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Should it be permitted to list short names/aliases in the documentation pages for maintenance templates?
Many templates have shortcuts; e.g. {{citation needed}} can be invoked by typing {{cn}}. This produces the same result, and saves a great amount of time for editors by eliminating pointless busywork (especially those with arthritis, RSI, bad keyboards, mobile devices, or other impairments).
It improves the project for people to tag uncited statements, even if they do so without a perfect understanding of template syntax. The same is true of all inline maintenance templates (e.g. {{dubious}}, {{failed verification}}, et cetera). Indeed, while tagging articles is necessary and vital, many people who do it don't know how templates work at all, and just type <sup>[citation needed]</sup> -- I have an AWB task to fix this. This is fine. We want people to help out even if they are not programmers. This is why templates have documentation pages, which explain how the templates work and what to type into the edit box. Typing {{dub}} instead of {{dubious}} saves time for volunteer editors (which we already have a shortage of), and it is good and proper to tell them they can do this.
These shortcuts are made possible by "template redirects": a non-intuitive MediaWiki hack where "transcluding" a redirect is equivalent to "transcluding" its target page. Template:Cn is a redirect to Template:Citation needed, the same way United States of America is a redirect to United States. This behavior is an idiosyncratic quirk of the MediaWiki software, and there is no reason to think it would be obvious to someone unfamiliar with how the backend works.
The only way to get a list of these redirects is a very complicated, obscure set of actions that don't clearly indicate their outcome. Users must:
Know about this unorthodox feature of MediaWiki in the first place (that a "redirect" is a shortcut when it's a template)
Pick one of nineteen options in a "Tools" dropdown, which is not in any way labeled to indicate it is a list of redirects, and has no clear relation to it (Special:WhatLinksHere)
There's no option to list redirects, so you have to create a list of redirects by exclusion, by clicking on two separate selection boxes for unrelated things, not indicated as being related to redirects ("Hide transclusions" and "Hide wikilinks")
Select these and reload the page a second time
Since this is an extremely time-consuming and inconvenient task involving counter-intuitive workarounds, most editors are not going to be aware that it's possible, and they are definitely not going to be doing it every time they look at a template's documentation.
Nevertheless, because it saves a significant amount of time to be able to use these shortcuts, many commonly-used templates explicitly list them in their documentation. For example, since at least 2013 (see Special:Permalink/562463167), the documentation for {{citation needed}} has featured a section listing redirects/shortcuts. However, after I spent a couple hours adding lists of shortcuts to other maintenance templates (like {{dubious}}, I was reverted, and a request made for formal consensus that template documentation pages are allowed to list shortcuts.
I propose that the documentation pages for inline maintenance templates be allowed to mention their shortcuts, either by listing them (e.g. with a collapsible {{list redirects}}) or by mentioning them in a hatnote.
Support Shortcuts like that are huge time-savers for me. Becoming aware of others that aren't currently mentioned on their doc pages will be useful. Using citation-needed as an example, that tiny box listing its shortcuts demonstrates that providing that helpful information doesn't unnecessarily expand the doc page. Schazjmd(talk)19:21, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
@JPxG, it appears that you're talking about a list of WP:REDIRECTS, and that this doesn't have anything to do with WP:SHORTCUTS. Please consider a quick copyedit to replace the word shortcut with redirect in your long comment above, so that editors are less likely to vote against you because they think you're talking about things like WP:V and WP:NPOV instead of typing {{fact}} when you want {{citation needed}}. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:29, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
Oppose See permalink for an example. The fact that DUB redirected to {{Dubious}} should not feature in documentation because it adds bloat and confusion. What is an editor to make of that list of 19 alternatives? A doc page is not the place for a database of what links where. Instead, a doc page needs to tell readers what they have to do and what is the recommended procedure. Johnuniq (talk) 00:10, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
The problem is that WP:RFD accepts just about any redirect that someone might want to use on the principle that redirects are cheap. That means redirects that are not really useful are kept and they accumulate. I am not going to lose any sleep if someone wants to add {{Dub}} to an article instead of {{Dubious}} but there should be a reason to promote Dub rather than the fact that it exists. It might be helpful if someone wants to set up a page with a master list of all template redirects that are used in more than, say, ten articles. Template documentation could link to that master list. But there is no benefit from the churning that would occur when one editor adds {{Dub}} to save typing four characters and another changes it to {{Dubious}} to make the wikitext comprehensible. Johnuniq (talk) 02:31, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
