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Policy
Starting a compilation of Wikipedia policies
I took long hours to condense core content policies into one document. By my calculations, I can retain at least 95% of the meaning of the policies, including most of their intricacies and details, by using only about a third of space that the policies and guidelines, scattered among multiple pages, now take (I estimated from raw text that the policies and guidelines I summarised have about 530 KB of raw text but under the compilation have just 173 KB - still a lot but much better).
It was a hard task and appears about as hard as working in one person to recompile the Constitution of Alabama - a ridiculously long document running at 373K words - 420K words before 2022 (for comparison, War and Peace is 587K words, and there's a good reason they publish it in volumes), but I think it is more than worth it, as people will have a unified set of policies that will be easier to read for people because there's gonna be much less of that but reflecting the same meaning. The overabundance of policies is one reason we have few new editors - there are too many rules, and then folks just randomly throw WP or MOS shortcuts not immediately obvious to the bystander, and suddenly nobody wants to join a project with United States Code-long rules and obscure jargon.
I will appreciate all feedback from you - positive or negative - and preferably some help into condensing further policies and guidelines, such as those about conduct, legal, editing etc. into one page where everything belongs.
I wish you well in your endeavour, but am worried that it will fail in the end because everyone thinks that "their" sub-sub-clause is vitally important. I admit that I rarely look at policies or guidelines now, but find a few basic ideas, along with common sense, to work. Phil Bridger (talk) 12:14, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That works for me as well (I normally look into the rules on an ad hoc basis), but then you wouldn't need all those volumes of tiny rules covering, like, 99% of cases, and yet here we are. Also, admins themselves need a clear set of rules for proper enforcement (even if you catch the gist that the persob is just NOTHERE - an essay btw - you still kinda need a more concrete reason that just "that's my hunch")
It's like with RL: pretty common-sense that you shouldn't kill or rob anyone, or what appears common-sense like not using the army or the government to finance/securre your own reelection campaign, and yet these are codified lest anyone have an idea to bend the rules. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 17:29, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This exists WP:Nutshell and I think your effort is noble but better focused on improving accessible language and navigation of existing guidelines for newcomers. Twinkle has feature to welcome new users for example. WP:Mentor finds ways to automate assisting newbies. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 12:47, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just to pick one example. There's no policy that an article must have (any) sources, let alone one. Yet we consistently advise new users to create articles with multiple sources. Save the edge cases and careful readings of guidelines/policies for advanced users who want to push the margins or change consensus. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 12:49, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Actually there very much are two policies that prohibit articles without sources:
Verifiability says that you should only add content that you can check against a reliable source, and that you can remove any unsourced content
No original research says you just can't make stuff up. The only way you can have some sort of content is if it can be supported by a reliable source. Technically just have to demonstrate that the source for the passage is somewhere but if you don't provide it in the article, you can totally expect it to be removed and it's gonna be your problem.
No, policy prohibits unverifiable articles, not unsourced articles. Sources are required for BLPs and anything that is likely to be challenged should include a source (but this doesn't have to be inline). An article List of uncontroversial statements of fact consisting of things like "The sky is blue", "Many people are Catholics", "The 1970s happened before the 1980s", etc could be completely fine (it would be deleted, but for reasons completely unrelated to not having sources). Thryduulf (talk) 17:28, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Look, I'm not making this up:
Any material lacking an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports[b] the material may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source
Which de facto means that if you are adding unsourced content, you are wasting your time as any editor may come by and just remove what you wrote, tell you "lacks an inline citation, I don't care why, pics or it didn't happen" and you are gonna still default to having to add a source (and then again giving time to fix it is a courtesy you needn't, though probably should, extend; though if you have the means to fix it yourself, you should do it)
So there's no obligation to source an article only in the most literal reading of policies. Anyone can enforce this policy provision. WP:SKYISBLUE is just an essay, although one with a pretty large following (and which totally makes sense for me, which is why there is a footnote to that effect) Szmenderowiecki (talk) 17:47, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
... any editor may come by and just remove what you wrote ...: the operative word is may. The reality is there's loads of unsourced text on WP, much of which will take years for it to be challenged, if ever. —Bagumba (talk) 18:29, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It has been tried before. Take a look at Wikipedia:Attribution, an attempt 18 years ago to consolidate some policies. Some very active and well regarded Wikipedians put a lot of time and effort into that proposal, but it was rejected by the community. Consensus can change, but I suspect the community remains just as resistant to change as it was then. Donald Albury20:07, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So I did read the poll, and a lot of stuff that was probably relevant here doesn't apply:
Users were complaining about lack of participation/that proposal being forced down their throats as policy - not an issue here (yet)
Merger of NOR, V, RS didn't appeal to people - not abolishing them, just giving sections to these concepts, not a problem.
Users complained about one massive page, or that they preferred separate policies rather than a massive policy code - well that is an issue to discuss but again it's not something that should extinguish all debate before it even starts.
Disgusted that truth is deprioritised - kinda not applicable here, because I'm not changing the framing of policy, just condensing it.
Change is unnecessary - again, debatable but let's have that debate in the first place
WP-links - well, you will have them all you like. Again, something to be discussed.
Assessment of any changes and their impact on disputes - to be discussed, again. This is how rulemaking process should work.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" - my whole point is that it is, in fact, broke, so needs fixing.
And again, you can say "meh, we tried eons ago and it didn't work, why bother anymore" but that's gonna be a catch-22, because nothing will change without discussion, which you don't want to hold anyway.
I believe the attitude should be "OK, let's see what you did there and if it makes any sense". It would be another thing if you told me why what I did was bullshit, which is fine. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 18:45, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I know, but that's not the point of the compilation. What you are pointing to has a different purpose.
Nutshell, WP:5P etc. is a post hoc summary of policies and guidelines that summarise the main goals in slogans. Just like a company saying "we want to increase the market share; we want good treatment of workers" but not saying how.
WP:SIMPLE is a very high-level summary of policies and guidelines. It's the company analogue of saying: Good treatment of workers means paying more than the minimum wage, giving them extra breaks, paid leave and some other perks, without telling much specifics.
The body of the policies and guidelines is like all internal company directives about pay grades, conditions of getting worker benefits, levels of compensation, powers of HR/executives etc. This page intends to clean up all this body of policies and codify them in a couple of places, grouped by category, so that we remove unnecessary bloat, as in too many redundancies and passages repeated across different policy pages, extraneous comments etc.
@Szmenderowiecki, I don't feel like you're hearing what people are telling you, so l'm going to try a completely different, un-Wikipedian way of explaining this, because the previous efforts haven't worked, and maybe this will get your attention. Here's my new way:
Hi, Szmenderowiecki, and welcome to Wikipedia! I see you've been editing for just four and a half years, and that you've made a few hundred edits at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, which I really appreciate. I don't know if you knew this, but you're in the top half a percent of contributors for all time. I also notice that you've never edited a single policy, and you have only made one small, uncontroversial edit to a guideline.
Just so you know, most of the people who have responded to you in this discussion have been editing for 15 to 20 years, and have made between 50,000 and 170,000 edits. Also, relevantly, we've been much more active in developing Wikipedia's policy and guideline ecosystem. If you'd like to see an incomplete overview of my own policy-related work, then you can start at User:WhatamIdoing#Policies and guidelines you can ask me about.
Now that you understand who's at the table for this discussion, I want to point out that there is an English saying that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Every person in this discussion has more experience than you, and every single one of them thinks that, even though your goal is laudable and praiseworthy and at least partially shared by everyone here, your approach is not likely to be successful. It is, of course, possible that you know better than any of us and that rushing ahead is a great idea, but I suggest to you that it is unlikely that all of us are wrong in urging caution and small steps.
If you think you could slow down and get some more experience, and if you're willing to consider doing this over the space of years, then I think we could help set you up for success. For example, if we implemented this idea, that would get about 300 words out of a policy. The next step is to write a good RFC question. If you're interested in this, you could get some practical experience by helping out. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:26, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if you realise it, and I guess you didn't mean it, but the comment has a very strong patronising "you are too young to understand" vibe which I have a hard time shaking off rn.
I asked you for specific input in opinion and help, and I just think the folks who suggested Nutshell etc. misunderstood my intentions. I apologise if I wasn't clear. My intent is to retain the same scope and level of detail but in fewer words.
If what you meant is to do it in increments, fine, that's an option, still I'd love some feedback if I fucked up with the text in the first place. That is valuable. I'm open to discuss it one-by-one. I will hear input from people who actually drafted policies. That was what I intended to do anyway. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 23:30, 24 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You've dropped things, rearranged things, and changed things, and I suspect you have done this without knowing what effects any of that will have.
For example, you've added the word secondary to the WP:GNG, and swapped in a description for the WP:SIGCOV language:
Original: "A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject."
Yours: A topic generally may have a stand-alone article or list when several reliablesecondary sources that are independent of the subject address the topic directly and in detail, so that editors do not have to resort to original research.
I've been trying to get a definition of SIGCOV for years (and years), and failing repeatedly because nobody wants to admit how long (or, perhaps more precisely, how low) "in detail" actually is, for fear that some "unworthy" subject might deliberately seek a qualifying level of independent media coverage. The NOR line in the GNG is basically worthless, and AFAICT removing it would have no effect whatsoever on AFD outcomes, but the fear of making changes to such a high-visibility sentence will likely prevent us from fixing that. Your [e] footnote requires a huge amount of work (e.g., primary sources aren't always about events, sources don't have to adhere to the neutral point of view, a smaller number of high-quality sources is not automatically less indicative of notability than a large number of worse sources).
At the time we started leaning on secondary sources (about 15 years ago), we had a lot of editors who thought that secondary was a fancy way to spell independent. You have added a requirement for secondary sources that does not actually appear in the GNG statement (though it is in the explanations). The GNG offers a conditional rebuttable presumption, which you have turned into a statement of permission (may/are allowed to have...). The GNG says that multiple sources are only "generally expected", rather than required, and you have changed that. Oh, and "several" is often interpreted, at least in American English, as meaning "four" (a=one, a couple=two, a few=three, several=four), whereas the GNG is usually looking for "two".
Among the things you haven't resolved is whether the sources for an article must be considered in isolation. For example:
If I have ten brief independent secondary sources, is that multiple+independent+secondary+SIGCOV, or just multiple+independent+secondary and no SIGCOV?
If I have SIGCOV in a very lengthy, extremely detailed independent primary source, and I have a non-SIGCOV secondary source, does that add up to multiple+independent+SIGCOV+secondary and therefore notability overall, or do I have to get all three key qualities (independent+secondary+SIGCOV) in each source separately?
@Szmenderowiecki, just so you know, I'm always going to be interested in this. If you want to talk about how to improve our written policies and guidelines, then feel free to drop by User talk:WhatamIdoing and tell me about your ideas. It doesn't matter to me if that's that's next month, or next year, or next decade – I'd be happy to hear your ideas whenever you want to share them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:19, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I'm finally back after fixing my phone with 2FA, I will respond to your suggestions above on the user talk page. It will be there in an hour or two. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 19:31, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If anything, the project would benefit from more "fresh eyes"—editors with enough experience to speak somewhat intelligently about these issues, but without so much experience that they are heavily invested in the status quo. There is a strong, almost indisputable case that current PAGs are far too convoluted and complex for the project's good. As a practical matter, the core problem is that the self-selected self-governance model, which created the problem, is incapable of addressing it. Resistance is futile; hence my semi-retirement after about ten years of futile resistance. ―Mandruss☎02:54, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would add that it's useful to hear from editors who still remember their first few edits, because a sentence that makes sense to the "old hands" isn't necessarily any good for the majority of editors. An actual majority of editors has made five or fewer edits, total, ever. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:02, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It might be "useful" in supporting the position that current PAGs are far too convoluted and complex for the project's good (but I think that's self-evident). As for fixing the problem, not so much. Incremental change is never going to be enough; what's needed is massive overhaul, and that's just not going to happen under the current model. Meanwhile, the current model is sacrosanct. ―Mandruss☎04:45, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'll confess that I rarely look at the written policies & guidelines, & mostly use them as a citation when I need to emphasize a point to another editor. I consider what they say is basic common sense, but I've been around so long that I've probably internalized all of the important points. (This is not to say that the original poster is wasting their time. The written policies & guidelines have been considered a mess for countless years.) -- llywrch (talk) 01:49, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is part of the reason why English Wikipedia's guidance is sprawling: a lot of additions get made because a situation arises, some people say "we should have a rule for that", it gets added with a shortcut used for jargon, and editors brandish it in future discussions. As I've written before, it would be better to address problems without creating new specialized rules. But in English Wikipedia's current decision-making environment, there is little appetite to delegate to a working group to more effectively rewrite any pages. Amongst those who like to discuss these matters, there are enough editors who want to be able to weigh in on each sentence that it's hard to modify existing guidance pages, and instead we accrete more. Writing well is hard; writing well in a group is even more so. The irony of a crowd-sourced web site is that crowd-sourcing works best for making incremental changes, but consumes a lot of editor time in discussion for larger-scale changes. Which is why the path of least resistance for modifying guidance pages (and articles too) is to add a few sentences, rather than rework the pages. isaacl (talk) 23:22, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As a new editor, adopting this would help me contribute more effectively. I would cautiously suggest that it seems like people know too many abbreviations. Support ForksForks (talk) 22:08, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And we use different WP:UPPERCASE for the same page/section, sometimes resulting in one editor claiming that "WP:PAGE" supports his view and the next saying that "WP:SAMEPAGE" requires the opposite, and neither of them realize that they're talking about the same page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:35, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see any substantive argument that our current P&G structure / the ability for users to peruse it is actually problematic. It should be telling that those editors generally seeing potential in this are relatively new, and those who don't are relatively experienced. That's not (just) survivorship bias, that's experience indicating that what is perceived by some newer editors as a pedagogical issue is (as stated above) actually just the inherent difficulties in learning how to do something conceptually multifaceted and difficult.
Editing is just hard intellectually and socially, and there's no shortcut to becoming familiar with it to be found in compiling one huge document people will not be able to digest immediately versus having several documents. Remsense ‥ 论22:18, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with the inherent difficulties in learning how to do something conceptually multifaceted and difficult, but I believe there are more effective and efficient ways to communicate the PAGs than our current structure. I also believe it is pretty much impossible to replace the current structure with a more effective one, having seen what it takes to add a sentence to a policy. Schazjmd(talk)23:32, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think there are substantial improvements that can be made throughout each policy, or even refactoring involving multiple policies, but I think on the broadest level the modular P&G structure has no actual downsides—this isn't Justinian's code. Remsense ‥ 论23:36, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Remsense No, and neither was that my point. The whole structure remains modular, just the modules are larger. As in, when you open a typical English textbook for foreigners, you have six books (A1-C2), each having 8-12 units.
Right now you have a separate page for every unit. I propose a separate page for a whole book, and all units get codified in one book.
So no, it's not gonna be one mammoth document, but maybe 5-8 big ones. Again, not even touching the Manual of Style.
That is more or less the reason why civil law countries have law codes. Instead of the law being scattered around 20-30 acts, you have a big one, but it resolves like 90-95% of cases. Any additional laws just build up on the codes. And even for American folks, the United States Code is sorted into 53 titles, and that organisation is in some sense not unlike that of civil law codes.
The downside is that yes, you get a tl;dr document (if you need the short story, WP:SIMPLE is indeed what you are looking for). The upside though is that you actually don't have to repeat parts of other policies in other places. Note how WP:V repeats a lot of RS because without it, V would kinda fall apart. Or how WP:OR has to remind of "related policies". Look at any subject-specific reliability guideline - depending on the size, up to half of it is copypasta from WP:N, and the only reason, apart from making the PAGs internally structurally sound, is to try to show that the policies are interconnected. In that large document, the one thing that connects all these policies is at the very top: why we need them. Because right now it's scattered all over the place. Other than that, the idea is to avoid redundant repetition. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 19:49, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, because a navigation template, either the one at the top or at the bottom - not sure which you refer to - is not intended to answer what the policy says, only shows you the way to actual policies. It's just a signpost, and it should stay that way. Very useful, but are not the thing I propose.
Why do we need to start a complimentary, high-complexity codification of documents which are already all in the exact same place? Again, this isn't Justinian's code, it's simply not the case that policies are "scattered all over the place".Remsense ‥ 论20:45, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is not "complimentary", it is intended as a replacement. And I'd say the current system has way more complexity because you need a hundred pages or so, a couple of FAQs, explanatory essays that sometimes define scopes of guidelines (see WP:BIOMED) and a couple of essays that de facto have the force of a guideline.
And what's the "exact same place" anyway? I can think of no one such place other than a navigation template, and it's simply not good enough, because duplicating the same thing has numerous downsides. a) slightly different text will be interpreted slightly differently, and it's not like wikilawyering will disappear anytime soon, b) maintaining two instances of same text is harder than maintaining one, c) after a change on page A there may appear a contradiction either with same copy of policy on page B or with a different rule on page C, which the community may simply not notice at first.
And if you think there are substantial improvements that can be made throughout each policy, or even refactoring involving multiple policies, why haven't you proposed that yet? Like a rewrite of V or N or whatever? Szmenderowiecki (talk) 21:39, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
About WP:OR has to remind of "related policies": I wonder if we should pull that. It makes the pages longer and introduces some confusion (e.g., if someone cites WP:THISPAGE for a rule that actually belongs to WP:THATPAGE, but happens to get mentioned in WP:THISPAGE). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:29, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm all for condensing our guidance down where possible, but I have to agree with Remsense – I'm not sure the goal should be putting absolutely everything on a single page.
There are quite a few policies and guidelines which the average editor doesn't really need to understand in detail unless they're editing in the particular area where it applies. For example, you've included our guideline on reliable sources for medical topics in your compilation, but I'd say that's not a guideline every editor needs to know in detail. For the average editor, it's probably enough to know "medical topics have stricter standards on sourcing, and if medical topics ever come up in my editing there's a page out there I can consult for more information". I don't see the benefit in trying to squeeze the details of that guidance onto a single page together with every other policy.
Sometimes there's a good reason for guidance to be extremely detailed or unusually attentive to particular wording. Our notability guideline for companies comes to mind – it goes over what sourcing does and doesn't demonstrate notability in pretty exhaustive detail. But the details are there for good reason – there's a lot of bad actors out there who manipulate the system for commercial interests, so we need to be unusually strict and explicit about exactly how to determine notability.
Of course, there's still a lot of cases where these caveats don't apply and we really could condense things down without losing much. My advice would be a more targeted approach: rather than condensing everything at once, work out where the low-hanging fruit is and push for changes there. – Teratix₵13:11, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Or rather, do you mean, the response to the proposal has reminded you of "On Exactitude in Science"?
The notion that one condenses a vast network policies to a simplified reference document, a map if you will, is well-founded (and as others have pointed out, a similar concept exists already in explanatory essays WP:Nutshell and WP:SIMPLE). Many objections posted here seem to be that currently the simplified essay does not accurately represent every single paragraph of every single policy accurately.
Fwiw, I think a complete from-scratch attempt at simplified reference document every few years, to be measured against whatever already exists, is a good thing. As people choose to direct new editors to one version or another, or as new editors opine on one or another, maybe something appears completely superior. Or not -- we have a bunch of independent ways of presenting the basic P&G. Currently you can choose to link from between 5 or more independent general editing tutorial portals for newbies (WP:NEWBIE, Help:Introduction, Wikipedia:GLAM/Beginner's_guide_to_Wikipedia, WP:MAN, etc.).
An explanatory essay is not new policy, and as long as it is in userspace it does not require consensus. I frankly think some of the behavior so far has been disappointing to the spirit of VP: when someone asks for feedback on a work in progress here, then we should at minimum be constructive. (And to be sure: any feedback with a tldr of "don't do this" or "nobody wants it" or "put your effort somewhere else" is the opposite of constructive.) SamuelRiv (talk) 20:59, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just for clarity, what I would mean by "simplified" in this case is not "this is the TLDR version" - you have pointed to enough of that but "this is the new comprehensive version, essentially same content, but we completely reviewed the text and made it clearer, shorter, neater, better organised etc.", with a dollop of advice from WP:POSA and a sprinkle of other advice about concise writing. Other than that, I agree. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 20:13, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess I'd suggest to just keep your presentation delicate for a while. Presenting as an alternative/better tldr version might be received more openly, since you've seen the reaction here when talking about a total conceptual rules overhaul.
In evaluating the quality, since many P&G are separated into pages with separate Talk sections, you might take one section of your draft you think is pretty refined and present it to one of those pages to get feedback on whether it makes sense as a concise version, then make adjustments from there. Everyone here is aware of WP:Bloat, so after doing the refinement, go back to the section Talk page and say at some point, "what if this entire page were replaced with just this, would it break anything?", you might get a better feel for what's possible. SamuelRiv (talk) 21:58, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is, tl;drs are already there, and xkcd covers creating "this one tl;dr that solves everything" well. So I don't want to go that way.
As for your suggestions, I may be subjective in what I believe is refined, but let's try that. Just choose what you believe is the best summary out there. Just not the one that has cross-references to other policies in the text, because folks will cry wolf and claim that it's absolutely essential to understand the policy. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 22:25, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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 Albury21:31, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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., [1]) 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
@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)[reply]
@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)[reply]
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)[reply]
@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}}).
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 [2]. 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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:
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
+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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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. -- GreenC21:41, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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. -- GreenC03:48, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@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. -- GreenC19:24, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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. -- GreenC17:49, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
CSD X4 criterion proposal
Per WP:NSPORTS2022 Proposal 5 and the subsequent update to WP:SPORTSCRIT, there is consensus that sports biographies are not subject to WP:NEXIST and are automatically subject to deletion if they do not contain at least one source demonstrating significant coverage in the article. To this point, cleanup has been slow as a courtesy to AfD. I propose CSD X4 so the articles can be addressed without causing a significant backlog. X4 would only apply if there is unambiguously no source to demonstrate significant coverage in the article, meaning borderline sigcov would still need to go through AfD or PROD. Articles sourced entirely to databases or passing mentions would qualify for X4 deletion. X4 would be an alternative to mass AfD nominations, which will be the likely outcome if no action is taken. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:24, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't read the close of NSPORTS2022 as saying that such articles must be deleted, but rather that for an article to be created it must have at least one source with SIGCOV. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:32, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you! I considered this the most "central" location and went to notify other places, but I got distracted after adding it to COIN. I have no objections if anyone thinks this should be moved to WT:CSD. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:51, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Firstly new CSD criteria should be proposed at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion (I'll notify them for you) and should demonstrate that they meet all four requirements listed at WP:NEWCSD. My first impression is that this would fail at least point 1 (objective) because what coverage counts as "significant" is subjective and whether coverage meets that standard is frequently a matter of disagreement at AfD. AIUI there is also frequent disagreement about what counts as a database and whether database entries are always non-trivial coverage. Thryduulf (talk) 21:52, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy deletions are for situations where the deletion criterion is clear and the deletion of articles meeting that criterion is uncontroversial. Past discussions of sports stubs have made it obvious that both of these conditions are not met here. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:57, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I regularly see athlete articles prodded, in the list at WP:PRODSUM, often in large batches. I haven't been keeping track of how successful the prods are but I think it's a good thing to try first before resorting to an AfD. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:08, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
All right, thank you. I do feel a little silly now that the points above have been raised. I'm just working through the NPP backlog right now and trying to find some sort of way to make it more efficient when sorting the good from the bad. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 22:10, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If your goal is efficiency or a minimum of drama, I think that you should not try to delete any "borderline" cases. Using WP:PROD on egregious examples, with a good explanation and a link to the requirements, isn't likely to earn you many wiki-enemies. However, trying to remove (by any means: AFD, PROD, Draft:, etc.) any subject for which SIGCOV is perhaps a matter of judgement is not likely to win friends and influence people. In particular, I suggest turning a blind eye towards any subject that someone could claim as SIGCOV under WP:100WORDS. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:24, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are 3 things I want to see in any X series new criterion proposals. Firstly, I want to see a list of the pages subject to the new x criterion. This is typically a page compiled in user or project space somewhere. This both defines the scope (how many pages are we talking about), and lets people take random dip samples. The second thing I'm looking for is a consensus that many or most, but not all or nearly all, of the pages subject to the criterion should be deleted if the appropriate consensus based process was run in full. If all or almost all of the articles should be deleted, make a single mass nomination at the appropriate XFD, or else have a RFC linked from that XfD. The third is a limit date, or some other way to demonstrate that the flow of new articles into the X series eligible pool has stopped. This is to ensure that an x series criterion doesn't grow in scope. No opinion on the merits of these articles, but I do need this info before I can weigh if X4 is an appropriate response. Tazerdadog (talk) 01:42, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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.
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.
Can we discourage indiscriminate automatic addition of Wayback archive links on all external links?
There are a bunch of Wikipedian meat-bots running around with an automated tool which indiscriminately adds Wayback Machine links to every external link in every reference on one Wikipedia article after another, either as an archive-url parameter for CS1 or CS2 citation templates, or using the {{Webarchive}} template for ordinary wiki-markup links.
While the Wayback Machine is a wonderful and invaluable resource that I use multiple times a week, and I am all in favor of adding archives for dead links (such as User:InternetArchiveBot currently does), adding a wayback link for every external link on Wikipedia, including all of the still live and publicly accessible URLs, seems to me extremely spammy and moderately reader-hostile. It wastes a lot of space, is confusing to readers, wastes time/attention and causes confusion for editors trying to verify claims in articles, and seems mostly like a way of turning Wikipedia into a massive advertisement for the Internet Archive. I personally think the Internet Archive is wonderful and well worth supporting with money and use, but this method feels really icky and unjustified to me, not that different in spirit from Wikipedia adding banner ads for third-party charities or individual Wikipedians indiscriminately spamming links to their own published papers. It feels abusive of Wikipedia as a platform and of the Wikipedia community, and as far as I know there was never any consensus for it.
Can we formalize some kind of policy discouraging indiscriminate automatic addition of archive links? If human editors want to deliberately add individual specific wayback backups for still-living pages for some good reason (e.g. a website changed their content, substantially changed their formatting, or put up a paywall, in a way that makes the original content difficult to use for verifying the claims in the article) I have no problem with that. And again, as I said above I am all in favor of adding wayback backups (including automatically) to dead links.
One thing that I suggested above is that rather than discourage the creation of the archive link (which is quite understandable at least when the person originally constructing the reference wants to make it bulletproof), we have the cite templates only display the archive if the link status is "dead" or some similar status that indicates that the original link is no longer appropriate. (I also question whether we need the statement archived at Internet Archive displayed on references even when the original URL is dead; anyone following the archive will see the site it's at, it doesn't really inform the reader about the quality of the source material, and as you say, it does come across as advertising.) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 06:14, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This doesn't seem like a good solution to me. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for editors to manually and intentionally add archive backups for specific still-living pages, e.g. if the site is flaky and routinely goes offline, is notorious for regularly changing URLs, or has substantially changed the content of a specific linked page. However, for other links, a "just in case" backup in the article source serves no purpose. The action that is useful, for still living pages, is to explicitly ask the IA to crawl and archive the content of the page (e.g. by requesting that it crawl all pages linked from a particular Wikipedia article), so that there will be a backup in case the link ever rots. But that can be done from the IA site or some external script and shouldn't involve changing the source markup of a Wikipedia article. –jacobolus(t)06:30, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's NoMore404, which monitors for every link added to every Wiki project including all 300+ wiki languages, and saves it to the Wayback Machine within 24hrs. This is why the coverage for Wikipedia on the Wayback Machine is so good. There are various reasons some URLs might not get saved, thus I wish we had another service filling in the gaps ie. logging new URLs and checking they exist on Wayback a few days later, if not archiving them elsewhere (Ghost, ArchiveToday etc). -- GreenC00:37, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am aware that this is done, but can you link an example bot or script that is doing this? (As you note, IAbot does not.) The code people are using may just be hastily written without checks. I am opposed to adding such archive links indiscriminately to every citation:
Archive links added after the fact, when not for rescue/CPR purposes, should be dated as close as possible to the |access-date= parameter of the citation, and not to the date of the crawl (which may or may not be the case for a given userscript.) If the new |archive-date= parameter must be different, the cited text must be checked manually.
If no |access-date= parameter is given, the cited text must be checked manually. (In practice it may not be justified to date it to the day the original edit was made, and I doubt it's computationally feasible to back-trace a section of wikitext to its last edit in a bot.)
Some very few citation links might be explicitly meant to reference the live version of a website, such as a webapp or "current status of..." footnote.
However, if the |access-date= parameter is given in the citation, I don't see an issue with adding an archive link with |url-status=live as applicable. (Although we might consider querying more archiving sites than just IA when doing this.) SamuelRiv (talk) 16:51, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Here's an example edit, special:diff/1243928783, edit summary "Rescuing 13 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.9.5 Tag: IABotManagementConsole [1.3]". (This one is a particularly annoying common variant that adds wayback links for stuff like Google Books pages, bibcode links, etc.) I'm not trying to call out specific Wikipedians or publicly shame anyone. There are a bunch of people doing this type of edit using the same automated tool, often to many pages in quick succession. I think these kinds of edits are done in good faith, but I think we should have a policy page discouraging them. –jacobolus(t)17:46, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Jacobolus could you clarify if your objection is to the use per-se of IA, or to the fact that people are doing it indiscriminately in a bot-like manner? I routinely run IABot on my own articles and tell it to add links to anything it archives. I hope you're not objecting to that. RoySmith(talk)17:33, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I am objecting to adding archive links to "anything it archives". This is, in my opinion, a type of spam. Please use archive links (whether from the internet archive or some other site) for links where the original is dead, changed, or unreliable for some reason, not just for fluffing out the citations section with distracting and unnecessary clutter. –jacobolus(t)17:37, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't purely rhetorical, but one could plainly search for URLs of IAing Google Books and quite quickly get a sense of how common this indiscriminate archiving is and what it looks like. Remsense ‥ 论20:18, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I guess I'll have to respectfully disagree. The problem is that by the time a link goes dead, it's too late to archive it, and then it's lost. I wouldn't mind if the citation templates treated this in a less "fluffy" way, but I'd hate to see the archive information omitted completely. RoySmith(talk)17:45, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Here's an example from RoySmith: special:diff/1232611207 to Big Duck. Most (all?) of the archive links being added here go to still-living pages which are publicly accessible on the open internet, so the archive links are nothing more than clutter. "by the time a link goes dead, it's too late to archive it" – People should directly ask the IA to crawl and backup pages linked from Wikipedia. It is completely unnecessary to change the markup source of Wikipedia articles to accomplish this task. But to be honest, I don't mind that strongly if one of the primary authors of an article wants to go ham on the wayback links. Discussion of that choice could be contained to individual article talk pages and hashed out locally. But there are also folks doing large numbers of these edits to one page after another in a bot-like fashion, and at scale it's impossible for someone who disagrees to meaningfully revert or contest those changes without spending an even greater amount of time. I don't think there's any established consensus that such archive links should be added site-wide, so adding them automatically at scale is a kind of fait accompli. –jacobolus(t)17:52, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Adding the IA link into the citation template makes it much easier to find later should it be necessary. If it bothers you to see that, it's easy enough to add some custom CSS to hide those sections of the citation. I'd be happy to have the templates add some classes to the markup to make that easier to implement. RoySmith(talk)18:32, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It bothers me that we are spamming editors and readers in a way that seems abusive of Wikipedia's platform and community. Hiding what I personally see does not at all address my concerns. "much easier to find later should it be necessary" – this seems like nonsense to me. We are talking about the result of a fully automated tool without human inspection or intervention beyond clicking a submit button; the IABot is currently automatically "rescuing" dead links across the site without any human involvement at all, and will presumably continue to do so. Speaking as a human who constantly uses the Wayback Machine to find archived pages, it is trivial to go to web.archive.org, type a URL in the box, and then click through to see the various archived versions of that URL. –jacobolus(t)18:47, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Jacobolus: I just want to express the exact opposite position to your proposal.
