Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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The policy section of the village pump is used to discuss proposed policies and guidelines and changes to existing policies and guidelines.
If you want to propose something new that is not a policy or guideline, use the proposals section.
If you have a question about how to apply an existing policy or guideline, try the one of the many Wikipedia:Noticeboards.

Please see this FAQ page for a list of frequent proposals and the responses to them.

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When should administrators decline to email the source text to deleted material?

Some administrators routinely decline to email the source text of deleted articles to authors citing the English language wikipedia's policy on biographies of living persons.

The wikipedia relies on its volunteer contributors for its content and editing. When contributors draft new editorial content they voluntarily surrender some significant intellectual property rights -- and they retain others.

Contributors are free to re-use editorial content we drafted, anywhere we want. We wrote it. We retain the right to claim authorship if we re-use material we first drafted here.

When contributions are deleted through the wikipedia's processes the contributors are recommended to consider that even though the material was judged not to fit within the english language wikipedia's project scope it may very well fit within the scope of a sibling WMF project. They are asked to consider that the deleted material may well fit within the scope of a non-WMF wiki.

Sometimes the author or authors of an article may be aware that it may soon be deleted -- because they were participating in its {{afd}} and they can see how it is going. In those cases they can look at the revision history, and cut and store those passages they wrote themselves, prior to deletion. If they were the sole author of the article's intellectual content, they can save a copy of the whole thing, for use elsewhere.

Other times however material was subject to speedy deletion, or it was subject to {{prod}} or {{afd}}, where the authors weren't aware the material faced deletion -- because the nominator skipped the important step of leaving them a good faith heads-up. In those cases authors who want access to the material they submitted to the project in good faith have to rely on administrators to get access to their material.

As I noted above some administrators routinely decline to email deleted content back to authors on BLP grounds.

I had an administrator recently decline to email me deleted content. I won't name the article, or the administrator, as I would prefer to have this discussion be about the general principle as to whether there are grounds an administrator can decline to return deleted text to authors.

I will say that in this most recent instance the article was deleted as an expired {{prod}}, not following an {{afd}} or after a claim it met a criteria for speedy deletion.

Is it legitimate for an administrator to call upon the authority of policies, like BLP, that only apply here, when justifying withholding deleted material from its legitimate authors for use elsewhere? We have a principle that the wikipedia is not censored. Policy compliant administrators don't delete material to "censor" it. Policy compliant administrators delete material that isn't in this project's scope, or otherwise doesn't comply with this project's policies, guidelines and long established conventions. So, does an administrator's authority to interpret this project's policies really extend to withholding content so it can't be used elsewhere?

Some administrators might read the arguments I wrote above, and might respond, "I am going to continue to decline to email deleted material from authors. I am going to justify doing so not on censorship grounds, but just because it is extra work, my time is valuable, and I don't see it as part of my job as a closing administrator."

We are all volunteers here -- including our administrators. No one has the right to order us to undertake new tasks, because we are volunteers, and we get to pick and choose our tasks. I do think the rest of the community should expect us to bring tasks we begin to completion. Sometimes we may begin a task only to realize it is going to be more work than we expected, and in those cases I think other contributors are entitled to expect us to nevertheless bring that task to completion or find someone to take over for us. I suggest to closing administrators that responding collegially to the occasional good faith request from contributors to have the source of their deleted contributions made available to them is part of the task of closure. Geo Swan (talk) 13:55, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

In principle, only in case of copyvio. Even there it would likely fall under fair use in the UK, but presumably the text would still be available anyway. There does seem to be a general willingness to email deleted pages, it's only one or two I've seen be awkward about it. Rich Farmbrough, 05:30, 27 May 2012 (UTC).

If an admin has a reasonable belief that deleted material fails to comply with significant English Wikipedia policy, such as COPYVIO or BLP, then they should decline to provide a copy, since they are in effect republishing the material by emailing it from an archive inaccessible to the public. It's not particularly uncollegial to decline IMO, and after all, since articles are based on reliable and verifiable sources, they can be rewritten from those same sources anyway, right? One expectation I could see being applied to closing admins is that they provide the sources the deleted article relied on, i.e. a HTML copy of the References section from a preview pane, and not necessarily by email. Franamax (talk) 05:42, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

• Thanks for your reply. Forgive me paraphrasing you...

... but you seem to be saying transmitting material by email constitutes republishing... We have contributors who are quite knowledgeable about copyright issues. I think they would be very surprised to learn transmittal by email constitutes publishing -- or republishing. Could you please clarify your position at #transmittal by email and the meaning of publishing?

Even if, for the sake of argument, transmittal by email constitutes publishing, do you mean to suggest that returning material to its original author could be in any way described as publishing?

Clarification please, are you disputing that we only release some of our intellectual property rights when we submit material here?

Clarification please, are you disputing that we retain the right to republish the material we personally drafted?

Articles can be redrafted, given the references. But why would we require an author to start from scratch if the author's intention is to submit the material they personally drafted to another wiki, with different policies, where the version that was deleted here would be perfectly acceptable without a rewrite?

Please consider if you really think withholding author's material from them really complies with your definition of collegiality.

Our standards have changed over the years. There are articles that I started, that complied with our standards when they were written, but wouldn't now. Some of these were kept at {{afd}} 5 or 6 years ago, and deleted at more recent 2nd {{afd}}, because references they relied upon were considered WP:RS then, but aren't considered RS here and now. I know, for a certain fact, that there are OTHER non-WMF wikis that would accept those references.

These deleted articles weren't deleted because they were slanderous, but because our standards over references changed.

In practice I would generally not simply port material I originally drafted to submit here, to the wikipedia, and submit it there, without a rewrite. But I would prefer to start from my original draft, and adapt it, rather than go the considerably greater effort of rewriting it from just the reference section.

Finally, with regard to suggestion that "closing admins [only] provide the sources the deleted article relied on, i.e. a HTML copy of the References section from a preview pane, and not necessarily by email." Clarification please, as I find this passage unclear. Do you mean that the references be provided after the WMF markup had been rendered? If so, you seem to be assuming the contents of a {{cite}} template is protected by copyright. Please see #Copyright and cite templates, spelling and punctuation corrections.

As I wrote above we have the principle that wikipedia is not censored. I think that means administrators should delete articles from here solely because they think they don't comply with our current policies. Franamax, clarification please, as you seem to be taking the position wikipedia administrators should withhold the intellectual property from wikipedia authors in order to enforce their interpretation of wikipedia policies over the use of that material outside of the wikipedia. That seems to be your meaning, and if it is I suggest your advice does not comply with WP:CENSORED. It seems to me that wikipedia administrator's authority to control the use of wikipedia contributor's intellectual property should apply only to their use on the wikipedia itself.

Is it possible you have forgotten that contributors haven't signed over all intellectual property rights to their contributions? Is it possible you have forgotten that the original contributors remain the copyright owners of their contributions? Geo Swan (talk) 14:10, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

The only time administrators should definitely say no is in cases of clear copyright violations or obvious libel, because legally (at least in the United States) this sort of text would not be acceptable anywhere. All other times should probably be considered on a case-by-case basis, with a bias towards "yes." That's just my opinion, though. Regardless of the legality of "transmission," sending someone a copy of clearly copied or libelous text implies that text would be acceptable even if published elsewhere, which isn't the case. In that regard, I don't think WP:NOTCENSORED applies here, because while Wikipedia isn't censored, it also operates within the law, and that includes not disseminating copyright violations or libel. elektrikSHOOS (talk) 23:21, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Admins should not decline to to email the source text to deleted material because they don't feel like it, or don't like the requester. In general, admins should be willing to provide other editors with copies of their own writing, including citations. The alternative is that the editor may use up a lot (2.4 shit-tons, to be precise) of valuable administrator time by contacting more and more of 'em until they get their writing back.--Elvey (talk) 01:24, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Copyright and cite templates, spelling and punctuation corrections

When answering a question I raised in #When should administrators decline to email the source text to deleted material? another contributors seemed to be suggesting that the source text to article's references -- the populated {{cite}} templates, and reasonable equivalent, were protected by copyright.

The US Supreme Court ruled, in Feist v. Rural, that "facts" aren't copyrightable. The ruled that copyright protection requires creativity, originality. I don't believe there is any originality in a populated {{cite}} template. I don't believe {{cite}} templates are protected by copyright.

The position that the other contributor seems to have taken is that respect for the copyright of contributors requires withholding the source text to deleted articles but even withholding the source text to references used in those articles.

I have contributed to some non-WMF wikis. I ported some articles I started here to some of them, including the Citizendium and a wiki aimed at providing information on military and political conflicts to US civil servants. When I have done so I looked at the revision history, and start the article there by cutting and pasting the last version where the article's history shows I was the last contributor of intellectual material -- material that qualifies for copyright protection.

1. It has been my interpretation that edits that add categories, add new wiki-links, but don't add new passages to the article, while useful, aren't eligible for copyright protection.
2. It has been my interpretation that edits that are devoted solely to correcting the spelling or punctuation of the article, but don't add new passages, while useful, aren't eligible for copyright protection.
3. It has been my interpretation that edits that merely add or flesh out references, while useful, aren't eligible for copyright protection.

The way I have seen it the three kinds of edit I listed above don't show the creativity necessary to be eligible for copyright under US law. The way I see it, if the initial edits to an article are mainly mine, but also include edits by other contributors, that add categories, or consist solely of minor corrections, or alterations to the meta information, but don't alter what it actually says, I don't have to undo those edits when copying contributions I altered to somewhere else.

The GFDL and CC liscenses we use here allow material to be re-used, but require attributing contributors. It is my interpretation that only contributors whose edits were eligible for copyright protection require attribution if material is copied. Since this other contributor seems to think {{cite}} templates are eligible for copyright I thought I would ask for others' opinions.

Cheers Geo Swan (talk) 05:31, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Nothing in that diff you linked suggests anything what you are saying about cite templates being copyrighted. --MASEM (t) 05:41, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply.

I think you are agreeing that the contents of {{cite}} templates aren't eligible for copyright.

If I understood the other contributor, they claimed respect for copyright required withholding the actual source text to references from deleted articles:

One expectation I could see being applied to closing admins is that they provide the sources the deleted article relied on, i.e. a HTML copy of the References section from a preview pane.

