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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 66.11.171.90 (talk) at 04:30, 4 April 2020 (→Recent Deaths List). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Click here to nominate an item for In the news. In the news toolbox

Template: In the news/special-header

We have two excellent FAs offering a beginners' introduction to viruses: Introduction to viruses and Social history of viruses. Would it make sense to add them to Template:In the news/special-header?

It would look like this:

Pinging the author Graham Beards; also SandyGeorgia, Wehwalt, Casliber, and Masem who created the template. I know there are plans to make the articles TFA too, but they could remain pinned to In the news anyway. SarahSV (talk) 05:44, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fearing that's starting to dilute that header banner. That should be a quick link for immediate information directly related to COVID-19, the spread, and effects. Now, I am aware we want people who are trying to learn more to be able to learn more. I could see those being added to both the {{2019–20 coronavirus pandemic sidebar}} (as a new "Background" section) and to the Portal:Coronavirus disease 2019 (adding some big bold links in Section 4 for those). That is -- and I haven't scanned all the COVID pages yet -- to know at what point does WP's coverage step back to talk basic facts of viruses and contagious spreads and so forth. I just don't think off the ITN page is the right place. --Masem (t) 06:26, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
On the one hand, I'm all for educating people during these times. On the other, it begs the question of whether Virus itself should be be made accessible like Introduction to viruses, or be flat out usurped by it.—Bagumba (talk) 06:55, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Added to portal. Kingsif (talk) 14:27, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Kingsif, thanks for doing that. Bagumba, readers will know to type in "virus" if they want to read that page. They won't know about Introduction to viruses. That was my thinking. It's a fascinating article: entry-level and well-written. SarahSV (talk) 02:00, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

COVID-19 banner still needed?

Given that the foundation has seen fit to put a gigantic banner about COVID-19 at the top of every single article on the site, can we remove the banner from ITN and go back to having it look normal? --LaserLegs (talk) 19:33, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see such banner, I think it only applies to non-logged in readers. --Masem (t) 19:49, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
And unless the WMF have changed the cookie settings very recently, it's only displayed once to each reader. ‑ Iridescent 19:53, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I can now only see it when using private browsing. ---Sluzzelin talk 20:14, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think logged in users can suppress it - I browse mostly in private so I see it a lot. If y'all wanna leave it then fine, but I saw the jarring WMF banner and thought maybe that's enough --LaserLegs (talk) 20:17, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Recent Deaths List