Clicking on a link vs. going to the Wayback page, copy/pasting the url, possibly comparing alternative archive copies ... yet you say you're concerned for everybody else rather than just yourself? That makes no sense to me. Fabrickator (talk) 19:13, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Fabrickator You are not understanding my point. Let me try to be clearer. The claim is that we need to defensively add archive links to every external link because otherwise it is not "easy" enough to find the archive link in the event that the link rots and it becomes "necessary". My responses are: (1) it doesn't get any harder to manually trigger an archive bot/script years down line in the possible case that some links rot, (2) there's a continuously running automated process scanning the web for dead links and "rescuing" Wikipedia citations by adding wayback archive links, requiring no human intervention at all in the general case, and (3) even if this bot somehow doesn't catch a very occasional stray dead link and a human editor tries to verify a claim but ends up at a 404 page or whatever, it is quite trivial for a human editor to use the wayback machine from their browser (it takes no more than a few minutes to manually find the wayback link and add it to an article, and we are talking about a tiny number of links at that point). People running this script certainly aren't comparing various archived versions of every link. I have no problem at all if editors carefully manually inspect and think about how best to present every citation link to readers, sometimes making the specific individual decision to add an archive link. –jacobolus(t)20:34, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Jacobolus, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that the current system, which is:
The bot does everything automatically. Bonus: Since it's running soon after you added the source, it will (almost) always link to the correct archived page.
is inferior, because the alternative:
Wait until the link breaks
Trigger the bot manually.
Check the results.
Oops, it linked to an archived copy of the broken page.
Go to archive.org.
Paste the dead URL into the search box.
Manually check through various versions of the page to figure out which one ought to be given to readers.
Copy that URL.
Paste the archive URL into the Wikipedia article.
Figure out what the citation template requires for the date stamp (because it produces a red error message if you don't get it right).
is "very easy" and "quite trivial", right? Speaking just for myself, I don't feel like a 10-step process is "easy" or "trivial", especially compared to the option of "The bot does everything automatically". WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:32, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, this is a dramatic mischaracterization both of what I am saying and also of "the current system". I'm not sure what's going wrong with communication here, but I'll try briefly to clear things up before I have to go. The working parts of the "current system" is (1) the Internet Archive (IA) automatically checks nearly all external links added to Wikipedia and crawls them, adding snapshots of the pages they point at to the Wayback machine (henceforth WB), (2) anyone in the world can explicitly request that any arbitrary webpage and all of its outgoing links should be crawled and a new snapshot of each added to WB, (3) the IA runs some kind of automatic process checking the outbound links from Wikipedia and flagging them when they are no longer working, (4) User:InternetArchiveBot ("IABot") "rescues" dead links which appear on Wiki pages by adding WB snapshot links to Wikipedia article citations, without much need for human intervention (though sometimes the bot screws up somehow, or the archive contains the wrong content, or the website changed their URL scheme and there's still a living page at a new URL, etc., in which case a human can fix it). All of the above generally works great. It prevents a lot of link rot across Wikipedia, and I have no problem with it.
Additionally, there's a part of "the current system" that I find to be spammy, confusing, wasteful of space and attention in both output and source markup, unnecessary churn in page histories, without any obvious practical value, and not supported by current community consensus. Namely: (5) human "meatbots" run a semi-automated script, "IABotManagementConsole", which indiscriminately adds a WB snapshot link to every citation with an external link on it on a particular article, nearly all of which are working links to still-living pages accessible to anyone on the open internet. These editors are not checking anything manually or making careful choices, but just clicking one or two buttons, and their behavior is not fundamentally different from bots. Some of them are doing this repeatedly over and over again to dozens or hundreds of different pages which they have no other interaction with.
These edits are unnecessary, because in the event a link rots, the other parts of "the current system" already take care of it. Only a trivially tiny proportion of links rot and get clicked on by human editors trying to verify a claim before they have been "rescued", and in these cases, it takes about 1–2 minutes for the human editor to manually do the rescuing, or a few clicks to get a bot to do it. There's no "10-step process" involved. –jacobolus(t)05:57, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, the part I dispute is your claim that "in the event a link rots, the other parts of "the current system" already take care of it". I find that the post-rot "rescues" are worse quality (e.g., undetected 404 pages and redirects to the site's main page) than the archived links added pre-rot.
Why do you think that 1–2 minutes manual work per link – and realistically, we have to assume that they will all die some day, so for an article with ~15 sources, that's half an hour of manual time – better than clicking a button once and being done forever with all the (current) refs? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:09, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In my experience the "pre-rot archive" links also have a substantial proportion of mistakes, and would also routinely require manual attention. (Except we can skip it by just deleting those snapshot links as reader-hostile spam.) My own expectation is that the amount of manual work required for these is going to be nearly identical either way, except demanding backup links everywhere front-loads that manual effort and forces a human to double-check a wayback link for every link on the site instead of reserving manual checks for cases where it makes a difference. I imagine most of whatever difference you are seeing is selection bias: working links are relatively more likely to come from better managed websites which don't break their URLs as often and therefore tend to have working archived snapshot links as well. But if those pages do break at some point, they will still have working snapshot links. By comparison, broken links are relatively more likely to come from neglected or mismanaged websites. But if you find "post-rot rescue" links to often show the wrong thing, then that seems like a problem for bot authors to work on: for example, the bot could try to check for variants of the page and avoid 404 pages or versions where there is limited visible content, or could try to pick a snapshot date close to the access date described in a citation template, when presumably a human was able to view the content. –jacobolus(t)06:22, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the source of pages, this cavalier archiving behavior manifests as either apparent negligence or obsessive compulsion far too often in certain situations. "Indiscriminate" is the key word here. Remsense ‥ 论20:20, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I HAVE NOT read through (or digested via ChatGPT or similar summary agents) this entire lengthy thread, but I do think it has significant relevance as a point of discussion and policy. In the article OpenStreetMap, Citation#1 which relates to the very first changeset indexed by the OpenStreetMap software, the citation contained an archive link dated to 2018; the original webpage was dated to 2005. However, the earliest InternetArchive stored page is from 2014. I changed the archive link to the earliest version because the 2018 stored page contains comments that were added to the changeset after it was apparently "found" to be the first changeset, while the 2014 archived page contained no such comments. I believe this is a good example (of a specific type) countering indiscriminate archive link additions ... though, I've not nailed down that this was something along the meat-bot lines being discussed above. The change to the page can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=OpenStreetMap&diff=1245279923&oldid=1245279698 . Hope this helps the discussion a bit. Regards --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 02:29, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I very much agree with this. I used to be one of those editors that clicked the button and let IAbot run because I thought adding the archive links was an improvement to any article. I no longer think so, especially since I learned that Internet Archive archives all external links on Wikipedia anyway, so having the bot run doesn't actually archive the links, it just adds archive links to the citations, which is usually not helpful, unless the link is dead and IA has the full version (or to get around a paywall, but that's not really a kosher use). The archive links make citations harder to read and work with. It's even worse when the link being archived is useless, e.g. archiving Google Books pages because it's linked in a citation to the book (which doesn't archive the book!). Bottom line: I do not think the automatic addition of web archive links to citations is a good thing. I would support a change to IABot that it only adds archive links if |url-status=dead. I think I'm in the minority on this, though. Levivich (talk) 19:27, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If what you say in your first bit of bolding is true (I have no reason to doubt it but don't have time to check now) then I am in the same minority, if it really is a minority. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:40, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This being Wikipedia, I should cite my sources :-) IA in 2018: For more than 5 years, the Internet Archive has been archiving nearly every URL referenced in close to 300 wikipedia sites as soon as those links are added or changed at the rate of about 20 million URLs/week.WP:WAYBACK also says New URLs added to Wikipedia articles (but not other pages) are usually automatically archived by a bot. It also says Editors are encouraged to add an archive link as a part of each citation, which I think it should not say. BTW, another very easy solution to this would be to code the citation templates to not display archive links unless |url-status=dead. This could also probably be done as a CSS hack, so editors who didn't want to see those links for live URLs could turn them off as it were. Levivich (talk) 20:07, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One of the reasons for linking to wayback is so that we can continue to cite webpages that are no longer available, or have been significantly changed. But this raises red flags for me… I want to know WHY the cited source is no longer available or has changed. This question should always be asked before we link to wayback. The answer may require us to reassess whether the information in our article is out of date, and thus no longer accurate and verifiable. Blueboar (talk) 21:19, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In my experience, archive links for still-alive links could be useful, as the site may be temporarily down or region-blocked. I don't have a strong opinion on this, though, because for me personally it's not hard to manually open a link through the Web Archive. Levivich's solution seems good to me, but I also agree with jacobolus that there should be an option in IABot to archive all the links but not add them to the article. AstonishingTunesAdmirer連絡21:10, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I just tested it, it's not that, it still adds archive links to the article. As far as I understand, the bot makes a list of all references in the selected article, then saves each link through the Web Archive, and then adds links to these archived pages to the article. What jacobolus was talking about is skipping that final part, so the bot would save all links through the Web Archive, but would not add them to the article. AstonishingTunesAdmirer連絡21:30, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Jacobolus: You wrote: "You are not understanding my point. Let me try to be clearer." I hear your point, but I think it's a bad one. I'm unclear whether you object to the archive link being visible, being present when you edit the article, or being stored in the wikitext. Certainly I don't object to it not showing up when you view an article, and the details of how this is stored is something I should like to see improved (e.g. along the lines of storing the data in Wikidata and accessing it using {{cite q}}).
But even the possibility that the live url is temporarily not working (or permanently not working) is good enough reason to have the archive link handy. It's a bonus that there are other scenarios where it's useful ... e.g. some "multi-page" articles (requiring a different url to get to subsequent pages) may also have a link that displays all pages with a single url. You might suppose this is neither here nor there, but as an editor, I make such a decision as to which is preferred. I am unhappy about the nuisance of all this, but I am happy that we are not stuck with what unintelligent bots choose to do.
I would long for a bot that was smart enough to make good decisions, but I see no evidence that we have the appropriate technology to develop sufficiently intelligent bots, so we have a fallback of manually adding or editing archive links, yet the existing system is useful in that it makes a passable selection at least most of the time, yet somehow you are annoyed about the presence of that selection. I throw up my hands. Fabrickator (talk) 21:51, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"I'm unclear whether you object to the archive link being visible, being present when you edit the article, or being stored in the wikitext." – I am strongly opposed to the first, which seems like spam and is confusing to readers, and moderately opposed to the other two, which still add a lot of clutter to the markup for no practical benefit. "may also have a link that displays all pages with a single url" if you want to link the article title to one URL and also add a second URL to a consolidated version of the content, there's nothing stopping you. It would be extremely confusing to use the "archive-url" parameter for this, so please don't do that. "as an editor, I make such a decision" – again, I am mostly unhappy with automated tools imposing poor choices not backed by site consensus, not by human editors making specific decisions about individual links on single articles. The latter is entirely possible to discuss and work out in local talk pages. –jacobolus(t)22:03, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess my response to this would be "you never know when a publication/company could go down". Just as a recent example, Game Informer went down this year and there was a mad scramble to archive all of their website links and making sure all that was saved because GameStop couldn't be bothered to keep GI's history up. I'd rather be preventative and avoid stuff like that from occurring rather than being reactionary and having to scramble to archive a source if it goes down. ♠JCW555(talk)♠ 22:22, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"You never know" simply isn't a compelling enough argument to applied literally 100% of the time in favor of obvious clutter that has clear concrete disadvantages in the meanwhile. What is the aversion editors have against literally any discretion being applied here? Remsense ‥ 论22:52, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"obvious clutter that has clear concrete disadvantages in the meanwhile" this is your opinion, which is fine to hold of course, but I (and others) don't feel that way so don't try and speak for everyone. "Discretion" in this case would be "editors should have the same opinion as I do". I'd rather be proactive in archiving sources than be reactive. ♠JCW555(talk)♠ 23:05, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My opinion is putting emphasis on what are demonstrable, objective issues caused by the practice. You can have a different emphasis, but let's not pretend whether the issues even exist (which I've just elaborated upon below) are a matter of opinion themselves. Remsense ‥ 论23:08, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"what are demonstrable, objective issues caused by the practice" again, according to you. I, and others in this conversation don't agree with you. You can think it's a problem, others can think it's not a problem. That doesn't make either of us right of course, but I don't say my opinion is 100% true and everyone must agree with me. I only speak for me, not every editor on the platform. So again, don't speak for me or everyone on here. ♠JCW555(talk)♠ 23:19, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My browser crashing when I try to turn on syntax highlighting isn't a figment of my imagination or a mere aesthetic preference I have. In the general case it is a problem for me and for you for all intents and purposes, so you're not going to force me to mince words as such. Remsense ‥ 论23:20, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've read this whole discussion a couple of times now and I'm still not understanding what is problematic about including the archive links for active links. They are useful for temporary outages, region locking, verification of pages that have changed content, usurped domains (which are hard to detect automatically, which is why the WP:JUDI domains have to be tracked manually for example) and for other uses too. I also don't understand why some people in the discussion find the presentation of both live and archived links confusing - is this an actual problem that readers have noted or is it just a theoretical somebody might potentially be confused? I'm not attached to changing the display, but I am opposed to removing it without evidence that the current presentation is actually problematic and that the proposed alternative is actually an improvement. If anything, I would prefer to encourage the inclusion of archive links with every citation, because they are significantly valuable to maintaining the integrity of the encyclopaedia and allowing continued verification of our articles. I completely disagree that they are "clutter" and nobody has presented any arguments here that convince me that inclusion has any disadvantages at all, indeed quite the opposite. Thryduulf (talk) 22:57, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When they are clearly addressing one of your stated issues then of course they are useful. Otherwise, wikitext length itself plus its associated visual and technical complexity simply isn't free or essentially free: the additional bundle of parameters indiscriminately added to every citation adds visual clutter for editors to scroll through, which does make it harder to factor articles and understand their wikitext, and even the rendered article if the archive is not serving any clear function. It is not controversial that it can also lag the editor, especially when syntax highlighting is enabled. I am dead serious when I say there are articles I cannot comfortably edit in their present state, whereas I would be able to if every Google Books url didn't add nearly 1kB to the article size instead of 100B. If we're supposed to have archives on literally every external URL, then that should be added to the backend or something so we don't have to deal with it this way. Let's not treat it technically like a matter of discretion when it's actually not editorially. Remsense ‥ 论23:05, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When they are clearly addressing one of your stated issues they always address those stated issues, because it is not possible to predict when a site is down (temporarily or otherwise), whether any editors will be geolocked (e.g. many US news sites are blocked to editors in Europe but it is completely invisible to US readers which they are and which they aren't), etc. Thryduulf (talk) 23:15, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But it is actually possible to weigh some of these factors based on context. Plus, why are we a priori able to assume the IA is perfectly reliable in this way, but any other site isn't? Remsense ‥ 论23:19, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is possible for a human to weigh some of those factors in context, which means that as humans don't (and can't) evaluate every link in context in advance of every reader reading the article the links are always addressing the stated issues. We don't assume that IA is perfectly reliable, we know that the IA does not geoblock and is generally reliable, we also know that the combination of a link and an archive (IA isn't the only game in town, despite what this thread implies) is more reliable than a link alone. Thryduulf (talk) 00:03, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Right—all I am arguing for is that discretion is possible, and that it is still expected in the use of automatic tools like with any other dimension of editing.
As a total tangent, I've always wondered why it isn't possible to collapse CS1 archiving into two parameters—date and liveness. Surely it's pretty feasible to derive |archive_url= from the |url= and |archive_date= (etc.) already given? Remsense ‥ 论00:11, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, that makes sense. Do you think it would be viable for the "default mode" to assume IA with no redirect, and other configurations could be further specified if needed? As strong as my opinion is here, reducing the wikitext footprint of archiving would make it essentially a nonissue! Remsense ‥ 论00:20, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's a good idea, in my opinion. I think combined with an option to disable rendering for archive links on live sites it should solve most of the complaints (wikicode would be less cluttered, there would be fewer archive links on screen). But I think this more of a question to people working on the citation templates, whether it's hard to implement, etc. Pinging @Trappist the monk and Izno: how hard would it be to generate an archive link for a URL, so instead of {{cite web|url=https://en.wikipedia.org|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240501005015/https://en.wikipedia.org|archive-date=May 1, 2024}} you could do just {{cite web|url=https://en.wikipedia.org|archive-date=May 1, 2024}}, but with an option to provide archive-url if it differs from url (or you need a specific snapshot, I guess)? AstonishingTunesAdmirer連絡00:49, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You would need the full timestamp of the archive 20240501005015, so you need a separate parameter regardless |archive.org-id=20240501005015 or whatever. You would not be able to do it solely with a |archive-date=. Izno (talk) 01:02, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sure—I was envisioning a |archive_vendor= parameter (or something terser) in the de facto exceptional case when we're using something else, which would default to IA.Remsense ‥ 论 01:34, 9 September 2024 (UTC) Scratch that, it should've probably occurred to me sooner that this can remain minimally complicated by just assuming IA by default and specifying |archive-url= otherwise. Remsense ‥ 论05:01, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I do not think that making changes to cs1|2 in an attempt to curb annoying or bad societal behavior is a good idea. For the narrow question of hiding the archive information in a rendered citation, I can imagine having Module:Citation/CS1 wrap the live form (Archived from the original on <archive date>) in a css class so that individual editors may hide that portion of the rendered citation with something like this:
Another possibility is to get someone at WP:US/R to write a script that hides live archive info but also provides a clickable something so that that individual editors can show a citation's archive info if the want to see it.
@Thryduulf, I talked to the IA folks about this a while ago. The problem we have is that what the bot does violates our guideline at WP:ELCITE. The problem they have is that the bot is too simple-minded to know how to stay out of the ==External links== section. It takes an all-or-nothing approach to adding archive links in an article. (It also has had problems with incorrectly claiming that sites are dead.)
For clarity, in the ==External links== section, either of these is Y good (depending whether the link is live):
WP:ELDEAD agrees with you. We tend to keep archived copies of official links, and occasionally something that an editor thought was particularly valuable, but otherwise, they should usually be removed/replaced with something else. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:55, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing that's an issue with the implementation of the specific bot, not with the addition of archive links.
@JacobolusSome links should remain archived (e.g. official websites), some can (and should) be fixed by replacing them with an updated link the bot is not aware of, others should be removed. However that determination needs to be made by a human, and marking a link as dead is a very good way of letting humans know that a determination needs to be made. Thryduulf (talk) 00:07, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Adding {{dead link}} is not usually a good idea for the ==External links== section. However, in the specific case of WP:ELOFFICIAL links for which you believe a working website to be reasonable (e.g., a company that is still in existence), it may occasionally be appropriate as a temporary measure (e.g., until someone can find the new corporate website). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:05, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why is it not a good idea? It signifies that a human needs to make a decision about whether to remove the link, replace it with a working alternative or replace it with an archived version. Thryduulf (talk) 01:14, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can understand the impulse to kick the can down the road to a hypothetical future editor. However, WP:ELDEAD says that instead of doing that, you should normally update or remove dead links right now. We don't need one human to ask another human to make a decision. Just make the decision yourself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:49, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We aren't talking about humans adding the template (although it would be appropriate while a discussion is ongoing or while attempting to locate the new location), we're talking about it being added by a bot. Thryduulf (talk) 02:00, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are we? I thought this thread was primarily about edits like this one, which affects nothing outside of the ref tags, and that I was talking about my desire to prevent the bot from making edits like this one, which added:
{{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180101214652/https://www.irishfa.com/ifa-international/squads/senior-men/chris-brunt |date=1 January 2018 }}
in the ==External links== section. It is the location of this edit, rather than the substance of it, that I believe is inappropriate. If this edit were made inside ref tags, I'd never complain.
I understand that edits like this one (adding the dead link template) can't be easily improved upon, because all the bot can do, when it can't figure out how to fix it, is either ignore it or tag it. I might prefer ignoring it in that case (the domain works, and the reader could search from there; also, this specific bot sometimes finds itself blocked when the URL is working correctly for humans), but bots have limited capabilities. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:41, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The first is policy compliant, but irritates some editors when they are working in a wikitext editor. That first edit is the problem described at the top of this thread. I don't know how to solve that problem, or even if we should solve that problem.
The second is a violation of the Wikipedia:External links guideline and should stop. However, that will reportedly require more than a trivial bit of coding effort.
The third is perhaps discouraged under WP:EL, but I don't think we can realistically hope for the bot to do any better than that.
"primarily about edits like this one (special:diff/1244763493)" – No, this is not the type of edits we are discussing here. I think this edit – which is adding archived snapshot backups for dead links – is just fine, and my impression is that almost everyone appreciates such edits. –jacobolus(t)06:07, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This URL does not have a working wayback snapshot, so no the snapshot should not be added as a backup. (And if the wayback snapshot had been added by a human while the page was still alive, we'd still be seeing the same empty content, because this website served a broken page to the wayback crawler, and is still serving broken pages to me when I navigate there now.) If this link does not show the intended content it should just be deleted as a citation, and a human will have to find a working replacement source. Any human adding wayback snapshot links should be double-checking every single snapshot link and making sure to never add anything like this to Wikipedia. (For example, wayback backups of Google Books pages should never be added, because they are similarly broken.) However, that is not currently happening, because wayback links are being added indiscriminately – what I am complaining about here. –jacobolus(t)06:33, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
wayback backups of Google Books pages should never be added, because they are similarly broken – This is not always correct. Pre-2020 it archived just fine, but it's possible the new Google Books UI broke something. A magazine we extensively cited was removed from Google Books in 2022, leaving hundreds of 404 links. And I've personally fixed many of these using the Web Archive. See ref 5 in Respect (Shaquille O'Neal album) for an example. AstonishingTunesAdmirer連絡16:23, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is a different view of the same Google scan of the same magazine hosted on the same website (archive.org), just going through their front-end instead of a wayback snapshot of google books. If you think that either of the two links is an unacceptable copyright violation then the other link surely has the same status, and you should just remove the external link and leave readers to find a copy of the magazine on their own. (I don't have any idea why the magazine was removed from Google Books, or what the copyright status is of the IA-hosted scan.) –jacobolus(t)18:42, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
the other link surely has the same status – does it though? A snapshot of a web page is explicitly allowed per the policy. But I haven't seen any mentions of reuploading of the web page's content. I do agree with you, the full scan is infinitely more useful. But I want to link sources that: 1) another editor will not delete at some point in future (right now this area is much grayer than what is allowed explicitly); 2) Internet Archive itself will not delete at some point in future (they absolutely will the moment copyright holders notice it and/or decide that sending a DMCA request is worth the effort, but it's extremely unlikely they will go after the archived copy of Google Books). AstonishingTunesAdmirer連絡19:40, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to follow "However, if you know or reasonably suspect that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of copyright, do not link to that copy of the work without the permission of the copyright holder." and don't think the current copyright owner of Vibe gave permission for a scan to be hosted by third parties, then you should probably delete the links. I have no idea whether this media conglomerate that bought and shut down the magazine 10 years ago and now calls it a "leading entertainment and lifestyle brand delivering content across multiple media platforms to a diverse audience around the world" (i.e. a fancy blog/email newsletter) is going to be trying to scrub 15-year-old magazine scans from the internet. Maybe? Perhaps the Internet Archive should be gating access to similar still-copyrighted magazines behind their "borrow" feature. Personally I would just link to the IA copy, assuming that the publisher will sort things out with the IA, and if the book later ends up unavailable or deleted from the IA then Wikipedia could just take out the external link at that point and leave readers to find the magazine on their own if they want to verify the quotation. YMMV. –jacobolus(t)19:54, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Honestly, I was just as puzzled when they deleted it from Google Books. I tried emailing them to ask whether it's some mistake on their side and if they are planning on fixing it, but it looks like they only accept corporate email addresses. It appears that they also own Billboard magazine, which is still available at Google Books (it will be an even bigger problem if they delete that one), so who knows. But I think you are right, eventually all of these will be unavailable. A shame, really. AstonishingTunesAdmirer連絡20:51, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I too agree that we should discourage the blanket archiving of live links. It feels we're adding extraneous text to the references (and extraneous wikitext. Like jacobolus', my browser crashes when I turn on syntax highlighting on large pages; I wish it didn't) that are unlikely to be intentionally read or clicked on. Internet Archive is already doing us and our readers the great service of archiving pages linked to from our articles. If those links go dead, a bot is already doing the great service of linking to an IA snapshot of the page. I don't think the other much less common (I dare to assume) use cases merit so much text clutter. I agree with jacobolus that the scale of the linking feels like advertising for the service IA provides. Ajpolino (talk) 00:10, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From the description, it does not seem that the addition of such links is indiscriminate. As long as it is reasonable to believe that the AI links will persist, which I think we all hope they will, there are numerous good reasons to always have a backup for any external link that can be backed up. BD2412T03:43, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But you're not actually arguing that "the situation as described isn't indiscriminate"—instead it's "we don't need to discriminate". I put such a fine point on it because that's rhetorically what we're all hinging around, degrees of totality versus discretion. Remsense ‥ 论03:48, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's not what "indiscriminate" means. Were someone to create an article titled List of interesting news articles archived in the Internet Archive, and to populate this list with a random selection of a few hundred internet archive links, that would be indiscriminate. If someone were to linkeverywordinanarticle and provide an online dictionary reference for each word with a consequent Internet Archive link, that would be indiscriminate. However, were someone to create an article on a discrete and notable subject, including references to reliable online sources relevant to that subject, and were to then provide Internet Archive links as backup links for that set of sources, that would be the opposite of indiscriminate. That would be providing backup links to exactly parallel the sources relevant and appropriate to the article. BD2412T12:38, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Doing something without discriminating, such as adding archive links to every link without considering them individually, is precisely what the word "indiscriminate" means: it would make a good example for a dictionary. Doing something indiscriminately doesn't necessarily mean it is bad, inappropriate, irrelevant, or involves ill intent. For example, a parent might indiscriminately and unconditionally tell each of their children they love them. (Though I personally think indiscriminately adding archive links is bad and inappropriate, which is why I raised the issue here.) –jacobolus(t)14:36, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would say that fundamentally, if in a frequently-updating publication like a newspaper or magazine (or something else reasonably expected to possibly have updated content within a month or two), IABot uses an archive-date that does not exactly match the access-date, and the editor does not verify that the content sourced is still verified by that archived copy (or else the archived text still matches), then that is indiscriminate editing subject to concern.
@SamuelRiv: I agree with you, and up above, Blueboar raised the same issue: if the original source goes down, it's important to know why that is, is it because the article was retracted? If so, simply switching to the archive link is not good. If the original was updated, similarly using the outdated archive link is not good. So, indiscriminate is an issue. (And there are other indiscriminate issues, like archiving pages that make no sense to archive, such as YouTube pages [which don't archive the video] and Google Books pages [which don't archive the book].) Levivich (talk) 17:15, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If the article content cites a source at a specific date, then an archive link should also be at that date, regardless of whether that source was updated or retracted. Ideally, the person adding the archive link would also check whether the source and the content still match (V), and in the process they would also check the status of the source (RS) and consequently update the access-date. But people doing wide-scoped markup maintenance work are almost by definition not stopping every time to do fine-grained content maintenance work. If the article content matches the source at its access-date, then it is correctly cited. If an editor adds an updated version of the article without changing the content, then that's one way citation drift happens, and it may soon enough fail V. SamuelRiv (talk) 17:27, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, the whole purpose of references is to ensure our articles are verifiable, not that they are correct. Just because a paper is retracted doesn't mean that what we were citing it for is incorrect (it depends what we are citing it for and why it was retracted) - and in some cases we will still want to cite it because its retraction is notable. Thryduulf (talk) 20:33, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Raising my hand as agreeing with Remsense in general here. My objection is that unnecessary archive links are a waste of reader time. If the IA was fast, it would be one thing, but it's not fast at all. --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇04:39, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's a distinction we should be clear about.
Some editors object to displaying archive links when the original is working just fine.
Some editors object to huge long strings of wikitext, even if readers never see it.
The first group would be perfectly satisfied if this wikitext: {{cite book |url=https://example.com |title=Example Domain |website=example.com |access-date=2 September 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240908173056/http://example.com/ |archive-date=8 September 2024 |url-status=live}} was in the article, so long as all the readers saw was a simple "Example Domain". example.com. Retrieved 2 September 2023.
