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:::I agree! undump the pump!! [[User:Sm8900|Sm8900]] ([[User talk:Sm8900|talk]]) 22:39, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
:::I agree! undump the pump!! [[User:Sm8900|Sm8900]] ([[User talk:Sm8900|talk]]) 22:39, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
That was terrible. I'll add it back in a proper way later, but in general... please stop using tables for designing pages. —[[User:TheDJ|Th<span style="color: green">e</span>DJ]] ([[User talk:TheDJ|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/TheDJ|contribs]]) 10:59, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
That was terrible. I'll add it back in a proper way later, but in general... please stop using tables for designing pages. —[[User:TheDJ|Th<span style="color: green">e</span>DJ]] ([[User talk:TheDJ|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/TheDJ|contribs]]) 10:59, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

:It's still incredibly ugly and totally messes with the readability, but at least it's not an accessibility problem this way. —[[User:TheDJ|Th<span style="color: green">e</span>DJ]] ([[User talk:TheDJ|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/TheDJ|contribs]]) 21:57, 10 November 2023 (UTC)


== Reverse watchlist? ==
== Reverse watchlist? ==

Revision as of 21:57, 10 November 2023

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 
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The idea lab section of the village pump is a place where new ideas or suggestions on general Wikipedia issues can be incubated, for later submission for consensus discussion at Village pump (proposals). Try to be creative and positive when commenting on ideas.
Before creating a new section, note:

Before commenting, note:

  • This page is not for consensus polling. Stalwart "Oppose" and "Support" comments generally have no place here. Instead, discuss ideas and suggest variations on them.
  • Wondering whether someone already had this idea? Search the archives below, and look through Wikipedia:Perennial proposals.

Discussions are automatically archived after remaining inactive for two weeks.

« Archives, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59

Unreferenced articles

Initial discussion

There is still discussion happening in the other subsections below, but this initial discussion was superceded by an RfC that was not adopted. Since this initial discussion seems to be attracting further !votes, despite being at VPI, I believe it's time to hat it so editors can focus energy on the related discussions below, or elsewhere entirely. (non-admin closure) —siroχo 08:48, 2 November 2023 (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.

Since I don't like writing long walls of text, and nobody reads those anyways, I'll state my idea in point form:

  • Unreferenced articles (i.e. those with zero sources) are a huge problem, and a violation of one of Wikipedia's core content policies: WP:V.
  • There are currently 119,000 articles tagged as unreferenced; and new ones get added every month.
  • With articles needing more sources, one can invoke WP:BURDEN and trim off the unsourced claims. One can't do that with totally unreferenced articles.
  • So here's my idea: "unreferenced" tags act as pseudo-prods. If the tag isn't removed within two weeks (and the problem fixed), the article is deleted. Users can draftify or improve the article during that period. Tags should not be removed unless references are added.
    • Don't panic! This idea will not apply retroactively; i.e.; articles already tagged with {{unreferenced}} would not be subject to this change.
  • This would greatly discourage creation of new, unsourced articles, of which there are too many.
  • This would stop the addition of new articles to the unreferenced backlog, allowing that to be picked away at.
  • This would maintain a higher average quality of verifiability and quality on the encyclopedia.
  • This would incentivise users to add sources to their unreferenced contributions.

I have a feeling this is idea will be drastically unpopular, but I believe something should be done, so... thoughts on the proposal? Since this is the idea lab, we can modify the idea to whatever directions necessary. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 18:17, 17 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

