Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)

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

• Discussions of technical issues belong at Village pump (technical).
• Discussions of policy belong at Village pump (policy).
• If you're ready to make a concrete proposal and determine whether it has consensus, go to the Village pump (proposals). Proposals worked out here can be brought there.

Before commenting, note:

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

Discussions are automatically archived after remaining inactive for two weeks.

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Make the talk page "Add a topic" form clearer

Currently if a user clicks "Add a topic" on an article talk page, they are prompted for a Subject and a Description and there's no further explanation of what's happening or what they're expected to type there.

Talk pages like Talk:ChatGPT and Talk:Speech synthesis have ended up having to be protected because so many IP visitors think that they're interacting with that software when they type there, and don't realise that they're posting a message on a Wikipedia talk page. Talk:DALL-E gets a lot but hasn't been protected yet. There are also weirder cases like Talk:Doppelgänger (perhaps it's also the name of an app?) where IPs constantly post short sentences about wanting to see their doppelgänger, sometimes entering their email address.

Can we give these cryptic Subject/Description boxes better names, and/or add a short "you are about to post a comment to Wikipedia" message somewhere? Description in particular seems a very strange word to use at all, for something that's a comment or a question. Belbury (talk) 15:47, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

I have never had a problem, but I am probably not a typical reader. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:39, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I'm thinking more about new users here. As well as the IP problems above there will also be cases where the first talk page a new user visits happens to be blank, and they're left to guess what the Subject/Description interface is actually asking of them.

Replying you to here the message box says Reply to Phil Bridger in grey text before I start typing. I'm wondering if we just forgot to set a meaningful box message for new comments (the new interface only went live in 2022). Belbury (talk) 19:52, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

"Description" could be replaced with "Message" or "Type your message here". QuietCicada - Talk 18:07, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

"Your message" (or similar variations as suggested by @QuietCicada) would be much clearer than "Description". (Generally, I think of "description" as metadata.) Along the same lines, "Title" is clearer than "Subject". Schazjmd (talk) 18:27, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

I was thinking "Suggest an improvement to the article" (for talkspace) or "Suggest an improvement to Wikipedia" (everywhere else), but these are more universal (neither would make sense, in, say, a user talk page.) 🌺 Cremastra (talk) 21:04, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Are you sure that this has anything to do with why people post messages on those pages ? You see a problem that annoys you and you want a solution. You THINK you have found a cause that is associated, but there is no proof of that association, you are only guessing. But some people are just really young/lost/unexperienced/dumb etc. when it comes to interacting with the Internet. I know someone working a Helpdesk and they literally keep a list of phone numbers of OTHER help desks, because ppl will happily call their bank if their internet is down. No amount of endlessly high stacked messaging or guardrails of any sort is going to protect some people from making mistakes like these. I just see a wall of meaningless text to ignore and archive. That page doesn't have to be clean. Nor are we required to answer each of those people dumb enough to ask a chat GPT a question there. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:56, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I am guessing at a connection, I saw a recurring behaviour and was considering what upstream factors might feed into it. Even if there turns out to be no connection, replacing the Subject / Description prompt with something clearer seems like it would still be a useful change to Wikipedia's interface. Belbury (talk) 14:07, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) will probably want to talk to the Editing team about this.

I've also wondered whether we're getting more reverted comments. For example, four misplaced comments were posted to WT:V last week. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:21, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

I will. It is not the first discussion I see about placeholder on text areas, though. Finding the right term for the right place, and therefore for the right context, is complicated. As TheDJ said, even if we make a change, you will always see a few users doing things the wrong way. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 14:09, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

So what changes are possible? Are the current Subject and Description messages only used inside new topic boxes on talk pages, or do the same strings need to work in other contexts as well? Would we be able to specify different messages for user/article/project talk pages? Belbury (talk) 19:08, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

As many people know, when you create a new section, the subject window is above the main edit window; and when you edit a existing section, the edit summary window is below the main edit window. But not everybody is aware that the subject window in the first case and the edit summary window in the second case have the same ID (it's wpSummary). So there is a possibility that changes affecting the subject window may also affect the edit summary window. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:40, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

The most basic fix would be altering the strings in MediaWiki:Discussiontools-newtopic-placeholder-title (currently Subject) and MediaWiki:Discussiontools-replywidget-placeholder-newtopic (currently Description), without touching any of the underlying code or HTML. It looks like the same strings are used on both article and user talk pages, though, so there's limited scope for how specific the new messages can be. Belbury (talk) 10:43, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

You are correct: altering these strings will affect all pages. This change has to be very carefully considered, until a proper solution for in-context labels is provided. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 14:38, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Okay. Where's a good place to consider that change? Should I start a thread at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), would it be better to workshop some ideas here first, or is there a better place to have this discussion? Belbury (talk) 17:41, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

You can add an edit notice to the talk page, if you think that additional messaging will help, and it will be shown above the "Add topic" form. (But, I beg you, no longer than ten words, or definitely nobody ever will read it.) Matma Rex talk 16:10, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Seconding that if this is mostly happening on a couple pages it should probably just be an editnotice on them. jp×g🗯️ 01:49, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Oh, most of these pages already have massive edit notices, and they don't work either, the solution probably lies elsewhere. (I think there was already a change a while ago to reject talk page messages that were just one word.) It's just an example of how if a completely new user clicks around the Wikipedia interface and doesn't know what a "talk" page is, the interface labels don't really help much.

The bigger, simpler point that I'm raising here is that Description is a weird placeholder kind of label to put on a text box where users are meant to type a conversational talk page message, and we should change it. Even to just Write your message here. Belbury (talk) 18:21, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Serious reform to this top-down nonsense of projects and quality assessments

I'm an active editor but I've never engaged with discussions about Wikipedia procedures before, so apologies if I'm going about this wrong way, but here are my thoughts on improving a frustrating aspect of the editing experience - an aspect which has recently become a lot more high profile.

For the past few weeks all the articles I am working on have been subject to bots delivering a project independent quality assessment. Hard enough to find out what this even means in plain language. The quality assessments are mostly nonsense being derived from "Projects" that either are totally inactive or have no possibility to achieve their aims because they consist of 7 people (half of whom are probably dead) aiming to assess all the articles in immensely broad categories.

This is deeply frustrating for people actually trying to improve articles because:

1) Its so top down - a bot swoops down and allocates some random rating to the article, based on a - probably ill-informed - rating done by someone affiliated to a project years ago.

2) There is no information provided to encourage people actually actively involved improving an article to engage with the quality assessment process. Its hard enough to even find out and understand what this whole PIQA process IS, despite the flurry of bot activity it has unleashed on active editors' watchlists.

3) The quality assessment is drawing attention to "importance" ratings from projects that are utterly arbitrary.

My suggestion to improve this is:

1) Information provided as part of the banner shell at the top of talk pages encouraging active editors of articles to provide the quality rating for that article on a simplified rating - they are the people who actually know.

2) A quality assessment based on 3 ratings: stub, improving, completed article (this last meaning ready for 3rd party assessment as a good article).

3) Guidance provided to projects to refocus their activity - not around unachievable quality assessments and meaningless importance ratings across thousands of articles - but instead around assessing good articles in their area, within the existing Good Article nomination and review process.

3) Take automatic project "importance ratings" off talk pages. If people are interested in what a small group of people think are the most important Wikipedia articles on the topic of e.g Christianity (a topic so broad it covers nearly all intellectual activity in Europe over most of 2000 years), they can find their way independently to the project page concerned.

This will have the benefit of:

1) Vastly improving the accuracy of quality assessments by encouraging active editors of an article - rather than randoms - to provide it.

2) Ending the demoralising effect of working on an article that some people years ago have classified as "low importance" and which a bot has now declared officially overall "stub" or "start class" (yes I know you can change it - but lets make that clear to all active editors).

3) Supporting the Good Article process and systematising third party review of articles, which is clearly important and valuable.

Atrapalhado (talk) 23:32, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

• Personally, I just ignore the whole “assessment” thing. If I think that I am able to improve an article, I do so… regardless of its “rating”. I hope everyone else would do the same. Blueboar (talk) 00:23, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Yes - but that's kind of my point - its just nonsense. Atrapalhado (talk) 00:25, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I think the content assessment link provided by the template is enough to know about what the heck these are. Maybe the page needs a nutshell though.

3) The quality assessment is drawing attention to "importance" ratings from projects that are utterly arbitrary.
Take automatic project "importance ratings" off talk pages. If people are interested in what a small group of people think are the most important Wikipedia articles on the topic of e.g Christianity (a topic so broad it covers nearly all intellectual activity in Europe over most of 2000 years), they can find their way independently to the project page concerned.

IMO this is a bad idea. The importance ratings are to focus (active) projects on actively maintaining their most vital articles, sort of like Wikipedia:Vital articles, but for a specific project. Maintaining giant lists situated somewhere in the remote outskirts of projectspace is way harder than just letting the banner shell automatically add categories based on the importance rating.
All types of ratings here are completely arbitrary. B-class and above maybe less so, but still.

2) A quality assessment based on 3 ratings: stub, improving, completed article (this last meaning ready for 3rd party assessment as a good article).

I see a couple problems with this:

1. "Improving" wouldn't necessarily mean improving. Most projects don't have much people working anymore. Guidance provided to a sparse hall would do almost nothing; it's not a matter of not knowing how, it's a matter of not enough workforce. (This also applies to recommendation #3)
2. Articles are never completed. We are a wiki, and all articles are constantly evolving. This would imply that no more changes should be made to the article. Getting an article to what was B class doesn't necessarily mean ready for GA review.
3. Having more layers between stub and just under GA is of great benefit. Under the current system, most B-class articles just need some polish based on consistency, style, and sometimes filling in obscurer content gaps. I'm pretty sure there are editors out there who just turn B-class articles into GAs. Start class articles are otherwise good but have a severe lack in content. These new ratings would just turn a lot of articles of different quality levels into "improving" for no good benefit that I can see. The old system is also pretty understandable.

Aaron Liu (talk) 01:47, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

@Atrapalhado, I think you'll want to read the Wikipedia:Content assessment page. The (optional) |importance= or |priority= ratings exist to tell the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team that an article might not be popular (in terms of page views) or central (in terms of incoming links) but is still important (or not) to a particular subject area (e.g., a small country), in the opinion of a group of editors who are sufficiently interested in that subject to form a group to improve those articles. High ratings somewhat increase the likelihood of the tagged article being included in an offline collection of articles.

Some groups additionally use those to prioritize their work. For example, years ago, editors at Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine systematically improved their 100 top-priority articles to at least Start-class.

Until a couple of months ago, each WikiProject separately assessed the |quality= of each article. We decided, through a series of discussions, that this was inefficient: a stub is a stub, and if four groups are interested in this article, we don't need each of the four groups to separately say that it's a stub. A couple of bots are currently running around and turning those duplicate project-specific quality assessments ("stub, stub, stub, stub") into a single project-independent rating ("all stub"). This is generating a lot of activity in watchlists right now but isn't AFAIK supposed to be creating new quality assessments. Hopefully it'll be done in a couple of weeks. (If you don't want to see the bots, then you can hide all bot edits in your watchlist.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:08, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you @WhatamIdoing. QUALITY SCORES I understand the current approach. As per my comment to @Aaron Liu below, the problem is that the quality ratings come from these projects that have impossibly broad scope and have tiny numbers of people involved and/or are largely inactive. Across the fifty or so articles I am more or less active on, only 1 has ever had a quality score updated: the PIQA scores are nearly all wrong. The PIQA project is building castles on sand. IMPORTANCE RATINGS - I wouldnt object to any group of people noting on the talk page that they think an article is important. Nobody has come up with any argument as to the value of med/low importance scores. Atrapalhado (talk) 10:56, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply @Aaron Liu. 1) Importance Ratings - "IMO this is a bad idea. The importance ratings are to focus (active) projects on actively maintaining their most vital articles." This does not require spreading arbitrary "medium" and "low importance" ratings at the top of talk pages on articles that people work hard on. As for projects needing to store the data of their (usually limited, out of date) project importance scores on talk pages, because of the way Wikipedia works, well maybe - but they certainly don't need to be presented at the top in the banner shell. As for everything being arbitrary, well maybe, I guess all of life is - and actually maybe arbitrary is the wrong word, as i suspect these importance scores show A LOT of systemic bias of the people involved in projects.

2 Quality Ratings - Yes the present system is logical. Its just nobody actually uses it apart from the tiny number of people involved in these impossibly vast Projects. The whole thing - especially with the PIQA update - is castles built on sand. The only answer is a simplified system that people who actually edit the articles concerned are encouraged to use. Atrapalhado (talk) 10:48, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

In my experience the importance ratings are much less reliable than the quality ratings. The quality ratings are at least based on semi-hard numbers. But in working on referencing unreferenced articles, I've often come across clearly noteworthy and important topics that are ranked Low either because the article was a low-context stub, or because the WikiProject it is associated with is somewhat tangential to the main topic. (Sha-Mail comes to mind out of some recent expansions.) Gnomingstuff (talk) 08:19, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

@Gnomingstuff: Re I've often come across clearly noteworthy and important topics that are ranked Low ... because the WikiProject it is associated with is somewhat tangential to the main topic.: that's the idea - it's the importance for that particular WikiProject, not the importance in the whole scheme of things. It is perfectly valid for one WikiProject to assign Low-importance to an article which another considers to be High-importance. For example, Talk:Charles III shows Top-importance for WikiProject United Kingdom (obviously), but Low-importance for WikiProject Children's literature - and it's hard to see how he might be rated above that. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:32, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

If my understanding of this is correct, these ratings are an artifact of a time where Wikipedia was aiming at producing a CD or something like that. I've seen some WikiProjects using them to prioritize work, but only a few and a minority. And I've seen complaints about importance ratings being dismissive. I would support a motion to turn them off by default and asking WikiProjects that want them to opt in. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:12, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I think that Start-class gets overused by timid assessors. They know it's not a stub, but they aren't confident enough to rate it any higher. I think that making the assessment "less wrong" is helpful. For the most part, I don't worry about class assessments unless they're significantly wrong. IMO a C-class article should not be rated as a Stub and vice versa, but the difference between a "high Start" and a "low C" might be a matter of individual judgment, so I don't worry about it myself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:43, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

The impression that I get is that few experienced Wikipedia editors care about quality ratings below WP:GA. Remember that a GA itself is usually rated by only one person, although against a consensus-agreed list of criteria. Only featured articles have undergone quality review by more than one editor. If you wish to then please review everything you've written to see if it can be bumped up one or two quality ratings, but I don't think that will achieve much other than give you a warm glow. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:12, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Quality assessments are also used by other editors, e.g., by student editors (do expand the stub; don't touch the FA) and for the occasional de-stubbification drive. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:31, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I agree with the last two sets of comments. The last time I took part in a de-stubbification drive I found at least 1/3 of the articles I looked at weren't remotely stubs. Partly people who improve articles are too reluctant to self-rate with a better class. I find I often upgrade quality ratings, but importance ratings sometimes need downgrading. I do wonder why I bother though. Johnbod (talk) 18:56, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

IMO, assessments are very useful to find articles to improve in a field of interest, and for me are more useful than specific issue tags. If you don't like them they can very easily be ignored, and if you disagree you can just change it. 90% of the problems with assessments onwiki are people being too hesitant to update or rate articles PARAKANYAA (talk) 22:39, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

I pretty much agree with the OP with regards to article/project ratings. For the reasons described, I don't think that they are very meaningful and also ignore them. And sometimes they are harmful. Maybe we should drop them. Regarding projects, there are some projects which are active or semi-active and which do valuable work, so I would not agree with broad negative statements about projects. Even though there are some dead or inactive ones. North8000 (talk) 18:45, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

It is irritating to create or edit an article and believe that it's good, complete, etc. -- and then rater X comes along and calls it a "start." That's worse than no rating at all. I don't care whether an article I've created is rated "C" or "B" or not rated at all, but "start" is an insult. Secondly, length is not a synonym for quality. A 300 word article is adequate for some subjects. I get irritated when rater X comes along and calls the 300 word article I have created a "stub." Perhaps a 2 tier rating system would be workable: "good" articles are those that have been peer-reviewed; everything else is unrated. Or maybe you have a third rating of "stub, needs improvement or expansion" and you put that as a header on the article page to encourage improvement of the article.Smallchief (talk) 10:40, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

You can rate your own articles. You don't have to wait for a random to come along. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 13:35, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Thing is, in most places of the world including Wikipedia judging one's own work is considered bad. So that's pretty unintuitive. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:11, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Removing the {{stub}} tags or updating a |class=stub rating is exactly as unintuitive as removing maintenance tags like {{unref}} or {{confusing}}, I'd say. We want editors, including new editors, to do all of these things when they believe they have solved the problem. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:08, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I am quite comfortable in rating articles I create or work on as "stub", "start", or "C class", based on my (subjective) assessment their quality. However, I will not rate any article I have worked on as "B class" or higher. I have seen articles I started that had a "stub" rating for years, even though they had several paragraphs of text and half-a-dozen cited sources. Given how many articles sit around with inappropriately low quality ratings, I think it is inefficient to stop editors from rating articles (below B class) they have worked on. Donald Albury 16:08, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't think that's what Eumerus is saying; seems to me like they are saying that it's a cultural thing to not rate your own Aaron Liu (talk) 16:41, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

(I think that's a reply to WikiOriginal's comment that "You can rate your own articles". Not everyone uses the Reply button/tries to make the indentation align with the exact comment they're responding to, especially if doing so might create a line of comments where you can't easily see when the first stops and the next starts.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:28, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Aye, what WikiOriginal is saying may be theoretically in line with the rules, but out of line with how assessments work elsewhere in the world including on Wikipedia (GA, DYK, etc.) Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:55, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks everyone so much for your comments. Having read the comments my view now is the following:

It's clear a lot of active editors just regard this whole system as irrelevant/ignorable (Good Article process excepted).

