So, after a recent RfA, I began thinking about whether rethinking the use of draft space at all is something that we should consider. I've personally come to the conclusion that draft space is a failure, and for the most part is something that is used as a holding ground for G13 since the majority of the content is unsalvageable.

While I'm not proposing anything formally yet, I'd be curious at getting the community's thoughts on ways forward, whether it be disabling draft space completely or some other reforms. The current system isn't working, and thinking about ways to change it so we don't have to waste volunteer time maintaining a broken concept would be ideal. TonyBallioni ( talk) 19:03, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

• I think it's doing exactly what it should be doing being a graveyard for crap that would otherwise get into mainspace. And also acts as a place for WP:AFC to do its role when people aren't submitting crap. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 19:13, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

  If you submit non-crap, the odds of it being found in AfC to be published in time for you to want to continue contributing approximate zero. The ideal here is that people should be able to create content that is notable and others improve it. Draft space hinders that goal, and does not help it. AfC could easily go back to the user subpage model for anyone who really wants to use it. TonyBallioni ( talk) 19:22, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

  If your solution is to resume putting new submissions into mainspace, then you're basically accepting all the G13 nonsense that is there to die the slow death it deserves. If you want to make sure the good stuff gets in, then the solution here is to improve the AFC process. One thing that could be done is to tag the talk pages of drafts, so they get put in the various WP:AALERTS notice of Wikiprojects. It works pretty well at WP:JOURNALS and WP:WPWIR and other involved projects. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 19:56, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

• I don't see what benefit the current use of draft space brings to the encyclopedia. The whole point of a wiki is that content should be developed collaboratively, but in draft space nobody finds the content that needs improving. Rather than move things to draft just for them to be deleted six months later under WP:G13 people should use the existing deletion procedures where articles should be deleted, and let articles that should not be deleted be developed in main space where they belong. The use for draft space that I would support is very different from the way that it is currently used. Because Wikinews has been a failure it would be a good place for things that are in the news, so are covered by primary sources, but have not yet been covered by proper secondary sources, but it seems that enough people come out in support of having Wikipedia articles about anything covered by newspapers to preclude this. Phil Bridger ( talk) 19:53, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
• I remember being excited about draftspace early on, because it offered a place to find and collaborate on drafts that weren't quite ready for mainspace. There were two problems, though: 1) We don't have great tools for finding drafts, or even for notifying people creating articles that there's already an extant draft (an easily missed line before you start editing a page with exactly the same title as a draft is as close as we get). So nobody really uses it for collaboration/discovery. 2) After a series of RfCs and other discussions, the function of draftspace is the same as userspace but with a countdown to deletion for newbies who don't know any better. I don't know, maybe it's useful to have a bin for pages that don't need to be deleted yet, but don't make sense for any one particular user's userspace. I'd be interested to see some statistics about its usage. Admittedly, I have a specific perspective in this. I'm disappointed that draftspace is useless for experienced editors, and of the many, many new users I engage with, the vast majority of them are through off-wiki programs (courses, edit-a-thons, etc.) -- and perhaps draftspace is really just for those newbies that come to Wikipedia with no help. If that's the purpose, we should be clear about that, though. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:38, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

  TonyBallioni, the problem is that Draft space has been used as a holding ground for articles that should be in Category:Articles needing additional references, but that already has 387,516 articles in it, and it's pretty obvious that if a new page patroller adds that category in stead of draftifying it, nothing will happen. So they get dumped in Draft space where they await a slow death. Somehow we should find a way to get more eyes on those articles, rather than less. Vexations ( talk) 20:55, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

• I think that realistically, there is always going to be more input than manpower available to maintain it. The Weibull distribution probably doesn't strictly apply here but I suspect that the vast majority of drafts are not going to be edited collaboratively. So if you let all these things go into articlespace you get a flood of poor articles. If you put them in draftspace, a lot will be picked out by G13. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk) 21:01, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
• I am personally of the opinion an article in draft space is one that is open for people to collaborate on; whereas in userspace its more for personal development without interference (and I would expect to be able to cut/paste at article to mainspace if necessary). And I do use it that way myself with 20 drafts on my watchlist currently, fettling the drafts every 4 months or so(10 new; 10 ex-Afd; expect 5 to be in mainspace this year). But I agree an article to effective in draft space it needs to be in one or more peoples stewardship(watchlist) (not necessarily the creator) or its almost certainly a G13 goner. Its likely pointless putting a long established article with an inactive author to draftspace unless someone shows interest it. For new newspace entries a point to "help - my articles been draftified what do a do about it". I'd like to see a two week pre-G13 banner notice that could trigger people's watchlist interest if necessary to try to minimize G13/Refunds. We need to minimize admin manual work and have good process pathways. HEADBOMB's article alert suggestions may have some value. Its my bedtime so I'm probably talking dribble. Djm-leighpark ( talk) 01:20, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
• Draft space is a repeat of ideas that failed before, including the Incubator and Nupedia. Wikipedia succeeded where the perfectionist Nupedia failed because of its Wiki approach which is inherently quick and dirty. Even after 20 years, 99% of Wikipedia's content is less than good and every page has a disclaimer to warn readers that the content is not reliable. Our processes are built around this fundamental understanding and acceptance that our content is flawed and always will be. New content should be put alongside old content so that they can be read and processed together by everyone, not just an inadequate handful of inspectors. Draft space should be disabled and marked as yet another failed experiment. Andrew🐉( talk) 01:22, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
• I don't try and interpret what the original ideas or thoughts belonged to the people behind the creation of the draftspace. I will however comment on its current function. There is no denying that there are more articles created then editors watching and fixing them. I work mainly in TV and film areas and check almost daily the articles alerts for these pages. There are a lot of pages that come from either non-English speaking countries or countries such as India where an article is created about some TV or web series that has a few lines, zero sources and is usually also badly written and ignores each and every MoS section it can. I personally do not have time to go over each one and fix them. I also do not have any intention of going to AfD for everyone as I find places like AfD and MfD to be bureaucracy filled places where the most horrible garbage can usually find supports to keep it. In most cases I've seen, these articles creators also never return. So what we are left with is horrible articles, with questionable notability and even more questionable unsupported statements. There is absolutely nothing to gain in keeping Wikipedia "mediocre" as one nom above me is arguing, and having these articles in article space does exactly that. To comment on the argument that drafts don't get worked on by others, I'd argue that the same articles won't get worked on even if they were in article space except from simple gnoming which doesn't make the article any better. On the other hand, articles which would have been worked together in article space, do get worked on together in draft space. There are many examples of MCU, Arrowverse, Star Wars and other notable TV series (and their seasons) that are actively worked on while being drafts. tl/dr - with the current overall system in place on Wikipedia, draftspace works and does what it needs to. -- Gonnym ( talk) 09:32, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
• Don't go looking for problems where there aren't any. Getting rid of Draftspace would be a disaster which I would oppose in the strongest possible way. Just leave it alone – it's working: some articles that merit attention do get that, and those that don't generally die the deaths they deserve. -- IJBall ( contribs • talk) 13:39, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
• The core issue here is that we have no meaningful way to sort and find content in draft space. But I'm not sure that burning down the house to catch the mouse is necessarily the correct way to respond to that. GMG ^talk 14:01, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
• All removing the draft space would do is massively increase the number of CSD and PROD and AFD tags being added to inappropriate new articles. If the draft space is serving no other purpose than acting as a holding area for stuff to keep it out of the article space, it's doing enough. Please don't get rid of it. -- Jayron 32 15:27, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
• Here's what usually happens with draft articles:
  1. A new user creates an article in mainspace / creates a draft and submits it to WP:AFC.
  2. A reviewer thinks it's undersourced and moves it to draft space / declines the draft.
  3. By now, the new user has probably left Wikipedia (either they left when they created their page or they left because their work was rejected).
  4. Nobody else notices the page and so 6 months later, an admin deletes the draft per WP:G13.

  It's not the new user's fault that they don't know how to meet the toughest reviewer's sourcing requirements. Reviewers don't bother looking for sources to improve articles, they just draftify/decline and move on to the next "problem", and neither do admins who see a valid G13 (and thus press the delete button as it only takes 1 click). Getting rid of draftspace isn't the solution as it stop new users from creating articles altogether. Making it easier to find drafts won't fix the problem either if nobody wants to work on them. The only solutions I see are to stop draftifying articles without a proper discussion and to get rid of G13. Why is there even a deadline for draft space? Iffy★ Chat -- 18:45, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

  Iffy, Reviewers don't bother looking for sources. They do if they're doing page patrol correctly. Look at the NPP flowchart. There is no way you a reviewer could reasonably arrive at draftify without meeting at least WP:BEFORE. I get your point about new users disappearing though. That is a problem, and it has to do with the size of the backlog. It takes too long to get feedback on an article. Vexations ( talk) 22:55, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

  I've seen reviewers decline articles on the grounds that the citations were listed in the article but weren't formatted in the WP:REFB style. I've seen an article declined because the sources were WP:NONENG, even though that's allowed. We shouldn't design processes that only produce acceptable results if each reviewer knows dozens and dozens of rules and follows them all perfectly every time. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:32, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

  WhatamIdoing, NPP folks or AfC? I've seen the behaviour you describe at AfC, and worse, but not by draftifying NPPers. The expectations of New Page Patrollers are that such mistakes should never happen, or very rarely. I don't think there's a problem with having a process that requires that the people doing the processing have extensive policy knowledge. Vexations ( talk) 23:43, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

  WhatamIdoing, I think you are referring to AfC reviewers, NPP reviewers would pretty quickly get crucified for this behaviour and is against the process (see the aforementioned NPP flowchart). If you do have such examples, please pass them to me so that I can hand out admonishments. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)}_{( click me!)} 03:08, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

• Even though I think the Draft namespace, and the whole system for dealing with new content, is nowadays functioning a bit better than say about two years ago, I still believe it is fundamentally not fit for purpose. A lot of junk is created that can't get immediately cleared out and a fair amount of easily improvable content on notable topics is relegated to silent deletion because it doesn't fit some reviewer's idea of what an exemplary article should be like. I'm beginning to think that the system of the pre- WP:ACTRIAL days was better: any registered user could create an article immediately available in mainspace, the loads of garbage could be quickly whisked away, the content with potential made immediately available for others to further improve, and the borderline cases decided on by the deliberative process. – Uanfala (talk) 23:44, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
• I agree with others above that the Draft namespace is not working well, and obstructs the proper functioning of the wiki. The original case for draftspace was persuasive and exciting, but it doesn't seem to have worked out very well in practice. It's ended up being less like an incubator and more like Limbo. I keep coming across decent starter articles on encyclopedic topics that were draftified/declined (and often subsequently deleted as "abandoned") because someone found them wanting on seemingly arbitrary grounds. One example that currently sticks in my craw is an article about a prominent African-American newspaper that a novice contributor submitted to AfC; one reviewer correctly identified it as "ready to go" but the article subsequently sat in limbo for four months before someone else decided it wasn't good enough and declined the submission. (I discovered and un-draftified it because I was in the process of creating such an article myself, and it would have been ridiculous and anti-wiki to pass up the opportunity to build on the original contributor's work.) While it may be true that Drafts help to filter out bad articles as well, the absence of one good article does more long-term harm to the project than the presence of a hundred bad ones. When we are treating our most dedicated new contributors this way, it's a wonder we have any contributors at all. I'll humbly submit, however, that at least half of the problem here is that we are currently tricking novice users into submitting through the optional AfC bureaucracy rather than inviting them to participate directly in the wiki as we should. Biting the newcomers is bad, but fencing them out as we currently do is much worse. -- Visviva ( talk) 06:46, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
• Looking into the history, I was a bit surprised to realize that draftspace didn't become a thing until 2013. That forces me to reconsider some of my assumptions about the feature's negative impacts, since Wikipedia's ongoing slump was already well under way by 2013. But the recency of that date also makes it a bit difficult to take any of the above prognostications of doom seriously. It's hard to think of any standard by which the Wikipedia of 2013 was an "unmitigated disaster" but the Wikipedia of 2020 is not. Thus it seems highly unlikely that returning to the draftspace-free status quo ante would have any particularly disastrous effects. -- Visviva ( talk) 07:12, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
• Idea: make draft space only for articles with a plausible COI concern. It's pretty clear that we're not doing new editors any favors by fencing them off from AfD, but we need a way to keep bad faith editors from soaking up our time and effort. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 07:15, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

  Rosguill, So much of the content submitted these days has a plausible COI that this wouldn't really help much unfortunately. and would make false flags even worse; who wants to work at AfC if ALL the articles are COIs? — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)}_{( click me!)} 03:11, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

• I sadly have to agree, even drafts that have a shot at making it into mainspace often end up subject to G13. However, I think that they could be fixed, possibly using Headbomb's suggestion of making drafts in particular subjects get a tag so that people that may be interested in them actually see them.
  However, I also think there should be a way to get junk cleared out faster, because at the end of the day the majority of drafts that fall to G13 are junk. I patrol recent changes, primarily userspace and draft space, and I believe this to be true based on what i've seen: lots of unrecoverable junk, an occasional good draft that's COI, and very little else. — moonythedwarf (Braden N.) 17:18, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
• Do we have any metrics for measuring the impact that 7 years of draftspace has had on the wiki? Are there less deletions from mainspace now than before? Fewer AfDs? Less promo? More articles? Better articles? Levivich ( lulz) 02:35, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
• My position to keep aligns closely with IJBall, Rosguill, and Vexations. WhatamIdoing, the actions by the NPPers you described are what needs review rather than the process, although I do understand the process is not perfect. Perhaps the WMF can conduct the necessary research and provide answers to the questions asked by Levivich? Kudpung has been one of the most active in getting NPP the tools needed to do the job, and he may have some insight as to resolving some of the issues we're facing now. ^Atsme _Talk 📧 13:30, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Research was done when the draftspace was fairly new, and the conclusion was that the draftspace is where articles go to die. See m:Research:Wikipedia article creation and m:Research:AfC processes and productivity. It's not primarily about the speed of the initial response. I think it might be more about the parable that User:Iridescent told me a couple of years ago. The incentives are set up so that nobody wants to be the "bad" reviewer that lets an unwanted article into the mainspace, with the result that both bad articles and borderline articles get suppressed, rather than just the bad ones. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 17:59, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
    • WhatamIdoing, that research appears to have been rather one sided and mainly the work and opinion of one WMF staff member. Unless I am seriously missing something, it failed to bring into the statistics the numbers of totally justified rejections of articles that are in no way fit or appropriate for an encyclopedia. Please correct me if I am wrong. This reinforces the notion that the the Foundation was interested in one thing only: the total number of creations, irrespective of their quality, and still is. Such research is probably best outsourced to a neutral consulting body, even if it costs some money. I firmly believe that such matters should be devolved to the community itself, leaving the WMF soley as the instiution that manages legal and financial matters on the Community's behalf, under the Community's instructions. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 01:11, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
      • Oh, I'm willing to believe that one of the research projects might have some bias involved. After all, the WMF staffer who originally proposed the creation of the Draft: space is listed as one of the contributors. I suppose the fact that the draftspace was created by the WMF and that this research involved its main proponent sort of undercuts your opinion that the research project was probably biased against the draftspace. If we had devolved everything to the community, then we wouldn't be having this discussion, because the draftspace wouldn't exist.
        I also don't see the research claiming that any decision is objectively wrong. It shows that draftspace standards are significantly higher than mainspace standards. It does not judge whether the problem is draftspace being "too high" or mainspace being "too low", or a combination of the two. That judgment, after all, is about people's values, and different people have different values. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 17:05, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
• I can understand TonyBallioni's motivation for starting this discussion, and I'm only here because I was pinged and I think DGG as a major contributor to these elements should be invited to comment.

A lot of things on Wikipedia are a 'broken concept', including AfC, NPP, AfD, and also the way users are encouraged, their behaviour is processed, or their qualities recognised, indeed, the Founder once said that RfA is a horrible and broken process.

The problem is that no one could have known when it was created that Wikipedia would become such a hugely successful and important collection of knowledge despite (or because of) its crowdsourced content. Many editors in that crowd may well be topic specific experts, professionals, or academics, but many are not, especially when it comes to creating new content, but those who patrol the new contributions are not necessarily schooled in real life either for the tasks that lay before them as Wikipedia backroom people. The main issues are that there is 1) a vast disparity in the way NPP and AfC reviewers go about their work and apply Wikipedia rules, regulations, guidelines, and policies, and 2) simply not enough active reviewers available for both systems (and in the absence of metrics, there is the possibility that some of the ~650 NPPers might be (or were) hat collectors, and 3) but perhaps less important, the cultural dichotomies among the different English speaking users who work in maintenance areas.

But this topic is not strictly about NPP/AfC, it's about the draft namespace which is nevertheless a major part of the mechanism fo maintaining the integrity of of the public part of the encyclopedia corpus. I welcomed the advent of the draft and the deprecation of the incubator, and I fought long and hard to bring about ACTRIAL and its permanent adoption and to create what I hoped would be a competent component to review new articles. I still believe that while 'the encyclopedia anyone can edit' is still an important founding principle, it does not exclude the possibility of introducing required controls as the project continues to grow organically - as demonstrated by the very reason why AfC was created in the first place, and the resounding consensus for ACPERM. Personally, I do not believe that ACPERM went far enough (but it was as much as we dared ask the community for at the time), and recent developments, such as the increase in paid editing and possible abuse of the Autopatrolled and NPP flags give me pause.

What we should probably be looking at is not to immediately deprecate the draft namespace, but to take a very long and serious look at the entire system of management of new content and that would begin with a proper system that informs potential new article creators just what they can and cannot create, and I firmly maintain that that is something that should be at least funded by the WMF even if they claim they do not have the developer capacity to do it. Tony's issue(s) therefore only scratches the surface, what is needed now after 18 years is a holistic approach, and less talk from the WMF about their big ideas lined up for the movement in 30 years hence (for one thing, I and possibly a lot of the users won't be around then unless we live to be a 100, and those of us who have been influential in the past may be seeking to reduce their activity as I have done over the past 2 years on NPP but we wouldn't want to think our efforts have been wasted). A good place to start perhaps, is at Wikipedia:The future of NPP and AfC, and extract some stats and metrics and until that is done, per Headbomb, WhatamIdoing/ Iridescent, Atsme, Jayron32,   IJBall, Jo-Jo Eumerus, not be too hasty to condemn the draft namespace. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 07:56, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

I find myself agreeing with Kudpung. Allowing the GFOO stream to go directly to mainspace would create an unimaginably huge mess, there simply must be a "holding pen" of some sort to enable at least basic triage.

