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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (policy). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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Discussion about some RS on Reliable sources/Noticeboard

Let's say that RS (a book or scholarly work of some historian) is put up for discussion, because supposedly it is not RS for Wikipedia. Are the arguments for proving irregularities of that RS is reviews of some historian, information from some books, etc. Or editor's personal opinion without confirmation in reviews etc. is enough? How is it discussed in that case, that is, what is needed to dispute or confirm some RS? Mikola22 (talk) 19:00, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

So we can understand your hypothetical, you are talking about a situation where other editors think the source is reliable, but you disagree and want to challenge this consensus and have it declared unreliable… Is this correct? Blueboar (talk) 19:18, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
@Blueboar: No, simply refuting the source with personal editorial opinion. Nothing is presented (RS, review etc) only personal opinion is used. Mikola22 (talk) 19:33, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
OK, I am confused… why are you refuting the source? Blueboar (talk) 19:37, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
@Blueboar: RS is put up for discussion. Two editors dispute that source with their personal opinion. I ask them for quality sources that challenge that source ie reviews etc but they still continue with a personal opinion about the source. Do I need to explain more? --Mikola22 (talk) 19:44, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
Ah… so it’s the other editors who are challenging the source? And you want to know what sort of evidence they need to present? Blueboar (talk) 19:52, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
Yes. What is the rule in such a discussion? Mikola22 (talk) 19:53, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
If there are RS that comment on the source (or even just the cite it as if it were reliable), arguments based on those comments should be weighted more in determining consensus. That said, there are no better options sometimes than informed editor opinion. There are hundreds of millions of unreliable sources about which no RS has commented. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 19:38, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
We are talking about a book of some historian or a scientific paper published by an Academy of Arts and Sciences, etc. Mikola22 (talk) 19:47, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
Unless there is wider input from other Wikipedians, you will have to accept whatever consensus has formed. If this is the only source that you can use to support the content in question, then it may be undue, and have to be left out until a reliable source acceptable to the community can be found. As it used to say in the verifiability policy, Verifiability, not truth is required for inclusion. - Donald Albury 20:18, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
@Donald Albury: I'm talking about discussion, not about the sources. Let's say that the source is RS(book of some historian). What the editors must present when they disputing such a source. Is a personal opinion enough, (that in their opinion the source is not valid, that there are errors, etc., or should the editors present negative reviews or books which talk about these irregularities? Mikola22 (talk) 20:30, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
While closers are encouraged to put more weight on arguments from policy in determining consensus in AfD discussions, there is no formal process for assessing discussions about the reliability of sources, and no rules about how to weigh opinions. It does state in the header for WP:Reliable sources/Noticeboard that: While we attempt to offer a second opinion, and the consensus of several editors can generally be relied upon, answers are not official policy. However, if you add a citation to a source that other editors remove as "not a reliable source", you should not add it again without a consensus of all editors who have expressed an opinion that it is reliable. That the author is a historian, or the publisher is an Academy, does not guarantee that the source will be accepted as reliable in Wikipedia. There is a presumption that sources authored by a recognized authority and/or published by a major publishing house or university press may be reliable, but again, there is no guarantee that such sources will be reliable for any particular use in Wikipedia. Ultimately, the reliability of source for a particular purpose is determined by the collective opinion (consensus) of Wikipedia editors. Donald Albury 20:55, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
Certainly, if one side or the other in a consensus discussion can present “evidence”, it will make their argument stronger and convince more editors to support their view of the source… but it is not required. I have seen cases where someone laid out all sorts of “evidence” to persuade everyone that a source was (or was not) reliable, only to have the broader community decide that this “evidence” was not convincing enough. Blueboar (talk) 21:12, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
@Donald Albury: I learned on this wikipedia that my opinion about some source (book) means nothing, that sources ie negative reviews must say that som RS is bad not me. And then, on the basis of such negative reviews, a source can be removed from Wikipedia. It's not possible that three of as editors take some historian RS ie book and that three of as expose personal opinion about that book ie that is not suitable for us, that book has errors, etc and declare it in consensus that this RS is not RS. I think that such thing is not possible without quality sources. What I learned here that it is almost impossible to declare some historian as no RS. For that we need dozens of negative reviews and academic critiques. For a scientific paper or book of some historian it is a little easier, but even then you need many sources which have negative criticism. And now you say that only personal opinion is enough. This is the first time I've heard that it's a rule. --Mikola22 (talk) 21:39, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
It depends on why it is being disputed. If a book has been self-published, for example, then per the English Wikipedia's rules it might not be used as a source. We wouldn't need a review to specifically complain about the publishing. But your dispute is on the Croatian Wikipedia. The answers you get here will be about the English Wikipedia. Each version of Wikipedia has its own rules and procedures. What you are being told at the English wiki may not apply at the Croatian wiki. MrOllie (talk) 21:51, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
I'm talking about a historian's book from a quality publisher and a scientific paper from the Academy of Arts and Sciences. This is the strongest RS that can be on this globe. There is nothing stronger than that. And now I hear that my opinion is enough to challenge those sources. Are you kidding me? Mikola22 (talk) 21:59, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
You are not hearing anything, because you haven't told us what you are talking about. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:04, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
We do not deal in such abstractions, but in concrete cases. It seems that the concrete case that this is about is not on the English Wikipedia. The question needs to be asked on the Croatian Wikipedia or, in extremis, at meta:. There is nothing we can do about it here. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:18, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
@Phil Bridger: What does Croatian Wikipedia have to do with this question? I am interested in how a RS is discussed on the English Wikipedia. What I as editor must present to challenge some RS? Do I give a personal opinion or do I have to quote reviews ie RS. Well, I can't put a book of some American academic here and say my personally opinion ie that the book is not good? And that my opinion will be taken into account. I guess I have to prove my opinion with something. We are not both historians and reviewers. Mikola22 (talk) 21:53, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
Then what concrete case on the English Wikipedia is this about? Phil Bridger (talk) 21:57, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
I said, the discussion itself. Not a specific discussion, but a discussion in general. Which is the rule in such cases? Let's say we have the strongest RS on the globe, the same was put up for discussion on Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Some editor comes and gives his personal opinion about this RS, that according to him it is not a quality source. Is this the correct way to dispute a source? Or he must expose negative reviews, other RS, etc. Mikola22 (talk) 22:10, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
I repeat that it all depends on the specific case. English Wikipedia policies and guidelines are summaries of what we do in such cases, not statute laws that try to predict what someone might do in a hypothetical case. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:17, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
To say the same thing in a different way, what use would an answer on specific simpler-than-reality hypothetical case be other than to mis-apply it to a different case? RSN works by multiple people weighing multiple considerations for the specific case. Overall I think that that works pretty well. As a mere observation of that process, I think that credible convincing arguments and observations formulated by the participant (and not necessarily quoting a source commenting on a source) are a common thing that influences the discussion. North8000 (talk) 22:45, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
@Donald Albury, MrOllie, Firefangledfeathers, and North8000: Guys let's try again. We have RS of some historian. The same source is published by the best publisher. Some editor put this RS on Reliable sources/Noticeboard for discussion. After that, some editors come and start reviewing the book themselves. That is, there is false information on this page, the author made a mistake od this pages, the context the author gives is wrong, this information is not possible because my personal opinion is that it is impossible, here things happened completely differently and not as described by the author, and therefore it cannot be RS for Wikipedia. I am interested in whether this way of proving the quality of RS is allowed or not. That is, whether such an editor's opinion is taken into account? I am not saying whether this is allowed to the editor because everyone can express their opinion, but whether it is taken as relevant evidence which other editors can also take as evidence (someone's private anonymous review) Try to answer me specifically yes or no. So let's start with this question first.
My experience with this Wikipedia is that in the beginning (until I didn't know the rules yet) I also contested the sources(books) in such a way, but my opinion was not taken into account considering that it is not written anywhere ie in RS and that my personal opinion means nothing without RS. That I cannot challenge RS ie some book of historian only with my opinion. I must have quality reviews that say so. Mikola22 (talk) 06:58, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
Yes as only RS can contest the claims in an RS. The way you prove an RS is not a valid source is to show that it does not represent the expert consensus. RS have a "reputation for fact-checking", you have to be able to show that a source does not have such a reputation. That can only be done by showing that other RS consider its opinions are flawed, that is fact expert opinion is that it does not fact check. If you want a concrete example, look at the career of David Irving, who went from reputable historian to pariah and peddler of false hoods in about two books. Slatersteven (talk) 12:52, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
@Slatersteven, thanks for an answer, @Selfstudier: if you can say your opinion it would be nice so that we have more opinions. Mikola22 (talk) 15:10, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
I already gave my opinion at the other board. Selfstudier (talk) 15:21, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
@Selfstudier: I know, but this is for the reason that everything remains in one place for some other editors if they see a similar problem. However, you said it there and that's it, thanks. Mikola22 (talk) 16:21, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

To put things in context (concrete cases, no abstractions!), let me start by quoting the passage in Pilić&Matković (p389) from which user Mikola22 added material to hr:Koncentracijski logor Jasenovac (en:Concentration camp Jasenovac) — google translation, my bolding and line breaks:

  1. According to the anthropologist's conclusion, "on the basis of the hair color, it can be concluded that this is a population with a light component, most likely of Slavic (Slavic) origin. So there were no Jews or Gypsies there."[ref:196x excavation]
  2. It is to be assumed that they were not Serbs either[ref:Štefan 1]
  3. so it is more likely to be Croats (Catholics and Muslims) and possibly Germans.
  4. Here we must recall the research of Ljubica Štefan, which is part of this research she quoted almost word for word in her works,[Štefan 2] which did not have "scientific quality" due to the lack of notes and the so-called scientific apparatus.
  5. Considering the material, objects, textile and its color and footwear, we can conclude that it was about people who went somewhere for a long time, that is, refugees. It can be assumed that the grave in question could be a war grave of Croatian refugees who were returning from Bleiburg and who were diverted from some of the Ways of the Cross. In all probability, they were liquidated in the near future, they were killed mostly with blunt objects and in series.

Because of all these uncertainties and dearth of scientific rigor expressed by the authors themselves, user Mikola22 has been asked to provide WP:VER "multiple high-quality sources, (because) there are surprising or apparently important claims not covered by multiple mainstream sources".

He has also been told that there must be a consensus on whether to add material or not. WP:VER: "While information must be verifiable for inclusion in an article, not all verifiable information must be included. Consensus may determine that certain information does not improve an article." Currently, no such consensus exists and his edit vas partially reverted.

WP:RS "One may be able to confirm that discussion of the source has entered mainstream academic discourse by checking what scholarly citations it has received in citation indexes." User Mikola22 has been asked to analyze all such citations. Slatersteven instructed "Per wp:rs a source has to have had a positive reception by either A a very large number of cites by nonexpert RS, or B a smaller number from expert RS. It needs to be shown RS thinks it knows what it is talking about. That RS considers it a trustworthy source."

There is a clique of Croatian historians and publicists that are, by some reputable sources, considered holocaust deniers and revisionists. Professor Kasapović of Zagreb University lists štefan, Pilić&Matković among them (here).

So it is not *only* the Croatian wikipedia editors' opinion that mattered, but the overal sentiment on the authors and their work. In that respect, believing that a lack of content is better than misleading or false content, the user has been challenged to show a widespread scientific consensus in reliable, highly cited sources.

But OK, what would you do? Maybe user Mikola22 can try to add the same material in the enwiki article and see how that discussion goes.

Note that m:Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment-2021 put special emphasis on this very article. It had been rewritten since, and its edit history is more-or-less stable.

It was not my choice to bring this discussion here, but I felt obliged to provide the full context. Apologies if it's out of this page's scope. Ponor (talk) 16:46, 29 December 2022 (UTC)


It is not the place of the English language WIki to decide policies or procedures on other wiki's. We are not some higher court of appeal. Slatersteven (talk) 16:56, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

Exactly my thoughts. That's why I was surprised that the RS/N discussion continued here and gained even more traction. Ponor (talk) 17:16, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

My request here is how does discussion work on english Wikipedia. I am part and this Wikipedia. Therefore discussing some source from other Wikipedias has nothing to do with my question here. Editor @Ponor: there must be some order. You can't discuss sources everywhere while I raise topics about procedure and method of discussion. Mikola22 (talk) 17:23, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

The process in English Wikipedia is that, if you want to include certain content in an article, and it is challenged, then there must be a consensus by involved editors that the material is verifiable from reliable sources, has a neutral point of view, and is appropriate for inclusion in the article. The question of whether a particular source is reliable for verifying particular content is based on an assessment of the reputation of the author and publisher for reliability. That decision is not based on any editor's personal analysis or opinion of the contents of the source. If you want to establish that a source that otherwise meets the English Wikipedia's criteria for reliable sources (published, but not self-published, not deprecated, having a reputation for fact checking and/or editorial review, etc.) is not reliable for verification of specific content, then you must present other reliable sources that make that clear. Your personal experience and opinion do not count. Donald Albury 18:25, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
@Donald Albury: Yes, that's what I learned on the English Wikipedia. We can't make personal claims such as "I know it's a good or bad source". And what about disputing or confirming the source ie RS, how to dispute some source (reputation of the author and publisher for reliability)? What do we need as the main argument in that case, procedure? Thanks. Mikola22 (talk) 18:47, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
Well, you can make a personal claim such as “I know it’s a good/bad source” (you are allowed to share your personal opinion) … it’s just that 99% of the time, no one will listen or give your opinion any weight if you can’t elaborate further and explain why you say that. And, obviously, the best elaboration/explanation is to point to other reliable sources that explicitly criticize the source in question.
Something else to consider… there are situations where two sources disagree with each other, and this does not necessarily mean that one is reliable and the other is unreliable. Both can be considered reliable despite the disagreement. When this happens, our policy is to stay neutral and present the disagreement (saying “Source A says X, but Source B says Y”.) Blueboar (talk) 19:11, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
@Blueboar: Yes, when I as a editor say “I know it’s a good/bad source” I always have some basis for my statement, source, review, opinion of another historian etc. When I present a source for discussion, I present negative reviews and then the editors in consensus decide whether that is enough to declare some source as not relevant. Mikola22 (talk) 19:29, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

You are trying to elicit categorical statements where they do not exist. I once encountered a case where a source that had the trappings to be a wp:RS and which was an actually reliable source, through a mere poor choice of words made an absurd statement, so absurd that no other source even addressed the issue. To make up an analogue, a statement that "elephants rained from the sky in Phoenix on January 1st, 2021." There is not going to be a source that says "elephants did not rain from the sky in Phoenix on January 1st, 2021", the statement is officially sourced and there is no policy basis to remove it on verifiability grounds, nor to put in a sourced view that disputes that statement. At RSN where common sense is unofficially utilized, they are somehow going to decide that the source is not sufficient to support the statement even though there is not a policy basis for that. Intuitively they will be applying the missing policy "the more extraordinary/ incredulous the claim, the stronger the sourcing that is required" and decide that a RS statement that went wrong due to a poor choice of words is not sufficient to source that particular statement. So the fuzzy system worked, even if there is no clear policy-based rule that led to it that you could extract as a categorical statement that could be transported to a different situation. North8000 (talk) 02:31, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

@North8000: I have many examples from articles where some information is false, unproven in other sources, or based on falsified information. But this informations cannot be removed from the articles because they are from RS. My personal opinion that some informations are "false, unproven in other sources, or based on falsified information", mean anything, nor did it mean anything in the discussions. I must have sources which talk about it(specifically). I am not a historian or reviewer that my opinion should be taken as irrefutable proof. As for imformation that "elephants rained from the sky in Phoenix on January 1st, 2021." from RS, obviously for such information you do not need to have RS to remove it. But for some false etc information that is significant and historical and even confirmed from two RS, is very difficult to throw out from article with a personal statement: “I know it’s a good/bad source” ie informaton. It is a very complex question. Mikola22 (talk) 06:36, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Otherwise, let's not spread the discussion about sources or information from sources, I'm specifically interested in the discussion process and personal opinion(without confirmation in anything) as an argument that some RS is not good or author ie historian. So we are talking about the strongest rank of sources and publishers of these sources. --Mikola22 (talk) 06:59, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Details matter. The details of your unrealistic hypothetical case (in your last two posts) more or less dictate the answer for that unrealistic hypothetical case. Two very strong sources (established as such) say what has been established to be the same thing. And the only argument against them is one editor who makes no argument other than saying that their personal opinion is that they are unreliable. In that particular unrealistic hypothetical example, obviously that editor's argument to not use them will not / should not prevail. North8000 (talk) 14:53, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
@North8000: In the case of two sources, I do not speak that someone disputes them with his personal opinion, I am saying that on Wikipedia RS must be respected even though some primary information which these sources use does not exist. But that non-existent primary information is a part two RS, and not only two but possibly in five sources. I am saying this for the reason that you cannot actually remove information from RS ie from Wikipedia with a private opinion. That's my experience, because in that case(two sources) I didn't have a private opinion. I had two sources, one from the highest authority ie Historian and Academician who say that the primary source (used by these two sources and another 4-5 of them) is actually a non-existent document. So I don't see any way that some information or RS could be disputed with just personal opinion as I could not remove some information based on two RS even though I had academic sources as evidence. Recently I also have an example of someone disputing RS with the claim that he dealt with this problem private (study, at work), and he privately knows scientific procedure, and this is the reason that he considers some RS as not relevant. Therefore, private opinion in disputing the RS actually means nothing. Mikola22 (talk) 18:57, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
Mikola22, if something is reliably sourced then it doesn't necessarily belong on the English Wikipedia. It is still subject to consensus. I will not post here any more unless you tell us what article this is about because I agree with Donald Albury below. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:22, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
@Phil Bridger: If you are interested in something, you have my page on Cro Wiki and feel free to ask. Mikola22 (talk) 19:29, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

I suggest that this discussion be collapsed. It is not going anywhere, and is eating up a lot of editor time. - Donald Albury 14:46, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

Sure, looks like we're done, anyway. Selfstudier (talk) 19:30, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Separating Fact from Fiction In Movie and TV descriptions

I was extremely disappointed with Wikipedia's posting regarding the feature film Tar. Your listing failed to mention that the Protagonist is not a real person. The response I received from my initial contact with Wikipedia concerning my initial complaint was "Must every article about a movie about a fictional character specifically state that the character is fictitious? Since most movies are not biopics, but made-up stories, doesn't it make more sense to highlight the few rather than the many? Tár is described as "a 2022 psychological drama film." See, for example, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Winston>, described as "a biographical adventure drama war film covering the early years of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill."

My reply was, yes, it should be stated when it is a fictional character. In the case of Tar, Wikipedia merely bolstered the fake ad campaign put out by the studio and/or producers that the film was a biopic about a real person. Wikipedia could have simply added to their page, as they did with 'This is Spinal Tap', "This Is Spinal Tap is a 1984 American mockumentary film...". Fisher92F (talk) 18:12, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

Usually we presume all characters in a work are fictional, but the way the Tar page is written, particularly the plot, it definitely raises questions about Tar being real or not (the number of real life touch points on the plot). Thus is definitely a case that "fictional" needs to be added to the lede and plot section. Masem (t) 18:26, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
That Lydia Tár isn't linked in the article (along with the film being labeled a psychological drama) should clue the reader in this is a fictional story. I haven't seen the film, but unless its presented as documentary the sort of mockumentary label used on This Is Spinal Tap wouldn't make sense. (That This Is Spinal Tap was a fictional documentary was central to the film's premise.) That said, I added a sentence to the lead about viewer confusion about the fictional nature of the film and it looks like there are a number of other sources discussing this, so it could probably be expanded upon as a section in the body of the article. — Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 18:51, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
I've tagged it with the standard {{in-universe}} notice. This happens all the time in fandom-related articles. Boba Fett is more real to some people than Jesus Christ. The "Reception" section doesn't yet seem to address the marketing aspect. I noticed one footnote that they've actually included a "thinly veiled" real person as a character. Elizium23 (talk) 08:07, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
User:Fisher92F I don't know who you contacted, but the right place to discuss the article content is on the article's talk page here Talk:Tár, where more interested editors will see your query. To the above points, Forrest Gump was written as if it was a real story, interspersed with real events, we don't call Gump 'fictional' explicitly in the lead and I don't think we need to. JeffUK 10:19, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Hi all,

Apologies if this is the wrong place for this, but whatevs.

I have recently added the IMDb profile of Barton Heyman to that article following the WP:IMDB-EL "explanatory essay".

The problem is, that IMDb page appears to include text that would appear to be a copyright violation of the 1996 NYT article I cited as reference in the article.

It would appear to me that WP:IMDB-EL does not take this sort of thing into account. Your thoughts about this?

Peter in Australia aka User:Shirt58 (talk) 🦘 11:53, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

If you believe that the content on the IMDB page may violate a copyright, then WP:COPYVIOEL applies; i.e., we cannot have a link in the article to that page. - Donald Albury 14:52, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Acceptable source?

I own a few of my grandfather’s sports medals and would like to mention given achievements in his Wikipedia article, but i wonder if it works as a source? I understand it possibly being problematic policy wise, but they’re not written about anywere (as sometimes is the case with these), so the idea of nobody ever knowing about it is tragic. Wonder if there are any exceptions that can be made. Xәkim (talk) 08:56, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

The medals themselves aren't really a usable source because nobody else can verify them. If your grandfather's achievements were reported somewhere (e.g. in local newspapers) that would be useable. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 09:52, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
Remember that you can still create a web page descibing your grandfather's achievements, even if the medals cannot be used as a reliable source for a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia may be very popular, but its policies do not apply to the whole Internet. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:00, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
If I recall correctly, there is a template for citing a highway sign, so there are pretty wide boundaries on what is considered verifiable, although the common thread is that it's publicly verifiable. jp×g 16:51, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
{{cite sign}} is only intended for existing (as of the time of citation) public displays. Historical signage could be cited through a secondary source, including via archives. 63.118.97.194 (talk) 15:35, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
Your grandfathers article is interesting. Could you not photograph the medals and show them in the article and thus list the achievements? CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 01:19, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
Well, CambridgeBayWeather can i do that? Xәkim (talk) 06:11, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
Or, maybe i can upload them to Flickr and give that as a a source? Xәkim (talk) 06:15, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
I can't give you a definitive answer because I don't know how the laws would cover reproductions of that sort in your country. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 14:33, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
Including photos of existing medals would be an example of WP:SKYISBLUE. If you want guidance on best practices for including medals in an article, WP:MILHIST WikiProject may have a lot of practical experience to share, given that it's a medal galore there. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 21:34, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
WP:RSN may be a more appropriate venue for this question. In any case, I can't imagine that most Wikipedia editors would accept the word of another Wikipedia editor, particularly one who is also claiming a clear conflict of interest, as a reliable source. It's not personal, we just need a source that has been published, preferable one that is secondary and independent. ElKevbo (talk) 03:36, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I think User:Nfhgfjtutumtmrm is not a sockpuppet of user:kfjisee

Wrong venue, if you need to report a disruptive user please read the directions at the top of WP:ANI. — xaosflux Talk 15:17, 5 January 2023 (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.

user:kfjisee is edit to build an encyclopedia but he edit war,abusing 3revert law

example editing

  1. However, the reduction of delayed onset muscle soreness may require compression in combination therapy.]
  2. However, some people who are thrifty and don't buy products. change in new technology It may not affect your liking.]
  3. remove "to benefit people, enterprises and the planet. text...because it is like an advertisement and reference Not certifying that it's really good.
  4. The page you're looking for doesn't exist.--->http://www.caa.co.za/resource%20center/AIC'S/17.1.pdf CAA Website,no that link is show text with "CAA Website" and link to "http://www.caa.co.za/resource%20center/AIC'S/17.1.pdf"]
  5. not warmimg

101.109.178.43 (talk) 07:56, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

What? I think you are in the wrong place -- this sounds like an WP:ANI issue, although I doubt that anyone there will know what to do about warmimgs such as this. jp×g 11:22, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
this is​ ​not​ sockpuppet​ issue, please read topic again— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:44C8:470E:93F5:EA48:C3BE:D2E:C342 (talk) 00:09 6 January 2023 (UTC)
WP:ANI is the correct venue for reporting problem editing. However, I think you need to more clearly explain what the problem is in order for anyone at ANI to comment on it. - Donald Albury 14:35, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
Note, this page is only for discussing already proposed policies and guidelines and to discuss changes to existing policies and guidelines. — xaosflux Talk 14:51, 6 January 2023 (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.

Acupuncture

A case request was opened about 24 hours ago at DRN concerning acupuncture, and I closed it for various reasons, one of which is that there is a consensus in Wikipedia that acupuncture is not medically effective. The filing editor is continuing to ask questions, and so I will ask questions here. Just to be clear, I am a skeptic about forms of so-called alternative medicine, including acupuncture, and I know that Wikipedia is skeptical about so-called alternative medicine, but I would like to be directed to where that consensus has been established.

So, first, will someone please point me to where the consensus has been established that Wikipedia considers acupuncture to be pseudoscience?

Second, if an editor wants to challenge the existing Wikipedia consensus that acupuncture is pseudoscience, what is the correct forum for that purpose?

Thank you. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:15, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Moved to WP:FTN
Any consensus arrived at via an RfC at a WikiProject would represent WP:Advice page perspective at most: it cannot be treated as standing consensus for a standard approach to be followed in individual articles, except when a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS at the relevant article talk page adopts the same perspective directly, or once the community adopts the rule into WP:Policy through a WP:PROPOSAL or if involves language added to the WP:MoS through the normal process. So I would caution that Robert should probably not direct the editor in question to look in that direction, or at least add a lot of caveats if they do. SnowRise let's rap 01:07, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
  • @Robert McClenon, this question is actually more complicated than it sounds. Here's an oversimplified answer:
  • Acupuncture, including placebo/sham acupuncture, often makes people feel better, especially for conditions that are susceptible to placebo effects (e.g., pain).
  • The idea that there is a non-material energy force that goes through certain paths/points in human bodies, and that the act of sticking a needle in those spots changes the flow of that energy is not compatible with scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge deals with the material world; anything that is not part of the material world is non-scientific (e.g., beauty, goodness, spirituality, knowledge per se, etc.).
  • Something can "work" (e.g., function to some purpose; be accurate) and be non-scientific (e.g., all great works of art; all good journalism). Something can "not work" and be 100% scientific (e.g., broken engineering designs, experimental drugs that turn out to be ineffective or harmful).
  • What makes something pseudoscientific is the story you tell about it. If I tell you that a television works because miniature actors run around inside of it to make the picture, then: the television works and my story is nonsense. If I tell you that a television works because string theory says that dark matter interacts with weak forces to make the picture, then: the television works and my story is pseudoscience. If I tell you that a television works because it receives radio waves that tell it which bits of the screen to turn off and on, then: the television works and my story is scientific.
  • Acupuncture could be said to work (for some conditions, under some circumstances), but the story about chi is irredeemably pseudoscientific.
Is it fair to say that acupuncture is pseudoscience? Maybe. It's an incomplete explanation, but IMO it might be fair.
See also Wikipedia:Alternative medicine and Wikipedia:Biomedical information if you want more general information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:27, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
  • @Robert McClenon: As far as I know, there is no such general consensus that operates at the overall community level to find that Acupuncture is pseudoscience and should be described as such, and I'd actually argue it was not appropriate to describe it as such to the editor in question. As Marshall noted above, the topic is under a WP:DS advisory, but that's a behavioural rather than a content matter. Any consensus on this topic one would expect to find on the talk page, in the TP archives, and in the edit revision history for Acupuncture and related articles. That is to say, the WP:LOCALCONSENSUS for those questions. WikiProjects also might provide insight to how editors working in this area feel about such issues, but per my response to Marshall above, those views are WP:Advice pages perspectives and not binding consensus.
It sounds like you had other good reasons for closing the request (and you would know what DRN's requirements are if anyone), and it probably is fair to say that consensus on this issue is unlikely to change, but that's not because of any established Project-wide stance that can be pointed to outside of the talk page discussion on the relevant pages. Rather it is because the belief in many of the claims made by acupuncture proponents cannot be supported by scientific literature to the WP:MEDRS standard, such that WP:V and WP:WEIGHT can be satisfied. That and a healthy dollop of skepticism from the typical Wikipedia editor towards alternative medicine claims, exacerbated by the fact that most veteran editors will have had to deal with POV pushing by SPA proponents of various practices, which probably does heighten the bias a little, if it can be fairly called that.
But there's no reason, in principle, that consensus can't change at the relevant articles (indeed, it's established policy that it always can), and that is where you should direct your editor: to the individual talk pages. Just be sure to remind them that arguing the point against recent and/or very strong consensus on the issues can be found to be WP:Tendentious after a point. That said, WhatamIdoing's caveats above are worth remembering: some claims about acupuncture's physiological effects are more supported by evidence than others, and the medical establishment is hardly 100% aligned against it, because one can still observe a limited effect in narrow circumstances on the one hand, and yet also dismiss other more wild claims of efficacy and what it can treat or accomplish, as well as any related mysticism or snakeoil peddling. SnowRise let's rap 01:27, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
Thank you. I think that the issue has gone away, because the editor who was causing the issue has gone away or quieted down. As I mentioned, there was a request at DRN which I closed. The filing party was an unregistered editor who had been partially blocked from the Acupuncture talk page for bludgeoning a discussion, and who wanted to contest their partial block, and who said that our criticism of Acupuncture was libelous to acupuncturists. DRN is not a forum for block review, or for wild claims that articles are libelous. I think that the issue has blown away. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:47, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Bare references

The following is one of the rules for the article creation process: "Articles should reflect only what reliable sources have said about the topic, and all articles need references to reliable sources." However, some of the draft articles are accepted although they have bare references. So, how do the reviewers implement this rule without knowing the reliability of the references when these are given in a bare form? I suggest that those articles created through this process should have full references. It would make it possible to implement this rule and also, to reduce the number of the articles with bare references. Filling bare references is a very hard and time-consuming activity for the editors. Best, Egeymi (talk) 13:05, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

A bare reference to a reliable source is still a reference to a reliable source and therefore does the job. Any reviewer who can't tell if a bare reference is to a reliable source or not frankly shouldn't be reviewing articles at all, so I don't see any problems here. Iffy★Chat -- 15:14, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
One could place a tag like {{Cleanup bare URLs}}, but it's a yellow tag, which isn't deemed critical, though should eventually be addressed.—Bagumba (talk) 15:44, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
Bare refs are references. The citation style is more to do with WP:LINKROT than not being suitable references. WP:REFILL is a thing as well that'll sort out a lot of these. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 16:47, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
@Egeymi, if you don't like running REFILL, then try out the visual editor. If you find a bare URL in ref tags, then it offers a "convert" button. It can fill in most citation templates automatically, though I don't think either system does a great job with PDFs. Overall, filling bare references isn't difficult or time consuming any longer. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:41, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF) Thank you for pinging me, Egeymi (talk) 06:07, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
Per all of the above, draft reviewers should not be holding up drafts that would pass WP:AFD and be kept. Citation format is not a valid reason to delete an article, ergo, it's not a reason to deny passing a draft into the article space. Bare references are at once sufficient to prove a subject is notable, and also in need of additional work. It's good enough for the mainspace, though as noted, someone should feel free to fix them!--Jayron32 15:53, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for all views, I just wanted to know if these bare urls may be given as full references at the beginning of the process by the editor who submits the article. I didn't say anything about the deletion of such articles with bare urls. Anyway, thanks. Egeymi (talk) 06:07, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
@Egeymi Sometimes Citation Bot can also fill in bare references, but I am not sure if it can be used on one off articles. Rlink2 (talk) 22:04, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
@ Rlink2 Thank you, I use all available tools. Egeymi (talk) 05:34, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Refill is actually one of the suggested tools for reviewers at AfC and next to the CopyVio tools at the top of the article. If there is more than a couple of bare refs (most of the time if there are any) or uncombined references then I run it to fix the issue. Gusfriend (talk) 02:12, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, Egeymi (talk) 05:34, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
It is not too hard to click on a bare reference to see if it immediately is a problem or not - for example, this needs to be done with any forbes.com links as staff and contributor links have the same appearance. But we should definitely not pushing draft writers for not fleshing out a reference format as long as the link is there. Masem (t) 05:03, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Proposals at WT:article size

FYI
 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

I'm in the process making a couple of proposals to change WP:Article size. See the first substantial draft proposal Wikipedia_talk:Article_size#Maintainability_issues, and watchlist the guideline for more proposals to come if you're interested. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 10:06, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

Removing blocks made with the summary "Appeal is only to the Arbitration Committee" from the Admin Policy

Unanimous consensus to remove the first bullet point and change the second bullet point to Xaosflux's revision with edits from isaacl and reccomendations from others; discussion has ran for a week. Two participants noted the need for future edits to reduce redundancy between the two policies. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 01:59, 15 January 2023 (UTC) (non-admin closure)

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.