P.S.: Please ping me on reply. Cheers, Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 18:24, 17 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • As long as this is not applied retroactively, as described in the proposed idea, this doesn't seem like too problematic of an idea, although it's not within current policy. WP:MINREF states: Technically, if an article contains none of these four types of material, then it is not required by any policy to name any sources at all, either as inline citations or as general references. That's an information page, but WP:V has always stated that All content must be verifiable. I think it was last year User:Levivich opened an RFC at VPP or somewhere proposing this language be changed to All content must be verified; the RFC did not pass. I think the present idea might be forcing through an unsupported policy change. If there is sufficient support for this, I would prefer an action less drastic than deletion, but as evidenced by other discussions currently active at VPR and VPI, something like draftification is a whole can of worms inside a barrel of worms inside an intermodal shipping container of worms. Folly Mox (talk) 19:18, 17 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I did consider proposing draftification, but abandoned it for pretty much that reason. I do frequently draftify articles myself, but I think institutionalized, automatic draftification would lead no where good, especially as long as G13 is around and kicking. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 19:21, 17 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
What if, instead of leaping all the way to deletion, articles thus tagged, after 14 days, were __NOINDEX__ed? That's just a tiny baby step towards a fully referenced mainspace, but mitigates propagation of potential misinformation, and retains the problem articles for potential improvement. Folly Mox (talk) 15:53, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The page would still be accessible, though, through links or URL-hopping. It is possible this idea could go hand-in-hand with the above-proposed softdeleting/archiving/whatever we're calling it this week. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 19:42, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The RFC I was thinking of was indeed last year. Folly Mox (talk) 20:18, 17 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Although MINREF says that, WP:V which is policy boy an information page says Any material lacking an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the material may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source. So an editor can redirect an article without any referencing, or cut it down to a stub. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:42, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. Stubbifying, redirecting, sourcing, tagging, and the null action are all permitted over unreferenced articles under current policy. Folly Mox (talk) 05:26, 19 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. It's not 2004 anymore. Everyone in the English-speaking world with an internet connection knows what Wikipedia is and what its basic requirements are, to the extent that {{Citation needed}} is a pretty universally recognized phrase even outside the context of Wikipedia. Sourcing things with the internet is easier now than it ever has been. So we should expect much more of people when it comes to citing something at article creation than we did in 2004. I would also guess we're somewhere approaching 99% coverage of the most globally-notable non-CE topics; thus, unlike in 2004, there is virtually 0% any old as-yet-untagged unreferenced article is going to be on a subject so integral to society that we can be certain expansion and sourcing will ever happen. JoelleJay (talk) 01:32, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think the idea that we're approaching 99% "completion" isn't accurate; see this recent discussion at VPM, for example. Curbon7 (talk) 03:09, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I did not say 99% "completion". I said 99% coverage of the most globally-notable non-CE topics. This means subjects like apple and knee and Muhammad and psychology and division (mathematics) and beauty and Russland. Things that are universally recognized and would always be expected to appear in any broad general-use encyclopedia. JoelleJay (talk) 03:31, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For clarification, when you say coverage are you talking about articles created or articles fleshed out? Curbon7 (talk) 04:24, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Articles created. JoelleJay (talk) 22:01, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Everyone in the English-speaking world with an internet connection knows what Wikipedia is and what its basic requirements are: on this point, it's just wrong to presume that everyone understands Wikipedia. They really don't. It might be a frequently used tool but it's extremely to rare to find people who have scraped near its innards, or to have more than the vaguest idea of en.wp's reliability beyond "I know it's iffy but it seems mostly ok". {{Citation needed}} is a niche reference in the first place, but especially outside cities and outside the age group 20–35. Even for highly educated people, have they ever looked at a Wikipedia reference list? would not infrequently elicit a 'they have those?'. Notability and verifiability are pretty much Wikipedia's basic requirements, and it's totally mad to expect anywhere upwards of 5% to recognise either one. Everyone in the English-speaking world with an internet connection? That sentence struck me as a massive example of projecting oneself on others, and I'm sorry if it's tangential but just wanted to put it out there. J947 † edits 09:46, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with Everyone here being an overstatement. My experience has been that people of my generation are aware of Wikipedia's existence, and people of younger generations typically encounter us in the form of their google lady saying "according to Wikipedia," before answering a question beginning "ok google" asked aloud in their kitchen.
If nothing else, the data constantly spewing in from AfC indicate that people generally don't understand what Wikipedia is and especially don't understand its basic requirements. Folly Mox (talk) 14:39, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
By "understand Wikipedia", I mean "understand that it's an encyclopedia" and what an encyclopedia is. It's the 5th-most visited website in the world, people are using it as a resource for accurate information. Sure, "everyone" might be hyperbolic--I guess there is that cohort of old folks who haven't had to write an essay in 50 years and so might have forgotten that things should be cited--but looking things up online is universal within the demographic I mentioned so I find it highly unlikely anyone doesn't understand what Wikipedia is. We have many expectations of adults that aren't always met, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have those expectations. Likewise, we can expect (as distinct from presume) that editors provide sources when creating articles. JoelleJay (talk) 18:47, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose as utterly irresponsible. I don't like a subject area, I go and mass tag all the unreferenced articles at a pace that nobody can keep up with, and they are gone in 14 days. It is simple as that. Could even be done by bot. --Rschen7754 04:13, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't like a subject area, I go and mass tag all the unreferenced articles at a pace that nobody can keep up with: are you suggesting requesting sources or deleting unsourced content is a form of vandalism or harassment? Or are you suggesting that a fait accompli implies what has been done is now everyone's valuable treasure and responsibility?
    If users did not add sources it is their problem, providing sources is the responsibility of the person who added information (WP:BURDEN). And other users have to deal with this lack of sources: no user should consider themselves "bad", "frivolous", "in a deletion frenzy", or "irresponsible", because they are simply doing what's right by removing what is unsourced (deleting articles included). Again, it is the person who adds the information who should be sourcing them. There were thousands of people who did not provide a source on multiple articles throughout WP? Anyone can remove what they have added, any of those unsourced articles should be deleted. Veverve (talk) 05:38, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't like a subject area, I go and mass tag all the unreferenced articles at a pace that nobody can keep up with: Not only would this happen, we would probably see a few people who "accidentally" remove "unreliable" (according to them) sources just before tagging them, or even tagging articles while the sources are still present. That's not IMO a sound reason not to set this long, slow train in motion, but I wouldn't want anyone to be surprised when it does happen. WhatamIdoing (talk) 09:15, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    we would probably see a few people who "accidentally" remove "unreliable" (according to them) sources just before tagging them, or even tagging articles while the sources are still present: the same argument can be said for anything that gets PRODed or XfDed. Veverve (talk) 10:32, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    It already happens with PROD and XFD; that's why I am confident that it will happen here, too. I suppose the more subtle way to handle this is for one editor to remove sources from the articles they dislike, and another to come along later to tag them for deletion. Since we can reasonably predict that this will be interpreted as a black-and-white rule, we should expect all uncited articles to be tagged for deletion. If it follows a PROD-like process, there's a risk that an admin will notice that the article was previously sourced, but I would not expect that to be a major barrier to deleting most articles about any subject we choose. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:43, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I read the will not apply retroactively as applying to articles created prior to the potential adoption of this idea, rather than articles tagged prior, but that could certainly be clarified further. Are there whole topic areas lacking references? There probably shouldn't be any topic areas lacking references created in the future, and if such a situation were to arise, I think I'd characterise the creation of all the unreferenced articles as more disruptive than tagging them all db-unref or whatever we'd call this process. Folly Mox (talk) 14:58, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    My intent was articles tagged prior to potential adoption, but I'm willing to be talked around. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 19:44, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support: you add information, you source, you prove notability. WP:BURDEN is on you. A 2007 essay already proposed the same philosophy Edward-Woodrow does here: Wikipedia:No reliable sources, no verifiability, no article. Veverve (talk) 05:27, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Deletion would be too harsh; consider that these may be created by newcomers, who would be bit and perhaps leave before they can become a good contributor. If we have to go down this road, then draftifying is a better solution, but with no deadline, this is way more than is necessary for all but BLPs and sensitive topics. SounderBruce 07:08, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    If someone in 2023 does not understand that they need to cite whichever sources they're using to write a Wikipedia article, they should not be writing Wikipedia articles. JoelleJay (talk) 18:18, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    No one begins editing with a perfect understanding of policies. Many editors receive proper guidance and become productive with some experience; turning them away at the first step would only contribute to worsening editor retention. There are also cultures that might not conform to our ideas of citations and reliable sources; are all those people not excluded from what should be an inclusive movement? Do we want to wall ourselves off to only people who fit a colonialist view of knowledge? SounderBruce 00:52, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @SounderBruce: They'll have two weeks to find references. Besides, speedy deletion would be far more bitey than this. I'm not sure I understand your statement There are also cultures that might not conform to our ideas of citations and reliable sources; are all those people not excluded from what should be an inclusive movement? Wikipedia policy requires sources. Period. And in what way would different cultures diverge on interpretation of "citations reliable sources?" I'm not sure I understand this. Edward-Woodrow • talk 01:16, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    We could write more about this subject than anyone would probably care to read, but the following two points are probably the biggest general areas:
    • What counts as "reliable" varies by culture. My culture doesn't accept "I saw Karp in the elevator, and he said it was probably np-complete" as a reliable source, but personal information from an expert is a very highly valued source in some other cultures.
    • Cultures without a long tradition of written language do not expect the sources they rely upon to be fixed in a tangible form. My culture (and enwiki's policy) does.
    WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:49, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I see, thanks. Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:12, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    You don't need a perfect understanding of the policies. You only need to meet the most basic expectation that you cite whatever source you're using to write an article so that other editors can verify it. If someone is from some hypothetical culture that doesn't have the concept of "this information came from this place" ends up on Wikipedia, gains autoconfirmed status, and then creates an unsourced article in passable English, this proposal would alert them to the requirement for sources (and what that means) and they could learn what to do. But I find it very unlikely that anyone creating unreferenced articles in 2023 is an editor we would want to retain, and even more unlikely that deleting unreferenced articles from 2006 would be discouraging to anyone. JoelleJay (talk) 01:31, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    You are assuming that the person is using a source, that the source has been fixed in a reasonably permanent form, and that the source has been made available to the general public. We require that it be possible to cite such a source, but I also know that I could write, without consulting a single source, that there is one public park in the small town where my mother grew up. It would be accurate, and it would probably be verifiable (I assume the town has a website), but if you asked me to "cite whatever source you're using", I'd have to say "I'm not using any sources. This is just something I've known for decades." While I give an example of a single sentence, it's possible to do this for whole articles.
    I think we do want to retain editors whose first contributions don't have inline citations. Your first addition of content was unsourced. Your first article had a few bare URLs but no inline citations. (My first edits were no better: although my first mainspace edit was to add bare URL as a source, my second added a significant amount of verifiable but uncited information, and my first article had just one bare URL, to what's now a dead link but whose domain name makes me think it might have been a personal blog.) I think that the core community would agree that they are happy that we have both been retained. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:05, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I wrote my first article 13 years ago as a high schooler, and despite clearly not having read Wikipedia's rules I still assumed I needed to cite some sources before I even published it to userspace. It had inline citations and a reflist a bit over an hour after going into mainspace.
    I'm talking about articles created in 2023 that don't have a single hint of a source, including external links. Someone so totally unaware of the concept of "published sources" that after two weeks they still don't understand what to do when their page gets the proposed tag should not be editing here. It should be irrelevant whether they come from some hypothetical culture that doesn't use/acknowledge Western sources even when they are writing on a modern platform. JoelleJay (talk) 01:21, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with SounderBruce (talk · contribs), draftiying is a better way to tackle new unreferenced articles. Deleting unreferenced articles, and assuming that they fail WP:V does not WP:AGF. SailingInABathTub ~~🛁~~ 09:08, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support in theory. Reminds me of the Commons thing where files without copyright data can be deleted with a similar system.
    • Does the tagger have a burden to search for sources and add them directly (or through Template:Refideas or similar)? We would need detailed policy on when not to tag. Add to TW eventually?
    • This would probably be primarily for the 110 000-some articles that already are unsourced, not affecting NPP, because unsourced articles wouldnt get through anyway? If this would affect NPP (flowchart), how?
    • What would 'automatically deleted after X days' mean in practice? Would an admin check for sources before deleting, or are articles really automatically gone?
      • How about a deletion review, where like 3 RS found = restore?
    • Eventually could we have nice things, like cats and bot-updated tables. NotAGenious (talk) 08:10, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @NotAGenious, based on how things went when we started deleting unsourced BLPs, "how it would work" is "with a good deal of finger-pointing and blame-shifting". The group of people who demand that articles be sourced tend unfortunately not to overlap significantly with the group of people who actually source articles themselves. For example, in the last ~two months, you've made about 750 edits and added about 15 refs. This doesn't mean that your contributions are unhelpful – nothing like that at all – but overall, as a purely practical matter, we'd probably have to assume that you wouldn't contribute a lot to the work necessary to make this proposal successful. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that was the case for most editors who support the idea in theory. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:23, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    The group of people who demand that articles be sourced tend unfortunately not to overlap significantly with the group of people who actually source articles themselves: and why should it be otherwise? Burden is not on those who demand sources, but on those who add information.
    As a sidenote, I have noticed that those who do not add sources to their claims are very much overlapping with those who do not want those kind of methods to exist. One just has to look at the fact you yourself consider unsourced contributions as valuable. Veverve (talk) 10:27, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    When you demand that other people do work that you do not choose to do yourself, they tend to feel like you are uncollegial, uncollaborative, and a nuisance. And when the person making those demands adds unsourced content himself (example from earlier this year), we can add hypocritical to the list of words people might apply to someone who says everything must be sourced, but doesn't actually add sources himself.
    But I wasn't actually concerned about you in particular; I'm just saying that if we're going to identify a problem that needs to be fixed on a certain timeline, we need to consider whether that is realistic with the time and energy that actual editors are willing to devote to it. Otherwise, the work won't actually get done.
    I do not consider unsourced contributions to be valuable per se, even though I opposed having your badly written essay in the project space. I consider some unsourced contributions to be valuable, and others to be garbage, just like I consider some cited contributions to be valuable and others to be garbage. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:20, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Thank you, WhatAmIDoing, for expressing your concerns. While I have read a lot of info and past discussions on referencing and participated in a few discussions on reliable sources, I agree that I haven't focused much on adding sources (well, nor content creation overall - but when I write something, I always source it). But, from what I've learned, I feel competent enough to participate here, and if the idea is succesful, be a part on implementing the system. NotAGenious (talk) 10:39, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm glad to hear it. The next question is: How many others like you are willing to pitch in?
    If we have 100,000 articles, and everyone in the team cites one article per week, we'll need 2,000 editors to accomplish this goal in one year. If they can do one a day, we'll need 275 for a year. Realistically speaking, and keeping in mind that all of the other work of the wiki still has to happen, including some major challenges during the next year (e.g., the introduction of mw:Help:Temporary accounts in 2024, which may ultimately be an improvement, but which will disrupt some people's workflows), how many do you think that an editor like you could do? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:25, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    A rotating crew of eleven, each sourcing an average of five articles a day, could complete the task by 2030. One year sounds like a pretty ambitious timeframe. Folly Mox (talk) 17:16, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    One article per week seems like a good goal. One per day seems like a little too much. Edward-Woodrow • talk 19:54, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    All right: At the rate of one article per week, per editor, between now and the start of 2030, we need 300 editors signed up. Doing it over the course of six years will require continually recruiting folks to replace those who fall away, but that's the scale that we're looking at.
    Now: Is that reasonable? I'm thinking that it's maybe not entirely reasonable. For comparison, consider the one-month-long Wikipedia:WikiCup and Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/GAN Backlog Drives, which seem to draw about 100 participants (some of which don't do much; others of which do a lot more). We're looking at needing three times as many people, for one or two orders of magnitude longer (depending on whether you think of this as "six annual events, each of which is 12 months long" or "72 months in a row"). Either way, it's more people for a much longer period of time.
    What might make it feasible, or at least not obviously impossible, is that the request is smaller. I added two sources to five medicine-related articles just now. It took me about 45 minutes to do five articles, with some of them being faster than others. (Generally, the more specific/narrow the subject, the easier it is to find a relevant source.) So if the goal is to get just one source into an article, rather than to fully source the content, that request is just 10 minutes a week, and the challenge would be to find enough people (you'd probably have to recruit more than a thousand, in the end, because people won't do a full year), and to find ways to keep them on task (because even people who genuinely want to help will forget). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:13, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    It would be helpful if a couple of other editors did a similar self-experiment. I pulled five non-organizational, non-BLP articles out of https://bambots.brucemyers.com/cwb/bycat/Medicine2.html#Cites%20no%20sources There are similar lists for most of the large WikiProjects. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:17, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I would say the tagger has a burden to do a cursory search, to make sure they aren't about to delete a future FA. It would be good for an admin to do the same quick searches, just to be safe. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 11:39, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Edward-Woodrow, The very first bullet point is wrong. Unreferenced articles are not "a violation of one of Wikipedia's core content policies: WP:V." WP:V only requires inline citations under certain circumstances. It is possible to write a (very short) stub that is not required to contain any inline citations. For example:
  • Lung cancer is a type of cancer. Smoking raises the risk of lung cancer.
  • Christmas candy is a type of candy associated with Christmas. Candy canes are one type of Christmas candy.
  • French Renaissance sculpture is the type of sculpture made in France during the Renaissance.
None of those sub-stubs contain direct quotations; none of them contain contentious matter about living people; none of them contain material that is WP:LIKELY to be challenged; none of them contain material that has already been challenged. If you wish to expand your view a little further, then all three of them contain solely material for which a source could be found quite easily, so it's not a NOR violation, either.
It is true that none of them prove that they are notable subjects, but I suggest to you that it is equally true that no editor will genuinely have any doubts about the notability of these subjects, and for better or worse, there is not one sentence in any of the core policies that says obviously notable subjects must be proven to be notable through the addition of an inline citation, even if every editor already knows that these are notable subjects. Past efforts to create such a requirement have failed. Maybe if you want to be able to delete articles because somebody else didn't do the thing that you haven't done yourself, then you should first try to get the undesirable behavior officially banned first. That's how we ended up with WP:BLPPROD some years back: first, you have to get the policy amended to disallow unsourced articles; only after that can you start deleting them for violating the rule. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:13, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not saying that everything needs an inline citation, I'm saying that all material in Wikipedia mainspace, including everything in articles, lists, and captions, must be verifiable. It's not verifiable if there isn't a source anywhere in the article, is it? Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 11:33, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Typical cases where things are verifiable but unsourced are when articles summarise other articles, and the references can be found only in articles linked from the unsourced article in question. —Kusma (talk) 11:43, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
User:Edward-Woodrow, It's not verifiable if there isn't a source anywhere in the article, is it? To me this reads as a misconception. Information is verifiable if it has been published somewhere. It makes everything way way easier if some indication of that publication is in the article, but "takes extra work to verify" is not equivalent to "unverifiable". Folly Mox (talk) 14:47, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That is definitely not how people evaluate WP:V in practice. An unsourced article tagged with {{sources exist}} because of some sigcov in obscure scholarship is rightfully said to “have unverifiable statements.” All information not proven false could theoretically be verified. Mach61 (talk) 23:40, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Then 'people' are wrong. – Joe (talk) 12:45, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Joe Roe, you're right, but @Mach61 has only been editing for a year, and I would not be the least bit surprised to hear that some high-volume editors "stretch" or "simplify" the rules for newer editors, in ways that happen to favor the convenience of the high-volume editors. We have an endless supply of written rules, but WP:Nobody reads the directions, and most people learn the alleged rules through a sort of telephone game: one editor tells me a slightly distorted version of the rules, and I misinterpret that when I tell you what you should do, and you're stuck with bad information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:33, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I've been thinking the same thing a lot lately. It seems like new editors are increasingly learning about our policies from, well, somewhere other than the policies themselves (training programmes? Condensed summaries? Word of mouth on Discord? I really don't know), resulting in baffling examples of people misunderstanding what I always considered to be very straightforward directions, mixing up concepts, applying guidance on one thing to something completely different, throwing around shortcuts without knowing what the linked section actually says (never mind the next section), etc. And I don't think I'm just being a cranky old man here; it really does seem like something has changed in the last couple of years. I wish I could put my finger on what it is. – Joe (talk) 06:44, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think the change predates the pandemic, and I wonder sometimes if we could trace it back to as early as 2016. That's the year when both "extended confirmed" and "new page reviewer" became addition user rights, and their main purpose is to give experienced editors control. So whatever zeitgeist at that time prompted this desire for even more control might be the start, not of "nobody reads the directions", which has been a thing on the internet since before most people had internet access, but of the idea that everything should be tailored to my convenience, and that the highest goal was reverting someone else's less-than-perfect first contribution, instead of creating content yourself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:40, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think the change has crept up on us gradually. There were people like that when I started editing in 2007, but they seem to have got more and more vocal. I am of the generation to whom you could say RTFM and I would go away sheepishly to do so, but more and more people seem to think that everything should be done their way, which usually involves someone else doing the work. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:29, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that it has been a gradual shift. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:27, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Edward-Woodrow, if there isn't a source anywhere in the article, it's only uncited. It's still verifiable if you (i.e., anyone) are able to find a reliable source that matches the contents. The rule is that content must be verifiABLE, and we assume you are "able" to use a search engine. See Wikipedia:Glossary#verifiable for a short definition of the related terms. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:29, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yes but as I said above WP:V says Any material lacking an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the material may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source. So there should be no expectation that unreferenced content can standard if it is challenged. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:51, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This is the idea lab, so I don't know what all the bold "support" votes above are here for. Anyway, the vast majority of the "unreferenced articles" issue is in old articles; most if not all new articles have some references (so I don't think your proposal would help discourage new unreferenced articles any more than they already are). Deleting articles that are unreferenced-but-nobody-has-tagged-them-yet (which focuses on articles that have been unreferenced for short times, not long times) seems less useful than other methods of choosing which unreferenced articles to deal with. You could randomly AfD five unreferenced articles per day. —Kusma (talk) 08:20, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think they're almost all tagged. We sent a bot through to tag unref'd articles some years back. I rarely encounter an untagged one (and sometimes still encounter an incorrectly tagged one). WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:25, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Disagree. I checked Petscan. There are 307 articles in the category for this month, but only 15 of those articles were created after July 1 of this year. Many were created years ago. 276 out of 307 were created before 2018. So the assumption that because this only applies to newly tagged articles, it only applies to newly created articles, is untrue; this proposal as stated will have retroactive effects. DFlhb (talk) 09:21, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
most if not all new articles have some references (so I don't think your proposal would help discourage new unreferenced articles any more than they already are). Besides DFlhb's reply above.... I suggest you check the New Pages Feed. This month, I have draftified 104 articles because the have no sources. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 11:42, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
My question is how many new unsourced articles make it through New Page patrol. —Kusma (talk) 11:44, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well, based on my limited experience, it depends, mostly on the reviewer. Some people like to tag and leave a friendly message on the talk page, I prefer to draftify, with the goal there to get it out of mainspace, and I assume there are other methods, too. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 11:49, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I've done I'd guess a few thousand NPP's. If I ever saw an article with zero references but where suitable sources clearly exist (and the article didn't have other disqualifying attributes and isn't a good situation for conversion of a stub to a redirect) I'd pass it, but that has never happened. North8000 (talk) 14:33, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I've seen a few with zero references but where suitable sources clearly exist. When I find ones like that, I add the sources. Yes, that makes NPP take longer and is arguably not NPP's job, but I'm of the mind that it should be part of the job. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 14:54, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Personally, I'd rather have NPP focus on CSD-worthy problems (=its original remit) and leave the rest for the rest of the community, but the scope creep has extended so far that I don't know that there is any chance of reducing the load on the NPPers at this point. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:36, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I feel like I read somewhere that there are two actions that can be taken on new pages: patrol and review. I'm not sure whether this is a distinction without a difference or two actually separate things, but it would make sense to me if there were a first order "is this CSDable" check and a second "are there any other major issues" check.
There was also a discussion somewhere about smearing out this boolean NPP tagging, by introducing other actions that could be undertaken by people with different skillsets, such that one person could mark an article as "not copyvio", another could mark it "not spam" etc until the bar is crossed where it becomes "fully patrolled", without pushing any one editor into making determinations they don't feel sufficiently practised at. To address myself in the present comment, this tangent would probably be better suited to a different venue. Folly Mox (talk) 17:30, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Folly Mox: introducing other actions that could be undertaken by people with different skillsets, such that one person could mark an article as "not copyvio", another could mark it "not spam" etc until the bar is crossed where it becomes "fully patrolled" I understand the rationale behind that, but I feel like it would just make everything take orders of magnitude longer in NPP; the backlog is big enough (although it looks like the redirect backlog is levelling off? Maybe?). Edward-Woodrow • talk 19:51, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It wasn't my idea, and it's not for this conversation, but yeah definitely if people have a single assigned station and you're always waiting on User:Example to finish the G5 check or whatever, NPP would certainly take longer. I think the original idea was to allow partial patrols to be recorded somehow, like if no one is comfortable assessing the reliability of the sourcing because it's in Armenian or Mongolian or something, but Earwig came up clean, there could at least be an easy way to record that to avoid duplication of effort. I think the thought was that ideally all NPPers would still be competent in all the areas to patrol an article fully from zero to indexed by search engines, but people who are weak in certain areas or can only dedicate time in smol chunks could still put in partial labour. Hopefully someone else remembers the conversation if anyone considers my hazy recollections to have value as a starting point for a new NPP experiment. Folly Mox (talk) 21:25, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Folly Mox, you are thinking of User talk:Iridescent/Archive 50#c-WhatamIdoing-20221011190200-Novem Linguae-20221010223100. It was partly inspired by the way MILHIST does B-class assessments.
A new article often gets ~50 page views on the first day. Particularly in the first hour, people are most often looking for the "quick fail". Those who have particular areas of interest (e.g., attack pages and copyvios) could save some time and reduce duplicated effort by being able to filter out articles that have already been determined not to be a hoax, attack page, etc. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:44, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I feel like Alice and Bob might have been there, but Special:Search has not been aligning with what my brain tells me it once read. I'll take your word for it. That sounds more reliable than my leaky memory. Sometimes it all feels like a dream. Folly Mox (talk) 07:54, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm pretty sure that I was in (at least) two discussions on that topic around that same time. Another at WT:AFC or a similar page, perhaps? It's possible that an insource: search for the buttons would find it, if we assume that I copied them from one discussion to the other.
P.S. Alice and Bob are everywhere. ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:20, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, it was the same conversation. I just had to scroll up from the posted link to the top of the subheading. That will (not) teach me to read the larger context I'm always harping on about. Folly Mox (talk) 18:16, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Duplicated effort is not necessarily a bad thing. One person may spot what another has missed. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:20, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
But the tenth person is unlikely to find an attack page that was somehow missed by the previous nine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:21, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Folly Mox: Sorry to continue this tangent on NPP, but the patrol vs review discrepancy is only because of a complicated technical issue explained Wikipedia:New pages patrol#Other issues under the Technical details subsection. VickKiang (talk) 08:15, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
My goodness! So it's not so much a two tiered system as it is a technical glitch. I'll forgo any further commentary on what it could or should be. Tangents are beautiful. Folly Mox (talk) 08:32, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm generally against anything categorical like this, but having absolutely zero references is a very very very very very very low bar and I'd support it. It would need some safety mechanisms to avoid unintended consequences. It would also put us a step towards the mentality that finding reference(es) is the main step 1 of building an article which would solve many of our problems. Without that somebody has done nothing of value / nothing worth preserving. It's like I say that I'm giving somebody a car and I just give them a floor mat and call that an "unfinished car" and tell them to keep a space for it in their garage while they "develop" the car. North8000 (talk) 14:22, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would support this, as long as currently existing articles are grandfathered-in and ineligible. Curious how that could be technically implemented. Could we have a bot revert this template when added to older articles? DFlhb (talk) 14:44, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question - wouldn’t it be simpler to have a bot scan any potential new article - and simply not accept the “save” into Mainspace unless there was at least one citation? It could generate an error message so the creator knows why the text isn’t being saved. Blueboar (talk) 14:58, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Not exactly a bot task, but presumably the Submit button on drafts could be coded to throw an error if no ref tags are present in the article rather than doing whatever it does to submit the draft to the AfC heap. Articles created directly in mainspace, expanded from redirects, or moved manually across namespaces would require at least an edit filter and possibly a software change. Folly Mox (talk) 15:05, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    (edit conflict) It would be difficult. Many (if not a majority) of new articles go into mainspace via "move" and so that restriction would also need to get applied to "move". Many others are created by conversion of redirects and it would also need to apply to those. Finally, people creating articles in mainspace would need to know that the absolute first edit would need to contain a reference which would practically mean that only clever insiders could build an article in mainspace. North8000 (talk) 15:09, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    There's also the issue that any warning describing how to solve the problem (e.g. "Error: All drafts must contain at least one reference before they can be saved to mainspace. Refs are added using <ref></ref> tags containing by the reference's name, ...") will just have users copy-and-paste the "magic words" so their article can be saved, without them knowing or caring what those tags mean to begin with. 2603:8001:4542:28FB:49F5:C6E1:BDC2:515F (talk) 15:24, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    It would be non-trivial, but those can be addressed by the WMF with thought-through interface changes. It would also narrow the "feedback gap" (proactive enforcement vs reactive, so newbs are told ahead of time if they're doing something they shouldn't, which would be more newb-friendly). Given the vast amounts of work spent on maintenance and gnoming, we could do with more 'automation' of this kind. DFlhb (talk) 16:16, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree that pro-active feedback is potentially the way to go, via improvements to the AfC wizard, edit filter warnings, etc. Suriname0 (talk) 20:47, 19 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    See mw:Edit check, which will be nudging editors to add sources (for any whole paragraph, at the moment, but that can be changed.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:39, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    This looks like a great initiative. Eager to see the results once this gets deployed. Suriname0 (talk) 03:14, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    This should be a non-issue for drafts, as an unsourced draft is easily dispositioned as such by AfC. --Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE    ) 18:30, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, this template would only be applicable to mainspace. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 19:36, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good idea. Anything that reduces the burden of AfD and cleans up the project with only high quality sources is a good thing. I would use it to amend BLPPROD. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 15:45, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm in general agreement with something along these lines - a requirement that articles cite at least one source (doesn't have to be in-line; doesn't have to be the best quality source) to remain in mainspace. I also think sending all such articles to draft is a bad idea. This seems to be similar to BLPPROD. That said, the two week time frame seems arbitrary. BLPPROD gives people 7 days to add sources. Regular PROD provides 7 days for someone to object. If instead of this psuedo prod we sent it to draft, they would have 6 months (although the drafts are harder to find than PRODs). I think this needs to be in line with some of our other processes, and either be 7 days or 6 months. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 16:40, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good idea as is Blueboar & North8000's idea above to have the Submit button throw an error code if someone tries to make an article without sources. I wouldn't even mind this being retroactive for the oldest articles- say, any articles from the <current oldest year tagged> get tagged with this. I'm neutral on whether this should last a week or a fortnight.
Additionally, I would point out that requiring sources isn't just a Wikipedia thing. Every essay requiring research since high school that I've written has required me to cite my sources. It doesn't take a genius to cite sources- if the average high school idiot can manage, there's no reason not to require it of would-be editors. This would just be a change to enforce rules that keep Wikipedia better than a failing high school essay. Happy editing, SilverTiger12 (talk) 17:46, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@ONUnicorn and SilverTiger12: About the time frame... I chose fourteen days because I thought seven days would be seen as a bit too stringent, especially since I suspect there will be more unreferenced-prods then other PRODs. Then again, seven days would be more consistent, and thus easier to remember, etc. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 19:39, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good goal in spirit. I don't agree with this suggested implementation for roughly 4 reasons.
  1. We should strive for clarity for our editors, experienced or new. We should improve the accuracy of template names, rather than making them mean something other than their name. Thus, repurposing {{unreferenced}} is not the right idea. I'm not fundamentally opposed to a new tag, for example {{proposed deletion unreferenced}} or even a fancy custom message for something like {{proposed deletion|unreferenced}}.
  2. {{unreferenced}} is currently often misused.
    1. For example already published books etc are sometimes marked unreferenced, but an article about an already published book has implicitly verifiable information from the published item itself.
    2. Sometimes it's also used when {{no footnotes}} would be more appropriate.
  3. Changing the meaning of {{unreferenced}} isn't worth it for the gain. Articles without references at AfD are not a major problem, they are (1) rare in comparison to other types of articles at AfD and (2) frequnetly HEY-able. The biggest threats to Wikipedia at AfD these days are WP:PROMO/WP:NOTCV things, and these articles tend to be WP:REFBOMBED with weak references.
  4. After some time, this would begin to encourage editors to add weak references. An article with only weak references is arguably worse than one with none at all. An article without any references is easy to spot and therefore improve. It's also easier to spot for readers. An article with weak references is harder to spot and could sit unimproved for much longer. For readers who only check for lists of references (as many of us do on occasion), it might fool them into thinking its better referenced than it really is.
—siroχo 19:14, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Edward-Woodrow Here's some feedback on the specific use of {{unreferenced}}, forgot you had asked for a ping on reply so here it is now. —siroχo 19:16, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Excellent points, especially number 4. We want people to add proper references, not the crap that sometimes gets added in referencing contests. An unsourced article is better than one with inline citations to a Wikipedia mirror. —Kusma (talk) 11:40, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think in that case, an editor could re-add the tag. <ref/> tags aren't the magic word, it's what's in them. Edward-Woodrow • talk 11:58, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, so your proposal isn't just about unsourced articles, but also about the (far more numerous) articles using bad sources? —Kusma (talk) 13:34, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No, I didn't say that. But it isn't a stretch to say that the following example would be disallowed:
  • Editor A creates an article with no sources.
  • Editor B tags it with {{unreferenced PROD}}
  • Editor A adds an unrelated citation that does not support the content, and they remove the tag, saying "look, it's referenced now".
In that case, the tag should clearly be re-added, otherwise the entire purpose is nulled. Edward-Woodrow • talk 19:42, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Realistically, it'd be better to follow the removed-PROD process, and ship it off to AFD. Otherwise, you're just going to end up with edit wars over whether that source is reliable, supports the content, etc. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:51, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
True. However, in egregious cases, Editor B can probably safely re-add the tag. Edward-Woodrow • talk 22:18, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support For the simple reason that this is the standard already applied to most IP and new editors, realistically only long-term editors can get away with creating such cruft. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:46, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I like with siroχo ideas of a new proposed deletion template would be a better idea than repurposing a pre-existing template. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:54, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support I think it is high time that we work at insuring that information in Wikipedia is in fact verifiable by requiring citation of source that varify the content. It is no longer enough to assume that something is verifiable without bothering to find and cite reliable sources. - Donald Albury 23:34, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • If I'm going to be 100% honest, I kind of thought something like this was already happening. You just don't see many of these unreference articles being successfully pushed out, at least not in my experience going from random page to random page. That being said, if at any point this becomes a bigger issue, such a process would be vital to have. I'm very much on board with this, but I think the month based system proposed would be better off as a set amount of time rather than the end of the month (should that be what you're actually proposing). Somewhere between 21-30 days? - Mebigrouxboy (talk) 04:52, 19 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Since this idea seems to be enjoying broad support, I will start a WP:VPPR discussion in early October, bearing mind the suggestions here. I support Siroxo's suggestion of creating a new template ({{unreferenced}} would be marked as deprecated). There remains the question of how long the waiting period should be. One week? Two weeks? One month?
We should also make sure that users don't:
  • Add nonsense references so they can remove the tag.
  • Add failed verification references so they can remove the tag.
  • etc.: listing the myriad methods here would be a WP:BEANS violation.
Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 14:04, 19 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. This seems like a good path to take. There really is no reason in allowing new articles to be created with zero sources. Regarding the above mentioned gaming the system, a fail verification or a nonsense source should be removed and the article tagged as unsourced. Personally, I'd not grandfather any article, but that's me. Gonnym (talk) 19:56, 19 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good idea. Given the risk of vandalism removing references, I'd prefer to have admins make all decisions about deletion, and not leave anything to bots. And there should be advice along the lines of WP:BEFORE for the use of the template. We might want to make repeatedly tagging pages that shouldn't be tagged something that is considered disruptive conduct. I would eventually want this procedure to apply to all unreferenced articles retroactively, although I realize that there would be a backlog. (I suspect, but don't know for sure, that a proposal like this could get consensus, even without grandfathering old articles.) I'm ambivalent about the length of the waiting period. On the one hand, I feel like editors should not be too rushed to find sources. On the other hand, with a likely backlog, there will be a delay anyway. I guess two weeks might be reasonable. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:31, 19 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Whether two weeks is reasonable depends on how many of them get tagged in a given time span. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:50, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Following up, I've been thinking about the concerns some editors have raised, that this would go against what Wikipedia has stood for. It seems to me that, nonetheless, times change, and this might be something where it's reasonable for us to do something that differs from historical practice. In its early days, the project needed to create new pages. Today, we have a much larger problem with low-quality content, than with missing content. So I believe we can move in the direction discussed here, without turning into Citizendium. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:32, 27 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • In its present form, this proposal is not compatible with WP:ATD, WP:NPOSSIBLE and WP:BEFORE. Unreferenced tags are very often erroneously placed on articles that are referenced. Many erroneous tags still remain on those articles. There are editors trying to clear the backlog of unreferenced articles by adding sources, and an artificial two week deadline would seriously disrupt their efforts. If an editor is trying to work through the unreferenced tags on, to pick a random example, articles about the chronology of Ireland (which has many obviously notable articles to which tags were inappropriately added instead of sources), it is not helpful to waste his time by forcing him to look at yet another prodlist every day. What is really needed is more people working on the backlog. James500 (talk) 06:18, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    The proposal would only apply to new articles, not the backlog Mach61 (talk) 12:01, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Actually I'm certain this would apply to the backlog, at least eventually. NPP and AFC already prevent new articles from not having any sources. If this debate is about new articles only, then people are passionately debating a moot point. Dave (talk) 22:27, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good idea. I'm not sure if I would ultimately support or oppose the proposal, but this has clearly been thought through and I would encourage the OP to take it to RfC when they feel it is appropriate. Curbon7 (talk) 09:18, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Upon reading more of the comments here, I am not sure of the feasibility of this. I think Kusma raises a good point below that this may simply lead to a rise of poor sourcing, and it feels like the proposal is getting more complicated as we're now talking about deprecating templates and de-"Prodding" procedure rather than a simple page tag. Curbon7 (talk) 08:37, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
A reminder that this is the idea lab, so please remember not to make support/oppose !votes, just suggestions for how we can improve the proposal. Thanks, Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:09, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • What people always seem to miss when trying to (mis)apply WP:BURDEN to deletion is that, while creating an unsourced article is analagous to adding an unsourced statement to an existing article, deleting an article is decidely not analagous to removing text from an existing article. You can't undo an article deletion without a whole bureaucratic song-and-dance. You can't even see what was deleted without the help of an admin. Removing an unsourced statement is just the first step in WP:BRD; deleting an article is a drastic and, for vast majority of editors, irreversable rejection of that content. That's why our deletion policy has always been based on the principle that we don't use deletion for surmountable problems, and unless you have reason to believe the whole article is unverifiable, lack of citations is definitely falls in that category. – Joe (talk) 12:41, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I think you have misunderstood how editors apply WP:BURDEN/WP:ONUS to article creations in practice; they don't delete articles, they redirect or draftify them. Such an action is easily revertable, if a consensus emerges to support the articles creation. BilledMammal (talk) 00:38, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • The idea behind this is valid, we definitely should not be solving it by enshrining grandfather clauses into Wikipedia's rules. * Pppery * it has begun... 02:28, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    If you do propose this, you need to be clear about what you are proposing - is it "unreferenced articles created after <DATE> are subject to this process", or "all unreferenced articles are subject to this process, but some human has to edit the page to start the 14-day count". The former I would oppose as both too infrequent to bother with (most unref tags are old unreferenced articles that somebody decided to add a tag to today) and creating an obvious double standard, and the latter I would probably support. * Pppery * it has begun... 02:47, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Pppery: The latter. Specifically, in the theoretical case this was implemented, here's what (I imagine) would happen from the technical perspective:
    • {{unreferenced}} is marked deprecated.
    • {{unreferenced PROD}} is created.
    • The {{unreferenced}} backlog stops growing at all.
    • {{unreferenced PROD}} replaces {{unreferenced}} except in the places where the old tag is already transcluded. Twinkle etc. remove the tag from their tagging options and add the new version to their "PROD" section.
    • Now, if you see an unreferenced article, instead of tagging it with the old template, you tag it with the PROD template.
    Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:20, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not sold that "deletion within 14 days" is a good way to deal with unsourced articles (mostly because I am afraid we will see too much poor sourcing as an unintended consequence), but I agree that grandfathering is not the way to go. Instead of concentrating on articles newly tagged as unsourced, any new proposal should deal with the unsourced backlog. If we had a method to deal with two months' worth of backlog per month, we should be able to kill the backlog within ten years; if we can do four months per months, in five years. Anything faster than that is probably too fast for our limited number of volunteers. —Kusma (talk) 08:13, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • The current system is (or at least is supposed to be) that an editor concerned about a lack of sourcing looks for sources first, and then, if unsuccessful, nominates for deletion if deletion policy applies. What is wrong with that? Remember that the creator doesn't own the article. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:42, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's always been policy that every article should be good enough to pass a GAC review if nominated. However, until recently, that was seen as a goal; an imprefect article was better than no article. It is my honest opinion this fairly recent trend of people who by and large do not contribute content to the encyclopedia, but go around and tag every flaw they find in articles with "Fix it now or I send this sucker off to AFD" will be the eventual demise of Wikipedia. I truely believe this. What made wikipedia great and allowed it to defeat Encarta, Citizendium and a hundred other encyclopedias in the market was that Wikipedia was a "one stop shop" with at least some coverage of the core topics you'd find in any respectable encyclopedia and those "$10 bar bet" articles that were beneath coverage in a "academically credentialed encyclopedia". The fact that many of the articles were flawed didn't really matter; what mattered is Wikipedia had coverage of a topic and "they" didn't. In my opinion, the people who now want Wikipedia to switch to the very model that it defeated a hundred times over should be laughed at, not listened to. If you find a flaw in an article, the right thing to do, IMHO, is fix the flaw; not tag, not whine, not delete. I see tagging as a means of requesting help when you can't fix the flaw yourself. Deletion should be reserved for when the flaws in an article are foundational and cannot be fixed by editing.Dave (talk) 18:45, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Indeed, the approach to building the encyclopedia that you describe is detailed in the editing policy, specifically at WP:IMPERFECT and WP:PRESERVE. —siroχo 18:54, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    You're saying I should be laughed at? I'm fine with that. Go ahead. I still think we should maintain quality over quantity. Edward-Woodrow • talk 19:49, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    My interpretation of Dave's comment was not literally that you should be laughed at, but that the model of encyclopedia creation that traditional encyclopedias, or UGC encyclopedias like Citizendium have used is less effective at creating a high quality encyclopedia.
    It's a worry that workable suggestions like yours could, over time, add up to a model like that. The vast majority of articles on Wikipedia started as low quality in one language or another, it's rare that the first edit creates a true good article.
    There is value in low quality articles. So when/if we implement a policy like this, we do need to take care not to lose that value. So, personally, the question I'm trying to help answer here how do we effectively reduce the number of unverifiable articles on Wikipedia without losing the value that low quality articles continue to bring to Wikipedia. —siroχo 02:54, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Edward, I don't think it's "quality over quantity". I think it's "narrowness over breadth".
    I think this old comment from Iridescent might be worth thinking about. Maybe the world needs our little articles on ultra-niche subjects, even if they aren't beautiful, more than the world needs Wikipedia:Vital articles from us. You can get information about popular and generally important subjects from many websites. But if you want to know more about the Ceilings of the Natural History Museum, London, Wikipedia may be one of your few free options. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:33, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I think this comment is a little inappropriate, in that it suggests editors support getting rid of articles like Ceilings of the Natural History Museum, London; that is very much false. BilledMammal (talk) 06:46, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Which is an FA? I'm not sure I see your point. Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:28, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Sure, it's a beautiful article, as one would expect from both the subject matter and the editor who created it. But also: "the ceilings in a particular museum" is not a subject whose notability is obvious from the start. What often matters is that we have some information about the subject, not that we have perfect information.
    The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of this. The highest traffic to the articles was in the gap between the disease obviously becoming a problem and "proper" sources getting their things published. For a couple of weeks, we were one of the best places on the internet for reasonably up to date, reasonably accurate information. When better (free) sources became available, our page views dropped. People might prefer beautiful articles from authoritative sources, but what they need is something useful.
    We've seen the same pattern for natural disasters, celebrity deaths, and other time-bound subjects. For those readers, what matters is that we have content. They do not need or expect us to be perfect. Material can be useful without being trustworthy, authoritative, or credible. We all know this from the real-world, too: If Uncle Bob says ____ about politics, then the opposite is almost certainly true. Uncle Bob isn't trustworthy, authoritative, or credible, but he's still useful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:39, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Are you a long-lost cousin or sister that I didn't know I had? We seem to have the same Uncle Bob. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:53, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    So you're saying that sometimes people rely on us for information, even though sometimes it's incorrect? I don't see the advantage of misinformation. If Uncle Bob is wrong, then Uncle Bob is not useful (unless he is consistently, 100% wrong, but that's a different matter). Edward-Woodrow • talk 19:41, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm saying that there's a difference between useful and trustworthy. Information can simultaneously be accurate and untrustworthy ("even a stopped clock is right twice a day"; we can't rely on Uncle Bob being wrong every single time), and it can be inaccurate and trustworthy (every news article between its publication and the publication of the corrections; every journal article between its publication and its retraction, that doctor who tried to convince me that over-the-counter cough syrup suppresses coughing, etc.).
    Wikipedia readers are generally looking for information that is useful, not information that is guaranteed to be correct. "Useful" can look like giving you some ideas for better keywords to use in your Google search. It doesn't necessarily mean that you got the One True™ Answer. Also, when it really matters to them, most people check information on multiple websites. Wikipedia might be the first place they look, or it might be the third, or the fifteenth. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:06, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Edward, while I would largely agree with Dave's comments, I don't find your actions or proposals offensive or laughable. However, there are two broad philosophical points I would earnestly urge you to consider. The first is that, in their time, Nupedia and Citizendium could have justified their superiority on the exact same grounds that you've given: they favored quality over quantity. Quality is a virtue, but pursuing it in certain ways endangers the entire enterprise of a crowdsourced encyclopedia. The second is to consider our overall goal as a work of reference: we are here to present true (well, verifiable) and relevant information about the generalized and specialized topics that people look up here (IMO, anyway). Things like sourcing and policy compliance are metrics we use to estimate how well we're meeting that goal, because it can't easily be evaluated at scale. However, as anyone who's been part of a large, modern organization can testify, confusing the metrics with the goal itself can have major detrimental consequences. Choess (talk) 13:10, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Exactly. Not only could they, Citizendium did. They bragged they had a better model of quality over quantity. Veropedia was another one that did. The only Wikipedia competitor that is still around with a quality over quantity model that I can name off the top of my head is Encyclopedia Brittanica. Even then Wikipedia has made a severe dent in their market share, and they have had to change their business model to adapt to Wikiedia's dominance. I think the heart of this difference in philosophies is the assumption "but we can't have flawed articles out there, we could mislead the public." Twenty years of experience suggests that's not the case. The public knows Wikipedia's model of "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" will result in potential flaws in it's articles. This is well known and discussed ad-nauseum all over the internet. Yet Wikipedia has thrived. The vastness of coverage in Wikipedia's articles makes up for the fact that a number of them have flaws; the flaws are known and tolerated. I would view it more like the market leader in many products, from cars to computer operating systems has many critics who point out the numerous flaws and longtime issues that have never been fixed. Yet they remain the market leader because in the big picture they still deliver what there competitors can't. That doesn't mean we ignore flaws in articles, we should fix them as we find them. I am saying Toyota shouldn't throw away it's market dominance to change business models because Volvo is perceived as having higher quality. Dave (talk) 15:50, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    This is edging towards the age-old inclusionist–deletionist debate, which I'd prefer to avoid in this discussion (and my leanings are probably fairly obvious, anyways), but I will say this.
    Wikipedia needs stubs and we need coverage in obscure areas; even if the articles aren't perfect. And no article is "perfect".
    However, an unreferenced article is completely different from an unnotable article. Unreferenced articles are a poison that we could do without. We shouldn't force out anything that isn't a C-class article and devolve into Encyclopedia Britannica v2.0, but we also shouldn't be willingly letting in unreferenced content without a fight. This proposal isn't a speedy deletion criterion or anything so drastic; it gives plenty of time for the creator and other interested editors to improve the article by one very small step. Really, it's BLPPROD extended to all articles.
    Perhaps deletion is too drastic, per WP:PRESERVE. Perhaps this idea could work with BilledMammal's idea of "soft-deleting" (or "archiving").
    Fundamentally, I see the core idea of this proposal (minus any specifics) – and my intent in starting this discussion – as an extension of WP:BURDEN:

    Any material lacking an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports [...] the material may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source. [...] In some cases, editors may object if you remove material without giving them time to provide references. Consider adding a citation needed tag as an interim step.

