Wikipedia talk:In the news

A possible idea to consider regarding target article(s) lengths

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.

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I would like to think that one measure of quality we use for target articles for ITN/C is that they should exceed 1500 characters of readable prose, the same metric used for DYK. This is not usually a problem in most items nominated but can occur with relatively obscure people nominated at RD, or breaking natural disaster events.

I don't want to make a formal proposal yet for how to handle these, but would like to see if there's opinions either way if we were to implement "do not nominate target articles that are less than 1500 of readable", with the implication that the nominator should do enough leg work to get it past the 1500 character point before actually nominating. This is based on the impression that I get that :

• If we are dealing with an RD, that RD rarely gets expanded after ITNC posting and several RD age out because no one sought to improve it (so why is the item taking up space on our list?)
• If we are talking a breaking event, a few hours or so is usually sufficient to get more details to exceed 1500 characters of prose, and that also helps to stabilize information for the event.

This would require some type of formalizing the 1500 char prose requirement for target articles (which I don't see as a problem), and whether we should subsequently then allow any editor to "quick-fail" too-short ITN/C nominations. Being able to quick-fail noms that do not meet the 1500 char aspect would help to keep the ITN/C list clear of nominations that likely won't go anywhere or that were posted prematurely.

That said, the major drawback I see is that if someone sees an RD that was quick-failed due to size, and spent enough time to improve it past 1500 characters, we'd have to either reopen the closed nomination, or ask that user to renominate it, either which could bog down the page to a degree, in additional lead to timing issues with RD in particular. This itself might make it too hard to directly enforce, though we can still include the 1500 char prose requirement as a measure of when we should not accept an ITN/C as we would with poor sourcing, etc. --MASEM (t) 16:19, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose arbitrary character count limits are one of the terrible criteria at DYK which can be easily gamed and is of no consequence to our readers. If a perfectly formed and precise ITN article is 1000 characters long, well-referenced and well-written, it should be posted. Creeping towards DYK with its myriad ruleset and arcane procedures is something that ITN should actively strive to avoid. An aside: have any of our readers complained about short-length ITN articles posted to the main page? The Rambling Man (talk) 18:41, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per TRM; this seems to be a solution in search of a problem. You (or anyone) are free to use that as your personal criteria to evaluate articles, but I think it would prevent some articles from being posted that would otherwise deserve it. 331dot (talk) 19:52, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
• Can we have, say, three examples of articles that were posted to ITN (not merely nominated) that would have failed a 1,500 character rule? If they were posted, they must have had a consensus that the article was sufficiently non-stubby to merit an ITN mention, and so I just don't see the need for the extra rule-creep about article lengths and quick-fail criteria. Oppose from me too. Bencherlite^Talk 20:15, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
  • I can't give you examples because by the process we have these too-short articles aren't considered quality measures. The issue is prevent nominations that are underprepared due to a short article. --MASEM (t) 05:53, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
    • Ah, I see. So your proposal would allow nomination of every article in need of work (e.g. referencing issues, lack of updating, prose issues) and attention (e.g. from those who frequent ITNC and might be interested in helping), except articles below an arbitrarily chosen length, which might in fact be the easiest of all to get up to standard? I find that a bizarre approach, sorry. Bencherlite^Talk 15:51, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose Length, edit count and citations are not measures of quality; they are measures of quantity. Andrew D. (talk) 21:53, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose WP:AFD is the tool for this. Short articles, unlikely to grow, may be examples of WP:RECENTISM. Wikipedia:Exclusionists can keep articles off the project, instead of just the main page. --CosmicAdventure (talk) 13:38, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
• Comment with 100% opposition to this, I'd move to close this discussion. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:37, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
• Comment three weeks this has been languishing with no discussion other than the above which has unanimous opposition. Suggest this is closed, perhaps even by Masem himself. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:10, 21 November 2016 (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.

Suggestion: Add a line of "Upcoming Elections"

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.

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In response to some different ideas at User talk:Jimbo Wales, I decided that it would be a good thing to feature elections from around the world. It sounded like @Rubbish computer: and @Coretheapple: were favorable to the idea there, though the latter preferred something else I didn't want. The idea I prefer would require a change to the ITN template, and considerable work from the ITN regulars, especially at first until an ITN/R list for elections has been assembled. But I think it would be very productive since so many people in so many countries care about voting, and since national news media seldom give readers information in advance of votes outside their own countries, though they are well covered regionally.

