true. Many sports are so minor that even the world championships themselves don't get an article here (or much media attention), never mind every athlete appearing in them being notable enough for an enwiki article. For example, Inline speed skating. I have created articles on a few inline speed skaters, I'm not biased against the sport in any way, but most competitors at the world championships are not notable. And then we have sports where NSPORTS explicitly sets the bar lower than competing at world championships. This is in itself defensible, e.g. everyone who plays in the Premier League is notable, fine. But this has been taken to extremes in some cases, like cricket, or cycling (especially women's cycling, where the bar for inclusion is lower even though the sport gets less media attention now and used to get massively less media attention in the past), or soccer (playing for a few minutes in an official game with the national team of a micronation is sufficient to be notable according to WP:NFOOTY). Often the mistake has been made that because people in sport X here and now are notable, this should be included in the guideline for then and there as well. This ignores the massive changes in populatity / notability one can have per sport over periods, countries, and gender. Even for the Olympics, one can reasonably argue that competing in the first games (up to at least 1920) often was not important and has in some cases not even been registered. Fram (talk) 12:01, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
    • @Fram: Wow. You know, I totally missed the FAQ. You are right, NSPORT clearly states that the subject still has to meet the GNG. But in my experience, the problem is that AfDs are often closed as keep solely based on NSPORT, with arguments that the subject doesn't meet GNG falling on deaf ears. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:15, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
      • Closers of AfD discussions for sports figures need to be reminded that if they ignore the context of the sports-specific guidelines, which is clearly laid out in the lead section and the FAQ, they are ignoring the community consensus that formed the guidelines, and the multiple subsequent reaffirmations on the talk page of the guidelines. isaacl (talk) 05:59, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment Part of the problem is that many of the sport-specific guidelines were created by editors from sport-specific wikiprojects; and while not everybody is inclusionist about their favorite sport, very few editors are deletionist about their favorite sport. So instead of a nice balance between inclusionists and deletionists, there's just inclusionists and moderates, which tends to lead to an inclusionist bias.
    That said, many of the sports stubs (and substubs) are about genuinely notable people (as in, people who meet GNG); given that the number of articles about sportspeople is so huge, it's hardly surprising that sports editors simply haven't found the time to flesh all of them out; and NSPORT guidelines, as they're intended to do, discourage AfDs in cases like that.
    Part of the problem, too, is that many editors at AfD apply NSPORT overenthusiastically; as in "keep - meets NSPORT" without any thought as to whether the athlete actually meets GNG. "Keep - meets NSPORT" can be a good and valid argument, but AfD !voters often forget that GNG must also be met; and if the case is made that an athlete meets NSPORT but fails GNG, "keep - meets NSPORT" is too simplistic to be of any value as a !vote or a reply. Sideways713 (talk) 12:41, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
As a further note: the OP asked "Who decided those and similar exceptions to WP:BIO?" NSPORT doesn't create any exceptions to WP:BIO or WP:GNG; on the contrary, it explicitly notes (in the FAQ) that all sports biographies must meet WP:GNG to be kept. Sportspeople do get a freebie compared to non-sportspeople in that WP:BIO1E is practically never applied to a sportsperson, but that's not codified in NSPORT. Sideways713 (talk) 14:58, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree. I think there is a problem with there being too many athlete articles as a proportion of all biographical articles on Wikipedia, for sure. But the problem is not that we're allowing too many articles on athletes, but rather we don't have enough articles on non-athletes. -- Earl Andrew - talk 13:26, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
It would be great if we could include more articles on other professions (academics for example are ones perennially under-represented) but then the issue is a matter of WP:V; it is very difficult to support articles on these other professions, whereas even for minor sports, websites with statistics exist allowing individual players to at least meet WP:V. --MASEM (t) 13:39, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree The ONLY principle for deciding if an article should exist is "could I fill it with enough well-referenced text to make it worthwhile". Any criteria that encourages the creation of articles which will never have enough text is simply ill-advised. --Jayron32 13:41, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Which is a much bigger project-wide issue that's not just related to sportspeople. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 13:52, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time... --Jayron32 17:50, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Indeed. Let's not derail the discussion by saying "there are other problematic areas". This one is a very good place to start. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:13, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Note that NSPORT is, in theory, supposed to simply be a quick way to judge if it's likely that an article can be filled with enough well-referenced text to make it worthwhile; it's not supposed to create any backdoors whereby athletes who fail that basic criterion can be declared "notable", though admittedly that does sometimes happen in practice. Sideways713 (talk) 14:02, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Intent means nothing, all that means anything is what actually happens. Every notability guideline beyond WP:42 is an invitation to create articles which will never be developed. --Jayron32 17:51, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
And how do you decide what is "enough text"? You are proposing that we introduce subjectivity instead of objectivity. "Enough text" could be 95% waffle and duplication of info from other articles. NSPORT generally uses objective criteria such as "must have played at the highest level of domestic competition". Any stub can be enlarged but would the additional text be useful? Jack | talk page 16:18, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
WP:42 is a good start. WP:GNG, the expanded version, is pretty solid as well. Not sure we need more than that. But yeah, if an article can never be developed, it should not exist in the first place. If all we have to say about a person is that they lived, why even have an article? If we can't write about their childhood, their careers in some sense of completeness, analysis of their lives by others, etc. then what are we putting in an article? In general, the text of a Wikipedia article should be less than the text which exists in the rest of the world outside of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia should be a summary. When Wikipedia articles are longer than reliable source material about a person, and consist solely of three lines of text and a table, that's a problem. --Jayron32 17:50, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
I've always thought a good rule of thumb is whether or not the article shows a reasonable potential of being developed into a Featured Article. Even a lot of perennial stubs show that potential. The article that sparked this thread might have that potential, if and only if someone is willing to do the research to show how that athlete fits into the larger context of the history of cycling in Poland. (And if the material to be researched doesn't exist, well, merging or deletion are the only viable alternatives. -- llywrch (talk) 19:39, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Potential article quality has little relation to suitability for inclusion in an encyclopedia. If we're covering someone as a sportsperson, the only essential is that we have sufficient sourced content about their significance as a sportsperson --Michig (talk) 19:51, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Your answer shows you haven't thought much about the issue. I have, because it's not unique to sports biographies. There are many articles -- both biographical & non-biographical -- currently existing in Wikipedia that will never be expanded beyond a stub because there isn't any further information about the subject. Yet one can argue the subject is notable.

So what to do? Avoid creating it in the first place? Delete them because they will never be developed beyond a stub? Or merge them into a list, much as tv episodes or fictional characters are? (You could call that the "Pokemon solution", in memory of the first time this issue came up.) Or perhaps there is another solution that this old Wikipedian is blind to. But a solution needs to be found because the issue of permanent stubs in Wikipedia is one that will only become more apparent as time goes on. -- llywrch (talk) 15:56, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

