Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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Admins and being paid to advise on editing

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Admins and being paid to advise on editing. This page is nearly a million bytes long, largely because of this oversized thread (55% of the page pre-split, with 779 comments from 140 accounts). Please continue the discussion over there.

Also, as a general note, if you are beginning an RFC on a large or popular discussion, please start it at (or move it to) a separate page, e.g., Wikipedia:Requests for comment/your-subject-here. Thanks for your understanding. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:09, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

RfC on the "Airlines and destinations" tables in airport articles

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

After reviewing the !votes and discussion, it is clear that there is consensus that airlines and destination tables may only be included in articles when independent, reliable, secondary sources demonstrate they meet WP:DUE. There is not a consensus for wholesale removal of such tables, but tables without independent, reliable, secondary sourcing, and where such sourcing cannot be found, should not be in the articles.

This is one of the rare cases with an RFC where, numerically, the responses are close, but arguments strongly grounded in established policy make a consensus clear. Wikipedia:Closing discussions says The closer is not to be a judge of the issue, but rather of the argument. In this discussion we have many !voters responding with strong policy-based rationales, and many responding with personal opinion. Additionally reading more than just the bolded yes or no, there is a common thread found in responses supporting and opposing the tables, as well as non-bolded and other !votes. That thread is articles should include such tables when including a table would be due... all the usual guidelines relating to weight and reliable referencing (I'm thinking specifically of WP:BURDEN and WP:ONUS) should still be considered... tables are fine if they are based in secondary sources... WP:V, WP:RS and WP:NPOV can cover relevant concerns... If it is unmaintained / not well sourced - it should be either repaired or deleted just like every other wikipedia article. This common thread, as well as the strength of arguments leads me to read consensus against the plurality of bolded !votes.

Addressing the arguments, the strongest and by far most common argument put forth by those opposed to the tables is WP:NOTALLSORTSOFSTUFF. WP:NOT is policy, and the strength of the arguments citing it are recognized by those supporting inclusion of the tables. There were also no strong arguments against the interpretation of WP:NOT, other than disagreement that it should apply. Merely stating that something is encyclopedic without elaborating how it does not fall foul of existing policy is not a strong counter-argument. A counter-argument saying that WP:V is a counter to WP:NOT, for instance, is weakened by the text of both policies, with WP:V linking specifically to WP:NOT and saying While information must be verifiable for inclusion in an article, not all verifiable information must be included. Another argument for excluding the tables was the editorial overhead of maintaining them, but this was significantly less widely cited and lacks the solid policy basis of WP:NOT arguments.

Many of those supporting provided weak arguments, with several essentially rooted in WP:ILIKEIT. Merely asserting that the information is useful or helpful doesn't demonstrate that it is encyclopedic. There were also several with reasoning that did not address and were strongly rebutted by the policy based arguments of those opposed to inclusion. There were also arguments that the tables provide an idea of how well served or active an airport is, but those arguments were weakened by pointing out that the context could be provided in prose. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 20:14, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

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Should airport articles include tables that display all the airlines that serve the airport and the cities they fly to? Sunnya343 (talk) 16:05, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

I wanted to clarify that the central question is whether airport articles should mention every single flight that the airport offers (no matter the way that the information is presented). I said "tables" specifically because that's the format currently used by all of the articles. Sunnya343 (talk) 23:39, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Virtually all airport articles contain tables showing all the cities that passenger airlines fly to. Some articles also have tables for cargo destinations. Here are a few examples: Tehran-Mehrabad, London-Heathrow, New York, Jakarta. In 2017, we had two RfCs at WikiProject Airports on this topic: one that determined we should keep the tables, and one on how to reference them. However, I am concerned the results of those RfCs may be cases of WP:CONLEVEL. I think it would be useful to hear more opinions from the wider Wikipedia community. Sunnya343 (talk) 16:07, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Notices placed at WikiProject Airports, WikiProject Aviation, and the talk pages of editors who participated in the two RfCs above and the following discussions on lists of airline destinations: 2018 RfC and 2023 AfD.

• No. An article should certainly discuss an airport's current operations, but the listing of every single flight that is running as of today's date is inappropriate for this encyclopedia. Airlines frequently make changes to their schedules, and Wikipedia is not meant to be a news service that documents all of these changes. I also consider the lists indiscriminate; in the overall history of an airport, there is no reason why today's particular list of destinations is more noteworthy than the one from last month or two months ago. Few to no independent sources exist for most of the routes, demonstrating that they are not significant enough to merit inclusion in an article. The references that do exist generally are just covering the recent inauguration or upcoming termination of the flight - one of those frequent changes to airline schedules. Sunnya343 (talk) 15:00, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

  (I wanted to present a more clear argument above based on policies. The following is my original comment, where I describe the impractical nature of attempting to maintain and reference up-to-date lists of destinations.) I'd say there are three general categories of sources for the tables:

  1. Secondary Independent sources - Only exist for a small fraction of routes.
  2. Booking engines or flight schedules on airline websites - These require you to input the origin, destination, and a random date to see if the airline flies between the two cities. For routes listed as seasonal, I suppose you'd have to search for flights on random dates in different months.
  3. Flight-tracking websites - FlightRadar24 will show you a map of routes from an airport (example). You have to click on each destination to see which airlines fly to it.
  I have not encountered another type of Wikipedia article that includes sources like #2 and #3 above - databases that you have to navigate to verify each destination. I don't know if they are considered acceptable references.

  When an airline announces a new destination, editors will add it to the list with a reference. However, once the new flight begins, that reference is often removed (probably to avoid citation clutter). Still, what this means is that timetable references in the right-most column (see the New York-JFK article) are taking precedence over what may have been secondary third-party sources supporting individual destinations. I've also noticed that the timetable sources usually have access-dates going back several years, even though editors continue to update the lists. So there is a discrepancy. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but theoretically, every time you make a change to the list, you should go through the timetable and verify every other destination, and then change the access-date...

  Ultimately, I believe the fact that there are no secondary independent sources for most of these destinations demonstrates that listing all of them isn't encyclopedic. Primary Non-independent sources are certainly allowed, but I don't think it's OK for large portions of an article to rely on them exclusively. It may be appropriate to replace the tables with a few paragraphs that summarize the airport's operations, supported primarily by secondary third-party sources. Below is a rough draft for the Indianapolis airport article.

Idea
As of September 2023, the Indianapolis airport is served by ten passenger airlines. Allegiant Air maintains a base at the airport. International air service includes routes to Cancun and Toronto. Indianapolis is also a hub for the cargo carrier FedEx Express. In 2022, the airport handled 8.7 million passengers and 1.3 million tons of cargo. References

Sunnya343 (talk) 16:19, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree in general but in my experience almost all routes will have secondary sources especially international ones. For example I bet I can find coverage for every single route out of Taoyuan International Airport. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:22, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

I've personally found those tables to be useful and feel it would be a waste to have them deleted. Wehwalt (talk) 16:36, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Is that what I'm agreeing with? My understanding is that Sunnya343 is opposed to the whole RfC in general hence why they voted "oppose" instead of yes or no. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:17, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm simply making my point without !voting. If you like I will outdent. Wehwalt (talk) 17:20, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

My apologies, I thought it was a direct response to me. Re-reading @Sunnya343:'s post their meaning does actually appear ambiguous and I'd like some clarification on that, so this was helpful for me regardless of whether it was intended. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:32, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion, I'll change it to "No" (as in no, I don't think the tables should be included). Sunnya343 (talk) 17:37, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, I did misunderstand a bit what you were saying but I still don't think we're actually that far apart position wise... 45% and 55% are close despite one being a yes and one being a no. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:42, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back: Even if you were able to find independent sources for each of the routes, the table would look like it does below, for each airline. I would argue that the bigger question is, do we need to mention every single destination.

Airlines	Destinations
China Airlines	Amsterdam, Auckland, Bangkok–Suvarnabhumi, Beijing–Capital, Brisbane, Busan, Cebu, Chengdu–Tianfu, Chiang Mai, Da Nang, Denpasar, Frankfurt, Fukuoka, Guangzhou, Hanoi, Hiroshima, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Jakarta–Soekarno-Hatta, Kagoshima, Koror, Kuala Lumpur–International

Sunnya343 (talk) 01:23, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

@Sunnya343, the sources you list in your example are almost all WP:PRIMARYNEWS sources. Did you mean that you wanted Wikipedia:Independent sources? Wikipedia:Secondary does not mean independent. I'd also add that Wikipedia:Secondary does not mean good. Wikipedia requires 100% use of reliable sources, not 100% use of secondary ones or 100% use of independent ones. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:54, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't realize those were primary sources. I would say then that the "Airlines and destinations" section should be based mainly on reliable independent sources. Sunnya343 (talk) 23:25, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

In my (US-focused) experience, every single time an airline adds a new destination (or a new airline), it's reported in the newspaper(s) for the airport's area. I therefore expect that it would be possible to provide a citation to an independent source for every destination (at least for a US airport). But – is it actually better? I'm not sure about that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:55, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

I agree with you about certain destinations, such as a new flight to a foreign city. But if we take the Indianapolis airport as an example, you'd be hard-pressed to find third-party sources for the more mundane domestic routes, e.g. American Airlines' flights to Charlotte and Phoenix. I think you have a point about newspaper articles and other independent sources perhaps not being better than non-independent sources in this context, where we only seek to reference the cities an airline flies to. What I'm arguing is that the lack of independent sources for many of the destinations is an indication that it is not notable to mention each and every one in an article. Sunnya343 (talk) 02:53, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

You will often find coverage of mundane domestic routes (even legacy ones), especially around mundane incidents. Here is Indianapolis to Charlotte[1] for example. I would also note that all of these routes were non-mundane once and almost certainly received coverage in the local paper when they launched even if that was in the 70s and it will be harder to find. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:38, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

If you can find reliable secondary coverage for each what would be the policy grounded basis for not including some of them? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:32, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

(Responding to your two comments above) You have a point. But I would say, compare your source on the Indianapolis-Charlotte route to this one that describes the airport's first transatlantic flight. Your source is not focused on the Charlotte route itself. I think this excerpt from the essay WP:TMI would apply: Advocates of adding a lot of details may argue that all of these details are reliably sourced. Even though the details may be reliably sourced, one must not lose sight of the need for balance. I'd also argue that per WP:NOTNEWS, we do not need to cover the launch of every single flight from an airport. Sunnya343 (talk) 15:19, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Which of the four points of NOTNEWS would that be per? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:22, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm referring to #2, in particular: While news coverage can be useful source material for encyclopedic topics, most newsworthy events do not qualify for inclusion and Wikipedia is not written in news style. You'll notice for example that in this table, the launch, resumption, and termination of various routes is mentioned. Sunnya343 (talk) 15:47, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

That part of 2 is about inclusion of articles on Wikipedia, that is WP:NOTABILITY not about what to include in articles. The only part of 2 which is not about notability is "Also, while including information on recent developments is sometimes appropriate, breaking news should not be emphasized or otherwise treated differently from other information." which does not support your argument that it be treated differently. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:51, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

I see your point. What I will say is that I'm focusing on the general notion of what sort of information belongs in the encyclopedia. The paragraph at the beginning of the section (WP:NOTEVERYTHING), especially the sentence A Wikipedia article should not be a complete exposition of all possible details, but a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject, addresses both the creation of articles on different subjects and the content of those articles. Do you really believe we ought to mention that Delta Air Lines is resuming flights from Indianapolis to Salt Lake City, or that Korean Air is ending service from Seoul to Tashkent? Sunnya343 (talk) 17:34, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

I struck the words above based on this excerpt from WP:N: [These guidelines on notability] do not limit the content of an article or list... For Wikipedia's policies regarding content, see Neutral point of view, Verifiability, No original research, What Wikipedia is not,... Sunnya343 (talk) 23:01, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

• Yes, airport articles should include such tables when including a table would be due (closed airports don't need to have an empty table for example). A table should not preclude prose coverage of routes nor should prose coverage of routes preclude a table, there is room for both and both are often due. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:39, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
• No comment there should not be WP:CREEP on this fairly minor point of discussion; as HEB noted above, prose coverage does not preclude tables and vice versa. Of course, all the usual guidelines relating to weight and reliable referencing (I'm thinking specifically of WP:BURDEN and WP:ONUS) should still be considered, but there is no need to prescribe a "yes" or "no" answer to this question. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 17:48, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
• The tables are fine if they are based in secondary sources rather than original research using booking systems and the like. --Guerillero ^{Parlez Moi} 18:27, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
• No, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. My feeling is that this is both a) sometimes impractical, b) hard to source reliably, and c) verging on a WP:NOTGUIDE violation, which is the main reason for my opposition. Edward-Woodrow • talk 19:03, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
• Partial A list of airlines that routinely serve the airport makes sense, but the list of cities probably does not since this is a function of the airline, not the airport, and can change regularly. That said, outside of table, one can describe in prose the general profile of cities that it serves - I can see this for small regional airports to say what cities that they link to. But this should be by the airport in general, and not because Airline X goes to one place and Airline Y goes to another. --Masem (t) 19:45, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

  Let me add another notch against city listings. We're supposed to be writing content as an encyclopedia that will stand the test of time, not what is just currently the situation. A list of airlines that an airport serves will not routinely change, and if there are major departures, that will likely be a discussion in prose. But for the most part, the cities that each airline services changes year-to-year if not more frequent, so it is not very useful information in the long-term. The only arguments that are being given to keep those cities are from a WP:NOT#GUIDE standpoint. Masem (t) 03:45, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

• No, per WP:INDISCRIMINATE, WP:NOTTRAVEL, and WP:OR. First, these lists relying almost without exception on WP:OR; entries are typically unsourced, and when they are sourced the reference is usually something like this. Second, they are indiscriminate and are are not put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources as required by WP:INDISCRIMINATE; they are just lists of where an individual can travel to and on which carrier. This brings us to WP:NOTTRAVEL; these lists are travel guides, telling people how to get from a to b, and not content that belongs on an encyclopedia.

This isn't to say that we can't include information on the airlines and destinations at an airport; to provide information that is actually beneficial to our reader and complies with our policies we can use the section to discuss how the number of airlines operating from an airport changed over time, as well as the number of destinations. For example, using prose we could show how Heathrow went from a small airfield to a global hub, including covering the impact of events like the pandemic, all of which is encyclopedic content and none of which can be done with tables. BilledMammal (talk) 20:05, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

• Yes - this is one of the key aspects of airports, namely what connections to other airports they have. If the info is only embedded in prose, the risk of outdated creep increases. --Soman (talk) 20:35, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

  @Espresso Addict, Kusma, Soman, and Reywas92: (Replying to you all at once because I feel your arguments are similar) The same could be said of airlines - that we should have a list of the cities they currently serve because it's a key aspect of them. But there is consensus not to mantain lists of airline destinations on Wikipedia. I don't see how we can disapprove of full lists of airline destinations, and at the same time allow complete lists of each airline's destinations from an airport. Sunnya343 (talk) 22:38, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  It seems to work and not cause any problems. Airline destination lists were also separate articles. It is perfectly acceptable to have rules that allow content in one form but not in a different one. —Kusma (talk) 05:19, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

• Generally yes per Horse Eye Black and Soman. Obviously everything must be verifiable, and in some cases it will be better covered on a separate article to the main airport article. In some cases there should be a history of notable carriers and destinations as the goal is an encyclopaedic coverage of the airport and its history rather than a contemporary travel guide. However the current services are an encyclopaedic aspect of the airport. Thryduulf (talk) 21:04, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

  @Thryduulf: When you say "in some cases it will be better covered on a separate article to the main airport article", where else do you believe the information should go?

  One could also argue that the current destinations of an airline are encyclopedic; however, the consensus of this RfC (reaffirmed by this AfD) was that Wikipedia should not have complete lists of airline destinations. I agree with Beeblebrox when they say, There is an important distinction between information and knowledge. Wikipedia strives to provide knowledge, and is explicitly not a directory or catalog, which is just information. Sunnya343 (talk) 14:51, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  where else do you believe the information should go? it depends how information about the airport is covered, and how much information there is. For example a major airport that has a long history and lots of detail may need spin-off articles per WP:SUMMARY and the list of destinations may be better in (or indeed as) one of them, in other cases it may be better to have an "Air travel in X" article covering multiple airports. Basically, being overly prescriptive could cause problems.

  Whether airlines do or should have complete destination lists is not relevant to coverage of airports. I'm sorry I didn't comment in that RFC, but as should have been easily predictable based on other contemporary discussions the consensus is being over-applied to excise encyclopaedic related content. Thryduulf (talk) 15:16, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

• No per WP:NOTGUIDE and WP:NOTDB. These are things that change all the time. There are websites which do an admirable job of tracking all this stuff. Our job is to be an encyclopedia, not a airline database. RoySmith (talk) 21:17, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
• I feel these tables semi-duplicate list of airline destinations, something long described as WP:NOT. Also if no other sources are describing this information, beyond primary sources, then are they WP:DUE. If they are going to be included they need to be properly referenced with something better than a ticket system that needs to work through to see if the route is currently nrunning or not. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:28, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
• Yes, generally this is relevant and encyclopedic information, and it should be included if you can source it (including to the airport's own website, which is reliable despite not being independent). I arrived at this general conclusion by thinking about how important it is to understanding the subject of the article (i.e., the airport). If you want to understand the airport in context, you need to know some basic, objective/universal facts. These include: Is there scheduled passenger service at all? How many passengers use this airport? How many airports does it connect to? Are those connected airports nearby, or does it have long-distance/international flights? There is a big difference between "one daily flight to the next city" and "direct flights from ten countries", and providing the lists makes it easy to see whatever level of granularity the reader is interested in (e.g., how many destinations, how many countries, whether they're all short flights, etc.). Similarly, you can't understand an airport unless you understand whether one airline holds a monopoly there. On the other hand, does it need to be presented in the exact form of a table? Meh, I don't think that matters. A table is a perfectly fine form for this, if there are more than about three airlines or destinations to be presented, but a bulleted list is also fine, and if the list is very small, then plain old prose text is good, too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:40, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

  Is there scheduled passenger service at all? How many passengers use this airport? How many airports does it connect to? Are those connected airports nearby, or does it have long-distance/international flights? These questions are all better answered with prose; take Heathrow Airport#Airlines and destinations for an example. It doesn't answer the question "How many passengers use this airport", and while theory it could provide answer to the questions of "How many airports does it connect to" and "Are those connected airports nearby, or does it have long-distance/international flights", in practice it does not - we can't expect our readers to count the airports listed, and nor can we expect them to carefully analyze which airports the flights go to to assess what types of flights that leave the airport. It does answer the question "Is there scheduled passenger service at all", but it would be hard to include information on the airlines and destinations serviced by the airport without doing so.

  What would be better for the reader is to say something like In 2022, 35,000,000 people used the airport, with flights to 200 airports in 90 countries. On the average day 120 flights departed; 40% of the flights were shorthaul, 20% were medium haul, 30% were long haul, and 10% were ultra-long haul. British airways accounted for 60% of all flights. - and that's just what I threw together in 30 seconds. An editor working to improve the article could provide far more benefit to the reader than that. BilledMammal (talk) 00:34, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  I would expect some of these questions to be answered elsewhere in the article, e.g., in Heathrow Airport#Air traffic and statistics, which begins with a description of its passenger traffic. (Note that you have quoted from a list of "some basic, objective/universal facts" that IMO readers need to know to understand the subject, and not from a list of things that I think belongs specifically in a list of destinations served.)

  Statements like "40% of the flights were shorthaul" and "British airways accounted for 60% of all flights" are good, but not necessarily what the reader wants to know, especially if the flight pattern is weird ("40% are shorthaul, and none of them go to the neighboring region that the governor is touting in his plan for promoting business in your state"). I think that a both/and approach would be better than an either/or approach. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:48, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

• Yes. The tables give a clear view of many encyclopedic aspects of airports, in particular their connectivity, that would be unacceptably vague if relegated to a prose "description." While some of the data may be sourced from databases, it is definitely verifiable, and no one seems to be suggesting that it cannot be kept accurate. CapitalSasha ~ talk 22:46, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

  @CapitalSasha: Here's an example of (what I consider to be) the difficulties of using databases as references. This is an excerpt from the table in the Los Angeles airport article:

  Airlines	Destinations	Refs
  Delta Air Lines	Atlanta, Auckland (begins October 28, 2023), Austin, Boston, Cancún, Cincinnati, Dallas/Fort Worth, Dallas–Love

  When the flight to Auckland begins, should I remove the reference attached to it, since the timetable is already cited in the "References" column? But on what grounds can I remove a valid reference? If I leave it there, then I don't see what's stopping an editor from adding references to all the other destinations:

Airlines	Destinations	Refs
Delta Air Lines	Atlanta, Auckland, Austin, Boston, Cancún, Cincinnati, Dallas/Fort Worth, Dallas–Love

An example of the above can be seen in the Flydubai row of the Dubai airport table.

Sources

Sunnya343 (talk) 22:27, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

@Sunnya343: What's the problem with just using the timetable when the Auckland flight starts? CapitalSasha ~ talk 22:50, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

I suppose it would be OK. But pretty much all articles on Wikipedia include information that is supported by more than one reference. I can't think of any other place in this encyclopedia where you can remove one of two references - and in this case, what would the justification be, to make the table look better? Sunnya343 (talk) 23:11, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

It seems to me that if a reference is really redundant or out of date then there is no issue with removing it.... CapitalSasha ~ talk 23:22, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

I agree with you. But by removing those references, we are prioritizing the timetables over third-party sources. It's true that the timetables are only being used to support basic facts, but articles are supposed to be based on independent sources. And as WhatamIdoing pointed out, both the timetables and the newspaper articles describing new routes are all primary sources, and I don't believe we should be including such large amounts of information supported only by primary sources.

Another issue is that the timetable reference above has an access-date of April 7, 2018. But we just included a destination that began after that date. So I guess I have to check all the other destinations in the timetable, make sure Delta still flies to them, and change the access-date. Who is really going to do this, and is this how a Wikipedia article should be? This might seem like a minor critique, but I believe it helps shows the problem with having these tables and trying to keep them up-to-date. Sunnya343 (talk) 00:32, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

To be clear, a newspaper article describing a new route is not a primary source. For example, this recent local news piece about new international routes is a secondary source. Primary sources may be the airport's press release and the airline's press release. But there's nothing wrong with using the non-independent sources - while an article as a whole needs secondary sources for notability and some interpretations, to suggest they can't be used for this type of section is simply false. If anything, these could be more accurate than a secondary source because it's straight from the horse's mouth. We sometimes avoid WP:PRIMARY sources because they may require WP writers' original research to interpret or summarize, but none of what's cautioned about there is happening for this, or even a timetable. Things change and may not always be perfectly up-to-date, but so what? This is a wiki, and there are a lot of interested users who actually seem to be doing a pretty good job on these to stay current, there aren't daily changes on most pages. Everything is still perfectly verifiable, even if the accessdate in the reference is old. Reywas92^Talk 01:38, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

@Reywas92, I think you will want to read WP:PRIMARYNEWS and WP:LINKSINACHAIN. A newspaper article that repeats someone else's information, without adding its own analysis, means the newspaper article is still a primary source. As the article Secondary source puts it, "Secondary sources involve generalization, analysis, interpretation, or evaluation of the original information." It's not enough to merely be the second link in a chain.

Having said that, I agree with you that this kind of basic information isn't really what we need either a secondary or an independent source for. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:23, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

• Sort of. I don't see why it's needful to have a complete list, but to me, it seems appropriate and encyclopaedic to provide some indication of which areas an airport serves.—S Marshall T/C 23:05, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
• Yes, this information is encyclopedic and as WhatamIdoing writes very important to understanding the nature of the airport. Sourcing to the airport website is sufficiently reliable. Agree that the list need not be exhaustive and need not necessarily be tabulated. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:29, 30 September 2023 (UTC)
• No the fact that these are not easily found and sourced to independent or secondary sources demonstrates that as a general rule they are run afoul of DIRECTORY and NOTGUIDE. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 02:08, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  @David Fuchs: is that a fact? It doesn't appear to be true so it doesn't seem like it could possibly be factual. The vast majority of these are easily sourced to secondary independent sources, on what basis do you draw your unique conclusion? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:44, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

• Allow destination lists. They are central to what airports do, and generally well maintained and up to date. Old Britannicas feature this type of information about seaports, so there is some precedent for calling it "encyclopedic". We also don't have to delete information only because it is useful to have. —Kusma (talk) 02:12, 1 October 2023 (UTC)
• Allow, again This is getting tiresome, already recently at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_167#RfC:_Ariport_destination_tables and Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Airports/Archive_19#RFC_on_Maps_and_Airline_&_Destination_Tables. That an airport is a gateway to numerous destinations –and which airports – is obviously highly relevant to the airport, and it is perfectly acceptable and informative to include this content in the articles. It is risible to say this is indiscriminate or original research to include information that is easily verified in airline timetables and other sites. I have yet to see an example of users fighting over someone making up routes because there are in fact ways to look this up. These are not travel guides because they are not instructions, unencyclopedic details, or a guide at all! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Reywas92 (talk • contribs) 03:27, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  Just because data is easily available doesn't mean it isn't indiscriminate - although based on the sparsity of sources at Heathrow Airport#Airlines and destinations I'm not convinced it is easily accessible.

  That an airport is a gateway to numerous destinations –and which airports – is obviously highly relevant to the airport, and it is perfectly acceptable and informative to include this content in the articles. Why are the specific airports that Heathrow is a gateway to highly relevant? As an experiment, I tried to find sources that discuss that the connection between Zakynthos International Airport and Heathrow Airport; Google news returns nothing, and while Google books returns a few dozen sources that mention both none of them even mention a connection between the two. Similarly, Google scholar returns five sources, but again there is no mention of a connection.

  If reliable sources don't consider this relevant, why should we?

  Based on this, I also support this proposal on the grounds of WP:BALASP; we are giving undue weight to an aspect of the topic that reliable sources give no weight to. BilledMammal (talk) 03:49, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  While there's not always in-depth coverage of individual routes – though the introduction or cancelletion of routes are often covered in travel media (and it's disingenuous to search academic article) – that's downright false to say sources "give no weight to" an airport's destinations. Some for Heathrow include [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. That's just risible to say no one cares about the entire point of an airport – getting to specific other places. How can this possibly be indiscriminate? Simple inclusion standard: Can you fly from one airport to another? There's no unrelated overlapping criteria, subjectivity, or excessive number of items for this objective, narrowly defined, and finite concept. Reywas92^Talk 23:57, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  Websites like flightsfrom.com, directline-flights.co.uk, and the blog London Air Travel are not the type of source we should be using on Wikipedia. Sunnya343 (talk) 00:33, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

  it's disingenuous to search academic article Why? In any case, I searched academic articles, news articles, and books.

  While there's not always in-depth coverage of individual routes ... that's downright false to say sources "give no weight to" an airport's destinations You've constructed a bit of a strawman here; you argued that the specific airports that an airport is a "gateway" to are highly relevant. I demonstrated that they weren't, by providing an example of a pairing - picked at random - that sources give no weight to. I'm not sure how you can claim that my comment is "downright false".

  How can this possibly be indiscriminate? Indiscriminate; done without careful judgement. Including every route, regardless of whether sources consider that route relevant or irrelevant, is done without careful judgement. BilledMammal (talk) 23:04, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

  When I go to the airport, there's a big board with all the flights and destinations – that's what the purpose of the place is and what people are often interested in when they come to these articles. Is going after London_King's_Cross_railway_station#Services and Union_Station_(Los_Angeles)#Services next? I don't think Google Scholar talks much about Amtrak's Texas Eagle... Is the real complaint just that air routes aren't as permanent as train tracks so some change more frequently? Reywas92^Talk 00:30, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  that's what the purpose of the place is and what people are often interested in when they come to these articles. And I still don't understand why we would want to have a manually updated, single-point-in-time snapshot, of what services are offered (contrary to WP:NOTDIRECTORY, which says Listings to be avoided include .... services), rather than an encyclopedic long-term summary. BilledMammal (talk) 23:14, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

• Yes. This is not indiscriminate info, as there's a very specific inclusion criteria. And being primary sourced is not disqualifying. Primary sources are perfectly acceptable for establishing matters of uncontroversial fact. oknazevad (talk) 14:53, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  I agree with you that the tables are discriminate - they list all the destinations currently operating. But airport articles are not supposed to be directories that note each and every destination, no matter how trivial. Sunnya343 (talk) 02:16, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  Your comment is begging the question and presumptive. This RFC is specifically to ask and answer whether or not such material is appropriate for articles. If the consensus is yes, then the guideline should be modified to note that consensus. Assuming existing guidelines automatically represent current and broader consensus is a perennial issue. Consensus can change, and arguing that the new consensus doesn't comply with older guidelines is without merit as an argument. oknazevad (talk) 23:29, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  How else am I supposed to justify my point of view that the lists are not appropriate for Wikipedia articles, if I am not allowed to cite existing Wikipedia policies? Is this not what you yourself are doing when you make references to WP:INDISCRIMINATE and WP:PRIMARY? WP:PG says, Wikipedia's policy and guideline pages describe its principles and agreed-upon best practices. I am trying to make an argument based on those principles and best practices. If you have a concern with a policy itself, you should start a separate discussion (example). Sunnya343 (talk) 02:27, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

  Since the discussion is about the scope and content of the guideline itself, saying what the guideline contains doesn't actually contribute to the discussion of what it should be. Saying you think the guideline is fine as is and why does. oknazevad (talk) 22:41, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

  On second thought, I concur with JoelleJay and others that the information is indiscriminate. The tables list all destinations as of [insert today's date], and this information changes frequently. In the entire history of an airport, what makes today's list of destinations so notable, and not the one two months ago?

  Say that two months ago, an airport lost its only international flight. Because the emphasis is on maintaining up-to-date lists, an editor decides to simply delete the foreign destination. Sure, you can still mention the flight in the "History" section of the article, but you've nevertheless removed it from the table because you believe today's particular list of destinations is more noteworthy. FOARP said the following in an AfD on the lists of airline destinations, but I believe it applies to these tables as well: Since [the lists] can only be true on a particular, randomly-selected day, they are ephemeral and impossible to maintain given the way airline schedules change constantly, but if you did try to do keep them up to date, what you would have would essentially be an airline news-service, and Wikipedia is not news. Sunnya343 (talk) 02:34, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

• No, per @BilledMammal, @RoySmith, and @David Fuchs. I cannot see how these lists/tables of the airlines/destinations serviced by an airport provide so much utility and encyclopedic value as to override our policies on indiscriminate info, NOTDB, BALANCE, NOTNEWS, and OR. Items on these lists may be ephemeral and quickly out of date, and if their only sourcing is non-independent or primary then having such detailed tables for them arguably violates the Do not base an entire article on primary sources, and be cautious about basing large passages on them. policy in PRIMARY. Of course any routes that have enough coverage to be part of a BALANCED article can be discussed, but creating exhaustive lists or tables simply for completion's sake, or for needless consistency between articles, regardless of how well the entries are sourced, should not be normalized. JoelleJay (talk) 18:50, 1 October 2023 (UTC)
• Sort of We should provided enough details on destinations to allow readers to have a good understanding of the airports reach. For smaller regional airports this will likely be the complete list, whereas for large international airports perhaps condensing it into countries served would be more useful. As an aside, another thing to consider is to remove what destinations a particular airline serves, this starts intruding into making a product guide and introduces duplication if multiple airlines serve a single destination. Jumpytoo Talk 19:34, 1 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes, the tables should stay – from a user standpoint, I've found them very helpful. At very least, if the tables are removed from Wikipedia, they should be moved elsewhere (Wikivoyage perhaps?) Codeofdusk (talk) 21:51, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

• @Codeofdusk: yes, Wikivoyage is the wiki for readers and users desiring for travel information, not encyclopedic information. See my vote+comment below. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contrib's.) 02:48, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

• Yes—There's nothing wrong with the prior RfC on this matter. Airports, like other transportation destinations, are primarily useful for their specific connections to specific places.--Carwil (talk) 16:43, 2 October 2023 (UTC)
• With my reader hat on, definitely yes - these are surprisingly useful. With my editor hat on, there is an obvious "...assuming they can be sourced", but this should not be difficult in most cases. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:10, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Andrew Gray: What do you mean by these are surprisingly useful to readers?

  I agree that many destinations can be sourced with timetables and similar references (although I noted my concerns about this above in my response to CapitalSasha), but I believe Wikipedia is not supposed to be a directory of all destinations from an airport, nor is it meant to be a news site that seeks to maintain a current list of all destinations and makes note of the launch, resumption, and discontinuation of individual flights. Sunnya343 (talk) 02:11, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Sunnya343 The use is I think in simply having that readable list of "where can you fly to from ---" without needing to go through individual airport websites. A reader can use it for various things, be that figuring out travel planning (I want to avoid a local domestic flight, does that place have any direct flights from Europe? Are they only seasonal?) or more general background reading (what places actually let commercial airlines fly to Pyongyang? Is some pair of cities very heavily served from that airport? Are the international flights only to one or two countries and what does that imply? Which airline clearly dominates the market here?). I think I've read it for some version of all of these over the years. Anecdotal I know, but hopefully informative.