Thryduulf to their credit has also stressed above that "working for me right now" isn't always sufficient for "working just fine", as an ancillary point. Remsense ‥ 论05:25, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I support, in general, the archiving of as many reference urls on Wikipedia as possible. I don't think the "clutter" affects readers very much, since the reference section is not meant to be read through as prose. I think readers are getting with ease all of the useful information out of the citations they check out, assuming the citations are properly formatted. The presence of text like "Archived from the original on December 26, 2021", usually presented at or near the end of the citation, is not unduly burdensome on readers who don't care about archive links, and is obviously useful to those who do. I do think local consensus should be able to determine that a given article's citation style is not to use archive links for live urls. It's currently the case at Donald Trump, mainly for size reasons. Article creators with a preference for less archive-related text should be able to establish that style and not have it overridden unless there's a discussion that leads to consensus for inclusion. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 12:23, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How do we take them out once they're in? Manually? I'd like this idea except in practice it's fait accompli. Once someone pressed the button, the links are there to stay, unless someone else manually removes each one. Levivich (talk) 14:49, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think it's generally true that "established styles" need some vigilance to maintain and that the work needed is minimal if deviations are caught early. I think the only exception might be date style, since a script can semi-automate switches between styles. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 18:30, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What's really mind-boggling is that it already works that way! Store a date as 2024-09-10 and it'll display as 12 Sep 2024 or Sep 12, 2024 depending on article and user preferences. Still, people argue about, and change, the underlying code. Levivich (talk) 18:55, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If only we could agree that non-ambiguous ISO-compliant date formats like 2024-08 could be displayed as "August 2024" instead of throwing a red error message. (Yes, 2001-02 is ambiguous. But most of them aren't, and the ambiguous ones are easy to predict.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:06, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
People should add e.g. {{use dmy dates|cs1-dates=sy|date=September 2024}} to the top of an article, and then use dates of the form 2024-09-14 within citation templates; they will be automatically formatted to the correct style, even if someone adds a citation template with date parameters in another format. –jacobolus(t)18:56, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Heh. I've always assumed that's how it worked, but then started assuming my understanding was wrong when reviewers started insisting I needed to change the dates in my templates in the sake of uniformity. I stopped arguing and just made them happy. Maybe I'll push back harder the next time. RoySmith(talk)19:36, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've brought this up a few times over the years. Basically, IABot is already creating archive links for articles added to citations without the need to run IAbot manually. It stores them in an off-wiki database and adds them as needed (I don't know exactly what it's looking for to do this). My perspective is that while there's an obvious downside of increasing the size of an article, there are some good reasons to err on the side of including the archive links in the articles. Namely, because what happens off-wiki is opaque and wiki bots have a tendency to just stop without notice, and also because it provides a link for a savvy reader to circumvent a paywall (not that this reason should be documented anywhere, mind you -- IA is having enough troubles lately). Regardless, however, this system of users drive-by "rescuing" sources that don't need rescuing isn't great. We could use an RfC simply asking "should all links have an archive link by default". If so, a bot should be doing it rather than random users adding them randomly. If not, we'll have to decide if it should be prohibited or left at a case-by-case basis. If case-by-case, what are the considerations? I'll also just add that my pet peeve in all this is less the size of the addition but how that addition messes with the tools we have to quickly determine who the primary contributors of an article are. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 17:47, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If there's real interest we could run an-house experiment on link clicks on a couple articles to see if there's any significant uptick in people viewing sources when the archive link is available versus not. That'd give the benefit for displaying the links to live urls, at the least.
If there's a client-side performance cost/benefit per page to consider, I don't know if that can be reasonably mitigated by something like passing an iarchive-id parameter instead of the full urls, or else only rendering the live parts of citations on mobile and limited connections, or keeping the citations section unexpanded except on clicks (as several academic publishers do). I don't think stopping a few characters here or there (that time will force upon a page eventually) addresses the legitimate issue of client-side performance that people are raising.
at Rhododendrites (above): since bots are flagged in edits, your tools should discount bot edits, no?
I'm more concerned with the examples given that it seems IABot is adding archive links that do not conform to |access-date=. It seems like this should be the default behavior (as opposed to adding the latest archive link), but I'm not sure whether it is according to IABot's documentation. Not sure I can tell from the API source main whether that's the default already, not using the tool myself. Can someone confirm? SamuelRiv (talk) 19:21, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My understanding is that IABot uses the archive that is closest in time to the access date in the article, if one is present. The closest archive may be quite different to the access date in some cases. When an access date is not present (e.g. for bare URIs) then I think it uses the most recent archive available. Thryduulf (talk) 19:37, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to doi:10.1145/3366423.3380300, 99.7% of readers don't click on any links in the refs. To give a few examples from the traffic report in The Signpost:
Vinesh Phogat might have had ~5,500 people click on a ref link during the last year. There are 90 refs, of which 66 have archive links. If we assume conditions along the lines of the spherical frictionless chicken, that might be an average of 11 opportunities per day for choosing between an archived link and a current link.
Noah Lyles might have had ~8,000 people click on a ref link during the last year. There are 68 refs, of which 9 have archive links. That might be around 3 opportunities a day for people to choose between an archived link and a current link.
Armand Duplantis might have had ~7,000 people click on a ref link during the last year. There are 79 refs, of which 52 have archive links. That means someone had to choose between an archived link and a current link about 12 times a day.
These are super-high traffic pages (mostly during the last month), and recording just 1,000 events would take more than a month. While I think that it would ultimately be feasible to test whether archived links encourage people to open a source, I would not want anyone to think that this would be quick and easy. I think it is more likely to involve words like long-term, perseverance, and (unfortunately) indeterminateresults. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:27, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
a reference popup screenshot I just took to illustrate this There's a problem I'd love someone to sink their UX teeth into. How can we make users read references period! @Valjean and some of the other editors on the Trump article were experimenting with lead ref targets. I wonder if Wikipedia should invest more in footnote overlay gadgets and the like. I use some kind of gadget or user script that makes a mouseover preview popup show up. It does work for footnote links, but you just get an overlay that shows you the footer. It could be a lot bigger, brighter, and with more information about the reference. Also, theoretically, it could show you other pages that cite that source or general information about its reliability, etc. There's also a great user script by @Novem Linguae that adds color highlighting to the references. Andre🚐20:37, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I believe that one of the ideas considered in Vector 2022 was having the refs displayed on the right-hand side (in all that "unnecessary" white space, if you have a wider screen and don't expand to full width).
But: Why should "making users read references" be one of our values? Also, would pushing that upset the apple cart in terms of WP:NONENG and WP:PAYWALL?
I looked up a Wikipedia article earlier today. I needed to remind myself that Bratislava really was in Slovakia, and I hadn't misremembered it. Do you think it would have been better for me to read the references for that? I don't. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:43, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not a fan of the extra white space, I like the popup approach better. The Vector whitespace was a disaster on my monitor until they fixed it and offered some adjustable option for a wider view. I was using Monobook for a while until they fixed it.
I think making users read references is pretty key to the mission of Wikipedia and verifiability. I think accessibility to open access journal articles and content literacy are key to the mission of education and inspiring critical thinking. As everyone knows, Wikipedia is NOT reliable. As someone seeking information that's a bit less common, anytime you look at an article you don't know whether everything on it is correct, especially controversial statements, unless you check the references. Hoaxes and vandalism exist due to the wiki model, and the chain of corroboration is key to making the whole thing work. Sure, looking up where Bratislava is, is not going to require looking at the references. I've come to see Wikipedia as basically a public source of information, while plenty of valuable stuff is locked behind paywalls or private, difficult to access archives. Wikipedia's goal is unlocking the world's information and making it available. Andre🚐20:51, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't agree that making users read references is a key goal. If it were, then the best way to achieve it would not be to create encyclopedia articles, but an index of references. And while that may be a useful reference work for a segment of Wikipedia's current readership, it would not have the same broad appeal as an encyclopedia. isaacl (talk) 19:07, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:V means people should check the references. It's in the first line. people using the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source. If nobody is reading or checking them, what's the point of having them? An index of simple references would be, I guess, Wikisource. Which is also really valuable. There's some great old Ukrainian documents on there. Or we could be Nupedia or World Book and simply have a cadre of expert magicians who we implicitly trust to create truthful articles? But I would argue that you're basically information-illiterate if you read Wikipedia and trust the text implicitly without checking the references. In fact, I'm surprised someone would push back on the importance of references. They're arguably more important than the text itself! Andre🚐19:34, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You're tripping yourself up on the very basic distinction between can and are expected to. I remember my pre-editor self, and I literally almost never actually checked the references. Remsense ‥ 论20:11, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Splitting some very semantic hair IMHO. I don't remember reading and not being an editor, but before I was an editor there weren't references and Wikipedia was a trash pile of Pokemon articles and original research by today's standards. Still -- I would consider it a problem worth solving that we don't make it easy for non-editors to verify things. Andre🚐21:53, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Insisting that readers must read references is an absurd fantasy. The wide variety of readers are going to do what they want, which mostly will not involve carefully reading details of the article, let alone tracking down paywalled scholarly sources to verify references for every claim. The job of articles is to best serve readers' needs and answer their questions, which means making statements which are generally accurate, reflect expert consensus, and weren't just made up by a pseudonymous Wikipedian. "what's the point of having [references]?" The purpose is that readers and other editors can check them if they want or need to for some reason, as is plainly stated in the text you quoted. –jacobolus(t)22:37, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think there's something between "must" and "should". Also, I think we agree that someone must check them, just not everyone. No reader is required to check the references, but they really ought to. A paywall is an obstacle but a motivated reader may pay. Luckily, most articles have at least a few non-paywalled references. At any rate, I wasn't insisting that readers must be reading the references, I was advocating to improve the UX to make it more likely that they would. Andre🚐00:07, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No reader is required to check the references, but they really ought to. that's oversimplified. Every reader should check the references associated with every statement for which "probably correct" is not good enough for their use case. If you need to know for certain that the melting point of a given alloy is greater than 3000 K then you absolutely should check the reference for that, but saying they "ought to check the reference" for it being invented in France in the 1990s is wrong. Conversely, someone compiling a report about the history of European metallurgy absolutely should check the latter reference but "it has a high melting point" is likely as much detail as is relevant to them (if not more so) and they don't need to verify it is 4112.88 K. Thryduulf (talk) 00:22, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't going to go here, but I can't resist any longer. Our current UI for presenting references sucks. Let's take John Rolph (today's TFA). I click on the first citation. That takes me to a list of references, highlighting "^ a b c Johnson 1989, p 223". So let's assume I figure out the highlighting mean "click here" and I do that. This gets me to the "Works cited" section, with "Johnson, J. K. (1989). Becoming Prominent: Regional Leadership in Upper Canada, 1791–1841. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0-7735-0641-1." highlighted. So, OK, I click on the first link, which gets me to McGill–Queen's University Press. At this point, I feel like I'm playing a scavenger hunt game and I've made a wrong turn somewhere. Why couldn't clicking on "[1]" just gotten me to the source directly?
Yeah, I know, [1] happens to be a source that's not on-line, but [2] is on line and the same three-click process is required. At least in that case, I get to a NCBI page where (with a fourth click) I can actually get to a PDF of the source. Except that by this time, I've lost track of the fact that one of the intermediate stops on this particular scavenger hunt said "p. 17", so I need to go back and find that again. We sure don't make it easy on our readers. RoySmith(talk)00:30, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
m:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing#Sub-referencing in a nutshell is one way to reduce the first step. Instead of going to "a b c Johnson 1989, p 223" and needing to click again to find the name of the book, it'd take you to a unified list that could look something like this:
Johnson, J. K. (1989). Becoming Prominent: Regional Leadership in Upper Canada, 1791–1841. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0-7735-0641-1.
I agree that'd be helpful but I'd go further, what about my mouse over overlay tooltip idea? Also, there's a bug in the visual editor that I just reproduced. If you click on the reflist itself you are offered a chance to "replace reference." This just ends up adding a reference to the bottom of the page instead. [6] The "replace reference" link only works if I click the footnote on the top of the page, not the line in the reflist. Let me know if you'd want a screenshot or if I should tell someone, do you still like receiving my bug reports? Andre🚐01:28, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Citations have opened on hover/mouseover for years for me, and I don't use any custom settings. When you hover on the bluetext in the popup for [1] on John Rolph, it gives a second popup for the full citation, as implemented in {{harvc}} and related referencing templates.
Not sure how fluid this is for mobile, but hovering should work for anyone on desktop (unless the refs in the article have not been templated, which is still technically allowed in MOS). SamuelRiv (talk) 01:48, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Our current UI for presenting references sucks. Let's take John Rolph (today's TFA). I click on the first citation. That takes me to a list of references, highlighting ... So let's assume I figure out the highlighting mean 'click here' and I do that. This gets me to the 'Works cited' section, with ... highlighted." Over here, I hover the footnote superscript, which pops up a little box, and then I hover the author name + year, which pops up another box with the book metadata. There's no external link involved because this is a book, not a website. If I click the ISBN link I can get to a page that helps me find the book in a local library. –jacobolus(t)02:41, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's expected. They don't work on {{sfn}}-type citations if you do have NAVPOPS enabled. The WMF's tool does the hover-and-hover-again trick. NAVPOPS doesn't. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:28, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, that's a big difference. Although I'm reenabling NAVPOPS because the WMF tool doesn't use a popup for user pages, and the NAVPOPS have additional buttons for actions and other things. Andre🚐03:41, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is a difference between "can check" and "should check". Whether you should check depends what use you're putting the information to. If you're doing something safety critical, or academic research, or something like that then you absolutely should be checking the references relevant to your subject, but even then you don't need to check every reference. For example, if you are interested in the melting point of elements you should be checking the references for the melting points but checking the references for date of discovery would just waste your time.
For many purposes, Wikipedia can be trusted to be good enough. For example the other day I looked up when Alun Michael represented Swansea in parliament, if Wikipedia was wrong then one question on a quiz that at most 5 people will ever take will also be wrong. Thryduulf (talk) 20:26, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would say simply for intellectual hygiene and epistemological edification. People really shouldn't blindly trust anything written on Wikipedia without checking the references and even sometimes the page history. I've found errors many times. It's the nature of a wiki. I'm actually a bit aghast to find so many people defending the idea that references are just an inside baseball thing. Andre🚐21:56, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nobody is defending the idea that references are just an inside baseball thing and if think they are then you have very seriously misunderstood what people are saying. References are vitally important, but that doesn't mean everybody needs to check every reference every time. There are more facts on Wikipedia that are right than there are facts on Wikipedia that are wrong. That means any given fact on Wikipedia is probably true. For many purposes probably true is good enough. References exist for those situations where it isn't. Thryduulf (talk) 23:17, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I assume that the "it" in "References exist for those situations where it isn't" is "probably true is good enough". The first time I read it, I briefly thought you meant that refs exist for when the Wikipedia article is wrong, and I thought that couldn't possibly be something you would say. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:37, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess it's quite likely that most statements on Wikipedia are true, meaning much more than half, but it's unclear if that means that any given statement may be true especially on obscure topics. There are hoaxes, incorrect information, mischaracterized sources, vandalism, and while there's an eventual aspect to this, vandalism and hoaxes aren't always found immediately, and some last for years, and some articles are insufficiently watched and find themselves subtly vandalized. I'd say it's probably closer to 80% than 99% or higher. A WP:BLUESKY statement is basically what I've seen Wiki discourse call an obvious statement. But for any non-obvious statement, as a reader reading the article, the likelihood of a fact definitely being true is more dependent on how recently extensively edited and how highly trafficked the article is. This is also something that users should be able to know about and check, and I'd say it's part of a mission of informational literacy to encourage surfacing this type of critical metadata. So checking out the article history and the references should, in my humble opinion, be a first class user activity or job to be done even for non-logged-in users. Andre🚐00:20, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Again it all depends on what level of accuracy is "good enough" for the reason you are consulting Wikipedia - and that varies hugely. 51% likely to be correct is enough for some uses, 99% is insufficient for others. Thryduulf (talk) 00:28, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not arguing against the importance of references (and I'm probably more hardline than many editors about putting references in right away rather than leaving it to someone else to do). I'm just saying that "make users read references" isn't a key goal. The verifiability policy is for editors; it doesn't mean that a key goal of Wikipedia is for all of its readers to check every reference. By all means, of course, they should be convenient to use for everyone who wants to read them. isaacl (talk) 22:05, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think anyone wants to deliberately make it difficult for others (readers or editors) to check sources. But in terms of what how articles actually get used, I think it's reasonable fair to estimate that it's at least 300x as important to get the article's content right as it is to give someone access to a source.
On my list of things to do, I want to update Multiple chemical sensitivity. Among the choices I have to make are: choose sources with Full text on the Net, or choose a highly rated medical school textbook? I chose the latter, even though basically nobody will be able to check the source (it's US$120, or follow my example and use Interlibrary loan), and even though I may spend the next couple of years getting requests for quotations from "just one more paragraph" from editors who don't like what it says. But it's the best source for most of the information in the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:35, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, by "convenient to use" I meant Wikipedia's citation system should make it convenient to see the citations and follow any provided links. I wasn't referring to how references should be selected. isaacl (talk) 23:55, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that if we agreed that getting readers to read the cited sources were a "key goal", then it only would be logical to prefer sources that readers can easily/freely read. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:17, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I think it's still better to use the WP:BESTSOURCES. People can pay if they really want to. There are also easy ways around paywalls. But the point being that it's cumbersome and cludgy to check the references. Better than nothing but could be better. I'm not advocating against the use of paywalled sources or non-English sources at all. Our responsibility starts and ends within the Wikipedia UX, and once we get you to the pay gate, it ends there. Andre🚐01:22, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's not quite true. If the same source is (legally) available in multiple places we should link to the more accessible one. If there are multiple equally good sources that verify the same content we should prefer the more accessible one. Obviously if one source is better we should prefer that one.
If there are three facts to verify and sources A and B are of equal quality; Source A is paywalled and verifies all three facts, source B is freely available to everyone but only verifies facts 1 and 2 (it's silent on fact 3), should we cite only source A, or should we cite source B for facts 1 and 2 and source B for fact 3? My gut feeling is we should do the latter, but I can see arguments in favour of the former. Thryduulf (talk) 02:14, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was discussing how references should be convenient to access, even though making readers read the sources is not a key goal. (I already stated that if it were, encyclopedia articles aren't the way to go.) isaacl (talk) 06:28, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is a use case for having invisible template text or a special transclusion type. Basically the archive links should live somewhere else, not in the actual article. Andre🚐19:43, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The concern brought up here, and brought up repeatedly at CS1, is site outage and region blocks. The solution, given time and time again, is to just use the archive link. (Adding explicit parameter options to notify bots is apparently unworkable, so undocumented html comments are recommended instead?) SamuelRiv (talk) 20:14, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So yeah, the archive link is useful, as a permalink of the article at that time, and solves a legitimate problem as you say, don't get me wrong. But for large articles someone blindly rescuing all the links, even ones that will never probably go down bloats the article with a ton of extra size for no gain, and it also creates a usability issue because in many cases the archive link, while preferable to a 404, is less usable than the real website - either due to lacking some assets or images, special javascripts or what-have-you. We've all experienced a great deal of jank browsing archive links, right? And there's no real reason that the archive links themselves need to be in the article for highly-trafficked sites, where the output of feeding that URL into the archive API will deterministically return something usable. As Rhodo says there's actually a bot that will store a map of the links, which seems like a good direction, versus having humans doing it. Andre🚐20:19, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Region locks and region throttles. That gets worse for big articles on regional subjects, especially those updated with local news (frequently region-throttled), Trump and other US pols being good examples. I also fail to see how a relatively small percentage increase in the tiny fraction of articles that are both utterly enormous and highly volatile should be what makes or breaks IABot (especially since it's those articles for which the first point of my paragraph here is most relevant). There are surely other ways to address performance issues on oversized over-newsed articles (including, but not limited to, those already enabled by default for mobile). SamuelRiv (talk) 20:54, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If articles are getting so big that editing them is difficult then they should be split. Unfortunately this will lead to having to defend some spinout articles against deletionists at AfD but that's a separate issue. Thryduulf (talk) 11:14, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Some articles are also more densely cited than others, which is a dimension that does not justify merely equating wikitext length with the abstract conceptual length withholding particular technical hiccups. Remsense ‥ 论11:23, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure I fully understand that comment, but splitting because it cannot be edited without problems is just as valid a reason for splitting as it being too long to read comfortably. Thryduulf (talk) 12:04, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry for the confusion—I suppose I would rephrase by saying I disagree with that. Articles should be split for the sake of readers; if there is a distinct temptation to split for the sake of editors, we should critically examine whether there are technical problems we can fix to avoid such a solution first. Remsense ‥ 论12:09, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think Levivich is in a minority, and I agree with Ajpolino. Here is a good-faith example by Susmuffin which has made the article miserable to work with. After the addition of archive links, 12% of the page content is still archive links; it is not necessary to add archive links on sources like The New York Times, the BBC, The Washington Post and multiple others whose links rarely go dead, and editing around the now excessively lengthy citation templates is made more complex. I don't feel I can revert a good-faith edit like that, but I wish I could, as having all of that template clutter isn't helpful. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:04, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Washington Post and The New York Times both limit access in various ways. Both at times also change the content on pages without changing the URL. While it might not be strictly necessary to add archives to such pages, they still add value to the page and I would revert removal of them for any reason other than them being broken (and even then it would be much better to replace them with ones that aren't broken). The extra wikitext is unfortunate, but nothing more than that, especially since tools like Visual Editor and syntax highlighting reduce the impact significantly. Thryduulf (talk) 11:12, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that using IA as a tool to bypass paywalls is unethical, but how exactly does that work? Does IA maintain subscriptions to paywalled sites and then expose the pages they retrieve? RoySmith(talk)15:04, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Some paywalls only trigger after a certain number of reads. Typically news websites. By using IA you can access a website even when you have used up all your free reads. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:53, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Websites sometimes
offer an openly available article at one time and then (sometimes many years) later retroactively put it behind a paywall, or
offer an openly available article to crawlers such as the Internet Archive's or Google's, but present a paywall to human readers.
I don't personally have a problem with including archived snapshots of paywalled pages in Wikipedia articles: these provide an important service to editors trying to verify claims made in articles, but are unlikely to significantly affect the website's revenue. If the website owner has a problem they can ask the archive site to take down the snapshot. –jacobolus(t)15:53, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@RoySmith: In addition to the above explanations, there are various technical ways to get around paywalls, and the various archive services sometimes use some of those ways. As an example (apologies to the New York Times), here is a NYT article, it's paywalled for me, I'm not sure if for others this is displayable as one of the "free articles per month," which perhaps I've used up. Here is the archive from Internet Archive, you'll see it's also paywalled. Here is another archive from Archive.today: voila, no paywall, you can read it for free. In my personal opinion, this is almost certainly copyright infringement. (Disclosure: I've used both these archiving services on Wikipedia; I think we all have at one point or another.) Now, try this with Wall Street Journal [7] and it doesn't work. Archive.today can break through NYT's paywall but not WSJ; I don't know why, but there is some technical explanation arising from the two newspapers using different paywall technology. I don't know which paywalls IA respects and which ones Archive.today respects (if any). And while Wikipedia can't do anything about the archiving practices of other websites, what we really should not do is add archive links because some sites are paywalled, as was suggested above. Levivich (talk) 16:59, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@SandyGeorgia If you find the archive links on living pages there to not be helpful, you should absolutely feel free to revert the change or otherwise remove them. Edits being done in good faith does not mean that no one else gets to disagree. –jacobolus(t)14:50, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I object again that adding archive links is adding important functionality. On live links it gets around region locks and throttles (especially to foreign news outlets, depending on where one is based; a number of US newspaper sites for example still block EU IPs for GDPR). (in re above: 99.7% source click rate is honestly higher than I expected, btw -- if you consider the sheer amount of traffic WP gets, and for what purposes people use it, that's an awful lot of people checking sources.) An addition of 50k wikisource characters on template expansion becomes 100KB of HTML (UTF-8) for the client, which is rendered as plaintext + hyperlink. I'm sympathetic to slow browsers and computers, but we have mobile wikipedia for that reason, which would keep the citations section collapsed by default. (If this is a persistent problem beyond what I'm calculating here, then more fine-tuned client performance tweaks per page can be looked into here.) I really think there's an assumption being made that this creates a significant performance hit, when I think that instead the performance hit is endemic within the page. The articles being used as examples, like Trump, are gargantuan to begin with, bloated by constant breaking WP:Notnews updates and WP:Citekill. (I and others have tried to trim this bloat, only to be reverted for removing RS; per discussing a split above, a split for bloatedness is usually uncontroversial, which is why it's not in detail in the P&G, until it's not, and these articles are the result).
Taking a fresh page on Chrome with the Venezuelan election diffs cited above (before and after the 50k addition), the memory footprint upon opening is 92708k and 98388k respectively (restarted and cleaned browser each time).
tldr: is there evidence that the adding of archive links significantly affects client performance on a bloated page, as people claim? Or is the page already lagging their machine? SamuelRiv (talk) 16:59, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's a 99.7% non-click rate. One in every 300 page views results in someone clicking on a link in a ref. This is most likely to happen in short articles, so the belief is that people click on sources when they need more information than we can give them (e.g., you want to see a picture of the subject, and the Wikipedia article doesn't have one). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:59, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It would be interesting to see what fraction of that 0.3% happens while the article is undergoing some sort of review process (DYK, GAN, FAC, AfD, etc). My hunch is most. RoySmith(talk)18:08, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think so. Those processes affect so few pages/page views. The middle 50% of articles have 2 to 9 refs (not all of which will have links). The median article has 13 sentences, which is long enough to meet most readers' needs, but short enough that someone might be looking for more details.
There will be a certain percentage of misclicks, and I would not be surprised if misclicks outweigh editor clicks. There are just so many more readers than editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:24, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, great insights. PDF citations more often clicked than a DOI or JSTOR? That's pretty scathing. Why don't we have a bot that harvests a raw PDF link and icons it? Andre🚐02:02, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the solution for articles like Donald Trump is for an editor to sacrifice multiple hours to systematically replace citations that have only been used once in the article with a recent book. For example, there is a paragraph about him not serving in the military, citing four sources. It's likely that all four of those could be replaced by a citation to a single book. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:07, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think we should be building policy based on exceptional cases like Donald Trump. There's always going to be articles like that and they're always going to be a pain to maintain no matter what policies and tools we have. We should concentrate on the 99.999%[citation needed] of our articles that don't have 834 references. RoySmith(talk)18:13, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Donald Trump is the 267th entry on Special:LongPages, and if we assume that wikitext size correlates to the number of refs, it might have approximately the 267th most refs, which would put it at 99.9961% – very close to your off-the-cuff estimate. I'm impressed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:12, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I gave my numbers. Would anyone else like to test page performance with and without mass IA linking on their machines/browsers, per above?
A couple posters have claimed there is reduced performance, but can people post evidence (I gave just one measurement) that the IA links actually affect performance to the significant degree that is being claimed? Because performance can, one way or another, be objectively demonstrated, unlike aesthetics (which is all this discussion reduces to, if it turns out there is no significant performance hit). SamuelRiv (talk) 02:16, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is it time to explore WikiCite? I know enwp doesn't like wikidata, but that project to take all the sources we cite and include them in wikidata has been going on for some time now. I imagine an archive link property is already in place. Time to have a bot replace citations with wikidata references and a bot to turn new citations into wikidata items? I don't expect so, but worth bringing up at least. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 12:34, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is it possible to have a smaller step, say one where archive links for live sites (ie. those created purely as a backup) can be stored at wikidata? That would keep the wikitext burden of the archive urls small (just a Qcode I suppose), while maintaining the backup functionality. CMD (talk) 12:43, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I know this doesn't address all of the issues raised here, but apparently the latest version of the syntax coloring extention includes template folding which should make large citation templates less obtrusive. RoySmith(talk)16:58, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem--or one problem--is that when editing a citation template, the archive-link stuff adds a bunch of extra stuff to the template that one must read (and process, and sometime remove).
Adding archive links to the citation templates for 'live' sources has both advantages and disadvantages. Should this be accepted as a best practice?
Should the inclusion of archive links for 'live' links be considered a form of WP:CITEVAR? If so, then editors running the Wikipedia:IABotManagementConsole script will sometimes have to discuss changing the article's citation style to include them before running the script.
I wasn't thinking of asking any question, but I don't think either of those two should be an RFC question, as they're too narrow, especially the second one, that's too wikilawyer-y. Thinking out loud here, I think a better RFC question would be something more open-ended, like: "when should archive links be added to articles?" Or something like that. Levivich (talk) 17:36, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That question seems so wide that it might be more effective at collecting information than at producing a consensus. We're already collecting information here (128 comments by 26 editors so far), so I'm not sure what additional value an RFC would provide. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:50, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
@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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
(...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)[reply]
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)[reply]
nonsensusn.: 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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?
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)[reply]
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)). BD2412T01:45, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Discussion about Notability and British Rail stations
Fringe Theories Noticeboard, religious topics, and WP:CANVAS
For years the Fringe Theory Noticeboard has been a go-to for a lot of editors when it comes to soliciting help on religious topics. This has caused… problems. FTN seems bent towards a particular kind of skepticism which, while healthy for Wikipedia as a whole, leads to some serious issues with WP:NPOV, WP:CIVILITY, and on occasion WP:OUT on these topics. The most signifficant incident off the top of my head was admins coming down on FTN for insisting that members of Falun Gong declare themselves as COI editors on any Falun Gong topics. There’s also been some pretty big issues with FTN regulars editing religious articles not realizing when something is technical/academic terminology when it comes to religious topics, which is playing out right now in the discussion here and which got its start on FTN.
There seems to be this attitude that religions should be treated as any other fringe theory and there are regular calls to edit religious articles in a way that seems to be fairly openly hostile. This definitely comes across as trying to right a great wrong with religion not being treated with appropriate intellectual derision. This is especially the case with New Religious Movements such as Mormonism, Falun Gong, etc.
My concern is that exclusively bringing these topics to WP:FTN and not, say, the religion wikiproject (or the appropriate wikiproject for a given religion) ends up feeling like a deliberate decision to exclude people who may be less hostile to a specific religion and comes across as WP:CANVAS, especially in light of how willing FTN regulars are to throw WP:CIVILITY out the window on religious topics to the point of multiple admin warnings and thread closures. My willingness to assume good faith is pretty low here considering the history of open hostility to (mainstream) religious/spiritual topics when they come up on FTN.
