Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 74

On March 10, 2023, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS - https://inf.ffzg.unizg.hr) at the University of Zagreb (Croatia) will host a presentation and hands-on workshop for the students of Information and Communication Science inside of Virtual Museum course, on the topic of Wikimedia and few of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata.org and most recent experiments on Wikispore.org. The program will be facilitated by informed and experienced Wikimedia contributors, open content/data advocates and educators who are actively involved in the (Open) GLAM wiki Croatia initiative.

During the event, students will be able to gain insight into some of the possibilities offered by these platforms, including those beyond Wikipedia, that are publicly less known. They will learn the significance of these platforms for the open knowledge ecosystem, as well as how to contribute and improve upon existing data. Furthermore, in partnership with the Department, students will have the opportunity to complete a portion of their course obligations by contributing data and improving content on selected topics on Wikimedia platforms, as well as to optionally join Wikimedia campaigns and initiatives.

We kindly ask you all for patience and understanding with new users on the day.

Thank you very much. --Zblace (talk) 09:12, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

I just signed in to the Wikipedia Library for the first time, and wow, what a great collection of free resources we have available there. Unfortunately, I'm no longer as energetic about deep research and writing as I was when I started my wikicareer 16 years ago. I'm sure I will use the library from time to time, though. But it would be nice if the WikiPowers That Be would provide a handy link to it somewhere on the page - I don't see any such link in the sidebar, or at the bottom of the page. Just a thought. Textorus (talk) 05:41, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Not a bad idea. There are various places we could look into adding a link to the Wikipedia Library. Template:Talk header's "find sources" section, for example. cc Samwalton9 (WMF) –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:03, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

My solution is to have a link to the Library in my own sandbox, which is always one click away. Ditto for Commons. PamD 06:20, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

I have a sub-page for my user page called "Useful links". Donald Albury 14:27, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Same here, I have my own User:CX Zoom/Quicklinks, link to which is added to my sidebar via User:BrandonXLF/PortletLinks.js. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 20:34, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I have it bookmarked too. But I notice that on the Main Page, there are 13 "other projects" listed in the sidebar, and at the bottom of the page, 12 of those are listed again, with colorful icons. I was just thinking how nice it would be if the Wikipedia Library - an enormous resource that is I'm sure intended to make knowledge easy to find and share - couldn't be made just a little easier to find by adding a link in the places I just mentioned. Textorus (talk) 00:40, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia Library is not a foundation project like those projects linked from the main page. They are user-edited, just like Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Library is not user-edited. Moreover, it is not intended as a public resource for non-Wikipedia editors. I don't know the details of the arrangements between the foundation and the database operators, but access to the resources of those databases by people who are not using them to edit Wikipedia would represent a loss of income to the database holders. Donald Albury 01:03, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

I can only tell you that I would not have known about the Wikipedia Library if not for a message alert that gave me a link to it. When I followed the link, there was a sign-in page that told me I am eligible because of length of service on WP, number of edits, and a few other things. Obviously, the screening system for access to the Library is automated. Thus, it seems to me, readers from the general public clicking on a link to the Library would or should be unable to access it if they do not meet the criteria. But what do I know. I've put my 2c out here, and I'm going to stop now.

But P.S. - I've already looked up a JSTOR article I've been wanting to read, and it took only two clicks to get into JSTOR. The system signed me in with my WP info, no filling out forms or other tedious stuff. Very nice set-up! Textorus (talk) 09:55, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

It is! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:51, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

I've encountered quite a few users that don't know about the Wikipedia Library, and are forced to resort to using mediocre web sources on topics where almost everything is in books/studies. And making the Library more prominent might even incentivise users to edit Wikipedia more, so they can get to extended-confirmed. That's a desirable incentive (compensated with the usual trip to ANI for people padding their edit counts to get there). Would be nice to put it on the front page somewhere. DFlhb (talk) 16:00, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the front page is the appropriate place. But it's a good point: there may be a lot of editors out there who could make use of The Wikipedia Library but don't know about it. Perhaps we should ask for a bot which, perhaps once a month, would check to find editors who meet the criteria for the Library (500+ edits, 6 months editing, at least 10 edits in last month, no active blocks) but are not yet registered for it, and have not already been notified by the bot, and post a nice informative message on their talk page to point it out to them and tell them what kind of thing is available (eg that it includes newspaper archives and reference books as well as academic journals etc). Just once per editor, I don't think it would be seen as intrusive and it might be useful for many newish editors. PamD 16:15, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea. Donald Albury 18:18, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

I received a notification to that effect in May of last year, so it seems that's already built into the software, no bot needed. Only difference is that it was an Echo notification, not a talk page message. Rummskartoffel 18:36, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

That's good, but it seems there are long-standing editors like Textorus who haven't had such an alert. Maybe we should get a bot to message editors who registered too early for the current system of Echo notifications to catch them? Maybe spreading out the mesages week by week over a year (eg anniversary week of first edit) so as not to overwhelm the Library's registration system? PamD 19:48, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Actually, I got the notice months ago, but only just now got around to checking it out. I thought it might require a lot of tedious set-up, but I was wrong - just click, click, and you're good to go. Kudos to the wikiwizards who made the process so easy. Textorus (talk) 19:53, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

By "front page" I guess I meant the side-menu on the left (could also be mentioned on the Wikipedia Adventure and a few other places), but your talk page notification idea is great. I can confirm the Echo notification works, though, no issue there. DFlhb (talk) 21:27, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this! I'm the product manager for The Wikipedia Library and this is a well-timed discussion as I've been thinking about this recently. I agree that it makes sense to let editors know in advance of receiving library access that it's available, as well as when they're editing and might need a link. As noted above editors receive an Echo notification when they cross the 6 month / 500 edit threshold, but a new editor has no reason to know that notification is coming in advance. In T330322 I sketched an idea for perhaps using the Newcomer Homepage to display information like how many edits/months away library access is, to inform and motivate new editors. I appreciate that's not so helpful to more experienced editors - editors have probably moved away from the homepage by the time they're getting towards that threshold, so I'm open to ideas about where else we could signpost the library. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 10:38, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

@Samwalton9 (WMF) Perhaps a once-a-year alert to editors who haven't joined up, describing briefly what kind of resources are available? Their interests and editing areas may have evolved since they were last alerted. PamD 12:14, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

@Samwalton9 (WMF) I'm not opposed to periodically advertising WP:TWL on a watchlist notice (maybe twice a year during slow times) if there are plenty of subscriptions available. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:28, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

@Xaosflux That sounds good to me! Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 09:09, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

if we use IP addresses to find sockpuppets of vandals and stuff, how would we deal with these people if they had VPNs? Blitzfan51 (talk) 21:45, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

There's several things we can do. 1) block them 2) block VPNs 3) block their VPNs 4) use other tools such as the edit filter and page protection. Blocks and IP addresses have never been a total solution to returning vandals, and vandalism will always happen. We ultimately deal with vandals by undoing their efforts, paying them no attention, and continuing to improve the encyclopaedia. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 21:58, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

As someone who has examined using various publicly-available VPNs to access Wikipedia, I can generally say that if you're not logged in, nearly all of these VPNs are blocked as open proxies. The admins do a good (oftentimes thankless) job of regulating possible vectors of attack. --⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 14:50, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

In many cases, even if you're logged-in while using VPN, you are blocked from editing. That's exactly why I had to get ip-block-exempt permission for myself. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 08:00, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Well, it's all going to become moot anyways once the WMF implements their long-standing plan to begin IP masking. --Jayron32 15:38, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

@Jayron32 in the current plan, admins will be able to see through the mask. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:24, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Do they have to opt into that? Are there special permissions required, like for CUs?--⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 16:32, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

@WaltCip it isn't 100% defined, yet. Last I checked there may be 2 levels, one that gives what ip range someone is in for some sort of established editors, one that gives their actual IP for admins and maybe someone else. It is likely going to be opt-in, tied with the existing "ip info" opt-in option. We may have some options to discuss (like should the first level be something like extended confirmed, or rollbackers, both, something else; can we let non-admins have level 2 somehow). What we can make local choices about isn't ready to start polling. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:46, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

The "Level 1" is available as a beta feature (IP info) since May 2022. However, it is next to useless, indicating that an IP address is from the US, UK, ..., that it is IP4 or IP6 (well, duh), that the connection is cellular or residental (e.g. here, where the sole edit is tagged as "mobile", so I knew it was very likely a cellular edit anyway)... If the IP address itself was hidden, then this would be completely insufficient to even start a socking investigation for a non-admin. The info is way too general to be of any use in nearly all cases. Fram (talk) 17:03, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Keeping in mind that this is 100% not settled, the story I heard last week sounds like this:

• There will probably only be one level (if you can see anything, you can see the full IP number). AIUI the idea with Level 1/2 was that one level would have the full number (e.g., 64.40.123.45) and the other would see only part of it (e.g., 64.40.xxx.xxx). Seeing any of it is probably not very helpful to most editors (except when an admin is calculating a range block), but seeing part of it is probably near-useless for everyone.
• Unregistered/logged-out users will not be able to see the actual IP number.
• Only some registered editors will be able to see the actual IP number. Exactly who is not settled – it seems to be Legal's decision – but it will include all admins, all CUs, etc., and will probably include just about any extended-confirmed editor who asks for it through Wikipedia:Requests for permissions (or any vaguely similar process – nothing as stringent as WP:RFA here, but they will probably want a basic human review). They might decide, e.g., that 500 edits is more than necessary, or that it could be an automatically achieved right similar to autoconfirmed. I expect that the usual pattern of "here's the minimum, and you can be more restrictive if you want" will apply; if they say 100 edits and one month, we could still say 500 edits and six months here. Similarly, if it's not an automatically applied user right, then there's nothing that could force a local admin to give (or let you retain) the new userright if they're concerned about why you want it (e.g., apparent Wikipedia:Hat collecting by editors who've done no anti-vandal work, statements that you plan to out people who revert you, etc.).
• You will probably have to have the new userright plus click on something that says you will use the IP addresses only for legitimate purposes (e.g., dealing with vandalism). You will probably not have to sign the m:Access to nonpublic personal data policy.
• Anyone with access will probably be able to see all of the IP numbers used by a temporary account (e.g., if User:*12345 made edits using three different IP addresses during the last 90 days, you'd be able to see all three of them, not just the most recent).
• Every time an IP number is accessed, it will be logged. This should help them identify potential problems (e.g., if someone checks the IPs of every single temporary editor ever, and feeds the usernames and matching IP addresses to a Twitter bot, they'll be able to figure out who did that). I don't imagine that editors should be concerned about this, but it's a way to find out how often it gets used and by which type of editors (e.g., admins vs non-admin RecentChanges patrollers).

If you're interested in following this, then m:IP masking is the page to watch. The team should have a more detailed proposal in the coming weeks, and I believe that Legal's supposed to finalize their rules soon(ish). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:41, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Having read that, here's a suggestion from me, regarding "IP based identity" vs "Session based identity" thing, since both have pros and cons. Why do we not implement both together? Let's say, I'm editing anonymously, so I get a username like: Anon-QWDFS-gfgfb => Here, the uppercase characters determine IP, lowercase ones determine session. So, when I change IP address, I get a new username like: Anon-YTDRD-gfgfb. Let's say I remain on this second IP, and delete my cookies or use another browser, my new username would be like: Anon-YTDRD-fsdfe. This would be extremely helpful for anti-vandalism editors to connect the dots, even when actual IPs are completely hidden from sight. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 08:12, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

In that case, if you're an editor who is trying to contact "Anon-QWDFS-gfgfb", then you won't be able to reach them, because they've taken their laptop home and turned into "Anon-YTDRD-gfgfb".

I think that if we need to figure out that multiple people/browsers are editing from the same IP address (whether that be due to shared wifi, students at school, a series of private/incognito windows, or any other means), we should just have tools that find those temporary accounts automatically. Why bother remembering "YTDRD" when a tool can automagically give you the whole list? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:05, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

I know that there are still several weeks before this year’s April fools’ day, but I believe that something have to be discussed before the start of the April fools’ day. There were lots of vandalism edits in Wikipedia:Rules for Fools last year. There were also some vandalism in the page in the past years’ April fools’ day. I believe that this page should be protected on the 1st April to prevent vandalism edits. Also, there were several RFCs on Wikipedia talk:Rules for Fools for changing the rules started last year, but there are still no results. I believe that there should be a result of those RFCs, either accepting or rejecting them. 132.234.229.223 (talk) 08:32, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

I think we should put a "cover" on the main page, saying something like "Due to recurring disruption and vandalism on April 1, Wikipedia is closed today. You are welcome back tomorrow, until then, you can click below to purchase Britannica Online Premium." Clicking below will reveal the usual main page. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:45, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

I like the general idea, but anything we do shouldn't inconvenience readers. I would support implementing this as a banner. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 04:05, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Is there a better place to ask this question (other than the article Talk page where I got no answer)? Apokrif (talk) 16:26, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

• Are you asking about the atrocious grammar or the factual content of the sentence? (Seriously, the grammar is so poor, it is hard to tell whether the content is accurate).Blueboar (talk) 16:36, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
• Text has been there since November 2020[1], ugh, first line of the article no less... Fram (talk) 16:50, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

  The text needs to be rewritten in understandable English based on the sources. I'm not volunteering to do it myself because there are many editors who have more knowledge about US politics and its sources than I do. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:03, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Do you want to host an in-person or virtual session at Wikimania 2023? Maybe a hands-on workshop, a lively discussion, a fun performance, a catchy poster, or a memorable lightning talk? Submissions are open until March 28. The event will have dedicated hybrid blocks, so virtual submissions and pre-recorded content are also welcome. If you have any questions, please join us at an upcoming conversation on March 12 or 19, or reach out by email at wikimania@wikimedia.org or on Telegram. More information on-wiki.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by MediaWiki message delivery (talk • contribs) 15:44, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Has anyone noticed that the Minecraft page thinks that Steve and Alex are the only skins and that it has been like that for TWO MONTHS!? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C8:968C:9001:B9C7:5E23:C4EF:36A7 (talk) 19:23, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Questions about individual pages should be posted on a talk page for that subject. You're looking for Talk:Minecraft. Or if you can find a reliable source to back it up, you can make the change yourself. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 04:05, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

That may depend on how big a Minecraft fan one is. Having known a fair number of serious gamers, I can see how such a thing could be considered important at a system level. – AndyFielding (talk) 08:53, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

As a long-time (but perpetually technically baffled) WP contributor, I've noticed that nearly every other Random Page (by far, the best way to edit) seems to be about an insect, an athlete, or an athletic event. I've always assumed there were many more insects on the planet than athletes or athletics-related things—but is it possible I've been mistaken? Could there be comparable numbers of them? – AndyFielding (talk) 08:59, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

A lot of editors are interested in sports. See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC on draftifying a subset of mass-created Olympian microstubs for a (very long) discussion on the topic of whether we should remove some poorly sourced articles about athletes. Donald Albury 13:36, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

The number of articles we have on a given topic is driven by what our editors want to write about. You could get a vague idea of the relative popularity of insects vs athletics by looking at Category:Insects and Category:Athletic sports. FWIW, I just got 10 random articles. Three of them were sports related. So, yeah, it does seem to be a popular topic. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:06, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I ran some numbers about six months ago - I was able to identify in the region of 600k biographies of sportspeople, a little under 10% of all articles. Don't have numbers for sports events and seasons and so forth but I would guess another couple of hundred thousand easily. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:12, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Portal text is sandwiched besides images in Vector 2022. Compare Vector legacy to Vector 2022. Selected images also appear smaller. Is this the end of portals? (I'm sure all 12 of you that still use portals are very upset by this right now.) Schierbecker (talk) 19:47, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF) will probably know whether this has been reported before.

I don't see any MOS:SANDWICHING on my screen, but I understand this to be something that depends strongly on your personal screen size and font settings. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:11, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

i don't see a problem. If there is a problem for you, than likely there was a problem before for others using that screenwidth. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:41, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

I see so many editors write "lead single" as title track, and EP as mini-album. These are actually different meanings. "Lead single" in South Korea is "pre-release single" and the single that released along with the EP/album is called "title track", which in international music industry term means a song that has same title as album/EP. About EP as mini-album, since we already have our own definition, we should use EP instead of "mini-album". But for title track, I have no idea. Do we have consensus about this? Do the admins actively correcting these mistakes? -GogoLion (talk) 02:27, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

@GogoLion to answer your question, administrators don't curate content so they won't be correcting mistakes as a admin.

Do you have sources to back up your claims? I suggest looking through WikiProject Korea, WikiProject Songs, WikiProject Albums and WikiProject Music to find answers. If that does not work start a RFC. Lightoil (talk) 03:50, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Hello all, an important update on the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) Enforcement Guidelines:

The vote on the Enforcement Guidelines in January 2023 showed a majority approval of the Enforcement Guidelines. There were 369 comments received and a detailed summary of the comments will be published shortly. Just over three-thousand (3097) voters voted and 76% approved of the Enforcement Guidelines. You can view the vote statistics on Meta-wiki.

As the support increased, this signifies to the Board that the current version has addressed some of the issues indicated during the last review in 2022. The Board of Trustees voted to ratify the Enforcement Guidelines. The resolution can be found on Foundation wiki and you can read more about the process behind the 2023 Enforcement Guidelines review on Diff.

There are some next steps to take with the important recommendations provided by the Enforcement Guidelines. More details will come soon about timelines. Thank you for your interest and participation.

