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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Proposal:Create a capability and process to expunge a block from someone's record when all agree that it was an error

Proposal:Create a capability and process to expunge a block from someone's record when all agree that it was an error.

I always wondered about this in general and now know of a case. Such a block can have an immense impact on someone who cares and has a clean record. I learned that neither exists. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 04:39, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

There is a discussion about the technical and policy implications of this proposal at Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy#Urgently required. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 14:49, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support - If technically possible - we all make errors (even admins when blocking) and these errors should not have a negative impact on the end user. Moxy (talk) 04:45, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
• Note: The purely technical capability exists, in the form of WP:Revision deletion#Log redaction, however the current policy states that:

Log redaction (outside of the limited scope of RD#2 for the move and delete logs) is intended solely for grossly improper content, and is not permitted for ordinary matters; the community needs to be able to review users' block logs and other logs whether or not proper [emphasis original]

Would you be willing to share the details of the case? A block record alone, if clearly mistaken, should not have "an immense impact on someone" as blocks are not brands or scarlet letters; the context should be evident, and if not, a note can be added to the log stating that the block was in error. Intelligentsium 04:51, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Note Redaction using revision deletion will not expunge the log entry, it will gray out and strike through the log entry so that non-admins cannot see who did the action, how long it was for, or what reason was given. A line will still appear in the user's log, it just won't say what happened. MBisanz ^talk 05:01, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Block log entries can also be oversighted. Of course, this would mean changing the OS policy. --Rschen7754 06:22, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Answering Intelligentsium, I'd rather keep it general. Hopefully that the proposal is just to have a general result (that the capability exist, and that there be a process for deciding to apply it) and that my question included the premise that all parties (including the blocking admin) agree is reassurance that I'm not looking for an out-of-context answer to take into a particular situation.

Answering Rschen7754 & Intelligentsium, as step 1 at Village Pump technical I asked if the ability technically exists and someone answered "no". So now I'd like to know who is right. (????)North8000 (talk) 13:27, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Removing the log entry partially (revision deletion) and completely (oversight) are both possible, but their implementation would go very much against the grain of what those tools are for. Personally, I'd rather not start down the (possibly) slippery slope of adding exceptions to those policies. Instead, when you unblock, just add a note in the unblock saying that the block was unnecessary/improper/whatever. If its expired already, do a quick block-and-unblock with a note that the original block was unnecessary/improper/whatever. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 14:22, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Any editor genuinely disturbed enough by the presence of a block log entry agreed to have been invalid, and determined enough to make a case for a change in policy, is not likely to be satisfied by a solution that creates another "corrective" entry in their block log. Leaky Caldron 14:29, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) "What the tools are for" is doing what's right. What's right is that someone who's done nothing wrong should have an empty block log. — Hex (❝?!❞) 14:30, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

• Strongly support the modification of oversight policy to allow the eradication of block log entries created in error. It's not fair that a bad decision made by an admin should irreversibly stain a user's record, even if the blocking admin is subsequently subject to censure. I would add that it should be possible for an admin to request such eradication of a log entry they caused themselves. — Hex (❝?!❞) 14:25, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support: If it is discovered and agreed that a block was made per incurium then it seems only fair that the person should be entitled to have that wiped from their record. The C of E. God Save The Queen! (talk) 14:40, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose. This capability is would be too easily misused. I would rather see people explain their block log as having an erroneous entry than have it wiped. Binksternet (talk) 15:17, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Support if only oversighter can perform this action. Binksternet (talk) 22:48, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

The problem is that the past block may be used to justify another block without giving the editor a chance to explain that the previous block was in error. Monty₈₄₅ 15:21, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

• The current proposal is too generic. Even if it reached a consensus, we would then need to conduct a second RFC to actually implement a specific policy for dealing with it. There are two main questions, and both can be addressed in one initial RFC. Question 1: should 1a) RevDel policy allow for the redaction of block log entries; 1b) Oversight policy allow for the redaction of block log entries; 1c) no redaction. Question 2: If there is consensus in favor of 1a or 1b, what standard should be used for redaction/what process is necessary? Monty₈₄₅ 15:20, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support - see the discussion on my talkpage before Christmas. If someone wants an example case, I accidentally blocked an innocent user who provided some information at an SPI using SPI helper script. It's also possible to do similar with the checkuser tools - you tick a box for all the accounts you want blocked, and it is possible to tick the wrong box). In case folks think it doesn't happen often, User:Courcelles has two blocks from admins with bad aim, and User:Dougweller has one, and that's just from a couple of conversations. It happens more than you think.

The proposal I would support has four elements -

1. Full suppression is carried out by an Oversighter. Revdel is not used
2. The block resulted from a factual error(admin has blocked the wrong user or did not intend to block any user) not from an error of judgement on the part of the admin (admin intended to block the user, but block is not supported by policy/consensus).
3. The admin who made the block is the one requesting suppression

The user in such a case should be unblocked immediately upon the error being discovered and advised that suppression will be requested.

I think if the community also desires a process whereby it can declare a block to be invalid and request it to be removed from the record, it needs to be thought through and set out in more detail. I also think that there should never be a circumstance in which a blocked editor can request an Oversighter to suppress their block record. Elen of the Roads (talk) 16:26, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi Elen....why would you exclude cases where the blocking Admin says that it was an intended block, but later decided that it was an erroneous decision?

I was thinking that the mechanism in your last post should be included eventually, but didn't want to complicate my proposal with it at this time.North8000 (talk) 16:55, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose: This seems to be a solution looking for a problem. I have never observed that a user has been unfairly judged simply because of a mistaken block, though I recognize of course that they occur. A block log is not a mark that condemns a user to ostracism for his/her wikilife, and I am sure there are cases where a block may be overturned, but later the original reasons for the block are later substantiated; in this case having the original block record would be helpful.

Moreover, I am somewhat disturbed by the sentiment expressed above basically to the effect that a block is some sort of conviction or prison sentence, and the log thereof a yellow passport that will cause a user to be spurned from every mairie in the countryside. Intelligentsium 17:26, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

• Agree with Intellegentsium's point. Also, we don't need to revisit such issues with more arguments and more "ivotes": ('it was mistaken -- no, it was not -- you're an idiot -- no you're a fool, etc.') . Moreover, a history of mistaken blocks by an adminsitrator should not be expunged. Perhaps annotations for incidental mistakes would be fine (I can't imagine a long or contentious discussion about whether to do that, but can't that already be done?)Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:35, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
• Comment/question I think that an erroneous block on ones block log does have an impact, even if it not the the extent of the over-the-top straw man descriptions of the impact (mentioned above.) For example, a "clean block log" is a widely-used term. Can an editor who has had only an admitted-eroneous block be said to simply have a "clean block log"? The answer is no. Some contortions would be needed like "technically not, but the one block was an error" which people are going to doubt, or if it is said that they do, people will look and say "well no" North8000 (talk) 17:48, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support both for blocks that were clearly errors (slips of the finger, wrong editor, wrong button, etc.) and also for blocks that a consensus of a hypothetical block-evaluating jury would consider to be bad blocks (violations of WP:INVOLVED; blocks from an admin desysopped for misuse of tools; blocks which normal, sane people would have thought were bad blocks if it had happened to them ... etc. etc.) Injustice damages people, and when it comes to block logs, injustice creates further injustices right down the line. Block #1 is a lousy block, block #2 was only done because there had already been a block allegedly for something similar, block #3 would have been kinda OK, possibly, but not really without warning and if blocks #1 and #2 had been properly recognised as wrongful; appearance at AN/I has a pile-on of drama-whores yelling "But see how many times he's been blocked already!" ... so EnthusiAdmin applies an indef on the basis of the "consensus" of the pile-on of people who haven't had the wit to analyse the previous blocks, and so on, and so son, and so on ... Pesky (talk) 17:57, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support As proposer. Comments elsewhere. North8000 (talk) 18:09, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
• Comment - the capability for suppression of blocks from the blocklog already exists; what's needed is agreement on when and how to use it. This could be used for completely mistaken blocks (oops! wrong user! type thing) at least. In addition, it's possible to annotate blocklogs where a disputed block remains - see Wikipedia:Blocks#Recording_in_the_block_log. Rd232 ^talk 18:18, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support. It is a relatively complicated work around to add a note that the block was unnecessary, and is much simpler handled by using an undo. As to the wording, all is undefined, imprecise, and superfluous. If we decide to allow it we can work out the details. There are basically two scenarios that I see someone tries to block Foobar, and accidentally blocks Footar. That can be reversed uncontroversially. The second is by editor error, this does not get reversed. For example, if someone loses count of their 3RRs (ignoring that 2 is prohibited, just not as strongly as 3 or 4), and gets blocked. That never gets expunged, even if they go on to become a Steward. What other types of mistakes are there? Apteva (talk) 20:47, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) But if an incorrect block is applied, it is actually less work to note that the block was unnecessary in the unblock log entry than to unblock, then suppress the block log; obviously the mistakenly-blocked user will not be expected to wait out the block! This also addresses your point that there be an undo - this is already handled by the unblock function.

As I see it there are two issues here: The first is, should a mistaken log entry be removable? If you edit the wrong page or perform an accidental revert, you can reverse it, but the edit remains in the history. Same goes for all other logs (move, delete, etc., with the exceptions set out in the suppression and oversight policy), whether the action was justified or not. The same arguments can be made about practically any mistaken action that happens to create a log entry, but I find it extremely unlikely that consensus will emerge to enable the editing of all logs. Logs are logs because they by definition record everything save egregious abuse.

The second and bigger issue is the perception that having a block on record, even if mistaken, in some way ipso facto "tarnishes" a user's reputation. This is why users are willing to have this discussion about block log but not delete/move/revert. My opposition stems not so much from the proposal itself as from this second issue. I firmly believe that this issue should be addressed, but this is completely the wrong way to address it, because it validates the claim that blocks are punitive and represent a stain upon a user's reputation which must be expunged to preserve his or her "good name". Blocks are not convictions.

The example cited by That Pesky Commoner above is unfortunate; not only does it not refer to any specific example of where such a thing has occurred or whether or not such a thing is a common occurrence among accidentally blocked users, but more concerning, it also assumes incompetence on the parts of the users involved. It assumes that users (and administrators) will not be circumspect or thoughtful enough to investigate the context behind the block. I am reminded of the old saying, Let people rise to your expectations (or something wittier, I forget); if you prepare for incompetence, then most likely you will encounter it. And even if that case occurs, where a user has a history of blocks, including one accidental or invalid block, that one fewer block is unlikely to change the circumstances.

The potential for abuse and the decrease in transparency in case an admin has a history of making bad blocks are also valid issues that other users have addressed better than I could. Intelligentsium 01:13, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose. Incorrect blocks in block logs are valuable - not because of what they say about the blocked user, but because they may in some cases help expose a pattern of carelessness or ineptitude by the blocking admin. I believe the correct solution is the ability to edit or append clarifications to block log summaries when they contain false information, not to pretend it never happened. Dcoetzee 00:59, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Create a sortable "List of expunged blocks". We need to preserve the record, but it doesn't have to be atomised across individual block logs. Such a list would be much more likely to expose a pattern of admin incompetence than the current situation. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 05:25, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support based on Dougweller's reasoning. By the way, I have no personal stake in the matter, given no blocks, but overall it certainly creates bad feelings for users. The process of agreeing on what is to be expunged needs to be based on WP:CON I think. History2007 (talk) 01:48, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose If people are being stupid and misinterpreting a log file, that is the people's fault, not the log's fault. If you hide the log file, the people will still be stupid and draw their unwarranted conclusions from other sources. Kilopi (talk) 03:18, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

• Per Elen. The "oopsy" block, where you didn't mean to block or accidentally blocked the wrong user, is uncontroversial. I think, if there is strong enough consensus here for Elen's formulation, we can go straight to the relevant policy pages and make the changes. As for blocks that were intended but later repudiated by the community or the blocking admin, we need to assess the extent of the problem and define precisely what kind of block can and can't be expunged, and what kind of record to keep. So, for now, I support immediately changing policy to allow suppression (oversight) of unambiguous oopsy blocks when that is requested by the blocking admin, and the creation of a sortable "List of expunged blocks." --Anthonyhcole (talk) 05:25, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose per Dcoetzee. Expunging blocks might provide some relief to the blocked user, but it would also shield admins from scrutiny (this is regards to blocks rescinded by the community; oversight of unintentional blocks per Elen seems fair). Hot Stop (Talk) 05:38, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

If bad blocks are removed from the victim's block log but added to a publicly-viewable "List of expunged blocks" (either attached to the blocking admin's account or a sortable - by admin, date and victim - list of all expunged blocks) this will improve our scrutiny of admins. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 06:07, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

An alternative would be to establish a practice where any admin that makes a block which is subsequently overturned by consensus (or deemed a bad block by consensus after it has expired) is blocked for one second with a summary linking the discussion in question. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 15:47, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Excellent suggestion that addresses the problem! Kiefer.Wolfowitz 15:34, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support expunging blocks: An undo could reverse several forms of unneeded block. Even a genius can make a mistake (Albert Einstein once mistakenly wrote "x' " where ex-double-prime "x' ' " was needed, or I could be mistaken), and there is no intelligence requirement for admins, so the community needs all the undo-admin help it can get. Other nitpick shades of undo can be discussed in other venues, such as line-hiding of borderline blocks, but a simple undo, or "erased block" rewrite of a block entry should be allowed as soon as possible. As a long-term editor with several improperly placed blocks, I can confirm that they are shouted, by many people, as evidence that "your next block will be indef" or the ever-snarky, "it can only end badly for you". I support the unblock, and any similar functions, to reduce the shoot-from-the-hip, knee-jerk, short-sighted actions of [wp:SNOW]]bunny admins. Also see: wp:MELT about the need to wait and re-think some decisions. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:01, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose. We all make mistakes on Wikipedia. Most of the time, this is on an article or a project page. In such cases, either we fix our own mistakes, or someone else does so. Except for extremely serious cases (such as a major privacy violation or massive copyright infringement), we do not mess with the history. The same should apply for admin actions. We need to be very careful to try to avoid admin mistakes. But when it happens, we should just correct it, and move on. In the case of an incorrect block, it is definitely good form for the admin to state unambiguously (e.g. on the blocked users' talk page) that it was an error. But I don't support messing with the logs. If it comes up (XYZ was blocked before), simply explain what happened, and point them to the blocking admin or someone who knows about the error. Another serious problem with this is who has to agree to the expungement. If it's just the admin, then it is a way for them to (at least partly) cover their tracks. If it's more people, then consensus becomes a problem. Superm401 - Talk 21:16, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

• Comment: WP:Perennial proposals#Prohibit removal of warnings is, I feel, relevant to this discussion. Toccata quarta (talk) 22:57, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support I agree that the official block log should have mistaken blocks removed. Not blocks that are simply overturned because someone else think enough time has elapsed, or the blocked editor is valuable, only blocks where a consensus of admins would agree that the block should not have been issued. I agree with Dcoetzee that I do not want the complete history to disappear, as it could help identify problematic admins, but I believe this is easily resolved, with either a complete history available in another place, or perhaps the incorrect block would be noted on the admins record, which preserves Dcoetzee's goal. yes, I fully understand that one ought to review a block log with care, but in the heat of a contentious situation, it would be unfortunate if an admin glanced at a block log, saw six entries, and didn't read closely enough to see that it was three blocks followed by three unblocks, each noting that the block was a misunderstanding. Why not make the block log informative, rather than a mystery to be analyzed?--SPhilbrick(Talk) 15:37, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Define all

The Proposal states "when all agree that it was an error", who is All?

• If All is everyone on Wikipedia, then the proposal fails with the first Oppose vote above.
• If All is just the Admin who made the block, then the proposal needs a huge rework for clarity.
• If All is everyone involved, then you need to define how to identify All and where to track their agreement.

JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 19:24, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

This is where I, personally, like the idea of a kinda jury of longish-term editors with a fair number of contributions (including at least 30% in article space) to review blocks. A consensus of a jury of "reasonable editors" (avoiding the possible sexism of "reasonable men" ;P) with perhaps 20 members should be sufficient. We do have to face the probability that the blocking admin themselves may never agree with that. Admins are human, and therefore like the rest of us not perfect. Pesky (talk) 20:29, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

I feel like the jury idea is one doomed to fail, amidst various cries of cronyism, cabalism, policy creep, and needless additional bureaucracy... not to mention the people that don't get picked to be on the jury and subsequently get pissy about it. EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:42, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

A jury is exactly what we don't want - it opens Pandora's box of other problems, as stated by EVula above, in addition to reinforcing the "court" mentality that pervades this thread. Sinking twenty users' time into this would be a terrible idea (time which could be used to edit articles). I thought the point of this was to be non-contentious; if you invite twenty users to have a discussion then naturally the discussion will drag on ad infinitum.

And just consider the negative impact that even one contentious expurgation would have; I daresay it would far outweigh the questionable positive impact that every noncontentious expurgation could have. Intelligentsium 01:30, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

In my proposal I used "all" as a simplification. It really translates to "If the admin who made the block agrees". And I deliberately avoided discussing (kicked the can down the road on) the possibility of a process to do this when the initial blocking admin does not agree. North8000 (talk) 22:08, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Why not just use WP:CON anyway. History2007 (talk) 01:52, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Yep. Community consensus is sufficient, and I don't agree with the blocking admin being able to veto expunging. How does that make sense? Consensus rules. For Elen's minimalist proposal, in the case of truly uncontroversial oopsies, it makes sense, but for cases where the community agrees the blocking admin exercised poor judgment, we shouldn't have to wait on that admin's approval for expunging. Too many cowboy admins here never admit they were wrong. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 05:37, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

More full views over at Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy#Summary, but the cabalism / picking thingie could be addressed in some way like this:

(copied across) to avoid the cabalism thingie, how about having "block-log-cleaning-juries" drawn from a pool of suitable editors? Editors could opt-in or opt-out of the pool, and a panel of 20 (or whatever number) could be drawn from a list of editors who have chosen to be available to look at whichever particular block log is under discussion. It could work something a bit like opting-in for RfC's, to get a long-list for each case, and picking the working party from the long-list could be randomised.

Sometimes the solutions to perceived (and / or actual) challenges aren't hard to think up. I think, on the whole, it's better to be solution-focussed than problem-focussed.

I think that this situation is one which a panel of fair-right-minded editors would be likely to agree is the kind of block (Rodhullandemu's block of Malleus) which should be removed from the block log.

We need to learn lessons from Real Life, and one of those most needed (particularly in today's increasingly litigious societies) is the very human tendency for some people to indulge themselves with barratry. We do need to be very aware of the injustices caused by pile-on responses from those who may have an axe to grind, when we're looking at consensus, for example. Pesky (talk) 11:33, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose - a block made in error is an important part of the blocking admin's record some of the time; we need to allow each user to make decisions about how much of a stain it is on the admin's record - for example, if we ever have a community desysop process, if the admin runs for ArbCom, etc. We should definitely make sure that the blocked user's log make it clear that the block was in error - but not hide it. Additionally, some times even a wrong block is important to show that the user should be aware of some thing - for example, there was a case where a new user did a fourth revert of a 3RR violation while logged out. While I (and several other users who commented there) had no doubt that the user logged out by accident, and the indef block for sockpuppetry was wrong, the user knows that if (s)he does this again, an indef block may be the result. And should it happen, admins need to be able to see the previous block to make the decision. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 20:48, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

• This is where having a separate record for bad blocks would solve that problem. The full record of the block is still there for any purpose for which it is needed, but it doesn't get used by the inadequate in a "But he's been blocked X-number of times already! He must be really bad ... he should have learned his lesson by now!" argument. Again, being solution-focussed rather than problem-focussed is necessary, and fairly simple. Pesky (talk) 10:56, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Where would you put the record of people blocking lay preachers? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 101.118.46.205 (talk) 14:04, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

I would support some sort of "badf block" marker - provided that it doesn't prevent anyone from seeing the block details (blocking admin, blocked account, and block reason). Unfortunately, that's currently not possible. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 14:13, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

I can't see any major technical issues with having something like that made possible. (and the comment about lay preachers ...(Theo-retically possible es.) ..d'uh? What was that about, and to whom was it addressed? And why is it relevant?) Pesky (talk) 19:23, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

My premature summary, overreaching interpretation and suggested next step / revised proposal

One person pointed out an ambiguity in my proposal (the undefined "all") which I then clarified, but that's now messy. I did a very fast count and it looks like a lot more support than oppose....not that means anything beyond maybe thinking about a refined proposal. More importantly, the reason cited by almost all of the "opposes" was that a record should be kept and visible, even of bad blocks. Finally, one or more editors pointed out the narrowness of my proposal as it only includes cases where the blocking admin admitted that it was an error. This "narrowness" was deliberate (to keep this from dying from complexity) but we should note that leaving it out does not weigh in against it. So I have a revised proposal which the above would indicate probable 90% or 100% support for. Lets let it sit a few hours without any "supports/opposes" in case anybody sees any error or ambiguities which we can fix. OK, it's been about about 9 hours. North8000 (talk) 00:13, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Proposal When the the administrator who made a block subsequently determines that the block was in error, let's create the ability and expectation that that administrator can and will mark the block as being in error in a way that makes it very clear. This can be via a mark on that block itself, or the ability to create an additional log entry (without creating an additional block) This ability to mark the log shall only be used by an admin to mark their own block as being in error. The "expectation" will be created by some new wording in Wikipedia:Blocking policy. The idea of a system for the community to do this without agreement by the blocker is acknowledged and can be discussed later but (for simplicity) is not included in this proposal.

