Wikipedia talk:Verifiability

"Get consensus" objections to text citing to Consensus policy

As a preliminary matter, I note that "get consensus" is not a valid objection to a bold edit on a policy page per wp:PGBOLD ("you should not remove any change solely on the grounds that there was no formal discussion indicating consensus for the change before it was made").

These two edits [1] [2] reverted the addition of the following text at wp:ONUS:

Compare WP:NOCON (lack of consensus commonly results in retaining the version of the article as it was prior to the proposal or bold edit).

WP:NOCON is a policy page. Neither editor gave a substantive reason for their reversions. Is there one? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:02, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

I get the part about add rather than include, I agree they are not the same. For my edification, what is the purpose of the reverted addition? Selfstudier (talk) 17:16, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm not asking about add/include here (but will later). With regard to the WP:NOCON sentence, the purpose is to alert editors to another policy dealing the same issue. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:57, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

It waters down the policy here by excessively privileging pre-existing text. "Commonly results" is not the same thing as saying who has the burden of getting consensus to retain text. Material which is dubious is unlikely to gain consensus to include but may end up without consensus either way; such material should be left out. Changing the policy implies there must a consensus to exclude before it can go. Crossroads ^-talk- 03:30, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Do you genuinely believe that the current default for longstanding text, when discussions deadlock and fail to reach a consensus, is to remove it? I feel like we've been in several disputes where you supported longstanding text and restored it when there was clearly no affirmative consensus to retain it. If you're going to argue that ONUS requires affirmative consensus, is it all right for anyone to go around restoring disputed text without a clear consensus to support it? Or, I guess - my real point is, how do you see this working in practice? Let's say I remove some longstanding text in an article, and you feel that I'm whitewashing it by doing so. Is it all right for you to revert my removal without first establishing a consensus? If you do and I then start a discussion on talk that deadlocks and fails to produce a clear consensus for the disputed text, do you actually feel that we should go back and remove it again per your interpretation of ONUS? --Aquillion (talk) 18:46, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Do you genuinely believe that inappropriate text is required to remain at Wikipedia indefinitely just because someone failed to notice it for a long enough period of time? Are people allowed to stonewall discussions in bad faith just to retain their pet text which is otherwise inappropriate for Wikipedia? Why is there a time limit when we can't remove inappropriate text from Wikipedia? --Jayron32 18:55, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Because text that has stood for a long time on an article enjoys implicit consensus due to the number of people who have read it without removing it. Your proposed version (ie. the version with parts of the article removed) enjoys no consensus, and it is completely inappropriate to insist that it remain in place during extend discussions - nor has policy or practice ever supported that. --Aquillion (talk) 19:17, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Text that has stood for a long time on an article shows implicit ignorance that it has been a problem, as any number of people who may have (rightly) objected to the text when it was added didn't know it was there and if the text didn't belong, but should have been removed, it should not default that the person who added it gets "first mover" advantage in keeping text in an article so long as they pass some arbitrary time period with no one noticing it. --Jayron32 19:40, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

I do think that (like I said below) we're not quite as in as much disagreement as might seem, since a lot of what you're saying focuses on "nobody noticing it" (ie. stuff that hasn't had many eyes on it, which would lack implicit consensus), whereas a lot of what I'm saying leans on implicit consensus (ie. the presumption that people have seen it and that the person who wants to remove it is just the first person to object to it.) I think any solution would do best to maybe hash out how WP:ONUS interacts with implicit consensus and what its contours are - though it's probably not something that can be nailed down with absolute precision, I think that "clearly nobody has seen this problem until now" is a valid argument for saying that something lacks implicit consensus and should therefore default to removal, whereas "clearly lots of people have read this text without objecting to it" is a valid argument that it enjoys implicit consensus and therefore requires affirmative consensus to remove. Part of the reason we disagree on what current practice is might also just be because we tend to edit different sorts of articles (ie. more established ones, controversial ones that have had a lot of attention, or even WP:GAs, where most of the text can be presumed to have implicit consensus; vs. newly-created ones or old but obscure ones that have very few edits and very few eyes on them, where it can't.) I do think that sometimes number-of-edits is a more useful measure of implicit consensus than just time-passed. --Aquillion (talk) 20:18, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

• I have reverted the addition of the corresponding text at WP:NOCON, largely per my arguments above; including it at only one policy and not the other gives the impression that ONUS trumps NOCON, which is not the case, and risks undermining NOCON in general. Beyond that I consider NOCON to be the better-worded and more well-supported policy (and the one that largely reflects actual practice), whereas the sloppy wording of ONUS with regards to what qualifies as consensus and what disputes it is meant to cover are what lead to the sorts of disputes we see here. I would strenuously oppose having NOCON point to ONUS in its current form. --Aquillion (talk) 21:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

  NOCON says (in hidden text) "This section summarizes existing policies and guidelines. It does not make any new rules. If this page and the more specific policy or guideline disagree, then this one should be changed to conform with the more specific page." It seems to me that in removing the sentence indicating that NOCON's summary might be incomplete ("Compare WP:ONUS (onus to achieve consensus is on those seeking to include disputed content)."), you kind of did the opposite of what NOCON says to do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:10, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

Conflict between ONUS and NOCON?

User:Crossroads, thank you for providing a substantive rationale for leaving the text out. Now I'm worried that the rationale you provide suggests WP:NOCON and WP:ONUS are in conflict. Is that the case? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 05:45, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

I wondered about this myself in the past, the issue has been exhaustively discussed as I recall, including by yourself, Wikipedia talk:Consensus required ? Does anyone have a link to those discussions? Selfstudier (talk) 11:02, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Hey, if I don't remember discussing this in the past then it didn't happen (;-)). I look forward to you finding the prior discussion so we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 15:18, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

There's that link there I just gave, I will see if I can find the other discussion, there might have been, probably was, more than one. It comes up fairly often, I think. Ultimately, I think what people want to avoid is situations being wikilawyered so a fair amount of flexibility is built in to the policies at the same time as indicating what might constitute a problem.Selfstudier (talk) 15:24, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Consensus/Archive_21#NOCONSENSUS in article pages -- recent edits, and ONUS There's this one, I didn't read it all again, I see you there again, tho :) Selfstudier (talk) 18:52, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

A flexible policy is good until, that is, it directly conflicts with another policy. Do these two policies conflict? That's my question. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 15:49, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

• They are 100% not in conflict. WP:ONUS says that, when there is contentious material, leave it out of the article while discussion happens. WP:NOCON says that at the conclusion of the discussion, a "no consensus" result causes a return to status quo ante bellum. Which is to say that until the discussion concludes, we leave all contested material out. After discussion has concluded, then if there is no consensus, we return the article to whatever state it was in before the discussed changes were made. Notice two things 1) your initial edit changed "include" to "add". This is a BIG change, as it draws a distinction between newly added content, and content that had already been in the article, which WP:ONUS never had made such a distinction before you changed the text. 2) the text I put in italics notes key differences between ONUS and NOCON. Specifically, which you seem to miss, is that "during" is not a synonym for "after". --Jayron32 11:09, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
  • Neither the word "during" nor the phrase "while discussion happens" appear in ONUS. Should we add text to make it clearer that ONUS only applies during discussion? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 15:31, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
  • That interpretation doesn't reflect current practice (excluding BLP-sensitive statements, which are a special case) - by that logic, I could remove any longstanding text from any existing article, argue about it on talk, refuse to accept any consensus, and start an RFC, at which point I could point to the RFC being in progress as an argument to continue excluding until it concludes (unless the RFC WP:SNOWed out or consensus was so glaringly against me as to be obvious.) The purpose of WP:NOCON is to ensure article stability; allowing people to remove longstanding text and then keep it out for as long as they can filibuster makes no sense and has never reflected any sort of practice or policy. --Aquillion (talk) 18:31, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
    • The phrase "The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content." Not add, and not remove, but "include", has been in the text of this page since at least 2017 (see this version), and in some form with slightly different wording since at least 2006 (see here [3], which states "Just because some information is verifiable, it doesn't mean that Wikipedia is the right place to publish it." which was later split out into WP:NOT, but was later returned to WP:V, as shown above. Also, we don't assume bad faith among fellow editors. If someone is abusing process, sanction the person. Good faith disagreements over content have always defaulted to "leave content out of articles", and has been codified here for at least 5 years, and at WP:NOT and other places for far longer. Bad faith behavior is dealt with through other processes, and not relevant to this discussion. There is no first-mover advantage. There's a consensus-having advantage, and while things are being negotiated, we talk it out. If a bad-faith actor is stonewalling consensus, deal with that elsewhere. But legitimately contentious material should be left out of articles unless there is consensus to include it. --Jayron32 18:53, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
      • Good faith disagreements over content have always defaulted to "leave content out of articles" This is flatly untrue. Disagreements currently - and have always - defaulted to leaving the longstanding version in place until consensus is achieved. This is necessary because a lack of consensus is a failure state, and failure states need resolve in a way that preserves article stability; outside of situations like WP:BLP, the longstanding version, which has had many editors view it and has had no objections until now, is safer and enjoys more consensus than an article where removals potentially leave it lopsided or incomplete, with no degree of consensus backing it up. And my point is not that the situation I described is an abuse of process - if someone feels strongly that text is wrong and needs to be removed, they're naturally going to be disinclined to accept consensus to include it unless it is glaringly indisputable, especially given that that consensus partially depends on the strength of people's arguments; and will naturally argue at length to exclude it, including starting an RFC. This will result in instability in longstanding articles, and versions ending up stuck in place for as long as a month on end despite being unequivocally disputed and never enjoying any sort of consensus (not even the implicit consensus that the longstanding version enjoys.) --Aquillion (talk) 19:16, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
    • User:Aquillion, are you saying there is a conflict between (a) NOCON and ONUS, (b) NOCON and Jayron's reading of ONUS, (c) both, or (d) neither? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 18:56, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

      I'm not Aquillion, but here's my answer: Yes, there's a conflict. No, it's not so obvious that any passing editor will notice it at a glance. No, the conflict doesn't affect most edits, as it is (in practice) only seen when someone tries to remove long-standing text and editors can't come to an agreement about what to do. (NB: "remove", "long-standing", and "no consensus either way" are required for the conflict to matter. If you don't have all three qualities, then there is no conflict between the policies.) However: Yes, it's a big enough conflict that some editors seem to selectively name the policy that aligns with the outcome they prefer and "accidentally" forget to mention the existence of the other policy.

      This has been discussed many times:

      Wikipedia talk:Consensus/Archive 21#NOCONSENSUS in article pages -- recent edits, and ONUS

      Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 162#RfC: Should we move WP:ONUS to WP:CONSENSUS?

      Wikipedia talk:Verifiability/Archive 68#WP:ONUS vs. WP:QUO

      Wikipedia talk:Verifiability/Archive 69#ONUS

      Wikipedia talk:Verifiability/Archive 70#ONUS: How to quickly fix it all

      Wikipedia talk:Verifiability/Archive 72#Silence and ONUS

      Fundamentally, if we are going to solve this, we have to decide whether the policy is – in the event that editors are unable to reach an agreement/consensus – either that we keep disputed long-standing text or that we remove disputed long-standing text. Right now, ONUS says that we remove disputed long-standing text unless editors agree to keep it, and NOCON says that we keep disputed long-standing text unless editors agree to remove it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:03, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

      I'm okay with such a discussion. I have been operating for years that there was no such conflict, but it is clear that there are different interpretations of the policy, and clearer language would help ameliorate that. I think it's important that such policy changes be based not on "bad faith" actors, but instead should reflect best practices of good faith editors acting in the best interest of the encyclopedia. Aquillion's scenarios are not helpful, as literally they can be retooled to imply that ANY policy is open to the abuse of bad-faith actors, (as I demonstrate above) and we should instead focus on best practices rather. --Jayron32 19:06, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

      • My point is not bad-faith actors (in fact, the fact that you characterize my description of the normal outcome of your proposed policy change as being "bad-faith" is a more severe indictment of your proposal than anything I could say about it.) My point is that, given that no-consensus outcomes are a failure state between people who feel strongly enough about their preferred version to result in an extended conflict, the default outcome of your proposed change would be disruptive and would result in a version with no consensus at all ending up on the article for an extended period of time over a version that enjoys implicit consensus - coupled with extended article instability, since any forceful objection to any longstanding text would require an immediate article change. --Aquillion (talk) 19:21, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

      • I sort-of mentioned this below, but I feel that the ideal solution is to incorporate the idea of implicit consensus more clearly into WP:ONUS. This basically reflects current practice and would answer most of the objections - it is presumed that when many editors have seen text without changing it, it enjoys a degree of consensus that requires affirmative consensus to remove, whereas low-traffic articles might not enjoy the same protection. (I also think that part of the reason these discussions go nowhere is because people are largely talking past each other in that respect - the people who side with WP:ONUS over WP:NOCON are picturing obscure overlooked bits of text saying something terrible, whereas the people who side with WP:NOCON are picturing longstanding text in a high-profile but controversial article, where someone removes a paragraph that has seen substantial editing and which has had a large number of eyes on it, then argues it should be kept out during discussions simply because it has never been discussed before.) At an absolute bare minimum, I would argue that the WP:GA version of any article automatically establishes at least a weak consensus for everything in it at the moment when it is promoted to GA - clearly removing and keeping something off of a GA requires affirmative consensus to do so. But this comes down to the more basic question that ONUS incorporates our concept of consensus, which is a bit nebulous by design. --Aquillion (talk) 19:10, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

      • My opinion is that they conflict to a degree, but that people have ignored the conflict by relying on the concept of implicit consensus to effectively render ONUS moot in most situations (which does answer some of Jayron's objections above, in the sense that text that has had few eyes on it lacks implicit consensus.) But clearly Jayron's suggestion does not reflect any sort of current practice - I've been editing for 18 years and the practice has always been to leave longstanding text in place during a dispute; people might sometimes WP:BOLDly remove it and sometimes it goes back and forth, but when it's clear the dispute isn't going to be resolved by editing the article is supposed to go back to the last stable version. Some people may disagree with that, or feel that that practice doesn't reflect ONUS, but the practice is 100% clear. In my 18 years here I've seen numerous disputes get stabilized by someone reverting to the last stable version while it has hashed out. I have never (not once) seen anyone follow Jayron's proposal to default to leaving disputed-but-longstanding text out outside of WP:BLP-sensitive statements, which are specifically called out as a special case in our policies. I have never even seen anyone suggest that it would be an appropriate way to approach a dispute outside of arguments on this talk page. When there's an intractable dispute on a stable, longstanding article (ie. one that has existed long enough to have a degree of implicit consensus), you go back to the last stable version until it is resolved - anyone who has edited controversial articles knows that this is current practice. --Aquillion (talk) 19:10, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

It looks like some discussed edits would be a major change, yet this this discussion is hard for anybody to understand or participate in. IMO any proposed change should be clearly specified here. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 16:08, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

The proposed change is on the backburner while we work on determining whether wp:ONUS and wp:NOCON are in conflict. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 18:15, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Nearly every editing decision also takes into account other variables. Including in defining / interpreting the terminology in the discussed provisions. How new is the proposed change/material? To what extent is it contested? Are other policy considerations being invoked in the conversation? (WP:Ver, WP:weight etc.) To what extent is the previous version "established"? This makes an explicit or precise "flow chart" guidance for those trillions of different possibilities impossible, so I'd advise against attempting that here. But these two policy provisions do provide influential guidance. IMO they do somewhat conflict/overlap, and persons here trying to "make it work" have been espousing seeing this through the lens of some some good views which eliminate/navigate the conflict but which are not policy. I think that the common meaning of "onus" is for new material, but it doesn't say that. Perhaps making that change would substantially reduce the overlap/conflict? North8000 (talk) 20:01, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

• I think that this raises some good points; and has things that I have not considered. I think this may be a good idea to start developing (not starting, but pre-writing) an RFC for clarification of the policy. I've always understood Wikipedia policy, per WP:ONUS, to be "It is better to be silent than wrong" however Aquillion's position, which is that longstanding text has implicit consensus, is also a reasonable interpretation (though I don't agree) of best practice, and I can see where those positions come into conflict. Perhaps it's time to start a new thread where we spend some time developing a neutral and concise RFC to bring to the community so we can see where consensus is on clarifying and harmonizing policy around this matter. --Jayron32 20:09, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

  I should be clear (I mentioned this above, but I should mention it here too since it might be part of any resolution) that I don't think time-passed is the primary source of implicit consensus, just a usually-convenient shorthand. What really matters is how many editors have read the text without objecting to it. An article that has existed for ten years with only one or two editors probably doesn't enjoy implicit consensus for any of its text, whereas a high-traffic controversial article where everything is approached with a fine-toothed comb can probably be presumed to have it after just a few months. --Aquillion (talk) 20:22, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

  @Aquillion, what I haven't yet understood from your comments is this:

  • Something gets added to an article.
  • Many, many page views/edits later, that something is still present, so we say that it has "implicit consensus".
  • Someone disputes the long-standing text.

  Does disputed text have implicit consensus? Or would it be more accurate to say that it used to have implicit consensus but now it is disputed?

  Imagine further that there are significant, substantive discussions about whether this content belongs in this article. The result is that editors' views are very evenly divided. There are good reasons to include it and good reasons to exclude it. What editors really agree on is that there is no consensus about what to do.

  When there is no consensus, is there also still an implicit consensus? It seems to me that these two states are mutually exclusive. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:49, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

  BLP-sensitive statements aside, text that is longstanding and which many editors have read without objecting to has implicit consensus even if someone disputes it - you'd need at least some form of consensus to overturn it, which just one person objecting doesn't qualify as. After all, if any objection was enough to overcome implicit consensus, it wouldn't have any meaning. When discussions break down, the older consensus remains in place - this is how it works in every other context, and WP:NOCON is very clear about how it works. --Aquillion (talk) 05:03, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

  Imagine this scenario:

  • Alice boldly adds something to an article.
  • Many, many page views/edits later, Bob boldly removes it.
  • Many, many page views/edits later, Carol objects to Bob's removal.

  How many times did we achieve implicit consensus? Which version counts as the "older consensus" if the discussion between Bob and Carol breaks down? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:14, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

  Or if its a small change that 100% of those discussing agree on, try just semi-boldly doing it? BTW, like usual, I'd advocate doing the homework 100% before putting out an RFC, and come up with something that we can get behind and make the case for. If we just put something this complex out too quickly, then we'd end up with 300,000 words and 10 additional proposals and no decision. North8000 (talk) 21:22, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

  If I understood it correctly, which I never did all the other times, if we don't have all three of "remove", "long-standing", and "no consensus either way", then there is no conflict between the policies and when do have all three, the problem is selectively name the policy that aligns with the outcome they prefer and "accidentally" forget to mention the existence of the other policy. That right? Selfstudier (talk) 22:09, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

  Almost?

  When we don't have all three of the relevant qualities ("remove", "long-standing", and "no consensus either way"), then we're going to quote you a different relevant page, e.g.:

  • "You're trying to re-word things, rather than remove them. I don't like your writing style, so STYLEVAR says to stop messing with my Wikipedia:Brilliant prose."
  • "This is brand-new text, so I can remove your contribution with near-impunity and tell you to follow BRD" (even though Wikipedia:What editors mean when they say you have to follow BRD isn't really what BRD is about).
  • "We have a CONSENSUS to do this."

  In the case of not having all three relevant qualities, it doesn't really matter which page we point at, because all of them end up in the same practical outcome (namely, revert everything unless and until there is a consensus otherwise).