  A lot of this can indeed be covered in text but it'd be awkward to try and pre-emptively address all those questions (as @WhatamIdoing I think noted above).

  In terms of suitability, I think I take an expansive approach to things like NOTDIRECTORY: the fact that we've been happily doing it for untold years means that we seem to implicitly consider that within the remit of permitted things, in much the same way we consider it eg appropriate to have a comprehensive list of film credits for an actor even when it's "policeman #3". You can certainly interpret the guidelines in such a way as to rule those both out, and I don't think you're wrong to read them that way, but ideally I feel our interpretation of them should be informed (and in many cases led) by what community practice is. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:41, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  No one should be using Wikipedia articles on airports to plan their travel. We are explicitly not a travel guide, our information can be decades out of date or plainly wrong, and numerous sites like Google Flights are freely available to use for most airlines. JoelleJay (talk) 18:38, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  To clarify, when I say "travel planning" I'm meaning something that might be better described as reading with the intention of eventually travelling, the sort of initial familiarisation reading people do well in advance of booking travel, rather than the detailed Google Flights type planning that involves "right, if we take Air France then there would be a connection in Frankfurt". I wouldn't expect anyone to use it for that. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:54, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  But...what would readers actually be getting out of this content? Why would anyone be looking up which particular airports service airlines that go to particular other airports at any point in their planning? It would be way more effort to try to reconstruct flight paths based on a rarely-updated table of destinations on the wiki pages of individual airports than to just...go to Google Flights and plug in e.g. Pyongyang as the origin, set the destination as "anywhere", and select "nonstop only", which will yield all the locations that will send planes directly to Pyongyang in the next six months. Apparently roundtrip goes as low as $161 from Tokyo... JoelleJay (talk) 19:37, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  You can disbelieve me if you want, but I'm pretty sure that I personally did that a few weeks ago (can't remember what prompted it, probably read something about someone travelling to NK and was curious; never underestimate idle curiosity...)

  I knew Wikipedia would have that table, and it was likely to be reasonably up-to-date (not updated this month, fine, but probably correct to a year or so) - YMMV, of course, but I wouldn't have gone to a flight search site because, well, I wouldn't want to wade through ads and a clunky interface to find the answer and then spend extra time figuring out if it was actually answering the question I'd meant to ask.

  On that note, GF would give you the wrong answer: it doesn't think Pyongyang Airport exists, so the flights it quotes are from the wrong side of the DMZ. Andrew Gray (talk) 20:22, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  Ok, I guess in the extremely unusual situation where an airport has very restricted commercial accessibility it might be easier to use something other than a standard flight planner, but I would not have expected to find this info on Wikipedia and definitely would not expect it to be updated... I would just google which airlines/airports serve NK and go to their websites. JoelleJay (talk) 23:24, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

• No - they are poorly maintained and often out of date. There is no way any reader is going to rely on Wikipedia for accurate and up to date information in this area. Isaidnoway (talk) 23:26, 2 October 2023 (UTC)
• No. Poorly-sourced and badly-maintained lists like these are worse than useless, in contexts where people might be misguidedly attempting to use Wikipedia to plan travel. Wikipedia should not be trying to substitute itself for better sources of information, even disregarding the obvious WP:NOT issues. AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:19, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  Do you have an example of one of these tables that is incorrect? CapitalSasha ~ talk 02:07, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

  Based on the airline destination list issue the problems are typically:

  - WP:CRYSTAL pronouncements about planned services that may not happen.

  - Long-out-of-date data.

  - Broken links.

  - Unreliable/non-independent sourcing.

  - Original research based on comparing the routes displayed as available on different days. FOARP (talk) 11:50, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

• No, not in this form. A general overview of an airport's airlines and connections over its history would be relevant. But a continuously updated point-in-time snapshot of every current airline and every current connections feels more like the function of a travel guide than an encyclopedia article taking a long-term, historical view.--Trystan (talk) 00:15, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes. WP:V, WP:RS and WP:NPOV can cover relevant concerns. Making a blanket rule banning such information is unnecessary WP:CREEP. —siroχo 00:45, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
• Not in this form - an overview of the major destinations served by a airport, sourced to an independent source seems fine. There we are talking about essentially transport infrastructure. Compiling exhaustive lists of all destinations served from airline websites, almost always including WP:CRYSTAL-style information about planned routes that may not happen, and which anyway change quickly, is creating a service-directory and promotional content, both barred by WP:NOT. Moreover it is essentially discussing the airlines, not the airport. FOARP (talk) 04:57, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

  Reliable sources like [11][12][13] do not violate CRYSTAL. There's no speculation, these are legitimate announced plans with approvals that rarely get reversed. Addressing the fact that they can change – and not that regularly – is the beauty of a wiki. Reywas92^Talk 04:34, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

  These are: (1 and 2) airline websites that are obviously not independent of the subject and (3) essentially a news-ticker blog. Flight plans change week-to-week, as a perusal of e.g., the BA website news section shows. FOARP (talk) 08:46, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

• yes such tables should be allowed or to a limited extent encouraged. Particularly for smaller airports, the information is useful and maintainable. However for major international hubs, it probably will not be complete or up-to-date. So major airports could have a reduced summary of long running or major routes. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:23, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
• No/ disallow per NOT. These ubiquitous lists exemplify everything we do not stand for: NOTNEWS, INDISCRIMINATE and NOTDIR. Also RECENT, for as the nom noted, this excludes previous versions on no other grounds than to be up to date. Whereas an encyclopedia should take a long-term, historical perspective where necessary. Plenty of policies back their exclusion. This would not preclude keeping information of genuinely encyclopedic interest (to be assessed on a talk page-by-talk page basis, perhaps). Serial 15:19, 7 October 2023 (UTC)
• No in this current form (airline+destination tables) in all airport articles. That is the job of Wikivoyage. Both Wikipedia and Wikivoyage provide meaningful information, but Wikipedia is geared towards encyclopedic information, not information exclusive for travellers or readers planning to travel. WP:NOTGUIDE. Migrate all tables to Wikivoyage. JWilz12345 (Talk|Contrib's.) 02:37, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes. Frostly (talk) 02:44, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes. At a glance, looking at how large the destination table gives us an idea how well served the airport is. And I would recommend listing this suggestion under WP:PERENNIAL because it is proposed at least once a year for last 3 years with no traction each time. I wouldn't oppose if this data is imported and made available in Wikidata before removing it from Wikipedia. But until then, it should stay. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 05:02, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

  Your accurate characterization of this information as data underscores a larger point. Allow me to pose a rhetorical question. What if we made a tool that imported all the data from airline flight schedules into airport articles, and we configured it to update the lists regularly? That way we would always have up-to-date information... However, articles are not supposed to be repositories of raw data. Sunnya343 (talk) 02:38, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  But we're proposing to delete the data first before it even has a chance to be exported to Wikidata. This is like telling someone that Commons can be used to upload photos but deletes the local copy first. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 14:19, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

• No for all of the different reasons cited by others already that Wikipedia is NOT. And a maintenance nightmare.— Preceding unsigned comment added by SandyGeorgia (talk • contribs) 18:34, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes The routes for an airport are sensible content and, per WP:CREEP, what we don't need are petty rules to micro-manage the form of presentation. Andrew🐉(talk) 19:05, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
• No. The RfC is about current airlines which currently "serve" the airport. This is constantly changing and, per WP:NOTNEWS, WP:NOTDIRECTORY, etc. etc. this information is not appropriate to an encyclopedia. I am sure that some "yes" voters find it useful, but that is not the point; useful stuff does exist elsewhere on the Internet, but that is no reason to maintain a live copy here. The previous RfC, earlier this year, showed a clear consensus, and just because one editor missed that discussion is no reason to revisit it so soon. This RfC borders on WP:DISRUPTION. Of course, illustrative remarks on major and historic destinations, backed in depth by multiple independent WP:RS are quite a different matter, but are not the subject of this RfC. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 19:51, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

  Do you oppose listing the current (ever changing) squad in an article about a professional sports team? —Kusma (talk) 09:26, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

  Nearly every pro sports team has a per year/season article where the roster for that year is given. That type of resolution works for sports since these are typically always noted. But I can't ever see support for a case like "2023 in Chicago O'Hara Activity" which would be the equivalent here. Masem (t) 17:54, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

  That query is just a red herring: sports teams are not airports, and the points of interest are not comparable, per Masem. Specifically, if you want to cite/verify the lineup of Pro Team X back in 1953 there is likely plenty of RS, but if you want to do so for Airport Y you will be lucky to find anything at all. So we get WP:NOTABILITY, WP:UNDUE, etc. weighing in too. Just because there are fans here on Wikipedia does not mean that there is a verifiable fan base out there in WP:RS land. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 08:58, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Steelpillow: Did you mean to link to this RfC from August 2023? That one was on the lists of airline destinations (example), whereas the present discussion is about the lists in airport articles (example). If you apply what you said to the latter type of list, I actually agree with you, but that's besides the point. I started this RfC here at the Village Pump because I felt the previous discussion at WikiProject Airports was a case of local consensus. Sunnya343 (talk) 02:18, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  Apologies, I did get my RfC's mixed up. Thank you for spotting it. But both support the case that these kinds of list are inappropriate to this encyclopedia. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 08:58, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

• No Lists of destinations by airline are very volatile, and do not belong ion an encyclopedia. I have largely given up on reviewing changes to airport articles because of the constant churning to destinations, which can be difficult to verify. - Donald Albury 19:57, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
• No. NODIRECTORY, NOTDATABASE, NOTINDISCRIMINATE, basically, and it all changes too frequently. The very fact that many of our readers might think that the information is reliable and current, instead of incomplete and months out-of-date anyway, is itself problematic. This is not the kind of informational purpose that an encyclopedia serves, and there are oodles and oodles of travel-related sites that already fill this niche (never mind that WMF even seems to be running one itself at Wikitravel.org already).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:01, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

  I would be happy to use one of the "oodles and oodles of travel-related sites" for my travel planning instead of Wikipedia, but I am not aware of any place that tells me in an easily accessible way what the direct connections from any given airport are. @SMcCandlish, if there are so many, I am sure it will be easy for you to point me to one. —Kusma (talk) 09:25, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

  [14][15], etc. And even if some informational niche gap could be identified does not mean that WP should fill it anyway; this is the main reason we have WP:NOT policy in the first place.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:01, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

  These are all terrible (ad-ridden and full of stuff like sales links that do not help answer my question). And the point of WP:NOT is not actually "this is useful, so we must kill it". —Kusma (talk) 14:23, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

  I agree with SMcCandlish, but I will say, why don't you just consult one of Flightradar24's route maps for that purpose, like this one? Come to think of it, the lists in airport articles are basically attempts to duplicate the entire content of those Flightradar24 maps, which are more up-to-date anyway. Sunnya343 (talk) 01:05, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

  Why would you even need to know the list of direct connections from given airports? Do you plan your trips by looking up what places some airport has non-stop service to and then choosing one of them? Why not use google flights instead...? Also the flysfo.com link with a list of all the SFO destinations has zero ads... JoelleJay (talk) 01:45, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

  Why not use google flights instead...? Because not every airline is on Google Flights. And that's just in the US. We haven't gotten to developing countries. Are you confident in telling me what airlines and flights fly out of Mogadishu Airport with links to the announcements? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 16:11, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

  As a contributor to an encyclopedia article, I'm not interested in mentioning every airline and flight out of the Mogadishu airport as of October 2023. I won't rehash my arguments in my !vote above, but one reason is that the body of reliable, independent sources does not cover that information in depth. On the other hand, I might note that Mogadishu has direct flights to the Middle East,[16] or that Turkish Airlines was the first major airline to begin flying to the city since the onset of the Somali Civil War 20 years prior.[17][18][19] Sunnya343 (talk) 03:20, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

• No. We settled this already. Nothing has changed, and WikiProject RfCs are a joke. --James (^talk/_contribs) 20:41, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

  That was a different question, about lists on airline articles. The question regarding airport articles has not been asked. Thryduulf (talk) 15:45, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

  In my opinion, the same logic applies here. --James (^talk/_contribs) 18:20, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

• No – WP:NOTDATABASE, WP:NOTTRAVEL, these lists are often quite volatile and difficult to properly maintain, and the fact that Wikivoyage exists. I did sample some major US airports and did not see lists of destinations on those articles, but there is no reason they cannot be created and maintained there with a cross-wiki link in the enWiki article. I presume the purpose of Wikivoyage is to serve as the very travel guide enWiki is not supposed to be. If there are particularly interesting things about an airport, such as the aforementioned fact that KIND only has CYYZ and MMUN as international destinations, then those can be mentioned in prose. — Jkudlick ⚓ (talk) 22:08, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
• No. A few very notable mentions are ok, but not a complete list. A lot of these lists aren't verifiable and the extend of what is considered a destination often involves adding references from booking sites, which becomes promotional. We have WikiVoyage for this purpose. Ajf773 (talk) 08:55, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

  With these and related articles where such lists mushroom up, perhaps we could do with a WP:NOTWIKIVOYAGE meme. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 12:02, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

• No. An encyclopedia summarizes. It has no business providing a comprehensive account of all the destinations served by an airport. It doesn't serve researchers, since it lacks any context or analysis, it is just raw information. It doesn't serve general readers, unless they are extremely bored. It doesn't serve historians, since it is only a snapshot of current arrangements (that it will invariably be out of date is already covered by the Wikipedia disclaimer). Edson Makatar (talk) 13:15, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes, obviously – The list of reachable destinations is naturally part of key information that a reader expects from airport articles. Even if Wikipedia is not a travel guide, it certainly is a go-to place to understand the local geography and potential connections in places you are not familiar with... or for that matter even for places you ARE familiar with. Wikipedia has a distinct advantage over travel-booking engines, in that the information is clearly and predictably laid out for a quick glance by human eyes instead of being buried in cookie acceptance requests, promotional offerings and ungodly "connections" through creative routes that only a database engine can imagine inflicting on a naive traveller. Yes, Wikipedia, please tell me whether I can fly direct from Phnom Penh to Yangon instead of spending 27 hours on a bus ride through the jungle. I'll figure out in a minute how to buy my tickets elsewhere, as you conveniently list which airlines may be able to serve me. Per WP:Readers first, Remember that the main purpose of Wikipedia is to provide useful articles for readers! — JFG ^talk 13:46, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, Wikipedia, please tell me whether I can fly direct from Phnom Penh to Yangon instead of spending 27 hours on a bus ride through the jungle. Per WP:NOTGUIDE, this is not our purpose. If someone wants to determine this they can go to Wikivoyage, or to any one of the dozens of websites that, upon being told you want to fly from Phnom Penh to Yangon, will provide you a complete and up to date list of flights and booking options. BilledMammal (talk) 13:51, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

  Our purpose (at least mine) does not include ideological adherence to a pure vision of WP:NOTGUIDE, though. (Otherwise we would have long since deleted classic violations like the lists of United States network television schedules). That something is useful is not a reason to delete it (weird that this needs to be said). —Kusma (talk) 14:31, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

  The issue of television schedules has been debated before (5+ years I believe), which is why the wording for that in NOT is clarified as such. Its why these are generally allowed as talking about a given year's television season as to compare the blocks of prime time programming between the major networks as these trends are themselves notable. But not the specific week-to-week scheduling or things like daytime programming. There's a clear refinement there. The same can be done for airports - there are broad ways to discuss airlines and main routes but that do not rely on trying to keep up with day-to-day operations. Masem (t) 23:20, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

  You can just visit the RGN website's flight schedule and see that Myanmar Airways International provides service to PNH Mondays and Sundays...which you can confirm at the MAI site. JoelleJay (talk) 02:02, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

  Being useful is not a sole reason to keep info. It would be extremely useful if we could supply medical advice to our readers, but even if we kept that strictly to MEDRS sourcing, that's still a huge minefield that we avoid it all together. Our first purpose is an encyclopedia, and NOT is what sets the bounds for what that should not cover. Masem (t) 18:02, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

• Yes Keep them available for readers to enjoy. I have been trying to keep them up to date and accurate for the airports in the Oceania region for 15 years. They can be maintained with the right sources and they have been allowed on Wikipedia almost since the beginning. A lot of people will miss them when they are removed but won't know why as they are not too involved with the Wikipedia policy. So will never know why they will be no longer on Airport pages CHCBOY (talk) 14:48, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes informative, encyclopedic. The Rambling Man (Keep wearing the mask...) 16:40, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes Easy to source, from someone who started out working those tables, encyclopedic and should be kept. 47.227.95.73 (talk) 19:39, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
• No Wikipedia is not a travel guide, WP:NOTGUIDE. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ratnahastin (talk • contribs) 01:19, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes, a rare case I disagree with SMcC. I love this discussion, as it combines many fine things about Wikipedia: meticulous attention to certain details; a desire to capture parallel details about every entry in a category; a desire to be concisely useful and maintainable as a public resource. The whole purpose of an airport is to host airlines taking people and things to other cities, so it is a significant detail. Destination tables are moderately long, need occasional but not continuous updating, and are maintained by a community of passionate enthusiasts — I see no reason not to include them. (This does not strike me as what NOTDIR or NOTGUIDE were created to avoid.) For the sake of making the freshness of information clear, it might help to have a standard template that includes a "last updated" footnote at the bottom of such tables with a link to a canonical source for anything without its own ref. – SJ + 01:38, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes, because non-stop destinations are useful information about an airport – what places does it directly connect to? Breaking it down by airline is even more helpful to determine WHO flies a specific route, instead of just saying there's a non-stop connection to X destination by some air carrier. Additionally, airport websites are not always the most frequently updated with their destination offerings, nor do they always differentiate between seasonal and year-round service. Panthercoffee72 (talk) 20:07, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes for me case-by-case makes the most encyclopedic sense; in general I would expect commercial airports with a handful of destinations would be the most suitable -- it really matters to understanding such a topic what three, or six, or nine places you can get to (indeed, it is perhaps the most informative thing to really understand the operation at all). Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:20, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
• Comment. There appear to be many Yes !votes here which really mean No. The OP has made it clear that "the central question is whether airport articles should mention every single flight that the airport offers". Many of those "Yes" votes are qualified as, for example, "every route" or "case by case", so what they really mean is "No, not every single flight indiscriminately". — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 16:04, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

  An outcome of "no" will be interpreted as a justification for indiscriminately removing entire lists, which is not what any of those qualified "yes" !votes want (nor at least some of those with bolded "no" comments). Thryduulf (talk) 18:43, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

  My impression is that the people who !voted "no" (and many of those who made a qualified "yes" !vote) do not seek to simply remove a list and leave it at that, but to provide instead a description of the airport's operations that is in line with Wikipedia policies. Sunnya343 (talk) 03:14, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  Some who voted "no" and some who voted "yes" do think a prose replacement and/or a prose supplement to a partial list will be appropriate, but lists (comprehensive and otherwise) will be removed without replacement using this RFC as a justification if the outcome is "no", even though that is not the desire of most. Thryduulf (talk) 09:16, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  Mass excision of lists without a sincere effort to replace them would not be productive, but disruptive, and such behavior should be dealt with accordingly. Sunnya343 (talk) 14:13, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  Except such mass removals are almost always the result of an RFC with a closure that something doesn't belong. And any attempt to push back against such mass removals results in not only the removed simply pointing to the RFC as justification with no nuance, but offer results in the person saying correctly that mass removal is a bad idea having to defend themself at ANI. Thryduulf is right. The strict binary of wording of the RFC would absolutely result in a mass removal with no sense of subtly whatsoever. oknazevad (talk) 14:32, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  Agreed, this is why I raised issues with the phasing of the question all the way at the beginning. I'm not sure I could blame the removal on disruptive users I think the blame falls squarely on the wording of the RfC. @Sunnya343: this means that if such mass excision happens it will be on your head alone. You can not, as you do here, simply pass the buck to other editors and claim that its them who is disruptive for your mistake. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:44, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  "It will be on your head alone"? What nonsense. It would be on the head of everybody who helped build the consensus - which usually means most of us - and especially on the wording of the closure. And many of us would not be sorry to see a clean slate and a fresh start on the well-sourced ones. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 15:19, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  How am I supposed to incorporate every possible nuance into the RfC statement and still comply with WP:RFCBRIEF? The nuances arise over the course of the discussion and should be incorporated into the closing summary, as Steelpillow noted. Sunnya343 (talk) 23:08, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  A question closer to "what should lists of destinations in airport articles include?" with a list of options, including (but not necessarily limited to) "nothing" (i.e. remove the lists), "an up-to-date list of all destinations", and "a representative sample of destinations" would allow for much greater nuance and much less scope for overzealous content removal. That you needed to clarify the question so soon after asking it is not evidence of a well-workshopped proposal. Thryduulf (talk) 00:33, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

I must add that I am astounded and bewildered by the personal attack on me for the hypothetical actions of other editors following the hypothetical outcome of an active RfC. Sunnya343 (talk) 22:58, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

• Close poorly phrased RFC and start over. It isn't clear from the wording whether we're discussing requiring these tables or banning them. I don't think anyone's going to !vote for saying the tables "should" always appear; that's not the same as putting in a rule against them. --Trovatore (talk) 18:56, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

  How is the wording different from this RfC, which editors did not have difficulty understanding: Should Wikipedia have and maintain complete lists of airline destinations? In the same vein as the latter discussion, the present RfC is asking whether the complete lists of airlines and destinations in airport articles belong in Wikipedia. The paragraph that begins with Virtually all airport articles should make this clear. Sunnya343 (talk) 02:34, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  Appears to be substantially different from "Should airport articles include tables that display all the airlines that serve the airport and the cities they fly to?" the key difference being "all the airlines" which the first question doesn't ask at all. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:48, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  The first question asks whether Wikipedia should have complete lists of airline destinations (example). My question asks if airport articles should have complete lists of airlines and destinations - i.e. "all the airlines that serve the airport and the cities they fly to". Sunnya343 (talk) 23:11, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Sunnya343: The problem is with the interpretation of the word "should", where a yes answer could be taken as meaning that these lists should always appear, and no could be taken as meaning that they should never appear. That's a bad question and basically invalidates the whole RfC. You need to close it and start over, asking a question more focused on what you mean. If you think that maybe we should ban the lists, you should ask if we should ban the lists. If you think they should always appear, you should ask whether they should always appear. --Trovatore (talk) 16:04, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

  There are, at a basic level, multiple options for how lists/tables of destinations could be handled.

  1. Never allowed.
  2. Exceptionally allowed. Exceptions would require discussion at an individual article level, with a presumption against inclusion
  3. Discouraged. Most articles should not have a list/table, but there are some airports where it is justified.
  4. Neutral. Neither required nor prohibited, with no general presumption for or against inclusion.
  5. Encouraged. Most articles should have such a list/table, but sometimes it makes sense not have one.
  6. Almost always required. Exceptions are possible and would require discussion on each article, with a presumption in favour of inclusion.
  7. Required. Every article about an airport with scheduled flights should have list and/or table of the airlines and destinations.

  It should also be made clear that there are multiple types of list/table, none of which are mutually exclusive (even on a single article) and the consensus regarding each might be different:

  1. Complete, listing every airline and destination.
  2. Comprehensive, including most but not necessarily all.
  3. Representative, a sample giving an overview of the types of airlines and destinations and their relative proportions
  4. Most significant only.

  Finally, each of those four types could be for the rolling now, for a specific moment in time or covering a period of time (e.g. a single year through to a decade or so, possibly more). An article may have more than one (e.g. a complete list for now and a representative list for each prior era of operations).

  This discussion reduces all this to a single question and assumes that everybody is talking about the same thing. Thryduulf (talk) 16:54, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

  The other RfC statement also includes the word should, yet editors raised no concerns about its meaning. The outcome of that RfC was clear enough for three subsequent discussions to reaffirm it (1, 2, 3). I have contacted the people who started those discussions to seek their input.

  The question is quite straightforward. Either you believe Wikipedia should maintain the current, complete lists of airlines and destinations found in all airport articles, or you do not. If you !vote "Yes", you provide your reasoning. If you !vote "No", you are free to explain what sort of information should be provided instead, as many editors have done. Sunnya343 (talk) 23:03, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

• Needs further clarification. It should not be required, but does not prohibit mentions either. Senorangel (talk) 02:20, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

• No hopelessly outdated in most articles WP:NOTGUIDE.Moxy- 23:39, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes. I don't buy the WP:NOTGUIDE argument one bit. It's encyclopedic info relating to which airlines serve the airport (along with other airports that can be reached directly from that airport, which can often be found in RS). That is essential info relating to an airport's operation - much like we would not have a road article that fails to list what towns the road serves, or a railway station article that doesn't mention what railway lines actually stop there. What would bring this into NOTGUIDE territory are timetables, flight numbers, gate numbers, etc. Epicgenius (talk) 13:10, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

  Roads and train tracks are essentially permanent and thus once down, they won't change. The airlines that serve an airport, and moreso the list of cities they serve, are extremely flexible since planes are not required to travel fixed paths. Masem (t) 02:05, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

  Good point; it could be harder to maintain articles like that. I still think airline/destination lists can be included if supported by RS; though I don't think their usage should be banned (or conversely, mandated), as the destinations served by an airport are still valuable pieces of information relating to the airport's very operations. If an airport only has flights to one or two other airports, for example, it would not serve the WP:READER well to not mention that. – Epicgenius (talk) 02:12, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

  To add, the equivalent of airports/airlines to roads would be bus and train routes, which are subject to daily changes. And which we don't include. Masem (t) 02:18, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Epicgenius: I agree 100% with your sentiment regarding an airport with few flights. For example, it would be silly to insist that you may not explicitly mention the three flights available at the Kalamazoo airport. I'm sure you will find a good number of RS that discuss them in detail, given their significance to a small airport like Kalamazoo's. The Newark airport is a different story. But even then, there are some noteworthy routes that we should describe in the article, such as the nonstop flight to Singapore, which is the longest in the world.[20][21]

  Is that what you thought when you read the RfC question and clarification - that if you !vote "No", it means you believe that explicitly mentioning any current destinations should be forbidden? (Not asking sarcastically.) Because that's not what I meant. I didn't think it was necessary to include that nuance since this RfC on a similar topic did not either, and editors seemed to understand. Sunnya343 (talk) 14:58, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

  Thanks for the response @Sunnya343. I will admit that I interpreted the question "Should airport articles include tables that display all the airlines that serve the airport and the cities they fly to?" as having two choices—yes, we should allow them to be included, and no, we should not allow them to be included. My position is that the tables could be included if sources support them, but that the tables shouldn't be mandatory (which I supposed would be the subject of a later discussion). Epicgenius (talk) 15:20, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

• Yes - It's an integral part of the importance of an airport. It includes information that goes into airport size, airline market share, and more. Since the dawn of Wikipedia we've had these tables and I'm not sure why some people keep going after them. ✈ mike_gigs ^talk_contribs 14:59, 17 October 2023 (UTC)
• No - We're not a directory and this comes off as way too promotional. It's like listing the menus of restaurants, or listing all the different model bulbs made by General Electric. It comes off as not only unencyclopedic but as an advertisement for these facilities. There's a fine line between giving a basic summary highlighting what a business does and promoting what they do. This seems to cross it by a mile. Zaereth (talk) 03:32, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes. The destinations that an airport serves are just as relevant as the destinations that a road or railway serves. It is true that these airport destinations change more easily than roads or railways, and so needs more frequent updating, but the content is usually easily verifiable through airport websites and airline timetables. Sjakkalle (Check!) 06:42, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

  As an aviation enthusiast who used to edit these lists frequently, I have found that the easiest way to verify their contents is to check Flightradar24. The website is convenient in that it compiles data from different airline timetables and other sources. If we take the Chongqing airport table as an example, it's easy to type "CKG-CAN" (the airport codes for Chongqing and Guangzhou) in the search box and click on Flight AQ 1200 to confirm that 9 Air flies between those cities. You can do the same for the rest of the destinations in the table. There was a time when I would pull up one of Flightradar24's route maps for an airport, write down all of the airlines and destinations, and add that information to articles in the Spanish Wikipedia that previously lacked such lists. Eventually I paused to reflect. What is the point of meticulously copying all of this information from one website to another, especially given how often it changes?