Comment There's a lot of hyperbole going on in that description of the "problem". Personally I think people would be more surprised if redirects to templates didn't work as they do. Anomie⚔12:18, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
People with 10K+ edits would. Contrariwise, there are people literally typing [citation needed] into articles (if anyone wonders, it is nearly 100% accurate use of the tag, just zero understanding of how templates/markup work). jp×g🗯️21:25, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
Sure, people who don't even know how to use templates won't know what a template redirect does either (people like yours, and the ones I come across sometimes who think they have to copy-paste the template's wikitext). But once someone knows how to use a template, and knows what a redirect is, I think they'd be surprised if the two didn't work together in the obvious way. Anomie⚔22:55, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
The current practice of using {{tsh}} with a small number of shortcuts (as exemplified here) is better than listing all redirects. It seems excessive to add all this to a documentation page:
I also don't see how the behavior of redirects is unintuitive. (Just as you can link a page via its redirects, you can insert a template (transclude a page) via its redirects.) Nor would listing redirects on the documentation page help people typing [citation needed] (who will not have occasion to visit the documentation page). SilverLocust💬22:18, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. This is needless bloat to the documentation. A documentation of a template is meant to explain how the template works and any quirks that it needs to address. More complicated templates, need longer documentation. A list of redirects does not add to understanding how a template works, it's purpose, or really anything. All it does is make the documentation page longer (bloated) and harder to navigate and read. When something is added to a page and placed in hidden or collapsed sections, that's usually a sign it really isn't needed (see MOS:DONTHIDE). A list of redirects can be found in the "what links here" page for anyone that wants to view them. Gonnym (talk) 07:47, 29 July 2024 (UTC)
Well, a doc page is meant to explain how to use the template, and letting people know that they can type {{fact}} instead of having to spell out {{citation needed}} every time is "how to use the template". WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:34, 29 July 2024 (UTC)
Support only for popular redirects, oppose others. It's certainly fine to have a note in the {{Citation needed}} documentation that the commonly used shortcut {{cn}} redirects there. But noting in the documentation that the misspelling {{Ciation needed}} redirects there adds nothing but bloat. I worry that if this passes without qualification, it'll lead folks to start adding bloated lists of every single template en masse. I understand the temptation to use {{list redirects}} to automate the process, but we're not ready for that until {{list redirects}} is made significantly more capable so that it can distinguish between common redirects and uncommon ones. Sdkbtalk17:55, 29 July 2024 (UTC)
Moot: There's no policy/otherwise forbidding this to begin with. Get consensus on the template's talk page that a redirect is worth mentioning, and then mention it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}22:08, 29 July 2024 (UTC)
Looks like it was discussed about a year ago at Template_talk:Time_ago. I don't think anyone has volunteered to add this feature, nor is it the result of anyone's previous work causing it, more like a design question than a bug, best way to say "now". Could also try WP:TEMPREQ for help. -- GreenC15:49, 19 July 2024 (UTC)
"Today" isn't the same day everywhere in the world. "0 days ago" indicates less than 24 hours ago, which could include "yesterday" in some time zones. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:30, 20 July 2024 (UTC)
I've no objections to that, and I suspect that if you posted the code in an edit request on the template's talk page, then it would be accepted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:17, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
Bot to restore long-term protections after shorter-term higher protections expire
A recurring issue with page protection is that long-term protections are sometimes overwritten by shorter-term protections at a higher protection level. When the shorter-term protection expires, administrators need to manually restore the previous lower protection level. For example, Beyoncé is indefinitely semi-protected due to vandalism and was recently fully protected due to edit warring. When the full protection expired, semi-protection needed to be restored manually by an administrator (more examples: 162794559, 162856607, 162974964, 163272356, 163337925). In addition to this happening after full protection due to edit warring, it also happens with ECP being applied to previously semi-protected articles.
Right now, administrators need to remember on their own, set a reminder, or rely on someone submitting a reprotection request on WP:RFPP. Unfortunately, disruption can be the result when the restoration of protection is delayed too long. Also, concerns about timely restoration can influence administrators to choose an approach other than protection when protection would have been their first choice in some situations.
The bot will not take any action if the duration of the higher protection level extends beyond the prior protection's expiration date, or if the protection level is the same or lower.