    Happy editing, Edward-Woodrow • talk 22:30, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose as unnecessary for cleanup and irresponsible to our preservation goals. Certainly not appropriate for deletion; maybe in some cases for converting to an archive [if we had a non-draft archive space that didn't auto-delete after 6 months]. The equivalent mass deletion on Commons of all images without modern copyright tags was a mistake and an avoidable loss. – SJ + 02:14, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    You bring up a good point, WP:PRESERVE is a policy.-- GreenC 17:00, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • The proposal sounds sensible in spirit, but it has bite potential, and I feel that retaining and training new editors is a more valuable pursuit than aggressively removing unreferenced articles. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:16, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I think this is a really good idea, but I think there should be a delay before the article is proposed for deletion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Professor Penguino (talk • contribs) 09:58, 22 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Rschen7754 and against the spirit of WP:BEFORE. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 01:47, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    A reminder that This page is not for consensus polling. Stalwart "Oppose" and "Support" comments generally have no place here. Instead, discuss ideas and suggest variations on them. This is not the RfC on this proposed change. Curbon7 (talk) 02:02, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm intrigued by against the spirit of WP:BEFORE. Would you care to elaborate? I was assuming the nominator would do a quick WP:BEFORE check to see if the problem can be easily fixed, like one would for PROD or AfD. Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:18, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    "I was assuming the nominator would do a quick WP:BEFORE" That is indeed the way it's supposed to work, however, a quick scan at some of the mass deletions, including mass deletions of every article that was ever created by an editor we've now deemed isn't worthy to be on this site, will reveal that is no longer how our deletion process works.Dave (talk) 16:42, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    But this isn't a mass-deletion question. Edward-Woodrow • talk 16:51, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Based on my reading of the proposal, it allows deletion of articles simply for being unreferenced, not for being unreferenceable. If the nominator is supposed to conduct WP:BEFORE (and refrain from nominating articles where sources exist), then how is it not redundant to our existing PROD and AfD processes? -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 02:33, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose we already have a {{prod}} tag. This proposal is to hijack a different, useful maintenance tag to become a copy of that tag. And even the proposer agrees that deleting all 100k articles tagged as "unsourced" (some of which are lists that don't need sourcing) is infeasible.
    As far as the proposals to (via edit filters, etc.) require new articles to have at least one source at the time of creation: possibly, but I'll believe it's possible when I see it. 217.180.228.138 (talk) 04:02, 24 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    This is a good point, but there is one major difference between current WP:PROD and this proposal. PROD must be subject to WP:DEL-REASON; unreferenced articles are not explicitly included in that policy, and thus this would exist as a sort of exception, propped up by WP:BURDEN, in the same way that BLPPROD is an exception, propped up by WP:BLP. The closest DEL-REASON comes to unreferenced articles is a little more stringent:
    • Articles that cannot possibly be attributed to reliable sources, including neologisms, original theories and conclusions, and hoaxes
    • Articles for which thorough attempts to find reliable sources to verify them have failed.
    Cheers, Edward-Woodrow • talk 13:02, 24 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Story
It is 2023.
A: The earth is not a cube.
B: Add references please.
A: The earth is not a cube. You know it and I know it. It’s verifiable. Our children may not know it and we’re telling them now. Why do we need that?
B: Please provide references. It’s our policy.
A: Why don’t YOU add that if you think it’s needed?
B: The BURDEN is on you.
A: Oh the atmosphere here is toxic. The people here are . . . OKOK, the earth is a cube. It’s a cube. Okay? Please don’t chase after me. I won’t edit any more. You can do whatever you want.
B: . . .
--Dustfreeworld (talk) 06:40, 24 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
...seems like a WP:SKYBLUE scenario rather than a relevant analogy, honestly. Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:57, 24 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
But when we set down a "rule", we can expect it to get implemented mindlessly. Consider, e.g., BURDEN, which says you may (=are permitted but not required to) remove uncited content, while noting that if you're stupid, mindless, or POINTY about it, people will be angry with you, but which is twisted by someone basically every day of the week to say that uncited content must be removed, that it is an abomination to have even exclusively SKYBLUE information on a page if there isn't a source on the page, etc.
And, of course, if you think that a particular unsourced sentence is okay (Something vulgaris is a type of insect in the Something family"), and therefore an unsourced article containing only that would be okay, then there wouldn't be any point to this proposal. You'd check an individual article, do a quick WP:BEFORE search, and then either add a source or {{subst:PROD}} it through the existing process. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:55, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I will note that the size and shape of the Earth have inline citations in that article... and if they didn't then that information should not be allowed to remain. Fritzmann (message me) 00:06, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Category:Articles lacking sources I am surprised to see articles created this year on the list. Just don't let new articles be created that don't have references. I thought we had that already. Didn't we have that at one point in time? A bot should be created to post on the talk pages of all those who created these articles, with a link to where to find references and instructions. Specific instructions can be given such as if they are in the catagory for artists, mention that any musuem that has their artwork will have an official website that mentions them and being featured in a permanent musuem collection confirms the notability of an artist. Dream Focus 15:50, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Dream Focus: Ah, so it's NPP's fault for letting in bad articles? Edward-Woodrow • talk 19:43, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    During the time this discussion has been open multiple new/IP editors have been blocked as disruptive for creating continuously unreferenced articles, it's only established accounts that can get away with doing this. But they are a special case and shouldn't be subjected to community policies apparently. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 19:50, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Wait... are there articles from this year? The category just contains articles according to when they were tagged. Birel, for example, is listed as September 2023, but it was created in 2004. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 21:20, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, currently 123 of them. —Cryptic 23:05, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I created one of those. List of fire departments in United States. Navigational list don't need references. Dream Focus 15:03, 27 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • What about pages like weak operator topology? There's a reason that page is still unsourced after all these years: most of us are utterly unqualified to judge if any reference even supports any non-trivial claim in the article. The responsible thing is to leave that page to someone who actually knows what they are doing, however long it takes, instead of accidentally TURGIDAXing it in an attempt to protect it from deletion.
    And it's not just math and physics. What about subjects where all the likely sources are in a language I do not speak? Again, if there's a deadline to deletion, and no speaker of the language seems to be coming along, should I just use Google Translate and hope for the best?
    Instead of this broad proposal, what I might favor is expanding BLPPROD (or a similar process) to cover at least some subjects other than BLPs. For example, anything that might realistically cause real-world harm, e.g. an unsourced page about a medical treatment. And maybe some "spam-magnet" subjects, e.g. online content, commercial products, etc. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:14, 26 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
To anyone still subscribed to this discussion and interested: I have started an RfC at VPPR. Edward-Woodrow • talk 19:13, 6 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, but can they be draftified instead and then deleted after six months if inactive. This is fairer than straight-up speedy deleting them. Nominating them for deletion is also a good alternative. JacobTheRox (talk) 06:40, 18 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose as unworkably disruptive. Also, we should have 100s of !voters at an RfC before signing off on new deletion system, not 1-2 dozen. Great idea in theory, though. We do have a big problem.
What we need is to recruit more editors to work this backlog down. Folks talk about an admin drought -- I think the big problem is not enough rank and file to research refs, which can be time-consuming. That's all the more reason to be welcoming and supportive of newcomers.
--A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 02:53, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Oppose, as it goes against the spirit of the wiki, and would change the very nature of the project. Why not program a feature into MediaWiki so that the save button doesn't work unless a citation for every sentence is included? Because, it would dampen participation and harm the wiki. If you raise the bar so high, you will hinder collaboration. Edits are the building blocks of the encyclopedia. The emphasis should be on adding citation building blocks, rather than removing content building blocks (which punishes editors for contributing). This proposal is all-or-nothing-reasoning an a grand scale. Content building blocks are extremely valuable, and they are what have made Wikipedia one of the largest-scale publishing projects in the history of civilization. Promote content contribution and citation contribution side-by-side, but, don't punish editors if they don't give you what you want. This would be taking deletionism to an extreme. Bypassing AfD, and denying other editors-at-large the opportunity to rescue an article before it is deleted is a bad idea. Besides, uncited articles do not violate WP:VER per se—they are only in violation if they are not verifiable, and that has to do with whether or not they are challenged or likely to be challenged. The idea behind the verifiability policy is not to automatically challenge everything that isn't referenced. But, that's where this is heading.    — The Transhumanist   22:46, 1 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support This isn't 2004. Uncited articles violate WP:VER; the interpretation about "challenged or likely to be challenged" was resolved a decade ago and now means fully cited is required. All articles must be fully referenced. Unreferenced articles are a burden to maintain, a liability to our readers, and a stain on opur reputation. They have no value and we don't want them. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:59, 1 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Nah. I've been casually monitoring this page for 15 years. The core of the policy, and its interpretation, haven't changed much since 2006. Also, I just came from a discussion over at WT:VER, about the claim about WP:VER that the proposer made. I.e., this very discussion. Their current interpretation of WP:VER does not coincide with the proposer's or your claim about what the "challenged" clause means.    — The Transhumanist   08:22, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Hawkeye7, The Transhumanist, and A. B.: a reminder, in case the page notice wasn't enough: this is the idea lab, a place for workshopping. As the editnotice says, try to be creative and positive. If possible, suggest a better variation of the idea, or a better solution to the problem identified. This is not the formal proposal, let alone and RfC. There was an RfC at VPPR; "oppose" !voters will be happy to know that it went down in flames. In conclusion: please stop !voting. Edward-Woodrow • talk 00:57, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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.

Alternative Idea

How about instead we have it so that they have to be fixed within 30 days before they can be nominated for deletion? After they are nominated for proposed deletion sources must be added then within 14 days. There can also be a tag for "An editor has identified that the contents of this article is verifiable, but the article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article. More information can be discussed on the talk page." The PROD tag could then only be removed as soon as a single reliable source is added. Sources in WP:RSPS determined to be "deprecated" can be discounted when assessing whether any sources are cited. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 18:58, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - I doubt anyone is reading this far down but could maybe someone send a bot through to add == References == {{reflist}} to the 118,000 that don't have it? It would just make the repair work slightly easier for people going through and trying to get things up to par. Who knows it might even prompt someone to add a ref just because it irritates them to see an empty unfilled field for them? jengod (talk) 20:19, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose it couldn't hurt. Also, I like the idea of empty references sections glaring at the readers. Edward-Woodrow • talk 20:27, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, for some reason that imagery also appeals to me a lot. JoelleJay (talk) 05:17, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I like this idea for a bot. It could check the last edit time to make sure to wait at least a few hours from the last edit. —siroχo 23:32, 29 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think this idea for a bot to create references sections is a great idea. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:24, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
So do I. BilledMammal (talk) 20:29, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Awesome Aasim (talk · contribs), you have described the goals of Wikipedia:Article Rescue Squadron which over the years has drawn a lot of hostility for trying to save articles thought notable by finding references & proving their notability. I've been too busy off-Wiki to know if they're still active, but it's a misunderstood project that deserves more support. -- llywrch (talk) 23:31, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know about the Article Rescue Squadron, but the WP:WikiProject Unreferenced articles is still active. If everyone participating here spent the time sourcing articles instead... Espresso Addict (talk) 23:51, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Bot to create References sections

Continuing directly from the subsection just above, I want to pull out an idea that I think is promising, and I don't want it to be overlooked amid a long discussion. Repeating what was said just above, the idea would be to have a bot go through the 118,000 pages in the unreferenced category, and add == References == {{reflist}} to each page. This would do nothing in the way of deleting any content. It would help editors a little bit in getting sources onto the page. And it would be a constructive way to present editors with a prompt that references need to be added. The bot could also set a minimum amount of time since the last edit to the page, before adding the section, so as not to step on editors' toes when new pages are being created. Personally, I think this is a splendid idea. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:38, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some care will need to be taken in implementation, since some of the tags are placed incorrectly. Special:Permalink/1173684615 had a general reference present in a subheading named "Literature", for example. Also this bot will codify the project's preference for naming this subheading "References", which I'm not against but should be recognised as an outcome. Folly Mox (talk) 22:53, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This should be done where the article has ref tags but no references section. It could also fix up where there is a header but no template or tag below to insert the references. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 03:00, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that there should be a reasonable amount of care regarding incorrectly tagged/categorized pages (although those pages are already incorrectly tagged and categorized). There's nothing to stop editors from subsequently changing the section header. But I disagree with limiting this only to pages that already have ref tags (which aren't unreferenced pages to begin with), although I'm fine with having the bot do clean up for improper formatting. Part of the idea (see comments in subsection above) is that there is actually a benefit to having a References section with no references in it. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:19, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
As one of those "cleaning up the mess", Adding the Ref. section from a bot insures it is correctly placed, i.e. After "See also" and Before "External links". I'm clueless how a bot can handle complexity of articles with/without those sections. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 19:26, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • If the reflist being added would be empty, the bot could also add a conspicuous call-to-action to help inform the author about what they need to do next. We could make the message hidden if references are added. Maybe also a date parameter, to say that the article will need to have references added within n days or whatever? I put together a mock-up to kind of demonstrate what I mean:
  • References
    It's time to add references to this article
    This article, {{PAGENAME}}, doesn't cite any sources yet. All Wikipedia articles must be supported by references to reliable, published sources.

    Learn how to add references   Edit this article

    Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

  • Cleanup/prod tags kind of do this already, but this could be less scary looking/bitey. It could also be a supplement to those tags. Well, it's just an idea! I hope this isn't too weird. 3df (talk) 06:53, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
We were talking about doing this to old articles, so the likelihood is that the creator retired years ago. The editors dealing with the problem are generally experienced and don't need instructions on how to add sources. Espresso Addict (talk) 08:06, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@3df and @Espresso Addict, I do like the idea of adding that box to unref. articles. Below here is a version that I "tweaked" to include the article's age.
References
It's time to add references to this article
This article, {{PAGENAME}}, was created February 2003 (21 years ago) (2003-02), and doesn't cite any sources yet. All Wikipedia articles must be supported by references to reliable, published sources.

Showing that article age can motivate update/PROD/AfD action. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 01:29, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@3df and JoeNMLC: I like this idea a lot. Perhaps we should move it to a new section? @Espresso Addict: I think it's readers and (potential) casual editors that this would target, not experienced editors. We unfortunately we don't have enough of those to fix 118,000 unreferenced articles any time soon. – Joe (talk) 06:29, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Do readers/casual editors add (valid) references to articles? That's not common in my experience. Would this encourage them? I really don't know. @WhatamIdoing: for an opinion. In the past, I've tried to get academics to help out with various problems with articles, but have invariably found that the culture here puts them off. I've tried to get wikiprojects involved as well, but that has not been all that successful.
As to the backlog of completely unsourced articles (now 117.5k), it's been trending down consistently of late, which I believe has been down to the diligent efforts of a small number of experienced editors (and a lot of prods), presumably coupled with NPP not allowing new completely unsourced articles to enter mainspace in the first place. Espresso Addict (talk) 18:12, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Espresso Addict, AFAIK there has never been even one study on what it takes to get a banner off a page. @Steven Walling will remember whether any research was done on this point 10–15 years ago, and @Trizek (WMF) can tell us whether the Growth team has studied this, but AFAICT if the question is "Does spamming an {{unref}} tag on an article result in references being added by a newcomer?", the answer is "nobody knows" (and my guess is "no"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:58, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose the useful question to ask in context of the present discussion is whether the proposed banner is better, worse or the same as the standard orange-edged banner. But, more generally, my experience with asking new good-faith editors to add sources to stave off deletion is that at best they add blogs, unreliable genealogy-type websites and the like. Espresso Addict (talk) 21:04, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I guess a follow on there, is once they add blogs and such, how likely is it that editors will add better sources? A blog is much more valuable than nothing to an editor looking to improve sourcing. I know I do try to improve sourcing some of the time, and having something to start from is easier than doing raw searches across multiple indices. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the collaborative, evolutionary model of Wikipedia, but I have noticed that there is a bit less of that in 2023 than there was back in the aughts. I don't necessarily mean that as an indictment, as I know we also need folks focused on FAs and GAs, but I also think the encyclopedia would benefit from more gnoming and such. /Ramble over. —siroχo 22:52, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The proposed banner takes up about 40% of my vertical screen space, FWIW. If I hadn't popped by this discussion for the preview, and first encountered it at a live article, I imagine I'd mistake it for a banner ad and scroll past it without reading. Folly Mox (talk) 11:45, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Growth features offer an option to connect any template that asks for citations to newcomers tasks. Newcomers are then encouraged to add citations. The technicalities are in place and some newcomers work on these tasks (you can highlight them in Recent Changes).
However, we observed the following, at all wikis where we keep an eye at newcomers' questions to their mentors:
  • newcomers ask their mentor about reliable sources, as most templates don't tell newcomers what a reliable citation is,
  • newcomers ask why their edits were reverted (colorally of the previous point),
  • newcomers ask why the template is still present while they added citations to the article.
Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 10:56, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for this Trizek (WMF). So theoretically it would be possible for someone like me to go through the unsourced heap, find a generally unproblematic looking, not-too-technical article (eg Nishi-magome Station oder Kawasaki KX250), and add it to the newcomers' task suggestions? I think the most useful way this could be implemented is if the experienced editor could also index the task by subject (eg motorbike) and/or language fluency (eg Japanese), so that there's a mechanism for the new editor to be offered tasks they might find possible/interesting based on what they've said about themselves, or their editing pattern. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:44, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Espresso Addict, as both article use {{unreferenced}}, they are already suggested to newcomers visiting Special:Homepage (you can visit it too). Users can filter articles using 39 topic filters. More at mw:Help:Growth/Tools/Suggested_edits
Regarding languages, considered translation work, but we never considered language fluency as a filter. We rely on geographic filters, as it seems that users are coming more for their passion than for their language. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 11:24, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, Trizek (WMF). From the (selfish) perspective of getting useful edits out of newcomers, I'd consider language fluency too; what stops me sourcing articles is generally inability to read the source enough to see whether it supports any point in the article. It's a much lower level of fluency than translation would require. New editors conversant with languages that don't use the western character set would be a particularly valuable resource to find or check sources. Espresso Addict (talk) 20:26, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If the bot adds a ==References== section to a page that has ref tags, then that action could inadvertently mask section-blanking vandalism.
Also, just as a probably unwelcome but important point of fact, we don't technically have a rule that says all non-BLP articles must cite sources. An article that contains only the most basic information, so that none of it falls into WP:MINREF territory, is not technically required to have any citations at all. See User:WhatamIdoing/Christmas candy for an example of what's 'legal'. Sources must be WP:Glossary#verifiable, but your suggested text claims that they must be WP:Glossary#cited, which is not the same thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:30, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing: If I'm not mistaken the proposal is to this only to pages in Category:Articles lacking sources, so it should always have been checked by a human who has verified that the lack of sources is real and really a problem. – Joe (talk) 06:37, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I checked the first 10 in Category:Articles lacking sources. Two had references, and needed the WikiProject banner to be updated. (A bot could do that.) One already had a ref section.
I checked the first item in the first 10 subsections of the randomly selected Category:Articles lacking sources from April 2020 (i.e., first starting with A, first starting with B, etc.). Four contained ref sections, one of which had no <ref> tags but did contain a bare URL to an article in The New York Times. One of the ref sections was named ==References and notes==.
This suggests that the bot would have to be moderately smart about detecting existing sections. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:14, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That is a problem, but one that exists independently of this proposal. – Joe (talk) 12:25, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The concept of "preserve" is based on there being some non-trivial work product to preserve. Without references, these is no work product. It's like I throw a floormat into a garage and say that it is a yet-to-be finished automobile and saying to leave a space in their garage waiting for somebody to finish it. North8000 (talk) 00:24, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah... or it's just perfectly good, accurate encyclopaedic text without citations. One of the two. – Joe (talk) 06:23, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hear hear! Yeah, after first encountering this thread, I started dabbling in adding sources to Unreferenced articles. Of the ones I've tackled, I turned two into redirects just bc they were one single hopeless sentence but mostly the articles I've worked on are incredibly small-potatoes low-traffic articles with good material. It's stuff like "cultivar of melon" and "Senate committee abolished in 1912" and "thunder god of aboriginal religion". Most of them are short and non-controversial, and I think part of the reason they've been unref'd for so long is because they're rarely read generally but also because they're largely fine and thus haven't made anybody mad.
The longest unref'd article I dealt with was an obscure kind of baseball pitch (Circle changeup). It was an interesting article! I added one ref to get it out of deletion jail (bc you guys are scaring me!). I imagine it would be trivial for a baseball person to repair it but it would be a huge pain for a complete rando to reference it to our current standards.
Which is to say:
  • RE PROPOSAL: I think threatening to delete all old unreferenced articles would incite panic, garner very deserved bad publicity, and is an abrogation of the unwritten deals we've made with our volunteers. In short, a Very Bad Idea.
  • LIBEL-RISK EXCEPTION: The main exception I see worth considering is whether or not there are any biographies of living persons on the site without references. If yes, those might be candidates for either some kind of deletionism OR a campaign to resolve that OR...something. Ideally someone could run a search and see what if any articles are both tagged unreferenced and categorized BLP.
  • GOING FORWARD: Finally, I would not be opposed to a de jure policy (which I think we already have de facto) that NEW unreferenced articles will no longer be accepted on en-wiki. I'm sure there are good reasons for admitting anything that's currently getting through with no sources, but I don't think it would be wrong to just draw a line.
OK, off now I'm off to pay the toll for participating in this thread by adding refs to three unref'd articles. Byyyyeee.
jengod (talk) 00:48, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Re point two: isn't that basically WP:BLPPROD? Edward-Woodrow • talk 01:08, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like it. I think the only difference (not articulated above) is that I was imagining a killer cyborg hunting down bot tagging the articles at the intersection of Unreferenced + BLP and maybe allowing/encouraging a small mass-deletion panic (in that domain only) with a highly publicized six-month countdown or something. (But also I'm truly I'm just curious to know what if articles we have in that intersection!) jengod (talk) 01:24, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The only truly unreferenced BLPs we should have are ones where the sources were sufficiently unreliable that someone removed them. I think there were some which were originally sourced to the Daily Mail? I've deleted one or two BLP prods where the article was old but "sources" had obviously been added at random when challenged and had literally nothing to do with the subject. That's a major downside of deletion drives.
There's the dilemma of what to do with actors only sourced to IMDb; I imagine there are quite a lot of those. I've never been as convinced as the folk at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard that IMDb is completely useless; it's pretty good (in my experience) at credited roles in recent films, though the user-supplied biographies are of course completely worthless. Espresso Addict (talk) 03:57, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I wouldn't want a bot to create a reference section, but I 100% can get behind a bot that either adds to the talk page with possible references, either just as a new talk section or as part of {{refideas}} block. Human review can determine the best sources to add from that. --Masem (t) 04:11, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I like 3df's mockup specifically (with "Learn how to add references, "Edit this article", and the Find sources links), since it's more actionable and newb-friendly, but also like JoeNMLC's idea of adding the article age. The thing looks sleek and modern, really nice. I would change the wording: doesn't cite any sources yet, and may risk being deleted., since that clarifies why readers should add sources; most non-Wikipedians have no idea about how AfD works (and sometimes fails to work). And I think it's worth adding to all these articles by bot, as a call-to-action to add sources. These articles may be neglected by us, but it's plausible that some readers would have domain expertise and know of good usable sources. DFlhb (talk) 09:02, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that the template mockups look very good, and I agree with your suggested wording addition. I think it would be fine for a bot to add a references section to pages in Category:Articles lacking sources, and put the template there. (I don't like the thought of it being at the top of the page, where it would be too intrusive. And I think it's better to put it on the page in the refs section, than on the talk page, where it might not be seen and might get archived without being acted upon.) And I think that even in cases where there had been blanking of existing references, the template would provide the right kind of feedback to lead editors to find those references. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:01, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Use of Wikidata values in infoboxes

Is there any possibility that infoboxes for US places could start using data from Wikidata? This could be used for population and area figures, for a start. This information generally comes from the US Census. If a bot could be developed on Wikidata to import population, land area, and water area figures from US Census sources to all states, county-equivalents, municipalities, and census-designated places, would this be a good idea? It could also be used to automatically update pages in other languages as well. Kk.urban (talk) 18:05, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • We have had a LOT of issues with the Verifiability (and thus the reliability) of Wikidata. We have had numerous discussions on how and when to use it, almost always deciding to limit its use. So… if it isn’t allowed now, my call would be to continue to not allow it. Blueboar (talk) 19:55, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Indeed, any such proposal would need to demonstrate that it would significantly improve data integrity and verifiability compared to what we have now. Failing that, it would be unlikely to overcome the fairly entrenched opposition to Wikidata use here on enwiki. —Kusma (talk) 20:07, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Of course, it could be vandalized, which is less likely to be caught than here. But this information could be imported by a bot, and an edit filter could be created to prevent editing of these fields except by admins or other approved users. If it was bot-generated, it would be correct and would not need to be modified. It's easier to control such things on Wikidata because of how Wikidata is structured (each piece of data is specifically attached to one property). Kk.urban (talk) 22:43, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Pulling in data from Wikidata is one of those perennial proposals that has always been rejected. Except for one, Template:Infobox software. It would be super nice to have that kind of structured data from Wikidata be pulled into all Wikipedias' infoboxes on a subject, so that one change can go to all languages. SWinxy (talk) 22:24, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that data gets pulled in whether it's referenced or not, a minor issue on somethings a potentially major issue for BLP details. Would be great if it was possible to edit here and have the changes backflushed to wikidata, but my understanding is that that project isn't going anywhere. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:31, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I was thinking of this use only where the information all comes from one source. That's why I suggested census data. Information such as a person's birthdate or spouse can come from many different sources, thus importing it from Wikidata would be less trustworthy. Kk.urban (talk) 22:47, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Would a bot be a better answer? A bot could be created to do the repetitive task of changes the data and refs, without any need to involve wikidata. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:57, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that would be good. It would make it much faster. (Of course, it can always be vandalized, and this would not translate to other Wikipedias, but this would solve the main issue.) Kk.urban (talk) 23:01, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well there's Module:PopulationFromWikidata for Australian places. Despite being from Australia and its use on many articles I watch, I don't personally know much about it beyond what's on the module page though. Graham87 (talk) 08:16, 24 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Template:PH wikidata is used to populate Philippines-related infoboxes. (There have been some on-wiki developed similar solutions to this question, like Template:UN population, but these lack significant benefits compared to wikidata templates while having the same issues as wikidata templates.) CMD (talk) 10:31, 24 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would agree on this wikidata. They are used to present information, also fill-in missing information that could not able to be inserted in descriptions, events, and photos. Therefore, there should be value in this data. 205.155.225.253 (talk) 15:52, 3 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Technically straightforward, including only showing referenced information (and even showing those references here, e.g., see South Pole Telescope). Community consensus wise, not there yet (as indeed this conversation shows). I'd encourage you to have a look at Commons or other language Wikipedias to see what Wikidata-powered infoboxes can do nowadays. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:17, 24 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest looking at w:es:Jimmy Wales. That large infobox has only six parameters (one of which is his name) in the article. The rest comes from Wikidata. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:37, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I suggest looking at ones that get less scrutiny and more issues. Take e.g. Roger Vangheluwe, a Catholic bishop who had to resign after he admitted sexually abusing his 5-year old nephew. According to Wikidata, and thus also according to the infobox at w:ca:Roger_Vangheluwe, he was convicted, but this isn't true though, the crimes had happened too far in the past. And yes, even such filth comes under our BLP policies, and we shouldn't make claims which aren't true. Of course it is easier to fill an infobox from Wikidata and leave it in their hands. The claims were unsourced on Wikidata for years, and have been "sourced" since August 2022 to a newspaper article which makes no claim of a conviction[1]. Please leave Wikidata out of our infoboxes. Fram (talk) 08:58, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
But that kind of thing isn't what I was suggesting. The material I am suggesting would all come from one database/source. Kk.urban (talk) 09:01, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think that if the Wikidata is actively curated, and sourced, then it could be used. It is used to a limited extent on the Chembox template. But there is enough incompatible data that not everything is just accepted from Wikidata. There are problems with scope, source and accuracy (which could be wikidata or wikipedia's problem). Even if everything comes from one database, that in turn may not be 100% accurate, and scope may vary, eg which area is included in a population count. So I think we could use Wikidata more, but on a case by case basis. By the way vandalism is not frequent on Wikidata. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:33, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Something I'd like to see us commit to as a prerequisite to any deeper Wikidata integration is significantly more useful error messaging from and documentation for the modules that pull from Wikidata. As it stands they're largely inscrutable black boxes that usually work, but always require expert assistance if they don't.
This broken map display from August, which I attempted to help out on, required updating something on OpenStreetMap (not documented, and the talkpage of the module responsible was a redlink). This referencing error from June, which I filed (improperly including a link in the header), required some troubleshooting due to inadequate documentation, although the fix was made on Wikidata rather than a third-party site.
I don't expect upstream errors to be as easy to address as in-house problems, but people shouldn't be expected to read and understand the codebase in order to fix them. Some sort of debugging checklist for error types, or even a "check value in property P at Wikidata item Q" should be the expectation. Folly Mox (talk) 23:24, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps surprisingly, there are not just accuracy/data integrity, but also technical problems with using Wikidata, especially for using more than one Wikidata item in an article. See e.g. the recent discussion at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Lua_freaking_out_at_Comparison_of_web_browsers. —Kusma (talk) 11:13, 26 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In answer to the OP's question, Module:WikidataIB exists for this purpose. All data pulled into infoboxes must be sourced to a non-Wikipedia source, per this 2018 RFC. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:45, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata is not merely inadequately curated. On the occasions when it is curated, it is sometimes robotically curated to require inaccurate claims to remain as claims, in order to keep its data consistent with other databases that make the same claims. It's ok for claims like "X person has id Y in database Z" but inadequately reliable for anything beyond that. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:34, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think you hit upon the best -- if not only -- way data in Wikidata will remain reliable: if the actual values are pulled from the reliable sources themselves. A fictional example of what I mean: embedding the parameter ID=1234567 from the US Census report for 2020 returns the number of adult men for South Podunk, Indiana. Doing this means that should this embedded link be altered, a bot will report it to the Admins there who can then vet the change. (Or the bot reverts it if the link points to a non-existent or blacklisted page.)
Of course, for that to happen, the universe of statistical databases will need to convert to a format that supports this use, which I doubt will happen soon, if ever. -- llywrch (talk) 00:21, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Drafting an RfC for whether news coverage counts toward GNG

WP:GNG and WP:NEVENTS say that for an event to be notable, it requires sustained significant coverage from secondary sources. As the guidelines stand, just being reported in the news does not establish notability, because that fails sustained and secondary. But for some reason, there are thousands of stub articles that just describe a news story without any meaningful encyclopedic coverage. They're sourced exclusively to news articles, and more are created just about every day. Traffic incidents, fires, mass murders, and explosions are common offenders, among others. These events simply don't have the coverage that warrant a separate article, but they get enough "it was in the news once so it's notable" that it brings an AfD to no consensus. That happened at this AfD, where the closer recommended an RfC. So here we are.