Note -- they said authors should only be allowed to see the rendered preview pane -- not the source. Why do you think they claimed this restrictions was necessary? Geo Swan (talk) 06:17, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

My take on that claim is not that the format of the cite templates would be a copyright problem, but simply a matter of workload. The source for references are scattered about the text in most articles with the way our current inline citation system works. Extracting all those would take a lot of time to assure no refs are missed. On the other hand, taking the rendered text in HTML that the reflist template produces, plus any general refs, is an easy copy-and-paste but otherwise has the same information outside of the actual cite template format. Most admins are going to want the easiest route so the copy-paste of the references is an acceptable solution. It is not because of any immediate copyright problems with the citation templates, just the difficulty of doing it. But consider: since the entire article has to be recreated, the actions of recreating the citation templates is trivial if you have the HTML information. --MASEM (t) 15:05, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

• Thanks for your reply. Yes, I understand there is additional workload involved in emailing a deleted article, or portions thereof.

But, in my experience, administrators who decline to email intellectual property back to the original copyright hold have not said it was too much work -- they justified their refusal on policy grounds. Declining to return intellectual property based on workload and -- declining on an interpretation of BLP or some other wikipedia policy are two very different arguments.

As I wrote in the earlier thread that triggered this one, I am concerned over administrators declining to return copyright holder's intellectual property back to the original authors on policy grounds. We all remain the copyright holder of all our intellectual contributions which pass de minimus. We only released some of our IP rights. The wikipedia is not the copyright holder -- we are. I think wikipedia community's role in deciding how the original copyright holder's intellectual property is used or re-used ends when the copyright holder want to consider re-using it outside the wikipedia, when they want to consider adapting it for re-use on another wiki.

I did address the workload issue in the original thread. Geo Swan (talk) 16:00, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

There's two ways to view this: one: if you make a major copyvio and attempt to publish it with a new license, that copyright/IP claim does not hold; you do not own the copyright on the original work and thus cannot claim copyright here. So in this case, asking to "return the IP" to the original author is bogus since the work wasn't theirs to start with.

OR

When you submit text to WP, you "irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL" as per the line right under this text box that I'm typing in. That means that IP as soon as you hit submit is no longer yours. There is no way to "return the IP" to you because you've passed the point of no return on hitting the submit button.

Arguably, the citation templates are not copyrightable to start with (they are factual info about sources), and thus that is neither "IP" that can be returned but could be returned if possible. That goes back to the work effort aspect. --MASEM (t) 17:55, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

With regard to what we have agreed to release, sorry, but I believe you are mistaken. You seem to be saying that clicking the button assigns all our rights to the WMF.

We do release key rights, but not all our rights. Let me quote that whole box.

By clicking the "Save Page" button, you agree to the Terms of Use, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.

The second sentence about attribution -- the one you did not quote -- is necessary because contributors retain copyright. We retain the right to have our copyright eligible contributions attributed to us. Wikipedia readers are free to re-use, adapt, rewrite, our work -- provided they acknowledge they are using the copyright work of others, and those others are named. Attribution would not be necessary if we had assigned all our rights to the wikipedia or WMF.

With regard to your theoretical examination of whether someone can request the return of copyright violations... Well, of course no request for copyright violations should be honored, because if the material was a copyright violation we would not have had the rights to use it in the first place, and we would be violating the rights of the legitimate copyright holder by emailing it. But we have a policy of assuming good faith. Are you suggesting we should never email source text of deleted articles that were essentially the work of one contributor -- based on the assumption that material was a copyright violationʔ That does not seem consistent with AGF.

You are absolutely correct that there is some additional time commitment for an adminstrator who agrees to email an deleted article where the intellectual content was essentially the work of a single contributor back to that contributor. Well, this is a cooperative project. We should all consider helping other contributors who have a civil request. My commitment to building the wikipedia is substantial. I don’t want to say exactly -- multiple thousands of hours. I do not remember ever declining to help out another contributor who made a good faith request of me. So should I be embarrassed to make an occasional request that would cost an administrator minutesʔ

When making a request like this I should be prepared to be gracious if an administrator said to me:

Geo Swan, the time I budgeted to deal with your request was not sufficient to confirm your recollection that you were the sole author of all the intellectual content. You made the first dozen edits. Then other contributors made some edits, and you returned and made some more. In the time I budgeted I did a diff that confirmed the first N edits by other contributors were all to the metadata, thus all de minimus, so this is the version as at 200x-yy-zz.

It would probably be possible for a bot to take a conservative approach and figure out at which revision was the last revision where the original contributor made the last edit where they were the sole contributor of intellectual content.

Anyhow, thanks for taking the time to make thoughtful comments. Geo Swan (talk) 19:30, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm not feeling too sympathetic here. The complaint is basically "I didn't think this was important enough to make a backup, but now I think it's important enough for someone else to go out of his way to give me a copy."

You have no more right to insist that a volunteer here give you a copy of an article you wrote than an author has the right to demand that I lend him my copy of his book so he can make a photocopy of it. You're asking for a favor. You are likely to get a more favorable reception is you ask nicely instead of standing on your supposed "rights". WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:16, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I think you have mischaracterized what I wrote.

I think my requests were polite. I thought I saw a pattern of administrators who declined by requests, based on interpretations of policy that I thought were incorrect. I thought seeking others opinions as to which interpretation of policy was useful and I thought a forum on policy would be the right place to ask these questions. Geo Swan (talk) 19:46, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't know whether your requests were polite or not (as I haven't seen them), but IMO WhatamIdoing is dead on in interpreting your "returning intellectual property to the copyright holder" argument. Anomie⚔ 22:17, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

• Well, since I think WhatamIdoing offered rebutals of straw arguments I did not make I do not know whether your agreement with her actually means you disagree with what I actually said.

My main point was that administrators have said they decline to email deleted articles to the original author saying policy prohibits this. I believed they were mistaken about this interpretation of policy, and I thought the policy forum was a good place to seek other opinions.

I believe wikipedia policy only authorizes administrators to try to control how contributions are used on the wikipedia itself.

I would be very interested if you had an opinion on this issue. Geo Swan (talk) 09:37, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

The problem is that you seem to be implying that there is some sort of obligation for admins to email a user a copy of their deleted edits on request. Regarding the BLP question specifically, Wikipedia:Undeletion policy#Access to deleted pages touches on the issue. Anomie⚔ 15:52, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

• Thanks for drawing my attention to Wikipedia:Undeletion policy#Access to deleted pages. I agree it merely touches on the policy issues I raised.

Would you agree the most relevant passage was: "Note that these requests are likely to be denied if the content has been deleted on legal grounds (such as defamation or copyright violation), or if no good reason is given for the request"?

Would you agree that the corollary would be that requests for deleted material, where there is no legal issue, and where the requester offered a good reason should not be declined -- on policy grounds.

Administrators who decline for reasons other than policy are a completely different issue. When an administrator declines, and says, "No, I can't be bothered", or reasonable equivalent, I can initiate a request at WP:DRV. But since administrators have declined -- citing policy justifications -- I think it was completely legitimate for me to ask questions about those interpretations of policy I had doubts about, here, in this policy forum.

In your last comment you used the word "problem" to describe my comments. I tried to phrase those questions in a civil, collegial way. I did make a suggestion, which I also tried to phrase in a civil, collegial manner. Honestly? I thought I succeeded. Maybe, by problem, you merely meant you disagreed with my suggestion. But, if by your use of the word "problem" you meant to imply that you saw a genuine lapse from policy in my comments, or something else I should try to avoid, I would appreciate you explaining what you thought lapsed. If that is what you meant I would appreciate you explaining on my talk page, or via email. Geo Swan (talk) 12:17, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Let me be clearer: It doesn't much matter to me what their excuse is for declining your request. They have zero obligation to fulfill your request. In declining your request for this strictly optional favor, I'd be satisfied if they told you that the Moon was in the wrong phase, or if they just said no.

If these pages were important to you, then you should have kept your own copy, so that you would not be dependent on the kindness of grumpy strangers to get the information now. Since you didn't, you are now faced with the difficult task of persuading someone to help you—persuading, as in, convincing them that helping you is a path to happiness and peace and rainbows and cookies and eternal gratitude, not claiming that they have some sort of obligation or duty to do so.

Your problem, in other words, isn't a policy problem. It's a human problem. We are never going to write a policy that requires anyone to give you a REFUND. Consequently, you need to make someone want to give you that page. No amount of policy editing or complaining here is going to have that effect. You need to win friends and influence people, not change a policy page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:25, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

See WP:Copying within Wikipedia#Where attribution is not needed. It may be more convenient to provide a full List of authors without filtering for minor contributions. Flatscan (talk) 04:24, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I was not familiar with that page.

WP:Copying within Wikipedia#Where attribution is not needed offers adding "bare references" as its first example of the kind of copying that does not require attribution. I can see how someone could interpret that as supporting the premise that copying a {{cite}} template with some of its fields populated, in contrast, would require attribution.

I think that would be a mistake. The third example that guideline offers of the kind of copying that does not require attribution are "Simple, non-creative lists of information." I believe populated {{cite}} template are "Simple, non-creative lists of information". Therefore I am going to suggest on Wikipedia talk:Copying within Wikipedia that it should say "references" -- not "bare references". Geo Swan (talk) 20:05, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't fully remember, but I think that "bare" is directed at the quote parameter, which has some creativity in its selection. Most or all of the other parameters are facts about the referenced work. Flatscan (talk) 04:09, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

• Hmmm. The person selecting the quoted material, is, bringing judgment to the selection. I would agree that this judgment passes the bar for creative input that qualifies for copyright protections -- except wouldn't the copyright to the quoted material clearly belong to the original author being quoted -- not to the person who chose to place it in the quote field? Geo Swan (talk) 05:06, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

  I have another guess: refs that are added to existing text. You will probably get a better answer at WT:Copying within Wikipedia. Flatscan (talk) 04:10, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

WP turning into a sports newspaper

It looks like with the outcome of two recent AfD's (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/UFC 145 and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2004 Estoril Open) the respective projects and fan bases can muster !votes at AfD's to keep articles on routine sports events, thus turning the encyclopedia into a sports news reporting service. So my question is do we :

• A) change the WP policy to accept that (if that's what we want) or
• B) reinforce policy to say we are not a sports reporting service.