I'm definitely not the first person to have the idea. After I starting looking into this, I found more than a few previous discussions (which also helped me iron out some details), such as this proposal for a bot in 2017. Starting with this task, I'm hoping to alleviate some of the drudgery I've experienced as an administrator helping out on WP:RFPP. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 08:56, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
I agree this would be useful functionality. I'n not sure implementing it as a bot is the right approach (but I won't oppose the idea either). T194697 covers the same idea for blocks; all the reasons given there apply equally well to page protections. RoySmith(talk)12:05, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
I feel like this has been raised before and went nowhere, though I might be misremembering. In any case, yes, this is functionality that should exist, whether as a bot or part of the protection interface. Vanamonde93 (talk) 17:59, 24 July 2024 (UTC)
This would be useful functionality. May I suggest that the bot also drop a templated message about its actions at the user talkpage of the (non-bot) admin who most recently protected the page, so that they can undo/adjust the bot's page-protection if needed? Abecedare (talk) 02:29, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
I agree. There should be some kind of automatic mechanism for reinstating the previous protection (like for example, an article already semi-protected gets bumped up to extended confirmed, and then when the EC protection expires, there should be some automatic mechanism to reinstate the semi-protection) West Virginia WXeditor (talk) 20:02, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
I think that this feature would be useful. Ideally, it would be in software, but I see no need to wait if the MediaWiki devs haven't put it in yet. — Red-tailed hawk(nest)20:04, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
Blame and Wikiblame have the same goal, but they're separate tools/separate software code. Someone might want to have access to both tools, but they should be side by side in the list.
On the other hand, Wikiblame should not be in the list with Wikidata, Wikinews, Wikibooks, and other sister projects. But Commons and Wiktionary should be in the list of sister projects, and I don't see them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:24, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing. Hopefully I haven't given off the impression that I am offering an exhaustive overview. Commons and Wiktionary are just as welcome. My main focus was on getting some relatively hidden tools to be accessible via 'Analysis'. Infogiraffic (talk) 08:32, 29 July 2024 (UTC)
As a proof of concept, I think it's fine. I wouldn't personally find it very useful, because I'd rather type than look for anything in a menu. But others, especially those less familiar with MediaWiki software, likely have the opposite preference. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:29, 29 July 2024 (UTC)
Both tools serve the same purpose (revision history tracking) but have separate codebases. Ideally, they should be grouped together under a single, clear label like "Revision History." While some users prefer keyboard shortcuts, menus can be helpful for those less familiar with MediaWiki. Perhaps a balance can be struck? We could consider a hybrid approach with both keyboard shortcuts and a more intuitive menu structure. What about submenus for categories like "Analysis Tools" (where "Revision History" would reside) and "Sister Projects"? BlackOrchidd (talk) 08:46, 7 August 2024 (UTC)
@BlackOrchidd. Even though I very much appreciate the suggestions, it seems they have made their way into the dark abyss of the Village pump Archive. It looks like this proposal is destined to become forgotten. Infogiraffic (talk) 14:21, 27 August 2024 (UTC)
Afd to Prn/Pcn
Can we rename Articles for deletion to Articles for checking/Reviewing notability which will give a positive impression than the present one. 103.66.169.3 (talk) 19:36, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
I think this is one of the perennial proposals, and the answer is "not necessary" (at any rate, it would require rewriting thousands of lines of active software, and moving half a million pages). jp×g🗯️22:15, 26 July 2024 (UTC)
The French Wikipedia did this, perhaps two years ago. AIUI they thought the communicative value (e.g., that we are here to check notability, not necessarily to delete the page) outweighed the one-time hassle. (Also, you don't have to move the prior pages; you can just move a few key pages, like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion itself, and leave the old ones alone.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:39, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
It was indeed a huge undertaking; no, we do have to move a huge amount of pages (as my major work 'bot did); and as JPxG points out there is more in place nowadays that is hardwired to the page prefix (from the templates that we invented at the same time, to people's private add-in scripts) than there was back then. Moreover we are not checking notability. We are deciding whether an administrator hits a delete button on an article, for those cases where it isn't obvious on sight that the article should be deleted and 1 person alone can safely make the decision to press that button. It's a very clear name for the very single purpose that it is there for. Stuff outwith the decision about whether an administrator hits a delete button or not is intentionally left to the editorship at large. Uncle G (talk) 02:08, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
I'm also old enough to remember the VfD days. Anyway, AfD has its problems. What it's called is not one of them. Let's worry about stuff that matters. RoySmith(talk)02:25, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
@Uncle G I appreciate the clarfication that this tool is focused on assisting administrators with clear cut deletion decisions, leaving broader editorial judgments to the communiity. Maybe having a name that reflects this purpose, like "Rapid Deletion Assist" or something similar, could be helpful. BlackOrchidd (talk) 09:15, 7 August 2024 (UTC)
"Rapid Deletion Assist"? Did you mean Category:Expired proposed deletions? Or perhaps WP:CSD? Or perhaps Special:Nuke? Also AfD is a venue and a process, but not a tool (those are pieces of code).Maybe we should leave the name as is, so we don't have to rewrite thousands of scripts and move a half million pages. If there's one deeply embedded major nomenclature failure on the project, it's Notability. The amount of confusion about / discomfort with AfD would need to increase by two orders of magnitude before it would be worth renaming at this point.Apologies for the grumpiness. My keyboard keeps crashing, which I hate is a thing that is possible. Folly Mox (talk) 10:12, 7 August 2024 (UTC)
I agree with Uncle G, the current name has a clarity that said replacements would not have. Even if the new name is somewhat less intimidating to newcomers, it's better to be upfront about what's happening. ― novov(tc)06:14, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
Rename to Articles for Discussion?, in line with the other XFDs. I had a similar query and sometimes feel uncertain about nominating articles when I'm on the fence if they should be deleted/merged/redirected. The 'AfD' acronym is also maintained. Svampesky (talk) 23:11, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
One thing I like to do occasionally is to use AutoWikiBrowser to make spellings on articles consistent with their English vareity (for example changing "favorite" to "favourite" in British English articles). A mistake I made once was changing "-ize" spellings to "-ise" spellings in British English articles, when both are correct in British English. We have Template:Use Oxford spelling to say "this articles uses the -ize suffix" but we do not have one for -ise spellings. I propose creating a template for that, and I have already created it and the documentation in my sandbox.