"sufficient sourced content about their significance as a sportsperson" is merely the standard we need to mention the person at Wikipedia as a whole. The issue is more about how to include text about their lives at Wikipedia: As part of a larger page or as a stand alone page. We aren't saying "Should this person be removed from Wikipedia entirely". What we are saying is "Is there enough text about this person's life to write to justify putting it on a separate page" If all we have to say is "Jane Smith competed in fencing at the 2012 Olympics" and we literally know nothing else about them, we can note that fact just fine in an article titled "Fencing at the 2012 Olympics". There's no need to ALSO create another page whose sole purpose is to contain that line of text. Jane Smith is at Wikipedia, all the information we have is already in the encyclopedia, and unless and until we can justify creating an entire page to house her biography (rather than just one or two facts about her participation in a sporting event) then the extra page isn't needed. No one is saying to remove the information from Wikipedia, just that creating an entire new page to house that information is not worthwhile. --Jayron32 16:09, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
  • "Your answer shows you haven't thought much about the issue" - could you possibly get any more arrogant? I don't get your obsession with articles having to go beyond stubs - have you ever looked at the size of many of the articles in other works such as Encyclopaedia Britannica? I have no objection to merging really short articles to wider topics, but that's an editorial decision on how we organize content and a separate issue to notability. --Michig (talk) 17:38, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
    I've never said such a thing, and I would thank you for not accusing me of doing so. --Jayron32 01:51, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree As a compromise, can we just have a guideline that makes such entries as the example in the OP presumed ok for a list but not for an article? Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:17, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment: Unfortunately for the majority here, you're writing for an encyclopedia where the fundamental underpinning of notability criteria isn't "We think your profession is important," but "The world has heard of you." Of course there will be many more athletes and entertainers than academics represented here, because our culture pays attention to athletes and entertainers, and a third-line forward for the Boston Bruins or a minor actress who gets her kit off for three scenes in Game of Thrones has vastly more name recognition than your average Nobel Prize winner. I'm just curious as to what some of you think should be done about that aside from jettisoning WP:V. Ravenswing 15:03, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
    • Subject-specific notability guidelines can be more restrictive than the GNG (They can't be less restrictive though), if that helps to prevent excessive coverage in a topic area where imbalanced sourcing can exist. But the case argued here is different: it is that criteria in NSPORT have been selected that allow for the presumption of notability based on weak criteria that can be easily met with WP:V (like the OP substub) but show no strong indication of eventually meeting GNG. Just because an athlete can be documented doesn't mean they are necessarily notable. --MASEM (t) 15:14, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
    • While I agree with the rough sentiment, and I would not suggest any quotas on sportspeople, nor would I disagree that they are a highly visible type of a profession with high notability compared to many others, we have to draw a line a bit higher; consider the example I linked in the OP: that cyclist has very little world recognition, and I doubt her name is recognized by anyone except die-hard cyclist fans in Poland. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:20, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree that its too inclusive, not sure what you can do at this point. I think you would probably get a majority of people in a site wide RfC to agree on that, but I don't think you could get agreement on what the content specific guideline should be. On a practical level, any drastic change would probably be more messy than even the schools issue in terms of flooding AfD. I think for any changes you'd need to have a very carefully crafted RfC. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:24, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
    • I would definitely agree that an RFC regarding this must pre-emptively set up some type of grandfathering approach to existing articles, and a means to address fait accompli at AFD. We learned from the SCHOOLOUTCOMES RFC that if these aren't set in stone to start, a lot of editors will reject the change due to their fears that we'll flood AFD. Preemptive processes for this will help alleviate those matters. --MASEM (t) 15:50, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
      • Yes. In my mind the proposed grandfather clause would need to be set as the date the RfC would be opened to prevent gaming the system, which would happen just as surely as a flood on AfD. Sports aren't my particular area of interest or expertise, but if someone decides to set up a draft RfC, feel free to ping me. I was involved with setting up the schools RfC, so I have thoughts on both the positives and negatives that came from that which might be helpful. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:54, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree. On the whole, WP:NSPORT is fine, but fine tuning is always possible and sometimes desirable. Having read the arguments raised by User:Piotrus, his issue is not about NSPORT but specifically about WP:NCYCLING and he needs to raise it with the cycling project. While he's there, he might ask them to stop obstructing the traffic on public roads. Jack | talk page 15:49, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
    • No, you are wrong. My issue ws with NSPORT, I just used NCYCLING as an example. Half if not more of the NSPORT guidelines are super-inclusive. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:27, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
      • @Piotrus: Perhaps, but not WP:CRIN of which I am the main author (it is summarised by WP:NCRIC within NSPORT). CRIN is actually exclusive because we insist that all cricketers must have performed at the highest domestic level to comply with WP:Notability and the article must clearly demonstrate, with verification, that the player has done so. For the most part, it means he or she has played for a team that is ranked "first-class". At WP:CRIC, we take any article that does not comply with CRIN straight to AfD. I don't know about the other sports projects but CRIC has set a high standard for inclusion and we strictly apply it. We have even taken cricket articles to AfD because there was no indication of first-class standard, even though subsequent investigation revealed that the subject did comply with CRIN but the author had been incompetent by not stating and verifying the notability. Maybe what is needed is for other sports projects to follow our example. Jack | talk page 18:14, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment - I tend to agree that NSPORTS is far too inclusive. At the top of NSPORTS there is a FAQ. The first item in the FAQ refers to the GNG. The answer says:
The topic-specific notability guidelines described on this page do not replace the general notability guideline. They are intended only to stop an article from being quickly deleted when there is very strong reason to believe that significant, independent, non-routine, non-promotional secondary coverage from reliable sources are available, given sufficient time to locate them.[1][2][3][4] Wikipedia's standard for including an article about a given person is not based on whether or not he/she has attained certain achievements, but on whether or not the person has received appropriate coverage in reliable sources, in accordance with the general notability guideline.
My opinion, which I've expressed at several AfD, is that this makes NSPORTS and all of it's sport specific criteria, secondary to the GNG. It helps clarify who might meet the GNG but I tend to think there are cases where a person who's done something specific in the sports related field is unlikely to meet the GNG in itself.
Perhaps that's a way forward? Yes, they've entered this race/played in this match/been part of this competition. So find sources to satisfy the GNG for them then. Blue Square Thing (talk) 16:55, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Yes, it's not just your opinion: this is the consensus that was agreed upon when the sports-related notability criteria were initially created, and reaffirmed multiple times since. isaacl (talk) 18:27, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
And to confirm further, most editors that were involved in NSPORT recognize that it sets a presumption of notability in lieu of meeting the GNG that can be challenged if an editor does the necessary legwork to confirm that the GNG cannot otherwise be met (eg following the steps at WP:BEFORE, particularly scouring print sources for athletes prior to 2000). If you can reasonable show no sourcing exists beyond stats, then it is acceptable to seek AFD for that athlete. Most of the editors involved in NSPORT that I'm aware don't think it overrides the GNG. --MASEM (t) 18:34, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree. The guideline is, on the whole, a pragmatic approach that avoids spending time discussing every single article in depth to get consensus each time. So we have lots of stubs - so what? So we have a small proportion of sports articles on people who would likely be considered by most not significant enough to have an encyclopedia article - better than having a debate every time, and we have to consider the difficulty in finding coverage that undoubtedly exists on subjects who were competing more than 20 years ago. Our starting point should be to ask at what level in each sport do competitors become worthy of inclusion in a wide-reaching and comprehensive encyclopedia, not to ask how much content we can find about someone right now, which is all the GNG gives you. In that respect, while not perfect, WP:NSPORT is doing the right thing (although personally I would drop the nonsense about having to satisfy the GNG from it). --Michig (talk) 17:07, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
    The problem is not the existence of stubs. Stubs are fine, so long as they could eventually be expanded with existing source material. The problem is the existence of stubs which can never grow beyond a stub because no source material exists. If we have a person for whom all we can say is "They competed in this one event." and have zero biographical material, well, we're creating an article for nothing. We already have documented their having competed in that one event. We don't have to do it twice. We really only need an article if we can write a biography about them. If we can't write a biography, why have an article? --Jayron32 17:54, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
But who's to say that x stub can never be expanded? Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 18:08, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
"You can't prove sources DON'T exist" is a bullshit rationale and you know it. Demanding that people prove the non-existence of sources before allowing an article to be deleted is so stupid, I won't even insult you by explaining why. --Jayron32 01:26, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Typical non-answer and a great way to dodge the question, clearly demonstrating you can't actually answer the question. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 06:45, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
OK: Here is your answer: You cannot justify anything by demanding that those that oppose you prove the non-existence of proof. That's called Argument from ignorance and is a core informal fallacy because it is ultimately impossible to do. If you demand that unicorns exist because no one has ever produced evidence of a "lack of unicorns" in the world, that's baldly silly: You can't demand that we accept the existence of the unobservable merely because no one has produced a lack of observation of the unobservable. You simply can't demand that the world accept the existence of unicorns on the basis that no one has produced a "lack of unicorns" as a proof. It stretches credibility. In the same way, you can't demand that all articles be allowed to exist forever once created merely because no one has produced proof that sources don't exist. If THAT was the standard for deletion at Wikipedia, we couldn't delete anything because no one can actually produce proof of non-existence. That's why in LIFE (that is, in the entirety of human experience, including outside of Wikipedia) concepts like null hypothesis and Philosophical burden of proof exist. You can't just go around making random assertions and then demand people assume your assertions are true without any positive evidence! Because (and this apparently includes you) some people are unaware of the way this reality of human existence works, Wikipedia has a policies in place like WP:BURDEN which establishes that the burden of proof that content should exist at Wikipedia lies solely with the person who wishes to keep the content at Wikipedia. I had assumed you understood how basic logic and proof of existence of things worked. I will not assume that level of intelligence in you any further. --Jayron32 01:43, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
I didn't "demand" anything. I stopped reading your pointless rant at that point. Lugnuts Fire Walk with Me 08:36, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
You are seriously trying to pull the n00b arguments of WP:THEREMUSTBESOURCES/WP:ATA#CRYSTAL on us? Really? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:30, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Stubs are absolutely fine if they are properly sourced and tell our readers the key facts about a subject. There is no need for them to be expanded beyond that level to become worthwhile articles. --Michig (talk) 17:52, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Well, it is awfully inclusive. But one big advantage is that it sets an objective guideline, and this helps reduce arguments, probably. Like WP:BASEBALL/N... if you had one at-bat in a major league, you are in, period; and if not, you're not (except if you meet WP:BIO on other grounds, which is a different question). There's no back-and-forth of "Well, but he didn't play much... define 'much', where's your cutoff?", with a random decision based on who happens happens to be populating the AfD discussion for that particular page. This is a net positive for the project IMO. And course these articles don't harm anyone. UNLESS... one editor above says "The 'sourcing' tends to come from websites that indiscriminately aggregate statistics, often with a dubious record of accuracy". Well if that's true it's very different. Is it? That's the only question that excites me (For baseball players, the sourcing is usually Baseball-Reference.com, which is comprehensive and reliable. But I don't know about other sports.) Herostratus (talk) 17:43, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
    • The general consensus for discussions involving baseball and hockey players is that sites which are compendiums of stats are considered to be routine coverage, and thus not sources indicative of the player meeting the general notability guideline. (They can be fine sources for the actual stats, as is the case for the Baseball Reference site, but they aren't used to show that English Wikipedia's standards for having an article have been met.) isaacl (talk) 18:23, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Really? My understanding is that you have one at-bat in the National League in 1904, you get an article. Are you saying that the "general consensus for discussions involving baseball... players" is that at AfD many major league player articles are being deleted? Yeesh, that's a big change. Herostratus (talk) 19:47, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
A player with an at bat meets the baseball-specific notability guidelines, but as described in the lead section of WP:NSPORTS, as well as the FAQ, the article can still get deleted for not meeting the general notability guideline. To determine if this guideline is met, a reference in a stats site is not considered to be sufficient. I do believe there are some corresponding examples of baseball player articles that were deleted, and there have been examples of professional European hockey player articles that were deleted where an entry on a stats site was insufficient to keep the article. isaacl (talk) 20:15, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • A fully inclusive approach via NCRIC and others is the only way to achieve a proper, complete, NPOV encyclopedia. Why is it that not a single person who says "this is wrong" is prepared to offer a viable alternative solution? Let's take NCRIC for an example. One first-class appearance. Want to make it two? Three? Fifty? Fine. Offer that suggestion as an alternative. State NPOV reasons why. But doing so is more POV than any existing guideline.
How easy is it to invent similar "guidelines" for other sports? A single professional appearance? Soccer checkY, MLB checkY, NFL checkY, NHL checkY, NBA checkY... already done. No further need for discussion. Any other need will encourage violation of NPOV. This whole discussion is happening about ten years too late. Bobo. 18:36, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
We could just as easily set it at "played one complete season" checkY for team sports, and won an international championship checkY for individuals. Both would give us a much more realistic expectation of actually establishing notability through sources. Blueboar (talk) 18:55, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
How do you define "playing in one complete season"? What if a player misses one game? Or two? Or ten? Obviously it depends on how many games a season includes (MLB teams play 162 games in their regular season, whereas NFL teams play only 16), but your criteria are still arbitrary. The idea that winning an international competition is the only thing that makes a player notable is laughable; some of the greatest soccer players of all time never won an international competition, and some sports (read American football) don't even have an international competition to speak of, or at least the highest level of their sport is contained within one nation. – PeeJay 19:58, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
I was considering that, Peejay. What is a "complete season"? The example I use is Robin van Persie. The season before he signed for Manchester United was the first season in which he played all domestic league games, and therefore the first in which he could be fully judged as a player in the English league. He then played another season before SAF retired, in which he once again played every single league fixture. After that, boom. Anyway, that's just the sports geek in me talking! For "amateur" players, who may have made only a single appearance, we probably don't know what they did for the rest of the season. Did they stay with the team or did they go back to working in their day job in the local pie shop? Bobo. 20:21, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
It's extremely rare to see MLB players play all 162 games of a season anymore. And what if someone's hurt and misses one game? Or suspended? A player could conceivably play for 20 years, be one of the elites in his sport, and never play every single game in a given season, especially in baseball. That criteria doesn't really work. Smartyllama (talk) 17:51, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree For the sports that I'm familiar with (football and rugby league) the guideline is probably about right in terms of identifying which players are definitely notable. If anything, WP:NFOOTY is used more to prevent articles being created rather than to allow them, as it's easy to create a well-sourced article on footballers playing well below the fully-professional leagues and we have a constant stream of articles on semi-pro players being deleted at AfD (there is also a small group of editors who have persistently attempted to relax the guideline further to allow semi-professional non-internationals). There may well be some individual guidelines that are too lax, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Number 57 20:28, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
    This is true. I remember one of the first things I did when I started trying to be "inclusionist" with footballers was to add articles on footballers for Alloa Athletic, who at the time were playing in the third tier of the Scottish pyramid. I now know the reasons why this was a bit excessive - and I understand these reasons fully, though I didn't at the time and it seemed inconsistent.
That and no two sources appeared to agree on how to spell Michael Bolochoweckyj's name! Bobo. 20:35, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree For American sports, the ones I am most familiar with, the guidelines appear appropriate. Anyone playing in even one game in the National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, and National Hockey League are bound to have sources from at least two areas. The first is their college/junior careers. These sports, in the U.S. are well covered and therefore generate a lot of coverage. The second is that the teams are very well covered. Minor roster moves are covered in detail, including the drafts. For non-team sports, the events in question gain a lot of coverage. Boxing title fights, golf majors, the Ironman triathlon, etc. are all significantly covered. Would be nice if other professions got that coverage, but they don't. There is a reason kids, at least in the U.S., collect baseball cards with baseball statistics and not scientist cards that list scientific discoveries. Its because of how well followed baseball is and not the sciences or other areas (see [12]). RonSigPi (talk) 21:33, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
    But if the sources already exist, why do you need the guideline in the first place? Doesn't WP:GNG already allow us to create the article? If the only reason we have the secondary guideline is to repeat exactly what WP:GNG says, then it is redundant. If the secondary guideline allows us to include material which can't be sourced, it's a bad idea. Which is it? --Jayron32 01:29, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
    The secondary guideline is there to help editors evaluate whether it's likely that an athlete will meet GNG when sources in the article (if any) fail to demonstrate that he does, but sources not in the article (including hard-to-access offline sources and non-English sources, but also English online sources no one's gone to the trouble of adding) might show otherwise. As the OP noted, Wikipedia has countless stubs about sportspeople; some of them can never be expanded and some can, and NSPORT helps editors make a quick educated guess about whether a particular stub can (given enough time and effort to locate the sources) be expanded and shown to meet GNG. If that guess is "yes" more often than it should in a particular sport, then the sport-specific guidelines for that sport are too lenient; which is almost certainly the case for many sports, but the existence of thousands of poorly sourced stubs doesn't in itself prove that, and is indeed almost inevitable considering the vast number of articles to be written and the limited number of dedicated sports editors.
    The guess is always just a guess, and can be challenged at AfD if you think the real answer is "no" - though you'll need to be strong of heart to try that with a cricket article... Sideways713 (talk) 10:27, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
    People keep saying that as though if by mere repetition, they would make it true. You may WISH the secondary guidelines exist to "help editors evaluate whether it's likely", but in the decade or more history of Wikipedia using such guidelines, we have ample evidence of their real use to Wikipedians: To cite in deletion discussions to stiffle discussion of source text and retain otherwise unexpandable articles. That's the raison d'etre of all secondary notability criteria: to provide a loop-hole to allow articles to exist which could otherwise never contain any substantive, referenced prose. You can keep asserting that they only exist to "help editors evaluate" but the bulk of evidence from actual use of these guidelines is quite not that. --Jayron32 01:49, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
    There's no need to take such an adversarial tone, as if I or other NSPORT editors were in disagreement about that. On the contrary, many of us are just as frustrated with NSPORT being misused that way as you are; and yes, sometimes it's not just misapplied by AfD editors, but used as a tool by inclusionist sports editors to justify keeping their pet perma-stub. But that's not the only reason NSPORT exists; it has a legitimate purpose, and not all articles it helps keep are unexpandable.
    And articles that meet NSPORT do sometimes get deleted in real life for failing to meet GNG; less often nowadays, unfortunately, but it does still happen. This AfD is a recent case. Sideways713 (talk) 09:43, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
    If you're frustrated with the use of the guideline, the solution is to nuke the guideline. Leave people with the GNG to work with. That would solve the problem quite well. --Jayron32 15:13, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
    I'm frustrated with the current use of the guideline and with shallow "keep - meets NSPORT" !votes; but I'd be even more frustrated if AfDs for track and field athletes who do meet GNG suddenly spiked tenfold and I had to run around looking for sources to prove the keep separately every single time, which is what might happen if NSPORT was nuked. There are thousands of track stubs with minimal sourcing, not because the sources don't exist (true in some cases, but not most) or even because the sources are hard to locate (true in many cases, but not all) but because WikiProject Athletics doesn't have enough manpower. The people we do have have better things to do than run from AfD to AfD, or to be at loggerheads with each other about notability. I'm not entirely happy with NSPORT or the track-specific guideline (which is a mishmash of strict criteria, lenient criteria, strange criteria and some misplaced stuff no one's ever got around to removing); but they give us more time to concentrate on actually improving articles. Sideways713 (talk) 22:42, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree, and as to the above about what the standards should be, we already have that standard. "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list." If an athlete meets that standard, they are notable. If not, they are not. But a brief blurb just mentioning that they happened to appear is not significant coverage. Seraphimblade Talk to me 21:52, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree. Seraphimblade says it well, Alanscottwalker offers a possible compromise. When push comes to shove, I can't think of any topic notability guideline that works well and all of those I have seen acknowledge the pre-eminence of GNG. They are at best well-intentioned attempts by aficionados to carve out some sort of standard but they are used in effect to bludgeon through things that would never apparently meet GNG. - Sitush (talk) 23:28, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
The GNG is one of the worst standards ever adopted by this project. Any other sensible encyclopedia (as WP originally did) would take objective criteria much along the lines of the SNGs as their starting point rather than judging which subjects to include based solely on how much coverage they can find elsewhere. --Michig (talk) 18:00, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
So, where are you going to find source texts to add information to articles at Wikipedia, if the GNG wasn't there? The GNG only says that source text needs to exist before creating an article. Why is that so wrong? Are you really proposing we do away with that standard, and allow articles to be created on subjects even when no source text exists about that subject? --Jayron32 15:13, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
What you have just stated makes no sense. We have the policy WP:V which would prevent articles existing even when no source text exists, whatever guidelines we might have. We can often glean sufficient sourced information for a properly sourced short article from several reliable sources, none of which would be considered to contain 'significant coverage', but GNG demands that the coverage in individual sources is significant. Plenty of unencyclopedic topics have 'significant coverage', and at the end of the day all it gives is the ability to create more detailed articles. --Michig (talk) 17:38, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree Like RonSigPi, I haven't had any trouble finding material on Australian athletes. The abundance of articles reflects the abundance of material available. That in turn reflects the degree interest of our reader base. Per Seraphimblade, GNG is our standard, and that means athletes get bios. Our guidelines merely reflect our accumulated experience of GNG, which is wider and more encompassing. An teenage athlete once asked me why a teammate warranted a Wikipedia article. I told her that it was because her teammate was a Paralympic medalist, and hence was notable. She said she thought you had to be a national hero. I replied that a Paralympian is a national hero. Hawkeye7 (talk) 23:57, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment It's objective standard? No, it is not, it's a made-up guideline, and it thus can be re-made-up. The arguments based on V and on NPOV, are just irrelevant, when what we are talking about is Notability - what we cover in a separate article, a separate biography, in fact - a biography covers birth to death - but what some appear to keep arguing is we need no reliable sources for their biography, just vital statistics and sport statistics, and the made-up guideline. And then there is the argument that there are a ton of reliable sources on these people because they are popular, well fine, but obviously they pass the GNG, then. Come now, and compromise over perpetual stubs (move them to Draft, put them in a list), now, what have you got to lose. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 00:00, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree. There is no reason to change a standard that is working fairly well. We have a bright line of notability that makes sense and is easy to follow. Anything else and you get bogged down in perpetual afd debates about what quantifies as enough coverage. These arguments come up every so often by people who don't think athletes deserve the coverage they get... but thats rubish... more people follow sports than many other professions and will want comprehensive coverage of the major sports. Spanneraol (talk) 00:09, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
No one here is begrudging whatever coverage they get, but why is that apparently mountainous coverage not in these biographies. Alanscottwalker (talk) 00:16, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
And they can get that coverage from, in many cases, the single sports ref website that we cite. Simplistically, if we are aggregating information then we are sort of adding value to the reader experience but otherwise we are not. - Sitush (talk) 00:18, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
So we are saying that people who are looking to research their favorite team should go somewhere else to find information about the players who arent covered here? We should offer complete coverage of major sports leagues as we do. And Yes many of the bios can be better with more information in them... but that isnt any reason to change the guidelines... diligent editors are constantly improving the stub articles to make them better and more informative...deleting the stubs doesnt help them do that. Spanneraol (talk) 00:32, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Like I say, if the article has been uninformative for perhaps 6 months, send it to Draft. And send new ones (after a date certain) to draft immediately.Alanscottwalker (talk) 00:38, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Why? People are more likely to find and improve an article if it is in main space than if it is hidden on some draft page somewhere. Why the arbitrary timeline to improve an article? Spanneraol (talk) 00:42, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Because they are not getting improved, obviously. As for finding them anyone who wants to know and write about them will find them in Draft space. Alanscottwalker (talk) 00:47, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
We are not the article quality police.... and no it is much harder to find stuff in draft space. Spanneraol (talk) 00:49, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Police? What? We are not here to not write actual encyclopedic biographies. And I'll add, that those articles that basically just regurgitate that single sports stat site, does make Wikipedia terrible in the eyes of readers. The least one can do is put all those sources about their life you say exist in a further reading section, so the reader might actually learn something. Alanscottwalker (talk) 00:55, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Did you run some survey that led you to understand that to be the case or is it your personal opinion? You are essentially saying articles should be deleted if they don't measure up to your personal standard of what a good article should be. Thats contrary to the mission of wikipedia. Spanneraol (talk) 16:04, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
No. Per Wikipedia policy as in WP:PAGEDECIDE, I am suggesting putting these non-articles in Lists and moving them to Draft pages. The only thing contrary to the mission of Wikipedia is the continued refusal, or inability to substantiate that these subjects have the sources. As for the rest, it takes no survey to know an article that rips off another website by just regurgitating its contents is bad. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:39, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Part of the problem is that many editors think that a "presumption" of notability means something actually is notable. Our SNGs could clarify this by using "likelihood" instead of "presumption". It is true that the more an athlete has done in his/her sport, the more likely it is that they will meet our GNG. Blueboar (talk) 00:31, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
    • The first sentence of the sports-specific notability guideline is the following: This guideline is used to help evaluate whether or not a sports person or sports league/organization (amateur or professional) is likely to meet the general notability guideline, and thus merit an article in Wikipedia. The third sentence uses "likely" again: If the article does meet the criteria set forth below, then it is likely that sufficient sources exist to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article. The third paragraph starts as follows: Please note that the failure to meet these criteria does not mean an article must be deleted; conversely, the meeting of any of these criteria does not mean that an article must be kept. I'm not sure how many more times this can be emphasized in the lead section of the guideline. isaacl (talk) 00:43, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Too often, the only part of a SNG that our fellow actually bother to read is the bullet pointed list of things that create a "presumption" of notability. They (mistakenly) think meeting one of these criteria makes the subject/topic notable... when all meeting the criteria indicates is that the subject/topic is likely to be notable (i.e. likely to pass GNG). Blueboar (talk) 00:57, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
I appreciate that many editors don't bother reading the guidelines they quote, but closers of AfD discussions really must read the guidelines referenced within the discussions, otherwise, they are overriding the consensus that created the guidelines. Short of inserting the sentences I quoted above into every subsection, I don't know what more to do to publicize the underlying context of the sports-specific guidelines. I wrote the FAQ, with references to the original discussion that created WP:NSPORTS, to make its relationship to the general notability guideline crystal clear. isaacl (talk) 01:10, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
A topic is generally considered to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. While the exisatence of such sources is possible, and frequently easy, to prove, the lack of them is impssible - especially given the fact that these sources need not be in English, on the internet, or freely accessable to the general public. In stead, we have specific guidelines which tend to indicate when topics are likely to be notable. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 03:46, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
The burden can't be on proving a negative. At some point, people who create the article, or argue to retain it, need to actually come up with references, not just handwave that they've got to be out there somewhere or another. Seraphimblade Talk to me 07:43, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Agree... But that begs the question: when do we reach "at some point"? A month? A year? Blueboar (talk) 10:05, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
@Blueboar: Well, to me, especially for an area where the vast majority of the articles will be BLPs, that standard is analogous to WP:BEFORE. Before you create the article, ensure that you have found sufficient source material to sustain a full article, not just a blurb or mention that would be sufficient to stave off BLPPROD. If you failed to, the article will be deleted, but if and when you turn up those sources, you can recreate it from them. Seraphimblade Talk to me 15:29, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
The majority of the articles that are actually stubs are not BLPs because they deal with athletes from the 19th century or early 20th century for which online sources are difficult if not impossible to find. Current living internet-era athletes in major sports are fairly easy to source and reference. The guidelines are meant to account for these people for whom sources are only available in newspaper microfiche at libraries. Spanneraol (talk) 16:02, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Well, then, same standard, really. Once you go to the library, read the microfiches, and determine that the source material really does exist, you can create the article, citing those sources. But just "Well I think it's at a library...on something...somewhere!" doesn't do. Create the article once you actually have the references in hand, not just with a wave of a hand that they must be out there somewhere. Seraphimblade Talk to me 18:42, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree that our standards for athletes' notability are far too lax and allow far too much cruft into the project. Take, for example, this guy: an 18-year-old kid who kicks around a football for a living. Essentially no in-depth coverage exists, but he's "presumed notable" per WP:NFOOTY, which apparently trumps WP:BASIC. (Certainly it does so at every relevant AfD I've witnessed.) By contrast, none of the faculty at the local university have articles, because WP:PROF is quite stringent, and rightly so. Nevertheless, these are people who've put in time and effort in obtaining doctorates, writing publications and teaching students. Similarly, none of the physicians at the local hospital is considered notable, although these individuals have studied medicine and are caring for patients every day. Again, I don't object, but what I do find objectionable, indeed downright bizarre, is that out of the economist, the oncologist and the basically random adolescent, it's the last we presume notable.
  • In terms of what should be done, I agree it's a more complicated problem now than it was ten years ago, but I think the focus should certainly be on having articles that comply with WP:BASIC: "people are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources". Presumption of notability should be granted for significant coverage, not simply participation and routine mention. - Biruitorul Talk 16:20, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
  • What's actually being proposed here? One note to keep in mind: how much coverage is out there that isn't online or in English. I've skimmed this thread and seen people challenge the notability of a Romanian and a Polish athlete. Has anyone checked the local papers where they come from? – Muboshgu (talk) 17:33, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
    • I don't think that's such a salient issue for contemporary athletes - in this day and age, newspapers if anything have more of an online than a print presence, and we have editors who know the major European languages. The heart of the problem lies with the too-permissive nature of WP:ATHLETE, which presumes notability for sub-stubs even in the absence of in-depth coverage. - Biruitorul Talk 19:05, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
      • I don't think the presumption is the problem as much as editor's application of it at AfD. In some cases, old articles that have shown no sign of being able to satisfy GNG are deleted despite meeting ATHLETE, but too often editors keep articles based on ATHLETE alone. Jogurney (talk) 19:11, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
        • While I agree the problem is the editor's application, I don't think the old article example is valid. The policy is good when a subject is relatively old. The older a subject is (or for an athlete the older their prime sporting years), the harder it is to actually find sources. While certainly this applies to pre-Internet players, I think that can go back as few as five years as many sources are not online anymore. Let's face it, most editors are sitting at their computer and doing online research. No one is going through hard newspapers finding sources. However, based on various factors, such as attendance and general understanding of newspaper, radio, etc. it can be viewed that era would have been covered - its just difficult and a lot to ask a volunteer website to go check those. Its a presumption the community that has knowledge on the topic has created and it should be respected. To be more honest, we have to make a judgement. Who can say that a 1900 Football League player was notable? None of us were alive then and no one is actually checking the sources. Its an unreasonable proposition to force the keep position people to find sources. If that is the case, then we might as well just say this is a project from 1997 on. Another time presumptions are good are foreign language. How many editors we have that know both English and Thai, are knowledgeable on the Thai League T1, and are in Thailand to access and evaluate sources (reminder - not everything is on the Internet even today). I assume very few if any. We have to make judgment calls and the sports projects (and other projects) are in the best position to make those calls. While I was a commenter, I think this whole idea was well reasoned by a number of editors in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Andy Ainscow. I think the solution is to have admins decide debates using critical thinking. Its not a vote, so a bunch of "Keep - meets WP:NFOOTY" should be discounted. For articles that are likely to have sources found (e.g., a 2017 National Football League player), make editors find sources since they should be able to be found. For a 1930s era racer at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, let's keep since no one is going to go though 80 year old French newspapers, but we know generally how well covered the race and its competitors were. Admins should use sound judgment, I think that solves about 95% of the problems. RonSigPi (talk) 22:55, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