Mtking ^(edits) 20:28, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

I guess the question is where do you draw the line? Aren't most UFC types of events pay for view? If so aren't they also television specials and as such also subject to those inclusion guidelines which would probably say they are fine? Vegaswikian (talk) 20:45, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

So are quite a number of sports events, that does not necessary make them anything other than routine sports events. Mtking ^(edits) 21:18, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

I've said at WT:Notability (sports) why Wikipedia is no good for what they want and not just because the policies and guidelines are against it. The really should set up a Wikia which concentrates on sports statistics and has stringent conditions on the editors so it can gain a status as a reliable source. I'm wondering about a couple involved in the business whether they are not doing it because they like sports or are just silly but because they like playing games with Wikipedia and causing disruption. Dmcq (talk) 21:03, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

• Mtking has a long history of trying to delete as many UFC articles as possible. He has sour grapes since his latest attempt to get a UFC article deleted failed. UFC 145 clearly passes notability guidelines. As the admin who closed the afd as keep said, it has sources from the NY Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, etc. Mtking tries to get a lot of UFC articles deleted, and when he CANNOT get them deleted, he goes to other areas of Wikipedia to try and get the POLICY changed so that he can get what he wants. It is his modus operandi. Gamezero05 23:30, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
• Let's be perfectly clear here. The Estoril Open AfD was comprehensively rejected by the wikipedia community. If you take out User:Portillo from the equation (he admits he only voted delete because he was being a "being a trouble maker"), the AfD, which was open for a fortnight, got all of 2 delete votes. Members of Wikiproject:Tennis contributed only a minority of the keep votes, so are not to blame for the AfD failing. Non tennis keep voters still outnumbered the delete voters by 3-1. Sour grapes? I think that's pretty clear. Jevansen (talk) 03:22, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)It is not sour grapes, if you re-read what I am asking her you will see that I asked is it time to change policy in light of those outcomes so as to remove any doubt. As for your analysis of the The Estoril Open AfD, I see that you failed to mention the fact that you and four others were canvassed by a member of the project (I know you denied it had any effect on your participation), I also take issue with the analysis of the keep votes, the majority of which were from project members (those judging by user-boxes on their user page or contribute at the project) or from editors canvassed by a member of the project. Mtking ^(edits) 03:56, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Take issue all you want, but I did the numbers and the majority of keep votes were not from WP:Tennis members (PrimeHunter, TheLou75, Secretaria, P.T. Aufrette, Ymblanter and John J. Bulten). I'll concede that TheLou75 has made some edits to Rafael Nadal related articles (and also a disturbing amount of edits at Talk:Human penis size) but he isn't a member of WP:Tennis. Regardless, it's 5-2 at best (non tennis keeps > deletes) so I suspect the AfD would have still failed without "canvassed" users and members of the wikiproject. That's all I'm saying, a pro-tennis wikipedia conspiracy isn't the reason your AfD didn't succeed. Jevansen (talk) 07:43, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Wikiprojects cannot override global consensus about notability, as well as other policies (like WP:NOT#STATS). There's no doubt that, for example the annual event of the Estoril Open is notable, but each yearly iteration fails NEVENT, NSPORTSEVENT, and several other policies, the same that are being applied to the MMA article. There is a serious issue if these articles are being kept on dubious claims of notability. --MASEM (t) 03:47, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

How do you decide what is notable? For example... do you think UFC 145 is notable? It had the light heavyweight championship of the world on it, was covered by major publications such as LA Times, USA Today, New York Post, etc. It was one of the biggest PPV events of the year, and not-to-mention, 360,000 people visited the Wikipedia page the day after the event. For comparison, 380,000 people visited the most recent Super Bowl page the day after the Super Bowl. If that isn't notable, then I don't know what is. One other point I'd like to make. There are different ideas of "notability". Users like Mtking finds things notable that are "unique" in some way. An article can get 2 page views in an entire year, but as long as some smart guys talked about it in scholarly journals, and it is unique, then it is notable. Yet other pages can get 10,000 views PER DAY for years, and even if it is covered by major newspapers, if he feels it has no "enduring notability", then he wants to delete it. Which brings me to my point... what is notable? Isn't notability what we make it? If hardly anybody cares about a subject apart from a few people, then how notable is it really? Notability isn't some inherent force in the universe that is just waiting for humans to find. Notability is what humans make of it. Gamezero05 05:43, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

The type of reporting that UFC 145 currently lists is what's consider "routine", it is "flash in a pan" with no evidence of long-term importance, and is all primary sources - straight data reporting and no context. Page views - and by extension popularity - do not count, unless those facts themselves are of significant discussion. Yes, we can define what notability is, but that is based on the idea that significant coverage in secondary sources - or the likelihood of that in the case of subject-specific guidelines - is what the community has decided. Projects cannot override that. --MASEM (t) 05:51, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Over at WT:Notability you seem to take a different view - that what the notability guidelines say is just a presumption, whereas what really matters for notability is what concrete decisions are reached in AfD discussions. So if the AfD discussions on these two articles concluded that they should be kept, then those topics are notable, right? Victor Yus (talk) 08:11, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Notability is still presumed - it can be challenged later. In this case, there is recognition there is a problem with articles like these that seem to pass the notability guidelines, but clearly there's something that other editors don't agree with that don't belong. So now this is where everything gets fine tuned on this specific aspect. --MASEM (t) 12:59, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

And the other thing to remember: we are an encyclopedia. We summarize information. We reiterate what is said about events from a 60,000 ft thousand view. UFC is a notable sport; several of the athletes in it are notable. But that doesn't make every event appropriate to include as the summary: the results, yes and how they relate to the bigger picture of UFC in general, but not the specifics of each individual event. Similarly: the state of the US economy and of stock markets like Dow Jones notable, but that doesn't mean the day-to-day market change (which is widely reported, perhaps more so than the UFC events) of appropriate encyclopdic value, unless it was a big dip or the like such as Black Friday. There may be notable UFC events, but my survey of such articles, and of articles like the tennis one, suggest otherwise. I point out how the PGA editors have done it - most of the annual golf events don't have articles, save for the 4 biggest matches (eg like the Masters) which attract extra attention due to their legacy to start with. Understand how to summarize sports coverage is what is lacking in all this. --MASEM (t) 05:59, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Masem. On some days 20% of what goes through my new-pages-patrol are articles about minor soccer players, barely notable event fixtures. Most of these stubs seem to have been auto-added and offer very little in the way of notability or verifiability. I think Wikipedia would best serve these sporting communities by encouraging them to form their own specialist wiki-sites for this kind of content. --Salimfadhley (talk) 08:48, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

And they should also have better editorial control than Wikipedia so people can trust them as a reliable source. Have we got vandals changing odd numbers in various of these pages and how would one know which figure is correct anyway with the lack of good sources. That would mean less maintenance too. For the stuff in Wikipedia you need lots of people looking at it and good sources as it is the encyclopaedia just about anyone might have edited, they could have a trust system for their editors which is something we can't do in Wikipedia where we rely on many eyes instead. Having that system would mean I believe we could refer to them for statistics like we can refer to Citizendum, there would e no point however in duplicating the data. Dmcq (talk) 09:44, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

This is the big problem with any article that is comprised of mainly statistics. There's simply no effective way to verify pages like Yemen national football team match results. Rather than allow these articles which consist of nothing other than long lists of statistics we should be encouraging shorter articles which explain what the most important results are, and their significance in the subject's history. I'd personally like these list'o'stats articles to go away. --Salimfadhley (talk) 12:04, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Here's an unrelated example of the kind of sports-related low-value content we seem to be accumulating: Archery New Zealand - from what I can tell the sole rationale for the existence of this page is that somebody has already created stubs for other administrative branches of the sport. There seems to be a sort of template-completism going on. This would make sense if the goal of Wikipedia was to catalogue every aspect of every known sport. I'm sure that's not our purpose! --Salimfadhley (talk) 09:05, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Notabilility has nothing to do with importance. It is more a question of "Do RS report about it" and "Do people expect us to provide some information". If I go to a village football match I don't go home afterwards and check if the goaly has a Wikipedia entry. I would if someone on the sidelines said "great that we now have x he used to play in such-and-such-higher league". Then I would want that information available and could expect notability as in such-and-such-higher league there no doubt was plenty of media coverage. Important? not really. On the other hand some boring scientist who found the cure to some obscure cancer might be considered important, but is he notable? Personally I would like to be able to look him up as well, but I doubt there might be sufficiant coverage. Agathoclea (talk) 09:28, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

But is that really Wikipedia's role? I could envisage some other kind of sporting statistics project whose role it is to compile not just an encyclopaedic but complete set of sporting statistics. Such a site would be unlimited by the WP:CRYSTALBALL rule, and could include include school and college leagues and would allow a user to chart the entire career of sports-players from the little league to the professional and back to amateur leagues. I do not think Wikipedia is that site. In the case you gave of the "boring scientist" - it would not be up to us to determine whether he was notable or not. We'd look to the reliable secondary sources. I think we should have the same standards for sports-people as we do for scientists in Wikipedia. --Salimfadhley (talk) 09:55, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

And as I said above I'd encourage them to use a reputation system so readers were fairly sure that what they read was right. Dmcq (talk) 10:08, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

I think we have - the only difference between the boring scientist and the popular sportsperson is that without checking we know that the relevant sources that establish notability exist purely on the popularity of the subject matter. There are thousands of specialist magazines covering that. Agathoclea (talk) 10:24, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

• And here is another Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/UFC 21. Mtking ^(edits) 10:41, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

I can't judge these events I have zilch interest in them, but I would hope for some statement at least showing why they are notable. 2004 Estoril Open mentioned above just seems an affront to me in that it was passed at AfD without even an attempt to put notability statement into the lead. Also the citations didn't support the statistics, how would we ever know if they were vandalized? Dmcq (talk) 10:52, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, but you seem to be putting yourself into the same contradictory position at Masem above. On the notability talk page you say that the one true solid test of notability is the result of AfD discussions, not the notability guidelines themselves. Yet here, when you see an AfD discussion whose result goes (in your view) against the guidelines, you feel something is wrong because the guidelines have not been adhered to. What is your actual position? Victor Yus (talk) 11:02, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

The guideline seems to be in contradiction with the AfD result. I'm commenting on that, such contradictions are a good basis for changing the guidelines. I'm asking if we wat to change the guideline for notability so we don't have to show notability and if the guideline on verifiability should be changed so statistics can be stuck in with no reliable sources. Isn't that what you want? Dmcq (talk) 12:41, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Let's not confuse two separate things here. The main problem that we have had recently is the effort by fans of an invented-for-TV pseudosport to get every last detail of their obsession into Wikipedia in as many different articles as possible, despite the fact that there is very little coverage of this entertainment outside the broadcaster promoting the events and unreliable fan sites. Let's treat these events for what they are, TV episodes, and follow the appropriate guideline. Events in genuine well-established sports, such as tennis, would take place even without TV coverage and receive plenty of independent coverage in mainstream reliable sources, so are a completely different kettle of fish. Phil Bridger (talk) 12:14, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