1) IMPORTANCE RATINGS - a few people have come up with arguments for projects needing to identify articles that are important. Nobody seems to value med and low importance scores; they can be demoralising and are largely ignored. They're also rarely updated and almost certainly harbour a lot of systemic bias. Accordingly I am going to put forward a formal proposal that importance ratings are removed from banner shells. Projects can still indicate on talk pages that projects are important or not to them, if they want. (A slightly qualified version of this would be to leave the info in banner shells where projects think an article is important, but not med/low importance). Under either approach, all the data on ratings provided by projects can still sit in the underlying article data, so it is not lost to the projects, just not be displayed in banner shells.

2) QUALITY RATINGS - more complicated/mixed views. PIQA is probably an improvement but the ratings still come from these impossibly vast projects that often barely active or totally inactive and the ratings are nearly all out of date, at least on the articles I work on. I think a big part of the problem is that as @Jo-Jo Eumerus points out "in most places of the world including Wikipedia judging one's own work is considered bad." The banner shell needs to enourage active editors of articles to update the PIQA - they are the people that know - and provide an easy mechanism for editors to do this. Atrapalhado (talk) 11:22, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

I think proposing that only top and high be included has a much higher chance of succeeding. Just including it as text on a talk page is disorganized and I don't see the harm in including these in the banner shell, which seems much more logical.
I'd agree with a proposal to encourage, though we need to work out the specific wording first. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:35, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Well, as one of the editors who actually uses |importance=low (though I wish it were described as "priority"), I obviously have some concerns about removing it. The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team, which still exists and is still active (though no longer using CDs for distributing Wikipedia articles to schools and other places with limited access to the internet), would also be sorry to lose that information.

I do see a difference, however, between "actually removing" and "not displaying prominently". I don't want 97.5% of WPMED's articles dumped back into Category:Unknown-importance medicine articles (which is what will happen if mid- and low- ratings are actually removed). I don't care whether the low rating (~75%, mostly organizations and people) is shown to people looking at the talk page banners, but I don't want to have the ~800 that we need to review for the first time lost in a sea of 50,000 that we've already reviewed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:40, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

@Atrapalhado: You appear to have the wrong idea about importance ratings. They are not part of the banner shell, and are not intended to be. They have always been set on each individual WikiProject banner.

Aside from that, are you aware of the extensive discussions that have taken place since January 2023 at this page, VPR, Template talk:WikiProject banner shell (particularly the archives since January 2023)? I am concerned that this is becoming a parallel discussion that is seeking to throw all of that away. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:55, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Redrose64 Thanks for the feedback. Worth splitting this out into importance ratings and quality assessments/ratings.

IMPORTANCE RATINGS. Apologies if I've got my technical language wrong in the reference to banner shell, but I think you're missing my wider point. The project banners always appear at the top of the talk page and they display the allocated project importance ratings. Those importance ratings - especially when they present a low or med rating - are irrelevant, demotivating, out of date and need to go.

QUALITY RATINGS On the links to the earlier discussions - thanks for these. I haven't read through all of these but will endeavour to. They seem to relate to the now implemented PIQA process. PIQA is an improvement on having lots of quality ratings from different projects. However, the ratings are still substantially out of date and (like importance ratings) usually regarded as an irrelevance by active editors. My revised proposal on quality ratings would be that (A) Active editors are encouraged to update the quality assessment for the article prob by adding a statement to this effect in the banner shell (B) There is a clear explanation (@Aaron Liu suggested a ?in a nutshell doc?) of the PIQA process which is currently totally opaque. Currently the PIQA bot activity on my watchlist looks like this: "(Implementing WP:PIQA (Task 26))." If you click on that WP:PIQA link it tells you: "In February 2023, the Wikipedia community expressed strong support for article quality assessments that are independent of WikiProjects. Consensus was found for adding a |class= parameter to Template:WikiProject banner shell, which all projects would inherit. To avoid redundancy, this rating is then shown only on the banner shell. Projects can choose to opt-out of this system by adding the parameter |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom to their project banner template. It is also possible to add a standalone banner shell template to an article without any WikiProjects, for example {{WikiProject banner shell | class=start}} The robot will regularly maintain {{WikiProject banner shell}}." WTF? Atrapalhado (talk) 15:04, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't see what your problem with the PIQA link is. It seems pretty clear to me.
I added the nutshell summary to Wikipedia:Content assessment. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:58, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

• IMO the |importance= ratings are irrelevant to most, demotivating to a few, but almost never out of date. In fact, I'd say they were wrong (e.g., raised by someone who mistakenly believes that will cause more improvements to an article) more often than outdated. The importance of, e.g., Cancer to Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine isn't something that changes over time. It will never be "out of date".
• The |quality= ratings are out of date on a significant minority of articles. However, the PIQA process has nothing to do with that; PIQA is merely rearranging where the existing information is stored. PIQA is a one-time, one-off update to the wikitext syntax. If you want some official encouragement, then you need to be looking at the long-term, permanent pages, such as WP:Content assessment, which say things like "Generally speaking, all editors, including editors who have written or improved an article, are encouraged to boldly set any quality rating that they believe is appropriate, except for the GA, FA, and A-class ratings." – and have said this for years and years.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:59, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks @WhatamIdoing On Importance Ratings: As I've said I had less problem where (as in your cancer article example) projects (or indeed anyone) wants to say an article is important to them. But nobody has come up with a use case for low or med project ratings on top of the talk page. Can I trade you an example: Talk:Spalding Priory - its an important enough little article in its way (I wont bore you with why I think its interesting!) and slowly developing - but what on earth use does it serve to have the top of the talk page telling us three different projects regard it of "low importance"? Atrapalhado (talk) 22:15, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

"Medium" is usually taken to mean normal or average, which does not seem to be problematic. (I don't ever remember seeing a complaint in which someone alleges that it's insulting.)

I don't think the value is in "the top of the talk page telling us". I think the value is someone (e.g., me) being able to get a list of articles I care about, excluding the ones that I don't care about. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:27, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you Aaron for doing this. Atrapalhado (talk) 22:22, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

The banner shell doesn't display importance ratings. Any importance rating that you see is displayed by a WikiProject banner, one or more of which are enclosed in the banner shell. See the Charles III example that I provided earlier. Some WikiProjects (e.g. Biography) do not provide importance ratings; but for those that do, PIQA has nothing to do with either how they are decided, where the chosen values are set, nor how they are displayed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:07, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Yes - I understand that - in my last response to you I tried to be very clear in distinguishing between comments on Quality Ratings/PIQA and importance ratings. And I apologised for not understanding banner shells. As I said, the point is still that the importance ratings are put there in banners at the top of the talk page and they're out of date, demotivating and irrelevant. Atrapalhado (talk) 22:20, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Technically, the banner "shell" is not displaying any importance ratings at all. It's the "banners" (inside the outer shell) that display the importance rating. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:30, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't think he mentioned banner shells in that reply. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:17, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Second sentence: "And I apologised for not understanding banner shells." In his defense, nested templates like that are confusing to just about everyone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:21, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

I think that means that he apologizes for not understanding the distinction between banner shells and banners. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:34, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

I would like to mention that I find Importance ratings to be quite useful. QuicoleJR (talk) 00:10, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. could you expand a bit. Why? How? Atrapalhado (talk) 01:10, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

It makes it easier to find potential new additions to the vital article list, for one. Also, if I was better at improving articles, the intersection of quality and importance would help me find which articles are most important to improve. Also, I do not think only having Top-Importance and High-Importance is a good idea, because allowing a high rating implies that there could be a low rating. Also, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. QuicoleJR (talk) 01:38, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

I find importance ratings quite useful as well. Nice to see what important articles for my fields of interest are in a sorry state so I can improve them. The cons for keeping them are very very low, so I think they're worth the benefit, even if it's just for some people. PARAKANYAA (talk) 22:35, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

My main project, Wikipedia:WikiProject_Visual_arts decided years ago not to use importance ratings. But we signed up to Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts/Popular pages, which compares views with quality ratings, & is in many ways a better way of assessing "importance" for a project's top 1,000 articles. Johnbod (talk) 15:31, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Popularity isn't necessarily related to relatedness. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:33, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

"relatedness" to what? It's arguably a better guide than the currect system, though common sense is needed, with allowance for google doodles, doodling sports stars etc. January's top 10 are:

Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts/Popular pages

Period: 2024-01-01 to 2024-01-31

Total views: 53,798,474

Rank Page title Views Daily average Assessment Importance

1 Ansel Adams 1,074,270 34,653 GA Unknown

2 Neri Oxman 513,881 16,576 GA Unknown

3 Mona Lisa 374,933 12,094 B Unknown

4 Leonardo da Vinci 305,479 9,854 GA Unknown

5 Vincent van Gogh 265,308 8,558 FA Unknown

6 Pablo Picasso 242,319 7,816 B Unknown

7 Arun Yogiraj 228,227 7,362 Start Unknown

8 Bob Ross 219,491 7,080 B Unknown

9 Eiffel Tower 214,041 6,904 C Unknown

10 Terry Crews 201,157 6,488 C Unknown

Johnbod (talk) 15:50, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Something popular might only be tangentially related to a subject. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:04, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Indeed - the current system has that flaw too. In theory different projects can use different "importance" ratings, but in practice they are generally the same for all projects. Johnbod (talk) 16:09, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Here's the top 10 at Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Popular pages:

1	Sexual intercourse	641,551	20,695	B	Mid
2	Paolo Macchiarini	494,071	15,937	C	Low
3	Christopher Duntsch	343,744	11,088	B	Low
4	COVID-19 pandemic	316,530	10,210	GA	Top
5	Bhopal disaster	307,206	9,909	B	Low
6	Suicide methods	287,328	9,268	B	Low
7	Norovirus	274,185	8,844	B	Mid
8	Jean Tatlock	265,429	8,562	GA	Low
9	Factitious disorder imposed on another	256,335	8,268	C	Mid
10	COVID-19	245,215	7,910	B	Top

As you can see, 50% of them are low priority to the group. Three are mid-priority, and the two COVID pages are top-priority. You could argue that we do care more about Suicide methods and we should care ore about Bhopal disaster, but we could also argue that the only reasons we care about two of the mid-rated articles is because they're popular (one not primarily being a medical subject and the other being a rare disease, which is normally rated low). Popularity has not been a reliable indicator for us. However, for groups that primarily work on articles about people, culture, and business, I would expect the popularity to line up more closely with their own priorities. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:16, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

As I said, on this test, you have to allow for temporary effects, eg Jean Tatlock was Oppenheimer's girlfriend; she'll drop back to her natural level soon (below 100 per day, having peaked at over 200,000 pd on the film's release). That's pretty much the same for arts. The top 10-20 are often odd anyway, with the real usefulness coming mid-table. Actually, if you want to know what readers are actually looking for, I'd expect this approach is at least as useful for medicine as for arts subjects, if not more. Johnbod (talk) 18:36, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

I'd say that if you want to know what readers are looking for with articletopic:medicine-and-health then it'd be very useful, but if you want to know what kinds of articles the editors at WP:MED want to work on, it's not so useful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:24, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Without talking about medicine in particular, one of our big problems on WP is that editors spend vast amounts of time on articles that readers don't want to read (see FAC at any time), and more attention to ones that people do want to read would be a good thing. Johnbod (talk) 04:26, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

@Iridescent has argued that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I can get a good bit of information on popular subjects (whether that's the new box-office hit or a common disease) anywhere. There aren't many good and freely available webpages talking about obscure subjects (whether that's a rare disease or an obscure work of art). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:26, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I never found Iri's oft-repeated argument convincing, or not for a vast range of "mid-popularity" subjects (up to say 1,000 views per day). When writing a new article or expansion, I always do a google search, and in most cases imagining what a teenage reader would make of it is rather depressing. Actually the rest of the internet does rare diseases rather well, I would have thought. Just one or two "good and freely available webpages" will be enough for most readers. Johnbod (talk) 15:39, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

At least two, I think, if the subject is a 'serious' one. I've heard that a typical pattern is to read several sites, and look for what matches. If all the sites say ______, then you tend to trust that they're correct. If they disagree with each other, then you know that you don't have the full story (e.g., maybe some of them are out of date). If you only read one, you're not sure whether the one you read is correct or if you landed on an outlier. Figuring out whether the contents of the webpage you're reading matches your own experiences/beliefs, and whether it matches other seemingly reputable sites, is one of the main ways that people decide what content to trust on the internet.

We even do that here; "figure out whether all the apparently reliable sources agree" is the basis for most of NPOV. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:36, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

On the other hand, I think Wikipedia has too much coverage of the ephemeral and popular and not enough of things of long-term significance, i.e., the problem of recentism. But then, we are all (well, almost all) volunteers who edit what they want to edit. Wikipedia is what it is, and I remain happy to primarily work on articles that often get less than 10 hits a day. And, then, something breaks in the news, and an article that has been getting less than a hundred hits a day suddenly gets 95 thousand in one day, and Wikipedia has proved its usefulness by having information about some obscure topic that everyone suddenly wants to know about, such as happened here. Donald Albury 13:10, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Well, Jean Taplock above is a good example of that. Perhaps one day the FA 1986–87 Gillingham F.C. season (av views 2 per day) will get its day in the sun. Johnbod (talk) 15:39, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I think medicine is a relatively poor example because as a topic area it contains a lot of living people and other "human interest stories" which may become popular for a brief period of time. Sure, people might want to know about Paolo Macchiarini this month, but it's clear it's not as important to the Medicine Wikiproject as, say, Pain. I found WikiProject Mathematic's popular page chart to be one that seems significantly less volatile:

1	Stephen Hawking	1,330,671	42,924	B	Mid
2	Albert Einstein	643,550	20,759	GA	High
3	1	296,115	9,552	C	Top
4	Ted Kaczynski	289,597	9,341	FA	Low
5	Isaac Newton	277,526	8,952	GA	Top
6	0	271,987	8,773	B	Top
7	Alan Turing	244,721	7,894	GA	High
8	Fibonacci sequence	230,374	7,431	B	High
9	Srinivasa Ramanujan	198,130	6,391	GA	Top
10	Pi	194,909	6,287	FA	Top

The popularity seems much more associated with importance to the field here. The only outlier is someone who is better known for things outside of mathematics, to put it mildly. I would guess that other academic and scientific subjects without much "drama" would line up well with their importance as well. I checked WikiProject Geology and it also seems relatively stable and well-correlated with importance. Pinguinn 🐧 19:30, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I see that WP:MATH has the same challenge that WP:MED does in one respect, though: If you want to write about math itself, instead of mathematicians, then you generally aren't going to be interested in the most popular articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:36, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I'd say scientists are way more related to their specific sciences than math. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:14, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Redefinition of ECP

Since the topic keeps coming up, and concerns about gaming this aren't seeming to go away, I want to open another WP:RFCBEFORE discussion about the possibility of redefining ECP to address gaming concerns.

My previous proposal turned out to be unworkable, so I'm going to keep this discussion a little broader:

1. Should we create a minimum byte size for some or all of the edits? For example:
   1. At least 500 significant edits, with "significant edits" defined as:
      • 200 bytes, or
      • 100 bytes, or
      • 20 bytes
   2. At least 250 major edits and 250 minor edits, with "major" and "minor" edits defined respectively as:
      • 200 bytes and 20 bytes, or
      • 100 bytes and 10 bytes
2. Should we require a minimum level of mainspace participation? For example:
   1. At least 500 edits total, including at least 250 edits to mainspace
3. Should we exclude reverts and/or reverted edits?
4. Should we exclude edits made to topic areas covered by ECP?

#1, #2, and #3 will be possible to automate - while it should be possible to modify mediawiki to work this way, it probably won't be practical. Instead, I would suggest we create an admin bot that checks whether these criteria are met and grants ECP when they are.

