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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (policy).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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Talk pages of contentious topics

Per WP:CTOP, many pages don't allow certain users to edit the page, or post in the talk page, but allow for all editors to request an edit on the talk page. Is the requesting editor allowed to respond to a reply on their request, in order to further explain the request/its reasoning, or to question a denial of the request? JoeJShmo💌 01:16, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

IMO, no. WP:ARBECR intends that non EC editor contributions be limited to (straightforward a la WP:EDITXY) edit requests only. If an EC editor were to specifically request clarification, then that could be responded to, but otherwise once the edit request has been made, then it is a matter for EC editors to decide whether to implement it or not. Selfstudier (talk) 08:25, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
In my opinion they absolutely should be able to do the first, because it is very clearly within the spirit of the exception and is a clear benefit to the project. The second is a much greyer area, I think it should be allowed as long as it doesn't stray into discussion - a single request for explanation (especially of jargon or references to past discussions) if the denial is unclear or a "I think you've misunderstood my request because..." as long as it's done in good faith. Do note though that some editors prioritise strict adherence to the letter of the rules much higher than I do (some accept even edit requests only begrudgingly). Thryduulf (talk) 08:30, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
My rough metric is "could this response reasonably have just been a stand-alone edit request". If an IP requests and edit adding the language "She was born in 1887", and it's declined due to a need for reliable sources, a response with links to such sources is fine. It's just bureaucracy to require them to submit a second edit request.
If the decline is at all an indication that the change itself is opposed, further replies from the IP could not reasonably be an edit request, since edit requests are for uncontroversial changes. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 12:03, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
Non-extendedconfirmed users are excluded from the consensus forming process. So, unless the responding party has clearly misunderstood the request, they are limited to responding to a request for clarification from an extendedconfirmed user. That's it. And I would say (based on experience in the PIA topic area), if they show any sign of a sense of entitlement by not complying with the rules they should just be blocked. Sean.hoyland (talk) 05:28, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
@Sean.hoyland @Firefangledfeathers@Thryduulf@Selfstudier There is now a case about this editor at AE Doug Weller talk 09:43, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
Thank you Doug, and thank you everyone for your responses. It seems a certain user (unfortunately with a previous vendetta against me) has jumped the gun and opened a case relevant to this discussion. I don't want anyone to waste their time, so I'd recommend not worrying about it too much. Take care. JoeJShmo💌 10:34, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Unmaintainable lists

Although we have generally avoided creating insane lists like List of notable men, List of albums (a redirect), List of roads in California, List of bird species, etc., there doesn't seem to be any clear policy against creating such lists, other than the vague guidance at WP:NOTDIRECTORY, WP:SIZE, and WP:LISTCRIT, which collectively discourage such lists, but don't seem to prohibit them. Because of this vague guidance, we sometimes end up with lists that are basically unmaintainable (especially with our shrinking editor base). Lists like:

Many of these lists are either arbitrarily populated (and misleadingly short) or they were heroically filled out by one editor and then left to rot. My questions are:

  1. Is this a problem?
  2. If so, how can we better prevent such lists from being created?

Nosferattus (talk) 01:13, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

FWIW, some lists display Template:Dynamic list, stating that the list might never be complete.—Bagumba (talk) 06:35, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
We used to have lists of people by name. Many of the broader lists, some of which pre-date the introduction of categories in May 2004, have been deleted/rationalised over the years. Graham87 (talk) 08:00, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
In some cases the scope of the lists should be clarified and/or long lists split into more focused sublists. e.g the List of kidnappings would benefit from tighter inclusion criteria and splitting (probably by date or location). Each of the lists needs to be evaluated individually though and I don't think there is anything we can (or should) do to prevent lists being created. Thryduulf (talk) 08:35, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure these lists are a bad idea in principle, or that we should have a policy against them, but I agree that the implementation is problematic. It feels like the ideal solution would be improving the category UI (current category views don't support easy full text search across all items, for example), or some sort of "Autolist" feature that derives equivalent list pages from category data (optionally pulling in the lead paragraph of each article, or wikidata items, to form a table). Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 10:32, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
We already have what is essentially a much improved version of both categories and lists in the form of Wikidata. You can generate such an 'autolist' from Wikidata using {{Wikidata list}}. Unfortunately, a vocal group of editors managed to block us actually using Wikidata on enwiki early on, based on a severe case of not invented here syndrome, so we can't have nice things like fr:Archives_de_l'État_de_Neuchâtel#Type_de_fonds_conservés_et_consultation. – Joe (talk) 10:56, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
Interesting... do you have a link to where that consensus was established? Was it about Wikidata generally or about the Wikidata list template specifically? I can see some limitations of the template, but the approach seems promising. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 11:17, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
There's a nice summary of the major discussions at Wikipedia:Wikidata#Appropriate usage in articles. There's never, as far as I know, been a clear consensus against using Wikidata-generated content in mainspace (be that Wikidata lists or Wikidata infoboxes like {{Infobox person/Wikidata}}), but a few editors opposed to it were very effective at simply edit-warring out all instances of them, citing the lack of affirmative consensus to use them. – Joe (talk) 12:03, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
Current consensus is based on this RfC from 2013 -- a few months after Wikidata went online -- which resulted in It is, on the other hand, not appropriate to use Wikidata in article text on English Wikipedia at this time. There were many reasons. Especially at that time nobody really knew how Wikidata even worked. The biggest remaining objection, expressed in another RfC last year (which found no consensus to change the status quo), is that it requires going to Wikidata to edit such articles, plus some fears that Wikidata is subject to less scrutiny as those changes won't show up on watchlists.
The thing is, enacting a full ban like we have basically kills the idea of those improvements ever happening. WMF builds things they know will have some kind of measurable impact. Despite "Wikidata editing from Wikipedia" being a perennial request and even sometimes goal for the WMF for the past decade, it's not realistic to expect them to devote real resources to actually getting it done when there's no guarantee we'd even allow it. But it would also make no sense to invest resources into drawing from our category system, which is both localized to enwp and a clumsy, ancient system compared to what Wikidata can do.
Back to the point of this thread, yes, an article like "list of women writers" is a crazy, unmaintainable list (btw, Nosferattus, I think the most relevant guideline is WP:SALAT), and would make a lot of sense to be updated via Wikidata. But since we can't have nice things, and because we do allow index articles, the best we can do is split it up by e.g. nationality or era. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:33, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
@Thryduulf and Barnards.tar.gz: What would be your opinion of a list like List of notable women or List of albums? Clearly more granular lists would be preferable in those cases, but why? What is the threshold for a list being unmaintainable? It's interesting to me that even Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/List of people by name was a contentious discussion (and originally closed as no consensus). Surely, our resources are better off not devoted to such Sisyphean tasks. Nosferattus (talk) 15:35, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
I think such lists are beset with practical problems. In practice, there aren't enough heroes available to watch and maintain them. Many aren't just lists of articles, but also contain content, which needs sourcing and verifying and copyediting and all the other things that make an article good. Now, that's a problem that many niche-subject articles have, but at least niche subjects can have a small enough scope that an article can be plausibly materially complete, without degrading over time. In contrast, these list articles go out of date immediately and need constant effort to maintain. A list article might be considered maintainable if it was popular enough to attract the requisite army of editors, but that might then result in another practical problem: List of notable women might be hundreds of thousands of entries long, likely hitting technical limits.
I took a look at {{Wikidata list}}, and although I like the result that has been achieved on frwiki, I could understand reticence to start using it to replace big list articles. For a start, it's much less accessible to editors, requiring proficiency in SPARQL as well as Wiki templating. It seems to depend on a bot rather than being updated in real time? That's a departure from the normal editing workflow. I'm also not sure how closely Wikidata's notability and sourcing practices match up to Wikipedia's. Might we be auto-importing junk? Nevertheless, exploring the option of using Wikidata or Wikipedia's existing category data, or some other system-based solution, seems to me a more promising line of enquiry than expending tons of manual effort maintaining unusably large articles. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:01, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
List of notable women and List of albums should be (redirects to) indexes of smaller, more focused lists. What is the threshold for a list being unmaintainable? There is no single answer to this question as it depends entirely on the context of the list - for example how many entries there are, how much information there is about each entry, how complete is the list (can it ever be complete? c.f. Wikidata's concept of expected completeness)? How objective is the definition (compare e.g. List of US States and List of shades of green)? How objective are the inclusion criteria? How granular is the list? What sublists do or could exist? In some cases the answers to these questions vary over time, e.g. prior to circa the 2010s a single list of exoplanets would have been regarded as a manageable finite list, since then the number known has increased exponentially. Thryduulf (talk) 16:05, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
Just to echo Thryduulf, it is a very common practice to split very long lists into a group of smaller more refined lists, and leave the original title as an index of lists. This could very easily be done with all of the current lists named by time period or geographic scope. BD2412 T 17:09, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
There are "only" about 6+ million pages on Enwiki. The universe of overlap among those 6 million pages, and traffic accidents, or kidnappings, is maintainable. The advantage of a list vs. a category is the list allows short descriptions, sortable columns for data points, etc.. This is not a bad thing. There are encyclopedias devoted to woman writers (often by country or time period). There is also an encyclopedia of kidnappings. We are not creating topics out of thin air, in most cases. Something like List of monarchs of fictional countries is a little strange but maybe it's a topic covered by RS? The statement "left to rot" is another way of saying "left to be further improved by someone else", which is how Wikipedia is designed. I've done this myself, and seen others do it. If it takes 1 months of 10 years, what's the rush? Wikipedia is not a finished product. -- GreenC 17:49, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

I've thought about this a lot because I see them in NPP and there is not much guidance on this and because it spans multiple guidelines (lists, notability, wp:not, and verifiabiltiy) none of which really cover it. ("Verifiabiltiy" because inclusion on a list is implicitly a statement that they are/meet the criteria of the list) IMO one good criteria would be that there is a reasonable likelyhood that some readers would look for it and find it useful. Which would include these criteria:

  1. Some selectivity So "list of humans" would not fulfill this criteria
  2. Not overly specialized in some abstract way (usually on "compound criteria" lists) So no "List of US senators who are 5' 7" tall"
  3. Somewhat objective (vs. subjective) criteria. So no "list of good US Senators". But "list of notable violin players" is somewhat objective and OK.

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 18:33, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

Not to get off the original topic, but as far as the secondary topic of how to populate lists and the discussion above of things like using Wikidata, it may or may not interest anyone that a Wiktionary user developed a javascript for populating ~lists by scraping categories' contents, discussed here, which is another possible idea (it pulls and displays definitions, but it's possible to imagine a Wikipedia implementation pulling e.g. shortdesc or infobox contents or lead sentences instead), though the benefit of "this is the contents of category X, just as a list" is admittedly debatable. (Or perhaps Wikipedia already has its own such gadget...) -sche (talk) 17:01, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

If you don't mind me going even further off topic, I've proposed a split at Talk:List of common misconceptions#Split proposal and I'd value any and all opinions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:35, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

WP:Logo's stance on ® and ™ in logos

Following discussions at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ice Hockey/Archive85#® and ™ in logos. Read it for more information.

WP:Logo doesn't say whether ® or ™ in logos are discouraged or not. If the entity itself uses its logo with these marks on its website, should the marks then be edited out, or remain? Here are some pages using logos with these marks: Amtrak, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, United Airlines, Five guys, New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Chicago White Sox, Titleist, Puma (brand), Discovery, Inc., Spotify, Hammarby Fotboll and 2026 FIFA World Cup. As far as I can tell, most pages on Wikipedia uses logos without these marks. Jonteemil (talk) 15:11, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

If a mark owner is consistently presenting their mark with the registration symbol (as they should be), then it is really not our place to alter the image to something different from its normal presentation. BD2412 T 16:23, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
As was stated in the hockey Wikiproject discussion, the reason that entities themselves use such marks when presenting their logos is in the active defense of their trademark. That neither compels Wikipedia (or any other entity) to do the same, and as you were told, MOS:TMRULES already sets forth "Do not use the ™ and ® symbols, or similar, in either article text or citations, unless unavoidably necessary for context." While you responded that TMRULES does not explicitly include images, the same principle remains valid. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Ravenswing 17:06, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
Note this is a slightly different question than you posed on the WikiProject Ice Hockey talk page. I don't know if I'd recommend editing a trademark symbol out of an image. As I stated in the other discussion thread, though, trademark symbols are not part of the trademark. Thus an accurate depiction of the trademark does not include the trademark symbol. If other qualities between a choice of two images are relatively equivalent, I feel a version without trademark symbols would be a better illustration of the actual trademark. isaacl (talk) 17:07, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
I agree with isaacl that I would not recommend editing a trademark symbol out of an image, but that's just because it's not important. This is so unimportant that if we had multiple versions of a given logo, it would be extremely low on my list of reasons to prefer one or the other. It'd be more pointful to argue over the relative merits of SVG vs PNG vs JPG than to worry about this.
I think this type of question tends to arise because someone is trying to do the right thing, but please let us reassure you: Nobody is legally required to display the ® symbol on someone else's trademark. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:44, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Are new rules needed for high-profile or previously contested proposals?

We have recently had a slate of discussions at Wikipedia:Move review wherein discussions had run for the requisite seven days (or had been relisted and run for fourteen days or more), and had the typical handful of participants, and were thereafter closed as moved, and where post-closure challenges were made asserting that because of the scope of the subject, more time or participation was required. An example is the still-pending discussion of the disambiguation of ABC News, and the move of the subject previously at that title to ABC News (United States). Another discussion with a comparable move review was the move of Chairperson to Chair (officer), for which it was noted that despite near-universal support for moving the article away from chairperson, a pervious discussion had rejected Chair (officer) as a title.

We currently have one set of rules for carrying out a contested or potentially contested requested move. We have no mechanism for identifying proposed moves, merges, or other changes that could arguably require some lengthier discussion time or higher standard of community participation. We do routinely notify relevant Wikiprojects, and allow anyone to relist a discussion if there is an absence of clarity on consensus. I am bringing this here to figure out if we do need some extra set of rules for discussions that deal with higher-profile topics, or will involve fixing a lot of links and templates, or deal with a subject that was previously discussed and reached a different consensus. I am not comfortable with the idea that some unwritten rule exists requiring different treatment of such cases. The rules should be written. Cheers! BD2412 T 00:45, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

WP:RMRELIST is a fine rule, and already contains guidance telling editors to publicize an RM as widely as needed. We shouldn't start carving out exceptions, especially when we can't predict them from the outset (for example, I would not have expected ABC News to be all that contentious). Additionally, "I didn't get a chance to participate" is not a good reason to overturn an otherwise correct close. If somebody thinks the consensus developed in the first discussion was horrendously wrong, they can open a new one. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:05, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
I had thought about this, having made closures on highly linked articles before when I initially started nosing around at WP:RM. Checking link count wasn't really in my workflow, and still isn't because there are not many of such discussions that I had closed.
While WP:RMRELIST is sufficient for most pages, but there are some which may bode well have better outcomes if the discussion was directed to more people. The banner on the article is placed by a bot, which means that many active registered editors may miss it if the option to exclude bot edits in the watchlist is enabled. Not many would go on WP:RMC to look for articles to be moved as well, despite the high pageview counts (I suspect that many of the regulars load the page multiple times in the day).
It would be good to have at a minimum that the link count of the pages requested for be displayed in the notice generated by the {{requested move/dated}} template. At the very least, closers may take a pause before closing the RM discussion early.
It would be nice to have a centralised notification somewhere on a highly trafficked discussion page (Open tasks at WP:AN?) to list some RM discussions based on number of links to the articles involved. Exact criteria can be fleshed out separately. – robertsky (talk) 02:00, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
I think creating bright-line prescriptive rules on this subject is likely to lead to undesirable bureaucracy rather than any actual improvements in the space. Rather than the arguments about "Topic X is prominent enough to have merited a longer RM" being resolved, I think they'd just change shape and instead manifest as "Topic X is prominent enough to have fallen under the Popular RM Ruleset". (I also share voorts' stance that these assertions are generally fairly weak. It's not practical to keep discussions open indefinitely for fear of someone missing out.) I'm also concerned that, if we create additional procedural hoops for RM closers to jump through, it would exacerbate the existing issues where controversial or complex discussions linger unclosed for weeks beyond their intended end dates.
By and large I think the status quo already works, but if there is consensus to implement a change, I think robertsky's suggested minimum options – displaying link counts on the banner, or having centralized notifications somewhere – would strike a decent balance between increasing visibility and protecting the closure process from overcomplication. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 05:23, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
One factor that inflates link counts is that if a template containing links to articles is included on a page, then every article linked in that template shows up in "What links from here", even though the link is only in the template, not elsewhere in the article. Some templates have hundreds of links in them. In other words, link counts are not a particularly accurate way of judging how many links will need to corrected after a move. Donald Albury 12:51, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
Yes, the widespread (over)use of navbox templates has made "what links here" virtually useless for many types of articles, sadly. Johnbod (talk) 15:30, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
Then we should have tools to determine how many actual non-template generated incoming links an article has. BD2412 T 15:35, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
Actually, it would be more useful to have "What links here" ignore links in templates. Donald Albury 16:30, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
Ideally I think it should be an option for "What links here" to show or hide links present only in transclusions, and also an option to show only pages that link via transcluded templates (grouped by template) given that its possible that some links wont show as being from the template namespace if they only appear based on parameters. Thryduulf (talk) 16:39, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
@Thryduulf: Agreed. It is always best to have options. BD2412 T 16:43, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
There's a nice plugin here to find source links that are not part of the template. Check it out at User:PrimeHunter/Source links.js and add it to your Special:MyPage/common.js file. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 16:43, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
I think this falls under WP:IAR and WP:NOTBURO. If you're closing a move request where there have been half a dozen previous requests that closed the other direction, or you're closing a move request that requires editing tens of thousands of pages, it's common sense to wait for more input. Similarly, if you close a move request, and lots of editors come out of the woodwork and say they would've participated had they seen it, then it should be clear that the discussion didn't necessarily capture the wider community consensus and should be re-opened. WP:RMRELIST is a process page, not a policy or a guideline, and it shouldn't be treated as prescriptive. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:50, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
Maybe it is "common sense" but it's not the rule, and closes that are valid under the rule should not be overturned based on some amorphous notion of common sense. Also, for a discussion that has already been relisted once, or has been moribund for days, how long should we "wait for more input"? What is the signal that it is enough? BD2412 T 17:56, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
When no more comments are being made, and or the arguments are exclusively repeating themselves, then the closer can determine the strengths of differentΩ arguments rather than popularity of said arguments. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 18:51, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
We have seen discussions where that is exactly the case, but where the discussion once closed is still collaterally attacked for having been closed with too little participation, because the change was to a high-profile topic. BD2412 T 19:01, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
@BD2412 What rule are you referring to? And even if there were a rule, a rule being overturned based on some amorphous notion of common sense is exactly why we have WP:5P5 as a pillar and WP:IAR as a policy. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:12, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
I am referring to the operations of Wikipedia:Requested moves that are laid out on that page. There is a process for proposing a move, a set time period for discussion, and a process for resolution of what has been proposed. There is no allowance there for declaring an article to be special for purposes of carrying out this process. BD2412 T 21:25, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
There doesn't need to be an allowance because that page is descriptive, not prescriptive. It is neither a policy nor a guideline. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 02:28, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
In my extremely limited experience, the problem lies less with how long RMs are open and more with whatever smorgasbord of reasons causing move review to be unpleasant to closers (and potential closers). Even in less controversial RMs, there's an unfortunately non-negligible probability of some individual going to closer's talk, failing to articulate which significant evidence or fact was overlooked or WP:RMCI clause violated (per MR's instructions), ignoring any response by the closer that isn't acquiescence, and dragging the closer to MR, where the discussion remains open despite the giant "this is not the place to relitigate RMs" sign on MR's front door. Even if I snapped my fingers and RMs, effective immediately, have to be open for at least three months (like the I/P-related RM open since April), someone's going to come after closure at 3.5 months and argue I don't agree with it and didn't get a chance to voice my opinion so clearly it wasn't open long enough and not enough of the right people were notified, etc. What we need is a culture of compliance with and better enforcement of existing rules, so that RM closers have the support of the community and its norms when closing controversial RMs. If we do so in a way that helps people who are actually following the MR instructions by allowing the community to focus their resources on closures that actually need fixing, even better. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 05:29, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
I agree with all of this. If in fact MR closers are reopening RM discussions based on these kinds of weak/irrelevant arguments, than there's an issue with how consensus is being evaluated at MR that needs to be addressed with the regular closers there. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:49, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
We also need people to relax a bit about these things. Some high-strung vitriol comes out over what amounts to a trivial matter, and one that can always be subject to a new consensus-testing process in the future. BD2412 T 21:04, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
This is an evergreen comment. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:08, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
  • The people posing the question do have the option of using RFC rather than RM, giving a (minimum) 30 day discussion period.—S Marshall T/C 07:52, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
  • I voted to relist at that MR, but for the broader procedural question, I think the status quo is fine. The healthiest use case of MR is actually precisely this - when there's a close that is totally valid by the rules, but Other Stuff (TM) came up, and whoops it's time to IAR it. There's no need to change policy - 98% of closes can continue at a fast pace, and MR can quibble on the 1% of bad closes, and the 1% of times where a close was good but New Developments means that the close should be overturned anyway. That seems like a healthy ratio. SnowFire (talk) 21:58, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
    • The express purpose of MR is to determine whether the closer acted incorrectly, and expressly not to introduce new variables that should have been introduced in the initial move request. I see too many complaints of move requests not being extended from editors who could have extended it themselves while it was ongoing, too many complaints of lack of notification from editors who could have done some notifying, and too many efforts to relitigate the underlying issue rather than evaluating whether the close was within policy. BD2412 T 22:14, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
      To analogize to the legal space, an appellate court generally won't address (or will give more deference to the trial court) issues that weren't raised in the court below. MR is designed to review whether a close is reasonable—a pretty low standard—not to force the reopening of long and contentious RMs. voorts (talk/contributions) 22:30, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
      • Er, editors can't extend it? A relist is the equivalent of a close, so someone who's !voted shouldn't relist, since if they could there could be a naysayer's veto of the losing side just spamming relists. (They can obviously make "please extend this comments!" but there's no guarantee that they'll be heeded.)
      • And yes, MR is not RM round 2, but I don't think that's the case here nor is it accurate to portray it as such. Especially in cases where the issue is simply turnout, there isn't really a great need for "finality" or some such (that's what RFCs for if an issue is truly radioactive). Take the broader question. A nominator proposes a move, and it's largely ignored. 2 editors show up out of nowhere on Day 7 and !vote support. A closer sees this and reasonably closes as non-controversial and moves it. 99.5% of the time, the story stops there, it was indeed non-controversial. 0.5% of the time, people involved in the topic come out of the woodwork and say "whoa, that's not right." There is very little harm in letting a courtesy relist happen, so that's what the nominator should do to such a good-faith request, and they should be taken to MR otherwise. Maybe nothing changes, but maybe 20 other editors in the field pop up to say that the move was a terrible mistake. Who knows. But there is 0 harm in at least exploring the possibility of the latter case. (The other option is giving leave to file a new RM, of course, but then that might annoy !voters in the previous RMs who feel like they have to copy-paste their arguments to ensure their !vote "counts.") SnowFire (talk) 22:57, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
        • @SnowFire: There is no limitation provided as to who can relist a discussion, nor is there any policy that says that "a relist is the equivalent of a close", so, yes, any editor can relist the discussion, including one who has !voted. I think it's fairly obvious that an editor who spammed relists would get called out on that, and it is not a behavior that has occurred in practice. BD2412 T 23:04, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
          • That's not the case. See WP:RELIST: "Editor qualifications to relist a discussion are the same as required to close a discussion." Someone who has !voted can't close, so therefore they can't relist either. I agree that the behavior does not happen in practice, but that's because it's prohibited, and we should not encourage involved editors to perform a relist - they are not a neutral source for if a discussion has sufficient consensus for a close. (Oddly enough, a position I feel is closer to yours, in the name of making speedier closes!) SnowFire (talk) 23:09, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
            • Well, I've learned something new, then. As far as I recall, I have relisted discussions in which I was a participant on several occasions, usually because someone made a new proposal that was worth additional time to consider. I have never been criticized for so doing. BD2412 T 03:08, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
              • I'm sure your relists were fine, but point is we also shouldn't hold it against one side that they didn't force a relist themselves, because technically they shouldn't do that. SnowFire (talk) 10:26, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
No. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:59, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
Yes. High-profile, or previously contested, or technically complicated cases, all need a Rule that the next random nominator must point to and summarise the previous RMs, and mention technical issues.
The bad things to be prevented are a surreptitious move in a holiday period, or exhaustion of opponents allowing win by tendentious teamwork, or a consensus based on inadequate information.
Rules should be documented, YES!
Inadequate nominations should be speedy closeable for being inadequate. SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:11, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
I wonder if the rule that would be most useful might sound more like: If a consensus forms to move the page, and the result will require updating links in other articles, then no more than ____ articles may be updated per day (perhaps 50 or 100 per day, for the first week).
If you move the page, and the redirect stays in place, and someone complains (bad close, new information – the reason doesn't matter) and those complaints result in reversing the decision, then it's no big deal. You move the page back, and you're done.
If you move the page, and the redirect doesn't stay in place (e.g., gets converted to a DAB page), and the decision gets reversed, then you may need to update all of the linked pages, which can be a huge, watchlist-flooding task. Also, it's more likely to happen, because the watchlist flooding will attract attention and irritation to the recent move request. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:33, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Extent of WP:CHANGELOG

@HyperAccelerated entirely removed the "Version history" section of KDE Plasma. Upon being informed that DragonFly BSD had a similar section, they also removed it from that article, citing WP:CHANGELOG in both cases.

The policy specifically states against an "exhaustive" log and additionally encourages third-party sources. In both cases, third-party sources were used in addition to first-party sources. I believe that in general, the two version history sections were useful, although perhaps they did not need to be as detailed as they were.

How should this policy be applied? Blanket removal of the two sections seems a bit of an overreaction to me. iczero (talk) 16:33, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

The section that was on KDE Plasma strikes me as a good example of the kind of thing that WP:CHANGELOG is about - I would support that removal. It was an list of every version, many with little or no information on the contents. And the article also has prose sections on the major releases separate from the table, which serves as the 'summary of development' which WP:CHANGELOG suggests should be considered instead. MrOllie (talk) 16:39, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
@Iczero, I think the main problem is that different editors have different ideas of what "exhaustive" means, and that you would probably get a more practical answer from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computing.
One idea that I've had (wrt to previous disputes, because this happens several times a year) is that it would be helpful to have one or two Wikipedia:Essays that illustrate it. I imagine, for example, someone finding a freely licensed changelog for a notable open-source product, pasting the whole thing into the essay, and then saying "This is what exhaustive looks like" (a section that repeats the original almost in its entirety) and "This is what an encyclopedic summary looks like" (a good summary, with third-party sources) and perhaps one or two other examples (one that's borderline and one that's far too short to useful?).
In the meantime, it's possible that the short list at Wikipedia:Featured articles#Computing would contain a good example. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:38, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
People like to cite WP:ALLCAPS links as justification for all sorts of things, including giant slash-and-burn edits that take out half an article.

WP:CHANGELOG was deliberately written to preserve articles like Android version history. The people who wrote it explicitly said they intended the policy to not be applied to those articles, or to prohibit articles from mentioning version histories.
The text was added sua sponte by this edit in February 2011, discussed at this talk page section, and its current wording arrived at by Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not/Archive_45#WP:NOTCHANGELOG (consensus to retain here). At no point was the intention ever to remove them entirely -- again, the sole focus of the discussion that wrote the policy was how to preserve Android version history and articles like it. Given this, it seems like a rather tortured by-the-letter reading to invoke it while slashing out tens of kilobytes of text. jp×g🗯️ 12:19, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
Those past discussions and the current wording also requires the use of third-party (not self-published or official) sources which all these list fail as the use only the official sources, so they at least need improvement. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:31, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
Sure -- they aren't great -- but I don't think it's a reasonable basis for wholesale removal. How many versions are there listed in the table? Here are my two-minutes-and-no-flashlight pulled out of my keister search results:
[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]

References

  1. ^ Turcotte-McCusker, Mike (March 25, 2017). "A Look at Desktop Environments: KDE 5 Plasma - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News.
  2. ^ "KDE Plasma 5 Linux desktop arrives". ZDNET.
  3. ^ Staff, Ars (August 18, 2014). "KDE Plasma 5—For those Linux users undecided on the kernel's future". Ars Technica.
  4. ^ Nestor, Marius (August 31, 2021). "KDE Plasma 5.22.5 Released as the Last Update in the Series with More Bug Fixes". 9to5Linux.
  5. ^ "KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS Releases with Updated Breeze Theme and New Overview Effect". It's FOSS News. February 9, 2022.
  6. ^ "KDE Plasma 6: The Big Release is Here!". It's FOSS News. February 28, 2024.
  7. ^ "I tested KDE Plasma 6 and found it very familiar. Here's why that's a good thing". ZDNET.
  8. ^ "KDE Plasma 6.0 released • The Register".
  9. ^ "KDE Plasma 6.1 Prepares For Release Next Week". www.phoronix.com.

jp×g🗯️ 13:23, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Agree with MrOllie that KDE Plasma is definitely a good example of "bad" changelogs. The vast majority of it isn't cited to secondary sources and it reads as an exhaustive list of minor changes rather than high-level things, violating summary style guidelines to boot. As for "NOTCHANGELOG isn't supposed to apply to these articles" suggested above, NOTCHANGELOG applies to all changelogs. There's no carveout exemptions. You can argue it was crafted to make articles like Android version history compliant, but no articles get a pass from our content rules. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs talk 12:33, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion § RfC: enacting C4 (unused maintenance categories)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion § RfC: enacting C4 (unused maintenance categories). HouseBlaster (talk · he/they) 03:11, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

User pages and Displaytitle

I came across User:Allninemice/sandbox which not only hides the user namesapce from the title, but completely changes the title to "Anime". While this is a sandbox page, this also happens in the main userspacee (see User:Bernardwebb357). Is this a valid use? Gonnym (talk) 08:27, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

imo, no. The only reason the title should be altered is for minor formatting (e.g. italics, lowercase first letter) or to workaround technical limitations (but even in the latter case we tend not to, e.g. at MeToo movement). Thryduulf (talk) 08:51, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
It's not possible to fix #MeToo movement without circumventing the limitations on DISPLAYTITLE. SilverLocust 💬 23:24, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Inappropriate use of templates?

Is there anywhere on Wikipedia that details inappropriate use of templates? I have the feeling that {{rut}} and {{rus}} only exist to replace simple links, but I can't find a policy that outright forbids this. If I were to send those templates to WP:TfD, would they likely survive deletion? – PeeJay 14:08, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

{{rut}} and {{rus}} are redirects to other templates. Are you talking about these redirects (saving some typing vs their full {{Rugby union team}} and {{Rugby union stadium}} names) or those underlying actual templates? DMacks (talk) 12:58, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
Link only templates are routinely deleted there for being too simple. (I have not reviewed this case to see if that label applies.) IznoPublic (talk) 16:39, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Stricter policy for unregistered ipv6 users vs ipv4 users

It is well established that unregistered (ip address) users are an important part of the Wikipedia community. However, a clear distinction can be made between ipv4 and ipv6, as the latter can be easily manipulated to create sock puppets and obscure other bad faith actions. The nature of ipv6 makes tracking, blocking, banning nearly impossible.