My fundamental question here as it relates to policy is should religious topics which are specifically relating to religious history and theology, as opposed to a specific empirical claim, fall under the “fringe theory” umbrella? If so, should the appropriate wikiprojects be notified at the same time so as to not basically canvas people who have specific biases but not necessarily a useful working knowledge of a given topic? Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ10:00, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Falun Gong is notably the only religious movement to have a dedicated CTOP designation, ie. Wikipedia:Contentious topics/Falun Gong, beyond the broader Wikipedia:Contentious topics/Pseudoscience and fringe science. Canvassing specific wikiprojects or not doesn't really mean much in my opinion. There definitely are POV editors, but most editors in WikiProjects on religion are heterogeneous. I do think there are tensions in terms of whether Wikipedia exists to promote a religious movements viewpoint about its religion, especially theological summaries, but I don't agree a policy change is helpful or warranted here. If there's any policy to look at, it's about sourcing requirements and weighing. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 10:21, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Falun Gong is notably the only religious movement to have a dedicated CTOP designation
Keep in mind the incident I was referring to was FTN demanding Falun Gong editors out their religious affiliation when editing pages, which the admins in the discussion came down like a meteorite on. It's not just a question of "Is this religion fringe/y" but this sort of r/atheism open hostility to religious topics, especially when it gets into the theological weeds and not just something which is clearly fringe. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ10:26, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On the other hand I do remember plenty of action in relation to the LDS/COI fracas, like an enormous amount of activity at ANI ending in sanctions.[8] and a WP:BUREAUCRAT losing their bits. But we're told here the multi-admin "meteor strike" was on FTN participants? Curious. Bon courage (talk) 08:00, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There can be 'fringe theories' about everything, including religious history and theology. It is trivial for wikiproject pages to transclude FTN if desired so as to provide notifications to followers. Feoffer (talk) 10:22, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But the issue isn't other people transcluding FTN, it's FTN editors only pinging FTN on religious topics when the editing gets contentious, as opposed to anyone else regardless of their experience in the exact topic in question, which is why it feels pretty strongly like WP:CANVAS. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ10:29, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not this again. This is like a stuck record from the OP, who keeps popping up at FTN to air this supposed grievance. The lack of the examples in their complaint speaks volumes and I suggest Hitchen's razor is applied. But, to repeat what has often been said there: religion does not fall under WP:FRINGE but when claims from a religion obtrude into the real world (like claiming that Christian Science can cure disease or that the E-meter has a useful function) then WP:FRINGE can certainly apply; the religious aspect doesn't give nonsense some sort of Holy Shield from Wikipedia's NPOV policy by which it must be accurately described within a rational, knowledge-based context. Bon courage (talk) 11:12, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is like a stuck record from the OP, who keeps popping up at FTN to air this supposed grievance.
What? I was told to bring this here during the last huge blowout about it and hadn't gotten around to it, the current spate of Mormon topics on FTN made me think it's finally time to get around to it. Beyond that I'm a regular at FTN? I'm not "popping up at FTN to air this supposed grievance", I'm a regular contributor there who is bothered by the handling of a specific topic at FTN and this is a recurring and ongoing problem, who only brings it up when that problem comes to the forefront, which it has in two separate and ongoing threads.
The lack of the examples in their complaint speaks volumes
I didn't provide specific examples because the main talk page of FTN is right there for all to see and I didn't want it to come across as airing grievances with specific individuals, or make the discussion about, say, Cunning folk traditions and the Latter Day Saint movement rather than the broader issue of FTN on religious topics.
religion does not fall under WP:FRINGE but when claims from a religion obtrude into the real world (like claiming that Christian Science can cure disease or that the E-meter has a useful function) then WP:FRINGE can certainly apply
I addressed this right away in the post you're replying to. The issue isn't the E-meter like content, which are absolutely fringe, but rather people treating core claims of theology as a fringe topic, when it may be a bit fuzzy in a Venn diagram between a fringe topic and a religious one, or even just blanket religious topics being treated as fringe despite them being wholly articles of faith. You've been around FTN long enough to know that there's a contingent that see religion as an inherent enemy and I'm very far from the only person to bring this up recently. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ11:33, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, I think you're imagining things and keep banging on about reddit and atheism. If people want to believe a Douglas DC-8 piloted by Xenu put Thetans in a volcano (or whatever) as part of their 'core theology' that's fine. If they say it actually happened that's a problem. There is nothing here to fix. Or do you have a specific proposal? Bon courage (talk) 11:37, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, I think you're imagining things and keep banging on about reddit and atheism.
As I'm far from the only one to raise this specific concern, that sure seems like a mass hallucination then. I (and others) use "r/atheism" as a shorthand for a specific form of "angry at religion" type of persona that pops up basically all over in bursts. It's a shorthand, and it's one where I'm far from the only person using it.
If people want to believe a Douglas DC-8 piloted by Xenu put Thetans in a volcano (or whatever) as part of their 'core theology' that's fine.
What isn't fine is users not feeling that a topic is being treated with appropriate derision, as opposed to just WP:NPOV and addressing WP:PROFRINGE. This comes up a hell of a lot on religious topics on FTN, and while it's not exactly a majority stance it is a present one. A contingent of FTN basically likes viewing the Resurrection of Jesus and the Loch Ness monster as rhetorically equivalent and deserving of the same sort of treatment. Regardless of personal beliefs around either, Wikipedia is not the place to air personal grievances with religion.
There is nothing here to fix. Or do you have a specific proposal?
Well, seeing as FTN handles religious topics indelicately, inexpertly, and with a very gung-ho attitude I think that making sure the appropriate wikiproject is roped in on religious issues would probably do quite a lot. I think the current discussion on cunning folk is a pretty great example of FTN jumping the gun due to a lack of familiarity with the literature on a given topic. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ11:45, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WikiProjects do not or should not create Wikipedia:Local consensus. You are welcome to add any relevant WikiProject banners on any talk pages, and notify any WikiProjects you want for broader discussions. It would not be seen as canvassing, because a WikiProject in of itself does not represent any particular NPOV (hopefully true for the WP:TERRORISM related ones). Sure, {{WikiProject Mormon}} likely has more adherents of LDS faith, but also more importantly, people with scholarly knowledge, whether as adherents, critics and other. If a specific WikiProject is POV pushing or trying to create local consensus, that can be dealt with, but in of itself, notifying any WikiProject you want is fine. Admittedly some projects like WP:ISRAEL and WP:PALESTINE COULD be merged, but neither projects are in of themselves "canvassing" when being notified. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 11:59, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If a specific WikiProject is POV pushing or trying to create local consensus, that can be dealt with
This is what I think is happening with FTN, though not necessarily very explicitly. "Anti-religion" isn't a neutral point of view, and it can come across as canvasing to go to a place where that's a prevailing attitude while simply ignoring the other wikiprojects that may actually have more ability to contribute directly to the topics at hand.
Essentially I don't feel that
a WikiProject in of itself does not represent any particular NPOV
Anyways, your point begs what's considered neutral/default state, and when it comes to religion, is not an easy one. I find this essay helpful Wikipedia:Criticisms of society may be consistent with NPOV and reliability. As someone who was raised extremely religious and now atheist, I am appreciative that Wikipedia has always been a decent source of summarizing the state of literature out there. In some cases, it was not as "comprehensive" as my specific religious theological education, because the sourcing requirements were not up-to par. There are better resources off-wiki if the goal is to provide a religious seminar. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 12:12, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the bigger issue is where it relates to New religious movements like Falun Gong, Mormonism, the Moonies, etc. which have a lot less established literature around theology and people tend to be a lot more open about treating with derision. Hell, I've been accused of being crypto-Falun Gong on FTN and I'm an FTN regular... Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ12:16, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose some notions are risible, and being labelled 'religion' doesn't mean a topic becomes deserving of respect (although maybe religious people believe this?) Thus yogic flying is as daft as perinium sunning: just because one has religious-y connections doesn't mean it isn't nonsense on toast. Bon courage (talk) 12:21, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think you are imaging (or maybe projecting) this "anger". Complaining about the supposed mental state of fellow editors is not useful. Wikipedia editors are often inexpert; it is the basis of much discussion on every article ever. If anybody want to inform any WikiProject that a discussion at any noticeboard may be of interest they may do so. Indeed that is often useful. Bon courage (talk) 12:00, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think you are imaging (or maybe projecting) this "anger". Complaining about the supposed mental state of fellow editors is not useful.
Not sure what the Cunning folk traditions thread has to do with anything. There were only 4 posts by 3 posters (including you and an IP). The initial post by @Feoffer: was clearly on the wrong board -- such a proposal if having too few people for consensus (or if too contentious) on an article Talk page is meant for an RfC on that Talk page, usually with notification of the relevant WikiProjects. The lack of replies on FTN suggests other watchers were generally aware this was misplaced. SamuelRiv (talk) 15:11, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Since the stated purpose of this noticeboard (top of page) is "to discuss already-proposed policies and guidelines and to discuss changes to existing policies and guidelines" and nothing of the sort is in evidence, I suggest this thread is closed as off-topic. Bon courage (talk) 12:45, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that this should probably be on one of the other Village Pump boards, since there's not really a P&G change or problem suggested here. It's not a huge deal either way, and the thread is already going, but the procedure to move a discussion thread is easy enough and can be done by anyone. Warrenmck, if you like, you can use the {{Moved discussion to}} template set and simply cut-and-paste this thread to a different pump. (But again, not a big deal either way.) SamuelRiv (talk) 14:49, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Putting aside the rest, the question is should religious topics which are specifically relating to religious history and theology, as opposed to a specific empirical claim, fall under the “fringe theory” umbrella. That's a fine policy question to ask here IMO as it's about WP:FRINGE. But the implied question here is actually "should religious topics be exempt from WP:FRINGE" and the answer is no. Not every aspect of religion has to do with WP:FRINGE, but some do. If someone is applying WP:FRINGE where it doesn't belong, that's the same as any user applying any other policy incorrectly and would have to be dealt with on the user level. If you think users are systematically misapplying policy at FTN, that's an issue for WP:AN and would need a lot of unambiguous diffs. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 13:06, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don’t think this could be done at WP:AN, because it’s more of a general attitude thing than a problem with specific users. Unambiguous diffs of FFN misapplying FTN are either easy or impossible, depending on what the remit of FTN is. I definitely agree that religion shouldn’t be exempt from fringe, but there’s a contingent that treat religion itself'’ as fringe.
looking at the threads I’ve been involved in recently on religion:
1. The LDS and Cunning Folk thread, which seems to heavilystem from a misunderstanding that “cunning folk” is the specific applicable academic term which exists well beyond Mormon topics.
2. The Joseph Smith Golden Plates thread. It’s rife with calls that Wikipedia should be outright calling Joseph Smith an active fraud, sources not fully agreeing with that conclusion (though leaving the possibility open) be damned.
3. The Tukdam thread, which did actually call out some issues with that page but also didn’t grasp the language used by researchers working with minority religious communities (and fair enough, that’s esoteric)
Of twenty threads on FTN right now, nine are directly about religion (discounting the tenth which mentions religion but which is really just about racism). Most of these do actually belong at FTN, but the substance of the threads really highlights that “religion is not inherently fringe” seems to be openly ignored by a decent chunk of the involved parties. If half the content on FTN is going to be religious in nature, then it’s not really just about fringe theories anymore, is it? And the lack of civility or ability to handle sensitive topics becomes a prominent issue that could use guidelines for handling so we reduce the amount of inexpert sledgehammers wielded in the direction of religious topics. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ13:32, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So you're saying all the (what you term) 'religious' threads at FTN are there properly, but there is a problem with stuff being raised there improperly. Then there is the vague complaint that you think some people ignore the “religion is not inherently fringe” idea, but with not a diff in sight. This is bizarre. The supposed bombshell 'cunning folk' thread has only four mild-mannered posts (one of them yours) discussing a proposal.[9] Isn't that what noticeboards are for? Bon courage (talk) 13:42, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you're so convinced there's nothing of merit here, why the WP:TEND? I think we're all fairly clear on your perspective that this is a nothing sandwich, but hell even in this thread:
being labelled 'religion' doesn't mean a topic becomes deserving of respect (although maybe religious people believe this?)
Feels sort of like the problem in a nutshell? Wikipedia's policies around civility and bigotry (not necessarily articles, just to pre-address that) absolutely does distinguish "religious belief" among other categories as deserving respect when it comes to civility. The point isn't respecting the beliefs, it's respecting that they are beliefs and mean a heck of a lot to some people, and while "some people" in this equation aren't entitled to ignore wikipedia policies around verifiability and neutrality in favour of their argument, that doesn't mean that they deserve to have their beliefs mocked and ridiculed in talk pages (but let's be real, the more fringe-y it gets the more that'll happen to a degree).
That we seem to have exempted NRMs from a need to handle the same way we do world religions is a genuine systemic failing of WP:NPOV. I can't for a second imagine someone who is committed to WP:NPOV and was themselves a Mormon wouldn't take more than a passing glance at the current state of FTN and instantly nope out due to the behaviour of editors in talk pages and noticeboards, and we need those editors to better address fringe relating to those topics. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ14:02, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From a glance, FTN seems to have a large number of useful Mormon participants. If there are civility problems, raise them at ANI, AE or appropriate venues (but again, you have provided zero evidence). To make the same point again: beliefs are beliefs, but reality is reality. There is no "respect" according to any claim in that latter realm, religious or not. Instead, Wikipedia relies on sources and concentrates on conveying accepted knowledge and if that upsets religious sensibilities, well: tough. So no, the Shroud of Turin is not Jesus' funeral shroud, the Earth is not 6,000 years old, Jesus did not visit America, and prayer does not cure cancer. NRMs and 'mainstream' religions are treated the same in this respect. Bon courage (talk) 14:19, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nothing in this discussion was a personal attack at you nor was it advocating for a diluting of Wikipedia’s stances around religion. I cannot begin to fathom the tone with which you’ve elected to engage here. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ14:25, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Basically, you're casting WP:ASPERSIONS on a whole noticeboard (effectively hundreds of editors) saying things which are largely un-evidenced (no diffs given) or simply wrong (such as Mormons shunning FTN). You have attacked me with a "why the WP:TEND?" jibe. Bon courage (talk) 14:37, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The part where you accuse Bon courage of disruptive editing (WP:TEND) without apparent grounds (or with really weak grounds that would equally apply to yourself) does appear to be a personal attack. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:41, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I’m trying to act in good faith here, it genuinely seemed Bon Courage was basically misrepresenting the initial argument while saying any discussion should be procedurally shut down. It was not intended as a personal attack. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ14:47, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"was admins coming down on FTN for insisting that members of Falun Gong declare themselves as COI editors on any Falun Gong topics" did this actually happen? I remember we had a whole string of issues with Falun Gong members being disruptive but I don't remember admins sanctioning FTN or anything like that. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:26, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The closest thing I can find is this related AE request where the filer was TBanned, another editor who was seen as broadly pro-Falun Gong was indeffed, and "editors in the Falun Gong topic area" (not FTN regulars) were "warned to not speculate about other editors' religious views, nor to attempt to disqualify others' comments based on actual or perceived religious views" (not against "insisting that members of Falun Gong declare themselves as COI editors on any Falun Gong topics").
In the FTN thread linked by Warren, there is a comment by ScottishFinnishRadish that WP:TPG is clear, Do not ask for another's personal details. It is inappropriate for a number of reasons, and adherents of a faith should in no way be expected to share that while editing. which isn't exactly "was admins coming down on FTN for insisting that members of Falun Gong declare themselves as COI editors on any Falun Gong topics". It's more "one admin saying that it isn't permitted to ask other editors whether they are Falun Gong adherents" which is... sort of close-ish? Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 08:46, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thats just an admin saying that you're supposed to say "Do you have a COI with topic X" without any prompting as to what the COI is believed to be not "Are you a member of topic X? If so you have a COI" which is a pretty common note that admins give. Its certainly not giving COI editors a free pass on COI as long as their COI is personal info (it almost always is)... Which appears to be what the OP was suggesting. COI is not an excuse for outing, but outing can't be used as a shield against legitimate COI concerns. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:49, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It'd be a lot easier if you refer us to specific example threads here. It's hardly throwing anyone under the bus to link to discussion threads instead of just implying them for us to find ourselves -- and people seem to be getting offended regardless.
Meanwhile, I believe what you have been referring to many times here is the Cargo cult thread (which is where the suggestion of canvassing and referral to VPP is made). I have two notes: first is that I agree that a P&G noticeboard should not be used for canvassing people back to an article Talk page or an RfC (per existing norms, RfC notifications are done on subject-matter WikiProjects, by subscription, etc). Generally with noticeboards like WP:RSN the scope is limited to resolving issues of the P&G, unless/until discussion goes into article content, at which point it is referred back to the article Talk page. The P&G noticeboards I've followed have been pretty disciplined about this, so I'm not sure whether that's one issue with FTN. On a similar note of scope, noticeboards can refer to superceding policy, and FT is pretty much made up entirely of superceding policies (it feels like it could be better as an explanatory essay more than a guideline imo). So if a post there is actually about a RS or OR dispute, maybe it should instead be referred to RSN or NORN? SamuelRiv (talk) 15:28, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
and people seem to be getting offended regardless.
To the extent I regret raising this thread. I think this thread is itself a microcosm of my core issue: FTN is unable to handle some religious topics in good faith. Not "FTN needs to treat religious claims as non-fringe" which is a honestly strange read multiple people here have had considering that my initial post specifically was narrowly focused on matters of theology and, as an example:
To make the same point again: beliefs are beliefs, but reality is reality. There is no "respect" according to any claim in that latter realm, religious or not. Instead, Wikipedia relies on sources and concentrates on conveying accepted knowledge and if that upsets religious sensibilities, well: tough. So no, the Shroud of Turin is not Jesus' funeral shroud, the Earth is not 6,000 years old, Jesus did not visit America, and prayer does not cure cancer. NRMs and 'mainstream' religions are treated the same in this respect.
How in any chosen diety's name does any of this have anything to do with a concern raised here? Not once did I call for Wikipedia to treat religious topics as hyper-credible per internal logic, nor did I express any concern about articles "offending religious sensibilities", nor did I make any sort of argument that'd exclude faith healing from the remit of FTN:
should religious topics which are specifically relating to religious history and theology, as opposed to a specific empirical claim, fall under the “fringe theory” umbrella?
Faith healing and every single example from Bon Voyage's reply above make specific empirical claims. All of them, without exception. So what I'm left with here is an FTN regular who came in extremely hot for some reason ignoring the fact that I'm also an FTN regular while pretending that my argument was an axe to grind, when my core argument is that FTN handling these topics alone without involving editors familiar with them has lead to some problematic editing, in addition to FTN basically openly vilifying NRMs on FTN. Not once in this entire thread have I said that FTN should leave all religious topics alone, nor, as some seem to imply, have I argued that religious claims should be treated with credulity and handled with kid gloves.
At this point to even engage with this thread I feel like I have to dedicate a fair amount of time to addressing arguments I never made. It feels like people are trying to read some kind of apologetics into my comments which I never intended, and if that's coming across to multiple people then that's a communication problem on my end, but I think that this thread right here has become a perfect example of how complex, loaded, nuanced topics which invoke strong emotions on all sides are not necessarily best handled in a vacuum by a noticeboard which, as much as we'd all love the policy-backed
Neutrally worded notices to noticeboards or projects are not canvassing
to be true, it doesn't necessarily hold water in practice.
You made an erroneous distinction: "religious history and theology, as opposed to a specific empirical claim". These are not cleanly distinct things. Religious history and theology is rife with empirical claims (Lazarus e.g.), and these are not exempt from "fringe". Your argument is weirdly personifying a noticeboard of hundreds of people with statements as though it were an monolith, like "FTN is unable to handle some religious topics in good faith", with zero evidence. Perhaps the reason you get a "hot" response is because you write accusatory, wrong and confused statements about "problems" which, without any evidence, come across as borderline trolling.This is all seems track back to when FTN addressed your own muddle over panspermia where,[11] instead of grappling with the problems at hand, you perceived some kind of problem with the noticeboard that was solving those content problems. There you wrongly asserted It’s absolutely erroneous to say “panspermia is a fringe theory” which, ironically, shows the very lack of understanding of specialist terminology you are now attacking here in imagined others. Instead of taking on the chin, you insinuated there was some kind of issue with FTN ("I do think that there's something very problematic here going on"). As another user observed in that linked thread "Instead of trying to find a solution, you are making accusations while claiming you are not". And so we have this pattern here again. It is a time sink. (It should be noted, if this[12] is to believed, that the OP's editing has been to FTN and ANI hugely more than to anything else in the Project, which tells its own story. I'm thinking WP:NOTHERE.) Bon courage (talk) 14:56, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would expect an article on a religion to describe, e.g., the foundational documents, the liturgy, the rituals, the tenets. Excluding believers would exclude the editors most likely to be familiar with the literature. As long as an editor is neither attacking nor proselytizing, I don't see a COI. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:23, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I personally thrill when people who are less hostile than I to religions post at WP:FTN and I thrill when people who are more hostile than I to religions post at WP:FTN. Generally, I thrill at anyone posting at WP:FTN. Though I may object (sometimes strenuously) to others' positions, I welcome their positions being aired as it helps clarify Wikipedia editorial praxis. I may be singular in this, I understand. Someone with sage observational skills pointed out that I may simply enjoy having arguments more than others. But I have learned things from such arguments and I do think that these discussions have helped clarify matters. Can't there be different strokes for different folks?
Maybe a resolution could be adding a request in the FTN boilerplate that when people start a thread that they notify relevant WikiProjects?
If they're notifying the WikiProjects, then it's a content dispute, and so it should be handled by the WikiProjects, or else RfC. If the intent is that FTN is a general-purpose board for fringe content, then that's the domain of a WikiProject, not a P&G noticeboard. (And just because FT has a separate guideline page, does not mean it automatically needs its own noticeboard; and in a separate point, I'd be interested if there's anything in FT that is not entirely redundant with the extensive RS and OR guidelines.) SamuelRiv (talk) 07:19, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Eh? All noticeboards except ANI/AN are for content disputes. The stated purpose of FTN is to "help determine whether [a] topic is fringe and if so, whether it is treated accurately and impartially". There is quite a bit in WP:FRINGE which is distinct, for example WP:FRIND, WP:NFRINGE and WP:PARITY. Bon courage (talk) 07:36, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You are free to propose FTN for deletion if you don't like the way it is set-up. Others have done so in the past.
I think the consensus has generally been that it's okay to have a centralized discussion board that brings together people who have a general interest in topics that are relevant to WP:FRINGE. WikiProjects have remits which go well beyond that sort of thing.
Neutrally worded notices to noticeboards or projects are not canvassing, and it's always possible to post to different noticeboards and projects if you feel that greater participation would help. So if something is posted to FTN there is nothing stopping you ftom adding notifications to projects that you feel are involved. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°20:03, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GamerGate is also relevant, but in a very different way. That's the case in which being the target of something like Death by a thousand cuts results in the community blaming the victim for not being able to tolerate even more "minor" annoyances.
I feel like there is some of that going on above. People aren't reacting here, as if from a tabula rasa, to the exact statements being made. They're reacting to long histories and perhaps what sounds like coded meanings or Dog whistle (politics). So, e.g., maybe you didn't directly say "having a religious belief is automatically a COI" – or at least not in this discussion – but other editors have said this, and you said something that reminded them of the overall climate on wiki. And now you're mad at them for noticing the overall climate, or for assuming that you agree with it, and anyway, how dare they be upset about something that upsets them?
If you haven't personally seen editors claiming that being religious is a problem, then I point out that there are l-o-n-g discussions open at ANI and COIN right now about whether being a member of a particular Christian denomination is a formal COI. Note that I'm not linking them because I think that having anyone in this discussion join them would be a bad idea – too much risk of us providing more heat than light, and all that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:47, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've never seen anyone say that having a religious belief is automatically a COI, I've seen people say that religious belief or affiliation can be a COI and people say that it can't be. Nothing in policy or guideline seems to support the "can't" side while the "can" side is currently consensus. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:03, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't remember seeing anyone claim that all religious beliefs are always a COI. I have seen editors say that having specific, uncommon religious beliefs (e.g., anyone who belongs to this or that 'cult') is a COI for any articles related to that subject area.
ArbCom disagreed in 2010: "For example, an editor who is a member of a particular organisation or holds a particular set of religious or other beliefs is not prohibited from editing articles about that organisation or those beliefs but should take care that his or her editing on that topic adheres to the neutrality policy and other key policies."
Editors with a COI are not prohibited from editing pages regardless so not sure if there actually is any disagreement there. The catch-22 is that if it is possible to identify the editor's religious affiliation from their edits alone then their edits aren't NPOV. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 05:26, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In what context is a COI editor actually prohibited from making edits? Incorrect identification is not an outing concern, so not sure why you would worry more about that than legit outing but OK. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 06:36, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Incorrect identification is a Wikipedia:Harassment concern. Earlier this year, you made false COI accusations about an editor – based on off-wiki information that turned out to be incomplete in important ways – that resulted in that editor feeling strongly pressured to disclose the highly personal situation that led to them being kicked out of the religion they were raised in. This is bad for Wikipedia, and it is bad for the falsely accused editors. You shouldn't have done that. IMO editors should be strongly discouraged from following your example.
COI editors are officially not prohibited from making all edits, but COI editors are officially prohibited from making most types of contributions. However, in practice, WP:Nobody reads the directions, and many of them are told by well-meaning editors that they shouldn't make any edits at all, and some of them are also told that if they do, then they'll be dragged to ANI or COIN for a criticism and self-criticism session. See, e.g., fully disclosed paid editors being told that simple updates for outdated information should be handled through the edit request system because "it's best" if paid editors never touch the mainspace. It is best – if your personal values prioritize purity over up-to-date articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:52, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Greetings. I noticed today (September 11th) on the anniversary section of the home page, a photo of United Airlines Flight 175 hitting the WTC South Tower, representing the anniversary of 9/11. Is there a policy preventing potentially distressing images (e.g. photos of graphic violence or serious injury, porn, etc.) from appearing on the home page? I understand that some articles, such as those on wars or atrocities, will warrant the use of potentially distressing images for illustration. But a visitor to an article like that will likely understand the risk of seeing those kinds of images if they know anything about the topic of that article. I don't think the same could be said for the home page.
Of course different people have different views on what amounts to a potentially distressing image. Nevertheless, I'd imagine that memories, reminders and depictions of 9/11 have traumatic impact on a wide swathe of people—people who were personally affected by the attacks (directly or indirectly), people who were distressed by watching them play out, people who have been affected by other aviation accidents, or even people who (like me) just have a low tolerance for these things. With all of these factors in mind, I was surprised to see that the photo of Flight 175 was deemed suitable to appear on the home page. Thecolonpagesaretoocomplicated (talk) 16:47, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's fairly uncomplicated: Wikipedia is not censored, unfortunately. If you've perused the Main Page for any length of time, you've likely seen dozens of images that were similarly distressful to individuals from different backgrounds than yours. Like with every other content issue, we reflect sources in what visibility we give these features, and there's just no getting around that this is one of the most famous images of the 21st century, ugly as it is. Remsense ‥ 论16:49, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Wikipedia is not censored" doesn't mean run whatever on the main page. I read the front page every day, I do not see dozens of images that are similarly distressful, or distasteful (can anyone point to three from the past year?). Of course that image should be in the article(s) about the attack, but there's really no reason to have an image of thousands of people being murdered on the front page every damn year. So, it bothers me, too, OP, you're not alone. I think it's callous of Wikipedia to put "violence porn" on the front page. (I also don't love that it's the lead image of the 9/11 article instead of being further down in the article, but having it in WP:OTD is much more gratuitous.) (Another example like this: the Hiroshima/Nagasaki "mushroom cloud" atomic bomb images.) Levivich (talk) 19:44, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'll put it like this: I personally loathe this about as much as you've expressed you do, but I am looking in my pockets for a way to make the argument you're making that's congruent with fundamental site policy and I am coming up with nothing. I am explicitly not making this about our ~~integrity as editors~~ because that would be inane and I respect my interlocutors a lot more than that, but sometimes we write and gleefully present violence porn because our reliable sources are violence porn, and there's no distinction I can honestly make there that makes any sense when taken to its logical conclusion.. Remsense ‥ 论19:55, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I hear ya. I would say we can choose a different image for 9/11 OTD (even a different 9/11 image, like the famous one of the rubble). That doesn't conflict with any site policies. And we don't have to take it to its logical conclusion (whatever that may be). We can choose an image for the main page for a particular item, and in making that choice, we can be sensitive to various sensitivities. I think what you're saying about us being effectively bound by policy is very true when it comes to article content--no way we can exclude that image from the 9/11 article and be in line with policy--but on the main page, we have discretion what photos to show. Just as we pick POTD based on aesthetics, we can be selective about OTD, DYK, etc. NOTCENSORED doesn't mean we can't make a good choice when we have several options, and there are many iconic 9/11 photos to choose from (firefighters running up the stairs while everyone else is running down, Bush with the megaphone, twisted steel of the tower ruins, just to name a few). Levivich (talk) 22:18, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's also nothing in our policies that requires us to include an image of any specific event in the list every single year. We could and perhaps should rotate them: This year it was the twin towers, and next year it can be the 30th anniversary of the space station trip, and the year after, we maybe we would choose an image for the 250th anniversary of the Staten Island Peace Conference. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:37, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Totally not trying to undermine peoples' points, I think they're right and we don't disagree about anything really, but I got myself curious: 9/11 was not mentioned by OTD in 2008, 2010, 2014, 2015 (was TFA), 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2022. Remsense ‥ 论22:52, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I did the same thing and noticed that it ran in 2020, 2023, and now 2024. The OTD images do rotate (and thank you to the volunteers who rotate them). I think this is easily fixed; this image sits in the image bin for that date. Tomorrow I'll swap it for another one. That way when we rotate in a 9/11 image next time, it'll be a different image. Or I'll get reverted and reported at ANI. One of the two. Levivich (talk) 23:02, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am looking in my pockets for a way to make the argument you're making that's congruent with fundamental site policy: The WP:OM guideline states that Images containing offensive material that is extraneous, unnecessary, irrelevant, or gratuitous are not preferred over non-offensive ones in the name of opposing censorship and that When multiple options are equally effective at portraying a concept, the most offensive options should not be used merely to "show off" possibly offensive materials. By citing this I don't mean to say that I think the image offends a person's sensibilities on like a propriety/decorum level but rather that, as OP says, the image can cause distress—'offend' in the sense of causing pain or hurt feelings. All that to say, it's entirely consistent with guidelines and policy to deliberately refrain from showing an image on the main page on the grounds that it's gratuitous and distress part of the readership when the relevant idea can be meaningfully conveyed with a different image. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 02:47, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But it's still ultimately the prevalence that guides choices, not whether they're offensive. It just so happens that offensive material is generally less prominent in RS, so we follow. Remsense ‥ 论02:56, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As a New Yorker who was in downtown NYC and saw 9/11 with my own eyes… I think it is GOOD that the images of that day are distressing. They should be. They remind us that it was a horrific incident. Don’t EVER sugar coat it. Remember it. Blueboar (talk) 19:56, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Using violence (in imagery or graphic text or whatever) for the sake of remembering violence (as opposed to, in reading an article, the purpose of education) is generally not a good idea. The selection of an image for the front page to be something rather than something else is not necessarily a "sugar coat" unless you're using you're using an image that is pretty much burying the lead -- an opaque coating around the point of the article, say.