The one that we won't be able to automate is #4, but it will make it clear to admins when it is appropriate to manually revoke ECP. BilledMammal (talk) 02:46, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

How many times a month does the community conclude that an editor is actually "gaming" ECP? For example, when was the last ANI discussion that concluded someone had gamed ECP? Can you name any editors blocked or otherwise sanctioned for gaming ECP this calendar year?

This feels a bit like a perceptual problem instead of a practical problem – like when violent crime is actually down, but unfounded fear of crime is up, so the politicians give speeches about being tough on crime. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:16, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Part of the trouble is that there is no clear definition of what gaming is; this is intended to help create such a definition. Further, action in many cases have been rejected because editors make the reasonable point that it was unfair to expect editors to abide by standards we don't tell them about; this is intended to allow us to tell editors these standards.

There are some examples, such as Onesgje9g334 who had their ECP revoked, but these are mostly the more obvious cases. BilledMammal (talk) 04:11, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't see why one would exclude topic area edits that haven't been reverted already; that sounds like bureaucracy. 3 should be split into two when this gets proposed (personally I like the second part much better). Unsure about the first one per WAID Aaron Liu (talk) 03:19, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Largely because there's a question of whether it's appropriate for an editor who evaded the restriction for long enough to gain ECP through those evasions to have ECP - there are two parts to this, those editors who continued evading after being made aware, and those editors who only evaded while unaware. BilledMammal (talk) 04:11, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

How exactly does one "evade the restriction"? What does that mean, exactly? Do you mean that if a page is EC-protected, then someone without EC rights has managed to edit it anyway? That sounds like the basis for a bug report, not for a policy change.

Or does this mean something like "Well, Hamas is under ECP, but there are articles that mention Hamas that aren't ECP, so if you edit one of those, or if you create an article about a notable subject related to Hamas that is put under ECP later, you were 'evading the restriction', because we only mean for 0.75% of successful editors to be able to contribute their bit in this area?" Your first 500 edits includes contributions to the talk pages of articles about Israel [1] and Ukraine [2]. Were you evading any restrictions when you participated in those discussions?

As for the rest – if it's not obvious, like the editor who adds or subtracts a couple of letters through a couple hundred edits in a single day, then I don't see the point in calling it "gaming". I think you need to explore what editors actually mean when they claim that someone (or the unspecified, vage 'others') are gaming. Once you know what they actually want stopped, you'll have an easier time formulating a relevant proposal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:39, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

On how to explore that subject: I think an couple of in-depth user interviews, with people who have recently made such an accusation, would be the way to find out what the complainants actually meant. Whether you agree with them or think their reasons are founded is not especially relevant. It's like older people saying "Too much crime around here" when what they really mean is "There's been a massive demographic shift in my community. When I was young, all the kids I saw were from my social/racial/ethnic group, but these days, all the kids I see in my community these days don't look like me, and it makes me feel isolated and insecure". You have to figure out what "They're gaming the system" actually looks like, regardless of whether you sympathize with the situation that they're complaining about. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:44, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Were you evading any restrictions when you participated in those discussions? Possibly; it depends on how the community assesses it. I would consider edits made in contravention of the restriction, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to be "evading", while edits made in line with the restriction would be permissible (I think those edits were in accordance with the restrictions as they were at the time - in particular, I think that ECP for Ukraine-Russia was applied after I made those edits), but the broader community may apply a stricter standard. I also wouldn't consider a couple of edits made inside the topic area to be a cause for concern; if an editor has made 450 outside but 50 inside, it simply isn't worth manually revoking ECP only to manually reinstate it a week later. Again, though, the broader community may apply a stricter standard.

For me, this comes down to what the purpose of ECP is. In my opinion, the purpose is too keep the topic areas functional; to make it harder for bad actors to participate in the topic area, and ensure that good actors have sufficient experience to participate in the topic area.

I'm not convinced that the current requirement is sufficient, and I think even a minor strengthening of it (for example, only unreverted edits above 20 bytes made outside the topic area contribute) would be a very positive step. BilledMammal (talk) 04:57, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

The best public policy design is based in data. You say I'm not convinced that the current requirement is sufficient where sufficient is to keep the topic areas functional; to make it harder for bad actors to participate in the topic area, and ensure that good actors have sufficient experience to participate in the topic area. Why not show that there is a strong association between (i) edit types that happens in editors' 0-500 edit history and (ii) how they turn out to be "good" or "bad" actors?

You'd have to find an agreed-upon labeling schema that marks editors as "good" or "bad". Maybe whether they were banned?

I think pinning these things down will help productively move this idea forward and make it more grounded. eyal (talk) 16:14, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

+1 to what @Eyal3400 said.

For example, all of these proposals are about the types of edits. Maybe it would make more sense is to adjust the minimum age of the account, which is currently 30 days. The account accused of gaming is currently 8 months old, reaching 500 edits after about five weeks and having EC manually removed around 5.5 months. Maybe setting the EC minimum to three or six months would help. If this is motivated by WP:ARBAP2, then we could set it, at least temporarily, to 9 months (=unless you have already registered an account, you will not be able to edit articles about the US presidential election until after election day, which is 8 months, 23 days from now).

But I'm still thinking: Where's the evidence that we have a significant problem that we aren't already capable of handling under the current rules? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:33, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

The problem with gaming is that any transparent procedure is open to it. For example, if the limits were set as in the immediately preceding edit (only unreverted edits above 20 bytes made outside the topic area contribute) how would we look upon an editor who made 500 unreverted edits each of exactly 21 bytes? The only ways to deal with gaming conclusively are by making our procedures secret (which goes against our culture so much that I won't even consider it) or not clearly defined. Phil Bridger (talk) 11:42, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

We tell editors that to edit a topic area you need to meet a certain criteria; I actually think it is reasonable and even natural for an editor interested in a topic area to work towards that criteria.

As such, if we decide the limit is 20 bytes and an editor makes 500 good faith edits each of 21 bytes, then I would suggest we do nothing; they've abided by our rules, and that's good enough - as you point out, we can't prevent editors working towards the criteria, but we can set the criteria at a level where we don't mind if editors do so. BilledMammal (talk) 15:10, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

• We currently tell editors that 500 edits count; an editor diligently worked towards that criteria with at least 250 edits of 1–3 bytes (plus perhaps as much as 250 apparently normal edits, looking only at the undeleted ones), and you level accusations of gaming.
• You propose telling editors that 500 edits of 20 bytes count; we ask whether an editor diligently working towards that criteria with edits of 21 bytes, and you say that's not gaming.

Does that make you think that One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)? I makes me think that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:12, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't understand what you're saying with Does that make you think that One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)? I makes me think that..

I think they're both gaming; I just think the way to address it is to set the criteria to a level where we don't mind if editors do so. BilledMammal (talk) 20:52, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

So if someone adds a simple link to 500 articles (+4), that would be gaming and would bother you/the community? But if they add {{refimprove|date=February 2024}} to 500 articles (+33), then that would be gaming but wouldn't bother you/the community? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:09, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Personally, I would set the criteria as higher than 20 bytes, but if the community decides that 20 bytes is sufficient I'm not going to oppose tightening restrictions because I don't think they're tightened enough. BilledMammal (talk) 21:11, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

• I'm fairly strongly opposed to managing page protection with a process that requires an administrator to individually screen editors. Complex automated screening should be done on the back end, which would require significant developer support (mw:Extension:FlaggedRevs can do many parts of this, but is lacking such support and would not be deployed without it. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:06, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

  Unless we really want to go all-in on it and make everyone apply for actual manual review. Perhaps change the auto ECP to 5000/300, and send everyone to WP:PERM/EC. I don't think this is a great idea though, but it eliminates making everything be the responsibility of one admin. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:21, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

  The current rule (500+ edits) excludes 99.25% of editors who have ever made an edit (ignoring the fact that the majority of qualified accounts are inactive).

  Setting it to 5,000 would exclude something like 99.95% of all editors. Do we really want only 0.05% of editors to be able to edit articles on some very large subject areas? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:15, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

  @WhatamIdoing that was just an arbitrary large number, this would be if the "normal" route to ECP becomes "manual review" - could still leave something big for automatic. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:14, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

  foundation:Wikimedia Access to Temporary Account IP Addresses Policy uses a default threshold of 300 edits and six months. Choosing 300 edits vs 500 edits did not significantly change the barrier (from "very high" to "slightly higher than that"). If you are a high-volume editor, then you are a high-volume editor, and if your editing leads you to make the first 300 edits, then it will lead you right along to the next 200 edits.

  I don't remember hearing about any specific research for the six-month level; we may have taken it from Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library. I had recommended against EC's 30-day minimum, and apparently they agreed with me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:48, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

  Adjusting the automatic from 500/30 to 500/180 is something we could do as well. I don't think 5000/300 is a "good value" - just was putting suggesting some fall back if we went to a normally manual process (perhaps 1000/360 would work there as well). — xaosflux ^Talk 11:29, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

  Is there even enough support for a system where WP:PERM/EC is the typical route to justify listing it in an RfC? My suspicion is that the overwhelming majority of users would oppose it due to sysop workload, the fact that it would make the ability to edit some massively important areas contingent on an individual's opinion, and so on. Sincerely, Novo Tape^{My Talk Page} 16:11, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

  I also have my doubts about this. How many potential candidates are we talking about? Hundreds or thousands? About 800K editors made one or more edits last year; if 1% of them achieved 500 edits, that would be 8,000 potential candidates to review. That's probably the highest possible estimate. If it's 0.1%, then that's 800 potential candidates, or several per week.

  More likely, though, is that few of them would know that they could ask for it, so we'd be silently missing out on contributions without having so many manual requests. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:03, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

  I agree with WAID. 5000 is way too much and would lead to more gaming Aaron Liu (talk) 16:43, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Going back all the way to the original AE request from which ECR sprang how is that more than a decade ago? there have been various proposals to limit the kind of edits that would qualify for the 500. Came up at the GG AE that first expanded it, and at ARBPIA3. The issue remains the same in that restricting the class of edits that qualify complicates administration of the prohibition while doing little to discourage gaming.

Lengthening the age requirement is easier but conflicts with our ideal of openness and is seen is the gateway to entrenching a hierarchy. Furthermore it also does essentially nothing to deter the persistent sockmasters who are being targeted as they are already quite adept at warehousing accounts. Perhaps there might be a brief reprieve, but even that is questionable.

In sum this is one of the cases where the solution seems worse than the problem. 184.152.68.190 (talk) 01:01, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Urging people to register an email account

I just read yet another sad case of a productive editor who lost access to their account because they lost the password and didn't have an email address registered so they couldn't recover it. What would people think about a bot which looked for accounts that don't have email registered and dropped them a message on their talk page explaining the risk of not being able to recover a lost password and how to fix that? We'd probably want some filter criteria like only doing it for accounts which have been active in the past N days and only sending a reminder once per year. RoySmith (talk) 17:02, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Maybe we should start with a watchlist notice or a sitenotice that displays only to extended-confirmed editors. I don't know whether the sitenotice can be controlled according to whether e-mail is registered, but perhaps that's not terribly important. Some of us may have invalid/outdated e-mail addresses.

As for making a list for personal messages, we could consider 500+ or 1,000+ edits and perhaps 1+ years old, or anyone with "advanced" user rights. Maybe it would be worth excluding the handful of people who have an e-mail address registered at another SUL-connected wiki (but disabled here).

Have you thought about Echo/Notifications messages? It's also possible to send to any list of individuals. That would be more private for the notified people and less potentially annoying to the people watching their pages. Once we've dealt with the backlog, it's possible to have an automatic trigger for a notification when a milestone is reached. Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library congratulates people on reaching 500 edits. Maybe when you reach a certain level, it could suggest making sure that an e-mail address is set in your prefs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:44, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Have you considered to edit milestones notifications locally? Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 17:51, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I like the idea of this being a notification, for all the reasons WhatamIdoing pointed out. RoySmith (talk) 18:09, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

"Has email" isn't something I think we can determine publicly, but for most people "Is emailable" (which can be determined) is good enough - we could MMS ("is NOT emailable" AND "in some group") I suppose. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:19, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm assuming whatever causes the "Email this user" link to show up in the sidebar is the same thing that allows you to do an account recovery, no? RoySmith (talk) 21:48, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

That's what he means by "is emailable". The user has to not deselect "allow emails from other users" for that link to show up. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:13, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

What about people who know they could do that but don't want to? 🌺 Cremastra (talk) 22:30, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I envision that they'll get one reminder and there will be a way to opt out of additional reminders. RoySmith (talk) 22:35, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Or, we only add it to the 500 edits milestone and maybe the 5000 (or the 10000) one, and foresake any further warnings. Aaron Liu (talk) 23:55, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

(Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library is a 500-edit milestone, so I think we should pick a different round number.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:34, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Why not both? Aaron Liu (talk) 12:33, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Because if you get one message in January, and a different message in February, you're more likely to take action on both of them than if you get both at the same time.

Also, do we really want to wait for 500 edits? Why not show this suggestion sooner? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:29, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't see why that'd be the case, especially since both messages are short.

Maybe 100? Aaron Liu (talk) 22:57, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

There are milestone notifications for the 1st, 10th, 100th, 1,000th (etc.) edits. There is a WP:TWL notification for the 500th edit. We should pick a number that isn't already being used. Maybe 150? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:20, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't see why we should pick a number that isn't already being used. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:31, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I repeat: Because if you get one message in January, and a different message in February, you're more likely to take action on both of them than if you get both at the same time.

This is because people are easily distracted. They say "Ooooh, I wanna play with the new shiny toy" and when they toddle off to do this, they forget that the second message existed (and the Notifications icon is no longer red, so they get no reminder, either). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:06, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

But the milestones don't tell you to do anything either. Aaron Liu (talk) 21:51, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

• Seems like being able to bulk report on emailable has been stalled for 10+ years phab:T70876. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:29, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

I lost my initial account, User:Union Tpke 613, since I was not yet old enough (13) to get a gmail account, and thus didn't link it to an email. Kew Gardens 613 (talk) 06:46, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

How Many Opinions Are Required to Reach Consensus ?

I'm not sure what forum is best for this post.

I think there should be much greater responses on talk pages before anyone declares a consensus is reached. The talk pages are great and useful for discussing and editing article content. Yet, they usually don't approach consensus with any scientific or academic validity. There are usually not enough responces. I'll recomed that the policy dictating consensus be updated with statistical polling requirements.

This is information I found easily that should have some bearing on a consensus:

• "The total number of English speakers in the world adds up to around 1,430,000,000." List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
• There are currently 46,926,663 Wikipedia accounts, of which 127,021 have made at least one edit during the last month. Wikipedia:Wikipedians
• The English Wikipedia includes 6,781,913 articles and it averages 540 new articles per day. In 2023, 812,635 registered editors made at least one edit.Wikipedia:Statistics
• Nearly 4,900,000,000 people visited Wikipedia in February 2022. 22 Astonishing Wikipedia Statistics and Facts
• English Wikipedia has 868 administrators Wikipedia:Administrators

• The survey response quantity that is required for statistically validity can be calculated simply from this website and the information above here.
• These websites have more complicated equations for calculating statistically validity: https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/ppc/section3/ppc333.htm , Sample_size_determination ,https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050915015781 , Consensus-based_assessment

A quick evaluation suggests that at the very minimum, to get a consensus with a 10% error possibility Wikipedia should get responses from 86 Administrators and/or 100 Wikipedians.

ProofCreature (talk) 22:01, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Simply no.
That just takes too much time. If not enough people respond and there aren't opposes, just implement the edit. They can always be reverted later.
WP:Wikipedia is not a democracy. We don't care about polling to get sample sizes unless the change is going to be so huge it warrants Wikipedia:Centralized discussion. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:26, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

A lot depends on what you are assessing consensus about. Sometimes two mildly disagreeing editors who are willing to compromise is all it takes to reach consensus. At other times you need more (even a wide sample from the broader community) to assess consensus. That said… one thing you can say: The fewer editors who are involved, the weaker the consensus is… and the more editors involved the stronger the consensus is. Blueboar (talk) 22:48, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Fair. ProofCreature (talk) 17:38, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

I get that. It is certainly easier to include one's own opinion and ignore any research or statistics - certainly easier and not uncommon.

