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Firstly, Jimbo Wales agrees with me. Well, not with me directly. But with the gist of this argument, and the argument behind unreferenced-PROD. He wrote in 2006:
I really want to encourage a much stronger culture which says: it is better to have no information, than to have information like this, with no sources. Any editor who removes such things, and refuses to allow it back without an actual and appropriate source, should be the recipient of a barnstar.
Anyways...
As a New Page Patroller, I frequently draftify unsourced articles.
Not unfrequently, the creator of the article moves the draft back to mainspace, or re-creates it with the same content. The topic is frequently fringe, difficult to verify, but not necessarily PRODable or AfD'able.
What to do? There's an unsourced "article" in mainspace. It should be in draftspace, where it should be improved by the creator. It is unfit for mainspace. As one of my favourite essays points out, unsourced content is essentially digital graffitti and should be removed. The WP:BURDEN is on the creator to add references to their claims.
It isn't 2005 anymore. We shouldn't have new unsourced articles being created. They do get created, but are usually PRODed or draftified by NPPers.
Per WP:DRAFTIFY, we aren't allowed to re-draftify an article. Because of this clause, draftifying is essentially useless. All the creator has to do is move it back.
An analogy (or possibly a parable):
I would like to propose disallowing draftified articles being moved back to mainspace if the problem for which the "article" was draftified has not been fixed. Let the street cleaner take the garbage back the waste-dumper's house. 🌺 Cremastra ( talk) 15:34, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
References
Hey, this article has no sources, and I could not find any based on a few Google searches, what should we do about this ?That's something that should be said on the article's talk page, not in an AfD. In AfD, what should be said is: "Here are very good reasons why this article should be deleted". The two statements are not interchangeable. Sometimes they will address the same situation, but sometimes they won't. — Alalch E. 15:04, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
;-)
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 14:32, 19 January 2024 (UTC)The topic is frequently fringe, difficult to verify, but not necessarily PRODable or AfD'able." If it would be appropriate to boldly draftify an article, then it would appropriate (when contested without fixing the issue) to nominate it at AfD for draftification. As with a contested blank-to-redirect, for which the appropriate discussion venue is AfD per this request for comment, you don't need to request deletion in order to nominate an article at AfD. And if it is not nominated for the purpose of deletion, then a full WP:BEFORE inquiry about whether the subject is notable and so forth isn't applicable. I'd like to see the standard draftification messages more explicitly say that if an editor disagrees with the reasons for draftification, they can respond to the reasons for the move and ask (insist) that the article be restored to mainspace until there is a discussion to either delete it or make it a draft. SilverLocust 💬 19:56, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
The topic is frequently fringe, difficult to verify, but not necessarily PRODable or AfD'able—why would it not be AfDable?— Alalch E. 15:01, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
The belief that an unsourced article is "unfit for mainspace" is not supported by any policy or guideline, that seems to contradict to our core content policy of Verifiability which says
All quotations, and any material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, must include an inline citation to a reliable source that directly support the material.Emphasis added. If any editor acting in good faith says "I challenge the material in this particular unreferenced article, because it is unreferenced", does that not impose an immediate policy burden to provide references (citations) that verify the challenged material? Cullen328 ( talk) 00:25, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
title=
would be a start. (If you have external CSS, you can do it with something like<span class="tooltip" data-mouseover="mouseover text here">
in the HTML and CSS like this:.tooltip:hover::after {
cursor: help;
content: attr(data-mouseover);
background-color:peru;
z-index:5;
position:fixed;
font-size: 15px;
color: white;
padding:2px;
}
"I challenge every unsourced article just because they're unsourced"is acceptable. The burden remains on the writer. 🌺 Cremastra ( talk) 18:42, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
I spent a good solid minute trying to find the button to post an idea here, and it was very hard. Maybe we should make the add topic button more noticeable, like the Teahouse? 3.14 ( talk) 00:37, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
I'd like to propose the idea of a a COPYVIO-hunter bot, but I'm not ready to make a specific Bot request yet, and so I'd like to expose this idea here first to brainstorm it. Sometimes, copyright violations are discovered that have been present on Wikipedia for years. (The copyright-violating content at Barnabas#Alleged writings was added on 4 August 2014 and discovered 18 December 2023.) But for an alert Tea house questioner two days ago, who knows when, if ever, this would have been discovered. That's worrisome.
We have some good tools out there, such as Earwig's detector, and my basic idea is to leverage that by building a bot around it, which would apply it to articles, and either generate a report, or apply the {{ Copyvio}} template directly. A couple of additional bot tasks could streamline the human part of the investigation by finding the insertion point (Blame) and determining copy direction (IA search). There are input, performance, scaling questions, and human factors, and likely others I haven't thought of. As far as input, ideally I'd like to see a hybrid or dual-channel input of a hopper with manual feed by editors (possibly semi-automated feed by other tools), and an automated input where the bot picks urls based on some heuristic.
For performance, I launched Earwig with all three boxes checked, and it took 62 seconds to return results for Charles de Gaulle (174,627b) and 16 seconds for (randomly chosen) Junes Barny (5,563b). I'm pretty sure there are a lot more articles closer in size to the latter than the former, so let's say Earwig takes 30 seconds per search on average; multiplying that by {{ NUMBEROFARTICLES}} gives us 6.43 years to search all of Wikipedia with a dumb, single-threaded bot with no ability to prune its input stack. (Of course, Wikipedia would be bigger six years later, but that gives us an idea.) Given that the Barnabas violation went undiscovered for nine years, six years is not so bad, as I see it. But not all articles are equal, and probably some pruning method could decrease the size of the input stack, or at least prioritize it towards articles more likely to have undiscovered violations.
As far as scaling, I have no idea of server availability at WMF, but presumably there are some bot instruction pages somewhere for bot writers which address how many threads are optimal, and other factors that could scale up the processing for better throughput; maybe someone knows something about that. If we had six threads going against one input stack, that would reduce it to one year; it would be great to run it annually against the entire encyclopedia.
For human factors, I'm thinking about the increased number of articles tagged with copy violations, and the additional load on admins that would inevitably result. There are currently 17 articles tagged with the {{ Copyvio}} template right now. I wanted to provide some estimate of activity at Wikipedia:Copyright problems to gauge current throughput, but I'm not so familiar with the page, and was unable to do so. Inevitably, a bot would increase the load on admins (for WP:REVDEL) and other volunteers, and it would be helpful to gather some data about what would happen. Not sure if its possible to project that, but maybe a stripped down version of the bot just to wrap Earwig and spit out numbers on a test run of a week or two might give us some idea. I'm guessing in operation, it would generate a big, backlog balloon initially based on the first two decades of Wikipedia, but then its output would slow to some steady state; in any case, backlogs in other areas have been generated and attacked before with success.
Maybe a bot could somewhat reduce load per investigation, by means a handy output report that includes Earwig percent, maybe a brief excerpt of copied content, and so on. A couple of additional tasks could be defined which would work off the output report, one task running Blame on the suspect articles to add date of insertion to the report, and another to read IA snapshots and determine direction of copy (i.e., is it a mirror, or a copyvio), resulting in a report with information that ought to make the human part of the investigation considerably faster and more efficient per occurrence, which should at least somewhat offset the increased overall number of investigations.
Would love to hear any feedback on the technical aspects of this, as well as the human factors, and whether something like this should even be attempted. Thanks, Mathglot ( talk) 02:00, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
{
"diff_id": 7275308,
"lang": "en",
"page_namespace": 0,
"page_title": "Mahāyāna_Mahāparinirvāṇa_Sūtra",
"project": "wikipedia",
"rev_id": 1178398456,
"rev_parent_id": 1178304407,
"rev_timestamp": "Tue, 03 Oct 2023 12:16:34 GMT",
"rev_user_text": "Javierfv1212",
"sources":
{
"description": "C. V. Jones. \"The Buddhist Self\", Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2021",
"percent": 50.3817,
"source_id": 820817,
"submission_id": "3084bde6-3b8b-488c-bf33-c8c27a73ae06",
"url": "https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824886493"
}
],
"status": 0,
"status_timestamp": "Tue, 03 Oct 2023 12:38:16 GMT",
"status_user_text": null,
"submission_id": "3084bde6-3b8b-488c-bf33-c8c27a73ae06"
}
There was an idea previously floated around about having Turnitin or Earwig run on all revisions of past cases; I'd say this is probably the general idea when talking about automation for CCI cases. When it actually comes down to making it happen, though, it's a spider web of caveats and limitations that make it hard to get off the ground. Here's a more-organized explanation of my thoughts that I randomly collected in the past few months:
- First is the issue of cost. There's around 508 thousand revisions left to check (as of May this year), but we only ever have a finite amount of Earwig search engine searches or Turnitin credits. Processing all of these automatically means we have to work with the WMF to get more credits for a one-time run-through, and we're not sure if we'll get decent results for a majority of those checks.
- We could work around this by completely disabling search engine checks, as the thread you linked discussed, but this can either work for or against us based on the case. We could also work around this by only selecting a few cases which rely mostly on web sources or (for Turnitin) sources that we know would probably be indexed. This significantly cuts down on the amount of revisions to check. But then there's the next issue:
- A lot of the older cases, especially the ones over three years old, start getting a lot of false positives. As article text remains on the wiki for long periods of time, SEO spam sites, academic documents, slideshows, and others start copying from Wikipedia. We filter out a lot of these already (like those in this list and a bunch of others), but we still hit them every once in a while and enough that it clogs up what reports we would otherwise get from Earwig/Turnitin.
- A possible solution to this would be human intervention (which is more or less a given with something like this), where editors will double-check to see if a flagged revision actually is copied from somewhere, or if it's just a false positive. Human intervention will weed out false positives, but then it won't weed out the false negatives.
- At the end of the day, copyvio checking is a really hard computer science problem that humanity is still in the middle of solving. False negatives; like when a revision flies under the radar because a source it copied from has died, or when the text has been paraphrased enough to make checkers think it's completely original text; will always be one of the biggest brick walls we face. False positives waste editor time, yes, but false negatives arguably take up more time, because we then need to re-check the case. It also wouldn't be a good look for us or the WMF if it turns out that we get a lot of false positives and negatives, since that could be perceived by the community as a waste of funds. Perhaps this is still something that could benefit from research and testing.
— User:Chlod 13:02, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
decent resultsis whether or not Earwig comes up with a false positive/negative.
Would be nice. But how would it differentiate stuff that is mirroring Wikipedia? North8000 ( talk) 20:46, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
Hello there, Village Pump! I am currently thinking about a WikiProject namespace, like changing Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess to WikiProject:Chess. I had this idea because it would look nicer in my opinion. Maybe the shortcut could still be WP: because WikiProject and WikiPedia share the letters W and P? - The Master of Hedgehogs ( always up for a conversation!) 19:23, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
I'm an active editor but I've never engaged with discussions about Wikipedia procedures before, so apologies if I'm going about this wrong way, but here are my thoughts on improving a frustrating aspect of the editing experience - an aspect which has recently become a lot more high profile.
For the past few weeks all the articles I am working on have been subject to bots delivering a project independent quality assessment. Hard enough to find out what this even means in plain language. The quality assessments are mostly nonsense being derived from "Projects" that either are totally inactive or have no possibility to achieve their aims because they consist of 7 people (half of whom are probably dead) aiming to assess all the articles in immensely broad categories.
This is deeply frustrating for people actually trying to improve articles because:
1) Its so top down - a bot swoops down and allocates some random rating to the article, based on a - probably ill-informed - rating done by someone affiliated to a project years ago.
2) There is no information provided to encourage people actually actively involved improving an article to engage with the quality assessment process. Its hard enough to even find out and understand what this whole PIQA process IS, despite the flurry of bot activity it has unleashed on active editors' watchlists.
3) The quality assessment is drawing attention to "importance" ratings from projects that are utterly arbitrary.
My suggestion to improve this is:
1) Information provided as part of the banner shell at the top of talk pages encouraging active editors of articles to provide the quality rating for that article on a simplified rating - they are the people who actually know.
2) A quality assessment based on 3 ratings: stub, improving, completed article (this last meaning ready for 3rd party assessment as a good article).
3) Guidance provided to projects to refocus their activity - not around unachievable quality assessments and meaningless importance ratings across thousands of articles - but instead around assessing good articles in their area, within the existing Good Article nomination and review process.
3) Take automatic project "importance ratings" off talk pages. If people are interested in what a small group of people think are the most important Wikipedia articles on the topic of e.g Christianity (a topic so broad it covers nearly all intellectual activity in Europe over most of 2000 years), they can find their way independently to the project page concerned.
This will have the benefit of:
1) Vastly improving the accuracy of quality assessments by encouraging active editors of an article - rather than randoms - to provide it.
2) Ending the demoralising effect of working on an article that some people years ago have classified as "low importance" and which a bot has now declared officially overall "stub" or "start class" (yes I know you can change it - but lets make that clear to all active editors).
3) Supporting the Good Article process and systematising third party review of articles, which is clearly important and valuable.