It doesn't matter if it is a pseudo-sport, the problem is that observing all these MMA/UFC events has highlighted that there are similar problems with true professional sports events like 2004 Estoril Open. If all we can cover about them is the same type of information that the UFC events are putting forwards - basically statistics and results - then these are no better than the UFC articles even if they are a professional event. This is where the various NSPORTS guidelines fail, because they are too inclusive and yet there seem to be double standards between the professional sports and the pseudo-sports in their application, and still include far more than any other project on WP. --MASEM (t) 12:59, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

What are you talking about "pseudo-sport"? MMA is regulated by state athletic commissions, is covered by all mainstream media and newspapers, and is broadcasted on major TV networks (Fox, Globo Brazil, etc). It is as much of a sport as any other out there. Secondly, it seems that Masem simply does not like sports. Because many of the UFC events contain far more than simply statistics and results. But secondly, statistics and results ARE going to be most of what a sports article is about due to the nature of what sport is. So why are you guys on an anti-sports crusade? And you guys like to bring up that Wikipedia is not a statsbook. So let's take the UFC for example. I can't find almost any UFC stats on Wikipedia except for individual records of fighters. I can't find takedown percentages, striking percentages, punch counters, transitions, takedown defense percentages, etc. Other than results of fights, there really isn't any statistics. Gamezero05 17:10, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

We're trying to summarize sports; we are not a sports almanac but at least can try to include elements of such. We recognize that sports gets a disproportionate amount of coverage in the media, but at the same time, much of that coverage is duplicative and mostly of a primary nature (read: box scores and game summaries for the major league game are reported in papers across the globe); effectively it is the definition of routine coverage. Thus, we have to be aware that if one cannot provide context and commentary on a sporting event, and can only give out stats and standings, the event probably isn't notable, even if current sports guidelines say they are. Thus given all other aspects, it makes sense that we can discuss sport results at the season level, or in the case of continuous events like MMA, as annual summaries, breaking out individual games, competitions, and the like when they are truly notable above and beyond routine coverage. This is normalizing the area of sports with all other fields on WP. --MASEM (t) 22:51, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

I would say you just aren't looking, Phil. I don't care for MMA myself, but one of my local papers covers each UFC event in considerable detail. Truthfully, I see no issue at all with an article for each UFC event. It's no different than articles on each WWE pay-per-view, many of which are GAs. Or season articles for pro-sports teams, many of which are GAs. Or articles on single games that are events, many of which are GAs. The simple fact is, people like Masem have consistently campaigned against these articles on the simple and exclusive argument of WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Resolute 17:26, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

I fully agree that there are lots of games which should be covered by Wikipedia. But how did 2004 Estoril Open though get through AfD without any indication of notability, practically zilch summary of anything and a whole bunch of statistics that aren't supported by the citations? Dmcq (talk) 17:42, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

I would say it passed because the participants of that AFD generally felt that such tennis events are notable. Wikipedia is a work in progress. No, that article is not done. But there is no reason why it can't be expanded. Resolute 17:48, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Fair enough I guess, but couldn't people at least add a citation for the statistics? How is anyone supposed to know what's right if somebody changes a 1 to a 2 in those tables? And if there is a good source that supplies those figures why are we duplicating them rather than summarizing? Dmcq (talk) 17:55, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

@Resolute, I don't agree with how you summarise the "campaign"; for example I would have the same reaction if WikiProject Australian rules football decided to have an article on each and every AFL game, they are are also covered in "considerable detail" in every newspaper and sports section of every news website here, shown on PPV TV overseas. What about WikiProject Football (Soccer) deciding to have an article on every one of the 300+ English league games every year, each of which is shown on pay-tv here and the results of every game make the TV news section here in Australia far more sourcing to chose from than these UFC events. Mtking ^(edits) 20:46, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Apples and oranges. We don't write articles on every tennis match or UFC fight either. We write on the tournament, the event or the season in most cases, with some exceptions made for the especially notable individual matches. e.g.: 2011 Heritage Classic or Isner–Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships. Resolute 20:53, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

I look at the number of "events" per year for UFC events and compare it to other sports that are centered on individual performance and realize that the folks that maintain the PGA tours (eg: 2011 PGA Tour) have it right. Most of the specific recurring yearly events aren't notable (but the encapsulating article about the collection of yearly events itself its), save for 5-6 major exceptions which are the biggest golf tourneys of the year. The same logic can be applied to UFC/MMA.

The problem become that the UFC/MMA stuff is geared towards individual on individual, not individual against the rest of the players involved. As such, yes, it seems like the smallest iota of information is the individual matches, but to that end, I strongly suggest that the right way to present this information is to focus it from the participant's side, instead of trying to group a series of unconnected matches together and saying that's notable. It's not the way the UFC/MMA people have been thinking about it, but it makes it much more logical (working on the assumption that notability of a MMA fighter is relatively easy to show compared to the match) to present the information that way. The yearly summaries can still be useful as a separate cross-reference for that. --MASEM (t) 23:06, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

I would apply the same logic to MMA as we have WWE and professional wrestling. We don't write articles on the individual house shows unless something truly notable occurs (MMA equivalent: UFC shows on broadcast TV/Bellator weekly shows) but there are currently 81 GA class articles on WWE/TNA/WCW pay-per-view events. And I'll tell you right now, I could write a GA class article on UFC 149 if I felt the desire to. So can the MMA folks - and I wish they would realize that doing so is their best defence against the people working to delete their articles. Resolute 14:34, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) So what if someone was to write an article on each days MLB games, or each week of the NFL season, or each week of the AFL or EPL ? What we have at the moment is a policy (WP:NOTNEWSPAPER) that says we don't cover newsworthy events unless there is some demonstrated enduring notability, we don't cover every reported murder, because the vast majority are not of encyclopaedic note yet most would get coverage in the press both at the time of the crime, at the time of the trial and at any appeal but all of the coverage is routine primary news reports. Take the 2004 Estoril Open, what happened at the event that was of encyclopaedic note ? some professionals were watched doing their job, it was shown on TV, it was reported in the press, so was 13 March 2012 in the Australian House of Representatives or 16 May 2012 in the US House of Representatives. Mtking ^(edits) 23:26, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

I told you above that we don't generally do articles on individual matches, and I have no doubt that such articles would be quickly and correctly deleted at AFD. If you are unable to comprehend the difference between an individual game, match or fight and a season, tournament or event, then you are just wasting my time. Resolute 14:34, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

WP:notability is founded on the fact that suitable coverage is a rough indicator of encyclopedic-type notability. Mathematically this assumes a a relatively constant ratio of suitable coverage to encyclopedic-type notability. When this ratio varies, the wp:notability guidelines don't work quite as well. Nowhere is this more true than with sports, which is extremely coverage-heavy, out of proportion to enclyclopedic-type notability. The coverage itself (and watching/reading it) is itself an immense activity and entertainment, rather being just coverage. Add to that being the one with a very high incidence of fandom, and fans working the AFD and I think that the overall situation has gotten out of whack. One answer is to toughen up the SNG standards. Biting my tongue while I say that because I think that GNG should be refined so that SNG's can be eliminated, and then eliminating SNG's. But that is a very complex project. It will probably require introducing a new metric into the wp:notability equation, the "degree of enclyclopedicness". Trying to handle this aspect only with a separate pass/fail test (via. "What Wikipedia is not") is too hamhanded to accomplish this. But I digress. North8000 (talk) 22:41, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

North8000, you have made some damn good points. I don't know what the solution is, but the problem is: coverage of sports does not reflect notability the way it does in other topics. Coverage is itself part of the spectacle, and fans work to bring Wikipedia into it. I'd like to hear some ideas about how to amend GNG to include genuinely notable sports topics and exclude the endless stream of trivia. —Ben Kovitz (talk) 18:24, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

• Folks, there is nothing wrong with covering notable events. And everything is routine at the end of the day if it happens on a regular basis. The Superbowl is a prime example. As are the Olympics and presentational elections. We cover them even so. If the coverage is there and even mildly sustained, we cover it. As well we should. Hobit (talk) 02:00, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Exactly. Even the Super Bowl is "routine". It happens every single year. We all know how much coverage it will get. We're expecting it. According to Mtking, only something like the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction that happened in 2004 would be considered "notable". The Super Bowl itself wouldn't. He takes the notability thing way to far... to the extreme. Gamezero05 16:49, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

<sarcasm>And here I was thinking it was turning into a reality show "news"paper</sarcasm>--ukexpat (talk) 17:54, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Agree on the Superbowl, and also for the other 20,000 sports articles that are next in line with respect to notability. The problem is the other 200,000 sports articles that aren't in that 20,000. North8000 (talk) 20:55, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Abolishment of using WP:BEFORE as an editing restriction

Several times (most recently with User:TenPoundHammer), I've seen editors propose being forced to follow WP:BEFORE as part of a thread involving supposed misuse of AfD or CSD. WP:BEFORE is neither policy nor a guideline and there has never been a consensus to make it as such. Therefore, I propose some sort of disclaimer that forced adherence to this non-policy is a non-starter. Note that this should not be a vote on the merits of WP:BEFORE pbp 13:28, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

The instructions in WP:BEFORE related to verifiability and notability (which are the ones that cause most contention) are firmly grounded in deletion policy, where the relevant criteria are "articles for which thorough attempts to find reliable sources to verify them have failed" and "articles whose subjects fail to meet the relevant notability guideline", not "articles which do not currently contain reliable sources" and "articles whose current content fails to meet the relevant notability guideline". Phil Bridger (talk) 13:36, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

• (ec)I'm afraid I don't understand your post or what you hope to accomplish with it if the merits aren't at issue. WP:BEFORE is consensus-supported, the main difference in opinion from case-to-case being how much "due diligence" someone is expected to do if the article's flaws seem pretty self-evidently unfixable on their face. You'll find there's little on Wikipedia that anyone is "forced" to do, but those editors who have nominated something that is easily found to be notable or whatever the issue are rightly criticized, and those who have repeatedly abused AFD by repeatedly making frivolous nominations have been banned from it. BEFORE is certainly in the spirit of WP:ATD and WP:PRESERVE, which are policy, and is at minimum good practice and an exercise of good judgment. If you're not questioning those merits, I don't understand why you'd want to make it less likely that editors would be expected to follow it. postdlf (talk) 13:46, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
  • "WP:BEFORE is consensus-supported". That's not exactly true. While there's no consensus to get rid of it, there's no consensus to upgrade it to a policy either. And since it ain't policy, editors can't be required to follow it, and it shouldn't be used as an editing restriction pbp 15:55, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
    • That strikes me as wikilawyering. Whether it's a policy, guideline, Miss Manners rule of etiquette, or traffic ordinance, it's a good idea and a reasonable expectation that AFDs not be wastes of time for easily researchable issues, and per policy at WP:ATD and WP:PRESERVE, not be brought for fixable issues. And we don't fail to do good things just because we're not "required" regardless of whether it's written down somewhere or not. If someone's only reason for not doing something is "you can't make me", they are failing to be a good editor and member of the community. Really that's about the worst attitude someone could have on here. postdlf (talk) 16:37, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
    • As Phil Bridger has already pointed out, WP:BEFORE is policy. It is currently deletion policy where it has been for some eight years, although it in fact originated in the verifiability policy in 2003. Uncle G (talk) 11:38, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Absolutely not. There's been a whole spate of AfD's recently where the good practice of BEFORE have categorically been ignored for favour of quick and dirty AfD's (several of which you were involved in you, Purplebackpack89). Some of those were problematic because the nominator failed to realise that they were AfD'ing an article with a problematic title (and was, in fact notable), or articles which were recently created.