Wikipedia lends itself to this kinda editing by allowing for reverting and multiple editors. That's the point to Wikipedia and a large part to the reason it's useful. I'm not sure it's a consensus, though. ProofCreature (talk) 17:43, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

In the vast majority of discussions I've been involved with here, getting that many responses would have been a miracle. Sometimes getting responses from five Wikipedians is challenging. Sometimes getting any responses when I try to initiate a discussion takes more effort than I would have anticipated. DonIago (talk) 13:52, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

One of the lesser-known strengths of the community is the actual high levels of courtesy here. If a capable responsible editor would like a change, then often people may allow it by allowiing the edits to proceed without debate. Sm8900 (talk) 15:01, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

True. ProofCreature (talk) 17:37, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Please no. If you look at the first listing on CENT, you'll notice it has a grand total of 6 commenters . Even the survey about Vector (2022) only has 63 editors. Getting 100 !voters, especially on pages about topics the vast majority of people have never even heard of, let alone care about, would be literally impossible. Sincerely, Novo Tape^{My Talk Page} 17:23, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

True. ProofCreature (talk) 17:37, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

I think the larger issues with this have already been covered above. I will add that there are levels of consensus, and that numbers already play a role in its assessment as explained at WP:CROWD. 184.152.68.190 (talk) 01:42, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Yeesh, there are so many policies. I've never seen that one. It summarizes my position fairly well except to omit any mention that commentators or those who start a post should have some obligation to try to find as many opinions as possible.

ProofCreature (talk) 13:09, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

That's not a policy or guideline; it's an essay that an influential user wrote Aaron Liu (talk) 13:13, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

That's funny. I thought "WP" stood in for Wikipedia Policy. lol. Just one more example that shows how acronyms are foolish as they are easily misinterpreted. ProofCreature (talk) 13:21, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

WP is a namespace WP:ALIAS that shortens links for convenience think WikiPedia if that helps. In fact most projectspace content, including this page, is not policy. Anyway, WP:CROWD is an interpretation of the longstanding policy at WP:CONLEVEL, and a fairly uncontroversial one despite its fairly recent documentation there.

As for the interaction of policies, guidelines, and essays, see WP:PGE but also WP:DCE. Confused yet? Don't worry no one here actually understands it all, and this is a vast and complicated place with a steep learning curve that is not helped by the fact we have any internal WikiSpeak that frequently uses words for example consensus in a way that is different from and sometimes in conflict with their ordinary English definition. 184.152.68.190 (talk) 20:00, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

How did you get the 86 Administrators and/or 100 Wikipedians number from this data? Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 13:21, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I did a very quick evaluation using the information on this website.

• These websites have more complicated equations for calculating statistically validity: https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/ppc/section3/ppc333.htm , Sample_size_determination ,https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050915015781 , Consensus-based_assessment. The first one on that list is probably the best.

ProofCreature (talk) 13:27, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Makes sense, although I'd say there are a lot more variables at play and these results assume you have a statistically representative sample, which is rarely the case given that not all editors are equally likely or motivated to reply. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 13:33, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Honestly, I don't expect much from this proposal. I am entirely aware how difficult it is to get more than a few Wikipedians to comment on any given page or article. There are many reasons for this. Disinterest on anything but "pet topics " is one big reason. There's also malaise and no motivating factors (ego, boredom, and a love to share learning are about the only motivation I can see to edit anything).

The thing I am looking to have happen from this suggestion is to see the statistics that describe consensus somehow included in the protocool for reaching a consensus without them becoming a mandate. More like a suggested action or just an F.y.i. There should be an effort (due diligence) made to draw in comments from Wikipedians who are less interested in the topic. Too, it should be noted, somehow, that limited comments (a number below the threshold for statistical consensus) can create an echo chamber effect. ProofCreature (talk) 17:55, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

• I think that it might be useful as an essay; but even then, it's a matter of how strong of a consensus is required. Most normal edits to individual articles do not require a very strong consensus at all, so this wouldn't be applicable to them; even most policy changes don't require the thresholds you describe here. But an essay on the subject would be useful as a reference for people who are considering the thresholds necessary to make truly drastic changes to policy with wide-ranging implications (I believe the threshold you mention is somewhat close to the currently required threshold necessary to amend ArbCom's charter, say.) It's also important to note that this assumes a random sample and that, while we do make some effort to prevent canvassing and meatpuppetry, Wikipedia participation is still not random, whether we're talking about participation in any one RFC or across Wikipedia as a whole. --Aquillion (talk) 21:38, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

  I'm not sure it would be useful even as a WP:User essay. The point behind discussion is to find out what the answer is. We know we have "the answer" when the results endure. For reasons of efficiency, the answer should be found out with the least amount of effort by anyone. If that can be done with no discussion, then great! If it can be done with a discussion involving just a few people, then good! If we really need WP:100 – well, perhaps twice a year we feel that we need that many editors to express an opinion. And unfortunately, that doesn't always result in a durable answer.

  @ProofCreature, I suggest that you look up the research Google did years ago on the correct number of interviewers they needed to make a decision about whether to hire someone. The answer was four (for most jobs). Any more than that was just a waste of resources that didn't change the outcome. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:51, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

• Two. What you're missing is that decisions require a consensus amongst those who participate in the consensus-building process, not amongst the population of people who could participate in it. – Joe (talk) 13:31, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

  I get that. @Joe Roe:, @Chaotic Enby:That very much describes the problem to struggle against. It would be best to get comments from people who would otherwise not participate in the discussion. Those comments are likely to be less partial, more neutral, and will increase the chance that the consensus will represent the total readership population.

  ProofCreature (talk) 14:12, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

  Again, a LOT depends on what the issue is. For a content dispute at an article about a relatively obscure topic, we ideally want comments from editors who know the topic well and know the related sources. That may be a small group of editors. Comments from the “total readership” are not as helpful. On the other hand, questions about policy interpretation or proposed changes to policy need comments from a wide swath of our community. Blueboar (talk) 14:58, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

  Total readership? Why on earth would we want or need decisions to representative of such a huge population, that by and large has no knowledge of or interest in the actual production of encyclopaedia articles? – Joe (talk) 08:54, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

  The total number of people who look at any particular Wikipedia article are exactly the people who should be able to comprehend the article.

  Wikipedia isn't about production it's about readers. It's (and any Wiki's) intent is as a "crowed sourced" collaboration edited and managed by its own audience.

  ProofCreature (talk) 12:02, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

• I think the question posed in the title of this section has been answered pretty comprehensively. If your intent is to get more people to participate in discussions then all power to your elbow, and I hope you're leading by example, but don't expect the kind of numbers that you state above. Phil Bridger (talk) 12:18, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I agree Phil Bridger, that it is very difficult. You'll see my comments about that above here, not far from the top.

It is worthwhile to note that you've highlighted the motivation for this topic - "[my] intent is to get more people to participate in discussions". More than once I've attempted to reach out for more participation on a talk page only for moderators to derail the attempt by declaring a consensus is reached too soon and /or with far less responses than are adequate. As @184.152.68.190: noted my position agrees with WP:CROWD. To that essay I'd add that there should beshould some obligation to try to find as many opinions as possible.

I'm asking that moderators give it a chance and time before trying to stop a Talk Page conversation.ProofCreature (talk) 13:04, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

This is complicated, and while I know most newcomers find this surprising, we don't have moderators.

What you are probably thinking of is closers more on that at WP:CLD and WP:ACD, gotta love all these TLAs, and while most informal discussions are open-ended, we do place time limits on formal discussions, usually 30 days for RfCs and 7 for XfDs and RMs. These time limits are an attempt to balance the desire to maximize participation with the need to eventually reach a resolution of some kind, even if only one of no consensus. In experience, most closers are willing to relist on request after a no consensus close where participation was minimal, but the truth is that usually the extra week does not garner any additional participation. Volunteer time is limited and there really is just not enough to go around to keep all our processes fully staffed, in fact staffing hasn't really been adequate for quite some time. There's a larger topic here about needing to reform our processes due to chronic participation shortages, but I don't want to go off on a long tangent. My only advice then is to WP:PAYITFORWARD when you can and encourage others to do the same, but the time needed to make a well-researched WP:!VOTE is non-trivial even if you are familiar with a topic area.

Sometimes you will also see more informal discussions closed, but that is usually because the discussion is rehashing something that has been discussed ad nauseum and the close is an effort to save everyone's time there's a reason that {{Round in circles}} exists. From a newcomer's perspective that can be frustrating, after all you didn't get to participate in those discussions. But try to consider the perspective of those who have been around a while, and read the earlier discussions. Most of the time I think you'll realize we got to where we are at for good reasons, messy though the discussions may have been. That does not mean those parts of Wikipedia are perfect, or that change is forever foreclosed on, some perennial proposals have eventually been implemented, but you need to do very thorough research first. Build consensus slowly from the ground up and make sure you address why similar proposals have failed.

Anyway I could probably spin-out what's already been written into several long essays explaining the hows and whys of Wikipedia process and consensus for newcomers, not that anyone would ever read them, but hopefully I've covered things adequately in broad strokes.

P.S. unregistered users can't be pinged, well not yet anyway, apparently that's in the works for sometime in the near future, but given the track record of technical fix timetables I'll believe it when I see it. 184.152.68.190 (talk) 15:54, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

WikiProject Namespace

Hello there, Village Pump! I am currently thinking about a WikiProject namespace, like changing Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess to WikiProject:Chess. I had this idea because it would look nicer in my opinion. Maybe the shortcut could still be WP: because WikiProject and WikiPedia share the letters W and P? - The  Master of  clockHedgehogsclock ^{(always up for a conversation!)} 19:23, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

This has been suggested before, though (if memory serves) not for this reason.

WikiProject:Chess and similar pages could be set up as Wikipedia:Cross-namespace redirects. I believe that the abbreviation (WP:) could usually be made to work through the addition of specific redirects.

However, I'm not sure that it would make much difference. Most experienced editors are going to use WP:CHESS, so we're not going to see the name in discussions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:40, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Note Wikipedia:Chess is already a redirect to the corresponding WikiProject, and Project is an alias for the Wikipedia namespace, so Project:Chess will redirect as well. isaacl (talk) 23:00, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

New sister project: WikiForum? WikiEssay?

So, I don't exactly know what the name would be, but I think a sister project where people will be allowed to write about things without worrying about notability, citations, etc. would be good. Kind of like Wikipedia essays but on any topic. It would still have restrictions of course, for inappropriate content and attacks on people or organizations. What do you think? Youprayteas (t • c) 16:22, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I think you're looking for forums like lesswrong, reddit, kbin, etc. I don't think such an host of arguments would align with the WMF's goals of free knowledge. Banning all attacks on people or organizations also severely restricts the quality essaying that might go. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:30, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Proposals should go to meta:Proposals for new projects. 115.188.119.62 (talk) 21:17, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

without worrying about notability, citations, etc AAAAAAAAAH! Try Twitter. 🌺 Cremastra (talk) 15:59, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Twitter has a length limit, along with being X'd. I think my suggestions are much better Aaron Liu (talk) 16:37, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Are you unaware of the existence of things called blogs? --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 16:10, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, but what I mean is like pages that could be used as a source because blogs are not allowed as references in Wikipedia. Basically journalism but you don't have to be a professional journalist and the work is taken seriously. Youprayteas (t • c) 18:07, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Hosting a page on a Wikimedia site wouldn't automatically make it a reliable source in the English Wikipedia sense. Its reliability would have to be analyzed in the same way as any self-published work. isaacl (talk) 18:26, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Is there a way to publish blog-like work with it being a usable reference? And how exactly are the sources determined to be trustable? Youprayteas (t • c) 18:30, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

@Youprayteas, have you read WP:SPS? It explains when self-published content can be used as a source. Schazjmd (talk) 18:34, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

See English Wikipedia's guideline on reliable sources. isaacl (talk) 18:35, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

I really can't see us taking things written "without worrying about notability, citations, etc." very seriously. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 19:25, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

WikiVoyage. Youprayteas (t • c) 19:39, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Do people really take Wikivoyage seriously? I forgot that it even exists. Reading over several bits of it, I can definitely say that I don't take anything it says seriously. "To understand Salvador you need to be open minded..." BLEEEECCCCCCHHHHHH! --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 19:44, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

...you must be fun at vacations. Aaron Liu (talk) 19:59, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Because I find a say nothing touchy feely statement to be useless? --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:08, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Not even to say that it has a very different way of life? Or to enhance the happy mood of vacations? Aaron Liu (talk) 20:11, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

How in the hell does saying "different place is different" enhance the happy mood of a vacation? Not to mention what does that have to do with the exact statement I quoted? "To understand Salvador you need to be open minded". Well, duh. To understand ANYTHING you have to be open minded. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:15, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

I won't discuss this further because at this point I don't think it contributes anything to improving anything. Aaron Liu (talk) 20:51, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Do people really take Wikidata seriously? I forgot that it even exists. Reading over several bits of it, I can definitely say that I don't take anything it says seriously. "P1313=Q27306390", "Wikisimpsons article ID=50604..." BLEEEECCCCCCHHHHHH!

Aaron Liu (talk) 20:05, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Kind of have to agree with this. 🌺 Cremastra (talk) 20:50, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Is this going to become a copypasta meme? Do people really take Wikipedia seriously? I forgot that it even exists. Reading over several bits of it, I can definitely say that I don't take anything it says seriously. “List of local service districts in Newfoundland and Labrador”? “History and impact of institutional investment in housing in the United States”? BLEEEECCCCCCHHHHHH! Dronebogus (talk) 10:53, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

That still has a limited amount of things that could be written about, whereas a forum service would just be infinite. Aaron Liu (talk) 20:03, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

But why would I TRUST it? If it isn't worried about notability or citations, why should I expect it to be any more useful than a blog about the game you and your good friend made up one day during Sunday school? User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:13, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Wikis (including Wikipedia itself) already can't be used as references on Wikipedia. If someone could write something unsourced on a Wikimedia project, and then use that writing as a source on Wikipedia, that's just original research with extra steps. And if they have to use a source, well, that's already a better source than the paraphrase used (that's also why tertiary sources, again like Wikipedia, shouldn't be used as references).
Also, being a professional journalist doesn't mean your stuff is automatically reliable. A Twitter post or self-published blog by a reputable journalist, for instance, would likely not count as a reliable source. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 13:25, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Deletion sorting list bot

Hello! Sorry if this isn't the right forum, has already been suggested, or is unworkable, but I wanted to suggest a bot that I would find time-saving. I don't know how to code, so this would definitely not be something I could take on, but thought some clever-clogs might like the idea!

When I first read WP:AFD, I didn't realise that you had to inform deletion-sorting lists and notify the AfD discussion that you've notified those lists. Adding notices to multiple deletion-sorting lists is quite an onerous manual task, and one that I suspect could be automated.

The bot would check open AfDs to check if a notice has been placed informing participants of an AfD's inclusion in a deletion-sorting list. The bot then checks the relevant deletion-sorting list. If said AfD hasn't been placed on the deletion-sorting list, then the bot adds the AfD to the list itself. Thus, editors need only place the notice in the AfD without updating individual deletion sorting lists. IgnatiusofLondon (talk) 16:19, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

@IgnatiusofLondon, try User:Enterprisey/delsort. Schazjmd (talk) 16:36, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

I think he's proposing a bot to automatically add AfDs to delsort lists based on their categories, not a userscript. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:39, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

The userscript is super-helpful (thank you, Schazjmd!), but yes, I had in mind a bot. Editor Cnilep recently discovered my mistake that I said I had notified lists without actually notifying lists (which I had done on a previous, still-open, AfD too). It made me wonder how many other new editors don't realise this, and after having to notify multiple delsort lists, I wondered whether the task could be automated by a bot, saving editors' time. IgnatiusofLondon (talk) 16:46, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

It'd be interesting to see exactly how common this is. I think the number of people who do fully manual sorting (probably 99% of the ones I see are from Twinkle or delsort) is fairly small. I'll try to spot-check some existing sortings I see. But it's definitely something a bot could do or figure out something else to make it more detectable/harder to do. Skynxnex (talk) 17:57, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! Part of the reason for pinging Cnilep was in the hope he might share how he came across my mistake too... IgnatiusofLondon (talk) 20:38, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Oh dear, homework. How did I come across it? If memory serves, IgnatiusofLondon manually notified WikiProject Languages of the deletion discussion, and I saw it there. Cnilep (talk) 03:19, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

You don't have to notify anyone about an AFD nomination. If you don't sort the nomination, someone else will. Also, they'll be listed in Wikipedia:Article alerts for each subscribed WikiProject.