  Railway services are major pieces of infrastructure that receive extensive coverage in the body of published sources. For instance, the services at Cleveland Lakefront Station are notable enough to have their own Wikipedia articles. If one of these ended, it would be a major event that we would describe in the station's article. On the other hand, when Lufthansa ends its Frankfurt–Erbil service or British Airways stops flying from Doha to London-Gatwick, we will simply delete the destination from the table; that information will be removed from the article forever. In other words, we're not meaningfully building or expanding the article, but continually hitting the "refresh" button on the list of destinations. Providing information that is transient and at this level of granularity is a job better suited to a constantly updated database like Flightradar24, than to an encyclopedia article. Sunnya343 (talk) 22:32, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

• Yes: WP:V and WP:CREEP are each valid counters to the WP:INDISCRIMINATE claims, and simply because some articles lack the proper sourcing does not mean that it doesn't exist. Let'srun (talk) 18:03, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes Certainly they may need better sourcing, but that can come in the course of article improvement, and it's useful to have.--Wehwalt (talk) 18:08, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
• Yes Without expounding further....as many excellent reasons cited above. But the same expectations and content rules should be applied as consistently as the rest of Wikipedia (well sourced, cited, maintained etc...) (If it is unmaintained / not well sourced - it should be either repaired or deleted just like every other wikipedia article. DigitalExpat (talk) 06:03, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

  Vote to close this RFC - upon rereading, there's been excellent valid points raised about the flawed nature of the question in this RG and it is unlikely to be able to drive to a productive conclusion. Some very experienced wiki editors have given good points here and they have largely been ignored or taken as an argument. I would suggest a more productive RFC would be on the Aviation Wiki talk pages on perhaps 'how best to source flight information' (eg OAG and Cirium as proof of routes instead of FR24 that just says a plane flew from A to B within the last 30days). To contradict my vote above, upon reread of this long (and growing) RFC, it is a flawed question and unanswerable as evidenced by the above. (PS - if we source superior resources like Cirium based data,it would tell us that EWR-SIN is not the "longest flight", but is the 2nd longest.) Cheers! DigitalExpat (talk) 02:42, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

• Qualified yes For major airports like Heathrow, or Chicago IMHO it's not necessary: one can assume that there are many flights to & from many places involving those airports. However, when it comes to less trafficked airports, where there might be only one or two carriers that service it, it becomes important not only to potential travelers, but as an indicator of how busy that airport is. Further, the airports I have in mind are those in second or third-tier cities in Africa or Asia -- only as an afterthought I realized this could apply to the US & Western Europe. (IIRC, all cities in Oregon except Portland have at most one carrier serving their airport, which is the case for most states in the US.) As for the issue of maintainability, we have that same issue with countless articles, & the only solution is for more eyes & editors. If we start accepting that as an unqualified reason to omit information, we might as well go on a deletion spree thru the rest of Wikipedia. -- llywrch (talk) 21:04, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
• No, not at all, per SMcCandlish and Moxy. The fact that readers trust us for this, is a problem in itself, when these very long tables are poorly maintained. Disallowed by several sections of WP:NOT (heck, even WP:NOTPRICE: "products and services" / "availability information"). Information cannot be defining (or encyclopedic) if it changes frequently, and we shouldn't be maintaining carbon copies of info findable on other websites (like the airport's site, or flightradar24). Destinations are determined by airlines, not airports, so this would make less sense than lists of airline destinations, which there is already consensus against. DFlhb (talk) 18:14, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
• Include in some way, either in the article or as a soft redirect to WikiVoyage. I think that ultimately it's more useful to keep them despite the strong NOTDIRECTORY argument as it would better assist readers (per the essay Wikipedia:Readers first), but if they have to go, consider soft redirecting our readers to WikiVoyage as a middle ground. InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 18:58, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
• Support. I think the most compelling argument for me was given by Kusma: this is traditionally within the scope of an encyclopedia. Streamline8988 (talk) 06:48, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Discussion (airlines and destinations)

• I have a problem with the framing of this question, "Should airport articles include tables that display all the airlines that serve the airport and the cities they fly to?" is so vague that we all appear to be voting on different proposals. @Sunnya343: can you clarify whether by "all the airlines that serve the airport and the cities they fly to" you mean all which we can reliably source or is it a rhetorical question? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:47, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

  I'm asking whether airport articles should mention every single flight that the airport offers, which is what it appears the articles are trying to do. I specifically mentioned "tables" because that is the format used by all the articles, but the central question is what I said in the previous sentence. Sunnya343 (talk) 23:35, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

  If they're going to mention some of them, and a complete list is possible, then why shouldn't we have a complete list? What's the advantage to having a partial list? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  In my rough draft for the Indianapolis airport article (which is just an idea, I'm not saying this is exactly how it should be), I do explicitly mention Toronto and Cancun, but that's because those are the airport's only two international destinations. If the airport had 10 or 15 international destinations, I personally wouldn't list all of them. So I'd say it comes down to the judgment of the editor(s), just like in other articles, where you have to decide whether or not to include certain details. I think WP:NOTEVERYTHING would apply. Sunnya343 (talk) 02:36, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  Does it come down to judgement or does it come down to what the sources cover? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:41, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  I still believe it comes down to judgment, and that WP:TMI is relevant here. Sunnya343 (talk) 17:35, 1 October 2023 (UTC) Actually, I think it's more nuanced. Please see the paragraph I wrote on October 7 after !voting "No". Sunnya343 (talk) 03:13, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

  TMI is a WP:ESSAY, WP:NPOV is a WP:POLICY. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:46, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  You're right. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the need to mention every flight then. Sunnya343 (talk) 18:37, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  You're disagreeing with a straw man, that is not my position and never has been. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:13, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  Then what exactly is your position? I thought you were saying that because third-party sources can be found for every destination, we should include them all. Sunnya343 (talk) 22:14, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  Nowhere did I say that and I'm not really sure where you would get that I did from. I said that "airport articles should include such tables when including a table would be due (closed airports don't need to have an empty table for example). A table should not preclude prose coverage of routes nor should prose coverage of routes preclude a table, there is room for both and both are often due." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 01:16, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

• Theoretically these tables might be able to be maintained to adequate sourcing levels, but this will not ever happen in practice. It's thousands of airports with shifting schedules and much fewer editors. The route and destination tables of most airport articles I watch are maintained by unsourced and often unexplained edits which add or remove routes and airlines. Obviously no-one checks these, and no-one has time to check them all, and even if someone did check them at some point it's entirely possible the situation might have changed. That is not to say the edits are not in good faith, much seem likely to be accurate, but it can be hard to know. Sometimes sources are added, which will note route opening, but these routes are as subject to change and removal as the unsourced ones. Many seem to find the tables useful, so I'm hesitant to oppose. I find the tables occasionally informative if indiscriminate. However, I read them with the knowledge that they are a mixture of incomplete, out of date, and possibly unsubstantiated information. I do not know if we should assume the same from our readers. CMD (talk) 02:45, 1 October 2023 (UTC)
• I am pretty sure there was a major deletion discussion and reversion a few years back, on exactly this topic. Would it be relevant to this question? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:36, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  You might be thinking of this RfC on the lists of airline destinations. Sunnya343 (talk) 17:37, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

  Yeah, that was really weird. We got a consensus to delete destination lists, then I got yelled for actually doing it. I still firmly belive that per WP:NOTDIRECTORY we shouldn't be hosting these schedules at all. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:51, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

• I would suggest that rather than attempting the impossible task of maintaining a complete and current list of airlines and destinations, we provide a snapshot of the typical operations of a given airport with respect to this information. That way, nothing needs to be updated, so long as we can accurately say that a particular set of this information from a particular date is exemplary for that airport. BD2412 T 18:18, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

  But what encyclopedic purpose would that serve?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:57, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

  The purpose would be to illustrate the typical activity of a given airport at a given time. This is not much different from showing a picture of a tiger in the Tiger article. No single picture will be illustrative of every possible instance of a tiger, but the snapshot is still informative. BD2412 T 02:45, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

  "a snapshot" and "at a given time" immediately runs against the fact we are an encyclopedia, that we are supposed to be looking reasonably long-term/enduring factors, and not what happens day to day. We can add and update that long-term coverage as it happens, but we should be far away from trying to keep WP up to date with information that is changing in the short term, as would be the case of an airport's destination list. Masem (t) 02:49, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

  As I said, it is the same as having a photograph of a tiger. Or, for that matter, a photograph of the airport itself, since airports tend to undergo steady renovations, extensions, and so forth. BD2412 T 01:18, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

  The matter of determining whether the list from a particular date is exemplary for the airport sounds arbitrary to me. Additionally, people will see an outdated list in the article and inevitably attempt to make corrections, and you will have to find a way to justify reverting all of their edits. Sunnya343 (talk) 01:07, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  If someone updates then they will either be correct to a new as-of date or they will be incorrect. If they are incorrect then either revert them as incorrect (as is frequently done across the encyclopaedia today) or correct them (as is frequently done across the encyclopaedia today), if the updates are correct leave them. If reverted then the project is no different to how it was before, no gain no loss. If the article is now more up-to-date then the project has benefited. Thryduulf (talk) 02:25, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  My comment above addresses BD2412's proposal, which, as I understand it, is to have a complete list of destinations from a particular date that is considered exemplary for the airport. Therefore, nothing [would need] to be updated (that is, until editors somehow decide the list is no longer exemplary). Let's say the list of destinations from July 2023 is deemed exemplary. If a person makes a single change today, the list will no longer be a snapshot from July 2023. You can either revert that edit or update the entire list every time someone modifies it, which would defeat the purpose of BD2412's strategy. In conclusion, this proposal would be difficult to carry out. Sunnya343 (talk) 02:44, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

  Look, it's a tautology. A list that is exemplary for its time will always be exemplary for its time. For example, a list (or a prose description) that demonstrates the height of activity of a particular airport in the 1970s will always demonstrate the height of activity of that particular airport in the 1970s. BD2412 T 02:55, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

  I think I understand what you were saying now. Nevertheless, two questions remain: a) How often would you "refresh" the entire list, and b) How would you respond to editors who just think the list is outdated and (in good faith) proceed to make individual corrections (e.g. today British Airways ended service to Zakynthos, tomorrow Ryanair starts flying to Warsaw) - i.e. the status quo.

  In any case, a complete list of destinations at a single point in time is far beyond what's necessary to communicate the scale of an airport's activity. See the paragraph I wrote in the HAL Airport article that starts with On the civilian front for, in my opinion, an example of how to convey that information without providing an exhaustive list of destinations. Sunnya343 (talk) 23:34, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

  Except a tiger doesn't change its stripes every quarter. Honestly, the comparison to a tiger is rather bizarre and suggests that there isn't a common understanding of what this discussion is about. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 06:07, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Orange Suede Sofa: no, that is not what I am saying at all. I am not saying that a given airport is like a specific tiger on a specific day. I am saying that there are thousands of tigers in the world, and we choose one picture of one tiger to represent all of the topic, Tiger, although there will be many tigers that do not look like the one selected. BD2412 T 03:33, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

School districts and GEOLAND

According to WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES, school districts are near-presumptive notable as "populated, legally recognized places". I started looking into this after looking through random articles and finding Rondout School District 72. WP:GEOLAND itself states that Census tracts, Abadi, and other areas not commonly recognized as a place (such as the area in an irrigation district) are not presumed to be notable. The Geographic Names Information System and the GEOnet Names Server do not satisfy the "legal recognition" requirement and are also unreliable for "populated place" designation. Maybe my interpretation differs from other Wikipedians, but school districts likely have more in common with census tracts? Therefore, would WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES be consistent with other current notability norms? My gut instinct is that school districts should not qualify as near-presumptively notable. I think being individually accessed under GNG would make more sense (e.g. like the 2017 RfC consensus about high schools not automatically being notable because they exist). However, I wanted some feedback on whether my line of thought here actually has any merit. Does anyone have a convincing counterargument they would like to make? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:37, 20 October 2023 (UTC), edited 18:43, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

The explanatory essay is incorrect, we treat school districts like census tracts not municipalities. Its very basic, school districts have no population... Therefore they are not "populated, legally recognized places" Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:57, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

(ec) Great that you brought this up. I think that the essay that you linked to incorrectly (or outdatededly ) mis-summarizes NGeo which specifically excludes such abstract entities (not commonly recognized as a place) from presumed notability. Second, that essay should be just observing/summarizing actual outcomes, not trying to provide it's own restatement of the guidelines. I'm tempted to change it right now but there's no rush while the discussion is in progress. North8000 (talk) 19:06, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

A couple of things I have to add are that WP:GEOLAND is about villages and towns, not school districts, and that school districts are a peculiarly American thing. In most of the world local authorities are responsible for state education. I would say that they are obviously notable, as a school district couldn't possibly exist without reliable sources having been written about it, but there seem to be many editors who disagree. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:41, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

In terms of schools, in most of the world ones that are not individually notable are merged to the article about the locality (or a list of schools in that locality if one exists), but in the US (and Canada?) they are merged to the articles about school districts. School districts do seem to be treated as notable though, the only example I've found of one being deleted at AfD is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rucker Elementary School District, the unsourced content of which was in its entirety "Rucker School District 66 was a school district in Cochise County, Arizona, currently closed." The deletion discussions include a mixture of views about inherent notability, but in pretty much every case sources were found that demonstrated GNG was met anyway, so the question in practical terms is moot. If they do have inherent or presumed notability though, that doesn't come from GEOLAND but from their own nature. As the long-gone Klonimus wrote in a 2005 VfD (as it was back then) A school district has the combined notability of each of its constituent schools. Thryduulf (talk) 20:18, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

I think that school districts (in the US at least) are presumptively notable (as long as they are verifiable). I think it would be hard to find a district that does not have any coverage of the organization or any of the component parts of the organization. - Enos733 (talk) 20:40, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Rondout School District 72 (as referenced above)? Rainy River District School Board? Superior-Greenstone District School Board? I think it can actually be difficult to find sources about school districts that go beyond passing mentions and would be enough to furfill GNG. One of the common arguments in the 2017 high school RfC was that notability went beyond verifying that a school existed. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:14, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Absent a scandal school districts rarely get significant coverage. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 03:44, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Scandals can definitely influence the amount of coverage but I don't think it's the only thing you see school districts in the news for. I will say that it's easier to find potential sources for larger school districts in more populated areas (e.g. Toronto Catholic District School Board or Detroit Public Schools Community District) but you're also more likely to have a scandal because you're dealing with larger amounts of money, resources, and the public.

I started writing this comment to say that the accessment of rarely didn't seem right. But I've spent the past hour or two looking at school district articles and the vast majority of them currently are lists of the schools and communities they serve and cited to primary sources. That doesn't mean that sources don't nessecarily exist and of course deletion isn't cleanup. I'm not suggesting any sort of like mass deletion spree for school district articles. I just see a lot of potential comparisons in regards that 2017 RfC about high schools and inherent notability. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 07:50, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

If I can clarify they often get coverage, rarely is that coverage significant. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:13, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I think the question are two-fold. What level of coverage of a school district goes beyond trivial coverage. I found this article for Superior-Greenstone District School Board that addresses concerns within this district. This, by itself, should be enough to meet GNG. And, with governmental entities, there are a large number of reliable, verifiable sources about their organization (stats usually from the state or province) and there is self-published data of the internal organization. Second, there is (or there ought to be) a usefulness to readers about governmental entities, and the examples of districts mentioned above contain pretty good information for our project. - Enos733 (talk) 00:26, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

In Canada is a school board the same thing as a school district? In the US it varies, some districts don't have boards and some boards don't have districts (only schools) but there's a clear split with the board being an organization and the district being a geographic feature. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 02:54, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

A schoolboard here is basically the overseeing body for several schools in a town or geographical area. They hire teachers/principals and own the schools. The area served by a school is called a catchment basin, at least in my corner of the world, it's a map showing what school your kid can attend based on where they live in the city/zone served by the schoolboard. Helps the schoolboard plan for numbers (we have x number of kids in the area, so our school can hold x number of students). Oaktree b (talk) 15:29, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

I think there's a clue to the "level" of coverage and that is if the coverage extends beyond the area around the district itself. If the East Whosville County, South Virginia school district is getting coverage in the East Whosville County Gazette-Advertiser, that can be expected to be by-the-numbers in our sense, but if it's getting covered the the Washington Post-Advertiser, that's another matter entirely -- Nat Gertler (talk) 21:25, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

We appear not to have articles for the vast majority of school districts, so the lack of AfD doesn't mean much. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 03:42, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

@Thryduulf: how do you square "A school district has the combined notability of each of its constituent schools." with "Geographical features must be notable on their own merits. They cannot inherit the notability of organizations, people, or events." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:13, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I explained that in my comment - the notability school districts have is not inherited from being a geographic feature, it comes from being a school district and/or from the schools within it. Thryduulf (talk) 16:26, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

But a school district is a geographic feature, it has to follow those rules which include not counting organizations (school boards, schools etc) towards its notability (at least when considering GEOLAND). It can not inherit the notability of schools within it anymore than a census tract inherits the notability of what's in it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:44, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

But a school district is a geographic feature, that's irrelevant. it has to follow those rules which include not counting organizations no it doesn't. The community decides what notability means for every subject, and this is not bound by any sort of hierarchy unless consensus says it apples. Thryduulf (talk) 18:20, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Yes, GNG is always a path to notability... But GNG also excludes inherited notability. There is no context in which "A school district has the combined notability of each of its constituent schools." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:43, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Anything can be excluded from GNG, due to inherent notability or any other reason, if the community consensus is that it should be. That is the de facto status quo in relation to school districts. The GNG is not some super-powerful policy that trumps all else, it is a guideline that applies when and how consensus says it applies. Thryduulf (talk) 19:55, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

What is inherent notability in this context? Thats not a wikipedia concept I'm familiar with. Has it been endorsed by the community? Note that an article which meets the GNG or a SNG may be deleted, but an article which does not meet the GNG or a SNG may not be kept on anything other than IAR grounds. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:59, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

In response to the first part of your comment (after edit conflict with you editing it and adding the second part): see also the reply I've just written to Espresso Addict below, but given that this is the current consensus, and consensus is by definition what the community endorses, yes. Thryduulf (talk) 20:04, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

So point me to this "inherent notability" consensus Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:10, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

It is the de facto consensus of school districts having articles and not being deleted at AfD when challenged on notability grounds whether sources GNG-passing sources are found or not. Thryduulf (talk) 20:11, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

The vast majority of school districts appear to not have articles, so the de facto consensus would appear to be against universal notability. I will ask you again, where is the community endorsement of the concept of "inherent notability"? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:24, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

The vast majority of school districts appear to not have articles that's irrelevant. Wikipedia is a work in progress, not everything that is notable has an article yet. Consensus is always what the status quo is until either the status quo changes or there is a discussion that explicitly determines that the consensus has changed. This is not a difficult concept, but this is not the first discussion related to notability in which it has been explained to you multiple times. Thryduulf (talk) 20:32, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

The status quo appears to be that there is no such thing as "inherent notability" and nothing you've presented suggests otherwise. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:37, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I've literally just explained to you what it means in this context. I do not intend to repeat myself further. Thryduulf (talk) 20:39, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

The status quo is that school districts don't have inherent notability. I'm not asking you to repeat yourself because you have yet to provide a diff of this consensus and until you do the status quo will stand. As you said "Consensus is always what the status quo is until either the status quo changes or there is a discussion that explicitly determines that the consensus has changed." so either provide a diff of such a discussion or drop it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:07, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Consensus in this case (as in the majority of other cases across the encyclopaedia) is (as repeatedly explained) derived from the collective outcome of smaller decisions and includes silent consensuses. I cannot give you a single diff to show that school districts are generally not nominated at AfD (silent consensus towards notability), and when they are they are almost always not deleted when nominated (collective local consensuses). As explained, this is the status quo I'm referring to. Thryduulf (talk) 00:19, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

On wikipedia a silent consensus ends the moment its challenged. See WP:SILENTCONSENSUS. You don't appear to be describing the status quo, you appear to be stating your personal opinion and then calling it the status quo... Or is that just a coincidence? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 02:52, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Regarding the second part, that's not quite true. The GNG is a guideline and as such is explicitly not applicable in every situation (just most) so keeping something that the GNG suggests is not notable is not "ignoring a rule" as such. Rather it is consensus saying that the given situation is one of the exceptions to the general case that the guideline allows for. In any case, even if it were a policy community consensus that would be perfectly compatible with the community deciding by consensus that it doesn't apply in a given situation. Thryduulf (talk) 20:11, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

The guideline allows exceptions in terms of deletion but it doesn't offer any in terms of inclusion unless I'm missing something. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:28, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

What you aren't understanding is that GNG is, by definition, a guideline. i.e. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Thryduulf (talk) 20:38, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that is why I brought up IAR which is policy. Did you think I was being flippant? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:07, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

In the comment starting "Regarding the second part" I explained that exceptions to guidelines and ignoring all rules are not the same thing. Did you read it? Thryduulf (talk) 00:20, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Now that is flippant... Please keep it civil, you know I read it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 02:56, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Are we taking about inherited or inherent notability? They are different words and mean different things. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:06, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

My understanding is that we were talking about inherited notability but then Thryduulf brought up inherent notability and they've done so repeatedly so it doesn't appear to be a typo. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:10, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

• I thought this was a compromise to prevent us from being flooded with articles on the individual schools? Espresso Addict (talk) 08:19, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

  Basically yes - the consensus regarding schools was that non-notable ones should be merged or redirected to the appropriate higher-level article, and that in the United States the article about the school district is that article in almost all cases. The inescapable implication of this is that school districts are notable enough for their own article. Thryduulf (talk) 20:01, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

  Question - for the US, what would be the next “higher” level after school District? Blueboar (talk) 20:48, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Blueboar: I'm not entirely certain as I'm not American and super familiar with their education system. At first glance, their district system seems to be similar to the one I'm used to but with greater student populations. I will say that at least in my Canadian province, school districts tends to line up with municipalities. For example, the District School Board of Niagara and the Niagara Catholic District School Board serve the Regional Municipality of Niagara. So I suppose one option would be fleshing out education sections in the most relevant article(s) if a district school board isn't considered notable enough in itself or writing something at a relevant province/state-related article like Education in Ontario. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:56, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

  In the US, usually the city or other municipality and much more occasionally the county. Never the state, though you could maybe argue for a List of school districts in state or list of schools in state which can be a merge target on occasion. Izno (talk) 22:07, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

  Never the state? What about state level boarding schools like Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts and Arkansas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:19, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

  Both could go to their containing cities, the suggested lists, or at the worst to the article that could/already does exist on education in the specific state. Much school content for schools outside the US have homes in their containing municipality regardless of who runs the school. Izno (talk) 22:42, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

  Depending on whether we're talking private or public, for the public its going to be a municipality, county, or state... For the private it might be a church, diocese, or district but likely its nothing at all. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:12, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

  I just want to note that here in Ontario both the regular public school systems and Catholic school boards are publically funded and not private schools. I realize this is likely not the case elsewhere but it is relevant in these particular circumstances. Time to go back to washing dishes and figure out what I'm doing with a draft. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:17, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

  Much more complicated in the US... Especially by things like Charter schools in the United States which are primarily publicly funded but in most cases independent of the local school districts. You also have things like education councils (example Capitol Region Education Council) which are kind of school districts but also kind of not. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 22:22, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

• No more "inherent" notability, please. All that gets us is a bunch of permastubs, in many cases either bot-generated or might as well be. Either we have sufficient independent and reliable source material available to write an article (not just factoid stub) about a subject, or we don't. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 15:18, 21 October 2023 (UTC)
  • I concur completely. A patchwork system of notability guidelines only ensures inconsistency. GNG should be the only PAG in this area. — Frostly (talk) 00:01, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

    On the contrary, a Procrustian one-size-fits-all system of notability guidelines based on media coverage, without subject-specific guidelines, ensures that we have an encyclopedia only of celebrities and pop culture. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:03, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Assuming good faith, any inclusionist sentiment is not widely-supported by the community. Lots of sources on a subject create GNG and provide the information for an article to be written. A dearth of sources with a subject-specific guideline or essay does, to paraphrase the Chinese, hurts the feelings of our editors. Inclusionism on behalf of silly fandoms is one thing. Inclusionism for schools is the most foolish I can think of. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:10, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Your first sentence needs an explanation of what you mean by "inclusionist sentiment" and a citation for that not being widely supported by the community because recent discussions show that there is a lot of support for positions that could be termed "inclusionist sentiment". Your last sentence is irrelevant as this is not about either fandoms or schools (school districts are not schools) let alone fandoms about schools. I can't parse your other sentences. Thryduulf (talk) 00:25, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Surely it doesn't *need* that? You didn't provide diffs when asked, so why would Chris troutman need to? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 02:59, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

I think Thryduulf was right to question a sweeping generalization about the community as a whole not espousing "inclusionist sentiment". I don't really engage in deletionism/inclusionism debates that much but I have noticed that many people seem to make a big deal over how these concepts align or do not align with their editing philosophy. I'd prefer if people not go into a constant back and forth here. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:18, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

• Comment - Per the guideline at WP:NRV, No subject is automatically or inherently notable merely because it exists, so please drop any discussion of "inherent notability", the adjacent formulation we might be looking for is presumed notability, otherwise a determination that school districts are inherently notable might mean that school districts are the only "inherently" notable thing in the universe according to Wikipedia, which would make us look rather stupid. As for the question on district notability specifically, I think we'd be making a terrible mistake to think that GEOLAND was ever meant to apply to what is essentially a specialized service district for notability purposes. Most people in the world, I tend to think, don't answer the question of "Where are you from?" with "I'm from the Foo garbage collection district". GEOLAND fits way better with recognized general purpose government jurisdictions (like towns with a governing council) or, even, notable communities that don't have their own unique governments but have good SIGCOV of their unique history etc.. While "place" is a broad term, as far as importance, it still has its limits. I've yet to meet a single human being who has ever identified themselves by what school district or other special service district they live in. I'm all ears if this is a pronounced phenomenon in non-US areas but I'm doubtful. -Indy beetle (talk) 08:56, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

RfC on school districts

Should school districts be required to meet WP:GNG? Support or oppose? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:49, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. In the United States (and other places where such districts are legally separate from and non-conterminous municipalities or other organs of local government), school districts should be presumptively notable. This is not because of their status as places or areas with a population but because they collections of (marginally) notable schools. Because of the large amounts of routine (and otherwise) coverage that schools receive it makes sense for Wikipedia to organize that coverage at the district level in most cases. Although most routine coverage of school sports and academics focuses on the individual school (because that is how students experience them) the actual practices and policies are usually set at the district level (or above) for U.S. public schools. U.S. school districts are not primarily abstract areas in which the state provides public education to its citizens but rather the local government entities that manage and provide that education. Eluchil404 (talk) 00:03, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Eluchil404: Are you perhaps confusing a school district and a school board? A district is in most cases an abstract area, in many cases (but not all) the school board is the local government entity that manage and provide that education. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:33, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

  In my U.S. based experience a school board functions as a board of directors for a school district and their is no real difference between them. Just as there is no real difference between the city council/city government and the city itself. We treat them as a same entity for notability purposes and cover them in the same article, even though they could be considered different things in the abstract. Eluchil404 (talk) 00:42, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

  I believe its different in every state... Education is handled on the state not the federal level in the US, no? I'm also curious as to whether you think no school districts need to meet GNG or just public ones don't? The religious ones can be extremely obscure. Also note that if there is no difference between them then they're an organization and would need to meet WP:ORG even if GNG isn't in play. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 01:03, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

  In the US, school districts are always government-run. Religious (and other private/non-government-run) schools don't have a school district. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:38, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

  That's not necessarily true. For example, Catholic schools where I live are part of the Diocese of Orlando, which is considered a private school district. -- Rockstone^{Send me a message!} 02:58, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Rockstone35, I'm not sure what it means to have a private school district. They don't get to tax the properties in the area, they can't compel the students in the area to attend, they have no legal duty to substantially modify the program to be appropriate for disabled students. In short, basically nothing that the US would normally say is the right or responsibility of the local school district is actually true about them.

  Does a student who lives outside of the area have to get special permission to attend that school? If a parent shows up with their kid and a check for the year's tuition, is the school going to say "Oh, no, you're not allowed to go to school here. This is West School; your home address is in East School's area"? So far, it seems to me that this sort of "school district" is not very different from a single business that offers after-school tutoring at several locations within an area. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:52, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

  "They don't get to tax the properties in the area" neither do school districts in the vast majority of states. In most places they are the beneficiaries of those taxes but don't have any control over them. The ability to compel appearance is also delegated to authorities other than the school district, normally the police. Thats not a power that the school district/board has in the vast majority of American states. What you have named as essential rights and responsibilities of American school districts actually aren't... Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:08, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Horse Eye's Back, I'm starting to wonder whether you and I need to collaborate on School district#United States. Working my way down the List of U.S. states and territories by population, California's school districts tax the properties within the district.[22] Texas school districts tax properties within the district.[23] Same in Florida.[24] New York's property taxes for school districts exceeds California's property tax for everything.[25] Pennsylvania school districts can lay taxes.[26] Illinois school districts collect around $20 billion a year.[27] Ohio and Georgia school districts lay taxes, too.[28] Those eight states make up half the population in the US.

  This report from Connecticut says that 40 out of the 50 US states allow school districts to lay taxes. [29] Perhaps you have only lived in one of those, so you didn't know how most of the country operates? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:43, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

  So you're wrong you're just not as wrong as I thought you were? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:56, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

  "Religious (and other private/non-government-run) schools don't have a school district." Are you sure about that? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:44, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

  I've never seen groups of such schools called districts and I wouldn't call them that. Catholic schools are, in my experience, usually organized on the diocesan level so a diocese could be used as redirect target. For other private schools I would proceed on a case by case basis. Usually following the GNG, but with the understanding that an association or company that manages multiple notable secondary schools is likely notable though some might be adequately covered in an article on a 'home campus'. But to the extent I favor suspending the GNG, as opposed to reading it relatively broadly in line with my generally inclusionist-in-the-present-environment views, I am only talking about publicly run school districts on the U.S. model. I believe that it makes sense to cover government subdivisions and agencies completely even if the independence prong of the GNG has to be bent or broken. My oppinion isn't really supported by any guideline that I am aware of, but don't believe that it is inconsistent with them either. At least in spirit. Eluchil404 (talk) 23:25, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

  So you would argue to disregard WP:N on WP:IAR grounds? Note thats not a " generally inclusionist-in-the-present-environment view" thats a radical inclusionist view which puts you on wikipedia's policy fringe. I'm generally inclusionist... You're way more radical and extreme than me. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:09, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

  I don't know if it's really that extreme. It's unusual for an article about any actual, separate government agency in the developed world to be deleted. If your government more or less holds to the usual level of transparency that we expect in democracies, then it would be very unusual to find a separate government agency that doesn't pass the GNG. Generally, when people think they have done so, they have learned that the fault is in their search skills. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:57, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

  IMO there's a big difference between presuming notability (a very mainstream position which I think is what you're describing) and inherent notability (suspending GNG). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 23:02, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

  In my area, Catholic schools do form their own school district. The idea of associating them with a dicocese would not really make sense. The ratio between public school board districts and Catholic school districts here are relatively comparable (and both are publically funded [30]), see List of school districts in Ontario. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:09, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

  Just so that everyone is on the same page: in Ontario, Canada there are *two* systems of publicly-funded school boards governed by publicly-elected trustees - the geographical extent governed by each board are also referred to as a school districts, One system is "public" and the other is "separate" (Roman Catholic). Each of the two systems consists of a set of geographically bounded entities that divide up the entirety (essentially) of the province's land mass. Both systems are governed by the same provincial curriculum and governing legislation and are under the same regime for collective bargaining (which the province has partly centralized). Each district board governs the schools in at least one municipality but often many more than one - only Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton have boards that correspond to a single city. These are large entities managing hundreds of schools, responsible for managing large budgets and thousands of employees under the scrutiny of parents, taxpayers and electors. I don't know other systems as well, but the quasi-religious status of Ontario's separate school boards - which teach, employ, and are responsible to an electorate of non-Catholics - is fairly idiosyncratic I think. Newimpartial (talk) 22:54, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

  I think the problem is that every country is idiosyncratic and even more so countries like the US where there are actually 50+ ways to do things because education is handled on the state and not the federal level. The Australians for example are somewhere between the US and Canada when it comes to religious schools... The money is public but the control is split between the state and the church and is either organized on the school level, something like a school district, or a national organization depending on the school/faith. The United Kingdom also does it a little oddly with each constituent country being in charge of Faith schools. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:56, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

  Outside of Ontario, publicly-funded education in Canada is now essentially secular, after Quebec removed the denominational aspect of its school system in 1998 and Newfoundland and Labrador abolished its four state-funded systems - including a Roman Catholic and a Pentecostal system - in 1997. Newimpartial (talk) 19:47, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

  Apart from private schools, note that the city of Ottawa (and other parts of Ontario) is actually covered by "four" school boards, that do not necessarily share the same boundaries as each other. These are: English-Public, French-Public, English-Catholic, and French-Catholic. Loopy30 (talk) 11:24, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  While this is true, it might be relevant to add that thr whole province is covered by only 12 French school districts/boards (four public and eight separate), as opposed to the 63 English boards (34 public and 29 sepatate). Among these, there is only one vestigal micro-board (an English Protestant board north of Toronto). Newimpartial (talk) 23:12, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. This proposal is too US-centric, too simplistic, premature and unnecessary. How is this rule meant to apply outside the US? Education is heavily localised all over the world, many places would think a US style school district would be a terrible idea, others may have a similar concept with a different name. Regardless of the answer to that question, the proposal suggests that school districts and similar government departments are not covered by WP:NORG. Is that really the case? If NORG doesn't apply, what's the default rule and how would the proposal change that? And most importantly, does changing the default rule improve the encyclopedia? Iffy★Chat -- 11:01, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Iffy: Reading the discussion above might help answer your confusion regarding the why? I'm not necessarily looking to change anything but to clarify what exactly the standard is/should be. So far it's been really unclear about whether or not people consider school districts to be inherently notable (if that's the case both GNG and NORG would require better sourcing than just verifying existence). I figured this proposal was actually useful because it might make the community's overall perspective on the matter more clear. I'd also like to note that I'm not American. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 11:56, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

  That discussion has way more heat than light at the moment as the two main participants (not faulting either of them for this) are talking past each other to try and answer your original question directly. If we all took a step back and instead tried figure out the answer to my predicate questions, it would then be a lot easier to resolve what the best way forward is. Iffy★Chat -- 12:18, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

  In the United States (and other places where such districts are legally separate from and non-conterminous municipalities or other organs of local government), school districts should be presumptively notable. This is not because of their status as places or areas with a population but because they collections of (marginally) notable schools. I live in a state where most (but not all) public school districts are not "legally separate from and non-conterminous [with] municipalities or other organs of local government". There are some unique "municipal" districts (though their jurisdictions don't typically align exactly with the cities/towns they claim to cover) but every county has a public school district and county commissioners usually help determine funding for things like teacher pay. I'm also not familiar with any other formula on Wikipedia which allows us to combine disparate coverage for multiple non-notable things to create a notability for an inclusive parent article. And, along the lines of what you're suggesting, how useful is it for us to have a few articles on the "Foo Highschools" football games when building an article dedicated to covering what the whole district does? While I do think it is appropriate to redirect a non-notable local school to its parent district article if such exists, I don't see why we should be combining a bunch of non-notable material and adding it to an article on an institution which is also not notable. -Indy beetle (talk) 08:27, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

  If school district = county I have problem using a "Education in Foo County, State" section of the county article as the equivalent of a district article. I think most lists work the way I described. In particular "List of mayors of Bar" or "List of characters in Foo media" don't require that every entry be separately notable only that the topic as a whole have coverage, usually as a part of coverage of Bar or Foo. In particular my proposal is based on my observation that U.S. secondary schools are basically always notable based on sourcing and my belief that it makes sense to have lists of all government run schools in the appropriate place. This is partly so that there is an obvious place to put content on actually notable events or controversies that people might look for, but also because I dislike removing content because it is "trivial" or "unimportant". It does not improve the encyclopedia to prevent our readers from finding reliably sourced verifiable content that they are looking for. The purpose of curation is to prevent trivia from crowding out important details and making it easy to find basic facts. But Wikipedia is not paper, if readers want to go on deep-dives down rabbit holes, we should let them. Eluchil404 (talk) 23:47, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose -- school districts are inherently notable. GNG should not apply. --Rockstone^{Send me a message!} 02:58, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
  • Why should they be? -Indy beetle (talk) 06:07, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support, obviously. They already are required to meet GNG.
  JoelleJay (talk) 04:04, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Important Note: School notability guidelines are explicitly mentioned in WP:NSCHOOL: All universities, colleges and schools, including high schools, middle schools, primary (elementary) schools, and schools that only provide a support to mainstream education must either satisfy the notability guidelines for organizations (i.e., this page), the general notability guideline, or both. For-profit educational organizations and institutions are considered commercial organizations and must satisfy those criteria.