To be clear, this proposed template is not for English varities that only use the -ise suffix (such as New Zealand English). It is only for British English (and to a lesser extent, Canadian English) which allows both -ize and -ise. ―Panamitsu(talk)07:59, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
This seems like a rather narrow justification for taking up an entire additional line at the top of articles. It seems far more practical just to be more discriminate with your AWB gnoming, unfortunately. Remsense ‥ 诉08:08, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
Why is any of this needed? From what I am reading at {{Use Oxford spelling}} and at Oxford spelling, "-ize" is Oxford spelling, and "-ise" is part of normal British spelling. If the article you are checking uses "-ize", you can presumably add the Oxford spelling template; otherwise, leave the British spelling template and leave the -ise endings alone. What am I missing? – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:27, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
As a Wikipedia convention I would support this, however if this does not reflect real world understanding of spelling variation, then we need a more precise term/spelling instructions. I was previously under the impression that British English was always -ise unless specified as Oxford English, but learned something new today. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:11, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
Respectfully, I really do not think we need more precise spelling instructions. This isn't a big deal, and is only an issue because of automated tools making assumptions that result in disruptive swaps between equally correct forms. Remsense ‥ 诉23:13, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
I don't think it is only useful for automated tools because editors have to figure out whether to use -ise/-ize when adding content. A tag saying which to use is just like how we already have the tags saying which engvar to use. ―Panamitsu(talk)00:09, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
At a certain level of article quality, spelling is required to be consistent, so it is indeed a big deal for people adding more content to the article. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 00:28, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
But it's not a big deal for generalized gnoming. One single orthographical difference simply does not require a different ENGVAR to be specified, whether as a subtype or otherwise. Remsense ‥ 诉01:49, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
It doesn't require it to be specified, but it in the same way that it doesn't require any ENGVAR to be specified. That doesn't mean it's not beneficial to specify - especially as it will (in at least some cases) reduce the work needed later on. Thryduulf (talk) 10:01, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
It's worth zooming out to note there are quite a few WP:VAR things we don't tag articles with, in my mind likely because the undue bureaucracy plus undue clutter outweigh the time saved and clarity achieved. It seems like the potential disruption from editors "making it more clear" with campaigns of various size changing EngvarB → EngvarB-ise makes this worth opposing. Remsense ‥ 诉10:37, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
It's four more characters, I don't see it as adding too much clutter or bureaucracy compared to the clarity it adds. Also, why would changing EngvarB to clarify "ise" if the article already uses "ise" be a disruption? Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 12:25, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
Proposal: An intermediary civility board
It would surprise most outsiders viewing our non-article space, as well as new editors, that civility is a required as a matter of policy, and is so theoretically important that it is one of the project's Five Pillars. The section on civility in the Five Pillars has an almost quaint sound to it, like something preached in church that no one actually observes. In certain project areas, a kind of "toxic workplace" atmosphere exists, in which low levels of hostility are the norm, are taken for granted, and as a practical matter are not subject to sanction.