It seems to me that you're trying to get rid of BEFORE, not because it's bad practice, but because it gets in the way of some sort of "kill score" that you hope to attain at AfD. ˜danjel [ talk | contribs ] 13:57, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

This "kill score" allegation is not germain, not proven at all and frankly is a personal attack pbp 15:55, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

All that BEFORE can be used for is to demonstrate AFDs that should have never been started because of "ease of correction" that BEFORE would highlight. The problem is that proving that BEFORE wasn't done is difficult and I've seen cases where the nominators who normally follow BEFORE and even talk about lack of sources from their google searches are accosted for failing to do BEFORE. Basically, if it is a case of an editor that nominates for AFD often but a great deal are quickly shown to be bad noms because of easy google search hits or the like, then that's a behavioral issue that likely will restrict their participation at AFD, not require them to do BEFORE since again, proving that BEFORE was actually used is impossible. --MASEM (t) 14:26, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Echoing what Masem just said, WP:BEFORE itself is not the problem; it's a great thing to follow when going through the deletion process. However, more of the problem lies when editors use WP:BEFORE to whack nominators over the head with, even if said nominator may have made a good faith effort to follow it. Of course, that in itself is very hard to show physically that one has or has not. --MuZemike 14:31, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

And that's exactly what I want to stop, Mu (and Masem). Inclusionist whack nominators over the head with it as a straw argument. When Hammer, or me, or any other number of editors have made several AfD nominations that are perfectly acceptable policywise but other editors don't like, and then make one AfD nomination of slightly more questionable merit, inclusionist insist they be shackled to the (not a policy or guide) of BEFORE for eternity. That's wrong. Assuming BEFORE is here to stay, but not as policy (and there's never been consensus to make it one), BEFORE shouldn't be used in this manner, and something should be added to BEFORE to reflect that it isn't policy and shouldn't be used that way pbp 15:57, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

How exactly are they being "shackled to BEFORE for eternity"? That sounds like empty rhetoric to me, and I don't know what you're actually trying to describe. postdlf (talk) 16:37, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Are you sure that needs modification of some policies or guidelines and not just some encouragement to follow Wikipedia:Assume good faith..? --Martynas Patasius (talk) 18:33, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, this is more of a behavioral argument than a policy problem. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 19:20, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Purplebackpack89, I suggest that you read WP:The difference between policies, guidelines, and essays. The tag at the top of the page is not what makes a page contain sense or be support. WP:BRD is widely supported, but it's "just" an essay. WP:Five pillars is wildly popular, but it has no tag at the top (it is generally considered to be the best essay about policies ever written, without being a policy itself). There's no tag at the top of BEFORE because it's been embedded into the middle of a major procedure page. It needs WP:NOTAG to contain good advice. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:32, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Forget WP:BEFORE for a second—let's look at underlying principles. The touchstone of AfD nominations on the basis of notability (and verifiability) is existence of sufficient reliable sources and certainly the majority of AfD nominations are notability-based. A nomination on the basis of notability is, then, profoundly a discussion on the merits of whether sufficient reliable sources exist. Now comes along a fairly experienced user who nominates a topic at AfD on notability grounds that literally a five second Google Books search would show has scads of sources written about it. They don't bother to do that search. What happens then: the nomination stays open for a week if not snowed, and ten people waste their time on it when it never had any chance of succeeding—never, not maybe, not possibly—it was a nonstarter because the grounds for the nomination did not exist and that lack of merit was child's play to discover. That's irresponsible and an insult to everyone who ultimately participates. We owe some duty to not be complete assholes to our fellow editors. Okay, so say this is the first time this user has done so as far as we can tell. Fine, they deserve a trout slap but let's not make a big deal. Now, how about the user who does this over and over (as does happen)? Now we're talking about numerous man hours wasted. That is disruption. WP:BEFORE is where the obviousness of this is written out (though it it doesn't say it in these terms, nor with the clarity and emphasis it should about the minimum expected—I attempted to fix that some time ago but that's for another discussion). Yes, I have seen WP:BEFORE abused; people who expect a complete survey of sources the nominator may not even be familiar with before nominating, but the principles of every policy/guideline/essay are subject to perversion, which does not invalidate their proper application.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:47, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Me personally I would agree that (regardless of WP:BEFORE) before sticking something in for AfD the nominator should check if there are obvious sources. It just wastes everyone's time otherwise. The better nominations say "A Googgle search turns up nothing but press releases by Foocorp" Elen of the Roads (talk) 21:25, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

As far as I know, it is the author who has to come with proof for statements (or whole articles). Not the nominator. Why should you put the burden on the nominator? Night of the Big Wind _talk 17:04, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

I would hope the better nominations spell Google correctly :) The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 16:56, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Advice to nominators

I agree with MuZemike, WP:BEFORE is sometimes used to beat nominators over the head with. Therefore, what a nominator should do when he properly follows WP:BEFORE is pick 3 sources from the search results that he suspects that a hyper-inclusionist might try to pass off as supersources and impeach them in his nomination statement. Are they press releases, are they trivial mentions, are they blogs? Say so. Yes there might be some editors !voting "keep" who disagree with the nominator about the quality of the sources but at least the discussion will be about the sources and not the nominator and there will be no doubt that the nominator did indeed follow WP:BEFORE. --Ron Ritzman (talk) 13:28, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

• It's extra work, but that would be ideal! Hobit (talk) 18:09, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Benifits from donation

Hello Everybody, I have given 100 $ donation to Wikipedia and I am proud of it.After all, Wikipedia is my favorite website.I'm using it since 2004.By the way, I was thinking that you people should created something like this.If a person makes a donation more than sufficient amount like 10000$ or something, then his/her user account should be given administrator privileges.Thus, I would say that any active user would be inspired to donate 10000 $ to Wikipedia and Wikipedia will easily make up revenues for expanding.Show what are your thoughts. Regards,14.97.189.216 (talk) 05:51, 6 June 2012 (UTC).

I was thinking you had said 1,000 there for a while, and was thinking if that was a reasonable amount to pay someone to create an admin sock for you given the number of hours required, the labor cost in various countries versus the level of english required and so on, of course, you wouldn't be putting the money into wikipedia to become an admin, they wouldn't accept it and might be a little disgusted with the idea, you'd be giving it to someone else to do the work for you, and no doubt they'd be happy with that arrangement, and wikipedia would be happy as there is no appearance of a conflict of interest, and you'd probably be happy until you found out the job is far from glamorous.

But then I noticed, wait a minute, you said $10,000, well, all I can say to that is email me :) Because I know I'll be really really really happy, not just 'I can't believe it's not butter happy' but fireworks jumping off my chair punching the air happy, tipping over the monitor by accident as I victory dance around the desk, while a cat ran out of the room with a Rarrrroow and I'm too busy being excited to think for a second 'wait, I don't HAVE a cat'.

But seriously $10,000, isn't that overpriced ? Penyulap ☏ 06:49, 6 Jun 2012 (UTC)

what is the going rate for adminship anyone ? Penyulap ☏ 06:52, 6 Jun 2012 (UTC)

These days? two pieces of leather: A belt to the mouth and a boot to the head : ) - jc37 14:08, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Uh, no. Buying adminship is just a bad idea. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 12:40, 6 June 2012 (UTC)

Buying admin seems misguided to me. On the other hand, there might be some kind of more harmless badge (something a bit like a barnstar) which could be given to donors. It may already exist. --Salimfadhley (talk) 13:59, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Buying admin seems indeed misguided. It would force upon the contributor the job of being a administrator. That's like being given a broom and the title "janitor" because you gave $10,000 to a charity. Being a administrator is not a title or a honor; its a responsibility and frankly a loot of work. A much better thing to give would be a barnstar or similar mark of honor. If someone gives time, or they give money, do not both deserve some kind of appreciation? Belorn (talk) 14:10, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

All donators, get free access to Wikipedia content. Those that donate $10,000 or more get un-metered access. What more could you want? Similar benefits are available for those who donate time instead of money. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 14:36, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Why on earth would we treat a large donor so poorly as that? We wouldn't have any left! :) Joking aside, being an admin isn't some wonderful thing. It invites a lot of abuse and criticism, and generally very little praise to temper it. Admin candidates have generally been around the block several times, and know what they're signing up for when they put their name in at RfA. Someone who buys their way in might be in for a very rude shock. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 19:39, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

No, $10,000 is never ever overpriced.Why? Because It's worth all the efforts you make to become a successful candidate at WP:RFA, including but not limited to fighting vandalism, giving a good judgement, making high amount of contribution, spending your time from your busy day, waiting for a long period, being criticized by fellow users, giving reply to all the damn questions at WP:RFA etc.In a nutshell, if a user is a experienced on Wikipedia, than instead of WP:RFA, he should be introduced with a new method of becoming a administrator.On the second point, I must say that becoming an administrator on world's largest encyclopedia that follows an ideal system of management would be an splendid experience.You can get a power and control in your hand via just a click of mouse!So, I am telling you to rethink in your mind about this subject.Also, I am not insisting the price to be such higher.It could be decided later.Keep only two word in mind- 'experienced user' and 'high amount to charity' Regards.(P.S.-I'm the same who started this thread, just my IP address is not static.)14.97.183.183 (talk) 07:41, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