On behalf of the UCoC Project Team,

JPBeland-WMF (talk) 21:08, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

I received an error report from the MilHistBot about Talk:Raymond W. Bliss. The problem is that the talk page has no associated article page. The article was deleted for "copyright problems" Wikipedia:Copyright problems/2023 March 17 but the talk page was not deleted and was tagged by SandyGeorgia with {{G8-exempt}}. That is a problem, because the article is now in maintenance categories. The MilHistBot will not be able to process any articles until the issue is resolved. I could tell it to skip articles like this but that is problematic at the present time and the issue will not be resolved; the page will clutter the maintenance categories. Normally I would resolve the issue manually but I don't know what the correct procedure is. The talk page needs to be given a proper MilHist rating and we don't have one for deleted articles. So what I have done for now is use the {{Suppress categories}} template to squelch the inclusion of maintenance categories, which works from my point of view. If anyone has any advice it would be appreciated. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:40, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Would a redirect solve this problem? If so, then a redirect to Surgeon General of the United States Army makes sense. Curbon7 (talk) 02:52, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that would work. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:47, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Hawkeye7 we need to get Mike Christie in on this as there are scores of these resulting from WP:DCGAR, and Mike needs the pages to generate the GA stats, similar to the FAC stats. I wonder if instead Mike could arrange to save only the GA page? I do not know how to resolve this, but it has always been a problem that GA reviews are sub-pages of article talk pages rather than stand-alone; I leave this to you, Mike and others as I am only entering the G8-exempt's per Mike's request for his GA scripts. I have been worried about the number of these stand-alone pages and whether they would cause problems down the line ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:53, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Losing the talk pages will remove some GAs from the historical stats database I've built, which would be a pity but is better than disrupting productive editing and useful bots. I'd rather see these deleted than see others have to work around them. Hawkeye7, how would your bot handle a similar situation with an FA that had the article deleted? Sandy, I know that's extremely rare, but in those cases would the talk page be G8 exempt? If I (and hence the bot, I assume) could see deleted pages this wouldn't be an issue. I'm not saying it's a reason to start an RfA but it's the first time I've seen a need for the tools.

I'd say delete these pages at will. I have some archives of the data I can use to reconstruct the history if I decide to go ahead and do that. Sandy, sorry to put you to the trouble over those pages and now change course, but it seems like too much of a divergence from normal business operations to persist, for now. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:08, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

The same problem would arise with an FA whose article page was deleted. Since that is a form of FAR, the procedure is for the article to be returned to the project for reclassification, but as I've noted, we have no classification for deleted articles, so it can neither be dealt with automatically nor manually. Note that my interim solution of using the {{Suppress categories}} template around the WikiProject templates has retained the categories related to the {{ArticleHistory}} template, ie Category:Delisted good articles and Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles thereby not messing up your database. In the case of an article that is being deleted for copyvio, my personal preference would be for the article to be reduced to a redirect or "stubbed" (ie reduced to its first line and infobox) and its history revdeled. However, I realise that this cannot be done for an article deleted as a hoax or under WP:NOT (where it is decided that Wikipedia will not have articles on certain subject areas). For those I would suggest suppressing the project templates. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:24, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

It's probably never been a concern with FARs, as there has only ever been one FA deleted (ANAK society), so it's not really messing up much data. But the FAC is not lost, as it's not a talk page subpage (eg Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/ANAK Society, embarrassingly promoted by moi :) But because GA reviews are subpages of the GA page, they get lost for data purposes.

Hawkeye7 could you show me an example of an article talk page with the suppress categories in place, if that is the work around, and let me/Mike Christie know what the final decision is? Mike, I'm not fussed what you all decide one way or the other; I just want to know what to do :) :) Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:17, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Sure. See Talk:Raymond W. Bliss for an example. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:56, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Sandy, I'm ok with deleting these talk pages. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:57, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Mike Christie if we want them deleted now, we need an admin to go through them at User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox10; all are identified as deleted there. Similarly, if we want to put Suppress categories on them, the list is there. Your call. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:16, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Now that I know how/where to put the suppress categories, it seems easy enough ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:18, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Mike Christie since it's the same amount of work either way, now that we've gone to the trouble to save them, I'm happy to help add the suppress categories ... whichever way we go, we have to edit every talk page, so why not save them? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:24, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

That would be great, of course! I just don't want to make more work for you or Hawkeye7. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:11, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

— Preceding unsigned comment added by RoySmith (talk • contribs) 03:30, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

There's currently a large number of articles about birding and ornithology for each year, listed at List of years in birding and ornithology. It's normal for a topic to have a series like this (see List of years in science or List of years in film), but I think feedback would be helpful on whether "birding and ornithology" is a significant enough topic to warrant these 100+ articles. Should they be left alone, or is cleanup necessary here? I'm wondering if they should be merged into a Timeline of birding and ornithology or something like that, but I don't know what the correct approach would be. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:21, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Shouldn't Wikipedia have a Wikipedia television network with shows, etc, showcasing our works, maybe news, and other aspects of culture which are presented at the project? I get that we already have an online encyclopedia, but for those without access to a computer? Antonio Wants to be the first Wikipedia TV celebrity Martin (Please discuss) 14:44, March 18, 2023 (UTC) Antonio Martin (talk) 14:45, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

That's an intriguing idea, but meta:Wikimedia Forum would be a better place to suggest it. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:58, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

An over-the-air television station is expensive and each one can only reach a local market. A cable access channel is relatively cheaper to produce but getting a slot on a cable provider is a challenge and again, each provider only reaches a specific market. An Internet-based media channel is more cost-effective for the number of people it reaches, in spite of its limitations of requiring viewers to have Internet access and an Internet-connected viewing device. Because of the wealth of information available globally on the Internet and video-sharing sites such as YouTube, people everywhere are motivated to obtain some minimal access to these resources, beyond just access to Wikipedia. isaacl (talk) 16:37, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes. Not a station but a channel, and not a channel on local Cable TV but A channel on Youtube, for example. Then the principle cost is production, not distribution. Jim.henderson (talk) 01:31, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

And if anyone is interested, they can go right ahead! All the content is available for reuse (with appropriate citations). isaacl (talk) 01:36, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Wikitube? -- RoySmith (talk) 02:45, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Something to watch for is how the content from Wikipedia is presented. A show (TV/YouTube/etc) is different from a text article. You wouldn't want someone reading an article to the camera. So, how do you make it engaging for viewers? As a faint indication of what could happen, I have blogged on topics that also have articles in Wikipedia that I have contributed to. In my blog posts I have linked to relevant WP articles, but I also included analysis and speculation that I could not put in Wikipedia. I suspect that anyone trying to adapt a Wikipedia article to a video presentation is going to find WP policies and guidelines too restricting. Think docudramas, with invented dialogue, or the visual aids that would be needed for most subjects. Good documentaries can take years to develop. How much work, and how much outside material, would be needed to create even a five or ten minute segment on a topic based on a Wikipedia article that would engage viewers? - Donald Albury 15:34, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Someone making videos on another site wouldn't be subject to Wikipedia policies (beyond satisfying licensing requirements). There are plenty of explainer videos out there that draw upon Wikipedia and other sources. For example, the Half as Interesting YouTube channel, devoted to brief explainers, started out covering small tidbits gleaned from Wikipedia articles. I absolutely agree that to do it well, significant effort has to be made, and graphics is what's going to make best use of the video format. isaacl (talk) 21:00, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

A video version of a Wikipedia article is a bad idea. Screenwriting is a completely different kind of writing; everything is organized differently from the start. An illustrated video documentary of a topic that is also covered by an encyclopedia article, yes that can work, though composing and editing it is a much bigger job than writing an article. The other things a Wikipedia TV channel can do better are interviews, lectures, panel discussions, and how-to pieces. And those are what the existing Youtube channel "Wikipedia Weekly" does. Those things could be done better and they could be done more. More of them could be linked from articles, and the various videos that we already have in Commons could be better linked, catalogued and organized. Basically, that's it. Wikipedia Weekly on YouTube Jim.henderson (talk) 00:04, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

• I highly recommend Understanding Wikis and Wikipedia. The market for broadcast educational content on TV is very small. See also AtheistTV. Schierbecker (talk) 18:16, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

I want to thank everyone who commented on this, and I will go through the channel indicated above. I also had another idea which I will bring up through there. Thanks all and God bless you! Antonio Nur Jeanette Martin (yo!) 14:35, March 28, 2023 (UTC)

Hello, I had requested an account as I cannot create it due to similar to other username. The page said that the request can take 2 to 3 days, but I have waited more than 3 days and still did not receive any emails. I checked the account creation log and I still cannot find my requested account being created. I filled in the username, the email, confirmation of email, comments and pressed send request. Did I missed some steps to submit my request? And should I resubmit my request? 202.144.171.195 (talk) 05:29, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I checked but I don't see any requests from your IP address in the queue, and at the moment there are only 2 pending requests. I also don't see any accounts being created on your IP. In both of these cases I wouldn't be able to see your request or your account if you made the request from a different IP address, so that's not a definitive answer. Check the email you provided for a message from wikiwikimedia.org (check your spam folder too), that should have instructions for your new account, or a reason why it could not be created. If you didn't receive the email then probably your request wasn't received properly, in which case you should submit a new request and it will be processed shortly. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 12:19, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

@Ivanvector: I made my request from IP “125.253.63.66” a few days ago. And I have checked the spam folder and still do not receive any email. Should I resubmit my request? 202.144.171.134 (talk) 00:35, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Please submit a new request. I don't see any open requests from that IP nor the range you're currently using, and I can't look up closed requests by IP address. Sorry for the inconvenience. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 11:49, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

@Ivanvector: Hello, when I tried to resubmit my request, an error message said that there is already an open request with my requested name in the system. What should I do? 202.144.170.145 (talk) 06:19, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Ok, I did find your request, my search was not broad enough. It is on hold because you have not confirmed the email you entered in your request, and I cannot do anything with the request with that flag. After you filled out the form, within a few minutes you should have received an email - it's not clear to me from the instructions but I think it is from accountswmflabs.org or wikiwikimedia.org, or possibly a different email on one of those two domains. You will need to click on the link in that email to confirm your request before it will go into the general queue to be processed. If you can't find it, I'll get in touch with a tool administrator (I'm not one) and see if your request can be dropped so that you can create a new one.

Alternatively, you can make a request under a different username, and then change it afterwards to your preferred name. The name you requested is available as far as I can tell. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:35, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Hello, I found the verification email. I have clicked the verification link. The email did in the spam folder, but I clicked the wrong button a few days ago when I checked my spam folder and I actually saw my trash folder. Thank you for your help. 202.144.170.168 (talk) 10:52, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Dear Wiki community,

Greetings from Feminism and Folklore International Team,

We are pleased to inform you that Feminism and Folklore an international writing contest on your local Wikipedia has been extended till the 15th of April 2023. This is the last chance of the year to write about feminism, women biographies and gender-focused topics such as folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, folk activities, folk games, folk cuisine, folk wear, fairy tales, folk plays, folk arts, folk religion, mythology, folk artists, folk dancers, folk singers, folk musicians, folk game athletes, women in mythology, women warriors in folklore, witches and witch hunting, fairy tales and more

We would like to have your immense participation in the writing contest to document your local Folk culture on Wikipedia. You can also help with the translation of project pages and share a word in your local language.

Best wishes,

International Team Feminism and Folklore ✝iѵɛɳ२२४०^{†ลℓк †๏ мэ} 05:11, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Template:Meals(File:Ch.megacephala_wiki.jpg)--Vcvfou698069 (talk) 01:10, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

@Vcvfou698069: It's due to this edit, since reverted. If you're still seeing it, try a WP:PURGE. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:02, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

A new edit filter may prevent this from recurring. Discussion: WP:EFR#Transclusions of articles in templates. Certes (talk) 19:22, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

I would like to know if anyone here can help me find better sources for Can You Duet. It doesn't seem to be notable per WP:NTV and every time I try to initiate a discussion, it fizzles out immediately. Please see Talk:Can You Duet for further analysis of sources. Thank you. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 18:30, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

As you might have seen, a federal judge in New York ruled Friday in Hachette v. Internet Archive that the Internet Archive's practice of lending out digitized copies of copyrighted books for free (aka controlled digital lending) constitutes copyright infringement that can't be defended on fair-use grounds. [2][3] This will be appealed, but in the very plausible event that it's upheld, one of our best ways to access reliable sources could be off the table. It's worth thinking about what we could do if that happened. Any ideas? Additional funding for The Wikipedia Library (which is already doing great work) might help, but it'd be awfully hard to compensate for the literally millions of free online books that could disappear in the not-so-distant future. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 07:19, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for letting us know about this. I think our links in citations would continue to be all right (unless links are broken by IA) because the judgment says "The Publishers do not challenge certain uses IA makes of the Works in Suit, including 'indexing them for the purpose of searching, displaying short excerpts in response to searches and citations, and supporting research in text and data mining.' Def.’s Memo., ECF No. 106, at 16-17. The Publishers limit their claims to IA’s digital lending of entire ebook versions of the Works in Suit". However our future research would be seriously hampered by editors being unable to "read" the works. Also more limited availability (via Wikipedia Library) might be lawful under the law's dispensations for libraries rather than under "fair use", the matter at issue in this case. Thincat (talk) 11:13, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

This is fairly concerning for the future of reliable sourcing on Wikipedia. Since 80% of links are backed up on the Internet Archive (see List of web archives on Wikipedia), it's potentially catastrophic if the Internet Archive loses the legal right to store links. Fortunately, per Thincat, this hasn't happened yet and isn't happening right now. However, since that right may go in the near future, I think we ought to have a backup plan -- some way to, if needs be, archive everything on other servers. Opal|zukor^(discuss) 08:31, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

As I understand it, it is only the Intenet Archive's practice of "loaning" access to the full text of digitized books that are under copyright that is endangered. I will be disappointed to see that taken away, as I have "checked out" such books to find material to be used in an article. Again, as I understand the reports, the judicial ruling does not affect archived links to material that was publically and legally available on the Internet. Donald Albury 13:27, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

This new look of Wikipedia has introduced two fixed blocks on either side of the browser window, forcing the actual wiki content in between them, making the layout of the content narrower. With normal prose text, this isn't much of a problem, but it is making tables containing large lengths of text less readable, at times to the point of ridiculousness. One example is at the article Turing Award, linked from today's In The News. If this new look is going to stay, should something be done to fix this? I personally don't see any solution other than to reconstruct the tables in an entirely different format. JIP | Talk 20:53, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

How well do such tables fit in Vector 2022 with full width toggled on? (That question may be an unanswerable because screen widths vary.) Although the WMF shows no signs of making full width the default again, plans are in hand to restore it locally in CSS. Certes (talk) 21:54, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

I made the table go below the infobox which makes it a normal width (although with now a gap above it). Galobtter (pingó mió) 22:06, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

The Vector 2010 version of the page, prior to Galobttr's fix, was also ridiculously squished on narrow screens. It's good that editors with wide screens are now being prompted to consider how their content might appear to others, and to make layout choices with that in mind. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 04:56, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

+1 - Wikipedia layouts should not be designed only to work on a wide-screen desktop monitor. Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:00, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

IP editors have pros and cons. The cons are such an existential threat, I wonder why we allow them anymore. This from my watchlist this morning:

• Special:Diff/1146692897/1146722326
• Special:Diff/1146655702/1146722480

Most vandalism is from IPs and SPAs who are persistent and sneaky, they are determined experienced malicious editors. The downside is we loose some legit editors, that was a big issue in the early days when the Wiki was new. As we transition into middle age, maintaining the existing is increasingly important. IPs can always use talk page edit requests. This is such a big change to 'what is Wikipedia' I don't expect this thread to go anywhere but I want to voice this POV which in time is inevitable if Wikipedia is to survive. The number of articles to maintain increases linearly while the number of experienced editors watching stays flat. -- GreenC 16:24, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Sadly, the world is heading towards that state. Are we there yet? I'm not sure. It's hard to tell when the gradual increase in vandalism crosses the threshold. Hiding IP addresses may soon make vandal-fighting impractical for the rank and file editor; that may be when we have to block the good IPs along with the bad. Certes (talk) 16:37, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Actual research would disagree with you: Research:Value of IP Editing. Legoktm (talk) 17:01, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

That's a useful document. This document is examining and detailing the pros of IP editors, while only acknowledging cons (mainly vandalism) exists. The last time a vandalism study was conducted was 2007 Wikipedia:Counter-Vandalism_Unit/Vandalism_studies/Study1. I'd like to see more recent studies how much damage vandals are actually causing, even better with trends. -- GreenC 17:17, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Certainly there's been more than 2007, I'm sure searching through e.g. the Research newsletter archives will turn up more things. In any case, it's important to look at IP editors in context, we have plenty of registered accounts that are engaging in the same "persistent and sneaky" behavior you called out (e.g. LTAs, paid editors, etc.) I would think that IP edits already get way more scrutiny than those accounts. Legoktm (talk) 17:34, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

In indirect ways, even low-quality contributions (from IP editors and others) can be valuable. A study by Gorbatâi suggests that low quality contributions by IP editors has an important effect by catalyzing additional high quality contributions by established editors. Chilling. Vandalism is valuable, because it triggers that "gotta-fix-it" itch and gets us to waste our time? DFlhb (talk) 10:44, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

That summary is a misrepresentation of the Gorbatai study, which did not specifically measure IP vandalism but instead measured contributions by novice editors vs. expert editors. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 16:51, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, and I support IP contribs. DFlhb (talk) 16:54, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

You may or may not be right in your conclusion, but your methodology is certainly wrong. Even at the very naïve level the metric to look at is the percentage of IP edits (I'll use this term although every editor uses IP) that are bad, not the percentage of bad edits that are made by IPs. Those can be very different. Then we get into the number of IP editors who then go on to register. Remember that correlation is not causation. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:04, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

I check through a lot of IP edits on my watchlist. Some are flagged by ORES, some not. Anecdotally, for me, on the whole, IP editors make more positive than negative edits. However, I cannot say the same for Wikidata. If it were up to me, I would ban IP edits in Wikidata, except for language linking edits. Again, anecdotal, but except for the language linking, I find IP edits to be more damaging than not in Wikidata. Peaceray (talk) 22:12, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Which is a serious issue for Wikipedia… because these vandalism edits to Wikidata can get transferred to Wikipedia without notification on our watchlists. Data could change and we would not even realize it had. Blueboar (talk) 22:31, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