We used to have an informal sounding board to deal with civility, WP:Wikiquette assistance. When WQA was shut down in 2012 in a discussion on this board, the community found that WQA "did more harm than good," but there was "also a consensus that there needs to be an intermediary process between the talkpage and ANI, now that WQA is closed." No such intermediary board was ever created, and as far as I can see, perhaps I missed it, but searching through the archives of this board I see no discussion of creating such a board since 2012. I think we need to revisit the topic and create an intermediary civility board. Perhaps just simply revive WQA. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 13:43, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
I very much agree that something is needed to avoid the toxic workplace atmosphere while not having to drag people to ANI for every civility issue (which often creates even more drama, on top of needing a pretty high bar for some remedy to actually be enacted). Not sure whether WQA itself is the best, but we definitely need to have an intermediate process for that matter. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 13:58, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
I just wanted to add (EC) that while the "more harm than good" verdict may have been correct in 2012 (personally I think it was a mistake) it would not be true today, and that an intermediary board is urgently needed if WP:CIVIL is to be taken seriously. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 14:01, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
There have been discussions over the years on venues to discuss editor behaviour (such as a noticeboard focused on civility, or a return of the request for comment process for user behaviour). The most recent one I could find is Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 167 § A page to report violations of WP:Civility policy. The key question is can a process be created that avoids the pitfalls of the past processes and the incidents' noticeboard, while also being more effective. Many of those who weigh in on this matter want a process that has a feedback process without automatically enacting a sanction, but that only works when the person in question is receptive, and when unfounded inquiries can be swiftly filtered out. English Wikipedia's consensus-based decision-making traditions aren't very good for analyzing behavioural issues in a sympathetic manner: large public, unmoderated group conversations are the opposite of how most organizations provide feedback to its members. Until the English Wikipedia community is willing to look at other decision-making methods in this situation, the root problem can't be addressed. isaacl (talk) 14:57, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
Maybe we could have a group of users elected by the community to provide feedback on these issues? A sort of mini-ArbCom, but without the gravitas, that will still make the discussions more manageable. We could adopt a format similar to moderated discussion for resolving such issues. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:05, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
Historically, the editors who like to weigh on these matters have been wary of delegating decision-making to a sub-group. An election process is additional overhead, and its results are decided by a self-selected sampling of interested editors. Editors are thus concerned that the sub-group won't adequately represent the community (and from a partisan perspective, that their viewpoint won't be adequately enforced). Personally, I think there will have to be some form of hierarchy introduced to be able to sustain a community of this size (though I think it would better to focus on managing content-related decisions more effectively, which would in turn forestall many behavioural issues, as they become losing strategies for influencing content). But it's not clear to me when the community might reach this conclusion. Moderated discussion might be a form of hierarchy to which the community is more receptive, but at present, it's still more concerned about moderation unduly restricting editors from saying whatever they want. isaacl (talk) 15:34, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
"Somehow" is the wildcard. Right now, a small number of vocal editors can stop actions from occurring, because the community genuinely seeks approaches that satisfy as many people as possible, in accordance with consensus. Such editors could be considering themselves as holding the line against a devolution into more biased editing, where sheer numbers of editors with an agenda are swamping a given page or topic area, or they could be the ones trying to give an outsized amount of weight to a minority view. If we can find a way to pull the content-decision out of the fray, with a result that remains in force until there are specific reasons to revisit it (*), then we can avoid re-litigating the decision endlessly, and thus remove incentive to be stubborn, aggressive, and repetitive.
But we're not talking about actions, but rather an area where the broader community can make input into specific alleged violations of WP:CIVILITY. The worst that can happen is what currently happens, which is nothing. However it gives a complainant the ability to vent their concerns about the behavior of specific editors or groups of editors. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 16:44, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
It seems like this proposal, along with another proposal by Bon courage to shut down WP:DRN as ineffective and Kovcszaln6's comments in that thread, point to a need for an infernal internal forum where disputes are referred to for input by uninvolved editors with the goal of either a) quickly defusing the situation with relevant policy/guideline advice or b) referring it to a more appropriate forum or process. signed, Rosguilltalk19:37, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
Can we go with your pre-strikeout version? That one intrigues me, and I would subscribe to its newsletter. ;) DonIago (talk) 19:42, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
I used "actions" generically to mean anything that the community agrees upon. With English Wikipedia's consensus-based decision-making traditions, many editors don't want to reach an agreement on something that they know several people disagree with. Editors will even try to make accommodations for a single editor objecting.
Regarding a venue to vent, I disagree that this should be a goal of a new noticeboard. There are plenty of places for venting. The community needs effective discussion. isaacl (talk) 20:51, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
"Vent" was not meant to mean "venting" in the sense of "getting stuff off your chest." "Express" would have been more precise. Yes I agree that we want a mechanism that will do more than give people a place to blow off steam.