  When we do have all three qualities, then we get divergent results:

  • "I don't like that long-standing content, so I'm removing it per ONUS. You have to prove to me that there is a consensus to keep this in the article, because Policy Says you have 'to achieve consensus for inclusion' before it can be included. If there's no consensus, the content stays out of the article."
  • "I love this long-standing content, so you can't remove it per NOCON and QUO. You have to prove to me that there is a consensus to remove this from the article, because Policy Says to 'retain the version of the article as it was prior to the proposal or bold edit'. If there's no consensus, the content stays in the article."

  These two policies disagree on the proper outcome when all three of these qualities apply. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:03, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

  Yeah I've definitely noticed this conflict before. I think I usually invoke ONUS rather than NOCON in those cases (and ONUS is definitely the way to go for BLPs). I personally think that if some content is controversial, we should not be saying it without a consensus, and would support changing NOCON to reflect this. Saying something in an article that is contentious (and thus possibly wrong/undue etc) is worse IMO than not saying anything. Galobtter (pingó mió) 23:30, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

  I don't believe that ONUS and NOCON conflict, as I articulated previously in this comment. I tried to clarify the policies with an RFC two years ago, but I think that what I had proposed was misunderstood, so I did not get a clear understanding of community's feelings. Kolya Butternut (talk) 02:01, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

  I was trying to recall what I had said about this in a previous topic. Kolya Butternut helped out by linking to their post which was just under one of mine. I agree with WhatamIdoing's comment. Based on what we have now it's not clear to me if we should view the fact that something is long term stable as justification for keeping it in in the case of no consensus or removing per ONUS in such a case. Along the same lines how strong is implicit consensus? If 2 editors favor a change and 1 opposes is that a consensus for change or not (assuming reasonable arguments all around)

  Note even in highly trafficked articles questionable content/changes can be unnoticed. This is particulary likely if there is a debate about one part of the article and a change that looks minor is made to a part that wasn't being debated. It can also happen if a big, debated edit is made after lots of talk page back and forth. We shouldn't assume that editors have really scrutinized an older change simply because many other edits have been made since.

  Also note that ONUS only applies to new content (edits subject to WP:V), not other edits where a consensus related debate may apply. Examples that aren't subject to WP:V include the order of content in an article or what content should be in the lead vs just in the body.

  However, content that was added and not challenged at the time should still be subject to ONUS in my view. Thus any content that has never had explicit consensus established (talk page discussion, etc) would be subject to an ONUS based challenge. This would address questions like how long does content have to be in the article before we flip from NOCON=keep vs NOCON=remove. It also protects from a case where editors would have objected had they noticed (watched the article) when the change was first made rather than noticing it say 6 months later. If the page is well trafficked and no one talk about a change but editors support it, it should be reasonable to assume a talk page discussion will establish consensus after the fact. If it can't, the content probably shouldn't be included. Finally, since it was mentioned previously, I would keep long term content in the article during the consensus discussion. If some addition is being challenged a year later it isn't critical to remove it now vs at the end of the discussion if DUE-ONUS is the only concern. Springee (talk) 03:35, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

To me it's pretty simple if we understand one thing as a preface. Most editing decisions are made by weighing multiple factors. Most wp policies prima facie go against that by seeking to specify what should happen based on just one or two considerations, but then make themselves useful and workable in the Wikipedia world by softening themselves by adding wording that makes them non-categorical. The result is that they usually only put "fingers on the scale" in such decisions rather than unilaterally prescribing what should happen.

• Onus Depending on how one interprets its common meaning, wp:onus puts one or two fingers on the scale. One also exists in the world of common sense which is a finger towards exclusion of disputed material. The "probably" second finger is towards exclusion of new material. The context and common meaning of the relevant sentence in ONUS tilts towards applicability only on new material, but it does not explicitly say so in its relevant operative sentence.
• NOCON wp:Nocon puts a finger on the scale towards the status quo.

Sometimes these "fingers on the scale" are in opposite directions, but as long as one understands how wikipedia works, such is not a "conflict". Of course there are other "fingers" on the scale besides these policies. One is that we're here to add material and build an encyclopedia. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 10:27, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

WP:ONUS is part of WP: Verifiability, which is a content policy not a conduct policy. This discussed portion of WP:ONUS merely reiterates how WP: Consensus works. Kolya Butternut (talk) 13:12, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

I tend to agree with you that ONUS reiterates how consensus works in practice (albeit for a rather narrow set of circumstances). However, the (relatively new) NOCON section of Wikipedia:Consensus is too simple. It puts a finger on the scale towards the status quo (assuming editors can agree on what that was, which all experienced editors know is not always simple), and it doesn't do a good job of saying "Um, except for all the exceptions, which include adding disputed non-BLP material". WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:19, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

List of possible meanings of the third sentence of ONUS

The discussion above makes it clear that there is no current consensus regarding the meaning of this sentence:

The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content.

Here I try to summarize the various meanings offered above. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

LIST OF POSSIBLE MEANINGS OF ONUS THIRD SENTENCE

Please add to the list if there are more possibilities. Please discuss this list at #Discussion of list of meanings of ONUS third sentence (below).

1. During discussion, disputed material may not be added. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
2. During discussion, disputed material may not be added or retained. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
3. During discussion, disputed material may not be added or, unless it has (or had) implicit consensus, retained. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
4. During discussion relating to verifiability, disputed material may not be added. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
5. During discussion relating to verifiability, disputed material may not be added or retained. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
6. During discussion relating to verifiability, disputed material may not be added or, unless it has (or had) implicit consensus, retained. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
7. Following discussion which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added. Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
8. Following discussion which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added or retained. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
9. Following discussion which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added or, unless it has (or had) implicit consensus, retained. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
10. Following discussion relating to verifiability which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added. Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
11. Following discussion relating to verifiability which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added or retained. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
12. Following discussion relating to verifiability which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added or, unless it has (or had) implicit consensus, retained. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
13. If you want to include something in an article, and anyone strongly objects, then it's your job to prove there is an active, positive agreement to include your material in that article. The people who want to remove your material do not have to prove that there is a consensus to remove the disputed material; they only have to establish (a) that they dispute the inclusion of the material (for any reason at all, including bad reasons) and (b) that you have not provided written evidence of an active, positive consensus to include your material. It is not enough for you to claim consensus without evidence; "presumed", "implicit", or "silent" consensus does not count for this provision of policy, and WP:STATUSQUO (which is only about what to do with an article during discussions about the dispute, and not about what to do after the discussion has ended) is irrelevant. (per WhatamIdoing, below at 02:21, 12 May 2022 (UTC)). - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 05:52, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Discussion of list of meanings of ONUS third sentence

IMO none of the above. Those are all categorical and onus isn't categorical and, by the nature of how Wikipedia works, can't be. North8000 (talk) 17:52, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

User:North8000: Okay, if those aren't the meaning of the third sentence in ONUS, what is? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 20:15, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

I think what North8000 is saying is that ONUS is better understood as a rough guideline rather than a hard and fast rule. I do think that part of the problem is that people are trying to treat it as too categorical and giving it too much force. Our policies are usually looser, since that encourages discussion and consensus-building; some of the wording and interpretations of ONUS seem closer to the way WP:BLP works (and even BLP only has that degree of force for actually BLP-sensitive statements.) I don't think that that would help dispute resolution - we give BLP-sensitive statements that "always default to removal" force because of the specific risk of harm, it's not and has never been our general policy. More generally, we ideally resolve things through discussion and consensus-building, not through wrangling over legalese; making policies like ONUS too rigid goes against that. --Aquillion (talk) 18:12, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

During the last few (five?) years, I feel like the community (or at least the dramaboards parts of the community) has moved away from the kind of consensus building that involves compromise, common sense, and finding things we can all support, and towards wrangling over legalese. We have always had wikilawyers, and it's good to write policy to minimize the damage that a wikilawyer can cause by quoting policies and guidelines, but I think we have more people believing that citing WP:SHORTCUTS and demanding that their view be enacted in the article is the best, or even the only correct way to write good articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:45, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

+1.Selfstudier (talk) 11:12, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Right, the arguably loose language might occasionally lead to a discussion but consensus will still rule at the end of it. I guess what I am saying, is it really broken? User:Selfstudier (talk) 17:57, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

User:Selfstudier, I'm just asking what the "loose language" means. We can talk about whether it is broken or not later. Does the "loose language" incorporate any of the meanings above? Which one(s)? Does it also have additional meanings not listed? What are they? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 20:15, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

The problem with ONUS vs NOCON is what should happen when consensus cannot rule at the end, because consensus cannot be achieved. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:21, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

• I get what you're saying, but sometimes consensus-building mechanisms break down - if people can reach a consensus then they don't need to rely on WP:ONUS or WP:NOCON. But we do need some sort of guideline for what state articles end up in when there's no clear consensus - and currently what happens is that we end up with situations where one person says "removing this, get consensus per WP:ONUS", then someone else restores it and says "no, you need consensus to remove it per WP:NOCON." That's not desirable. The guidelines do not have to be strict - in fact, they shouldn't be; honestly one problem with ONUS is that it is simultaneously vague about what it covers and incredibly stridently-worded. I feel that making the guidelines too strict in either direction discourages people from coming to the table and compromising, as opposed to just smacking each other with policy shortcuts. But at the very least the two shouldn't directly contradict each other. --Aquillion (talk) 21:56, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

  I agree strongly with this. The popularity of WP:BRD adds fuel to this fire, as removal of longstanding content is frequently seen as the B. I also want to echo Aquillion's point higher above that some reference to WP:IMPLICIT is needed. Doing so will lead to more status quo bias in the policy, which I'd prefer over bias toward exclusion of content. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 00:44, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

  I believe a common POV among experienced editors is, in Jimmy's words, "Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information". I assume that you mean that you'd rather err on the side of including, e.g., accurate trivia and well-sourced but overly detailed facts, but you still want all serious problems removed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:31, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

  You're reading me mostly correctly. We're talking, after all, about material that's already cleared the bar of verifiability. Technically, adding or acknowledging a little status quo bias in ONUS wouldn't lead us to only err on the side of inclusion, as I'd equally support continued removal of content that was removed and kept out over many months/revisions. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 02:44, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

About B's dozen sentences: I don't think that we should prescribe the state of the article under which discussions happen. Sometimes you should discuss with m:The Wrong Version showing, and sometimes you should discuss with The Right Version, but it depends on circumstances, the nature of the problem, the real-world importance of the problem, whether editors are willing to discuss (sometimes, removing their contribution is the only way to motivate them to join the discussion), and (of course) the fact that you don't actually know, until the end of the discussion(s), which version is The Right Version. ONUS does not specify that the state of the article during discussions is critical, and caring too much about the state of the article during discussions is a bad practice in general; therefore, I conclude that it should not be interpreted to apply strictly in such cases. Therefore, I reject 1 through 6 as being focused on the wrong point in the process.

I think that sentence 8 is closest to my understanding of ONUS. The reason that I reject the others are:

• 7 is a subset of 8; it is true but is too narrow. Focusing only on additions puts us back in the realm of bad practices of edit warring to have The Right Version in the article while the discussion happens. If I get my version, then ONUS would have no effect, because I wouldn't be "adding" it after failing to achieve consensus. I'd only be "retaining" it. This would promote edit warring. Version 10 has the same problem.
• Material that is currently disputed no longer has implicit consensus. IMPLICITCONSENSUS says An edit has presumed consensus unless it is disputed or reverted. As soon as the dispute arises, the material no longer has any sort presumed/implicit consensus. Therefore 9 and 12 are wrong.
• ONUS does not require that the dispute be related to sourcing. Therefore 10, 11, and 12 are wrong.

That leaves only option 8. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:40, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

Which is what happens in practice, no-consensus consensus if you like. But then someone will start an RFC:) Selfstudier (talk) 00:48, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

If someone starts an RFC, then we're still in the "during discussion" phase. :-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:08, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

The current question is not what the third sentence of ONUS should say, but what it currently says. Are you saying that (a) 8 is what it currently says? If not, (b) is its current meaning in the list? If not, (3) what additional meaning should we add to the list to make it complete? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 00:54, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

What it currently says is "The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content", which is so obvious that I don't believe that's what you meant to ask. I assume that you meant to ask what that means.

If you feel that my response is too focused on what the policy should mean, then I could perhaps translate the current sentence's meaning in this more practical way: "If you want to include something in an article, and anyone strongly objects, then it's your job to prove there is an active, positive agreement to include your material in that article. The people who want to remove your material do not have to prove that there is a consensus to remove the disputed material; they only have to establish (a) that they dispute the inclusion of the material (for any reason at all, including bad reasons) and (b) that you have not provided written evidence of an active, positive consensus to include your material. It is not enough for you to claim consensus without evidence; "presumed", "implicit", or "silent" consensus does not count for this provision of policy, and WP:STATUSQUO (which is only about what to do with an article during discussions about the dispute, and not about what to do after the discussion has ended) is irrelevant."

Is that helpful? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:21, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, may I add the text in quotes to the #List of possible meanings of the third sentence of ONUS? (Or, better still, will you add it?) - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 03:16, 12 May 2022 (UTC) @WhatamIdoing: please reply. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 21:44, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't think it will help, but I don't object. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:40, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

I agree, WAID, that the article state during discussion is overemphasized. At least, I agree academically, as I do sometimes feel very invested in which version is up. Since that overemphasis is a frequent cause of edit warring, I think the policy needs to address the reality. Clearer policy here can lead to less edit wars.

In practice, ONUS only comes up before and during talk page discussion, not after a discussion's consensus is evaluated. Mostly NOCON seems to come up at the end. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 00:56, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

About the academic agreement: Sometimes the Wrong Version is very, very wrong indeed, and I expect the discussions to last for weeks, or even months. It can be hard to focus in those situations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:25, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

• I also think 8 is the correct meaning, and the ideal meaning.
• It was noted above that the dispute here over ONUS vs. NOCON probably arises in large part from different editors picturing different scenarios. So I will explain why I support ONUS, and why I believe the opposing scenario meant to favor NOCON is not actually a problem under ONUS. This is a scenario I've seen evidence of firsthand multiple times.
• So, imagine an inexperienced editor inserts text on an article. This text contains sources, but the content is actually FRINGE or OR. The article it is inserted on has moderately-low or lower traffic and is on a complex topic. The text is just convincing enough that while some other editors do see it in passing, they are not familiar enough with the topic to notice the problems with it. It sticks around for years, with other edits occurring to other parts of the article and it seemingly thus gains implicit consensus. However, eventually, another editor figures out it is really bad text and deletes it with a mean red -4,000 or whatever in the edit history. Reversion and discussion ensues, but there's only one other editor in it, and they support the text because it looks superficially convincing or for POV reasons (maybe it was the original adder). Perhaps the remover knows the topic but not Wikipedia bureaucracy and detailed policy and thinks there is nothing left to do but give up. Which side should policy support?
• The editors who favor NOCON and the status quo seem to often have in mind scenarios where at a high-traffic but socially controversial topic, someone removes text and then games the system to keep it out. However, ONUS as written does not contribute to this problem - at such an article it is very easy to establish a quick consensus that supports the material; indeed one possibly already existed on the talk page.
• Right now ONUS basically says 'if content doesn't have consensus, it doesn't stay', which is better than 'it has to stay unless we get a consensus to remove it'. In cases where there is not a consensus for material, it should stay out, lest the encyclopedia accumulate garbage. We should not privilege material just for happening to lack scrutiny and sticking around for a while. Think about how huge the encyclopedia is and how little-scrutinized most of it is. Most passing editors are not too familiar with a topic and are biased toward letting through (or not bothering with) something that looks superficially okay.
• All this was a central concern at this aforementioned RfC, which was closed with this statement: There is an overwhelming consensus against this proposed change, primarily due to concerns that it would undermine verifiability and efforts to remove poorly sourced information. I supported this clarification (or something along those lines) of NOCON. Crossroads ^-talk- 05:11, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

  I'm not sure I understand these concerns when we have WP:BURDEN. Kolya Butternut (talk) 05:33, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

  Read the footnote in BURDEN: "Once an editor has provided any source they believe, in good faith, to be sufficient, then any editor who later removes the material must articulate specific problems that would justify its exclusion from Wikipedia (e.g. why the source is unreliable; the source does not support the claim; undue emphasis; unencyclopedic content; etc.). If necessary, all editors are then expected to help achieve consensus, and any problems with the text or sourcing should be fixed before the material is added back."

  In other words, BURDEN generally does not apply to (plausibly) sourced content. Generally, under BURDEN, editors are only required to provide one source. Requiring editors to provide an unlimited number of sources until an POV pusher agrees would create its own set of problems ("Sure, you gave me sources from the Pope, the Queen of England, and Albert Einstein to support this statement, but I reject them all as being completely unreliable. Bring me another rock – or don't, because I will never agree that any source is reliable unless the source supports my POV.") WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:08, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

  • Crossroads, apologies for bringing up previous disputes; my point here isn't to go into them in-depth here but to try and get an understanding of what you feel WP:ONUS means and how, under your reading, it would actually affect the sorts of disputes we run into every day. We've previously had disputes on, among other articles, Mermaids (charity), Gina Carano, and Heterodox Academy where I removed longstanding text from articles that I don't think had previously obtained a consensus; you restored it, and discussion on the talk page broke down without producing a clear consensus to include. In each case, my understanding is that the text remained merely because it is longstanding - in the last case I eventually had to go through an RFC to remove it. Is it your assertion that in each of those cases the text should be removed, or at least that the onus is on you to demonstrate consensus if you want it to stay (and that an inconclusive discussion that breaks down roughly evenly means they get removed absent a formal RFC to keep them?) eg. do you feel that the Heterodox Academy text should have been removed, and that the onus was on you, and not me, if you wanted to restore it, once it was clear it was disputed and there was no prior consensus? Again, my point isn't to rehash those issues here; I want to understand how you think this would work in practice, what you feel qualifies as a consensus necessary to retain text, and so on, and to make it clear what I think is the implications of pushing for option 8 with no concession towards implicit consensus. Because I want to make sure we're on the same page in terms of what the implications here are - the next time I remove something because I feel it's undue, and you object because you feel it's due, how do you feel WP:ONUS will apply to that? (If you feel implicit consensus applies in all of those situations, that's fine, but that's 3 and not 8, so I want to be certain where the dispute here is.) --Aquillion (talk) 17:38, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

I would agree that option 8 is correct. I wouldn't agree that WP:NOCON contradicts it. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 15:09, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

I think option 8 doesn't account for situations such as when material has been in an article for years and it is just being disputed by one person. Kolya Butternut (talk) 17:01, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

If the material is truly disputed by just one person, then it should be possible to find one or two other editors who support its inclusion. In that case, we'd be able to form something like a consensus to retain the material, and ONUS wouldn't really apply. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:38, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

Only one person did the original bold insertion. The policy doesn't say it will self-destruct after a deadline and adding a deadline would give a first mover advantage based on a vague ("years" or "longstanding") assertion which could trump multiple opponents afterward. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 13:19, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Since all are categorical, none of them account for other factors relevant to the outcome. North8000 (talk) 17:56, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

My issue is that I think that the applicability of implicit consensus is the main factor in the dispute. Removing the concept of implicit consensus (or making it so ONUS overrides it, which amounts to the same thing) would have fairly drastic implications to how we resolve disputes. --Aquillion (talk) 18:07, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

I feel like WP:Consensus simply means, in part: The onus to achieve consensus for changes to consensus content is on those seeking the change. The third sentence of WP:ONUS is just part of this. Kolya Butternut (talk) 19:13, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

My note is mostly structural and two steps. For example, if Mary says "I generally like big dogs", first what she really means is that when deciding whether or not she likes a particular dog or breed, that bigness is a plus. Maybe outweighed by that particular dog being vicious and having bit her kid on the face yesterday. So if we come up with very specific "meaning" ideas like "Mary likes all big dogs" or "Mary likes all dogs over 90 lbs" or "Mary likes all dogs over 80 lbs", through their specificity and explicitness we are inventing things that Mary never said. North8000 (talk) 19:33, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