This is already happening. (This comment reminded me to go do some searches on Wikidata and, lo and behold, 5 minutes later I have already found an instance.) Gnomingstuff (talk) 00:00, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia watchlists can show edits at "an associated Wikidata page". However, it's disabled by default, doesn't work with grouping, and excludes any other Wikidata pages which may contribute to the article. As others have said, preventing IP edits to Wikipedia wouldn't solve that problem. The one consolation is that Wikidata has a much lower profile than Wikipedia, so many casual vandals won't know it exists, but security through obscurity is rarely a good solution. Certes (talk) 09:38, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

I fix a lot of vandalism, primarily undetected vandalism (more than a few days old, sometimes years or even a decade-plus old). IPs are responsible for the vast majority of this vandalism, and it's not remotely close. However, most of this is not by "persistent and sneaky" editors. It's by probable teenagers who found it funny to change "Brown Sugar" to "Brown shit poop" and having done so, most likely never thought of it again. Or it's by someone on their school's shared IP that makes dozens or hundreds of edits, many actually constructive. Gnomingstuff (talk) 00:00, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Ironically that particular vandalism was fixed by an unregistered editor — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:17, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Good catch! Seems like an existential benefit to me... Gnomingstuff (talk) 15:05, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

The self-congratulatory research referred to above misses some points relevant for the 2023 English Wikipedia which is a very different place from the early days. First, while many IP editors are great, it's likely that those very experienced contributors use an IP from habit or because they enjoy being a rebel (they see making an account as following the herd). Many of them would probably be grateful to be forced to make an account so they can say to themselves that they only did it because that's how the world is these days. Second, it's likely that significant degradation occurs from IPs who enjoy changing numbers or making other hard-to-check edits. Third, the drip-drip of nonsense, even if quickly reverted, can be very de-motivating for good editors. I have seen a retired academic leave Wikipedia due to the idiocy of needing to constantly monitor articles. Fourth, apart from those writing open-source software, the English Wikipedia is #1 for anyone wanting to make a contribution to the common good. People capable of helping the encyclopedia will be highly motivated to join the premier website—so long as the process of making an account is simple and carefully explained, they probably will join. Johnuniq (talk) 05:10, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

The research page was created in 2019, which is hardly "the early days." Gnomingstuff (talk) 14:28, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:Counter-Vandalism Unit/Vandalism studies there have been 4 comprehensive attempts to study vandalism and only 1 study has finished to completion, in 2007, the first one. -- GreenC 16:44, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

IPs can vandalize and accounts can vandalize. It's more difficult to deal with users that create accounts to vandalize so we would actually prefer that they don't. Barriers to entry reduce the total number of both good and bad edits; most edits are constructive. Further reverts are cheap, they take all of 1 second. Content creation is not, it takes time and interest. Even today, many event articles are entirely updated and built out by IPs and SPAs. Will there be some new registrations if compelled? yes. Will it be enough to offset the loss? no. We already lack the interested editor base needed to continually update vast swaths of content, no need to make it worse.

I wouldn't be so confident that every long-term IP editor will register if forced to, I won't. Not a big deal in my case these years I'm not very active so my departure probably won't be noticed, but I know some of the others well enough to say that I won't be the only one to leave on principle, and while the community may not be as lively as in the past, there's more of us than many people realize.

Lots of people are already motivated to help, let's continue trying to keep it as easy as possible for them to do so. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 04:10, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Is anyone aware of more recent analysis of pt.wiki than meta:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/IP Editing Restriction Study/Portuguese Wikipedia? CMD (talk) 09:59, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't think there's anything else, but I'll ask around and see what I can find.

@GreenC, did you edit as an IP before creating an account? I did, and I think a lot of long-time editors did. (Someone used the wrong punctuation on the internet!) One of the concerns about requiring registration is that we might cut off the future generations of casual typo-fixers.

More generally, I have a problem that you all might be able to help me with. With m:IP masking coming up (and it is a "whether we like it or not" matter), I'm expecting to see parallel conversations like this:

• Alice: Let's require registration. Nobody will see any IP addresses, and we won't have these terrible IP editors around. Two problems solved.
• Bob: Noooooo, I always have to see everyone's IP addresses forever! If everyone registers accounts, I won't be able to see all of their IP addresses, and only CUs will be able to block vandals!

The plan as I've heard it^[1] is to convert "IP editors" to "temporary accounts". The page history will stop saying "User:127.0.0.1" and start saying "User:123456".^[2] Admins and some other users^[3] will be able to "reveal" the IP address for themselves for at least 90 days but probably not forever^[4].

One of the challenges has been the number of different IP addresses. The English Wikipedia gets contributions from about a quarter million IP addresses each month. That's about 8,000 users per day here. (For reference, Cluebot reverts about 200 mainspace edits per day from IP addresses.) Some of these "different" IPs are the same person (edits made from your phone at home + on the bus + at school = three "different" editors), and some of the "same" IPs are different people (shared computers at school or library; shared network in an office). The new system will not resolve this perfectly either (me on my laptop at home in Safari + Chrome + Firefox = one IP address, but three separate temporary users), but it's possible that we will see a decline in the overall number of unregistered editors, and that it will be easier to differentiate between frequent editors whose IP address changes frequently vs newbies/one-off editors. OTOH, it's also possible that we'll see an increase, as every incognito/private window, and every shared computer that rejects cookies^[5], is a "new" account.

One result that I'm hoping for is that it'll be easier to contact logged-out editors even if their IP changes.

So my question for all of you is: Does this plan seem basically workable? It'll require some changes (e.g., updates to {{welcome-anon}}), but does anything in here sound especially concerning?

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:51, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Are you saying that a vandal can change their User123456 number just by opening a new incognito window? If so then Special:Contributions may no longer show what else they've ruined recently. Of course, they can hop between IPs now, but not as simply as hitting ⇧ Shift+Ctrl+N. Certes (talk) 21:14, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

To spell out a couple of consequences: firstly, we couldn't easily list their other edits to examine and consider reverting; secondly, we wouldn't know that they've already been warned several times recently and may need blocking. Certes (talk) 22:44, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Whether that's true depends on who you mean by "we". Any random person on the internet? True. An editor with the relevant user right and suitable tools? Not true. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:12, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Will the proposal make it easier or more difficult to detect that 2A00:23C4:FB19:8301:9575:2322:47E4:3AC1 (talk), 2A02:C7C:AC60:B900:E482:1D08:8149:4E02 (talk), 86.45.142.178 (talk) and 86.24.213.229 (talk) are all the same person? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:34, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Right now, we have these situations:

• Traveling editor – same person, same browser, multiple IPs, difficult to connect.
• IP-switching LTA – same person, same browser, multiple IPs, difficult to connect.
• Incognito editor – same person, "different" browser, same IP, easy to connect.

In the future, we expect these situations:

• Traveling editor – Stable temporary username (plus Help:Notifications will work).
• IP-switching LTA – Stable temporary username.
• Incognito editor – Different temporary username every time, but the IPs can be revealed by admins+others with the relevant user right.

So if the four IPs you mention are all in the same browser, it'll be automatically connected. If they're the same person but different computers (e.g., on their phone, their laptop, a shared computer at school, etc.), then it will be just as difficult as it currently is. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:10, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

A good analysis, but I fear that any LTA clever enough to switch IPs will soon work out how to change their temporary username. Certes (talk) 17:19, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

I assume so, too, but is that really any worse than what we have now? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:56, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Only for case six above (Incognito editor, future). I don't know how many of those we have, or how many will switch to that mode (there being little point in adopting it now other than concealing one's browsing history from Mummy and Daddy.) Certes (talk) 21:56, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

The incognito editor would be indistinguishable from a shared computer (e.g., in a library) that rests everything between users.

I'm pretty sure that this is going to work out okay in the end. I'm worried about a rocky entry, though. Does anything need to be done to Twinkle? To Navpops? To tools I don't use or haven't heard of? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:12, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, the incognito editor is now and will remain indistinguishable from a shared computer. Now, both have a constant IP address, allowing us to tie the edits together. After masking, both will have changing temporary usernames, making it harder to associate their edits. That's a good change for innocent library visitors, but also helps a vandal who's discovered the incognito button. Certes (talk) 23:06, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Except that experienced editors will also be able to see the IP addresses for temporary accounts.

If we were requiring everyone to log in, you wouldn't be able to see anyone's IP addresses. This system will prevent readers/casual editors from seeing the IP address, but it won't prevent everyone from seeing the IP addresses. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:05, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Being unable to see the IP addresses would make it worse, so impact would depend on how "some other users" and "probably not forever" shakes out. CMD (talk) 22:55, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Is it not being able to see the IP address per se that would make things worse (how?), or is it not being able to see what other edits were made from this IP address that would make things worse? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:07, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Mainly the latter. Connecting the edits of one IP is useful, but so is connecting those of adjacent IPs, especially within the same IPv6 /64, a range which often (but not always) denotes the same device and person. The exact IP only matters if tracking down a potential COI, such as an organisation's article edited from its own IP range. Some of us have suggested solutions such as Crypto-PAn, but received no response. Certes (talk) 16:38, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

The plan is to let most experienced editors be able to reveal the IP address itself, so for a single IP, it shouldn't be a problem. Legal's supposed to post their requirements this week, and it's going to be one of those "Legal's minimum, but you can set a higher standard if you want" thing. At a glance, I think every editor in this discussion would easily clear the minimum. You'll need to click something to promise you won't misuse private information, but it shouldn't be a big deal.

I'm not sure how they're handling the problem of adjacent IPs (e.g., for finding out which other temp users are in the same the IPv6 /64 range). I'd expect existing CU tools to be able to do that, but I'm not sure how it would work for the rest of us. Let me figure out who to ask...

Please let me know if you have favorite tools that you'd like to keep using for this – it's 9–12 months away, but there's no point in waiting until the last minute. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:00, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

I just found this vandalism from a year ago while checking the contribs of an IP on my watchlist. I don't think I'd be able to do that sort of thing under the new system. (I'd previously done things like this before but it was hard to find examples ... this just happens to be a really good one!) Graham87 03:59, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

In the past, the Internet Archive Bot used to add a report to an article's talk page containing every archive it added to the article. (example: here) According to this discussion at Village pump (proposals), it is acceptable for editors to delete the talk page posts added by the IA Bot, but there was no consensus for a mass removal of these posts. Interestingly, though, there doesn't seem to be an agreed-upon method of removing these posts. For instance, if a user reviews these archives and finds that they are live and well, can they subsequently remove the post? Probably. But what if they decided to do the same to, say, 100 talk pages? Would that be acceptable? I understand that many users are worried that this would flood their watchlists, but that's not necessary. An editor could perhaps carefully select articles that likely aren't watchlisted, and they could keep their removals at a low level, perhaps 20-30 a day, from the least watched articles; that wouldn't be disruptive. Instead of discussing why someone would want to remove these posts, let's discuss what would be a reasonable number of removals, if any number is even necessary. Perhaps no limit is necessary if the removals are done reasonably? — Nythar (💬-🍀) 00:25, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

I'd say same as anything else on a talk page, unless the page is long - just leave it be, if it is too big to read easily - archive some of it using the archive method that is already in use. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:42, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

The previous discussion resulted in consensus in favor of Option 2, which states in part: "the wording of the post is modified to give users permission to delete posts if they want to. Since talk page posts normally can't be deleted by other users, it would remove that restriction." So apparently, these posts don't need to be treated like posts created by actual editors (for example: are they worth archiving?). I think it'll be helpful if we can clarify where the limits exist. — Nythar (💬-🍀) 03:42, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes these are 100% removable by anyone, anytime. In fact a proposal to remove all of them via bot would be a good idea. It's an old system that came about via compromise by committee in the early days of the bot when the community was unsure about the quality of the work and we have long since moved on from it. -- GreenC 13:48, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

GreenC, does this mean I can go ahead and very carefully test-remove 100 of these messages without being warned? — Nythar (💬-🍀) 04:15, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Sure, why not. I remove them all the time whenever I see them. There is no justification for them, and some justification to remove them. -- GreenC 12:35, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

@Nythar I'm a bit lost here, how will the edits you are proposing improve the encyclopedia? — xaosflux ^Talk 09:53, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

@Xaosflux I suppose by decluttering talk pages they might make life easier for editors, and thus improve editor experience and editor contributions. On the other hand, it would flood the watch lists of people who have already been mildly irritated once by the announcement by IABot, so is probably not worthwhile. Perhaps a better approach would be to add automatic archiving to all talk pages which have reached some size limit. If all talk pages had archiving enabled it wouldn't be a problem, the IABot posts would just disappear from sight! PamD 10:03, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm not really arguing too much for or against this, but that is a good test for "should I do x" here, if the answer is "no" or "I don't know" - then the answer is rather evident. — xaosflux ^Talk 10:12, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Xaosflux I personally compared the benefits and disadvantages of removing these posts. Say for instance an editor disruptively, but not vandalistically, adds long posts to 1,000 talk pages (for some reason). We'd normally remove such posts because they are simply unnecessary. In IABot's case, decluttering those talk pages would certainly be an improvement. We also wouldn't have to archive them, which would leave an article's archives uncluttered. Uncluttered talk pages are more advantageous and easier to edit than cluttered ones. Since Wikipedia is supposedly unlimited in terms of storage space and the edits made removing these posts won't cause us to reach some sort of limit, the only disadvantage that could arise from deleting these posts is perhaps one or two watchlist updates someone might receive (which is the reason I'm not proposing a bot remove them all). Since the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, I think this does improve the encyclopedia, albeit in the more hidden regions. — Nythar (💬-🍀) 13:34, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Why not just encourage the removal of the IA Bot posts when making any unrelated edits to a talk page? BTW, archiving IA Bot posts on a talk page will generate a watchlist notice, so that will not reduce the number of watchlist notices an editor receives compared to simply removing the IA Bot posts. - Donald Albury 14:34, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

So I was looking up some obscure city and happened upon this article about the Loray Mill strike and was surprised to see the lead describe it as a “notable” labor strike in US history. Now I have studied the labor movement in the 19th-20th century US and have never heard of this before. But I’m humble enough to admit I don’t know everything about everything much less anything, but I can’t find any sources to back this nor many other claims made throughout — like in the “impact” section. I don’t know, but it feels like some sort of “agenda” based editing. Now I don’t want to accuse anyone of bad faith editing, but at the same time something smells fishy is going on. Any advice? Artificial Nagger (talk) 04:31, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

(I have not done any research and have no opinion on this article, just answering the question as asked.)

You can tag questionable parts with Template:Citation needed or Template:POV or Template:Disputed (or the inline/section equivalents) as appropriate, or if you're fairly confident something's nonsense, just be bold and remove it.

If it's more of a "this needs changes but we should discuss what sort of changes first" sort of thing, you should post on Talk:Loray Mill strike. People who frequently edit the article will have that on their watchlist. ℰmi1y_⧼T·C⧽ 04:42, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Or at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Organized Labour, which has a lot more watchers. Nardog (talk) 04:48, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Have you checked the sources cited in the article for those claims? Phil Bridger (talk) 07:17, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

The article began by calling it "influential", and then "one of the best known", and was switched to "notable" in 2011. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:47, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm not saying this has to be the case here, but in general, when I see an editor calling something "notable", I usually suspect that's an attempt to convince other editors is passes WP:N. If there's no WP:RS which calls it "notable" then we shouldn't either. -- RoySmith (talk) 19:52, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Hello,

Just wondering if there may be a fix, without having to get a new computer. I have an old version of Windows and Firefox that can't be updated anymore. I know this.

1- Watchlist no longer offers live updates. When a watchlist edit was viewed already, it still shows like you never read it. 2- When editing a page -- it no longer has the advanced/symbol etc. drop tab on top. When you click 'show preview', no preview is shown, it keeps me on the same edit page. 3- Replying to a message on a talk page, there's no reply button. This message I'm sending may not be signed either. I have to edit in order to send a message.

If anyone knows anything about any of these problems, please reply.

Thank you in advance. Bringingthewood

P.S. I was here for exactly one year this April 6th (no problems at all).... this all happened overnight starting April 7th with no warning. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bringingthewood (talk • contribs) 23:54, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

See phab:T178356 - Wikimedia recently dropped support for running JavaScript on old browsers. As far as I can tell there's nothing you can do other than upgrade to a browser that meets the requirements for "Grade A" at mw:Compatibility (what you are currently experiencing is "Grade C"). * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:29, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, Pppery. Sorry for not having an official reply to send you. Options are really limited.

I'll try searching for a browser upgrade. Looks like this old thing will have to go. Never thought it would all crumble on 4/7.

Oh well. I thank you again for the info.

Regards, John (BTW) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bringingthewood (talk • contribs) 02:24, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

@Bringingthewood: This was covered by Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Tech News: 2023-14, the bit beginning "Some older Web browsers ..." and several of the posts afterwards. BTW, please always sign your posts. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:58, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, Redrose64.

I'd love to sign my posts, but like I mentioned in my list of problems ... that's one of them. I have to edit the page in order to send a message/reply.

You must have seen that I apologized to Pppery and now I apologize to you.

One day I'll get a new computer and this will be done.

Thank you all.  :)

Regards,

John (Bringingthewood) -- This is the best I can do. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bringingthewood (talk • contribs) 03:17, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

@Bringingthewood: Have you seen Wikipedia:Signatures#How to sign your posts? You can type ~~~~ (that's four tilde characters) to sign your post, as I am doing with my own post right now telling you this to sign it. Anomie⚔ 12:08, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Wow, it really seems like it bothers everyone that I'm not signing my posts.

I CAN'T!!! I have no reply button, no show preview and no tildes. Just edit and publish changes. I can't even edit with an 'en dash'. I explained all this above. Trust me I sent messages to talk pages before this all happened on April 7th.

I'm friends with Bagumba, thank God when he said to come to this page he did not say ... OH and by the way.... sign your post.

I actually apologized prior to all this regarding just that.

Thank you all once again, but guess what? I have to type my name in. Sorry.

