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Better methods than IP blocks and rangeblocks for completely stopping rampant recurring vandals
So, I intend for this thread to be about the discussion of various theoretical methods other than IP blocks / rangeblocks that could be used to mitigate a persistent vandal highly effectively while causing little to no collateral damage.
Some background
Wikipedia was founded in 2001, a time when a good majority of residential IP addresses were relatively all static, due to the much lesser number of internet users at that time. IP blocks probably made a lot of sense at that time due to that fact - you couldn't just reboot your modem to obtain a new IP address and keep editing, and cell phones pretty much had no usable web browsing capability at the time.
Today, the only type of tool used to stop anonymous vandals and disruptors, despite dynamic IP addresses and shared IPs being very common, is still the same old IP address blocks and range blocks. While IP block are effective at stopping the "casual" / "one-off" type of vandals from editing again, when it comes to the more dedicated disruptors and LTAs, IP blocks simply don't seem to hinder them at all, due to the highly dynamic IP address nature. Okay, but range blocks exist, right? Well, unfortunately not all IP address allotment sizes are the same, and it varies a lot from ISP to ISP - some ISPs just seem to put literally all their customers on one gigantic (i.e. /16 or bigger for IPv4, /32 or bigger for IPv6) subdivision, making it straight up impossible to put a complete stop to the LTA vandal without also stopping all those thousands and thousands of innocent other people from being able to edit.
I've always had these thoughts in my mind, about what the Wikimedia team could potentially do / implement to more accurately yet effectively put a complete halt to long-term abusers. But I felt like now's the time we really could use some better method to stop LTAs, as there are just sooooo many of them today, and soooo much admin time/effort is being spent trying to stop them only for them to come back again and again because pretty much the only way to stop them is to literally block the entire ISP from editing Wikipedia.
The first thing that might come to one's mind, and probably the most controversial method too, is disabling anonymous editing entirely and making it so only registered editors can edit English Wikipedia. Someone pointed out to me before that the Portuguese Wikipedia is a registration-only wiki. I tried it out for myself, and indeed when you click the edit button while not logged in, you are brought to an account login page. I'm guessing ENwiki will never become like this because it would eliminate a large and thriving culture of "casual" type of editors who don't want to register an account and just simply want to fix a typo, update a table's data or add a small sentence. It's probably not 100% effective either, as a registered-only wiki still wouldn't stop someone from creating a whole bunch of throwaway accounts to keep vandalising, and account creation blocks on IP addresses could still be dodged by, you know, the modem power plug dance or good ol' proxies/VPNs.
I've noticed some other language wikis like the German Wikipedia have "pending changes" type protection pretty much enabled on every single page. I imagine this isn't going to work on the English Wikipedia because of the comparatively high volume of edits from anonymous editors compared to DEwiki, as it would overload the pending changes review queue and there just will never be enough active reviewers to keep up with the volume of edits.
Now here are some of my original thoughts which I don't think I've seen anyone discuss here on Wikipedia before. The first of which, is hardware ID (HWID) bans or "device bans". The reason why popular free-to-play video games like League of Legends, Overwatch 2, Counter-Strike 2 etc aren't overrun with non-stop cheaters and abusers despite them being free-to-play is because they employ an anti-cheat and abuse system that will ban the serial numbers of the computer, rather than just simply banning the user or their IP address. Now, I have heard of HWID spoofing before, but cheating isn't rampant in these games anyway so I guess they are effective in some form. Besides replacing hardware, one could theoretically use a virtual machine to evade the HWID ban, but virtual machines don't provide the performance, graphics acceleration and special features needed to get a modern multiplayer video game to work. However though, I could see virtual machines as being a rather big weakness for Wikipedia HWID bans, as a web browser doesn't need a dedicated powerful video card and any of those special features to work; web browsers easily run in virtualised environments. But I guess not a great deal of LTAs are technologically competent enough to do that, and even if they did, spinning up a new VM is significantly slower than switching countries in a VPN.
The second, and probably the most craziest one, is employing some form of mandatory personal ID system. Where, even if you're not going to sign up and only edit anonymously, you will be forced to enter a social security number or passport number or whatever ID number that is completely unique to you, to be able to edit. In South Korea, some gaming companies like Blizzard make you enter a SSN when signing up for an account, which makes it virtually impossible for a person to go to an internet cafe ("PC bang") and make a whole bunch of throwaway accounts and jump from computer to computer when an account/device becomes banned to keep on cheating (see PC bang § Industry impact). One could theoretically get the IDs of family members and friends when they become "ID banned", but after all there are only going to be so few other people's IDs they will be able to obtain, certainly nowhere near on the order of magnitude as the number of available IP addresses on a large IP subnet or VPN. I'm guessing this method isn't going to be feasible for English Wikipedia either, as it completely goes against the simple, "open" and "anonymous" nature of Wikipedia, where not only can you edit anonymously without entering any personal details, but even when signing up for an account you don't even have to enter an email address, only just a password.
A third theoretical method is that what if, the customer ID numbers of ISPs were visible to Wikimedia, and then Wikimedia could ban that ISP customer therefore making them completely unable to edit Wikipedia even if they jump to a different IP address or subnet on that ISP? Or maybe how about the reverse where the ISP themselves ban the customer from being able to access Wikipedia after enough abuse? Perhaps ISPs need to wake up and implement such a site-level blocking policy.
Here's a related "side question": how come other popular online services like Discord, Facebook, Reddit, etc aren't overly infested with people who spam, attack, or otherwise make malicious posts on the site everyday? Could Wikimedia implement whatever methods these services are using to stop potential "long-term abusers"? — AP 499D25(talk)13:29, 12 January 2025 (UTC)
I just thought of yet another theoretical solution: AI has gotten good enough to be able to write stories and poems, analyse a 1000 page long book, make songs, realistic pictures, and more. Wikipedia already uses AI (albelt a rather primitive and simple one) in the famous anti-vandal bot User:ClueBot NG. What if, we deploy an edit filter based on the latest and greatest AI model, to filter out edits based on past vandalism/disruption patterns? — AP 499D25(talk)13:37, 12 January 2025 (UTC)
I'll preface this by saying that I have quite a few problems with this idea (although I may be biased because I'm strongly opposed to the direction that modern AI is going); but I'd like to hear why and how you think this would work in more detail. For instance, would the AI filter just block edits outright? Would they be flagged like with WP:ORES? What mechanisms would the hypothetical AI use to detect LTA? How would we reduce false positives? And so on. Thanks, /home/gracen/ (they/them) 17:24, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
The AI idea I have in mind is a rather "mild" form of system, where it only works on edits based on past patterns of disruption. Take for example, MAB's posts. They are quite easily recognisable from a distance even with the source code obscuring that makes it impossible for traditional edit filters to detect the edits. Maybe an AI could perform OCR on that text to then filter it out?
The AI will not filter out new types of vandalism, or disruptive edits that it isn't "familiar" with. There will be an "input text file" where admins can add examples of LTA disruption for the AI to then watch for any edits that closely resemble those examples. It will not look for, or revert edits that aren't anywhere near as being like those samples. That way I think false positives will be minimised a lot, and of course there shall be a system for reporting false positives much like how there exists WP:EFFP. — AP 499D25(talk)22:44, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
Ah, thanks! I'm immediately hesitant whenever I hear the word "AI" because of the actions of corporations like OpenAI, among others. However, given what you've just said, I actually think this might be an interesting idea to pursue. I'm relatively new to WP and I've never looked at WP:SPI, so I'd rather leave this to more experienced editors to discuss, but this does seem like a good and ethical application of neural networks and is within their capabilities. /home/gracen/ (they/them) 16:16, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
The second, and probably the most craziest one, is employing some form of mandatory personal ID system. Where, even if you're not going to sign up and only edit anonymously, you will be forced to enter a social security number or passport number or whatever ID number that is completely unique to you, to be able to edit.
This means that editors will have to give up a large amount of privacy, and the vast majority of people casually editing Wikipedia aren't ready to give their passport number in order to do so. Plus, editors at risk might be afraid of their ID numbers ending in the wrong hands, which is much more worrying than "just" their IP address.
Here's a related "side question": how come other popular online services like Discord, Facebook, Reddit, etc aren't overly infested with people who spam, attack, or otherwise make malicious posts on the site everyday?
They are, it's just that the issue is more visible on Wikipedia as the content is easy to find for all readers, but it doesn't mean platforms like Discord or Reddit aren't full of bad actors too. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 13:38, 12 January 2025 (UTC)
WMF Legal will reject any sort of privacy invasion similar to requiring a real-world identity check for a person. A HWID ban might be legally feasible (i.e., I've never heard them say that it's already been considered and rejected). It would require amending the Privacy Policy, but that happens every now and again anyway, so that's not impossible. However, I understand that it's not very effective in practice (outside of proprietary systems, which is not what we're dealing with), and the whole project involves a significant tradeoff with privacy: Everything that's possible to track a Wikipedia vandal is something that's possible to track you for advertising purposes, or that could be subpoenaed for legal purposes. Writing a Wikipedia article (in the mainspace, to describe what it is and how it works) about that subject, or updating device fingerprint, might actually be the most useful thing you could do, if you thought that was worth pursuing. If a proposal is made along these lines, then the first thing people will do is read the Wikipedia article to find out what it says.
I understand that when Wikipedia was in its early days, a few ISPs were willing to track down abusive customers on occasion. My impression now is that basically none of them are willing to spend any staff time/expense doing this. We can e-mail their abuse@ addresses (they should all have one), but they are unlikely to do anything. A publicly visible approach on social media might work in a few cases ("Hey, @Name-of-ISP, one of your customers keeps vandalizing #Wikipedia. See <link to WP:AIV>. Why don't you stop them?"). However, if the LTA is using a VPN or similar system, then the ISP we claim they're using might be the wrong one anyway. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:58, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
I dont know exactly what is meant by hardware id (something like [1]?), but genrrally speaking most things that come under that heading require you to be using a native app and not a web browser. Web Environment Integrity is a possible exception but was abandoned. Bawolff (talk) 00:13, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
We do not have access to the MAC addresses when a user is accessing from a web browser. For mobile apps you generally need special permissions to access it, and I suspect our app would be rejected from the app store if we tried. Bawolff (talk) 13:04, 24 January 2025 (UTC)
Web browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox) do not allow a site to access your HWID information. That would be a huge invasion of privacy.
Submitting IDS, SSN, etc is a massive invasion of privacy as well and will make people not want to use wikipedia. Why submit your ID every single time you enter a session on Wikipedia? Not to mention that its very inconvienent. Its also ineffective as you can use fake IDS, unless you want to check everything which would cost millions to employ recognition software, make a request to the databases, wait for a response, and then authorize editing. Manual checking is even worse.
Advanced artificial intelligence to scan wikipedia pages for vandalism, trained on previous vandalism incidents could work but it would be very ineffective. The site is coming on 7 million wikipedia articles, now to give you leniency, lets say that only pages with no protection or auto-confirmed protection are scanned. That would still be the majority of articles and it would cost billions yearly to constantly check each page for vandalism. Abuse filters already cover a lot of common vandalism (replacing words with swear words, blanking, spamming the article with letters, etc) and volunteers go by and check pages to see if vandalism has occurred and revert it.
Registration only editing is not a good idea. Trolls that are even mildly dedicated only need a couple minutes to sign up and vandalize the page again.
Browsers will not hand over MAC address info.
Getting ISP's to block a user just because they vandalized a page is only going to cause controversy. It would be a huge invasion of privacy, "why is wikipedia reaching across their site and attacking me and invading privacy?" would likely be the response. Also VPNs are a thing and ISPs dont want to waste money tracking down a petty vandalizer.
Even with all that in mind, I still think the least we could do is implement an OCR-based edit filtering system where it performs OCR on the output text rather than checking the source code of the edit against regular expressions. Some of the non-stop vandalism that happens on this site everyday involves using strange text or Unicode characters to circumvent what a traditional regex-based edit filter can do. I'm not sure if you have seen an LTA called 'MAB' but they are a vandal responsible for making just about every centralised discussion page and noticeboard on Wikipedia semi-protected. Edit filters simply don't seem able to stop them.
"it would cost billions yearly to constantly check each page for vandalism" - why would it cost billions of dollars for an AI to scan every edit? — AP 499D25(talk)04:23, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
Part of what motivated me to make this VPIL post is this:
As someone who does recent changes patrolling from time to time and spends a quite a bit of wiki-time in general fighting out LTAs and sockpuppets, I am getting quite tired of vandal-fighting in general - the more and more I do it, the more it feels like I'm a "man fighting a machine" and not someone actually stopping another person's destructive actions. In this present-day world of highly dynamic IP addresses, it's become very difficult to fight a lot of vandals that edit using IPs, as a lot of the time when you block a singular IP address they'll come back and vandalise using another IP address, sometimes within hours or even mere minutes.
Rangeblocks exist as a further solution I already know, and I make rangeblock calculations on the regular when reporting certain IP-hopping editors, but you probably already know the issue with them - the accuracy - both in terms of how much it actually stops the malicious editor, and in terms of how much other constructive editors in that range are affected. The accuracy of rangeblocks varies wildly from ISP to ISP. When they're actually feasible (i.e. the person's different IPs used are all in a range where there's little to none legitimate editors tipping the scale) they work great, but when they're not practicable due to high potential of collateral damage, it becomes a huge pain in the rear, as then you have yet another IP range to monitor the contributions of on your 'watchlist'.
As for page protections, they are conveniently practical when the person is only attacking one page or a small number of pages. But what if they are regularly disrupting dozens/hundreds of different pages every day? I've also never really been a big fan of page protections in general - semi-protection shuts out pretty much every newbie and 'casual' types of editors, who make up a significant percentage of the Wikipedia editor base. I remember seeing some statistic where the number of new editors joining Wikipedia has significantly dropped over the last 20 years. It certainly doesn't help with that. Excluding these groups of editors from editing pages also further contributes to the already bad systemic bias we have on Wikipedia. Furthermore, have you not seen how pages like the Teahouse, Help desk, and all the various admin help noticeboards (e.g. WP:AN) are protected seemingly every day? All caused by one person hopping from proxy to proxy and circumventing edit filters with special characters. If that wasn't bad enough, take a look at their talk pages. All in all, in other words: page protection comes with its own "collateral damage" much like shared IP range blocks. — AP 499D25(talk)04:52, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
The solution to that is probably better character normalization for the regexes. Not OCR. OCR would probably be easier to trick than the current system. Bawolff (talk) 08:05, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
An interesting idea I saw on the internet (Which is probably not viable here, but interesting nonetheless) is https://github.com/zk-passport/openpassport which the blockchain people have been working on. Essentially blockchain stuff has a similar problem where they worry about people having sockpuppets. They've devised a system where you can use your passport to prove that you don't have any sockpuppets without revealing any private data from the passport. Its hard to imagine that gaining traction here, but its one of the first genuinely new ideas to solve the sockpuppet problem that I have heard in a long time. Bawolff (talk) 13:48, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
Using a Tabber for infoboxes with multiple subjects
There are many articles that cover closely related subjects, such as IPhone 16 Pro which covers both the Pro and Pro Max models, Nintendo Switch which covers the original, OLED, and Lite models, and Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II which covers the A, B, C, and I variants. Most of these articles use a single infobox to display specifications and information about all of the covered subjects, leading to clutter and lots of parentheticals.
I propose that a tabber, like Tabber Neue, be used to instead create distinct infobox tabs for each subject. This would allow many benefits, such as clearly separating different specifications, providing more room for unique photos of each subject, and reducing visual clutter. An example of good use of tabs is one of my personal favorite wikis, https://oldschool.runescape.wiki, which uses tabs effectively to organize the many variants of monsters, NPCs, and items. A great example is the entry for Guard, a very common NPC with many variants. It even uses nested tabs to show both the spawn location grouped by city, and the individual variants within each city. While this is an extreme example in terms of the raw number of subjects, it provides a good look at how similar subjects can be effectively organized using tabs. Using Wikipedia's system instead, it would be substantially more cluttered, with parentheticals such as: Examine: "He tries to keep order around here" (Edgeville 1, Edgeville 2, Falador (sword) 1...) If you tried to save space using citations, it becomes very opaque: Examine: "He tries to keep order around here" [1][2][7][22]...