Given that there are an increased number of notable deaths from COVID-19 and there seems to be space for it, could the active list be increased from the current size of 6, to say 10? - Indefensible (talk) 21:42, 25 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Bottom of the list currently is March 18, so they are staying up for around a week after their death right now. Probably not necessary yet, but perhaps will be in the future. Kees08 (Talk) 22:27, 25 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Usually it takes a few days for a nomination to get through though. E.g. Catherine Hamlin is the current last one, but she was not posted until the 21st, so she's really only been up for 4 days. It looks like the queue is filling up, so I expect people to be replaced faster as well. Having more spaces would let them stay on the list longer. - Indefensible (talk) 22:36, 25 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
We've already got the giant COVID-19 banner, another row of RDs is going to cost another blurb. Do we really want that? --LaserLegs (talk) 12:34, 26 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Not specifically reserved for COVID-19 deaths, just that the rate of notable deaths is going to increase because of COVID-19. - Indefensible (talk) 15:43, 26 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Right but my point still stands: a third row of RDs for any reason costs another blurb. --LaserLegs (talk) 16:04, 26 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
We can use the 2nd line which is mostly empty space right now, it may not require using a 3rd line. Also, isn't the ITN box overall responsive, so it will just push the whole column down if a line is added? Should not be that big of a deal I would think. - Indefensible (talk) 19:30, 26 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This one is quite easy to resolve. I suggested something similar here about two weeks ago, on the basis of the sheer numbers of WP pages devoted to people who had been in some way significant within their field, and, almost by definition, their ages -- essentially, within most fields, one tends to become more significant within one's field as one grows older. Simply add "C-19 deaths" to the COVID-specific banner between "Impact" and "Portal", and reserve that space for COVID-specific deaths. Suddenly your regular RD will be quite manageable. Personally, I would suggest not being worried about whether a given death for that page becomes stale: this would be a growing list, not a ticker, so staleness (and, I would suggest, article quality) would be irrelevant for *this* list specifically -- there is no way everyone can keep up, and the specific person's page is not front-paged. This btw would make it easier for non-COVID RDs to be posted to the ticker before they become stale and they would remain on the ticker longer -- and in RD the regular emphasis on article quality would continue to be enforced. Also, don't be surprised if that section gets *heavy* traffic -- people looking for politicians, celebrities, sports figures (which suggests a way of organizing that page) ... - Tenebris 66.11.171.90 (talk) 13:43, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This issue is now more apparent, with the RD postings flying by in the past 12 hours or so, and at least 2 Ready nominations missed. It does look like the list was expanded from 6 to the current 7, but further expansion should be considered again, either with a simple extension or a separate COVID list as proposed by Tenebris above. - Indefensible (talk) 18:27, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Except -- few of these are COVID related. (At least, they're not dying from COVID. Maybe their health care is disrupted due to COVID stressing the system, leading to their deaths, but that's speculation). We just had a bunch of deaths around the same time. --Masem (t) 18:29, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
And just to make sure I wasn't dreaming, the numbers from the last 5 days, deaths directed tied to COVID: 3.24: 2 of 8, 3.25: 1 of 5, 3.26: 4 of 10, 3.27, 1 of 5, and 3.28, 1 of 4 , or a total of 9 of 32. (this assumes all RDs are good RDs). So maybe a notch under 30% but not close to 50%, which would be where I would even consider drawing the line of making the distinction. We just have had a run of of a lot of RDs in the last week. --Masem (t) 18:41, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
25% would be a significant increase, even if it does not meet a 50% threshold would it not make sense for a 25% increase in notable deaths to have a proportional 25% increase in RD space? It is not like the change to the frontpage's format would be difficult either. Alternatively, the RD list could just be removed and replaced with a link to the deaths in 2020 page, similar to the link for other recent events. - Indefensible (talk) 19:21, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
My point was not so much about the COVID side, but the total number of deaths reported. I go back a month and over a 5 day period ending Feb 28, we have 14 RDs nominated; a month before that, 12 over a similar 5 day period. We nearly doubled that without COVID deaths here. The last several days is a statistical happenstance that a lot of notable people died. It happened at the same time as the mass spread of COVID, but there's no evidence that that's linked (Correlation without causation). Thus at this point, there's no need to do anything.
Assuming that we add 8 COVID deaths a week to 14 regular RD deaths (what seems to be the baseline, roughly 2 RDs a day), we're basically adding 1 RD a day to the process, which is not going to stress ITNC nor the template. If those numbers shift drastically, then we can discuss alternatives. --Masem (t) 20:43, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