Atrapalhado (
talk) 23:32, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
IMO this is a bad idea. The importance ratings are to focus (active) projects on actively maintaining their most vital articles, sort of like Wikipedia:Vital articles, but for a specific project. Maintaining giant lists situated somewhere in the remote outskirts of projectspace is way harder than just letting the banner shell automatically add categories based on the importance rating.3) The quality assessment is drawing attention to "importance" ratings from projects that are utterly arbitrary.
Take automatic project "importance ratings" off talk pages. If people are interested in what a small group of people think are the most important Wikipedia articles on the topic of e.g Christianity (a topic so broad it covers nearly all intellectual activity in Europe over most of 2000 years), they can find their way independently to the project page concerned.
I see a couple problems with this:2) A quality assessment based on 3 ratings: stub, improving, completed article (this last meaning ready for 3rd party assessment as a good article).
|importance=
or |priority=
ratings exist to tell the
Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team that an article might not be popular (in terms of page views) or central (in terms of incoming links) but is still important (or not) to a particular subject area (e.g., a small country), in the opinion of a group of editors who are sufficiently interested in that subject to form a group to improve those articles. High ratings somewhat increase the likelihood of the tagged article being included in an offline collection of articles.|quality=
of each article. We decided, through a series of discussions, that this was inefficient: a stub is a stub, and if four groups are interested in this article, we don't need each of the four groups to separately say that it's a stub. A couple of bots are currently running around and turning those duplicate project-specific quality assessments ("stub, stub, stub, stub") into a single project-independent rating ("all stub"). This is generating a lot of activity in
watchlists right now but isn't AFAIK supposed to be creating new quality assessments. Hopefully it'll be done in a couple of weeks. (If you don't want to see the bots, then you can hide all bot edits in your watchlist.)
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 03:08, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
I've often come across clearly noteworthy and important topics that are ranked Low ... because the WikiProject it is associated with is somewhat tangential to the main topic.: that's the idea - it's the importance for that particular WikiProject, not the importance in the whole scheme of things. It is perfectly valid for one WikiProject to assign Low-importance to an article which another considers to be High-importance. For example, Talk:Charles III shows Top-importance for WikiProject United Kingdom (obviously), but Low-importance for WikiProject Children's literature - and it's hard to see how he might be rated above that. -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 09:32, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
I pretty much agree with the OP with regards to article/project ratings. For the reasons described, I don't think that they are very meaningful and also ignore them. And sometimes they are harmful. Maybe we should drop them. Regarding projects, there are some projects which are active or semi-active and which do valuable work, so I would not agree with broad negative statements about projects. Even though there are some dead or inactive ones. North8000 ( talk) 18:45, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
It is irritating to create or edit an article and believe that it's good, complete, etc. -- and then rater X comes along and calls it a "start." That's worse than no rating at all. I don't care whether an article I've created is rated "C" or "B" or not rated at all, but "start" is an insult. Secondly, length is not a synonym for quality. A 300 word article is adequate for some subjects. I get irritated when rater X comes along and calls the 300 word article I have created a "stub." Perhaps a 2 tier rating system would be workable: "good" articles are those that have been peer-reviewed; everything else is unrated. Or maybe you have a third rating of "stub, needs improvement or expansion" and you put that as a header on the article page to encourage improvement of the article. Smallchief ( talk) 10:40, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
|class=stub
rating is exactly as unintuitive as removing maintenance tags like {{
unref}} or {{
confusing}}, I'd say. We want editors, including new editors, to do all of these things when they believe they have solved the problem.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 16:08, 13 February 2024 (UTC)Thanks everyone so much for your comments. Having read the comments my view now is the following:
|importance=low
(though I wish it were described as "priority"), I obviously have some concerns about removing it. The
Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team, which still exists and is still active (though no longer using CDs for distributing Wikipedia articles to schools and other places with limited access to the internet), would also be sorry to lose that information.|class=
parameter to
Template:WikiProject banner shell, which all projects would inherit. To avoid redundancy, this rating is then shown only on the banner shell. Projects can choose to opt-out of this system by adding the parameter |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom
to their project banner template. It is also possible to add a standalone banner shell template to an article without any WikiProjects, for example {{WikiProject banner shell | class=start}}
The
robot will regularly maintain {{
WikiProject banner shell}}." WTF?
Atrapalhado (
talk) 15:04, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
Johnbod ( talk) 15:50, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
Here's the top 10 at Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Popular pages:
1 | Sexual intercourse | 641,551 | 20,695 | B | Mid |
2 | Paolo Macchiarini | 494,071 | 15,937 | C | Low |
3 | Christopher Duntsch | 343,744 | 11,088 | B | Low |
4 | COVID-19 pandemic | 316,530 | 10,210 | GA | Top |
5 | Bhopal disaster | 307,206 | 9,909 | B | Low |
6 | Suicide methods | 287,328 | 9,268 | B | Low |
7 | Norovirus | 274,185 | 8,844 | B | Mid |
8 | Jean Tatlock | 265,429 | 8,562 | GA | Low |
9 | Factitious disorder imposed on another | 256,335 | 8,268 | C | Mid |
10 | COVID-19 | 245,215 | 7,910 | B | Top |
As you can see, 50% of them are low priority to the group. Three are mid-priority, and the two COVID pages are top-priority. You could argue that we do care more about Suicide methods and we should care ore about Bhopal disaster, but we could also argue that the only reasons we care about two of the mid-rated articles is because they're popular (one not primarily being a medical subject and the other being a rare disease, which is normally rated low). Popularity has not been a reliable indicator for us. However, for groups that primarily work on articles about people, culture, and business, I would expect the popularity to line up more closely with their own priorities. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 18:16, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
articletopic:medicine-and-health
then it'd be very useful, but if you want to know what kinds of articles the editors at WP:MED want to work on, it's not so useful.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 22:24, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
I think medicine is a relatively poor example because as a topic area it contains a lot of living people and other "human interest stories" which may become popular for a brief period of time. Sure, people might want to know about Paolo Macchiarini this month, but it's clear it's not as important to the Medicine Wikiproject as, say, Pain. I found WikiProject Mathematic's popular page chart to be one that seems significantly less volatile:
1 | Stephen Hawking | 1,330,671 | 42,924 | B | Mid |
2 | Albert Einstein | 643,550 | 20,759 | GA | High |
3 | 1 | 296,115 | 9,552 | C | Top |
4 | Ted Kaczynski | 289,597 | 9,341 | FA | Low |
5 | Isaac Newton | 277,526 | 8,952 | GA | Top |
6 | 0 | 271,987 | 8,773 | B | Top |
7 | Alan Turing | 244,721 | 7,894 | GA | High |
8 | Fibonacci sequence | 230,374 | 7,431 | B | High |
9 | Srinivasa Ramanujan | 198,130 | 6,391 | GA | Top |
10 | Pi | 194,909 | 6,287 | FA | Top |
The popularity seems much more associated with importance to the field here. The only outlier is someone who is better known for things outside of mathematics, to put it mildly. I would guess that other academic and scientific subjects without much "drama" would line up well with their importance as well. I checked WikiProject Geology and it also seems relatively stable and well-correlated with importance. Pinguinn 🐧 19:30, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
@ HouseBlaster, Barkeep49, and SilkTork: I'm thinking that, since we have three RfA ideas currently open at WP:PROPOSE, we should be moving these to a dedicated subpage to avoid clutter and maybe get the community's creative juices flowing on more ideas. Would any of you object to having your threads moved to a Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review? (the format of this one will be a bit more streamlined, in light of RFA2021 and RFA2015 having already done the groundwork on the "problems" phase.) theleekycauldron ( talk • she/her) 18:57, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
As it says in the title, this is about getting plainrowheaders
out of
MediaWiki:Common.css. This would be accomplished by running a bot
like this stalled request to place {{
plain row headers}} above each table which uses class=plainrowheaders
before removing the styling from Common.css. The reasons this is A Good Thing are detailed at
MediaWiki talk:Common.css/to do#Description of work, but in summary it allows for faster loading times and lets more people to edit "sitewide" styles (
WP:5P3). CC (from the stalled bot request) @
Dušan Kreheľ,
GoingBatty,
Hellknowz,
Izno,
JJMC89,
Primefac, and
William Avery. Thoughts/objections/comments/ideas?
House
Blaster (
talk · he/him) 03:22, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:TemplateStyles § RfC: converting sitewide CSS to TemplateStyles. House Blaster ( talk · he/him) 15:30, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
Currently if a user clicks "Add a topic" on an article talk page, they are prompted for a Subject
and a Description
and there's no further explanation of what's happening or what they're expected to type there.
Talk pages like Talk:ChatGPT and Talk:Speech synthesis have ended up having to be protected because so many IP visitors think that they're interacting with that software when they type there, and don't realise that they're posting a message on a Wikipedia talk page. Talk:DALL-E gets a lot but hasn't been protected yet. There are also weirder cases like Talk:Doppelgänger (perhaps it's also the name of an app?) where IPs constantly post short sentences about wanting to see their doppelgänger, sometimes entering their email address.
Can we give these cryptic Subject/Description boxes better names, and/or add a short "you are about to post a comment to Wikipedia" message somewhere? Description
in particular seems a very strange word to use at all, for something that's a comment or a question.
Belbury (
talk) 15:47, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
Reply to Phil Bridgerin grey text before I start typing. I'm wondering if we just forgot to set a meaningful box message for new comments (the new interface only went live in 2022). Belbury ( talk) 19:52, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
Subject / Descriptionprompt with something clearer seems like it would still be a useful change to Wikipedia's interface. Belbury ( talk) 14:07, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
Subjectand
Descriptionmessages only used inside new topic boxes on talk pages, or do the same strings need to work in other contexts as well? Would we be able to specify different messages for user/article/project talk pages? Belbury ( talk) 19:08, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
wpSummary
). So there is a possibility that changes affecting the subject window may also affect the edit summary window. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 21:40, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
Subject
) and
MediaWiki:Discussiontools-replywidget-placeholder-newtopic (currently Description
), without touching any of the underlying code or HTML. It looks like the same strings are used on both article and user talk pages, though, so there's limited scope for how specific the new messages can be.
Belbury (
talk) 10:43, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
Description
is a weird placeholder kind of label to put on a text box where users are meant to type a conversational talk page message, and we should change it. Even to just Write your message here
.
Belbury (
talk) 18:21, 21 February 2024 (UTC)This may be the nth time someone (me) has proposed that we resurrect vote templates, but I am actually starting to see more advantages the more I think about it. If anything, any proposal for vote templates should take into account WP:!VOTE as well as whether there is a benefit of having these templates.
However, I do see several things that make these !vote templates (with the icons) quite a bit helpful:
I have seen the reasons talked to death against all this, with some saying it's pointless, that it contradicts WP:!VOTE and WP:CONSENSUS, etc. But I wanted to put this here because I think there is a way to have these templates while accounting for all the concerns that led to the templates' deletion to begin with. This is why it's the idea lab after all. Awesome Aasim 20:19, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
In general, if a talk page is edited in by simply choosing edit, and a new section is added at the bottom, the summary has the name of the last section that existed prior to this edit, regardless of whether the new text includes a section. Can this be fixed? i.e. Current state of talk page is
==ABC== Text1
and what is added is
==DEF== Text2
The summary added shows that the edit was in section ABC, *not* DEF. Naraht ( talk) 05:12, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
/* section */
to the front of your edit summary. IMO it serves no use to waste a lot of resources implementing that when you can 1. just change the summary 2. just use the "Add topic" button.
Aaron Liu (
talk) 14:50, 23 February 2024 (UTC)Hello! Sorry if this isn't the right forum, has already been suggested, or is unworkable, but I wanted to suggest a bot that I would find time-saving. I don't know how to code, so this would definitely not be something I could take on, but thought some clever-clogs might like the idea!
When I first read WP:AFD, I didn't realise that you had to inform deletion-sorting lists and notify the AfD discussion that you've notified those lists. Adding notices to multiple deletion-sorting lists is quite an onerous manual task, and one that I suspect could be automated.