Overall I think this would make infoboxes more easily readable and engaging. It encourages "perusing" by clicking or tapping through the tabs, as opposed to trying to figure out what applies where. DeklinCaban (talk) 18:42, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
That would be an interesting idea! To go back to you iPhone 16 Pro example, a lot of information gets repeated in both tabs – maybe there could be a way to have it so that it only has to be added to the article in one place (even if shown in both tabs) to make them easier to keep in sync? Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 18:46, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
There definitely is - a lot of tab implementations allow for this, for example by using "value1", "value2", etc. to specify individual tabs, and "value" to specify all tabs. DeklinCaban (talk) 14:43, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
If it can print and display without JS effectively. From my testing under these environments, Tabber(Neue) makes these awkward line/paragraph-breaks that don't display the header at all. $wgTabberNeueUseCodex may be promising, but at least with the examples at wmdoc:codex/latest/components/demos/tabs.html, it's even worse: the tabs don't expand for the printing view at all, and the info under the other tabs will just be inaccessible on paper. Aaron Liu (talk) 20:21, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
A couple points at first blush: first, having a tabbed infobox seems like it's a usability nightmare. Secondly, it seems to be doing an end run around the overarching problem, which is that the infobox for iPhone 16 Pro is terrible. Software and tech articles are often like this (bad) where they try and cram an entire spec sheet into the infobox, and that's a failing of the infobox and the editors maintaining it. Trying to create a technical solution rather than the obvious one (just edit what's in the infobox to the most important elements) seems like a waste of everyone's time. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchstalk20:33, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
I suspect that our users would not even realise that they could click the tabs to see other info. So it will make it harder for our readers. Alternatives are to have multiple infoboxes, but this does take up space, particularly on mobile. Another way is to use parameter indexing as in the Chembox. Parameters can have a number on the end to describe variations on related substances in the one infobox. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:37, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
Tabs are widely used even on amateur wikis like 90% of Fandom Wikia. I'm sure readers know how to use them. (In fact, the "Article/Talk" "Read/Edit/View history" thing on the top is a tab.) Aaron Liu (talk) 21:27, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
Readers and potential editors don't know what the protection, good article, featured article, and other icons mean. I'm just one person but I'd never heard of tabs like that until I read this. CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva01:35, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
For contentious pages, from what I can tell, there is no way in Wikipedia to come to a consensus when both camps are not making a good faith effort, and maybe even then. My proposal is: an expert could start an alternative page for one that he thinks is flawed, and have the same protections from further editing as the original? Then there could be a competition of narratives Iuvalclejan (talk) 19:32, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
Honestly, the consensus system works especially well on contentious pages, even if the discussions can sometimes get heated. Having content forks everywhere would not really be preferable, as, not only would you not have a single place to link the reader to, but you would quickly end up with pages full of personal opinions or cherry-picking sources if each group was given its own place to write about its point of view. A competition of narratives could be interesting as a website concept, but it would be pretty far from an encyclopedia. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 19:43, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
The competition would not be the last step. Selection of alternatives could happen by votes, with some cutoffs: if a fork does not get votes above a cutoff, it is eliminated. That would prevent proliferation of narratives. Or you could have the selction criteria be differential instead of absolute: if one narrative gets 2x (for example) more votes than another, the other one is eliminated. Consensus does not work if pages become protected but the disagreement is still strong. Iuvalclejan (talk) 19:48, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
Honestly, the consensus system works especially well on contentious pages, I'd agree, but I'd also say we don't actually use the consensus system for contentious pages in practice—the more controversial the topic, the more I notice it devolving into straight voting issue-by-issue. (Even though that's the situation where you actually need to identify a consensus that all sides can live with.) – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 21:42, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
Interestingly, it's been theorized ([2], pg 101) that we already have a "community of dissensus" whereby contentious and poorly-supported claims are weeded out from our articles until only that which can be verified remains. signed, Rosguilltalk19:45, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
The problems I see are not due to poorly supported claims. They are due to a biased reporting, that is technically correct (e.g. "hostilities erupted", rather than side A attacked side B), or outright omissions (e.g. the leader of said group is not mentioned because of his shady associations with Nazis, whereas the leader of the other group is mentioned many times). Iuvalclejan (talk) 20:29, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
In that case, we should stick to what sources say, rather than making multiple versions trying to please each editor. If sources mention the names of both leaders, then we should have them both in the article, rather than hiding one in a separate article. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:36, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
So that addresses one issue, but evern there, if the page is protected, you can't "mention them both". What about the way of presenting a phenomenon, that while technically correct, is misleading by omission of important details? Iuvalclejan (talk) 20:42, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
For both cases: page protection doesn't mean that no one can propose any changes, it just means that you have to go to the talk page and discuss them with other editors (usually, to avoid someone else coming just after you and reverting it). If you feel like the discussion isn't going anywhere, we have channels for Wikipedia:Dispute resolution. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:49, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
That said, there are special restrictions on articles related to Palestinian–Israeli conflicts, and you shouldn't attempt to edit them or discuss them until you have made 500+ edits elsewhere. This will give you a chance to learn our processes, jargon, and rules in a less fraught context. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:13, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
Our existing POV-fork articles are effectively a trial of this idea, and demonstrate that it doesn't work well in practice. People create forks when they feel the original article is being gate-kept by someone with ownership issues who's pushing a particular POV. Having two articles is then very confusing for our readers, and there's a real risk that they will find only one or the other, thereby missing half the story. But worse, the proponents of each article often feel that the other article is still misrepresenting the subject, so they inevitably want it deleted or edited to reflect their viewpoint - the conflict remains! At the other extreme, sometimes the proponents of each article seem to go into denial about the other article (or maybe just don't want to draw readers to it), so they avoid all cross-referencing between the articles - making it still more misleading for the reader. If there is disagreement, it's better to get it all in one article, with sources and discussion, so the reader sees the whole picture - even if it means some fairly heated stuff in the talk page. Elemimele (talk) 17:19, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
I was a bit surprised last night to discover that WP:CRITICISM is "only" an essay. I see people try to follow it on a somewhat frequent basis for best practices and was under the impression that it must be a guideline. But it's not. Should it be? I've never tried to "upgrade" the status of something before and I'm assuming to some extent that would be controversial, but input would be welcome. I'm assuming some things might need to be finetuned if it does get that extra status. Clovermoss🍀(talk)17:31, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
Regarding the process, Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines § Life cycle describes the process of establishing consensus for guidance to be designated as a guideline or policy. Before having a request for comment discussion, it would probably be good to have a discussion reviewing its current content and establishing consensus amongst interested editors, before moving to a broader sampling of the community in an RfC. isaacl (talk) 17:46, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
Maybe put a pointer on the talk page for Wikipedia:Criticism then? The idea lab page is usually more for brainstorming than establishing consensus, but probably not a big deal if the discussion happens here or, say, the miscellaneous village pump, as long as they're pointers at the other places. isaacl (talk) 18:10, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
I don't think the talk page has that many watchers. I came here for brainstorming and wider community input. I thought that's was what one should do before even attempting an rfc. It seems to fit exactly with the stated purpose of this page. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:15, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
Sure; I gave my brainstorming thoughts that it would probably be good to have a discussion to do that finetuning you described to ensure that the page was a good representation of in-practice consensus, before having an RfC. A village pump is a fine place to have a discussion. I was just suggesting that it might be helpful to attract interested editors with pointers on the corresponding talk page and the miscellaneous village pump, since the idea lab typically discusses less fully-formed ideas, and so its set of page watchers might not cover enough of the desired audience. isaacl (talk) 18:24, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
I think your instinct is correct; Special:PageInfo says that 9 editors who have the page on their watchlist looked at the WP: page during the last 30 days, and 10 of them looked at the talk page. That's not a lot.
(edit conflict) X 2. Often too much notice is made of which word an essay, guideline or policy has at the top. How much it is binding depends more on how widely it is accepted rather than its formal status. Having said that, I would follow Isaacl's advice before "upgrading" anything. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:12, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
I would support a process to bring CRITICISM to at least a guideline. This might mean an initial stage to review and revise the text to make it appropriate for a guideline before bringing an RFC to make it a guideline. Masem (t) 18:42, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
I don't see why, in that particular case, there are separate "reception" and "criticism" sections. Surely any criticism is part of the reception? Maybe if this was made a guideline it would help. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:41, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
"Criticism" is a type of "reception", so it doesn't seem reasonable to have them be separate, but what I really mean in that instance is that it doesn't make sense to say in the first or second section something like "It proposes changing the rules for this class of medications" and then you have to scroll through 14 other sections to get to a sentence that says "And this advocacy group thinks that changing the rules for that class of medications is a really bad idea". Those two sentences are on the same subject, so they belong together. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:36, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
I think it would be useful as a guideline, after the community signs off on the wording. A few years ago, @HaeB: ran a query to identify BLPs with controversy sections, then I went through those to see which could be integrated or at least more appropriately titled. (It was fun, actually.) I couldn't come up with solutions for all of them, but we cleaned up quite a few. I think some readers/editors like "controversy" sections because that's where the "juiciest" content is. Schazjmd(talk)20:39, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
Frequently, the content I see in criticism sections for businesses would be better integrated into the history sections for the company, so the events can be placed into context. As touched upon in Wikipedia:Criticism § Organizations and corporations, though, there are some cases where there is an ongoing criticism that spans across an extended period of time, and it's more easily described in a separate section that pulls together various threads.
I do think there are some editors who take any negative news, and describe it as a controversy or criticism when it's not really either. This type of info usually should be integrated into the sections for the overall history of the subject. isaacl (talk) 00:38, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
I agree. I can also see how a cohesive "counter-arguments" section might be helpful to readers, such as on an article about a theory or concept. Schazjmd(talk)23:49, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
WP as a whole has a larger problem that editors want to include every bit of negative content they can find about a topic when documented in reliable sources, particularly for BLP and more particularly for certain types of BLP due to recent events. Criticism and controversy gets added far more faster and without regards to trying to integrate it better than other types of content for the most part, and we really need stronger guidelines that stem from NPOV that not all negative content or criticsm is appropriate or needs to be included, and when included, it generally should be integrated better in the article than as a standalone section or the like. — Masem (t) 03:57, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
At some level, we teach them to do this. If editors, especially new editors, add positive content, then someone comes around and smacks them for being "promotional". Take a look at the history of Pickathon. An inexperienced editor tried to add some content, and got told off for, among other things, adding facts that were reported in major newspapers. How dare you say that free things are free. How dare you say that it's plastic-free. How dare you say that they offer childcare services, because "many, many" festivals – none of which anyone can find or name, and we did look – do the same. But do feel free to add anything negative you can find, because that's "balance". WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:50, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
Criticism sections should already be disallowed per WP:STRUCTURE, but for some reason there's a footnote in there saying that actually it doesn't count. They're almost always problems when it comes to NPOV, and their fiercest advocates tend to be people who want to present a negative point of view on the subject. Adding them to BLPs is even worse and in my opinion should be considered a serious policy violation. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:37, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
The fact that WP:STRUCTURE already points to WP:Criticism as a source for further guidance on the subject supports the idea that WP:Criticism is more weighty than a mere essay. Especially when dealing with BLP situations, there should usually be a better option than grouping a labeling content by the POV it represents. -- LWGtalk23:40, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
I've never actually seen a criticism section with that tag so I suspect that the total amount of these sections is a much higher number. Clovermoss🍀(talk)23:50, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
That's fair, and also related to a conversation happening on the talk page for that template about the appropriate use of the tag. Currently that tag falls under the broad heading of "POV Dispute tags" which means it is only meant to be used to make the presence of an ongoing discussion/dispute. In the absence of an active consensus building process the appropriate thing to do is not to tag the article, but to fix it. But an argument could be made that the presence of a badly-structured crit section is less a matter of dispute and more a matter of content quality, in which case the time and effort involved in fixing the article might merit some amount of "drive-by tagging". My general thoughts on the matter are that for topics whose controversial nature is itself a subject of comment by RSs, it may be appropriate to dedicate a section in the article to opposing viewpoints, but in that case the section should usually be given a more informative title than just "Criticism". -- LWGtalk00:22, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
New editors and IP use it a lot, specifically the WP:CSECTION, to remove criticisms or controversial items from articles. Most of the times this is a COI/NPV issue and the criticism they tend to wrongly remove is justified by WP:DUE. Turning it into a guideline or policy, as in its current version, could just empower them more. We need to fix this for sure. --𝓔xclusive𝓔ditorPing Me🔔07:25, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
Implemeting "ChatBot Validation" for sentences of Wikipedia
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.
Hi, I propose to define a "Validation process" using Chatbots (e.g. ChatGPT) in this way:
The editor or an ordinary user, presses a button named "Validate this Sentence"
A query named "Is this sentence true or not? + Sentence" is sent to ChatGPT
If the ChatGPT answer is true, then tick that sentence as valid, otherwise declare that the sentence needs to be validated manually by humans.
I think the implementation of this process is very fast and convenient.
I really think that "ChatBot validation" is a very helpful capability for users to be sure about the validity of information of articles of Wikipedia. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 10:34, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
While it would certainly be convenient, it would also be horribly inaccurate. The current generation of chatbots are prone to hallucinations and cannot be relied on for such basic facts as what the current year is, let alone anything more complicated. Thryduulf (talk) 10:48, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
Is Wikipedia hallucinations or ChatGPT is hallucinations?
This type of validation (validation by ChatGPT) may be inaccurate for correctness of Wikipedia, but when ChatGPT declares that "Wikipedia information is Wong!", a very important process named "Validate Manually by Humans" is activated. This second validation is the main application of this idea. That is, finding possibly wrong data on Wikipedia to be investigated more accurately by humans. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 11:02, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
The issue is, ChatGPT (or any other LLM/chatbot) might hallucinate in both directions, flagging false sentences as valid and correct sentences as needing validation. I don't see how this is an improvement compared to the current process of needing verification for all sentences that don't already have a source. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 11:13, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
If there was some meaningful correlation between what ChatGPT declares true (or false) and what is actually true (or false) then this might be useful. This would just waste editor time. Thryduulf (talk) 11:15, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
@Chaotic Enby@Thryduulf Although ChatGPT may give wrong answers, but it is very powerful. To assess its power, we need to apply this research:
Give ChatGPT a sample containing true and false sentences, but hide true answers
There are many examples of people doing this research, e.g. [3] ranks ChatGPT as examples accurate "88.7% of the time", but (a) I have no idea how reliable that source is, and (b) it explicitly comes with multiple caveats about how that's not a very meaningful figure. Even if we assume that it is 88.7% accurate at identifying what is and isn't factual across all content on Wikipedia that's still not really very useful. In the real world it would be less accurate than that, because those accuracy figures include very simple factual questions that it is very good at ("What is the capital of Canada?" is the example given in the source) that we don't need to use ChatGPT to verify because it's quicker and easier for a human to verify themselves. More complex things, especially related to information that is not commonly found in its training data (heavily biased towards information in English easily accessible on the internet), where the would be the most benefit to automatic verification, the accuracy gets worse. Thryduulf (talk) 11:38, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
Factual questions are where LLMs like ChatGPT are weakest. Simple maths, for example. I just asked "Is pi larger than 3.14159265?" and got the wrong answer "no" with an explanation why the answer should be "yes":
"No, π is not larger than 3.14159265. The value of π is approximately 3.14159265358979, which is slightly larger than 3.14159265. So, 3.14159265 is a rounded approximation of π, and π itself is just a tiny bit larger."
Any sentence "validated by ChatGPT" should be considered unverified, just like any sentence not validated by ChatGPT. —Kusma (talk) 11:28, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
I get a perfect answer to that question (from the subscription version of ChatGPT): "Yes. The value of π to more digits is approximately 3.141592653589793… which is slightly larger than 3.14159265. The difference is on the order of a few billionths." But you are correct; these tools are not ready for serious fact checking. There is another reason this proposal is not good: ChatGPT gets a lot of its knowledge from Wikipedia, and when it isn't from Wikipedia it can be from the same dubious sources that we would like to not use. One safer use I can see is detection of ungrammatical sentences. It seems to be good at that. Zerotalk11:42, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
It's a good example of the challenges of accuracy. Using a different prompt "Is the statement pi > 3.14159265 true or false?", I got "The statement 𝜋 > 3.14159265 is true. The value of π is approximately 3.14159265358979, which is greater than 3.14159265." So, whatever circuit is activated by the word 'larger' is doing something less than ideal, I guess. Either way, it seems to improve with scale, grounding via RAG or some other method and chain of thought reasoning. Baby steps. Sean.hoyland (talk) 11:51, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
I do not think we should outsource our ability to check whether a sentence is true and/or whether a source verifies a claim to AI. This would create orders of magnitude more problems than it would solve... besides, as people point out above, facts is where chatbots are weakest. They're increasingly good at imitating tone and style and meter and writing nicely, but are often garbage at telling fact from truth. Cremastra (u — c) 02:22, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
Writing a script that would automatically give a "validation score" to every article—average probability of True vs. False across all sentences—would be helpful. (Even if it completely sucks, we can just ignore it, so there's no harm done.) Go ahead and do it if you know how! However, WMF's ML team is already very busy, so I don't think this will get done if nobody volunteers. – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 04:41, 11 January 2025 (UTC)
Using ChatBots for reverting new edits by new users
Even though the previous idea may have issues, I really think that one factor for reverting new edits by new users can be "the false answer of verification of Chatbots". If the accuracy is near 88.7%, we can use that to verify new edits, possibly by new users, and find vandalism conveniently. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 13:48, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
Even if we assume the accuracy to be near near 88.7%, I would not support having a chatbot to review edits. Many editors do a lot of editing and getting every 1 edit out of 10 edit reverted due to an error will be annoying and demotivating. The bot User:Cluebot NG already automatically reverts obvious vandalism with 99%+ success rate. Catalk to me!14:11, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
instead of an inventor, this sentence wrongly declares that he was an engineer. Can User:Cluebot NG detect this sentence automatically as a wrong sentence?
So I propose to rewrite User:Cluebot NG in a way that it uses Chatbots, somehow, to semantically check the new edits, and tag semantically wrong edits like the above sentence to "invalid by chatbot" for other users to correct that. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 14:22, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
Can Cluebot detect this sentence automatically as a wrong sentence? No. It can't. Cluebot isn't looking through sources. It's an anti-vandalism bot. You're welcome to bring this up with those that maintain Cluebot; although I don't think it'll work out, because that's way beyond the scope of what Cluebot does. SmittenGalaxy|talk!19:46, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
I think you, Hooman Mallahzadeh, are too enamoured with the wilder claims of AI and chatbots, both from their supporters and the naysayers. They are simply not as good as humans at spotting vandalism yet; at least the free ones are not. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:46, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
The number of false positives would be too high. Again, this would create more work for humans. Let's not fall to AI hype. Cremastra (u — c) 02:23, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
The User:Cluebot NG does not check any semantics for sentences. These semantics can only be checked by Large Language Models like ChatGPT. Please note that every Wikipedia sentence can be "semantically wrong", as they can be syntacticly wrong.
But LLMs are not good at checking the accuracy of information, so Cluebot NG would not be more accurate, and in being less accurate would behave in a more BITEY manner to new editors. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°17:24, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
Maybe ChatGPT should add a capability for "validation of sentences", that its output may only be "one word": True/False/I Don't know. Specially for the purpose of validation.
Validation is not a binary thing that an AI would be able to do. It's a lot more complicated than you make it sound (as it requires interpretation of sources - something an AI is incapable of actually doing), and may require access to things an AI would never be able to touch (such as offline sources). —Jéské Courianov^_^vthreadscritiques17:37, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
(edit conflict × 4) For Wikipedia's purposes, accuracy is determined by whether it matches what reliable sources say. For any given statement there are multiple possible states:
Correct and supported by one or more reliable sources at the end of the statement
Correct and supported by one or more reliable sources elsewhere on the page (e.g. the end of paragraph)
Correct and self-supporting (e.g. book titles and authors)
Correct but not supported by a reliable source
Correct but supported by a questionable or unreliable source
Correct according to some sources (cited or otherwise) but not others (cited or otherwise)
Correct but not supported by the cited source
Incorrect and not associated with a source
Incorrect and contradicted by the source cited
Incorrect but neither supported nor contradicted by the cited source
Neither correct nor incorrect (e.g. it's a matter of opinion or unproven), all possible options for sourcing
Previously correct, and supported by contemporary reliable sources (cited or otherwise), but now outdated (e.g. superceded records, outdate scientific theories, early reports about breaking news stories)
Both correct and incorrect, depending on context or circumstance (with all possible citation options)
Previously incorrect, and stated as such in contemporary sources, but now correct (e.g. 2021 sources stating Donald Trump as president of the US)
Correct reporting of someone's incorrect statements (cited or otherwise).
Predictions that turned out to be incorrect, reported as fact (possibly misleadingly or unclearly) at the time in contemporary reliable sources.
And probably others I've failed to think of. LLMs simply cannot correctly determine all of these, especially as sources may be in different languages and/or not machine readable. Thryduulf (talk) 17:44, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
I believe someone else had a working implementation of a script that would verify whether a reference supported a claim using LLMs - I think I saw it on one of the Village Pumps a while back. They eventually abandoned it because it wasn't reliable enough, if I remember correctly. — Qwerfjkltalk16:46, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
It probably struggles to understand meaning. On the other hand, I reckon you could get a working implementation to look for copyvio. CMD (talk) 18:02, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
Even professional-grade plagiarism detectors are poor at that, generating both false positives and false negatives. That's fine in the environment where they are used with full understanding of the system's limitations and it is used only as one piece of information among multiple sources by those familiar with the topic area. Very little of that is true in the way it would be used on Wikipedia. Thryduulf (talk) 18:49, 20 January 2025 (UTC)
Pertty implementation of this idea in gemini.google.com
Hi, I noticed that this idea is pretty implemented in https://gemini.google.com .
Here are some sentence to validate given to gemini and the result of validation:
Sentence to validate
Steven Paul Jobs was German.
The result:
No, Steven Paul Jobs was not German. He was born in San Francisco, California, and was an American citizen. His parents were American college students, and he was adopted shortly after his birth.