But the same is not true of ipv4 users, where the limited address space is a reasonable restraint, vs the virtually unrestrained nature of ipv6 unregistered users. Ipv6 creates a dense forest of ip addresses that bad actors can easily use to hide within.

I have personally experienced certain users (who are otherwise registered) logging out, and using a number of ipv6 addresses to harass and/or make bad faith edits. If unregistered users were restricted to ipv4 addresses, it would maintain access for unregistered users, while usefully hampering bad actors rolling through the nearly unlimited ipv6 addresses.

Of course, there should be no restriction connecting by ipv6 for registered user accounts.

Summary

Restricting only ipv6 unregistered users improves admin control, while not unduly hampering good-faith unregistered users' access to edit.  Myndex talk   09:27, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Most people have no control over whether they use ipv4 or ipv6 addresses, and many who might have control won't know this. For most, the restriction would be completely arbitrary. There is also not a lack of harassment from ipv4s. CMD (talk) 10:01, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
Seems to unfair and unnecessarily discriminate against ipv6 users, who likely don't know they're ipv6 users, and can't control it. I don't know whether my IP is "ipv4" or "ipv6". I have noticed that some IP users are just numbers, like this: 40.7.211.792 or something, while some are more like 2f:00e::56a8:9000s. I assume that's the difference. Cremastra (talk) 10:22, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
You seem to have got the right idea. IPv4 addresses (like your first example) are usually expressed as 4 decimal numbers in the range 0-255 and are limited to about 4 billion in number, and IPv6 addresses are expressed in hexadecimal (base 16 with A-F representing the digits 10-15) with, in theory, over 1038 addresses available, which means that they will "never" run out, in the same sense that IBM mainframes didn't run out of accessible memory with the increase in addressibility from 24 bits to 31 in the 1980s. Of course there's no need for the average encyclopedia writer to know or care about any of this. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:00, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
@CMD The user doesn't need control—any user's agent will use either ipv4 or ipv6, depending on the server connecting to. Wikipedia's servers could ask for ipv4 if an anonymous editor wanted to make an edit. And I am not suggesting banning nor blocking ipv6 addresses—only suggesting that ipv6 addresses be required to either log in or create an account. Perhaps temporary accounts might help.
An objective here is to prevent anonymous sock puppets. Perhaps there is a better method to require logging into some registered account from certain ip addresses. Myndex talk   10:04, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
  • That's not how IPv6 users are treated, though. In effect, most IPv6 are allocated a /64 range of addresses (for example ABCD:EF12:3456:7890::/64) which is functionally equivalent to a single IPv4 address. When admins block or restrict IP users, they generally do this to the whole /64 range, not the individual IP (here's my blocking log, note the difference). Also note that we can extend that /64 to a wider range if necessary (there's a /32 in that list near the top). Therefore the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 are not a major issue. Black Kite (talk) 16:19, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
WP:LOUTSOCKing is a major pain for good faith IP editors, as it instills distrust towards them. But I don't see how tarring all IP editors using IPv6 addresses helps. Someone switching between different IPv6 /64 ranges is no different from someone switching between IPV4 addresses, and as Black Kite says there are methods for blocking ranges. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:26, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
Okay, but in practice ABCD:EF12:3456:7890::/64 does not seem narrow enough due I assume to DHCP/dynamic allocation at the ISP. YEs, this is still an issue with ipv4, but at the moment it doesn't appear that Wikipedia is grouping edits by only the first 64. And to be clear, I am not proposing that any ip address be blocked per se, only that certain IP addresses/ranges can be restricted to require login.  Myndex talk   09:46, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
In general on all but the busiest ranges you can go as wide as /48 and it will still be the same editor, so more than one editor in a /64 is unlikely. Anything wider than /48 and it's probably more than one editor. You can group edits simply by adding /64 or such to the end of the IP address in the contribution screen, it's not automatic but it only takes a second.
If IPv6 editors are required to create an account then they are blocked from editing as an IP. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 01:21, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
Isn't this all going to become redundant anyway when WP:Temporary accounts become a thing? Thryduulf (talk) 16:37, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
This (IPv4 v IPv6) isn't an issue IMO, but no it won't really, since any reasonably experienced editor (6 months tenure and 300 edits) will be able see the IPs behind the temporary accounts anyway. Black Kite (talk) 23:49, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
Indeed no. Temporary accounts hide it to casual users, but the IP can be displayed in whole or part with certain advanced rights (admin and CU at the minimum will have access to the whole, and there is/was a plan for something lesser like rollback group). IznoPublic (talk) 16:42, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Copyvio revdel question

Recently 37 revisions of the article Puberty blocker were revdeled in order to roll back the article to its state prior to a minor copyright violation. The non-copyvio content that was added in those 37 revisions, which included entirely new sections of the article, was then restored in a single new revision. While this isn't as problematic as a copy-paste move, it entails some of the same problems. Namely, it is no longer possible to see which editors contributed which content without asking an admin. I have two questions:

  1. Does this cause any legal issues with our license compliance?
  2. Is this practice a good idea? It seems like overkill that causes more problems than it solves. Why not just delete the copyvio material and move on?

Nosferattus (talk) 02:31, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Re question 2. Revision deletion (and suppression) work on whole revisions only, so if problematic content is added in say revision 10 and not removed until revision 20, we have to delete (or suppress) all of revisions 10 to 19, even if the intermediate revisions added no problematic content (or indeed were entirely unrelated). This means the only options for dealing with such content are
  1. Remove the problematic content then delete (or suppress) all the revisions between insertion and removal
  2. Roll-back the article to the last revision before problematic content was added, delete (or suppress) all the revisions between insertion and removal and then re-add the good content.
Given that the effect of both options is identical for practical purposes which is best depends on the circumstances. If you have a particular desire to know who added what then diffs (minus any interaction with the problematic content) can be copied somewhere for reference by an admin (or oversighter if material has been suppressed rather than just revision deleted) but this is quite a bit of work so not something we do routinely (I've been an oversighter for nearly 10 years and can recall being asked this sort of question perhaps 2-3 times at most during that time).
I'll leave a definitive answer to question 1 to those more qualified than me, but my gut feeling is that if it did cause legal issues something would have been done about it before now as this hasn't changed since I became an admin in 2005 (although revision deletion was introduced during this time, the old method of deleting the whole page and restoring only the good revisions produced an identical output). Thryduulf (talk) 02:57, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
I once proposed using XML imports to rebase edits to avoid this problem in situations like this. The idea was shot down by pretty much everyone. * Pppery * it has begun... 03:16, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
@Thryduulf: So if the 1st revision of the article philosophy was a copyvio that had persisted until the present day, would we revdel the entire history? What's wrong with just removing the copyvio? Surely retaining the article's version history would pass as fair use. Nosferattus (talk) 03:34, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
Whether it would count as fair use would depend on the amount of copyright violating material used and other factors, but potentially yes. The WMF took down the whole French Wikiquote for several months because of extensive copyright violations iirc. Thryduulf (talk) 09:23, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
Generally, revision deletion only occurs when there are few other editors who edited after the addition of a copyright violation. There are no "set" requirements for WP:RD1 (there probably should be), but usually it requires a significant copyright violation, few other editors and a reasonable amount of intermediate revisions (all can vary). – Isochrone (talk) 20:41, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
"the old method of deleting the whole page and restoring only the good revisions produced an identical output" It didn't really. "Editor 1" introduced a copyvio and the article was then edited by 49 other editors before "Editor 51" removed the copyvio. If you, or I, deleted the page and restored the good version, then the names of "Editor 1" to "Editor 50" would no longer be visible in the page history. Revdel shows the names in the history. CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 17:33, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
Regarding the licensing question: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license requires attribution, but not traceability of each word to a specific author. This would be difficult in any case for copy-edited passages, or rewrites that were based on previous versions. isaacl (talk) 02:57, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
I wonder whether mw:Who Wrote That? can see the revdel'd items. It would be handy on occasion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:12, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
The existence (and "open" statuses) of phab:T252860 and phab:T334500 suggests it does not. Anomie⚔ 11:13, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Attribution does not require blame will probably be of interest. —Cryptic 03:13, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
In short: Selective deletion, where these revisions disappear without a trace, would be a copyright problem. Revision Deletion, where the edits are still listed, each with their respective author but with no access to the content of each revision, is not. Animal lover |666| 21:43, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

WP:V relating to photographs

How to photographs align with WP:V? Consider an example "Jane Jones drove to work in a blue Chevrolet" where sources describe Jane Jones driving to work, have a picture of her blue Chevrolet, but do not explicitly describe the vehicle as blue. Would we be able to describe the vehicle in our articles based on the photograph publish in a WP:RS or only based on prose descriptions published in WP:RS? I took a glance at WP:V and couldn't find anything. --24.125.98.89 (talk) 13:18, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

If a photograph is published in a RS, we generally trust that the photograph is what the RS says it is. Synthesis can still creep in though. In your example, if the RS just says “this is a picture of Jane Jones’s car”, then it’s possible that she drove to work in a different car which might not have been blue. If the RS says clearly “this is the car in which Jane Jones drove to work”, then I think it would be verifiable to say she drove to work in a blue car. If this turns out to be an important or controversial fact (e.g. for Blue–green distinction in language reasons), we might want to ask for the assessment of “blue” to be made by the RS rather than by the editor.
If the source isn’t explicit in text, then it may also be a question of whether that information is due. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 13:41, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
24.125, is this related to the tag you added to List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, July 2024 about whether the would-be assassin was actually a white person? I don't think anyone has any genuine doubts about that, and a couple of minutes turned up sources like these:
  • "a tall, slender, white man who wore glasses and had long sandy-brown hair" [1]
  • "According to the FBI, the shooter was identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a white male" [2]
I don't think you should assume that the information was added on the basis of a photo. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:33, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
That series of lists does seem to have both V and DUE issues in the race column. I spot checked a few. There are cases where the person’s race is not mentioned and there is no photo, making it look like race has been inferred from name by the editor. There are cases where the person’s race is not mentioned and an image is given, and the editor may have made their own judgement about what their race looked like. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 08:39, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
@Barnards.tar.gz, were you looking at only the cited sources? Do you have any reason to believe that any of these are actually wrong?
In terms of Gun violence in the United States, race is one of the biggest predictors of both the person holding the gun (e.g., police officers are disproportionately white) and the person getting shot. There are books, such as The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America and Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race, on the subject of how gun violence and race interact in the US. Gun violence and race is a notable subject; perhaps we will someday write an article on it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:11, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
An example from List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, February 2024 is Kassandra Lozano, whose entry uses this source: [3] which is about a car crash and doesn’t mention being killed by a law enforcement officer, or the race of the victim. Digging deeper, it seems the entry is actually based on this source: [4], which does state that a law enforcement officer was the cause of the crash, but doesn’t mention the victim’s race, or include a picture.
I’m guessing someone decided that a person called “Lozano” is likely to be Hispanic. Is that good enough for WP:V? Also, why “Hispanic”? The list also uses Latino/Latina occasionally. What taxonomy of race are we working to here? Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 07:25, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Just as a side note. The IP that originally started this discussion is a blocked IP with a history of trolling and racism. West Virginia WXeditor (talk) 19:56, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
@Barnards.tar.gz, that's an interesting example, because it doesn't feel like the sort of thing I'd expect to find from the title. The officer was off duty, driving a private vehicle, and the deceased was his girlfriend, who was a passenger in the car he was driving. This is "young guy gets [allegedly] drunk and causes a wreck in which his girlfriend dies", rather than "police officer killed someone".
With a glance at Laredo, Texas#Demographics, which reports 95.15% "Hispanic or Latino" from the 2020 US Census, it would be surprising if she weren't Hispanic. Photos of her are easy to find online, and included in some news articles, and they align with the claim. Her parents' and other family members' names are typical names for Spanish-speaking families. But, as you say, is that good enough for WP:V? I don't know what the basis for adding that claim was, nor am I familiar with the Latino/Hispanic preferences for towns on the Texas–Mexico border. As a general rule, people prefer Latino/a/x in California, and Hispanic is more popular in Florida, but I'm not sure about Texans' preferences. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:03, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Policy against demands of proof of non-existence

Answered to my satisfaction - Altenmann >talk 18:17, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Now and then someone tells me something like "What proof do you have that J. Random was not a Christian?" I know this is a logical blunder, but I cannot remember any rule against this in our WP:V rules. Neither I remember the name of the fallacy. Can someone remind me? - Altenmann >talk 17:20, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Proving a negative? Similar to but not the same as Argument from ignorance? Idk if it is in WP policies, but I would want proof (sourcing) that he was. Selfstudier (talk) 17:30, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
but I would want proof (sourcing) that he was -- My question is about demanding a proof that 'he was not. - Altenmann >talk
Proving a negative is philosophically too broad. But Evidence of absence seems to suit Wikipedia's approach to WP:TRUTH: our WP:V requires evidence. - Altenmann >talk 17:54, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
I assume you're talking about this for statements within an article context, in which case I would need to see an example statement in which it's a problem. If the article on Judy Random states that she was a Christian, I would expect that to be sourced, as well as any statement that she was not a Christian (which is a sourcable thing.) If you're talking about in discussion, that seems quite allowable thing to ask, depending on what was being discussed. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:55, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
It does not matter. Talk pages are not an idle chat: they are about article content. Of course you can say in talk page anything you want, but if the implications are to change article content, then the arguments must be based on reliable sources. Of course, there are discussions where opinions of editors do matter, such as article titles (heck, take AfDs), but still, they must involve arguments, not opinions, and arguments boil down to shat is said in "real world"- Altenmann >talk 18:01, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
OK, the point is, if an article wants to claim that Random was not a Christian, you do actually need a source that says Random was not a Christian. I don't see what's hard about this. WP:V requires verifiability for all claims, including negative ones. --Trovatore (talk) 18:04, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Absolutely it does matter. Your initial post seemed to be seeking a rule against it, and you're on a page for discussing policy. The verifiability policies already cover this for article content, and there's no particular need for a rule against it elsewhere. The example is weak, as it seems quite possible to source a statement that Judy Random was not a Christian or to specify that she held some other religious belief. But if someone is asking that on the talk page, it seems quite a reasonable response to a talk page statement that she was not a Christian. It should not be disallowed to ask that as a response for a claim. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 18:08, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, I stated my question incorrectly. Let me set it closer to the issue: Someone added Category:Buddhists to a bio. I removed it and I was reverted because I didnt provide an evidence that a person was not a Buddhist. What would be my proper counter-argument. WP:CATV didnt enlighten me. Sorry for my fussy brains. - Altenmann >talk 18:13, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

The WP:ONUS is on the person doing the adding to justify the addition. Usually, one could expect WP:BRD but that's not compulsory. So discussion on talk to resolve. Selfstudier (talk) 18:17, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Got it. WP:ONUS is what I needed. - Altenmann >talk 18:20, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

The above collapsed discussion does raise a point that sometimes troubles me. Category links don't have footnotes. In theory they're supposed to be justified by sourced material in the article, but you can't necessarily tell which cite justifies the category.
Of course in most cases this is not that much of a problem, but it can become one when someone adds a category that makes a potentially contentious claim. I remember this specifically over someone wanting to add category:Whitewashing in film to The Last Temptation of Christ (film), which struck me as an uncited criticism of the casting. --Trovatore (talk) 21:46, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps one way to resolve this for categories without an clear justification in the prose (or which might do if prose is removed from the article for any reason or perhaps even just reworded) would be to put a hidden comment next to the category link with a source or explicit link to the relevant section of the article (e.g. "see criticism from XYZ Group", "source: P.D. Michaels, 2024", "Ref name=BBCNewsApril29"). Thryduulf (talk) 23:02, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Hmm, it's better than nothing, but it seems more aimed at editors than at readers. --Trovatore (talk) 23:20, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
(A distinct but related concern is that categories can appear to make assertions in Wikivoice, which we have to be careful about.) --Trovatore (talk) 23:23, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Categories are supposed to be for defining characteristics. If it's a defining characteristic, it really should be in the prose (although with the way we create categories like "Left-handed Inuit arcwelders from Texas", it may be a combination of different sections of prose.) Per WP:CATV, "It should be clear from verifiable information in the article why it was placed in each of its categories."-- Nat Gertler (talk) 02:01, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Something else related to the collapsed part of this discussion, but not mentioned there, is that sometimes justification for a category can be implicit. For example if a person is verifiably Swedish and verifiably a member of an organisation that requires members to be Buddhists, you don't need an explicit citation to add Category:Swedish Buddhists to the article unless there is evidence they are/were not Buddhist (perhaps they renounced that religion later in life). Thryduulf (talk) 23:10, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

I think someone adding a category which casts the subject in a negative light, most especially if a BLP, ought to be prepared to defend the addition if challenged. Wehwalt (talk) 01:26, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Everybody who adds anything needs to be prepared to defend it if challenged. In the example above the defence would be exactly as I've laid out - they are/were Swedish, are/were a member of an organisation that requires members to be Buddhists and there is no evidence the person adding it has seen to the contrary. Thryduulf (talk) 08:37, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Hmm, so out of curiosity I took a look at that category, which has only two individual bios at the top level, one of which is Malin Ackerman. Ackerman's bio categorizes her as both a "Swedish Buddhist" as an "American Buddhist". However, the body asserts that she was raised Buddhist, and mentions her "Buddhist upbringing", but does not assert that she is currently Buddhist.
Not sure there's a broad policy conclusion here, but I think it's worth noticing that articles are not always entirely careful about these things. Thryduulf, this is arguably similar to the case you mention. She was raised Buddhist, with sources (I haven't checked them, but that seems not on-point in this discussion), and we have no active assertion that she decided she wasn't a Buddhist anymore. Is that enough to put her in the cats? My intuition is no, not when the article uses language that seems noncommittal on her current status. --Trovatore (talk) 17:38, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
I had a similar issue with people adding categories like Jewish Conservatives to Benjamin Disraeli, who was certainly not both Jewish and Conservative at the same time ... Wehwalt (talk) 17:50, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Disraeli is not even an edgecase - the lead of the article makes it very clear that that category is incorrect and so should not be on the article. Thryduulf (talk) 17:56, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
@Trovatore: I picked the category out of thin air, so it's interesting you found an edgecase! Reading Ackerman's bio (but not the sources), I'd say that if the standard is "on the balance of probabilities" then the category is correct but if the standard is "beyond reasonable doubt" then it isn't (not because it's necessarily incorrect, but because there is reasonable doubt).
When it comes to BLP anything contentious or potentially defamatory absolutely needs to have the higher standard of proof, something innocuous is usually fine at the lesser standard (although obviously better is always preferred if possible). A person's religious beliefs are something that can be contentious and some people would regard some mischaracterisations as defamatory, but not everybody and not always. Given the content in the article I am completely confident that describing Ackerman as Buddhist would not be defamatory even if correct, and I'm not seeing anything to suggest it is contentious. My gut feeling is that they are probably nominally or casually Buddhist - someone who doesn't actively practice the faith but would tick that box on a form. Thryduulf (talk) 17:54, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
So the analogy with legal burdens of proof could get a bit strained, but I'd kind of suggest that the (underused) clear and convincing evidence might be a better way of thinking of it. "Eh, it's probably true" doesn't strike me as good enough to add a cat, particularly to a BLP, even if we think the subject probably doesn't mind being called a Buddhist. --Trovatore (talk) 22:33, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
I don't think categories are (or should be) limited to current status. Babe Ruth is not currently a baseball player, but he's probably properly in those categories. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:56, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Wow, new one on me. I did not know that Babe Ruth was a Swedish Buddhist.
Anyway I think that's a bit of a different issue. Ruth's profession was ballplayer, until he retired. That's what he was known for. Ackerman is not particularly known for being a Buddhist, as far as I'm aware.
It does raise some interesting questions. Eldridge Cleaver became a conservative Republican, but is most known for what you could call "far left" activism, to the limited IMHO extent that that terminology makes sense. Does he belong in e.g. "socialist" categories? I really don't know. --Trovatore (talk) 22:51, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Maybe we need "Lapsed ..." categories. Donald Albury 23:03, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
I think the idea that categories should be a single-moment snapshot rather than reflecting the wide range that has been noted is wrong. We have a list of American politicians who switched parties in office -- which party's categories should they be under? Both! There may be some categorization that only applies to non-notable periods of their life -- Jane was baptized but declared herself an atheist when she was 12, long before she became a professional cat juggler, so she certainly doesn't belong in Christian cat jugglers and perhaps not even in Christians at all, but if she switched from atheism to agnosticism mid-career, then she does belong in both atheist cat jugglers and agnostic cat jugglers. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:14, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Categories are fundamentally for navigational purposes. If someone is looking for articles about ____, then they should find the articles related to _____, even if occasionally that article says "Well, you might have thought he was a ____, but the truth is rather more complex and interesting than that". WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:21, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
I'm aware of that viewpoint but I don't really agree. The problem is that an article's presence in a category often appears to be an assertion (in Wikivoice no less) that the subject of the article satisfies the category's defining criterion. If there were a way to make it clear to readers, including casual ones, that that is not the case ... but there isn't. --Trovatore (talk) 17:21, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
That's the biggest problem imo, with cats. I stopped paying attention to them for that reason, as long as people are not using cats to enforce or contradict content in actual articles, fine with me. Selfstudier (talk) 17:30, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
In some cases it can be mitigated by renaming the cat to make the criterion more objective. For example I happened to see that the category I called out, category:Whitewashing in film, is actually at CfD. I think a lot of the problem would go away if we renamed it to something along the lines of category:Controversies over whitewashing in film. It's reasonably objective whether there was a controversy; you can support that with one reliable cite. Whether the film is actually an example of whitewashing is much more fraught. --Trovatore (talk) 01:20, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
Trovatore, the second sentence of the Wikipedia:Categorization guideline literally says "The central goal of the category system is to provide navigational links to pages in Wikipedia within a hierarchy of categories".
I conclude from this that categories are therefore fundamentally for navigational purposes, equivalent to something in a navbox. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:21, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
That might be the goal, but it doesn't trump V or NPOV. I sharply disagree with the idea of providing categories that might appear to make contentious claims just because they might help someone find something. --Trovatore (talk) 19:34, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
We follow the same basic rules for all forms of navigational content. That means that if it doesn't have to be cited in a navbox, it doesn't have to be cited in a category, or a ==See also== list, or a disambiguation page. None of them should be unfair ("non-neutral"), but the primary point of all navigation is to help people find things, not to hide appropriate content away because someone might jump to conclusions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:02, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
Putting an article in category:Foos, on its face, makes the claim that the subject of the article is a foo. That ineluctably implicates V, and the claim that it is a foo must be cited (if contentious). --Trovatore (talk) 20:45, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
See also why {{unreferenced category}} exists.
But I wonder whether we have the same idea about what's being "contended" in that small minority of cats that are actually contentious. I think that what matters is whether the article would be of interest to someone looking for articles about _____. This would include articles that are not, sensu strictu, actually about _____. For example, if you look in Category:Planets, you will find 13 pages and one redirect that are not planets. If you take the POV that putting an article in Category:Planets means you are defining that article's subject as "being a planet", then you will be unhappy to discover pages like Definition of planet and Equatorial bulge in that cat, because those subjects are related to planets but not actually planets themselves. OTOH if you take my POV, which is that putting an article in that cat means that someone looking to learn more about planets might be interested in those articles, then you won't have any concerns about the contents of that cat at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:25, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
As I said, if we could make your POV clear to all readers, including casual ones ... but we can't. --Trovatore (talk) 02:00, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
We could. If we wanted to, every content cat page could have an explanation at the top that explains what a category is, what it means for a page to be listed there, and how to use the page. We haven't chosen to do this yet, but there's nothing stopping us from doing so, if we thought it was really important to explain to readers why Category:Planets does not exclusively contain articles about planets.
Actually, we already do, to a very limited extent; it looks like there's a link to Help:Category at the top of every cat page. That's more of a how-to/editor-help page, but we could change that to a reader-help page, if we wanted to. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:21, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing: No. We can't. I mean, sure, we can, but people won't see it.
And that's COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. I think it's utterly inconsistent with NPOV to apply categories that are going to look like assertions in Wikivoice and that are not supported by a consensus of sources. The navigational value is insignificant next to that. --Trovatore (talk) 06:22, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
But that's only if they go to the category page. The casual reader is only seeing the bottom of the page where it lists that this person is in Category:deadbeat dads and Category:pervs and skeezes with nothing covering the fact that he's in those categories as a critic of those people. (Obviously, I'm feeling far too lazy to look up a real example this morning.) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 13:30, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
If you're in the article, and it's important enough for the person to be in the cat, then there should normally be some content in the article itself that makes the relevance reasonably clear. That doesn't require the article to say "Ro Righteous is a deadbeat dad[1]", but it should say something related to the subject (perhaps "Ro Righteous has repeatedly introduced legislation about child support payments[1]"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:29, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
Because if there isn't any relevant content in the article, then there's no navigational point in putting the article in [Cat:Deadbeat dads]. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:33, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
Categories are definitely a navigational tool...... when Wikipedia began we thought it'd be a good way of collecting data and analyzing relationships between articles. However categories are so unstable that data can never be reproduced for any real academic analysis. This is also a problem with our vital articles Moxy🍁 00:54, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
I think they're still a pretty good way of collecting data and analyzing relationships/various other things. They're certainly useful for building graphs and graphs can be very useful. There can be a lot of instability and confusing weirdness, but for the one fairly large topic area I've looked at, there are plenty of relatively stable structures in the networks too (that can be easier to see when edges are bundled e.g. here). Sean.hoyland (talk) 02:11, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
Idea is cat= List= navbox sort of thing, I get that but they are susceptible to manipulation and lots of editors can't be bothered to check, including me, although I used to. I might correct if I happen to notice something weird or outlandish, but all this diffuse, parent/child blah, nah. Selfstudier (talk) 11:12, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
@Trovatore, your comment that people won't see it has made me wonder if you and I are talking about completely different things. So I'm talking about something that looks like this:
The Category: page, with (1) a Help button to click on and get more information, (2) room for a description of what belongs on that page, and (3) a list of articles in the category.
and I think you're talking about something that looks like this:
The categories listed at the bottom of the article
Are you only talking about the list at the bottom of the article? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:05, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
The categories as shown at the bottom of the article are my main concern, yes. --Trovatore (talk) 22:59, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
As a general rule, if the cat is at the bottom of the page, there should be something on the page above that explains why the cat is there. That might not be "He's definitely a <cat name> himself", but it should explain why this biography is related to that cat's subject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:32, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
In my view that's not good enough. I don't think there's any way to avoid giving the impression that the category at the bottom of the page is an assertion in Wikivoice, which means it needs the support of a consensus of sources. --Trovatore (talk) 00:42, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Totally agree. If you RFC'd this, I'd support. And start sourcing See Also sections while we're at it. Primergrey (talk) 00:56, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
That's what the articles are for. Just repeating the sources used in category pages that the article already has would just make category pages really cluttered. Also, and this is just me, but you are insulting the intelligence of our readers if you think that they can't come to the conclusion that the categories in the article are representative of the sources used in said article. ♠JCW555 (talk)♠ 01:02, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Huh? I didn't say anything about category pages. As I said, my main concern is that the categories as they display in the article may appear to be assertions in Wikivoice. Therefore articles should not be added to those categories unless the implied assertion would be the view of the consensus of the sources, not just a single source.
I don't think there's any available reform of the category system that addresses this concern. It could be I just haven't thought of it, in which case please do elaborate.
I think the only solution consistent with V and NPOV is to categorize less, specifically not to apply categories that would appear to be assertions and that are not supported by a consensus of sources. I think this concern is massively more important than ease of navigation. --Trovatore (talk) 01:37, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Can you give me a couple of examples of BLPs in which a given cat is included, but the consensus of the sources is that the cat is irrelevant or wrong? I'm not looking for something like "This scholar is the foremost authority on deadbeat dads, so if you want to know about deadbeat dads, you need to read his work" or "This person is primarily notable because of a landmark court case about deadbeat dads", but "His ex once called him a deadbeat dad, and the consensus of sources is that she's wrong, but I put him in the cat anyway". WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:57, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Way up higher in this same discussion there's the case of Malin Ackerman, who is categorized as a "Swedish Buddhist", an "American Buddhist", and some others. However the article does not say she is a Buddhist at all; it says she was raised Buddhist.
In the discussion it was speculated that she might be a casual or nominal Buddhist, or anyway someone who doesn't mind being called Buddhist, and that may well be true.
My view is that's not good enough. If we are going to put her in those cats, then the article should be able to say in Wikivoice "Malin Ackerman is a Buddhist", with all the sourcing requirements that entails. I don't mean that the article necessarily has to say that, but it has to be able to say it. --Trovatore (talk) 02:03, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Are people raised in a religion not appropriately described as being related to that religion? I think you are interpreting this as "If it says Category:Buddhist, then the person must be actively Buddhist right now". I interpret it as indicating that the person is or was Buddhist. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:22, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Of course, if we had sources saying that she was definitely no longer Buddhist, then we'd use Category:Former Buddhists instead. But since we know that she definitely was in the past, and we don't have any concrete reason to believe that has changed, then I think the category is fine. We don't have a People who were verifiably Buddhists at one point but whose current adherence to that is unknown category. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:28, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
No, I disagree. A living person in a "Buddhist" category should be verifiably a Buddhist right now. With strong enough sourcing to put that claim in Wikivoice. That's the natural inference a reader is going to make seeing the category at the bottom of the page. --Trovatore (talk) 06:34, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
I don't think that someone who reads "She was raised Buddhist" will either be surprised to see Buddhism-related cats, or jump to conclusions beyond the statement that they just read. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:37, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
But they may not have read that part of the article. It appears to be an assertion in Wikivoice that she is a Buddhist. It should require the same sourcing as an assertion in Wikivoice that she is a Buddhist. --Trovatore (talk) 06:58, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
And by the way, that's not "jumping to a conclusion". That's what the plain language means on its face. You can't change that fact by putting assertions to the contrary on help pages. --Trovatore (talk) 07:01, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
The difference is that you (Trovatore) believe that presence in a category means the article subject is (subject of category) whereas WhatamIdoing is arguing that the presence in a category means the article subject is, was or is relevant to (subject of category). Based on how categories are used, the latter is correct. For example John Major is in all the following categories:
All of them are or were true at some point but are not now, yet nobody is being mislead. Thryduulf (talk) 09:00, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Well, I think those are a different case. Those are offices, and it's natural that they include anyone who has held the office. But note that it would be objectively incorrect to put someone in one of those categories who had not held the office, even if they were "relevant to" the office. So no, "the latter" is not correct. --Trovatore (talk) 16:25, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
What makes an office different to non-offices?
Why is it "natural" to include former office-holders in an office-holder category and completely inappropriate to put someone who was a Buddhist but who might or might not currently be in a category for Buddhists?
Which type are categories for place of origin? people associated with a place? occupational categories (e.g. John Major is in Category:English bankers)?
Is it appropriate for Boris Johnson to be in both Category:Politicians from Manhattan and Category:People who renounced United States citizenship? What about both Category:Writers from the London Borough of Southwark and Category:Writers from Manhattan? Does his presence in Category:Partygate scandal imply that he is a scandal? If not, why is that different to him being in Category:British Anglicans? Thryduulf (talk) 16:45, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
I'd use a "reasonable person" test here.
  • Would a reasonable person, without inside knowledge of Wikipedia, take the category "Swedish Buddhists", appearing at the bottom of an article on a living person, as implying that the person is currently a Swedish Buddhist? Yes, I think they would.
  • Would such a person take the category "Presidents of the United States" as implying that the subject is currently the President of the United States? No.
  • Would such a person take that category as implying strictly that the subject is or has been the President of the United States, and that no other sort of "relevance" counts at all? Yes, clearly. Putting someone in that category who was even extraordinarily relevant to the US presidency, but had never been the US President, would be an unambiguous error.
Hope that clarifies. --Trovatore (talk) 22:25, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
It seems the reasonable people you're replying to disagree. Anomie⚔ 12:08, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
You think the examples here aren't what a reasonable person would expect from categories? JoelleJay (talk) 20:37, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
I think that reasonable people might have different ideas. For example, some (I think) reasonable people in this discussion believe that only people who definitely and currently profess a given religion should be listed in the cat for that religion. Some other (I think) reasonable people in this discussion believe that the cat should include people who did profess that religion, and for whom we have no reason (i.e., reliable source saying) to believe that their religious affiliation has changed.
I wonder what the first group would make of Category:Wikipedia people. Do they believe that there is only a single reasonable answer to whether only current editors should be considered "Wikipedia people", or do they think that reasonable editors might sometimes disagree about whether an important but inactive editor should be included in that cat? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:54, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
If we have no info confirming whether someone currently practices a religion, or that that religion verifiably played a significant part in their life at some point, how can we possibly consider it a "defining characteristic"? What would anyone who wants to learn more specifically about Swedish Buddhists gain from a page about someone whose status as a Swedish Buddhist is so ambiguous and brief that it barely warrants a mention? I also think it's frankly hypocritical that we'd only seem to make these assumptions/assertions of religious observation based on such weak textual support for intersections that are "unusual"; most people in the US grow up belonging to some strain of Christianity, and this can probably be verified for many of those who are notable, yet we don't go around categorizing them as "American Christian actors" etc. unless they've explicitly identified as such. JoelleJay (talk) 03:27, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
> how can we possibly consider it a "defining characteristic"
Did you know that cats don't actually have to be defining characteristics? I can't remember whether we've talked about this before, but the guideline gives Caravaggio as an example, and lists the two defining characteristics. Yet, if you go look at the article, you'll find a lot more than two cats, and several of them, including Category:Knights of Malta, Category:Italian duellists, and Category:Deaths from sepsis, aren't defining cats. You're required to include the defining cats, but it's also okay for editors to use their judgment to add a reasonable number of non-defining cats, too. Over at Donald Trump, they appear to have decided that it's reasonable to include 62 cats in that BLP. I'd guess that around 10% of them are defining (maybe less, if you prefer a strict definition). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:22, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
I agree with this, and on a side note as someone who does go to category pages to find new topics it is not at all helpful for them to be cluttered with entries that are only tenuously related. If I'm browsing contemporary Algerian authors it's because I want to learn about authors for whom "being Algerian" is a defining characteristic, not, e.g., French people who wrote about spending a few summers in Algeria. I also wish Wikipedia categories would distinguish between cats that are actually defining features of a topic, cats to which a topic belongs but that it's not "known for", and cats "associated with" a topic. I use color-coding when categorizing some of my own spreadsheets, so I can picture a system where on the topic's page cats of the first type are highlighted in cyan, cats of the second in yellow, and cats of the third in grey, and the topic is highlighted with its corresponding color on the category page. JoelleJay (talk) 00:07, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
This prioritization idea appeals to me, because sometimes you want to be able to find the famous cancer survivor who happens to be an athlete, vs the famous athlete who happens to be a cancer survivor.
But I also think it would lead to POV disputes, as people will inevitably, on some articles, have different ideas about what's most important. Lou Gherig probably thought that being a baseball player was more important than developing a neurological problem, but folks who are currently living with Lou Gherig's disease might think it was the other way around. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:37, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
Lou Gehrig would certainly have "baseball player" and "people with ALS" as primary categories in my system. JoelleJay (talk) 03:28, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
While Categorizations are navigational in purpose… that navigation is based on defining characteristics.
For a characteristic to be considered defining for a specific subject/topic, I would expect the article text would discuss that characteristic and explain why it is defining to the subject/topic. Furthermore, I would expect a defining characteristic to have more than just a passing mention in the article. Blueboar (talk) 21:18, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
I mostly agree with Blueboar, though sometimes a passing mention is enough. A birth date in 1956 should be enough to be in the cat "people born in 1956". But cats like that are more noise than useful. The cat "criminals" must have in the article a reliable source for a criminal conviction, etc. The practice that annoys me the most is the use of cats as an alternative for "see also" when the characteristic doesn't literally apply to the article subject. Zerotalk 04:58, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Note and Notability