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 15:02, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support As proposer. North8000 (talk) 00:13, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support - When acting as admin on other projects (not Wikipedia) I've even made mistakes of blocking the wrong person simply by pressing the wrong user information and imposing the block. I've always undone such blocks immediately and usually even apologized on the user's talk page with usually a note of praise of what that user has accomplished as well to try and smooth things over. Still, having the ability to mark in the logs itself that the block was in error would be useful. I've also stepped into wheel warring disputes as well where it was later determined by the community at large that the blocks were done in error and bad faith. While the ability to note a small text explanation is already in the MediaWiki software, what seems to be missing is the ability to retroactively mark a specific block as being done in error. Perhaps simply allowing an admin to make an "administrative" entry on behalf of that user in the block log that could be a standard summary field of any kind for any reason but would otherwise not have any impact upon the user? I could see this being used in other log entries too as a more generic tool. --Robert Horning (talk) 06:37, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support: this is obviously a good starting point for further work on less unambiguous areas. Pesky (talk) 12:14, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support I like the idea of creating an "whoops!" entry in the block log without having to re-block. An elegant solution. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 13:01, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support I can support the blocking admin marking a block as erroneous in the log. This is purely a case of adding information; I do not support removing information from any block logs. However, a block "being in error" should mean, "At the time of the block, there was not justification for blocking." It does not mean "Since block expiration, or since unblocking, the editor has edited productively." It is the goal that editors will return to productivity after the block is done. That does not mean it was mistaken. In other words, 'user forgiven' is not the same as 'mistaken block'. Superm401 - Talk 18:58, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support Per Superm401. Intelligentsium 02:38, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support as reasonable in the case of a bad block. -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 03:41, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support new version. Having worked in a medical-related field, I've grown to appreciate the need for clear documentation, especially when errors are made. Even if you document it elsewhere, the record itself should be amended to indicate the error and what steps were taken to correct it. That way, there is no impression you are "hiding" the error. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 20:43, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support I'd like to go a little broader, but have nothing against starting with clean situations, and if it works well, consider expanding later, as noted by the proposal. I'd also rpefer that the block log look clean as opposed to being dirtied with an explanation, but that too can come later.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 22:59, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support. I'd go further and support bad blocks being expunged from the log as proposed above, but this is a good first step in that direction, with no obvious problems. Robofish (talk) 23:36, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support, good corrections, feasible solution, reasonable option. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:42, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support - Fair is fair. Blocks can have lasting consequences, needless to say, and this would fix simple human error. Jusdafax 23:46, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

Theoretical situation: Admin A makes a questionable block of User. Discussion, and then uproar on ANI, and eventually creation of a case at Arbcom where the Arbcom makes a finding that Admin A's block was wrong. Admin A refuses to make note in Users block record as described above indicating that the block was wrong . Is Admin then in violation of Arbcom's findings? -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 23:13, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Well no one can be in "violation" of findings. They could only be in violation of sanctions. And that's a different issue, likely handled by ArbCom itself. It's not a requirement for the blocking admin to be the one who amends the block log, so it's not relevant to this. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 15:33, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

This proposal only covers cases where the blocking admin has determined that their block was in error. So, your question is not actually germane to this proposal. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:30, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Once again i believe there are procedural problems here:

• If a radical change to the way supposedly erroneous blocks are handled is seriously being proposed there needs to be a much more public process, as in a formal RFC, a listing at WP:CENT, possibly watchlist notices, etc

• Are we sure this is even possible with the current software? Big changes in the interface take months or even years to implement and can be quite expensive for the WMF to implement, has anyone even asked about this?
• Will this "notational ability" be given to all admins, enabling any admin to add notes to any users block log at any time?

Until these questions are answered I don't see much point in proceeding with actually discussing the proposal. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:57, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Answering you points and question in order:

• I don't believe that adding the ability and expectation that when an admin determines that their own block is in error that there is an ability and expectation to make a log entry to that effect is a "radical change". But review of this in a wider venue would be great, given that such a venue would be more likely to lead to implementation once decided. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:42, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
• If adding the ability to add a notation were a huge process (which IMHO is doubtful), then something needs fixing with the system. On the second note, it would kill every new idea and proposal to have to assume the worst and confirm the opposite prior to discussing. North8000 (talk) 20:55, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
• Regarding your "ability" question, Per the proposal, "This ability to mark the log shall only be used by an admin to mark their own block as being in error.". If you are asking whether admins would have the technical ability to do things that are in violation of policy (e.g. use that ability ability to add a notation for a non-allowed purpose), the technical ability to do things in violation of policy already exists for all admins and all editors including IP's, but immensely so for admins. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:35, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Assumption of guilt

We cant fairly make the assumption the previous block was valid. We can make a guideline that specifically forbids using previous blocks as a motivation to block a person. One time I was blocked for a few hours. Reason given: "dubious IP edits". It took a bit to long to get unblocked for my taste but no real harm was done. Pointing at such entry as if it demonstrates previous problematic behavior should be frowned upon. It smells WAAAAAAAAAAY to much like "making it up as we go along". We should simply close the old case and open a new one. The new one shouldn't be mistaken for reopening the closed one.

I've even seen a group of users report the same guy over and over again, each time assuming the previous reports had already demonstrated his wrongdoings. The uninvolved editor reviewing a report should never be expected to go figure out if the previous report contains evidence.

How many times you've seen the inside of a court room wont tell us if you are guilty or not. 84.106.26.81 (talk) 03:40, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Agree with you 100%, and your thought should be promulgated, but you'll have to rewire how the human brain works to fully make that happen. In the meantime my proposal is a partial step towards that end. North8000 (talk) 13:15, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Close?

The proposal went through 2 variations. The first was a bit vaguely written and call for the ability to completely expunge the record. There were approx. 11 in favor and 6 against. Very importantly, the reason cited by all of the "opposes" essentially said that the record of the block should be retained. I then prepared a revised proposal which was more specific, and called for the ability and expectation to mark (rather than delete) the log. Of the 10 respondents, support was unanimous. Moreover, the change clearly resolved the issue cited by all of the "opposes" in the first round. North8000 (talk) 01:27, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

What is needed now is to simply present this to the developers, most likely as a Bugzilla request with a link to this discussion noting this is now a formal feature request from the Wikipedia community and that consensus has been formed on the concept with unanimous support. While anybody can make that request, I would suggest that the original proposer make the formal request if possible with support on Bugzilla by as many people who want to follow/support on the Bugzilla request as well. "Advertising" this request on some of the various mailing lists would be useful as well for further discussion or support of this concept. I agree, this proposal should be marked as closed, although further action is needed. --Robert Horning (talk) 21:26, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Cool. I'll have to learn how to use that Bugzilla channel; I know nothing about it. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 23:38, 28 January 2013 (UTC) North8000 North8000 (talk) 16:04, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Next steps

I learned and put in a request at Bugzilla. North8000 (talk) 18:51, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

They asked how it was different than the ability to create an additional block and immediately undo it. I provided various answers to this, most notably that this possibility was already acknowledged early in the RFC, and responses were made with that knowledge / take that into account. North8000 (talk) 13:59, 10 February 2013 (UTC) North8000 (talk) 12:47, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Link to bug please? Thanks. — Hex (❝?!❞) 12:20, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for asking. I just learned how to file a wp bugzilla and that's basically all that I know. I'll need to and will figure out how to look at it and get a link. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 12:41, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I think that this is a link. [1] North8000 (talk) 14:20, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Child protection policy

I just wrote about this policy at the Jimbo Wales talk page (as he made it to a policy). Overall I am just wondering if anyone remember in what way it arrived to the current consensus state of a policy what "should not be the subject of community discussion, comment or consensus". As I explained in my first post, it is about to add the translation as a rule to another language project. --NeoLexx (talk) 18:41, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

The policy is a good idea. I would just make one change in the wording: "who advocate inappropriate adult–child relationships (e.g. by expressing the view that inappropriate relationships are not harmful to children)" should be changed to "who defend inappropriate adult–child relationships (e.g. by expressing the view that inappropriate relationships are not harmful to children)". "Advocate" denotes that said editors are encouraging adults to have sex with children. If I say, "Drugs should not be illegal", am I advocating drug use? I hope we have consensus to make this change (and since this is a policy page, WP:BEBOLD doesn't apply). Guideline & Policy Wonk (talk) 02:52, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

> If I say, "Drugs should not be illegal", am I advocating drug use? Of course. Same way as if some John Doe says "Having sex with 8 years old should not be illegal" — he flies promptly and rapidly from the project. I hope we have full consensus on that ;-) --NeoLexx (talk) 11:32, 1 February 2013 (UTC)4

Up to what age would that apply? Victor Yus (talk) 11:37, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

In this case you have a very strange idea of what legality/illegality actually means. Ruslik_Zero 11:44, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

"If I say, 'Drugs should not be illegal', am I advocating drug use?" Of course. Simply stating that you believe something is not morally wrong/should not be illegal (for many people, the same thing) does not amount to encouraging people to do it. The verbs "advocate" and "promote" mean to actively push for other people to do something. If you just disagree that people should not do something, that does not mean you think people should do it. If I don't go out there and say, "Hey, everybody, eat meat!", does that mean I'm pushing vegetarianism? I suppose most of you agree that water-skiing should not be illegal. Does that mean you go about saying, "Water-skiing is great!"? It really angers me when people misuse the words "advocate" and "promote" this way, and I seek to correct it when I see either of the words so misused. Guideline & Policy Wonk (talk) 07:55, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

I have my own strong idea of what is legal and illegal, some people may have rather opposite and equally strong ideas. The policy is not about sharing these ideas or to enforce them over the country borders. What is "a child" is well defined in each society and every reader will get its own meaning of it. The policy - as I see it - is about to free up children (however it is defined in a particular society) from any personal anonymous volunteer help to arrive to the "right" (from that anonymous volunteer point of view) definition of a child and of a sex ready person. --NeoLexx (talk) 12:17, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Oppose your change would mean saying (in a UK context) "17 year old youth X should not have been be prosecuted for having sex with his 15 year old girlfriend" would mean a ban form Wikipedia. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:33, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose; not an improvement. As a side note, if you have your "own strong idea" about what is legal and illegal, you don't understand legality. You may have your own ideas about what ought to be legal or illegal, but the laws are generally reasonably clear, and you aren't entitled, for example, to decide that even though stealing cars is against written law, it isn't illegal because you don't think it should be. KillerChihuahua 14:38, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
  • I assume you mean some other user with your Oppose as I didn't propose any policy change at all: see the very top for my original question. --NeoLexx (talk) 16:08, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
• Noone should advocate anything on wikipedia. Wikipedia is not the place to discuss whether anything at all should be legal or illegal. The policy is fine.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:48, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

The policy has the obvious weakness that it fails to define "inappropriate" (so if editor X expresses some view about what the age of consent should be, and editor Y believes that X's figure is too low, then the question of whether editor X is afoul of the policy can only be decided by determining which of editor X or Y is right in the first place, which can't be done objectively). But I think (hope) that in practice our administrators would be able to recognize the kind of person who actually poses a danger, and would not apply the policy in a silly way. Victor Yus (talk) 14:57, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

All advocacy is inappropriate on wikipedia.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 17:38, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

This policy is a late relic of the practice of Jimbo Wales, as founder of the Wiki, promulgating policies on his own. There was considerable objection to it - myself included - on the basis of the wording, which had some effect on it, and it is all recorded in the archives (Wikipedia talk:Child protection/Archive 1 to 7). I feel that the WP:Terms of use took a much better approach, which avoided some of the vagueness of the original formulation. I also feel (I'm nearly alone in this though) that the community should discuss these cases openly, like they did for one case on Commons, rather than leaving it to back rooms. The Penn State child sex abuse scandal reminds us of the sort of bad things that happen in back rooms. I have no evidence for this, but I suspect that part of the resistance to serious rewording of the policy is that Jimbo (rightly) wants to be able to tell media that Wikipedia has always had a policy against pedophiles hunting children here. There is some reason to fear that that could happen, though a larger number of cases (search "Wikisposure") involve ideologues who want to write some tolerance for these relationships into the articles. There is therefore a lot of blurring between pedophile POV-pushing and pedophile attempts to recruit children to their own private Wiki or porn site, which to my mind are two very different levels of trouble.

The problem with that, and with banning 'advocacy' in general, is that there is some reason in anarchist thought for people to do so, namely, because anarchists don't believe in ID cards and therefore aren't likely to accept a strict, arbitrary age limit written as positive law. There is also some belief among Muslims, such as in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, that these relationships should be allowed. In practice I haven't seen the policy turn into an ideological witch-hunt for such viewpoints, as I'd initially feared. In practice, the rules are actually underenforced - allegations can be made against someone in a public forum but it is not WP:revdeled, nor is the person accusing blocked, nor is the person discussed blocked quickly, or indeed, not until an amazing amount of arguing over the issue. I think we have a situation in which we have a policy not open to discussion that really needs to be discussed and adjusted, not for the purpose of allowing pedophiles to hunt kids here, but to refine our philosophy so that we can respond more effectively. Wnt (talk) 17:15, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

• I see no reason why someone should be advocating on wikipedia anything about age of consent laws. I see no purpose to doing so. The last thing we want is articles on such laws to be written with the intent of getting them changed. This applies just as much to people who feel the current laws set too low of ages, at least in some cases, as to those who feel the laws set too high of ages.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:58, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

That's true in general - Wikipedia's discussion pages aren't intended for debating of outside-world issues - but under normal circumstances, if you mention some view that you hold on some such issue (as people do, from time to time) it's not going to get you immediately thrown off the project. This policy creates a special case, in that it implies that expressing (a certain type of) views on this particular issue may indeed lead to your expulsion. I don't know if people with other "obnoxious" viewpoints would be treated similarly - do we ban holocaust deniers, for example? (Just thinking aloud, there's no particular point I'm trying to make here.) Victor Yus (talk) 11:05, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Done here? The Russian Pedia policy has apparently been rejected for the time being. [2] So further discussion about the English policy should probably go to its talk page. Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:44, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

"Notability" of a geographical location

What are the criteria for "notability" of a geographical location?

I remember how a number of years ago, a user named "Ram-Man" or something similar went ahead and uploaded literally tens of thousands of articles on United States cities, towns, and perhaps other U.S. locations as well. "Notability" didn't seem to have anything to do with it: a one-house, one-horse place in the middle of nowhere got the same attention as a city of millions, even if the only people who really care that the former even exists are the (very) few residents and a handful of government bureaucrats.

To put this in perspective: suppose someone went ahead and did an article on every mud-hut village in Africa.

See Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features). The general consensus is that any officially-defined (and officially documented) populated location can reasonably be presumed notable; even the proverbial one-horse Wyoming town will feature in a lot of documentation. Problems around articles on African (etc.) places tend towards issues with the identification and availability of reliable sources than philosophical objections to covering these places at all. Andrew Gray (talk) 14:00, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

If that "mud hut" or small collection of them in Africa is on a formal list of places, such as Nyang’oma Kogelo in Keynya (to pick on one of those towns) it would be notable. This is a very old issue that has been resolved a long time ago. While you can certainly try to bring new perspectives on this issue, I would not expect there to be much support for widespread mass deletions of articles like this and other small towns. If you can find a list from the Kenyan government of towns in that country which includes some details beyond just the name and pure geographic location, I don't see any problem with somebody creating those articles. If anything, that mass creation of thousands of articles about small towns was in fact a major bonus to Wikipedia when it happened and commendable work when it happened, where that initial seeding of articles has blossomed into a great many well written articles often with edits by people who live in those small towns. If anything, it is a fantastic way to encourage new editors to become involved in Wikipedia if they improve an article like that. --Robert Horning (talk) 15:55, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

But Nyang'oma Kogelo is the hometown to much of the family of the leader of the Free World! Of course it has a claim to fame. I support articles on every city in the world, however, including every small town and even verifiable ghost towns like Hollywood, Pennsylvania. I should note that articles on species of animals, plants, fungi, protists, bacteria and archaebacteria are included without controversy. Basically, anything that's natural and verifiable (no hoaxes), including all natural languages, are considered notable. Being traditional also gets a subject a free pass. When arroz con pollo was nominated for deletion, almost everyone !voted to keep it. The things that get deleted due to non-notability are pretty much things that are recent and man-made: micronations, conlangs, contemporary songs, bands, companies, products, individual people not mentioned in ancient texts, individual animals, books, Internet memes and culture and web content, stores and other buildings and establishments, streets, movies, plays, protologisms and other things made up in eighth-grade gym class one day, granular articles on TV shows characters and similar things often denounced as "cruft", short stories, works of art, dance moves, skateboarding tricks, etc. Guideline & Policy Wonk (talk) 07:43, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Natural and verifiable isn't quite as simple as it seems; see WP:NASTRO for a counterexample. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:11, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

A lot of the arguments for notability of these small villages rests on two facets: 1) part of WP's function is to be a gazetteer, and 2) that documentation about any place can be expected to come in time, if from that place itself.

I would argue that we can maintain the first point with lists of such communities (when they are are not clearly notable themselves); on the second point, if the only source of documentation about the place is going to end up being documents from the place itself and likely the tiers of government that officially recognize it, it fails WP:V and WP:GNG (requiring third party sources). I know that the history towards such places has been counter to this, but I think that it is time for WP to mature past this, particularly as no harm would be done redirecting clealy non-notable places to lists of communities until such a time notability can actually be shown. No other area of WP gets this wide open allowance for inclusion, and while a gazetteer is part of our function, this doesn't require us to have separate articles for each entry. --MASEM (t) 16:20, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

I think part of the reason that the community tends to allow this practice, while coming down hard on other marginally notable entities is that this has a relatively low potential for abuse. It has not been shown that one-horse towns are using Wikipedia pages for rampant spamming campaigns or eggregiously unbalanced attack pages the way that other types of marginally notable articles are. There are other rather large classes of articles besides towns, the kajillions of species articles, for example. For documented biological species of any kind, there's little effort made to delete the articles, even for microministubs, because no one is using these articles for purposes that run counter to Wikipedia's goal of providing a neutral encyclopedia. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. --Jayron32 01:24, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

CSD G10

I recently marked Molemo Maarohanye for speedy deletion under CSD G10, but after looking more into the specific wording of that criterion I'm not as certain it applies.

Before I marked it (which blanked the page), the article had zero sources, but stated that the subject had been charged with the murder of four children, which is quite a significant negative claim. It appeared to be neutrally written, and the article itself (short though it was) did not have a negative tone, so does that criterion actually apply?