Sentence to validate:
The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal union of 60 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C.
The answer:
The United States of America consists of 50 states, not 60.
Sentence to validate:
Steven Paul Jobs was an American engineer.
Answer:
While Steven Paul Jobs was not a formally trained engineer, he was a visionary and a key figure in the development of personal computers.
He was a businessman, inventor, and investor who co-founded Apple Inc. and was instrumental in the creation of iconic products like the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
@Cremastra No need to be trusted. My purpose for claiming this proposal was to detect "suspicious wrong sentences". The purpose of the idea is only to find "suspicious wrong sentences" to inspect by humans afterwards. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 15:07, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
Here, take a look.
Is the lesser-toothed pademelon common in Sydney suburbs? The lesser-toothed pademelon is not common in Sydney suburbs. It is found in the rainforests of eastern Australia, including New South Wales, but it prefers undisturbed habitats. It is not likely to be found in areas that have been heavily modified by human activity.
Needless to say, that animal does not exist.
Rhympophorus gigas can be dangerous if approached. Yes, Rhympophorus gigas can be dangerous if approached. They are large, aggressive beetles that can bite if they feel threatened. Their bites are not venomous, but they can be painful and cause infection.
Ditto.
Red-toed frogs are endangered. Red-toed frogs are not endangered. However, they are considered a species of special concern in Canada. This means that they are at risk of becoming endangered in the future.
The brown elbow galaxy can be seen by amateur observers with larger telescopes. The brown elbow galaxy is a popular name for the spiral galaxy M83. It is located about 15 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra.
Dear @Cremastra. If you note the Gemini site answers, It contains a three dots after each response. For example, to validate this wrong sentence:
Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1956 and adopted shortly afterwards.
In three dots part, there exists a hyperlink named "Double-check response". In this link, the correct birthdate of Steve Jobs is written as 1955 which is adopted from "www.cccco.edu".
I checked your sentence too which is "The brown elbow galaxy can be seen by amateur observers with larger telescopes." Only some parts of this answer are "Double-checked response".
Given answer for me was
"The "Brown Elbow Galaxy" isn't a commonly used name for any celestial object. It's possible that it's a nickname given to a specific galaxy by amateur astronomers in a particular region."
it is like
The brown elbow galaxy is a popular name for the spiral galaxy M83
Cremastra did try it 3 4 times above, and each time it said that something exists when it doesn't exist. Free AI is nowhere near as good as a human editor yet, so just give up on this silly idea. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:49, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
Dear @Phil Bridger, these exists "three dots" and click "Double-checked response" in gemini site answers. Those "dreams" are not double checked. Please try again.
I tried Cremastra's Pademelon question, and asked for a double check. It lit up some of the text in green, which indicates that it thinks it passed the double check. Can we end this now? MrOllie (talk) 16:14, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
(edit conflict) If someone or something tells me in English that the lesser-toothed pademelon or Rhympophorus gigas or Red-toed frogs or the brown elbow galaxy exists I expect to be able to believe them without checking whether it has three dots after it or that it doesn't come with "Double-checked response" or that they haven't got their fingers crossed behind their back. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:16, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
@MrOllie:@Rosguill: Final question: You said "some part of it was green". My final question is "what part" was exactly was in green? Is that part "dreams part"? See some part does not imply "total answer". Please mention exacly "what question" and "what answer" that you applied and got on Gemini. I should see what you applied and got exacly. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 16:37, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
Hooman Mallahzadeh I threw pademelons at it again with the "double check". It highlighted this text in green: The lesser-toothed pademelon is a small marsupial native to Australia.. Which is, um, false.
I also tried it with the statement, Greater-toothed pademelons, Thylogale gigadonti, can be seen in wildlife preserves in Queensland.
It responded with Yes, greater-toothed pademelons are found in wildlife preserves in Queensland. They are shy and nocturnal, so it may be difficult to see them during the day. However, you may be able to see their tracks or hear them rustling in the bushes at night.
When I ran doublecheck, it highlighted this sentence in green (the rest was in grey): They are shy and nocturnal, so it may be difficult to see them during the day.
The source it "cited" for that claim (I clicked the little green down arrow) was an Australian Museum article about a real species [4]. This whole project is a wild goose chase, or, rather, some lesser-toothed pademelon tracks. (According to Gemini, I can see lesser-toothed pademelon tracks in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park – this thing lies so pathologically I'm amazed that someone thought that even with the "double check" it was a useful tool.) Cremastra (talk) 16:58, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
Besides, here's another one, free of marsupials. I gave it only the scientific name, with a genus that doesn't exist, so it has no information to go on:
Kemptorus henryii was named in honour of Sir Charles Henry.
Its answer (emphasis added):
That's correct! Kemptorus henryii is a species of extinct reptile that was named after Sir Charles Henry. Sir Charles Henry was a British colonial governor who served in several colonies, including Jamaica, the Cape Colony, and Victoria. He was known for his progressive policies and his support for education and social reform. Kemptorus henryii is a small, lizard-like reptile that lived during the Triassic period. It was first discovered in South Africa in the 1960s.
You know how liberal those British colonial governors are.
The point is I gave it no information and it still hallucinated that this made up name was that of an extinct Triassic reptile. Double check gave the last two sentences a "consider searching further" (but it still generated this lie in the first place!!), but okayed Sir Charles Henry was a British colonial governor who served in several colonies, including Jamaica, the Cape Colony, and Victoria and provided this source [5] which is about a real person with a similar name.
Defining reliable resources for Chatbots to validate Wikipedia sentences and implementing a chatbot-resourcing mechanism
I propose to define a set of reliable resources for chatbots like "Google Gemini" to validate Wikipedia sentences with that, and then in the "double-checking phase", it automatically would adds some references for that sentence, as a proof for its validity.
I really think that by the current way that Wikipedia resources its contents, the readers have not the opportunity to conveniently access reliable sources. This idea can make resourcing very fast, directly to the page and sentence of that reliable resource. Please discuss the idea. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 13:25, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
The thread will be archived automatically if you simply stop posting for a few days. You had an idea, but it turned out to be an extraordinarily bad idea. Just drop it. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:06, 30 January 2025 (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.
More levels of protection and user levels
I think the jump from 4 days and 10 edits to 30 days and 500 edits is far too extreme and takes a really long time to do it when there are many editors with just 100, 200 edits (including me) that are not vandals, they do not have strong opinions on usually controversial opinions and just want to edit. Which is why I want the possibility for more user levels to be created. For example one for 200 edits, and 15 days that can be applied whenever vandalism happens somewhat, in that case normally ECP would be applied however I that is far too extreme and a more moderate protection would be more useful. Vandals that are that dedicated to make 200 edits and wait 30 days will be dedicated enough to get Extended Confirmed Protection. Though I want to see what the community thinks of sliding in another protection being ACP and ECP. 2 levels should suffice to bridge the gap between 4 edits and 500 edits would allow low edit count editors to edit while still blocking out vandalism. This is surprisingly not a perennial proposal. SimpleSubCubicGraph (talk) 02:19, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
It's more that editors who have 500/30 generally have been in enough situations to hold Wikipedian knowledge that's in-depth enough. That doesn't necessarily hold true for those you've proposed. Time is part of the intention. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:28, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
possibility for more user levels to be created I had thought about this before and think more levels (or at least an additional level with tweaks to the current ones) would be a good idea. Something along the lines of:
1. WP:SEMI - 7 days / 15 edits
2. WP:ECP - 30 days / 300 edits
3. WP:??? - 6 months / 750 edits (reserved for pages with rampant sockpuppetry problems, such as those in the WP:PIA topic area). Some1 (talk) 02:50, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
@Aaron Liu Yes, that may be apart of the intention but I feel like there are editors with under 500 edits who can make just a good enough edit to not get it instantly reverted. Also protection is there mainly for vandalism, if we lived in a perfect society anyone could edit wikipedia pages without needing accounts and making tons of edits.
@Some1 I think 180/750 would be far too harsh, not even the most divisive topics and controversial issues get vandalized often with ECP.
My idea generally was keeping ECP the same but inserting another type of protection level in-between for mildly controversial topics and pages that are vandalized infrequently. SimpleSubCubicGraph (talk) 03:25, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
Can you give some specific examples of "controversial topics and pages that are vandalized infrequently"? Is there a particular article you want to edit but are unable to? Some1 (talk) 03:29, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
SimpleSubCubicGraph, if this is regarding Skibidi Toilet (per the comments below), then under my proposed ECP level requirements (30 day/300 edits), you would be able to edit that article. Some1 (talk) 12:35, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
There is not too much utility to creating a variety of new levels, as it generally gets clunky trying to define everything, and it makes the system less easy to grasp. What differentiates 100 edits from 200 from 300? ECP is not usually for vandalism, it is deployed for topics that receive particular levels of non-vandalistic (WP:VAND is very narrow) disruption. These are topics where experience is usually quite helpful, where editors who just want to edit are more likely to get in trouble. However, it is also a very narrow range of topics, apparently only affecting 3,067 articles at the moment, or less than 0.05% of articles. CMD (talk) 03:39, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
@Espresso Addict even though there are 3,000 articles that have ECP protection, many articles are often upgraded to ECP in light of infrequent vandalism (once a day, few times a week, etc). I know Skidibi Toilet was upgraded to ECP when the page was vandalized a few times. It was quite hilarious but it demonstrates a wider problem with liberally putting ECP on everything that gets even remotely vandalized. SimpleSubCubicGraph (talk) 07:06, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
Now, are there that many people that care for Skidibi Toilet? No. But it is also liberally applied to other wiki pages that are infrequently vandalized and editors can be there, wanting to edit, but they have to wait until an admin removes the protection which can vary depending on how active they are. It can be a day, to a week, and up to a month if you are really unlucky and the article is not that well known/significant. Which is why another type of protection can allow these editors to edit their favorite subject while still preventing vandalism. There are very few ECP users and that is with counting alternate accounts. So this change will affect a lot with how wikipedia works. SimpleSubCubicGraph (talk) 07:09, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
ECP is not liberally applied. Admins are usually very cautious about applying it, and if there is a particular case where you think it is no longer needed, raise it and it will very likely be looked at. CMD (talk) 08:11, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
Editors who make it to about ~300 edits without getting blocked or banned usually stick around (and usually continue not getting blocked or banned). So in that sense, we could reduce it to 300/30 without making much of a difference, or even making the timespan a bigger component (e.g., 300 edits + 90 days). But it's also true that if you just really want to get 500, then you could sit down with Special:RecentChanges and get the rest of your edits in a couple of hours. You could also sort out a couple of grammar problems. Search, e.g., on "diffuse the conflict": diffuse means to spread the conflict around; it should say defuse (remove the fuse from the explosive) instead. I cleaned up a bunch of these a while ago, but there will be more. You could do this for anything in the List of commonly misused English words (so long as you are absolutely certain that you understand how to use the misused words!). WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:36, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
[to SimpleSubCubicGraph] Sorry, I must have missed the various RfCs that extended the use outside contentious topics. SimpleSubCubicGraph, if you finding pages that could safely be reduced in protection level, and that don't fall within contentious topics, then you should ask the protecting admin to reduce the level on their talk page. But if you have an urge to edit Skibidi Toilet then the simplest thing to do is make small improvements to mainspace for a couple of hundred edits. If you don't have a topic you are interested in that isn't protected just hit random article a few times or do a wikilink random walk until you find something that you can improve. Espresso Addict (talk) 08:47, 21 January 2025 (UTC)
For anyone who wants to run up their edit count: Search for "it can be argued that", and replace them with more concise words, like "may" ("It can be argued that coffee tastes good" → "Coffee may taste good"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:27, 22 January 2025 (UTC)
I'm one of those affected by it, and I'm all for an open encyclopedia, but I'd honestly say that the 500/30 ECP makes sense. There is a great depth to this project, from the philosophy (e.g. standards for inclusion, notability, reliability) and practice (a million gray areas in PAG) of building an encyclopedia, to the philosophy (e.g. idea darwinism and convergence to a good result) and practice (the heavy bureaucracy and politics) of running a productive wiki project. If an editor comes in unfamiliar with these ideas, encountering and absorbing them organically takes time. spintheer (talk) 06:20, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
That message is making a judgment about a user's internal state. We warn users when their conduct does not conform with policies and guidelines, and may sanction them when their behavior continues to not conform with policies and guidelines, but we should never be commenting on their intentions, beliefs, or other internal states. Donald Albury22:10, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
I basically agree with your opinion, but" Discussion of behavior in an appropriate forum (e.g. user's talk page or Wikipedia noticeboard) does not in itself constitute a personal attack." Anyway, in practice, there are far more severe criticisms in messages between users, and a mild and humorous example might have a place to test. Arbabi second (talk) 22:24, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
There is a difference between discussing overt behavior and discussing internal intentions. We assume good faith, but we may sanction problematic behavior even if it may have been done in good faith. We don't know why an editor does something, we only know what they did. Telling someone that they don't care is not assuming good faith. I'm sorry to jump on you like this, but I think AGF is a very important principal to maintain. Donald Albury23:15, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Personally I think it's better to focus on what behaviour is desired, rather than any internal motivation for someone exhibiting poor behaviour. For instance, it's helpful when commenters acknowledge the viewpoints of others to let them know that their points have been considered, even if the commenters disagree with the conclusions being drawn. isaacl (talk) 23:19, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Like many others, I often forget that there is another side to an argument, and now, in my old age, I have finally learned not to be offended by others' reminders and to try to listen to the other side. Arbabi second (talk) 22:41, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Perhaps your meaning would be closer to "You are very precise and fluent in explaining your points and opinions, but right now, I wish you were paying attention to my points and opinions." WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:49, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
In my view, it would be better to demonstrate the desired behaviour by example first (or refer to where the desired behaviour has already been exhibited), and then ask for a response to your expressed viewpoints. By itself, just asking for attention can come across as being self-centred. isaacl (talk) 15:19, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
Note by modifying your original post, you've made it difficult for new people joining the thread to understand the previous responses. Perhaps you can restore the original post, and post the modified message separately? isaacl (talk) 15:22, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
For posterity, the previous text was "You are very precise and fluent in explaining your points and opinions, but unfortunately you don't care much about the opinions of others." The current text is "You express your points and opinions very precisely and fluently, but at this moment, I wish you would pay more attention to mine." I personally find both examples to be rude, and the first one probably counts as a personal attack. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:37, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
In my experience after several years on Wikipedia, it is rare for a user to personally attack others or to be offended by the normal, mild sarcasm of others. It is not unlikely that there are other intentions behind extreme actions and reactions. I invite you to read Wikipedia:"Breaching experiment" considered harmful to understand the complexity of behavioral issues. A template like this may be a useful tool for new users who have unknowingly been exposed to "Breaching experiment". Arbabi second (talk) 08:46, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
I can't edit semi protected pages which can be edited by new users with more than 10 edits and also I can't create new pages on English Wikipedia
Hi Wikipedia users and admins! I have registered an account days ago and made some edits on Wikipedia. I want to ask you, can you remove the semi protected feature from the pages which can be edited from new users which have made more than 10 edits, in this case me, as I am unable to edit them for now. In addition, make possible to create new pages on English Wikipedia, as I have made more than 10 edits and new pages on English Wikipedia can be created by users who have made more than 10 edits. For now, I must create a new page on a draft. Please remove these limitations. Thanks EmanGero (talk) 20:20, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
Seconding this advice – that process is also there so that new users can gain some experience instead of directly jumping to creating an article in mainspace. Helps to have more experienced eyes on what you are doing the first few times. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 21:12, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
Change Wikipedia themes using View > Page Style in Firefox
This is not really what I would call a "standard feature" – it has been deprecated from several browsers (Chrome, Opera), and doesn't appear to have ever been implemented in other browsers, besides Firefox. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 19:35, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
And a lot more support, as we already have a way to change themes and any implementation of alternative style sheets will have to be made to work in tandem with these themes. And that's not counting user CSS (which itself can vary across themes) and other potential issues, like having to memorize the theme when switching from one page to another. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:29, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
Speaking as someone who worked in technical IT from time immemorial until a bit before smartphones came into existence, I can say that even when I started out this would have been a bad idea, and it has got progrssively worse since then. The main reason is given by Chaotic Enby above. I happen to use Firefox on Linux, but what about the majority of users that use different browsers or apps? Phil Bridger (talk) 22:54, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
Adding a TLDR section for AFC submissions
Currently, a lot of AFC drafts get stuck in the middle of the queue due to refbombing by inexperienced editors. Would it make sense to modify the AFC process so that the new article wizard asks the user to provide three reliable sources and a blurb ? The blurb and three refs would be added to the top of article which would then be used by AFC reviewers to assess notability (after which they can work with the submitter to move the rest of the draft to mainspace). Sohom (talk) 02:49, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
Thanks! For the specific implementation, I was thinking that we could help the new writers evaluate what is and isn't a reliable source, by pointing them towards something like WP:THREE or directly having a clear wording similar to WP:42. Something such as:
Here, please link what you think are the three best reliable sources that are independent and provide significant coverage of the topic:
(with or without piped links to WP:RS, WP:SIGCOV, etc.) We can clarify that it is the quality of sources, and not the quantity, that matters, and that highlighting your best sources makes the article easier to assess, and thus more likely to be accepted soon. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 02:56, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I made a prototype of what I had in mind at User:Chaotic Enby/Article wizard, although the buttons aren't functional yet. My idea for the technical part is to have the first two link to the same page with themselves as added hyperlink parameters, and the third send to the next page with all the hyperlink parameters, which can then be passed to the draft's source editor (in a suitable template we can create). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 03:14, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
That could also be a great idea! Since the last phase of the article wizard is the source editor where the draft is written and published, we could have the WP:THREE sources be in a template that is clearly visible in the source editor, so that the user can review and edit the sources if needed.The current code displayed in the editor is:
{{subst:AfC submission/draftnew}}<!-- Important, do not remove this line before article has been created. -->== References ==<!-- Inline citations added to your article will automatically display here. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:REFB for instructions on how to add citations. -->{{reflist}}
We could have it become something like:
{{subst:AfC submission/draftnew}}<!-- Important, do not remove this line before article has been created. -->{{best sources <!-- Your three best sources -->| $1
| $2
| $3
}}== References ==<!-- Inline citations added to your article will automatically display here. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:REFB for instructions on how to add citations. -->{{reflist}}
Sounds good! Depending on how energetic code support is feeling, the tool could actually step through the "best sources" one at a time, with an explanatory checklist for the editor to complete (for various aspects of independence, reliability, significant coverage, etc.) ~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~03:49, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I strongly support something like this conceptually. Anything to streamline the identification of WP:GNG-establishing sources to get pages out to mainspace seems greatly helpful for reviewers and draft-writers alike. Utopes(talk / cont)05:41, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I like this proposal, but I'd caution against 100% relying on this system when reviewing. Most newbies don't have a good idea of what a GNG compliant source is, a skill that comes through experience. I'd imagine this would be helpful for obvious cases, but borderline cases will require closer examination that just three sources. Catalk to me!11:38, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
Strong support. This is a wonderful idea. I suggest adding that it will speed up reviewing if we can see the best references for notability up front. StarryGrandma (talk) 22:03, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I saw this on Discord and came here to check out the mockup, which looks great. This idea would make reviewing so more fun and might also make "notability" easier to understand for new editors. Toadspike[Talk]20:10, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Oppose as written, but support in theory. My main concern is that there needs to be exceptions (i.e. three sources are not always needed). Numerous notability guidelines do not mandate three sources. For example, books only require two sources and numerous criteria in NSPORTS, NACADEMIC, NPOLITICS or even NBIO could be met with just one source. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me!21:47, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
Good point, that's definitely something that could be clarified in the wizard. See Special:Diff/1273654439 for an example of an article I passed on WP:NMUSIC despite none of the three given sources technically counting for WP:GNG.However, something to note is that most new editors do not necessarily know every SNG, and it could be more prudent for them to give three sources if possible, even if some guidelines require less (for instance, having three book reviews for WP:NBOOK is better if the editor was wrong about the reliability/independence of one of them). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 22:01, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
I'm digressing, NSPORTS kind of became lame duck guideline after that last RfC, and doesn't have recommendations for soccer players. It should really just be put out of its misery. Catalk to me!00:13, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
Creating a template named "Template:High view is predicted"
Hi, high view (jump in views) of an article on Wikipedia may be caused by different reasons:
TV and satellite
News web sites
Social media (e.g. Instagram)
Reaching a milestone (for example, birthday of a scientist)
and other reasons. So in my opinion, a jump in page views can be predicted by these causes in advance a couple of minutes/hours/days before.
