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 Village pump (proposals).
If you have a question about how to apply an existing policy or guideline, try one of the many Wikipedia:Noticeboards.
This is not the place to resolve disputes over how a policy should be implemented. Please see Wikipedia:Dispute resolution for how to proceed in such cases.

Please see this FAQ page for a list of frequently rejected or ignored proposals.

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Adding a consensus to NPOL

I have recently encountered a draft about a politician for lost an election and which is not notable. However when arguing with the creator, I have realized that our stance on sources related to elections is simply not covered in policy or guidelines. Could this be fixed?

@Primefac: told this person: The "significant independent coverage" that is required for these individuals must be from outside the political sphere to show that they are independently notable from the campaign.

In my opinion this sums up the consensus well, yet I can only find the following to support it, from WP:POLOUTCOMES; "Losing candidates for office below the national level who are otherwise non-notable are generally deleted. They are not moved to user space for fear of establishing a precedent that any premature article about an as-yet-unelected candidate for office can be kept in draftspace pending election returns, effectively making draftspace a repository for campaign brochures (see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Siân Gwenllian.)"

WP:NPOL is totally useless for this, as it does not say such politicians are not notable (instead points to the GNG), nor does it deal with the issue of which sources are acceptable. WP:ROUTINE is not detailed enough to be directly usable, as it only mentions events, and WP:BLP1E does not mention elections or politics. I know it is possible to draw a inference of the consensus from these guidelines, but there is nothing that directly covers the issue of the sources.

It could be argued that they are only passing mentions, as they focus on the circumstance of the campaign, and would not otherwise mention the individual, but this is not defined in guidelines either. Sources related to a person, which do discuss the person at length, but which are doing this for the purposes of covering an election campaign, are clearly not usable per WP:ROUTINE. This is not made clear in WP:ROUTINE, in the absence of something being made clear, it is simply my interpretation of the guidelines.

Consider the draft creator has said things like: "Thanks for providing your logic. However your phrase "outside the political sphere" appears to be your personal interpretation of the criteria about "independent, reliable sources", no? There is also guidance about "non-trivial / non-merely-directory-like details" of the news coverage. The Cairns Post (newspaper) & Sydney Morning Herald (newspaper) & 4CA (AM radio) & ABC Far North (FM radio) both offered multiple, independent, reliable, in depth coverage of the campaign..." and "I will now quote the sentence I wish you would acknowledge: Just being an elected local official, or an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability, although such people can still be notable if they meet the primary notability criterion of "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject of the article". Why are Wikipedia editors so intent to judge the content of sources. Just check for the above qualities (only) please!!" (see my talk page).

If I have missed some glaringly obvious guideline that covers this then I apologize in advance. Α Guy into Books™ § (Message) -  12:18, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Please provide a link to the article in question... It is impossible to comment meaningfully without reviewing the specifics of the case. I gather that there was some media coverage... so a lot depends on what the media coverage about him/her says. We would need to review the sources. Certainly a losing politician can be considered notable (example: Jimmy McMillan) ... but that does not mean that all losing politicians are considered notable. We have to judge each case on its merits. Blueboar (talk) 14:26, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

The article in question is Draft:Kurt_Pudniks Skinduptruk (talk) 14:56, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

• I would like to clarify and expand upon my statements (which I still stand by) on the draft and my talk page. WP:POLOUTCOMES is a better essay than WP:NPOL because it better describes the losing candidates. In any election cycle there is bound to be a significant amount of coverage about all parties involved - after all, how else would be public know who to vote for? However, all of this coverage pertains to one "event", meaning it falls under the second point of WP:BLP1E. This is why I requested that there be independent reliable coverage of Pudniks from outside the election cycle - it would show that he's more than just a guy who failed to get elected. Primefac (talk) 16:08, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

I think it more accurate to say that the coverage all relates to a chain of events (the campaign) culminating in one event (the election). I'm not sure that BLP1E was intended to apply to this.

This may be my US outlook on elections... but I doubt anyone from the US would apply 1E to a US election - where we first have primary elections and then the general election ... each of which could be considered separate "events" (even though they are part of the same overarching political process)... as well as numerous campaign rallies, debates, fundraisers, etc. (which could also be considered separate "events"). Blueboar (talk) 18:49, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

• Aguyintobooks Fwiw, I think you / we're getting punked in this specific case.. See here. Drewmutt (^ᴥ^) talk 23:31, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Reddit is not a credible & significant source that is independent of the subject of the article (me, with CoI declared on my user page on 17 Aug 2017 - Aguyintomagazines has been emailed about this)! I wish wiki editors spent more time pondering policy than muck-raking unreliable internet forums (admin Spez has admitted to editing posts at will). By the way, on a serious note, the basic error in Primefac's judgement above seems to be the phrase "independent of the subject of the article". You are reading that as independent of the topic of politics. I think the intent was sources written by authors whom are independent of the person the article is about! With due respect, may I explain that it was quite significant for a candidate in Far North Queensland to get a story in newspapers from southern Australia. ie. No other Qld Greens' candidates got such cover in the 2016 campaign (that I can find). Aus rough humour aside, please accept my sincere thanks you for your interest and time to explore this point of policy. Skinduptruk (talk) 10:22, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Has the proverbial cat got your tongues?? 😸 Skinduptruk (talk) 00:36, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

On User_talk:Chrissymad#please_define_.22in_depth_coverage.22.3F.3F Chrissymad offers many pigeon holed opinions re the sources, but sadly misses this policy point entirely. Where can I get a fair review around here?!

Aguyintobooks, Drewmutt, Blueboar, Primefac

Skinduptruk (talk) 15:46, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

I would argue that Chrissy's breakdown of the references illustrates exactly why the draft continues to be declined. I'm not sure what policy point you're referencing, since the first line of WP:42 quite clearly says significant coverage, not "two dozen sources that might happen to mention the subject." Primefac (talk) 15:54, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Skinduptruk What point have I missed, exactly? CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 15:59, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the prompt reply. Please point me to where "significant" is defined? I can only find "not mere mentions" as policy guidance. The point I think you missed: editors are meant to only check against wiki policy, in this case, multiple, reliable, independent, significant (aka not mere mentions) coverage. Instead, you just keep testing these definitions. Please quote policy, or propose / argue the case for your subjective decisions re these aspects listed above. Have a nice day! Skinduptruk (talk) 16:08, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

You defined it yourself - "not mere mentions". Nowhere on Chrissy's list do I see anything that meets the very list you just now posted. Primefac (talk) 16:18, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

I am with Primefac on this, but will add that basically the current consenus on the meaning of policy is against the inclusion of this article at his time given the current sources. By all means you may be featured on Wikipedia at a later date,when you are more notable and you may want to collect sources for this. And perhaps petition a biographical dictionary or reliable author to feature your biography in a book, but failing that, and failing actually being elected. sorry. Dysklyver 19:15, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Please define "mere mention"? With examples of other bios on wiki? Is this consensus an offline discussion or...? I think we are looking at the same SMH link and not agreeing. Mere mention was meant to guard from directory listings. The SMH was a professional reporter & sitting member of Qld Parliament, yet you called it "puff piece / interview" which seems very harsh! Also please re-read above on unelected candidates. A Den Jentyl Ettien Avel Dysklyver made an error saying "and failing actually being elected" Skinduptruk (talk) 23:50, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Another editor, another assertion over & above wiki policy! The theme that is developing here, is that wiki policy asks for objective review of the source, not a subjective review of the content of the source, yes? 🤔🤔🤔 Skinduptruk (talk) 00:09, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Actually, Skinduptruk, your starting point is wrong. The English Wikipedia's "rules" aren't a collection of laws that have to be followed, and everything else must be ignored. See WP:NOTLAW and WP:IAR for just two of the written policies that say this.

But: as an editor who has worked on notability guidelines for years (and years), let me help you understand the point. When you're trying to determine whether a person qualifies for a separate article, then the goal (see WP:WHYN) is to see whether it would be possible to write a decent article (not just a few sentences) while only referring to high-quality, independent, secondary reliable sources. If you can't do that, then it will be impossible to comply with WP:NPOV (which requires that an actual majority of the article about a person be based on source other than the person – since an article that's 90% based on the person/company/political organization's own sources wouldn't really be "neutral").

So a handful of "mere mentions" won't help much towards that goal, will they? It doesn't matter how many sources say "Alice Expert is the head of BigOrg"; if that's all the sources say, then you'd only end up with one short sentence in that hypothetical independent-source-based article.

If you're looking for mechanical rules of thumb, then look for at least two WP:Independent sources that contain multiple consecutive paragraphs about the subject (not including quotations from the subject), ideally 500+ words directly about the subject. Your target is to be able to write at least 10 non-redundant, encyclopedic sentences based entirely on independent sources. If you can reach that target, then your subject will be almost AFD proof. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:28, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

• Concur with WhatamIdoing. As for the OP, I do agree the guideline could use some touch-up, and that these improvements about failed candidates can be based on what the essay says, since the latter is well-received and reflects actual practice. That doesn't really seem like a Village Pump matter, and more a small addition to draft and propose as the guideline talk page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:09, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Thanks for your thoughtful reply WhatamIdoing. Agree with your mere mention example of "Alice Expert is the head of BigOrg". The article in question has plenty of sources that contain more detail than these mere mentions. I will need to read those other policies you linked to as well, thanks for that. Note that, rather than rules based, my query was prompted by other editors confusing "independent of the subject" as "on a subject other than politics"! And choosing to equate "not mere mention" as a puff piece (with no supporting arguments or standards of comparison presented). However I agree the suggested rule of thumb re 10x sentences and 500 words seems quite reasonable, based on years of experience as you said. Skinduptruk (talk) 06:40, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Straw poll on the current view of WP:NOT#NEWS

Recently I proposed a change at WT:NOT which related to WP:NOT#NEWS (Wikipedia is not a newspaper) which was taken through an RFC that closed recently here (permalink to that) It closed as no consensus, but I would recommended reading the !votes and discussion of that, as it highlights a currently growing issue on en.wiki, how are we supposed to handle current events/news.

A key factor is the current fate of Wikinews. It is, as mentioned several times in the discussion above, effectively a dead project, stuck in a catch-22 problem to get people to use it. There is clearly both editor desire and readership interest to see current news provided in a wiki-style, and en.wiki has generally done well before in covering current events. But events over the last few years (particularly over the last 2 years) have created a lot of editor tension and behavioral problems related to current event coverage (given what passes by AN/ANI/ARBCOM and various policy noticeboards), and highlights the differences between what an encyclopedia is and what a newspaper is. Their goals aren't fully mutually exclusive but there are several conflicting goals. WP:RECENTISM highlights many of these issues.

So I figure that to try to resolve this is to at least start with a straw poll, not designed to establish any immediate change in policy or guideline, but only to see where the current perception is of how en.wiki should be handling NOT#NEWS. Testing the wind, to speak. To that, there's principle three options to consider to get an idea where an editor/reader's interest in this may be as to determine the preferred method to go forward, if needed.

1. The current situation for NOT#NEWS is fine or only needs some small adjustments. This might include defining a guideline to help with writing current events articles (akin to WP:Writing about fiction), but likely no change to policy.
2. NOT#NEWS should be more strongly enforced, and limiting our current event coverage. This might include stronger enforcement of WP:NEVENTS, additional policies relating to NOT#NEWS, encouraging/putting more current news articles to draft space, pushing more content/editors to Wikinews, and the like.
3. NOT#NEWS should be less strong enforced, and expanding our current event coverage. This might include outright removal of NOT#NEWS, adjusting how NOT#NEWS and NEVENTS are written and handled to allow more news, effectively merge Wikinews in en.wiki, and the like.

As this is not an attempt to find a solution right now; I would fully expect that any proposed idea that comes out of that would be under a full Wiki RFC to consider before implementation. So a straw poll is best here. I would request you simply !vote in the appropriate section below, keeping threaded discussion to the provided discussion section. --MASEM (t) 16:23, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Option 1: WP:NOT#NEWS is working as is

Or: The coverage of current events on en.wiki is about right or only needs fine adjustment

1. What should happen is the creation of a taskforce who routinely checks on news items that don't have longterm impacts. We should be posting items our readers are interested in, without our readers, this is all pointless, but I agree that some things which are instantly recorded as "news" may not have such a long-term impact as to be considered encyclopedic for a long-term view. This is a natural conflict between (say) an "in the news" section and a paper encyclopedia which records genuinely uber-notable events. We should not divest our readers of the things they want to see just because of some snobbish and contrived criterion. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:24, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
2. First choice. Each time I've tried to get articles deleted for violating NOTNEWS (such as Richard Matt) the AfD has gone nowhere - and on each occasion, in hindsight, the judgment of the community has proven correct. There are a good number of editors who like to write about current events and overall I think they do a good job and provide useful articles that bring readers to the project and enhance Wikipedia's reputation. In the discussion at the NOTNEWS talk page there was a great deal of "it's terrible" comments but little in the way of specific examples of a need for change. Coretheapple (talk) 21:25, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
3. I'm not seeing the need for stricter enforcement, and I doubt the practicality of trying to stamp out current events articles. Wikipedia will be what Wikipedians want it to be, and this is what they want it to be. If that doesn't jibe with NOTNEWS, then jettison NOTNEWS. Beyond My Ken (talk) 21:32, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
4. stricter enforcement will not be useful/effective. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:35, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
5. First choice. --Jayron32 14:04, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
6. The folks who are busy AfDing current events article are generally not busy AfDing old-current-events articles from 10+ years ago. Why is that? Because human nature enjoys working with current events, be it inclusionist or deletionist. It's just a manifestation of what people want to work on and how. For those AfDing the old articles, they will need more justification than citing the NOTNEWS alone, like if there has been longer term impacts, consequences of the event. -- GreenC 14:18, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
7. First choice. -- E.M.Gregory (talk) 21:03, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
8. First choice. NOTNEWS, properly applied, strikes a fair balance between keeping encyclopedic material and avoiding the truly mundane topics that also get news coverage. The problem is that there is not much guidance, and too many people think that NOTNEWS is carte-blanche to delete any articles about current events. Wikinews is dead and its writing style is anathema to Wikipedia's. Whether we like it or not, Wikipedia's article on a breaking news event is often the most complete, up-to-date, and unbiased coverage available, which is why so many readers come to us. We should be helping those readers, not hindering them. ---- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 20:49, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
9. First choice. petrarchan47คุก 18:08, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
10. It is working as it is. The "news articles" are relevant for Wikipedia. So the question here is: should we wait a year or two or longer with writing an article on the topic (since that would be the amount of time needed until the entire investigation and law system is done) or should we write an article on the event and update it. And as we clearly can see: there is a) an interest from Wikipedia users and editors at keeping it the way it is and b) there are enough editors editing it, so the information is from reliable sources and updated very quickly. The "current event" at the head of the article is pointing out, that information can quickly change. The product is actually quite good. Of course we could wait - but that would make Wikipedia less useful (who cares about the event in 5 years from now!?) and the articles would get worse, because less users would edit them.--Albin Schmitt (talk) 14:58, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
11. First choice, lets work on the fine things first before going into major changes. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:59, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
12. First choice. We're never going to get this perfect, when an event is fresh knowing whether it will get persistent coverage over time, etc., is a matter of judgment. On the whole, I think we do okay, I see as many things that appear errors of inclusion as errors of exclusion. --joe decker^talk 15:08, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
13. You're clearly forum shopping, looking for a result that will justify your predetermined solution. No evidence that the policy is a problem other than a few disgruntled editors who won't WP:DROPTHESTICK. Wikinews is dead, editors and readers come here for encyclopedic looks at current topics. They have already spoken loud and clear and have been doing so for years. Gamaliel (talk) 15:17, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
14. I've been working around current events on Wikipedia for 10+ years. During that entire time there have always been people who think we spend too much time covering the news, and there have also been people who think we should do more to cover the news. Personally, I think we get the balance about right most of the time. If I had to choose in the moment, I would probably err on the side of more news articles rather than less. We can always go back and clean-up / delete the less significant news stories later. However, in general, producing a lasting encyclopedic summary out of major breaking news is one of the things we are actually quite good at. This should be encouraged, and for the most part I think it has been. Dragons flight (talk) 15:19, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
15. Disagree with the way this poll has been presented and hope it will not be used as any form of consensus. I don't think a problem has been properly framed – to base it on Wikinews being a "key factor" seems completely out of step with what most Wikipedians do with current events. Wikinews is irrelevant, hasn't been a factor and shouldn't be a factor. As User:Gamaliel alluded to, I cannot avoid thinking that this being the third massive discussion about this (one, two, and this) in as many months is counterproductive and asking the same question over and over again in hopes of getting a different answer. Instead, I'll assume good faith. But I must say this is quite taxing while not really moving the conversation forward. -- Fuzheado | Talk 18:45, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
16. I agree that this appears to be forum-shopping, with essentially the same issues raised with slightly altered language. Even before this is over an effort is being made to generate "observations" i.e., consensus on specific points. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 18:54, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
17. Seems fine; what should happen is not the creation of new rules, but rather than enforcement of our current ones. And I agree with other editors who say that this "straw poll" was not properly presented. Neutrality^talk 12:28, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
18. I don't see any problem with the current balance; some people are quick to create articles, other people are quick to nominate them for deletion, and there is senseless and futile knee-jerk reaction on both sides, which tends to settle over time into more reasonable results. We'd also need a demonstrated consensus to change anything anyway; we can't just legislate from on high to target the articles we want deleted at AFD. postdlf (talk) 15:10, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
19. First choice Gandydancer (talk) 15:25, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
20. Seems to be working about right the way it is. Some people abuse the guideline to try to get rid of stuff they don't like, but regardless of what happens everything sorts itself out in the end through discussion and becomes obvious with (or without) WP:SUSTAINED coverage. Truly notable subjects will continue to get coverage, and those that are only covered for a short time will get deleted eventually. People on both sides need to realize that there is WP:NORUSH. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)} 13:14, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
21. Sure, support aswell. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:27, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
22. Theb alance seems to be working well--as judged by the trend decisions at AfD, there is general agreement on the boundaries, tho sometimes sharp disagreement in specific cases. No change in rules will eliminate that sort of disagreement. DGG ( talk ) 16:49, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
23. Our status quo agreement per RS is the way to go. No need to restrict any further. --QEDK (愛 • 海) 19:30, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
24. Second choice. --Shrike (talk) 10:29, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
25. First Choice The current consensus is adequate with borderline cases being decided at AFD, there is no need for instruction creep Atlantic306 (talk) 20:24, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Option 2: WP:NOT#NEWS should be more strongly enforced

Or: En.wiki should have significantly less coverage of current events

1. We definitely need to be stricter. Blueboar (talk) 20:11, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
2. Per the fact that WP:TRUMPSCANDALAFD is pretty much standard these days and it can go any way you want. A lot of the keep or no consensus AfDs eventually end up deleted the second go round or merged. Creating clearer standards than the GNG for current events is important, and NOTNEWS is the obvious first place to start with clarifying what is and isn't acceptable to include in Wikipedia immediately. Also, per my comments below, the biggest issue with not enforcing NOTNEWS is that we spend an inordinate amount of time having to deal with enforcing BLP policy amidst shouting and screaming that because something is so notable it must not be covered by BLP policy. This could be avoided both for the good of the encyclopedia and for the subjects of the articles if we encforced NOTNEWS more strongly. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:17, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
3. and this should include daily and weekly updates of sports tallies, film takings and so on. Here we are just acting as a mirror site riding on the websites that specialize in those types of information. Concurrently the main page "in the news" section should be scrapped, it's like a pile of last week's newspapers: Noyster (talk), 23:00, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
4. I think we could strengthen and clarify these guidelines a bit. Kaldari (talk) 00:09, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
5. NOTNEWS needs to be stricter. I don't like inclusionists claiming that a piece of Trumpcruft deserves to be included because it has a couple reliable sources. KMF (talk) 00:50, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
6. I would support allowing for an inter-wiki redirect for these topics, to aid in enforcement. Hurricane Harvey was obviously notable as it was happening, but even there it would be better to have people do live updates of that page on Wikinews. With SUL there's no editor burden to editing on a different Wiki domain. power~enwiki (π, ν) 01:07, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

   Wikinews is largely a failed project that doesn't really report on any of the major news events that we are discussing here. Just pointing that out as an example of why the interwiki links wouldn't likely work. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:51, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

   I'm not familiar with the details of why it failed, but I'm aware that it's mostly dead. Pointing editors from en.wikipedia to it (for certain topics) would need to be part of a plan to revive it. power~enwiki (π, ν) 02:46, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

7. Above points taken on Wikinews and the inanity of repeated "current event" AfDs. I don't know what good additional "rules" will do here, but I do think it would be smart to funnel/interwiki our less encyclopedic topics into Wikinews articles, or at least reach out to the English Wikinews editors to see how the content may be transferred fruitfully. (Has anyone reached out?) On the other end of the predicament, I think better enforcement of summary style for new topics makes for better encyclopedic coverage. Standalone topics tend to collect all kinds of overly specific detail and tone unfit for a general audience. czar 03:05, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
8. As per Tony. While I agree with the Option 1 comments that stronger enforcement of WP:NOTNEWS as a whole in the moment isn't realistic and at times can be counterproductive, there are certain aspects of it (for example WP:BLP as Tony says) which are IMO incredibly important. And although more bureaucracy is really not the best way to deal with anything, I think that it could be useful to have some sort of review of current events articles a certain amount of time after creation to determine if it meets the notability criteria that can't be determined while it's still in the normal news cycle (WP:SUSTAINED, for example). The ideal solution would be for people to wait before creating articles instead of having them nominated for deletion immediately and then having those discussions closed with a "wait and see" type result, but that really isn't going to happen. ansh666 08:57, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
9. For reasons of notability and BLP. Fram (talk) 12:06, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
10. And this can be enforced as soon as admins discount the "wait and see" tactics inclusionists employ at AfD. This has become the most popular rationale to keep an article when it fails the actual substance of WP:EVENTCRIT. Or discredit the "easily passes GNG" votes which is not the case on a news event. Another thing we need consensus for is converting WP:RAPID to an essay; it contradicts itself and has no basis on notability yet inclusionists use it as a safeguard for deletion.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 16:56, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
11. My idea for stronger enforcement would perhaps involve changes to policy for a, presumed, "immediate" forced merger to existing articles of breaking news, say to last for at least a week or two - perhaps with a breaking news merger noticeboard and project, and a simultaneous allowing of a "draft" article that is indexed. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:50, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
12. Wikipedia has stupidly encouraged the hoi polloi to reflexively come here to post their own truth, aided and abetted by the overenthusiastic among us who seek to write about every current event. Not only do many of these creations fail notability criteria, we give their subjects short shrift by parroting the contemporaneous screed from mere journalists. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:58, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
13. News coverage of current events is and should be treated as primary sources. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. While we err on the side of more coverage by allowing some articles to rely mostly on primary sources, events that are entirely and solely sourceable to news media should not be covered by Wikipedia. This is why we made Wikinews. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 02:00, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
14. Per Mendaliv and other above. Whether Wikinews is functioning or not, it doesn't change the fact that we're an encyclopedia, not a news outlet. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:12, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
15. Too many people think if it was in the papers it must be notable. Many things are in the papers becasue they are interesting and satify people's thirst for something to engage their interest - which sells papers - but they are not notable in the scheme of things. The internet has made all this information so much more readily available but run-of-the-mill events have been happening for millenia. One only needs compare the ratio of recent events recorded here to the similar events that happened 30, 50 or 100 years ago. This encyclopedia is fast becoming the Readers Digest version of online newspapers. ClubOranje^T 19:40, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
16. I am not sure we can actually enforce NOTNEWS anymore, as people have become used to Wikipedia being pretty good (and a lot better than Wikinews) at covering current events. However, I think we should at least try. As a first step, maybe we can replace the "In the news" section of the Main Page by a link to Wikinews? —Kusma (t·c) 21:26, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

    @Kusma: For what it's worth, that has been proposed before and shot down because of inactivity at en.wn. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:22, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

    @Koavf: I think our ITN section is one of the things that cause inactivity at Wikinews. —Kusma (t·c) 08:56, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

17. We should be stricter with this, especially given the recent influx of political articles being created preemptively. Jdcomix (talk) 17:16, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
18. I think the basic problem here is that Wikipedia operates on an idiosyncratic definition of secondary sources that includes news reports. Everybody outside Wikipedia regards news reports as primary sources, so we should do the same, and follow our basic principle of basing articles on genuine secondary sources, which can include some content published in newspapers, such as profiles and background articles that look at events over a long term, but not contemporaneous news reports. 86.17.222.157 (talk) 19:48, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
    1. I agree with 86.17 on the "secondary source problem": WP:Secondary does not mean independent. However, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. WP:PRIMARYNEWS covers some of the differences between a primary news source (e.g., eyewitness news reports) and a secondary source that is published in a newspaper (e.g., news analysis). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:16, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
19. Per User:Noyster (great reasoning)....but trying to enforce that would be daunting....endless editwars and RfC's. --Moxy (talk) 19:58, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
20. I agree with several of the points in the comments above, ultimately boiling down to "I support the existence of WP:NOTNEWS for the reasons we have it in the first place." In the interest of thinking about enforcement strategies, I'll say again that this seems like a perfect use of the draftspace. See, although Wikinews hasn't done so well, Wikipedia does sometimes cover news well (that doesn't mean we should be doing so, of course -- I'll bet we could do lots of the things from WP:NOT well). Because many of the subjects do turn out to be notable, I see no reason why we shouldn't use the draft space to capitalize on short-term interest for the benefit of the long-term article. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:02, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

    That's an interesting observation about draft space. My experience of it has been that it is used as an excuse to delete articles about topics that don't qualify for deletion under policy and that should be developed in main space where they are visible to potential editors, as has always been a central part of the wiki process, but this seems like a valid use of that space. 86.17.222.157 (talk) 09:52, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

21. To abandon or weaken NOTNEWS is a counsel of despair IMO. I hope to have time to leave a longer post over the next few days, but believe we should clarify (to ourselves at least), that we are notnews for good reasons. These include that we undertake a longer-term responsibility to the subject, to give the more complete and rounded picture than that revealed in yesterday's headlines. I agree that it would be nearly impossible to put a 'full embarge' on news articles, and many of the 'big event' ones are well-written and accurate surprisingly quickly. However, IMO, it is a simple mathematical inevitability that the more we become simply a 'news archive', the less we will have any encyc. character or purpose. Pincrete (talk) 11:22, 1 October 2017 (UTC) … … ps I endorse the "is fast becoming the Readers Digest version of online newspapers" comment above, I wish I'd thought of the analogy! Pincrete (talk) 11:28, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
22. Stricter. I agree with Pincrete. BLP is a major issue, as are the seismic changes (hm, is that hyperbole) in not just American but other countries' resulting in a large number of new articles, as mentioned above, and new editors with no knowledge of our guidelines and often SPAs. Doug Weller talk 14:02, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
23. Same fix I've proposed before, which is a policy WP:Criteria for Speedy Incubation which is like WP:CSD.  A new criteria allows a breaking news article to be moved to draftspace, with the mainspace title being salted for 7 to 14 days.  An AfD in progress gets procedurally closed WP:NPASR.  The problem I'm seeing is that AfDs are spinning their wheels analyzing notability with a moving target.  As I posted yesterday at DRV, the problem pushes forward to other forums when decisions are made based on moving-target notability.  Unscintillating (talk) 20:24, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
24. Stricter. I'm glad to see this straw poll because I've often wondered about WP:NOTNEWS myself. While Wikpedia is fast becoming a gutter press, some of the more serious news items also belong on Wikinews. I don't know how we can achieve this. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:32, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
25. Stricter. There is far too much insertion of trivial news events, commentary about our subjects and lengthy quotations. It gets in the way of knowledge. I am developing a solution. Join me. - Shiftchange (talk) 00:55, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
26. Stricter. Too many articles are being created which have a splash in the news with no lasting notability. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:57, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
27. Agreed. Creating lasting enyclopedic articles with proven information backed by references in solid reliable sources is something the wiki system does (perhaps suprisingly) very well. Mimicking the National Inquirer and TMZ, not so much. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 17:13, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
    • And the WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, NPR aren't solid reliable sources? Using them to cover fairly recent events would be an issue because we'd be like TMZ? I'm not quite getting your point here. Hobit (talk) 11:24, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
28. Definitely. And in particular the insistence on lasting interest in a subject is widely disregarded. Mangoe (talk) 22:04, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
29. There is definitely a problem of people with WP:RECENTISM forgetting that we want encyclopedic knowledge, not blow-by-blows of unfolding events simply because they are sourced. That can range in the short term of a few hours or events happening over a day or two. Sometimes, an event is going to take a longer time to determine whether it's truly a significant event or not. Lawsuits are a good example of the latter where they came take time, sometimes years, but you get people pushing to things like ambulance chasing suits to articles because a newspaper reported that someone got sued (as opposed to the court decision that establishes the encyclopedic value). I'm not sure how we can stress that Wikipedia takes the long view even more though. Kingofaces43 (talk) 22:25, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
30. I am mostly in sympathy with this view. Many articles about recent events are simply summarized news reports, often contemporaneous to the event, with little or no long-term view. It's basically a news feed. On the other hand, at the beginning stages, a summary of the various news reports is the only thing known about the topic, and many people come to Wikipedia to get a decent overview. It's something Wikipedia does passably well, though there are many distortions involved. My instinct is that Wikipedia should not be summarizing news; that's not its job, and BLP issues also frequently arise. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 02:12, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
31. Example: Every time someone who works for Big Company A tweets a stupid thing and gets fired, people run screaming to Big Company A's article to tack it on or to create a "Controversies" section. Wp:NotNews needs to be beefed up to be a bulwark against the headline-of-the-moment news cycle. TheValeyard (talk) 04:08, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
32. Stricter. As I often try to parse bias, as opposed to going into edit wars, the "value" of perceived editors over recent events ends up in clear bias and conflated news items, with loooooong talk pages of arguing what is notable or noteworthy, when in reality, if they waited an hour, they'd get confirmation or an RS. I just supported an AfD for "reactions" for the Vegas shooting, because it was full of "my prayers and sympathies"... from Mariah Carey, for example. Just as I support removing conjecture on weapons used, etc., if Wiki is to read like an Encyclopedia, then something that has hard fact that will be released in the coming days or even hours, including wild speculation from people not on the scene is actually the currently supported way to do it on the 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting. In fact, the name of the page itself is a bit wonky, because it wasn't on the strip and didn't target the strip. (And actually was performed within confines known as the South Strip, which makes a bit of a difference geographically.) As an encyclopedic entry, it would be named something like Jason Aldean Concert Shooting or Route 91 Harvest Music Festival Shooting. Alas, someone had to rush it to Wiki and rush to slam in a bunch of conjecture and unrelated facts. Trying to bring sanity to edit wars when that happens is nigh impossible. Avoiding the mess in the first place would be ideal. Seola (talk) 05:36, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

    I should also add, like others mention, when an event may or may not be notable waxes and wanes. There are a great many stub pages of events that no one can remember and no one looks for. I come across them and try to clean them or if I can't, I nom for AfD. And invariably, some random editor comes by and insists that nothing on Wiki should ever be removed because it was justified "at the time". There is just too many of these junk articles as it is. Putting up stricter guidelines would avoid errant words, phrases or sentences that also often happen when edit wars are going on, especially when vandalism is missed, because so many edits are happening at once.Seola (talk) 05:40, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

33. Wikipedia's structure makes it far too easy for any user to create an article about the latest minor controversy, meme, or viral incident without meeting criteria or consensus that the page should exist, while far too hard to remove an article that shouldn't be here. The proliferation of news sites that piggyback on each other's work without independently providing notability undermines the GNG and in turn the project as ephemeral topics all have their own low-quality articles. We should also encourage more summarizing into main or related articles, rather than permitting subarticles to be made for so many little things. (See also: also the awful "International reaction to..." quotefarm articles). Reywas92^Talk 06:22, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
34. Realised I hadn't actually !voted. Per my comments elsewhere and below regarding current news coverage. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:12, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
35. It should be more strongly enforced, but in an even-handed manner that treats similar situations similarly, rather than in an ad hoc or partisan manner. I’d suggest that we more strongly discourage material about recent news that relies on primary sources, including newspaper opinion pieces and blog posts that have not been deemed worthy of mention in reliable secondary sources. We could also discourage material about recent news that names people who are expected to remain non-public figures. If we carve out particular areas like this for special treatment, then we can make good progress toward enforcing NotNews in a way that isn’t apt to change e.g. when the political shoe is on the other foot. Anythingyouwant (talk) 23:35, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
36. An encyclopedia does not need any of the transiently popular "stories". Rentier (talk) 23:58, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
37. As as been said, we want to report the controversy, not to be art of it. One of the main issues are probably a nees to clarify notability (say a election result is immediatelly notable, some fact about the latest shooting may be or not - and we should play on the safe side). That WikiNews is not active (or not) is not a reason to have news(ish) articles here. If we have no "news" here, probably WikiNews would work better - better connection / linking to and from may benefit all: editors and readers of both tendencies. "Sell" it as "the wikipedia of recent events", link to it for day-to-day timelines, and so on. - Nabla (talk) 18:27, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
38. Only choice. This also works to counter systemic bias in favour of northern hemisphere, western news. Stifle (talk) 15:56, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
39. Absolutely. Recent news articles are too often irreparable messes created with the presumption that an AP/Reuters report parroted by half a dozen news portals constitutes eternal notability, and hijacked by editors with a chip on their shoulder who edit war until the subject (doomed to "no consensus" on AfD) falls into oblivion a few months later. I think Wikipedia would do better without the product of such labour. Daß Wölf 18:25, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
40. Both as to inclusion of "passing stuff" and misuse of WP as a "live feed", e.g. of questionable and basically OR sports scores, casualty tolls, etc. which we don't know are confirmed until some time has passed. As just one example, a snooker ranking tournament article was recently updated over 300 times in the space of a day or two, to provide live coverage of game results. This is not what WP is for, and there are snooker news sites that are for this. We need not have any results tables at all until the event is over and RS confirm the results. "I was there" isn't a source, and "I saw the win on a televised match" isn't a reliable one. I'm not picking on snooker coverage in particular, I just saw it yesterday. The problem is likely much worse for things like football/soccer.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:13, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

    The problem isn't usually so bad with sports, because the running commentary is usually factual. but, more seriously, we get similar running news added to Wikipedia about news events that may or may not be terrorism based on primary news reports. We had an article created recently that was edited by loads of people about a road traffic accident in Exhibition Road, London, because the initial reports speculated that it might be terrorist-related, although it turned out pretty quickly that it was not. Why can't we just do our job as an encyclopedia and wait for secondary sources to appear before rushing to create an article based on editors' own interpretation of primary sources? 86.17.222.157 (talk) 16:32, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

41. The problem with such intensive coverage of the news of the day is that you end up with lots of abandoned articles about stories that are forgotten fifteen minutes after they occur. What Wikinews is or is not doing isn't really relevant to a discussion about what is happening here on Wikipedia though. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 00:27, 24 October 2017 (UTC).

Option 3: WP:NOT#NEWS should be less strongly enforced

Or: En.wiki should have more expanded coverage of current events

1. Weak support here - I dislike the current push against current events, but I don't think that we should fully become like a newspaper (i.e. we should take into account the lower reliability of reporting on current events and require more sources than usual to pass notability for current events). RileyBugz^会話_投稿記録 18:24, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
2. It'll be what it's going to be, and if that doesn't align with NOTNEWS, get rid of it. Beyond My Ken (talk) 21:34, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
3. Support. The problem with "NOT#News" is that a) it is a badly written policy, like all of WP:NOT, because it is all written as part of a list of negative things rather than as a direct statement of policy, and b) none of its "enforcement" (i.e. taking out articles about things because you dislike them politically, which is what that means in practice) has anything to do with what it says. Conversely, when you see a blindingly obvious violation of the text as written -- like the list of current watches and warnings in Hurricane Maria, temporary content that is being taken out the moment it expires, complete with a special disclaimer at the top of the article -- nobody seems to give a damn. I say if you have a dog that can't hunt and can't point and can't fetch but it can sink its teeth into every car tire, neighbor and postman that goes past, it's time to think about getting rid of the dog. Wnt (talk) 11:54, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
4. Second choice. The problem with WP:NOTNEWS is that it is over-used by people who think it means "If it is reported by newspapers somewhere, it is AUTOMATICALLY not appropriate for Wikipedia." which is fantastic over-reach. News coverage does not disqualify or invalidate Wikipedia content, and yet I would (unscientifically estimate) that WP:NOTNEWS is envoked more than half of the time as a deletion rationale rather than as style guidance. --Jayron32 14:06, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
5. I guess this is my second choice too, thank you Jayron32 for reminding me of that option. I agree with Jayron32 that NOTNEWS is overused, and if any changes are necessary they should be in that direction. Coretheapple (talk) 14:35, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
6. Second choice per Jayron32 and Coretheapple. NOTNEWS should work as it is, but it often doesn't. ---- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 20:58, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
7. Second choice. The problem with WP:NOTNEWS is that it is over-used by people who think it means "If it is reported by newspapers somewhere, it is AUTOMATICALLY not appropriate for Wikipedia." To this I want to add that our readers expect certain kinds of news stories to appear on Wikipedia, and that is no bad thing, not least because it has long seemed to me that the urge to add a bit of information to a breaking news story - or even to start an article on a news event, seems ot sometimes be an entry point for new editors. Of course, more editors would be the best solution to this and many problems and the nasty aggression on exhibit seems to drive editors away. I think one solution is for editors to hold off bringing articles to AfD on NOTNEWS rationals for about 3 months, a waiting period would reduce the Sturm und Drang factor.E.M.Gregory (talk) 21:02, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
8. Support—Current events are a way to capture editing energy and to rapidly compare developing information. It's one of Wikipedia's unique contributions to global knowledge, based on the fact that it's the only near-real-time encyclopedia. There should be strong enforcement of standards (BLP, V) on current events stories, but patient evaluation of notability for borderline cases. The quick but byzantine disputes over notability during a highly charged time pose emotionally charged questions that new editors are not ready for: are these atrocity victims significant? will that protest affect the course of the state? We're better served having editors focus on sourcing and information gathering than on debating these questions. And we're better off having started articles of borderline permanent notability (e.g., this article on Egyptian protests by midnight of 25 January 2011) Then, after a short-term time window (7 or 14 days, perhaps), evaluate notability and keep, delete (if of poor quality), or export to Wikinews (if not notable).--Carwil (talk) 18:52, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
9. Weak support. The problem with WP:NOTNEWS enforcement right now is that it often causes highly-trafficked articles to be nominated at AfD, with editors spending their efforts arguing for or against deletion instead of trying to improve content viewed by many people. This reflects badly on Wikipedia, and visitors may also perceive Wikipedia to be heartless when they see a large rectangle on top of an article about a significant news event that may or may not be notable. It can be argued that this may be a good opportunity to introduce casual visitors to the world of Wikipedia, but emotionally charged discussions about whether a news topic is WP:N notable or not, often before there is enough time for long-term coverage to be developed, is not an image we want to present to prospective editors. Whether that means NOTNEWS needs to be changed is debatable, but it is best to benefit the most readers efficiently, and ugly AfD discussions right in the face of readers aren't going to accomplish that. feminist 14:51, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
10. Support, with Option 1 as a close second choice. (I notice that the introduction includes "This might include outright removal of NOT#NEWS" as part of option 3 – I would strongly oppose that; what I'm agreeing with is "expanding our current event coverage".) Anything which receives significant coverage should be included in Wikipedia. Readers are not everything, but I think the deletion of reliably sourced content receiving high traffic is a shame when it occurs. Obviously volunteers are allowed to direct their energy anywhere they want, but I think it is suboptimal when we waste time on long AfD discussions instead of improving the article, or large efforts deleting things rather than creating them (in the specific case of well-sourced articles on recent news stories). Per the eloquent arguments of RileyBugz, Carwil, Coretheapple and feminist. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 20:14, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
11. Support per Bilorv; similarly, Option 1 is fine as well, but there's no need to outright remove NOT#NEWS. I think a good metric for news stories - as hinted at by The Rambling Man - is "will this be interesting in 10 years time, or even 100 years time." But... actually quite a bit of seemingly transient news IS relevant, and will still matter 100 years later. There've been plenty of AfDs on content that, if it had happened in 1927, would still be a fascinating slice of life of the times - maybe even just that this was considered relevant, even if it blew over eventually. (Like... if 1927 KLM Fokker F.VIII crash was as well-built up and sourced as 2006 New York City plane crash (which was AfD'd on NOTNEWS grounds), that'd be great! SnowFire (talk) 09:26, 30 September 2017 (UTC)
12. Support WP:NOTNEWS should be removed per WP:CREEP and WP:NOTLAW. It is obviously our policy and practice to cover items in the news, including breaking news. The way in which we do this is best covered by other, existing guidelines such as WP:UNDUE, WP:N, WP:OR, WP:SUMMARY which address the issues more clearly. Andrew D. (talk) 12:56, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
13. Support per Andrew Davidson. Current events is a significant aspect of Wikipedia's mission, as recognized by the "in the news" section of the main page. Those who wish to turn this into the Britannica are blind to the realities of the way the project works. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 15:19, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
14. Full Support.--Albin Schmitt (talk) 14:59, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
15. Support IMO Wikipedia provides an enormous public service by covering news, even (or especially) hot breaking news like Las Vegas Strip shooting. We have not historically had a problem with people putting unconfirmed or incorrect information in such articles; they are usually carefully monitored and vetted by experienced editors. My own experience is that a Wikipedia article about a current event is usually more accurate than any single news report. I'm not saying to abolish NOTNEWS - we don't and shouldn't cover everything as soon as it hits the press - but we should recognize that sometimes it is our duty to our readers to cover this kind of information in a timely fashion. --MelanieN (talk) 23:02, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
16. Support WP:NOTNEWS is generally employed to give teeth to WP:IDONTLIKEIT. The best time to find reliable sources is before link rot sets in. I have found that many articles nominated for deletion under WP:NOTNEWS still have appreciable traffic ten years later. Leaning towards supporting Andrew D.'s suggestion of abolishing WP:NOTNEWS entirely; but it certainly should be added to WP:AADP Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:17, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
17. Support Agree with MelanieN that breaking news articles are closely monitored and poor-quality content is quickly removed. Our community does a remarkable job of sorting out verifiable facts as they become available and quickly building a high-quality article. We're not running out of space, so I don't see a reason to delete articles simply because they are old news. –dlthewave ☎ 23:00, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
18. Support If it is reliably sourced, there is no reason why we should not have an article. Verifiability concerns I can respect, some news stories are covered in a way that are guaranteed to give a distorted picture of the subject and thus leave an article that can never be accurate (e.g. BLP1E type), but for many events this is not the case. As to 'will this be important in 10 years?', who cares? If you don't want to write articles on things of no lasting importance, you don't have to --but if I want to, let me. Antrocent (♫♬) 04:24, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
19. Support as first choice – Verifiability is the reason we have notability standards. It is very easy to verify information on news items, as there is heaps of news articles about them. I do agree though, that articles made extremely quickly after a news break, articles every time Trump says something, and news reports should still be permitted as part of WP:NOTNEWS. J947^{( c ) (m)} 21:59, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
20. Support NOTNEWS is redundant with WP:N. Smooth alligator (talk) 19:57, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
21. Support Used as an excuse not to cover current events. People expect us to cover current events and we do a generally okay job at that. Of course we do not break stories but that does not mean we should not summarize notable stories. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:26, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
22. Support NOTNEWS as currently implemented is detrimental to Wikipedia's mission. It is fine as written, but people act like it should overrule GNG when it comes to covering events. The best use of NOTNEWS is to balance against article notability for routine coverage of local events and against the recentism of giving undue coverage to minor events in news cycles as well as regulating Wikipedia's tone. I largely agree with Hawkeye7, and would like to add that its invocation is often about proving a point rather than supporting free knowledge. Winner 42 Talk to me! 15:29, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
23. Kind of I think we mostly hit the right place, but there are too many people making arguments that newspapers are primary sources or NOTNEWS means we shouldn't cover much of anything recent. I've seen more and more of that recently. So mostly "we are in a good place" but also "I'm worried we are pushing towards too strong of a NOTNEWS world". Hobit (talk) 04:26, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