A mock-up is as follows:

In the news

Aurora borealis seen from Southern England A series of solar storms impact Earth, creating aurorae (pictured) at lower latitudes than usual. Former prime minister of Fiji Frank Bainimarama is sentenced to one year in prison for attempting to pervert the course of justice. Mahamat Déby is declared the winner of the Chadian presidential election. Flooding in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, leaves more than 110 people dead and at least 140 others missing. Kyren Wilson wins the World Snooker Championship. Ongoing: Israel–Hamas war timeline Myanmar civil war Russian invasion of Ukraine timeline War in Sudan timeline Recent deaths: Sam Rubin Hans Wahlgren Yvonne Mokgoro Sean Burroughs César Luis Menotti Colleen Barrett Upcoming elections:

On this day...

This is only a visual mock-up since the flags would have to be linked to specific articles about real elections. Also I wonder if there's a better place to link the bold Upcoming elections than Portal:politics.

Potentially, there might be text after the flags, like "Nov. 6" or something, which might be highlighted on the day of the election, or we might only have text "today" on the day of the election or something - I think that may be too much trouble and so for now I'm just proposing flags and links. If people go for that we can moot such ideas later.

One issue would be how long to run the flags for. The U.S. nowadays lets people in some states vote remarkably early, but I assume many countries are still day-of, voting in person only. I don't want to build a bias into the system, so I think it might just be best to count back a fixed time interval from the end of the last day of voting, regardless of the duration of the election; hence my preference for calling it "upcoming" elections. We could probably make it pretty long without running out of room for flags, but it's hard to say if that would cover the entire early voting period for the U.S.; I'm OK with that. Wnt (talk) 14:49, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

I would ONLY be OK with this IF and ONLY IF target articles were first vetted for quality before posting. We shouldn't be directing readers to shit articles from the main page. --Jayron32 14:51, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

• Conditional Support per Jayron32. I like the idea, but we need to be careful not to direct readers to poor quality articles. -Ad Orientem (talk) 15:34, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose. This has been proposed before at least once and the reasons not to do this have not changed; with elections, the story is the result, which can't be easily explained with a country's flag or its name as all that would appear on the MP. They need context. 331dot (talk) 17:36, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

I'm also confused by the statement "at first until an ITN/R list for elections has been assembled"; elections are already addressed at ITNR(general elections and head of state elections of all sovereign states). 331dot (talk) 17:39, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose most people won't know what most of the flags mean. Plus the target articles will need to be postable quality, and most are not, even after the elections have concluded and results are all in. Also, would they then get a blurb after their conclusion per ITN/R? The Rambling Man (talk) 17:53, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose. As The Rambling Man writes, the quality of election articles is rarely suitable for posting. Also the flags look untidy and convey little or no meaning. Espresso Addict (talk) 18:40, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

I think the quality of the articles should improve based on the number of people reading them, and of course, just knowing that people will read them should further motivate existing volunteers. I don't mind linking to unfinished articles at all - if that's all we have on some country's imminent election, we ought to be just as ashamed whether it is on the main page or not! Wnt (talk) 09:10, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose. Aside from the issue with "forthcoming election" articles generally being of dubious quality, there's also the problem that while the US may have a single election day every four years, the remaining 95% of the world doesn't necessarily do things this way. Take France, for instance—a major country which we couldn't possibly leave out—with their system of two-round runoffs and separate presidential and legislative elections with the legislative elections held after the presidential election, we'd literally have to keep France up there for three months every election year, and this would be replicated for every other country that uses a similar system. ‑ Iridescent 19:21, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Well, I was thinking we should always have somebody up - precisely who depends on whose election is closest. For France, the separate presidential and legislative elections on different days would actually be two different links. I was picturing we put all the upcoming elections as parameters into a template: each has a flag, an article link, and an end date. The template has a parameter to show no more than N elections as space allows. It then goes through and (using a Lua module) picks out the entries which are presently closest to their end date. So France might have a while when it's up, then the first vote is cast and it goes out, and then later on it comes up again, but you could add those two elections in the template next to each other at the same time without having to manually fiddle with them. It doesn't bother me if France gets more time on the Main Page if their people really have to spend that many different days twiddling with ballots. Wnt (talk) 19:30, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