JOHN (BRINGINGTHEWOOD) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bringingthewood (talk • contribs) 22:42, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

If you can type your name, you can type four tildes (~~~~). - Donald Albury 22:57, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

HEY LOOK AT THAT. Instead of treating me like a criminal not having a valid excuse, I looked and found the tilde button on my Window Vista relic.

Now I can sign my requests for help ... which the answer is probably me getting a new computer.

Donald, please tell me you're happy that I found that button. And forgive me if you thought I was here for my health and to annoy everyone else.

Please, at least give me that much. Bringingthewood (talk) 23:10, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Is there any way to search users by their registration number? Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:37, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

@Beyond My Ken: Do you mean User ID? Special:Redirect provides such functionality if so. You can look up User ID of users at https://xtools.wmflabs.org/. If that's not what you're looking for, my pardon. –Vipz (talk) 20:54, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

The API is probably most often used for that. If that's not your thing, try like this. There's probably other places that works, but I forget them. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 20:55, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, that's what I was looking for, I appreciate the answers. Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:08, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

As roughly a third of the world marks the Easter holiday, some children around the world will go (or have already gone) hunting for eggs. Although the WP version isn't colored or filled with candy, I'd like to invite the community to help hunt down some of our own WP:EASTEREGGs during this season as well.

If you're unfamiliar, an WP:EASTEREGG link is a wikilink that requires the reader to open the link before understanding where it leads.

To help find links like this, a good while back I put together a very rough "EggHunt" script. The script can tag links in article prose that might be in need of review. If you use it, look for emojii like 🥚 and 🐣 to be added next to some links.

Script is available here: User:N8wilson/EggHunt.js, and a brief overview here. Happy Hunting! --N8_wilson 🔔 12:17, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Cool script, nice connection to the date, love the emojis! EpicPupper (talk) 02:53, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

As a follow-up to a previous discussion here, there is now a community-run @Wikipedia account on Mastodon/the Fediverse. Please see m:@Wikipedia for more details if you're interested in contributing. Legoktm (talk) 05:54, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

I've lost a link to something that I intended to re-read. It was about not watchlisting articles you create. A phrase in it struck me, that the original revision that you created is always there so you should not feel that anything is "lost" by subsequent editing. The problem is I'm not sure where I read it. It's probably an essay in WP: space but maybe a user essay. And possibly off-wiki entirely. Sorry for the broad ask, but I thought maybe it is well known to another editor. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:34, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi Bri. Maybe Wikipedia:Don't watch articles that you care about? Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 16:42, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I was just in progress of linking to the same page... (I found it from its link on Wikipedia:Don't overload your watchlist!, which came up in a Wikipedia search for "watchlist created articles".) isaacl (talk) 16:45, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Misunderstood on first try. Try again. Every edit you ever make is preserved in the page's history, unless it has been revdeled or oversighted. All you have to do is look in the edit history of a page for edits you made. If you are on the [(article name):Revision history] page, there is link at the top to a tool that will let you search the history for all edits made by a designated editor. Donald Albury 16:46, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I'm looking for the essay that references that fact. It's in the spirit of "Don't watch articles that you care about", but more specifically about the page history preserving something you might otherwise feel compelled to prevent changes to. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:44, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand what you are looking for. Once an edit has been committed, it is preserved for ever (or, at least, as long as the current WikiMedia software is in use), and cannot be changed. Old edits can be hidden by revdel or oversight, but they are still there, are still visible to admins (revdels only) and oversighters, and can be made visible again to regular editors if it is decided policy will allow that. When you edit a page, you are creating a new version of the page that is the default seen by readers, but the pervious version is unchanged, and can be seen by anyone who cares to dig into the edit history. Donald Albury 21:10, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Donald, I'm aware of the edit history feature but I'm looking for the essay that references it. Sorry I'm not being clearer but my memory of exactl what the essay said is fuzzy. ☆ Bri (talk) 15:47, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

You might try looking in the Help: or User: namespaces. Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Who did what: Page histories and reverting says something about everything being preserved forever, but I don't think that's exactly what you're looking for. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:36, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

I vaguely remember reading something about not worrying about changes being lost forever as you can retrieve them from the article history, but I don't remember this being tied to your watchlist. So far, I haven't found what I was thinking of by looking through Wikipedia:Essay directory and Template:Wikipedia essays. isaacl (talk) 22:50, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

But please do continue to watchlist articles you create. I'm increasingly worried that there are articles out there slowly degrading through incompetent, or worse, edits which are not noticed. For a sad saga, see this ANI report where I described the edits of one editor who had left a trail of muddled edits, most of which had not been picked up and corrected (stuff like changing the surname "Yampier" to "Vampire" or "Bibliomemoir" to "Bibliometric" because their spellchecker suggested it). The essay Wikipedia:Don't watch articles that you care about seems to be about avoiding stressful content disputes, but there are other reasons to watchlist articles: just keeping up the quality of the encyclopedia. If you don't look after the artices you create, perhaps no-one else will do so. PamD 08:12, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

@PamD: Agreed, in general, to the limits of this being a volunteer project and all that; a lot of the articles on my watchlist are only there because no-one else seems to be watching them. Bri, was this inspired by the email I sent you, since you linked me to the first essay noted above? (I occasionally check out all the village pumps which is how I found this). I'll briefly summarise the relevant case here. It was about the Sally Whitwell article that you created, which had a blatant lie about a supposed breakup of her long-term relationship that stayed in the article for over two years. Literally my first thought when finding out about this situation was "I wish article creators would keep a better eye on their articles". She was very distressed when she discovered the vandalism; I know this through mutual friends (she's fairly well-known among the Australian blind musicians community, which I used to be involved with, because she helped us out in the past). Adding an article to Wikipedia increases its knowledge base but also increases its maintenance burden, especially regarding biographies of living people like that one. Having said that, the watchlist system does have major problems ... it's all-too-easy for things like that to fall off the wagon, even with assiduous watchlist checking ... and it's always good to find new pages in the Wikipedia namespace. Graham87 11:59, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

here is the link to the requests. I don't know if there is a better place to be posting this. 137a (talk • edits) 13:46, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

permanent link in case this gets archived 137a (talk • edits) 13:49, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Hello! For anyone willing to provide input, there's an RFC related to a couple mass-shooting categories here, and any input would be greatly appreciated. The question is: "Should this article, concerning firearm-related violence with multiple persons injured, be included in mass-shooting categories, even though no sources directly refer to it as a 'mass shooting'?" The key debate concerns whether "mass shooting" is a special term that requires labelling by a reliable source. Thanks in advance!--Jerome Frank Disciple (talk) 17:05, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi! Does enwiki have any policy regarding the use of these? Is it acceptable to use a photo of an award certificate as a proof of that award if no other sources are available? P.S. especially if it's been uploaded to Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons and hadn't been published anywhere else? Piramidion 17:21, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

Hmm! If an image has been uploaded to Commons, but is not available anywhere else, that is a problem. Commons, like Wikipedia itself, is not a reliable source. Anyone can upload any image to Commons as long as they claim it is in the public domain or is released under a license compatible with our requirements. Without a link to a reliable source establishing the provenance of the image, it is not usable as a source. Even then, I would question using such an image as a source. Donald Albury 17:30, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

I have been asked this question to which I do not know the answer. Can one change the email address associated with an existing login username, without surrendering the username? Thanks in advance.

@Krushnarjun: with regard to your query

Ashwin Baindur (User:AshLin) (talk) 07:29, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

I've never done it but sure, why not? Special:UserLogin asks you to enter a username, not an email address. The email address can be changed any time at Special:Preferences. More robust answers would be available at WP:VPT. Johnuniq (talk) 08:02, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Specifically this is under "Notifications" at Special:Preferences. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:36, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

@AshLin: Your email address may be set in either of two places in preferences - the "Change or remove email address" link Notifications as noted above, or the Change or remove email address button at User profile. Both of them are titled "Email options", and both take you to Special:ChangeEmail. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:42, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Many thanks :) @Redrose64, Phil Bridger, and Johnuniq:. Ashwin Baindur (User:AshLin) (talk) 12:52, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Does this comment violate any Wikipedia policies and can it be removed Talk:My_Days_of_Mercy#The_identity_of_the_star 76.14.122.5 (talk) 03:25, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, WP:BLP. I've removed it. RAN1 (talk) 03:50, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! 76.14.122.5 (talk) 05:07, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Greetings Wikipedians. The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to share a summary of our draft annual plan with you here on English Wikipedia. If you're interested in the full plan, it's available on Meta-wiki, and we encourage you to take a look. We'd also love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to leave a comment on the talk page here on English Wikipedia or on Meta-wiki. The comment period is open from now until May 19th. Thank you for your interest in our work. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 21:24, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Hello everyone,

The Wikimedia Foundation elections committee (Elections Committee) is, from today until April 24, seeking an additional 2–4 members to help facilitate the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustee (Board) selection process.

The 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election is being planned. New members are invited to join the Elections Committee. The Elections Committee oversees the Board of Trustees community seat selection process. Join the committee and contribute your valuable skills and ideas to the Trustee selection process.

There are eight community- and affiliate-selected seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board. The wider Wikimedia community votes for community members to occupy these seats. In 2024, the Elections Committee will oversee this selection process for the community- and affiliate-selected seats with expiring terms. This process will be supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Elections Committee members sign up for three-year terms and will be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. Members can expect to contribute 2–5 hours per week before the selection process and 5–8 hours per week during the selection process.

As an Elections Committee member, you will be responsible for:

• Attending online meetings between now and the next election (mid-2024)
• Attending onboarding and online training in May–June 2023
• Working with the Committee to fulfill its other responsibilities

New members should have the following qualities:

• Fluency in English
• Responsiveness to email collaboration
• Knowledge of the movement and movement governance

If you would like to volunteer for this role, please submit your candidacy by April 24, 2023 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth) on this Meta-Wiki page.

You can read the full announcement here. Thank you in advance for your interest! If you are not interested but know someone who might be, share this message with them. Please let me know if you have questions.

On behalf of the Elections Committee,

Zuz (WMF) (talk) 08:42, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

How do I invite the The Toy Pool team to improve the articles like My Little Pony, Equestria Girls, Littlest Pet Shop, Monster High and Ever After High, and their related articles? JSH-alive/^{talk/cont/mail} 08:24, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

You can mention to them that anyone can edit Wikipedia. However, to avoid misunderstanding, you should keep in mind the policy at Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry#Meatpuppetry and the guideline at Wikipedia:Canvassing. You should also inform anyone from that site that you recruit to edit Wikipedia about the guideline at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest. Donald Albury 17:41, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

There's a discussion going on right now at WT:DYK#Coronation of Charles III and Camilla May 6, 2023 about how much coverage is appropriate on DYK about this event. The reason I'm posting on VP is because all of the other projects which contribute main page content are going royal on that day as well. Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 6, 2023, Template:POTD/2023-05-06, and apparently WP:ITN and WP:OTD have UK royalty items in progress as well. There is concern expressed by some (myself included) that devoting the entire main page that day to the coronation is not appropriate. Basically WP:UNDUE at large scale. To be fair, others have argued that the scope of the event really does justify this amount of coverage. I don't think VP can tell the individual projects what to do, but at the same time, I think some discussion here, a cross-project forum, would be valuable. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:17, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't think VP can tell the individual projects what to do – Just the opposite. There is no part of Wikipedia that is exempt from community decisions, and projects have been shut down for trying to come up with their own rules. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:25, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

The coverage seems WP:UNDUE; I doubt that many news sites will dedicate their entire front page to the coronation. I also agree with Thebiguglyalien that VP, as representative of the broader community, can tell individual projects what to do per WP:LOCALCONSENSUS.

I suggest limiting the coverage to an ITN story which is required to be topical; the rest of the articles can appear on different days. It's easier to take this broad approach than trying to individually decide which articles can run on that day and which need to wait. BilledMammal (talk) 18:39, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

I can see no reason to ban monarchy related articles from DYK on a day when people will be interested in them. Should we feature Christmas related content only in summer? —Kusma (talk) 18:50, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

I only suggest having no coronation-related stories on that day because it is easier than determining which of DYK, POTD, TFA, and OTD can run with it on that day. However, I have no objection to one DYK hook on that day if POTD, TFA, and OTD don't cover it on the same day. BilledMammal (talk) 18:54, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

I wish I shared your confidence that not many news sites will dedicate their entire front page to the coronation. If nothing truly momentous happens on that day I'm sure they will. I (a Brit) remember going to the US at the time when Charles and Diana were having marital difficulties and I lost count of the number of people who told me things about them that I didn't know, but expected me to know more. People seemed not to want to believe that I didn't know them personally. In most parts of the world the media are obsessed with the British royal family and we haven't had a coronation for seventy years, so expect a level of coverage that you have never seen before. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:00, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

There will be a maximum of one ITN item related to the coronation, and even that isn't guaranteed. Even in the unlikely event of a plane crashing onto the processional route after the king and queen have separately expired from heart attacks that would almost certainly be combined into a single blurb. Thryduulf (talk) 20:40, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

Comment we usually run with what is submitted and approved at DYK. Additionally people will care about the event on the day of the event. I agree with what @Kusma: has said above. In contrast to other projects of the front page we go with what is likely to be interesting to our readers. A King is likely to be interesting to many of our readers. Also 1953 was the last similar coronation so we should run what we have. It might be goofy for us to run coronation hooks for several days after the event Lightburst (talk) 21:14, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't agree on imposing an artificial balance on the Main Page to subvert all of our existing nomination processes. I don't see what it's supposed to accomplish, for one thing. For another, it would set an unnecessary and unfortunate precedent for the future, where any and all processes on DYK/POTD/TFA/OTD/ITN would be subject to higher approval, which would slow down the process considerably. I also wouldn't assume that the coronation will be a shoo-in on every Main Page section. Given the straw vote being taken at WT:ITN, it's very much not a fait accompli. --⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 12:26, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

As an addendum to my last post, when I say that I don't know what it's supposed to accomplish, I mainly mean that I cannot really fathom what sort of problem there is with the happy coincidence that three or four items about the same topic are run at the same time on the Main Page. Everybody has different attitudes as to what purpose the Main Page is supposed to serve, of course, but I can't think of any policy-based reasons where this might be a problem.

For example, WP:UNDUE in its current form specifically applies to mainspace articles and pages. The Main Page is more of a "special page" and while technically in the mainspace, there's no imbalance that is being created from a POV standpoint. In other words, we are not providing overly excessive weight towards a minority POV, due to the fact that the news coverage and public consciousness towards the coronation is quite high.

It seems to me that the primary complaint against this coincidental coordination is that, for some people, it's annoying or disgusting to see the same topic covered repeatedly. I can sympathize with that, but until there is some firm, documented consensus as to what sort of topics should and should not be covered on the Main Page, in the end it's still an opinion among many opinions, which anyone and everyone is free to have. --⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 14:17, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Can someone tell me what should happen when a domain used in a reference expires and the domain is grabbed for exploitation? Actually, I'm looking for a gnome with the scripts and experience to handle Talk:Michael Aldrich#Dead links. I would say that all external links to a hijacked domain should be removed or at least not clickable. I suppose that means formatting the refs with {{cite web}} and using |url-status=usurped? What about talk pages—nowiki them? Johnuniq (talk) 04:36, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes report to WP:URLREQ. This is part of a gambling website problem, described and tracked at WP:JUDI. I have the scripts and programs to do everything but usually wait until there are enough domains to make it worth running as a batch. To answer your question the procedure is WP:USURPURL -- GreenC 04:40, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm still hoping that someone with a script can format the refs. I fixed a bunch of the URLs (the remaining aldricharchive.com links are hijacked while aldricharchive.co.uk is good). Johnuniq (talk) 04:52, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

The method outlined at USURPURL has worked fine for years for 100s of domains for refs that are CS1|2, bare or square URLs. WAYBACKMEDIC can handle it. -- GreenC 05:02, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the information and all your good work in this area. I corrected twelve .html links by finding their equivalent on a working website at aldricharchive.co.uk (not easy!), and I found one pdf at archive.org (again, not easy since the recent archives are junk) and fixed it using {{usurped}}. However, there are another broken 14 pdf links and I suspect that the simplest procedure would be to trim out the WP:UNDUE promotional text and see what links are left. Question: Talk:Michael Aldrich has the usurped URL in 33 places. Surely your bot cannot magically fix them because more than changing the domain is needed? Perhaps I will just replace all instances with a brief note including a link to a new section on talk explaining the issue. Thoughts? Johnuniq (talk) 07:56, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Manual is going to be ideal, though it won't scale. There are two things, the usurped domain, and moving the URL to a new domain. WaybackMedic can also do the second, but only if there are some rules it can follow eg transform the URL based on patterns, or follow a redirect. Your edit Special:Diff/1122023815/1151450117 is fantastic but no bot could do that because it has nothing to go by, no redirects or patterns. This edit Special:Diff/1151450117/1151468348 is typical of what the bot can do. -- GreenC 13:43, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm probably just running against the wind, but I would really like articles on songs to include the music basics, in particular, what the song's time is. When I have requested this at specific song sites, I have gotten either silence or statements that the song can be in different times. But most song articles focus on one rendition, e.g., Maggy May, so it would be reasonable to say what time and key the song (in the version discussed) is in. (I realize this might be hard to document, but I think it would be worthwhile for those of us who are musically challenged but also musically interested.) Kdammers (talk) 16:46, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

When you try to add this information, does anyone revert it or complain about it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:40, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Quite. I don't see how anyone could complain if the content is reliably sourced. The time of most songs does not change much, but many folk and other traditional songs, such as Maggie May (folk song), can be performed in many different keys. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:02, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

The length (and other characteristics) of a particular recording is fixed, but performers can choose different tempos, keys, and so forth for their performances for stylistic or practical reasons (and of course just ordinary variance). An indication of a recording's tempo might be a more basic data point than its length, but as far as I know there's no reputable third-party reliable source for that info. isaacl (talk) 07:35, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

An article about a song ought to be thought of as primarily about the song as a piece of music and only secondarily about recordings of the song. A notable song is rarely recorded just once and then never performed live, never recorded in other versions by the original performer and never recorded in cover versions by other performers. Songs are not recordings, although obviously, the most notable recorded versions need to be discussed in articles about songs. Folk songs can have very long histories and many variations before they were ever recorded. Therefore, it is not possible to say that a given song is so many minutes and so many seconds long. We can only say that about a specific recorded version of that song. Cullen328 (talk) 08:02, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

I was interpreting time as being as in time signature. Of course the length of time that it takes to perform a song can vary enormously. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:49, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

So was I. Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven) is in ²
₄. We have plenty of reliable sources for this, and we don't really need a specifically third-party source for it.