In short, such efforts are in effect proposing a new revised version / meaning, not discerning a meaning of the current one. North8000 (talk) 23:14, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

User:North8000, speaking of which, I ask again (see 20:15, 11 May 2022, above), what do you think is the meaning of the current one? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 20:22, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

A sincere answer is that the meaning is "The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content" applied and interpreted in the context of the preceding sentence, it's section header and how the Wikipedia system operates. If you would like me to attempt en explanation on that, the specific-simple-special-case version would be: If all other factors are neutral, inclusion of new disputed material requires a consensus. A more general case attempted explanation would be that in decisions on inclusion/exclusion of disputed content, apply an extra finger on the scale towards exclusion, and doubly so if it for new material. And in that context that a consensus puts a heavier finger on the scale than any of those. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 00:21, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Trying to put your general case in the simplified format I get: "If all other factors are neutral, the addition or retention of disputed material requires a consensus." Is that how you read the third sentence of ONUS? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 02:22, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

I understand your desire to get to the bottom of it, I still say the same, it's all worded so as to permit flexibility in edge cases and where it will never be entirely clear what the outcome might be. It is I suppose possible that nocon is an outcome (after endless discussions), most of the time consensus will sort it out. Like here, if this is really a concern, save some time and just go for the RFC. Selfstudier (talk) 10:39, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

User:Selfstudier: Just curious, what do you think the core principal is - what would the clear outcome be when you're not in an edge case? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 21:35, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

@Butwhatdoiknow: You accurately restated the core principle in another post whcih you pinged me on. Regarding your second question, that can't be answered here....that would be determined by the Wikipedia system, and this merely specifies an input to it. North8000 (talk) 22:02, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Butwhatdoiknow, that would not be a statement of my "general case" explanation, but would be special case version of it as applied to that particular situation. But such an example is useful for illustrating the underlying concept. North8000 (talk) 13:51, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

User:North8000: And the core concept is "in decisions on inclusion/exclusion of disputed content, apply an extra finger on the scale towards exclusion, and doubly so if it for new material. And in that context that a consensus puts a heavier finger on the scale than any of those," do I have that right? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 21:42, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

I would agree with that in principle, I wouldn't like to try and codify that, tho. My inclination is still that it ain't really broke and it's more like we are trying to find ways to break it. Selfstudier (talk) 21:52, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Selfstudier, at this point I'm not trying to codify anything, I'm just trying to understand what the community thinks is the meaning of the current, "unbroken" third sentence of ONUS. Do you think the text I quoted from North8000 is the meaning of that sentence? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 03:28, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

@Selfstudier, it is broken, because we get divergent results, as described above. Aligned policies lead everyone in the same direction, including people who don't know all the policies; broken policies let me cite the SHORTCUT that supports my POV, and if you didn't know that another policy says the opposite – well, too bad for you, because I'll win our dispute. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:40, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Until another editor shows up who knows better? It's not supposed to be a contest anyway tho I agree it can be sometimes. Selfstudier (talk) 10:46, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

@Butwhatdoiknow: Exactly. Actually the first sentence is from wp:onus, the second sentence comes from how Wikipedia operates, but is good and needed explanation/clarification/information. North8000 (talk) 21:56, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

North8000, focusing just on the third sentence in ONUS, the core concept is "in decisions on inclusion/exclusion of disputed content, apply an extra finger on the scale towards exclusion, and doubly so if it for new material," right? Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 03:28, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

I think 7 or 9 is the closest to my interpretation. Basically, if you add something and someone reverts you relatively soon afterwards, then the text stays out unless you can get consensus. If you remove longstanding text and are reverted, then the text stays in unless 1) you can get consensus or 2) there is no consensus and retaining the text carries unusually high risk (e.g. negative BLP material). -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 05:03, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

@King of Hearts, when you read "The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content", do you really hear "If the disputed text has been there a long time, then the onus to achieve consensus is on those seeking to exclude the disputed content"? Or are you saying that's not what the text says, but that's what it ought to say/what the current practice is? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:43, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, because that this the only interpretation which is consistent with WP:NOCON. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 07:30, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Beware of implicit consensus as policy

I would like to caution against giving implicit consensus too much weight as policy, as the conversation seems to be heading in that direction. While WP:NOCON acknowledges that we often maintain the previous version in the absence of consensus, it does not actually recommend that course of action as the desired result; and I'd be wary of encoding it as the preferred outcome by policy. There is the risk that it will encourage editors to revert articles back to the status quo ante version, using "there's implicit consensus" as the only reason for the revert; which is far from a good guideline of desired behavior. As WhatamIdoing recalled above, implicit consensus disappears as soon as someone challenges it.

At the very least, any clarification to ONUS and NOCON should warn editors to provide, each time, a summary of the arguments on which consensus was achieved. Even if the outcome is the same of retaining the original version, at least the editor challenging the content will have a basis on which to work to improve the article on top of that consensus, maybe looking for ways to get their desired outcome without contradicting those arguments; instead of the alternative of being stonewalled by a flood of camped editors undoing all attempts at improvement on the only basis of "revert to previous consensus per WP:NOCON" with the force of policy. Wikipedia already has a bad reputation of veteran editors behaving that way; let's not encode in policy that undesired behavior, and instead guide editors to avoid it by explaining the most constructive way to protect a challenged article. Diego (talk) 07:46, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

The types of "clarifications" described above would have huge impacts and would require consensus in a widely advertised RFC. Maybe not for a low impact tweak. North8000 (talk) 13:27, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

I, also, find the concept of "implicit consensus" to be problematic. Either we've had the discussion, and the consensus is taken from that discussion, or we haven't, and the status of consensus on any matter is merely "unknown". It doesn't become more known as time passes. This isn't always a problem; if something isn't contentious, the matter never comes up. But as soon as something DOES become contentious, an actual taking of consensus needs to occur. It isn't sufficient to say "no one objected until now..." as though that's somehow consensus. Once a good-faith reasonable challenge has been made, we need to assess the situation more closely. "No one objected until now" is only sufficient until someone objects. --Jayron32 14:42, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

I agree with Jayron32. Most of our articles are thinly edited. We shouldn't codify any language that suggests the standing text has consensus merely because it's aged. For text that's been discussed or in articles that are frequently edited by many editors, implicit consensus has a valid basis, but consensus can change, new sources can become available, due weight can change, and we should not be publishing guidelines that may be misinterpreted in such a way that they hinder article improvement. SPECIFICO talk 15:42, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

@Jayron32, I wonder whether your last sentence could be usefully used to improve Wikipedia:Silence and consensus. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:46, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Not necessarily. The operative part of that essay is already in the first sentence. People seem to think that there's some kind of hidden time limit at which time Wikipedia articles become written in stone, but that essay already makes clear that consensus exists "until disagreement becomes evident". As soon as someone removes some text from an article (excepting obvious vandalism, etc.), it is evident they disagree. Unless there has already been a discussion about that text, the text is now no longer in consensus. --Jayron32 11:06, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

@North8000 Well yeah that's the thing, I don't believe you can solve this issue with a "low impact tweak" to the guidelines, that's why I'm raising the warning in this section. I agree if we are to include such clarifications it should be widely publicized, gathering feedback from the community at large. Diego (talk) 16:56, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Maybe, maybe not. It might be possible to describe a best practice without insisting that it be followed every time. For example, "If someone cites this section, it may be helpful if you briefly outline your thoughts on the talk page. For example, you might post links to recent discussions about this matter on the talk page, which could help others understand why you believe there is support for including (or excluding) the material." WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:49, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that would be a good course of action, in line with what I was suggesting. Though I'm afraid it also has the potential to require wide, well publicized consensus as North8000 said. Diego (talk) 20:59, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Fixing this

One thing abundantly clear from the above discussion is that our policies ONUS and NOCON are not clear, open to multiple reasonable interpretations. What say we focus on clarifying them: let's talk about what they should say, and then draft an RFC to change them? Levivich 20:49, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

I fear that jumping to "what should we do about ONUS and NOCON" is likely to result in "no consensus." End result: the existing text stays and there is no improvement.

It seems to me that the first issue is that ONUS is ambiguous. My plan: (a) collect all the possible meanings of the current ONUS text (we've pretty much done that), (2) do a survey regarding which meaning is correct for the current text and see whether we can, at least, have a majority view regarding what the current ONUS text says. (3) Revise ONUS to more clearly say what the majority of folks says it means. And then, finally, (4) work on resolving any conflict between ONUS and NOCON.

How does that sound to you? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:26, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

@Butwhatdoiknow: I'm certainly not opposed to your plan--hey, give it a shot--but I think you'll find that the answer to #2 is no, w don't have a majority view regarding the current ONUS text, and if we did have one, we wouldn't be having the problems with ONUS as we have now. So I don't think we're ever going to get to #3 (to "say what the majority of folks says it means"). I think the discussion above between Jayron and Aquillion was a rather perfect "microcosm" of the two leading views I've seen "in the wild" in editing discussions, and that's what we'd see on a larger scale if we had an RFC about the current meaning of ONUS. But of course I could be wrong... give it a shot. Levivich 03:27, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

...and I personally wouldn't focus on the conflict between ONUS and NOCON. I think that's not the best place to focus. I think the current "system" as written is not particularly helpful to us editors by and large, and so trying to "tweak" the current system won't lead to meaningful improvement (or even to consensus for any tweaks). I think, instead, it's better to focus on the goals or issues that ONUS and NOCON seek to address, which, namely, are about CONSENSUS, SILENCE, BOLD, BRD, and things like that. In other words, I think it'd more productive, instead of talking about the meaning of the current language, or conflicts between the current language, to talk about things like: when should/shouldn't an editor revert? When should/shouldn't "longstanding content" be considered (and what does "longstanding" mean)? What sort of consensus do we need to add something to an article, remove it, or change it? These are the sorts of questions that I think, if the community could answer them, would lead us to the best language for ONUS, NOCON, and other policy pages. Levivich 03:31, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I'll give (2) a try when I get a moment (busy times for me in the real world). - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 06:07, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

The meaning of the CURRENT text at ONUS (introduction)

The third sentence of wp:ONUS reads:

The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content.

For the survey below, please select from the meanings of that sentence identified in the discussion above:

LIST OF POSSIBLE MEANINGS OF ONUS THIRD SENTENCE

1. During discussion, disputed material may not be added.
2. During discussion, disputed material may not be added or retained.
3. During discussion, disputed material may not be added or, unless it has (or had) implicit consensus, retained.
4. During discussion relating to verifiability, disputed material may not be added.
5. During discussion relating to verifiability, disputed material may not be added or retained.
6. During discussion relating to verifiability, disputed material may not be added or, unless it has (or had) implicit consensus, retained.
7. Following discussion which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added.
8. Following discussion which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added or retained.
9. Following discussion which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added or, unless it has (or had) implicit consensus, retained.
10. Following discussion relating to verifiability which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added.
11. Following discussion relating to verifiability which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added or retained.
12. Following discussion relating to verifiability which results in no consensus, disputed material may not be added or, unless it has (or had) implicit consensus, retained.
13. If you want to include something in an article, and anyone strongly objects, then it's your job to prove there is an active, positive agreement to include your material in that article. The people who want to remove your material do not have to prove that there is a consensus to remove the disputed material; they only have to establish (a) that they dispute the inclusion of the material (for any reason at all, including bad reasons) and (b) that you have not provided written evidence of an active, positive consensus to include your material. It is not enough for you to claim consensus without evidence; "presumed", "implicit", or "silent" consensus does not count for this provision of policy, and WP:STATUSQUO (which is only about what to do with an article during discussions about the dispute, and not about what to do after the discussion has ended) is irrelevant.
14. A combination of the above (please identify).
15. None of the above (please provide the alternative current meaning of the sentence).

- Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 22:36, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

The meaning of the CURRENT text at ONUS (survey)

From the list above, please select one or more meanings of the current third sentence OF wp:ONUS as written: "The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content". - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 22:36, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

• 14 (2 & 8). - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 22:36, 3 June 2022 (UTC)
• 13 comes closest to the original intent. Blueboar (talk) 22:44, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

• 

  This means you!

  13 (which is not very different in substance from 8, although I think it is much clearer about the "this means you" aspect). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:15, 4 June 2022 (UTC)
• 14 by way of and 8 and 2; more specifically, the most important thing is what the result of a discussion is, so 8 is the primary meaning, with 2 as a secondary meaning. Crossroads ^-talk- 04:15, 4 June 2022 (UTC)
• 13. Selfstudier (talk) 12:47, 4 June 2022 (UTC)
• 15. Per my comments below, these are all far too categorical to accurately summarize the existing text; and the argument that a discussion ending in no-consensus results in omission reflects current practice is just obviously false, as anyone who has participated in that process is well aware. WP:IMPLICITCONSENSUS, meanwhile, is policy and is therefore incorporated into this policy's meaning. I also want to register my specific objection to the non-neutral wording of 13, which I feel is clearly prejudicial - it is totally inappropriate to devote several times the text to one option, invoking other policies to justify its position and so on. This "simple explanation" of ONUS is several times the length of the sentence it supposedly summarizes. --Aquillion (talk) 21:23, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
• 15. I think the text speaks adequately for itself. I don't think that attempting to further clarify the current wording is likely to be constructive. -- Visviva (talk) 21:28, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
• 13 - it's pretty obvious. Atsme 💬 📧 19:12, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
• 13 though I get the concern that the others are summary statements while 13 is a more detailed statement. Regardless, 13 is how I would view ONUS. Springee (talk) 12:00, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

The meaning of the CURRENT text at ONUS (discussion)

Discussion of issues raised at #The meaning of the CURRENT text at ONUS (survey), above.

User:Blueboar thank you for adding to the survey. However, the question is not the original intent. It is the meaning of the current text as written. Do you think 13 best matches the current text? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 00:10, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

• Yes. Blueboar (talk) 12:20, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

• 13 is just a long-winded way of saying 8 while preempting all the excuses people give for pretending that ONUS doesn't apply when the disputed content is something they want in the article. It is IMO "the meaning of the current text as written", just in a far more verbose and tetchy style. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:12, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

• I would like to know how the "original intent" was worded, where can I find that? Selfstudier (talk) 09:43, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

In the archives… what eventually grew into ONUS was discussed in January and early February of 2013… and the initial language was added on 11 Feb, 2013 (by me). Blueboar (talk) 11:40, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

• Thank you, bit of history is always good (and WP:PAGEDECIDE which I have never really paid that much attention to before). Selfstudier (talk) 12:17, 4 June 2022 (UTC)
• The original language does not appear to say anything about onus (what happens when there is no consensus regarding "whether specific information is irrelevant or trivial to the topic") or the process elaborated at 13. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:03, 5 June 2022 (UTC) @Blueboar: please reply. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 15:49, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

• I don't believe the just-added text, "if a discussion results in no consensus then the disputed material may not be added or retained," is appropriate in a policy that many Wikipedians treat as having the force of law. (Nor can the tiny number of responses above be taken seriously as representing any sort of project-wide consensus.) Taken literally (which people will), this new language goes far beyond a mere burden of persuasion and effectively gives a formal heckler's veto to any motivated group of bad-faith actors. Of which we have many. (I am thinking particularly of the nationalists that occasionally swarm an article they don't like, but there are plenty of other examples.) They wouldn't even have to put in the work of edit-warring! More generally, WP:V should not be in the business of specifying page-level dispute resolution practices. I haven't responded to the survey above because I see no overwhelming need for exegesis here. Sometimes ambiguous policies are ambiguous for a reason. -- Visviva (talk) 06:07, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

  I agree with Visviva. It certainly should not have done until the discussion was closed. From my experience, Visviva accurately describes what would happen if the new wording is included. I'm reverting it. Doug Weller talk 07:40, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

  I agree with Doug Weller said and go far beyond that. Adding such a disastrously prescriptive and categorical statement to this high impact core area of a core policy would be just that and require much more that just interpreting it out of this general local discussion.North8000 (talk) 13:48, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

• More generally, WP:V should not be in the business of specifying page-level dispute resolution practices. I haven't responded to the survey above because I see no overwhelming need for exegesis here. Sometimes ambiguous policies are ambiguous for a reason. This is an interesting statement (and one that seems to be excluded by even the exhaustive list of options above, which presumes that WP:ONUS should be categorical in some form.) Do you think it should be added to the RFC - something that makes it clear that ONUS is advisory or intentionally ambiguous and does not impose hard requirements? The fact that large numbers of people have contributed to the discussion without weighing in there suggests that there is a flaw or an omitted middle somewhere in it. --Aquillion (talk) 21:07, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

  I think at least a "no additions are needed"/"the current text speaks for itself" option would probably be a good thing. Beyond that I'm not sure adding more options would be helpful give how many are already there. -- Visviva (talk) 21:21, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

  @Visviva, we've had multiple long discussions about this. How many thousands of words do we need to spend discussing how confused certain editors are before you would agree that the current form isn't working for the editors who claim that they're confused by it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:07, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

  FWIW, I am 100% in favor of removing the text entirely, as it already does more harm than good. I hadn't realized that option was on the table. I am skeptical that a consensus could be achieved for that either, however; many editors are likely very attached to their personal understandings of the policy. -- Visviva (talk) 18:59, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

• I want to raise a particular objection to how this list provides a detailed rationale and explanation for 13 while all the other options are brief, terse sentences - that is obviously not a neutral way to word an RFC. Finally, every point where WP:IMPLICITCONSENSUS is mentioned raises WP:CONLOCAL issues in that declaring that implicit consensus has no applicability here would effectively moot it as a concept, which isn't something that can be done by a relatively small number of people on an unrelated talk page. The argument made in 13 in particular makes it clear that people are interpreting this as not being related to or confined to WP:V-related manners. In that case, why is it on this page, and why are we discussing it here? Policy set on WP:V cannot override WP:CONSENSUS, which establishes implicit consensus, without a truly broad and overwhelming consensus itself, but the fact that by interpretation 13 this has nothing to do with verifiability makes it even more confusing. --Aquillion (talk) 21:24, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

  So we need the policy to explain that it must not be interpreted as 14(2<->8) or 13. I knew there was a reason I didn't understand it all the other times:) Selfstudier (talk) 21:29, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what to say to that because, as I've said, I've almost never encountered anyone actually attempting to use anything that I would describe as remotely compatible with 13 or the 2 + 8 in actual discussions where text has implicit consensus. I would like to drill down into what the people who support those actually mean, ie. what they think discussions should look like when governed by this, because I feel like there's a fundamental disconnect. I posted a big question to Crossroads in that regard above (since he's the one who I've had the most past disputes with where I feel that this change in practice would drastically alter the outcome) but didn't get a response... which is fair enough because I can understand not wanting to rehash past disputes. But if the result of what people are pushing for here is "no-consensus RFCs default to removal; if someone challenges any inclusion, it must be immediately removed and stay out until / unless you can point to an unambiguous consensus to include, either via a near-unanimous / overwhelmingly lopsided discussion on talk or a closed RFC", then that would break a lot of our existing consensus-building mechanisms and would result in any controversial article either being much, much shorter and more empty, or an absolutely massive wave of RFCs for anything that is seriously disputed. It would be one thing for people to propose this as a change - I'd think it's a bad suggestion, but I'd at least understand what you're suggesting. For people to say they believe that this is how things work currently, though, is, to me, extremely worrisome because it suggests that there's still no real understanding of what such a seismic change would mean in practice (and from the comments above regarding the specific proposed change I'm not the only one who shares that worry). --Aquillion (talk) 21:41, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