As I noted in my edit summary on the ITN template and at the RD nomination itself, I decided to add the seventh RD and was hoping to see it up for at least a few hours, ideally a day. There are more ahead of it that are almost ready, so maybe we should expand to 8 for just a bit and see how that goes? I don't really care either way, RD (IMO) is mostly an incentive to get folks to update and source articles, so if we can keep the incentive there and get more articles improved, that seems like the best option. Relatively indifferent, and if anyone wants to remove the seventh RD I posted they can. Kees08 (Talk) 20:49, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The seventh entry makes for a bulky 4th row of RDs on my phone. I'm OK with it as a one-off IAR.—Bagumba (talk) 01:41, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to add only to make it easy to track for a week or so for RDs if deaths were related to COVID or not (with the assumption if the RSes don't spell out why the person died, it was not COVID related). Only to help decide what might need to be next steps. This is not meant at this point to alter how the RD should be processed, nor do I expect this to be a long-term factor. --Masem (t) 20:53, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Or: Shelter in place could be providing editors the opportunity to nominate and improve more RDs.—Bagumba (talk) 00:29, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  • I don't think we can make a distinction between COVID and non-COVID deaths; if someone needs a ventilator but can't access one because COVID patients are using them all, that death falls in a middle grey zone. In my opinion however, I think that a third line for RD is too many; there's a balance between featuring deaths on the template but a third line I think takes up too much space. We do link to "Deaths in 2020" already in the template as well. SpencerT•C 01:40, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep the RD list at six entries. One of the main arguments for dropping the significance criterion for RD a few years ago was that we would never need more than three entries; that has already been doubled to six. Increasing it further would be a gradual takeover of the ITN box by RDs - we need to draw the line somewhere. If six slots isn't enough to keep up with the current criteria for RD, we should be looking at re-imposing a significance requirement, not devoting yet more space on the MP to minor figures. Modest Genius talk 11:23, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think we might have to get to the point where, if a person's recent death is COVID-related, we might need to push them off into a separate link or ticker out of the ITN box. I suspect the rate of RDs might ramp up really soon, and it'll become a daunting task just to try and keep up with them all.--WaltCip (talk) 13:23, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would prefer that entries are displayed in the order that they are promoted, so they all had a fair share of main page time. With the flood in recent nominations, some RDs are falling off in a matter of minutes while others still remain for several days. This imbalance is caused by the almost arbitrary order that they are promoted by an admin. As long as they are all within the last 7 days, then I don't think the order of death of particularly important — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:24, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    I think that kind of reduces the element of recent deaths, I think an added consideration of keeping items on for a minimum of 24 hours on the Main Page is the most simple (and easy to implement). ----qedk (t 心 c) 13:33, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    I think it's reasonable to allow an extra entry if it hasn't been up at least near 24hrs.—Bagumba (talk) 13:53, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Agree with Martin, this is definitely an issue currently. "Recent" is subjective and a semantic issue, but is a week not "recent" enough? If not, what is the point of allowing the candidates page to run for a week? If entries nominated at the bottom of the still active list of candidates are just going to be marked as "stale" and excluded right away, then there is no point in even letting the list run that long. - Indefensible (talk) 20:07, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Those ratios won't stay there. It took from January to now to reach a million worldwide reported cases; it will take less than two weeks to reach 2 million, and in that same time the number of reported COVID-19 deaths will triple, if not quadruple. Things will change, are already changing; and they will change quickly ... possibly more quickly than ITN editors will be prepared to deal with at that time. Some may no longer be able to post, hopefully temporarily; but the online world cannot know what has become of them, except in their silence. - Tenebris 66.11.171.90 (talk) 21:05, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

