Talk:COVID-19 pandemic in Poland

Too much politics

Political aspects are strewn through out the entire article and aren't balanced by any means. The political aspects should all be put maybe in a seperate section, where it would also be much easier to balance and make the article more neutral. Also there are tons of reports from social media (which is a potential hive of disinformation) and singular instances of things which can be blown out of proportion. The fact that we have an entire paragraph dedicated to the minister's remark: "On 26 March, the Minister of Health Łukasz Szumowski claimed that European solidarity in the provision of medical equipment to Poland had failed. OKO.press qualified the claim as "false" and accused the minister of deliberately misleading public opinion.[18] OKO.press referred to the European Union (EU) tender process for masks and other protective equipment as a "success" that Poland applied for very late, and commented as context that the EU does not have the legal powers to impose health management policy, such as quarantine measures or closing schools, on member states. The EU tender process was announced on 28 February 2020, to which 20 member states, without Poland, responded. Poland joined the mechanism on 6 March, qualifying for a procedure opened on 17 March for the purchase of gloves, goggles, face protectors, surgical masks and clothing. The European Commission claimed that all the purchases were satisfied by offers, and should arrive within two weeks. Commissioner Thierry Breton described the procedure as illustrating the power of EU coordination.[18] On 19 March, the EU announced the creation of the rescEU strategic stockpile of medical equipment, to be financed at the level of 90% by the Commission, to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.[64]" I think illustrates this problem very nicely. Undue weight is a plague in this article. There is also a heavy overreliance on OKO.press. I think we should trim this, place it in a seperate section and balance it. Tomasz Magierowski (talk) 09:46, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

To me it looks the article is edited mostly by someone, or group of peple related to oko press whatever it is, but apparently bolitically biased. #77.255.58.231 (talk) 19:08, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Vague claims like the most recent comment are hard to use for improving the article. See WP:NPOV and WP:RS.

The earlier comment is more or less a repetition of a discussion already finished in the archived discussions. For convenience, here's a key line: This is an article about a medical event in a society. That society has been preparing for and is reacting to try to handle the event. So yes, "political" aspects in the sense of "the Ministry claimed that such a number of people were SARS-CoV-2 positive or that nobody was SARS-CoV-2 positive as of date dd.mm.2020" and "the Ministry did that" and "the Ministry claimed this" as well as other points of view are going to be present throughout the article. That is politics: decision-making that affects millions of people. Remove the politics - decision-making, sociopolitical actions - and we won't have an article at all. Maybe what is being complained about is "party politics", rather than "politics"? I only see one place in the article in which the ruling party PiS (or any political party at all) is mentioned, and the claim there is attributed and rather uncontroversial. The Minister of Health is a member of PiS, so this article gives him - a politician - a lot of free publicity and the impression that he, a prominent politician, is running things mostly rather well. We cannot avoid this political bias and "political advertising" in favour of Szumowski, because (right now, anyway) that's more or less what the sources say.

Regarding OKO.press: In a country in which a newly created court was suspended today by the Court of Justice of the European Union because, in the words of the New York Times, the new court has a politically selected membership and extraordinary powers to prosecute judges who oppose the government, a neutral point of view will be difficult to reach without the use of prominent media that are independent of the governing political party and the un-elected de facto head of the country (archive). OKO.press is an internationally recognised journalistic source that is opposed to the government of that country and is in favour of freedom of speech and other political freedoms. In the archived discussion, there was a claim that OKO.press was not internationally recognised, but the sources disagreed with that. OKO.press is shortlisted for an Index on Censorship journalism award for 2020 (along with three other organisations/people) - so it should probably be used a lot more in other Wikipedia articles on the topic of Poland.