You have different ideas about what adminship than I do. Since becoming an admin, I have found it much more restricting than empowering. I certainly have to parse my words more carefully to avoid a firestorm, I'm expected to tolerate incivility from others while not being able to crack wise back. If I make any mistake, there are dozens of people happy to point it out in multiple venues. Power and control are overrated and overstated, as we admins aren't the leaders of the community, we are its servants. A great many of the best leaders, voices of reason and editors around here are not admins. Being an admin has been a splendid experience in some way but not all, and it isn't ideal management. It is more akin to herding cats. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 10:59, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Hit the nail right on the head for why I wouldn't want to be an admin, it would cramp my style :) I have much more variety and scope of strategies for interacting with morons than I would otherwise. But enough of this Dr Smith Lost in space 'oh the pain, the pain, adminship is such a pain' it does have it's prestige in the eyes of newbies who arrive from other boards thinking it is like the role of a sysop. The main difference in the eyes of a newbie between God and an admin is that God doesn't walk around all day long thinking he' an admin. Sysops are held to account for destroying Bulletin boards and forums, whereas here, nobody cares, it's all good. Penyulap ☏ 07:38, 11 Jun 2012 (UTC)

The idea of making users admins for giving money is akin to appointing some dude for public office just because they gave a million dollars to the President. That's capitalism, and I don't like the idea of capitalism on Wikipedia - or anywhere. 68.173.113.106 (talk) 23:16, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Plutocracy, not Capitalism, fwiw, 113.106. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:22, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Ha! the irony, to be the US president, people have to give you the millions of dollars. Penyulap ☏ 07:11, 13 Jun 2012 (UTC)

I'm just glad to be an American, where how much money you have doesn't effect your chances to be elected. </sarcasm> Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 15:22, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Oppose Wikipedia does not choose its policies or its admins based on revenues, and thank goodness for that. We are a volunteer organization that makes a free encyclopedia, and that is all. If money comes into it, that skews the editing and reshapes the entire purpose and direction of the project. —Ben Kovitz (talk) 18:14, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Council of Wikipedia

Currently, there is no body which coordinates actions and policies on a Wiki-wide level. While the rulings of the Arbitration Committee and its cousin the Mediation Committee may apply to all within the community, these bodies are responsible for adjudicating disputes, not for coordinating improvements to Wikipedia. Therefore, in my essay "The need for coordination," I lay out a proposal for a Council of Wikipedia which will fill this enormous gap and end the disorganized, unicellular way in which Wikipedia is growing. Please comment on the proposal either here or on the talk page of the essay. Wer900 • ^{talk • coordinationconsensus defined} 00:45, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

A WikiProject is—I quote the actual definition—"a group of editors that want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia." So you are proposing a WikiProject, just a regimented, powerful one whose scope is a mash of the existing WP:WikiProject Council, WP:WikiProject Policy and guidelines, and the WMF's Meta. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:39, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

When one usually thinks of a WikiProject, its normally a group of editors who come together and discuss improvement to a particular subject, not the entire Wikipedia project. WikiProjects do have some power in deciding the content of each article related to their subject but not enough power to rise above the powers of bodies such as the Arbitration Committee and coordinate Wikipedia as proposed. --Michaelzeng7 (talk - contribs) 01:19, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

One could only believe that WikiProjects were content-oriented if one were unfamiliar with the long list of WikiProjects at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Wikipedia.

WikiProjects per the official guideline have no more authority than any other group of editors, and rather less than the editors actually working on any given article. If a couple of editors waltzes into the talk page of an article you've been working on and tells you to do everything their way because they're a "WikiProject" and they said so, then you may freely reject their silly and anti-policy demands. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:24, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Looks like this proposal has been shot down (just as it should) on its talk page. However, I would like to use the opportunity to ask the proposer how User:Wer900/Consensus study is going on. It is the report you "almost promised" in Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 94#A clear process for determination of consensus, isn't it? I suspect that if you concluded this study, you would have found out that the problems that you want to solve (with this and other proposals) are not the problems that have to be solved...

Oh, and, if you don't mind that much, could you please remove the links to your essays from your signature? They made finding that first link via "What links here" much harder, adding unnecessary noise... --Martynas Patasius (talk) 19:26, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

The proposal has been changed, an updated version can be found here, and it takes into account all of the grievances of the editors who have commented on the original page. Wer900 • ^{talk • coordinationconsensus defined} 01:18, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

OK, I read some of it and have a single piece of advice: it's time to abandon this proposal. I understand that it is fun to think about different "constitutions", but it is clear that those proposals will be completely rejected.

Also, I don't think it is accurate to say "it takes into account all of the grievances of the editors who have commented on the original page", when, for example, the proposal ([1]) still gives great power to Wikiprojects (that are only informal groups of editors where being a "member" is mostly meaningless by itself) - and that was one of the criticisms both here and on the talk page ([2]). It is still not clear what the "Council" will really do ("To promulgate resolutions calling for action on a given area of Wikipedia." - they will write essays? You know, you can also do that now - and, by the way, have done so.). And I suspect that writing down something like "This article of the Charter of the Council of Wikipedia may not be amended through any process." is a bad idea in any constitutional arrangement anywhere. Who knows when some improvements will be necessary?

So, once again, I'd like to ask you to give up on this proposal, mark it as rejected and cancel the RFC. Now it is no longer a fun (and probably useful) game where you invent constitutions and imagine how they would work, but just a waste of time, energy and nerves. It would be far more fruitful if you did some more research on how Wikipedia actually works (like User:Wer900/Consensus study - that's a very good start; unfortunately, you didn't reference it in your proposal). Then you might find real problems with internal order of Wikipedia and propose solutions that will be far more useful. --Martynas Patasius (talk) 20:35, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

WIkipedia has lots of problems. And I wouldn't consider lack of coordination to be one of them. North8000 (talk) 20:58, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

We're all going in different directions, together Penyulap ☏ 03:18, 12 Jun 2012 (UTC)

A universal board would give the illusion of an oligarchy. Bulbapedia (an independent Pokemon encyclopedia that only registered Bulbagarden members can edit) is a prime example of such a system. 68.173.113.106 (talk) 23:09, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm rewriting this proposal within my user space to make it more logical. I've already cut WikiProjects out of the loop and added an Electoral Commission to ensure honesty. - Wer900 (talk | contributions)

Good luck. When you're done with the draft, you might ask for feedback at WT:COUNCIL. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:26, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Wer900, what problem would actually be solved by this new bureaucracy? Someguy1221 (talk) 23:45, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

The newcomer's manual

I came across this purely by accident when looking up Manchester's WikiProject. Had this page been launched properly I think it could have been a really useful tool for newbies. Is there anyone who would be willing to restart it? Otherwise what should be done about it? Simply south...... always punctual, no matter how late for just 6 years 20:32, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Per MOS, this should really be called WP:Newcomer's manual or WP:Newcomer's guide. Our impersonators at Uncyclopedia call theirs simply "Beginner's Guide" and incorrectly have it in the mainspace. 68.173.113.106 (talk) 21:18, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

There we go, I've changed the title of the discussion. Simply south...... always punctual, no matter how late for just 6 years 21:26, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Btw, this subject is not todo with the subject's title. 193.201.64.11 (talk) 13:21, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Proposal re.: Wording change needed to stop forbidding copying of properly licensed free content

We need to stop telling editors to not do something we want them to do!

This MediaWiki message, found at the bottom of each of the zillion edit pages our editors use, needs changing! :

• Please do not copy and paste from copyrighted websites – only public domain resources can be copied without permission. (it's crossed out to ensure people don't confuse the extant text with the proposed text)

However, it's often perfectly fine to copy and paste content from copyrighted websites: Nearly all of our own websites' content is copyrighted. Much essential Wikipedia content comes from copyrighted websites that license their copyrighted work. The CC-BY-SA 3.0 License itself was copied from the copyrighted website http://creativecommons.org! The improper instruction of the first half of the sentence, "Please do not copy and paste from copyrighted websites" is not rectified by the second half. Inthis discussion in a less-trafficked forum, several alternatives were considered.

So, I now propose we go with the following (Credit to Richardguk for coming up with this revision and listing some pros and cons.)

• Do not copy and paste from other websites unless permitted by Wikipedia copyright policy.

Argument

Advantages: brief, comprehensive. "Please" is unnecessary when warning people not to break the law.

Disadvantages: unspecific, no reference to copy-pasting from sources other than websites, no explanation of public domain and other exemptions. But anyone relying on public domain exemptions can reasonably be expected to have enough diligence to check the detailed rules.

For the sake of brevity, the text is deliberately ambiguous about who must have "permitted". This is intended to combine the notion of the source site permitting copying and the notion of Wikipedia policy permitting pasting.

"Copyrighted websites" is changed to "other webites" because many casual users don't know that nearly all websites are copyrighted, but they are so it is safer and simpler to cover everywhere – except Wikipedia itself.

The important thing here is to firmly deter potential abusers, briefly guide casual users, and usefully steer diligent users.

Thoughts? Let's get this fixed! --Elvey (talk) 01:10, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Discussion (less cruft)

• Agree about avoiding to frame the issue as "public domain" vs. "copyrighted", which is somewhat misleading. But I'm not quite happy about the proposed alternative either – we need something very simple, something that gets just the central message across to the clueless user, and without the reader having to first follow a link to the extremely confusing WP:Copyrights page. For the purpose of simplicity, I would think that even a slight amount of oversimplification is a reasonable price to pay. Perhaps something along the lines of "Do not copy text from elsewhere, unless it has been released under a free license". Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:35, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks and Kudos for the support and suggestion! (That's the best kind of feedback one can get!) A problem with your suggestion is that PD work is not licensed at all, so it has not "been released under a free license". --Elvey (talk) 21:00, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

• Support any such improvement as anyone's mentioned so far; the "public domain" vs. "copyrighted" dichotomy is legally wrong and so misleading as to be worse than pointless. I've long detested it. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 08:08, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! --Elvey (talk) 21:00, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

• Copying straight from external websites is against policy as far as I'm aware anyway. We don't copy information, we re-write it into our articles and source the material accordingly. This is why I Oppose. MrLittleIrish ^(talk) © 19:29, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

You're mistaken. There are many good Wikipedia articles that started out as a copy of an entry in another 'free' encyclopedia.--Elvey (talk) 21:00, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

• Support per Nyttend. We routinely copy from EB1911 or the DNB, for example, and AFAIK the policy is that we attribute to avoid plagiarism, not that we do not copy.--Tagishsimon (talk) 19:46, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Looks like rough consensus is forming for this. If no unresolved objections within a few days, would an admin please make it so? --Elvey (talk) 01:51, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Not sure that we are clear on which statement we are discussing. In any case, it should probably be run by the WMF counsel to be sure we're doing something legally sensible. Meanwhile, I note that below the edit window, I read

Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable.
By clicking the "Save Page" button, you agree to the Terms of Use, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.