The bot would check open AfDs to check if a notice has been placed informing participants of an AfD's inclusion in a deletion-sorting list. The bot then checks the relevant deletion-sorting list. If said AfD hasn't been placed on the deletion-sorting list, then the bot adds the AfD to the list itself. Thus, editors need only place the notice in the AfD without updating individual deletion sorting lists. IgnatiusofLondon ( talk) 16:19, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
hastopic:
feature. There are 64 "topics" at the moment, and it would not be difficult to produce lists based on these, including for articles that aren't categorized or tagged by WikiProjects. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be pretty good.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 06:30, 25 February 2024 (UTC)According to WP:PCPP, Readers who are not logged in (the vast majority of readers) are shown the latest accepted version of the page; logged-in users see the latest version of the page, with all changes (reviewed or not) applied. This could cause some problems. A lot of what comes through Special:PendingChanges has factual errors, supported with no reliable source, is vandalism, or has other problems (examples: [2] [3] [4]). The point of pending changes protection is for someone to vet problematic edits before the readers see them. However, logged-in editors can see these edits. Most users with an account never make a single edit, so they'll see the potentially problematic edits. That's why it might be beneficial to change pending changes protection so only confirmed editors can see the latest version of the page. Any thoughts? Relativity 03:09, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
I'm a pending changes reviewer. I don't think that pending changes does much good. I don't think that I ever reviewed one that was vandalism/ outlandish. A common situation is where I accept it as a PC reviewer and then revert it as an editor. Which means that it was an OK edit under Pending Changes criteria. I'm guessing that such edits might get wrongly rejected by others on a Pending Changes basis which means rejections with no visible edit summary/explanation. North8000 ( talk) 19:42, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Reviewers and administrators will see a yellow watchlist banner on their watchlist whenever there is a pending edit needing review.There is currently a pending edit, and I don't see the banner, nor do I have any styles that'd modify the display. Did you ever see it? Aaron Liu ( talk) 21:41, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Relevant links: Wikipedia:Protection policy and Special:MovePage/Wikipedia:Protection_policy (To see what it looks like to try and move a protected page. non admins only)
Currently, articles that are protected from editing have the relevant lock in the top right hand corner. Userpages may not have the relevant edit lock on the top right. With regarding edit protection, it will stay as it is but why don't we do the same for move, create and upload so that articles (other than user pages) require all types of protection to be shown on the top right. The lock icon will display in the same way shown in the protection policy page (linked above). With move protection, the only way to tell that the page is protected is if the move button is not seen (this article for example, doesn't have the move button for me, but it does have subscribe) with the possible exception for administrators as they can move any page even if it's protected. Even if accounts are able to edit semi and EC protected pages, the relevant lock is still there. But like I said, that will not change. Admins will also be able to see if a page is move protected from the green lock icon at protection policy page.
The only way to see the green (move) and blue (create/also known as salting) lock is if the URL was typed for some reason, like here and here respectively. (for ECP create protection this appears instead). JuniperChill ( talk) 21:40, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
Since the topic keeps coming up, and concerns about gaming this aren't seeming to go away, I want to open another WP:RFCBEFORE discussion about the possibility of redefining ECP to address gaming concerns.
My previous proposal turned out to be unworkable, so I'm going to keep this discussion a little broader:
#1, #2, and #3 will be possible to automate - while it should be possible to modify mediawiki to work this way, it probably won't be practical. Instead, I would suggest we create an admin bot that checks whether these criteria are met and grants ECP when they are.
The one that we won't be able to automate is #4, but it will make it clear to admins when it is appropriate to manually revoke ECP. BilledMammal ( talk) 02:46, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
Were you evading any restrictions when you participated in those discussions?Possibly; it depends on how the community assesses it. I would consider edits made in contravention of the restriction, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to be "evading", while edits made in line with the restriction would be permissible (I think those edits were in accordance with the restrictions as they were at the time - in particular, I think that ECP for Ukraine-Russia was applied after I made those edits), but the broader community may apply a stricter standard. I also wouldn't consider a couple of edits made inside the topic area to be a cause for concern; if an editor has made 450 outside but 50 inside, it simply isn't worth manually revoking ECP only to manually reinstate it a week later. Again, though, the broader community may apply a stricter standard.
I'm not convinced that the current requirement is sufficientwhere sufficient is
to keep the topic areas functional; to make it harder for bad actors to participate in the topic area, and ensure that good actors have sufficient experience to participate in the topic area.Why not show that there is a strong association between (i) edit types that happens in editors' 0-500 edit history and (ii) how they turn out to be "good" or "bad" actors?
Does that make you think that One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)? I makes me think that..
{{refimprove|date=February 2024}}
to 500 articles (+33), then that would be gaming but wouldn't bother you/the community?
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 21:09, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
So, I don't exactly know what the name would be, but I think a sister project where people will be allowed to write about things without worrying about notability, citations, etc. would be good. Kind of like Wikipedia essays but on any topic. It would still have restrictions of course, for inappropriate content and attacks on people or organizations. What do you think? Youprayteas ( t • c) 16:22, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
without worrying about notability, citations, etcAAAAAAAAAH! Try Twitter. 🌺 Cremastra ( talk) 15:59, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
Aaron Liu ( talk) 20:05, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Do people really take Wikidata seriously? I forgot that it even exists. Reading over several bits of it, I can definitely say that I don't take anything it says seriously. "P1313=Q27306390", "Wikisimpsons article ID=50604..." BLEEEECCCCCCHHHHHH!
I'm not sure what forum is best for this post.
I think there should be much greater responses on talk pages before anyone declares a consensus is reached. The talk pages are great and useful for discussing and editing article content. Yet, they usually don't approach consensus with any scientific or academic validity. There are usually not enough responces.
I'll recomed that the policy dictating consensus be updated with statistical polling requirements.
ProofCreature ( talk) 22:01, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
86 Administrators and/or 100 Wikipediansnumber from this data? Chaotıċ Enby ( talk · contribs) 13:21, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
A consensus with appropriate statistical validity should firmly settle an issue
Honestly, I don't expect much from this proposal. I am entirely aware how difficult it is to get more than a few Wikipedians to comment on any given page or article. There are many reasons for this. Disinterest on anything but "pet topics " is one big reason. There's also malaise and no motivating factors (ego, boredom, and a love to share learning are about the only motivation I can see to edit anything).
The thing I am looking to have happen from this suggestion is to see the statistics that describe consensus somehow included in the protocool for reaching a consensus without them becoming a mandate. More like a suggested action or just an F.y.i. There should be an effort (due diligence) made to draw in comments from Wikipedians who are less interested in the topic. Too, it should be noted, somehow, that limited comments (a number below the threshold for statistical consensus) can create an echo chamber effect. ProofCreature ( talk) 17:55, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
no consensus. In experience, most closers are willing to relist on request after a no consensus close where participation was minimal, but the truth is that usually the extra week does not garner any additional participation. Volunteer time is limited and there really is just not enough to go around to keep all our processes fully staffed, in fact staffing hasn't really been adequate for quite some time. There's a larger topic here about needing to reform our processes due to chronic participation shortages, but I don't want to go off on a long tangent. My only advice then is to WP:PAYITFORWARD when you can and encourage others to do the same, but the time needed to make a well-researched WP:!VOTE is non-trivial even if you are familiar with a topic area.
I'd like to propose a "Content Policy Committee" with broad authority within Wikipedia governance to resolve disputes over applications of content and manual of style policies, especially where current policy pages are ambiguous or silent, and to revise content policies to codify at least Dispute Resolution Noticeboard resolutions and Arbitration Committee rulings (if and where applicable), as well as possibly other Noticeboard discussions, Requests for Comments discussions, and WikiProject talk discussions. I am not sure exactly which discussion resolutions would be most appropriate, but would welcome suggestions since I'm largely unfamiliar with Wikipedia's current governance structure. In a current discussion I've recently had a with a fellow editor we came to a disagreement over the application of policies that as far as I could tell were not clearly applicable in the context in which they were being applied and where it was unclear that there was any policy that applied.
My fellow editor stated that previous Arbitration Committee rulings have had implications for content policy, but I've always been under the impression that the Arbitration Committee only dealt with conduct policy disputes. Additionally, in my experience many individual editors apply content and MoS policy capriciously and in ways that in keeping with personal preferences rather than in ways that enhance the encyclopedia or are actually in keeping with what policies explicitly require. As a personal aside, it appears to me as someone who has little familiarity with Wikipedia governance that the Arbitration Committee should be limited to conduct policy disputes, and that there should be a separate but equivalent organ within Wikipedia governance that resolves disputes over content policy to prevent one committee having undue influence over the development of the entire project.
The Committee would be divided into 4 standing subcommittees: (1) a Resolution Subcommittee that would operate the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard and where individual subcommittee members would respond to Third Opinion Requests; (2) a Codification Subcommittee responsible for drafting the codifying the codified revisions to existing content policy based on prior rulings and reviewing public comments on the revisions revision drafts; (3) an Appeals Subcommittee to provide a panel review of adopted Committee revisions prior to an en banc review by the entire Content Policy Committee if an appeal of a revision is requested; and (4) a Proposals Subcommittee for presenting proposed content policies at the Village Pump based on dispute resolutions where there is no existing policy to resolve the issue. The Content Policy Committee would not make or legislate content policy, which would instead reside with the Village Pump.
The Content Policy Committee members would presumably be selected in a process similar to the Arbitration Committee members with elections to the seats following a nomination to be a candidate by a petition. However, I suspect that the Content Policy Committee may need to be larger than the Arbitration Committee with maybe as many as 28 29 members in total with 7 on each subcommittee. The Content Policy Committee Chair would be elected by the Committee members and the Committee Chair would appoint Subcommittee Chairs. If deletionist and inclusionist factions emerge on the Committee, a Committee Ranking Member may be elected by the minority faction to appoint Subcommittee Ranking Members. Other procedural practices of the Committee would follow Robert's Rules of Order. --
CommonKnowledgeCreator (
talk) 09:54, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
Those functions all happen already, except anyone can take part, and decisions are arrived at by consensus.Perhaps I shouldn't have said "revisions"; I'll strikethrough where I said that because that's not really what I meant. "Revision" implies the consensus policymaking process that I don't wish to alter. What I'm really trying to propose is a committee that would create and maintain pages that codify and summarize dispute resolution rulings of content policy disputes by the specific policy and creating a dispute resolution committee separate from the current Arbitration Committee for content policy decisions. I do not believe the codification summary functions I've proposed do occur already, and the process for making revisions to content policy appear to be done in a manner that is disjointed and often capricious where many editors who may have wished to contribute to the discussion are unaware that the discussion even occurred.
What you are proposing is a lot of additional bureaucracy - is there really a big enough problem to justify it? Policy is sometimes silent because we can’t write rules that cover all eventualities, and we still expect editors to use judgement to apply principles to specific cases.Out of the tens of thousands of editors that regularly contribute to the project, a 29-member committee is NOT a particularly large bureaucracy. If there are past Arbitration Committee rulings that are being enforced as interpretive rules for content policies beyond the specific dispute that the ruling was issued for, then those rulings need to be codified and summarized by the specific policy applied in separate articles in the way that I am describing because those rulings effectively amount to content policy rules. If the Arbitration Committee acts as a kind of court of last resort of Wikipedia dispute resolution and its rulings are binding applications of policies, then the Arbitration Committee is effectively creating policy rules every time it issues a ruling in the same way that a case law in a common law legal system develops. Laws do not have to explicitly cover every eventuality; that's the logic behind a common law legal system itself. This also occurs without the consensus process that you've expressed concern that my proposal would upend.
Additionally, if a local consensus developed on one talk page contradicts the local consensus developed on a different one, we end up with competing rules.I just want to point out that this is an intended feature, not a flaw. It’s common for editors of different articles in different areas to come to different local consensuses. A trivial example would be WP:ENGVAR where we explicitly accept global inconsistency (although consistency is still preferable where possible). Barnards.tar.gz ( talk) 08:24, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
I’m open to the idea that there might be important decisions being made somewhere on a random article talk page that could use more visibility (either to neutrally gather participants or just to communicate the result). ... Perhaps it would be helpful to find ways of increasing uptake of these existing mechanisms rather than invoke the rather significant overhead of a committee?See the comments made by User:TheWordsmith and User:Novo Tape below and my replies. The issue that motivated me to propose this Committee is that policymaking is too disjointed and too scattered. Like I said, I don't really wish to upend the existing consensus-building processes for modifying policy. Instead, I would argue that having a committee of editors to facilitate dispute resolution and to field and make proposals for changes to policy would be a better process for integrating the existing mechanisms. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 19:16, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
a committee of editors to facilitate dispute resolution: Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard
field and make proposals for changes to policy: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)
The membership of these existing "committees" is: whoever shows up.Doesn't sound like enough people for "consensus" though, especially for changes to policy or dispute resolutions that effectively become interpretive rules for existing policies. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 13:10, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
It would help if you went into more detail on the problem you are trying to solve, what incident led to this, and how you think this proposal would help the problem. … Might also be useful to have people keeping an eye on these discussions as a whole and nipping behavioral issues in the bud.The "incident", insofar as I should to refer to it as that because as far as I could tell it was perfectly civil and polite disagreement, was the discussion I had with User:Hipal in the "Selected Publications" section of Talk:Jonathan Haidt. I was unaware of the existence of WP:MEDCOM, WP:MEDCAB, and WP:CENT. I have not had a chance to review them more fully; I have been spending the last couple of days just trying to compose the response to clarify my proposal. However, after looking at WP:MEDCOM briefly, I did notice that WP:MEDCOM did not take on very many cases and that would be completely different with what I am proposing. My hope is that this Committee would immediately respond to the content disputes rather than allowing them to snowball into conduct violations.