Regardless of whether I picked the correct CSD, I think the article needs to either go or change fast, because it either needs sources quick or at least needs to not claim murder charges. I'm also not certain the subject is notable. —Kierkkadon ^{talk/contribs} 20:53, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Well, my mark got declined. It would be nice to have an explanation though, still. —Kierkkadon ^{talk/contribs} 22:14, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

I can't speak for the person that declined it but there is at least one source (the BBC article in the external links) that provided verification; no, its not how we like to do citations but that's never a reason to delete. Also, in further cases, when you tag an article for CSD, you should never touch its contents; wiping the article is inappropriate and if the article was inappropriate, the whole thing would be ultimately deleted. --MASEM (t) 01:44, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

All I did was use the Twinkle CSD function. In addition to blanking the page, it also sent a "Cease and desist, thou vandal!" -esque message to the fellow who "created" the article, but he had nothing to do with the article's content: he created a redirect some time ago and then other people came along and made it into an article. —Kierkkadon ^{talk/contribs} 02:26, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

In the case of an article exists only to attack someone, blanking the page is entirely appropriate. This is especially true if it is a new article because it lessens the chances of Google retaining a copy of the attack. Articles which are candidates for speedy deletion are no different from any other articles, so the advice of "when you tag an article for CSD, you should never touch its contents" is not based on any guideline or even good practice. Any halfway competent admin will check the history of an article before deleting it. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 04:45, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Courtesy blanking is appropriate for true attack pages, which this was not. Negative unsourced content about people, though, should still be removed on sight. You are responsible for all edits made with Twinkle, including the optional-but-included-by-default notifications when tagging a page as an attack. A more appropriate course of action here would have been to first edit the article removing the negative unsourced content, then research whether the negative information was verifiable in reliable sources and significant enough to bear mention in the biography, then finally add the negative information back in but now with a source. VQuakr (talk) 04:47, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

CSD was totally inappropriate in this case. It could not have been easier to find sources of the best quality for the claims in the article. (BBC, SABC, large local newspaper, all with in-depth reports.) And it can hardly be argued that a 25-year prison sentence is a minor event in a rapper's biography. None of our rules are completely fool proof. They were all written, and are constantly being changed, by volunteers on the internet and must be interpreted in such a way that they make sense. The unwritten assumption behind the "unsourced" requirement in CSD #10 is that it is unsourced even after you have made a minimal effort to find sources. Hans Adler 16:04, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Hans here. And Twinkle... that robot needs to be terminated with extreme prejudice. It seems to exist for the purpose of getting otherwise reasonable editors to trash newbies and start fights. Wnt (talk) 03:12, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Meh, people still own their actions. It is more of a bionic arm than a robot, anyways. VQuakr (talk) 04:47, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Adding content farms to the spam blacklist

Many Wikipedia articles link to mere content farms. Hundreds link to wisegeek.com alone. (For agreement on the worthlessness of wisegeek.com, see this discussion in a WP:RSN archive.) The links are worthless; yet readers who are less alert (or whose English is weaker) may not realize this, and may be taken in by them, and they are therefore detrimental.

Removing these links seems like whack-a-mole. What I'd regard as an obvious solution is to choose a content farm, remove the links to it, and add it to the spam blacklist. Links to it will not be added thereafter.

However, there's an obvious problem with this:

1. Wikipedia:Spam-blacklisting makes it clear that the spam blacklist is for sites that have been spammed (and indeed as only a last resort even for these). But:
2. It's not at all obvious that links to wisegeek.com (as an example) have been spammed: most, perhaps all, were instead probably added
   • by people unable to distinguish between good and bad sources;
   • by people too lazy to distinguish between good and bad sources;
   • by people desperate to cite any "sourcing", no matter how bad, for assertions for which RS cannot be found.

I therefore (A) tentatively propose that Wikipedia:Spam-blacklisting should be rewritten to allow the addition of content farms, while I (B) invite suggestions of better ways to deal with the problem.

(I brought this up here at WP:RSN -- probably soon to be part of archive 142 or archive 143 -- and am about to link from there to here.) -- Hoary (talk) 08:38, 6 February 2013 (UTC) slightly rephrased 09:23, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't know about the current practice, but I agree that we should be able to add content farms to the spam blacklist. Hans Adler 11:02, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

We already blacklisted examiner.com due to persistent spamming from the authors of the articles (they can get money for views). --Enric Naval (talk) 11:38, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Aha! So examiner.com was spammed. Well then, there we have an essential part of the justification for adding it to the spam list. But I've no particular reason to think that wisegeek.com (among many others) is spammed, no desire to spend hours of my limited lifespan looking to see whether it has been spammed, and no reason to think that links to it would be of any value even if it could be shown that they were all added with the most innocent of motives. ¶ My hunch is that unspammed but irritating junk sites have at times been discreetly added to the spam list even with no evidence of spam, but "don't ask, don't tell" isn't very satisfactory. -- Hoary (talk) 13:12, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

We could argue that by spamming Google, content farms are indirectly spamming Wikipedia. Also, if it is true that the authors for content farms are paid by success, then that would have results indistinguishable from a sustained crowd-sourced spam attack. But it would be cleaner to just say we can put content farms on the spam list once they are too troublesome to remove by hand. Hans Adler 13:23, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Oh but there are a fair number of content farms. Look at the fragrant array of "sources" lending credibility (ha ha) to the article Johann Theodor Jablonski. (Well, one of the sources is OK.) Should I identify each website as worthless, chase up the other references to this, delete these, and then remember to check every month or so thereafter that nobody has added new references to it? I'd rather the lot were deleted and then a measure put in place to prevent addition. ¶ Of course I'm not deluding myself that this practice would end the use of junk sources. Junk sources will afflict WP for ever. But let's try to reduce the problem, even if we can't end it. -- Hoary (talk) 13:45, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

It is clear that there are WP:RS issues with self-published essays and such. However, blacklisting those sites is a bridge too far. For example, an editor can link to a bad reference on a talk page and ask if anybody has a better source for X. Or take something they say to the Refdesk. The spam blacklist is already at risk for being abused in other ways. Wnt (talk) 03:09, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

It's true that links to bad references can be legimately posted on talk pages and to the reference desk, and that the inability to post them there would cause some irritation. But one can (I believe) always type something like "www.stupider.com/dumb_essay.html" and let the reader copy this and paste it where needed. ¶ I'm not suggesting that links to all unreliable sources, or to all junk, should be prevented via the blacklist. WP takes a dim view of "WorldNetDaily", for example; but I wouldn't attempt to put wnd.com on the list, if only because what is written on wnd.com can at times itself be of some interest. Thus my (tentative proposal) would be to limit the addition to content farms. It's hard (though admittedly not impossible) for me to imagine that a page on wisegeek.com could generate informed interest, for example, more than the most fleeting mention in a newspaper article. (As I view Google News, it has just eight hits for "wisegeek", none of them impressive.) ¶ I realize that spammed websites and non-spammed content farms would make an incomprehensible combination, that such a combination for a single blacklist could easily lead to the addition of various other kinds of websites, and that such additions could be counterproductive; and this is why I'm now tending to favor a second, separate list, one for wide-ranging content farms only. (I'm smugly assuming that an additional en:WP-specific blacklist is technically possible, and that some altruistic person would do the technical work involved.) ¶ Meanwhile, I have a couple of questions for Wnt or anyone who agrees with him/her. Many pages link to wisegeek.com. (True, many of these are talk pages. But many are articles.) Does this concern you? If it does concern you, what do you think should be done about it? -- Hoary (talk) 08:46, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

First, is there an existing way to filter the list to just the links in article space? If not, we should get one, because it will help people go over the list for articles they are interested in editing. After that, the answer is to patrol the links one by one, replacing with better content when available. Nonetheless, Wisegeek says it has about 200 contributors, apparently paid, so there's some kind of editorial process to it. Therefore it is not quite a blog/Usenet level source, not something that absolutely needs to be exterminated on sight, though of course usually its articles will be rehashing sources better reached directly. Wnt (talk) 18:54, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the ability to block certain domains in certain namespaces only would be very convenient. I have no idea about the technical (im)possibilities. I could try to educate myself, but then I might easily misunderstand something elementary. I think that Psychonaut would have a much better idea, and have therefore just now invited him/her/them here. ¶ On the quality of Wisegeek: The website tells us about the article creation process here. A couple of tasty quotes:

• wiseGEEK writers are asked to write at least five articles per week, or 20 articles a month, on average.
• We pay writers per article. Current rates range from $10 to $14 depending on the article topic.

I've just clicked on "What is a morpheme?" As far as it goes, it's not so bad (though parts are oddly hazy). It's not surprising that it doesn't mention, say, templatic morphology (whereby the words of Semitic languages have a kind of consonant skeleton, around which the vowels vary with tense, etc) and that it instead sticks to English. What is extraordinary is that it doesn't mention compounds ("blackbird", "pickpocket", etc): very common in English (and every other language I can think of) and utterly basic to morphology. The article is "Written By: A. B. Kelsey | Edited By: O. Wallace". There's no link for either Kelsey or Wallace, and neither name appears within this page, which is the only one I can find that writes up (some) contributors. I agree that most links to blogs should be eliminated; but really, many blogs command far more respect than this. (To continue with linguistics for a moment: I'd certainly consider claims made for the linguistics-related blogs of people with doctorates in linguistics who teach linguistics at properly accredited universities.) -- Hoary (talk) 05:02, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

First a response to your technical questions. As far as I can tell the SpamBlacklist extension does not allow you to restrict the filtering to certain namespaces. You could always file a request for enhancement, though given that the extension was developed specifically to combat spammed links, and because spammers don't often care about namespaces, the developers may not see this as a particularly useful enhancement, and may therefore reject it or give it low priority. If links to content farms tend to be added not by spammers but rather by new users unaware of their unreliability, perhaps the XLinkBot RevertList would be a better place to submit these, at least for the time being.

Now, as to whether to blacklist non-spammed links to content farms at all (setting aside for a moment the mechanism by which this is achieved, and the namespaces to which the restrictions would apply), how do you propose to define "content farm" in such a way that the policy can be fairly and consistently applied? Or would the administrators responsible for maintaining the list simply do so on a case-by-case basis? Also, are there any conceivable situations in which a user may legitimately link to a content farm? I ask because there are other types of sources that we don't generally accept as reliable, but which we do not automatically filter. For example, blogs aren't usually permitted as reliable sources, but past suggestions to blacklist entire blog domains such as blogspot.com and blogger.com have been shot down with the argument that this would cause too much collateral damage. —Psychonaut (talk) 21:29, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for commenting. Well, if a prevention of addition of domain names to certain namespaces only is neither currently possible nor likely to interest the people who'd have to do the work to make it possible, then it sounds like a no-no. Granted that addition of a given domain name to an article is most unlikely to be helpful but that addition of it to a talk page might be, I still don't see what's so dreadful about the copy/pasting of "http://"-shorn URLs. (Example: I see from utter-bollocks.biz/cold_fusion.html that blah blah.) Is this technically/psychologically too demanding for many (potential) contributors? On the assumption that it is not too demanding, I'd happily block a number of domains whose web pages can I think be legitimately discussed. ¶ I completely agree that blogger.* -- perhaps blogger.com for you, but after IP-sniffing autoconverted to blogger.jp for me, and presumably converted likewise around the world -- and wordpress.com and the like should not be added to a list of autoblocked domains, even while I'd guess that the great majority of links people try to add to them are worthless. That's because a number (even if only a small minority) of the links to them are worthwhile. With content farms, I wonder. Yes, I can imagine that a page in a content farm could itself become notable. Let's say . . . somebody kills somebody in an unusual way, is arrested, and the cops find a print-out of some page from a content farm that describes the method. But this is far-fetched. ¶ The question how do you propose to define "content farm" in such a way that the policy can be fairly and consistently applied? is an excellent one. I can't immediately give a good answer. I think that I could sketch a definition; no doubt it would then get some heavy (and deserved) bruising from others, but something might survive. ¶ I must confess that I'm only dimly familiar with XLinkBot. Its use might be suitable and adequate. I've invited the éminence grise to the discussion here. -- Hoary (talk) 02:18, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Is this how Wikipedia treats contributors?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:166.82.205.115&diff=537122923&oldid=537087991

"Hello, "Erik," or whatever your name is. Now, if you are done whining like a little bitch, please either kindly contribute to the encylopedia at hand, or GTFO. What do you think this is, Twitter? Oh, and the next time you are hanging around that cult-like website you control, can you do me a favor and tell that "Kohai" to go fuck herself? Same goes for KCO and CorriJean and the rest of that gang of patzer trolls you have sucking your dick. Welcome to Wikipedia, Brah! OGBranniff (talk) 22:28, 7 February 2013 (UTC)"

Wikipedia needs to start setting some guidelines and enforcing them. This behavior is unacceptable and explains why Wikipedia is continuing to decline. User:68.191.214.247

No, it isn't, which is why the person who left that message has been blocked. The Wikipedia community doesn't stand for that, and it's been taken care of. We can't stop people from doing that before they actually do it (not being mindreaders and all) but when it happens, as in this case, it is dealt with. --Jayron32 01:18, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

+1 If someone joins Wikipedia just to troll, s/he WILL eventually be blocked. Guideline & Policy Wonk (talk) 07:48, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Template talk:Sister project links#Wikivoyage hidden by default

This discussion concerns changing Template:Sister project links so that Wikivoyage is not hidden by default. Everyone who has commented thus far are active Wikivoyagers, and I think all of us were drawn to the discussion by a mention on Wikivoyage. I'm just dropping a line here to solicit comment on that page from others (so we don't run afoul of Wikipedia:Canvassing) before any changes are made. This is a common template that would be affected site-wide, so it's important that the discussion isn't driven by an interested party. Thanks. AHeneen (talk) 19:50, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Removal of information that only serves to antagonize

Alpha Phi's secret motto was published on a book then added to the Alpha Phi article. There were and are numerous attempts to remove it, I being probably replacing it more than most; usually citing WP:NOTCENSORED. I stopped, realizing that this information really is not useful, except perhaps, to antagonize (Nener-nener! I know your secret motto!) some people. Perhaps a policy should be added to allow removal of such content? I don't think that antagonizing Alpha Phi's members is helpful to Wikipedia. Jim1138 (talk) 21:33, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

If it's not widely reported, then it's probably covered by existing prohibitions against giving WP:UNDUE attention to WP:TRIVAl details. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:59, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

TRIVIA and UNDUE seem rather subjective, but then so is deciding what is undue trivia. There continue to be attempts to remove it from the talk page as well which are reverted. Perhaps it should be archived or removed by a white-listed user? Jim1138 (talk) 01:32, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

I feel it goes against Wikipedia's fundamental purpose of existing for it to start to play the game of keeping secrets. The UNDUE and TRIVIA memes seem to be used mainly as excuses to suppress information which is in fact no more trivial or narrowly reported than much of the information we do happily publish, but which happens to upset someone for some reason. Unfortunately it often seems to be the suppressors who care more, and therefore win the "argument". Victor Yus (talk) 10:53, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

It isn't our job to expose secrets... our job is to present relevant information about the topic, so our readers can understand what the fraternity is, what it does, where it came from, etc. Of course it is always a judgement call as to whether some bit of information is relevant or not. That is a matter for consensus at the article. But we should ask is the fraternity's secret motto really important for the reader to know? Does mentioning it really help the reader understand what the fraternity is, what it does, where it came from, etc. Or is it simply a bit of non-essential trivia. Blueboar (talk) 15:37, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

The last time the information was removed from the article was 20:35, 13 July 2012‎ and it hasn't been added back since then. The only place that it has been removed and added back in lately is on the article's talk page where IPs stop by and refactor others comments. GB fan 16:14, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

And I can't find any significant discussion or consensus as to its relevance or likely importance to the reader (how can we know that anyway? why not let the reader decide what she does and does not want to know?). As I implied above, the decision (like many others on Wikipedia, it seems) was not made in accordance with our theoretical procedures, but simply by way of who's prepared to edit war about it the longest. (Admittedly the argument seems to have been that the source was not reliable, rather than that the information was not important, but it seems the reliability of the source was only called into question by those with a clear agenda of suppressing the information.) Something similar happened at an article where a long-dead person had been identified as a child molester. Any information that seems "unsympathetic" or inconvenient to the subject appears to have an inordinately high barrier set for its inclusion, which just doesn't apply to other types of information. Victor Yus (talk) 17:10, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

USAmerican psuado history and bias

Again we have USAmericans altering factual information and replacing it with the fake history that USAmericans are taught in the article History of the London Underground we have the fake clain that the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel in New York City, opened in 1844 is somehow relevent to the underground railway and it is somehow the first it is not in reaql history or to people educated outside the USA the Wapping Tunnel in reality proceded it, how can we educate the USAmerican of real facts and prevent them from altering real facts and inserting their agena on this "encyclopedia" of course I am aware the encyclopedias in the USa probably do cotain lies such as this but wikipedia needs to contain real facts not agtendas. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.178.163.45 (talk) 10:44, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

wikipedia is full of ERRORS, spreading rumors and lies! controlled by chinese communist party. it is so obvious.

marginally coherent rant.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
if you are not controlled by chinese communist spies or being supported by the chinese communist government, why are you doing communist propaganda for them? and "protecting" Bo Guagua's article for "vandalism", even though everything which were deleted were based on the truth! 1. you don't know what nationality bo guagua is, did you ask him to show you his passport? and how do you know that he doesn't have another country's passport? but on your Bo Guagua page, you listed him as "chinese" as if you have verified that he indeed has a chinese passport. 2. you are promoting for his fake award! the British Chinese Youth Federation (BCYF http://www.bcyf.org.uk/) which gave him the award has already ceased operation. and if you go this fake award web site, "http://www.gbvcchina.co.uk/", click on "english", you will see that this UK award does not even have an english page! 3. the sponsors for this fake award were all from the chinese communist party! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:CC6B:6B90:B5D5:B9DB:D33C:8DE (talk) 00:49, 10 February 2013 (UTC) Chinese communist spies are vandalizing communist son's article again! and i challenge you to show me which part of his fake reard section was NOT true. Bo Guagua got vandalized once again, everything about his FAKE award were added which were based on Chinese news reports by well-established newspapers and magazines. the admins deleted everything about his FAKE AWARD, and are protecting the vandalized page once again. is your web site controlled by communist lovers? the citizenship of chinese communist criminal Bo Xilai's son Bo Guagua is unknown, how can you say that his has a chinese nationality? did you see his passport or you checked his current immigration status with the home land security in the usa? if not, how can you state that he is still a chinese citizen? you have no proof! also, the entire section of the following was deleted by your chinese communist spies on this site. i chanllege you to list anything here that is not the truth. and everything can verified according the links. why did your stupid admins delete all of them then protect the article? what is the purpose? are you here to spread lies and rumors, and promoting for the chinese communist criminal? EF∙Royal Cornell 2009 Big Ben Award and Ten Outstanding Chinese Young Persons Selection in the UK Charity Ceremony According to Taiwan Apple Daily newspaper, the award he won was entirely fake. On May 9th of 2009, a charity organisation registered in UK - British Chinese Youth Federation (BCYF http://www.bcyf.org.uk/) which the web site stopped operating after this award was given. The address registered for this organization was in a ghetto in London. The owner is Yinya Li (李引亞, English name: Jonsson Li) from city of Fuzhou of Fujian province, gave Bo Guagua an award during the first annual "EF∙Royal Cornell 2009 Big Ben Award and Ten Outstanding Chinese Young Persons Selection in the UK Charity Ceremony (TOCYP-UK)". at Le Meridien Hotel Piccadilly in London. No one from the UK government or any UK royals were present during this ceremony, but Chinese Consul Jin Shihong and his wife, the director of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London - Hu Baozhu, representatives from the Malaysian Embassy, the Taipei Representative Office and Singapore attended the ceremony. The five judges were: Lord Tom Pendry, Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London - Hu Baozhu, Chairman of 48 Group Club Stephen Perry, Dr Xiaojiu Zhu who doesn't have a law degree who was hired as a legal counsel and to provide notary service for BCYF. She finished her biological education in the USA, then moved to the UK to work for a solicitor who immigrated from New Zealand to the UK. and the owner of BCYF - Yinya Li. The official sponsors include: the Chinese embassy in the UK, All China Youth Federation (http://www.qinglian.org) under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, China Central Television, Phoenix Television and a free Chinese newspaper called 倫敦時報 (The London Times) not to be confused with the actual The London Times. The sponsoring media was Jonsson Li Publishing House (「歐金出版局（倫敦）」) whose owner is the same person of this award. 。 Marco Fu was also given the award, even though he lives in Hong Kong, and is a Canadian permanent resident. Daniel Jacoel who was the chairman of the 48 Group Club Young Icebreakers, was also given an award. Let Me Be Me performed during the event. This event was only widely reported by news media in mainland China. Most mainland Chinese were given the impression that he won the award that was given by the UK government. After 2009, British Chinese Youth Federation second web site (http://www.bcyf.org.uk) has ceased to operate. Their first web site ukbcyf.org expired. The web site of second annual EF∙Royal Cornell Big Ben Awards for the Top Ten Outstanding Young Chinese in the UK was moved to a web site based in China. Meanwhile, Big Ben Award Corporation started to offer awards to Chinese all over the world. Its English page is still empty. Their Chinese page "Contact Us" has no name, phone number or email address listed. Both web sites are registered to Yinya Li. The current address for "Big Ben Award Corporation" is located in a dental office in London.。 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:cc6b:6b90:2d68:299c:8c07:b726 (talk) 12:29, 9 February 2013‎

• Can anyone remember whose sock drawer the above IPV6 editor fits in. A few months back this guy was running around with his "Communist spies have taken over Wikipedia" mularky, but I can't seem to place him. Anyone? --Jayron32 05:48, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

This may be a little bit of a stretch and he hasn't been heard from in years, but could it be this guy? If nothing else, the focus on the PRC, the lowercase typing, and the accusations against Wikipedia are similar. szyslak (t) 07:47, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, my opinion of the CCP is no higher than his, but from a quick look, if the Bo Guagua article is biased in favor of the CCP, then the truth must be genuinely astonishing. --Trovatore (talk) 07:52, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Scandals?