I don't know exactly what the wording for an RfC should be, which is why I'm posting it at the idea lab. But essentially the idea would be to determine whether being sourced exclusively to news sources is enough for an event article or if that's a valid reason for deleting/merging/BLARing. Other problems that might be addressed include: what WP:SUSTAINED means, whether local coverage is significant coverage, and how to respond to an article about an event that happened in the last few days.

Pinging everyone who participated in the last discussion on this: EvergreenFir, Silver seren, SMcCandlish, Orange Suede Sofa, Masem, BilledMammal, Moabdave, Newimpartial, Davidstewartharvey. Whatever result we come up with in this discussion, I'm expecting to post it as an RfC at WP:VPP before this goes stale like the last one did. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:13, 5 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia talk:Notability, imo. Andre🚐 05:26, 5 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
A key point that is regurgitated in both GNG and NEVENTS is that notability is a rebuttable presumption. An event article may be created the day it happens, with news coverage giving to the GNG in the short term, but well after the event has completed and there's no signs of any enduring coverage, then the notability can be fairly challenges, and the claim that "but there were newspapers article that meet the GNG!" should no longer hold true due to the lack of enduring coverage. We need to be clear that passing the GNG once doesn't mean it can be challenged later.
Also, what came up in that AFD is the aspect that much of coverage from news can be seen as routine, which is specifically called out in the GNG. While a crime like that shooting may not itself be routine, the coverage of it was routine (a burst of coverage at the start, but very little after the fact). Contrast to racially-motivated shootings or school shootings that have very long tails of coverage of how to stop those types of crimes. That should be a major consideration but requires editors to get their heads out of trying to capture every news detail and instead thing about topics that will be of interest 10-25 years from now. Masem (t) 12:36, 5 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Contrast to racially-motivated shootings or school shootings that have very long tails of coverage of how to stop those types of crimes. Even for many of these (but not all, of course) the "long tail" referred to seems likely to be about the politics, with mention of the event itself just an excuse to bring the politics up. Anomie⚔ 21:53, 6 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly, if there's such an event that has a normal short tail of coverage, but some local politicians try to use the event to push their own works, that's not the same as a long tail of coverage. We're expecting, for example, secondary analysis on the event or further significant events that results from that one, not just name dropping particularly for political plays. Masem (t) 00:09, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
As you mention Alien, it's kind of already written into the relevant PAG that primary and routine coverage are not suitable for establishing notability. If this no longer reflects AFD practice, then either AFD or the PAG no longer reflect the community consensus. I'm not sure anyone would even read more detail guidance, so the most an RFC could do is to clarify which one is the case. Alpha3031 (t • c) 09:02, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Coming back to this, I think we could use a better definition of ROUTINE though. Alpha3031 (t • c) 03:36, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, yeah, I like that idea. Andre🚐 03:50, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There a couple of distinct questions here. "what WP:SUSTAINED means" is a different question to "how to respond to an article about an event that happened in the last few days". An event that happens in the last few days is by definition going to lack sustained coverage, yet we create them anyway (with I suspect broad community acceptance). There is an intersection in that the question of SUSTAINED eventually comes up for news events, and if that is the target question it would be best addressed with a narrowly tailored RfC that doesn't go into related wider questions. CMD (talk) 10:31, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
RFCs about changing a (single) policy or guideline almost always happen at on the talk page of the page that will be changed.
Perhaps a sensible question to ask is how long "a sufficiently significant period of time" is. For example, if the event (e.g., sports game, natural disaster, election) happened at the start of April 2010, is it sufficient if news/other sources write about it:
  • the month in which the event happened only?
  • the year in which the event happened only?
  • occasionally during the next (two? – five? – ten?) years?
  • according to a scheme that is not primarily related to time (e.g., the next time either of those teams reach the championships, which could be next year, or it could be 20 years from now)?
Were editors to say, e.g., that sustained coverage requires five years, then we would presumably permit the article for (at least) five years, and then consider it at AFD during year #6. This is probably a point that you'd want to make clear from the start, because there is no appetite in the community (or from our readers) to exclude content about recent events, and if people think you are proposing that the 2024 United States presidential election or the 2024 Summer Olympics or the Death of Queen Elizabeth II can't be written about until five years after they happen, they'll stop reading and vote against your proposal without a second thought. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:41, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yup. Andre🚐 20:47, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This would affect both WP:N and WP:NEVENTS (and possibly WP:OR and WP:RS if the critical primary/secondary issue is addressed). I think "length of time" is a red herring. To me, a logical reading of WP:SUSTAINED/WP:PERSISTENCE is that the source needs to be retrospective in nature based on previous reporting (i.e. a secondary source). "Let's look back at the earthquake that happened three months ago" would be sustained coverage while "new development about building code violations in the earthquake six months ago" would not be sustained coverage because it's still reporting on the event. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:02, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Disagree. Firstly, the line between a primary source and a secondary source is blurry. A primary source is generally unambiguously primary if it's a direct source, but when it comes to at-the-time news reporting, then it starts taking on more secondariness as time goes on, and I would argue it's not wise or practicable to make that secondary source line a bright one. Nowadays, since reliable outlets are releasing new content every day, there is going to be primary and secondary material about recent and past events every day. E.g. 1 article that's mostly just breaking news facts and interviews about the earthquake, which is essentially a completely primary source. 1 article that is a retrospective aggregation analysis about earthquake coverage. That could definitely land on the same day, week, or month easily. Andre🚐 21:08, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If you have a secondary source, then you have a secondary source. Get one or two more of those, and it meets GNG. Even if there are still primary sources being written. If I understand WP:OR and WP:RS correctly, the whole point of requiring secondary sources is because that's what's needed to write a proper article. All that should really matter with notability is the existence of sources which could reasonably be considered secondary. The problem I wish to solve is that this primary/secondary distinction has been lost in favor of an "any coverage at all" standard that results in newspaper-like articles for events that will never see serious retrospective coverage. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:26, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree it's a potential problem and there may be a potential solution to it. I'm not engaging to just poke holes in your idea. But I think the problem can be solved either through notability, which seems to be where the action is in wiki policy as WAID says, or thinking about reforming AFD. On the latter point. Isn't the real problem that Wikipedians came to a "wrong or bad non-consensus"? Andre🚐 21:29, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
AfD reform is another thing that I thought of, but I wasn't sure if that would be effective. The problem I found is that a lot of editors in AfD discussions about events like crimes or disasters will either say "X people died so it's notable" or "it was in the news so it meets GNG", and they won't hear any challenge as to whether these are relevant to notability. Closing admins then accept these !votes at face value, even though they probably shouldn't. It's often the same editors, so it seems that AfD has developed its own culture independent from the actual expectations of the community. My hope was that an RfC would affirm these expectations. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:38, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
My suggestion as a first start would be to write a >=~3 paragraph essay articulating the above point. Why admins should discard bad rationales at AFD. Andre🚐 21:42, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The problem of a general "rule" saying X and the specific consensus of editors saying not-X is not really one that we are likely to solve. According to WP:NOT and WP:PG (both policies), when the written rules diverge consistently from actual practice, it's the written rules that are wrong, not the actual practice. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:42, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The question is whether that consensus exists among the community or just among a small handful of AfD regulars. In theory, an RfC would answer that. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:17, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It's axiomatic that any group disagreeing with "me" is only a tiny fraction of the community, and if that's hard to say with a straight face, then it's obvious that they were confused or did not fully understand the situation. Anyone who understands as much as "me" is always going to agree with "me", right?
So having said that, I think that you will find that it's difficult to claim that there are more people participating in discussions about any given policy or guideline than are participating at AFD. To put some numbers on that, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2023 October 2 got 240 comments on 2 October 2023 (NB: not the whole week; just the one day). Wikipedia talk:Notability had 19 comments that day (it usually averages around five). Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not had zero. WT:V, zero. WT:NPOV, zero. WT:CONSENSUS, three. This village pump, four.
When you look at those numbers, I think it is pretty clear where the community's attention is. The chattering classes might congregate on the policy/guideline/village pump pages, but we're a very small minority. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:14, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well, you've !voted in just 10 AfDs since December 2020 and yet you participate in pretty much every single PAG discussion that comes up, so isn't that pretty strong evidence that there are editors who are heavily involved in community-wide PAG RfCs who nevertheless decline to help enforce the resulting consensuses? So, no, the editors who !vote regularly at AfD on any particular topic definitely comprise a very small sliver of the community broadly interested in that topic who would participate in PAG discussions if properly notified. We saw this with the 120+ !votes at the NSPORT RfC, despite NSPORT AfDs having maybe 20 regular !voters in a given month. Local PAG-contradicting consensuses in the form of AfD outcomes can accumulate rapidly if even a couple regulars from one "side" are absent for a bit. We saw this in a set of cricketer AfDs in the months after NSPORTS2022 was settled where a group of cricket project members continued !voting "per NCRIC" despite it having been resoundingly deprecated, and these closed as keep despite the topics objectively failing a criterion that had received global consensus as a requirement for retention.(See, e.g., [2]; @Dlthewave might have more background). Those editors then cited those closes as precedent at more AfDs. It was only when a handful more people from the larger community stepped in that these articles were deleted.[3] JoelleJay (talk) 01:32, 10 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That's right: I participate in relatively few AFDs, and when it comes to AFD, I advocate for paying more attention to the people who do the work than to people who talk about it. You could argue that I am advocating for less influence from me, and people like me, and you'd be right. My goal is to get the guidelines to accurately reflect what happens at AFD. My goal is not to change what happens at AFD; my goal is to give content creators a fair understanding of what reality looks like. One way to do this is to provide definitions of our jargon, so that they know, e.g., that SIGCOV is necessary, and that SIGCOV has a meaning that goes beyond whatever Humpty Dumpty wanted it to mean this time, all in the service of determining who is to be master.
If the community refuses to enforce the supposed consensus, then we don't actually have a consensus. It's against our core principles to elevate the words from those of us in the talking shops over the actions of people doing the work. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:45, 10 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that is a good point. But it still wouldn't necessarily preclude an essay encouraging admins to discard bad rationales at AFD. Which then if admins were to follow, would become the practice. Making it a rule, as you say, is fraught since we tend to ignore all of those when needed. Andre🚐 23:57, 8 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I believe that we already have an essay for that at Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:55, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think WP:ROUGHCONSENSUS, which is incorporated as a section in the deletion guidelines for administrators, is technically more applicable as it actually says that those !votes are discounted. Alpha3031 (t • c) 01:51, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Both are good answers; yet we're still faced with the quandary. Is it education? Various areas of the project have a lot of structure now that they didn't have 10 years ago. Andre🚐 01:54, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the admins are in a bind. If the tiny minority of editors in the talking shops say that generally speaking, ____ should be deleted, but the tiny minority of editors who actually evaluated the specific subject say that, in this particular case, this particular article should be kept, the admin has a choice between Wikipedia:Ignore all rules or a brisk trip to Wikipedia:Deletion review.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked another editor (sorry, I don't have the link handy, and I don't remember who it was) what they'd advise an admin in such a case, and if memory serves, I got no direct answer. Especially for some of our newer editors, whom we educated to believe in The One True™ Set of Rules, the idea that AFD might exist to make the right decision in individual cases rather than to implement The True™ Rules, seems to be a foreign concept. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:38, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think a use of IAR should generally explain how the situation is different from the general case. Otherwise, either the policy should change or the discussion is defective. (or, for that matter, both)
I think, though , maybe those cases should be taken to DRV whichever way it's closed... or, perhaps there are ways we can make DRV less intimidating to admins. Of course, there might be a positive effect of promoting deeper consideration of the appropriate close, but I think it's less than ideal for the likelihood of DRV itself to influence which direction the discussion closes. Alpha3031 (t • c) 03:56, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately, WP:IAR was misused so badly years ago by one Wikipedian (whom I will not name) that those Wikipedians who know about that escape clause are reluctant to use it. Which is a problem because invoking IAR is often a way to show that the current formulation of a given rule needs to be revisited & revised. -- llywrch (talk) 00:43, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
What should end up happening is these articles on sensational breaking news topics (if initially kept at AfD) are deleted after a year or so when no further coverage occurs. But then we have editors who insist any background (i.e. secondary) material in a news piece automatically constitutes sustained coverage, because it is coverage of a "sustained" period of the subject's existence... See this AfD and its related discussion at WT:N. So that would end up resulting in a keep even if 10 years from now there has not been a single additional piece of SIGCOV of the subject since the initial news burst. JoelleJay (talk) 23:30, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
So far based on this discussion, the wording for an RfC would be a simple one sentence question like Does news coverage satisfy WP:GNG for articles about events? oder For articles about events, does news coverage about that event satisfy notability requirements?. Is this what would work? It still leaves unanswered what constitutes news coverage (such as whether coverage of a trial or other aftermath would still be news coverage of the same event). And what would be the appropriate place to hold it? WP:VPP, Wikipedia talk:Notability, and Wikipedia talk:Notability (events) all seem reasonable. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:37, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There may be a difference between a news article published the day after an event and one published much later. I think the concern here is about recent events, so that difference won't arise, but I wouldn't want to see use of retrospective news coverage to help establish notability for historical events inadvertently being discouraged by the wording of this proposal. Perhaps adding "recent" would deal with that, although there is the potential for much squabbling over what "recent" means. Donald Albury 12:31, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Another problem… not all events are equal. there are some events that are obviously notable the instant they occur - the election of a new Pope comes to mind. We know that there will be significant (sustained) coverage of the new Pope… even if at the time of writing all we have are breaking news reports announcing the election. I see no reason why this initial news coverage should be deemed non GNG compliant. Blueboar (talk) 12:52, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Do we have articles about the elections of popes? I'm not sure if those would be notable, which sort of proves the point here. The election itself would need sustained coverage if it were to have its own article. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:10, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Of course we do. See Category:Papal conclaves. These are major events with sustained coverage over centuries. —Kusma (talk) 15:26, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
All right, it seemed like something that would be covered in the given pope's article. In this case WP:EFFECT would apply. But even then, it would be difficult to write an article that wasn't just a bare sequence of events until it was analyzed. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:32, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Are you referring to updates or retrospectives? Taking the 2020 Beirut explosion for example. You can have breaking news about an update, which is routine coverage, but you can also have a retrospective, which is a great source for an event article. Both of these are 2023 articles, but only one provides coverage that suggests this is an event that's being studied and is of encyclopedic interest. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:09, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I did write "retrospective". Donald Albury 15:30, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
As it happens, I cited a retrospective published in a newspaper just yesterday. The source was a "what happened in the last decade" kind of piece. Many US newspapers also do a similar thing at the end of December, to review the year's news.
Nobody would doubt the notability of the biggest public corruption scandal in the US, and it might be interesting to imagine Wikipedia in spring of 1981, with the FBI arresting dozens of elected officials on charges of bribery. It doesn't take a crystal ball to imagine that an event of this magnitude will produce sustained coverage. What would you recommend to editors who create the article right away? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:02, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Thebiguglyalien, I would only recommend that you ask an RFC question like "Does news coverage satisfy?" if your goal is to get a resounding "Yes, of course!" on record. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:03, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, that's something I'm worried about. If that's how most of the community feels, then so be it, but obviously I don't want to influence such an answer with the wording of the question. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:15, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder whether you might be able to get a more nuanced answer if you ask something more specific, like "If an event (e.g., a fire) happened more than a couple of years ago, but a good-faith search finds no sources beyond the year of the event, should those early sources be considered to constitute 'sustained coverage' of the event?"
In general, I'm not sure that this will produce the results that you seem to want, because the real policy is what experienced editors do, rather than exact words we put into a page with a fancy tag at the top (see the fifth of the Wikipedia:Five pillars), so they might still vote to keep them at AFD, and they wouldn't be wrong. But it's possible that this would give you a written ruling that would let you argue at AFD that The Community™, or at least the tiny fraction that responds to RFCs, says your way is better. Or, you know, you could just PROD or AFD a couple of those every day until someone complains. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:15, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think maybe we should discuss it more, have more facilitated problem solving brainstorming. E.g. what is the problem, what are the possible opportunities, a strengths/weaknesses/actions/opportunities analysis for each, make a tree and start pruning the tree until you arrive at somewhat of a rigorous proposal. Currently, I agree with WAID that having an RFC for a result that would simply reaffirm the value of news coverage without any narrowing or clarification of the bright lines and tests we want to approximate, is not valuable for anyone and wouldn't have a meaningful change. I do think you've touched on a few troubling or interesting ends to tug on. 1) why, when closing discussions, don't admins or non-admin closers clarify the consensus by asking questions or by being more transparent about discarding invalid logic, according to a consensus and precedent based understanding of policy, leading to some outcomes that never get a DRV or a challenge, and then we are left holding a bag, this seems like a generalized weakness of how some closers close discussions (consensus is not a vote/not bean counting) 2) why do some commenters at AFD refuse to engage or change their mind and stick to an invalid view. without naming names, I have AFD'd or !voted to delete an article and found that some people left comments that I thought didn't make sense, then the article was kept for no consensus. is it education? is it the process? Andre🚐 17:24, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I have AFD'd or !voted to delete an article and found that some people left comments that I thought didn't make sense, then the article was kept for no consensus. is it education? is it the process? Yeah...I have a whole bookmarks folder of such AfDs. And another folder for the ones that were only closed correctly after lengthy needless debate over something that should be obvious. Like where editors insisted school newspaper coverage of a student was independent despite historical precedent, the PAGs themselves, and a concurrent question at RS that came to a unanimous consensus before the AfD ended resoundingly confirming they are not independent of the student for the purposes of notability. Or the one where editors insisted the results of an anonymous, one-off google docs poll hosted by a football fan club's Twitter account was of sufficient significance to pass ANYBIO, and the 40 non-quote words of coverage of this "honor" was SIGCOV even after it was shown to be a word-for-word copy of a press release on the football club's facebook...that one was originally closed as "no consensus" even with all that info available! JoelleJay (talk) 20:53, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think it's going to be difficult to have a hard-and-fast rule for this. The main issue that immediately comes to mind is that some events obviously have long-term notability. If a US president is assassinated, you'd better believe we're making an article for that the instant the news breaks, and anyone complaining that we're WP:NOTNEWS or demanding we wait for WP:SUSTAINED coverage isn't going to be treated seriously. But according to policy, we're not really supposed to rely on our "gut feeling" about events like that (see WP:CRYSTALBALL), so... what do we use to determine that a breaking event is so significant that it definitely requires an article? I would say that the tone and level of coverage both matter as well; if an event gets only cursory coverage in the local news, whose tone is "here's a thing that happened today", it may not need an article until we have either non-news coverage or WP:SUSTAINED coverage; but if it gets wall-to-wall coverage in national / international news and the tone of that coverage is "oh my god, this changes everything forever / a day that will live in infamy" etc etc etc, then it probably can support its own article. Another thing that occurs to me that might support a hypothetical refined GNG for news is what you might call "secondary news" coverage, news coverage that isn't about the event itself but its long-term effects - if you look at the recent attacks in Israel, say, or think about a hypothetical presidential assassination, there will be massive amounts of articles that aren't just covering the event directly but which devote an entire article to eg. "here is what this means in a specific context; here is how it might affect the price of X, Y, and Z; here's the impact it will have on the stock market" etc etc etc. Basically I don't think that we can use WP:SUSTAINED as the sole criteria, we need criteria that helps us determine what news stories really do require their own articles immediately. (And while the examples I gave might seem obvious, I suspect that the main borderline articles are going to be political grist ones - lots of stories get a ton of coverage as "the most important thing EVER, politician XYZ is TOTALLY DESTROYED" in the partisan press but little sustained coverage elsewhere. OTOH sometimes they represent genuinely important scandals that do deserve an immediate article. So what to do with those articles and what sort of sources would demonstrate we can write a neutral article about them is probably the main thing to keep in mind when writing guidelines.) --Aquillion (talk) 17:51, 11 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'd like to point out that CRYSTAL only applies to article content. It does not apply to discussions on how much sourcing we might expect to find in the future, or in XYZ location that we haven't looked at yet. In fact, most of NOT applies primarily or exclusively to content in or intended for mainspace. Same with OR or V. Editors may or may not find such arguments less persuasive, but they are not proscribed by policy. Alpha3031 (t • c) 16:32, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Allgemein comment. I used to work a lot at ITN, and my impression was that lots of editors, often not well-known ones here on en-wiki, were extremely interested and active in starting and developing articles on "disasters" especially where people died. There are some topics (disasters, sports events, television/films...) where there is abundant online sourcing that is easy to understand and free to access, and so inexperienced or non-native English speaker editors feel comfortable working to build articles in those areas. There's also considerable reader interest in such topics, far more so than any of the kinds of more obviously encyclopedia topics I tend to edit. For example my article from last year George Checkley gets only a handful of daily views on a good day, whereas 2022 Taitung earthquakes, from a similar timeframe, gets around 14 daily views; also September 2022 Afghanistan earthquake got a recent spike of hits, after the recent earthquakes. So there is low-level sustained reader interest beyond the year mark. Not sure where I'm going with this exactly, but I think (1) starting to prune this content (which I don't disagree with personally) is likely to be very difficult and contentious; and (2) any guidelines developed will need to be very clear, because many of the editors working in these areas are not experienced, don't have fluent English, care passionately about the topic, and often don't work much in other areas of en-wiki. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:35, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Current events are definitely popular with readers.
    Perhaps one of the points should be to merge such articles into a "List of earthquakes in..." rather than a full deletion. Even if you don't think that a given event is worth having a separate article on it, it might still be worth mentioning it somewhere. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:32, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Maybe we could just create a space somewhere on this project but somewhat separated from mainspace and just get rid of NOTNEWS and IINFO in that space. Somewhere adhering to WP:COPO but without necessarily being as attached to what an encyclopaedia is or is not, or what precisely counts as encyclopedic content. Alpha3031 (t • c) 16:42, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    The first of the Wikipedia:Five pillars indicates that Wikipedia is not exclusively an encyclopedia, as it also includes the sort of information one would expect to find in almanacs and gazetteers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:16, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, but while IINFO and NEWS are both excluded (in 5P1 as well as NOT) there's no reason why we can't create a space for it. Alpha3031 (t • c) 08:10, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    WP:NEWS says nothing relevant; I think you've got the wrong WP:UPPERCASE.
    WP:NOTNEWS says that Wikipedia articles aren't supposed to be news articles, which is different from being about whatever is in the news. That policy says Editors are encouraged to include current and up-to-date information within its coverage, and to develop stand-alone articles on significant current events. Whatever subjects are in the news are not excluded from Wikipedia; indeed, there are officially encouraged according to long-standing policy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:58, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, I was referencing them as sections within NOT, which also says that most newsworthy events do not qualify for inclusion. Alpha3031 (t • c) 05:55, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    TL;DR: Most is measured against what's in the newspaper, not what editors start articles about.
    I agree that most newsworthy events do not qualify for inclusion, and most newsworthy events are not even attempted to be included in Wikipedia. Here's a list of the "bigger" articles in a daily newspaper for one day last week: Ten articles about sports. Three articles about crimes. One article each about a Nobel prize, city meetings, statewide demographic changes, travel, a celebrity–charity kerfuffle, a local business, a routine report about an airport, a local hospital, a car wreck, update on a previous wildfire, pollution worries, an invasive species, and a photo spread about seasonal events. Two articles each about new state laws, music, and the Israel–Hamas mess. There were also half a dozen nationally syndicated columns and another half-dozen pieces about homes that sold recently.
    The number of these articles that I expect to be cited on Wikipedia is: zero. However, a couple of them (e.g., 2023 Israel–Hamas war) are about notable subjects, and a couple might be usable to expand or update existing content (e.g., Demographics of California).
    For bigger newspapers, here are some 2016 numbers on content:
    That's a whole bunch of newsworthy events just on the one day. Most of them do not qualify for inclusion. But even if just 1% of the newsworthy events qualify for inclusion, that could be thousands of current events per year. We don't want articles about most newsworthy events, but we probably do want articles about most of the newsworthy events that editors actually start articles about. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:23, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Strong agree on this analysis. Andre🚐 21:30, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I like WAID's idea to officially advise a merge. Current events articles already exist. It might be a way to deal with portals, too? Andre🚐 17:21, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    As far as I'm concerned, merging all of the non-notable events into "list of" articles is the optimal solution. The trick is making it happen, because right now we basically have to RM or AfD each article one at a time and convince the "news coverage = new article" editors that merging is a better way to organize these things. I could easily come up with a list of hundreds of event articles that should almost certainly be merged, and that's to say nothing of the borderline cases. But just getting one of them addressed is a struggle. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:10, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Maybe you could propose a speedy mergification similar to how some articles are draftified or prodded. Andre🚐 05:38, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    The discussion Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 49#Addressing non-notable event articles: Traffic incidents might be of interest. I raised the issue of addressing lots of articles at the same time, and it was completely unproductive. I expect any other idea that involves dealing with large amounts of articles would be met with similar nitpicking. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 13:59, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Thebiguglyalien, how many merges have you proposed, using the directions at Wikipedia:Merging#Proposing a merge? What were the outcomes? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:03, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    None. I don't want to start merging if it's not clear what type of merging we're talking about here. For example I can say that 2021 Cairo clothing factory fire probably doesn't need an article. But the most likely target, List of building or structure fires, already mentions it. It's not clear what these merges would look like. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:40, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Looking at the English-language sources about that one fire, it appears that a List of fatal fires in Egypt would be a valid subject. Several of the longer sources included a list of fatal fires in Egypt during the previous months. The same (large) city had another fatal factory fire in 2015. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:02, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    An article on major fires in Egypt, and what factors contribute to them happening, would be much more interesting than just a list. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:43, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I think a list along the lines of Floods in California would work. A plain bullet point list says only something like like:
    • Fire at Business in City on 32 Octember 2021
    would be boring. (The overall cause appears to be a systematic failure to enforce safety regulations, and once the fire has started, the fire departments do their best but don't have the amazing resources that some others do. It is not a wealthy country, after all.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:44, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Lists like this would be a perfect solution. The easiest way to cover everything would be to split the current List of building or structure fires by decade. Then bullet points can be expanded into a paragraph or two by merging the relevant details from the main article where applicable. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:49, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Late to the party , don't know how I missed the ping, but I agree that the example above, Floods in California is a good example of what should be recommended. Earlier this year I was involved in an AFD where a road accident had been nominated, but there was coverage years later as it was one of the worst UK road accidents so it was kept. But as I pointed out then, on the same day on the same road a former rugby player had died in a separate accident which didn't have an article. I did put forward that we could create page about the serious road accidents on that occured on that actual road. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 14:20, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    That one is quite nice. I think lists are a neat solution to this problem. DFlhb (talk) 15:31, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I've up-merged several stub articles into List of tanker explosions as a proof of concept, and it looks much cleaner and more useful than a bunch of disparate stubs. There are still a few blank sections where I want a second opinion about whether merging or WP:SUMMARY is appropriate. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:38, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • This entire discussion is crazy to me. I have written hundreds of articles on 19th-century state supreme court justices, relying almost entirely on news coverage of their careers and their deaths. Many of these are sourced to local newspapers of the time period. BD2412 T 21:37, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, absolutely. Historical news coverage is critical to write articles properly. Andre🚐 22:31, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Are you writing "inauguration of [justice]" or "tenure of [justice]" articles? That's the only way I could see this being relevant to that. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 22:36, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I believe I raised this topic earlier and it was clarified that the current proposal only relates to events, not people or places. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:40, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Thebiguglyalien: Obituaries often provide fairly comprehensive biographical coverage, although occasionally newspapers will provide biographical summaries for all current members of their state's high court. This was more common in the 1800s, of course, when there tended not to be other sources for this information. @Espresso Addict: I am concerned about creep. This sounds like the beginning of saying that news coverage is not appropriate as an encyclopedic source. BD2412 T 22:56, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I too am worried about creep, both intentional and unintentional (eg discussion about a minor change to minor changes spiralling into a call to nuke 'em from orbit). Espresso Addict (talk) 23:03, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    BD2412, my problem is with articles about events that have no lasting effect and no retrospective coverage. When a deadly car crash happens and makes the news, can I say it meets GNG? To me the answer is obviously no for a number of reasons, but there are enough people at AfD who say yes that it needs to be settled one way or the other. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:18, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I hope this won't be settled "one way or the other", but by intelligent merging of less notable event articles, something that doesn't require AfD or noticeboard discussions. —Kusma (talk) 15:00, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree. As tempting as it is to create the One True™ Rule for this, it's better just to do the work. There is enough information in the sources in 2021 Cairo clothing factory fire to create (e.g.,) a List of fatal fires in Egypt. Creating an official rule will have basically no effect, but merging up related articles solves the actual problem directly. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:21, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm optimistic that this can happen based on the thread of comments above this one. It's just a matter of figuring out what any potential target lists would look like and how they're organized. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:23, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    As others have pointed out, the existing policy on merging already is fine with what you're doing, so go ahead. Andre🚐 21:46, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
List of tanker explosions looks how I'd expect most lists of events would look after merging up. Shorter instances are collected on the same page, while more in-depth coverage is provided for a few with Template:Main. If there's general agreement that this works, then maybe it can be applied to some of the other events-related topics that have a lot of stubs. For larger topics, they can be divided into multiple lists divided by location ("List of X in country" or "List of X in continent") or by time ("List of X in year" or "List of X in decade"). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:01, 18 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
So how do you decide which articles to retain? The answer seems in this case to be practically none. I remember the Bahawalpur, Pakistan (2017) incident distinctly, which received coverage in depth in the UK and had a well-developed article classed as C-class and mid-importance for some projects. I would not have thought that kind of article would be reduced to a redirect by such proposals without any individual discussion. Espresso Addict (talk) 05:44, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There are a few relevant guidelines regarding merges of inadequate articles. The most immediate ones are WP:PAGEDECIDE and WP:AVOIDSPLIT. The former recommends keeping it within a larger topic if there isn't adequate sourcing, and the latter encourages such merges if sourcing can't be found to demonstrate notability. Regarding notability, relevant guidelines obviously include WP:N, which requires significant secondary coverage sustained over time, as well as WP:NEVENTS, which has similar requirements. Now if someone was willing to do the work to replace most of the primary sources with secondary ones and write up a few paragraphs about analysis that's taken place in the past few years, then I would encourage them to revert the merge and do so. If it's not possible to do that, then it was inappropriate to ever give it its own article in the first place. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 14:22, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For the without any individual discussion worry, the Wikipedia:Merging process recommends discussions of at least a week, so I don't think we should assume that there would be no opportunity for discussion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:29, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
WhatamIdoing/Espresso Addict/anyone else interested: What do you suggest as far as getting consensus for merges if a bold merge is challenged? For List of tanker explosions, I merged the articles that were short enough to be stub or start class articles. Ideally any article that's all primary sources should be rewritten, merged, or deleted, but that's not going to stop some editors from bringing together some primary sources and asserting notability. Case in point, I've laid the groundwork for List of mass stabbing incidents (before 2010) which is still a work in progress, but one of the redirects was reverted, restoring an "article" that's just regurgitating primary sources and reads like a news story. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:05, 19 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
WP:PROPMERGE. Curbon7 (talk) 00:10, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think another issue that needs to be borne in mind is the appearance of racism, when all non-recent articles on a topic are merged, except one lone American one. Espresso Addict (talk) 05:02, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would appreciate if you discussed the merge with me beforehand and not just done it immediately without any consensus. Lettlerhello • contribs 13:42, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Also, I do agree that most of the articles on the List of mass stabbings are not really articles and do not follow the lasting coverage guidelines at all. E.g. Nanital wedding massacre, it might not even be a real story if I'm being honest. However, you did merge some articles that definitely cover notable topics and have lasting coverage through retrospectives, etc. like the Rackham's stabbings. Again, I would appreciate if you and other editors had a discussion prior to this instead of you going on a one-person crusade based on your own opinions. Lettlerhello • contribs 13:47, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I will point out there is a closely-related discussion at WT:NOT#WP:NOTNEWS/unfolding news stories related to how to write/clean up event articles well after the event is over. That is tightly related to establishing that most news cover of an event in the short term is primary, and what we're looking for is more secondary (analysis or reflection, or describing what impacts an event had). --Masem (t) 17:30, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if the answer is a policy change, but I like the idea of a clean-up. It does seem people rush to crate articles that don't really hold-up over time. And I certainly agree with some of the commentary here about some of the fluff stuff added to articles to try and establish their notability. To me, the problem is the phrase "encyclopedic" and how its used here. It's really easy for people to justify any information they put in an article by saying that it is such, and really is quite difficult to refute. I think trying to define what content is relevant and not in articles is a good start in filing down the number of articles in general. DarkSide830 (talk) 16:58, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that merging some subjects that don't hold up over time into a single, bigger article has a lot of potential for improving their encyclopedic value.
I'm not sure that we need to reduce the number of articles in general. Some estimates suggest that we're still short by at least several million (e.g., politicians from previous centuries that were mostly covered in non-English sources – look at the red links in List of mayors of Berlin, all of which are merely waiting for an interested German-speaking editor to create the articles). Consequently, I don't see this as a way of having "less"; I see this approach as a way of having "better" (and possibly even "more"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:36, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. We used to say WP:NOT paper. Andre🚐 17:50, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sure we're missing relevant older articles, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the breaking newsy stuff that get articles before we can establish their long-term significance, nor am I talking about people unless we're talking about 1E bios. DarkSide830 (talk) 19:23, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Here from a ping by WhatamIdoing, thank you. We tried to lance this boil with WP:NEVENT back in 2009, to reconcile WP:GNG, WP:NOTNEWS, and WP:NTEMP. It seems we failed. Please read the discussion starting at Wikipedia talk:Notability (events)/Archive 1 to see how the current guidance was arrived at and whether there were any useful ideas left on the cutting room floor. Fences&Windows 10:02, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    The thing is, NEVENT does cover nearly all cases here. The problem is that some editors just don't care, so they keep creating weak articles and then !voting keep as a group at AfD by saying that appearing in a newspaper is enough to meet GNG. Instead of proposing a change to NEVENT (which would almost certainly be shot down), they just blatantly ignore sitewide consensus, and no one does anything about it. The small handful of admins who close AfD discussions seem to be unwilling or unable to weigh arguments against notability guidelines like they're supposed to. So now we're stuck with thousands of articles that read like news and provide no meaningful analysis. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:10, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions. The written rules exist for our convenience, and as something we can wave at people when we're fixing things up, and not because we expect others to seek them out and carefully follow them. The expected path is:
    If you are expecting this path:
    • A person interested enough to contribute information to Wikipedia is able to find all the directions.
    • That person puts their excitement on hold long enough to carefully read and understand all the directions.
    • The excited person then dispassionately and correctly evaluates the subject that they're excited about, and decides that Wikipedia isn't interested in hearing about a potentially big-deal event,
    then you have not been paying attention. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    My frustration stems from the fact that waving this tends not to do anything. I can list too many AfDs where I pointed to these things, was ignored or flat out told that our guidelines were wrong, and then it was closed as keep. This, this, and this are some examples. On the latter, I had to withdraw after an ANI discussion was opened. This is what we're dealing with at AfD. I'm tempted to start taking it to deletion review any time a keep is decided based on news coverage. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:48, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Deletion review is definitely one option that we have under the present system. Andre🚐 19:56, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    The wider problem is that there is a disconnect between the editors who create much of the content, and the editors who frequent discussions that generate policy/guidelines. Content editors are more likely to comment in AfD than other backroom areas. Espresso Addict (talk) 21:21, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    That's a very good point. Maybe the problem we should focus on is how to open up policy backroom to more content editors who don't have experience in such discussion. Andre🚐 22:55, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    That's the whole point about setting up an RFC at a Village Pump and advertising it at CENT and other places. These are the equivalent to the town square, and there is no better way to mass advertise key PAG discussions. Editors that do not engage in these areas and then complain about PAG override what they think is consensus are not working within the proper context of what we expect. Masem (t) 22:59, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I think we should put on our product thinking hat. If people don't do things you have to ask why they chose another path, and try to guide them better. With better tools, or better UI, or better design, or better ideas, or a new workflow, etc. It's problem solving. This is the idea lab. Andre🚐 23:23, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Someday, we should probably pull the numbers for VP participation, so that we can get over this idea that the talking shops are where editors hang out. For this Village pump (alone), so far, less than 3,300 editors have ever posted here. About 13.9 million registered editors have made at least one edit to the English Wikipedia. That's about one in 4,000 (four thousand) editors, or one fiftieth of one percent of registered editors. The other 99.98% of editors have never posted here.
    If you think that it's "unfair" to include editors who haven't made many edits, then let's look at the numbers a different way:
    • 99% of editors who have made 100+ edits have never posted to this village pump.
    • 95% of editors who have made 1,000+ edits have never posted to this village pump.
    • 75% of editors who have made 10,000+ edits have never posted to this village pump.
    My conclusion: This village pump is not the way to reach the whole community. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:07, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Andrevan, I think you will be interested in the work that the Editing team did on uploading images to Commons from inside the visual editor a few years ago. The goal is to get people to upload relevant images (e.g., they're writing about a type of food and upload a photo of their dinner) while they're editing.
    • What's wanted: Here's my own photo, taken by me personally, that I'm donating to Commons.
    • What happened: I copied this logo on the internet, but when I truthfully said that it wasn't my own work, it wouldn't let me upload it. So I lied, because the only way to make the stupid thing work was to say that it was my own work, promise to give my first-born son to Rumpelstiltskin, and click through all these pointless warnings about copyright law. What a lot of nonsense. Everyone knows that it's okay to have a corporate logo in a Wikipedia article!
    Education in the UI only goes so far. When people believe that they are doing the right thing, they will do or say whatever is necessary to convince the computer to let them do it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:12, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree, but that's why you need to do before-the-fact user testing and optimization. Andre🚐 02:27, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm telling you the results of the user testing and optimization. There was no amount of education that actually stopped people from doing what they believed was the right thing to do. Eventually Commons put up an AbuseFilter to stop nearly all of the in-editor uploads (except from highly experienced Commons editors, who rarely use the feature anyway). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:50, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Fair enough. I believe you. And that's an interesting result. And it's definitely one kind of result. But I wouldn't extrapolate that to mean no UI change could make people participate on the village pump more. I bet, if we did an AB test of a giant red callout to the village pump versus not, it would increase traffic. Andre🚐 02:54, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    It is unfortunately not a unique result. It's a truism in computer security that if you give people a choice between following the policies (e.g., "No uploading confidential documents to external websites like Dropbox") and getting their job done (e.g., "He needs this doc, and it's too big to send in e-mail!"), they will break the policy every time. The average person, if promised a video of dancing bears, will click on anything necessary to watch that video. A person might not click the buttons labeled "Download malware", but they will click buttons that say "Enter your password to download the dancing bear video. Note: You may have to override your antiviral software to see this".
    It is highly likely that we could to drive some traffic (=page views) here. It is possible that we could drive some participation here (=edits). It is much harder to retain people, and much harder to convince them that their preferred contribution (e.g., updating the stats from the big game) is more important or more fun than chatting with people about abstract ideas. (Also, since Wikipedia:Policy writing is hard, they might not be any good at it.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:35, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Policy writing is hard, but people often don't even try to get good at it. And we don't offer them many venues to break into it or to polish their skills. Part of this is how bad threaded discussion is on Wikipedia. The reply tool is very helpful, but it's still a long way from solving the problem. I know they've been working on that for a while. Anyway, one thing I think is part of the issue is that people like to go straight to the hairiest, meatiest topic, like NPOV for controversial current events. There are not a lot of "training ground" low stakes policy/meta discussions. Andre🚐 18:44, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I have a more detailed set of numbers about who posts at the Village pumps. See Wikipedia talk:Village pump#Who posts at the Village pumps? if you're interested in statistics. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:38, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    If people want their voices to be heard on Wikipedia, then the onus is on them to speak up. We can and should make the venue as available as possible, but they ultimately have to come here on their own. If they fail to do that, then they're endorsing whatever conclusion we come to here by default, and that's their decision. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:17, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Your opinion does not seem to be consistent with either the Wikipedia:Ignore all rules policy or the Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not compulsory policy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:20, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    WP is not compulsory, but also we expect editors to be editing from the start within PAG (that's why the Welcome message standard for new editors goes to the top level set of these pages). We absolutely do expect editors to understand what PAG are and how they are developed, and that if they don't like how some things are handled on WP, they should be speaking up at the appropriate forums. Outside of rare cases, we take silence on such matters as implicit agreement with PAG. Which does lead to the difference between the small number of editors that spend a lot of time at PAG pages (and typically the same group with the largest contribution numbers on WP), and those editors that come by once a week or month to add something and get annoyed when they get reverted, but make no effort to engage beyond that level. Masem (t) 03:11, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think any of that's true.
    Is anyone here actually surprised if a newbie screws up their first edits? I'm not. You're not. We don't actually expect them to know what the rules are, or to follow them even if they do know the rules. We actually expect them to get it wrong, and we're pleasantly surprised when a newbie's edit summary says "typo" and the diff shows them actually fixing a typo. We enforce the rules – Ignorantia juris non excusat – but we don't expect them to know or follow our rules.
    Even most experienced editors, who generally know some distorted telephone game version of some of the rules, have no idea how policies and guidelines are developed. I'd bet that if you asked the next three RFA candidates to tell you how they're developed, you'd get three different answers – and that I wouldn't agree with any of them, as the candidates would be too focused on writing a diplomatic reply to tell the truth, which is that if you want a change (e.g.,) to the FAC rules, it matters more to get a short list of specific individuals on board than to get any other random editors to vote your way.
    Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions. This is true on Wikipedia, and it is true everywhere on the internet. And in the real world, too. Think about how few people actually read the directions before trying to use the device (or build the flat pack furniture) they just bought. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:22, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with this. Wikipolitics is the thing. Andre🚐 18:27, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    New editors, we do not expect them to know off the bat, which is why we welcome them with PAG links.
    And I agree that no experienced editor knows the PAG word for word, and likely have their own internal concept of them that differs from the actual language. However, the point is that we do expect editors to be aware PAG exists, that they are derived from consensus, and that their are ways to request changes to that. An editor that consistently edits against a PAG even after being told of the correct PAG, and that complains bitterly about the PAG, but never participates in discussions about changing PAG is likely going to be seen as disruptive.
    So knowing in general the PAG framework and editing within it aren't compulsory. You aren't required to participate in discussions on changing PAG, but you have little recourse if you constantly complain the PAG are bad and hampers your editing. Which goes back to making sure that if we want to change any OAG related to news coverage, it needs to be advertised as widely as possible, as I suspect many editors that do work on current event articles have never really participated in PAG discussions. Masem (t) 23:29, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    What's that bumper sticker? "If you didn't vote, you don't have the right to complain", or something like that? And yet people complain anyway.
    I agree with you that many editors that do work on current event articles have never really participated in discussions about policies and guidelines, or even AFDs. We would all benefit from having more of our discussions include people who are writing the articles, instead of just those of us who like to hang out in the talking shops. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:07, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Thebiguglyalien, "delete the whole thing" is not the same as "salvage what you can". The Wikipedia:Editing policy says Wikipedia summarizes accepted knowledge. As a rule, the more accepted knowledge it can encapsulate, the better it is. Outright deleting information is not a path towards having "more accepted knowledge". It is a path towards making Wikipedia useless to readers, because the thing they want to read about isn't here.
    Looking at the first one, let's leave aside the absurdity of an editor looking into his WP:CRYSTALBALL just 11 hours after the article was created, and barely a day after the event, and declaring that he already knows that this event has no lasting significance. There might be a policy basis for not having a separate article for any given mass shooting, but there's no policy basis for not having this information somewhere in the English Wikipedia. The goal at AFD is to make sure that information is excluded completely – that it does not survive as even a brief little paragraph in a larger subject (e.g., the city, the police department), or as a redirect to the item in the List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, May 2023. If this wasn't the goal, then the editor wouldn't have taken the subject to AFD. I ask: Why would an editor who agrees with our policy ("the more accepted knowledge, the better") want to do have less knowledge? If more = better, then less = worse. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:54, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    If your interpretation of the editing policy is correct, then the logical conclusion as I see it is covering everything ever mentioned in any source. I believe that there should be a limit on what knowledge we cover, and that limit should be what's analyzed in secondary sources. I disagree with the premise that events should be assumed notable simply because they happened recently. If lasting coverage doesn't exist yet, then it doesn't exist. We don't get to say that it will some day exist. That's what would constitute a crystal ball. I'm happy with the metric set by WP:EVENTCRIT for when a recent event should be assumed notable. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:14, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    There are certainly editors who support a "everything in any [reliable] source" standard, but most of us want something a little stronger – most usually a filter for what's encyclopedic (e.g., yes to mass shootings, no to what color suit Queen Elizabeth wore to an event). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:18, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I've set up a slightly larger test case with mass stabbing incidents:
I merged many of the articles where there was clearly no case for a WP:SIZESPLIT. More could reasonably be merged, if anyone wishes to do so, and many of the remaining articles are likely non-notable as well. The problem of bad sourcing also still exists and needs to be addressed among this category of events. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:04, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The RFC in the OP would create a mess in many ways. Rather than getting into that I'll just note that the discussion has evolved since then. I think that the gist of the OP is that in principle the SNG/GNG look OK but that they really arent getting followed. When it's suits them, people generally ignore the vaguer generally ignore general guidance in policies and guidlines and only feel obliged to follow the more explicit stuff. For some articles (for example, those on the "In the news" on the main page), the events are or very high prominence /impact/importance, have lots of sourcing and lots of content I think that people generally say "wp:notable enough". IMO giving (only) some consideration to degree of prominence /impact/importance is how the fuzzy notability ecosystem actuall works, even though it's not explicitly in any guideline. I think that the sooner that we acknowlesdge that the sooner we can solve these otherwise unsolvable quandaries. North8000 (talk) 20:18, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