Feel free to add sourced information from other reliable sources, especially from other internationally recognised media (or at least well-reputed national or regional media) that analyse or add relevant facts to the authorities' actions in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland. We still don't have clarity on the U07.2 situation for COVID-19 deaths that are untested - in particular, for the COVID-19 deaths of untested quarantined people that should be listed as U07.2 COVID-19 deaths but according to the sources, including GIS quotes, apparently are still excluded from the body counts. We need more sources for that, not less. You can propose specific sections and specific edits to add missing POVs here on the talk page if help is needed.

In the earlier comment: tons of reports from social media - Yes, the Ministry publishes its reports on social media based in California, not in Poland, not even in the European Union. Can you point to any uses of social media in this article apart from the Ministry's use of Californian social media for publishing its data? Boud (talk) 21:09, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Why can't we put the political things in one place and trim it? Not even the article on the US or UK outbreak have nearly as much politics as this one, here it's like 1/5,1/4 of the article.

The twitter of a government agency is something entirely different than someone writing something on facebook. I really don't think it's a good idea to add these things in as during crisis it is extremely easy to blow things out of proportion and do misinformation.

If it is really necassary to have these things in than, as I said, mention a few things, make it brief and in a separate section. This reads like a propaganda piece now. Tomasz Magierowski (talk) 10:20, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Why can't we put the political things in one place and trim it? The problem is your notion of the word "political" and the claim that politics and sociological events can be separated. This is an article about a sociological event. The events involve millions of people. So politics is involved by definition: there is decision-making that affects millions of people. That is a fundamental part of the article. That is politics! Remove the politics - decision-making, sociopolitical actions - and we won't have an article at all. Again: "politics" does not mean "party politics". If you want to discuss a political-party aspect to this article, then please say that in an unambiguous way.

You seem to propose separating out what government authorities did from what citizens' groups, media and so on have stated. That would introduce a sharp political-party focus: executive+legislative+judiciary+public-media powers (one political party is trying to control all four, and to some degree has attained that) versus everyone else in Poland. I don't see the point. Keeping the article to focus on natural subtopics of the main topic would be more standard.

You wrote it is extremely easy to blow things out of proportion and do misinformation. In Wikipedia that is extremely difficult. The politics of editing here are fully transparent, structured and versioned. In online social media, sure that happens, but that's irrelevant for this article on en.Wikipedia. By focussing on subtopics of the main topic and using reliable sources we try to avoid this. There are some points where misinformation cannot be avoided, because the information provided by governmental authorities - such as the issue of U07.2 - is confusing, and could be termed "misinformation". For several days we had a statement in the article saying that U07.2 deaths were included officially, but the latest information we have is that quarantined COVID-19 deaths seem to be excluded.

It is natural to expect government authorities' announcements to be biased in favour of the government, and independent media statements to be critical of the government in a country in which the media are sufficiently free, and in which there are democratic constitutional protections. The sources overwhelmingly state that Poland is under considerable threat to its constitutional order and judicial independence from thirteen laws implemented by the present party in government.

This reads like a propaganda piece now This comment is too vague to work on concretely. It's also ambiguous: the article could easily be interpreted by someone who is unfamiliar with Wikipedia sourcing policies as a propaganda piece for Szumowski, with just a few minor flaw listed to make it seem neutral. As stated above, the sources happen to say that he has more or less done what mostly seems to be a good job.

You might be interested in this recent series of edits by a new user, which was written very much in the style of a governmental press release. This has been copyedited, but the content is more or less unchanged.

Proposal: How about you choose a section that you think is "political", try making some changes to add missing points of view on what happened, or where, or why, or who, keeping in mind Wikipedia policies, and then we (everyone interested) can try successive edits to see if we can reach consensus, based on the information in the sources, and if edit summaries are insufficient for explaining our edits, we start a section on the talk page to the specific section that is being edited? Boud (talk) 14:46, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

The political aspects that I think should be moved and trimmed are as follows: definetly the paragraph with Bodnar that takes up half the lead, all of "Medical Supplies" and "Censorship of Medical Personnel" and yes, these things are mainly political. Then I would put these in a section called "controversy" or something along those lines, trim everything to say 2 or 3 paragraphs and add 1 more pro government/anti opposition (they've been doing controversial things too like here: https://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/7,114884,25740157,opozycja-uderza-w-rzad-narracja-o-ukrywaniu-koronawirusa-kidawa-blonska.html) paragraph as counterbalance. Isn't this fair? And no, I didn't add that section if that's what the accusation is... It's written quite poorly. Also, justice reforms aren't at all important in this topic.