    Can you identify any source outside Wikipedia that does not regard news reports as primary sources? Any introductory book about history aimed at high school or undergraduate students explains that they are pretty much the definition of primary sources. 86.17.222.157 (talk) 16:38, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

    Secondary sources describe, discuss, interpret, comment upon, analyze, evaluate, summarize, and process primary sources. Secondary source materials can be articles in newspapers or popular magazines, book or movie reviews, or articles found in scholarly journals that discuss or evaluate someone else's original research. An interview is a great example of a primary source. An article that summarizes a number of interviews and court documents is a clear secondary source. Hobit (talk) 22:26, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

24. First choice In my opinion events that discussed widely in world media is worthy to include in Encyclopedia. --Shrike (talk) 08:12, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
25. Second choice provided there is coverage in multiple secondary sources such as newspaper analysis rather tnan basic primary reporting Atlantic306 (talk) 20:27, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Threaded discussion on NOT#NEWS

On NOTNEWS, I think that the main issue that people have with it is the notability of recent events. I think that we all agree that Wikipedia should not be written in a news style. But, we don't agree whether recent events should ever have a chance of being notable (until a week or so after) or whether we should just increase the number of sources needed for notability. RileyBugz^会話_投稿記録 18:32, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

No, notability is not the main issue. The main issue is that current events are magnets for BLP violations: even if they are notable they are also normally UNDUE and all sorts of other BLP issues, plus a massive suck on the community's time in making sure that BLP is enforced on a highly visible page and figuring out what to do with the content. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:20, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

I wouldn't necessarily eliminate notability from this. Inappropriate assessment of notability based on volume of news sources can lead to a too-narrowly defined article on a news topic that does happen to be the subject of much recent news, but where the potential for BLP violations (among other issues) may and has arisen in the past. (eg Dismissal of James Comey to me is indicative of what's been happening here). --MASEM (t) 20:28, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Oh, I agree notability is one factor here. It is not the primary danger in my mind, though. The encyclopedia is not harmed by keeping a non-notable event around for a few months before it gets sent to AfD again and merged or deleted. The encyclopedia and real people are harmed when we can't make up our mind on BLP issues and problematic statements under BLP policy keep getting inserted or we have articles created like the first Pissgate article (which was deleted. I'm also not sure if we should even have that redirect, but thats another matter). I think we need to acknowledge that there are several factors in play here, notability being one of them, but it is not the factor that has the potential to do the most damage. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:33, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Agreed on all points. --MASEM (t) 20:40, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

I see two problems: first, we act as if we were in competition with other sources, so there is something of a "scoop" mentality about getting the story in quickly even if it is wrong. That isn't historically how encyclopedias functioned, and I would almost suggest that we should specifically forbid writing about things so soon after the event. But second, too many people simply do not understand why news stories are published. We have to spend way too much time prying out slow-news-day and click-bait fluff, even when the article in question is years old any there's abundant evidence that nobody ever cared after that. Mangoe (talk) 22:10, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

• EEng, I know you had a list of people who had asked to be notified if there was going to be a discussion about enforcing NOTNEWS. I'm notifying you since you probably know where the conversation is. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:46, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

The ping-me list is at User_talk:EEng#Shaping_a_proposal. I'm not sure I can commit to this discussion at this time. I will say I liked someone's suggestion that if there's going to be an embargo of some kind on breaking news, the right form for it might be that a breaking-news topic shouldn't get its own standalone article for X days or weeks i.e. breaking-news content should, at first, be new content in some appropriate existing article, and only after X days/weeks should it be considered for its own article. The beauty of this is that there will typically be many eyes on the existing article, who will help keep UNDUE, BLP, and similar problems under control.Any after the X waiting period, notability for a standalone article will be much clearer. EEng 23:33, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

• I've not listed the discussion in Template:CENT yet; I wonder how the discussion would normally proceed without listing it in CENT or notifying others about this discussion. BTW, before voting, let's look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Events/archive and Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Sports/archive. Shall we? Most listed articles are deleted for plainly violating either notability guidelines and/or the "Wikipedia is not a newspaper" policy. Ooh... the Trump orb article is deleted... um, re-created as a redirect, actually. So are other articles. --George Ho (talk) 20:27, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
• Question - Didn't we just go through this shit? Beyond My Ken (talk) 21:29, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

• Yes we did. Coretheapple (talk) 21:39, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

• No we didn't. It is a very different question, about exactly how should NOT#NEWS be taken, not a new principle for NOT#NEWS. As the closure of the discussion put it, there is a question of exactly what NOT#NEWS means nowadays. --MASEM (t) 22:00, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

• OK, let's see how different this one becomes. Coretheapple (talk) 22:06, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

• Sort of. This conversation about our encyclopaedic treatment of breaking events was simmering below and at the surface of the RfC and surrounding discussions. Masem identified the issue three weeks ago, during the proposal of this straw poll: Whether [the RfC] closes as failed or no consensus… the disconnect related to the core NOT#NEWS policy is still evident and should be addressed…. I would characterise Masem as passionate about NOTNEWS, and in implementing performing the RfC closure I felt certain this proposed poll would go forward; perhaps that expectation affected my framing of the close. Apologies to community members sick of this topic. It's... historically contentious. Snuge purveyor (talk) 08:30, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

• One commonality with the recently concluded discussion is that the wording is problematic. Option 2 is that NOTNEWS "should be more strongly enforced" or that "En.wiki should have significantly less coverage of current events." To do that would seem to require not enforcement of the existing rules but change in the policy. So that option would appear to incorporate two separate outcomes. One could argue that NOTNEWS is already strictly enforced. Coretheapple (talk) 12:55, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

• Which is the whole point of this straw poll. the RFC even before it was closed (though the close re-affirmed what I saw) gave no clear indicator how the majority of editors felt about NOT#NEWS, with both directions having been presented. This is meant to simply determine if and by how much of a change in policy is needed, but makes no attempt to say what that could be because its impossible to know what has a likely chance of gaining consensus. --MASEM (t) 13:29, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

• But that's precisely my point. Sure some folks are going to be explicit. But when people stop by and says "yeah I'm for option 2" without saying what they want to happen, how is that to be interpreted? Option 2 provides two dramatically different outcomes - enforcement of the existing rules or changing them. If people are silent on these alternate outcomes, how do you read their minds? Coretheapple (talk) 14:13, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

• You can't, but the whole point of a straw poll is to get a quick idea of an opinion, and determine how strong the various opinions to see what type of action might be appropriate to suggest. If one option "wins" by a landfall, then there's clearly a means to consider new policy or the like towards that. If instead it just "wins" by a few percentage, I would say a massive policy change is out of the question. I do point out in the intro that results could range from adjusting existing P&G to creating new policy to eliminating some policies. --MASEM (t) 14:18, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

@Power~enwiki: The problem with Wikinews is a catch-22. It requires editors to use to fill it with news stories, and then there needs to be awareness that it exists so that people coming to WMF projects for news coverage use that instead. If no one knows about it, it's hard to draw editors to use it. If editors don't use it, it gets no visibility and people don't know about it. It's not dead-dead, articles are still created for it, but its very clear that editors and readers presently believe en.wiki is the place to find news articles, and Wikinews is basically a ghost town. --MASEM (t) 13:34, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Oftentimes I see an AfD on a recently created article on a recent event (say, a terrorist attack) with people saying things to the effect "keep, meets GNG" and "delete, NOTNEWS". Typically these end up as "keep", I am not sure if there is a general feeling on how such cases should be treated. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:41, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting and List of terrorist incidents in October 2017(and its kindred) are examples of the problems we have with editors seeing something in the media and adding it immediately. Every rumour gets added as soon as it hits the web, no matter how dodgy the source. Doug Weller talk 15:45, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Are RS and BLP insufficient to deal with this problem? If they are not being sufficiently enforced, the problem won't be solved by adding another policy that won't be enforced. Gamaliel (talk) 17:23, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Technically between the existing NOT#NEWS, RS, and BLP, these should be kept in check (that's the whole point of WP:RECENTISM, but as sometimes breaking news articles get swayed on being "popularity contests" in the number of voices supporting something outweigh those arguing for established policy, to which part of that is something I'd attributed to a lax treatment of NOT#NEWS by long-time editors, and admins. There are a lot of other factors though that contribute to this too, it's not just a NOT#NEWS issue, but better adherence to NOT#NEWS would help alot. --MASEM (t) 17:44, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

It's also the speed at which these articles are edited. I haven't looked but I know that the right wing media had a different, innocent (but liberal) subject named as the shooter and his name was the main name on Google for a few hours. I hope it didn't get into any of our articles. These articles also attract a lot of new editors who don't have a clue and are quite happy to argue. Doug Weller talk 17:50, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

@MelanieN: for a while yesterday Facebook and Google were presenting a conspiracy theory naming someone uninvolved as the shooter. I haven't checked to see if this poor guy's name ever go into our article (but I will), but such instant responses to breaking stories, particularly when often done by new editors who don't know about reliable sources or care at times, can be damaging. Doug Weller talk 08:00, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: Please do check; I'd like to know. I will be very surprised if our systems failed that badly. In the time I have been involved with the article, we have been concerned with whether and how to report that false news incident as false news; it seems finally to have found a home under "Social media". My hunch is that if anyone had inserted that story at the time, it would have been removed almost instantly as poorly sourced. --MelanieN (talk) 14:29, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

@MelanieN: I used Wikiblame and went back through 1500 edits, but it looks as though it wasn't added. If it had been added, I wouldn't be surprised if a copy of that version showed up somewhere else. Doug Weller talk 14:34, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for checking. I have actually been very impressed with what a good job we do on breaking news stories like this. To me it proves again the saying, "the trouble with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work." --MelanieN (talk) 14:45, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

P.S. I looked all through the talk page archives and can't find that anyone ever even proposed adding that false report. There were a few other wild conspiracy theories proposed at the talk page, but they were quickly shut down and never got into the article. The only false thing that went into the article is that some people, before the article was protected, inserted "Muslim" or something similar to describe the shooter. Removed almost instantly. We have strong systems. --MelanieN (talk) 14:54, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

User:Doug Weller, the first item in the list you cite is the Marseille stabbing. In fact Fr police are at present very equivocal as to whether this incident is terrorist or not French interior minister Gérard Collomb said: “It might be a terrorist act, but at this point we can’t say so with certainty”. Of course no such uncertainty is mentioned in 'our' list, and the likelihood of it being even reported widely if the story has an anti-climatic end (if, for example it was simply a conventional murder), so any update probably won't be incorporated in our article or list unless it is 'dramatic'. I believe this identifies the real danger of 'news' articles, which are the 'peripheral stories' and list entries with too few watchers, rather than the big events like 'Las Vegas'. A particularly silly example is recorded here, where WP on two seperate lists recorded a terrorist plot that simply never existed. Failing to 'update' is the norm, rather than the exception in this topic area, with dozens of articles that I know of ending "police arrested X suspects", (but how many were ever convicted of anything?) . I don't know what we do about it however. Pincrete (talk) 13:06, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Hell, that was User:Gianluigi02 that I recently blocked for 72 hours for similar edits. Doug Weller talk 13:31, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Another editor put it into another list, where it stayed even longer (20-ish months) and many other editors cheerfully reinstated (and sometimes embellished) it on the first list, claiming it to be "well-sourced". The list article was so full of SYNTH and over-statement that even I did not notice it for a long time. It was a NOTNEWS argument that finally killed it. Pincrete (talk) 14:43, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Some points to reply to in regards to @Gamaliel and @Fuzheado in their !votes about forum shopping and Wikinews. First, as forum shopping, this is not the question that was asked at WT:NOT about NOT#NEWS. That was a very specific proposal about how much commentary should be in news articles, which during the course of it, it became clear the bigger "issue" is how NOT#NEWS is to be treated, period. That was a point made in the closure of that previous discussion , so it is not forum shopping because this is asking a very different, and much larger question about our relationship to breaking news, in the first place. Second, the Wikinews issue, I fully agree that Wikinews is dead, the problem is, there was nothing in place that designed en.wiki as the defacto place that news would go with Wikinews being dead. There's nothing that says WMF needs a sister site that handles news. Maybe it might seem to be practice to have news on WP, but that's a change from NOT#NEWS that never appeared to have been processed through by consensus. The point here is thus to establish if that practice does have any type of consensus, and update policies and guidelines as needed. If the practice is fine, then that needs to be written into policies and guidelines; if not, then we need to fix how it is being practiced. --MASEM (t) 19:57, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

@Masem and Gamaliel: - Regarding this: "there was nothing in place that designed en.wiki as the defacto place that news would go with Wikinews being dead." Er, you don't need a formal pact, agreement or interface on where one starts and one begins. In fact, Wikipedia existed for years before Wikinews ever came to the scene, and there was never anything formal about Wikinews does X to the exclusion of Y on Wikipedia, nor should there be. Regarding what you said, "that's a change from NOT#NEWS that never appeared to have been processed through by consensus." The practice is the consensus! It has been this way for years and years, and only now are you surfacing this as some sort of illegitimate mode of operation that needs an overhaul when there is no real desire to do so. Frankly, it's puzzling and borderline patronizing when we as a community have done very well with creating articles as news breaks and serve the public interest. Forget the old notions of "this bin is news" and "this bin in history" and never the two shall be comingled. The great thing about Wikipedia is that it blends these two seamlessly in a way we've never done before, so why make that harsh and artificial distinction? Nobody puts Wikipedia in a corner! -- Fuzheado | Talk 20:52, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Just because it's practice doesn't make it a community consensus, particularly if the change is slow and not immediately obvious. I agree that we probably have been running current event articles for several years that would seem to go against the rub of NOT#NEWS, but this wasn't an issue until events of the last couple of years, principally driven by the US election, which has created a unique political and ideological battleground in the world as a whole that never had been present prior to this, and eventually filters down into en.wiki. The "practice" of rapidly pushing current news, while seemingly okay before, has created an endless stream of behavioral problems, much less issues with how news intersects with key content policies, because of what current news typically ends up being. That's not sustainable, unless we either establish the practice as having consensus, or adjusting our policies and guideline to reflect which way the community would want to see this. There is no question that some news today can eventually become an encyclopedic topic tomorrow, and thus it makes no sense to wholly chase off news coverage on WP. But to what level we cover breaking news and migrate that into an encyclopedic topic is a question that really needs to be answered in this current political and ideological environment. --MASEM (t) 21:59, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

• I think the most useful thing would be a straw poll or survey trying to identify what -- if any - kinds of content should be excluded under NOTNEWS. I think a lot of people will say "nothing -- if there is an RS it comes into WP". I am curious if we can get consensus around anything. If we can, then NOTNEWS should be narrowed to that. If we cannot find anything then NOTNEWS should be removed from NOT. But the first step is to try to get people to identify what they think NOTNEWS does exclude. Nobody replied at my query at NOT; how do you feel about trying that here Masem? Jytdog (talk) 05:28, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

  @Jytdog: We can get specific consensus for certain limitations; this particular change simply hasn't been made to WP:NOTNEWS. --Izno (talk) 12:39, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

You have more confidence than I do that we will find anything left of this policy in what editors actually do. There is a very strong strain of "it is in a source so we include it" out there. Jytdog (talk) 12:42, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Neither Wikipedia nor Wikinews are set up to work well with current events and breaking news stories. Here's why:

1. Immediacy. I used to contribute at WikiNews but found it immensely frustrating, because the whole thing is so very slow. You can write a couple of unreferenced sentences on Wikipedia, tag it as a stub, and publish it immediately. Straight away it's visible to readers, and you can continue working on it - making it longer, adding sources and images etc, as can other editors. This is the way other news outlets work - they publish a "breaking news" article that's usually just a sentence or two, then add content as more information becomes available. But not Wikinews. On Wikinews there's no concept of breaking news, of the importance of publishing first and editing later. Every single Wikinews article has to be reviewed by somebody else before it's published. With so few users on that project, it can be several days before your "breaking" news article is even looked at. News by definition has to be "new". It's crazy that we can publish something to Wikipedia with immediate effect but not to our newspaper sister project.
2. Original research is allowed and very much encouraged on Wikinews, but obviously not on Wikipedia (and rightly so). To work as a news source, original research is important. The eyewitness report, the first-hand account, the reporter on the ground, the direct interview - these often make for the best news articles but they have no place in an encyclopaedia. This is something Wikinews gets right and that Wikipedia would fail at if the decision was made to replace Wikinews with Wikipedia's current events section.
3. Editorials and opinion pieces don't stand a chance with the NPOV policies that exist on both sites. NPOV is vital for every encyclopaedia article and is rightly one of the central pillars of Wikipedia policy. We want Wikimedia sites to be neutral and welcoming to all, so we don't want our newspaper project to have a strong overall political leaning as many regular newspapers do. But opinion pieces and reporter blogs are now an important feature of just about every news source out there, and the key is to allow points of view to be represented in them provided they are balanced (i.e. one piece "for", another "against", resulting in overall balance) and clearly marked as an opinion piece and not a news article.
4. Edit conflicts. The Wikimedia platform is great for collaboration over a long time, but bearing in mind the importance of immediacy mentioned above, big breaking news stories really need to allow multiple editors to work on the article in real time, in the same way as a shared Google Drive document/spreadsheet. That's a massive technical hurdle to overcome, and currently some way off. (See mw:Parser_2011/Real-time_collaboration and mw:Extension:TogetherJS)

For me, the biggest barrier by far is that first one. WikiNews needs to change the way it works dramatically and fundamentally if it is to succeed. But if Wikinews does the job it's meant to do, we can then look at strengthening the NOT:NEWS policy here on Wikipedia. Meanwhile we have a mess on our hands and I don't think any of the proposals in this RfC will remedy that. WaggersTALK 14:13, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

• My 2¢ Based on my admittedly anecdotal experiences at AfD and elsewhere I'd say that NOTNEWS is so widely ignored that it is about a half step away from being WP:HISTORICAL. I don't like it. Point in fact I am appalled by it. But it is what it is. Maybe it's time to just admit that it's on life support and talk about pulling the plug. -Ad Orientem (talk) 21:59, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
  • That's part of why I opted for this straw poll to see if that was a viable option. The current stances suggest otherwise (edging to make NOT#NEWS enforcement stronger presently), meaning we should be looking to find ways to fix issues with how AFD handles new news articles without being bitey to newcomers, among other things. A lot of AFDs I see on news events comes down to editors thinking "lots of immediate coverage" == "notable topic", despite both NOT#NEWS and WP:N saying otherwise, and AFDs are unfortunately easy to swing by sheer numbers of !votes. --MASEM (t) 22:20, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
    • The !votes so far are as close to a lack of consensus as I have ever seen. The far more lopsided sentiments in the NOT discussion were termed "no consensus" long before the close, so I find your "edging" characterization interesting in light of that. Coretheapple (talk) 23:06, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
      • Might have missed some, but taking out duplicates and second choices it appears to be a dead heat, 38 in favor of strengthening, 38 keeping same or weakening, at the present time. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 17:41, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

Idea

• Comment. Its pretty obvious that the issue is not with NOTNEWS, but with the total failure of the Wikinews project to attract a sustainable editor base. Rather than whatever you hope to achieve here in this RfC, you should consider the bigger picture. For example a simple change to the Wikimedia software to add a namespace called News: could deal with the problem and revitalise Wikinews at once, some news items worthy of long term inclusion in the enclyopedia would be simply moved to mainspace via a method similar to AfC, news items would exist on wikipedia as a kind of draft, but still be indexable and accessible. Simultaneously dealing with the NOTNEWS and Wikinews issues in one action. To avoid issues with removing Wikinews, all news articles would be editable via Wikinews (which would still exist as a portal) and on Wikipedia, where we would no longer have to fret over which news stories will be relevant later on. This whole system is more in line with Wikipedias 'lagging behind' verifiability policy, and avoids splitting editors into unsustainable over-localised communities. Α Guy into Books™ § (Message) -  21:30, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Aguyintobooks, the article creation has become a total mess as is. Right now, we have 1500+ articles pending review via AfC. A bunch of articles, including some articles about current events, get deleted from Wikipedia because they fail to meet encyclopedic standards. Currently, we have WP:ACTRIAL running for six months. Merging Wikinews into Wikipedia would make matters worse. We would expect more articles created and then deleted for failing to meet the standards. Also, what about 20+ other Wikinews language sites? This year, Dutch Wikinews is reopened. --George Ho (talk) 00:59, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

No. Replicating the AfC model is not the way forward. The future of how we handle new content in in limbo pending ACTRIAL/the followup RfC, and the current policy fights over the draft space are popping up all over my watchlist, and I never seek out doing anything with the draft space. Making current events AfC/Drafts 2.0 is a battleground waiting to happen. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:10, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

I also thought of this as a possible solution, but yeah there are too many problems with similar processes currently for it to be feasible. Maybe if we ever get AfC and drafts and all that stuff figured out, this could be a good idea. ansh666 09:00, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

@Aguyintobooks: The problem here and at Wikinews is the same problem: there seem to be a lot of people who want to wave around policies to try to interfere with free-licensed work about news. If you do work on Wikinews, it is very likely to be thrown away - that's why no one does. Even if successful, it will be a locked snapshot, not a comprehensive review of a phenomenon. Now I don't know the motivation of any specific person, but I think on average we should look at the myriad legal embattlements and legislative setbacks of news aggregators to see that the ever-shrinking media industry might be exerting some push-back against its competitors. I mean, if the encyclopedias had done the same back in 2001, Britannica would be making as much money as Microsoft! But on Wikipedia there is a never-ending stream of editors from other topics who just wade in and start editing without regard that we're not supposed to be able to put current events in context. This raw ignorance is our foremost strength. Wnt (talk) 18:47, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

• The statement "the total failure of the Wikinews project to attract a sustainable editor base..." is entirely true. The reason for that is that the entrenched editor base is mostly lazy and opposed to helping new users integrate their contributions in a useful manner; rather they see it as their duty to eradicate all new user contribitions that don't meet the extremely strict standards that have taken years of experience to develop. It's the expectation that all brand new Wikipedia users are born fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus, and that any new contribution which is not already FA-quality is to be deleted within seconds of its creation with little to no explanation of the problem, and absolutely no attempt to improve such substandard contributions. What kills new user retention is primarily a culture that treats them all as enemies until they have proven themselves not to be. --Jayron32 14:11, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

  Mea culpa. Misunderstood the OP's original point. My response makes no sense. Carry on. --Jayron32 15:09, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Your point is perfectly valid though, having ~2250 pages of policy is one thing, expecting new users to understand it all is another.  --- Α Guy Into Books™ § (Message) -  21:27, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

• Truer words were never spoken. I have been here for 3 years, and I feel as though I have just begun to get a grip on the morass of policy in the handful of areas where I most commonly edit. To me, editing feels like a deadly video game were partisan gangs try to kill you as you wander through an uncharted swamp without a compass trying to avoid the arcane booby-traps that editors set to get you banned.E.M.Gregory (talk) 21:38, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

  Large systems always grow in procedure as the numbers grow. At some point communication breaks down and a policy is made to hold the signal. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:58, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

• I think E.M.Gregory's point in his !vote about current events articles being an entry point for new editors is a good one. People have an interest in current events, readers like them, and they add value. A win-win all around. Coretheapple (talk) 22:30, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
  • We definitely do not want to be too restrictive on new editors, and we want to encourage them to participate, but at the same time, current event articles can be touchy, and already a large subset of them fall under the post-1923 US politics Arbcom DS, where it's not the best for a novice to be making unsure edits compared to other pages. There's definitely a balance needed. --MASEM (t) 23:13, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
    • You mean, post-1932, right? George Ho (talk) 23:14, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Realistically all events were current at some point, and there are going to be more people interested in an event at the time it happens than some years afterwards, but a balance has to be struck somewhere, especially for events where the available information changes rapidly.  --- Α Guy Into Books™ § (Message) -  23:17, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Everything was current at one point or another but the online media quickly shares stories saying essentially the same thing; you never had that in 1932. Editors need to understand that journalists report one thing, and we, who are not journalists (some like to believe they are, however), have a different criteria for our content. If we were more patient, most current events would reveal their importance in a few weeks and speculation would be replaced by verified facts. Perhaps we can move current events to a draft space for a week or two and then access if it established a historic or societal importance after that time has passed.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 00:32, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

"most current events would reveal their importance in a few weeks" A few weeks? I think you mean a few years. Secondary source analysis (see WP:ANALYSIS) has to take place well-removed from the event. We shouldn't be writing about any presidential administration until they're a dozen years out of office. I could argue we shouldn't have any entries about living people, at all. It's still too early to write about the Gulf War, let alone the Invasion of Iraq in 2003. But of course, Wikipedia exists as a playground for wannabe writers to shout out their narrative. Wikipedia's crass inclusive approach to keep the donations coming in results in shoddy entries written by fanboys and cranks. Had we emphasized article quality over article quantity we might have built our gamification around writing responsible entries rather than the vomiting of words into multiple overlapping pages. Chris Troutman (talk) 01:09, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Chris troutman I actually agree with you more than you probably realize. In fact, I really need your perspective for some of the articles I nominate for deletion! I was trying to bring about some sort of middle ground: no consensus will exist, instructing us to wait years for notability. Many editors like putting their "I'm a journalist" caps on and writing an often inaccurate load of drivel we are forced to call an "encyclopedic article". Unless more editors like you participate at AfD, I doubt we can initiate a serious movement to rid Wikipedia of news.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 02:15, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

@TheGracefulSlick: I'm your huckleberry, but I've hurt my AfD record by tilting at these windmills to prevent Wikipedia from being a free-for-all. I recognize Wikipedia isn't a serious endeavor, despite my desire for it to be that. Chris Troutman (talk) 02:26, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Whether or not our articles are "inaccurate loads of drivel" (I think not), at least we still have copy editors and can spell, which is more than can be said for most of the professional media outlets that people have to resort to for far less comprehensive, partisan, and hard-to-find reviews of news events if they can't find them on Wikipedia. Wnt (talk) 10:44, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Realistically whether our news articles are relevant depends greatly on the quality of our editor base, there is the inherent problem that news is closer to original research and harder to verify than an encyclopedic topic, and the issues presented by the accepted facts changing is always an issue. and the obvious issue that wikinews is always behind everyone else (as it is based on other news, which for news is really a disadvantage. Not a disadvantage faced by wikipedia. The strongest core concept of wikinews is that is a neutral aggregate of content, A wikinews article should always be more complete than any other single piece of coverage. A den jentyl ettien avel dysklyver 11:32, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

• I want to emphasize the points made above by User:Carwil and User:Feminist. Feminist is correct to flag the negative impact on the project viscous attacks on new editors get socked with at AfDs on big news stories. And Carwil is surely correct that energy is better put into improving articles at the moment when they are drawing attention, to which I want to add that I, personally, go to WP as an efficient way to get up to speed on a breaking political or culture wars firestorm. I expect the article to exist. And it often leads me to go take a moment to expand one of our many old, sad, neglected articles on a neighborhood, institution, think tank, publication, or individual involved in the breaking news event.E.M.Gregory (talk) 18:24, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
  • Excellent points. postdlf (talk) 22:39, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Some observations

I'm going to note a few common themes that I'm seeing in the !votes here as they come - I'm not suggesting they are immediately actionable, that they have consensus, or the like, but they open up some reason and points of discussion why we're at this impasse on NOT#NEWS and how to proceed on that. --MASEM (t) 15:02, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

1. Handling of current events articles at AFD is an issue - both from those there !voting "Keep per GNG" (asking larger questions about news reports, bursts of news, and notability per NEVENT/GNG) and those !voting "Delete per NOT#NEWS" (more reflecting of how strong NOT#NEWS should be enforced). There should be a middle ground recognizing that DEADLINE is also a factor in addition to NOT#NEWS. --MASEM (t) 15:02, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

I see no such common theme at present. Coretheapple (talk) 18:46, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Concur with Coretheapple; no consensus has appeared. Moreover, the problem with WP:DEADLINE is the reality that creating articles when a significant event is breaking news is among the few proven techniques to overcome our endemic shortage of editors, because when an EVENT is notable enough to support an article, many editors show up and usually create pretty solid articles before the news cycle ends. There is all the time in the world to delete, but the existence of fingers willing to build the article evaporates rapidly.E.M.Gregory (talk) 19:40, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

I question whether 'breaking news' articles actually recruit new editors. Certainly they attract IP's and a few 'newbies' (some of both are quick learners and great to have around, and some are huge liabilities) to edit on that particular article, but is there any reason to believe that news articles actually recruit long term editors? This has not been my experience. Pincrete (talk) 11:01, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Agreed, but just to elaborate a little, the comments here should speak for themselves and editors should not be providing an ongoing play-by-play that purports to summarize the positions of multiple editors at any given point in time. Even if so far there was an actual consensus or overwhelming view on a particular subject,, that would have to be viewed in conjunction with whatever else is said. Let's not fragment and tilt the discussion, please. Coretheapple (talk) 20:24, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

My only point here is that regardless of the straw poll, there is a valid concern of problems of how NOT#NEWS is handled (for or against) at AFD on recent news articles. I can't tell you how that has to be fixed, yet, but the AFD angle (whether we are talking retention of an article or deletion) is an issue of concern. --MASEM (t) 18:01, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

News articles on current events are primary sources, and primary sources have little weight in a notability (AFD) discussion. If the only reason to keep the article is 'its been in the news recently' then it lacks notability and so should be deleted. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:06, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

I think that there is a certain consensus for a stricter application of NOTNEWS as it applies to BLP violations. RileyBugz^会話_投稿記録 19:07, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Seems more logical to apply BLP to BLP violations. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 16:04, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

There are frequently times where good RSes do publish things that we would normally consider BLP violations, like the rush to name suspects. What happens far too often is editors will see that name in good RSes, and believe it is appropriate to add right away to the articles, as they don't see it as a BLP violation (because RSes back the naming). But for us, that generally is the case until some time has passed to know how much importance the suspect's name is to the situation, as per BLP. BLP is not 100% consistent which is where situations like this come up. --MASEM (t) 18:01, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, it's terrible how the media refers to [name redacted] as the shooter in the Las Vegas massacre. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 23:39, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

That's not where the problem arises. I distinctly remember during Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that in the first few hours, the name of the brother of the actual shooter was named as the shooter in several RSes, only because his ID was on the shooter's body. Obviously it all got sorted out in the end, but if we had included his name at the time, that would have been a major BLP problem. That's an example of a situation with BLP is at odds with massive coverage by RS. Even with the LV shooting, I know several of the early articles this morning named a possible accomplice to the shootings, but that was quickly ruled out by police. Properly, our article does not mention this person at all despite that RSes still mentioning the name. Furthermore, and this is more a sign of the times, but there were tons of false stories that floated around on major RSes, some intentionally false. (I could also point out the situation with Tom Petty today as yet another example of this). BLP is supposed to prevent issues with that, and in the long-term it does, but in the short term there has to be more awareness of why we have NOT#NEWS towards this end to help protect BLP from misinformation. --MASEM (t) 23:57, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

I just don't see the need for yet another layer of rules, based upon the supposition that RSs may not "get it right" now but may "get it right" down the road. That would put articles in a straitjacket, and would be subject to all kinds of abuse and conflict. Our BLP rules are already strict and more than sufficient. What you describe as a "problem" is simply a fact of life, not just for current events articles but all articles, even articles on ancient subjects, as the RS sources shift and change in their perspective. All we do is reflect the RS sources. That does not create a BLP issue a all, but rather is a mirror to the reality of the sourcing. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 00:32, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

It's not a "fact of life" that we needed (or for that matter still need) 240 posts so far in the Tom Petty article. It's only a fact of WP, apparently, that people cannot be trusted to get caught up in the what will prove to be a passing and unimportant episode of misinformation. Mangoe (talk) 02:01, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Another datapoint showing that BLP is not sufficient to deal with NOT#NEWS violations: Harvey Weinstein sexual misconduct allegations - an article based only on that allegations were made and some of those aftereffects on Weinstein, but going into far too much detail for what is yet to be even a legal charge against him. --MASEM (t) 13:43, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

Yet another datapoint is how swiftly your AfD of the article was closed as a speedy keep, without a single supporting !vote. You seem to have a narrow view of NOTNEWS that is extreme and out of step with the community. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 16:22, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

I feel the need for written clarification of BLP as it applies to current events. Many unproductive discussions and edit wars could be avoided if we had something that explicitly stated "we do not refer to something as a murder/homicide/assault/attack until there is a conviction." This may already be covered by the existing policy, but it should be written in a way that can't easily be misinterpreted or misrepresented. –dlthewave ☎ 22:53, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

• Unfortunately, none of this is new. for a non-recent example of an article where NOTNEWS was totally ignored... see University of Florida Taser incident (of "Don't tase me, bro" fame.) Worth reading the discussions that took place about why that article should be kept. 17:54, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

• There is a lot of inappropriate assumption that media are necessarily reliable as a class, when the reality is that in the extreme short-term, they really aren't that reliable. It is typical of breaking news stories that initial reports aren't reliable: they're usually somewhat right, but they are often revised more or less drastically in light of later reports. I see no reason why something calling itself an encyclopedia should be chasing this. Reliability of accounts is something that is achieved over the long term, when the matter has been sifted through. Quick response media really cannot be taken to be that reliable until others judge them so, and that takes retrospection and therefore time. Mangoe (talk) 20:40, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

• I'd suggest that a more important need, one that no one has addressed, is to update "news" articles after the initial hubub has died down and the pageviews and editor interest has ebbed. That is an issue not just for articles on recent events but for all kinds of articles. "Orphaned" and neglected articles, sometimes bearing maintenance tags for years, are a serious problem in the project. Coretheapple (talk) 14:05, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
  • It is a serious issue, which is why a possible solution is to create a space that is on en.wiki and comes up in search results so that current news is there, and excepted to follow all content policies, but serves as a means to incubate news content such that if it doesn't turn out notable once the initial coverage has died down, it can be deleted, merged, or otherwise placed in context of something else. (Obviously notable stories can be brought into mainspace without question). It's like a Draft: space, but it needs to be more integrated with mainspace, and should have more formal processes to remove content that hasn't yet been transitioned to mainspace so they don't linger. Whether this has to be an explicit "News:" space, or management of article tags, I don't know, but it would meet both sides of the matter. (And there's a lot of cavaets, this by no means a formal proposal for this). --MASEM (t) 14:24, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
    • No, that would be like trying to light a campfire with napalm. A simple problem requiring a simple solution: greater energy expended after an article has lost its high visibility status. Not just news articles but, for instance, articles on corporations that have undergone scandal. BP comes to mind. Coretheapple (talk) 16:38, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
      • No. Better to head off the crap to begin with - and it is crap always filled with the personal predilictions of the Wikipedia editors because there are no sources who have reflected and weighed - just the personal prejudices of Wikipedians - and it is absolutely no public service to be a news aggregator. Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:36, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
        • I'm not seeing crap, I'm seeing articles in need of updating. BP isn't crap. 2014 East Harlem gas explosion isn't crap, and neither is filled with personal predilictions. Coretheapple (talk) 21:50, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
      • Not really. Once an article has lost its high visibility status in the news, we should be reviewing it per NEVENT/GNG for notability and appropriateness. Some will clearly stay, some should be merged, and few should be deleted. That achieves the same thing of then being able to tag those that are key to gain more eyes to improve, resummarize, and work in later sources after the initial burst of news, rather than let them stagnate. New developments on existing articles are less a problem, save for far far too much proseline in many cases, since we're not questioning the basic notability of the original topic. --MASEM (t) 22:28, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
        • @Masem: Can you cite any examples of current event articles which were deleted after they were no longer current events? Coretheapple (talk) 13:30, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
          • Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2009 Fox News – White House controversy Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2014 Romania helicopter crash Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2014 Norfolk helicopter crash Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2011 India–Pakistan border incident Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kosovo–Serbia January 2017 train incident (merged but effectively same for the question at hand) - This is just scanning the first few pages of hits in the AFD archives. Obviously there's also some keeps and some retained by no consensus, but there are definitely deletions. --MASEM (t) 13:43, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
            • @Masem: I'm referring to articles on current events that were deleted when they were no longer current. All except the India-Pakistan one were deleted shortly after they were created, and the India-Pakistan one appears to have reappeared as 2011 India–Pakistan border skirmish. Coretheapple (talk) 14:58, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
              • Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Power Shortage in Japan 2012, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2017 collapse of Route 4 bridge in Israel, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2014 SOCATA TBM crash (2nd nomination), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Nicolas Estemar stabbing spree. And that's just a portion of a list I'm scanning through.
              • I will say that it is reasonable to allow articles on current events to be created and given some time to demonstrate notability per both NEVENT and GNG (with obvious hoaxes or BLP violations speedily removed), but we should still have some checkpoint a few weeks after creation of such that these articles are either approved with presumed notability (if not sooner if it is obvious) or sent to AFD to be deleted. --MASEM (t) 15:20, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
                • I'd say overall we have a pretty good record at creating articles that last and deleting ones that don't seem very significant in retrospect. And when dubious articles are created that aren't deleted... so what? I wanted Richard Matt deleted. The community emphatically disagreed. The article remains, and I fail to see excessive harm from that, except to my ego. And no, I'm not going to nom it for deletion again, for the simple reason that in fact he has gotten so much notoriety since his demise he probably does warrant an article. Coretheapple (talk) 17:02, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
                  • The problem is that when you start reviewing some of the other AFDs on events, (and I don't have any in front of me, this is from recollection earlier today) is that there is a strong pattern of numerous !votes going "Keep, lots of international coverage" and the closer clearly following that majority despite opposing !votes that point out that bot NOT#NEWS, WP:N, and WP:NEVENT point out that a burst of coverage is not sufficient to keep a news event. In other words, its a compound problem of editors not understanding existing policy/guidelines and admins not properly evaluating !votes under NOT#NEWS concerns. And then further, when this articles are kept, and the AFD is a mere memory, no one spends the time to convert these from newspaper, on-the-spot reporting to something that is more appropriate for permanence. (The whole problem with reaction sections is one part of this). Compare Watergate scandal or Lewinsky scandal (pre-WP days) to United States diplomatic cables leak (written as the events went along). Even something like Boston Marathon bombing is still showing the training wheels it needed to build out when the event was happening, and that's an article with a lot of editing activity still. And these are the high profile news articles; it's the smaller ones that have less of an impact that are typically even worse and are frequently overlooked. There is definitely a place for allowing editors to start current events articles, but we need to have a better process to make sure that these are going to end up being quality articles at some point. There's no one solution to this, but based only on the poll, there probably needs to be something changed, though not drastically. --MASEM (t) 00:42, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
                    • "Based only on the poll." We're back to that again? It is indeed funny how the lopsided !vote in the NOTNEWS page you interpreted as "no consensus" whereas this even-steven one you claim to be a mandate for something . There is no consensus here to do anything, with half the !voters wanting less or the same enforcement of Notnews and half wanting stronger. As for all those articles that need improvement, sofixem. Coretheapple (talk) 12:55, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Not News and Reliable Sources conflict. The strictest definition of "not news" will mean that even if there are reliable sources, inclusion should be banned because Wikipedia is not news.

I believe the solution that reliable sources is a higher priority than not news. This is because if there is something truly historic but it doesn't have reliable sources, it cannot be put into Wikipedia. However, something that has reliable sources, even if we think it is news, is more worthy.

The biggest problem is that there is no editorial board and professionally trained editor in chief to make decisions. That is the wikipedia way. AGrandeFan (talk) 20:42, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Why is it important to have articles on breaking news?

This is, to me, the undiscussed question. From my perspective, I can see three reasons not to have such articles:

1. They create notability issues because of the implication that anything that has been published about at all is notable, which our principles have said isn't true. Getting rid of them is laborious.
2. They present accuracy issues because the real sources are unstable (and often enough unreliable) and because the tendency is for the article to freeze at the point where someone lost interest. One has to hope that someone comes back after things quiet down and potential sources have had a chance to take a longer view and sort out all the various reports (which, BTW, could on some level be taken as primary sources, when it comes to that), but often enough it doesn't happen. It's pretty common that, in the long run, The World decides the event was unimportant and doesn't get around to sorting it out beyond ignoring it.
3. They present readers with a choice: who should your read for breaking news: the news, or us? Shouldn't the answer be, "well, not us, for now"?

I see some sentiment of "well, it gets sorted out in the end." I don't think that's true, but even to the degree that it does, aren't we performing a disservice until it does? Mangoe (talk) 16:46, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

A few reasons I'd offer:

• We are instinctively drawn to "citizen journalism", which is enabled by the MediaWiki platform, the WMF, and the general polices we have. It also fits well within WP due to inter-linking and a cadre of templates and tools to help build these articles. The "citizen journalism" is more in effect in the last several years due to several factors (read: Trump) that has drawn more eyes and more potential breaking news topics.
• We have had several successful breaking news articles developed on WP without much fuss and with high quality from the start, and WMF has praised that approach in the past, validating it. However, these examples all tend to be examples of major disasters (earthquakes, international terrorist attacks, etc.) where most of the reporting is objective so editors aren't fighting or pushing specific content. However, applying this same model to other stories (eg anything dealing with the Russia interference in the US elections) tends to cause more problems. There is a place for certain types of breaking news stories, but not every breaking news story needs to be in WP the moment. Most breaking should wait until we know we're into the long-tail of the story, and thus can have a more holistic view of the event to write for WP to know if it is appropriately notable, and how to structure the article and views and opinions associated with it, as to avoid OR and POV with trying to cover from the instant start.
• Where citizen journalism was to be established by the WMF, Wikinews, has failed, but the drive to write and read breaking news articles persists. It has migrated to en.wiki based on the previous models where breaking news has worked well, but when all breaking news is reported on en.wiki, it seems to cause no end to problems. We could admit we are now WikiNews and adopt policies to reflect that, but from the current state of this straw poll, that's not a likely solution. --MASEM (t) 17:06, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

• Regarding #1: I think that the objection here is poorly framed, in that the implication that is not merely that anything published is notable, it is that anything which is published in sufficient depth in the proper sources is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia in some manner. Requirements of sourcing are universal, and don't "go away" merely because sufficient time has not passed since the event. The fact that something happened yesterday or last year or 1,000 years ago does not change the existence or non-existence of sufficient source text. If the source text is sufficient, what more is needed?
• Regarding #2: This is an issue which is true for all sources, and for all text across Wikipedia. It isn't unique to new news. Accuracy at Wikipedia is only as good as interest, and we have thousands of articles on old subjects which are based on outdated, inaccurate, or outright false information right now. That is not restricted to new stories. It's not a good thing, mind you, but it's also not a problem unique to recent events, which means setting some artificial time limit on when a topic becomes "eligible" for Wikipedia wouldn't fix the problem.

--Jayron32 17:00, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Then there's Stonehenge, old and forgotten, but continually in the news since the dawn of the Internet. Authorities now believe the perpetrators "ate food from Scotland". Wikipedia neither confirms nor denies these latest allegations. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:49, October 23, 2017 (UTC)

When we do it well, we do it really well. Sources of breaking news are not merely cited, they are in-line attributed "The town sheriff was reported on CNN as saying it was almost certainly the work of werewolves." Meanwhile we often find news outlets are quoting each other and rumour as fact.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:36, 16 October 2017 (UTC).