Also, the other possibility, I guess, is that if the people who push for interpretations 13 or 2 + 8 actually believe that that reflects both the current practice and is what the current text means, then I guess to a certain extent the disagreement is illusionary because don't have to do anything; we can continue to default to the status quo or using implicit consensus to the extent that we currently do and nothing will actually change beyond occasional argument. But that doesn't seem to me to be possible because 13 or 2 + 8 so directly contradict that current practice - I can go over more examples of past disputes I've been involved in, maybe, and the people who push for those interpretations can say how they think those disputes should have gone, or ought to be going? --Aquillion (talk) 21:47, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't know why you keep bringing me up, and I don't think disputes with me are of any particular relevance. In my experience, text found not to have a consensus ends up deleted, even without an RfC. As has been said previously, IMPLICITCONSENSUS goes away once a good-faith objection appears. Often it will be easy to re-establish a stronger consensus, and "near-unanimous" discussions are not needed to establish consensus. If they were, I'd turn the question around - why would we allow content to stay even if a majority - though not "overwhelmingly lopsided" - said it should go? Also as said earlier, we need to beware of making it too difficult to remove old, bad material that went unnoticed. As other editors stated: If the material is truly disputed by just one person, then it should be possible to find one or two other editors who support its inclusion. In that case, we'd be able to form something like a consensus to retain the material, and ONUS wouldn't really apply. And: Only one person did the original bold insertion. The policy doesn't say it will self-destruct after a deadline and adding a deadline would give a first mover advantage based on a vague ("years" or "longstanding") assertion which could trump multiple opponents afterward. Crossroads ^-talk- 21:58, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

I spelled it out above, but in our past disputes on eg. Mermaids (charity) - I definitely think there has never been a clear consensus for the Training section. Do you believe it actually had explicit consensus? And, in your view, how would that be resolved, if I insisted otherwise? Would it require an RFC, and would it default to removal if that RFC reached no consensus? If you agree it lacked explicit consensus, what do you think the people involved should have done differently? My point isn't simply to dredge it back up but to try and get some understanding of how you feel WP:ONUS should work and apply to dispute resolution in controversial areas in practice. Rehashing specific discussions in depth can wait until / unless policy is actually changed or clarified here, but - I am using an example to try and understand what you think this interpretation actually means, in the sense of how it would apply to actual disputes. Because to me this is a drastic change that would overturn or throw into question numerous past status-quo decisions similar to that one, and would in practice lead to either article instability, controversial articles getting trimmed down to the bone, or an absolute avalanche of RFCs on every seriously disputed point. --Aquillion (talk) 22:10, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

If I recall correctly, as seen on the talk page, that section as it stands is the result of compromises, removals, and adjustments on the part of many different editors that are part of the process of consensus - which often is more complex than a simple keep/remove. I haven't reviewed that discussion for this, but removing it all after that agreement was reached would be throwing out that more explicit consensus on the part of one editor and hence inappropriate. As for RfCs, while I do believe that RfC closure as "no consensus" is best avoided since it sidesteps the whole point of an RfC which is to get a definite answer to an intractible dispute, if even after one there is such significant disagreement with merely including a matter, then yes, the encyclopedia is better off without it. I think this interpretation of ONUS is in practice what is usually done anyway, and would throw hardly anything into dispute again, as my experience in controversial topics is that usually most controversial text is the result of explicit consensuses on the talk page, or could have one easily developed in case of disruptive deletion. Crossroads ^-talk- 03:52, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

That first part is interesting. I don't totally disagree because as I've said above I feel that the crux of WP:IMPLICITCONSENSUS is that the more people who have seen or, better yet, edited something without removing it, the stronger the implied consensus backing it; we use time only as a quick shorthand, obviously text doesn't gain implicit consensus just by lingering on an article with a single editor that nobody else has ever seen. But I still think that that's just implicit consensus and therefore would not count under either 13 or 2 + 8 proposals above. Part of this might be that we need to refine the concept of implicit consensus a bit better, or at least add more guidelines as to the difference between the hypothetical "clearly only one person has seen this ever, but it has been here for 12 years" text and "it's been here for three months but has been extensively edited by numerous editors on a high-traffic article without anyone objecting to its basic presence" text. By my reading, though, barring the use of implicit consensus to satisfy WP:ONUS would mean that the only thing that would satisfy it is a clear discussion or RFC about that specific text that definitely led to a consensus supporting it. Simply being discussed and failing to reach a consensus or being heavily-edited aren't enough - the first is WP:NOCON (leaving only whatever implicit consensus it had before in place) and the latter is just a strong implicit consensus. I would add a caveat that edits that clearly treat a disputed addition as controversial (eg. adding tags, but also edits that are solely attempts to tone it down or pare it back) do not really contribute to its implicit consensus - especially if, eg. someone removes an entire addition, gets reverted, then tries for a compromise that removes the most objectionable part, that doesn't mean they support it and per WP:NOTSILENCE can actually weaken or remove implicit consensus rather than strengthening it. It's important that any objection to a disputed new or no-consensus addition "breaks the seal" of implicit consensus and blocks it from achieving it afterwards, because otherwise you're discouraging people from compromising at all, ie. if an editor effectively says "fine, I don't want to get into an extended dispute on this, I think the whole thing should go but I'm going to at least remove the very worst part", that's not even implicit consensus, let alone explicit consensus. --Aquillion (talk) 05:00, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

@Aquillion, about "this list provides a detailed rationale and explanation for 13": No, it doesn't. There is no rationale given for 13 at all. The whole point of 13 is that it explains the existing wording in extreme, over-the-top detail. Some editors claim to have found it enlightening. Perhaps it offers a sort of "I really mean it – This means you!" moment for editors who had previously thought there was an implied exemption for their circumstances. But there is no rationale given for why 13 is the meaning. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:13, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

I mean it goes on for several times as long as the others, with passionate wording that invokes arguments based on additional interpretations of other policies - like STATUSQUO and WP:CONSENSUS. Neither of those policies, obviously, can be changed or curtailed by discussions here; stuff on this page is only applicable to WP:V and to challenges related to V, per WP:CONLOCAL, and will not change how we assess consensus in any way. As it is, the wording reads to me as blatantly prejudicial - you don't ask people to choose between 14 sets of dry simple wording and a massive paragraph of passionate invocations. --Aquillion (talk) 07:52, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Can we talk about this when you have a little more time to think it over? You've just called STATUSQUO a policy, when it's an essay; and if I could get you to click here to open the specific section of CONSENSUS, I think you'll find a very interesting and relevant note at the top of the section that provides direct and explicit information about what to do if that section diverges from other policies. As a result, your worries about CONLOCAL are probably misplaced, if not exactly backwards.

I'd have thought that my highly informal, over-passtionate wording, which was turned into 13, would have discouraged other editors from choosing it. Editors generally want a certain amount of formality in their policies. Perhaps the important point, though, is that there's a gap between "This sentence correctly explains the meaning" and "I think this sentence belongs in the policy". I'm not seeing much of the latter; are you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:38, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

There's yet another severe structural problem with trying to interpret a policy change out of this. Trying to think that one can interpret the results out of a local "what do you think this wording means?" into a policy change on a high-impact core policy is not correct. The policy is what what is written right now, with all of it's deliberate fuzziness. Any change would nee to get proposed as a specific proposed change. North8000 (talk) 00:14, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

I think that there is at least a lot of confusion over what implicit consensus is and how it works, which means that having a policy discussion that references whether to respect it but doesn't define it is mostly useless. At least by my reading, implicit consensus is any consensus at all that is not backed by a discussion that clearly reaches a consensus for the disputed text in question, or (in situations where there is any degree of reasonable doubt) an RFC; and, therefore, if ONUS does not respect implicit consensus, anyone who wants to restore any removed content must point to one of those two things first. I obviously don't think that's workable. The vast majority of our text has had either of those things. --Aquillion (talk) 05:06, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree that WP:Consensus needs to better define what constitutes an implicit (silent) consensus, and how much weight to give it (to my mind, we should focus less on the amount of time between addition and challenge, and more on the number of intervening edits. That is a better indication that other editors have reviewed the original addition and are OK with it). However, that discussion really needs to happen at WP:Consensus, not here at WP:V.

All WP:V needs to include is a warning that Verifiability is only one of many factors to consider when determining whether to include or omit information… and those other factors can result in verifiable information being omitted. Blueboar (talk) 13:05, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree with your last bit. Some people above are saying that ONUS has no relation to, or is not limited to, disputes over WP:V; at that point... why is it here? It's not part of our WP:CONSENSUS-building policy; it's in the wrong place for that. If ONUS just said that verifiability does not guarantee inclusion, and referenced other policies like WP:CONSENSUS to define how consensus is built (plus stuff like WP:NOT, that also have things to say about it), that eliminate the problem. Well, it would eliminate it here, at least, we might still have to work on CONSENSUS if people think that it is missing some vital part that is currently only in ONUS. Aquillion (talk) 18:03, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

To put my last post in short form, a "what do we think that the policy means?" discussion is not a basis for changing a policy. An RFC on a specific proposed change would be needed to do that. North8000 (talk) 13:17, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

What say we focus on clarifying them: let's talk about what they should say, and then draft an RFC to change them per Levivich above. Is that where we are at? Selfstudier (talk) 13:29, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

If we do have an RFC, I'd like to have an option along the lines of what Blueboar said above, eg. All WP:V needs to include is a warning that Verifiability is only one of many factors to consider when determining whether to include or omit information… and those other factors can result in verifiable information being omitted - that is to say, WP:ONUS should not make any sweeping statements about the consensus-building process, it should just indicate that it is necessary and then point people to WP:CONSENSUS. --Aquillion (talk) 18:03, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

+1. The ONUS sentence, "The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content", regardless of what it means or may be re-worded to say, really should be moved to WP:CONSENSUS (and clarified). The rest of WP:V#Verifiability does not guarantee inclusion should do what Blueboar said in Aquillion's quote above (and what the section heading says). That remaining part could probably be wordsmithed too. Levivich 21:34, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

There already was a Village Pump RfC for a very similar proposal, and it was closed thusly: There is an overwhelming consensus against this proposed change, primarily due to concerns that it would undermine verifiability and efforts to remove poorly sourced information.

Tying implicit consensus to number of intervening edits instead of elapsed time per se doesn't really mitigate the issue. A lot of intervening edits can occur that are to, say, the lead of the article or some other portion, while those same editors don't notice the problem material. A lot of edits are copyedits, categories, AWB, and bots, and hence also aren't really much in the way of scrutiny. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:27, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

That proposal failed because it proposed bad wording for a new onus section of wp:consensus; it's not really applicable to this idea. Levivich 01:59, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

• To put an exclamation point on the risks of overly categorical language in this section, there is at least one prolific AFDer who contends that ONUS means that deletion is the default outcome of AFDs, and thus a guideline that states "there is consensus that articles of type X are OK and should generally not be deleted" means that all articles not of type X should be deleted. I have, of course, pointed out that of all the things ONUS is not, it is definitely not a deletion or notability policy. But I would have to think that this sort of misunderstanding is probably not original with this user on this day. Imagine the damage such a misreading could do if it the language of this section were even more legalistic. -- Visviva (talk) 00:48, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

  In that discussion, the only person voting "endorse" is probably the only person misreading anything. The "prolific AFDer" whose edit you link to has participated in a whopping 19 AFDs. The editor, in that discussion, does not contend that ONUS means that deletion is the default outcome of AFDs (their argument is more complicated than that). And you should probably ping editors when you use them as examples. Welcome back, BTW, glad the new admin inactivity requirements have spurred a return to editing :-) Levivich^[block] 02:40, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

  It would have just spurred a desysopping if I'd had to spend any longer in the hospital, but I suppose we can leave that particular example of how policy change goes wrong alone. For my part, I would not wish to personalize a policy discussion in the manner you suggest or have it done to me, but ymmv. (I'll consider omitting diffs entirely in the future, although that hardly seems like an improvement.) I cheerfully withdraw the characterization, although I think anyone who has participated in more than a couple of AFD discussions (myself included) can fairly be described as "prolific" relative to the community as a whole. I do think I have accurately summarized the position in that comment; I am unclear what sort of "nuance" would lead to such an explicit inversion of NLIST if my summary is incorrect. In any event, I think my broader point here as to the risk of misinterpretation of this passage stands. As to me being "the only person voting 'endorse'" in that discussion, since I have been reliably informed (elsewhere on that very page) that consensus is now determined solely by strength of arguments rather than numbers, the fact that some of my fellow Wikipedians disagree with my correct interpretation of policy is, apparently, neither here nor there. What a time to be alive! -- Visviva (talk) 04:45, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

• Okay, what about the other solution: removing the third sentence altogether? Or, at least, proposing its removal. By its own terms the onus would then be on those who want to preserve it to explain why we should "include" a policy statement when the community cannot come to a consensus regarding when it applies or what it means. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 03:41, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
  • Sounds good to me. -- Visviva (talk) 04:45, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
  • Of course not. Policy text is not article text; there is no risk of spreading misinformation to the public, and they are the rules that underlie how editing works, so ONUS does not apply just like WP:V in general does not apply. In no way would this discussion be sufficient to remove any sentence (I assume you meant the fourth sentence). And changing so it applied to changes in general was rejected at the Village Pump RfC - obviously removing it has the same effect of changing the policy and the same reasons for rejection apply. Crossroads ^-talk- 06:56, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
    • Given that the community cannot agree on what the sentence means, what is the policy that removal would change? - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 16:03, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
      • To borrow phrasing from North8000 below, removal would put a finger on the scale away from exclusion of controversial and dubious material, and that's bad. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:29, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

IMHO the meaning of "The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content"

IMHO: The meaning of "The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content" must be understood in the context of the Wikipedia system. The "Wikipedia system" includes making multi-variable decisions (those fancy words describe how normal human decision making and wp:consensus works) based on considering and weighting numerous factors, policies and guidelines, this being (merely) one of them. (Examples of the many others include: how long the material has been in the article, how much tacit review/consent it has accumulated, and "last stable version" considerations) The meaning of this sentence is to put a finger on that decision scale towards exclusion when the the material is disputed. A few special-case derivatives/ examples of this are:

• If the material is disputed and all other considerations are equal, the material stays out
• If the material is weakly disputed, but other factors add up very strongly towards inclusion, it will be included

Like most Wikipedia policies, by necessity, the sentence is not written in a very specific, categorical way. Any attempt to do so would be something that preclude also taking into consideration other policies, guidelines and factors which is not how Wikipedia operates and would also create conflicts with other policies, guidelines and considerations.

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 17:03, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

+1. It looks as if it's broken but it ain't really broke in practice and it's designed to be a bit woolly so as to cover all sorts of possibilities. Selfstudier (talk) 17:09, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Right. But if our policy documents did their job, they would read like what N8k just wrote here, which is a whole lot clearer than anything written in any of our policies. Let's actually document this, which the current sentence does a poor job of doing. Levivich^[block] 17:36, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

No objection here, might not have the patience for the discussion that tries to settle the precise words that will be equivalent to what N8k just wrote:) Selfstudier (talk) 17:46, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Yup same :-) Levivich^[block] 18:15, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Describing how the described aspect of the Wikipedia system actually works (including how it interacts policies, guidelines and considerations) could be called "out of place" here but besides solving the issue it could be the seed for something that would have astoundingly huge benefits. A tiny place for "make no small plans"  :-) North8000 (talk) 19:22, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

What North wrote was the easy part. It can be shortened to "Consensus is not unanimity. If you have a consensus, then do whatever you all agreed to do".

The question is what to do when the objections to the material (however they happened to be measured by you/in that specific dispute) are exactly equal to the support for that same material. Imagine 100 editors with 100 medium-strength arguments in favor, against an exactly equal 100 editors with 100 exactly equal medium-strength arguments against. There is no consensus; we have not achieved anything like an agreement. Imagine for simplicity that it is not possible to compromise on some sort of halfway-in-and-halfway-out position: the disputed material (e.g., an image, a name, a link, a source) is either included or excluded.

In those rare instances in which you cannot form a consensus to include or exclude, what do you do? The non-random options are:

• Default to an outcome (inclusion or exclusion)
• Default to a precedent (the oldest or newest edit)
• Default to a person/role (e.g., if one of the principal disputants is an admin, or whoever has made the most edits)
• Wikipedia:Supervote by quoting STATUSQUO or selective bits of WP:PRESERVE if you want to keep a version that included it, or by quoting ONUS and Jimmy on "Zero information is preferred" if you want to exclude it.

It's that last option that I'd like to see spiked. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:04, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

<preach> The real problem with the WP:ONUS sentence ("The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content.") is that it's written entirely wrong, and until we completely rewrite it--and completely change how we approach the problem--we will always have this underlying fundamental disagreement.

What's wrong with the ONUS sentence is that it frames the issue in a battleground way, by dividing editors into two camps: those "seeking to include disputed content", and everyone else (presumably, those opposing inclusion of the disputed content). To further encourage a battle between the two sides, the sentence gives one side the "onus" of winning inclusion--or in other words, it divides us into two sides and tells us which side is playing offense and which side is playing defense. Talk about encouraging WP:BATTLEGROUND and WP:GAME behavior!

In content disputes, nobody really "supports" or "opposes" inclusion. Everyone supports inclusion of what's WP:DUE, and opposes inclusion of what's undue. And we all read and interpret sources to determine what we think is due for inclusion. Of course, many people disagree about what's due, but to frame that as a disagreement between those supporting inclusion and others is to completely oversimplify what actually happens in real content disputes: people have many different and overlapping interpretations of sources that lead them to different and overlapping conclusions about what's due for inclusion. They discuss their interpretations until they come up with something that overlaps enough people's interpretations that everyone agrees it's more or less OK, and if successful, we call that "consensus".

The consensus-building process is not a battle between two sides, it's a collaborative effort with everyone working together towards the same goal. The fact that sometimes we have votes on things where people "support" and "oppose" is a granular detail, just a part of a larger process, and to focus just on that little detail by having rules about which side has the "onus" is to completely miss the forest for the trees.

Whenever I read the ONUS sentence, my initial reaction is always: "Who the hell cares where the onus lies?" How does it help us resolve a dispute to identify who has the onus of resolving the dispute, but not identify how the dispute gets resolved? Wikipedia is not a legal system and is not trying to be one, so why do we use these legalistic analogies like burden of proof? I suggest we don't care where the onus lies, we care about what to do with disputed content while we come to consensus about what's WP:DUE. That is what WP:ONUS should tell us.

And we already know half the answer: if it's newly-added content, it should stay out until there's consensus about whether/how to include it. The hard part is for content that's already been in the article for a while (however one defines "a while"), and when such "longstanding" content is disputed, what do we do with it while we figure out what's due for inclusion? I don't know the answer to that question, and I think it's a "multifactorial" analysis like what N8k wrote above, balancing multiple considerations on a case-by-case basis. We could clear up all this confusion about the third sentence of WP:ONUS by rewriting it so it answers the question of what to do with new content, and longstanding content, while inclusion of the content is being discussed. </preach> Levivich^[block] 18:18, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Ideally, yes. However, sometimes it reallt does come down to a zero-sum 'include or exclude' outcome, with multiple experienced editors on each side. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:36, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Levivich, I don't agree that there are no battles between two sides or that it's always a collaborative effort with the same goal. Sometimes people just want to stick their thing in, and they don't really care about anything else. Consider the newbie who seems to be posting a WP:SELFCITE to a source we'd never use. Consider the anti-vaxxers or other real-world (or at least Twitterverse-based) POV pushers, who want Wikipedia to give more airtime to their views. Consider the paid promoters, whose goal is to get their client mentioned in Wikipedia no matter what. "Everyone" isn't working towards the same goal unless your "everyone" excludes a lot of people.