I understand that others would find the tempo (=beats per minute) to be useful, but that will be specific to individual recordings. I'm not sure I'd include that routinely, but it can be relevant to an article in some instances (e.g., the Bee Gees "Stayin' Alive" is just the right tempo for CPR; consider downloading that to your phone in case you need it). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:10, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Time signatures for music influenced by 18th century European musical traditions is usually obvious, and if sheet music is sold for a given song, it can be used as a source. Note not all music follows in that tradition, and there are instances of songs when determining the time signature for a specific passage comes down to musical interpretation. There are also unusual cases where songs have been notably performed with different meters ("The Star-Spangled Banner" being an example); a discussion of this would be reasonable to include within a song article. As long as editors don't try to force a single standard upon all songs, such as requiring a single time signature to be assigned to every song, there shouldn't be an issue with including this info for cases where the time signature info is well known. isaacl (talk) 21:29, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Regarding the key of a recording (*): it can be tricky to find a source that meets English Wikipedia's standards for reliability. For some types of music, it's fairly clear. Piano pieces following 18th-century European musical traditions played on pianos tuned to a known standard are straightforward enough (though analog recordings can introduce additional uncertainty). Again, generally speaking if sheet music is available and it can be established that it matches the recording in question, it can be used as a source, but it isn't always the literal truth: a rock piece might be written in an easier-to-play key, but the recording may have been made with the guitars detuned so the performance is actually in a different key. Thus the same caveat about not forcing a one-size-fits-all standard applies.

(*) Key isn't an inherent characteristic of songs, as they can be transposed to any key. Usually for a given performance, it's transposed to a key suitable for the instruments (including voices). isaacl (talk) 22:04, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

(I am the original poster.) I was referring to time signature. I understand that for classical pieces there is published sheet music, but for pop songs such material might not be available. Still, I would like to read if a song is in 2/4, 2/2, 4/4 (all of which seem to be the same to me, but I would still like to know), 3/4, 7/8, 5/4 etc., especially since I usually can't "hear" which time signature is applicable.Kdammers (talk) 18:20, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

From a timing perspective, the bottom number in the time signature doesn't technically matter (you could double it and halve the tempo to match, for example, so everything would be the same), but there are different connotations for musicians when reading it, plus it's usually more convenient to use certain notes as the basic beat. In a similar manner, whether something is notated with three or six beats per measure, or other multiples of a prime number is usually a matter of convenience. (Two or four is a bit of an exception; because the first beat in a measure traditionally has a stronger emphasis, some might choose to use two instead of four for more frequent emphasis.) Time signatures with anything other than multiples of two or three as the top number are relatively rare for popular music in the European-influenced cultural traditions, though there are some bands (particularly in the jazz world) who like to create music with more complex time signatures. Most common pop music has four beats per measure, so you can first try counting to four repeatedly in time with the song's beat, and see if it fits the melody. A song with three beats per measure has a waltzing feel (One-two-three One-two-three). And for popular songs, you can readily find the beats per measure information through searching online; the results don't meet English Wikipedia's standards of reliability and won't handle unusual cases (such as changing time signatures), but will be good enough for a lot of music. isaacl (talk) 01:00, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

@Kdammers: for pop songs such material might not be available - it might be difficult to obtain, but legally, sheet music should have been made available in order to establish copyright in the melody and lyrics, and to satisfy PRS requirements concerning public performance of anything that you didn't write yourself. Try going to a musical instrument shop, they normally have a sheet music section - have a look through what is on sale, you might be surprised. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:53, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

I forgot about the discussion you started last year at the idea lab village pump, which can be found at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 43 § Time in music articles and has more discussion about the challenges of identifying a specific time signature in a manner suitable for inclusion in an English Wikipedia article. isaacl (talk) 01:41, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

The problem with this is verification -- many songs, especially pop songs, are ambiguous about what signature they are in, non-classical music critics don't usually mention something this technical, and music theorists often disagree. (A good example is "Get Lucky" by Daft Punk -- we cite some sheet music but then a music theory article about how it's actually two different keys, and then there are people not cited who disagree with that...) Gnomingstuff (talk) 13:22, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

When should athlete bio stubs be deleted? There are hundreds of association football and American football biographies that are only a few sentences long and have no references or only routine statistics references. I'm currently adding statistics references or tagging them as unreferenced when I find them. WP:NSPORTS doesn't say much about these specific sports. When should I be using AfD or PROD? And how many should I AfD/PROD at once to avoid overwhelming the process? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:46, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

They shouldn't be nominated if they meet WP:GNG, so WP:BEFORE should be followed. WP:AFDISNOTCLEANUP. —Bagumba (talk) 00:13, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

If you are concerned that the few facts presented in these unreferenced BLPs are not verified through a reference of some kind (inline citation or external link), then you can either search for such a reference and remove the BLP unsourced tag or use BLPPROD to see if someone else will. Looking at the association football BLPs, most of the facts can be referenced to a comprehensive statistics database like soccerway.com.

If instead you are questioning the notability of the BLPs, then I believe mass-PRODing or mass-AfDing them is disruptive. We are averaging 5-10 new AfDs on association football biographies daily right now, so dumping a large batch is going to overload the system. I think it would be better to tag (No significant coverage (sports) is the most appropriate) or do individual BEFORE searches and improve or send a no more than a few to PROD/AfD daily as appropriate. Jogurney (talk) 00:29, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

My impression here is that no one has any idea how WP:NSPORTS should be applied or whether anything from WP:NSPORTS2022 is actionable. The problems that these are meant to address still remain. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:22, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

I can't see any reason to believe that. I know there have been thousands of association football biography PRODs and AfDs (not to mention thousands of biographies brought up to GNG-compliance) since NSPORTS2022. The reason you're still seeing non-compliant biographies is there were tens of thousands of them before NSPORTS2022 because many years of article creation pre-dated NSPORTS2022, and we have limited editor time. Jogurney (talk) 14:25, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Agree with Jogurney on this. — Ixtal ^{( T / C )} ⁂ Non nobis solum. 16:23, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

I've had a look at the PRODs that you've done and they seem to be fine. These are all footballers of questionable notability with either no sources or clearly insufficient. As long as you have done some element of WP:BEFORE, these are fine. I personally would have given Jeannot Lamarque a BLP PROD rather than a normal PROD, though, as it's an unsourced BLP. This would mean that the deletion tag can't be removed until a reliable source is provided. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 19:19, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

I was doing BLPPRODs, but I'm not sure about them now because it seems like a lot of the athlete bio stubs used to have external links that were at some point removed, which kind of puts them in a gray area. And since there doesn't seem to be any SNG or other rule of thumb, I'm just doing Google searches (including foreign language searches when applicable) to see if coverage exists. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:27, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough, that is a grey area. Some of these PRODs might get contested, in which case hopefully someone will add the sources needed. If not, we should go to AfD. A rationale like the one at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gary Perchet is useful as it shows the best source(s) that the nominator could find and explains why that isn't sufficient. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 19:49, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

I think that the GNG should be the governing set of rules when it comes to this. I'm not enthralled into Association Football as other Wikipedians, but most of us can agree that the star player from your school's team should not get his or her own article unless they're in the highest levels of professional leagues or are otherwise widely known. InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 01:38, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Dear all,

I would like to inform our community members in India about the upcoming annual Wikimedia Foundation fundraising campaign in India.

The fundraising campaign will have two components.

1. We will send emails to people who have previously donated from India. The emails are scheduled to be sent between the 2nd of May and the 1st of June.  
2. We will run banners for non-logged in users in India on English Wikipedia itself. The banners will run from the 30th of May until the 27th of June.

Prior to this, we are planning to run some tests in April and May, so you might see banners a couple of times before the campaign starts. This activity will ensure that our technical infrastructure works.

We have now launched a community engagement page where you can find more detail around the campaign. We are also sharing some banner examples there and are inviting you to give feedback on the examples as well as provide your own messaging on the talk page.  

I will also be hosting a community call on the 23rd of April at 19:30pm IST to which you can bring your questions and suggestions.

Generally, before and during the campaign, you can contact us:

• On the talk page of the fundraising team
• If you need to report a bug or technical issue, please create a phabricator ticket
• If you see a donor on a talk page, VRT or social media having difficulties in donating, please refer them to donatewikimedia.org

Thanks you and regards, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 07:00, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

@JBrungs (WMF): I am not convinced we should be running any campaigns in the global south, but while we are can you please post all banners that you use so that we can ensure they meet the requirements of the 2022 Banners RfC? BilledMammal (talk) 03:30, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Sure, you can find example banners on the community engagement page we created. As always, we provide our control banners as example banners. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 07:17, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

@JBrungs (WMF): Thank you, but what I was asking for was as you deploy different banners you post the banners here so that they can be reviewed by the community. BilledMammal (talk) 02:33, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

We will use the community engagement page, and the community call on the 23rd of April at 19:30pm IST, to talk to Indian volunteers about messaging improvement ideas they have as well as inviting new messaging ideas from them. This is very similar to the process we had around the English campaign. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 05:46, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Please no more "community calls". Hard to see this as a good faith practice. small jars tc 14:56, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

How is a community call with Indian Wikimedians about a fundraising campaign in India not a "good faith practice"? dwadieff ✉ 15:01, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

@David Wadie Fisher-Freberg: It is not a good faith practice because the Wikimedia Foundation is not soliciting active consent, they only solicit for opposition. There is no Wikimedia community in India which has the infrastructure to organize a response to this call. Part of the reason for that is that the Wikimedia Foundation does not fund community organization in India. Because there is no community which is able to oppose or even appear at these calls, the Wikimedia Foundation by default interprets lack of participation as consent for the foundation to proceed. Also, the Wikimedia Foundation sets the agenda for the conversation, not the community. The community in India would like support for accessing grants, not to volunteer in assisting the transfer of money from India to the Wikimedia Foundation. If the volunteers had their way, first they would get WMF sponsorship to organize themselves to participate in conversations, then after that there could be conversations about India giving money back to the foundation.

The ethical alternative that I would propose for this and all other community conversations is a global Wikimedia default presumption that there is no Wikimedia community consent, until and unless there is on-wiki evidence of active consent. Only "yes" means yes; the absence of "no" is not consent. A great demonstration of consent would be for Wikimedia user groups and individuals in India to sign their support for this kind of fundraising to happen. That demonstration of support does not exist - the Wikimedia Foundation's evidence of support is that few or no people show up to the calls. If we ever had a third party researcher at a university evaluate this consent process, it would not pass as valid.

The fundraising is not the problem, exactly. The problem is colonization in which the Wikimedia Foundation speaks for the community of India, while also not supporting the development of community infrastructure which would empower local people to speak for themselves. If the people could speak for themselves, then I expect they would ask for collected funds to support programs in India, and actively negotiate how that would look. I am aware of no evidence that such community conversation is happening. Bluerasberry (talk) 16:22, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

@BilledMammal: For reference, here are the sample banners and sample email texts Julia kindly posted on m:Fundraising:

• Fundraising emails in India - 2nd to 19th of May. Here are some example emails please note, we are still working on those and they might change, we also test emails and you might see different variations of these emails: Email 1, Email 2, Email 3, Email 4
• Fundraising banners in India - 30th of May to 27th of June. Here are some example banners - please note that we constantly test banners and you might see different variations of these banners: Desktop large, Desktop small, Mobile large, Mobile small

--Andreas JN466 19:41, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

We ⚠️⚠️choose⚠️⚠️ not to charge a subscription fee – emphasis my own. small jars tc 23:17, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

I agree. That passage is unacceptable. Andreas JN466 07:15, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

Appreciate your response, this is really helpful feedback that will help improve our content. Based on what you have shared we are changing the line in our email copy to say "There is no subscription fee to access content on Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean we don't need support from our readers." 2601:C9:100:9CF0:7412:2FEB:7826:C5EF (talk) 18:04, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Sorry my response below did not show my login name and I wanted you to know this was coming from someone legitimately at the Foundation:

Appreciate your response, this is really helpful feedback that will help improve our content. Based on what you have shared we are changing the line in our email copy to say "There is no subscription fee to access content on Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean we don't need support from our readers." DBu-WMF (talk) 18:49, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

"There is" is no better: we need "There will never be". Even with that change, the line would be deceptive since it strongly implies that financial support from readers is needed to provide access to Wikipedia, a notion that has repeatedly been demonstrated to be far from the truth. An acceptable message, especially one targeted at people living in the global south, can only be one that honestly attempts to summarise what the WMF spends the majority of its funds on, as anything coming in from fundraisers at this point is surplus that will have no impact whatsoever on servers or site access, unless it was kept saved for many decades. Indian people are currently battling with the impacts of a serious heatwave; surely the last thing they deserve is to be swindled out of their money by an organisation (subtly?) threatening to remove their access to a cornerstone of free knowledge resources. small jars tc 21:43, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Once again the Featured picture today (4/21/2023) is a very long Chinese scroll with no indication that it is very long and that the viewer can see the whole scroll by sliding the image. Also I skimmed its link and nowhere is its dimensions given. That should also be given every time it’s shown. Not doing these things is a disservice to your readers.Wis2fan (talk) 05:52, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

Well, on desktop browsers there is a horizontal scrollbar. So, on desktop, I think that should give a good idea how long the image is horizontally. But since your edit is marked as "mobile edit" I decided to check it on mobile and I noticed that the scrollbar indeed is not shown in Chrome on Android (in both desktop/mobile sites). The tiny greyish scrollbar appears only when you're actively scrolling it, and otherwise it doesn't. Maybe there is a CSS hack for it? —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 11:55, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

It isn’t on either my iPad or iPhone, either. Does Wikipedia know what type of browser most browsers use? I’d bet a lot use phones or pads. Your posts should be compatible with everything. You don’t mention my size request—I think that info is important too.Wis2fan (talk)< Wis2fan (talk) 16:54, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

The CSS Overflow Module Level 3 is still at W3C Working Draft stage (as it has been for ten years and four days), so shouldn't be relied upon. Pending that, we can really only use the techniques described at Visual effects (part of the Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification), which work in all modern browsers. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:56, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

I discovered the size of the original buried in the photo data — the original was 10.3” by 20’. Why can’t that be given. & why can’t Wikipedia say the photo moves or slides or something?Wis2fan (talk)< Wis2fan (talk) 17:07, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

This is not a new problem — Wikipedia has featured other scrolls and I also remember a long photo of a unified train that had the same information omitted-that the picture would move to show the complete object and the length of the object.Wis2fan (talk)< Wis2fan (talk) 17:20, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

As a regular POTD editor: this is certainly something we could include in the blurb, perhaps "this scrollable image of [...]" – it is normally more encyclopedic to avoid "talking directly to the reader", as it were. Adding an indication of size can be useful, but might not immediately tell readers that the POTD is scrollable. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 13:36, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

More languages • Please help translate to other languages.

Hello,

As follow-up to the message about the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines by Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Vice Chair, Shani Evenstein Sigalov, I am reaching out about the next steps. I want to bring your attention to the next stage of the Universal Code of Conduct process, which is forming a building committee for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C). I invite community members with experience and deep interest in community health and governance to nominate themselves to be part of the U4C building committee, which needs people who are:

• Community members in good standing
• Knowledgeable about movement community processes, such as, but not limited to, policy drafting, participatory decision making, and application of existing rules and policies on Wikimedia projects
• Aware and appreciative of the diversity of the movement, such as, but not limited to, languages spoken, identity, geography, and project type
• Committed to participate for the entire U4C Building Committee period from mid-May - December 2023
• Comfortable with engaging in difficult, but productive conversations
• Confidently able to communicate in English

The Building Committee shall consist of volunteer community members, affiliate board or staff, and Wikimedia Foundation staff.

The Universal Code of Conduct has been a process strengthened by the skills and knowledge of the community and I look forward to what the U4C Building Committee creates. If you are interested in joining the Building Committee, please either sign up on the Meta-Wiki page, or contact ucocprojectwikimedia.org by May 12, 2023. Read more on Meta-Wiki.