(not an episode of Blackadder III)

I would prefer that the word notable in articles be replaced by noted. We can record that a subject is noted; it is not our place to say whether a subject is worthy of note. (Of course I'm not proposing to change the word in policy pages, that would be a nightmare.)

What is the sense of the house? If I make a habit of replacing notable with noted when I happen to notice it, should I expect angry reaction? —Tamfang (talk) 19:34, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

We say a subject is notable because that's our policy. Noted and notability are interchangeable in wiki speak. If I make a habit of replacing notable with noted when I happen to notice it, should I expect angry reaction? Yes. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:35, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
Notability isn't a policy. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 20:37, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
I meant guideline. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:40, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
Whatever it is, articles shouldn't be referring to concepts defined in Wikipedia policy. Readers don't care about our jargon. – Joe (talk) 21:58, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
Right. While (unlike @Tamfang) I'd love to rename Wikipedia:Notability to something like WP:Criteria for a separate, stand-alone article, I'd prefer not to see articles saying things like "Alice Expert is a notable expert".
The word notable is listed in MOS:PEACOCK. Noted is not listed in that section, but the same applies. It's usually better to say that Alice is an expert, and leave out the notable/noted intensifier. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:23, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
We're using "notable" in its 1b sense -- distinguished or prominent. The noting that sources do distinguish the individual, gives them prominence. (It's better than using definition 2, "efficient or capable in performance of housewifely duties". That would make for a strange encyclpedia indeed!) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 20:43, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
When I've encountered notable in articles, it often seems out of place, as if the editor is trying to preempt any deletion attempts. So-and-so is notable for blah instead of So-and-so did blah. Schazjmd (talk) 20:47, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
  • I suspect a lot of people will think you are being overly pedantic. Whether they get angry depends on whether they think your pedantry crosses the line and becomes “disruptive”.
Pedantry can be “correct” but still be considered disruptive. So… my advice: go slowly. Make your change if you think it improves the articles… but if you get reverted or someone complains, don’t argue. Just let it go, and let the other guy “win”. Blueboar (talk) 21:11, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
Feel free to change it on occasion, but you are not going to get a universal rule on it. (On another matter, we should have long ago changed the name of the so called "Notability" guideline -- you see, that guideline has nothing to do with this notability discussion). -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 23:04, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
  1. I can't think of any situation where directly describing a subject as "notable" adds anything to their article. Their deeds or associations may be notable, but ideally if one writes that, it's surrounded by actual substance of what others have noted regarding XYZ. It's basically a totally empty statement to refer to someone as "notable", and only makes sense to me in passing as a way to smooth out the diction of a paragraph.
  2. Luckily, one doesn't have to think too hard about lexical nuance as regards "notable → capable of being noted"? By that definition, everything is notable because I have and continue to make note of literally everything without limit or distinction. As a result, I've taken that potential definition completely off the table for folks, as such a word would then become totally useless. You're welcome.
Seems like something not to worry about much. Remsense诉 06:50, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

The header for this page

The top of this page (i.e., [Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)] ) says:

The policy section of the village pump is used to discuss already proposed policies and guidelines and to discuss changes to existing policies and guidelines.

This has probably been here for years, and it's basically true. However, in the last couple of years, I've seen a few editors claim that because of this sentence, you're not allowed to discussion changes to existing policies and guidelines on the talk pages of those policies or guidelines. That is, if you want to change, e.g., a sentence in WP:V, those editors, citing this sentence, genuinely believe that you really shouldn't discuss those changes at Wikipedia talk:Verifiability, and instead you either should or must discuss them here.

The relevant policy (the WP:PGCHANGE section of the Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines policy) prefers the talk page of the relevant policy, though the venue for a discussion is not absolutely mandatory. Huge discussions like Wikipedia:Verifiability/First sentence need their own pages, and the point behind the RFC system is to bring editors from all over to the location of the discussion, even if it's otherwise "hidden" on some low-traffic page. See Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines#Venue if you're interested in more details.

I'd like to adjust this sentence to still be truthful, while removing any suggestion that this is the primary venue for discussion about changes to a policy or guideline. I'm not sure how to do it, however. Perhaps something like "The policy section of the village pump is one of several venues used to discuss..."? Or "The policy section of the village pump is used to discuss some..."?

What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:56, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Is this really a widespread problem, or is it just a handful of people? If it's the latter I think we'd do better to educate or WP:TROUT those few people who insist on misinterpreting the existing sentence, which already doesn't make any claim to this being the only (or even a preferred) place for such discussions. Anomie⚔ 11:37, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
I’d support instructions to make trouting of such people mandatory 🐠 ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 12:55, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
It's not necessarily fair to trout people for believing a literal reading of the written directions, especially since we have a large number of autistic editors (and young autistic editors – I saw one the other day who still believes that Santa Claus is real). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:35, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
If you're wanting to point to a literal reading, then you need to read it literally. The header under discussion here says "this page is used to discuss X", and goes on to list places (or places to find places) that various kinds of not-X (and one special subtype of X) should be discussed. It says nothing about whether any other place is used to discuss X or whether it's preferred to discuss every X here. Anomie⚔ 11:44, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
I also have trouble believing that this is a genuine misunderstanding rather than motivated reasoning, but it never hurts to be clear. – Joe (talk) 11:58, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
There's a similar problem with the "proposals" page, so I added "For drafting with a more focused group, you can also start on the talk page for a WikiProject, Manual of Style, or other relevant project page." -- Beland (talk) 08:14, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
To address the original complaint, I added "Change discussions often start on local talk pages and then move or get mentioned here for more visibility and broader consensus." Feel free to tweak. -- Beland (talk) 08:18, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't know where else to ask this & this might be a hornets' nest but here goes...

Recently there has been a spate of changes & reverts to the articles Martha Jefferson, John Wayles, Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, Sally Hemings and other articles concerning the usage of the terms "enslaved"/"enslaved persons" instead of "slaves". It is my understanding that "enslaved" & its associated terms are considered correct in modern usage as they describe a condition that could be considered reversible while the terms "slave"/"slaves" describe a person who is owned by another as that state of being and only as that state of being, plus the term being considered pejorative, etc. Do I have to open a Rfc for general usage of the terms "enslaved" to see if this is really the editorial consensus/Wikipedai accepted usage or whatever? It seems obvious to me that enslaved is preferred/accepted but there is disagreement over the usage. Not sure what to do and gawd help me RfCs can be such sinkholes of time & energy but then again I personally dislike long-simmering back&forth word-wrestling... Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 13:40, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

You mean we've actually not had one or several Rfc:s on this already? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:48, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
Fwiw, here's one previous discussion: Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch/Archive_10#"Slaves"_versus_"enslaved_persons". I see there's no MOS:SLAVE atm. There is a WP:SLAVE, but it doesn't really help this discussion. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:51, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
One comment from that Words to watch discussion from HighinBC really stuck out to me:
"I say use the wording that is most common in the reliable sources the article is based on." I'm not sure I quite agree with it completely but it sure would stop any long-simmering edit wars over wording choices. - Shearonink (talk) 15:09, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
This is best starting point imo. Whether "slave" or "enslaved person" is preferable (and in most cases it will be a preference, not correct vs incorrect) will depend on the usage in reliable sources relevant to the topic area and is likely be context dependent. Thryduulf (talk) 15:17, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
No, the phrases mean the same thing with no differentiation in terms of permanence. The only difference is the emphasis on the humanity of the person. Given that, "slave" becomes socially unacceptable because who (the thinking goes) after becoming aware of that distinction would use the word "slave" except someone who is intentionally being accommodating of dehumanization.
"Use the same words as sources" doesn't seem tenable, given that we don't want to refer to people as Negroes or Coloreds or the n-word or other terms that were used at various times. Nor do even modern-era printed sources change as the social acceptability of sensitive words changes over the course of a couple decades. It would be weird if we now referred to openly gay people as "admitted homosexuals", even though that wasn't unusual to hear on the TV news in 1980s America. -- Beland (talk) 06:29, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
Here's another discussion: Talk:Confederate_States_of_America/Archive_21#h-Request_for_comment:_"slaves"_vs._"enslaved_people"-2022-02-14T01:30:00.000Z. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:03, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
And some more.
Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:07, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
We've not had a consensus for a strong preference either way regarding people-first language. Some consider the noun terms pejorative and prefer the adjective terms for that reason, other do not. On the related topic of disability, MOS:EUPHEMISM notes the priority is clarity of understanding. It links to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Disability/Style advice essay, which prefers people-first language where possible and clear but notes a mixture is fine. CMD (talk) 15:31, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
WP:SUFFER addresses person-first language in medical contexts. However, changing "slaves" to "enslaved persons" is not, strictly speaking, a case of person-first language.
I'm not sure that we need to have a single rule for all articles. I think that edit warring to enforce the retention of the older style of wording (i.e., to put slaves back in the article because that's the language used in history textbooks when some of us were kids) is inappropriate, but I think editors should be using their judgment instead of of imposing a one-size-fits-all rule on all articles. One should hesitate to label the American abolitionists Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass as 'slaves'; however, one might not have the same feeling about using that term for, say, Sicinnus from the 5th century BC or Spartacus of the 1st century CE. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:19, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
Meh… Spartacus was born a free person and was subsequently “enslaved”. At which point he became a “slave”.
Tubman and Douglas were born in a condition of slavery, and thus were “slaves” until they gained their freedom. They used that term about themselves. Blueboar (talk) 00:56, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
Neither of your statements are arguments unto themselves. Need I explain how the latter argument falls apart especially quickly? Remsense诉 00:59, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
I wasn’t trying to make an argument either way, but noting that the words “enslaved” and “slave” are contextual. That said, a personal observation: When I see the term “enslaved”, I tend to assume it is referring to first generation slaves (ie those who were free, but then captured and… enslaved) and not to those born into slavery. That may be because I see “enslave” used more as a verb, rather than a noun. Blueboar (talk) 14:12, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Agreed. See the Cambridge dictionary: en- "used to form verbs that mean to put into or onto something" or "used to form verbs that mean to cause to be something". Examples: encircle = "to put into a circle" or enlarge = "to make large". To enslave is to make someone into a slave and the past participle enslaved revers to someone who has been made into a slave. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 14:49, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Someone born into slavery is enslaved by those who take advantage of the law. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:56, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
No. The essence of "en-" is the "putting into" or "causing to be". A child born into slavery is not put into slavery, from the moment of birth (possibly conception?) they are already a slave. Just as a mare's foal belongs to the breeder from birth, the breeder does not acquire the foal. It's ugly, vicious and cruel, but then does any modern person not think that slavery is not ugly, vicious and cruel? Martin of Sheffield (talk) 15:56, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
No. Chattle slavery cannot exist without the owner, it is their assertion of the property interest that places the child into slavery. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:05, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Etymological fallacy probably needs some improvements, if anyone's interested in the subject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:11, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
(Oh, that's a good one. Might just take you up on that.) Remsense诉 05:05, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
"Enslaved" does not refer to first-generation slaves only. Everyone who is in a state of slavery is also in a state of enslavement or enslaved, even if they have always been that way. Arguably, everyone is born free, and enslavement is a continuing, ongoing process, preventing people from actualizing the universal desire for freedom, though the threat of violence.
But regardless of our feelings about how "active" ongoing enslavement is, the en- prefix is also used to describe states that are "passive", never-changing, and never-not-been. Something is encapsulated or entangled even if it has always been that way. We can also say something was encapsulated or entangled at a particular point in time, or that someone was enslaved at a particular point in time, in which case we'd need to use context to clarify if we mean an initial change of state or the continuation of an ongoing state. But "was an enslaved person" unambiguously means "was in a state of slavery at that time", in contrast to the ambiguous "person X was enslaved". -- Beland (talk) 06:47, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
This is unnecessary for the same reason we have WP:EUPHEMISM. Ngrams isn't the be-all end-all, but it's telling. This effort to erase the word "slave" gives the whiff of WP:ACTIVIST/WP:ADVOCACY/WP:RIGHTINGGREATWRONGS/whathaveyou. The discussions provided by Gråbergs Gråa Sång seem to indicate that the community broadly agrees. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:01, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
Agree with Thebiguglyalien. As I have said before, these WP:EUPHEMISMS are verbose and unecessary, and definitely have a tinge of WP:ADVOCACY-style editing. I'm not categorically opposed to them, but I'd like to see a lot more evidence that this term is becoming standard, and I'm not seeing that in common speech or most sources. Let's not put the cart before the horse – wait and see if this is a new and widely-used term, or another short-lived part of a new mild euphemism treadmill. Cremastra (talk) 00:16, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Enslaved person or person who was enslaved is not a euphemism. Nothing's being covered up here. Something like involuntary migrant or involuntary worker could be a euphemism. Servant was a euphemism popular with white Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries, because it hid the ugly facts behind a veneer of normalcy (JSTOR 26361869). WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:57, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Also, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/04/equity-language-guides-sierra-club-banned-words/673085/ says that "enslaved person has generally replaced slave", so apparently it's already a widely used term. It is not, however, new in any sense. It's been in use for more than two centuries, as you can see from a quick search in Google Books. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:05, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
That's an opinion piece that sources its claim to another opinion piece. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:13, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
I hope you are not expecting a randomized controlled trial over word choice. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:33, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
We should avoid taking American sources as indicators of global usage. CMD (talk) 01:14, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
True, but part of the complaint is that this change is only being seen in articles about American people. See, e.g., the recent complaint from @Clintville at Talk:Martha Washington that an article about an American subject, using WP:AMENG, shouldn't use the language popular in American sources because "It also makes no sense that the new term is only used in regards to American slavery. No one is changing the articles on Spartacus or the Ottoman Empire."
Since the word choice is only affecting American subjects, and the articles are written in American English, I think it's perfectly reasonable and normal for us to be consulting American sources about what's common or appropriate for them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:37, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Sure, just a note worth keeping in mind as the opening post is a discussion on "general usage", and this factor is often overlooked. It may even be the case that American English common usage differs between Marth Washington and Spartacus. CMD (talk) 03:42, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
To me it gives off more of a feeling of trying to hide great wrongs. Advocates of "enslaved person" keep saying that calling someone a "slave" is dehumanizing. Well, duh. THAT WAS THE FREAKING POINT OF SLAVERY!!! Calling someone a slave hits the reader in the face with the fact that these people were seen as and treated as no better than garden tools. Calling someone an enslaved person covers all that up in a feel good bandage of "ain't we so much better now?". The past was UGLY. Which is why we need to look at it directly. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 11:43, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Well, if anything was UGLY, surely it was enslaving others. It also makes little sense that you suggest the purpose is to make the present feel better, but what really you want to say is the past is UGLY. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:49, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
The way slaves were treated depends greatly on time and place. Contrast the laws regarding slaves in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) with the way slaves were treated in the American South. None of those societies treated slaves well, but some were worse than others. And, no, the word does not imply a permanent condition. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 12:58, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
Um, yes that was the point of slavery; it is not the point of the language we use today. During slavery, they were property. Retrospectively, they can be actual people. The language shift is to highlight it was something done to them and didn't define them as a person. We're not writing fiction or Django Unchained such that we must retain the language used at the time for emotional resonance. We're trying to be as specific as possible in describing subjects. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:49, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
People advocate for "enslaved person" because it is both humanizing and highlights the ugliness of the past more by emphasizing that a very horrible thing is being done to a real person, who is more than a dehumanized social role like "slave". -- Beland (talk) 06:14, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
If I may: to me, both perspectives expressed here clearly have significant merit to them, which is why we're here having this discussion. No one needs me to tell them that a harrowing thing about slavery is we have to engage in the lifelong process of understanding these people both as human and more, as their stories are remarkable and frankly the closest I can get to "sacred"—while simultaneously having to actually make an active effort to truly understand them as property, if we are to understand how these conditions could exist and perpetuate, and thus do their experiences justice.
This is all to say that—it seems appropriate for both terms to be used depending on context, possibly with specific attention to the tone and purpose of the immediately surrounding prose. As noted above, I do not think "enslaved person" is a euphemism in the slightest; it is perfectly informative and neutral, and I do not even see it as a "gentler" word tonally. It is obviously reasonable to use the vast majority of the time, as it seems implausible that reader would not understand the term upon reading: it is fairly familiar if not predominant. However, I would not advocate its recommendation over "slave" as a content guideline. At the same time, I don't see any reason why an article should solely use one or the other, so there are not strong WP:RETAIN reasons not to use it unless one goes out of their way to replace existing prose. I think that would require discussion on a case by case basis. Remsense诉 06:35, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
Assuming one accepts the argument that "enslaved person" is supposed to be more humanizing, in what context would "slave" ever be better, and due to what factors? (We can use "enslaved by X" instead of "slave of X", and so on, so I don't see grammatical context mattering, and I'm assuming direct quotes would retain original language, even if offensive - if not because it's offensive.) Likewise, if one accepts the argument that "enslaved person" is either too euphemistic or sounds too PC, what context factors would change the calculus to favor "enslaved person" over "slave"? -- Beland (talk) 07:51, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
This is sort of what I'm getting at: I really think it may be best if these terms are treated as equivalent or eligible to be used in free variation most of the time: it's hard to put forward a compelling hypothetical when one isn't right in front of me. It's important to think hard about these things, but sometimes if I try to think too hard for a reason, I'll end up making up a mediocre one instead of acknowledging the fact that words are forever slippery and depending on the situation certain vocabulary choices simply can't be demonstrated to make a real difference to the quality of the text. Remsense诉 07:53, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
Ah, OK, "free variation" (implying the truce of "retain existing") does make more sense to me than "depends on context" if one declares neutrality in the argument over whether one of the terms always has a bad ring to it. (Though I am not actually neutral on that question.) -- Beland (talk) 08:08, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
To me it really does matter on the conversation being had, though it makes all the sense in the world people have notably divergent perspectives on what's most appropriate when Remsense诉 08:24, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
I hope this doesn't sound cynical or straight up blockheaded, but returning to a point I made earlier: since the two terms can be agreed to be lexically equivalent for our purposes (i.e. no one will be confused if one term is used in place of another, even if they may have distinct connotations the core meaning is clear)—perhaps it's more workable for some if we embrace doing the exact opposite of our usual "figure out one term and stick with it" that would normally be the only sane means—here, I think it's possible we just use both terms a lot in most articles. Maybe I'm sounding blockheaded because the presence of the unwanted term would displease more than also being "assured" (you know what I mean) of a "counterweight". The audience while reading is both made to reckon with the humanity of enslaved people, and feel the appropriate sting from reckoning with terms useful in a system that didn't treat them that way. Dunno. Remsense诉 08:31, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
We don't throw in an occasional "Negro" in Wikipedia's voice to generate mild offense in our readers by using an outdated term which can now sound insensitive outside of proper nouns or direct quotes, nor do we refer to it as "the peculiar institution" in free variation. The only reason to keep "slavery" around in free variation is if it's widely perceived as neutral and not offensive. -- Beland (talk) 19:19, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
The idea was predicated on an assumption that this lexical situation is in practice categorically less offensive from others such as the examples you gave. In this case, I think a firm dichotomy of neutral versus non-neutral may harm our analysis: one would have to admit these are certainly both "terms to watch", in the Wikipedia idiom. We deal with different magnitudes of connotation in our language every time we have to choose what words to utter. I would insist that as far as pure text thought experiment goes, the idea is simply not as crass as the examples you give. (Could certainly make an argument that it's absurd socially and would make things worse if tried though.) Remsense诉 19:52, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
Language changes. "Negro" has fallen completely out of use in contemporary English, "Slave" has not. There are people arguing and campaigning that it should, but per WP:NPOV that is not for Wikipedia to have an opinion about. Wikipedia should always be just behind the peak usage shift when it comes to changing language - i.e. we follow just behind the majority, but that point has not happened yet with regards to "slave"/"enslaved person". We do not and should not prohibit either term, but neither do we or should be actively encourage the use of one term over the other and we absolutely should not be making any changes without article-level consensus and consideration of individual context. Thryduulf (talk) 20:51, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
Sure, my point is that we shouldn't use a term because it has fallen out of acceptable contemporary use for the purpose of being intentionally jarring, aside from the question of whether or not that has actually happened. -- Beland (talk) 21:20, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure I quite understand your last comment. If you are saying that a term having fallen out contemporary use is not a reason in itself to use that term then we agree. If you are saying that "slave" shouldn't be used because it has, or should have, fallen out of use then we disagree. Thryduulf (talk) 21:35, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
In that particular comment, I was making the first point you mentioned. -- Beland (talk) 23:51, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
It's perfectly fine to call them enslaved, it's neither wrong nor anything else (in particular it is not euphemism) but a choice, whether we have a rule about it seems unlikely, except perhaps a modified type of ENGVAR procedure. Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:34, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Just to add something related to the NGRAMS link: "slave" is a flexible term in English that is far more often used colloquially or metaphorically (slave to fashion, slave away at work, master/slave computers, treats X like a slave, etc.), so NGRAMS aren't going to be useful to identify trends in [the word referring specifically to the type of slave we're talking about]. That might in itself be a [weak] reason to go with some version of "enslaved person" -- because it's unambiguous. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:49, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Unnecessary delay in publishing articles translated for $$ by an NGO

So, I just stumbled upon Wikipedia:WikiProject Intertranswiki/OKA. TL;DR, there is an NGO sponsoring translating high quality articles between Wikipedias. But on EN due to our COI/PAID policies they are required to use AfC, which means that their articles, which usually are very good, are delayed through AfC backlog, to which they also contribute. I think this is an excellent initative that however needlessly clutters AfC due to our current rules, and I'd like to suggest we consider giving it exception from the COI requirement to use AfC. It makes sense to direct paid-for spammers to AfC, as their articles are often problematic (notability, etc.) but what we have here is very different (translations of good quality articles from other wikis - ex. current drafts include Draft:Renaissance in Ferrara, Draft:Spa Conference (2-3 July 1918), Draft:Formal procedure law in Switzerland, etc.), yet this stuff is caught in the same "COI" net. (See project page linked above for links of articles already published, links to drafts waiting for review, and their instructions to translators) Thoughts? (Courstesy ping project founder @7804j). PS. A question to 7804j - how are articles chosen for translation? How is the system designed not to be abused by spammers? Perhaps if an exception is granted on en wiki, it should not apply to articles about companies, products or living persons? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:27, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