One of our oldest policies says that when it suits the situation, you're supposed to ignore all rules, vague and explicit alike. It's really hard to say that it's bad when people don't follow the rules when one of the rules is that you shouldn't follow rules that (initially just in your own opinion; later, iff your opinion is challenged, in the group's view) make Wikipedia worse.
One way to see this issue is:
  • The written rules neither encourage nor forbid a certain action (e.g., creating separate articles for subjects whose lasting significance is possible but unclear).
  • An editor believes that taking this action will improve Wikipedia, and so takes this action.
  • A second editor worries that doing what improves Wikipedia, instead of following The Rules™ is bad, because everything which is not explicitly allowed is probably forbidden.
I wonder whether we are best served by promoting rule-following as a primary value. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:55, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Conversely, the action, under eventualism and mergism, did improve the encyclopedia. We just need to reduce friction to that state. Andre🚐 02:54, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing: Many good points there. My belief is that, even though seldom invoked explicitly, WP:IAR is immensely used as an influence on other decisions. For example, giving some consideration to prominence/importance/impact to let it tip a wp:notability decision towards inclusion. North8000 (talk) 12:27, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Or to tip it towards exclusion (e.g., towards merging). I'd still rather that we consider putting WP:N's note about editorial discretion into the GNG itself, since that would deal with the "prominence/importance/impact" issue directly, and maybe then we'd quit seeing people claim that Wikipedia:Significant coverage means "[media] coverage claiming WP:ITSIMPORTANT". I think a lot of discussions would be smoother if we all agreed that SIGCOV means "an amount of attention that is significant" (the dominant view, as you know, but when an editor understanding it as "an amount" and an editor understanding it as "evidence that it's an important subject" are in a dispute, they can't understand each other). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:17, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Alternatively, we could add some tests for "importance"/"significance" to the guideline. I've always considered GNG to be a proxy metric. Which is why there's so much wiggle room around quantifying GNG. "Notability" in wiki-jargon means significant coverage which means the amount of coverage. But notability the term is a proxy metric for the abstract quantity of being notable, which we judge based on significant coverage. Going back to the idea that the rules are principles, the point of IAR is that you're not supposed to rules-lawyer the letter of the law. You are supposed to internalize the deep values and principles, from which the practices emerge. That is why people often conflate notability, the measured quantity, with notability, the common sense common language idea that the wiki-jargon metric is attempting to capture a proxy for. Andre🚐 15:20, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Regardless of what quick fixes we come up with, I still believe that some form of RfC is necessary. We still have our best and brightest at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Events automatically !voting keep if something appeared in newspapers for a few days. Or even worse, "there was an incident and a trial, therefore it's sustained". Thebiguglyalien (talk) 14:01, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If the RFC goes the other way, are you going to stop !voting delete if something appears in the newspapers for a few days? If your own personal judgment of individual cases wouldn't really change as a result of the RFC, then I wouldn't expect anyone else's to change, either.
I looked at some of the AFDs listed there today. These three caught my eye:
Specifically, after three days, one week, and six months, respectively, each of the nominating editors felt like they already had enough information to determine whether the subject would have an enduring effect on the world. In all three of these cases, the event (a political statement, an airstrike, a mass shooting) is ongoing in some respect (e.g., the perpetrator of the mass shooting has not yet been tried). I'm not sure that I would feel so confident about determining the ultimate effect (or lack thereof) of these events before they are fully resolved. However, there were some other recent events in the list that I thought editors were rightly concerned about, e.g., an event in the Hamas–Israeli mess that was reported by one side and not (as of the time of nomination) confirmed to have happened by any independent party. I'm not sure that a single "wait until it's over before you declare that your WP:CRYSTAL ball says it has no enduring historical impact" rule would be a good idea. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:32, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