One thing that leave me cold in these discussions is that nobody is making the case "Having these articles degrades the reader's experience, and/or is a burden on our system not warranted by the article's small value, because _________". Well what goes in the blank? If you don't have something exciting to put in the blank, you can count me off the boat, and a lot of other editors too: you are not going to get anywhere.

I'll tell you what doesn't go in the blank: "It it too permissive" or "these are not notable people" or "it doesn't meet our notability rules which were handed down to Moses on Mount Ararat" or "our printing costs are too high" or "it annoys me to see these articles" or "too many of these come up if I use the Random Article function" or "it is overloading the servers with data" or "these articles have small value" (true, but what I want to know is net value), and stuff of that nature

You know what I haven't seen? I haven't seen anybody say "I don't come here anymore, instead I use Britannica or just Google, because there are too many articles here about cyclists, and this degrades my ability to use the Wikipedia".

Now, there are arguments against having articles on unnotable subjects, and they mostly have to do with our own internal dynamics, and the one good argument that's raised for all obscure articles (not just athletes) is that is that there some overhead cost to any article -- which basically means, it has to be watchlisted or checked in the Recent Changes feed.

I wouldn't worry about that too much myself. Obscure athletes are pretty popular, relative to all obscure subjects. People like sports! Just as some people like to watch over maintain articles on lichen species, Parliamentary elections of the 17th century, and towns in Ecuador, so there are people who like to watch over articles on Portuguese cyclists. This enthusiasm is evidenced, in part, by the very existence of the articles.

And if you take those articles away, those editors are not necessarily going to be like "OK, they've cleared out most of Category:Portuguese cyclists, guess I'll focus on Category:South Carolina State Senators instead". It doesn't necessarily work like that.

On that score, there're a lot of subjects before athletes where I'd worry that nobody is watching them. I just found vandalism from 2014 in a (non-athlete) article. Is that happening a lot with athlete articles in particular? Nobody in the discussion above has claimed that it is. Is it?

Another good argument could be "no one -- quite literally, virtually no person -- is interested in this class of articles, as shown by the page views which are consistently at or near zero in the my sample of these kinds of articles, so the value is not just small but is zero". Of course, that's only a good argument if it is true. Is it?

In all the above discussion, I have seen one, and really only one, good argument against these articles: that they are frequently inaccurate -- the statistics and other data in them are wrong, to an unacceptable level of frequency. However, this was presented as an offhand aside and I suspect it is just an uninformed opinion. It if was true, then we would have a problem. Is it?