Best regards,

Xeno (WMF) 19:00, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

I’m pleased to announce that a new design for Special:Preferences on the mobile website is now live on all Wikimedia projects. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar. To read more and leave feedback, please see our project page. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 10:58, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't know quite where to ask about this but here goes... There's a brand new category - Category:Children of billionaires - that was populated with 120+ biographical articles today/April 28. Is it legit to have a category mass-populated with people who just happen to be the offspring of rich people? When I first happened upon it I thought "this can't be legit" but now I don't know... Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 14:09, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Overcategorization would seem to indicate not. Specifically WP:TRIVIALCAT and WP:NONDEF seem applicable here. WP:CFD is the correct place to discuss deleting a category, if you wish to take that route. --Jayron32 14:17, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

If we must have such a category (which I doubt) I would have expected it to include Charles III. Surely his mum was a billionaire several times over? Phil Bridger (talk) 14:27, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

According to our article on the Crown Estate, it's worth approximately £15 billion. Perhaps Charles III and Princes William and Harry should be added. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 14:42, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps we should stop adding people to a category that is supposed to be deleted, and start the conversation at WP:CFD to do exactly that. --Jayron32 14:46, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Has there been a discussion about the use of AI in generating or modifying Wikipedia articles?Kdammers (talk) 20:13, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

yes. about how to spot generated articles and delete them. happens regularly.

as a means to generate something which can serve as inspiration for further research and confirmation... not sure. whatever helps, but you'd be expected to verify everything about the generated text yourself and not let any "AI hearsay" slip through. nobody can prevent you from browsing online forums where people have opinions either, but those opinions carry little weight. Nowakki (talk) 20:28, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

@Kdammers, see Wikipedia:Large language models and the talkpage. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:53, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Also: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#WP:MASSCREATE and WP:MEATBOT; Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#CSD for AI generated content; Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#AI/chatbot/large language models; Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1125#Suspected hoax content and LLM use by User:Gyan.Know. I think that there have been several more. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:09, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

• FYI, apparently AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart. Oh no. BD2412 T 21:17, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

  Interesting. You'd think we would've noticed. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:53, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

  Well, I guess we're cooked. No more Wikipedia. Does that mean the WMF donation banners will stop for good? ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 16:39, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

  Well, you know WP:HEADLINES. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:37, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

International peace association Service Civil International is offering an online Wikipedia editing camp on peace topics from May 8th to June 7th, with online meetups and trainings. More information can be found on the organization's website or on the project page on meta. Flor WMCH (talk) 15:58, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Files, such as File:Ayodhya_Nagri.jpg have already been transferred to Commons. How does one delete the image file on English Wikipedia? Or is there a policy to retain them? Ashwin Baindur (User:AshLin) (talk) 04:49, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

As long as there's no {{KeepLocal}} or {{notforcommons}} on it, just put {{NowCommons}} on it. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.3% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600^th FP!} 06:16, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you very much. Ashwin Baindur (User:AshLin) (talk) 07:30, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Don't mention it! Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.3% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600^th FP!} 08:51, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

What encyclopedias do serious people use? Don't they need any?

Once you start editing on wikipedia a bit and go even a little deep on any topic, wikipedia itself becomes useless. The articles are all vague, do not contain much systematic information that can be used to look up information. There are so many articles that are essentially unchanged for 10 years, that anyone with moderate search engine skill can beef up in a few days without even having any topic-relevant professional background.

One cannot shake the feeling that there must be thousands of people more qualified who were in a position to do X in the last decade and they just didn't do it. Wikipedia is being ignored by the very people who could make it good. Why is that? Do serious people have no use for an encyclopedia? Nowakki (talk) 01:35, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't know what encyclopedias they use, but I do know that serious people use capital letters. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:00, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Maybe you know somebody who knows more about this. Nowakki (talk) 12:25, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't know why you say Wikipedia is useless. Of course, Wikipedia is not reliable. Its coverage, although very much broader than any other encyclopedia, is incomplete, and often contains errors. It is, nevertheless, useful as a starting point for exploring a subject, as many important articles cite useful sources. It is usually the first place I look when I want to find out more about something. As for your question on why experts (I assume that is who you are talking about) don't edit Wikipedia, some do, but the pseudo-anonymity under which WP operates makes it hard to see who the experts are. Others of us (if I may say so) become fairly knowledgable about certain subjects after years of researching those subjects in order to improve WP articles. There have been discussions over the years on why more experts don't contribute to WP, and how we can encourage them to do so, but no concrete results have followed from those discussions. And, no matter how unreliable WP is, it is far more reliable than more than 95% of what is available on the Internet. Donald Albury 17:05, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

• I think the OP is engaging in a bit of a false dichotomy, whereby "less than perfection" is somehow "useless". What is Wikipedia good for? For a quick check of uncontroversial information about well known subjects, it's a fine resource. --Jayron32 18:24, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  Yes. No encyclopedia for a couple of centuries has contained everything that is known about the topics it covers. That is not the job of an encyclopedia. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:35, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  compare Star Trek: The Next Generation (season 6) to Homestead Steel Works.

  one is a single season of a television series. the other is a large steel plant that lasted for 100 years.

  i can easily find out who guest-starred on TNG season 6 and on what day an episode aired.

  can you tell me in the span of 2 minutes how many blast furnaces were ever built in the steel mill and on what dates they were built?

  useful and comprehensive vs. useless and vague. Nowakki (talk) 19:48, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  If you think that an article does not provide sufficent coverage of a subject, you are always welcome to add reliably sourced, neutral information to it. My personal list of articles I want to work on has been growing faster than my output since I started editing more than 17 years ago. Donald Albury 20:00, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  There would only be a problem if Wikipedia claimed to be complete. It does not, although it probably contains more information than any other encyclopedia ever has. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:10, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  my question is: why do i even have to ask the question. the steel industry is over a hundred years old, has employed millions of people (there are now millions of descendants of employees alive, the topic is taught each year in a large number of schools and universities). and nobody is interested in producing an encyclopedia about it that satisfies some criteria for greatness? Nowakki (talk) 20:20, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  Why did somebody not do the work that you don't want to do yourself? Hmm.... Why do you think the reasons you have are different from the reasons they have? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:15, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

  The content currently at Homestead Steel Works strikes me as being significantly more appropriate for a general encyclopedia entry about the subject, focusing on its history and broader significance, as opposed to comprehensive minutiae of its throughput. A full list of blast furnaces built by the mill would be material for an industry publication or an in-depth research paper, but is of little interest to the casual reader. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 20:17, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  the list of guest stars or the air date of episodes of Star Trek TNG is of actual interest to the reader? Nowakki (talk) 20:21, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  Well, they obviously have been of interest to one or more of our editors. If you feel that certain content in an article is too trivial for inclusion, you can always raise the issue on the talk page of the article. Unsourced content is always subject to being removed from Wikipedia, although how it is removed may create problems. Content that is sourced to reliable sources may also be removed, but only if there are strong policy reasons or there is a consensus to do so. Donald Albury 23:18, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  nothing wrong with the page.

  i said: not all information on a page needs to be suitable for a casual reader. Nowakki (talk) 23:55, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  Just for the record, I checked what Britannica, the canonical old-school "serious" encyclopedia, has to say about Homestead Steel Works. I'd venture that we're currently doing a better job at covering it than they are. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 18:18, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

  and yet, if you start reading contemporary material you will quickly find that the page is not helpful. if you read in a journal that Homestead has just added a new rolling mill, you'd want to (1) see that the conensus of sources on wikipedia confirm it and (2) get a quick overview of the history of development of the plant.

  pick any A-rated wikipedia article and compare it to Homestead and you will see that "better than Britannica" does not mean much. It's the 21st century. People are much more sophisticated and emancipated than Britannica old school folks. By the new standards, Homestead is barely milktoast. Nowakki (talk) 20:15, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

  I don't think there is a single existing encyclopedia that will meet your standards as you've described them in this discussion. So, feel free to rant about Wikipedia's inadequacies (or better yet, fix them), but the point remains that there is no more "serious" project for assembling all encyclopedic knowledge than the one on this website. It's like you showed up to the work camp for the Tower of Babel to complain that there isn't already an elevator installed. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 19:20, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

  @Jayron32: i don't agree.

  if you want information about star trek, you go to memory alpha. excellent wiki. if you can't stand all the popups, you go to the star trek section on wikipedia. also pretty good.

  look at steelmaking on wikipedia: it's not pretty.

  and then all you get is half a dozen middle management people who find ways to make it sound like this failure is in fact intentional.

  of course i am not blaming the free participation encyclopedia for lack of participation. but it strikes me as odd, that there seems to be no need for an encyclopedia of the topic. the only conclusion that makes sense to me is that billion dollar steel corporations have their own intelligence departments and have built their own encyclopedias and they are all proprietary. but i do not know. that's why i ask. Nowakki (talk) 08:32, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

  I never asked you to agree. You go on believing that giant steel corporations have a conspiracy to keep information from you. I lack the energy to even attempt to convince you out of such things. --Jayron32 10:59, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

  having proprietary information of any kind is not a conspiracy. Nowakki (talk) 11:14, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

  There's no need to have an outlandish theory (conspiracy or not) about this when the truth is much more prosaic. It's that no Wikipedia editor has shown enough interest in steel to write much about it, but lots of Wikipedia editors are interested in Star Trek. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:50, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

  Qapla'! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:49, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

  Lots of Wikipedia editors may be interested in Star Trek, but they don't include me, so it took me quite some time even to work out what language that was. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:15, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

  It has been noted that you've not experienced Shakespeare until you've read him in the original Klingon. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:06, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

I think the OP, who seems to have put in a fair bit of work on our coverage of steel companies, is being bagged on a bit unfairly (I'm pretty sure the "only conclusion" is tongue-in-cheek shitposting). My theory of the case: traditional encyclopedias produce (fewer) articles by employing disinterested subject-matter experts to write them. In a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, we cannot guarantee that editors are experts, or are acting in good faith, and many of our core policies aim to check the damage that could result from this. As these policies are applied mechanistically and rigorously, productive content contributors become tired of being treated like malicious idiots, and walk away; but not all subject matter is affected to the same extent. Subjects where articles can be built up by mechanically piling small factoids from easily-available online sources are less affected. Our policies on notability, sourcing, etc. are absolutely load-bearing and have some useful side effects (a well-written article is functionally equivalent to a literature review), but they also make it significantly more difficult for a person who does have expertise on a subject to share it, and this is usually obscured by vapid rah-rahing about how great our practices are. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Choess (talk • contribs) 03:47, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

From https://www.indianculture.gov.in/ebooks/census-india-punjab-part-ii-tables-vol-xvii-1931 (page 283), some information was added to Arain at Special:Diff/1151544874. The e-book is actually a scanned copy of the original printed material accessed by Archaeological Survey of India. Thus, I'm not sure what cite template should be used here. So, I need some help. Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 18:28, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

If it's content within the book that you're citing then {{cite book}} seems to be the template to use. But I would be very wary of using pre-1947 sources for anything to do with castes or tribes in India. They are mostly tainted by scientific racism, which was part of India's rulers' divide-and-rule strategy. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:00, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Frankly, afaik census and other government data from British period were mostly reliable. After all that is the data government officials relied on, the reason they started conducting census of this large a country at so much of an expense. I would like to invite more discussion on this if I'm wrong. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 21:28, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

I think it's a case of "all sources are reliable for something". Whether they're reliable depends on exactly what the claim is. "The 1931 British census said <whatever it said>" is okay. "The following is the sole, complete, and indisputable truth about India in 1931" ...not so much. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:08, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Agreed that cite-book would be the one to use. However, I'm concerned about this being a WP:PRIMARYSOURCE though. Am I wrong in making that assertion? --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:30, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

To me, it is more a kind of research journal? Because the numbers of people are facts, and authorities use surveys and statistical methods to find that number, just like one might use statistical methods to find the number of molecules in a given chemical sample. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 07:49, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Hello, I'd like to know if you can use sandboxes as a place where you can do page drafts. I was thinking of doing a page but I feel it would take too long to type up and I'd like to know if other users use sandboxes for this purpose. It feels like a really silly question I know but I just wanted to know if anyone uses them often or not so often as I've never used it before. Thank you, SarahTHunter (talk) 11:50, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

You can use your own sandbox or a specially created subpage under your user page (if you have registered an account), or the draft space. Donald Albury 13:44, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes, you can definitely use a sandbox as a place to draft pages or documents. In fact, this is a common use case for sandboxes, especially in collaborative environments where multiple users may be working on the same document or page.

A sandbox provides a secure and isolated environment where you can work on your draft without affecting the live system or other users. You can experiment with different layouts, formatting, and content without any consequences. Once you're satisfied with your draft, you can then transfer it to the live system or share it with other users for feedback.

In summary, sandboxes are a great tool for drafting pages or documents, and many users use them for this purpose. So it's not a silly question at all! If you haven't used a sandbox before, it's worth trying it out and seeing how it can help you with your work. PO1983 (talk) 19:55, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

As above, sure, use your sandbox. However, many of us save our sandbox for short tests. If you move your sandbox to main space, all the old sandbox history will be in the article history. It would be better to make a user subpage like User:SarahTHunter/Draft so the history holds only edits related to the article you are developing. You can replace "Draft" with any text. If you forget the name, visit your user page then click 'Page information' in the sidebar, then click 'Number of subpages of this page' for a list. Johnuniq (talk) 00:38, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

I create a new user subpage for each article I start [4]. Many (most?) of them never get past the "vague idea" stage, and some languish for years before I finally finish them. By using a new page for each one, if I ever do move them into mainspace, the history will be intact. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:46, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi, folks! On behalf of the Wikimedia LGBT+ user group, I'm posting this invitation to invite all of you to join us for this year's Queering Wikipedia conference on May 12, 14 and 17!

Come join us as we bring together people from all over to discuss how we can make our projects a safer and more welcoming place for LGBTQ+ Wikimedians and those who may want to join in the future. You can register for the conference here, and our schedule is available here. We also have in-person events for those who may be interested in attending in their local area.

We look forward to seeing you all at the conference, and thank you! --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 15:46, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

As far as I know, the Encyclopedia of Chinese allows a shortcut to be assigned to each LTA case. Can we do the same? Q𝟤𝟪 07:45, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Standard procedure here is that things are done if desirable and avoided otherwise. There is no reason to make shortcuts that may not be needed. A discussion about a particular case might lead to the creation of a shortcut. Johnuniq (talk) 09:03, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

I believe this is from some time in 2021. It's interesting how some of the media will note the presence or absence of an article at Wikipedia. (En:wp has an article now.) Omid Scobie writes a lot of gossip about the royals. This just caught my eye. (And the dude has eyebrows for days.)

From https://www.thesteepletimes.com/movers-shakers/who-is-omid-scobie/:

Apart from being a royal editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Omid Scobie claims to be “an authoritative voice on the lives and philanthropic endeavors of the royal family’s younger members.” Strangely though, very little is actually known about this mysterious meddler and given his supposed “fame,” isn’t it strange that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page about him? David10244 (talk) 13:02, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

It's not unique, Donna Strickland, Clarice Phelps and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes to mind. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:34, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

I saw a marsouin survey at the banner some time back, but when I read their terms and wanted to start the survey I got a "CDbConnection failed to open the DB connection." from marsouin.org. Now on clicking the banner, it is not even going to their page but I'm getting a "Internal Server Error" asking me to contact the server administrator at postmaster@questionnaires.marsouin.org Jay 💬 08:57, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Is there a meta page for every current banner we are having on enwiki, so if there are any issues, there is a central page to talk about it? I assume every user sees the same banner, and the banners don't change based on user account / IP user etc.? I came to Village Pump because I didn't know where else to go for this. Jay 💬 09:07, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

WP:VPT is the right place to report this. Johnuniq (talk) 09:10, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

I didn't want to post this on Technical, since this is an issue with an external server, and not Wikipedia. This post is more about handling banners in general, and the current banner issue in particular. Jay 💬 09:18, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Someone else has reported it, see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Banner link error. The banner has been disabled due to that report. Johnuniq (talk) 10:18, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

hello @Jay and all,

Yes we've had a problem of capacity in our servers (we also thought that less people would be interested in answering...)

Anyhow, the capacities are upgraded and the questionnaire is back, but the banner will be delayed a bit for the English Wikipedia's survey (probably begining of June).

Of course you can answer and feedback any question before!

Thank you all for your understanding! Jullienn (talk) 08:50, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Please see this petition to amend the arbitration policy to remove Jimbo Wales's ability to overturn ArbCom decisions, which needs a 100 signatures as per the formal amendment process. Beyond My Ken (talk) 05:14, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Per Petscan:24767247, there are currently 97 articles that are tagged as both having unclear notability and being unreferenced BLPs. If it was just a few, I would simply nominate for deletion, but that feels inappropriate for this many articles. Would a mass deletion or mass PROD be appropriate here? Given the sensitive nature of BLP articles, I think that addressing BLPs which are both unreferenced and non-notable should be high priority. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:18, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Of course it should, but we need to ensure that the tags are correct - anyone can put a tag on an article just as anyone can create one. I am actually surprised that the number is so low, low enough that existing deletion processes can take care of things without any panic about a "mass" anything. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:41, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm sure there are many, many more unreferenced non-notable BLP articles that simply aren't tagged. I've AfD'd and BLPPRODed several such articles over the last few weeks. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:46, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

I checked 3 of them at random; and all of the ones I checked, while they don't have inline citations to RSs, are ineligible for BLP prod due to the presence of sources in other forms (such as external links). At least one of them has been around since 2005. They seem to be mostly complex, edge cases that don't fit neatly into the "easy to dispose of or fix" boxes.~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 17:55, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

The complexity is why I made a post here instead of just dealing with it myself. There are plenty that I'm still trying to figure out what to do with. I felt these ones leaned toward the "easy to dispose of" end of the spectrum because they've been tagged for notability. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:09, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't have the same faith as you in notability taggers as opposed to article creators. One may be wrong as much as the other. Taking ONUnicorn's lead I too checked three at random (asking random.org to give me three numbers from 1 to 96) and found one that was already at AfD and two that, if I had a bit more time today, I would take to AfD. That is just using existing procedures, rather than asking for mass deletion. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:41, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

My faith in article creators that create entirely uncited articles is approximately zero. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:55, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

I checked one on the list, it was created 17 years ago...expectations were a bit looser back then. I found two reliable sources and one WP:ABOUTSELF so added them. I still nom'd to AFD for lack of notability, but that I was able to find a few sources tells me that the lack of sources on any on that list might just be for lack of looking. Schazjmd (talk) 19:00, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Why, then, is your faith in notability taggers close to 100%, which it must be for you to propose this? They are the same people. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:26, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Because unsourced content is at best an acceptable loss and at worst actively harmful. I'd like to delete all unreferenced BLPs, but that's not as plausible as simply deleting the ones that have been tagged for notability for several years. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:51, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

We had that debate many years ago, and the result was the WP:BLPPROD procedure which already allows all unreferenced BLPs to be deleted. What is so wrong with that procedure that you need extra powers? Phil Bridger (talk) 20:31, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

The fact that there are still over a thousand unreferenced articles about living people that are ineligible for BLPPROD, many of which are about non-notable people. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:34, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Support. I just came across Alan Kay, and found that Kay himself raised numerous factual errors on the talk page in 2019, most of which are still in the article today. If that's true for Kay, bet it's true for these others. It's negligent; and I hope that one day, WP:BLP will require all uncited BLP material to be removed on sight; risk of harm & citogenesis is far too high. DFlhb (talk) 23:23, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

I would support much stricter measures on BLP articles. Beyond the nearly two thousand articles in Category:Unreferenced BLPs, there are nearly 95,000 in Category:BLP articles lacking sources. I'm trying to revive WP:Unreferenced BLP rescue, but there seems to be little interest. The only way this is going to see any sort of resolution is with drastic action. And special attention needs to go to sports bios in particular; working on unreferenced BLPs has given me serious doubts about the ability of editors of sports topics to manage sourcing in that area. I've seen multiple well established sports editors slap a single citation (sometimes a bare link or a general ref) onto an article and call it sourced. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:48, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Saw the thread on Lev's talk page, and this thread. 95k is crazy; the idea of adding unsourced stuff, and relying on other editors to add cites (who could just as well add the material from scratch with sources) is silly. Not familiar with sports bios, but I bet it's caused by mass creation sourced to a database, so ineligible for BLPPROD; yuck.