Now hold onto your hats as I'm going to make a radical (and maybe crazy) suggestion... As I see it the problem is not the existence of draftspace, it's the way drafts are created. There are simply not enough competent reviewers to handle the stream of incoming GFOO, which consists overwelmingly of crap with a light sprinkling of legitimate draft articles. The status of new article creation needs to be drastically downgraded, it should be one of the least significant things a Wikipedian does. In fact the vast majority of draft/article creators are not "true Wikipedians" as all they do is drop one article and leave, many have an obvious COI too. They are the least desirable type of contributor (except for vandals of course). If we really want to reduce the draft overload we should find a way to force users to do substantial "gnome edits" before being allowed to create even a draft - autoconfirmed is a ridiculously trivial barrier. If a newbie had to do several hundred edits to existing mainspace articles before being allowed to create any new pages outside of their own userspace we would basically eliminate spammers and SPAs, as only people interested in working on WP for the sake of WP would be willing to do it. Anyone can edit, but only committed Wikipedians should be allowed to create articles. Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 08:36, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Roger (Dodger67): completely agree with you. At 6M articles, if a newcomer wants to immediately create a new article, that's because it's some kind of their pet project (ranging from innocent article on one's primary school to COI spam). Many prolific users I know (myself included) started off with some type of "gnome edit" -- quick fix a typo or a mistake and then somehow you get hooked. These are the type of editors that we need to recruit -- the one's that care about information, not about their pet project. Renata ( talk) 19:35, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

• While some good comes out of draftspace, I believe it is draftspace is net negative to the project due to the way it burns wide eyed newcomers. A better approach would be to discourage newcomers from writing new pages until after they have found their editing legs by improving existing content. Other standard criticism is: in draftspace, drafters have virtually no contact with the mainspace editing community; & when they do submit, they receive patronising, top-of-draft templated comments, dissimilar to how mainspace works with talk on talk pages. The most valid reasons for draftspace is forcing AfC and draftspace processes on COI editors, and proponents of AfD-deleted pages who thing they can improve them, however, for both cases userspace could be used. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 13:47, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
• Well, Draftspace is a problem because it does what it sets out to do very badly (help new editors). It delays good faith editors with months of waiting before inevitably getting a 'not ready' negative review (they are after all, new editors that don't know how to write articles). It is also used as a holding pen for COI editors' creations, but even for that it doesn't work well! Because those COI editors can just re-create the same article in mainspace again, and the New Page Patroller then has to pursue other means anyway (AfD, PROD, CSD). I think the draft space being a failure is simply a result of the fundamental problem with all the new page processes on wikipedia. We don't have enough reviewers, and we never will. The result of this short-handedness is that we do triage instead of holistic care. This is a necessity, but it results in fundamentally broken processes if you don't accept the fact of it on its face. New Page Patrol KNOWS that it is triage, and it bills itself as such. It doesn't pretend to be a welcoming place, it doesn't pretend to be a bunch of people that are there to help the newbies to write new articles. No, we sort the wheat from the chaff and we move on. AfC and the draftspace are fundamentally broken because they WANT to be something that they CANT be, because they simply don't have the manpower; and they never will. The result is something that ends up as a wild west; with some reviewers trying to help, and others just trying to keep AfC's head above water by pressing yes/no as quickly as possible (and even then the wait times are INSANE). The result is that as someone that submits to AfC, you are guaranteed to have a bad time; first you will wait for months, then, you'll get a decline and some semi-helpful tips (if you are lucky). The reviewers don't have time to help you write your articles, but that's what would be required in a lot of cases simply because not all new editors are capable of the competence required to write new articles on Wikipedia. Should Draft space be gotten rid of? YES. It is a drain on already strained reviewing manpower, and we simply won't ever have the manpower to make it work as intended. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)}_{( click me!)} 03:36, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Insertcleverphrasehere I agree entirely with every you said here - except the last two sentences. What do you do if you got rid of it? AfC as a project would disappear into the horizon on a hot day, leaving simply thousands of NPP permatagged articles that people are not going to pick up and improve. As you most correctly and emphatically spelled out, NPR is triage, the New Page Patrollers aren't going to do more than they do and they're not expected to - the backlog is already ridiculously long again. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 08:58, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
    • I don't think that everyone agrees with you that having "thousands of NPP permatagged articles that people are not going to pick up and improve" is a big problem. Editors have quite a diversity of views on this subject, and the folks at NPP and AFC do not seem to be representative of the whole community's views. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 17:15, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

    Kudpung, What WhatamIdoing said. I don't find this a significant issue. If the topic is notable, but it's content is problematic, then it can be stubified with a couple sources and tagged for improvement. I think this is highly preferable to the current "move it to draft so that nobody sees how horrible it looks" (or keep it in draft). This is often even done when all that is needed are formatting fixes, and then the drafts end up deleted G13. If draft space didn't exist then stubifying articlles that need notability guidelines but fail content guidelines would become the new gold standard. Paid and COI editing would still be a problem, but as I said above, the draft space isn't really a solution to that anyway. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)}_{( click me!)} 18:04, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

• One thing I have noticed in draft space is that users will spend considerable amounts of time creating very long articles that they think are masterpieces, but which will likely never be published for any number of reasons. It strikes me that limiting the size of drafts for new users might go some ways towards reducing disappointment, and letting us catch poor efforts before they go on for too long. Conversely, any page reviewer can tell when a short draft that is well sourced is notable enough, and can promote it to main space. I'm not sure how it would work, but something like "You can create a draft up to 5K in size using the best sourcing you can find" might be helpful. This is a clunky idea as I have described it, but the gist of it is to avoid huge long spam articles. ThatMontrealIP ( talk) 16:40, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
• Removing draft space would flood mainspace with the worst articles particularly attack pages, copyvios and spam which would stay for longer due to the NPP backlog which would be signifiantly increased by this proposal. There are a number of editors who do improve and publish drafts including abandoned drafts and the AFC process can work to significantly improve articles for mainspace that if posted there would be quickly deleted in their original condition, imv Atlantic306 ( talk) 19:51, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
• It's no secret that I think the current deployment of draft space – with overwhelmed & overpicky Articles for Creation reviewers, one-click draftify to "incubate" (the most ironic automated edit summary in the 'pedia) and semi-automated G13 deletion – is one of the most negative changes ever made to Wikipedia. I tend to advise good-faith newbies to accumulate enough edits to create articles directly in mainspace because they get far more attention there -- sometimes a swift death, but not the inexorable slide to deletion of G13. There is a place for drafting articles collaboratively, it's called mainspace. Espresso Addict ( talk) 06:17, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
• It is well known ( m:Research:Wikipedia article creation) that restrictions to article creation reduce the quality of the articles being created, probably because bad faith users invest disproportionate efforts to get their edits through, while good faith users just give up. Wikipedia works thanks to cooperation and that happens mostly in mainspace. The entire namespace should be deleted and people directed to create their articles in main namespace. In the interim, past drafts can be moved by a bot to a subpage of the creator's userpage. To improve the average quality of articles created in main namespace, the requirements to create an article should then be restored to be the same as for any other edit. Nemo 06:23, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

An example

Yesterday I came across the newly created article Bob Chapek, with a very strong indication of importance and a reliable but not independent source. Nine minutes after creation it was moved to Draft:Bob Chapek by a new-page patroller following the instructions. From the histories and talk pages of those two pages you can see what a mess this has produced, with people misunderstanding speedy deletion templates and developing them in parallel. If the original article had simply been left alone to be developed in mainspace the normal wiki process would have been followed and people wouldn't have to waste their time trying to deal with the situation. Phil Bridger ( talk) 12:35, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

The backlog at NPP is unacceptable. Not the monumental 22,00o it was 3 years ago, but constantly hovering around five to eight thousand makes it still totally unacceptable. If every active New Page Reviewer stopped to do a full service to every page in the queue that backlog would be immense. This therefore does not, IMO, exemplify any typical issues with the draft namespace system. I don't think Willbb234 did anything unusual in moving the IP's creation to draft - it was pretty much what any current active New Page Reviewer , including me, would probably do with such a page particularly as it was a BLP. In fact there followed a flurry of activity which resulted in a mainspace ready article very quickly, one way or another, so under the current processes available no one really wasted their time dealing with it. AFAICS, the draftification process did its job. Arjunpat, an autoconfirmed user (with albeit a low edit count ) created an appropriate article in good faith, was not really doing anything wrong but was almost certainly not aware that they may have been doing something that was nevertheless not quite right., i.e. creating a page in mainspace that was not ready for it; they were most likely not aware of other options such as creating it offline first, or in their user space, or as recommended, in draft space.

If every user who registers an account was informed immediately of what they can and can't do on Wikipedia, then a 'mess' would not be produced, articles would not be produced that would cause a mess, and time and energy would be saved all round - ball back in the WMF court. Nobody is being criticised here, but perhaps as a pure exercise in interest, after reading the main thread here, the contributing editors and BigRed606, Spshu, might like to chime in here with their thoughts. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 00:57, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Probably time for a backlog drive. And also tag them with WikiProject banners so they show up in WP:AALERTS. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 01:17, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Headbomb, Yeah, When we lost Onel a month or so back, things have started spiraling downhill. We are still treading water, but only just. I'm working on a methodology for inviting new people to join NPP, but running a drive might also be due. Really busy at work at the moment personally, so mostly just been dropping an average of a few reviews a day myself, as I don't really have the time for more. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)}_{( click me!)} 03:43, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

If you look at the history and the talk page of the mainspace redirect that was left behind by this move, and was later moved to Draft:Move Bob Chapek (admins only by now), you will see that this move to draft did cause considerable confusion and meant that experienced editors who understood what was happening had to spend time putting things right. We had editors adding content to the redirect, claiming that they had "fixed" things, and contesting speedy deletion. I purposely didn't name the editor who performed this move to draft because, as you say, most new page patrollers would have done the same. Phil Bridger ( talk) 09:38, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps the main problem is that different editors have different ideas about what constitutes "a mainspace ready article", especially as measured nine minutes after creation. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 16:49, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Here's one: AQUILA HOTELS & RESORTS. I found it at main space. The creator has a COI, but is probably good faith (but biased in a way that limits thier ability to write an article. The topic looks notable, but as written it is just jammed with promotionalism and way too many refs. It looks notable, but it's a company and its going to take an hour to strip out all the garbage refs from this article down to what is salvageable and fix all the formatting errors. No one wants to waste the time, so it ends up in draft space. Where it will likely die unless somebody takes pity on it. I posted on coin but I doubt anything would happen. Would it get CSDed if we didn't have draft space? I don't think so (it isn't exclusively promotional). Would it get AfDed? No, AfD isn't cleanup, and the topic does look notable. Our only option would be to stubify it and nuke most of the bad content. This would be preferable to it just getting shunted to draft space. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)}_{( click me!)} 04:02, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Aaaaaaand, its gone. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{( or here)}_{( click me!)} 18:07, 27 February 2020 (UTC

Another example

Today I got a notice that a draft I created, Draft:Sandra Pinel was up for G13 deletion, and indeed was both notified on my talk and deleted while I was in the middle of leaving a lengthy message elsewhere. I don't believe I would have spontaneously had an idea to create this article, so I must have responded to a noticeboard thread or something to create it in draft, but I'm blowed if I can remember what. I've restored it (as policy states any user can get a G13 refunded on request I don't consider myself WP:INVOLVED to just do it myself), but most people won't even think of doing this, and if I don't get any ideas or assistance, it'll get deleted again, a year after creation. Update: I've worked out it's because I was patrolling CAT:CSD on 12 July 2019 and saw Sandra Pinel tagged for A7, searched for sources as a triage and moved it to draft with the idea of blowing it up and starting over. Obviously I didn't get very far! In the meantime the article was re-created in mainspace by the original creator, tagged for G11, AfDed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sandra Pinel and deleted, and the creator indefinitely blocked. GAME OVER.

A long time ago, I wrote on Wikipedia:WikiSpeak that Articles for Creation was "A place where articles don't get created, but sit languishing in purgatory". There is good stuff in draftspace to pull out, but it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Essentially, we have the following conflicting requirements:

• Creating articles is hard. Reviewing them properly is harder
• As a corollary to the above, we don't have enough reviewers to cope with incoming work, and never will
• Because experienced and knowledgeable reviewers are more likely to pause and pass on difficult or contentious new pages, new pages (both in mainspace and draft) are more likely to be dealt by less conscientious reviewers who will not do this
• As a corollary to the above, all things being equal, a new page is more likely to dealt with by a "cookie cutter" message rather than anything with thought and knowledge, putting off genuine newcomers
• Spammers looking to create COI topics should not be allowed to start articles AT ALL

Is it even possible to come up with a solution that handles the above? I'm not sure. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 18:20, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Ritchie333, I think there are some ways to handle at least most of the above, but it means making Wikipedia less useful to readers. For example, a rule that says "No new articles about living people, businesses, or products (including pop culture products such as books, films, websites, etc.) less than 50 years old" would knock out a lot of COI and spam pages. But the cost, measured in terms of harm to the reason we're here, would be significant. I don't think the community would agree to that. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:13, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Yet another example

The article Narayanrao Uttamrao Deshmukh had a cast-iron source that confirmed that it passed WP:POLITICIAN, but was moved to draft and then rejected twice at AfC. We seem to be giving new page patrollers and AfC reviewers, who have not been given deletion powers via WP:RFA, the power to remove things from main space. This is very clearly a use of draft space as a backdoor route to deletion, as it is not supposed to be. Phil Bridger ( talk) 20:23, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

This is not the best example: IMHO the AFC reviewers both acted properly. During the first review, the page was totally unsourced. During the 2nd review, the source was a dead link. Neither reviewer would have any evidence that the claims in the article were true unless they took the time to research the subject themselves. Their only choices were to not review, to decline and give the submitter useful feedback, or to halt their AFC reviews and start editing the page as if they were an editor rather than a reviewer. Another editor moved the page to the main encyclopedia. I found a suitable replacement source and removed the top-of-page sources-needed template. There is still some unsourced material but it's no longer a major BLP issue. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 22:30, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

The AfC people might've done the right thing, but these unilateral and process-free moves to draft space to circumvent deletion processes need to be reined the hell in already. The Drover's Wife ( talk) 22:44, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

(after edit conflict) Sorry, but that's far from an acceptable answer. Sources do not have to be online, but, in this case, I can certainly read the original source online without the archive link. Phil Bridger ( talk) 22:47, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

https://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-maharashtra-assembly-election-results-1967-full-list-of-winners-2798429 (the original source) works for me, too. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 16:33, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

A counter-example

I have over 1,400 draft pages underway for U.S. state supreme court justices. Every few days, I pick one out and finish it. Sometimes I find a source covering several and make improvements across the covered group. Every few weeks, someone else comes along and finishes a draft or two, usually in connection with a specific state. In this way, over 600 articles have been created and moved to mainspace from this list (which initially had over 2,000 entries). This, I think, is an example of draftspace working as it should - with drafts for specific topics connected to specific projects, from which appropriate attention can be drawn. Perhaps what is needed is a better way to connect drafts with the projects that should be concerned about them. BD2412 T 03:37, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

The same tools that help improve articles could be used to help improve drafts. Would something similar to Random article but for drafts help? El Millo ( talk) 03:59, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

I think order would present a better tool than randomness, in this space. BD2412 T 04:15, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

@ BD2412: Order? Do you mean order from less to more complete? El Millo ( talk) 04:47, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

I mean as in tying drafts to projects and to potentially interested editors. Every draft has some family of articles or topics that are the closest things to it, and a good step would be to bring the attention of contributors to those related topics to those drafts. One way might be to find some way to notify editors (or projects) when a link is made from a draft to a particular mainspace article. BD2412 T 05:00, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Why not do both? PJvanMill ( talk) 21:44, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

I just discovered, by reading more discussion below, that this already exists: Special:Random/Draft. PJvanMill ( talk) 21:59, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

It might be possible to get Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by article count run for the current contents of the draftspace. (I don't think it could tell you which pages began in the draftspace.) WhatamIdoing ( talk) 16:46, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

It could also be useful to have them automatically transcluded at the top of relevant wikiproject talkpages (similar to tracking pages like Wikipedia:WikiProject_Genetics/Article alerts). Over at WP:Molbio we typically rely on people from AfC and NPP manually dropping my to let us know there's a relevant draft in need of attention. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo) ^talk 09:23, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

This is one of the neatest uses for draft space I've seen. // Lollipoplollipoplollipop :: talk 16:03, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Arbitrary break after the examples

• Having higher standards to move something out of draftspace than to delete it at AfD has been the case for so long that it seems normal to us, but to everyone else it's crazy. I'd love to know what percentage of Declined drafts end up being deleted ( Whatamidoing (WMF), do you know if this data exists?) as opposed to being improved to the point of acceptance. If we do keep draftspace, search capabilities should be improved so that people from the Wikiprojects can search for keywords among drafts that have reached at least the "Submitted" stage, and assess articles themselves. Wikiproject participants would likely still have higher standards to "accept" than to "not delete" - I believe that's unfotunately human nature - but at least the reviewing would be done by people who are interested in the topic area.

With ad-hoc and infrequent perusing of draft space, I've found and rescued some wonderful articles that were declined, including Marine heatwave. The way we use draftspace might be the biggest biter of newbies we've ever created. Clayoquot ( talk | contribs) 19:03, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

I agree that it's a big biter of newbies, not least because we tell people that it's best to create articles in draft space but they then take months to get reviewed and then, when they do, the reviewer quite often has less of an idea about what belongs in an encyclopedia than the article creator. Also if usage of moving to draft space by new page patrollers remains as it is then we should abandon the pretence that moving to draft is not a backdoor route to deletion. It is very clearly used in that way. Phil Bridger ( talk) 19:26, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Clayoquot, I don't know the percentage of deletions. The last research I saw on this was shortly after the creation of WP:G13, which really changed the numbers. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:40, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

• The problems of Draft space are inseparable form COI spam problems. Until we find a way to fix COI, Draft will remain broken. Renata ( talk) 19:38, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
  • That reminds me of another question I have for Whatamidoing (WMF) ;) : What percentage of articles in Draft space are about people, organizations, or products, vs. everything else (this presumably can't be detected programmatically but maybe someone could do it by sampling)? Articles such as Webbed foot and Psychology of climate change denial seem to me to be obviously unrelated to our COI spam problem. Both of these were created at AfC by newbies who probably thought it was the only way to create an article, and Declined at AfC. Clayoquot ( talk | contribs) 19:55, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
    • mw:ORES/Draft topic could answer your question, but I don't think it's actually been implemented. In lieu of real answers, I clicked Special:Random/Draft ten times. I found three drafts about living people, one had no article (the title was mathematics-related), one was a (worse) article on a subject that's had an article for years and years, one is a geographical place (the contents were only an infobox), two were for pop culture (more or less comic books), one was a building, and one was about computer science. One of the goals for ORES is to be able to tell us (i.e., WP:MED) when medicine-related articles are in the draftspace. Right now, editors leave notes at WT:MED when they find something to look at. (Forgive me for not bothering to clock in to reply to your interesting questions. Right now, I'm sitting outside and looking at blue skies and wispy clouds, and thinking that all I really need is a bowl of good strawberries and a power cord.) WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:40, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
    • Clayoquot: I did a quick sample of 50 drafts (selected via Special:Random/Draft so only 2 of them are not pending a review). Obviously, did not dig into notability and judged it at first glance. Details here.