The 🏎 Corvette 🏍 ZR1^{(The Garage)} 19:54, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

@The Corvette ZR1: I'm aware of NSCHOOL but (and the 2017 RfC that led to high schools needing to meet GNG) but so far I've been under the impression that school districts are not required to meet the same standard. WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES mentions this requirement for individual schools but explicitly excludes school districts in the section above. I also think that the way this conversation is going seems to indicate that current consensus is somewhat unclear on what is suppossed to apply and why. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:03, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

I am generally against any presumption of notability. Having sufficient sourcing to meet the GNG is also a decent threshold for being able to write a decent article of use to readers on the subject - and avoid two line permastubs. firefly ( t · c ) 10:03, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

• Support. School districts in the US vary widely in size. Miami-Dade County Public Schools (the third largest school district in the US), serves over 350,000 students in 415 schools, while the Bois Blanc Pines School District has four students in one school. There is nothing inherently notable about a school district. It is the amount and quality of reliable sources about a district that establish whether it is notable. (I will note that the Bois Blanc Pines School District article has only one source, an article in The New York Times, that is independent and not just statistics or a trivial mention.)

Donald Albury 02:51, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

IMO this should be reworded or dropped A "no" could be interpreted as either support of the status quo or as specifically rejecting the idea of a school district having to (ever) pass GNG. North8000 (talk) 12:25, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm open to suggestions on how to make it clearer. I was trying to keep it simple because I was under the impression that's what you're supposed to do. I thought my phrasing was okay (I support/oppose school districts being required to meet GNG) but people do seem to be having different interpretations of what I'm asking here. I'm not even sure what the status quo is so I thought an RfC could gauge that a bit more accurately. I thought seeking community consensus on this would be helpful because it gives people some direction going forward (e.g. WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES interpretation regarding GEOLAND could be changed). I will say it's slightly disheartening that I've got the impression that whenever I try to start an RfC it's not that helpful when I genuinely do have good intentions. I'd like to know how exactly I'm messing up. If anyone wants to give me constructive feedback on my talk page or anything, please feel free to. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:19, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

I think some of the confusion arises because it's not clear whether the subject is the location (24.5 square miles, could be GEOLAND) or the government agency (180 employees and a budget of millions, could be WP:ORG). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:40, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. Meeting GNG should be enough, I don't see anything here that gets them an automatic pass. If there are neutral sources, extensively written, about the "thing", it's fine. Oaktree b (talk) 15:33, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
• Unclear RfC I'm with North8000 here: what is a "yes" or "no", or even a "support" or "oppose", supposed to mean in this case? And what is the scope meant to be? Are we trying to gauge what the status quo is, or is this about articulating something new? I can appreciate the desire to seek greater clarity, but I doubt this particular RfC will help in that regard. XOR'easter (talk) 17:52, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

  Right now we're on two opposes indicating GNG should be applied and two opposes indicating GNG should be disregarded. At the very least we can conclude the proposal has generated strong opposition. CMD (talk) 03:09, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

• Support using GNG to judge notability for school districts Unlike the commenters above, I was not so confused as to what the RfC was getting at. GNG is a perfectly reasonable standard to use globally and, lest we forget, is a low bar of 2-3 secondary sources of SIGCOV. I'm not sure what a good argument for the alternative is: "I went here so it should be mentioned on Wikipedia" (how most Wikipedia primary and secondary school article content is typically generated)? If you can't find 2-3 secondary sources to rub together on a given school district (or its governing body), why should there be an article on it? -Indy beetle (talk) 08:38, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose but there should be some established standard (GNG is a little too high, but I strongly disagree with Rockstone35's assertion that they are WP:INHERENTly notable. Edward-Woodrow • talk 20:38, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
  Changing to tentative support. Edward-Woodrow • talk 19:49, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
• Confused Doesn't school districts come under WP:ORG? Davidstewartharvey (talk) 21:22, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Davidstewartharvey: I think school boards would, but a school district is an administrative region used by the school board (at least in my understanding). Edward-Woodrow • talk 19:51, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Edward-Woodrow From my reading they are one in the same, with the district just being the area covered by the board. However I may be wrong as its the wrong side of the pond for me!Davidstewartharvey (talk) 07:01, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) My personal experience has led me to believe that school districts are where a school board operates as an organization. To me, the two concepts are interconnected and cannot be easily separated from each other. It's possible that this isn't the case everywhere where school districts exist and this is what is causing the confusion. Alternatively, I'm just making a stupid mistake for using an RfC in this situation. I haven't had the best of luck with them and I don't want to be seen as misusing the process. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 07:05, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

  Don't be. As per my failed attempt to actually change GEOLAND because it is not accurate, this is a valid point and as we can see from the varied different responses, opinions differ. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 08:39, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

  The first thing I have learned in this discussion is that in some jurisdictions (like Ontario, where I live) a school district is essentially a synonym for a school board (technically the territory in which a board operates, but used as a synonym) while in others, a school district is a subset of a school board's territory (sometimes maybe equivalent to an electoral district for school trustees, or perhaps similar to what we might call a catchment area for a high school, or conceivably both).

  School district lacks a treatment of the Ontario system, but something I learned from that article is that on average, a US school district enrolls 5,000 students while I calculate the average for Ontario as more than five times that number (and the average for Ontario is depressed slightly by the inclusion in the denominator of eight special-purpose "school districts" outside of the two main school systems). Newimpartial (talk) 13:50, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

• Support forcing them to meet GNG. I do not see how they could be considered anything like a city in terms of notability. They should not get a free pass just by existing. QuicoleJR (talk) 13:57, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose, they can meet GNG or a SNG. If they pass a SNG they don't need to pass the GNG. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:12, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
• Unclear RfC This should be withdrawn and a new RFC put together. --Enos733 (talk) 00:21, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
• School districts should have to meet WP:NORG to have a separate article, just like any other organization. (t · c) buidhe 03:28, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
• Comment One complexity is that "school district" can refer to two completely different things. One is a set of lines on a map. The other is an organization which is a bundle of a governmental body, a bunch of facilities, a bunch of staff etc. (whose area of operation is defined by those lines on a map) North8000 (talk) 14:21, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
  • True, but aren't those typically merged in practice in articles? -Indy beetle (talk) 07:05, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
• School districts should have to meet WP:NORG just like any other organization. Schools, school districts, school boards, non-profit schools, for-profit schools... they're all types of organizations. Levivich (talk) 19:30, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose as written. Many of these articles are better viewed as set-index articles about the schools in the school district. Policy should be designed to prevent AFD arguments such as "the references aren't about the school district organization, but the schools in the school district (which don't have stand-alone articles)" leading to article deletion. But I also don't support "inherent notability"; for example Maynard School District could probably be merged. Walt Yoder (talk) 19:51, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support school dsitricts not having any kind of "automatic" or "presumed" notability - It's simply daft that people are proposing to have an article for every single US school district, simply because of a tendentious interpretation of WP:GEOLAND. The interpretation of GEOLAND's presumption of notability being an automatic pass on requiring any actual significant overage anywhere is just crazy - the only way to source the vast majority of these articles is from the documents of the organsations themselves - where's the NPOV?

Regarding the unclear objections above - it's a pretty simple question of whether or not school districts are under GEOLAND, and they definitely should not be. FOARP (talk) 09:10, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose For some time now, there has been consensus in community discussions that school districts should be presumed to be notable. School districts should continue to be presumed to be notable. School districts are likely to satisfy GNG and LISTN. Articles on school districts are needed so that individual schools can be redirected to them. The following passage, or something similar, should be added to NGEO: " School districts are typically presumed to be notable." The alternative is to have futile time wasting arguments about whether schools district articles are lists of schools; or populated legally recognized places that are administrative regions; or organizations; or all of these things at the same time; or none of these things; or some of these things. None of which matters, because we need articles about "education within geographical area X", and we presently do not appear to have any practical alternative. (The most likely alternative at this time is "being flooded with articles on the individual schools" as Expresso Addict put it). James500 (talk) 03:20, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose The status quo is working fine here. In the US public school context (which is the relevant one for most of the articles being discussed), school district articles tend to be about the district itself, the schools it encompasses, and even the history of local education within the district. There are some smaller districts where this information could fit in the local town's article, but in most cases it's worthy of an article itself, and subjecting school districts to GNG would most likely lead to a lot of arguments that the sources have to be about the district itself rather than anything else. (By the way, it was pretty easy to find coverage of the Rondout school district that started all of this: [31] [32]) TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 21:15, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• I think this is best settled case by case. Some districts, such as the Palo Alto Unified School District aren't as notable solely on their own but provide better organization for certain districts which have a lot of notable institutions. Some districts, like Lagunitas School District, could do better by being merged into their home article. Then there are some which already fulfill GNG on their own; I think that Columbus' Dublin City School District (despite a Notability tag there already) would meet this based on the awards it has received. Oppose a blanket solution; the status quo doesn't seem as harmful as it seems to be put out to be. InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 03:24, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• Unclear RfC. I support the status quo, but it is unclear what !voting "support" or "oppose" means here in terms of effecting a change to the notability guidelines. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 03:33, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose. I think there are multiple adequate descriptions by editors above. I also foresee heated AfD debates about how many paragraphs of coverage a single decades old print article needs to have and how many quotes are allowed, before we count a school district (with decades of coverage) as notable. Given what other editors have explained above, let's avoid putting ourselves through that. —siroχo 03:54, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• Speedy close. It's clear that this RfC is unclear and that there are multiple subquestions. (1) The basic question, based on the previous thread, is whether Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Common outcomes#School districts is correct. I suspect it isn't, seeing as no discussion-based consensus has been linked and the disagreement on this very page. (2) Relatedly, whether school districts fit under WP:NORG (per this discussion) or WP:NGEO (per "Common Outcomes"); the evidence is that NORG at least mentions schools as organizations whereas NGEO does not. (3) The matter of whether "GNG applies": GNG always applies, with rare exception by consensus. If attempting to make a similar case here, it needs to be stronger than the circular logic about what should be "presumed notable" and why this would warrant an exception. (4) Given the differences here, it's unclear what other editors mean by "status quo". At the very least, it needs to be codified as was necessary in the [2017 discussion]. czar 17:05, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose The WP:GNG is not a rigid policy. Instead it is a guideline and explicitly says that "occasional exceptions may apply", citing our actual policy to ignore all rules. So, nothing is required to meet GNG in an absolute way.

School district seem to be a recent US institution but our guidelines should be global and historical. For example, I created an article on the Cuckoo Schools which were first named the Central London District Poor Law School. This was founded by the City of London and the East London and St. Saviour Workhouse Unions in 1857 for the Central London District. Those bodies may be good topics or not but trying to shoehorn them into the concept of school district is not helpful. If people want to do something useful, they should start by improving the article school district which has had multiple issues since 2010. We might then better understand what we're talking about.

Andrew🐉(talk) 08:31, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

• Support. Consider what constitutes a school district's administration: a few people fulfilling an often (particularly in rural areas) part-time job. They are nothing more than a minor regional office that happens to have a map. That'd be useful if there was widespread identification with one's school district, beyond simple school pride. I've never heard of such a thing, and the number of sources you can find about individual school districts reflects this. - Mebigrouxboy (talk) 02:09, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Creating a new Close review page (CLRV/RFCRV) to be split from AN

See also: Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Archive 12 § Review

There were two discussions on the topic of an RfC review noticeboard separate from AN. A 2017 discussion briefly touched on the topic, and under a recent close review, there was another one, which was relatively extensive. It appears that there was enough brainstorming to have at least a discussion to create a new board.

It is proposed to:

• Create a separate "Close review" page (CLRV/RFCRV) to handle challenges to closures.
• Create an archive of all close reviews in one place (something like this but updated and not self-reported)
• Generally model the CLRV on deletion review processes, but with a few quirks. To be exact:
  1. The duty of the user to discuss the closure with the closer will stay, except for closures made by IP editors, which may be reverted without discussion.
  2. When pushing a "Request a close review" button, there will be an automatically generated template (something like when opening an AE request) where the user will put the necessary data (link to the RfC, diff(s) of closure, user who closed an RfC, evidence of talking with the user, evidence of notifying them about the review, reason for making the request, possibly other fields should there be a need)
  3. Create "Involved", "Uninvolved" and "Discussion" sections for discussing the merits of the closure (see WP:INVOLVED for details). Admins may sanction users who routinely post their opinions in the "Uninvolved" part of the closure if they are involved.

     Editors will !vote "Endorse" or "Overturn". Overturned discussions will be automatically reopened until the next closer comes. Overturned closures should be collapsed and the CLRV thread provided in the hat above the RfC for reference.

     CLRV should not be RfC round 2. Only closer's judgment should be analysed. Statements that rehash the arguments in the RfC or do not discuss the soundness of the closure given the arguments presented in the RfC should be discarded from consideration. (Cf. Deletion review should not be used, in WP:DRV)

     Editors will determine the burden of demonstrating the (un)soundness of the closure if the page is created. This may potentially impact WP:NOCON.

• Modify WP:CLOSECHALLENGE, Wikipedia:Processes#Formal_review and other relevant policies, guidelines and information/explanatory pages to direct closure review requests to the newly created page. Edit all relevant templates and post relevant info to AN/ANI so that editors engage in close reviews on the dedicated forum.

I would like to see if there is consensus for a concept of the page, before actually starting to create it.

Szmenderowiecki (talk) 16:10, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose I do not see the need of creating a separate noticeboard, when the most needed regulations could simply be transcribed as a formal AN procedure. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:18, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support as proposer. Close reviews should feature less drama, so it's best to move them from a drama board which AN is. Also, a couple of common-sense formal rules would not be a bad thing for these discussions. It's going to be active enough that people will be actually watching it, so I see no harm doing that, and all the benefits of housekeeping and civil, focused discussion. AN should best be left for, well, purely administrative stuff, or stuff where only admins can act on something, like unblock requests.
  Also, DRV and MRV are not noticeboards, and at least before MRV was created in 2012, appeals were processed on AN.
  EDIT: I'll add that if we need a separate formal procedure for some threads on AN that can be grouped in one category (here: close reviews), but not for others, chances are we need a separate page. Clogging up the top template of AN with instructions for each type of requests that may come to AN is suboptimal and will dissuade people from actually reading the template to see if they have any business being on AN because the template will be too big and folks will scroll through the wall of text.
  Szmenderowiecki (talk) 16:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support the general idea For the reasons described. But there are also about 12 other rules in the proposal.....IMO some are codifying current practices plus many more good and bad new rules. Suggest workshopping to develop the "rules" and keeping them to a minimum which mostly follow current practices. North8000 (talk) 17:46, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support the idea, although per North8000 the specific proposal needs more workshopping first. DRV and MRV work well and have little bureaucracy so something modelled after them should work for RFCs. Thryduulf (talk) 19:50, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose as stated. I'm not sure we need a entirely new board, RFC close reviews are not that numerous. But some set of guidelines for the process would help improve discussions. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 20:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose, as splitting it off to a page with fewer watchers and more self-selection isn't likely to be the ticket. Some enforced guidelines at AN would be sufficient. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 21:29, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support. RfCs are mostly content decisions, and sysops don't/shouldn't have any special jurisdiction over content, so reviewing RfC closes on the administrators' noticeboard doesn't make sense.—S Marshall T/C 23:22, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

  We also need a searchable index of RfCs, by the way. At the moment they're often on talk pages or talk page archives. It would be better if they were transcluded into log pages like XFDs are, and a useful abuse-fighting tool would be if we could search those logs for all the closes made by a particular editor.—S Marshall T/C 23:26, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

  Brilliant!

  The only problem here would be to comb through 20+ years of RfCs, but yeah, that's a good one. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 07:13, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

  Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Archive is something like an archive of RfCs of project-wide relevance, but I agree better searchability would be useful. I've spent far, far too much of my life digging through talk page articles to try and find out how a particular policy came to be. – Joe (talk) 07:41, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

  A good step to take to address that would be change administrator's noticeboard to administration noticeboard, which better matches its use. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 23:32, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

• Support. Close reviews have become more and more formalised over recent years and centralising them, as we do for deletion reviews, move reviews, admin action reviews, etc., seems like a straightforward organisational improvement to me. I don't see how low volume or an (initially) lower number of watchers are particularly problematic; ANI should be enough evidence for everyone that having lots of eyes and lots of opinions doesn't make for better decisions. We should also consider the fact that neither making closes nor participating in close reviews is restricted to admins. Anything that brings AN closer to being a noticeboard for admins again is a step in the right direction, in my book. – Joe (talk) 07:38, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support - especially the automated discussion template generation. I take the point that these aren't as common as deletion reviews but when they do occur they tend to be lengthy and seem to take take over WP:AN until they're closed and archived. Having a separate RfC noticeboard will also give us an easy way to refer back to RfC decisions without having to search through the entire AN archives. The positives of this proposal far outweigh the negatives in my view. WaggersTALK 12:20, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support - because of how well DRV works. DRV does well not to be "AFD round 2", and I believe this proposal will assist in stopping the discussions at AN being "RFC round 2", but rather focusing on endorse or overturn based on the prescribed format. I don't believe AN is capable of this sort of debate as there is little to no distinction between a normal AN discussion and a Close Review. Daniel (talk) 14:52, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support DRV for RFCs per nom and others above. The archive will be useful and getting it off AN will improve the participant pool. Levivich (talk) 17:57, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

  A template, splitting involved/uninvolved votes, is also a good idea. Levivich (talk) 16:15, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

  XRV (suggested below) works, too. Levivich (talk) 14:51, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

• Comment If this more specialized (than AN) place were created, people who watch the page are more likely to catch / less likely to miss something close-review related than on a broader/ more active page like AN. For example, if AN had 30 posts a day and the person checked their watchlist twice per day, they would see only 2 of the 30 posts on their watchlist page. North8000 (talk) 18:28, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support: worth a try to clean up the cesspit of AN. Close reviews should be rare and too often they are just attempts to run "RFC round 2", as Daniel puts it. I'm unsure whether this board would encourage more vexatious close reviews or provide the necessary structure to mitigate this trend. I like the idea of separating involved comments from uninvolved comments to help independent editors and the final closer assess provenance more easily. — Bilorv (talk) 23:59, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
• We have too many noticeboards already. I'd start with combining WP:NPOVN and WP:NORN into one before creating yet another noticeboard, dividing attention. WP:XRV is a mostly-failed dream with the same idea of splitting something away from AN; there is no reason to believe that a separate closure noticeboard would be more popular. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:03, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose. Most RfCs and similar do not need formal closure. Most formal closures don't need to be reviewed. A dedicated noticeboard would just encourage more unnecessary reviews in the same way that WP:CR has caused the number of requests for formal closure (mostly unnecessary) to balloon. And, as TBF points out immediately above, a similar concept never really got off the ground (which is a shame because I'd strongly support something like XRV but with teeth). HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 21:13, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose. I was going to stay out of this, but HJ Mitchell's point is compelling: If you create a special, high-profile place request that a decision be overturned (and that's always the point of a review request; nobody opens a review because they think the closing statement was perfect), then the existence of that page will suggest to some editors that closing summaries should be challenged, and thus we'll see somewhat more of them, and that could turn into a time sink. BTW, if you don't know how to challenge a closing summary, then read the directions (middle of second point at top of WP:ANRFC, Wikipedia:Closing discussions#Challenging other closures, and probably elsewhere) or ask someone (e.g., at WT:RFC. Also, at least wrt RFCs, we don't get very many of these now, so creating a new noticeboard for an uncommon event is unnecessary. If the folks at WP:AN found that these discussions were so frequent as to disrupt their other work, I'd have another view, but they don't. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:33, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

  Yeah, so it's an equivalent of: "why let people know that there's a dedicated appeals court with clear rules in one place when there is 75-95% chance they won't succeed anyway? It just burdens the justice system too much and that's why we have delays".

  If the thinking goes that people will appeal just for the sake of it, this will always happen but that doesn't mean automatically they are wrong. If the rules are scattered all over the place it's just user-unfriendly.

  It is as simple as that: i

  If a request is frivolous, vexatious, comes from a sock or people didn't read the manual, it can be closed down quickly so it's not a timesink. Admins are not needed for that.

  Wrt to RfC review frequency, let's see the stats for move reviews and estimated RfC close reviews on AN to see the difference, starting from the beginning of 2022, by month:

  • Move reviews: 0, 6, 8, 2, 2, 3, 1, 4, 3, 8, 5, 4, 1, 7, 4, 3, 6, 9, 1, 1, 2, 5 (avg per month: 4.5 reviews, of these only 20% were overturned and a few, like 5, simply relisted, and a couple of procedural moves)
  • Requested close reviews (searched through AN archives from 340 till today), and I generally saw about 2 closure reviews per month, which was fairly consistent month-to-month. On your theory that dedicated forums will encourage appeals in their subject matter, it might be a bit lower than move reviews but not by much at the end of the day. Surely you won't vote to delete MRV because it is inactive?

  The discussion that triggered the RfC was an absolute mess of a review, so in fact if you are concerned about timesinks, we can do that by enforcing certain rules that already work elsewhere and prevent people from continuing the RFC on AN. But can we really apply that directly to AN when there are so many other discussions that we have to distinguish from? Szmenderowiecki (talk) 06:24, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

  • Increasing the number of close reviews will be subject to the Law of diminishing marginal benefit. If you're seeing ~5 move reviews a month now, with 4 being sustained and 1 being overturned, then creating this is more likely to result in twice as many discussions but a lower chance of success (e.g., 8 discussions, 7 sustained and 1 overturned, or 20 discussions, 18 sustained and 2 overturned).
  • If an editor discovers this process through a navbox, they are unlikely to learn enough about the process to post relevant and appropriate discussions. We need people to discover this process by Reading The Friendly Manual, which says things like close reviews not being an opportunity for re-litigating the dispute because all the other editors are wrong.

  WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:58, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

  This mirrors the schools of management opposing theories, one side advocating for a flat management style with no hierarchy and the other with various levels of hierarchy, generally between 5 and 10 members per team in a vertical chain of command (command which also has various theories of leadership style). Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 20:07, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

  From what I saw, some close reviews are already close reviews for the sake of them, so there is little marginal benefit in having them in the first place. Also, to show this law is applicable, you'd have to see if the current rate of overturning RfC closes at AN is higher than at MRV, or, which would be better, look through pre-2012 AN archives and compare MRVs from back then and after moving to MRV. Have you made the research? Well, I can't be bothered but my hypothesis is that it's not about economics here, and RfC closure reviews aren't delicatessen which you get used to once you start eating a lot of them.

  If a user discovers the new process through the navbox but is otherwise uninterested, I agree they won't learn about it. But if they think that an RfC was poorly closed, and they become interested in how this should be filed, they will click on the link and RTFM. And the friendly manual should and, as I proposed, will in fact include such instructions.

  Right now these instructions are not in one place so if someone new (who we should assume edits in good faith) is lurking at AN and sees an RfC review process, they have little clue about how this should go, because AN does not say it and it does not tell which policies apply. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 10:39, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose for now. There's definitely a problem here, but creating a new noticeboard should be a last resort. We should at least try separate uninvolved/involved sections (which everyone seems to support) first, and if that doesn't work, there are also other techniques (hatting unproductive tangents, preventing bolded !votes from involved editors, etc.) out there. If close reviews are still a mess after all that, we can revisit this conversation, but otherwise I think it'd cause more harm than good, per several others above. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 23:52, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
• Strongly support. I think noticeboards for specific situations if there are enough editors willing to participate in them are a good idea that promote more expertise, efficiency, quality, and fairness in processes.

    I have to mention I went to AN once about this, adding an entry challenging a close, following instructions in WP:CLOSECHALLENGE; it was a monumental fiasco. The summary speaks for itself: Improper forum. I got excoriated for "making a mountain out of a molehill" and for a "time-wasting exercise", among other things. It was my impression that a few editors neither cared about the guidance I linked nor based their rationale in Wikipedia guidance but in general they resorted more to their arbitrary opinions. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 01:17, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

  The other editors were correct; please don't assume their reaction is a problem to be corrected. DFlhb (talk) 08:03, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

  I disagree but in order not to divert the main topic of this thread, I won't start a discussion about it here. If you want to discuss it you are welcome to post in my talk page. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 19:34, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose per HJ. However, I would be open to moving close challenges to XRV. HouseBlaster^talk 06:51, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose per ToBeFree. AN benefits from having a lot of experienced eyes on it, and a new noticeboard will not have as many of those eyes. Mz7 (talk) 01:17, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support - There are actually two main parts to this proposal.
  • Specify procedures for RFC close reviews, of which the most important is that close review is not RFC round 2. This principle is taken from the culture of Deletion Review, where it is often stated that DRV is not AFD round 2. The deletion reviewers ae not asked how they would have closed the AFD, but only whether the close was reasonable, or whether the closer made an error.
  • Set up a separate board for RFC close reviews to implement these reviews, with an origination template, and with automated archival of close reviews.
  • In my opinion, the first is very much needed, as has been concluded by recent discussions at WP:AN and elsewhere.
  • The second, a separate forum, is a nice-to-have rather than essential. However, if the close reviews continue to be carried out at WP:AN, they probably will not have their own automation processes.
  • A separate forum will provide the benefits of its own automation. If there is agreement that special procedures are needed, but not agreement for a separate forum, there will have to be discussion of how to integrate the new procedures into WP:AN.

Robert McClenon (talk) 08:08, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

Robert McClenon, we have already specified the procedure for RFC close reviews. You can find the procedure (and a list of strong and weak arguments for overturning the summary) at Wikipedia:Closing discussions#Challenging other closures. The first sentence in that paragraph specifies very clearly that it applies to RFCs, splits, and merges. Therefore, the first part is done; in fact, it was done years ago. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:05, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

• Support largely per proposer. Simply put, close reviews are irrelevant to an administrator's work so AN is the wrong place. Having a dedicated venue to appeal things is due process, not encouraging frivolous claims; after all, an equally strong (and much more evidence based) argument could be made that AN/I encourages frivolous claims of incivility. I'm not experienced enough to judge imperfections in the details of the proposed rules, but I don't see obvious issues and I'm sure it will be ironed out. Fermiboson (talk) 19:58, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Notified: centralized discussion and the the administrators' noticeboard. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 10:18, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose per ToBeFree. —Ganesha811 (talk) 00:55, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose, very much per Mz7, ToBeFree, et al, above. The standard of "many eyes" applies to this. Plus, this is putting the cart before the horse - we don't have much in the way of a written guideline regarding reviewing RFC closures as far as I know. So we're now going to create a whole new process out of whole cloth? No. - jc37 12:13, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  Here you can see that the Category for Discussions page has about a 2,700 monthly views average while Closure requests has about 2,400. I am pretty sure CfD started one day somehow, therefore the argument no guideline does not hold much weight because things start one day. Also, "WP:Closure requests".

  User:Mz7 talks about AN having experience. Show me a discussion about specifically a close challenge in that noticeboard. I went there once challenging a close (with a detailed rationale) and ironically my request was closed with the explanation "improper forum" (see my post above) and derided for spending time in researching and pointing guidance you imply doesn't exist.

  User:ToBeFree states, "there is no reason to believe that a separate closure noticeboard would be more popular". I point out the views of closure requests and the level of support the proposal for the noticeboard has in this thread. I think they are proper reasons. And I do support more specialized noticeboards, not less. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 18:16, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  WP:AN has about 40,000 views per month. Your counterexamples prove the point: There would probably be less attention on other pages. Here's the requested example of a well-attended AN closure challenge; this one led to overturning a panel close: [33]

  As pointed out above, what you portray as a general problem may have been very specific to your closure challenge request. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:52, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  I think the example you provided is less illustrative of general cases because it relates directly to an administrator's issue not just a close. Do you have an example of a close challenge in AN that is not directly related to an administrative issue? Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 07:12, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose per HJ, ToBeFree and SFR. Splitting to a new noticeboard with fewer page watchers will result in fewer uninvolved participants. We're already seeing this at WP:ORN (almost no uninvolved input), hence the current discussion on getting rid of ORN; we already have too many noticeboards as is. Though we should separate involved responses into a separate section; Tamzin tried it a few months back and it helped. DFlhb (talk) 19:00, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Support. CR isn't an admin thing. Also, due to the negative connotation of AN and its length, I think it's better to have a centralized location. Clyde _{[trout needed]} 22:18, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose. Generally speaking, the more eyeballs on such "review" discussions, the better, else relatively small groups of motivated editors can tend to overwhelm an actual consensus process from more uninvolved parties. Deletion reviews, in particular, happen often enough that it makes sense to split them off (and they will generally get enough participation to prevent that phenomenon), but RfC close challenges are more rare, so I don't think a separate board for that would attract enough participation to represent a genuine cross-section of the community at large. If it starts happening a lot more often to the point it's overwhelming AN, we could revisit it then, but I don't see that as being a beneficial change at this time. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 17:39, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  You bring a valid point but then the solution could be making the RfC review noticeboard a step in the dispute resolution process and the next step to address your concern could be AN. Why not AN directly? Because right now I don't see administrators interested in reviewing closures and a specific noticeboard would attract editors interested in reviewing closures. Check my post supporting the proposal. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 21:33, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  I already did "check (your) post for this proposal", as I generally read through existing comments on an RfC prior to commenting. It did not convince me, and I stand by what I said. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 22:02, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. Firstly, I don't believe this needs to be separated from admin concerns. Admins are implicitly expected to be/become experts at closing discussions and generally at assessing consensus (It's a sizeable piece of Wikipedia:Administrators' reading list), and this is an evaluation of an assessment of consensus, so admin eyes improve the process.

Secondly this is WP:CREEP. An RfC is already one step away from the general process for achieving consensus. A formal close is yet another step away. Close reviews are a third step from our standard consensus building process, and indeed we already have a way of accomplishing them when deemed necessary. I guess this is to say, I agree with both HJ Mitchell and ToBeFree and others – either this will not be popular and not have enough eyes, or it will be popular and lead to too many close reviews. —siroχo 05:35, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose The last thing we need is another noticeboard. The ones we have aren't well enough attended as is. CaptainEek ^{Edits Ho Cap'n!}⚓ 18:12, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose I gather that this proposal arose after this close review. That review was done in a reasonably expeditious way and so "if it works, don't fix it". The original dispute (whether someone was a journalist or not) seems quite lame and so did not merit the amount of attention that it was given. Making mountains out of molehills should not be encouraged as it wastes everyone's time. By keeping such activity at WP:AN, frivolous and vexatious disputes will tend to be discouraged per WP:BOOMERANG. Andrew🐉(talk) 13:40, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

  There is a difference between making mountains out of molehills and satisfying proper due process. Trash for you may be the treasure of someone else. Also, I bemoan the lack of attention to detail that in my opinion permeates generally in society in favor of haste. Therefore, I support and favor attention to detail and quality. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 05:46, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose, solution in search of a problem. Stifle (talk) 14:47, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
• Neutral - I can see the arguments on both sides of this. The strongest argument in favour in my view is that AN is an admin's noticeboard and should be kept for discussion amongst admins, whilst close-review might profit from a less cosy environment. On the other side we don't have many close reviews, and shouldn't want more of them. FOARP (talk) 16:53, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
•  Question: don't we already have WP:CR for this? The 🏎 Corvette 🏍 ZR1^{(The Garage)} 23:14, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

  No, it's not. CR is for asking someone to formally close a discussion (closure request), and that's not only about RfCs. This is about a separate page to process closure reviews. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 08:24, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

  • Oh well, after clarification (thanks Szmenderowiecki) I would say weak support. AN could benefit from the new page by diverting traffic and better organizing what goes in, but first, if to be created, the new noticeboard would have to be widely covered, like maybe a Signpost article would help also? Anyway, there should also be a rule set, just like all the other noticeboards. One rule could be if the blizzard sets in to a discussion, then there is no need for review. Let me know if I'm wrong about anything. The 🏎 Corvette 🏍 ZR1^{(The Garage)} 16:43, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Discussion of proposed close review page

• Comment. I have made a quantitative analysis to translate into hard numbers the viability of this proposal.

item\proportion	views	watchers	recent watch	v/w	w/rw	edits	v/e	w/e	daily edits	rw/de
AN	41,000	5,265	489	8	11	1,174	35	4	39	12
DRN	5,077	1,249	76	4	16	433	12	3	14	5
NORN	2,968	916	82	3	11	93	32	10	3	27
AFD	10,109	1,900	107	5	18	3,482	3	1	116	1
DR	3,849	1,291	140	3	9	513	8	3	17	8
CR	2,425	580	71	4	8	222	11	3	7	10
CRRN	923	323	32	3	10	33	28	10	1	29

Interest in the pages can be measured as a function of views, watchers, number of edits. AN seem to have top interest in function of these parameters' numbers. Whereas the proposed noticeboard (CRRN) seems to be last. Although this may be true regarding raw views and number of participants, if we analyze deeper, we can see that AN turns out to be last if we sort by proportion of viewers/watchers. More views per watcher would indicate less interest and less views per watcher would indicate more interest, at least more than a passing interest.

CRRN in this measure has an estimated projection of top interest proportionally. It is estimated that CRRN would have around 300+watchers and at times 30+ watchers of recent changes. An estimated number of 30+ monthly average edits is projected or around 1 per day. Considering that "discussions should be kept open at least a week" per WP:TALK and RfCs may run a month or more, 1 edit per day indicates threads could stay regularly active or new threads started frequently. Having 30+ watchers of recent edits would indicate viability of the project.