I do think it would need to be scaled way back to achieve support, but there might be some merit to having a more centralized place to give structure to discussions attempting to change policies and guidelines. We have the various Village Pumps, policy/guideline talkpages, wikiproject talkpages, individual RfCs everywhere but not really a place or group of people to organize it. Having a dashboard or project that can answer simple content policy questions and display proposals in a useful format could be good.It appears that you have picked up the spirit of what has motivated my proposal, not just for proposing changes to content policies but also a place for resolving disputes over them. Thank you. :) -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 02:09, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
"Think about what would happen if the editor you're in a dispute with (or one of his like-minded wiki-friends) is on the committee...and you're not". ... In practice, some editors would interpret such a rule as meaning that anybody on the committee who disagrees with me ought to recuse.See my reply to User:Barnards.tar.gz. Committee members would be required to recuse in disputes in which they are engaged are brought before the Committee. That would address at least the first and third parts of your concern about recusal and the Committee being a neutral third-party. As for the issue of "like-minded wiki-friends", if an editor felt that the Committee or its Subcommittees did not provide them with due process and fair hearings under its procedures, the editor would be permitted to appeal to the Arbitration Committee. Though not proposed in my previous comments, perhaps the Appeals Subcommittee could also field requested appeals at the beginning of each new term if an editor felt that neither the Committee, its Subcommittees, and the Arbitration Committee did not provide due process or fair hearings as well.
I don't think that what the English Wikipedia needs is a greater adherence to the rules. We have a policy that says Wikipedia:If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. Do what's right by the article. If the policies and guidelines are well-written, then the policies and guidelines will follow you.See my replies to User:TheWordsmith and User:Novo Tape. I don't disagree with your sentiment about adherence to rules, but in my experience other editors will continue enforcing the policies and continually lead to disputes or discourage further contributions. This Committee would be required by its charter to be inclusionist to prevent a single reverting editor or handful of deletionist editors from becoming, as I said before, "a policymaking and enforcement body unto themselves based on their personal interpretations of a policy without a larger consensus in favor of what is effectively a new policy rule." I'm not so sure policies follow good editing. I think they too often follow the arbitrary whims of the handful of editors who just keep going in a dispute or talk page discussion. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 07:12, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
This Committee would be required by its charter to be inclusionist...Really? I'd have thought that any legitimate committee ought to be expected to reflect, with due balance, the perspectives of the contributing community as a whole. Telling them in advance how to think seems a little extreme. AndyTheGrump ( talk) 14:30, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
Figured I'd outdent considering the number of previous comments and their differing subject matter.
Given how much opposition there has been to the policy proposal functions of the proposed Committee, I'd just drop the Proposals Subcommittee as well as the Appeals Subcommittee and instead just focus on the Resolution Subcommittee and Codification Subcommittee as part of a Content Arbitration Committee rather than a Content Policy Committee to reduce confusion. I wasn't aware that ArbCom had so few candidates in the last election. Perhaps instead of a separate Content Arbitration Committee, a better proposal would be to have that the Arbitration Committee itself be authorized to a form a Content Subcommittee to fulfill the functions of the Resolution Subcommittee and Codification Subcommittee considering that the Arbitration Committee by acknowledgement is primarily authorized to adjudicate alleged conduct policy violations rather than content policy application disputes. To be clear, I propose these functions because I would be willing to perform them myself if I had the administrative authority to do so and because I sincerely do believe that they are needed.
I have never been involved with any policymaking or administrative governance decisions of the project in my time here, and as such, I cannot cite any examples of important content policy decisions that have been made by only handfuls of editors. However, this is why I'd still argue that at least the codification procedures that I've proposed (i.e. summarizing dispute resolution rulings by policy on separate pages that are linked to from the policy pages) are needed so that it is clearer where, why, and when decisions are made. I'd also add that if the current policy pages are changed to reflect a new consensus that has developed, then policy pages should be redesigned to note when and how a policy has been changed or separate policy pages should be created to summarize the changes rather than it just being included in a talk page archive somewhere because otherwise it will not be clear where, when, and why a policy change was made to the vast majority of editors. Conversely, below is a list of examples of other editors reverting content that I've contributed that, as far as I could tell at the time, did not clearly violate a content policy where other editors disagreed, and in two cases mobbed my talk page. Also listed is a third opinion request that I don't remember at this point if any editor even responded to.
Also, I think the fact that there were an insufficient number of ArbCom candidates and the fact that there even is a Wikipedia essay on "How to lose" is illustrative of my larger point about why allowing editors to revert content beyond what is explicitly precluded by policy and allowing editors to filibuster in any and every talk page and dispute resolution discussion is problematic for Wikipedia as a project: it is probably what keeps more people from participating to begin with. A process for orderly deliberation on questions of interest to a community or organization is what parliamentary procedure is for, and this is why I initially proposed having the Committee follow Robert's Rules of Order. If the Wikimedia Foundation has programmers or software engineers who have the technical ability to do so, I'd also recommend that they alter the dispute resolution pages to effectively build parliamentary procedure into the editing features of those pages. I've recently agreed to become a New Page Patroller; if there is the ability to create something like the Page Curation Tool, there should be the ability to do something similar for the features of dispute resolution pages. Maybe then more people would be willing to stand for election to the Arbitration Committee and not resign if elected because the process would be far more formal and organized. It also appears to me that this is further justification of why the Foundation should be verifying the identities of at least extended confirmed users to prevent the kind of "collusive disputes" that I mentioned before, as well as any potential "collusive consensus" via sockpuppetry.
Per WP:Community, there are approximately only 125,000 editors in English-language Wikipedia who regularly contribute to the project despite there being more than 47 million English-language Wikipedia username accounts across at least the 88 countries in the English-speaking world. By contrast, there are more members of the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, and the American Bar Association than active Wikipedia editors accounts, and there are only barely more active Wikipedia editors than members of the American Institute of Physics and the National Association of Social Workers. Yet despite Wikipedia not being a professional association with membership dues or members being required to have post-secondary degrees, we have fewer people regularly contributing than organizations that do have those membership requirements. Also, I recently added the results of an
October 2023 YouGov poll on participation in the Wikipedia community by U.S. adults on the WP:Community page and Wikipedia community article. 7% of U.S. adults surveyed said they had ever edited Wikipedia and 20% had considered doing so who had not. Doing back-of-the-envelope calculations using
American FactFinder Quickfacts of the U.S. Census Bureau, that would mean that approximately more than 18.3 million U.S. adults have edited Wikipedia at least once and more than 70.8 million U.S. adults have either edited Wikipedia at least once or seriously considered it.
The poll didn't ask further questions of the survey respondents who had edited Wikipedia at least once what it was that they had edited, if they had done so more than once (and if not, why), and the poll also did not ask the survey respondents who had considered editing Wikipedia that hadn't why they didn't. However, I strongly suspect that if YouGov did ask, the poll would have shown that many people do not contribute because of overzealous reverting editors, Wikipedia's existing policies, Wikipedia's policymaking process, and filibustering editors on talk pages. Also, this was a poll of only the U.S. population. In light of the poll's findings, it is remarkable to me and it should be to others how few people regularly contribute to this project globally. Per the Criticism of Wikipedia article and the Predictions of the end of Wikipedia article, it appears that I am not the only person who has had these concerns. To reiterate, this is why I would argue that the functions of the Codification Subcommittee and the Resolution Subcommittee as part of a Content Arbitration Committee or as subcommittees of the Arbitration Committee as I've proposed are needed because it appears Wikipedia's fundamental WP:5P5 and WP:5P4 policies are two principles that are actually in conflict. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 17:50, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
I strongly suspect that [...]), as none of the "predictions of the end of Wikipedia" have yet materialized. Chaotıċ Enby ( talk · contribs) 19:44, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
The number of Wikipedia editors is stable, thank you very much. We don't need committees to decide on content instead of editors... And the reasons you provide for why this number isn't higher/lower are pure speculation...Stable perhaps, but peculiarly small. The Committee would not be deciding content policy, just resolving disputes of the applications of content policy where existing policy is silent or ambiguous. This is the Village pump idea lab. It is unclear to me why speculation would be inappropriate here, and I'd certainly hope that the Foundation would take into account the results of such a poll and request further ones to try create strategies to increase participation in the project. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 20:08, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
I think you are considerably inflating the existing editor fatigue from petty tyranny and lack of clarity...That's certainly possible, but the reason I bring it up is because it's consistent with my own experience here. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 01:08, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
@
Barnards.tar.gz,
The Wordsmith,
AndyTheGrump,
Donald Albury,
Novo Tape,
WhatamIdoing,
Phil Bridger,
CoffeeCrumbs,
Redrose64, and
Cremastra: Just wondering if any of you had any additional thoughts in lights light of my most recent posts. --
CommonKnowledgeCreator (
talk) 20:13, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
Sometimes they will provide information about strengths or weaknesses they perceive (e.g., gender gap). What they don't do is tell us that they think we need to change particular bits of content, or to use a different process to change particular bits of content. They stay as far away from the nitty-gritty details of content as they legally can.I am not recommending that the Foundation have an active role in content policymaking, but I would hope that they would take an interest in trying to grow the size of the Wikipedia editing community and make some suggestions to the community if they have evidence that existing policy dispute resolution processes are discouraging participation. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 22:10, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
"Think about what would happen if the editor you're in a dispute with (or one of his like-minded wiki-friends) is on the committee...and you're not". Handing power to a small group can backfire.I'm not sure that the hypotheticals that you've proposed really illustrate the issue that you've proposed and the faults of my proposal. As I understand it, here is the current step-by-step sequence for resolving a content policy application dispute where existing policy is silent or ambiguous (and with the assumption of no conduct policy violations):
My primary concern is that the "losing" editor will declare that if they "lost" then that fact alone proves that the committee didn't give them a fair hearing.My reaction is "So what?" There needs to be a process for resolving disputes, and sometimes that means that someone "loses". I guess I don't see what the problem is. Under what I'm proposing, there would always be a resolution to a dispute, while under current policy there is not necessarily a resolution and that's really what my issue is with the current content dispute resolution procedures. Also, the Committee's decisions in some sense would only be binding for its individual terms since the Committee could in subsequent terms with different members reverse the previous decisions. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 23:54, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
This Committee would be required by its charter to be inclusionist...to which I raised objections earlier for which no response has been given, I see no reason to go into any particular detail over my objections, beyond pointing out that any such committee would self-evidently become a focus for faction-fighting, politicisation, and attempts to game the system to manufacture 'lack of consensus' where it might otherwise be found by the community itself. The whole idea is so utterly ill-thought-out and wrong-headed that I see no prospect of it ever being adopted, and not worthy of further debate. AndyTheGrump ( talk) 00:00, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
Really? I'd have thought that any legitimate committee ought to be expected to reflect, with due balance, the perspectives of the contributing community as a whole. Telling them in advance how to think seems a little extreme. ... frankly, given the poor arguments put forward... I see no reason to go into any particular detail over my objections, beyond pointing out that any such committee would self-evidently become a focus for faction-fighting, politicisation, and attempts to game the system to manufacture 'lack of consensus' where it might otherwise be found by the community itself. The whole idea is so utterly ill-thought-out and wrong-headed that I see no prospect of it ever being adopted, and not worthy of further debate.The reason why I proposed that the Committee be inclusionist is only due to concerns raised about the Committee not providing fair hearings, having a binding resolution authority, and to prevent it from becoming a policymaking body. You have to appreciate that I'm trying to respond to multiple criticisms at once and many of which have been non-overlapping. Your only complaint, as far as I can tell, is that it is self-evident that the Committee that I've proposed would be subject to manipulation. That's why I've suggested that the Foundation verify editor identifies but other editors have argued that would lead to further editor fatigue. I don't believe this is poorly thought-out; I just think that the community has an excessive distaste for even limited bureaucracy despite the fact that it is not clear that the community itself always finds consensus except in the direction of deleting things and excluding content that should be acceptable but just some particular editors don't like. I apologize, but I don't know how to contact other editors other than pings and replies. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 00:22, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
I've recently been working on vandalism reversal, which, in some cases, has resulted in the user needed to be reported to AIV because of vandalism past their 4th warning. Generally, for every warning there is a record of the article vandalised and the form of vandalism which can be useful for identifying trends in vandalism/NPOV issues (i.e. if a user always vandalises articles relating to certain person or idea).
However, for the vandalism which initiates an AIV report, there is no such record of the type of vandalism and where the vandalism occurs, a report to AIV just occurs, usually with the description "vandalism after 4th warning". The administrator has to look through Special:Contributions and timestamps to determine if vandalism did occur after the 4th warning. The lack of a record for this vandalism reversion also fragment's the user's vandalism history, so, if they are unblocked/only temporarily blocked, the complete history of their vandalism isn't fully documented on the talk page for when they (hopefully) return to Wikipedia.
I made a quick template ( Template:AIV Notice) for this which I use for my personal purposes. An example where I used it was here, where the admin was easily able to determine the offending edit from the talk page message (as shown in the block message).
I was wondering about the feasibility of proposing that adding this notice to a talk page, with the article argument, be added a requirement for reporting someone to AIV, just like Template:ANI-notice must be used when reporting users to WP:ANI. Another potential proposal is that it becomes a soft requirement, like using Template:uw-vandalism2 or similar is a soft requirement when reverting an vandalism edit. Molecular Pilot Let's talk! 23:06, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
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Firstly, Jimbo Wales agrees with me. Well, not with me directly. But with the gist of this argument, and the argument behind unreferenced-PROD. He wrote in 2006:
I really want to encourage a much stronger culture which says: it is better to have no information, than to have information like this, with no sources. Any editor who removes such things, and refuses to allow it back without an actual and appropriate source, should be the recipient of a barnstar.