Fixing would be hard. IMO: change BLP so content not cited inline must be removed; and expand BLPPROD to match the GNG (must be met inline, not "presumed"). That'd be the most minimal way to clear the backlog. Then to reduce the inflow: if you create a BLP, you must bring it to B-class before you create another. Though these ideas would probably land me in the same place as this guy. DFlhb (talk) 01:33, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

I completely forgot to mention, there are another 26k BLPs that are tagged with the regular "needs more sources" template instead of the BLP variant. And those are just the ones that were tagged at all. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:59, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Most of those were tagged by bot. Specifically, we had two bots identify articles without little blue clicky numbers, and then another bot go back through to remove the ones that editors had since added little blue clicky numbers to. But the bot changed the now-sourced articles from "unref" to "needs more sources" (there's always room for more sources, right?), so now we have thousands of tagged articles that no human ever thought to complain about.

Consider the 26k BLPs you found in the search results. The first is Sachin Tendulkar, which has 472 refs. That is not a typo. It already has four hundred seventy-two sources, and it's still in Category:All articles needing additional references. Presumably you are not thinking of this kind of article as unsourced. Why's it in the cat? The cat is added automatically by some templates, and is not a comment on any human's judgment of the overall situation for an article.

The second is Jack Black, with 101 inline citations. Why's it in the list? Well, almost a decade ago, someone tagged a single sub-section. That section now contains 10 little blue clicky numbers. Will any editor ever remove that outdated tag? Maybe, maybe not. After all, the reason we sent that bot around to clean up the unref cats is that even in the most obvious cases, most editors won't remove outdated tags.

The third is Lionel Richie, which has 49 inline citations. It was tagged three years ago, when it had 39 citations. The median number of inline citations in a Wikipedia article is a small single-digit number, so why are we tagging something with dozens of refs? I dunno. It wasn't the only tag added, so I'd guess that this really wasn't the primary concern.

All of which is to say: Don't trust those tags, and don't overinterpret those category names. The situation is not as bad as it sounds. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:58, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing I don't think looking at the number of sources is the correct approach. Having a lot of sources is not the same as having sufficient sourcing. Take Lionel Richie, for example. Those 49 citations aren't doing a lot of good if there are still nine paragraphs that don't have a single inline citation on this BLP. I'm starting with Category:All unreferenced BLPs because it's the most straightforward and its backlog is relatively manageable at "only" ~2,000. But the fact that a BLP has a handful of inline citations doesn't mean it's sufficient. There should not be unreferenced statements in BLPs at all. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:18, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

@Thebiguglyalien, there is no policy or other agreement that "There should not be unreferenced statements in BLPs at all". The last time I checked, the policy said there should not be any "contentious material" that is unreferenced or poorly referenced. It is therefore still "legal" to have non-contentious material about BLPs included in articles without an inline citation.

The most recent past BLP at TFA and the next BLP in the list (Angel Locsin and Judy Ann Santos) both begin with three unreferenced paragraphs and later include several individual sentences within paragraphs that don't have ref tags at the end. I doubt that there are many BLPs of significant length that meet your personal goal of not having any unreferenced statements at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:22, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Since verifiability means other people using the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source, uncited content is inherently a problem to be fixed, not something we tolerate long-term. We were super cavalier with citations in the early Wild West Wikipedia, but we've inexorably moved further and further away from that, and it's inevitable that we'll eventually move to "must be verified" rather than "must be verifiable". BLPs are the best place to start, due to the risk of real-world harm and citogenesis. The most practical way to start is to require all new additions to BLPs to be cited or reverted on sight; and then figure out what to do with the old uncited crap that's doubtlessly filled with self-promotion, defamation, inaccuracies and the like.

Thebiguglyalien, I first refrained from posting this since I didn't want the conversation to veer away from your initial query; but really, there's no point to try to address this when the inflow valve is still wide open. We should first close the industrial-strength sewage pipe before we try to scoop out bits of poop with a spoon; systemic problems require systemic solutions — DFlhb (talk) 02:40, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

I would very much like for this to veer away from my original query if it means actual progress on this issue. You've pretty much summed up my thoughts on the matter here. WP:BLPPROD was a step in the right direction in preventing new 100% uncited BLPs from being created, but it's still wildly insufficient. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:44, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Cool; here are two practical incremental proposals: (1) strengthen BLPPROD to require one reliable source that is secondary and independent of the subject and provides significant coverage, not just a homepage or database, and (2) enforce that through NPP. Although it should also be enforced for those with the autopatrolled bit, but I'm not sure how that could be done. DFlhb (talk) 04:02, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

While I have a lot of sympathy for this goal, and despite my belief that a Wikipedia:An article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing, (1) means "repeal WP:NPROF and delete most of the articles about academics", which may not be practical.

You'll also run into problems with editors having incompatible ideas about what constitutes a secondary source. (See old rant here.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:09, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Any other ideas? The intent behind mine, was that we should strive to minimise the amount of BLPs in a "neither easy to dispose of, nor to fix" state (reusing ONUnicorn's term) DFlhb (talk) 13:55, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Why should only easy articles be wanted? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:26, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Verifiability means other people using the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source", but notice the absence of any words that sound like "through the sole and exact method of looking at the little blue clicky numbers at the end of that sentence."

WP:V, if some "other people" can find a reliable source that says the same thing as the Wikipedia article, even if they have to use a web search engine or visit a library to do so, then that uncited material is still verifiable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:00, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

I've been doing a bit of BLP cleanup recently, @Thebiguglyalien I've also marked Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue as active since there seems to be more activity here.

Here's what I've noticed going through a number of articles.

1) Tags are not always correct, I've run over a number of articles with references, that the unsourced tag does not reflect. Perhaps a bot run to update these tags would be best before discussing mass-prod?

2) There was a mass-prod run many many years ago, we should look at what led to that and the parameters used.

3) We need stricter notability requirements for sports people. There's amass of minor sports players that are added, I don't see the encyclopedic value (my own opinion) in maintaining a database per WP:NOTDATABASE. I do wonder if these are added by the players themselves, as a bunch of the creators had very little edits.

4) BLPPROD should be updated, if there are no references to point to notability, then we should be able to deleted. There's so many minor folks that have no notable coverage that do not meet BLPPROD because theres an external link to a mass collection database Mr.weedle (talk) 16:02, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't know what the best solution is. I'm just trying to get any sort of progress. But after working with these articles for the last month, I've come to the conclusion that sports articles are by far the biggest issue here, and it seems that the sports section of Wikipedia has been operating with very little sitewide accountability for at least a decade. And this is clearly still a problem, because a recent attempt to create even the tiniest shred of accountability (a proposal to draftify 960 minimally sourced microstubs of questionable notability that were mass-created by a single banned contributor) proved very controversial. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:38, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

@Mr.weedle, you referred to NOTDATABASE, in reference to a page that cites a database but that isn't, itself, a database entry. Do you think that NOTDATABASE means that we're not supposed to cite databases? I know that Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions, and people often guess the meaning just from the WP:UPPERCASE label. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:23, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

A good portion of these sports articles are just statistics and tables. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:30, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Which is apparently what we think a Wikipedia article about sports should look like. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:08, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Who is "we"? The small handful of editors that mass created these bios in the thousands and then forgot about them? Based on the policy at WP:MASSCREATION, it seems the community has decided that this is not how these articles should be, but now we're stuck with the mess from when editors got away with it.

I feel like there's some sort of miscommunication here, because we're basically saying "we should encourage thorough referencing in BLPs". The current state of referencing in BLPs, while often in compliance with policy, is still abysmal. You can't look at the articles for Antoine Grauss or Bill Hogaboam and tell me that we should be satisfied with them or the thousands of other articles that look just like them. There is room for improvement, and I am seeking that improvement. For articles where such improvement is not possible due to a lack of WP:SIGCOV, then deletion is the appropriate remedy. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:17, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Any way to run Earwig en masse? The Petscan you linked in the OP included John Rose (organist), which seemed to have been wholly copyvio. Would like to be able to run Earwig on all unsourced or mostly unsourced BLPs, which should at least clear out a few — DFlhb (talk) 06:15, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Earwig's tool is pretty intensive when doing a full check. As it says on the tool page, it can take up to a minute to run a full check of the Internet for one WP article, and may time out under a heavy load. A batch mode for Earwig's tool may not be a good idea. Donald Albury 13:51, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

I think this is a clear description of the problem: The current state of referencing in BLPs, while often in compliance with policy, is still abysmal.

"We" wrote the policy, and any article that complies with it is okay. However, "you" want these already-compliant articles to be held to a standard that is significantly higher than that the one that "we" agreed to and documented in the policy. I'm in favor of high standards, but at some point, if an article technically complies with the policies, then there is an actual consensus for accepting articles like that. If you want higher standards, go propose changes to the policy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:00, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I think the broader issue is the lack of notability along with the lack of sourcing. For example, not everyone gets a wikipedia entry just because they were in a couple of regional tennis tournaments. Mass creation of articles is a waste of the communities time. There are real articles that lack sources that are well worth community effort, but it's -exhausting- to have to wade through a bunch of non-notable items to find and improve them. Can you imagine if every song had it's own entry? It would be chaos. Mr.weedle (talk) 22:57, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

• I just picked one at random from the noted category (thanks for the referral to random.org, by the way), Herma Auguste Wittstock and find that it's pretty much a port of the German article, which I think is how a substantial number of these articles get created. As for why the German article has not been tagged for removal ... differences in retention policies? --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 14:22, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

  It's definitely possible that it's policy difference. But working on these, I'm seeing lots of them that should probably be deleted. Far more than I'm willing to AfD/PROD at once. That particular article has been around since January 2006, meaning it took us over 17 years to tag it for removal. So a big factor is just finding the articles that need to be removed. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:30, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

  I added a talk-page comment related to the article's being de-proded by nominator > Talk:Herma Auguste Wittstock#Fate of article? --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:26, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

  oh - and I was able to delete one of the unsource-BLP tracking categories! Progress. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:36, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Is there a guideline that describes or limits what sort of articles can be linked on the main page? WP:DYK, WP:ITN, and WP:OTD all have their own rules for what can be posted, but how much of this is based on sitewide consensus and how much is WP:LOCALCONSENSUS? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:56, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Each section has its own standards; what makes an article qualify for, say the "Today's Featured Article" section is different than what makes an article qualify for the "Did You Know" section. There are no universal standards, obviously. Featured status is appropriate for Today's Featured Article, but then to apply that standard to all of the other sections would be unreasonable. --Jayron32 14:24, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Does that mean that all of the criteria and processes for each of these corners of Wikipedia are based on WP:LOCALCONSENSUS? There's got to be some sort of sitewide consensus that at least sets out the basics of the main page. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:27, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

As far as I know; while the criteria for each section are decided indeptendently, there seems to be a broad, unwritten consensus that articles are not appropriate for main page display while they are at AFD, or if they have orange-level maintenance tags. Those two seem to generally hold regardless of which section they are appearing on. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 17:51, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Those processes are not LOCALCONSENSUS because the entire community participated in creating them. LOCALCONSENSUS talks about "Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time". In these examples, we have a broader group of editors, in multiple places, at multiple times. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:07, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

There's a convincing-looking screenshot in With great power comes great responsibility alleging that the WMF once said this famous spider-man quote. However, I can't find the screenshotted page anywhere. Aaron Liu (talk) 19:44, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Looks like it's from Editing Wikipedia articles on psychology.pdf (from Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Education program handout) — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 19:51, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Wow, great find! Is there any reason the screenshot is so dark though? Aaron Liu (talk) 19:55, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Where can I find it? Starling's link to the archive no longer exists. 94.191.137.107 (talk) 12:35, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

https://dumps.wikimedia.org/archive/ is one place. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 13:36, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

In the assessment of articles for WikiProjects, what should the correct assessment for set index articles be — "List" class or "Disambuation"? Thanks in advance. Ashwin Baindur (User:AshLin) (talk) 06:02, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

I am thinking this is a kind of disambiguation, so that would be an appropriate designation. But it probably does not matter if it is type none. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:41, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

I'd say List. A set index is a type of list article. It is not a disambiguation page, though it can serve a similar function. Certes (talk) 13:39, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Certes that a "set index is a type of list article" and not a disambiguation page. However, it can be confusing whether a specific page is a set index article or disambiguation page and I think there are some set index articles that would be more correctly identified as disambiguation pages. older ≠ wiser 13:44, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

I think they are essentially disambiguation pages, they list different things of the same name, and attract incorrect incoming links just like dab pages. DuncanHill (talk) 13:59, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Not exactly. For example, articles on surnames and given names often include a list of person with the name, but very few of the persons are commonly known by only the surname or given name. The distinction is that the presumption is any links to a disambiguation page other that intentional links are in error. At least theoretically, one could correctly link to set index for the content of that article. Unfortunately, many set index 'articles' are little more than re-badged disambiguation pages. That said, I'm not sure it really matters all that much how these are categorized in wikiproject assessments unless a wikiproject has some particular interest in making a distinction between them. older ≠ wiser 14:18, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

And, in fact, most set-index articles, even surname ones, probably should have most links disambiguated and the few that are intentional go through redirects indicating such. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 14:47, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Please immediately apply Revision Deletion to all editing actions of User:I can't do this anymore, because the user's remarks are extremely disgusting or obscene. And a large amount of meaningless repetitive content (at least 10,000 bytes or more) is likely to cause damage to some old browsers or mobile phone applications, or directly cause the program to crash. ALSTROEMERIA🌸Čijukas Kuvajamas 08:31, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Also I'm not sure if this user's editing violated Florida law (WMF is bound by Florida law) because child pornography is illegal in Florida. Although florida does not legally prohibit general pornography. ALSTROEMERIA🌸Čijukas Kuvajamas 08:34, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

 Already done Administrators notice board is a better place to request this. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:39, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

@Fumikas Sagisavas: For future ref, please don't post requests like this on a widely-watched noticeboard. Better methods are described at WP:REVDELREQUEST. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:33, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

I found a way that a vandal can artificially increase his edit count to get to extended confirmed faster. He can simply just keep reverting and restoring a single action on an article. I figured this out when I undid someone's revision on a page by accident and ended up restoring/reverting 3 times before I just set the version to the one before I messed with it. It counted my restorations and revisions as 3 edits. Blitzfan51 the manager 19:41, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

@Blitzfan51 that is generally considered Wikipedia:Gaming the system, and if someone does it there are multiple ways to catch them. Additionally, if someone spams edits to make EConfirmed, we generally will revoke it and make them apply after they make legitimate edits later. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:29, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

As the main page's talk page is not open for editing, I'm putting this here. The caption could be read to imply that Germany started WWI by occupying the Alsace region. This neglects the fact that the Alsace region is famous in history for having passed back and forth between the two identities. This pattern has persisted since late Roman times. The name, Alsace, actually derives from Old German. So at best, the changing possession is a sort of time-honored background jitter, whereas the caption reflects the French political framing from 1887, which we should just not be presenting in Wikipedia voice. So to make a concrete proposal, I think the matter would be resolved by not presenting this as a singular incident, but rather one in a long series of change-of-hands of this region. 2003:F9:9F01:2501:6249:B723:4471:A82E (talk) 10:23, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

This is just the opening paragraph of Alsace–Lorraine. If you have a concrete proposal how to word this more succinctly, please post at WP:ERRORS, the specialised page for issues with Main Page content. —Kusma (talk) 10:32, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Realised this after my wikilinks for closing policy kept getting redirected to WP:COMMONNAME. Is there any good reason why these two spellings of the same word redirect to different policies? Curious as to the rationale and if it needs to be rectified. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 10:25, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

• Hmm… they don’t actually redirect us to different policies (both redirect to WP:Article titles)… the confusion is that they each redirect to different sections of that policy. Blueboar (talk) 11:55, 16 May 2023 (UTC)
• WP:SOFIXIT. --Jayron32 12:55, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Redirected so both go to WP:COMMONNAME, WP:CRITERIA seems sufficient for the summary section on the page. If anyone objects, they may feel free to undo my redirect. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 17:10, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Cryptocurrency mixer  Tornado cash is under sanctions U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY. While under sanctions, the project changed the site address. Is it possible to specify a new address in the article about the project?