So I propose to create a template named "Template:High view is predicted", to alarm editors to pay more attention to such articles in advance and try to improve its quality as much as they can, due to such predicted increase in page views. This template should have a category named "Category:Most predicted view articles" that shows all such articles in rush view at that time at a glance. Four possible arguments of this template are 1- The start time of view rush, 2- Duration of view rush 3-estimated views 4- Reason(s) of this high rush view.
I don't think enough people would notice a template / maintenance category for this to be helpful. Better to post at a non-dead relevant discussion page (for example, a WikiProject talk page). —Kusma (talk) 17:51, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
Number four seems to be the only one in that list (I understand that the list is not exclusive) that is predictable a couple of days in advance. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:52, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
Yes, these changes (Instagram and Tv) impact page views very faster, may be the prediction is "they impact page views a couple of hours, minutes or seconds later". Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 18:04, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
Awards where nominees are known in advance but winners will get lots of attention (say, Oscars) would also qualify I guess. —Kusma (talk) 17:56, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
@Xaosflux No, similar to Template:High traffic, but it predicts the future instead of past. For example after the release and success of the movie A Separation, on 15 February 2011, it could be predicted that a rush view can be seen for Asghar Farhadi and all its actors, beginning at 15 February at least on week later.
For today, I predict that the article named Learjet 55 would be on top view for tomorrow due to this news. The exact estimate depends on many factors but its about 20000. Let us see what happens. I propose to use this template:
{{High view is predicted|2/4/2025|2days|20000|a crashes happened}}
We can predict that views to the page will increase, but I don't think we can predict by how much and for how long, even to one significant figure. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:27, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
Predicting article views by machine learning algorithms
@Phil Bridger: I think we can apply some machine-learning algorithms for predicting page views
Based on 1-concept 2-reasons 3-previous page views: train a model. This model can predict page views for each article on a given day.
Predict page views for the following days
If its prediction be somehow wrong, then we check the reasons given to it and if we are sure that all reasons was applied, the learned model is modified and improved automatically.
This "view prediction model" incorporates some features from Wikidata about the type of concept. For example Learjet 55 is an airplane and so on. I think we only need to give "reasons" to this model and get predicted view number from it. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 10:44, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
A note at an existing noticeboard, or a village pump, would be more useful. A new noticeboard = a page few people are watching. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:55, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
That model would very much need a way to retrieve and quantify information about current events, rather than manually inputting "reasons". Information retrieval is quite a wide field. Also, I don't think relying on discrete Wikidata encoding is the way to go – embedding the subject into a high-dimensional space feels like a more natural way to go at it. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 12:08, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
Random article button for specific wikiproject proposal
Would be really nice if individual wikiprojects had their own random article button purely for articles under the scope of that wikiproject.
Reading and going through normal webpages and sites, I started to wonder: Do we really need links to shine blue these days? We are all so used to just "test clicking" on anything, since most things online are clickable these days, so I'm just wondering if we still need to differentiate our links by having them shine blue. This topic might have been discussed before and I've simply missed it.
We have several rules on how to limit the number of links on an article, simply because too many of them disrupts the reading experience. It also takes a lot of time to weed out double links or anything that doesn't fall inside the guidelines. With black links, there wouldn't be any problem with over-linking.
Sure, this is just a very rudimentary idea that would need to be sorted for editors. Like perhaps the links could turn blue (and red) when you open a page in the editing window, black links could be default for when you are not logged in, and when logged in you could select the color in your settings. Or: the second, third, etc. link in an article could automatically be displayed in black, leaving only the first time blue (surely we have the tech for that now). It needs to look good on all platforms. And what about all the menus on wiki pages, do they really need to be blue? What normal websites these days have their menus in a "click color". I think that a reduction of colored links would be a way to give the layout of Wikis a bit of an update.
Respectfully, I don't think that this would be a very practical navigating experience. The idea of having blue links is specifically so the readers don't have to "test click" on every word, and I don't think Wikipedia readers are actually doing it. Having links be black by default would make for a more painful navigating experience, as you'd have to try to click on every word to see if there is a link hidden there.However, I do agree that making the menus (and only the menus) be black could be a possibility (although not sure if it would be an improvement) as the readers already expect them to be links. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:28, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I am not used to test clicking. Not differentiating before hovering is just bad UX and has not been and should not be normalized. Not to mention the print view.
With black links, there wouldn't be any problem with over-linking.
I don't understand this rationale at all. We should make it easy for readers to go places. "Solving" navigational issues by breaking navigation entirely is the "nuke the world and just die out" solution. Aaron Liu (talk) 13:28, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Not an expert, but I believe there has to be some way to distinguish between links and plain text to meet accessibility standards (this is why link colors were lightened between Vector 2010 and Vector 2022 – to increase contrast between text colors). RunningTiger123 (talk) 14:11, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Do you have any evidence of "We are all so used to just 'test clicking?'" I certainly do not do that and looking over peers shoulders, I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that, period. This is anecdote vs anecdote, but I feel that you're making an extraordinary claim. Most people don't click something unless there's something to differentiate it from surrounding text (or it's obviously part of a menu.) Nebman227 (talk) 14:23, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Ok, I was obviously unclear in calling it 'test clicking'. But say that you go on a news website like BBC or CNN, you see no links at all. On a computer the links will show up as underlined when you move your cursor over them, but not so on a phone. You just assume that the headlines are clickable and so you 'test click' on them, and that usually works. You are directed to the article you are looking for.
As for how having the second, third etc. links to the same article on a page turn black automatically, it would reduce the visual number of links, making the page easier to read. The links would be there, just not so much in your face. And if you happen to click on that word it will link as usual. Cart(talk)15:04, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Those headlines fall under Nebman227's point about "differentiate[d] from surrounding text (or it's obviously part of a menu)". Nobody just randomly clicks on words in the middle of an article.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:09, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
Indeed the actual links in BBC and CNN articles are underlined see e.g. [6] and [7]. I'd note over linking is also likely to cause problems for touch screen users even worse if these links aren't obvious. Nil Einne (talk) 14:55, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
A setting to underline links could be helpful for visually impaired readers (assuming it is optional, in order not to add visual clutter to the default experience), although maybe that is already a thing? Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:56, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
Blue and purple links are a pretty standardized thing online and have been since the early days. I wouldn't be opposed to the option (more options is never a bad thing), but by default I think wikipedia should stick to common internet standards Mgjertson (talk) 16:02, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
Since we all read Wikipedia in dark mode, black links would be invisible against the black background. I don't agree that this would increase readability.</sass> See also H:LC and MOS:COLOUR.One of Wikipedia's foundational ideas is highlighting our intraconnectivity, and bluelinks are basically part of our brand identity (and jargon). I think many desktop browsers have options to use different colours and/or text-decorations for their default link presentation, so some readers can already configure this to their liking.As to what looks good (even on one platform, let alone all platforms), this value cannot be reliably defined. And the following isn't really a counterargument, but I feel like Wikipedia is one of the only normal websites these days, most of the rest having degenerated into ads and widgets. Folly Mox (talk) 17:36, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
A new hidden category for articles using raw HTML for built-in MediaWiki features
For example, what will be in this category - an article using <i>...</i> for italic text instead of ''...'', or an article using <h2>...</h2> for lv. 2 header instead of ==...==. This will be useful to replace raw HTML with proper wikitext. 5.228.112.228 (talk) 22:27, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
Probably need to exclude div and span tags from this, those are everywhere. Also probably exclude anywhere with user signatures (talk pages, etc). Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:36, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
Have you seen the "Ask the chatbot" feature in Britannica? Honestly I am a bit suprised that they developed something like that. I think that it's a good way to consume the encyclopedia contents for quick questions. One of the most frequent uses for ChatGPT and similar tools (hi DeepSeek R1) is Q&A, and they use to reply using our contents (their models are trained partially using Wikipedia after all), so why don't we develop our own chatbot? What do you think? Regards. emijrp (talk) 18:18, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
Ideally 0, but that's probably impossible. I am not an expert in the field, though IMHO we could train the model excluding articles with maintenance tags, all sentences without a reference, pages written by newbiews or few editors, etc. Also, adding the "I don't know" sentence to the chatbot vocabulary could be a feature, it's not bad to say it. Furthermore, more than a purely conversational chatbot that can hallucinate, I propose one which replies to your questions pasting the relevant sentences in the articles, with minimum originality. Other features could be "please summarize this article, or all articles in this category, tell me three writers born in France in the 17th century, the most important Van Gogh paintings, etc". Definitely, an improved search engine which helps to consume the content. emijrp (talk) 19:10, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
To be fair, "pages written by few editors" isn't necessarily something we should exclude: GAs and FAs are usually written by a few dedicated editors, rather than in a slow incremental way (my own example).Regarding the proposal of adding the "I don't know" sentence to the chatbot vocabulary, while the idea is certainly good, there isn't a specific "chatbot vocabulary" that can be edited: rather, that's something that has to be pushed for during training. However, I do like your proposal of one which replies to your questions pasting the relevant sentences in the articles (there's something similar that can be found in the literature, namely retrieval-augmented generation, which directly adds the relevant sentences to the prompt and answers from there). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 02:17, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I don't see any particular need why we should integrate chatbots – a rapidly changing and frequently flawed technology – into our own rapidly changing and frequently flawed encyclopedia. It'll only make matters worse. Cremastra (talk) 20:10, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
Good plan. We can have a little box off to the side that says, "ask the chatbot ✨" below a little box. Whatever the user enters in the box is replaced with "Will Wikipedia integrate chatbots into its encyclopedia". The response is then "no". I'll get started on development. Cremastra (talk) 17:40, 8 February 2025 (UTC)
No, wikipedia is one of the few places left on the internet not infected by the LLM hypetrain. LLMs have a very antisocial and corporatized connotation, they are the antithesis of what wikipedia is Mgjertson (talk) 16:00, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
How about adding whatever script would be required to include a person's age measured in days along with their approximate age in years among their personal details? Peter Jedicke (talk) 11:44, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
I mean, we could, but I don't see the point of this. Learning that someone is 3017 days old is honestly useless. There may be extremely select circumstances when this is needed, but that's no reason to include it. Cremastra (talk) 20:52, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
Yeah lol. Your age in days becomes useless information after you are 1 month old. And besides, it would have to be updated daily, which is time consuming manually and resource intensive automatically. Gallus lafayettii (talk) 23:53, 8 February 2025 (UTC)
Hello, I have recently noticed that, plenty countries have only the ortographic projection as geography representation, I would just like to know if, it is necessary to add a second picture (ONLY FOR COUNTRIES WHICH DOES NOT HAVE AN IMAGE SWITCHER; like the majority of American, Asian and Oceanian countries). On the Indonesian version, an image switcher is present to the majority of the countries, it have the map of the country with the flag in it and it is presented like this (Kirgizstan actual article in Indonesian Language, to see the improvement of the geography representation, go on the second option of the image switcher to see the map.)). Please take time and feel free to answer me, if you want to go deeper with the subject, go on my talk page.
Thanks. QwertyZ34 (talk) 19:58, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
At some other Wikipedia, the infobox contains two or more images. For example, at idwiki, the infobox for that country contains the above map plus also File:Kyrgyzstan stub.svg.
The linked id.wiki page switches to a flag map, these are not hugely encyclopaedic or helpful to a reader, and we should not boldly copy that. CMD (talk) 04:10, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
Yes, I know, I rather prefer to add a map of the country with the largest cities, than this. Please tell me if it is necessary or not, to add it. QwertyZ34 (talk) 15:32, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
Yes, that's why I want to add a second image in the infobox, like a map of Kyrgyzstan with its largest cities, it will be for sure better for the reader, and also more encyclopaediv, in the term of imformation. QwertyZ34 (talk) 15:34, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
You can add any second image you want. If someone disagrees, they'll revert it or change it to an image that they think is better. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
I know that it is not possible to delete user accounts on Wikipedia. I was wondering if there could be a possibility of if an account is deleted, that there could be a placeholder that would look something like this: [deleted] The edit would remain there, but it would indicate that it was made by a deleted account. Hope to get some ideas. Interstellarity (talk) 16:16, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
Edits legally must be attributable to someone. The best that can be done is a vanishing as isaccl describes. Identifying an edit as by "deleted" would be insufficient. 331dot (talk) 16:38, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
Under Creative Commons, it would be CC0. Otherwise, it would be a Terms of Service thing whereby the registered user explicitly assign the copyright ownership of their contributions to WMF or the community (the latter would be a headache if there's a legal issue as the community isn't a legal body per se), and then WMF/community rededicates the contributions accordingly. I can imagine pushbacks if done so this way. – robertsky (talk) 01:27, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
You can never revoke your CCBYSA/GFDL license, but you can declare an additional CC0 license. Procedurally this would have many issues such as: (a) you make a derivative version of an existing article, even declaring CC0 right then, (b) someone else makes a future derivative. Well you can't relicense the edits before you, and the future edits are still going to not be in CC0 so it's not very useful for those wanting to reuse the page again in the future. One place something like that would likely have the most use would be if you upload original media and would like to add additional free-er licenses later. A utility to help with that might be useful, and discussing that idea over at commonswiki is probably the best venue. — xaosfluxTalk10:50, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
More generally, copyrights can be assigned, through contracts, your will, etc. However, I'm not sure whether the WMF would appreciate having someone unilaterally assign their copyrights to the WMF ("Hi Legal, so User:Example died, and left the copyright to all their edits to the foundation, so I have some papers for you...". WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:09, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
I guess attribution is always maintained in the sense that actor.actor_id and user.user_id are retained in the database regardless of changes to the user_name. But user names must be unique, so I guess any kind of non-unique placeholder like [deleted] would have to happen outside the database. I'm not sure how it would be better than the current vanisheduser_somenumber or whatever it is now. Sean.hoyland (talk) 17:04, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
ADD translate.google.com into wikipedia
Having a feature like translate.google.com integrated into Wikipedia could provide users with audio pronunciations and translations directly within articles, enhancing accessibility and language learning.
Thanks deo! 2A06:5900:42A:F000:F05B:AF:54A7:FBB4 (talk) 15:09, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
Also, not sure if either the Wikipedia community or the WMF would be okay with adding a non-transparent, non-open source commercial feature on the website like this. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:12, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
Unless things have massively changed over there, WMF would certainly be against it. I think most of us here would be against it as anything other than an optional user script people could install too (I know I would). Anomie⚔00:55, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
many mainstream browsers nowadays have this integrated natively into the software, ie Chrome would use Google Translate if the user right clicks to open the context options menu and then selects Translate this page. – robertsky (talk) 03:46, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
Yeah, the second phab ticket with respect to the Google-related privacy issues is what's especially concerning for me. While a minor shift key bug isn't a big deal, a potential breach of privacy by a private company's API is exactly what I would've expected from using proprietary software in our gadgets, and, well, I've made my opinion on it pretty clear already. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 01:26, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
Index of Deleted Pages (Categorized and or Searchable by Topic)
A wish for the benefit of subscribers who may hold memory of a page that had existed and find no redirection that relates to the topic. Each item in this Deleted Articles index might hold a jumplink to the actual deleted article, which itself is of course only accessible to admins. There might be appended right to each index item a coded reason for the article deletion.
Case in point, this user wanted to know what happened to the article on Technofeudalism. Googling "Technofeudalism Wikipedia" gets a "redirect" to Neo-feudalism as the first hit, but there are no redirects from Technofeudalism in the Wikipedia article for Neo-feudalism. If it is known by this index there once existed a page for Technofeudalism, the Neo-feudalism page can be updated, if not, there may be a case for a separate and new page for Technofeudalism.
Such an index may fill some of the gaps Deletionpedia had covered, it's clear the formulation and structure would require the drawing on considerable resource particularly if a search term can rely on keywords within the deleted articles. Also possibility for a bot. Lmstearn (talk) 14:32, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
Many deleted pages should not be searchable and we often even hide the fact that an article has ever existed at a certain name. (some vandals like to create pages with titles like "Kusma's phone number is 1-812-555-6969, call today for [illegal activity]"). Making metadata about deleted pages more available than through the deletion log risks leaking all kinds of private data and would require substantial effort; also, to help with issues like the one mentioned above you might need to search not just the top revisions of deleted pages, but also content that is hidden away in old revisions of pages that used to be articles and are now redirects (or deleted). I don't think this is feasible, and I also do not think it is desirable without a huge amount of manual effort that would further reduce the feasibility. —Kusma (talk) 14:47, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
Would you please you explain your use case example more? Are you trying to provide an example of a page that was deleted? I'm not seeing such a page deletion. — xaosfluxTalk15:03, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
Neither did I, but someone there claimed in that [page] they did. The point is a subscriber may wish to know whether a page had ever existed. For example, Google might throw hits for a search term like "Wubblies", but there is no Wikipedia page for that, so one may wish to to know if a page for "Wubblies" was ever published in Wikipedia. And yes, the Deleted Articles index would not want to contain vandalised data.Lmstearn (talk) 15:28, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
The deletion log is publicly viewable and can be used to determine whether a page by a given title ever existed, and if it did why it was deleted. This does not page titles that have been oversighted (e.g. for containing private information), which are not visible even to administrators, but it is very unlikely that someone other than the page creator will be looking for that. Searching the contents of deleted pages is not something that will ever happen. Thryduulf (talk) 18:01, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
A limit on an editor's unsolicited responses to an AfD discussion??
I'm wondering if it would be helpful to have some sort of limit on how many responses a person can post in a single AfD discussion.
The background to this is that I've noticed it's increasingly common for an editor to appoint themselves as "prosecution" or "defence" attorney in an article's discussion, and respond to every !vote that they disagree with, often in very terse, dismissive (borderline aggressive) language. This has a very chilling effect on discussion.