• Comment for spectacles like the US election, maybe an ongoing is appropriate. Same goes for any other where there are frequent updates to a quality article. That's what ongoing is for. For other elections, I'd be OK with it going up the day the polls open with an update for the winner (subject the usual quality requirements). Seems like every 4 years we discuss the election ticker around here. --CosmicAdventure (talk) 00:41, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Once you post the US election to ongoing, non-US people will scream systemic bias and want their nation's election posted to Ongoing too. It's a slippery slope. 331dot (talk) 08:18, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

I understand your point, but they could get their country's upcoming election article to a main page quality, and update it regularly. The criteria around ongoing are already sufficient for this. --CosmicAdventure (talk) 13:48, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

@User:The_Rambling_Man Just like we did with RD, I really think the quality gate prevents a "flood" of elections in ongoing. Should someone put forth the effort to get a quality pre-election article for Ghana, or Indonesia or wherever, and update it regularly. I'd love to see it in "Ongoing", and if the updates slow down, we can pull it off just like we've done with Battle of Aleppo. --CosmicAdventure (talk) 11:18, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose ITN is for showcasing quality, updated articles for events that are in the news. It is not for listing every upcoming election. Stephen 03:43, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose In addition to what everyone else said, how early should the "upcoming elections" show up on the home page? Is it limited to presidential, parliamentary, state, regional, county or local elections? Even then, why stop at elections? We could have "upcoming tennis tournaments", "upcoming football tournaments", "upcoming x", "upcoming y". If an event is considered important, it will be covered ITN by consensus, there's no need for more blanket rules of inclusion. BytEfLUSh | Talk! 02:34, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
• Comment three weeks have passed, this clearly has no consensus to support such changes, I suggest a neutral observer close this discussion down. Cheers. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:09, 21 November 2016 (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.

Proposal to simplify ITN

Has anyone actually read this? If so, the argument "too parochial" would be shouted down as irrelevant and ignored by admins. I propose to simplify the whole section to:

• The event can be described as "current", that is the event is appearing currently in news sources, and/or the event itself occurred within the time frame of ITN.
• Not currently nominated for deletion or speedy deletion.
• Of sufficient quality to be posted on the main page, as determined by a consensus of commenters.

Sound familiar to anyone? Let WP:N satisfy significance/importance/whatever. Did RD become a ticker? Nope. Why? Because without enough WP:RS no one writes a quality update, and it never makes it to the main page. Pretty slick right? So what does this solve? Ends silly bickering about "enough deaths" (or similar qualitative opinions around importance) and gets more quality content up onto the main page. Does that mean that maybe a celebrity divorce would get onto the main page? Sure. Why is that a problem? If someone writes a quality update about Brangelina and our WP:READERS are interested, then why not feature it? --CosmicAdventure (talk) 15:37, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

• GOOD GOD PLEASE YES. Yes with all of my soul, YES. I support this with every atom of my being. --Jayron32 16:32, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
• The RD change had a trial to gather data, is it worth doing something similar, say 3 months? Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:40, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose under any circumstances turning ITN into a news ticker and celebrity tabloid. "Appearing currently in news sources" could mean a short story appearing in my local weekly newspaper. It just is not significant to the rest of my state, let alone my nation or the world. I disagree that a weighing of what is significant enough for a global encyclopedia is "silly bickering"; it is called consensus and editorial judgement. If we want every quality updated article to appear on the Main Page, then that's what the Main Page should be turned into- a list of quality updated articles with little context as to why they are there. If readers are interested in Brangelina, they should read the tabloids, not an encyclopedia. RD is a very different animal; people meriting articles is relatively easy to determine, that is not the case for events. If people want to read news or write news, Wikinews is thataway..... I would further add that this should get a formal RfC as the change to RD did at some point. 331dot (talk) 18:32, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
• Strongly oppose per 331dot. Even assuming notability rules will prevent the worst elements of the "local news" aspects, this will clearly lead to a crapflood. I can provide impeccable sourcing to national news media and respectable specialist media that Rizzle Kicks have just called off their UK tour owing to Harley Alexander-Sule suffering panic attacks, but that doesn't mean it's an appropriate story for the front page of Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 18:44, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
• Hammer down - Systemic bias is a problem on Wikipedia. RD, as mentioned above, is not as negatively impacted by systemic bias and actually benefits from the loosened standards. Releasing this requirement for ITN would almost guarantee a clickbait effect for truly insignificant stories like the day-to-day antics of the Kardashians.--WaltCip (talk) 19:32, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for posting that; it is quite correct that systemic bias would make this worse. 331dot (talk) 19:36, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