Should the Administrator and Blocking policies be harmonized by removing the bulletpoint that begins "Blocks made with the summary "Appeal is only to the Arbitration Committee" " from the Administrator policy? 21:46, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Proposed Special situations text

In some situations, the usual policy for reversing another administrator's action does not apply:

* Blocks made with the summary "Appeal is only to the Arbitration Committee": Rarely, in blocking an editor, an administrator will have to note that their block "should be lifted only by the Arbitration Committee" or that "any appeal from this block is to ArbCom only". Such a provision must only be made if the nature of the block demands that its circumstances not be further discussed on-wiki (and instead be considered further only in a confidential environment). This could include situations where discussion would reveal or emphasize information whose disclosure could jeopardize an editor's physical or mental well-being, where on-wiki discussion would identify an anonymous editor, or where the underlying block reason would be defamatory if the block was unjustified. In such cases, the blocking administrator should immediately notify the Arbitration Committee by email of the block and the reasons for it.

In August 2012, the Arbitration Committee issued a reminder that administrators must promptly notify the committee when making sensitive blocks or when noting that a block can be "appealed only to ArbCom". In these situations, the administrator retains responsibility for their block (see this arbitration ruling) but will be accountable to the committee. (Such blocks have been the subject of long-standing Wikipedia practice, and were also discussed in the fourth paragraph of this statement.)
  • Blocks made by the Arbitration Committee: Separate from the first situation, a member of the Arbitration Committee may block an account. Blocks made by an arbitrator with the summary "For the Arbitration Committee", "Appeal is only to the Arbitration Committee", or "{{ArbComBlock}}" are made on behalf of the Arbitration Committee. These blocks are made by a decision of arbitrators, very rarely, and only with good reason. Therefore, administrators must not reverse ArbCom blocks without the prior, written consent of the committee. (See also: Wikipedia:Arbitration/Policy#Appeal of decisions.)
  • Checkuser blocks: Blocks designated as "Checkuser blocks" (that is blocks relying on confidential checkuser findings) may not be reversed by administrators who do not have access to the checkuser permission. Appeal of these blocks may be made to the Unblock Ticket Requests System (which has a designated "checkuser" area) or to the Arbitration Committee. Administrators were reminded in July 2010 that they may not reverse checkuser blocks without prior consent from the committee or a checkuser.
  • Oversight blocks: Blocks designated as "Oversight blocks" (that is blocks relying on information that has been suppressed) may not be reversed by administrators who do not have access to the oversight permission. The Arbitration Committee ruled in March 2013 that oversight blocks cannot be reversed without prior consent from the committee or an oversighter.

Background

There is longstanding wording in the Administrator's policy that allows Admins to make blocks "appealable only to the Arbitration Committee". There is no such authorization in the Blocking policy. The language in the Admin policy originated in a 2012 Arbitration Committee statement and references the need at the time to block editors for child protection and other oversightable activities. This statement came before the existence of Oversight Blocks and before the Wikimedia Foundation assumed responsibility for child protection enforcement. A 2022 review by ArbCom of the use of blocks labeled "Appeal is only to the Arbitration Committee" over the preceding 6 years revealed 11 blocks labeled like that not levied by the Arbitration Committee or by a Checkuser. Of those 11, 5 blocks were reported and 6 were not reported to the Arbitration Committee. Nearly all the blocks were for paid editing reasons. Following this audit the Arbitration Committee updated its guidance and the community subsequently affirmed that admins should not be blocking based on off-wiki evidence in an RfC.

Survey (ArbCom appeal blocks)

  • Yes I have long thought it ridiculous that an individual admin could label something as an Arbcom only block. I'm a sitting arb and I don't have that power by myself - it takes a majority vote of the committee to do. The community has recently endorsed the idea that it doesn't want non-CUOS admins blocking for private evidence and this feels like a related idea, especially because the concept has existed only in the admin policy. This removes wording that was rarely used, that when it was used was not appropriately followed half the time, and that seems out of step with our policies and practices in general. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:46, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support, I do not see any obvious downsides.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:52, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support the only time I ever have done it was in a quasi-OS capacity when something had to be oversighted at the database level in UTRS, so it couldn't be sent to the OS team as a whole for review, and by that time I was already an OS'r. Fringe cases like that don't make policy. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:58, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support, with also fixing associated bullet 2 as below. — xaosflux Talk 23:35, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support, basically per barkeep. It really doesn't make any sense that I, as a non-arb, can either impose on a user a sanction which only arbcom can lift, nor impose on arbcom a responsibility to hear an appeal which they wouldn't have required themselves. -- RoySmith (talk) 23:48, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support, with the amended text Isaacl provided. I also support just the suggestion of merging this with the current text at WP:Blocking policy since there is no point describing the same thing two different ways and there are discrepancies between the two as I note below. Terasail[✉️] 00:17, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support as that individual admin should be able to change their mind. Also community discussion should be able to make decisions on actions by one individual admin. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:04, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support removing an artifact from the mid-2000s before the WMF could handle difficult cases with legal implications. It made sense then but it doesn't now. --Rschen7754 01:17, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • (summoned by the bot) Support, seems sensible. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 01:21, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support both this proposal and xaosflux's additional change below. I am supporting the ideas, not the phrasing (read: I would oppose forming consensus for this specific wording). If it has not been done already, I would ask that whoever closes this discussion reblocks the 11 accounts previously blocked under this bullet point without the "ArbCom block" label so as to avoid any confusion later down the road. HouseBlastertalk 02:29, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support both the main proposal and xaosflux's as sensible updates for the reasons explained by the editors above. Levivich (talk) 02:49, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support both the main proposal and the change made by xaosflux (or as refined by isaacl). --Enos733 (talk) 18:30, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support the main proposal and isaacl's version of xaosflux's change. Ajpolino (talk) 20:55, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • (edit conflict) Support. It doesn't make sense for admins to impose something only people above them can undo. I also support isaacl's modification. Clyde!Franklin! 20:56, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. This is a good change. Thryduulf (talk) 21:04, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support Don't see any downsides, makes sense. I'd support any of the versions, with a preference for whichever ends up most succinct and straightforward, since it appears the exact language is still being workshopped. Lord Roem ~ (talk) 19:03, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. (Summoned by bot) This change, aside from harmonizing the two policies as noted in the prompt, also generally makes sense given the present administrative/oversight framework and tools, and would make the admin policy more expressly consistent with the most recent consensus from both ArbCom and the community at large about the scope of administrator purview when undertaking blocks and certain other actions in areas of heightened sensitivity. SnowRise let's rap 00:25, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
    As to the supplemental proposal below, I also support that, but only to the extent the language remains consistent with Xaosflux's most recent proposal as it stands at the time of this !vote. SnowRise let's rap 00:32, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support Can't see any downside. --Jayron32 15:56, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support if it is appealable only to the committee, that means it is probably a block the committee should be making in the first place. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 23:45, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per above. Made sense in the past, but certainly not now. -FASTILY 05:44, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support Makes sense to me. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:11, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support - That wording is a holdover from when it was needed, but things and processes have changed since 2012 and it's no longer needed and potentially introduces unnecessary ambiguity. Let ArbCom decide what falls under their scope. - Aoidh (talk) 07:40, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support per proposal. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:31, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support. Thank you Barkeep49 for starting this discussion. This policy section has been a major source of confusion, particularly at the WT:ACN discussion that catalyzed the 2022 BLOCKEVIDENCE RfC, see [1]. The section in question seems to have been added unilaterally in 2012 based on an ArbCom statement, not a community discussion, so it seems dubious that this provision ever enjoyed community support from its inception. The explanation of the background makes sense—that this was put in place before the existence of oversight blocks and before WMF T&S played a more active role in child protection. It seems that these sorts of "appeal is only to ArbCom" blocks are now obsolete and can be safely removed from the administrator policy without much consequence. Mz7 (talk) 08:21, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

Discussion (ArbCom appeal blocks)

  • While brainstorming this idea Xaosflux suggested a larger change: use the same language in the Blocking and Admin policies. While that does seem useful, it's a much larger change than what I was aiming for. So I thought it worth bringing up in this discussion, should there be interest, without it complicating the more focused change I'm invested in. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:46, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
  • If this is open, lets fix bullet 2 as well:
    FROM:
    Blocks made by the Arbitration Committee: Separate from the first situation, a member of the Arbitration Committee may block an account. Blocks made by an arbitrator with the summary "For the Arbitration Committee", "Appeal is only to the Arbitration Committee", or "{{ArbComBlock}}" are made on behalf of the Arbitration Committee. These blocks are made by a decision of arbitrators, very rarely, and only with good reason. Therefore, administrators must not reverse ArbCom blocks without the prior, written consent of the committee. (See also: Wikipedia:Arbitration/Policy#Appeal of decisions.)
    TO:
    Blocks made per the Arbitration Committee: The Arbitration Committee may require an account to be blocked as a remedy or motion. Such blocks must be labeled as "For the Arbitration Committee", "Appeal is only to the Arbitration Committee", or "{{ArbComBlock}}". These blocks are made by a decision of arbitrators, very rarely, and only with good reason. Only blocks approved by such as decision may be labeled as such. Therefore, administrators must not reverse ArbCom blocks without the prior, written consent of the committee. (See also: Wikipedia:Arbitration/Policy#Appeal of decisions.)
    Reasoning is that: 1, there no longer would be a "first situation". 2) There is no requirement to be an administrator to be on arbcom; arbcom must order these - but they are enacted by an admin - even if that admin just happens to be on the committee. (there is no "super class" of editors called arbadmins....) — xaosflux Talk 23:32, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
    @Barkeep49: any concerns? Wordsmithing, etc encouraged. — xaosflux Talk 23:34, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
    The entire paragraph is a bit longwinded. It could be half the size and still achive the same thing. For example: very rarely, and only with good reason why is policy making note of frequency and arbitrator motivations in a "don't unblock section"? All that needs to be said is "don't revert" and properly define an "arb block" but maybe not with those exact words... Terasail[✉️] 23:51, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
    I agree with Terasail that the section can be trimmed down to just its essentials, such as something like the following:
    • Blocks made by the Arbitration Committee: Blocks authorized by the Arbitration Committee must have a summary containing "For the Arbitration Committee", "Appeal is only to the Arbitration Committee", or "{{ArbComBlock}}". Administrators must not reverse such blocks without the prior, written consent of the committee. (See also: Wikipedia:Arbitration/Policy#Appeal of decisions.)
    The context of these blocks can be described within the arbitration policy and procedures. isaacl (talk) 00:06, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • @Barkeep49: This might just be me but what is with this policy explicitly stating that blocks from arb motions shouldn't be unblocked but WP:NEVERUNBLOCK only states that remedies should never be unblocked? Terasail[✉️] 00:15, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
    @Terasail that's part of the larger issue - the admin and blocking policies are not really the same here - and really they shouldn't be redundant. I think ideally the admin policy should just refer that special situation blocks exist and have special rules, and everything about "blocking" belongs in the blocking policy. I think barkeep49 is trying to make an incremental positive improvement that will be easier to pass than to have a larger more encompassing discussion right now. — xaosflux Talk 00:22, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
    I have no concerns with more copy editing of the other bulletpoints and am supportive of even more alignment of the language between ADMIN and BLOCK - ideally through transclusion so that they could never become out of sync again. But unlike the other issues we're talking about - which is about what not to do - the bulletpoint in ADMINS gave affirmative permission to do something. If some admin were to reverse an unblock of Arbcoms and go "But it wasn't in ADMIN" they wouldn't get very far. But I think it has been entirely possible for good faith admin to rely on the language in ADMIN to do something that isn't ultimately endorsed by the community any more. Fixing that is my priority. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:32, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Slight tweak to Isaacl improvement, keeps it succinct, preserves one of the ideas above that such blocks can't be made discretionarily:
    • Blocks made by the Arbitration Committee: Blocks authorized by the Arbitration Committee must have a summary containing "For the Arbitration Committee", "Appeal is only to the Arbitration Committee", or "{{ArbComBlock}}". Administrators must only place, change, or remove such blocks with the prior, written consent of the committee. (See also: Wikipedia:Arbitration/Policy#Appeal of decisions.)
    • — xaosflux Talk 18:48, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
      I like the brevity but using the word "change" introduces a complication we've seen with changing CU blocks. Admins can 'tighten' blocks, often for good reason and sometimes in a hurry, by yanking email or TPA - typically for someone abusing email or their talk page. Blocks may also be extended, even though it may not always be particularly recommended. With CU blocks, if the latest entry is not made by a checkuser, then you have to trawl through the block log to understand its origin. You can end up with layers of blocks. The CU and OS policies are not perfect and are inconsistent in this regard, but do ultimately veer towards "loosen" rather than "change" or "alter". I'd suggest retaining this approach. -- zzuuzz (talk) 19:40, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
      @Zzuuzz how about place, reduce, or remove? This wouldn't apply to "CU" blocks (CU and OS are in their own bullets that aren't being proposed for change today), only "ARBCOM" blocks. However there is the situation where arbcom blocks someone, then normal community response is needed to further block them. — xaosflux Talk 20:13, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
      "Reduce" works for me. I was merely highlighting why CU blocks already avoid the word "change". They and Arbcom blocks are very similar in nature. -- zzuuzz (talk) 20:32, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
      "Place, reduce, or remove" sounds good to me, too. It might be a generational thing: each time I read "the prior, written consent" I want to follow it up with "of Major League Baseball".) isaacl (talk) 22:59, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
    I think ArbCom has a fair amount of discretion, under ARBPOL, for how it words its blocks and so the must language (which I hadn't noticed before) sets-up a potential conflict between ADMIN and ARBPOL that the previous language did not. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:27, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
    @Barkeep49 agree, I would say they "must" identify that they are arbcom blocks, but shouldn't require exact verbiage - can tweak that. — xaosflux Talk 00:02, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
    @Xaosflux I agree they must clearly state they are blocks by the Arbitration Committee in some form or fashion but that particular method needn't be specified in the policy. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 00:06, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
    Sure, it could be something like "Blocks authorized by the Arbitration Committee must include a clear indication of their source, such as..." isaacl (talk) 01:33, 8 January 2023 (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.

Discussion at Wikipedia:Good Article proposal drive 2023

FYI
 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

WP:GA has started the new year with a discussion on covering a range of proposals to change policy and update guidelines. The discussion has been live for the last 2 weeks with approximately 20 different proposals currently being discussed. If your interested in participating or offering your own proposals then follow the link to Wikipedia talk:Good Article proposal drive 2023. 🏵️Etrius ( Us) 03:02, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Removal of vague and relative wording from weather/climate sections on places

From Portland, Maine § Climate:

Portland has a humid continental climate (Köppen: Dfb, closely bordering on Dfa), with cold, snowy, and often prolonged winters, and warm, relatively short summers.

From Livermore, California § Climate:

Livermore features hot, dry summers and mild to cool winters with occasional rainfall (Köppen climate classification Csa).

I propose removing the words "cold", "warm", "dry", etc. because they are entirely relative to the climates of other locations, and since the articles already have Template:Weatherbox, these words aren't giving any new information. Numberguy6 (talk) 21:46, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Meh… These are words that are commonly used when discussing climate zones. How would you suggest we convey the same information without using them? Blueboar (talk) 22:49, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
Although clearly what's considered cold in Norway is different than what's cold in Bermuda, I think readers are able to contextualize the climate description to the general region in question, and thus it's a helpful shorthand. isaacl (talk) 23:02, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
  • It's basically a quote/paraphrase of the Köppen climate classification itself; which is useful because most people don't know what Dfb means, but they can get a sense for what "Cold, snowy, prolonged winters" means. --Jayron32 15:50, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
  • I don't mind the descriptors given above. I have problems using things like "bitterly" and "extreme". CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 18:08, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Those descriptors are far more useful than "Dfb, closely bordering on Dfa". CMD (talk) 05:10, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
  • I don't see how this is workable. Aside from the arguments already made above for retaining the option for such language as simple terms (be they admittedly relative and imprecise) for the benefit of the average reader, there's also the fact that these descriptors are often going to align with the language employed by the relevant reliable sources for a location's climate/average temperatures, so I think that in and of itself creates an unsurmountable obstacle for this proposal. That said, I don't see a problem with editors attempting to make better and more nuanced descriptions where feasible SnowRise let's rap 18:42, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
  • This isn't something that lends itself to codification in policy. It depends on what the sources say, so, if there is a dispute about any particular article, it should be decided by consensus on the article talk page. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:31, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
How is this helpful to anyone? Are terms as simple and objective as “hot” and “cold” now going to be (wrongly) considered “non neutral” in the way other simple, objective terms like “far right” and “pseudoscience” are? We aren’t describing climates as “awful” or “nice”; some parts of the Earth are just hotter than others. Dronebogus (talk) 11:31, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
I have worked in Livermore, California many times over a 30 year period, and the description above is accurate and neutrally written. I support keeping this type of prose in city articles. Cullen328 (talk) 18:16, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Vector 2022 has an RFC

There is an RfC on whether Vector legacy should be restored as the default skin on the English Wikipedia. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Rollback of Vector 2022. Thank you. InfiniteNexus (talk) 00:49, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at WT:CSD

There is currently a discussion about a possible new criterion at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#New General Criteria?. At this point there are no concrete proposals, but several users have commented about problematic drafts that aren't obviously covered under any existing criteria. Any input would be appreciated. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 13:57, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Allow registered editors to use vpn (open proxies)

Currently, WP:PROXY states about itself, "This policy is known to cause difficulty for some editors who may need to use open proxies". I have experienced said difficulty and whenever I try to use my vpn I get the Wikipedia notice that I am not able to edit because of it. The rationale of the policy states, " open proxies are often used abusively. MediaWiki, the wiki software that powers Wikipedia, depends on IP addresses for administrator intervention against abuse, especially by unregistered users." Why not let registered editors use vpn (open proxies)? When I use an online website with interaction with other users, oftentimes I can block any given user, I don't need their ip. I don't see why Wikipedia cannot do the same by just blocking the account without resorting to the ip.

The current policy and technical actions of blocking the use of open proxies by registered users seems to be unreasonable. Placing bureacratic hurdles to be able to use one seems to be also unneeded and unreasonable when it comes to said registered editors.

Many people who want to contribute to Wikipedia are probably just enthusiastic about editing here but they may not have much idea in what kind of serious problems that can even destroy their life they can get in by the simple act of editing.[1] [2]

As a balance between vandalism by anonymous users and the safety of editors, Wikipedia should allow unrestricted vpn (open proxies) use by registered editors. Thinker78 (talk) 17:11, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

@Thinker78: This is pretty much a nonstarter. The IP is needed to help prevent block evasion via WP:SOCKPUPPETRY. If you really need edit behind a proxy, then simply just request WP:IPBE.
It's also not true that other websites don't block VPNs. Netflix routinely does this as well (albeit for very different reasons). –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 19:52, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
I never said that "other websites don't block VPNs". Besides, what's the percentage of registered editors who have been blocked? What's the percentage of those blocked editors who could cause really harm to the project for suckpuppetring as opposed to any ip user or new account? Also, for any issues with a new sockpuppet account, pages can be protected.
According to WP:IPBE there are only 806 editors with the block exemption out of the millions of editors in Wikipedia. That's not a very successful statistic of the program. The balance to be made is between sockpuppetry and the safety of editors. Thinker78 (talk) 22:09, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
The people who are blocked by this are disproportionately from developing countries. See m:Talk:No open proxies/Unfair blocking for some examples.
This is going to become a bigger problem. Blocking everyone who uses Apple's iCloud Private Relay is going to cut into the English Wikipedia's core editor base. We're asking people to choose between disabling privacy features on all websites, or not being able to edit. Google Chrome, which is the most popular web browser among editors, is likely to ship something similar in the next year or two. MediaWiki (the software that we use) may have to stop focusing on IP addresses and move to another system, like a Device fingerprint.
I know that there's been talk among the devs and product managers about this problem recently (also, off and on for at least ten years). The one thing that any registered editor could do to help in the short term is to turn on the "IP Info" item in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. I've found this answers most common questions (e.g., what part of the world is this IP editing from?), and it's really handy on the history page. Please try it out, and provide your feedback to the team, so they can get this initial project wrapped up. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:38, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
I live in Guatemala and many times when I try to edit from my cell phone using data and not wifi I find that I am blocked. For some reason the ip address assigned to my phone by my ISP is not of the liking of the blocking code or the dev who placed the restrictions. Basically people are blocked from editing from cell phones only because they live in Guatemala. Thinker78 (talk) 15:49, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
We have the same problem in the US. If you use T-Mobile (the second biggest mobile phone service in the US), then you can't edit from your phone. Admins have blocked all the IPs. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:42, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
With respect it's nowhere near the same problem. T-Mobile is just about never hard blocked. You just need to log in (and if you think that needs softening then you'd be wrong). -- zzuuzz (talk) 22:51, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
That sounds like something they should take up with their VPN client provider. Many clients allow you to whitelist destinations. — xaosflux Talk 15:56, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
That might be possible if we could safely assume that they have control of the VPN (and, e.g., not the VPN that 30% of internet users say they are required to use for work), and if we assume that someone who wants to add a sentence or correct an error in an article has enough skill to know how to do that. Just from those two groups, I'd guess that less than half of people are able to do this in practice. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:37, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Whereas other sites require some form of identity verification, whether through email, phone, payment, social media or other checks and metrics, Wikipedia requires none of that. The requirements for an account here are basically non-existent. For this reason, users who are merely registered or unregistered are usually more similar than you might think. -- zzuuzz (talk) 20:17, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
Some of that identity verification is meaningless though. Most require email verification, but that email could be a throwaway email or to a disposable email service, so not really good identity verification. For better or worse, Wikipedia's VPN/proxy blocks are definitely stronger/better than any other site I've seen, and are a stronger form of identity verification. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:18, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
This three-part series on proxy blocks from Vermont on Diff may be relevant: first part, second part, third part. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 05:25, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
You are linking to the same article for the second and third parts. 2603:8000:FC00:800:1055:C75E:A3A:3DE (talk) 17:39, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
Good catch, thanks. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 01:51, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Those are great blog posts. BTW, the blog's open to volunteers. If you know something about this problem (or another subject) and want to write it up, please contact User:RAdimer-WMF. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
I have been caught out on this a few times myself due to the iCloud relay before giving up on mobile or iPad editing. I was initially thinking that the idea was good but once reading the replies made me realise the issue was more complex. My immediate thought was that, perhaps, it could be Extended Confirmed required to use an open proxy (or carrier grade NAT or similar). If an extended confirmed user gets blocked then their user created for block evasion would still need to reach EC before being able to bypass anything. Gusfriend (talk) 02:09, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Unfortunately we already have disruptive editors who game extended confirmed so that they can edit disruptively on articles that are EC protected. Making it so that upon granting of EC the editor is also given the equivalent of IPBE would make it harder for CheckUsers to identify repeat offenders and block any sleepers they may have pre-prepared. Sideswipe9th (talk) 01:32, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
How do they game extended confirmed? Besides, the issue cannot just be thought about restricting editors but there has to be a meaningful balance with the safety and privacy of editors online. Thinker78 (talk) 03:22, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Same way disruptive editors game autoconfirmed. I'll not say more than that per WP:BEANS, just that the difference between the two types of gaming is one of volume and time. If you edit any of the more controversial topic areas though, I'm fairly positive you will have seen this behaviour.
I agree that there is a balance to be struck between safety and privacy, but I do not agree that granting all extended confirmed users meets that balance. IPBE is closer to balancing those needs, though it is also not without its problems. Sideswipe9th (talk) 03:31, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
"it could be Extended Confirmed required to use an open proxy (or carrier grade NAT or similar)" – I agree strongly with this. It's time Wikimedia left the 2000s and entered the 2020s on security, but we don't want randos being able to hide their IPs from us.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:46, 13 January 2023 (UTC)
We already have WP:IPBE though. If you are effected, then apply. If lots of people get denied this, then we need to rethink, but if we're just complaining about it without applying it's a bit of a non-starter. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 01:10, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
As I mentioned previously, "According to WP:IPBE there are only 806 editors with the block exemption out of the millions of editors in Wikipedia." Thinker78 (talk) 03:27, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
That's not a relevant statistic though as the vast majority of those editors have no need for IBPE (or had no need at the time they edited). We have a current system (IPBE) and so before replacing it with something else we need to determine whether it is fit for purpose and, if it isn't, whether it needs modifying or replacing. Some questions that should help determine whether it is fit for purpose are:
  1. How many people have a need for IBPE (or a replacement)?
  2. Of those, what proportion are good faith editors? (because at least some bad faith editors would definitely benefit in ways we do not want)
  3. How many of those good-faith editors know to ask for IBPE?
  4. Of those good-faith editors that ask, how many are approved?
I don't pay a lot of attention to the IPBE discussions that happen on the Functionaries mailing list, but from what I remember the answer to 4 is that it is at least a majority and probably a significant one. Thryduulf (talk) 12:45, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
That statistic doesn't include admin, who have the right by default. The question is how many people are being denied access via a IPBE request? Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 13:47, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
@Lee Vilenski admnins have "half" of IPBE; they can bypass blocks but can't use tor. — xaosflux Talk 17:03, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
What's your standard to weigh whether someone needs IBPE? Thinker78 (talk) 17:47, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
My personal standard is that IPBE is needed only when someone is unable to contribute (safely) without it and will use it only to contribute in good faith. The second is obviously hard to judge objectively, especially for new users, but for existing contributors your contribution history is usually a fairly reliable guide. (Note this is not an official position of the functionaries or any other group). Thryduulf (talk) 15:36, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
How is the determination if someone is unable to contribute safely? Examples? Thinker78 (talk) 18:44, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
There is and can be no single criterion for this as it depends a lot on individual circumstances, but an editor in a first world country wanting to write about first world topics can do so safely without IPBE in pretty much every case (but exceptions may exist). In contrast an editor in Iran wanting to write about contemporary Iranian politics will plausibly need to use a proxy for their own safety. Thryduulf (talk) 20:46, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
I think that standard is unreasonable. For starters, security experts recommend using vpn when connecting to a network one doesn't trust (it could be public wifi, at home with relatives or roommates one doesn't trust, or a snooping ISP who wants to sell data).[3]
In addition, regarding first world countries, you probably didn't hear of the time when the government of France forced an editor of the French-language Wikipedia, and president of Wikimedia France, under threat of detention and arrest, into deleting an article about Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station.
This points out that even in first world countries, specially in the US, people are subject to violations of their human and legal rights regularly by authorities. Police regularly arrest people for legally protected things, like taking pictures in public places, for having a bumper sticker in the truck.[4] or for criticizing public officials[5]
Finally, some US law enforcement authorities are deeply corrupt and can even murder people for criminal organizations.[6] Thinker78 (talk) 23:03, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
[2]. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 23:46, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
@EpicPupper that's like the dilemma as to whether to have bodyguards or not. How would one know the bodyguards are not bought out or tracking one's every move for nefarious purposes or even to plan to takeover one's businesses? Some bodyguards are really great people, but others probably not so much.
The issue then becomes of choice. The normal advice is to use an open proxy if one thinks the connection is not safe. Some providers of vpn may be dishonest but others are not. Whether its use gets to be beneficial or not really depends on individual circumstances. Thinker78 (talk) 19:57, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
The normal advice is to use an open proxy if one thinks the connection is not safe. @Thinker78: VPNs don't provide security.