13 pure garbage CSD

1 draft working on improving mainspace article ( Draft:Michigan–Penn State Football Rivalry)

4 drafts from the project about US judges by BD2412

4 clearly notable topics (but will probably die in Draft)

5 clearly not notable topics

23 (effectively 50% of sample) in the notability grey zone -- which is the labor-intensive & frustrating zone of promo, COI, etc., of these:

2 are pending review

6 are rejected drafts

8 have neither references nor proper format

3 imho ready for mainspace

2 imho are borderline

2 imho are not ready for mainspace Renata ( talk) 00:34, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

• Personally, I'll only !vote for the deletion of draftspace if one of the following are done:

1. An alternative is created to decrease the chances of a new user having to experience an article deletion. Also, disclosing any conflicts of interest are made easier.
2. Research is done that indicates that blocking for undisclosed paid editing/using an account only to advertise or article deletion wasn't diminished after ACPERM.

If the only thing draftspace is doing is keeping junk out of mainspace, it's doing enough good that it needs to be kept around so we can discuss how it can do better. Frankly, I'd be less enthused to NPP again without a draftspace. It's not out of the purview of new editors to become upset when the article they created is nominated for deletion; I've even received a lawsuit threat or two. They aren't quite as upset when I decline their draft. Whenever I get a message about a decline, even if there is an underlying upset, there is also curiosity on how to do better. You don't get that with a deletion nomination. Therefore, having a draftspace is less bite-y than not having one. I dream of horses ^{(talk) (contribs)} _{Remember to {{ ping}} me after replying off my talk page} 21:49, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

The options aren't "draftspace or nothing". For example, we used to move pages to userspace. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:40, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, which posed the issue that G13 was created to fix; userspace drafts would sometimes languish in userspace, untouched for years, completely and totally forgotten. Nowadays we'd probably G13 old userspace drafts, but userfying articles would still cause a lot of the problems draftspace has, but without the little formality draftspace has. I dream of horses ^{(talk) (contribs)} _{Remember to {{ ping}} me after replying off my talk page} 19:45, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

I agree that there is no system that forces any WP:VOLUNTEER to finish articles that someone else started. The #Is it acceptable to blank userspace sandboxes of long-term/established, but inactive editors? discussion above suggests to me that not everyone thinks that it's actually a problem to have drafts "languish[ing] in userspace, untouched for years, completely and totally forgotten". WhatamIdoing ( talk) 20:47, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

I would like to register my objection to moving either my WP:USCJ drafts or my WP:DABCONCEPT drafts to userspace. They do get worked on in draftspace by various editors from time to time, and it is my experience that having them in userspace would discourage those kinds of improvements. Also, @ Renata3: what was the condition of the judge drafts that you saw in your review? BD2412 T 22:11, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

BD2412, If one of those Drafts was about to be deleted under G13, would you appreciate having the option to userfy it? Blueboar ( talk) 23:50, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, nowadays people can, if an editor is inactive (as in "hasn't edited for years") and has userfied drafts that have languished for years without being touched, have those drafts moved to draftspace. Also, BD2412 has an interesting objection; I have seen draftspace drafts gnomed quite frequently, but I doubt userspace drafts get that.

Since userfying articles is what we did before draftspace, and you've yet to offer any other option despite having a lot of time, I'm unconvinced that it's not "draftspace or nothing". Going back to the way things were before draftspace is "nothing", in my mind. If draftspace is unacceptable, we need to come up with an alternative to both that and userfying articles.

Blueboar, not speaking for BD2412, but there is a template one can use for drafts that are technically G13able but "have potential". I think that's the sort of draft he is working on. I dream of horses ^{(talk) (contribs)} _{Remember to {{ ping}} me after replying off my talk page} 13:59, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes, a draft in Userspace CAN be moved to Draftspace... However, nothing requires drafts in Userspace to be moved. It is OK to leave material in Userspace, indefinitely. Also, I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to go in the other direction as well, and move a draft from Draftspace over to Userspace.

The two spaces have different purposes, and so have different rules that govern them, but BOTH can be used to work on potential articles. The primary difference is that one (Draftspace) is for communal work, while the other (Userspace) is more for solo work. The point is... we have options. Blueboar ( talk) 14:58, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Obviously this is not an option of everyone, but if one of my drafts gets deleted pursuant to G13, I undelete it. BD2412 T 15:29, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

There are the different namespaces as we're using them today (mainspace, draftspace, userspace), but we could be using other approaches entirely. We might be able to hide them with Wikipedia:Pending changes. We might be able to put them in projectspace as subpages for a relevant (and active) WikiProject (if any). We could put them in draftspace, but make them easier for everyone to find (e.g., searching draftspace by default).

We could also change the incentives. Pages in draftspace are supposed to be proto-articles that would not survive WP:AFD. The NPPers have made a big deal here about saying that they follow AFD's WP:BEFORE process before moving a page to the draftspace, and then they turned around and defended their move of a minutes-old stub about the new CEO of Disney to draftspace, even though there is approximately a snowball's chance in Hell of that article ever being deleted at AFD. So maybe a random sample of AFC-declined/NPP-draftified articles should be sent to AFD, and if we find that any individual editor is using draftspace to store pages that have a high likelihood of surviving AFD (as evidenced by them actually surviving AFD), then maybe that editor is told to mend his ways or get banned from that process.

I am not particularly recommending any of these options. My point is only that there are a lot of options, once you start thinking about what we need to do instead of focusing on which namespace the page should be in. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 03:39, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

I agree there are lots of options. One thing that could change the incentives would be to require admin rights to move a page from mainspace to draft space or to userspace, so it would be subject to scrutiny and like other admin actions. We could use a noticeboard or category to process cases in which, say, the creator of an article published it accidentally and wants to keep working on it privately. In most cases, draftifying an article is functionally equivalent to deleting it, but with a lot less accountability. Clayoquot ( talk | contribs) 22:05, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Getting rid of the draftspace means that we would lose out on useful incubtion for articles before they make it into the mainspace. I don't see how dleting this step willl reduce the amount of 'bad' articles. >> BEANS X2 t 14:41, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Comments from a Reviewer

I will respond to the comments of User:TonyBallioni about draft space being a failure. I am one of the more active AFC reviewers of drafts, and I think that I am qualified to comment on drafts in general. I mostly agree that draft space has not resulted in the benefits that some editors thought would come from it. If it is judged based on some of the optimistic thoughts that it would result in new collaboration, or in improvements in the quality of new articles, I agree that it has not succeeded. I think that any such expectations were unrealistic. The real question however should be whether it should be abandoned as a failure, replaced with something else, or retained for lack of a viable alternative. If draft space is abandoned as a failure, then the question must further be asked what is to be done with the documents that currently go into draft space. So what currently goes into draft space?

The documents in draft space are primarily: (1) proposed articles created by very new users, not yet autoconfirmed, who are not allowed to create new articles; (2) proposed articles created by other users who choose to use draft space, rather than using user space or putting the articles directly into article space; (3) proposed articles originally in user space that have been submitted for review, and are moved by AFC reviewers into draft space; (4) articles that are undersourced or have notability issues that have been draftified by New Page reviewers. If draft space is to be abandoned as a failure, we should consider what to do with those four current uses of draft space. The first use of draft space is by very new users. Are we proposing to reverse the requirement of auto-confirmation for new articles? I hope not. So are we proposing that they be submitted for review in their user space? Does that have any material benefit? The second use of draft space is by some content creators who go through the review process. It is true that they could skip the review process, or rely on WikiProjects for review. Dissolving draft space would be neither harmful nor useful for them. The third use of draft space is for AFC reviewers to move drafts into draft space from user space. Presumably reviewers would simply no longer do that, and would instead review drafts in user space. Nothing would really be gained by dissolving draft space. The fourth use of draft space is for moving articles into, as a side-door quasi-deletion. Eliminating draft space would presumably mean that these articles would instead be proposed for deletion or nominated for deletion. I would not mind seeing more questionable articles nominated for deletion, but I think that most editors would prefer not to increase the number of deletion debates. So, based on listing the uses of draft space, I fail to see any benefit to eliminating draft space.

As a reviewer, I think that drafts fall into four quality classes: (1) good; (2) possible; (3) not ready; (4) no good. The first should normally be accepted, although there may be an issue to be resolved or a question to be answered first. The second require a careful review by a reviewer who is patient and willing to spend the time on the review. The third are declined, and the reviewer does not need to worry much about whether it may be resubmitted later. The choices of the reviewer for the fourth class of drafts are to decline the draft (not worrying much about whether it may be resubmitted), to reject the draft, or to tag the draft for speedy deletion, sometimes as G11, G3, or G10. If draft space were to be dissolved, it is the second and third classes that would need to go somewhere other than draft space. The first will go into article space, and it doesn't matter what bit bucket to put the fourth in.

My conclusion is that draft space has indeed been a failure if we expected it to result in improved collaboration. Collaboration is done in article space. However, I haven't seen an alternative that would be any better than draft space. Robert McClenon ( talk) 02:11, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Robert McClenon, add me as someone who does not want more deletion nominations. It causes quite a bit of upset when that happens, particularly with newer editors. With a draft rejection, there's often still upset, but I think there's also often more understanding of why it happened.

And yeah, I agree with your last sentence. If we get rid of draftspace, we need to replace it with something else. To add to that point, at least we know what to expect from draftspace now. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know. I dream of horses ^{(talk) (contribs)} _{Remember to {{ ping}} me after replying off my talk page} 02:46, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I came back to indent my comment, which I forgot to do the first time, and to also ping TonyBallioni for Robert. I dream of horses ^{(talk) (contribs)} _{Remember to {{ ping}} me after replying off my talk page} 02:48, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

@ Robert McClenon: I would slightly disagree with certain phrasing above. I create articles in draft space with no intention of going through the review process, but merely to have a place to assemble them that is not user space, so that other editors feel comfortable working on them. In many cases, these drafts are made in groups and start out as a collection of scraps and notes that are in no way suitable for introduction to article space, but which show promise for future development into an article. BD2412 T 00:57, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

User:BD2412 - Okay. That is still within my second category of draft space, but the explanation of why is different. You are creating the draft in draft space for possible collaboration prior to moving it into article space. If draft space were dissolved, you would presumably use user space. I don't think that changes the conclusion. Robert McClenon ( talk) 03:47, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

@ BD2412: That kind of collaboration could potentially be done in the project space of a relevant wikiproject. Espresso Addict ( talk) 04:40, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

It could, yes. I suppose issues would arise as to which project space to use for subjects falling under multiple topic headings, but that is a minor concern. Draft space offers the utility of making it clear that the content being worked on there is nothing else but a draft. Unless and until we have a specific "Wikiproject:" namespace, all of these pages would be in project space, along with message boards and policy pages and the like. BD2412 T 04:54, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

BD2412, I think you are the first experienced editor I've met to use draftspace in the way it was originally sold to the community – ie for collaborative editing with other experienced editors – rather than an alternative to userspace for personal article development (rather less useful with the G13 clock ticking) or a place to hand-hold new editors through their early articles. I'd be interested in whether this is actually more common than I'd thought. Espresso Addict ( talk) 05:17, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

I can't say that I know of any other experienced editors who use it this way - certainly not to the same scale. BD2412 T 05:24, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Maybe this is the wrong place for this comment. But I don't know where else to put it.

I think it would be sad to lose draft space. Draft space is where I do most to cooperate with other editors. Usually this happens when a new editor is trying to create an article about a topic I believe is notable, but needs the help of a more experienced editor. Sometimes they've created the article in draft space, sometimes it's in their userspace and I persuade them to move it to draft space. Then we can cooperate, with them providing knowledge of the subject and sources, and me doing the formatting and explaining WP policies. Disabling this opportunity for cooperation would be a loss. Maproom ( talk) 11:02, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Maproom, if you're going to editors and persuading them to WP:MOVE the page to draftspace so you can help, why can't you just ask "Mind if I help with the article in your sandbox?", and skip the whole step about moving the page? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 02:44, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Some reasons:

• If it's in draft space, it can get some attention from other helpful editors.
• My memory is not perfect. I don't want to have to maintain a list of which private sandboxes I've been granted access to.
• I think it's useful to maintain a distinction between private sandboxes, where the owner can do pretty much what they like without interference, and public drafts, where everyone is cooperating in moving towards an acceptable article. I want new editors to understand this distinction.

I think it would be a pity to lose the distinction. Many of the arguments against sandboxes on this page are, essentially, "lots of drafts are full of crap, let's just get rid of them all". Editors here are confusing container and content. Maproom ( talk) 07:14, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Ten random declined drafts

I clicked Special:Random/Draft until I found ten drafts that had been Declined (I clicked through about as many drafts that had not been submitted). I'm posting them here so we can have some data to collectively analyze questions such as "To what extent are the drafts that we decline at AfC acceptable to the community by the standards of AfD?", "How often are articles improved after they are declined?" and perhaps other questions too.

1. Draft:Cherokee Files (series of classified correspondences between various representatives of the United States Government and the Republic of Korea)
2. Draft:Vision Bus (company)
3. Draft:Florida Crime and Intelligence Analyst Association (organization)
4. Draft:DMCA Sans Serif (free font)
5. Draft:Sartaj Singh Pannu (filmmaker)
6. Draft:Gallery A (art gallery)
7. Draft:Veidehi Gite (entrepreneur and "influencer")
8. Draft:Stevie Tennet (musician)
9. Draft:Subjectivity (journal) (academic journal)
10. Draft:Sickle Cell Disease in the Caribbean (medical issue)

Clayoquot ( talk | contribs) 17:21, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Here's my analysis: 1) Cherokee files should have been accepted. AfC is not for stylistic concerns, it should only be concerned with "Would this survive the AFD". There's no reason to think this article would have been deleted from the main space. There's some MOS issues, and a few very minor tone issues, but that's a decent start to an article that normal editing should fix. 2) Vision Bus: Borderline notability, probably a good decline. 3) Florida Crime and Intelligence Analyst Association: Not clearly notable, no independent sources. Good decline. 4) Good decline, maybe suited for a redirect. No independent sourcing. 5) Sartaj Singh Pannu: Borderline; I would have probably leaned accept given the sourcing already in the article, but its a close one, and I won't begrudge a decline here. He's clearly a director of notable films, and as such there is likely to be good information out there on his bio, even if it isn't already cited. 6) Gallery A: Should have been accepted. Article directly cites one source, but the "Further reading" section indicates there's PLENTY of information available. There's clearly enough there to have avoided AFD if the article had gone that route. 7) Veidehi Gite: Probably a good decline, but there's not nothing there. I think I agree with the reviewer, but I also would not have tried to delete it if I ran across it in the wild. Hard call for me. 8) Stevie Tennet looks like it could have been accepted. The sourcing looks to pass WP:GNG to me. 9) Subjectivity (journal) is a good decline. Borderline A7 even. 10) Sickle Cell Disease in the Caribbean: Probably a good decline, though the information is good this is essentially a fork from other articles on Sickle Cell disease, and most of the novel information could be added to existing articles at Wikipedia without overwhelming them. My final count: 3 bad declines, 5 good declines, 2 borderline cases. -- Jayron 32 17:47, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm working on Draft:Gallery A, so it has changed significantly since being mentioned above. ThatMontrealIP ( talk) 20:03, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Draft:Cherokee Files is entirely referenced by primary documents on a random person's website (which I'm not clicking through to--but all evidence suggests they're primary). The draft looks like one person is really interested in this bit of classified history and is summarizing the content of primary sources themselves. I see some brief mentions of this topic within Google Books ("Cherokee, Cyrus Vance") but nothing to hang an article on. There could be historians that discuss this enough to justify an article, but the Draft writer didn't show that. Outriggr ( talk) 08:16, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

The real problem is biographies and lack of classification

If those could be sidelined into a different 'processing' workflow, it would free up pretty much everything else which have a much better chance of being worthwhile. Biographies created through AFC/Draftspace are by far and large WP:COI/ WP:AUTOBIO stuff. If for instance, the drafter was asked in the WP:WIZARD what topics, broadly speaking, the article was about, it would also allowed WikiProjects to be notified of new drafts in their scope. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 05:25, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

I've proposed this before. It would be ideal if submitters could be persuaded to do some of the sorting work via a suitable wizard, and it could also be used to give them tailored advice and links to specific notability guidelines. Espresso Addict ( talk) 05:35, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

The main issue is that someone needs to code this into wizard and update the relevant scripts. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 06:34, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

I love all of the above ideas. The articles I most hate to lose are the ones that take a lot of time and subject matter expertise to write. Clayoquot ( talk | contribs) 16:13, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

I've added an "Improving your odds of a speedy review" section to {{ AFC submission}}, which should hopefully help. See discussion. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 08:44, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

User:EpochFail, is there any chance of mw:ORES/Draft topic being able to do this soon-ish? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 16:48, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes! The topic model is ready and can be applied to any article or draft on Wikipedia. What we're missing is some useful integrations between the models that make the predictions and tools for Wikipedia editors. Let me give an example. Let's look at the first version of the article for Alan Turing -- this roughly represents a draft. rev_id:234785. We can ask ORES what the general topics are using a query: https://ores.wikimedia.org/v3/scores/enwiki/234785/drafttopic ORES tells us that this draft article is probably relevant to: "Culture.Biography.Biography*", "STEM.Computing", "STEM.Mathematics", "STEM.STEM*". These can be used to route reviews of article drafts by subject expertise/interest/notability guidelines. Right now, we're working on some integrations by they aren't targeting new page review or AFC. E.g. you can use the search box to explore intersections of these topics. E.g. if you type: "articletopic:women articletopic:stem" into the search box [1], you'll get a list of topics that are probably relevant to WikiProject Women Scientists. This doesn't currently work for drafts, but it could. See Phab:T218132 for a task I filed regarding integration with NewPagesFeed. Topic routing was deemed to be of lower importance. I'd like to see this integrated with Special:Recentchanges too. In the meantime, a bot is a good option for producing lists of articles for WikiProjects and other groups of subject experts to review. In the past, I reached out to User:SQL about putting something together but I'm not sure if that got anywhere. -- EpochFail ( talk • contribs) 17:18, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

@ EpochFail: Note that this is already being done - User:SD0001/AfC sorting -- a listing of submitted AfC drafts sorted by ORES-predicted topics. That's only a prototype report, but I'm still working on converting that to a periodically updated report -- this is being discussed at WT:WPAFC#Pending_AfC_drafts_sorted_by_subject -- the initial comments were highly favourable.