{{Article for deletion}} refinement

When an article is nominated for deletion it can create controversy outside Wikipedia, here's the latest for example: https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1707181074001121633. This problem I think can be because of how the template is worded and designed. The use of red color can be misleading, as if it's "warning this/your article is going to be deleted" and as if deletion is a bad thing (whatever the outcome, deleted or not, is actually a good thing as long as it's according to the policy); probably the color should be changed, or no color is needed at all. Only one user is needed to nominate an article for deletion, but the template doesn't really indicate that. Also the wording could be not neutral, as if the article is leaning to deletion. The bolded text could be changed to something like: "An user has nominated this article for deletion. An uninvolved administrator will decide whether this article, after discussion, is kept or deleted according to Wikipedia's deletion policy." Hddty (talk) 08:30, 5 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's fairly normal to use red to represent something been cancelled or deleted. A deletion nomination is more serious and urgent than most tags that appear at the top of articles, and I think it's a good idea to draw attention to that. Few authors of articles would agree that having their work removed is a desirable outcome or a "good thing", even if it accords with policy.
But I do agree that there's a common misunderstanding that a deletion nomination means that "Wikipedia" (which most people seem to assume is some sort of tech company that controls articles, even if the know that in theory we're the encyclopaedia that "anyone can edit") has decided that the article should be erased. We could easily avoid that by using more active wording, e.g. An editor has nominated this article for deletion [...]. We should probably avoid giving the impression that a single administrator decides anything, and perhaps make more explicit reference to the concept of consensus (since "please share your thoughts" often leads to drive-by voting). – Joe (talk) 10:07, 5 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
WRT red, it's not just that it can signify deletion (though you're right it does), it also ties into some more general visual shorthand. There is an escalating colour scheme for reader-facing tags - blue for the most neutral things like {{current event}}, yellow and orange for ones which indicate varying levels of content problem like {{very long}} or {{POV}}, and red for the most dramatic ones like {{copypaste}} or the various deletion templates. I think it's quite helpful to have that little visual flag. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:32, 5 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I feel a lot of the template messages come of rather cold. "There is a current discussion to decide if this article should be deleted" might come across better than "This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy".
Although I wouldn't worry touch about cranks on twitter using Wikipedia discussions for part of the culture war, whatever is done there will be some (of either side) who try to use it to create outrage. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 19:13, 5 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I've made some changes to the wording prompted by this discussion. Please take a look. – Joe (talk) 04:12, 6 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Convenience diff. Folly Mox (talk) 04:24, 6 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Text at WP:PROD and WP:CSD templates should probably be changed too. Hddty (talk) 07:54, 6 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For PROD, how would "An editor has proposed that this article be deleted" sound? Going off of the changes to the AfD template. Deauthorized. (talk) 18:55, 6 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't really know, better ask native English speakers. Hddty (talk) 03:11, 7 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Joe Roe and Sdkb: On my mobile screen there's a space missing before "Feel free", so it reads "retain it.Feel free" – but when I view it in landscape mode, "Feel free" drops down to a separate paragraph so I don't know what's going on there.
This seems like an unexpected place to be discussing major changes to a heavily-used template. Could we move this to VP/PR? For my part, I like the active voice but I don't think the link to the deletion policy should be hidden the way it is, so I'd like to see the wording workshopped a bit. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 13:22, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I can't reproduce that exactly, but it behaves strangely on mobile, both before and after our changes. Maybe something to do with this: Template_talk:Article_for_deletion/Archive_8#Edit_request_(mobile_support). Might be worth raising it at WP:VPT.
As for where to discuss, this is a template message, not a policy. I don't think it's necessary to discuss changes centrally, and it does not appear to have been done for previous changes. They were just proposed on Template talk:Article for deletion (because the template is protected) or done directly. – Joe (talk) 14:13, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I've linked to this discussion from Template talk:Article for deletion, because that's where editors wishing to discuss this will naturally go (and they might not find their way to Template:Afd/dated, where the changes were actually made). Sojourner in the earth (talk) 15:51, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
User:Sdkb, in Special:Diff/1178838002 you mention avoiding easter eggs in the edit summary, but link Wikipedia:Deletion policy to the text "whether or not", which confused even me, a person who knows what to expect this template to link to.
Might I propose a mostly-revert? Maybe something like "which will decide whether it will be retained per our deletion policy" or something similar? (I would personally prefer retained in accordance with our oder retained pursuant to our over retained per our, but I know we're trying to keep it concise and non-technical.) Folly Mox (talk) 17:30, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Or like which will decide whether to retain the article per our deletion policy. I don't know; I'm not really good with this kind of words. I just found "whether or not" to be confusing. Folly Mox (talk) 17:37, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Done. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:13, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I preferred sdkb's more concise wording. I don't think placing the link on "whether or not" was an easter egg; that's what the policy is about. By contrast, using "may" and "per" here makes the message sound colder and more legalistic ("per" here sounds straight-up ungrammatical to me, but I know it's used more loosely in American and Indian English), which is unfortunate given the goal of the sentence is to invite people to a discussion. @Folly Mox: Could you clarify, was it the placement of the link you didn't like, or the actual phrase "whether or not"? – Joe (talk) 04:05, 10 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
User:Joe Roe, it was the linking of just those three words that had me confused (I even clicked through, so maybe it was a feature). I think "which will decide whether or not to retain it" might be both clear enough for easily confused types like me, and also concise as is preferred. Folly Mox (talk) 04:36, 10 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I feel like the struggle for concision is resulting in a sacrifice of clarity in one part of the message or another. Does it really matter if the message is on two lines? My suggestion would be: You are welcome to participate in the deletion discussion, which will decide whether or not the article meets our criteria for deletion. (I prefer "criteria" because it's a little ambiguous whether "meeting the policy" is a good thing or not.) Sojourner in the earth (talk) 04:41, 10 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm fine with either suggestion, but the deletion policy almost always uses the word "criteria" to refer to speedy deletion, so that could be a source of confusion. – Joe (talk) 05:28, 10 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm. What about whether or not there is a valid reason for deletion. (With or without naming delpol after in the same sentence) Alpha3031 (t • c) 06:38, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This looks good to me and I think it helps address the problem -- whenever there are high-traffic AfDs, the coverage (in the news and on le social media) tends to be something along the lines of "I can't believe WIKIPEDIA is TRYING TO DELETE this thing". Which is understandable given what the message is -- the old version really did sound opaquely bureaucratic. (especially frustrating when the AfD in question is an inappropriate nom and very few people want to delete it, we're still forced to tell the world that for seven days we're unable to tell whether it's good or bad) jp×g 09:01, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
You may participate in the deletion discussion, which will decide whether or not to retain it But the discussion doesn't decide whether the article will be retained, the editors in that discussion (and closing administrator) do. – Teratix ₵ 14:53, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that sentence still looks awkward to me, and I agree with Joe above that "per" sticks out as ungrammatical. I'm also not sure about the relevance of the deletion policy to the actual AfD discussion. It makes sense to say that an editor has AfD'd an article in accordance with the policy that describes the deletion process, but we don't really use that policy to decide whether or not the article should be deleted. Could we maybe just revert back to Joe Roe's original edit, which changed the passive voice to active but left everything else untouched? That change seems to be uncontroversial, it's all the later copyedits that are causing difficulties. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 16:04, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Hddty, just in case it wasn't already obvious to you (or others), the big red box shown in that tweet is something that the poster drew. That's not what an AFD notice actually looks like. We use a different shade of red, and a lot less of it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:22, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm already aware that the poster drew the big red box. Hddty (talk) 17:23, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Having "welcome" in the template is a nice addition, but now in some discussion only extended confirmed users can edit in the discussion because of WP:ARBECR, should it be indicated in this template or not? (and also for Template:Title notice, and other template if it similar) Hddty (talk) 00:44, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Rewriting WP:N to reflect community consensus

I always thought how we lay out our notability guidelines are a) convoluted b) does not reflect community consensus, most glaring example being

"It meets either the general notability guideline (GNG) below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific notability guideline (SNG)"

This lumps all the SNGs into one group wholly seperate from GNG when in fact they have different levels of acceptance and independence from GNG. What is your opinion on replacing the lead of WP:N with something like User:Ca/Notability restructuring? Ca talk to me! 08:45, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it does say "A topic is rebuttably presumed to merit an article if:" That seems pretty correct. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:07, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
At this point I would call NSPORT a supplement to GNG, not a standalone notability guideline. Apart from that, the general principle is good; making it clear that meeting SNG's is not as good as meeting GNG will hopefully help editors realize that to future proof their creations they should ensure they meet GNG. BilledMammal (talk) 13:26, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Honestly at this point I think we would be better served by turning NSPORT into an essay, removing all language implying it's a notability guideline, and renaming it to make point clear (even deleting the NSPORT and "Notability (sports)" redirects, which implies an equality with actual notability guidelines that no longer exists.) The simple reality is that the idea of having a sports-specific notability guideline with any actual force to it has been rejected. As a result, the page not useful in its current form and isn't really a "notability guideline" because it is completely subsidiary to the GNG (IMHO all subject-specific guidelines are subsidiary to the GNG, of course; ultimately we need enough sources to write a neutral article. But NSPORT lacks even the force that the others have.) It's just an essay discussing things that might meet the GNG and possible places you might look for sources to do so. We need to put a stake in it once and for all, basically. --Aquillion (talk) 20:47, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There are aspects of NSPORT that remain important and suggest a higher bar than GNG to meet the expectations for notability - especially how it discusses prep and college athletes. But it also provides guidance on individual sport seasons. - Enos733 (talk) 22:05, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would not be in favor of the change. While some SNGs are more akin to WP:OUTCOMES than guidelines, there are good reasons why the SNGs exist and why they make sense as subject-specific alternatives to GNG (such as WP:NPROF). In general, the presumption of notability in some SNGs can and do limit which articles are brought to AfD and can provide some guidance to (new) editors about which subjects are likely to merit an article. - Enos733 (talk) 15:54, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think NPROF is actually unique in this way, there are no other "such as". Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:54, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There are NAUTHOR and NGEO. Newimpartial (talk) 17:25, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
WP:GEOLAND is a little special, acknowledged, but since when is NAUTHOR "explicitly listed as an alternative to the general notability guideline."? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:02, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It isn't "listed" in that sense, but it is "listed" as an exception to NOTINHERIT and offers a presumption of notability independent of the GNG, as NGEO and NPROF also do (as does ANYBIO, for that matter). Newimpartial (talk) 21:00, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'd also note that NAUTHOR, by being an exception to not inherited, often allows us to have fewer articles on the author/their works as several notable books/&c can often be covered in the article on the author. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:31, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Also, the real "teeth" of NPROF - the part that matters relative to the GNG - is that it allows us to use a very narrowly defined category of sources that wouldn't usually be considered WP:INDEPENDENT for GNG purposes, on the basis that some academic sources are sufficiently high-quality to overcome that hurdle. Despite what it says, it doesn't really really replace the GNG in that regard, it just clarifies how to apply it in a particular area. --Aquillion (talk) 20:56, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Often the sources are actually independent (ie citations in research papers by other scholars) but the coverage would not be considered sufficiently in depth. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:10, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Can I ask you what part of the proposal contradicts what your views? I tried to adjust the "tiers" so that it aligns with popular opinion. Ca talk to me! 03:46, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I know you weren't addressing me, but I think the biggest problem with the proposal is that it gives GNG notability the highest "level" as (perhaps) more than a rebuttable presumption for a topic to have its own article, compared with other grounds for Notability. I don't think this is true at present, I don't think this view has community consensus, and I think this interptetation of the Notability ecosystem (as a hierarchy, with GNG on top) actively works against the encyclopaedic treatment of topics. Newimpartial (talk) 16:22, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The prose of WP:N had a recent (last 2 or 3 years) addition to spell out the complicated nuances of the SNGs to the GNG. It is more complicated than the nutshell statement but the nutshell statement captures 95% of that otherwise. There is no need to change. Masem (t) 16:59, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The key thing is "presumed" - which means that if it meets these guidelines, it is up to editors at a deletion discussion that the page should not be included for WP:NOT reasons. Awesome Aasim 17:42, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The thing that I think we need to make clearer regarding SNGs is that, for the most part, they are guidelines to tell us when sources probably exist and where to look for sources. The thing we need to make clearer about the GNG is that it is explicitly not about if something is worthy of an article, it's about the fact that we cannot write an article without sources of information. Something is presumed to be notable (worthy of an article) if there are sufficient sources of information that we can write about it. If there are no acceptable sources, it's not that it's not worthy of notice, it's that we do not have the necessary raw materials to build an article. We have consistently made a mistake by calling topics for which there is insufficient available sourcing "non-notable". I do not think your proposed text clarifies that, and indeed I think it makes the situation more confusing, not less. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 18:18, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I do think that this bears repeating. The reason why the GNG finally put the first round of major disputes over deletion to rest is because it recognized that the key question wasn't "is this notable" but "do we have enough sources to write a neutral, independent article?" I don't think that an article that fails to pass the GNG is ever acceptable - it's the absolute minimum baseline below which it doesn't matter how "notable" an editor feels something is, we just don't have enough to write even the most basic stub in compliance with our policies. The real problem with articles that fail the GNG isn't that they're obscure or non-notable or whatever, it's that they involve original research, putting undue weight on a single source, relying too heavily on non-WP:INDEPENDENT sources, or relying too heavily on low-quality sources like raw databases and the like, which should never be used as the sole basis for an article. --Aquillion (talk) 20:50, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Its also important to remember that the GNG itself is also a rebuttable presumption. Just showing two or three sources may be reasonable at the start of an article's life, but the article cannot reasonably be expanded past that, it still can be put to deletion. It's part of the complex nature of the GNG and the SNGs that can't be easily expressed in one sentence, only the majority of cases as we already do in the lede. Masem (t) 00:14, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I do feel that the SNGs might be useful if, instead of trying to replace the GNG, they became more loose guidelines for "what should guide our judgement after the bare minimum of the GNG is satisfied." It might be worth at least considering an attempt to change the GNG to that end, ie. the GNG ought to be a hard bare minimum (with perhaps a small number of footnotes for cases where sources might be more useful than they'd appear at first), with SNGs mostly serving to answer where to go after that bare minimum has been satisfied. --Aquillion (talk) 05:21, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think the SNGs should be trying to serve that purpose only. We want the GNG and the SNGs to encourage editors to create articles that they can demonstrate may likely be notable (due to either existing sources or some type of high merit), but after that, when the rebuttal presumption comes into play is if there is simply no way to readily expand the article with more sources beyond a stub shape or other problem with NOT (eg overreliance on primary sources), and then we can talk whether retention in a larger article comes around or whether deletion is better. The SNGs can serve to say "look for additional coverage via these routes..." or "It may be better to cover this type of topic in a larger article..." with advice tuned to the field the SNG covers, but I don't think we should expect the SNGs to be for this purpose. Masem (t) 16:45, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
A side effect of the levels, is that we shift from: GNG is for everything, SNGs are for some stuff, to: GNG is the strongest form of notability, SNGs are weaker forms. I agree with BilledMammal that there are benefits. But sources may fulfill GNG without being sufficient to let us to write a basic, neutral outline of the subject. GNG is already applied too rigidly (i.e. nominally meets GNG = must Keep). These levels, with GNG placed at the top, risk making that rigidity worse, even omitting the are very rarely deleted wording. DFlhb (talk) 18:55, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree--I changed the wording around a little bit to reflect this. Ca talk to me! 06:22, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • More generally, no simplistic attempt to put GNG and SNG into tiers is ever going to reflect the complex relationships. Sometimes GNG trumps SNG, sometimes SNGs are held to overrule the GNG. The truth is the guidelines are often in conflict with each other; different editors understand that tension in different ways, and AfD exists to allow those different interpretations to be discussed as they apply to one individual case to come to a consensus on that individual case. If there was an easy codeable answer we could use just use speedy deletion. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:17, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with your point entirely. To be realistic, notability is a mess, and no single systematic treatment would be sufficient to describe how notability is applied across all of Wikipedia. However, I believe that the adage "perfection is the enemy of good" applies here. It took me insanely long time grasp what notability is(I used a different account in the past), and some more time to understand the complex interplay between SNGs and GNG. I incorporated your suggestion and softened the wording to show that this tier system is not meant to be rigid—–exceptions may, of course, occur. Though it is not perfect, I believe this change would provide at least a general guidance to new editors. Ca talk to me! 00:55, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
What might be helpful is some sort of Notability for Newbies essay, though presumably several already exist. Indeed I believe one main point of the more-explanatory SNGs is to try to explain what is often considered notable in a particular topic area to assist newer editors. Usually when I talk to new editors I try to explain the individual case at least briefly, and link to the Teahouse for further advice. In an ideal world, very new editors should not be creating new articles nor trying to get existing ones deleted. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:48, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder if NPPSCHOOL training materials couldn't be partly integrated into our notability guidelines. Most would be out of scope, but they do a robust job of explaining the way GNG and each SNGs fit together, and which takes priority in each case. DFlhb (talk) 06:05, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • GNG is not "the highest form of notability". In particular, for WP:NEVENTS meeting GNG is necessary but not sufficient to demonstrate notability. Some SNGs are stricter than GNG rather than being a run-around. Fences&Windows 10:57, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I interpreted the "lasting coverage" requirement in NEVENT as just showing how WP:NOTNEWS is applied when considering whether to have an article or now.
    After all WP:N currently says

    A topic is rebuttably presumed to merit an article if:

    1. It meets either the general notability guideline (GNG) below, or the
    2. criteria outlined in a subject-specific notability guideline (SNG); and It is not excluded under the What Wikipedia is not policy.
NEVENT is just clarifying how WP:NOT applies in practice. Ca talk to me! 12:10, 22 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Ca, this is probably obvious to you, but the WP:NOT exclusion applies to GNG subjects as well, and the way you've lined the items up here suggests that it only applies to SNG subjects. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Code of conduct for outreach projects

Do we have anything like a code of conduct for the organizers of outreach projects? For example, I suspect the following statement reflects our wishes but I don't know if we have it stated formally anywhere: "Organizers of outreach projects are expected to monitor the quality of participants' contributions. They should ensure any negative effects of the project such as copyright violations are promptly removed. It is not acceptable for a funded project to leave serious problems in Wikipedia for volunteers to find and clean up." Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 22:15, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think the movement has any written rules to that effect. I'm not sure that it's entirely applicable everywhere, or that this would be entirely appropriate. Consider:
  • The project has funding, but nobody's being paid for their time. Is it logical to say that the volunteers who organize an event be expected to deal with "any negative effects", so that volunteers (a group that includes the organizers themselves) don't have to do any work?
  • The project affects a small wiki, but there's no material difference between "the organizers" and "the volunteers" at that wiki. Do we need a rule that says they have to do the work that they're going to do anyway?
More broadly: Is it actually a bad thing for us to "clean up" after newbies who are trying to contribute positively? I don't know about you, but my first edits were not all perfect. I calculated recently that for the movement to get one high-volume editor like me, we have to put up with thirty thousand (30,000!) first edits. To get someone like you, we have to suffer through three thousand first edits (and 2,000 second edits, and so forth). Many of those edits are going to be imperfect. Some of them will be outright vandalism. This means, in turn, that the editors who welcomed us back in the day put up with many thousands of first edits just to find the two of us. If we want Wikipedia to survive us, we will need to extend that grace to the next generation.
And, realistically, outreach efforts might be better than the average newbie. Vandalism is much rarer with organized outreach events, and most of them provide some advice and check some of the contributions. They might not catch or fix everything, but they aren't worse than the completely unguided, unchecked contributions from equally new contributors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:34, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. This discussion is at the English Wikipedia Village Pump as I have no ambitions to tell anyone how to conduct their work on other Wikimedia projects. After reading your response I'm thinking perhaps some context on where I'm coming from might be helpful. I am not anti-outreach. I've devoted many hours to outreach over the years. I share your belief that attracting and welcoming new editors is critical for the future of our project. I'm also aware that many outreach events go fine and that these are the ones that we tend to not remember.
A subset of outreach events don't go well. Some go badly enough to overwhelm our quality control processes and cause experienced volunteers to temporarily burn out or worse. The worst events produce large volumes of crap that is harder to get rid of than most vandalism is. When that happens, we yell at the organizers to clean up the mess and we are unhappy if they don't. But the organizers 1) don't know if the people asking them to clean up actually represent Wikipedia, and 2) haven't budgeted any hours for cleanup because they thought Wikipedia stays crap-free by some sort of magic. This process is the status quo. Perhaps we can improve on the status quo by giving organizers our expectations in advance.
Another reason to share our expectations is that some donors hate the idea of sponsoring a project that ends up harming Wikipedia. If the conversation around grant-making can involve assurances that the organizers will follow Wikipedia's code of conduct for organizers, that can provide donors with a level of comfort that the risk of harm will be well-managed. Without this kind of assurance, some donors don't want to sponsor Wikipedia projects at all. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 22:07, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thinking about it from the good-faith organizer's side, imagine that you are organizing an online event. You've got some experience and you've done your homework, but something goes spectacularly wrong – say, you were expecting 20 people but you got 200, and half of them apparently subscribed to the theory that if it's not a copyright violation, then it's a violation of Wikipedia:No original research.
Now what?
Would you really want us to tell you that you have to personally clean up everything by yourself, while we all sit on the sidelines and complain about what a 'bad organizer' you are? Or would you like some help? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:13, 15 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think the best would be for organisers be aware that something has gone wrong and ask for help. Unfortunately it seems all to often organisers are unaware that anything is wrong. I would hope that the community would help anyone genuinely asking for help, I know I certainly would. I think of lot of poor sentiment comes from the community discovering this issue, and being unable to get an reply from the organiser. Maybe what is needed is better avenues of communications and some standards of expectations of communication. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 20:55, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing, regarding the spectre of editors making uncivil comments such as 'bad organizer', the possibility of incivility by people who think they are upholding behavioural standards is always a possibility. This possibility doesn't usually inhibit us from trying to articulate what our behavioural standards are.
I think both of you have made very valid points around flexibility and collaboration. "Clean everything up by yourself" seems to be too much to ask of everyone. How about starting with something along the following lines:
  1. Watch participants' user talk pages so you can be aware of issues raised by the community
  2. Spot-check participants' edits for quality
  3. Monitor your own user talk page and engage with questions and concerns that are brought to your attention there
  4. If people are raising concerns that you do not understand or know how to fix, ask at the Teahouse
  5. When planning a project, set aside some organizer time/budget to monitor and resolve issues with the quality of contributions
Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 23:32, 18 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds like a model that is common for in-person events (e.g., student group meets at the library). I'm not sure it would scale to, say, Wikipedia:Wiki Loves Monuments. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:26, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Outreach projects vary considerably in their format. Organisers often don't establish a relationship with the attendees or even know their accounts. For example, I recently attended an event which was organised as a project of the Oxford Food Symposium. The format was an online presentation which lasted just an hour and so just covered the basics of creating an account. The main presenter mainly had to cope with delivering the presentation which wasn't simple as she was using an unfamiliar computer. I and other experienced attendees helped out in various ways. One did some screen sharing while I focussed on tracking down and welcoming the newbies. As an event coordinator, I also gave them confirmed editor status for ten days to minimise trouble like captcha.
Sometimes, the dashboard feature is used to help identify participation and follow-up but that usually has a limited timescale. For a longer-term relationship, there's the mentorship features but I've not used them much yet. See the FAQ for details.
Andrew🐉(talk) 09:13, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I've been scratching my head over this for the past few days. The frustrations I have - and that I think we as a community have - are with well-funded projects where the organizers' success metrics are number of edits, number of articles created, number of participants, etc., with no attempt to measure or mitigate negative effects. Some of these projects involve series of editathons. Another type of project that I have in mind is where professional Wikipedians are paid to improve articles on sustainability issues. Sometimes a group gets a second round of funding and uses it all to do more stuff rather clean up past mistakes. A behavioural guideline would need some kind of scope about whose behaviour it applies to but 'm not sure how to articulate it yet. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 20:03, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Idea for Entry on Banned Board Game

Hey all, hope this is the place to do this. Im not quite experienced enough with this site to do this myself, but I found a very interesting banned board game that doesn't have a Wikipedia entry. Here are a few links if anyone would like to get started on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUXkBsfSZ_Y

https://archive.org/details/Public_Assistance_Game/

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3393/public-assistance

https://www.nobleknight.com/Publisher/Hammerhead-Enterprises

Good luck, have fun, and good night! JikiScott (talk) 17:18, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Read Wikipedia:Notability and Wikipedia:Reliable sources. There are innumerable things that don't have Wikipedia articles, and almost all never will.AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:26, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
And who exactly banned this? I can see mentions of stores not stocking this, as is their right, but no evidence that this was banned, or that anyone had the power to ban it. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:27, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

WP: Village pump is not really the place for requesting new articles. You could try Wikipedia: Requested articles, but please bear in mind that many of the articles requested there never get Wikipedia entries. YTKJ (talk) 06:21, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Adjusting the extended-confirmed criteria

At the moment, extended confirmed is a useful tool, but it suffers from a few deficiencies, most significantly that it is easy to game.

I would suggest we change the criteria to the following:

  1. 500 significant edits overall
  2. Including at least 250 in main space
  3. Including at least 100 in talk space
  4. Significant edits defined as "larger than 200 bytes" (the definition the community has been using at the various WP:LUGSTUBS requests)

From what I understand, this is not possible to implement on the MediaWiki side; instead we would need to create an adminbot that automatically grants the permission when the criteria is met.

This discussion is related to this ArbCom clarification request. BilledMammal (talk) 03:01, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The criteria can be gamed, but in examples I recall seeing it was always quite obvious that it was gamed. Unless I'm mistaken, the user right can be removed in those cases. (Am I mistaken?) CMD (talk) 04:41, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It can, but it isn't always, and that is even under circumstances where it is identified and reported. BilledMammal (talk) 04:48, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@BilledMammal, your account is 4.5 years old now. Have you calculated how long this would keep you locked out? I'm betting it's somewhere between 2 and 2.5 years, but I haven't bothered to see how many of your early edits were "insignificant". Do you have a rationale for us wanting to keep editors like you away from difficult subjects even longer?
It might also be interesting to see how much this would disfavor some of our patrollers. We have good editors whose net contribution is a negative number of bytes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:12, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Looking it up, it would have delayed me by just under six months; that might have been reasonable, but Redfiona's "still not extended confirmed" is definitely not. Clearly this proposal is faulty; I'll suggest a different one below. BilledMammal (talk) 09:35, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I have a distinct feeling that I'd still not be extended confirmed by these criteria, and I've had an account for 17 years. (Edited to add, I had a quick look on xtools, I became extended confirmed in 2016, I think these would likely have extended it to 2018 so WhatamIdoing's "an extra 2 years" maths works out for me.) Red Fiona (talk) 07:22, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Even without checking the "significant edits" criterion, my 500th edit (as caeciliusinhorto) was in October 2015, a little under a year after I joned; my hundredth talkpage edit was in April 2016, the same month I hit 1000 articlespace edits and got my second good article. The significant talkspace edits criterion would push me just over a month further, to 9 May 2016. In my first year and a half I didn't have any interest in ECP areas (and to be honest largely still don't) so it wouldn't have personally affected me, but tightening up the restrictions like this would certainly have a significant impact on honest editors. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:28, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, you still wouldn't be; you've only made 49 edits considered "significant" under the above definition to the talk namespace. My thinking was that it might be beneficial for editors to demonstrate they can communicate and collaborate, but that isn't practical because clearly you and editors like you should be extended-confirmed.
Perhaps we just change it to:
  1. 500 significant edits overall
  2. Significant edits defined as "larger than 20 bytes"/"large than 10 bytes" ("Larger" includes both edits that add content and edits that remove content)
20 bytes would have delayed my ECP by two months and RedFiona's by three months; 10 bytes would have delayed mine by two weeks and RedFiona's by two months.
The most common form of gaming that I have seen is adding a single wiki-link to article, which is a four byte edit; even if we only count edits over 10 or 20 bytes we will still create a substantial barrier to that gaming while having a negligible effect on good faith editors. BilledMammal (talk) 09:35, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That feels more reasonable to me. Even the ten byte threshold is enough to count out edits which only add or remove one or two wikilinks, change some punctuation, or fix a simple spelling error; I don't think it's unreasonable not to consider those edits as counting towards demonstrating the experience we would want to see from users in contentious ECP areas. Of course it's impossible to prevent gaming entirely without making life very difficult for good-faith editors, but if we think the current system is too easy to game this seems like a reasonable tweak to make things slightly more difficult. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:56, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder if it'd be not too hard to use a definition of significant that would count changing the sky is pink and fully fluorine to the sky is blue and mostly nitrogen. That gets a +1 but is a significant edit. Bit of an edge case but just looking at the +/- can be misleading with how much it changes.
Another threshold, which I think is simpler but captures some of the earlier proposed talk page edit count could be something like "Made significant edits to at least 10 distinct pages, excluding their own user and user talk space." Skynxnex (talk) 17:09, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@BilledMammal: I feel like this might just kick the can to other gaming strategies like adding shortdescs or expanding bare URLs (often +1kB). People who are really determined to game EC always will. If there's a group we can stop, it's the one's doing it on the spur of the moment—"Eh, I've got a few hours to kill, I can make 500 easy edits so I can tell the world how the real bad guy is $country". To that end, we could make it so you don't actually get EC for 4 days after qualifying. Even would leave room for admins to glance at who's on-deck to get EC, and whether any gamed it, and disable autopromotion if so. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|she) 17:21, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It already has a 30-day requirement, so I'm not sure what the extra half-week adds. If we wanted it to be longer, we could just make it longer. 30 days/500 edits could become 90 days/500 edits. If we haven't found a reason to block you in that amount of time, you're probably not a simple troll. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:19, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
If that doesn't tell me to use the talk pages more, nothing will :) Suggestion 2 works for me. I don't tend to edit pages that are covered by ECP, I was trying to think of a me who happened to be in a country whose articles are more frequently covered by that sort of thing. Red Fiona (talk) 18:54, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
An alternate suggestion: exclude reverted edits (and probably reverts also) instead of counting bytes. That both takes care of the add-link/remove-link 250 times strategy, and makes it more likely that, even if they do just do something like 500 shortdescs, we get some minimal benefit out of their gaming. (Under the original proposal here, I'd have been an admin well before being extended-confirmed. That 100 200-byte talk page edit requirement's a killer.) —Cryptic 03:38, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think that would be more effective at filtering out poor-quality edits (as well as potentially deleted edits which are also not live) than edit size requirements, as it would not excessively lengthen the wait to become extended confirmed (in my case, I recently became EC and more than half of my edits are less than 20 bytes (according to XTools), although it took several years to obtain it because I did not edit very frequently). The main shortcoming I can think of with this is probably where a user surpasses the edit requirements, but then has an edit reverted to bring their unreverted edit count below 500 again, although the difference seems a bit miniscule for it to really affect a user's perception of constructiveness.
Also, I think excluding reverted and/or deleted edits would be more useful with the semi-confirmed status (which is much easier to game) to filter out vandals/obvious sockpuppets and inexperienced editors that make misguided edits to ensure enough trust and at least some experience to edit semi-protected articles. While it could also be useful for EC as well, they are much more likely to be trusted not to make poor edits so it might not be considered as essential there. Xeroctic (talk) 11:22, 29 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't work in permission granting, but I'd guess that manually assessing each case at least for obvious gaming of the system, would result in time saving overall across the project. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:15, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The next obvious question: How many editors gain this permission and then display some sort of behavioral problem? We don't have very many bad-faith editors reaching this point. The problem likely isn't bad-faith editors (=trying to hurt Wikipedia on purpose). It's probably good-faith editors (=trying to help) who are inept (e.g., haven't yet learned to differentiate between the politics popular in their little bubble vs what the sources say). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:22, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That would certainly require more than a quick sanity check to detect. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:44, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree that we should ratchet up requirements in a way that forestalls gaming the system. There should be some number of clearly high-quality edits in the mix. Not necessarily all 500 of them, but some number. BD2412 T 02:40, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Centralized source assessment project