Also: We might care a little bit about what to do with content while we come to consensus, but what about those rare times when we don't ever come to consensus? Shouldn't ONUS care more about these years-long situations than about a brief situation? BRD tells you to let the other guy win during the discussion, and if you don't like that, QUO tells you to leave it at some old version during discussion, and EW tells you definitely to stop edit warring over it, but most discussions only take about a week to resolve. Quit worrying about the relatively brief "during the discussion" part. Worry about what happens when it is utterly and completely impossible to develop a consensus. What should policies tell you about that?

And what about those situations in which an editor refuses to engage in the discussion? About a dozen years ago, I encountered an editor who would add something to a hotly disputed article and refuse to discuss it – unless and until someone removed it. Every removal produced a revert and a polite comment. If we didn't remove it, the editor refused to engage in the discussion. If we were to set the rules as "No removal unless discussion supports removal", then it would be in the best interests of the person who wants the material included to have the consensus-oriented discussion fail. I crammed that in the article, you can't get it out with consensus, and I sabotaged the discussion, so it'll never come to consensus. Voilà, there is no consensus to include that particular disputed material, but you still can't remove it.

I would be interested in hearing what you think should happen if:

• I add well-sourced but possibly inappropriate content (and it's been there a long time).
• You want to remove it (for very good reasons).
• We have a long discussion followed by an RFC that ends with the words "There is no consensus either way. Editors were not able to agree on whether to include this or to remove it. Both numbers and reasons are closely balanced. There is no obvious reason to believe that further discussion will produce a different result."

Now what? That is the question that ONUS is meant to answer. What's your answer? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:14, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

It should be excluded. More specifically:

• If you just added it, and someone objects, they should revert it, and nobody should reinstate it unless and until there is consensus to do so. If the subsequent RFC ends in "no consensus", it stays out.
• If it's been there a long time, whether it should stay in during the discussion would be determined by a multifactorial analysis that looks at factors like: is this a BLP, is it sensitive/controversial content, how well sourced is it, how strong are the objections, how long has it been there, and how many edits since it was added, among other factors. As N8k put it above, the factors may weigh towards inclusion (e.g., if it's been there for 10 years over 1,000 edits, it's not a BLP, it's not controversial, and only one editor is objecting) or exclusion (e.g., it's been there for 1 week over 5 edits, it's controversial, it's a BLP, only one editor wants to include it), depending on the specific circumstances; that's a case-by-case. At the end of the RFC, if there is no consensus on whether to include or exclude, it should be excluded.

A section of WP:CONSENSUS should explain this. Levivich^[block] 17:07, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

sometimes it reallt does come down to a zero-sum 'include or exclude' outcome, with multiple experienced editors on each side yes, and those times are examples of "trees" in the "forest" that is the consensus-building process. By focusing on those "trees", ONUS misses the "forest". Levivich^[block] 17:01, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

I see no real issue with the wording here, the meaning to me being obvious in that until there is an affirmative consensus to include material it stays out as disputed and it settles what "no consensus" should default to (exclusion). I think the better thing would be to adjust NOCON rather than attempt to adjust ONUS. NOCON defaulting to status quo ante should only be applied when there is an existing affirmative consensus, and no implicit consensus through silence or time is not that. A discussion where one can show a consensus, not necessarily an RFC, would be necessary for a no consensus to default to content being retained. nableezy - 18:41, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm with you on the first part of the argument, but I am a little confused by your conclusion. The kinds of battleground-type disputes where ONUS would apply at all are, as you note, not at all representative of what we are doing, or trying to do, on the wiki. So it's hard to see what it's doing in WP:V, which does apply to pretty much everything we do in article space. Disputes that get to the point of ONUS wikilawyering are so weird and warped in different ways that they pretty much all give truth to the hard cases make bad law maxim. Core policies shouldn't be tailored to edge cases. ONUS, as I read it, is trying to give a rough rule of thumb for those edge cases -- but it can't really do the job, because adding another Rule to the pile isn't likely to help anyone in finding a solution when the situation is already rife with wikilawyering. -- Visviva (talk) 19:13, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

I think it ended up in WP:V for two reasons: The first is that we needed a place to stick it, and WP:V is "a place". Not every policy statement ends up in the most logical place, and this one could have gone in several places.

Two, there's a tendency to think that everything that can be well-sourced belongs in Wikipedia. I can find many very good sources about the color of Queen Elizabeth's hat at 12:00 UTC on the first Thursday of this month, but that doesn't mean that any Wikipedia articles need a sentence that says "At 12:00 UTC on the first Thursday of June 2022, Queen Elizabeth wore a powder blue hat", right? I know that; you know that; some editors are ...maybe a little shaky on that point.

The fact is that we're so used to removing badly sourced content that we kind of forget that there are other policies, so when we encounter a situation like that, we tend to think of WP:V before WP:BALASP or WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. So our shaky editor is saying "But I sourced it beautifully, and it fully complies with WP:V, so that means it can stay!", and we point to the section of WP:V where this sentence is: ===Verifiability does not guarantee inclusion===. It's not enough to perfectly verify that she wore a powder blue hat at that exact minute; also, if people are disputing your perfectly verified claims, then you have to convince them to leave your perfectly verified sentence in the article. They do not have to convince you to agree to removal.

We could have taken other approaches ("If you have a dispute about whether a bit of perfectly verified content should remain in an article, please see the following six pages:"), but editors ended up sticking the sentence here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:23, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Are the editors who who stuck this sentence here the same ones who gave us wp:NOCON? I ask because I'm still having trouble seeing how that policy doesn't conflict with this one. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 05:15, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

No. I wrote NOCON, except for the sentence that conflicts with ONUS. The conflicting sentence is one that I (we) discussed repeatedly, at both WT:V and WT:CON, because it never felt quite right. We were thinking about it as a kind of jumping-off point, to be tried out and refined later, etc., except that we haven't been able to make progress on it. "What we usually do" in that situation is complicated. Also, what we usually do in some instances might not be best for articles.

The other, more 'structural', problem with NOCON is that it's meant to be a convenient pointer to all the other, actually-controlling policies, but instead some editors think that NOCON is in charge of everything, and all the other policies have to change to align with it, which is backwards. It'd probably be safer in a separate essay. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:36, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

It might be helpful to have a little more detail about the history.

• I started NOCON in November 2011. See this comment and the one by Kotniski that follows it for the most immediately relevant precipitating comment, but if you want to understand the motivation, you really have to read that entire section plus multiple discussions on that and other pages earlier that year.
• Ring Cinema added the QUO-oriented sentence in January 2012. I refused to add it myself because I didn't think it was correct, but I didn't object to attempting to cover this subject.

Something that might be useful to know is that Ring pushed hard, for years, to have QUO be enshrined in that policy as the One True™ Way. See, e.g., March 2012 to remove the idea that QUO didn't always happen; March 2012 to remove the anti-QUO BLP rules; same thing in June 2012; claiming that changes to the original version of an article without consensus are anti-policy in October 2012; July 2013 to remove the idea that QUO was a tiebreaker instead of a dominant principle, with edit summaries like "sorry, no consensus means no change -- it's in this policy", and so forth.

For clarity, this isn't the only editor who holds this view. See, e.g., this edit in 2015, or this one in 2020, which says even COPYVIO isn't worth mentioning as an exception to the sacred principle of QUO. Some people are dedicated to the principle that QUO is the law of the wiki. (Tangent: I wonder if editors who hold that view are disproportionately likely to end up blocked, like Ring was, for edit warring.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:50, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

And to add: Of course we default to QUO, except:

• BLP
• CHALLENGE
• COPYVIO
• ONUS (at least theoretically)
• No agreement on which version is m:The Wrong Version and which one is the QUO version
• One side's more willing to edit-war than the other
• Editors actually read QUO, and figured out that it says "During a dispute discussion, you should not revert", and doesn't say anything about what should happen after the discussion is finished.
• Editors actually read QUO, and figured out that it says "During a dispute discussion, you should not revert" and does not actually say anything even remotely like "you have a duty to force the status quo version onto the page".
• Editors develop a nuanced understanding of consensus ("We agree on this much, even if we don't agree on everything")
• Probably some other reasons

That amounts to a lot of exceptions, and possibly enough to swamp the boat. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:59, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

• OK… more background history… back in the day (before we had ONUS), when there was a dispute over whether an article should mention factoid X or not, one side would say: “you need consensus to include this”, while the other side would say: “no, you need consensus to exclude it”. We needed something to break this stalemate. We figured that it was usually easier to achieve a consensus to include than to exclude (proving the positive rather than the negative), so we placed the “onus” to achieve consensus on those who wished to include. Blueboar (talk) 19:29, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm going to guess that it ended up where it is because it relates to the sentences preceding it which I'll bet were an attempt to offset the oft-invoked false urban legend.....the verifiability is a reason for inclusion rather than just a requirement for inclusion.North8000 (talk) 19:35, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Self-published sources discussing themselves: What if they state a falsehood?

The existing policy "Self-published or questionable sources as sources on themselves" says: "Self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, usually in articles about themselves or their activities." Five exceptions are provided, including "the material is...an exceptional claim" or there is "reasonable doubt as to its authenticity." Currently, there's an active discussion on WP MOS Gender Identity which sprang from an active discussion on the Talk page for "Tucker Carlson". The situation is: A couple days ago, Carlson updated his blue-checked (verified) Twitter bio to contain six false statements about himself. Some are just simply, verifiably false, e.g., his Twitter bio claims he went to Harvard and won an Emmy, when he did not. Nonetheless, WP editors are suggesting adding one of the six claims, namely that his pronouns are "they/them", as WP MOS Gender Identity provides for using "the person's latest expressed gender self-identification". The obvious objection is: What if the person is known for his anti-transgender opinions, he's claiming to express a different gender as a joke, and he admits to the conservative site The Daily Wire that he was joking? What then? This is not only about MOS Gender Identity. More broadly, it's about the verifiability of self-published sources about one's own biographical information of any type. If you say you went to Harvard and won an Emmy and you very clearly did not -- because you think that's a joke, for whatever reason, regardless of whether the joke succeeds in being funny to your audience or otherwise achieving your objective for making that joke (like, I don't know, gaining entrance to a Harvard alumni event to extend the "joke," if hypothetically that were your plan) -- the issue isn't that it's an exceptional claim, it's that it is false, and it's not that it's inauthentic (in the sense that someone might have hacked your Twitter account and updated your bio without your knowledge or consent), but, again, it's that you, the authentic you, said something false. For most editors, hopefully, it's obvious that we should not transcribe falsehoods, but perhaps it is worth acknowledging in this guideline that sometimes people make false statements about themselves. Otherwise, we have Talk page battles about whether we should take everyone's statements about themselves at face value. - Tuckerlieberman (talk) 13:53, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

What do RS say about the issue? False information should not be included without RS commentary which explains that it is false and what the facts are about it. It is the RS which give it due weight for mention in the first place. Unreliable sources, such as Carlson and whatever venues he controls, do not have due weight for mention. Only RS have that "power". ABOUTSELF allows use for basic information that is not unduly self-serving, and such deceptive information serves some function that may be weird, but it's also self-serving in that it is apparently designed to create controversy and draw attention. Wikipedia does not wish to become party to such shenanigans, even though we will certainly document it if RS discuss it. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 14:08, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

My understanding of the "Verifiability: Self-published sources" rule is that we can accept a person's assertions about their basic biographical details. Example: If you need to know where someone went to college, you consult a biographical paragraph that they wrote. If it's self-published or something they themselves said on TV, that's OK, because people are the experts on their own résumé. (Correct?) I personally agree that Carlson is an unreliable individual and his non-factual "graduate of Harvard College & Yale Law School" trolling is part of a self-serving act, but another editor might counter that this is my subjective judgment against Carlson. And what the "Verifiability: Self-published sources" rule appears to say is that, if Carlson says he graduated Harvard, we are cleared to add that "fact" to his WP page (i.e. that he did go to Harvard, not only that he said he went there), even though it is just very clearly false information. I wonder if it is unclear to editors that, if the self-published statement is false, that in itself is grounds to refrain from making changes to someone's page—regardless of whether we like him, or find his jokes funny, or what we believe his motivations are for making a false statement. Tuckerlieberman (talk) 15:33, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

To some extent you are correct. If the claim isn't extraordinary or self serving we can included per ABOUTSELF. So if it's known a person's parents are from France, claiming they grew up speaking French at home is likely not a claim that we would reasonably treat as suspect. If the claim were just that they can speak French we and we have a video of them speaking the language in an interview that would clearly not be an extraordinary claim. However, if they claim to speak 17 different languages we would likely assume that is an extraordinary claim and seek further proof before accepting it. So yes, in this case, if Carlson were a less known BLP someone could have taken those claims at face value. However, for a high profile BLP we have more eyes and more information to go on. We can question a self published claim that seems at odds with the rest of the person's statements/behaviors/etc. At some level we always have to use some level of judgement when deciding how to use/not use information from both RS and SPS. Springee (talk) 16:25, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

OK, thanks. What the editors actually wanted to add was Carlson's statement about his gender pronouns (which they argued we ought to take seriously) and that logic is being discussed on MOS Gender Identity. They didn't want to add his school (which no one really thought we had to take seriously, since it doesn't check out) so that is more of a hypothetical I brought up here, as another instance of self-misrepresentation. Likely, they knew not to add fake info about his school because he's high-profile, as you pointed out. Thanks again. Tuckerlieberman (talk) 18:04, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

(edit conflict)See point 4 here, WP:SELFSOURCE. Self published content about one's self is fine except in cases such as, "There is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity." Number 1 also could apply as this, in context, is an exceptional claim. Springee (talk) 14:12, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Well, yes, this is what I was trying to bring up—

To me, "authenticity" (item 4) implies that the person themselves (and not a hacker or impersonator) made the statement. If I say, "I don't think Tucker Carlson's current Twitter bio sounds authentic," someone might say: "Do you mean his account was hacked?" And I say, "No, he probably wrote it himself, but—" and they say "Well, then, it's authentic." In that dialogue, what I meant to get at is that his statement isn't sincere and doesn't faithfully represent his beliefs.

Also, to me, "exceptional claim" (item 1) doesn't really cover this situation either. Saying that one graduated Harvard and Yale Law isn't an exceptional claim, as every year Harvard grants about 1,500 bachelor's degrees and Yale grants about 200 law degrees, so there are thousands of people walking around with these degrees. I mean, any college degree is a big personal accomplishment, but it doesn't go in Ripley's Believe It Or Not! (A couple of my immediate family members graduated from Harvard.) The only way in which that claim is "exceptional" is in the sense of: Well gosh, Tucker Carlson, I always thought you went to Trinity College? Rewriting history is certainly 'exceptional'!

So my observation is that his statement is authentic and unexceptional, in the sense that he really is Tucker Carlson making this statement and many people do go to Harvard. But my concern is that it is also false. What I'm looking for is a rule making it clear that we don't transcribe self-published content about oneself if it's false. If I look in Harvard yearbooks, Tucker Carlson won't be there. Tuckerlieberman (talk) 16:23, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

It is indeed unexceptional for Carlson to constantly make false statements, but RS trump self-published sources when it comes to due weight for inclusion. When the content is controversial or of doubtful accuracy, we are not required to include the person's own words. We can leave them out and wait for the judgment from RS.

Falsehoods should never be included apart from the context, commentary, and debunkings provided by the RS that created the initial due weight for inclusion. Presenting a bare falsehood without context makes Wikipedia a vehicle for falsehood, and that is so wrong. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 16:49, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

• I think Springee meant that the They / Them part in particular is exceptional given Carlson's history. The other parts just contradict higher-quality sources and aren't covered by the MOS:GENDERID requirement to defer to self-identification, so we can ignore them like we would any lower-quality source that is contradicted by a higher-quality source. --Aquillion (talk) 17:30, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
  • Aquillion is correct. Given what we know about Carlson we can assume that a request to use They/Them is an exceptional claim and thus we need additional sourcing before acting on it. We are not obliged to include self published claims we reasonably suspect are false. Springee (talk) 18:15, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

There's several things to consider here.

• First, if the sources contradict, we can just go with higher-quality sources. Unfortunately that can be a problem with certain narrow WP:ABOUTSELF statements because higher-quality sources might not discuss it at all, but for most of these there's a plain contradiction, so we should go with the higher-quality sources.
• Second, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Gender identity is a special case that gives more weight to their self-identification; that's why it came up in this case. It's also, unlike historical details, something that can in theory change, so there isn't the same stark contradiction we have for everything else.
• Third, WP:EXCEPTIONAL still applies. The idea that Tucker Carlson, given his political views, would suddenly genuinely identify as they / them is clearly exceptional, so I think it's fair to require higher-quality sources than we normally would (ie. in this particular case, not WP:ABOUTSELF ones, whereas a source like that would be sufficient for a random public figure without a history of views that make it unlikely they would identify that way.) And the basic underlying logic of EXCEPTIONAL applies as well - Carlson is a high-profile media figure well-known for the views that would make this exceptional; if any sources took this remotely seriously it would have massive amounts of coverage, which is conspicuously absent.
• Fourth, I would argue that a source's reputation for fact-checking and accuracy does matter when it comes to WP:ABOUTSELF - aboutself allows us to cite a source for statements about themselves but does not completely erase the other requirements of RS. Carlson has a history of making false and misleading statements, which affects our ability to use him as a source for statements even about himself.

Finally, even when the sources are unambiguous in saying something that seems obviously wrong, we do have some leeway to omit it or wait for better sources - regardless of the outcome of the arguments about WP:ONUS above, it is definitely true that verifiability does not guarantee inclusion, while part of the purpose of WP:RECENTISM is to avoid problems like this. Arguing to exclude something because it is dubious or plainly false is a weak argument in the sense that it more or less requires everyone agree there is a problem so severe it approaches WP:BLUE levels, but when the sources are flagrantly, unambiguously wrong we are not actually required to follow them over a cliff - we do have the option to just decline to include something, at least up to a certain point. --Aquillion (talk) 17:30, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

• Per Aqullion, and WP:COMMONSENSE, we do not have to include material from any source where there are good-faith objections to its reliability even if it is an SPS. If there is evidence that the source is not reliable when discussing themselves, we don't have to use it. --Jayron32 18:23, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

  I agree. Use your Wikipedia:Editorial discretion. Nobody can force you to add a weak source to an article. Nobody can force you to take a joke post seriously. Even if you did choose to use it, you'd want to write something like "Carlson, who has publicly admitted to lying on his show, once claimed that he attended Harvard, that he had won an Emmy, and that his preferred personal pronouns were they/them". WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:04, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Evidence of reliability and fact checking goes way beyond just reputation

Personally, I'd feel far more comfort ascribing weight to content produced from an established journalistic blogger or video content creator who declared their workings and whose comments were turned on than that produced by some opinionated hack or celeb that somehow got their closed for comment writings into some established publication.

Articles and videos that are presented by individuals can certainly have vastly higher readerships and viewerships than those typically achieved within the memberships of various press gang contingents. Of course, the press will typically deride other contents or ascribe poor associations potentially because of their vested interests in maintaining their own positions.