Category:Political scandals and all the sub-cats. Is this a correct term? Could a bot change them all to 'political controversies'? If not then it would be a huge pain to go through all of them. We just cleaned a few of the Canadian ones that contained biography articles, company articles, highways, islands, etc. Should they be re-named 'articles containing political controversy' Someone mentioned that 'scandal' is the tabloid term for controversy. Which wikipedia term is correct? Some articles do have scandal in the title while others have terms like fiasco, controversy, boondogle, Reverse Ferret, etc.--Canoe1967 (talk) 16:46, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Categories named "Articles containing..." or things like that are usually for behind-the-scenes maintenance, not for content. So you need to pick a straightforward term, like "Political scandals" or "Political incidents" or whatever you think best.

Cats are not 'defining' items. Exact descriptions belong in the articles, not on the category names. Otherwise, we'd end up with names like "Category:Political scandals, incidents, controversies, fiascoes, boondoggles, and things given a name ending in -gate by the media", which obviously nobody wants.

The purpose is to group together pages that readers interested in <name of category> might be looking for or interested in. For example, if I'm really a Martian, but readers believe that I'm from California, or editors like you believe that readers who are interested in people from California might be interested in a page about me, then you should list me under Category:People from California (if I were notable, which of course I'm not). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:40, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm of the feeling that it would be incorrect to name Watergate anything but a scandal. (The article is even titled "Watergate scandal"!) Additionally, consider the fact that the main page is named political scandal. That is not to say that the category does not need cleaning, naturally. --Izno (talk) 02:53, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

"Watergate scandal" could be renamed something like, oh, let's say "Watergate criminal enterprise". (No, I'm not suggesting this.) "Scandal" has been trivialized. (People have nipples. Janet Jackson momentarily revealed one of hers. That was, we were told, a "scandal". Zzzz.) But "controversy"? Nations that claim to be democratic have two or more political parties. Other than in nations whose veneer of democracy is the least convincing, these parties disagree on much, if not most. Where newspapers are at least moderately free, every day's edition shows political disagreements. That which is disagreed over is thereby controversial. So "political controversy", despite being a trisyllabic and slightly impressive-sounding word, means little: every slightly democratic nation has thousands per decade. Even if the "scandal" in "political scandal" also means next to nothing, the collocation "political scandal" isn't yet entirely humdrum and says something that "political controversy" does not. (Of course, autocracies have political scandals too: try this, aka "China Ferrari sex orgy death crash") -- Hoary (talk) 02:41, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

We do what the preponderance of reliable sources do. If everyone out there (pointing at the rest of the universe that isn't Wikipedia) calls something a scandal, then we in here (pointing at Wikipedia) have no reason not to do the same. --Jayron32 02:56, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Remove WP:DEFINING

WP:DEFINING as a part of the guideline Wikipedia:Overcategorization does not comply with actual practice. Articles are routinely added to categories because the category is applicable to the subject, not because the subject is defined by the category. Very few people are defined by their year of birth or the university they graduated from; however, these categories are beneficial and are used in practice. I propose removing the section of the guideline, and replacing it with the current practice. Articles are placed into any category that is applicable to the subject of the article. Ryan Vesey 00:59, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I think it is a useful rule... but could use a clearer statement as to what it means. Blueboar (talk) 03:47, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Isn't it more a case of actual practice does not always comply with WP:OC ?, but doesn't that apply to any rule ? Sure, WP:DEFINING should be improved (many discussions at WP:CFD revolve around differing interpretations of it) and exceptions such as year of birth (which is, in effect, a sort of maintenance category) should be allowed. However changing guidance to allow articles to be placed into any category that anyone thinks is applicable would lead to articles in far too many categories and far too many articles in categories - reducing the usefulness of categories. It would also increase the amount of adding/removal of categories on pages causing more watchlist "noise". Example: There is sometimes disagreement between newbie editors who want to add an article to (their) "of country" category (because the subject has some connection with that country) and the members of the relevant wikiproject who want to restrict the categorization to defining characteristics (this is a recent example) - removing WP:DEFINING would make things worse. DexDor (talk) 04:08, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Can you suggest an improved wording for WP:DEFINING that would (a) be consistent with the Eagle Scout situation below; and also (b) satisfy your concern about "far too many categories/articles"? There must be some improvement to the wording we could make that recognizes the reality of what happens in WP. --Noleander (talk) 04:17, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

How about this for a solution: Improve the wording to make it clear that "definingness" applies to the existence of the category; not to whether individual articles belong in the category. Those are two distinct concepts. WP:DEFINING is already written to apply only to the existence of categories, so it is good to go there. Maybe we could simply add a sentence that says "Whether or not an article belongs in a category does not require that the category's attribute define the topic of the article, instead the requirement is that reliable sources must clearly, uniformly, and unambiguously state that the topic of the article has the attribute." --Noleander (talk) 04:29, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm not too keen on that - does it makes things clearer? DexDor (talk) 11:04, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Sure, it addresses the Eagle Scout example. The way DEFINING is written now is a bit ambiguous: it suggests to some editors that a person/thing cannot be put into a category unless the category's attribute defines the person/thing. In fact, it is standard practice to put people/things in a (otherwise valid) category even if the attribute is fairly incidental. Example: senator A is an Eagle Scout, yet that fact has never played any significant role in A's life. Would you agree that that represents a potentially confusing aspect of DEFINING? --Noleander (talk) 15:59, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

We categorize articles not people. An article should only be in Category:Scouting if it tells you something significant about Scouting. An article about a senator that mentions he was a Scout (as were millions of others) doesn't tell you much about scouting. An article that explains why someone didn't join an organisation might actually tell you more about that organisation than an article saying someone was a member. However, the Eagle Scout category doesn't lead to a lot of overcategorization and (unlike some categories) is unlikely to be used instead of the correct category. DexDor (talk) 17:18, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I agree that it should be removed or modified. I recall a major discussion about a year ago about whether person X should be included in Category:Eagle Scouts. Person X was, by no means, "defined" by being an Eagle Scout. Indeed, that category contains scores of persons that are not defined by being a scout. That category is simply an index of every person (who has a WP article) that was an eagle scout. The existence of WP:DEFINING made it really hard to argue that person X should remain in the category. The problem is not just in WP:DEFINING: the primary WP:Categorization guideline also contains similar guidance: "A central concept used in categorising articles is that of the defining characteristics of a subject of the article. A defining characteristic is one that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having—such as nationality or notable profession". Therefore, by all means, the requirement that the category be "defining" needs to be removed or modified. --Noleander (talk) 04:14, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't think that's what is meant. I think the point is, Category:Eagle Scouts should include only Eagle Scouts, not things related to Eagle Scouts. For example, you wouldn't include someone who had achieved only the rank of Life Scout, on the grounds that it's a related concept. You wouldn't include merit badge on the grounds that you need lots of merit badges to become an Eagle Scout. The wording is less than ideal, but the point is important. --Trovatore (talk) 20:01, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

In practice, the way we categorize articles about individual (unique) things is a bit different from the way we categorize articles about concepts; WP:DEFINING can't be significantly improved unless this is considered. Maybe something like the following would be help:

Articles about individual people and (unique) items (John Smith, BBC, RMS Titanic ...) should be categorized by the characteristic(s) that makes the person/item notable (e.g. a person may be notable as an actor) and by biographical characteristics (in particular the year of birth/establishment/construction). Articles about other subjects (e.g. concepts) should be categorized by what the subject is a subset of - for example the subject of warships is part of the subjects of naval warfare and ships.

Most WP articles are already categorized as per the above guidance. Many articles also have other categories (e.g. "alumni of" or Eagle Scouts); the above guidance could be extended to allow such categorization in limited cases where it would not cause lots of categories to be added to an article (see [3] for an example of what we don't want).DexDor (talk)

Categories do take policing. If adding a category to an article amounts to overcategorization, it can be removed from the article, or switched to a more appropriate cat. Blueboar (talk) 15:40, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

@DexDor: To clarify your proposal: you're saying wording could be added to DEFINING to say something like:

Generally, an article about a person/thing may be placed in a category only if the attribute of the category plays a role in what makes the person/thing notable (that is, the attribute is significant in the history/definition of the person/thing). However, a person/thing may be included in a category which is not directly related to its notability provided that (a) it does not cause the person/thing to belong to an excessive number of categories, and (b) reliable sources clearly, uniformly, and unambiguously state that person/thing has the attribute.

Is that an accurate restatement of your point immediately above about Eagle Scouts? --Noleander (talk) 16:05, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

No. An article can (in fact should) be categorized in every category for which it meets the inclusion criteria (subject to rules like not being in 2 cats one of which is a parent of the other). The category structure should be designed so that most articles don't have an excessive number of categories - for example we don't have "people alive in <year>" categories. WP:OC (which includes WP:DEFINING) is about deciding what categories we (don't) have. Your text says that decisions to avoid OC are made at the article level which is incorrect. DexDor (talk) 17:18, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Let's step back to the beginning: Do you agree that there has been confusion in the past in situations like Eagle Scout category, where editor A says "person X cannot be in the ES category because their membership in the scouts was not 'defining' ... they just happened to be in the Scouts"; and editor B says "Yes, X can be in the category because they were a Scout". I've seen that kinds of confusion lots of times. Do you think the guideline wording could be improved so editors A and B have clearer guidance for that kind of situation? --Noleander (talk) 17:55, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Note that WP:Categorization of people#General considerations clarifies the debate to some extent... It says that (with the exception of certain limited "standard biographical details") we should categorize people only by characteristics that make the person notable. This connects the categorization directly to the individual. It means that since some people are notable for being Eagle Scouts, and others are not, we are going to categorize some people as Eagle Scouts and not categorize others. To my mind, what needs to happen is this: If a person is notable for being a scout (and thus categorized as such), this fact should be clear in the article, and supported by sources. The sources need to do more than just mention in passing that the person was an Eagle Scout... the sources should discuss how being an Eagle Scout had an impact on the the person's life (or, I suppose, how the person had an impact on Eagle Scouting). Unfortunately, a lot of people are not aware that the COP guideline exists, and that it says this... so they add categories that are inappropriate... not connected to the person's notabliity. The only way to fix this is to do a better job of policing the category... going through the category, article by article, and determining if the categorization is appropriate or not. Blueboar (talk) 18:30, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I think even more than any problems we have with WP:DEFINING, the section you quote above in WP:Categorization of people#General considerations ("Categorize by those characteristics that make the person notable") is seriously contrary to practice as well as a bad idea (and when you said that "a lot of people are not aware that the COP guideline exists", that's really just another way of saying that "the COP guideline does not actually represent practice"). The example given there ("For example, a film actor who holds a law degree should be categorized as a film actor, but not as a lawyer unless his or her legal career was notable in its own right.") makes this clear.

We have never omitted people that qualify for a category just because that category is not why we personally think they have been the subject of significant coverage in multiple reliable sources. Doing so would punch arbitrary holes in category content that readers will be unable to figure out the meaning of, seriously hindering navigation and creating more disagreements than it would solve.

More evidence that this section is completely confused is the fact that occupation is a "standard biographical detail," especially when we're talking about a licensed profession such as law; many people might also consider participation in scouting to be a "standard biographical detail", so the division that section is trying to establish doesn't even mean anything and just leads to arguments and subjective decisions. All at the expense of a categorization system that is supposed to be predictable and factual rather than subjective and selective. So no, we should not categorize only some people who were Eagle Scouts but not others, nor only some people who were lawyers but not others. postdlf (talk) 19:09, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Who's "we"... You might not have removed a category from an article due to the cat not being "what makes the person notable", but others (including me) have done so... frequently. I suppose a lot depends on which category we are talking about, and how controversial it is. Category:Eagle Scouts may not be the best example here... as it is not that controversial. I doubt many object to it being applied to an article, so it suffers from neglect. Other categories are much more likely to be removed when misapplied or over applied. Blueboar (talk) 19:29, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

If the category is "controversial" or "sensitive" (as the category guideline you cite to above calls it), that's a very different question, as it is when a category is "misapplied" (i.e., factually inapplicable). But yes, I would consider it contrary to consensus and a bad idea to prune mundane categories of articles that factually belong in them, and that's what this discussion here so far also seems to represent, and so far you haven't presented a good reason for doing so (nor responded to my several points as to why it is a bad idea). Especially considering that many categories would be considered "standard biographical details", and thus even omitted from the "only if it's why they're notable" standard from the guideline you are citing for it.

But it's difficult to discuss these things meaningfully in the abstract (part of why broad, abstract rules tend to be useless and counterproductive in many instances as a substitute for case-by-case judgment), and it's possible that I would even agree with you regarding many of your category removals even though I don't agree with the principle you are now offering in support. Re: the specific, concrete case before us, I think that if Category:Eagle Scouts exists, it should contain every person verified to have been an Eagle Scout. If for 99.9% of those it is completely trivial to the point that it's questionable whether it's even worth it to mention in their articles, then maybe that should instead lead us to question whether the category should exist at all, or ask if there is a better way to rename the category so as to target the .1% for whom it is significant without opening the door to everyone else. postdlf (talk) 20:05, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I tend to agree with the sentiments Postdlf is expressing. I'm not interested in prescribing how editors should categorize; But I do want to describe the current practices in WP. When a new editor asks us "person X has attribute A, but it is not very important, can I put them in category A?", we should have a guideline that we can point them to that is consistent with what the WP community does now. Right now the guidelines are not consistent with long-standing community practices demonstrated in categories like Category:Eagle Scouts. --Noleander (talk) 02:49, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Given that WP contains many categories like Category:Eagle Scouts that the community has decided do not need to meet the Defining requirement (that is, anyone who is an Scout can be in the category, even if that did not make them notable) what guidance can we give to future editors to let them know when this is permissible? I don't think it is wise to just ignore this dilemma, or else the arguments & debates will repeat weekly, for years to come. Let me toss out a few options (I'm not endorsing any of these):

1. The Defining requirement may be bypassed if the categorization is not controversial
2. The Defining requirement may be bypassed only for biographical articles, and only if the categorization is not controversial
3. The Defining requirement may be bypassed for membership categories (clubs, alumni, scouts, groups, etc)
4. The Defining requirement may be bypassed if it does not cause the person/thing article to belong to an excessive number of categories
5. The Defining requirement may be bypassed if it does not cause the category to contain an excessive number of articles
6. ... others? ...

Can we agree that one or more of the above are exceptions to the Defining requirement that have been accepted by the WP community? Or, can someone propose what they think is a statement of when the WP community bypasses the Defining requirement. --Noleander (talk) 02:42, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't know whether or how the current guidelines regarding defining categories should be changed, but I don't think the place of birth for Pauline Anna Milder-Hauptmann (Constantinople) or Willy Clément and Renato Capecchi (Cairo) is of any value for categorising these people. Does Erich Kästner's compulsory military service for 1 1/2 years when he was 18 make him a member of Category:German military personnel of World War I? Of course not. Any changes in the guidelines which would support such categorisations will only dilute the navigational advantages of categories. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 09:53, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

If a new editor asked you for guidance on how to tell the difference between categories where any person (with a WP article) can be included (Category:Eagle Scouts, Category:Louisiana State University alumni, etc) and categories where the membership must be "defining" (Category:German military personnel of World War I, Category:Anarchist writers, etc) .. what would you tell that editor? --Noleander (talk) 10:01, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Good question. The answer is to look at the text on the category (which ideally will say something like "This category is for ...") to see if that specifies the inclusion criteria. If not, go to the category's parent(s). For example Category:People by occupation says "This category classifies people by their notable occupations:...". So if an article about a politician says he was a (non-notable) paper-boy as a teenager then his article shouldn't be in Category:Newspaper people. DexDor (talk) 20:39, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Why wouldn't Erich Kästner be placed in Category:German military personnel of World War I? It is not "People primarily known as German military personnel of World War I." Kästner did, in fact, serve in the German military during WWI, which his article not only mentions but even discusses at length, to the extent of using it to explain his later pacifist views and even lifelong health problems. And military service should be a pretty obvious "standard biographical detail" that shouldn't require any further analysis other than "does this verifiably apply?" I think we have some major problems if editors feel themselves free to second guess the applicability of such straightforward categories, on the basis of nothing more than "I don't personally think it really matters to the subject..." It's as if people are trying to treat categories as more than simple indexing tools, as if the only people who would belong in a category are those who would be mentioned in the article that defines the category. postdlf (talk) 21:54, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

I would not call military service a "standard biographical detail"... it isn't something that happens to most people. That said, there are people who are notable for being in the military during a particular war... and it does sound like this is the case with Erich Kastner. On the other hand, I don't think that is the case with Alfred Alexander (That article does not even mention that Alexander was in the military, much less in it during WW I). The category could certainly have a clearer inclusion criteria. Blueboar (talk) 22:21, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

What could be more clear criteria for "German military personnel of World War I" than "personnel who served in the German military during World War I"? If an article does not even mention a category's fact, feel free to remove it (though the Alfred Alexander article actually does mention that he received the Iron Cross for his service during WWI, albeit with a cite needed tag, but if verifiable certainly significant). But if inclusion is verifiable, again I'm not seeing any solid reason for not including an article in that category. Categories aren't simply useful for finding people who are notable because of X, but instead for finding people about whom X is true. One might as well say the deaths by year categories should only include only people notable for dying in that year, as to exclude from a military service category anyone who is notable for other reasons than serving in the military. postdlf (talk) 23:04, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

If you look at a Category:Bartenders you find a mixture of articles about people who are notable as bartenders and articles where it barely gets mentioned (example). There are probably hundreds of other articles that mention the person did a bit of bartending (e.g. while at uni); that so few of those articles are in the cat shows that the "categorize only by notable occupation" rule is working pretty well. The rule is a bit blunt, but as editors we can apply some discretion in how strictly we enforce it. Articles about people contain lots of facts (raised on a farm, bullied at school ...), but we don't categorize by every fact. DexDor (talk) 23:18, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Vanity categories?