The 9/11 article encompassing a long series of events (the aftermath being arguably orders of magnitude more significant for the world than the events of the day itself), one has a choice of many such events from which to take a headline image. A plane crashing into something, while a dramatic image and certainly a trigger moment for the event cascade, does not necessarily have to be the only kind of image that's justified for a headline (although it is certainly necessary for the article). And that day had a number of critical images that replayed on TV for days, not just the airplanes smashing into buildings. (And also remember that certain images were self-censored by media very early on, such as video of people jumping from the towers, which thus while shocking on the day of, has perhaps a less persistent memory because it was not replayed endlessly -- but would that not perhaps be a more powerful representation of the human tragedy?)
I don't have an alternative image to suggestion, from the day of Sept 11 itself, that isn't by some extension comparably morbid: showing both towers before the plane hits, or showing one tower in smoke is showing people about to die, and showing rubble is showing dead bodies. But those are probably have less violence-in-motion, this-is-people-being-killed-in-front-of-you, than the plane in the process of crashing. SamuelRiv (talk) 20:23, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know whether it's a good or a bad thing, but we have definitely become more squeamish about such things during my lifetime. As a child I watched TV programmes such as All Our Yesterdays which showed footage from World War Two, much of people being killed (usually off-screen, such as films of bombing raids taken from the bombers' point of view), but I don't remember any complaints, even about children watching. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:23, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think like most comparisons of this ilk, a large part of it is "people previously had fewer opportunities to voice the nuances of their opinions about media for you to notice". Remsense ‥ 论21:27, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We have had Wikipedia editors whose parents survived WWI or who lived through WWII themselves.
The television show mentioned above started airing in 1960, so it is reasonable to assume that every adult watching it had lived through the events, and that some fraction of them were watching events that had affected them very personally (e.g., the bombing raid that destroyed the family home). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:49, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Phil_Bridger gave an impression of their personal recollection of the show which seems like they were not watching their civilian peers in their country or hometowns getting bombed, which fundamentally contrasts to the TV experience that Blueboar describes. Therefore, the notion that "we have definitely become more squeamish about such things" seems to be unsupported by that anecdote, which is what my point is.
Furthermore, to give a contrasting anecdotal argument: my own experience is that older generations tend to be more reluctant to reflect on pain of their past in detail (whether theirs or of their peers) (which in my anecdotes would correlate at least somewhat to education, as those with more education seem more likely to value history for its own sake, as opposed to "letting the dead rest in peace" as one person told me; and education has improved dramatically across populations across the world.) SamuelRiv (talk) 00:58, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To be clear… my experience was live rather than on TV. Not only did I witness it all with my own eyes, I personally knew two people who were in the Towers that morning and didn’t make it out.
So yes, even after 23 years, seeing graphic images of 9/11 can bring back some very strong memories (sights, sounds and smells)… but, each time I see them, each time I mentally re-live that day, there is also some catharsis. The pain heals… the sadness-mixed-with-anger fades… That’s a good thing. Blueboar (talk) 12:58, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
IMO, any generalization to the tune of "we used to be more/less sensitive to this" that stretches back to cultural memory of WWII is going to be a major oversimplification. There's been many wars and generations since then, and attitudes toward cultural memory of each have shifted over time and place (not to mention that there is no unified historical "we" that we as Wikipedia editors can point to that covers this time period). signed, Rosguilltalk14:50, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The entire premise of this discussion starts with the idea that the image in question is on the same level as graphic violence or serious injury or porn, which it... very much isn't. An atomic mushroom cloud, likewise, is not graphic violence even if it is connected to extreme losses of life that lots of people today still have strong feelings about. They aren't gratuitous, they are massively important images that are part of the cultural awareness of these events. You can take complaints about the lead image of September 11 attacks to the talk page of that article, where I imagine one will find much support for changing it. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchstalk14:36, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think it's totally fine to cede all territory here, as people are fully expected to have a wide variety of emotional responses mediated by social association and context, even if the media isn't explicit. My first and imo strongest point was merely that—while avoiding being overly reductive or obtuse about it—Wikipedia has plenty to offer in terms of distress for different members of its readership. That's why I'm genuinely wary about going too far out of my way to advocate maximal tastefulness on the front page—one possible outcome are a general censorship if we try really hard to be fair to everyone while being maximally tasteful, or an ebb in the wrong direction towards presentation based on the type of people Wikipedia editors tend to be, rather than who readers are intended to be. Remsense ‥ 论14:50, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to WP:TPG, the purpose of the user talk pages is to provide space for editors to discuss editing that page. Also, this page specifies that archives over 512kB should not be used for accessibility reasons. There is a good reason for that, as for extremely long pages, browsing on mobile is basically impossible because the browser can't handle the RAM overload and simply breaks, forcing to delete all the other open tabs along the way. My phone stopped responding when trying to put a CCI notice to this guy, who had 1.5 MB of text - and I haven't gone into images yet. My phone isn't particularly old, was first produced in 2017 - there are definitely folks out there with much older hardware on their hands.
More examples: my PC stutters on this, this, this and this user talk subpages; and in the case of Bishonen, these are not mostly newsletter subscriptions but actual talk page, even if archived. So if anyone were to browse it for whatever reason, they may get problems actually loading it, let alone using it for any meaningful purpose. And imagine trying to edit the talk page if, like me, you are editing by default in source code but use syntax highlighters, which seem to be loading the browser pretty heavily. My PC is not that old, either.
For active users, the same issue arises from talkpages like those of AwfulReader. For Dr Sroy or Masao - no longer active, installing Lowercase sigmabot 3 didn't work at all, as their pages are still at over 1MB.
In any case, there are very clear accessibility issues involved, so this needs addressing. Something to the tune of a change to WP:TPG saying If an editor experiences accessibility issues with the editor's user talk page because it is too large to navigate comfortably, they may archive it themselves after notifying the editor of the changes and explaining their character. When doing that, they should use reasonable sorting criteria (e.g. sort by year, or by a smaller period if size concerns justify it), and use sorting criteria that would allow comfortable browsing of archives (e.g. 100 kB per page).
I have, on rare occassions, seen excessively long user talk pages forcibly archived. People are generally given wide latitude on how to manage their own user space, but that doesn't extend to breaking the ability of the project to function. RoySmith(talk)19:10, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I wholeheartedly endorse some system of page size limitation and forced archiving in egregious cases. I have done this myself in the past. I would also note that in some instances editors have long abandoned the project while their talk pages continue to grow through various automated messages and through notices about their long-ago article creations being proposed or nominated for deletion. BD2412T19:14, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I tried to avoid listing these pages, as inactive editors are of little concern to me or to Wikipedia in most situations where you'd actually want to use the talk, but subscriptions do clutter a lot of user talk pages in at the top of the list by user length. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 23:48, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I fully endorse a size limit on user talk pages, after which they are forcibly archived. This is a basic accessibility issue, and in my experience the editors with pages that are too long have usually been asked to trim them and haven't done so. Vanamonde93 (talk) 19:23, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Good idea! But how would it work? Do the old posts get deleted? Will it Block you from puttibg in a New post? I think The smartest things to do would be that A: The old posts get archived OR B: The talk page gets split into two after a certain amount of posts. There would be a button at the top saying: "Older topics" or something like that. 87.95.81.141 (talk) 19:28, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
At the end of the day, if someone can't use a user talk page to talk to the user, it's fundamentally at odds with the principles of Wikipedia. I would support some restriction on page length. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:30, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To clarify, per TPG we can edit a User's Talk page already in certain cases, and if the user is inactive and not responding to an email and message request and this is an accessibility issue, then that seems like a perfect reason to just go ahead and fix it. We don't need a new policy that says we can do a policy.
For existing archives, when it's not just newsletter subscriptions that can all be pruned or replaced into a separate archive, I'm not sure what the best solution is (maybe preserving section anchors and then redirecting the content into Archive 16.1, Archive 16.2, etc.?). SamuelRiv (talk) 21:08, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I support this proposal to enforce talk page size limitations. Maybe the best way would be to have a bot post a talk page notice once it reaches 150k or so, and then a month later, if it is still at or over 150k the bot automatically applies the archive coding and {{archives}} box to the talk page. Iggy pop goes the weasel (talk) 20:31, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A few comments:
Just for clarity, many of these pages are not user talk pages, they are user talk page archives.
I realize this isn't AN/ANI, but it still would have been classy to tell people you're posting about them, by name, here.
I'm not necessarily against some kind of page size limit, nor necessarily for it. I'd need someone to convince me that it affects more than, say a couple of people. At some point, it is your responsibility to upgrade your equipment. Where that point is, is a reasonable thing to discuss. We can't all be expected to limit our choices so a 15-year-old computer still works, though.
Editing on the mobile site is not fit for purpose. I'd be against anyone insisting that talk pages be accessible to people using old (or new) phones with the sucky mobile interface.
I am against the original proposal that anyone with an ancient computer gets to decide the size of other peoples' talk pages and/or talk page archives. There would need to be some agreed-upon size limit, and if one's computer is so bad that this limit is still too big, it's time for a new computer. --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:30, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I use the desktop site on a reasonably modern mobile phone for a large portion of my editing, and enormous talk pages can cause issues. It's also a problem with large talk page sections. So it's not just the mobile interface that has issues. We should also keep in mind that a large and growing number of editors use a mobile device as their primary, or only, means of editing. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 21:40, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:User talk pages are inaccessible for many reasons. Making the best of the current system, I agree that you should politely ask someone to archive (let them decide how first). Conversely, I find it disruptive when users archive their talk page with each and every single edit, making it difficult to peruse through older conversations without going through their entire page history. Reading and replying to longer convos on talk pages while on mobile is next to impossible even in relatively short conversations. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 21:47, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's also a problem with large talk page sections: I could definitely get behind a size limit for individual AN/ANI/AE/ArbCom/VP threads! If it isn't solved after X kB of text (X is TBD), then zot, into the archive it goes. Floquenbeam (talk) 21:58, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents is a chronic offender, despite aggressive archiving, and I've wondered whether we could split it into a rotating list by day of the week (all getting archived to the same place – that part would be easy). This would make it easier for people to find manageable ways to help out ("I'll can keep an eye on WP:ANI/Monday if you'll take care of WP:ANI/Tuesday, but I refuse to watch every single dispute all year long") and keep each individual page relatively short. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:30, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not opposed to a size limit on talk pages, but I agree with Floq here (sorry, Floq, I tried my best not to, but your post just made too much sense). I don't mean any disrespect here, but a 7-year-old phone is a really old phone, and I personally don't care whether people with obsolete hardware have a hard time accessing this website. It's the internet, backwards compatibility can only go so far (like 3 years). Beyond that, backwards compatibility is just not a priority in my view.
I remember having a similar discussion not long ago about "page weight" (the total size of everything that's downloaded on a webpage, images and text). It was in the context of thumbnail images. The average page weight now is 2MB IIRC. A rationale rule would be that no page on Wikipedia should have a page weight that is, say, larger than the average page weight on the internet (or 75% of that figure, or whatever).
But if your phone or PC is having a problem loading a 1MB page, you're using very obsolete hardware and probably have trouble surfing the rest of the web, too.
In general, Wikipedia should keep up with the times. Sure, let's not have greater-than-average page weight. But let's not worry about 2017 phones. Levivich (talk) 22:32, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think we actually should worry about 2017 hardware. Most people in the world can't afford to replace their devices every few years.
I am posting this from my MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017). Up until early this year, it was my daily driver. I still use it extensively when not at my desk. I agree we can't burden ourselves with supporting ancient hardware forever, but three years is way too soon and even seven years is rather aggressive. RoySmith(talk)23:32, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's a MacBook Pro! That's one of the most expensive laptops on the market! Of course it'll last longer. Average PC lifespan is 3-4 years. Yes, Macs can last much longer, I've had MacBooks go 10 years before. But that's not typical. 84% of computer users do not use a Mac (16% market share). Levivich (talk) 23:37, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, but if you are saying that to edit Wikipedia you need ultra-modern hardware then no, I don't agree with the premise.
Also, tell all the government agencies/school districts etc. to have their PCs go to waste every 3-4 years - I'd like to see taxpayers' reaction on that. It's fine if you want to upgrade it so often but we aren't speaking of playing AAA games or doing Photoshop or video rendering, it's just editing the text with a couple of images in a CSS envelope.
I'm not saying Wikipedia should be able to run on Nokia 3310 but I'm damn sure a lot of folks outside the western world just want a phone and not necessarily iPhone 16, and they will buy the cheapest Chinese stuff sold on the market, which will do the basic work of calling, texting and browsing/scrolling through memes/watching YT/listening to music/make some pictures. And even in my case I don't really see a point in high-end phones when budget options are just fine (my phone is a mid-range tier, and still works perfectly well after so much abuse I've inflicted on it).
Agree with this. I just checked to see my phone's age and it's pretty much seven years. I am looking into getting a new one, but I haven't treated the current one overly well. Seven years seems an aggressive cutoff for no backwards compatibility. CMD (talk) 05:38, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Globally, the replacement cycle of smartphones was about 21 months in 2016, with apparently longer cycles in developed markets (Counterpoint Research, 2016; Kantar World Panel, 2017). Interestingly, the average replacement cycle is close to the smartphone service contract length typically signed by consumers in Germany (Prakash et al., 2020), as well as in other countries. As a comparison, it is calculated that the median lifespan of a (pre-smartphone era) mobile phone decreased from 4.8 to 4.6 years between 2000 and 2005 (Bakker et al., 2014). — journal article
More:
In 2016, American smartphone owners used their phones for 22.7 months on average before upgrading. By 2018, that number had increased to 24.7 ... The life cycle of a smartphone in China was relatively shorter at 20.2 months in 2016 and 21 months for both 2017 and 2018.CNBC
As a result, the average amount of time that people own a car before replacing it, about eight years, dwarfs the length of time before a phone upgrade, about three and a half years.NYT
Today, the average lifespan of smartphones is around 2.5 years.USAToday
Why the average lifespan of a smartphone is only three yearsEl Pais
That first paper goes into some detail about those issues. It also distinguishes between "functional lifetime" (user preference) and "technical lifetime" (how long the phone will physically function). Levivich (talk) 20:33, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing For my last three phones, I replaced two when they physically broke (one after about 4 years, one after about 8 years) the other I replaced after the 2½ year contract partly because it had a few annoying minor issues and partly because there was an excellent upgrade offer available. Thryduulf (talk) 20:47, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know why we're arguing about this in the first place. People have complained about the problem. Let's fix it—which costs us nothing—instead of arguing that "it doesn't affect me" or deciding whether the opinions of the people who want it fixed are worthwhile. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:51, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Can we back up here? If page length alone in terms of wikitext is enough to break even a 20-year-old machine, then something is really wrong. The performance should not in principle scale disproportionately -- a Talk page is primarily, at scale, plaintext, with comparatively few templates. If the dynamic UX elements of Talk pages are scaling with, then that's a software problem to report to phabricator. (Also, on Talk page archives, already nicely templated, the dynamic UX should be disabled.)
You might have to manually disable the fancy discussion bells and whistles in your settings in the meantime, but for WMF default interface, 2017 hardware should be able to handle pages of this size, and if it can't that's a bug. SamuelRiv (talk) 05:10, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
First, when the problem is reading, then the "page length alone in terms of wikitext" is not a good predictor of the size of the HTML that's being delivered to you. A mere 51 characters of wikitext can put 1.6MB in your browser, if the 51 characters happen to be {{Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents}}.
Second, even if the page weight is light (e.g., limited formatting, no photos), if a page has zillions of words on it, it's going to be difficult to find the part that you want to read. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:43, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it shouldn't be controversial to make pages more accessible at practically no cost. Just archive the page. It's super easy. If someone is inactive, then we can set up auto-archiving on their behalf. If someone is active but doesn't know this is an issue, then they can be notified (presumably by one of the people touting their performance above) or it can be done for them. If someone is active, knows this is an issue, and refuses to fix it after being asked, then they need to demonstrate that they can participate in a collaborative environment before anything else, because choosing to die on this hill fails to meet the very low bar of rational behavior we expect from each other. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 06:29, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe it's a script, but at the top of user talk pages I see "Latest comment:" with the time and date, easy to click on that and get to the bottom or close to it. Or just click the new topic button. Doug Wellertalk14:42, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is some sort of script, I just tried to go as a guest on a different browser on your talk page and the latest comment line doesn't appear - but I do have it when logged in. The PC version also has the "Add topic" button, but the issue is more with mobile than PC. On mobile you have the blue "Add topic" button, but because these pages load so slowly it is basically unclickable and can crash your browser in extreme loads (that is, if the browser doesn't crash before that because it thinks you are asking too much of it). Szmenderowiecki (talk) 15:23, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Floquenbeam, the old phone is a bit of a red herring; I'm currently on a state-of-the-art laptop and an ethernet connection, and there are user talk pages that have a noticeable load time. Vanamonde93 (talk) 15:50, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's not just going to be device age. It's also going to be internet connectivity/ bandwidth for a laptop and wifi 3G/4G/5G coverage for a phone? These are likely to be variable. Especially if people edit while moving around. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:02, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I just don't think "no noticeable load time" is a reasonable criterion. I have my own personal experience too; my 2450 page watchlist (that's not gigantic compared to others) takes about 6 seconds to load, and a certain editor (who is famous for a large talk page) has a talk page that currently takes me about 4 seconds to load. I realize watchlist sizes vary, and this probably depends on a dozen things I don't understand, scripts I have loaded, etc. But I don't think I have a right to insist that an editor ensure that their talk page loads quicker than my watchlist. What we really need - if this is currently an actual problem for a significnat number of editors - is some kind of methodology respectful to both extremes, and some kind of rational criteria, so that (a) the number of editors who have a hard time loading a page (esp. a talk page) using desktop mode is "reasonably" small, and (b) the number of editors forced to change the way they manage their talk page is "reasonably" small as well. If anyone can claim they can't load someone's talk page with no way of proving it, and force a change, then people will immediately weaponize that rule and try to piss off their perceived enemies. Floquenbeam (talk) 17:36, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
some kind of methodology, it's called "page weight". The median today for desktop is 2.7MB, for mobile it's 2.4MB [13]. You can test a page's page weight with tools like this one: [14]. I checked the ones mentioned here:
Bish's archive 19 does take a hot minute for my work PC to load... and it's less than a year old.. but at the same time, how often are people looking back at archives? is a slower load a huge issue? -- Aunva6talk - contribs19:17, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The original link is for non-user talk pages, not Wikipedia:User pages. " User pages are for communication and collaboration. While considerable leeway is allowed in personalizing and managing your user pages, they are community project pages, not a personal website, blog, social networking medium, or a Wikipedia article. They should be used to better participate in the community, and not used to excess for unrelated purposes nor to bring the project into disrepute."Doug Wellertalk16:02, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is a technology problem and the WMF is responsible for providing the core technology. The core issue is that Wiki software is not a good tool for creating and managing a mailbox facility. And the widespread use of scripts and templates makes the problem worse by encouraging people to spam bloated messages with a single click.
My real email inbox is much better. With that, I can file or delete or tag messages easily. I can set up filters to route them automatically. There's a spam filter and sensible defaults which segregate the different types of messages – social media, promotional, newsletters – so that the primary inbox is comparatively uncluttered.
But, checking latest developments at mw:Talk pages project, I'm not seeing a lot of activity there. I'll try a little innovating in my own case....
That team is working on mw:Edit check now. I would not expect any significant new features to be added during the next year. Additionally, one of the community-imposed restraints on it was that it be compatible with wikitext, which means that filtering and tagging are not realistic. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Anybody who wishes can archive my talk page. I tried to do it once and I couldn't figure out how. The instructions were impenetrable for my technology level of pen and paper 1.0. Smallchief (talk) 19:49, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think we would do well to have a bot which sets up talk page archiving for all new accounts. Maybe only after they pass some minimal activity bar like autoconfirmed. Pick a reasonable configuration and it'll be fine for 99.99% of users. RoySmith(talk)22:42, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A one-time pass on User_talk: pages above a certain size+staleness (say, >50kb and only affecting comments >90 days old) would probably also be fine for 99.99% of users.
A one-time pass has the advantage of not generating ongoing support requests ("It archives my page every day! How do I turn this thing off?!" as well as "I don't read the village pumps, participate in RFCs, or watch CENT, and I hate this, which is proof that you don't have consensus for this!"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:51, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Rather than having a bot, can't you build that into the standard Welcome messages? I realize that wouldn't hit 100% of the new accounts, but likely a large percentage. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 14:40, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect it would be closer to nobody. People don't read instructions, and people certainly don't take the time to implement things that they have no immediate need for. RoySmith(talk)14:49, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I had an archived CBAN/Indef proposal that got archived without any action, but pretty much all users agreed there was a case for supporting one. What should I do? Allan Nonymous (talk) 14:03, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I feel like specifying formulas inline could be susceptible to subtle vandalism which would be undesirable. I'm also seeing mentions of eval, can you comment on how this calculations are being done ? (I'll note evaling user-generated content on Wikimedia sites should probably be a no-go from a security POV). Sohom (talk) 16:57, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Everything on Wikipedia is susceptible to vandalism; it doesn't mean we stop mentioning people's birth dates and other details which can be subtly fabricated. The calculators could be made templates which can be protected if necessary. Evalling is fine if inputs are sanitised. – SD0001 (talk) 17:10, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@SD0001 Wrt to the first point, my thought process was that manipulating birthdays would be a lesser issue than manipulating a BMI calculator that could be potentially be used by people to self-diagnose metabolism disorders. Regarding the rest, on looking further at the code, I agree that security shouldn't be a issue for it's current version, however, it would be nice to document the method the script uses anyway (as a comment) to make sure future editors of the script are aware of this consideration. Sohom (talk) 19:33, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The tl;dr is that the formulas are parsed using a simple Recursive descent parser into an AST type structure. The AST is evaluated by walking through the tree. In the tree there are OP nodes that represent an operation from a fixed set of valid operations implemented in javascript. A dependency graph structure is also created in order to refresh any widgets that depend on a value that was changed with loop detection. Bawolff (talk) 19:41, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Sohom Datta this would serve the user some javascript, execution is client-side via browser. The script code itself could only be modified by interface admins. The current script would always be viewable by anyone, and is currently available to see at this link. — xaosfluxTalk19:30, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
See my comment just above regarding this, I agree that is probably safe, but it would make sense to document the security considerations in the code for future interface admins/script editors. Sohom (talk) 19:36, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Useful gadget, but it should be placed below the infobox rather than inside it, because it's somewhat unnoticeable when its placed inside the infobox. Vestrian24Bio (TALK) 14:42, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Prior to larger development, a trigger category Category:Pages using gadget Calculator should be built. Additionally, related templates and documentation are needed. How to present the template when the gadget isn't running or javascript isn't running should be discussed. Finally, the non-technical consideration of article styling/usage consideration (such as what @Vestrian24Bio brought up above) should be discussed. — xaosfluxTalk15:14, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When logged out, in dark mode, at {{Soulfly}}, the actual link for Soulfly is an extremely dark grey that is difficult to see on a black background. It was not this way before. Does anyone know how to fix this? --Jax 0677 (talk) 15:47, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Using Firefox and Dark Reader with Light Mode on, the icons are the same hue as the background and are not visible.
Fix by using Wikipedia's new Dark Mode? Not so fast. The background is too dark and the text is too bright. My eyes hurt when looking at it, and they don't hurt when using Dark Reader. This issue has already been raised by multiple users,[16] and will no doubt be solved in a timely fashion. But until then it would be nice to hit the undo button on whatever happened this week to the icons.
I have been having this issue for a while now and would like some help solving it. I use Advanced Mode as a mobile user. Occasionally, going to some pages in the Wikipedia or User namespaces will show me the non-Advanced Mode UI. Going to another page typically fixes this, and going into Settings shows that Advanced Mode is still turned on. This seems to happen most often when clicking a link from one Wikipedia namespace page to another page in that namespace, but will sometimes also happen in other circumstances. There is no visible pattern to when it happens. Does anyone know why this happens or how it can be fixed? Thanks, QuicoleJR (talk) 14:42, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@QuicoleJR thank you, was clarifying if you were using the browser or the Wikipedia App. For your browser, assuming you are using Safari? Are you using the current version of Safari? — xaosfluxTalk14:55, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, no, I do not use Safari. I use the Google app (not Google Chrome, Google itself). I am using the current version of Google AFAICT. QuicoleJR (talk) 15:01, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I noticed that my userpage was in Category:Pages with image sizes containing extra px. As it turned out, this was because I had specified |widths=80px. Removing the px solved it. This appears to be a WP:PXPX issue.
Checking a random sample of a dozen pages of the currently 8k+ in the category, I found that, in all cases, the member pages had the exact same issue with |widths= and/or |heights= specifications. Paradoctor (talk) 10:25, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is phab:T374311. I think it has always been suggested to include px in gallery sizes but now it adds the new tracking category. I think the gallery tag or tracking code should be modifed to allow one px in gallery wikitext without triggering the category, rather than mass-removing old px from all wikis to avoid the category. The suggestion to include px was removed from mw:Gallery examples yesterday and today.[17]PrimeHunter (talk) 12:49, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This category appears to be broken at this time (false positives on properly configured gallery tags, per long-standing documentation at mediawiki.org), and possibly not needed at all, since Linter started detecting pxpx errors in 2023. I have commented at two related Phab tasks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:48, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see any pxpx in there. I agree that any hardcoded px should go away and live in the "gallery" declaration. That might allow us to use other units like em with code like "widths=10" being ambiguous. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:31, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem I'm having is actually on wikiconference.org, not here, but I'm asking this here because this is where all the really smart people hang out :-)
I'm trying to generate some custom CSS for https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2024/Schedule which will let me highlight the talks I want to go to. this works, but only highlights the talk title. this one highlights every table cell (as expected). this one does exactly what I want (i.e. highlights the table cell containing the desired title), but when I go to save it, I get an error message "The document contains errors. Are you sure you want to save?" and "Error: Expected RPAREN at line 1, col 9". Ignoring the error message and clicking "OK" seems to work fine.
:has() was first-implemented in 2022 by Safari, then Chromium, then late 2023 by Firefox (implementing it was non-trivial for performance reasons), and I think went through a few name changes between 2018 and 2022. I am not surprised that the editor doesn't know it. Izno (talk) 16:41, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Basically, enabling "Make headers of tables display as long as the table is in view" in Special:Preferences Gadgets results in the first table data row in templated tables being hidden by the table header rows shifted down. See Phabricator ticket for example and screenshots. ~Anachronist (talk) 14:19, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Interestingly, it displays properly in Chrome if my window is about half the width of the screen, or if I turn on Developer Tools so that the display area is about half the width of the screen. --SarekOfVulcan (talk)14:28, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page. [19][20]
Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [21]
Project updates
Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [22]
Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos). [23]
Deployment of the MOS namespace on English Wikipedia is expected to happen tomorrow. I'll post a list of titles that need to be cleaned up after it happens; expected the bare [[MOS:]] and [[MoS:]] etc to break; please replace these with WP:MOS. C. Scott Ananian (WMF) (talk) 14:52, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Enhanced editnotice loader
I worked on a module that would serve as an enhanced editnotice loader for Wikipedia. See testwiki:Module:Editnotice_load and Module:Editnotice load (which is an exact copy). Features include category editnotices, better group notices, and editnotices by page ID (which would reduce the need to move pages around).
I want to get further feedback on this loader before it inevitably gets implemented. Please check out the testwiki. It should be backwards compatible with the way we do things, but I would like checks for this first.
If this is to be implemented, there will need to be a couple of changes made, including to:
Some documentation on how it works from a user's perspective would be helpful, in order to understand the context and how it would be used in practice, including how security restrictions are enforced. On a side note, I'm not sure that its deployment is "inevitable". isaacl (talk) 22:03, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have some testcases on testwiki. For best results, view when logged out and inspect the HTML when logged in.
testwiki:Taylor Swift should be a good example of me getting category editnotices working. testwiki:Protected title and testwiki:Protected title2 show the protection editnotice on both the create screen and on the "does not exist" screen when a title is protected from creation for other reasons.
testwiki:Special:EditPage/A should show the page notice from testwiki:Template:Editnotices/PageID/54370 (which is for A). You can also see I renamed previous "page notice"s to "title notice"s because the way page notices are bound to currently are actually to titles, not pages. The new "page notice" will remain bound to a specific page because it uses PageID. There will be no need to update the title notices for pages that exist. On the other hand, for pages that don't exist, the title notice will need to be kept up to date. AwesomeAasim04:01, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can't tell from the article page how to use the feature: where the edit notice lives, how will access be limited, and so forth. Thus it's hard to evaluate the feature without knowing the maintenance cost. isaacl (talk) 09:58, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I also moved the editnotice links to a collapsible box because the number of creatable editnotices has gotten relatively high after adding category notices. AwesomeAasim13:16, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I see there's now a link above the edit notice point to its location, so category-based notices are grouped under a "Category" subpage. What are the enhancements for the group-based notices? isaacl (talk) 18:33, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is less ambiguity in how they are handled. For example, on testwiki:Template:A/B/C/D/E, there are five different group editnotices that can be created. So if there is a page where it is desirable that the group Template:A/B needs one group notice, and Template:A/B/C needs another group notice, and Template:A/B/D needs another group notice, that can now be done; there will be one common group notice and two separate group notices for subpages. AwesomeAasim19:21, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would suggest to phase the rollout into stages, and creating a test plan to ensure nothing regressed. Editing this many interface pages and fully protected templates at once sounds like too much work for an admin to volunteer to. For instance, the specific category editnotices you mention can be left for later as we already have a decent system to handle those categories. Immediately, in preparation for this, I would consider adding the following category editnotices templates this cannot be done immediately as they also need to be removed from Module:Mainspace editnotice, else they would show up twice when the rest of the changes are deployed. – SD0001 (talk) 08:01, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I actually think this might be something that is better done all in one go. Removing the two category editnotices from Module:Mainspace editnotice should be kind of a no-brainer after the rollout. The way that the module currently does these checks, checking the unparsed wikitext, currently sucks.
You are running into Apple's browser's inflation algorithm which is adjusting your font size to what it thinks is the preferred minimum font size because they consider the current font-size too small for the current page and your preferences. It's best to set your preferred font size locally on your device so it doesn't change again.
You can alter this by changing your font size on your device or if you have an account applying text-size-adjust in your user CSS.