Go get some data, or even anecdotes, showing some of these things to be true. Absent that, you haven't convinced me that it is a problem. Herostratus (talk) 10:31, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Any stub has a higher chance of being if not inaccurate then at least misleading, because a stub will likely be based on a single source or a very small number of sources. Sources, even good reliable sources, are wrong sometimes, omit important information or concentrate on only one aspect of the subject (potentially creating WP:UNDUE or WP:BALASP problems); which is a problem with only one cure, namely introducing more sources. This is of course true for any stub, not just athlete stubs; but it does make it understandable that some people aren't happy to see so many athlete stubs, particularly given that many of them are BLPs.
A very concrete case of athlete articles being inaccurate unacceptably often was the recent Sander.v.Ginkel debacle, which led to the mass deletion of thousands of athlete BLPs created by Sander.v.Ginkel. The problem there was caused by a bad editor, not by too lenient sport-specific notability guidelines, but the stubby nature of the articles was still a factor; articles that had been fleshed out by editors other than Sander were less likely to have serious problems, though they were still included in the cleanup effort. Sideways713 (talk) 11:21, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
We've had that argument before: it's the fiction purges of the late 2000s. --Izno (talk) 12:39, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
OK, but "argument made previously" is not the same as "wrong argument"; so that's not really a refutation. @User:Sideways713, OK, fair point. But a lot of the material in these articles, I think, is "She finished third in the 1999 such-and-such race with a time of 27:13" and so forth. Well, its either true or isn't; its a statement of objective measurable fact. So if we have a site that is regularly giving times of 27:13 when the actual time was 26:43, then we need to blacklist that site. Most sites giving statistics are probably getting them from the official source, or are the official source, I would suppose. Although granted typos occur, yes.
However, most statements in the encyclopedia have a single source (if any). And multiple refs don't necessarily help that much, because errors replicate. I get that with birthates sometimes: eight sources that have it wrong, because they're copying from the same flawed source or each other. So I dunno. Possibly the single-source angle is an argument against a lot of lower-level articles, from politicians to villages to lichen species. Whether articles on athletes in particular are a problem on this account I don't know. Herostratus (talk) 13:12, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
"She finished third in the 1999 such-and-such race with a time of 27:13" is a sentence not an article, and for an Article the pedia needs multiple qualified RS. Moreover, NPOV would suggest that most statements in the Pedia have multiple reliable sources, and common sense would seem to back-up that the tons of innocuous statements like "Paris is the capital of France" have multiple reliable sources, and for statements 'of note' per NPOV/OR/BLP, multiple sources would exist, as we rely on noted received knowledge. Sure, only one source is cited but it has 'weight' because of the multiple other sources that reconfirm it, contextualize it, and qualify it. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:45, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
Beyond what Alanscottwalker said, there's a difference between statements that have only one source and whole articles that have only one source. Bad sources, typos and the like can cause a single statement in any article to be wrong; but if that single statement is the entire article, the consequences are more dramatic. For example, the article may be named incorrectly; obviously if there's a typo/mistake in the source, but also if the source uses a name that isn't the WP:COMMONNAME. With multiple sources it's usually easy to tell what the COMMONNAME is, or at least discard very uncommon names as definitely not being the COMMONNAME.
An even worse problem would be a poorly supported controversial statement in a BLP.
Often, though, the problem with an article that only has one source isn't so much what is in the article as what is not in the article. Say:
  • The source correctly notes she finished third in such-and-such race in 1999, but doesn't note that she won the same race in 2001, so that more noteworthy fact won't be mentioned in the article.
  • The source, and consequently the article, concentrates on her running career and doesn't mention that she's equally or more notable as a coach, a triathlete, a local politician, etc.
  • The source omits important controversies surrounding the athlete.
In these cases what's in the stub is perfectly true, yet still gives the reader a misleading overview of the topic. This kind of thing can happen very easily with athletes, maybe more easily than with non-athletes, because databases (commonly used as the single source in athlete stubs) sometimes give an incomplete view of a subject's athletic career and almost always give an incomplete view of their life as a whole. But the other reason why it may be a bigger issue with athletes is simply that there are so many of them. Sideways713 (talk) 15:53, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Just as a general comment for brainstorming: WP:N does not require a standalone article should the GNG be met; WP:N only requires that the presumption that the GNG can be met to support a stand-alone article. What this means in another way is that we are not required to include every athlete that possibly may meet the GNG. Wikiprojects are allowed to specify SNGs purposely more stricter than the GNG if they believe that will improve their project's coverage. (As an example, over at the video games project, we developed what is now WP:NOT#GAMEGUIDE to avoid extensive strategy guide material, most which can meet the GNG but fails NOT. I will point out that WP:NOT suggests we are not simply a "Who's Who" type work, so while having the ability to document every athlete that might have ever played doesn't mean that is a feature we want. That said, finding a bar here that is above the GNG and still reasonably inclusive rather than deletionist is not a simple task at all.
    With that in mind, one of the things I do find about the current NSPORT that I've pointed out in the past is that they make presumptions on importance that while can be documented, really beg the question of whether they meet the GNG. A common one is for any professional NFL player that at least steps onto the field once. The argument, fairly enough, is that for someone to be pro NFL, they had to have had a college football career, and that college career can be documented. However, to some extent, that type of coverage could be considered rote or routine for most college players; there's definitely a few that quickly bubble to the top but with so many teams, the only type of coverage that gets every single players starts to become more localized (to the school), and more on stats than actual "content". In other words, if we took a stub for an NFL player than had an average college career, and only one game appearance before retiring, and fill out the article with their college career, we're still looking at a very weak article, content-wise, even if it is meeting WP:V, one that will likely never reach a GA or FA (which should be an ultimate goal for every article). Making this NSPORT presumption far too inclusive. Not all of NSPORT is like that, but I really do think there needs to be a re-evaluation that is going to avoid unexpandable permastubs that even if fully sourced will go nowhere.
    I don't think ditching NSPORT is right as there's far too many issues with print-only sources that the presumption of notability is needed to allow articles to expand, but there does need tightening of the loosest inclusion metrics for players. --MASEM (t) 18:14, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
    • Perhaps a better place to start is expanding on the meaning of "significant coverage" in English Wikipedia's basic criteria for the notability of persons: the independent, non-promotional, non-routine, reliable secondary coverage of the subject should be sufficiently detailed that a reasonably complete overview of the person's life can be written. A reasonably complete overview includes major life events, accomplishments, and other significant influences spanning most of the person's lifetime. isaacl (talk) 18:40, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
      • That's opening a huge can of worms - such a change could be used to drive massive deletions, not just of sportspersons, and not just of minimal content stubs - "major life events, accomplishments, and other significant influences spanning most of the person's lifetime" means that the majority of biographies, even of major figures and featured articles, could be deleted because we don't have references of where the person went to school, or what they did in retirement. For example - see Robert Millar - the article of this notoriously private person contains nothing of his life post 1998. Does that mean it should be deleted? Because by strict application of this rule, it would be liable for deletion.Nigel Ish (talk) 19:06, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
        • A better line, but this would require a lot of thought, is the idea of avoiding people that are doing their profession in a routine manner, while while may be very visible to the world via sources, is just not necessarily an encyclopedic topic. This for NSPORTS would require recognizing that every professional player is not necessarily unique. Furthermore, this at least sets an apples-to-apples comparison between players within the same sport, or if outside NSPORTS, within the same profession (for example, not all CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are necessarily notable, some are just doing their job to keep their business running). This needs a lot more thought before even going that way, but it is a possibility. --MASEM (t) 19:11, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
          • There appears to be a presumption in this discussion that a large proportion of articles on sportspeople MUST be deleted and that Wikipedia should have much less coverage of sport. Some people here are proposing much stricter application of GNG than would be applied to say 10th century royalty or to Politicians. This risks increasing systemic bias - by removing coverage of older (pre-internet) sportspersons, participants in less fashionable sports, participants in non-English speaking nations or of sportswomen, all of whom may suffer from any attempt to artificially ratchet up standards for sportspersons.Nigel Ish (talk) 19:31, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
            • I'm not making any presumptions either way; I rather agree that sports figures and other persons should be treated in the same manner, as much as is feasible, which is why I think it is better to look at potential changes to Wikipedia's standards for inclusion for persons. I'm just exploring what I think the crux of the issue is: some editors want to use a standard for inclusion that requires sufficient source material to make a reasonable non-stub article. I apologize for not making it clear that my suggestion was just a starting point for discussion. I toyed with language to say that articles must cover the portion of the persons' lives during which they were engaging in the activities that make them notable, but I settled on what I wrote above as a compromise. The key problem of course is how to determine what makes a reasonable non-stub. (I know it will be hard to reach any agreement as Wikipedia's version of consensus has structural issues, including an inability to scale up, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.) isaacl (talk) 00:49, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree - Our notability criteria are here to make sure that everything on Wikipedia is able to be verifiable and neutral. With NSPORTS and such, we are setting the bar for what we can verify and write in a neutral manner. Without this criteria, we are excluding certain people without any noticeable benefit. Thus, getting rid of this criteria will be a detriment to the encyclopedia. RileyBugzYell at me | Edits 20:09, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree - We should seek to establish a high quality of articles on all athletes, but not having a great abundance of material on an athlete should not preclude us from including that person. Every major competition, MLB team &c. should be able to blue-link to players involved, since even so-called "non-notable" athletes often "get around." Editosaurus (talk) 03:57, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree, I've long believed that NSPORTS allows us to keep articles on living persons that we would not otherwise have due to a paucity of reliable sources. This has led to a situation where there are a lot of low-quality directory style entries that are not adequately maintained and create an enormous risk of serious BLP violation. I'd be in favour of wholesale repealing it and moving back to the standard that substantial non-routine coverage in reliable sources is required for sportsperson biographies. Lankiveil (speak to me) 04:56, 24 April 2017 (UTC).
    • As discussed in the Wikipedia:Notability (sports)/FAQ, that is the standard. The sports-specific guidelines provide rules of thumb when this standard is expected to be met, but they do not replace the general notability guideline. Any AfD closers ignoring this portion of the sports-specific guidelines are substituting their own opinion for the consensus agreement that established the guidelines. isaacl (talk) 05:08, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
      • I'm fine with that being the intent, but that's not what is happening on the ground at AFD. My observation from closing and participating in many, many, many discussions is that "Passes WP:NSPORTS" or similar is being used as a substitute for actually locating sources and presenting them for discussion, on the grounds that "well, they should be there". Potentially one could tweak the guideline to emphasise that it should not be used as a substitute for finding good references. I'd also suggest that for many more obscure sports, merely competing at the top level is probably not a good indicator of notability in the same way that it is for major sports. Lankiveil (speak to me) 01:34, 26 April 2017 (UTC).
        • I have argued for improved wording (in particular the second sentence and the nutshell summary), but to be honest, if closers are not reading the instructions that are right there in the first sentence and the third paragraph of the lead section, plus the FAQ which puts the context of the guidelines front and centre, tweaking the wording isn't going to help. It's an odd position where there is really agreement between the editors who have crafted the guidelines (*) and those who are concerned that the guidelines are not being applied in accordance with the general notability guideline, but closers are not following suit.
        • (*) For the sports that have been discussed on the talk page in the past few years; others can benefit from further review. isaacl (talk) 01:54, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree - Someone who competed at the highest level of a major sport is notable. These events receive significant coverage, both for them and the participants, and, as others have pointed out, it's useful to bluelink the participants. Smartyllama (talk) 18:16, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
    • The general standard for a subject having an article in English Wikipedia is not based on attaining achievements, but by receiving significant, independent, non-routine, non-promotional secondary coverage from reliable sources. Accordingly there is no consensus that those who compete at the highest level of a sport are inherently notable. isaacl (talk) 19:23, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
      • And therein lies the problem - a perfectly sensible real world definition of notability dismissed based on a guideline (WP:GNG) that is (generally) reasonable when applied to argue that a subject is notable, but absymal when used to argue that they are not. --Michig (talk) 19:32, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
        • The issue is that consensus doesn't scale upwards. As long as the English Wikipedia editing community tries to follow its version of consensus (which is really a straw poll followed by people trying to convince each other to change their stated view), and doesn't / can't take into account expert opinion (*), it cannot agree upon what achievements should be used to determine if a subject should have an article. Instead, it tries to evaluate the question one step removed: are there adequate sources to indicate if a subject should have an article?
        • (*) There are pros and cons to this; a pro is that English Wikipedia can more easily expand into areas not covered by other encyclopedias. A con is that editor opinions end up weighted roughly evenly, regardless of their level of familiarity with the topic in question. This particular con plus the fact that (real-world) consensus only works when the interested parties are strongly aligned in their goals are huge barriers in trying to establish an achievement-based standard for having an article on a subject. isaacl (talk) 20:43, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
        • @Michig: It is a very good point that we need to use common sense, and I totally support the idea that top sportspeople - ones who represent the nation at top events - are notable. But the problem is that there is no agreement on what is a top event: for someone like me, it is just the Olympics, but for some fans of cycling, apparently it is 10-20 events per year, and that seems excessively inclusive. Hence the default to GNG makes sense. If there is coverage, we are good. But if there is nothing but a stat site saying that someone competed in event X, didn't win any prize, just competed... I don't see what makes them notable. Again: I am fine agreeing to a GNG/BIO exception for Olympic participants and winners of several other major competitions, but run-of-the-mill participants of events who did not win any medals or such... why should they get special treatment? What makes them more notable than let's say a random average academic, who is also listed on an academic stat(citation) site? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 07:03, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
          • In most sports, there are far more major events than the Olympics, and taking part in those events represents a competitor getting way beyond 'run-of-the-mill', e.g. in cycling there are world championships and other international track events, and on the roads major tours - your average club competitor won't get anywhere near these events. For some sports the guidelines are very inclusive (e.g. someone who played one first class cricket match), others quite the opposite. What a lot of people don't appreciate is that having a guideline for notability doesn't mean every subject that satisfies it has to have an article - if we have 100 minimal articles about people who played in one match for Glamorgan they can all be covered in one list article - if this isn't happening that's a fault of editors, not the guideline. This whole discussion is a bit bit pointless since there is no proposal for anything specific to be changed. If someone feels any part of the guideline is pitched at the wrong level of inclusivity they should make a specific proposal of how to change the guidelines. To answer your other point, as someone who used to be a random average academic, they don't tend to get covered because nobody is generally interested in them; Any that achieve something out of the ordinary and become top-level in their field will likely get articles, just like sportspeople who do that get articles. --Michig (talk) 07:26, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
            • Wikipedia:Notability (sports) and the general notability guideline do in fact specify standards for having an article on a subject. So in the context of this discussion, the issue is what standards should be required for a sports figure to have a standalone article. I think everyone agrees a lower standard is required to be mentioned in another article. isaacl (talk) 15:46, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
              • No, I disagree. There is no proposal here. If you read WP:N, it is quite clear, despite what a lot of editors seem to believe, that whether or not a subject is considered notable, and whether or not they should have a standalone article are separate considerations. After spelling out the notability criteria it states "This is not a guarantee that a topic will necessarily be handled as a separate, stand-alone page. Editors may use their discretion to merge or group two or more related topics into a single article." Given the editor who started this discussion is trying to get stub-level articles on world-class athletes deleted to try to prove a point, it appears that some people think we should either have a detailed article on sportspeople or should have no mention of them at all, which is ridiculous. If someone were to come up with a proposal on how to incorporate minimal articles on SNG-satisfying subjects in wider articles that would at least be constructive. The SNG tells us whether someone is likely to be notable, not necessarily whether they should have a standalone article. Maybe if more people understood that they would see that NSPORT isn't really the problem. --Michig (talk) 16:18, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
                • I didn't say anything about there being a proposal. I referred specifically to the general notability guideline, and not the notability page in general. However, the first sentence in Wikipedia:Notability is On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article. The sentence saying that a topic will not necessarily have a standalone article doesn't negate the previous paragraph, which starts A topic is presumed to merit an article. It just means even if a topic meets the standards for having a standalone article, there doesn't have to be a standalone article if editorially the content would better fit into another article. Also note the discussions that resulted the sports-specific notability guidelines specifically decided to create criteria for the creation of standalone articles. In my comments, I usually refer explicitly to "standards for having an article", or a similar phrase, to avoid any confusion regarding what aspect is being discussed. isaacl (talk) 17:44, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree, god, yes. I have been slogging through the orphan backlog at Category:Orphaned articles from February 2009 (over 17,000 articles) and you see so many awful sub-stubs for random sportspeople who have played one single game of cricket or football or whatever other sport at a top-tier level and that is the sum total of their "notable" lifetime achievement, and yet because of WP:NSPORT, people insist that we maintain an article on them.
In almost all of the cases I've seen of these people, there is simply no WP:RS coverage of them that rises above the brutally routine sports stat collections: "Dude McDude of Some Second-Tier Team 1 game 0 points 0 whatevers 0 other important metric". No in-depth commentary, no discussion of their function in the game, not even trivial personal history. Nothing. Hell, I'd love to see an article that mentioned why the guy only played one game, but you don't even get that. We are not an indiscriminate collection of stats, and yet in many cases NSPORT forces us to appear that way.
As Masem noted above, "people that are doing their profession in a routine manner, while while may be very visible to the world via sources, is just not necessarily an encyclopedic topic." In many cases these people aren't even visible to sources except stat-farms. If there is something non-routine (ie, notable) about these people, it should be in the articles, but otherwise, there is no point to maintaining thousands of articles about people who did a sport once in a manner so dull as to be recorded as "1 game 0 points 0 whatevers". ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:39, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment A bunch of commenters seem to be missing the point that NSPORT and simiar guidelines are all meant to be subordinate to GNG. If there aren't enough sources to write a decent article, then the article shouldn't exist. The fact that a bunch of AFD commenters and a lot of article-creators also miss this point isn't a failure of the policy; it's a failure of the individual editors, and editors who repeatedly fail in this manner should be politely notified of the policy first, cautioned second, and (if both of those fail) sanctioned. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:37, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Incorrect. As WP:N spells out: "A topic is presumed to merit an article if it meets either the general notability guideline, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific guideline". WP:N, GNG, etc. are guidelines (rules of thumb), not policies - big difference. You can often have sufficient sourced information without finding anything constituting significant coverage, which is where GNG falls down. --Michig (talk) 09:58, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
Okay, I was using "policy" in the figurative sense; if we were nitpicking about what are "policies" and what are "guidelines" then this whole thread, which is about guidelines, would be off-topic per the name of this page (which I also take as figurative). Also, you appear to be right to quote WP:N that way, but that wording is clearly in error, as it incorrectly assumes that all the subject-specific guidelines include explicit "significant coverage" requirements. Wikipedia doesn't contain standalone articles on topics for which enough sources don't exist to write a decent standalone article. This fact is so intuitive that it shouldn't need to be explicitly codified in any PAG, but it is in the "significant coverage" clause of GNG. All the other notability guidelines are subordinate to that in that if a topic has not received significant coverage, and the only way we could write a decent article is by engaging in OR, the topic doesn't merit a standalone article. I really think we should be discussing either (a) the removal the "either/or" part of WP:N, if it is being interpreted as allowing articles on non-notable topics, or (b) the addition a "significant coverage" clause to NSPORT and whatever other guidelines currently lack it. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:47, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
No, right at the top of the page it states this page is for discussion of policies and guidelines, but there's a big difference between the two. The wording on WP:N is not in error, and the subject-specific guidelines do not all insist on "significant coverage". You can have enough sources to write a well-enough sourced short article without having anything that strictly constitutes "significant coverage" - short articles just like you would find in any other encyclopedia. --Michig (talk) 13:11, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
The key word of WP:N is "presumed". We allow the standalone from a subject-specific guideline, presuming the criteria in that guideline are chosen appropriately, that in the future and with time and effort, a detailed article with significant coverage (which we do consider notable now, no presumption necessary) can be obtained. The presumption that allows for a standalone article can be challenged by demonstrating that a proper search of sources, as outlined at WP:BEFORE, brings forth no new sources or a lack of information that can bring the article up to meet significant coverage. That's why the subject-specific criteria are selected in a manner that assures few false positives (articles that can't be expands). --MASEM (t) 13:23, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
You keep stating that the SNGs are just indicators that GNG can be met, but it isn't true. We had SNGs before anyone came up with the GNG. And no, satisfying the GNG is not a guarantee of notability. We really need to get away from this doctrinaire GNG-obsession because it simply doesn't make sense. --Michig (talk) 13:59, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
WP:NSPORT was created on 29 August 2007. WP:N was created at least as early as 19 May 2005, and while it has undergone several moves and renames and changes of wording, the earliest expression of what we now call the GNG is found on 20 November 2006 when it was merged into WP:N by User:Uncle G who had been working it up in his userspace before that. Called "Primary Notability Criterion" it is essentially (with some minor wording changes) nearly identical to what we are using now. So you seem to be mistaken that NSPORT predates the GNG. The GNG had existed for 10 months before NSPORT did. Also, 11 years of continuous acceptance as a guiding principle on the minimum standards for a stand-alone article is a pretty good sign of consensus. --Jayron32 14:19, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
I didn't say NSPORT predated the GNG, and WP:N has for as long as I can remember stated that subjects are presumed notable if they satisfy either the GNG or one of the SNGs. WP:N is the guiding principle, not GNG. --Michig (talk) 14:27, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Notability/RFC:compromise, an RFC in 2008 that established the relationship between the GNG and SNG. --MASEM (t) 14:31, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
And multiple discussions since with differing outcomes, as this old chestnut seems to get discussed about every 6 months. --Michig (talk) 14:37, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
Except it still remains valid, there's a reason we use the word "presumed" in both GNG and the SNGs, and link that to Rebuttal presumption. I am pretty confident that while I don't see eye-to-eye with many of the drafters of the NSPORTS often, that we have been in agreement that if you can satisfactorily prove there are not enough sources or significant to expand an article beyond a stub (that otherwise meets NSPORTS) to meet WP:N in general, then deletion is an acceptable route; it's just that with sports, satisfactorily proving that requires a great deal of effort for those seeking deletion (print source exhaustion for example). --MASEM (t) 15:47, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
Right, but the problem is that WP:NSPORTS/FAQ is not consistent with the general notability guideline: "The topic-specific notability guidelines described on this page do not replace the general notability guideline. They are intended only to stop an article from being quickly deleted when there is very strong reason to believe that significant, independent, non-routine, non-promotional secondary coverage from reliable sources are available, given sufficient time to locate them." However, it seems evident that in practice this is not actually observed: see for example this deletion discussion where there does not seem to be any effort to determine whether the subject passes the GNG, and instead going down the WP:NCYC checklist. Furthermore, to make matters worse, WP:NSPORT is internally inconsistent, since it also says "The article must provide reliable sources showing that the subject meets the general notability guideline or the sport specific criteria set forth below." This is consistent with the guidance put forth at the GNG, and it seems like it captures the way NSPORT is applied in practice, but defenders of the permissiveness of NSPORT seem fond of pointing out whenever asked that meeting NSPORT implies that the subject also meets GNG, which is false for the majority of articles about participants in minor sporting events. Sławomir Biały (talk) 10:42, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
I suspect the topic-specific guidelines were all written with the assumption that Wikipedians understood that topics need to have had significant coverage to merit standalone articles. In other words, they were written with the same assumption I made when I wrote my comment above, but WP:N incorrectly assumes that they were written with the assumption that they could act as a substitute for GNG. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:47, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
Michig, that is only partially true. There's actually three pieces of guidelines involved: the core concept of WP:N that we can flesh out a topic in detail with secondary sourcing, the GNG that established a presumption of notability based on at least some secondary sources existing, and the subject-specific notability guidelines that provide an alternate means of presumption (from the GNG) that WP:N can eventually be met, using criteria that generally assure secondary sources can be found for a topic, which in turn is generally based on reaching some level of achievement of merit. So to this end, the GNG and the SNGs are both subsidary to the core WP:N principle (that is, the SNG is an equal but alternate path of presumed notability), but in the long run, we do expect topics much meet WP:N with demonstration of the secondary sources. In all fairness, with something like NSPORT, this means that editors wishing to delete do need to do the footwork of exhausting to a reasonably good degree the available pool of resources (including print versions!) to show no sourcing exists, making it a difficult barrier to delete and avoids petty deletions. And in my past interactions with most editors behind NSPORT, they fully understand and accept this in drafting the NSPORT guidelines. What I think is the newer challenge that is being recognized is that most of those sources that NSPORT anticipates people will find when they actually search run afoul of being routine coverage for sports; for example, one criteria is for anyone that has played in (that is, actually on the field at some point, not just bench warming) a professional league game is presumed notable, the argument having been that one does not simply get into the pro leagues for a sport without having some career in the past (college, amateur, whatever), and those merits can be documented, at minimum. But it seems to me more and more that this type of reporting of team sports often is routine and very often focused only from local sources. Technically that all meets the WP:N/GNG, but... taking NORG and the recent discussion of SCHOOLOUTCOMES as examples, there's a general trend that in-depth coverage from only local sources is not sufficient for a WP article. Eg, its not clear how to resolve this but it is one of the factors I see what NSPORT is seen as too inclusive. --MASEM (t) 13:51, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
I mean, our rules are suppose to codify practice. If they don't, change 'em. If you can't change 'em -- and it's hard to change anything here -- ignore 'em. There are exceptions for core constitutional provision -- NPOV, V, BLP, and a (very) few others, where even if there's a local consensus to ignore, this is overridden by the functionaries. Whether or not we have an article about Joe Shlabotnik is not a core constitutional question.
So if you've got a 12-2 "Keep" vote based on WP:NFOOTY wielded in the a manner that makes it clear that the sentiment is actually "But we like us some football player articles", what are you gonna do? Sputter "Bu-bu-but our Rules, which were handed down from the Holy Mount"?
Since the days of Nupedia, it has been assumed that if
  1. There are sufficient good sources to have an article, and
  2. Some reasonable number of people would be interested in the article, and
  3. Somebody can be bothered to actually create the article,
then the default is that we should have the article. WP:GNG came later. It is reasonable and certainly something to consider, but is not Holy Writ and we can override whenever we want to, since this is a wiki. Herostratus (talk) 14:10, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
Well, GNG and your point 1 sorta go together. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 14:34, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
I think ignoring the explicit statements within a given guideline, which includes context on how to apply the guideline, is supervoting. Enacting the guideline was a result of long discussions held amongst a relatively (for English Wikipedia) large group of interested parties who were looking at the overall best interest of Wikipedia. If consensus agreements are readily discarded, there isn't much motivation to work towards a common understanding. isaacl (talk) 15:30, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
I can affirm there was a site-wide RFC run several years ago for NSPORT, no question. But things change. Again, looking at the recent SCHOOLOUTCOMES discussion, while not reaching any actionable steps, shows there's a larger concern about the use of local sources as primary sourcing for a topic, which at the time NSPORT's RFC was run, wasn't as large an issue. --MASEM (t) 15:33, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
I agree things can change, but they should change as a result of a new general agreement. As the context behind the original approval of the guideline has been reaffirmed several times since then, I don't see any reason why closers of AfDs should take a statement "per NSPORTS" to mean they should ignore the portion of NSPORTS that defers to the general notability guideline as the final word. Before this can be done, a new consensus should be established, and this may mean rewriting the sports-specific criteria, which were not developed with the aim of replacing the general notability guideline. (Note local sources were indeed discussed in the enacting RfC, and the basic criteria has qualifications on how local sources should be used. For example, with hockey players, local sources are regularly discounted as indicative of meeting the standards for inclusion as defined by the general notability guideline.) isaacl (talk) 16:10, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
While the 2010 RFC did include aspects related to local sources, and passed with that, keep in mind that the broader communicate consensus towards local and more routine sources has changed; NORG has specifically added language towards this and the recent SCHOOLOUTCOMES discussion showed there's less tolerance to articles that rest too much on routine or local sourcing (they're fine to augment significant coverage from broad sources, however). This is a relatively new consideration that would absolutely require some thought towards planning an RFC, including principles for grandfathering and avoiding AFD flooding via fait accompli, and can't be changed just on the basis of this current discussion. But this is a new wrinkle that didn't exist when NSPORTS was passed in 2010. --MASEM (t) 16:22, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
There has been discussion on the sports-specific notability talk page regarding local coverage, most recently in this thread. There are some enthusiastic editors who feel differently, but from the discussion over the past few years I think most editors are in agreement with what I wrote in that thread regarding sports journalism and local sources. Thus I believe the most interested parties in the sports-specific notability guidelines are in agreement with ensuring adequate sources are present for a sports figure to have an article, and that the quality of sources must be examined carefully to determine if they are suitable for establishing if the standard for inclusion has been met. The problem is English Wikipedia's straw poll approach to evaluating consensus isn't conducive to this type of examination. Closers will mostly look at an initial straw count, and so those pushing for inclusion with shaky sources are at an advantage, since their opinion will get counted with a lot less effort than those who take the time to look into the sources. Plus often what happens is someone dumps the first set of hits from a search engine, a bunch of people pile on say per person X, and person Y goes through the links and explains how they are routine coverage. By strength of argument considerations, the first set of opinions should be given no or little weight, but often the closer just goes by the raw count. isaacl (talk) 19:30, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
This actually might out there's two separate issues at play: 1) the changing perception of how much reliance the notability of a topic (not just sports-related) can have from local or routine sources, which affects all of WP, and subsequently 2) how this change, if agreed by consensus, impacts the various criteria of NSPORTS. Or another way, to jump at NSPORTS before establishing and documenting a new consensus about local/routine sources is the wrong order. Otherwise, I can certainly understand editors at sports-related projects balking at this undocumented change that would be forced on them. --MASEM (t) 23:55, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
In addition to the promotional/local interest nature of local coverage, and the entertainment aspect alluded to above, there is also a promotional aspect of sports journalism that is specific to sports. I think most editors understand that not every highschooler covered in a local paper should have an article, and that the same underlying issues with local coverage extend to higher levels of competition. Drawing the line is, as always, challenging. And if closers continue to ignore general consensus in favour of a local head count, any guideline changes will be fruitless. isaacl (talk) 02:13, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