Would it be a good idea to create a source assessment project for subjects that are not (yet) notable or where it's unclear if they are notable or not?
Recently I created Wikipedia:SSSniperWolf sources overview and I think it's working pretty well. I moved that to project space on purpose because I didn't want to do everything by myself. All the potential sources are in one place instead of being scattered over various deletion discussions and deleted articles only admins can see. This makes it much easier to track the notability of a subject which often progresses over time. Questions like "doesn't (insert link to article) make this subject notable?" can be answered with a link to the centralized source assessment for that subject.
I'd imagine creating a project page named Wikipedia:Source assessment and creating subpages for subjects. An obvious concern would be for such assessments to turn into quasi-articles, but with some clear rules I think that's avoidable.
Thoughts? — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 16:39, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A very nice idea. AfD, but at the beginning of an article's lifecycle. I think this would benefit new and more experienced editors. Waste of editor time and effort creating articles on non-notable figures would perhaps reduce, given that an opportunity prior discussion of notability is possible. I've seen a similar idea at point 4 User:Sdkb/Vision for a better Article Wizard, which makes me too think that this could be implemented to Article Wizard, and that a system like this would also reduce the workload of AFC and NPP. NotAGenious (talk) 18:37, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Something like this could be useful for assessing drafts. A template or wizard to generate the table would help. There's a similar table in Wikipedia:Notability_(organizations_and_companies)#How_to_apply_the_criteria. Here's some existing notability essays that may help you frame the guidance for this tool: Wikipedia:Extracting the meaning of significant coverage, Wikipedia:Independent sources, WP:109PAPERS, WP:TRIVIALCOVERAGE, Wikipedia:Bare notability, Wikipedia:Multiple sources. Fences&Windows 23:33, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Collaborating with other encyclopedias such as Britannica

Instead of Wikipedia just dominating what's stopping you guys from collaborating with other encyclopedias to share/pool knowledge or help each other out in some other way? Americanfreedom (talk) 15:27, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We collaborate by default by licensing our content permissively: Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content. Other encyclopedias are generally free to use Wikipedia content within the terms of that license. If the other encyclopedias were to return the favour, we could do likewise. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 15:42, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Americanfreedom, Encyclopædia Britannica is a commercial enterprise. They probably wouldn't consider licensing their content freely to be compatible with their business model. Wikipedia requires content to be freely licensed. Wikipedia can technically borrow text from some freely licensed projects like Fandom (website). Unfortunately there's rarely any site with text that can really be used on Wikipedia without significant editing, at which point it's often easier to just start from scratch. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 01:47, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Third party vendors already perform the function of pooling knowledge from available sources, including encyclopedias. AI chatbot-powered search engines, for example. They have the potential to leap-frog encyclopedias within as little as 5 years. See https://www.perplexity.ai/    — The Transhumanist   21:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Rather minor point, but Britannica has for years been using one photo or another that I uploaded to Commons.[4] Donald Albury 00:09, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
They played around with the color balance a little, looks like. [5] [6] —Cryptic 00:24, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Which they are allowed to do, per the license. :) Donald Albury 14:59, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well, yes, if they credited you, and licensed their derivative work the same. Which I see no evidence of anywhere. —Cryptic 01:55, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Cryptic, it is credited, but you have to click the image to see the large version and uncollapse the description. There's no link to the original though. They also refer to the GFDL there, so I guess that's the license for the derivative as well. Though such a minor adjustment may well not be eligible for copyright protection depending on your jurisdiction, so I doubt it would legally be considered a derivative work. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 02:10, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Clicking the image in the article without javascript enabled takes you directly to the full-size version, with no hint that attribution or licensing information was omitted; and the derivative work I was concerned about is the article. Besides which, GFDL 1.2 - now that we can see that's the license they chose as the basis for reuse - requires preserving copyright notices, including a history of modifications and who made them, and a notice, in a specific form, that grants permission for reuse, none of which is done even for just the image itself. —Cryptic 03:14, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Cryptic, well there's two ways to look at this.
Creative Commons (but they're not using the CC license, which makes me wonder for how long they've been using that image - before 2010?) requires attribution "reasonable to the medium". I think the requirement for a browser that supports JavaScript is reasonable as all major browsers support that by default. Requiring something obscure or obsolete (e.g. Microsoft Silverlight) would not be reasonable. But as I said, there's no link to the original which CC requires if it's reasonable to the medium, and it certainly would be reasonable for a website.
the derivative work I was concerned about is the article.
That's actually not how a "derivative work" works, but I think I've been similarly confused in the past. The photo and the article are two separate works, they can exist independent from each other. A news article can use a photo with a CC BY-SA license without the need to freely license the article text. But if they make a derivative work, for example by moving people within the image around using photoshop, the derivative would have to be freely licensed.
The other way to look at it is simply this: they're using the GFDL license and GFDL is teh suck because it's so hard to comply with. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 05:08, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
As for how long Britannica has been using that image, I only know that a few years ago they were using a different image that I had uploaded to Commons. The Wayback Machine indicates that the current photo has been used in that article since it was first archived in 2015, but I remember another photo I had uploaded to Commons being used in the article, I just didn't think it had been that long since I saw it there. Anyway, as the copyright holder of the image, I'm not going to bust Britannica's chops over technicalities about how the licensing is presented. Donald Albury 16:03, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Donald Albury, I'd guess Britannica changed the URL scheme in 2015. If you can figure out what the URL for a Britannica article used to look like you may be able to find it. Not really important, but might explain why there's no archive of the article with the other photo. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 17:16, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, not a big deal. Oh, the photos were uploaded in 2007 under the GNU 1.2, which appears above the CCA licenses on the pages in Commons, which explains why Britannica is using the GNU license. It is one of the small pleasures in my life that photos I took with a point-and-shoot digital camera 16 years ago are still being used in both WP and EB. Donald Albury 18:43, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Americanfreedom: Encyclopedia Britannica is tiny compared to Wikipedia: see Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia. We have hundreds of thousands of contributors, they have a few hundred. Yes, they are well respected for a good reason, and yes we benefited greatly from their older (i.e., public domain) editions in our early years, but by now we have little to gain from them. They are free to consult WP, and even directly use our material (with attribution). We are free to consult EB, but we cannot directly use their material, and we need to find the prpper references, i.e., the ones they used. This arms-length "collaboration" works well enough. By many measures, WP is a "better" encyclopedia than EB. Do you have a suggestion for how we could better collaborate? -Arch dude (talk) 20:23, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Slavery Icon - near title for articles relating to the exploitation via slavery

My suggestion is for an icon (Chain or Fetters) on these types of articles:

• modern biographies: slavers, slave owners, slave traders.

• modern Monuments (statues) that are of one of the above

• modern Monuments (buildings) whose construction was financed in part or wholly by slavery

• modern Institutions who were funded in part of wholly by money originating from slavery, slavers, slave owners, slave traders

That the icon be placed at the top of the article.

That the icon can easily be placed/removed by any editor.

That the article must have an an explanation in the body of the article relating to the links on slavery.


I think there is a need for this as:

• it reflects a modern political consensus

• it reminds the reader that everything about the person/building/institution is tainted (a sort of shadow)

• it is an ironic branding for those who branded.


This is very much a draft type of suggestion, feel free to suggest alternatives, adjustments, or even rejection.

Yours ever, ~~~~ Czar Brodie (talk) 15:33, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Why slavery specifically? There are hundreds (probably more, probably infinite) topics that articles could be icon-tagged against, and this seems a particularly controversial one. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 15:45, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Slavery is something that I noticed is becoming very topical in labelling (people, buildings, institutions) outside Wikipedia, and its organisational Wikipedia absence caught my eye in articles I was editing. (I was looking for a way to label articles I noticed had slavers/slave exploitation/slave profit.)
Yes I agree that this concept could be expanded , but I do not think something should not be done because it has potential to be expanded. Yours ever, Czar Brodie (talk) 16:02, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The usual Wikipedia way of approaching this is categories, e.g. Category:Slave owners. There are mature guidelines to pay attention to that may temper the instinct to tag/categorize everything that looks a little bit slavery-adjacent. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:29, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, very good point, but my suggestion is for something bold and visible other that an academic grouping tucked at the bottom of the page with a bunch of other categories. i.e. John Threlkeld. Yours ever, Czar Brodie (talk) 16:48, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
apologies I forgot to address your good point : "a particularly controversial one". Yes, agreed, but I do not think that is reason to shy away from the issue. Yours ever, Czar Brodie (talk) 16:16, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. This is political activism, and an inherently-contentious form of that. Should University of Virginia be tagged with your scarlet letter? Virginia? Genghis Khan? There are no answers, and that is why this is an idea that shouldn't be pursued. Walt Yoder (talk) 16:10, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    University of Virginia, probably yes, with explanation in body of the article as to why; Virginia, no, states, countries in my view are outside my suggestion (needs to be focused). Genghis Khan, probably, the idea would not be limited to European/American slavery. Is it really that contentious? Those who think slavery is a good idea are now very much a minuscule minority. The contention would probably people who do not want to be reminded of this historical event. But is it Wikipedia's place to not upset them for consensus? Yours ever, Czar Brodie (talk) 16:26, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • It has nothing to do with anyone believing slavery is a good idea. It has to do with WP:NPOV and with the proliferation of such icons one could add (religious oppression? Gains from violence, e.g. the art in the Louvre acquired by the Napoleonic Wars? Women's oppression? Child abuse? Child labour? LGBTQ+ discrimination? ...) All it would do is clutter our pages, create countless heated discussions and edit wars, for very little actual benefit (more moral posturing than anything else). Fram (talk) 16:42, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      I disagree that something should not be done because it has the potential to proliferate. In a sense, for me, this this goes against the philosophy of Wikipedia. I see proliferation as beneficial, so it is difficult for me to argue. My idea of an icon is kind of designed to avoid clutter. I think only certain pages would have heated discussions. i.e. the example I used above, John Threlkeld, is not controversial so I doubt there would be edit wars, but George Washington on the other hand....I agree, but there will always be edit wars on these subjects with very notable people. I get your point, but I personally do not think this is reason to not proceed. Yours ever, Czar Brodie (talk) 17:07, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      We have a whole article (quite good, too!) George Washington and slavery so I don't think it would be *that* controversial. Mostly I think we just need to edit all the relevant articles to include the relevant material on slavery, with words, rather than with a digital stamp.
      Also, there is already a blurry old image of slave fetters that shows up as a thumbnail on all slavery related articles with their own thumbnail bc it's attached to the slavery navbox templates. jengod (talk) 02:20, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think this idea would bring more heat than light to Wikipedia. Yes, I agree that those who think slavery is a good idea are now very much a minuscule minority, but in the ancient world it was very much accepted. Would this icon be applied to nearly everyone from Ancient Greece or Rome that we have articles about? If we were to apply it consistently then it would. We should just describe people or institutions that were supported by slavery as reliable sources do, and in many cases that would mean inclusion of such content, but not a yes/no icon. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:48, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Very strong point @Phil Bridger that forces me to reconsider and adjust my proposal. According do you think it would be viable to limit the icons for those people/buildings/institutions in the modern era? Or still problematic? Yours ever, Czar Brodie (talk) 20:01, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I imagine there would also be difficulty and contention in labelling, for example, the Kafala system, which some have called "modern slavery" and others have rejected this description. Curbon7 (talk) 20:12, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for that @Curbon7, yes Kafala system is a good example. As with all articles it is best to go with the sources. From what I understood from reading the article it is not slavery but creates a situation where slavery becomes possible, so no, probably no icon for Kafala but rather icons for those who use it for slavery. My suggestion is for an icon to be be used on people, structures, and institutions, and I think Kafala system is more a law. But I did wonder if the football stadiums mentioned in the article could come under what I am suggesting. My conclusion is that if a stadium in mentioned by reliable sources as being constructed with slave labour (not just the Kafala system) then, yes, I would not have a problem with an icon identifying such, and think it would be helpful and informative to have this highlighted at the top of the article. Czar Brodie (talk) 20:48, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No, I don't think this is needed. If reliable sources document a person/institution's relation to slavery, then it can be put in the article anyway. This is simply redundant to the category system and may also be a violate of the No Disclaimers policy. I'm also a bit troubled by your want to "[brand] those who branded": in no way whatsoever do I condone slavery, but as editors we must write article neutrally, which this is not. Schminnte [talk to me] 23:52, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I feel the category system is the way to go. Is there a category for 'institutions which profitted from slavery'? – Reidgreg (talk) 05:32, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This is not the way to go. Adding this would be WP:UNDUE. And the second and third reasons are against the philosophy of Wikipedia (taint and branding) to not be a point of view pusher. For the first reason about political consensus, where is the proof for that? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 05:45, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Unnecessary and likely to be divisive, edit-war inducing, heat-generating, etc. Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:09, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
And we certainly don't need to bow to "modern political consensus". Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:09, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Czar Brodie: you write above Slavery is something that I noticed is becoming very topical in labelling (people, buildings, institutions) outside Wikipedia—can you give any examples of what this actually looks like? On first brush with your idea, I find myself agreeing with a lot of the comments above that "we add little icons for this one specific topic that people are going to fight about" is not a productive use of time, especially since we a) already have categories, and b) already have arguments about where those categories properly apply. Beyond that, I would think you'd be very hard-pressed to find an article where slavery or slaveholding is a significant part of the topic and it doesn't mention it in the body; beyond that, the idea that content follows from an icon someone unilaterally added doesn't actually match how our editorial practices work. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs talk 13:24, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
We don't need a "badge of shame" to suggest that "everything about the person/building/institution is tainted", as amusing as it might be to see how the kind of people who might support this idea would react to finding that Democratic Party (United States) would get said badge while Republican Party (United States) wouldn't. A topic's relation to slavery should be discussed in the article to the extent that such discussion is in accordance with WP:DUE. Anomie⚔ 18:23, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
On Wikipedia, we have article categories and WikiProject banners already. Maybe start a slavery taskforce under Wikipedia:WikiProject Human rights?
This "awareness icon" idea sounds like something a browser add-on or userscript could do. Fences&Windows 23:41, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • As others have already said, this is extremely problematic, and an aspect of WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS. Apply it to slavery, and now you'll have people asking for something similar to anti-abortion topics, white supremacy, anti-sematism, etc. WP is supposed to be amoral (we don't take any side on any argument), and even though we probably write from the position that slavery is bad, we don't give such topics any special marks against that point. --Masem (t) 00:24, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Display of references for section edits

I'd like to revive the idea from archive 11 (2013) to display references in the preview window during section edits. I have been thinking about this for some time, and I agree that it's tricky to realize for articles where the inline citations are placed directly in the prose part of the markup code.

However, there is a growing number of articles where the citations are placed in the reference section. How about marking articles of this type with a special template at the top like {{Article using bundled ref section}} or smth like that and display both the edited section and "References" section in the preview? I think, for this article type it should be possible to realize? That would definitely help a lot during editing. Henni147 (talk) 15:43, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References have been included in section edit previews since 2016. The task about being able to preview the content of named references defined outside of the section being edited is T124840, and isn't something we can do much about here on the English Wikipedia. Anomie⚔ 18:33, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Anomie: Thank you very much for the quick reply and the link to the related task! Henni147 (talk) 09:06, 1 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia Truth-O-Meter

I think people have suggested this before but maybe we have a personality-test style rating scale on each article (1-5) to see how true an article is. It would go False, Slightly True, Half True, Mostly True, True. The result is displayed as a bar graph. I know there's problems with this (bots, spam, people might vote straight away, e.c.t) but with enough polishing out we might have a good system. Maybe we could have a citation system like this too (same scale but majority is displayed) to show which ones are good and which ones might need to be replaced. 99.226.2.176 (talk) 12:57, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How do you define what is true and who would how "true" the article is? The essays at WP:TRUTH and WP:IKNOWITSTRUE might be applicable. RudolfRed (talk) 14:49, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This would be way too easy to abuse. QuicoleJR (talk) 17:03, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
So now we also have to define truth? Way too much to ask of volunteers. Edward-Woodrow • talk 20:08, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
We work on the basis of making all articles as true as we can. This sounds like a more agressive version of a POV tag, or some sort of social media "I like this" thing. Our problems are I think mostly about particular statements or sections rather than whole articles. I don't see this working. Johnbod (talk) 02:47, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Make the mobile "Add categories" editing mode available as a general option

Greetings and felicitations. I've just discovered that the mobile "Add categories" option allows access to an editing mode that encompasses an entire article, not just a single section, and does it in an actually readable font size. (This happens after you add a category, and are in the "save" phase. The current show full page mode is clumsy (I'm using iOS 16), but the "Add categories" mode is less so. —DocWatson42 (talk) 10:44, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Replace Template:Broken anchors with inline tags

Currently, editors flag broken anchors in articles by placing Template:Broken anchors on the article talk page. This means that broken anchors are less likely to be fixed because their maintenance template is off in the talk page rather than in the article itself. On the talk page, Template:Broken anchors is a large banner, and may contribute to banner blindness. In addition, talk page banners are usually for longer-term banners, not for ones that can have their relevant issues easily fixed in a single edit. Replacing Template:Broken anchors with an inline tag like Template:Citation needed would make it easier for editors to tag broken anchors and for editors to notice and fix them. QuietCicada - Talk 12:53, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Interactive collages/galleries for articles

Hello. I don't know if this is possible but I propose a way to make galleries more interactive (i.e. infobox collages and/or static gallery sections on articles become more like image slideshows). These slideshows could be linked to Commons categories relating to each topic; Commons galleries, which have a more refined selection of images; and/or manually queue images by adding them into the template. If manually inputted, each image caption could be edited as well. For the linked categories, it could either use the image captions on Wikimedia Commons or one umbrella caption for the template. To sum it up, collages and/or gallery sections on pages could be combined into one interactive thumbnail box which is animated (moves automatically) with the ability to become semi-static for mobile users (move between images with arrows). I have noticed many conflicts in the past about the size of infobox collages and whether gallery sections are notable enough to be included on pages. So this might be a compromise because the size of collages/galleries are limited to standard thumbnails but still include multiple images. Thank you for your time and have a great day! -- DiscoA340 (talk) 14:16, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Infobox guideline idea

One challenge for participants in, and closers of, infobox RFCs is that there is no guideline explaining how to determine whether an article should have an infobox, what factors should be considered, nothing against which to measure the strength of arguments.

The first paragraph of MOS:INFOBOXUSE says: The use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited for any article. Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article.

Here is an idea for adding two more sentences to the existing text: In discussions determining whether an article should have an infobox, editors should focus on whether the article as currently written has clear, policy-compliant (e.g. V, NPOV, BLP) information to fill enough parameters of an applicable infobox. Whether the information is "clear" and "policy-compliant," and whether there is "enough" of it to merit an infobox, should be determined by editorial consensus on a case by case basis.

This would help structure and focus discussions on something more measurable than just "infoboxes are useful/not useful." Feedback welcome. Levivich (talk) 23:26, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Disagree. I think the problem we have here is that there are insuperable differences between those who think infoboxes are generally positive and those who think the converse. Any formulation will appear to favour one side or other, depending on which side of the fence one occupies. It really just needs to be a case-by-case discussion, defaulting to status quo where there's no consensus to change. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:18, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Which side does this formulation appear to favor? Levivich (talk) 04:17, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Obviously, the one I don't personally favour! To give a slightly more useful answer, there are many reasons that an infobox in a particular article might not be optimal, not all of which are to do with whether there is enough information to put in it. Espresso Addict (talk) 10:19, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In May, I helped draft a proposal, but while there was plenty of editors who wanted to find a way forward there was no consensus on how to do it. Nemov (talk) 04:07, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure this will have the desired impact. The "infoboxes are useful/not useful" arguments are already about whether infoboxes are clear/NPOV/BLP, and the proposed sentences seem to spell out a number of different ways this can be argued. CMD (talk) 05:33, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
You say that last part like it's a bad thing? Levivich (talk) 05:56, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This will give anti-infobox sentiments more of a leg to stand on, when they were just about beginning to die out (here, I mean classical music articles). If I correctly understand the article that led to this, it's too small a problem to address in that MoS. DFlhb (talk) 06:09, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't about any one article or any one RFC. This is coming out of admins pointing out at AN that there is no guideline explaining how editors should decide whether or not an article should have an infobox. AFAICT, all previous attempts at a guideline proposal have focused on categories of articles, answering the question "what kinds of articles should have infoboxes," rather answering the question, "how do we decide if a particular article should have an infobox?" Levivich (talk) 06:25, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I'd missed the AN followup. I'd support your idea, or something similar, because too much time was wasted and guidelines can address that, but I'm not sure if this idea is sufficient, because "fill enough parameters" is still subjective. Perhaps consider wording like: "beyond trivial factoids"; that's wording I took from Isaidnoway's comment in the original discussion. DFlhb (talk) 07:14, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Levivich, with reference to the timing and the AN, I appreciate the effort, and think something similar will eventually be fruitful, but think it might be the wrong time to advance solutions in light of the unresolved behavioral issues at that AN; hence, I oppose for now as the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
The idea that there is no policy to enforce is misleading; ARBINFO2 remedies already gives guidance about conduct and about how to approach the content, that is not being adhered to and is not even being addressed by admins. Having stepped back through the diffs in that case from the first callous post on 26 September, it's apparent the recurring problems are not a lack of guidance, rather behavioral issues that haven't been clearly examined at that AN, and in fact, have been obscured and only partially represented there. And it's unclear there would even be an infobox problem if those recurring misbehaviors and misbehavors were addressed. The discussion at AN hasn't presented all of what would be evidence in what should be a third arbcase (since admins aren't adminning the misbehavors that would be sanctionable even without CTOP, it seems Arb Enforcement has been rendered toothless in infobox disputes). Bad cases make bad law, so I suggest now is not the time to advance your idea. Particularly if dealing with the misbehavors first would address the problems (I believe it would, as the behaviors are a simple repeat of ARBINFOBOX1).
Looking at the specifics of the wording you advance, I similarly don't think it addresses the problems we're seeing; there are individuals who honestly believe that how many children one has, or the name of one's spouse, constitute meaningful neutral verifiable information worthy of an infobox. (I wonder how many BLP subjects who don't have children by choice, or can't have children for other reasons, feel about that being the summary of their accomplishments ... or how a BLP subject who has great accomplishments in life feels about having their mistaken marriage of youth featured as one of their main characteristics). Moving the argument from proper conduct in an infobox discussion, to your proposal, won't address the improper conduct; it just changes the target of the misbehavior from whether to include an infobox to whether how many children one has is a defining characteristic of their life accomplishments that made them notable. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:38, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal to reduce citation clutter

Withdrawn by proposer in the face of WP:SNOW. Anomie⚔ 23:34, 6 November 2023 (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.

In my opinion, many Wikipedia articles suffer from citation clutter, particularly in sections covering controversial topics. The numerous in-line citations can disrupt reading flow, particularly for those who are not from academic background or are new to Wikipedia, and make the text look messy.

I think we can improve this by displaying all citations at the end of each paragraph by default. Furthermore, if a paragraph contains more than two citations, we could collapse them into an expandable symbol.

These changes would make articles more readable and visually appealing without compromising on the verifiability or the accessibility of sources. Advanced readers should be able to disable this feature. Marokwitz (talk) 07:22, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

EDIT: I am retracting this suggestion following your feedback, a refined suggestion is in the next section.