• Full support for a trial (1 month should be long enough to assess the impact). The status quo is not working, as anyone outside ITN will tell you. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:38, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Yes, it is people outside of ITN saying that, and not those who actually participate in it in any capacity. If people want to see different things posted, they need to participate and do the work needed. 331dot (talk) 19:40, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

I also would like to see "status quo not working" defined. 331dot (talk) 19:41, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose it would turn English language Wikipedia into American Wikipedia. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:07, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
• Respond - "tabloid"? Really? That made up criteria doesn't prevent RAF pilots, video games and celebrities off of TFA? The WP main page is reserved for pointless train cashes and "international" sport? That must be written down some place I missed. --CosmicAdventure (talk) 20:47, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
  • could mean a short story appearing in my local weekly newspaper sorry, no. Your local newspaper is likely not comprehensive enough to write a quality update or an article that'd be featured on the main page. This was the same silly argument used about "highschool gym coaches" for RD and was thoroughly debunked.
  • usual shrieking about systemic bias you fight bias by improving articles about underrepresented topics, not by suppressing articles about "over-represented topics".
  • English WP --> American WP ^^^ see above about bias

--CosmicAdventure (talk) 20:47, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

1. There is no "made up criteria"; there is discussion to reach a consensus. If people don't like what is posted, they need to participate.
2. You don't mention any limitations on news stories in your proposal("the event is appearing currently in news sources"). If my weekly newspaper does provide a good account of an event, there is nothing preventing it from being posted to the Main Page of a global encyclopedia.
3. Yes, you fight bias by working on underrepresented topics, but this proposal does not encourage that. In fact, it will do the opposite. 331dot (talk) 21:07, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

• • I'm afraid if we went with "what was in the reported news" we'd no longer be an encyclopedia. That, fundamentally, is the issue. We don't post Kim's latest instagram, even if it draws 10 million views. Think long and hard, would it live long? Would it be something in a traditionally printed encyclopedia? Doubt it. Would a train crash involving more than a hundred fatalities feature in a traditionally printed encyclopedia? Perhaps. Much more likely than Kim. The "highschool gym coach" argument was never debunked although it was successfully used to debunk the fact that this isn't American Wikipedia, and a key element in removing the "super-notability" approach RD used to take. That a third or fourth tier coach who won zip was allowed to feature was a watershed moment for RD and therefore was essential in the progress of ITN from ITN in America to ITN across the globe, in particular with regard to recent deaths. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:35, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
• Comment rethinking all this, I would advocate a criterion that asked our readers and contributors to expound upon the idea that a news story was worthy of main page publication if "they sincerely believed it would be considered for a paper encyclopedia in ten years time". That would focus the mindset here. Avoid passing crap and focus on truly "encyclopedic" content. Or perhaps change the tagline of Wikipedia from "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" to "Wikipedia, the free webhost". The Rambling Man (talk) 21:38, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
• Neutral - In the previous RfC for RDs I wrote "The arguments for making this change can easily be rephrased to apply to blurbs as well. It's easy enough to say this is only for RD, and there is no slippery slope. But it's only a matter of time before someone comes along and says, why can't the existence of an article like 2016 Northeast India earthquake signify significance? I see no convincing argument for why blurbs should not have this while RDs should, but that would violate ITN's core purposes (of which only one of the four mentions "quality")", and here we are.

On the one hand, I think that if we were brave / brash / enlightened / crazy / [insert your favourite adjective here] enough to actually approve the RD reform, then we ought also to go ahead with this one. There is no difference in the argument; all the "oppose" rationales above could also have been applied to oppose the RD reform, and yet that passed. This should be implemented without controversy then. On the other hand, I am still opposed to the RD reform, and reforming blurbs the same way is even worse than reforming RDs. I am going to stay neutral, but if this goes to a RfC, I will oppose for the same reasons as I opposed the RD reform. Banedon (talk) 02:45, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose per 331dot, Iridescent and WaltCip. -Ad Orientem (talk) 02:59, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per 331dot, Iridescent, WaltCip and The Rambling Man. Espresso Addict (talk) 07:31, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose let's just think what this would have meant for ITN for the past year. It would have been dominated by daily developments in the race to become Democrat and Republican nominees and then by the US presidential campaign itself. If people want to see what is happening in the news, as opposed to which encyclopedia articles have been created or updated in response to important events, they need to look elsewhere and stop expecting Wikipedia also to function as the front page of the BBC News or the Daily Mail. Bencherlite^Talk 10:29, 25 November 2016 (UTC)
• Respond to all though I recognize this proposal is doomed, I'm wondering if anyone has ever actually read WP:N. WP:15MOF, WP:SUSTAINED. Lets be real: just because a local paper publishes the result of some school sports game does not mean the content satisfies WP:N. Why exactly does ITN need separate criteria from the rest of the project? Should someone actually write a quality update about Kims Paris robbery, and it's in the news cycle for days (WP:15MOF and our WP:READERS are interested, I mean, who is it hurting? Does ITN have an editorial voice? No one has explained how it hurts to post a little celebrity fodder or consumer products news. All I'm saying is let WP:N, a quality update, and timeliness be enough for ITN.