You mention bad acts by authorities as part of your justification; if you are concerned about the government arresting you, a VPN will not help. It will simply move the organization that a government needs to order to hand over evidence from a website to the VPN provider (see one highly-publicized example; the service is still in operation). In that case, I would encourage you to ask yourself whether you trust the Wikimedia Foundation or an arbitrary VPN provider of your choice more. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 03:15, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
In the US, the government needs a warrant to compel a business to hand over data. Although sometimes data is handing over by simple request, the point is that there needs to be an extra step rather than without having any privacy protection.
I don't quite see the connection presenting the Wikimedia Foundation vs an arbitrary VPN provider. What's your point? (I had made the following comment previously: "I know that Wikipedia has a secure connection but it has happened to me that the network transaction to connect to it sometimes is reset in the middle of it and the connection becomes unsecured for a couple of seconds, enough to reveal the contents of whatever I am doing at the time.") Thinker78 (talk) 19:05, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
My point is that your data can be handed over through a warrant, with VPN or without. The question is simply *who* is warranted, the WMF or a VPN provider. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 23:21, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
That would be a situation specific to the US. Because foreign governments probably would have a harder time to make Wikimedia submit user data. And I happen to edit from Guatemala. My point was simply that even in first world nations there is risk by the government or other organizations. My guess is that the WMF would make it harder for the US or local government to be able to get user data.
If the user doesn't use an open proxy there is still the issue of the ISP which is probably all too happy to hand over whatever data the government asks for, unlike most vpns or proxies. And as I pointed out, there are many other uses of open proxies that can protect the privacy and data integrity of editors. Thinker78 (talk) 03:15, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
the WMF would make it harder for the US or local government to be able to get user data. Great, then a VPN would compromise your privacy if they have looser rules than the WMF in terms of data disclosure.
many other uses of open proxies that can protect the privacy and data integrity of editors. please mention these uses.
the issue of the ISP which is probably all too happy to hand over whatever data the government asks for, unlike most vpns or proxies. please provide evidence that "most vpns" will not happily hand over user data. I've linked the HMA case, see also this example of a public disclosure policy. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 03:27, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
Uses of open proxy for non-government issues, for example, connecting to a network one doesn't trust or presents issues in a restaurant, cafe, airport, street, roommates, shady relatives, library, work, college, etc.
You asked about trust, well, I trust more certain open proxies than ISPS regarding illegitimate government requests. And I believe that open proxies because of the nature of their business are somewhat more trustworthy in general than ISPS. Not saying that some vpns can't be honeypots or shady. Thinker78 (talk) 03:43, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
I'll add my own personal criteria, which is slightly different to Thryduulf, and probably on the more liberal side of written policy. The user generally needs to be a) unreasonably affected by blocks, and b) not a sockpuppet. There's obviously some judgement which goes into that. I'm not hugely sympathetic to the first world problem of not being able to edit through Apple relays from your latest iPhone due to some false sense of security. Be reasonable: Just turn it off. It's not going to get you arrested, and it will help checkusers. Also, trust me, you don't want to be using the same IP addresses and user agent as some banned troll making death threats. I'm open to persuasion in individual cases though. For users in countries strongly affected by P2P blocks, or in countries with serious security issues, I'll often grant IPBE without even a request, subject to my second criterion. As for who is not a sockpuppet? it's probably one of those things you know it when you see it. I've seen many many extended-confirmed socks, some of whom request (and sometimes get) IPBE. There's no real threshold, short of several years and many thousands of edits, where I'd place any automatic grant. For one thing, we have a plague of accounts getting compromised, and having IP blocks can help when that happens. I find it interesting looking through all the IPBE grants made by all the admins above. I count maybe two in the last several years. There's probably several factors at play there. Lack of requests is probably a leading factor. Also, talking of statistics, the number quoted is just a snapshot. Many IPBE grants come and go as, like a lot users, they're usually temporary. -- zzuuzz (talk) 20:27, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
Zzuuzz, as per my previous reply, there are no guarantees that no one gets arrested or worse for what they contribute in Wikipedia in the US. Thinker78 (talk) 23:07, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
If the authorities are watching what you're doing through your account and HTTPS then you have bigger problems than your IP address. I'll wager that using Apple services won't help your situation either. Most of what you mention is unrelated to IP addresses. I'll just add that I have granted IPBE for these types of concerns. They're not common, and are rarely plausible. -- zzuuzz (talk) 23:39, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
It's more about people not in the radar of despotic or corrupt authorities not getting in their radar. And if they are in their radar, make it more difficult to get snooped on and not completely forget about cybersecurity. I know that Wikipedia has a secure connection but it has happened to me that the network transaction to connect to it sometimes is reset in the middle of it and the connection becomes unsecured for a couple of seconds, enough to reveal the contents of whatever I am doing at the time. Thinker78 (talk) 20:03, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
@Thinker78: That is not how HTTPS works; the connection will not "become unsecured for a couple of seconds" (Wikimedia sites use HSTS). Please familiarize yourself with the underlying technology before making similar claims.

It looks like you've brought up the "authorities" lens again. Please see my comment above.

If your concern is privacy through hiding your IP addresses, IP addresses are not private information and cannot be easily linked to personal details. The linked Google Public Policy Blog post is from 2008; the Web has changed even more since, with more address reuse by ISPs.

Ultimately, the movement is not well-equipped to deal with matters of personal preference or of "societal issues" with regards to governments. If individual editors want to edit with a VPN, they can ask any of the 498 active administrators to request IPBE. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 03:23, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply. I have to point out that instead of assuming that I am not familiar with how HTTPS works and discouraging me to make "claims", it would have been more helpful to direct me to Phabrikator or a relevant venue. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 19:51, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
I do not see how Phabricator is relevant in this situation, hence I did not link to it. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 23:20, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
I'd also like to note that making broad and incorrect claims can incite worry amongst readers of this page; I did not caution against them without reason. 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 03:28, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
There is no guarantees that no one gets arrested or worse for what they contribute anywhere, whatsoever. It's not just the US, all countries suffer from this problem. --RockstoneSend me a message! 04:24, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
@Thryduulf and @Zzuuzz, this story is for you:
Way back in the day, I talked to someone in what's now m:T&S about a problem he'd resolved. The WMF had received an order from a US court to hand over the IP addresses of everyone who had ever read(!) a particular Wikipedia article.
In the end, that information is automatically purged after no more than 90 days anyway, and the law enforcement agency was satisfied with having their over-broad order complied with more narrowly (i.e., only IP addresses that could be connected to the relevant local area), and, happily, it turned out that nobody in that area had read that particular article, so they ended up not having to disclose any IP addresses at all.
But think about that for a moment: The WMF received a lawful court order to disclose the IP addresses of every single person in the world who had read that article.
When you say "Just turn it off" or that most editors can edit "safely without IPBE in pretty much every case", I'd like you to remember that it's not always possible to even read safely. Most people's idea of safety and privacy doesn't include having law enforcement asking you to explain why you were reading an article related to a violent crime they're investigating. And while this story had a happy ending for our users' privacy, if we say "Just turn if off", we're asking them to turn off privacy tools for every website, not just ours. We intentionally purge our IP addresses automatically. Many websites make the opposite decision, and keep that information forever. IMO the ability to contribute to Wikipedia should not be constrained by your willingness to have your location tracked by advertisers or anyone else. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF) readers do not require IPBE to read articles.

VPNs do not provide privacy through their obsufucation of IPs; IP addresses are not private information and cannot be easily linked to personal details. The linked Google Public Policy Blog post is from 2008; the Web has changed even more since, with more address reuse by ISPs. Also note that most advertisers already know your location regardless of if you use a VPN; billions of pieces of information have already been collected from users by the time they turn 18.

I see that you posted this message with your WMF account; is this, then, a statement in your capacity in the Community Relations team, and is it intended to represent the team's thoughts on this matter?

Thanks! 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk) 03:31, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
Did anyone say that IPBE is necessary to read articles? I certainly didn't.
I tell this story to illustrate that we should not assume that IP addresses are ever safe or harmless things to disclose, or that any of us can easily judge when or whether an editor "needs" IPBE. Do I personally want to edit from an IP range that also contains a malicious actor? No. Do I want to exclude every current and potential editor whose ISP that uses CGNAT or who edits from an iPhone, and who hasn't been able to both discover the process for requesting IPBE and then convince an admin that they really, truly, desperately "need" IPBE? Also no.
As for your other claims, most IP addresses can no longer be easily linked to personal details, but this is not always true, even today. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:52, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
  • I don't this this is a great idea as-is, but perhaps something. We could make some intermediary access, that only has (ipblock-exempt), and does not have (torunblocked, sfsblock-bypass) - but would need to decide on some bar for it... so it would need to be what does the community and admin who have to deal with this is a low enough bar? I don't think econf is high enough - maybe something like 1000edits and 180 days with autopromoteonce. If the bar is so high that it would be useless, then it is useless to bother though. — xaosflux Talk 17:09, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
    Maybe 90 days? Half a year seems like quite a high bar. 90 days would already be 3x XC and more than inconvenient for anyone trying to game the system. Terasail[✉️] 17:33, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
    According to Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits, only 0.25% of editors are extended confirmed. That's 1 in 400. Now the questions are, what range of number of edits do you think is entry level bar for ipblock exempt? What's the global share of edits performed by said segment of editors? To have a rough measure of good faith edits, what's the percentage of said editors who have been blocked indefinitely (keep in mind that even User:Koavf was at one point blocked indefinitely)? Thinker78 (talk) 17:44, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
However this policy is definitely causing more difficulties for unregistered users than registered ones, especially those who needs to use proxies to bypass the censorship of Wikipedia. They will feel frustrating after trying to create an account but find his IP blocked. There are many ways to bypass the block, but WP:IPBE is only applicable for registered users and WP:UTRS is very inconvenient. They may even be unable to send emails to unblock-en@wikimedia.org as the address is blocked. The only way may be requesting to unblock on his talk page on Meta-wiki, but it is impossible for administrators to unblock the proxy so they may give advice to the user to let him try the IPBE, UTRS, etc. In conclusion, it is very hard for an unregistered user to contribute to WP at such situations. (I know these because I also have had such experience.)
Then I would like to share what I think is useful to directly connect to Wikipedia: TCPioneer (found on an instruction page on the Chinese WP) IntegerSequences (talk | contribs) 07:08, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

I think we definitely need to be realistic; one of the biggest problems Wikipedia has is its tendency to solipsism even when it's not at all helpful. We already recognise that editors behind the Great Firewall have a need for editing behind a VPN. As WhatAmIDoing points out, there are times where ultra-zealous law enforcement agencies have been casting wide nets already, and with the direction of politics in some places of the developed world… well, what if a red-state attorney general decided that editing Wikipedia articles about abortion or trans issues constituted promotion of the idea, and demanded editor details? What if Suella Braverman decided that the article English Channel migrant crossings (2018–present) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) was "portraying people smugglers in a positive light"? We can't ask editors to make themselves feel unsafe just because we want to stick to a view of "open proxies" that's been obsolete for at least half a decade. That said, I understand the need for a balance; at the very least, IPBE should be shall-issue if someone in reasonable enough standing requests it. Sceptre (talk) 09:04, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/wikipedia-admin-jailed-for-32-years-after-alleged-saudi-spy-infiltration/?comments=1&comments-page=1
  2. ^ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/wikipedia-editor-allegedly-forced-by-french-intelligence-to-delete-classified-entry/
  3. ^ https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/do-i-need-a-vpn-at-home
  4. ^ https://nypost.com/2019/05/07/florida-man-arrested-after-refusing-to-remove-i-eat-a-bumper-sticker/
  5. ^ https://reason.com/2022/05/23/police-arrested-him-for-criticizing-the-cops-qualified-immunity-st-tammany-parish-louisiana/
  6. ^ https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/nyregion/new-york-city-to-pay-dollar5-million-in-mafia-cops-case.html
  • I think the blocks are irritating, and will be increasingly so. I use iCloud's proxy, for example, and hence sometimes encounter these blocks, at least on a mobile device. I used to disable the proxy temporarily + restart my browser, these days I just wouldn't bother make an edit on a mobile device. I suspect this feeling is much stronger for driveby editors who might see an error, wish to fix it, but don't really want to spend minutes changing system settings to do it, so will abandon. The CU use-case makes it difficult to just abandon these blocks I suppose, but the problem stands. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:24, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Update policy editnotice

While not a change to a policy, it will have a change on all policy pages so I am posting here for visibility. The current editnotice comes off as a Wall of big text and no one really wants to read that. Editnotices are best when they have a title, bullet points of what to do and additional text for anyone who cares. I was inspired by {{Contentious topics/page restriction editnotice}} to update this editnotice and propose changing it to {{Policy or guideline editnotice/sandbox}}. I can't say I ever properly read the edit notice before since I never felt the need to read 4 lines for just an "attention", this change should help with that. Terasail[✉️] 15:10, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

I dig it. If no one is going to read it anyways, it's useful to have less material for them not to read. --Jayron32 15:13, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
They both seem fine, however the proposed one looks more like a "wall of text" that I'm not going to read then the current one to me. — xaosflux Talk 15:17, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
You think so? There is only one sentence which is the full width of the box (The final one), the other 4 are between 40%-60% of the width of the box, with 2 clear bullet points of what to do instead of having the instructions mixed in a text block. Terasail[✉️] 19:56, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
@Terasail, I've no opinion on the content, but I suggest dropping the icon. Those tend to display badly on narrow screens (e.g., mobile). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:10, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
 Not done: No consensus for this being a positive change as proposed. Terasail[✉️] 01:53, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Adding an edit notice to standalone lists of organizations

I'd like to mass request an edit notice to lists of organizations. Specifically starting with all the pages listed in Category:Lists of high schools in the United States by state. Wikipedia:LISTORG indicates that for inclusion in a standalone list, an entry must have an existing page or be independently and reliably sourced. Thus, I have created Template:Editnotice listorg. I have also begun the process of removing entries from lists in the aforementioned category but am going to hold off for now until I discuss here and get approval. I'm hoping this will help cut down on link spam and cruft in these lists. Philipnelson99 (talk) 13:23, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

If the template needs changing, then that is perfectly fine by me. Philipnelson99 (talk) 18:46, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
It's unclear to me if you intend to put this template on the page or on the talk page? Jahaza (talk) 19:38, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
That's fine, I meant specifically the list pages included in Category:Lists of high schools in the United States by state, not the talk pages. Philipnelson99 (talk) 19:47, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
These lists don't have a notability criteria. So it might be better to add citations than to try to eliminate schools that fit the list inclusion criteria as cruft/link spam, because they're not really. There are databases that can serve as a source for a lot of schools. Jahaza (talk) 19:38, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
Does WP:LISTORG not apply here? If so then I agree that this isn't needed. But as it stands, I believe it does apply and therefore any schools added would need to meet the criteria specified in that policy. If I've misunderstood the policy that's fine. And if a blanket reference from an independent database suffices that's fine too, but it would obviously need to be referenced on the page. Most of these pages don't contain such references and if they contain references at all they are usually primary sources which don't meet the criteria in WP:LISTORG. Philipnelson99 (talk) 19:50, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
I think you're misreading WP:LISTORG? That guideline does apply, but it specifically says that members of a list don't have to be independently notable unless the list itself specifies that criteria. They just need to be cited. Since these lists don't have a notability criteria, any school added is not cruft as long as it can be verified. Meanwhile, it's better to add those citations rather than just blanked deleting the content. Jahaza (talk) 20:18, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
I am specifically looking at:

If the company or organization does not have an existing article in Wikipedia, a citation to an independent, reliable source should be provided to establish its membership in the list's group.

— WP:LISTORG
I acknowledge there is a sentence of policy before this that says the entry does not have to meet WP:NOTABILITY, but entries also to have meet the second part quoted above. Maybe removal of unsourced entries is too much but new entries should absolutely adhere to the policy. Philipnelson99 (talk) 20:26, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
Also take a look at this diff where I cleaned up a lot of entries that had no source at all. Adding sources to each one of these and verifying that they are indeed real schools would take an extraordinary amount of time. Not saying it's an unwarranted thing to do but lots of these articles are in this condition right now. Philipnelson99 (talk) 20:33, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
  • I would recommend you go ahead and undue your removal of non-linked public high schools from whatever states you have removed it from. You absolutely have failed to attempt to source these entries at all (where any sort of minor newspaper coverage at all would have sufficed). You removed Vincent Martinez from the list of California schools: here's a source right here [3]. You removed New Brockton High School: ditto [4]. It's one thing to remove external links, and it's another to make wide-sweeping removals which are in all honestly pretty terrible despite you acting in good faith.
Also, your new notice is wrong. You absolutely can add external links to lists per WP:ELLIST. For example, it would not be undue formatting it as:
School School District City Website
New London High School New London, Wisconsin New London School District Official website
Saying you cannot add links unless they are a reference is wrong. (If you don't revert, I will myself, as your WP:BOLD changes have been opposed.) Why? I Ask (talk) 10:32, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Just to be clear, you've now reverted all the pages I changed back to their state from the other day. I'm not going to revert your changes because I'm not going to edit war but I still believet WP:LISTORG applies here and that the edit notice should be added which is the original proposal. Philipnelson99 (talk) 12:08, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
I believe you've misread WP:ELLIST.

External link sections are not prohibited at the end of stand-alone lists or at the end of articles that contain embedded lists. However, the lists themselves should not be composed of external links. These lists are primarily intended to provide direct information and internal navigation, not to be a directory of sites on the web.

— WP:ELLIST
There is a part in WP:ELLIST that says official links may be included if the list is of software or political candidates. I see no mention here of standalone lists of organizations. WP:LISTORG says that entries must be independently sourced or have existing Wikipedia pages. Philipnelson99 (talk) 12:46, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
No, that provision basically means that you can't have lists that read:
As part as tables, yes they are allowed, using politicians and software as non-exhaustive examples. And the vast removal of easily verifiable information is just blatantly disruptive. Instead of taking the short time to look up the school on the internet, you removed them. These aren't facts that need careful studying, this is simply verifying that a school exists through local coverage. You have utterly missed the purpose of WP:LISTORG. And besides, you've also overlook the fact that many non-linked schools are mentioned at their school district as well. Why not create redirects? You're trying to create solutions to a problem that hardly exists or is easily fixable. Why? I Ask (talk) 13:35, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
I'm simply removing information that doesn't adhere to an existing policy, how is that disruptive? The information can always be added back in a way that adheres to policy in the future. Philipnelson99 (talk) 13:45, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Dude, every state has a directory that lists every school. And guess what? Every single school you removed are on those directories. Each highschool is verifiably real and this meets the criteria for inclusion (private schools not included). It does no good for the encyclopedia to require citing that yes, "School A" is real when it takes a five seconds to search on the directories or Google. Why? I Ask (talk) 13:53, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
@Philipnelson99, you have misread ELLIST. @Why? I Ask is correct. It would be very strange if a guideline specifically recommended a table of "Candidate – Political party – Official website" but secretly meant to ban "School – Government agency – Official website".
(In case it matters, I wrote ELLIST.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:11, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
  • The key here is WP:NOTDIRECTORY. We shouldn’t list every high school in the country (any country)… only those that are notable on their own. Blueboar (talk) 14:32, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
    Exactly, I think the edit notice could be altered to include that information. Philipnelson99 (talk) 14:37, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
    That's an entirely separate issue than what this notice is trying to correct, and your own analysis of WP:DIRECTORY may also not be correct here. There's very few public high schools from each state without a page, and adding them to the list for completeness is not undue (per WP:CSC). (Most of those missing pages could be created relatively easily too). Or, as stated, they can be redirected to the school district.
    Basically, the edit notice is wrong, so I oppose it. And whether or not listing all public high schools of a state should be done is a completely separate discussion. Why? I Ask (talk) 15:11, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
    The edit notice is correct, it plainly states that no entries should be added that do not follow WP:LISTORG. Philipnelson99 (talk) 15:14, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
    No, I've already pointed out that the section about external links is wrong. Why? I Ask (talk) 15:15, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
    It's a policy, are you saying the policy is wrong? Philipnelson99 (talk) 15:16, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
    No, the policy is right. It says in other cases, such as for lists of political candidates and software, a list may be formatted as a table, and appropriate external links can be displayed compactly within the table. Yes, links can be included per the policy. Why? I Ask (talk) 15:18, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
    You still haven't said why exactly the edit notice is wrong. You shouldn't add entries without an independent source or unless they have a wikipedia page. Regardless of how easy it is to source an entry, it must be sourced or meet notability guidelines. Including an WP:ELOFFICIAL is an entirely different issue than providing an edit notice and removing non-adhering entries. Philipnelson99 (talk) 15:35, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
    Because the edit notice literally says Do NOT add external links. There's nothing prohibiting an editor from doing so. Otherwise, sure it's fine and correct. But the mass removal of easily citable information is not cool. Otherwise, every page that is unreferenced would be systemically deleted despite how easily notability can be proved. If you want to prevent editors from adding unsourced information in the future, great. Removing longstanding entries that you admit can be sourced but you've refused because "it takes too much time" (your words) is disruptive regardless of any policies. Why? I Ask (talk) 16:00, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
    @Blueboar, it's always been fine to make a list of non-notable subjects, or a mix of notable and non-notable subjects. (Weren't you around for the Pokémon wars 'way back in the misty dawn of the wiki?) I don't understand why you think a list of high schools must be limited to notable schools only. We wouldn't question a short list of high schools in the standard ==Education== section of a small city or a complete list of all schools in a school district (example), so why couldn't there be a longer list in a bigger area? "List of high schools in the United States" would be unwieldy, but "List of high schools in South Dakota" would be manageable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:16, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Should non-admins be allowed to review unblock requests?

There's clear consensus here that evaluating unblock requests isn't something that non-admins should be doing. It's fine to offer opinions, but leave the actual acceptance/decline of the request to an admin. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:44, 1 February 2023 (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.


There's an LTA that has a fondness for going through CAT:RFU and making bogus unblock reviews. [5] is an example. Discussion ongoing at Wikipedia:Edit filter/Requested/Archive_20#Illegitimate unblock request handling. As a policy issue, is there any reason to allow non-admins to review unblock requests? --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 20:01, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

I can't think of a legitimate case, outside of procedural closes after being under/TPA blocked after the review had been posted, or if it were added by another party. Realistically, this could still easily be done by admin.Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 20:22, 28 January 2023 (UTC)
Without the toolkit you cannot accept an unblock request and the only defensible declines would be procedural, but those are invariably of the type that could practically be done by a bot and so contribute minimally to the maintenance burden. Usually if someone who isn't a sysop starts to review unblock requests we ask them to stop even if the requests were certain to have been declined by anyone.
Be that as it may, if this is the LTA I think it is they will promptly find a new way to disrupt the unblock process or find a new internal process to disrupt, so don't get your hopes up too much even if an edit filter is implemented.
There's also the risk they will game the filters to perpetuate disruption by interfering with reverts by non-sysop RCP. I won't get into this for obvious reasons, but it's been done before and any filter would need to be constructed with due care. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 04:07, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
If a user makes a disruptive request, the request should be removed completely. Otherwise, the user should get a response from an account which is capable of unblocking - currently (and probably permanently) an admin account. Animal lover |666| 13:36, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Blocking policy#Unblocking says quite clearly that Any user may comment on an unblock request; however, only administrators may resolve the request (either declining or unblocking). Non-admins are not allowed to review unblock requests under the current policy as written. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 16:20, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
I can't see any reason why the policy should change to allow that. There are of course a few administrative tasks where a WP:NAC is welcomed when done appropriately. Unblock requests are certainly not one of them. The WordsmithTalk to me 02:05, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
  • As someone who has spend over a decade defending the rights of non-admins and demanding that we stop hassling them for doing work that doesn't need an admin to do; this is one of the rare cases where non-admins should not be handling the work. Non-admins can feel free to weigh in with their opinions, to comment, but the mechanical act of closing the unblock request should still be left to admins, because only admins can actually unblock them. From a policy point of view, I'm pretty sure this is already clear in policy, as noted above by Chess. Given that, I don't think we need to be careful in handling this troll in question. The edit filter is a good idea here. --Jayron32 16:05, 1 February 2023 (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.

Overcategorization of events by venue

Wikipedia talk:Overcategorization#Categorizing events by venue

Having lost at Categories for Discussion repeatedly, and opposed again on the Talk, the user has attempted a non-conforming RFC.
William Allen Simpson (talk) 08:39, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Elevate WP:BLUDGEON to guideline

The essay WP:BLUDGEON seems to have wide support among the community and compliance with it is expected as part of standard user conduct. I was surprised that it's not already listed as a guideline. Despite this, I still often see users, sometimes even well-established users, replying to and arguing with a dozen comments in large discussions. I propose that we make it official and include it as a guideline. I believe it could be done by either of the following:

Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:08, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't think this would be a good idea. Much of the time people who oppose a position will accuse an editor advancing it of bludgeoning the process, but those supporting it will, on the same evidence, regard that editor as simply correcting the point made. Neither gets us any closer to a resolution. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:09, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
Phil Bridger: It is mentioned briefly in other guidelines (like WP:EXHAUST) if that suffices. --Mhhossein talk 08:31, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
I also don't think this is a good idea. WP:TPNO and WP:CIVIL are sufficient guidance in the PAG space that cover this. This page does what a good essay does; it explains or elaborates how a person may violate a policy or a guideline, and what to do to avoid that. But explanations are not the PAGs themselves, and should not be confused with them. --Jayron32 13:28, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Agreed completely. The essay can be used to explain why a certain behavior is considered uncivil, but it should not in itself be considered a policy on the same level as WP:CIV. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 13:55, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Bludgeoning is more often than not encountered as a secondary "offence" together with with some other more serious abuse (often NOTHERE) and it is the combination that gives rises to sanctions. Bludgeoning would have to be laid on pretty thick to get sanctioned just for it. It's a bit like incivility, we shouldn't do it, but in the heat of the moment, we do, again rarely sanctionable, unless its ott. Both more frequent in CT areas. Idk, perhaps that is why it is an essay rather than a guideline.Selfstudier (talk) 23:13, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
Linking to essays when making a complaint about behavior is usually a bad thing. As a starting point, such essays might make a good vague point about behaviors to avoid, but lack the carefulness and specificity to be taken any further than that. So the "vague" is dangerous and easily abuse-able and when taken or used beyond that. They are used to paint someone as being bad without having to be specific abut the complaint. Lots of such linking is also used to give a false sense of credibility, wiki-expertise or authoritativeness to the complaint or disparagement. North8000 (talk) 20:10, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
IMO not a good idea. Any persistence or failure-to-cave can be claimed to be bludgeoning. North8000 (talk) 20:21, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
I don't think that it would be pointful to make such a change because Wikipedia:The difference between policies, guidelines and essays. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:51, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
This is the sort of thing that I think should be fixed. It's unfair to users if we say not to present essays as policies but we then use essays to justify sanctions when it's convenient. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:26, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
But, the purpose of having an essay written out is so that people don't have to type out the entire essay every time they wish to justify something that the essay explains well. Instead of saying, "I think this person's actions are disruptive because they are repeatedly commenting on the discussion, to the point where no one else can get a word in edgewise. Clearly, that kind of domination of the discussion drives away other voices and is bad for the collaborative process, clearly they should stop doing that." That's a lot of things to type, every time someone exhibits that behavior. When someone writes "per WP:BLUDGEON", they are saying basically what I said above, and their rationale is no less valid than someone who types out an entire paragraph. --Jayron32 15:19, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
I'd support the second option, though exact language would need to be drafted. BLUDGEON is a good essay, but it's written like an essay and not like a guideline. I think caution against bludgeoning would be a good guideline in two important senses: it reflects current admin practice—as admins are blocking users while citing the essay—and the community benefits from discussions where a multitude of voices are not crowded out by one loud one. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 08:05, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
The point of BLUDGEON, like many explanatory essays (those with the {{supplement}} tag), is to further elaborate on a specific problem/situation that is already covered by the existing policies and guidelines. That's why such essays don't have to be guidelines themselves: They contain nothing that is not already covered (in less detail) in the other guidelines and policies. A lot of essays like that exist (e.g. WP:BRD, WP:SNOW etc.) that have broad community support but that does not mean we should transform then into guidelines. That would be the kind of detailed WP:CREEP (another such supplement) that our policies and guidelines should strive to avoid. Regards SoWhy 09:42, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose any change from essay status or adding bludgeoning to any guide - Genuine bludgeoning is one of those "you know it when you see it" things, which allows it to be mis-applied simply as a device against the minority in any discussion. To put it simply, someone who, being in the minority in a discussion, responds to the majority in a discussion addressing their points and not needlessly repeating themselves, has done absolutely nothing wrong, even if they respond to each of them individually. Wikipedia is not a vote, it is not a place where simply being in the majority makes you correct. If ten people raise different arguments in an AFD that are not properly grounded, then a single editor is entirely correct to respond to each one of them pointing out why they are wrong, and this is not uncivil or disruptive. Unless and until bludgeoning is defined in a way that accounts for that, essay-status is where it should stay. FOARP (talk) 15:49, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Most of the unsourced history section at Sherborn, Massachusetts, was copied word-for-word from this source. At that source, it states: "copywriter by Betsy Johnson, 1988. (permission given to reproduce); edited, 2020". Does this mean it's ok to leave the history as it is, and just credit the source? Thank you. Magnolia677 (talk) 10:58, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

The proper place to raise this question if at Wikipedia:Copyright problems, as people that patrol THAT noticeboard are more likely to have experience working with these types of issues. --Jayron32 12:41, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
@Magnolia677 I'd say our article is a copyvio. The statement on the source website is not explicit that anyone can use the content, just that the copyright holder gave permission for the website to use her content. Nthep (talk) 17:08, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Proposed guideline regarding Islamic honorifics and user-generated calligraphic images

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Islam-related articles#Islamic honorifics and user-generated calligraphic images. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:49, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Create Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Years

Wikipedia:WikiProject Years currently has an issue where there are no agreed upon sitewide standard for such articles, and several users of the WikiProject are attempting to enforce ill-defined project standards on users inside and outside of the WikiProject. The most recent examples of this enforcement can be found at Talk:2022#RFC on the inclusion of Barbara Walters in Deaths (Result:) and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years#Defining international notability, but the WikiProject has been plagued with WP:OWNERSHIP issues for some time. I propose that the community as a whole create a guideline page at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Years so an agreed upon standard can be implemented. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:45, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

There's not much issue regarding the style or layout of main year articles. The small minority of people wanting to remove all or the vast majority of the deaths are likely motivated primarily by wanting to avoid disagreements. The main issue is which events, births & deaths to include, which isn't a style issue. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 19:11, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
I would strongly disagree with this notion. More and more people don't like the current "absolute internationalism", and more and more people who attempt to add figures are categorized as "fans" and discriminately reverted/treated as such on previous talk page discussions. If Wikipedia is meant to be for our readers, it should include both what is norable AND what people want to see, albeit with some quality control to ensure that "the acquisition of Reichstag-Climbing Spider-Men, Inc. by the Angry Mastodon Corporation" isn't on there. InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 20:46, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
I don't think an MOS page is the answer, as there isn't any issue with style or formatting, and MOS isn't the place for an inclusion criteria. there are no agreed upon sitewide standard for such articles is incorrect; as has been pointed out at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years#Defining international notability, there is indeed a sitewide standard for such articles, and it's WP:WEIGHT. I believe WikiProject Years has lost sight of the fact that these year articles are articles and thus are subject to the same WP:NPOV policy as all other articles. How do you determine what to include and what not to include? By looking at what WP:RSes include and exclude. There is no lack of RS "year in review" articles that can serve as sources. If an event is included in multiple RS "year in review" articles, then it's probably WP:DUE for inclusion in the Wikipedia year article. Same for deaths (if those continue to be included in year articles): there are plenty of RS "notable deaths of the year" articles. 2022 is supposed to be a summary of RSes that write about "2022 in review". Applying that logic to Barbara Walters (or any nominated inclusion) would easily resolve the question. The problem at WP:YEARS is people voting without reference to (and in some cases, such as Barbara Walters, obviously without even looking at) RSes. WP:YEARS should probably write an internal project guideline that reminds editors to look at RS and to apply WP:NPOV when deciding what to include and exclude. I don't think anything more is needed other than enforcing our existing content policies. Levivich (talk) 19:27, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
I generally agree with this approach regarding years articles, and it's what I initially tried a few months ago, but it was rejected by users that wish to maintain the year articles as they are. I made this proposal in the hopes that the broader community could provide input on what goes into these articles and how they're formatted, but really anything involving sitewide input would be great at this point, regardless of what conclusion it comes to. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:38, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
@Thebiguglyalien: Would you mind dropping a link to that discussion from a few months ago? I'd be interested in reading it. It sounds like you were on the right track then, and I agree that this merits broader community input and thank you for starting this discussion. Levivich (talk) 19:42, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
There was (and is) a lot going on. It got a bit heated and a bit spread out. The discussions in question are Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years/Archive 15#Standalone lists – prose in year articles and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years#RfC on prose in year articles, but basically everything after that relates to the topic somehow. There's a novel's worth of arguments on the WikiProject talk page that basically goes in circles. I think the talk page there speaks for itself why I'm trying to reach out to the community. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:52, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
The discussions to which you refer are about the content of the article, not about formatting in the sense in which the Manual of Style already covers Years. The changes you wanted to make related mainly to whether you should be allowed to add subjective, unreferenced summaries to the year articles, without any recourse to the Talk page. The "Example Year" section of Wikipedia:WikiProject Years included a section to allow for a short summary, which for some reason you removed (I suspect that was simply a careless mistake when you tried to rewrite that section) and I restored. Deb (talk)
The large majority of year in review articles are country-centric. For example, those by the US media for 2022 would prominently include Depp v. Heard & the Will Smith–Chris Rock slapping incident as being among the most important events of the year, but not mention the 2022 Peshawar mosque attack. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 20:01, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
The large majority of year in review articles are country-centric is easily disproven. I typed in 2022 in review into Google, and here is what I found on the first two pages of results: AP, Reuters, CBS, The New Yorker, McKinsey, WSJ, NPR, CFR. Every single one of those is global in scope. CNN divides it into "US" and "international". There is no lack of RSes that do a year-in-review with a global scope. I didn't see the Peshawar mosque attack listed in any of those, although I did see other Pakistan news listed in many of those. It's almost as if ... wait for it ... the RSes don't think this mosque attack was one of the most important events that happened in 2022. We should follow those sources. 2022 Peshawar mosque attack does not appear WP:DUE for inclusion in 2022; it should be removed, if we followed WP:NPOV. Levivich (talk) 20:27, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
You have to be joking if you seriously think the Peshawar mosque terrorist attacks, which killed over 60 people and injured nearly 200, is less internationally notable than a slap on an awards show. How can you not see the issue with systemic bias? TheScrubby (talk) 20:39, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
How many of the links I just posted included the awards show slap? Therein lies my answer to whether it should be included in 2022. It's a simple algorithm: follow the sources. Levivich (talk) 21:00, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Those many not, but many do. Many media sources portray the slap as one of the most important events of last year. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 22:00, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
If that were true, you'd have no problem posting some examples of "year in review" articles by reliable sources that list the slap. I've seen them in "2022 in entertainment" reviews--in which case, the slap is one of the biggest stories of 2022 in entertainment--but I have not seen them in the general overviews, such as the ones I posted above. Levivich (talk) 22:09, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Global, maybe - but with a disproportionate amount of coverage from their own countries. You're helping to prove my point regarding many media sources' measure of importance. They print/broadcast what sells. We shouldn't follow their sensationalist, reader/viewer-chasing tactics. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 20:48, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
On Wikipedia, that sensationalist, reader/viewer-chasing media are called "WP:Reliable sources". I'd like to quote Snow Rise from a recent posting at WP:ITNC:

The only relevant evidence anyone should be advancing is that which is based in the volume and depth of coverage in sourcing, not idiosyncratic opinions directly from our editorial corps' mental processes as to why this subject is or is not "really important in the grander scheme of things". You think that "the media" is blowing the story out of proportion? Oh well, too bad--that is exactly as much an WP:OR argument here as it would be on the talk page for relevant articles. You know what we call "the media" in contexts such as this? WP:RELIABLE SOURCES--you know, the stuff we are supposed to be basing our content on, rather than our individual, personal opinions?