Anyways...
As a New Page Patroller, I frequently draftify unsourced articles.
Not unfrequently, the creator of the article moves the draft back to mainspace, or re-creates it with the same content. The topic is frequently fringe, difficult to verify, but not necessarily PRODable or AfD'able.
What to do? There's an unsourced "article" in mainspace. It should be in draftspace, where it should be improved by the creator. It is unfit for mainspace. As one of my favourite essays points out, unsourced content is essentially digital graffitti and should be removed. The WP:BURDEN is on the creator to add references to their claims.
It isn't 2005 anymore. We shouldn't have new unsourced articles being created. They do get created, but are usually PRODed or draftified by NPPers.
Per WP:DRAFTIFY, we aren't allowed to re-draftify an article. Because of this clause, draftifying is essentially useless. All the creator has to do is move it back.
An analogy (or possibly a parable):
I would like to propose disallowing draftified articles being moved back to mainspace if the problem for which the "article" was draftified has not been fixed. Let the street cleaner take the garbage back the waste-dumper's house. 🌺 Cremastra ( talk) 15:34, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
References
Hey, this article has no sources, and I could not find any based on a few Google searches, what should we do about this ?That's something that should be said on the article's talk page, not in an AfD. In AfD, what should be said is: "Here are very good reasons why this article should be deleted". The two statements are not interchangeable. Sometimes they will address the same situation, but sometimes they won't. — Alalch E. 15:04, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
;-)
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 14:32, 19 January 2024 (UTC)The topic is frequently fringe, difficult to verify, but not necessarily PRODable or AfD'able." If it would be appropriate to boldly draftify an article, then it would appropriate (when contested without fixing the issue) to nominate it at AfD for draftification. As with a contested blank-to-redirect, for which the appropriate discussion venue is AfD per this request for comment, you don't need to request deletion in order to nominate an article at AfD. And if it is not nominated for the purpose of deletion, then a full WP:BEFORE inquiry about whether the subject is notable and so forth isn't applicable. I'd like to see the standard draftification messages more explicitly say that if an editor disagrees with the reasons for draftification, they can respond to the reasons for the move and ask (insist) that the article be restored to mainspace until there is a discussion to either delete it or make it a draft. SilverLocust 💬 19:56, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
The topic is frequently fringe, difficult to verify, but not necessarily PRODable or AfD'able—why would it not be AfDable?— Alalch E. 15:01, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
The belief that an unsourced article is "unfit for mainspace" is not supported by any policy or guideline, that seems to contradict to our core content policy of Verifiability which says
All quotations, and any material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, must include an inline citation to a reliable source that directly support the material.Emphasis added. If any editor acting in good faith says "I challenge the material in this particular unreferenced article, because it is unreferenced", does that not impose an immediate policy burden to provide references (citations) that verify the challenged material? Cullen328 ( talk) 00:25, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
title=
would be a start. (If you have external CSS, you can do it with something like<span class="tooltip" data-mouseover="mouseover text here">
in the HTML and CSS like this:.tooltip:hover::after {
cursor: help;
content: attr(data-mouseover);
background-color:peru;
z-index:5;
position:fixed;
font-size: 15px;
color: white;
padding:2px;
}
"I challenge every unsourced article just because they're unsourced"is acceptable. The burden remains on the writer. 🌺 Cremastra ( talk) 18:42, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
I spent a good solid minute trying to find the button to post an idea here, and it was very hard. Maybe we should make the add topic button more noticeable, like the Teahouse? 3.14 ( talk) 00:37, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
I'd like to propose the idea of a a COPYVIO-hunter bot, but I'm not ready to make a specific Bot request yet, and so I'd like to expose this idea here first to brainstorm it. Sometimes, copyright violations are discovered that have been present on Wikipedia for years. (The copyright-violating content at Barnabas#Alleged writings was added on 4 August 2014 and discovered 18 December 2023.) But for an alert Tea house questioner two days ago, who knows when, if ever, this would have been discovered. That's worrisome.
We have some good tools out there, such as Earwig's detector, and my basic idea is to leverage that by building a bot around it, which would apply it to articles, and either generate a report, or apply the {{ Copyvio}} template directly. A couple of additional bot tasks could streamline the human part of the investigation by finding the insertion point (Blame) and determining copy direction (IA search). There are input, performance, scaling questions, and human factors, and likely others I haven't thought of. As far as input, ideally I'd like to see a hybrid or dual-channel input of a hopper with manual feed by editors (possibly semi-automated feed by other tools), and an automated input where the bot picks urls based on some heuristic.
For performance, I launched Earwig with all three boxes checked, and it took 62 seconds to return results for Charles de Gaulle (174,627b) and 16 seconds for (randomly chosen) Junes Barny (5,563b). I'm pretty sure there are a lot more articles closer in size to the latter than the former, so let's say Earwig takes 30 seconds per search on average; multiplying that by {{ NUMBEROFARTICLES}} gives us 6.43 years to search all of Wikipedia with a dumb, single-threaded bot with no ability to prune its input stack. (Of course, Wikipedia would be bigger six years later, but that gives us an idea.) Given that the Barnabas violation went undiscovered for nine years, six years is not so bad, as I see it. But not all articles are equal, and probably some pruning method could decrease the size of the input stack, or at least prioritize it towards articles more likely to have undiscovered violations.
As far as scaling, I have no idea of server availability at WMF, but presumably there are some bot instruction pages somewhere for bot writers which address how many threads are optimal, and other factors that could scale up the processing for better throughput; maybe someone knows something about that. If we had six threads going against one input stack, that would reduce it to one year; it would be great to run it annually against the entire encyclopedia.
For human factors, I'm thinking about the increased number of articles tagged with copy violations, and the additional load on admins that would inevitably result. There are currently 17 articles tagged with the {{ Copyvio}} template right now. I wanted to provide some estimate of activity at Wikipedia:Copyright problems to gauge current throughput, but I'm not so familiar with the page, and was unable to do so. Inevitably, a bot would increase the load on admins (for WP:REVDEL) and other volunteers, and it would be helpful to gather some data about what would happen. Not sure if its possible to project that, but maybe a stripped down version of the bot just to wrap Earwig and spit out numbers on a test run of a week or two might give us some idea. I'm guessing in operation, it would generate a big, backlog balloon initially based on the first two decades of Wikipedia, but then its output would slow to some steady state; in any case, backlogs in other areas have been generated and attacked before with success.
Maybe a bot could somewhat reduce load per investigation, by means a handy output report that includes Earwig percent, maybe a brief excerpt of copied content, and so on. A couple of additional tasks could be defined which would work off the output report, one task running Blame on the suspect articles to add date of insertion to the report, and another to read IA snapshots and determine direction of copy (i.e., is it a mirror, or a copyvio), resulting in a report with information that ought to make the human part of the investigation considerably faster and more efficient per occurrence, which should at least somewhat offset the increased overall number of investigations.
Would love to hear any feedback on the technical aspects of this, as well as the human factors, and whether something like this should even be attempted. Thanks, Mathglot ( talk) 02:00, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
{
"diff_id": 7275308,
"lang": "en",
"page_namespace": 0,
"page_title": "Mahāyāna_Mahāparinirvāṇa_Sūtra",
"project": "wikipedia",
"rev_id": 1178398456,
"rev_parent_id": 1178304407,
"rev_timestamp": "Tue, 03 Oct 2023 12:16:34 GMT",
"rev_user_text": "Javierfv1212",
"sources":
{
"description": "C. V. Jones. \"The Buddhist Self\", Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2021",
"percent": 50.3817,
"source_id": 820817,
"submission_id": "3084bde6-3b8b-488c-bf33-c8c27a73ae06",
"url": "https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824886493"
}
],
"status": 0,
"status_timestamp": "Tue, 03 Oct 2023 12:38:16 GMT",
"status_user_text": null,
"submission_id": "3084bde6-3b8b-488c-bf33-c8c27a73ae06"
}
There was an idea previously floated around about having Turnitin or Earwig run on all revisions of past cases; I'd say this is probably the general idea when talking about automation for CCI cases. When it actually comes down to making it happen, though, it's a spider web of caveats and limitations that make it hard to get off the ground. Here's a more-organized explanation of my thoughts that I randomly collected in the past few months:
- First is the issue of cost. There's around 508 thousand revisions left to check (as of May this year), but we only ever have a finite amount of Earwig search engine searches or Turnitin credits. Processing all of these automatically means we have to work with the WMF to get more credits for a one-time run-through, and we're not sure if we'll get decent results for a majority of those checks.
- We could work around this by completely disabling search engine checks, as the thread you linked discussed, but this can either work for or against us based on the case. We could also work around this by only selecting a few cases which rely mostly on web sources or (for Turnitin) sources that we know would probably be indexed. This significantly cuts down on the amount of revisions to check. But then there's the next issue:
- A lot of the older cases, especially the ones over three years old, start getting a lot of false positives. As article text remains on the wiki for long periods of time, SEO spam sites, academic documents, slideshows, and others start copying from Wikipedia. We filter out a lot of these already (like those in this list and a bunch of others), but we still hit them every once in a while and enough that it clogs up what reports we would otherwise get from Earwig/Turnitin.
- A possible solution to this would be human intervention (which is more or less a given with something like this), where editors will double-check to see if a flagged revision actually is copied from somewhere, or if it's just a false positive. Human intervention will weed out false positives, but then it won't weed out the false negatives.
- At the end of the day, copyvio checking is a really hard computer science problem that humanity is still in the middle of solving. False negatives; like when a revision flies under the radar because a source it copied from has died, or when the text has been paraphrased enough to make checkers think it's completely original text; will always be one of the biggest brick walls we face. False positives waste editor time, yes, but false negatives arguably take up more time, because we then need to re-check the case. It also wouldn't be a good look for us or the WMF if it turns out that we get a lot of false positives and negatives, since that could be perceived by the community as a waste of funds. Perhaps this is still something that could benefit from research and testing.
— User:Chlod 13:02, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
decent resultsis whether or not Earwig comes up with a false positive/negative.
Would be nice. But how would it differentiate stuff that is mirroring Wikipedia? North8000 ( talk) 20:46, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
Hello there, Village Pump! I am currently thinking about a WikiProject namespace, like changing Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess to WikiProject:Chess. I had this idea because it would look nicer in my opinion. Maybe the shortcut could still be WP: because WikiProject and WikiPedia share the letters W and P? - The Master of Hedgehogs ( always up for a conversation!) 19:23, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
I'm an active editor but I've never engaged with discussions about Wikipedia procedures before, so apologies if I'm going about this wrong way, but here are my thoughts on improving a frustrating aspect of the editing experience - an aspect which has recently become a lot more high profile.
For the past few weeks all the articles I am working on have been subject to bots delivering a project independent quality assessment. Hard enough to find out what this even means in plain language. The quality assessments are mostly nonsense being derived from "Projects" that either are totally inactive or have no possibility to achieve their aims because they consist of 7 people (half of whom are probably dead) aiming to assess all the articles in immensely broad categories.
This is deeply frustrating for people actually trying to improve articles because:
1) Its so top down - a bot swoops down and allocates some random rating to the article, based on a - probably ill-informed - rating done by someone affiliated to a project years ago.
2) There is no information provided to encourage people actually actively involved improving an article to engage with the quality assessment process. Its hard enough to even find out and understand what this whole PIQA process IS, despite the flurry of bot activity it has unleashed on active editors' watchlists.
3) The quality assessment is drawing attention to "importance" ratings from projects that are utterly arbitrary.
My suggestion to improve this is:
1) Information provided as part of the banner shell at the top of talk pages encouraging active editors of articles to provide the quality rating for that article on a simplified rating - they are the people who actually know.
2) A quality assessment based on 3 ratings: stub, improving, completed article (this last meaning ready for 3rd party assessment as a good article).
3) Guidance provided to projects to refocus their activity - not around unachievable quality assessments and meaningless importance ratings across thousands of articles - but instead around assessing good articles in their area, within the existing Good Article nomination and review process.
3) Take automatic project "importance ratings" off talk pages. If people are interested in what a small group of people think are the most important Wikipedia articles on the topic of e.g Christianity (a topic so broad it covers nearly all intellectual activity in Europe over most of 2000 years), they can find their way independently to the project page concerned.
This will have the benefit of:
1) Vastly improving the accuracy of quality assessments by encouraging active editors of an article - rather than randoms - to provide it.
2) Ending the demoralising effect of working on an article that some people years ago have classified as "low importance" and which a bot has now declared officially overall "stub" or "start class" (yes I know you can change it - but lets make that clear to all active editors).
3) Supporting the Good Article process and systematising third party review of articles, which is clearly important and valuable.