AfD is poorly attended. It's desperately important, because decisions at AfD can leave utter junk in Wikipedia, or remove valuable subjects. Decisions like this ideally shouldn't be taken based on a consensus of just three editors! We should be encouraging more participation, but if potential contributors get intimidated into submission by aggressive disagreement backed up by a ferocious dollop of Wiki-acronyms, is it surprising people steer clear?
Almost all of the follow-ups are unhelpful. People who close AfD discussions know the policy. They don't need to read diatribes from editor A about how editor B has failed to read N:PROF or GNG. Extra words just mean more to read.
There are situations where multiple responses may be needed, for example where a delete-voter asks if someone active in editing the article can find additional sources. For this reason, I think maybe a blanket "one response per AfD only" might not work; we might need to allow follow-up answers to direct questions.
WP:BLUDGEON is supposed to deal with this problem, but is itself a blunt instrument. Being accused of bludgeoning is no fun, and just makes people get defensive and polarised. A more concrete limit might make it easier for people to know how far they can go, without bludgeoning. To be honest, I can't see how most people responding to an AfD need to do more than a single statement of why they think the article should be deleted or kept, and leave it at that.
One reason why I don't take part in AfD discussions nearly as much as I used to is that I could see them becoming more of a vote and less of a discussion. I see this proposal as exacerbating that tendency, and so a step in precisely the wrong direction. The one proposal that I would make is to discourage (or at least stop encouraging) people from making bold "keep" or "delete" opinions, which seem to stop people changing their minds in response to the discussion. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:49, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
You don't need to respond to such attorneys, especially if they don't bring up new arguments. If their walls of text and aggression endure after asking them to stop, you could ask an administrator for their view. Aaron Liu (talk) 18:04, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
I don't see how a hard limit would work in practice. However, I was surprised to find that there was no mention of the etiquette around responding to other people's comments in the AfD instructions; perhaps a note there to say that responding to all or multiple comments is often unproductive and can constitute bludgeoning? Espresso Addict (talk) 23:49, 16 February 2025 (UTC)
Yes, having read what Phil Bridger wrote above, I think my original idea was ill-conceived. But it would be helpful to add something to the AfD instructions. Basically, "You do not strengthen your case by repeating yourself. Allow others to disagree. Don't respond to others unless you have something material new to add, or can answer a question they have posed." .... or something along those lines? Elemimele (talk) 17:50, 19 February 2025 (UTC)
I disagree with the assertion that AfD is poorly attended. It's probably better attended than it was a dozen years ago, and it's probably sufficiently attended to get the right answer most of the time (~95%, not Six Sigma levels). But since you are concerned about a particular, uncommon behavior, the usual reactions appear to be:
Tell the editor something gentler but with a similar meaning, such as "Yes, you've already said that" or "I think we know what your opinion is by now, so it's not really necessary for you to repeat yourself".
A way to view edits made to a user's talk page, as a "diff"
Seeing what other editors have had to say about another editor is a useful tool, which is limited of course when potentially problematic editors just delete every negative interaction. It would of course be useful to have a tool which would allow one to view the activity on someones talk page, as a "diff". That may be contrary to an assumed or actual goal of Wikipedia, which may be to allow someone to make a fresh start or some such, which I can respect. Also, I have to figure such a tool would hit the Wikiservers kind of hard, so it may be undesirable to allow such functionality. Marcus Markup (talk) 14:40, 17 February 2025 (UTC)
What I meant was... without having to open each red link on the edit history. Because for some editors, that could take some time. I'm talking about a one page solution. Marcus Markup (talk) 14:46, 17 February 2025 (UTC)
Maybe not? Because if we're getting good information on these pages, then it would be better to have an EXTCONF editor adopt the article than to have it deleted. Perhaps a friendly request for help at MILHIST would be a viable path forward. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:01, 19 February 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia 1 minute name change
Why not change the name to Elon's requested name for 1 minute? If his terms were as vague as I have seen, that should satisfy them and Wikipedia could collect. This assumes it's not just another internet farce. 47.158.29.103 (talk) 22:11, 19 February 2025 (UTC)
Even if we did rename to what he wanted immediately and without being clever about it I am not convinced he would follow through with his end of the bargain. Even if he was going to pay up, our integrity is worth more than money can buy. Thryduulf (talk) 22:51, 19 February 2025 (UTC)
Editors are overstretched – automating more basic tasks
It has struck me recently that Wikipedia contributors really are quite overstretched, with slightly over 54 articles to every editor.
Articles about less-than-top-level topics may suffer from outdated or needlessly time-sensitive information.
I am not a technical expert, but it appears to me – emphasising that the idea should not be taken too far – that certain simplistic, mundane and repetitive tasks probably should be automated.
One particular improvement, which is only an example, would be automatic updating of transport patronage figures. Some transport agencies now to release detailed patronage data. This is well illustrated by Transport for NSW, which releases detailed figures.
Isn't automation what we already do through a variety of bots, edit filters, etc.? If you have a specific idea for something to be automated you can raise this at WP:BOTREQ. I've also seen templates used for rapidly changing figures which allow every connected article to be updated with a single edit. CMD (talk) 13:37, 18 February 2025 (UTC)
Hopefully, someone with proficiency which I lack will do this! The specific example I mentioned I noticed was an issue when looking at Melbourne railway station articles. Cheers, Will Thorpe (talk) 12:06, 19 February 2025 (UTC)
There are projects which have gone further as far as directly integrating information from Wikidata is concerned - see for example the infobox in this Spanish article. Why this sort of thing didn't catch on over here I don't know, as the early days of Wikidata happened well before my time. Dr. Duh🩺 (talk) 12:19, 19 February 2025 (UTC)
The original idea of Wikidata was to allow people to just edit such data once and then it would be included in all language versions of Wikipedia. In its early years Wikidata suffered from a lack of verifiability, so it was decided that the English Wikipedia would not make much use of it. I don't know whether it has got any better now - I think others such as Fram may know more. I don't think it's only us old fuddy-duddies who worry about verifiability. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:00, 19 February 2025 (UTC)
Elevate status of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to level of other non-UN members
I request that the countries mentioned above be treated the same as non-UN members, such as Puerto Rico and Hong Kong. I, at least, request that the above countries receive the status of the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar, who seem to get separate listings on various articles, such as the list of countries by population. I would like for the above countries to be listed separately in articles, such as the list of countries covered by Google Street View. Finally, I propose that the above countries always take precedence when describing the nationalities of their citizen, such that no article of any said citizen should refer to them at all as British. Pablothepenguin (talk) 23:48, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
"Non-UN members" is vague, as the entities you mention are of varying status, and aren't treated uniformly either. In any case, we don't really have an "official" list of how each territory/entity should be treated across the encyclopedia.However, regarding the nationalities, we do have MOS:NATIONALITY, which currently states in the footnote:
There is no categorical preference between describing a person as British rather than as English, Scottish, or Welsh. Decisions on which label to use should be determined through discussions and consensus. The label must not be changed arbitrarily. To come to a consensus, editors should consider how reliable sources refer to the subject, particularly UK reliable sources, and whether the subject has a preferred nationality by which they identify.
I remain of the opinion that Scotland, Wales and NI have a right to be included in those country lists I mention. They deserve the same status on this Wiki as Gibraltar and the Isle of Mann. Pablothepenguin (talk) 00:34, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
That MOS:NATIONALITY be changed so that people cannot be described as "British", but instead must be described (for example) as "English", or perhaps "English–Welsh–Irish–French", since many people have ancestry from multiple places.
It looks like #1 is being discussed below, so let's talk about #2.
We can't ban describing people as "British", because reliable sources don't always tell us anything else. That's a bigger problem for lower-profile people, but I'm not sure we could do it even for the highest profile people. How would you describe, for example, the current Prince of Wales? Is he an English–Scottish–German–Irish–French–Hungarian man? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:16, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
So when Encyclopædia Britannica says that he's a "British prince"[8], that he was "the first British heir apparent born at a hospital", and never uses the word English to describe him, they're just wrong?
They're legally the same country, so it follows that they should be listed as the same country. We don't list Bosnia and Herzegovina as two separate countries either. You should discuss this on the talk page of an article first, as Idea lab is for the workshopping of more project-wide or meta proposals. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:42, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
So... it seems that there are varying scholarly opinions about what counts as "a nation" or "a country", If you take (e.g.,) the definition that says that True™ nations independently conduct their own foreign affairs (e.g., signing treaties), then Scotland isn't a nation, and neither is any satellite state, or, say, Estonia, when it was the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic during the Cold War.
But if you prefer the definition that says a True™ nation is one that has an ethnic group associated with a geographical territory, then of course Scotland and Wales are real, separate nations.
There are other definitions, too, but the bottom line is that deciding whether something/some group/some place is a nation is a bit of an If by whiskey question. You have to know what the other person means by that word before you can have a sensible conversation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:14, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
Indeed, we know scholars use "nation"/"country"/"state" variably, so our lists generally have more specific criteria than just whether any of those words are ever used to describe an entity. CMD (talk) 04:03, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
That's not really something Wikipedia has power over, sources treat them differently, reflecting different histories and choices made by the people of those places. CMD (talk) 08:35, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
As we have said, there is no discrepancy. IoM is a crown dependency with status and laws quite different from the rest of the Crown; the constituent territories are simply not, just like the US's 50 states and Bosnia and Herzegovina's 10 cantons. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:33, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
What is a dependency? Anyway, Scotland has always been a country. Through its history, it has more right to that name than any US State. It also has its own details that should be listed on the articles from which it is missing. Pablothepenguin (talk) 19:56, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
Click on the link and you'll see its very clear definition accepted by reliable source (which we are an echo chamber of) and the international community. (I can also point towards the colonial period of the United States.) Aaron Liu (talk) 20:19, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
Noting that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland don't operate under a federal model, but a devolved one – making them "less sovereign" than US states, as their powers are instead granted to them by the central government. A better analogy would be the autonomous communities of Spain, which are similarly devolved. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:23, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
Don’t forget Scotland and Wales are countries. Thats an important word. We Scots have our own parliament with a small amount of autonomy. We also have limited recognition in some sporting events, such as the FIFA World Cup and the Six Nations. Pablothepenguin (talk) 20:31, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
None of these mean that Scotland is sovereign or a dependency. Scotland has no more claim to being a country than New York, which was not a part of the constitutional United States for centuries. Aaron Liu (talk) 20:36, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
Other than the fact we had our own kings back in the Middle Ages? And what about the fact that we had autonomy and lots of it before the 1707 act of union? I think those are pretty strong claims. Pablothepenguin (talk) 21:44, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
But then your king became England’s king (and thus also became Wales’s and Ireland’s king) and then the whole Union thing happened. In other words, we are not in the Middle Ages anymore, and a lot of history has happened since then. Blueboar (talk) Blueboar (talk) 22:09, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
True, but you must admit that it is not ok to have disputed countries such as Abkhazia and Western Sahara listed on Wikipedia articles that do not contain Scotland, Wales, or NI. Pablothepenguin (talk) 23:13, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
Then you have no recognition, period. I can say the same thing about Texas, whose ruling party includes Texit in their platform. We strive to echo reliable sources, not the PointsOfView of individual editors. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:31, 22 February 2025 (UTC)
It strikes me that the OP is confusing what they would like to be, which they are welcome to advocate and campaign for in appropriate places, with what actually is according to reliable sources. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:35, 22 February 2025 (UTC)
It is my desire to see more people recognise Scotland, Wales and NI in many ways. I feel that people should give them the treatment they deserve, and it would be advisable to try and give them more autonomy. We need to change the way we talk about them ordinarily, as people fail to recognise our unique cultures and traditions. At the very least we deserve the same status as Puerto Rico and Aruba. Pablothepenguin (talk) 15:47, 22 February 2025 (UTC)
If you want Scotland (is that the "we"?) to have the same status as Puerto Rico and Aruba, that is something you will have to advocate for outside of Wikipedia. CMD (talk) 16:22, 22 February 2025 (UTC)
I think there is an obvious next action (especially after looking at your contribution history) but I don't think you would like it. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:58, 22 February 2025 (UTC)
Add a Simple English Wikipedia link on the top of Main Page
Should we add a the link to the Simple English Wikipediaat the top of the main page? While the link is already there at the bottom of the Main Page, anyone who is unfamliar with English and arrived on the page would probably have pressed "go back" on their browser before they can find the link to Simple English Wikipedia. (considering the amount of 'complex' English above that) Perhaps below the count of active editors and total articles, like "Also available in Simple English" (obviously subject to change). I'm also aware that this topic has been discussed at least once, but the most recent one I found was in 2012... Replicative Cloverleaf (talk) 22:47, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
I'd support this, Simple English Wikipedia is a project I wish got more attention. Also, it would reduce the amount of people with poor grasps on English trying to contribute when their poor English often results in their edits being reverted. Mgjertson (talk) 16:14, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
I'm not sure that those with poor English skills would be more likely to choose to edit Simple Wikipedia over English Wikipedia. Perhaps more importantly, I don't think this would be beneficial to Simple Wikipedia, as it takes a great deal of skill to write clearly at a simpler level, and the much smaller editing population at Simple Wikipedia has less capacity to deal with poorly written contributions. isaacl (talk) 18:21, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
There are a lot fewer editors on Simple Wikipedia, so I don't think that poorly written contributions will be more likely to be detected and reverted. isaacl (talk) 22:54, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
Simple Wikipedia also has the unfortunate position of being the place the more tenacious monolingual editors go after getting banned on en.wp...JoelleJay (talk) 22:06, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
I would much prefer some sort of MediaWiki patch to move the languages dropdown to the top-right of the "welcome to wikipedia" box. Aaron Liu (talk) 19:34, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
Google Scholar and Google Books
Hello everyone... Do experienced Wikipedia users have access to Google Scholar and Google Books? If not, wouldn't it be better to initiate a discussion to gather opinions from other users? If the majority agree, experienced Wikipedia users could be granted access to Google articles and books. Hulu2024 (talk) 20:53, 23 February 2025 (UTC)
Hi! Google Scholar is a search browser, and is free to use by anyone. However, some of the articles it links to might be paywalled by their respective websites. Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library gives access to a lot of them, and the requirements aren't that high (only 500 edits across all projects). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 21:06, 23 February 2025 (UTC)
(edit conflict) As far as I am aware both of those services are available to everyone. There is no need to be any sort of Wikipedia user, let alone an experienced one. To access some works that are found by those services it is necessary to have access to the underlying publishers. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:11, 23 February 2025 (UTC)
Editors have said in the past that Google Books offers different books to people in different countries. Presumably this has something to do with differing copyright rules in different places. I don't find the book you are looking for in US Google Books (though I can see it has been cited in other books). It is available in some libraries (list at WorldCat). You might ask for help at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:49, 23 February 2025 (UTC)
@Moxy No, dear, this is a different encyclopedia with a similar name... I'm looking for another encyclopedia. But my main point is that experienced Wikipedia users should be given access to Google Books and Google Scholar. Hulu2024 (talk) 01:19, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
The entire world already has access to Google Books and Google Scholar.
@WhatamIdoing No... I mean having free access to its pages, just like I have access to Cambridge University articles or Brill publications through the Wikipedia Library. Hulu2024 (talk) 01:44, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
Nobody has free access to all of its pages. This is not a service that Google provides, exactly like it is not a service that Amazon provides. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:54, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing But as far as I know, some research institutions have contracts with Google Books and, like universities that pay a monthly or yearly fee, they have open access. Why don’t Wikipedia officials do something similar so that experienced users can also have free access? Even if it is limited, for example, allowing access to 10 books per month from Google Books. Hulu2024 (talk) 02:44, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
I don't think contracts are available that let people read any book or paper from any publisher. I don't see how that could possibly be squared with copyright law in any jurisdiction. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:29, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
Container category removal bot/warning before publishing
Container categories are categories which should only contain subcategories and not articles or pages. These categories often get added to articles by mistake.
Is there a way there could be a warning or notice given to editors who have added a container category to a page before they publish it? An orange box that says "You've added a container category...are you sure you want to publish this revision?", perhaps?
While bot detection is definitely feasible I think that's probably where a bot's usefulness would end. In most cases the article should be recategorised into one (or more) of the content categories the container category contains, but which one requires contextual knowledge from the article that is beyond the capabilities of current technology (c.f. WP:CONTEXTBOT). Thryduulf (talk) 00:01, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
Perhaps Hotcat could detect this and expand out subcategories to use instead. For example Category:Butchers by nationality would give the list of nationality categories to choose from, or an option to create another category, if there is not a suitable one, eg Italian butchers. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 06:16, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
Lysergamides article renamed to Substituted lysergamide
The Lysergamides article was recently changed to Substituted lysergamide. This was done because lysergamide is not just a category, but a chemical (ergine), thus, technically, lysergamides other than lysergamide can be seen as substituted versions of lysergamide. I think this is an overly-technical move, as many legitimate publications use lysergamides to refer to the category. Having a category name also serve as the name of an individual chemical can cause confusion, and this may be the reason that a new term was coined for the category: ergoamide (see two refs at the beginning of the article). Thus, I propose that ergoamide is the most appropriate and aesthetically pleasing term. Wk472 (talk) 16:48, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
But if many credible publications use lysergamides and if there is a more modern term that isn't ambiguous then the decision is obvious. Wk472 (talk) 20:00, 25 February 2025 (UTC) ← My sig looks like four tildes in the preview, which lead me to believe I wasn't doing something right. The tildes should convert in the preview. The four tildes are obsolete, no? I didn't use them in my initial post…
Whether the decision is obvious or not isn't the issue. The talk page is used to discuss article content and titling. I use the tildes, and both your posts look fine. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:36, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
Thank you for reverting the name. I was pleased when I came across the new term, ergoamide, and I hope that it will eventually supercede the sloppy-sounding term, lysergamide. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wk472 (talk • contribs) 08:50, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
Creation of article indicates whether it exists in other language?