@Jdlrobson: thanks for responding. I've tried something like this already, by having JavaScript revert the viewport back to width=100 (reverting the font size back to normal). What I don't understand is why this change was applied to legacy Vector, instead of just the new Vector. ‑‑Neveselbert (talk·contribs·email) 18:59, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Gallery issue
I noticed some recent gallery's in articles that have this heading: <gallery mode=packed heights=250px>. The result is such a gallery having very big images, not the specified 250px but 469px high. I found the 469px by making a screenshot of the page (using Edge as browser, with zoom 100%), followed by cropping is to contain one image only. For an example see Wat Ket Karam. FredTC (talk) 11:14, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The thumbnails are shown too big, because the parameter is not "heights" but "height". "<gallery mode=packed height=250px>" works fine.--Snævar (talk) 22:30, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, "heights" is correct. "height" is ignored as an unknown parameter and you get a default size. I don't know the precise algorithm when heights is used but it looks like the browser may calculate how many images will fit in a row with the current window width, and then enlarges the images so the whole window width is used, except it's limited how much it will enlarge an image. And MediaWiki apparently offers a larger image file than requested with the heights parameter so the browser has a good image to work with if enlargement is needed by the algorithm. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:01, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Then this text:
heights= Image heights in pixels (has no effect if mode is set to slideshow)
Whenever I click on the language selector, it shows not only languages in which the article is available, but also suggestions of new languages to translate it in. (Which are never useful to me, but that is beside the point.)
The problem is that this suggestion appears with a delay of a second or so. See screencast:
Typically, I move my mouse cursor to the language name that I want to select, then just before I have the time to click, this suggestion appears and moves the target, so I end up clicking on the wrong languages.
I want to mark some of my edit as Minor Edit, but unable to do so with source editor. only Visual Editor provide interface to do that but i mostly work with source editor. how to mark any edit as minor edit on source editor of mobile website.
I tried enwiki-20240820-pages-articles.xml.bz2 and the latest enwiki dump but 7zip and bzip2 keep failing. I redownloaded it multiple times. I'm on Pop OS and there is plenty of disk space available of course.
I am using 7z x enwiki-20240820-pages-articles.xml.bz2 and
bzip2 -d enwiki-20240820-pages-articles.xml.bz2 to extract.
Thanks. So far I figured out that the problem is in all tools that use libbzip2 under the hood (I think 7zip and pbzip2 and bzip2). The problem is that the default block size is 900.000 bytes, and if you go over that you get:
pbzip2 -dkv enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2
Parallel BZIP2 v1.1.13 [Dec 18, 2015]
By: Jeff Gilchrist [http://compression.ca]
Major contributions: Yavor Nikolov [http://javornikolov.wordpress.com]
Uses libbzip2 by Julian Seward
# CPUs: 20
Maximum Memory: 100 MB
Ignore Trailing Garbage: off
-------------------------------------------
File #: 1 of 1
Input Name: enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2
Output Name: enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml
BWT Block Size: 900k
Input Size: 22880311372 bytes
Decompressing data...
pbzip2: *ERROR: Could not write 900000 bytes to file [ret=-1]! Aborting...
pbzip2: *ERROR: system call failed with errno=[2: No such file or directory]!
pbzip2: *ERROR: system call failed with errno=[5: Input/output error]!
Terminator thread: premature exit requested - quitting...
Cleanup unfinished work [Outfile: enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml]...
Deleting output file: enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml, if it exists...
pbzip2: *INFO: Deletion of output file succeeded.
When a bot edits a watched page or file, notification emails for subsequent human edits stop being sent. Notifications only resume once the page is manually viewed or the entire watchlist is marked as read. Has anyone not had this problem? ‑‑Neveselbert (talk·contribs·email) 19:11, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure if this is the right place, but why are navboxes not visible in mainspace articles in mobile view (unless rotated sideways)? They are visible in drafts. Kailash29792(talk)01:38, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Template:Linux layers is working fine in light mode, but in dark mode, the <code>...</code> blocks (with text like "fopen") are unreadable dark gray text on dark gray background. It looks like that's happening from this CSS block:
Firefox is telling me it's the last item in the comma-separated list which is active. I think this might be coming from the built-in skin CSS? This is a complicated case because the surrounding background colors are pastel in both light and dark modes, but the background of the code tag itself is white in light mode and dark gray in dark mode. It would require careful testing if this is in fact a skin problem. -- Beland (talk) 03:37, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is this related to all HTML tags (that used to appear as green text in syntax highlighter) are now indistinguishable from plaintext when viewed in dark mode? Started yesterday on Wikivoyage, and today here on en.wiki. Zinnober9 (talk) 22:06, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure where else to properly propose or showcase this, but I did a refactor of the Unicode block template design, introducing various BCP bells and whistles—namely dark mode support via TemplateStyles (Template:Unicode chart/styles minimal.css). Sadly, I can't use <tfoot>. Compare {{Unicode chart CJK Radicals Supplement}}
@Gonnym suggested the bare EL be converted into a reference. I think I agree with that, but I didn't want to unilaterally change everything at once. It's a pretty dated design though, while several editors have tried to redesign it but haven't completed it. So, I guess I wanted to triage it and do everything right while keeping the manual work of fixing every block manageable. Remsense ‥ 论15:37, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A nitpick: I don't love the use of two different fonts and font sizes for the column and row headers, especially since both appear to be different from the base page font. Is there a reason for these fonts to be different from the base page font? See MOS:FONTFAMILY for a guideline. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:09, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the nitpick, of course! I wouldn't do it purely for decoration per guidelines and good sense; I could easily lose one of the font sizes which was just mirroring the original, but the monospace is due to it being a computer-based code point, I guess? Now that I'm interrogating that again, it's a rather weak reason to insist on it, I think I can 86 that too. Remsense ‥ 论17:13, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I do think the table footer is a bit visually distracting at 1rem, especially if the string appears several times on a page corresponding to several blocks. What do you think? Remsense ‥ 论17:19, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely restore the normal-sized and fixed-pitch row and column headers (you might try making *all* the characters normal-sized). Try to make the cells perfectly square and as small as possible, they seem to not be square and are bigger than before. I would just put the text "Unicode 16.0" in the header with a ref leading to the PDF, and also there is no need to tell them that gray cells are unassigned, so both footnotes are removed. Spitzak (talk) 18:22, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure about making square cells—which would be easy to do—of course we inspect isolated glyphs in an ideal square, but I think this becomes significantly harder to read as a table that way. Though, I realize I've picked a CJK block to test this with, maybe that's different with a graphetically different script so square cells would be best.Remsense ‥ 论18:26, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm no, I'm full of it and square cells is obviously the move. I've allowed the headers to be bolded like in other tables instead, and I think that's good. Trying to step away so people can analyze for now. Remsense ‥ 论18:35, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Remsense: You can't use tfoot for the same reason that thead and tbody (also a, img and a bunch of others) can't be used - none of these are whitelisted in MediaWiki. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:45, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I support the rewrite, especially on accessibility grounds, but nounderlines class should probably be removed: does it even serve a purpose here? (If it even has one at al.) stjn15:09, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Seems like a pretty bad relic of a different time. I get the case for why someone though this might be a good idea, but removing underlines is also just removing pretty much the only way you can tell a link from a non-link apart in Wikipedia, so moving styles like that to TemplateStyles (where they target specific things) seems much better. stjn19:52, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, hence why it's in the TemplateStyles section of the page. The problem is that none of the classes of interest really go with specific templates, or are additionally employed in the "table" use case even when they do have a specific template in mind. So I haven't spent a ton of time trying to fix this one. Izno (talk) 20:11, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Looking better but can you please restore the cell size to what it was in the original? We seem to be suffering some bloat, it is even larger than before. In addition the cell sizes should match the inline tables being used for 8-bit character sets, which were designed to match the original.
Though it was not in the original, making the row/col headers be fixed-pitch (as well as bold) would help for recognizing Hex values.
I still think the footer can be removed in the majority of cases. Put "Unicode 16.0" and the PDF link into the title, and just remove the "gray indicates non-assigned" as this is well known. Spitzak (talk) 17:46, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've reduced the effective padding, that looks better. I think I would like to maintain the table caption being used exclusively for the name of the block. I am also a hair skeptical that the meaning of gray squares is adequately intuitive to many readers who might be learning about Unicode or any related concept for the very first time, and they might not even really know that letters are assigned as such. That is to say, I think the note plausibly should remain. Remsense ‥ 论17:56, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I found that fixed sized boxes with a very small padding is the way to get smaller boxes. They are still too large.
That's what I've done. Are you sure they're still too large? This is the worst case scenario for readability I think, with rather complex and diverse, square-filling glyphs. I worry if I reduce the spacing any more it will become more difficult to discern one glyph from another at a glance. Remsense ‥ 论18:18, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe just add the PDF as a ref to the title, with no unicode version text. The Unicode version is part of the title of the reference anyway.
Yes they are still too large, as they are larger than the original. Copy however the original version set the box sizes. These glyphs should not be causing the boxes to get larger, that should not happen until the glyph literally does not fit in the box, with zero padding. Spitzak (talk) 18:19, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I like the fact that you fixed the width of the row headers. Do you think you could try fixed pitch? I think that will help as usually U+AB12 is being shown in a fixed-pitch font. Spitzak (talk) 18:23, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am on the fence about this choice as well, but I am often tugged towards parsimony (i.e. only using one font) but I'll try it out again now. Remsense ‥ 论18:29, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's odd, there's no reason for that to be the case, they're both set to font-family: monospace. I'll change it though to what our templates do instead. Remsense ‥ 论18:02, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Makes sense! I have no idea why they would be tagged that, as it's not the case that the text is writing several different languages! Not sure why I bothered copying it over. Remsense ‥ 论20:20, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm concerned about making the table design slicker at the expense of conveigying information clearly. That said, User:Remsense asked for my feedback on the redesign...
I'm as adamant about the use of "nounderlines" as I was ten years ago. Yes, readers are used to the use of underlines on Latin letters but it gets very confusing with unfamiliar letters/symbols. The best example is Template:Unicode chart Mathematical Operators. I contend that the change is color of the linked symbol is sufficient to alert the reader of a link.
I would like a PDF symbol in the header of the chart to the official Unicode code chart. I don't think it's intuitive to follow a reference for "As of Unicode version 16.0" to find the chart. That just buries this incredibly useful information. If you want to condense the information, what about this for the heading: Early Dynastic Cuneiform as of Unicode version 16.0 or Early Dynastic Cuneiform as of Unicode version 16.0 (official chart)
Be sure to test that the new block layout works when multiple charts appear on the same page, like Mon–Burmese script.
I don't really care which font is used for the headings/column heading but it will need to be different than the fonts (if any) for the data cells themselves. For example, Template:Unicode chart Ahom. We don't want to use Noto Serif Ahom for the entire chart, just the data cells. Not sure if the new format makes this an issue or not.
Thank you very much, it's just what I was hoping for! Of course, the last thing I want to do is make anything less clear, but I need to do everything wrong first Remsense ‥ 论21:35, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The request is to fix wikilinks which only say [[MOS:]] (or other capitalizations) without anything after the colon. Those links will become broken like [[Wikipedia:]] which produces [[Wikipedia:]]. It can be fixed by replacing the links with [[WP:MOS]] which produces WP:MOS. A linksto search currently finds 4908 links to [[MOS:]] so it sounds like a job for a bot or patient AWB users. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:43, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It’s still many, many pages due to that template being substituted in every GA review. So PrimeHunter’s link is better (since it captures most of the cases which are boilerplate [[MoS:|…]], and your link doesn’t). stjn16:40, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have just done it. I have skipped user talk pages and just a handful of sandbox pages, for which a bot may be better to avoid OBODs.
I find it telling that of the 500 some odd links, the vast majority were added because of the one template being substed or transcluded. I think maybe only some 100 uses were actual natural links, and those across the time-space of 20 years... well, I wouldn't support the work of that task. There are better edge cases to support. Izno (talk) 17:51, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I just did it after cscott made it obvious what the impact of many of these links was (adding an iw link to mos wiki and vanishing the original link in the process). Izno (talk) 15:32, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Cite links are broken when VisualEditor is rendered in Parsoid
An odd bug that for some reason only affects, ironically enough, the article VisualEditor, which is why Parsoid began in the first place.
For some reason, all citation links, which should normally cause the query fragment of the citation ID to be used as a hyperlink, for example #cite-note_24 in the Technical section, instead get #Technical, the name of a subsection, prepended to them (so something like #Technical#cite-note_24) This naturally is an invalid ID for any element on the page, and thus citations aren't able to send you to where they're stored. Despite the name, this bug appears to affect every citation on the page, as well as the caret links back.
A quick search for another article with a level 3 header as Technical was, Oura Health, did not provoke this bug.
So, you mean that at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor?useparsoid=1 (link for the Parsoid version) the anchors are broken? Can confirm the described bug happens to me in that link, yes. As for the Oura Health test, I don't see a #Technical subsection in that article.
Something of note(maybe): The previous revision (permalink) of the VisualEditor article with Parsoid did not have broken anchors. I don't see anything in Special:Diff/1245017847 that could have caused it, though it is an edit to the #Technical subsection, hm. – 2804:F1...EE:9927 (talk) 20:15, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
...How did I forget about Special:Purge? Such a simple thing to fix a bizarre (?) bug. But yeah, the reason why I brought up Oura Health was that was my Special:Random-found "control group" article, to try to understand the nature of the bug. ("as Technical was" was meant to be understood in the sense that both articles had a level 3 header, not that Oura Health literally had a "Technical" subsection. But yeah, I wonder if/how this should be reported, given that the purge got rid of it. Regards, User:TheDragonFire300. (Contact me | Contributions). 23:22, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What's the best fix for section titles containing ‹math› code?
I've come across some articles like List of repunit primes that have section titles like Bases such that is prime for prime which appear in the table of contents sidebar as Bases ?'"`UNIQ--postMath-00000001-QINU`"'? such that ?'"`UNIQ--postMath-00000002-QINU`"'? is prime for prime ?'"`UNIQ--postMath-00000003-QINU`"'. I presume this is another issue related to strip markers, but I'm not sure what the correct fix is. Should the section titles just be reworded and the <math> tags stripped out? Or is there a way to keep the math markup in the section titles without breaking the table of contents? 28bytes (talk) 22:13, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have "fixed" a few of these in the past—not really a fix because the math markup often gives a far better result in section headings. A bluesky solution might be for some new wikitext to define the heading for the contents, although that would give ugly wikitext and another hassle for visual editor developers. See this search to find more. Johnuniq (talk) 03:24, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
IP editor(s) cannot edit talk pages
An IP editor came to my user talk, and said he was unable to edit an article talk page. So, I logged out, and tried editing article talk pages, but was also unable. What’s up? Anythingyouwant (talk) 05:04, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Seeing your user talk page, the person who asked you is not an IP editor. Their described problem also happened after clicking "Add topic", which you managed to do successfully (you just hit an edit filter that prevents creating very short talk page topics as an IP or new user, the user in your user talk page did not hit that filter though).
Again, you are hitting an edit filter, specifically Special:AbuseFilter/1245, which, if I read the code correctly, prevents users who are not autoconfirmed or confirmed (which includes all IPs) from adding new talk page topics that have a title that is 2 words or less and a content that is 2 words or less (and less than 300 characters total).
I had originally tried to add the topic to Talk:Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy without logging in. When it failed I created User:Swan2024, but I still have the same problem. I just tried again while logged in and it still fails the same way (moving slanted lines over the text for a few seconds, then gives up). I don't see any warning/error messages. I checked Special:AbuseLog and do not see any entries for me. Any other ideas? Swan2024 (talk) 00:11, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Swan2024: If you are trying to add external links then place them inside <nowiki>...</nowiki> in source mode to deactivate them. The add topic feature doesn't currently work with external links for users who are not autoconfirmed which requires four days and ten edits. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:28, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Huh? Is this mentioned anywhere? That does seem to be it (can reproduce with a link to Google)...
Until today, the "New pages" list were bright yellow highlight if no one had looked at them. It was very helpful in spotting new articles that needed editing. As of about an hour ago, that bright yellow went away and has been replaced by a very blah and light flesh colored background for the new pages. The new color, if you can even call it a color, only makes it more hard to scroll for entries. — Maile (talk) 00:25, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Who controls the tooltips, popup, etc.? Is it the developers, or can we administrators edit some MediaWiki page that controls them? I just now logged out, and I was shown a brief popup with the following text:
"You are being logged out, please wait."
This has a clear comma splice, so it needs to have the comma replaced with a semicolon, but I'm not sure how to do it or whom to ask. The popup wasn't really a separate window; it looked more like a tooltip, but it appeared only after I clicked the link, so it's not really a tooltip. Nyttend (talk) 04:49, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Accounts and passwords never expire. If you have a spam folder, maybe at your email provider, then try checking it. If you post the username (on this public page which already shows your IP address) then we can check whether the account exists and has an email address stored, but that's all. We cannot see what the email address is. If you didn't store one or cannot receive mail at it then you have to create new account. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:41, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, I've been checking my spam folders, but I'm not getting an email.
The account User:Emdub510 does exist and has set an email address but has chosen to not receive mails from other users. The account was created in 2006. Most users rarely or never use our email features so it's plausible you gave the email address in 2006 and never needed it before now. Maybe you changed email address? The account has made 119 edits (only 1 since 2011). That's low by Wikipedia standards. You can just create a new account. If you want you can write on the user page of the old and new account that you are the same user. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:28, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Your best course of action might be to file a bug report in Phabricator about not receiving the password reset emails for your account. The developers can both look into that and offer any alternatives. Anomie⚔13:34, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Foundation has developed a new tool at Meta:CampaignEvents which is used by other editions of Wikipedia. Anyone who organizes an Edit-a-thon knows the event management tooling is quite limited and requires lot of behind-the-scene knowledge for promotion of events.
If you believe English Wikipedia should try this feature out, please support this proposal. It does not remove any existing options or require people to use this over other forms of event management. In order to set this up, we need to establish consensus to try it out and then file a Phabricator ticket request, which I am happy to do. See the recent talk from 2024 Wikimania about it here on Youtube and notes from the same session. Here are the slides.
In the past I organized edit-a-thons using the Outreach Dashboard which helped with tracking contributions, but not collaboration between editors (see here). I am also happy for English Wikipedia to try tooling that is used by other language editions of Wikipedia and contribute insightful feedback in order to make these tools useful. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:24, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Has the support team been looped in on this? There are 3 projects using so far, and it would be useful to know any outstanding issues. Also note, this requires a permission group (c.f. meta:Meta:Event_organizers) that we'd have to determine how to deal with. (some options: WP:PERM, autopromote). — xaosfluxTalk22:44, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The description says "enhance the management and visibility/discoverability of events within Wikimedia". That certainly sounds like a good thing.
But going off on a tangent, as a checkuser, one thing I'd love to see is some way for an event coordinator to register the IP address(s) which are going to be used at the event, and having that be visible in the checkuser tool (@Dreamy Jazz). One of my suckiest CU experiences was blocking a whole pile of socks only to discover after the fact that what I really did was stomp on a perfectly legitimate "Learn to use Wikipedia" event for 13 year olds. There would be much awesomeness if a notification about that could come up in the tool. RoySmith(talk)23:06, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for bringing this up. Regarding this tool, what are the specific implications for en.wiki? Based on Meta:CampaignEvents, it currently has two tools, Registration and Event list. I would assume we would not want Registration here, as that seems to involve the creation of a new namespace (Event:) and is a task better suited for Meta. Conversely, the Event List seems like something people may want to casually have access to, and thus locking it behind the Wikipedia:Event coordinator perm (ie. at the same level as being able to generate unlimited new accounts on a single IP) feels limiting. CMD (talk) 06:28, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You can directly edit as a user this event: Meta:Event:Sandbox/Shushugah/Testing without any special permissions on Meta. And same would be true for English Wikipedia if approved here
We should have the Event namespace in English Wikipedia. While only users with event creator can "register" the event, any editor can still edit the content and description with project updates. To-do lists etc..
Meta:Main might be better suited for multi-wiki events it also requires advanced knowledge of Help:Interwiki syntax and is not very new user friendly. Copying and pasting a list from enwp project page to Meta wouldn’t simply work and would require juggling two different accounts. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 15:00, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there an advantage to adding the new namespace on en.wiki in the days of unified accounts when new users can post on meta too? CMD (talk) 13:57, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I mentioned a few cons, namely that wikilink templates would break, templates are not usable across different Wikis, the watchlist is separate for each. For advanced users this might be acceptable but for new users explaining difference between Meta and enWP would be a very high hurdle and counterproductive. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:01, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, everyone! My name is Ilana, and I’m the product manager for the Campaigns team, which developed the CampaignEvents extension. Thanks for bringing up this topic, @Shushugah, and thank you for your responses and feedback, @Xaosflux, @Pppery, @RoySmith, and @Chipmunkdavis. I’ll respond to the questions and comments so far below, and I’m happy to respond to any other questions that come up:
Event Registration was first released to Meta-Wiki in November 2022. It has been used in 600+ events with over 10k participants. The Event List was released in April 2024, and we’re now expanding it to feature WikiProjects as well (see T368115). Invitation Lists is our newest feature. It is testable on the beta cluster (see video demo), and we’re planning to release to Igbo Wikipedia & Swahili Wikipedia soon.
The extension has two sides: an organizer side and participant side. The participant side requires no special rights for access. The organizer side requires the Event organizer right for access. Wiki admins set the criteria for and manage the right. We are open to comments on how the right can be configured or expanded. We love the idea of bundling it with the Event coordinator right.
The extension comes with two new namespaces: event and event talk. You can read our rationale for why the namespaces were created. Overall, we think that there are many advantages to keeping the two namespaces, but we’re open to other ways that communities may want to define event pages. So, we are curious to hear what others think on the topic!
In the near future, we are hoping to integrate Community Configuration (T370829). This way, wiki communities can choose to turn on the extension, and they can choose which tools to turn on and how they should be configured.
I have a question for you all: How do you feel about my team inviting some organizers and/or users of the CampaignEvents extension into the conversation? Perhaps they can provide some more context. Since the extension is enabled on Meta-Wiki, we already have users from many different wiki communities.
Is there a reason the invitation list is not listed as one of the features alongside the Event Registration and the Event list on the main meta page? Anyway, if the features are separately toggleable, it sounds like enabling the overall extension is only beneficial and separate discussions can be had on the existing and upcoming features. CMD (talk) 07:50, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Invitation list is a very fresh feature with some tickets still being worked on so that would explain why it's not mentioned yet. In any case, with Community integration coming soon, it will be easier for admins to automatically activate/de-activate features based on our wishes. I am quite curious whether embedding/transcluding the Event list in different namespaces is possible, e.g a Wikipedia Talk namespace for a WikiProject talk page. @IFried (WMF) what would be best way to test this assuming it's approved? I guess Admins/Event Coordinators would be the subset of people who could create events. Can you envision this tool being useful for backlog-drives? Is there any paper/findings about how Events have been used/evolved? ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:57, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Shushugah & @CMD! Great questions, which I will respond to below:
Why isn’t Invitation Lists on the CampaignEvents page? We just updated the page with information on Invitation Lists. We previously didn’t include this information, since Invitation Lists was not yet available to any live wikis. However, we just released Invitation Lists to all wikis with the extension (T373041), which means all such wikis can opt to enable it. It has also been enabled on Swahili & Igbo Wikipedia (T372582). For these reasons, the page has been updated, and we’re open to any feedback on the tool or interest from communities that would like to enable it.
Can we transclude the Event List onto a page in a different namespace?: No, there is currently no ability to do this. However, we’re interested in learning more about this request on the project talk page or in Phabricator. We’re especially interested in learning what problems would be solved by developing such a feature improvement. Thank you for bringing this up, and we look forward to learning more!
Can the tools be used for backlog drives?:
Yes, we think all three tools in the extension can be useful for backlog drives. With Event Registration, organizers can set the infrastructure in place for managing participation in the backlog drive. They can register participants, collect optional demographic information, and communicate with participants via mass email. With Invitation Lists, organizers can find people to invite who have demonstrated interest in the topics covered in the drive. With the Event List, organizers can promote the backlog drive to a wider audience. Overall, Event Registration can be used for many different types of activities, and we encourage organizers to use the tools in ways that work for them.
My colleague, @Astinson (WMF), an experienced editor on English Wikipedia, shared another use case: He signs up for backlog drives, but then sometimes he forgets to come back and work on them (like the Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Backlog drives/September 2024). He shared with me that the Event Registration tool could help organizers remind participants like him to participate in collaborative work.
Are there any papers/findings for how events have been used or evolved?:
We do not have an official paper like you mentioned. However, our work was initially inspired by the findings from the Movement Organizers study, along with other studies (see Evidence). Since the launch of our team, we have conducted regular office hours to collect feedback on our work. We have also launched surveys (for example, V0 findings). In the case of Invitation Lists, we conducted an experiment on its potential efficacy and published our findings (see April 2024 update).
Event Registration is being used for a wide range of event types, such as campaigns (example), edit-a-thons (example), training sessions (example), hackathons (example), affiliate meetings (example), office hours (example), and conferences (example).
Both Event List and Invitation Lists are quite new, but they’re focused on making events more discoverable on the wikis. We look forward to seeing what we can learn from them.
We have a survey: On the topic of continually learning, we have a survey that is going on now. We’re exploring how the toolset could be expanded for other collaboration tactics (i.e. WikiProjects, collaboration groups, tasks forces, etc). We want to see if and how the infrastructural pipeline in the extension (i.e., discovery of potential participants, registration, and communication) could be helpful to WikiProjects and other forms of collaboration on the wikis. In that case, we encourage folks to take part in our survey, and we’ll share our findings once the survey is complete: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKWHPjSjSqOmca8E-eQl1HHUxYRbB4QeEV3zR2bd1_tcwuMg/viewform?usp=sf_link
Annual readership is currently used on 53,510 talk pages. The consensus on the TfD appears to be that the template should be kept, but noincluded and made invisible, pending a solution for the Graph extension.
In the same TfD, I proposed a "Page views" link in the tools menu as an alternative of sorts. See the included screenshots. Right now, the link to the page views tool is carefully hidden in: Tools -> Page information -> scroll all the way down -> External tools -> Page view statistics. Could we perhaps make the page view link appear more prominently?
For me, the length of the Tools menu makes it harder to find specific items that I'm looking for. Thus I prefer that the page view link remain grouped under the page information menu item. isaacl (talk) 21:18, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the "Print/export" section of the the tools menu could be consolidated and be put on a page called "Print/export". So that would consolidate 3 lines in the tools menu to one link. That would leave room for a page views link on the tools menu. --Timeshifter (talk) 11:04, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't feel that Page views is that much more important than the other external tools linked in page information and page history. Personally, I use Revision history statistics more. Obviously adding them all would be too much clutter though, so I wouldn't propose that as an alternative. ― novov(tc)03:12, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So you feel that "page views" is a little more important? So then it should replace something less important.
Concerning revision history, I assume you are talking about the "View history" link at the top of nearly all pages? I agree that is very important. But we are not asking for the page views link to be put at the top of pages. --Timeshifter (talk) 10:54, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm talking about the Revision history statistics tool, which is also in the page information. What I'm saying is that there's no reason why page views should be added to the tools menu when it's not been proven that it's "special" compared to the other things, and page information is in there anyway. ― novov(tc)01:51, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I say do both. But if not in the tools menu, let's start here in the talk header template. We could remove {{annual readership}} from all talk pages, and use this location instead. This way the number of links to page views on talk pages goes from around 53,000 to 726,000 talk pages.
This talk page header already has a lot of clutter. I am against adding anything else to it; if anything, it should be simplified. ― novov(tc)01:54, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
{{talk header}} has been developed over a long time. There is agreement on what is there now. So I think you are in the minority on that. Adding a page views link there justifies hiding or deleting {{annual readership}}. So that means less stuff on the talk page. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:51, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't help anyone else, but if you personally want a more concise talk page header I recommend adding to your user style: #talkheader tr:has(> td > .talkheader-body) { display:none; } this cuts most of it out but leaves the search box. –jacobolus(t)15:42, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is true that the content in the white box isn't at all relevant for experienced editors. I'd be interested to consider a proposal not to display it for those editors. Sdkbtalk03:37, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sdkb, proposal not needed, just a doc update. That box (like most else) is already classed, this as .talkheader-help and all you have to do is add .talkheader-help {display:none} to your common.css, and that should do it. (If it doesn't, please ping me from Template talk:Talk header.) Mathglot (talk) 00:42, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I see; should be pretty straightforward with a new param. If only we had a magic word for the id of the user reading the page, instead of the last one who saved it, we could do it without a param, but alas. Mathglot (talk) 07:54, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have recently come to the conclusion that promoting page views information to editors is a bad idea. Here's why: the page views for most articles are very low.
I pulled the page views counts for all of 2023 for a random set of 10,000 articles. 90% of articles get less than 10 page views per day. 70% get less than 1 page view per day. Almost 40% of them get less than 1 page view per month.
Please imagine for a moment that you have created an article, or you decided to improve it. Then you look on the talk page and discover that the number of page views is far lower than you expected. A metric that never really mattered to you before has been put in your face, and now you feel discouraged. Metrics that might align better with your own values (e.g., how grateful a reader was to find information on such an obscure topic) are not available and will not be surfaced to you. We're just going to tell you that 40% of your articles are probably pointless. Or 70%, if you thought one reader a day was enough. Or 90%, if you'd hoped your efforts would help "only" 10 readers a day. My point is, for most articles, this is not a feel-good metric. This is a feel-bad metric, and we should be cautious about promoting it indiscriminately.
BTW, if you'd like to figure out how your favorite page compares, then here are a few key numbers:
Though I agree that page views can be surprisingly low sometimes, I think your methodology is possibly flawed; editors don't just edit random articles. I would imagine that articles that are edited more tend to get more views, as there is most likely some overlap between reader interest and editor interest. ― novov(tc)06:54, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that editor interest is non-random, but that means it will be worse than average for some editors. If your niche happens to be an unpopular one, then you could find yourself looking at evidence of its unpopularity very frequently.