Cheers with a stiff upper lip from the other side of the pond, --CosmicAdventure (talk) 22:24, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Proposal: modification of RD criteria to include extraordinary events

Per today's events at ITNC, with regard to LaMia Airlines Flight 2933 (posted) and the RD nomination for Cléber Santana (not posted), it's clear we need a caveat to the RD criteria to take into account when one or more notable individuals (by Wikipedia standards) die in an event that's already posted at ITN as a blurb. Interestingly, none of the objectors considered a situation where the blurb about the event wasn't posted, but notable people still died. However, the proposal is as follows (with thanks to WaltCip), to add the following to the RD rules:

• "In the event of circumstances where the deaths of one or more individuals (with articles) are caused as the result of an independently notable event already posted as a blurb, a recent deaths posting of all or most of the individuals can be forgone in the interests of avoiding redundancy."

The Rambling Man (talk) 18:52, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

I have started (but not yet finished) what might become a proposal to significantly rearrange the organisation of WP:ITN for clarity and make explicit some things done by inference and convention only. It is not ready to become a proposal yet, and has not kept up with recent changes to the live page, but one aspect is relevant to this:

"It is sometimes contentious whether or not the death of a person merits a blurb or a listing in the "recent deaths" section. This is discussed in the #Deaths of people section, but a person's death will not appear in both sections concurrently."

In the mentioned "Deaths of people" section, I include the following

"For deaths where the cause of death itself is a major story (such as the unexpected death of prominent figures by murder, suicide, or major accident) or where the events surrounding the death merit additional explanation (such as ongoing investigations, major stories about memorial services or international reactions, etc.) a blurb may be merited to explain the death's relevance."

While I cannot claim to have thought about this situation exactly I think adapting this wording - particularly "a person's death will not appear in both sections [blurb and RD] concurrently." to the current organisation of the page. I find your (TRM) wording overly bureaucratic and slightly pointy. Thryduulf (talk) 19:59, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't call the wording pointy or bureaucratic, personally, but I think it could be simpler. If a blurb-worthy incident happens to kill one or two notable people, then we might say "A [something] in [somewhere] kills 10 people, including FamousX and FamousY". When a large group of notable people is killed, picking a couple of names either for the blurb or RD would be arbitrary and including them all would be excessive. "People who die as the result of an event posted as a blurb shall not be listed in RD, but may be included in the blurb if appropriate" would do it. Bencherlite^Talk 20:41, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

I support this idea, and am agreeable with either TRM or Bencherlite proposed wording. Jehochman ^Talk 21:07, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Bencherlite Thing is, we wouldn't be picking them arbitrarily, we'd be picking them per RD guidelines, i.e. on the quality of their article. As I said three or four times at ITNC, there was no chance at all of RD being flooded with these souls because they either had no article or their articles were terrible. If this process encouraged people to make them worth featuring on the main page, that would be brilliant. Instead, we're now advocating that such individuals languish with a one line update. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:12, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

In the specific incident perhaps, but the point of discussing this here is to cope with the situation should it arise again. We need to work out how we will handle things if the next time this happens, there are 7 people all of whom have GA standard articles? Selecting a subset based on article quality will not work in that case. Thryduulf (talk) 23:26, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Hence my proposal!! The Rambling Man (talk) 07:56, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Thryduulf if you'd read the whole section I added, this is simply a cut-down version of the proposal made by WaltCip, so to accuse me of me proposing something pointy is unnecessarily inflammatory and detracting from the point of the discussion. Please redact your bad faith accusation. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:09, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

I apologise, but my comments were not made in bad faith. Thryduulf (talk) 23:26, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