When editors overrule RS coverage with their own personal opinions about what is/isn't important, that violates our policies (like WP:DUE). Levivich (talk) 21:08, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Most sensationalist outlets aren't reliable. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 22:00, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
AP, Reuters, CBS, NPR, WSJ, CNN are not reliable sources? Levivich (talk) 22:06, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
They are, but if they all omit the 2022 Peshawar bombing from their reviews of last year, it shows that they're selecting some of their stories based on what will gain the most readers/viewers rather than importance. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 22:19, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Uh, "what will gain the most readers/viewers" == what is important to most people == what is most important. But aside from that tautology, if you're seriously suggesting that when reliable sources don't cover something you think should be covered, that means they're no longer reliable sources, then you should not be editing here at all. All of our core content policies are about not setting aside RSes and going with our own personal opinions instead. What you're suggseting is way, way outside what is allowed on this website; it's quite literally the very opposite of WP:V, WP:NOR and WP:NPOV. Levivich (talk) 22:25, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
International notability is, and ought to continue to be, the standard for inclusion on the main Year articles, which are meant to be a summary of the most important events around the world rather than just one or a handful of countries. I reject very strongly the dismissal of the (very fair) arguments against the inclusion of Walters by Levivich, and I reject any move that would in any way help perpetuate systemic Americentric bias. What ought to be done is to look at our current international notability standards and make necessary improvements (there is always room for improvement) to address the concerns of some users, as well as to work on a criteria for entertainment figures (like the criteria already in place for political and sports figures). We don’t need to treat dandruff with decapitation, and while it’s not a perfect system I think basing inclusion on substantial international notability for the main international year pages is the best way to go. Not to return to how things used to be, which clearly was not working and was leading to Americentric bias as described in the WikiProject talk page, and I oppose any changes that would in any way help perpetuate this systemic bias, including the notion of relying solely on international media sources (if that was allegedly how most inclusions on the main yearly pages were decided, then the fact that it led to overwhelming Americentric bias where all things American were added with far less scrutiny than its international counterparts, and that “RSes” strongly favour America/the Anglosphere over the rest of the world, then clearly it wasn’t working and that change was absolutely necessary). TheScrubby (talk) 20:27, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
My belief is that international notability should be preferred, albeit there should be more leeway for the inclusion of notable domestic events with substantial international coverage. Events that currently aren't included or are "borderline included" (as defined by previous discussions on Main Year Article talk pages) would be January 6, the recent events in Brasilia, events which were domestic but contributed to inciting a major global movement (such as the Killing of Oscar Grant being a key inciting incident to the BLM movement), well-covered international protests like Mahsa Amini and the US-Canadian Freedom Convoy, and at a stretch, Dobbs v. Jackson.
In terms of the implementation of an MOS guideline, I'd like to only see it implemented as a last resort. I think that Thebiguglyalien makes quite a few good points on WikiProject Years exhibiting an unacceptable amount of ownership behavior, even if slightly over the line. I'm not exactly keen on the abolition of the WP entirely, but it's something that should be looked at. My view on the problem is that it seems to be a lack of compromise between the more exclusionist editors and the more inclusionist ones. No one seems to be willing to work together on some key inclusions, and while we're all mostly behind excluding stuff like Gabby Petito on Main Year articles, too many disputes have caused controversy. The Deaths section in particular generates a lot of heated debate and wasted time that could have been spent on and off wiki, leading me to support the complete or near-complete removal of deaths entirely and provide a hatnote to the Deaths article (though I have suggested as a compromise that these discussions judge the inclusion of sidebar photos in deaths). InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 20:58, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
People add insufficiently notable things to main year articles every day. We need more regular editors to remove them.
The killing of Grant was domestic, 99% of people outside the US haven't heard of it & it shouldn't be included. If it were important to BLM's founding, it wouldn't have taken them 4 years. We don't include things on the basis of them being one of the things that lead up to a group being founded; there are many such events.
You're the only editor who wants Dobbs included. Those protests had a death toll of zero, were overwhelmingly domestic & had no effect. Protests happen all the time; we only include the most important ones. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 21:25, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
People add insufficiently notable things to main year articles every day. Is there a notability guideline for Year articles? My guess from WP:NOTEWORTHY would be "no", but curious if there's something I've missed. we only include the most important ones. Who decides that? Our sources, or you? —Locke Cole • t • c 22:54, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Yes, decided over many discussions regarding that. Trivia that's frequently added to main year articles includes local sports events & clubs, openings of shopping malls, local weather records, concerts, releases of singles & albums, premieres of plays & films, the start & end dates of radio & TV shows as well as broadcast dates of 'particularly important episodes' of them, when celebrities met their partners, married & divorced them etc. We need more regular editors removing these things. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 23:10, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Yes, decided over many discussions regarding that. If those "discussions" weren't involving our reliable sources, then it sounds like a group of editors were off engaging in WP:OR. The way to keep local sports events & clubs, openings of shopping malls, local weather records, concerts, releases of singles & albums, premieres of plays & films, the start & end dates of radio & TV shows as well as broadcast dates of 'particularly important episodes' of them, when celebrities met their partners, married & divorced them etc. out of year articles is to look to whether or not reliable sources provide coverage of the items being added in their year-end roundup articles. —Locke Cole • t • c 23:19, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
All entries are required to be backed by reliable sources. You don't understand the problem: every day fans add what they want to add to main year articles regardless of the rules/guidelines/inclusion criteria. There are far too few regulars to remove them. Loads of people love to add the person or event that they want to promote, such as a 'really important' episode of Friends, the highest temperature recorded in Brisbane in the 20th century, a band's 'crucial' second album, a celebrity wedding, the biggest shopping mall in Calgary reopening after renovations, the opening of a play on Broadway & the births & deaths of various people who have no international notability. Such things are often on main year articles for months or years. They clearly don't belong there. If people put half the effort into removing them rather than starting discussions like these & RfCs for people who've already been excluded by consensus due to their insufficient international notability, main year articles would be a lot better. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 00:47, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
All entries are required to be backed by reliable sources and starting discussions like these & RfCs for people who've already been excluded by consensus are problematic when being used to discuss the same problem. We don't "exclude content by consensus". We follow what our reliable sources on the matter state, using Wikipedia's voice to distill that information down to what is encyclopedic. I'm not saying there shouldn't be some kind of standard establishing how many reliable sources must cover the topic being debated to merit inclusion, but the way it's been described here rings of people just engaging in a long-form version of WP:ILIKEIT (or the contrary) which is original research.. but the regulars in these articles wishing to exclude Barbara Walters from a list of deaths for 2022 tells me nobody was checking the sources when that decision was made. —Locke Cole • t • c 01:28, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
The significance outside of the United States of Walters’ has been greatly exaggerated by many users arguing in favour of inclusion. Whatever the final outcome of the discussion may be, I think it’s important that the discussion took place to begin with. It’s important that we scrutinise potential inclusions and that those with questionable levels of international notability who are much more significant domestically within their own country are discussed rather than automatically included (complete with image, as some users attempted to include initially - and we never include images of figures who were borderline inclusions or were only included after heavy debate necessitating an RFC) without question because of the country they happen to come from. After reviewing the discussion and what was brought to it, it’s clear that Walters did have some international influence within her field of journalism, although I am not convinced that it’s sufficiently internationally notable enough (certainly not for automatic inclusion) and that she is still predominately a domestic figure mainly relevant to the United States. I can absolutely guarantee that had Walters been from any other country, and had achieved everything she did within any other country other than the United States, the discussion over her inclusion would have been very different - and almost certainly considerably shorter. TheScrubby (talk) 01:45, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
@TheScrubby: Which reliable sources do you consult when arriving at a conclusion about including/excluding an entry, e.g. Walters? Levivich (talk) 02:04, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
The person's international career, international awards etc. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 02:40, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Inclusion/exclusion is based on the person's accomplishments? Levivich (talk) 03:29, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
For main year articles, yes. For example, Olympic medals for sportspeople, international acting awards for actors, playing international concerts &/or having international chart hits for musicians, being a head of state/gov for politicians. Those are substantial international notability. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 03:47, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
And this has been the consensus at WP:YEARS since mid-2021? Levivich (talk) 03:58, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
We have a criteria in place for political figures since mid-2021 (which you can read on the FAQs sections of each of the recent years pages), after a long discussion on the matter and with a consensus that has been backed up by successive actions by virtually all regular users since. What were things like prior to this consensus? Minor, purely domestic US politicians such as John B. Anderson, John Dingell and Ralph Hall were included for years without discussion or scrutiny, whereas their international equivalents (or indeed politicians from outside the US in general who actually held senior ministerial positions) were summarily questioned and removed. Having one set of standards for American figures, and another for everybody else. As for the rest, multiple discussions over the successive main year Talk pages have concluded in favour of including individual (not team) Olympic gold medalists. Entertainment figures are still in need of a criteria written up as a guideline for inclusion, although there is broad agreement on including core, essential members of internationally notable bands; musicians who had more than one major international chart hit; and recipients of major international film awards for directors and actors. TheScrubby (talk) 04:40, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Some of the criteria have had consensus for longer than that, including automatic inclusion of politicians if they are current or former heads of state/gov, and exclusion of all others with the exception of those who nevertheless have substantial international notability, such Donald Rumsfeld. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 11:18, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
The bar here is international notability, and consensus on the main year pages is that international media sources do not, and should not, automatically equate to international notability. International notability has been the basic standard since mid-2021, due to severe issues with systemic bias before that where figures and events from one country were included with little to no scrutiny while figures/events from everywhere else were treated with a different standard entirely. If you’re looking for a concise definition of international notability as has been applied by multiple regulars over the last couple of years on the main international yearly pages, one was written a few days ago on the WikiProject Years talk page. TheScrubby (talk) 00:00, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
...has been the basic standard since mid-2021...: This "standard" has no Wikipedia Project advice page, let alone evidence of wide community support e.g. RfC. —Bagumba (talk) 01:08, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
I'm just gonna direct your attention to WP:LOCALCON: Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. For instance, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope. WikiProject advice pages, how-to and information pages, and template documentation pages have not formally been approved by the community through the policy and guideline proposal process, thus have no more status than an essay. We will not be supplanting WP:V, WP:NOR or WP:NPOV with whatever flavor of the month a WikiProject has chosen. A consensus there has no more status than an essay. —Locke Cole • t • c 01:57, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Why are you trying to defend a system that clearly perpetuates systemic bias, and attempting to delegitimatise a system for main international yearly pages that bases inclusion on international notability rather than what is notable in the United States, and has been in place and supported by regular users since mid-2021 (which, by my estimation, is a little more than a “flavour of the month”)? Why even bother having the main international yearly pages or the Year In Country pages if 2023 becomes filled with domestic American events/figures and to hell with their international counterparts? The way things were before mid-2021 was utterly broken; figures and events were arbitrarily added and so many minor figures with scant international notability were included without any question or debate, oftentimes while equivalent figures were excluded. You lot continue to cite “reliable sources” as the be-all and end-all, and yet you seemingly choose to blindly ignore that even that system isn’t perfect and that such a system for these pages contribute to systemic bias in favour of figures from the Anglosphere, especially the United States. None of you have even attempted to come up with an alternative to either the current system or the broken Americentric system from before, and are instead just blindly going on about “reliable sources” without any acknowledgement of the flaws of relying solely on that system is for inclusion on the main international yearly pages. Frankly, it’s not helpful or constructive at all, and if relying solely on “reliable sources” was how inclusions were decided prior to mid-2021, either that was appallingly applied in practice, or that it clearly wasn’t working at all and that it led to lists that was overlong (especially with domestic figures/events) and easily exceeded the recommended maximum size for a Wikipedia article, then all I can say is that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing that’s clearly not working over and over again. TheScrubby (talk) 02:15, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Why are you trying to supplant what our reliable sources indicate are the notable events for a year with whatever you and your peers choose using whatever "standard" happens to be at play in the moment? If you want to change the world, go join a newsroom or create a podcast or whatever else tickles your fancy to undo the injustices of systemic bias, but Wikipedia is not a battleground. The only world-changing that ought to be going on here is making knowledge free for all. Wikipedia documents the world as it is, good and bad. —Locke Cole • t • c 02:26, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
You mean the standard of removing systemic bias by applying the same standards for events/figures of every country, and including events/figures of substantial international notability for the main international yearly pages? You’re clearly ignoring all of the issues which led to the adoption of the international notability criteria completely. How is it at all controversial to include people/events based on notability that goes beyond one country/region; being based on major international awards; representing their country on the international stage for major international competitions/conferences/organisations; and having an impact of international consequence based on the work in their relevant field beyond just their home country/region? Which, believe it or not, is a system that is far less arbitrary than how things were beforehand - and hey, this was all already de facto applied to figures/events of most non-Anglosphere countries, but certainly not for American figures where there has always been one standard for them and another for everyone else. Sources are useful for the main international year pages as a secondary factor for inclusion, and in helping back up all of the above, but not for arbitrarily using it as the one and only, be-all and end-all standard for inclusion, with all the flaws that comes with it. TheScrubby (talk) 02:36, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Furthermore, before you try and deny/put your fingers in your ears about systemic bias here, how on earth can you possibly justify the fact that the main international yearly pages use the American mdy date system when the overwhelming majority of countries internationally use dmy? Even InvadingInvader, who started the RFC on Walters (and is in favour of her inclusion) and who thinks we should be more flexible on the international notability criteria, acknowledges and accepts that there’s issues with Americentric bias, and that the previous Americentric system for the main yearly pages was deeply flawed and untenable. Refusing to address these issues and going on instead about “reliable sources” is little more than a reactionary cop-out. TheScrubby (talk) 02:45, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Do you understand what main year articles are for? Do you understand why the large majority of things that are on year by country articles aren't on main year articles? Jim Michael 2 (talk) 02:40, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Because we violated WP:SUMMARY? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:47, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
We didn't violate anything. Main year articles are for international events & people. Year by country articles are for each country's. For example, Depp v. Heard is domestic, so it's on 2022 in the United States but not 2022. Main year articles include links to the subarticles. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 02:57, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
We don't need an RfC for everything. International media coverage doesn't grant international notability. If it did, James Michael Tyler would be regarded as having very high international notability & therefore be included. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 02:22, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Jim, could I ask you to stop it with the "We don't do this" arguments? We're discussing what we should do, and when what we do is on the table, it doesn't seem productive to the discussion to say "what we don't do" and "what we do do" without providing a reason to change aside from appeal to tradition...in this discussion especially, this is like "We don't do things because we said so" (possible WP:OWN). InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 21:41, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

section break 1

Copying and pasting from the WikiProject years as well as the FAQs section, for easy access on this discussion here’s international notability as how we have defined and implemented it on the main international Year pages since mid-2021.

International notability is:

  • Notability that goes beyond one country or one region/a handful of countries, and is not merely domestic.
  • Being the recipient of multiple major international awards, rather than just awards that are domestic and mainly given to those from their native country. In other words, representing their country on the world stage
  • Having an impact with their work in their relevant field beyond their home country/region, and are of international consequence; being an essential, central member of an internationally notable group; or achieving international notability beyond their most famous work (in other words, for example with actors they would be internationally recognised in their own right rather than say, being known as “x character in y franchise” and only being known internationally by fans)

International notability is not:

  • Measured by international media sources/obituaries. They’re essential on this Wiki for who is notable enough to warrant an article, or for other lists, but not for a page that is focused on the most internationally notable figures and events. Furthermore, using media sources runs the risk of perpetuating systemic bias, particularly in favour of figures/events from the Anglosphere over figures/events from the non-English speaking world.
  • Measured by the number of Wiki language articles or article views. Anybody can create language articles, including hardcore fans of celebrities, as is prominently the case with Corbin Bleu. Page figures can be an indicator of what is trending at the time, but cannot be used as a factor for determining international notability - which is not a popularity contest; nor are the international yearly articles meant to resemble tabloid papers (so we wouldn’t include trendy human interest stories that is not of lasting international significance).
  • Measured by the number of fans somebody may have internationally.
  • Having one set of standards for figures/events from one or a handful of countries, and another set of standards for figures/events from everywhere else. What’s notable in one country is not automatically notable elsewhere, and we would not include figures/events if their international counterparts are excluded. Americentrism or any other form of systemic bias is firmly repudiated.
  • Including people on the basis of quotas, tokenism or positive discrimination.

As a bonus, here is the political criteria we have in place, in line with the international notability requirement for the main international yearly pages:

1. Automatic inclusion: Heads of government/state (prime ministers, presidents, chancellors, governor-generals, etc.), figures regarded as central founding fathers of their nations, and heads of major intergovernmental organisations (such as the Secretary-General of the United Nations, President of the European Commission, etc.)
2. Considered for inclusion: Politicians who served as Foreign Affairs Minister, Secretary of State, Foreign Secretary, etc. whose actions were internationally notable and/or consequential.
3. Case-by-case basis: any other politicians (including deputy heads of government/state and opposition leaders/presidential candidates who failed to win an election) if they are internationally notable and/or consequential for reasons other than just holding the title of their office (such as those who won major international prizes such as the Nobel Prize)

And the sports criteria:

Tier 1: Association football, Cricket, Golf, and Tennis - as well as individual (not team) gold medalists of international sports competitions such as the Olympic Games. Include figures if at least globally known within the sport's culture.
Tier 2: Baseball, Ice hockey, Rugby football, Boxing, and Basketball. Include figures if globally known beyond the sport, and include the most notable of the sport's world ambassadors or most widely-successful promoters.
Tier 3: National footballs (Australian rules football, Gaelic football, Gridiron football), Lacrosse, Field hockey, Professional wrestling, and everything else. Generally exclude with exceptions made only for the most outstanding, arguably “once in a generation” type figures, equivalent to Pelé and Lionel Messi for soccer, or Don Bradman and Sachin Tendulkar for cricket - though in the event of inclusion they will not be prioritised for an image.