Food for thought

It seems to me the point of NOTNEWS is to weed out overly detailed summaries of events. Some events can only be described by such, and the litmus test appears to be that if that's what it takes to elevate an event to Wikipedia-style coverage, it's not worthy of inclusion here. To be frank, the policy seems fine to me, but then, what do I know? I won't add it above because I feel like there's something missing here, something I don't quite have the time to wade through the discussion to see. I think NOTNEWS also transcends merely creating new articles for things, as it also dictates what we add to articles we already have. Such articles' subjects have already been vetted to be describable on a more notable, more general level where it's more about impact than merely, "This happened." What we must think of when we add something to Wikipedia, especially concerning the tense sociopolitical climate of the last few years, is whether anyone outside of our sphere would care. Would someone in Uganda care about Trump's latest gaffe? After awhile, are a certain person's gaffes even worthy of tracking, or are they simply the noise that person makes as they walk by? Especially with the rise of social media and, sigh, Twitter, meme-ifying things has reached critical mass to the point that we must ask what even makes a meme anymore. Things that trend don't always deserve to trend, and wouldn't trend again once the event in question was over. If the world has largely moved on, if the world doesn't care about the specifics, then we should move on too, and we shouldn't care either. And if we choose to cover newsworthy-but-questionably-Wikipedia-worthy things, we have to tie it into a greater whole. Understandably, anytime a President goofs, it reflects on his character, so one could make the argument that whatever seemingly boneheaded thing Trump just did deserves to be covered, even mocked, by Wikipedia. But we must also ask whether such a mistake, if it were even one to start with, reflects on his Presidential qualities. Would he be any better at his job if he were never prone to such a thing? That's difficult to answer, but now I'm rambling, so my point there is that smaller, less-notable things have to truly, and of course verifiably, be tied into a greater whole that adds to the depth of our coverage of a subject. Article length or the cumulative data of coverage by a particular WikiProject are not enough to assert such depth. Therefore, my understanding is that this policy is intended to help us trim the fat off topics, or fight harder to prove why we should care and how the fat is actually a valuable part of the cut of meat, so to speak. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 03:51, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Narrowing down the poll

It seems that there might be a consensus to increase how BLP applies to recent events. Therefore, I propose a poll to see whether people would be ok with having BLP modified so that the suspects in incidents in which people were killed would not be put in to article until 3 or 4 days after the incident. If you would support this, but with some other time limit, please say so and please say what time limit. RileyBugz^会話_投稿記録 20:19, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. Moratoriums like this are arbitrary and impossible to enforce, and of little to no relation to the confidence we have in the validity of what reliable sources report. With some events, the facts are immediately clear and never in dispute, with others years may go by without official consensus on who did what. We should follow the sources in either case and discuss our concerns in relation to each topic. postdlf (talk) 20:31, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
• Huh? There is no consensus to do anything at this point except continue this pointless exercise. Coretheapple (talk) 21:29, 5 October 2017 (UTC)*
• Oppose. I agree that BLP should be modified but it would be best to tie it to an event such as an arrest or criminal conviction. I've seen countless discussions over whether or not we can identify a suspect who has been charged but not yet convicted. We should answer that question and apply it consistently everywhere instead of discussing it repeatedly on Talk pages. –dlthewave ☎ 22:12, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
• Huh? I second User:Coretheapple in seeing no consensus here.E.M.Gregory (talk) 23:18, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Rename the Notability guideline

• The dictionary definition (according to Google Define - based on the Oxford Dictionary):

notability
nəʊtəˈbɪlɪti/
noun
noun: notability

    the fact or quality of being notable.
    "the village enjoys a notability out of all relation to its size"
    synonyms:	noteworthiness, momentousness, memorability, impressiveness, extraordinariness;
    prominence, importance, significance, eminence;
    fame, publicity, renown, notoriety, stature, media attention/interest
    "the village has always enjoyed a notability out of all relation to its size"

dated
        a famous or important person.
        plural noun: notabilities
        "a Fleet Street notability"
        synonyms:	celebrity, public figure, important person, VIP, personality, personage, notable, dignitary, leading light, star, superstar, name,
        big name, famous name, household name; lion, worthy, grandee, luminary, panjandrum;
        informal: celeb, somebody, bigwig, big shot, big noise, big cheese, big gun, big fish, biggie, heavy, megastar;
        informal: nob;
        informal: kahuna, macher, high muckamuck, high muckety-muck
        "the enterprise enjoyed the patronage of notabilities and aristocrats"
        antonyms:	nonentity

• Our definition (simplest definition - WP:GNG):

"If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list."

• Issue: Any word we could use would cause a similar issue, as all words have a established meaning already, notability is sort of close to our usage, so nothing seems better.
• Possible Solution: Invent a new neologism specifically for this purpose. Or, change an existing word to show it is not being used with its normal use - example: Wikinotability, or Wikirelevance (adding Wiki to the word makes it clear we are using it for a specific purpose. Like how we are an encyclopedia called Wiki - pedia. showing how we are better than a normal encyclopedia. This could be taken further to: Wikiability, or Wikivance, these are clearly created to be diffrent, rather than just adding Wiki. We have alreaady done this with words such as 'Wikilinks'.

The only disadvantage is that people would need to read the policy to know what it means, so it would require editors to use more Wikilinks to allow easy reference, this could be solved by a template (like {{WPN}} which would subst: a wikilink in place without having to type it out in full.

Dysklyver 08:31, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Discuss

• Oppose any change, obviously; as clear a solution to a non-existent problem as ever I've seen. The actual definition of "notability" used at WP:N (worthy of notice) tallies with the actual definition in the OED as opposed to "Google Define - based on the Oxford Dictionary" (Noteworthiness, distinction, prominence; an instance of this). There are justifiable discussions to be had over some of the terminology used by Wikipedia, such as "reliable", but "notability" is clearly the best word to use to describe "de we consider something notable?". ‑ Iridescent 08:58, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I assume you are aware that the notability policy is stated as being the requirement for sources, rather than the subject being 'worthy of notice', for example: My granddad was a highly prominent judge, community leader of distinction etc, definitely 'worthy of notice', yet there are no surviving reliable sources that mention him at all. According to your definition, he would pass WP:N.

My argument is primarily based on WP:WHYN, which is relevant reading and explains how the WP:N policy is based on WP:V, the requirement for WP:N does not include the requirement for something to be notable (which is an exact synonym of 'eminence & fame'). This is a separate consensus often used at the same time.

Your assertion here is based primarily on a relented consensus based on WP:NOT (don't include everything that is verifiable as Wikipedia is not a indiscriminate collection of information), this is not part of the notability guideline itself, although it could become so given it's widespread use.

Your comment only reinforces the point that the notability guideline is often confused with the actual definition, and that it needs to be dealt with, I would not put this forward if it were a non-issue. Obviously you can easily understand the guidelines, as most people posting on this board do, but this is not clear to newcomers. Dysklyver 09:31, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

WHYN is not part of the guideline as such.  Historically, people had the idea to make WP:N a content guideline, but the idea doesn't work.  The idea is circular reasoning, that a topic is notable if there is an article for it on Wikipedia.  The idea also competes with our core content policies, including DEL7 within deletion policy.  Unscintillating (talk) 10:46, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

How is WHYN not part of the guideline? It certainly is part of the guideline, since it is included in the guideline page, and is there by consensus. There is nothing on that page that says - "this is not part of the guideline" or "this is only FYi". This is the kind of stuff that confuses new Wikipedians, not the word "notability". --Steve Quinn (talk) 02:59, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose, I don't see how/why another word, or a neologism would be clearer than a particular reading of an existing term. I know there is sometimes confusion when something is borderline notable, but I don't believe this would help, since the 'confusion' is often caused by editors preferring their own definition to WP's. Pincrete (talk) 11:45, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

• see [1]. Dysklyver 13:08, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. Attempts to rename "notability" basically are perennial proposals that have never gone through because of how ingrained the term is here. --MASEM (t) 13:13, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
• Do I wish we had come up with a different title back when we created the guideline... yup. WP:Notedness (for example) would have more accurately described the concept that we were trying to express - that a topic needs to have been already noted by sources, as opposed to the topic being "worthy of notice"). However, that is water long under the bridge. It is too late to change the title now. A rename would cause more confusion than it would resolve. Blueboar (talk) 13:57, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I suggest seppuku. EEng 22:06, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Dying for change....ClubOranje^T 01:09, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support - are you all blind? this is fooling new Wikipedians, I was fooled until recently. Suggestion, change to "Sourceability" - ZLEA ^{(Talk,Contribs)} 20:08, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
• I'm blatantly canvassing for contributions to my stub essay WP:Noted not notable. EEng 22:44, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
• Noted is still "crap", its literally meaning is well known; famous. noted define, I prefer basic Wiki-Notability. Dysklyver 22:48, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
• "Wikinotability" might work.  I tried using lower case "wp:notability" for a while, but more recently I've been using "Wikipedia notability".  That would be another proposal to rename the guideline, too, WP:Wikipedia notability.  Unscintillating (talk) 10:59, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
• We could spell it backwards, ytilibaton (ybaton for short), and maybe then every sportsperson who walks onto a professional field will have to do just a little more to earn their ytilibaton. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:03, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
  • On a side note, sports-specific guidelines for league-based sports do not presume that all professional players meet English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. Only players from specific leagues (either by name or by their level of competition) qualify for this presumption. Additionally, sports-specific guidelines explicitly defer to the general notability guideline, and so the existence of an article can be challenged on the basis that the general notability guideline is not met. Admittedly it is a difficult matter to prove, given English Wikipedia's lack of a deadline to complete articles. isaacl (talk) 03:30, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - Notability is already part of the culture and seems adequate. —PaleoNeonate – 02:00, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - I agree that "notability" serves our purpose. A change to a neologism is a good idea, but it is no better than "notability". Too bad this idea for a neologism didn't win the day when the content policies and WP:N were morphing and flexing many years ago. "Notability" is ingrained in our culture. If in practice we were drifting away from what we do now then this would be grounds for a change.

And has been pointed out, "notability" is no better or worse than any other word - because they all have common definitions. New Wikipedians should not have a problem with this if they take the time to read WP:N all the way through and even study it for more than five minutes, and click on some of the wikilinks there. And I like the fact that we are in agreement with the OED definition. Steve Quinn (talk) 02:38, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

• As coincidence may have, I just received a query on my talk page asking if a topic was now "noticeable enough" and had "significant attention" to have the article restored I deleted a while ago. That plus comments I regularly see at AfD indicate that "notability" may indeed be ambiguous enough for people less familiar to mistake it for "famous" or the like (fame often implies to coverage by non-reliable sources, so it isn't exactly synonymous). I don't know is "sourceable" is necessarily better though. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:03, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - A lot is going on right now in terms of policy change discussions here, this shouldn't take priority. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:17, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
• Comment The OED definition of "notable" has been mentioned above "Worthy of attention or notice; remarkable." [2]. Dictionary.com defines "notable" as::# "worthy of note or notice; noteworthy"

1. "prominent, important, or distinguished"
2. "a prominent, distinguished, or important person" [3]

It seems to me this is what we strive for while editing on Wikipedia. It does not seem to be a mistake that "notability" was selected. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 04:06, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support - "Inclusion criteria" would be a much better way of describing what we currently call notability. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 00:02, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

  @Ajraddatz: being notable isn't our only "inclusion criteria" (e.g. WP:V is also an inclusion criterion), perhaps something else? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:36, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

  It might make sense then to merge the two into a page entitled "inclusion criteria", i.e. to meet a certain standard of importance and to have reliable sources confirming that standard. Now, I have no expectation of the community wanting this to happen. But "notability" is one of those words we love to use here (along with "need" at RfXs, as if anyone needed any advanced permissions) that I don't think accurately reflects to the public what we want it to. When we say the subject of an article should be notable, we mean that the subject should meet a certain guideline of importance that we have established in order to be included. Notability as an idea is heavily subjective, and using a word or phrase that better reflects the fact that we have established a guideline by consensus would seem ideal to me. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 05:03, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

  How about "Importance" - sort of the same problem as notability, it is not easily "measured" though. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:35, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

  Xaosflux, this feels like the appropriate spot to insert my standard complaint that people misunderstand that the GNG is not about importance, it is about verifiability (WP:V). The SNGs are about importance (WP:NOTINDISCRIMINATE), and any real notability reform will be in a direction that leads us towards a more robust system of subject-specific criteria that help us determine notability/importance, with the GNG serving really as a test of WP:V. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:00, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose I understand the intent behind this proposal. There are frequent conversations where editors have to explain the difference between wiki notions of notability and wider understanding of that term. That said, wiki-notability is merely a subset of general notability with a tighter and (slightly) more-objective definition. This is a common feature of the English language and creating a neologism to bridge the gap won't solve it. We'll still be explaining what "Wikiability" or whatever means to others. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 02:53, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose pointless as of now because we are still working out the tensions within WP:N between the GNG and the SNGs. Until we have a system like I described in my reply to Xaosflux above, the notability guideline will continue to be in tension with itself because it is a guideline trying to explain how we apply two independent policies. Notability is a trade term within Wikipedia, and there is no need to change it until we further refine our guidelines for inclusion. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:00, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. If it ain't broke... -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:30, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. It took a long time to arrive at "notability" and a WP contextual definition of it, and it's working well enough for our purposes. Its ingrained into WP lingo and process today, and changing it would start way more fires than doing so would put out. See Wikipedia:Notability/Historical (which I compiled; you're welcome. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:21, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Its amazing how many "notable" people for whom there are Wikipedia pages apparently don't care for having their picture taken given how many "BLP" articles exist without a single "image" of the "notable" subject. Then again, it's interesting how many articles are lousy with images to the point where they make infomercials look "encyclopedic" too. Equally amazing is how a "non-notable" subject is important enough to justify anywhere from paragraphs to pages of arguments against the "notability" of that subject. Kinda hard to understand how so many exalted encyclopedia-building editors consider themselves the authorities on "notability" but need to spend vast amounts of time telling "noobs" why the subject of their new article isn't "notable" to them. Of course those exalted "editors" rarely EDIT anything. They'd be more accurately referred to as "deleters" or maybe "censors". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.234.100.169 (talk) 09:29, 23 October 2017‎ (UTC)

Change suicide references to remove criminal allusion

The woman who wrote the article below makes a good case for not using 'committed/committing suicide'. I suggest changing all references to suicide to something that no longer relates it to a crime.

themighty.com/2015/07/why-you-shouldnt-say-committed-suicide/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by ServelanBlake (talk • contribs) 15:50, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

No objection. "Completed suicide" is an odd-sounding neologism, but "died by suicide" is neutral and understandable. I expect the change could be implemented in existing articles by AutoWikiBot: Noyster (talk), 18:59, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't see why the use of "committed" matters. Which transitive verb we use doesn't change what implications, legal or otherwise, are raised in a given context by the fact of suicide. postdlf (talk) 19:13, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. I've seen this language before several times and while it's nice if it helps her understand her brother's death, it's not like anyone else has some preconceived notion that "committing" suicide makes it a crime anymore than "committing" to a football team or a spouse is a crime. There are all kinds of scenarios where we say "committing" outside of crimes. Plus, someone may well think that suicide should be a crime and there are plenty of places where it is. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:37, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm opposed to using Wikipedia for language reform, however well-intentioned. As long as the sources keep saying "committed", there should be no general proscription against it in Wikipedia. --Trovatore (talk) 19:41, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Strong oppose as per Trovatore. power~enwiki (π, ν) 21:33, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Strong oppose. I don't object to editors using or encouraging this, but I do object to mandating specific usage project-wide. –dlthewave ☎ 22:03, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Oppose... I don't think the phrase "committed suicide" implies a crime. One can also "commit an act of heroism". Blueboar (talk) 22:15, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Not finding these arguments persuasive.

You may find the odd counter-example but to "commit" an act mostly has a negative connotation. My Concise Oxford says "Be doer of, perpetrate (crime, sin, blunder)..." so in saying "commit suicide" we are employing a non-neutral description. Whether or not we ourselves take this negative view of a deed, it's still non-neutral.

And as for (reliable) sources, we draw on these for our facts, not necessarily for our precise wording.

I didn't read the OP as asking to make any specific usage mandatory, but politely suggesting a change to one specific non-neutral usage: Noyster (talk), 07:49, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

@Noyster: "Commit" a sin/crime is no doubt one of several connotations of the word but when someone "commits" code to a repository, I don't think of it as criminal. Again, I don't think any of us in common speech think that since someone "committed" suicide, he "committed" a crime but conversely, there are places where suicide is a crime. Whether we are claiming some criminal intent or not, it's a quirk of the language that this is still by far the most common way in English to say that someone killed himself (other than possibly "he killed himself" but that is also ambiguous to accidental deaths) and I think simply does not have the connotations the author of the above piece claims, even if they actually did have that basis etymologically. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:07, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Wholly agree with you, Justin. Also, just to clarify, if the death occurred at a time and in a place when suicide was a crime, would normal procedure not be to preserve that wording anyway, as being historically more accurate? Martinevans123 (talk) 08:56, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

I also agree. "Committed suicide" is a normal English formulation, and "commit" does not always have criminal connotations. One can commit to making a delivery by a deadline, for example, or be committed to a psychiatric institution, neither of which carries any connotation of anything criminal at all. Someone also brought up committing source code, another common use that implies no crime or wrongdoing. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:01, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

I agree that we don't need to follow RSs for precise wording. That's not the point. The point is we shouldn't use WP for language reform. Let's assume for the sake of argument that it would be better for the language to change to avoid the word "commit" here. That's not Wikipedia's role. We follow general (high status) usage; we don't promote it, no matter how high-minded the reasons. --Trovatore (talk) 07:32, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

How do you reconcile that with Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch? ―Mandruss ☎ 09:02, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't see any attempts at language reform being promoted in that guideline. --Trovatore (talk) 10:11, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Well I fail to see the distinction. That guideline says we should avoid the use of certain words regardless of what reliable sources say. How that is somehow not under your language reform umbrella is lost on me. Is the difference that "commit suicide" is such a common phrase? ―Mandruss ☎ 10:24, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

WP:WORDS clearly says that there are no forbidden words or terms on Wikipedia. Yes, the words and phrases outlined in that guideline should be used with caution, but they can still be used when appropriate. Blueboar (talk) 10:40, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

@Mandruss, yes. A simple web news search for commits suicide shows it to be common usage. While some words have specific connotations in some contexts, this only has those connotations when used in the context of sin or crime. In this context it's context only suggest that they completed the act of suicide. I'm going to commit this thread to memory before it gets committed to the archive where I'll never find it again. ClubOranje^T 10:55, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Mandruss, the difference here is that the motivation appears to be to change the English language at large. Some people don't want Wikipedia to say "commits suicide" because really they don't want anyone to say it. That's not style, that's political correctness. Wikipedia should not be used to promote that. --Trovatore (talk) 20:07, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Several commenters here don't seem to perceive a difference between "committing an act" and "committing something to a place or object". And I don't see the proposal as trying to right some great linguistic wrong, like mandating "xe/xir" or something that isn't already an accepted usage. I see it as raising the question "are we using a neutral description in our articles?": Noyster (talk), 15:11, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

We are not here to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS, not that I think the phrase "commit suicide" constitutes a "wrong", and we are not expected to WP:ADVOCATE for anything, not even the Right to die. Bus stop (talk) 16:07, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. This was very recently discussed in depth at WT:Manual of Style/Words to watch with no consensus that "committed suicide" implies in a crime. The word "commit" has many meanings in English, and the phrase "committed suicide" is the normal, everyday, idiomatic expression in English, with many alternatives being awkward or dwelling overmuch on the exact cause of death (which can also trigger WP:NOR problems).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  22:02, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose as "commit" is the most common way to say it. It may or may not be a crime, but commit does not imply either way, it means that the choice has been made and cannot be reversed. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:22, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - following the OP's logic, every edit to Wikipedia would be seen as a criminal act... COMMIT (SQL). Cabayi (talk) 09:46, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
• Comment A commitment can be seen as a deed which is not necessarily criminal. A marriage is an example of a commitment is it not, even if it is not mentioned, it's still a deed. A commitment to suicide doesn't imply criminal, simply a deed weather good or bad.--NadirAli نادر علی (talk) 20:37, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose commit is a perfectly normal word which in no way implies criminality. --Jayron32 20:41, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. Clear widely used phrase which is normally accepted as neutral. Alsee (talk) 09:52, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
• Comment. What bothers me at times is not the phrase but when it is written as if it were a certainty. Often the actual documents are more circumspect, and so at times I think it is better to say presumptive suicide, ruled a suicide, etc. The reason why this seems important to me is that I tend to believe that dumb people commit murders, smart people commit suicides... Wnt (talk) 17:09, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. On Wikipedia, we use the English language as it is used, not as we might want it to be used. There is nothing wrong with saying "committed suicide". -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:28, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Stable Consensus Version of an Article

I hope that this isn't considered a stupid question. In a content dispute, sometimes an article has been more or less unchanged for a long time, and then it is modified, and one or more other editors agree with the change, but some editors disagree with the change, and cite WP:EDITCONSENSUS and argue that the article should be restored to the stable consensus version. In the cases that I have in mind, there no longer appears to be a current consensus, but editors who favor the previous version of the article refer to the previous version as the stable consensus version. My question is whether there is a policy or guideline that I have missed that overrides or should be weighed against Consensus Can Change to take history into account. That is, is there a policy or guideline about historical consensus, which is apparently what is really being invoked by editors who oppose changes to an article.

We agree that, in the situation where one editor changes an article without prior discussion, other editors may revert the edits, and discussion is necessary. In the situation that I have in mind, which I have seen several times, after discussion, two or more editors support the new version, and two or more editors support the old version, and call it the stable version or the consensus version. Is there any policy or guideline that I have missed that gives special weight to a historical consensus version, and so must be balanced against changing consensus? My own thought is that, in such situations, the best answer is often a Request for Comments, which establishes a new consensus. I haven't found a policy or guideline that states that a historical version should be given special treatment as a stable consensus version. Have I missed something, or have other editors missed something? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:57, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

You are correct in that in general there is no stable version as such - unless there has been some sort of discussion where a point has been threshed out - which includes RfCs. Featured Articles would be considered de facto stable versions as WP:FAC functions as a detaile discussion or review that comes to a consensus, (hopefully) having discussed all aspects of an article. This is true also of Good Articles to a degree. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:05, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Per WP:Consensus, “In discussions of proposals to add, modify or remove material in articles, a lack of consensus commonly results in retaining the version of the article as it was prior to the proposal or bold edit.” This is especially true if the prior version had a clear consensus. That version is supposed to remain in place absent a consensus to change it plus a consensus how to change it. Of course, a bold, unchallenged edit creates a new consensus. Anythingyouwant (talk) 21:36, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps I wasn't clear, or perhaps the replies are about other situations than I am describing. An article was stable for a period of a few years. Then, in case A, an editor came along and deleted a section. Another editor restored the section, and another editor deleted it. More editors favored keeping the section deleted than favored restoring it. Editors who favored restoring it called it the stable consensus version, but the consensus was purely historical, because the section no longer had current majority support. In case B, two editors came along, and substantially rewrote the article, with new references. Two editors complained, saying that changing the article away from the stable version was disruptive. So my question is: In either case, do the editors who want the original version restored have a policy-based argument for restoration? Robert McClenon (talk) 02:11, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

In case A, “More editors favored keeping the section deleted than favored restoring it.“ If that amounted to a consensus for deleting the section then there is no policy-based argument AFAIK for restoring the original version, unless perhaps there was a recent extensive RFC or the like. But, if there are not so many more editors who favor deletion as to amount to a consensus, then there is a policy-based argument for restoring the original version, because “a lack of consensus commonly results in retaining the version of the article as it was prior to the proposal or bold edit.” In case B, if the two editors who complained were only complaining that there was no consensus without explaining why they disagreed with the actual edits, then arguably there was in fact consensus for the edits, see Wikipedia:Don't revert due solely to "no consensus". On the other hand, if they also disagreed with the actual edits, so as to make consensus nonexistent, then there is a policy-based argument for restoring the original version, because “a lack of consensus commonly results in retaining the version of the article as it was prior to the proposal or bold edit.” IMHO. Anythingyouwant (talk) 02:37, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Robert McClenon can you point out the discussion in question. There should be more relevant policy and guideline reasons being cited than just status quo. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 04:06, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard/Archive_156#Talk:Microsoft_Hearts.23Mathematics_section . It appears that two editors wanted to restore the section, and said that it was the stable consensus version, and that multiple editors supported its removal. I was officially neutral but did not see any policy basis for restoring the section based on history or consensus. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:27, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

As mentioned, the policy says “a lack of consensus commonly results in retaining the version of the article as it was prior to the proposal or bold edit”. To me, this means there must be some extraordinary reason to allow changes to the article without consensus for those changes. Were it otherwise, one could just as easily add completely new material that lacks current consensus, as delete old material that lacks current consensus. Anythingyouwant (talk) 03:38, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

First, what is an extraordinary reason? Second, in the case in point, it appears that four or five editors supported removal of the section, and two editors favored restoration of the section. At the time of the controversy, there was something closer to a consensus for removing the section than for keeping it. So my question is whether the fact that the section had been there for a year or more in itself resulted in a historical argument for restoring it. Am I explaining the situation clearly, or should I explain it differently? Robert McClenon (talk) 18:19, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

A clear BLP violation would be an example of an extraordinary reason. Moreover, if there is a current consensus against a previous stable version, then nothing in policy or guidelines requires preservation of the previous stable version, unless some special reason exists (e.g. the previous stable consensus resulted from an RFC, or changing the stable consensus version would violate BLP, etc.). You also discussed other scenarios, e.g. "there no longer appears to be a current consensus" or "In case B, two editors came along, and substantially rewrote the article, with new references. Two editors complained…." and in those other scenarios there is no current consensus to change the old version so the old version is supposed to be restored per WP:Consensus. Anythingyouwant (talk) 19:50, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

User:Anythingyouwant - I don't understand. What you say isn't clear. Are you saying that the historical version should be restored, or not? Actually, you appear to be saying both that the historical consensus should be restored because it was the old consensus, and that "no consensus" is not a reason for reverting. Is there a guideline that gives weight to historical versions, even when there is a majority for a change, or is there no such guideline? Where is the guideline that says that "stable consensus versions" take precedence over a change in consensus? Robert McClenon (talk) 00:54, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

In case A, the majority of editors wanted the section deleted. Should it be restored because four over two is not enough of a consensus to override a stable historical version, or should the new consensus be accepted? (I assume that we all agree that an RFC would establish a new consensus that overrides the history.)

In case B, as a matter of fact, there was extended very lengthy inconclusive discussion (a filibuster). The editors who had rewritten the article said that the rewrite was more consistent with what scholarly reliable sources said. It was my judgment that the complaining editors waited a long time after the rewrite before complaining, and as a result the new version had become the stable version, but I still haven't seen the light about "stable consensus versions". Robert McClenon (talk) 00:54, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

I do not want to comment about whether there is a current consensus in your case A or your case B. I merely said that IF there is not current consensus then the old version should normally be restored per the policy that says “a lack of consensus commonly results in retaining the version of the article as it was prior to the proposal or bold edit”. I don’t see how I could be any clearer than that. Anythingyouwant (talk) 01:35, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm still confused. Where is the guideline that says that "stable consensus versions" based on history should be preserved as an alternative to consensus changing? Robert McClenon (talk) 00:54, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

I am aware of no guideline that uses the exact phrase you quote. Anythingyouwant (talk) 01:35, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

I am not sure either "side" in the disputes described can really claim a true consensus. A true consensus requires a fairly broad sampling of editors (I would say you need at least 10). I would suggest that you take the specific disputes to a wider audience (file an RFC) and see if that wider audience can break the deadlock. Blueboar (talk) 01:26, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

I don’t agree that “true consensus requires a fairly broad sampling of editors”. One unchallenged editor can be a consensus. See Wikipedia:Silence and consensus. However, it’s true that an RFC can create a more weighty community-wide consensus that takes precedence over local consensus. Anythingyouwant (talk) 01:39, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

• The general principle is that if consensus for a change cannot be reached, go with the status quo ante (i.e., revert to the version before the dispute broken out), then discuss further until consensus is reached (which can take a long time, sometimes years – it's often best to just drop the matter and come back a year later and open a new discussion).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:23, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I agree with what User:SMcCandlish said, and would only add that consensus for a change means a consensus about how to change it. If one person wants to change the article one way, and another person wants to change it a different way, then there is no consensus and policy ordinarily requires preserving the status quo ante until a consensus emerges: "a lack of consensus commonly results in retaining the version of the article as it was prior to the proposal or bold edit”. N.B. I tried six years ago to make this aspect of the consensus policy crystal clear, but nevertheless it is clear enough.[4] Anythingyouwant (talk) 21:31, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
    • As a practical matter it can be very difficult to make substantive changes to articles that are stable and have a dedicated cadre of watchers, and even minor changes are sometimes out of the question when they are Featured Articles. Coretheapple (talk) 22:21, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

WP:NOTMEMORIAL and victim lists in tragedy articles

Currently, WP:NOTMEMORIAL states that "Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others who do not meet [the requirements at WP:BLP]". Many, including myself, have interpreted this as prohibiting lists of victims in the articles of tragedies. However, many others disagreed, and in June 2016 there was a discussion as to whether to add such a list to 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. In the closing statement, it was suggested that while there is a precedent to include such lists, such precedent may conflict with NOTMEMORIAL, and a separate RfC should be held about the general interpretation of the NOTMEMORIAL and to determine whether or not a list of victims violates the policy. Indeed, local consensus for 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting was "to allow the list untill it is either removed to a separate article or a higher level consensus abolishes the use of such lists acrosss wikipedia" [sic]. The full closing statement by Maunus is below for reference:

I count 22 !votes to include vs. 16 to exclude. However, several arguments for excluding are temporary opening the possibility of having separate page listing the victims. The argument against is WP:NOTMEMORIAL, which suggests that wikipedia should not memorialize people who are not themselves notable biographic subjects. Arguments for allowing, suggest that WP:MEMORIAL does not apply to embedded lists in articles, and point out the precedentfor having such lists in other articles about mass shootings. I think that there is a conflict between WP:MEMORIAL and the existing precendent, but this should be addressed in a separate RfC about the general interpretation of the WP:MEMORIAL. In such an RfC i would vote to exclude lists of victims in articles on mass deaths (especially given the inequal possibilities afforded different kinds of victims in different pats of the world), but in this case the local consensus regarding this article in specific is to allow the list untill it is either removed to a separate article or a higher level consensus abolishes the use of such lists acrosss wikipedia.

That brings us here. I propose that we add a line to WP:NOTMEMORIAL that would prohibit listing individual victims of tragedies if they do not meet our notability guidelines and/or WP:BLP. This would apply to not just lists, but general naming of non-notable victims as well, either in the article or as a separate article. This proposal, if approved, would also override any local consensus and precedents. SkyWarrior 04:53, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Support

• Support as nominator. SkyWarrior 04:53, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support per WP:BIO1E and just generally out of respect. If all we can write about a person's entire life is that they died, we should not write about them. I've done a lot in my life, none of it notable, but if I die in a terrorism incident and that's the only thing you ever write about me, I will haunt your ass. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 12:24, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support. Naming non-notable victims is a horrible and blatant invasion of privacy (and WP:BLP), as well as a bizarre misuse of Wikipedia. Softlavender (talk) 03:07, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support More specifically, I agree there are times they are appropriate as to understanding whatever the tragedy was, but we should be considering those exception, with the rule to avoid inclusion of victim lists in general. Hence I support the general idea, just that we need the "with exception" cavaet. --MASEM (t) 14:12, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• Conditional support, "I support the general idea, just that we need the "with exception" caveat" per Masem. Therefore wording should indicate ' ordinarily avoid', rather than 'ban' such lists. Per others, these lists fulfil no real purpose, except sentimental memorialising. Pincrete (talk) 15:01, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support Not a fan of victim lists in general. SparklingPessimist ^{Scream at me!} 02:54, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

• I'm not a fan of Pessimists so does that mean we get rid of you ? .... No ofcourse it doesn't, You either need to provide a better rationale other than WP:IDONTLIKEIT or strike the entire thing. –Davey2010^Talk 21:02, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support Not only is this a pretty blatant violation of WP:NOTMEMORIAL, there are WP:BLP concerns here. Unless these people are independently WP:notable, it's a dubious call to be archiving their names in our articles in this fashion; I don't think the value a list of names adds to understanding the substance and context of a tragedy (as an encyclopedic topic) is significant enough to justify dragging the identities of these people (and by consequence, their families) into an article. Needless to say, the equation changes with enough WP:WEIGHT in the sources--with the important caveat that weight in this instance means more than just a handful of sources repeating the names: there would need to be a certain baseline depth of coverage as well. And even then, we would have prose detail for anyone who is genuinely WP:DUE for inclusion, not a mere listing. Snow ^{let's rap} 06:52, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support, as general rule, allowing for exceptions, as others have already explained. - Nabla (talk) 20:57, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support per Snow Rise. The case-by-case discussion should be limited to whether the victims are independently notable, and that is already a provision of this proposal. There is little need for case-by-case discussion about anything else. Those discussions invariably have more to do with interpretation of NOTMEMORIAL than about the specifics of the article, and article talk is not the place to have such discussions. Further, the notion that name-listing in RS is all we need to list these names is in direct conflict with WP:BLPNAME. ―Mandruss ☎ 19:18, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Oppose

• Oppose. This should be handled case by case, not by a blanket global prohibition. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 05:03, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. Totally agree that this is something that is handled case by case. A full on ban would be ignoring situations that we simply can't anticipate today. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 11:01, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose Case-by-case consideration is the best way to go. The phrase "victims of tragedies" covers far too broad and far too diverse a population for the proposed rule. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 11:50, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose This should be handled case by case. At a minimum BLP1E (or similar) cases should be mentioned. If victims of a notable event are mentioned/listed as part of reliable coverage of said event, it makes sense that we mention them as well. A prohibition would go against the intention of WP:MEMORIAL. Agathoclea (talk) 12:11, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose per above. postdlf (talk) 13:47, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose per above. HastyBriar321 (talk) 02:27, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose per Seraphimblade. I'll also add that this is especially true if reliable sources have produced such lists. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 01:36, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose as per above - Should be done case-by-case, As noted by Agathoclea if they're mentioned in reliable sources = Include them, if not = don't. –Davey2010^Talk 02:59, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose per "case by case" arguments. Similarly oppose "name them if RS names them", and I certainly hope that doesn't make it into the close statement. RS almost always names them because their mission is very different from ours. As for the language at WP:MEMORIAL, name lists in a handful of news articles do not make the individuals notable; if they did, we would have bio articles on those individuals; there is only one notability threshold. ―Mandruss ☎ 06:46, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose weakly. (Summoned by bot) It has to be a case by case, anything else will just cause trouble, not guidance. L3X1 (distænt write) 16:13, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose . (Summoned by bot) Depends on the tragedy. Should not be a blanket rule, should be case-by-case. Coretheapple (talk) 15:34, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose If the names are verifiable / covered in reliable sources, then it could be part of the article. Each article should be considered on the merit of including such a list. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:19, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose I see no reason not to list where the subjects are verifiable with reliable source. Consider 1940 Canberra air disaster. Four of those killed are very notable indeed; the four aircrew are not. But I think the article is best served by their inclusion. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:28, 11 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - Case by case basis is needed. If they are mentioned in a reliable source I fail to see any argument against their inclusion. Nihlus 18:45, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose This issue came into sharp relief after the 11 Sept 2001 attacks (we eventually created an entire wiki which is now mothballed). I am in general cautiously against including lists of victims, particularly long lists, it adds very little. There are cases, though, where even non-notable names are relevant, for example where the names themselves indicate something of value. Even then this is best sourced and stated explicitly. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:24, 16 October 2017 (UTC).
  
• Oppose. No need for a hard and fast rule. Sometimes it's appropriate to name victims; sometimes (especially when there are many victims) it isn't. Depends entirely on the individual case. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:24, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - It would cause chaos to implement such a hard and fast rule across the board. Each article must be looked at individually. No hard and fast rule should be implemented across the board. Each article must looked at individually. If the list of victim names is included in numerous top-tier reliable sources, particularly for major tragedies such as mass shootings, then exluding the names would be non-sensical and a great disservice to readers. The names would obviously be noteworthy content. Including only basic, identifying information - such as name, age, and residence city - would in no way be memorializing victims. Memorializing would include things such as personal background details, tributes, anecdotes, quotes, and photos. For articles about mass shootings, consider this: the 10 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history are, in order, the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the Orlando nightclub shooting, the Virginia Tech shooting, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the Luby's shooting, the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre, the University of Texas tower shooting, the Edmond post office shooting, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, and the Binghamton shootings. All of them, except Las Vegas (which is currently in the midst of a discussion about this), include a list of the victims' names and, at the very least, their ages. This evidence makes clear that Wikipedia editors have repeatedly debated this issue and clearly established a consensus that a list of victim names should and will be listed in major mass shooting articles, and that its inclusion overrides any objections based on WP:NOTMEMORIAL, WP:BLP, and WP:OTHERSTUFF. 2605:A000:FFC0:D8:E8B0:35F4:5401:1C0D (talk) 15:16, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose—Most individuals who are killed tragically are not "independently notable." If they were, they could have their own article. The proposed policy misses what lists do. Among other things, lists can illustrate the discriminatory intent of a massacre perpetrator (École Polytechnique massacre); provide an illustration of the indiscriminate nature of violence, for example that a shooter attacked children; help describe the chronology and place where violence was applied (Haditha massacre); illustrate familial relationships among those victimized (Haditha massacre, again); and indicate the affiliations of those killed. It's possible that a truly random, or non-purposeful attack needs none of these things, but let's leave it to page editors to work that out. Moreover, lists provide a mechanism for a user searching for a given victim to find the tragedy in which they were killed. These objective grounds are in addition to concerns that encyclopedic text should offer at least the same human dignity to victims of tragic violence as their perpetrators.--Carwil (talk) 19:34, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose – WP:NOTMEMORIAL says "Subjects of encyclopedia articles must satisfy Wikipedia's notability requirements. Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others who do not meet such requirements." This is about articles and notability, and says nothing about whether lists of victims are encyclopedic or not. I suggest we continue to look at this more case-by-case. When reliable sources publish lists of victims, it would seem OK for us to do the same. Dicklyon (talk) 04:52, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose, list of victims is part of encyclopedic knowledge of an attack. If reliable sources publish such lists, do not see why they cannot be included on Wikipedia. A violation of not memorial would be if we started including obituaries ("they are survived by five kids, three dogs, and a hamster"). In some cases, the lists might not be appropriate, but they should be handled on case-by-case basis. Renata (talk) 23:16, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose, If the incident itself in which they died is notable, then the people who died taken as a whole are notable. In some cases obviously the number would be too big (e.g., 9/11, or the sinking of the Titanic). Should be decided case-by-case. FOARP (talk) 12:37, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - As others have said this should be handled on a case by case basis. No need for WP:CREEP here. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:36, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - Each article is different. If the victims are named in multiple reliable sources and if it is due weight they should be included Atlantic306 (talk) 20:09, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Alternatives

• Mixed guidance - Alternative guidance might be "avoid listing names in mass deaths unless the individual names are commonly listed in accounts, or are otherwise notable" This seems an area where the precedent seems to sometimes list victims of shootings but not always, with no clear guide that I can see. Guidance might mention that larger events should not list names because it's infeasible and large enough that the individual names were not covered so do not meet WP:V or WP:WEIGHT. Examples University of Texas tower shooting, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and Columbine High School massacre, UpStairs Lounge arson attack. Versus Cleveland Elementary School shooting (Stockton), Oklahoma City bombing, 1975 LaGuardia Airport bombing, or September 11 attacks. Markbassett (talk) 04:54, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
• Mixed guidance, per Markbassett. We do have an issue to resolve, but should not over-reach.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  21:57, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
• Mixed guidance - I agree that it is improper to list the victims in cases of random mass shootings... but I do think the names of the victims are important to mention in cases where the victims were the intentional targets (i.e. where the killer was intentionally trying to kill specific individuals). Blueboar (talk) 15:13, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• Mixed guidance - I would probably have agreed to support this proposal, but then there are cases where a simple list is notable and should be included. Perhaps the guideline is set dependant on the overall number of people, most higher-body-count incidents would also have a proportionally higher number of unnotable individuals. It could be that low-individual lists are allowed, medium-individual lists are collapsed (possibly in a template at the end of the page called "List of people killed in *x*"), and high-individual lists are excluded altogether? IJReid ^{{{T - C - D - R}}} 05:32, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
• Mixed guidance: Where inclusion of victims is necessary to understand a crime (motivation, sequencing, interaction with perp, etc), then they should be included. Where inclusion is not required to understand a crime, they should not be included. This means that in some cases all victims would be included, while in other cases some might be referred to obliquely or grouped, and in other cases few or none would be included. For the Las Vegas shooting, Campos appears to be the only victim critical to understanding the event.^~Hydronium^~Hydroxide^~(Talk)~ 11:48, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Mixed guidance: I would prefer External Links to lists of victims. Failing that, I would like the names to be treated the way secondary sources handle them. That is, if multiple reliable secondary sources mention a victim's name, then Wikipedia can do so. As an example, University of Texas tower shooting is drawing from a variety of documentaries. Abductive (reasoning) 06:50, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

General discussion

Please arrange for the RfC format to be fixed. There are at least two problems with the layout:

1. There is neither a signature nor even an unattributed timestamp for the opening statement. When building the RfC listings, Legobot (talk · contribs) copies from the {{rfc}} template (exclusive) to the next timestamp (inclusive). The next timestamp is in the "Support" section, so Legobot will copy that heading and the first !vote. If this appears in the RfC listing, it would be against WP:RFC#Statement should be neutral and brief, and could skew the responses.
2. The text copied by Legobot includes a table; this is forbidden by WP:RFC#Statement should be neutral and brief as it breaks the listing entry.

Have a look at how the RfC appears at WP:RFC/BIO (Permalink). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:09, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Sorry about that, I think I fixed it. SkyWarrior 23:35, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Please also note that the opening statement should be "neutral and brief [...] A long statement will make the list harder to read [...] If you have lots to say on the issue, give and sign a brief statement in the initial description and save the page, then edit the page again and place additional comments below your first statement and signature", per Wikipedia:Requests for comment. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 17:15, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Anti/Pro-Trump/other politician user categories and userboxes?

I'm doing this as a pre-emptive measure because there seem to have been quite a lot of user categories and userboxes that are being brought to the attention of both WP:CFD and WP:MFD. The earliest discussion I can find is Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2017 February 14#Category:Politically leftist Wikipedians, which saw both that category and an equivalent for right-wing Wikipedians get deleted. It seems that for awhile things were quiet, until we had this discussion, Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2017 September 4#Category:Wikipedians who are against Donald Trump, which also saw that category get deleted. I've nominated a category recently myself, but only one, and I didn't realize how widespread these materials are, or how much momentum this trend of nominating these things is gaining. There is also Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2017 October 6#Political support categories, which seems to be gaining a steady delete consensus (it's about user categories that specifically and unambiguously endorse candidates on both sides of the spectrum). Elsewhere, however, the solution is not so clear-cut, with many categories, in the view of users such as myself, expressing support for one sociopolitical viewpoint or another without using it to imply interest in collaboration with other Wikipedians in editing those same topic areas regardless of whether they personally agree with each other. Personally, my view is that these userboxes stand in clear violation of WP:UBCR, while the categories violate WP:User categories#Inappropriate types of user categories, namely "Categories which group users by advocacy of a position". This is not merely a fringe view either, as there's enough of us who think this way that it's clouding consensus on the issue, warranting broader discussion.

I believe the best way to go about this is to list examples of what might end up being discussed at either MFD or CFD. I encourage others to add to it, but within reason - this is not a substitute for discussion at either venue. Whether we decide to keep them or get rid of them, we'll likely still have to take it over there. It is not my goal to try to circumvent either venue; it is not merely about these specific examples or others like them, but the idea of them as a whole. I just want to nip this in the bud and give us some peace of mind. If you add something to this list, please leave a ping for the user who originally made it unless that user has already been pinged here.

Keep in mind that userboxes can also be categorized in a confrontational way, so on the face of it they may seem to express a message everyone can agree with, but in adding them to your own page you'll add a category you may not necessarily feel you belong in. Userboxes may be kept, but should be recategorized as the community sees fit. Feel free to point out problematic categorization wherever you see it.

{{Template:User alt-right foe}}

Paging Buaidh (talk · contribs). Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 14:02, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I agree, political userboxes should not add a user to a "Left/Right wing" or "Anti-Trump/Clinton" category, but to a category such as "Users that support Trump/Clinton". - ZLEA ^{(Talk,Contribs)} 17:07, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

We shouldn't even have those, since they don't support encyclopedic collaboration (likely the opposite), and the Trump vs. Clinton matter is already over anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  21:56, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

• Given that we are supposed to maintain a Neutral Point of View as editors, I don't think it appropriate to have any politically oriented user categories. Whether a user supports (or opposes) candidate X, Y or Z is irrelevant to writing and maintaining an encyclopedia.