As far as sorting of declined submissions are concerned, I am thinking it would be better to use categories - because of the large number of declined submissions. This would need to be discussed first. SD0001 ( talk) 15:14, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

@ SD0001: After reading this discussion when it first started, and recently finding about about WP:AfC sorting, I actually was about to ask about expanding the AfC sorting tool on your talk page. (but then I went back to this discussion, and realized it has already been mentioned)

I think if the AfC sorting tool could be made in a similar way for all of draftspace, then draftspace could easily become a collaborative space (like it seemed to be originally imagined as). As long as editors were directed to using the tool in an easy-to-find space, it could be a great way to get involved in editing drafts, especially for new users. It could then be a way for newer users to potentially collaborate with those who have more editing knowledge, too. And it could be a great tool for Wikiprojects to use as well, especially during edit-a-thons. I'm not sure of the feasability of creating something similar to AfC Sorting for all of draftspace, though. - Whisperjanes ( talk) 18:46, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

It is feasible. However, considering that there are over 22,000 declined AfC drafts and 12,000 unsubmitted ones, it would not make sense to make lists like WP:AFCS. It would be better to categorise them instead. That's what the category system is built for. But I'm not sure about doing this for the ones which don't have any AfC templates. Some folks like BD2412 maintain big sets of drafts on particular topics which are best left alone. SD0001 ( talk) 16:27, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

@ SD0001: Yes, I meant to propose lists for categorization, but I'm not sure if I explained it well. Are you saying that those types of lists are best used for AfC submissions, specifically? (I can imagine, since I assume including all drafts might be too many for editors to comfortably look through or for a page to handle, even if they were categorized). I think a list for all AfC drafts would be good, but I also thought it would be nice to be able to do something similar for non-AfC drafts, since draftspace is open for other editors to collaborate in. I don't think it should theoretically get in the way of lists that other editors maintain themselves (unless I'm missing something). Also, looking at some of the discussion above, it seems like other editors collaborate on BD2412's drafts, so I'm not sure how categorization would bother their own efforts, unless they use a specific process that would be disrupted by a new list. - Whisperjanes ( talk) 15:45, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

I have no objection at all to a scheme of categorization of the drafts I have created. BD2412 T 15:58, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Whoops, I seemed to also misunderstand something. In the comment I was replying to, I think SD0001 meant to say it would not make sense to make lists like WP:AFCS. I thought the term "list" and "categorize" were being used interchangeably (like how the WP:AFCS list has "categories" in the non-Wiki sense). My bad -- You can largely ignore my comment above.

I was proposing a list, originally, although I can see now why that probably wouldn't work. I do think separate lists for each type of draft topic could possibly work, though, or at least some of the other suggestions above are worth looking into (like being able get draft suggestions by topic). The reason I am a bit hesitant to use categories as the main way for specific drafts to be found is that I personally do not find categorizes to be an easy navigational tool, and I'm not sure about it being used as a tool to drive collaboration (mostly because I don't think its very accessible for new users). A list, to me, is a lot more frontward facing and accessible to all users, so could be more easily understood and used in article creation initiatives (like edit-a-thons). - Whisperjanes ( talk) 16:31, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

@ Whisperjanes: I'm sorry, it was my fault, I omitted a "not" in that comment (now fixed), because of which it must have been very confusing. I agree that categories aren't a very good navigational tool. But the reason I think lists are not worth it in this case is that since these are lists of declined or unsubmitted drafts, it's unlikely that they'd be of much interest to others. Categories are a more natural organisational tool which comes with lesser overhead. Categories can be easily converted to lists if needed for some purpose, and they can also be used in search (the "incategory" keyword, and combined with other search filters), and in PetScan. All this isn't possible with simple lists. While I agree that lists are better for browsing, that doesn't seem like an important consideration as I don't think many users are going to browse through lists of declined/unsubmitted stuff. SD0001 ( talk) 13:30, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

• I was going to chime in with how great draft space is for developing articles collaboratively within a WikiProject. But then I remembered how inactive most WikiProjects are. This is a dual problem. ☆ Bri ( talk) 16:03, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Possibly useful data point is reviewing my own contribs noted at User:Bri/Created#January 2019, a total of nineteen articles. Two were first drafts for at least two months: Draft:BMW R1250GS, tagged for collab at WP:WikiProject Motorcycling; and Draft:Pritchard Park. Neither attracted input from other editors. ☆ Bri ( talk) 16:55, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Headbomb, I'd really like to see biographies sorted into those about people who are still alive (or very recently deceased) and those who are historical figures. My experience is that WP:BLPs are almost always promotional, either WP:AUTO or some sort of WP:COI, and as such, almost always undesirable as encyclopedia content. On the other hand, a biography about somebody who has been dead for, say, more than 10 years, is likely to be notable, and these should be given priority for reviewing. -- RoySmith (talk) 02:35, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Agree. Sometimes I search through declined drafts for phrases indicating that it is a biography about a dead person, because the majority are notable. Calliopejen1 ( talk) 16:16, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Proposal: Categorize all AfC drafts with ORES topics using a bot

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

I have proposed at WT:WPAFC#Proposal:_Categorize_all_AfC_drafts_with_ORES_topics_using_a_bot that a bot be used for sorting all AfC drafts by ORES-predicted topics. (@ Headbomb, Espresso Addict, Clayoquot, WhatamIdoing, EpochFail, Whisperjanes, and Bri: ). SD0001 ( talk) 11:00, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

More collaborative editing in draftspace

A few months ago I learned how to use AWB to check across draftspace as well as mainapsce, since then I have fixed a lot of typos in draftspace and had lots of thanks, mostly from newbies ( my last 500 draftspace edits go back to Oct 2019, but I'm hoping in that time some got moved to mainspace). It is fiddly and not the default, and timewasting even if you skip past a bunch of articles that would be obvious A1, A3 or A7 in mainspace. But if we changed AWB and some other tools to default to including draftspace within article space we could easily increase collaborative editing in draftspace. Similarly with categories. Currently you are not supposed to add mainspace categories to drafts, but what if we changed the software so that the category system ignored categories in draftspace unless an editor had opted in to seeing them? That way categories could be added, and editors who look for new things categorised in "their" area would likely do more collaborative editing in draftspace. Ϣere SpielChequers 15:46, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Keep it simple

I read all my experienced playmates sharing experiences about using draft space- culling the crud, and devising ever more complicated ways of bringing life back into the corpse. Whatever the system is tomorrow- make it one that you can explain to a non-user. We need more editors, and they are out there- brimming over with good faith but a soon as we describe what you have to do to create a new article- they thank you for the coffee and we never see them again. The R value of editing Wikipedia is well below 1, when I started it was 3 or 4 (making up the number- WP:OR, {(cn)}} and probably POV and BLP as well). So keep Draft:Space for the experienced and make it read only for the newbies. WP is already too complicated to explain in an afternoon training session to the potentially committed. ClemRutter ( talk) 12:11, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

A? deletion of week old drafts

One reason why draft space doesn't work is that it protects for 6 months a bunch of articles that in mainspace would be deleted A1, A3 or A7. So one simple reform would be to allow all types of speedy deletion to apply to relevant drafts that were a week old. If a week is thought too harsh, a month would still enable us to sieve out a lot of crud. It should be fairly easy to create a "week old draft pages feed" to enable such sifting. Ϣere SpielChequers 15:46, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Support either a week or a month. 6 months is too long to wait for G13 deletion. This would get rid of a lot of crap. b uidh e 09:43, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

A week is way too short. A month of inactivity would be the bare minimum. We do want people to be able to return to their drafts and improve them to standards. With obvious provision that a submitted draft that doesn't get reviewed is exempt. Maybe we should consider WP:CSD#D criteria which apply after a month of inactivity. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 10:37, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

Six months seems fine. Anything shorter will introduce a perverse incentive: an editor who knows his draft is not ready, but has a heavy work period, new baby, etc. coming up, will protect it by submitting it for review, increasing the load on the already overworked reviewers. Maproom ( talk) 17:51, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

@Headbomb, this is for A1, A3 or A7 candidates. This isn't a suggestion that drafts be deleted if they aren't ready for mainspace, more if they have no prospect of ever reaching mainspace. "Hoped to take part in the next Olympics" not "took part in the last Olympics. Ϣere SpielChequers 15:43, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

• • Six months is appropriate, as it can take 3 months or more for an article to be reviewed. Even if those are exempt Ive come across some good drafts that should be published that have been abandoned for unknown reasons and reducing the time limit will make it easier for those drafts to be missed. With the current backlog there are 270 articles in the 3 month que and some do not need further editing so less than 6 months would be biting the newbies, imv Atlantic306 ( talk)
    • There is a difference between screening out stuff such as this - an obvious A7 candidate if it was in mainspace, and reviewing drafts that have content worth reviewing. Ϣere SpielChequers 18:32, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

I have no problems with the six month grace period, but I would propose applying CSD-U5 and CSD-G11 to the draft space to weed out the worst misuse of draft space. Kleuske ( talk) 09:09, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

G11 already applies in draftspace as it does in all namespaces. Not sure about U5, I don't recall seeing many pages in draftspace that would merit U5 deletion if they were in userspace. Ϣere SpielChequers 15:43, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

30/500 for new page creation

Spitballing: article proposals?

First off, disclaimer that I'm not involved in AfC or NPP. I do spend a lot of time in Huggle, however, so I do come across drafts fairly frequently. That being said, there's a fairly good chance that people more familiar with this stuff will think this is a bad idea, and I defer to them.

That being said: it seems to me that a large problem with the current Draft/AfC system is that new contributors spend a lot of time on articles that quite frankly have no chance of notability. However, there's no reason we actually need an article present to make a notability judgement. Therefore, I propose something like this:

1. Prevent non-autoconfirmed users from creating pages in Draft: space.
2. Instead, create a WP:Article Proposals page where those users can fill out something like the following:
   • Title of proposed article:
   • Describe the topic in a sentence or two:
   • In a sentence or two, why is this topic important?
   • What, if anything, is your relationship to the subject?
   • List at least two sources on which you would base your article. Make sure these sources are reliable and independent of the subject.

   The first and last questions are the most important here, but the others also seem worth including.

3. Submissions to that page would be handled in one of three ways: a) immediately decline it, if it would almost certainly get speedied or fail AfD; b) if it's clearly notable, create the draftspace article and let the new editor know they can get to work; or c) if it's borderline, still create the draftspace article, but warn the editor that there's a good chance their effort would be wasted.
4. Commit to keeping the Article Proposals backlog under a week or so.

   Is this practical? I have no idea. I kinda imagine that something like this would be quicker to review than a full on AfC, but I quite frankly have no idea.

5. Once the article's been written, send it through a (possibly streamlined) AfC process, which hopefully would have a much shorter queue.

If this works as intended, I think it qualifies as an improvement on all sides:

• New contributors benefit by quickly getting told that their article idea won't fly, before they've put a bunch of work into it; hopefully, this is less discouraging than our current AfC rejections, and they can go on to make a better proposal or contribute in other ways. Once they write their articles, they benefit from a significantly shorter AfC queue (and therefore wait time).
• Reviewers can more quickly deal with obvious cases.
• Draft space has much less cruft that will never be accepted, and maybe even becomes a useful place to find future articles to help with.

Again, this is not my area of expertise, and there's a decent chance it's a completely stupid idea. Thoughts? Gaelan 💬 ✏️ 08:25, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

I also don't work in this area at all (I admit that at this point, I rarely stray out of WP-space), but I do like this idea. It shouldn't be too difficult to implement, and it certainly seems like a friendlier environment for new editors. Despite my AWWDMBJ membership and general deletionist tendencies, I believe we may be reaching the point where borderline articles should be more acceptable, and this system would encourage the creation of those with a focus on proving the subject falls on the right side of that borderline. —⁠ 烏⁠Γ ^{( kaw)} │ 08:37, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

This has all the existing problems of draftspace while tiptoing away from the problem. De Wikipedia has a feature that prompts newbies to cite their source. Rather than reinvent the wheel we should nick that idea, and maybe put some screen in to reject certain commonly used unreliable source. Ϣere SpielChequers 11:19, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose We already have a process for requesting articles, which has existed since 2001. Per WP:CREEP, we need to stop the proliferation of processes as we already have too much complexity and confusion. We should instead rationalise and simplify our processes by eliminating the ones that don't work; such as draft space and AfC. Andrew🐉( talk) 11:35, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

  Andrew Davidson, my proposal serves an entirely different purpose. Requested Articles is for people who want someone else to write an article about something. I'm proposing a sort of "pre-AfC" for people who want to write an article themselves, where we make sure it's notable before they spend a bunch of time writing. As for the CREEP argument, I agree that, all other things being equal, simpler processes are better; but all other things are not equal, and sometimes the more complex process works better overall. In addition, if this process results in higher quality drafts, it might mean we could significantly streamline the AfC process, it might actually result in simplification. Gaelan 💬 ✏️ 19:52, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

• Comment I think User:Gaelan’s proposal for a simple wizard is interesting and could possibly save a lot of people wasting their time creating things that are never going to fly. Our basic problem is that for every unit of notable encyclopedic material there are hundreds of units of non-notable stuff out there – that’s even before we come on to the finer details of sourcing, COI etc. We can’t just open the mainspace to anything everyone feels like writing, unless many of us plan to spend the rest of our lives just pressing a delete button. As others have said there’s too much stuff and too few people to deal with it. I am not sure that just abolishing Draftspace will be of much benefit. I think we need the data others have asked for here, and we need to think about the whole workflow of creation/triage/support and encouragement. Under our current system things get stuck in various places because it’s just too much work for most editors to deal with them. Some get stuck in draftspace where they die. Others reach the New Pages Feed, where they sit for month after month without completing review. They’re probably not ok to release for a variety of reasons, but equally they’re too much work to easily fix, the creator is already a redlink anyway, and unless they are clearly not notable nobody wants to clog up AfD (maybe they could be sent to Article Rescue Squadron??). Nobody has yet found a way of getting decent, improvable content on quickly and encouraging new editors while disposing of non-notable content quickly too. The individual elements of our existing system are probably reasonably serviceable, but how they all work together is not optimal. If we outright banned IMDB as a source at all we could probably reduce all our backlogs by around 20% overnight. My last thought is that from memory in every case of a page I’ve reviewed that had been previously rejected at AfC and moved into mainspace by its creator anyway, the AfC rejection was correct. Mccapra ( talk) 07:07, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

  @ Mccapra and Gaelan: I think this is moving in the right direction. I'd love for you both to take a look at a discussion that Gryllida, DGG, and I recently had on improving the Article wizard. The TL;DR is that I'd like to force people using the wizard to provide some sources, and then to offer feedback based on how those sources compare with the WP:RSP list. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 07:50, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Gaelan, you've proven once more the virtue of being open to outsiders--your proposal is simpler and better than anything discussed on that page, and I think it should be the basis of further discussion. Now of course the regulars will need to start looking for problems and exceptions , but i think what you have suggested is the basis on which we should build. The main problem is that the only judge of whether there should be an article is the community as a whole at AfD,; there are cases of AfD making what probably all of us here would regard as the wrong decision, and many cases about which any one reviewer would think so. Reviewers use experience to anticipate the likely judgement of the community, but it's not the reviewer's opinion that matters in the end. In other words, let us design the best and most logical rules at AfC, and we'll still be wrong. Tens of thousands of articles have been accepted at AfD without RSs. DGG ( talk ) 00:28, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

•  Comment:I would suggest to implement this by adding "{{ article start request}}" template, which would be similar to {{ edit request}} in that it adds the request to a particular category.

Users could then place this "{{ article start request}}" template at their personal talk page, followed by a description of what they are writing about, and a list of sources with summary of what each one of them says about the proposed article subject.

I think this could work especially well for paid editors as their draft usually is connected to one account.

I think this would also be good to be in a discussion format, and starting with a shorter "sources list" snippet rather than a complete article.

Has this been discussed anywhere else? -- Gryllida ( talk) 01:27, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Gryllida, I suggest you go aheadwith this iidea, more or les as outlined. The place to discusss the details, is on the AFC talk page. DGG ( talk ) 01:31, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, soon I will create an initial version of these templates and follow up at that talk page. -- Gryllida ( talk) 10:02, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

A really radical proposal

Why not follow the procedure outlined above, but instead of the initial proposed article being in a special place have it as a couple of sentences in main space. Then editors who know what they are doing (rather than anyone with a few hundred inconsequential edits under their belt) could review it and triage it by proposing it for speedy deletion, either improving it themselves or telling the author what needs to be improved or doing nothing and cheering the fact that something good has been created. People would then be able to find this thing (for which I have just made up the name "stub") and add content and sources to it. I propose calling this process a "wiki". Has nobody ever thought of this before? Phil Bridger ( talk) 19:33, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Let's say it's a controversial topic or a biography. Then if it doesn't start out good, the writer will only have a week to improve it or it will be deleted. The point of the draftspace is to give sufficient time to write a good article.— Naddruf ( talk ~ contribs) 22:32, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Phil Bridger: If I'm reading this correctly, you're just (with a heavy dose of sarcasm) proposing we open up mainspace to anonymous editors. If so, that's already been discussed to death above, has it not? Gaelan 💬 ✏️ 01:23, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't think that the proposal is to open it up to logged-out/IP editors. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 17:39, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

This is a lingering issue I tried to open discussion at the main policy page WT:RS but got little input, following an earlier discussion at [2] (under "Daily Mail and RSOPINION").

The short background: Obviously works like the Daily Mail are deprecated and should not be at all used for statements of facts. But they also do have staff writers that are reviewers for films and televisions, and thus their writings would seem to fall under WP:RSOPINION , and thus should be removed necessarily due to the DM's deprecation. This led to the whole intent of RSOPINION, which lacks the clarity that needs better resolution for works broadly, not just Daily Mail nor other deprecated works.

• Does RSOPINION allow for the use of sources that are not reliable for fact, including those that are deprecated? The first statement of RSOPINION suggests this Some sources may be considered reliable for statements as to their author's opinion, but not for statements asserted as fact. but others argue that the line A prime example of this is opinion pieces in sources recognized as reliable. means RSOPINION is restricted to reliable sources.
• Assuming RSOPINION does allow for the use of sources normally considered unreliable or deprecated. Should there also be a factor in RSOPINION related to expertise/recognition or similar authorizativeness of the author or the work to separate journalism from fan blogs or the like? For example, there are noted reviewers at the Daily Mail that have a history in reviewing UK television, so they would by a valued voice compared to some excited Doctor Who fan writing on their blog. I do note that if we take the interpretation about limiting to only reliable sources, this question becomes a non-starter on the presumption an RS is only going to publish opinions from people it considers authoritative to start.
• Is there anything else of clarity that could be added to this point in RSOPINION? What we don't want is to open the floodgates to allowing random opinions to be used, and either by sticking only to reliable sources, or making sure that expertise/authority is sought here, we should be good, but there may be other facets I'm missing.