That wording seems pretty much on the mark. It doesn't introduce red herrings about websites vs other sources. It doesn't confuse copying copyrighted content with violating that copyright. It remains silent on copying public domain content. LeadSongDog come howl! 03:00, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Using the same wording as the edit page is a more sound proposition. It avoids ambiguity and is legally accurate. isfutile:P (talk) 13:44, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

The above comments by LeadSongDog and isfutile (AKA Tonyinman AKA Tony Inman) indicate they are confused and need to reread the first sentence of this section. The proposal is about other wording that is also on the edit page that is legally INACCURATE and needs fixing. We are telling users to not do that which we routinely and appropriately do, as Tagishsimon notes, above. --Elvey (talk) 01:10, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I would propose Please do not copy and paste from websites unless you know that this is permitted.. Taemyr (talk) 09:08, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

• Comment. Instead of telling what people should not do, it would be better if we said what we want them to do. Psychology has commonly proven that negative statements are harder to understand, and most people filter away those kind of messages seconds after reading them. Belorn (talk) 15:36, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Current consensus on PR editing?

Is there any collected consensus on PR editing or is it all still a lot of shouting?

I ask because next Wednesday I will be the Wikipedian at an episode of the CIPR TV webcast. (A past episode.) Basically a podcast with a camera. I have my own opinions, but I'll be there to say something reasonably representative of what the community actually thinks. So is there any place to get a feel for that?

They're also interested in this document, which is a how-not-to-foul-up guide put together by WMUK. But of course that's descriptive and not normative. - David Gerard (talk) 13:09, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

No. It's all shouting. Nikkimaria (talk) 21:38, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

If PR is part of COI, then even the shouting seems to have gone dead, judging by Wikipedia:Requests for comment/COI and its talk page, where even my query last week about what was happening drew no response. Victor Yus (talk) 15:01, 14 June 2012 (UTC)hat's very useful,

That's very useful, thank you! - David Gerard (talk) 09:05, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

This recent RfC might be of interest. Hut 8.5 13:25, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm with Nikki: it's all shouting in the end. If you play it straight, then you will get a couple of cowboys yelling at you for doing even those things that we beg people to do ASAP (like reverting unsourced libel from BLPs). If you don't disclose your connection, and you get discovered, then people who would have welcomed above-board editing are now mad at you. If you don't edit directly, for fear of being banned as a POV pusher, then people tell you to be WP:BOLD—or, as is often the case for articles about smaller companies or other low-traffic pages—nothing will ever happen because nobody ever reads it.

And the lack of hard-and-fast rules means that you get all sorts of made-up rules. I dealt with one nasty situation for a long while in which one editor (a self-disclosed activist) demanded that another editor (a self-disclosed professor) disclose his supposed "conflict of interest" not just on his user page, but every single time he edited an article having any connection at all to his academic area. There's no such rule—but there's also no way to stop a POV pusher from yelling at you or trying to convince inexperienced people that his made-up rules are real.

I'm fond of WP:MEDCOI, if I haven't mentioned it before. It gives some decent examples of strengths and weaknesses for particular types of editors. Perhaps it would make a good model for something about PR professionals. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:46, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

BTW, please help with the draft best practices guideline

By the way, I should note that the draft best practice guidelines for PR mentioned above needs more review. It's had a fair bit on the talk page, but it would be best if no-one were surprised that this thing exists. More input from jaundiced en:wp eyes would be tremendously helpful - David Gerard (talk) 21:40, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

CIPR would like questions for the show

From the producer: "Also, are you sending out a note to your members on the show? We’re really keen to get questions from the ‘public’ too. They can tweet them to #CIPRTV in advance (or during the show) or submit them by the question box on the www.cipr.tv website." By midday tomorrow - David Gerard (talk) 15:58, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Years

Does Wikipedia have a guideline about whether "1921–2", "1921–22" or "1921–1922" is to be preferred, or does it depend solely on the manual of style that one is following? --Toccata quarta (talk) 20:57, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Longer periods says "A closing CE or AD year is normally written with two digits (1881–86) unless it is in a different century from that of the opening year, in which case the full closing year is given (1881–1986)."

So, in this case, 1921-22. I'd also say this seems more natural, but that's just my preference ;-) Andrew Gray (talk) 21:01, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Closed webpage

There is a closed webpage (http://www.jl.sl.btinternet.co.uk/stampsite/cricket/histories/matches.html) being used to reference the Datchet Common article. I have attempted to change the reference to an archived version but have had my edit reverted seemingly on the grounds that the page although closed isn't dead. The archived version (http://web.archive.org/web/20110716021623/http://www.jl.sl.btinternet.co.uk/stampsite/cricket/histories/matches.html) of the page can back-up the articles claim while the current closed webpage cannot so is it not better to use the former? --88.111.35.122 (talk) 22:05, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

http://www.jl.sl.btinternet.co.uk/stampsite/cricket/histories/matches.html works fine for me here (82.71.1.109). It's a really long page ... - David Gerard (talk) 22:28, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

I've used cite web to add the archive. Hope that helps. --Izno (talk) 19:21, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Taboo Titles

In past few days, we had a discussion in Persian Wikipedia on avoiding taboo words in titles. In fact, there are some articles in Persian Wikipedia whose titles are taboo words (Most of them are body parts). In English Wikipedia, scientific names for these body parts are used. I wanted to know if there is a guide, law or policy about avoiding taboo or slang words when there is a scientific neutral name. In other words, can I move these articles to a neutral name based on a policy?Ali Pirhayati (talk) 16:31, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Our policy only extends to the English wikipedia. If you're talking about what happens on the Persian WP, that's not in our realm. The Foundation (Which oversees all) has asked for an approach of least surprise in all aspects of any Foundation project but how that's implimented at the Persian WP is outside our venue. --MASEM (t) 16:38, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

In the case of body parts the way that we handle this on English Wikipedia is to have articles about anatomy under neutral titles, such as "vagina" and "vulva", but, if the taboo words are notable as words, we have separate articles about the words themselves, such as this one. Apart from the shock factor the neutral titles are better for anatomy articles because they are usually more precisely defined than taboo words. This would seem to me to be a sensible approach to take in any language Wikipedia, but it's possible that editors of the Persian Wikipedia see things differently, so you really need to discuss things there rather than here. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:46, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Electromagnetic hypotheses about UFOs

Hello. The above page was created by a banned user in violation of ban, and deleted per speedy deletion criterion G5. I had requested an exception to this rule and had left a note on the deleting admin's talk page stating that I believe it is reasonable to make an exception request for this given that the page contained content which was very useful and constructive for the encyclopedia. The deleting admin appeared to have avoided responding. I hope that I am not perceived as a sock puppet of that banned user, but I honestly do believe that significantly constructive pages, even those created by banned users, should be retained. Please provide input. 69.155.128.40 (talk) 18:14, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

They shouldn't have been sticking in stuff into Wikipedia and I see no reason to acknowledge their contribution no matter how interesting or notable. They can apply to have the ban lifted if they wish to contribute constructively. If they weren't doing something unconstructive elsewhere they probably wouldn't have been detected or people wouldn't have cared, WP:DENY is the appropriate advice I believe. Dmcq (talk) 20:35, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

I think the philosophy of banning a former editors is that their contributions are so unlikely to be useful that it is unfair to ask editors in good standing to bother thinking about the contribution, and blind, unthinking deletion is in order. If you think the approach is worthwhile, write the article yourself. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:54, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

A judgement call has to be made with such deletions, as with anything else we do. In the case of articles created by banned users the best such call is only to keep them if no effort is required to ascertain that they are of obvious benefit to the encyclopedia. I don't believe that any article with such a title could possibly fall into this category. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:54, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability (published works)

Wikipedia:Notability (published works) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

This proposed guideline was created years ago but then has become neglected. I wonder if it must become official at this state. Nevertheless, the intention to replace all existing guidelines is way too much and must not come true, but I don't know if I want to remove that notice of intent yet. --George Ho (talk) 19:48, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Should we create a new namespace, for essays?

The Wikipedia: namespace contains policies, guidelines -- and essays. One doesn't have to participate in many discussions before one sees contributors admonishing other contributors for "violating" an essay.

While some essays contain excellent advice, others contain bad advice, or advice from a fringe position. I suggest no good faith contributors has an obligation to explain, in advance, why they are not following the advice of one of our very large number of essays.

Clearly the box essays usually have at their top fails to make clear to those who reference them, as if they had the authority of policy, that they are just essays. Due to the use of wikilinks to sections of both policies and essays, these links skip the preambles, as to whether the document is a policy, a guideline, or just an essay.

I suggest that if all essays were demoted to an essay namespace, fewer contributors would cite them as if they were policies.

I suggest all existing essays be copied, with their contribution history, to a new Essay: namespace, with an explanation left, telling readers that the document was an essay, and where it can be found. When the essay is the target of a bunch of wikilinks to subsections within that essay, I think the explanation should list links to corresponding section, in the Essay: namespace. I don't think the current redirections should be changed to be cross-namespace redirections. I believe it was the widespread use of these shortcuts that it largely responsible for the confusion between policies and essays.