1. Does a reputable site (as example https://cointelegraph.com/) indicate that the site is working at a new address?
2. Do Coinmarketcap or coingesko indicate a new legal website address on the Tornado Cash page?
3. The site is under sanctions and therefore it is impossible to specify a legal link to the site.Vladlen Terezhe (talk) 10:02, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Firstly, there are relatively few reliable cryptocurrency-related websites, as far as Wikipedia is concerned - and the appropriate place to ask whether these sites are acceptable is the Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, not here. As for linking the site if an appropriate source can be found, I can think of no good reason why Wikipedia would wish to assist a cryptocurrency-related website sanctioned for money-laundering to evade such blacklisting. AndyTheGrump (talk) 10:56, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

The "main menu" is at the upper left corner of every page, or if hidden, it hides in a square in the upper left corner, to the left of the Wikipedia globe. That menu has a list of links, including "Contribute" which doesn't link to anything. (It apparently means contribute to an article, as there is also a working link labeled "Donate".) Is that a bug, a feature, or too hard to fix? It happens on both Windows 10 and 11, and two different browsers. You'd think they'd either link it to an appropriate page or delete the menu item. Art LaPella (talk) 01:14, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

It's a heading for the next five options, I think. Ian Dalziel (talk) 01:29, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes it is. Have a look at a page in another skin, such as proper Vector or MonoBook. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 05:52, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

If it confuses one person enough to actually post about it, it's likely confusing another thousand people who haven't, fwiw. -- Avocado (talk) 22:41, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

The next stage in the Universal Code of Conduct process is establishing a Building Committee to create the charter for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C). The Building Committee has been selected. Read about the members and the work ahead on Meta-wiki.

-- UCoC Project Team, 04:20, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

The Foundation's Form 990 published today shows that the WMF paid 5 executives a combined total of over $1.2 million in severance pay. About half of this was pocketed by Katherine Maher. Individual figures as given on page 50:

• Katherine Maher $623,286 (over 150% of her base compensation in her last full year)
• Janeen Uzzell $324,748 (over 100% of her base compensation in her last full year)
• Heather Walls $153,612
• Lynette Logan $74,645
• Anthony Negrin $70,920

In 2021 there were six WMF executives receiving total compensation of more than $400,000; likely to be more now.

For historical comparison, the severance payment Lila Tretikov got in 2016 was $262.5K, approx. 77% of her $342K base compensation in 2015, her last full year. Andreas JN466 20:24, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

I dunno, I'm pretty sure I've provided at least 1/10 the value Katherine Maher has to Wikipedia, I wouldn't mind some of that cash. --Golbez (talk) 20:50, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

That’s a bold statement. Frostly (talk) 17:38, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

How does this compare with typical severance settlements regarding similar posts in nonprofit organisations? Anyone have any data? AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:56, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Apparently this has been recognized as a problem, and the "Highlights of Form 990" blog post talks about severance and links to an earlier blog post which has a small mention of "new standardized severance policy for staff at all levels of one month of severance pay for every year of their employment, up to nine months (unless local laws require otherwise)", or in other words 75% base compensation maximum. Matma Rex talk 21:36, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Now we know what those donations are going towards. On a more serious note, we do need to take care that the WMF structure is not captured by profiteering opportunists. BD2412 T 22:20, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

I wonder whether the new "standardized" severance policy still requires people to agree to a "You agree to refrain from publicly criticizing, denigrating, or otherwise disparaging WMF, WMF Board members, WMF officers, or WMF staff members, or otherwise take any action which could reasonably be expected to adversely affect the reputation of same" clause (and/or "You agree not to disclose the existence, contents or negotiations leading to this Agreement, unless required by law") to get any severance. Anomie⚔ 11:37, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

If the WMF has identified a role which is unnecessary, and paid a year's salary to make that ongoing commitment go away, then that may be a wise investment which will repay itself every year. However, if the WMF just took on someone else to do essentially the same job then we need to look more closely. For example, if a departing employee didn't do their job adequately, or decided to leave of their own accord, then we must ask why they should be compensated for going. Other explanations are possible, and I make no comment on any individual listed above, as I am not in a position to assess their contributions. Certes (talk) 22:59, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Reorgs are expensive, as Certes notes. When the WMF board embarked on a journey to replace the management and decided to get a new ED from outside, surely they knew it would come at a cost, but they decided the benefits were still higher. Upfront cash outlays like severance pay are more visible than other costs, but often they're worth it: a bitter departure can also come at considerable costs, as does any delay in implementing necessary changes.

Personally I think WMF management has performed very poorly for the past 10 years or more, and change needs to start at the top. If anything I hope the WMF has budgeted for more severance costs this year, so that changes can happen at a suitable speed and not be unnecessarily delayed by personal circumstances. A layoff equal to 5 % of the headcount was already announced for 2023, so I wouldn't be surprised to see one-time expenditure of 10 % of the annual budget to make it possible (especially if the more expensive USA-based roles are involved).

That said, the mantra of "professionalisation", which was constantly repeated since the early 2010s to justify the increases in wage expenditure for top and middle management, has only wrecked damage on the Wikimedia mission, so it would probably be healthy for WMF to reduce overall management costs in the next few years. Less managers often means less ill-advised vanity projects thrown to us just for the sake of justifying salaries or promotions. Nemo 07:05, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

It's worth noting that even the present WMF management appears to acknowledge that these payments were excessive. A Diff post published last month describes new guidelines that ...

have also provided an opportunity to better align our processes globally when staff leave the Foundation. This includes a new standardized severance policy for staff at all levels of one month of severance pay for every year of their employment, up to nine months (unless local laws require otherwise) – any exceptions require a joint recommendation by the Head of Talent & Culture and the General Counsel, with final approval from the CEO.

If I read this correctly, this would cap severance at 75% of annual (base?) compensation (for employees with a tenure of nine years or more); someone who has only been at the WMF for a little over two years (like Uzzell, for example) would only get around 1/6 or 1/4 of their compensation.

As can be seen, however, even this new policy still allows for "exceptions", plus there have been cases recently of steep pay rises for executives in their final year at the WMF (which might then obviously also increase the severance). So it seems by no means assured that the new policy will prevent the recurrence of such large severance payments, which are ultimately paid from global Wikipedia donations. Right? Andreas JN466 12:18, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Local laws permitting, the pay rise just before departure could be countered by handing out not one month's pay per year of service, but one twelfth of their total salary to date. The cap could still stay, though I expect the very few staff who have served for more than nine years didn't earn much ten years ago. Certes (talk) 12:30, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

For an interesting historical overview of WMF executive pay see m:Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries. The page has just been updated and reorganised. Andreas JN466 11:20, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

It'd be nice if the WMF at least reimbursed me for the books I've had to buy to write comprehensive articles that help contribute to someone's bloated pay. Darkwarriorblake / Vote for something that matters 12:04, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I must say that is what still rankles with me as well: the money I spent on books back in the day (before the Wikipedia Library, and before the ballooning of these pay checks). Chipping in was all well and good as long as everybody was poor. But then ... Andreas JN466 12:40, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Should we fork then? CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 12:11, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Also the WMF fundraising giving me https://xkcd.com/1948/ vibes... CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 12:14, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

That's a tough question which deserves its own page, if not its own website. The WMF has many faults, but there are signs that the juggernaut is starting to turn and remember its former core values of serving readers and helping editors to do so. Forking is possible but far from easy given a very wealthy owner which controls our trademarks, URLs and hardware. Certes (talk) 15:17, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

No chance. Too big to fail. At this point it (like Facebook and others) can only be disrupted by something better, never replaced by an equivalent. DFlhb (talk) 17:42, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Mastodon seems to be replacing Twitter, the only disruption being growing dislike of its ownership. But this thread isn't the best place for such discussions. Certes (talk) 18:33, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm periodically reminded of Mastodon only every now and then when someone brings it up, a bit like the concept of an actual mastodon, and it's still not clear to me how one is supposed to use it. Cheers, ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 12:53, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Does Wikipedia use Inkscape for their content, such as maps, crests, diagrams and other symbols? Espallosgi (talk) 21:09, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Inkscape is a tool. Any tool can be used by a Wikipedia editor to produce output in a format supported by Wikipedia, such as SVG. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:16, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

I have created graphics for Wikipedia using Inkscape, but plenty of alternatives are available. No particular tool is recommended. Certes (talk) 21:53, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

I create my SVGs using WordPad, and view the result in my browser. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:02, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

TLDR: Did you make an edit first, or did you create an account before your first edit?

A conversation over at Meta-Wiki about m:IP masking has revived my curiosity about how experienced Wikipedia editors got started. Specifically, was your first edit as an IP, or did you Special:CreateAccount before making that very first edit?

For example, my first edit was as an IP, probably sometime in 2005. It was probably fixing punctuation, because when someone puts a comma in the wrong place, I'm in the https://xkcd.com/386/ "Duty Calls" mindset.

This is meant to be a fun question, and I hope that a lot of registered editors are willing to help me find out what's common. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

1. WhatamIdoing (=volunteer-me) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
2. Pretty sure I did.. — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 01:18, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
3. Aye, I don't remember which page but I did make one or two edits before registering. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:05, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
4. Just a few typos. I show an unreasonable level of hatred for sites which expect me to register just to read content they could have served me instead of a registration form, but soon realised that Wikipedia did not fall into that category and was well worth joining. Certes (talk) 11:44, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
5. I made about ~150 edits over 3 years as an IP, before creating my account when I wanted to create either a redirect or a disambiguation page (don't remember which), which I couldn't do while logged out. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 13:11, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
6. Random minor type edits back in 2005, but if I started on a new project today I'd register first. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:14, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
7. One edit early in 2005, added a phrase that a radio station's call letters supposedly represented, then waited to see if it would be reverted because it was unsourced. Created an account in August 2005 to make one edit, started editing in earnest in October 2005. - Donald Albury 16:12, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
8. Obviously. But maybe I don't count here, since I never made an edit with the account I eventually created. 199.208.172.35 (talk) 16:55, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
9. Yes, and I revealed it many years ago, see User:Redrose64#Editing. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:15, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
10. Minor edits. Dege31 (talk) 22:22, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
11. Yes, but I probably wouldn't if I was starting out today. the wub "?!" 21:57, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
12. I edited for quite some time before making an account. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:25, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
13. I think it was about a month as an IP. Art LaPella (talk) 23:38, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
14. I edited for a few months as an IP years ago, improving a few pages here and there, but I mostly did anti-vandalism. OutsideNormality (talk) 16:50, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
15. Probably around a dozen small edits in January and February of 2013. I don't think I would've became a regular editor here if registration had been required. — SamX [talk · contribs] 04:34, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
16. I absolutely did, probably for several months in late 2005 to early 2006. I was so excited to find a website I could actually correct. I didn't register until I found I wanted to write a missing article. Ntsimp (talk) 19:33, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
17. Yes, I did. But that was back in 2002, which was another time & another Wikipedia. -- llywrch (talk) 18:49, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
18. Made hundreds of edits in 2014 before registering. – SD0001 (talk) 17:32, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
19. I loved to contribute with no account, and I still do. --NaBUru38 (talk) 21:27, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
20. I edited for probably half a year as an IP before making an account. Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 21:13, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

1. I was read-only for quite awhile and then made my first edit using this account. RudolfRed (talk) 04:33, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
2. Ditto, but I read Wikipedia through a mirror. Once I found out this site could be edited, I created my account and began contributing. Graham87 06:12, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
3. If I recall I created an account to participate on talk pages, editing after that. CMD (talk) 06:54, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
4. I seem to have created an account in May 2006, made my first edit with it in June 2006 (seems unlikely - possibly I edited pages which have since been deleted?). I suppose I might have edited earlier as an IP but have no memory of doing so! PamD 07:57, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

   @PamD: Your earliest deleted edits are three from 15 June 2006, all to The University of Nottingham Hillwalking and Rambling Society. Your earliest live edit is from 9 June 2006 - six days earlier. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:09, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

   @Redrose64: Ah yes, I remember that article. I wonder why I created an account a month before I used it ... will never know. I do know that I was encouraged to edit by my former colleague, the late lamented GuillaumeTell. PamD 07:07, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

5. My first edit was to an AfD discussion to which I had been canvassed, but I didn't make a comment that the canvasser would have liked. I don't think that I was aware that I could contribute to the discussion without creating an account. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:40, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
6. I seem to have created this account at the end of 2012 with my first edit in late 2013. Although I did not start regularly editing till March 2017. Paulpat99 (talk) 09:24, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
7. Created this account in case I ever wanted to edit. My first edit was two years later. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:05, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
8. It was so long ago (early 2003) that I can no longer be sure, but I think I created this account for my first edit. Probably unknowable at this point. Skynxnex (talk) 18:35, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
9. I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure it was an account with a plan Nosebagbear (talk) 18:56, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
10. I've only ever edited logged out by accident. I don't think I knew it was possible to edit logged out. Had some trouble even finding the edit button. Schierbecker (talk) 01:48, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
11. My first wiki was another in 2005/2006ish timeframe in an ecosystem that had an expectation of logging in (video gaming). Besides it being natural here, I understood the privacy context for logging in as well rather than editing logged out. IznoPublic (talk) 02:38, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
12. I created an account to avoid my IP being shown publicly. Frostly (talk) 19:02, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
13. I had the idea (I don't remember where from) that I could do some Wikipedia copyediting as a distraction / procrastination activity. As I recall I created an account because it was recommended at the time – I remember being annoyed that my preferred username was already taken. Wham2001 (talk) 15:30, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
14. I had the idea that if I write something I am responsible for my words. unfortunately people tend to misuse this.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:30, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Should this discussion refer to editors whose earliest edits were signed by users who signed off their names in red letters, because they had not learnt how to set up user pages? That was the case with me, and you might, if you traced back the history of some articles far enough, find edits I signed as being by ACarl or Cardamom, both in red letters. YTKJ (talk) 19:12, 29 May 2023 (UTC) You can find some edits by "Cardamom" on the article on the Psychology of Religion, dating back to July 2005. YTKJ (talk) 19:17, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Many editors "sign off their names in red letters" because they see no need to set up a user page, just as many people (like myself) don't have a presence on social media or an email account. Anyone wishing to contact such an editor can set up a user talk page for them themself or ping the editor. 156.61.250.251 (talk) 08:19, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

A banner currently on my watchlist reads:

Please help us better understand what you do on Wikipedia! By responding to this questionnaire created by an international group of university researchers and members of the Wikipedia community. (Answers are collected outside the Wikimedia Foundation's servers, by the public research center Marsouin.org, in France)

I spent 15 minutes or so answering questions, then was called away to attend to a domestic issue for a few minutes. When I returned, I spent another few minutes answering the questions on the current page, hit "next", and was told:

We are sorry but your session has expired.

I therefore advise people to avoid this egregious waste of time. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:25, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

I just hate things that do this. Don't people realise that by taking part in a survey we are helping them, rather than ourselves, so no such obstacles should be put in our way? Phil Bridger (talk) 19:59, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello @Pigsonthewing. Sorry to hear that; of course we want people to be able to answer as smoothly as possible! As said below, we are going to expend the session time, before turning to other solutions Jullienn (talk) 07:33, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

We've asked the server host to extend the session time (in the meantime, I've add a sentence reminding to "save" the session. Hope that helps Jullienn (talk) 10:08, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I got the "session expired" message a few minutes ago in what seemed like spurious circumstances as well. Feels like a blunder in the back end. BSVulturis (talk) 06:46, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

@Jullienn: is the point of contact for this survey/banner. Pyb en résidence (talk) 09:17, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello, I am sorry to hear that; we have chosen to not put cookies, and people can register their session, but you are right it has to be volunteer. Do you think putting cookies would be better? Jullienn (talk) 07:25, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Add me to the list of people who couldn't complete the survey, whose session suddenly expired without warning or reason (I answered the questions in what I would consider a reasonable time). Jullienn: it's not that people can register their session, it's that they are apparently required to do so. Most sites would handle this with a session cookie which stores the session identifier while the browser window is open. Registering a session would then save the cookie in a more persistent (still temporary but non-session) cookie, so you can close the window and return later. Perhaps you're saving the session ID in the querystring parameters, in which case the time is set way too short or it's malfunctioning in some other way. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 07:53, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I think what Nicolas meant to say is that the office is going to extend the session time. 156.61.250.251 (talk) 08:26, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Exact. I've also add a sentence to remind that the answers can be saved (a button on the top-right of the pages). Jullienn (talk) 10:26, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

• This survey is currently on for ~5% of the traffic. I did eventually take it, but it is excruciatingly long. — xaosflux ^Talk 10:18, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  @Xaosflux, how long did it take for you? (we've test several configurations, but you are probably on the extreme, I think it's important to have a fair estimation on the front page Jullienn (talk) 10:28, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  @Jullienn certainly more than 10 mins, maybe 15? Long enough that I would have certainly abandoned it if I wasn't one of our senior-uber-elite-vested-contributors (but really, just because I was checking it related to the central notice). I did the password save/continue route and completed it in 2 or 3 sessions. Do you have abandon rate statistics? — xaosflux ^Talk 10:47, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  @Xaosflux

  Yes, we put 10 to 20 mins. I see that ~ 10% of the people finish the questionnaire.

  In 2015 we had a 2 steps procedure (the banner sent to a landing page, the landing page sent to the questionnaire), and ~ half of the people who went through the landed page finished the questionnaire.

  So, it is hard to say if it's less, or not. However the landing page would discharge the server for sure.

  => maybe we could speak of that in the research page (or in the banner request page) Jullienn (talk) 11:33, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  @Jullienn the landing page does warn of the 10-20 mins already, so it shouldn't be shocking. Perhaps put the timeout warning on that page, letting people know that they can have more time with the save/resume option. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:34, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

• Yeah, it happened to me twice despite the fact I never took a break for the questions.. When I made an account and saved frequently, I finally managed to get through the whole thing without issue. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 19:24, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
• I immediately got the "your session has expired" message lol. I didn't even see any questions. SWinxy (talk) 16:49, 8 June 2023 (UTC)
• No survey that takes so long can possibly get a representative sample of its target audience. You will only get people with loads of time to spare answering it, which will skew the results massively in favour of those with loads of time to spare. Chop it down to a maximum of three short questions and you might get a usable result. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:46, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

  Hello @Phil Bridger. I totally agree with you that the sample will not be representative. It is impossible with this technique of banner, anyhow. Even with three quick short questions, answer only those who want to answer. To have a representative profile of the English Wikipedia readers, you'd need to survey a representative profile of the Earth population and ask then if they use wikipedia, and to do what.

  However, other statistics techniques, such as logistic regression, decision tree, etc. may provide interesting results on the profiles, and above all of the difference between profiles. That's the goal. Jullienn (talk) 07:37, 9 June 2023 (UTC)