FWIW, I disagree the guidelines are too inclusive. Plenty of sports have notable players who didn't represent their country nationally. And article quality. There will be loads of stubs of higher notability as well, its about folks actually writing them. One of WPs drawing cards is its inclusiveness so to tamper with that is risky. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 14:34, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

  • Disagree - If a project area with many active participants creates a reasonable notability criterion I don't think we should second guess them without a strong showing of harm. I haven't seen anything close to such a showing here.--agr (talk) 15:00, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
  • This applies to several of the more recent comments, but notability guidelines are not meant to be developed in isolation of community expectations. I point to the problem with Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) problem from about 3-4 years ago, where a small group of editors decided on their own notability guidelines, and required a lot of cleanup from that. This is not to say that NSPORTS was developed in isolation, there's enough different projects' eyes on it, but they also add and modify criteria without what should be put to wiki-wide review (I know that there was an RFC years ago for this, but more recently there hasn't). The subject-specific notability guidelines should have roughly equal acceptance across the project, and what this discussion seems to suggest is that there may need to be a better review of these criteria by the community to make sure they follow with other subject-specific guidelines. --MASEM (t) 15:18, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

Looking over all the above, my personal impression -- this is strictly my own personal opinion -- is that there are three classes of arguments for tightning NSPORTS:

  1. Arguments which, while reasonable and I understand where the the person is coming from, sort of come down to personal opinion, don't demonstrate any harm, and so I don't think ultimately will gain much traction, given the number of sports completionist enthusiasts here. These are arguments of the nature "these are too short", "we are too inclusive", "these will never advance beyond stubs", "This is not what the Wikipedia is for" and so forth.
  2. Arguments which make a claim of harm, but a weak one. "It is clutter, and clutter has bad effects in subtle but pervasive ways". "It encourages the wrong sort of editor". "Each article must be watchlisted, and that takes resources", and that sort of thing ( don't see much of this above, but you do hear this.) I consider these to be unproven mostly, or can be reasonably refuted (yes you need more watchlisters, but then then the articles bring in watchers), or even if true are not that big a deal.
  3. One very good argument, which is this: "A lot of these are referenced to a single source or maybe two at most, and you can't add more refs since they don't exist, and a lot of these sources are unreliable or at any rate we can't be confident of their reliability.

(Actually the point "No article should have just a single source, since no source is reliable enough to entirely support an entire article -- it is too dangerous" is also made. Fair point also.)

Speaking for myself, this third point and only this third point makes me sit up and take notice. We do not want to present false data and if NSPORTS is leading us down the path where we are doing so to an unacceptable degree, then that is a problem. Is it true? Yes, it is true in some cases if you take the "we can't be confident of their reliability" part.

I am mostly familiar with baseball, and we use sources like Baseball-Reference.com. Believe me, baseball sources are very reliable. Are they always right? Of course not. The question for any source is "are they wrong seldom enough that, generally, we can consider them reliable to our standard, such that we can be confident that their statements of fact are true, sufficient to put our name and reputation behind such a statement" and Baseball-Reference.com meets that standard.

For other sports, not so much. At least, editors above have vouchsafed that.