And if we do decide to keep these categories, we should institute a topic ban to go with them... anyone who declares for or against a politician should be topic banned from editing articles that relate to that politician. Blueboar (talk)|

I hereby declare my strong opposition to Donald Trump and defy any editor to show that that has negatively affected my fairly active participation at Donald Trump since before the election. Just try a TBAN against me and see how far you get. Sorry but that's a non-starter. Besides, such a rule would do absolutely nothing for article quality, it would simply make POV editors keep quiet about their POVs. I agree that Wikipedia should be as apolitical as possible and editors should generally keep their political leanings to themselves (exception made in this comment for a good reason). ―Mandruss ☎ 18:02, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

You may have good intentions, but that's not a good idea. It presumes that any editor with any position strong enough that he/she mentions it on his/her userpage is automatically going to make NPOV-violating edits. This simply is not true, though. Master of Time (talk) 18:05, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Interesting, I'd never heard that viewpoint before. That's certainly not what I'm concerned about, and it's not been the concern raised so far. What we're worried about is this causing schisms among editors, perhaps people refusing to collaborate with each other or getting to any degree antagonistic over issues as sensitive as political ones. Biased editing on related articles was definitely not something that crossed my mind. As far as the point you two are making, there's a difference between "Wikipedians interested in Donald Trump" and "Wikipedians against Donald Trump"; the earlier implies some sort of vested interest in actually bringing more information about him to the encyclopedia, aside from the more positive connotations "interested" tends to have, whereas the latter does not actually carry any implication of interest in editing in that topic area at all, making it a questionable use of userspace and category space. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 21:08, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't disagree with that. My previous comment was only about the TBAN-if-you-declare idea. WP:UBCR (emphasis theirs): "Userboxes must not be inflammatory or divisive." Inflammatory? Probably. Divisive? Definitely. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:19, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I see. I don't know how I missed that part of Blueboar's post. My apologies. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 21:34, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

A topic ban is definitely taking things too far. Concern over biased editing was not the spirit in which this RFC was started, and until now was not something I'd seen mentioned in discussion over this topic. As I said before, the concerns that folks like myself share is that it could foment discord among the userbase, making users reluctant to collaborate on certain topics or engage in certain discussions to avoid risking being antagonized for holding to one belief or another. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 21:32, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

• Break out the thought police. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:19, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

• One, I hope we break out the rational arguments instead. Two, we can keep the petty mudslinging off the page. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 20:55, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

• Well, don't try to control how people express their opinions and you wont be accused of thought police. If I have a userbox saying 'I think the US president is a racist homophobic imbecile' vs 'I support the Democrats'. You could make a credible argument the first would be disallowed under BLP but any restrictions on the latter would just lead to the knock on effect of people complaining about every political position. Users advocating for gender legislation reform? That's a political position, cant have it on the userpage. Users in favour of gun control? Political position. Users with anti-racism statements? Political position. Unless you are going to blanket ban per Blueboar above *all* userboxes, this will never fly - as there will always be someone who disagrees politically with something or other. On a basic level a userbox that professes support for the LGBT movement is both offensive and inflammatory to a huge number of people. I will enjoy watching you attempt to get rid of them. Just let me know so I can get the popcorn ready. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:28, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

• You are making valid arguments but using needlessly uncivil language. No one here is trying to be the "thought police". This RFC was not to enforce some kind of deletionist solution to the problem. I'll accept the outcome whichever way it goes. I simply believe this needs to be discussed as while we have reached consensus in some of the discussions I've linked, there appear to be many more that could end up at MFD or CFD sooner or later, and rather than bombard people with notices of discussions in progress, it would just be easier to find examples and reach some kind of consensus here to prevent needless discussions. Whatever outcome we achieve here will be replicated on the individual discussions, thus invalidating the need for them and saving us a lot of time & work. I have only made my own thoughts on the matter clear, I have made no attempt to control the discussion or enforce any kind of outcome - you made a blatant personal attack with that accusation. Try helping us achieve a consensus rather than getting confrontational. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 19:48, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• You could have just made your arguments in your original post and not gotten confrontational at any point. It would have been a very welcome contribution to this discussion. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 20:03, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• It's somewhat pointless to call something a personal attack if it wouldn't stand a chance of a sanction following a traumatic 10-day train wreck at WP:ANI. "Thought police" would not. But it's unhelpful hyperbole; if this is a proposal to "control how people express their opinions", WP:UBCR is another one that already has community consensus. We do put reasonable limits on editor self-expression here, or try to do so with incomplete success. ―Mandruss ☎ 07:45, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

• That it wouldn't stand a chance at ANI is not the point, and in fact is evidence that WP:CIVIL is increasingly irrelevant because people ignore it knowing that most transgressions against it won't be punished since it would take too long relative to the degree of slight that occurred. It is a personal attack, it's a false accusation. How people react to it does not at all define what it actually is.

You do have a point that Wikipedia already does try to control what users say on it, though, and to see that, look no further than WP:FORUM, which mandates that we relegate discussion on talk pages strictly to being about improving the articles to which they are attached. To pretend we have "free speech" here is laughable because Wikipedia is a private organization that can enforce whatever rules it damn well pleases on those who use it, not an attempt at any form of government that would have such obligations towards its citizens. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 02:31, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

• Zeke - I think other kinds for MFD would be (1) Coverage of something trivial and transient -- just momentarily viral on the internet and now no longer covered. In particular lately far too many articles about Trump (is it over 1,000 now?) where far far to many were some embarassingly trivial topic. (e.g. covfefe or high heels or hair or handshakes). Also MFD might be (2) Content present in more than 3 articles. I tend to think some of this was pasted into multiple spots and so winds up not a good fit to most places it was put. Markbassett (talk) 05:59, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
• Having thought about this some more, I realize that another important concern is the treatment of our userspaces as social media profiles, which are so often used merely as a platform for expressing and promoting points of view while refusing to be challenged. Ideally, I would think interests and tastes are not described unless they either 1) are used to imply where you're most likely to see a particular editor working or 2) could influence that editor's contributions in any way. Me personally, I've left a lot unsaid about me on my own userpage only because I did not see its potential to contribute to my profile as an editor. I have my own political opinions, but I don't see the need to express them here, largely because I don't intend to contribute to political topic areas if I can help it. But enabling these sorts of things might leave the door open for mere soapboxing of the kind that we see so often on Facebook - things people say only to be heard, not to actually make the encyclopedia any better for having said it or getting any kind of dialogue going. More often than not, they're intended for people to accept and start believing in without any response whatsoever. After all, our userspaces are not really part of the encyclopedia, and people have to take our actual article content with a grain of salt as it is. Why would a userspace rant be any more reliable? And would they necessarily be posted with an eye toward making the encyclopedia around which userspace orbits any better? Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 00:51, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• I agree basically that we should not have categories that classify editors directly into any political or ideological mindset, particularly if they are just adding a userbox to their page (the userboxes are fine in this regards). Far too much potential for abuse internally and externally there. Fully agree that there is a problem if a user-box automatically includes an editor into a category, since that is ripe for problems if the user box is edited to include other categories by presumption. I don't see a problem on a user-page or user-boxes as long as all necessary content and behavior policies are followed (eg no BLP violations, political messages should remain civil, etc.),since the user is controlling that themselves. I would probably make a case that editors should not use user-page content to cast aspirations against an editor, under WP:NPA, so that people should be free to express their views to understand their editing patterns. --MASEM (t) 15:40, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

That last point is important.... adding political user tags can give the appearance of non-neutral editing, even when the actual editing may be neutral (or at least attempting to be neutral). I am concerned that these tags will lead other editors to dismiss a valid concern ("oh, we can dismiss this editor's concern... he/she is not neutral... see, he/she even proclaims their non-neutrality on their user page!"). In disputes, these tags will encourage others to focus on the editor, and not the actual edit. Blueboar (talk) 16:47, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

That type of concern should be handled by behavior around those making a deal of a user-tag, and should be called out as completely inappropriate, approaching an NPA warning, as otherwise we'd be questioning the differential between what is a political position versus other sentiments expressed by user-boxes. If an editor has a user box that says "I support the far right", we shouldn't care as long as their behavior in editing is not solely informed by that stance, and they follow all expected behavior patterns for editors. That's a whole problem of identity politics that is dominating the real world but shouldn't be a factor in editing on WP, and should actually be called out when people use that against editors when editor behavior otherwise does not warrant. Obviously, if we find a case of an editor that consistently edits uncollaborative with the POV represented by a user-box, that's a different situation that should be handled in a different manner. --MASEM (t) 17:04, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. POV-editing should be handled on a case-by-case basis, and I really don't think userboxes should ever come into play in that situation - in fact, my experience would tell me the editors with the greatest problems concerning their biases would be ones whose usernames are redlinks because they didn't come to build a userpage, let alone an encyclopedia, so they wouldn't know or care about userboxes. The editors who take the time to actually use them are, in my book, far less likely to cause that kind of problem. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 03:21, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

We really have no community consensus as to the role of p&g, a consensus that should form the bedrock for everything else. Some will say that p&g guide behavior, so we can speak of violations of it. Others say that p&g reflect behavior, and a p or g should be updated if there are enough editors ignoring it or unaware of it (in that case it follows that speaking of violations impedes the community's ability to form consensus). Ample support for both concepts can be found in policy and common practice. I have never understood how both can be true, but that's what we appear to have and it makes this kind of discussion problematic. This is "meta" and probably out-of-venue, so feel free to disregard or respond on my talk page (I would dearly love to understand this apparent paradox), but it also seems at the core of the frequent issues like this one. ―Mandruss ☎ 08:52, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

• Categories are meant to allow easy access to topics that are connected. User categories are thus meant to allow to find users who share common characteristics which might be useful in improving the encyclopedia, broadly construed. So categories that group users by country, language, school etc. are good uses for categories, because you might need to find someone from country X, school Y, speaking language Z etc. Is there any need to find editors who support or oppose a certain politician? I can't think of one...
  Userboxes on the other hand serve a different purpose, they allow users to (positively) declare interests and (negatively) declare biases and thus are useful even when there is no reason to categorize such users. So a "Pro-Trump"/"Anti-Trump"/etc. userbox is definitely useful because it allows others to understand that some contributions might be tinged by a certain bias. Like Masem, I don't see a problem with that since contributions by people who take the time to declare their biases are usually made with more thought than by those who don't. Regards SoWhy 09:35, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

definitely useful because it allows others to understand that some contributions might be tinged by a certain bias. If I understand what you're saying, you have demonstrated the potential problem that Blueboar referred to above. I think we have more than enough false suspicions of POV editing held by people who fail to recognize/acknowledge their own bias, without feeding those people with ammunition for their ABF. Far from being "useful", it's both useless and destructive. ―Mandruss ☎ 11:30, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

I could certainly support userboxes ahead of user categories. Having too many on a certain subject might be something we look into solving, but that's probably another RFC. Userboxes are personal, and if this ends up changing the rules as to their content, that's fine too. If anything, we should look at it this way: Our policies on userboxes say one thing, but by and large, our userboxes, the things it supposedly governs, say a very different one, and the divide has only been allowed to grow over the years, especially these tense last few. It's obvious something needs to change there, whether any of us like the outcome or not. But categories definitely serve a different purpose on user pages compared to articles, which even serve a different purpose to those on talk pages, and so on. Being able to find someone based on potential political bias, if it is indeed helpful at all, has a far less obvious benefit than being able to find someone willing to make difficult blocks, provide copies of deleted pages, can provide some feedback on a much-needed topic area, or can potentially supply some good photography for a given subject. To put it simply, the categories define what a user can bring to the table of editing Wikipedia, and bias, one way or another, doesn't exactly have potential in that area. At best, it would merely show what might influence an editor for better or for worse. It wouldn't show some skillset this user has. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 02:31, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

Here is a convenient way to find the editors who currently transclude {{User anti-Trump}}, just one of the many pro- or anti-Trump userboxes currently extant. I don't see much difference between the categories and the userboxes for the purposes of this discussion. Both have the same very real potential to impede the project's mission (building an encyclopedia), and both have little upside besides self-expression. In the end, Wikipedia is not a social networking site. This applies also to other divisive political userboxes such as {{User Black Lives}}, but I'm willing to limit scope for now. ―Mandruss ☎ 13:54, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

Downgrade Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines?

On the page Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines I propose replacing

 {{subcat guideline|editing guideline|Reference desk|WP:RD/G}}

with

 {{Supplement|pages=[[Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines]]|shortcut=WP:RD/G}}

This would change...

Category:Wikipedia editing guidelines

...to...

Category:Wikipedia supplemental pages

Reason: Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines has never actually been approved as a guideline by the Wikipedia community, just by a few editors on the reference desks at the time it was created. See WP:LOCALCON. More importantly, there are editors on the reference desks who quote this guideline as permission to violate WP:TPOC. In several recent examples, other user's comments were deleted because the editor doing the deleting deemed them to be "worthless". Downgrading this local guideline to a supplemental page will make it clear that WP:TPOC applies when deciding what can be deleted. This suggested downgrade would not prevent deletions as allowed by WP:TPOC such as trolling and vandalism. --Guy Macon (talk) 21:14, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

The real problem is not the guideline - it's the inability, of some editors (me included, sometimes) to recognize trolling questions when they turn up. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:32, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Actually, the real underlying problem is that, all to often, we treat the reference desk as an answer desk. We try to answer questions (based on our own knowledge) instead of helping the OP find the answer themselves (by providing actual references) ... and yeah... I am guilty of this myself. As for trolls... I find they get bored and stop posting if you limit your answer to: "See source X"... and refrain from other commentary. Blueboar (talk) 16:11, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Blueboar, I agree that what you describe is the real underlying problem. Alas, I don't have a solution for it. If you can think of one, I would love to present a proposal that implements the solution.

I do however, have a solution for the far smaller secondary problem of editors on the reference desks who (mis)quote WP:RD/G and say that it overrides WP:TPOC. That solution is at the top of this proposal. Do you have any objections to me implementing my suggested change? --Guy Macon (talk) 18:47, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

You say "Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines has never actually been approved as a guideline by the Wikipedia community, just by a few editors on the reference desks at the time it was created. See WP:LOCALCON." I would argue that the word "community" is more applicable to the Reference desks than to the rest of the encyclopedia. Therefore I think the problem is WP:LOCALCON. It needs to loosen up a bit in this instance. The Reference desks certainly are a part of the overall encyclopedia but a community and a very good community in my opinion has developed at the Reference desks including its own community quirks. It is watched over by knowledgeable and competent people and more than a few administrators. Bus stop (talk) 19:47, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Disagree. We've had a rampant problem for years with every other wikiproject (and the RD is basically a wikiproject) declaring whatever they come up with to be a "guideline" without any input from anyone else, or any examination by the broader community. We have WP:VPPRO for a reason.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  21:54, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Is the Reference desk "basically a wikiproject"? Are there articles within "WikiProject Reference desk"? Bus stop (talk) 23:07, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

I have an amazingly easy way to fix those issues. Don't answer unless you are providing a reference, either to a work or a relevant Wikipedia article containing multiple refs. Any responses not containing the above get removed on sight. Close all questions after 72 hours answered or not. Boom, disappearing chatforum, personal knowledge and extensive trolling. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:11, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

So you would leave the neo-Nazi posts visible for 3 days? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:15, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Anything clearly offensive/racist can already be removed under existing guidance. However the fact is we have plenty of articles based on subjects that are relevant to the neo-nazis, historical and current, so unless the question is 'How many jews can I gas with a mark 1 gas chamber' your question is meaningless without context. Trolls get bored when you stop playing their game. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:33, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

And therein lies the problem. Your hypothetical is in the neighborhood of the types of questions he asks. And he never gets bored. He's been at it for yeas. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:42, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Only in death offers a good suggestion, although a bit too dogmatically. It is possible that a constructive response might not contain a good reference. But it is a good suggestion that we should try to adhere too. I have my own suggestion. It is often not clear if an inquiry is a prank (trolling) or a question worth addressing. Therefore I feel it is virtually imperative that the person posing the inquiry must be available for dialogue. We are placing ourselves in a weak position when we allow an initial post to generate a volume of discussion without any further input from the initiator of that thread. They must be available for instance for questions from those trying to help them. If they refuse to be further involved, then it is a good indication that the thread should be hatted. The problem here is a battle of wits. We have to assume that we have the ability, through sustained dialogue, to suss out the intention of the person posting a query. It is my working assumption that pranksters don't have the intellectual rigor required for in-depth discussion of the "topic" that they've raised. The topic is often ill-defined. If they decide to change their question to a more focussed question, then fine, we proceed normally and try to help them get answers to their newly revised question. Bus stop (talk) 16:55, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Support. It won't affect the wording or nature of the material in any way, but will avoid confusion between WP:P&G material that's been vetted by the broader editorial community, versus narrowly topical WP:PROJPAGE essay material that hasn't had the input of much of anyone but its authors.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  21:54, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Oppose. The reference desks are not talk pages. They are reference desks as described at Reference desk. A reference desk is not an encyclopaedia, it is a way for the public to access the facility. It requires its own guidelines because it is a reference desk and not an encyclopaedia article or a page for editors to discuss improvements. Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy for a long standing guideline to be changed just because someone thinks some hoops haven't been jumped through. Dmcq (talk) 18:59, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

Comment. I honestly have no idea what the effect of this change is, nor the validity of the current guidelines. I should point out that their most overbearing use - efforts by a medical lobby to keep people from answering basic questions - won't really be changed because the same people will argue, at very great length, about how the general disclaimer at the bottom of the page means they should delete your question. As a guideline, literally taken, it is not a bad idea to tell people not to give advice (about anything - and the guidelines actually say that but only the medical lobby cares). Then it would simply be a stylistic thing and we'd provide references and ideas rather than being afraid to mention things we can think of. So I think it's mostly a matter of resisting the abuse of policy, rather than what the policy says. I find proposals like only in death's to be bizarre and completely undesirable -- the expiration time of postings has nothing to do with anything, but it's already too short to get decent answers for a lot of questions. And while editors should come with references in hand I don't think we can enforce that strongly because sometimes a suggestion without refs helps someone else jog their memory; I've seen it many times. Wnt (talk) 10:53, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Well i do give advice sometimes - mostly of the form of if they had just stuck the title of the query into Google search they'd have got an answer much quicker and with less bother. :) It would be good though if some of the editors there could just either ignore annoying questions or just answer them with a reference rather than doing anything else. Rising to some troll is just stupid. Dmcq (talk) 12:44, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose The page has been stable and in use for the better part of a decade without widespread changes or objections. That's a consensus as one can get. --Jayron32 19:35, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
• I Support the proposed change in tags, which I see as a "clarification" rather than a "downgrade". Also, I think we should consider the advantages of WP:NOTAG for pages like that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:32, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose The refdesks are talky, but they're not talk pages — they have a completely different purpose. There are indeed some common issues, and I wouldn't be opposed to incorporating WP:TPOC, the specific concern that seems to be at the top of Guy's mind. --Trovatore (talk) 08:50, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Comment - There is an open proposal to shut down the Reference Desks, here. If passed, it would moot this discussion. ―Mandruss ☎ 16:06, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Followup Proposal

WP:RD/G/M has the same problems as WP:RD/G, and is also being claimed to override WP:TPOC. Does anyone object to be downgrading this one to a explanatory supplement at well? --Guy Macon (talk) 22:05, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

If you seriously want to approve giving out professional advice, you should discuss it with the WMF first. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:52, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

• To cut through all the blather here... the question seems to be simple: Should WP:RD/G be considered a) a "guideline" page or b) a "supplement" page? I suggest we hold an RFC here on the VPP to ask this simple question. Then we will know what the broader community thinks of it... and any question of Local Consensus will disappear. Blueboar (talk) 23:59, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

• That's a really good way of stating the question. Much better than I could have done. Are there any objections to me posting an RfC on this? --Guy Macon (talk) 02:26, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

WP:TPO bullet 4: Off topic. This is one surefire way to derail a constructive discussion. ―Mandruss ☎ 12:41, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

You shouldn't post any more RFC's until you've withdrawn your RFC to get Betacommand reinstated. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:14, 9 October 2017 (UTC) Come on, Bugs, why are you introducing Betacommand into every discussion Guy Macon is involved in? No matter how justified your emotions about that RFC might be, it has no relevance whatsoever here. Repeatedly bringing it up where it doesn't belong only distracts from the topic at hand, and is annoying. ---Sluzzelin talk 15:25, 9 October 2017 (UTC) Not near as annoying as the thought of Betacommand being reinstated. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:40, 9 October 2017 (UTC) Sluzzelin, Bugs is heading toward a block for WP:HOUNDING. I am ignoring his comments and advise other to do likewise. Responding in any way only encourages more of the bad behavior. Wikipedia being open to all, if you work on building the encyclopedia for any length of time, you have the possibility of attracting your own personal stalker who considers pretty much anything you do a personal affront, and who considers it their sacred duty to "expose" the person they fixate on. It's really quite pathetic, but for some reason they just can't quite seem to figure out why no one else sees their actions as heroic. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:08, 10 October 2017 (UTC) That's for sure. I've got some stalkers that go back to 2009 or earlier. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:39, 12 October 2017 (UTC) FWIW I see this discussion is at [5] - there is certainly nothing inherently disqualifying to Macon's positions overall because he's trying to rehabilitate an editor out of Wikigulag. Wnt (talk) 13:00, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

• Well there really needs to be an option to mark it as neither and mark it as an essay until its fit for purpose. Its not a useful guideline because its conflicts with TPOC. Its not a supplement because what it allegedly supplements actually says something different. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:41, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Technically, there is no conflict between the RD/guidelines and TPOC, because ref desk pages are not talk pages - they are project pages. This is why the ref desk pages have their own guidelines - TPOC does not apply to ref desk pages (I suppose, however, that it would apply to the talk page that is attached to every ref desk). Blueboar (talk) 10:57, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Lets just say if its treated like a talk page, its a talk page. That its technically a project page does not give it a magical shield against the guidelines designed specifically for pages where editors interact in discussion. Although saying that, it would be easier to add a line to TPOC to indicate that it also applies to all pages whose primary purpose is discussion. Would you seriously argue at AN/ANI that TPOC doesn't apply there because they are project pages? Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:09, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Ha, apparently someone got there first. Last line of the lead for WP:TPG (of which WP:TPOC is a subsection) "All guidelines here also apply to Wikipedia discussion pages, such as articles for deletion." - try arguing the ref desk isn't a discussion page ;) Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:13, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Given the trend of discussions here, I have been bold and amended that line... to note that Ref desks are an considered an exception to TPOC, and that they have their own separate guidelines. Feel free to revert (and we can discuss further), but I think my change does accurately reflect consensus. Blueboar (talk) 13:50, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

FTR, Blueboar has returned to stable version.[6] I was going to take him up on his invitation to revert his bold. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:51, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

But ref desks are not supposed to be discussion pages... their original purpose was to help editors find articles and sources that would answer their questions. We aren't supposed to discuss (or answer) the questions posted at the ref desks ... we are supposed to limit ourselves to pointing the reader to articles and sources ... so the reader can find the answers themselves. Blueboar (talk) 11:50, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Well it doesn't go both ways, you cant claim its not a discussion page (when it clearly is - despite the intent) so TPG don't apply, while not actually doing anything to prevent it being used as a discussion page. Wikipedia policies and guidelines apply to 'what is' not 'what we wanted it to be in the beginning but it hasn't been for a long time'. Its currently a discussion page, so guidelines on discussion pages should apply. If you don't want it to be a discussion page, it needs to be *very quickly* have its focus changed. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:09, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Why "very quickly"? Is there a specific incident that demands we rush this? Blueboar (talk) 12:42, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Well as a general rule we cant have an entire wikiproject running around ignoring relevant guidelines, but mainly because as you can see there is starting to be significant support in closing it altogether. Without *some* movement towards cleaning it up, I doubt it will last a year. Only in death does duty end (talk) 07:45, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Downgrade all this WP:PROJPAGE material; it isn't really guidelines.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:25, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

WP:BLPMINOR?

After the massive discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Holly Neher (2nd nomination) and a few other AfDs in recent months, I think that clearer guidelines are needed as to when Wikipedia should have an article on a person based on media coverage of them before they turn 18 or 21. Malala Yousafzai and Prince George of Cambridge will obviously have articles, but almost every other case is controversial, and most guidelines are written with the expectation that they will be discussing adults. power~enwiki (π, ν) 15:11, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Which guidelines assume that we're talking about adults? Anywa, while it's certainly true that most notable people only become notable as adults, there are certainly many exceptions. For example, Daniel Radcliffe was clearly notable once the first Harryu Potter film came out when he was 12; Chelsea Clinton was certainly notable at age 13, when her father Bill Clinton became the US president. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 03:38, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Daniel Radcliffe was an actor and notable in his own right. Chelsea Clinton was a minor of no accomplishment who happened to have a famous father (at the time). WP:NOTINHERIT is very clear about this fallacious argument. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:01, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

I think the best rule of thumb regarding if there should be an article on a minor or not is they are being covered due to their own accomplishments or is it related to the accomplishments of another. Radcliffe would have been independently notable reglardless of whether or not him family was previous famous whereas Clinton, at that time would have almost certainly been a virtual nobody if her did was did not enter politics.--67.68.21.146 (talk) 02:36, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Which somehow reminds me of the strange Bana al-Abed case... —PaleoNeonate – 03:14, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

power~enwiki - I favor a few lines for BLPMINOR at the Presumption of Privacy section. There does seem a norm of not having articles for minor children, such as the White House Malia Obama or Barron Trump, with exceptions for PUBLICFIGURE of entertainer or spokesperson and generally a desire to err on the side of caution. But I've also got to note defining 'minor' may be difficult as the legal permissions are gradual and the age involved varies by jurisdiction. Is it 14 when employment is legal, 16 when driving or marriage is legal, 18 when military service is legal, or 20/21 ? Cheers Markbassett (talk) 23:59, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

• The BLP policy by default favours privacy. In practice we do take the privacy of minors very seriously, and while often it is unfortunately phrased in terms of notability at discussions, what we are really arguing is often: this kid has just received their 15 minutes of fame. Do we really want to invade their privacy for the rest of their (hopefully long) lives by creating an article that will be the first Google result for their name until the day they die?.
  I would support an addition to the BLP policy based on the WP:NHSPHSATH wording that would require prolonged coverage of a minor before they were included. This would fall short of a public figure standard, allowing us to capture biographies of minors that are significant but aren't necessarily public figures, while also taking an important step to protect the real life privacy of children. In terms of the question above, the definition of minor that I would use would be the age of majority in their country of residence. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:52, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
• Unfortunately, the issue is not "having an article", the issue is that of covering the minor anywhere in the encyclopedia.  WP:Deletion policy#Alternatives to deletion shows that notability is not a deletion issue when the topic is covered elsewhere in the encyclopedia.  The Holly Neher AfD cited the explanatory supplement to the deletion policy that states, "Unless there is a particular reason to delete a redirect, admins should feel free to interpret Merge and delete votes as Merge....An advanced editor who wishes to argue for a merge and delete should make clear why the redirect would be unacceptable."  Presumably that later point includes the closer.  IMO, the close should either have followed policy guidance and converted the delete !votes to merge !votes, or taken the implied IAR seriously and deleted the topic from the entire encyclopedia.  @Seraphimblade:.  Unscintillating (talk) 01:27, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
• Never is WP:NOTINHERITED so literal: articles on minors do need to be looked at to see whether the sources writing about them really only care about the parent entity. That is obvious for Chelsea Clinton but might apply even in the Holly Neher case -- we are seeing a societal transformation in which even the Boy Scouts just started taking girls, so the decision of her school's team (which is what would be said to make her notable) is part of a social trend. A redirect to a general topic like like high school football may be in order, together with a brief description there, which may or may not include the name depending on whether it is useful. We should completely disregard concerns like those of User:TonyBallioni above where Wikipedia tries to trim its sails and tailor its coverage to be of putative benefit to someone by not making an unwanted search result. We have no idea whether this notability will be positive, negative, wanted, unwanted in the long run, and no responsibility for the actions of corporate vermin who fill their overpriced chairs looking up web history to discriminate over rather than looking for competent employees. What we know is that if search engines are permitted to exist for any significant part of this girl's life, which I don't even think we can take for granted any more, then what they do is their responsibility not ours. Above them it is - apparently - the responsibility of Xi Jinping and his emulators throughout the world to sift and adjust what information someone without a security clearance can find out about old news to be consistent with what is judged to be a Harmonious Society; if Wikipedia is to be censored we can at least demand it be done by paid men, not amateur wanna-bes. Our responsibility is to have whatever mention we provide as accurate and well-researched as possible, with the incidental effect that our hit is better than its rivals. Wnt (talk) 10:33, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
• Another object example was the four attempts it took to permanently get rid of an article on Jacob Barnett. The history of these deletion arguments is that the community's desire to put an article in on everything tends to overwhelm its collective moral sense, and therefore BLP policies tend to require more defense than ought to be necessary. In particular, any minor caught in a hype-storm tends to get stuck with an article which requires a major battle to get deleted, even though these are really the textbook case of when we shouldn't be making articles on minors. And I really have to object to the behavior of "corporate vermin" in justifying our own lack of a moral sense. The presumption on these articles should be that, except for a few very narrowly-defined cases (e.g. child actors with substantial careers), these article should be speedied. Mangoe (talk) 15:17, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

I looked up some Jacob Barnett articles - not hard to find - and I can't see any way that not describing his story makes Wikipedia a better place. Why *shouldn't* we take interest in prodigies? The story of how his parents decided to direct his education should be inspirational - and helpful - for other parents. If we can document it verifiably, we should document it verifiably, unless no editors are interested in doing so. Wnt (talk) 20:25, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

RFC: Proposal to allow Template Editors the ability to indirectly edit the Main Page

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Unfortunately, this will have to be an early close per WP:SNOW, as consensus is clearly against this proposal as written. Most editors agreed that this proposal would extend the reach of the template editor right beyond the point that is appropriate. Some editors suggested alternative solutions, such as creating a new user right that unbundles the ability to edit protected pages. Respectfully, Mz7 (talk) 21:09, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

---

Following discussion at WP:AN#The Rambling Man and WP:VPP#Editing through protection, I'd like to propose a system which will give editors with the Template Editor privilege (TEs) the ability to indirectly edit the Main Page (MP).

There are five main templates that make up the MP. All of them are protected at admin level, and cascade protected. AFAIUI, it means that it is impossible to grant TEs the ability to directly edit the templates. However, it would appear that the is a way around this. If there were subpages of these templates, protected at TE level but outside cascade protection, TEs could edit them. Each template could take the name of the main template with /TE as its subtemplate name. An admin-level bot could then copy across any changes to the relevant template (it would also need to copy over any changes made to the main templates to the subtemplate). Thus allowing TEs to indirectly edit the MP without impinging on the cascade protection. This would increase the number of editors who are able to respond to issues raised at WP:ERRORS. TEs are obviously a trusted bunch of editors. The risk of vandalism to the main page would be very low, and any such instances could be swiftly dealt with by immediate removal of the privilege and other administrative action. Please indicate your support/objection below. Mjroots (talk) 13:02, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. Mjroots (talk) 13:02, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
2. This is the way it is now, though I also would say no further change is needed. Click on "Edit source" for the Main Page and you'll see stuff like Module:convert at the bottom. So the template editors have permission to do things that can alter the Main Page. That said, the nature of the permission really is technical - it is given to people who know what they are doing and can nerve themselves up to altering templates with hundreds of thousands of instances with some confidence they can check everything in the sandbox first correctly and won't foul up all those pages. I don't think it would be a good idea to tie that to non-technical Main Page editing in any new way. because inevitably that will mean either some editors try to worm their way in who are not as technically oriented who could be trouble elsewhere, or else it will be harder for genuine template nerds to get the permission and help out where most useful. Wnt (talk) 10:56, 14 October 2017 (UTC) Per the comment below and the Friendly Manual, it appears I misunderstood how template editor status actually works. I think I'll shut up now. Wnt (talk) 21:39, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

   @Wnt: this is not true, in MOST situations it would be, however some pages (such as Main page) have an additional protection called "Cascading protection" with applies to everything transcluded on it, at full protection level. Trying to edit Module:Convert for example will show WARNING: This page has been protected so that only administrators can edit it because it is transcluded in the following pages (which are protected with the "cascading" option enabled). . — xaosflux ^Talk 15:12, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose as not the purpose of the template editor user right. It is not intended to be given to non-technical editors as a way of getting around full protection via some convoluted scheme involving an admin bot. It's intended to allow technical editors to edit highly complex or highly visible templates which are at a very high risk of intentional vandalism or unintentional disruption by well-meaning but non-technical editors. Using template editor to allow non-admins to edit through full protection is some serious scope creep. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 13:15, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
2. Oppose per BU Rob13.--WaltCip (talk) 13:51, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
3. Oppose TE is supposed to be for editors who have shown good sense and have very minimal behaviorial issues, not to sneak around editing one of the most visible pages in the entire encyclopedia. If we have Errors on the main page that aren't being answered, we either need to promote more trusted users to administrator (and get them to fix the problem) or create an appropriate permission for this specific purpose. Hasteur (talk) 14:06, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
4. Oppose Per Hasteur. (Not saying we should add another user right though...) Just let admins handle main page issues, I have serious concerns with allowing template editors to edit what's shown on the main page. AdA&D 15:38, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
5. Oppose as written, and point-of-order: this policy proposal doesn't clearly specify what policy or guideline is to be revised, and how. I'd need to see much clearer parameters on this hypothetical bot (including who is going to be responsible for its edits) to review this in more detail. Creating a new usergroup of protected-page editors (akin to the interface-editor groups on other projects) can be done (with the current software limitation that they would be required to have to have (protect) access (we could have policy specifying HOW they were allowed or not allowed to use it) - prior discussions have been shot down as too complicated as trusted editors that want advanced tools can just sign up for them at WP:RFA. My primary concern is that this bot task adds unneeded complication to main page maintenance. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:39, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
6. Oppose. As a template editor myself, template editors are given the right for their competency in editing templates and not their judgement in general, so they have no more prerogative than any other non-admin to edit stuff that goes on the main page, which is (probably) cascade-protected for a good reason. It would be more logical to allow extended-confirmed editors to edit the main page, if cascade protection no longer makes sense for whatever reason. Jc86035 (talk) 15:56, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
7. Oppose: Only admins can edit the main page but allowing template editors don't make sense. If they need to edit the main page, they should be trusted with admin tools. KGirl ^{(Wanna chat?)} 17:01, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
8. Oppose - There are many with the TE bit whom I would trust to edit the front page, directly or indirectly. The vetting process, however, is currently insufficient an the bit wasn't originally setup to allow this particular group this type of access. If it were to be changed, you would have to review every editor with TE access and vet them over again. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 17:35, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
9. Oppose as written but support in spirit the idea of some trusted non-admin users having rights to edit the main page. This method seems a needlessly convoluted set of hacks. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:40, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
10. Oppose something like this might be workable if the right was given to a special user group and the bot is carefully written, but template editors aren't chosen for the ability to edit the main page. There have been cases of admin accounts being compromised and vandalising the main page, and even one case of somebody becoming an administrator just to go on a vandalism spree, so I wouldn't rule out the possibility that someone might do this with the template editor right (which is a lot easier to get than adminship). Hut 8.5 19:16, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
11. Oppose: Template editor right was designed for editing template-protected templates and overriding the title blacklist, not for editing the Main Page. —MRD2014 ^{Talk • Edits • Help!} 20:24, 13 October 2017 (UTC)
12. Basically per Dennis. --Rschen7754 00:45, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
13. Oppose, essentially per Dennis and Rob. The TE user right was not created to provide a convoluted way for some trusted non-admins to edit the main page. I agree that we've a problem here that needs solving: we have several users who the community probably trusts to edit the main page and its associated cascade protected pages, but that the community will not trust with other tools. The logical solution (which I have expressed elsewhere) is to unbundle the ability to edit full-protected pages, and hand the new user right to the main-page-content regulars who we deem trustworthy. Unless and until it is clearly demonstrated that this is not technically feasible, I will advocate for this position. To preemptively answer the objection that this would grant the ability to protect pages by transcluding them on to pages with cascade protection; true, but such an action would be abuse of the tool, and would lead to revocation of the right, just as with rollback or NPR. Vanamonde (talk) 08:16, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

    Even if we don't specifically use it on the English Wikipedia, I think unbundling the technical aspects of "change protection levels" and "edit cascade-protected pages" should be done to facilitate such a use case on any project. I'll create a phab request, likely will depend on developer strategy. — xaosflux ^Talk 09:40, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

    So apparently this has been requested for over 3 years and is stalled at phab:T71607 - feel free to subscribe and comment to get it pushed along! — xaosflux ^Talk 14:33, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

    @Xaosflux: Thanks for doing that: I've never commented on a ticket before, but I have done so now. I'm honestly quite surprised by the lack of demand for said feature: why are we unable to look beyond reducing protection vs doing nothing? Vanamonde (talk) 06:18, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

14. Oppose per BU Rob and Dennis. This proposal appears to be an end-run to achieve special dispensation (largely for a single editor, it appears) for a purpose not at all covered by the intent of the permission and which the various persons who have this permission either may not be qualified for or should not have. Softlavender (talk) 09:33, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
15. Oppose per BU Rob13. This goes way beyond the intent of the TE right and has little to no correlation to the requested change. Nihlus 15:54, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

Neutral

1. I've never felt that TRM specifically would be irresponsible with this right, so I think that in his case, I would NOT specifically object to his working on this as described (as an aside, he used to be an admin, and I've never quite agreed with the rational for his desysop...), but I don't know that as a general policy such a system is workable. On the question of "Would it benefit the encyclopedia for TRM to be able to do this work", I am an unequivocal support. However, sui generis solutions like this aren't really possible, as on the general question "should we create a system to let anyone do this..." I'm much less in support of. --Jayron32 16:51, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

@Jayron32: as you know, this did start off as a specific proposal to allow TRM to do his good work re ERRORS. From discussion it seemed better to widen the proposal. That said, a specific work-around that will allow named (trusted) editors to work around the protection has also been suggested. Will let this RFC run before I put forward a specific proposal for TRM. Mjroots (talk) 17:06, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Creating special technical processes for the use of a single editor is not sustainable. Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/The_Rambling_Man specifically allows him to reapply at WP:RFA if he wants to be an admin again. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:52, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Discussion

• Related suggestion perhaps: what if we created a separate userright to grant to trusted users which would specifically permit editing through the protections on the main page templates? I don't know if it's technically feasible, in fact I'm pretty sure it's not without involvement of WMF developers, but is it a feature worth asking for? Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:43, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

  The ability to edit a cascade-protected page bestows the ability to protect other pages (by transcluding them within the cascade stream) - thus why "Change protection levels and edit cascade-protected pages (protect)" is all the same permission. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:18, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

• I think that the protection on the MP should be downgraded to extended confirmed, and the templates should be downgraded to semi. KMF (talk) 19:50, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

  No. Do you know what happens when vandals get their hands on compromised admin accounts? They usually attack the Main Page first (like in November 2016). There is a reason there is an edit notice for the Main Page that admins only see when editing the Main Page, which reminds them of this fact. If we downgrade the Main Page to extended confirmed, then we'd have to basically have to ask most of the Wikipedia community to adopt strong passwords and practice user account security across the board. And of course, that will also likely attract more vandals to build up tons of sleeper accounts at the 30/500 threshold, so they would be able to do a massive attack on the Main Page with all these sock puppets. Sorry, I would rather limit access to editing the Main Page than risk the most visible page on Wikipedia to be vulnerable. Zzyzx11 (talk) 03:07, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

  That could easily be changed to "Extended confirmed users! Yes, you!". BTW, template editors should be allowed to edit the MediaWiki namespace and subpages of Template:Editnotices. KMF (talk) 19:03, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Orphans

Over the past decade the guidelines on what constitutes an orphan article have been shifting - at least in some places. It used to be that an orphaned article had less than three incoming links from other articles (note, an orphan is a person who has lost one, or both parents). Initially disambiguations (set index articles did not exist then?) and lists did not count.

The following changes at least have since taken place:

• September 2009 This change recommends adding orphan tags, only if there are no incoming links. The removal of phrase "less than three" was again by User:OlEnglish here, at 06:20, 11 October 2011. This seems to have been a BOLD move, but based on the idea that by redefining the problem we could make it go away (dealing with backlogs by ignoring them is not a solution in my opinion).
• Now also disambiguations, set index articles and lists are considered sufficient incoming links.
  • As far as I am aware as per this current criteria disambiguation pages do not count. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:20, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
• Other places have gradually been edited to conform with these changes, but there are still places that do not - for example New Page Patrol.
• WP:AWB has been changed to conform with the prevailing wisdom, which has changed over the years.
• We also do not deal with (and never have, really) "walled gardens".
• {{Orphan}} has become a "mostly invisible" tag.

Personally I think a more sophisticated method of monitoring incoming links might be appropriate these days, and as I said in 2010 " there is no intrinsic reason that some page should not be validly an orphan, and indeed many pages are only linked to from one or more lists." [Even so it was in 2017 trivial to create two new incoming links for Methuen Water Works, in that era claimed as non-de-orphanable.]

Given that the idea of de-orphaning was to "build the web", not to make sure that each page was reachable from every other, be it by means ever so circuitous, what do the panel think we should do in the future?

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:13, 16 October 2017 (UTC).

• If I had my way the {{orphan}} tag and everything associated with it would be deprecated completely. The people who take it upon themselves to tag articles as orphans appear unable to grasp the concept that because something is a niche topic and doesn't have many incoming links, doesn't mean either that it's not notable nor that the lack of incoming links is some kind of problem that needs to be fixed; "build the web" doesn't mean it has to be possible to navigate from every page to every other page, even if they're on completely unrelated topics, purely by clicking wikilinks. (Something with no incoming or outgoing links, on the other hand, is a problem.) Wikipedia does have many issues, but "it's difficult to get from 626 Notburga to Selina Rushbrook purely by following links" shouldn't be considered one of them. ‑ Iridescent 22:29, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
• I agree with Iridescent. The mindless tagging and untagging takes more effort than just going in and adding links where they are appropriate, and it takes away from the pages that might truly be orphaned yet fixable. And as Iridescent said, not everything is going to be linked to a ton of pages and not everything needs to be either. Nihlus 22:54, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
• As one of the people working at the Feb 09 orphan category, I disagree that the orphan tag is useless or unhelpful. Building the web isn't just for the sake of being able to get to every page from every other page - the intent behind building the web is to increase the amount of information available to the reader. I have found plenty of instances where investigating why something is tagged as orphaned has helped me improve Wikipedia. I apologize for not having diffs at the ready, as these are observations made over several months of de-orphaning work and it would be quite an effort to go back through thousands of contribs looking for specific examples.

Off the top of my head: I have found plenty of orphans that have actually turned out to be duplicates of better-linked articles; merge and redirection improves the main article and reduces confusion for readers. Many orphans are drill-down topics that would be appropriate to mention in parent articles but have not been for whatever reason, adding that information to the parent article (and linking the child) enriches it. I have expanded plenty of list articles with orphans, increasing the accuracy and utility of those lists. Many species and/or genus articles are orphans, which has prompted me to research and create taxonomy articles to fill the gaps. And finally, many are just plain useful articles that someone tried to link to but some error (typo or formatting difference causing redlink, newbie failure to wikilink, etc etc) caused the link not to work. (There are also plenty of articles in the backlog that need deleting because of promotional issues, lack of notability, and even ancient copyvios, so if tagging something as an orphan gets extra eyes on articles when they're far out of the NPP queue, I'm in favor of that).