If we wanted to have a fully automated system, we should probably look into standardizing the lists based on the hastopic: feature. There are 64 "topics" at the moment, and it would not be difficult to produce lists based on these, including for articles that aren't categorized or tagged by WikiProjects. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be pretty good. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:30, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Semi-Administrator right

I believe that there should be an extended level of protection named "Semi-Administrator" that requires a user request their permissions on a WP:PERM page. I believe this should be added because it would prevent WP:PGAME and a possible future WP:INVASION. It would be like requesting WP:TPE or WP:RBK, but instead it gives users the right to edit semi-administrator protected pages which would likely become commonplace in the future due to the expansion of media bias, systematic bias, and political extremism, all leading to increased vandalism. Combined with the reduction of editors, this will cause disasterous effects. Another idea is to make WP:ECP a requested right instead of an automatic one. To reduce request backlog, however, there must be more administrators which means WP:RFAINFLATION needs to stop. 2003LN6 18:34, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

WP:WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG!
I don't think we should worry about anything that has no indication of happening. Permission gaming isn't happening on a large scale, and I'd rather preserve adminship being no big deal. Aaron Liu (talk) 19:44, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Sounds good, but I still believe a backup plan is good or else admins will have to do mass rangeblocks on pretty much the entire world during an WP:INVASION, which would be quite hostile to newcomers. 2003LN6 05:37, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

I think mass-enabling WP:Pending changes would be a good plan. Aaron Liu (talk) 13:25, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

The number of active editors (registered accounts making 5+ edits in a given month) has been stable at the English Wikipedia since about 2013.

@2003 LN6, just in case it was the very old image at the top of the page that made you believe that the number of editors is still declining, I've made an updated image for you.

As you can see, the number of active editors has been stable for 10+ years. There are some seasonal effects, but most months have 36K to 38K registered editors making five or more edits during the calendar month. The English Wikipedia isn't growing, but there is no decline, either.

If you want to see what a decline looks like, then check out the numbers for the German Wikipedia. Other communities, like the Persian Wikipedia, are growing. Overall, across all the languages, I understand that the number of editors was increasing slowly over time, spiked up during the first year of the pandemic, and might be settling down to a natural growth rate again. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:18, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I genuinely don't think a hypothetical scenario of thousands of vandals hacking into Wikipedia is a reasonable basis for such drastic changes. Blocking is easy for admins, and, if your hypothetical WikiInvaders can hack into established accounts, what would stop them from also hacking into accounts with that new user right? Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 13:30, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

RFA2024

@HouseBlaster, Barkeep49, and SilkTork: I'm thinking that, since we have three RfA ideas currently open at WP:PROPOSE, we should be moving these to a dedicated subpage to avoid clutter and maybe get the community's creative juices flowing on more ideas. Would any of you object to having your threads moved to a Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review? (the format of this one will be a bit more streamlined, in light of RFA2021 and RFA2015 having already done the groundwork on the "problems" phase.) theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 18:57, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Let's do it. HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 19:00, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

No objections provided no impetus is lost. SilkTork (talk) 19:38, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

I see these three proposed tweaks as data points ahead of some proposed larger change - like Leaky's draft elections or rethinking how we do moderation - which feels more like a 2024 review, personally. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:49, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

@Barkeep49: Totally, and I think that moving to review is what's gonna let us have new proposals to implement elections or rethink 'crat clerking. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 22:51, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Ohhh, I see where you're coming from. Let me think on that :) theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 22:54, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

What if we have one phase of RFA2024 (i.e. what we are currently doing) which proposes temporary changes to try, and then phase two which determines what we want to keep (and perhaps further reforms/admin elections/etc.). HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 00:07, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Changing the viewing restrictions on pending changes protection

According to WP:PCPP, Readers who are not logged in (the vast majority of readers) are shown the latest accepted version of the page; logged-in users see the latest version of the page, with all changes (reviewed or not) applied. This could cause some problems. A lot of what comes through Special:PendingChanges has factual errors, supported with no reliable source, is vandalism, or has other problems (examples: [3] [4] [5]). The point of pending changes protection is for someone to vet problematic edits before the readers see them. However, logged-in editors can see these edits. Most users with an account never make a single edit, so they'll see the potentially problematic edits. That's why it might be beneficial to change pending changes protection so only confirmed editors can see the latest version of the page. Any thoughts? ‍ Relativity 03:09, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

FYI no one really maintains pending changes anymore so even if there's a consensus to do this it's unlikely it'll ever be implemented. And this might be hard technically, since for all articles logged in users are already served a different page (anons get a fully cached html while for logged in users the html is generated on the fly) so it's easy to have them get the new version while anon users don't, but it'd probably be harder to serve different versions based on confirmed status. Galobtter (talk) 05:17, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

I imagine most readers who have accounts and never edit also never log in. For new editors, it would be confusing when they edited a pending-changes protected article, they saw a different version in the edit box and in edit preview, and yet didn't see the result after publishing an edit. isaacl (talk) 07:43, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Those who have accounts and never edit usually do that for preferences purposes. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:07, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

My guess is that people create accounts intending to edit but then never do, and never bother to log in again. Although I considered readers creating accounts just to set preferences, and I'm sure there are some, to me it feels like the intend-to-edit population would be larger than the setting-preference population. Do you know of any available stats on this? isaacl (talk) 18:11, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

No, and I don't see how such stats could be obtained. At best we can take the account surge after the change to V22. Aaron Liu (talk) 21:37, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

User surveys would be needed. The WMF could also examine how many of these accounts actually change any preferences. Given how people generally don't like to take extra steps when using web sites, I'm dubious, but in any case I don't think it matters much for this proposal. The negative effects on editors are significant. isaacl (talk) 22:41, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

You could determine the percentage of "new" accounts that were autocreated. It's not unusual for someone who is working on a Wikipedia article to check out the other languages (e.g., to find pictures you might want to use). I think we could presume that most auto-created SUL accounts that have edited elsewhere and haven't edited here didn't really intend to edit here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:26, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Logged in non-editing readers are really a minority, most readers are not logged in. We'd like to encourage editors to fix problems, not make it harder for them to. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:18, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm a pending changes reviewer. I don't think that pending changes does much good. I don't think that I ever reviewed one that was vandalism/ outlandish. A common situation is where I accept it as a PC reviewer and then revert it as an editor. Which means that it was an OK edit under Pending Changes criteria. I'm guessing that such edits might get wrongly rejected by others on a Pending Changes basis which means rejections with no visible edit summary/explanation. North8000 (talk) 19:42, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Huh, as a reviewer I didn't know that. Wikipedia:Pending changes also says that Reviewers and administrators will see a yellow watchlist banner on their watchlist whenever there is a pending edit needing review. There is currently a pending edit, and I don't see the banner, nor do I have any styles that'd modify the display. Did you ever see it? Aaron Liu (talk) 21:41, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

I have seen that banner, as a reviewer. My understanding is that it will display that banner if a page on your watchlist has pending changes and not for just any page wiki-wide. (That may be what you meant but reading the instructions text now it seems ambiguous, assuming I'm correct.) Skynxnex (talk) 00:57, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean by what I meant. Anyways, that is not something that makes sense... What would the purpose of that banner be, if it's only for pages already on the watchlist? Aaron Liu (talk) 01:05, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

(Sorry if I was unclear; just wanted to make I admitted I maybe misunderstood what you meant.) I personally have found it somewhat useful since for awhile I page I watched was getting a lot of IP vandalism and so highlighting both on the top and marking the the entry itself (like when the pending change is down near the bottom since it's a busy day). Screenshot of a single page such in timeless: c:File:Watchlist-pendingchanges-20240221.png. Skynxnex (talk) 13:28, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

If you want to see all pages with pending changes, just go directly to Special:PendingChanges. There are 13 at the moment, which might be the most I've ever seen. The oldest has been awaiting review for 8 hours. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:28, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I would just revert and that would generally automatically accept the edit. Galobtter (talk) 01:17, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

No, it does not. It only accepts yours. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:23, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Getting plainrowheaders out of MediaWiki:Common.css

As it says in the title, this is about getting plainrowheaders out of MediaWiki:Common.css. This would be accomplished by running a bot like this stalled request to place {{plain row headers}} above each table which uses class=plainrowheaders before removing the styling from Common.css. The reasons this is A Good Thing are detailed at MediaWiki talk:Common.css/to do#Description of work, but in summary it allows for faster loading times and lets more people to edit "sitewide" styles (WP:5P3). CC (from the stalled bot request) @Dušan Kreheľ, GoingBatty, Hellknowz, Izno, JJMC89, Primefac, and William Avery. Thoughts/objections/comments/ideas? HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 03:22, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Of course, we got stuck at the 'have a consensus discussion' which the idea lab can't, er, generate one of those. Probably better to discuss this first at WT:TemplateStyles to get technical editors on board that this is a good idea and then at VPPRO? to get everyone else... I think it is a good idea, as I've stated on that BRFA already. Izno (talk) 04:21, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

I'll say here that if this bot request is made again, ping me and I'll support it. jp×g🗯️ 06:52, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Having slept on it, I think it might be better to do a general "does the community endorse moving stuff from Common.css to TemplateStyles so we don't have to do this dance for everything remaining in Common.css. HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 13:30, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:TemplateStyles § RfC: converting sitewide CSS to TemplateStyles. HouseBlaster (talk · he/him) 15:30, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Almost-notable or seemingly-notable-but-not topics create duplicated effort

Anyone who plays any rhythm video games at all has probably heard of Camellia, a music artist who creates fast-paced EDM songs. I was quite surprised to find that we do not have an article on him, and 30 minutes later, I was even more surprised with my conclusion that he isn't notable.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to investigate writing an article on him, and I won't be the last either. The thing is, unless someone has tried before (creating a deletion log entry), a non-notable topic leaves no evidence that someone else has tried to write the article but deemed the topic to be non-notable.

I think that evidence should be somewhere. Perhaps an index of topic titles where each topic is a section on a page, that contains a list of sources if any are found, a couple of possible redirects for searchability, and a log of editors who have determined the topic to be non-notable and when they did so. This would make my search much faster—I would check this page, see that 2 editors have already looked into making the article less than 6 months ago, and be on my way. Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 19:28, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

I feel like, having sort of memorized the notability guideline, such a person didn't get significant press coverage or do something really big (which can be a summary of most notability guidelines), so they're not notable. I'm not very convinced that there are a lot of subjects that are nearly notable. WP:BFDI seems to be the only one I can think of. I'm sure there are more, but not by much.
Personally I like core-y songs like those from LeaF better Aaron Liu (talk) 19:48, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Sometimes a topic that is not notable becomes notable. Years ago I repeatedly reverted attempts to add an up-and-comming rapper named Flo rida to various lists of notable people. And then he made the grade. Donald Albury 23:43, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Before they were notable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:30, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Camellia's one person? I guess that shows how much I know. jp×g🗯️ 21:29, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

You could add URLs about Camellia to his Wikidata item at Camellia (Q40857248) using the Property P973 "described at URL".

As an example, you can see the reviews I added to the novel A Fire So Wild (Q124606008) in case someone were to eventually create a Wikipedia article about it. Besides helping editors, the URLs there help to establish Wikidata notability. Lovelano (talk) 01:04, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I think it’s a valid point, but I would be concerned that any centralised location for recording information about non-notable subjects could become a garbage magnet.

If you think there’s a chance that the subject is not notable yet but stands a chance of becoming notable eventually, you could maintain a stub in Draftspace, with your rationale on the talk page. But without continuous effort it would eventually get G13 speedy-deleted.

As a minimum you could maintain a “research log” on your user page detailing your efforts, which might possibly be found by a future editor. Maybe. Possibly. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:37, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Content Policy Committee

I'd like to propose a "Content Policy Committee" with broad authority within Wikipedia governance to resolve disputes over applications of content and manual of style policies, especially where current policy pages are ambiguous or silent, and to revise content policies to codify at least Dispute Resolution Noticeboard resolutions and Arbitration Committee rulings (if and where applicable), as well as possibly other Noticeboard discussions, Requests for Comments discussions, and WikiProject talk discussions. I am not sure exactly which discussion resolutions would be most appropriate, but would welcome suggestions since I'm largely unfamiliar with Wikipedia's current governance structure. In a current discussion I've recently had a with a fellow editor we came to a disagreement over the application of policies that as far as I could tell were not clearly applicable in the context in which they were being applied and where it was unclear that there was any policy that applied.

My fellow editor stated that previous Arbitration Committee rulings have had implications for content policy, but I've always been under the impression that the Arbitration Committee only dealt with conduct policy disputes. Additionally, in my experience many individual editors apply content and MoS policy capriciously and in ways that in keeping with personal preferences rather than in ways that enhance the encyclopedia or are actually in keeping with what policies explicitly require. As a personal aside, it appears to me as someone who has little familiarity with Wikipedia governance that the Arbitration Committee should be limited to conduct policy disputes, and that there should be a separate but equivalent organ within Wikipedia governance that resolves disputes over content policy to prevent one committee having undue influence over the development of the entire project.

The Committee would be divided into 4 standing subcommittees: (1) a Resolution Subcommittee that would operate the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard and where individual subcommittee members would respond to Third Opinion Requests; (2) a Codification Subcommittee responsible for drafting the codifying the codified revisions to existing content policy based on prior rulings and reviewing public comments on the revisions revision drafts; (3) an Appeals Subcommittee to provide a panel review of adopted Committee revisions prior to an en banc review by the entire Content Policy Committee if an appeal of a revision is requested; and (4) a Proposals Subcommittee for presenting proposed content policies at the Village Pump based on dispute resolutions where there is no existing policy to resolve the issue. The Content Policy Committee would not make or legislate content policy, which would instead reside with the Village Pump.

The Content Policy Committee members would presumably be selected in a process similar to the Arbitration Committee members with elections to the seats following a nomination to be a candidate by a petition. However, I suspect that the Content Policy Committee may need to be larger than the Arbitration Committee with maybe as many as 28 29 members in total with 7 on each subcommittee. The Content Policy Committee Chair would be elected by the Committee members and the Committee Chair would appoint Subcommittee Chairs. If deletionist and inclusionist factions emerge on the Committee, a Committee Ranking Member may be elected by the minority faction to appoint Subcommittee Ranking Members. Other procedural practices of the Committee would follow Robert's Rules of Order. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 09:54, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Those functions all happen already, except anyone can take part, and decisions are arrived at by consensus. What you are proposing is a lot of additional bureaucracy - is there really a big enough problem to justify it? Policy is sometimes silent because we can’t write rules that cover all eventualities, and we still expect editors to use judgement to apply principles to specific cases. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 12:31, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Those functions all happen already, except anyone can take part, and decisions are arrived at by consensus. Perhaps I shouldn't have said "revisions"; I'll strikethrough where I said that because that's not really what I meant. "Revision" implies the consensus policymaking process that I don't wish to alter. What I'm really trying to propose is a committee that would create and maintain pages that codify and summarize dispute resolution rulings of content policy disputes by the specific policy and creating a dispute resolution committee separate from the current Arbitration Committee for content policy decisions. I do not believe the codification summary functions I've proposed do occur already, and the process for making revisions to content policy appear to be done in a manner that is disjointed and often capricious where many editors who may have wished to contribute to the discussion are unaware that the discussion even occurred.

Talk page discussions in my experience typically only involve handfuls of editors even though WP:BUREAU states that policies "document already-existing community consensus regarding what should be accepted and what should be rejected", and WP:CON supposedly requires that "Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. … unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope." Likewise, the Arbitration Committee's statement of principles on levels of consensus requires that "Where there is a global consensus to edit in a certain way, it should be respected and cannot be overruled by a local consensus." I myself have encountered instances where I was unaware that a previous discussion had come to a supposed previous local consensus.

Conversely, what some editors call "no consensus" in my experience is just one or two editors (especially long-time editors) disliking another editor's contributions (especially newer editors) regardless of what the policies may explicitly say and then simply say "you don't have consensus". I suspect that this is something that drives people away from this project and leaves many editors deeply dissatisfied with how Wikipedia operates in practice and disappointed with the Wikipedia community in general because the policies are being applied arbitrarily, inconsistently, and in ways that the policies do not explicitly require, despite WP:CON requiring that "Wikipedia has a standard of participation and consensus for changes to policies and guidelines. Their stability and consistency are important to the community." This capricious enforcement of policy based upon personal interpretation of just a handful of reverting editors may leave the contributing editor feeling that their contributions are not valued by the community as a whole, and so they leave the project or don't bother joining at all. It is certainly how I often feel because I have the experience of having contributions reverted that as far as I could tell did not violate any policy. While WP:5P4 requires consensus when a dispute arises, demands for consensus for every single contribution seems to me would completely retard the development of the encyclopedia following WP:5P5.

What you are proposing is a lot of additional bureaucracy - is there really a big enough problem to justify it? Policy is sometimes silent because we can’t write rules that cover all eventualities, and we still expect editors to use judgement to apply principles to specific cases. Out of the tens of thousands of editors that regularly contribute to the project, a 29-member committee is NOT a particularly large bureaucracy. If there are past Arbitration Committee rulings that are being enforced as interpretive rules for content policies beyond the specific dispute that the ruling was issued for, then those rulings need to be codified and summarized by the specific policy applied in separate articles in the way that I am describing because those rulings effectively amount to content policy rules. If the Arbitration Committee acts as a kind of court of last resort of Wikipedia dispute resolution and its rulings are binding applications of policies, then the Arbitration Committee is effectively creating policy rules every time it issues a ruling in the same way that a case law in a common law legal system develops. Laws do not have to explicitly cover every eventuality; that's the logic behind a common law legal system itself. This also occurs without the consensus process that you've expressed concern that my proposal would upend.