ITN (like the rest of WP) is not a memorial. We only track death that 1) have been reported in the news and 2) have quality articles. If the news itself is able to keep up with so many notable deaths and editors do keep quality , then we'll figure out how to post all those. --Masem (t) 21:26, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Did you think what I said had anything to do with WP being a "memorial"? I say what I say simply so that planning ahead is possible, rather than something that gets "figured out" later. In two weeks, the U.S. will optimistically have somewhere in the range of 1 million cases -- how many WP editors and administrators do you think that will affect? - Tenebris 66.11.171.90 (talk) 21:30, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Approximately 1 in 327 Americans, or 1 in 200 American adults, so you could assume the same ratio would carry over. Stephen 23:18, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Actually far more than that. You are thinking purely in terms of case-to-population ratio. (Btw the ratio does not carry over: both children and older seniors would be underrepresented among WP editors -- but current research suggests that half of all hospitalizations are for people 40 and under.) You are not adding in the effects on family, roommates, people with aggravated housebound illness not associated with COVID (but no room in hospitals -- did you know mastectomies are being considered elective surgery for this purpose?) ... the list goes on. And in the U.S. specifically, a constant underlying factor is previously untreated or undertreated comorbidities, because uninsured. Nearly all those people newly unemployed just lost any workplace-related health insurance they might have had. The average price for insulin alone is $450 per month (except in Colorado -- capped at $100 per month by regulation, but even that adds up if you are unemployed). - Tenebris 66.11.171.90 (talk) 04:30, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Things are speeding up rather dramatically, and I would urge us to reserve a much bigger space for recent deaths until this flood of notable deaths is over. We have articles on many of these (although there are a lot of notable entries from non-English countries who don't get articles, never mind RD entries), and people are interested in these (judging from the big jump in numbers an RD posting often causes). When someone's death is only announced after a few days (as is now the case with Bill Withers, died 30 March but only now announced), there is no chance of it getting on RD, even though that would be a service to our readers, a motivation for our editors, and an all-round good thing for enwiki. Fram (talk) 15:04, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Deaths from other countries would have to be nominated.
An option, and I have not put full thought how this would play out, is to temporarily use queues like DYK does for RD. That is, say we start this queue tomorrow, April 4, at 00:00 UTC. No RD would be added directly to the ITN template but to this queue for 4 April once the article is ready/consensus gained - it does not matter when the death was at this point (outside of not being stale), just when an admin deemed the approval was there. When 5 April comes along, the 4 April queue is added to the template RD. If there is space for the 3 April "queue" it can be kept, but otherwise, all other RDs removed. This assures an RD is present for at minimum 24hrs, and avoids any favoritism issues. This would only be necessary with the high rate of COVID related notable deaths which has pushed RD nominations > 3 a day (average) (covid or non-covid related). Once that average falls back under 3 we can go back to the normal approach. --Masem (t) 15:21, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
For the most recent RD removals, both entries have been up at least 24 hours. That would be the indicator I look for to determine if the queue size or our selection process needs adjustment. Some have already stated to just IAR in those cases and leave extra entries, but only when needed.—Bagumba (talk) 17:09, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'm just considering that we may end up with days where on (hypothetical) we have 7 RDs posted from 10 April (which "fills" the RD line) and then there's delayed news of a few deaths on 9 April. In any other situation, those 9 April would be immediately considered stale, but in this case, only because the news was not as fast as, say, American celebrity deaths, that we'd not want to ignore them as long as the RD quality is there. Thus a batch approach, grouping them in batches based on date of readiness rather than date of death, would help if we need to be able to account for more RDs. Right now we're not quite there yet. --Masem (t) 17:41, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately we're rapidly approaching that point; we've posted 10 RDs in the past 20 hours. SpencerT•C 22:34, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
We're down to three blurbs, and even so we're not promoting them with any kind of rapidity - even the newest is older than any of the RDs. Bumping another off the bottom gets us enough space for another five or six RDs. —Cryptic 19:03, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
And then we start entering the WP:SEAOFBLUE issue. Not that eliminating a blurb right now isn't a viable solution but that's short term. --Masem (t) 19:06, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
For Withers, we often use the announce date for posting purposes when it differs a bit from the actual date (see WP:ITNRD).—Bagumba (talk) 16:22, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note that posting Withers bumped Bucky Pizzarelli off the list after only 5 hours. If another one gets posted in the next couple hours, it looks like Zoltán Peskó will be up for even shorter. - Indefensible (talk) 22:37, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think Ellis Marsalis Jr. and Bucky Pizzarelli should be restored for now. There's reasonable consensus above that we can increase the number of RDs if there's space to do so, and right now with only three blurbs, the ITN section is still significantly shorter than the TFA to the left of it at most screen resolutions.  — Amakuru (talk) 22:51, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think at this post , we need to be looking at the date of when the ITN was posted to at least give it a 24hr period, not when the death was, because, yes, like Marsalis was far less than 24hr. We're going to have a lot of uneven death announcements with this, which is very atypical. --Masem (t) 23:11, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Posting by nomination or in Ready order would be preferable I think, and is more consistent with announce date. Currently if there are >6 deaths on the same given day, that would effectively block out the 6 previous days of the week. In that situation, a death and nomination from the day before would be "stale" despite only being one day earlier. It is not that extreme yet, but currently entries that are 2-3 days old are already "stale." Changing the queue order would even things out. - Indefensible (talk) 23:26, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Posting admins need to work from the bottom up, and not pick easy ones at the top. Stephen 23:45, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I dont understand this removal of Ellis Marsalis Jr. and Bucky Pizzarelli, April 1 deaths up for a mere 5 hours, while keeping the older March 31 Zoltán Peskó.—Bagumba (talk) 01:01, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Peskó was the last one up before Withers I think, he would have been posted for less than 2 hours if Withers had bumped him off. - Indefensible (talk) 01:10, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
But he was 1) not relatively recent compared to April 1s and 2) was already not "recent" when he was posted as the 8th RD on the list.[1]—Bagumba (talk) 01:23, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Peskó was one day earlier on the 31st as you wrote (and actually seems to have been mistakenly listed with the other two on April 1st), but the difference of a day is negligible in my opinion--that is the point I disagree on. In my opinion, the whole week is "recent" enough; otherwise there is no reason to keep the candidates list that long and dates should be archived to the new definition of "recent," because holding it open is going to invite needless and unwanted nominations--which is already the case currently. - Indefensible (talk) 02:41, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Is your issue that older noms are not diligently marked "stale", or are you requesting that someone make the archive bots more intelligent that just waiting 7 days to archive?—Bagumba (talk) 02:47, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
No, I am saying that a death that is only 3 days old (and halfway down the week on the candidates page) is still too "recent" to be called "stale" in my opinion. A nomination that comes in 5 days down the list should still be considered for posting without being "stale." Otherwise why even keep the list open that long? - Indefensible (talk) 02:52, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Short term RD handling proposal - go by date of posting, give min. of 24 hrs