I think a sub-issue here is what I will call "vanity categories"... ie categories created by members of an organization - more for the purpose of promoting their org (by demonstrating how many famous people are members) and less to aid editors in finding related articles. WP:DEFINING is a useful tool for minimizing such categories. Blueboar (talk) 19:43, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Okay, but how does that observation specifically impact WP categorization guidelines? Take the two examples above: Category:Eagle Scouts and Category:Louisiana State University alumni. Are you suggesting that (a) Those should be eliminated? (b) That they should be pruned to leave only persons that are notable because they are members of that group? or (c) those categories are okay as-is (with any WP-notable person included)? --Noleander (talk) 20:22, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Re (a) You could take the cats to CFD, but take a look at the DRV in 2007 and Wikipedia:Systemic bias#The "average Wikipedian". Re (b) Not if the articles satisfy the inclusion criteria of the category - you'd need to get that changed first. DexDor (talk) 20:39, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Personally, I would go with (b)... I suspect that there will be at least some people who are notable for their involvement in each group (those who founded the groups, for example... or those who were prominent leaders in the groups). I would say the cat is absolutely appropriate for these people. So... my call would be that the cats should be kept, but pruned back. Shift the criteria for inclusion from "mere membership" to "significant involvement". This shifts the cat from being a simple vanity category (ooh... look at all the prominent people who were members of this group!) to something more appropriate (ah... these people are important in relation to the group.) Blueboar (talk) 20:58, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Okay, so option (a) has been tried and failed (and common sense says those categories will never get deleted). Considering option (b): Given that this issue has come up many times before, and given that those example categories have always ended up using the "mere membership" rule, do you think there is any chance at all that the WP community would now approve pruning those categories to "significant involvement" (which would, I guess, remove 80% to 99% of the articles from the category)? --Noleander (talk) 21:20, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

It probably depends on the specific category in question. With Category:Eagle Scouts I would expect some push back from those who are emotionally tied to the vanity category (such as Eagle Scouts or former Eagle Scouts), but I think the community at large might accept a redefinition of the inclusion criteria once the concept and rational was explained to them. I am less sure about Category:Louisiana State University alumni (where a person went to school boarders on being "standard biographical information" along the lines of year of birth/death... so I would expect a much harder job of gaining a community consensus on that one). Blueboar (talk) 21:31, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

To look at it from another angle, someone may have played a violin in high school, and even still have it as a hobby (and this a verifiable confirmed thing). But if they are known as an actor, a politician, or a reporter, being a violinist doesn't matter one iota to the reason they are on WP. Some thing, it's probably unlikely that them having been an Eagle Scout is relevant, and for many people what college they went to isn't really either, though I would certainly never take the later out of an article anymore than I would birth/death dates. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 00:00, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

It is useful to note that stuff like the Eagle Scout category is an accomplishment that is earned and not something given out to anybody. Note that only 2% of all scouts in the BSA earn that achievement and takes several years of hard work to get there. Then again, I don't see a problem with Category:United States Marines either, which is also an achievement to be called a U.S. Marine. Many categories of this nature really do define the very life of the people involved. That James Carville (to pick on some particular person here) was a Marine is something useful to note (mentioned and sourced in the WP article) and can be used for searching purposes as well. His role as a Marine, however, is not the reason why James Carville is notable. Should this category be removed from this article? I am suggesting it shouldn't and furthermore has value improving Wikipedia simply by having this category exist. Frankly, I think it is neat to see a list of notable Marines, Eagle Scouts, or alumni of some university and have Wikipedia automatically create those lists through the use of categories like this. --Robert Horning (talk) 01:21, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

There seem to be two schools of thought here: (1) the alumni/EagleScout-type categories include too many articles, and should be pruned to be consistent with the DEFINING guideline; vs (2) the alumni/EagleScout-type categories can include any person, and DEFINING should be augmented to mention this possibility (or already permits it). Personally I dont have a preference one way or another, but the fact is that we've presently got a dysfunctional situation where we have scores, perhaps hundreds of categories that are technically in violation of DEFINING (or, some might say DEFINING permits such categories but it is just worded in a very confusing manner). I wonder if an RFC should be initiated to formally try to pick on path or another? --Noleander (talk) 04:12, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I doubt an RFC would actually clarify things. I think you are correct in saying that there are two schools of thought here... and my guess is that the community will be as equally divided on the issue as those of us who have commented so far. I suspect an RFC will simply confirm that there is "No Consensus". Still, it might we worth it just to confirm my suspicion. Blueboar (talk) 15:16, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes, my gut feeling is that the community is split .. but is it 50/50 or 80/20? Or maybe consensus could be achieved if the proposal said "Retain DEFINING for all categories except for the following exceptions: blah, blah"? I seem to recall that you (Blueboar) invested a lot of time in a policy-based RfC recently ... I'm more inclined to work on articles than waste spend my time on an RfC that may have strong passions on all sides :-) But, I may try it. --Noleander (talk) 16:30, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

RFC regarding signature images in biographies

I've started an RFC over at Stephen King's bio. As it involves BLP issues it might be of interest to editors who monitor PUMP/POLICY. Thanks. §FreeRangeFrog^croak 02:38, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

sahaja yoga and in general: articles on religion

Hi,

I don't know wether I'm posting this at the right place, but I felt angry after reading two articles and googling around a bit and I didn't feel like editing. First of all, English is not my first language and second: I guess it's not a good idea to edit or contribute to a talk page when angry. I'm not a wiki editor anyway. However, I do feel I have a point so I guess the village pump is the place to leave something like a rant.

Like a lot of people nowadays, I use wikipedia as a source of information a lot, especially on topics I don't want to spend weeks or longer doing research on. I know a bit how it works, so I know not all information on wikipedia is always accurate. I do get the impression that articles on various religions, cults, sects, New Religious Movements etc. quite often are written and/or edited by people who actually belong to the group which is written about, so I won't get any objective information at all. In the past I was looking for sociological theories about the historical witch hunts and all the time I got trapped into articles which were used by Wiccans to shed their light on history. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Wiccans and it seems like these things have been improved or corrected by now. Now I read Dutch, English and German and compare different articles, so I might confuse some wiki's in different languages. Now I have also read quite some stuff about Scientology and about the history of Scientology on Wikipedia. The whole story seems to have resulted in a load of good and critical information about the CoS on wikipedia (well, at least on the English wiki, the Dutch one definitely is a different story). My compliments to the people who did all that! But I'm afraid it doesn't all stop with CoS...

However: the articles about Sahaja Yoga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahaja_Yoga , and it's founder, [[4]], seem like a load of crap to me. This is most definitely not neutral information, this is a complete eulogy, to a certain level it might be promotion according wiki-guidlines. For instance in the part "Cult allegations and refutations", there is stated:

A 2008 court case in Brussels has ruled that Sahaja Yoga had been wrongly labelled as a cult by a Belgian state authority and awarded the group compensation.

Further on is stated:

In 2008 the Belgian newspapers De Morgen,[155] De Standaard[156] and Le Soir reported that the Court of First Instance of Brussels ordered the Belgian state to pay 1,500 Euros compensation to Sahaja Yoga for wrongly labelling the movement as a sect (cult). The Centre of Information and Opinion on Harmful Sectarian Organizations (CIAOSN/IACSSO) had given an unfavourable report on the meditation movement which was found to be unobjective and had resulted in the movement being defamed. The state appealed.

Now I felt I wanted to get a bit deeper into this and I found the actual court verdict from this appeal, which is quite nasty for Sahaja Yoga and it's late founder. You can find it on the site of the Belgian state organization IACSSO, both in Dutch and in French and it dates from 12-4-2011. You can find it here:

http://www.iacsso.be/actualiteit.htm

in Dutch there's this scan: http://www.iacsso.be/110412-hof_van_beroep_te_brussel-2008-AR-889.pdf

in French there's this one: http://www.iacsso.be/110412-cour_d%27appel_de_bruxelles-2008-AR-889.pdf.

The point is: the Belgian organization never did say that Sahaja Yoga was a destructive cult or anything like that. However, it did point out some things which this Court of Appeal found justifiable remarks, even according the ECHM. The French scan looks better than the Dutch one and I can recommend anyone interested in this subject to read this verdict carefully! As far as I get it, the Belgian Court of Appeal stated that a state organization may rightfully say that the founder of Sahaja Yoga did make anti semitic and thus xenophobic and racist remarks in her writings. And there is more, Sahaja Yoga lost the case completely! I'm amazed that the Belgian press didn't put any attention on this verdict (at least so it seems, they were probably too busy with other matters at the time). As far as I understand this verdict stands as long as there is no higher appeal (Cassatie) but didn't find any information on such an appeal. Did Sahaja give up? I would understand that, when I read this verdict. Now this verdict is almost two years old and hardly anyone noticed, even when a scan in two languages was put on the internet! I guess the writers and editors of the two wiki articles missed this one as well ... or didn't they want to know?

Another thing is: one organization which is given as a source in the wiki articles is "Human Rights Without Frontiers International" - this seems to me a bit shady small NGO - apart from it's own website there's not much mention of it on the internet. Is this actually a genuine human rights organization or a Brussels lobby group? Where do they get their money from?

One more quote: In 1995, Nirmala Srivastava was awarded an honorary doctorate in Cognitive and Parapsychological Sciences by the Ecological University of Bucharest, Romania.

Now that sounds like bogus to me and it's just supported with one dead link. Can someone find a reliable source for this honorary doctorate? I can't find anything about it, apart from Sahaja-sites. Anyway, there's a lot more like this.

Now I understand it's not possible to put a sign on articles like this, saying: "WARNING! Joining this New Religious Movement might be dangerous for your mental and physical health, your children might be put in some dodgy school in another country and you may not see them again for years, your marriage might get ruined or you might get put in some arranged marriage, if you suffer from epilepsy or when you are gay you might get labeled as 'possessed by an evil spirit' and it's founder is known for her anti semitic ideas and was a complete homophobe who stated she could cure homosexuality with yoga, just tell them you're HIV-positive and they won't even allow you to meditate with them". But that is just my opinion. Yes, I am biased! This whole thing is complete Mumbo Jumbo to me! They are most definitely not up front with their agenda! You have to dig really a bit deeper on the internet to find this out. And it's another good reason why I shouldn't edit those articles...

I'm afraid there's more examples of things like this on wikipedia and I don't have a clear proposal how to avoid them. But could somebody please have a closer look at those articles, maybe? I'd love to read something more neutral! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Xochopili (talk • contribs) 02:57, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Somewhere like Portal talk:Religion might be a better place for these comments (more likely to be seen by editors who may address any problems) - and, of course, there's the talk pages of the specific articles. P.S. Your English is much better than many WP contributors! DexDor (talk) 11:17, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

--- Thanks for the compliment and the advise. I've posted it here: [[5]]

grt, Xochipili — Preceding unsigned comment added by Xochopili (talk • contribs) 15:27, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

If a group were problematic, I think that the best defense is credible knowledge about them, something that a well written Wikipedia article imparts. (more than an opinion/warning written by one editor) And something which is as problematic as you indicate will have sourced criticism and content on the problematic areas to include. North8000 (talk) 13:55, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Deprecation of disproportionate usage of "initialism" on Wikipedia

Following recent decisions regarding removal of the word "initialism"

• from WP:TITLE
• from the title of Acronym and
• from the title of List of acronyms,

I would like to gauge consensus on the next logical (to me) step, i.e. deprecating wide use of the term "initialism" in Wikipedia articles.

Please note that I don't seek its complete removal. I acknowledge the existence of the term, and I consider its coverage in the current version of the Acronym article adequate.

Here is a summary of the rationale (see discussions linked above for details and supporting evidence)

• There is no universally accepted definition of "initialism". While it's true that some reliable sources define it in contrast to "acronym" (describing the latter as being pronounced as words instead of single letters), some others define it as a synonym of "acronym".
• Most reliable sources use "acronym" for both concepts. The term is therefore receiving WP:UNDUE attention on our site.
• There exist plenty other cases that are neither pronounced as a word or pronounced as letters (e.g. JPEG), or cases whose pronunciation varies according to the speaker (e.g. IRA). There is no term describing these cases, which makes the alleged distinction between "acronym" and "initialism" even more confusing.
• Per WP:JARGON, we should "not introduce new and specialized words simply to teach them to the reader, when more common alternatives will do". Saying that AOL is "commonly pronounced as an initialism" is unnecessarily obscure to most readers. It sounds pretentious and elitist. Introducing LGBT and LGB as initialisms is superfluous and disruptive to the average reader.

If people agree that we should limit our use of "initialism" to specialised linguistic contexts (such as in the current version of the Acronym article) I volunteer to go around and convert the excessive occurrences. Thanks. 220.246.155.114 (talk) 14:06, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I have advertised this at Talk:Acronym and Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Linguistics. Let me know if it would be appropriate to open an RFC. 220.246.155.114 (talk) 14:08, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I really don't see the problem. Constructions of the form "X and Y" where X and Y are synonyms or otherwise closely related notions are widespread for various reasons that ultimately boil down to instant recognisability. Sometimes, as in the case of "odds and end", "pots and pans", "nuts and bolts" they become idiomatic, almost like a single word. That's known as Siamese twins (linguistics). But one can also make them up on the spot, and this is a good one. "Acronym" is a well known technical term, but not everyone knows it and for those who don't, etymology won't help. "Initialism" is less well known and maybe more ambiguous, but in context you have a good chance of guessing what it means even if you have never seen it. "Acronym and/or initialism" roughly means "acronym in a wide sense" and inherits the advantages of both individual words. The use of such combinations is a matter of good style, especially when writing for a diverse audience. E.g. when the German dialects and local speech forms were unified to a single Standard German language, many such Siamese twins were formed because they significantly enhanced and improved the odds and chances that a farmer or peasant from somewhere all up in the South or a sailor or seaman from somewhere all down at the sea coast comprehended and understood at least minimally one of the two terms and alternative words. Hans Adler 14:38, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Note, this proposal is not about WP:AND or its applications. It's about the overuse of "initialism" in Wikipedia articles, instead of the much more common term "acronym". 220.246.155.114 (talk) 14:53, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm coming at this from a background of having had some linguistics instruction, so it's hard for me to see the terms as equivalent. It seems to me that there is a useful distinction being made that goes beyond jargon. In the same way that we utilize IPA (which is specialized knowledge akin to jargon) to tell people how words are pronounced, it is within our purview to indicate to readers whether one of these is pronounced as it is spelled or as a series of letters. Thus, to me, this proposal seems to be arguing for making the indication of pronunciation that much harder for no reason except that we might accidentally teach someone a new word.

I understand that reliable sources differ on whether they view acronym and initialism as synonymous (and that is the only difference, it seems, in the definitions of initialism), but we can choose to mark that distinction and to maintain it across Wikipedia articles. It's not as though doing so would violate WP:NPOV any more than not doing so would.

At the same time, I'm fine with considering initialisms a subcategory of acronym so that the former term is used more frequently when the distinction is needed in the same way that tabby and cat are. I'm not sure if that categorization is represented in relevant literature. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 16:00, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. The discussions referenced above have already chosen *not* to mark such distinction in their respective contexts (notably, in the Acronym article), unless use of "initialism" is strictly required, for instance in order to explain the nomenclature of the concept. Hence my request to extend this decision to the whole site, following the same logic. Where there is a need to explain how an acronym is pronounced (and I would argue that in the case of LGBT no such need exists), indeed either IPA (an international standard in very wide use in reference works) or a short inline explanation (e.g. "pronounced as a string of letters", which is only 6 characters longer and is exactly the explanation readers eventually get to if they follow the initialism hyperlink) would be preferable. 220.246.155.114 (talk) 16:25, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Actually, the discussions at WT:TITLE and Talk:Acronym were explicitly about WP:AND, not about marking the distinction between acronyms and initialisms. One user even explicitly stated that their support of the move was only about the title, saying "We need not be so imprecise in the body of the article."

Like I said, I'm fine with using acronym as the more general term, which would probably be consistent with most of the initialism>acronym changes you'd like to make. But I'm not behind completely eliminating proper usage of initialism just because it's jargon or because it's possible to use it as a synonym for acronym. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 21:28, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. Just to be clear, could you please give examples of what would be OK to change (and how) and what should stay as it is? (You can choose from this list.)

Also, are you suggesting that we take the view that initialisms are a subset of acronyms? This way out did not occur to me, but if so we should state it very clearly, and possibly find sources for it. If we are not fairly prescriptive on this, the same people who hold the view that acronyms and initialisms are disjoint sets, and that it's useful for WP articles to use them as such, are liable to change the occurrences back, for consistency. Also, if we take the subset view, the phrase "acronyms and initialisms" would lose any meaning, so it would be effectively banned from WP, which I'm definitely OK with. 219.78.114.21 (talk) 01:55, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Sorry about the delay. I'm not sure about examples of when we should keep "initialism." Instances would probably be pretty rare. As to your second question, I am indeed suggesting that we may want to consider initialisms to be a subcategory of acronyms, though as I said above I'm not sure how representative that view is. Looking in google books for the phrase "initialism is an acronym" turns up five sources and "initialisms are acronyms" turns up three. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 19:53, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointers. As I predicted, some editors argue that initialisms are not acronyms, further arguing that the distinction has nothing to do with pronunciation(!) I think the bottom line is that for every reference one can find that <X> is an initialism, I can find 100 that say that it's an acronym. 219.73.120.206 (talk) 11:35, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't believe that any uses of the word initialism should be removed in favor of the technically incorrect, or at least less precise (depending on which dictionary you consult) word acronym. We aren't introducing these words for the purpose of showing off our vocabulary or teaching the words; we're trying to write with suitable precision and on the assumption that our readers have a decent education, even to the extent of including the occasional word with four or more syllables.

This is no more "jargon" than our decision to have an article about Motor vehicle collisions rather than "car wrecks" (as if trucks were never involved in collisions). I wouldn't insist that you use the longer word yourself, but I do not believe that we should be reverting other people's accurate choice of terms. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:59, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

As per the above, it is not technically incorrect to say that initialisms are acronyms, based on both the definitions available in reliable sources, and on usage in reliable sources.

Motor vehicle collisions strikes me as another violation of WP:COMMONNAME. Luckily, that redirects to the less pompous traffic collision. 219.73.120.206 (talk) 11:35, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

As for your "less precise" remark, I find that there is nothing less precise and more confusing than using a term that has no universally accepted definition, the ones available being incompatible with each other. 219.73.120.206 (talk) 12:16, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

There is a very simple distinction that editors can follow: if the string of letters is pronounced as a word, call it an acronym (e.g. NASA). If it is pronounced a separate letters, call it an initialism (e.g. EU, USA). The acronym article has an explanation of this. As it says, some people call the latter type "acronyms" as well. But there is nothing wrong with calling them initialisms, and if we do then everyone can agree that the usage is correct. Many people learn this distinction in school, so it is not some sort of advanced jargon. Personally, I don't think there is any reason to try to discourage the use of the term "initialism". — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:07, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Like I said, there are cases that are neither pronounced as a word or pronounced as letters (e.g. JPEG), or cases whose pronunciation varies according to the speaker (e.g. IRA). Therefore, the distinction you are proposing is not as simple as you portray, and it's what led to the invention of such monsters as "pseudo-blends" in the List of acronyms.

I also doubt that so many people learn that distinction in school, again based on the number of sources defining "initialism" in other ways, and based on the number of reliable sources referring to what you propose to call "initialisms" as "acronyms". 219.73.120.206 (talk) 13:51, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

If you read the list of acronyms lede, they would call JPEG an initialism and UNIFEM a "pseudo-blend". They use the latter term for things like "MAOI" where the "A" is not an intial. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:06, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

JPEG is also an initialism, which is the catch-all term for abbreviations made from initials. It is true that some sources call initialisms "acronyms", but that does not mean there is something wrong with calling them "initialisms". Even if some sources call "EU" for "European Union" an "acronym", if we call it an "initialism" nobody will mind. People who think that "acronym" and "initialism" are synonymous will be satisfied, and so will people who think they are different. Only people who have a pet peeve for the word "initialism" will worry about it, and I don't give much weight to linguistic pet peeves. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:02, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't find the there's-no-common-definition argument convincing. It is a misleading characterization that implies there are a multitude of meanings possible when one says initialism. In reality, the only dispute is whether it has a separate meaning from acronym; when it does, the meaning is unambiguous. When you think about it, this means that it is actually acronym with the inherent ambiguity.

Considering initialisms to be a type of acronym will actually keep us from needing to do a purge the other way (replacing acronym with initialism) and will also help with circumstances where an abbreviation can be either or where it's not clear. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 14:16, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. One thing though. You say that the meaning of initialism is well-defined and it is only its relationship with acronym that is ambiguous. However, so far I have heard various (stand-alone) definitions that are incompatible, such as the one that Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language gives (anything made from initials, which would therefore include "laser" and "sonar"), and the one at List of acronyms (anything made from initials pronounced as letters, with the additional "wholly or partly" unsourced cop-out). 219.73.120.206 (talk) 14:56, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, it seems like CEEL (as well as the Google books that show up when one searches for "acronyms are initialisms" or "acronym is an initialism") sees acronyms as a subtype of initialism. That kind of puts a wrench in things, doesn't it? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]} 16:59, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

"JPEG is also an initialism, which is the catch-all term for abbreviations made from initials." According to which source, sorry if I missed it? 219.73.120.206 (talk) 14:24, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Found it, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, per acronym, thanks. 219.73.120.206 (talk) 14:49, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

It is true that some sources call initialisms "acronyms", but that does not mean there is something wrong with calling them "initialisms". - It's not just "some" sources, it's "most". Big difference there, which supports invoking WP:JARGON. 219.73.120.206 (talk) 15:12, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I just looked up "acronym" and "initialism" in the OED. Under "initialism" it indicates that the word is "contrasted with acronym". Under "acronym" it has two definitions:

1. A group of initial letters used as an abbreviation for a name or expression, each letter or part being pronounced separately; an initialism

2. A word formed from the initial letters of other words or (occas.) from the initial parts of syllables taken from other words, the whole being pronounced as a single word (such as NATO, RADA).