I would dispute that "this is an excellent initative" or "that their articles, which usually are very good". They have caused a lot of work; mostly these are machine translations by people whose English is rather poor. The titles chosen are often completely ungrammatical (Greek Classicism Sculpture was a typical one) or inappropriate, & in the past they have chosen often subjects we already have. The texts are just whatever the language taken - usually Portuguese, Spanish, French or Italian, has on their wiki, & the quality of the original is often poor, & errors introduced by machine translation go uncorrrected. There have been numerous complaints. They have got slightly better, but I think still don't publish a full list of articles they have paid for, whicgh they should. The Open Knowledge Association isn't really "an NGO" - as far as I can see it's a single Swiss guy with a bit of money to spend, who you have rashly decided to endorse. Johnbod (talk) 02:51, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
I think that the principle is sound: high-quality articles can and should be translated into languages where they're missing. Doc James ran a similar program for certain medical articles a few years ago (e.g., during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks), to public acclaim. However, he was working with pre-screened professional translators, and OKA seems to have struggled with quality control. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:19, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Unfortunately the ODA model makes absolutely no attempt at quality control. As will be clear to anyone who reads one of them, they are just machine translations dumped onto en:wp with no aftercare. Many that were forks were just turned into redirects, which the ODA doesn't appear to have noticed. The ones that are left take a lot of cleaning up, when some regular editor can be bothered. Johnbod (talk) 01:52, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
I am afraid that your anecdotal analysis above is different from mine. The articles from OKA I've seen seem pretty decent, at start+ class, and would survive AfD if nominated. Can you recall which articles were redirected - and prove that they are a rule, and not an exception? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:50, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Whether they would survive Afd is almost all about the notability of the subject, and that is not usually an issue - the quality is. In fact the worst issues arise when they tackle very prominent subjects. I never claimed that redirected ones were the "rule" - I make no attempt to search out OKA efforts, but then clearly neither do you. Draft:Crow-stepped gable is a recent creation, objected to, for which we have a redirect already in place. Not much of it will survive, I'd imagine. If they kept proper lists of their articles on wiki I would be able to find some, I imagine. Johnbod (talk) 03:12, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Johnbod List here; may not be everything. Mathglot (talk) 03:34, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Thanks, but I don't think that is at all complete. The template was only set up in October 22 (by 7804j), well into OKA's project. Stuff may have been added later. You used to able to access an off-wiki spreadsheet 7804j maintained, but I can't see that you can now. User:7804j? For example, the earlier efforts of User:Racnela21, one of the most prolific OKA editors, are not templated - see the 48k bytes of Brazilian Romantic painting (typically, initially called Brazilian Romanticism Painting). Johnbod (talk) 13:08, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
This list contains all articles created by OKA after the template was created. Oka was created relatively shortly before the template was created, therefore there are not many articles without it (probably 90+% have the template). The off wiki tracker is still at oka.wiki/tracker 7804j (talk) 13:24, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Also, I'd like to highlight that quality is not really the topic of this discussion, since this is about whether COI should require all paid editors to go through AfC and, as you pointed out yourself, AfC's goals are not primarily to check quality. I'd suggest moving the OKA discussions somewhere else such as our talkpage in the intertranswiki project 7804j (talk) 13:27, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Piotr brings up "would survive AfD" because that's the standard AfC uses. If OKA articles typically have quality issues that wouldn't be enough for deletion, then there's no point insisting they go through AfC – assuming reviewers are doing their job properly, they'll just send them right through. – Joe (talk) 11:00, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Things that would make them fail Afd include repeating articles we already have under a different title, a perennial problem with OKA, which reviewers don't always pick up, but sometimes do - as currently at Draft:Crow-stepped gable. Besides, some reviewers (perhaps not "doing their job properly" - how shocking) insist on minimal standards of coherent English, etc. Johnbod (talk) 14:31, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Health translation efforts from English to other languages are still running. Wiki Project Med Translation Dashboard Our translators are mostly volunteers with a mix of Wikipedians and professional translators. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:40, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Hi Piotrus,
Thanks for initiating that discussion! I am fully supportive of such an exemption, as I see this AfC requirement as additional red tape that consumes a lot of time for OKA translators and AfC reviewers.
Our core principle is that our translators are free to work on anything that interests them. We provide them with a monthly stipend, some training on how Wikipedia works, but we then see them as volunteer contributors on whom we impose some process to ensure they do not abuse the grant and provide overall value (eg, quality checks, quantity checks). To help them find articles to translate, we curate an optional backlog (at oka.wiki/tracker). Articles of this tracker primarily consist of "Featured" and "Good" quality articles from other Wikis, as well as red links from these articles. We also complement this with articles that we find important, eg, about geographical features such as lakes, mountains, etc. The broader principles for articles prioritization are described at oka.wiki/overview
Note that there was a similar discussion in the Interwiki talkpage, which can provide useful additional context.
Regarding Johnbod's response, I would like to bring 3 points of context:
1) While overall quality is good, it may vary. Because we have many different translators, with difference levels of experience, the quality will not be uniform. We are providing them with training, and we have observed their quality improved over time. We stop providing grants to translators wjth recurring quality issues. Overall, I do not agree with Johnbod's characterizarion of a high degree of quality issues. Often, the issues raised with OKA's work were not due to the quality of the translation, but because of the source article itself. We have published several thousand of articles, most of which are still live with very minimal change vs their original published version.
2) This discussion is not about assessing the quality of the work, but whether the COI requirement to go through AfC should apply to OKA. The only reason why our translators go through AfC today is because of the COI policy, which was not created primarily to check quality of paid translations but to eliminate bias. Therefore, I don't think such arguments are appropriate in the current discussion.
3) Our funding comes from many different private individuals, but it is true that currently I am the main donor. That being said, this should not make any difference as to whether we can be called an "NGO". Would the Gates Foundation not be called an NGO just because most of its funding comes from Bill Gates? We have over 15 full time translators who agree to do this work with a very small stipend, much smaller than what they could earn in a regular job, so the work of OKA is much more than that of a single person 7804j (talk) 08:46, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Personally, I don't care how high quality the articles end up being, if you have a financial tie to a subject you should go through AfC. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 08:59, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Getting paid to translate an article about Brazilian Romantic painting (popular in the late 1800s) is not exactly the same as having a financial tie to the subject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:32, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
I would prefer not to couch any action in terms of "an exception" for a named user or group. Rather, I would prefer to see an adjustment to WP:PAID to make a modification to allow "philanthropic paid editing" where the articles in question and the content added are chosen by the paid editors and there is no oversight by the payer. At that point, individual articles and editors would be subject to the same kind of oversight as any other. It seems to me that philanthropic paid editing to expand the encyclopedia is within the scope of WP:HERE, and this should not be formulated as an "exception" as if something were wrong with it in the general case. Mathglot (talk) 09:14, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
I agree with [[U|Lee Vilenski}} if you have a financial tie to a subject you should go through AfC, The given example Draft:Renaissance in Ferrara is very poorly translated. Theroadislong (talk) 09:19, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Courtesy ping: Lee Vilenski. Mathglot (talk) 09:22, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
But that's the thing, OKA editors don't have a financial tie to the subject. They're paid by an organisation to edit Wikipedia, but the selection of topics is independent. It's basically paid editing without a COI, which is a bit of blind spot in our current policies. – Joe (talk) 09:30, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Indeed. What "tie to the subject" is there in "Renaissance in Ferrara"? We might as well call COI and PAID for Wikipedia:School and university projects or most of WP:GLAM stuff, and various edit-a-thons, since there is $ involved in it as well. Do we require AfC from Wikipedians in Residences? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:48, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Actually I would be interested to understand what are the requirements for projects such as the ones you mentioned to *not* qualify as paid editing. As you pointed out, Wikipedians in Residence do not need to go through AfC -- what are the formal criteria/policy allowing them to be compensated without being considered paid editors? 7804j (talk) 20:17, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
As per foundation:Policy:Terms of Use/Frequently asked questions on paid contributions without disclosure#How does this provision affect teachers, professors, and employees of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums ("GLAM")?, Wikipedians-in-residence are still considered paid editors for contributions for which they are being paid. isaacl (talk) 22:30, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
@Isaacl:, yes, but as I read it, they are free to make edits of their choice without even disclosing their paid status, as long as they are not making specific edits about the payer institution. The way I read it, is that GLAM employees do not need to disclose because: "Disclosure is only necessary where compensation has been promised or received in exchange for a particular contribution". That section recommends a simple disclosure for W-in-residence, but only in the case where they are "specifically compensated to edit the article about the archive at which they are employed". Paid status need not be disclosed for general edits unrelated to that. Do you see it differently? Mathglot (talk) 02:20, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Yes, I do, and so has previous discussion at Wikipedia talk:Paid-contribution disclosure. If they are being compensated for a particular contribution, as per the section you quoted, then they fit the definition of a paid editor. :foundation:Policy:Terms of Use#Paid Contributions Without Disclosure does not distinguish reasons for the paid contributions. isaacl (talk) 06:14, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Yes they do fit it if compensated for a *particular contribution*, and the Paid FAQ linked by the foundation Policy you cited above specifically calls out the circumstances when paid editors do *not* need to disclose their contributions. Those circumstances match those of paid OKA volunteers, who, had they been a Wikipedia-in-residence or a GLAM-paid instead of OKA-paid, would not have had to disclose their status, according to the wmf policy FAQ itself. Mathglot (talk) 06:39, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
On the English wikipedia we do require that disclosure "If you receive, or expect to receive, compensation for your contributions to Wikipedia, you must disclose who is paying you to edit (your "employer"), who the client is, and any other relevant role or relationship." Even if the foundation FAQ says that per the foundation they don't per English wikipedia they do. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 06:44, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
The FAQ is giving specific examples, and is non-exhaustive. As explained in the first paragraph of the section, you are only required to comply with the disclosure provision when you are compensated by your employer or by a client specifically for edits and uploads to a Wikimedia project. This is in accordance with the actual Terms of Use: if you are being specifically compensated for contributions, you are a paid editor, but this does not extend to your contributions that are not within the scope of your compensation. If you are being paid to edit about your employer, that's within the scope of your compensation, and so the relationship has to be disclosed (and the example is about this specific situation). isaacl (talk) 13:24, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
So in the same line of thought, this means that all articles created by Wikipedians in Residence in the context of the organization that pays them need to go through AfC (as @Horse Eye's Back suggests in the comment below), is that also your understanding? 7804j (talk) 16:21, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Note that "Wikipedian-in-residence" is just a self-described title, without any oversight from anyone involved with the WMF or Wikipedia, so the scope of their role is entirely decided by their employer and them. Some of those who have participated at Wikipedia talk:Paid-contribution disclosure have said that they do not edit Wikipedia as part of their role; they provide education and support to the institution's staff. isaacl (talk) 16:56, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
"Do we require AfC from Wikipedians in Residences?" The outcome of the recent case involving the BYU library's Wikipedians in Residence clarified that the community does in fact expect Wikipedians in Residence to use AfC. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 03:54, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
@Mathglot "philanthropic paid editing". I like the term - hope it makes it into our updated policies. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:51, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
This is one reason I prefer the term financial conflict of interest. "Paid editing" focuses on a transaction—being paid to edit—but the real issue is the tendency to bias created by some financial relationships. Wikipedians in Residence are the paradigmatic example of people who are literally paid to edit but don't have a conflict of interest; it seems like OKA translators are another. If we shifted the guideline to talk about FCOIs instead of paid editing, the need for an exception for philanthropy would disappear. – Joe (talk) 11:24, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Hear, hear. There is nothing inherently wrong with folks making $$ out of volunteering. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 14:17, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
By definition you can't make money out of volunteering, if they're making money they're working not volunteering. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 05:39, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
If you can make xxx$ out of a full tims job and only half of that when editing Wikipedia, it becomes more a hybrid role than pure full time job. Our translators usually give up much better paid opportunities for being able to work on Wikipedia. 7804j (talk) 06:10, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
7804j, I would not pursue this line; it's a distraction, and a loser. Volunteering/working is binary, there is no hybrid, in-between, or threshold of payment so low that it is not "working". Mathglot (talk) 06:18, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
In the context of Wikipedia I agree with you that there should be no distinction in the policy. I just wanted to call out that many of these paid editors do so not because they are interested financially but because they care about Wikipedia and just need some money to pay rent and food (thus why we call it a grant/stipend). Sometimes people are being overly harsh on them, so I think it's important to highlight they also do some personal sacrifices to do that job. 7804j (talk) 06:22, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
Indeed. And WiRs get paid stipends and such, and we still consider them volunteers, no? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 08:09, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
We consider WiR and such to be paid editors if they are paid (there are volunteer WiR who don't get any compensation). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:32, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
You seem to be making the distinction between working full time and working part time, not between working and volunteering. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:32, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
No, I am making the distinction between working full time in a for-profit translation company that pays well, and working full-time through stipends from a non-profit organization like OKA that pays a lot less. OKA editors accept a much lower grant than what they could earn elsewhere because they know it's an important cause. 7804j (talk) 15:41, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
And what is the distinction? Neither of those is a hybrid situation or volunteering... Taking a lower salary to work in a job you want to work in vs one which pays more but you don't want to do is not volunteering, almost all of us do that. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:54, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedians in Residence all have signficant conflicts of interest, primarily in relation to their employer. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 05:43, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Everyone has significant conflicts of interest, primarily in relation to their employers. The issue is whether they make edits in those areas or not. If a WiR at the Museum of Nowheresville was editing Museum of Nowheresville, there'd be a problem. If an OKA translator was editing Open Knowledge Association, there'd be a problem. But that's not what we're talking about here. – Joe (talk) 10:49, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Not able to square "Wikipedians in Residence are the paradigmatic example of people who are literally paid to edit but don't have a conflict of interest" with "Everyone has significant conflicts of interest, primarily in relation to their employers" Horse Eye's Back (talk) 07:05, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
So OKA has been on my radar for some years now due to off-wiki reports sent to the paid editing queue. I was extremely suspicious of it at first and (along with others active in UPE patrolling) worried it would be a sort of front for the usual abusive paid editing. However, I have to hold my hands up and say that it's been c. five years and nothing like that has come up. From what I've seen, the selection of topics is genuinely made based on what's missing on enwiki, and the quality of the translation are at least no worse than average. @7804j: You perhaps made an initial strategic error in structuring/talking about this as "freelancers" doing "paid editing", because this puts you in a category of people that the volunteer community, for good reason, have come to be very sceptical of. Essentially identical activities that are framed as grant-making or residency do not raise the same eyebrows, especially if you can get some sort of buy-in from the WMF (which is not hard).
Quality is a separate issue and something that pretty much always causes friction when people who aren't very familiar with Wikipedia are incentivised to contribute to it en masse. There is no easy to solution to this. Specifically, making them go through AfC isn't going to help – AfC reviewers don't have the time to do a close reading of drafts to look for translation issues. They'll take a look through for major problems (which OKA drafts don't seem to have) and for notability (virtually guaranteed because these are substantial articles on other Wikipedias) and then pass it through. So we'll end up with the same outcome as if they were created in mainspace directly, just with some extra volunteer time wasted within an already backlogged process.
As to whether OKA creations need to go through AfC, I am usually the last person to point this out, but technically this is a request not a requirement. AfC is broken by design because generally we don't want to encourage paid editors by giving them an efficient route to publication, or encourage volunteers to do work that someone else will get paid for. As Mathglot says, Neither our COI policy or the AfC process was designed with 'philanthropic paid editing' in mind. I think it's fine for OKA editors to bypass this and create directly in mainspace. This isn't an exception our a change to the rules, it's just applying WP:IAR and recognising that forcing good faith creations into a broken process because their creator got a stipend while writing them, or because they might have some translation issues, is not in the spirit of WP:FCOI. – Joe (talk) 09:25, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
@Joe Roe "extra volunteer time wasted" - exactly, this is the problem I am trying to address. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:12, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Thanks @Joe Roe!
Initially, I also thought that the AfC requirement for paid editors was a request and not a requirement. However, @Seraphimblade raised in my talk page that any OKA editor creating an article in the mainspace without going through AfC would be blocked. Hence why we started requiring all our translators to go through AfC since early May.
I agree with you that it was a mistake from my end to have initially used the term "freelancer". Our translators are volunteers receiving a grant to cover basic costs of living (~400 usd per month for the ones working full time). Going forward, I will make sure to always use the more accurate terms of "Grant/stipend recipients". I did not want to use the term of "Wikipedians in Residence" as it seemed to me that this requires that the work be related to the institution itself. I wasn't aware that there are options to get buy-in from the Wikimedia foundation, but I will explore this avenue as it will indeed help with acceptance of OKA among the community.
In general, I strongly with the idea of introducing a broader exemption to the AfC requirement of the COI policy to either philanthropic institutions that do not target specific topics and give high degree of freedom to grant recipients, or to payments that are too low to represent full wages (e.g., <xxx$ per month/ per hour).
7804j (talk) 11:54, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Specifically you might want to look into meta:Wikimedia thematic organizations or one of the other categories of meta:Wikimedia movement affiliates. – Joe (talk) 12:06, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Whatever avenues you explore, I would not get into proposals related to trying to find a threshold where a payment is "too low" to make a difference, and thus presumably not trigger a PAID concern. Experience with paid crowd-sourcing platforms such as MTurk shows that micropayments may attract volunteers for certain tasks, even sometimes for a larger than average task such as a translation. Mathglot (talk) 18:04, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
This might be a dumb question, but I'm tired and can't find it: where in the policies do we require paid editors to use AFC? (please do not ping on reply) Primefac (talk) 22:05, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
WP:COIEDIT states that paid editors "should put new articles through the Articles for Creation (AfC) process instead of creating them directly". Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:52, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
I see. Primefac (talk) 12:38, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Ah, so here's this month's OKA thread, I thought I'd miss it!
If an organization of this sentiment really wanted to help the English Wikipedia, they would be working exclusively on poorly developed vital articles. Then there would be no AFC necessary. The English WP is far past the point where creating new articles is an effective way to make meaningful improvements. Unless, of course, this creation targets areas of systemic bias where there is a genuine dearth in coverage.
To me this appears much like the organizers have gone so far in one direction that whether or not their effort is actually worthwhile is no longer a consideration. Even with their current infrastructure, it would be considerably more effective to take EN FAs and translate them into other languages. Aza24 (talk) 07:29, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
You've created 68 articles, the last one two weeks ago. Are we to understand that that was the last one we needed? – Joe (talk) 11:22, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Halleluyah, we are done! Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 13:27, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
The English Wikipedia does not need new articles nearly as much as it needs improvements on existing ones. As I said, the only exception is to fill systemic bias gaps, which yes, includes a woman poet! Comparing a single editor with an entire organization does not track.
Unfortunately, the OKA is fundamentally flawed in this regard, but it doesn’t seem like an object of concern for them. Aza24 (talk) 17:09, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
I should add that if I'm being overly critical, it's because this organization should be held to a high standard. Sine it is under the guise of effective altruism, the former "effective" qualifier needs to take more prominence. I can't see anywhere that it's even been considered how to most effectively help Wikipedia. Otherwise, the OKA would have approached the community before founding, to identify what is actually needed. Since they didn't, now we find ourselves in these same threads, time and time again. Aza24 (talk) 17:35, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Your argument appears to be about your opinion on how work on Wikipedia ought to be prioritized, and is a red herring. One of the central features of a volunteer organization, is that volunteers work on articles of their choice, not articles of your choice, or some committee's choice. Thank goodness I didn't have to listen to you, or I never would have had the opportunity to translate that article about a medieval Catalan peasant uprising, when there were no doubt many hundreds of thousands of tasks more urgent than that one at the time. The OKA volunteers who translate articles of their choice in their own manner should be held to the same standard I was, namely, Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and nothing else. Mathglot (talk) 19:14, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Thank goodness I don't have to listen to you either! Aza24 (talk) 19:45, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
@Aza24 I do not think this is the right place to discuss this. This thread is about whether to make changes to the AfC requirement of COI, not about how OKA prioritizes articles. So I would suggest moving that discussion for example to the OKA taskforce talkpage.
That being said, we (OKA) already operate along the lines of what you seem to recommend. Many if the articles our translators work are are about neglected topics in EN wiki, for example, articles about geographical features of non-English speaking countries (eg, Spain, Latin America) or non-English speaking historical figures. I would actually argue that improving coverage on these topics is much more important than extending already extensive articles on important topics. But most importantly, it takes different skill sets to translate vs expand articles. The editors who receive our grants would not necessarily be sufficiently familiar with these topics to be able to expand them starting from scratch.
Regarding your recommendation to translate from English to other languages: we do that already. We published thousands of articles in the Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedia, with a strong focus on under represented topics in these Wikipedia such as mathematics, computer science, etc. There's been a lot of off Wiki analysis of opportunities to maximize impact on donation that went on before we decided to set up OKA the way it is, and I'm happy to share more detail about the rationale if there is interest 7804j (talk) 19:41, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
I'm going to retract my comments. Given your response, I don't think I'm nearly as informed as I should be on the organization to be casting such aspirations/critiscms. Also, my comments seemed needly inflammatory; my apologies. – Aza24 (talk) 20:54, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
@Aza24 I just wanted to say that it is quite rare to see folks backtrack and even apologize in Internet discussions (and that includes on Wikipedia). Regardless of the issue at hand, I would like to say I very much respect and appreciate you for what you have just said above. Cheers, Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:47, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
How did feline hyperthyroidism come up then? Traumnovelle (talk) 09:23, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
I see a nescessary delay, there is no rush and that absolutely needs to be treated the same way as other paid edits. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:49, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Translator here. I stumbled across this group a couple of months ago. I was well into remediation of an article when I began to wonder who had created the thing -- something I normally care about not at all -- and discovered it was an OKA editor. I talked to the coordinator and was told that the editor in question was one of their best, that the editor was a really nice person, and the quality of the English was not really an issue, since nice people like me would fix things up. Oh, and I was just jealous because I was not myself getting paid.
I am far from a snob when it comes to English, and in fact spend most of my time on Wikipedia instilling readability into the work of subject matter experts whose English is not as good as they think it is, or who have not realized the problems with machine translation. For the most part consider it a good use of my time. I dropped the article after that remark though; I don't appreciate my pro bono efforts being taken for granted in anyone's business model. The article was inane as I recall, and seemed hastily written. Copy-editing is analogous to image editing. In the same way that you can't bring out pixels that aren't there, you can't add meaning to vague generalities; it requires research and at that point you are re-writing. More bytes does not equal more information necessarily, or even very often. The WP:PNT translation project essentially drowned in MT bullshit and this project is only a more subtle incarnation of the same problem.
I vehemently oppose removing the little quality control there is now for these articles, and we really do not need more of them.Elinruby (talk) 21:49, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
Hi Elinruby,
I assume the conversation you are referring to is this one? I don't think you are making a fair characterization of that discussion. As I responded in that thread, I completely agree that the improvements you made to the article were great, but I think one needs to make the distinction between "Improving the English" vs "Improving the overall writing". Sometimes, the English is correct but the writing can be improved (e.g., shortening of sentences that are too long). People with native English may still sometimes make poor sentence constructions. Of course, both the quality of the English and of the writing are important, but I was just saying that the two concepts are orthogonal. And if the sentence construction of the original article was poor, it makes it also harder for translators to resolve these in the translation, hence why sometimes it gets missed; but when someone flags our article on these grounds, we go back to it and improve them. In any case, these type of issues will not be caught through the AfC process.
I have never implied that you were "jealous" of the fact they are paid. In that thread, I had just asked whether your judgement of the work would have been as harsh if the editor was a volunteer rather than paid. 7804j (talk) 07:36, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
Of course you don't, and the answer is still no. I would not. I constantly clean up good articles in bad English because it is helping someone to share their knowledge, and I applaud the sharing of knowledge. I stick up for editors that other editors are trying to get blocked on CIR grounds because of their English, and to the best of my ability encourage such editors to contribute where they have a competitive advantage, ie where their knowledge of another language matters. I would, for the record, applaud your concept, in theory. But having been up close and personal with its products, I have to say that the quality is so poor that it literally would be easier to simply pay these people for the article topics they identify, then have someone else do the writing. That an article can be so bad it is better re-started from scratch is a concept I loudly poo-pooed back in the day of CTX. I hereby recant my then-assertion that nothing could be that bad. I will however stick to my guns on the weird concept that turning CTX off fixed anything at all. It is a useful tool when properly used, like all machine translation. I say this as someone who went though *all* of the flagged material with DGG and S Marshall. What was lacking in the CTX debacle and is still lacking today, as we see, is a sane workflow for translations, one that involves some quality control and does not massively penalize anyone who attempts to clean up a translation. As for whether you said the word "jealous" in that particular venue -- whatever. I seem to recall more than one conversation, as I was quite perturbed to discover than in your mind I was working for you.
I am not claiming that you engaged in personal attacks, just explaining one of several sorry episodes that made me stop trying to fix machine translation. I merely report that you did not seem able to understand that I think that if anyone is going to pay anyone for anything at Wikipedia it should not be for creating ever-increasing piles of dreck. Those piles are what we have now, not solely because of you of course, but you are adding to them using the same badly broken system, where incomprehensibly translated articles may or may not get flagged and may or may not go to WP:PNT, where as far as I know nobody works on them at this point. Sending them back to the original writer is a laughable solution btw, and this is true of AfC in general. Anyway. AfC is not very good-quality control, it's true, but it is *some* quality control. We could perhaps have a conversation on what could be done better, but as I told you then, it is important to realize that I am not available to clean up after you. I have much more interesting things I am trying to clean up, and this is true of most other wikipedia editors. Elinruby (talk) 21:50, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
For the record, I am jealous of folks being paid to do wiki work (more than I am, as my work, to some degree, already involves some peripheral interaction with Wikimedia...), and I do wish I could write for wiki as a full time, salaried job. And I do not mind saying so - and still supporting this project :P Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:59, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
In many ways I wish you could too, Piotrus. I would btw support your students not having to go through AfC if you were willing to vouch for the results. We have had this conversation before about content creation. But this is another instance of you supporting the wrong people, perhaps for the right reasons, imho. Elinruby (talk) 21:50, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
FYI almost no education projects use AfC; it is not required and it is cumbersome and too backlogged to be reliable in a setting with deadlines. I actually have data on that (as in, data supporting the claim most educational project use sandboxes, not draft space), from my research into the educational and Wiki stuff. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:01, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
I believe Piotrus is correct, but to put some numbers on it, I have raised this at ENB. Mathglot (talk) 00:43, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

I agree that paid editing is fishy due to the presence of inherently non-encyclopedic motivation, which may ultimately lead to poor quality translations of selection of poorly referenced source articles. As I see, OKA is fairly new and it is probably not flooded with quick buck seekers, but things may quickly change when rumors spread on how to earn some extra easy cash off google translator. I took a quick look at OKA articles submitted in AfC and all my random picks seem to have good quality. So here is my suggestion: How about vetting decent contributors to bypass AfC? - Altenmann >talk 19:19, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

I could see creating some sort of “fast-track” for reviewing these articles, but some sort of review is still necessary. If for no other reason than preventing duplication of topic with existing articles. Blueboar (talk) 19:51, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
I could get behind a separate lane so to speak, I just really dislike the idea of creating a loophole. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:58, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
HEB, Can you expand on what you mean by the idea of "a separate lane"? I wouldn't favor a change that referred to OKA by name (except at best in an explanatory note as an illustration of a general point in line that requires an example). Plenty of generalized guidelines have logical carve-outs that need to be explicit, for example, the guidance that strongly discourages external links in the body of an article specifically states that it doesn't apply to inline citations. We could follow that approach.
But there may be even a better way to deal with this. Currently, the first line of WP:FCOI says this:
Being paid to contribute to Wikipedia is one form of financial COI; it places the paid editor in a conflict between their employer's goals and Wikipedia's goals.
In my view, this is the crux of the problem, because it *assumes* that an employer's goals are in conflict with Wikipedia's goals. But what if that is a false assumption? I believe the general problem we are addressing could be handled without any specific carve-out, by altering it as follows:
Being paid to contribute to Wikipedia is one form of financial COI; it places the paid editor in a conflict when their employer's goals and Wikipedia's goals differ.
If the goals of an organization do not differ from Wikipedia's goals, then no separate lane or carve-out is required elsewhwere. This somewhat leaves open the question of what we would define as Wikipedia's goals, but Wikipedia:Purpose (info page) says this:
Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by acting as a widely accessible and free encyclopedia; a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge. ...
The goal of a Wikipedia article is to present a neutrally written summary of existing mainstream knowledge in a fair and accurate manner with a straightforward, "just-the-facts style".
If a philanthropic organization's goals are the same as Wikipedia's, and there is no organizational oversight of payees' output, then it seems to me no special lane is required. (edit conflict) Mathglot (talk) 20:35, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
The practical question is who's going to decide which edits do or do not need independent review? If in practice this can only be done on an article-by-article basis, then I don't think much is gained by setting up a new decision branch that comes before using the articles for creation process. isaacl (talk) 22:39, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
The lane or whatever isn't me idea so I don't want to speculate on it, in general I think what we have now works. In terms of the hypothetical unless they themselves are wikipedia how can their goals be the same as Wikipedia's? Generally organizations have self promotion as a goal and that is forbidden per WP:PROMOTION. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 05:52, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
The organisation's goals may be the same but the individual's goal may be to try and make as much as money as quickly as they can which can lead to machine translations + quality issues, which I've notice in the one OKA article I came across. Traumnovelle (talk) 09:25, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
That could be a problem if the payment model is Piece work, but it's unlikely to be a problem with a set monthly stipend. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
The New Page Patrol process should already cover most of the review requirements, no? 7804j (talk) 20:11, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Question: do we actually have some specific consensus that these uniformly awful translations should in fact be submitted through AfC? That would be such a good thing! Every one of them I've seen so far (mostly relating to horses) has been created directly in mainspace, and requires an amount of clean-up that seems to be far beyond the editor resources we have – with the result that overall this project is making the encyclopaedia worse, not better. I've asked myself several times why these pages were not being submitted as drafts, but not until now seen any discussion of them; if there's an standing consensus that they should go through AfC, I'll be draftifying several of them in the near future. Sorry, but oppose any kind of AfC exemption for the moment. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 20:42, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Justlettersandnumbers, First: imho, you should draftify them regardless, if they are not ready for mainspace, not because there is or isn't some guideline stating that they should all go through Afc. Secondly, do you draw a distinction between awful translations produced by paid translators and awful translations produced by unpaid translators that go straignt into mainspace, and if so, what criteria should be used for each? Granted, the former are easier to find due to categorization. Mathglot (talk) 20:52, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
  • I think enough concerns have been raised about poor translations here that the argument to skip the AFC process is quite weak. I will also add that unedited machine translations are an extreme drain on experienced editor time, resulting in diffs like this one from 2021. If unedited machine translations are occurring here, this could turn into a big problem and big cleanup effort, and once sufficient evidence is gathered, we should attempt to communicate these concerns to the event organizers. –Novem Linguae (talk) 02:19, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
    I've seen no evidence that OKA translators are creating unedited machine translations. – Joe (talk) 10:55, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
    Sounds like @Johnbod (mostly these are machine translations by people whose English is rather poor) and @Theroadislong (Has this been machine translated? There seems to be a lot of mangled content here? in Draft:Renaissance in Ferrara) might disagree. –Novem Linguae (talk) 16:13, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
    Indeed - 7804j has never denied that these are machine translations, and they normally appear on en:wp in a single edit, & are not edited further except for a couple of tidies. There is no evidence that they are edited machine translations when OKA bow out, and they should be treated as "unedited machine translations" - what other evidence of absence would there actually be? Other volunteers are left to do things like categories and links, which they normally lack. Very rarely does anyone do the complete rewrite that ones like Draft:Renaissance in Ferrara need just to be comprehensible to an average English reader. To anyone who think OKA texts are "generally good" or "decent translations" I would say: just try actually reading that one - which btw will probably get far more views than most OKA efforts, as there is a real topic there. It covers our existing School of Ferrara but that is so crap I don't object on WP:FORK grounds, though it is typical that OKA haven't addressed this. Johnbod (talk) 15:11, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
    I think you're applying a really high standard here. For example, the original title of Brazilian Romanticism Painting, and yes of course that's not perfect English, but does it impair the reader's ability to understand that the article is about Romanticism in Brazilian art? No. I see the same kind of thing reading through the rest of the article and other OKA articles: uneven English, yes, but perfectly comprehensible and, more importantly, sourced encyclopaedic content. The rest will be ironed out with time, like how you corrected the title of Brazilian Romantic painting a couple of weeks after it was created.
    It's actually quite easy to verify whether a machine translation has been edited or not: just run the original through the same translator. For example, here's how DeepL handles the first paragraph of the first section:
    The Este court in Ferrara was one of the most vital in northern Italy from the end of the 14th century, when Niccolò d'Este started the university and initiated the construction of the castle[1]. The courtly connotations were pronounced, as evidenced by the interest in the world of fairy tales of medieval heritage, as evidenced by the numerous novels of chivalry that enriched the famous library, in astrology and esotericism[2]. On an artistic level, Pisanello, who produced various medals for Lionello d'Este, was highly appreciated, as was the illuminated production, both of an international nature, in which Belbello da Pavia (author of the Bible of Niccolò d'Este) stood out, and updated to humanism, such as that of Taddeo Crivelli (Bible of Borso d'Este)[2].
    Compare that to the draft:
    The court of the Este in Ferrara was one of the most vital in northern Italy since the late 14th century, when Niccolò d'Este funded the University of Ferrara and started the construction of the Castello Estense.[1] His courtly features were prominent, as evidenced by his interests in the fable world of medieval heritage, astrology and esotericism. On the artistic level, Pisanello, who produced several medals for Lionello d'Este, was highly regarded, as was the illuminated production of both international in which Belbello da Pavia (author of the Bible of Niccolò d'Este) stood out, as well as update to humanism, such as that of Taddeo Crivelli (author of the Bible of Borso d'Este).[2]
    Again, it's not perfect, but it's not somebody just acting as a conduit for automated translations, which is what the practice of draftifying these is supposed to filter out. OKA editors are using a machine translation as a base and then proofreading it, which in my experience is what practically everyone that works in more than one language does these days. – Joe (talk) 15:41, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
    Not sure what you think this demonstrates. It could be that they used a different translator. If you are suggesting they used the same one, then manually touched it up, the effect of their changes has on the whole made things worse, no? To someone who doesn't know the area, both versions of the passage are basicly gibberish in the details. To bring either up to even mediocre WP standards, a total rewording is needed. This is typical (ok, this example, which Piotrus selected, is worse than most of theirs these days). Johnbod (talk) 15:02, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
    Including estabilished and experienced editors like myself. (I machine translate and proofread my own articles between en and pl, for example). Nothing wrong with using MT as long as one knows how to proofread stuff (and if the original article of course is of decent starting quality to begin with). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:53, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
    The draft as it was first submitted was:
    The court of the Este in Ferrara was one of the most vital in northern Italy since the late 14th century, when Niccolò d'Este funded the University of Ferrara and started the construction of the castello Estense[1]. His courtly features were prominent, as evidenced by his interests in the fable world of medieval heritage, evidenced by the numerous chivalric novels that enriched his famous library, in astrology and esotericism[2]. On the artistic level, Pisanello, who produced several medals for Lionello d'Este, was highly regarded, as was the illuminated production of both international in which Belbello da Pavia (author of the Bible of Niccolò d'Este']) stood out, as well as update to humanism, such as that of Taddeo Crivelli (Bible of Borso d'Este)[2].
    That is substantially identical to the unedited machine translation. JoelleJay (talk) 04:02, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
    See Feline hyperthyroidism
    Deepl translate of the German lead gives me: Feline hyperthyroidism is a disorder of the endocrine system in domestic cats (feline, adjective from the Latin felis "cat"), which is characterised by hyperthyroidism. It is the most common hormonal disorder (endocrinopathy) in cats over ten years of age, whereas hyperthyroidism is much less common in other pets. The disease is often characterised by weight loss despite increased food intake, is usually detected by blood tests and is easily treatable.
    I believe the whole article is probably just a straight up machine translation. Traumnovelle (talk) 09:34, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
    Novem Linguae, one of the points of this discussion, I believe, is that there is a difference between poor translations in general on the one hand, and translations by paid OKA editors on the other. Can you confirm that the translations in your 2021 link above as added to Cemetery of San Fernando were from OKA editors? Because if they weren't, everyone, I think, is in agreement that there are very many poor translations by new editors. The question at issue here is whether that applies to OKA editors as well, to such a degree that Afc is necessary for their contributions. Mathglot (talk) 11:21, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
    Can you confirm that the translations in your 2021 link above as added to Cemetery of San Fernando were from OKA editors? They were not OKA editors. That link is just a generic example of how much work machine translations are to clean up. –Novem Linguae (talk) 16:13, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
@Justlettersandnumbers: I'm not sure if you're asking about this specific case or translations in general. If it's the specific case of OKA, it sounds like you've found a bad run of horse-related translations, but myself and others have seen a lot of decent translations from them too. The reason some are asking OKA translations to go through AfC is because they're paid for them, not because they're translations.
If you're asking whether there is community consensus for draftifying poor translations in general, I'd say the answer is no. Unedited machine translations are fair game (a legacy of the WMF's failed experiment with auto-translation, I believe), but if it just needs copyediting then draftspace will not help. AfC reviewers don't routinely do anything about translation issues, as long as it's a viable article. Instead there's the {{Cleanup translation}} family of templates and an active patrol that deals with them in mainspace. – Joe (talk) 11:22, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
The WMF has never attempted to do anything with auto-translation. They accidentally (and briefly) enabled exactly the sort of "machine translation as a base, but then proofread it and clean it up" system that many good editors use themselves, from Spanish to English (only that language pair) here, and then turned it back off when the error was pointed out to them.
In the meantime, one (1) editor dumped a bunch of unedited Spanish mis-translations in the mainspace, and we panicked and created Security through obscurity restrictions on all editors ever since. Which is to say: I can, and have, used machine translation to English in the Wikipedia:Content translation tool, but most editors, including those with far better translation skills than me, won't be able to figure out how to do that on their own. In the meantime, most editors are pasting the contents into machine translation in another tab, and thereby screwing up links, templates, categories, and formatting. Anyone who's been paying attention will know that this is typical of our community. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:05, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing Indeed. My students do translations for class assignments, and I often tell them not to bother with the official Wiki translation tool because it doesn't work due to the reasons you discuss (i.e. their work can't be easily published). Then, of course, they struggle with code etc. eating our class time, so instead of having let's say a discussion about free culture or such I have to spend time doing activities about how to add hyperlinks or templates or such. On the bright side, they eventually learn the code, at least some of it. But it is still embarassing that I have to tell them "don't use the official tool, it is not friendly enough". Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:50, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
Yes, that's what I was referring to. A promising tool that was killed by a botched deployment – typical of the WMF in that era! – Joe (talk) 06:30, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
If you are referring to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/CXT, then your summary is extremely misleading, as it was about the extremely poor translations from many editors, with that Spanish editor as the most visible example. But upon rereading that discussion, I see that you were trying to muddle the waters and defend the indefensible by providing wrong numbers there already, so I guess hoping that you will change now is rather useless. Fram (talk) 08:58, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