Atrapalhado (
talk) 23:32, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
IMO this is a bad idea. The importance ratings are to focus (active) projects on actively maintaining their most vital articles, sort of like Wikipedia:Vital articles, but for a specific project. Maintaining giant lists situated somewhere in the remote outskirts of projectspace is way harder than just letting the banner shell automatically add categories based on the importance rating.3) The quality assessment is drawing attention to "importance" ratings from projects that are utterly arbitrary.
Take automatic project "importance ratings" off talk pages. If people are interested in what a small group of people think are the most important Wikipedia articles on the topic of e.g Christianity (a topic so broad it covers nearly all intellectual activity in Europe over most of 2000 years), they can find their way independently to the project page concerned.
I see a couple problems with this:2) A quality assessment based on 3 ratings: stub, improving, completed article (this last meaning ready for 3rd party assessment as a good article).
|importance=
or |priority=
ratings exist to tell the
Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team that an article might not be popular (in terms of page views) or central (in terms of incoming links) but is still important (or not) to a particular subject area (e.g., a small country), in the opinion of a group of editors who are sufficiently interested in that subject to form a group to improve those articles. High ratings somewhat increase the likelihood of the tagged article being included in an offline collection of articles.|quality=
of each article. We decided, through a series of discussions, that this was inefficient: a stub is a stub, and if four groups are interested in this article, we don't need each of the four groups to separately say that it's a stub. A couple of bots are currently running around and turning those duplicate project-specific quality assessments ("stub, stub, stub, stub") into a single project-independent rating ("all stub"). This is generating a lot of activity in
watchlists right now but isn't AFAIK supposed to be creating new quality assessments. Hopefully it'll be done in a couple of weeks. (If you don't want to see the bots, then you can hide all bot edits in your watchlist.)
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 03:08, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
I've often come across clearly noteworthy and important topics that are ranked Low ... because the WikiProject it is associated with is somewhat tangential to the main topic.: that's the idea - it's the importance for that particular WikiProject, not the importance in the whole scheme of things. It is perfectly valid for one WikiProject to assign Low-importance to an article which another considers to be High-importance. For example, Talk:Charles III shows Top-importance for WikiProject United Kingdom (obviously), but Low-importance for WikiProject Children's literature - and it's hard to see how he might be rated above that. -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 09:32, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
I pretty much agree with the OP with regards to article/project ratings. For the reasons described, I don't think that they are very meaningful and also ignore them. And sometimes they are harmful. Maybe we should drop them. Regarding projects, there are some projects which are active or semi-active and which do valuable work, so I would not agree with broad negative statements about projects. Even though there are some dead or inactive ones. North8000 ( talk) 18:45, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
It is irritating to create or edit an article and believe that it's good, complete, etc. -- and then rater X comes along and calls it a "start." That's worse than no rating at all. I don't care whether an article I've created is rated "C" or "B" or not rated at all, but "start" is an insult. Secondly, length is not a synonym for quality. A 300 word article is adequate for some subjects. I get irritated when rater X comes along and calls the 300 word article I have created a "stub." Perhaps a 2 tier rating system would be workable: "good" articles are those that have been peer-reviewed; everything else is unrated. Or maybe you have a third rating of "stub, needs improvement or expansion" and you put that as a header on the article page to encourage improvement of the article. Smallchief ( talk) 10:40, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
|class=stub
rating is exactly as unintuitive as removing maintenance tags like {{
unref}} or {{
confusing}}, I'd say. We want editors, including new editors, to do all of these things when they believe they have solved the problem.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 16:08, 13 February 2024 (UTC)Thanks everyone so much for your comments. Having read the comments my view now is the following:
|importance=low
(though I wish it were described as "priority"), I obviously have some concerns about removing it. The
Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team, which still exists and is still active (though no longer using CDs for distributing Wikipedia articles to schools and other places with limited access to the internet), would also be sorry to lose that information.|class=
parameter to
Template:WikiProject banner shell, which all projects would inherit. To avoid redundancy, this rating is then shown only on the banner shell. Projects can choose to opt-out of this system by adding the parameter |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom
to their project banner template. It is also possible to add a standalone banner shell template to an article without any WikiProjects, for example {{WikiProject banner shell | class=start}}
The
robot will regularly maintain {{
WikiProject banner shell}}." WTF?
Atrapalhado (
talk) 15:04, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
Johnbod ( talk) 15:50, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
Here's the top 10 at Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Popular pages:
1 | Sexual intercourse | 641,551 | 20,695 | B | Mid |
2 | Paolo Macchiarini | 494,071 | 15,937 | C | Low |
3 | Christopher Duntsch | 343,744 | 11,088 | B | Low |
4 | COVID-19 pandemic | 316,530 | 10,210 | GA | Top |
5 | Bhopal disaster | 307,206 | 9,909 | B | Low |
6 | Suicide methods | 287,328 | 9,268 | B | Low |
7 | Norovirus | 274,185 | 8,844 | B | Mid |
8 | Jean Tatlock | 265,429 | 8,562 | GA | Low |
9 | Factitious disorder imposed on another | 256,335 | 8,268 | C | Mid |
10 | COVID-19 | 245,215 | 7,910 | B | Top |
As you can see, 50% of them are low priority to the group. Three are mid-priority, and the two COVID pages are top-priority. You could argue that we do care more about Suicide methods and we should care ore about Bhopal disaster, but we could also argue that the only reasons we care about two of the mid-rated articles is because they're popular (one not primarily being a medical subject and the other being a rare disease, which is normally rated low). Popularity has not been a reliable indicator for us. However, for groups that primarily work on articles about people, culture, and business, I would expect the popularity to line up more closely with their own priorities. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 18:16, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
articletopic:medicine-and-health
then it'd be very useful, but if you want to know what kinds of articles the editors at WP:MED want to work on, it's not so useful.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 22:24, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
I think medicine is a relatively poor example because as a topic area it contains a lot of living people and other "human interest stories" which may become popular for a brief period of time. Sure, people might want to know about Paolo Macchiarini this month, but it's clear it's not as important to the Medicine Wikiproject as, say, Pain. I found WikiProject Mathematic's popular page chart to be one that seems significantly less volatile:
1 | Stephen Hawking | 1,330,671 | 42,924 | B | Mid |
2 | Albert Einstein | 643,550 | 20,759 | GA | High |
3 | 1 | 296,115 | 9,552 | C | Top |
4 | Ted Kaczynski | 289,597 | 9,341 | FA | Low |
5 | Isaac Newton | 277,526 | 8,952 | GA | Top |
6 | 0 | 271,987 | 8,773 | B | Top |
7 | Alan Turing | 244,721 | 7,894 | GA | High |
8 | Fibonacci sequence | 230,374 | 7,431 | B | High |
9 | Srinivasa Ramanujan | 198,130 | 6,391 | GA | Top |
10 | Pi | 194,909 | 6,287 | FA | Top |
The popularity seems much more associated with importance to the field here. The only outlier is someone who is better known for things outside of mathematics, to put it mildly. I would guess that other academic and scientific subjects without much "drama" would line up well with their importance as well. I checked WikiProject Geology and it also seems relatively stable and well-correlated with importance. Pinguinn 🐧 19:30, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
@ HouseBlaster, Barkeep49, and SilkTork: I'm thinking that, since we have three RfA ideas currently open at WP:PROPOSE, we should be moving these to a dedicated subpage to avoid clutter and maybe get the community's creative juices flowing on more ideas. Would any of you object to having your threads moved to a Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review? (the format of this one will be a bit more streamlined, in light of RFA2021 and RFA2015 having already done the groundwork on the "problems" phase.) theleekycauldron ( talk • she/her) 18:57, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
As it says in the title, this is about getting plainrowheaders
out of
MediaWiki:Common.css. This would be accomplished by running a bot
like this stalled request to place {{
plain row headers}} above each table which uses class=plainrowheaders
before removing the styling from Common.css. The reasons this is A Good Thing are detailed at
MediaWiki talk:Common.css/to do#Description of work, but in summary it allows for faster loading times and lets more people to edit "sitewide" styles (
WP:5P3). CC (from the stalled bot request) @
Dušan Kreheľ,
GoingBatty,
Hellknowz,
Izno,
JJMC89,
Primefac, and
William Avery. Thoughts/objections/comments/ideas?
House
Blaster (
talk · he/him) 03:22, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:TemplateStyles § RfC: converting sitewide CSS to TemplateStyles. House Blaster ( talk · he/him) 15:30, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
Currently if a user clicks "Add a topic" on an article talk page, they are prompted for a Subject
and a Description
and there's no further explanation of what's happening or what they're expected to type there.
Talk pages like Talk:ChatGPT and Talk:Speech synthesis have ended up having to be protected because so many IP visitors think that they're interacting with that software when they type there, and don't realise that they're posting a message on a Wikipedia talk page. Talk:DALL-E gets a lot but hasn't been protected yet. There are also weirder cases like Talk:Doppelgänger (perhaps it's also the name of an app?) where IPs constantly post short sentences about wanting to see their doppelgänger, sometimes entering their email address.
Can we give these cryptic Subject/Description boxes better names, and/or add a short "you are about to post a comment to Wikipedia" message somewhere? Description
in particular seems a very strange word to use at all, for something that's a comment or a question.
Belbury (
talk) 15:47, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
Reply to Phil Bridgerin grey text before I start typing. I'm wondering if we just forgot to set a meaningful box message for new comments (the new interface only went live in 2022). Belbury ( talk) 19:52, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
Subject / Descriptionprompt with something clearer seems like it would still be a useful change to Wikipedia's interface. Belbury ( talk) 14:07, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
Subjectand
Descriptionmessages only used inside new topic boxes on talk pages, or do the same strings need to work in other contexts as well? Would we be able to specify different messages for user/article/project talk pages? Belbury ( talk) 19:08, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
wpSummary
). So there is a possibility that changes affecting the subject window may also affect the edit summary window. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 21:40, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
Subject
) and
MediaWiki:Discussiontools-replywidget-placeholder-newtopic (currently Description
), without touching any of the underlying code or HTML. It looks like the same strings are used on both article and user talk pages, though, so there's limited scope for how specific the new messages can be.
Belbury (
talk) 10:43, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
Description
is a weird placeholder kind of label to put on a text box where users are meant to type a conversational talk page message, and we should change it. Even to just Write your message here
.
Belbury (
talk) 18:21, 21 February 2024 (UTC)This may be the nth time someone (me) has proposed that we resurrect vote templates, but I am actually starting to see more advantages the more I think about it. If anything, any proposal for vote templates should take into account WP:!VOTE as well as whether there is a benefit of having these templates.
However, I do see several things that make these !vote templates (with the icons) quite a bit helpful:
I have seen the reasons talked to death against all this, with some saying it's pointless, that it contradicts WP:!VOTE and WP:CONSENSUS, etc. But I wanted to put this here because I think there is a way to have these templates while accounting for all the concerns that led to the templates' deletion to begin with. This is why it's the idea lab after all. Awesome Aasim 20:19, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
In general, if a talk page is edited in by simply choosing edit, and a new section is added at the bottom, the summary has the name of the last section that existed prior to this edit, regardless of whether the new text includes a section. Can this be fixed? i.e. Current state of talk page is
==ABC== Text1
and what is added is
==DEF== Text2
The summary added shows that the edit was in section ABC, *not* DEF. Naraht ( talk) 05:12, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
/* section */
to the front of your edit summary. IMO it serves no use to waste a lot of resources implementing that when you can 1. just change the summary 2. just use the "Add topic" button.
Aaron Liu (
talk) 14:50, 23 February 2024 (UTC)Hello! Sorry if this isn't the right forum, has already been suggested, or is unworkable, but I wanted to suggest a bot that I would find time-saving. I don't know how to code, so this would definitely not be something I could take on, but thought some clever-clogs might like the idea!
When I first read WP:AFD, I didn't realise that you had to inform deletion-sorting lists and notify the AfD discussion that you've notified those lists. Adding notices to multiple deletion-sorting lists is quite an onerous manual task, and one that I suspect could be automated.