The world is changing. Previously, the ability to produce the physical outputs of the press was limited to the hands of just a few players. We now live in a different world in which anyone can report and, hopefully, cite evidence. It's still a world where the press wants to hold onto their own reputations while damning everyone else. My hope is that Wikipedia may find ways to be more openminded. If independent journalists etc. have established good track records of providing good, fact checked materials that are openly available and have not been relevantly contested, why not? GregKaye 08:29, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

"Declaring your workings" is fashionable at the moment, but you're taking it on faith that the declarations are truthful. I remember hearing that Rush Limbaugh regularly asserted the existence of an internal fact-checking process that declared 98% or 99% of his on-air statements to be factual. This is a person who accused people of committing crimes for political purposes, denied the existence of climate change, and said that COVID-19 was just the common cold. He even said that tobacco's role in lung cancer was unimportant about five years before dying prematurely of lung cancer.[4] Do you trust his declarations about fact-checking? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:55, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Checks blp policy...no. Selfstudier (talk) 17:43, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Definition of a source

SOURCE says:

The word "source" when citing sources on Wikipedia has three related meanings:

• The work itself (the article, book)
• The creator of the work (the writer, journalist)
• The publisher of the work (for example, Random House or Cambridge University Press)

All three can affect reliability.

I have been thinking since our last conversation on this about how to make it clearer. Here's my current thinking:

A source is the person, place, or thing that a Wikipedia editor took information from. Usually, when editors are talking about a source, they mean one or more of these four things:

• The work itself (the article, book: "That book looks like a useful source for this article.")
• The creator of the work (the writer, journalist: "What do we know about that source's reputation?")
• The publication (for example, the newspaper, journal, magazine: "That source covers the arts.")
• The publisher of the work (for example, Random House or Cambridge University Press: "That source publishes reference works.")

All four can affect reliability.

This adds a straight definition of source (NB source – not reliable source) and examples of how editors might use the word. I also separated publisher from publication, which turns our three categories into four.

As an example of why I think four categories is more appropriate, consider the 2022 Pulitzer Prize winners in investigative journalism. The winning work was a series of five articles by three reporters.[5] So we might say:

• the sources, meaning the individual articles: Part 1: The Factory, Part 2: The Failings, Florida’s only lead factory finds itself in damage-control mode, A look inside Florida’s only lead smelter, Cadmium spiked inside a Tampa lead factory. Workers didn’t get help., and Part 3: The Fallout
• the sources, meaning the journalists: Corey G. Johnson, Rebecca Woolington and Eli Murray
• the source, meaning the publication: Tampa Bay Times
• the source, meaning the publisher: Times Publishing Company

I think this will make the what-we-mean-by-this-word explanation a bit clearer. What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:35, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

• I think so, it's tiresome when one cites with attribution a reliable source1 from a reliable source2 and someone claims that you misrepresented source2 because of some other stuff in source2 that you didn't mention. Don't ask. Selfstudier (talk) 17:48, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

  Because when you are talking about a source by a source in a source from a source, then everyone knows exactly what you mean when you say "I think we need to look into that source a little more", right? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:54, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

  ) Selfstudier (talk) 09:26, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

• Someone will have to dig back through the archives, but I remember that we had some discussions on this back when the section was crafted… it might be helpful to look back at those discussions. If I remember correctly, we deliberately chose to use the word “meanings” (and intentionally AVOIDED using the word “definitions”) in that sentence. Ie we were not trying to DEFINE the term “source”, but instead clarifying that people often USE the term “source” in different contexts, each of which need to be thought about when discussing the general mishmash that is reliability. Blueboar (talk) 18:39, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

I agree that these things aren't really the definition of a source, but rather an odd mix between explaining what people may mean when they say "the source" and trying to list attributes of a source that affect its reliability. And for the latter, this list is importantly incomplete and badly weighted. I think it is good in WAID's proposal to recognise that the "publication" is an important attribute and often used as a noun when we say "source" (e.g. The Guardian is a good source) but I think we should drop "publisher". Who the publisher is is actually a bit vague. The examples here seem to think it is the corporate entity that owns the publication. But often that is just an "imprint" of a bigger publishing house who in turn are owned by someone further up (a trust, a listed company, a Russian oligarch). If a newspaper runs a political live blog, the publisher is really the journalist posting entries. For other articles, we might view the editor as the one who made a decision to publish an article. The corporate entities may own so many titles that they don't really feature in our views of reliability. When has anyone said 'I sourced this from Penguin Random House"' or "Elsevier is a reliable source" or "That's unsupported by the source, Guardian Media Group".

I wonder if this policy is so focused on what makes a source reliable that it has missed the fact that of the three or four "sources" listed above, only one of them is fundamental to verifiability: the actual text of the article we cite. If our article text is not capable of being drawn from that source text, it simply isn't even a "source" and certainly isn't verifiable. I think the policy should start with that, that fundamentally the thing that actually used as a source for the wiki text is some article text (or speech or a diagram I guess). These other nouns (creator, publication, publisher) may often be used to when we talk about a source, but whenever we do so, we are being vague and importantly we are being indirect. We don't actually source our text to Katy Balls or to The Guardian or to Guardian Media Group. We source it to words on a page.

So maybe we need to say this, what a source really is, and then explain that sometimes people use indirect nouns when they talk vaguely about sources. Because I don't think there is anything particularly special about creator/publication/publisher as attributes of a source that determine "What counts as a reliable source" (the section heading). For example, it is far far more important that an article in The Guardian is straightforward news reporting of current affairs rather than opinion, blog, review, obituary, humour, etc. We know in medical publications the article type is absolutely critical (more so than the publication or author) and yet does not feature in the above "what counts as a reliable source". There are other attributes at Wikipedia:Reliable sources such as age. A new source may more reliably reflect current thinking than an old source.

I think trying to focus on the primary attributes of "what counts as a reliable source" by listing these nouns is a bad approach we should now retire. -- Colin°^Talk 10:08, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

It is words on a page but no-one speaks about sources in that way, RSP is organized by publisher for example. I think it is helpful to describe simply what is a "source", not necessarily reliable and not necessarily for WP experts, agreed, but WP is not mostly experts and every little helps. Selfstudier (talk) 11:00, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Well, WP:RSP is actually mostly organised by publication, not publisher. For example, it lists Scientific American who are a magazine published by Springer Nature who in turn are owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. What's the publisher of a website like Science-Based Medicine? Is it themselves, their blog authors or the New England Skeptical Society that owns it? Who cares really, when we can treat it as a publication and discuss at that level. I guess books don't really have a "publication" since they are all one-offs, though they may be part of a series or an imprint that has a reputation. WP:V currently states "Random House" is what editors call a "source" and claims that being published by "Random House" affects reliability. Really? Has anyone ever called Random House a "source" and claimed they are or are not generally reliable? Surely that isn't a meaningful example.

You say "no-one speaks about sources in that way". Well they really do at article level, because if you read an article and its citation you get the source for the text, which really really is the words on the page what is cited. Nobody (beyond newbie level) puts just an author's name as the source, or just "the Bible" as a source, even mind "Cambridge University Press" as a source. So I say: Nobody actually cites sources that way. And at the level of discussing whether article text "fails verification" then the primary thing that matters is whether the words on the page support the article text. If someone says "Hold on a sec, the source doesn't support the text", they mean the words cited, not the person who authored it. Or if they amend the text "per source" they are doing so per the words on the page, not per Random House or because they happen to personally know what Katy Balls really meant. Perhaps that kind of discussion generally gets sorted out on article talk page rather than going to noticeboards and such, so perhaps it is easy to forget.

Whenever you go beyond the words on the page, to the author, publication and so on, you are being indirect and general. And I'd say that these nouns less useful to us as a grouping mechanism for generalities than to consider attributes. Sure who the author is and what the containing publication is are also attributes, but so is the type of article and so is the age of the article. I think WP:V's over-emphasis on publisher/publication it is harmful, actually, because at MEDRS and medical topics, we have to explain to people that yes the NEJM is a fantastic publication, and yes the paper is peer reviewed, but your study of 20 patients in 1995 is not a reliable source for saying Wonderpam cures baldness. It is the wrong type of article and it is very old. Do you really think the fact that something is published by Cambridge University Press rather than Penguin is more important than whether one is 30 years old and one is a year old. -- Colin°^Talk 11:07, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Nobody (beyond newbie level) puts just an author's name as the source, is not true, every time we cite an expert opinion, the text of our article will cite the author as source, regardless of where it was published. This does not stop persons going on to say it was published by X and X is a crap publisher that does no fact checking, prints conspiracy theories etc etc. You see, no discussion of the actual text, just arguments about the author and the publisher, very common situation. Those MEDRS examples you mention are also typical of the discussions in other areas and again they are not about the actual words. The truth is that all of the elements whether they be WP:RS elements or V elements go into discussions (when they occur) about "a source". Finally your comment publication, not publisher kinda proves my point about how slippery this all is, so additions that clarify are welcome in my view. Selfstudier (talk) 11:20, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Are you talking about in-text attribution? I'm not sure that's quite what WP:V is talking about when it means a source.

Here's the thing, the actual words on the page that we cite as our source cannot be judged reliable or unreliable, any more than a clock face showing 3:15 can be judged reliable. Judging reliability means examining qualities of something from which we draw our cited source information from. Something bigger or more general. In the WP:V text we are discussing, we've gone bigger by crawling up the publication hierarchy. But we can become more general in other directions too.

Those attributes of reliability might be being in a certain respected non-fiction book, in a quality newspaper, by a professional author with relevant qualifications, be an appropriate type of article, be recent. Some of those attributes happen to align with concrete nouns that people casually talk about when discussing "reliable sources" but I argue some of those important attributes have been neglected. In medicine we might say that our source is a literature review, or it is a meta-analysis, or that it is just an editorial or a case report. I might say "A case report is a terrible source for Wikipedia". But this "type of article" doesn't feature in the above bullets. I might say "Try to use a modern source" but age doesn't feature in the above bullets.

Verification is concerned with two things. Does the source cited literally support the article text. This is the basic requirement to even meet the definition of source. I agree that when everyone here discusses reliability we don't discuss the actual text (much) and we discuss all these other things. The problem with hierarchies, as these bullet points above demonstrate, is that they often restrict our ways of thinking. They are just one way of organising things, and I think that by doing it like above, we aren't focusing on the most useful qualities and over emphasising a rather unimportant one. But also, I think we are confusing the newbie editor if we really are trying to say this is the definition of a source. -- Colin°^Talk 15:03, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

In re Do you really think the fact that something is published by Cambridge University Press rather than Penguin is more important than whether one is 30 years old and one is a year old?

I think the fact that something is published by the author, or published by the subject, or published by a predatory journal group is very important. The difference between CUP and Penguin could be trivial; the difference between a corporate press release and any large non-fiction publishing house is significant. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:30, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

IMO, in practice talking about the publisher is usually in the context of confirming that it isn't self-published. And what's more relevant is the "next level up"; e.g. the magazine that it's in, not the ultimate owner of the magazine. Probably a distant second is when there is a respected known publisher who really does publisher-type work involved, such bolsters the source during any discussions. North8000 (talk) 11:43, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

The publisher is the key point if you're talking about predatory journals. Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/Questionable1 is organized by publisher, e.g., Hindawi (publisher). WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:30, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Focusing on "publisher", and more specifically, that the publisher itself is key to relability when considering aspects like self-publishing and promotional/predatory works, can help. At least it becomes easy when you identify the publisher as the entity that has editorial control and review of the work before it is made public, and reliability is a measure of that editorial control. Eg it is understanding the YouTube nor Twitter is the publisher of that content, merely a host while the uploaded is the publisher. Forbes contribs have minimal review before they are published to which we consider the contributor as the publisher. A predatory journal is not going to have the rigorous peer review like top tier journals so while they may be the publisher, their process of editorial oversight sucks to make them unreliable. Etc. Masem (t) 19:46, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Plural

I think I've found a way to adapt the current/proposed text in a way that includes what is missing. I maintain that when the current text says "The word "source" when citing sources on Wikipedia has three related meanings" it is very misleading and WAID's proposal is only a little better "Usually, when editors are talking about a source, they mean one or more of these four things". Because there are five things we talk about, one of them is what we actually cite, and that isn't mentioned in either list. We cite a specific source text, with varying degrees of precision, and we expect the reader to be able to find words in the source text that supports the article text. We are not "citing" a person or a publication or a publisher and citing a whole book would be unhelpful. But we are talking about those things, mostly when we are considering reliability.

An additional problem with the current/proposed text is that it is all singular. And that's not often helpful for discussing reliability. Sure, we can find examples of these things that are individually considered unreliable. The Lancet MMR paper by Andrew Wakefield got withdrawn (eventually) and is itself widely notable as unreliable. Same goes for its lead author, Wakefield. And the Daily Mail is our go-to example of an unreliable publication. But it is often more helpful to talk in the plural and we do also consider them as a source in the plural. We may say "Primary research papers are not a reliable source of medical facts" or "Professional textbooks are reliable sources". We can say "Newspapers are not a good source for medical facts" without having to deal with a specific newspaper's own reputation.

How to talk about sources in the plural? Any ideas for revising the section? Here's a quick draft:

While a cited source is usually a specific block of text, when we talk about a reliable source we mean the person, place, or work that a Wikipedia editor took information from. Usually, when editors are talking about a reliable source or sources, they mean one or more of these four things:

• The work itself (the article, book: "That book looks like a useful source for this article.") and works like it ("An obituary can be a useful biographical source", "A recent source is better than an old one")
• The creator of the work (the writer, journalist: "What do we know about that source's reputation?") and people like them ("A medical researcher is a better source than a journalist for..").
• The publication (for example, the newspaper, journal, magazine: "That source covers the arts.") and publications like them ("A newspaper is not a reliable source for medical facts").
• The publisher of the work (for example, Random House or Cambridge University Press: "That source publishes reference works.") and publishers like them ("An academic publisher is a good source of reference works").

I disagree with WAIDs claim that their text "a straight definition of source (NB source – not reliable source)" because it missed out the cited source, which is a very important use of the word source, and I think (correct me I'm wrong) those other meanings are mainly concerned with choosing reliable ones. We aren't defining reliable source either, but trying to define source when used in either circumstance. When I say "The source does not support the article text" I'm referring to the cited source text, not the book or author or publisher. When I say "The source is not reliable" I'm not referring to the cited source text itself, but the other things around that. -- Colin°^Talk 10:59, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree with much of what Colin has said, but I wanted to raise considerations that go beyond WP:V (since editors are often juggling multiple policies and related definitions). For example when considering Notability, and also when establishing WP:BALANCE and WP:DUE, it is typically the publication meaning of "source" that is used as the unit of measurement in "counting RS" (though this doesn't apply to academic journals). Perhape we could keep these related aspects in mind for any proposed new text here? Newimpartial (talk) 12:05, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Colin captures the original intent of this section of policy. We were not attempting to define the term “source”, but outlining the different ways in which the term is used in discussions, and cautioning editors to think about all of them when assessing reliability. Blueboar (talk) 13:49, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

I hear what you're saying, but presumably the section should at least offer scaffolding for the ways "source" is used within this policy. The top of the policy page includes the statement If reliable sources disagree, then maintain a neutral point of view and present what the various sources say, giving each side its due weight, with a link to DUE, so it wouldn't be off-topic to note that the publisher definition of "source" is typically used in discussions of BALANCE. Newimpartial (talk) 14:48, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

There are two parts to this, and one of them is to define "source". The other is to give a somewhat clearer/longer explanation of the ways that the word gets used.

1. I propose adding an actual definition of source (NB: not "reliable source". Just plain old "source", including unreliable ones and ones whose reliability is not yet determined).
2. I propose expanding the "how we use this in this policy" bit from three types to four types, because I think that will cover almost all of the uses of this word.

I think that we should have a definition of "source" in this policy (again: not "reliable source"). People reading this policy should be able to find a sentence that tells them that if they're writing something that they read on social media, then social media posts are their source, if they are writing something their grandparents said, then their grandparents are the source, etc. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:52, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

The expanded version I propose doesn't define a "reliable source" either, but it does clarify that we generally mean different things depending on whether we are citing it (in which case it is a concrete thing with actual words) or discussing the reliability of something that contains it or things that are similar to it and may even be an abstract thing like "newspapers" or "literature reviews".

If they are writing about something they read on social media and they actually cited it (a tweet, say) then their cited source is that sentence someone tweeted. Verifiability is very interested in that sentence (does it support the article text) but it is unimportant when we consider if it is a reliable source. If someone complains "that's an unreliable source" they might mention Twitter or the author of the tweet, but could also disparage all "social media posts", as you put it, as an unreliable source of information, which are plural and general, and that plurality and generalisation was missing from your original proposed version.

If they don't cite the source, then it is what we'd call "unsourced" even if there is a "source" within their head. The same goes for their grandparent's oral wisdom. I don't think your example then fits into "when editors are talking about a source" because we don't have extended conversations about intangible unknowable sources. The policy page is "Verifiability" and we are in the section "Reliable sources" and subsection "What counts as a reliable source". If we are concerned to educate our readers about any kind of sources, citable for the purpose of verification or only vaguely remembered, then source is a starting point for articles on the topic. -- Colin°^Talk 17:46, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

My main concern about your proposal is the inclusion of the word reliable in the phrase "when we talk about a reliable source we mean the person, place, or work that a Wikipedia editor took information from". Consider:

• "Source": Any person, place, or thing that a Wikipedia editor took information from
• "Cited source": Any person, place, or thing that is cited in the article, even if it's not the one that a Wikipedia editor originally took the information from (e.g., a source cited by someone else to deal with a {{fact}} tag; a source that has failed verification)
• "Reliable source": Any person, place, or thing that experienced editors accept as being appropriate for verifying the specific content in question.

The definition of (plain) source needs to encompass unreliable sources. What you wrote doesn't do that. If the problem isn't obvious to you, then try flipping that sentence: "the person, place, or work that a Wikipedia editor took information from is what we mean when we talk about a reliable source". It is not true that every person, place, or work that a Wikipedia editor took information from is a reliable source. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:19, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I really don't want to be defining "source" or "cited source" or "reliable source" as though they are dictionary definitions, and I don't think those definitions are helpful. I was trying to clarify what editors mean by "source" in the two key circumstances that matter to Verifiability: when we cite a source and when we discuss reliability of a source. I don't think it is useful to clump all the possible meanings together, because we really really do not cite publishing houses or people, and we really really do not discuss the reliability of page 51 of the January 2022 edition of the British Medical Journal.

I think you got "person, place, or thing" from Google's definition of a "source" and I think that's an unhelpfully general definition because "place" might be fine for where you get your groceries but is pretty irrelevant to Wikipedia's use of the word. And "thing" is way too unspecific. A dictionary has to include e.g. "mackerel is a good source of fish oil" but we don't. We use the word "work" so we might as well lead with that, rather than "thing".

How about "While a cited source is usually a specific block of text, when we talk about whether or not a source is reliable, we mean the work or works a Wikipedia editor took information from, or those involved in creating and publishing those works:"

That avoids your concern that we are trying to define reliable source and is a better lead description than the "person, place or thing" that Google gave us. I think we can drop the last sentence too, and just let this one lead into the bullet list. In a way, this sentence then is a transition from thinking about citing specific source text, to thinking about "What counts as a reliable source", which is the section heading. -- Colin°^Talk 17:35, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I didn't get this definition from Google; that's the typical definition of a noun, which my own Miss Snodgrass insisted that all her students learn.

Citing a place is not common, except for {{cite sign}}, but a geographical location really can be a source of information, e.g., "I walked over to this park last week and found a monument to the soldiers of the Great War, and now I'm writing "There is a war memorial in this park" in the Wikipedia article. It might not be a reliable source, but if this is how you acquired the information you put in the article, then it is your source.