While Wikipedia itself is not a bureaucracy, its governance structure is a bureaucracy because that's what all governance structures are. More importantly, as I said before, the Committee I am proposing would not be a body that makes revisions to policies. It would mostly exist to resolve content policy disputes and codify case policy (i.e. the body of rulings on applications of existing policies to specific disputes) in a summary page that is linked to on the content policy page. It would have a "policymaking avoidance doctrine" analogous to the political question doctrine and constitutional avoidance doctrine of U.S. constitutional law with respect to the Resolution Subcommittee rulings and appeals of Resolution Subcommittee rulings to the whole Committee. However, in contrast to the logic behind the political question and constitutional avoidance doctrines, this Committee would be elected unlike the federal judiciary of the United States.

While the Arbitration Committee's statement of principles on levels of consensus also provides that "on subjects where there is no global consensus, a local consensus should be taken into account", it occurs to me that we end up with a lot of dissatisfied editors who are unhappy when their contributions to a page are reverted on a basis that does not appear consistent with what content policies explicitly preclude and want a fair hearing that provides a resolution that doesn't involve just the handful of editors who took issue with their contribution based on their personal interpretations of the policy. Additionally, if a local consensus developed on one talk page contradicts the local consensus developed on a different one, we end up with competing rules.

What I am proposing would streamline content policy dispute resolution when disputes over interpretation of policies don't arrive at a local consensus on individual talk pages by having a standing subcommittee of editors readily available to issue Third Opinions, to respond to Requests for Comments, and to participate and moderate Dispute Resolution Noticeboard discussions for every dispute that arises. My proposal would also accelerate the development of global consensus for revisions to policy rather than slow it down by precluding the possibility of mutually contradictory local consensuses by providing a centralized process of dispute resolution for content policy disputes and a standing subcommittee to formulate proposals to address issues that arose during previous disputes.

If the size of the Committee is that big of an issue, then I'd propose eliminating the Appeals Subcommittee since upon reflection it seems that it could be unnecessary (although this would create an issue for dispute resolution since the Committee would have an even number of members). I would also require in any formal proposal that Committee members would also be required to recuse themselves in any dispute in which they are engaged is brought before the Committee to ensure that the Committee would be a disinterested third-party to the dispute. The Committee Chair would be permitted to sit on all of the Subcommittees as a non-voting ex officio member (except in instances where the Chair is required to recuse), and would only have a vote in the place of a recusing member both on the Subcommittee and votes on appeals votes in en banc reviews by the entire Committee. Also, if an editor felt that the Committee or its Subcommittees did not provide them with due process and fair hearings under its procedures, the editor would be permitted to appeal to the Arbitration Committee. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:09, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Additionally, if a local consensus developed on one talk page contradicts the local consensus developed on a different one, we end up with competing rules. I just want to point out that this is an intended feature, not a flaw. It’s common for editors of different articles in different areas to come to different local consensuses. A trivial example would be WP:ENGVAR where we explicitly accept global inconsistency (although consistency is still preferable where possible). Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 08:24, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I can understand having local consensus for something like WP:ENGVAR (which is already codified in policy), but that's not really what I'm talking about. I'm referring to policies that have global scale. I don't know what would be appropriate, but the Committee should be required to have rules for recognizing local consensuses in its codification summary process. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 15:29, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

What normally happens at the moment is that if an issue of global significance keeps getting raised, then eventually someone will open a discussion at the talk page of the relevant policy/guideline, and if there’s consensus for a policy/guideline change, the change is made. I’m open to the idea that there might be important decisions being made somewhere on a random article talk page that could use more visibility (either to neutrally gather participants or just to communicate the result). We do have mechanisms like WP:FRS, and the various noticeboards, to help do this. Perhaps it would be helpful to find ways of increasing uptake of these existing mechanisms rather than invoke the rather significant overhead of a committee? Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 15:56, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I’m open to the idea that there might be important decisions being made somewhere on a random article talk page that could use more visibility (either to neutrally gather participants or just to communicate the result). ... Perhaps it would be helpful to find ways of increasing uptake of these existing mechanisms rather than invoke the rather significant overhead of a committee? See the comments made by User:TheWordsmith and User:Novo Tape below and my replies. The issue that motivated me to propose this Committee is that policymaking is too disjointed and too scattered. Like I said, I don't really wish to upend the existing consensus-building processes for modifying policy. Instead, I would argue that having a committee of editors to facilitate dispute resolution and to field and make proposals for changes to policy would be a better process for integrating the existing mechanisms. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 19:16, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Thing is, we do already have both of those things.

a committee of editors to facilitate dispute resolution: Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard

field and make proposals for changes to policy: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

The membership of these existing "committees" is: whoever shows up. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 10:01, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

The membership of these existing "committees" is: whoever shows up. Doesn't sound like enough people for "consensus" though, especially for changes to policy or dispute resolutions that effectively become interpretive rules for existing policies. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 13:10, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Maybe, but I think the way forward in that case would be to encourage more people to show up. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 13:15, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I think that's overly optimistic. Instead, a Committee that is required to show up and mediate that includes 29 editors elected by the entire community would guarantee that whatever decision is made is more reflective of the entire community then just the few editors who show up. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 13:50, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

It's quite unusual in Wikipedia culture to require editors to commit their time to something, or to guarantee anything. Even admins aren't obliged to put in a minimum number of hours or attendances. If we can't get volunteers to attend the central noticeboards (and I'm not saying this is the case - the noticeboards seem fairly busy), then are they definitely going to be there for a committee? There's also no guarantee that elections would be voted in by the entire community - just like RfAs, the voters would just be those who showed up to vote. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 14:21, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I think you're overreacting to the specific wording of my previous comment. By "require", I meant only that those who have voluntarily chosen to be on the Committee would be "required" to do something in following its procedures. I'm not exceptionally familiar with the Arbitration Committee and its processes, but they have procedures that they are "required" to follow (particularly where offline harm could occur). If an editor has voluntarily chosen to be a candidate for election to the Committee, then they would be agreeing to fulfill the responsibilities of the Committee in the same way that the candidates for election to the Arbitration Committee do. While there obviously is an issue of voter turnout, the decisions of elected Committee members would still be more legitimate than the endless number of decisions made with only handfuls of editors who under the current system, as I've said multiple comments in this thread, effectively become "a policymaking and enforcement body unto themselves based on their personal interpretations of a policy without a larger consensus in favor of what is effectively a new policy rule." -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 14:45, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

To make this concrete, perhaps you could find 2-3 examples of important content policy decisions that have been made by only handfuls of editors, and bring them to a noticeboard for discussion (whichever you think is the most appropriate, probably Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) if it's about policy). Then see if there is consensus to codify, or overturn, or whatever you think needs to be done. And then, if you don't get the outcome you hoped for, it might be easier to explain how a committee would have done the job better. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 15:06, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Since you keep invoking ArbCom, as a past member of ArbCom I will say that I thought I understood how much of a time commitment was involved when I nominated myself. As it turned out, I decided I was not contributing enough to the committee's work, and resigned after a year. You can find plenty of examples of editors who have been elected to ArbCom and then, for whatever reason, did not fully particpate in the functioning of the committee for the full extent of their term. Indeed, there is an understanding that ArbCom members have to take breaks from participation, and do not need permission from anyone to take a break. We cannot "require" anyone to perform any duties or participate in any activities. Donald Albury 16:14, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

We only had 10 candidates for the last ArbCom election. I'd be very surprised if we could find 29 additional editors volunteering to be yelled at. (Because you know that's what will happen: Only people who don't know WP:How to lose in an ordinary discussion will appeal to this committee, and when they don't get their preferred outcome the next time, they'll complain that the committee is biased/bad/wrong.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:04, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Even with ArbCom, members commonly go inactive for long periods or resign. The problem was even worse when they had 3-year terms. Even they have little they were "required" to do in an individual capacity. This happened with MedCom and every other Committee/Subcommittee that projects have tried developing. I do think reactivating some old DR processes would be a good thing considering the types of disputes we're starting to see more and more of, and I could see the use in a better way to increase participation at decision-making discussions. But given your stated unfamiliarity with Wikipedia governance, proposing big sweeping changes like this is unlikely to be successful. I've been around in some capacity since 2005; I've written and changed guidelines, sat on MedCom and was the MedCab Coordinator for a while. If you want to change things for the better (plenty of room for that), in my experience the best way is to start small. Pick one issue, strip it down to a specific and easily identifiable problem, and come up with a tightly focused solution. Your heart is in the right place, but these big catch-all reforms do not work. The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 16:22, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

You cannot "require" anybody to do anything on Wikipedia. We are all volunteers, any of us may walk away at any time for any period that we like, up to and including forever. There isn't even a requirement to post notice of absence: you can simply vanish, and if you subsequently decide to return, that again is up to you, and you are not obliged to explain your absence. Even at Arbcom, those arbs who decide not to involve themselves in a case are not required to post a recusal (although the arbcom clerks might enquire by private off-wiki email). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:54, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

At least as far as the Resolution Subcommittee, that just sounds like reviving WP:MEDCOM and WP:MEDCAB but with extra steps. Which might not be a bad thing; having more organized systems of formal and informal mediation again might be helpful. As far as the rest, that's a lot of extra bureaucracy for an unknown benefit. It would help if you went into more detail on the problem you are trying to solve, what incident led to this, and how you think this proposal would help the problem.

I do think it would need to be scaled way back to achieve support, but there might be some merit to having a more centralized place to give structure to discussions attempting to change policies and guidelines. We have the various Village Pumps, policy/guideline talkpages, wikiproject talkpages, individual RfCs everywhere but not really a place or group of people to organize it. Having a dashboard or project that can answer simple content policy questions and display proposals in a useful format could be good. We do have WP:CENT but it is limited in what it covers. Might also be useful to have people keeping an eye on these discussions as a whole and nipping behavioral issues in the bud. The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 18:46, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

It would help if you went into more detail on the problem you are trying to solve, what incident led to this, and how you think this proposal would help the problem. … Might also be useful to have people keeping an eye on these discussions as a whole and nipping behavioral issues in the bud. The "incident", insofar as I should to refer to it as that because as far as I could tell it was perfectly civil and polite disagreement, was the discussion I had with User:Hipal in the "Selected Publications" section of Talk:Jonathan Haidt. I was unaware of the existence of WP:MEDCOM, WP:MEDCAB, and WP:CENT. I have not had a chance to review them more fully; I have been spending the last couple of days just trying to compose the response to clarify my proposal. However, after looking at WP:MEDCOM briefly, I did notice that WP:MEDCOM did not take on very many cases and that would be completely different with what I am proposing. My hope is that this Committee would immediately respond to the content disputes rather than allowing them to snowball into conduct violations.

I do think it would need to be scaled way back to achieve support, but there might be some merit to having a more centralized place to give structure to discussions attempting to change policies and guidelines. We have the various Village Pumps, policy/guideline talkpages, wikiproject talkpages, individual RfCs everywhere but not really a place or group of people to organize it. Having a dashboard or project that can answer simple content policy questions and display proposals in a useful format could be good. It appears that you have picked up the spirit of what has motivated my proposal, not just for proposing changes to content policies but also a place for resolving disputes over them. Thank you. :) -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:09, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity, do you know what other reasons WP:MEDCOM and WP:MEDCAM were shuttered over? -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 07:14, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

WP:MEDCAB was shuttered in 2012 because at the time, there was one formal mediation venue WP:MEDCOM, one semi-formal (WP:RFC/U) and too many informal ones (WP:3O, WP:DRN, MedCab, and WP:WQA). The latter two were shuttered in 2012 in these discussions[6][7] to consolidate venues, because mediators were stretched very thin and forum shopping was commonplace. RFC/U was shut down in 2014 here, because it was overly rigid, combative and lacked teeth to actually resolve problems aside from being a stepping stone to Arbcom. MedCom was finally disbanded in 2018 due to a lack of participation/activity, lack of suitable cases, and lack of teeth. They also coincided with the increasing use of Discretionary Sanctions (now known as WP:CTOP to resolve conduct disputes, so fewer editors are seeking dispute resolution to begin with. Since then DRN has taken structure more like the old MedCab and much of the workload, but it isn't as active as the old processes were. I've had some ideas about reviving the idea of MedCab as a sort of hub for independent roaming cabalists to wander around talkpages mediating disputes, but haven't had the time to invest in it. The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 17:02, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

The Manual of Style is a guideline. It is not policy. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:00, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

See WP:NOTBURO. We don't need hierarchical sub-comissions to tell us what to do. 🌺 Cremastra (talk) 13:20, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Have you read WP:Wikipedia Committees? It sounds like a much clrarer way to have separate but related (in your case, sub) commitees for policy and content changes. Eitjer way, I'd oppose any such change as being a solution in search of a problem unless you could elaborate more on how much this would actually help and provide specific examples. Sincerely, Novo Tape^{My Talk Page} 21:05, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

See my replies to User:Barnards.tar.gz and User:TheWordsmith. I was also unaware of and WP:Wikipedia Committees. After skimming that proposal, I'm relieved to find that I'm not the only person who raised similar issues. Do you know why WP:Wikipedia Committees failed to develop consensus? -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:10, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

This was long before my time, but I suspect it's because the primary author, rootology, left enwiki. I don't think they ever held an RfC or large discussion so there was no strong consensus against it either FWIW. The talk page has some info on common objections people had.

You've addressed my objections above and I'd probably be a supporter in an RfC for a one-year trial.

I wish you luck in this proposal if you decide to pursue it (and can help if you'd like), but I suspect the majority of the community would be opposed. The fact of the matter is (as you're seeing on a small scale here) Wikipedians tend to vehemently dislike bureaucracy. Sincerely, Novo Tape^{My Talk Page} Sincerely, Novo Tape^{My Talk Page} 17:44, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I can certainly appreciate that most Wikipedians hate bureaucracy! :) I myself am not big fan of bureaucracy in general either, and believe that one of the virtues of Wikipedia is that isn't bogged down in a bureaucracy that requires consensus for every single contribution. However, this leads to a different problem: while every editor can make a contribution, every editor can also revert contributions. This leads to disputes over interpretations of policies, and where the reversions stand, every reverting editor or handful of reverting editors on individual talk pages effectively become a policymaking and enforcement body unto themselves based on their personal interpretations of a policy without a larger consensus in favor of what is effectively a new policy rule. I do intend to pursue this proposal as far as I can further it, and the help other editors, such as yourself, would be deeply appreciated. Thank you! :) -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 19:29, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: Before proposing such a bureaucratic process, consider this checklist:

1. Identify a problem
2. Demonstrate that the problem is both current and widespread
3. Show that the existing processes are incapable of solving the problem
4. Propose a solution to the problem in terms that are easily understood by the majority of editors
5. Show that your proposal will solve the problem, or at least bring it to a point where the existing processes are now capable of solving the problem

In short: this isn't going to fly. See also WP:NOTBURO and WP:CREEP. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:33, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

@Cremastra and Redrose64: Per my replies to User:Barnards.tar.gz and User:TheWordsmith, perhaps I should named the committee I've proposed as a "Content Arbitration Committee" or "Content Committee" to reduce confusion. CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:11, 25 February 2024‎ (UTC)

I think it would also be good to add a step #4.1, "Think about what would happen if the editor you're in a dispute with (or one of his like-minded wiki-friends) is on the committee...and you're not". Handing power to a small group can backfire. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:43, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Per the part of my reply to User:Barnards.tar.gz about a "policymaking avoidance doctrine", among other rules the Committee would be required to follow would be: "When the consistency of a contribution with a content policy is drawn in question, and even if a serious doubt of inconsistency is raised, it is a cardinal principle that this Committee will first ascertain whether a construction of the policy is fairly possible by which the contribution may be retained or restored." -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 15:25, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Also, there could be additional rules about recusal to address that type of concern. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 15:42, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

In practice, some editors would interpret such a rule as meaning that anybody on the committee who disagrees with me ought to recuse.

I don't think that what the English Wikipedia needs is a greater adherence to the rules. We have a policy that says Wikipedia:If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. Do what's right by the article. If the policies and guidelines are well-written, then the policies and guidelines will follow you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:10, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

"Think about what would happen if the editor you're in a dispute with (or one of his like-minded wiki-friends) is on the committee...and you're not". ... In practice, some editors would interpret such a rule as meaning that anybody on the committee who disagrees with me ought to recuse. See my reply to User:Barnards.tar.gz. Committee members would be required to recuse in disputes in which they are engaged are brought before the Committee. That would address at least the first and third parts of your concern about recusal and the Committee being a neutral third-party. As for the issue of "like-minded wiki-friends", if an editor felt that the Committee or its Subcommittees did not provide them with due process and fair hearings under its procedures, the editor would be permitted to appeal to the Arbitration Committee. Though not proposed in my previous comments, perhaps the Appeals Subcommittee could also field requested appeals at the beginning of each new term if an editor felt that neither the Committee, its Subcommittees, and the Arbitration Committee did not provide due process or fair hearings as well.