I agree with the comments above re an informal forum. I had forgotten about DRN even though I guess I used to participate, as a DRN userbox is on my user page. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 21:25, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
The preceding comments seem to be about an internal forum, not an informal one. The dispute resolution noticeboard, as it states at the top, was created to resolve small disputes and help redirect to more appropriate forums. I'm not clear how a new forum with the same purpose would be more effective. isaacl (talk) 02:14, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
Recreating the dispute resolution noticeboard under a different name isn't a productive use of the community's time. Ultimately, the self-selected set of editors who like to discuss behavioural issues aren't able to reach a consensus agreement on some of the situations that are raised. Moving the discussion from one central forum to another doesn't change this. Determining questions by consensus scales poorly as a group grows larger in size, and it reaches that point very quickly. Further, the way it's done on English Wikipedia, the outcome is highly dependent on who happens to participate in discussion, and so results are inconsistent. isaacl (talk) 15:36, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
My apologies; I did forget this. I do appreciate that due to there being different people willing to discuss content disputes vs behavioural disputes, a separate noticeboard would be desirable. Nonetheless, it's not clear how to avoid the ineffectiveness of the previous venues as long as the same decision-making processes are in place. isaacl (talk) 20:34, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
A few thoughts:
Ask four editors to define civility, and you'll get at least five mutually incompatible answers.
The Robustness principle gets applied backwards. What it says is: Ignore the fact that the other guy is dumping profanity on you, but don't ever use profanity yourself. What we see on wiki is: "I'm allowed to use profanity, and you're not allowed to be upset about it!"
Anyone who thinks this is easy has never thought about this.
In particular, anyone who has never considered how to get two people, both upset, to agree on how to treat each other during a hot-button dispute that is important to both of them, when one of them is from a hierarchical face-saving culture and the other is from an egalitarian guilt/sin culture, probably has no idea how impossible it is. The latter person is probably insulting the first person left and right without even realizing it. Now toss in English as a second or third language (anyone else remember the Indian students trying to be friendly by saying "Hi, buddy"?).
We could impose a default culture (which actually will end up being the manners of US white-person middle-class males, no matter what anyone says or wants), but supporting and including all the cultures equally is really, really, really hard. Like "mediator charges US$1,000 an hour" hard, not "we'll all have to think nice thoughts" hard.
I have frequently seen civility arguments improperly introduced either as distraction or defense of some other impropriety, that might explain admin reluctance as well. Do you have any statistics on how many cases are not being properly pursued? Selfstudier (talk) 12:36, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
If there is no incivility, an uninvolved volunteer can point that out to the complainant. That's the advantage of having a forum in which editors with no knowledge of the topic area can weigh in. The motive of the complainant is immaterial. Civility is required. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 12:43, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
I think the nature and motive of the complainant can be material, despite being essentially unverifiable. The complainant can, for example, be a person who uses deception via sockpuppetry to evade a block or ban, then exploits sampling bias to select instances of past incivility to target a perceived political opponent. And this is not a hypothetical. It's something you can observe from time to time. In certain topic areas, when thinking about Wikipedia's homeostatic systems, it is probably worth asking "How would a person willing to use deception exploit this system for their mission?", because that will definitely happen. Employing deception is relatively common in Wikipedia, the protections against it are relatively weak, it is one of the drivers of incivility and people employing deception are immune from all sanctions, including those related to civility of course. So, the way I see it is that civility requirements are nice, but right now, they only apply to honest editors. For editors willing to use disposable accounts, there is zero cost for incivility, and it is another tool that can be used to manipulate a community that will almost always prioritize compliance with WP:CIVIL over compliance with WP:SOCK (and other mandatory policies), probably in part because it is much easier, and people pay attention to drama. Sean.hoyland (talk) 15:13, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
There is all kinds of rotten stuff that goes on in many topic areas. Somebody in this discussion mentioned tag-teaming in response to civility complaints. There has been canvassing proven time and again that has come up on AE. That is beyond the scope of any Wikipedia forum short of AE or Arbcom. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 15:50, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
A good thing about a WP:3O or WP:RfC for civility is that it'd put more focus on wikiquette (probably) in new editors' minds. Currently, there are a lot of avenues for dispute resolution regarding content, which creates a lot of focus on work. The work of building an encyclopaedia is of course important. But if editors are driven off due to incivility, who is left to build it? Aspets (talk) 14:35, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
In a real-life workplace that relies on collaboration, if somebody has reached the point of swearing, sniping, or snarking at their colleagues, they are probably beyond the point of no return and about to enter a one-way HR process, assuming they aren't fired on the spot. Real-life workplaces have the luxury of enforcing strong filters at the interview stage, which are usually highly effective at enforcing the kind of culture the workplace wants to have. Since we don't have that luxury, perhaps we could consider another popular tool that real-life workplaces use: training.
Wikipedia is a deeply weird workplace. Remote-only text-only collaboration (ROTOC) does not come naturally to human beings. There are some people who find it perfectly obvious, but that's only due to years of training through doing computer-mediated work. To be clear, you don't have to be a computer person to work here, but it helps. The group of people with the most extensive ROTOC training happens to be a group that skews white, middle-class and male.