On the other hand, if AFD has more than 40,000 edits average monthly per another counting mechanism, the proportion with its appeal noticeboard DRV (DR) would be 57 to 1, which if applied to the proportion of CR and CRRN would result in only this latter having around 4 monthly average monthly edits, which would mean not enough edits to sustain a discussion properly, rendering the noticeboard not viable. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 04:44, 4 November 2023 (UTC) 21:16, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Your number for AFD edits is way short; there were about 420,000 in 2023. I expect you're also only counting views and watchers on the daily log subpages, too; that's not the way AFD is set up. —Cryptic 19:45, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

For AFD I ran a query based on the code you shared with me for Deletion review. Why the discrepancy in the number of edits? Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 20:02, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Look at the source of WP:Deletion review/Log/2023 January 2 and of WP:Articles for deletion/Log/2023 January 2. Discussion happens directly on DRV daily log subpages; AFD daily logs transclude an individual subpage for each discussion. —Cryptic 20:18, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Geeze! Thinker78 (talk) 20:21, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

I got the number of watchers in the page info. Number of views in the page views in page history. Where do you recommend checking these numbers? Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 20:12, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

To get a meaningful number, you'd have to count the views of each individual afd subpage; same for watchers, except you'd want to eliminate duplicate watchers (say, if I'm watchlisting three afds, you'd only want to count me once), and you can't because who's watching a page isn't published. People viewing or watching WP:AFD directly, or even daily log subpages, isn't meaningful, since that's not where the discussions happen. —Cryptic 20:18, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

I see the number of views with this method do increase exponentially. It looks like AFD may be by far the most popular noticeboard in Wikipedia. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 20:27, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Notes

References

Too many noticeboards?

I find it curious how many people above state "we have too many noticeboards" or "we don't need another noticeboard" as a grounds for opposing this proposal that doesn't need further elaboration. Is this an established fact? There's some mention of individual noticeboards with very low activity (e.g. ORN), but since there are other noticeboards with very high activity (e.g. ANI), that doesn't seem to work as a general explanation. I'd be interested if someone could explain to me why many focused, low-activity noticeboards is ipso facto less desirable than few broad, high-activity noticeboards (if they think that's the case). – Joe (talk) 06:55, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

One factor is that only those with a particularly high fascination with wikidrama would be active in multiple noticeboards. Getting something reviewed at a noticeboard dedicated to that sole task would mean that only those with a particular ax to grind in that area would be likely to participate (along with relatively few exceptions that make the rule). Asking for a review at WP:AN would get attention from a much wider and more representative section of the community. Johnuniq (talk) 07:52, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't know what section of the community because for many years I thought AN was only for administrative complaints. In fact, I think we need a new noticeboard, Community noticeboard, which would be more about a wider and more representative section of the community, without the stigma of posting in a noticeboard that seems to be aimed to complaints and dissuades participation with boomerang. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 05:52, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The Confusion of Tongues

• I notice elsewhere on VP that there's a proposal to create a Editor Communication Feedback noticeboard. So, how many noticeboards do we have already? WP:Noticeboards has a list and then there's a separate category. This includes the Noticeboard proliferation noticeboard, which is a joke, and Discussions for discussion which isn't supposed to be a joke but is still laughable.

These lists don't include some noticeboard-like places that I watch such as WP:ITN/C. That has a fairly clear agenda, process and output and there's a crew of regular posters and admins who attend it. And then there's all the projects. So, the exact definition may need work. WP:Dashboard seems to be one place that brings it all together but I've never looked at that before and so need to understand that now. As I already have at least two other different dashboards (1, 2), I'm now wondering how many dashboards there are...

And this is just the English Wikipedia. There's a variety of noticeboard activity elsewhere including Discord, Meta, Phabricator, OTRS/VRT and more.

And, of course, we have a policy which forbids all this: WP:NOTFORUM. This vainly says, "Please try to stay on the task of creating an encyclopedia." See also: Parkinson's Law.

Andrew🐉(talk) 09:01, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes but what's the actual problem with having a lot of noticeboards? They're not forums. – Joe (talk) 09:22, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Proliferation will tend to generate empire-building, forum-shopping, passing the buck, turf battles, chaos and confusion. For example, when discussing news items at WP:ITN, we've been repeatedly told recently to take discussion of their images to WP:ERRORS. But that noticeboard is supposed to be strictly for errors, not for such general content issues. And the result is then forking of the discussion, repetition and confusion because the archives and process are split or done differently. See the KISS principle. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:15, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

That's probably a problem of not defining well what goes to ITN and what goes to ERRORS. Your forums are already there, it's that you should probably try to say something like: "If images are not erroneous but are otherwise objectionable, post in XYZ, do not post in ERRORS". Szmenderowiecki (talk) 10:50, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Of course, I can and do say things; I'm here now in yet another forum telling you about it. And ITN has perennial discussions at WT:ITN which often propose reforms and reorganisations. But, like the Village Pump, they rarely result in consensus and collegial action. The more moving parts you have, the more friction you get and the more scope there is for things to go wrong. As Steve Jobs said, "Simplify, Simplify, Simplify"! Andrew🐉(talk) 11:25, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Or as Ken Thompson said, "do one thing and do it well". I don't see how having one big board that handles everything is necessarily more simple than many small boards that handle specific types of discussion. – Joe (talk) 12:01, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Ken Thompson's point is like KISS and Jobs in urging simplicity. But doing things well is easier said than done. ITN does one thing but doesn't do it well. The case in question here is the appeal process for RfCs, right? Does AN work well for this? How would a dedicated board work better? Wouldn't it have exactly the same process? The main way it might work better is by having fewer voices, right? But RfCs tend to attract vested interests and these tend to be noisy regardless of the forum. What's needed to shut them up is administrative power and that's most likely to be found at places like AN and Arbcom -- existing forums with established traditions and powers. Andrew🐉(talk) 12:41, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

• I deplore this practice of using AN as the village pump. I really wish that we could use admin boards to talk about conduct. I wish we could move everything about content elsewhere. AN and ANI would still be very busy places! I can't understand the constant obstructionism about it.—S Marshall T/C 09:07, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
  • What about my comments at 07:52, 6 November 2023 just above? Johnuniq (talk) 09:41, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

    I think your point that discussions should have a broad and representative audience is something few would disagree with, but AN is hardly the only place we can achieve that. So the question remains, why is it acceptable to have dedicated noticeboards for some topics but not others? – Joe (talk) 12:04, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

    • • I think Johnuniq's point is about drama-mongers, and I don't see it. Separating content-focused discussion from conduct-focused discussion would surely reduce drama rather than increasing it.—S Marshall T/C 16:18, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Standardised templates

So after seeing so much bickering here, I thought that it would be better to make at least part of the proposal implemented. I need some help with workshopping and technical guidance and help with three templates that I just created, namely Template:RfC closure review, Template:RfC closure review links and Template:RfC closure review banner. The idea is copied from Template:Move review list. When you subst RfC closure review, you will have then something like Template:Move review list, followed by the banner and ===Involved===, ===Uninvolved=== and ===Discussion=== subheadings. Ideally I'd also want to templatise the heading ("Request for RfC closure review at #Article name#", as defined from page param. Ąny help will be welcome. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 13:49, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

I think the template is ready to be deployed and can be used at AN. I made appropriate changes to WP:CLOSECHALLENGE so that folks can useit in the future. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 18:24, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

I think the template will give a more official feel to challenges so editors are not so tempted to close such discussions with "improper forum" or the like and may encourage proper discussion. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 23:26, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Is Template:RfC closure review/doc meant to contain I fuck your bullshit!? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:08, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

They are just colorful metaphors. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 22:18, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

ActivelyDisinterested Definitely not meant to be, it is just an illustrative example. That's from a relatively known viral video in Russian-speaking countries about a casino client who was suspecting that its employees were cheating him by improperly dealing cards. About half of the video is swear words.

Because that's the reaction I suspect a lot of users have when seeing a poor RfC closure before putting it in a more civil manner publicly, I thought this would be relevant. Obviously, this is not the words you should use when challenging a close. You are free to edit the template doc if you are offended. It's a minor detail. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 22:36, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Not offended, just checking it's wasn't somehow sneak in by a vandal. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:39, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Fresh example

There has been a long discussion at the Village Pump: Admins and being paid to advise on editing. This was closed recently: Closing (Admins and being paid to advise on editing). An admin didn't like the close and took it to WP:AN: Close challenge: Required disclosure for admin paid advising. The original discussion took over two months. The close was overturned in less than 24 hours. Andrew🐉(talk) 20:38, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Well, at least now I have an example... The 🏎 Corvette 🏍 ZR1^{(The Garage)} 20:49, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

An admin didn't like the close Delightful. However: not an admin, not about "liking", and it was nearly unanimously understood to be a bad close. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:00, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

I was trying to avoid personalising the matter and so referred to Rhododendrites less directly but didn't think to check his status. I stand corrected. Anyway, the main point is that this seems a timely high-profile example of a close review. Make of it what you will... Andrew🐉(talk) 22:02, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Well I make nothing out of that.

SNOW closures will happen.

They will be processed well on any WP page. Or should be.

The question is not about the speed of review but about what people are doing in it. And you see, at the beginning there is a closure review request which descended into a mess because concurrently people started searching ways to resolve a conflict about including infoboxes, thinking if

notifying people at VPP/VPR about a content RfC is following WP's rules, aconducting nd meta discussions about appropriateness to close the discussion formally.

I want none of this to happen with CLRV.

If you want to have an argument, ANI and sometimes AE is the way to go.

If this involves admin action, AN and XRV are appropriate.

But it has nothing to do with closure reviews. There's no need for digressions. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 16:00, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

References

RfC: Standardizing ISBN formatting (and an end to editwarring about it)

Should the format of ISBNs be standardized (or be subject to a rule to not change format without consensus)?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:04, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

We have an ongoing problem that ISBNs are not subject to a formatting standard here, with the predictable result that different editors are going around normalizing them to one format and then again to another, at cross-purposes to each other, and without a clear consensus for any particular format. This is apt to continue unabated unless we settle on one format (or on a new rule to not change the format without consensus). Someone has created a {{Format ISBN}} template that forces hyphens into ISBNs, and AnomieBOT then goes around substituting this template, which makes undiscussed changes to the format difficult to undo (any intervening edits may necessitate tediously removing every hyphen from every ISBN manually since the edits to insert them can't be reverted without also reverting unrelated changes by other editors). A similar complaint could be made about manually going around and changing all ISBNs in random articles to use the hyphen-less format.

Background

ISBNs are often divided up by hyphens (or spaces), e.g. 978-1-7238-1802-8 or 978-1723818028 or 978 1 7238 1802 8, but this is not standardized and is entirely optional; the more concise form 9781723818028 is perfectly valid. From our ISBN article: A 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts (prefix element, registration group, registrant, publication and check digit), and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts (registration group, registrant, publication and check digit) of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces. Figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. Real-world treatment varies widely, but the hyphens (or spaces) are dropped by most bibliographic databases (WorldCat, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Internet Archive Open Library, Google Books, Project Muse, Copyright Clearance Center, Anobii, OverDrive, etc.), and major publishing companies (the majority of publishers' own online catalogs I've checked, e.g. Oxford University Press, O'Reilly Media, etc.), and many major libraries. Some retailer sites (e.g. Amazon.com, Chegg.com, GetTextbooks.com) use only one hyphen, between the 978 prefix of an ISBN-13 and the rest of the number (no hyphens in an ISBN-10). And many publishers typically include the fully hyphenated form on a book's colophon page (I could find one bibliographic site also doing it, Internet Speculative Fiction Database). A handful of databases like ProQuest don't seem to make use of ISBNs at all. So, usage is not consistent. There is no standard; the International ISBN Agency issued a manual preferring separation of elements, but defined more than 1,000 of them, making for a complex system that in practice has not resulted in actual standardization. (The {{Format ISBN}} template is presently enforcing some of that organization's formatting as if it is a "rule" adopted by Wikipedia, which is clearly not the case.)

Options to choose from

1. Option 1: Standardize on 9781723818028 format, and change {{Format ISBN}} to use it.
2. Option 2: Standardize on 978-1-7238-1802-8 format, and do nothing to {{Format ISBN}}.
3. Option 3: Standardize on 978-1723818028 format, and change {{Format ISBN}} to use it (this would have no effect on the short ISBN-10 format, only ISBN-13).
4. Option 4: Standardize on 978 1 7238 1802 8 format, and change {{Format ISBN}} to use it.
5. Option 5: Standardize on nothing; change {{Format ISBN}} to have parameter options for each of these formats; and add an instruction (probably at MOS:NUM and summarized at WP:CITE) to use a single format consistently in any given article, but not change from one consistent format to another without consensus (maybe shortcut this as MOS:ISBNVAR).

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:04, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Summary of known arguments

Feel free to add more.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:04, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

For concision:

• Hyphen-less (and space-less) ISBNs offer much more utility to the reader: a Google search on ISBN 9781723818028 immediately produces a wealth of useful results [34], but very often a search on the hyphenated form, ISBN 978-1-7238-1802-8, does not [35]; same with spaced format [36] (in both cases, often just a circular link back to one or more Wikipedia articles using that string). Not quotation-marking the spaced format yields wildly wrong false-positives [37]. The one-hyphen format may produce some very minimal correct results [38], but they have more to do with shopping than with finding a source in bibliographic databases, libraries, free-text archives, etc. Doing such a search is faster and easier than trying to use WP's built-in Special:BookSources/9781723818028 functionality, so readers will do it.

  Counter-argument: search engine behavior changes over time for reasons we don't know and have no control over, so optimizing to that target is a fool's errand; the built-in functionality relies on the same click-to-learn-more interface that the rest of the encyclopedia does, so readers will do it.

  Furthermore, Google does not consistently prefer the unhyphenated form. A GBooks search for ISBN 978-1-137-43098-4 brings up the correct result [39], while ISBN 9781137430984 does not [40]. A Google web search for the same ISBN gives better results for the hyphenated than the unhyphenated form [41][42]. Our policies should not be based on our predictions of what Google will do.

  Rebuttal: A test of this did not prove true; both searches brought up Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, c.1100–1500 by Kathryn Hurlock, and the version without hyphens brought up more [correct] results than the version with them.

  Google searches with and without hyphenation create different results -- some overlapping, some unique. A person pasting the hyphenated version can easily create the non-hyphenated version to search as well. The converse is not true - it is not a trivial effort to create the hyphenated version from the non-hyphenated one. The example chosen above is poor; when searching for a hyphenated ISBN, one should not include the term "ISBN" in the search as false positives for the hyphenated version are unlikely and ones that display the ISBN without the term "ISBN" are common. (For example, this search for a 10-digit hyphenated ISBN without the word ISBN produces 8 web results, all on point; the same search with ISBN included in the search produces only three.) The example hyphenless search posted above is claimed to generate "a wealth of useful results:" in contrast to one which generates results that "have more to do with shopping than with finding a source in bibliographic databases, libraries, free-text archives"... when the hyphenless one also generates zero "bibliographic databases, libraries, free-text archives" but almost solely results to do with shopping (the exceptions being one blog and a Wikipedia page where it is used as a source). This result is unsurprising, as the book used as an example is a thin volume published using Amazon's self-publishing tools.

• The hyphens (or spaces) are extraneous and less concise. None of our tools (e.g. {{ISBN}}, and the |isbn= parameter of citation templates, and the Special:BookSources system they use, etc.) need them, and ISBN usage in independent sources demonstrates no widely accepted standard for how to do it.

  Counter-argument: Not every kind of concision is best for our end readers, and the fully hyphenated form is common enough on book colophons that we should adopt it, especially since International ISBN Agency advises it.

For hyphens:

• A hyphenated form is easier to read.

  Counter-argument: ISBNs are not encyclopedic content in the usual sense but functional identifiers; only under unusual circumstances would a reader of our article have a need to type or read one aloud character-by-character like reciting one's phone number, while the hyphenless form provably produces better utility. And there is no single hyphenated form, but conflicting ones.

  Counter-counter-argument: Checking whether the book that one is reading is the same book cited in an article is not an "unusual circumstance".

• We already have a template, {{Format ISBN}}, that is normalizing these to a hyphenated format.

  Counter-argument: The fact that someone created a template doesn't indicate community consensus that it is doing the right thing and should be "enforced". This doesn't seem to have end-user utility or other encyclopedic purpose.

• Both the hyphenated and spaced formats convey a bit of extra information for those who are ISBN aware. For example, the early digits indicate the country. The length of the last segment before the checksum strongly suggests information about the size of the publisher. For example, if that segment is two digits long, it means the publisher is buying their ISBNs in blocks of 100, so probably not a simple self-publisher who will buy them in 1s or 10s, but a very small publisher.

For spaces:

• It's another way to make an ISBN more readable.

  Counter-argument: See above about "readable", and using spaces makes it more difficult to recognize as a single identifier. Also poor searchability.

For no standard:

• We don't need to standardize something like this, and should just leave everything to editorial consensus on a page-by-page basis.

  Counter-argument: We need to, and do, standardize many things (especially when it comes to numeric formatting), both for consistent presentation to the reader and for ending editorial conflict, which is happening on this matter.

Survey (ISBNs)

• Option 1, both for utility to the end reader and for concision. Fall back to option 5 as a second choice. I'm strongly opposed to all of 2–4 because they are inimical to actual usability, and are an inappropriate attempt to force the preferences of a third-party organization (either Intl. ISBN Agency or Amazon), that the real world has not adopted, onto to Wikipedia. There is simply no question that [43] is a better result for readers than [44] or [45] or [46] or the wildly wrong [47] (brings up incorrect books). And none of our tools require any hypenation or spaces in ISBNs (even if one did, it could be fixed easily). If someone copy-pastes in an ISBN in one of the other formats, it's a trivial matter for a bot to clean it up later. Settling on the no-hyphens-no-spaces format in no way would impose a requirement on any particular editor to input it in that form. It's the same situation as someone pasting in <ref>https://BareURL.com/here</ref> – we tolerate it and clean it up later. (Remember that no editor is actually expected to read any of our MOS:NUM, WP:CITE, or other guidelines before editing here, just comply with core content policies.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:04, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 clearly the best option, as pointed out a large amount of organisations don't use hyphens, especially Worldcat, Trove and most libraries. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 07:19, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Uncertain about hyphens, but object to spaces. "Hard to recognize as a single identifier" and "poorest searchability" are each critical problems. And if it line-wraps, the former of them becomes even worse. DMacks (talk) 07:29, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 as it makes it easier to use in other applications. Also as there is no accepted standard, it makes sense to avoid using hyphens (and especially spaces!!) and only use the actual numbers --Ita140188 (talk) 08:42, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 for useability – see reasons given above about being easier to search for and the number remaining as a single coherent element rather than breaking across multiple lines. Also, if we required the spaces or hyphens, I expect people would end up putting them in incorrectly, which would be even worse. Mgp28 (talk) 09:30, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 for blatantly obvious reasons. There seems to be a problem with ISBNs almost all the time. I routinely see book citations with the warning "isbn= value: invalid character," despite the fact that, upon checking out the book's details, we see the ISBN number correctly copied. -The Gnome (talk) 10:23, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  (Side note: whenever you see that, try checking if someone automatically replaced the hyphens with en-dashes (e.g. Special:Diff/1178112453).) 2603:8001:4542:28FB:69D3:61CF:7C25:A2F8 (talk) 01:50, 1 November 2023 (UTC) (Please send talk messages here instead)

• Option 5 but without the need to change the format ISBN template. This is a tempest in a teacup and frankly a waste of time to set a formal policy on this. Just because a couple of editors have run into a disagreement doesn't mean we need to standardize anything. Ealdgyth (talk) 11:39, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 5 Add an explicit mention of ISBN to CITEVAR and block editors who edit war other it or perform mass changes. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 11:41, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  There's no real need to change {{format ISBN}}. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 11:44, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

• Option 1: KISS principle applies. I think Wikipedia looks more credible when it is consistent, both within and between articles. I appreciate how nice some people find it to work in a world where they have all options and no limits, but this is a small change that will make things easier for editors and readers. SchreiberBike | ⌨  12:15, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1, there are external tools which allow you to add hyphens automatically if you really want to. Any standard is better than none, however, to facilitate looking up book citations Mach61 (talk) 13:07, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 5 and endorse ActivelyDisinterested's recommendation to Add an explicit mention of ISBN to CITEVAR and block editors who edit war other it or perform mass changes. Indeed I would extend this to blocking everyone who edit wars or makes mass changes (without explicit prior community consensus) related to any manual of style matters - such behaviour actively hinders the improvement of the encyclopaedia. Any option here other than option 5 is implicitly endorsing the uncollegiate behaviour that brought us here and encourages more time wasting about trivialities. Thryduulf (talk) 13:57, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  I understand your frustration with mass-change style-warriors (and just took one to ANI a few days ago), but you seem to not address the evidence that one of these formats is demonstrably more utile for the end reader (for a common use case of Googling for what we said the ISBN is).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:43, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

• Option 1 or 2 - basically either no hyphens (or spaces) or all hyphens. My preference is for 1. Lack of spaces and hyphens is more search friendly, and while hyphenated may be easier to read, when you are caring about the ISBN other than doing research/searching for it. Its an identifier, not a descriptive piece of prose. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:59, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 2 The hyphens create information for those who know, and as we generate search links for ISBNs, we've addressed the search problem. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 14:57, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  A search problem is solved, but another is not, as I've clearly demonstrated. How does "creating [the] information" someone somewhere might know, aid anyone in finding the source, which is the sole function of our citations (or case of us providing an ISBN)? WP is not a database of bibliographic trivia.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:49, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  I disagree with your evaluation that "finding the source" is the sole function of our citations. During my editing I have found myself all the time looking at citations and using the information there to know whether spending extra attention on it may be worth my while for improving an article. Some of these are pretty obvious - if I see a citation from the New York Times, I'm less likely to think that I'd better check that than if it comes from something called the Fight For Our Truths Newsletter. A citation to a science publication's 1920 edition is going to need checking and probable removal in a way that one to a 2020 edition is less likely to. I may know nothing about the University of Worcestershire Press, but if they purchased a one-digit block of ISBNs, that will more likely have me digging into the question of whether this is a legitimate scholarly press than if they had a three-digit block. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:03, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  So, because probably the only WP editor in the entire world who would recognize and use that information finds it personally convenient to have hyphens in there to make that determination a little easier, all the other users who are copy-pasting ISBNs to use them for actual source finding (which, yes, really is the purpose of our citations, per WP:CITE and WP:V) should have their utility impeded?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:45, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  So far, you're "the only WP editor in the entire world" I've seen actually complain about the search ability, rather than discuss it in the abstract. You also seem to be quite hostile to people who have different knowledge or experiences making comments, so perhaps it was not wise for you to open up a "Request for Comment". Were you under the illusion that I had not read your earlier comments about searching even though I had reflected that in my comments, or are you just trying to bully me into agreeing with you? Or was the sole point of this to slide your claim of "sole function" before and pretend you'd said "purpose"? (For those who may wonder the difference: the purpose of a screwdriver is to turn screws, but if I also use it to open pistachios, then screwdriving is not its sole function; it is functional in other ways as well.) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:06, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

• 5 and don't change the template, per AD and Ealdgyth above. Second choice, 2 per Nat above. Also, hats off for the most un-neutral presentation of an RfC I've seen in a long time, where in the "summary of arguments," counter arguments are presented for every option except OP's preferred Option 1. I have not seen anyone try to prime the pump like this before. At least the RfC question is brief and neutral! 😂 Levivich (talk) 15:05, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  One of the arguments for that option doesn't have a counter, and everyone's invited to add one, and I literally can't think of one that wouldn't sound like some kind of parody/mockery of someone trying to make such an argument.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:49, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  You could just search by title, it doesn't have any of the issues searching by ISBN does, or you could search with the isbn special word.[48]. Both of these are more likely to return results on rare books. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 17:22, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  Nah. Lots of works have the same title, and lots of works are published in very different editions, while we are citing a specific one, and it is the one that the reader needs to find. And nearly zero of our readers know anything about a Google "special word" (meanwhile that is Google-specific, and the searchability issues with ISBNs actually apply across other major search engines).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:48, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  There may be more than one book that it is fine to find, as there are many books these days where a paperback and a hardcover have the guts printed at the same time, including listing both ISBNs on those pages; it is only on the cover where only the separate edition ISBN shows up, and any reference to interior material on the paperback edition also works for the hardcover edition, and vice versa. On the other hand, you can have two copies of a book that have the same ISBN but are different printings, and the newer one may have had errors corrected, so that creates verification problems; someone checking the first printing of that ISBN may not find the statement as claimed, someone checking a later edition with a different ISBN might be able to verify it just fine. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:27, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT. It doesn't matter that some other source than the one the claim-making editor used might also be usable to verify the claim. The purpose of our citations is saying where exactly the claim came from and providing sufficient information to verify it with the exact work that is said to be the source for that claim.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:15, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• Option 2 – I'm biased because I wrote the current version of {{Format ISBN}} so of course I prefer option 2. I prefer hyphenated ISBNs because at a glance they look like ISBNs ; otherwise they are just big-damn-numbers that require inspection. —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:41, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Preference for Option 2 or Option 5, because otherwise they just look like lengthy numbers when in option 1 format. Looks less high-quality that way. Would also like to see evidence of the strength of the edit conflicts that prompted this RfC. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:09, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 5 and enforce "Where more than one style or format is acceptable under the MoS, one should be used consistently within an article and should not be changed without good reason." (From the lead to the MoS.) Especially re the bot. We manage to do this with a host of issues, from US v British English to serial commas, I don't see why ISBNs should be an exception. (Nor why they should be jammed into one particular house style, seems pretty unWikipedian to me.) Gog the Mild (talk) 16:28, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  Just for clarification, the bot isn't doing anything. Anomiebot is just substituting templates, which it does for any template setup to substitute. The change has to have been made by a normal editor. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 17:06, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

• Option 5 I don't think this needs to be standardized, although I personally prefer and use the hyphenated format. (t · c) buidhe 16:31, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 - most reliable format for searches. Glendoremus (talk) 18:01, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 5 as most flexible for both their reader and writer. Also with note to block the Citation Bot from FA pages, which it consistently edits despite WP:FAOWN and WP:CITEVAR explicitly advocating against this. Suggest proactive policing as to whether certain individuals fire up the bot even when NOBOTS is present, in gross violation of P&G. Serial 18:08, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 5 without single format instruction. I have always followed Template:Cite book "Use the ISBN actually printed on or in the book", which may or may not be hyphenated. We should be going by how the book publisher presents ISBNs, not databases. If it doesn't show up in as many search results that's not our problem. I am not convinced that readers are unable to change formatting themselves if they happen to need different search results. I don't see why it matters if some are hyphenated or not. Some DOIs are very extensive and others are short. Other identifiers differ, so too can ISBNs. Heartfox (talk) 18:21, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
• Option 5. If necessary change the gadget(s) that format ISBNs to enable them to allow click through to the various tools mentioned; it is definitely not a good idea for these formats to be mass-changed. ISBNVAR seems worthwhile; it's a pity we need it but having it would be better than mass edits to fix this. This simply doesn't need to be made consistent everywhere. The arguments against 5 given above are consistent presentation to the reader -- few readers will care, and fewer of those will agree on what the right format is; and ending editorial conflict, which ISBNVAR would achieve. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:03, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  Adding a note to say that I read option 5 as "no change" but if there's a substantive difference and "no change" gains consensus then my !vote can be read as a support for either. And either creating an ISBNVAR or clarifying that CITEVAR includes ISBNs would also be good. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:21, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• Option 2 - Usually the way it appears in the sources, and easier to proof read. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:28, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 or 5. 1 is the most efficient. 5 is the most accommodating. Senorangel (talk) 03:28, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 2 – Those who omit the hyphens are doing so out of convenience or laziness — which I get, we all have busy lives, but that's what bots are for. InfiniteNexus (talk) 04:02, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

  It's not "lazy" to want opaque numeric identifiers to waste as little space as possible. –jacobolus (t) 18:27, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

  I don't believe that's a valid argument. There is no reason to "save space" on Wikipedia — this isn't AP style, where newspapers have to save space as much as possible because of their limited space. Hyphens are the proper formatting and make the long string of numbers easier to read. InfiniteNexus (talk) 20:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  ISBNs are, to the vast majority of readers, an opaque numerical identifier without personally meaningful structure. Readers are not memorizing these numbers, writing them in their journals, or reciting them over the phone. They are clicking links or copy/pasting them from one computer system to another.