All that being said, I think that one incoming link suffices to make something not an orphan. There's no sense demanding that everything be linked from a bunch of places; some things are really only related to one parent topic and that's okay. An orphan should be any page which has no incoming links from mainspace. Any single link from mainspace, be it lists, indexes, navboxes, "see also" sections, etc (with the exception of disambiguation pages) should be enough for us to accept that a page is not an orphan. I would support the deprecation of the "low-linked" articles categories if we confirm the one-article de-orphan criteria, since that would be redundant. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:07, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

• My only thoughts here are that if it is at all humanly possible, I would love it if AWB did not put articles in the "tag as orphan" workflow until 8 days after creation. Quite literally the practice I hate most on all of Wikipedia is when people who just got AWB practice how to use it by tagbombing articles with speedy deletion tags on them as orphans that need more categories. Putting an 8 day hold on the AWB part of this would help prevent tagbombing of new articles and stop watchlists from being clutted by useless edits that are going to be deleted within a few hours to a week. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:17, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

• I feel the orphan tag serves an important purpose, yes there are some cases where there isn't going to be much to link too, but more often than not, I think that there is. Even more important than that. it gets people of thinking of ways that page could be incorporated into other articles, and investigating if there are options available. The tag should not be looked up as a badge of shame, but as a way by which many by many editors can help make the jigsaw puzzle of Wikipedia work. --Deathawk (talk) 05:51, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
• support single link de-orphan criteria, (excluding redirects); not every topic has a lot that can link to it. Also support TonyBallioni's suggestion of a stand down period for new creations. What we need is other criteria to de-tag the >130k articles tagged orphan; perhaps after a certain period at least 1 (2, 3?) outgoing links is enough to auto de-tag it. ClubOranje^T 12:07, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I take great pleasure in having never touched AWB, but I'm assuming this is something we can build into its default recommendations? I'd support a 8 day moratorium on AWB tagging any article because I don't think I've ever seen de facto NPP done well using AWB, but I'd settle for a delay on the orphan template as it is the one that is most frequently spammed by new AWB users. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:40, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
    • I think that a delay for both orphan and nocat would be appropriate. Whether or not the ideal delay is eight days is something that people would have to consider, but I am convinced that a delay would be helpful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:21, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
      • I'm not sure about nocat, as our catters use that find pages to cat, which they usually do very quickly. For Orphan there is a significant backlog, so a default delay might be a good idea - but I am not wholly convinced, especially given that the tag becomes invisible very quickly. I doubt (despite my comments above) that there are a significant number of pages where at least one incoming link cannot be created. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:28, 19 October 2017 (UTC).
        
      • WhatamIdoing my reasoning for 8 days is because by that time most of the articles that are CSDable or the obvious AfD candidates are gone. Adding orphan tags to these articles serves absolutely no purpose other than to clutter watchlists IMO. The nocat I'd suggest a 24 hour delay: even some very experienced editors create articles without cats then add them after creation. Getting an AWB tag on it while you are going through hotcat yourself can be very annoying for many people. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:39, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
    • I don't think NPP is done with AWB? Calling tags "spam" and conflating speedy with orphan is - well I would just say "wrong". All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:28, 19 October 2017 (UTC).
      
      • You are correct that NPP should not be done with AWB, but unfortunately tagbombing of new pages is often done with it. I never claimed that all orphans were CSD candidates. I was saying that as one of the more active people at NPP it is very common to see pointless orphan tags being placed on pages tagged for speedy deletion cluttering watchlists and this is most frequently done by new users that are just getting used to AWB. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:39, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
        • I don't see how speedy deletion pages are going to be on many people's watchlists - if you are saying this is a difficulty for you as a NPP who has watchlisted the articles when CSDing them, perhaps we should be getting the orphan tag applied before the CSD tag - 8 days later is not going to cut it in these cases. I also think that finding incoming links for CSDs would tend to mitigate against speedy deletion in cases where it isn't justified.
        • All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:50, 19 October 2017 (UTC).
          

Comment You may read User:Magioladitis/AWB and orphans for a full report of which pages are excluded by AWB. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:16, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you Magioladitis, that is very helpful. Would there be a way to get AWB to delay the tagging until a certain amount of time after article creation? TonyBallioni (talk) 13:20, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

TonyBallioni I have a similar open Phabricator task: T127173 which can be modified to much that demand. Till now we had no problems with that because we had a bot for both tagging and untagging and it was running also daily. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:27, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Deprecate visible templates (or move to talk pages and use code to enforce their placement there – throw an error is used in mainspace); retain invisible maintenance categories, since these are useful for finding under-linked articles and working them into our "web".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:29, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Retain one link discounts an orphan tag, there are already 140,000 orphans (many wrongly tagged ). Increasing orphans to 3 links would at least double the list and disillusion those who are deorphaning, considerably slowing down the clean up rate. Atlantic306 (talk) 19:58, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Naming, when word X most commonly refers to subject A, but is also the only available term for subject B?

I've been trying to work out how Wikipedia policy is best applied to the article Catholicism (term), previously at Catholicism. Catholicism was fairly recently changed to be a redirect to Catholic Church, on the basis that the majority of people who search for or link to "Catholicism" will be looking for the Catholic Church (i.e. the church in communion with Rome).

However, the broader concept of 'Catholicism' - which is also employed by Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Old Catholics, and all sorts of other people not in communion with Rome - doesn't really have another word for it; and I'm struggling to even come up with a good disambiguation term. There's a proposal to move from '(term)' to '(concept)', which isn't great but at least a bit better - the article is specifically not about the term, which is covered at Catholic (term).

Is there a definitive answer on what to do when a term has been judged to most commonly refer to one topic (though is not the article title for it); but is also the primary term for a different topic? TSP (talk) 12:50, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

A hatnote on the redirect target page is the most usual solution to this problem. See, for example, Catholic Church, Cattle, August 8. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 05:06, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

RfC: Should the Reference Desks be closed?

Should the Reference Desks be closed? Fram (talk) 06:54, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Moved from Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard § Time to close down the ref desks?

 – ―Mandruss ☎ 18:32, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

The ref desk has long been a source of bickering between regulars, and more and more seems to be a walled garden, separate from the encyclopedia, and with some people who feel that the rules of enwiki don't apply there. BLP violations are not only accepted but actively produced and defended by some of the more frequent ref desk responders, and the whole is more of a WP:NOT forum violation than anything else.

Instead of silencing one or the other side at the ref desks, or letting this fester on and on, isn't it time to simply close down the ref desks as being out of scope for enwiki and consider it a well-meaning but ultimately failed project? People who really feel it should continue can request the WMF to set up "Wikirefdesk", parallel to Wikivoyage, Wikinews, Wikisource and so on, where they can have their own rules and chat with whoever they want for as long as they want about any subject. Fram (talk) 06:54, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Survey: Should the Reference Desks be closed?

• Support - I don't think it has a ghost of a chance, but I'll at least give it my moral support. After all, if the ref desk went away, where would people go to find the source of their chimp gifs, the story behind their favorite Simpsons clip, or their thinly veiled medical questions? I'm just not sure IMDB and WebMD can handle the traffic if we don't do our fair share. GMG^talk 10:41, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• You have a rather unique definition of "asking for medical advice"... --Guy Macon (talk) 14:40, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

[7] GMG^talk 16:30, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support - Well, I don't think it has a ghost of a chance, either, but stranger things have happened here, so I'll add my support and we'll see where it goes. The refdesks are a distraction, seem to want their own rules, and provide no real encyclopedic benefit. Close them, or spin them off somewhere else. -- Begoon 11:33, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support - My preference would be to actually operate them as you know, a reference desk, but since the residents there seem unable to do this, closing it would be better. Alternatively rename it to 'chatforum'. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:34, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support never been there, but all I know is that my watchlist has been fairly full of discussions relating to drama there consistently for as long as I can remember. When I become aware that something I don't care about is causing issues, it typically means it's doing more harm than good. I'm also convinced by GMG and Fram's points. TonyBallioni (talk) 11:39, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose - I don't think the existence of the desks harm Wikipedia; nor do I think that closing them would cause people to spend the time they would spend there on other parts of this site. So, I don't think closing them will either stop harm or bring any additional good. And, yes, there are some seemingly pointless questions that are asked there, sure, however, there are also a lot of good ones (it has been very helpful to me in tracking down some more obscure mathematical points, and I found little help elsewhere in that regard) - and, for those seemingly pointless questions, they may not be pointless to everyone, but, even if they were, they aren't hurting anything. Finally, if the argument is that the regulars there disagree, then we should probably just go ahead and remove any pages on controversial issues, they raise a lot of problems too and have just as much nonsense and edit warring.Phoenixia1177 (talk) 11:39, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
  • "Pages on controversial issues": e.g. Turkey has an ongoing edit war, including page protection and so on, about whether (or how much) it is a democracy or not. But this is a discussion which pertains directly to the encyclopedia: we can't delete Turkey or we should simply delete Wikipedia completely as being pointless: but we can easily delete the refdesks without any impact on the encyclopedia or its completeness. Opposing the deletion of the refdesks because there are problems elsewhere as well is not really a valid argument. Fram (talk) 11:54, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
    • You'll notice that before section where I am asserting that refdesks have redeeming features and that they, usually, function rather well - my whole point was that deleting something just because it has problems, sometimes, and disagreement, sometimes, is rather idiotic. In short: we don't delete Turkey because it is worth keeping was the entire point, I see the refdesks as worth keeping. They certainly aren't injuring Wikipedia - I've seen a lot of criticisms of Wiki, most of which I don't agree with, none of them have ever been "Look at this thread on their reference desks". I don't think the desks do harm, I do think they do good - just because harm exists doesn't entail removing it, as you so adroitly observed regarding the article Turkey, so thank you for seeing my point of view.Phoenixia1177 (talk) 13:57, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
      • Do you have much experience of editing outside the refdesk or similar venues, Phoenixia1177? -- Begoon 14:03, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support per Only in Death. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:27, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. The ref desks keep me motivated to look up things, and on the way to fix article shortcomings. I suspect the effect is similar for many others. The ref desks also acts as a lightning rod - see talk.origins for historical precedence. Not to mention the fact that often enough they provide interesting and enlightening answers to questions. BTW, should someone mention this to the most affected group or is this going to be a Star Chamber decision? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:12, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
  • "Now at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Proposal: Topic ban for Medeis / μηδείς. Let the WP:BLUDGEONING begin": link to this ANI discussion posted by Guy Macon (with a rther unhappy choice of words). Fram (talk) 13:22, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
  • How is one of the most visible and open pages on the project a Star Chamber? Inaccurate hyperbole much? (it's linked here). -- Begoon 13:26, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
    • Only wonks read the noticeboards routinely, and the link gives no indication that there is a semi-RfC on closing the ref desks. A bit like a rider to get rid of public libraries nation-wide on a bill titled "Provision of a sign warning against Hooliganism of Upper Petunia Park Drive". --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:34, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
      • Yeah, any proposal to actually close the ref desks would obviously need much wider input than this straw poll. It's a start though, and your Star Chamber comparison is bizarre. -- Begoon 13:45, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose "Throwing out the baby with the bath water" seems to be the perfect phrase to describe this proposal. The ref desks might have problems but closing them will not solve them. But they are the source of a lot of good things too, as Stephan mentions and are quite useful to many people who simply wish to find an answer without having to read dozens of articles. So let's keep the baby inside and just handle policy violations like everywhere else. Regards SoWhy 13:18, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

To be fair, I'm not sure anyone is really in favor of getting rid of the ref desk because of behavioral issues with one particular user. I expect most who are in favor would be because it is a glaring and egregious violation of NOTFORUM, and, if anything, should be moved to a sister project, in the same way that Vikivoyage is a stand along project, and could never be fully integrated with Wikipedia, because of fundamental irreconcilable difference, such as our prohibition on original research. GMG^talk 14:04, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't think WP:NOTFORUM applies here and not only because that part of WP:NOT explicitly excludes the ref desks. Specific questions about certain subjects are a good thing because they promote interest creating and improving articles or finding new articles one has never heard of. I myself (anecdotal evidence alert!) have more than once found interesting new articles through questions at the ref desk I have since edited, edits I would never have made without it. Regards SoWhy 14:24, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm certain it doesn't apply. I think that's the problem. GMG^talk 14:45, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. The reference desk is a useful function of Wikipedia that has worked well for more than a decade. Any current problems are temporary and more related to individuals rather than the the Ref Desk itself. Also, the Administrators' Noticeboard is not the appropriate place to hold a discussion that would be of interest to the Wikipedia community as a whole. -- Ed (Edgar181) 13:33, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
  • It was intended more as a feeler for some opinions than a full-blown definitive discussion. That will need an RfC on one of the Village Pumps, but if there had been unanimous opposition to the idea here, it would have been rather fruitless to go that way. But this wasn't really made clear in my opening post here. Fram (talk) 13:36, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support per @Only in death:. The ref desks are completely cretinous, and work against our encyclopaedic principle. It is a hive of WP:INDISCRIMINATE, WP:OR, WP:NRS, etc., etc., and distracts from what we are actually WP:HERE for. If the amount of effort that is expended daily at the ref desks was expended on content creation, then-. — fortunavelut luna(Currently not receiving (most) pings, sorry) 13:41, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. We need to fix it, probably with more administrative oversight. There should be a place on Wikipedia for readers to go to ask questions, in my opinion; that fits with our purposes quite nicely. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 13:47, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

BU Rob13 are you volunteering? --JBL (talk) 20:26, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. Proponents assume that if the reference desk is eliminated then it will eliminate the material that was being posted there. My expectation is that it would still be posted but scattered over the entire project. RJFJR (talk) 14:14, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Soft support because it has probably outlived its usefulness. The one thing in its favor is that it can lead to improvements in articles. Unfortunately, it has also become a magnet for some banned users. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:17, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose, refdesks are not just about discussion of personalities, this would be like closing libraries and sacking staff just because someone happened to talk about someone else, regardless of the universe of questions that are beyond that scope, baby and bathwater... -- Mentifisto 14:28, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose: This is killing a housefly with a bulldozer. Why not instead try encouraging a few administrators to enforce Wikipedia's policies and guidelines instead of letting a few bad apples on the refdesks flout the rules? --Guy Macon (talk) 14:34, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support per others. RD has been given more than ample time to realize its potential and has failed. Downside greatly exceeds upside in my view (I note that one of the more prolific RD LTA-trolls attempted to Oppose this proposal to remove one of their favorite trolling playgrounds-[8]). Time to let it go. As Guy pointed out, this and the preceding proposal are not either-or. ―Mandruss ☎ 14:54, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support The RD is not really part of Wikipedia's core mission and the only time I hear about it is when trolls and disruptive editors attack it. Having a quick look, I can't see any reason I'd use it when I can just google for stuff or go to my local library. The questions (sample : "According to Bart the Genius#Cultural references, 'Students at the gifted school have lunchboxes that feature images of the 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited and chess grandmaster Anatoly Karpov.' This video on YouTube has a screenshot of the second lunchbox at 6:49. The portrait is obviously not that of Anatoly Karpov - who is it? Or did the animators just draw a generic "Russian" person?") seem rather banal and ridiculous. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 15:36, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support at least having a grown up discussion about whether this corner of the project has outlived its usefulness. Well, now that it's been moved to a better venue and it seems we are having the grown-up discussion, let me say that on reflection I think this corner of the project has outlived its usefulness and is now a net negative. I think we should get rid of it or else see if can be spun of into a separate project. --John (talk) 16:00, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Process

Exception: I don't know about the proposal, but I am certain this is a poor location for this -- because it calls into question all of WP:Reference Desk, it needs to be a thirty day RfC, at least, at probably WP:VPP, with wide notice including on the projects effected and listed at CENT. (feel free to move all these comments) Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:18, 19 October 2017 (UTC) Not a bad point, now that you mention it. Fram? If it's moved, the heading and a {{Moved discussion to}} should be left here, as there is already at least one incoming link to this proposal. ―Mandruss ☎ 16:25, 19 October 2017 (UTC) Moving it, or starting a new RfC, I'm fine with either. This is indeed not the place to have the final discussion, but I guess that asking everyone to state their opinion again on the exact same question is overkill. I don't have the time to properly move it right now, so anyone who feels like it may do it instead. Otherwise, I'll do it tomorrow morning. Fram (talk) 18:10, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• Weak support and with a heavy heart. I used to be a language refdesk regular and liked it a lot there – I haven't really been there much since returning to Wikipedia this year, but it was an intellectually stimulating forum which did occasionally encourage me to edit articles. I created for example Eastern Slovak dialects on the back of a refdesk discussion with the very user named at the top of this thread. I also disagree with the person a few posts above who said it was redundant to google or going to the library – at times I found it quite useful when the problem was not knowing what to google, which happens occasionally when you identify something but don't know a particular term for it. That is my defence of the refdesk, and were we in 2012, I would leave my comment here with a strong oppose.

However. Today, I successfully asked for help with something outside my own abilities on a WikiProject talk page, so I believe if we did close the refdesks, at least some of the encyclopedic value of them would still persist elsewhere on the project. And having read this whole discussion, I must admit the arguments for closing the desks down make a lot of sense. Even as I remember them they were a bit of a walled garden, I am sure it does attract many banned users, and WP:BLP (which is not such a problem on the language desk, but very much so on others) is very serious business. So if they were deprecated I would not protest. – filelakeshoe (t / c)  16:23, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support as the RDs, even when operating ideally, function in a manner contrary to fundamental Wikipedia policies. If we could restrict responses to simply linking to articles and providing information that is in articles, then I could see something within policy. But I can't imagine the bureaucracy involved in that as being particularly pleasant or successful. In all, I'm vaguely reminded of the old, defunct Esperanza project, which was disestablished partly because it did a lot more social networking than encyclopedia building, but also because of a lot of the bureaucratic processes involved. Look, I get that a reference desk is a fundamental part of a library, and that answering basic questions is something that librarians do... but we're an encyclopedia, not a library. While I don't view the argumentation and bickering that happens at the RD as being enough on its own to merit disbanding (after all, argument and bickering is something endemic to a lot of our background operations), I see this as an opportunity to return us to our roots as an encyclopedia. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 17:20, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose to closing down the Ref Desks. Many people have been directed to the correct article, many articles have been improved, and many Q's about how Wikipedia works have been answered there. I suspect that much of this would move and then overload the Help Desk if the Ref Desk was closed. Also, the fact that this is suggested whenever we bring up the behavior of one person on the Ref Desk makes us reluctant to get Admins involved in any way. Imagine if the same happened whenever a problematic editor was causing problems with an article and we asked for a topic ban on the editor there ? If the counter-proposal was always to delete the article, then people who care about the article wouldn't feel comfortable asking for Admin help, would they ? Or, in real life, if reporting a robbery at your store made them try to close down your store ? I've also seen the tendency to try to ban users who, say, complain about an Admin's actions, with a similar chilling effect. StuRat (talk) 17:34, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

@StuRat: You should probably declare your CoI] :) 87,393 edits... 70,380 of them to refdesks?! Mildly incredible: imagine if they had been to articlespace! — fortunavelut luna 17:45, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Still, that's a lot of non-Ref Desk edits, too. Most are just spelling and wording fixes, but it adds up. StuRat (talk) 17:50, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi based on StuRat's contributions at the math ref desk, if those edits were to main space it would be 70,000 edits of self-indulgent OR ramblings, only dimly related to article content or any standard of quality. --JBL (talk) 05:32, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Only 3,395 of my edits have been to the Math Ref Desk, and that's spread out over 11 years, with many being requests for clarification or replies to non-math Q's mistakenly placed there. Most days I don't edit the Math Desk at all. I assume you are upset by my initial contribution here: [9], which I believe was both professional and potentially helpful, while your response was neither (a professional Ref Desk worker doesn't swear and insult others). StuRat (talk) 17:04, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

StuRat I am upset at the bulk of your edits to the math ref desk. The most recent one is a typical example of your self-indulgent OR rambling, only dimly related to the question or to any standard of quality. Your answer is not potentially helpful and it is not "professional" by any standard that I am aware of -- it's just you stroking your ego by producing "answers" while completely failing to understand what the question is about or what would constitute a useful response. I suggest that you ask RDBury (who is much more polite than I am) whether he found your answer helpful. --JBL (talk) 20:54, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I did as you suggested, and he provided a classic answer I wish everyone here would listen to: "All I expect is people to make their best effort to provide some useful information on the question, since that's all anyone can expect from me when I answer a question. I don't expect answers to be useful or even correct as long as as that was the intent." User_talk:RDBury#My_Ref_Desk_answer. StuRat (talk) 01:54, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

If you think that the quality of your efforts is similar in any respect to that of RDBury's, then there is no point in having this conversation. --JBL (talk) 17:55, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• 1. The mission of the desks has never been to answer questions about how Wikipedia works. 2. Overload the Help Desk? Seriously? What, are we seeing dozens of such questions a day at RD? That's what it would take to overload the Help Desk. Never mind that we also have WP:Teahouse, WP:VPM, and probably other venues to assume this non-massive burden. 3. This proposal goes way beyond the behavior of one user, so that seems a bit of a strawman. 4. A suggestion has already been made to move this to a more public venue as an RfC, and I think it's likely that will happen because the argument for it is hard to refute. In that case your comment about admin involvement will be moot. ―Mandruss ☎ 17:54, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• At WP:RD it says, The Wikipedia reference desk works like a library reference desk. Ask a question here and Wikipedia volunteers will try to answer it. That second sentence however, is a non-sequitur. The wikilink to "reference desk" that I quoted is in the original. At that article, it says, The reference desk or information desk of a library is a public service counter where professional librarians provide library users with direction to library materials, advice on library collections and services, and expertise on multiple kinds of information from multiple sources. Nowhere in that description does it say that a reference desk is for answering questions. A reference desk is for assisting patrons (readers) in finding their own answers. Have we evidence that this is what's happening at WP:RD? To answer the question posed by Fram (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA): maybe. If the project can be reigned in to the parameters of "reference desk" as opposed to "trying to answer questions", then it seems like a benefit to the English Wikipedia. If the project has provably resulted in grand improvements to the encyclopedia that far-and-away outweigh the drama at WP:RD (that's spilled over here), then it might be worth expending effort to bring it in line. Otherwise, it sounds like it's more of a detriment than a benefit, and should be shut down. — fourthords | =Λ= | 18:12, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Indifferent at this point, but I would like to throw in one aspect of the desks explaining why I, for most of my active years here, haven't regarded my (or most other editors') volunteering at the desk as harmful to the project, but rather as a net benefit: Different people use different points of motivation and inspiration for doing whatever they do, including for working on an encyclopedia. There are a number of editors who regularly use questions at the desks as a springboard for improving and creating articles in mainspace. For one small sample, a few articles had been (and very infrequently still are) added to the Category:WikiProject Reference Desk Article Collaboration. I occasionally check the desks' recent changes with the namespace filter set for articles (and/or article talk etc.). Example language desk (sorry if there's a problem, not used to the new filtering tools yet) I regularly see changes made by volunteers of the desk (often small improvements, sometimes more significant ones, and occasionally even a new article). I copied most of this from a discussion from over four years ago on the same topic. Sad to see where here again, and I fully understand the supporters, and most of us are supersaturated with unnecessary speculation, bickering, unfriendliness, and general drama at the desks (and other places). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sluzzelin (talk • contribs) 18:13, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose The Reference desk is a useful part of wikipedia, albeit one with somewhat different rules. (Somewhere between the freewheeling of talk pages and the stricter rules on mainspace pages.Naraht (talk) 18:23, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support although I doubt that this is the right venue to ask this question. Overall, this does not help to build an encyclopedia and should be removed per WP:NOT, as with the decline in editors we should be throwing away anything that doesn't help us to reach this goal. --Rschen7754 18:22, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

  Over the years, I have frequently edited articles because finding them at the Ref Desk piqued my interest in them. I'm quite confident that if the Ref Desk goes away I will spend less time on article editing. I am only one anecdotal point of view, but from my perspective the assumption that removing the Ref Desk will encourage more editing of the encyclopedia seems exactly backward. Dragons flight (talk) 18:48, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support - disposing of the giant mess of WP:NOTFORUM that the ref desk has obviously become. Fyddlestix (talk) 13:33, Today (UTC−5)
• ReformSupport: very often it is the case that an editor does not receive an adequate answer to the question posed. This is often because discussions are closed too quickly. If they are to stay, discussions must remain open for a set period of time (I suggest seven days), as this allows more editors to partake, and a new name should be applied, to relieve them of the negative image currently possessed (something along the lines of 'Help Centre'). –Sb2001 19:01, 19 October 2017 (UTC)Changed to support, as this seems to be the only way for change to be effected. –Sb2001 00:50, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. The Ref Desks are a form of community engagement with our content. For myself, and for at least some others, they can be a springboard for article editing because questions asked often help identify information that Wikipedia either doesn't cover or doesn't present in a way that one would expect. They are also a gateway for some newbies to gain an awareness that there is a community behind Wikipedia that one can engage with. Public librarians often provide a reference desk service because it helps people to engage with and benefit from the library's content. Our Ref Desk operates a little bit differently but I believe is serves the same beneficial purpose. I would strongly disagree with anyone that believes shutting down the Ref Desks will encourage more editing of articles. For my part, I'm sure it would lead to less editing of articles, as I would lose one of the major pathways by which I routinely encounter interesting articles (and learn about their gaps based on the questions people ask). I suspect that many other Ref Desk regulars feel similarly. More generally, Wikipedia's success is built upon a sense of community. Forums like the Ref Desk, Help Desk, Village Pump, etc., contribute to building that sense of community and engagement. We could cut all those things out and still have an encyclopedia, but our sense of community would be worse for it, and in turn our ability to build the encyclopedia would doubtless suffer. I realize that not everyone enjoys the Ref Desks or thinks that they operate in a productive way, but I believe that they are generally a net positive and that Wikipedia would be poorer without them. Dragons flight (talk) 19:04, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I get what you're saying, but most of your arguments sound to me to be the same arguments that were levied against the closure of Wikipedia:Esperanza. Yes, community engagement is extremely important, particularly where it is engagement of the readership and not merely editors. I actually somewhat agree with you, that closing down the ref desks won't encourage editing, and will close off a vehicle of getting people into editing Wikipedia. Even then, I believe the RDs should be closed as contrary to the purpose of Wikipedia. As I note above, it would be theoretically possible to reform the RDs to keep them in line with Wikipedia's purposes, but the bureaucracy required—not merely aggressive removal of off-topic questions, but policing of responses that weren't referring people to either articles or published sources—seems unsustainable. I don't have a problem with the helpdesk or village pump in the same way as the RD, because those forums actually are focused in principle and practice on improving the encyclopedia. While it's been argued that the RD takes pressure off talk pages, I don't think that's the case today, though it may have been so in the mid-2000s. Those topics on RD that receive useful answers tend to be topics of pages that are patrolled enough now that they wouldn't sit ignored for years. Those topics where the talk page would sit ignored for years, honestly, I don't think the RD often delivers useful answers. So, really, I don't think this aspect of RD is all that much of a factor. I definitely don't think we're "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", we're more asking people to stop eating in the library; eating is a necessity; can be a social event; and if we let people eat in here we'll get more foot traffic, and some of those people may read books. But we're not a cafeteria, the crumbs attract pests, and the noises and odors disturb people using us as intended. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 20:31, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
    • I don't think Esperanza is a good model here. Actually I sort of thought it was overreach to shut it down, but I do get what pissed people off about it — it was sort of explicitly an invitation-only "cool kids club". All the talk about how it didn't advance the purposes of the encyclopedia was, in my estimation, mostly secondary to that annoyance. The refdesks don't have that problem; if anything, people are upset at how all the Randys can contribute and no one can stop them.
      As for the "cafeteria" analogy, I have not really seen it explained in what way the refdesks are interfering with the encyclopedic mission. If you don't like them, you can ignore them, and I don't see any substantive way in which you are the worse off. --Trovatore (talk) 21:17, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - I only read the science one though. I think that they serve a purpose, which would be inappropriate use of article talk pages or other noticeboards. —PaleoNeonate – 19:36, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Weak Support for deletion/closing down - Unfortunately, I have come to agree with User:Fram. I have sometimes gotten useful information at the Computing Reference Desk and interesting information at the Humanities Reference Desk and the Science Reference Desk, but the benefit to regular editors of having the Reference Desks is exceeded by the burden that the desks have come to be to the community because of a combination of trolling, overreaction (e.g., Medeis, Guy Macon), and feuds (most recently, Medeis and Guy Macon, but another feud was recently cited by ArbCom). I had been among those who had asked that ArbCom look into the Reference Desks, but that really just reflects that the Reference Desks have become a nuisance. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:46, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strong support. Refdesk has nothing to do with our goal of building an encyclopedia. Instead, it's always been a huge drain on human resources. Max Semenik (talk) 19:54, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

  As one of those human resources, I don't feel drained, but rather energised. We run on volunteers, and volunteers do what they want to do, not what you or anyone think they should do. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:26, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

That is a truly terrible piece of reasoning. As RD editors keep pointing out, different editors get motivated by different things. I edit articles, I also participate occasionally on refdesksci. I don't feel drained by either, otherwise I wouldn't do them. Greglocock (talk) 00:33, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• oppose —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:59, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strong oppose. If the occasional bickering bothers you, take it off your watchlist — problem solved. "Human resources" belong to the contributors, who are volunteers and can allocate them as they wish. There is no evidence that that effort would otherwise go into improving articles, and indeed articles sometimes get improved as a result of refdesk discussions. I suppose there is some small burden on the non-human resources — servers, bandwith, etc — but the Foundation and developers can tell us if that is getting out of hand (WP:PERFORMANCE). The refdesks provide a very valuable venue for actually explaining our content, making it more useful to users. --Trovatore (talk) 20:02, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

"If the occasional bickering bothers you, take it off your watchlist" - I have never put the refdesk on my watchlist, and I think I watchlisted ANI once for about a week and then realised that was a waste of time. Based on that, if I can still see complaints about trolls on the refdesk from just normal looking at admin backlogs, then something is wrong. "There is no evidence that that effort would otherwise go into improving articles, and indeed articles sometimes get improved as a result of refdesk discussions." Well then perhaps those people need to go to Quora or Stack Overflow or any number of other Q&A sites available on the internet. Wikipedia isn't the only website in the world - let's be good at our core mission, and not try and be a half-assed copy of some other website. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:11, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Quora doesn't allow you to use a (non-offensive) pseudonym and Stack Overflow is only for programming. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:01, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose per my previous comments (as well as others') here. Deor (talk) 20:12, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose , but fix - The problems with the ref desks all stem from the fact that we have drifted away from original intent. Instead of simply aiding research by providing pointers to articles and sources (so editors can ‘’find’’ the answers to their questions... themselves), we have alllowed ourselves to venture into Original Research by attempting to answer the questions based on our own knowledge. Then we drift into POV by adding commentary on eachother’s answers. The solution is go back to basics. Limit ref desk replies to simply pointing to an article or a source. No explanations... no opinions... no commentary. Just a link to article or source. Blueboar (talk) 20:38, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

  I think that would degrade much of the value. It's a feature, not a bug, that the refdesks are a freer-form venue than article (or even article talk) space. There's a lot of useful explanation that can't be done within the (necessary) constraints of those spaces. --Trovatore (talk) 21:10, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose because otherwise I wouldn't be able to post problems like this. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:19, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes you would, you'd be able to go to Stack Overflow like this person did. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:11, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose - I would actually be sympathetic to this proposal based on the very harsh allegations of it being some segregated community full of nonstop, unbridled misconduct, but after reviewing the situation, I'm simply not seeing this problem as stated. I see people asking genuine questions, and getting genuinely helpful answers. I don't see any out of control discussions full of empty banter, I don't see any editors unleashing torrents of incivility or personal attacks, I don't see unbridled petty bickering. I see people going there for help, and getting help, and that contradicts the notion that it's some failed, cancerous venue in need of complete scrapping. Sure, BLP violations are unacceptable, and those should be dealt with as they come up, just as they are in any other venue. Bickering between regulars, well that's never going to go away, as feuding editors will simply carry their feuds to other venues. I agree with SoWhy that this smacks of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater"—shutting down an entire section of the project is not a reasonable response to a handful of observed conflicts. And I don't find abstract comments such as "outlived its usefulness" convincing. It's obviously still useful to people; it's continuously used and continuously staffed, so for the life of me I can't go along with that strange, empty rationale either. Swarm ♠ 22:23, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose: Baby/ bathwater. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:02, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support, never understood the purpose of RD on Wikipedia. Renata (talk) 22:13, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

I once tried to figure out the origins of the Ref Desk. It's exact origins are lost. (As are many edits from that time period.) But the jist of it seemed to be that it was assumed that people would only ask questions about things Wikipedia didn't already cover, so a RefDesk was a way of exposing gaps in wikipedia's coverage. In those early days, people would generally answer questions by starting a new article that answered the question.

It's long since evolved past that, but I thought it was an interesting origin story. ApLundell (talk) 22:56, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

I've also wondered about the origin of the ref desk which precedes my involvement here. While I've heard your theory of also heard an alternate one – in the early days, readers would pose questions on article talk pages and other editors would attempt to answer them, which led to a lot of discussion unrelated to improving the article. Rather than just telling these people to go away (which might come across as rude) the ref desk served as an outlet so you can more politely tell these people to take it to the ref desk.

Both theories, of course, could have some element of truth. The distinction being that if the first argument is the sole rationale we are long past that and it might support an argument for closing the desk down, but if the second argument has any validity, it is still as true today as it was earlier.--S Philbrick(Talk) 20:24, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support This proposal focuses on the wrong things. It focuses on the bickering, and not the more important fact that the Ref Desks are not serving any purpose nowadays. The number of unique question-askers being helped is way down. Why? Because the reference desk has been surpassed by other services. Stack Exchange, Quorra, and others like them are purpose-built from the ground up to provide this service, and they do a far better job.

Instead, we've got a cobbled together system that is not remotely ideal for purpose.

Go to the reference desk and ask "Why is the sky blue", people will instantly reply with "Who says it's blue? You have a cite?", "Define 'blue'.", and "Why didn't you Google it?". In one of the purpose-built question systems I mentioned, those replies would be voted down into oblivion, (along with trolling or inappropriate questions). But in our talk-page-based systems, those comments stick around, and so what is often a first-time wikipedia editor goes away forever, because we're obviously not interested in being helpful.

In the olden days, people put up with that, because despite those problems the Ref Desk was the best game in town. Now it's a relic. It drives people away more than it helps them.

And yes, on top of all that uselessness, it generates drama that spills over to ANI and elsewhere.

Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia in the world. Its question-answering service hasn't been able to claim that for a long time. It's time to cut it loose.

ApLundell (talk) 22:30, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Go to the reference desk and ask "Why is the sky blue", people will instantly reply with "Who says it's blue? You have a cite?", "Define 'blue'.", and "Why didn't you Google it?" - Huh, no. I am confident the former two will not happen. "why didn't you Google it" could happen, but most likely in the form of "Literally the first Google result: [link that answers the question]", so that part of the argument is factually false. (If the concern is attacks like "Learn to use search engines, you rump-fed ronyon", you might have a point, but that is a different one.) Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 14:13, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose: but Reform. It should enforce a focus on sources (not discussions). All answers should provide at least one source. And an admin should be allowed to patrol the desk and remove offending posts without drama, in the same way as an admin of every forum on he internet. Hofhof (talk) 22:46, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strongly Oppose. - The function of answering questions has existed since the earliest days of Wikipedia. The reference desk was created as a spin-off of the Help page because those asking for help in editing Wikipedia were being overwhelmed by the factual questions being asked. We knew that both kinds of questions would keep coming in and would need to be handled somewhere. And answering the factual questions has led to numerous article improvements and even some new articles. Rmhermen (talk) 22:51, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. As long as you ask a question whose answer people know, it's a good place to go. For example, see the "Do some people in Indonesia eat pork?" section in the current version of WP:RDH. In response to this simple question, Hofhof was provided with articles and off-wiki links that provided an answer to the question. How is that a problem? Meanwhile, strong oppose a requirement that all answers must provide a source. Please read the reference interview article; when I'm sitting at the reference desk and helping a student, I don't generally start off with answers: I generally start off with clarification questions like "Are you familiar with searching our databases" or "Where have you looked so far". This is a key element of what we professional librarians do at academic reference desks, and prohibiting it would be quite harmful. We should encourage good information seeking behavior, rather than retarding it by enacting a prohibition on clarifications. Nyttend (talk) 22:55, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• PS, when did you ever go to a physical reference desk and get badgered by the librarian? We don't do that, because it's not professional — our job is helping people solve their information needs better than an underinformed search ("Google can give you a million answers; a librarian can give you the right answer", to quote something I saw on a listserv today), not showing off. At worst, we need to redirect problematic questions; see philosophical discussion at [10] with examples such as "I want to freebase cocaine" coming from someone who looks like a bum, or "I want to learn about suicide methods" from a distressed teenager. This also provides a way to get rid of trolls; what's the excitement in asking a provocative question, only to be told "This isn't a question that we're able to answer"? Nyttend (talk) 23:33, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• Comment I was asked by Nyttend to comment on reference desks from a public library perspective. In general, at public library desks, we are asked a lot questions from the interesting "How many volcanoes are there under the ocean?" to the mundane "What does the horoscope for Leo say today?" If the question is already phrased well, we find and/or direct them to the sources they need. If the question is confusing, we do a reference interview with them and try to figure out what the person really wants. This can have a lot of back and forth and it should have as much clarification as needed to narrow a search. We also don't tell anyone their questions are trivial or comment in general on what they want to learn about. We are to stay neutral and, for example, I don't tell people "ghosts aren't real" when they want a Ghost Hunter book. We also take all questions seriously and actually spend a lot of time referring people to social services or legal services as needed. I hope this perspective is useful to the discussion. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 00:34, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Do you allow anybody to come in off the street and come behind the counter to help? No? Can you say why not? Our "reference desks" are wide open to literally anybody with internet access and the slightest ability to write in English; this applies to both questioners and responders. Very few responders have any interest in library science, let alone the necessary skills, so I'm not sure what relevance your experience has to our situation. ―Mandruss ☎ 02:44, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• No, we don't; you have to have an ML(I)S. We also don't let anybody to come in off the street and write the content (in most cases, you have to have a PhD), but that's the whole idea of this project. In article-writing, we have standards for what's expected, whether crucial (e.g. don't infringe other people's copyright, and don't misspell everything) or just something we decided (e.g. bold the first appearance of the article title in the typical article, and don't link every word), and we ensure that those standards are followed, whether by going around and fixing problems or working with problem editors to help them to know what to do (and imposing sanctions if really necessary). In the same way, we would do well to improve the reference desk by developing standards and ensuring that they're followed. Nyttend (talk) 02:50, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• I don't know how much more evidence you need that, when push comes to shove, there is no community will to enforce standards at the reference desks, precisely because the desks are not central to the the project's mission. When I see clear signs that the community has grown such a will, I will oppose elimination of the desks. ―Mandruss ☎ 03:03, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Refocus Ref desks should help people find references for answers to help build the encyclopedia. Certainly not all requests are going to be "Where a source for this specific data I need?", and some might take a bit of discussion to get at what exactly information is needed and where to source that from, but the end goal of a request should be to have either an answer to take back into an article to add with a WP:V-meeting source, or resolve that the information can't be found. As soon as discussion starts or verves in to something that is not going to end up helping improve an article, it needs to be closed. --MASEM (t) 23:41, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose The newer editors need an place to get their information. Bobherry Talk Edits 00:28, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

That ... is not what goes on at the reference desk. People ask general knowledge questions. The vast majority of them are asking for their own purposes, not to edit the encyclopedia. In fact a large fraction of the traffic is from a small number of regular questioners who ask whatever random question they have off the top of their head, even though they have no use for the information. ApLundell (talk) 06:56, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose I don't disagree that there are stupid questions on there that don't belong, but for the couple times I've used it, it's been a wealth of knowledge. I've said it before in other outlets, but I think more discretion needs to be given (or practiced) on closing out questions which aren't worth the community's time. I've sat on the sidelines in awe about the level the community is willing to sink to, to answer some of these, like how hard you have to kick a gorilla in the nuts to incapacitate it which is amusing (and yes, I also kinda wanted to know the answer), but things like that don't really belong. Drewmutt (^ᴥ^) talk 00:41, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Obvious oppose and let's assume bad faith. People are literally arguing here that Wikipedia shouldn't compete with commercial operations that allow people to contribute their knowledge to the company's vast database of copyrighted material. In other words, why have Wikipedia at all when we can all be property? I know people make a big deal out of assuming good faith, but when people who do nothing useful (and no, deleting and reducing our articles isn't useful) turn up to break a core feature of the site, I don't believe that bullshit anymore. I don't know which of that handful of sites listed above thinks we compete with them too hard but until proven otherwise I think I should assume one of them has something to do with this just as I should assume that the news organizations that are getting news aggregators banned and restricted might have something to do with the anti-news crusade. These people will not stop with this -- they'll be right back looking to get people banned because they tried to ask questions about our unclear articles on the talk pages if Refdesk isn't available. They'll follow us to Wikiversity and ruin that if we try to run there. They will ban questions, ban news, ban honest biographies -- everything but whitewashed PR spam and the endless succession of video game Featured Ads on the Main Page, which are SACROSANCT. They will not stop until Wikipedia is a smoking hole in the ground, not until we are all literal meat on their tables. Deletionists delete -- it's what they do. I am tired of the internet of greed, of censorship and intimidation and everything that internet was not about before the corporations came and shat all over it, and Wikipedia is one of the last things still partly in their way. Wnt (talk) 00:47, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose Baby bathwater etc. That said there have been some problems there. In particular I think we need to extend/step up NOTFORUM enforcement vis a vis the Refdesks. -Ad Orientem (talk) 14:28, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose This proposal seems to have arisen out of pique at the failure of an ANI proposal to get me topic banned from hiding (medical/legal advice) or removing material -- patent BLP violations -- at the various desks I frequent. There is a certain clique that feels every bit of gossip and requests that are "interesting" deserve to be addressed when they would not be tolerated according to policy (BLP, DISCLAIMER) or guidelines anywhere else in the project.

The essence of the problem is acting like the same rules don't apply.

That being said, the ref desks serve a vital and useful function, such as identification/translation of objects and texts uploaded to the project, and pointing users toward articles and resources that can elucidate a subject or verify that a certain critter is indeed a swallowtail butterfly caterpillar or a reference to the hairstyles of Cossack warriors (two subjects from the past). There's cruft that could easily be googled, and scatology, speculation, and POV pushing -- but that can easily be handled by applying the same rules as do to the rest of the project.

Users may note I haven't posted since the 12th. I am not young or in the best health and was discharged from the hospital late on the 19th and am physically and mentally exhausted. I may not participate much for a few days. But I don't think cutting the baby in two is a useful solution here stemming from a dispute that involved me elsewhere a few weeks back. μηδείς (talk) 16:25, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

@Medeis: Is it really those for the ban behind this? I didn't keep track. But I would ask you to take the complaints seriously. From what I saw out of those edits, you delete about 1/3 useless unanswerable threads, 1/3 silly threads of little interest, and 1/3 threads that seem to surprise you somehow. I mean, I don't trust your diagnosis of sock puppets, and the way I see it, if an editor wants to delve into the thought process by which today's justifiably pedo-paranoid society still dresses little girls in short skirts, that's a fair thing to psychoanalyze. I think your baby-to-bathwater ratio is too high, and the reason I didn't vote there was I would have had to vote in favor of the ban, which isn't one of my interests on Wikipedia. Wnt (talk) 17:17, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Break for editing

• Oppose I have asked questions at both the Science and Maths reference desks that were not appropriate for article talk pages, but have ultimately led me to understand the issue I was asking about, and fed back into article improvements. On the question of sourcing / external links: obviously they are often very helpful (and necessary if material is ultimately going to be added into an article). But sometimes, particularly in Science and Maths, just to be led through the correct reasoning can be enough to explode a personal misconception -- eg a misunderstanding I once had about projective representations of orthogonal groups, and how they differ from normal representations. Ref desk was a much better place to clear that up; then, once I understood the subject better, I was in a much better position to assess strengths and weaknesses in our articles. I also had experience recently of quite a broad query, inspired by some coverage of a topic off-wiki, that ultimately led to quite a detailed specific content section to be added to a particular article. (And those are just from my handful of experiences, as a very infrequent visitor to the Ref Desks).