Then I looked at the American Heritage Dictionary, which has "usage notes". Here is their note about "acronym":

"In strict usage, the term acronym refers to a word made from the initial letters or parts of other words, such as sonar from so(und) na(vigation and) r(anging). The distinguishing feature of an acronym is that it is pronounced as if it were a single word, in the manner of NATO and NASA. Acronyms are often distinguished from initialisms like FBI and NIH, whose individual letters are pronounced as separate syllables. While observing this distinction has some virtue in precision, it may be lost on many people, for whom the term acronym refers to both kinds of abbreviations."

So I think it is perfectly consistent with reliable sources for us to use the word "initialism". — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:20, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Webcite to stop accepting submissions unless donation goal met

WebCite is running a donation drive, and claim that they will stop accepting submissions after 2013 if they don't reach their goal ($50k). (Note they won't shut down, just not add more)

Given how much we as the en.wiki use this for archiving web pages, this might be a problem if they don't reach it. Two things come to mind: is there a possible replacement for the service, and is this something that we may persuade the foundation to help fund?

It may be a non-problem if the fundraising goal is hit. --MASEM (t) 17:03, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

See here for more information and a link to Meta about taking it over. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 17:08, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) See discussion at meta:WebCite (linked in {{Centralized discussion}}) and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#a heads-up -- webcitation.org may go dark. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:10, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

• Comment This needs to go up as a Watchlist Notice. Our citations are part of our critical infrastructure. They are the basis for valid content and critically important to our readers. Without them, our content is no more valid than any random website on the net. This conversation needs to put on a Watchlist Notice in order to get input from the wider community. Can some knowledgeable Admin please set up a Watchlist Notice? Thanks in advance. 64.40.54.47 (talk) 10:43, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

And, of course, this only impacts our on-line citations... citations to hard copy will not be affected. Blueboar (talk) 18:02, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia is dying. Does anyone care?

Wikipedia is dying. That should be obvious to anyone who has been around for a few years.
 Does anyone really care?
 Until 2005 or so, the number of editors was growing exponentially. Starting 2006, it has been falling exponentially. Experienced editors are leaving, and Wikipedia somehow became unable to recruit new ones.
 There may be many causes for this situation, but some of them are well known. A couple of years ago, with great fanfare, the Foundation hired a "usability study". It was too limited in time and methods to properly diagnose the causes of the disease; but it did show, very clearly, one of the most obvious: the forbidding complexity of wikisource wiki code.
 Believe it or not, when Wikipedia was created, the Founders opted for an original markup language because HTML was thought to be too hard to edit. Thus wikisource wiki code used only straight quotes and apostrophes, and very simple markup, easy to master and type (''...'' instead of <it>...</it>, [[...]] instead of <a href="...">...</a>, ==...= instead of <h2>...</h2>, and so on), Frills were capitals sins; editors were supposed to work on contents rather than form.
 Ten years later, the people in charge of Wikipedia (including the Foudation) seem to have forgotten that stroke of genius. Little by little, rule by rule, template by template, wikisource wiki code has become much harder to edit than straight HTML. Today even a veteran editor cannot write three articles without violating some obscure rule (like linking to a disamb, or using hyphen for en-dash), or being immediately criticized (often by a robot) for not following this or that recommended style, or being invited to add some random bell or whistle. There are many articles that not even a veteran editor will know how to edit an article, because it uses obscure undocumented templates or other weird markup devices. And so on, and on, and on, and on...
 Inded, this was the main conclusion of the usability study: many readers who clicked "Edit" for the first time were scared away by the cryptic mess that they saw.
 And what has the Foundation done about it?

Nothing.

Nothing. Zilch. Nihil. Nada.

In the wake of that study, not a single bit of complexity has been removed. Not a single rule has been relaxed. Not a single navbox, template, or editorial tag has been deleted, or made less onoxious. Not a single form-over-substance robot has been switched off. Not one of the many useless scaffolds that have been erected without due thought - stub tags, sorting tags, categories, wikiprojects, article grading - have been junked. Not a single improvement was done to the editing interface, to the wikisyntax, or to the talk pages.
 The only response to that study was to add another ill-though, useless, time-wasting and screen-wasting trinket, the "feedback tool"; which, in spite of overwhelming disapproval by editors, does not look like it is ever going to be junked.

Why?

All the best, hopefully, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 04:12, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

• I have the same general opinion of the issue at hand, though I would have probably expressed it with less vitriol. I have discussed it at length with some Foundation Employees. I have been told in the past that they are working on a WYSIWYG editor. I agree that it is the biggest barrier to entry for new users, and that the article feedback tool is essentially redundant to the article talk page and was largely a waste of effort and resources, though of course the Foundation disagrees vehemently on that point. Let's just say that as far as has been told to me over a couple of beers is that the Foundation is aware of the need of a more user friendly WYSIWYG editor, though they believe that it is less of a problem than you or I do. However, I don't think the "Wikipedia is Dying" trope is necessarily true: Wikipedia has plateaued for several reasons, mainly because a) much of the easy stuff has been done already, so there's less really interesting stuff for new editors to do and b) the early growth years in membership aren't likely sustainable. Wikipedia can't grow at that rate indefinitely, and some leveling off is expected at some point. I think Wikipedia isn't dying, it's just matured to the point where nearly everyone who is likely to join Wikipedia as an active editor has already done so. The next challenge is involving editors who have a lower overall interest level, and that requires a change in focus from Wikipedia's early growth years. A WYSIWYG editor built in to the interface should help that a lot, as the technical aspects of writing can be daunting for new editors. It's gotten better, baby steps have been made in that direction (the reftools integrated into the edit window are a HUGE improvement, and categories work much better than they used to) but there needs to be more effort made in that direction. --Jayron32 05:30, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

"...as far as has been told to me over a couple of beers is that the Foundation is aware of the need of a more user friendly WYSIWYG editor" - there's no need to make it sound secret and speculative, the prototype has been available since December :-)

Special:Preferences > Editing > tick "Enable VisualEditor". It's limited to some pages and can;t handle some complex features yet, but there's a concerted push to get it up and running, and has been since last summer.

As to who's to blame for this, it's true that the Foundation hasn't taken drastic steps to cut down on the complexity of templates ... but neither has the community. It we want to address the issue of pages that are a deterrent to a new user, we can't simply blame someone else for not making it better; we need to think about why we have this feature creep, why editors choose to incorporate this material, etc. The only thing mentioned above that was a centralised project was AFT - everything else, stubs, templates, dash-fights, wikiprojects, grading - it all came from the community, from us, for good or for ill. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:51, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Admittedly, those beers are several months old. It's good to see progress in that direction. --Jayron32 19:01, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

I slightly agree that wikipedia is facing some problems, I have not been here for very long but in my short span I have seen experienced editors leaving Wikiedia for good. The reason is not the wikisource but disputes which cannot be avoided. However I agree that wiki mark-up language might be the reason why there might be lesser number of new editors.--sarvajna (talk) 06:22, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

• The Wikimedia Foundation is actually attempting to do something about the declining editor retention rate and signup rate, though in my opinion it's not enough. The issue lays with the editors and the policies that are used to deal with problematic editor. Like the economic scale of output model, Wikipedia has reached its "optimum scale" in terms of the number of new editors that are joining and Wikipedia's retention rate. Similarly, Wikipedia, like any other company that's surpassed the optimal scale, currently has too much red tape - the process of removing problematic editors other than vandals and sockpuppets is simply too lengthy for anyone to endure, hence it's probably easier and simplier for editors who encounter rogue, overzealous and problematic editors to just simply give up at times. Of course this brings up the concept of WP:DIVA, however occasionally, and probably now often, one can simply lose faith in Wikipedia's ability to handle complex issues involving editors that are widely considered problematic in a manner that at least from a superficial level doesn't appear to conflict with policies or guidelines - POV pushers, deliberate guideline misinterpreters and the likes. YuMaNuMa ^Contrib 12:37, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
• I think the author of this piece makes a good point about instruction creep scaring new editors off. Killing that disambiguation notification bot would be a move in the right direction (or make the notifications voluntary by sign up, not sign out). filelakeshoe (talk) 12:42, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
  • I like the disambiguation notification bot - it seems to be something that's actually genuinely helpful towards article improvement. What have you got against it? Victor Yus (talk) 16:51, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
    • WP:CREEP. As the OP points out, new users are intimidated by how complicated editing Wikipedia is and throwing automated messages on new users' talk pages is intimidating - same problem with the "uncategorised bot" on Commons. I have nothing against the bot as an opt-in process, but I don't think it should automatically run on all users. filelakeshoe (talk) 12:57, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
  • I think the bot is useful, but why does it have to notify users of its actions on the talk page? That seems rather silly. I can understand the logic of allowing the user to double-check the bots actions to make sure it didn't make a mistake, but I think a vigilant editor probably already has the article on his/her watch list anyway, nullifying the point. And new editors are just going to see it as a useless waste of time. WTF? (talk) 18:57, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
    • Your comment doesn't make sense to me, because, at least if I recall correctly, the disambiguation notification bot doesn't actually do the disambiguations, that typically requires human input. See, for example, User_talk:Joe_Decker/Archive_9#Disambiguation_link_notification_for_December_29. More or less, you can ask the editor who'd know what was intended: "Did you mean X, or Y?" If new editors are really put off by such questions in the abstract, then either we need to kill the bot entirely or realize that the editors involved are such hothouse flowers that they will never be able to manage working in a collaborative environment. Neither feels particularly appealing ot me. If the problem is more a matter of how that question is communicated, then perhaps there is a more constructive way forward. --j⚛e decker^talk 19:38, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
      • I would prefer if the bot added {{disambiguation needed}} to the article rather than messages to user talk space - that way more people see it, it gets fixed quicker. filelakeshoe (talk) 12:57, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
        • Not necessarily - new users might not notice or understand that sort of thing on their watchlist (or use their watchlist at all), and it might be that no-one else (or no-one who cares) is actively watching the article. I don't see why anyone should find these messages intimidating - they don't attack you, they just give you a hint as to how you might change what you've written so as to better achieve your purpose. It might also help you avoid the same mistake in future (I may eventually learn that morphology is ambiguous...) Victor Yus (talk) 14:02, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
• Is there really a disease? From 2001 to 2005, there were still easy articles to make. At one point, United States was a single paragraph, and we didn't have articles on every modern famous person. So the barrier to entry was very low - I myself made dozens of articles on speedways, governors, subway station, provinces, etc. But then we ran out of easy articles and easy edits to make. Now, unless you want to fix a typo (not very glamorous), pimp your pet cause, or share increasingly obscure information (yes, this person was the vice premier of kerpleckistan for 25 minutes in 1881 during the Monsoon Coup), there's less and less reason to show up. And there's nothing that can really be done about this, we're a victim of our own success. But I do agree - if we made wikimarkup simpler, people would be at least more likely to fix typos. --Golbez (talk) 13:43, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
• Golbez has a point. It is not uncommon for new editors to discover that there is already an article on the topic he/she was interested in writing. Thus there is less incentive for them to become involved in the project. Sure, we still have the task of improving those articles ... but that task is not as fun as writing new articles. It is less of a draw.

The fact is, Wikipedia is not dying... it is simply moving to a new phase of its existence... one that is less appealing to the average Joe, and will not attract a lot of participants. We are shifting from "building" an encyclopedia, to improving the one we already have. In this new phase, we can not measure success by the quantity of editors ... we need to measure success by the quality of the edits made by those of us who are still around. Blueboar (talk) 14:11, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Moving to a new phase of its existence doesn't mean that it's not going in the wrong direction. The problem as I see it is that the kind of people who were drawn to the project out of the desire to add vast swaths of new content are no longer coming to Wikipedia, because the content has indeed plateaued. However, as the new content tasks diminish, the less glamorous maintenance tasks continue to increase. Writing a new article on an interesting subject is a lot more fun and engaging than fending off the constant efforts of vandals, or even fixing common spelling mistakes and grammar errors, and we are not bringing in very many people who are interested in doing maintenance. At that point, we need new strategies to attract and motivate editors. bd2412 T 14:54, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

• A number of these points are discussed on Observations on Wikipedia Behaviour. It's true that the easy stuff has been done, most of the basic articles exist, and while there is a lot of work to do, it requires experience with being able to research sources, write good English, debate articulately, and interact with others. The barrier to entry has risen, and the user interface hasn't caught up. In an ideal world, you'd create an article, the software would ask you for sources up front, you'd realise you haven't got any, and ask the help desk. Instead, you create the article, within 2 minutes somebody whacks a great big red template on the front of it and hectors you about some policy. (Example from today). Being slightly facetious, though, I would say the best way to get the WMF to implement a nicer user interface is to pay them to do so. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 14:42, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

  I'd say the barrier to entry is extreme. In addition to the non-WYSIWYG editor, WP is the only website I've seen where everyone else's content is submitted to you to be edited!

  You've then got the obscure rule structure.

  Perhaps worst of all, with most pages already written, POV pushing has become much more prominent, with editors treating it as a game, driving away anyone who threatens their ownership of an article through hostility, misquoting rules and calling for bans with all their meat/sockpuppets. WykiP (talk) 21:00, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

The "observations on Wikipedia behaviour" essay actually reflects many of the problems of the existing culture on this site - not least of which is the extremely condescending tone adopted in the essay and the dismissiveness of criticism as disruptive rather than potentially constructive or pertinent. FiachraByrne (talk) 12:05, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I think that the reality falls in between "the sky is falling" and "since the sky isn't falling, the status quo should not be questioned or changed" folks. It has plateaued out. North8000 (talk) 16:57, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

• Observation It's bizarre that this complaint is phrased as being about the markup language. I am not aware that the markup language has changed at all in the 7.5 years I've been editing Wikipedia, though no doubt there have been hundreds if not thousands of obscure little bugfixes. There is some validity in the complaint that policies, guidelines, and procedures have gotten more complicated (that's the hyphen-v-endash thing), but this has nothing whatsoever to do with markup or a WYSIWYG editor. --Trovatore (talk) 17:45, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

the fucking obsession that so many editors have to put everything in tables with their coding that takes a doctorate to make work right. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 10:30, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

• Markup has become more difficult in the sense that the expected lavel of mastery of complex features has risen, so that for example citation templates and the like is now almost a requirement which it wasn't in 2005.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 17:58, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

  I just don't think that's markup issue. That's an instruction-creep issue. In any case, in theory, you're supposed to be able to dump the citation information into the article in whatever format, and wait for the gnomes to come clean it up. --Trovatore (talk) 18:04, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

  The issue, as much as anything, is what people see when they click "Edit" for the first time. These days, it's horrifically offputting on an average article (ooh that looks complicated, I'm bound break something, and I don't know how I'm supposed to do stuff, never mind), in a way it just wasn't 10 years ago. The idea of "anyone can edit" originally was "anyone can click Edit and dive in" - and that's just no as true as it was originally. A properly working Visual Editor will help, but really it's at least 5 years overdue. Rd232 ^talk 18:28, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

  I'm more than a little skeptical that a visual editor can be kept synched with templates and such. Templates are supposed to be changeable by consensus at any time; an editor is supposed to work with the core software. How can an editor possibly be kept up to date? Would it become a barrier to changing formats when people want to? I suppose a visual editor could have a boilerplate interface that somewhat facilitates entry of "fields" in templates that have them, but I doubt it would be hugely easier to use than the text markup. (Think about the little "Signature and timestamp" widget at the top of the edit window — when was the last time you used that, instead of typing four tildes?) --Trovatore (talk) 18:54, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

  Dreamweaver certainly could handle the equivalent of templates, but I wouldn't objet to a big shift in how we store and manage article data if that's what it took to make it easier for everyone to edit. --j⚛e decker^talk 19:03, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

  I can't quite visualize what such a shift would look like. Can you say more about what you mean? --Trovatore (talk) 19:29, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Over complicated formats like WP:LDR should be eliminated.Moxy (talk) 18:34, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

I think this is actually at one of the cruxes of the problem, but I don't think it's as easily solved. (a) References are important in WP:V and WP:BLP policy and should continue to be. (b) Any way you represent references is hard for new editors to assimilate. (c) The way wikitext handles them is particularly challenging. I'm not ready to throw out (a), and it may always be in conflict with (b), but at least we could use technology to improve the situation with (c). --j⚛e decker^talk 19:03, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't use it myself because of my own idiosyncratic writing style (I like to bundle citations) but list defined references are a great solution to the problem of writing clutter.FiachraByrne (talk) 11:25, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I think that what has made more and more of Wikipedia inaccessible to newer and medium-experienced editors is the proliferation of templates. Making it worse, each template is only about half documented (people who develop software items never like to do the last 2/3rds of the job which is documentation and instructions, including updating when they make changes.) North8000 (talk) 18:38, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

• The OP seems a bit harsh. The powers-that-be are working on a WYSIWYG editor, and I think they even had a prototype last time I looked. On a related note, sometimes when the foundation proposes a change to WP (Pending Changes; Article Feedback Tool), the community reacts with hostility, so perhaps the Foundation is a bit gun-shy? As for the number of new editors/articles declining: that is a natural evolution in the lifespan of the project. The nature of edits & improvements are gradually changing from lots-of-new-stuff, to improving consistency & quality of existing stuff. --Noleander (talk) 18:45, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

By "gun shy" do you mean "ignore input and don't ask anymore and do it anyway" like pending changes and feedback tool? Or do you mean no longer thinking about some changes that would actually be useful. "Pending changes" reminds me of the liquid metal robot in Terminator 2....I keep thinking "we thought we killed it but it returned....what do we have to do to really kill it?" North8000 (talk) 19:10, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

:-) Yeah, probably a bit of both :-) --Noleander (talk) 19:15, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Following an initial suggestion from the WMF in, hrm, 2008(?), Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions was developed for enwiki after a lengthy community discussion, and coded to those specifications before being deployed. After this, there was lengthy community debate in which it was honestly very difficult to determine what the answer was, and we pulled it; after more community discussion, a limited form was reenabled. I'm not sure this can really be described as "don't ask and do it anyway"! (For more background, see the 2012 RFC to turn it back on, which has a decent summary at the top). Andrew Gray (talk) 20:34, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

• One would also imagine that the Pedia has competition from other (niche) wiki's that did not exist before; so, those editors who are more attracted to those other niches spend their time there. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:18, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Just imagine a newer editor running into "pending changes" seeing their edit mysteriously disappear into no-man's land. North8000 (talk) 19:20, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

I would, but I'm busy trying to imagine what a nonspecific VPP discussion does about it. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:29, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

I've certainly seen incidents where I've had discussions, sometimes quite strong ones, where editors here just do not comprehend that other people would rather edit a niche wiki, be it on wikia or self hosted, than come here. Their brains just seem to explode. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 10:40, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Wikipedia is failing and Wikipedia:Wikipedia is succeeding.

—Wavelength (talk) 20:35, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

• Wikipedia inadvertently causing its own decline in participation - Quote = "University of Minnesota research finds that changes made by the Wikipedia community to manage quality have crippled the growth they were designed to manage".Moxy (talk) 21:27, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

• Imminent death of Wikipedia predicted. — Hex (❝?!❞) 22:18, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
• In Affectionate Remembrance

of

WIKIPEDIA,

which died on the Internet

on

12, Feburary 2013,

Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing

friends and acquaintances

R.I.P.