I moved Draft:History of Caraquet back to draft space yesterday. It would be nice if such articles didn't start with presenting speculation by one local amateur historian and genealogist as if it was accepted truth, even though it disagrees with nearly all actual historians and the available evidence. The remainder of the article isn't much better. Fram (talk) 08:58, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

@Fram What policy allows you to draftify such an article without consulting the community? I believe AfD is the only acceptable option (or perhaps PROD/CSD if not contested). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:40, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
WP:ATD, why? The topic is probably salvageable, the article is largely rubbish, so the paid editor can make sure they write a decent article which at least follows accepted science, instead of blindly copying what another Wiki has produced. Fram (talk) 10:07, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
I do not see draftification listsed as an acceptable ATD. Sure, the article needs various fixes, but I don't see why they cannot be done in the mainspace. If you think it should not be in the mainspace, we need a community consensus (i.e. through AfD) on whether it should be de-mainspaced. Single editors do not have the power to delete (hide) articles - this is a task we relegate to the community (outside CSD-level garbage) and this is hardly at that level. See also WP:DRAFTNO. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 08:13, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
I see it listed under incubation: "Recently created articles that have potential, but do not yet meet Wikipedia's quality standards, may be moved to the draft namespace ("draftified") for improvement, with the aim of eventually moving them back to the main namespace, optionally via the articles for creation (AfC) process..." (the whole incubation subsection is actually about draftification, incubation and draftification appear to by synonyms... Maybe we should just use one term as it seems to be causing confusion?) Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:45, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
Before the Draft: space was created (late 2013), that section of the deletion policy was talking about the Wikipedia:Article Incubator. Before the Wikipedia:Article Incubator was created (in 2009), we moved such articles to the creator's userspace. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:27, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
The problem is the ambiguous "Wikipedia's quality standards". Some AfC reviewers seem to decline anything that's not GA-level ready. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:30, 6 July 2024 (UTC)
"Wikipedia's quality standards" does not mean GA and I don't think you will find a single editor who will publicly say that. If an AfC reviewer is doing that on the DL then bring a case against them and get their privilages stripped, someone being an abusive jerk isn't the wording's fault its the absusive jerk's fault. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:45, 6 July 2024 (UTC)
We do have a mismatch between the mainspace's actual standards and what it takes to get an article out of AFC. For example, we had a chat last week about why "too short" was listed in Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Reviewing instructions as a reason to decline an article. We agreed to change it.
Looking at 10 recently accepted articles, the Page Size gadget shows a median new article accepted by AFC is around 400 words. A quick visit to Special:Random indicates that the median Wikipedia article (most of which are not new, and some of which are very well developed) is less than 200 words. I don't think that AFC should be expecting the typical new article to be twice the length of established articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:18, 6 July 2024 (UTC)
@Horse Eye's Back I've seen some articles declined, by various reviewers, where I am sure those articles would not be draftified or deleted at AfD. Declining articles because not all content is referenced, for example, is I think pretty common (but I don't have a solid sample to say if this is a systemic problem, or I just stumbled upon some expections). Now, it's great to prod new editors and tell them to make sure everything is referenced - but if they don't do this, should their content be declined and even deleted, even through the same article, if published in the mainspace, would at best get some {{fact}}s? For example, recently Draft:Battle of Pinsk was declined due to no inline citations (it only had general links). The creator, fortunately, addressed this and now the article languishes in draft queue, even through it's obviously good enough for mainspace. But even without inline citations, it would've been fine as a stub/start-class; having inline citations is not necessary (not that I am not saying we should not push for their addition, I am just saying - the rules don't say lack of inline citations is sufficient reasons for not publishing content). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 14:04, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
PS. Even AfC reviewing rules linked just above state that declining article due to lack of inline cites is an error: "Avoid declining an article because it correctly uses general references to support some or all of the material. The content and sourcing policies require inline citations for only four specific types of material, most commonly direct quotations and contentious material about living persons." Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 14:05, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
I have accepted this draft, though the lead section needs re-writing per WP:LEAD. Theroadislong (talk) 17:27, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
Thank you, @Theroadislong. I know some reviewers worry about what will happen if they accept WP:IMPERFECT articles. If the reviewer doesn't accept such an article, they break the nominal rules and often lose content (because the original editor will give up), but if they do, then someone who doesn't know the actual rules or who disagrees with them might come yell at them. If they do it more than rarely, the reviewer can end up at risk of a serious attack. One 'mistake' in 100 adds up to a lot of mistakes if you review thousands of articles, but nobody at ANI says "1% possible error rate"; they say "Obvious WP:COMPETENCE problem; here are a dozen he screwed up on!" WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:14, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
Here's what I think about the issue:
  • AFC is essentially broken by design (See Wikipedia:Broken by design)
    • It takes an enormous amount of time
    • Reviewers do thankless work and don't want to exhaustively review a translation
    • Reviewers are technically speaking supposed to allow things that are notable & not promotive through regardless of translation qualify.
  • The articles are accurate & unbiased but badly translated
    • Looked at a couple, consider Brazilian Romantic painting. The subject is notable and the article is probably going to be helpful to somebody, but the sentence "This pictorial production was part of the local evolution of the Romantic movement" seems typical. "Pictorial" is a word I assume is more common in portguese, but when used for no reason makes things jarring and hard to understand in English.
    • That one can probably be improved (though it would be a lot of work, given the length). But if you consider Draft:Renaissance in Ferrara, even the lead is genuinely difficult to understanding the meaning behind. Content can't be fixed if it can't be understood in the first place.
  • Normal Wikipedia articles are also terrible
So, probably let them be created without AFC, but maybe the NGO should have someone who has native-level proficiency in English review them if they're not by professional translators? Because some of the text in Renaissance in Ferrara is bad, and Brazilian Romantic painting is obviously very oddly worded as of the first sentence. Maybe it's ok if some of the articles on Wikipedia are badly worded. Especially because AFC is not designed for this. Mrfoogles (talk) 23:00, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
The one thing that AFC *is* designed for is finding articles that duplicate material already present on Wikipedia, as in Draft:Wooden_house (see reviewer comment). That is important. Mrfoogles (talk) 23:03, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
I don't see how this is a COI. The editors are writing on random topics they choose. Presumably they have no financial or other interest in the topics they are writing on. If individual editors have a COI, they should of course declare it and go through AfC. If an article is really terribly awful and not notable at all, it will be deleted, merged, BLARed, etc.; if an article is really terribly awful and of marginal notability, someone at NPP will probably draftify it. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:20, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

arbitrary break (translated for $$)

There have been a lot of assertions unsubstantiated opinions about the quality of OKA-generated content that range roughly from it sucks to very good, with little to back it up. As of yesterday, articles which have been assessed for quality and which carry the {{OKA}} template on the Talk page now appear in the standard, quality-assessment categories; the parent category is OKA articles by quality. (A flat, quality-agnostic view is available here.) I am not knowledgeable about how these ratings are assigned, but afaik it has something to do with the Afc process. It might be interesting to compare the quality distribution here with that of all translated articles. In any case, at least we have some data to look at, instead of just raw opinion. Mathglot (talk) 20:03, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

Anything B and below is pretty much meaningless in terms of measuring quality as anyone can assign these ratings and they are not given much oversight/critical evaluation. I don't doubt some quality translated articles can exist but offering money for a task that can be very easily automated is a terrible idea as proven by the multiple examples of terrible articles.
@7804j I don't know how your payment model works but if you're paying per article that's a bad idea. Why not pay for good/featured articles instead? It would be much harder to game such a system and would result in better quality if editors were required to work on an article beyond creation. Traumnovelle (talk) 09:47, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
We're not paying per quantity, but per hour of work and instructing that people should focus on quality. Our translators are also paid when they work on improvements of existing articles. 7804j (talk) 09:49, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
How do you measure hours worked given people are working remotely, is it just a trust based model? I can still see someone abusing that through using a machine translation then claiming they did it manually to inflate hours worked. Time clock fraud. Also what put feline hyperthyroidism on the radar, if I may ask? Traumnovelle (talk) 10:08, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
I would say that while hours worked could be an interesting question and relevant for OKA's bookkeeping and financial health, the question of whether OKA is being defrauded by its users is irrelevant as far as Wikipedia article quality is concerned, so can we drop this line of inquiry, or move it to the OKA external website, and stick to the question of how this relates to Wikipedia?
As far as feline hyperthyroidism, I don't understand what you are asking; afaict, you were the first to mention this article. If you meant, "How did this topic get picked up by an OKA editor?" then I would say that my understanding is that OKA editors get to work on any topic of their choice. Is that what you were asking? Mathglot (talk) 10:35, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for starting the category Category:OKA articles by quality, Mathglot, as a useful list of OKA articles. Unfortunately our assessments are normally almost entirely based on length, regardless of quality - and many OKA articles are all too long. I see there are ZERO A/FA/FL/GA class articles, & the great majority are B or C. Taking Brazilian Abolitionist Confederation, a 37 kbyte B-class slab from the dreaded User:Racnela21, this is in principle the kind of article I'd support, as being something we are unlikely to cover otherwise, even if it has only had about 40 views a month, a quick skim finds "The document also reports on other aspects of the history of the advances and setbacks made in the Empire's path towards abolition, which is described as a fatality that "caused slavery to become a fact and, what is more, to obtain universal tolerance". Huh? Johnbod (talk) 16:34, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
Zero sounds like the right number. The total number of A/FA/FL/GA class articles in the encyclopedia is 59,491[source] and I would expect a sample of 60,000 articles drawn randomly from 8M articles in Wikipedia to have about 0.007 articles rated A/FA/FL/GA class. By that reckoning, we should see the first high quality OKA articles appear when the total number of OKA translations reaches somewhere between 200 and 1,000 times the current number. Mathglot (talk) 19:12, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
You're putting this paid editing on par with mass stub creation by now-banned users and all the terrible articles that wouldn't (or shouldn't) survive AfD. A lot of these articles are machine translated without any work in fixing them put into them by the 'creator'. Traumnovelle (talk) 19:19, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
My calculation is bonkers and I was going to redo it, but frankly trying to play a numbers game and somehow measure that against an unknown number of articles that shouldn't survive Afd is a distraction. In any case this is only a sliver of a much bigger issue, already being discussed in other forums, namely that of machine translation and AI output being added to the encyclopedia. This sliver is getting more attention because of the paid aspect, but it goes far beyond that. How are we to deal with that? Somebody said, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it," and quality ratings seem like the first step. If they are strictly connected with length, do they have any value at all then? Mathglot (talk) 19:54, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
Let's be clear to those looking on; the calculation is not just wrong, it's wrong by many orders of magnitude and should be ignored. if about 60,000 out of 8M articles are A/FA/FL/GA, then that is a rate of 0.007 per article. If you then sample 60,000 articles, you would expect (60,000*.007) articles to me that class... not zero, but 420. If the OKA articles were as good as typical for reaching those classifications, we would expect to see them. (A reference above suggests there are 7000-and-some Oka articles, so we'd expect around 50 meeting that class.) This is not to say that there aren't other considerations, such as the age of the article; how many articles as new to engWiki as the Oka ones are of that class? -- Nat Gertler (talk) 21:59, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
It also takes time and motivation to achieve GA or FA. So don't expect new articles to easily reach that standard. For B class someone should have checked that it was well written. So hopefully B class OKA assessment is not just based on size and pictures. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:10, 10 July 2024 (UTC)
Well, all too clearly they haven't - see various complaints above and elsewhere. Many of these are translations of FA/GA articles on other wikis. Even allowing for different standards, if they were in comprehensible English, many ought to at least pass GA. But neither OKA or anyone else is interested in nominating them, if only because they would often need a total rewrite. Johnbod (talk) 01:26, 10 July 2024 (UTC)
The featured article on de.wiki I saw translated by OKA had multiple prose lines that were unreferenced. Whether that is due to article deterioration or if it passed like that I am unsure of. But machine translation introduces many issues that would result in an article failing GA class. Traumnovelle (talk) 01:30, 10 July 2024 (UTC)
No, that's just how dewiki does things. They use very few inline citations, even in Featured Articles. Today's Featured Article there is w:de:Paul Maas (Altphilologe), which has ~1,300 words and 10 refs. About half the paragraphs have no citations at all. Their wiki, their rules. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:22, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
Since this is still running, people might like to comment at Talk:Spanish Decadence. Johnbod (talk) 17:41, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Notes (translated for $$)

  1. ^ Zuffi, 2004, cit., p. 186.
  2. ^ De Vecchi-Cerchiari,. cit., p. 108.

Fixing over-capitalization by bot

In general, if an RM discussion has come to a robust consensus for a particular capitalization pattern in a title, is it recommended to fix article text where the un-preferred version appears, to make it more MOS:CAPS compliant? In particular, do you support changing things like 2020 United States Census to 2020 United States census in article text, in light of the consensus at Talk:2020 United States census/Archive 1#Requested move 16 November 2020 (and all the other US census years, too), given that there are on the order of 50,000 of them, such that the work would need to be done by a bot?

Also, what about mass-fixing things tagged as miscapitalizations, often without RM discussions, such as Mechanical Engineering, American Football, Chief of Staff, Artificial Intelligence, Private Company, with about 500 to 1000 articles each? Assuming a bot could be made good enough at avoiding false-positive triggering based on good context parsing, are these likely to be approvable easily for a bot, or would each one need a discussion such as an RFC, like we did on the NFL Draft? Or just a discussion at WP:BRFA? Or in the other direction, to capitalize under-capitalized items, such as Hyderabad queer pride and Youtube? In general, when is it appropriate to ask for a bot, and for that request to be approved? I don't necessarily need a guideline or policy on this question if there's a clear enough opinion, hopefully in favor of moving toward compliance with style guidelines more rapidly than can be done by hand, or even by AWB.

But in particular, for now, it's about the census. (ps. I don't do bots, but I've had some luck enlisting help from several who do.) Dicklyon (talk) 03:58, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Assuming a bot could be made good enough at avoiding false-positive triggering based on good context parsing this feels like the key element. WP:CONTEXTBOT gives "Correcting spelling, grammar, or punctuation mistakes." as the first example of the sort of bot that is extremely difficult. In the examples you give, all of them are likely to occur at some point as proper nouns and/or quotes where the author has used more capitals than we would (especially "artificial intelligence"). Certainly not bot should be changing the capitalisation of anything where there has been no explicit community consensus that a particular capitalisation is always an error (not just most commonly). Thryduulf (talk) 10:01, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
@Thryduulf: Hey! Jumping in as one of the apparent several who do bots. I operate an approved bot that fixes miscapitalizations of "NFL draft," but only within wikilinks and some hatnotes. Since the RfC about that capitalization resulted in a consensus to change article titles and text, a bot request discussion and a subsequent BRFA were held. (For the exact behind-the-scenes logic, feel free to review the BRFA and my source code.) Out of the 3,000 pages affected by this task since I finally got this task up and running a few days ago, my spot checks haven't found any issues, and not a single change has been reverted (yet), so I'm fairly confident in the technical logic. Now, I'm not sure whether the same community consensus holds up for the "census" case, so that's how we find ourselves here. I'm personally less sure about the more common terms like "Artificial Intelligence" which are more likely to be used in quotes/etc, but I think links to "XXXX United States Census" redirects could be fixed with little to no error in line with the "NFL Draft" links. Perhaps this remains a case-by-case issue rather than a broad policy/guideline, but I'd love to learn a community answer to Dicklyon's question, In general, when is it appropriate to ask for a bot, and for that request to be approved? Bsoyka (t • c • g) 14:07, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
Links specifically do seem like a case when there is a very low possibility of false positives (although again some quotes might be exceptions) for terms that are clearly almost always a proper noun or common noun and where there is a low chance of links to the wrong article (e.g. links to 2020 United States Census are unlikely to be wrongly targetted, links to Artificial intelligence could be intended for e.g. Artificial Intelligence (book), Artificial Intelligence (EP) or Artificial Intelligence (journal).)
As for the general question, I think a request should only be approved if, at minimum, both the following are true:
  • There is an explicit community consensus that all* instances of one or more specific terms are incorrect and should always be changed.
  • There is an explicit community consensus for a bot to make the changes*. The consensuses need not be in separate discussions, but there must be explicit consensus for both points.
*or a clearly defined subset, e.g. only in links, only in articles in specific category, etc.
Thryduulf (talk) 14:31, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
It might be simpler to test the thing by addressing the many examples of under-capitalization. Johnbod (talk) 17:38, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
For this sort of thing, it would need human supervision, and be restricted to smaller groups of miscapitalizations. So use semi-automation. AWB could handle this and speed changes. Also there is a regex editor that can help where something is wrong many times in one article. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:29, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

I agree that for most of the other (non-census) cases, AWB is the way to go. Thanks for the input/feedback about that. So back to the census cases.

I searched up uses of /2020 United States Census/ and related to see what they look like. First observation: the majority of case fixes would be "cosmetic", to links piped through the over-capitalized redirect, in these specific cases: 

 population_as_of = [[2020 United States Census|2020]]
 in the [[2020 United States Census|2020 United States census]]
 |[[2020 United States Census|2020 census]]
 with a [[2020 United States Census|2020 census]] population
 the [[2020 United States Census|2020 census]]
 ([[2020 United States Census|2020 census]])
 ([[2020 United States Census|2020]])

Then there are the ones that are not just cosmetic: 

 The [[2020 United States Census]]
 stat_ref =  [[2020 United States Census|2020 U.S. Census]]
 the [[2020 United States Census|2020 Census]]
 The [[2020 United States Census|2020 Census]]
 the 2020 United States Census
 the [[2020 United States Census]]

Including these with the correct lowercase link, piped to capitalize: 

 [[2020 United States census|As of 2020 United States Census]]
 The [[2020 United States census|2020 U.S. Census]]
 the [[2020 United States census|2020 U.S. Census]]
 the [[2020 United States census|2020 United States Census]],
 the [[2020 United States census|2020 Census]]
 ([[2020 United States census|2020 Census]])
 ([[2020 United States census|2020 Census]] <ref> ...

I know fixing "cosmetic" errors is frowned upon, but fixing those is the only way to reduce the list of "what links here", to the point where the remaining odd cases can be found and fixed "by hand". If we decide that kind of fixing is not OK, then we should still do the non-cosmetic ones; that's how Bsoyka handled the NFL Draft downcasing bot, to avoid raising that objection; no file is edited if the edit would be only cosmetic.

I found only one "no go" hit on /2020 United States Census/, but I'm sure there will be some more like this, in ref titles, file names, or whatever: "title=2020 United States Census Profile ...". I think Bsoyka's parser identifies and avoids such contexts. Dicklyon (talk) 04:04, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

To clarify how my current bot task handles the logic on NFL draft edits:
  • Yes, as Dicklyon described, the bot only edits if at least one non-cosmetic change is made (affecting something visible to the reader). If so, other cosmetic changes are bundled into the same edit. If there are only cosmetic changes to be made in the article, the bot doesn't edit. If the same task is run for the census articles, this is how I recommend handling it.
  • As it runs now, the bot shouldn't touch |title=2020 United States Census Profile, since it doesn't include a wikilink. Now, if it was |title=[[2020 United States Census]] Profile, the bot would currently try to edit that. However, that's a weird edge case that I find incredibly unlikely to actually happen. Also, as long as the citation also has a URL, we'd get a URL–wikilink conflict error, which pops up in a well-maintained category.
  • Reiterating for clarity, my bot's NFL draft task currently only edits in two places: wikilinks and hatnotes (specifically only {{Main}}, {{See also}}, and {{Further}}). I believe this significantly limits false positives and the CONTEXTBOT issue, because it's not blindly replacing plain text throughout the article. This has already been tested pretty extensively now—so far no false positives have been reported to me, and none of that task's edits have been reverted.
Happy to answer any other questions about how this could function for U.S. censuses and other similar cases. However, I'm not sure a policy discussion is the right venue for the specific census replacement proposal. Let's first figure out a general rule for when a bot should be used to correct miscapitalizations, and then we can discuss the census case at the appropriate venue as needed depending on this discussion's outcome.
As for my opinions, I support Thryduulf's proposal above; I believe there should be an explicit consensus for bots making mass replacements in article text, and I don't believe this is included by default in a requested move discussion. Additionally, I disagree that human supervision should be required for these mass replacements—as I've indicated above, my bot has shown in practice that these edits work fine without supervision when the logic is done right. Bsoyka (t • c • g) 04:39, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
I just searched up the not-linked /the 2020 United States Census/. There are 67, all which (as verified by eye on the search hits) should be downcased. But one has "the 2020 United States Census Data", so Data would also need to be downcased. These can be done easily enough by AWB. So yes, I agree sticking to links is good. I have seen any Main or Also templates or such, but I haven't looked.
As for skipping the cosmetic-only ones, that's going to leave quite a mess; that is, the "what links here" will not be a useful guide to finishing thke fixing. That's why I brought up the possibility of "bending" that guideline. The edits are called "cosmetic", but they do have a visible effect on maintenance reports, which is the point. I think that's maybe a smaller issue on the NFL Draft ones; do you have an estimate of how many are skipped as being only cosmetic? Dicklyon (talk) 05:47, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
I do not support "bending" the usual requirements about cosmetic edits. Maintenance reports, especially relatively trivial ones like capitalisation, are not a good reason to disrupt other editors. Thryduulf (talk) 07:30, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
I believe these non-visual edits to piped links wouldn't be considered "cosmetic" according to our policies because WP:COSMETICBOT specifically allows changes that affect the "administration of the encyclopedia", such as the maintenance of hidden categories used to track maintenance backlogs. I have no opinion on whether these trivial edits should actually be made for miscapitalizations, as I understand the reasoning for both sides of that argument. Bsoyka (t • c • g) 13:22, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
I'd want to see some consensus that the piped replacements should be done rather than relying solely on that bullet to avoid complaints about WP:COSMETICBOT. Anomie⚔ 13:53, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
I'd want to see that, too. That's why I'm asking. Dicklyon (talk) 17:04, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
WP:VPR would probably be better for the question, since it's not really a policy question anymore. Anomie⚔ 19:34, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
Maybe it's too hard to converge on a general policy here, and we should instead take the census case specifically to WP:RFBA? Dicklyon (talk) 18:42, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
I can work on some preliminary code and get a request going soon. Bsoyka (t • c • g) 19:02, 2 August 2024 (UTC)
See also this very similar bot request that just popped up, also changing one incorrect character across a large number of pages per a page move consensus: Wikipedia:Bot requests#Consensus: Aldo, Giovanni e Giacomo Bsoyka (t • c • g) 20:03, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Files in content categories

When evaluating the botworthiness of the task of adding the NOGALLERY tag to categories that contain non-free files, I realized that we don't have clear guidelines on when locally hosted files (non-free or otherwise) should be placed in content categories.

Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Images#Uploading_images and WP:FILECAT vaguely imply that files should be placed in categories, but the rules are so unclear that in practice there is a lot of inconsistency when it comes to content categories primarily intended for articles (e.g. Category:PAW Patrol), as opposed to ones that are dedicated to files (e.g. Category:Halo (franchise) media files). –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 06:31, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Is there a problem with media and articles being in the same category?
If we have a lot of local media about a given topic then it makes sense to have a dedicated category for that, but if we only have a one or two (as I guess will be the case for most topics illustrated by non-free files) then it doesn't seem useful to have a separate category, but also potentially useful for e.g. File:2 Tone Records.png to be in Category:2 Tone Records. Thryduulf (talk) 09:56, 3 August 2024 (UTC)
The question, then, is when exactly we want to do that. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 23:37, 3 August 2024 (UTC)
Why do we need exact rules? If a media file is relevant to a content category then it can go in that category, unless there is a more specific sub-category in which it fits. Create subcategories if and when there are enough pages to justify one. If there is a disagreement, discuss it. This seems to work for all other pages in categories so I don't understand why it won't work here? Thryduulf (talk) 00:04, 4 August 2024 (UTC)
It is necessary to answer the question to figure out the botworthiness of the task of adding NOGALLERY tags. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 00:38, 4 August 2024 (UTC)
This feels backwards, but I can't quite put my finger on why. Thryduulf (talk) 00:42, 4 August 2024 (UTC)
The TL;DR of the bot request seems to be this: WP:NFCC doesn't allow non-free images to show in Category-namespace galleries. If a non-free image is added to a category that doesn't already have __NOGALLERY__, and editor might either revert the addition of the image to the category or add __NOGALLERY__ to the category description to suppress the gallery (I see you, Thryduulf, suggested a third alternative there that would require a new magic word be added to MediaWiki). As things currently stand, that decision would fall under WP:CONTEXTBOT as which to choose depends on human judgement as to whether the category should contain non-free images or not. LaundryPizza03 is hoping for exact-enough rules that would make it not be WP:CONTEXTBOT, since he want a bot to handle this rather than having humans work off of a database report. Anomie⚔ 13:46, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

British vs UK

Why is often "UK" used instead of just "British" word? For example, there is "UK singles chart" instead of "British singles chart" so it's like there would be "RO record charts" instead of "Romanian record charts". Eurohunter (talk) 20:44, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

"British" may refer to the island of Great Britain, or to the British Isles (which, I might add, is a controversial name in some circles), but "U.K." is short for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which doesn't really match either meaning of "British". Donald Albury 21:38, 4 August 2024 (UTC)
Agreed. Its similar to "US" vs "American" in terms of when one or the other is appropriate. Theknightwho (talk) 22:37, 4 August 2024 (UTC)
I would suggest the difference is the same as that between Romania record charts and Romanian record charts, British being a demonym for the UK (or what Donald said, to give it its proper name). Sometimes one is more appropriate. -- zzuuzz (talk) 21:43, 4 August 2024 (UTC)
Many/most Irish people with enetitlements to British citizenship who live in areas governed by the UK would generally not call themselves British. Most people living in the six counties, would not consider that they live in Britain, but rather live in the UK (the legal entity) or Ireland (the geogrpahic entity). See Terminology of the British Isles for more detail. Regards, Goldsztajn (talk) 22:39, 4 August 2024 (UTC)
Of course, it's also true to say that many Northern Irish people would say that they are British. DuncanHill (talk) 22:54, 4 August 2024 (UTC)
We have a handy encyclopedia somewhere around here with an article that covers this question: Terminology of the British Isles. Not quite the specificity of American (word), but it's close. —Cryptic 23:07, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Ukrainians in the United Kingdom vs Ukrainian diaspora in the United Kingdom

What is the difference between "Ukrainians in the United Kingdom" and "Ukrainian diaspora in the United Kingdom"? Eurohunter (talk) 17:40, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Nothing now, as the latter redirects to the former. Bduke (talk) 00:03, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Rewriting WP:BITE

A RfC is open on rewriting the guideline WP:Please do not bite the newcomers. Ca talk to me! 13:47, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

Templates and WP:MOS

I thought that templates (and modules) used in articles must produce output consistent with WP:MOS. In particular, automatic calculations and unit conversions should use established output formats instead of inventing their own (especially if they are explicitly marked as "unacceptable" in MOS:NUM). Is this always true, or there might be some exceptions? And if such exceptions exist, how they should be established?