I don't think that what the English Wikipedia needs is a greater adherence to the rules. We have a policy that says Wikipedia:If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. Do what's right by the article. If the policies and guidelines are well-written, then the policies and guidelines will follow you. See my replies to User:TheWordsmith and User:Novo Tape. I don't disagree with your sentiment about adherence to rules, but in my experience other editors will continue enforcing the policies and continually lead to disputes or discourage further contributions. This Committee would be required by its charter to be inclusionist to prevent a single reverting editor or handful of deletionist editors from becoming, as I said before, "a policymaking and enforcement body unto themselves based on their personal interpretations of a policy without a larger consensus in favor of what is effectively a new policy rule." I'm not so sure policies follow good editing. I think they too often follow the arbitrary whims of the handful of editors who just keep going in a dispute or talk page discussion. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 07:12, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I think I'd also recommend that the Wikimedia Foundation verify the identities of the editors on the Content Policy Committee to ensure that there are no "collusive" disputes. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 14:23, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

This Committee would be required by its charter to be inclusionist... Really? I'd have thought that any legitimate committee ought to be expected to reflect, with due balance, the perspectives of the contributing community as a whole. Telling them in advance how to think seems a little extreme. AndyTheGrump (talk) 14:30, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Andy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:05, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Just what we need, ARS but with binding decision-making powers. The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 17:31, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

If it hadn't just been included in Wikipedia clichés I would say that this is a solution in search of a problem. Phil Bridger (talk) 14:47, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

!vote templates idea... again

This may be the nth time someone (me) has proposed that we resurrect vote templates, but I am actually starting to see more advantages the more I think about it. If anything, any proposal for vote templates should take into account WP:!VOTE as well as whether there is a benefit of having these templates.

However, I do see several things that make these !vote templates (with the icons) quite a bit helpful:

1. Accessibility: This is the biggest advantage I see about having icons with the !vote templates. Not everyone understands English well, and some have dyslexia which makes reading harder. For anyone who falls in these categories, these icons help people understand what the person is proposing. One can argue that this can be accomplished by a user script, but it neglects that people who are logged out do not have JavaScript.
2. !vote?: Some processes are actually (mostly) a vote. Namely the referendums for amending ratified policies like WP:ARBPOL as well as nominations at WP:RFA which generally require more than 60% support to pass. We also have templates like {{not a vote}} to remind users in non-polling processes that "votes" are really just arguments in favor of or against a specific idea. We can address that by essentially producing nothing or an error message that "polling is not a substitute for discussion".
3. Supplement to closure summaries: For anyone who wants to see the end result of a process, the icons could serve to show the end result of a discussion. Because again, for someone with dyslexia, they might not immediately recognize the icons.
4. Bots and user scripts: From a technical point of view, bots and user scripts can more easily prefill templates than humans themselves. Having templates for "!vote"s improves i18n if a script were to be used across multiple wikis.

I have seen the reasons talked to death against all this, with some saying it's pointless, that it contradicts WP:!VOTE and WP:CONSENSUS, etc. But I wanted to put this here because I think there is a way to have these templates while accounting for all the concerns that led to the templates' deletion to begin with. This is why it's the idea lab after all. Awesome Aasim 20:19, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

While I agree, this wiki seems to be very anti-decoration, having banned any decoration other than centering for blockquotes. I doubt people would find consensus towards peppering icons in.
I also don't think memorizing a few words would be too inaccessible for non-English speakers willing to endeavor into !vote-y English Wikipedia discussions.
Disabling these templates for non-votes would disable most of your other points in non-votes, and most votes have a numbered vote counter anyways. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:26, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

IMHO the !vote icons are not "purely decorative"; they have a utilitarian function that cannot easily be accomplished by hand. In this case, showing the level of support a person is expressing. And I can agree with not having pull quotes as well as we are an encyclopedia and we do not need to excerpt out encyclopedic text and display it prominently. Awesome Aasim 01:00, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

As a kinda non-native speaker who didn't read any books that used that kind of quote formatting for quite a while, I didn't know that indenting both sides somehow meant that the area was a quote. Just having big quote signs on both sides of the text doesn't mean you have to only use that for pull quotes (which I agree are useless). Both have a utilitarian and accessibility function to me. I'm also not sure what you mean by "by hand". Aaron Liu (talk) 01:13, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Where would you use this and where not? In particular with articles for deletion, the vote-like process with which I am most familiar, I would encourage editors to include less bolded recommendations (and so templates) rather than more. Once a recommendation for action has been made it is very difficult to change one's mind, so it should only be made when one is certain of it. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:02, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Adding move, create and upload protection locks to the top right corner

Relevant links: Wikipedia:Protection policy and Special:MovePage/Wikipedia:Protection_policy (To see what it looks like to try and move a protected page. non admins only)

Currently, articles that are protected from editing have the relevant lock in the top right hand corner. Userpages may not have the relevant edit lock on the top right. With regarding edit protection, it will stay as it is but why don't we do the same for move, create and upload so that articles (other than user pages) require all types of protection to be shown on the top right. The lock icon will display in the same way shown in the protection policy page (linked above). With move protection, the only way to tell that the page is protected is if the move button is not seen (this article for example, doesn't have the move button for me, but it does have subscribe) with the possible exception for administrators as they can move any page even if it's protected. Even if accounts are able to edit semi and EC protected pages, the relevant lock is still there. But like I said, that will not change. Admins will also be able to see if a page is move protected from the green lock icon at protection policy page.

The only way to see the green (move) and blue (create/also known as salting) lock is if the URL was typed for some reason, like here and here respectively. (for ECP create protection this appears instead). JuniperChill (talk) 21:40, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Also, I forgot to realize most people (I think) replying to be are actually ECP, so please do not even try to recreate the linked page. I am not ECP myself (have ~260 edits). This is just an example of what it looks like for non ECP users to try and (re)create a salted page. You may wish to use an incognito tab to do so JuniperChill (talk) 21:47, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

I have a user script for doing just that, User:Awesome Aasim/DetectProtectionLevels.js. Awesome Aasim 21:51, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

@JuniperChill, have you ever looked at the page logs? Click here for the logs for WP:PROT, for example. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:37, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Yeah but its easier to display the edit and move protection on the top right corner. Plus, the move, create and upload protection lock is not really used. JuniperChill (talk) 22:15, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Correct section title in Talk Summary?

In general, if a talk page is edited in by simply choosing edit, and a new section is added at the bottom, the summary has the name of the last section that existed prior to this edit, regardless of whether the new text includes a section. Can this be fixed? i.e. Current state of talk page is

 ==ABC==
 Text1

and what is added is

 ==DEF==
 Text2

The summary added shows that the edit was in section ABC, *not* DEF. Naraht (talk) 05:12, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

You can change the text manually.
That's not how the "edited section detection" works. See Help:Automatic edit summaries. All that does is simply automatically add /* section */ to the front of your edit summary. IMO it serves no use to waste a lot of resources implementing that when you can 1. just change the summary 2. just use the "Add topic" button. Aaron Liu (talk) 14:50, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Why is AfC so strict compared to NPP?

For new pages patrol, it is common to see pages with a single source or two (in some cases even none) which are not even very reliable be reviewed and accepted. NPP seems to pass every article which doesn't have speedy deletion criteria-meeting problems, while AfC is much more strict with everything. I would even go further and say that some declined AfC submissions are better quality than over 15% of mainspace articles. Often, a declined AfC submission has incredible potential but gets declined, and the draft just dies after 6 months. What do you think? I think this discourages new users and kills out articles with potential to be well-sourced and notable. Youprayteas (t • c) 16:39, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I suspect the reason is that an actual article can only be deleted either if it meets one of the strict CSD criteria, or if it undergoes the community effort of an AFD. On the other hand, a single reviewer is allowed to decline an AFC submission purely because the reviewer thinks it's too low quality to submit as an article. Animal lover |666| 17:15, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I think the real reason is probably as above, but I would point out that the best time to deal with any problems that an article might have is when it is brand new, so if an article author cooperates with the reviewer, rather than just abandoning things, a better article may result. A few reviewers seem to just reject any non-English or offline sources out of hand. If you come across one of those then it should be remembered that most of the time an author can simply move the article to main space where it will be subject to speedy deletion or an AfD discussion in the usual way. That option should be better publicised. AfC should be regarded as a service to article authors rather than a hurdle to be jumped over. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:57, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I think it's more structural than that: an AFC reviewer may be yelled at if they accept articles that meet the rules ("unlikely to get deleted at AFD") but are ugly ("How dare you put that short/incompletely cited/poorly written article in the mainspace?! Won't somebody think of our reputation!"). They are almost never yelled at if they decline these articles. Therefore, they are incentivized to ignore and decline articles that should be accepted. Therefore (since they are rational people), they will ignore and decline articles that should be accepted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:15, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I think this is spot on. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:57, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps we should strike a middle ground on both of them. AfC reviewers should be expected to review them a little more leniently if they're sourced but WP:NOTFINISHED (which is inherent to any article), and NPP reviewers should be a little more willing to draftify or AfD weak articles if they don't immediately demonstrate notability. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:56, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Makes sense to me. Youprayteas ^{talk/contribs} 18:58, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

One issue here is user reputation: you lose nothing if you do nothing, but you risk losing some if you do something. In this context, neither declining an AFC (it will probably be unseen for a few months and then deleted), nor marking a page as patrolled (leaves behind a log entry, but few will notice it), is truly considered something; on the other hand, accepting a draft, or nominating an article for AFD, is. In borderline cases, the primary incentive is to do nothing. Animal lover |666| 17:41, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

@Animal lover 666, you might be interested in this discussion at WT:NPP earlier this month, about how to make "doing nothing" a little more visible to other patrollers. (The context is that we need all new articles reviewed at least once in the first few minutes more than we need any single article silently reviewed 20 times.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Is it time to just ban “in popular culture” sections?

I think everyone already knows what these things are. They’re the bane of Wikipedia. They’re pure fancruft magnets. They’re glorified trivia sections. They’re almost never cited, and when they are the citations are usually irrelevant. And yet sometimes established, respected users are willing to fight to the death to preserve even the most god-awful looking examples, like here. I think a great solution has already been figured out: if the topic of “x in fiction” is notable, it deserves a well written, well-sourced article like Venus in fiction. If there’s only a few notable examples, then they could just be written into a section like “history” or “impact”. But there is absolutely no reason we should have mundane, unvetted lists of things appearing in media or whatever else a person thinks counts as “popular culture”. So is it finally time to just ban any kind of “in popular culture” style cruft sections from articles? Dronebogus (talk) 11:12, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Many "in popular culture" sections are as you describe, but some are OK, so I don't think a blanket ban is what is needed. I would rename even the good ones, however. There is no need for us to distinguish popular culture from "high" culture. Phil Bridger (talk) 11:41, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

There is some relevant guidance here: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trivia sections and a sensible essay here: Wikipedia:"In popular culture" content. I think we could usefully trim these sections (especially anything unsourced) rather than ban them outright. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 11:43, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I agree with that’s the common sense solution, but read the cringeworthy popular culture section at Ha-ha, then read the linked talk page discussion where you have some of the biggest names in Wikipedia defending it (MoS be damned), and explain how you would get around that without some kind of brute force ban. Dronebogus (talk) 11:56, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Jane Austen's mention of the ha-ha seems like an excellent example of a legitimate in-popular-culture item, in that I can see numerous mainstream and academic sources linking the two (examples: [8] and [9]). It looks like your intervention resulted in a citation being added for it - so something is working. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 13:12, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I still think the others are terrible, and you could remove them and put Austen’s example somewhere better in the rest of the article, like at the end of the “examples” section with the beginning “in fiction, a ha-ha appears in Jane Austen’s…” blah blah blah. Why do we have the others? Because I wasn’t going to fight with three established users even when their arguments were poor and contradicted what is arguably well-established best practice. Dronebogus (talk) 13:18, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

They're not great. At a minimum, there needs to be sourcing to demonstrate that the reference has some significance, otherwise it's original research. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 13:55, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

But apparently some big-name users think it’s cool, so it stays. I’m admittedly getting into conduct issues here, but if we really have people like Johnbod, a 270,000+ edit veteran, playing the WP:ILIKEIT card with this crap we need a hard rule against it. Dronebogus (talk) 13:59, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Apologies for nitpicking: there needs to be sourcing to demonstrate that the reference has some significance, otherwise it's original research is not true. Original research == has never been published in any (reliable) source – anywhere in the world, in any language, regardless of whether a source is cited in the article or even known to editors. It is literally the "Dear Mr. Usenet personality, please don't put your unpublished 'proof that Einsteinian physics is wrong' garbage anywhere in Wikipedia" policy.

Sourcing that demonstrates "significance" helps us meet the requirements of WP:DUE and WP:BALASP.

Also, naming a source in the prose of the article is a type of Wikipedia:Inline citation. When the text says "Alice Jones said in her 2008 book, The Sun Is Really Big..." – or, in this case, "In Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, a ha-ha...", nothing is actually improved by adding a little blue clicky number afterwards that repeats the information already provided in the text. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:19, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

OTOH, if the cite behind the "little blue clicky number" gives the specific page number and such, that can be useful. Anomie⚔ 17:51, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

For famous works, there are so many editions that a page number is likely to be useless. Page 127 in my copy won't match page 127 in your copy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:04, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

That can often be overcome with a sufficiently precise citation (to a specific edition, or a specific print run, or whatever), but this is perhaps a digression from the main point which is that if we are going to claim that there is a significant (as opposed to trivial) mention of Subject A in Subject B, then a citation to Subject B as a primary source does nothing to prove the significance. We need at least a secondary source. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 18:30, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

"Foo was mentioned in the 628th episode of The Simpsons" is not a claim of significance. Merely mentioning the existence of something is not inherently a claim of significance.

Many articles might benefit from setting some Wikipedia:List selection criteria that require exclusion of insignificant items, but merely saying that ____ was mentioned does not automatically require a secondary source that says it is significant. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:40, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Merely mentioning the existence of something is not inherently a claim of significance. It is in an article that complies with WP:DUE and WP:NOTEVERYTHING, where we must have a reason for including a piece of information beyond its mere existence. Absent such reason, including such statements amounts to the personal opinion of the editor. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 18:56, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Not really? The opening for most biographies gives the dates of birth and death, but we're not claiming that it's really significant that this person happened to be born on Octember 32nd.

A fact does not become an opinion merely because you don't (or someone thinks you don't) have a good reason to mention the fact. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:35, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

There are two separate things here: the fact that A mentions B, and the inclusion of that fact in an article. The former is a plain fact, verifiable with a primary source reference. The latter is what amounts to an editor’s opinion if there’s no source with which to evaluate the due weight of the fact. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 07:40, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't think that's true, or that it's the community's view. If it were true, we'd have to ban all use of primary sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:14, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

When including primary sources, policy requires us to take care. We are expected to have a good reason for including a primary source. “Cultural references” sections are a great example of why care is needed. When we can’t readily evaluate due weight, personal opinion is usually what remains. This is why the MoS calls for secondary and tertiary sources to support inclusion of cultural references. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 07:52, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

No. They're always at the bottom of the page, which hardly any readers reach, and do no harm, perhaps usefully engaging younger readers and would-be editors. "Cultural references" is often a better header though, especially when eg operas are listed. Johnbod (talk) 13:35, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Johnbod, I think I’ve extensively explained why your inexplicable support for these things is so disappointing to me, but now you’ve added even more very bad arguments for them— WP:HARMLESS? “Nobody sees them anyway”? “They’re for the kids”? “New users should be encouraged to add fancruft because it’s more fun than doing something actually constructive”? Dronebogus (talk) 13:41, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Everyone has to learn how to edit somehow, and having new users screw up by adding unimportant information at the bottom of an article is probably better than having them screw up with important content. (Or maybe your first edits were all perfect? Mine weren't.)