If this step was taken some contributors may wish to promote some of the most widely cited essays to guideline status. I would see that requiring a discussion as to the whether the advice in the essay is widely enough accepted, and well enough written to belong in the Wikipedia: namespace. Geo Swan (talk) 14:24, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree there is a problem (many problems; most obviously that many of them don't make sense, but have "owners" who refuse to allow them to be corrected). But I think there are already quite enough namespaces. I would say that essays should be in the User: namespace (so it could be clear who owns them), whereas anything that is consensually accepted as giving good advice and accurate documentaion of accepted practice should be in the Help: namespace (no need then to further mark it as a "policy" or a "guideline"). That would leave the Wikipedia: namespace for internal bits and pieces that people have no need to read unless they want to. Discussion pages like this should be in a Talk: namespace. But I realize that I have far too logical a mind to bother trying to reason with anyone around here. Victor Yus (talk) 16:10, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Oppose Essays in the Wikipedia space can and should improve and gain acceptance gradually, or go nowhere due to lack of interest, mixed right in with the policies and established guidelines. I think this is much more in accordance with the wiki way than making a special, privileged public namespace. There is indeed some problem with people citing essays as if they were policy; a worse problem is that people cite guidelines as if they were policy. But overall, things work pretty well. Editors debate most changes on their own merits, appealing to the insights found in a sprawl of conflicting guidelines and essays with no clearly defined levels of authoritativeness. That is all just as it should be. I concur with Victor Yus: people who want to "own" essays should keep them in their private User area, not in a public namespace by any name. There is also a new danger with an Essay namespace: that could encourage people to post essays about any topic, not just insights and advice about editing Wikipedia articles. —Ben Kovitz (talk) 18:06, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Oppose: I certainly agree that there's a problem - today I stumbled upon an essay that clearly goes against policy on at least three counts. I may have been too harsh in adding a warning to that essay. :/ Such extreme examples should not be included in the project namespace at all; they can go in the user area. But many essays contain useful information that isn't covered by official policy, and before one searches for the information, there's no way to know whether it will be in an essay or in a policy. Keeping them both under the same namespace makes it easier to locate that information. ʝunglejill 22:31, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

But then the (good) essays should be marked as guidelines, right? Because if you're told than a page contains just the views of an unspecified number of users, you don't know whether it is useful information or not. Victor Yus (talk) 13:56, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Something can be useful without being a policy. That's what the essays are for, I suppose. If something hasn't been made a policy, there's usually a reason, like lack of consensus, or a desire to treat certain issues informally. There is a way of knowing whether the information is useful - if it helps you contribute and doesn't contradict policy, then it's useful. ʝunglejill 21:02, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Oppose. There's already too much weight given (by some editors) to the policy-guideline-essay trichotomy; this proposal would further entrench such misguided thinking and further embolden ruleslawyers to the detriment of the project. How many times have you seen variations on the following three themes at a noticeboard or in another discussion:

• That's a policy, therefore there can be no exceptions...(even in your unusual circumstances which probably weren't contemplated when the policy was created).
• That's a guideline and not a policy, therefore I am not required to follow it, and I can't be punished for continuing to violate it.
• That's just an essay, so you can't bring it up as a justification or argument in favor of anything; it should be ignored in this discussion.

Essays can be particularly slipperly creatures to classify, too, because often they have much stronger elements of why, and much weaker elements of how—they may describe a particular line of reasoning or justification for a given policy or interpretation, rather than give specific directives about how to perform specific tasks.

Finally, I would remind the proposer of the Wikipedia policy that Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:34, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

• Thanks to everyone who weighed in here!

I am going to take the liberty of attempting a summary -- there seems to be general agreement that contributors citing essays as if they had the authority of policy is a problem.

Thanks to Victor Yus for suggesting that essays which the original author or authors aren't still working on in User: the namespace, could be kept in Help: namespace. I'd certainly prefer that to the current situation. There are some essays that I think authors would like to promote from User:, that are so controversial, poorly thought out, or otherwise inadequate that they should be demoted back to User:. But I don't know a mechanism for that kind of demotion.

Thanks to Ben Kovitz for noting that an Essay: could encourage individuals to use it for general essays that aren't related to the functioning of WMF projects. Geo Swan (talk) 18:23, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I think if someone cites an essay to help explain their opinion, that's fine. It can save a lot of typing. If anyone cites an essay and claims that it's policy, it's pretty easy to tell them that it's not. The only problem I see is with essays that contradict policies and good practice. ʝunglejill 21:02, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Usually, in the problematic cases, there is no explicit claim that the essay is policy (or even a guideline). What I see more is people giving shortcut links to essays in the same sort of context that they would give them to policies or guidelines, allowing readers to assume that the positions have consensus support. I am not saying that this is always deliberate and disingenuous, though sometimes I have my suspicions, but it's a problem even if it's not. --Trovatore (talk) 21:09, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

There's a disclaimer right above every essay. I agree that someone can always come along and completely misunderstand an essay as a policy - this is the internet after all. But let's not take lowest common denominator too far. Most editors are perfectly aware that not every wp:ACRONYM is a policy. ʝunglejill 22:00, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

It's not so much that anyone explicitly thinks it's a policy. It's that editors who approve of the essay subtly give their positions the air of an authority or a consensus they may not have. Some essays are habitual offenders on this point (WP:ATA, I'm looking at you). --Trovatore (talk) 22:07, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I think I suggested this a while back - mainly so that essays would have an E: shortcut (instead of WP:) and be easily identifiable when cited. Rd232 ^talk 21:59, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps the underlying problem is that this habit of "arguing" by writing things like WP:XYZ has become far too engrained. We need to rediscover our ability to think, instead of kidding ourselves that we have an infallible set of rules that will solve every problem for us, that arguments not based explicitly on any of these rules are deficient, and that simply writing the shortcut to a page of rules carries any weight as an argument. Another poor habit (not on topic, though it's illustrated by example here) is prefacing one's responses to others' suggestions with the words Support, Oppose and similar. We're supposed to be discussing matters and reaching a conclusion having weighed up all the factors, not jumping to a conclusion right away, which inevitably leads to a competitive debating-chamber atmosphere. Victor Yus (talk) 06:08, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree. But in terms of what we can do towards that, which is relevant to this thread: I think having Essay: and shortcut E: would help a little, because it would prod things towards using essays as argument (substitute for writing words - this essay says want I want to say here) rather than as authority, which WP: tends to imply. Rd232 ^talk 13:53, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Can anyone respond to the reason for my objection? To reiterate, it's easier to search for information if it's under the same namespace. A lot of essays contain useful information about editing Wikipedia, even if they're not formal policy. Sorry, but as a new editor, this is more important to me than providing a minor fix to a perceived problem with discussion style. ʝunglejill 14:06, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

it's easier to search for information if it's under the same namespace - not substantially. You would just need to tick both the Wikipedia and Essay namespaces at Special:Search. On the other hand, if you knew it was (or probably was) an Essay, you could restrict your search to that namespace, which would be helpful as the Wikipedia namespace contains an awful lot of content (all WikiProjects, for example). Rd232 ^talk 15:03, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

I suspect that you're strongly overestimating the willingness of individuals to divide their writings into separate namespace-appropriate 'what we do' versus 'why we do it' portions. Consider the existing system with its Wikipedia: and Help: namespaces. There's a certain amount of overlap between the two namespaces' mandates (as there would be between a future Essay: space and WP:), with two consequences. First, the Help: namespace is underused; even documents that probably should be there often end up in the more-popular and better-known WP: space; pages that sit on the edge almost universally end up falling on the WP: side. There's no good reason to expect this not to happen with a new Essay: space. (Where do we put the putative essay Wikipedia:Advanced footnote formatting?)

Second, we have a massive number of cross-namespace redirects, shortcuts, and hatnotes so that people who go looking for something in one space can still find it if it happens to be in the other. This cross-namespace confusion grows to epic proportions if we move all the existing essays wholesale to a new namespace, as discussions would contain a deeply perplexing mix of WP:- and E:-prefixed titles and shortcuts. (We'd have to leave all the old redirects and shortcuts in place to avoid breaking hundreds of thousands of talk page archives, and there's nothing to prevent our thousands of experienced editors from continuing to use their familiar shortcuts.) TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:42, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Essay shortcuts could also start using the E: shortcut regardless of what space they're in, as long as there's community consensus for it. See how a lot of Manual of Style shortcuts use MOS: (such as MOS:NUM, MOS:LAYOUT, etc.), despite them existing in the Wikipedia: namespace. The shortcuts technically exist in articlespace but redirect to Wikipedia-space. elektrikSHOOS (talk) 18:52, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

WP:article size and WP:SPLIT causing problems to Wikipedia?

List of Codename: Kids Next Door episodes (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Personal life of Jennifer Lopez (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

The Codename episode list was split into Season articles, and each is full of fancruft and absent of reality. The second was split from Jennifer Lopez due to length and is nominated for AFD due to possible violations of WP:BLP and tabloidism. I wonder if this guideline about size and splitting helps Wikipedia become a better place than it is now. As far as I can see, Jennifer Lopez article is 180k, and Codename list needs some heavy cleanup, as transcluding Seasons pages is not very easy. --George Ho (talk) 18:36, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

We need SIZE as long as we are considering serving as many devices (including mobiles and other units on limited bandwidth) as possible. SIZE and SPLIT work just fine, its isolated problems like these that can be resolved without changing these policies. --MASEM (t) 18:44, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Question about closing the verifiability RfC

I have a question that I would like to put to the community. I am currently mediating a MedCab case about the verifiability policy, in which we are drafting an RfC about the wording of the policy lede. We are very nearly ready to put the RfC up live for community comment, and discussion has turned to the matter of who will close it. The participants are all of the opinion that it should be closed by three uninvolved admins, and there seems to be a rough consensus that we should specify which admins these will be before the discussion starts. Furthermore, there is a rough agreement that these admins should be the same ones that closed the Oct-Dec 2011 RfC on the same issue - namely RegentsPark, Worm That Turned and HJ Mitchell. However, I'm not sure that these are all things that we mediation participants are qualified to decide. Therefore I'd like to ask the community if these are reasonable things to do, and whether it is reasonable to ask the same admins to close the discussion as did last time. Also, I've left messages on the talk pages of RegentsPark, WormTT, and HJ Mitchell asking them whether they would be willing to do this, and whether they could comment here as well. I'd be very grateful for any feedback people can give about this. Best regards — Mr. Stradivarius ^{(have a chat)} 14:28, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm happy to close as a neutral admin again. I don't believe I've taken a side on the debate, let alone expressed one, but if anyone has any issue with me as a closer, just let me know. Worm^TT(talk) 14:38, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I had no objections to the conclusions reached the last time. Unlike the last time I have avoided involvement in the subject and have no idea what form the RFC will take. Two points occur to me. Is it intended to give this widespread awareness via MediaWiki? As far as the closing Admins are concerned, surely they are now involved having studied and adjudicated on the issue the last time and having arrived at a particular decision may not be seen by all parties to be entirely without a view on the matter. Leaky Caldron 17:01, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I haven't been following the discussion at all and am willing to close it again as a neutral admin but Leaky caldron makes a good point. So, as with worm, if anyone has any issues at all I'm just as happy to step back. --regentspark (comment) 20:21, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Sorry everyone, it looks like my post here might have been a little hasty. Since I posted the original thread here we have had a couple more mediation participants disagree with the plan I mentioned above. So probably what we'll end up doing is starting the RfC without mentioning any closers, and we can work out how the closing process will happen nearer the time. Thanks for all the input you've given so far. (And Leaky caldron, yes, the RfC will be widely advertised, including at WP:CENT and with a watchlist notice.) Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{(have a chat)} 04:46, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Australian athletes?

My first post here so please be gentle! If this should be posted somewhere else I will be happy to do so. Is it my imagination, or is there an unusually high proportion of "did you know" items about Australian athletes? I don't particularly mind and maybe it's just because there are so many good athletes in Australia, but I found it curious. They also seem to come in groups by a particular sport or team. I haven't been able to find anything that tells me how these items are chosen - if someone could point me to the right spot I would be grateful.