This is seeking input, as the discussion at WT:RS got little to add to that.-- Masem ( t) 14:58, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

What statement are you trying to source? If the statement is "In such-and-such a newspaper, so-and-so stated "The sky is green"", then that statement can be sourced to the original source where the quote came from. That's what RSOPINION is stating; if you need to establish that someone has stated something themselves then it's fine. It is not, never in any context, fine to use that statement to assess the veracity of the statement itself. That is, you cannot use such sources to verify that the sky is green, merely that the person who said "the sky is green" actual said those words. -- Jayron 32 18:12, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Shoot, I should be explicit. The specific question was around things like critic's reviews of contemporary media like film, television and books, and if that is needed to tune the the use of RSOPINION better, so be it. I can see RSOPINION being more restrictive in some topic areas like political commentary, for example. Actually even moreso for political commentary given why sources like Breitbart have been strongly deprecated. But again, if we need to focus this specifically on critic reviews, that's might make this an easier discussion for that "carve out". -- Masem ( t) 20:15, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

If we're asking about critic reviews of media, that's an issue of WP:UNDUE and not reliability. A critic is a reliable source for what they said themselves. That's always true. The issue is "why should we care that the critic in question said it?" not "Do we believe they actually said the thing we're saying they did?" I mean, I'll take Robert Christgau and David Fricke over "Joe Schmoe from random local newspaper's" review of a particular album, even if the local newspaper is a reliable source, and we can believe that Joe Schmoe actually wrote that particular review. That's not a reliability issue. It's a recognized expertise and acclaim issue; opinions are not reliable or unreliable, opinions have weight and importance based on who the person who has the opinion is, and their reputation and area of expertise. -- Jayron 32 05:36, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

• Blanket treatment of organs such as the Daily Mail is silly because they are typically have numerous sections written by many different writers in a variety of styles. Recognised staff critics such as Jack Tinker typically have a byline and their opinions will tend to be personal rather than just parroting a party line or house style. When I cite or quote such notable critics in a reception section, I would usually attribute them inline and link to their article, saying something like " Jack Tinker, writng for the Daily Mail, thought that the work was..." Andrew🐉( talk) 20:59, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

  Part of the issue was the blanket Daily Mail review removal but I want this to focus on the general RSOPINION though as I pointed out above, if we have to narrowly focus on critic reviews to distinguish from political commentary, that's fine. Reviews are far less contentious issues than political commentary from sources not normally RS for fact. -- Masem ( t) 03:57, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

• I can see the temptation to allow critic/review pieces but I see two counterpoints. First, it would be a bit messy distinguishing acceptable review-pieces from other, unacceptable, opinion-pieces. Second, if the editorial management of that source is so thoroughly disreputable then it casts significant doubt on their choice of critic-staff and on their oversight of such content. No one Reliable is certifying that this critic's opinion is worth hearing. The critic is no better than a random blogger for our purposes. Alsee ( talk) 02:34, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
• I agree with Jayron32. When the Daily Mail says the UK government is about to lift lockdown we cannot use that as a source to support a statement that this is indeed the government’s plan. If their cinema reviewer says a film is boring that’s not a statement of fact it’s a statement of opinion. There’s no reason I can see why that shouldn’t be cited. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Mccapra ( talk) 02:55, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

• So I'm wondering if it makes sense that we have what would be an "RSEXPERT" section, rather than modifying RSOPINION, which would allow statements (opinion or otherwise) from established experts regardless from where they are published but with a whole host of caveats:
  1. That who is an expert has to be established by consensus: not just someone notable (eg Alex Jones is not an expert on politics) but who editors that know the field are aware is a recognized voice in the field. In the area of media reviews, this would be notable film critics even those that write for a deprecated work like the Daily Mail. (As a corollary, an expert does not need to be notable, but if they have never been attached to a notable organization at all, that raises several questions).
  2. There has to be some verifyability that the expert is the one posted/writing the work. This is like the Twitter checkmark purpose.
  3. Key sourcing policies must be respected. BLPSPS still cannot be violated; an expert's commentary piece on its own cannot be used for talking about another BLP. MEDRS absolutely must be respected: An expert medical doctor writing to a common-man level about a new drug in his blog would not be allowed to be used on the page about that drug (though there may be other pages this could be applicable) A similar stance would be for SCIRS topics.
  4. This should be used for content that has general encyclopedic value, keeping in mind facets like WP:NOT#NEWS, WP:RECENTISM, WP:UNDUE, and so forth. This generally means that there are few areas where a single person's opinion, absent any other sources that call to that opinion, has weight to be used in WP. Reviews of media like television and film are one notable exception, another may be in analysis of court cases after they have been decided by legal experts, as in normal coverage of these types of topics, there is usually an accumulation of such reviews or analyses as to give the reader a broad idea of what experts have said about the topic.
• Does this make sense? -- Masem ( t) 03:39, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

  We currently have an exception for subject-matter experts' self-published sources: "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications." It looks like your proposal would extend this exception to all questionable sources, instead of just self-published sources. If the publication is considered unreliable because it does not exercise adequate editorial control, your proposal would make sense. However, like Alsee said above, if the publication is considered unreliable because its editorial team has a reputation for curating content that is considered disreputable by reliable sources, then the opinion would still be questionable. Using the Alex Jones example, all of InfoWars would fall into the latter category regardless of author. —  Newslinger  talk 04:38, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

  That's why, in part, who is a subject-matter expert is going to be driven by consensus and based on where they are publishing from among other factors. Definitely don't the case that would allow Alex Jones to be considered a subject matter expert for a topic, for example. But I'm also wanting to make sure that if we have a UK reviewer who maybe has only written for the Daily Mail for their entire career, is known in other RS works talking about the UK reviewing scene as a top and important critic, that we can allow them as a subject-matter expert despite their lack of publication in an "reliable" source; consensus should be able to judge from the RSes talking about the person that they are an expert and can use them in this "RSEXPERT" manner. -- Masem ( t) 17:12, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Please see Special:Contributions/Philoserf ( example). Thoughts on this? Those talkpages will probably have 1 or 2 threads for years to come, I don't see why the need for such forced archiving. This is not a complaint, and I'm posting here because I couldn't find any policy for/against this (but I certainly am against). Ping to User:Philoserf; please hold those edits until there is feedback? Reh man 02:42, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Rehman, will do —¿philoserf? ( talk) 02:45, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Rehman, now there is someone following me deleting conversations. Weird. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 03:48, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Mass changes of any kind without prior discussion is highly undesirable. Infrequently used talk pages should be left alone until a central discussion says otherwise. Johnuniq ( talk) 04:32, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Should those edits be reverted? Reh man 06:04, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

In my opinion it's a non-issue. Leave the already modified talk pages as they are but inform Philoserf that archiving shouldn't be done for infrequently used pages (a new post every few months or so would be the bare minimum for me). Anarchyte ( talk • work) 06:14, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

True. Although I'm leaning towards reverting as they look cluttered. I.e. in the example above, the talkpage already has {{ Talkpage header}}, which would display the archives if available. And I've just noticed {{ Friendly search suggestions}} and {{ Annual readership}} has also been mass added. While it may be useful to some articles, I don't see the practicality of mass adding those to talkpages in this manner. Reh man 06:40, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

I was deleting "External links modified" sections from otherwise empty talk pages, which I'm allowed to do, to prevent them from being archived and creating useless archived pages. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 17:36, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

If archiving is set up, it should leave a minimum number of threads on the page like at least 3–5. For that archive client, it would be set by |minkeepthreads=.— Bagumba ( talk) 08:59, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Thank you all for the feedback. I learn each time I encounter an editor with an opinion.

Context

As I learn my way around, I have been visiting as many pages as possible. Observing the condition of the page, the talk page, and editorial interactions on these. I often make some small improvement and watch the page for editorial reactions. In this way I have learned a lot in just a little bit more than two active months here.

What I was finding in talk pages

I had seen a lot of pages with leading comments without title, often without signature. These, of course, acted as a lede and blew up the TOC. I had seen a jumble of talk page headers, warnings, markers, and other cruft in various mixed orders and styles. I also found misconfigured archive bot settings too.

What I intended

I thought that by adding friendly search suggestions and page views a new editor’s experience could have a bit of guidance and information about the article. I thought a conversation archive would help by moving crufty old conversations out of the way. Finally, I thought that by adding these as a prophylactic to pages that have been rarely updated we might get editors engaged.

Lesson learned

There are more views of what a talk page should be than I imagined.

Result

I will be more careful in any talk page updates I may offer and I will set retention so that a few old conversations remain when I do setup archiving. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 17:55, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

There is no guideline for notability of beauty pageants. Wikipedia:WikiProject Beauty Pageants/Notability (beauty pageant participants) was an attempt to create such a guideline, but I am not sure why it fizzled out. As of now a huge number of pages in this category have been created which may or may not meet GNG as it is entirely a matter of perspective. Specific concerns in this matter are;

1. Is a person notable just for participating in a pageant? If so what type of pageant confers notability, a national level? or a state level? or an international level pageant?
2. What defines a national level pageant? or an international one? Who establishes the fact that a certain pageant is truly international? There are dozens of pageants that have international attached to their name, yet they are of not noteworthy.
3. Is a single time winner of a national/international pageant considered to have passed GNG according to the AWARD guideline or should they be classed under SINGLEEVENT?
4. what type of pageants can have their own articles?

I would like to invite the community to discuss this and come up with a policy WP:PAGEANT that can be quoted in discussions as an inclusion criterion for pageants and contestants. MistyGraceWhite ( talk) 19:24, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

• From my limited understanding of beauty pageants (which comes mostly from patrolling articles about them, and not due to any off-Wikipedia familiarity), there's "international" pageants that are nevertheless small-scale productions with limited notability. I think that if an SNG were to be drafted for this subject, the criteria would likely need to name specific pageants that actually represent the most prestigious competitions. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 20:39, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
• It looks like Wikipedia:WikiProject Beauty Pageants/Notability (beauty pageant participants) was located in draftspace and marked as a failed policy proposal until a little over a week ago, when Zanimum removed that tag without edit summary and moved the page out of draftspace. What's up with that? I also recall there being some other discussion on beauty pageants not too long ago, but I forget where. Is there other context we should have here? {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 20:57, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

That draft was created after a series of AfD discussions about individual pageant contestants, winners and pageants themselves. Discussion at the Wikiproject level tended toward the opinion that there shouldn't be a pageant-specific SNG and that SNG's were a bad idea anyway. This meant that the proposal failed to gain consensus and was abandoned. I marked the proposal as failed and left it in draft for historical reasons. Hasteur apparently saw an abandoned draft and marked it for speedy deletion seven months later but it was not removed at that time. Zanimum apparently saw an over two-and-a-half CSD tag and took the actions they thought appropriate. It is still a failed proposal but new discussion may reach a different consensus. The previous discussion can be found at the project talk page archives. Similar older discussions include this one and this one. The end result is that beauty pageant contestants and pageants tend to get held to the general notability guideline at AfD. I hope this helps. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 17:08, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

Proposals should be drafted in user or project space (moved to the latter when ready for discussion if not there already) and failed ones left there appropriately marked. Draft space is for the drafting of articles, and anything that isn't one will likely get speedily deleted and the history lost. Thryduulf ( talk) 19:33, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

Absent further discussion, I'm going to mark this as historical. It never was broadly accepted as a guideline for usage and leaving it as-is might cause confusion that this is a valid standard. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 18:22, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

I agree with the need to have the option of indefinitely blocking a user from using the website. However, I feel that after five years has gone by, the block is no longer needed, especially in the case of users who made massive contributions to the website. Let's let some of the old users out of the cage. They probably won't be expecting their release and may not even realize it. But the point of Wikipedia is not to exercise the power to block people- the point of Wikipedia is to make an encylopedia. In 2015, User:Billy Hathorn was blocked for massive copyright violations. The user is also in the top 300 editors by number of edits on Wikipedia. Let's imagine that the person is still interested in editing Wikipedia one day: do you think the person has learned their lesson? I don't know all the details of this user's case, but I'm just saying that a permaban may be "justified" but it is not necessarily conducive to producing the best encylopedia. If you let some of the blocked users that made massive mistakes but also some good contributions out of their cages, they might be able to make productive contributions. If they mess up again, just ban them again- simple as that! That's my opinion. I know it probably won't get anywhere, but I think the concept of permabanning people here is excessive except in the case where every edit a user makes is reliably deleterious to the goal of making an encyclopaedia. Geographyinitiative ( talk) 12:06, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

"Indefinite" does not mean "permanent". Anyone subject to an indefinite block can explain why they should be unblocked and if that explanation is judged to be acceptable they will be unblocked. And what makes you think that doing loads of edits is a way to produce the best encyclopedia? In some cases it has been that the user in question has made loads of edits that make the encyclopedia worse. Such thinking led to one editor only being desysopped recently by Arbcom even though it had been obvious for well over a decade that this person's prolific admin actions were detrimental to Wikipedia. Let's look for quality rather than quantity. Phil Bridger ( talk) 12:22, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

Putting that aside, with any case that's 5 years old, it would hardly be that difficult to make an unblock request if they were interested in doing so. It seems a very niche group of editors who: were an appreciable positive; have a 5-year old indef; at some stage will want to edit again with that account; can't/don't want to make an unblock request. Nosebagbear ( talk) 13:23, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

No one is blocked from using this website by us, the only people blocked from using this website are people who live in or access the internet through countries, households or organisations that ban access to Wikipedia. We block people from editing this site, not from using it. Everyone is welcome to use this site as a reader, but we reserve the right to withdraw editing privileges. Most indefinitely blocked accounts are never going to be unblocked, even if the editor wanted to edit within the rules, why expect a twenty something to resume with an account that was banned for vandalism when they were a child? If there was one change to the policy that I would most strongly support it would be to say that if you were blocked before your 18th birthday, you are welcome to create a new account two years after your previous edit. Ϣere SpielChequers 11:43, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

WereSpielChequers, I generally agree, but there is at lease one minor who in my opinion should be talking to law enforcement based on some of their actions here. There’s the idiot kids making penis jokes that frankly I don’t care about, and then there are the really messed up kids who engage in cyberstalking their “enemies” on this site. I don’t want the latter back, no matter how long it’s been. TonyBallioni ( talk) 16:24, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

The relevant policy you seek to amend is Wikipedia:Blocking policy#Indefinite blocks, which states in its entirety:

An indefinite block is a block that does not have a definite (or fixed) duration. Indefinite blocks are usually applied when there is significant disruption or threats of disruption, or major breaches of policy. In such cases an open-ended block may be appropriate to prevent further problems until the matter can be resolved by discussion. It is designed to prevent further disruption, and the desired outcome is a commitment to observe Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, and to stop problematic conduct in future.

Indefinite does not mean infinite: an indefinitely blocked user may later be unblocked in appropriate circumstances. In particularly serious cases in which no administrator would be willing to lift the block, the user is effectively banned by the community.

Looking at the text of this policy, I think it provides a pretty clear avenue for how indefinitely blocked users may return. If they appeal their block and manage to convince us through discussion that the block is no longer necessary to prevent disruption, they will be unblocked. Other relevant essays on this include Wikipedia:Guide to appealing blocks and Wikipedia:Standard offer. Mz7 ( talk) 18:55, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Template in question: {{ UserboxCOI}}

So far, this has been a good little tool for dealing with COI users. However, a routine search revealed that there are about 260 transclusions outside of userspace. I glossed through most of them, and it seemed that a good amount of these are in user talk space. Some of these are in the COI editor's user talk, while some are in more experienced users', when the COI editor was corresponding and put a COI tag there. Most of the remaining are in draftspace; I am working on removing them. I am raising a few questions:

1. should the COI template categorize userpages into, for example, Category:User pages with Conflict of Interest declarations?
2. should the COI template warn users when placed in the wrong namespace (like the {{ Afd}} template)?
3. should the COI template categorize such templating mistakes into a tracking category, with an option to exempt (to keep an archive of past discussions)?

Thanks. Eumat114 formerly TLOM ( Message) 14:00, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

I am not a principal to any of these disputes but would like the opinion of other editors on a policy matter that comes up from time to time. An editor offers a reasoned argument that an article topic is not notable and that the article should be redirected to a parent article. This most frequently happens in music, but also elsewhere. In music, commonly there is an article on a song, and the argument is that the song is not notable and should be redirected to the album. Sometimes the argument is that an album is not notable and should be redirected to the artist. An opposing reasoned argument is made that the topic is notable and the article should be kept. The question is how this dispute should be resolved. One option is a deletion discussion, but often the proponent of redirection says that they are not requesting deletion, so that AFD is not the appropriate forum, and that the article should simply be redirected. I have occasionally seen this lead to edit-warring, and we know that edit-warring is the wrong answer, regardless of what the right answer is. So is there a different right answer? My thought, after looking at the policies and guidelines once, but not reviewing them in depth, is that a deletion discussion is the appropriate answer, even if no one is actually proposing deletion, because redirection is an alternative to deletion and is a side-door deletion; but maybe there is another procedure that is preferred. I realize that discussion is the preferred first step, but what is to be done if the discussion is inconclusive? Is there a first-mover advantage? Is there a second-mover advantage? A Request for Comments is another way to resolve a content dispute, but the only real differences between an RFC and an AFD are the length of time, with AFD being quicker, and that AFD is specialized to deletion-like disputes.

Should redirection disputes be resolved by AFD, or is there a different answer? Robert McClenon ( talk) 23:41, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

• Having been brought up on this very topic several times in the past (yes, the majority being music-related), I am glad for this opportunity to get some wider input.

I am firmly of the opinion that AfD is the suitable forum for these discussions. My main argument is that almost all of the send-to-AfD-for-redirect cases I have kicked off stem from NPP, and concern newly created articles. That means that there are practically no watchers of these pages - in many cases it will be just the author and the new page reviewer. It is pointless to start a "redirect discussion" on the articles talk page under these circumstances; no one will comment. This is also the very situation in which an obvious redirect won't "stick", because there are only two people involved, one of them heavily invested. - Now, one could address that by creating a list of redirect proposals for people to monitor. But that would have to be publicized and editors would have to get into the habit of watching it (maybe that even exists already? If so, I don't know where - which would illustrate the problem). In contrast, most experienced editors keep the occasional eye on AfDs, and at least some good input is rarely hard to come by. So we already have a well-visited forum to invite discussion of these cases.

Are intended-redirect AfDs sucking up too much time and energy from AfD commenters? I doubt it - there's generally some amount of such cases in evidence, but they are hardly swamping the venue. Is some functionality of AfD being abused because it is employed for discussions that don't have an intial target of "have an admin push the delete button"? Nope - because "delete" is not an uncommon outcome in these cases, and "redirect" is a rather common outcome in intended delete cases. It seems a rather finicky distinction to regard the latter ones as suited to AfD and the former as in the wrong venue. Looked at from a different angle, would the average non-notable song nomination suddenly be welcome at AfD if I nominated it for deletion up front, in the expectation that the outcome would instead be a redirect (as is the usual treatment)? Yeah, if done with intent that would be gaming the system, but don't tell me that very scenario doesn't happen innocently as well. And policing whether the intention of nominators equals the likely outcome would seem positively kafkaesque.