  Most of the time I personally would rather leave the ISBNs out altogether. I find them usually to be less useful than the author + title for looking up books, and they add quite a lot of noisy clutter to citations. But I recognize that some editors seem to really love ISBNs. The least we can do is make them as compact as possible. –jacobolus (t) 20:18, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  I suspect that a fair portion of the people who are actually using ISBNs from references are doing so in a way that the number is not going to be just copied and pasted. While certainly plenty of people get books from online sources, others go to their local bookstore or ask for it from their local library, perhaps as an interlibrary loan... and in those cases, it seems unlikely to me that they would be saying "go to Wikipedia and copy and paste from there", but bringing along a printout. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 21:12, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  Have you personally done this? Do you know someone who does this? Speaking only for myself, I don't know of anyone who has ever done this. The last time I can imagine someone taking a printout to the library to look up a book there was about 1998, and it wouldn't have been by ISBN. –jacobolus (t) 04:43, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, I have personally printed out book information including ISBN and taken it to the library (not for finding the book on their shelves, but for requesting an interlibrary loan) and to the local bookstore requesting a book be special-ordered. I live a life beyond your imagination. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 07:16, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  If we best want to help folks taking citations to their local public library though, it would probably be more useful to add Dewey Decimal numbers instead of hyphenating the ISBNs. –jacobolus (t) 04:49, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• Eliminate Option 4 (spaces) as an acceptable format on Wikipedia, for the many disadvantages cited, including parsing and copy/paste searches. I prefer hyphens, as they are more readable especially when looking for errors, but can live without them. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:29, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

  I agree. Whether hyphenated or not, option 4 should not be supported on Wikipedia except as a target for cleaning. Izno (talk) 18:54, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

• Follow the current guidance (not offered as an option above): hyphens are optional but preferred, and should not be removed if correctly placed. Bots use and help maintain WP, but our primary concern is human readers and editors, and chunking is useful for humans. Kanguole 09:31, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

  +1 for this. Just noticed it now. Justifying what I also understand as the current guidelines is basically what I've tried to verbosely communicate in my other comments. Thx. Salpynx (talk) 01:44, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

• Eliminate the 'Format ISBN' template – Using this template, especially within other citation templates, is a huge eyesore. If ISBNs need any kind of formatting it should be done automatically by the {{ISBN}} template or CS1 / CS2 templates (similar to the way they automatically standardize date formats). Personally I'd prefer the version without hyphens but this really doesn't matter. user:Trappist the monk has started disruptively littering these templates all over the place, and they should be told to stop. –jacobolus (t) 18:22, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

  Update: I misunderstood. Apparently there's a cleanup bot that comes and converts use of the template to just the digits with hyphens. These still seem like distracting bikeshedding edits in violation of WP:CITEVAR (now twice as many), but thankfully at least the template name doesn't stick around. –jacobolus (t) 23:30, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

• Option 2 - If a book lists its ISBN with hyphens, it would be really annoying to have a bot come through and remove them. The hyphenated number is recognizable as an ISBN and adds a layer of meaning that would be lost. Cuñado ☼ - Talk 20:28, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1. The single long digit string is easier to select (via double click on a desktop UI or by tap-and-hold on a touch UI). Searching works better with this option. Select-copy-paste-search seems like by far the most common thing users will be doing with an ISBN. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 20:47, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 2 Although I think the terminology of the survey is misleading. I don't think 9781723818028 is wrong at all, but 978-1-7238-1802-8 is better. I find the hyphenation meaningful and frequently helpful when editing, as do others. Both are ISBNs according to the ISBN standard. Wikipedia doesn't need to invent an ISBN standard -- there is one and many editors seem able to work with it. We don't need to oversimplify reality. It's not that complicated. I do have a personal opinion/preference that we shouldn't use spaces because of the practical concern already mentioned "more difficult to recognize as a single identifier", which just seems practical for Wikipedia, but is anyone really suggesting that? The consistency argument just seems wrong to me. It's like arguing we need capitalization standards for personal names, and seriously suggesting all-lowercase would solve potential confusion. To capture the variable information available a better analogy would be publication date specification and insisting either everything on Wikipedia needs full year-month-day, or everything should have month and day stripped for "consistency". I do not understand why anyone seriously thinks correctly hyphenated ISBNs are a problem. (and I thought ISBN edit warring had settled down) Salpynx (talk) 21:15, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
• Options 2 or 5 I like the hyphens visible as I know how the digits are encoded by the hyphens. I often get nothing when trying to get the autofill function in the cite book template to work and have to fill in the the fields manually because the ISBN isn't recognized for some reason and the hyphens help me to ensure that I've transcribed them properly. We're not paper and I'm entirely unmoved by the argument that the hyphens consume precious space and typing time in the templates.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 23:26, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 5. Standardise nothing; permit editorial discretion.
  I can't remember which publishers are which way, but I have definitely both needed to hyphenate an unhyphenated ISBN and separately to dehyphenate a hyphenated ISBN for different publisher's search queries.
  Personally, I copypaste whatever format is on the publisher's landing page, or type in whatever is on the copyright page of a physical book.
  I'm probably biased because I don't think I've ever noticed whether an ISBN in a citation is hyphenated or not (I'm just glad to see them), and have never thought to standardize their formatting even in one article, even if I've personally added all the book citations. Folly Mox (talk) 02:55, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Options 4 and 2 in that order. Having grouping is the point; it intuitively identifies what is or isn't an ISBN. Spaces should always be preferred to hyphens, commas, and all other grouping characters. Ifly6 (talk) 02:41, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• ISBNs used to be fundamental to the markup, many years ago, and spaces didn't work then. For historical compatibility, and the fact that spaces break word selection, rule out any option that includes spaces. Other than that, on balance I'd lean towards what all of the other WWW sites mentioned are doing. It's the 21st century. We don't punctuate our ISBNs now, just as many of us don't punctuate our telephone numbers in our mobile 'phones now. Yes, there are house style guides for paper publishers that say "use hyphens". It seems like a step backwards to copy them when we started off Wikipedia by keeping up with modern non-paper WWW conventions. That said, we should be easygoing if an editor uses the old paper-style hyphens. The hyphen style should be acceptable, just recognized as not what the WWW has largely settled on. Uncle G (talk) 03:13, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 5/status quo. This is a tea-cup storm. Let's not make it harder to use templates for those with editing issues and make countless pointless bot edits to clutter watchlists and edit histories. For clarity, I don't support the idea of standardising ISBNs even within a given article; it just seems like pointless make-work. Espresso Addict (talk) 05:27, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1; failing that: Option 5. We see that lots of sites with information about books use the compact form, with no loss in utility as an identifier. This actual use across the web is much more persuasive than what a standards body has said it wants. Introducing hyphens or spaces introduces more possibility for error (like the example where endashes created an error) and harder detection of error. Confirming that a string consists of 978 and then ten more digits is one of the simplest regular expressions you can make; (verifying the check digit is more complex but has to be done whatever format the ISBN is given in.) MartinPoulter (talk) 14:06, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 5 for consistency with the way we as a project handle other issues of this type. Me, I like hyphens. I think they make a bibliography look more cyberpunk. XOR'easter (talk) 14:34, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 or, failing that Option 5. Practice elsewhere and ease-of-use argument favour option 1. Ease-of-reading arguments against this have some merit, but don't make a particularly compelling argument in favour of any particular hyphenated/spaced option - so option 5 second-choice. But to me, ISBNs have limited utility as human-readable information, and are much more valuable as machine-readable tags, which favours option 1. Charlie A. (talk) 15:43, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 for usability and concision. Happy editing, SilverTiger12 (talk) 16:16, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 as first choice. Option 5 as a second choice (although I do not like to see spaces). I do think consistency is important here. --Enos733 (talk) 16:53, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 5 Consistently inconsistent. Leave it up to personal preference/local consensus so long as it is consistent within the article. Curbon7 (talk) 21:36, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 – Unequivocally the highest utility option. Will begrudgingly support Option 5 if consensus for Option 1 does not eventuate. 5225_C (talk • contributions) 12:14, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 2 or 5 - per Sturmvogel 66. I'm not impressed by the arguments for either conciseness or consistency, and I find the spaceless version (as mandated by option 1) to be less usable. — Charles Stewart (talk) 21:52, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  "Less usable" in what way? What's an example use case in which the hyphenated form demonstrably has better usability (which is not the same as or even closely related to subjective aesthetics)?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:56, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

• Option 5 per WP:CREEP. Andrew🐉(talk) 22:33, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  I disagree that that's applicable.; users still won't have to change their behavior or read any new rules if one of options 1-4 passes. Mach61 (talk) 05:29, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

  If 1-4 won't have any effect then I'm not seeing the point of them. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:15, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

• Status quo per Kanguole: hyphens are optional but preferred. No evidence has been presented that there is a problem here, except that some editors idiosyncratically prefer to copypaste ISBNs into a Google web search rather than use Special:BookSources. The advantages of hyphenenated ISBNs (viz. that they are human-readable, and that they convey useful information to those who know how to read them) outweigh the slight inconveniences suffered by those who are using them in unexpected ways.
  I second the argument by Salpynx below that the RFC is malformed; the question implies that there is no existing standard, which will naturally cause !voters to assume that Option 5 is the status quo (see for example the !votes by Mike Christie and Espresso Addict). In my opinion, every one of the options presented will cause more problems than simple enforcement of the existing guidelines. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 08:31, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
  ETA: if I have to pick an option, Option 2, but this is still a distant second to the status quo. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 07:09, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
  • FWIW my !vote for option 5 is not support for "hyphens are optional but preferred", it is support for "no option is preferred over any other". Thryduulf (talk) 12:09, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
• Preferably Option 2 which looks like an ISBN. I find Option 1 and Option 3 acceptable, but not 4, since it doesn't get the pros of 1 (searchability) or 2/3 (readability, usability). Option 5 is a reasonable improvement if no standard is adopted. MarioGom (talk) 17:23, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 2: It's the official standard and it's much better for readability than just an unstructured string of 13 digits. If that fails to reach consensus, my second choice would be option 5 with options 1 (9781723818028), 2 (978-1-7238-1802-8), and 3 (978-1723818028) as supported variants. The use of spaces (option 4) seems to be rare and non-standard and I can't see any good reason to support it even as a variant. Gawaon (talk) 18:36, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1: It's cleaner in the wikitext, which is complex and messy. Templates can reformat with dashes during rendering. Second choice is #2. Third choice is #5. -- GreenC 02:00, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 2 (looks like an ISBN, and is more common), or, less preferably, option 1 (consistency above all), enforced by all relevant templates, and oppose option 5 which will lead to bikeshedding. People who argue that option 5 will prevent arguments are ignoring the fact that ISBN formatting will become inconsistent in an article over time, thus leading to arguments. This should be 'set & forget'; we have more important things to do. DFlhb (talk) 09:51, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

  Citation styles and national language varieties do not generally lead to bikeshedding, I don't see why this would be any different? Thryduulf (talk) 10:44, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

  It's not that rare for ENGVAR, but its clear benefits make up for that. Even one debate about ISBN format is one too many, when around 1% of readers interact with citations, and much fewer will interact with ISBNs.

  edit: the debates in this discussion give you a preview. Some have opinions about how all ISBNs should look. Others will argue for changing some ISBNs to reflect various search engines or the style used in the book. Option 5 guarantees these arguments will occur, whereas tyranny of the majority will save us all boatloads of time on an irrelevant matter. DFlhb (talk) 11:22, 6 November 2023 (UTC) edited 12:48, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

• Option 2 looks like the better choice, Option 1 is also acceptable. Having dashes makes it look more organized and easier to understand. The 🏎 Corvette 🏍 ZR1^{(The Garage)} 13:37, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 2 – Hyphens are used by the vast majority of sources, and they facilitate line breaks which is useful for multi-column footnote sections. Additionally, I would very much be opposed to mandating that the hyphens be removed (as in option 1). Graham (talk) 06:11, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

  Are they? As pointed out in the proposal Worldcat, which is probably the biggest record of ISBN on the web doest use hyphens or spaces. My wife's latest read Rod The Autobiography doesn't, neither does my read by Jack Dee. And if you look at the back of books where the bar code is, they are only spaced as per the bar code. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 07:21, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

  Quickly grabbing the four closest books, all of them from different publishers (DK, Andrews McMeel, Running Press, Center Street) and published in 2022 or later, all four of them have the ISBN with proper hyphens above the bar code. The Center Street one does not use hyphens on the copyright page, but the other three do. Pulling up an Amazon listing for the hardcover edition of Rod: the Autobiography. I see a picture of its back cover which does included the hyphenated version over the bar code (although there do seem to be multiple editions off hardback out there.) Finding a listing for the UK paperback edition on eBay, it does not use hyphens on the copyright page but does above the bar code. Searching "Jack Dee" on Amazon and pulling up the first result, then using the "read sample" version (which shows the ebook version), the copyright page there shows separated ISBNs, although using spaces (grrr) instead of hyphens. Pulling up a copy of that same Jack Dee book on eBay, I can see it uses hyphens above the bar code on the back cover. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 14:21, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

  I find them hyphenated on copyright pages the vast majority of the time. Of course, the style used in bibliographic databases (such as WorldCat) might differ from that, and I might feel differently if we were discussing the style best used in a database. Graham (talk) 02:20, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• Option 5 per the above arguments. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 08:08, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• Status quo (not quite option 5). As with Espresso Addict above, I don't think this is something that's worth standardizing even within a given article. I'm not being given the indication that one way is preferable to the other or that this is such a common, reoccurring issue that a rule needs to be laid down (as opposed to this being a WP:LAME edit war or otherwise incidents that require individual sanctions). (Personally, I find that hyphens make a citation look more complete, and it's easier to remove them than to add them if you don't know where they go, but it's not such a big deal that I change from one to the other arbitrarily.) Oh, and this !vote applies to both ISBN-10 and ISBN-13. -BRAINULATOR9 (TALK) 18:43, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• Status quo / Option 5. But I disagree with the idea that even within an article there needs to be consistency. It doesn't matter. If one editor wants to have the hyphenless version and another uses hyphens, who cares. The rare times ISBNs get used, they're going to an ISBN lookup website, which should be able to handle any format. Furthermore, to the extent any format should be preferred, it should be the format read out of the book itself - which usually seems to be the hyphens format in my experience, so I'm surprised Option 1 is getting as much traction as it is. But basically whatever is written in the book itself is what should be used for any one citation, and if for some reason different books within the same article had different styles, then oh well. But really. This is WP:CREEP - it doesn't matter, let people contribute ISBNs however they like. SnowFire (talk) 22:23, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
• Status quo /Option 5. For the reasons given by SnowFire and others. I don't see how forcing any change is going to improve Wikipedia. - Donald Albury 23:33, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1, easier to copy and transfer. Stifle (talk) 10:49, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
• Status quo. I was ready to go all in on Option 2 as what I recall bibliographies using most often, but that is tempered by how WorldCat uses Option 1. I'm inclined to think that this isn't an issue and that internal consistency is only important for FAs. I see no harm in adding the Option 5 functionality and letting editors opt into an ISBN-standardizing CS1 option similar to date and engvar formatting but I also don't think we need to police this across all articles now. czar 17:18, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
• Option 1 Regards,--Goldsztajn (talk) 11:39, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Discussion (ISBNs)

The searchability issue favors no spaces. But it's even more important that the ISBN be correctly entered, and in many cases this must be done by the editor looking at a paper book and typing the ISBN. The hyphens reduce the likelihood of an error in the manual copying process. Jc3s5h (talk) 10:48, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

But this won't be affected, because nothing about this RfC (no matter what its outcome) would have any requirement for particular input. There isn't any suggestion anywhere in here to do something to disallow anyone inputting |isbn=978-1-7238-1802-8 or {{ISBN|978-1-7238-1802-8}}. All the options presented above call for ensuring that {{format ISBN}} will auto-convert whatever format, as needed. And |isbn= and {{ISBN}} already handle all these formats anyway and convert them internally (to 9781723818028 style) for use with tools like Special:BookSources/9781723818028). AnomieBot would take care of {{format ISBN}} regardless of the input, automatically, since it's already substituting that template (the bot is completely agnostic as to what the template's output is). Even Option 5 wouldn't impose on someone an entry-format requirement, just permit other editors to re-normalize the format to whatever was already dominant on the page (the way we do with normalizing divergent citation formats, date formats, English variety, etc., to conform to the rest of the page). If we settled on a particular format (instead of option 5), a bot could actually more directly just replace divergent formats with the canonical one, without relying on {{format ISBN}} as an intermediary.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:10, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

|isbn= and {{ISBN}} already handle all these formats anyway and convert them internally (to 9781723818028 style) – wouldn't the obvious solution here be to have these templates which "already handle and convert" these variants also standardize the displayed output throughout an article? A global standard would in my opinion be best, but if there's no consensus on a global standard format, it could be subjected to a per-page preference similar to date formats, defaulting to the just-the-digits format since that one seems to be most popular to date. There does not need to be any kind of stardization of the hyphens/spaces used in the template parameters in the page markup, so readers who want to type an ISBN from a paper book copying the format exactly could continue to do so. –jacobolus (t) 18:51, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

This is basically what Option 5 is about.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:51, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

No this is entirely different from your "Option 5". Changing the {{ISBN}}, {{citation}}, and {{cite book}} to standardize the output ISBN format would solve the problem once and for all in a single place in a way which would require no article edits and no significant editor effort. Changing {{format ISBN}} and insisting on a standard hyphenation (even per article) would require a bot to go touch some proportion of citations on most articles throughout the project, which would be hugely disruptive and annoying, and then would be just as much of a pain if anyone ever later decided to standardize on a particular hyphenation variant. –jacobolus (t) 13:00, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Note AnomieBOT doesn't do anything special to subst {{Format ISBN}}. It does so only because someone has placed {{Subst only|auto=yes}} on the template's documentation page, causing it to be in Category:Wikipedia templates to be automatically substituted. Anomie⚔ 11:41, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

• The issue of intervening edits making changes harder to undo is just a standard part of Wikipedia editting, I'm not sure it's mentioned, and {{format ISBN}} doesn't enforce anything, it's a tool you can use if you wish to format the ISBNs with hyphens.-- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 11:49, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  If you're working on an article and want to make sure everything is presented in a standard manner that's great, as per the exception to CITEVAR that covers such work. However if your going from article to article to just impose your preference on such things you should find something actually useful to do. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 15:27, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  It was "drive-by" changing of the format to the hyphen-laden form, by different editors at unrelated articles, twice in the same week that inspired me to pose this RfC question, though it had been on my mind for some time because of previous but more spaced-apart incidents.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:03, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  If editors are ignoring CITEVAR (and I think it would already apply), ask them to stop. If that doesn't work report them for disruptive editting as with any problematic editting. Introducing CREEP to solve the issue isn't the way to go. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 17:09, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  If we already all clearly agreed that CITEVAR applied to this, then this discussion and the events which led to it would have have happened. And not all ISBNs on Wikipedia are in citations; that's just the most common use case.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:52, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  The events that led to this was one editor systematically mass editting their own personal preference into articles. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 12:28, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Some history:

• 16 March 2020 – {{Format ISBN}}, Module:Format ISBN, and Module:Format ISBN created
• 6 June 2020 – template made substable
• 18 November 2022 – nominated for deletion
• 25 November 2022 – template and modules deleted deleted as a result of the TfD
• 22 April 2023 – template and modules recreated as a result of this discussion (permalink) at WT:ISBN

Above Editor SMcCandlish wrote: And |isbn= and {{ISBN}} already handle all these formats anyway and convert them internally (to 9781723818028 style) for use with tools like Special:BookSources/9781723818028). Not wholly true. Yes, |isbn= and {{ISBN}} handle separated and non-separated ISBNs and, yes, for ease of check-digit validation, hyphens and spaces are stripped, but when creating a link to Special:BookSources, both use the ISBN string as supplied in the template:

|isbn=978-1-7238-1802-8 → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-7238-1802-8.

Editor SMcCandlish also wrote: Given that "most of the parts [of an ISBN] do not use a fixed number of digits", some of the output of this template may be arbitrary anyway, without corresponding to meaningful ISBN identifier fragments. None of the {{format ISBN}} template output is arbitrary. The data in Module:Format ISBN/data is created by Module:ISBN RangeMessage xlate which takes as input a local copy of https://www.isbn-international.org/export_rangemessage.xml (that's a direct download link; the local copy that created the current version of Module:Format ISBN/data can be seen by editing Module:ISBN RangeMessage xlate/doc (edit link). The range data are inside the <!--...--> tags.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:34, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Well, if it's Special:BookSources that does the parsing instead, it's the same ultimate point in the end: it doesn't matter what input format some editor wants to use. I stand corrected on what {{format ISBN}} is doing (and adjusted the argument above to compensate); it's more clever code than it looked at first. But the same question remains: what utility does this provide? It seems to be clever geekery for clever geekery's own sake. We don't have any encyclopedic need for it, when a 9781723818028 works perfectly fine (as does Amazon's format 978-1723818028 for that matter). How is the end reader helped in any way? How are editors (doing anything actually productive) helped in any way?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:03, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

• question Would it be possible to do for ISBNs what we did for geographic coordinates, and display the value with hyphens while lilnking through to a page that allows passing the unhyphenated value to the various book search services? Mangoe (talk) 15:53, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  Are you asking this question of me? Are you asking for the citation templates to take |isbn=978-1-7238-1802-8 as input and have it create https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9781723818028 as output? When creating links to Google books, Amazon, Worldcat, etc, Special:BookSources does strip hyphen and space separators (float you mouse over any or the source links at Special:BookSources/978-1-7238-1802-8 to see that).

  —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:11, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) We're already passing the value through to various book search services: when you click on the linked ISBN (in, e.g.: Title Here. ISBN 9781723818028.), you get to a page like Special:BookSources/9781723818028. One of the problems here, though, is that this is not a particularly convenient way to find a book at all, and it is much more expedient to (i.e., users will) just copy-paste the ISBN and Google it. I've outlined in detail above what the results are with different formats, and the only dependably good one is the no-hyphens-no-spaces format. So, I suppose a possible kinda-sorta solution would be to display the ISBN visually as hyphenated (or with spaces, whatever someone chose) but make it copy-paste without that formatting. That would require some CSS ::before stuff, probably. But someone might object that people shouldn't be surprised by what they copy-paste. And then others might counter that we're already doing things like this (without anyone evincing any confusion) with small-caps templates so that {{sc|abc}} ABC copy-pastes as "abc" (the caps are only visual cosmetics). And so on. Is that really a debate worth having? I'm not sure.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:21, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

  I use Special:Booksources exclusively for the templates that produce it, because copying the digits, typing out https://books.google.com/, selecting the entry box, typing isbn: and then pasting is a stupid amount of work when I have two links so easily available (one from article to Booksources and the other from Booksources to Google).

  And to be frank, using Google Web Search is a bad idea for book searching. Use the tool they provide for the reason they provide it. Izno (talk) 02:23, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

  That's kind of a straw man, since I suggested no such tedious process, and going through it is entirely unnecessary. Just copy the "9781723818028" ISBN, open a new window or tab, type isbn , paste the number, press Enter. The entire process takes a couple of seconds, and instantly brings up the book you are looking for both in biblio databases (including your favored Google Books, which is not favored by everyone) and at vendors. Well, unless the ISBN has dashes or spaces in it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:33, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

  Even this process takes longer than two clicks. I presented the whole of what one might do to ensure it was clear that I wasn't strawmanning - it's really how I do it to ensure that I get the data I need immediately (a user story). If we take your workflow (I was fairly certain you were using this shorter flow, so that's the second reason I wanted to make clear how people were getting from point A to B), you still are using Google (or other search service -- I use DDG, so your flow is not sufficient to account for that - I'd need to type !g also) in a way they don't intend ultimately, and thus you get the imprecise answers that you claim are the fault of one particular style of entry. Using Booksources eliminates this issue and also provides the normal ways to get at the bibliographic data, including Google Books, OCLC, and Amazon.com (or .ae, .au, .br, .ca, .cn, .de, .es, .fr, .in, .it, .jp, .mx, .nl, .pl, .sa, .se, .sg, .tr, .uk). Those are all present on the "front page" matter of Booksources (with access to other options below that). The only thing Booksources doesn't do is give me a direct link to the publisher's website, and that is even more trivial than your search (select, right click, search for -- but I'm not usually searching for the ISBN at that point anyway, I just plug the title in).

  Then you're just left with hand-input ISBN numbers which are no longer hand-input since a while ago since they all (were supposed to) lost their link to Special:Booksources, for which we now have {{ISBN}}. Izno (talk) 18:51, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

  That you personally prefer a longer search process and/or using our Special:Booksources feature is rather irrelevant. It's faster to not. Booksources is something good to have in existence, but is actually quite tedious to use, and can be intimidating/confusing to a lot of users who have no idea what any of those databases and things are, so don't know what to click on when they get there. Even experienced users like me who do know what they are may find it much more convenient just to do copy-paste-click in Google. It's much more efficient. Unless the ISBN is broken up. Even then, I find it more efficient to copy-paste the ISBN and remove hyphens from it than to futz around in the Booksources list.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:57, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  It's faster to not This is a statement in your reality, but not a fact. Don't present it as such. Izno (talk) 21:10, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Is there any data on how widespread of a problem this actually is? If this issue is truly causing editors to catapult fireballs at one another, that's one thing, but the opening statement says the issue is that different editors are going around normalizing them to one format and then again to another, at cross-purposes to each other, and without a clear consensus for any particular format. So one editor pastes an ISBN in without hyphens and another editor adds hyphens to it. If it isn't actually impacting one another's work, who cares? (I'll also say I must agree with Levivich: it is very evident reading the RFC background which option SMcCandlish is personally vying for, and even though that would be my personal preference too, that and the utter lack of a "leave everything as is" option strike me as a tad concerning.) 2603:8001:4542:28FB:69D3:61CF:7C25:A2F8 (talk) 01:44, 1 November 2023 (UTC) (Please send talk messages here instead)

So, should I rewrite the backaround material to hide basic facts and maybe inject some blatant lies about utility of or a globally standardized requirement for dashes or spaces? What would please you? It's not my fault that the actual reality leans strongly in a particular direction on this. Yes, I strongly favor option 1, but I included option 5 anyway, knowing full well it would strongly appeal to regulars at WT:CITE and probably cause option 1 to fail. And I included all the other options even though they are terrible ideas, because I knew at least a few people would want them anyway. There is no rationale for a "leave everything as is" option when there is an issue to resolve. If people believe no issue exists they can say so and suggest to do nothing, on their own initiative. Or someone can go add that pointless option to the option list. But I left it off on purpose, because "do nothing" is not constructive in problem-solving. "No change" is only a sensible option when someone wants to make a subjective change that is not addressing any actual objectively definable issue (like a proposal to reword a guideline for alleged inclarity in how it phrases something). Option 5 is already the "permit everything" option, which is probably what most people actually have in mind when "do nothing/no change" is their gut reaction but a poor phrasing/conceptualization of the "permit everything" sense that inpired them to feel that way in the first place. And "fireball catapulting" is not a magical requirement for there to be an issue to address. Any unproductive editorial conflict that is recurrent and predictable and also unnecessary is something that should be addressed one way or another.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:33, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Here's one editor who generates much more than their share of fuss by repeatedly messing with valid ISBNs. Others can probably link to more. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:32, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

And not even one of the ones whose activity in this regard inspired me to open this thread.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:33, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

{{Format ISBN}} is a tool that editors can use to hypenate ISBNs as specified by the International ISBN Agency. It is always subst'ed – the bot is merely subst'ing cases where subst: does not work due to a MediaWiki bug. The template is not enforcing anything. As such, the suggestions to have {{Format ISBN}} simply remove hyphens, or just add one in a fixed position, or to have options to do these things, are pointless.

As noted by the IP above, the omission of a status quo option is a major flaw of this RFC. That status quo (reflected in WP:ISBN#Types and {{cite book}}) is that hyphens are optional but preferred, and should not be removed if correctly placed. Kanguole 09:19, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

IMHO, we need Option 6: use the ISBN format in the source. That solves the problem of where to add spaces or hyphens. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 13:25, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Option 5 is more or less the status quo option. Re option 6: which source? The printed copy of the book? The publisher's web site? Google Books? WorldCat? There is no reason to expect these all to use the same format as each other. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:26, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Obviously, from the document being cited, whether it is, e.g., a dead tree, a PDF, a web page. I suppose that there could still be ambiguity if it is a reprint with a different ISBN, but the rule of citing the copy you're looking at should resolve the potential ambiguity. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:43, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

So if I happen to be using a print book I have to go to the trouble of finding the ISBN printed on it and manually typing it in rather than looking up the same book on Google Books and copying the ISBN? And then, because the version I used was a print copy, I am forbidden from providing publisher links to electronic copies of the same book, typeset exactly the same, because that would be citing a different version? And I have to cite the reprint year of the copy I have rather than citing the year the same book was originally first published? This is taking "cite the version you used" to a ridiculous and obstructionary extreme. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:58, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

Please stop attributing to me things that I never wrote. Yes, you are allowed to use, e,g, |chapter-url=, |orig-date=, |url=. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk)

I don't think the "ISBN agency" statements in the Background which appear to diminish the status of hyphens here are correct. "There is no standard" is false. From the ISO 2108:2017 standard under section 4.1, General Structure of an ISBN:

When an ISBN is displayed in human readable form (i.e. a form meant primarily to be read or written by a person, in contrast to a form primarily meant to be used by data processing equipment), it shall be preceded by the letters ISBN and each of the elements of the ISBN should be separated from the others by a hyphen as in the following example. EXAMPLE ISBN 978-90-70002-34-3

(since last I checked the bit about spaces appears to have been removed; this is good.) Comparing database forms to the Wikipedia form which is clearly meant to be human readable is not a fair comparison. Usage is not consistent because the usecases are not consistent. The standard has clear guidelines for both. If editors are entering ISBNs from the imprint page we shouldn't have such a problem with missing hyphens (un-hyphenated ISBNs in my experience are a sign of shortcut referencing by scraping databases, and a ISBN with m-dashes and other extraneous symbols is a better sign of good faith by-the-book referencing. Either way both can be tidied later). Adding hyphens is a little computationally expensive and having them pre-populated for display (the main purpose of a wiki-page) is preferable to doing it on the fly (could be done with bulky js). Stripping hyphens is less expensive, and that is done efficiently where and when needed. I'm willing to tolerate un-hyphenated ISBNs for practicality's sake, but I'm not going to like or prefer them. Also, unthinking Google searches as an argument for usability aren't really valid either. Google search doesn't tokenise ISBN or ISBN-like strings that way for general search... but they do for their book specific service Google books: isbn:978-1-7238-1802-8 will produce useful results. The usability argument on https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tartan&diff=1182749582&oldid=1182729804 doesn't make sense since the used templates provide links to Google books in a way that handles hyphens correctly. If your usecase really is to use general Google indexing to maximise ISBN like results, you have to do more work get get all possible variants that may have been indexed on various kinds of online documents, but that's not what Wikipedia ISBN templates offer to do (nor should they; they currently do a reasonable job). I lack the terminology or links to argue that ISBN-hyphens are more than merely a style like UK or US English. It's more like page numbers in references. An article with 3 out 10 refs having page numbers would not be fixed by deleting all page numbers. Also share some of the frustration + storm in a tea-cup comments expressed above. Perhaps the problem could be solved with better ISBN documentation on one of the many pages: what is acceptable and why, and set expectations on how to reasonably use ISBNs for search and other valid and important purposes. Anti-hyphen editors seem to miss some of these. Salpynx (talk) 23:48, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Something that an organization wishes would become a standard, but which has not been widely adopted and has not resulted in anything like standardization, is not a "standard" in any meaning of that word that Wikipedia (or much of anyone else for that matter) needs to care about. In point of fact, usage of the no-hyphens-no-spaces form has increased exponentinally over the last 20 years or so, through adoption and usage by all these databases and most vendors; any hope that either the hyphenated or spaced forms would ever become a standard was lost long ago. Next, the idea that they're all using the bare-numeric format as just some kind of internal identifier not intended for human reading is not correct at all. Every single one of the databases and such that I linked to as using 9781723818028 format does so in way that is reader-facing content. I clearly identified the outlier using the hypenated form, and the one I could find that did not seem to use ISBNs at all. If I had been able to find any major bibiographic site using bare-numeric for internal data-munging reasons (e.g. in its URL strings) but hyphenated or spaced form for human presentation I would have listed it. Feel free to find one and add it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:14, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

While this RFC has been going on, User:Trappist the monk has suddenly begun making huge numbers of edits replacing ISBNs with the format template, with the edit summary "cite repair;". I think Wikipedia:Fait accompli is relevant here. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:38, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

This sounds like something that needs to be brought up at ANI sooner rather than later. Thryduulf (talk) 01:46, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

Not true. Not true. Not true. I have been adding {{format ISBN}} to articles for months. Here is a manual edit from 1 June 2023. I included {{format ISBN}} in an awb script I was using to clear Category:CS1 maint: uses authors parameter on 1 October 2023. Here is the first edit from that run to add {{format ISBN}} to an article. I am currently working on Category:CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list using another awb script that also adds {{format ISBN}}. I included {{format ISBN}} in the scripts because the nominally preferred form was (and still is) hyphenated; see WP:ISBN and Template:Cite book#csdoc_isbn. Until this discussion started there had been nary a peep from anyone about my use of {{format ISBN}} to hyphenate ISBNs. Since this discussion began, I have modified the current script that I am using so that it uses a crude counting scheme to determine if the article uses a mix of hyphenated or non hyphenated ISBNs. Only when the count of hyphenated ISBNs is greater than or equal to the count of non hyphenated ISBNs will the script apply {{format ISBN}}. The script does not undo hyphenated formatting because that is not a functionality available in {{format ISBN}}.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 02:56, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

All of Trappist's recent edits labeled "cite repair" that I have examined are ones I would consider to run against the spirit of WP:COSMETICBOT and WP:CITEVAR. These edits are in my opinion a pure distraction, pointlessly cluttering up watchlists for no reader benefit I can discern. –jacobolus (t) 07:33, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

I strongly feel that WP:CITEVAR has no impact on ISBN hyphen preference. They are not two equally valid alternative styles, one is preferred over the other This happens to be my personal preference too, but I honestly believe it has been discussed and some version of that truth is settled upon consistently every time this issue comes up. I and other editors have been editing in hyphens like this for years, without any editwars. Hyphenated ISBNs are the preference.

Can we add ISBN hyphenation to "Generally considered helpful" WP:CITEVAR because that is my, and others', understanding of what the guidelines are in fact now? Stating it there might clear up some of the misconceptions around ISBN edit-wars. I'm somewhat surprised that WP:COSMETICBOT seemingly puts these hyphen edits clearly in the substantive category because they do make a visual difference, and assistive whitespace changes are also included. It seems ISBN hyphenation is clearly Help:Minor_edit, and seems reasonable to group with punctuation and italicization of non-English words. I'd totally entertain the idea that bot edits only doing punctuation, non-English word italicization, or ISBN hyphenation "are a bit annoying", but I can't even see a warning not to. According to that page marking the edit as minor is sufficient to avoid watchlist noise. Is there are real guideline against making repetitive minor edits? Salpynx (talk) 08:17, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

No, because if this poll is showing anything it is a clear lack of consensus that adding hyphens to ISBNs is "generally considered helpful" on Wikipedia. The leading option right now appears to be no. 5 (permit multiple styles), and running second is removing all hyphens and spaces.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:58, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

That's the leading option of the options presented. I wasn't going to participate in this RfC myself because I don't agree with any of the options; but I'm concerned now that a "no consensus" close will be interpreted as "no consensus that hyphens are useful", simply because there is no option that says "hyphens are useful but we shouldn't mandate them", i.e. status quo. I suspect this is what many people !voting 5 actually mean. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 09:08, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

That's certainly what I meant. Gog the Mild (talk) 20:58, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

I have not been paying close recent attention, but was aware that User:Trappist the monk has been making this kind of edit arising from events and discussions months ago on various ISBN pages. I see no problem with these edits and strongly agree with his "Not true" x3. I'd characterize these pre-and-post RFC edits as entirely in line with all current guidelines including CITEVAR and the current guidance (as stated by User:Kanguole "hyphens are optional but preferred, and should not be removed if correctly placed.", and also consistent with "consensus" as there was quite a bit of discussion around it months ago, and some of the ideas and concerns have been around for years on various ISBN and bibliographic pages, and this work arose naturally out of a long history of discussion and other ISBN related work. The fact that he has made some concessions in his script seems a politeness not even warranted by this RFC. Various editors have tried to express the "what is this?" nature of the RFC, from its obvious favouring of option 1, "if it's not broke don't fix it", lack of status quo option, lack of concrete examples of the disruptive edits or edit war that prompted it. Four of the 5 options, and even the 6th suggested options are all things have have been taken into consideration with the current status-quo guidelines, which is a practical compromise that takes into account the main features of ISBNs, publication practicalities, and the goals of Wikipedia. Some or most of the details can easily be dismissed as ISBN or bibliographic "geekery". The problem is that all the editors who seem to care about this geekery have a shared understanding of what it is, or actively contributed to the existing guidelines, and can see how it can be apllied consistently in many situations. Editors who expressly _don't_ care about the details seem less willing to understand, and it's sometimes difficult to explain all the relevant factors. This problem sorts itself in practice by the editors who do care, do the thing, and editors who don't care don't have to worry about it. Option 1 barely makes sense with its "and change {{Format ISBN}} to use it." -- I don't know how or why this could be used in practice, and the very suggestion seems to betray a lack of understanding of what the template is for, and how it got here. The basic premise of the RFC is flawed: "Should the format of ISBNs be standardized (or be subject to a rule to not change format without consensus)?" -- The format of ISBNs is standard, it is reflected in "hyphens are optional but preferred". This may not be strict enough for you, but people who care, care, and there are reasons behind this, which lead to its quo status. There is a consensus rule that relates to whether ISBN formats should be changed: "hyphens are optional but preferred, and should not be removed if correctly placed." In my last comment I posted a quote from the ISBN standard, and User: SMcCandlish responded with some sort of No true Scotsman response. I don't want to argue whether an industry body responsible for the spec of the industry standard we are talking about is entitled to author that spec or should be taken seriously -- that seems like madness. You have been provided with:

• Specific claims from Wikipedia editors who claim to find hyphenated ISBNs useful, and multiple use-cases to show how (some listed above)
• General principles outside Wikipedia that suggest chunked-numeric ids are more suited to human use, and Wikipedia principles that articles are for human use over machine use, made concrete by the specific claims above. It's not just theoretical. We should at least pay lip service to the idea that Wikipedia isn't written by-bots-for-bots. Also, Wikipedia is not other websites.
• The ISBN spec that succinctly supports the above specific use-case claims and principles, although maybe we can dismiss specs?