The opposite is also true: if you happen to be impressed with the page views an article is getting, then you might feel the stakes are much higher. There can be no compromise when so many people are going to read this, right? Everything's got to be perfect. Don't be bold; be very, very, very careful. The next thing you know, editors are thinking about the fact that almost a million people read Cancer a year. Someone could die! (I'm going to die. We're all going to die.) We need editors thinking about the work that needs to be done, rather than being focused on the popularity of the page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:12, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I actually do pay attention to page views for articles I work on, but I am comfortable going to the page history to access them. Very low page views for a given article can be disappointing, but every once-in-a-while something in the news will cause a hundred- or thousand-fold spike in page views for such an article, and I then take satisfaction in knowing that we had some background on the topic available to the reading public. Donald Albury12:18, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I find this condescending to editors and readers: "We need editors thinking about the work that needs to be done, rather than being focused on the popularity of the page." You, or some committee, shouldn't be determining what is important to editors and readers. I assume now that this is why page views has been made so inaccessible to regular readers and editors. I make decisions on what and how I edit based on numerous factors, including page views. Maybe you have unlimited time to edit. I don't, and so I want to edit what I think makes a difference, and what matters to me. If I have a choice between a popular and unpopular page, and both matter to me, then I will probably edit the popular page more. --Timeshifter (talk) 00:45, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I doubt that's why Page views isn't that visible; most likely it just wasn't considered that important.
And by definition, any user interface design makes a determination of what's important or not important. People use Talk more than, say, What links here, so it makes sense that the former is more prominent. In such a wide-ranging and community-focused project like Wikipedia there's always going to be a variety of opinions on what exactly that order is.
The closest thing to letting people decide for themselves would be if we just make every action associated with a page buttons of the exactly the same size that are always visible, which would be unbearably cluttered and intimidating to newcomers. ― novov(tc)02:36, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
novov: Now your veering into ridiculousness. As I previously said average readers and editors are more interested in page views than other statistics. And elsewhere you said you want page views in a separate template, and not as 2 words (Daily pageviews) added to {{talk header}}. Many people do not want a separate template. So that leaves few choices if you really want pages views to be more accessible to average readers and editors. --Timeshifter (talk) 21:57, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Strong oppose. I am a strong supporter of accessibility of page views information on Talk pages, but this is not he way to go. I won't repeat the reasoning I already gave at Template talk:Talk header, I will just say that I am coming up with a stopgap, template-based replacement for {{annual readership}} until a more permanent solution can be found, and will expose it here shortly for discussion. (I've added DNAU so this doesn't get archived in the meantime.) Please stay tuned. Mathglot (talk) 23:04, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Timeshifter, where is the evidence for your assertion that average readers and editors are more interested in page views than other statistics? I don't think we have any the evidence that "average readers" are interested in any statistics at all, and what we can reasonably predict about editors is that some will appreciate it and others won't.
It is very easy to assume "I want this; therefore almost everyone wants this". I'm telling you: I don't want this, and because of the page-view distribution curve, I think it is very bad for Wikipedia's future to promote page views. You are proposing that 90% of talk pages carry "proof" that those articles are unimportant. That will not make editors feel happy. It will not make them feel like contributing more. In some cases, it will scare them away from editing. Cancer has a self-contradiction in it. It's hard enough to get someone to edit that article. I don't need "help" in the form of you scaring away editors because you've made sure that they know how many people will see that edit. I very much need "editors thinking about the work that needs to be done, rather than being focused on the popularity of the page", even if you think it's condescending ("an attitude of patronizing superiority or contempt") of me to want editors to WP:Be bold and fix the problems in that article and not to be scared off by your reminder that the page gets read 1.5 times per minute. Editing articles is an anxious business for some people.
Putting the page views on all the pages will make editors feel like someone else (i.e., you) has told them that they should care about this factor. In fact, you think they should care about page views so much that you are trying to force them to see the numbers (or, for now, a link to the numbers) whenever they venture onto a talk page.
You should get to pick the articles that you want to work on. I suggest to you that a page like Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics/Popular pages would be a more efficient way of finding popular articles than clicking on each talk page, but if you like clicking on each page individually, then feel free to click away. What I'm saying is: Don't force your preference on everyone else. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:19, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"XTools: dynamically show statistics about a page's history under the page heading."
It lists the number of editors, watchers, and pageviews. It names the page creator, and has a link to "full page statistics" that goes here (it is filled in automatically):
The statistics bar is below both article and talk pages. There are separate stats for the talk page.
Only logged in users see the statistics bar. Turning it on by default would allow all logged in users to see it. If they don't like it they can always turn it off. But if they never turn it on, they will not know that it has a page views link. That is why it should be turned on by default.
I think this should be done, and after people see that the sky will not fall by giving editors this info, then it should be turned on by default for both logged-in users, and all readers. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:32, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think this is a good idea, forcing all editors (and even all readers) to make client-side calls to a volunteer project on every page load is asking a lot, also this gadget causes a screen jump as it waits to load then inserts itself in to the header. — xaosfluxTalk07:44, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The screen jump doesn't bother me. Pages have screen jumps for other reasons too. People can turn it off if they don't like it. And it is not much of a screen jump. A line or 2.
We can start with logged-in users first and see how that goes. If it is too much of a load on the servers, then set it to only update the numbers once a day.
I don't think these statistics are relevant to the average reader. Or average editor really, I can count the amount of times that I've looked up any of these statistics for the last twenty pages I've edited on zero hands. The same is most likely true for the last two hundred.
To be quite frank, even before it became hidden {{Annual readership}} wasn't on most talk pages. For those pages, the situation was identical to how it was now, so I don't get why this is such a huge issue. ― novov(tc)09:29, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Invariably the first thing I want to do after landing at the Wikipedia home page is search for the article that I want to look at. I think it would be sensible to make the search field permanently visible. There is already room there at the top of the page, and although only a click away, it seems unnecessary to have to click on the magnifier. Why not just have the field there ready to type into? Am I right in thinking that it used to be that way? I wonder why it was changed. 2A00:23C8:7B0C:9A01:8A7:5D88:5F57:107E (talk) 19:53, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the magnifying glass only appears when the window is narrower than some threshold (looks like about 1100 px). I'm not sure why they do that; there's plenty of space left at all but the most extremely narrow widths to allow for a full search box. But in any case, this is really a Vector 2022 skin issue, not something enwiki has any direct control over. Perhaps ask on meta:Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements? RoySmith(talk)20:04, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You're right, it's dynamically controlled. I didn't realise that. When I lower the browser zoom level the search field becomes visible. It seems to me that all that needs to be done is adjust the "trigger" level at which it is displayed, so it is only suppressed when there is "obviously" not enough room to type a search query. 2A00:23C8:7B0C:9A01:8A7:5D88:5F57:107E (talk) 20:32, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have a proposal. Please can you consider to add two Kartvelian languages of Georgia and neighboring countries spoken as a minority, which are written in Georgian script and are missing on Wikipedia like there are Georgian and Mingrelian. I want from one of the admins to create two Wikipedia editions for Svan language and Laz language. These two languages belong to the Kartvelian language family and are written in Georgian script, however they aren't mutually intelligible with each other and also with Georgian and Mingrelian. If they will be added, each of these four branch speakers of the Kartvelian language will have a better opportunity to learn more these languages belonging to the Kartvelian language family, and also these two new Wikipedia editions will have their own articles which they will belong to the article scope of the regions where these languages are spoken. In addition, the other visitors from different parts of the world will learn about these languages. Please add these two Wikipedia editions as they are old languages spoken in Georgia, which is an ancient country with rich history and culture. I would be so happy if you will take my request into consideration.
Yes, but, as WhatamIdoing says, there is a bureaucratic procedure that has to be followed on Meta, not the English Wikipedia, to get this proposal off the ground. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:22, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It might be helpful to be clearer about that process: If you want Wikipedia articles in those languages, then 99% of the time, you will have to do the writing/translation work yourself. There is no secret group of people here that is skilled in those languages and just waiting for the opportunity to create the articles. If your hope is "I'll suggest this, and someone else will do all the work", then you will be disappointed. The process that is likely to work is the one that sounds a lot more like "I've got a dozen friends who speak these languages natively and would love to spend several hours per week, for the next decade, working on this". WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:21, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:ITN has long been a revolving door of editor-related and/or process-related issues. And I think a large part of it is merely due to the conflict between trying to feature current events on the main page, and WP:NOTNEWS.
I think we would go a long way towards fixing this if we simply remove the word "news" from the title of the section. It connotatively suggests that these are things one might find in newspapers or news sites, or even that this is Wikipedia presenting news items. When, as best as I can tell, that's not the primary intention of the section. I think the intro to Wikipedia:In the news states this pretty clearly.
In multiple discussions, the regulars there appear to be defending the process as a way for the encyclopedia to feature articles. Well, if that's the purpose, then let's call it that, and sidestep all the baggage that the word "news" can carry with it. - 12:17, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Conditional support – (involved as ITN regular) It's a good thing to have a section on the Main Page featuring current events-related articles, as it helps show that the encyclopedia is kept up-to-date and engaging, but the key criterion should be to feature quality articles about current events, not decide what to feature based on perceived newsworthiness. Noting that a name change alone without underlying changes wouldn't fix much of the issues, so I wish it would come along with a fundamental change in how the articles are selected. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 12:51, 12 September 2024 (UTC) Striking my vote, better to have an early close and to come up with a more fleshed-out proposal. See reasoning in the #Early close section below. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 07:38, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Weak support: Contrary to the others, I think that a name change—even by itself, only—could be a bit less misleading to newcomers, especially those who come to WP going "why isn't this news here?".I do feel like it would be better to just rename it to "Current events" if possible, as this name is indeed too verbose. To solve the conflict with the portal, just add a {{distinguish}}. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:55, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NOTBURO - "workshops" are RfCs too. I welcome discussion on this, whereever the discussion takes us. An RfC can result in more things than merely "support/oppose/no consensus" - WP:NOTAVOTE, after all. - jc3713:35, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
RfCs are meant to have a clear question that editors can answer. That's why the RFCBEFORE requirement exists: so that editors can talk it out, try to come to a consensus, and when all else fails, narrow the dispute so that uninvolved editors can help answer a clear-cut qurstuon via RfC. Citing NOTBURO to say that an RfC should be a free for all is ridiculous. voorts (talk/contributions) 13:37, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A "RFC" = a "request for comment". no more, no less. It is a consensual discussion. So yes, NOTBURO applies. And a simple question of renaming? That's pretty clear cut. Alternate rename suggestions are proposed in rename discussions all the time. So I'm not sure what you find so "ridiculous". Anyway, this is a tangent to the discussion itself. - jc3713:43, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The idea of doing some RFCBEFORE before launching a T:CENT RFC is a good one, I think. A smaller group discussion can help figure out what the most likely options to pass are in a big RFC, and then just present those, which is a nice optimization that reduces friction and saves editor time and reduces the chance of messy closes. –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:01, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. New name is more verbose, lacking concision. The idea of rebranding something to fix its problems is a bit questionable. For example on meta they tried this with the community wishlist this year and the community made it clear that they preferred the old name. Is the fundamental problem with ITN really its name and the fact that it focuses on topics that are "in the news", or is its core problem actually something else such as toxicity, which might not be addressed by a name change? –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:48, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think it could be said that at least some of that "toxicity" (to use your word) might be due to the unsaid expectations of commenters when they come to a discussion about topics "in the news". Changing the name can change that expectation and tone. And besides, the name "in the news" doesn't reflect what's said on WP:ITN - it makes it clear that this is about articles that are involved in current events in some way. So, similar to what we do with Article titles, shouldn't the name of this project page (and process) match the contents and intent? - jc3713:10, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose' per Novem Linguae. The problem is not the name, and even if it were the new name wouldn't resolve the misunderstandings about what the purpose of the section is (or trying to turn it into what they, but most other editors do not, think it should be). I also agree that this should have been workshopped first as there are very probably better alternatives to the one suggested (that still wouldn't solve the problems but would not introduce waffle). Thryduulf (talk) 13:00, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe it's more of a British English thing but it means being excessively verbose in a non-meaningful way. Someone who waffles on talks a lot but says little. — Czello(music)13:20, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose I think the newly proposed name departs from the format of the ITN section. Note that "news" is information about "current events". We post blurbs that summarise news. To me, "Articles featuring current events" sounds like posting links to articles that document current events. That's not what the ITN is.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 13:15, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The very first line of WP:ITN: "The "In the news" (ITN) section on the Main Page serves to direct readers to articles that have been substantially updated to reflect recent or current events of wide interest." - As you can see, that's exactly the stated intent. - jc3713:20, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but it's confusing as we don't precisify the way we direct readers to articles. "In the news" sounds simpler and clearer to my ear, and we really don't need to include "articles" in the name.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 13:39, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If it's confusing, then I think we should probably fix that. Something typically done in either changing the mission statement or the name. I'm proposing changing the name to match the mission statement. - jc3713:50, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The most precise wording in the spirit of the current name would be "From the current events". Anyway, the name change won't solve a problem because there's no problem at all. We have a section called "Did you know...", which "showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process". Shall we change it to "From the new and expanded articles" just to better match the mission statement of DYK? I think there should be some aesthetics on the main page, and "In the news" and "Did you know..." are names that provide it.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 15:03, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose as the page isn't called "the news" (as it seems OP framed that's how it's being presented), it's called "in the news"; as in, "here are articles whose topics are currently in the news". I think renaming the page would be a blunt instrument to fix policy issues (if it even does). — Czello(music)13:24, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. This is a CREEPy, bureaucratic cosmetic change that will do nothing to address the asserted issues. Frankly, Well, if that's the purpose, then let's call it that sounds pretty pointy. Editor time is valuable. In my view, the current proposal is a waste of it. James (talk/contribs) 15:06, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. With all due respect, nominator, to put it simply, I just don't believe a name change would actually do anything to improve decorum at ITN. Its issues are much deeper than a branding problem. DarkSide830 (talk) 15:49, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose per Czello. The problem with ITN is not the name or the theme, it's the fact that the discussions are too slow and rambling to produce punctual postings while things remain in the news. (It would also be good to get a clearer steer on subject matter - culture topics other than deaths are rarely nominated, and frequently opposed when they are, but sports get reasonably consistent coverage. Personally, I'd favour evolving some standards for a wider range of cultural stories to carry.) GenevieveDEon (talk) 16:37, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Generally speaking, "current events" are "in the news". Almost everything nominated for ITN is already posted in that day's Current events section and the majority of what's posted to ITN (invariably undated) stays up well after its currency expires. If ITN storylinks should ever become as current as CE storylinks, such a similar name might make sense. InedibleHulk (talk) 17:19, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. I too share concerns about the process, or more specifically how certain regulars do things, but this proposal is half-baked to put it mildly. ~~ Jessintime (talk) 20:30, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. From what I can see, this doesn't really have any tangible benefit, but it makes the title of the ITN page substantially longer. I do think behavior at ITN could be improved, but this feels like, to put it bluntly, putting lipstick on a pig. – Epicgenius (talk) 02:15, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. Even changing the name to “Current events” is unnecessary, since the phrase “in the news” directly implies that the section is about current events. “Articles for current events” is an even worse name, since it’s unnecessarily long. 198.17.110.223 (talk) 18:45, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Anything WP:UNUSUAL shall be promoted to the main page in chaotic order." Plus, regardless of whether this will weed out everything, "Current events" already >> "In the news". News is a superset of current "newsy" events, and such a new title would at least weed out some stuff. I see no reason this could go wrong, except potential whiplash if the current WT:ITN discussions suddenly watershed into a radically different direction. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:50, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - Like others, a name change/small proposal like this is premature imo. A comprehensive way forward for the main page section in question - including not only changes to processes/procedures/policies/etc. but to the name should be fleshed out before small changes like this are proposed. Trout the nominator because while it looks like this was in good faith, it was premature given RFCBEFORE discussion ongoing. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez | me | talk to me!23:00, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Same, there's been RFCBEFORE discussions on the ITN talk page following the AN discussion about an RFC to reevaluate aspects of ITN which have been going on for a few days, and this seems to be jumping the gun. I recommend this be shuttered and ideas held off until the planned RFC is ready to go instead. --Masem (t) 12:56, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Based on the results of this planned RFC, a different option for a new name may have fallen out from that. It goes back to raised concerns about workshopping an option first, and makes this premature. Masem (t) 13:24, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that's incorrect. There's a wide ranging discussion about changing ITN right now and you should have weighed in there and helped to workshop instead of running here to start an RfC—which may very well become moot depending on what comes out of the ongoing discussion. I would boldly close this RfC to allow the RFCBEFORE discussion to finish but I'm not at my computer. Somebody else should. voorts (talk/contributions) 13:25, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not an ITN regular. If you'd read the two discussions that preceded this one, you'd know I tried participating in ITN once and was so turned off I've only commented there a couple of times since. I want this to go somewhere, hopefully to fix ITN for the better. Rushing into an RfC before the BEFORE discussion is finished and ideas are hashed out is a recipe for disaster. voorts (talk/contributions) 13:40, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And I appreciate your comments as well.
And - in my opinion anyway - we should never shy away from asking the community to comment, to provide their thoughts, about something. Especially not out of fear that some individuals might come along and try to derail the discussion, rather than discuss the matters at hand. I have faith in the community. And regardless of how this discussion turns out, I welcome the community's thoughts. - jc3713:47, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Asking the community to comment and provide thoughts about something is a good thing, but (a) that's what's happening at WT:ITN, and (b) that's not what an RFC is - an RFC is a specific question with a finite number of answers with the aim of generating consensus for one them. Thryduulf (talk) 13:52, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We should absolutely shy away from asking the community to comment, to provide their thoughts, about something, because people's time is limited and valuable. We should ask for that time sparingly. Not every idea we have deserves the formal attention of an RFC, and there are specific places to go to float or brainstorm ideas for those who are interested (like the idea lab, or, in this case, WT:ITN). RFC is an "expensive" process. Levivich (talk) 06:19, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Spending some time workshopping it might have come up with a better alternative title, too. This one is obviously going to fail because the proposed new name is incredibly clunky. --Aquillion (talk) 20:06, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. This proposal is ill-formed, will not result in any kind of useable consensus, and we should wait for a workshopped proposal regarding other reforms to ITN to be completed and put up for RfC before changing its name. This is putting the cart before the horse. voorts (talk/contributions) 15:19, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But what if the proposals that come out of the WT:ITN discussion are to shift ITN away from "Current events"? Then we'll have wasted community time with an irrelevant name change. voorts (talk/contributions) 15:26, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. I originally thought that this was an unconventional attempt at suggesting the re-scoping discussed in the RFCBEFORE, but I'm realizing that a title change that is only said to also thereby re-theme the process is way too vague of a proposed change, and that a much better and more precise proposal should've been workshopped. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:10, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wait This is what I was talking about, endless regulars sandbagging everyone with their/our endless badgering. Let a few outsiders weigh in first. Then wait for even more. InedibleHulk (talk) 19:47, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Okay. Regarding your comment about ITN regulars badgering/sandbagging, I'm not sure if you're referring to me, but if you are, I'm going to quote myself from above:
I'm not an ITN regular. If you'd read the two discussions that preceded this one, you'd know I tried participating in ITN once and was so turned off I've only commented there a couple of times since. I want this to go somewhere, hopefully to fix ITN for the better. Rushing into an RfC before the BEFORE discussion is finished and ideas are hashed out is a recipe for disaster.
Yes per Thebiguglyalien, Joseph2302, et al. This is a poorly-thought through, hasty, vague proposal that detracts from the constructive work being done at WT:ITN. Thryduulf (talk) 20:54, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a better way of assessing an editor's experience? This is something one might (should?) do before interacting with another editor. (And also something to apply to oneself, now and again.) At present we have (1) edit counts and (2) number of articles created (3) date of first edit (have I missed one?). It seems hard to get an opinion on how much of an editor's work is in writing new encyclopaedia content of articles – which is the job we are here to do (yes, just like, e.g., a car manufacturer being all about building cars, we do need a lot of support functions to achieve that job).
The problem with edit counts is that this includes:
lots of short edits because the editor does not prepare a considered piece, check it with a preview, and then add it.
interminable discussions/arguments on talk pages.
a focus on page curation (example:[26]) or other "maintenance" activity.
The problem with number of articles created is that an editor may be working in an area where most subjects have an article on them already. Some of these may need improvement (sometimes radical improvement), updating or simply expanding from a stub. So this measure favours those who edit in rapidly changing subjects where new topics arise frequently.
Date of first edit has some use, but there are still editors who started years ago who seem to be unaware of some of the basics, and quite new editors who seem to have got a real good grip of how everything works and produce quality article content.
In searching for a useful set of measures, I suggest something that looks at activity in main namespace (i.e. encyclopaedia content). This could be, as a single group of information:
the total number of characters added
the number of edits
the number of edits grouped in size bands
I feel this would give a more useful view of an editor's activity. What is important is that this should be easily visible to anyone (without needing knowledge of some little used method of getting this data).
My first thought is to back up a step and ask why you think we need a measure of editor "experience" in the first place? Anomie⚔11:19, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with Anomie, especially since "experience" doesn't really translate linearly, someone could be very experienced at writing content but not familiar with "backend" or administrative tasks. Or someone could be very good at writing templates and maintaining code. Or doing mostly WikiGnoming. Etc. Yes, one could say that only the first one is "pure" editing, but this doesn't mean they're inherently the only one doing valuable work, or that they should be higher in some kind of hierarchy of experience. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 11:43, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In addition to the points made by Anomie and Chaotic Enby (with which I agree), your proposed metrics are not reliable indicators of anything relevant: a highly skilled copyeditor will have fewer character additions to their name than someone who writes long, terrible prose. Which of these two edits of mine is the greater addition of encyclopaedic content +220,030 bytes or +759 bytes? Is making the same improvement in one edit better or worse than making it in twoedits? My recent gnoming contributions have ranged in size from -167 bytes to +220,030 bytes, almost entirely overlapping with my non-gnoming edits (other than deprodding and BLARing). The number of edits in each band tell you nothing about the sort of editor I am. Thryduulf (talk) 12:04, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I thought the brief analogy (above) with a car factory was clear – sticking with that analogy, yes the main task may be building cars, but you still need accountants, cleaners, a marketing department, etc., etc. So I am well aware that Wikipedia would not function without lots of tasks other than "pure" editing. What I find a problem is that in the example I gave above, [27] the edit count (as the only readily available metric) does not make clear that the editor has done very little writing of encyclopaedia content, yet they are welcoming new editors, have offered themselves (on 11 July) for multiple feedback services and are active on approval of draft articles. There is very little editing of actual article content and even less of finding some sourced material and adding it to an article. So from this I conclude that the measure of edit count is misleading and that the editor in question does not really have the experience to be judging other editors' efforts. Hence the need for more better quality information. With that information available to all, it might make an editor ask themselves "am I the right person for this job?", so providing a self-policing element. ThoughtIdRetiredTIR12:42, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On Wikipedia:Page Curation, we find Page Curation is a suite of tools developed between March and September 2012 by the Wikimedia Foundation, and greatly improved in 2018 in collaboration with the Wikipedia community, to help experienced editors review new pages on the English Wikipedia.[bold added] The thoughts here are all about determining what is an "experienced editor" – hopefully with that largely being self-policing if the right info is available. ThoughtIdRetiredTIR12:48, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What is it about extensive writing of article content that makes someone uniquely qualified to welcome other editors, offer feedback on articles or determine the quality of a draft? In the passage you quote, "experienced" means "is familiar with Wikipedia's policies, guidelines and norms", someone who spends most of their time on Wikipedia reading a broad range of existing articles and discussions is very likely going to have a much better grasp of what page curation entails than someone who has spent twice that amount of time adding sourced content to a narrow topic area. Two people who spend the same amount of time making the same number, size and type of edits to the same type of articles can be very differently suited to page curation - for example if editor A's edits are almost all accepted as good by others while editor B's are reverted and/or require extensive fixing by others. Editor B is arguably more experienced because they will likely have been directed to read more policies and guidelines and had more talk page interaction regarding their editing than editor A (whose talk page may consist only of a welcome message). There is no simple metric that can capture this. Thryduulf (talk) 13:03, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Large numbers of edits that welcome new users make a correspondingly large increase in the edit count of a user. These are not edits that increase an editor's knowledge of Wikipedia. This is something that devalues edit count as a useful measure of experience. ThoughtIdRetiredTIR16:25, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Respectfully, I don't think we need more metrics and ratings and hierarchies of editors. I'll also note that the Wikipedia:New page reviewer user right (which gives access to the Page Curation tools) is only granted by administrators, most often at first for a short trial, so there is already every opportunity to check if the user has the experience needed.One does not simply walk in and start patrolling new pages. (Although NPP always needs more people!) Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:27, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think it’s helpful to know whether someone is a [[WP:Young editor]] when giving them feedback on potentially problematic edits. But when people are able to communicate adequately, none of the metrics about previous edit count, areas of expertise concern me. I can be convinced that having certain about edit count, user permissions can be helpful when looking at someone’s diff and to ascertain what kind of question to ask someone; but again with emphasis on being kind and effective communicators. In the past, I’ve been chided as a “new editor” when I had 500 edits by someone who was abusing their seniority status. Needless to say, they were also blocked frequently for problematic behaviours. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:46, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From my experience (and I am talking about positive experiences) the most helpful of editors are those who have added a lot of encyclopaedia content. I attribute that to their understanding of some of the problems in sourcing and explaining an article, and also in how to interact with some of the more difficult people in this community. I suspect that many editors, whether they know it or not, have learnt most of their knowledge on Wikipedia from other editors with a substantial track record behind them. What worries me in this case is: who will a new editor go to for assistance/guidance? If they go to someone who was their new page reviewer, but that person does not have any depth of experience, that new editor is being short changed. In the example given, the editor in question apparently does not read the articles too closely – I have no idea what they are doing, but tagging a short article that says when some died (20 years ago, at a good age) with a BLP warning suggests a superficial approach, as does immediately sticking an orphan tag on everything that comes out of draft, which will obviously be the case on making that transition. To answer I don't think we need more metrics and ratings and hierarchies of editors: I think I am trying to make a closely related point, that the metrics we do have can mislead. Perhaps we just need a warning that the existing measures can mislead. ThoughtIdRetiredTIR16:14, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And that's no reason to think that you're a better or worse editor than anyone else. User:ThoughtIdRetired, is there any page that gives the impression things like edit count, number of articles created, and date of first edit are meaningful measures? Phil Bridger (talk) 19:53, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's one of the points that I am trying to make: that measures of editor experience can mislead. I have in mind an argumentative editor who questioned my edits (to "their" articles, of course) based on the fact that I have only created x number of articles (whilst they have created very many, one of which I am currently looking at proposing for deletion as it is a complete work of fiction). At the other end of the scale, as described above, we have a relatively new editor whose edit count consists of a large number of welcomes to new editors – so perhaps misleading them on their knowledge of Wikipedia, when a new editor might go to them for help (due to the welcome message). Based on comments here, I am coming to the conclusion that we need some sort of health warning on anything that could be construed as a measure of editor experience. Whilst measures do have value (like spotting the new editor, or realising that you are dealing with an editor with a huge amount of experience), they are only indicators. Both new editors and very experienced editors can surprise with characteristics we might not expect. ThoughtIdRetiredTIR13:55, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
ThoughtIdRetired, I usually check xtools's Edit Count tool available at the bottom of an editor's contribs. Here's yours. There's no perfect method, of course, but it combines enough information that I find it genuinely helpful. The namespace breakdown pie chart can be particularly illuminating. YMMV. Folly Mox (talk) 11:21, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I do wonder (partly in jest) if the best measure of an editor is the number of times that they have been thanked as a proportion of their total number of edits. In reality, this might be a function of the other editors that they interact with. More seriously, all of these methods of assessments are useful only if we all remember their limitations. ThoughtIdRetiredTIR13:55, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Do note that on some devices (e.g. my smartphone), an editor's edit count is prominently displayed when looking at an edit, whilst it is not on the computer that I am using now. I think we need to take this into account. ThoughtIdRetiredTIR13:55, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that any automatically-generated process can give any meaningful measure beyond knowing that an editor with only a few edits probably hasn't read all the policies and guidelines that old-timers have. I don't use a smartphone to edit Wikipedia, but know that there are many more important things than edit count, so I wouldn't have decided to display it prominently. I would probably do reasonably well on the "number of thanks" measure but that's probably just a function of the pages that I tend to edit. There's no real substitute for looking at someone's contribution history and deciding for yourself who the good editors are. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:51, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The thing about the number of edits is you have to remember how few edits is normal. Of the registered editors who edited at all last year (calendar year 2023), half of them had five or fewer edits. Not "five in 2023", but five total, for the whole lifetime of the account. Someone who has just reached Wikipedia:EXTCONFIRMED is in the top 1% of all time. We tend to think "Oh, three thousand edits – practically a baby", but almost nobody reaches that level. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:28, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Angela (enslaved woman)
On June 4, 2024, I moved the article Angela (enslaved woman) to Angela (slave), for homogenization. It was reverted by @CaroleHenson on July 3, in which they cite Slavery#Terminology. I attempted to reach them 6 days ago (as of August 30), but they are currently inactive.
The terminology section itself describes the naming as "dispute". I thought the (slave) disambiguator would be a better choice due to WP:NOTCENSORED, similarly to changing "passed away" to "died".
Also, I suggest reading WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS before writing your explanation for the requested move process. You will want to write something that doesn't sound like "It's more important for this article to match the others than to avoid language that I've been told is potentially offensive".
Wikipedia should generally avoid needlessly offending people. We want people who read that article to be thinking about the historical subject. We don't want them thinking about whether Wikipedia uses outdated or offensive language. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:52, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There was a recent discussion that, while not formally closed, basically came to the conclusion that both "slave" and "enslaved person" are acceptable ("slave" is not "outdated language") but that one might be preferable to the other depending on the specific context. In such situations it is almost always a bad idea to change from one to the other without consensus. Thryduulf (talk) 23:03, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that (non-RFC) discussion needs a formal closing statement. We probably need to have multiple conversations like that, until more editors become familiar with the subject matter. A formal summary tends to discourage future discussions.
In particular, "both are acceptable" summaries tend to get misused this way: "The rules say that both are acceptable, so my preference is acceptable, and so the rules say we have to do it my way (and never, ever your way)".
As linguistic practices in scholarly and other high-quality sources have just started changing enough for editors to be noticing this, this is probably an area where we need people to keep their brains turned on instead of just trying to find a simplistic rule. I think the best approach will be more obvious in, say, five years. For now, we just need to avoid carving a rule in stone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:44, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The policy requires Neutrality in article titles, so if editors decide that they have to match, they might need to make them match on the one that won't create an opportunity for complaints about offensiveness.