But I disagree with Masem immediately above, that the purpose of Ref Desk is to improve articles. At most that is a useful spin-off, sometimes. Rather, the purpose of Ref Desk is to let Wiki contributors use their knowledge and experience to answer user queries, which, as many have noted above, can be energising both for those answering and for those asking questions -- eg very often in Science and Maths to work through the implications of article content that may be much too specific to include in any actual article itself. For example a few months ago I asked how well the mathematics of actual black hole physics matched their depiction in a recent Doctor Who episode. (Answer: well, not really). That was not a question that was particularly likely to add to either our content on black holes, or even our content on the DW episode (other than a note on the talk page). But it was a useful and enjoyable and ultimately satisfying discussion to work through all the same. Sometimes going through that process, from quite a specific initial query, may indeed reveal general weaknesses in an article that can be improved. Sometimes it may help an editor get past a road-block in their understanding that then enables them to contribute much more effectively. But even when neither of the above turn out to be the case, in my view the forum is still very valuable. Jheald (talk) 01:04, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support - The Ref Desk has also been, in my view, completely ancillary to the proper focus of this project, which is the creation of an online encyclopedia. If the WMF feels that a Ref Desk-type facility is needed, it can be spun-off into a separate project, but I see no need for it here. Beyond My Ken (talk) 01:37, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Weak Oppose – I only frequent the math desk, so I don't know the culture elsewhere, and my view is probably somewhat skewed because of that. I really empathize with the supporters, but similar to some others' experiences, a not-insignificant number of my edits have been to articles I found because someone linked to them from a ref desk question (or answer). So yeah, there's definitely a certain stink in the area, but I still think it would be a net plus to keep them around. --Deacon Vorbis (talk) 01:50, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - I am an IP editor and I suppose my vote won't count because of that, but I just wanted to say that I come there to ask questions every now and then and they've been a great source of information. I can't think of any other place on the internet where you can ask questions without so much as opening an account, and usually get quick quality answers. Please take this into account instead of comparing it with an unreasonable ideal of what a reference desk should be. 93.136.33.184 (talk) 01:53, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support - It should be significant that practically none of the oppose !votes attempt to refute the fundamental WP:NOT issue. Instead, keep because it's fun, because it's useful, because sometimes it leads to activity related to improving the encyclopedia, because it fosters community, etc. These are also reasons why Quora, Facebook, Slackexchange, Deviantart, Pinterest, Imdb, and a whole bunch of other sites exist (i.e. sites that are not encyclopedias). If we were to open a consumer goods shopping forum which let people talk about deals they've seen, whether one product is better than another, how the customer service was at such and such store, etc. that would also occasionally lead to encyclopedia-related activity, it would also be useful, it would also foster community, etc... but it's an obvious WP:NOT issue, because it isn't actually relevant to building an encyclopedia. If you oppose, please help me to understand how to reconcile the RD with NOT and/or why fundamental policies like NOT should not apply? All of this said, I would absolutely support a proposal for a new WMF-hosted Q&A project. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:11, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

  How is it irrelevant when libraries usually have reference desks? Are talk pages unencyclopedic too then? -- Mentifisto 09:17, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Wishy-washy sort-of support The current implementation of the RD and the way its been treated historically are clearly not in keeping with the mission of en.wiki. That said, there is equally clearly a demand for a general factual question-and-answer service under the WMF umbrella and every effort should be made to support a WMF-endorsed RD under a separate name. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 02:16, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose More than half the stuff I learn on Wikipedia comes from these desks. If they were gone, I'd be twice as dumb. Wouldn't edit many of the articles I do, either, for not seeing them. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:33, October 20, 2017 (UTC)
• Support. The RD is unencyclopedic, like memecruft and Trump scandal overcoverage. KMF (talk) 01:02, 20 October 2017 (UTC) (Moved from discussion section; pinging KATMAKROFAN –Sb2001 02:35, 20 October 2017 (UTC))
• Strong support – the Ref Desk has become a perennial sideshow, and is not anywhere near part of Wikipedia's core mission. If someone wants to keep this up, do it at another website, not here. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 03:45, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Reluctant Support - If Wikipedia is not prepared to build specific infrastructure for a Q&A system, I don't see how WP:RD can survive. What is needed is the political will at the WikiMedia Foundation level to start a Q&A system with it's own software base. If they combined a custom Q&A software platform with the Wikipedia culture - I think it would be a wonderful thing for mankind. But it's ridiculous to continue to try to wedge a Q&A system on top of a system designed for making comments about articles which in turn was shoehorned onto a system designed for editing articles. WP:RD either needs 10 software engineers for a year - or it needs to be quietly laid to rest. SteveBaker (talk) 04:13, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

  Do you mean the software itself isn't appropriate for a Q&A format? But it is for discussions like these, which they often end up (':' is useful). -- Mentifisto 09:17, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. I don't often participate at the Reference Desks, but in the past I have both asked and answered questions there in discussions that seemed productive to me. If there are problems there, it would be reasonable to crack down on inappropriate discussions and warn, and eventually block, those who refuse to comply with the rules. But I don't think the problems are so severe that the Reference Desks should be deleted altogether. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:34, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support. I had never been there, so I did a little basic research on them and this is what I came up with:

• Questions are rarely relevant to anything to do with encyclopedia content.
• Serious questions could be answered by the questioners themselves by doing the same research as the Reference regulars.
• The desks are manned by a handfull of regulars, some of whom are in fact quite knowledable and provide intelligent answers.
• Other regulars appear to be simply hovering over the desk to be the first to make any answer at all, which often is not helpful.
• The Travel desk already redirects to Wikivoyage.

I believe the Reference Desk should be split off from Wikipedia and created on the same lines as the othe non-encyclopedic WikiMedia projects. The regulars might not appreciate such a move because their participation there counts towards their edits, but that's the way things happen. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:47, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

I think many editors, such as myself, move effortlessly between the Reference desks and our articles. I don't work primarily on one or the other. I go where my intellectual curiosity takes me, and where there is work that I see that needs to be done. And I think it is a pointless argument that the Reference desks have nothing to do with the articles. This is entirely a function of the way in which one thinks. It is not a distinction inherent in the two parts of the encyclopedia. I think everyone participating on the Reference desks is mindful of the existence of the encyclopedia. The most basic response is "See title of article." An important problem with the Reference desks is the constant bombardment by prank questions. Smart-alecky questions are fielded on Quora too. (I realize you did not mention Quora.) I think we are better at dealing with these sort of questions than Quora though our methods could use some improvement too. Bus stop (talk) 16:50, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose the reference desks are a valuable resource and the fact that someone has been misbehaving on them is not much of a reason to close them down. I am open to the idea of splitting them out into a standalone project but that's not the same thing as closing them down. The claim that "BLP violations are not only accepted but actively produced and defended by some of the more frequent ref desk responders" frankly needs something approaching evidence if it is to be taken seriously. Hut 8.5 06:50, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose, I've been thinking of proposing that the Reference Desks should be made searchable by Google. They're interesting and drive traffic. And, as people above have mentioned, closing the Desks will just make people ask their questions on article talk pages, where they will be ignored. Abductive (reasoning) 06:55, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
  • @Abductive: They already are; see this GOogle search, for example. Graham87 11:03, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support The reference desks have nothing to do with Wikipedia's only function, which is to create a high quality free encyclopedia. Yes, I sometimes read refdesk content and even contribute from time to time. But it is a troll magnet, a source of ongoing conflict, and a diversion for several well-known editors from creating and improving encyclopedic content. Let sites like Quora handle these ephemeral inquiries, and let's instead refocus on writing, expanding and referencing encyclopedia articles. Nothing else is important here. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 06:54, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - I find the reference desks very useful for identifying holes in Wikipedia's coverage. Articles I have created based on questions to the ref desk include Calendar (stationery) (original question - incredibly, we didn't have a proper article on calendars until someone pointed it out at Ref Desk!), Kokomo Jr. (original question), birthday effect (original question), Loose wheel nut indicator (original question), and I've added missing info or fixed errors in plenty of other articles. Without the Ref Desks, we lose a significant mechanism for improving the encyclopedia. Smurrayinchester 07:37, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose useful service, and important for editors in ways which would cause real harm to the coverage, accuracy, and therefore quality of the encyclopedia if it were removed. It has compared favorably to science library reference desks, in accuracy if not rapidity. If there is a BLP problem on which admins should be exercising sanctions, I'm sure admins are no strangers to the desks or their regulars. 2A02:C7D:45A:1900:3569:4AC7:197D:9E79 (talk) 08:25, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose For example this question about the Otaheite Dog and Wolf let to Animals Drawn from Nature and Engraved in Aqua-tinta being created together with wikisource:Animals drawn from Nature and engraved in aqua-tinta. How else could this have been achieved? People believing there is no benefit have not sorted the wheat from the chaff. Thincat (talk) 08:35, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Reform, if possible. Enforcing existing RefDesk guidelines would go a long way. However, with so many of the regulars indulging in activity that is not according to RefDesk guidelines, this will be difficult. To pick one example, violating RefDesk guidelines by guessing and providing factually incorrect information [11] happens quite often.--Wikimedes (talk) 09:12, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Srongest possible oppose - I would argue it's one of the most important aspects of the project. What needs to be done is to ban some of the unpleasant characters that inhabit the desk and still haven't been banned for whatever reason, the Medeises and Baseball Buggses of this world. Fgf10 (talk) 09:26, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose The only reference desk I'm familiar with is WP:RDH, and it's a pretty trouble free place which serves a useful purpose. I don't see any reason to close it. Nick-D (talk) 10:25, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. That said some reform is needed. I think the biggest problem is that refdesks follow the same rules as talk pages, where anything anybody writes is sacred – you can't modify it, let alone delete it. In the best case, you can hat a particularly long rant or off-topic chat. I'd say refdesks should be treated a little bit more like article pages. If you see a response that does not further the goal of pointing the OP to a reliable source that is pertinent to their question, then you should have the right to go ahead and delete it (rather than closing the question; it might still get useful responses). Would it occasionally lead to revert wars? For sure, but we've got mechanisms for dealing with them already. Hopefully, after some time of active patrolling and deleting off-topic content from refdesks, the worst offenders should be more or less permanently driven off. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:52, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support, reluctantly, per ApLundell and SteveBaker. Either close them as out-of-scope and unsustainable in the long-term or fork them off to a new Wikimedia project and give them sufficient resources (e.g. an up/downvote system) for comments. I used to be an occasional contributor and regular reader of the desks, and I found them useful when I needed a question answered. However, recently I've enjoyed reading through the desks less and less ... whether it's because of changes in me or the contributors is hard to tell. I suspect that competition from Quora and other such sites might have caused a dropoff in participation (especially among newbies). Graham87 11:03, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose Every time some minor tiff blows up, this gets proposed. If you're not happy helping out at the ref desks, you are not required to. Shutting it down because you don't like helping out is nonsensical. 99% of what goes on there is helpful to readers and users of Wikipedia, and the minor quarrels that break out are entirely like anything else anywhere on Wikipedia. --Jayron32 11:12, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - Although reforms need to be done (particularly when it comes to enforcement of rules), I consider the reference desk as a net benefit to the encyclopedia. I've used it for years, and much of the information that goes in there does lead to improvements of and even creation of new articles. In addition, while there is the question of WP:NOT, it doesn't actually specify there that something like this isn't allowed. I sometimes think of the reference desk as something like a feedback form for the encyclopedia, kind of like if you wished to contact the publishers of traditional media (like encyclopedias). While the reference desks usually source answers from articles, it tends to go the other way as well. Overall, while the proposal does have some merit, it will probably be a net negative for the project as a whole. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 11:18, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose per some of the above comments. Fix the problems but keep the project. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:21, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Dolphin (t) 11:28, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support - Like Ritchie333, the only time I see something come up about the Ref Desk is when there are problems. I don't hear positive feedback, ever. We have had considerable problems in the past with "helpers" going beyond the mission, giving medical advice, which opens us up for legal litigation. Because we are a website, a reference desk isn't needed and software should be relied upon. We could stand to improve some software and make searching easier for new readers, but the proper use of Google to find information here is always faster and more accurate. It isn't everyone's fault there, but it has still outlived its usefulness and there is no way to properly police it without being draconian. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 11:34, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
  • There is ample positive feedback, it just doesn't get escalated outside the Ref Desk. — Kpalion^(talk) 12:13, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Weak oppose. The refdesks do perform a service consistent with the mission of assisting researchers to navigate the encyclopedia. There is no clear line between that assistance, and sometimes venturing off into discussion about general topics. There are certainly some abuses of the refdesk, including some rather ineffectual trolls, but I don't find that these abuses are anywhere near extreme enough to suggest that the only solution is to close down the refdesk entirely. Editors who frequent the RefDesk should probably be reminded from time to time not to be the enablers of their abuse. Sławomir Biały (talk) 12:44, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose An encyclopaedia should try and provide good access to all comers. A search box is not a complete answer. All means of access are an integral part of an encyclopaedia. Not having a reference desk is like having a library without an index and a person to help people look it up or find an appropriate book. A large part of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is devoted to providing means whereby people can find appropriate articles. It is true that some regulars on the reference desks cause trouble. That they have not been dealt with appropriately is because admins are bloody useless in dealing with disruption. But even so and despite that the reference desks have much more activity than elsewhere, they have caused me far less bother than the numerous socks and persistent POV pushers and people with totally no sense of weight or relevance and the like I have encountered editing articles. If you want a quieter life improve the guidelines and deal with the few people who just cause trouble there and contribute little but don't destroy something that improves public access and engagement and has led to numerous improvements to the articles. Dmcq (talk) 12:58, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. I think the Reference Desks serves a useful function that is consistent with Wikipedia's educational purpose. Behavior issues should be resolved by dealing with the people exhibiting the behavior, not by killing the whole forum. Deli nk (talk) 13:03, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. While our RefDesks aren't great (and StackExchange is usually better), they are easily accessible places where newcomers can ask questions. If we close our refdesks, expert editors will still find places to use as refdesks (I would use WikiProject talk pages or sometime article talk pages), but (a) these places have far less traffic (b) are harder to find for newbies and (c) using them as refdesks is going to be technically against our rules. In other words, closing the refdesks probably won't improve things very much, just make us even less helpful to outsiders. —Kusma (t·c) 13:54, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. Unless an alternative for asking help with factual information or references is created first, newbie editors and readers will loose a major source of genuine help. You can stamp down on the bickering by issuing the normal warnings & punishment to editors (temporary bans). Even seasoned editors need to be sometimes reminded of this. --Lgriot (talk) 14:15, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose I use them for language translations, which can't be done anywhere else, either with sustained accuracy in translation, or in terms of cost, which they provide. Both the translate services, bing and google are not there yet. For simple work, no problem. But for real work, trying to extract meaningful translations is sometime a truly Sisyphean task. If you don't know the language, or can't define the outcome, it is almost impossible to find quick accurate translations on WP, outside the language desk. I've tried multiple channels, tried to build relationships in various types of places, organizations and even individuals, but when payment is not offered, it sometimes problematic, even occasionally very difficult to get an accurate translation. Well worth keeping. scope_creep (talk) 22:03, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Break 2 (survey)

• Strong Oppose. When my bike has a flat tire, I fix it, I don't throw it out. When my cats bicker, I don't give them both away. Shutting down the ref desks is WP:POINTY nonsense. Though there are persistent bad actors at WP:RD, a lot of good work gets done there. Often we help improve encyclopedia articles, and we serve the broader WMF goals to "collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." SemanticMantis (talk) 14:53, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strongest possible oppose. The RDs are important forums for any kind of questions in terms of content. They are a great assistance when you are at a loss and need quick specialist support, but also for more profound reference. With their great variety and high reachability, the RDs are one of the major and significant lateral contributions to the project regarding the exchange processes on learning and explaining taking place here, as well as their important role as a nucleus of founded article improvements. Hence, it would mean a great loss to all parties involved to abandon those.--Cleph (talk) 15:06, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Remark: this account made its first edits all of 5 days ago. --JBL (talk) 20:19, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Supporting remark; the account came to Help Desk, requested clarification on whether they could comment here, and were guided with encouragement. Lourdes 02:38, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

 Statement @Joel B. Lewis and Lourdes: I've been around with different accounts before (also frequently and beneficially using the RDs) and also edit as IP.--Cleph (talk) 21:21, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Probably not the best idea, Cleph ... WP:SOCK. You need to declare your other accounts on your user page. –Sb2001 17:29, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

@Sb2001: Please read carefully: I said I've been around with different accounts before. Best--Cleph (talk) 17:43, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I hope you have placed a 'retired' card on your previous pages, then. Probably still a good idea to declare your previous identities, unless you are doing a proper clean start. –Sb2001 18:08, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support The rational organization is to make these desks a WMF separate project, where they can have their own fit for purpose moderation policies and living people policies, etc. And such separate organization will still allow for whatever benefit there may be. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:13, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose as per SoWhy et al. GAB^gab 15:27, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support per above. We're here to build an encyclopedia, and not a forum or OR/opinion-based Q/A site. -FASTILY 15:46, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support Clearly out of scope of the project, and unlikely to be used by the average reader. James (^talk/_contribs) 15:52, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - I am a RefDesk regular and believe that most of those who make a request for a reference actually end up with one. Others are directed to the correct article - not always a simple task. I have personally created about 10 WP articles on the basis of RefDesk queries and improved dozens (or hundreds) of others. It's also a tool that I use on a fairly regular basis while writing articles myself. I accept fully that there is often a lot of pointless chatter and bickering on the RefDesks (guilty myself now and again), but I believe that should not detract from the good work that is done there. Alansplodge (talk) 09:29, 20 October 2017 (UTC) (Transferred from discussion section; pinging Alansplodge. –Sb2001 16:03, 20 October 2017 (UTC))
• Oppose. It's well within Wikipedia's educational scope and used by many average readers. Peacock (talk) 16:56, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support per the very clear and accurate diagnosis given by Kudpung (and as a person who actually does spend some time reading and commenting on the (math) reference desk). In practice, there is no connection to the mission of Wikipedia. --JBL (talk) 16:59, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose, but I do think that every single response to a legitimate question should be sourced as opposed to our tolerating unscientific wild-assed guesses, stupid often puerile jokes from regulars, and really anything that wouldn't be tolerated from a real reference librarian in a real world situation. --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇} 17:02, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Jpgordon, I agree, if the RefDesk were completely different than it is now, it would be great! --JBL (talk) 20:16, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose - Oppose times infinity. I've never opposed a suggestion more! I don't have a clue what the person who originated this is talking about regarding some people who consider this a "walled off" whatever but I know that I have posted questions that were very deep and have received excellent answers. And I'm not someone who is incapable of finding things on Google or Wikipedia myself. I can usually find just about any info I want. But every once in a while I'll have a very specific question that I can't get (or understand) the answer to and the Reference desk is a fantastic resource. If there are problems with some editors... to be honest I didn't even understand what the problems are supposed to really be but whatever they are there must be better ways to solve them then shutting the whole thing down. That would be a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I emphatically oppose the idea with ever fibre of my being! --MadScientistX11 (talk) 17:53, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose The solution is to warn the editors who continue to bicker that they'll face being blocked, not to close the whole thing down. Duh. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 18:13, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. The opening statement of this RFC says the Reference Desks are a "source of bickering" and have "some people who feel that the rules of enwiki don't apply there". These concerns could just as easily be expressed regarding almost any other aspect of Wikipedia as well. The solution is to deal with those people who are the sources of the bickering and those people who feel the rules don't apply to them, not to delete the Reference Desks because of them. TimBuck2 (talk) 18:56, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose per many arguments above. Just because a few jerks can abuse the refdesks one way or the other is not the reason to bow down and close them altogether. Humans will be humans, the entire Wikipedia regularly fends off various nasty stuff. I, for one, have a positive opinion on refdesks, having received several meaningful replies. Brandmeister^talk 19:22, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strongest oppose I've ever lodged in an !vote on this project to date. With respect to some of the supporters, some of whose policy opinions I often align with to a very high degree, I think the proposal is a clear-cut case of curing the disease by killing the patient. The reference desks are far too valuable an asset to this project's mission to be dissolved over the (admittedly increasingly problematic) attitudes of a handful of editors who will not self-restrain themselves (plus some trolls there for simple 'lolz'). To my mind, the argument is something akin to the suggesting that we should dissolve ANI, because it is habitually abused by people with an axe to grind or who are otherwise disruptive. Yes, it certainly is, but those headaches are miniscule in relation to the utility we extract from that space.

So it is with the RefDesks, which enhance and further Wikipedia's core educational purpose in at least three ways. First, questions asked on the desks sometimes directly lead to additional information or sources, removal or adjustment of erroneous statements, or other content contributions for our mainspace articles--even if this doesn't happen nearly so often as I'd like. Second, Ref Desk answers more generally fill holes for our readers (either in their personal knowledge or in our own content) who have already read our relevant articles on a given topic and 1) are having (for any number of idiosyncratic reasons) difficulty in parsing the meaning of those articles, 2) have inadequate knowledge to synergize the content of multiple articles, or 3) have hit upon a novel question that isn't likely to be covered in any one particular article. These answers are then archived to help others who may be similarly situated in relation to the knowledge in question. But even where these factors are not in play, the process (in the overwhelming majority of cases) aligns very precisely with the educational purpose that is at the core of all work on this project. The RefDesks may be one of the most atypical outgrowths of the encyclopedia, but they very certainly augment it and further the precise goals for which we have created it.

Now, do the desks have issues that need community attention? Unfortunately, the answer is yes--indeed, I think we are long overdue for this discussion. Although most regulars fully understand that the desks operate within Wikipedia's policy framework and that contributions there must be made consistent with broader community outlook on open-ended discussions, there are a handful (though the names that come to mind for me could be listed with the fingers for one hand) who regularly abuse WP:NOTAFORUM and other principles of WP:What Wikipedia is not. They regularly engage in ego-stroking exercises by engaging in wildly speculative answers (unsupported by references) to as many questions as possible, even those that are in topic areas that are clearly beyond their ability to talk about in a truly informed manner, and where they make one un-WP:verified claim or wild guess after another. They will even do this in cases where their speculation could well prove risky for the person reading it and where it could create liability for the project, even where they have to manifestly violate the RefDesk's own explicit guidelines and higher level project/WMF policies. And all accompanied by forum-like divergences into unrelated topics and chummy banter that drags far beyond what the Wikipedia community regards as appropriate for our workspaces. These are real problems, and for many years now I (among others) have been warning the local community of editors at the RefDesks that if we did not resolve them ourselves, the wider community was bound to step eventually, and we would probably find their solutions more restrictive than the reasonable middle ground solutions we might have arrived at ourselves. Well, that day has finally come, and frankly, I'm happy to have a broad community discussion on how to preserve the unique value and role served by the desks, while also enforcing referencing and reliability in our answers and an end to free passes to those who have decided they are entitles to wax philosophic on every discussion that takes place there.

Fortunately, the issues are not really all that difficult to parse or address. Above, Mandruss suggests that those who favour a reform of the desks under-appreciating the extent of the problems from lack of familiarity with the desks, and tacitly asks if they appreciate that there would need to be enforcement mechansisms and additional oversight, including reliable blocks for those who just cannot accept limitations on their comments. The answer to each of those questions (at least for some regulars) is not just "yes", but rather "Yes--and we've been advocating for that for years". If we removed just the three worst offenders today, the amount of sheer speculation on the desks would drop by 80% instantly. What has been lacking all of these years is not a clear way forward; our project policies already outline what is and is not permissive in most instances and we just need to create some sharper local guidelines which demonstrate how the reference desks should work within them (and I think these guidelines more or less write themselves), plus get a few admins on board who would be willing to issue warnings and blocks to those editors who just refuse to follow said guidelines. What has been missing is not solutions, but rather the will to implement them. The RefDesks are a valuable part of the project and problematic behaviour there can be controlled with similar mechanisms to those employed to control problematic behaviour on the project in general. We certainly shouldn't scuttle a space of such inherent value to both those who use this project and those who build it, simply because of the (admittedly long un-checked) behaviour of a very small minority of contributors who don't appreciate that there is a difference between Wikipedia and Reddit, and who would probably find a warmer reception to their contributions on the latter. Snow ^{let's rap} 20:23, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• (having only scanned through this TL;DR) so what, Snow Rise, could you possibly have against splitting the ref desk off into its own Wiki and letting it take its silly questions and nonsense answers with it? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:00, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Kudpung: My initial impulse was to respond to your gracious invitation here with the following "I tell you what, why don't you do me the courtesy of taking the time to read my entire post (it's a little long, but hardly a treatise) before asking me to engage in debate over the opinions I expressed within it, and I'll do you the courtesy of taking the time to craft a well considered response. Which is, in any event, a pretty big ask, considering your 'silly questions and nonsense answers' phrasing doesn't paint the picture of someone truly open to a different perspective on the issue." In any event, this RfC doesn't ask for input on a move, it asked for input on a closure.

That said, the issue you raise is one I have considered while following this discussion over the last week or so and there are quite a few obvious points and questions about that notion that I haven't seen anyone address--so I'll take the opportunity to answer your question all the same. I honestly don't have any particular strong feeling about what domain the desks rest at. I happen to think they are most convenient where they are, and that the reasoning for moving them is superficial and seems to impute to something like "Good enough for Wikimedia's educational mission, but not Wikipedia's". While projects do spin off from one-another from time to time, they usually have a much larger footprint than the desks. I frankly wonder if those who are supporting such a change understand the amount of technical and policy effort that option would entail for the community, to say nothing of the WMF process. If any among us are volunteering to spearhead that community effort, recruit the technical volunteers, and organize the process, and are proposing we wait to move the desks until the domain, software and forum are prepared, well that's one thing. But I haven't seen anyone saying that. I hope I managed to sustain your interest through this one. Snow ^{let's rap} 05:42, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

• Comment - As a non-registered user who has frequented the RDs for some years, I won't vote, but I will express some observations. First, if you look at, say, the Computing Desk as it sits right now, you will see zero instances of bickering or other inappropriate behavior. You will see reasonable questions being asked and some good answers being given. So it's not as if the whole group of RDs is a total cesspool. I have supplied answers that were appreciated and I have asked questions myself that got answers I appreciated. And second, I agree with the statements to the effect that the RDs would be better off without certain individuals, but with Wikipedia being what it is, I don't imagine it's likely that this would ever happen. --69.159.60.147 (talk) 21:09, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
  • How many questions about Nazis does the computing desk get? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:51, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
    • How many "questions about Nazis" (assuming you refer to contributions by the resident Nazi socktroll) doe the refdesks get in total? I may be wrong, but I'd say it's less than one a week. This is a bit of a nuisance, but it's not a serious problem. Also, how appropriate is it to close down a useful venue used by a large number of people due to one troll? That would be rewarding and encouraging trolling! --Stephan Schulz (talk) 00:25, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Generally support the idea of moving the Ref Desk stuff to its own sister project. It's not really part of WP's mission, and seems to cause a lot of problems. Not just BLP ones. I've encountered other issues, like people giving bad, one-sided advice at the language ref desk, and this directly inspiring wrongheaded editwarring both at English-language usage articles and at MoS. The problem here is that ref desk stuff is basically original research; while we can do OR in limited ways in projectspace, when this spills over into mainspace, all bets are off. I agree broadly with filelakeshoe and Ritchie333 above. There is potentially a "market" for a Q&A site with open moderation, meanwhile the nature of things have changed enough that our RD is just a troll playground. I'm not at all swayed by the argument in the discussion subsection below that RD is just misunderstood and only people participating in it have a clear picture. I think the opposite is likely true. By way of analogy, if a bunch of well-meaning amateurs set about doing fertilizer experiments in my front yard, I don't need to join them and experience for myself the fun or the importance of their work to make up my mind that I don't want them doing it to my lawn in particular. RD is an experiment that's going on for a long time, with results that seem rather too mixed to me.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  00:33, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support Our mission is to write an encyclopedia and it sounds like the reference desks not only fail to contribute, they actively encourage discussions not allowable on other talk pages. To that end, they should be closed. If Wikimedians choose to create a sister project to kibitz, then good for them. It doesn't sound to me like they enjoy editing here, anyway. Chris Troutman (talk) 01:07, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose Our mission is to write an encyclopedia and not be so serious about it. I've found the Reference Desks excellent go-to forums for clarifying stuff not related to editing on Wikipedia. I've redirected numerous new editors to the Help Desk when they've asked questions not related to the Help Desk. I've even congratulated RefDesk members in the past for giving brilliant insights into any and every question. We need to have such a desk that enables the free flow of thought, not restricted to sticking to a square encyclopedic box. Lourdes 02:44, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

• Can you please point to the Wikipedia policy that says we shouldn't be serious about building an encyclopedia? I'd say that almost completely the opposite is the case: the vast majority of our policies exist to make sure that we are serious about it. Beyond My Ken (talk) 23:48, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

• Hello BMK, hope you're doing good. My statement "...not be so serious about it..." is obviously different from your translation of "...we shouldn't be serious about building an encyclopedia...". Let me reiterate: We're all serious about building the encyclopedia; but shouldn't be "so serious" that we curb down on each and every place where there's a not so serious discussion taking place. I hope I'm able to put across the point appropriately to you now. Warmly. Lourdes 02:58, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Reform/refocus. I think the terminology is throwing this discussion. There are two different questions: Whether WP should provide a "general reference desk", providing sourced answers for any question, akin to what libraries at least used to offer, and where WP editors should go to discuss topic-specific sourcing. The latter begins to answer the former. If we had good forums for unearthing topic-specific sourcing, this conversation would have been preempted. The "ref desk" has always appeared to me as a hodgepodge, best for broad answers to broad questions, not really for drilling down into nitty gritty, which usually entails finding good, offline sources that were completely unknown to the inquirer. Like it or not, the foundation to a good encyclopedia is good bibliography, and many of our stubs are more useful for telling readers where to find good sources than to read/trust directly. I say we embrace that and create better guidance for finding good, offline sources, chiefly by re-scoping WikiProject talk pages to serve as topic-specific reference noticeboards. (Note for terminology, that our noticeboards are more for discussion than announcements.) Both the tenor of the ref desks and the torpid state of WikiProjects would appear ready for this kind of shift in simple purpose. Granular, topic-specific noticeboards could provide reference guidance alongside the topic-specific editing guidance and third opinions when working in a topic area (as the best WikiProjects try to do when not primarily focused on assessment). For example, I'm more likely to provide physical refs for good, offline sources when I can watch the noticeboards specific to my areas of expertise. Like many editors, I am knowledgeable on a variety on topics, but I'm more interested in providing assistance on, say, WikiProject level granularity than in the broad categories currently delineated at the ref desk. I see the pros and cons of the "general reference desk" idea (that it could bring people into the project and that there are better forums for general questions—to which I'd add that as a former Quora admin, I really miss the library reference desk of yore...) and by all means, talk it out, but like Wikipedia:Portals, I leave it to the editors with stronger opinions. But I do think we should have a stronger focus on expert bibliographic research as a community, and that the best solution would be to create reference noticeboards that consolidate the purpose of WikiProject talk pages and the ref desk. czar 03:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. The reference desks are not only about getting answers but also about asking questions. One of the skills honed at the reference desks is the ability to formulate a question in such a way that it is likely to get a good quality response. In general the reference desks are an opportunity for all to hone verbal skills. And it is not as if we know how to speak therefore there is nothing left to learn. I think it is the use of language that may be one of the more important aspects of the reference desks. I think the Humanities reference desk is especially important in this regard. And this is not unrelated to the total purpose of the encyclopedia. Bus stop (talk) 03:39, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose, as Ref Desks attract experts. What I've noticed, working at the Reference Desks over the past several years, is that subject-matter experts can be attracted to help answer and explain issues, which can lead to expanding related articles, even while those experts could be annoyed by writing articles, at the time. A common problem in an ageing bureaucracy is the workload of "administrivia" handling numerous trivial details, which can distract from major expansion of topics or drive away experts who tire of excessive form-over-substance debates. Instead, the Reference Desks provide a venue to allow experts (or knowledge workers) to quickly focus on major, complex or detailed topics, without the delays of tedious formatting to fit current WP policies and page guidelines. Oppose closing Desks. -Wikid77 (talk) 06:04, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - Although they attract a few trolls, the Reference Desks serve a valid function as a question-and-answer area for newcomers. Carrite (talk) 10:25, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strong support as outside the scope of an encyclopedia. This should be a separate project entirely, perhaps associated with Wikipedia, but clearly separated. ElKevbo (talk) 15:06, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Very Strongly Oppose I can't for the life of me see why you want to close down the most obvious way for someone to ask an question and get an answer on Wikipedia. If people think some editors need reining in, then what is needed is more effective moderation and policing - not complete removal. --TammyMoet (talk) 17:53, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose. I've been a Wikipedian for 11 years, very active at first but these days I'm only active at WP:RD/Ma. Among other things, I was active in Wikipedia:Help desk (I hope you guys aren't discussing closing that...). Occasionally someone would ask a general knowledge question not related to using Wikipedia, and it was extremely useful to be able to tell these people "WP:HD is not the place for such questions, but please check out WP:RD". I imagine this is still the case. Shutting down WP:RD will just lead to a greater number of questions that end up where they don't belong. Regardless, the RD are a great place for people who want to ask questions and get insights from experts, specifically those who by and large are those who edit Wikipedia. Also, Wikipedia is still neither complete nor perfect, and these questions often help to find things which can be improved in Wikipedia. I see absolutely no reason to shut such a valuable resource down - I don't know what are the "bickering" and "BLP violations" that were mentioned, perhaps these are a problem in a specific RD but in RD/Ma people just ask questions and get quality answers. I imagine that if the RD were to shut down, very soon people will start asking for something like it to be created. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 20:41, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strong oppose The reference desks should remain open as their purpose is to help people use the encyclopedia. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:56, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Graeme Bartlett, the problem is that there is scant evidence that they actually serve that purpose. --JBL (talk) 22:29, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose The ref desks enrich Wikipedia with question-based content which can help explain differences between articled topics. I find the fact there is a discussion on closing them very much absurd. Ben-Yeudith (talk) 21:41, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose but block Baseball Bugs and StuRat. Problem solved. That has always been the solution, for years, but no one cares. Medeis at least provides useful answers sometimes. Adam Bishop (talk) 01:31, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, the section on the Humanities desk called "opera Cinderella" proves that point. Bus stop (talk) 03:12, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

I would happily change my vote from "burn it all down" to "block StuRat" as a compromise position. --JBL (talk) 05:28, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

It's a separate discussion for a separate venue, in my opinion, but I'd have no hesitation in supporting a block for Stu, as by and far the RefDesk's single biggest problem. Literal scores of contributors have engaged patiently with Stu for years on end, asking him to restrain his obsessive-compulsive need to have something to say on virtually any thread that appears on the desk, even if it means (as in a majority of cases) going off on half-cocked, wild speculation that is never sourced and often leads to nonsense assertions that confuse rather than elucidate. He's clearly convinced himself that for the purposes of the reference desk, there's nothing that is beyond his ability to inform upon and has steadfastly refused to engage with the many editors who have pointed out how much trouble his behaviour can cause for the desks, many of whom have plead with him at length to moderate himself. I passed the point of patience with this insane Dunning-Kruger routine years ago and I'm frankly at a loss to explain why none of us have ever taken the matter to ANI. Maybe it's the fact that we'll have to rely on a general WP:disruptive rationale, rather than a specific kind of blockable behaviour. Or maybe it's the fact that, even as he cheerily refuses to listen to anyone, Stu generally avoids firing back at anyone and thus comes off as pretty civil, despite ignoring everyone. But enough is enough; non-caustic or not, he does disrupt the legitimate operation of the desks like no one else. Snow ^{let's rap} 01:48, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

It's been attempted in the past - that one is from last year, although there are other complaints going back to 2006. Adam Bishop (talk) 03:06, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Some of my correct and useful Ref Desk answers: Science,Math,Computers and Electronics,Miscellaneous,Humanities,Language,Entertainment. This is only a small portion, as I felt it necessary to be able to refute charges that I never make any useful contributions (charges which I attribute to the volume of contributions I make, just as a person who drives more often will get more tickets, even if they are a good driver). Meanwhile, this thread, originally just a topic ban proposal for Medeis, growing to blocking multiple people and possibly shutting down the Ref Desk entirely, is the type of thing I was talking about earlier, where everyone is afraid to ask Admins for help because they so often take this "kill them all and let God sort them out" approach. StuRat (talk) 16:48, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

There are so many complaints about you that you actually made a list of the very few times that you maybe didn't completely embarrass yourself and the Reference Desk? This actually makes it even worse. Adam Bishop (talk) 18:53, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

You apparently didn't read what I wrote above. The number of complaints is high because my number of contributions is high, just like the number of tickets is higher on somebody who drives more. My number of accolades (barnstars, thanks, etc.) is also high, but you don't consider those. I've only been blocked once, over 10 years ago, and that was a mistake (I was given a 3RR warning, then somebody else reverted, and they mistakenly blocked me). For somebody with my level of contributions, that's an amazing record. StuRat (talk) 20:25, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Cherry picking correct answers is useful in winning an argument, but says nothing about the sheer volume of incorrect answers you provide on the RefDesk. Every time you provide an incorrect answer on the RefDesk you 1) spread misinformation and 2) leave a mess for other contributors to clean up. Please take the time and effort to ensure that your answers are correct, even if it means reducing the volume of answers you provide.--Wikimedes (talk) 20:35, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I do try not to post incorrect answers, but there are times when it's good to list possibilities, so that they may be investigated further, as you did here: [12]. Some of those possibilities will, of course, turn out to be wrong. Then of course, somebody will always say that any answer is wrong: "The shape of the Earth is round", "No, your wrong, it's a sphere.", "No, your wrong, it's a oblate spheroid", "No, your wrong, it has an irregular shape", "No, your wrong, it's a close approximation of an oblate spheroid". None of those answers is actually wrong, but some are better than others, with the last one being my choice. And cherry-picking is exactly what people do when they attack others, so this is also needed to defend one's self. StuRat (talk) 20:53, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

StuRat, what they're saying has some point. Not enough of a point that I'd vote to get you banned, because I don't think your nuisance level of half-cocked answering is something I need or want to invite admins into our walled garden over. But it's enough that I wish you'd pay attention to what people are saying. And, push come to shove, it's enough that I'd throw you under the bus if it were necessary to save the Refdesk from a broader peasants-with-pitchforks crusade. Still, my feeling is that throwing you to the wolves would merely whet their appetite for more, so don't expect any ban votes from me shortly - but don't take that as an endorsement. Wnt (talk) 23:01, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

StuRat's analogy with someone who drives a lot is just as inane as his RD answers. StuRat is a driver who drives the wrong way down a one-way street, on the sidewalk, hitting parking meters and mailboxes and garbage cans, and there are fruit stands and bananas and watermelons go flying all over the place, and he drives through a pile of empty cardboard boxes, then he knocks over a fire hydrant and water sprays everywhere, but he's actually driving so slowly that pedestrians can get out of the way and everyone just watches him go by because it's more confusing than dangerous, and eventually he makes it back on the road travelling in the right direction and he's super proud of himself because he's totally obeying the rules of the road now, but only for a few minutes until he starts driving backwards down a dead-end alley and crashes into a fence. Adam Bishop (talk) 11:04, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Adam Bishop if you want to take another swing at AN (it's been a year) let me know, I'd be happy to add my 2 cents for blocking/banning. --JBL (talk) 23:58, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose does the reference desk help in building the encyclopedia? Often questions in the reference desk reflect a weakness in our articles. Either the navigational structure is not up to the job of directing users to the best article or the articles themselves are missing information. There have been a good number of times when answering questions have led me to edit related articles. Also if we do get rid of the reference desk we will just shift the questions elsewhere. You often see on article talk pages questions relating to the topic, now we redirect the question to the reference desk. Where would such questions go? --Salix alba (talk): 10:38, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support, as I support closing any and all of our sideshows that don't directly and clearly advance our core mission of building an encyclopedia. The only positive to the reference desk is that since it's our official troll playpen, it arguably distracts trolls from the encyclopedia proper. That said, that's an unproved hypothetical benefit and it's pretty clear closing down our very own skid row would only do us good. I also take note of ApLundell's observation that the reference desk is already dying after years of decline, so officially getting rid of it at this point may be an act of mercy. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 18:23, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strong oppose try applying the same arguments to articles. Wumbolo (talk) 20:59, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

• Which arguments are those? The ones that say the RD is outside our core mission? That it's a side show? That it's more bother than it's worth? That it has nothing to do with building an encyclopedia? Just what arguments are you referring to? Beyond My Ken (talk) 23:51, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

• That's one vote that should be struck here, for starters, Wumbolo. It's about as useful as the nonsense answers that are given on the ref desk. Articles are the core of the encyclopedia. The ref desk is a sideshow at best and low quality comic relief at its worst. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:00, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose even though if it does deviate from some Wikipedia polciies at a greater frequency than other pages, this might be due to the high freuency of interaction between users compared to other pages and discussions there sometimes result in correction to pages brought up in discussion. 23:34, 22 October 2017 (UTC)178.170.142.48 (talk)
• Oppose this proposal in its current form. The Reference Desks are not what they once were, and there are certainly deficiencies which could and should be improved, but to suggest that they be shut down because they "seem to be a walled garden", or because there's some "bickering", or because of one editor's bizarre and unsupported allegation that "BLP violations are actively produced and defended", would be quite a travesty. —Steve Summit (talk) 01:16, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose; shutting down the Reference Desks would basically amount to throwing out the babies with the bathwater. Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty | Averted crashes} 02:21, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

• Whoop whoop pull up, when we've finished whooping and pulling the plug up and letting the water out, what babies do you expect to find? Examples please instead of an empty vote. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:28, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support After a perusal, it's like the Wikipedia is hosting its own version of Yahoo! Answers. Self-appointed "experts" squabbling over who is right and wrong while answering the most inane of questions. "When and Why did the board game Connect Four change to yellow discs?", "What's the highest speed limit at a traffic light in the world?" ? Geez. TheValeyard (talk) 04:35, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support. The reference desk is blatantly outside our mission to write and maintain an encyclopaedia, and seems to exist purely because a horde of regulars just like it. – Joe (talk) 07:43, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support - Long overdue tbh, I will admit I've never posted at the Ref Desks however looking at them even now most of the questions are more or less unrelated to this website, If I wanted to find info on something .... I would Google it, RD is nothing more than a troll playpen and like Ritchie and Dennis I only ever hear negative stuff about them, They may of served a purpose in 2005 but they clearly don't now, If you want information on something ... Google it. –Davey2010^Talk 13:18, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support - If we're being honest with ourselves, the ref desks are already dead, killed off by superior competing sites like Stack Exchange. And the ref desks aren't going to come back to life, because it'd only be possible to solve the ref desks' problems with new software that's designed to work well for handling Q&A, not just with tweaked policies and procedures. As someone who used to be very active on the Science ref desk, I'd like to see the ref desks be given a proper burial, instead of just pretending that the stench coming off of the ref desks' decaying corpse is just a bad case of body odor. Red Act (talk) 16:45, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. What many people seem to be missing is that the Reference Desks are very much tied to the mission of the encyclopedia. Many questions can be answered by helping an individual who is asking a question to find the relevant Wikipedia article that has the answers. Many questions lead to improvements to articles related to the question asked. Many questions indicate that our articles are confusing to readers in some way, and this gives us indication where clarifications are needed. Throwing all this away because of some editors that have recently been disruptive is a short sighted and simple minded suggestion. Slideshow Bob (talk) 17:35, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

• Slideshow Bob, Have you actually looked? Like I did? Most of it is a slideshow of nonsense. The questions are mostly totally unrelated to encyclopedia building, and many editors treat it as their personal blog. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:28, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose, I think SnowRise above speaks well on both the value of the desks and the problems that do exist there (and indeed in many other parts of the Wikipedia). Slideshow Rob above also makes well the point that the desks have an important role to play in improving the Wikipedia. DuncanHill (talk) 17:42, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose The ref desks contribute to the goals of Wikipedia. They are not perfect, but closing them is not the answer. Baby/bath water in short. Gandalf61 (talk) 20:22, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose per the many baby/bathwater arguments above. Optimist on the run (talk) 09:32, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• I'll ask again: What babies? Or do we mean the regulars there who act like children? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:28, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• User:Kudpung it's an English idiom: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The "babies" is the useful service it provides; "the bathwater" is the minor disruption that occurs there, that triggered this RfC. Many editors use and contribute to the ref desk, making it seem to be a valuable asset from their point of view. If you think everyone there "acts as children" you're providing a very inaccurate portrait indeed, at least from my experiences. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 14:50, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Mrjulesd, quite right, quite right: the water and the babies, as as Starblind says: The only positive to the reference desk is that since it's our official troll playpen, it arguably distracts trolls from the encyclopedia proper. And that's why it's also a good idea when commenting, to read the whole RfC comments first - and perhaps also not assume that we are all non native speakers (although Wikipedia seems to be getting that way). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:53, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Kudpung I was clarifying why I thought the idiom was appropriate. And I really think descriptions such as official troll playpen are hyperbolic and unhelpful, and do not represent my experiences there in the slightest. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 16:31, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Mrjulesd, like the hyperbolic and unhelpful extraneous interjections in the answers there by, for example, Alansplodge and Cleph? I'm not saying that all the efforts are not serious, but I am saying that the vast majority of the questions have nothing to do with our encyclopedia, and that a great many of the answers are inappropriate, which together make the RD a net negative. If you would take a moment as I suggested, and read this entire RfC, you'll easily see that the Supporters are not wrong, and that nany of them are indeed thinking of viable alternatives. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:13, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support The cliché baby/bathwater arguments above do not address the fact that the ref desks are a bit out of date, and there are dedicated websites like Quora that can offer the same service but with a better focus, because that's the main purpose of their website, a Q&A place. The argument is more or less "they should be kept because closing it down is an over-reaction"; it ignores that it is not our purpose to be a Q&A site -- better sites have superseded us. ^{My name is}not^dave (talk/contribs) 10:47, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

In what way is Quora providing the "same service with a better focus"? You say this is "because that's the main purpose of their website". In my opinion there is nothing special about Quora. Why would I want certain responses hidden from me? Because by popular opinion or as per the opinions of Quora's moderators those responses are of lesser importance? I would say our focus is preferable. Our website has no commercial interests. Quora is a zoo. It is meant to be entertaining. Its raison d'être is driving traffic to advertisers. Its intellectual honesty is compromised and it entertains a proliferation of silly and poorly formed questions that on a good day would be removed from our desks. Bus stop (talk) 15:17, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support: Wikipedia is an encylopedia and a project towards creating and improving that encylopedia. The reference desk is neither encyclopaedic content, nor helpful towards the rest of the project. As mentioned above, various other sites do this better, and maintaining such a forum is outside of Wikipedia's scope. --LukeSurl ^{t c} 14:33, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

You say "various other sites do this better". How? In what way? Bus stop (talk) 15:24, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose: If you don't like the way the RefDesk operates, feel free to not use it. It's useful to me. Justin15w (talk) 14:45, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose, given that it is currently in use and is obviously considered useful by quite a few people. Jc86035 (talk) 15:00, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support. Not part of an encyclopedia and therefore out of project scope. A reference desk is found in libraries. We are an encyclopedia, not a library.  Sandstein  15:02, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. If we close things because some people act like an ass on them, we may as well close the whole project. If people are misbehaving, first counsel and warn them, and if that doesn't work, sanction them. There's a reason we have available sanctions like topic bans; those could be applied to Reference Desk participation as easily as anything else. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 15:23, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose at present. The RDs are a toxic mess, but this is largely the result of a single obsessively active and irredeemably disruptive editor systematically poisoning the well. Before making wholesale changes, I'd prefer to topic ban StuRat (or siteban for that matter; lord knows we've indeffed editors for considerably less long-term abuse) and see if that resolves the issues; I suspect that it will. ‑ Iridescent 18:26, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Weak oppose: There has been a history of unfortunate problems with user behaviour, but I do think there is something of value in the Refdesks. I don't agree with the argument that if the reference desk were to close, suddenly the people who contribute to it would start cranking out article improvements instead. (Perhaps if the Refdesk regulars wished to show the value contributed to mainspace, they should perhaps maintain a list of article improvements that have been made following questions to the Refdesk. I'd be interested in seeing such a list.) —Tom Morris (talk) 20:34, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Oppose The ref desk serves a useful purpose that isn't served by either the main articles or the article talk pages. I've often asked and had questions answered there, sometimes enabling me to resolve problems with main articles that were not being answered in the relevant talk page. I've also answered questions there, (usually) providing links to Wikipedia and other articles with the appropriate information. Wikipedia:NOTFORUM doesn't apply here - or rather it does. It is specifically mainspace and talk pages that are not to be used for asking general questions, and the refdesk is specifically stated as where to go if you want to do that. Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:No original research both specifically apply to main articles (not talk pages or ref desk). Therefore the refdesk per se does not violate any policy I know of, and because it has different rules to the talk pages, it fills a role that they don't. I'd also note that the refdesk is described as being "like" a library reference desk - not "functions identically to" (and just as Wikipedia isn't expected or required to be run exactly like a paper encyclopedia, I don't see why a virtual ref desk should be run exactly like a physical one). That's not to say there aren't problems, but I don't think they're inherent to the concept of a ref desk, nor are they serious to warrant closure. (I think most problems could be solved by better enforcement of the "no personal attacks" rule - both regarding arguments between regulars, and "why didn't you just google it" put-downs of people asking "obvious" questions). Iapetus (talk) 10:15, 23 October 2017 (UTC) Oppose. I have asked what I hope were intelligent questions and received informed, helpful answers (as well as ho-hum answers that I politely ignored). I have seen intelligent questions and given what I hope were informed, helpful answers. I've also seen a lot of time-wasting silliness there but haven't had much trouble ignoring it. Some tweaking of the relevant guidelines would probably help, as would encouragement to ignore users who are rather clearly using one or more of the refdesks as an alternative either to expending mental effort at school or to socializing via Facebook or similar. -- Hoary (talk) 09:07, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Discussion: Should the Reference Desks be closed?