The one concrete use-case to apparently "counter" the pro-hyphen human readability is the "quicker to click and Google search it", which as others have hinted above runs into search-engine blackbox / monopoly territory, and you yourself appreciated Special:BookSources and Google books as a beneficial clearly "different" use-case, so agree that it's not a replacement for the Wikipedia specific solution to useful bibliographic searches that other editors are able to competently and successfully use. Your argument use-case seems to explicitly distance itself from the provided Wikipedia method to achieve a Wiki-goal via templates and special-links, so your single "As a user who doesn't want to look at ISBNs, I want to click on them in my browser and search a general-purpose search engine for results relevant to my interests" sounds more like a use-case for you favourite browser-and-search-engine corporation, and self-admittedly less relevant to Wikipedia.

The beauty of the pro-hyphen view is that you can still do this if it's important to you. The counter to this seems to be "but think of the machines! What reasonable person could think an automated tool could reliably strip hyphens from a string?" Turns out machines are very good at this, in a way that human eyes aren't at adding them when viewing multiple 13 digit numbers on a page. Consider a browser plugin that removes hyphens from text so you can send it directly to search engines if that's an important use-case.

The consistency "argument" does not conflict with the current status-quo. If we are to take both at face value we can conclude that consistently ISBN hyphenated articles are preferred to consistently un-hyphenated articles. It's not clear what we should do in an inconsistent state though. Hypothetically, since we don't have a good example from this RFC, suppose good-faith-ISBN-hyphenating-editor trying to follow status-quo guidelines correctly hyphenated 28 out of 30 ISBNs in an article. Should a bystander editor say:

A) "Thank you for improving that article! You missed two, could you please hyphenate those too, or is there a reason you didn't, or show me the tools so I can do this!"

or

B) "You have made my carefully crafted machine readable references inconsistent! I swear I have copy-pasted these ISBNs accurately, and have not incorrectly duplicated any, or swapped ISBNs to a different publisher's book, or accidentally auto-translated a German title copied from de.wiki in ways that might be obvious at a glance to ISBN geekery editors with hyphenation! And you are just making up these examples because you hate machine readablity, they're not real!" Revert!

A. seems the more reasonable approach, but if B occurs, the page will be protected until the next editor with a internally consistent view of how to apply current ISBN related guidelines will make the same "mistake" perhaps during other reference related improvements, and the page will need to be "defended" again.

It's fun to disparage disruptive edits; above there's a mention of an editor who, ironically, had been making the same kind of ISBN hyphenation reversions -- deleting correctly placed hyphens -- as the author of this RFC. When these things are discussed on ISBN related talk pages, historically it goes round and round and the consensus of different editors who care about ISBNs and adjacent things is "don't remove correctly placed hyphens from ISBNs -- this kind of edit is always wrong, it removes something many editors find useful, and adds nothing". Either the lone hyphen remover gives up, or perhaps takes some of the advice on board and improves their editing, all in accordance with existing guidelines, consensus, and specs. I thought the last editor who brought this up did learn somewhat and their edits improved. How is this RFC different? Why does anything need to change? I'm waving my hands defending a status-quo that doesn't need defending. When the next editor complains about ISBN hyphenation, will the status-quo guidelines change then? Is there anything inconsistent now that needs changing? There wasn't in the past, I see no reason for it to change now.

A concrete example relevant to this RFC is https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tartan&diff=1182749582&oldid=1182729804 -- where the author of this RFC removed correctly placed hyphens from an ISBN. For clarity I consider this according to current guidelines and past history and consensus, an unhelpful reversion that does not add anything, and reverts a minor constructive edit which is completely in line with all current guidelines. Why do we need an RFC to justify it after the fact?

Adjacent points which might have merit are:

• Making the Special:BookSources more useful if it is lacking in some concrete respect?
• What to do about minor but technically constructive according-to-current-guidelines edits at scale? There could be a valid but subtle point to make somewhere in here, but this RFC topic doesn't have much to do with it, and hopelessly confuses things.

On reflection this RFC misrepresents the reality of ISBN guidelines and formatting standards in a way that makes it difficult to succinctly engage with. It falsely equates the 'adding hyphens' and 'removing hyphens' rogue editors in way that makes it very unclear whether a particular side exists or is the main problem. There _is_ a standard and preference, there are guidelines and they seem consistent and un-problematic. It's not clear what problem the RFC is meant to solve, other than those caused by the originator's own edits, which don't align with the current guidelines as other editors seemingly agree.

Salpynx (talk) 06:10, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

Can you summarize this into a statement that won't take an hour to pore over? Homing in on a diff I can see in there, that was me reverting a change to the established style in the article, and with a clear rationale (though one person has long after the fact attempt to refute it, on the grounds that search engine behavior may change). If you want to fall back on WP:CITEVAR as the principle (and it seems you do: "in line with all current guidelines including CITEVAR", though it doesn't actually say anything about ISBNs, and ISBNs are not used on WP exclusively within citations), then that guideline is entirely on my side in that.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:03, 3 November 2023 (UTC); revised: 07:07, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

WP:CITEVAR does not support your edit, and this should be clarified there as it appears to be a common misconception. Adding ISBN hyphenation under Generally considered helpful should suffice.

Hyphenation has been discussed on Wikipedia_talk:ISBN for over a decade, and hyphens always win. It is the house style of Wikipedia via consensus not because it's a arbitrary choice, but because it has real advantages in line with Wikipedia principles like WP:READABLE. The human readable display form is well defined. Many editors have expressed their appreciation of this human readable form for practical and aesthetic reasons. Current guidelines can be re-phrased as "human readable ISBNs are preferred". The optional part is really just a concession to practicality, one that some editors aren't happy with, but are willing to tolerate, primarily because tooling is not perfect. {{Format ISBN}} is an improvement here. "I'm a human who needs machine readable ISBNs" does not counter all the human readable cases, and can be trivially accommodated by stripping the hyphens. Arguments for Option 6 express why the un-hyphenated format is objectively inferior for a human readable wiki. Inferior ISBN formatting is not a "style" choice to be consistent about. Salpynx (talk) 22:52, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

But there is really clearly no consensus that adding hyphens to ISBNs is generally considered helpful. Your entire argument depends on that being true, and it demonstrably is not.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:58, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

You haven't demonstrated anything. Evidence to support claim of consensus that ISBN hyphenation is helpful:

• Two main ISBN related templates I'm aware of have stated unchallenged for ages:
  • "Hyphens in the ISBN are optional, but preferred." Help:Citation_Style_1#isbn
  • "Use hyphens if they are included, as they divide the number into meaningful parts." Wikipedia:ISBN
• A decade of discussions on Wikipedia_talk:ISBN consistently favors and explains the merits of hyphenation.
• Documented and linked history of editors regarding hyphen removal as 'disruptive,' with swift corrections.
• No strong anti-hyphen argument has emerged or withstood scrutiny.
• Editors have made thousands of uncontroversial hyphen additions, indicating a widespread acceptance of hyphenated ISBNs.

I may be in a bubble, but my own standing edits, along with thousands of others (from bots, IP editors, and others I'm aware of over the last year), supports my view that there is a consensus favoring hyphenated ISBNs, evident in current guidelines and real edit histories.

If you have a valid question or argument about ISBN formats you should make it clearly and appropriately.

User:SMcCandlish Could you please withdraw or close-as-invalid this misleading and malformed RFC? Salpynx (talk) 01:45, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Some random user creating a template and offering their opinion it its documentation means jack-squat. That's not a guideline or policy, is not any other kind of site-wide consensus, and is noticed by virtually nobody. See also WP:CONTENTAGE: the fact that something has sat around unaddressed for a long time does not make it right. Discussions among the same tiny number of editors at a page like WT:ISBN that virtually no one knows or cares about? Exactly the same. VVPOL exists for a reason. I can also diff me and other people reverting injection of hyphens swiftly, also as disruptive. There is no agreement on this matter, as proved by the input at this RfC. The closest thing we have to a consensus about this, judging from how the RfC is proceeding, is that ISBN formatting should be treated as a WP:CITEVAR matter (which is about what I expected, though not what I hoped). The only argument that has presented any "scrutiny" of the anti-hyphen-anti-space argument is the idea that because search engine behavior might change we shouldn't take it into account; but search engines' different handling of strings like 9781723818028, 978-1723818028, 978-1-949996-57-9, and 978 1 949996 57 9 has not changed in any way that anyone has detected, for around 20 years, so there is no reason to expect that it will. That argument against no-hyphens-no-spaces is quite weak and in no way an actual refutation of the utility argument in favor of 9781723818028. The other arguments against it boil down to a combination of WP:IDONTLIKEIT and argument to authority (claim that Intl. ISBN Agency has produced a standard, when what they have produced is a would-be standard that is almost completely ignored in the real world and has no hope at this point of becoming an actual standard that gets broadly adopted; it's in a much, much worse implementation position now than it was a generation ago). Editors have also made thousands of uncontrovered hyphen removals; "my side is doing stuff" isn't proof that your side is right. Yes, you are in a bubble: you are ignoring or outright distorting all evidence that doesn't agree with your predetermined preference. Most obviously, if there were "a consensus favoring hyphenated ISBNs", then this RfC would not been leaning heavily toward treating it as CITEVAR matter. So, no I will not rescind an RfC that's making you unhappy because it contradicts you. I have no control over the fact that actual reality leans strongly toward favoring one particular format, falling back to treating them all as valid options, and leans strongly away from treating either of the hyphenated forms or especially the spaced form as preferable. The RfC looks "misleading" to you simply because it contradicts your desired outcome.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:51, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

almost completely ignored in the real world – Not sure this is fair. This is a pretty common way for ISBNs to be printed in physical books. –jacobolus (t) 14:17, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

As a publisher who purchases ISBNs, I can tell you that they arrive (at least from the US broker) in hyphenated format. Doing a quick Newspapers.com search for ISBN without any filters and looking at the first thirty results, I see about an even mix of hyphenated and non, with examples of each in both editorial and advertising. Checking publisher catalogs, I find examples that use hyphens and ones that don't, and that's three imprints from the same publisher! Now, whether the publishing world has anything to do with the real world is another question... --Nat Gertler (talk) 15:36, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Sure, okay. Then "almost completely ignored in the real world for any purposes that Wikipedia has any reason to care about". Hyphenated forms, found primarily on book colophons (and by no means all of them, just commonly) can be entered in that format, and would still continue to be able to be entered in that format, under every possible result of this RfC. But that format is not necessary for any purpose anyone can identify, is not a real-world standard, and provably impedes reader utility. This is why I favor option 1 but can live with option 5 (since at least I can provide that better utility in articles I create and someone else will not be empowered to willy-nilly undo it later; it's sad that people doing unhelpful things, to satisfy their own aesthetic urges or their own misunderstandings of what a standard is for practical purposes, will also be enabled to impose an unhelpful format on articles they create, but I can't lose sleep over the fact that the world contains problems I can't address, and I'm actually confident that given a longer span of time to mull this over, the community will actually standardize on the hyphenless format anyway).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:09, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Wait, you're saying that being able to get better results from newspapers.com and from Google aren't things people who might be using an ISBN from Wikipedia would care about? Wow. That seems inconsistent, considering your first in the list of arguments focused on getting search results from Google. It seems to me that finding more information about the material being cited is something a fair portion of those copying the ISBNs would care about; I have trouble seeing why one would assume otherwise. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 14:44, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

There is no possible reality where "Hyphens in the ISBN are optional, but preferred." and "Use hyphens if they are included..." can exist in those two templates and Wikipedia ISBNs not tend to become uniformly hyphenated through ongoing quality edits. Those words exist there now. We don't even need to talk about why. We could talk about why we would want to change them.

• No reasonable editor should be edit-warring over ISBNs. Given the lack of evidence, I see no problem.
• You are correct that to avoid circular edit wars we need a standard. We have one: it's the current status quo, it's hyphens.

If you give an example of a real world edit we could determine which version was correct and why. No correctly placed ISBN hyphen removal is ever justified, unless there is another factor at play. Under status quo I'd class any ISBN hyphen removal as either disruptive or unhelpful depending on the scale. I can't defend a hypothetical non-example. The only workable alternative to status quo is to change the ISBN template statements to say the un-hyphenated version is always preferred, and hyphenation is discouraged even if printed at the source. There is no reason other than WP:IDONTLIKEIT to change to this. The only argument put forward is your newly presented and poor one from search-laziness, being rebutted by others. The RFc framing is so bad it's hard to hone in on what we are actually talking about here. Salpynx (talk) 19:43, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

@Salpynx that is not the only workable alternative, which is that presented by option 5: "none of hyphens, spaces or neither are preferred. Do not change one for the other except to maintain consistency in the article, or with explicit consensus on the article talk page." i.e. treating it the same as US vs British spelling or citation styles. This appears to be the option supported by the majority of participants in this discussion. Thryduulf (talk) 20:34, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Personally I couldn't care less about whether the ISBNs have hyphens or not, and I would guess the same is true for the vast majority of editors and readers. I just find it pointlessly disruptive to have bots or bot-mimicking humans come through and reformat the ISBNs every time someone tries to add a citation anywhere in Wikipedia, and/or have bots mass change the hyphenation site wide. This is why I'd really like to see normalization handled automatically by the output of the {{ISBN}} and CS1/CS2 templates, instead of by modifying the template input. Can someone who is knowledgeable about these templates clarify whether this is feasible? –jacobolus (t) 22:46, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

This is concrete, and I sympathize. If otherwise valid current guidelines are being applied in a problematic way, let's fix forward. It appears that ISBN hyphenation and the repetitive en-dash style bot edits (example, but incative: DyceBot) fall into a similar category with no apparent guidelines against. The suggestion to hyphenate ISBNs on save could satisfy both pro-hyphen and bot(like) users and eliminates the need for bots to do the work. I don't know of any template that modifies input on save. Are there downsides; technical, or editing confusion? ISBNs can be consistently and deterministically hyphenated. Invalid cases are already detected by the templates (invalid registration group would be a new case). Periodic updates for new ISBN groups would be necessary (bots and ISBN code libraries have to do this). Client side and on-request hyphenation are wasteful. Hyphenation on save seems like a really promising approach. Salpynx (talk) 04:17, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

"suggestion to hyphenate ISBNs on save" – this is emphatically not the suggestion. I am suggesting that we should not care at all about the source markup (input) hyphenation, but should instead make templates which are smart enough to normalize their HTML output, so that readers can see a consistent style irrespective of the input formatting. This would entirely eliminate the need for bots to come modify the source hyphenation. The CS1/CS2 templates already do this for date formatting. It seems to me like it should be just as easy to similarly normalize ISBNs. "wasteful" this can't possibly be a significant resource problem. –jacobolus (t) 04:32, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Ok, sorry I misunderstood. I meant wasteful in a relative computational sense and didn't mean disrespect. The data to make the split is unfortunately kilobytes in size, and is a conditional with about 256 parts. Doing that for every ISBN in an article for every page load could add up. Maybe I'm overthinking it. I don't understand why display consistency is good but source isn't. I thought wiki source was somewhere between database content and human readable, but I don't know. Salpynx (talk) 06:54, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Why is it so complicated to hyphenate ISBNs? How many possible places can the hyphen breaks be? There are only a few digits involved here... In any event I still wouldn't expect the expense of this to be a practical problem. Computers are pretty fast nowadays (hundreds of billions of operations every second). –jacobolus (t) 22:56, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Without use-cases to clarify the problem we are trying to solve, or to clarify the option's specifics, I'm going to struggle to express why 5 might cause more edit wars or other problems than it solves. I'll be either constructing strawmen or attacking castles in the sky.

The worst problem with this RFc's 5 is it's not clearly defined (see concerns raised by User:Sojourner in the earth). 5 sounds like a good compromise compared to the total anarchy claimed by the RFc, but that's not the status quo. The two alternatives I mentioned above were an attempt to contrast two well defined alternatives since User:SMcCandlish is providing nothing concrete. For that argument, no hyphens is just as workable as hyphens, so why change? 5 is less workable than either because it is more confusing, has format proliferation for no clear benefit (other than a misleading placate-all-the-sides of an equal argument implication), and provides more territory to war over with many potential grey areas, more than status quo now. Is consistency set on a first-come basis, or critical mass? Having an objective standard helps. I honestly can't tell if User:SMcCandlish is claiming no-hyphens is a better standard than hyphens, or that there is objectively no standard. He is not clear. To mesh with my argument, what are the #5 clear template guidelines? Use the article's current ISBN style if obvious, otherwise ... . I could provide specific use-case based arguments against interpretations of 5 to illustrate why it will likely be inconsistent and increase strife but I'm afraid people are getting tired of this. I am. Salpynx (talk) 01:24, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

What is actually tiresome is this pretense that the RfC somehow can't be understood. No one else is having difficulty parsing it, just you. You keep droning on about not being able to understand or recommend anything without a specific use case, but every use case is the same: An article either has has hyphenated ISBNs (mostly or entirely), or it has unhyphenated ones, and someone comes along and changes them all to the other format. The end. There is nothing more to investigate. The fact that this is not a dispute type that is happening at every page and tearing the community apart doesn't magically make it a non-problem. You keep asserting that we effectively already have a standard and that it is hyphens (specifically the multi-hyphen version; Amazon's format also uses a hyphen, and is quite common on WP from copy-pasting, but no one here seems to actually favor it). But this is not a "standard" or a consensus that the community agreed on. It's an incidental skew introduced by one or two template editors who decided to make their templates use the multi-hyphen format, and by a few editors (with overlap with that first category) going around robotically injecting hyphens (including while this RfC is running, which is disruptive). This is WP:FAITACCOMPLI, not a consensus. Whether you find my own personal position "unclear" (and it certainly isn't) is irrelevant; an RfC is not about one particular editor's preference, it's about finding out what the aggregate editorial preferences is.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:09, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

At this point, without an example, I think you are grossly misrepresenting any current (or past) hypen-stripping incidents. You dismiss my picking two arbitrary templates as relevant to the discussion -- are there any other templates that use ISBNs on Wikipedia? I don't know of any more, but you haven't been clear. I think 100% of the ISBN use-cases on Wikipedia currently have clear instructions on how hyphens relate. Am I missing one? Again, falling into the trap of trying to be clear about my side, I believe guidelines exist that placing bare ISBNs in a template is helpful, not disruptive, but who knows? Do you understand that the people who add hyphens to ISBNs at least think it is being helpful? I think it's written somewhere that ISBN hyphenation is useful, but a task best suited to bots for doing correctly and achieving the all important "consistency" . I've provided links, a spec (Argument_from_authority) and attempted to show what I (mis?)interpreted as consensus (randos on the internet × many/a few). At least my links demonstrate that a pro-hyphen argument exists and can be stumbled upon and picked up like a nasty disease. Where were we supposed to look to get the correct view on ISBNs? Was it always obvious but unexpressed, and you are trying to get it written down now for literally the first time to help the bibliographically inclined? Has something changed recently? Hyphens made sense in the olden days, but books are so last century, and no-one can own an ebook now anyway, so reality is just what leaks out of search engines and Amazon? A number of people have expressed support for the status quo as the option with fewest problems and most benefits. Is that a meaningful option to you? The RFc appears to deny it's existence, but I think the meaning is clear enough. It's a slightly nuanced version of the terrible anarchy you claim, with specific justifications for various parts of it which could be critiqued or defended specifically, but that's not happening here. Salpynx (talk) 03:18, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

editors stripping hyphens from fully hyphenated articles I've seen this happen, actually; Srich32977 used to do this prolifically. After numerous complaints at his talk page, he was eventually brought to ANI, where there was pretty much unanimous agreement that these edits were disruptive. To me, this is a example of the existing standard being correctly applied to admonish an editor who is editing against that standard. I don't know of any examples of editors being admonished for adding hyphens.

I would support a proposal to disallow drive-by ISBN reformatting, perhaps by explicitly classing such changes as cosmetic, but that's not what this proposal will accomplish. Every option in the current proposal will result in a tremendous amount of watchlist clutter as editors try to enforce whatever standard is agreed upon here onto every article in Wikipedia. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 06:53, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

TL;DR attempt: Sorry User:SMcCandlish, I had assumed you were presenting Option 1 as a serious alternative to current guidelines, but that's not how this is framed at all.

This entire RFC is fundamentally flawed, and I can't see how anything productive can come of it. There is no concrete example to clarify exactly what problem you are talking about, there is no evidence of the emotive "edit warring". It's not quite clear if the possibly implied both-sideism is real or a hypothetical scenario extrapolated from false premises. The background and text of the RFC are so oblivious to the current ISBN reality it's hard to engage with productively, it's not even wrong. I can't imagine any edit you've seen that can't be explained and justified by current ISBN guidelines, but I guess I don't even know what you are talking about because you haven't been clear or accurate. Complaints raised by others seem to concern minor bot edits on previously agreed upon consistent-with-guideline improvements which have been discussed long ago and been in progress for ages. Again I'm making up arguments to defend because there's nothing real presented here to discuss. We're just accumulating an opportunistic grab-bag of ISBN related complaints in unconnected comments. The misleading nature of this RFC which clearly pushes option 1 is concerning because many people are engaging with it at face value. It's not clear how any presented option will make things better, because what things and are they real? All presented options are oversimplified, and don't relate well to current reality. I fell into discussing ISBN hyphenation details and possible common misconceptions, but perhaps the correct thing to do is shut down spurious and unwarranted RFCs that are constructed in such a way as to be unfortunately unhelpful? Salpynx (talk) 06:51, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

I trust our editors to have the intelligence to make up their own minds, and that clearly seems to be happening. The leading option at least for now is 5 not 1.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:58, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm surprised by the number of people extolling the utility of pasting plain ISBNs into Google searches – I've always just clicked on the ISBN for directly relevant book searches. Are all these people really doing that, or are they just taking the proposer's word for it? Kanguole 13:20, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• I can only speak for myself, but as someone who regularly uses Wikipedia articles as the starting point for further research, I have always copied and pasted the ISBN (and been forced to remove the hyphens or spaces where they exist). I find the built-in search function is clunky and very inefficient. I can copy and paste the ISBN into Google and determine basically immediately if the book is archived, in a library, or needs to be sourced some other way. If I were using the built-in function, I have to click through several screens only to end up at WorldCat (useless in 9/10 cases) or Amazon. 5225_C (talk • contributions) 13:57, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

We've been discussing Googlability as if one would only want to engoogle the ISBN with no hyphens, because if you Google with hyphens, you don't get the results that have a no-hyphen version. While that is true, the converse is also true. Forgive me for using as an example an ISBN for a book I publish, but I already had it in an open window to copy and paste. If I Google for it without the hyphens, yes, I get a few bookstore listings... but I don't get any of the results that I get Googling with the hyphens. If I'm looking for information on the book, I may want to Google both versions. If I have the hyphenated version, it is trivial to figure out what the non-hyphenated version will be... but the converse is not true. If I've copied the non-hyphenated version, I have no simple system for knowing where the hyphens will go. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 21:35, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

You just need to make it clear to the search engine that you're searching for an ISBN, not for an utterly random character string: [49]. (This is pretty basic search engine usage; I think we all know that if you put in a string without adding some indication what class of thing it pertains to, the search engine will produce a river of false positives in other categories of things, and this is regardless of what kind of thing you are looking for.) If you do this, you get provably better results without the hyphens (or spaces) in the numeric string, with or without quotation marks around the ISBN. The hyphen and space formats (if they work at all) will only match for results that contain those separator characters, but a search on the bare number will pull up not only many more results (including in resources like bibliographic databases that the user is going to care about, most of which use the bare number) but also will match sites that use the hyphened or spaced form (the very top result of the link just above proves this: it's Amazon, but Amazon gives the ISBN as "978-1949996579" with a hyphen).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:51, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

The things you make up or assume aren't always the truth. A Google search for an ISBN is not always going to "produce a river of false positives", unsurprising as it is a long string, If you had checked the example links I put in, well, I can't promise your results as Google customizes itself to the users in ways, but I get three web link results on each before the warning that any other results are similar, and all six of those links are genuine positives, references to the book in some way. The example link you provide, however, while it does pull up for me six results, is pulling up for me the same three results as my no-hyphen search (yes, that detects the Amazon page, for other reasons than you suppose) plus three false positives. That makes it a notably worse result than the plain no-hyphen result, and it's not catching any of the three results I get for my hyphenated search, including missing a Bleeding Cool article specifically about the book's release. Now, you may believe there's some large contingent of people who use Google in the same poor way you do and that there's some large overlap of those with people who cannot use Booksources, but I certainly find no reason to believe that. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 14:58, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

The person who is the subject of a wiki page should have the right to have their page removed

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

There is a snowball's chance in hell that this proposal will be adopted. That is, as a general matter no subject of a wiki page has or will have a veto right over their articles, and there is consensus against changing the policy in this respect. This outcome is clear, so I will close the discussion before it takes away more community effort. Dr Luchins may try suggested alternatives to have an article about them deleted through our standard processes. See e.g. WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE and WP:BIODELETE. (non-admin closure) Szmenderowiecki (talk) 14:05, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

---

This is my opinion RogerSni (talk) 21:25, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• OK. Maybe, after having this pointed out to you a couple of times, you can read the actual policies, and have the subject read WP:BIOSELF. Drmies (talk) 21:43, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  He is aware that this is policy. He is here specifically because he wants to change policy, and I told him this is where one would discuss such a change in policy. (I should note here that I have a slight COI when it comes the page the individual is seeking to have deleted, David Luchins.) I did also warn him that such a suggested change in policy would be unlikely to gain traction. He should not be criticized for bringing a request to change policy to the place where we discuss exactly that. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:07, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• I cannot agree with this suggestion. Allowing everyone to have pages about themselves deleted would vastly weaken this site's quality. If you think of, say, a big name politician who has done some disreputable things, for example, we can certainly understand why he might not want an encyclopedia page that includes his various misdeeds showing up on search results before, say, his official biography on his campaign page -- but it is in the public good that it does. While we generally allow people of marginal notability to have the page about them deleted upon their request, it would be a vast problem to extend that power to anyone who is the topic of a page. (There may be some argument for expanding the range of who qualifies as "marginally notable".) -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:12, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
• Strongly oppose. Imagine if that was the case with any book, news article, documentary, opinion. Your proposal runs against basic principles in free countries. Sincerely, Thinker78 (talk) 00:09, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

See WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE. Curbon7 (talk) 00:34, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

• I've opened a discussion at the article talk. Valereee (talk) 12:07, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Please give link. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:21, 4 November 2023 (UTC).

Talk:David_Luchins#Discussion_about_Luchins'_preference_to_have_the_article_deleted. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:55, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

• I disagree. I'm OK with the current policy re people of borderline notability, but I wouldn't give deletion rights to people who have chosen to be high profile in public life. Imagine if you will two scenarios, firstly we have deleted the article we have on a prominent terrorist, not because we want to deny the terrorist publicity, but because they have given us an instruction that we are following. Secondly a high profile individual, one who you would expect Wikipedia to have an article on, drops us an email asking us to give less prominence to a scandal they are involved or delete the article about them. If we make the proposed change in policy, neither scenario ends well. If we want to retain our neutrality we have to be willing to publish articles that are not as hagiographic as our subjects might like. They are welcome to supply a good quality, flattering photograph, but otherwise we need to fairly sum up what reliable sources are saying about them. ϢereSpielChequers 21:52, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose I have often supported deletion of BLPs of people of borderline notability that made one or two silly mistakes. But this policy proposal would force us to remove legitimate and informative biographies of highly notable people, just because many reliable sources report their misdeeds. This proposal is, in my opinion, contrary to the purpose of this encyclopedia. Cullen328 (talk) 10:24, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
• Strong oppose - A stalker once created an attack-page about me on Wikipedia, I had it speedy-ed. People absolutely 100% should be allowed to do something about articles about them on Wikipedia if they are problematic. However just as obviously there are people out there who legitimately did something wrong, and that can be seen from reliable sources, and they should not be entitled to simply remove that content. FOARP (talk) 17:11, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• @RogerSni: question: would this "right" extend after death or would it only be for the living? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:18, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• Dr Luchins is a Jew who's receiving death threats, folks. He's at direct risk of harm and has obvious and weighty grounds for wanting his page gone.—S Marshall T/C

But do we have any reason to think that those death threats or the direct risk of harm are because they have a wikipedia page? Also note that unless I'm missing something death threats weren't because of their religion but their opinion on Jonathan Pollard so I'm not really sure what "naming the Jew" does to improve the conversation. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:32, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

No, I have no reason to think Dr Luchins' Wikipedia page causes any of these things. But I think that he's at risk, and I think we have a basic duty to consider the risks and problems to article subjects that their Wikipedia page might cause. Certainly there are super-notable or notorious people who should have a page even if they don't want them. But I don't think Dr Luchins is necessarily in this category.—S Marshall T/C 22:37, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Do you have reason to believe that he has received death threats lately? The article does cite him having gotten threats, but the source is a 2002 article talking about earlier events. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:52, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

What leads you to believe that the subject is currently at risk? Am I missing something here? Also still unclear what his religion has to do with anything but you appear to think its significant so please explain that. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:47, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

There's been a massive rise in antisemitism violence across the globe due to the events in the Gaza strip, so there is something to consider if they are receiving direct threats of violence now. Masem (t) 01:20, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

If you read the page, you might think otherwise. It is true that antisemitism is on the rise, however the threats described on the page do not appear related to that. JMWt (talk) 07:48, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Are they receiving direct threats of violence now? The editor operating on their behalf doesn't appear to have made that claim, as far as I see only S Marshall has. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:47, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

• Generally oppose an individual's veto on a page, however if they have good reason to think that the presence of a WP page is leading to death threats, they're not likely to get much help here. They need to contact the legal department of the Foundation. JMWt (talk) 18:38, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• The David Luchins article doesn't receive a whole lot of page views [50] (minus the recent influx due to this ANI thread). From 11/2/2022 to 11/2/2023, the article averaged 3 page views a day. If he wants his page deleted, I believe he'll have to go through the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion process, similar to the other WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE ones [51]. FWIW, I wouldn't be opposed to his deletion request. Some1 (talk) 01:32, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose: BLP policy already allows for this if a person is borderline notable. However, if Donald Trump or Joe Biden said that they did not want to have Wikipedia articles about them, this would be unworkable.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 07:54, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose. Current policy suffices. Xxanthippe (talk) 08:07, 8 November 2023 (UTC).
• Oppose: Ridiculous. Public figures can't expect control like that over what is said about them pbp 20:07, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose, pending further expiation from RogerSni. I do not think that living people should be able to request the deletion of their article other than by questioning its notability. That applies doubly to representatives or likewise of the dead. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:13, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Unthinkable for an enclyclopedia. Addressing the stated death threats, they are not started or ended by having or not having a Wikipedia article. Which by policy, for anything that is challenged, contains only published public information on WP:notable topics. North8000 (talk) 21:12, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

RFA process reformation

As @Lourdes case happened, it showed us that banned editor can become a sysop, or even getting higher privilege for years without being noticed. It will definitely shock common editors on this project if cases like this happened numeric times. Also, a banned editor became a sysop will lead more troubles for desysoping them or requesting global ban against them.
I'm inclined to propose an amendment to currently RfA process, for example, every successful RfA candidate should be checked by checkuser or Arbcom members before granting tools for them, if there is something uncommon, e.g. using a specific User agent related to a well-known LTA, IP matched a banned user on checkuser wiki or Arbcom wiki, Arbcom need to be noticed.