Tldr - sending an intended redirect to AfD for decision is functional and doesn't hurt. If we formally disallow the practice, some replacement infrastructure will have to be created, spun up and popularized. Let's not. -- Elmidae ( talk · contribs) 22:34, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

• I think my perspective is similar to Elmidae's: converting to redirect is valid as a bold change, but further dispute should be handled at AfD. The only gray area in my mind are situations where one, usually inexperienced, editor is trying to prevent an article from being converted to a redirect despite there being a consensus among other editors that the page should be a redirect. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 23:18, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
• I agree; AfD is the best venue, both because of all of the reasons Elmidae explained and because this would essentially be one added purpose of an expanded " Articles for Discussion". If the talk page goes unseen, and it's not currently a redirect (or consensus for it to be one is unknown or nonexistent), AfD is the only logical choice. I personally would add the caveat from WP:NOTBURO that A procedural error made in a proposal or request is not grounds for rejecting that proposal or request, and that it shouldn't matter where the discussion takes place. —⁠ 烏⁠Γ ^{( kaw)} │ 00:48, 02 May 2020 (UTC)
• New page is poorly created and needs to be redirected elsewhere. Especially true when a user tries to convert a redirect into a new article. NPP patroller boldly redirects, page creator reverts. If I see another experienced NPP patroller has redirected once, I may try to boldly redirect one more time to see if the creator takes the hint - if it's already been redirected a couple times, I would send the article to AfD for further discussion. If the page has been around for awhile, AfD is definitely the proper forum. So I would send it to AfD in all instances, if the dispute cannot be mediated between the edit warring users. SportingFlyer T· C 01:13, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
• AfD is the appropriate location, if there is a discussion (that's can't be settled by BOLD/internally), making sure to ping everyone. Nominator should bold right at the start of their nomination that it's a redirection AfD, otherwise it defaults in interpretation to a redirect. Nosebagbear ( talk) 09:01, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
• I'm not sold on AFDs for redirect-or-standalone discussions. Redirect/don't redirect isn't just a notability question, it's also about WP:PAGEDECIDE. Deletion is about whether we have an entry or not; redirecting is about where the content should go. For example, one reason to put content about a song on the album page instead of its own page is if there isn't much content about the song. And a redirect discussion doesn't require an admin to close (no one is pressing the delete button). All of this pushes me to thinking that an RFC is better for redirect-or-standalone discussions than AFD. Though RFCs usually take 30 days as opposed to AFD's 7, that strike me more as a reason to close "redirect RFCs" sooner, rather than hold them in another venue. Levivich  ^{dubious – discuss} 05:53, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
• What is the problem with WP:Redirects for discussion? Thincat ( talk) 08:46, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
  • @ Thincat: RfD deals with pages that are currently redirects or soft redirects, and whether or not they should be deleted or retargetted. It is not a forum for discussing article content, so these sorts of discussions are completely out of scope. It's not a perfect fit for AfD but in the absence of a dedicated venue that is by far the best. Thryduulf ( talk) 10:02, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
• I agree that AfD would be the usual and best place to discuss whether an article should be redirected to a parent topic when article talk page discussion has failed -- I think the article talk page should usually be tried first. I would also note that music is not the only area to have this sort mof issue. Articles about primary schools are often but not always redirected to the article about the school district. Articles about neighborhoods are often redirected mto the articvel about the city or other larger area which contains them. Articles about TV episodes are sometimes redirected to an article about the series. Articles about individual books in a series are sometimes redirected to articles about the whole series. These are all similar judgement calls and simialr procedures should be followed for each of them. DES ^(talk) _{DESiegel Contribs} 15:47, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

More Thoughts

I have a few comments. First, the music area has these debates because there can be different reasonable views as to how many articles to have at what level of granularity. With biography, for instance, the choices are delete or keep, no or yes. Merge/redirect is an occasional issue with biographies; it is the issue with music. There are strong inclusionist feelings by some editors and strong mergist or redirectionist feelings by some editors.

Second, I have also seen these debates after the article was in place for a while, although maybe that was because NPP was backlogged.

Third, I don't see any gaming of the system, but, to the extent that anyone is trying to use the system to their advantage, it may be the redirectionists, who argue against using AFD because they are not advocating deletion. I think that occasionally a redirectionist doesn't want to use AFD because it is likely to result in Keep, and they would prefer to win. There is good faith, but sometimes there is stubborn good faith.

Fourth, if there is consensus to redirect (merge) except for one editor, why not use AFD anyway? The alternatives are edit-warring or WP:ANI, and the alternatives are likely to take a few days to resolve, and AFD only takes a week. There is a commonly expressed view that formal closure is not always necessary because sometimes consensus is apparent, but if it isn't apparent to one person, formal closure is less messy than edit-warring.

Fifth, is there any reasonable reason not to use AFD for a deletion-like process?

Sixth, I will check to see whether the deletion policies and guidelines need to be clarified to establish that AFD is the proper forum for redirect disputes.

Robert McClenon ( talk) 03:09, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

• Imho, the WP:MERGEPROP procedure can be used unless one of the two articles is likely too un- WP:GNG to exist separately (which should then probably be rather discussed at WP:AfD). The WP:MERGEPROP procedure is somewhat less formal than WP:AfD, but is definitely a bit more structured than a mere "talk page discussion". It might be a good alternative when the article that is a candidate for being turned into a redirect is not wholly without merit, and a MERGEPROP discussion can possibly, for instance, be somewhat more suitable to concentrate on discerning whether the to-be-merged article merits a separate section in the article where the resulting redirect would go to (instead of only on the to-be-or-not-to-be question). -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 18:18, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

From the Deletion Policy

It says: "Suitable venues for seeking a consensus if a redirection is challenged include the article's talk page and Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion." So the claim that AFD is not appropriate for a redirect discussion is not just silly, it is just plain wrong. Robert McClenon ( talk) 05:33, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

I agree, as seemingly has every editor to weigh in so far, that guidelines and precedent all support AfD as a place to deal with non-notable entries. One way to deal with lack of notability is to redirect/merge. Another way is to delete.There are others too. AfD is the correct venue to deal with articles that lack notability. Best, Barkeep49 ( talk) 19:59, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

I have added clarifying language to WP:BEFORE. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 21:34, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

• Yep, the policy at WP:ATD-R says that AfD is a suitable place for such questions, this was decided in a 2018 RfC. – Uanfala (talk) 15:32, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

I mean it been there for years now — Preceding unsigned comment added by The Awesome Guy in the world ( talk • contribs) 10:40, 15 May 2020 (GMT)

@ The Awesome Guy in the world: Did you mean to post this elsewhere? Anarchyte ( talk • work) 09:38, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

@ Anarchyte: I just seen the archives and I saw the should we remove the in wrestling section? I’m sorry if this the wrong section to post The Awesome Guy in the world ( talk • contribs) 10:40, 15 May 2020 (GMT)

If you're referring to this little discussion Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_145#Should_the_"In_wrestling"_section_be_removed_from_professional_wrestling_articles? I'd say HECK NO. Consider Fandom (website) or something. Gråbergs Gråa Sång ( talk) 15:26, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Considering the discussion had a clear consensus I see no reason to restore it unless there is an extremely compelling reason to do so.-- 69.157.254.64 ( talk) 05:30, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

We recently encountered a somewhat novel situation: Blood irradiation therapy, an article that had previously seen less than 50 views a day, suddenly spiked to over 30,000. We learned thanks to Beorhtwulf that it was because of a manufactured screenshot being shared on Facebook to try to give credence to Donald Trump's statement that ultraviolet light might be a cure for COVID-19. After a discussion at WikiProject Medicine, I whipped up a template, {{ False version}}, and placed it on the article. It looks like this:

Some media outlets have circulated an outdated or fake version of this article, claimed to be its current state. Please check if claims or screenshots you've seen are consistent with what's actually here.

The pageviews for the page have since dropped back down to a healthier level, although they're still ~10x the baseline, meaning that roughly 90% of current readers are there because of the hoax. The template was brought to TfD by ToBeFree with the rationale that it wasn't appropriate to use a maintenance template for something that isn't a maintenance issue. It easily survived there, but several participants rightfully noted that we should probably have some broader discussion, so I'd like to bring up the general issue here. The next time we encounter misinformation of this sort, how should we handle it? {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 20:23, 7 May 2020 (UTC) ^{Courtesy pings to previously involved @ Mark viking, WhatamIdoing, Mdaniels5757, and TheTVExpert: {{u| Sdkb}}  talk 20:23, 7 May 2020 (UTC)}

I think some may find the "please verify" language confusing. Verify with whom? It sounds like an instruction to specifically seek verification somewhere. BD2412 T 20:26, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

@ BD2412: Would "confirm" or "check" be better word choice? {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 20:45, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps something more passive like "please take care". BD2412 T 22:04, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

I agree with the use of "Please take care" comrade waddie96 ( talk) 11:25, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

• Thank you very much, Sdkb, both for creating the template and this discussion. I do appreciate any attempt to combat fake news by facts, and I do see this as one. I just believe that, ironically, you're adding original research to the top of an article if there is no reliable source other than "Wikipedia user Beorhtwulf" and personal interpretation of statistics for placing the template in the first place. ~ ToBeFree ( talk) 20:36, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

  Yeah, I don't really know how we could address that other than deciding that this is a valid exception to WP:OR, which wasn't drafted with a situation like this in mind. I certainly would have felt less confident placing the notice if Beorhtwulf had been an IP, had a talk page filled with warnings, or had ignored the request to upload a screenshot. It also would have complicated things if blood irradiation therapy had been getting steady normal traffic. This particular case was pretty clear-cut in my view, but part of what I'm hoping to accomplish by bringing this up here is to figure out how we might want to approach cases with more complicating factors. Some brainstorming is needed. {{u| Sdkb}}  ^talk 20:52, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

  There is no requirement that project notices comply with WP:OR. It's always been just an editor's opinion that an article needs to be cleaned up, has an excessively long lead, or is difficult to understand. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 23:28, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

  I wouldn't say this was a case of OR. An unsourced claim in the article text that a misleading version of it was circulating would be both OR and a questionable self-reference, but a template on a top is an out-of-band editorial communication aimed at helping the reader contextualise and understand what they are looking at. It's no more OR than a cleanup tag. For the record I was not the creator of the template and don't have a clear view on its retention. Neither did I seek to include 'research findings' or personal interpretations of statistics in the article. My involvement in this was to mention the article on a couple of talk pages in the hope of getting it some expert attention. Beorhtwulf ( talk) 02:23, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

• Thanks for starting the discussion, Sdkb. I can understand ToBeFree's concern--this seems like a real-world assertion that would need a verifiable source. But I am more sanguine about a warning template like this because there is already precedent for article lead templates making assertions that are not verifiable in RS--this article is written like an advertisement, that article is non-neutral, those articles have topics that are not notable. All of these tags caution the reader to read with a more critical eye and warning about fake offsite copies seems to be in the same vein. More generally, templates like this occupy an intermediate place between article content, which should be verifiable, and communications with the readers and fellow editors about the articles and the encyclopedia, which do not need verification, just consensus. --{{u| Mark viking}} { Talk} 21:09, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

  Yes, I don't see the big difference compared to if I, purely based on my own judgement, add another warning template. / Julle ( talk) 22:23, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

  I agree that maintenance and warning templates don't (or at least shouldn't) fall under OR. They're, by definition, a result of our editors making judgment calls on the content of the articles and sections they're placed on. I believe that incorporating this template is a good idea, and as for the wording, I would go with something closer to instructing the reader to make sure they're reading this page rather than trusting a screenshot, but I'm unsure of the specifics on how to word that properly. —⁠ 烏⁠Γ ^{( kaw)} │ 22:54, 07 May 2020 (UTC)

• I don't think I understand the need. So a reader sees a fake screenshot of a given Wikipedia article, then opens the real article on Wikipedia. Would the reader not, at that point, see that the screenshot is a fake? -- Bsherr ( talk) 21:58, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Someone could easily think the screenshot was real, but since it no longer confirms biases it raises suspicions in their mind. Damaging Wikipedia credibility, which is what they are trying to achieve ie. nothing is true and everything is possible. Such are the goals of disinformation. -- Green C 22:18, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

That would involve them parsing the article to check whether it matched what they had been told it said. We should not underestimate the deficiencies in reading comprehension, critical thinking and ability to assess of sources of some of the morons who weigh in on current affairs by sharing viral images of unknown provenance around Facebook (I don't know if your feed is as full as mine with utter nonsense about 5G, the whole pandemic is a conspiracy, etc). No doubt some of the spike in traffic was made up of visitors who wanted to look into the technology themselves, and hopefully they read the article, although I must say it was in a significantly poorer state at that point, which is why I brought it to the attention of editors (I wasn't the instigator of the template). Beorhtwulf ( talk) 02:19, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Don't such templates usually go on the talk page instead? Elizium23 ( talk) 07:03, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

If the sole point of this template is as a response to File:Blood irradiation misleading screenshot.png, then I think the whole thing is based on a false premise. It's not the text that's being attributed to Wikipedia, it's the accompanying image ( this one), and that's what people reusing our images are supposed to do. (They haven't done it quite correctly—they should be attributing the creator rather than "Wikipedia"—but they're definitely trying to comply.) Is there any evidence that whoever posted this is claiming that Wikipedia is responsible for the text, rather than just the image? ‑  Iridescent 13:48, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

My concern in initially raising this (again, I didn't make the template, though I think that was a reasonable thing for another editor to do) was the effect, not the intent. The social media post included both our photo and the text beneath it, within the same image as if from a screenshot. The text is written in something resembling a Wikipedia style: bolded term, abbreviation in brackets, definitional sentence followed by more detail. Obviously those of us familiar with Wikipedia spot that second-person wording in the second sentence and know this is not a quote from one of our articles, but given the Wikipedia domain as the image credit just above it looks to the uninformed like a screenshot from Wikipedia, maybe as viewed on a mobile device. I agree that it is not necessarily the case that whoever created this image did so to deliberately impersonate Wikipedia: maybe they just did an image search and got our image, and combined it with some ######## text, but the effect on uninformed readers is potentially the same. Whatever the intent here, page views on that article (the term as stated in the social media post redirects to the article in question) jumped overnight from 50 a day to tens of thousands, so people were looking this up. At the time the article was in a worse state, containing plenty of unsourced statements, although was not as egregious as the text in the screenshot. Beorhtwulf ( talk) 10:53, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

FYI Wikipedia_talk:Notability#Notable_or_noted? — A question about the practical usage of the definition of 'notable' on Wikipedia — GhostInTheMachine ( talk) 13:16, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

This may be in the wrong place, so bear with me and advise where to post if it is with my apologies.

I have tried searching around but cannot locate any good consensus regarding a matter which I recently got reverted for five times.

In regards to {{Infobox person}}, a category exists Category:Infobox person using certain parameters when dead which is added to an article when the {{{death_date}}} or {{{death_place}}} params exist but also a {{{salary}}} or {{{networth/net_worth/net worth}}}. Net worth states In personal finance, net worth (or wealth) refers to an individual's net economic position; similarly, it uses the value of all assets (long term assets) minus the value of all liabilities. - a dead person doesn't have any assets or liabilities.

Even the documentation for the template states Current estimated net worth, if relevant. for that parameter. Looks like there was some attempt to gain consensus on the talk page for the template, but that didn't get far.

Therefore the question I'm looking to gain consensus on here is should {{{salary}}} and/or {{{networth/net_worth/net worth}}} be removed if {{{death_date}}} and/or {{{death_place}}} exists and is a valid entry?

- Rich ^{T| C| E-Mail} 22:22, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

FWIW, I noticed an infobox for death was created late last year. Template:Infobox death —¿philoserf? ( talk) 22:28, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps it would be better if salary or net worth mentioned the date of that particular reporting in the infobox? If it's cited well, it should be in reference to a specific time in which that salary or net worth was current. bibliomaniac 1 5 22:32, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

The net worth being cited is another can of worms which I'm not going to get in to here - Rich ^{T| C| E-Mail} 23:10, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

• No Even if a person is dead their last known net worth before perishing is still worth noting in the infobox. For example it is worth noting that John D. Rockefeller was worth US$418 billion (in 2019 dollars; inflation-adjusted) in 1913 whilst he was alive. Regards  Spy-cicle💥  ^Talk? 22:40, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
• No in addition to what I said here, one's earnings can be a defining trait whether dead or alive. People like John Jacob Astor (one of the reverts I made that was linked above), John Davison Rockefeller (who Spy-cicle mentioned), Andew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt are all well known for being highly wealthy. SNUGGUMS ( talk / edits) 00:34, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
• No though editors should try to find the sourced value that is closest to the date of death, and consider applying standard WP inflation adjustment to current dollars. UnitedStatesian ( talk) 04:16, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
• No. As always, we are summarising what is reported in reliable sources, and for billionaires and other wealthy individuals, their networth is the subject of considerable media attention. For example, today sees the publication of the 32nd edition of the Sunday Times Rich List, a 100+ page report on the 1000 wealthiest people in the UK. Rich_Smith, as it looks unlikely that you will get support to remove "net worth" from infoboxes, please stop removing it, and restore it to any articles where you have taken it out. Edwardx ( talk) 11:27, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

@ Edwardx: I think you are missing the point of this, I'm only concerned with net worth with a person that has died (and where {{{death_date}}} and/or {{{death_place}}} is present and valid in the infobox)... not those still alive which I believe is what your reply was aiming at - - Rich ^{T| C| E-Mail} 13:17, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Rich_Smith, I do get that you are only seeking to address the infobox net worth issue for those no longer living (ie non-BLPs). Mention of the Sunday Times Rich List was only to highlight the media coverage that net worth matters receive more broadly. And you do appear to be missing my point that one should not seek to make changes (ie removing "net worth" from infoboxes of non-BLPs) BEFORE getting consensus to do so, rather one should wait and only do so if and when such a consensus is achieved. Edwardx ( talk) 18:47, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

@ Edwardx: I was working under the impression that as Category:Infobox person using certain parameters when dead exists and is displayed on the bottom of Template:Infobox_person/doc#Tracking_categories that consensus was reached at some point... albeit not able to find it when I was reverted, although someone did ask but got no response - Rich ^{T| C| E-Mail} 21:13, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

• A couple of things stand out in this post. Firstly, it is not true that "a dead person doesn't have any assets or liabilities". The whole procedure of probate is concerned with a dead person's assets and liabilities, known as their estate. Secondly we usually only get a reliable figure for anyone's net worth after they have died. I would have thought that it would be obvious that these fields were for the figures at the time of death (or maybe at some previous time for salary of people who retired before they died), but as it doesn't seem so obvious to everyone then maybe something like "at death" needs to be added to their titles. The net worth of a dead person is just as much encyclopedic content as that of a living person. Phil Bridger ( talk) 13:47, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

In which case maybe the suggestion that Pigsonthewing suggested here will be better? A "Value of Estate"? Of course the other question there is should there be a requirement for a source for that figure - Rich ^{T| C| E-Mail} 21:13, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

• No per Snuggums and UnitedStatesian, although the net worth should be accompanied by a date (whether the person is dead or alive), the most encyclopaedic point in time is not necessarily always going to be the date of death (or the current year if living), so I'd be opposed to hard coding anything specific in the label. The use of {{ inflation}} where relevant should be encouraged but not mandated. Sourcing should always be highly encouraged. Thryduulf ( talk) 22:35, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Template talk:Infobox person#Proposal: Repurpose and redocument the home_town parameter.