NB that I'm not saying anyone should be offended; I'm just saying that we already do get complaints about "slave" being offensive, so we can reasonably predict that we will get complaints about offensiveness if we choose the (slave) convention. Similarly, we currently don't get complaints about "enslaved person" being offensive, so I think we can reasonable predict that we won't get complaints about offensiveness if we choose the (enslaved person) convention. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But I do find substituting "enslaved person" for "slave" grating. Now, I was trained as a linguist and fully understand that a spoken language is a living thing and constantly evolving, but I am also an old fogey and have grown weary of euphemism churning. I have lived through several cases of a term being recognized as offensive, so we switched to some euphemism, which in a few years become offensive to some, so we switched again. In truth, we are just avoiding how the term is used offensively, and replacing one term with another that will also come to be used offensively. That said, I do not choose this as the "great wrong" to right. I will speak up, though, against the trend I've recently seen of changing "plantation" to "forced-labor cotton farm" and similar monstrosities. Saying that slaves were just "forced laborers" is hiding or dimishing the horrors of chattel slavery. Donald Albury17:05, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
These aren't exactly euphemisms, but I wonder sometimes whether the idea is to grab attention, in the way that an annoying advertisement for used cars is grating but effective at communicating the basic content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:47, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Should we put stub templates on articles that will never be able to be expanded to a start-class?
For example, John Settle (footballer) will very very very very very likely never be expanded to the 1500 character threshhold. It's stub category (Category:English football defender, 1890s birth stubs), could be used by editors to find short articles to be made longer, but is crowded by articles that are extremely unlikely to have more information to be added.
What would you call such articles? In any case, how can you tell that an article has no hope of being expanded beyond a stub? At least some editors feel that stub articles that have no hope of being expanded don't belong in Wikipedia as stand-alone articles, and any useful information in them should be merged into a higher level article. So, search for reliable sources on the topic; if you cannot find anything useful, explore merging the article into a more inclusive article, convert it to a redirect, or take it to AfD. Donald Albury13:30, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A basic question, what OP asks, is what to do about historical biographies? For the example footballer above, I suppose you could make articles for each team he played in for each few seasons that include biographies of all footballers, but then you'd be duplicating all those biographies for the multitude of teams they play in. The alternative is a "list of 1890s footballers" type article, which in addition to being an arbitrary categorization, does not solve the GNG justification for the article, and is a list article, which I would argue is more difficult to maintain and generally of worse quality than a stub (especially when entries do not have main articles). SamuelRiv (talk) 14:46, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sports biographies have been a particular problem on Wikipedia where editors mass create them in the hundreds or thousands despite being asked to stop. It got to the point that a discussion in 2022 determined that sports biographies without significant coverage should be deleted. Feel free to WP:PROD or WP:AFD any sports biography like this that you see where it doesn't have any significant coverage in its listed sources. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:34, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
break up paragraphs
This is a practice request rather than a feature request.
When looking at diffs, it's a pain to scroll through a paragraph taller than my screen to find the one changed word (or comma), not to mention the similarly long paragraphs shown before and after it for context.
I would urge editors to insert single line breaks – which are invisible on the page – between sentences, especially after complex refs. Or at least not to go out of your way to remove such breaks! —Tamfang (talk) 19:10, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's fine to put linebreaks inside templates, such as the citation template. If one is really concerned about losing something in the underlying html, then one can enclose a linebreak within an html comment <!-- -->. These may or may not help with alleviating the diff display.
The html for a single line break in plain wikitext appears as a newline character within a <p> element, which is not rendered by default, but may be picked up accidentally by a bot (not sure for example if AWB's regexp tools default to stop at newlines, or else match "^" to newlines, but imo regexp is inherently a trial-and-error tool, and people who have been using it on WP for a while will have tested their code on newlines already).
As for whether it impacts something more important like commercial accessibility tools (like screen readers), I don't know. But OP's issue is an important accessibility issue as well, since as most of the emerging and young world is operating exclusively on mobile devices, we want to address their UX concerns. (I enjoyed the essay Wikipedia:Editing on mobile devices.) SamuelRiv (talk) 18:41, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
See, the issue is that shortcut isn't memorable, so how can I possibly make the same point as this essay two weeks from now if I can't remember what letters to link the guy? Remsense ‥ 论22:57, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Length and complexity
I noticed the recent expansion of Mekosuchinae that evolved from this to its current form. Articles can sometimes become so large and complex, they exceed the average audience's time and interest. This is not to say the current article should be trimmed or split, it presumably does a good job. But it's very long and specialist. For example one sentence has:
"A later study focused on mekosuchines in general; examining material assigned to Kambara, Baru, the "Floraville Taxon" and what might have either been a juvenile Baru or Mekosuchus; suggests that the group as a whole had collumnar humeri than modern crocodylids with an elliptical rather than rounded crosssection."
One option is to feed it to ChapGPT and ask for a summary in the style of a museum brochure ie. for a "general audience", which is what I thought Wikipedia is supposed to be anyway. There is Simple Wikipedia, but that seems different. Anyway, there does seem to be a need for articles on complex topics that are geared to a casual general audience, that are approachable, readable, interesting without sacrificing accuracy. -- GreenC18:05, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nobody is expected to read a Wikipedia article, or any encyclopedia article, in its entirety from front to back. It's a reference book. (Wikipedia is many more things than that, but the encyclopedic style, the piecemeal improvements, the both narrow and wide audience scope, and the nature of citations, suggest you treat it more as that.) SamuelRiv (talk) 18:15, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Technicality and prose complexity are independent of whether or not something is a reference book. A Michelin's Guide is a reference book. A children's encyclopedia is a reference book. I don't see how either of the guidelines you link contradict my statement. I fully understand that the lede section is aimed to be read as a cohesive narrative whole... which is why I specified that an entire article is what should generally not be expected to be read front-to-back. SamuelRiv (talk) 02:44, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Given recent news regarding an investigation into the promotion of Russian propaganda by right-wing media outlets (see Tenet Media and Lauren Chen), I'm curious about best practices for new articles of people and companies involved in high-profile criminal investigations. Within 24 hours of news being released, editors created Wikipedia articles for Lauren Chen and Tenet Media, both of which primarily focused on the investigation. While Chen had been a public figure prior to the investigation, I had trouble finding RSes with SIGCOV to establish notability without including articles related to the investigation, which runs up against issues regarding Wikipedia's policies relating to illegal conduct--especially without a conviction and especially for a BLP. As such, I brought both articles to AFD (see the discussions for Tenet Media and Lauren Chen). Both discussions quickly filled with keep !votes given the high profile of the case, the vast majority of which do not cite existing policy. I'm curious how to best handle scenarios like this. Significa liberdade (she/her) (talk) 01:27, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Accept that you failed at this time to make your case for deletion. If you really think that WP:ILLCON and WP:BLP1E apply, you'd do better to advocate for both to be merged to an article on the investigation, as suggested in some of the early comments on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tenet Media, rather than continuing to push for deletion. Even then I see several claims in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lauren Chen that sufficient sources exist for that article to counter WP:BLP1E, so you may need to wait for the dust to clear on that before proposing that merge. Anomie⚔11:56, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Idea for a bot. If you can work it, go ahead.
A TP message I woke up to, this morning, combined with User:Cullen328/Smartphone editing, got me thinking this morning, of how many mobile diffs must be getting thrown up on-wiki every day, and causing the interface changes that Gray flagged up with me.
So why don’t we have a bot, that sweeps edits for en.m.wikipedia links, and changes them to en.wikipedia? I’m not a coding guy, so I couldn’t build this myself, so I’m bringing it to the Idea Lab, if anyone likes the look, and fancies having a go. MM(Give me info.)(Victories)10:57, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I'm not WMF staff (although I am the Wikimedian of the Year) but I noticed something I thought should have wider community input. Please keep in mind that as far as I'm aware this is in very early stages and there is no guarantee that it will actually be implemented. Also, please be nice. I anticipate that some people will be surprised by what it was being proposed here so I felt like this was an important reminder. Anyways: mw:Wikimedia Apps/Team/iOS/Fundraising Experiment in the iOS App. There is a feedback section towards the end of you wish to give it. I have already commented there. Clovermoss🍀(talk)17:47, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is an example of what is being proposed. Essentially, there would be a donation button near the top right of an article and these would kind of be like Reddit trophies. I think this needs way more visibility than being buried in the depths of mediawiki which is why I'm posting here. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:52, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Clovermoss, it’s Haley from the Mobile Apps team! You’re correct that the project is in very early stages. We just recently published the project page and had planned to start outreach after Wikimania—that’s why folks might not have heard about it yet. In short, the idea is that we want to try out other ways of fundraising beyond just banners – hopefully ways that make readers and editors feel more connected to each other. But we know that fundraising ideas have to be considered carefully, which is why our goal right now is just to be in conversation with the community on high level concepts. We hope people will join the discussion on the project page. P.S. Congratulations on Wikimedian of the Year! HNordeen (WMF) (talk) 16:01, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This should have been mentioned at the fundraising brainstorming page as soon as it was published. I object to the "gamification" aspect of giving money to people. I'm not sure how "donating from an article" is an improvement over just having a discrete "donate" button, which we already have. In conclusion: I think this is unnecessary.
Also here – is it THAT HARD to say "introduce", which is a long-standing, universally recognized word, rather than "onboarding" which is today's #1 corporatese-jargon? These things always make the WMF look bad, bureaucratic, corporate, and out of touch. Cremastra (talk) 17:06, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@HNordeen (WMF): This is what I meant when I said at the page itself that this is likely to cause a public relations disaster. Imagine a thousand comments like this. Please understand that I really don't think this is a good idea and I don't say this because I wish you to fail but I wish to see everyone suceed. Clovermoss🍀(talk)17:13, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'll also note that the phrase "Microinteraction and confirmation snackbar." was used without apparent embarrassment to mean "a notification/confirmation box". The thing is, phrases like this are inaccessible, and make these pages harder to understand. Cremastra (talk) 17:17, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While "microinteraction" definitely should've been left out, that's not a "box". "Confirmation box" sounds like a dialog for you to confirm. A snackbar can only be a small message that pops up from the bottom to tell you that the operation has been a success (sometimes with an ündo" button to the right). Aaron Liu (talk) 18:17, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, what I meant by confirmation box was a box confirming that the operation worked. That is, it's sending you a confirmation, not the other way around. Cremastra (talk) 18:19, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's an important distinction for developers, but I think if the page is targeted to the general public, "notification bar" should suffice. Cremastra (talk) 18:46, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't mean to sound like a complete crank, but this is, I think, part of the reason some or many editors react badly to WMF pages like this: they're sometimes hard to understand and come off as a bit condescending. I've WP:BOLDly toned down the language so that it's easier to understand for non-developers. Cremastra (talk) 18:12, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate that my comment prompted you to reflect and tone things down a little. [31] I also know that your heart is in the right place too and that a lot of the time these comments are caused by a series of frustrating events and not feeling like one has been listened to. Feel free to tell me if I'm putting words in your mouth, Cremastra. I just know that HNordeen (WMF) is relatively new to the foundation and I don't want her to feel like all of this was directed at her personally. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:19, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess I can put this here: I feel like calling this "mobile fundraising" is a little bit misleading. Do not misunderstand me: I sincerely appreciate Clovermoss bringing this here, regardless of the title. But this is not really about fundraising on mobile. That always has happened, and I doubt anyone will have feedback on that. This is about allowing people to donate to "support"/"champion"/"appreciate" a particular article. Would "allowing people to donate in appreciation of a particular article" be a neutral way to phrase what is being suggested? Best, HouseBlaster (talk · he/they) 18:32, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I said mobile fundraising because I wasn't sure what else I could put without making it sound like I was canvassing and steering the discussion a certain way. Between here and CENT, I'm sure this will get enough eyes instead of being buried at mediawiki. If someone does change the title, I'd suggest that it's as clear and concise as possible. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:42, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@HouseBlaster: What would you think if we added "experiment" to the end of the current text? It'd make it more clear that what is being proposed is a bit different compared to a normal mobile fundraising. Clovermoss🍀(talk)21:01, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm largely indifferent to the idea of mobile fundraising in general, and was surprised it wasn't already well established. I'm also mostly indifferent to the idea of donations tied to articles. What I have a quite strong opinion about is what happens when someone donates "to" an article. To the point: there should be no direct connection between donations and the appearance of a Wikipedia article for anyone other than the donor. No matter how it's framed (badges, stickers, sponsors, endorsements, pictures, text, etc.), if there's any way to affect the appearance of the article with money, there will emerge metacommunicative/signalling strategies to manipulate the system in unacceptable ways. On some level, I like the idea of audiences being better able to communicate appreciation to contributors, but it has to be divorced from money. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 18:59, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To the point: there should be no direct connection between donations and the appearance of a Wikipedia article for anyone other than the donor.
Agreed. I also see that the WMF recognises at least some of issues this could cause, saying Safeguards should be added to prevent inappropriate usage of the feature on sensitive articles, but I don’t think they’ve thought through the complexity of accurately classifying articles as sensitive.
Alternatively, if they have already succeeded in doing so in a robust manner, can they please release the tool, as it will be very helpful in general? BilledMammal (talk) 00:23, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the safeguards comment was in regards to the concerns that I and other people expressed at the page itself on why you wouldn't want something like this on controversial articles. As far as I'm aware, this is just an idea and nothing has actually been implemented. That would mean that there isn't a way to filter this content out yet either. Clovermoss🍀(talk)00:41, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I encourage people to leave their feedback on the mediawiki page itself (see my initial comments at the top of the thread) so it isn't scattered across pages and projects. Clovermoss🍀(talk)00:45, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you to everyone who has spoken up here - I'll echo @Clovermoss's request to please leave thoughts and ideas on the mediawiki project page. The mediawiki page has been edited to make it more clear (thank you for suggestions on how to do that!) and in hopes to communicate that this is at an early stage, and we are not limited to this first idea that is on the page. I've also expanded the page to include risks that have been brought up so far. Thanks to everyone who has contributed, we have the capacity to try a new format of fundraising within the iOS app this year, and we're excited to work together with you to identify what form it could take. HNordeen (WMF) (talk) 21:04, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Clovermoss, it's meant to communicate that we want to change direction to pursue alternate ideas in response to feedback and suggestions we receive. We want to work together with you to figure out ways of recognizing existing donors and creating pathways for potential donors, and we only want to proceed with ideas that we can all feel good about experimenting with. HNordeen (WMF) (talk) 16:16, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikimedia Foundation banner fundraising campaign in India postponed to start on the 27th of August
Dear all,
As mentioned previously, the WMF is running its annual banner fundraising campaign for non logged in users in India. Initially, we planned the campaign to start tomorrow and run until the 10th of September. We have had some issues with our local payment provider in India and due to this we are postponing the campaign by a couple of weeks. Our new campaign dates are the 27th of August to the 24th of September.
You can find more information around the campaign, see example banners, and leave any questions or suggestions you might have, on the community collaboration page.
Generally, before and during the campaign, you can contact us:
The Open Conversation with the Trustees at Wikimania hosted breakout discussions about the Movement Charter, affiliate strategy and hubs, the proposal for a Global Resource Distribution Committee (hybrid table--had streaming and is available to watch back online), the Product/Tech Advisory Council & Product/Tech priorities, building a sustainable revenue strategy for the movement: online fundraising, Wikimedia Enterprise and the Wikimedia Endowment, and responding to emerging threats to free knowledge: litigation, censorship, disinformation, and trust in an election year.
Editor tools related to references & categories and more tech updates on the latest Tech News.
Outreachy (a paid, remote three-month internship to support underrepresented groups in tech) is open. Mentors should submit projects before September 11 at 16:00 UTC (more info).
The Campaign Events extension is now available on Meta-Wiki, Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested in other language wikis.
Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
Some next steps on a movement charter: A message from Wikimedia Foundation CEO, Maryana Iskander, Chair of Board of Trustees, Nataliia Tymkiv, and Chair of Governance Committee, Dariusz Jemielniak.
Elections for four community-and-affiliate elected seats on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation will be held from September 3 to September 17. To learn more about the candidates, watch this short "Meet the Candidates" presentations.
A few minutes ago, shortly after midnight GMT, 3 September 2024, I saw a pop-up message saying that WMF Board of Trustees elections were open, and giving me a link to click. I right-clicked on the link to open a new page, and got a page saying that I was not eligible to vote because 300 edits were required, and I had 39 edits. I tried again, and got the same message. That page was on Meta:, and 39 is in fact my count of edits on Meta:. A few minutes later, that banner was no longer displayed at the top of my English Wikipedia pages. So I think I have at least four questions:
1. Where can I vote for WMF Trustees?
2. Is my analysis correct, that it was using the number of Meta: edits when it should have been using total edits?
Thank you. It now says that I am eligible to vote on English Wikipedia, although the number of edits that it says I have made is somewhat different from what CA shows, but still large. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:44, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How does one get one of these invitations? From what's been said I'm sure I am eligible. Does one have to say nice things about the Foundation to be invited? DuncanHill (talk) 22:26, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem was a bug in the setup; everyone eligible should now be able to vote and doesn't need an exemption. If you're not able to vote even now (and you are eligible please email the Elections Committee. Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 22:48, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I found out about the vote via a large WP:CentralNotice banner. If there is a bug, it would be worthwhile investigating, but being condescending makes me less inclined to want to investigate with you. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:55, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've reported it here. This is the page to communicate with WMF. Monobook, Win 11, Edge. I do not feel safe on Meta after previous experiences there. I am sure I'm not the only editor not to have received notification. People on en-Wiki need to know. DuncanHill (talk) 23:08, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@User:the wub I have them all ticked. And even if I didn't, I would rather have assumed that "Certain platform notices, such as those relating to site maintenance and special notices considered necessary to all users, will always be displayed" would cover WMF trustee elections as "special notices considered necessary to all users". DuncanHill (talk) 23:44, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are you saying that you think that who has ultimate control over the Wikipedia servers is really "considered necessary to all users"? Maybe you and we think so, but maybe some people think that is an abstraction, or maybe they think that the "movement" and the servers are only incidentally related. And I haven't seen statements or questions that seem directly relevant to our servers anyway. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:24, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
FYI I received an email just now about being eligible to vote and containing a link to vote. Looks like WMF is doing a massive email blast today to eligible voters. Hopefully this addresses concerns farther up in the thread about folks not being sufficiently informed. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:50, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
88, do you allow tracking cookies from wikipedia.org in your browser? If not, the site won't remember that you've dismissed the banner already. Another option is to create an account (it's free and a single step; doesn't even require email confirmation), which will allow you to hide donation banners. Folly Mox (talk) 11:02, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin September Issue 1
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation over the first half of September 2024. Please help Translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversationsTalking: 2024 continues
Join Wiki Loves Onam, a photo campaign dedicated to documenting the vibrant and colorful festival of Onam on Wikimedia Commons. The campaign runs until September 30.
The Alternative Text suggested edits feature has now been fully deployed to production on the iOS App for Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and French Wikipedias! This feature, part of WE1.2, is designed to enhance how newcomers add alt text to images, aiming to improve accessibility and engagement. For more details, visit the project page and explore the new feature in the app!
Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualization can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help test the charts.
A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia’s APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.
See the new members of the U4C following the results of the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) special election, a new decision making group that will enforce the UCoC in specific circumstances.
Why are less images being uploaded today? It wasn't like that from 2006 to 2009, many images were uploaded at that time period. Is there a reason why the image uploads declined after that period of time? MJGTMKME123 (talk) 21:49, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is nothing preventing appropriate and policy-compliant images from being uploaded. As to when it is appropriate to replace an existing image with a new one, that will depend on the specifics: newer isn't necessarily better. AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:57, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If someone finds it worth uploading in each particular instance? I have very little clue what sort of general rule you'd expect there to be. Remsense ‥ 论22:03, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is no general answer to this line of questioning. Improved media are uploaded if editors discover or create them; what constitutes an improvement depends entirely on the media in question. Remsense ‥ 论22:18, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have an image that you think would illustrate an article better than whatever is already there? Then upload it and add it to the article, replacing the old one. Then, when someone reverts, explain on the Talk page why yours is better. —Tamfang (talk) 17:56, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@MJGTMKME123, what do you mean by "less images being uploaded today"?
Do you mean specifically what's being uploaded today, as in Sunday, the 25th of August? (If so, please go to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) and sound the alarm, because a sudden downturn is probably technical in nature.) Or do you mean "in recent years"?
How much less? Is this like a long-term leveling off? Are you talking about uploads directly to the English Wikipedia, or at Commons? How are you counting the number of uploads? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:20, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We have made efforts to direct uploaders Wikimedia Commons whenever appropriate, so having less uploads here could be a good thing. — xaosfluxTalk22:32, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are you thinking about any images in particular? Again, we can't really answer your question because it's way too broad. Remsense ‥ 论22:38, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm just asking about the trend of fewer image uploads in the recent years, but I understand if it's too broad. I was wondering if there are any topics where image uploads have noticeably declined. MJGTMKME123 (talk) 22:43, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't actually use a tool. I just noticed that most images were made around that time period by just analyzing the date of random images. MJGTMKME123 (talk) 22:59, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@MJGTMKME123, I suggest looking at c:Commons:Statistics of uploads vs deletions, which gives the number of annual uploads from 2003 through 2022, and which does not support your hypothesis that there has been a multi-year decline in uploads.
If you know anything about SQL, you can run queries like this and get whatever numbers you want. I use the "check 10 pages in Special:Random" method a lot, but you've got to remember that it's really quite a crude estimate, and if your random images weren't actually random (e.g., they were images used in Wikipedia articles), then you'd be looking at a crude estimate of a biased sample, which is basically worthless. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:07, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's way more useful data than what I found just below. So uploads to Commons have risen steadily if non-monotonically, and there is no year for which the number of files uploaded was less than any all of the three previous years. Folly Mox (talk) 23:19, 25 August 2024 (UTC)edited 10:16, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This wouldn't account for which images are actually being used in articles (plenty of Commons images aren't), but I'd be very surprised if those are mostly pre-2009. ― novov(tc)10:10, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What do you base that on? The number of articles in the English Wikipedia has more than doubled since 2009 (3,144,000 on 1 Jan 2010, 6,764,355 on 1 Jan 2024), and images in older articles are often replaced, so I suspect a large majority of images in articles have been added since 2009. For your claim to be valid, editors would have had to be preferencially using images uploaded before 2009 to add to articles. However, an analysis of the upload dates of a large enough sample of images currently in use in articles would be needed to support your claim. Frankly, I don't think that is worth pursuing, as I don't see its relevance to building a quality encyclopedia. Donald Albury13:49, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On a related point, please consider looking through the popular articles for a favorite subject area – most WikiProjects have a page like Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Popular pages – and seeing what new images could/should be added. Not having an adequate number of images in each article is a constant complaint from readers, and it even has benefits beyond the obvious value of the image itself (e.g., helping people with dyslexia keep their eyes on the right part of the article). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:08, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Another source for images (which I suspect has been under utilized) are family photos. For example, over his lifetime my Dad took approximately 4,000 photos which are in slide format. While some will be of little interest to Wikimedia in general -- I doubt anyone is eager to see photos of llywrch's first birthday -- there are a number of images that I know will be of interest, such as photos of his business trips to Sudan & Nigeria, photos Oregon from as far back as 1960, & so forth. (I have some of a railway train that ran between Banks & Vernonia back in the 1960s that no longer exists. The trackway has since then been converted to the Banks–Vernonia State Trail. I've already uploaded a few of these to Commons. I'd be far more along with sharing these on Commons except that for many I'm missing information. For example, he visited an agricultural station in a town in Western Sudan -- for which I'd be surprised if we had any photos -- however I don't remember/know the name of that town.I expect there are countless Wikipedians with older family members who were hobbyist photographers, so this is a resource begging to be exploited. (PS, I had discussed doing this with my father before he passed, so I definitely have permission to do this.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:43, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's a reasonably sized subcommunity who decide which news stories are linked at "In the news". The conversations are held at WP:ITN/C. You should be able to participate without an account, assuming some knowledge of Wikipedia policy. Folly Mox (talk) 11:53, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think you have a common misunderstanding of what this section actually is. It is not meant to be a continuously updated news ticker, it is a way of showcasing articles that have been updated to reflect recent events. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:42, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Your thoughts are appreciated. If the main page had 138 million page views in the last 30 days, maybe the space could be used for something more intriguing or something that changes every day like the other sections on the main page? 2600:6C4A:4E7F:8D9D:F09D:D640:9B79:6F77 (talk) 18:14, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We don't updated ITN particularly quickly compared to a normal news website. I think the normal cadence is a new news item in the ITN box every few days. And there's only around 4 bullets so not that many total news items either. I'm not sure the reasoning for this... maybe limited space, and the editor time it would take to do more voluminous or more frequent updates? –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:15, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, ITN does not have a formal overseer, unlike other mainpage sections which are either driven by a single key volunteer or elected coordinator. But it has plenty of editors who hang around and vote on nominations. Very little gets through this gauntlet and so the section often gets stale, as you have noticed. Most recently, ITN ran the same picture of a cyclist for ten straight days. There were plenty of other pictures that might have been run but no-one was accountable or responsible for making this happen.
The good news is that this doesn't much matter because our readers just go straight to topics which are in the news. For example, the top read article on Wikipedia yesterday was WWE Bash in Berlin. But you'd never see that at ITN because, for some reason, such combat sports get no love at ITN – InedibleHulk can perhaps explain why that is.
If you want to browse what's happening in the world, then the best place to look is Portal:Current_events, which seems to work much better because there's a crew of editors more focussed on posting items than arguing about them. For example, today it reports that "NASA announces discovery of Earth's subtle electric field, which contributes to the polar wind phenomenon." Such interesting science gets little love at ITN too.
I would say that if you want to browse “what is currently happening in the world”, the best place is a dedicated news outlet… not an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is better for history than current events. Blueboar (talk) 22:21, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the info. What if that section rotated with fresh links like the other sections on the main page? Are there any current event links on the page? Or how about positive news items to balance the negative trends of the for profit media? If this is an encyclopedia, maybe in the news section might be better as something else? Just wondering. I have no agenda. Seems a waste of potential to me. 2600:6C4A:4E7F:8D9D:F09D:D640:9B79:6F77 (talk) 18:20, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
These are all good points. The first link above was to discuss ITN candidate articles, but you might also try Wikipedia talk:In the news, which is where to "discuss improvements to the In the news process", and where you'd get responses from the people who would actually make such reforms.
For my part, I'd note that it's not the popularity of the article (or event) that determines if it gets on the main page, but the article's quality (despite the fact that ITN and WP:DYK are made for new-and-improved articles). This could be expressed more clearly about ITN on the main page, but typically a major news story will attract a lot of old and new editors, and consequent quality control, regardless of its appearance on the main page or linking elsewhere. That said, I agree that the section could be more dynamic day by day (while still even restricting it to 4 or so quality items), just by rethinking that instead of being so exclusive about what is added, we be exclusive about what is kept on for more than a single day or two (regardless of whether a news event is considered ongoing). Rotation is a fine idea for a possible implementation. SamuelRiv (talk) 19:10, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I see it as "In the news AND likely Wikipedia-notable". I don't say that's any kind of policy, because I don't know. I think Wikipedia should avoid making that section more like a normal news website, because that would force Wikipedia to hire full-time staff to keep it up to date; or if it continued to be done by volunteers, it would be "just like [news site] except incomplete and out of date". Nobody needs or wants a bad copy of what other sites do, to be put here.
Hi everybody. I was searching about a person named Geoffrey Duchet, but he doesn't have any biography in wikipedia. He was british explorer and he visited persepolis in 1569 AD. My source about him was a persian translated of 1 of books of Alfons Gabriel means Geographical research about Iran (unfortunately all of his books is in german language, and i don't know do any of you can read german books or not). Can somebody build Geoffrey Duchet's biography's page on english wikipedia? Hulu2024 (talk) 13:19, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And i shall add that i don't have any access on printed books on Geoffrey Duchet's biography to build his page, on myself. please if someone have access to english books on 16 th century, please write his biography. i needed it strongly. Hulu2024 (talk) 13:23, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I eager but i don't have access to academic and primary sources. It's odd that USA and UK have best universities with best storage of book (with monetary online access for western countries) and english wikipedia does the most editors in all languages, but nobody made this historical person's biography. Hulu2024 (talk) 13:43, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Hulu2024: Geoffrey Duchet may not have been notable in his day, hence the lack of coverage. I pretty much could only find modern day people by that name with a Google search.
The only mention that I found of his name in a Wikimedia article space was in Farsi, fa:ایرانشناسی (English version of the article is Iranian studies). At the end of the sentence mentioning him as جفری داکت, there is a footnote that points to a shortened footnote, موسوی، تخت جمشید، ۱۴. [Mousavi, Persepolis, 14], which then appears to point to a full citation of an encyclopedic text,موسوی، علی (۱۳۸۵). «تخت جمشید». دائرةالمعارف بزرگ اسلامی. ج. ۱۴. تهران: مرکز دائرةالمعارف بزرگ اسلامی. شابک ۹۶۴-۷۰۲۵-۵۴-۸. بایگانیشده از اصلی در ۷ اوت ۲۰۲۴. دریافتشده در ۷ اوت ۲۰۲۴. [Mousavi, Ali (1385). "Persepolis". The great Islamic encyclopedia. c. 14. Tehran: Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia. Shabak 964-7025-54-8. Archived from the original on August 7, 2024. Retrieved on August 7, 2024.]
@TooManyFingers Because he was traveler and he travels to persepolis in 1569 and his wrote about that at his memorial, i want to improve my article in persian wikipedia (iraian studies) to be choose as Featured articles, so i need enough information about him. Persepolis is one of iranian's historical monument, which european travelers had seen, and that was the motivation to start about iranology. Hulu2024 (talk) 21:11, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Seems to be a pretty notable person. We had an article by a user who has left, which was nominated for speedy by a user who has since been banned for socking, after a discussion, started unironically by another user who has since been banned for socking.
Can someone restore this, and other history of the page. Looking at the incoming links GNG should be easily achievable.
Wish #4: Easy access templates – help users configure the Template dialog to show common and favorite templates.
We have shared on the focus area page how are seeing this problem, and approaching it. We also have some design mockups to show you.
We are inviting you all to discuss, hopefully support (or let us know what to improve) about the focus area. You can leave your feedback on the talkpage of the focus area.
Joe Cunningham (D) for Congress (archived copy)
Joe Cunningham (D) for Congress Archived April 22, 2019, at the Wayback Machine Archived – we don't add bibliographic information like dates
Done [10] jps (talk) 17:45, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Resolved
Remsense ‥ 论 21:35, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
— GhostInTheMachine talk to me 12:49, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
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