The reason I prefer "person, place, or thing" is because it encompasses everything that could give information to a Wikipedia editor. "Work" feels narrower, as if it includes only artwork and documents. What if you're reading the label on an object, and you add "The Russell Hobbs iron is made in China" to a relevant Wikipedia article? Is that "a work"? It doesn't feel that way to me. What if the source of my information is personal experience? I can tell you that falling down hurts a lot more than it used to. Is my personal experience "a work"? If it's the basis for me adding information to an article, it would be "my source" (and an unreliable one banned by NOR), but it doesn't feel like it's "a work". WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:46, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I think you are trying to do something different to what this point in the policy page needs to do, and was (imperfectly) trying to do, which is describe what editors usually mean by "source" when they are having sourcing discussions. While we could extend "source" to include one's grandparent's oral wisdom, what your primary school teacher taught you, your local woodland or your own self discoveries about pain, these aren't what editors are usually talking about. The {{cite sign}} template describes it being used for a noticeboard providing information. I'd regard that as a "work" (it certainly is wrt copyright in the UK) and it really isn't a place, even it has a static location that could be part of the citation. The word "work" was already used multiple times in this section and used multiple times in your draft.

Wikipedia's verification policy requires a source to be a tangible thing that another editor can consult independently in order to verify the article text. I would say that was a core part of the restrictive meaning of "source" we use when citing and when discussing their reliability. So, while those other meanings of "source" are valid for where you may have got your ideas from, they aren't relevant to Wikipedia, to WP:V or to the section on what makes a reliable source.

I think there's a reason that copyright licences use the term "work". It means it was created by a human and is more than what existed before (in our case, it presents information to the consumer of that work). It is more than just a "thing" and certainly isn't a "place". Is there an alternative word? -- Colin°^Talk 10:37, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Even if we were writing this policy from scratch, I would recommend having a definition of source in it. If people believe that all sources are copyrightable works, then people will be misled as to the nature of the actual sources.

It is not a matter of whether we "could" extend the concept of a source to unreliable and non-traditional works; the fact is that we "already do". Using your examples, it would surprise me if, in these 6,845,862 articles, there were really nothing based on what someone's grandmother said about the food she cooked, what an editor's schoolteacher said about grammar or basic mathematics, a description of a place based on the Wikipedia editor walking over to the woodland and then writing here a description of its location or the presence of some type of plants, or identifying a particular experience as being painful based on the editor's personal experience (e.g., the unsourced content in Breakup about pain). WP:PRIMARYCARE gives an example of using a painting as a source. NOR gives an example of archaeological artifacts as being sources. Middens probably don't qualify as "works", but NOR says they are primary sources. Note, too, that the FAQ at the top of this page mentions unpublished personal communications as being a source.

I think the disconnect is here: "Wikipedia's verification policy requires a source to be a tangible thing". It doesn't. Wikipedia's verification policy requires a reliable source to be a tangible thing, but it doesn't require an unreliable source to be anything. Source = unreliable+reliable. The definition of source should not be wrongly limited to reliable ones. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:40, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

I can't escape the problem that all the things you listed in the first paragraph are what editors here would call "unsourced". I'm quite sure there are lots of facts that come from these intangible origins but editors don't tend to regard them as sources worth discussing. It doesn't even make sense to consider whether they are reliable or not. When have we ever had a discussion about whether your grandmother was reliable, or the woods were a reliable source of facts about trees, or your heart was a reliable source about the pain of a breakup. I think for a section in WP:V that is describing what makes a source reliable, it doesn't help to get distracted by them.

I'm not really sold by the idea that editors need a general definition of source that so clearly majors on sources we don't discuss. I don't think the proposed text claims these are the only meanings, but they are the usual meanings that editors generally discuss.

I'm not at all claiming that sources need to be copyrightable. The word "works" has existed in this policy for a very long time, and I mentioned copyright licences merely to say that they also used the same term to describe something human created that has value. Your examples of paintings or archaeological artefacts being primary sources fits completely into "works" too, though we wouldn't tend to have a reliability discussion about those, more whether the facts claimed from such primary sources fouled OR. The proposed text says "usually" wrt both the citation ("usually a specific block of text") and the reliability discussion. Are you actually suggesting people cite paintings so often that "usually" is wrong? Or that I've been unaware of WP:UNRELIABLEGRANDMOTHERS where editors have for years been categorising which ancestors are reliable and unreliable?

Aside from your feelings that WP:V needs a general definition of source, which we haven't had to date, what really is wrong with the text I proposed and what is better about it? I think adding the plurals makes it much easier for us to point at policy when saying "this type of source is unreliable" rather than getting bogged down in specifics as the current text keeps doing. And I think it corrects the mistake in the current text that claims we cite people or publishers, because we really don't. Blueboar and Newimpartial appear to agree it is an improvement that better describes what editors are talking about. Perhaps there is room for your general source definition, if it has merit, in another part of the page? -- Colin°^Talk 07:55, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

When have we ever had conversations about whether someone's grandmother is reliable? In practice, probably about 90% of the times we've discussed whether any document written by a woman over the age of 60. But if you meant "When have we discussed whether unpublished personal communications count"?, then I repeat that this has happened often enough that it ended up in the Wikipedia talk:Verifiability/FAQ years ago. My own preferred example begins "I saw Karp in the elevator, and he said...", and I can find five conversations in which I've mentioned that specific example with a quick search, so it does apparently come up.

I think that WP:V and WP:RS will eventually need a definition of reliable source. That requires having a definition for source. It is very difficult to reach an agreement about what counts as "a source that is reliable" if we cannot reach an agreement about what counts as "a source".

For the rest, I repeat: My main concern about your proposal is the inclusion of the word reliable in the phrase "when we talk about a reliable source we mean the person, place, or work that a Wikipedia editor took information from".

Consider the classic OR violation of posting unpublished information. I even cite it: <ref>Unpublished document from work</ref>.

Now I read your proposed statement: "when we talk about a reliable source we mean..." – well, we don't even need to read the whole sentence, because apparently we mean something of absolutely no relevance to what I did, because I cited an unreliable source, and this whole thing is only about reliable sources. All the following stuff about documents, authors, and publishers has just been defined as irrelevant, because it's an unreliable source and this sentence is only talking about reliable sources. This means you're going to tell me that I can't say this because we care about publishers (and there isn't one, which is essentially a fatal omission for a document), and I'm going to very sweetly reply "Dear Colin, your sentence says we mean to talk about publishers for reliable sources. You said this is an unreliable one, so we don't talk about the publisher", and then you are going to think about whether to cheer for the comet. Sticking the word reliable in there is an unnecessary gift to dramamongers and wikilawyers. If you re-write your opening sentence in there to not limit the type of sources whose work, author(s), or publisher(s) could be meant, then I'd be satisfied. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:56, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

I've already amended the proposal to meet this demand. See the text in green posted 6th June, that says "when we talk about whether or not a source is reliable". That covers both reliable and unreliable sources, and covers the situation where those meanings are appropriate (vs the restricted kind of sources we typically see cited in articles).

I'm not aware there is disagreement or confusion about what is a source, in the general meaning, but if an editor is confused or disagrees, then they could be referred to a dictionary or an encyclopaedia. I don't see why policy needs to define every day words to include more general examples than is useful for a discussion on verifiability.

Wrt your personal communication example, the FAQ is a little misleading, in that the issue with such a source (telephone or email or letter or face-to-face or whatever) is that it simply isn't acceptable as verifiable by a reader at all, and the reliability of it is by-they-by. As the page you link to (Wikipedia:Published) explains: "Sources that are not published (e.g., something someone said to you personally) or not accessible (e.g., the only remaining copy of the book is locked in a vault, with no one allowed to read it) are never acceptable as sources on Wikipedia." While it also says reliable sources must be published/accessible, that is not a definition of reliable, merely that those attributes are a bare minimum before we can even entertain a discussion of reliability. For example, in the WP:V lead "verifiability means other people using the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source", requires published/accessible for the "other people using the encylcopedia can check" bit.

The lead of WP:V already requires "content is determined by previously published information rather than the beliefs or experiences of editors" and we have a section on accessibility. I think it is fair at this point in the policy ("What counts as a reliable source") to consider those sources that "other people using the encyclopedia can check".

Editors generally use "unsourced" to mean text that either isn't cited at all, or that it doesn't appear to come from the cited source, or that the citation is not to a published accessible source. I don't think it helps us at this point in policy to effectively state that nothing is unsourced, because everything comes from somewhere, even one's own "beliefs or experiences". That's why it has been useful to clarify what editors mean by "source" in citation/reliability discussions, and not to just offer a general dictionary definition. -- Colin°^Talk 12:36, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't think I've ever seen an editor claim that a sentence is unsourced unless there is no little blue clicky number (or, previously, WP:PARENs) at the end of the sentence. People who cite inaccessible documents (I remember a case of documents available only to people belonging to a particular religion) are told that the source is unreliable or unacceptable, not that they didn't cite it.

I think the fastest path forward would be for you to make the change(s) you'd like to see. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:27, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Uh huh, second that, enough abstract, let's get concrete:) Selfstudier (talk) 09:25, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

• By focusing on “definition”, I think we are missing the important part of the statement: There are multiple aspects of a source that can affect whether we consider it reliable or not. All have to be considered. Sometimes one will outweigh the others (and that can be enough to tip the determination in one direction or the other), but they should all be considered. Blueboar (talk) 17:45, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

  There are so many factor to consider when thinking about reliability. This section doesn't cover them all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:12, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Citing a book without page numbers

What is the proper way to cite a book whose pages are unnumbered? I want to cite this book in Pam Tillis, but none of the pages are numbered. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 17:17, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

@TenPoundHammer: I've historically cited the chapter if I can't get a page number. You could also consider adding Template:Page needed and hoping someone comes along with the physical book. For the record, that book is available at Open Library (here) and "Every Home Should Have One" is on page 67. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 17:20, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

This seems to be more and more common due to the rising popularity of ebooks. Sometimes, you can find another version of the book that has page numbers (as FFF did above; and, indeed, I find that Google often has an ebook scan with no page numbers, whereas Archive.org will have a scan of a paper version, with the page numbers). Either way, I think citing to the chapter is good enough if no page number is available on the copy you're working from. If it's really something controversial, you can provide a quote in the cite to help the reader find the right page in the source, if needed. Levivich 16:26, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

WP:PAGENUM has the official advice, which amounts to "do your best". WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:54, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Verifiable ≠ cited

I feel like I've had too many conversations recently in which someone has selectively quoted BURDEN to claim that all uncited sentences are unable to be verified. The idea is that "other people" are entirely, hopelessly unable "to check that the information comes from a reliable source" unless a reliable source is presented to them on a silver platter.

I think it is probably time to add a sentence about the difference between cited and verifiable. NOR uses the line "verifiable, even if not verified", but "verified" could be understood as someone actually checking the source, rather than a source merely being listed in the article, so I'm inclined to suggest "verifiable, even if not cited" instead. A less stylish way might be to note that "if some material is not presently cited, but you can find a reliable source that directly supports it, then that material is already verifiable, and we would like you to edit the article so that the material is both verifiable and also cited".

What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:38, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

I wonder if you are just trying to handle a situation where a room full of pedants still frequently use lazy shorthand, expecting others in the room to understand their shorthand, rather than to get diverted by someone dismantling their failure to be utterly precise. In other words, is this an issue to bother most editors with? The lead does already state everything must be verifiable but only "material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged" needs inline citations. So the message is already present in the lead that there is that there is text that is verifiable already but lacks and doesn't need a citation. Your proposed guidance would perhaps suggest editors should spend their time citing that Paris is the capital of France if they can find a source for it.

Perhaps the problem is with BURDEN:

"All content must be verifiable. The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material, and it is satisfied by providing an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution."

is absolute. The two sentences combined make this bold text require one demonstrates verifiability with citations in all content, which is wrong. We could drop that first sentence that just repeats what the lead has already stated. Replace this short paragraph with

"If material has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, the burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores that material. This is achieved by providing an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution."

Remember this is the section on "Responsibility for providing citations" so a statement "All content must be verifiable." is not vital here. However, if editors wish to keep it, I think the caveat I've added would mean that first sentence could remain:

"All content must be verifiable. If material has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, the burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores that material. This is achieved by providing an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution."

-- Colin°^Talk 13:45, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Or perhaps insert a sentence: All content must be verifiable. Content might be verifiable even while it is uncited, but sometimes it is necessary to demonstrate verifiability, by adding a citation. (No changes, just adding the second sentence.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Way, way more than "sometimes". How much uncited text do you find in GAs and FAs? This isn't 2003 anymore where editors welcome people just plopping down whatever they believe to be true. The overwhelming majority of our text should be and is cited. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:24, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Using GAs and FAs as a guide to what a binding minimum standard like WP:V requires doesn't seem well-founded. -- Visviva (talk) 02:04, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

There might even be a difference between when it is "necessary" to demonstrate verifiability and when it is "desirable" to do so. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:19, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

An aspect to consider: say I add a paragraph of info to an article, but because I am baffled by WP's citation system, I include the URL to the source on the talk page or even as the edit summary. That is a completely valid verified piece of info with a source, just that the source isn't in an inline cite, and meets this guideline. Obviously, not including the citation will make it hard on other editors to track, so it would be expected experienced editors can help to include the cite, but just because the cite is absent doesn't make it unverified. --Masem (t) 19:34, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Masem, I think the issue is about articles that end-up in the NPP queue or somehow make it into mainspace without any sources - totally unsourced articles - and the expectation is for NPP to find the sources that will (a) verify N, and (b) verify that it is not OR. NPP should not be burdened beyond identifying unsourced articles as being unsourced, and then send them to draft or PROD them for failing to meet GNG, and V. BURDEN states the onus is on the article creator to provide sources - NPP are not article creators and we have enough on our plates without having to finish the work that may be the result of a bot or UPE or an editor who just wants to take credit for article creation but doesn't want to do the work associated with V and GNG. NPP was not established to complete unfinished articles. Our job is to not allow them to be indexed, and to send them back to draft. We should not be encouraging the creation of unsourced articles by doing the work the creators failed to do, or were unable to do because sources don't exist, or the topic was not notable. Atsme 💬 📧 23:57, 20 June 2022 (UTC)

Sure, but that said, if I as a new editor created an article and still confused about citation style, dumped all my sources into the talk page, that's still "verified" for all purposes. Mind you, we absolutely accept bare URLs wrapped in ref tags as acceptable inline cites (they can be improved but they aren't failing to source their information) and a NPP patroller can inform the user how to do this quickly. Masem (t) 00:43, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Even if you didn't dump any sources anywhere, the subject could be notable and the contents could be verifiable.

Have a look at Geriatric sexology, which I ran across yesterday. It's three sentences long. It's been unsourced since its creation about 17 years ago. But ask yourself: Do you reasonably expect someone to have written about this subject? Is there anything in those three generic sentences that sounds like the kind of thing that you'd never find in a reliable source? I don't see any problems here, and I suspect that the reason it remains unsourced is because nobody else thought it was all that important to have those three unsurprising, basic sentences followed by citations, either.

I'm not saying that the article benefits from being unsourced. I'm only saying that its completely uncited contents are also completely verifiable, even though it's obviously an article that made it into the mainspace without any sources. I'd expect a NPPer to glance at it long enough to see that it doesn't contain any inappropriate jokes, have enough general knowledge to realize that since old people have sex, someone's going to write about old people having sex, click the [Mark page as patrolled] button, and move on without giving it another thought. I would not expect NPP to spend time searching for sources (though if you want to, you can find several books on the subject as well as many journal articles), finishing the article (unless it just happened to be a subject area that interested the individual), or deciding whether it's worthy of being indexed by a search engine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:37, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

I would expect at minimum a competent NPP patroller to at least dump the term into Google and make sure its not something made up, because it is very easy to make a unsourced article with compelling enough language to seem legit. (I'm thinking of the hoaxes involving "dihydrogen oxide" being dangerous as a outside-of-Wikipedia example). The NPP doesn't have to read any more than 2-3 pages of results - a whole minute of work - to validate its a legit topic and then flag the article for "needs sources". But its like Schrodinger's cat - without sources present somewhere (talk page or bare url or the like), there's no way to know if the topic can be validated without at least identifying the potential for sourcing. Masem (t) 04:48, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Masem, how about this idea - when NPP tags an unsourced article with a CSD or PROD, and an admin rejects the tag, they should go ahead and find the sources to satisfy Notability and Verifiability - it only takes a minute, right? And while they're at it, they can do some CE and make sure MOS is followed. I like that idea. Let the rejecting admins do the work and find the sources if they choose to not encourage article creators to make sure their articles are ready for mainspace, and are verifiable by adding RS since the ONUS is on them. Why won't that work? NPP has a 14k+/- backlog and that doesn't count AfC so it seems perfectly feasible for our admins to help out. After all, the article could be a hoax. j/s Atsme 💬 📧 12:37, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

This might be the only time you and I have agreed, Atsme. I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not but I do think that declining CSD/prods (by pretty much anyone) if it's largely unsourced/unreliably sourced, should absolutely put the onus on the decliner instead of allowing a vague notion toward "sources exist" which I know of at least 3 editors who mass de-prod, de-tag and de-csd articles but fail to even provide a single one of those "sources" that exist. PRAXIDICAE🌈 12:44, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Not sarcasm, Prax – I've never faked a sarcasm in my life. And we actually do agree on a lot more than you think, despite our occasional differences. We're both here to help build an encyclopedia. (PS: I love your new sig). Atsme 💬 📧 13:34, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

All I am saying is that asking for a NPP patrolled to do a 1-minute Google search for the topic where the new article lacks any type of source confirmation, just to make sure it doesn't appear to be a hoax, is a very reasonable check. They don't have to add sources, just be aware that potential sources exist. At worst, then.maint-tag the article for lack of sources before approving Masem (t) 13:21, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

This sounds like a problem with NPP taking on a bit too much, frankly. The expectations at WP:NPPCHK are wildly excessive for the basic protections against spam, vandalism and other facially inappropriate material that we actually need patrollers to protect the project from. If reviewers are overloaded because they're taking on extra work checking cites, or because this voluntary project has been structured in a way that makes them think they have to do a bunch of extra work, that's unfortunate but not really something a core policy should be addressing. -- Visviva (talk) 02:04, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree, @Visviva. NPP used to be our defense against CSD-worthy new pages. Now they're trying to stop anyone from getting an imperfect article into the mainspace. This is a hugely bigger scope than the original goal and a completely unfair expectation to put on them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:09, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Your linked example of geriatric sexology is not, in fact, notable, and is a fitting example of why it's good that NPP enforces reasonable standards, and why we shouldn't be so forgiving of unsourced material. The phrase, in quotes, returns almost nothing on Google Scholar - there is no evidence that this is a distinct field of sexology. Rather, research on this topic belongs in the much-better article linked in the "see also" - Sexuality in older age. I intend to pursue deletion or redirection of this article once this discussion runs out. I would very much not want NPP to approve a lazy and misleading article like this. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:26, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm a dedicated mergeist, so put me down as a support. Just please add a few sources while you're at it. ISBN 9789021905662 by Zwi Hoch and Harold Lief (quote: "The lifecycle subdivisions of sexology are: embryonal–fetal, infantile, child, pubertal, adolescent, adult, and geriatric sexology") is plausible, if old. You'll find a similar description in one of the books by John Money. But I point out that the question on this page isn't whether it should be handled as a Wikipedia:Separate, stand-alone article. The question on this page is whether someone is "able" to "verify" that this information comes from reliable sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:51, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

The idea is that "other people" are entirely, hopelessly unable "to check that the information comes from a reliable source" unless a reliable source is presented to them on a silver platter. Doesn't matter. As soon as a good faith challenge occurs, it is the BURDEN of someone restoring a claim to demonstrate that the claim is verifiable. Why is the (frankly) bare minimum of "cite sources for your claims" so oddly controversial with some, getting derided as requiring sources "on a silver platter"? We should not water down BURDEN whatsoever with anything confusing about how uncited text is supposedly verifiable. Again, nowadays, we don't want people just lazily plopping down whatever they believe to be true. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:24, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Whether an uncited fact is verifiable is really a separate question from whether an editor should do something.