Now, tell me how these criteria for inclusion on the main international yearly pages are inadequate to the point where we need to repudiate it entirely and preference a system that for years allowed for systemic Americentric bias for pages that are meant to be the main international year pages. Certainly there’s always room for improvement, and I hope that users can get cracking on an entertainment criteria especially. But I’d honestly like to know why some users here are so dogmatically against any notion of using an internationally notable criteria where we apply the same standards to figures/events from every country without exception, and would rather a system that allows for systemic Americentric bias. TheScrubby (talk) 06:12, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Articles about years, like 2022, are still WP:ARTICLEs, and subject to the same policies whether written in WP:PROSE (preferred), as a list, or a mix. WP:Stand-alone lists says: Being articles, stand-alone lists are subject to Wikipedia's content policies, such as verifiability, no original research, neutral point of view, and what Wikipedia is not, as well as the notability guidelines.
When determining whether certain content should or should not be included in a year article, treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject (WP:PROPORTION). Keep in mind that, in determining proper weight, we consider a viewpoint's prevalence in reliable sources, not its prevalence among Wikipedia editors or the general public. (WP:WEIGHT). When writing about a topic, basing content on the best respected and most authoritative reliable sources helps to prevent bias, undue weight, and other NPOV disagreements (WP:BESTSOURCES). And as has been pointed out, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, a Wikiproject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope (WP:CONLEVEL).
Articles about years are summaries of reliable sources about those years, and what events are included should be determined by the event's treatment in the body of reliable sources about the topic (about the year for main year articles, or about the year-in-topic for sub-articles). To vary that would require a widely-advertised WP:RFC, which I don't think has happened yet (and I don't think would be successful). Levivich (talk) 06:19, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Levivich, Locke Cole: I've tried to explain this to them nearly a dozen different ways. These two (and a few other users on the WikiProject talk page) have been giving the same sort of responses for months. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 06:39, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
And yet nobody has given a sufficient response on how to deal with systemic Americentric bias as we have explained again and again, and which especially plagued the main yearly pages before the adoption of the international notability criteria. I’m not even talking American figures making up more than those from other countries; I’m talking cases where minor domestic American figures (especially B-list and C-list actors, and politicians who weren’t even senior figures) are not scrutinised the same way as their international counterparts, and with nobody demanding “reliable sources” to demonstrate their suitability for inclusion. I’ve given example after example on the WikiProject Years Talk page, and all you guys have is “reliable sources this, reliable sources that”.
A potential compromise would be to retain the international notability criteria, but to rely on “reliable sources” from outside their native country and from more than one language source, in order to demonstrate the subject’s international notability and importance/influence beyond their native country/region - with the burden of proof on those arguing for inclusion. So long as we don’t go back to how things were before mid-2021. TheScrubby (talk) 06:52, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
"When writing about a topic, basing content on the best respected and most authoritative reliable sources helps to prevent bias". The WP:ONUS is always on those arguing for inclusion. Arguments for and against inclusion of an entry in a year article should be based on the entry's prominence in reliable sources about the year. One of the things WP:YEARS could do is to compile a list of the best respected and most authoritative reliable sources about years, from around the world. For the current year, it's the world's best news media. For recent years, annual retrospectives. For older years, scholarship like history books and articles. Levivich (talk) 07:19, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
And yet nobody has given a sufficient response on how to deal with systemic Americentric bias as we have explained again and again Because we're here to write an encyclopedia, not to try to right great wrongs: You might think that Wikipedia is a great place to set the record straight and right great wrongs, but that is absolutely not the case. While we can record the righting of great wrongs, we can't actually "ride the crest of the wave" ourselves. We are, by design, supposed to be "behind the curve". This is because we only report what is verifiable using secondary reliable sources, giving appropriate weight to the balance of informed opinion. That being said, there is a countering systemic bias WikiProject, and from a brief look at that, it seems far more reasonable than the ideas pushed here (ignoring reliable sources and supplanting that with the will of a handful of editors who cherry pick things to bring their own sense of "balance" to this very niche-specific subject). Countering systemic bias in how we produce articles? Sure. Making sure we try to be inclusive of international/gender/racial views/subjects? Absolutely. But we don't get to start second-guessing reliable sources to make that happen. —Locke Cole • t • c 08:10, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
  • I have been a frequent editor for over 13 years and an active administrator for over five years. Until today, I had never once heard of the concept of "international notability". In my view, there is no such thing and we do not have flavors or subcategories of notability. Of course, we debate borderline cases but in the end, we need to decide that topic A is notable but topic B is not notable. That's it. I am all in favor of efforts to deal with systemic bias, but repeated arguments that Amanpour is more "internationally notable" than Walters, as if that was actually a thing, is laughable. Both are notable, but Walters died and all sane people hope that Amanpour lives for many years to come. Inclusion criteria need to be rooted in what reliable sources say about the topic, not on the whims of a handful of editors at a Wikiproject. The notion that sources that enjoy project-wide consensus as reliable sources are somehow unacceptably sensationalistic in their end-of-the-year coverage, and should be rejected by a small clique of editors at this group of articles is utterly bizarre. We summarize what reliable sources say about topics, nothing more and nothing less. Period, end of story. We have no "super-editors" who are self-deputized to call coverage in reliable sources unacceptably sensationalistic. Gain projectwide consensus to deprecate such sources, if you want to try that, but accept them as reliable until consensus changes. I do not feel strongly one way or another about the inclusion of Barbara Walters in particular but analogizing her death to local temperature records or the opening of a shopping mall is deeply inappropriate. I am an American but have no wish to exaggerate my country's importance. At the same time, I cannot ignore efforts to diminish the importance of the United States on the world stage, and especially its role in the Anglosphere. There is a serious problem here, and Levivich has written some very perceptive things above. Cullen328 (talk) 07:47, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
There clearly are a significant minority of people & events which are significantly international & are therefore eligible for main year articles. Domestic events are for the many year by country articles. We don't wait for end of year coverage; these articles are edited every day. I'm not saying that all the insufficiently notable events are equal or similar; I listed many of the types of things that are wrongly added to main year articles. Being anti-Americentric isn't being anti-American. The US & to a lesser extent the rest of the developed Western world is greatly overrepresented on main year articles & WP in general. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 11:18, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
It really is sad. The mentality operating here is exactly the sort of activist WP:BATTLEGROUND stuff that we try so hard to avoid. If the consensus that previously existed on these pages is being challenged, and that consensus has not been challenged for multiple years, that does not mean that the people challenging it are wrong nor does it mean the consensus is here to stay forever more. WP:CCC is specifically part of established policy for a reason. At Wikipedia:In the news, we ourselves have been dealing with a similar phenomenon, when it comes to international notability being pushed as a "criterion" and thus used to challenge stories that might be primarily based out of the U.S. or the U.K. As is noted in WP:ITNCRIT, it's not required for a story to gain consensus. And as Cullen328 has so eloquently pointed out, nowhere on Wikipedia does international notability exist as a policy-based criterion for excluding or including anything from anywhere. There might have been a local consensus at one point in time, and there might still be concerted efforts through WP:SYSTEMICBIAS to add more events and persons to Wikipedia that might have been excluded in the past due to race, gender, ethnicity, etc. But that is not a reason to remove events and persons that happen to be from the United States if they demonstrate notability, which in these aforementioned cases, they clearly do. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 13:25, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Sad is that the criteria since mid-2021 is more biased than the media. We won't reduce systemic bias by ranking golf and tennis, two very white sports, as Tier 1, while ranking basketball--a more popular sport played overwhelmingly by people of color--as Tier 2, and ranking professional wrestling--which isn't a sport at all--as Tier 3 along with "national footballs"--which gridiron football is not, because it's played internationally. This is the sort of sword-skeleton theory we get when we trade reliable sources for the opinions of editors. Instead of reducing bias, we make it worse. Trading Americentrism for Eurocentrism won't help us learn about Asia, Africa, or the rest of the world. Levivich (talk) 14:59, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Golf and tennis are two of the most internationally played sports, and so many of the world’s most famous players from both have not been “white”. Basketball is in the right tier - it’s a sport that has grown internationally in recent decades but is still not on the level of the Tier One sports. Gridiron football is a national football of just one country - like Australian Rules or Gaelic football, it’s played outside their main country but not widely played. Tier 3 is absolutely the most appropriate category for them. Professional wrestling was only included (and included in the third tier) because we’ve had issues over the years of super fans attempting to add professional wrestling figures with scant international notability. None of this was on the basis of bias of any sort, and was decided on the basis of how internationally notable and played each sport is. Any assertion that there’s Eurocentrism of any kind on the main yearly lists are complete nonsense - we treat figures from Europe no different from Africa, Asia, the Americas, or elsewhere. TheScrubby (talk) 22:47, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
I'm no expert on the subject, but I don't think promoting golf and tennis is the best way to fight systemic bias. Levivich (talk) 22:56, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Both sports are among the most widely played internationally and in terms of the number of countries that they enjoy popularity in. It would be systemic bias to put gridiron football any higher when the sport is barely played outside the United States. TheScrubby (talk) 23:01, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Systemic bias is about more than just counting the number of countries. Pro golf and tennis are among the least diverse sports in the world, and rather famously so. Levivich (talk) 23:12, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
International notability is notability that goes beyond one country/one region. It’s that simple. Figures and events with domestic notability go in Year In Country pages, while figures and events with substantial international notability go in the main international year pages. TheScrubby (talk) 23:06, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
  • With the caveat that I am not a member of WikiProject Years nor particularly active on years articles, I very much support efforts to fight systemic bias in this area by ensuring that articles have an appropriately international focus. We are an encyclopedia for all of humanity, not just the Anglosphere. It is entirely foreseeable that year articles, given their broad scope, will have a tendency to accrue Anglocentric cruft, and it is absolutely our role to push back against that. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 16:32, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
    The thing is, nobody disagrees with this, which makes this a bit of a straw man argument. We all agree about systemic bias, WP:SYSTEMICBIAS was written in 2006. The question isn't whether systemic bias exists or doesn't, nor is it whether we should fight it or not, the question is how. Levivich (talk) 16:35, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
  • It seems like the underlying issue here is that additions of Ameri/Anglo-centric information to year articles outpace the addition of other material, due to English Wikipedia's own demographic. The solution IMO would be to proactively add more information about events outside that sphere, or to slap a {{globalize}} template on the article if it's still a work in progress. In principle, I think it would be theoretically possible to come up with guidelines for inclusion that are more specific than "does the topic meet article notability guidelines" or systemic curbs on overrepresenting a country (e.g. to add a WP:LASTING-style consideration, or adding it for overrepresented regions), but in practice the range of material that is viable to include in a year article is so broad that establishing such standards would likely be quite difficult. signed, Rosguill talk 16:42, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
  • International notability is not...Including people on the basis of quotas, tokenism or positive discrimination: But that is exactly what is being done by merely seeing too many Americans and creating rules to arbitrarily boost subjects with mentions in lower-population countries while ignoring WP:WEIGHT. Any "solutions" of systemic bias need to have a litmus test of addressing the lack of women, and subjects from high-population countries like China and India. This otherwise has a Eurocentric male tilt.—Bagumba (talk) 18:45, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
    The issue hasn’t specifically been “too many Americans”. Even with the international notability criteria in place, Americans still have more representation than figures from any other country. We acknowledge that due to its population size and the influence of American culture internationally, they would have a higher percentage of people with sufficient international notability. No, the issue has always been the treatment of American figures with insufficient international notability - the likes of John B. Anderson and James Michael Tyler, people on those levels of notability. Figures who were not internationally significant or even major figures in their respective fields, whose international counterparts would never have been included by most users and, if they were included, they would be immediately scrutinised and removed - something that prior to 2021 simply didn’t happen in a major way with American figures on that level. And year death entires prior to 2021 were flooded with precisely these kind of entries. The inclusion for years of an image of the domestic politician and failed Presidential nominee (which with most countries their Opposition leaders and failed Presidential candidates are rarely ever included) John McCain in August 2018 over the Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (who was internationally consequential with the actions he took in office as head of government of the country with the world’s second-largest population - and is the world’s largest democracy) is absolutely inexcusable and a damning indictment on the Americentric bias of this Wiki. Don’t have one standard for figures/events from one country, and another for figures/events from everywhere else. TheScrubby (talk) 22:57, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Reading through all the linked to discussions, it really does seem like a major ownership issue from the people of said Wikiproject that are attempting to internally make a rigid claim about inclusion notability without involving the wider community (who quite possibly would disagree). And I do think a good point is given above that we should be fixing systemic bias by adding more things to said articles to cover underrepresented regions and groups. But attempting to restrict or remove rather blatantly notable subjects in order to facilitate that is a nonstarter. As a comparison, the method for members of WiR like myself to increase the coverage of women on the project is to make more articles on women, not to delete articles on men. SilverserenC 01:16, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
How can it be WP:OWN when consensus has existed since mid-2021 among all regular contributors on the yearly pages that international notability is the bar for inclusion (with disputes mainly being over the extent of which the standard should be applied), and that domestic figures/events go into Year In Country articles? Consensus has always been respected on these pages - there are many instances time and again where certain regular users for one reason or another has always conceded to consensus even if they disagree with it - to use an example involving myself, I conceded to consensus when Norm Macdonald was included even if I argued against inclusion on the basis that he lacked substantial international notability as an actor, and that his notability was mainly restricted to North America (and I’m sure @Jim Michael 2: or any of the other regulars can point to many examples where they conceded to consensus for the inclusion of certain figures even if they personally disagreed). As for “attempting to restrict or remove rather blatantly notable subjects in order to facilitate that”, please read my comment directly above yours. TheScrubby (talk) 01:39, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Your response presupposes four things:
  • 1. That the consensus which existed since mid-2021 regarding international notability still has standing, meaning WP:CCC does not apply,
  • 2. That "certain regular users" should have the final say on what gets posted into the Year articles, except by the goodness of their hearts in which they concede, which is the definition of WP:OWN,
  • 3. The failure by users to nominate international counterparts automatically means that we should continue excluding notable figures forevermore on the basis of avoiding Americentrism, which is not what WP:CSB proposes, and
  • 4. What you call "Americentric bias" is not, in fact, the system working as it should, per WP:RS, WP:N, etc..
CSB calls for increasing visibility of underrepresented areas, regions, and persons across Wikipedia. It doesn't call for a handful of impassioned users barring figures who are notable because of being notable in the U.S. I've noticed that you and Jim Michael 2 - obviously both favoring exclusion - comprise about 80% of the argumentation regarding the proposed inclusion of Barbara Walters, despite what seems to be a more even proportion of people arguing for her inclusion. It is, perhaps, a sign that certain areas of Wikipedia do need to be examined more closely to ensure that policy and guidelines are being appropriately applied, and that MOS:YEARS is in fact needed. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 13:59, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
You seem to be implying that Scrubby & I have an anti-American bias. We don't; we're opposed to domestic figures being on main year articles because they're for international figures. When a well-known person from the Anglosphere (especially the US) dies, it's common for many fans to push for them to be added even if they're domestic figures. We shouldn't make exceptions on the basis of a deluge of fans demanding it. I'm pleased but very surprised that very few Anne Heche fans did so, because her death was one of the most reported of last year. I'm not going by who I know or am a fan of, because I've long been a fan of Robbie Coltrane but argued against him being included because he's a domestic figure.
It's unfortunate that this discussion, as well as those on WP:YEARS, are taking place when our best editor, Deb, is absent. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 18:00, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Deb has been engaging in similar ownership behavior at WikiProject Years, but to a broader degree and for much, much longer. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:38, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Exactly Jim; I believe those that are making such insinuations when we have both made ourselves absolutely clear about our positions and why we say there is systemic Americentric bias are simply ignoring what we have to say and painting false pictures of our attitudes and motives. How else can you jump to such ridiculous conclusions as to insinuate anti-American bias when all we are asking for at the end of the day is to end systemic bias and to treat figures/events from one country with the same standards as those from all other countries, and not have one standard for one country and another for everywhere else. Like, international notability isn’t a hard concept to grasp, and it’s insane that for some users here, such a notion as to base inclusion on the main international yearly pages on substantial notability beyond just one country/region and add domestically notable figures/events to the relevant Year In Country pages (even if we were to base these on “reliable sources” so as to demonstrate the subject’s international notability and impact) is unthinkable and unacceptable. Otherwise, as I said earlier here, to just completely ignore and/or intentionally twist and misinterpret what we have said and the concerns about the utter shambles of a system the Year pages ran under until mid-2021 (even those critical of aspects of the international notability criteria who would like to see it reformed such as InvadingInvader have conceded that these issues are valid and need to be addressed rather than swept under the carpet by conservative “status quo” users putting their fingers in their ears and repeating “reliable sources” over and over again) is not constructive in the slightest and at worst borders on bad faith accusations towards us. TheScrubby (talk) 23:16, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
You don't need to boldface giant portions of your text. I can read it just fine without it, thank you. ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 12:46, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
  • I would like to echo what Cullen328 said above, noting that I've been an editor for almost 17 years and an admin for over 15, and have never seen the particular standard being bandied about in these discussions. The vagaries of "international notability" appears to have been created a short while ago by a small number of editors who see themselves as the sole gatekeepers of the year articles, and frankly, there is no clear guidance on how to establish who is, and who isn't, supposed to be listed in things like the "Birth" and "Death" lists in such articles. If I agree with one thing is that there should be some standard; insofar as listing everyone with a Wikipedia article who is either born in, or who has died in, a particular year is not reasonable, but insofar as we need to have such a site-wide standard, we need to have that discussion in a forum like this, and not in some backwater corner of Wikipedia, where some small group of editors makes a decision and decides to enforce it on everyone else that comes along later. That is decidedly not how we do things around here. We need objective standards that anyone who is unfamiliar with a person to be added to such a list can read and then assess a person against those standards. Those standards should be open to a broad discussion on a site-wide forum with wide participation. I'd be very much on board with whatever that discussion concludes. What I'm not on board with is some small cadre of editors coming up with their own rules, and then trying to enforce it on the rest of us. --Jayron32 15:58, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
  • FYI: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RFC: split births & deaths from year articles. Levivich (talk) 18:29, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Noting that there is only one mention of the word "international" on WP:N, and it has nothing to do with "international notability". I echo Cullen and Jayron in the fact that this "international notability" criteria has no basis in any Wikipedia policy. We have just one standard for notability, not certain standards for certain pages made by WikiProjects that clearly decide to engage in ownership/gatekeeping contrary to Wikipedia's policies. ♠JCW555 (talk)♠ 23:01, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
    So you believe what’s notable in one country/region is automatically notable internationally? TheScrubby (talk) 23:03, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
    Again, your "international notability" criteria has no basis in any Wikipedia policy. None. Zero. Zip. Ziltch. Nada. So stop using it as this shield you put up against any criticism of this arbitrary criteria that does not enjoy site-wide consensus. ♠JCW555 (talk)♠ 23:12, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
    So you believe it is correct to fill main international yearly pages with domestic figures with scant international notability, and by extension promote systemic bias. I make absolutely zero apologies for believing that figures/events on the main international yearly pages ought to be internationally notable, and for believing that inclusion standards for figures/events from all countries should all be the same rather than arbitrarily having one standard for one/a handful of countries and another standard for everywhere else. TheScrubby (talk) 23:18, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
    There is only one standard we have, and that's Wikipedia:Notability. You'll notice that Wikipedia:InternationalNotability is a red link. Why? Because it's not any standard English Wikipedia uses. End of story. ♠JCW555 (talk)♠ 23:29, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
    @TheScrubby, when editors talk about "notability", they mean "whether a given topic warrants its own article." They don't mean what the dictionary says. So when you say "He's not internationally notable", people are thinking "What do you mean? He's only getting a Wikipedia article in certain countries?"
    Wikipedia's inherently international. We either have an article that can be read by anyone in the world, or we don't have an article at all. There's no way to have a Wikipedia article that's international versus having a Wikipedia article that is only available in certain countries. All WP:Notable subjects are inherently "internationally" notable.
    I suspect that what you mean is that some subjects, though 100% WP:Notable for Wikipedia's purposes, do not have a public presence on the international stage.
    One possible way to deal with this is to adopt the Wikipedia:Vital articles approach. There's doubtless some reasonable number of desirable entries to include in each year. Whether that's 25 or 250, figure out the basic number. Then tell people: Make a list up to number±wiggle room. Maybe it's 50, and you want wiggle room of another 25. That would give each year 25 to 75 entries.
    But also tell them: Once we pass the magic threshold, if you want "your" entry included, you have to propose the removal of two existing entries, and those entries have to be similar to your proposed entry in some respect (e.g., you want to add sports, so you propose removing two sports entries; you want to add a politician, so you propose removing two politicians; you want to add an American, so you propose removing two Americans – the point is that people interested in a particular subject area can't propose removing subjects they don't care about). Editors then need to reach consensus about how to make space, before for your proposed new entry can be accepted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:52, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
    I think your comment is insightful, except adopt the Wikipedia:Vital articles approach is not an option for a mainspace article like year articles like 2022. Setting a numeric threshold is permissible for a WikiProject like WP:VA when including pages in its scope, but not for an article in mainspace. I don't think we'd want "Top 100 most important events of 2022" in mainspace. Levivich (talk) 00:09, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    @Levivich, I think it's not just "an option", but actually "required by policy". We don't want a "Top 100 most important events" article, but we do want one that gives WP:Due weight to different subjects, that does a good job of Wikipedia:Balancing aspects of the subject, and that uses Wikipedia:Summary style to point people to more detailed subjects.
    In the case of list of events during a time period, following the existing policies would inevitably result in something similar to a "Top few dozen most important events in this time period". WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:12, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
  • I want to reïterate a point I made at the Walters RfC, and that Levivich has been getting at a bit above: Our judgment does not trump that of RS. Yes, at the margins, we may make editorial decisions like "Source X should be ignored because it's clearly sloppy reporting" and "Source Y seems to be factually incorrect here", but overall, our job as encyclopedists is to present information in due weight to what is represented in reliable sources. We do not get to say "I think the sources care about X, but I care about Y, so let's talk about Y instead". Telling, above, is the discussion about "The Slap" vs. the Peshawar attack. I'm certainly not going to sit here and argue that the former is objectively more notable than the latter, but, by what standard exactly is the converse being argued? Is the contention that it is intuitively obvious that a terrorist attack is more notable than an act of violence that was physically inconsequential but deeply culturally impactful? Many may feel one way or the other way, but that's the whole point of following reliable sources: It doesn't matter what we think.
    It troubles me deeply that some editors have not just appointed themselves arbiter of notability above the reliable sources, but indeed have explicitly argued that the reliable sources can't be trusted, to the extent that agreement with the reliable sources' perspective is disqualifying. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this goes against everything we stand for as Wikipedians. We follow the RS, even when we don't want to. As someone with some pretty out-there views, I regularly have to suck it up and write an article that follows statements in RS that I have personal objections to. None of us is above that.
    A stray thought in closing: Who says these articles need to be lists? -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she|they|xe) 06:02, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    I just want to quickly address that stray thought. If anything, that's an even hotter subject of debate in the WikiProject. A few months ago, BorgQueen and I spent a few weeks expanding 2001 to bring it closer to the Good Article criteria (before and after), but a few regulars on the WikiProject shut it down and reverted all of the changes. Relevant discussions here and here for anyone interested. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 06:19, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    Wow, this edit by InvadingInvader seems... Come on Tamzin, must not say V-word, must not say V-word... but I mean, seriously, that's removing 60kB of sourced material because "no consensus". Actually, not even "becase 'no consensus'", because no consensus yet. It's good-faith, so it's not vandalism, but it's functionally indistinguishable from it. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she|they|xe) 12:04, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    I will say that I believe InvadingInvader was trying to be a neutral party in the dispute. The larger problem is that several users on the WikiProject will challenge virtually every change or addition as "no consensus" without allowing discussion to take place. It's gotten quite out of hand, and it appears to have been going on since long before I got here. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 14:50, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    It was more so procedural. At the time, I was not aware of the No Consensus essay that Tamzin cited. InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 23:45, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    [tangent] I wonder how many of editors are unfamiliar with Wikipedia:Don't revert due solely to "no consensus". Maybe it should go on a list of secret rules that get revealed by the cabal (Wikipedia:There is no cabal) when you make your 1,000th edit. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:15, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
    While that edit was in good faith, this is a perfect illustration of the downsides of the "international notability criteria". The information that was removed was IMO due, informative, and encyclopedic. I largely align with Thebiguglyalien's views on prose and dueness when it comes to Years articles. Consistency among these lackluster articles seems to be valued more highly than quality. DFlhb (talk) 19:51, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
    In retrospect, it is. InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 07:21, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Reading above, the use of the term "Notability" seems to be causing a significant amount of miscommunication here, as that term has both a general meaning and a specific wikispeak meaning, which overlap, but also differ in important ways. (WhatamIdoing makes the point above as well.) Taking the premise that article should be somewhat in line with our guidelines on WP:SUMMARYSTYLE and WP:Article size, the question is not "notability", but (as Tamzin mentions) WP:DUE weight. There is a need to make sure cruft, and for that matter WP:RECENTISM, is handled appropriately, and no doubt these articles are a magnet for random trivia. However, while considering systematic bias is an important component of weight, it does not overcome the principle that articles should be based on reliable sources. We can evaluate those sources and consider how their target framework may or may not match ours, but that isn't the same thing as building purely based on our own evaluations. CMD (talk) 06:57, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    WP:N is about being notable enough to have a WP article. All the events, births & deaths of each year are eligible to be in the relevant subarticles, such as 2023 in science & 2023 in the United States. Only those with substantial international notability are eligible to be in main year articles, such as 2023. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 11:13, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    Again with the "international notability" criteria that has no basis in Wikipedia policy. ♠JCW555 (talk)♠ 11:30, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    Why do you think there are main year articles such as 2022 & country subarticles such as 2022 in China & 2022 in India? The main ones are international & the country articles are national. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 11:46, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    The latter does not at all follow from the former. It makes sense that the main list will have a higher standard for inclusion than the national lists, but there's a leap of logic to there from the current "international notability" rules. What each list should be based on is what reliable sources say were the key events in that year in that region (or globally). In many cases, for the main list, this will coincide with "international notability", but not always. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she|they|xe) 12:04, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    This is all a very good example of why the term "international notability" should stop being used. Actual existing guidelines, such as WP:SUMMARYSTYLE and WP:DUE, are the relevant considerations. CMD (talk) 12:43, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    It's logical & makes very good sense. You're saying that if some RS give the release of Squid Game more coverage than the end of the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021), we should do likewise, saying/implying that SG is more important?! Jim Michael 2 (talk) 15:44, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    If some of them do? No. If the balance do? Yes. That's how being a neutral tertiary source works. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she|they|xe) 22:36, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    I think it's more complicated than that. If a non-Wikipedia encyclopedia article would cover certain things, then a Wikipedia encyclopedia should, too, even if those things don't get much attention in other types of sources (e.g., breaking news). That's what Wikipedia:Balancing aspects (=part of the NPOV policy) is about. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:44, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
    My understanding of it is that the proportion of weight should reflect the proportion of weight in reliable sources as proportional to the prominence and quality of the sources. Most weight afforded to high-end academic sources like highly-cited journal articles, papers, and books. Not necessarily what encyclopedias cover. Andre🚐 04:53, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
    @Andrevan, the "due weight" section of NPOV is about "viewpoints". However, encyclopedias additionally include a type of information that I'm going to call "facts". There aren't really any "viewpoints" about the atomic mass of Hydrogen, or whether penicillin is an antibiotic, or whether there was a big earthquake this week, and even high-quality sources don't expend a lot of effort on the basics. If an article reflects a mechanical distillation of recent scholarship, then we'd be omitting important basics.
    I think you'd be hard pressed to find any highly-cited journal article that goes on at length about, e.g., the birthdate for any current head of state, and yet we include that information every single time we can source it. We don't include it because we are "fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources" (=WP:Due weight). There aren't any significant "viewpoints" and it's not "prominent" in any source. We include it because providing basic context is what good encyclopedia articles do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:39, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
    I agree that facts are encyclopedic, and there's policy/guideline that encourages encyclopedicity, which to me is about a fact's ability to inform and educate and create a good description of a topic that is comprehensive. Basically it's evidence of the existence and experience of a topic, but we're allowed to stipulate the importance of common sense and common knowledge as to what is relevant when it pertains to basic background info. But facts are facts not simply because they are encyclopedic, but also probably have a lot of weight in the source material. You're right that basic background facts don't need a justification to be included, and that a deep source probably doesn't cover surface material. But the balance of prominence in reliable sources is not exclusively high-quality academic sources but also includes some basic background sources which could include news or magazine articles, articles in other reference works that are considered reliable, other books, etc. I agree about the viewpoints - they are not viewpoints. Facts that appear in RS uncontested may be facts and shouldn't be confused with opinions. Maybe policy/guideline doesn't say this today, but the idea to me is that if you look at all the sources comprehensively on a topic, you would find sufficient weight for that biographical material, and if it only appears in a few or no sources, that is sufficient reason to exclude it. Andre🚐 20:34, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
    I'm glad that we agree that basic facts are not viewpoints. Can we also agree that WP:Due weight is about "viewpoints" and not about non-viewpoint-oriented content? (Read it; don't rely on a guess based on what someone claimed when they gave you an ALLCAPS excuse for reverting you.)
    As for whether we'd find sufficient weight for biographical material: Were you around, probably more than decade ago now, when the guy was trying to get his birthdate corrected? First we tell him that Wikipedia:You are not a reliable source, so no fair just showing up on wiki and correcting the article. We tell him that he has to publish his birthdate somewhere else before we'll believe him. Fair enough, so he goes to social media and posts a note that says something like "Dear Wikipedia, my birthday is the 15th, not the 17th".
    Oh, no, we say; just telling us what to correct is definitely not good enough. We have rules against combining the discussion on wiki with the social media account. You have to post the whole date. It took him several attempts before editors were satisfied. I believe he ended up writing his birthdate on a piece of cardboard, taking a selfie, and posting the selfie before we were satisfied.
    The reason I'm telling this story is: It's either true that if you look at all the sources comprehensively on a topic, you would find sufficient weight for that biographical material or it's true that we regularly add birthdates based on social media posts and other questionable sources (e.g., IMDb) all the time. Consider trying Special:RandomInCategory/American actors or Special:RandominCategory/21st-century American writers if you want to see what the actual practice is. Even FAs don't always have inline citations for birthdates, much less ideal sources, but they all include birthdates in biographies whenever that information is available.
    In other words, we're not considering whether sources about "Alice Expert" specifically put much (or any) emphasis on this. Instead, we're considering whether "biographies", especially biographies as they are written in encyclopedias, include this information. Biographies normally include birth years (and some of them include full birth dates), so we follow their lead. It still kind of "based on sources", but it's not "based on sources about the subject of this individual article". If you need an official written justification, it's Wikipedia:Featured article criteria #1b: "comprehensive: it neglects no major facts or details and places the subject in context". Some information is added not because sources care about this, but because that information "places the subject in context". Knowing (approximately) when someone was born "places the subject in context", even if you really have to dig deep to find any plausibly acceptable source to support that content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:40, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
    What benefit do we give to our readers from excluding widely-reported nation events but including the peaceful resolution of the Whiskey Islands dispute between Canada and Denmark? What benefit in the Deaths sectiondo we give to our readers by excluding Barbara Walters but including an Olympic gold medalist who most people have never heard of? I don't oppose the inclusion of both events/people, but it's baffling to trade those widely-reported events for niche ones only studied by academia. We're not Citizendium. InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 19:32, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    I've always been against mentioning the trivial dispute over tiny, barren Hans Island. A discussion about Olympians resulted in a consensus that individual Olympic gold medallists routinely be included. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 23:08, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
    Can you provide the link to this discussion? Thanks. —Bagumba (talk) 07:29, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

section break 2

Maybe the solution is to discontinue WP:YEARS & delete all Year related-pages. I suppose that'll never happen, but maybe it's an option to have in mind. GoodDay (talk) 22:18, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Alternatively, someone stated above that turning the year articles into prose like how we do with 10th millennium BC, which could be a way to cut all the squabbling. Curbon7 (talk) 23:26, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
I mentioned above that I had done such edits to 2001 (before and after), but GoodDay and one other editor challenged the edits and forbade me from doing so any further because they felt I didn't get consensus from the WikiProject. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:46, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
Do you still wish to make those changes to those International Year pages? GoodDay (talk) 23:57, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
I think at this point the community needs to discuss more broadly what to do with the year articles moving forward, which is what I was trying to do when I opened this discussion. The years articles still follow basically the same format that they did at the beginning of Wikipedia (example), and they were never updated to reflect best practices like the rest of Wikipedia was. I think prose is a strong contender given the guideline at WP:PROSE, but whatever happens to them, it ultimately needs to be something that complies with modern Wikipedia standards, and I think it will take more than one or two users to figure out what that is. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:07, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
Would your proposal bring about the deletion of the image collages? I'm asking, as those additions were the result of a compromise. GoodDay (talk) 00:16, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the image collages. But again, it really comes down to what the community thinks, and broader issues of structure and coverage will probably take precedence over cosmetic concerns, at least until this mess is cleaned up a little bit. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:26, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
Years are clearly an encyclopedic topic. How could deleting all year articles be a solution? If you mean to avoid disagreements, the same could be said for many other types of articles, including those about politics, religion, sex, sport, entertainment, celebrities etc. Jim Michael 2 (talk) 15:15, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
To the main point of this discussion: I do not believe that the creation of an MoS subpage (specific to year lists) is warranted (on neither the basis of this discussion nor the previous discussions giving its rise). While disagreement (legitimate and sincere on both sides) clearly exists, the path of its mitigation is not within the style manual's remit proper. That path (hard traveled and often obscure) is through editorial consensus as reflected in the letter and spirit of Wikipedia's policy/guideline provisions. Provisions, of which, the MoS itself is subject and subordinate to. There's no magic pill to cure the ills of hard work needed to resolve editorial disputes like this, yet the pain and scar tissue of the hard fight can easily be magnified by needless expenditures of time and effort from asking the wrong question or pursuing its answer in the wrong place. It's clear that general notability guidelines (as written) can not be objectively used to segregate a topic by imagined increments of notability from regional to global. It's not clear whether the community desires such a means or not (this should be known first). And then, if it does, an RfC capable of amending our notability guidelines would have to ensue. Use the time available before the RfC to establish a well written request that addresses as many concerns as possible and effectively achieves the stated goals. For example, I do not believe efforts to establish "international notability" will satisfactorily identify a topic as being globally significant, if that is your goal, because international can easily be limited to a geographical region like Europe, The Middle East, Africa, and others that may not be sufficient enough to satisfy global importance, if that is your ultimate goal. These things said, I believe the editorial dispute outlined in this discussion is intractable, long standing, and worthy of being resolved; I wish you the best and look forward to what the future may bring. Sincerely. --John Cline (talk) 00:56, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
An alternative idea is to not discontinue Years, but discontinue main year events entirely and make main year articles a prosified portal into the rest of the year. The new 2001 is a good example of this "prosified" year article. InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 20:28, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

RFC proposing a new notability guideline, WP:Notability (politics)

Interested editors may comment at the RfC held on that page. BilledMammal (talk) 08:43, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Subversion of consensus mechanisms, and how our current procedures can't deal with it

On 9 February 2023, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein published a research paper titled "Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". In this paper, the authors allege subversions of our consensus mechanisms through selective selection and quotation of sources to push a specific narrative or point of view, in a manner that our dispute resolution and conduct resolution mechanisms cannot handle. While this paper discusses these issues in relation to a specific topic, the history of the Holocaust in Poland, it is the belief of myself and several other editors that the generalised issue of subversion of policy, and an inability of our resolution mechanisms to handle that subversion, applies to other content areas.

Is this a problem that other editors have encountered? If so, would you define this problem in the same or a different way? In your own words, how would you define this problem? In your experience how does it manifest? Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:34, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Discussion (Subversion of consensus)

In my experience in content areas that I am familiar with, the generalised problem as described in the paper is true. I have seen and been involved in multiple discussions, and know of multiple articles where sources have been selected, quoted and presented in a manner that is aligned with a specific point of view. Unfortunately this disruption is usually done in a subtle manner, such that an editor who is either largely unfamiliar or only has a surface level familiarity with the content area would be unable to detect. By the time that an editor or admin has the requisite knowledge to take action against one or more of the disruptive editors, they are seen as being involved at best, or accused of making attempts to remove opponents from the content area at worst.