N.B.—The body will be cremated and the

ashes taken to 4chan. Hasteur (talk) 22:30, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

The reality is that 90% of the problems are things that are under the (headless horsemen in this respect) "control" of the groupthink that runs the English Wikipedia. So Wikimedia can't fix most of them. It would take some leadership in the English wikipedia to fix it. And by "leadership: I don't mean imposing ideas on people, I mean taking them where they want to go. North8000 (talk) 03:18, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

• One thing that could probably be done quite easily, and without any help from WM, is to rewrite the instructions (including policies, guidelines, help pages, etc.) to make them clear and helpful to potential editors rather than the largely unfathomable and offputting trainwrecks that they tend to be. Experience shows, however, that there is huge resistance to any changes to these pages, among a certain group of established editors who don't seem to regard incomprehensibility as a problem even when it's pointed out. Victor Yus (talk) 09:24, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I find policies and guidelines are just something you need to learn like riding a bike or driving a car. You can read all the instruction manuals in the world, but the only way you'll really understand how things work is by getting involved and screwing up. And that's where Wikipedia falls down - I get really annoyed when newcomers, who've never had to deal with our policies, say "I like it!" at AfDs in good faith, and some snot nosed punk cries "OMG! WTF! Get lost, clueless meatpuppets!" Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 10:06, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a vicious, nasty place. It doesn't know that, and it doesn't understand why. You just gave one small good example. Actually, your meatpuppet example covers 2-3 of the ways that it is vicious. North8000 (talk) 10:28, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I agree with User:North8000 & User:Victor. There should be some attempt to centralise and coordinate the various and often contradictory policy documents into a coherent text. Likewise, I'd favour a simplification of the interminable levels of "process" which are supposed to police content and behaviour (having participated in a couple I'd also add that RFC/U can be particularly destructive opportunity for slandering and bullying editors). Aside from the vitriol and gameplaying that complex & often frankly incoherent levels of policy and process can facilitate, navigating that landscape is extremely difficult and takes a huge investment of time. That level of difficulty means that editors who are correct on content issues can be at a disadvantage to editors who have sufficient mastery of policy and process which they may use (willfully or not) to uphold erroneous positions. I also think that there should be a greater emphasis on policing edit quality rather than editor behaviour, but that would entail favouring expertise (if experts could be recruited); this might be especially useful in areas of ongoing conflict (Israel/Palestine; Falkland Islands/Maldives disupte; Race and Intelligence; etc.). FiachraByrne (talk) 11:38, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Also, the level of complexity currently governing interaction on Wikipedia suggests the over-riding importance of retaining productive (knowledgeable, non-tribal and non-gameplaying) longterm editors (be they content writers, wikignomes, bot operators, etc.). For a new editor to gain a comparable level of expertise on the operation of wikipedia (technical, political, social, writing norms, etc) could take a year or more. FiachraByrne (talk) 11:43, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I think that FiachraByrne hit the nail on the head the best of anybody so far. Both with respect to objectives and problems. On "retention objectives" I would add editors with expertise. North8000 (talk) 11:56, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

(ec) I have to say that I've only survived this long on Wikipedia because I can take criticism on the chin and just laugh when people tell me to fuck off to my face. On a number of occasions, other people have seen on-wiki conversations I've had and said things to the effect of "You gave a much better response than I did - I'd have told them to get stuffed and left". On the other side of the coin though, once you have got some experience with writing good articles and making good calls at AfD, it is very easy to get complacent and assume cluenessness without even thinking about it - this experience I had this week made me feel a right chump for reverting an edit by one of my favourite musicians. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:59, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

In looking at the dynamics of how (English) Wikipedia works, I have concluded that 1,000,000 words in forums will not cause it to be fixed. But I have also concluded that 5 (but 20 would be better) experienced editors actively working together could make immense transformations (like move any mountain) if they acted well. I'd be willing to try to organize something like that if some folks are interested. (???) North8000 (talk) 12:10, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

To organize what exactly?--Ymblanter (talk) 12:34, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Get >= 5 experienced or understanding people together, decide on what changes are needed to make Wikipedia less vicious, and then go to the places that the changes are needed and make them / get them made. North8000 (talk) 12:42, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Isn't that what that editor retention project is about? There are probably other "reform" projects too. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:38, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

This one would hopefully have a difference....the "W" option. (W = "Works") North8000 (talk) 14:44, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I may not be the best person to judge as once, a long time ago, I used to be a computer programmer, but is Wikipedia syntax really so difficult? There is always some hurdle to be overcome for new users of anything. If people are interested enough they will persevere. The two or three times I have tried to use Facebook I have found it utterly baffling, and yet millions, maybe billions of people apparently successfully use it every day. One thing that would help a lot, and for a lot less effort than a full WYSIWYG (do people still use that word) editor is colour coding in the edit window. I saw that proposed, and possibly even partially implemented, years ago, so why hasn't it been rolled out yet? 86.167.124.138 (talk) 14:32, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not dying

The notion that the number of editors needs to continually grow is not supportable. The truth is that probably the vast majority of articles get written once, receive fairly minor updates, and then mostly have to protected from vandalism and be subjected to maintenance when categories change or other mechanical updates need to be applied. The supply of people to write about things does eventually exceed the supply of things to write about, and it's not terribly surprising that we may have reached that point.

Likewise, I don't see the markup as being that big of an impediment. Most articles I see that have big markup issues also lack any kind of references and are like as not to be written in a style foreign to every other encyclopedia, and plenty of them get deleted because they do not address notable subjects or indeed sometimes cannot be puzzled out at all.

The places where Wikipedia may be "dying" are the perpetual political battlegrounds and the places that require subject expertise which may not intersect with the will to contribute, or which is driven away by well- or ill-meaning amateurs. These are both issues whose solution may and often does involve less participation, not more. Mangoe (talk) 14:17, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

How does this "dying" manifest in terms of the product (Wikipedia itself) as opposed to the labour force currently in use (editors)? Like the car industry, we've replaced a lot of tedious manual tasks with automated processes that make such a large labour force unnecessary. Continuing the literary conceit, what we need these days is more specialists to make expert contributions - in our case to enhance the quality of the articles that have been created during the days of mass participation. That said, I welcome each and every potential editor. --Dweller (talk) 14:21, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

• I agree. Wikipedia at this stage will progress not by increasing the quantity of its contributors but their quality, and by focusing on improving those areas that are underdeveloped due to systemic bias. Wikipedia should do more to attract expert editors and specifically in areas that are poorly covered. Whether Randy in Boise is dissapointed in wikipedia when someone reverts his skeleton theory is less important for the continued progress of wikipedia towards becoming not only a repository of large amounts of knowledge - but also an encyclopedia where the overall quality of coverage is not solely a function of what topics are of particular interest to male, socially dysfunctional American kids. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:57, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

(ec)So the question becomes... what can we do to attract such expert editors. and the specialists who can cover poorly covered areas? Blueboar (talk) 15:13, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I would suggest soliciting review articles from experts directly, like other encyclopedias do. However, because the wikiformat requires subsequent editing by others which most experts are unlikely to be comfortable with, probably what we should do would be to host the articles on an external site (e.g. commons or wikiquote or some such), where they will remain in their original form, but make sure that they are released in a form so that we can incorporate the text directly in to articles with attribution to the off-site text. The only requirement would be that the off-site repository be considered a reliable source and that they be released with no restrictions on reproduction. In that way we will be able to get good coverage and experts are less likely to be offended or disheartened by the editing process or to become engaged in disputes. I think many experts would be willing to do this since it will bring some prestige and visibility to them to have text cited freqeuently within the wikipedia article on their topic of expertise. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 15:31, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

This AfD is a good example of me getting annoyed with systematic bias and the general air of "If I can't prove notability, nobody can". Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 15:10, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes, AfDs like the one you point to can be annoying for the editors working on the article, but they are nothing new (we have had similar AfDs since the early days of Wikipedia). More importantly, they actually serve a useful purpose... The article was woefully under-sourced. Bringing the article to AfD highlighted that fact, and forced editors to look for sources in order to justify keeping the article... these sources can now be used to improve the article. In other words... such AfDs, as annoying as they might be in the short term, result in improving the article in the long term, and thus improving Wikipedia. Blueboar (talk) 16:08, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I take your point, but I think the cleanup happened despite the nominator, who made no edits other than the AfD nomination, and seemed more content on shouting "No sources! No sources! No sources!" a lot. Hey ho. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:36, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I've seen similar: Some one nominated an article for deletion as non-notable and containing many BLP violations. (This was the mayor of a major Australian city.) One Google search found the top five search results were newspaper articles substantially about the person, and that the person was dead. The subject was notable and the article was not a BLP violation. Often, people do a 2 weeks on Google news that shows up as the default and call it a day. No effort is made beyond that. Articles about Indonesians or Norwegians? Why should Indonesian and Norwegian newspapers be looked at? (And then if loads of sources are found, the newspapers are often belittled as minor and not usable for notability, even if the newspaper is the leading national newspaper in the country.) There really should be a check box that certifies a person nominating for AfD on any notability grounds has done a comprehensive search of sources before making the nomination. --LauraHale (talk) 17:20, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

This is correct, I intervene into AfD discussions on articles related to Russia on a regular basis. For instance, on the last occasion the article was AfDed because it stayed unsourced for five years. I managed to expand it using Russian language sources, and it is now on its way to be closed as keep. However, I can not do it for all articles, and there are many topics I am not competent or just not interested in.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:46, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Even with well-meaning editors, articles about subjects whose only sourcing comes from non-English sources represent an enormous difficulty for the encyclopedia, and even more so for cases where automated translation is not available (e.g., Urdu) or is pathetically, unusably bad (e.g., Thai.) The community and the Foundation have both made it clear that they are not, in the long run, comfortable with the prospect of indefinitely unsourced or poorly sourced biographies, and the spot that we're in, between the language issues and the biography issues is not an entirely comfortable one. The only thing that makes it better is the work of knowledgable editors competent in those languages being willing to go improve the articles before they're proposed for deletion, or to monitor and work on those that are nominated. (Which I've seen you do, thank you.) Yes, we need to address indefensible nominations, but those are, in my experience, a small fraction of this larger problem. --j⚛e decker^talk 18:05, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia is vicious and hostile to newer expert editors. I have been through that myself in areas where I write the sources that others are citing. I've also mentored some new expert editors who were about to bail. So how 'bout we start with stopping the beatings before we worry about getting more people to beat up? North8000 (talk) 15:59, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

In what way is Wikipedia "vicious and hostile"? Blueboar (talk) 16:08, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I once was overruled by two other editors who did not want to listen to what I was saying about my expert area (I am a full professor in a major university). The things I was referring to are textbook material. Then I just unwatched the page and walked out, since I obviously have more interesting things to do than quarreling with the people with little understanding of the research field. A vast majority (over 99%) of my edits are not related to my expert area.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:43, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Isn't Wikipedia sort of like your school job?..... Except (minor difference) you work for free and any two students can overrule you and any three students can get you banned from that classroom. That's all a part of the plan to retain expert editors. North8000 (talk) 19:35, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I left an article in a wreckage state in disgust in a field where I author sources that other people are citing. A really creepy person was following me around Wikipedia and fighting (vis wiki-lawyering) just for the sake of fighting. North8000 (talk) 18:53, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

• Way #1 In many arguments, the aggressive anti-social person wins, if they are wiki-saavy. This is a product that the rules (if taken rigorously) are more stringent than the reality of how things work, and the every person in Wikipedia is given a badge and a gun, and switch from reality to rigorousnesses if it serves a POV or pissing war. North8000 (talk) 18:01, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

That strikes me as a fairly odd argument since you seem to be suggesting that having fewer strict rules would make it easier for easy-going experts with little wiki-knowledge to stand up to aggressive anti-social people with no knowledge of the topic. I don't see how that would work. I think you are confusing two separate problems. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:10, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't think I was clear enough on what my core point was. When a policy is unrealistic to the point where the accepted practice and need is to technically violate it, you have a problem, everybody is vulnerable to getting smacked. And the remedy is simply to have the policies match the accepted norm.North8000 (talk) 03:03, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

• Way #2 In the real world a civic minded person who rallies to support causes is called a model, high-minded citizen. When they come to Wikipedia and do the same thing, they are called a meatpuppet. North8000 (talk) 18:05, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that allowing canvassing would make POV wars more easy to handle?·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:10, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

That's 2-3 questions and 1 implied premise in one. But on one of the them the answer is simple. Get rid of the awful word "meatpuppet"North8000 (talk) 18:26, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

• Way #3 It takes a few thousand edits before a person half understands how Wikipedia really works, and that it is an alternate universe compared to the real world. For example, that Albert Einstein couldn't write about relativity in Wikipedia unless they cited a work, but a grade school kid could if the cited a source. It takes them a while to learn this; until then they will try to operate like in the real world and and get beat up big time as a misbehaving editor.North8000 (talk) 18:24, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

This only works up to a point. I think the only time I've technically breached 3RR was when an IP kept adding unsourced stuff about someone being an alleged murder accomplice, and didn't understand why I kept reverting him. He wouldn't have understood WP:BLP, so I just pleaded with him to stop. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 19:52, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

• Wikipedia is structured so that gang warfare almost always wins, if the gang members are wiki-savvy. North8000 (talk) 18:29, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
• Way #4 Another example of the police state situation where the norm requires violating the rules and anybody can use that against you. If you make 2 edits anywhere on an article in one day you are violating 1 RR, and 4 edits anywhere on an article in on day you are violating 3RR. This is because nearly every edit is technically a "revert" even if it is to 5 year old material. North8000 (talk) 18:36, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
• Way #5 Rightly so you can't put material in from your expertise, but there is a persistent urban legend that any application of expertise (such as to leave out erroneous material) is illegitimate. North8000 (talk) 18:38, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
• Way #6 There are rules in Wikipedia against calling somebody a bad word, but not against making false and baseless accusations against them. So that is a common tactic. And a great way to beat them up with immunity. North8000 (talk) 18:40, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
• Way #7 Until you get very very very experienced, wiki-lawyering will always win against you. North8000 (talk) 18:48, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I echo User:North8000's sentiment 100%. I don't know how widespread POV-pushing Wiki-savvy editors are, but they WP:OWN most protoscience articles.

I have little idea what can be done about it, but the first step is admitting there's a problem. WykiP (talk) 00:23, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Blueboar said above that "So the question becomes... what can we do to attract such expert editors. and the specialists who can cover poorly covered areas?" I have a few answers at the moment: 1) start walking around Universities introducing professors to Wikipedia, and seeing if they might contribute or competently run a WP:AFSE. I've had two Skype meetings today, one with a graduate level class, and other with a Ph.D. in education (or something like that) at a big University. 2) Start academic journals/publishing, centered around productive Wikiprojects. O and maybe 3) this. 4) Institutional ambassadors/Wikimedians in residence. Such as this: college kids are looking for internships, why not start managing a volunteer internship program at a local, big-city newspaper to help a) Wikipedia improve and b) the publication get cited on Wikipedia, and c) claim credit for doing public outreach/eduction, instead of letting newspaper articles go to archives and forgotten. Or maybe a bright undergraduate could get an assignment from a local government agency, company, or organization to improve a Wikipedia article about an important concept that relates to the organization. A student or volunteer or intern or worker at CARE (relief agency) might get maternal health up to GA status. That kind of stuff. Biosthmors (talk) 19:44, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I know we have WP:Ambassadors to Universities. Let's have them to organizations and institutions without prejudice, as long as it is done in the open then experienced Wikipedians can monitor things for neutrality. Biosthmors (talk) 19:47, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

A metaphor

The construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System involved tens of thousands of people. An entire highway had to be built just to get the project started, then over 800 miles of pipe was laid across some very wild, inhospitable territory. Thirty-two people dies working on it.

Today the company that built and maintains the pipeline employs less than a thousand people. Why? Because the company was created for one sole purpose, to build a pipeline. The main part of that was done in 1977 and most of those workers went back home and found new jobs.

Semi-common bumper sticker in Alaska: "Lord, give me another pipeline, I promise I won't piss it away this time."

The wiki-pipe is laid. The pumping stations are running. Large, new discoveries of wiki-oil are unlikely.

</end metaphor>

A core group will always be needed to keep things running smoothly and some turnover is natural and desirable, but the days of needing thousands upon thousands of users solely to create content are basically over. There are certainly vast quantities of content in need of improvement, but there are at least stubs on just about anything you can think of, to the point where we're covering sandwich shops and small town mayors.

We should be less concerned with sheer numbers of new users and more concerned with the diversity of new recruits and the ability of the community to retain valued content contributors. En.Wikipedia is still largely white males from the "developed world". The content we don't have is the content that people not fitting that description are more likely to write. Things are being done at the Foundation level to encourage such persons, but I don't know how well we, as a community are doing at it. Rather than having "is the sky falling or isn't it" discussion about sheer numbers of users or successful RFAs we should be addressing these issues. Beeblebrox (talk) 04:01, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I like this analogy very much, but interpret it completely differently. When the pipeline was done, it was an FA class article and only minor tweeks were needed to keep it updated. On Wikipedia, every article is a pipeline. It takes tens, sometimes hundreds of people to get an article to FA class.

• It needs people to reseach it
• It needs people expand it
• It needs people add references
• It needs people organize it
• It needs people to format it to MOS standards
• It needs people to write high quality prose

Every FA class article has hudreds if not thosands of man-hours put in to it. And every Wikipedia article needs to get to FA class. This cannot be done by a small group of people. Getting 4 million articles to FA class is going to take a lot of people. If there is only a small group working on that, then the goal won't be reached for thousands of years. And in a thousand years there won't be just 4 million articles. This type of massive undertaking can only be done by large groups of people and the more the project expands, the more people are needed to make a decent encyclopedia. If we continue to have a dwindling number of editors, then our quality will be as poor as it is now, with only a fraction of a percent of FA class articles and 99%+ of low quality articles. Here's the basic question;

• How many man-hours of effort will it take to get 4 million articles to FA class?

This question puts everything in to perspective. 64.40.54.22 (talk) 10:25, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

You would also have to get all those people to buy into FA process and issues and review. Which seems unlikely, unless you find a huge group of people that think pretty much the same about all that and indoctrinate them into it. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:42, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, I did a very rough calculation and reworked a familiar table from WP:1.0. I listed the experience required to work n a class of article and the number of hours it would take to get that article to the next class. This tells us how much work we need by the differnt experience levels.

Quality	Articles	Effort to next class	Total	Experience required
FA	4,363
FL	1,788
A	1,157
GA	17,604	50 hrs.	880,200 hrs.	300 hrs.
B	85,496	50 hrs.	4,274,800 hrs.	200 hrs.
C	139,077	15 hrs.	2,086,155 hrs.	100 hrs.
Start	936,324	10 hrs.	9,363,240 hrs.	10 hrs.
Stub	2,264,053	1 hr.	2,264,053 hrs.	1 hr.
List	109,715
Assessed	3,559,577
Unassessed	479,893
Total	4,039,470

This is a very rough calculation and is completely inaccurate. But it gives a rough idea of how many people we need to be working on the project and the different levels of experience required to work at each level. I think this shows that we could easily use the efforts of 50,000 new users. 64.40.54.22 (talk) 11:34, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

50,000 volunteers who all think the same about those things? Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:41, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

50,000 inexperienced users to work on stub articles to get them to at least start class. Almost anything done to stub is an improvement (except outright vandalism). It would seem to be a worthy goal to at least have any article over a year old to be at least start class. In my humble opinion anyway. 64.40.54.22 (talk) 13:05, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Just adding, I think having 2+ million stub articles is kind of a disgrace for a project that's been around for more than 10 years. Just my opinion. 64.40.54.22 (talk) 13:10, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Seems reasonable but they would actually need to be experienced enough to know what is a stub and what a start is and have the topic/knowledge skills to source, etc., and then it only get harder and more conflicted as you go up the (somewhat arbitrary?) ladder. At present, it's not uncommon to run across articles and think (how was that graded? and does it matter?) -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:17, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a volunteer organization, and volunteers will only contribute to articles on topics that interest them. This is why popular topics now have relatively solid articles while less popular topics are still in the stub stage... with the popular topics, lots of people were interested in the topic and cared enough about it to add information, find sources, work on language, etc. With less popular topics, few people are interested, and few really care enough about them to research and improve the article.

So... simply recruiting lots of new editors is not going to be enough to solve the perma-stub issue. Most of the recruits will quickly go to the articles on the popular topics (which are now relatively complete) and say... "hmmm, nothing for me to do here"... and leave.