I'm sure many of us have rolled many an eye through extremely dull and patronising computer-based-training courses that teach us how to suck eggs, but that eye-rolling is a privilege afforded to those who are expert egg-suckers already. I think if we want to improve standards of collaboration, a new/revived form of disciplinary process would be the worst approach, because it would be an inherently negative experience. Explicit training in ROTOC skills has the potential to be a positive experience for the victim.
I was thinking about how maybe we should be thinking in terms of "proactive public health" rather than "remedial process". Remsense ‥ 诉11:07, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
Remote-only text-only collaboration (ROTOC) does not come naturally to human beings. There are some people who find it perfectly obvious, but that's only due to years of training through doing computer-mediated work. Does in-person collaboration come naturally either, though? Or is it just that neurotypical humans usually pick it up through years of training as young children (with the details varying by culture)? Anomie⚔11:54, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
Totally unsolicited, slightly overcooked reflections here: without really thinking of natural or otherwise—writing is just comparably discrete (though not discreet) in what it communicates; given the additional social context provided by face-to-face speech and general cues of colocation. You often have to try harder such that you get everything you want across and nothing more, and it can feel alienating, as if anyone you're trying to get on the same page with dissolves into the aether save for the instant where they reply. That is to say, consensus-building sometimes feels less like a directed process you're invested in with others and a bit more like trying to craft the right magic spell to use on your interlocutor, with substantially less clue to what degree they're "getting" what's already been said. Remsense ‥ 诉12:32, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
As I've discussed elsewhere, unmoderated online conversations are prone to overly verbose, repetitive discussions. In face-to-face conversations, listeners can provide visual cues or well-timed interruptions to mitigate this. There is already a lot of advice pages on English Wikipedia regarding desired behaviour (see Wikipedia:Essays in a nutshell/Civility and Template:Wikipedia essays for many links). I've also discussed elsewhere (though I can't recall exactly where) that although it is desirable to have guidance that outlines expectations that are specific to the English Wikipedia environment, it's too onerous to try to provide training on all aspects of interpersonal communication. We rely on editors having picked up these skills in their lives outside of Wikipedia. isaacl (talk) 15:37, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
it's too onerous to try to provide training on all aspects of interpersonal communication It's more like training in interapersonal communication that is needed. I don't think we should launch a primary school, but maybe something like a finishing school. Well, not really a school. Just some good guidance on the differences between collaborating with people in person, and collaborating with people in our weird environment. Essays like Wikipedia:Expectations_and_norms_of_the_Wikipedia_community are good, but they are buried in the vastness of project space. I think the "training" form factor for this kind of information could reach people in a way that essays don't and post-incident interventions definitely don't. The medium is the message...
To make this idea concrete, it could be as simple as offering a kind of interactive quiz, with each question being a collaboration scenario, and then some multiple-choice answers for what the best approach would be. The answer-reveal can explain why one of the answers is best, and what the possible bad outcomes of the other answers were. Basic stuff, but perhaps only basic because we've been steeped in it for a long time.
If it's just me creating a curriculum, then sure, I could assemble something. But odds are you have a different idea of what should be covered and emphasized, and editor X wants to add another scenario, and editor Y thinks the structure is entirely wrong, and so forth. Our help pages sprawl because it's really hard to get any agreement on modifying them, so editors just create more of them. And there are endless variations that different people think are vitally important to cover. isaacl (talk) 21:01, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
Also, I'm not sure if this approach will reach the target audience. A lot of Wikipedia guidance ends up being just link targets that editors brandish, as getting people to read and follow documentation is hard. isaacl (talk) 21:08, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
In a real-life workplace that relies on collaboration, if somebody has reached the point of swearing, sniping, or snarking at their colleagues, they are probably beyond the point of no return and about to enter a one-way HR process, assuming they aren't fired on the spot. This comment astounds me, Barnards.tar.gz. You and I must have worked in deeply different sorts of workplaces. I can't deny what you said must be true for the kinds of places you've worked, but that type of hardline, attitude-based termination culture seems to me like it might be restricted to a subset of workplaces that exhibit high profitability, staffing, and turnover.I've been in and seen others be in face-to-face meetings over attitude issues, but all the terminations I've seen were based in either exposing the company to legal liability, unreasonable theft of company property, or absenteeism.I'm not arguing we can't do better in showing people the door than all the places I've been employed, but we are talking cultural differences, and my astonishment at the above moved me to chime in with a counterexperience. Folly Mox (talk) 17:01, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