Would it be reasonable to note in the case where an article is being created (or where the option to do so when you've gone to a redline) to see whether or not such an article exists on another language wikipedia under that name? Yes, I know that it would be highly unlikely for an article to exist in zhwiki under that name, but for French and Spanish, especially for people, not that unreasonable.Naraht (talk) 21:57, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
Hi Naraht, took me a bit to figure out what you mean, you mean that you would want to see if a page in another wiki exactly matches the title of the redlink? I can see why that might be helpful. If it's something you need now, try plugging the name into Wikidata or WikiCommons and see what comes up, it's helped me a couple of times. CMD (talk) 02:34, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
Yes I can see that being useful. As long as you are aware that an academic and an adolescent pro skateboarder can have the same name, and may or may not be the same person. ϢereSpielChequers08:38, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
If nothing else, it would help with doing template:ill. And the Academic could always have started out by skateboarding to class. :) It just seems odd that cross wiki searches boil down to, go use google with site:wikipedia.org Naraht (talk) 11:13, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
WikiRPG Gadget/Extension
I had this idea a good bit ago. A gadget or extension for Wikipedia that turns it into an RPG, where you can like, get XP for making good edits and stuff, or maybe even fight enemies on wikipedia articles to make it a real rpg. This is obviously a non-serious idea, and it's just an idea to make editing a bit more fun for some, but I do think it'd be cool. Discuss in the comments, I'm excited to see what y'all add! From Rushpedia, the free stupid goofball (talk) 18:18, 28 January 2025 (UTC)
I don't want to encounter grinders spamming minor edits to level up quick. It would also buff trolls because they'd be treated as a proper enemy instead of something to deny and clean up after.[Humor]ABG (Talk/Report any mistakes here) 05:56, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
I like the idea, but the execution would be hard. also you would need to make scripts that would detect vandals, but what if the people using the script were vandals? TwineeetalkRoc14:29, 8 February 2025 (UTC)
Maybie scrap any vandal hunting ideas ab the project, since they would be hard to do without encouraging biting newcomers, but I could see maybe a system for getting XP for doing tasks like adding sources and the like, or other tasks that are simple enough that they cant be done poorly to grind for XP. An XP cap might also solve a few problems like this Wikimanisbackuwu (talk) 21:47, 27 February 2025 (UTC)
Bot for deleting user subpages if requested by said user
Could there realistically be a bot that, on request, delete user subpages? I'm not completely Sure how it would work, but I know it would need:
Deletion permission
Safeguards so that it could only delete user pages the user that created them requested (ex: user:x/page could not be deleted by user y, only user x)
Is there need for a bot to do this? Pages that are tagged for speedy deletion under criterion U1 (user request in their own userspace) are automatically placed in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion by user along with pages tagged for G7 (deletion request by the sole author in any namespace). As I write this that category is empty, suggesting that we don't need a bot. Thryduulf (talk) 22:13, 27 February 2025 (UTC)
I considered having AnomieBOT III do this at one point, but didn't because human admins were consistently on top of it. If the people who work in the area ask for a bot to reduce their workload, I'd look again. Anomie⚔12:30, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
Would a filter to identify changes from "transgender" to man, boy, girl, female, woman be appropriate
I'm seeing editors make such changes, presumably related to the Trump's making official there are only two choices, male or female. Doug Wellertalk12:19, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
Might not be a bad idea. A lot of that may start to happen in relatively unventilated corners (i.e., little-watched BLPs), and a filter could, in the first place, be helpful to figure out whether it is going to be a problem. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 12:40, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
Notifying WP:EFR of this. Also agree with the proposal, presuming it's only logging rather than completely disallowing. The amount of false positives might be pretty high, so it's best that humans take a second look at them. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:46, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
I would hope that most filters, apart from ones that deal with an urgent problem, start life by only logging, so we can get a better idea of how prevalent the problem is, how many false positives are thrown up etc. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:13, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
Is there an actual problem that needs fixing, or just the chance that there may be a problem some day? So far, it seems just the standard levels of vandalism. Cambalachero (talk) 15:20, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
I think it's a real problem - part of the problem that certain Wikipedia editors feel emboldened towards particular kinds of disruption by the current power shift in the US. Here's an example, with a specific reference to "the government" having ruled that trans women are men. Bishonen | tålk15:35, 9 February 2025 (UTC).
So? Did that user edit articles in a way that this proposed filter would catch? All I see in that link is a user explaining his view over the way the article is written. And citing big proponents of a given idea (such as the government of the US) is a way to show the weight of that idea. Cambalachero (talk) 01:43, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
That doesn't add much. Remember, the proposal here is about a specific type of vandalism (changing pronouns from biographies), and an edit filter that would detect those; not about the presence of editors with certain ideas. But before implementing a solution for a problem (which requires time, resources, and editor's work) we need to know that the problem actually exists (because if it ain't broke, don't fix it). For example, 10 or 15 examples of such vandalism reverted on the last week. Cambalachero (talk) 13:20, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
Here's a two-edit diff from a brand new account today, undoing an announcement of trans status and updating of pronouns that had happened just yesterday in the face of the subject's public announcement of trans status. No visible alarms were triggered other than reference removal. Not the precise text change originally noted by OP, but pronoun reversal and in general an example of what we're facing. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 20:53, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
What I would filter for is something along the lines of... changes from one gendered word to another (pronoun or gender-identifier), especially on articles categorized as trans-related in some way, and particularly on biography articles for trans individuals. Some false positives are inevitable and there's no way to catch everything, but it could probably get the number flagged for review down to a reasonable number and could catch a lot of the blatant "someone sweeps in and changes pronouns throughout the article" stuff. --Aquillion (talk) 20:35, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
Even "someone sweeps in and changes pronouns throughout the article" is occasionally going to be correct, such as when some notable person first publicly comes out as transgender, so human review will always be needed. However flagging them so that humans know there is a need for review seems like a very sensible idea. Thryduulf (talk) 23:56, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
Special:AbuseFilter/1200 covers most of what you mention (it flags people changing a bunch of pronouns on a trans person's page), but if people want more filters like that, diffs are useful - generally it is hard to create a useful filter without a few diffs which help to figure out patterns that can be filtered for. Galobtter (talk) 01:49, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
I saw the request for diffs so I had a look at edits I had reverted in the recent past. I thought I had more diffs to hand than I do. In many cases I see these bad edits after somebody else has already reverted them. Even so, I've found a few and I think we can extrapolate a few patterns from them. Let's try to break them up into categories and suggest some possible rules.
Replacing words for Transgender people with something incorrect or offensive:
Flag on addition of phrases "Trans identified men" and "Trans identified women". These are never legitimate except when discussing the dog-whistle phrases themselves.
Suggestion 2:
Flag on changing "trans/transgender woman/women" to a phrase containing "man/men/male/males"
Flag on changing "trans/transgender man/men" to a phrase containing "woman/women/female/females"
Suggestion 3:
Flag on addition of common slurs, particularly when used to replace "trans" or "transgender". Whitelist articles that specifically discuss the slurs as they will need to contain them.
Replacing "Cisgender" with something incorrect or nothing at all:
(Not sure how much a filter can help with this type.)
The Ferengis:
I didn't find any examples of this in my recent reverts but we should probably flag for changing any gendered term to "males" or "females". I'm not sure if my suggestion 2 covers this sufficiently.
And finally, here is a good example of a troll trying to leverage Trump's pronouncements as an excuse to censor Wikipedia. I don't think that can be dealt with by a filter. Maybe a FAQ would help or maybe it would just invite more of the same.
Not sure if this would count as recent enough, but this is another example, non blp but another example, this edit stayed around for a month so it would have been useful to have been flagged. It used the phrase "trans-identified males" so we might have to do quite a few variations to be able to flag this kind of language appropriately. LunaHasArrived (talk) 09:12, 17 February 2025 (UTC)
Don't have a lot of comments on the technical side but did want to drop in and say this is important work that needs to be done. Mrfoogles (talk) 17:07, 2 March 2025 (UTC)
Only 1 of those diffs is from the last week. So far, it seems like a minor problem that can be perfectly dealt with with the current anti-vandalism tools. Cambalachero (talk) 19:57, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
I don't think it's relevant, but if you need to know, I don't like edit filters. They make the watchlist increasingly busy. I understand why they are there, but I would prefer them to be added only when really necessary, when there's an actual ongoing problem to fix, not "just because", because each new filter adds some extra technical gibberish next to many watchlist entries. As said, don't fix it if it ain't broke. Cambalachero (talk) 01:06, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
@Cambalachero Tagging and logging are separate things. Tags are what you see adjacent to a watchlist entry (e.g. "possible unreferenced addition to BLP"), the log is a list of edits that have matched the given filter that you have to actively look at to be aware of. For example the edit to South Korea at 05:28, 11 February 2025 is listed in the log for filter 833 but this is unknowable if you look at the edit history or see the edit in your watchlist. Thryduulf (talk) 05:41, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
I don't see any problem with a logging only filter to attempt to catch changes in pronouns or the addition/removal of "transgender". I do, however, want to point out that a filter that looks for "trans" or "trans-" or "trans " potentially cause many false positives from science articles, where trans (and cis) can be used to describe cis–trans isomerism of a molecule. In the chemical names, this would be (properly) written as trans-(name of molecule) or cis-(name of molecule). But after it's first referred to, it is common to simply refer to "the trans isomer" or similar, rather than repeating the whole name. I suspect there may be a way to account for this in the filter design to reduce the false positives. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez | me | talk to me!20:06, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
Yeah. That's definitely a risk. If the filter can handle it, it might make sense to do something like:
On any article, if they mess with "transgender", "trans woman" or "trans man" then apply the filter. The risk of false positives is small.
Only apply the filter on "trans" if the article has categories indicating that it is about transgender people or topics or if "trans" is linked to an article about a transgender topic.
I think that would be enough to avoid stomping on any chemistry articles, unless there are any transgender chemists who specialise in isomerism, in which case I guess that's one to whitelist.
Is this idea limited to just English Wikipedia? If so, then a gadget perhaps. Of course, a user would have to go to user preferences to enable that. For logged-out users, that's a huge challenge, and an edit filter would be too limiting. If the issue goes beyond English Wikpedia, then why not take this to Meta-wiki RFC? George Ho (talk) 18:41, 17 February 2025 (UTC); edited, 20:05, 17 February 2025 (UTC)
Really not sure why a gadget would be more useful than an edit filter, as those already have the functionality we're looking for. And yes, this is for the English Wikipedia. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 19:22, 17 February 2025 (UTC)
Personally, I'm not a fan of edit filtering except in Commons and to combat spamming and questionable sources. As I fear, any more of edit filtering would lead to more outrage and attempts to bypass the filter. IMO, a gadget would appease those who would make preferences as they see fit without having to edit (over and over probably).George Ho (talk) 19:35, 17 February 2025 (UTC); struck, 20:05, 17 February 2025 (UTC)
As I fear, any more of edit filtering would lead to more outrage and attempts to bypass the filter. To clarify, we're talking about a filter for logging, not for disallowing the edits. We already have more than a thousand edit filters for various purposes, and many of them just log the edit in the edit filter log (the edit isn't even tagged in the history page, and shows up as normal). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 19:54, 17 February 2025 (UTC)
Someone seeking to make such edits would not activate a gadget that logged the edit (or that tried to block it), so I don't think it would help. isaacl (talk) 19:55, 17 February 2025 (UTC)
Given the recent ANI, Le Point, Sambaji situations (See the most recent The Signpost coverage and also List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia), where editors have faced persecution for edits they made, I believe a creation of a process for making anonymous edit is needed. I drafted a rough prototype at User:Ca/Anonymous edits. Any ideas for improving the process are welcome. In particular, I am still working out what should happen if an anoymized edit was reverted by a good-faith user. Catalk to me!12:15, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
One thing that immediately springs to mind is that what is described here are not really anonymous edits, but edits where the identity of the author is confidential and only known to an admin. This makes me extremely worried about the wisdom of a volunteer admin taking on such a responsibility when the stakes are so high, the security of their own identity, and their ability to self-assess whether they live in 'safe circumstances' (notably, most people in Western democracies that have not interacted with the justice system do not feel threatened by it... until they do). Not to mention the potential blowback from a Wikipedia policy/process implicitly or explicitly vouching for any of these things.
I think this is a noble goal but very risky as currently conceived. Investigating means of facilitating supervised, cryptographically-secure edits seem more feasible to me. – Joe (talk) 12:31, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
A pseudonymous right to disappear might be better - a method of allowing a permanent namechange, logged possibly with Arbitration rather than an admin, which is agnostic for the reason as to why the person wants the namechange. Old account is shut down and locked. New account is opened with no technical information indicating that the new account is the old one. It would have to adhere to new account restrictions like ECR but it would allow a person afraid that their identity was compromised in a way that might threaten their safety to disappear without having to stop editing altogether. this would require changes to WP:CLEANSTART and there would have to be a method to prevent this from being exploited for socking. Simonm223 (talk) 14:36, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
There are limitations to the effectiveness of such a scheme. Basically, anyone can apply the duck test, and non-Wikipedian actors are not constrained by any of our policies in rooting out the possible identity of an editor. We can make it as hard as possible for governments or other agencies to discover the real life identities of editors, but an agency with sufficient resources and will can probably eventually discover the real life identity of any active editor. That said, we should do everything we can to hinder efforts to discover real-life identities of WP editors. Donald Albury16:18, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
I agree that there is a big risk in a single admin handling such responsibilities. Perhaps a softer version of the proposal can be implemented, where the roles of an oversighter is expanded to allow the deletion of usernames on edits upon request under reasonable concern of future harassment. Catalk to me!09:20, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
It's an interesting idea with many possible comments. My primary thought is that this doesn't require an administrator. I also agree this should be labelled as 'proxied', there are several other possibilities, rather than 'anonymous'. That's because anyone making the potential edit is far from anonymous and carry for themselves many potential risks. -- zzuuzz(talk)16:49, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
Seems a good a place as any to put this. Here's a process I've been thinking about, which has some overlap with this proposal.
First, an account -- let's call it AnonymizerBot -- is set up with an IP block exemption to allow it to connect via proxy.
A user wishing to be anonymous sends a message to the bot via Signal or similarly secure platform.
[one-time step to verify the user is who they say they are]. Someone with better cryptographic knowledge than me would need to come up with a step to hash the user's Signal contact for future reference.
AnonymizerBot checks to ensure the user is in good standing (no active sanctions, edit count above a certain threshold, account age over a certain threshold, and not on a manually updated list of users who cannot use this service). It also checks to see if the user has edited the page in the last X months (I do not think there would be community support for someone making some edits with their account and some edits anonymously).
Assuming the user is in good standing and has made no recent edits, the request is added to an anonymized queue for review by some user group akin to pending changes reviewers (perhaps it's even an extension of pending changes, but with different criteria for reviewers). These reviews are organized in two categories, based on a variety of factors (e.g. the size of the edit, an ORES (or similar) evaluation, the experience level of the user [perhaps whether they're on a bot's whitelist], etc. We would also need to determine how/whether to log reviews and how to select reviewers (not just trust, but security reasons):
Changes that require a single approval, at which point AnonymizerBot will make the edit. (How to take an input from anonymous editors that can be parsed into an actual change is another technical challenge). This is similar to pending changes.
Changes that require some higher threshold to be accepted, such as an OK by multiple reviewers or some consensus process among reviewers.
The key difference between this and the process above is that no identifiable editor is actually making the log, so the WMF has no information to be subpoenaed other than the proxy address the bot connects from. The bot in turn should have no logs apart from an encrypted list of users who can use it. There are several challenges in here, granted, but it's another idea... — Rhododendritestalk \\ 20:08, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
How would the bot have no logs? Would we need every edit it makes to be suppressed? Or do you just mean there wouldn't be a log of who uses it? JJPMaster (she/they) 19:02, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
I'm posting this in the idea lab because it's more open-ended, but I've been giving some thought to how Wikipedia functions from a casual reader's perspective. Editors have been worrying about LLMs as they invade Wikipedia's space as a search tool where people Google something and then pull up the associated Wikipedia page. But many readers are simply interested in browsing Wikipedia and going down rabbit holes, and that's somewhere we could excel if we were to do more for these readers. Our navigational tools aren't the greatest. Right now we have:
The main page, which could be improved but works okay for giving people a few articles each day.
Categories, which are not intuitive to a lot of people.
Outlines, which would need quality checks, and are well-hidden so that most people don't know about them.
Portals, which were popular historically but are increasingly hidden.
Sidebars and navboxes, which work well but aren't accessible on mobile.
Categories and navigation templates are more technical in nature, while outlines and portals are obscure because editors (as opposed to readers) dislike them. I'm interested in hearing what others think about this sort of thing. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸00:46, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
Statistically, most readers click on a maximum of one link per session. Usually, that link is in the article's lead. (The most popular link is the official link for a company/organization/film/etc., but the second most popular link is something in the lead of the article.)
I suspect that people who are really doing the "rabbit hole" aren't looking for organized lists. They are playing their own personal version of Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy: they read, click an interesting link, read some more, click another interesting link, and so forth. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:32, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
This isn't meant to appeal to all readers. It's meant to appeal to the readers who would be interested in this. And of course Wikipedia isn't used for browsing when we don't provide highly visible options to do so. That's why I'm hoping someone will come along with constructive input. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸23:46, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
What sort of navigation are you thinking of? I would wager that outlines and portals are not much better than the main page of a topic, where you would expect the links to be similar, just embedded in more context. This likely applies to navboxes too, although at least those are roughly constrained to a single screen. For category navigation, that's a longstanding challenge but we have H:DEEPCAT, which helps to some extent. Missing from your list is Special:Random. CMD (talk) 02:30, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
I think the Village Pump wasn't the right place to post this, so here it is: I think people can talk on a discussion forum whilst contributing to make a free and open-source encyclopedia... We should have two boards, one is related to Wikipedia, and the other one is any topic alike. We may have to change What Wikipedia Is Not, but I find this as a great idea. A editor from mars (talk) 06:23, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
It would be interesting to have a "suggested edit" feature, whereby users —any users, experienced or new ones— could draft and suggest individual edits they're not too sure about and that they thus maybe don't want to immediately go live. Currently this staging can be done on the Talk page, but a "suggested edit" feature would provide another, possibly more direct mechanism. Once the suggestion is made, any other users could accept the edit – or just let it linger. Obviously, the longer any suggested edit lingers, the more likely the attempt to accept it would generate an edit conflict, at which point the suggestion would need to be manually worked in. This would be somewhat similar to —but also different from— the Wikipedia:Pending changes feature. "Suggested edits" could be submitted for any article, even by users who do have the right to just full-on edit the page. Perhaps the submitter of the suggested edit could even set a threshold i.e. this suggestion needs to be voted for by at least n other editors to go live. This feature would basically be an instrument of self-restraint and confidence and consensus-building, which could avoid some potential for controversy and friction and eventually overbearing "policing" altogether. It would set apart edits that really clearly should go in, and go in right away, from those it's quite reasonable to disagree on. Because once those are conflated, that can tempt overbearing policemen to treat constructive contributions very non-constructively. So I don't know, maybe a technical fix like this could avoid any such friction, and reduce opportunities for would-be self-appointed policemen to reach for the foot-guns. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 18:45, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
I remember reading about a similar proposal not long ago, and that could definitely be interesting to explore. Something inbetween pending changes and edit requests, making Wikipedia more Git-like, is a tempting idea, although I'd have to find the previous discussion as I remember some important points were brought up there. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:38, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
For a period of time, an article feedback tool was deployed to selected articles on English Wikipedia that solicited suggestions. The community reached a consensus not to pursue a full deployment. The request for comments discussion in question used a now out-of-vogue format of commenters expressing a viewpoint and like-minded individuals signing up to support the view (without any opposes being collected), so without re-reading the whole thing, my recollection is that a significant factor was that the signal to noise ratio was extremely low (the report from the developer team stated that 12% of comments were useful). This made it both a poor investment of volunteer time, and a disincentive for volunteers to spend time examining the feedback, which resulted in backlogged queues. Anyone considering developing a new feature along these lines should look for a way to mitigate the problems encountered in the past. isaacl (talk) 04:31, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
You fail to make the case that the added benefit is worth the added costs—both short-term (developer time) and long-term (increased complexity, resulting in increased learning curve for newcomers). As you have noted, anyone can simply start a new thread to "suggest" an edit. ―Mandruss☎ IMO. 11:51, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
Download pages as HTML?