Unfortunately this means that our forums for handling this sort of behaviour (AN, ANI, AE, ArbCom) are broadly incapable of handling this disruption. Where conduct cases are brought to AN or ANI, these are often described as content disputes by both involved and uninvolved editors which should be handled elsewhere. And where cases are brought to AE or ArbCom, admins and arbitrators who are familiar enough with the content area to recognise the problem and therefore best suited to identify problematic editors are forced to recuse themselves from taking part. Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:34, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm mentioned in the Grabowski and Klein paper. I have two comments/observations at this point:
  • This article is still brand new and in some ways "the dust hasn't settled yet". A possibility of replies, responses, reductions exists and it's important not to take the claims made by the authors at face value.
  • Having said that *I* actually do ALSO think that WP:CON mechanisms are often "subverted" "through selective selection and quotation of sources to push a specific narrative or point of view" etc etc. In fact I have stated and complained about this on numerous occasions previously, including in exactly this context, in connection to the activities of indef-banned User:Icewhiz that Grabowski and Klein discuss so extensively and portray as some kind of a tragic hero. Honestly, it reflects horribly on Wikipedia that it took Icewhiz making death threats and doxxing numerous Wikipedia users for us to finally indef ban him even though it was blindingly obvious exactly what kind of person he was long before that happened. And while it took way way too long, and while it seems he still has some defenders on Wikipedia, "subversions of our consensus mechanisms through selective selection and quotation of sources to push a specific narrative or point of view" was exactly what he was eventually topic banned for (among other things).
That is going to be the main problem right there. EVERYONE who's involved in disputes thinks that it's the OTHER SIDE who's "subverting" our processes (because otherwise everyone would instantaneously recognize how right I am about everything!!!). While I 100% support working and developing ways to overcome this problem I also think there are serious difficulties in solving it - how do we actually recognize that it's happening since we can't take the parties' involved word for it? Volunteer Marek 21:46, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
While I recognise you and the other editors named in the paper have (to put mildly) a long and troubled history, could we please keep this discussion generalised such that we're not discussing specific problematic editors? I think there's some value in trying to gauge how widespread this issue is in other unconnected topic areas, and what we can try to do to resolve it from a policy and guideline perspective, without getting into the specifics of how "UserX is pushing point Y in topic area Z". Sideswipe9th (talk) 21:56, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
I appreciate that but I also think it's very important to keep the meta-perspective here in mind, if for no other reason than that this very article is in some way part of the very same phenomenon we're discussing. Look at the response to this article from many people (including possibly yourself). They glance at it, read some of it, and think "oh wow this sounds very bad" and proceed to jump to conclusions. People who have been involved in Icewhiz-related drama for the past five years and who understand this article's context, have a completely different perspective. How many people do you think actually bothered investigating the article closely, like clicking on the actual links provided in it and checking that these show what the authors actually claim? (Answer to that one is "None" because the ref links in the article don't actually work). Did you do this before jumping to start these discussions? As isaacl says below "fact checking" and genuine engagement is an extremely time consuming process and that's why most people, including Wikipedians, don't do it. And that means that all kinds of BS can be passed off, "subverting" the consensus process.
BTW, on his twitter account in couple instances Icewhiz gave advice to would-be Wikipedia trolls. He said (paraphrasing) - "if you want to put in a false claim into an article just put a reliable looking citation at the end. Even if the citation doesn't say anything like the claim, it doesn't matter, hardly anyone ever actually checks that as long as the citation looks reliable." This is one of the main ways that your proposal is referring to no? Perhaps a good first step would be to enumerate different ways that "consensus can be subverted"? Volunteer Marek 23:02, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
While I can only speak for myself on this, the generalised conclusions surrounding subversion of consensus mechanisms is something that has been on my mind for at least the last year. To my knowledge Icewhiz did not edit in the content areas I'm active in.
As for reading the paper closely and checking the citations in the paper I did so prior to contributing, both here and at two of the other discussions on this paper. Some references are broken, some are not. With the broken links the diff ID numbers were included in the URLs, so finding the correct edit using Special:PermaLink was pretty straightforward and a mild annoyance at best though I do also recognise that many readers would not know how to do this.
As I said at the AN thread prior to making this discussion, while I'm not familiar enough to untangle the specifics within the content area that the paper is discussing, I do recognise the same problem occurring in other unrelated content areas that I am familiar with.
On inserting false claims with reliable looking citations, yes that is one manifestation of the problem. I've also seen discussions where older sources, which are favoured by one side of a current culture war topic, are preferred over newer sources, which represent the current scientific and medical consensus on a topic. I also see discussions where sources are cherrypicked and presented in a manner that favours a specific point-of-view, and that editors who are not fully familiar with the topic cannot easily determine. In a lot of ways, the various manifestations are already laid out at the WP:CPUSH essay that I referred to in my first message in this section. Sideswipe9th (talk) 23:44, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
The broken links work if you copy-and-paste them rather than clicking on them. Here is a tweet from the journal about the problem. Levivich (talk) 00:06, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
how do we actually recognize that it's happening since we can't take the parties' involved word for it? This is a very good question. I wonder if we need to more clearly delineate the various levels of involvement. For example, an editor who is knowledgable about and actively editing a topic can currently be seen to be as involved as two editors who have a history of tense and barely civil discussions. To a degree this pushes subject matter experts to the side in favour of editors who are not active in a content area, when trying to resolve this sort of problem.
Should an editor or admin who is active in a topic area, and not in direct dispute with an editor who is being problematic be treated as though they have the same level of involvement as an editor or admin who is in direct dispute with another? Sideswipe9th (talk) 22:26, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm also mentioned in the cited essay (which suffers from numerous major problems, but as you said, this thread is not the place to discuss them, so I will focus on generalities).
Frankly, I don't think it is possible to do anything about this, since as you say, once someone becomes involved in a content dispute beyond simply enforcing technical rules like 3RR or similar, they are, well, involved. That's why we see an occasional recusal from Arbitratros, for example.
If you click through to a related interview with Joe Roe here, he make a good point that we would need a new type of body, one that I imagine should be stuffed with experts on a particular topic area. But first, we know it's unrealistic to expect that sufficient experts will involve themselves with Wikipedia (for example, the cited essay concerns Polish-Jewish history; I don't believe we ever got any notable expert on this topic area editing Wikipedia in, what, 20+ years of the project's history?). Second, even creating such a body would lead to discussions on whether its composition is neutral (think about discussions related to composition of Supreme Court bodies, etc.). Third, how to prevent such experts from becoming involved on Wikipedia? And in fact, because they are experts and involved in the content area outside, how to account for their bias? Is an expert scholar a truly neutral party when it comes to discussing content that may related to research that is their own, cites his works, maybe praises it or criticizes it? Seiously I think there is no realistic solution here - I could joke we could put ChatGTP in charge or ruling who is right nor not, b/c seriously I don't know what can we do better than what we are doing now. As WP:NPOV states, "Editors, while naturally having their own points of view, should strive in good faith to provide complete information and not to promote one particular point of view over another." We all, including any concivebale experts, are biased due to having some POVs. Anyone who things they are perfectly neutral is in fact a very dangerous individual (see my small essay here).
However, I see another angle of subervsion of consensus here, related to harassment (see WP:OWH) and "mud sticking"/"where there is smoke, there must be fire" logic (see my second mini-essay here). We all know that, unfortunately but realistially, one way of winning content disputes is perseverance. The harassment angle here is that this can be achived not just by "sticking it out", but also by driving one's opponents from the field - even after one gets banned. In here, I am afraid I have no choice but to move back, if slightly, from hypothetical to practical. Icewhiz, a major source of information and agenda for the essay linked by OP, has been site banned for harassment with the declared agenda of driving his perceived wiki-enemies away from the project by destroying their reputation. How can we, the community, prevent such extremly dangerous actors from slowly succeeding, particularly when they get a voice in otherwise reliable media? For example, if a claim that meets WP:ASPERSIONS is dismissed by ArbCom (which concludes that the evidence presented was insufficient for said claim), the editor making the claim is site-banned by Trust and Safety for harassment, but the claim is later repeated in a reliable media, what should we do? It seems like another no perfect situation. Saying that such claim can never be revisited and should be ignored or censored goes against free speech and assumes ArbCom's infallability; on the other hand, revisiting it goes against WP:DENY and invokes the aforementioned "where there is smoke, there must be fire" fallacy, slowly chipping on the reputation of the targeted, vicimized editors. There is a reason some cases related to harassment are heard by ArbCom and Trust and Safety "behind the closed doors", to prevent more harm from coming to the victims by giving the attacker a forum and/or an audience, but what to do when the attacker already has an outside forum? What steps, if any, can we take to DENY the harassment and protect the victims? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:31, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
I think the authors have it right. A volunteer community can't deal with this kind of problem. If we ever have an Editorial Board/"ArbCom for content" (the idea I alluded to in the interview, though it isn't mine) then it'll have to be through intervention by the Foundation. Something like meta:Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment-2021 on a grander scale – where they proactively commission (i.e. pay) outside experts to investigate our coverage of a topic and make binding recommendations. I realise that offends pretty much every idea we have about project governance, but there it is. – Joe (talk) 08:19, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
@Joe Roe - how can you have "binding recommendations"? Something is either a recommendation, or it is binding (a dictat) - the two together doesn't work. Speaking as one who read it, and then asked follow-up questions that weren't answered because the contractor's contract hadn't been planned with Q&A time for some unknown reason, the assessment had significant flaws. The Foundation is prohibited from doing what would be the actual creation of content here, as it would make them cease being a publisher and the safeguards that go with it.
That aside, I'd also ask how these external experts could make recommendations in a form that would (excluding consensus and fixable ones like MOS aside) comply with Wikipedia policies. Nosebagbear (talk) 13:28, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
An expert commission could recommend, for example, that we consider a certain source or body of sources unreliable, which we'd then treat as policy. – Joe (talk) 14:13, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
If Grabowski and Klein believe that there's an NPOV issue in a certain article or topic, then I advise them to open a discussion at the NPOV noticeboard. WP:CPUSH is a huge problem on Wikipedia; I would argue it might be the single biggest problem we face as editors. But it seems the authors are just complaining that it exists rather than offering any sort of novel insights or solutions. I'm more immediately concerned that they're making accusations against editors with which they have content disputes by name in an externally published work. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:08, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

If it is a CT area and an article is well attended I don't really think this is a serious problem, in general. While a certain amount of dodgy stuff might get in for a while, eventually it will be sorted out by the usual processes, discussion, RFCs, dispute resolution and whatnot. If there is a problem, it is in the amount of wasted ink/time in reaching a desirable outcome, democracy right? Selfstudier (talk) 22:06, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

While I don't go into specifics, I can say that the articles that I'm familiar with this being a problem in are in CT areas (sometimes multiple overlapping areas) and are generally well attended.
I could also cite an example of one of our usual processes, where it was remarked by editors and the discussion closer, that editors who were familiar with the topic were contributing in favour of one outcome and editors who were not familiar with the topic were in favour of another outcome, and the overall determination of the closer was one of no consensus. Sideswipe9th (talk) 22:44, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
@Selfstudier - you're possibly thinking of the American Politics topic area which is extremely "well attended" and the process as you do describe does seem to work far better. Unfortunately this is not true for other contentious areas. Volunteer Marek 22:52, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Consensus-based decision making doesn't scale up well. The more people involved, the harder it is for individual voices to be heard. One of the factors for measuring strength of argument is weighing how many participants speak in favour of the argument, which provides incentive for flamboyant statements both to attract support and drive away opponents from the discussion, and encourages participants to align with a viewpoint without necessarily understanding the full context. English Wikipedia's consensus-based approach also produces inconsistent results, relying on who shows up at a given time and who hasn't left the discussion through attrition. This rewards the incalcitrant over collaborative editors. Getting more people to learn about the circumstances in full is an idealistic approach, but demands a high cost on a large proportion of the community, thus isn't time-effective. To avoid decisions being made on a superficial basis, the most effective avenue would be to find ways to move away from making all decisions by consensus in large, unmoderated group conversations. For better or worse, the community still seems to prefer the advantages of the current decision-making traditions. isaacl (talk) 22:24, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

To pose the obvious question, what can be more "consensus subverting" than an indefinetly banned user being allowed to influence Wikipedia article content and policies from the outside, long after they have been globally banned? Volunteer Marek 23:05, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

  • Comment In my experience, this is a significant issue in a couple of ways. One is by strength of numbers – for example, the Israel/Palestinian topic area, has a huge disparity in the number of pro- and anti-Israel editors, with a large majority of regular editors in the topic area being in the latter camp. This means most "consensuses" developed through discussion in the topic area are inevitably skewed (I have occasionally seen discussions in which pretty much every editor from outside the topic area (who can probably assumed to be reasonably neutral) has commented in one way, but the regulars (whose responses are entirely predictable) manage to sway the discussion, or at least block consensus from forming against their viewpoint). The second is through relentlessness – there are some editors (or small groups of editors) who will relentlessly badger away at discussions over days or weeks. I would say this is perhaps less of a problem at article talk level, but tends to happen at policy discussions.
Regarding how these issues can be resolved, I only have an idea for the former issue. I would suggest an alternative to an RfC be created – a 'Request for outside opinion' in which topic area regulars would not be able to comment and only outside views would be taken into account. This would prevent vote stacking in controversial topic areas dominated by a group with a similar POV, and perhaps help flag up that there are issues in an area when the outside (neutral) editors tend to come to quite different conclusions to the regulars. Cheers Number 57 00:25, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
@Number 57 Good idea in theory, but in practice, hard to execute - see also my comment above. How do we ensure the outside comments are balanced, and/or how to we judge them afterward? Anyone with experience in academia can comment on how peer review is a lottery, for example, and the same article can be rejected in one journal and accepted in another one with identical reputation, simply because the first set of reviewers was skewed towards not liking the article and the second was skewed in another way. (This also reminds of an old Polish joke: "what voting method are we going to use to chose the voting method we will use"?). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:37, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
@Number 57: In RfC's in ARBPIA (the area with which I am most familiar), it is commonplace for a large fraction of the participants to not be regulars. Sometimes a considerable number come with identical opinions that they are unable to justify if challenged. We could conjecture why this happens, but the moral is that excluding the regulars could mean excluding everyone who knows much about the topic. Many disputes are on topics that require some background to understand. Zerotalk 13:54, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment There's an old joke amongst lawyers, who are professional debaters paid to win arguments -- or at least minimize the effects of losing them: "When the facts are against you, pound on the law; when the law is against you, pound on the facts; when both are against you, pound on the table." In short, no one likes to lose arguments, especially when your beliefs &/or paycheck is on the line. And the world of Wikipedia is no different than the Real World (tm). If the facts in an article is in variance with what you think is true, you'll argue to either exclude them, or include different facts, or both. If you can't persuade others, you'll argue Wikipedia policy. And if all that fails, you'll go to some forum (print or online) that believes Wikipedia will never be as good as, say, Encyclopaedia Britannia , & they'll publish your rant, which may lead to unpleasant repercussions for all. Sigh. I don't think we'll ever fix this problem, because no one wants to lose an argument, especially if it invalidates your beliefs or impacts your paycheck. -- llywrch (talk) 05:37, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

A serious long-term problem is that the dispute resolution process is heavily weighted towards "behavior" and away from "integrity". It is far easier to get blocked for calling someone an idiot than for misrepresenting sources, even though it is obvious that the latter is the most damaging to the encyclopedia. It is largely forgotten at the noticeboards that the only reason we are here is to build a fine encyclopedia for our readers (not for our editors). Report someone at ANI or AE for mispresenting a source, or even for making up a source, and it is likely to be dismissed as a "content dispute" or even (as has happened to me) completely ignored. Endless pov-pushing with dishonest use of sources will not be punished if carried out politely. On the other hand, editors who have contributed vast amounts of fine content can get topic-banned for not being nice to other editors a few times. Finally, note that I didn't say that this problem is easy to fix. Nor did I say that my concern is boosted by the journal article, which I actually think is dreadful. Zerotalk 08:34, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

Yup. We often act as if the purpose of this website is to provide entertainment to the people who edit and administrate here (and boy, can it be entertaining) rather to write encyclopedic articles for the general public. The basic standard for sanctions is "does this behavior annoy administrators and take up their time" rather than "how does this behavior change the quality of our articles" Volunteer Marek 08:52, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
  • This needs two-track resolution. Grabowski and Klein contend that we have active antisemites who are co-ordinating offwiki to distort content and drive off those who disagree with them, on a large scale and over a long period. That allegation could belong at Arbcom, but preferably at WMF Trust & Safety who are professionals drawing a salary. Meanwhile our means of resolving large or intractable content disputes is a community RfC, and there's clearly scope to open one on this.—S Marshall T/C 12:15, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
    Understanding that dispute requires deep knowledge of the topic. It isn't something that poking around in diffs will sort out. Nor do I think that we are obliged to respond to claims of outside activists. Zerotalk 14:00, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
    An RfC would only really apply if we've come up with a specific solution and are seeking approval to implement it. This seems like something that evades a specific solution, as it doesn't identify a specific issue so much as a general dislike of the system. We can't really have an RfC that says "hey, should we take action against biased and dishonest users". Of course we should, but what does that mean? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:52, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
    The community has to recognize, though, that in a large-scale, unmoderated community RfC, most participants won't want to invest the amount of time to evaluate the entire context, including evaluating the cited sources and diffs of editor responses. This leads to inconsistent results. If we want to avoid the resulting problems, we need to explore ways to allow decisions to be more strongly influenced by those who are willing to invest the requisite time, and have a track record of being open to following the evidence wherever it leads. I understand why many editors are reluctant to delegate decision-making influence in this way. Without this, though, decision making will continue to be vulnerable to the whims of whoever shows up to engage and engages the longest. isaacl (talk) 18:03, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
You can have an RFC where you actually ask the community for input and comment without a specific solution in mind.—S Marshall T/C 18:05, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, possible, to see if there is a direction of travel or if it is just all over the place. Selfstudier (talk) 18:10, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Ack, I've just seen that the long reply I typed to Zero0000 got lost in an edit conflict. The gist of it was that I agree that we aren't obliged to respond, but I think we should. We know from experience on other wikis that distortionism does occur and can become very entrenched, and Grabowski and Klein are subject matter experts. Their allegations are plausible. To my eyes as a non-expert their paper doesn't prove their case, but I think it would be best for Trust & Safety to review this carefully. Isn't this what the UCOC is for? I mean, if the UCOC isn't for this, then I have no idea what it's for.
If it turns out that Grabowski and Klein's case isn't proven, then we should say so, and task the relevant WMF department to do what they can to protect the named editors, who are at risk of reputational damage and career-limiting consequences if those allegations are false.—S Marshall T/C 18:12, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
I don't know if this is the way to go, but if Wikipedia needs to speak with one voice on this, then an RfC is necessary but is not enough: we should have some kind of independent third-party review of the article contents and the internal processes that lead to them, entrusted to academics with expertise in the field. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 18:40, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
The problem with "entrusting" review to "experts in the field" is that first, who gets to pick these experts? As this article makes it crystal clear, experts - by which I mean credentialed historians holding positions at various academic institutions - often disagree with one another. In fact in this case there seems to be some very serious personal or professional animus between at least two of them. Second, almost by definition, experts are going to have a WP:COI in this regard. Suppose we ask someone to review. And that person says "well, of course you should exclusively use just my work and that of my co-authors on this subject as it's the best there is!" I mean... no? That's not how it works? I distinctly recall a couple instances where an expert - someone with an expertise in the field - attempted to make contributions to articles related to their work and some editors, including some active in this dispute IMMEDIATELY ran off to drama boards to report COI. Apparently THAT particular expert was the wrong kind of expert (i.e. didn't support their POV).
There is a very basic and simple reason for why the roles of "author" and "editor" (editor as in publishing, not in as in Wikipedian) are separate in academic publishing. Or even "author", "editor" and "publisher". Authors will always have a biased view of their own work (or work which agrees with them) and it is the job of the editor and the publisher to reign them in (honestly most of the job of an editor is to cut the hell out of manuscript length - worth to remember next time someone complains about "massive removal of content"!). This is also why on Wikipedia the key policy is WP:V and WP:OR. We use reliable sources and verify that these says what they're supposed to say. We don't adjudicate - it's simply not our job nor are we qualified to do it, nor are even "experts" that we may invite - disputes among scholars (like Grabowski contra Lukas). That is up to the broader academic community and we can only report on what they say. So yeah, no, this is an unworkable idea that is contrary to our policy and ethos. Volunteer Marek 20:19, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
And there lies the problem, Volunteer Marek. No one of us is a professional author, editor or publisher, and few of us are subject-matter experts (not that it really matters on Wikipedia if you are any of these). So if the question is "who gets to decide if a scholar is good enough?" is valid, then so is "who gets to decide if an author/editor/publisher is good enough" is valid as well.
From your answer it appears that you treat those who add content as "authors" whose judgment is somehow clouded by the very fact that they create content, which apparently should empower "editors" (whom you seem to self-identify with) who may and should temper (i.e., mostly by removal) what the "authors" write. This misses one point, though. On Wikipedia, for good or bad reasons, there is generally no distinction between "authors" and "editors" (an exception I can think of is AfC, where draft reviewers are "editors" and drafters are "authors", but we are patently not speaking of that situation). Just because you choose not to create content (avoid to be an "author") you don't gain any additional powers of review or any other privilege, nor does it mean that your judgment is clearer and better than the others' from the outset. We all exercise the roles of authors, editors and publishers, these roles are inseparable and that's by design. Since essentially we are random people, my judgment is statistically not better or worse than yours, and that stems from the fact that we are anonymous. You may see your role as you wish but in the eyes of Wikipedia, you are just one of the crowd (albeit one who informally has more social capital than I do by virtue of being an older editor) and can't just claim to be somehow more impartial.
  1. We have the consensus process as the next best choice (doesn't work as it looks like trench warfare in this area but on the Internet) and admins who are supposed to mediate/decide the conflict but don't want to get killed in the crossfire, which is kind of instinctive. Thus there is no mediation and whoever is more stubborn wins. Which is what the paper describes in detail. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 03:29, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
Sure; I don't think that contradicts anything I wrote. isaacl (talk) 18:48, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
It's not meant to. My reply is below yours because I put it in chronological order, but I was responding to Thebiguglyalien. I don't disagree with you.—S Marshall T/C 20:06, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification. I was expecting the reply to be nested under the comment to which it is replying. isaacl (talk) 20:25, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Responding to S Marshall above. I don't think we can leave a dispute about content to T&S to sort out -- if I understand your point correctly. For one thing, that's editorial control, which the Foundation must avoid to keep their common carrier immunity; the moment they start telling us what to include in one article, they start being responsible for the content in every article. (IANAL, but that's my understanding of how the Telecommunications Act of 1996 works.) For another, do any of us trust the Foundation to actually do a competent job of sorting out a dispute? Based on the disaster of how T&S handled the FRAM case, they can't. A few paid employees won't take the time & effort dozens of unpaid volunteers would in an important case, & even less for less serious ones. (Although I had the thought today that maybe a few experienced Wikipedians ought to be paid to manage article reviews. As I said somewhere on this page, our increasing need to keep Wikipedia reliable is experienced & willing Wikipedians to review articles; otherwise, only the ones active Wikipedians happen to have an interest in are monitored. And even then, you can't become an expert in a subject without forming biases.) -- llywrch (talk) 01:52, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
A scheme I know kind of works on Russian Wikipedia, but also doesn't really work, is mandated mediation (принудительное посредничество), where the mediators (admins) have the power to resolve content disputes and conduct Disputes, and enforce their decisions appropriately, but I won't vote for its implementation. For starters, who gets to choose the arbitrators? On ru.wiki it's ArbCom, but one time the previous ArbCom here was presented with the issue in the topic area, it was a total free-for-all, a mess which was handled poorly by the committee, the parties and in particular by the clerks (yeah, it was Christmas/New Year time, but that is hardly an excuse). Secondly, in that system, admins have to be previously uninvolved in the dispute and basically agnostic about the whole issue, which means that the admin will be impartial but also clueless, but that's what we already have, so this gives me a lot of plus ça change vibes 3. if the appointed mediator sucks, which is a distinct possibility because see point 2, ArbCom won't, or will be reluctant to, dig in deeper for the same reasons it didn't want to for all the time so far, 4. admins would dread to be appointed mediators. Also, with the current system, no expert in the subject area will be realistically able to be an admin. So that kind of makes that idea bad in my eyes. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 03:58, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure it's really accurate to call the controversies here a "subversion of consensus", it is an allegation of intentional distortion by a small, named, clique of editors. Regardless of whether the allegations in this case have any merit, it is a matter of historical fact that such cliques have existed and operated on a variety of topics historically, and we have prior ARBCOM cases dealing with them. And it's certainly my experience as an administrator that has to a point specialized in mediating Balkan and post-Soviet disputes that a lot of articles about contentious conflicts, particularly ones that sit at the edges of obscurity from the perspective of English Wikipedia's biases, are dominated by editors using dubious methods--in many cases it may even just be one editor who has taken free reign over a topic until someone stumbles on their work and calls them out (or alternatively, a set of POV-opposed editors who have incorrectly decided to just each create their own walled garden WP:CFORKs dedicated to the topic). Unlike the Holocaust in Poland, perhaps, the damage is muffled by the fact that these articles are typically not very well written, and thus don't carry the full weight of "trusted information" that well-written Wikivoice has with our readership.
The article identifies admin intransigence as a contributing factor. I think that the broader problem is a similar (justifiable) reluctance on the part of the community as a whole to engage with a topic owing to its high emotional burden (and, in the case of pretty much all of the examples I'm thinking of other than the Holocaust, obscurity). If there is clear buy-in and participation from good-faith editors from all corners of the encyclopedia to give clear judgment calls about whether sources say what editors claim they say, what DUE actually looks like, etc. it's much easier for admins to step in and block bad actors. Otherwise, admins are both a) relying on their possibly-weak personal understanding of the subject matter and b) making calls that could cause them to be considered WP:INVOLVED. But, as I said, editors in these areas face a steep emotional burden: even for editors with zero personal connection to a conflict, editing around topics like genocide takes a toll; conversely, bad-faith editors will face no similar obstacle due to their personal contempt for the topic at hand. I think that if we want to be proactive about dealing with contentious topics dominated by POV-warriors, we need to either find a way to incentivize uninvolved, skilled editors to go edit these topics (read: get the WMF to pay people to do it) or else revisit expectations of how admins adjudicate in contentious topics with low participation. signed, Rosguill talk 21:40, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia is very vulnerable to determined manipulation and undeclared COI. While I am among those who have given up on editing topics in World War II in Eastern Europe, as there really is no point in trying, I have seen this behaviour on topics as disparate as the history of the Congo, Ugg boots and water quality in Fresno. Simply put, an unpaid editor cannot compete with a determined SPA. As to solutions, admins are part of the problem, though I would call it administrator fatigue, not intransigence. "The same editors being TL;DR" was what somebody at ANI called a series of fairly serious complaints recently. We need more admins and, understandably, people are reluctant to run the gauntlet of RfA. I don't have a full-fledged suggestion, but if RfA is an obstacle maybe we need lower stakes. Term limits for admins would never fly, but perhaps we could have an advisory board for questions where the sources matter, whose members might be willing to serve a month, let's say, where they might be unwilling to commit indefinitely, shrug. TL;DR: it's a problem, it isn't limited to Poland, and I urge En.wikipedia to take it seriously. Elinruby (talk) 23:20, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
In the name of fairness I feel the need to add 1) Grabowski at several points does not seem to understand the reliable source designation 2) While the article is not *only* about Volunteer Marek, and it is true that his reverts are often "aggressive', he was invaluable in the article about sexual violence in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which today would likely would omit all mention of Russian soldiers were it not for him. He persisted when many of us could not. Credit where due.Elinruby (talk) 00:47, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, DRC. Haven't been in there in a while but "manipulation" mostly took the form of (very polite) objections to certain subsidiaries or mines being mentioned on pages for parent companies. I don't want to look names up but Katanga and Kivu province come to mind. Mentions of diamonds financing conflict, or pollution, or local objections, or allegations of bribery, tended to subsequently fall off pages. The pattern of one corporation per mine, which would then go bankrupt, would get obfuscated, or orphaned... Don't remember all the details. Possibly I appeared to be trying to right great wrongs, but these were different user names, so I don't think that this was someone monitoring me, especially since I was almost exclusively working from ICIJ sources in the wake of Panama Papers. Probably employees, IMHO, which I don't consider necessarily an issue if done in good faith. There was also a heated dispute over King Leopold's Ghost, but that was fairly by the book as heated disputes go; wouldn't call it "manipulation". Does that answer your question? Elinruby (talk) 10:54, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

new Haaretz article Selfstudier (talk) 12:32, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

  • One issue that I think this situation brings up, that the community will need to readjust to, is understanding how to evaluate "peer-reviewed academic publications" as the basis for evaluating conduct disputes. We are all accustomed to thinking in terms of WP:RS. The paper that led to the discussion here and at ArbCom meets our criteria as a "reliable source" for content such as that at Criticism of Wikipedia. (I'm amused to notice that, as of my post here, it doesn't seem to have been added at that page.) But that doesn't mean that we should trust it, at least on face value, for determining how to resolve either a content dispute or a conduct dispute. There's an awful lot of discussion at the ArbCom case request page about the article being "peer-reviewed", as if that should have a bearing on the article's usefulness for framing the case, and yet the reality may very well be that it is far from being a "reliable" source for that kind of purpose. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:25, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
    Heh. If someone edited Criticism of Wikipedia and attempted a summary (in prose without quotes), using the above Haaretz article as an RS, would anything happen? Would anyone challenge the material? Selfstudier (talk) 18:58, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
    I agree that the article cannot be used as a source for conduct: it is up to the WP community and its admins and arbitrators to assess conduct. However, the article is a reliable source as far as article content and content disputes are concerned. In fact, it is an indispensable source for cleaning up articles from the many errors they contain. There are many good reasons to criticise the article, but from the point of view of our articles' quality, it is a blessing. (Note that Criticism of Wikipedia has not yet been updated, but I myself used the article as a source in Reliability of Wikipedia). Gitz (talk) (contribs) 18:59, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
    @Gitz6666 As someone who is criticized in that piece, I want to say I think your summary there seems neutral. It is a fact the authors criticize Wikipedia's reliability. To what degree they are correct is another issue, and this is why it's important to use the correct language (claim... believe... allege) as you did. Shame that some news outlets reporting on this are less careful and treat the paper as a holy word that "proved" something. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:25, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
    I agree this is a reliable source, but that doesn't mean that other reliable sources don't exist. If this was article space it would be be given due weight against other sources. The idea that "a" historian is right, and is not how it works. When that reliable source agrees with the opinions of certain current and former Wikipedia editors, and works in tandem with those editors, it will of course come to a conclusion that they all agree upon. There is certainly civil (and not so civil) POV pushing going on, in this area and others, and maybe ARBCOM needs to be more active in combatting it. But it's a shame they would wait to use something such as this article to start doing anything. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 19:00, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
    My point really isn't about using it as a source for content, but rather, about using it as a rationale for dispute resolution. I think that using it as a starting point for the ArbCom case will be anything but a blessing. "May we live in interesting current events times." --Tryptofish (talk) 20:08, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
  • In addition to the points brought up by Rosguill and Tryptofish, this highlights some other general issues about our article writing processes:
    • Context is always difficult to establish, because we try to keep an article tightly focused on its subject. Context, if it appears at all, is merely summarised.
    • This often generates criticism of biographical articles that we are writing from the subject's point of view.
    • Our requirement to avoid WP:COPYVIO through paraphrase can result in subtleties in the original source material being lost.
    • The perennial problem WP:UNDUE, especially in incomplete articles. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:18, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

It's not just about the consensus process, our policies and guidelines are the the creator or enable enabler of this, our bias problem, and the fact that every article about a real world contest (e.g. politics) is eternally in some painful process. We could 80% fix all of the above by improving our policies and guidelines. North8000 (talk) 19:29, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

  • Manufactured consensus by professionally managed bot armies: usually when a editor tries to manufacture a consensus by creating an army of sock puppets, it is usually rather obvious that they are WP:single purpose accounts. Yesterday, an investigation by "reporters from 30 outlets including Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and El País revealed that there are professional 'opinion formation' companies that create bot armies that each have a track record of apparently good faith participation in a broad range of discussions. This makes them much less likely to be identified. If these guys aren't already trying to manipulate Wikipedia articles, I would be astonished. As if we didn't have enough of a problem, as described by others already. Sigh. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 19:30, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
@North8000: What would you change in our policies and guidelines? Levivich (talk) 21:21, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for asking. I'll prepare a succinct overview. It will be derived from my giant mess at Wikipedia:Strategic issues with core policies, guidelines and structures North8000 (talk) 21:51, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
A major part of the problem is that any attempt at UNDUE is OR. Take the following very realistic scenario: It's actually part of the on-going Israeli life in areas close to the Gaza Strip that there are rockets being launched at them. These rockets don't come at an even rate; there may be a few completely quiet days, and there are days with dozens of rockets. These rockets rarely actually hit any populated area, and as a result there are few direct deaths or injuries directly attributable to them; however, living like this for years has been proven to have long-term health problems. One day, after a direct hit destroys a room in a house and kills some people who were in the room, Israel goes on a small operation in the Gaza Strip to stop these attacks. This includes destroying places where these rockets are stored (in densely populated neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, etc.). As soon as Israel kills one innocent person, the international media (that is, nearly all non-Israeli media) emphasizes this death, while ignoring the rockets and the deaths which were the proximate cause, as well as the presence of rockets at the attacked location. Yes, this is very realistic. Animal lover |666| 07:34, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
It is the belief of myself and several other editors that the generalised issue of subversion of policy, and an inability of our resolution mechanisms to handle that subversion, applies to other content areas - I can only agree with that. Although, as Volunteer Marek says above, I suspect that we may have different views on who the 'subversives' are...  Tewdar  09:46, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I've seen many comments which use whataboutism to minimalise the holocaust by using unequal comparisions, we have a whole article pushing the idea. Unfortunately Wikipedia's articles are written by those interested in writing them, and that isn't always a great thing. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:31, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I'll say something that really is so obvious that it shouldn't need saying. Personally, I don't want to see bogus arguments such as whataboutism used to POV our content about the very serious topic of the Hholocaust, and I'm pretty sure most of us would agree about that. I think most of us want our content to be accurate and balanced, and are particularly sensitive to wanting to avoid any influence of hateful POVs that would minimize things that should not be minimized. But the original issue raised in this discussion thread was about whether outside publications might have undesirable influences on our normal process of consensus. And I think we have to be very careful about not assigning, well, WP:UNDUE weight to single, polemical, publications – while also keeping an open mind and an active interest in input from the outside world about Wikipedia's shortcomings. I would argue that, for purposes of dispute resolution, the focus should still be on evaluating whether editors have edited in disruptive or policy-violating ways, as opposed to overreacting to a single flashy publication. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:52, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@ActivelyDisinterested @Tryptofish Just a passing nitpicking comment. Holocaust should be capitalized in this context. See holocaust (sacrifice) vs The Holocaust. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:40, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
You are absolutely right, and I corrected it. After all, this is Wikipedia, and we really should get capitalization right, especially for something this important. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:46, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

(Restricting myself to history & politics.) Academics and other professional experts all have their own values and views, and spend a good fraction of their time defending their views from experts with different views. Some of them are less strident than others, but there is no such thing as a neutral expert. I am horrified by proposals to place decisions, such as the reliability of sources, in the hands of such experts. Wikipedia is almost unique in that we strive to produce a neutral summary of all notable views, which is an entirely different aim. Our tool, imperfect as it is, is consensus among editors with different viewpoints. Putting decisions into the hands of experts would be the death of NPOV. Zerotalk 04:36, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, particularly in the context of WP:UNDUE/WP:BALANCE and the concept of echo chambers, which certainly affects in academia. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:41, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Decisions? No. Recommendations? Yes. Levivich (talk) 04:43, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Levivich Anyone can make recommendations, talk pages and like are open to "anyone who can edit". Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:45, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Anyone can make recommendations but not everyone's recommendations are equally helpful. Not anyone is qualified to, for example, review Wikipedia coverage of the Holocaust for accuracy. Given how much time it would take, the people who are qualified probably won't do it for free. So the WMF should pay for experts to review articles and make recommendations. Levivich (talk) 04:59, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
I actually like the idea that "WMF should pay for experts to review articles and make recommendations". This should be a good use to spend WMF's budget. It should be something that affects the entire Wikipedia, however, and not just a random topic area. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:03, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Editors whose POV matches the "recommendation" of an external "expert" will claim a superior right to apply that POV to articles. The "recommendation" will become a trump card in content disputes that is almost impossible to counter. So I don't see any distinction in practice between recommendations and directions. Zerotalk 06:24, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
"This reliable, mainstream expert, who is a reliable, mainstream expert because they themselves and their reliable, mainstream collegues describe them as such, agrees with my POV. Hence, I represent a reliable, mainstream POV and those who disagree with me are fringe POV-pushers who need to be topic banned." Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:27, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Sounds like "articles should not give minority views or aspects as much of or as detailed a description as more widely held views or widely supported aspects". If a panel of three experts, from Yad Vashem, the Wiener Holocaust Library, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, say X is the mainstream view and Y is fringe, and give us a list of RSes on the point, that would be helpful. Levivich (talk) 06:40, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
How do we chose the experts, or the institutions? Why not the Jewish Historical Institute, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum or the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, for example? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 07:08, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
We could have a deep bench. Levivich (talk) 07:19, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

RfC about turning the snowball clause into a policy/guideline

Please see: Wikipedia talk:Snowball clause#RfC about turning the snowball clause into a policy/guideline --- Tbf69 P • T 22:38, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Request for comment (RfC) about WP:USPLACE

Please see: Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (geographic names)#Request for comment (RfC) about WP:USPLACE --- Tbf69 P • T 19:46, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Preventing poisoning of Wikipedia bimonthly dumps

A recent article on 'poisoning' web-scale training datasets of AI language models describes, among other things, an injection of malicious edits into Wikipedia pages immediately before they are snapshotted for addition into bimonthly dumps, which are often used as training data for language models. The attack exploits a vulnerability in Wikipedia's snapshot processing: as the ordering in which articles are snapshotted is virtually sequential by article id, so that the time at which an article is snapshotted is extremely predictable (to within an order of minutes).