I wonder if the solution is not to mess with WP:NSPORTS but to seek out and blacklist the bad sources? Yes blacklisting is severe, but if the source is mainly used for statistics, and we can't trust their statistics, what use are they? Blacklisting some sports sources will cause many sports articles to fall as unsourced of course. What we'd need to know though is what sources are bad, with some indication of that beyond just assertion. This sounds hard, and I wonder if its possible.

Another solution would be rule against single-source articles generally (if a second source can't be found). This has nothing to do with NSPORTs, and would be tricky and easy to game (e. g., add the text "is from Barcelona, a city in Spain" and then a ref that Barcelona is indeed in Spain). So dunno about that. Herostratus (talk) 16:04, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

  • Agree But it's no crisis. And just fixing the SNG wouldn't balance it out. Because Sports "coverage" is itself entertainment, sports tends to be "coverage"-heavy in proportion to actual encyclopedic notability as compared to other topics. Someday we can re-write wp:GNG to calibrate itself to such things and then get rid of the SNGs. There's a little project for someone.  :-) North8000 (talk) 19:53, 25 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree Why should the bar for inclusion be so much lower for sportspeople than for other professions? Taking part in athletics does not confer notability to anyone, even if it means they will be forever listed in almanacs of sports statistics. Even competing professionally does not mean there will be coverage of an individual, especially because there are many levels of professionalism and lengths of participation. The requirements for actual coverage of people in multiple reliable sources, not just listings on rosters and event reports in sports-related media, should still be met for sportspeople. This oversaturation of articles about individuals who have done nothing of note is an embarrassment to Wikipedia. Reywas92Talk 06:38, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree I do not agree that verifiability and the completionist desire by sports project enthusiasts justify stand-alone articles for every participant in say a dozen competitions a year in a sport which gets little coverage. I do not mind a "one-at-bat" rule for baseball, because the few such unfortunate players probably have some coverage in books and articles about the odd cases of major sports.See a one-game pitcher, for instance. There are unlikely to be reliable sources analyzing the one-time cycling competitors who competed in one of 12 events in a year and finished 99 out of 100. Sport-specific guidelines should not trump GNG. It is inappropriate to close an AFD as "Keep" when the only argument presented is "Satisfies NSPORT." It is more encyclopedic to include the participant in a list than to have a one-line permastub article which only conveys the same information that inclusion in a list would convey. Edison (talk) 18:35, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree-- NSPORTS is intended to support, not supplant, GNG. Focus on the quality and reliability of the sources. That said, I think that at times NSPORTS is a bit on the permissive side, but I also think that NPROF is often too restrictive. So really, just keep working on GNG to clarify standards for the pre-internet age where sources may be more difficult to locate, be careful not to let cultural bias sneak in (as in excluding an eastern European but not a similarly-situated American), and onward through the fog Montanabw(talk) 17:37, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree-- There's biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias of sports that are dedicated to documenting every single major league player released nearly every year (Where are the dictionaries of professors?), why should we deprive our readers of that knowledge? It will create more problems (Who meets the criteria etc) then it's worth. Also the fact that this will bring more bias to American sports as they are easier to find sources for due to dominant American media coverage. This policy change will result in more Americanization of the project. Having thousands of articles deleted is not in the projects best interest. GuzzyG (talk) 03:04, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment. In a perfect world, we'd have articles on just about everyone and everything, with access for everyone to reliable sources (even if they're behind a paywall or in a print-only medium) and an endless supply of volunteers to look after them. The reality of it is far different. Anyone who has patrolled recent changes will be aware that a large percentage of edits are to articles on obscure athletes and sports teams. Mousing over the diffs, I see updates to standings and other statistics that I cannot verify easily (if at all), news of trades and injuries and on-field dramas that might be verifiable if I happened to be fluent in the relevant language. Rarely do I see an edit summary. Checking the page histories, I see innumerable unexplained changes from innumerable IPs, occasional evidence of a low-profile edit war between supporters of rival teams, unreverted vandalism by someone who was upset with someone for playing a less-than-stellar game, and so on. And I have to wonder: how can anyone be confident this content is even a little bit sound? There are way more articles about way more athletes (and teams) than we have the resources to curate. I don't have any solution in mind here, but I do think there's a problem. RivertorchFIREWATER 16:41, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree Oh yes, this has long irritated me. That someone who once kicked a ball in a single game is presumed notable with very little else being needed, as it often appears, is, to me, ridiculous. LadyofShalott 20:28, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
  • I have to agree with that comment. The proposed blacklisting of these unreliable sources(and the subsequent deletion of otherwise unsupported articles via BLPprod/AFD) is, however, a step in the right direction. In a direction where articles not meeting WP:V are no longer kept.
  • To the other points: We have three places where we have something that should go against this sort of articles that aren't curatable in total. First is the essay WP:Run-of-the-mill, which sums up that sportspeople get more coverage, especially in local newspapers; second is the WP:GNG, specifically the sidenote that routine coverage may not be sufficient to establish notability, something that both these statistics sites and newspaper sources often are, routine. Third, we have the policy WP:What Wikipedia is not; especially WP:NOTNEWSPAPER and WP:INDISCRIMINATE, and the articles that are solely based on newspaper coverage and broad statistics databases should NOT pass WP:NOT.
  • The question immediately forming itself is:Why do we have so many articles that are being kept when they don't meet these expectations?

There are two possibilities: The first one is that these policies and guidelines are ignored because they are outdated, and no longer apply; at least not to sports articles; they have no consensus anymore. The second one is that we have a WP:Local consensus that keeps working to undermine a global consensus that these pages should actually not be kept. A WP:RFC might help here, however, it might have to be one that starts here, on this noticeboard, with a central notice, and especially without every sports fan going to inform every sports project that their precious articles are in danger, which would be disruptive to the consensus-building as canvassing.Burning Pillar (talk) 20:42, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

As discussed above, the participants at Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports) largely agree that stats sites and descriptions of games are routine coverage and not indicative of meeting English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. The need to eventually meet the general notability guideline has been reaffirmed multiple times in conversations involving those who aren't sports enthusiasts as well as active members of sports WikiProjects. ("Eventually" is typically interpreted very leniently, though, given that there is no deadline to complete articles.) Thus a local consensus seems to be occurring at AfD where the consensus achieved in broader discussions is getting ignored. isaacl (talk) 20:54, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree with changing the current standards. If it ain't broke, etc. Carrite (talk) 04:03, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Disagree - the problem with just using WP:GNG is that we'll end up with a lot more work debating whether (at least in the Football world) this player meets GNG and that player meets GNG. It's bad enough with just English sources, with various debates about what is a valid source, and what isn't - it becomes a nightmare using many other languages. Therefore, to simplify it, we need some kind of Bright-line. Our various notability criteria, such as WP:NFOOTBALL is that bright-line, and saves us a lot of work - requiring only focus on those who don't meet it, but still meet WP:GNG, and those rare individuals who do meet it, but have an extreme lack of verifiable sources. This discussion should be whether we abandon the Bright-line, but instead whether we shift or tweak it. Is it in the right place for Football? We certainly have enough players who don't meet it, and yet still meet WP:GNG - so one might argue that it's too high. Or perhaps, it needs to be modified by increasing the minimum number of appearances or something. But that's another debate - and it's a different one for different sports. Meanwhile, what's the damage? There's little indication that material here is false. There's a lot of verifiable information for many athletes who come know where meeting any criteria. There's probably less information that's wrong in a short stub, than a long article on a well-known player. Nfitz (talk) 20:03, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree -- I've seen a number of sports related AfDs where the discussion went along the way of "Meets NSPORT-X, speedy close! And let's trout the nominator while we are at it." All the while the article contains one sentence, no sources have been presented and it's not at all clear whether they exist in the first place. I think things are at a point where the sports SNG are not in step with GNG; that is: they are not predictive of sources on these subjects actually existing to write an NPOV bio article. K.e.coffman (talk) 05:41, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree – I created Tom Babson because the guy appeared in Cheers, not because he is an ice hockey coach. I saw a few months ago that it was nominated for deletion last year, indicating how NSPORTS is slowly becoming challenged. And I saw a few years back that "Sam Scarber", whose subject appeared also on Cheers, was created. On the general issue, if the guideline is trimmed or something, the notabilities of sports personalities will be challenged, leading to more and more AfD nominations. Nevertheless, I think WP:notability and WP:V#Notability will be adequate, especially if NSPORTS is deemed redundant. Also, notabilities of those personalities will become determined case-by-case, making NSPORTS less effective anymore. George Ho (talk) 19:10, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Comment -- The people who are the subject of these problematic sports stubs just don't randomly appear, but by necessity are pulled into the sport for some reason; for example, another player was sidelined due to injury. This suggests that the stub should be merged into another article, say the one about the missing player. Or the team. Or the year of that sport. Doing so would force an improvement in the article the sub-stub was merged into: the article would have more detail about the fortunes of the team or sport. But if we are faced with a sub-stub about Some Guy who played a single game of Professional Tiddly-winks on 1946 for Lower Elbonia, & there is no article on Professional Tiddly-winks in 1946, let alone one on Professional Tiddly-winks in Lower Elbonia, then there is a larger problem than WP:GNG & WP:NSPORTS conflicting. -- llywrch (talk) 17:08, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree -- I believe the problem arises from league/competition/championship classifications. E.g. tier 3 soccer (football) league (which is basically one step above amateur league ) is classified as "fully-professional", that's absolutely wrong. Some leagues on this list of fully professional leagues kept by WikiProject Football are not even close to professional level (sponsorship, stadium capacity etc.). Also I noticed that at least 3 people mentioned WP:NFOOTY. I absolutely agree that section 2 of this policy is way too lax: Players who have played, and managers who have managed in a competitive game between two teams from fully-professional leagues, will generally be regarded as notable. Basically, this sentence is implying that you can ignore WP:GNG & WP:NSPORTS as long as the person meets WP:NFOOTY, Jone Rohne Nester (talk) 16:29, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
Hi again, BU Rob13. Wasn't your comment supposed to go to the "Arbitrary break" section? George Ho (talk) 08:15, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
Probably. I'm contributing on mobile so it's difficult to find that location - I just put my comment at the end. Feel free to move it. ~ Rob13Talk 14:54, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
 Moved as permitted by BU Rob13, for whom I thank him. --George Ho (talk) 17:42, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
  • Agree – Look at the list of notable alumni for any US high school or college and it's almost all sports figures who are there for no reason except that they played in some game that qualifies them for NSPORTS. You'd think US schools turn out nothing but athletes. Kendall-K1 (talk) 02:42, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

Questions:Deletion

RFC: Conflicts between WP:GNG and WP:NSPORTS

No satifactory discussion and consensus has arose w.r.t to imposition of any arbitrary time limit.Broadly, the community is currently opposed to any such timeline. Winged Blades Godric 14:03, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

What should be the maximum time limit for sufficient sources according to WP:GNG to be found before an article that meets WP:NSPORTS is to be deleted at WP:AFD?Burning Pillar (talk) 21:50, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Survey

I think one problem is that people keep insisting on WP:There is no deadline when it doesn't work: If (as indicated by a patroller) the number of articles with poor sourcing we have cannot be curated well, then we need to cut down that number. A possibility is to set a time when this article should absolutely have something, because the current approach seems to end with "can be improved" in articles that are 7 years old. I'd set the cut at 3 months after the first AfD nominationor 1 year after page creation, whichever happens first.(The article would still have a last chance time period at WP:AFD, unless speedy deletion criteria apply)Burning Pillar (talk) 21:50, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

  • Comment -- this is a rather non-specific question. For all other AfDs, it's usually "put up or shut up" -- i.e. sources must be presented at the AfD for the article to be kept. I don't see why NSPORT would be an exception. K.e.coffman (talk) 05:28, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
Threaded discussion
  • It is normally agreed that the issue is that those seeking deletion of a NSPORTS-meeting article that they believe fails WP:N must do the burden of searching for sources to convince others that no such sourcing likely exists (you can't prove a negative completely, obviously). And so it is whatever time it takes for a reasonable search to be completed and the results presented. If you give me an athlete that played for a few seasons since 2010 in a US professional sport (as to meet NSPORTS) but took a life-threating injury and retired to a normal job, I would expect that someone can search for sources within a week, if not less, since most of that will be online. If you give me a similar athlete from 1960, I expect that to take a lot more work since that absolutely requires print source exhaustion. Moreso if we are now talking Indian or Chinese athletes from the same timeframe. --MASEM (t) 22:45, 4 May 2017 (UTC)
  • I am opposed to any such arbitrary timeline. There is no reason for such a thing to exist and as others have said it would lead to lots of unnecessary deletion activity. From the prior discussion there is absolutely no consensus for such an approach either. Spanneraol (talk) 22:42, 4 May 2017 (UTC)
  • The question is not limited to the timeline I proposed(and the answer could be infinite). However, a WP:BEFORE search only asks you to make a reasonable search. It does NOT require you to look everywhere where sources may exist if it would take undue time and effort. Ultimatively, the sources should be in an article, and if you have only sources not meeting our standards, then the article isn't reliable. And an article meeting WP:NSPORTS with the possibility of sources can get some period of time to allow for longer searches, but if the current approach is followed(articles about old subjects are kept infinitely without meeting WP:GNG, then we allow unreliable articles to persist. And if you compare the number of articles needing improvement with the number of articles getting improval, then you will see a gap. A gap that, by the way, is not only present in sports- rather in nearly every field, and not limited to verifiability, reliability but also neutrality.Burning Pillar (talk) 03:28, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
  • How do you know the article isn't reliable? An article sourced only to a dependable stats site is actually reliable and accurate so if your only complaint is reliability most of these articles pass that bar. Spanneraol (talk) 15:15, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
  • We should simply adopt NSPORTS, and deprecate the use of the GNG in this field except as an exception (or where there is notability in another field). This is exactly what we do in NPROF, and it avoids most of the arguments. Obviously we still want WP:V. The simpler the better. (I point out that we only keep from having WP flooded by millions of school and locally known amateur athletes by deciding in almost all cases that the sources aren't substantial or discriminating enough. It's amazing the number of undistinguished people in all fields that get covered by local newspapers. DGG ( talk ) 19:11, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Speedy deletion criterion X3

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
This is being agreed on as a bad ideaBurning Pillar (talk) 18:41, 2 May 2017 (UTC)(non-admin closure)

Should the following speedy deletion criterion be created as exceptional criterion; for a limited time?: Articles related to sports that are either unsourced or only sourced via broad statistics databases and/or routine newspaper coverage. This must apply to all versions of the article, and the article must have been created before the 1st May of 2015."Burning Pillar (talk) 21:50, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

My answer is yes, to remove all these problematic articles that seem to be possibly too numerous to let them all go through AFD without disrupting that process. It might generate a higher number of false positives than normally expected when using a speedy deletion criterion, however. This criterion should stop to be applied after 1 year.Burning Pillar (talk) 21:50, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

This is a gross misuse of Prod - using speedy to get rid of articles which are sourced would ensure that many salvageable articles are deleted just because some people don't like them.Nigel Ish (talk) 22:32, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
I'm sorry, user:Nigel Ish, but I don't understand what you mean with "This is a gross misuse of Prod". I also don't know why it is a problem-articles that are sourced may still be speedily deleted under some critera, for example a garage band that is sourced via facebook et al. These sources aren't establishing any notability, so why is that a problem?Burning Pillar (talk) 22:41, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
I mean that the proposal would be a gross misuse of speedy - to delete articles many of which could be salvageable. These are not articles that do not assert notability. (if so they would qualify for A7) - these are articles that you don't think are notable. Articles that are sourced from facebook etc should NOT be speedied unless they meet one of the very specific criteria, and not meeting GNG isn't one of them.Nigel Ish (talk) 22:51, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose WP:IDONTLIKEIT is not a reason for deletion, yet alone speedy. If it has an assertion of notability, then it shouldn't qualify for speedy. This seems to make it seem like you're just being lazy and/or know these articles would survive AfD and are trying to go around it. Mass speedy deletion is never good, especially for articles which could be salvageable. Smartyllama (talk) 17:41, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose - First off, the RfC/survey above has not even been concluded—oppose votes are roughly equal to support votes. Second off, speedy deletion is to be used for unsalvageable articles. Third off, this would be... very alarming to some experience editors working in these areas, possibly discouraging contribution. Overall, a terrible idea. RileyBugz会話投稿記録 17:50, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose The only problematic articles are those that fail WP:V. Even those people who don't like the sort of stubs we are discussing, if they care about the project at all, should be looking at merging them into list articles. --Michig (talk) 18:59, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Magdalena Zamolska has been deleted. The reason -- which I'm not necessarily saying is wrong -- was more or less "Well, it was a lively discussion, and the votes were about equal, but in terms of strength of argument, nobody made a credible assertion that she meets WP:GNG, therefore deleted on policy grounds".