To reiterate, my biggest gripe is that these things take up so much of the article and as a result are extremely distracting to anyone who's "sitting in" Polish politics, it's why I want them moved into a seperate section. Tomasz Magierowski (talk) 15:26, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose: We shouldn't trim or moved Censorship of "Medical Supplies" and "Censorship of Medical Personnel", this things could be important/interesting to someone who also isn't from Poland. The world needs to know whats going on in Poland, such as the lack of medical supplies or gov censorship of medical personnel. Natanieluz (talk) 17:22, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

There is no way to have a chance at convergence with so many parallel proposals for changes, where it is difficult to work out precisely is being proposed. Nevertheless, here are some arguments in relation to what seems to be proposed.

• Oppose removal of the third lead paragraph: Lockdown-type control measures started on 10–12 March, ... from 12 April, allowing religious and other gatherings to be held for up to a maximum of 50 people.[28] - This is the WP:LEAD, so the aim is to summarise the content. There are about one or two sentences summarising each of the main sections. A summary of the way that Polish society handled the pandemic makes sense in the lead. So removal of the third lead paragraph would be against WP:LEAD - Wikipedia policy. (Yes, this is politics: Wikipedia has politics firmly built into its foundations: Wikipedia is biased in favour of encyclopedicity, NPOV, free-licensing, civility, and rule evolution.)
• Oppose deleting the Medical supplies section because in a pandemic, medical supplies are one of the key issues critical to how many people survive or die. Information on this is vital for the article. Calling this "political" does not change its relevance.
• Oppose deleting Censorship of Medical Personnel. As Bodnar stated, access by the public to information is a human right that does not disappear during a pandemic. Calling this "political" does not change its relevance. Please read what an ombudsman is. This has nothing to do with party politics; the Ombudsman deals with human rights. (People interested in this point might be interested in the Streisand effect.)
• (No, I wasn't suggesting that you (Tomasz) wrote that.)
• This is an encyclopedia for the whole world, including this article, it is not especially for people living in Poland. Whoever is interested in the topic may read it. It's not quite clear what you mean by people '"sitting in" Polish politics', but my guess is "people who live in Poland". If some people living in Poland are distracted by NPOVed information relevant to the pandemic in Poland, that's not a reason remove the information. The use of sections enables the reader to read those parts that s/he finds most useful/interesting. Boud (talk) 19:05, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

I think the fact that you think that "Medical Supplies" talks about medical supplies is the root of the problem. The section on medical supplies is not about medical supplies but about the European Union. And did I suggest deleting everything? No I suggested trimming it and moving it somewhere to one place in the article yet both of you argue as if I am arguing to delete everything and you miss the point entirely... Tomasz Magierowski (talk) 19:46, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose The section on medical supplies can be trimmed a little, but should definitely be kept as a topic. It has major relevance and has received widespread coverage making it notable. If you're looking to trim the article down, I would look at the removing daily total breakdowns in that unnecessarily over-sized timeline tables. Since this will be on ongoing pandemic for months if not longer, were you planning to have a few hundred rows and make the table take up the entire article? MartinezMD (talk) 19:58, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

I think the other issue is that the data on this page differes with the one in pl. The other page does not mention any of the censorship. Is it because more people outside of country are editing the page? Or would the data like that be more doubtful and discouraged there? For me, it is misleading, confusive even. Maybe that's why people are discouraging this content and defining it as 'political'. I think the page in pl should also have the content like this to keep consistency.