The authors have (allegedly) notified WMF regarding the details of their attack, and I think it would be helpful to publish their email. To the limit of my knowledge, we currently have no detection in place for observing patterns in malicious edits that may correspond to such a frontrunning attack, which may be useful in case one has occurred or will occur in the future (not unlikely).

The article authors proposed two methods of mitigating such an attack:

  • Randomizing the order in which articles are snapshotted, such that attackers must keep an article 'poisoned' with malicious edits for the entirety of the snapshot period (about a day) instead of precisely knowing when to inject poison edits.
  • Creating an initial snapshot of an article, selectively applying edits from "trusted moderators" (extended-confirmed users?) during a hold period, and finalizing the snapshot after some number of hours. More difficult to implement.

Additional mitigations may include:

  • Continuous (as opposed to bimonthly) snapshotting of articles in addition to randomization such that attackers do not even have as little as a day to sustain poison edits — but degrades the quality of the data dumps, as they will contain articles that are weeks old.
  • "Rolling blackouts" on the ability to edit pages around snapshot events, restricting edits to confirmed users during those periods such that it becomes nigh impossible to actually inject malicious edits — but degrades the editing experience for users.

I may not have covered all viable/useful mitigation measures here. [osunpokeh/talk/contributions] 18:13, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I read the relevant section of the article, and I agree that improvements are needed for the screenshot system. Organizing backend information incrementally is bad practice for this exact reason. With that said, anyone who uses information from Wikipedia for something of consequence is doing so at their own risk. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:24, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Expanding WP:NOTGUIDE to include part lists/specifications

There are currently many hundreds of articles on Wikipedia which are just lists of information like gear ratios in every variant of every car part ever made by every single manufacturer. Pretty much every single page in every one of these categories is huge amounts of non-contextual information without evidence of notability. Here are some random examples:

I'm not sure what the solution is here. A while ago I opened Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Toyota C transmission after stumbling upon the article from random and the consensus there was to delete, but it just feels painful. Following this rough consensus, the follow-up should be to go on a mass nomination spree and start spraying WP:TNT since I don't think there's much hope any of these articles meet GNG or WP:NPRODUCT. On the other hand, running around as a deletion monkey and blowing up megabytes of almost certainly reliable text that someone painstakingly copied from a manual doesn't feel good either.

WP:NOTGUIDE is much less clear here than it could be. It's clearly the most relevant policy alongside WP:NOTDATABASE and WP:NPRODUCT, but only explicitly condemns "how-to" style guides which these are not. I'm unsure about the right way to proceed. I feel like a modification to NOTGUIDE might be due here to clarify explicitly whether "parts list" style articles are appropriate. BrigadierG (talk) 00:40, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

For a proposal to mass delete articles that are all under a particular wikiproject, good etiquette would say to at least notify that project. Otherwise it looks like you are trying to get the deletions done before the involved editors know what's happening. I came across this topic by sheer luck. I have notified them at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Automobiles#Proposal_to_delete_many_engine_and_transmission_articles.
The C transmission article got consensus to delete mostly because of too few references rather than whether it was a bad choice of article.  Stepho  talk  00:36, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm not trying to propose mass deletion. If I wanted mass deletion I wouldn't waste my time talking about it here, I'd just start mass nominating, and I'm sure nominating enough would successfully ram a good few through successfully given the tenuous connection these articles have to GNG. Deletion isn't necessarily my goal. What I'm seeking is clarity, and perhaps an alternate route forward. I'm not sure the current article structure is appropriate, but it might be possible to do something like folding down the amount of information (which I think is generally excessive) and grouping articles as series rather than as individual articles for each part. As for "too few references rather than whether it was a bad choice of article", if you can find 2 quality secondary sources to pass WP:NPRODUCT then I will personally recreate the article. BrigadierG (talk) 02:40, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
I can see the problem with these articles – they lack sufficient context and fail to explain what they are about. The question is whether they provide any useful information to the average reader. Considering that most people seem to be interested primarily in tech specs, one could argue that this is the case, but considering the poor referencing situation I'd personally say that we sadly got nothing but a hearsay compilation. Especially when browsing through the history of these articles I start getting serious doubts about the accuracy of the information provided. And I guess that no article is always better than an article that is made up of unverifiable nonsense. Best regards, --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 08:22, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
I originally nominated the article after an IP changed an unreferenced gear ratio to add a "XD" Toyota gearbox specification to a long list of gearbox specifications. Their only other edit was unconstructive so I reverted it, but I really have no idea either way, and I didn't feel like it was appropriate to have to trawl through a 200 page specification to find out. Call it inadequate referencing or whatever, but a nightmare from a WP:V perspective BrigadierG (talk) 00:49, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
"Inadequate referencing" sounds fair, but I'm doubtful about the original premise, namely that there won't be sources written about a major component used in a multi-billion dollar industry. I'm unfamiliar with this subject area, but on the subject of Toyota A transmission, I found sources such as:
  • Kuramochi, K., Shindo, K., Kubo, S., & Miura, M. (1984). "Toyota New Four-Speed Automatic Transmission for Front Wheel Drive Vehicles." SAE Transactions, 93, 305–315.
  • Kondo, M., Hasegawa, Y., Takanami, Y., Arai, K. et al., "Toyota AA80E 8-Speed Automatic Transmission with Novel Powertrain Control System," SAE Technical Paper 2007-01-1311, 2007, https://doi.org/10.4271/2007-01-1311.
  • Watanabe, M., Sasaki, K., Miyamoto, K., Kinoshita, M. et al., "Toyota's New Six-Speed Automatic Transmission AB60E for RWD Vehicles," SAE Technical Paper 2007-01-1098, 2007, https://doi.org/10.4271/2007-01-1098.
Chapter 8 of a book called Design Practices: Passenger Car Automatic Transmissions looks like it might have some relevant information on Toyota's design of transmission, too. Someone with a greater knowledge of the subject area could doubtless find more and better sources, but I am now convinced that such sources do exist. Finding them might be inconvenient (standard search engines assume you're looking for a repair manual), but I believe it could be done. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:20, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
That doesn't make that material DUE, though. JoelleJay (talk) 19:25, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
Given that the subject is a specific line of automobile transmissions, why would we not assume that a basic description of the specific line of automobile transmission is appropriate for a well-written encyclopedia article? (DUE itself isn't relevant, as it is about "viewpoints". There are differing viewpoints on whether this line is good/bad/indifferent/better than this alternative; there are no viewpoints about what the basic facts are. I find that page 65 of this book helps elucidate the difference between a fact and a viewpoint.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:08, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
25kb listing every single transmission and transmission feature and all their applications is not a "basic description", it is an exhaustive directory of information that falls far afoul of NOT: Information should not be included in this encyclopedia solely because it is true or useful. A Wikipedia article should not be a complete exposition of all possible details, but a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject. Verifiable and sourced statements should be treated with appropriate weight. and Use reliable third-party (not self-published or official) sources in articles dealing with software updates to describe the versions listed or discussed in the article. Common sense must be applied with regard to the level of detail to be included. JoelleJay (talk) 02:53, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Did you not notice me supplying several non-self-published, non-official sources earlier?
More to the point, if you are trying to figure out the difference between the AC60E and the AC60F – if you were trying to produce a summary of accepted knowledge, not just a context-free list of the parts numbers – aren't the facts reported about them the kinds of things you would need to know? Do you think you could actually explain the difference without noting that they're both six-speed automatics but they have different gear sets for torque converter lockup? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:03, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
You linked a handful of primary articles by employees of Toyota, those are clearly not acceptable. If data are included in context-free lists as they are here then they violate NOTINDISCRIMINATE; if that huge amount of data is accompanied by prose summaries of each item sourced to primary/non-independent reports, it violates PRIMARY. I don't see how this material belongs in a general encyclopedia. JoelleJay (talk) 03:31, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
In what way is an article written by an employee but published in a reputable, independent journal "clearly not acceptable"? Do you apply this standard to other commercial products, such as pharmaceutical drug or agricultural products, or is it a special standard for vehicles?
(WP:5P1 says "Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias", so it doesn't really matter if it would belong in a purely general encyclopedia.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:29, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
It is primary data released by the company; we do not base articles on primary sources, and if this is the only type of sourcing that exists on the topic then the article would be 90+% primary. And of course I would oppose listing exhaustive products/specs sourced to pharma and ag companies... JoelleJay (talk) 21:03, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
The problem is in fact wider: restaurants with their menus, record labels with all their signings (notable or non-notable). The Banner talk 16:21, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
I don't think I've ever run across a list of restaurants with their menus.
A record label with all their signings sounds fine to me. In fact, one of the three most common selection criteria in WP:SAL is "Short, complete lists of every item that is verifiably a member of the group." Short doesn't mean 10 entries. It means less than 32K in length. That's long enough for, say, 5,000 (yes, five thousand, not five hundred) words. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:49, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
Support clarification. Those articles also fail INDISCRIMINATE and NOTDIRECTORY and our basic standards for DUE and fancruft and should be deleted. JoelleJay (talk) 20:52, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
Deletion. It can kinda suck deleting good faith content, but I stand by the position that Wikipedia should not attempt to duplicate or host the kind of content that would more reasonably be expected to be found in a database or catalog. The fact that such content is almost invariably unsourced, or that it should be sourced to the authoritative primary source, is a red flag that Wikipedia isn't the right place to look for it in the first place. Alsee (talk) 14:42, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

Oppose - at least Mitsubishi Neptune engine - you guys are sweeping with a very broad brush here. Most people who read about automobiles find engine specifications and descriptions of interest, and this kind of information is best presented in articles that only cover the engines, rather than in the automobile articles themselves. This avoids duplicating content and most articles on engines have more content than being mere lists. A lot of these articles fall short on sourcing because they were started a long time ago, when sourcing requirements were much looser than today. I am always working to add appropriate sources but it is not something which can be done overnight.  Mr.choppers | ✎  03:17, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Should news sources without attribution to specific authors be deprecated?

There is a lot of discussion currently about the risk of generated content being entered into Wikipedia directly, but another concern is third-party generated content being used indirectly as a source. Just last week there was some level of reporting regarding CNET's now-retracted decision to publish articles on their site that were written by an "Article Writing AI", articles which, despite ostensibly being screened by an editor, were found to have significant factual errors. CNET attributed these articles to CNET Money Staff, and then, after some criticism, just CNET Money. Now, because of the negative attention, they've "paused" the rollout.

https://futurism.com/cnet-ai-errors

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23564311/cnet-pausing-ai-articles-bot-red-ventures

The thing is, CNET is still considered a reputable publication, which is why it was notable that they did this and is also why they publicly stopped. However, there are certainly many other smaller sites that could implement technologies like this (and maybe already have) in order to appeal to SEO and search result rankings, and as these sources suggest, it will be very easy for factual errors to slip by well-meaning editors who are not used to manually fact-checking every single factual statement in a given text.

Given this issue, I think we may want to consider deprecating sources from news/newsblog articles that are not attributable to a specific author, or at least doing so for sites that have been confirmed to use AI generated content. Tpdwkouaa (talk) 18:38, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Or, we could wait and see if sites lose their reputation for reliablity because they have been found to be using AI generated content that contained unacceptable levels of false information. I am very leary about deprecating sources because of what they might do, rather than because they have demonstratably published false content. Donald Albury 19:30, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
I have to agree with Donald… WAY too soon… we can react to what actually happens, and should not “pre-act” due to fear of what might happen. Blueboar (talk) 19:44, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
If a source becomes unreliable for this practice, then it's not suitable for use. That's the time to depreciate. We shouldn't do so on the idea that it might not be what we think. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 19:47, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Much too broad a solution to this narrow issue. Newswire services generally do not credit a specific author - this change would deprecate a very large number of highly reliable sources. I would support deprecating CNET even if they've stopped their article-writing bot, since clearly their editorial oversight is quite poor and that has implications even for articles written by humans. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 19:52, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Overreaction to a minor issue that will complicate things immeasurably. Many news sources simply have their author set as "News desk" or something generic like that. Similarly, print newspapers often don't directly name an author for the majority of clippings. Should instead be handled on a case-by-case basis. Curbon7 (talk) 19:53, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
I've long stated that the biggest threat is that Wikipedians seems to have no idea what to do now that 2rd party vetting and verification is becoming ever less reliable. In the mean time, there are some great reporters who seem to have switched to self publishing, but we don't recognize that work either. We need to begin putting thought into replacing that entire system, probably by creating a new system to allow individuals to verify sources, news reporting and news reporters and probably keep track of some sort of ranking and reputation score or something like that. The fact that we keep being stuck in old conventions and refuse to even think about what first hand and oral knowledge means is concerning for our future, because its going to get pretty thin in sourcing when half the news is coming out of tik tok reporters. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:33, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Reliability is in general an issue, I don't like "Staff" or "News Desk" either but the suggestion is overkill. Sure, we should be keeping an eye on this and if needs be, case by case, addressing it. Selfstudier (talk) 22:40, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
  • There are dual, growing problems: the old Gell-Mann Amnesia effect (worsening, due to persistent cost-cutting and monetary pressures), and the new (partial) downfall of "gatekeepers" (i.e., formal publishing of any kind).
Here's how we could start to tackle that: WP:RSN is too rigid a mechanism. Most WP:RSN RFCs judge a source's quality based on a handful of articles, which is a minuscule amount of the source's overall content; they also largely rely on vague heuristics, like how the source's website looks, whether it's in text or video format, whether the authors have formalcredentials, etc). I can come across 10 missstatements of fact by The XYZ Post over a few months, but I'm not keeping notes, so those falsities won't be discussed in any RFC. And I can come across outstanding reporting by a self-published source or blog, but if I miss that RFC, it'll never be discussed.
We should create a new page, with subpages for each source (broadly defined; could even include YouTubers). When a source published an incorrect statement of fact, we list that to their subpage; when they publish high-quality exclusive reporting (again, even including YouTube videos), we list that too. This would allow any WP:RSN RFC to judge a source far more holistically and more comprehensively than is done currently. (note: this is only a very early idea, not a proposal) DFlhb (talk) 14:03, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
  • If the problem is with sources generated by AI then the solution should be targeted at sources generated by AI, not at the other 99+% of news sources without attribution to specific authors. There may be other reasons for not accepting news sources, whether or not they have attribution to specific authors, but this proposal is not about those reasons. Phil Bridger (talk) 23:08, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
    And there are tools that, at least for now, can detect AI-generated text, so questionable articles can be tested to see if an AI is probably involved. See https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/, for example. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 23:19, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Just to be clear, most old newspapers (which are widely used as sources for old biographies) identify no authors. I assume this question is directed at modern or future sources. BD2412 T 23:40, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
  • This is very common with syndicated news articles written by news agencies (e.g. the Associated Press, Agence France Press, Reuters), which are actually probably the most reliable sources in news. See e.g. a syndicated article by the AP published in the SCMP, or a syndicated article by AFP in France24, neither of which have a named author in the byline. So this proposal is a complete nonstarter. Endwise (talk) 00:21, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
    The number of times I have found factual, contextual and positional (bias) errors with stories (signed or unsigned) by the news agencies listed above is too big to count. Sometimes they disseminate worthwhile information. Sometimes they are just worthless. Since there is no mechanism to discern in advance which of those conditions apply for any specific story, they can never be called "reliable". That is a blanket statement that is just not true. On the issue raised by the OP I agree that the proposal is too broad. 65.88.88.59 (talk) 20:55, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
    The fact that a source sometimes makes mistakes does not make it unreliable. As it stands, mainstream news agencies are considered generally reliable by the Wikipedia community: WP:RSP lists Agence-France Press, Associated Press, and Reuters as generally reliable. If you think that consensus is wrong, you need to start a new discussion about that, preferably at WP:RSN, but you're going to need strong evidence to convince people.
    Insofar as mainstream news agencies are currently considered reliable, a new policy which makes them unreliable as an accidental side-effect is clearly a non-starter. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:59, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
    Agreed with Endwise, and I'd have used the exact same words ('complete nonstarter'). Our current mechanisms are beyond sufficient: if a source is found to use AI bots, WP:RSN will deal with it accordingly, including by determining which properties are affected (whether a whole outlet, or just a sub-brand). DFlhb (talk) 14:16, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
    No, we should not deprecate news stories with no author. Many news agency stories are team efforts with no byline. Deprecating sources with no author would also wipe out most sources used in our coverage of the Russo-Ukranian war. I do agree with the comment above that many very reliable authors are publishing independently and are too easily dismissed as "blogs", but that is a different issue. Elinruby (talk) 23:14, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Not a good idea. In addition to everything mentioned above, content management systems for news agencies are not perfect, and sometimes the byline listed on the website will change, disappear, or never make it online in the first place. Gnomingstuff (talk) 06:02, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
Most reputable web sites probably know better than to publish unreviewed automated text. If they review the text properly to ensure it's okay, the article is probably as reliable as any other article on the same topic on the same site, and the reviewer may not be listed. If attributed articles on any particular site turn out to be problematic, we can always make a decision for that site. Animal lover |666| 07:02, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Plot summary structure

Looking at the plot summaries for films on Wikipedia, it seems like in general they tend to devote a disproportionate amount of words summarising the second half of the film, and ignore many plot points from the first half. (I haven't looked at the books much, but it's possible they have the same problem.) I wonder if there may be some kind of recency effect going on, in that editors remember the second half of the film much better because they saw it second. Regardless, is there anything that can be done about this? Plokmijnuhby (talk) 16:02, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

How about excluding plot summaries entirely, and basing article content on what reliable sources have to say about the subject instead? AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:06, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
As plot summaries are to be concise and capture that main points of a film without introducing interpretation, it is more than natural to have these focus on a film's resolution than introduction. Masem (t) 16:09, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
If that were the reason, that would imply that in a three act film, the third act gets the most focus but the first two acts get roughly the same amount of focus as each other. This does not seem to hold true, the second act tends to get more focus than the first. Plokmijnuhby (talk) 22:16, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
This happens due to a bad rule that we have, called WP:PLOTSOURCE: The plot summary for a work, on a page about that work, does not need to be sourced with in-line citations, as it is generally assumed that the work itself is the primary source for the plot summary. This is one of the few areas of Wikipedia where--for reasons I can guess--we have a guideline that violates a policy (WP:NOR). Works of fiction are primary sources for their own plots, and normally we don't allow editors to interpret primary sources because that's original research. Notable works of fiction has WP:RSes about them, of course (reviews), and those include plot summaries. What we should do is require all plot summaries in Wikipedia articles to be summaries of plot summaries written by RSes. That way, we can be sure that it is the RSes, and not editors, who are interpreting the plot. "Interpreting the plot" means summarizing it, identifying important plot points, conveying how they are related, etc., all of which should be done by RSes. It's not a surprise, then, that when editors summarize a plot by themselves (instead of summarizing RS plot summaries), they end up summarizing the plot wrong. Levivich (talk) 16:22, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
I agree, but the headwind on this is very strong. Donald Albury 16:28, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
@Levivich, I think you're wrong.
OR is "material—such as facts, allegations, and ideas—for which no reliable, published sources exist".
Any published source is a reliable primary source for its own contents. If you read a book whose plot is "An orphaned boy learns that he is a magician and then tries to defeat the wizard who killed his parents", then the book itself is a reliable source for the plot line. You're not "interpreting" anything as far as NOR is concerned until you start adding commentary (e.g., how famous it is, how it compares to other works, whether it's properly categorized as comedy). WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:29, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
One cannot write a plot summary without interpreting the plot. The selection, placement, and description of details (aka interpretation) should be done by RSes not editors, or else we'll get: Goldilocks and the Three Bears is about a girl who enters the house of three bears while they are away, eats their food, breaks their furniture, and sleeps in their beds. Levivich (talk) 06:43, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, that's what it's about, yes. Why? I Ask (talk) 08:56, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
It is possible, and in my view encyclopedic, to summarize and describe the plot / events that occur within a narrative for the reader without also interpreting them. These sections aid in their understanding of the subject of the article, and also the context of the secondary sourced reception. The plot summary is also verifiable by the reader who has access to the primary source as to whether those events occurred as described. It is obviously possible to badly summarize or weight elements of a plot in the same way as it is possible to badly summarize the contents of a secondary source, but this alone isn't a reason not to do it. Consensus based editing applies here, as it does everywhere else to mitigate against non-compliant content. FWIW it's worth if it was possible to burn 99% of fictional character biographies with fire I would, as these are magnets for cruft and far more dependent on editorial decisions, but that's another discussion. Scribolt (talk) 09:38, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
I agree with @Scribolt: reading a book ("a primary source") and writing down what I'll call "straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge" is not "interpretation" as far as NOR is concerned. @Levivich, if you believe that's a NOR violation, then please head to WT:NOR and explain why you want to have part of the PSTS section removed. This is explicitly authorized behavior in WP:PSTS; you either need to stop claiming that NOR bans it, or you need to get NOR's explicit authorization of it removed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:14, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Summarizing sources without interpreting them is expected in all Wikipedia articles. The issue is when we can summarize a primary source. WP:PRIMARY provides six policy rules that have to be followed when using primary sources, so it's just a matter of whether a summary complies with them. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:11, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps the problem is that some people believe "interpret" means "understanding the source you just read". WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:15, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
The intent of NOR -- speaking as one of the people. who was involved in the early discussions -- was to exclude the kind of kooky ideas that plagued social media such as USENET, but persists in corners of Wikipedia where contributors attempt to cherry-pick facts & present their own novel, idiosyncratic interpretations. (And even for those of us who understand NOR, it is sometimes hard to avoid.) Further, for many well-known films & books there is no good secondary source that summarizes the works adequately: movie/book reviews rarely devote more than a few sentences to the actual work, & spend more space persuading the reader that said work is either worth paying money for -- or not. (There are times I suspect even academic articles on canonical or classic works are just well-written arguments to the reader to watch the movie or buy the book. I doubt anyone will ever get tenure for writing the definitive monographs on why Manos, the Hands of Fate is the worst movie ever created.) So we are forced to create summaries for most of these works from necessity.

What I suspect the problem is that we need people who can write compact yet useful summaries of movies & books, an observation I base on having read more than a few summaries that are way too long to be useful. Maybe set a limit of 500 words on any summary, which should be enough space to summarize almost any work; the only exception I can think of would be a novel like The Dream of the Red Chamber which I understand the unabridged Chinese original text, if translated into English, would amount to over a million words. (Although, having looked at the article, I see someone has provided a summary.) But a good summary will not try to reproduce the narrative, instead the elements will be rearranged to enable compression in a rational form. Editorial decisions will always persist in the creation of Wikipedia articles, whether we like it or not. -- llywrch (talk) 05:18, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