I really don't feel we should try to single out specific people in the case of a disaster that kills multiple notable people. Let's say a plane crashes with the entire New England Patriots football team and front office on board, and kills every person. If we singled people out to post, which ones are we choosing? Tom Brady? Bill Belichick? Rob Gronkowski? Darrelle Revis? Robert Kraft? Others?--WaltCip (talk) 01:14, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose does this happen often enough to necessitate another rule? One contentious debate a pattern does not make. IMO WP:IAR + WP:COMMONSENSE ought to be used. It's impossible to capture all the edge cases. My two cents anyway. --CosmicAdventure (talk) 10:14, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

It's not that it happens often enough; it's more that we want a documented consensus in case this scenario happens again so as to avoid confusion.--WaltCip (talk) 20:59, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Well, as Masem pointed out, it has happened a few times in the past year or so, in which case I think we should simply caveat it out of RD. It's a low-risk, low-effort suggestion. All the furore above seems a little disproportionate considering we're simply looking to indoctrinate this particular IAR into guidance. Honestly!! The Rambling Man (talk) 21:02, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

That's sort of the point of WP:CREEP; if we indoctrinate every rare or unusual possibility into written rules, the rules become unwieldy and less useful as guidance. IAR is IAR for a reason; the rules and guidelines should exist for helping us navigate the stuff that happens every single day, all the time, so we can keep moving smoothly. We should never have a rule for the extremely rare, one off, and sui generis events and should instead merely have a discussion and come to an agreement in the moment for that one event, understanding that every such agreement is not a precedent. Write rules for what we do every day. Discuss the weird stuff on its own. --Jayron32 00:41, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Instead of trying to adapt rules for rare events, I rather like the idea of creating a "case book", noting the situation and how it was resolved -effectively indexing the archives of the most unusual cases that took some discussion to review and agree or disagree (this plane accident being a prime example). Case book doesn't define "rules" but at least provides a key reference to go back to and review. --MASEM (t) 00:48, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

No, no matter how many caveats you put in it, once you write it down, it's a rule. If you establish a list of precedents, they become instantly binding once they exist in such a form. That's how people tend to treat such things, which it is why it is best to not do it at all. The best guidance is "good judgement" and the best way to reach decisions is "discuss, compromise, and reach consensus" Once you put it into a form like you propose, you create a cudgel which people will use to beat people they disagree with instead of using reason and rationality. --Jayron32 02:12, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

We already do that. It's called WP:V, WP:N, WP:GNG, WP:CIV, WP:MOS, and yes, even WP:IAR. It's accepted that there are exceptions in which certain rules need not apply, but to avoid creating a fairly simple and limited rule because someone might abuse it is missing the forest for the trees.--WaltCip (talk) 13:36, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes, we do it for the stuff we do every day; those rules establish expected norms for 99% of life at Wikipedia, which is why it was a good idea to write THOSE rules down. IAR is sufficient for the rest of it. You'll note that I stated "rules and guidelines should exist for helping us navigate the stuff that happens every single day, all the time," What I meant by that was "rules and guidelines should exist for helping us navigate the stuff that happens every single day, all the time," I never said we shouldn't have rules. If I had meant to say that I would have said that. I didn't. What I DID say was "We should never have a rule for the extremely rare...events" What I meant by that was "We should never have a rule for the extremely rare...events" --Jayron32 15:02, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

The point of the case book idea is not to be a rules, but a way to easily find cases of where there was an unusual situation in the news and we handled in this way to use as a starting point for consensus discussion at ITN. This is already done commonly at ITN/C (eg the football sexual abuse scandle pointed out that we did also post the onset of the Penn state scandal), so this is not anything out of what's already done, only to make it easier for all editors to refer to. It is not meant to say it is right or wrong - in fact we should make sure that ITN/Cs that were posted and then recognized to be bad posts should be included too, for reference. --MASEM (t) 15:19, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

I'm afraid all too often we hear "precedents are not set" and "consensus can change", so I'm not even sure a history of past decisions is even that helpful. Our community evolves in time and what found a consensus last year may not this year. The Rambling Man (talk) 15:38, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

cazeneuve

Hello,

In France, Bernard Cazeneuve is the new Prime Minister.

Thanks you, Tyseria (talk) 16:57, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

Please join in the discussion at WP:ITNC if you want to see something added to the main page. Also, the current discussion indicates that the articles are sub-par and need much improvement. You could help improve them if you wanted to see them posted on the main page. --Jayron32 17:09, 6 December 2016 (UTC)