Over the last couple of years, @DMacks and I have been adding citations to an article that has some significant lists (historical examples and cultural references). Mostly, this has involved clicking on the linked article, scrolling halfway down the page, copying the refs, and pasting them into the first article; it's appropriate and constructive work, but it's also not really important. I'd like to approximately halve the number of "Popular culture" entries (which includes Shakespeare and other classics, so it's not all "pop culture"), but I'm aware of my limitations here. I don't want to remove something just because I personally WP:NEVERHEARDOFIT. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

My first contributions were uncontroversial copyediting as an IP, which I think is better than either “screwing up by adding unimportant information” or “screwing up with important content”. Dronebogus (talk) 18:45, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Many people manage to screw up copyediting. There is no foolproof task. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:36, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Yeah. Many's the time that I've seem a newbie making good-faith spelling corrections of words like "centre", "traveller" and "colour". Or altering 27 February to 27th February. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:17, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

• I'm in general agreement - I think "impact" or "Cultural impact" is better than "in popular culture." Lots of trivia sections contain information relevant to the article that just needs to be rewritten, so I'm not in favour of removing them, but I am in favour of maybe a template similar to the trivia template saying these sections are discouraged? SportingFlyer T·C 14:02, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

  I think what you’re thinking of already exists: Template:in popular culture. I think we need a harder explicit policy stance here. Dronebogus (talk) 14:05, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

  I was thinking of including it in line with the section like the trivia template. SportingFlyer T·C 14:08, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

On the general question, I don't think we should ban them. I think we should figure out what makes a good section, and promote that as the goal, but I don't think we should ban them.

I find that the sections I find lacking usually look like this:

• In the 639th episode of The Simpsons, a character pretended to have/do/be _____.
• ____ was mentioned twice in the 2019 Box Office Hit.
• A minor character in Popular Teen Book mentioned _____ in passing.

What I find less irritating is:

• ____ was a major plot point in Classic Work.

What I find desirable usually sounds like:

• Fairly Popular is generally recognized as the first significant representation of a character with _____.
• Its appearance in Television Show changed public perception of _____ in the following ways...
• ____ is usually misrepresented in popular culture, with cultural representations combining _____ with irrelevant and stereotypical features of Unrelated Subject.

For example: Shirley Temple publicly disclosed her breast cancer diagnosis on television, and the Breast cancer awareness movement was never the same again. Lucille Ball's on-screen pregnancy changed both television and the American public's perception of pregnancy. This is "In popular culture", but it's not trivia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:37, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Pop-cult/In fiction/In art and culture sections and articles can be awful, and they can be ok. Start with removing everything without a decent independent cite (WP:PROPORTION) and you're off to a good start. Or try citing, sometimes there's good stuff in there. I have afd:d [10][11], made edits like this [12], started listicles like Christopher Marlowe in fiction and Cultural depictions of Belshazzar, and started sections like Shakespeare_authorship_question#In_fiction. Metatron#In_popular_culture was improved during a discussion at the talkpage. Someday I may start a William Shakespeare in fiction article (the person, not the writings). Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:37, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Some "in popular culture" sections are, or can be, sourced to high-quality or academic sources so, no, I don't think it is time to "ban" all such sections. Newimpartial (talk) 20:56, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I think that they are always a problem. The heading is something which distorts the inclusion criteria. Like "the section is there, so we need to look for something to put in it." Also they are magnets for promotional and fancruft inclusions. BTW in a few cases they work in the opposite direction. There can be something truly worth including which gets minus points if it is under a "In popular culture" heading. If something is worth including, it doesn't need that heading. North8000 (talk) 18:07, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

They often do need looking after, but that's true about most things on this website. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:40, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

If there are secondary sources describing something's effect in popular culture, then it warrants inclusion and our opinion that it's trivial isn't relevant. If the statements are cited to the work itself, then it should be removed and the person who added it should have WP:PROPORTIONAL and WP:PRIMARY explained to them. If someone keeps adding or restoring unsourced or primary-sourced examples, then explanations should escalate to warnings. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:51, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

What do you do if the person who added it should obviously, obviously know better? Dronebogus (talk) 18:56, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

...WP:DR? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:04, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

In addition to the concerns already noted above relating to primary sourcing (or none), and to the proliferation of trivia, I think it should probably be noted just how systemic bias, in multiple forms, is inherent in such sections. They aren't 'popular culture' in the abstract, but instead, almost without exception, the familiar 'popular culture' of the contributor, who sees a reference to something-or-other in their favourite TV show etc, and then looks for an article on said something to shoehorn it into. This reduces interaction with 'popular culture' to nothing but passive absorption and regurgitation of mass media. That isn't 'popular culture' as any sociologist would define it, it is merely a small and frequently uninteresting facet of it. Real culture ('popular' or otherwise) is something you interact with. Something you play with and subvert, something that both makes you who you are, and enables you to change yourself, and the culture you experience around you as you do so. Reducing it all to stuff seen on episodes of the Simpsons is an insult to the endless creativity of humanity. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:11, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I think you're getting a bit away from the question originally posed and into the definition of culture (popular or otherwise). My English culture involves queuing for buses but not in pubs (although informal self-policing usually means that people are served in roughly the right order), which is the reverse of many countries. They are far more important elements of my culture than my favourite TV show or computer game. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:19, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

There are entire academic journals devoted to this. A journal for Robert Louis Stevenson comes to mind. Every issues contains 100+ new entries - movies, plays, games, mentions, etc. It's called cultural studies. It's an academic field of study. It doesn't have preconceived pretensions about ignoring video games and the Simpsons. All culture is academically interesting, when you study culture. The only question is where to draw the line for an encyclopedia, since Wikipedia is not trying to be a complete record. -- GreenC 22:46, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I am well aware of the field you describe. It does not in any shape or form revolve around creating random listings of appearances of something in something else, as typified by Wikipedia's so-called 'popular culture' sections. That isn't academic study. It imparts no useful understanding of any specific aspect of culture, and as raw data it is so utterly skewed by the narrow demographic and limited passive mass-media obsessed perceptions of 'culture' of those contributing it that nothing useful could come from an analysis of it. Whatever else Wikipedia is, is is undoubtedly not intended to be a means to amass data on 'popular culture'. AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:24, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Have a way to prevent "hallucinated" AI-generated citations in articles

A major issue observed at Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup is the ability for LLMs to make up entire citations that never actually existed, given a veneer of verifiability to actually completely unsourced articles. Examples include Leninist historiography (now turned into a redirect), with completely made-up references. Another example is Estola albosignata, with LLMs generating foreign-language sources that actually existed, but had nothing to do with the topic and would be unlikely to be detected by a non-specialist not speaking the relevant languages.
As LLMs become more commonplace, and this kind of insidious "sourced-but-really-unsourced" text generation becomes harder to detect than plain unsourced text, should we try to work on a way to limit such situations? Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 01:30, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Ultimately edits have to be checked. It would be a good university research project to build an AI to evalute edits and highlight ones that appear to be unsupported by citations. The rate at which content was falsely flagged would probably be high to start (including content supported by sources in some more distant location in the article), but it could still help produced a prioritized list of edits for human checking. isaacl (talk) 01:52, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

True, but as interesting as it would be, a university research project isn't a Wikipedia policy or task force. And that wouldn't solve the specific problem of AI-generated text making up convincing-looking references, which something like a limitation on AI reference generation could do. Something as simple as having to disclose the references as having been AI-generated (and tagging them for further review) could be helpful. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 03:51, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the only way to truly know whether a citation is genuine is to manually check it. Blueboar (talk) 12:17, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Yep, and that's why tagging AI-generated citations for manual reviews is the best way to go. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 13:02, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Your base assumption seemed to be that it was hard to detect when a citation had been AI-generated. Ultimately all edits have to be checked. isaacl (talk) 17:29, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

No. Please stop assuming what others' "base assumptions" were, it's strawmanning and doesn't help the discussion at all. Citations in the middle of AI-generated text are easy to recognize as AI-generated, but the lack of policies on AI generation means they currently stand without any extra scrutiny. Despite being spurious in the vast majority of cases. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 17:05, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

It would be a good research project for Wikipedians to work on, too. I only mentioned universities because I feel it's a natural fit for the WMF to engage in partnership, with external timelines from the university and other funders also driving progress. But Wikipedia editors can apply for WMF funding, or just work on it for free if they desire. isaacl (talk) 17:29, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

To clarify, the task would be to mimic what human verification does: examine the change, look at any related references (either as part of the change or pre-existing ones that seem appropriate), determine if the references exist, read the cited works if they are accessible, and evaluate if the change is supported by the references. This is of course a difficult task. But a program working on it will do it tirelessly and continually. It wouldn't be a magic solution, but it could help enable human checking to find more problems more rapidly. At a minimum, it would help identify plausible but fictional references. isaacl (talk) 17:48, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

So, you are proposing a solution to a problem caused by AI that involves more AI. Surely it would be easier just to not use AI in the first place? Phil Bridger (talk) 12:22, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Well, yes. Similarly, the best solution to gun crime would be for criminals not to use guns, but arming the police is a good plan B. If AI has any place in Wikipedia, it's in suggesting edits which an experienced human can consider critically and make or discard. There are plenty of problems where finding a solution is hard but verifying it is easy. As long as no one implements alleged solutions without verification. AI can have a role. Certes (talk) 12:47, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

The assumption in the original comment seemed to be that it was difficult to distinguish when the source of the edit was program-generated text. Sure, it would be easier to say text shouldn't be written by programs (and I think there's a reasonable chance that this could attain consensus support), but it wouldn't stop the problem of editors ignoring this policy. Ultimately, all edits have to be checked; AI could be used to help prioritize which edits to check first, but it doesn't have to be. Either way, we need to find a way to ramp up the amount of verification effort in a sustained manner, which isn't going to be easy. isaacl (talk) 17:37, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Saying that making a policy doesn't stop editors from ignoring the policy, while technically true, doesn't mean it isn't helpful. That's the reason we have policies at all to begin with. Also, I never suggested banning AI writing altogether, but using AI to generate citations, as they are nearly always incorrect or completely made up.
Also, your suggestion of implementing automated verification of all edits is pretty far off from the original discussion, and doesn't really answer the specific issue raised. I suggest you open a separate discussion for this proposal, to avoid both getting mixed up. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 17:07, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

You asked for ways to manage fictious citations, and I suggested one way was to find automated ways to detect them. I feel this aligns with your suggestion of tagging them. Are you considering a manual process for tagging them? isaacl (talk) 18:10, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm just considering tagging or disclosing citations that are AI-generated. The question is how to deal with a tool (LLMs) that facilitates adding spurious citations, rather than how to make a tool to verify every single citation (which would be a project at a much bigger scale, and relying on it for the first issue would make the process take much longer).
I'm not against an automated way to verify citations. To the contrary, I feel like this would be extremely beneficial to the encyclopedia, and I encourage you to work on it! My point is just that relying on this (very powerful, but harder to implement) tool to solve the more specific problem would be slower than implementing a tagging/disclosing/etc. policy, with warnings/sanctions for editors adding false citations with LLMs. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 20:40, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Again, no hard feelings at all, I really believe your idea has potential! I just feel like it would be better for both to have their own sections/discussions as they solve different, although certainly related, problems. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 20:41, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate the response. I don't think relying on editors to flag their own edits as containing citations generated by text-writing programs is going to very effective, since editors who follow policy will be manually checking that any citations are valid and support the added content. I think some kind of automated tagging would be needed to avoid editor fatigue, and to free up editor effort for the real problem of verifying edits. It's already counter to policy to include a false citation, regardless of where it came from, so administrators can take appropriate actions as needed. Although English Wikipedia's good-faith and welcoming traditions underlie its ability to attract more volunteers, they also mean there isn't much way to prevent a new editor from doing things they really want to do. isaacl (talk) 02:54, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Your comment below on an approach that would "only solve half the problem" seems to indicate that you are also concerned about verifying if a cited work actually supports the content added. This also aligns with having tools to help assist with that verification. isaacl (talk) 18:17, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

So what I said at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 179#What can chatbots do? actually came true... 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 12:55, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I think this is going to be the most challenging thing with LLMs. Unsourced text is trivial to spot, but these generated citations can be really convincing, e.g. using the names of real authors with expertise in that subject alongside titles they would plausibly (but didn't) write. And most of our quality-control processes are too undermanned to manually verify each citation.

One solution I can think of is to start insisting that references include at least one external identifier (ISBN, ISSN, DOI, etc.). These could be used to automatically check the existence of a publication matching the citation in external databases. We could start gently at first, with warnings for missing template parameters and tags like {{ISBN missing}}. – Joe (talk) 13:27, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I at least ocassionally use books as sources that were published before ISBN existed. I also often use articles as sources from journals that do not have ISSN or DOI identifiers, but which I regard as reliable sources for what I use them for. The journal articles and many of the older books that I have cited for many years now are on-line, either free-access or available through the WikiLibrary, and I link the URL when there is no DOI, JSTOR, or similar link, but I would oppose any measure that prevents us from using relevant, reliable sources that do not have an ISBN, ISSN, DOI, etc identifier, and are not (yet) on-line. Donald Albury 16:07, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I also often work with sources that legitimately have no ISBNs etc, and I agree that a hard requirement for ISBNs is a non-starter -- it wouldn't even help much against LLMs, because they often do provide (fake) ISBNs. But! Since the LLM's ISBN is usually fake, it rarely points to the book being cited (especially when that book is fake too) -- a mismatch would be a useful diagnostic symptom to prompt scrutiny. It seems tricky but not impossible to have a bot that, e.g., looks up a cited ISBN for its title and compares that title to the title in the citation. If these mismatches were given a maint tag, they could then be scrutinized more easily. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 00:24, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

That would only solve half of the issue, at best. A lot of times, AI-generated citations link to actual works in the general domain of the topic, that could plausibly match, but which don't address the specific topic or verify the claim at all (see the Estola albosignata example discussed above). Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 17:12, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

It seems like a potentially useful application of AI would be to download a corpus of (sentences with citations, full text of the cited sources) pairs, and train/finetune an AI model to evaluate whether it thinks the source supports the sentence. Even if it produces some false negatives, it could still generate a useful prioritised worklist for human editors to manually verify. Of course, not all sources are readily available to download, but many are. This would help catch cases of verification failures in general, not just LLM hallucinations. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 17:46, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Special period advertising sister projects

• Proposal: Launch a multi-week campaign in some format (e.g. more prominent links on the Main Page, banners, or any other ideas you have) that encourages en.wiki readers to explore and possibly contribute to our sister projects. (e.g. Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikifunctions)
• Why? Quite simply, sister Wikimedia projects have a lot to offer readers, and as one of the most viewed sites on the internet (globally!) we should help introduce readers to these resources. As you know, other Wikimedia projects include a dictionary/thesaurus which includes translations; a travel guide; a library of digitized public domain texts that anyone can download or distribute; a travel guide; a media repository; and many others. The sister project links are currently buried far down on the Main Page, and are especially distant for mobile viewers who make up an increasing share of our readership. Why would we not want to help readers discover some of the useful resources our sister projects have to offer?
• I am conscious this proposal is extremely unlikely to succeed or even make it to the RfC-at-VPPR phase, if only because it's either too drastic a change (it isn't!) or because Wikipedia is infected with the conceit that it is the primary and greatest Wikimedia project and shouldn't lift a finger to help smaller ones (In 2024, we are the seventh most-visited website in the world. We're fine. Adding a few links is not going to cause en.wiki's readership to collapse.)

Happy editing, 🌺 Cremastra (talk) 21:17, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I like the idea of promoting, but one question is, indeed, how. I'd suggest just using a banner.
As a tangent, I really don't feel compelled to contribute to Wikifunctions as long as we can't invoke these functions anywhere else. Aaron Liu (talk) 21:55, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Banners are probably the best option (and I have a couple of ideas on that front)

Continuing the tangent: yeah, nobody seems to be breaking down the door to get at the free python functions. I guess the eventual plan is to implement wikifunctions in sister projects, i.e. in modules, in the same way that wikidata supports some infoboxen. 🌺 Cremastra (talk) 21:58, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I've drafted a few sketchy ideas here. 🌺 Cremastra (talk) 16:44, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I'd 1. Remove the serif style and make the button look like Wikipedia's buttons 2. Add a bit of padding inside around the border 3. Link to the "welcome, wikipedian" templates or guides Aaron Liu (talk) 17:40, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

1.  Partly done I like the serif font for the names; but this is an aesthetic issue at the end of the day
2.  Done
3.  Not done Only a small percentage of readers are Wikipedians.

🌺 Cremastra (talk) 18:25, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Sounds good. Maybe make "ikisource" in smallcaps to match the wordmark? Aaron Liu (talk) 18:47, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I would definitely support a multi-week campaign, but also some way to more effectively link to other projects permanently. For example the Wikivoyage article for "Australia" is not accessible from our article Australia at all on mobile and rather obscurely linked from desktop. If the campaign is successful we need to back it up after it is done. Commander Keane (talk) 03:01, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

While I'm not against Wikivoyage, personally I'm against linking articles to Wikivoyage as it is by definition quite opinionated. That said, you can use the template {{wikivoyage}}. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:14, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I was wrong, you can access the Wikivoyage article from mobile on Australia if you expand External links and then expand In sister projects. As to the general proposal for a campaign, Aaron Liu do you support Wikivoyage banners as long as they don't specifically link to particular Wikivoyage entries? Commander Keane (talk) 03:28, 29 February 2024 (UTC)