OK, this is interesting. By my count the vote was 10-6 in favor of Keep (the closer characterized that as "roughly equal", which, maybe). It is extremely usual (although certainly not universal) for a result like that to be closed as "no consensus" if not outright "keep". But as the closer pointed out WP:CONSENSUS says "Consensus is ascertained by the quality of the arguments given on the various sides of an issue, as viewed through the lens of Wikipedia policy" (which BTW shows that "consensus" as used here is quite different from the normal dictionary definition of the word). And "does not meet GNG" was certainly true -- there's no question of that, since there was not "significant coverage". There was not one sentence on where she went to school, or what her class background was, or her path to becoming an athlete, or if she is married, or what her opinion on state of sports in Poland is, or anything. Just raw statistics, essentially.

Bot on the other hand... we are a community. 10-6. That's quite a poke in the eye to a segment of our community. And GNG is not technically a policy -- it isn't labeled as such, and hasn't gone through the process by which guidelines are elevated to policy. But the quote by the closer was "...viewed through the lens of Wikipedia policy".

Anyway, this suggests that as practical matter GNG has attained the status of NPOV, BLP, V, and other core principles as policy de facto. In my personal opinion this is a new thing and an unwelcome sea change.

But it is what it is. If that's what it is, then adding a Speedy Deletion criteria "Incontrovertibly does not meet GNG, by any reasonable interpretation of 'significant coverage', and is judged unlikely to be able to do so with a reasonable level of effort" or something. We could certainly clear out a lot articles quickly that way.

Wouldn't this be logical? If an article is AfD'd, and the vote is 17-2 to keep, but it clearly doesn't meet GNG and can't, and so is going to be deleted anyway -- what's the point of a long discussion?

That's a separate discussion, to be had over at Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion. And probably at Wikipedia:Notability should be proposed to be formally promoted to policy, or perhaps WP:GNG split off and just that promoted.

At any rate we can possibly cap this discussion -- if NFOOTY and the rest are not going to be considered, what are we even talking about here? Herostratus (talk) 18:34, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

A guideline is only ever a rule of thumb (and should never be more than that), and consensus within an AfD discussion, as long as people are not putting forward arguments that contradict policy, should never be overridden because of a line in a guideline. I think that's a very poor close. --Michig (talk) 18:59, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
I have mixed feelings (I voted to delete BTW). Closing is hard (its amazing we get smart people to do this stuff for free). Going the other way could have been criticized too. Anyway what matters is not what you or I think but what closers, as a class, are going to to generally. If this is the trend... Herostratus (talk) 21:16, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
The purpose of a discussion is to verify that indeed the article doesn't meet the GNG. This is why I oppose the notion of a temporary speedy deletion criterion. In my book the AFD for Magdalena Zamolska has gone exactly as it should have; when you take away the bolded words in that discussion and don't treat it as a vote, it's clear that nobody was able to demonstrate that the article met our criteria. Lankiveil (speak to me) 04:28, 30 April 2017 (UTC).
Besides, if anyone feels the AfD was closed incorrectly, they are free to use WP:CLOSECHALLENGE. — Gestrid (talk) 04:31, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
I have left a message on the closer's talk page. We'll see what happens. Smartyllama (talk) 15:10, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
That was an excellent close from Scottywong, who (correctly) judged consensus based on policy-based arguments and not a vote count. The keep voters, while numerous, completely failed to make a case that Zamolska meets GNG; many of them even seemed to regard meeting GNG as optional, which is the exact opposite of what NSPORT says and therefore undermined their appeals to NSPORT. Sideways713 (talk) 23:13, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Tightening up NCYC

Trying one small step at a time, I proposed tightening of NCYC with detailed rationale why I think that particular subguideline needs rewriting, at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Cycling#Tightening_up_of_WP:NCYC. Sadly, it has been 48h and nobody commented there - I guess the project is sem-active. Perhaps the discussion needs more light, so I am posting it here (and feel encouraged to repost the link to any other relevant forum). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:38, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Changes to WP:NSPORTS

I changed two parts of WP:NSPORTS, one after a discussion of one day, one without discussion(that one seemed obvious to me). I was quickly reverted, and the comments were very negative. It was pointed out that any substantial change should be discussed througly before to avoid changes that are not welcomed by the community as a whole. I have to agree with that. Now, I know that there are definitely problems with WP:NSPORT, so I quickly checked if someone else had done such things in the past. The substantial changes are:

  1. Resulting from a WT:NSPORTS discussion:[13];[14](both)
  2. Resulting from a discussion of a WP:WikiProject:[15];[16];(both)
  3. Changes without discussion on WT:NSPORTS without attribution to a WikiProject:[17];[18];[19];[20];[21]

These are the changes of one year. Quickly reverted changes are not included.Two (significant) changes were discussed at WT:NSPORTS only, two were discussed at a Wikiproject only, one was discussed at both, and five changes seem to be undiscussed. Burning Pillar (talk) 20:57, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

Discussion is still ongoing - you need to wait for some sort of consensus to form in the discussion before trying to change the guidelines if you want your changes to be accepted by the community.Nigel Ish (talk) 21:17, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
Those changes I proposed are under discussion, and I agree with you. I just wanted to share this because there were concerns about undiscussed changes, and there are some that are indeed undiscussed changes(and those that were not discussed at the right talk page).. And this could be related to the discussion above.Burning Pillar (talk) 22:09, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for the analysis. I find edits like [22] quite problematic, as they are likely edits made by fans of a certain sport, pushing for yet more inclusiveness, seemingly without discussion. And attempts to revert such changes later are criticized as 'no consensus', even when there often is 'no consensus' to broaden the criteria in the first place. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:08, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
@Piotrus: The problem you uncover is another - a part of a guideline or policy should have to get consensus to be added, but also to be retained, after all, guidelines and policy should have strong community support, so the burden to get consensus for the part of the guideline/policy should be on those who want the text to be in the guideline or policy. Oh, and you know that there is something wrong with a special notability guideline that states "Motorsport figures are presumed notable if they[...]2.Predate the sharp distinction between professional and amateur (prior to World War II)."(this has been in the guideline for more than a YEAR) And no, this sentence is even being defended on the talk page, even if it should be obvious that this criterion cannot have been developed with WP:GNG in mind. In addition to shifting the burden on those who want something in the guideline, we probably have to make sure that proposed changes are scrutinized well enough, which just does not seem to happen(e.g your example above, and that sentence I provided). There are probably some methods to assure that. One of them would be full protection of WP:Notability (sports), another would be requiring consensus on the talk page, in a RFC or here, before the change is to be made, for any substantial change and for any change that someone assumes to be substantial. I hope there are more, less problematic but still effective methods.Burning Pillar (talk) 00:25, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

How to best close this discussion?

Before asking a request for closure, I just want to be sure how complex or simple the issue is before requesting it in one venue, either WP:ANRFC or WP:AN. Seems that the issue is notability of sports personalities and the inclusivity criteria of NSPORTS. I listed this discussion in the "Centralized discussion" template. Numerically, the consensus appears divided. However, if the issue is more complex and requires more than one closer, I would go to WP:AN to request teamwork closure. Thoughts? --George Ho (talk) 03:29, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

It is too soon to close this discussion. It is still active, and a new section was started that generated recent comments.Burning Pillar (talk) 00:01, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
No, I think it should be closed... The conversation has too many threads and its clear that nothing will get resolved from this as there just is not consensus for change.. or any real concrete proposals. Spanneraol (talk) 18:00, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
Okay, Spanneraol. Is just one closer okay, or do you think more closers are needed? --George Ho (talk) 19:16, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
I don't see why we would need multiple ones. Spanneraol (talk) 19:49, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
Two closers might be needed, just to check for consensus, as whether there is a lack of consensus or not might be a problem. RileyBugz会話投稿記録 21:43, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
I requested closure at WP:ANRFC and then WP:AN three days later, just in case. --George Ho (talk) 18:49, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Update: Tazerdadog says that he'll be one of the closers. If necessary, at least one more may be needed. --George Ho (talk) 02:52, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

I don't see any need for two closers. isaacl (talk) 03:16, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
I don't know. 1) The one who started the thread was very undecided on how to request a closure. 2) The votes are split, and the arguments of both sides may be logical. 3) It was listed in the "centralized discussion" template. 4) The discussion got very lengthy (if not heated), and two subsequent proposals failed. 5) It's been nearly two months since the discussion started (including nearly three weeks after first 30 days), indicating that it's not an easy close yet. 6) Amending the NSPORTS is still on the works. 7) Two above editors disagree on how many closers are needed, i.e. one or two closers. 8) A closing rationale may affect multiple biographical articles of sports personalities. --George Ho (talk) 04:17, 6 June 2017 (UTC); amended. 04:24, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Forgot #9: One exemplified article shown in the OP was deleted per AFD; the deletion review ended with "no consensus" defaulting to "deleted". George Ho (talk) 04:29, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Whether it demands two editors or not, I've started working with Tazerdadog on a possible close. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 04:31, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Cool. Two should suffice if third closer is unnecessary. Okay. I'm awaiting the closure then. George Ho (talk) 05:04, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
These are common characteristics of many discussions with dissenting views that have been closed by a single closer (because nearly all discussions have been closed by a single closer). One person saying, hey, maybe two closers would be useful, doesn't mean that two closers are needed. Two closers don't necessarily help discussions get closed faster (the two co-ordinating can in fact slow things down); discussions often remain unclosed because they are lengthy with a lot of views to dig through. isaacl (talk) 12:44, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Sure, they may be common for most discussions. However, the topic isn't about one article or another. It's about a bunch of them and their notabilities. Also, the consistency between Notability guideline (longstanding one) and NSPORTS has been questioned here. I don't know whether you believe the matter is simple to close and resolve. Well, no point on arguing further whether a second closer is necessary; we already have two closers working on the closure. Moreover, I'm not seeking a rushed closure but an accurate one because, as you also said, arguments have to be thorough checked, not missed. BTW, the person said earlier, "Two closers might be needed." George Ho (talk) 14:55, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Next steps

This is hardly the first time that there's been a conflict between fans of a particular category-specific notability guideline (many of which are not really guidelines but WP:PROJPAGE essays someone slapped a guideline tag on without any WP:PROPOSAL process) versus the actual WP:Notability guideline and WP:GNG in particular. This is also not the first time a big RfC on this issue has failed to resolve much (see the recently closed RfC about – yet again – secondary schools, and many earlier examples).

One thing this one did conclude, though, is important:

There is clear consensus that no subject-specific notability guideline, including Notability (sports) is a replacement for or supercedes the General Notability Guideline. Arguments must be more refined than simply citing compliance with a subguideline of WP:NSPORTS in the context of an Articles for Deletion discussion.

This hardly applies to just NSPORTS.

I would suggest that the first and most obvious course of action is to propose changes at WP:N that state this very explicitly, using near-identical wording (without the reference to NSPORTS in particular). This would resolve a lot of these disputes permanently.

This would be bolstered ver effectively by also methodically editing every one of the topical guidelines to make it clear that what they do is give a predictive indication of likelihood that a subject will be found notable, not a guarantee (they do not establish notability criteria for their topic, and notability doesn't vary by topic except where WP:N indicates it does). I've done this kind of edit already with a few of them over the last couple of years – this one bit of consensus this RfC came to has actually already been consensus for a long time and we're just reaffirming it again at VPPOL. But it needs to be done with all of them, no exceptions. Ideally, it would be done with a template, so no one can WP:GAME the wording by subtly altering it bit by bit after the attention of people who aren't "topic insiders" moves elsewhere. This might could be done by adding a <div>...</div> to the header templates for topical notability guidelines, but maybe a separate template is warranted, and a bot can be used to periodically confirm that every page in the category for them has the template.

This might also obviate another problem:

There is a general unhappiness with the permissiveness of some NSPORTS criteria....

The exact wording at that page is probably mostly a matter for discussion on its talk page, and it is not the only topical notability page to have problems of this sort (or even some in the opposite direction, of over-exclusion of subjects that actually pass GNG). However, if the teeth are pulled – if these pages are made to stop masquerading as "anti-GNGs", and GNG is updated to specifically state that they cannot override GNG – there is no longer any incentive for anyone to try to make "my pet topic" have looser notability at these topical guidelines. If these pages are correctly worded, described and interpreted as AfD prediction tools, then everyone has a strong incentive for these predictions to be as accurate as possible, i.e. to adhere as close to GNG as possible.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:09, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

  • Agree to change The "fully professional" criteria for football notability is too broad. For American football, if it was just the NFL that granted default notability it might be reasonable. However the throughly ignored Arena Football league also grants default notability for playing in just one game. I think football should be limited to the top tier for any given country of fully professional teams for one game play making someone notable. It should also be noted that at times nominations that do not even come close to meeting sport specific inclusion guidelines result in virulent attacks on the person who did the nomination, treating them as if they are violating Wikipedia policy for even nominating an article for deletion.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:50, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

Petition to re-add the categories "ethnicity", and "religion" to "infobox person".