Consider "The capital of France is Paris".

We Y fully agree that if someone makes a good-faith challenge for that sentence, then editors must cite a reliable source for that uncited sentence.

The question we're addressing here, though, isn't whether WP:CHALLENGE rules apply to CHALLENGEd material. We all already agree to that and support those rules.

The question at hand is whether that sentence is actually verifiable right now, despite not having a citation after it right now, or if – according to some editors – the sentence is unverifiable unless and until someone adds a citation (...which nobody is "able" to do, because it's "unverifiable", right?).

Do you have an opinion on whether editors are able to verify that uncited sentence? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:17, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Responded below. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:41, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps it is the nature of the discussions I've been in, but I think I've had more difficulty with editors trying to satisfy verifiability with vague and unspecific citations, for example citing an entire 10,000+ page book, instead of citing a specific chapter or page within that book, than I have with editors trying to do what WAID has said when opening this section. Sideswipe9th (talk) 01:33, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

FWIW I have also observed that this confusion seems to be increasingly common. I think the distinction is very important, and should be addressed in the policy, since the lack of clarity on this point only serves to encourage ever more aggressive gatekeeping that harms the project. -- Visviva (talk) 02:04, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

• I mean, policy is already clear that citations are only required for things that are challenged or likely to be challenged. I'd be reluctant to tinker further in the way you suggest because I do think that when something is challenged, the citation needs to be clear - it is not sufficient, in the long term, to say "a citation exists on talk" or "there's a citation elsewhere in the article." I think that in situations where a citation can be easily produced WP:PRESERVE might lightly discourage massive wholesale removals, but ultimately we can't forbid them because the burden is on whoever wants to keep the text. So I don't think we want to encourage process-wonkery arguments about the difference between "verified" and "verifiable" - if you are at the point where you're actually arguing with someone, then the bottom line is that whoever wants to preserve the text is the one with the actual responsibility to affix an actual citation to the disputed text in question, end of story. Yes, on a proverbial silver platter, so to speak. If people are going around challenging massive swaths of text on the belief that absolutely all text requires citations even on very new articles, they're mistaken and policy is clear about that; but once that challenge is made I'd be very reluctant to do anything that could weaken WP:BURDEN. --Aquillion (talk) 03:32, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

  What I want is for highly experienced editors to not say that an uncited sentence, such as The capital of France is Paris, is unverifiable or a violation of this policy.

  It is very easy to follow this sloppy path, and I'm sure you've seen editors do it:

  • Everything uncited is unverifiable.
  • BURDEN says "All content must be verifiable".
  • That means all uncited content is a violation of the Verifiability policy!

  This conclusion is false, because it is simply not true that all uncited content is unverifiable. The capital of France is Paris is a verifiable statement even when it is uncited. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:46, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

  If there's an editor who's routinely challenging such WP:SKYISBLUE-style statements, then you might be able to make an argument that it's a conduct matter rather than an issue with the underlying content being challenged. However, I'm not sure that this issue is endemic enough that a change to policy is warranted...though I might support further clarification on the differences between "verifiable" and "cited". In my personal experience, when I challenge "obviously true" statements, I tend to end up in arguments with editors claiming that the information doesn't need to be sourced because it's "obvious"...nevermind that the most productive option would be to simply produce a source rather than bickering over the need for one (maybe that should be in the policy), and then frequently the first source they (finally) provide is a bad source. DonIago (talk) 03:54, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

  I am looking only for a clarification on the differences between the words "verifiable" and "cited". I am not looking to change the policy on when or whether something should be cited. (Editors in those disputes should WP:Let the Wookiee win; it's faster to cite obvious information than to argue about it.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:25, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

  I agree with the logic behind the concern. Editors can easily misinterpret BURDEN to mean that all material must have an inline citation. Instead of tinkering with the first paragraph, perhaps change the third paragraph to say something like: "Any material lacking an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the material may still be verifiable. If challenged, the material may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation..." (bold is only to emphasize the suggested change). Maybe that's not front and center enough to cater to the concern, but just a thought. --GoneIn60 (talk) 04:17, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

What would that change even mean? The removal itself is a challenge. The policy already says, in bold, that only things that are challenged or likely to be challenged require a source; anyone who ignores such a flat statement is not going to be convinced by turning the entire section into tortured language that reiterates that point again and again. Additionally, I would strenuously oppose anything that would add additional bars to removing unsourced material. We are not required to do so, but unsourced material 100% can be removed, at any time, by anyone, solely based on the fact that it is unsourced, and when that happens anyone who wants to restore it should find a source. (If it really is WP:BLUE, good for you; finding a source should be trivial.) I would oppose any change to that in strongest possible terms. Indeed, my position is that entirely unsourced articles should be removable at any time for any reason. It is absolutely essential that we encourage people to provide sources for the things they add, and the best way to produce that pressure is to make it clear that if you don't add a source then anything you add can be instantly removed with no further discussion or explanation. Per WP:PRESERVE it is not always required to remove it; often a CN tag is better. But I would never support anything that would prevent anyone from doing so or add any barriers to doing so. Removing unsourced text is always, without exception, valid, fullstop. --Aquillion (talk) 09:04, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

"The policy already says, in bold, that only things that are challenged or likely to be challenged..." The "only" in your statement is assumed; it is not explicitly stated in policy, hence the potential for confusion. You and I get it, but novice editors can easily interpret this to mean that no citation always means not verifiable, and therefore any statement lacking an inline citation violates WP:V and should be fixed, tagged, or removed. BURDEN shouldn't be seen as an instruction to do so, that some action must be performed, because it is possible for verifiability to exist without a citation. If there's a way to add that clarification without being overly repetitive, then I'm all for taking that into consideration. --GoneIn60 (talk) 10:11, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

As I've said before, the extreme overwhelming majority of our content does not consist of widely-known things like "Paris is the capital of France", so writing policy with that in mind is misguided. Rather, our content consists of things that most people don't know off the top of their heads. My concern is the 99.9999...% of content that tells most readers things they don't know, and that material should ideally be cited (and we definitely should not move toward saying or implying it's okay not to). And in that process, someone can quick cite the CIA World Factbook or something for where the capital of France is, rather than these lengthy debates about enabling failure to cite sources. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:41, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't think that makes any difference. Consider:

• Here is information you know, and you can find a reliable source if you try. You are "able" to "verify" it, so it's verifiable.
• Here is information you don't know, and you can find a reliable source if you try. You are "able" to "verify" it, so it's verifiable.

Same end result, right?

I could agree that it's worse to have that second type of information unsourced, but I can't agree that it's unverifiable. The question here isn't whether uncited information is bad. The question here is whether uncited information is unverifiable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

• To be honest, other than the two sentences at the top of the BURDEN section (which I think should be fixed because their juxtaposition suggests verifiable = cited), I keep seeing WP:V reminding me that "Verifiable ≠ cited". Read the sentences beginning "When tagging or removing..." Those would make no sense if uncited meant unverifiable. I've read a lot of completely made up and untrue things about polices in the last few months but I don't think adding more text to those policies always a solution. If NPP needs guidance is how best editors should handle utterly uncited articles, say, then perhaps there should be some guidance for NPP, rather than a policy text change. -- Colin°^Talk 09:01, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

  To be frank, ^{because I'm always being honest,} the problem is not that NPP doesn't know what to do or cannot discern the difference between cited and verifiable. Verifiable means that the article, in its current state, should include RS that establish notability, verifiability and NOR. If it doesn't, then it fails and should not be allowed in main space until those issues are addressed. The policy needs to more clearly state that RS are required to establish both V, N and OR before an article or stub will be published in main space and indexed. Otherwise, V will conflict with all our other PAGs. What some may not be taking into consideration is whether or not the article includes any sources at all, it's not simply about inline citations. Stubs/articles that are sourced and have no inline citations are simply tagged by NPP with either or a big tag at the top of the page. NPP reviewers know the drill. My concerns are not about material that is added to an article that already contains RS. For all we know, some of those thousands of articles sitting in main space that are not sourced at all, and have slipped under the radar, could have been created by a UPE who has written a really nice promotional article that reads like an advertisement for a BLP or company they represent. How do those articles make it into main space? Could have been theft of a redirect, or an autopatrolled editor helped make it happen – I don't know, but we eventually find out if it's an admin or NPP reviewer with autopatrolled rights. There's a reason the decision was made to stop automatically giving all admins autopatrolled rights, and for having new reviewers either attend NPPSCHOOL or qualify via experience before they are given NPP user rights. Unsourced articles are much more serious than what some of the arguments have presented. It is not in the best interests of WP for any of us to turn a blind eye and simple accept unsourced articles under an assumption that they qualify. It's time to stop (a) putting bandaids on gaping wounds, and (b) encouraging editors to create articles in main space without RS or having first established V, OR and/or N. Perhaps some of our problems stem from a lack of qualified AfC reviewers, I don't know. I've read some of the comments by DGG who is inundated with new articles at AfC and carries more than his weight. He's beginning to burn out, and the same happens at NPP. Atsme 💬 📧 14:32, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

  Atsme is absolutely right. An article without any RS has no right to exist here. Independent RS notability has not been established. There is no evidence it's not a hoax or OR. It doesn't have to be fully referenced, but there must be enough RS to first establish V, OR and/or N. Period. Without RS we should treat it as the opinion of the author, and we don't allow such content in any article here. Send it back to private userspace or draft space. The initial burden of establishing V, OR and/or N is on the article's creator. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 21:14, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

  @Valjean, I disagree. @Atsme says:

  • "Verifiable means that the article, in its current state, should include RS that establish notability, verifiability and NOR."

  The actual policy says:

  • "verifiability means other people using the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source."

  These definitions are not the same. Worse, one of them is wrong. If you read the next bit, you see her say 'The policy needs to more clearly state that "RS are required"...'. This indicates to me that Atsme's first sentence is a statement of what she wishes the definition of verifiability were, rather than what the definition actually is.

  It is not necessary to say that uncited information is technically unverifiable or a violation of this particular policy to say that unsourced articles are a blight upon humanity. If you want to establish rules that say unsourced articles are bad or banned (i.e., even when the contents are technically verifiable because someone could add citations), then I suggest making a proposal at WP:NOT. Please insist that at least one of those sources be WP:INDY. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:32, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

  WhatamIdoing stated: "verifiability means other people using the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source." That is exactly what it says, but it doesn't mean what you think it means. See Use-mention distinction which may be at issue here, so forgive me for using bold text and for highlighting the important aspects of the policy that are either being overlooked or misinterpreted. Based on what I've gleaned, the position in some of the arguments are that we should keep unsourced articles in main space and not worry that the article isn't sourced or is missing inline citations because it can be verified. The "how" of verification is what appears to be missing or misunderstood, as does the use of "material" which may include the entire stub/article. The following very important aspect of V supports my position: Any material that needs a source but does not have one may be removed. It goes on to say: Please immediately remove contentious material about living people that is unsourced or poorly sourced. Granted, not every sentence in an article requires a citation provided the article is properly sourced...only challenged material or material that is likely to be challenged are affected. If those sources are not provided the material can be removed and that comes straight from our core content policy as does the following: {{tq|All content must be verifiable. The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material, and it is satisfied by providing an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports[2] the contribution.[3] NOTE 2 is also extremely important: A source "directly supports" a given piece of material if the information is present explicitly in the source so that using this source to support the material is not a violation of Wikipedia:No original research. What part of the former and latter are causing editors to believe that unsourced articles are ok, and should not be removed from main space? But wait...there's more. Unsourced articles are automatically challenged as OR - and any experienced editor should already know that, especially if they've edited in a controversial topic area or BLPs. If a source is not cited, and/or there are no sources listed in the article at all, is it expected that our readers should leave the article to find those RS in order to verify the information in the article? If that's the case, why read WP? Here's a somewhat comparable comparison: a grad student turns in a master thesis without references or citing any sources, and then simply tells the prof not to worry about it – it's verifiable. What do you think happens? When an article is unsourced, it's more than just a matter of simply finding a source to verify that the topic is a valid one, and not a hoax. It involves finding multiple RS to satisfy GNG, V, and OR, as I've stated repeatedly, and am being criticized over. Far too many arguments are failing to acknowledge that the sources used must support what the author wrote, so if the author failed to provide the sources they used, and failed to provide inline citations for the material they added that is likely to be challenged, how are we supposed to find those same sources that were used to add that material? Cited sources and citations are how we separate the wheat from the chaffe. Bottomline: if the article creator failed to provide the sources they used and/or failed to include citations for material that is likely to be challenged so that our readers could easily verify a statement, opinion, or fact in that article it should not be allowed in main space. Atsme 💬 📧 12:39, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

• Citations do not verify; they merely facilitate. The process of verification is inherently difficult because, even when you have some evidence, analysis and understanding is required to confirm that the evidence corresponds with the assertion. The process of analysis itself requires verification and so you then get an infinite regress per What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. At some point, the reader just has to accept that something is true and that requires an act of faith. Often this faith is lacking and this generates much activity at WP:RSN.

As an example, consider the main page of Wikipedia and notice that none of the facts there are cited. But we mostly accept them on trust that someone has done the relevant checking to ensure that they all stand up. But this is a fallible process and so there is regular activity at WP:ERRORS.

And, even if everything has been done right, there will still be a disclaimer footnote which says emphatically that "WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY".

So, as we are not claiming that any of our pages are exactly correct, we should just relax and save our energies for the most controversial and complex cases. It's like the dictum of Frederick the Great, "He who defends everything, defends nothing."

Andrew🐉(talk) 13:37, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

• Question - Something that needs clarification for this discussion to continue productively: are we discussing the situation where an article has NO citations (at all)… or are we discussing the situation where an individual fact (within a sentence or short paragraph) does not have a citation? I think these are two different issues. Blueboar (talk) 14:55, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

  My understanding is that it's the latter; sentences or short paragraphs that do not have an inline citation. I agree that these are two totally separate issues, and judging from some of the responses so far, it looks like there may be some confusion. --GoneIn60 (talk) 21:26, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

  Unless it's a 2 or 3 sentence stub like this one: Jagatipala. Or you have to deal with articles like 3rd Alley, originally deleted back in 2008. Right now there are 182 pages in the NPP queue with no citations/sources. From what I've gathered, some editors are of the mind that as long as an article is verifiable it meets V, but there's no guarantee that V aligns with N, or OR. And doesn't using V in that context also suggest that an article's notability is also verifiable if sources are automatically verifiable? Why even bother to add sources if it's ok to make these assumptions? We could just let WP run as an aggregator, I guess.^[stretch] + ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Atsme 💬 📧 22:10, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

  Information that (truly) meets V will always meet NOR. But there are no guarantees whatsoever that something complying with WP:V is a notable subject. If the only sources ever published about a business are the business's own self-published website, you could write a fully verifiable and even fully cited article, but it would not be a notable subject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:40, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

  It doesn't really matter. Uncited information that could be cited to RS is verifiable. We are "able" to "verify" it; it is "verifiable". This is true whether we are talking about the only three sentences on the page, or the only uncited three sentences in an otherwise well-sourced article.

  There might be some differences (e.g., whether it is a minor problem or a serious violation of all that is holy), but the presence or absence of other citations elsewhere on the page makes no difference in whether someone is actually able to verify that particular information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:13, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

  Uncited information that could be cited to RS is verifiable. We are "able" to "verify" it; it is "verifiable". I like this. Effectively explains in a nutshell why verifiable ≠ cited. Sometimes it's the simple analogies that really hit home. Perhaps some variation of this is the answer. --GoneIn60 (talk) 05:49, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Using Verifiability as an excuse for gratuitous removal of information

The Lock (water navigation) article has recently seen major removal of content (-56,000 characters), with this policy given as justification. To take a few examples, it has sections on pound locks and drop locks but no longer has the introductory paragraphs saying what they are. It mentions lock flights and staircase locks but no longer has sections saying what these are or describing how they work. Similarly with many other examples, making the article disjointed and hopelessly incomplete. This is not good practice for something which is not a controversial issue. 23:01, 21 June 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C6:148A:9B01:D0F:5BED:374E:CB89 (talk)

Intoning that our encyclopedia can have false information on non-controversial subjects? While I can understand your arrogance blinds you, just because you think something is true or important doesn't mean that it actually is. I would recommend you cite reliable sources to support content you would like to add, rather than complain that this policy is unfair. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:08, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

• I remind editors that we only require a citation for information that is likely to be challenged or actually is challenged. The removed information was so basic that it certainly surprises me that it was challenged.

Nevertheless, it has now been challenged. This is a situation where my advice is to “Let the Wookie Win”. You could spend hours and hours arguing about policy (and whether the removal is or is not “valid”)… or… you can spend a few minutes finding sources to support the information and simply add it all back with those citations. The latter is far less stressful. Blueboar (talk) 23:52, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Not sure what's "so basic" about, say the following removed sentence:

For a long period since the 1970s it was British Waterways policy not to provide gate paddles in replacement top gates if two ground paddles existed.

Are you claiming that this is common knowledge which every reader should already know? As explained (somewhat humorously) in WP:NOTBLUE, such assumptions are rarely valid arguments for an exemption from verifiability. Regards, HaeB (talk) 05:38, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

• I agree with the above that the ideal positive-sum solution is to provide citations. Looking at the page history, though, it's worth noting that the issue is not that the OP here was trying to add material, but that one user had taken upon themselves to remove 56k of longstanding, uncited but seemingly uncontroversial text from the article, exactly one month after adding {{cn}} tags, and without providing any reason (in either edit) why removal was so urgently needed. This appears to be based on a legalistic reading of WP:BURDEN, but ironically the remover did not follow BURDEN's instruction to (inter alia) "state your concern that it may not be possible to find a published reliable source, and the material therefore may not be verifiable." The OP seems to be entirely correct that this action left a mess of an article that is considerably more of a disservice to the reader than the removed material was. This scenario is awfully similar (though not identical) to one of the bullet points at WP:POINT, which makes me think we should reconsider any language that appears to support these sorts of disruptions. It also suggests to me that BURDEN's "encouragement" to "provide an inline citation yourself before considering whether to remove or tag" verifiable but uncited information is not reaching the people it needs to reach. -- Visviva (talk) 01:05, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
• I have always understood material that is challenged"to mean "material that is reasonably challenged". Any of our rules can be converted into nonsense by taking them over literally. The usually appropriate way to see if the challenge is reasonable in a situation like this is to ask the challenger "just what statement in the material do you think is incorrect, or needs further explanation?" In this particular instance, I think adding a general citation would be sufficient. DGG ( talk ) 01:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

No, policy does not require the editor who removes material to have concluded that it contains incorrect statements. And for good reason, because otherwise many hoaxes and misinformation edits would become essentially bulletproof.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 05:38, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

• It's somewhat facetious to claim that this material has been removed while neglecting to mention that it was moved to the Talk page for the article and that the material had been previously tagged (contrary to Visviva's claim above, most of the tags I saw were dated March or April, so over a month ago). In any case, in the end I agree with Blueboard: the easiest option here is to provide sources. DonIago (talk) 03:32, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

• I think that Nightscream (the target of 2A00:23C6's accusations above, who does not appear to have been notified yet about this discussion) did the right thing here. WP:BURDEN is pretty clear that the burden to provide references is on those who want to restore the material. Advance notice was given, and once sources have been found, the text can easily be restored from the talk page or revision history, so no work will have been lost. Regards, HaeB (talk) 05:38, 22 June 2022 (UTC)