Also I think mentioning media agencies straight up in the article looks a bit like advertising, but I understand that the source of any information has to be added. KavinskyM (talk) 16:24, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

@KavinskyM: first of all if you want changes on that .pl page go and write there..., secondly I am from Poland (hey). I don't know why there isn't any info about censorhip e.t.c. (I think that I will go there some day and write something about that- but my text will be waiting for review, we will see if this changes will be accepted. But as of that "misleading, confusive" stuff, well... I don't think that someone who speak English will go and read that Polish site :D. This (eng) site is more global, more "universal", more people will go here. Natanieluz (talk) 17:57, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Also I think mentioning media agencies straight up in the article looks a bit like advertising, but I understand that the source of any information has to be added. Explicitly attributing the source makes it easier to reach WP:NPOV if alternative claims about facts exist, and shifts the meaning from X is true to A claims that X is true. This is at the heart of NPOV. There's a matter of judgment of when it's needed or not needed to attribute the source. Attribution is less risky for Wikipedia in terms of NPOV. The attribution is not necessarily positive ("advertising") for the source: readers who think the information is wrong/misleading/biased will tend to gain or reinforce a negative view of the source.

Regarding the pl.Wikipedia page - editorial decisions in the different language wikipedias are in principle independent. There's nothing wrong with multilingual editors trying to edit and participate in discussions to try to match content between the different language wikipedias, but there's no obligation to do so. On the particular issue that you raise: there are plenty of countries in the world where locals are more afraid of the consequences of discussing censorship than people who live outside of the country. The consequences are not necessarily execution or imprisonment: job losses or demotions or students being given low grades or legal cases or online psychological harassment (called ,,hejt" in Polish, from "hate") are easier for people in positions of power to carry out locally than internationally; and the question here is people's fear of that happening. That's not necessarily the reason for the differences, but it's an obvious hypothesis to think about when the topic is censorship. Boud (talk) 01:23, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Or alternatively instead of making up conspiracy theories about government manipulation you can compare this article to the one on the pandemic in say Spain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Spain) or Italy (which got hit extremely hard and there are political controversies there too), on the Spain one I counted 10 sentences which I'd consider "politically controvesial". By comparison, in this much shorter article I counted at least 20! And look how in the Spanish one political controversy is in just 2 sections- "criticism" and "politics" and how condensed it all is while here it's everywhere (including the lead) and written in the longest form possible! Tomasz Magierowski (talk) 14:31, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

I would not use the term like conspiracy theory. In the end, the press agency talks with some medical presonel/local government representatives and it's some source of information. Whether it is reliable or not - it is not for the editors to decide, right?

As for the differences between pages - sometimes I think that I could be 'repressed' if I would try to stand up for the government point of view - trying to keep people safe from panic spread by unifying the source of knowledge on pandemic. I know that the denial of freedom of speech is very very wrong - we can discuss this article because we have it. But I think that it is also harmful when there are multiple sources of information, especially in situations when it's necessary to unify the effort between people, to keep them focused on one thing like in this case, to stop the pandemic spread. It leads to more questions - can I trust this or that? That's where the conspiracy theories are also born. When I had a look at this page, it's not the data on the pandemic that struck me. It was the talk on the censorship, the controversies behind it ("hot" stuff). Not sure if it is good that the header like this is used. Maybe it would be better when it's in section named 'Controversies'. KavinskyM (talk) 17:10, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

My use of the term "conspiracy theory" was leveled at the accusation that the Polish wiki doesn't have these things because of government intervention. My whole argument is not the remove the controversies entirely, but to make it so they don't take up so much of the article, because as of right now it's around a quarter of it. Plus the fact that it's put everywhere possible- like prof. Zajadło's political opinion which has nothing to do with the pandemic. This is really the only covid-19 related wiki page that has this much political controversy and it really looks to me like if some people want to just vent frustration at the Polish government here. Tomasz Magierowski (talk) 12:36, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Don't abbreviate "Wikipedia" as "Wiki"! There are other wikis out there – Wikipedia is just one of them.