My question is general, but the confusion arose from Module talk:Age § abbr=on violates MOS in particular. I was told there (by the WP administrator maintaining the module) that "more than a mention of a guideline is needed to effect a change" and that "it would be good to get opinions from editors currently interested in affected articles rather than rely on a guideline", although without any explanations where these opinions are supposed to be collected and why they should override WP:CONLEVEL. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 00:37, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

How about an example of what it does, versus what the MOS says it should do? Dicklyon (talk) 03:30, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
Some easy-to-see cases are at Brazilian currency#Historical currencies. This is not the right place to discuss the details but examples can be helpful to save time:
  • {{time interval|1942-11-01|1967-02-13|abbr=on}} → 24y 3m 12d
The issue is that MOS:UNITSYMBOLS says there should be a non-breaking space before the units. Another issue is that m is used as the abbreviation for month (as above) but also for minute, as in the next example from Expedition 59#Uncrewed spaceflights to the ISS.
  • {{time interval|2019-4-4, 14:22|2019-07-29, 10:44|show=dhm|abbr=on}} → 115d 20h 22m
Please discuss at the above link. Johnuniq (talk) 04:05, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
Oh, you're wanting discussion at Module talk:Age § abbr=on violates MOS. Thanks. Dicklyon (talk) 04:34, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
Please don't get distracted. The question is whether templates must obey WP:MOS (and if not, why). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 05:03, 3 August 2024 (UTC)
The manual of style is a guideline, and like all guidelines should be followed unless there is a good reason not to. That is not something that can be discussed at a level higher than either the individual template or a group of closely related templates, because that is the highest level at which it can be determined whether or not there is a good reason for doing something contrary to the guidelines (and that is because the answer is always context dependent).
In the linked discussion there is the additional question of whether the specific guidance in the manual of style is correct on the specific point. Thryduulf (talk) 10:03, 3 August 2024 (UTC)
It seems to me that your opinion on the level of discussion explicitly contradicts the policy WP:CONLEVEL. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 01:12, 5 August 2024 (UTC)
It only seems that way if you don't understand what a guideline is. Guidelines are standards that should usually be followed but must be interpreted with common sense and exceptions will apply. This means that the answer to the question "should templates obey the MOS?" is "Usually." However that isn't the question you actually want to know the answer to, which is "should this specific template follow the manual of style?" and that is something that can only be answered in the context of the individual template and so is best discussed at that template's talk page. 01:32, 5 August 2024 (UTC) Thryduulf (talk) 01:32, 5 August 2024 (UTC)
I am interested in the community consensus, not in your personal interpretation, unsupported by any references (and contradicting the fact that WP:MOS does include many exceptions for specific cases, which would be unnecessary if your ideas about ignoring general guidelines in local contexts were correct). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 03:01, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
It's not "my personal interpretation" it's the definition of a guideline. Thryduulf (talk) 03:04, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
Then please quote that "definition". — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 03:30, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
See WP:GUIDES: "Guidelines are sets of best practices supported by consensus. Editors should attempt to follow guidelines, though they are best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply.
See also the header of each guideline, which says something like "This page documents an English Wikipedia content guideline. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply." The header varies depending on the type of guideline, but they're all pretty close to that. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 03:34, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
From the top of Wikipedia:Manual of Style: This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though occasional exceptions may apply.. Thryduulf (talk) 09:32, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
Now we need an expert on "common sense"... WP:COMMONSENSE says: "When advancing a position or justifying an action, base your argument on existing agreements, community foundation issues, and the interests of the encyclopedia, not your own common sense. Exhorting another editor to 'just use common sense' is likely to be taken as insulting, for good reasons." And Wikipedia:Ignore all rules linked from "normally"/"occasional exceptions" explains what it actually means: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." I don't think that designing a general-purpose module/template such that it systematically violates the rules without any explanations (or even mentioning the discrepancy) can be called "common sense". I also don't think that broadly using nonstandard formatting, especially if the MOS explicitly calls it "unacceptable", can be considered an "improvement" (otherwise, if this "exception" is really an improvement and is so common, it must be included in the MOS). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 03:18, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
The point is that if someone claims an exception applies because it improves the encyclopaedia and another person disagrees because they think it doesn't, then what happens next is discussion. That discussion needs to take place in the place relevant to that exception so it has the benefit of full context and is visible to editors who are involved with the relevant article/template/whatever. The consensus of that discussion will determine whether the exception is justified or not.
In this case you need to participate in the linked discussion and make your case there about why you think the the exception is not justified in this particular case. Refusing to engage and just repeating that you don't think there should be exceptions is just wasting your and others' time. Thryduulf (talk) 08:40, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability (species)

An RfC to adopt a guideline regarding the notability of species has been opened at Wikipedia talk:Notability (species)#Proposal to adopt this guideline. C F A 💬 23:59, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Inclusion in year articles

In a section above, Oloddin asked "the inclusion or non-inclusion criteria of certain articles in general articles such as "X year" may not be straightforward; what "degree" of notability (if a person has an article on Wikipedia that person is already notable) a person has to have to be included in "Births"?" I think this is a very good question, and on a quick look I couldn't find any guidelines that answered it (please let me know if I've missed it). Should the article 2000 in the United States include everyone in Category:2000 births born in the US? If no, who should it include/exclude? Nikkimaria (talk) 02:58, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

So long as a person is notable in Wikipedia terms, I would say they should be included. General year lists include everyone born in those years. I don't see why year in X nation lists should be any different. voorts (talk/contributions) 03:15, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
voorts, I don't think general year lists do - for example Category:1994 births has 16k entries but 1994 has nowhere near that. (And if it did the page probably wouldn't load). Nikkimaria (talk) 03:40, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
This appears to be the most recent consensus on the topics of births & deaths at year articles. voorts (talk/contributions) 03:57, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
There also seems to be some consensus at WP:YEARS for the proposition that someone should be internationally notable to be included in the international (i.e., plain old year) article, as opposed to year by nation articles. voorts (talk/contributions) 04:01, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
Shortly after that discussion, I took this "consensus" to the Village Pump and then ANI, where it was found to be a false consensus and one of the editors enforcing it was topic banned. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 06:57, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for that context. voorts (talk/contributions) 07:31, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
I agree that we ought to have some inclusion criteria. International and national notability for year and year by nation articles respectively seems to be one workable guideline, although I'm not wedded to it. voorts (talk/contributions) 04:04, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
This is something of a hornets nest. WikiProject Years has been taken to task a few times for ownership issues, and groups of users have on occasion come up with their own systems that contradict P&G. User:InvadingInvader/Against international notability describes some of the events that led to removal of births and deaths lists in year articles per Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 199#RFC: split births & deaths from year articles. I've also reminded editors that per WP:PROPORTION, things shouldn't be included in the article if they're not given significant coverage in sources about that year—which births virtually never are. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 06:54, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
Per the RfC linked above long lists of births should be removed. Most birth inclusions also seem questionable weight-wise in general; most notable individuals were not notable at their births, and their births would not have had a significant impact on X year. CMD (talk) 07:28, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
The RfC you both mentioned was (as I understand it) about splitting rather than removing births/deaths and didn't establish a consensus where these removed births/deaths should go. It's also stated that most participants do not favor total deletion of deaths and no agreement about births. I think it's technically possible to break down "complex" year births/deaths articles into smaller articles "births/deaths in X year", "births/deaths in XX month in X year" or even "in XXX days" to cover all people (especially if we classify them further by location/nationality, occupation etc.) in an organized way. The question is whether we should do it. Regarding impact, there are some articles from time to time like "<someone famous> born this day" or "<someone famous> born 10/25/50/100 years ago". --Oloddin (talk) 02:25, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
Based on my experience, there seems to be support for this. Deaths by year and month already exist, listed at Lists of deaths by year. I created Births in 2001 while I was expanding the 2001 article, and someone created Births in 2000 shortly after. If someone was interested in making more births by year or month lists, I think that would be a good idea. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:41, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

RFC on adopting WP:NSPECIES as a guideline

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Notability (species) § Proposal to adopt this guideline
 – This RfC existed in two places. That's bad. Editors were commenting at both venues, causing the discussions to fall out of sync with each other. I have no position on which venue is appropriate, but there should not be two. I have defaulted to the original venue. If it turns out it should be here, revert me, unless that would end up recreating the problem. – Teratix ₵ 09:57, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Palaeogenetics and ethnicity in articles

I had this big plan where I'd intentfully draft my case before even making a post here and it would have robust sourcing and all that, but I realized I should just go for it and if there's any agreement other editors will chime in.

The key summary is: the scholarly field of palaeogenetics (or archaeogenetics) has exploded in the past decade-plus. The data we can collect from the DNA of millennia-old human remains is a shocking new advancement. However, scholarly sources often use ethnic labels for the historical genetic populations they are studying. This creates friction with the universal understanding among serious people since the end of World War II that ethnicity is a social and cultural category, not a genetic one; one's ethnicity is the result of human choices and not amino acid pairs. As such, the distinct field of ethnography generally shies from ascribing ethnic identity to almost any individual that isn't the author or focus of direct literary analysis. To wit, speaking of "Lombard DNA" (etc.) is completely inane if we're to take it as face value; it is best defended as a shorthand for lack of better language to use in these papers.

That said: if one has pages for historical people groups or demographics on their watchlist, they will notice a lot of tertiary analysis of these studies being added to articles, which often transparently conflate the actual subject of the article with genetic populations analysed in a distinct manner, sometimes because that's what those sources themselves do. I think we should consider some guideline regarding the correct representation of what this information is actually saying and how it relates to the universal notion of ethnicity otherwise described in articles about them. Remsense诉 07:10, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

There should be agreement in principle, the discussions on the topics I've seen (and been involved in) tend to land on ensuring that such genetic studies are not over-emphasised in relevant articles. The biggest risk is that detailed coverage of X or Y genetic study, which will use shorthands out of necessity (often explaining so in the paper), gets added to an otherwise underdeveloped article and thus turns the paper output from perhaps an academically interesting note about a certain group of people that comes with a lot of interpretative caveats, to coming off in the article as a defining trait of said group of people. I haven't seen an academic paper suggest that the genetic studies overturn ideas of ethnicity, however unfortunately the papers do get entangled with the many complex issues surrounding defining ethnicity on individual and group levels. I would support a broad guideline noting the principles of understanding the limitations and limited meaning of such studies. CMD (talk) 08:25, 7 August 2024 (UTC)
The issue isn't that academics suggest genetic studies overturn ideas of ethnicity (particularly the broadly accepted social-constuction one). Rather, the issue is that that the people doing the genetic work have a tendency to use labels as shorthands and these labels frequently coincide with ethnic terms, but they do not mean the same thing in the two contexts. Remsense is onto a for-real problem, one that I've noticed myself, but which WP hasn't really tackled. We have a general "follow the sources" habit of using whatever terminology the source material does, but we have a central purpose and principle to not confuse and even directly mislead readers, especially in a way that promotes pseudo-science (even by inference/assumption/misunderstanding). So, this is the sort of case in which we need to diverge from the (sloppy) practice of some of the specialist literature in a particular field that has mis-borrowed terminology from another, broader, and much better-established field. Exactly how to do that is open to some question. We're not in a positition to make up alternative terminology (WP:NOR), but we are probably in a position to "scare-quote" any ethno-cultural terms that are misused by geneticists and explain (perhaps in a footnote, maybe a standardized templated one) that the term in this context does not equate to an ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural, politico-national, or other socially defined grouping, and is being used as convenience label that simply refers to a haplogroup's primary geographic locus (often by reference to a social group associated with that area).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:33, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
The issue I mention is not with the academics, it's with the interpretation of the work of the academics here. The easiest way to not mislead readers is not to use the sources where they shouldn't be used, as has been done at various times. Talk:Colombia#RfC: Genetic ancestry of Colombians is the most recent discussion that comes to my mind. CMD (talk) 11:36, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
More the use than the interpretation. The problem can be alleviated if we:
  • Include |quote= in the citations.
  • Include a nomenclature section near the beginning of the article, explaining the variations in nomenclature and the specific nomenclature used in the article.
  • Stick to the nomenclature specified.
This doesn't solve everything, but I believe that it would help. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 13:26, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
What I perceived to be the best solution was simply to (make it a guideline to) change the terminology used in the article—e.g. Lombard DNA → DNA of populations in modern Lombardy c. 600 AD or what have you—reflecting a responsible tertiary analysis in the context of the article as a whole. Remsense诉 01:06, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
I can't help but think this is going in circles. The name "Lombardy" derives from the name of the people who lived there c. 600 AD, so how much distinction is there really between "Lombards" and "populations in modern Lombardy c. 600 AD"? How often did a group of people have limited enough exogamy to have both a distinct genetic profile and a distinct culture, so both paleogeneticists and ethnologists would be reasonably correct to use the name of the group? Anomie⚔ 02:09, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
The etymology of the toponym is irrelevant—it's just the modern geographical area where the modern extractions were made, as an example. Swap out with whatever name for the studied political, topographical, or geological area as appropriate/given in the source. There's obvious distinctions made between ethnic groups in a given area even in antiquity—esp. given the historical migrations of Germanic groups like the Lombards versus "native" Italians. Hence why it was a particularly illustrative example, another would be between groupings of Anglo-Saxons, Britons, and others in early medieval Britain.Remsense诉 02:11, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
(edit conflict × 2) The etymology of the toponym is relevant since you're proposing saying "the people who lived in Lombardy c. 600 AD" is somehow obviously distinct from "Lombards" when "Lombardy" means "the region where the Lombards lived c. 600 AD". Or, with the attempted "clarification" in the (edit conflict), are you sure the paleogeneticists are really that sloppy that they're assuming everyone currently living in Lombardy is a decendent of the people who lived there 1400 years ago or something like that? As for the rest, you're ignoring my question and going off on an irrelevant tangent. Anomie⚔ 02:27, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
No, Lombardy here is meant as Lombardy, the modern region of the modern nation-state of Italy. (Sorry for the post-hoc editing.) And yes, many papers use ethnic labels as shorthand when ethnic groups are not what is being studied. Remsense诉 02:30, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for the elucidation here: I really should have picked some real-life examples from articles but I really didn't want to embarrass anyone in particular and felt the practice was ubiquitous enough that anyone with the inclination would likely know what I'm talking about. Remsense诉 18:57, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Taking the temperature on NACs in CTs

This is not a formal proposal, but may be a precursor to one. WP:NAC is generally cited as the roadmap for non-admin closures. It cautions non-admins against closing potentially contentious discussions, but does not prohibit them. It is also only an essay; but the relevant policy pages that I skimmed do not appear to make distinctions between admin and non-admin closures.

We have a good few experienced non-admin closers. Their decisions are, best as I can tell, not inferior to admin ones. However, based on the caution against contentious closures by non-admins in WP:NAC, I believe they are challenged far more frequently, and consequently their closures often end up costing, rather than saving, the community time (if this comes to a formal proposal, I will do the archival research needed to show this).

I'd like thoughts on a) whether we should prohibit non-admin closures in contentious topics, as a means of saving community time on close reviews; and b) what the best way to do this would be, given that WP:NAC does not currently carry formal weight. Regards, Vanamonde93 (talk) 21:57, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Notified: Wikipedia talk:Non-admin closure. voorts (talk/contributions) 02:59, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
A few thoughts.
First, there are levels of contentiousness, with ARBPIA at one end and ARBBLP at the other. While non-admin closures may be more likely to be challenged for the former to the point of costing community time, I am certain that is not true of the latter.
Second, I am certain this does not apply to request moves. As a NAC, I close a lot of RM's, and as expected given the volume a number are challenged. I haven't found it any more likely that those I close within contentious topics are challenged than those outside, and given the number closed to the number contested I am certain that these closures have saved community time. BilledMammal (talk) 22:11, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
I generally think we should be offloading bureaucratic workload from admins, not piling more on. If there are specific subject areas that become magnets for poor NACs, existing processes are sufficient to curtail those without instruction creep. VQuakr (talk) 22:17, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
As a regular NAC, I'm not sure NACs are challenged more often than admin closures; even if they were, close reviews are relatively rare (for example, as of December 2023, there was an average of 2 close reviews per month as discussed here). More importantly, we shouldn't be taking editor's powers away just because some editors spuriously choose to challenge closures solely on the grounds that they were done by non-admins. As for NAC, I read that just as you do—as a word of caution, not as a command. voorts (talk/contributions) 22:35, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
Thinking out loud, but if NACs are costing the community time in contentious areas, I think it would be better to have a new "userright" (for want of a better term) called "discussion closer" that gives users who have it no extra tools but the same weight in closing discussions as an admin has. Such a right would need to be conferred in a process only slightly heavier weight than file mover - I'm thinking something like request open 2-5 days, consensus in a discussion that has at least 5 supports from admins and/or discussion closers (no consensus after 5 days = not granted). We would then recommend that discussions that are or which are likely to be contentious be closed by admins or discussion closers.
NAC would be explicitly not a permissible ground on which to challenge a closure by a discussion closer - if that's the only reason given the challenge would be speedily declined, if it was accompanied by other reasons then the portion of the statement relating to being an NAC would be struck.
Actually, even without the discussion closer status, speedily declining any review request where NAC is the only ground would be a good thing. Thryduulf (talk) 22:44, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
speedily declining any review request where NAC is the only ground would be a good thing – This, 100%. As Vanamonde noted, there's no actual policy or guideline that says we give admin closures more weight. Indeed, per WP:NOBIGDEAL and WP:ANOT, being an admin doesn't give anyone special authority over content decisions or determing consensus. To the extent that people read WP:NAC as implying that admin closes are better than NACs just because the closers have a mop, it ought to be clarified. I'm against the new "userright" because I don't like the idea that some editors determinations of consensus are weightier than others. voorts (talk/contributions) 22:55, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
@Voorts: I agree with you about the admin-non-admin distinction, but in general, there most certainly are editors who shouldn't be doing NACs. We need to allow genuinely bad closures to be reversed: we also don't want the closer's status as a non-admin to become a distraction. I'm open to other ideas on how to achieve that. Vanamonde93 (talk) 01:04, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
In such cases, the review request needs to say "this summary does not accurately/fully represent the outcome of the discussion" rather than saying "the wrong kind of person wrote this". WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:41, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
We do allow genuinely bad closures to be reversed through close reviews. If the close is so egregious, the close review will likely be a snow overturn. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:31, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
And, while this is not a great outcome, it's also not something we should fear. People learn by making mistakes, at least to the extent that they're willing to learn. Some people are resistant to learning from their mistakes; they are the ones to fear. RoySmith (talk) 23:58, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
I've suggested a flag like this in the past, and I still think it's a good idea. We don't even need to say it gives "the same weight that an admin has"; we could just say that closing especially contentious or WP:CTOP discussions requires (or recommends) the discussioncloser right and bundle it into the sysop flag in addition to making it available at WP:RFPERM. The WordsmithTalk to me 18:46, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
I think making it clear that only very experienced closers should close complicated or contentious discussions is sufficient. Relatedly, one of the things I look for at RFA is difficult closes the candidate has made. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 23:35, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
I think the type of discussion being closed plays a substantial role. For RMs and some RfCs in CTs I don't think NACs are per se a problem, but at AfD, where non-admins literally cannot close in favor of the most common outcome, we really do need to retain the current guidance. AfD NACs can become experienced at closing debates that have a relatively clear keep or ATD outcome, but they are perpetually lacking in the skill of finding consensus for deletion. A non-delete outcome is also necessarily predetermined when a NAC decides to close an AfD, which means in close cases where either a keep or a delete outcome would be within discretion they will always go for keep. And that's on top of the already strong selection bias towards inclusionism among current NACs, which would skew things even further. JoelleJay (talk) 05:11, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
they are perpetually lacking in the skill of finding consensus for deletion I think that's a bit unfair to NACs. After all, we can't close as delete, so how would you know if we can't find consensus for it. In my experience, when I see a discussion where the discussion could reasonably be closed as delete, I add it to my watchlist, skip it, and when it's closed I can see if I agree with the admin closure. voorts (talk/contributions) 13:32, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
NACs can be plenty competent at assessing discussions, but as they are not supposed to close anything where deletion would be remotely reasonable they can't develop the practical skills needed for both reading nuanced consensus and communicating that consensus. JoelleJay (talk) 22:06, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
I don't see why assessing/communicating that consensus is any different than assessing/communicating any other form of consensus. Plus, most AfDs appear to be closed without a written rationale anyways. voorts (talk/contributions) 22:09, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
But the point is that the AfDs closed by NACs should, by definition, not need a close summary because the outcome is uncontroversial. So if NACs have been following the current guidance, they could not have developed experience in closing AfDs where deletion is on the table, and especially not the ones where they would need to provide a close summary explaining why they didn't see consensus to delete. They just literally cannot cultivate that skillset. JoelleJay (talk) 22:44, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
I disagree. In an AFD with one or two good rationals for delete (e.g. "the sources do not meet GNG") but there are (many) more editors who say that that there are sufficient sources or who come after the first delete comments, I think a close summary is helpful. - Enos733 (talk) 22:50, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
I agree and I wish close summaries (and relisting comments) were a lot more common, but I think it's still true that they're not expected for uncontroversial outcomes. JoelleJay (talk) 23:00, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

As a somewhat irregular NAC-er focussed on AfDs, I can appreciate where this is coming from - although my (purely anecdotal) observations of DRV would say this is not, relatively speaking, a problem in that sphere. I think the question is less about status (admin or not) and rather experience; I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to setting some thresholds (edit count, participation etc) for NAC on CTOPs, but I don't see a strong enough case yet for exclusion. Regards,--Goldsztajn (talk) 23:29, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Like anything else on the wiki, the qualification to do most things is that you know how to do it, and having a mop is no promise that you do. I'm sure most of the regulars at WP:AfD, admin or not, know the details of our notability guidelines better than I do; it's absurd to suggest that I'm better qualified to close a complicated AfD just because 19 years ago, 27 people thought I'd be an OK admin. Our current NAC mindset is an anachronism and should be done away with. RoySmith (talk) 23:54, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

  • We should root out and destroy every suggestion that discussion closure is an admin task. It makes sense for the admin noticeboards, and is vestigial in most other places. I like Thryduulf's user right suggestion (I know others have suggested something similar in the past) and speedy close suggestion, though I've rarely seen a situation where NAC is the only objection. We should guide newer closers to less controversial discussions, and we should explicitly indicate that experience multiple discussions is necessary for closing contentious, major discussions. We should still allow for challenges based (in part) on lack of experience, it's just that many non-admin closers are much more experienced than almost all admins. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:14, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
    This isn't any different from any other process. I spend a lot of time at DYK. For all the chaos that goes on there, there's an effective culture of new people being groomed to take on greater responsibility. You start out by doing your obligatory initial reviews and move on to more complicated things like building prep sets. People inevitably make mistakes, the mistakes get fixed, experience is gained, and the cycle continues. WP:GA works the same way. And WP:FA. And dozens of other nooks and crannies of the wiki where just plain editors sans mop keep everything going. As it should be. When somebody's been working in an area for a long time, they become an expert at it. The idea that some random admin who's never worked in that area could possibly do a better job is absurd. RoySmith (talk) 01:37, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
    I agree with Roy.
    @Firefangledfeathers, even a "major" discussion on an officially Contentious Topic™ can sometimes be easy and uncontentious to summarize. The ideal result of an RFC is that everyone already knows what the outcome is. A given participant might be inclined to privately summarize that outcome as "The community is a bunch of jerks who'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes", but even the most passionate editor on the "losing" side can often recognize when a consensus has been reached for the "wrong" result. In such cases, we don't necessarily need a highly experienced editor to state the obvious. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:53, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
    Sure. I meant contentious in the non-trademarked sense. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 22:19, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
  • Outside of deletion discussions and other outcomes that need an admin to carry out (where it absolutely does make sense), I view invoking BADNAC as essentially scope creep. You don't need to be an admin to close RfCs, at all. But I don't think it's fair to dismiss people who bring it up as baseless wikilawyers either. Usually what they're trying to allude to is that contentious discussions are hard to close and therefore that the community expects someone with experience in making successful closes to do it. This is a good and widely agreed upon principle, but it's not written down with a handy shortcut, so BADNAC gets invoked instead. If we articulate that broader principle somewhere, I think we'll see BADNAC cited less often. – Joe (talk) 07:32, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
    Outside of deletion discussions and other outcomes that need an admin to carry out (where it absolutely does make sense). There's no fundamental reason why a non-admin can't close an AfD as "delete" and then find an admin to actually push the button. In fact, it looks like {{Db-xfd}} covers exactly this use case. This is similar to how non-admin SPI clerks can determine that an account is a sock and should be blocked and then have to go find an admin to do it for them. RoySmith (talk) 14:57, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
    No fundamental reason, no, but why create the extra work and complexity when we have no shortage of admins willing to close AfDs? Any process that requires admin intervention should be left to admins unless and until it becomes obvious they need the extra help (as with SPI), as matter of efficiency if nothing else. – Joe (talk) 15:04, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
    I think that's over-broad. I think you shouldn't have to be a sysop to close an RfC that's about making a change to a fully-protected page, for example.—S Marshall T/C 18:11, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
    Pressing delete from a closed AfD feels like a situation where an admin would need to verify consensus in the first place and so now you've spent the time of two editors where one could have done. Beyond that, I am pretty staunchly opposed to admin close creep in places like RfCs. When I was a regular at AfD, I found non-admin work to be far less "right" than with RfCs; I think it attracts a different kind of non-admin. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 04:02, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
    @Barkeep49 your point about the button-pusher needing to verify the result is valid, and indeed I've made similar arguments myself. But a good close can make that job a lot easier. A good close won't just say "Consensus to delete". It'll summarize the main points made on both sides, list the minority opinions, and talk about which arguments were rejected by other discussants (or by the closer) and for what reasons. With a good analysis like that, you can get your head around the discussion without having to read every word. And, yes, the button-pusher is ultimately responsible for their actions, and I assume all responsible button-pushers will dig as far as they feel is necessary to validate the summary. RoySmith (talk) 15:55, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
    Most AfDs don't require a long closing statement or often don't require any closing statement. This lack of need for closing statements is a way that AfD is different from RfCs. This also doesn't change my point - it's not a good use of editor time to close something which will require substantial re-verification to implement (outside of processes like DYK which are designed to have these multiple levels of checking). Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:15, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
    It's true that "Consensus to delete" is an adequate close for many AfDs. I would expect somebody to write the kind of detailed analysis I outlined above only for discussions that warranted it due to their complexity. RoySmith (talk) 13:35, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
    now you've spent the time of two editors where one could have done is true, but we don't stop people from wasting their own time. The admin would have to spend time to process the deletion regardless of whether it was NAC'd first or not. So in the NAC scenario, the only person who's time is arguably wasted is the NAC who volunteered their time to do this, and if that's how people want to spend their time, I don't see why policy should prohibit them from doing so. Arguably, two sets of eyes is a benefit anyway, so it's not necessarily wasted time at all. Levivich (talk) 23:51, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
  • I would distinguish between a discussion close that's a content decision, and one that's a conduct or technical decision. There are philosophical and principled reasons why we absolutely must not give sysops special authority to make content decisions. Conduct decisions in CT areas, on the other hand, are best reserved for sysops even where an unelected person could make them.—S Marshall T/C 07:58, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
  • There are non-admins (like S Marshall) who would be in the top 10% of admins regarding closures (even if I disagree with one) if they were one. And vice versa. It's just that the odds and optics are better when it's an admin. I think that the current guidance on this is about right. North8000 (talk) 15:46, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
  • There a many inherent reasons for people not to close long, complicated, or contentious discussions, so I see the lessening of the pool of willing closers as throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:06, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
  • It cautions non-admins against closing potentially contentious discussions, but does not prohibit them. WP:NAC should do more than caution, but still should not prohibit. It should advise against NAC closes of contentious discussions where consensus is not abundantly clear.
We have a good few experienced non-admin closers. Absolutely. Adminship is not a requirement for being a good closer, but being a good closer is something tested at RfA, or at least, not being a bad closer and knowing your own strengths is tested at RfA.
Some challenges to NAC closes may be unfair, but this depends on perspective. It is a fact that many ordinary Wikipedians do not consider a non admin close of a contentious discussion to be a satisfactory close. This is not a reason to slap down ordinary wikipedians, but for non admins engaging in advances functions to do it more conservatively. A good skillful close should make a contentious-looking discussion look no longer contentious.
If a non admin's close of a discussion produces another, longer, more contentious discussion, then their close was not a net positive contribution, and they should not do such closes.
We should advise non admins to not close contentious discussions unless they are very confident that they will explain their close to the satisfaction of all the participants. Alternatively put: If an admin is confident that they can close a discussion to the satisfaction of all participants, then they should be encouraged to do so. Despite being very confident, non admins are allowed to be wrong, sometimes. Don't make a habit of it. If a challenge to their close surprises them in any way, then strongly consider reverting the close and listing it at Wikipedia:Closure requests. Then, sit back and see if someone else closes it the same way.
In any discussion, the closer should be the least important person, not the most important person.
All of the above should apply equally to XfDs, RM, and RfCs. It should apply moreso to closes at AN, DRV, MRV and XRV.
Spurious challenges should not be feared. Spurious challenges are characterised by a SNOW endorse at review.
I don't think a special user-right for closing is warranted. If credentials are wanted, I suggest a category of barnstars for good closes.
--SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:40, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
  • If a non admin's close of a discussion produces another, longer, more contentious discussion, then their close was not a net positive contribution, and they should not do such closes. Sometimes admin closes are bad and result in additional contentious discussions. Admins aren't magically better at analytical thinking.
  • We should advise non admins to not close contentious discussions unless they are very confident that they will explain their close to the satisfaction of all the participants. I agree. The guidance should be "to each according to his ability". But, per my first bullet above, the same should be said for admins. If an admin doesn't feel confident that they have the chops to close a particular discussion, they shouldn't feel like their status gives them license to bite off more than they can chew.
  • Don't make a habit of it. If a challenge to their close surprises them in any way, then strongly consider reverting the close and listing it at Wikipedia:Closure requests. Unless a close is clearly vandalism or extremely incoherent, we shouldn't be reverting closes absent a close review. Otherwise, we invite random editors to revert closes because they think it's inadequate, leading to even more bickering and bad feelings.
voorts (talk/contributions) 23:30, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
I agree that Admins aren't magically better at analytical thinking, but it is a trait that we select for at RFA, so a random admin will usually do better in this area than a random non-admin. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:58, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Amending BADNAC?