This should be at WP:VPI. The technical village pump is to discuss technical implementations and problems, not whether something would be desirable. Feel free to remove this section, including my comment. Johnuniq (talk) 07:56, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, moved to VPI.Marokwitz (talk) 08:23, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think this is an issue in practice, as citations can already be bundled together; for example, see footnotes 3 and 4 in Marjorie Taylor Greene. Curbon7 (talk) 08:33, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Marjorie Taylor Greene's article lead serves as a prime example of a section overwhelmed with mid-sentence citations, even after manual bundling. This format can be particularly disconcerting for readers, especially those without an academic background.
Bundling citations, while useful, carries significant drawbacks. It obscures which sources verify particular facts within a paragraph and complicates the reuse of citations elsewhere in the document without deconstructing the bundle.
Therefore, I propose a straightforward alteration to the visual presentation of citations. Wikipedia is not written on paper and we have modern technology that allows us to present things with better UX. Marokwitz (talk) 09:17, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose A lengthy paragraph may contain several discrete assertions, each verified by a discrete citation. For maximum benefit to the reader, the phrase or sentence making an assertion needs to be immediately followed by the appropriate citation. A two citation per paragraph limit is impractical, and collapsing citations is a bad idea for readers. I admit that I occasionally see a controversial sentence followed by nine citations, but that is a problem to be addressed at the individual article level. In 14 years of conversations about Wikipedia, I do not recall anyone telling me, "You have too many citations in your articles" or "I do not like citations in the middle of a paragraph". I see a project-wide proposal like this as a solution in search of a problem. Cullen328 (talk) 08:48, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Why is collapsing citations detrimental to readers? How inconvenient would it be to click to expand the list in the rare cases where it is lengthy? Why must Wikipedia resemble a paper publication when we have access to modern UX controls that enable the collapsing and expanding of citations? I believe we need to prioritize the continuity and flow of reading and take into account those without an academic background. I'm just proposing a better display that prioritizes continuous reading, not a fundamental change in how articles are written. Marokwitz (talk) 09:22, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, I have had people complain about excessive citations in the paragraphs, although sometimes they were in the middle of sentences. Sometimes I think that making the footnote symbol a little bit smaller might make some pages more readable. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:26, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mid-paragraph citations are necessary, particularly when discussing controversial topics, so it's clear which sources support any particular statement. That part of this proposal is a bad idea. OTOH, I do like the idea of a user script or gadget that would turn [1][23][42][etc] where it does occur into something like [+], because it might reduce the number of cases where people insist on doing WP:CITEBUNDLE. Anomie⚔ 12:29, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree in principle -- and in my own writing I normally put citations only at the end of paragraphs. An occasional exception, however, should be made for sentences or words that are especially inflammatory, i.e. "Joe Blow said Jane Doe is a fascist." In that occasional case I believe a citation directly following the text is necessary. A problem is citation overload. Example: a previous editor has added a citation or two to a paragraph. I come along years later and revise or add material to the paragraph and add another citation or two while leaving the older citations. Pretty soon you have a citation jungle that looks goofy to the reader.
  • A remedy might be a recommendation stating a Wikipedia preference for bundling citations together into a single footnote at the end of paragraphs. Example. "Jane Doe said BS." <open ref> Jones, page 15; Smith, page 24; Journal for Advanced Pedantry, page 56.</closed ref> That way you would have only one footnote at the end of each paragraph instead of several which would improve presentation. Moreover, for the technically incompetent (me) that procedure doesn't require any complicated gadgets. Smallchief (talk) 12:32, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't agree that anything needs to be done on a project-wide scale to make our text more visually appealing or cater to readers who don't encounter citations in their typical reading. I do agree that citations could often be better placed, or bundled more frequently, but this is more a problem for editors than for readers.
    The most common case seems to be doing a full inline cite every time, with the wikicode bloating haphazardly over the years, making the actual prose diffecult to locate in skins that don't support syntax highlighting (like Minerva). Sometimes bots will come along and name identical citations for reuse, but they'll never move them to the |refs= parameter of {{reflist}} for LDR, or convert them to {{sfnp}}s or the like.
    I do think more and better bundling and scootching the citation code out from the prose would be better practice, but leaving citations in full form wherever they start out is hardly our most detrimental poor citation practice.
    Without a background in the codebase, it's my initial take that the original idea here would be difficult to implement, but it might not be as hard as it seems if the software has a strong idea of where paragraphs begin and end. I don't think this would be something we'd want to have turned on by default: I'm imagining readers astonished about some extraordinary claim that seems unsourced, dropping into edit mode to slap down a {{cn}}, only to find that the statement was actually thoroughly sourced, but the citation was disconnected because they hadn't tapped the right thingy.
    I'm not opposed to a user script or something that could toggle the visibility of citations (the superscript numerals are clearly marked in the html, so should be easy to mark as hidden or visible with javascript). I don't think making the blue clicky numbers smaller (Jo-Jo Eumerus's idea) is practicable: they're already the smallest size reliably selectable on mobile; the text would have to be made larger instead to increase the size difference between the prose and citations. Folly Mox (talk) 13:14, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't object to collapsing multiple citations but I really, really, really don't like forcing citations to the end of the paragraph. We'll end up losing more text-source integrity, especially if it's a long paragraph. It also makes it more difficult to find out if the sources verify the paragraph, since you have more text and more references to look through. I've made an example below, copied from Myzobdella lugubris. One sentence here I made up and inserted.
What is known for certain is that crustaceans act as vehicles for cocoon deposition and dispersion. The leeches lay their egg cocoons on the carapace of the crustaceans, sometimes in great numbers: one study found an average of 118 cocoons on 18 crabs. A population of the leeches found in Nova Scotia appear to lay their eggs exclusively on the legs of their hosts. Another related species, Myzobdella platensis, may be a true parasite of the blue crab. Other animals affected by M. lugubris include shrimp, oysters, crayfish and prawns.[1][2][3][4][5][6][3][2]
It shouldn't be that hard, but it makes it harder than it should be. Compare to the original, end-of-sentence-cited paragraph.
What is known for certain is that crustaceans act as vehicles for cocoon deposition and dispersion.[6][3] The leeches lay their egg cocoons on the carapace of the crustaceans, sometimes in great numbers: one study found an average of 118 cocoons on 18 crabs.[2]A population of the leeches found in Nova Scotia appear to lay their eggs exclusively on the legs of their hosts. Another related species, Myzobdella platensis, may be a true parasite of the blue crab.[6] Other animals affected by M. lugubris include shrimp, oysters, crayfish and prawns.[1][2][3][7][8]

References

  1. ^ a b "Myzobdella lugubris". invasions.si.edu. Retrieved 2023-01-28.
  2. ^ a b c d Daniels, Bruce A.; Sawyer, Roy T. (May 1975). "The Biology of the Leech Myzobdella lugubris Infesting Blue Crabs and Catfish". The Biological Bulletin. 148 (2): 193–198. doi:10.2307/1540542. ISSN 0006-3185. JSTOR 1540542. PMID 1156600.
  3. ^ a b c d Sawyer, Roy; Lawler, Adrian; Overstreet, Robin (1975-01-01). "Marine Leeches of the Eastern United States and the Gulf of Mexico with a Key to the Species". Faculty Publications from the Harold W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology.
  4. ^ M.C. Meyer; A.A. Barden, Jr. (Fall 1955). "Leeches Symbiotic on Arthropoda, Especially Decapod Crustacea". The Wasmann Journal of Biology. 13 (2). Retrieved 2023-01-29.
  5. ^ "NOAA technical report NMFS SSRF". National Marine Fisheries Service. 1971.
  6. ^ a b c Zara, Fernando José; Diogo Reigada, Alvaro Luiz; Domingues Passero, Luiz Felipe; Toyama, Marcos Hikari (Feb 2009). "Myzobdella platensis (Hirundinida: Piscicolidae) is True Parasite of Blue Crabs (Crustacea: Portunidae)". Journal of Parasitology. 95 (1): 124–128. doi:10.1645/GE-1616.1. ISSN 0022-3395. PMID 18601577. S2CID 23393406.
  7. ^ M.C. Meyer; A.A. Barden, Jr. (Fall 1955). "Leeches Symbiotic on Arthropoda, Especially Decapod Crustacea". The Wasmann Journal of Biology. 13 (2). Retrieved 2023-01-29.
  8. ^ "NOAA technical report NMFS SSRF". National Marine Fisheries Service. 1971.
Edward-Woodrow (talk) 13:09, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
See here we have some examples of live citations with actual poor practice:
  • 4 and 7 are the same, as are references 5 and 8 (this is an artifact of the copypaste, not in the live article)
  • no information on reference 1 (what is "invasions.si.edu"? inspecting the source reveals "Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Marine Invasion Lab")
  • references 2 and 6 have non-free URLs, duplicating the DOI, linking a publisher paywall page
  • reference 3 has dumb hosting information instead of the actual publication information (Journal of Natural History 9:(6)), with an artificially specific publication date, and no doi, even though it has one
  • reference 4(=7) has an unnecessary |access-date= parameter, even though it cites a printed source that does not change over time
  • reference 5(=8) completely lacks correct attribution, instead just a publisher id code (it's actually Marlin E. Tagatz and Ann Bowman Hall, "Annotated Bibliography on the Fishing Industry and Biology of the Blue Crab, Callinectes sapidus").
This is what happens when we let javascript cite our sources for us. Folly Mox (talk) 13:33, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose bundling all citations at the end of a paragraph. This can/will lead to much worse problems with WP:V policy than the aesthetic problem of many citations. This proposal will reduce verifiability and lead to worse issues in contentious topics. There may be a problem that needs to be solved, but it has to do with editor behavior, not how to write and place citations. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:31, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    To clarify, I'm only advocating for a 'display mode' that groups the citations together, no changes in the way articles are written. Rather, when WP:V is needed, one could click on a tool, and the citations would revert to their standard position. However, 90% of the time, users are only interested in reading, and the citations can be obstructive. Maybe we can call those modes "Reading Mode" and "Scholar Mode". What do you think? Marokwitz (talk) 14:48, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    We're putting the cart before the horse by putting readability before verifiability/accuracy. What's the point in reading wikipedia if there's lessened guarantee that the content is accurate? And isn't this just going to lead to a spate of people not understanding what's going on and slapping a ton of CN tags into the middle of paragraphs? Making this a default view seems like a very bad idea to me. Hog Farm Talk 14:51, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, agreed... further to my comment below (which was made before seeing this clarification here) I don't think having separate "reader" and "editor" views is particularly a good idea either. The goal is for those readers who are so inclined to become editors themselves, and we don't want to entrench a view of the prose which differs from how it's supposed to be written...  — Amakuru (talk) 14:55, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Heck no - moving all citations to the end of a paragraph is just going to make a verifiability mess. It's often quite important to tell what exactly is being sourced to what, as source acceptability will vary by topic matter. Verifying content in sources will become extremely difficult in many cases with this. Our guidelines/procedures for handling direct quotes and controversial material pretty much require direct inline citation at times. This proposal is pretty much a non-starter if WP:V will continue to have any sort of meaning. Hog Farm Talk 14:47, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Can you look at my previous response? I think my proposal is misunderstood. Marokwitz (talk) 14:49, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose per Sandy. As someone who spends a fair bit of time reconciling citations to the text they claim to cite, I'd say the problem is almost the opposite of that stated. Rather than mandating the pushing of references to the end of paragraphs we should be discouraging it. The references should be adjacent to the piece of prose they're verifying, for easy checking. As an aside, I also have to say I don't like the convention of not putting citations in the lead - obviously I understand the theory that everything in the lead summarises something in the body, but if I were the mythical god-of-the-wiki I'd say just put the same cite in the lead as well as the body. As things stand it just makes is all the harder to check whether what's written really is cited or not - particularly when the language used isn't the same. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 14:50, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Amakuru we may be getting off-topic, but see the observations from Sphilbrick at Wikipedia:Featured article review/Harriet Tubman/archive1; I'm unsure where I stand on that, but Sphilbrick is a thoughful editor who brings forward an interesting dilemma. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:50, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Yeah, @SandyGeorgia: I think for me this is almost a no-brainer - I think every mention of every fact, even in infoboxes and other tables should be cited, not this "it's cited here so no need to cite it here" business. I suspect there'd be fierce resistance, and not sure I have the time or energy to pursue it right now, hence an off-topic comment in this now-withdrawn discussion may have to do! But off the top of my head, good reasons for doing this include:
    1. Makes it easier for people (for example when I'm looking at potential POTD articles) to check citations without having to use Ctrl-F or comb through the article for wherever the fact in question is cited.
    2. On a related note, the lead is by far the most likely site for drive-by additions by inexperienced editors or those who can't be bothered to cite their sources.
    3. Ensures that if the text in the body is subsequently altered, or the text in question removed, then the lead citation is still there.
    4. Sphilbrick's point about giving readers more confidence in trusting and verifying what they read in Wikipedia is a very good one too
    The reality is that many non-FA leads have cites in them anyway, and when I'm trying to stitch up POTDs with enough verifiable material to include in a blurb, I'll just directly cite lead material myself too, rather than faffing around adding it in triplicate... Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 17:37, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • (edit conflict) Hell no. Watch WP:V go up in smoke the moment you do that. This is a messy solution looking for a problem. - SchroCat (talk) 14:51, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose per WP:V and SandyGeorgia. Harrias (he/him) • talk 14:56, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I would strongly oppose this. It would dilute wp:verifiability by removing the requirement for the direct connection between the stated fact and the citation supporting it. North8000 (talk) 17:58, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like to retract my suggestion. Please see a refined proposal in the next section. Marokwitz (talk) 14:57, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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.

Refined Proposal to reduce citation clutter

I would like to adjust my above suggestion. What I am proposing a 'Reading Mode' where citations are bundled and collapsed at the end of paragraphs, providing a cleaner view for those primarily interested in the content. This would be in contrast to a 'Scholar Mode,' which would maintain the current format with citations in their usual place for in-depth study and verification.Marokwitz (talk) 14:54, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • I don't like this idea. While regular Wikipedia editors like us will understand how this works, the average reader might not know about the two different views, and will be confused when citations disappear. Also, Wikipedia is an information and research website that shows where we got our information from: we should be proud that we have footnotes at the end of the sentence that it is verifying, not trying to hide them for readability. Z1720 (talk) 14:57, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No; same problems, explained by others in the previous section. Whether reader or editor, we want both to be able to verify each bit, and particularly readers who aren't editors. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:51, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Text–source integrity is important for editors and readers. Do you have any evidence that the average reader struggles to read paragraphs interspersed with footnotes? – Joe (talk) 16:02, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Joe, Here is an example article, Suvigya Sharma with many wikilinks, cites. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 16:20, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That's an example of an article with footnotes within paragraphs. I'm asking for evidence that this has a significant effect on readability, for the average person. – Joe (talk) 16:23, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It is a good example for how too much notation kills the readability of an article. It is of course subjective but for me, this is annoying to read despite years of Wikipedia experience. No academic journal would read like that.
A clutter-free interface reduces cognitive load, making content easier to understand for individuals with cognitive disabilities or attention disorders.
While I don't have 'evidence' pertaining to the average reader - but I am confident we can improve upon the current design that relies on the text being interrupted by strings of tiny numbers.
This is an Idea lab. Let's imagine how Steve Jobs would have designed Wikipedia! Marokwitz (talk) 16:27, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't find that article annoying or difficult to read (maybe because I'm used to Harvard referencing, be thankful we didn't go that way!) – I'm probably not representative in that regard, but that's the problem with anecdotal data. As you say this is the idea lab and I'm not saying you should have done a UX study or anything, but Wikipedia is one of the most widely-read websites in the world so if this change is going to happen then, well, someone needs to do a UX study. As for a Steve Jobs-designed Wikipedia... I'm glad I don't have to imagine that dystopia. – Joe (talk) 16:41, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well, probably not as bad as an Elon Musk Wikipedia - [7] Marokwitz (talk) 16:48, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I've always had the belief that regular-folk readers of WP articles have long since (unconsciously) learned to visually ignore the blue superscript citation notations. Regular readers don't care if they are bundled or individual, or whether they are at the end of clauses, sentences, or paragraphs, or if they repeat the same number on consecutive sentences, or if groupings are not in ascending numerical order, or if they do or don't appear in any other way WP editors have been known to debate about. Regular readers just don't see them. Wasted Time R (talk) 16:55, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I think we'd need some really strikingly clear data that readers are somehow underserved or misled in order to implement this. Right now this feels like the realm of browser extensions and userscripts. —siroχo 18:52, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No. We should be proud of our citations, not trying to hide them. Edward-Woodrow (talk) 20:42, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I would strongly oppose this. It would dilute wp:verifiability by removing the requirement for the direct connection between the stated fact and the citation supporting it. This isn't just for scholars to analyze it's for regular readers who might want to see the specific source that supports the specific claim. Also, which thanking Marokwitz for their concern, work and initiative in bringing this up, it is a non-solution (how would moving cites around reduce clutter) for a non-problem (seeing cite marks is routine reading in Wikipedia and elsewhere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by North8000 (talk • contribs) 18:05, November 6, 2023 (UTC)

The idea is to take the citation marks out of the sentences so that they don't interfere with reading flow, and collapsing long

strings of citation marks by using an expandable "+" icon. In addition, a reader can click on a button to switch to scholar view which shows the exact location of the citations Marokwitz (talk) 18:20, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • Is it such a fundamental and far reaching change really being proposed on the back of an evidence-free, anecdotal "I don't like it"? For shame. Gog the Mild (talk) 18:27, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Why so negative ? Isn't this the right place to suggest ideas ? Marokwitz (talk) 20:25, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • User:Marokwitz, why this intermediate level at all? Why not just a "show / hide citations" toggle (defaults to "show", obvs), so that if readers are getting distracted from the prose by the numerals they can just hide them until they want to check them? I'm not grasping what a single expandy pile of paragraph terminal citations you have to tap to locate citation position would accomplish that a simple visibility toggle wouldn't. Folly Mox (talk) 18:57, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    t is possible, I suppose, but I believe that would contravene our core principle of verifiability. Showing a citation mark at the end of each paragraph, which enables jumping to the correct citations for that paragraph, seems to be a good compromise. In academic literature, multiple citations within a sentence to indicate the source of individual words are seldom used; this approach is excessive in 90% of cases. I aim to reach a compromise that is sufficient to become the default for many readers who do value verification. Marokwitz (talk) 19:51, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

On the subject of citations, I pulled a random book off my shelves: When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away by Ramón A. Gutiérrez, 1991, Stanford University Press. In a quick survey of the book, I didn't find any footnotes in the middle of paragraphs. Single footnotes, and only single footnotes, were at the end of paragraphs and often cited two or three sources for the text of said paragraph. Well, if it's good enough for Stanford..... Also, I note that Parenthetical referencing is deprecated by Wikipedia. (An example of parenthetical references: "Smith said the sun is hot (Jones, 2000, page 12) but Clark said it is cold (Walters, 2023, page 251))". Why is parenthetical referencing deprecated? In the discussion about its deprecation, it was called inelegant and distracting, hindering the reader. I suggest that a plethora of blue citation marks distributed thickly inside a paragraph of text has the same inelegant and distracting impact.User: Marokwitz makes a good point. Smallchief (talk) 21:44, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Keep in mind, many books and papers out there tend to be secondary sources, meaning that citations are provided for related but slightly different reasons than at Wikipedia, which is not only a tertiary source, but one with a very strong verifiability policy. The differences in location, frequency, and scope of citations can be explained in large part by that distinction. —siroχo 23:28, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
But the proposal does not suggest weakening verifiability; rather, it is a display option that presents simplified citation marks to optimize for continuous reading. This actually allows for the addition of *more* quotations placed directly after the facts they verify, without hindering the reading experience of casual learners - a single click would display the detailed citation marks. Marokwitz (talk) 06:20, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The difference is that academic publishers are generally publishing works that are meant to represent new research, adding to the sum of human knowledge, while Wikipedia is not to be a place of original research. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Hog Farm Talk 23:44, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Books from academic publishers can't remotely be compared to "the encyclopedia that any idiot can edit", and don't have credibility or verifiability issues we do. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:46, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I reran this experiment with five arbitrary books on my shelf, and all had mid-paragraph citations. Two had mid-sentence citations (one Harvard parenthetical style). Folly Mox (talk) 03:38, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Academic reviews always have abundant mid-paragraph citations, it's only original research and essays, where the viewpoint is the author's, that don't. And academic reviews are authored by topic experts, not a heterogeneous group of volunteers who are usually not topic experts. Espresso Addict (talk) 10:32, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Generally, where there are multiple refs at the same place, the solution is a combination of a) not using every ref that says the same thing, but just the strongest (one or two), and b) "bundling" the refs so only one number appears in the text. Generally a semi-colon does this fine. Johnbod (talk) 02:51, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discretionary citations in reflist

LaTeX has several packages that allow an author to use a list of citations selectively, i.e., any citations that he does not cite are ignored with no message. A similar facility would be useful in wiki. As a start, a |discretionay=yes parameter for templates called within {{reflist|refs=}} would help. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:59, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We have this too. It's the "Further reading" section. The reference section is for sources that are cited. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:18, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

New watchlist idea

This is probably more of a MediaWiki suggestion than a Wikipedia suggestion, but if we get support here, we could ask on MediaWiki.

The goal of the watchlist is to show new edits to your watched pages. When viewed in "latest revision" mode, if the newest edit is a minor edit, a small "m" will indicate this. However, most editors want to review the whole set of recent edits, not just the last edit. Some have complained that a significant change was marked as minor on their watchlist, just because the last edit was minor.

I think any of the following would improve the watchlist in "latest revision" mode:

  • We could add a box to indicate whether all the recent edits were minor
  • We could indicate the number of edits if it's more than one
  • We could show the total number of bytes added or removed in all the recent edits

Kk.urban (talk) 18:31, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like what you want is the "show all revisions, grouped by page" mode that already exists. Anomie⚔ 23:40, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I would really appreciate it if we could put the village pump back.

Many moons ago in this village, there was a wonderful picture of a village pump where anyone could go get some fresh sweet Wikipedia water. I miss that pump so much. Look Wikipedians, I know its the future now, its 2023 and all, but what the heck is a village pump page without the village pump? Please all of you fine citizens of this magnificent community, please bring back the famed village pump. JaydenBDarby (talk) 18:59, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Boldly  Erledigt... I'll see how long it takes for it to be reverted for some reason. Edward-Woodrow (talk) 22:08, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
We are going to PUMP YOU UP! RoySmith (talk) 22:23, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much, Edward-Woodrow! I appreciate it! That fresh, cold Wikipedia water is so good! JaydenBDarby (talk) 01:49, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Someone downsized our village pump and moved it down the page. The water is going sour, lol. JaydenBDarby (talk) 03:29, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It can only be speculated that, like the modern office water cooler, the village pump must have been a gathering place where dwellers discussed ideas for the improvement of their locale.
That would be this one →, removed without discussion here. I'll admit I kind of miss it too. —Cryptic 23:28, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) - I agree.
I was thinking that Wikipedia:Village pump should also have an accompanying piece of prose explaining how the town well/village pump was the common gathering place in society.
So I did some quick looking around, and we don't seem to have much on the subject. Noting that Village pump redirects to Well.
And Well#Society_and_culture doesn't say much at all.
I did some google searching, and I'm seriously wondering if an article could be started on this topic... - jc37 23:53, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hand pump is a bit better. —Cryptic 00:00, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
About pumps, but not much on the cultural part. I looked at Watering hole, and it has even less. - jc37 00:33, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I second that, jc37. Let's start an article on that. Make it top shelf, like the Cleopatra article. JaydenBDarby (talk) 03:47, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I'm game : )
Maybe we should see if we can better expand Well#Society_and_culture. If we can, then we can always split to a separate article. - jc37 15:26, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Not much more explanation in the sandbox that edit says it's copying from, either. Anomie⚔ 23:43, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Incidentally both the sandbox editor and the live editor are now under editing restrictions preventing them from repeating the edit (the sandbox editor is banned outright and the live editor is topic-banned from template namespace. * Pppery * it has begun... 00:42, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Actually that edit was reverted (for reasons unrelated to the image removal). The later removal that stuck was here, calling the image "just simply useless". I'd be inclined to agree. * Pppery * it has begun... 00:42, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
What that edit removed was this. (Non-admins: It irritatingly shuffled through File:Wikipump.jpg, File:Amstetten Württemberg Wasserhahn und Gasleuchte 2008 10 11.jpg, File:Beypazarı Hırkatepe Köy çeşmesi.jpg, File:Village pump in India.jpg, File:John Snow memorial and pub.jpg, File:Thatched water pump at Aylsham, Norfolk.jpg, File:Town pump Vingtaine de la Ville Jersey.jpg, File:Clonakilty County Cork - geograph.org.uk - 209126.jpg, File:Reczna pompa studzienna - rzeszow p.jpg, File:Old manual pump in Crespino, Italy.jpg, File:Dorpspomp te Diepenveen -03.jpg, File:Doel - Water pump 1.jpg, File:Brunnen Rinnen 1569.jpg, and File:Balga, February 2010, Women around the water pump - conversation.jpg.) I'd've been tempted to get rid of it, too; only a couple of the alternates had the gravitas, and none the nostalgia value, of good ol' Wikipump. —Cryptic 01:06, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I like idea of rotating images of pumps around the world. Drives home the universality of it. Levivich (talk) 01:52, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the explanation Cryptic. My instinct is to disagree with Levivich; I feel universality is helped by having one common pump. That said, either that or the rotating seems relatively harmless. CMD (talk) 04:21, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
My instinct is to disagree with Levivich - it's a common human instinct. Levivich (talk) 05:33, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Not mine, though. I like the rotation. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:33, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thirded. And since it was removed without discussion, see little reason not to just put it back. If someone wants to go through the horrible mess the markup has become... Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.6% of all FPs. 23:42, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Put the pump back. RoySmith (talk) 14:56, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree! undump the pump!! Sm8900 (talk) 22:39, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That was terrible. I'll add it back in a proper way later, but in general... please stop using tables for designing pages. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:59, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's still incredibly ugly and totally messes with the readability, but at least it's not an accessibility problem this way. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:57, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Reverse watchlist?

It would be nice if there was a way to start a clock ticking for when you expect something to happen on a thread and have it show up on your watchlist if it doesn't. One use case would be putting a WP:GAN on hold. Too often, people put a review on hold for a week (or whatever) and then forget about it. It would be nice to have a mechanism where I get a reminder on my watchlist after a week if the nom hasn't responded. It could also be used when making a request or asking a question on somebody talk page where you want to give them some respectful amount of time to respond, but not have it fall off your radar. RoySmith (talk) 15:02, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I was looking for some sort of template that a bot could check to see if you wanted a reminder and I found User:DannyS712/RemindMe. 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 15:13, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For reminders on watchlist, literally, try User:SD0001/W-Ping. – SD0001 (talk) 18:01, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Filter out AWB edits from watchlist

While this is possible through a user script, I think it should be added as an option in the Watchlist preference tab. AWB use requires a permission people have to apply for, is generally done by experienced editors, and the rate of actual content edits is very low, let alone disruptive edits. The "watchlist spam" leads to many editors (across many articles) spending time reviewing edits that are much more likely to be innocuous than the average edit.

I think the "watchlist spam" caused by AWB is currently a disincentive to AWB-assisted maintenance, so I'd further propose that this option be enabled by default. Some users, including admins, will of course want to disable it so they can catch misbehaving bots and users. DFlhb (talk) 19:14, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@DFlhb You can already filter out AWB edits without a user script as long as you are using the new Javascript watchlist (you haven't checked the "Use non-Javascript interface" box in preferences). Either go to Filters -> Tagged Edits -> AWB -> Exclude selected, or just add &tagfilter=AWB&inverttags=1 to the end of the URL. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 04:50, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Neat, thanks - DFlhb (talk) 06:12, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
One thing that stands out to me is that this can bury edits -- there's been a few times something on my watchlist got vandalized and I didn't notice for a while because a bot or a person running AWB went over it immediately afterwards. I imagine this would be way worse if I hadn't even seen the edits at all by default. jp×g🗯️ 04:33, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Which is why being able to hide anything from your watchlist while you don't have the "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" preference on is such a horrific misfeature. —Cryptic 05:08, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Stamping out Scams

The series of recent scam reports show that Wikipedia scams are alive and ongoing. There was a small discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation § Where should we place the scam warning? that suggested that this issue requires a larger solution than just a disclaimer on the WP:Article Wizard. So I am posting here to raise awareness and bring out ideas.

Recent examples: [8], [9], [10] Ca talk to me! 11:09, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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