The ref desk has long been a source of bickering between regulars, and more and more seems to be a walled garden, separate from the encyclopedia, and with some people who feel that the rules of enwiki don't apply there. BLP violations are not only accepted but actively produced and defended by some of the more frequent ref desk responders, and the whole is more of a WP:NOT forum violation than anything else.

Instead of silencing one or the other side at the ref desks, or letting this fester on and on, isn't it time to simply close down the ref desks as being out of scope for enwiki and consider it a well-meaning but ultimately failed project? People who really feel it should continue can request the WMF to set up "Wikirefdesk", parallel to Wikivoyage, Wikinews, Wikisource and so on, where they can have their own rules and chat with whoever they want for as long as they want about any subject. Fram (talk) 06:54, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Alternative theory: you (Fram) have a mental concept of "BLP violation" that is wildly different from our published policies and from the consensus of the community. For example, you and Medeis / μηδείς both appear to believe that criticizing Donald Trump's public statements is a deletable BLP violation, but the Wikipedia community does not agree. Rather than attempting to get the policy changed to match your beliefs, you are simply accusing those who don't agree with your interpretation of policy when you say things like "BLP violations are not only accepted but actively produced and defended". No. It is not an established fact that criticizing Donald Trump's public statements is a deletable BLP violation. You think it is but it isn't. You are correct when you say "some people who feel that the rules of enwiki don't apply there" but the rule that is being ignored is not WP:BLP. It is WP:TPOC. --Guy Macon (talk) 10:12, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

"criticizing Donald Trump's public statements" is not the purpose of enwiki, not even its talk pages, per WP:NOTFORUM/WP:SOAP. Furthermore, statements like "the belief that he is an idiot is about the only consolation there is", "make him look like an idiot and/or bully", "seems incapable of such self-control", "there's madness to his method" are simply BLP violations. Fram (talk) 11:24, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

I think you need to both look at this objectively. Proper application of talkpage guidelines and BLP would mean 90% of the problems with the ref desk would disappear. If someone asks a question related to criticism of Donald Trump, the correct response would be to refer them to our relevant articles and/or provide any number of references that are readily available on the subject of his personal and professional failings. Provided without the usual discussion, this would also be compliant with the BLP. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:37, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Agree 100%. Your solution would satisfy both WP:BLP and WO:TPOC. Right now, the de-facto rule is "I can delete anything I don't like and nobody is willing to do anything about it". --Guy Macon (talk) 14:40, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

No, the current situation is "if you dare to apply WP:BLP, WP:SOAP, WP:TPOC to the ref desks, you will be dragged to ANI to get a topic ban, as we don't want people to actually maintain these policies at our playground". Not having the BLP violations would be best: if the regulars can't control themselves though, deletion of such discussions is a perfectly acceptable solution. Fram (talk) 14:51, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

So you won't even consider the possibility that your interpretation of "BLP violation" that is wildly different from our published policies and from the consensus of the community? No direct quotes from any policy that you believe allow Medeis / μηδείς to delete (as opposed to, say, hatting) comments criticizing Donald Trump's public statements (As you argued at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Proposal: Topic ban for Medeis / μηδείς)? Is it your intent to keep asserting that you are right without actually making an argument supporting your position? --Guy Macon (talk) 20:11, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Do you really want me to quote the parts of WP:BLP that allow (no, require) the removal of such comments? Not hatting, removal. I have quoted some of the most egregious statements here, these are not "criticizing his public statements", these are direct negative comments on his mental state. They may be right or not, that doesn't matter, they are the kind of comments which are simply not allowed anywhere on enwiki. You obviously disagree, but that doesn't mean that I haven't made any arguments supporting my position. Your claim that my interpretation of BLP violation is "wildly different" from the consensus of the community seems to ignore the responses you got from non-refdesk regulars at AN and here completely. That some people at the refdesk has developed their own set of rules or interpretations which are not compatible with the policies used elsewhere on enwiki is one of the main reasons so many people here are advocating shutting down the refdesk, and comments like the one you made here only reinforce that opinion. Fram (talk) 20:47, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Your claim that "these are not 'criticizing his public statements', these are direct negative comments on his mental state" is demonstrably not true. The question that you defended deleting[13] was "Is Donald Trump saying outrageous things a clever tactic meant to manipulate the media into not focussing as much attention on his actual policies?"[14] That question contains zero reference to Donald Trump's mental state. Yes, one reply called Trump an idiot, but Medeis / μηδείς didn't delete just that one comment. She deleted the entire thread. And you are defending her deletion.

I will assume from your response that the answer to my question is no; you won't even consider the possibility that your interpretation of "BLP violation" is wildly different from our published policies and from the consensus of the community. WP:CRYBLP.--Guy Macon (talk) 20:54, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Repeating the same errors won't suddenly make them true, it is just WP:BLUDGEONING, which I thought you heavily opposed? If a question only or mainly brings out BLP violations by the regulars at that ref desk, simply deleting that whole thread is perfectly justified and the best solution under our policy. Warning and if necessary blocking the culprits (not the asker of the question, but the regulars who forgot our most basic policies) is also something that should be considered in such situations. WP:SOAP and all that. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but actions like yours and threads like the one removed by Medeis are the reason so many people here are either voting support or oppose but reform / apply policies much stricter. There is very little support for your position here, so perhaps you should take that as a clue about whose position is "wildly different etc." Fram (talk) 07:31, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

So your position is that a correct application of policy results in a topic ban? Interesting. Who are you going to set above ANI participants to tell us all what is the correct application of policy? Wnt (talk) 00:57, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

I believe that is Fram's point. If ANI is repeatedly forced to decide the lesser of two evils, why not eliminate the problem? ApLundell (talk) 08:10, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I think it would be more correct to say that ANI's primary purpose is to decide the lesser of two evils. Bus stop (talk) 15:53, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

• Is this RFC question accurate to the intentions? The section title "Should the Reference Desks be closed?" and the subsection title "Survey: Should the Reference Desks be closed?" allow for only closing or keeping the RD but the opening statement says, [p]eople who really feel it should continue can request the WMF to set up "Wikirefdesk".... That seems like three possible outcomes and the discussion above ignores the third option almost completely. It seems either this should be confined explicitly to keep/remove or there should be a parallel RfC for the spin-out option. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 20:59, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

  If this RfC fails, the second question is moot. If it passes, the second question (and any other related questions) can be asked separately. There is little to be gained by trying to address both questions in one RfC. On the other hand, there is a lot to be lost by complicating the RfC to the point where no consensus is possible on anything. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:11, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

A "WikiRefdesk" with software and rules that mimick a more modern question-answering service like Stack Exchange, would be an interesting experiment. Might be worth a try.

I'll bet they wouldn't be interested, though.

As question-answering desks go, Wikipedia has allowed itself to fall to the bottom. I don't know if the foundation will see any value in trying to climb back up that particular hill. ApLundell (talk) 22:34, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

• QUESTION - is this about one ref desk in particular, some but not others, or all the various ref desks? I get the impression that people’s experience (and thus attitude towards the desks) differs depending on which desk we focus on. Blueboar (talk) 21:44, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

  Nobody has said anything about shutting down only selected desks. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:47, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Break 1 (discussion)

It seems to me that many of the Opposers must have little experience with the day-to-day reality of the desks. They speak eloquently of how the desks should be reformed, but they don't say how to make that happen. Are they going to support topic bans for the regulars who continue to use the desks as chat forums no matter what anybody says to them? Is there going to be a new refdesk moderator function with discretionary blocking authority? That seems very unlikely, but that's what it would take.
One of my earliest experiences at the desks was when I collapsed some of that chat (citing the instructions at the top of each RD page). I was reverted, I took it to Village Pump, and the takeaway was that I should let experienced editors do what they want to do and avoid offending them (and one of the comments, from an editor with some 7 years, actually said that). What will be different in the future if the desks are kept around?
In the end, many editors will do what they want to do, no matter what others think, unless they are forced to stop doing it. If nothing else, our RD experience has clearly shown that. ―Mandruss ☎ 00:03, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

First, it occurs to me that the Reference Desks, as implemented, resemble Usenet, a chaotic resource with no administration, and with known trolls and flamers, that has since been superseded by more modern systems. Wikipedia doesn't need a Usenet-like system. Those who say to keep the reference desks but to reform them would be well advised to read the history of Usenet, to see how resistant it has been to all attempts to reform it. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:37, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Second, since it appears that this RFC is likely to be closed either as No Consensus or with a conclusion of Keep, but Reform, I would first like to ask those who favor "reform" how they propose reforming the Reference Desks. Second (of second), I would suggest that the only viable approach to reform within the context of the English Wikipedia is ArbCom discretionary sanctions, with administrators given draconian power to impose sanctions ranging from limited topic-bans through Reference Desk bans up through extended blocks to deal with disruptive behavior. That is the only mechanism I know of within the context of the English Wikipedia that might work. If you don't want ArbCom Discretionary Sanctions, either propose a totally new reform, or !vote to close down, or !vote to keep as is. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:37, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Third, the discussion is about the Reference Desks in general, not any specific Reference Desk. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:37, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Fourth, the comment is made that if the Reference Desks are deleted, troublemakers will go somewhere else. That is true. In particular, trolls may go somewhere else in Wikipedia, and be quickly indeffed, or may go somewhere outside Wikipedia. In either case, good riddance. Completely clueless questioners will go to another Reference Desk. Good riddance. Also, some of the problems that we have at the Reference Desks are not due to troublemakers as such, but to well-meaning counter-productive editors. However, the argument that they will go somewhere else is not a reason to keep or reform the Reference Desks. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:15, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes: to the extent that the refdesk is a problem because it's a locus for bad behavior, closing it will almost certainly decrease the total amount of bad behavior. This is relevant. --JBL (talk) 01:02, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)That is why I suggest giving it a 'rebrand'. It is a useful area of WP for some editors, but far too often proves to be a waste-of-time. I completely support the idea of banning certain editors from the RDs. I really do not know why it has not been done already. There should also be a visible moderator presence, so the trouble causers' additions may be removed. I do think that there should be some sort of similar area, but it would need to be completely different. 'Help Centre' is a much better name, as it sounds more welcoming than 'reference desk' (which is not as formal as it likes to make out). We would probably need to close RD and re-open it as something else, otherwise it will not be obvious that it is a new entity. –Sb2001 00:44, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Calling it a Help Centre would cause confusion with the Help Desk, which is necessary and useful and orderly. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:15, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

How about 'Reference Centre'? –Sb2001 01:33, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

A huge chunk of readers believe the word is spelled "center". They're wrong, of course, but have enough evidence to raise a substantial stink. As do we. Best to use a word everyone can spell comfortably. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:16, October 20, 2017 (UTC)

What, like the Persistant Commitee for Accomodating Curiousity? Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 03:27, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Eggsellent. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:46, October 20, 2017 (UTC)

Eggseptionally eggsemplary. Eggstraordinary, even. (Somebody call the humor police!) ―Mandruss ☎ 06:22, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

If the cops show up, I'm throwing the book at them. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:45, October 20, 2017 (UTC)

These "reforms" are no more welcome than deletion. Comparing the Refdesks to Usenet is interesting, because Usenet, for all its technical limitations, has been an honest mechanism, whereas all this Web 2.0 crap is designed to let publicists control what you read with volleys of upvotes for their friends and a tyranny of instant downvotes for anything insightful. You didn't see the Russian government manipulate an election with Usenet! Why is that? We don't need power freaks, we don't need bureaucratic proceedings. We just need people to leave us to ask and answer questions as we've been doing. There is nothing wrong here except for the destroyers and so-called reformers who want to interfere with the project. Wnt (talk) 00:54, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

What has been made clear in this discussion is that editors are not happy with RD as it is. That leaves only two options—reform it, or delete it. Having something is better than having nothing. That is why editors are asking for reforms. Editors avoid using the RDs, as they are not helpful. This should not be the case. People are not 'power freaks' for wanting an area designed to be helpful to be helpful. –Sb2001 01:33, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

User:Sb2001 - What reforms are you suggesting? The only reform that I am aware of that is consistent with the way the English Wikipedia is implemented would be ArbCom discretionary sanctions. Is that what you are suggesting, or something else? Moderation has been suggested. Moderation is not used in the English Wikipedia (except as a means for facilitated discussions). How would the moderators be chosen? What reforms are you suggesting? Robert McClenon (talk) 03:42, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

I think that editors should be topic banned for non-constrictive contributions to discussions. We should not have a situation where a few people have the ability to run riot at an area of WP, just because they have been here for a long time. The RDs should not be considered their play area. Choosing moderators could either be by nomination and approval—similar to RfA—or administrators could gain the right by default. This is only really to stop the disruptive behaviour. As I set out earlier, I would like to see threads remain open for longer before they are marked as 'resolved'. Often is is the case that one (or, if one is lucky, two) editor provides a response to queries. This does not allow an issue to be explored fully, and could result in WP's content being swayed by the thoughts of one person. Having discussions open for seven days would mean that as many people could contribute as have something to say. –Sb2001 12:37, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

User:Sb2001: I think you should qualify that. Some editors are not happy with the RD as it is. Now, undoubtedly it can be improved (what can't?) but what is not clear to me is what skin it is off their nose, or anyone's, to have the RD as it is, relative to not having anything. Why can't they just ignore it? To be sure, you can't ignore BLP violations, but that can be dealt with in a narrowly tailored way. --Trovatore (talk) 05:08, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Because it is a useful part of WP. Well, it should be. There are occasions where sensible and helpful answers are given, but this is often overshadowed by the poor conduct of certain editors. Why would we want to allow them a platform to do whatever they like? –Sb2001 12:37, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

It not only should be useful, it actually is useful, and very useful, exactly as it exists now. I sharply disagree that this is overshadowed by poor conduct. I guess this is a matter of taste; some people find such conduct so distasteful that they can't ignore it. Why should their preferences override those of the ones that find the desks useful? The sensitive souls can just not use the desks, and no harm done. --Trovatore (talk) 14:55, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

I firmly believe that a couple of bad eggs (you know who they are) have collectively trashed the Reference Desks - which finally make me decide to look elsewhere. These days I hang out on Quora. It uses a *small* amount of advertising to support it's operations - but aside from that, it's the perfect platform for asking and answering questions. It has a much better way to thread questions and comments - there is peer-reviewing of questions, answers and comments on answers. There is a good system for merging questions and a light-weight admin presence that quietly steps in and fixes "problems" without being intrusive. There is even a kind of "Featured Answers" section (analogous to "Featured Articles" in Wikipedia.

I've answered around 3,500 questions there in a year(!) - my answers have been viewed 3.8 million times - I have over 100,000 upvotes and 18,000 people who "follow" my answers. Wikipedia's reference desks could have done better...but being forced to fit the business of asking and answering questions using software that's designed to handle writing and commenting on an encyclopedia article is bound to cause problem. The sheer number of people on Quora makes the moderation system work beautifully. There is much that WP:RD could gain from looking at how Quora works. Even things like editing other people's answers is handled elegantly. It tells you when you're doing well - you can see whether what you're doing is helping people (up-votes), interesting people (followers) or displeasing people (downvotes) and adjust your style accordingly. People who excel in answering particular kinds of questions get given more questions of a similar kind. When you ask a question, you can scroll through a list of PROVEN experts in that field and ask them personally if they'd be willing to answer your question for you.

Quora is astounding. I've asked questions about the operations of the International Space Station - and gotten an answer from an astronaut who lived there for six months. Barack Obama, Jimbo Wales, at least a dozen nobel prize winners all answer questions there.

It's not without problems - there are some topic areas that are populated by idiots - but the Quora moderators seem to work on those areas to fix them - but most areas I've worked in are full of interesting people - have a good number of interesting, thought provoking questions and answers.

IMHO, the reference desks could survive if you could just get rid of the few people who STILL don't "get it" and prefer to be drama queens. But what it REALLY needs is the software infrastructure of Quora. Combine that with Wikipedia's "reference-based" culture and the naturalness of integrating an encyclopedia with the Q&A system - it could be a winner. But I don't see Wikipedia's software team being interested in fixing the latter - or the admins sorting out the former.

So regrettably, I don't see the WP:RD being fixed. Quora is a clear demonstration of how a Q&A system SHOULD be run. It would be a shame to see the venerable old WP:RD die - but it is what it is.

SteveBaker (talk) 04:06, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

The populations of idiots being quietly fixed are intriguing, but the Terms of Service seem a tad greedy. Relative to Wikipedia's hippie sharealike deal, anyway. Probably on par with Facebook, YouTube or other questionable sites where view counts matter, but without a financial upside. InedibleHulk (talk) 04:52, October 20, 2017 (UTC)

Quora works the same way as all that "web 2.0" crap. You have a bunch of people upvoting answers and the company hides the ones on the bottom. So the trolls quietly disappear, as I assume do any but the first few answers since nobody will be getting a chance to upvote them. (Do you have a way to "friend" each other and form alliances to upvote each other's answers so that you can improve those critical statistics you want to advertise? hmm, reading Quora it sounds like there are followers who were getting creepy amounts of data about each other) In other words, it's the same awful soulless inequality, self-promotion and corporatist hive-mind as all that other "social media" that works so well they have Americans clamoring to be behind a new Great Firewall of China to protect themselves from it.

The argument here seems to be that a) Free resources can't do as much self-promotion as the Biggest Company, b) Free resources don't have as much software (or interest!) in looking optimal for self-promotion as the Biggest Company, therefore c) Free resources should all give up and everyone should put everything they do under the constant control of the Biggest Company. I mean, that's bloody genius ... we should disband Wikipedia entirely and go home, right???? And all --- WHY? --- because you saw a Nazi troll post something disturbing once? Because Medeis deleted half a dozen good questions and a dozen marginal questions over the past few months? That's why every knee on Earth has to bend to the Beast? Seriously?

I say fuck the corporations. You can say this is madness - I say this is Wikipedia! Wnt (talk) 07:41, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

You're like one of those people who was around 100 years ago who said "fuck electricity!" Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:29, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

You're like one of those people today who wants to see solar panel users hit with special taxes and fees in order to make sure the electrical grid doesn't suffer from competition. Keeping Wikipedia alive, keeping our application of free and open software and data alive, that is not a backward sentiment. Wnt (talk) 11:50, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

It is kind of SteveBaker to spare time from his megatriumphs on "perfect platform" Quora to commiserate with us. Has Steve now abandoned Wikipedia's quaint cooperative editing ethic or does he object to strangers correcting these examples of his latest writing: 1) It uses a *small* amount of advertising to support its operations - but aside from that, it's the perfect platform... 2)...at least a dozen Nobel prize winners all answer questions there. ? Blooteuth (talk) 15:27, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

I agree that a totally free-as-in-beer/free-as-in-freedom service with improved terms of service and an open-source license for everything would be an improvement on Quora IF it had the right structural attributes to work as a Q&A system. But the WP:RD approach - while it has all of the right free/free/open attributes - simply doesn't work. It services a pathetic number of questions and attracts a pathetic number of readers. I can (and do) make better use of my free time by addressing a wider audience than I can with the vanishingly tiny one that WP:RD has. I'm helping vastly more people than I ever could at WP:RD.

That said - if the WikiMedia Foundation were to decide to add "WikiQuestions" (or maybe "WikiAnswers") to the stable of Wikipedia, WikiCommon, Wiktionary, etc...and if it were done intelligently and with the right kinds of moderation and quality systems in place - then I'd be the first to sign up to it. But the structural problems of WP:RD, with the shoehorning of Q&A functionality into a system for writing articles - the present system simply doesn't work.

Note also that I'm also not saying that Wikipedia itself is bad - it's absolutely not. It's a shining example of how to make a great encyclopedia for the peoples of the world. It's just that it's a sucky platform for them to ask questions and receive answers on. SteveBaker (talk) 17:27, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

To try my own metaphor here, you're sounding like the sort of person who thinks Firefox is a noble idea, but if Opera is a few percent faster then who really cares if you have to authorize some Chinese company to keep six months of your browsing history. Well, I care about whether a project is free or not a lot more than how many people are reading it now. Free means ... free. Anything could happen. We might get people to do "phase II" someday and polish those answers, or they might get reworked by somebody else (even a private company, if that comforts you). So you tell me you reach more people, but I say history ain't finished yet. We've built up a database of free stuff, huge numbers of questions and answers, and there's no telling what happens. Wnt (talk) 20:54, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

We're not talking about "a few percent better". Competing services are functioning thousands of times better. The Stack Exchange network (I don't know how to pull stats for Quorra.) gets more questions in a minute than the Ref Desks get in a day! And the ref-desks sure ain't trending upwards.

You're like someone who insists that NCSA Mosaic is still worth using. ApLundell (talk) 07:23, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

(btw Wnt, The Stack Exchange network licenses the user content under CC licenses. So the RefDesk is not the last candle against that particular darkness, if that's what's bothering you.ApLundell (talk) 07:56, 21 October 2017 (UTC))

Sometimes less is more. McDonald's can pump out a billion McNuggets before my mom can prepare one whole stuffed camel. Fewer people will eat that camel, but they'll go home less wanting. InedibleHulk (talk) 10:59, October 21, 2017 (UTC)

Break 2 (discussion)

For the record, I would strongly support the RefDesks evolving into a separate project, a Q&A site that everyone can edit, with transparent moderation practices, which is something Quora emphatically does NOT have and it pisses a lot of their users off no end. I really think there is a niche in the market here - a MediaWiki Q&A site run by volunteers as a WMF project. A considerable amount of Quora answers are just plagiarisms or close paraphrasings of Wikipedia articles yet not released under GFDL or CC-BY-SA, we would have a platform to do this but with better integration with Wikipedia and other projects and actually follow the rules. And we could organise it a lot better than splitting a reference desk into a handful of broad topics! – filelakeshoe (t / c)  07:56, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Specifically? WP:TPG, WP:TPOC and WP:BLP being enforced regularly would solve most of the problems. The remainder would be solved by treating the ref desks as an actual ref desk - question is asked, ref or link to relevant article provided, question closed. What needs to be made clear to the bad actors who are against enforcing Wikipedia's already existing guidelines regarding discussion pages is that failure to abide by them will result in swift admin action. This needs a concerted effort by numerous admins and/or experienced editors outside the usual ref desk population to overcome the walled garden resistance. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:02, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Some folks get excited figuring out how to communicate with parallel universes ... and some here get joy out of making other Wikipedia editors feel lousy for wanting to talk to each other or learn something. It would be funny to watch what would happen if the second group ever got a dose of their own medicine. Like if these endless, voluminous, useless administrative forums were put on "NOTFORUM" lockdown and you couldn't just spout off about why the Refdesk is supposed to be bad. Oh, I'm not saying that could ever happen, but doesn't it seem amazing that out of all the gigabytes of blather Wikipedians manage to generate as they play Wikilawyer and passive-aggressive each other out of the project, the thing that gets all the complaints is that every day we answer a handful of questions in six different categories???? Wnt (talk) 11:22, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Sorry I fell asleep looking for a point in that. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:09, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Comment Since Wikipedia was first set up, the internet has changed out of all recognition, AJAX has allowed the user experience of the web to improve and the barrier to entry to drop. Now folk who don't dream in regular expressions are able to do and say stuff. Okay, it means that we have to listen to Trump tweeting, but that's the price you pay for a low barrier to entry, I guess. Why is Wikipedia still relevant? Well the answer probably is because there's no better free encyclopedia that has the same level of popularity and traction. If Google could set up a free encyclopedia tomorrow that was better than Wikipedia and have a nicer user interface, we could reach a tipping point where the editorship defects en masse and only luddites are left behind. It happened with Usenet, it happened with Myspace, and it can happen here.

Wikipedia's UI is well behind in the playing field. In my opinion, talk pages are not as usable as Facebook and Q&A isn't as usable as Stack Overflow - those sites have a better user interface than here and are used by more people. If you want Wikipedia to compete with Quora, great - take a look at something like 10 Awesome Q&A Sites and ask yourself the question, "how do we encourage people using those sites to use the Ref Desk"? Until you answer that, the Ref Desk is doomed to being trolled out of existence, and I'm going to continue to hold the opinion that the Ref Desk sucks compared to other sites because its UI is poor and it doesn't have the market share. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:29, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Their "awesome" sites are things like Yahoo! Answers. I doubt even the corporatists can put lipstick on that pig. Wikipedia could easily promote the Ref desk more itself, for example if we moved the Ref desk and nearby links up where the general topic browsing terms are at the top of the Main Page. Or we could put some giant notice in the place of those fundraising appeals that take up your screen if you ever make the mistake of accidentally enabling scripts to enjoy the wonderful experience AJAX has brought us. (Seriously, the purpose of Javascript is ads) And as for better user interface, Wikimedia gave us the Visual Editor - you can use it if you want; when I tried it it didn't seem bad really. But the thing is ... it doesn't matter if we get more or fewer questions; it's worthwhile either way. Wnt (talk) 11:44, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

For those not in the know, I think the term "UI" means "user interface". 2A00:23C0:7903:B901:542E:486E:9136:263F (talk) 11:54, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

The technical problem with the Refdesks isn't really the UI - it's more that it is so hard to search anything and the indexes are so poor. I tried making up a Lua script to index things better a few years ago but the way I was doing it it would still take a lot of work and/or some bot to set them up right, and really, they needed a content sorting that I couldn't really do in a sane amount of time. And the questions really could use to be extracted, edited and simplified to give a new set of files with comprehensive best answers minus the dead ends and sidetracks. This "reference desk phase II" would really help with usability but somebody has to do the work. Wnt (talk) 12:12, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

It could certainly do with some improvements like better search. I'm not at all convinced it should become a me too upvote downvote place though. Too many of those of those are echo rooms reinforcing peoples prejudices. Dmcq (talk) 20:40, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

I absolutely agree about that! When I suggested "refdesk phase II" I meant something like opening individual archived discussions and using them as notes to create a polished Q-and-A much like you'd write an article, together with good tags for categorization. I mean, I think we would agree that's a great idea ... the only problem is it's work, and a lot of it. Wnt (talk) 20:48, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Question - Just asking for clarification: considering the Support/Oppose comments are under a section titled "Survey", if for example the consensus was for a "support" position, would the Reference Desks be closed then, or would another discussion be done for a final decision? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 12:57, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

It's not strictly speaking the "ui" that's the problem. It's the underlying function. It's just a flat page.

Perfect for writing an encyclopedia, but laughably behind the times for what the reference desk is. ApLundell (talk) 06:45, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Just a random passing IP here, who used the refdesk to ask a question and then noticed the deletion banner at the top. Wasn't there supposed to be new software under development that would turn talk pages into the discussion threads that most other websites have - and wouldn't (one of) the refdesks be a good place to try it? I don't know if it works though, or if it includes an upvote/downvote option. Personally I think a separate Wikilibrarians project with its own domain could be great if it had a better interface, as you mentioned, and also if it was frequently linked to and recommended on this project. It would wither away unless every talk page and welcome template here suggested it to new editors, but with that small effort to build a community, it could become a more open competitor to Quora. My 2 cents anyway. 129.67.118.73 (talk) 19:31, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

• I would guess I meet the definition of a held desk regular, so I will not !vote per the following, but I think a nuance about the obnoxious atmosphere at the RD got lost in the above noise (which I read in its entirety, yes). The RD atmosphere is toxic because of bickering between the regulars, but passer-bys are relatively spared. This invalidates a few arguments from both sides, IMO, but more to the point: I encourage whoever closes this mess, if it comes to a headcount, to disregard input from the regulars, half of whom will defend the RefDesks tooth and nail to protect their playground, half of whom try to win their long-fought battle against the first half. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tigraan (talk • contribs) 14:34, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Ignoring the people who actually contribute and spend time on a project, in favor of people who don't have much experience there does not seem like wisdom to me. Also I am highly amused by the people who still regularly contribute but !vote in support of closing the desks. It's like announcing to WP that they enjoy wasting their time on useless projects. I encourage them to simply stop posting there it they really think it should be destroyed.

I will indeed defend the ref desks, but that's because I've seen all kinds of great answers and references there, not because I happen to also contribute. Also, sadly, I only see a few of our actual good regular responders !voting and commenting above (e.g. Jayron, Wnt, Fgf, a few others). I wonder what these fine folks — Nimur — BenRG — Looie496 — Gandalf61 — DrChrissy — Mikenorton — Snow_Rise: think: they are all highly trained, but that doesn't matter, because they (semi-)regularly give well-referenced answers in their fields of expertise that do not rely upon the reader trusting the respondent's authority.

(This list is by no means exhaustive, it's just the handful of users who demonstrate exemplary ref-desk conduct, and who are part of what makes it a valuable place.) SemanticMantis (talk) 18:12, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Comment there appears to be a lot of trolling from IPs, and dealing with that appears to be a main cause of controversy. Would semi-protecting the Reference Desk be a possible option? power~enwiki (π, ν) 22:44, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

That's already been tried before, and semi-protection is applied on occasion, but considering how the Reference desk works (kind of like a help area for articles), indefinite semis would probably do more harm than good. Edit filters and stronger enforcement of the guidelines would probably be more effective. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 23:18, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

No. Many questioners are not Wikipedia editors, and we are never going to require registration - let alone auto-confirm - for asking a question at the desks. You would also exclude all unregistered editors, including some who have long and respectable editing histories. Trolling is only a part of the issue anyway. ―Mandruss ☎ 23:21, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• If this proposal is successful, can the Reference Desks be temporarily hosted on Wikiversity until a "WikiRefDesk" sister project is created? KMF (talk) 01:06, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps people here are failing to understand the magnitude of the problem. I looked at what (I believe) are the two most popular RD pages - "Science" and "Misc" for the last 30 days. A year or two ago, I was a regular on WP:RD - I answered around 5 to 10 questions a day (things were a little busier back then) - and people seemed to like what I wrote. I got sick of the continual bickering and interventions from the like of Medeis and the continual annoying "buzz" of attempted humor and other lame answers. So I decided to call it a day and move on. These days I provide the exact same kinds and quality of answer to very similar questions on Quora.

• According to the "Page Information" for the two most popular RD's: Science and Misc, those two pages have had 18,000 and 13,000 page views over the past 30 days. Over that time, there were mostly between 1 and 4 questions per day to each of those two desks. You're being asked maybe 5 to 6 questions per day on those two desks combined. How many people benefit from those answers is hard to say - there are no quality metrics that you can point to. At about 1000 views and 5 questions per day - and with the OP and the answerers both visiting the page multiple times to track the gradual input of answers - you're clearly not getting many readers who are not either asking questions or answering them. One person asks a question, several people answer it - and only a couple of other people are really reading the answers. Perhaps those two desks together are helping 50 people per day...tops.

• On Quora I answer the same kinds of questions you'd see on those two WP:RD pages with answers of similar depth and quality and so forth - and I still answer about 10 to 15 questions per day. I do EXACTLY what I used to do on WP:RD Misc & Science. Just *MY* answers ALONE got 964,000 page views over the past 30 days - that's not all of the questions answered by all of the people. That's MY ANSWERS ALONE. I got more people clicking the "UPVOTE" button on my answers over that period than the ENTIRE WP:RD had page views. And we're not talking ALL of Quora's science and misc questions - we're talking just the one's I answered over that time.

So just one person (and I'm not claiming any special skills here) armed with the right software and the enough eyes on the system can help between ten and a hundred times more people than all of the WP:RD Science/Misc contributors put together - then WP:RD is (by any measure) a tremendous waste of human brain power. All of our smart, intelligent and resilient authors could be far more helpful to the human race if they did the exact same thing they are doing now on a web site that's DESIGNED for answering the questions of the general public.

My conclusion remains: If you can re-imagine WP:RD in the style of a properly organized peer-reviewed Q&A system - and if it's pushed as a valuable resource from the Wikipedia home page - then it could become as good as, or better than, Quora. But as it is now, it's a horribly inefficient mess.

SteveBaker (talk) 15:34, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I have been on and off at refdesks since at least 2011 and, as has been noted, I think the problem is really overblown. Aside from a few trainwrecks, I still get overwhelmingly good answers (and even broken English questions are often tackled). Those who perceive the RD atmosphere as toxic can simply move on to other Q&A websites. Often it's a matter of sense of humor simply because we can't be deadly serious all the time. Unlike other Q&A websites, refdesks are designed to serve particularly the needs of Wikipedia editors so that they don't have to register elsewhere (such as on Quora) to ask something or request a source for wikiediting. The RDs are thus germane to improving Wikipedia and I recall some questions and replies highlighting the shortcomings of a relevant article or its absence. Thus the claim that it's a waste of time and that volunteers should move to other Q&A sites is inappropriate. And the relatively low present number of refdesk questions is not a particularly useful metric. It would be worse if the refdesks were overwhelmed by unanswered questions. Given that out of 70 million registered WP users there are only roughly 469,000 active users, the mere fact that the questions are still answered is telling. The same noble volunteer force powers the entire Wikipedia. Brandmeister^talk 20:43, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

@SteveBaker: I am honestly curious -- would Quora be able to match the degree of interesting information I obtained in this question? I mean, I started out by trying to see whether alternate probabilities of a mathematician-in-a-box can be used to do quantum computing. With some really interesting answers, especially by User:icek~enwiki, it came up that Grover's algorithm can be used to rapidly (but not immediately) determine the right randomly seeded world-line for the mathematician in question. I then wanted to invert the quantum computing system so only the processor is isolated, thereby allowing alternate universes (seeded by the quantum circuit) to be processed to determine the correct result. Which brings us to questions of whether the Copenhagen interpretation or something else is correct - how does a state-vector collapse anyway? I am actually seriously thinking it might actually be possible to create a device to detect whether something has a soul by this mechanism, assuming a certain paranormal/causality violation/universal boundary condition explanation for how that works. Now the question is, can Quora actually assist with this kind of intrepid multi-legged flight of fancy, or does it corporate-bitch-slap you and tell you that's all much too creative to talk about? Wnt (talk) 00:20, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

@Wnt: Emphatically, yes. A question on Quora gets content attached to it in at half a dozen ways:

• You can add your comment on the question itself - not an "answer" but just a comment - like "Your question needs clarification because...".
• You can answer it - a complete self-contained answer that does not refer to any of the other answers.
• You can comment on existing (or your own) answers - so "Your answer is wrong because..." or "I'd like to amplify your answer by adding this..." or "It would have been nice if you'd mentioned this...". Comments are threaded, so you can comment on comments...just like on WP:RD only in a somewhat more structured way.
• You can offer an edit to someone else's answer. It won't "go live" unless they actively OK it...but it's good for helping people with typos, math errors, etc.
• You can offer an edit to someone else's question. Same deal - it won't go live until the OP OK's it.
• You can merge similar questions (although it may get un-merged by someone else) - and Quora will merge all of the answers and comments into a single stream.

All questions, answers and comments can be "upvoted" or "downvoted" - and if they are downvoted 'enough' they'll get pushed into a "This content has been hidden - click here to read it" section.

So - to directly answer your question - YES! Emphatically yes. Threaded "comment" conversations happen all the time - they get deep and complicated - and they can diverge from the topic as much as you like (although if you get lots more downvotes than upvotes, you might get "hidden").

For example, someone asked how we can prove that the world is round. I gave a decent, considered answer - and so did about 20 other people...but at least a couple of them quoted the experiment performed by Eratosthenes (where he measured the circumference of the earth by measuring the length of the shadows cast by two sticks spaced 100 miles apart). But this doesn't PROVE that the earth is round. It could either be that the Earth is round (with a radius of 4,000 miles) and the Sun is very, very far away...OR...(as the Flat Earther's rightly point out) it could demonstrate that the Earth is flat and the Sun is just a tiny ball, 4,000 miles away. Eratosthenes isn't a proof of the round earth...it's just a way to calculate it's size *IF* it's round. So I point this out - and a LONG chain of comments ensues in which this is argued back and forth. It wound up with a debate about whether Eratosthenes was guilty of petitio principii (begging the question) by effectively saying "The earth is round...experiments...Conclusion: The Earth is Round." -- This is not atypical.

Quora has a VERY small number of staff - they couldn't possibly have time to read even the tiniest percentage of posts there. I've been answering questions on Quora for about a year now (and recall that I was once a big time ref-desk regular - so I know of what I speak) - I've never once had a "corporate bitch slap" from Quora people. But down-votes from the community do ROUTINELY push truly crappy questions and truly crappy answers into the nether-world.

I *LOVED* working on WP:RD - I did it for many years - my edit count was embarrassingly high. I now work on Quora - and it's every bit as much fun, except without a single idiot being able to trash things - and with a HUGE readership making it feel much more worthwhile. (Also, you *NEVER* run out of interesting questions to answer...it's like drinking from a fire hose.) SteveBaker (talk) 13:44, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

The "up-vote"—"down-vote" feature is a weakness of Quora's design. The best answers can and do get pushed into the "This content has been hidden, click here to read it" section. Participants are not necessarily knowledgeable. Nor are Quora "moderators" necessarily knowledgeable. It is my contention that all honest attempts to answer a question should be equally readable. Some responses should not be hidden, sometimes out of the ignorance of those voting. Knowledge is not comparable to consumer items. Yes, I want to know if others were satisfied with a pair of sneakers. No, I am not interested in their prejudices about subjects that they misunderstand in the first place. Disclaimer: my observations only concerned questions in the realm of the visual arts. I assume bad faith concerning Quora: their priorities include generating traffic for advertisers. Their "best" answers tend favor restating popular misconceptions. Bus stop (talk) 15:57, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

• I've just moved 3 Oppose !votes from here (the discussion section) to the Survey section above. Folks, please be sure to put your Support or Oppose in the proper section or it might be missed by the closer(s). Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:44, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Possible Reforms?

Well, it now appears likely that this RFC may be closed as a simple No or Oppose or Keep, in which case we don't need to address the reforms. However, it would still be useful to identify possible or proposed reforms at least to see whether they are worth considering further. The only ideas that I have seen mentioned are: stricter enforcement of existing guidelines (by multiple editors); permanent semi-protection (by at least one editor); moderation (by a few editors); ArbCom discretionary sanctions (by me); new software. I would suggest that any approach that doesn't fit with the existing implementation of the English Wikipedia should be dismissed; I am sure that a few editors think that keeping a Reference Desk function nominally in the English Wikipedia is so important that we should do something that isn't really English Wikipedia to support it. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:27, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't think there is a non-software solution that will make the refdesk not seem sad compared to other more modern platforms.