I want to be very clear that when I opened this it wasn't because I felt some NACs were inappropriate, but because I wanted to avoid spurious challenges, or challenges where non-admin status was muddying the waters. It's fairly clear that there is strong support for not limiting NACs; so what do folks think of an alternative approach to address the problem I mention, and making BADNAC contingent strictly on experience rather than admin status: that is, essentially striking BADNAC#2, and perhaps strengthening the reference to experience in BADNAC#3? Vanamonde93 (talk) 02:45, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I am in favor of striking #2. I think #3 could be struck too; if somebody inexperienced is really good at evaluating consensus and has read Wikipedia's PAGs, I don't see why the close ought to be overturned on those grounds alone. But, I can live with #3 as it's currently if there's consensus that that kind of limitation should be in BADNAC. Also, I've notified WT:NAC of this discussion. voorts (talk/contributions) 03:04, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
The likelihood that someone using an account with few edits will do a passable job on anything except the most obvious cases is low. Also, it gives anyone on the "losing" side an opportunity to suggest that the newbie is a bad-hand sock, which is more drama that we would like to avoid.
BTW, "experienced editor" appears to be a label that there are different views about. @Levivich and I were chatting about this at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedians#Higher volume: Can someone who has "only" been editing for a year (the median account activity is one day), with "only" 500 edits total (more than 99.25% of accounts that have ever made a first edit), averaging "only" one edit per day during the last month (less than 10% of currently active accounts), be truly considered "an experienced editor"? If you'd like to provide a third opinion (or fourth, or fifth), please share your idea of what the minimum standard for "an experienced editor" could be over there. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:14, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
It sounds like we need to temper our expectations regarding how we treat newcomers on Wikipedia, instead of limiting them because others might have bad faith objections.
As for a rare but pertinent counterexample, I noticed Chrhns's close of an RFC within their first 50 edits. It was well reasoned, not "exceptionally obvious" and pretty much the exact close I would make too. I did end up suggesting they edit other parts of the Wiki first, simply because I know how contentious challenges can get. But should they (or editors like them but with 500 more edits) be restricted from one part of the encyclopedia just because they read the rules before they start editing?
I think it's far more important that close challenges cite an actual policy being broken instead of just BADNAC. If a close is flawed, it will be flawed on multiple grounds. Soni (talk) 11:23, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
Agree in general, CTs excepted, non EC editors cannot close or even participate in internal project discussions. Otherwise I don't object to NACs in principle, if they are messed up, as some will be, we have the procedures to deal with that. Learning by doing is not a bad thing. Selfstudier (talk) 11:30, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
Learning by doing is how Wikipedia works. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:02, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
Your observation that they get challenged more often could be right and a reason to advise non-admin to be careful (thus keeping it included as advice at NAC) without doing the wrong thing of making that advise a prohibition, which is what people are objecting to here. I think some data more than than the philosophical discussion above could be useful in making this kind of decision. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 04:04, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
I will attempt to compile data in a few days. I think the problem exists regardless of frequency, however. A close challenge in which the closer's admin/non-admin status has become a factor is, I think, a priori a bad use of the community's time. Evaluations of closures need to focus on other things. Vanamonde93 (talk) 01:33, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
I oppose simply striking #2 ("The outcome is a close call (especially where there are several valid outcomes) or likely to be controversial") but suggest instead rewording it. As it reads, I don't think it is very good. I suggest, it get ideas started,
"The discussion is contentious and your close is likely to be controversial."
I think it is a good idea to put the judgement of the appropriateness of the NAC in the control of the NAC-er, and point to "the close" as the thing that will be judged. (The number of valid outcomes parenthetical is wordy verbosity)
"#3 The non-admin has little or no experience editing Wikipedia generally or has little or no previous participation in discussions." is good and important. It doesn't require touching. It is important for newbies. To make it easier for newbies to understand, I would suggest closers should have one year experience editing Wikipedia, and 500 edits in projectspace, and 100 AfDs participated before closing AfDs.
- SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:54, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
Nobody can ever know in advance if their close will be controversial. Sometimes people get upset over the silliest issues. voorts (talk/contributions) 17:39, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
A few days ago, I said this, and I think it's apt here too.—S Marshall T/C 20:57, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
Critique or criticise the close, not the closer, absolutely yes, start there. Where the same closer repeated has their closes criticised, maybe there is a pattern of evidence to suggest a change in behaviour.
NAC-ers should be advised to be cautious in closing, not prohibited in closing. NAC-ers should be advised on how the can best help. On a quick review of old-admin closes, I think you'll find they tend to be terse. A newcomer may think that a good close is a terse close. SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:50, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
nobody can ever know in advance if their close will be controversial? Nonsense. Wrong. If you can't tell that the discussion is contested, with heated participants, and that your close does not address their positions, then you should not be closing. SomeoneTM getting upset over something silly is life, not controversy. SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:45, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
A topic of discussion can be controversial, but the outcome can sometimes be so obvious that the closure isn't challenged. For example, the recent RM for Gaza genocide. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:49, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
I think this is the better path. I'd oppose striking #2 entirely, but I think we can make some more room in it for places where NACs are fine by modifying that first clause which seems to be the more objectionable one. I think a small improvement would be The discussion is contentious, (especially if it falls within a Contentious Topic), and your close is likely to be controversial. While it is true that nobody can know for sure if the close will be controversial (occasionally there's an editor who just can't let go), we're only assessing the likelihood which is usually common sense. A high-profile RFC over a controversial WP:ARBPIA issue or certain parts of the MOS, for example, have a high likelihood of being controversial while a merge discussion about insects where basically everyone is on the same page is not. If a closer is unable to see the difference, they probably don't have the judgement to assess consensus anyway. The WordsmithTalk to me 18:37, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
I am in favor of striking #2 and strengthening the reference to experience in #3. I think experience, not the admin bit, is the strongest predictor of good closes. Levivich (talk) 23:56, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

As I see it, BADNAC serves a couple of purposes. Preventing bad quality closes by telling editors when they might not be appropriate before they attempt to close. Providing the outcome of a close a degree of "authority" against challenges from without or within by setting some minimum standards and allowing closes procedurally to be set aside regardless content. I see the second as being less important than the quality of the close but in terms of optics, if the DAILYMAIL close was made by a 2 day account it would not have had the same weight. Therefore I do see some value in retaining a version of the current #2 somehere in BADNAC which sets a higher bar in terms of required experience for something controversial or complex than a simple snowclose. In terms of how that experience is defined, it should be related to actually closing discussions, not just general editing, and admin status should not be relevant. Scribolt (talk) 08:26, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Just throwing this out there: there should be some sort of statement that BADNAC is not itself a grounds to challenge a close, and that challengers should focus on the assessment of consensus, not who assessed it. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:34, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
I agree with this suggestion.
That section currently ends with ...or could result in a request to redo the process at Wikipedia:Deletion review, and a footnote saying Discuss with the closing editor first before starting a deletion review. We could change it to say:
...or could result in a request to redo the process at Wikipedia:Deletion review. Discuss with the closing editor first before starting a deletion review. If you need to pursue deletion review, your explanation should focus on content. Reviews that only complain that the discussion was summarized by a non-admin, without identifying at least one substantive error in the result, can be removed without warning by any editor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:07, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
I'd oppose at least the last sentence of this. DRV already comes down like a ton of bricks on arguments based solely on the lack of admin privileges, and nominations based solely on that are rare enough that I can't remember the last time it happened. Advising early closes there is already dangerous, since DRVs are themselves overturned so rarely that it's only barely inaccurate to say "it never happens", and so it's important that it's gotten right the first time; simply reverting nominations is even worse, and seems very likely to me to raise the heat in what we try very hard to keep a drama-free zone. —Cryptic 03:32, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
"DRV already comes down like a ton of bricks on arguments based solely on the lack of admin privileges"... so you don't think we should warn folks not to make "arguments based solely on the lack of admin privileges"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:08, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
I mostly object to the rest of the sentence, about removing requests. DRV doesn't even speedy close nominations consisting mostly or entirely of accusations of bias or other personal attacks anymore (despite its own instructions), let alone just blank them. I've got no problem with your suggested text up to and including the WP:FOC link; maybe add something to the effect of ", not just complain that the discussion was summarized by a non-admin." to the end. —Cryptic 04:21, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
I wasn't just speaking to deletion discussions, but also using BADNAC solely as a means to challenge an RfC closure, for example, so I think we need some broader proposed language. Also, the last sentence of BADNAC is odd because it purports to apply only to "inappropriate early closures of deletion debates" (emphasis added), which doesn't really have much to do with the rest of BADNAC. voorts (talk/contributions) 06:16, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
I agree that the scope of any warning needs to be broader than just early closures of XFDs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:09, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
I agree. Although I'd nominally like #2 to be struck, I think that would have to be done with a strengthening of #3 or something like Scribolt describes. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:37, 31 July 2024 (UTC)
I think the issue, if there is one, is with bad closes, not specifically with bad non-admin closes. Yes, there is a pretty strong correlation between being an admin and being a good closer, because for both it is usually best to be an "experienced editor" (I'm deliberately avoiding defining that), but correlation is not causation. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:02, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
I agree that there are many non-admins who are good at closing controversial discussions. The issue is that there are many more non-admins who are bad at closing controversial discussions than admins who are bad at the same thing. So the norm of having admins close discussions does improve the quality of closes.
Because of this, I support something like Thryduulf's discussion-closer userright but wouldn't really support weakening #2 in the meantime. Bad closures are hard to fix and even if the process goes perfectly they waste way more time and effort than just waiting for a better closer, so I'd really rather err on the side of caution here. Loki (talk) 02:37, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Bot to inform temp users of expiry

Crossposted (per request) from Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Bot_to_inform_temp_users_of_expiry. Leaderboard (talk) 14:27, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

First-person pronouns in the Manual of Style

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#We and first-person pronouns about when the word we should be used in an article. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:26, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

We thank yous. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:34, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

Views on de-orphaning?

What does the community think about systematic efforts to add links to orphaned articles?

Until recently, my impression was de-orphaning can sometimes be beneficial (I did a bit when I was starting to edit) but, in most cases, isn't hugely significant because decent search engines are widespread. Additionally, many orphans cover naturally obscure topics which just aren't going to get many readers or improvements even if they were linked elsewhere.

However, I've been coming across cases where de-orphaning has actually made things worse, generally by giving too much weight to a subject we might not even want to have an article on in the first place. For example, I recently cleaned out a large number of dubiously-notable companies whose establishments were listed as nationally prominent events on pages like 2000 in the United States because of systematic de-orphaning.

It's become increasingly unclear to me whether de-orphaning efforts, as currently practised, are doing more good than harm. But this is based on my impressions, not detailed analysis. So I'm interested to hear others' thoughts.

(A couple of previous discussions: 2017, 2019, there's probably been others). – Teratix ₵ 06:15, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

It probably depends on exactly what is meant by deorphaning. Adding links to relevant articles is good, in that it provides readers a path to find new information. Search cannot help someone find something they don't know they are looking for. The 2017 and 2019 discussions however make a good point that deorphaning as an end in itself is obsolete.
Stepping back slightly, is there more information on what the de-orphaning efforts as currently practised are? The adding of links where they are not beneficial is not great, but how much of it is a problem, and is it a systemic issue or a relatively occasional occurrence? CMD (talk) 06:54, 5 August 2024 (UTC)
The issue with de-orphaning is that it tends to be rather black-and-white. WikiProject Orphanage has the singular objective of reducing the backlog of orphaned articles, which can result in articles that may not meet GNG being given undue weight. Something like the introduction of an 'Orphan-Notability' template, alongside the 'Orphan' template, might help. When de-orphaning a particular article, the option of replacing the 'Orphan' template with 'Orphan-Notability' would create two lists: one for orphaned articles and another for orphaned articles requiring a notability check before they are de-orphaned. Svampesky (talk) 09:15, 5 August 2024 (UTC)
I've seen good things happen from good links. If an article has no inbound article links it gets very few page views, and thus very few edits. With meaningful links from other articles it is now being seen by readers interested in related topics, and someone reading an article on one topic is probably just the person to make good edits to a related article they click through to. It's true that low-quality links, like linking to a dubiously notable company in a large city article because the company is based there, tend to lower the quality of the established article. Cluttering it up without adding useful information for readers.
I think if meaningful, good article links can't be created to an article, that's a strong sign that the article subject is not notable. It's not a criteria for deletion of course, just an indication that a topic might not be encyclopedic, if no other encyclopedia articles should even mention it. Here2rewrite (talk) 11:29, 5 August 2024 (UTC)
+1 for I think if meaningful, good article links can't be created to an article, that's a strong sign that the article subject is not notable.. CapitalSasha ~ talk 11:33, 5 August 2024 (UTC)
As an "Orphanologist" working on oldest orphan articles (beginning with 2014 backlog articles), I have seen much progress. At one point the backlog was over 120,000 articles and now about 55,000. And millions more of non-orphan articles. Prior to my involvement, the consensus is to make orphan tag "invisible" after two months. My suggestion would be to show all orphan tags. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 13:11, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

It always seems odd to me if an article can't reasonably be linked to other articles. This could of course mean that those other articles are missing rather than that our orphan is not notable. As for whether we use visible or invisible tags, it rather depends on whether we think the task is something we want to invite our readers to do. In its early days, yes I assume most new orphans can easily be linked into the project. After some time it ceases to be a newbie task and it requires a bit more experience of the project - does this link improve the pedia or is it visual clutter? I'm not sure whether two months is the right time and if not whether it should be increased to three or more or reduced to one. But if we were going to change the interval I'd like it done with some data as to the relative ease of deorphaning articles after one, two or three months. Ideally the link should become invisible at the point where deorphaning becomes a task we don't want to promote to newbies. ϢereSpielChequers 13:33, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

I don't find this odd at all, and being an orphan isn't the end of the world. Of course some articles are crying out to be linked to (creators of new articles are often very poor at looking for links to add). I'm strongly against WP:UNDUE adding the name and a link just for the sake of de-orphaning. Johnbod (talk) 15:08, 5 August 2024 (UTC)
  • When this was discussed in 2017, I left rather lengthy comment. Although I no longer de-orphan to the same extent that I once did, I still think the tag is valuable as a diagnostic that signals that an article should be looked at. As I said back then, I have found plenty of instances where investigating why something is tagged as orphaned has helped me improve Wikipedia - merging duplicate articles, upmerging stubs to parent articles, creating new articles in a taxonomic chain, fixing broken links, and initiating the deletion of junk that no one has laid eyes on in years.
    Issues can arise when people focus more on the idea of removing the tag at all costs rather than figuring out what to do with the article, but that can happen with any maintenance backlog. Think of someone who mass-redirects unsourced articles rather than improving sourcing. Is the problem the tag, or the behavior? Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater if we can solve the crap-links problem by dealing with whoever is doing it. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 08:00, 6 August 2024 (UTC)
    I agree. Even if someone deorphans by mechanically adding a See also link to a more prominent article, the watchers of that more prominent article will then be alerted to the lesser article and it then has an opportunity to be improved. ~Kvng (talk) 14:20, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
    As is often the case when editing WP, de-orphaning requires a degree of editorial judgement. The problems almost always occur when people edit without discernment - adding links just for the sake of linking. The reality is that some de-orphaning links are very beneficial, while others are not. Blueboar (talk) 14:44, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

The relevant policy/guideline is actually already there:

It may be the case that some articles currently just cannot be de-orphaned. If this is the case then please do not try to 'force-fit' by adding unrelated links to articles where they don't belong just for the sake of de-orphaning. Always keep in mind that our primary goal is to improve the reader's experience, not satisfy the editor's indulgence in statistical achievements. Your priority when adding links should be to maintain article quality by adding relevant and useful links wherever possible
— WP:CANTDEORPHAN

So, unnecessary links can always be removed. But it's not always bad, and the inclusion or non-inclusion criteria of certain articles in general articles such as "X year" may not be straightforward; what "degree" of notability (if a person has an article on Wikipedia that person is already notable) a person has to have to be included in "Births"?

Companies can be included in some lists by location or something else. What to put in "See also" is also covered by a guideline.

But do some articles even need to exist? I somewhat agree with other users regarding the (probable) lack of notability (though it may require changes in some notability policies). The other important thing here is the size of the article. Members of the state legislatures are presumed notable, but what if the fact that a person was a member is almost the only thing we know about them? Example. Named natural features are often notable, provided information beyond statistics and coordinates is known to exist. But for some very small streams, this "information beyond" is the etymology and what bodies of water they flow into (sometimes another small stream). Example, Example. The same doubts arise regarding small unidentified villages (that may not even exist), very small neighbourhoods or just "areas".

There are also a lot of articles about New Zealand court decisions, but that's a separate story.

Finally, there are some interesting guidelines about orphans: Editors may also remove the tag from any article if they believe that de-orphaning is unlikely to be successful, or if they have attempted to provide incoming links -//- However, if you are certain the article is unlikely to ever be de-orphaned then simply remove the tag. Can this also be the answer sometimes? It can also be elaborated. For example, after some time and/or a number of attempts an article may be declared "hopeless" and the tag may be removed.

The reality is that some de-orphaning links are very beneficial, while others are not. A lot of those that "are not" are not harmful either. Oloddin (talk) 05:53, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

I've opened a new section on your first question below, as it extends beyond the question of deorphaning. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:58, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Let's go a bit deeper here. So far, a fair few editors have said something along the lines of "well, sometimes de-orphaning is beneficial and sometimes not", with varying emphasis on "sometimes beneficial" and "sometimes not". But what proportion of de-orphaning, in practice, is beneficial? Is it 90% beneficial, 10% not so much? 70–30? 40–60? 20–80? And where is the threshold for "this benefits Wikipedia on net"? – Teratix ₵ 02:59, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

To go a bit broader, I would estimate that 90% of good-faith edits are beneficial. The deorphaning edits I have reviewed have about the same level of quality as the other edits I review on my watchlist. ~Kvng (talk) 13:42, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
"De-orphaning" is not some special process; it's simply connecting an orphan with the other articles by creating links to the orphan. This is beneficial unless these links don't fit into the articles where an editor is trying to put them in. It's hard to estimate how often that happens (not least because, again, whether the link belongs or not is often subjective), but I would say not too often (I agree with Kvng on that). In general, the appropriateness of a link, of some text that includes a link, or of the element in the list (or list-type article) is not dependent on whether it was an attempt to de-orphan or not. Oloddin (talk) 22:36, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
@Teratix, I suspect that the benefit depends on the subject. De-orphaning a sports or film actor bio probably has a ≥90% benefit: the athlete should be named in some list of the people on their notable team(s), and the actor should be named in the articles about the films they appeared in. De-orphaning a business probably has a 10% benefit. You might occasionally want a sentence like "Bob's Big Business has been the biggest employer in Smallville since 2005", but there are currently about 15,000 places to eat in London, and even if only 0.5% of them are notable, London#Leisure and entertainment doesn't need 75 restaurants named in it. It doesn't even need all six of its Michelin 3-star restaurants listed. However, when something like List of award-winning pubs in London is available, then that's an opportunity to de-orphan these pubs without unbalancing London. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:17, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

What is the policy for maintaining access to Wikipedia's library?

It took me six months of steady editing to gain access to the library and for months now, I haven't been able to clip articles at Newspapers.com because I access it through an Ancestry account. Needless to say, this has slowed my editing significantly. How many edits do I have to complete in what sort of timeframe to maintain access? Not being able to clip articles for citations for so long has really sapped my enthusiam but I don't want to lose access to the library after working to gain it in the first place. Oona Wikiwalker (talk) 01:27, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

From the TWL about page:

Any editor can use the library if they meet a few basic requirements:

  • You have an account that is a minimum of 6 months old
  • You have made a minimum of 500 edits to Wikimedia projects
  • You have made at least 10 edits to Wikimedia projects in the last month
  • You are not currently blocked from editing a Wikimedia project
Here's the TWL contact page and the Meta talk page if you're having technical issues. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:37, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
Note that there are known issues with Newspapers.com through TWL right now, not sure what the status on fixing them is though. ― novov (t c) 01:39, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
Send newspapers.com an email. That’s worked for me twice. Wehwalt (talk) 11:18, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
As mentioned, newspapers.com often (and currently is) has technical issues with Wikipedia Library. Recently I needed to follow the steps in phabricator T322916 (direct link to comment with steps) to basically copy an authenticated session from https://www.newspapers.com/ to https://www-newspapers-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/, which is where a session needs to be in order to clip content using TWL's access. It's annoying and intermittent but at least it's (likely) has nothing to do with your access or account. Skynxnex (talk) 14:57, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
Thank you so much. I did try the steps, but Firefox was spitting up errors so I shut the window and walked away from it for a few days. Difficulties with Newspapers.com is really a pity because it's often a necessary source, but I'm so grateful to have it when it works! Oona Wikiwalker (talk) 06:12, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

In the news

I enjoy reading the news in the "in the news" section of the home page of Wikipedia. It has the kind of hard news I like: tornados, earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, etc. from around the world. But new stories don't come out very often. The current "cycling" item is now 10 days old. Can't we get a top story each day? Ifyoucrydon'tlose (talk) 20:06, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

There are some nominations in the queue (see WP:ITNC) but these haven't been posted as they either haven't found to be appropriate topics for ITN to feature, or the article lacks the quality needed to be featured on the main page. As WP is not a newspaper, ITN should not be considered as a news ticket and we don't have an obligation to keep fresh stories there. Of course, more nominations for stories that meet the criteria can always help, but it should be forewarned that there is usually a high bar related to significance of the stories to be posted. — Masem (t) 20:17, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
Discussions at In the news are largely composed of a group of regulars who have their own ideas about what is "significant" enough to be posted to the main page. I largely avoid ITN because my one experience attempting to nominate something there was extremely frustrating and I don't think it's worth wasting my time updating articles with breaking news stories that editors will randomly find "insignificant" for idiosyncratic reasons. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:42, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
I see that "in the news" is not a newspaper and it is not a newspaper ticket. So what is it? Ifyoucrydon'tlose (talk) 23:41, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
Its primary purpose is to point readers to Wikipedia articles that discuss the people, places and events that are in the news. These articles will (ideally) give readers the background information to better contextualize and understand what they read/see in news media. Blueboar (talk) 12:30, 29 August 2024 (UTC)
That's a good description and I thank you for that.
One small note: If you hover over and click on "Ongoing", you can get a list of previous items.
Same with "Deaths".
But if you hover over "In the news" you cannot get a list of previous items. Ifyoucrydon'tlose (talk) 10:14, 30 August 2024 (UTC)
The only thing that WP:ITNSIGNIF says is:

It is highly subjective whether an event is considered significant enough, and ultimately each event should be discussed on its own merits. The consensus among those discussing the event is all that is necessary to decide if an event is significant enough for posting.

Anything else is subject to who shows up. If non-regulars chose to change the outcomes, there is no current guideline-based reason why present trends couldn't change. Until then, what you are seeing is the will of the "regulars". —Bagumba (talk) 10:29, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

WikiProject 2010s

Tags for this (fairly new) WikiProject are being mass-added to practically every article imaginable that is tangentially related to the 2010s — every sporting event in the 2010s; every film, TV show, and video game released in the 2010s; every Super Bowl, solar eclipse, election, notable death, and session of Congress during the 2010s, and so forth. Here's a sampling of the flood of edits that are flooding my watchlist (and likely others). Is this really necessary? To begin with, it's unclear whether a WikiProject should have a scope this large, or if this is attainable (if so, a bot should be assigned to handle mass-tagging). The WikiProject page explicitly states, The WikiProject is and will be involved in thousands of articles. There's no WikiProject equivalent for other decades or centuries, so we're in uncharted waters. InfiniteNexus (talk) 01:01, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

@DukeOfDelTaco: could you please explain your thinking? Other than a discussion a few months ago about the scope of the WikiProject, this WikiProject seems to be inactive. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:11, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
On a related note, we've been talking at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council about the process for creating new WikiProjects. Please join the discussion of you have any ideas about how to support groups of editors without having non-groups (e.g., one editor who hopes that If you build it, they will come) creating and inevitably abandoning a bunch of pages and templates. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:15, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Apologies if my edits have been overbearing or troublesome, I'll make sure to stop with any further edits. To explain my reasoning, I found the concept of a WikiProject with goals like these to be interesting, so I thought it would help to participate by expanding its scope. I understand that there are countless articles that could qualify as relating to the 2010s, but it honestly made the challenge more enticing. Again I apologize for the flood of edits and clogging up your watchlists, I will make sure to end the expansion and mass edits and I wouldn't be opposed if the WikiProject ends up being removed. DukeOfDelTaco (talk) 01:31, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
To be clear, I am not targeting you specifically; you aren't the first and only person to mass-add these tags for WikiProject 2010s, but you are the most recent person to do so. InfiniteNexus (talk) 01:55, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
No worries. I think it's laudable to try to resurrect a WikiProject, but tagging random articles probably isn't the best way to do it. The best way to get the project up and running again would be to find some other editors (maybe @TrademarkedTWOrantula, who revamped the 2010s page a few months back) who are willing to help narrow the scope of the project and focus on crafting some initial tasks. voorts (talk/contributions) 02:03, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
I, um, kinda lost interest in the project altogether... sorry, going back to this WikiProject gives me bad memories of who I was back then :( TWOrantulaTM (enter the web) 03:21, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Well, then ... if the project is inactive, then the tags should definitely not be mass-added to thousands of articles in a bot-like fashion. Even if the project weren't inactive, I still don't think a WikiProject should have a scope this broad. InfiniteNexus (talk) 19:08, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
I think given that it's inactive, and there's no prospect that participants in the project will come to a consensus regarding narrowing its scope, there would need to be some sort of higher level of consensus to deactivate it and avoid having people tag random articles with this WikiProject going forward. On the other hand, as long as mass tagging isn't occurring, I don't really see the harm with tagging this WikiProject inactive and moving on. voorts (talk/contributions) 19:11, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

In regards to plot summary

Works, from films to books, usually have a "plot" section, detailing its plot. However, I believe that they should be used only if there are reliable, secondary sources that summarize it. Without them, such sections become original research. So, we should make a policy where plot summary sections are only allowed in an article in the presence of reliable sources. 2804:14D:72B3:98F5:0:0:0:1F51 (talk) 19:55, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

I do not support this. Almost everything we do is summarizing or selecting from other sources. The work we have an article on is a reliable source for its own content. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 19:58, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
It's not original research, the work itself is the primary source. This is addressed at MOS:FILMPLOT, WP:PLOTCITE, and MOS:PLOTSOURCE. InfiniteNexus (talk) 20:09, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
That. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:30, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
I'm not particularly fond of the practice, but it was already embedded in WP when I started editing 19 years ago. Not worth tilting at that windmill. Donald Albury 21:31, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Formatting of election pages - external links and pseudoheads

After noticing US election pages having potential issues with WP:LINKFARM/WP:NOTDIR and MOS:PSEUDOHEAD, I crafted some personal WP:AutoWikiBrowser find/replace rules to replace the semicolon pseudoheads with apostrophe-bolded versions and to switch the polling external links to wikilinks with references. I thought my edits were perhaps a bit WP:BOLD, but consistent with policies, provided readers with internal links to learn about the pollsters, and preempted expansion of columns when {{webarchive}} was placed directly into the tables to address dead links. A small subset of recent edits were reverted (e.g., [5]) and my attempt to discuss the issue with the reverting editor was met with my message being blanked from their talk page. I have found no guideline or policy to permit the types of pseuodoheads being used nor to include extensive tables of external links of polls, and this formatting may be more pervasive than I first realized. I had seen some of the election pages tagged with {{External links}} and I have since found that another editor brought up similar concerns about external links on WT:WikiProject Elections and Referendums. The RfC appears to have some support that extensive external linking is contrary to policy, but the discussion had few participants and several suggested to discuss at Village Pump, hence why I'm first posting here. I agree with User:Mikeblas's assessment in the RfC that "No explicit consensus has been discovered here, so the status quo is apparently just replicated behaviour counter to the site's policies." Is there consensus or guidance to allow such formatting of election (or other) pages? Is this the appropriate place to discuss this? Thanks, Ost (talk) 16:40, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

I think there are some issues with that user regarding Ownership of content, WP:COMMUNICATE, and civility. It seems like you're experiencing some of the same issues. There's no telling why your edits were reverted. I think they enhanced the article by replacing raw links to references (particularly to PDF files) and corrected formatting issues. Given the policy-breaking behavior issues, maybe WP:ANI is the next step.
Issues with link farms in election articles remain. As the article age, the links are rotting often becoming usurped to nefarious purposes. It's not hard to find articles where half of the campaign sites are dead links. I don't think the RfC was ever closed; it was just moved to an archive in the talk page of the project. (It is my first and only RfC, so maybe I was meant to do something differently.) -- mikeblas (talk) 18:47, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
If your good faith edits are being reverted and the editor isn't responding, I agree that AN/I seems to be the next step. voorts (talk/contributions) 19:49, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
Mikeblas, official websites that have gone defunct should generally be replaced with an archived copy (if one is available). Compare these:
WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:02, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. But how do you know? I read WP:ELDEAD and it didn't seem to have any specific recommendation other than "dead URLs are of no use". (Well, obviously.) -- mikeblas (talk) 21:36, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
WP:ELCITE says not to add extraneous information (e.g., archive dates).
As for how I know, I helped write WP:ELLIST. We talked specifically about the benefits of replacing campaign websites with archived copies. Mass replacement of US election websites, in articles of the "2024 [office] election in [place]" type, on the day after the election, was something we thought would be great. It shouldn't be anything fancy, just a simple link showing the campaign website as it was at the end of the campaign election. (@GreenC, perhaps you'd be interested?) WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:15, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: Bots like WP:IABOT are typically not updating links to the simple archive link; they generally use {{webarchive}} or similar formatting like your second link. I think it would require a change in bot behavior or manual cleanup to change them to the formatting that you indicate is preferred. It would probably also be good to list your examples in a policy or guideline. —Ost (talk) 22:11, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
@Ost316, does WP:ELLIST answer your questions about external links? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:57, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
Also, as a general reminder, whenever you have questions about external links, please take them to Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:03, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: Thank you for the reminder of that Noticeboard; I was following the suggestions at the RfC and did not consider that location to start the discussion, especially as there was also MOS concerns. However, this discussion can be moved there or split if it is more appropriate. —Ost (talk) 22:03, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for also pointing out WP:ELLIST, though I don't believe that it answers the question because it states that "This section does not apply if the external link is serving as a citation to a reliable source for a stand-alone list entry that otherwise meets that list's inclusion criteria." That guidance may be valid for a minority of my edits that included links to debates (and I was open to further discussing those links and changing my edits), but the vast majority of the links are to polls which appear to be verifying the information in the table (i.e., serving as a citation). To me, the guidance also isn't clear on when it is permissible to include a list or table external links; it explains how they can be formatted and gives examples of political candidates, software, and websites, but it does not explain what makes a list acceptable to contain a links for entries (although the websites one may be self-evident). I don't think that most lists of movies, for instance, contain lists to the official websites for the movies. —Ost (talk) 22:03, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
@Ost316, keep reading that section until you get to the last paragraph:
In some cases, these links may serve as both official links and as inline citations to primary sources. In the case of elections or other one-time events, it may be desirable to replace the original links with links to archived copies when the event is over.
Polls should be formatted with <ref>...</ref> tags (or whatever system is used in that article, e.g., {{sfn}}).
If you look in 2020 United States House of Representatives elections in South Carolina#Results, you see this table:
South Carolina's 1st congressional district, 2020[1]
Party Candidate Votes %
Republican Nancy Mace 216,042 50.6
Democratic Joe Cunningham (incumbent) 210,627 49.3
Write-in 442 0.1
Total votes 427,111 100.0
Republican gain from Democratic
and if you look in 2020 United States House of Representatives elections in South Carolina#External links you see this list:
Official campaign websites for 1st district candidates
What we recommend with ELLIST is that these be combined, e.g., through the addition of a column in the middle of the table adds something like "Official website" or "Campaign website" or even just [6]. Then most of the ==External links== section can be removed. After the election, a link to "ElectAlice2024.com" can be replaced with a simple archive link.
I add that we assumed that, for most articles, only the official websites for the main candidates would be appropriate, but there is no actual rule prohibiting editors from using their judgement to include more, if they really believe that would constitute an improvement for the article. I mention this because every country is a bit different, and we did not want to make a one-size-fits-all rule for such a diverse system. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:28, 4 September 2024 (UTC)
Linking to archived copies of campaign websites for long-past elections (as opposed to live campaign websites in current elections) makes them essentially a historical primary document, appropriate for a bibliographic-style entry in a Further Reading section.
If it is the case, as others are implying, that every modern election page should have the archived campaign websites of all candidates linked, then perhaps a specific repeatable template should be used for that, such as within an infobox. But that should have some sense to it, and not just be fit into columns of whatever table is available. SamuelRiv (talk) 07:21, 5 September 2024 (UTC)
When the page has many WP:ELOFFICIAL links (e.g., defunct campaign websites), then it's more sensible to put them in a list with the candidates' names, instead of duplicating the list. The options are fundamentally like this:
How to format multiple official links in lists
WP:ELLIST recommendation Duplicative separate lists
Candidates
Candidates
Further reading
I prefer the non-duplicative list, and the longer the list of official links gets, the more I prefer it. How about you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:45, 5 September 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for all your insight and explanations. I especially appreciate that polls should use the pages' referencing format, but the clarity over other ELLIST recommendations are also very good to know and understand. —Ost (talk) 18:21, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ "2020 Statewide General Election Night Reporting - Results". South Carolina Election Commission. November 10, 2020. Retrieved November 11, 2020.