There is no hypothesis that the pl.Wikipedia, which is not "the Polish wiki" (it's a Wikipedia written in the Polish language; there are two differences there), lacks information because of government intervention in pl.Wikipedia. There was a question of why information is missing there, so I proposed a hypothesis about one of the factors. The hypothesis does not constitute a conspiracy theory. There is also no harm in looking at similar articles on en.Wikipedia and comparing them, but there is also no problem with this article being of higher quality - with more NPOVed content - than the others. If you want to propose a policy for all the COVID-19 country pages to focus on raw data and government POVs alone, then you could propose it on the WikiProject COVID-19 talk page. However, keep in mind that editors there are quite likely to know that Poland is subject to European Union disciplinary procedures because of the weakening of the state of law in Poland, while Spain is not subject to any worries about the fundamental elements of democracy being dismantled. The pandemic has not miraculously changed that situation.

when it's necessary to unify the effort between people Unifying people by giving a non-NPOV overview of sourced information is going to be worse in terms of working against a pandemic than if we have NPOV information. This is more or less what the Ombudsman said, not just Wikipedia policy. it's not the data on the pandemic that struck me. It was the talk on the censorship - The info about censorship is sourced information. It's better that people know that information is being hidden than if they think that it's just an anti-government rumour. Whether that leads to better circulation of information or not is not Wikipedia's task; it's up to readers to use that information and if they wish to act on it, they may, after checking the sources and judging which sources they feel are more credible and reliable. Zajadło's opinion is related to the pandemic. How can readers unfamiliar with the situation in Poland understand the ways in which parliamentary decisions related to the pandemic are being made if context is excluded?

some people want to just vent frustration at the Polish government here I wouldn't quite call this statement a conspiracy theory; it's rather just a hypothesis with no evidence to motivate it. Providing sourced information and NPOVed prose text is not "venting frustration". Please read WP:NPOV.

As for the prominence of the censorship section, we now have two new sections more or less presenting Polish ministry/government POVs, with no NPOVing (so far), both placed ahead of the censorship section. So, getting back to concrete editing work, people following this discussion might wish to try learning about WP:NPOV by adding some complementary, sourced information in those sections that helps to NPOV them; by definition, NPOVing the original information will only be wikt:complementary, and is unlikely to be wikt:complimentary to decision-makers; that's reality. Claims of unity can often tend to be misinformation. Boud (talk) 23:01, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

It leads to more questions - can I trust this or that? Questions and sourcing are what Wikipedia is all about. You should not believe, in the absolute yes/no sense, what you read in Wikipedia! You should not believe, in that sense, what you read in any source. You need to understand where information comes from, and make your own judgment of how reliable you believe certain procedures and methods are and how much, at a given time, you judge a given source of information to follow those procedures. You cannot check everything all the time yourself. So you make a qualitative judgment in a finite time based on the information you have available. You assign a subjective Bayesian probability to the information you read, about how likely the information is to be true. That's not the same as yes/no believing or trusting an information source. See Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth for more on this. I would be very surprised if any conspiracy theories were born in Wikipedia, apart from a very few mediatised exceptions some years ago. Today, at least in en.Wikipedia and fr.Wikipedia (and I think also pl.Wikipedia), it would be difficult to get a conspiracy theory to survive for long. Boud (talk) 23:23, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Added separate column for sources in template "Poland medical cases by voivodeship"

@Boud:, @Andreiii3213:, @Nadzik: and to everyone interested: I have just added a separate column for sources in Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/Poland medical cases by voivodeship, without creating a proposal since I'am the only one who is editting that template here, and we saw earlier that others also stated that this should be done. But if someone have any comments/ or is opposed -feel free to write your opinion. If thats ok -tomorrow (11 April) I will make this same with deaths template. Natanieluz (talk) 21:27, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

: @Natanieluz - just thank you. Proposed it month ago or so, but was harangued by one of the activists here. Now it is possible to read it.