As I know that changes to major infoboxes are often controversial (and many to that template in particular have been WP:VPPOL RfCs in their own right), it seemed pertinent to notify this board of the proposal.

Summary: We removed |residence=, but kept this parameter for childhood non-birthplace residence, despite that being usually trivia. The proposal would repurpose this parameter for long-term residency places during the subject's period of notability.
 —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:11, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

It seems that {{ Infobox port}} has been used in what I would consider an incorrect manner. The template is deigned for ports but it seems to have been used on many multiple occasions for places such as Peace Arch Border Crossing which is not a port, but a port of entry, a subset of which may include some (many? most?) ports. One solution to this may be to fork the current template into a new one for ports of entry, remove the port-related parameters ( draft/depth being the most obvious one) and then swap them over either manually, or using a bot if a list or category of them can be identified. Is that a reasonable approach to take? Could/should I be bold and do that? Or should it be discussed somewhere first? Fob.schools ( talk) 13:38, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Based on a quick look, I think those instances should be changed to {{ Infobox border}}. Also, this discussion might be better off at a WikiProject talkpage. Reh man 14:06, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, but which project? Fob.schools ( talk) 14:30, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

If there's nothing more suitable, I'd post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Infoboxes. Reh man 15:00, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

I have a specific example of which I am unsure if a non-admin archiving a discussion is appropriate. In this scenario on the spam whitelist talk page, an editor asked for one link to be whitelisted to use on an article that was recently deleted via RfD consensus. Since the spam whitelist talk page is primarily frequented by admins, is it appropriate for a non-admin to archive this discussion, as it is clearly unneeded now that the article has been deleted? Was just curious and thought this would be the appropriate forum to inquire on. Nanophosis ( talk) 01:23, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

• If the closure doesn't require admin action, and the closure is otherwise appropriate by that user, then yes, there's definitely no problem in a non-admin closing such a discussion. {{ Nihiltres | talk | edits}} 19:31, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Copyright violations/Archive_1#Making it clear that copyvio tags should not be removed. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 11:49, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

I raised this as a thread on checkuser-l, but WP:INTADMIN currently restricts the ability to view deleted interface pages to IADMINS not as a feature of policy or intent, but as a bug in the system. There’s a patch that’s been proposed since August 2018, but is stalled at the review stage. I’ve debated asking for the permission for view access to deleted pages, since I doubt it’s going to be fixed anytime soon and there are several sockmasters where having the access to their deleted common.js, etc. would be very helpful to me.

The glitch in that is that our local activity policy requires use every six months. I have zero interest in using it for anything other than view deleted access. I think adding a line to the activity policy such as the interface administrator indicating that they still need access to the right to view deleted content would be fine. If people are overly concerned about the security risk here, we could possibly restrict activity for that reason counting to the CU team, but I don’t really think we’re talking about more than a handful of people who would want it for this reason.

Anyway, is there a consensus here for a quick change to the policy to allow for this? If not I can start an RfC, but I’m hoping this will be non-controversial. TonyBallioni ( talk) 14:03, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

TonyBallioni, This sounds like a sensible change. S Philbrick (Talk) 14:08, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

I think you should just push to get this worked on, having to constantly check for people with no logged use that just "say" they want this constantly is going to be a headache. Suppose to keep automation checks working you could just indicate your need by updating something like User:Example/test.css. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:00, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

A patch has been in the works for two years and has stalled. I don’t really have any faith this is going to be fixed within the next decade even with poking. I don’t really think the automation issue is actually an issue. There’s 11 people with this now. One talk page message to check every six months for 1-2 people isn’t that much work. TonyBallioni ( talk) 15:27, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Also, xaosflux a link to the actual gerrit: [4] TonyBallioni ( talk) 15:37, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

The easiest thing to do is grant interface administrator access as part of the checkuser toolset (whether it's done by bundling the actual permissions, or just by granting the flag concurrently with the checkuser flag) and then ignoring all checkusers who have interface administrator access from the activity monitoring stuff. I don't suppose anybody can explain why WMF is hell bent of making life as difficult as possible for those of us who have volunteered our time to behind the scenes management stuff. Why can't they just fucking fix the IADMINS stuff and stop trying to find new ways to make life impossible for the rest of us (such as the hiding anonymous users IP data) ? Nick ( talk) 15:41, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Some CUs here and on other projects have valid reasons not having 2FA, so that wouldn’t work from a WMF security standpoint. If you want a quick way to automate it, you could exempt CUs who have it from the activity requirements of IA. TonyBallioni ( talk) 15:50, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Adding editinterface to the CU group is silly and really not the point of the entire thing; I certainly agree the primary viewing problem should be fixed (I'm the one that authored the request afterall!) - a dev did update it a couple of months ago - just poked them on phab:T202989 - where this really is a global problem. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:53, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

As far as "indicate you have an ongoing need", it would be just as easy to indicate that at a dummy page like the one I put above as anywhere else, and would not require any extra work. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:55, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

I think it’s less complicated just to have a bureaucrat ask the question 1-2 times a year. Gaming the system isn’t something that I think is a good thing. People shouldn’t have to make a dummy edit to keep this if they’re using it. You could also look at it from a security standpoint that people who don’t need it are more likely to give it up if asked if they still need it rather than being told how to keep it. TonyBallioni ( talk) 16:32, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

@ TonyBallioni: oh all the dummy edits made by +sysops every year........ This wouldn't be a "twice a year" thing specifically, the policy has these rights continually expire - we don't do a twice a year review of everyone. In practice, we only review the rights holders monthly though. Looks like the activity at the phab task has given some renewed interest in the fixing though (which is really where it belongs). — xaosflux ^Talk 01:36, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Is it not just easier to flip user:TonyBallioni’s Iadmin bit with a note that the 6 month term does not apply to him in a fully automated way, but that he just needs to confirm the need every 6 months? — Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 17:40, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Beetstra, That also sounds like a workable solution. S Philbrick (Talk) 18:18, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

If he's the only one with this issue/concern, then I'd support that. Primefac ( talk) 21:21, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

I would prefer the view and edit permissions be split; until that happens WP:IAR and give Tony IAdmin since he has a clear need. — Wug· a·po·des​ 21:20, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

@ Wugapodes: FWIW, there is no IAR needed for Tony to get this, he requested it at BN and I doubt there will be any cause to not issue it. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:32, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

I thought the criteria were more restrictive than that, but I read them again and clearly I misremembered. Good to know there's enough room for this in the existing policy. I trust Tony with IAdmin regardless, but I still think view and edit should be split for the reasons given in the phab task. — Wug· a·po·des​ 03:29, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

To increase transparency and robustness of the process for classification of sources, increase the review requirement for actions that prevent use of a source. This affects the list of perennial sources at the reliable sources noticeboard and also the spam blacklist. Guy ( help!) 19:55, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Add the following to the instructions for admins at MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist:

A project-level RfC is required when blacklisting any entry that is widely used as a cited source in articles (per {{ insource|$SOURCEDOMAIN}}) other than those added by the spammer(s). The RfC may be initiated after addition to the blacklist where there is ongoing abuse, with the expectation that it will be removed if the RfC decides against blacklisting. RfCs should be registered using {{ rfc|prop}} at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

Opinions (Source classification process)

• Support as proposer. Guy ( help!) 19:55, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose as needless bureaucracy. If blacklisting will obviously be very controversial then have a big RfC, if the domain is only used by spammers just blacklist it already without any palaver. If it's somewhere between then just have a normal discussion and only move to a formal RfC if it is actually needed in that specific circumstance. As the proposal stands you're just asking for arguments about whether a source is "widely used" and whether any particular uses were technically "spammers" or not. Thryduulf ( talk) 22:29, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose needless restrictions on the spam blacklist. I trust User:Beetstra and the other admins at the spam blacklist to know the difference between spammed sites and unreliable sources and to act accordingly. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 19:13, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Discussion (Source classification process)

This RfC follows on from text suggestions made in Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 293 § RfC: Deprecation and blacklisting process, which closed on 10 May 2020. Guy ( help!) 19:55, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Oh christ, no. RSN gets enough RfCs as it is - at one point late on 15 May, there were no fewer than eighteen open RfCs at that one board alone. People are going to acquire what I might term "RfC blindness" so that they no longer either care or even notice. -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 20:16, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Redrose64, that's partly because people are opening RfCs for sources that someone used once, rather than for sources where it's worth having a serious discussion. Guy ( help!) 09:34, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

So perhaps a more pointful RFC would says something like "Shall we keep wasting editors' time with sources that aren't widely used? For example, future proposals to add a website to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources should show that there have been at least two discussions at RSN about the source in the past (not counting the current discussion), or that it is currently present in more than 10 articles."

This innovative list of unreliable sources is allegedly for the stuff that gets disputed over and over. That's why editors named it WP:RSP with a "P" for perennial and not Wikipedia:Assorted collection of things we found on the internet and have never used much, but we don't like them so we're proactively banning everyone from using them." WhatamIdoing ( talk) 19:21, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Blacking out Wikipedia in Support of Black Lives Matter

 – So Why 09:23, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

The WMF Board has just authorised the creation of a UCOC by the Foundation (presumably T&S) to create a UCOC, purely in consultation with the local communities, along with various other related facets, which are summarised below.

1. Developing and introducing, in close consultation with volunteer contributor communities, a universal code of conduct that will be a binding minimum set of standards across all Wikimedia projects;
2. Taking actions to ban, sanction, or otherwise limit the access of Wikimedia movement participants who do not comply with these policies and the Terms of Use;
3. Working with community functionaries to create and refine a retroactive review process for cases brought by involved parties, excluding those cases which pose legal or other severe risks; and
4. Significantly increasing support for and collaboration with community functionaries primarily enforcing such compliance in a way that prioritizes the personal safety of these functionaries.

Whatever our respective views on the issues are, I believe we've now reached the point where a co-ordinated Community viewpoint, rather than that of a few interested editors on meta, needs to be created so we are in a position to engage, or react, rather than attempting to coordinate on the fly.

I've just created a general discussion part below for an initial discussion, but I imagine it'll need spinning off into aspects and so on and so forth. Nosebagbear ( talk) 22:23, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

• Whatever our respective views on the issues are, I believe we've now reached the point where a co-ordinated Community viewpoint, rather than that of a few interested editors on meta, needs to be created so we are in a position to engage, or react, rather than attempting to coordinate on the fly
  I disagree with this sentence basically in it's entirety. I've been in the minority on this project in regards to global/meta/Foundation issues in the past, and I think the local en.wiki community tends to overreact to things that aren't big deals and post-last year tries to turn everything into FRAM2.0. Because non-en.wiki specific stuff includes people from a lot of different projects it is often very nuanced, and I don't think having a single coordinated response that would inevitably have some broad strokes would do whatever the idea is justice. That includes not being able to identify any valid criticisms and address them in a fair way because of an overarching position.
  So no, I do not want there to be an official en.wiki position. To my knowledge, I am still an active member of this community who is generally trusted by others. I also think that the tendencies of some on this project to see every move of the Foundation as the boogeyman coming to get us is over the top and unhelpful. I don't want to be associated with that.
  If people want to raise their voices on meta, they can, but we absolutely should not be giving the weight of the entire English Wikipedia community behind a position that:

1. most active editors will never see or care about (most people don't care about this level of inside baseball)
2. that will have significant opposition on either side regardless of what the position is.

This project and community is not monolithic. We are a group of individuals and that is what makes us work. If people care deeply about this (as I'm sure many do), comment on meta. If you don't care enough to comment on meta. I don't want to be stuck with a coordinated position of driveby voters who don't actually engage long-term. TonyBallioni ( talk) 22:36, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

• This isn't inside baseball. It will affect everyone. SarahSV ^(talk) 22:57, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
  • I get that view, but I also doubt it will have much if any impact on existing processes. I think anti-harassment is important, but after FRAM the foundation is very hesitant to do anything (for good reason.) Likely what you're going to see is a formalization of the norms they already use to global lock people who are already blocked on multiple projects. TonyBallioni ( talk) 23:14, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
• I think it's important for the range of views of enwiki editors to be made clear to the Foundation. I know that many weren't happy with the way Framgate happened, and I was one of them, but I'm currently trying to support a victim of bullying on another project, and I can see the value of the principles in that announcement. The likely problems aren't in the goal of a universal code of conduct (UCoC), but in the way that it gets implemented, and the more we can influence that to match our needs and expectations, the more likely it will turn out to be an improvement, not a burden. -- RexxS ( talk) 23:21, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
• I don't think we're at the point where a co-ordinated Community viewpoint is necessary. As far as I'm aware, the WMF has not even proposed what a universal code of conduct would look like. Trying to discuss this now puts the cart before the horse, and prevents anyone from actually working toward a positive result. I think there is a real need for a baseline code of conduct for all Wikimedia wikis, because very few wikis have the codified conduct policy that enwiki does. This makes it more difficult to deal with even blatant incivility and harassment (see the amwiki situation last year). There are some things that are unacceptable on any wiki, and I think a global policy to handle that is important. I do think that the WMF could greatly improve Foundation-community relations during this discussion by committing to allowing wikis to replace the code of conduct with a sufficient policy and strong community consensus. -- AntiCompositeNumber ( talk) 23:28, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
• Agree with AntiCompositeNumber. What exactly is the purpose of this VP thread? As far as I can tell the "UCOC" hasn't even been drafted yet. - FASTILY 00:37, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
• @ TonyBallioni: Tony, this may be one time I might have to disagree with you, if I understand what you're saying (and it's far from impossible that I haven't). I am personally very concerned about the WMF handing down diktats from above, when they're not on the front lines, actually editing on a day-to-day basis and facing the trials and tribulations that almost every Wikipedian has to confront. It's very easy to look down from on high and pontificate in a vacuum about ideal behavior, without experiencing what it's actually like to try to protect and improve a Wikipedia project from the onslaught of vandals, SPAs, CPOVs, not-at-all-civil POVs, children, jerks, assholes, and well-meaning fans. In the trenches, behavior is going to be a lot more brusque and direct than might be considered ideal in a utopian world, as we attempt to deflect these forces, while at the same time not running afoul of our community-based policies on civility and other behaviors. To have yet another layer of behavioral proscriptions imposed on us from a bunch of people even further removed from the realities of editing is a real concern for me, and -- I would think -- for other Wikipedians as well.
  Is it your concern that we shouldn't respond to the WMF about their Universal Code of Conduct ("Universal"? Is conduct in Nepal really the same as conduct in Detroit?) or that we shouldn't coalesce around a single "community response" too soon? I, too, would like to avoid another Framgate, but not at the cost of having my views and those of others like me being ignored by the WMF. If I'm mistaken about what you're proposing, please straighten me out. Beyond My Ken ( talk) 05:21, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
  • Beyond My Ken, I have a more pro-WMF view than many on en.wiki because I have seen them do positive things both in terms of software ( WP:ACPERM) and in their global actions ( User:Til Eulenspiegel was globally banned by both the community and the foundation. After his community ban he socked and urged acts of violence against LGBT people. Basically the posterchild for Foundation action.)
    What I'm saying is that people like you and many other in this community do have legitimate concerns. I respect that, even if they are different from my views, and think that you and others should respectfully voice those concerns as individuals in dialogue with the Foundation to try to find a ground everyone can live with, but we've seen that this community can sometimes react rather kneejerk to anything the Foundation proposes (the recent rebranding thing on meta is probably the best recent example.) You'd likely get a consensus that was built of fear rather than an intent to work together, which is not something I want, nor do I think many reasonable community members. Letting people express their views individually can help make it so the largest Wikimedia Project doesn't have a statement like that, which I think would be a good thing.
    On the universal code of conduct and different geographies, as I said to Sarah, my gut tells me this is more about codification of things that have been ad hoc and isn't going to affect any major projects with the possible exception of pt.wiki, where there are other issues. The other thing is that on some small projects, this is 100% needed. See TI above: he basically owned a project and blocked a steward for telling him he couldn't block a user for having "Queer" in their username and then went on a socking spree cross-wiki. Abuse on small-wiki is not uncommon and stewards are very reluctant to do much about it for a variety of reasons. It has to get to the level where someone blocks a minority and then blocks a steward for intervening for something to be done. Giving the WMF more power to act when small wikis go haywire is a very good thing. TonyBallioni ( talk) 05:48, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
    • Tony: I can see where the UCOC would be useful for smaller projects without community enforcement capabilities, but I think larger projects with a history of community-based policing of behavioral problems should be exempted, as long as that project's local policies generally follow the UCOC. Just as global sysops don't operate in the larger projects, and the role of stewarts is minimal in larger projects and more fundamental in smaller ones, T&S should concentrate on UCOC-enforcement on smaller projects, and not in larger projects, such as en.wiki. As projects become larger and more self-sufficient, they too can do their own behavioral policing and T&S/WMF can back off. Beyond My Ken ( talk) 01:57, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