There's already a limit in place, which is 400–700 words long, at MOS:PLOTBLOAT. —El Millo (talk) 22:41, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
I was not aware of this, and I assume many other editors aren't either. Is there a bot or a report that automatically finds plot summaries for films or books that are outside of these bounds? That would be really helpful for plot cleanup. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 22:58, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
There's a maintenance template, {{Long plot}}, that places articles to the Category:Wikipedia articles with plot summary needing attention. —El Millo (talk) 23:07, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
But you have to find them first. @Thebiguglyalien, you could ask at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). I suspect that you'd need to find someone who knows how to handle the WP:DUMPS (or learn to do it yourself). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:18, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Not that applies to films only, though I know some other projects have adopted it (like WP:VG). However, it is not universal. Masem (t) 01:26, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Novels should also be 400 to 700 words per WP:NOVELPLOT. MichaelMaggs (talk) 07:59, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
There's also WP:TVPLOT. If you check Template:uw-plotsum1 I believe there may be other MOSes that have plot length guidelines as well. DonIago (talk) 03:22, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
I can quite often watch a TV show or movie, but I need our articles to help understand it because the symbolism is often lost on me. So I beg of you, please don't remove this or I will never understand TV or movies again Seriously, this is a bit of a dilemma. Before AV Club and company came about, would there be reliable plot summaries of TV episodes that were published? --Rschen7754 01:28, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Explaining symbolism is "interpretation", and requires a source beyond the book. It's okay for an editor to read a book/watch a film and write "He gave her a white lily". It's even okay for the editor to write that sentence and include a link to Lilium candidum#In culture. If the editor wants to write something like "He gave her a white lily, to represent his acceptance of her decision to enter the convent instead of marrying him", then you need a source. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:42, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Agree the work can be used as a primary source for what is in the work, or a summary of the work, but interpretation of the work requires secondary sources to not be WP:OR. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 20:54, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
  • My biggest complaint about plot summary sections is that our article writers often don’t understand the difference between a “re-telling” of the plot, and a summarization of it. When the “3rd act” gets too much space, it usually means that the writers are re-telling the plot, rather than summarizing it. Further summarizing is needed. Blueboar (talk) 22:21, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
    I don't understand quite what you mean by that. What's the difference between a re-telling and just bad summarisation? Plokmijnuhby (talk) 10:22, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
    I'd ask the same question about the difference between interpretation and summarization. Levivich (talk) 17:00, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
    Bad summation is where the editor tries to write and include every scene or relevant event as shown in order that the work gives it. Instead of saying "Captain America fights Thanos", a bad summary may go on that battle for 3 to 4 sentences. Or as another type of example, Memento (film)'s plot is untangled as that makes it far simpler (and concise) to describe it than going back and forth between the two sequences, or for films like Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow, that time loops are involved are explained as well as what happens in a typical loop, but not every single loop is discussed, just that "the plot advances over several loops"-type language.
    Summation vs Interpretation is a very thick grey line, but summarization should be exactly as shown "on the tin" which every viewer of the work will see without having to think about it, whereas interpretation is delving into aspects that are not explicitly stated by the dialog nor stated by the work's creators in other sourcing. A common example that comes up with the type of editors on WP is analyzing films frame by frame to try to deduce order of events or common points, which is above and beyond what we consider a normal viewing. Often we see editors try to overly interpret things like characters' emotions and motives that may seem obvious to one who has watched the film multiple times, but are vague on a single watch. That's why its important to only summarize what is clearly shown on screen, not what an editor thinks is happening. Masem (t) 18:20, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
    Another point is that summarizing versus interpreting with a work of fiction isn't much different than it is with any other source. If a news article simply describes a sequence of events, we're expected to summarize that sequence of events without inserting our own thoughts on motive or how it's relevant to other things. If we want to do that, we have to find a separate source that analyzes the events. It's the same logic, just applied to a different format. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:34, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
    @Thebiguglyalien: My summary above ("Goldilocks and the Three Bears is about a girl who enters the house of three bears while they are away, eats their food, breaks their furniture, and sleeps in their beds.") misses key plot points that would be in any other RS summary of the story, and describes events differently than other RS summaries would. It's an example of why I think the selection of what is "important" (what to include in a summary) is interpretation, inherently and unavoidably so. Deciding what's important is interpretation. Levivich (talk) 18:55, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
    If that's an issue, then it's not one that's unique to plot summaries or even to primary sources. Every single article on Wikipedia involves subjective judgement on what aspects of the source are covered and how much they should be emphasized. I've tried to raise the issue of how we're supposed to evaluate this when designating an article as a WP:Good article, but it doesn't seem there's much interest in addressing this. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 22:35, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
    I understand what you are saying. When I am writing or rewriting an article I am making decisions about what to include from reliable sources and what to leave out, what to emphasize, and the order in which to present things. I try to write in a neutral manner, but I do want readers to understand the subject as I understand it. That is why it is important to have multiple editors independently contribute to an article, to avoid having articles shaped too much by any one editor's systemic, deliberate or systemic and unconscious. Donald Albury 17:27, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    ...and why it's important to have multiple sources to guide the selection of details that are included in the summary. (See my userpage.) If you have three WP:RS and you summarize them, any detail that is in all three, or at least two out of three, is probably WP:DUE; details that are in only one of the three are probably WP:UNDUE; whereas details that don't appear in any source might not even meet WP:V. Same goes for specific words and phrases used: e.g. we say "terrorist" or "freedom fighter" or neither based on what the sources say.
    Here are three plot summaries of Goldilocks and the Three Bears:
    1. Goldilocks and the Three Bears is about a girl who enters the house of three bears while they are away, eats their food, breaks their furniture, and sleeps in their beds.
    2. Goldilocks and the Three Bears is about three bears who return from a trip to find a human has broken into their home, stolen their food, vandalized their furniture, and slept in their beds.
    3. Goldilocks and the Three Bears is about a child who explores a house and learns that some things are too hot, too cold, too big, too small, too hard, or too soft, but other things are just right.
    All of these plot summaries meet WP:V, they're all accurate in their details, but they tell wildly different stories. How can we decide which of these three, if any, are correct? Only by looking at RS plot summaries and seeing how they summarize the story. Otherwise, without RS, we are unmoored, drifting in a sea of WP:OR. Levivich (talk) 17:43, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Except, outside classic works and some pop culture sources, the full complete plot of works is rarely spelled out in sources. Film reviews will touch on the "Act I" content but rarely on Act III. We don't have a consistent way to source the plot of most works of fiction.
    This goes back to Thebiguglyalien's statement that we have exactly the same problem when we summarize non-fictional topics. Rarely does one single source cover the topic completely and comprehensively to leave no question of how we should summarize it. Instead, we have to work together as editors to figure out the appropriate summary structure and organization of content. That often requires editors to discuss and talk out what is seemingly the best way without violating NOR and NPOV.
    Applying this to fiction, it is again having editors each coming with their perceptions of what the original work shows and making sure the summary covers the work in a concise, comprehensive manner without interpretation. Its clear the three example summaries fail to comprehensively cover the plot, but you also have more room (from a word count side) to expand. A combination of three, under 200-300 words, would be a proper plot summary without violating WP:V. Masem (t) 17:53, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    outside classic works and some pop culture sources, the full complete plot of works is rarely spelled out in sources Nonsense. Give me the name of a notable work and I'll show you an RS plot summary of that work. Levivich (talk) 18:04, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Dora the Explorer Season 5 Episode 3: "Isa's Unicorn Flowers". Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:13, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    I said notable work; Dora Season 5, Episode 3 is not a notable work. Nevertheless, here are three different WP:RS plot summaries:
    1. [6] From Paramount+ (I'm guessing that's the publisher, so WP:ABOUTSELF): Dora and Isa are planting Isa's special unicorn flowers when suddenly a baby unicorn, Unicornio, rides in on a Rainbow. He's thrilled to see Isa's beautiful flowers 'cause they're his Mami's favorite.
    2. [7] From TV Guide: Dora and Isa help a baby unicorn get back home after his magical rainbow vanishes. They pass the Dragon Cave and the Troll Bridge before finding the rainbow that takes them back to the unicorn's forest.
    3. [8] From Sky Group: Baby Unicornio rides in on a rainbow, and loves Isa's beautiful flowers. He can't wait to get home, but his rainbow has disappeared, and he can't get home without it!
    Broken clocks, though; feel free to give me another :-) Levivich (talk) 18:29, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Those are plot synopses, which are similar to the Three Bears example above - they're too high level for a plot summary for us to use.
    I would try something like Everything Everywhere All At Once, which I have done a quick search for and can only find either synopses (not summaries) or partial coverage of the film. Masem (t) 18:36, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Oh, brother. Synopses, not summaries? Well, my Goldilocks synopses were all just one sentence... and if a work is not notable, such as Dora S5 Ep3, then we're only going to need a sentence or two for a row in a table, which is probably also why RSes are only writing a sentence or two synopsis.
    Anyway, an Oscar-nominated film is low-hanging fruit. Here are summaries, not synopses, from The New York Times [9], two from the Los Angeles Times [10] [11], The New Yorker [12], and for fun, Architectural Digest [13]. Levivich (talk) 18:51, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Those are not full comprehensive plot summaries. They are exactly what I mentioned above, that being reviews they touch on some parts of the film but do not fully summarize the film. Such as enough of the introduction of characters and early plot points, but not the "Act II" or "Act III" parts to a great degree. They get into themes, which is a separate part of our articles.
    Mind you, I am 100% supportive of adding appropriate references in plot summaries from sources like this to help better support the summaries beyond the primary work, but this has been met with resistance from editors in certain fiction areas (like television). I believe the solution lies in a realm where we can use the main work in addition to reliable sources where possible, but knowing that the full plot (within 400-700 words) will unlikely be fully discussed in RSes. Masem (t) 19:06, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Are there any plot points of "Isa's Unicorn Flowers" or "Everything Everywhere All at Once" that are DUE but cannot be sourced to the RSes I posted above? Levivich (talk) 19:22, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    I think the issue is that this strict reading applies policies in ways they weren't meant to be applied. WP:NOR specifies that using a primary source to provide basic facts is not original research, and using a novel as a source for its own plot is one of the examples it gives. And I'm not sure if anything in WP:DUE is applicable here, as due applies to interpretations and opinions rather than basic descriptions, and you'd have a hard time making a case that WP:MINORASPECT applies. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:43, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    MINORASPECT is exactly the part of DUE I had in mind. An article should not give undue weight to minor aspects of its subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject. For example, a description of isolated events ... related to one subject may be verifiable and impartial, but still disproportionate to their overall significance to the article topic. Why wouldn't this apply to details in a plot summary (some details are minor aspects, others are DUE for inclusion, the difference depends on what the RSes say). Levivich (talk) 20:58, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    If there's a practical way to apply this, then crafting an RfC to deprecate works as sources on themselves would be the next step. But like I said, I think that would be an uphill battle. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:07, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Applying DUE to plots is as easy as changing WP:PLOTSOURCE from "does not need" to "needs". But I don't think that would gain consensus, just as a rule that every statement should be sourced would not gain consensus. I don't really understand why that is, but I know that it is. Levivich (talk) 21:12, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Because encyclopedic coverage is not the same as review coverage. Reviews will rarely include an ending out of fear of spoiling the film. Encyclopedias should. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.2% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600th FP! 21:19, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    I suspect this is indeed the reason why PLOTSOURCE exists: because without that rule, we wouldn't be able to include the endings of current works, because while RSes do indeed summarize the entire plot of historical works (including the endings), RSes will usually avoid spoilers when writing about current works. What I don't understand is why editors want to include the endings of current works in Wikipedia articles. I don't believe that "encyclopedias should," nor that encyclopedias do include the plot endings of contemporary works. There's a reason that pretty much nobody does that; why should we be the first? It's anti-Wikipedia IMO, to do something no RSes do, because editors want to do it; it's OR. Levivich (talk) 21:23, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Because the reader wants to know how it ends. An article would be incomplete without it. --Rschen7754 21:29, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    How do we know that's true? You're suggesting a tertiary source include information that is not in any of the secondary sources (plot endings of contemporary works). What evidence supports the conclusion that Wikipedia readers want contemporary plot endings? Was a poll taken? Levivich (talk) 21:40, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Many works have reception that touches on various parts of the plot like specific scenes or general themes. A comprehensive plot is thus necessary to establish why that reception applies to the work. Of course there are also many works where the reception doesn't touch on anything direct in the plot, but what that then creates is where some works have the plot summary and some don't, and thus for consistency the plot summary is included.
    I suggest searching on "plot" in WT:RS as the whole situation around sourcing of plot summaries has been a subject of discussion since at least 2006. There's always been a segment of the editing population that doesn't prefer the lack of citations, but all main discussions I see at the moment still support that a plot summary that is only sourced to the work itself is fine as long as the summary is written following NOR/NPOV rules and within the conciseness factor. Masem (t) 21:54, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Why do you think Wikipedia:Spoiler exists? --Rschen7754 03:14, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
    There are narrative pieces of glue that aid in understanding how characters get from one scene to another (not necessarily just in the physical sense) that aren't covered through the partial coverage of the plot from those reviews. For example, from what I see from those linked reviews, the structure of EEAAO (where the film's three acts are introduced) is not really discussed, but narratively break apart the work that makes it easy to explain it. We want the plot summary to be understandable and concise, which these elements not covered by RSes often help. --Masem (t) 19:58, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
    Well, Memento is an outlier, not all films are so confusing. And if every scene is described in three or four sentences, the whole summary will be inordinately long - but then I guess that's not what you're saying, you're returning to my original point, that people tend to spend too much time talking about the wrong things? Plokmijnuhby (talk) 22:20, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Linking to Wikipedia alternatives/forks for other languages

See World energy supply and consumption (Diff ~1141093198).
I'm pretty sure linking to Wikisage in any article outside of Deletionpedia isn't desired, but I don't actually know which policy applies in this particular case. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 12:00, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

For this edit specifically, WP:NOTSEEALSO prohibits external links. In the more general case, WP:ELNO#12 recommends against wikis in general, and mirrors or forks of Wikipedia in particular. And of course WP:UGC is relevant when edits use forks of Wikipedia as a reference. (I see the edit has already been reverted) Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 19:50, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
World energy supply and consumption has similar Wikipedia articles in 19 languages. But Nederlands is missing. However, Wikisage contains
http://nl.wikisage.org/wiki/Wereldenergievoorziening
Nederlands and very similar. Wikisage is not a mirror or fork of Wikipedia. Where can Wereldenergievoorziening be mentioned in World energy supply and consumption? Rwbest (talk) 09:42, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Rwbest, if you are the sole author of the Wikisage article (at a glance the contributions by others seem to be minor) you could simply create the article on Dutch Wikipedia. That article could be linked through Wikidata so it'll appear in the list of translations. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 11:44, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
The wikisage article shouldn't be linked anywhere on World energy supply and consumption. That's exactly the point of the guidelines I cited. It's not an article on English Wikipedia, so it shouldn't be in the §See also section. WikiSage appears to be user-generated, so it is not a reliable source and therefore should not be used as a citation. There are various parts of the external link guideline which suggest that it shouldn't be included as an external link – as well as WP:ELNO#12 which I previously mentioned, WP:ELNO#1 and WP:NONENGEL both apply.
Or, to put it another way: in what way is it useful for readers of English Wikipedia to have a link to an article in a foreign-language wiki which doesn't even have its own Wikipedia article? If nl.wikipedia.org is missing an article on the topic, and it fits with their inclusion criteria, someone can and should write that article. But for en.wikipedia readers I don't see what benefit there is to linking to the Wikisage article. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 12:53, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Alexis Jazz, I have created the article on Dutch Wikipedia, but it was removed, not fitting within their inclusion criteria.
Caeciliusinhorto-public, the Wikisage article is as reliable as the Wikipedia article, as the text is very similar and it refers to nearly the same sources. For en.wikipedia readers the benefit to linking to the Wikisage article is the same as linking to foreign-language Wikipedia articles.
Your objections seem not to the point and not fair. Rwbest (talk) 16:25, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
If you don't think the guidelines are fair, you can always propose changing them – though they are all well-established and I doubt you'll get much traction. If you think I am misinterpreting the guidelines, do please explain how. But while the guidelines are what they are, unless I am grossly misreading them, external links to WikiSage are clearly at minimum strongly discouraged. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 17:45, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
(And while I'm at it, "as reliable as the Wikipedia article" is pretty damning as an argument for inclusion; Wikipedia is very clear both in our reliable sources guideline and the supplementary essay "Wikipedia is not a reliable source" that Wikipedia is not a reliable source.) Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 17:48, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
The point is that we do not allow user-generated/edited sites such as Wikisage to be used as sources, and, generally, as external links. You say, the Wikisage article is as reliable as the Wikipedia article, but policy says that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, and neither is Wikisage. If the article you created on the Nederlands Wikipedia was deleted, then you need to figure how to write an article that meets the requirments of the Nederlands Wikipedia, instead of asking us to waive policy to allow you to link to Wikisage. Donald Albury 17:51, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Writing anything about energy supply was made impossible for me on nl.wikipedia, and it's still impossible. But I can write on en.wikipedia and nl.wikisage.
Now I observe that the en.wikipedia reader searching for a Nederlands version of World energy supply, sees that it is missing. That is evidently not true in view of Wereldenergievoorziening, so I simply asked where to mention this article. And get not-to-the-point intimidating response. I quit the village pump. Rwbest (talk) 09:03, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
For reference, see the section for "Wereldenergievoorziening" at w:nl:Wikipedia:Te beoordelen pagina's/Toegevoegd 20151002. Rwbest, it might be possible to turn the article into a Dutch Wikibook and have a soft redirect on nl.wikipedia to make it show in the language section. But if you wish to pursue that you should consult with both communities beforehand to make sure it won't be deleted again. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 10:31, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Should non-free images be allowed in search results?

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content § Non-free images in search results (redux). {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:46, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Review of RFC Closes at AN

I have a question about the review of AFCRFC closes at AN. Should the other editors be asking how they would have closed the RFC, or should they be asking whether the closer reached a conclusion that was consistent with consensus and strength of arguments? The type of formal consensus process that is most often closed, and is most often challenged, is AFD, and between 1 and 3 AFD closes a day are likely to be reviewed at Deletion Review. One of the principles of DRV is that DRV is not AFD round 2, and that the appellant cannot simply ask the DRV participants to Keep the article, and the DRV participants consider whether the close was a valid conclusion, but not how they would close the AFD. I am asking because it appears that some of the editors in an RFC close review develop their own close reasoning. Maybe RFC closes are not sufficiently common that there are standard guidelines for how they should be done. Maybe the guidelines should say that an RFC close review is not RFC round 2. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:18, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: This is confusing. You have mentioned RFC six times, AN twice, AFC once, AFD four times, and DRV five times. These are five different things, but it all seems to be mixed about - I get the impression that you are asking about one decision-making process and one decision-review process. Please clarify whether you are asking about (i) WP:RFC, WP:AFC or WP:AFD; (ii) WP:AN or WP:DRV. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:39, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
My question is about the review of RFC closes at WP:AN. I am trying to compare it to the more commonly used process of the review of AFD closes at DRV.
If the close of an RFC is being reviewed at AN, are the other editors asked to review whether the closer of the RFC made a reasonable effort to assess consensus, or are the other editors asked each to propose how they would have closed the RFC? Robert McClenon (talk) 10:22, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
I know how DRV is done. I thought I knew how AN reviewed RFC closes. I no longer know, and so am asking. Robert McClenon (talk) 10:22, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
I don't think there is a consistent standard. There needs to be some degree of permanence to a close, because closing a discussion takes time on the part of the closer, and if AN is discussing how it'd collectively close the discussion (like a de novo review) then it somewhat discourages closing discussions, and removes the permanence of the close. OTOH, getting a correct assessment of consensus is important. Too many discussions are closed with a closing statement which, if you squint very hard, might seem valid, but substantively the close was poor. Discussions take community energy, and poor closing statements which don't really accurately reflect the discussion and either stonewall consensus or result in unsupported changes, or otherwise fail to hold up to substantive scrutiny, should be challenged and amended.
So I don't think there is a consistent standard for RFC close reviews, and I don't think we need one. In many content discussions, multiple possible closes are valid, and any sufficiently valid close should be upheld. In others, the community should consider the issue substantively. In particular, a discussion which has large community impact and was closed in a way which only a small minority of closers would've done should be overturned on substantive grounds. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 12:33, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
I agree that given that Requests for Comments are catchall discussions covering a wide variety of questions, and the plethora of lines of reasoning that can be made by any one who decides on their own initiative to evaluate the outcome of a discussion, a one-size-fits-all approach to reviewing the outcome isn't suitable. Discussions that have covered all arguments thoroughly don't need to be re-argued in a review. At the opposite end of the spectrum, discussions that were closed early based on a small number of participants are good candidates to be re-opened for discussion. Most discussions will fall somewhere in between. The best approach will depend on circumstances. isaacl (talk) 17:53, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
  • RFC closure reviews are similar to WP:DRV closure reviews, they are NOT supposed to be a relitigation of the case at hand, it is ONLY supposed to look for technical and other really obvious bad closes, such as violations of WP:INVOLVED or WP:SUPERVOTE and stuff like that. It should not be a chance for other editors to chime in with "I would have read the consensus a different way" for close calls, neither should it be a chance for people to re-argue a case on the merits, whether or not they contributed to the initial discussion. --Jayron32 15:53, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
  • AfDs select from a menu of options, and DRV decides whether the correct menu item was picked. RFCs resolve more complex questions and don't have to select from a menu, so RFC close reviews have to allow a lot more nuance than DRVs.—S Marshall T/C 18:07, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
    I do generally agree with that, but I still feel like RFC Close reviews should not be a relitigation of the case on the merits. Arguments should not be of the form "I think this should have been the outcome because..." but rather "the closure was inappropriate because..." and the inappropriate closure arguments should almost always be technical in nature rather than substantive; like the RFC was closed to early, or the closure reads like a WP:SUPERVOTE, or the closer was clearly involved in the dispute, and should not have closed; that sort of thing. Closure reviews should NOT be a place to argue "I read the consensus differently than the closer did" or "I think the closer weighted these arguments differently than I would have weighted them" or stuff like that. --Jayron32 19:29, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
    Surely if we said that, then RfC closers' content decisions couldn't be challenged in any venue.—S Marshall T/C 19:40, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
    Right. Where would we challenge a closer's reading of consensus, if not at close reviews? Levivich (talk) 19:44, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
    If reasonable people could disagree over the way a consensus should have been closed, there's no basis to overturn such a consensus. If there's room for interpretation, my interpretation doesn't become more right because it is different than your interpretation. If we turn it into a "vote on whether or not the consensus was for choice A or choice B", then that's basically relitigating the case. RFC review is not supposed to be deciding on the difference between choice A and choice B, it should be "did the person who closed this act inappropriately" not "did they act reasonably, but still reach a different answer than I would have". The place to decide how to vote between the choices in an RFC (or whatever) is when the RFC is running. If we have a review discussion over which way the RFC should have been closed, that's just having the vote all over again. --Jayron32 20:39, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
    It has to be possible to relitigate a case, because bad decisions need to be correctable. Closers aren't infallible.—S Marshall T/C 21:00, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
    No, they are not. But "making a decision I would have made differently" is not a fault. That's not a valid reason to undo a close. A valid reason to undo a close would be "the closer was involved in the discussion" or "the closer closed it too early" or "the closer exercised a WP:SUPERVOTE rather than assessing the consensus". There are many good reasons why we undo a close. "I had a different opinion on the outcome" is not one of them. --Jayron32 13:43, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
    It think that the distinction needs to be whether or not the review is about the closing process. Jayron32, imo your wording seems to imply narrowing it further to only clear-cut cases of "violations". An example to "force" clarity on this would be reviewing whether or not the closer simply did an erroneous job of closing....assessing consensus or lack of consensus, and closing based on that assessment. North8000 (talk) 14:24, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
    I'm not sure that this needs to be treated much differently than WP:DRV is; WP:DRVPURPOSE seems fine here. I mean, if someone obviously interpreted consensus blatantly wrong, like it went unanimous in one direction, and the closer implemented a supervote in the other direction, obviously that's a bad reading of consensus. What gets tiring and I think is inappropriate is the close call cases where a closer makes a reasonable assessment of a discussion that could have gone either way (for whatever your break point is for "either way", that's a fuzzy idea, but it nonetheless must exist in every case), there's far too many times when people think that reasonable closes that could have gone either way must be closed because their preference was to go the other way. Yes, of course, obviously bad closes that in no way reflect anything anyone in the discussion actually said should be open to review. But we shouldn't try to use review as a means of overturning a reasonable conclusion. If reasonable people could have decided a situation either way, there is no basis to undo a decision that went the way we personally didn't want it to go. Or, that people use review processes to merely reinforce the vote they made the first time. Or to vote in a discussion they didn't vote in the first time, etc. That's not what a review is. The review is "Did the reviewer close the discussion correctly" not "Did the reviewer agree with me" or "Did the reviewer close the discussion the way I wanted them to." --Jayron32 14:47, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
    This suggestion, if implemented, would mean that we couldn't review the close without reviewing the closer. It personalizes the RfC close review and I think that's needless. If I feel there was a better close available, then I should be able to say: "Close X would have been better, because Y". I shouldn't have to say, "This person closed a tangentially relevant discussion in 2017 so they should have recused".—S Marshall T/C 15:16, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
  • if someone obviously interpreted consensus blatantly wrong, like it went unanimous in one direction, and the closer implemented a supervote in the other direction, obviously that's a bad reading of consensus. What gets tiring and I think is inappropriate is the close call cases where a closer makes a reasonable assessment of a discussion... Everyone else feels the same way. The thing is, whether it's a close call or blatantly wrong is subjective. The review is "Did the reviewer close the discussion correctly" not "Did the reviewer agree with me" or "Did the reviewer close the discussion the way I wanted them to." "Correctly" is also subjective and often indistinguishable from "the way I wanted them to". Whether a closer should have weighed votes, and how they should have been weighed, is all subjective. A correct close is one I think was done correctly. A reasonable close is one I think is reasonable. An obvious error is one I think is obvious. There are no objective ways to determine "correct", "reasonable", "obvious". That's why we vote on it. Unavoidable. Levivich (talk) 15:53, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
    That's plainly not true. I have been involved in hundreds of discussions where my position/vote was NOT the one that was implemented, which is to say that the discussion was closed the way I didn't want it closed. I was, in essentially every one of those cases, perfectly capable of separating my feelings about the way it should have gone from my assessment of the behavior of the person who closed it. I (and I suspect other people as well) am perfectly capable of seeing a discussion closed the opposite way from the way I voted and still recognize that it was closed correctly. It happens all the time. A correct close is not always the one where I agreed with the result. To imply that means that people only care about winning, and nothing else. I don't always win. If I don't win, then I don't also see it as proper for me to complain that the person who closed the discussion did anything wrong. I'm not sure why you think that everyone is not capable of the same sort of mindset. --Jayron32 16:08, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
    I think it is avoidable; RfC's are not votes, and that means that the close review cannot be a vote. If we limit close reviews to determining whether the close was reasonable we avoid this; if it was a reasonable result, then even if a majority of editors would have closed it differently the result should stand. BilledMammal (talk) 16:20, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
  • (edit conflict) Jayron32 You seem to be advocating higher bar to review and describing only the other extreme (re-litigation) as the alternate. For clarity, what do you think about the "middle ground" example that I gave? Reviewing where the are concerns that the close did a faulty job of assessing consensus or lack thereof? Or a close that required a consensus but didn't have one and the closer didn't even claim that there was a consensus? And this is not about the narrower special case of a supervote. North8000 (talk) 16:04, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
    Yes, "erroneous job of closing" is what I have been talking about every single post I have made on this matter, the problem is that people want to use reviews to claim that erroneous means "I voted one way and this closed the other way" or "I would have voted one way, and this was closed the other way" or some variation of that. We should not use any review process to merely make the discussion go "our way". We should use the review process for when there is a legitimate problem with the close that isn't merely "I think the other decision would have been the one I prefer". --Jayron32 16:16, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
  • I think that you have a variety of questions and possible proposals bundled in there.
    • Should AN review of an RFC close be allowed to be be a complete do-over of the RFC ("round 2")? IMO not. It's a review of the close.
    • Should a note be added somewhere saying that?
    • Should there be restrictions on what aspects of the close can be discussed at AN? IMO not. Anything about the close is OK to discuss.
    • Should more close guidelines specific to RFC's be developed? I dunno, but sounds like a near-impossible task given the variations of RFC's.
    • Use a comparison to AFD/DRV for this discussion? IMHO probably not useful.
  • Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:43, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

RfC about turning Wikipedia:Naming conventions (conflicts and protests) into an official naming convention policy

Please see the RfC at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (conflicts and protests)#RfC about turning Wikipedia:Naming conventions (conflicts and protests) into an official naming convention policy. --- Tbf69 P • T 17:27, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

RfC proposing a ban on most misconduct/disruption filings at ANI for issues arising in the WP:GENSEX topic area, automatically routing such complaints to WP:AE

Hi folks, there's currently a discussion under way at the AN proposing that complaints about conduct and disruption which arise out editing that touches upon gender or sexuality (a WP:CTOP subject matter) be generally closed on sight and deferred instead to WP:Arbitration Enforcement, for handling by an admin, rather than the community at large at ANI. Presently the issue is being debated mostly by those admins who happen to be present at the noticeboard just now, and a handful of other editors who were involved with or commented upon the divisive ANI thread that gave rise to this proposal. I believe the implications of this discussion are quite significant with regard to how the community handles disruption in this and other contentious topic areas, and that the proposal should accordingly be subject to/benefit from broad community scrutiny, so if you have a moment, please consider stopping in to review and possibly share your perspective. SnowRise let's rap 22:08, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Vandalism by BoyTheKingCanDance

Wrong venue. Behavioral issues should be discussed privately with the user in question. As a last resort, WP:ANI is available after individual discussions have been tried and not worked. This message board is not for dealing with individual user behavior. --Jayron32 15:45, 10 March 2023 (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.

I usually add new content and regularly update it, which can take some time. However, BoyTheKingCanDance, who is a Pending Changes Reviewer & New Page Reviewer, often comes and vandalizes the entire article. For example, he recently deleted almost everything, including general information, from my new article "Deobandi hadith studies," which I had created just an hour ago and was still working on. Another example of his vandalism is Idarat al-Mabahith al-Fiqhiya.​–MinisterOfReligion (Talk) 05:15, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

@Owais Al Qarni, you should put an {{In use}} tag in the article whilst you are working. This stops others from interfering on articles which are being worked upon by others. ─ The Aafī (talk) 05:19, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Also this venue is not a very good place to report such cases. You should have discussed the issue with @BoyTheKingCanDance on their talk page, or on the article's talk page, and then perhaps been through at the WP:ANI. Please make sure you use an "under construction/in use" tag while you are working on an article. This helps to avoid unexpected edit-conflicts. ─ The Aafī (talk) 05:23, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
The advice above is good advice. It prevents this happening. Best wishes, BoyTheKingCanDance (talk) 05:24, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
I posted this on Owais's talk page: "Hi my friend, the new page review is one of the last approval stages, so when I see a page with huge amounts of unreferenced information, and no {{In use}} tag that the page is undergoing a major build, I tend to err on the side of caution and remove the unreferenced information. The easiest solution is to add the tag to indicate the page in under construction. This prevents editors from editing until the process is complete. Please assume good faith of me, as I do of you. Very best wishes, BoyTheKingCanDance". It is sincerely meant. BoyTheKingCanDance (talk) 05:48, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
User:Owais Al Qarni - Do you actually think that User:BoyTheKingCanDance is engaging in vandalism, or are you yelling vandalism? If you really think that their conduct is vandalism, report it at the vandalism noticeboard. If you have been editing Wikipedia long enough to know what is vandalism, you have been editing long enough to know what is not vandalism. Robert McClenon (talk) 08:16, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon: I regularly contribute to Bengali Wikipedia. However, there is a policy that prohibits adding any tags to newly created articles for a period of 48 hours. I am unsure if a similar policy exists on English Wikipedia. Crafting a comprehensive article usually takes time and effort, and it can be discouraging and extremely frustrating to see everything deleted immediately after publication, especially when I am constantly trying to improve.–MinisterOfReligion (Talk) 09:03, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Consider creating the article first in draftspace or your user sandbox. Curbon7 (talk) 12:44, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
User:Owais Al Qarni - You didn't answer my question about whether the edits by the other editor were intended to harm the encyclopedia. If they are, you can report them at the vandalism noticeboard. Since you didn't answer that question, and based on what else you have said, it appears that you were yelling vandalism. That is a personal attack. Do not yell vandalism if the edits are not vandalism. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:27, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

The problem isn't vandalism by BoyTheKing, but promotional editing by Owais Al Qarni. However, that should be taken up on their user talk page or if it persists at a dedicated noticeboard, not on this village pump which has nothing to do with either users vandalizing nor with users creating promo articles. Fram (talk) 13:32, 10 March 2023 (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.

Contesting a Blank and Redirect

What is the proper forum for resolving a dispute over whether an article should be blanked and redirected, cut down to a redirect to an article that is considered a parent article? A plausible-sounding answer that is completely useless is that this decision, since it does not involve deletion, should be done by normal editorial discussion. That is true but useless, because it doesn't answer what should be done when discussion is inconclusive. What binding consensus process is used to decide whether to cut an article down to a redirect or to let it stand? One area in which I have seen edit wars is music disputes, typically over whether a song should have an article, or be redirected to the album, or sometimes whether an album should be redirected to the artist. Many content disputes can be resolved by RFC, but is there another forum? Can Redirects for Discussion be used to ask that a redirect be replaced by an article? Robert McClenon (talk) 02:23, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

In this situation, isn't it the article rather than the redirect which is at issue? If so, in the case of an article<->redirect controversy, WP:AFD would be the venue to establish resolution. AllyD (talk) 06:57, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon and AllyD: per WP:ATD-R the appropriate forum is AFD (see also the pertinent RFC). There's some additional nuance in practice when long-standing redirects that have not previously been articles are converted into them, but ultimately AFD is still the best way to resolve these disputes. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 07:03, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
User:AllyD - What if the user who is requesting dispute resolution is the originator of the article which is being redirected? Can that editor file a procedural Articles for Deletion nomination in order to argue that the article should be Kept, when another editor has been redirecting it? Robert McClenon (talk) 08:20, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
It would be better form for the "redirector", in recognition that their attempted action is controversial, to themselves bring the article to AfD with a rationale about the topic's non-notability; however, failing that, I see no reason why the article originator should not bring it to AfD explaining that they consider the topic notable but that this is disputed. I feel I have seen some such AfD cases recently - possibly in the controversial area of changing sport notability criteria? AllyD (talk) 09:03, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
That's more or less my thought too. In theory such a situation should not arise since there should be consensus before a BLAR is repeated, analogous to how "no consensus" outcomes at AFD result in retention, in practice it can be complicated. I can't speak all that well to recent events, but procedural nominations are an accepted part of AFD and quite common [14]. In sum, NOTBURO. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:59, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
If you choose the "talk page" route suggested as one of the multiple suitable venues, then treating it as a case of a contentious Wikipedia:Proposed article mergers would probably be functional, too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:16, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
  • Note: Redirecting is a normal editing action; it doesn't require any special tools, not even autoconfirmation. As such, it is subject to the same principles as any edit. Prior approval is not required, though if someone objects or undoes it, it is best to discuss it and reach consensus before doing it again. While redirecting is sometimes the result of an AFD (in which case it should be considered standing consensus), it doesn't need to be. AFD should probably not be used unless deletion is earnestly sought; if you want to just redirect the article, and there's opposition to doing so, the article talk page is sufficient for handling such discussion. WP:RFD is available, but that's mainly for when redirects need to be deleted, or moved to a new target, or perhaps the redirect is protected from editing and that needs to be remedied. --Jayron32 15:51, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
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