Update wording of WP:INVOLVED

Moved to Wikipedia_talk:Administrators#Proposal_to_update_WP:_INVOLVE_language— Preceding unsigned comment added by Shushugah (talk • contribs) 14:25, 7 September 2024 (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.

WP:INVOLVED policy regulates permissible conduct of Admins and editors performing non-admin closures. This policy was created before the existence of WP:Contentious topics. Inside the first sentence In general, editors should not act as administrators in disputes in which they have been involved. (bold emphasis mine) the term dispute is not well defined, despite the fact that some WP:Contentious topics are exceptionally well defined, e.g WP:ARBPIA while others like WP:BLP are not narrow in scope. Inspired by the larger discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Possible_involvement_of_Admin_in_ARBPIA_area

My proposed re-wording (added text in green) of above sentence for minimal change would be:

In general, editors should not act as administrators in disputes in which they have been involved. When the editing area is covered under existing WP:Contentious topics, the definition of dispute scope may be broadened to include a larger subset of said contentious topic area to be defined by the Arbitration Committee.

This would allow us to avoid changing wording of WP:INVOLVED to litigate each individual contentious topic, while retaining flexibility. For example ARBCOM could clarify that ARBPIA could be envisioned as 'one dispute area', while WP:ARBAP2 might involve several (Trump, US voting rights etc..) and something like WP:BLP might not define any for purpose of WP:INVOLVED. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 10:53, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

I believe it is already covered by the "construed broadly" and "may be seen to be involved" portions of INVOLVED:

Involvement is construed broadly by the community to include current or past conflicts with an editor (or editors), and disputes on topics, regardless of the nature, age, or outcome of the dispute ... it is still the best practice in cases where an administrator may be seen to be involved to pass the matter to another administrator via the relevant noticeboards.

—Bagumba (talk) 11:31, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
I have notified the talk page of WP:INVOLVED. –Novem Linguae (talk) 11:42, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. The proposed added text doesn't make much sense to me. I think it could benefit from further workshopping. –Novem Linguae (talk) 11:51, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose Expectations of administrators in enforcing contentious topics are a matter for the Arbitration Committee as part of that procedure, see WP:CTOP#Administrators' role and expectations. Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 12:04, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
Since that links back to WP:INVOLVED, maybe that's the place to start? Selfstudier (talk) 12:09, 7 September 2024 (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.

unmerge

is there a way to unmerge wikipedia pages 2600:6C4E:CF0:9E0:6C5B:D27B:4CB:F909 (talk) 00:04, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Splitting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:07, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Should we stop using Wayback Machine and Internet Archive?

The following is copy-pasted from Wikipedia:Teahouse#Should we stop using Wayback Machine and Internet Archive?:

In light of recent developments in the U.S. court case Hachette v. Internet Archive, should Wikipedians stop using Internet Archive? What about Wayback Machine? If so, should that stopping be limited to Wikipedians in the U.S. (like me)? Ss0jse (talk) 21:49, 5 September 2024 (UTC)
What about U.S. government web pages, or other public domain content? Ss0jse (talk) 21:51, 5 September 2024 (UTC)
I mean, what about using Wayback Machine archives of U.S. government web pages or of other public domain content? Ss0jse (talk) 21:52, 5 September 2024 (UTC)
A question on changing policies would be more suitable for policy over at the Village Pump, but I see no reason for this to have any effect on us here whatsoever. The case here was very specifically about controlled digital lending. CoffeeCrumbs (talk) 22:23, 5 September 2024 (UTC)
Okay. Ss0jse (talk) 14:54, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

No. This judgement is completely irrelevant to the Wayback Machine, and not significant for any of the other ways we use the Internet Archive. In practice all that it will mean is that a small number of links in references/external links to books in their library might be broken. In the case of external links we'll just remove them if there is no other copy available. In the case of references then it doesn't affect the content at all, it just becomes slightly harder (but not impossible) to verify - we cite offline references all the time, and they are even explicitly allowed by policy. Thryduulf (talk) 15:14, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

+1 This is a legal determination for the WMF Office to make. This is not legal advice, but I agree with Thryduulf's reading of the case. As an aside, I'm not hopeful SCOTUS will take this case up. voorts (talk/contributions) 15:43, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
This has some slight relevence, at least to the degree that we cannot trust IA's own evaluation of the legality of their efforts (although that has been true for a while.)
One thing we should consider doing is altering the reference templates so that the Archived link only appears if the url-status is set to "dead". It seems to my not-a-lawyerly eyes to strain fair use claims when we are giving people that link to serve as a way around a paywall for commercially available copyrighted material.
Wikipedia for too long has treated IA as a sole good, without concern to copyright statuses, nor to the fact that they have been paying editors to skew Wikipedia toward them, in part to encourage used book sales. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 15:57, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
This has some slight relevence, at least to the degree that we cannot trust IA's own evaluation of the legality of their efforts ... The issue in this case was one of first impression and IA had a lot of amici briefs filed in support of their legal position, including the Wikimedia Foundation.
In any event, this case is solely related to IA's digital book lending program, and the court will likely order IA to remove the offending books. Wayback has been around for a long time and as far as I know none of the big media orgs have ever sued over it or indicated that they will sue over it. It's premature to start deprecating Wayback links or limiting their use. voorts (talk/contributions) 16:14, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
So should we rewrite WP:COPYVIOEL to say it's a-okay to be linking to sites that violate the copyrights of others, so long as they have not yet been specifically sued for the copyright violation we are linking to? IA is a confirmed piracy site, it just seems to be the one we pretend is okay because they put "Archive" in their name. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:44, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
Confirmed piracy according to whom? The US copyvio suit was resolved with a negotiated judgement, and there's an injunction on them lending these classes of books. Violating the injunction results in strictly defined penalties. If believe they are violating the injunction, you may wish to contact the parties' counsel to confirm -- I'd guess that'd be a faster and more reliable confirmation of copyvio than WMF counsel, since the original parties are motivated financially to enforce each potential violation.
With the injunction, we can be reasonably sure that book-lending that was considered to violate copyright in this judgement has all been removed. Furthermore, linking to the book does not violate copyright nor can it reasonably be considered to facilitate violating copyright (certainly now). The IA's action that was violating copyright in the NEL was controlled digital lending, which usually requires some kind of login to the site, and regardless can be (and is) deactivated site-wide. The NEL is gone, and our existing NEL book links should be fine as long as they continue go to some bibliographic info and are not otherwise broken.
Furthermore, even if IA admitted that its NEL was a "confirmed piracy site" or piracy operation (which they didn't, and keep in mind IA has not been charged criminally unlike something like megaupload), it does not make sources outside the NEL part of that operation (the scope of the lawsuit is only NEL book lending). SamuelRiv (talk) 18:06, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
According to both the court decision that their use was not fair use, and the appeals court confirmation.
With the injunction, I can confirm for you that they are still offering unauthorized electronic editions to which I own the copyright, so no, we cannot reasonably assume that the problem has been addressed.
The fact that IA hasn't admitted themselves to what they did does not obviate the rulings, nor should our standard be "avoid linking only to sites that have announced themselves to be pirates, yar har har." The idea that we should assume that even on a site that has already had identified piracy, we should assume that all their other files are okay is ludicrous. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 18:53, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
If your copyrighted materials are not now or were being offered in context of the NEL or controlled digital lending, then the case this past month has no relevance to you. If you have a direct copyright violation complaint, US law allows you to request removal from host websites, and you can see IA's procedure for it. Every major content-hosting site has DMCA takedown procedures, and every such site has had copyright-violating material be struck, legitimately, after such procedures were followed per applicable law. Such procedures, followed with such violating content, do not make such sites (like Youtube, Twitter, etc.) a "confirmed piracy site" in any meaningful manner. SamuelRiv (talk) 19:27, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
Yes, I know that the pirate site has a set of hoops they've put up in order to request that they stop one little piece of their piracy, and I've also seen them ignore that before. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 20:56, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
If they ignored your request to remove your copyrighted content, then speak to a lawyer, because you can cash in. But if this thread is no longer about NEL content then I don't think there's anything to discuss. SamuelRiv (talk) 23:45, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
Are you or your publisher a plaintiff in the suit? If not, the injunction doesn't cover your works. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:34, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
Also, if IA were a piracy site, they would just move their servers to a country where they didn't have to listen to the US courts. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:36, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
But the copyright laws do themselves cover my works. If we want to remove all restriction from directing people to pirate sites, we should say so up front. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 20:53, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
Nobody is proposing removing all restrictions regarding pirate sites, but nobody, including you, has provided any evidence that IA is a pirate site. Thryduulf (talk) 21:00, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
If large groups of rightsholders suing them, and multiple court rulings against IA is not sufficient for you, here is them offering an electronic edition of a book that I hold the compilation copyright as well as publishing rights on, my name is right there on the cover, and I am telling you that I have not licensed them nor anyone else to create an electronic edition of that book. I've seen a lot of links deleted for WP:COPYVIOEL before, and I have trouble thinking of any for which the evidence was greater than court rulings and copyright holders objections. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 21:11, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
If you're a publisher you should be aware of, or have counsel to advise you on, the relevant laws in your jurisdiction on libraries, inter-library loans of ebooks, and something if you are a member of a class settlement (or else whether you are covered by the AAP). Wikipedia talk pages are not the place to seek legal relief. (Comic relief, on the other hand, ...) SamuelRiv (talk) 00:01, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk pages are, however, the place to discuss Wikipedia applying our policies and guidelines, which do include WP:COPYVIOEL, much as everyone seems to want to whistle and look the other way. Attempting to silence me seems rather inappropriate. Folks are erecting exceptions for IA that I do not recall them every erecting in other copyvioel concerns. But thank you for explaining to me how I should run the business I've been running for a quarter century, or how easy it is to take on legally a business that's hundreds of times one's size. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 18:19, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
I looked at the book. It's not available for Controlled Digital Lending, and thus irrelevant to the Publishers case which concerns CDL only. -- GreenC 21:14, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
I have not licensed them nor anyone else to create an electronic edition of that book. Institutions like Google and Internet Archive don't need a license to digitize the book so long as they are only displaying short passages and search results, it is considered Fair Use. This was established and reestablished in the Google and Publishers cases. -- GreenC 21:41, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
According to them, they are not just displaying short passages and search results. They are telling people that they can log in and borrow the book for an hour, which would be their display of their complete electronic edition through a web browser. And I cannot point to any other WP:COPYVIOEL concern where we required a completed lawsuit to notice that copyrighted material is being offered without license, can you? -- Nat Gertler (talk) 06:35, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
If IA is making your book available contrary to the settlement then you contact their office as I linked above. If you are concerned that WP is facilitating copyright infringement on your material, then you contact admins per WP DMCA policy. The lawsuit on CDL is complete -- DMCA requests (or whatever your lawyer advises) are how you get it enforced. (And I imagine if you were to file a lawsuit, the very first question that will be asked is, "Did you send them a DMCA request?".) But please ask your lawyer first. (And when on the internet someone says "If you have personal legal concerns you should speak to your lawyer and our legal department", that's not them silencing you, that's just common sense.) SamuelRiv (talk) 16:34, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
You are right, it appears to have CDL. Then we need to look at the Publisher's settlement. According to the official statement:
The lawsuit only concerns our book lending program ie. CDL. The injunction clarifies that the Publisher Plaintiffs will notify us of their commercially available books, and the Internet Archive will expeditiously remove them from lending. Additionally, Judge Koeltl also signed an order in favor of the Internet Archive, agreeing with our request that the injunction should only cover books available in electronic format, and not the publishers’ full catalog of books in print. Separately, we have come to agreement with the Association of American Publishers (AAP) .. if we follow the same takedown procedures for any AAP-member publisher.
This book is not available for sale in electronic form, it's not in the Plaintiffs catalog, and I guess(?) you are not a member of AAP. So the settlement and injunction is probably not applicable to this book. Where does that leave it? I have no idea so I reached out at IA to see if they have further information. -- GreenC 03:48, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
@NatGertler: The book now says "Borrow Unavailable". It has been removed from CDL. They said it is unclear if there were any previous requests to remove CDL. Nevertheless, if you need further help with other books, ask them, and if you don't get a response, you can ask me. -- GreenC 19:24, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
Thank you. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:25, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
No. (Put aside that the proposition as worded fundamentally breaks WP itself.) The negotiated settlement has been in force for nearly a month now, with an injunction on the books at issue (which is a small subset of the total books that IA has available.) Furthermore, in my editing here, I have seen a full book-edition-in-copyright linked on IA library as a reference maybe... a couple times at most? The vast majority is non-lending books out of copyright and/or out of print. That is reinforced by how citations work in WP, and how our citation template works, passively encouraging more openly accessible means of verification (e.g. searchable passages of books as opposed to limited-time lending of entire books). SamuelRiv (talk) 16:33, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
  • Not at all, per all of the above. Cheers! BD2412 T 17:04, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
  • Internet Archive has been in compliance with the lower courts injunction and settlement for quite a while. See "What the Hachette v. Internet Archive Decision Means for Our Library" (Aug 2023) for the archive's official statement. -- GreenC 18:52, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
    GreenC is a paid agent of the Internet Archive, something which he should probably raise whenever he journeys into conversations like this. (It can be verified down at the bottom of his user page.) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 18:56, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
    That does not alter the factuality of his comment in any way. Thryduulf (talk) 19:13, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
    The factuality of his statement (to whatever degree it has; it's not something they're backing up with a reliable third-party source) does not obviate that they are a paid agent of the organization and should identify themself as such in such a discussion. As you have a conflict of interest, you must ensure everyone with whom you interact is aware of your paid status, in all discussions on Wikipedia pages within any namespace. (WP:UPE) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 21:01, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
    I've thought about it but my relation to the org is so far removed it gives the wrong impression to say "I work for IA", I'm certainly not an Agent, or posting on their behalf, I'm not technically an employee, or even been to their offices. My primary role here is as a 21-year Wikipedian posting for the benefit of other Wikipedia editors. Maybe in these discussions I could say something like "disclosed COI but not posting on their behalf", and leave it there. Also, feel free to reach out if you want help navigating the organization, possibly I could help, but not sure your situation. -- GreenC 17:49, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
    I think that would be appropriate; you are certainly welcome in these discussions, but such a disclosure would serve both those who don't know you have a WP:COI (and editing in discussions related to a client does indeed fit in that, even if it is not specifically what they are a client for) as well as those who do know that you have that link and may assume you are making statements at their behest. (And I'm saying that someone who tries to remember to note my own COIs even when all I'm doing is a very simple MOS fix.) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 18:08, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
    You seem to have a much greater COI with regards to the IA than GreenC does, yet you are giving the impression that your contributions to this discussion are more objective than GreenC's are. Thryduulf (talk) 18:22, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
    I'm sorry, I must've missed where having ones material copied by a site gives one a WP:COI; if that's the case, then basically everyone who has ever put anything on the web has that same conflict with IA. And can you point to anywhere where I state that GreenC has said anything not objective? The brief question of "factuality" is questioning at most the accuracy of a statement. Had he said "the sun is three feet across", that would be an objective statement, but not factual. If you have some concerns about impressions, you may want to deal with the impression you are creating trying to shout me down rather than addressing actual concerns. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 06:30, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
    Your COI is that you appear to be in an active dispute with the IA. Thryduulf (talk) 14:29, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
    I was in no active dispute before posting on this thread that I was someone whose books they had pirated. Indeed, it was pulling up the examples to answer those in the thread who wanted to deny what was going on that drove me to send a letter requesting that they stop hosting their unauthorized editions. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 16:22, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
    And you're a writer and a publisher, as stated on your user page, so you're not neutral on this topic either. Anomie⚔ 03:45, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
  • Not our job to make an such a determination. If the office wants to tell us to not use IA, they can do so.--Wehwalt (talk) 20:14, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
    If and when "the office" tells us that, how will I find out? Ss0jse (talk) 23:23, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
    In the extremely unlikely event that the WMF office decided to ban the use of the Wayback Machine, there would be:
  1. Outrage
  2. Panic
  3. Riots
  4. ???
  5. PROFIT
voorts (talk/contributions) 23:31, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
If the office (see WP:OFFICE) decided to ban linking to a site (regardless of which site and why) they would communicate that to us officially by posting on Meta (as I can't imagine such a ban applying to only one project) and cross-post it to various places on large projects. Editors would then disseminate that message elsewhere - you can guarantee that someone (whether the WMF or an editor) would post it to WP:AN for example. If the site is notable then it wont take long before the article is updated to reflect the ban and you'll see the decision discussed in countless internet forums and probably news publications too. Thryduulf (talk) 00:14, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
Agree with Thrydulf's assessment here. Wayback (normal archiving of URLs) isn't touched by this, and this only makes book copies on Internet Archive in question, which I've always felt was going to be a problem. Masem (t) 00:10, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

Explain !vote?

I have read WP:!VOTE, and I still don't really understand what it means when a closer says I see around 22 !votes endorsing the closure and 15 saying to overturn. Can someone explain properly and maybe rewrite the wp:!vote section? Contrary to the section, I very often see people saying it as if there was actually a vote, as above. It seems logically inconsistent to say "this is not a vote, however 5 people voted (or !voted) for this and 10 people voted for this". No matter how you phrase it, if there's two numbers and one is higher than the other, you are heavily implying it is actually a vote. MarkiPoli (talk) 13:51, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

@MarkiPoli: It sounds like you have figured it out fairly accurately. The "!vote" indicates how people "would have" voted, if a given proposal were to be put up to a vote. But it's not actually being put up to a vote (i.e. the number of "!votes" does not determine the result), and hence they are called "!votes". Fabrickator (talk) 15:31, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
I've discussed previously how it's a bit of jargon that I personally find unnecessary. For programmers who understand that "!" means "not", it generally means "I know this isn't supposed to be a vote but I'm framing my comment as a support/oppose vote anyway", or sometimes "I know this isn't supposed to be a vote, but we all know that the closer is going to treat the supports/opposes as a straw poll". However in some instances it's just used as a synonym for participate/participation (for example, every single use at Wikipedia:Advice for RfA candidates) or for actual voting. For better or worse, jargon forms part of a group's culture, and a lot of people are accustomed to this bit of culture. isaacl (talk) 17:32, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
I share your frustration, which I think in part is the cognitive dissonance of always reading in my head "!vote" as "not-vote". Perhaps the better metaphor would be a dynamic object type for discussion participation, that can then be down-cast into a static 'vote' type? Then for example one could say, "I 'cast my vote' for option A." SamuelRiv (talk) 18:06, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
I see we're moving even further into the obscurity of the programming domain... The thing is, since the opinions aren't supposed to be interpreted in an individual binary manner, the object in question shouldn't support a conversion operator to support/oppose. isaacl (talk) 18:22, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Voting is evil, Wikipedia:Consensus is not a vote Andre🚐 19:44, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
  • Throwing my 2¢ in... Essentially the closer should first weigh arguments based on their level of policy/guideline-reinforced reasoning. If the balance between opposing viewpoints is roughly equal at this stage (e.g., a trump card such as a BLP violation has not been played), then the closer essentially moves on to a head count and tallies the !votes. Strength of argument still matters, of course. Simple WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT comments could be ignored. Although we don't start with the tally, we might end with one. In fact, that's just how it plays out a vast majority of the time. --GoneIn60 (talk) 21:13, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
    Although this may be a difference without a distinction, it's not exactly the case that the evaluator of consensus might move onto a head count, but that in cases where there is no overriding policy, the numbers of supporters of a particular argument gets used as a proxy for evaluating its strength. And since the evaluator isn't supposed to evaluating the positions themselves, but evaluating the consensus of the participants regarding the positions, there aren't a lot of good options for weighing the arguments in other ways. Thus in practice, it can be difficult for an evaluator to go against the straw poll results, inevitably facing challenges for their reasoning, which exerts subtle pressure to follow the head count. isaacl (talk) 22:24, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
    Or as WP:DISCARD frames it, judge "which view has the predominant number of responsible Wikipedians supporting it", which in the end can boil down to a head count depending on your perspective of things. The participant(s) may not realize the process involved – what factors were eliminated – before that point was reached. -- GoneIn60 (talk) 22:46, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
    Worth noting that is an info page, and not guideline or policy per se writ large. Andre🚐 22:53, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
    Ah yes, worth noting for anyone who's reading them. ;-) GoneIn60 (talk) 00:27, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
!vote n. (pronounced "not-vote"): a misnomer invented by early Wikipedians who erroneously believed that a weighted vote was not a vote at all, and that a decision-making process that uses weighted voting is not democracy. Levivich (talk) 23:18, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
One of the main reasons that Wikipedia is not a democracy is that it's not a government or any kind of body with rights or responsibilities. It's an encyclopedia full of processes, it's more of a product than it is an organization, and organizationally, it's designed as a charitable nonprofit. Boards of directors of corporations have votes, with different weights, but nobody says the board is a democracy and that it's 1 person, 1 vote. Disenfranchisement, for example, is a crime in democracy, but is permissible in a board. Andre🚐 23:21, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
Ah, here is one of those early Wikipedians now! Welcome back :-) Of course it's not a democracy, and I didn't say "a democracy," nor does WP:NOTDEMOCRACY say "a democracy". I said, and WP:NOTDEMOCRACY said, "not democracy," as in "not democratic." BTW, disenfranchisement is not a crime in all democracies. It was the law, part of the constitution, in the United States for a long time (and some say, in some parts, still is). Levivich (talk) 23:24, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
That's a good distinction to split, but still, I would argue, given the stakes are low, that Wikipedia is not democratic. Consensus is not a mechanism by which the rabble mob wins out by the numbers. The rabble mob could argumentum ad populum all day but if they are wrong according to the trusted closer/arbiter (used to be admins), well, they are wrong. Doesn't in practice happen often probably because the situations where a minority numerically stubbornly argued the correct interpretation and the closer found irregularities or non-policy abiding positions, do not occur in such significant number. Wikipedia is meritocratic at its heart, which has to do with its roots in the The Californian Ideology, namely techno-libertarians. Rule by reason, not rule by numbers. Andre🚐 23:30, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
Personally, I feel we're far more akin to a federated constitutional democracy than Galt's Gulch. Regards, Goldsztajn (talk) 23:52, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
I respectfully submit that may be an artifact of the reference point and the unavoidable fact of most English Wikipedians inhabiting one of the major parliamentary or constitutional domains. Also, while there's an overlap with the Objectivist crew, the techno-libertarians of Silicon Valley borrow a lot from both the mainstream social liberalism as well as the anarchism and socialist movements of the punk and acid hippie world of California computer scientists. In 2004 at least, Wikipedia quite decidedly did not want to have politicking such as populist electoralism ("adminship is not a big deal"), legal systems ("wikilawyering"), or extensive ceremony ("IAR") of something like a legislature. "Rough" is the operative word in consensus. Andre🚐 00:00, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
40%+ of the world's population live in federal states, more than half the world's population have democratic systems, we're just starting to look more like the rest of the world. Early Wikipedia from my experience was a weird amalgum of epistemological anarchism and tech bro libertarianism. Thankfully, the adults took over. :) Regards, Goldsztajn (talk) 00:35, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
I always thought we were an anarcho-syndicalist commune, taking it in turns to act as sort of executive officers for the week. (And we're an autonomous collective wrt the self-perpetuating autocracy that is the WMF.) (Jfc, this is way too close to the truth.) SamuelRiv (talk) 03:11, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
(...But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting, by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more important matters, except in reality, everyone is just a peasant pushing mud around for no reason? Way too close to the truth.) Levivich (talk) 03:22, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
Ya know, in all seriousness, syndicalism by sortition, in which a limited number of admin positions (and/or other elevated rights) are distributed on a rotating basis among EC editors might actually be a really fantastic idea. (Other admins stay long-term as-is.) One way to boost engagement and responsible editing is to endow responsibility (and ofc take it away as soon as it's abused), and it's also a way to get motivated editors motivated even more, or to take on projects on the site they might otherwise not. (Admittedly, these are not the problems for which sortition has been studied to have an ameliorating effect -- see citations in article -- we don't have anything like a problem of a broken polarized electoral process that encourages extremist politics and anticompromise -- so the benefits I suggest seem largely unexplored in the literature.) SamuelRiv (talk) 04:46, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
nonsensus n.: One of the founding myths of Wikipedia, which claims that in between everybody writing their opinion, and the closer writing the closing statement, an invisible, undefinable, indescribable, but nevertheless real phenomenon called "consensus" arises. According to the Nonsensus Myth, when writing a closing statement, the closer is not counting votes, nor giving their own opinion, but rather observing and reporting on the "consensus" phenomenon. The Nonsensus Myth holds that in some cases, "consensus" is said to be clear enough that everybody can observe it; although this only happens in numerical supermajorities, the Nonsensus Myth insists that it is not the numerical supermajority that determines the clarity of the consensus. In cases in which it is said that the "consensus" is not clear, which are almost always cases where there is no numerical supermajority, the Nonsensus Myth teaches that only a person who never wrote an opinion about a matter under discussion, called an "uninvolved" person, can accurately observe the "consensus" phenomenon, while continuing to insist that the lack of numerical supermajority is not the reason that "consensus" cannot be clearly seen by everyone, but only be an "uninvolved" person.
In reality, what happens is that the votes are being weighted against certain objective criteria -- do they align with policies and guidelines, do they accurately reflect reliable sources, are they made by a blocked or banned user, etc. -- and then the outcome is based on which side is in the majority after the weighing is done. It's not really anything more complex than that. Levivich (talk) 23:56, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
For an invisible and indescribable phenomenon, quite a few people have described it adequately enough. I recognize you're being a bit good-naturedly snarky or tongue-in-cheek, but I sure hope that people closing discussions in 2024 at least have some understanding of the supermajority merely being an indicator or a rule of thumb that should not substitute for analysis. Andre🚐 00:03, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
  • On occasion, you will see in closing statements something like, 'those voicing opposition agree with the supports that . . .' -- the general idea being, the process searches beyond the raw count. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 23:57, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
    In the early days of WP, RFCs were more focused on trying to cobble together compromises, rather than simply counting opinions on yes/no questions. Doing a quick (often informal) !vote tally helped editors see which direction people were leaning. Indeed you might see several !vote tallies in the same RFC (to see if we were inching towards compromise). They were part of the process, but not necessarily the end of the process. Blueboar (talk) 00:12, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Discussion about Notability and British Rail stations

You are invited to join discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability#RfC: Notability and British Rail stations. —Matrix(!) {user - talk? - uselesscontributions} 20:28, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Must each entry of a disambiguation page link to an article?

Following the thread on Talk:Rawdog, I think it appropriate to change Rawdog from a redirect to a disambiguation page as the current viral phenomenon is different from the current redirected article, with a second entry describing the alternative meaning. Wikishovel reverted it.

As the phenomenon may be too transient to warrant a new article, it seems out of place in Air travel#Commercial_air_travel, and yet a reader looking up "rawdogging" might be confused by its earlier meaning, what's the best way to handle this?

Thanks, cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 11:27, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

There's nothing we're disambiguating if there's no content to point to. Remsense ‥ 论 11:29, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. So should a new article be created or a section added under Air travel#Commercial_air_travel? cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 11:58, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
That would depend on whether we have reliable secondary sources that would support an article or section. Do we have such sourcing? Blueboar (talk) 12:06, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
There are probably enough sources to justify an entry in a list such as the List of Internet phenomena. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:55, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
First, not clear why this is at VPP. Second, the rawdogging on flights thing is a passing fad that will have no lasting significance or notability and we should not create an article on it. voorts (talk/contributions) 13:41, 10 September 2024 (UTC)
The question here is about inclusion in a disambiguation page. We have a rule for that, WP:DABMENTION, under which it is generally appropriate to include on a disambiguation page items that do not have an article of their own, but which are mentioned in other articles. There has been some dissension over the contours of this rule, particularly where there are disambiguation pages containing nothing but WP:DABMENTION links, but its aptness becomes obvious when things having multiple names are considered (e.g., of course we are going to list IBM on Big Blue (disambiguation)). BD2412 T 01:45, 11 September 2024 (UTC)
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