The bot would check open AfDs to check if a notice has been placed informing participants of an AfD's inclusion in a deletion-sorting list. The bot then checks the relevant deletion-sorting list. If said AfD hasn't been placed on the deletion-sorting list, then the bot adds the AfD to the list itself. Thus, editors need only place the notice in the AfD without updating individual deletion sorting lists. IgnatiusofLondon ( talk) 16:19, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
hastopic:
feature. There are 64 "topics" at the moment, and it would not be difficult to produce lists based on these, including for articles that aren't categorized or tagged by WikiProjects. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be pretty good.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 06:30, 25 February 2024 (UTC)According to WP:PCPP, Readers who are not logged in (the vast majority of readers) are shown the latest accepted version of the page; logged-in users see the latest version of the page, with all changes (reviewed or not) applied. This could cause some problems. A lot of what comes through Special:PendingChanges has factual errors, supported with no reliable source, is vandalism, or has other problems (examples: [2] [3] [4]). The point of pending changes protection is for someone to vet problematic edits before the readers see them. However, logged-in editors can see these edits. Most users with an account never make a single edit, so they'll see the potentially problematic edits. That's why it might be beneficial to change pending changes protection so only confirmed editors can see the latest version of the page. Any thoughts? Relativity 03:09, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
I'm a pending changes reviewer. I don't think that pending changes does much good. I don't think that I ever reviewed one that was vandalism/ outlandish. A common situation is where I accept it as a PC reviewer and then revert it as an editor. Which means that it was an OK edit under Pending Changes criteria. I'm guessing that such edits might get wrongly rejected by others on a Pending Changes basis which means rejections with no visible edit summary/explanation. North8000 ( talk) 19:42, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Reviewers and administrators will see a yellow watchlist banner on their watchlist whenever there is a pending edit needing review.There is currently a pending edit, and I don't see the banner, nor do I have any styles that'd modify the display. Did you ever see it? Aaron Liu ( talk) 21:41, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
Relevant links: Wikipedia:Protection policy and Special:MovePage/Wikipedia:Protection_policy (To see what it looks like to try and move a protected page. non admins only)
Currently, articles that are protected from editing have the relevant lock in the top right hand corner. Userpages may not have the relevant edit lock on the top right. With regarding edit protection, it will stay as it is but why don't we do the same for move, create and upload so that articles (other than user pages) require all types of protection to be shown on the top right. The lock icon will display in the same way shown in the protection policy page (linked above). With move protection, the only way to tell that the page is protected is if the move button is not seen (this article for example, doesn't have the move button for me, but it does have subscribe) with the possible exception for administrators as they can move any page even if it's protected. Even if accounts are able to edit semi and EC protected pages, the relevant lock is still there. But like I said, that will not change. Admins will also be able to see if a page is move protected from the green lock icon at protection policy page.
The only way to see the green (move) and blue (create/also known as salting) lock is if the URL was typed for some reason, like here and here respectively. (for ECP create protection this appears instead). JuniperChill ( talk) 21:40, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
Since the topic keeps coming up, and concerns about gaming this aren't seeming to go away, I want to open another WP:RFCBEFORE discussion about the possibility of redefining ECP to address gaming concerns.
My previous proposal turned out to be unworkable, so I'm going to keep this discussion a little broader:
#1, #2, and #3 will be possible to automate - while it should be possible to modify mediawiki to work this way, it probably won't be practical. Instead, I would suggest we create an admin bot that checks whether these criteria are met and grants ECP when they are.
The one that we won't be able to automate is #4, but it will make it clear to admins when it is appropriate to manually revoke ECP. BilledMammal ( talk) 02:46, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
Were you evading any restrictions when you participated in those discussions?Possibly; it depends on how the community assesses it. I would consider edits made in contravention of the restriction, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to be "evading", while edits made in line with the restriction would be permissible (I think those edits were in accordance with the restrictions as they were at the time - in particular, I think that ECP for Ukraine-Russia was applied after I made those edits), but the broader community may apply a stricter standard. I also wouldn't consider a couple of edits made inside the topic area to be a cause for concern; if an editor has made 450 outside but 50 inside, it simply isn't worth manually revoking ECP only to manually reinstate it a week later. Again, though, the broader community may apply a stricter standard.
I'm not convinced that the current requirement is sufficientwhere sufficient is
to keep the topic areas functional; to make it harder for bad actors to participate in the topic area, and ensure that good actors have sufficient experience to participate in the topic area.Why not show that there is a strong association between (i) edit types that happens in editors' 0-500 edit history and (ii) how they turn out to be "good" or "bad" actors?
Does that make you think that One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)? I makes me think that..
{{refimprove|date=February 2024}}
to 500 articles (+33), then that would be gaming but wouldn't bother you/the community?
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 21:09, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
So, I don't exactly know what the name would be, but I think a sister project where people will be allowed to write about things without worrying about notability, citations, etc. would be good. Kind of like Wikipedia essays but on any topic. It would still have restrictions of course, for inappropriate content and attacks on people or organizations. What do you think? Youprayteas ( t • c) 16:22, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
without worrying about notability, citations, etcAAAAAAAAAH! Try Twitter. 🌺 Cremastra ( talk) 15:59, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
Aaron Liu ( talk) 20:05, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Do people really take Wikidata seriously? I forgot that it even exists. Reading over several bits of it, I can definitely say that I don't take anything it says seriously. "P1313=Q27306390", "Wikisimpsons article ID=50604..." BLEEEECCCCCCHHHHHH!
I'm not sure what forum is best for this post.
I think there should be much greater responses on talk pages before anyone declares a consensus is reached. The talk pages are great and useful for discussing and editing article content. Yet, they usually don't approach consensus with any scientific or academic validity. There are usually not enough responces.
I'll recomed that the policy dictating consensus be updated with statistical polling requirements.
ProofCreature ( talk) 22:01, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
86 Administrators and/or 100 Wikipediansnumber from this data? Chaotıċ Enby ( talk · contribs) 13:21, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
A consensus with appropriate statistical validity should firmly settle an issue
Honestly, I don't expect much from this proposal. I am entirely aware how difficult it is to get more than a few Wikipedians to comment on any given page or article. There are many reasons for this. Disinterest on anything but "pet topics " is one big reason. There's also malaise and no motivating factors (ego, boredom, and a love to share learning are about the only motivation I can see to edit anything).
The thing I am looking to have happen from this suggestion is to see the statistics that describe consensus somehow included in the protocool for reaching a consensus without them becoming a mandate. More like a suggested action or just an F.y.i. There should be an effort (due diligence) made to draw in comments from Wikipedians who are less interested in the topic. Too, it should be noted, somehow, that limited comments (a number below the threshold for statistical consensus) can create an echo chamber effect. ProofCreature ( talk) 17:55, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
no consensus. In experience, most closers are willing to relist on request after a no consensus close where participation was minimal, but the truth is that usually the extra week does not garner any additional participation. Volunteer time is limited and there really is just not enough to go around to keep all our processes fully staffed, in fact staffing hasn't really been adequate for quite some time. There's a larger topic here about needing to reform our processes due to chronic participation shortages, but I don't want to go off on a long tangent. My only advice then is to WP:PAYITFORWARD when you can and encourage others to do the same, but the time needed to make a well-researched WP:!VOTE is non-trivial even if you are familiar with a topic area.
I'd like to propose a "Content Policy Committee" with broad authority within Wikipedia governance to resolve disputes over applications of content and manual of style policies, especially where current policy pages are ambiguous or silent, and to revise content policies to codify at least Dispute Resolution Noticeboard resolutions and Arbitration Committee rulings (if and where applicable), as well as possibly other Noticeboard discussions, Requests for Comments discussions, and WikiProject talk discussions. I am not sure exactly which discussion resolutions would be most appropriate, but would welcome suggestions since I'm largely unfamiliar with Wikipedia's current governance structure. In a current discussion I've recently had a with a fellow editor we came to a disagreement over the application of policies that as far as I could tell were not clearly applicable in the context in which they were being applied and where it was unclear that there was any policy that applied.
My fellow editor stated that previous Arbitration Committee rulings have had implications for content policy, but I've always been under the impression that the Arbitration Committee only dealt with conduct policy disputes. Additionally, in my experience many individual editors apply content and MoS policy capriciously and in ways that in keeping with personal preferences rather than in ways that enhance the encyclopedia or are actually in keeping with what policies explicitly require. As a personal aside, it appears to me as someone who has little familiarity with Wikipedia governance that the Arbitration Committee should be limited to conduct policy disputes, and that there should be a separate but equivalent organ within Wikipedia governance that resolves disputes over content policy to prevent one committee having undue influence over the development of the entire project.
The Committee would be divided into 4 standing subcommittees: (1) a Resolution Subcommittee that would operate the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard and where individual subcommittee members would respond to Third Opinion Requests; (2) a Codification Subcommittee responsible for drafting the codifying the codified revisions to existing content policy based on prior rulings and reviewing public comments on the revisions revision drafts; (3) an Appeals Subcommittee to provide a panel review of adopted Committee revisions prior to an en banc review by the entire Content Policy Committee if an appeal of a revision is requested; and (4) a Proposals Subcommittee for presenting proposed content policies at the Village Pump based on dispute resolutions where there is no existing policy to resolve the issue. The Content Policy Committee would not make or legislate content policy, which would instead reside with the Village Pump.
The Content Policy Committee members would presumably be selected in a process similar to the Arbitration Committee members with elections to the seats following a nomination to be a candidate by a petition. However, I suspect that the Content Policy Committee may need to be larger than the Arbitration Committee with maybe as many as 28 29 members in total with 7 on each subcommittee. The Content Policy Committee Chair would be elected by the Committee members and the Committee Chair would appoint Subcommittee Chairs. If deletionist and inclusionist factions emerge on the Committee, a Committee Ranking Member may be elected by the minority faction to appoint Subcommittee Ranking Members. Other procedural practices of the Committee would follow Robert's Rules of Order. --
CommonKnowledgeCreator (
talk) 09:54, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
Those functions all happen already, except anyone can take part, and decisions are arrived at by consensus.Perhaps I shouldn't have said "revisions"; I'll strikethrough where I said that because that's not really what I meant. "Revision" implies the consensus policymaking process that I don't wish to alter. What I'm really trying to propose is a committee that would create and maintain pages that codify and summarize dispute resolution rulings of content policy disputes by the specific policy and creating a dispute resolution committee separate from the current Arbitration Committee for content policy decisions. I do not believe the codification summary functions I've proposed do occur already, and the process for making revisions to content policy appear to be done in a manner that is disjointed and often capricious where many editors who may have wished to contribute to the discussion are unaware that the discussion even occurred.
What you are proposing is a lot of additional bureaucracy - is there really a big enough problem to justify it? Policy is sometimes silent because we can’t write rules that cover all eventualities, and we still expect editors to use judgement to apply principles to specific cases.Out of the tens of thousands of editors that regularly contribute to the project, a 29-member committee is NOT a particularly large bureaucracy. If there are past Arbitration Committee rulings that are being enforced as interpretive rules for content policies beyond the specific dispute that the ruling was issued for, then those rulings need to be codified and summarized by the specific policy applied in separate articles in the way that I am describing because those rulings effectively amount to content policy rules. If the Arbitration Committee acts as a kind of court of last resort of Wikipedia dispute resolution and its rulings are binding applications of policies, then the Arbitration Committee is effectively creating policy rules every time it issues a ruling in the same way that a case law in a common law legal system develops. Laws do not have to explicitly cover every eventuality; that's the logic behind a common law legal system itself. This also occurs without the consensus process that you've expressed concern that my proposal would upend.
Additionally, if a local consensus developed on one talk page contradicts the local consensus developed on a different one, we end up with competing rules.I just want to point out that this is an intended feature, not a flaw. It’s common for editors of different articles in different areas to come to different local consensuses. A trivial example would be WP:ENGVAR where we explicitly accept global inconsistency (although consistency is still preferable where possible). Barnards.tar.gz ( talk) 08:24, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
I’m open to the idea that there might be important decisions being made somewhere on a random article talk page that could use more visibility (either to neutrally gather participants or just to communicate the result). ... Perhaps it would be helpful to find ways of increasing uptake of these existing mechanisms rather than invoke the rather significant overhead of a committee?See the comments made by User:TheWordsmith and User:Novo Tape below and my replies. The issue that motivated me to propose this Committee is that policymaking is too disjointed and too scattered. Like I said, I don't really wish to upend the existing consensus-building processes for modifying policy. Instead, I would argue that having a committee of editors to facilitate dispute resolution and to field and make proposals for changes to policy would be a better process for integrating the existing mechanisms. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 19:16, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
a committee of editors to facilitate dispute resolution: Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard
field and make proposals for changes to policy: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)
The membership of these existing "committees" is: whoever shows up.Doesn't sound like enough people for "consensus" though, especially for changes to policy or dispute resolutions that effectively become interpretive rules for existing policies. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 13:10, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
It would help if you went into more detail on the problem you are trying to solve, what incident led to this, and how you think this proposal would help the problem. … Might also be useful to have people keeping an eye on these discussions as a whole and nipping behavioral issues in the bud.The "incident", insofar as I should to refer to it as that because as far as I could tell it was perfectly civil and polite disagreement, was the discussion I had with User:Hipal in the "Selected Publications" section of Talk:Jonathan Haidt. I was unaware of the existence of WP:MEDCOM, WP:MEDCAB, and WP:CENT. I have not had a chance to review them more fully; I have been spending the last couple of days just trying to compose the response to clarify my proposal. However, after looking at WP:MEDCOM briefly, I did notice that WP:MEDCOM did not take on very many cases and that would be completely different with what I am proposing. My hope is that this Committee would immediately respond to the content disputes rather than allowing them to snowball into conduct violations.