Suspected cases => hospital cases

Infobox is just wrong. You translate MOHPL tweets saying "12345 hospitalizowanych pacjentow" as "12345 suspected cases". "Hospitalizowanych" means "staying in hospital", most of them probably 100% confirmed cases. --5.173.104.136 (talk) 22:25, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

This is not a question of literal translation. Please read the note [a] at the top of the column in the data table, which says [a] Hospitalised for suspected COVID-19. We could say that this is a problem of the MOHPL providing information in tweets on a server in California rather than on regular web pages with clear definitions of what information is being provided (if the MOHPL ran a Mastodon (software) server and posted toots on the decentralised Fediverse, then on a default install it would have 500 characters per toot instead of 280 characters per tweet, and the wording could have been clearer). In any case, we have plenty of regular sources that provide definitions.

Here is the definition of "hospitalizowanych" according to Polish media in late February, early March, and early April:

• 27 Feb 2020 Szef resortu poinformował, że obecnie w polskich szpitalach przebywa 47 osób z podejrzeniem koronawirusa. ... Łukasz Szumowski poinformował także, że obecnie w polskich szpitalach przebywa z podejrzeniem zakażenia koronawirusem 47 osób. 55 osób jest objętych kwarantanną domową, a ponad 1570 - monitoringiem służb sanitarnych.
• 4 March 2020 W związku z podejrzeniem koronawirusa w Polsce 68 osób jest hospitalizowanych ... Minister poinformował także, że 68 osób w tej chwili jest hospitalizowanych w związku z podejrzeniem koronawirusa,
• 8 April 2020 W związku z koronawirusem hospitalizowanych 8 kwietnia były 2473 osoby ... Hospitalizacja oznacza, że osoba przebywa w szpitalu, ale niekoniecznie jest zakażona koronawirusem. Niektórzy mają objawy chorobowe charakterystyczne dla covid-19, ale może to być np. grypa. Przeprowadzenie badania diagnostycznego pozwala ustalić, czy hospitalizowany jest zakażony wirusem SARS-CoV-2.

So according to the interpretation by Polish media, "hospitalised" means people hospitalised because they are suspected of having the disease, but their infection is not confirmed.

The tweets abbreviate this datum as "Hospitalizowanych", but the name of a parameter is not the definition of a parameter. I'll add the same note to the infobox to clarify this.

If you have sources that disagree, then please provide them. Boud (talk) 00:11, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

New law: "specustawa"

The only information I have got from this section is I have learnt about opinions of various persons and how they voted.
Unfortunately, I have not learnt much about the law itself.
Is Wikipedia a political portal presenting people's opinions only?
Or does Wikipedia present facts?
What is the reason for such a section to exist? CoV2 (talk) 15:04, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Please read WP:NPOV to learn about NPOV in Wikipedia (which is also a general standard in scientific research and other scholarly studies). There is no dispute that those prominent experts stated those descriptions (opinions) of the law and the procedures. Unless there is a dispute, we can consider it a fact that those experts - a prominent law professor/philosopher, and a former judge - gave their descriptions of what happened. So yes, this is factual type information that is presented in the section.

We can put it another way: it is quite likely that some legal experts consider the specustawa to be legally valid, so it would be unreasonable to state, as a fact, that the specustawa is legally null and void. So instead we give a legal opinion about it being unconstitutional. We are still waiting for someone to add a sourced opinion by a well-recognised lawyer to claim that the specustawa is valid.

The reason for the section to exist is that there is a pandemic ongoing in the world, part of that pandemic is in Poland, and part of the reaction by Polish society was to pass a law of disputed constitutionality that has had big effects on the handling of the epidemic and may have big, predictable effects on Polish society - according to named experts.

The reason you didn't learn much about the law itself is because you and others who read the en.Wikipedia did not add further material to the section, with appropriate references, and respecting WP:NPOV.