It's like we're all standing around trying to put in screws with a stone hammer, and everybody knows we'll never be able to afford a screw-driver, so we pretend that hammering in screws with a rock is a perfectly valid personal preference. ApLundell (talk) 06:42, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I will point out that there is general agreement that better enforcement of existing guidelines is a good idea, but no agreement on how to enforce the guidelines more strictly. I will point out that moderation is not currently done anywhere in the English Wikipedia. I will point out that even temporary semi-protection due to trolling or other disruptive editing causes a few of the regulars to scream and bellow because the Reference Desks are too special as an outreach to unregistered editors to compromise them by applying a basic rule, but never mind reality. I think that leaves ArbCom discretionary sanctions as the one plausible reform that is consistent with the way the English Wikipedia is currently handled. Do other editors, regardless of whether they want to keep or discard the Reference Desks, have other reform ideas? Robert McClenon (talk) 00:27, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

While there are problems, I don't think it has been established that they are crippling the refdesks or massively hurting the project. That does not mean that nothing should be done, but we should keep Perfect is the enemy of good and the Pareto principle in mind. Maybe it's as good as it gets with reasonable effort (maybe not, but let's not rule out that case). I'd say this discussion has already generated more bits and bytes than a few months worth of refdesk problems. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 00:34, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Well, If semi-protecting doesn't damage the ref-desks, then that's a stronger argument than anyone could possibly make here that they serve no purpose. ApLundell (talk) 06:42, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Which is why I support closing them rather than attempting to fix them. We obviously have a crowd who wants to shoot the breeze over there and resents that the encyclopedia should insist they play by the rules. If our admins can't bring the editors into compliance with BLP because of a clique of Wikipedians that don't write articles, then the problem can't be fixed. Chris Troutman (talk) 07:40, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I have several problems with that paragraph. "We obviously have a crowd [...] which resents that the encyclopedia should insist they play by the rules" - not in evidence. Of course there are different users with different viewpoints, including difference on the interpretation of our rules. But that is not different then in other parts of the project. Maybe I've worked in the wrong spaces here, but I've seen a lot more problems at, say e-Cat, global warming, creationism, Jesus, Holocaust denial, and so on. I don't see a particularly problematic "crowd" at the refdesk, nor any significant number of BLP problems, much less a significant fraction. I also don't see "a clique that [doesn't] write articles" - many of the refdesk regulars have written and are making significant contributions to the article side. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:54, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I encourage people to look at The refdesk ten years ago and compare it to last month. It's dying. And competing services are growing like mad. The Stack Exchange Network now gets slightly more question-askers in a minute than the RefDesk does in a day. With that in mind ... what's the goal? Is the goal to be a distant also-ran? Is the goal to provide a different service that fills a niche? (Which one?) What value does it serve, to Wikipedia or to the world? ApLundell (talk) 07:31, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

@ApLundell: The arguments you use above seem disingenuous.

1) If our software is so sucky for carrying out conversations that we need to delete the Refdesk because it's no good for that purpose, then I propose we delete WP:Village pump (policy) right now. I mean, obviously the Village Pump is a tremendously low-tech stone age mechanism compared to having Xi Jinping lay out a policy course for us in the Five Year Plan, and it just generates endless drama and tension.

2) Semi-protection does create problems, which is why the regulars were generally infuriated with it and we made a big deal about it when an admin started unilaterally imposing it a while back. Yeah, I know, more "drama" to be held against us, that we didn't think admin action was needed!

3) Yes, there are competing services. Ten years ago they didn't have ads on the TV where people asked their friend Google or Alexa any question they had at the top of their head. Now many of them have these devices always listening to see what they are interested in. They can look toward the records they generate for the Utah Data Center the way that more primitive generations might have looked to God to remember them in the afterlife. And yet, where do those answers come from? Wikipedia, a lot of the time. I bet even our own Refdesk archives are rich sources for those answers the friendly electronic voices yield. In any case, what of it? Having competitors doesn't mean that the activity is worthless - to the contrary, it is proof that others find it worthwhile to do also.

Now I will repeat the reform I suggested -- if we really want a nice pretty outcome from the Refdesk, it means that we need to take the archive files and use them to generate a new set of files of neatly edited questions and answers, with abundant categorization tags and a cleverer way to search them. We can do that, but it is a lot of work. And for some people here, I suppose it is less rewarding work to do than trying to get pieces of Wikipedia shut down. Wnt (talk) 08:28, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

You're right as to a lot of work, and I predict that few of those saying we should keep and reform the desks (after many years of people saying that to no effect) will be seen anywhere near that work. It will fail due to lack of support and participation. It's easy to !vote in an RfC, saying what we think others should do with their time. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:21, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

It seems to me that's what the deletionists are doing. At least the people writing answers are generating something useful that can be taken another step later. There is nothing on Wikipedia that doesn't need improvement, article or otherwise; it is a multigenerational project. Wnt (talk) 17:02, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

You still seem unable to grasp that we have been saying the desks "need improvement" for many years - including RfCs very much like this one - and no improvement has been forthcoming. ―Mandruss ☎ 17:14, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Wnt : Your Point 1) illustrates the problem. You're arguing that the Refdesks are an acceptable place to have a conversation. Ok, but that's not what they're supposed to do. Modern question/answer sites like StackExchange and Quorra actively discourage conversation through UX design and get better results because of it. Your Point 2) I agree with. I routinely argue that semi-protect does damage the theoretical goal of the refdesk. If others are saying that the damage isn't even noticeable, that can only be because the ref desk's positive effect is basically nil these days. Point 3) I don't understand. Yes. The encyclopedia is a valuable source of information. Nobody is suggesting shutting that down! It doesn't automatically follow that all Open Content projects will one day reach the same level of value. Some fail.

I really think your fear of non-open products is stopping you from honestly evaluating how badly this particular battle has been lost. The refdesks aren't helping the cause of Open Content, If they're noticed at all, it's as a humiliating example of a stereotypical failure state. ApLundell (talk) 20:30, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

• In order to reform, we need to more clearly identify what the problems are, and prioritize them. Is the problem bickering among editors? Is the problem that the RDs attract trolls? Is the problem answering questions based on personal opinion instead of sources? Is the problem not enough rules? Is the problem too many rules? Each of these “problems” require different solutions. Blueboar (talk) 12:38, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Comment. Indeed the clear identification of problems is an absolute must. From what I understand from more than one hour spent to read the arguments above it seems that a perceived problem raised by some who have commented above is the ocurrence of comments/questions which criticize Donald Trump and that is included in BLP violations. I want therefore to ask: Where in the Refdesks Math and Science Archives have such problems appeared? Can someone point links to such incidents? I personally have never encountered such incidents and I say/estimate that such incidents of, for instance, BLP violations are very less likey to impossible to occur in Math and Science refdesk. Perhaps such incidents are likely to appear in some narrow areas of Refdesk Humanities!(?)! Thoughts?--82.137.12.149 (talk) 13:09, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

One user is 80% of the problem. three users are well over 95% of the problem. A single admin watching over the refdesks and issuing warnings and blocks for anyone who refuses to follow our policies and guidelines (the real ones, not the imaginary ones that say you can delete anything that you don't like) would solve the problem. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:45, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

People who believe in science are frequently displeased with Trump and his people. Commenting on politics (including criticism, which is most of politics nowadays after all) is not a BLP violation, and by and large we don't need the 'problem' to be addressed. To the contrary, admin suppression of political sentiments is likely to be taken as overt political bias and censorship - under the best of circumstances by both sides equally; otherwise even more justifiably. Wnt (talk) 07:38, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

I do not believe WP:RD can be fixed within the MediaWiki software framework. This isn't a matter of coming up with better policies or anything of that nature. A proper Q&A system needs to be set up entirely differently. Again (and I'm sorry to keep beating this particular drum) the Quora system is simply better. (NOTE: Jimbo Wales clearly agrees because he's a frequent user of Quora and I don't think I've ever seen him either ask or answer a question on WP:RD.)

The world NEED a world-class, fully open, advert-free Q&A system. It needs to have the ethics and vision of Wikipedia - but it DOESN'T need the MediaWiki software. It needs something with Questions, Answers and Comments more clearly separated. It needs upvotes and downvotes and ways to report abuse that are outside of the editing realm. It needs tighter categorizations. It needs a whole bunch of stuff that you simply cannot do with five long, cooperatively edited, text files...which is what WP:RD is.

It also needs the backing of the WikiMedia foundation. If we went to all the effort to write custom WP:RD software (multiple man-years!) and still got only a dozen questions a day - then that would be a disaster. We need the backing and promotion of Wikipedia. There would need to be a button next to EVERY article that says "ASK THE AUTHORS A QUESTION ABOUT THIS ARTICLE". Just that tie-in alone would be enough to wipe the likes of Quora off of the map.

Encyclopedias are a wonderful thing - but so many people have trouble either finding or interpreting things they find there - that we NEED a comprehensive, peer-reviewed Q&A system to provide the necessary readership support.

That was why WP:RD was created in the first place - but it has the wrong structure - and people don't know about it.

So REPLACE WP:RD...and if you can't, then let's just kill it and get it over with.

SteveBaker (talk) 15:47, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

From what I can see Quora doesn't place emphasis on sources but rather allows responders to self-identify as experts. Am I misunderstanding Quora? Bus stop (talk) 18:29, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

You can self-identify - but whether anyone will believe you is tough to guess. I think, mostly not. I tried self-identifying and NOT self-identifying - and it didn't seem to affect the number of questions and upvotes I got. "Experts" emerge from the volume of answers they give on some narrow topic - plus the number of up-votes they have on those answers. So expertise labelling is really an emergent property of the system that tends to back up the self-identification. When you ask a question, you can specifically address it to up to 16 people who YOU think will be best able to answer it (so they get notifications of that) - but it also goes out into the feed for that topic so anyone looking for something good to answer will see it. My experience with questions I've asked has been very good. I've asked questions about everything from Physics and Math to plumbing and car maintenance - and I've only once managed to 'stump' the experts and gotten no good answers. SteveBaker (talk) 13:54, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

The rational approach would be to kill Refdesk 1.0 now; then, if there are enough people willing to devote the enormous amount of time and effort, they could discuss and implement Refdesk 2.0, whether that ends up using our existing framework or something entirely different, whether a Wikipedia initiative or a WMF one. Odds of this happening after we have so many Opposes? Pretty close to nil. We will keep the status quo pending reforms or replacement that will never happen, and we'll be back here with all the same arguments sometime around 2022. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:59, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps start building a RD-2.0 FIRST and THEN kill RD-1.0 once it's up and running. If you kill it, wait a year, then restart it - you'll lose all of your RD regulars...which would be bad. SteveBaker (talk) 13:54, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

A far as I can see the main current problem with the reference desks is not with trollish IPs or anything like that but regulars on the desk itself causing disruption. I would like to see the guidelines enforced more firmly. The one straightforward change I would make is to allow a mark to be put on queries saying that one considers it possibly contentious and that editors should be careful to ensure their answers should follow the guidelines strictly in giving straightforward factual answers with references to reliable sources or articles in Wikipedia. Editor who persist in digressive answers on possibly contentious topics despite such warnings should be banned. There may be reasons to remove e.g. banned questioners or clear trolls but banning or hatting should be only very carefully done - there are many people of less than average intelligence who do deserve a straightforward answer rather than being removed. Dmcq (talk) 16:41, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

It seems to me that a major cause of the pointless digressive side discussions is a tendency to interrogate question askers with pointless followup questions. If someone asks "Why is the sky blue?" Someone else will inevitably counter-ask "define 'blue'.".

Those pointless clarifications are easy to post. So it's human nature that people jump in with them as often as possible, while letting someone else do the hard work of researching and explaining the answer.

I don't know how you could make a rule against those pointless interrogations without also banning legitimate, necessary requests for clarification.

If I could down-vote replies, I'd downvote that kind of noise when I saw it. (and expect others to do the same to me.) But as it stands, I'm not going to reply with "That question is unhelpful and slightly rude." because that would make things so much worse.

So sections start with a question, fill up with easy guesses, pointless counter-questions, demands to cite the premise of the question, and other noise that just invites long irrelevant discussion. I just can't imagine any rule or guideline you could make to stop it. And enforcing the guideline! Imagine! Imagine going to ANI and expecting to get consensus to ban someone for making too many well-meaning easy guesses!

Other sites have solved these human issues with UX changes, but with the current very low daily volume of the refdesk, I can't imagine the foundation sparing any programmer resources to experiment on this issue. For a website that serves millions of people a day, it wouldn't be worth it to them to help improve service for a dozen people a day.ApLundell (talk) 20:50, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

From your edit summary, "And my personal pet peeve : Someone asks a question about the plot to a popular story, and editors trip over each-other for the glory of being the first to condescendingly explain that fiction is made up." So, how would you handle it when the OP asks a question whose answer is not in the work itself? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:41, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Can I also put a +1 by SteveBaker's idea of a query button besides articles. It need not just be seen by the people editing the article but could also be seen by people monitoring a relevant reference desk. (And can I say I do not want a +1 or -1 upvote downvote system even if I said +1 there) Dmcq (talk) 18:36, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I dislike the "UPVOTE" function at Quora as it can also serve to reinforce and perpetuate commonly held misunderstandings. Admittedly this is based on only a brief perusal of Quora. Bus stop (talk) 19:14, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

SteveBaker's idea of a query button beside articles has merits of being programmable, non-judgemental and it functions at the source of questions. This could be a unexpectedly constructive take-away from this long thread. I would like to develop Steve's idea further as follows.

Whereas a query button next to every mainspace article would amount of millions of buttons each offering a contact service that Wikipedia cannot guarantee, that would also seem to some readers a tempting distraction to "chat" instead of reading the article carefully, would likely also intercept comments that should go to the article discussion page, and I think the button would be problematic when it appears on mirror sites and on article printouts;

I propose instead that we recommend one or both of these software changes. I believe they are practical and affordable but it needs a WMF programmer to confirm.

1. Modify the form that appears on pressing "Ask a new question!" by dividing the field "Subject/headline" into two fields labelled

- Wikipedia article that nearest matches your question (may leave blank)

- Your question subject

(Reasoning for the above: the form gives the questioner just a nudge to let the Ref. Desk reponders know what article they are already looking at, similar to SteveBaker's proposed button. The two fields could fit within the present 255-character limit so the software change is minor.)

2. Notify users who are watching the article named by a question that it is mentioned on the relevant Ref. Desk.

Blooteuth (talk) 23:18, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Re ApLundell's comment, see User experience design. 31.52.216.53 (talk) 05:03, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

• The "query button" is reasonably appealing - though untested, and the details are crucial (because it will generate a lot of questions whose answer will tend to be 'duh, can't you read?'). Note Wikipedia has played with fancy Javascript and WP:article feedback before and it was a complete failure, whereas the Refdesks work fine everywhere except in the minds of people who are constitutively against them. Nothing else I see here appeals to me. Especially, the whole upvote/downvote thing (with the inevitable sequelae, universal on "social media", that there will be infinite scrolling and a Javascript interface carefully designed to make it practically impossible to access the answers at the bottom of the infinite scroll). Any good mechanism for serious discussion among equals will have a low Gini coefficient, i.e. everyone's answers are visible to all. The social media model is one of intentional inequality. More generally, the Usonian ideal of having Responsible People in Charge design something to micro-manage it for specific purposes, whether it be homes or discussion mechanisms, is intrinsically flawed, because the best ways of doing things emerge from the bottom up. Wnt (talk) 07:30, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

• The best reform I can think of is to institute some sort of moderation/clerking where we have some agreed means by which to close down/remove inappropriate questions and/or responses. Not sure of the specifics, but having someone uninvolved who can assess questions and responses that are within already established guidelines or not may be the best way forward. --Jayron32 11:42, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Well, that's pretty much how all this started -- the proposed system was to have anybody but Medeis do it. Wnt (talk) 12:59, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

• Trying to resolve the problems of the Reference Desks through new software programming, or what have you, could take a long time. I recommend that inappropriate discussions be closed and hatted, and the persons responsible for the inappropriate content be warned and, if they persist, blocked. That wouldn't require any technical changes. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 13:17, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

  You're missing the ENTIRE POINT here. The problem is that the closing and hatting of "inappropriate" material is being done - but very, very badly. Any random individual can be judge, jury and executioner. This causes big arguments - and is the ultimate cause of this entire RfC chain. Binary moderation in a world that contains an infinite number of shades of grey is the problem here. Very *VERY* often, I'd see a slightly odd-ball question, which could be answered carefully and intelligently - and some annoying idiot would "vanish" it just because they couldn't see that it was actually an interesting question. Then the "hatting" and "deletion" might go unnoticed - or it might often result in a hatting-war with all of the usual 3RR bullshit. With an "upvote/downvote" system (with automatic hatting when something gets lots more downs than ups) you get "Wisdom of the Crowd" effects which is The Right Thing. If lots of people found the thread valuable - and a few did not...bad luck to the few. With many downvotes and few ups - it vanishes quietly into the sump where only the very enthusiastic will read it. SteveBaker (talk) 14:02, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Metropolitan90 correctly points out that the feasibility of the software changes that SteveBaker and myself have proposed are uncertain without input from a programmer competent with the Wiki software, specifically with MediaWiki. The WMF is its leading user and developer of wiki-based projects, and already hosts some extended functions. @Katherine Maher you one hopes, as executive director, are able to support or quash our various ideas (for improvement with new buttons, form layout or voting) by checking them against the Foundation's resources of time and money. May we have guidance about this? Blooteuth (talk) 18:42, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Metropolitan90 Said : " I recommend that inappropriate discussions be closed and hatted, and [...]"

Ok. We tried that. Didn't work. Now what?

In fact that's exactly the plan that has failed so badly that there is now a proposal to shut down the RefDesk entirely. ApLundell (talk) 22:39, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Strong oppose--the reference desks aren't great yet, but they're enormously more professional than they were a few years ago, and can be quite helpful. I've learned many important things from the desks. Also, a lot of of people working at the reference desk probably have been sweating blood trying to improve it, putting up with less polite and unknowledgeable colleagues, and it wouldn't be fair to pull the plug on the project now.Rich (talk) 20:28, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, did I cast my vote properly, and in the right location on this thread? Should I go back and boldface it. I do want my oppose vote to be counted and read. thanks.Rich (talk) 03:03, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• The best reform is to do away with the RD entirely, and as a compromise, shunt it off to its own Wikimedia project, taking its regulars with it - for better or for worse - where they can have their own rules, admins, crats, and arbs, and just get on with it. They'll soon find out how well they compete with other Internet Q&A sites. They'll either continue to treat it as a blog or MMORPG, or they will buck their ideas up.

The next best solution would be to T-ban one or two regulars from the Reference Desk, and introduce some boilerplate answers such as Thank you for your question, but this is unrelated to current or future encyclopedia content for Wikipedia, with perhaps a couple of other appropriate boiler plates in a dropdown à la Twinkle. And also, instead of giving lengthy answers, just provide a link to a relevant Wikipedia article, policy, guideline, or help page - which theoretically is all a city librarian on the desk in the lobby does. He/she doesn't try to teach the whole answer to the enquirer, and certainly does not give some silly response if they don't know, and there are not three or four library employees all jostling to be the first to answer.

The other, and quite radical solution is something on the lines suggested by Wnt: take the archive files and use them to generate a new set of files of neatly edited questions and answers, with abundant categorization tags and a cleverer way to search them. It could be done with semantic searching, but it would be very expensive to set up and in view of the difficulty of even getting some urgently needed essential software prioritised, at Wikipedia pace it wouldn't happen this half of the century. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:41, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

MMORPG - I had to look that one up. It means "Massively multiplayer online role-playing game". 92.8.218.38 (talk) 10:28, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

• A similar experience: This reminds of me a forum I used to help moderate some time ago, which had one sub-forum which was intended for Straightforward factual answers to straightforward factual questions. It was one of the most problematic and hardest to moderate, with the reasons for the removal of posts being along the lines of "The board is for factual answers, not discussions or opinions", "Please don't question or criticize the OP, just answer if you can or don't if you can't" - essentially variants of "This reply is not a factual answer to the question asked" or "This it not a factual question". It was extremely hard to get people to understand and adhere to the purpose of the sub-forum, and it ended up being managed pretty strictly by topic banning repeat offenders. It sounds to me like the ref desks are experiencing very similar problems. Maybe a similar solution is needed here - establish clear ground rules (eg "The ref desks are for asking factual questions, and for answering factual questions with references to Wikipedia content") and topic ban editors who will not adhere to those rules? Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:00, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

  I've just read Kudpung กุดผึ้ง's comments above, and yes, we also used boiler plate answers for a number of common problems. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:03, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Towards a close/the scores so far

• I'm not suggesting closing yet as discussion is still ongoing, but I've just done a count and I thought I'd note it here rather than forget it in case anyone is interested (and it is just a count rather than the assessment of arguments that would be needed to evaluate a consensus). Anyway, I make it:

Support = 40

Oppose = 87 (89 if you include Reform, which implicitly opposes closure)

Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:37, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Updated after I moved 3 Oppose !votes from the discussion section to the survey section. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:42, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

MoS RfC: Inconsistent capitalization of eponym in same context

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#RfC: Inconsistent capitalization of eponym in same context.

The short version: is it okay to use Gram stain then gram-negative when both of these refer to the same thing (a microscopy dye-staining technique named for Hans Christian Gram, with no connection to the metric unit gram)? People have been editwarring about this since 2004, so an RfC seemed wise.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  00:21, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

It looks like the first few reliable sources I checked use the capitalization you'd expect [15] and given the relative illogic of leaving a name uncapitalized, I don't see why you would do it that way. That said, the talk page cites medical dictionaries and the CDC for the lowercase form, and that's what they say. The reliable sources rule here, and no general policy should override them, so I'm afraid we need to let this be handled on the article talk page, one way or the other. Wnt (talk) 21:51, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Multiple reliable sources

If you have reliable Site A and reliable Site B, can Wikipedia say that you can only use one site in an article and not the other? Because that's what Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games is doing, over here. SharkD  Talk  05:24, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

When two (or more) reliable sources say the same thing, it becomes a matter of editorial judgement and WP:Consensus as to whether to use one, the other, or both. We don't need to create "rules" to settle every minor sourcing dispute. Blueboar (talk) 14:19, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Keep in mind we're comparing OpenCritic to Metacritic, which are only review aggregators and otherwise don't provide novel content (they're tertiary sources) outside of which reviews they count towards their averaging. And presently, in the video game industry, Metacritic is the standard that is used (to a point of causing problems within the industry, but that's not an issue), so it doesn't make any sense to provide both sources when they exist for presenting the average reviews for a game. --MASEM (t) 14:28, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

If the content being sourced is not likely to be challenged in any serious way, and no reasonable editor would object to the reliablilty of the source, then additional reliable sources, while allowed, are unnecessary. However, if it's likely that reasonable editors may object to the content's accuracy in some way and desire additional verification, then multiple reliable sources should be used. Also, if there are two sources for content that only needs one, and editors generally agree that one of the sources is far more respected on the topic than the other, then removing the inferior source, even if it was used first, would be fine (if there are no strong objections) since it would have more credibility. By the way, SharkD: it's "cite" as in citation, not "site" as in Web site. 2605:A000:FFC0:D8:E8B0:35F4:5401:1C0D (talk) 16:55, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I am talking about two websites. WPVG wants to blanket ban Website B across all of Wikipedia. Despite also claiming that Website A and Website B are equivalent (and thus equally reliable?), which multiple other RSs actually disagree about. SharkD  Talk  00:18, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Scanning the discussion it seems that the issue is whether or not to use Metacritic or, the relatively new, Opencritic. The thing is that Metacritic, as the Open Critic article itself implies, has been embraced as a standard for this sort of thing, so it does not make sense to not use them. Now, maybe down the line it'll be reversed and Opencritic will gain some traction, but we should stick to the one most people use. --Deathawk (talk) 04:24, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

There's no ban, just that there's yet to be any material provided by OpenCritic that would make it more preferred over MetaCritic. It's not a ban, just a case where, for example, we'd use what the NYTimes or BBC reports on the same content of the same story over the Smalltown Gazette. --MASEM (t) 04:46, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

• This pops up from time to time. There is also the related issue that someone/people involved with opencritic have in the past attempted to spamlink. Essentially its as the two above state: Metacritic is both the defacto and endorsed standard both outside and inside the industry. Outside, metacritic is the go-to for tertiary sourcing, inside its the metric by which publishers often pay developers bonuses (one of the problems Masem alludes to above). Opencritic is new, not used widely, and really only differs in one area - in that it is, per its name, more open about its methodology (Metacritic obfuscates its weighting given to different reviewers). It always ends the same way, editors are generally of the opinion when opencritic use is more widespread, then it may be considered. The 'pushers' shall we say (which in the past have COI issues or have direct contact with the owner) would like to use Wikipedia to demonstrate that use - which is backwards to how we do things. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:08, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

One should note, where OpenCritic has been covered in the media, it is generally endorsed as a better replacement for MetaCritic due to the above reasons. (Also, where MetaCritic has revealed its methodology, it has been shown that it cannot do math or tally the scores properly, angering some review sites enough to stop using scores at all. Example.) SharkD  Talk  13:19, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

While OpenCritic has been endorsed by some journalists, it still remains (as best we can tell) that MetaCritic is what drives developers and publishers w.r.t. things like bonuses tied to critical scores, etc, even if their methods have been repeated called out as flawed. That makes it really hard for us to change from that. --MASEM (t) 13:25, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Medical advice on user / user talk pages

We have both WP:MEDICAL/WP:RD/G/M which covers basically mainspace/Wikipedia space, but how do we go about users giving each other medical advice on user talk page, e.g. stuff like this? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:46, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

The disclaimer warns users not to believe stuff like this; it doesn't prohibit posting it. And obviously the Refdesk guidelines, if they apply anywhere, don't apply to talk pages. And nobody is going to spot this stuff often anyway. Best thing to do is stay out of it, unless there is a pattern that supports an allegation of commercial spam. Of course, nothing prohibits you from saying "don't believe any of this" on a talk page yourself. Wnt (talk) 21:55, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Maybe that disclaimer should be quoted in full, anytime an OP asks for medical advice. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:58, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Those two linked disclaimers are about articles and refdesk. You'd need something a little different. Maybe a big red flag saying something like "Warning: only listen to doctors about health issues, because everyone else might have a conflict of interest", posted on every talk page where someone offers health or medicine advice, would draw attention away from these dangerous discussions. Dicklyon (talk) 22:03, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Speaking of which, Conflict of interest in the healthcare industry is barely more than a stub, and there's nothing in there about, e.g., overuse of tests that involve newly purchased expensive equipment, referrals to facilities owned by the prescribing physician or that pay kickbacks, or the ethical problems of recruiting patients into clinical trials run by the physician. There are other under-developed articles as well. For example, Thought leader unaccountably doesn't mention physicians targeted by pharmaceutical companies to promote high-priced drugs (e.g., in local medical association meetings), even though "you're a local thought leader" is the excuse that the targeted physicians are fed to explain why the pharma company is giving them so much personal attention. We are missing quite a lot of information about medical ethics. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:34, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Oh, and we need Conflicts of interest in dentistry. I had, but can no longer lay my hands on, an in-depth news source on the difficulties of getting dental care to poor American children. One of the problems? In some US states, it is illegal for a non-profit organization(!) to provide dental services unless the CEO/Executive Director is a licensed dentist. Why? Well, the dental association says that people get better care when the treatment recommendation is being made by someone whose mortgage payment depends upon upselling you on cosmetic procedures, rather than by a dentist on a fixed salary who can work full time with patients instead of spending most of his time running a business and fretting about making ends meet.

This source: Jordan, Mary (2017-07-01). "The unexpected political power of dentists". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. might also be useful for building such an article. The widespread practice of making (mostly female) dental hygienists in the US work only in dentists' offices (and frequently making them cobble together several part-time jobs around town, because no dentist wants to pay benefits like sick leave and health insurance when he could have five part-time hygienists instead of two full-time ones) and prohibiting them from doing things like sealing teeth is another sign of how COI in that industry isn't being managed appropriately. Basically, if anything happens to your teeth, the local business owner with a dental license expects to get a share of the profits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:16, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Just googling for the phrase medical advice gave me "WebMD does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment"[16]. Our own article says Medical advice is the provision of a formal professional opinion regarding what a specific individual should or should not do to restore or preserve health. It's not some random stranger on the Intertubes saying "Take lemon juice with hot water". I'd say the panic about possibly giving "medical advice" is mostly due to a cultural meme that does not reflect any real legal (or moral) problem. The disclaimer makes it clear that whatever you find on Wikipedia is not "medical advice" (in the legal sense) and should not be mistaken for it. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:09, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

• I checked to see if that link is being spammed and it isn't. I think that person was just being funny. Or maybe they thought they were being helpful. Or maybe it was a weird form of gravedancing... hard to say without understaning the interaction. But i don't think it is particularly something to be concerned about with respect to medical advice. Jytdog (talk) 22:23, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• My own POV (subject to change without warning, etc.): I think we should stay out of it. It's not hateful or vandalism or something obviously destructive like that, so if someone posted something like that on my talk page, then I would want you to let me handle it. I assume that if it were your talk page, then each of you would also want the right to respond, or not, in the way that you thought best. So I suggest leaving it alone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:21, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• There is one bit of medical advice that is never wrong, and that we SHOULD give: “Consult a doctor”. Blueboar (talk) 02:09, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
  • At the ref desk, it has been generally agreed in past that the best phrasing is, "If you're concerned, consult a doctor." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:20, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Articles on bi-lateral relations

Context: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Qatar–San Marino relations and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Canada-Cambodia Relations

I don't believe there's a clear guideline as for when articles on bi-lateral relations between countries should exist. I do feel that one is necessary.

The exchanging of ambassadors is a good starting point, as its presence or absence should not be controversial. While it clearly isn't a requirement for relations to be notable (Iran–Israel relations, for example), it generally is correlated with significant relations between countries.

This leads to several possible outcomes, at a minimum:

1. All country-pairs should have a bi-lateral relations page. Having an ambassador isn't at all relevant.
2. All country-pairs that partially exchange ambassadors (for example, one country has a resident ambassador and the other does not) should have a bi-lateral relations page.
3. All country-pairs that exchange ambassadors should have a bi-lateral relations page.
4. Some country-pairs that exchange ambassadors should have a bi-lateral relations page.
5. Some country-pairs should have a bi-lateral relations page, but the presence or absence of ambassadors isn't a useful test; other factors (such as a long-standing history or significant bi-lateral trade) are more relevant.

Thoughts? power~enwiki (π, ν) 17:58, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

FWIW, Several years ago I took a stab at a guideline here. Yilloslime ^T_C 18:25, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Option 6: Any country-pair that can be reliably sourced as the subject of significant reliable source coverage about the relationship. Diplomatic relationships don't necessarily require an exchange of ambassadors to be notable (as you note, Israel-Iran is a clearly notable topic regardless of their lack of an ambassadorial relationship), but the exchange of ambassadors also can't be an automatic inclusion freebie that exempts the topic from actually having to be sourced to much more than just a primary source press release from the diplomatic corps itself.

Far too many of these pages get created as boilerplate placeholders which say little more than "Canada-Cambodia relations are a diplomatic relationship that exists, the end", which isn't a useful article at all. And even if something more substantial can be written and sourced about Canada-Cambodia relations, it's not necessary to keep the boilerplate page as the base from which to start it — there's so little substance to the existing version that starting over from scratch does not represent any significant increase in the workload involved in redoing it right.

There's no value in comprehensively boilerplating tens of thousands of placeholder articles about every possible combination of two countries, if all the editor can be arsed to actually do is write a stub which just says that the diplomatic relationship exists — if a person really cares about the topic enough to want to start the article, then by definition they should care enough about the topic to put enough work into the article to make it worth existing. Bearcat (talk) 18:30, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

• • There's something like 200 sovereign nations on Earth, so if we're going to have an article for every possible permutation, that would be almost 20,000 articles. Most of which will not be notable. I think we can all agree that this is excessive stamp collecting. The metric is as it's always been: showing enough independent, significant coverage to demonstrate notability. Reyk _YO! 19:00, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• I think the standard has to remain GNG. Either journalists and academics are writing about these relationships enough to pass GNG or the bilateral relationship isn't going to have enough material upon which for us to write. Chris Troutman (talk) 19:58, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• Stick with the GNG, plus the tendency of editors to be slow to create boring articles (especially if they actually have to look up some sources for them). If we get 20,000 articles -- great! But we won't, at least not until we're at tens of millions overall. Wnt (talk) 21:17, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
•  #2 is the most practical, because if there is even one embassy, there is always something to say in an article.  Requiring GNG is setting us up for voluminous meaningless AfDs, and potentially a resulting crosspatch of country pairs that do and don't have articles.  This is also a special case because the normal concepts for redirecting non-notable topics to a larger topic don't work well.  There is another subtle issue here that complicates AfD, that in terms of our concepts of secondary and independent, a press release or article from a government is not the same as a press release from a private company.  Unscintillating (talk) 02:18, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I definitely agree with Bearcat's comments above. There is no need to define relations solely by the exchange of ambassadors, although it is likely a representative factor. What is important is to include information that supports the fact that there is a relationship between these two countries/states/entities. Examples issues to include would be:

• Treaties, pacts and international agreements (eg. information sharing agreements, tax treaties, resource extraction, defence sharing)
• Unresolved issues and negotiations to resolve conflicts/disagreements
• Significant economic relationships (major foreign investments, high degrees of financial dependence or remittance funds)
• Significant movements of people for labor exchanges, tourism, medical treatments, markets, refugees, etc
• Any shared infrastructure, resources, language, culture or activities that are discussed at an official level
• Recent military conflicts, support for internal unrest, or sponsored terrorism
• Exchanges of official representation
• Coverage of significant popular opinion on the relationship

There may be many more factors, but what is important is to demonstrate that there is a relationship and that it is not just an insignificant one. Loopy30 (talk) 17:33, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

This is an excellent summary of the kinds of issues that would represent useful and relevant content for the purposes of establishing a bilateral diplomatic relationship as notable enough to warrant a standalone article. I have little more to add but to endorse Loopy's comment. Oh, except to point out that one example of unresolved issues and negotiations would be a direct boundary dispute. Bearcat (talk) 17:41, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Endorse Option # 5.) "Some country-pairs should have a bi-lateral relations page, but the presence or absence of ambassadors isn't a useful test; other factors (such as a long-standing history or significant bi-lateral trade) are more relevant." Basically, a WP:SIGCOV standard. Although I haven't been active in this area lately, a year or two ago I waded into a number of these pages, attempted to source some unsourced ones, and can clearly see the absurdity of having articles on bilateral diplomatic relations between Ruritania and Spensonia.E.M.Gregory (talk) 21:07, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Small addition to WP:NOTNEWS

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

• Current wording - For example, routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, or celebrities is not a sufficient basis for inclusion in the encyclopedia.
• Proposed wording - For example, routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, crimes, or celebrities is not a sufficient basis for inclusion in the encyclopedia.

• I am basing this small change on pre-existing policies and to clear up confusion with editors who do not believe crimes are something the media routinely reports. Our guidelines for events already describes crimes as routine here: "Routine kinds of news events (including most crimes, accidents, deaths, celebrity or political news, "shock" news, stories lacking lasting value such as "water cooler stories," and viral phenomena) – whether or not tragic or widely reported at the time – are usually not notable unless something further gives them additional enduring significance". This proposal, I believe, is a small but beneficial step toward enforcing NOTNEWS and we go about it simply by consolidating with another core policy.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 18:20, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Of course, it is possible to include "crimes" but these were intended only as examples, not as an exhaustive list. Ruslik_Zero 20:43, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Hmm... I wish we could extend this, and say that media coverage of politics was “routine”. Saying that would moot about 99% of the arguments regarding NOTNEWS. Blueboar (talk) 21:11, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Oppose. The policy is badly written and even more badly abused, and giving it any more to work with is only a recipe for more trouble. I would read something like that and assume they are talking about genuinely routine announcements, like "The Grateful Dead will be playing at Madison Square Garden tomorrow", "The Wikipedia High School Heroes trounced the visiting team from Mozilla 10-3 at Friday's game" and so on. Not one of a kind things like a murder you see in the world media. A lot of people don't want to read it that way anyway, but why help them be troublesome? Wnt (talk) 21:14, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

The Grateful Dead are dust and dinosaurs, man. Today's children of tomorrow demand Royal Blood and Queens of the Stone Age. Reminds them of the good old days, before their parents were born. InedibleHulk (talk) 04:20, October 23, 2017 (UTC)

Ruslik0 yes I realize they are examples but many editors take them as the only Things to apply to NOTNEWS. Since crime is a common news item brought to AfD, I thought this would save a lot of time.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 21:28, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Oppose Agree with Wnt that giving clueless editors more reason to disrupt discussions of articles on notable events is not a good idea. Coretheapple (talk) 21:49, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Coretheapple you do realize I am just applying text literally taken from WP:EVENTCRIT -- the guidelines for events. Am I one of these "clueless editors" for reading policies for what they say? If the notability guideline for events calls most crimes "routine kinds of news" our policy for news should reflect that.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 22:08, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm seeing virtually every article stemming from current events being put up for AfD before the ink has dried (so to speak) and I'm seeing NOTNEWS widely abused. There is no need to add ammunition for that, and I guarantee it will happen if "crime" is added to what is definitely not intended to be an exhaustive list. Coretheapple (talk) 22:12, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Oppose Crimes that are reported by World media are notable and shouldn't be considered routine by Wikipedia standards--Shrike (talk) 07:50, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Shrike according to WP:EVENTCRIT they already are routine by Wikipedia standards.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 13:35, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Oppose per WP:CREEP. The list is not exhaustive, and no one should ever consider it such, for that reason we have no need to itemize such things. --Jayron32 11:44, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

But Jayron32 editors actually think the list is exhaustive -- so exhaustive in fact that they believe only those examples provided are what NOTNEWS applies to. Can we at least clarify that those few examples are not the only things related to NOTNEWS?TheGracefulSlick (talk) 13:35, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Then I would prefer adding the addendum "this list is not exhaustive" rather than trying to MAKE it exhaustive (which is impossible). --Jayron32 14:42, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose The operative phrase is "routine news reporting," and it's a good standard. It separates routine stories like: "Two killed in eight car pile up on foggy road," from non-routine stories like, "Two killed in eight car pile up as authorities investigate possibility that criminal rock throwing by militant supporters of the Nordic Resistance Movement caused car to crash; authorities scouring unpronouncable Swedish village in search for suspects; Prime Minister to address nation." Because while most crimes are not notable; those that get non-routine breaking news coverage may well be notable.E.M.Gregory (talk) 23:38, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

WP:NOTNEWS (Part II)

Based on the advice given above by Jayron32, I am refining my proposal for WP:NOTNEWS. My proposal again reflects on this sentence: For example, routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, or celebrities is not a sufficient basis for inclusion in the encyclopedia. Too many editors seem to believe this brief listing is exhaustive when, in reality, it is not. Of course, if it was it would read like "This applies only to...". I recommend adding the sentence This list is not exhaustive so there is no confusion, at least over that issue with the policy. I do not see why this call for clarification would be opposed but I've seen more surprising things from parts of the community.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 00:30, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. Unnecessary. "For example" does the job. I respectfully disagree with the assertion that there are scads of editors out there trying to write about routine news events like christenings and Sewer Board meetings because they don't understand what "for example" means and it has to be explained to them. What I do see are significant news events minimized by editors who take an extreme view of NOTNEWS. Coretheapple (talk) 13:15, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• It would be helpful to point to examples where events were kept that would have fallen under this, where editors arguing to keep said 'This event is not the type listed in NOTNEWS therefore NOTNEWS does not apply" to know if this is a severe problem. --MASEM (t) 13:18, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• I could suggest that we tweak the rule to address abuse of NOTNEWS, but I won't, That's because there is no consensus to change this rule. We had an RfC above and a straw vote at Village Pump, both of which reached that same conclusion. Time to let this rest a while rather than keep trying to nibble at it. Coretheapple (talk) 13:33, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support Clearly more clarity is needed, since people believe the list to be both exhaustive and final. If it isn't, we need to explicitly tell them that. --Jayron32 15:57, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

i've seen that asserted. Where is the evidence that editors view that as an exhaustive list? If this is not a real problem then we have a WP:CREEP issue. Coretheapple (talk) 16:46, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Coretheapple clarifying a policy isn't WP:CREEP. I can find many more instances but here is a recent example of an editor of 11 years asserting NOTNEWS doesn't apply to crimes because it isn't one of the examples provided.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 17:13, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Sorry but I'm not seeing Shrike making that assertion. (Pinging, so they can correct me if I'm wrong.) They said " WP:NOTNEWS doesn't apply "its not routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, or celebrities" . They're saying it's not routine, not that it's not one of the examples listed. And yes, CREEP does apply to so-called clarifications of policy. Coretheapple (talk) 17:20, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Seriously Coretheapple? He quoted (incorrectly, I might add) that part of NOTNEWS to say crime wasn't one of the items listed. What possible harm can you reasonably find from adding this small sentence for "so-called" clarity? You are just fighting a small change for absolutely no rationale reason.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 17:34, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

A segment from CREEP: "WP:CREEP" is not a substitute for actual arguments. Instruction can be helpful, even if long – when clearly and accurately representing community consensus. Hmm, so how does it apply again?TheGracefulSlick (talk) 17:41, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

I think you're totally misinterpreting Shrike's comment in a very unfair way---but hey, if they think you're being fair and correct it's a different story. As for CREEP, it seems to me that assuming that people don't know what "for example" means, on the basis of such slim evidence, is the epitome of instruction creep. Coretheapple (talk) 18:02, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• I have read User:Shrike's comment and I do think that GrecefulSlick is misrepresenting it.E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:45, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose To me, "its not routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, or celebrities" seems like a perfectly clear statement; attempting to list all types of "routine" news would be futile and might, as editors have argued above, lead to more problems than it solves; and, I see no evidence that NOTNEWS is being misunderstood. What I do see is is a sort of WP:FORUMSHOP by TheGracefulSlick. Abut 6 months ago, GracefulSlick began a campaign to delete pages that she regards as non-notable terrorist attacks. Some were deleted, others were kept, still others closed as "no consensus." She rapidly brought some kept and "no consensus" pages to AfD for a second go, started discussions on the talk pages of pages that closed as no consensus to merge to lists, and filed ANI complaints on editors who opposed her deletions of terrorist attacks (including me). I suggest that we give it a rest, on the grounds that there is no community consensus on what is, in essence, a difference of opinion about the notability of low casualty terrorist attacks.E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:45, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Where to start with this comment? First off, "its not routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, or celebrities" isn't even how the sentence is read in NOTNEWS. As I mentioned quite clearly in my opening statement, this proposal is not trying to list anything but rather take the advice that was given to me by a neutral admin from the previous thread; I revised my proposal thanks to a community discussion. Yes, I nominated articles for deletion but with thorough nom statements reflecting entirely on notability guidelines. Most of the 2nd nominations were months or even years after the originals so editors could reflect on any long-term impact. One, I admitted already was a bad nomination and I think it would be unfair to still hold it against me. Also true, I did start an ANI thread on you and you were warned about your behavior at AFDs. I sincerely apologize, but I do not think your !vote here was done in good-faith, considering you could not even be bothered with quoting the sentence correctly; then you felt compelled to bring a misrepresented take of my editing history into the conversation which could taint the discussion on a simple clarity statement for NOTNEWS.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 01:57, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support per Jayron and nominator. I can easily see how some might complain based on an improperly exclusive reading of the list. CREEP is not a concern for me here. The proposal entails just a few words, and not everyone has English as a mother tongue. And CREEP is not a substituted for a grounded argument for opposing, as per WP:CREEP. (P.S. if E.M. Gregory is even a tiny bit right about TheGracefulSlick's motives, I would TROUT them for that, but still support this minor addition of extra clarification. It's nice when guidelines are clear and admit less bickering. ). SemanticMantis (talk) 21:51, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support My suggestion would be to add this new note as a note/reference rather than in the main text. Shouldn't be such an issue. Lourdes 02:51, 25 October 2017 (UTC)