Why you can download pages as a PDF file but not as a single HTML file with no scripts or stylesheets? I think you should be able to. 90.154.73.20 (talk) 09:14, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia pages are delivered as HTML files as default and all web browsers should allow you to save them, most with the option of making them self-contained. For example, using Firefox, you can right click on the page and select "Save page as...", which will be default use the "Web page, complete" format. – Joe (talk) 09:46, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
Update: apparently, there's something called "&action=render" when a page will look like this and can be saved as a single HTML file. However, this produces slightly malformed HTML (no doctype, for example). I wonder why nobody made this a Wikipedia skin... 90.154.73.20 (talk) 10:07, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
Saving in "complete" format will give you a single file that looks the same as it does live by inlining the CSS and JS, if that's what you mean. Otherwise, saving just the HTML file will give you an unstyled view similar to your link above (which delivers just a fragment of the page, intended to be embedded elsewhere). The Wikipedia server doesn't need to do anything special to support this. It's a fundamental feature of the HTTP protocol. If you want to see Wikipedia pages without styles or Javascript, your browser probably has a setting for that too. – Joe (talk) 10:20, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
saving just the HTML file will give you an unstyled view similar to your link above - this will look good only if you use the "&action=render" parameter in the URL, otherwise (at least with Vector-2022) it looks really ugly.
Saving in "complete" format will give you a single file that looks the same as it does live by inlining the CSS and JS - for me saving in complete format creates a folder with all images, CSS and JS. I'm using Firefox. 90.154.73.20 (talk) 10:23, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
I believe one issue the encyclopaedia faces is contributions from new or IP editors in which information is added but not sourced.
My suggestion in response to this is that new or IP editors face a prompt before their edits are published along the lines of:
If you have added information to this article, have you provided an appropriate reference?
...with 'Yes' and 'No' buttons, and one for other kinds of edits (or it could be a two-part questionnaire).
Answering no would provide the editor with further information about Wikipedia's referencing policy and direct them to provide a source – with information too about correct formatting.
This seems to me a simple enough imposition to counter such edits. Any thoughts on the proposal would be much appreciated.
I believe the technical capability for something similar already exists, able to prompt users for a certain number of times, although I can't find what it was called and what happened to testing/deployment. CMD (talk) 06:18, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
I've been thinking about the thousands of sportspeople stubs on Wikipedia this evening, and I think it would be a good idea for the community to come up with an idea to address them.
While I'm not familiar with the lore, I'm aware that at one point there was a user who made thousands of these stubs for Olympic sportspeople, and I assume based on the volume that others must have participated in this as well. The end result of this is a steady stream of these articles in AfD, which I think is counterproductive.
AfD takes time, and with 70 odd articles being added to it every day, anything that reduces the total amount of time editors need to spend discussing AfDs, and the amount of time administrators spend closing AfDs, would be a net positive to the project. I feel as though either all of these sportspeople stubs should remain, per WP:NOTPAPER, or we should find a way to carefully nuke the whole lot per WP:NOTEVERYTHING. Getting rid of them one by one creates a very choppy browsing experience, for the one person who does want to know who won a specific race in Spain in 1932. I looked around and I didn't see this having been discussed in-depth prior to this, but if I missed a previous discussion please let me know. Kylemahar902 (talk) 00:29, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
I am really glad that Kylemahar902 has made this point - I've been going through and nominating a lot of articles for deletion and there's still so many more to do. I can't do too many at once as we need time to properly look for sources. I'm not entirely sure what we can do but I think we need to at least talk about it. RossEvans19 (talk) 02:13, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
Oh, are we doing that thing again where we're trying to prove those people who say that there's no such thing as a stupid question wrong? How fun! But if that's not what this is, I have a few questions of my own. Is your reading comprehension level above that of the average third grader? Are there any other pointless and insulting questions you'd like to add at this time? Dr. Duh🩺 (talk) 07:23, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
You didn't do anything wrong. I don't mean to assume, but I believe Dr. Duh was replying to the user above them. There's nothing wrong with sending articles to AfD, that's why it exists. I don't want to start any arguments about the merits of deletion, though, that's not really what this is about. Kylemahar902 (talk) 13:13, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
To ask my question in a more verbose, and therefore possibly less misunderstandable way:
Approximately 99% of Wikipedia editors don't spend their days looking around for articles they can send to AFD. This is, therefore, an unusual behavior. People who do this probably enjoy the work at some level, because if they didn't, they're WP:VOLUNTEERS and would presumably stop doing it.
So: What's the appeal for you, @RossEvans19? You've nominated 25 articles in the last week. Do you like this work, or do you feel like it's some sort of obligation? Do you feel a sense of accomplishment when you find a subject that should be deleted? Is it satisfying to think you have protected Wikipedia from having two outdated sentences about an athlete such as Taku Morinaga? Do you feel like you're protecting the subjects themselves? In short, why do you do this? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:12, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
I don't think this type of questioning directed at an individual editor is the best way to discuss potential improvements to either the editor's workflow or that of the overall process. For process improvements, I think it would be more effective if you would state the reason for your inquiries up front (for example, I'm trying to understand editor motivations to nominate articles for deletion so we can adjust the process to keep the incoming rate to a manageable level), and solicit opinions from all editors. isaacl (talk) 18:25, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
If anyone else has nominated an unusually large number of athlete articles for deletion recently, I'd be happy hear from them, too. The >99% of us who contribute only in other ways, or who share Phil's sentiment below, aren't really going to be able to answer the question usefully. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:43, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
I realize you don't participate in AfD really at all, and especially not on sportspeople, but 25 articles in a week is not "unusually large". And clearing the encyclopedia of non-encyclopedic topics seems like a pretty straightforward motivation. JoelleJay (talk) 19:05, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
I've only made 14 edits at AFD so far this month, which I'm sure is less than a day's work for you and the others who spend a lot of time in that area. Of course, I usually only comment if I think the nomination is wrong or otherwise problematic in some way, or if there's no sign of a consensus forming, so I review far more than I post in, and my comments (example, example, example) usually take a lot longer than to write than someone saying "Delete because I've WP:NEVERHEARDOFIT and I couldn't find any obviously reliable sources within 30 seconds".
Spot-checking Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Sportspeople over the last month, it appears that this list usually has 50 to 90 AFDs listed each week. That means that 25 is a lot – up to 50% of the week's noms. Perhaps of greater relevancy if you're nominated 25 Japanese athletes and can't read enough Japanese to do a valid BEFORE search in Japanese sources, Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Japan normally has about 10 AFDs listed. Adding 25 triples the workload for our limited number of Japanese speakers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:51, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
It's perplexing that this sentiment is always expressed in terms of increasing workload for volunteers, but never any consideration about the fact that these articles exist whatsoever also increases the workload. People can ignore the AfDs the same way they can ignore the stubs. Also, let me ask, why are you so opposed to getting rid of bad content on Wikipedia? I get you got paid to buy into the "all content added is good content" canard the WMF has always loved peddling, but the fact you regularly show up to complain about anyone taking issue with people dumping poor-quality content onwiki is as inscrutable to me as you thinking someone who methodically nominates stuff for AfD has a screw in their head loose. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchstalk21:14, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
@David Fuchs ignoring the bad faith assumptions in your comment, I share similar (but not identical) perspectives to WAID about deletion and notability. The issue is not with deleting articles about subjects we shouldn't have, it's with deleting articles about subjects we should have. Every article about a notable subject that gets deleted harms the encyclopaedia in two ways - firstly it means that people looking for neutral encyclopaedic information about that subject are less likely to find it, and secondly it discourages contributors from adding content. It's much easier to delete an article that someone else has written than it is to write a new article, especially if you're new here and the subject you want to write about is one somebody might want to promote (whether you are promoting it is barely relevant). Thryduulf (talk) 21:42, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
It's much easier to delete an article that someone else has written than it is to write a new articleThat is objectively untrue. It takes one person under two minutes to create a new article, which in these sportsperson cases often involved a boilerplate intro and a single citation to a stats database. It takes 7+ days and at least two editors to delete an article, with noms expected to be able to rebut any existing refs in it, many of which weren't even added by the creator. JoelleJay (talk) 23:24, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
It takes 7+ days and at least two editors to delete an article, with noms expected to be able to rebut any existing refs in it – in reality, that's not usually the case. Almost every active sportsperson AFD right now is something like Played 16 times professionally in 2014, hasn't played professionally since, fails GNG; Fails WP:SPORTSCRIT and WP:NOLY. Eliminated in 1st round of heats.; Non-notable athlete., etc. – Then the vast majority get a few drive-bys like Does not meet guidelines for athlete a per nom. / per nom, Insufficient coverage by independent, reliable secondary sources to pass WP:GNG. and then get deleted, with little actual evidence of decent BEFORE searches being performed. Its actually very easy to get these deleted. I recall one user who not long ago mass nomm'ed about 60 figure skaters for deletion in 30 minutes with no BEFORE – some of which even did have decent sources, and almost all of them were soft-deleted, except for the tiny handful that got some users actually recognizing the notability of the nominated subjects. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:40, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
7+ days and 2+ people (nom and closer) is required for every non-speediable AfD... That is still more total effort than was put into creating many of these articles. However I do think that noms based only on failing a sport-specific criterion should be challenged and procedurally addressed for not supplying a valid deletion rationale (if the nom doesn't amend their statement to show BEFORE was done). JoelleJay (talk) 00:40, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
"It's much easier to delete an article that someone else has written than it is to write a new article"—that's simply not the case, otherwise we wouldn't have these perennial questions and we wouldn't see Wikipedia's article count grow unrestrainedly. I suppose you can argue this is true at a single article level, but the entire problem with mass creation has always been that there's no way of deleting even bad articles with the rapidity they can be created. If that weren't the case then there would have never been any need for the LUGSTUBS remedy. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchstalk21:52, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
@David Fuchs, I remind you that Wikipedia:Editing policy – our policy, not the WMF's – says "Wikipedia summarizes accepted knowledge. As a rule, the more accepted knowledge it contains, the better."
I just spent an hour looking at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Naoki Hara. I picked it because the OP here nominated it for deletion. I found multiple news sources. Apparently neither the nom nor the other respondent there found any.
I assume the difference is that I deliberately looked for sources in Japanese, and they didn't. As you will see on the AFD page, I conclude – from the sources I found, with my limited abilities, which mostly involve knowing that the List of newspapers in Japan exists and being able to copy and paste the BLP's Japanese name into a search box – that this BLP is possibly notable in GNG terms, and that we're probably better off having the article than not having it. Someone who could actually read Japanese, or who checked more than four Japanese-language newspapers, might think the case is even strong.
When I look at nominations like this, I think that it's much easier to send an article to AFD than to provide an accurate response to the nomination. What do you think?
I'm not saying that anyone is acting in bad faith. Sometimes a nom seems like a good idea, because you personally don't have the necessary information or access to the necessary sources to do a reliable WP:BEFORE search, or because it's actually really complicated. (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fudge cake is an example of that: good sources are hard to find under piles of recipes, and when you do find them, some give exactly opposite definitions to distinguish Fudge cake from Chocolate cake.) But I do feel like some articles, especially those that aren't about English-language subjects, are much easier to take to AFD than to create or to defend. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:45, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
As I note in my comment at that AfD, the coverage you found is routine transactional announcements, passing mentions in game recaps, and stats profiles. Noms/!voters generally do not even mention, let alone link, such sources because they are expected for every single athlete and do not count towards notability. JoelleJay (talk) 23:15, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
The GNG, unlike NCORP, does not discount "routine" sources. Attention from the world at large is still attention from the world at large, even if it is predictable attention. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:30, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
NOT discounts routine coverage, and this is implemented at NSPORT. routine news coverage of announcements, events, sports, or celebrities, while sometimes useful, is not by itself a sufficient basis for inclusion of the subject of that coverage. Routine coverage of transaction announcements is exactly what we dismiss for sportspeople. JoelleJay (talk) 23:36, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
And WP:ROUTINE names "sports scores", but not "more than Wikipedia:One hundred words, including a description of the athlete's educational background".
Perhaps the community needs to have a discussion about what's really "routine", so that we can have a shared understanding. Is it about brevity ("sports scores")? The lack of continued coverage ("wedding announcements" – though not necessarily the weddings themselves)? The mere predictability of it (the Super Bowl happens every year)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:54, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
WP:NOT, which I cited, specifically states "routine coverage of announcements". "The community" clearly rejects these barely-refactored press releases, otherwise it would not have reached the global consensus that it did. If you are not familiar with NSPORT and typical sports coverage, perhaps you should do what I did before ever participating in an NSPORT AfD and read 200+ old 10kb+ discussions in the sportsperson delsort archives first. JoelleJay (talk) 00:05, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
Is the content in a "routine coverage of announcements" more like "Alice has announced that Bob is being transferred" or more like the non-announcement statement that "Bob attended This School"?
An the original version (2007) of that sentence said "Routine and insubstantial news coverage, such as announcements, sports, gossip, and tabloid journalism, are not sufficient basis for an article"; it was later "Routine news coverage and matters lacking encyclopedic substance". The discussions on the talk page is at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not/Archive 15#Tabloid news and was focused on Tabloid journalism, defined in that discussion as "the gossipy crap magazines". I doubt that a couple hundred words describing a BLP's background and achievements, even if that news article was written in the context of a "routine" news event, was what they intended for that sentence to cover. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:34, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
I also participate virtually exclusively in controversial AfDs... Brief, unsupported arguments are just as common among keep !votes, which more often take the form of presuming SIGCOV exists somewhere even when, e.g., someone has shown only passing mentions exist in the archives of 27 sports news sites across four different languages. Sportsperson AfDs often come in waves; sometimes regulars come across a walled garden of articles that were all solely justified in their creation by a deprecated criterion and are similar enough in time period and level of play that they have similar SIGCOV predictions as well. The number of articles at AfD has lately been consistently much lower than what I've seen the past. JoelleJay (talk) 22:53, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
I just want to say before I explain my reasons why, that it seems like I've done something wrong - I'm just a bit confused why your asking me about this. The truth is, I do like it, and it is an obligation. Articles about footballers who played once 10 years ago need to be deleted, they aren't notable. I think I might be misunderstanding you and your genuinely just curious xD RossEvans19 (talk) 01:58, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
What do you like about it? For example, some people enjoy making Wikipedia conform to the rules.
To whom do you feel obligated?
By the way, this sentence: Articles about footballers who played once 10 years ago need to be deleted, they aren't notable is completely wrong. It doesn't matter when they played, because notability is not temporary. They don't "need" to be deleted, and the usual thing for someone who played on a team is to not delete but instead redirect it to the team's page. And nothing you've said actually proves that they're not notable. Someone "who played once 10 years ago" could have gotten an enormous amount of attention; someone who played 10 times one year ago might have gotten none.
I'm not doing anything wrong. These players aren't notable. And the fact you've replied to this, which means you would have seen my other post and ignored it, means you are intentionally misgendering me. RossEvans19 (talk) 13:12, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
How can you be certain that these players aren't notable? Did you check for Japanese-language news sources, or only English ones?
There is unfortunately not a list of Japanese players who have played 1-25 games in Japan, but there is lists for designated special players, which I have been adding redirects to today :) - One more thing, you added one they, but it still says "and he's managed to nominate 25 in the space of one week"
Most of the discussions on this issue have taken place on the NSPORT and WP:N talk pages. See also WP:LUGSTUBS for an example of other approaches to cleaning up sportsperson stubs. JoelleJay (talk) 02:26, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
Unless they're wrong in some way I don't think their existence is a pressing concern. Maybe not ideal, but is it a serious issue? PARAKANYAA (talk) 03:27, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
Some editors are annoyed by the existence of short articles. Their thinking seems to be that if it's worth having, it's worth having hundreds of words immediately. (A quarter of our existing articles have less than 150 words.)
And some of this is a real shift in standards. Two decades ago, writing "Nobody knows what his full name is, but John played professionally for the Blue Team in Smallville on 32 Octember 1898[1]", then that was considered a net positive contribution. Now it's considered, at most, to be worth a list entry. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:38, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
There have been many discussions about this. Further WP:MASSCREATE is against consensus, but there has never been consensus to do anything to existing stubs outside of the normal editing process. There is a wide variety of differences in scope and content in stubs, and you can be bold with any edits. CMD (talk) 05:23, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
I just read the above comments. Thanks to @JoelleJay for the link to prior discussions, and I hope I'm not opening a can of worms here. I actually have no strong opinion either way, but my point is we should be aiming for consistency. If consensus is that these stubs are worth keeping, and that mass deletion is too risky, then I'd like to see a way to stop having them flood AfD. Yes, there's plenty of more pressing issues facing the encyclopedia, but apparently this keeps coming up and there hasn't yet been a solution. If the issue was serious enough to warrant all the past drama, then surely it's serious enough to solve now, right? Kylemahar902 (talk) 11:31, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
The only way to stop them flooding AfD is to either sanction individual editors for being disruptive or improve the articles to their standards before they get there. Consensus of the past discussions has never been in favour of mass deletion, and rightly so, and trying to get around that by flooding AfD is disruptive. Thryduulf (talk) 12:13, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
I agree with you that if consensus isn't in favour of mass deletion, then sending them to AfD en masse could be considered disruptive. Just thinking out loud here—I wonder if it would be an idea to have AfDs for these sportspeople stubs automatically close as keep, unless an additional flag is added. I wouldn't want to go so far as to sanction people who send them to AfD, or stop the ability to AfD them altogether, but maybe a method of making people think twice about whether or not it's worth the hassle of AfDing these articles would be enough to stop the flow. An alternative could be to only allow prods of sportspeople stubs, to cut out the wasted time of the discusson and review, but administrators would still have to go through and clear out all the prods in that case. Would love to hear some more ideas if anyone wants to help me brainstorm here. Kylemahar902 (talk) 13:31, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
That suggestion would go against the recent strong global consensus that all sportsperson articles must cite a source of IRS SIGCOV in their article, in addition to the subject meeting GNG. The problem isn't "too many articles at AfD", it's that too many articles were created in the first place. JoelleJay (talk) 19:28, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
Whether or not the articles should have been created is, at this point, irrelevant. They were created and they do exist. There is a consensus that the articles must cite significant coverage, a consensus that the articles should not be deleted without review but no consensus about how to resolve the tension that creates. "Too many articles at AfD" is still a problem, even if it isn't the first problem in the pipeline, because it means articles are not getting the review that consensus says they need before deletion. The best way, in my view, to resolve the issue is to make a full BEFORE search mandatory for stubs of sportspeople created more than circa a year ago, and require that a summary of this search be included with any nomination. That would slow down the rate of AfDs to a level that is manageable by reducing the number that are being sent there unnecessarily.