Welcome to Wikipedia! Please learn about the academic principles that are adopted here. Boud (talk) 19:46, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Recent press release-style contributions

Just for the record, we now have two new users whose first (and so far only) contribution to en.Wikipedia has been to add a long list of points to this article:

• This set of three edits by Czerwone.maki on 9 April;
• This edit by Kwitzer on 13 April.

The normal Wikipedia encyclopedic style is to prefer prose, by default - see MOS:LISTNUMBERED - Do not use lists if a passage is read easily as plain paragraphs. - and any well-edited article that is not on COVID-19 (the COVID-19 articles are mostly recent and not well NPOVed and so on) - so anyone who is looking to improve this article should feel welcome to work on these sections. The Tarcza antykryzysowa section would do with some NPOVing; there are plenty of references around in Polish. Boud (talk) 20:10, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Sentence "starting from 12 April, allowing religious and other gatherings to be held for up to a maximum of 50 people" may be misleading.

According to https://www.gov.pl/web/koronawirus/zasady-na-dluzej, those restrictions were prolonged until 19 April, hence sentence "The same regulation loosened the restrictions on public gatherings starting from 12 April, allowing religious and other gatherings to be held for up to a maximum of 50 people" may be misleading. People may be fined for not obeying those restrictions, therefore, such information may be actually harmful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.143.98.10 (talk • contribs) 07:46, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

The information is perfectly correct - that's what is in the 31 March regulation, but it's now out of date; the starting date for allowing gatherings of 50 people was shifted to 20 April (instead of 12 April), and it's only for religious/funeral gatherings, not "other" generic gatherings.

Another IP user did add a link to the new regulation, and corrected the start date from 12 April to 20 April (the edit was not quite correct, because the new start date is in the 10 April regulation, not the 31 March regulation, but overall, it was a good edit, easy for anyone else to do a minor tidy up later). The body and lead are now corrected.

As for information being harmful, there is no guarantee that any information in Wikipedia, or any other source of information, is correct. You need to think about how the information in the source is generated - what are the procedures? where does the information come from? what checking have you done yourself? What is the chance that the URL is the wrong URL? or that the server was cracked? You cannot check everything, but you can make a few checks, and assign probabilities to various possible sources of error. And your contribution to this talk page is, of course, a part of these procedures. :) Welcome to Wikipedia and knowledge!

As for harm itself: it's the authorities who have chosen to encourage harm by allowing religious gatherings of up to 50 people starting from 20 April while the COVID-19 pandemic is still far from the end of the first infection peak. Boud (talk) 15:37, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/Poland medical cases formatting

This template is in the "Unofficial deaths" sections. In my browser this table is rendered only on half the width of the screen. Can this be fixed so that is goes across the whole screen like the other tables? I am afraid of editing templates.Nyx86 (talk) 15:08, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

@Nyx86: Hey!
what browser are you using? I'am on Google Chrome 81.0 and everything looks good, can you provide us a screenshot to see how that exactly looks like? On my pc that template looks like that https://imgur.com/a/6P83UDu Natanieluz (talk) 18:19, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

@Natanieluz:, it appears in my browser the same way as in yours. I am complaining about the table being right-justified and only taking up half of the screen (lots of white on the left). All the rest of the tables in the article stretch across the screen, but this one stays fixed.Nyx86 (talk) 15:12, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

@Nyx86: I think you could search for help by reading at Help:Tables and if that's not enough (it wasn't enough for me) asking at either Help talk:Table or the Wikipedia:Teahouse. You can invite people to respond directly here at [[Talk:2020 coronavirus pandemic in Poland#Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/Poland medical cases formatting]] in case people are willing to do that. I don't think we really want to stretch any tables across the screen, what we really need is an improvement in the management of floats in the page layout so that we get text filling in nicely next to tables. I experimented a bit, but didn't find any better layout solutions. Boud (talk) 23:35, 21 April 2020 (UTC)