• RexxS, just to clarify, I agree with your statement generally. I'm just opposed to there being one en.wiki response. We should absolutely engage, but I think the diversity of our views on this topic are best reflected by individually commenting rather than a "community position" TonyBallioni ( talk) 23:28, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
  • I respect that view, Tony, but I disagree with it in some ways. If we were to seek consensus for a united response and found one that almost everybody could live with, then I think a single response would be appropriate. If we found a range of views that couldn't reach a single consensus, then maybe we could present a selection of the views that had the most approval. Of course, individuals are always going to be able to respond, but that method of self-selection isn't likely to lead to a representative view, IMHO. As a community, we're surely grown-up enough now to encourage participation from a much broader spectrum of editors and work out what we can agree on. -- RexxS ( talk) 00:41, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
    • A real consensus (something everyone can live with) is likely not feasible with so many people. However it may be feasible to compile lists of pros and cons that have significant support. isaacl ( talk) 20:06, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
• I feel that there are two paths: A) One where enwiki engages in good faith and with the expectation of compromise and people walk away mostly happy-or-unfulfilled, and then B) One where enwiki refuses to engage or assumes bad faith or assumes that the WMF will bow to their demands and no one on enwiki is happy because the WMF lays down some hammers and fingers get smashed and people wail and gnash their teeth and bans and blocks get handed out and there's lots of drama about it but the grinder continues on, unpurturbed. A is productive; B is not. I think the best thing is for the English Wikipedia to draft a statement of support for the WMF's efforts and thus be part of the team writing the rules rather than reacting to them.-- Jorm ( talk) 23:53, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
  • Thing is, Jorm, nobody's going to disagree about what the rules should be: be nice to each other; no bullying; respect minority opinions, etc. The conflict will come when we try to figure out how to police those rules, and for enwiki, it's going to take a real effort to balance doing as much as we can in-house with the stress of being a volunteer asked to carry out that role. Giving way a little, and making better use of each other's strengths is how the WMF and the enwiki community are going to be able to achieve that balance. That's going to need a genuine partnership, not a hierarchical approach where each side thinks they know best and wants to run the whole show. -- RexxS ( talk) 00:41, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
    • Oh, I agree - and I think you and I are actually in furious agreement. I was using "rules" more metaphorically in the context of "we can be part of the people who drive the discussion" as "writing the rules".-- Jorm ( talk) 01:00, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
• The Foundation has given itself a very powerful weapon, and I am afraid this is wishful thinking to assume it would only be applied to small projects where nobody can read the language and is unwilling to take action. If stewards are unwilling to take action, the Foundation will not do anything either, because nobody can understand what users on Amcharic Wikipedia tell to each other, unless Google translate of a given sentence would provide something like "I promise to murder you". I was once blocked for half a year on a project I had zero edits, I took it to Meta and nobody was willing to do anything, until Millosh, a steward at the time, went to the project and negotiated an unblock with the admin. And, if I am not mistaken, the guy is still an admin there. On the other hand, WP:FRAM happen at the English Wikipedia, not at thew Amcharic or Acenese one. I am really worried about damage they can inflict, not even necessarily intentianally misusing the tool, but just applying it without sufficient care.-- Ymblanter ( talk) 07:10, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
• It is noteworthy that the BBC is now reporting that harassment would include edit warring. Now, whether this comes about as a simple misunderstanding on the part of the BBC, or whether this is being directly briefed by the WMF, is not clear. That being said, I think it's uncontroversial to state that common-and-garden edit warring is not a matter for which WMF centralised sanctions would be appropriate, and if that's the direction that this is moving in, then that is problematic.
  I think it is a fundamentally good idea to have a minimum standard of behaviour across all WMF projects, and I'd argue that that point shouldn't be controversial, even if perhaps it is; "don't be sexist, racist, homophobic; don't personally attack other editors; etc" all seems like a perfectly reasonable minimum baseline. The problem strikes me as coming when that baseline starts turning into other rules being enforced by WMF sanctions rather than by the local wiki procedures, as would be the case with simple edit warring as suggested by the BBC.
  I'm uncomfortable with the phrasing of "the Board is directing the Wikimedia Foundation to directly improve the situation", too, I have to say, and I hope that the "in collaboration with the communities" that follows is genuinely taken into account. Where local sanctions can be placed, that's almost always preferable in my view to WMF sanctions as a port of first call.
  Overall, though, I think it's too early to form "a position" on this one way or another; we need to see what, concretely, is being proposed. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 09:17, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

  I am not sure that even a minimum standard you mention is enforceable. For example, we know that Iran and Pakistan are deeply sexist societies, sexism is part of the culture, and, whereas it might be changing, it will take decades to have a noticeable change. It is deeply rooted in culture. It would be unreasonable to expect that Persian and Urdu Wikipedias are free from sexism, because their users are just part of the society. And whereas it would be great if anti-sexism measures are enforced, I just do not see how it could be done - hiring native speakers to monitor all the discussions? I have some (though a pretty old one) experience on the Russian Wikipedia, and WMF were at the time considered there as aliens from a different galaxy. They just can not enforce anything there in any consultation with the society. They can randomly block a bunch of users, it would be perceived that the user have been removed randomly by aliens. It would not change the project culture.-- Ymblanter ( talk) 09:33, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

  @ Ymblanter: I understand the point you're making, and to some extent agree with it - it may come to pass that such a set of standards are not, in fact, proactively enforceable in all cases. However, that doesn't mean they wouldn't be helpful in reactive enforcement; if someone brings a complaint, there is then at least a policy to deal with it. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 11:45, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

• I’m fine with this in theory but I’d need to see a draft of the text first to have a more informed opinion. What I don’t want to see is the WMF using this for more Fram-like bans, as that would be bad for everyone involved. — pythoncoder ( talk |  contribs) 12:22, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
• There are certainly toxic aspects to our culture. But the Wikimedia Foundation has, by way of hamfisted and tone-deaf decisions, lost the community's confidence. We have of course already discussed and rejected the idea of a binding code of conduct that applies to en.wiki.— S Marshall  T/ C 14:22, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
• What matters in this is the implementation, not the statement. As is typical for Board statements, almost everything about the implementation is too vague too discus directly--what needs discussion is our views on what the specific standards ought to be-- and once they are announcement, how we are going to deal with them. But there is one part that even as broad policy very much concerns me, the second point,"Take actions to ban, sanction, or otherwise limit the access of Wikimedia movement participants who do not comply with these policies and the Terms of Use;" - ifthe sentence refers to groups, such as individual projects which insist upon maintaining rules that justify harassment, then there's a point to it, and a role for theFoundation, because they are the only ones who have control over such groups. If it refers to individual editors, then it's a disaster, anda violation of all agreed working arrangements between enWP and the foundation. I willl have more to say on this when I know what meaning they intend. DGG ( talk ) 15:28, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
  • I have just become aware of the BBC version. If it is correct, andt he WMF intend to regulate edit warring, they will find, as we have found, that there is no way of doing it without regulating content. .Most truly difficult conduct problems arise from content disputes. (others arise from relatively arcane points of style, such as the infoboxes war, which in no rational organization would warrant either edit warring or harassment, and yet others from plain ordinary interpersonal hostility without rational motivation, which certainly requires regulation). In enWP, and presumably elsewhere, harassment is in fact a common way of settling content disputes, usually with hostility directed to those with particular points of view. This does need regulation -- I think in fact it is our greatest ongoing problem -- but what it absolutely doe not need is regulation from the foundation. To the extent we have biased content , we're to that extent a lower quality encyclopedia, but remain capable of improvement, the continual improvement that most of us came here to engage it; to the extent that others than the participants here regulate content, we 're not a open project, but the sort of directed project most of us came here to avoid. DGG ( talk ) 15:41, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

    DGG, the resistance to any authoritative body to rule on content disputes has always been a source of strife. Once civil POV-pusher can in theory drive off multiple frustrated editors if civility is the only standard - and that's my worry with what WMF appear to be proposing. It looks, in short, like a sealion's charter. Guy ( help!) 16:56, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

JzG We are I think in complete agreement about the extent and nature of the problem, and the need to solve it. It is however very difficult to actually do this within our basic structure. Certainly and almost everyone in enWP would reject an outside authority here; I can imagine ways of setting an internal authority, but not one that would be generally accepted. Nor can I think of a set of rules that would not be capable of manipulation. The only way forward is to decrease the intensity of the disputes by not using the necessarily harsh sanctions for them that would be used for bad-faith disruption. The current procedure for winning a dispute is to try to get one's opponents removed from the topic, and our currrent DS rules provide that this can be done in a way very difficult to reverse. These are things we can improve. DGG ( talk ) 17:15, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

DGG, agreed. The closest we've ever come was probably the pseudoscience arbitration case. And that really was quite transformative. Guy ( help!) 20:54, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

JzG. yes, that case and its followups need to be re-analyzed. The original motivation was good--to prevent the take over of scientific topics by true-believers, (the way Citizendium was taken over by a belief in homeopathy). The fundamental ideas, of distinguishing between various levels of scientific confidence, and providing for proportional coverage , remain valid. The way these standards can be misused, by overconfidence in what individuals here think scientific results, and the manipulation of the Reliable Sources standard to invalidate references showing the reality of coverage of things you rather didn't exist, was not really predicted. At a more fundamental level, it comes from the naïve reliance of WP upon sourcing, without the necessary critical examination of the actual sources. The worst part currently is the attempt to use standards that are applicable to the natural sciences to judge matters in the social science, and more recently to judge matters in the field of politics. Scientists have always known the extent of uncertainty--public reporting of the sciences is much less knowledgable; I instance the realization of the unreproducibility of results in fields such as psychology, or the disagreement between good controlled especially over time, and of evolving standards of practice. Or, most recently, the statistical blunders made by even the best analysts and most authoritative centers respecting Covid. The first step will be to convince WPedians in general of the problems; the much more difficult one will be how to solve it without destroying out principles. DGG ( talk ) 00:54, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

DGG, well, yes, but on the other hand we're not experts so we're supposed to take sources more or less at face value, depending on their quality. Where are you seeing the pseudoscience arbitration misapplied in politics? Guy ( help!) 06:36, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

The difference between the natural sciences and politics derives from the difference in the way the word "fringe" is used in the fields. In the natural sciences any serious researcher at least pays lip service to the scientific method, in which unfalsifiable claims are rejected as unscientific and so fringe, or falsified claims are rejected as such. In the field of politics, where the term "political science" seemed to take hold many decades ago in the US and has now spread to the UK, very few claims are actually falsifiable, so the word "fringe" simply means "unpopular". Phil Bridger ( talk) 12:30, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Phil Bridger, and specifically? Guy ( help!) 00:10, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard/Archive_69#Bryan_Caplan. fiveby( zero) 20:40, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

If there's anything we learned for m the RS discussions of the past 10 years, it's that sources cannot be taken at face value. We may not be experts, but we're expected to be intelligent. Our editing here should make us more intelligent yet, and particularly skillful about the nature of writing and publishing. Critical reading is a skill, it can be taught, and I've taught librarians how to do it. . We should as a minimum know enough to recognize that headlines are generally written by the editor , not the author, and that selective quotation is deceptive. Rare is the news article even in places like F_x, that does not have some wording that pretends to give a balance. Rare is the book review that says nothing positive to be quoted; equally rare the one which says nothing negative., and in all cases they start out by saying something polite about the author. Technical literature is more sutle about these things, but it does not necessarily require great subject expertise beyond knowing the technical language of the subject. DGG ( talk ) 09:21, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

DGG, I aqgree here: it has to meet RS *and* it has to pass the sniff test. Guy ( help!) 00:11, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

• Meh I don't think we can do much beyond wait and see at this point. One obvious plus is that after they translate it into every language we have a project in it will at least provide a widely translated non religious text. ©Geni ( talk) 17:41, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

  There is already the Universal Declaration of Human Rights though. It's very widely translated. TryKid  ^{dubious – discuss} 01:05, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

• I know others are taking a 'wait and see' approach, but I find it impossible to be optimistic about this. The WMF has recent history of heavy-handedness in its dealings with our community and I am not aware of any reason to believe they have changed their methods. A code of conduct is a good idea in theory, but making it work in practice will be a nightmare given the current state of WMF-community relations. I'm concerned for the future of this project now that we are likely to fall under further regulation from people who aren't actively involved in the task of building an encyclopedia and, given how they use their donation money, don't really seem to care. LEPRICAVARK ( talk) 18:40, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
• No confidence. — Cryptic 18:58, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
• After Framgate, I don't have any confidence in the WMF's capability to levy sanctions for behavioural conduct that isn't over a bright line, and especially not with a one-size-fits-nobody UCoC. — A little blue Bori v^_^v ^{2020's a bust; thanks SARS-CoV-2} 20:32, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
• I see that civility is being added to the code of conduct (now civility is mentioned in the summary of the terms of use, but it's not part of the legally-binding part). When the chat in Counter-Strike is more friendly and civil than Wikipedia, it's not surprising that the WMF has to step in, for legal reasons as well (the "Fuck off" RfC etc). What is especially embarassing about how AN/I handles incivility is that most users don't realize that Wikipedia has 148,477 active editors – being friends with a popular admin shouldn't grant you any special privileges not to follow policies of the site. That absolutely does not belong to a site of this scale. Unblockables, pitchforks and torches, factionalism... The downside is that the private WMF investigations might not be equally fair to all participants, either, if we judge by the Framban. -- Pudeo ( talk) 22:17, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

  Pudeo, you're absolutely spot-on about Wikpedia's chronic problem of cronyism. This problem has long been in need of a resolution, and ideally the WMF would be able to 'help' in a manner that would actually be helpful. But Framgate, to which you alluded, clearly demonstrated that the WMF is also susceptible to fairly blatant corruption. Moreover, I think it's fair to say that the community had little confidence in the WMF even before that fiasco. Regardless of how the rules are enforced, the system will always be somewhat corrupt. It's just a question of whether we want our community matters to be (mis)handled by people who are part of our community and thus somewhat accountable to us or by people who have few meaningful connections to our work and absolutely no accountability when they makes mistakes. LEPRICAVARK ( talk) 22:47, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

• I join the general group that we are unlikely to disagree much on the base rules (assuming EW isn't in there), but the implementation mechanisms. However, what I'd like to focus more in, is that several above are saying "let's wait for a full copy, then discuss it". At that point, changes are going to be much harder to bring in. Instead, having a better idea for when they initially come to us "what would the communities like to add in", is helpful. I did like @ RexxS:'s suggestion of offering a range of community group viewpoints if no single one got consensus. I have a suspicion the WMF may pick the one they like more and completely ignore the other(s), but if we can't get a clear-cut viewpoint, that option has some major positives to it. Nosebagbear ( talk)
• In terms of what I'd like to see specifically, ideally I'd prefer implementation by communities with ARBCOMs and active conduct boards, and where their current policy covers everything within the minimums within a UCOC, be provided by the Community. There would need to be a corrective mechanism for communities which run out of control, conduct-wise, despite an ARBCOM, but that would need to be a general tool (rather than them just pulling out individual cases). Nosebagbear ( talk) 09:18, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
• A minimal (basic) global set of moral rules (i.e. rules of behavior) is necessary. Tgeorgescu ( talk) 21:30, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
• I have no confidence whatsoever in the WMF even to consider points raised by those who actually work on creating an informative and neutrally worded encyclopedia. The notion that they can or should even seek to impose a uniform code of conduct defining civility for volunteers worldwide is an affront, and their stated basis for so doing: that some female editors have complained that having their contributions edited by others inhibits their attempts to slant our coverage and is inherently biased—demonstrates their contempt for us and what we do that enables them to draw their salaries. There are conversations to be had about entrenched bias. There's research to be done to replace the WMF's woeful assumptions about percentage of female editors, which at this point I believe are deliberately alarmist (I am not male just because I don't have a pink userbox). Yes, there are double standards on civility and we could do better; WMF employees are among the worst offenders when it comes to sarcasm and dismissiveness, and the canard that not using four-letter words is a universal requirement to be treated with respect is classist and parochial even in the US. But the WMF don't listen to editors' wishes or show respect for the editing community. No, we should not try to meet them partway, and beg for them to understand, or hops they don't mean en.wikipedia as well. We should refuse to accept that they have any right whatsoever to dictate to us, and call them on their own intolerance and intolerable rudeness. Yngvadottir ( talk) 21:58, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
• I won't mince words here. This is bad. Wikipedia is not the first project on the Internet to have a code of conduct imposed on it, and these things are typically social justice takeovers that make everyone guilty but are enforced selectively. The Fram case (accompanied as it was by vague accusations of harassmeent) makes this more obvious. So does the list of social justice groups in the Signpost article that the WMF consulted with in April 2019. Ken Arromdee ( talk) 01:47, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
• Acting on the principle that a good defense is a good offense, I went ahead & proposed my own draft for a Universal Code of Conduct over at Meta. The important points are simple: except for defined & currently accepted areas, the Foundation will not intervene where the communities have a functioning governance system; if they do intervene, they must provide a justification for their action; & that there be a model Code of Conduct that applies to communities where none exist. I don't know how the PTB will respond to my proposed draft, but I hope it is in the spirit it was offered. -- llywrch ( talk) 18:16, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
• A friend of mine correctly pointed out that in situations like this, you should always summarily oppose to start and have your support won. Then, if things make sense, maybe it gets adopted. But without significant buy in, the answer is no, and should be anticipated to be no, unless the WMF convinces us they present us with a set of rules we agree with, and convince us they are capable of enforcing them without overstepping. My answer would have been no before FRAMGATE. It's even more no after FRAMGATE. I'm open to have my mind changed, but the WMF needs to do the legwork here. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 14:34, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
• The WMF has a severe case of cranial rectal inversion, demonstrated not only with Framgate, but their tone deaf response to most everything (including private correspondances). Frankly, we need less WMF involvement, not more. Let them stick to what they do best, raise money, and blow money unnecessarily. They have the reverse Midas touch. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 16:43, 27 May 2020 (UTC)

En.wikipedia would be much better served by somebody who just keeps the servers and software running. Maybe we should replace WMF.North8000 ( talk) 18:58, 27 May 2020 (UTC)

• • Any editor (indeed, any person) can start a new website cloning all of Wikipedia's content and running it under whatever rules they like. However, since WMF owns the trademark registrations, the name "Wikipedia" can not be used outside the structure of the WMF without their permission. BD2412 T 19:24, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
• Wasn't this already rejected by the community on Meta? GMG ^talk 12:24, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
• I have to agree with Tony. Any RfC or set of RfCs here is unlikely to be helpful. WMF has made mistakes but that doesn't mean they're always wrong, and often the first instinct here on enwiki seems to be "If it came from WMF, I'm agin' it." WMF aren't our enemies. —valereee ( talk) 14:19, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

  Well, Valereee, I think it's more a question of "I've seen what happened before." In the past, vague statements like this were followed by disastrous, heavy-handed moves from WMF, be that in the form of software or Framgate. Yes, we always try to assume good faith, but when someone's already abused that assumption repeatedly, we don't keep blindly doing it. So in this instance, I certainly understand why the reaction is "Good God, not this again." Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 18:43, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

• A couple of months ago, circa Framgate, I would have regarded anything involving WMF in enforcing civility as a terrible idea. But since then, I've become pretty much disgusted with Wikipedia, and particularly with what does, indeed, seem to me to be an intractable problem with incivility. I've largely given up on editing, on the theory that it makes no sense for me to volunteer time and effort for a project that makes me feel unhappy, when I can use my time and effort elsewhere with much greater satisfaction. I've briefly come back to participate in the soon-to-be-closed ArbCom Medicine case, because it was supposed to deal with some of the things that have made me unhappy here. And as that case looks to be on the verge of closure, it looks to me to have ended up appallingly. Not only does it look unlikely that the Arbs will do what they needed to do about toxic (or whatever other term one wants to use) conduct, but it's becoming pretty clear to me that several of the Arbs are not even reading the evidence. It's a case study in institutional failure. Now, from what I saw during Framgate, I doubt that WMF can do any better, but – and I surprise myself to find me saying this! – I'm actually kind of curious to see whether WMF should take over from ArbCom. They probably won't do any better than ArbCom, and likely will be even worse, but for en-wiki it may be the kind of shock to the system that will either lead to an actual improvement here, or that will, well, hasten the day. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 18:21, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Toxic

Every time they say "toxic" in a document, a little part of me wants to scream inside. I have proposed on Meta that the term be avoided. —  Pelagic (  messages ) Z – (02:59 Sat 30, AEST) 16:59, 29 May 2020 (UTC)