I do think it would need to be scaled way back to achieve support, but there might be some merit to having a more centralized place to give structure to discussions attempting to change policies and guidelines. We have the various Village Pumps, policy/guideline talkpages, wikiproject talkpages, individual RfCs everywhere but not really a place or group of people to organize it. Having a dashboard or project that can answer simple content policy questions and display proposals in a useful format could be good.It appears that you have picked up the spirit of what has motivated my proposal, not just for proposing changes to content policies but also a place for resolving disputes over them. Thank you. :) -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 02:09, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
"Think about what would happen if the editor you're in a dispute with (or one of his like-minded wiki-friends) is on the committee...and you're not". ... In practice, some editors would interpret such a rule as meaning that anybody on the committee who disagrees with me ought to recuse.See my reply to User:Barnards.tar.gz. Committee members would be required to recuse in disputes in which they are engaged are brought before the Committee. That would address at least the first and third parts of your concern about recusal and the Committee being a neutral third-party. As for the issue of "like-minded wiki-friends", if an editor felt that the Committee or its Subcommittees did not provide them with due process and fair hearings under its procedures, the editor would be permitted to appeal to the Arbitration Committee. Though not proposed in my previous comments, perhaps the Appeals Subcommittee could also field requested appeals at the beginning of each new term if an editor felt that neither the Committee, its Subcommittees, and the Arbitration Committee did not provide due process or fair hearings as well.
I don't think that what the English Wikipedia needs is a greater adherence to the rules. We have a policy that says Wikipedia:If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. Do what's right by the article. If the policies and guidelines are well-written, then the policies and guidelines will follow you.See my replies to User:TheWordsmith and User:Novo Tape. I don't disagree with your sentiment about adherence to rules, but in my experience other editors will continue enforcing the policies and continually lead to disputes or discourage further contributions. This Committee would be required by its charter to be inclusionist to prevent a single reverting editor or handful of deletionist editors from becoming, as I said before, "a policymaking and enforcement body unto themselves based on their personal interpretations of a policy without a larger consensus in favor of what is effectively a new policy rule." I'm not so sure policies follow good editing. I think they too often follow the arbitrary whims of the handful of editors who just keep going in a dispute or talk page discussion. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 07:12, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
This Committee would be required by its charter to be inclusionist...Really? I'd have thought that any legitimate committee ought to be expected to reflect, with due balance, the perspectives of the contributing community as a whole. Telling them in advance how to think seems a little extreme. AndyTheGrump ( talk) 14:30, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
Figured I'd outdent considering the number of previous comments and their differing subject matter.
Given how much opposition there has been to the policy proposal functions of the proposed Committee, I'd just drop the Proposals Subcommittee as well as the Appeals Subcommittee and instead just focus on the Resolution Subcommittee and Codification Subcommittee as part of a Content Arbitration Committee rather than a Content Policy Committee to reduce confusion. I wasn't aware that ArbCom had so few candidates in the last election. Perhaps instead of a separate Content Arbitration Committee, a better proposal would be to have that the Arbitration Committee itself be authorized to a form a Content Subcommittee to fulfill the functions of the Resolution Subcommittee and Codification Subcommittee considering that the Arbitration Committee by acknowledgement is primarily authorized to adjudicate alleged conduct policy violations rather than content policy application disputes. To be clear, I propose these functions because I would be willing to perform them myself if I had the administrative authority to do so and because I sincerely do believe that they are needed.
I have never been involved with any policymaking or administrative governance decisions of the project in my time here, and as such, I cannot cite any examples of important content policy decisions that have been made by only handfuls of editors. However, this is why I'd still argue that at least the codification procedures that I've proposed (i.e. summarizing dispute resolution rulings by policy on separate pages that are linked to from the policy pages) are needed so that it is clearer where, why, and when decisions are made. I'd also add that if the current policy pages are changed to reflect a new consensus that has developed, then policy pages should be redesigned to note when and how a policy has been changed or separate policy pages should be created to summarize the changes rather than it just being included in a talk page archive somewhere because otherwise it will not be clear where, when, and why a policy change was made to the vast majority of editors. Conversely, below is a list of examples of other editors reverting content that I've contributed that, as far as I could tell at the time, did not clearly violate a content policy where other editors disagreed, and in two cases mobbed my talk page. Also listed is a third opinion request that I don't remember at this point if any editor even responded to.
Also, I think the fact that there were an insufficient number of ArbCom candidates and the fact that there even is a Wikipedia essay on "How to lose" is illustrative of my larger point about why allowing editors to revert content beyond what is explicitly precluded by policy and allowing editors to filibuster in any and every talk page and dispute resolution discussion is problematic for Wikipedia as a project: it is probably what keeps more people from participating to begin with. A process for orderly deliberation on questions of interest to a community or organization is what parliamentary procedure is for, and this is why I initially proposed having the Committee follow Robert's Rules of Order. If the Wikimedia Foundation has programmers or software engineers who have the technical ability to do so, I'd also recommend that they alter the dispute resolution pages to effectively build parliamentary procedure into the editing features of those pages. I've recently agreed to become a New Page Patroller; if there is the ability to create something like the Page Curation Tool, there should be the ability to do something similar for the features of dispute resolution pages. Maybe then more people would be willing to stand for election to the Arbitration Committee and not resign if elected because the process would be far more formal and organized. It also appears to me that this is further justification of why the Foundation should be verifying the identities of at least extended confirmed users to prevent the kind of "collusive disputes" that I mentioned before, as well as any potential "collusive consensus" via sockpuppetry.
Per WP:Community, there are approximately only 125,000 editors in English-language Wikipedia who regularly contribute to the project despite there being more than 47 million English-language Wikipedia username accounts across at least the 88 countries in the English-speaking world. By contrast, there are more members of the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, and the American Bar Association than active Wikipedia editors accounts, and there are only barely more active Wikipedia editors than members of the American Institute of Physics and the National Association of Social Workers. Yet despite Wikipedia not being a professional association with membership dues or members being required to have post-secondary degrees, we have fewer people regularly contributing than organizations that do have those membership requirements. Also, I recently added the results of an
October 2023 YouGov poll on participation in the Wikipedia community by U.S. adults on the WP:Community page and Wikipedia community article. 7% of U.S. adults surveyed said they had ever edited Wikipedia and 20% had considered doing so who had not. Doing back-of-the-envelope calculations using
American FactFinder Quickfacts of the U.S. Census Bureau, that would mean that approximately more than 18.3 million U.S. adults have edited Wikipedia at least once and more than 70.8 million U.S. adults have either edited Wikipedia at least once or seriously considered it.
The poll didn't ask further questions of the survey respondents who had edited Wikipedia at least once what it was that they had edited, if they had done so more than once (and if not, why), and the poll also did not ask the survey respondents who had considered editing Wikipedia that hadn't why they didn't. However, I strongly suspect that if YouGov did ask, the poll would have shown that many people do not contribute because of overzealous reverting editors, Wikipedia's existing policies, Wikipedia's policymaking process, and filibustering editors on talk pages. Also, this was a poll of only the U.S. population. In light of the poll's findings, it is remarkable to me and it should be to others how few people regularly contribute to this project globally. Per the Criticism of Wikipedia article and the Predictions of the end of Wikipedia article, it appears that I am not the only person who has had these concerns. To reiterate, this is why I would argue that the functions of the Codification Subcommittee and the Resolution Subcommittee as part of a Content Arbitration Committee or as subcommittees of the Arbitration Committee as I've proposed are needed because it appears Wikipedia's fundamental WP:5P5 and WP:5P4 policies are two principles that are actually in conflict. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 17:50, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
I strongly suspect that [...]), as none of the "predictions of the end of Wikipedia" have yet materialized. Chaotıċ Enby ( talk · contribs) 19:44, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
The number of Wikipedia editors is stable, thank you very much. We don't need committees to decide on content instead of editors... And the reasons you provide for why this number isn't higher/lower are pure speculation...Stable perhaps, but peculiarly small. The Committee would not be deciding content policy, just resolving disputes of the applications of content policy where existing policy is silent or ambiguous. This is the Village pump idea lab. It is unclear to me why speculation would be inappropriate here, and I'd certainly hope that the Foundation would take into account the results of such a poll and request further ones to try create strategies to increase participation in the project. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 20:08, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
I think you are considerably inflating the existing editor fatigue from petty tyranny and lack of clarity...That's certainly possible, but the reason I bring it up is because it's consistent with my own experience here. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 01:08, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
@
Barnards.tar.gz,
The Wordsmith,
AndyTheGrump,
Donald Albury,
Novo Tape,
WhatamIdoing,
Phil Bridger,
CoffeeCrumbs,
Redrose64, and
Cremastra: Just wondering if any of you had any additional thoughts in lights light of my most recent posts. --
CommonKnowledgeCreator (
talk) 20:13, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
Sometimes they will provide information about strengths or weaknesses they perceive (e.g., gender gap). What they don't do is tell us that they think we need to change particular bits of content, or to use a different process to change particular bits of content. They stay as far away from the nitty-gritty details of content as they legally can.I am not recommending that the Foundation have an active role in content policymaking, but I would hope that they would take an interest in trying to grow the size of the Wikipedia editing community and make some suggestions to the community if they have evidence that existing policy dispute resolution processes are discouraging participation. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 22:10, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
"Think about what would happen if the editor you're in a dispute with (or one of his like-minded wiki-friends) is on the committee...and you're not". Handing power to a small group can backfire.I'm not sure that the hypotheticals that you've proposed really illustrate the issue that you've proposed and the faults of my proposal. As I understand it, here is the current step-by-step sequence for resolving a content policy application dispute where existing policy is silent or ambiguous (and with the assumption of no conduct policy violations):
My primary concern is that the "losing" editor will declare that if they "lost" then that fact alone proves that the committee didn't give them a fair hearing.My reaction is "So what?" There needs to be a process for resolving disputes, and sometimes that means that someone "loses". I guess I don't see what the problem is. Under what I'm proposing, there would always be a resolution to a dispute, while under current policy there is not necessarily a resolution and that's really what my issue is with the current content dispute resolution procedures. Also, the Committee's decisions in some sense would only be binding for its individual terms since the Committee could in subsequent terms with different members reverse the previous decisions. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 23:54, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
This Committee would be required by its charter to be inclusionist...to which I raised objections earlier for which no response has been given, I see no reason to go into any particular detail over my objections, beyond pointing out that any such committee would self-evidently become a focus for faction-fighting, politicisation, and attempts to game the system to manufacture 'lack of consensus' where it might otherwise be found by the community itself. The whole idea is so utterly ill-thought-out and wrong-headed that I see no prospect of it ever being adopted, and not worthy of further debate. AndyTheGrump ( talk) 00:00, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
Really? I'd have thought that any legitimate committee ought to be expected to reflect, with due balance, the perspectives of the contributing community as a whole. Telling them in advance how to think seems a little extreme. ... frankly, given the poor arguments put forward... I see no reason to go into any particular detail over my objections, beyond pointing out that any such committee would self-evidently become a focus for faction-fighting, politicisation, and attempts to game the system to manufacture 'lack of consensus' where it might otherwise be found by the community itself. The whole idea is so utterly ill-thought-out and wrong-headed that I see no prospect of it ever being adopted, and not worthy of further debate.The reason why I proposed that the Committee be inclusionist is only due to concerns raised about the Committee not providing fair hearings, having a binding resolution authority, and to prevent it from becoming a policymaking body. You have to appreciate that I'm trying to respond to multiple criticisms at once and many of which have been non-overlapping. Your only complaint, as far as I can tell, is that it is self-evident that the Committee that I've proposed would be subject to manipulation. That's why I've suggested that the Foundation verify editor identifies but other editors have argued that would lead to further editor fatigue. I don't believe this is poorly thought-out; I just think that the community has an excessive distaste for even limited bureaucracy despite the fact that it is not clear that the community itself always finds consensus except in the direction of deleting things and excluding content that should be acceptable but just some particular editors don't like. I apologize, but I don't know how to contact other editors other than pings and replies. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator ( talk) 00:22, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
I've recently been working on vandalism reversal, which, in some cases, has resulted in the user needed to be reported to AIV because of vandalism past their 4th warning. Generally, for every warning there is a record of the article vandalised and the form of vandalism which can be useful for identifying trends in vandalism/NPOV issues (i.e. if a user always vandalises articles relating to certain person or idea).
However, for the vandalism which initiates an AIV report, there is no such record of the type of vandalism and where the vandalism occurs, a report to AIV just occurs, usually with the description "vandalism after 4th warning". The administrator has to look through Special:Contributions and timestamps to determine if vandalism did occur after the 4th warning. The lack of a record for this vandalism reversion also fragment's the user's vandalism history, so, if they are unblocked/only temporarily blocked, the complete history of their vandalism isn't fully documented on the talk page for when they (hopefully) return to Wikipedia.
I made a quick template ( Template:AIV Notice) for this which I use for my personal purposes. An example where I used it was here, where the admin was easily able to determine the offending edit from the talk page message (as shown in the block message).
I was wondering about the feasibility of proposing that adding this notice to a talk page, with the article argument, be added a requirement for reporting someone to AIV, just like Template:ANI-notice must be used when reporting users to WP:ANI. Another potential proposal is that it becomes a soft requirement, like using Template:uw-vandalism2 or similar is a soft requirement when reverting an vandalism edit. Molecular Pilot Let's talk! 23:06, 4 March 2024 (UTC)