It's generally considered bad form to resurrect an issue a year after it was settled, especially one that had so much participation and debate. Even if you did, it would need an RfC. The community consensus is that the downside of these parameters exceeds their upside. I'll stick my neck out and close this per WP:SNOW and WP:BOLD. ―Mandruss ☎ 17:58, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Last year the categories “religion”, and “ethnicity” were removed from the infobox template “person”, and in response to this sudden removal a new infobox “religious person” was created that could only be applied to a person whose entire notability and coverage is based on their status within a religious hierarchy. On the part of the editors who removed these two categories this move seems rather unfounded, and worst of all deletionist, the repeated arguments were that what someone is, or what they believe in aren’t a part of their notability so these categories should be removed but if we'd go by that logic we could scrap not just the entire infobox, but remove anything from the article ‘’other’’ than what made them famous, basically making Wikipedia into a redundant add-on to the Wiktionary.

Let me dissect and debunk every major argument that lead to this “consensus” (it was more of “a popular vote” since those in favour to keeping these categories were often ignored, and if responded to only got addressed as to why these categories were irrelevant to the U.S. American politician Bernie Sanders).

The idea that “religion/ethnicity” are “deeply personal things that can’t be summed up in an infobox”, what this argument misses is that for various people their religion, ethnicity, Etc. are important factors in their political or public life. And I mostly have to agree with the proposals that these categories should be kept but only included according to a strict guideline but that argument was “shot down” multiple times by being responded by with “this is not the place for such suggestions” or “talk about it elsewhere” basically making it into a “yes or no” “discussion” (more like a vote), for example some politicians may want to add aspects of their religion into their legislature I don’t see how this makes their religion “irrelevant”, another thing could be how rarely “ethnicity” was used.

The same argument above requires another kind of debunk for the “ethnicity” argument, yes It’s impossible to simply say “that person is that ethnicity”, and for Bernie Sanders the argument was used “according to American laws he would be White, not of Hispanic origin”, even if the argument was limited to Bernie Sanders it would still be wrong, “White, not of Hispanic origin” is a ‘’racial’’ and not an ethnic grouping, him being a Non-Hispanic Jewish American would fill the category, in America you have races (who can, or can’t be Hispanic, you can combine any race with “Hispanic” thus having a Black, Asian, and/or White politician all being “ethnically Hispanic”, though it’s more of both a linguistic and geographical thing, but that’s another discussion), I must agree that “ethnicity” could be hard to define as not all ethnic groups are genetic, you can have ethno-linguistic groups such as “Hispanics”, and “Arabs”, ethno-religious groups such as Croats, Muslims (Southern-Slavs), Serbs, and Muslims (genetically Han Chinese), and yes it could be hard to ask whether an “Ethnic Muslim” from Bosnia and Herzegovina who is an Atheist should be seen aa “a Muslim” but again, that’s a while different debate, and if they would still ethnically define themselves as “Muslim” despite not believing in God (yes, I’m calling “Allah” God as we write in English), and (s)he lives in a predominantly Serbian area where discrimination is rampant and news 📰 stories constantly repeat that the person is “brave fighting Serb supremacy” than removing “ethnicity” from that person’s infobox does the reader a disservice. The same argument could be said for Jews in the shoah, their “citizenship” would still say ”German”, and placing “Jewish” at “Nationality” would confuse some readers with little idea of history that the person was an Israeli citizen.

Which brings me to “Nationality” simply doesn't replace “ethnicity”, the main argument I read for the cases where ethnicity was relevant was that we should “simply use Nationality”, not only does the term “nationality” only describe “ethnicity” in America, Canada, and Bolivia (thus making the term confusing for readers who aren’t from there), even in those places “nationality” could still mean which country’s passport you hold. To give a good comparison in the Republic of China you have 3 types of “Chinese/Taiwanese” people, you have “Chinese/Taiwanese citizens” (people who are registered in a R.O.C. family book 📚), “Chinese/Taiwanese nationals” (people who hold a R.O.C. passport, but don’t necessarily live in the free area), and “ethnic Chinese/Taiwanese” (people of Han, Mongolian, Tibetan, Manchu, Muslim, Etc. Heritage in the world, thus making it well over a milliard “Taiwanese” people worldwide), in this context it could be easily understood that “citizenship” is residential, “nationality” is which passport they hold (thus “national”), and “ethnicity” is genetic.

Another argument I would like to propose is that in some occupations ethnicity is important such as acting, for the sake 🍶 of keeping up with the WP:NPOV policy I never clarify who, or what I am, and what I believe in, but I could tell that some of the arguments proposed came from “politically left” people that felt that ethnicity, and religion should NEVER be disclosed, and that It’s ALWAYS irrelevant. Well, I’m far-left myself, and I think that in real life someone’s ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, Etc. Should be irrelevant, but if I would put that into Wikipedia I would actively violate the neutral point of view where they are possible, look no further than acting. To me personally I can enjoy a good visual story regardless of if the protagonist or antagonist is male, female, homosexual, heterosexual, non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Asian, non-Hispanic African/non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic and/or Latino, if they speak Wolof, Hausa, Cebuano, Quechua, Etc. A good story is a good story, but in reality people (and by extend reliable secondary, and tertiary sources) do care about these things, if Bruce Lee is known for being a Non-Hispanic Chinese-American in Hollywood who broke various barriers for other Orientals than removing his Han ethnicity would remove crucial information from the infobox, the infobox should be “an article within an article”, a condensed “article at a glance” look and withholding information for any reason is simply un-encyclopedic, it’s not something that should be done, let alone celebrated. Yeah, by my own above argument I could watch “yellowface”, and yeah, I could if the story is good enough, and so could people during the 1920’s, if there’s a yellowface actor removing their ethnicity would be equally of a disservice as the fact that they weren’t Oriental makes it relevant to their profession, and yes even to their notability. (if a White (wo)man is famous for playing Asian that shouldn't be omitted).

Further, and this is beyond Wikipedia’s scope, but infoboxes help make search engines like Microsoft Bing, Google, Etc. In categorising data at a glance, though I do think that there should be strict guidelines when or when not “religion”, and “ethnicity” can be used (and I’d even propose an “irreligion” category for non-theists like Atheists, Deists, Free Thinkers, Agnostics, Etc. But I digress), removing them simply doesn't do anyone a arrive.


Which brings me to my final argument, why such a weak attempt? The categories at the bottom of the pages for religions, races, and ethnicities still exist, clearly it's worth categorising people as such when it’s relevant, and to claim that “it’s private”, Wikipedia talks about people’s sex lives if that’s been covered by the news 📰/historical sources so “WikiGossip” is already a thing, and if they openly disclose these things to the public, why should we hide it? Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia about notable, and relevant information, removing information from hundreds of thousands of articles because 1 American politician’s page was subject to edit warring is not only childish, drastic, and unnecessary, it’s unproductice and removes relevant information from countless of other articles.

Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.

I hope that someone who read the above is willing to debate this. 1.54.210.203 (talk) 11:49, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

  • Oppose - In my opinion, both religion and ethnicity are irrelevant details for the majority of our bio subjects... and certainly not worth highlighting in the infobox. In most cases, it does not matter if someone is/was of French or Scottish or Serbian heritage... it is what they did that makes them notable, not where their ancestors came from. In most cases, it does not matter if the person is/was Jewish or Christian or Muslim... What matters is what the subject did, not what their religion is/was. OK... sure... there are some subject who are notable because they are of a given religio-ethnic background. And in such cases we can create a custom info box to note this. But the template should be for the majority of cases where this is not the case.
Secondly, all too often, adding a subject's religion or ethnicity to an info-box ends up fomenting argument... as editors with an agenda try to claim the subject as "one of us" (or perhaps more importantly, not "one of them"). Such arguments can be avoided by simply omitting the data from the info-box in the first place.
Finally... you mention the religious and ethnic categorizations... I am of the opinion that adding religious or ethnic categories to bio articles is all too often a case of Wikipedia:Overcategorization. I think we should enforce WP:NONDEF with more vigor, and remove such categorizations in cases where the subject's religion or ethnicity is not really central to what makes them notable. Blueboar (talk) 15:40, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
Sent by whistling into my telephone into a 56K modem line and running data compression, TCP/IP Stack, and HTTPS encryption in my head. --Guy Macon (talk) 11:33, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Oppose Put simply, if a field is there, some numbskulls will think it has to be filled in. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, someones ethnicity and/or religion is irrelevant. —Farix (t | c) 12:06, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Comment on the close, which appears to have happened about 29 hours after the start:

Mandruss, I think that waiting a whole year before re-opening a contentious discussion is very good form. I believe that we normally hope that people will wait only half that long.

Sure, it would have been good to add an RFC template, but that's an easily solved problem.

On the merits of the question: it probably also would have been good for participants to first understand that ethnicity and religion are absolutely enormous factors in parts of the (non-Western) world, and only second form their opinions. I imagine, for example, that Tutsi people in Rwanda have a different view about the relevance of ethnicity than white people in the US. If your country had an ethnic war recently, then the ethnicity of people in your country is likely critically important information from your POV, even if someone from somewhere else thinks that you "shouldn't" care. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:36, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

I'll reply since I was pinged. 1. I feel that my close represented the consensus, as closes are supposed to do. 2. If you read WP:RFC you'll see that the absence of an {{Rfc}} template is far from the only thing separating this discussion from a properly-formed RfC. You can't take a discussion and just slap the template on it and call it an RfC.
If you still feel this shouldn't have been closed, re-open it. ―Mandruss ☎ 01:21, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
Mandruss, I've written a good deal of WP:RFC, so I don't think I need to read it again to say that I think this was salvageable beginning. If it were me, I'd have added a handful of examples, with sources saying that ethnicity or religion was a decisive factor in the local culture, and I'd have added a brief summary question before the long explanation, but my preferred approach isn't the only one. (Actually, I'd probably not have opened it, because it's not a question that I care about personally, and our track record for understanding cultures where ethnicity or religion is a rigid, involuntary, and important fact of life is poor.)
I believe that it is very difficult to know whether the comments that appeared during 29 hours over a weekend, without contacting any of the groups that know something about the subject area, actually represents consensus, especially since a large fraction of the commenters never got much further than making an anti-wiki and anti-policy "consensus can't change" statement. I think you should have left it open, or at least have refrained from telling people that they shouldn't discuss decisions that were made last year. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:00, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
The RfC that established the consensus lasted a bit longer than 29 hours, so you may be missing some of the point. In my opinion, the chances of a change here closely approximate zero, so I'm not going to re-open it; that's the thrust of WP:SNOW as I understand it. As I said, if you think it should be open, re-open it, but I'm not going to do so. I cited WP:BOLD in the close statement for a reason. ―Mandruss ☎ 03:17, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
  • It would have been good for Whatamidoing to first understand that the participants know perfectly well religion and ethnicity are very important for some people, and even a brief perusal of the previous RFC's will show that lots of arguments were made that it was too nuanced an issue in many cases to be left to an infobox which cannot go into detail. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:20, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
  • A 29-hour closure was absurd in this case. And SNOW seems to have been applied on the basis of a handful of aligned signatures, not because there are overwhelming number of reasons presented here. On the merits, religion and ethnicity are in many contexts both objective and relevant (take the Northern Island conflict and Apartheid South Africa as places where they represented hard-edged groups with near constant political and social relevance). The stance of the community is, quite frankly, anomalous with respect to the human community about whom the encyclopedia should be written, and the original decision privileges convenience of editing ("it causes arguments") over encyclopedic utility (what social parameters ought to characterize people in a systematic fashion). We ought to have this conversation at some point in the future, and two days on Village Pump isn't enough time to establish we're not ready to have it now.--Carwil (talk) 03:00, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
This means that in such contexts, the religion or ethnic aspect is sufficient to have significant coverage and for the article to discuss the issue. If it's important enough, the lead will also mention it. Why is the infobox necessary then? —PaleoNeonate - 03:39, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
PaleoNeonate—why wouldn't the Infobox be used to convey to the reader an attribute of identity that reliable sources support as being applicable to an individual, be that attribute ethnic or religious? The real question is, what do sources say? Obviously in the absence of substantial support in sources we are not going to convey to the reader that such an attribute applies to an individual. But given sufficient support in sources I don't think the Infobox is an improper format in which to convey such information to a reader. Bus stop (talk) 14:10, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
PaleoNeonate — There are at least two reasons to have this in the infobox:
  1. The infobox is designed for quick reference of relevant biographical data, and in many cases, this information is highly relevant to place someone, while not necessarily belonging in the lead describing them. Consider Rwandan politician Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, an ethnic Hutu; and German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt, an ethnic Jew (but eventually not a religious Jew, hence Jewish would go under ethnicity) born in pre-war Germany and exiled from Nazi Germany. For both, ethnicity would become "an indispensable datum of my life" (Arendt's words), defining their situation in times of turmoil, while not characterizing their professional life more broadly. That is, it should be easily reference-able, but doesn't merit being in the lead.
  2. The infobox services the systematization of knowledge in a machine-translatable form via the Wikidata project, and as an element easily translated onto other language Wikipedias.
In both these capacities, ethnicity and religion stand alongside other parameters of the Infobox person template and the person properties on Wikidata, like height, movement, and organization, that should not be filled out for many humans, but are relevant to others.--Carwil (talk) 14:30, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for outlining the precise reasons why labels such as ethnicity and religion do not belong in infoboxes. Readers wanting a quick summary and machines scraping factoids would often be totally misled by a short label which cannot capture a complex story. Johnuniq (talk) 22:19, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
Agreeing with Johnuniq here; :If it were possible to always state it unambiguously and without dispute, it might have been thought acceptable, but it is not always possible, and there is no place to make a clear distinction obvious or not. There has been a large number of contentious disputes over these parameters, and thee disputes have had a tendency to turn into extended and unresolvable arguments between some members of the different groups involved. The shorter the statement, the more difficult it is to write a universally acceptable description, and in practice not having these disputes had been very beneficial to the encyclopedia . The only way to not have them is to never use the parameters. DGG ( talk ) 14:36, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
DGG, this seems like an unreasonably high standard. "It is not always possible", so you conclude that we must never do it, even when it is actually possible, undisputed, and supplied with inline citations? "The only way to not have [disputes] is never to use the parameters", but that true for all kinds of parameters. I'm sure that you don't think that we should delete every parameter that produces disputes in a minority of articles. To name only two persistent sources of disputes off the top of my head, |genre= in {{Infobox musical artist}} and |nationality= in {{Infobox person}} seem to meet your criteria. Why should the community accept and support subjective things such as musical genre, but not something as objective and undisputed as the caste that Mahatma Gandhi was born into? Reasonable people could disagree over whether a particular artist is best classified as this or that; reasonable people will not conclude that Gandhi's caste (and the advantages that it conferred on him in terms of access to money, education, and social power) was completely irrelevant to his the work that made him notable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:46, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
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