We need to find a way to recruit editors who are actually interested in working on obscure (less interesting) topics (since these are the articles that most need improvement)... either that or we need to recruit editors who are willing to be assigned articles to research and edit (which is unlikely). Blueboar (talk) 15:14, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Also, many of the articles on difficult (technical, scholarly, legal etc) topics have plateaud out and we need experts that can develop them further. North8000 (talk) 15:23, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

True. Although there does seem to be a subset that are intent on creating an article and running it up that flag pole/gauntlet to its top. Which, is nice for them and generally for the pedia, if that floats their boat. The Project drives for a particular article also got some play, at one point. I wonder if anyone has studied the successes/failures of the Project drives. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:35, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Actually, already finding people who speak languages and are able to search for sources in these languages would be a good achievement. My estimate is that the activities here I am involved with, at least with the current pace, will be sufficient to keep me busy for the rest of my life.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:38, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I would not assume that there are this many stubs. A very quick, small sample of the Maryland articles showed that those I looked at were all at least start class, with one borderline stub. Possibly the message here is that nobody wants to go and assess a few million articles. Mangoe (talk) 15:53, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Some estimates I did a while back suggests that conservatively at least 25% of stubs should be rated higher (and probably a nontrivial fraction of start). Part of the issue is that there's no easy way to date ratings - so it's not apparent when they go obsolete - and most people's workflow doesn't extend to updating them. Andrew Gray (talk) 16:41, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I think that this illustrates two of my pet peeves.....it seems that the only time we take a hard look at the status quo, the only lens/objective we use is quantity of editors. And the second is that only two choices are:

1. The sky is falling
2. The status quo is just fine

With no choice for the in-between reality. I tend to think that the problem is that it has plateaud out, with the two biggest problems being:

• The articles requiring expertise to take to the next level often aren't progressing
• The contentious articles are in permanent junk-article status

North8000 (talk) 17:09, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Just to throw another example in the mix, you'd have thought there wouldn't be that much work to do on Pink Floyd anymore, what with that article, and several others, reaching FA and GA status. But then I was presented with this list and noticed there was actually a substantial amount of work to be done, just most of it's tricky and requires offline sources, which requires more determination and interest. I might buy or borrow a book to read, and use it for sourcing on here if it's reliable, but I'm not sure I'd specifically go out and do that for a topic I didn't have great interest to start with. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:28, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Yup... There is still a lot of work for editors to do... the question is, is anyone willing to do it? I think so... but a lot of what needs to be done is difficult and somewhat boring, and this means we do need to accept that Wikipedia will not attract the kind of numbers we used to get. Blueboar (talk) 18:32, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Also, the point here is that this sort of work doesn't create content. Mangoe (talk) 20:49, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Why do you think so? Usually, it does. Very few people dig out off-line sources and sources in foreign language just to add them to the articles, usually they expand articles as well.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:09, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant to respond to earlier remarks. Sure, some big topics can continue to accrue info. But the stats on assessment don't show that. If the reason that we appear to have so many stubs is because most of them actually would assess out higher, we don't get more content by fixing that. And I have to wonder how attractive it is to new editors to slog through a list of articles simply to assess them. Mangoe (talk) 22:02, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia - "The encyclopedia where anyone can assess articles and do other background administrative tasks!" that will get them signing up in droves! Blueboar (talk) 22:26, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Well, it seems that there are at least a dozen people who do care. And another dozen who say that they don't care because everything is fine and there is nothing to care about. 8-(. Some random comments:

• "All important inventions have been invented and now we need only systematize what we know." I gather that was the opinion of a famous Roman engineer two millennia ago. The claim that "Wikipedia is naturally slowing down because has matured" is flatly denied by the 2.2 million stubs and millions of red links. In some area like biology and chemistry the scope for new articles is nearly infinite, and there are millions of people who could contribute new articles on topics that they care about and are not covered yet. Why aren't they doing so?
• It seems that a major cause of the problem is precisely the refusal, by many of the "people in charge", to acknowledge that the problem exists. Perhaps because they are afraid that the cause may turn out to be what they have been doing all along?
• It is undeniable that editing wiki code now is much less pleasant today than it was 8 years ago. The basic syntax did not change, but the templates, rules, and the standard article format have become forbidding. For example, the rule against linking to a disamb forces the editor to check every link he types; and then turn any one that happens to be a disamb into a pipe. So a sentence that before could be written in 5 seconds may now take 10 minutes -- to an experienced editor. And that is just one tiny example in a thousand problems.
• To an editor, it makes no difference whether a feature is implemented as a template or in the low-level engines; it is all "wikisource syntax" to him. So every new template effectively adds complexity to the wiki source. I have seen hundreds of templates, and can think of only one that is actually good: the {{chem}} template for chemical formulas. Over 99% of the templates out there certainly do far more harm than good, and should be deleted. Templates should be created only by the Wikimedia foundation, and only when really, really needed (say, a new one every five years).
• Obviously it is much easier to create a new template than to get rid of it once it has been used in a hundred articles. Therefore, under the current "self-policing" policy, templates will only keep proliferating, no matter how harmful they are. The same goes for most other features, including "wikipedia policies" and style rules.
• Beware of tools that will make life easier only for the editors who use them. For example, there is a robo-vandal out there that turns plain <ref>...</ref> citations into <ref>{{cite...}}</ref> templates. That replacement only makes a messy wikisource even messier, with no benefit whatsoever to the reader. Yet the person driving that robot seem unable to understand the harm he is doing to wikipedia; presumably because he has a nice tool interface, that does not show him the mess he is creating. So, will that wysiwyg editor be used by absolutely everybody? Will it produce clean readable wikisource, or will it turn it into absolutely uneditable machine code (like Inkscape does to SVG files)?

All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 23:41, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, one more thing:

• The article assessment mechanism may be also part of the problem. For one thing, it does not actually improve Wikipedia, and does not actually increase the total amount of editor-hours that get contributed to the project; all it can do is to redistribute that scarce resource among articles. Is that a good thing? I suspect that it tends to concentrate the work on the articles that least need it, instead of encouraging people to fill the "holes" by starting new articles. Moreover, its definition of what is a "good article" seems to include length as the main criterion. That is having a terrible effect on Wikipedia; it encourages people to write lengthy and messy all-in-one monographs or book chapters instead of many short and clear single-topic encyclopedia articles. And yet even the Featured Articles are often very poor by the standards of journals. The assessment machinery seems to be yet another "feature" of Wikipedia that lost sight of the project's ultimate goal and exists only for the sake of old-time editors. Has anyone bothered to check whether there is any correlation between the assessed quality of an article and its usefulness to readers? Or which articles would yield the best return (usefulness to readers) on investment (editing work)? --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 00:46, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

User:Ritchie333/How newbies see templates Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 00:21, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Making a list

Did we ever make that list of all the discussions like this over the years? If so, can someone give me the link? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:02, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Are interlanguage links unnecessary now?

Have the interlanguage links been made redundant by the introduction of Wikidata? They all seem to appear to the left of the article even if they're deleted from the wikicode (at least in previews). Can they be removed from the code now?--eh bien mon prince (talk) 01:49, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

If they still don't exist in the wikicode, how will Wikidata know about the interlanguage links? Will we need to go to wikidata to create them from now on? That wouldn't make any sense. In addition, how will we address issues in the future where interlanguage links are incorrect? Ryan Vesey 02:14, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

IL links can be edited normally. All Wikidata does is store all of them in the same place. And there shouldn't be incorrect links anymore due to that. Yes, you will need to go to Wikidata to create/edit them. There are a few exceptions of course. --Izno (talk) 03:46, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

That's incredibly annoying, where can I find out more about this? Will they be creating a way to modify Wikidata by proxy from Wikipedia? Ryan Vesey 03:49, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm glad I'm not the only one that's confused. I asked some questions this morning at WP:HD#Wikidata. There is some information at WP:AN#Wikidata deployed to the English Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by David Biddulph (talk • contribs) 03:59, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

... and the answer to your specific question on how to edit the Wikidata is that there is a link labelled "Edit links" at the bottom of the list of language links. Interestingly, if I use this page (VPP) as an example that link doesn't find a relevant Wikidata page, but for most pages with iw links it will lead you to the relevant Wikidata page. - David Biddulph (talk) 06:11, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T46985

Something seems to be broken with the non-mainspace links, but for mainspace articles it should work as long as the item exists. I'm told that a JavaScript tool will be installed locally to allow links to be added, but it (as well as much of the Wikidata site) is under construction. --Rschen7754 06:19, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Reported to bugzilla. Thanks, Legoktm (talk) 06:31, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

@Ryan: The whole point of wikidata is a central database, as opposed to having langlinks split up across all projects, and then using an army of bots to transfer them from project to project. Legoktm (talk) 06:33, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I didn't realize how easy it would be to modify. I just picked a random article and checked the page [6]. I was under the impression that you'd have to dive into some data dump like thing to modify things. This should solve a ton of problems where we have articles with an incorrect interlanguage links that bots edit war to restore. Ryan Vesey 15:04, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

To go back to the original question, can the interlanguage links on wikipedia (those like [[fr:Example]]) be removed now?--eh bien mon prince (talk) 14:53, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes, if and only if the Wikidata item exists. If not, its advised you create it yourself using some of the scripts available on Wikidata (d:WD:Tools). Its possible that an interwiki bot may revert you, however we've messaged all bot owners, who have 24h to update their scripts. Legoktm (talk) 15:00, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

However, it would be good not just removing them all in once, contaminating the watchlists, but doing it gradually, when one edits an article for whatever purpose, also to remove the interwiki links.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:35, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

As above, there's no urgent need to remove them, so you may as well leave them be unless you're doing some other tidying up, and they'll get removed in time. One important caveat is that the FA/GA link templates are not yet included in Wikidata, so these need to be left in place even if the interwikis themselves are removed. Andrew Gray (talk) 15:52, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I made a start of a description page for Wikipedia at WP:Wikidata. People are welcome to improve it! --Izno (talk) 16:19, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Subpages don't appear to be disabled

I just created Test/test.

But Wikipedia:Subpages says that subpages are disabled in the main namespace.

I was about to update the Wikipedia:Tip of the day/February 19 ("When to use subpages"), which states that they are disabled. But when I tried to create a subpage, it worked.

What is going on? The Transhumanist 04:25, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Do you see any note below the title like on Talk:9/11? If not, then there is no subpage, but rather a title with a slash in it. Chris857 (talk) 04:32, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Didn't think of looking for the back link. Thank you. The Transhumanist 05:20, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Subpages are enabled in every namespace but the article namespace. --Izno (talk) 04:57, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Probably a dumb question, but why can't we have subpages in the article namespace? That would help avoid awkwardly titled forks and articles that are de facto subpages already (filmographies, list of television series episodes, etc.). Evanh2008 ^{(talk|contribs)} 05:06, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

They're cumbersome (they can result in super long titles). And awkward when an article could have two parents, but back links to just one. The Transhumanist 05:20, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

WP:Subpages should give you the background. --Izno (talk) 13:21, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

It is a sub page but it isn't really a sub page. It isn't disabled so that we can have titles with slashes in them. If you make a real sub page it will be deleted. 84.106.26.81 (talk) 12:13, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

More to the point, I think: it is disabled so that we can have titles with slashes in them (without the pages with those titles being treated as subpages). As noted above, in the Talk: space this isn't corrected, so Talk:9/11 is treated as a subpage of Talk:9. Victor Yus (talk) 12:53, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

One of the absolutely genial ideas of Wikipedia was the flat article name space. It saves people from the temptation of organizing articles into trees. Articles should be linked by wikilinks, and each should stand on its own; no topic should be declared "sub-topic" of another.
Facts, things, people, and ideas do not have a tree structure. Our compulsion to hammer them into trees may be the best proof yet that Darwin was right... 8-) --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 23:55, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Do "plot summaries" get a pass from WP:Verifiability core policy?

I was not previously aware that a plot summary for a fictional work, described on Wikipedia, has a special dispensation and need not follow standard Wikipedia policy on verifiability and original research. I was so informed by an editor on this matter about a month ago, on the Talk page here: Talk:The_Sword_of_Shannara#Sources_for_claims_in_the_plot_summaries.

Once that editor gained consensus support for that position, I backed away and accepted that as the consensus for that particular article, with respect to plot summaries. That was about a month ago. It seemed a bit odd, but I did not follow up to see about WP policy for plot summaries in general. But now, I'd like to see about that concept more generally.

My question here is broader: Is it really the case that there is a WP guideline or WP policy somewhere that documents this as a general policy for plot summaries? Something that says Wikipedia editors may freely write plot summaries for fictional works without regard to WP:V, WP:OR and WP:RS? If so, can someone please point me to that policy or guideline. Thanks. N2e (talk) 00:44, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Plot summaries is simply the worst areas on Wikipedia by far - So bad there have been news article written about them over the years. For some odd reason they are ok with OR in them.Moxy (talk) 00:50, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

We don't accept OR in plot summaries, and that's never been the case. Yes, they are "unsourced" but the assumption on plot summaries is that the work itself is the source required for WP:V. If one can find sources beyond the work to support the plot summary, that would be great to add them too. It is also not a bad idea to drop "placeholder" references to the primary work to help guide where actions are taking place if the work is long enough, but these are far from required.

That said, as outlined at WP:WAF plot summaries must not attempt intepretion or synthesis from the primary work. If a character's motive is not clear, we can't fill in that gap in writing it. We can summarize appropriately, but that's it. If one sees synthesis - in other words what is not easily apparent from a causal first read of the work - that needs to be marked and tagged and removed appropriately. --MASEM (t) 00:54, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Plot summaries most definitely do need to pass WP:Verifiability and WP:NOR. A proper plot summary will stick to purely descriptive (non-OR) statements that are verifiable by the work itself (thus passing both policies). It is important to note the difference between plot summary and plot analysis (or analytical commentary about the plot). Analysis needs to be supported by a secondary source. It is also important to note information can be verifiable without actually having a source cited in the article. In the case of plot summaries, we can assume that the citation is to the work itself, and therefor there is no need to actually include a citation in the article. Blueboar (talk) 01:06, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Plot summaries can be nightmares in numerous ways; generally (especially with less-known literature), the book is the only possible source for much of the information. Content writing standards, of course, always apply, no matter the subject. dci | TALK 01:38, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Actually, if what you say is true than plot summaries get a dispensation from WP:V standards for inline citation. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 02:05, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm basically echoing what Blueboar said above. dci | TALK 02:06, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

WP:V doesn't require an inline citation for everything, and never has. See WP:MINREF for the actual minimum requirements. WP:V requires that it must be possible for a sufficiently motivated and sufficiently resourced editor to provide a citation if necessary. It does not require that any be added except in three specific, defined instances (and BLP adds a fourth instance). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:11, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

For everything? No, and that's not what was said. The Policy standards for inline citation are laid out in WP:unsourced in WP:V. Where the dispensation comes in is that apparently, it is a priori rule that there is nothing likely to be challenged in plots, which is not how we treat any other text. That's fine (and apparently its felt there is good reason for that), but it's not like it's riskless, because with other text we ask editors to be aware of the likely to be challenged and to inline cite (so they focus on getting detail right) but the plot writer writes under the assumption that no cite is needed blowing past all that. (And one just hopes that does not turn into people arguing it can't be challenged and settled in the normal way). Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:34, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I think the issue is that a plot summary should be of the same nature as a statement like "the sky is blue". Many articles need a plot summary, and it is not feasible to restrict them to fully verified text, although the text shold be verifiable in principle, and should follow normal rules regarding things like WP:DUE. An unusual claim in a plot summary should be removed, and there should be an explanation or reference to justify reinclusion. If the level of referencing wanted for article text were required for plot summaries, we would either have very few summaries, or we would have a lot of copyvios where a published review had been plagiarised. Johnuniq (talk) 02:12, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

A plot summary (which has only "descriptive statements", and not "interpretation", in the language of WP:NOR), can be cited to the work in question. There is no exception about the requirement for citations - if someone really complains, then we can just add a citation to the work itself, which is acceptable as a primary source for purely descriptive statements. Now, in practice, the source is so obvious that people may not bother adding the citation, but if anyone wants to be fussy it can be added very easily. It would be silly to remove a descriptive plot summary merely because no source was cited - just add the source... — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:14, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

What happens when someone says a plot summary is wrong and there is a disagreement? In the non plot case, a citation would be the way to settle it. Alanscottwalker (talk) 02:19, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Do the same thing you would do it the obvious citation was added: read the book or watch the movie and find out. This is no different than what would happen if people disagreed about whether a non-plot citation was accurate. The key point is that that citation itself is not what verifies correctness - it is the act of checking the citation that verifies it. A citation is only the means to verification, it does not verify anything by its mere presence. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:23, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

No. In a normal citation we require a page number, so we definitely do not say, oh somewhere in that book it says that. Alanscottwalker (talk) 02:28, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Right, but the prerequisite for having any credibility when editing an article about a book or movie is... reading the book or watching the movie. If you haven't done that you are in no position to "challenge" the plot summary in the first place. If you still think that something is not in the book after reading it, raise it for discussion on the talk page of the article. The first step in source based research is the RTFS: read the source first. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:31, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, if it wasn't clear, we're talking about a disagreement between people who have read the book. Alanscottwalker (talk) 02:39, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that is not what I was thinking of. If someone has read the book, and they didn't see something, they should ask on the talk page (as part of AGF) and then, if nobody can satisfy their doubt, they should remove the claim from the article after a reasonable wait (at least a few days). So for things that are uncontroversial - because everyone who reads the book agrees - we don't force citations to be added. But if someone reads the book and can't find a claim, then they are justified in asking about it. The same is true even for claims that do have a citation. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:44, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

And do remember that if there's ambiguity and parts open to interpretation, one can simply give a little more detail to explain that something is ambiguous. For instance, if the fate of Character X is left ambiguous, once could say something along the lines of "the book does not clarify the fate of character X, only stating her pack was found three days later" (and if a reliable source puts the evidence together and reaches a conclusion, you could cite that source for more information). Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 03:24, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

There is no required format for citations. If I write that the final scene in Mystery Movie X reveals that the butler did it, that is a citation. Jc3s5h (talk) 02:32, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

• Assuming the Butler did do it, yes. Featured and good articles on films and novels (like Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, Atheis, Ruma Maida, and Mother India) have the plot summary sourced (but not cited) to the work in question. If a direct quotation is provided, like at Frank's Cock, then a citation should be given. Otherwise, no. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 02:57, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

If you think a plot summary is inaccurate, it is perfectly acceptable to rewrite it... to make it more accurate. If someone objects... or reverts your rewrite, go to the talk page and discuss it. Challenge the accuracy of the plot summary on the talk page. You can say something like... "Our plot summary says the Butler did it... but I read the book, and on page 345 it actually says that the maid did it... did I miss something? Is our plot summary accurate? Could someone give me the page in the book where it says that the butler did it?" Blueboar (talk) 14:57, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

As the editor who kicked off this active conversation a half-day ago, I'm still interested in two specific questions:

• Is there a WP guideline or WP policy re WP:V/WP:RS/WP:NoOriginalResearch and plot summaries? Is there somewhere that documents what I read as the general view of the commenters above: for plot summaries, it is "okay to assume the source is the book/film/work" as a general policy, and no citation is generally required, etc.? And furthermore, it is okay for the Original Research to be done by the readers of the book or the viewers of the film, who then come over, as Wikipedia editors, to write the plot summary on Wikipedia? And perhaps that, as one commenter stated above, it would then not be acceptable for any Wikipedia editor who has not read the book (or seen the film, etc.) to request a citation since only the small circle of fans for that work can have a say in what Wikipedia has to say about that particular plot summary.
• When a dispute arises on a Talk page of a particular fictional work related to Verifiability/OriginalResearch issues, where would be the place to request comment, where one might find a mix of WP editors who perhaps have opinions on both sides of the verifiability debate, but to help bring in other editors who are not merely fans of the particular fictional work in question.

— Cheers. N2e (talk) 15:41, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

• • It's been long in practice but I know I couldn't find any policy that I can point to that says "the work is implicitly the source for plot summary". But very few question that.
  • I think you're confusing "lack of sourcing" for "original research", in general. Summarizing any source without introducing OR is standard practice for all editing, writing a plot summary is no different. The argument that only a small number of editors that have read the work can have a say exists for any topic where the source may be difficult to get but still available (meeting WP:V). Verifiability is met as long as the work has been published.
  • If the talk page of an article about the work cannot resolve the summary issues, standard dispute process resolution steps should be taken. But the talk page should always be the first step. --MASEM (t) 15:58, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
• "Is there a WP guideline or WP policy re WP:V/WP:RS/WP:NoOriginalResearch and plot summaries? Is there somewhere that documents what I read as the general view of the commenters above: for plot summaries" The guideline for film (Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Film#Plot) states;

Since films are primary sources in their articles, basic descriptions of their plots are acceptable without reference to an outside source.

I don't know the others off the top of my head, but there was one guideline that said the infobox for the article was to be considered the citation for the plot section, or something like that. 64.40.54.4 (talk) 17:44, 15 February 2013 (UTC)