Before anyone howls in protest about how this requires more effort from nominators than was put into their creation, firstly that is not necessarily actually true, and secondly you've already succeeded in massively increasing the amount of effort required to create an article, and in massively increasing the effort required from those reviewing articles at AfD, so slightly to moderately increasing the effort required to delete an article is simply partially correcting this imbalance. If you require more effort from others you cannot complain if others require a comparable increase in effort from you. Thryduulf (talk) 22:08, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
OTOH, Ross says that he'sthey're taking the time to properly look for sources, and he's they've managed to nominate 25 in the space of one week. If we really do have a volume problem at AFD, I'd suggest first trying to recruit a couple of people with excellent search skills to respond to the nominations. Only if alternatives fail would I consider something drastic, like a per-editor cap on the number of nominated articles per week/month. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:21, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
We had that with WP:ARS - a "group of people" who have excellent search skills, deep knowledge of the NOTE rules, good writing skills. Successfully expanded and saved thousands of articles. However the community banned most of the editors because they thought it was a canvassing board (the deleters successfully portrayed them as such), we no longer have any "group of people" to save articles from deletion, and likely never will again. It's wishful thinking. AfD is dominated by a deletion-mindset, by its nature. It's the old got a hammer / looks like a nail problem. Deleters should be held to higher standards, they weild a powerful tool, they should be accountable for an obvious lack of WP:BEFORE, in most cases that is the problem. -- GreenC18:02, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
[people nominating articles for deletion] should be accountable for an obvious lack of WP:BEFORE absolutely. Despite main howls of protests over the years I'm still not convinced there is any reason why a BEFORE search that includes looking in the place sources are most likely to exist should not be a mandatory aspect of a deletion nomination on the grounds of notability. A google search in English is absolutely fine when the topic under discussion is 21st century American popular culture, it is absolutely not sufficient when the topic is 19th century railway stations in rural India or 1970s footballers in Japan. Thryduulf (talk) 18:10, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
I would support pushing nominators to summarize their BEFORE approach. However BEFORE absolutely does not require exhaustively checking news archives. JoelleJay (talk) 19:18, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
I'd like to know your opinion: Say we have someone who has passing mentions in modern times as the "greatest athlete in the history of Niger" (but the mentions are not considered as sigcov), and they competed in the 1960s. Nigerien archives go back only about five years (everything before that has gone dead or was never put on the internet in the first place). What do you think an appropriate-level BEFORE search would encompass? BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:29, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
If we do not have notability-demonstrating sources to build an article, we should not have that standalone article. Brief mentions of greatness do not satisfy any notability criteria, and without at least one SIGCOV source even their sport-specific achievements cannot be presumed to have garnered SIGCOV. That's what the global consensus decided. This is especially true for BLPs, where we need particular care WRT NPOV. The same Nigerien sources you presume might have SIGCOV of someone's sporting career might also have coverage of significant controversies involving them, discussion of which would be required for a biography to be neutral. A stub simply relaying their stats and repeating the "greatest athlete" claim would thus be inappropriate as a biography, which is supposed to encompass a person's life. Passing mentions should not be the basis of an article no matter what they say, as by definition they do not explore the subject deeply enough that we can presume they reflect the overall treatment of the subject in IRS. JoelleJay (talk) 21:58, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
I didn't ask your thoughts on whether it is appropriate to have a stub without sigcov on the greatest Nigerien athlete ever. I asked: what do you think would be an appropriate level of BEFORE searching if one was considering nominating the greatest Nigerien athlete ever for deletion? BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:14, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
The more generic way to ask this question would be: If you personally have knowledge (e.g., from reading sources that namecheck the subject as the greatest Nigerian athlete ever) that leads you to believe that sources probably exist, but those sources are not FUTON-compliant ("full text on the net" or "free text on the net"), should you:
assume the subject isn't notable after all, and send it to AFD, or
assume that the problem is in your ability to access the sources, instead of their non-existence?
Sorry I didn't see this earlier. I think a search in the local language, as outlined in BEFORE, should be enough for a topic where the only claim to notability is a couple passing mentions of being the "greatest Nigerien athlete ever". What little we can objectively say about them can be covered in other articles, there is no reason for a standalone. JoelleJay (talk) 17:55, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
I think a search in the local language, as outlined in BEFORE, should be enough – Do you mean a 45-second Google search in the language or actually looking at newspapers from that country, where coverage is most likely to be? Also, while not on Niger, an issue I have with many of these active AFDs on Olympians is no search at all is being performed in the local language. Do you think all the Olympian AFDs going on right now are appropriate given that no search in the language is being performed? BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:10, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
I think @LibStar would be well advised to outline the products of their BEFORE in their noms, especially what searches they've done in local languages. But equally you should recognize that the community came to a global consensus that sportsperson articles must cite a source of IRS SIGCOV, and this applies even to topics where coverage would be difficult to access. No carve-out was accepted at the RfC. JoelleJay (talk) 19:28, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
Too late now, but honestly, I don't think SPORTCRIT ever would have been passed if the proposal was made clear to require all historic athletes to have sigcov with deletion allowed en masse with no BEFORE search otherwise. I don't remember that ever really being discussed there (that one could mass nominate articles on old athletes without BEFORE). Cbl62 originally called its passage A complete travesty ... one that was never, ever supported by consensus.BeanieFan11 (talk) 19:44, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
From memory (and I've not got time right now to verify this) but I believe that when it was passed it was explicitly stated that mass deletion was explicitly not supported by consensus and should not happen. Thryduulf (talk) 22:33, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
And one more thought. If consensus is that we don't want to mass delete, but we don't want to limit them going to AfD, or otherwise take action on the issue, then in that case we could publish a guideline explaining that position. I can't help but feel as though this will continue to come up as long as we ignore it. Kylemahar902 (talk) 13:47, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
What is the precise issue that is coming up? Articles being created, and articles going to AfD, are normal parts of the editing process. That is not something being ignored, it is expected. If 70 AfDs a day is too much, what is the target, and how would envisioned action on sportsstubs affect it? CMD (talk) 13:57, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
You make a great point. I do regret my wording of "as long as we ignore it", what I meant was "as long as the issue remains unaddressed." I do feel that whatever action is going to be applied to sports stubs, it should be applied consistently. As it stands right now, the action being applied is just letting them get ever-so-slowly thinned out through AfD, which really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's clear that this is something that editors care about, given the large amount of discussion on the topic and the actions taken against those who perpetuated the creation of these stubs. Maybe I'm making mountains out of molehills here, and feel free to tell me if you think so, but surely it wouldn't be a bad idea to try to clarify the community's position on sports stubs. Kylemahar902 (talk) 14:42, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
I don't know that aggregate sum of AfD results, but the article base getting ever-so-slowly thinned out is what I would expect AfD to do. If say out of every 10 articles created one should be deleted for various reasons, that's a small thinning out that still sees the overall number of articles rise, and I suspect it's a very high estimate for the percentage of articles that are deleted. CMD (talk) 09:51, 23 February 2025 (UTC)
Kyle, what you seem to be asking for is something like WP:LUGSTUBS2. It turns out that the community is deeply divided on this issue, and the status quo reflects the lack of a unitary position either to delete sports stubs in bulk or to protect them from deletion. 1.5 years later, I don't see any indication that there's been a strong shift in community feeling to either side of the debate; an attempt to "clarify the community's position" would almost certainly repeat LUGSTUBS2, i.e., expend enormous amounts of time and emotional energy without coming to a really definitive answer. "The lore" is not just some weird handle to allow grognards to flex on you; it's an important record of what the community will and won't accept. I think unfamiliarity with these past transactions has led you to massively underestimate the cost to the community of establishing "consistency" on a point where there is no consensus, but rather a sharp division of opinion. I know you mean well and I can see why the inconsistency would bother you, but this is not something that can be fixed up with a casual discussion and promulgation of a new guideline. Choess (talk) 18:06, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
Thank you Choess, I appreciate the thoughtful response. I was hesitant to post about this, but I'm glad I did, because this discussion has certainly given me a different outlook on AfD in general. Perhaps the best solution really is no solution. I would get behind @BeanieFan11's idea for a WikiCup, though. Kylemahar902 (talk) 18:44, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
No offense, but not only are you opening up a can of worms, but you are opening up a can of worms that has had something like 1 million words and counting expended on it, and is responsible for some very ugly rhetoric directed at people (sometimes long after they've left the project). I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you that you independently came up with this idea, but most of this discussion -- this reply included -- is the same people fighting the same battles now that they've been gifted another battlefield. Gnomingstuff (talk) 07:51, 23 February 2025 (UTC)
I do a lot of NPP's. Regarding sportspeople, I sure wish we had a workable notability standard. We went from one extreme ("did it for a living for one day") to "full GNG" (which approximately 0% of new sportspeople articles meet). I try to interpret what the "middle of the road" community standard is which is sort of a "1/2 GNG" with at least a a bit of content outside of stats/factoids. A FAR bigger problem are multi-criteria topic "stats only" articles (like "The 2013 season of the XYZ team" or "the XYZ tournament of the XYZ sport at the XYZ location") with zero even 1/4 GNG sources and maybe one or two of the stats turned into a sentence. There are a lot of these being created by completionists. ("I'm going to create an article from databases for each year for each team"). These are piled up in the backlog, probably because NPP'ers (like me) avoid having one of those miserable "trips to AFD" days. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:09, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
Applying my previous post to the specific topic at hand, given that we have extreme deletionists out there, and extreme inclusionists out there (who forget that we are an enclyclopedia covering material in articles) the question is unsolvable until there is a realistic wp:notablity standard (or de facto practice) for these. Without that:
The inclusionists can take 3 minutes to make an "article" out of what should be a list item and the demand a 2 hour "before" search including finding and GNG-evaluating non-english articles (or proving a negative that they don't exist) as a condition to get rid of a non-article that they took 3 minutes to make
The more extreme exclusionists out there (and they exist) applying a literal reading of selected rules can say that 99% of sportspeople articles don't meet (a rigorous interpretation of) GNG, and the community doesn't want to turn them loose and start a purge of the 99%. But the only tool they have for keeping them at bay is the ham-handed one of making ALL deletions difficult.
Solving this needs a workable notability standard for these. My idea would be that there be at least one source that is an edge case regarding being a GNG source included in the article. Finding and including such a source should be considered the main useful task of creating or keeping such an article. Making an "article" out of a database entry with only database sources isn't useful work, it's littering, and somebody who just calls for an unusually thorough "wp:before" makes it a huge job to remove each one piece of litter. Conversely, we should consider a norm for sportspeople articles that if there is an at least "close-to-GNG" source in there and a couple sentence of prose that isn't just turning a database factoid into a sentence, that the norm is to not bring it to AFD and to keep any that meet that criteria. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 22:25, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
I don't demand a "two-hour BEFORE" or any of the other extreme exaggerations that opponents of asking deletion nominators to expend any effort claim, I simply want two things:
A BEFORE search that includes looking for sources in the most likely place for such sources to exist.
Deletion nominators to summarise their BEFORE searches in their nomination. Not only will this demonstrate whether they actually have done an adequate BEFORE search, but also it helps other commenters avoid duplicating effort (if you spent an hour searching e.g. Google books then say that, so that someone else can spend their available hour searching somewhere different). 23:55, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
North, do you remember the discussion about six months ago at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 194#"Failure to thrive"? Campaign desk was an example AFD there. A couple of us found multiple reliable sources for it. Guess what? They're still not in the article. A highly experienced, well-respected (including by me) admin "cared" enough about it being unsourced to try to get it deleted on the grounds that it was uncited, but apparently didn't care enough to copy and paste the sources into the article. This doesn't require a "two-hour BEFORE"; this requires two tabs and three minutes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:16, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
My idea would be that there be at least one source that is an edge case regarding being a GNG source included in the article....Have you not read NSPORT? Has no one here read NSPORT? JoelleJay (talk) 00:33, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
Why don't you be more specific instead of just referring to an entire guidline and implying that nobody read it or missed something relevant to this discussion?
Okay, look, I can't take this anymore. I shouldn't have brought it up. I'm going to opt out of messages from this discussion. I'm not trying to upset, or offend, or hurt, I'm just trying to remove poor articles. I don't want to be involved in the discussion anymore. I appreciate everyone's time and effort. RossEvans19 (talk) 02:15, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
To clarify: NSPORT literally already says that a fully-GNG-contributing source must be cited in all sportsperson articles, regardless of whether an athlete meets a sport-specific SIGCOV-presuming criterion. We don't need to propose having "GNG edge case" sources when the guideline is already extremely clear from an extremely well-attended global consensus. That so many athlete articles do not cite an IRS SIGCOV source is a problem, as articulated by a supermajority of the policy-aware community, and if editors cannot identify sources to bring these articles into compliance then AfD is absolutely acceptable. JoelleJay (talk) 05:55, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
I bolded the part that made it a two hour before to satisfy some of the demands. To further explain, it is what it would take to analyze the sources in a non-English search to see if they are GNG grade. And doing enough of that to prove a negative when they don't exist. North8000 (talk) 03:35, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
Speaking of WP:BEFORE searches, stuff like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ismael Mahmoud Ghassab is why it should really be enforced more. A subject which it is exceedingly clear no adequate BEFORE search was done – the subject is Arabic from the pre-internet era, the nominator says they "can't read Arabic" but then immediately shifts the question of BEFORE to others and declares that anyone asking about it is just "playing games"... BeanieFan11 (talk) 22:43, 27 February 2025 (UTC)
If you know that your search was ineffective (e.g., because you searched English-language sources for a person who would have been covered only by non-English sources), you probably shouldn't send it to AFD at all. Apply a little collegial humility, you might say.
We have talked before about the misaligned incentives. If a subject is notable but the article is unsourced or weakly sourced, we actually don't want an AFD to happen at all. AFD means anyone interested in the subject needs stop working on their goals and reply before the seven-day WP:DEADLINE. But if your own goal is to force somebody else to prove that this subject is notable right now, then AFD is a very effective method of getting what you want. And, hey, if that means that other, more important articles are getting neglected or other, more important problems aren't being addressed, then that's not your fault. The universe should be providing the community with an unlimited amount of time and energy to meet your demands, or those other editors just shouldn't care whether we delete these unimportant articles about people from non-English-speaking countries. I mean, really: who actually cares if we delete this apparently accurate information? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:40, 27 February 2025 (UTC)
I agree with WhatamIdoing. There are times people are active, but they're not editing sometimes. Regarding articles, this is why I've been having a difficult time cleaning up pre-internet articles, but the only problem is I don't have experience with referencing archived newspapers. ⋆｡˚꒰ঌClara A. Djalim໒꒱˚｡⋆11:16, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
If you're having trouble finding archived newspapers, and the subject is reasonably expected to be covered in English-speaking newspapers (e.g., a non-famous US Olympic athlete from the 1980s), then try Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library. Remember that you have to search some partners individually, so you can't just rely on the big search box at the top.
If you're having trouble figuring out how to WP:CITE old newspapers, then remember that URLs are not required. You can just write this:
Journalist, Jo (29 February 1964). "Local Player Goes to the Olympics". The Local Daily News.
If I've found it in TWL, then I like to put <!-- [[WP:TWL]] --> in the |via= parameter. It's invisible to readers but gives a hint to future editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:28, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for reminding me, but I'm afraid I don't have access to those newspapers. Normally, I'm cleaning up sportspeople from outside English-speaking countries. Someone else might know it. ⋆｡˚꒰ঌClara A. Djalim໒꒱˚｡⋆14:46, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
Why is it not obvious that the solution here is to merge and redirect these stubs into lists of these sportspeople organized by sport and nationality, breaking them out into individual articles when sufficient content and sourcing exist to support individual notability? BD2412T20:13, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
The issue then becomes who do you list? And what about athletes that compete in multiple decades, and those who later become coaches, or enter other fields? BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:21, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
And then ten years from now, someone will nominate the list for deletion. "Fails NLIST. Belarusian Olympians are not discussed as a group. Fails NSTATS, NOTDATABASE" blah blah blah. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 20:48, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
Yes, except "ten years from now" would probably be "the next day".
How many of the articles in question have sources cited that go beyond establishing participation in a single major event (Olympics, major regional games, etc.) or playing for a major team for a relatively short period? If there are sources cited showing a career spanning decades, or in multiple roles, it certainly will be easier to assess notability. Donald Albury20:53, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
Some of these are for people who competed several Olympics (e.g. 1976 & 1980) or competed at a number of other international events (e.g. one's for a 1988 Yemen Olympian who competed in world championships in his event through the late 1990s). BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:55, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
We absolutely do not need to break them out by decade, for athletes in specific sports, particularly from smaller countries. The suggestion that such lists will fail NLIST is not reality. Of course athletes in a given sport in a given country will be discussed as a group. BD2412T23:10, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
Well, there's plenty of countries that have had only one Olympian in a particular sport in the history, for example. BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:27, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
Some AFD folks are very much in the Show me the money mindset; common sense does not always prevail. What's a matter of "Of course" to you and me is a matter of "Links or it didn't happen" to others. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:48, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
Edit recommendations
For new users or those who've made only one edit, we should add a "Recommended Edits" bar on top, for example how X asks you for interests and then gives you relevant tweets, have Wikipedia ask you about your interests and suggest pages. Batorang (talk) 10:07, 8 March 2025 (UTC)
That’s what the newcomer homepage is. It should be there if you click on your username at the top of the screen. If it isn’t there, you can turn it on in preferences. Roasted (talk) 15:44, 8 March 2025 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Similar ideas have already been extensively discussed before, and here again is a clear consensus against. Closing this as we don't need more pile-on opposition. Cremastra (talk) 14:19, 11 March 2025 (UTC)
Hello there,
I've been visiting Wikipedia for quite a while and I like how much info is here! But sometimes, I find myself turning to a chatbot to get the main point of an article—like with Mind at Large. Skimming didn’t quite cut it, and I needed a quick, clear explanation.
What if Wikipedia had a small AI helper—maybe a little icon tucked in the corner (like Grok on X)—that stays out of the way unless you click it? You could ask something like, “What does ‘Mind at Large’ really mean?” and it’d give you a short, simple summary. Nothing fancy, just the crux of it. I think this could help a lot of users, especially on tricky or dense topics that aren’t super clear right away.
A feature like this could make Wikipedia even more welcoming and useful, drawing in more people (like how Grok boosted X). It’d be great for articles that are hard to grasp or need a little extra clarity.
Thanks... It's not like it's [AI is] all bad. This feature will save time and get more people to Wikipedia for finding a quick, witty or however prompted solution tailored to their need from the huge pile of information. Maverick 9828 (talk) 18:27, 10 March 2025 (UTC)
then explain what's Mind at Large from wikipedia, without much digging.
Not easily possible cause this article itself is not clear enough. That's when this tool will be helpful. And you can seek it yourself to not to use it. Maverick 9828 (talk) 19:06, 10 March 2025 (UTC)
That's not a very good reason to add something to Wikipedia which we know to be expensive, bad for the environment, and also often factually incorrect. MrOllie (talk) 19:09, 10 March 2025 (UTC)
Can we not? For reasons already stated, this is a bad idea. Others have already said it better than I could, but I just wanted to add that for me personally, I would straight up stop editing wikipedia if this was implemented, not to try to make a 'statement' but because I know that I physically would not be able to comply with WP:NPOV if this was implemented. I'm sure this is the case for others as well. Froglegseternal (talk) 11:03, 11 March 2025 (UTC)
If you find the introduction to the article unclear, perhaps drop a note on the talkpage noting this. They're intended to do what you propose, provide a concise summary. CMD (talk) 11:53, 11 March 2025 (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.
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Moved from Wikipedia:Teahouse § A feature suggestion