We mainly focus on remedy when case pointed out by on and off-wiki evidence, ignoring that we can avoid this from the starting point. -Lemonaka‎ 08:55, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

@Lemonaka: Well, I'm clearly out of the loop. What happened? Cheers, Edward-Woodrow • talk 17:43, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Woah, okay, I see the AN discussion. For others like me, here's a link: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#A recent row at RfA. Edward-Woodrow • talk 17:45, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Ehh, Lourdes (talk · contribs) get to become sysop just after Wifione (talk · contribs) banned away, that's satirical a banned user can become sysop until recent, though declined case on Arbcom found they are someone banned. They have hidden their identification for nearly, eh, my math is terrible, 6 years? -Lemonaka‎ 17:46, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

I agree that it's very concerning a sock passed RfA, and so on, but I really don't think CU-needling every candidate is the right approach. Edward-Woodrow • talk 20:32, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

For the patient LTA, it's also easily bypassed by waiting for the CU information of the blocked accounts to become stale. Certes (talk) 21:23, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

every successful RfA candidate should be checked by checkuser or Arbcom members before granting tools for them is called "fishing" and is not compatible with the local or global CheckUser policies. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 22:11, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Here's a question I would like a checkuser to answer: Would the current private evidence, along with Loudres's edits around the time of her RFA, have been likely to cause the connection to the previous account to be known? Animal lover |666| 22:22, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not a CU so haven't seen the private evidence, but based on how it has been described and assuming that the private evidence visible now is similar to the private evidence that was visible at the time (which is unknowable) then it is extremely unlikely that CU at the time of Lourdes' RFA would have revealed a connection to Wifione. Thryduulf (talk) 10:48, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

As the saying goes,  CheckUser is not magic pixie dust. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 21:24, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

I am a checkuser, but also haven't seen the private evidence. To answer the question generally: such a check would be against policy, and almost certainly would not reveal anything. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:43, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

This has come up before (Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Archive 260#CU as a matter of course for RFAs was the last time), and the consensus is always that it would be both a fishing problem and simply ineffective. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 22:16, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Bad idea. Overtly in contradiction to global privacy and CU policies, which supersede any local policies. And also very, very unlikely to reveal any socking. Risker (talk) 22:21, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

I'll tell you how we can avoid it: have everybody holding advanced permissions registered with the foundation under their real name. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:32, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

You're joking, right? Edward-Woodrow (talk) 12:53, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Its not a silly suggestion. That doesnt mean its ever likely to happen, but in the list of potential solutions, having people with access to advanced permissions identify their real identity and have it confirmed would eliminate some (but not all) problems with editors-turning-out-to-be-someone-else. There are actually two issues here, Lourdes was claiming to be someone they are not (identifying who you actually are would prevent this) and being a sock of a banned user (which wouldnt be prevented unless the WMF actually knew the real identity of the banned user in the first place, assuming they knew how to avoid the usual CU traps). CU and socking is largely a red herring here, because Lourdes got away with basically purporting to be someone else (which was highly improbable to start with, honestly, if you believe them I have a bridge to sell you) and editing activity that was highly unlikely to be in line with that identity's persona. All it really would have taken is at RFA time, someone doing a deep dive on their past editing activity and the asking pertinent questions. Thats completely possible *now* under the current RFA process. Only everyone is so aggressively nice and refuses to even suspect that a candidate might not be on the level. The Lourdes issue was a lack of skepticism in the participants, not a fault of the RFA process. The signs were there only if people would open their eyes and look, AND then actually ask the difficult questions. Ultimately all CU would do at RFA is catch people who dont know how to go on the test wiki and learn for themselves how CU works and what they need to guard against. Actually forcing people to identify to the WMF would have a far greater chance of surfacing any discrepancies. Never going to happen though. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:12, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Registering with the WMF under what looks like a real name wouldn't make much difference. Verifying that identity in some way would certainly make a difference, but at a price. To prevent a similar Wifione/Lourdes scenario simply verifying identities wouldn't suffice, the WMF would have to verify details and then store those details and compare them to new registrations. We have projects across the world, including in countries where the governments are more than a tad dodgy, and if past experience continues, there will be current admins who think their country is free and will remain so, but who are in for a shock in the future. We also have problems with the Public relations industry and various litigious subjects of Wikipedia articles. Having the shield of anonymity between our editors and spammers is an essential part of us remaining neutral. Of course we could operate with admins avoiding contentious content. But IMHO, the defence against spammers and other bad faith actors is that they can sue the WMF, but the WMF can honestly say they don't have real world details for all but a handful of editors. As someone who has received an email on my real life work email address from a banned editor, I think the price of preventing future Lourdes type scenarios through verification is much higher than the cost of risking further incidents of this type. ϢereSpielChequers 13:42, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Just as an example of the potential risk, there was a case where France forced a French admin to delete an article. It obviously didn't stick (and fortunately France was hamhanded about it due to not understanding Wikipedia policies), but the key point is that even governments that are generally not considered authoritarian are going to view admins and bureaucrats as potential points of pressure to try and control Wikipedia. Forcing them to divulge personal information would open the door to eg. a government forcing someone to divulge that information, then using it to put pressure on other administrators to do what they want. --Aquillion (talk) 22:40, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Only everyone is so aggressively nice and refuses to even suspect that a candidate might not be on the level. Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/ScottishFinnishRadish doesn't seem to agree with that statement. I feel that people are more than willing to express that they think there's something fishy going on at RFA. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 23:03, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• CU isn't going to pick up a sock from years prior. Not how the tool works. Without getting into a BEANS level of specificity, it's just not how the tool works. GMG^talk 13:22, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
• Do something - Check user isn't a totally dumb idea, it at least may dissuade some people from even trying as they may not be sure whether they'll get caught or not. Lourdes is hardly the first case where this has come up recently. I also don't think registering under your real identity with the foundation is a crazy idea, though obviously I am aware it's a risky thing for some admins who live in dictatorships. FOARP (talk) 14:11, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

  The problem with checkuser is the ones who aren't certain fall into two types - those who are going to be caught through other means anyway, and those who will wait until they are certain they can't get caught. Registering your real identity with the foundation is risky for everybody, not just those who live in regimes that are currently dictatorships (c.f. Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station#Controversy over Wikipedia article as just one example). Thryduulf (talk) 16:31, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

  The obvious short-term outcome of requiring admins to declare their "real" names to the foundation would be a mass walkout of admins. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:21, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Given that there have been security leaks with ArbCom before, and there have been problems with the WMF, I have no intention of identifying my personal identity to anyone on this project, now or ever. If I, as an admin, were required to do so, I'd give up being an admin. It's hardly worth it. I also think it would be an active disincentive to people running for RfA, and that's the last thing we need. As to checkuser, it's been commented elsewhere, and by Maxim in great detail here, checkuser isn't a solution at all. If someone wants to skirt around checkuser, it's just not that hard. Let's look at this from a different perspective; how much damage did Lourdes actually do? I haven't followed the situation closely, though I am aware of it. --Hammersoft (talk) 22:54, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware (and I don't know how up-to-date I am), no egregiously bad admin actions have been discovered, although there were some that were dubious or poor (in the now-known context). There were bad actions but most of those could have been done by any extended confirmed editor, and the incident that lead to the arbitration case request is (as I understand it, it was all over before I was aware of the drama) probably best characterised as an abuse of admin status but didn't involve misuse of the tools. The majority (possibly even the vast majority) of their admin actions (at least those that have been examined) were correct either objectively or by being within the bounds of the "any reasonable admin" test. So, although they definitely should not have become an admin, the actual harm caused by being one was low.

Anyone attempting similar has two possible strategies - bold or quiet. Those that choose the bold option live fast and die young - they don't get to become admins in the first place because we spot them with existing processes and structures and they get blocked. The quiet option relies on not making waves, and repeatedly or egregiously making bad actions causes waves. Thryduulf (talk) 01:31, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

I am aware it's a risky thing for some admins who live in dictatorships - not just admins who live in dictatorships. As I mentioned above, there's at least one case where the French government put pressure on a French Wikipedia admin to try and obtain a desired outcome. Even in states with relatively functional systems of laws and justice, admins can become targets for legal pressure under the right (or wrong) circumstances. It's not unthinkable for a first-world government to go eg. "by undeleting this article you, as a citizen of ABC, violated law XYZ on national secrets; we're going to compel Wikipedia to divulge your identity so we can throw you in jail." Of course they already have ways to do that, but we shouldn't make it easier for them (having the list in one place means that eg. under a broke enough national security law, the FBI could notionally compel anyone with access to it to divulge someone's details, say, without having to inform anyone else.) --Aquillion (talk) 22:50, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

• I would support check-usering admin candidates; even if the positive benefit is minimal I'm still convinced it will outweigh the harm. However, I would oppose requiring candidates to disclose their real identities; privacy is too important for such a requirement to be imposed. BilledMammal (talk) 23:20, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

  That's the on-wiki equivalent of the search before you enter a concert or sports stadium. Security theater with no real benefit. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 23:23, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

  Sometimes, the perception of security is more important than security itself; it may serve to deter a breach attempt before it is ever made. Further, while it's unlikely there will be a technical match, there are tools available to checkusers beyond just comparing IP's and user agents, such as linguistic analysis which may provide a hint that further investigation is warranted. BilledMammal (talk) 23:38, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

  The only effective part of that doesn't need CU tools. I disagree that security theater is effective. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 23:48, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• Checkuser isn't magic and won't produce usable results on its own. What we can do is make it a matter of practice to use publicly-available information to vet candidates for potential socking problems, and add a note to the Checkuser policy that when there is any evidence, even weak or circumstantial evidence, people who hold or are seeking advanced permissions should lean towards a more thorough investigation. This wouldn't be fishing (there would have to be some reason to suspect socking) but would be a reasonable extension of the way WP:ADMINACCT imposes a higher standard for advanced permissions in general - you need some sort of evidence, but the standard should be lower for admin accounts (and would-be admin accounts). --Aquillion (talk) 22:50, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
• Yup, I'm going to quit from this project, but I still suggest that be calm. It is not worthy to quarrel against each other on this topic, while the debate gets heated, there will be no solution. We all know things need to be done, but emailing all your personal information to WMF before elected for a sysop on some projects is totally absurd. WMF is not an organization can be trusted unanimously, AFAIK, they sometimes have conflicts against common editors. It is said that some editors discussing this topic just had nasty fights against WMF not so long ago.
  I had a little superstition about CU tools, during the case of PlanespotterA320 (talk · contribs), we found a sysop was an LTA by checking here and finally banned her. However, we may know that CU results can expire and the only CU results are helpless.
  Making a conclusion from previous discussion, on wiki evidence may need more attention, including using of words, grammars, typos etc. when there is any evidence, CU may need to be noticed. -Lemonaka‎ 12:06, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

This proposal would only make any sense if:

1. The use of CU would expose them. Apparently it won't. Additionally, if they know we will check, they can intentionally work on ensuring there will be nothing to find.
2. These users, if they become admins, will abuse the right significantly. This is actually unlikely. They would need to do a lot of harm quickly, or else act in a sneaky wave of disruption - otherwise they will be exposed quickly. We don't want the to become admins, but the risk is actually low if they succeed.

The down side is that it will reduce the number of admin candidates who are not socks will go down significantly. There is already too much overload of admin-work, and the damage from a small number of banned users who behave well enough with their sockpuppets to allow them to become admins is low. Animal lover |666| 17:56, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Keep in mind also that if a sockpuppet succeeds in passing an RFA, this means that the user is using great restraint with this account. He is unlikely to drop it immediately after passing the RFA. Animal lover |666| 07:37, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I remember when Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Leanne was considered shocking, and CheckUser wasn't magic then, either. Uncle G (talk) 11:30, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

@Uncle G If my memory serves me well, Checkuser tool has been improved several times since invented. Now they are more helpful on collecting logs for more actions? -Lemonaka‎ 08:12, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Policies for reducing frivolous complaints

I would like to raise a concern regarding the increasing instances of editorial process abuse, where some editors are extensively engaging in procedural complaints and unwarranted investigations, rather than focusing on constructive content contribution.

This concern stems from my personal experience of being subjected to a baseless sockpuppetry investigation, despite my long-standing record of unblemished contributions on a variety of topics (including highly controversial subject areas) over more than 15 years. The investigation has ended with no finding, however the experience of having to face a baseless complaint was painful and a big turnoff.

The core issue at hand is that editors who dedicate themselves almost entirely to 'wikilawyering' in the various noticeboards, are acting in direct contradiction to Wikipedia's ethos of bold editing and good faith collaboration.

It's also important to note that there is a need to acknowledge the possibility of 'false positives' in administrative actions, which can occur due to human error, and if sufficient false complaints are filed against a victim, we might be blocking good and constructive editors (which I believe is happening in practice).

Community Questions:

1. Is this recognized as a significant issue within the community?
2. In your opinion, should there be a limit on the number of complaints an individual can file in a period of time?
3. In your opinion, should there be sanctions for filing repetitive, meritless complaints?
4. Are there other suggestions to address this pattern of behavior?

This is my first post on village pump, so please forgive me if I'm not aware of some discussion rules. Marokwitz (talk) 23:14, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

I think that if a user makes repeated baseless complaints on some forum, they should be banned from that forum with the exception of replying to complaints against them. If a user gets banned from multiple forums, a site ban may be necessary. And, of course, there is always the interaction ban if a user makes several complaints against the same user. Animal lover |666| 06:43, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Do we have such policy currently ? And if not, what would be a good way to propose it ? How would 'repeated' and 'baseless' be defined in such a policy? Marokwitz (talk) 10:28, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Under current policy at WP:CBAN, the community can ban any user for any behavior they deem wrong; the details of the ban are generally written by the proposer, and the community votes on it. This can be used for the purpose of dealing with what the community deems to be "repeated baseless" complaints. There is no such ban currently, but we do have a ban against SashiRolls, whereby SashiRolls is prohibited from commenting on AE requests where they are not a party. Animal lover |666| 10:44, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Because the language of topic bans is tailored to the specific situation it's not always easy to pick out themes, but Celestina007's topic ban includes restrictions to prevent frivolous complaints, Mbz1, Gilisa, and Factsontheground are all prohibited from making complaints related to any of the others, and Lurking shadow is limited in the complaints they can make regarding copyright infringement. There have also been other restrictions in the past that have now expired or successfully appealed. Thryduulf (talk) 04:01, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

In order of you questions, 1. I've certainly seen it happen, 2. No, 3. Yes, and I've seen editors sanctioned for doing so, 4. I wish I did.

This is probably currently covered by WP:HARASSMENT (if its targeted at a specific editor) and WP:DISRUPTIVE (if it's a general pattern of behaviour). It's not given as a specific example in either case, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't apply. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 18:07, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. What if the editor is not being disruptive, but rather very litigious? I believe we shouldn't encourage the over-use of these tools . Some individuals deploy these tools too readily, mainly because there are no consequences for incorrect use. This enables them to hound others and catch them on technicalities, which goes against the collaborative spirit of this project. Marokwitz (talk) 19:32, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

If an editor keeps raises false or petty issues they are usually dealt with. There may be cases where new editors do it and are dealt with a bit more leniently as part of a learning experience. There is also definitely consequences for such actions, and very definate consequences for the misuse of tools (I'm guessing you mean admin tools in this case). -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:45, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

In some cases newer users get blocked (e.g. per WP:NOTHERE) rather than topic banned if they keep raising such issues after advice and warnings and they have few to no contributions outside that sphere. If the reports from a new account (almost) all relate to a specific area and/or dispute then it's not uncommon they turn out to be socks of someone blocked for disrupting that topic area (the history of Eastern Europe topic area has experienced this disproportionately). Thryduulf (talk) 03:53, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Re: if the editor is not being disruptive, but rather very litigious: if they're repeatedly bringing baseless complaints to drama boards or spi, about one or more persons, that is in fact disruptive editing. It wastes people's time having to deal with that kind of thing, which all by itself is disruptive.

The way to deal with it is to open a case at WP:ANI about them making repeated baseless complaints and -- crucially -- to in that complaint provide diffs/links of the evidence that they've done that. I say crucially because without these diffs that show the complaints were baseless and that they've done this multiple times, you're likely to be seen as making a baseless complaint yourself. Be aware also that if they've made 50 complaints and 47 of them were valid, no one is going to take three bad reports as evidence of disruption.

With regards to the SPI you were called to, the closing admin found not only no evidence of sockpuppetry but apparently evidence there was not sockpuppetry, so yes, a baseless complaint. But unless you have actual evidence the editor in question has done this kind of thing repeatedly, I'd take the win. Valereee (talk) 12:26, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

It's not unusual for complaints to backfire – see WP:BOOMERANG. Andrew🐉(talk) 18:52, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Who decides what is frivolous? A cap on complaints would have waaaaaay too much potential for abuse, abuse far worse than any "frivolous complaints" could represent. Edward-Woodrow (talk) 21:19, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't think anyone is suggesting a bright line numerical cap on complaints. And the community decides what is frivolous. Valereee (talk) 13:11, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

• I think we're talking about several different things here. I would divide "frivolous" complaints into subcategories:

  Hopeless complaints, which means complaints opened in good faith that have no prospect of going anywhere. Such complaints need a sysop to have a friendly talk page conversation with the complainer.

  Spurious complaints, which means complaints about nothing or nothing intelligible. Such complaints need a sysop to have a stern talk page conversation with the complainer.

  Vexatious complaints, which means complaints whose purpose is to annoy, confound, or distract their target. Such complaints need a sysop to issue topic bans and warnings, or in rare cases, even escalation to arbcom.

I think it's custom and practice that this is what we do. Are there any kinds of "frivolous" complaint that I'm missing?—S Marshall T/C 00:05, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

@S Marshall, ooh, fun exercise! Do bludgeoning/pointy complaints already count as one of those? Like when someone disagrees with a policy and complains about multiple people following that policy all over the place and refuses to accept that while they may disagree with the policy, there's consensus for it or at least none against it? Valereee (talk) 14:07, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Oop, yes, you're right. That's a fourth kind of dumbassitude that I missed!—S Marshall T/C 15:02, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Regardless of motive, a user who makes too many frivolous complaints (1 is certainly not too many) will be stopped - either by an admin blocking him or by a community ban. Note that AGF is irrelevant here; we may be more willing to give an other chance for a good-faith user, and try with more warnings, but there is still a limit. Animal lover |666| 07:46, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

RfC on WP:GEOLAND and local history

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The question needs some better work in order for this RfC to be useful at fixing conflicts around WP:GEOLAND.बिनोद थारू (talk) 03:47, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

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Should the WP:GEOLAND guideline be deprecated in favor of WP:GNG? बिनोद थारू (talk) 00:05, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

In light of multiple recent AfDs including Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Red Bank, California, the closer of those AfDs User:Liz suggested to start a RfC regarding how exactly the WP:GEOLAND guidelines applies to small rural locations like Red Bank, California. WP:GEOLAND as it stands presumes notability for localities: 1) which are or were inhabited, 2) have some form of legal recognition. In such contentious AfDs, some people suggest that minor places meet WP:GEOLAND with their post offices, fire stations, and one-room schools, and are therefore notable. Other people say that such places do not meet the more well-known guideline WP:N. This can be true as the sources are often scarce, primary, not reliable, etc. But as worded, WP:GEOLAND grants them presumed notability regardless. Also for small localities, the indiscriminate collection of data clause of WP:NOT may apply systematically (though it has not been mentioned much in those AfDs). Another point of discussion is that WP:GEOLAND's "legal recognition" clause not being clear. Does a post office count as legal recognition? Either way, to resolve those common issues, I think that good questions to ask are:

• 1) Should the WP:GEOLAND guideline be deprecated in favor of WP:GNG?
• 2) What counts as "legal recognition"?
• 3) Establish a more exhaustive list of settlement types that should and should not be covered by WP:GEOLAND (eg. rural districts, ranches, railroad-siding-turned-settlements)?

बिनोद थारू (talk) 23:53, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

• No, per countless previous discussions. Suggest a more-nuanced question. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:49, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

ETA. I have just listed this at WP:CENT, but if we're going to go round this (yet) again, it needs proper notification of relevant wikiprojects. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:56, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

I notify Wikiproject history. बिनोद थारू (talk) 03:01, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

• Comment I won't immediately jump on a yes or no train, but I will say I think this is not well thought out. WP:NSPORTS2022 was workshopped for a while before the RfC even launched, and any RfC on deprecating GEOLAND will certainly be on that scale. Curbon7 (talk) 03:09, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

  It is a small guideline (chiefly If once inhabited and legal recognition, then presumed notability) so I wouldn't imagine it requires a big thought out introduction. I tried to mention all of the talking points in those recent AfDs which led to this RfC (most of which I participated). बिनोद थारू (talk) 03:15, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

  It's a small guideline in that it is only a few sentences, but that is a very superficial reading as this would carry implications for hundreds of thousands of articles, hence why in my view it should be thought out before launch (WP:VPIL?) rather than jumping in gung-ho to avoid it becoming a trainwreck. Curbon7 (talk) 03:24, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

  I agree with your point. I wanted to know if it is possible to get assistance to close this discussion properly for me or someone else to develop the proposal elsewhere. बिनोद थारू (talk) 03:35, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

• With this closed, I just want to comment that some of the confusion here is over what we mean when we talk about “Presumed” notability. Far too many editors think this word is the same as inherent or automatic notability… and it isn’t. We chose the word Presumed intentionally… because a presumption ISN’T the same as inherance.

Presumed notability simply means that we give the topic the benefit of the doubt. We assume that sources should exist (and thus the topic should pass GNG), so we should do a thorough WP:BEFORE search for sources before we nominate it for deletion. However (and this is important), if after a thorough search we still don’t find anything, we know that our initial assumption was incorrect, and we can absolutely nominate it for deletion.

A presumption of notability is an assessment of likelihood, not a statement of certainty. Blueboar (talk) 20:58, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Utterly badly sourced business articles

I observed somewhere over a decade ago how Articles for deletion was often approaching People, bands, and businesses for deletion. This is still true today. I wonder whether we can relieve some of the pressure on the AFD process, and on volunteers, with a modification of policy.

Consider the likes of Industrial Fasteners Institute (AfD discussion) It has stood for 12 years (and a few hours!) with its only source ever being the business's own WWW site. Or there's Imagine Sports (AfD discussion) which has stood for 16 years with two "official web site"s and an "official blog".

Should we encourage a presumption of deletion, or perhaps greater use of the proposed deletion process, for articles on business where they cite no other sources than the business's own direct publications? We have the proposed deletion of biographies of living people process for biographies with no independent reliable sources, perhaps we need a similar mechanism for utterly badly sourced business articles, where we demand at least something other than company self-published histories and "about" pages.

(I'd agree with the deletion of business articles sourced to nothing other that the business's own publications, and press releases in other publications; but I think that that's another discussion. And similarly, I notice that people are addressing the undisclosed paid editing through other means. That's another discussion, too. It's the plethora of business articles that are basically vehicles for company website links that I think that we could address.)

Thoughts?

Uncle G (talk) 11:17, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

• I'd agree. But it should apply to all articles about anything. Which is better, a badly-sourced article that might or might not be accurate but nobody cares enough to source it, or no article? Does WP:BURDEN not apply to article creation as much as to its content? Maybe we need a WP:NOEXCEPTIONS policy. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 18:49, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
  • Many of the older ones are actually fine, they originated in the days when sourcing was optional but derived from respectable sources such as other encyclopedias. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:33, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
    • That claim is currently not verifiable, and the longer the cites stagnate the less tenable it becomes. Again, I draw your attention to WP:BURDEN. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 07:29, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
      • As I've said in various fora of late, if we all just referenced articles instead of wasting breath discussing how to delete them the encyclopedia would be a great deal better served. Espresso Addict (talk) 10:03, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
• Undersourced businesses are already prod staples, I don't think any more encouragement is needed, and there's a big difference between non-profit societies/organisations and for-profit companies. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:33, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
  • I disagree. WP:N and WP:V apply equally to all subjects. RoySmith (talk) 14:52, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

After the recent changes to WP:NCORP, the standards for for-profit companies are higher than for non-profit bodies such as academic societies – which just have to be national/international in scope & meet GNG – rather than having to meet the new elevated standards for companies. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:36, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

• "nobody cares enough to source it" includes those trying to delete it, in many cases. The "BURDEN" is WP:BEFORE. A lack of sources in an article does not mean there are a lack of sources. Wikipedia itself is not a reliable source for determining if a topic is notable. Many editors don't look beyond Wikipedia. This is a common problem at AfD. -- GreenC 15:07, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
  • That sword cuts both ways. Many editors have not gone beyond corporate promotional blurbs when creating articles, and not only is this a problem at AFC this is a worse problem in the encyclopaedia. Vehicles for corporate WWW site links like International Labmate Ltd (AfD discussion), which had even more external links to the company's various WWW sites in its older versions than it has now, are littered throughout the encyclopaedia. Uncle G (talk) 17:29, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

That company won The King's Awards for Enterprise, the UK's highest business award, in 1996. It could actually be notable if one knew the right places to look for coverage. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:07, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

The most slam-dunk case is articles on businesses. If the above example one went to AFD, it would be an easy fail or if there is advocate for the article they will need to quickly find and add GNG sources. But for those years nobody even questioned it. Sports articles are a lot tougher. Since in sports, coverage itself a form of entertainment (rather than the typical criteria to receive coverage) and has lots of fan clubs in Wikipedia, and whoever takes it to AFD will get beat up for not first searching for the missing sources. Edge case bands always end up as edge cases because there is a lot of edge case coverage situations. (interviews etc.) Finally, the typical mechanics of the Wikipedia system are that WP:Ver is a way to remove content and not directly a criteria for existence of an article. Theoretically, if GNG sources exist that aren't in the article it can be kept. So if it's a sports article with no substantive sources from a place when the media is non-english in a different character set, it's arguable that you need to have someone fluent in the language/character set to search to show no suitable coverage in order to delete it. Bottom line, I don't think that anything that speeds up the simplest cases is going to do much. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 15:35, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

• This is why I asked specfically about businesses, and about a specifically identifiable set of business articles, at that. This isn't setting out to solve the world's problems, just to address one thing to see whether there's a way to make things incrementally better. And I think that there's a good case to be made that if we already apply the just one reliable independent source criterion to biographies, we can apply it to businesses. Indeed, we already do that and more to business articles at AFC.

  So maybe we should close this hole in our standards and require that as a simple uniform minimum across the article namespace too: at least one reliable independent source in the article for a business. We decide that we don't host external linkfarms for corporate WWW sites for 15 years like, say, Forsythe Technology or Nisco Invest.

  Uncle G (talk) 17:29, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

• Nowadays, these wouldn't make it through our excellent if overloaded NPP process. The community might be minded to enact WP:CSD#X4: article about a business, enterprise, or product that was started before 2020 and has never had an independent source?—S Marshall T/C 17:51, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
  • If we can't get consensus to speedy new articles like this, then we're unlikely to find it for deleting old ones. —Cryptic 18:05, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

  CSD is really not appropriate, because Wikipedia:Deletion is not cleanup, and therefore there is the potential for it to be legitimately contested. PROD should be sufficient.

  That said, I took a look at Industrial Fasteners Institute, mentioned at the top of the thread, and I have two overall thoughts:

  1. Wow, that industry is way more complex and interesting than I'd ever have imagined, and
  2. I couldn't find any sources (e.g., in Google News) that contain more than two consecutive sentences about the organization itself, though https://www.google.com/books/edition/Magazine_of_Standards/8Cw9AAAAYAAJ looks promising, if anyone can track it down.

  I can find sources for European Industrial Fasteners Institute (EIFI), which started a trade dispute a little while ago, but not as much about the (US) IFI. But I suspect them of being a case of WP:ITSIMPORTANT in the real world (like: they're actually important, if you care about things like whether a plane is likely to spontaneously disassemble itself while you're inside), and I'd suggest a "merge" (of this one stub plus a half-dozen similar organizations for whom a stub hasn't been created) to a List of fastener industry organizations or Fastener industry, rather than deletion.

  I was reminded recently that it's our official policy that more information (NB: information, not separate articles) is better than less. If we make a recommendation, I would like to see us recommend something that results in more knowledge. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:09, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

I too looked at the fasteners article and was intrigued. Agree merging would be more useful than deletion.

Unless we want to purge almost all content on companies, a new speedy tag is not the way to go. I don't see why standard prod is not effective for old articles where the creator has retired? Are people mass-removing the prods? (I try to check the prod list from time to time but mostly tend to leave the businesses alone, as it is not an area in which I edit.) Espresso Addict (talk) 23:45, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Spongebob Squarepants is now freely licensed!

Gee Spongebob, tell me more.

Wait, really?

Well.. At least Commons seems to think so. Sites like Flickr and YouTube allow their users to set the license for their uploads, offering the option to release one's content with a free license. Which is really awesome! I use it myself. (but I do it on purpose)

File:SpongeBob SquarePants character.png

Look Squidward, I'm freely licensed!

For some reason, several major entertainment companies are also doing this or used to. For example Nickelodeon, Ubisoft, Bandai Namco, Disney (to be precise, DisneyChannelIsrael) and Microsoft. For short clips of live action series this could be defensible: creating a spin-off from live action footage would be difficult and it doesn't print well on mugs and t-shirts. And a free license might encourage people to make memes using screenshots of that, which is free publicity. But according to at least three Wikimedia Commons administrators (one of them is a crat and CU even!) I can make my own Spongebob webcomic spinoff! (title idea: "Squidward motorboats Bikini Top") I can start selling t-shirts and lunchboxes with Spongebob Squarepants and Squidward now! (as long as I provide attribution. I'll print that on the bottom of the lunchbox) Imma be RICH!!

Shall we get back to earth now? In videos that include non-live action characters from companies whose business model is to sell licenses, that CC-BY license is an accident. Why these clips are freely licensed? Maybe some SEO idiot determined it makes the YouTube algorithm 0.1% happier. Maybe an intern thought that any creative work needs to be marked as "creative commons". Maybe it's a bug in some upload script. Who cares?

Here are the important questions:
1. Is this license enforceable? If I do start selling Spongebob-branded lunchboxes and scuba gear, will this license hold up in court? My best guess? Yes and no, because it'll never go to trial. Nickelodeon would start with a simple cease and desist. If I'd ignore that, they would make me settle, no matter the cost. It's irrelevant how solid of a case they might be able to build - even a 1% chance they would lose would be FAR to costly. They would rather give me a free license to sell my lunchboxes and a million dollars cash to sweeten the deal. Nobody wants that to go to trial. Literally nobody, because it would be bad for free culture as well. If Nickelodeon wins, it may undermine the validity of Creative Commons licenses. If Nickelodeon loses, the stock price for at least Nickelodeon and Disney will take a nosedive and the headlines will read "Wikipedia stole Spongebob". Does that sound like good publicity? Even the monkey selfie had some negative impact in that regard, but in that case the precedent it would've set otherwise was an unacceptable risk. Now imagine the negative impact of the monkey selfie, times a billion.

2. Do these files endanger our re-users? Well, yeah, I think they do..

If Commons is declaring Spongebob to be freely licensed and two clicks away from declaring a few dozen Disney characters to be freely licensed (Big Hero 6, Ducktales 2017, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Milo Murphy's Law).. We can't tell Commons what to do. "Freely licensed" images of characters that are owned by multinationals based solely on the license setting on Flickr or YouTube is silly. It might be up to us to not allow them to be embedded here to protect re-users. How we would technically achieve that, or how we would word such policy? I don't know yet. Or we need to find another solution.

Or we go to war with with Disney and Nickelodeon.

• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#User:Yann
• c:Commons:Village pump/Copyright#CC-BY license on YouTube videos by Disney Channel Israel
• c:Commons:Deletion requests/Files in Category:Hogwarts Legacy
• c:Commons:Undeletion requests/Archive/2023-10#A few files from CC-licensed Nickelodeon videos
• c:Commons:Deletion requests/Files found with "Disney Channel Canada" (old discussion I may have borrowed some arguments from..)
• Commons:Undeletion requests/Current requests (revision 824251709)
• Commons:Undeletion requests/Current requests (revision 824251709)
• c:Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by D. Benjamin Miller#Files uploaded by D. Benjamin Miller (talk · contribs) 2

— Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 17:55, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Ask George Romero if he ever got Night of the Living Dead back out of the public domain after it was accidentally released in cinemas for a few years without a copyright licence.... (Ironically you would need to raise him as a zombie to ask, but there we go.) Historically even accidental copyright releases are held to that. So commons wouldnt be incorrect in saying *for the moment* that anything released on a free licence is *free*. Because there is a lot of previous cases that absolutely support that. Of course the other side is, dont mess with the mouse. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:11, 22 November 2023 (UTC)