To summarize the above, there's a partial agreement that while we are having several COVID deaths a day (a situation that is likely to run for at least the next month or two), that we change the approach to listing them:

  • They should be dated that the posting admin posts the RD, not the date the death was in the news. We'll still use the date it was in the news to determine a stale death (a death from a week ago is stale and won't be posted), but for purposes of at least given some due to all RDs per the RD RFC, going by date of posting will still be fair. Cavaet: We will need editors to be running through the ITNC at least once a day to make sure that we don't have too many entries backed up.
  • That once posted, these RDs should remain for a minimum of 24hr. If this means that in addition to indiciating the date that it was added to RD but the approximate time (UTC), then so be it.

Is there any major issues objections here? This is a temporary/IAR solution, not a permanent change in policy and the once-in-a-lifetime situation so maybe a brief FAQ page but not to change instructions presently. --Masem (t) 02:20, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Withers late announce cases aside (which was an existing pre-COVID practice) I do not support posting older deaths if there are enough recent ones just 2-3 days old. I do support 24hr minimum time on page, and permitting more than 6 RDs to allow that (barring further complications).—Bagumba (talk) 02:40, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This is in the direction that I prefer, but there are still 2 fundamental problems potentially:
  1. What happens if the queue fills up at a faster rate than 6 entries (or the length of the active list) per 24 hours? Then the waiting list will grow as Ready nominations have to wait 24 hours on the oldest active entry. In an extreme case there could be rollover where the Waiting queue exceeds the 7 days "Recent" period of incoming nominations, although this is hopefully unlikely to happen even with COVID-19.
  2. Even when COVID-19 is over and back to normal conditions, there will still be growth in Recent Deaths due to demographics as the population both grows and ages. This is a structural issue that will have to be addressed at some point, if not now during this situation. - Indefensible (talk) 02:50, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

non-encyclopedic content

Why have we begun to cover non-encyclopedic content?

there are other platforms for people to share news, in fact there is a dedicated news wiki (https://www.wikinews.org/), I am sure this debate has already been had, but I must voice renewed objection. A. we are just parroting to conversation points of partisan media organisations B. It allows for our editors to introduce further bias in selecting what is and isn't newsworthy C. It biases wikipedia towards countries which produce more news media and have more news media impact.

Leave the news to news sites, safe wikipedia for the facts. --Willthewanderer (talk) 21:42, 26 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

ITN is not covering the news. We are covering Wikipedia articles that are of good quality that happen to be in the news. It doesn't matter what news sources are covering them as long as they are reliable news sources. So we're not limited to partisan news sources, though due to reliability that's going to cut off certain poor sources like The Daily Mail. --Masem (t) 22:03, 26 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have any specific examples Willthewanderer? - Indefensible (talk) 22:46, 26 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it isn’t clear what objection you have to what we are currently covering. P-K3 (talk) 12:05, 27 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Timeline - March

In the front page coronavirus-specific box, I suggest dropping "March" as a Timeline sublink (and, for future, just keeping the active month). After all, January and February are not there either, and the number of individual country cases during those months were not surpassed until just a week ago. March can still be accessed from the April or main timeline page. - Tenebris 66.11.171.90 (talk) 20:49, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

March will be removed on 7 April. Stephen 20:52, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yup, just having a few days of overlap consistent with our typically consideration that news is stale after 7 days. --Masem (t) 20:58, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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