To be clear, the successful workplaces I have experienced do not have a termination culture at all, and HR incidents are extremely rare, because the input filter is so strong. Any workplace that had as many "admin interventions" as we do here would be a circus of dysfunction. What I'm trying to say is that we don't want to have to resort to interviewing prospective editors to ensure "good fit" or "team player" or equivalent, but we could perhaps learn from other ways that workplaces manage their culture without resorting to disciplinary proceedings. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 18:00, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
I'm all for that. I have no disagreement: merely divergent lived experience. I don't believe I've ever worked anywhere with a particularly selective interview process, so that probably has something to do with it. All the best, Folly Mox (talk) 18:10, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
Folly Mox, in the US, in most white-collar jobs, "swearing, sniping, or snarking at their colleagues" is going to look like a hostile work environment to HR and therefore exactly a case of "exposing the company to legal liability". Whether the swearing or the sniping or the snarking is more likely to attract a performance improvement plan likely depends on the industry (e.g., the construction industry may accept swearing, or the fashion industry may accept snark) and the target (swearing at inanimate objects is usually more accepted than running down your colleagues), but there's a risk. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:15, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
Way back in the day, I was a regular at WQA. WQA was non-binding, and explicitly not a place to request that another user be sanctioned in any way. I thought it was a good thing to have a page to discuss civility issues without the threat of a block. I don't agree that it "did more harm than good" but I would admit that it was very often innefective. Somewhere between half and two-thirds of cases filed there moved on to ANI after a day or two, while other suffered from one or more of the parties simply ignoring it. In the end the fact that it could not lead to sanctions is probably what doomed it. Like the also-deprecated WP:MEDCOM or the moribund backwater that is WP:AARV, completely voluntary processes with no "teeth" have proven largely innefective. I think that's a shame but there it is. Just Step Sidewaysfrom this world ..... today18:38, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
In the I/P area an admin, ScottishFinnishRadish kindly allows his talk page to be used as a very informal sounding board on issues relating to that area. It a good thing to have. Matters are not always resolved but it is a good way for people in that area to ascertain if behavior they see in that area is undesirable or not, and if undesirable, if potentially sanctionable. Perhaps in the eyes of an objective admin it's not worth pursuing. So OK, the editor may not like that, but that is an objective judgment.
People I think should lower their expectations. Having something is better than nothing. Having an admin generously allow his user page to be utilized in this fashion is certainly a lot better than nothing at all. Having an intermediary board on civility of some kind (for which there was a consensus in 2012) is better than nothing. How to structure such a board is another matter. But let's not just throw up our hands because civility is sometimes subjective. Personally I don't think it is as subjective as some here have argued. It is difficult to measure "success," and perhaps we are too hung up on that and not on having a kind of "peace process," pardon the expression. Going back to the point I raised at the beginning, editors who perceive an ongoing low-level civility issue, a toxic workplace of sorts, at the current time have, for all intents and purposes, nothing. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 18:56, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
I think the old Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct process was more useful than WQA, but it still fundamentally relied on people voluntarily responding to the feedback. In particular, it was useful for the sort of WP:IDHT cases in which getting people to "vote", all on the same page, that they disliked your behavior might convince you that all of the previous complaints weren't just random individuals with weird standards, and that The Community™ actually didn't approve. But I don't think it was wildly successful; I think it was just occasionally helpful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:10, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
I feel editors got tired of the something just being a dead end that took up time before taking up the issue at a different noticeboard. A redundant noticeboard isn't better than not having it. On the other hand, I can see how something more like Wikipedia:Administrative action review, with a no-fault review of a given scenario, could be useful in separating the evaluation of behaviour from the determination of any restrictions. But the problem of a lack of consensus in the community (at least among the subset that discusses these matters) regarding accepted behaviour remains. isaacl (talk) 20:34, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
I keep hearing people saying that WQA was a waste of time, a dead end and so on. I beg to differ. I participated in it myself as a volunteer, and just checked the archives to confirm that I was actually pretty active for a time. I found my participation to be interesting and rewarding. I feel that I helped people. While I was fairly new to the project at the time, it wasn't hard. WP:CIVIL wasn't and isn't rocket science. While a good deal about Wikipedia was complicated, civility was not. It didn't, and doesn't, take a law degree to figure out what's civil and what isn't. I wish people would be more positive on the WQA. It was better than I think it is being characterized, and I certainly don't feel that it was such a snake pit or horror show at all. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 21:26, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
I agree that it doesn't take a law degree to figure out what's civil and what isn't. It sometimes takes a PsyD or a PhD, though. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:56, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
Common sense is often enough, especially when the disputants come from the same culture. However, common sense isn't enough when Alice, who thinks in black-and-white terms, feels justice is only served by clearly and directly stating that Bob's actions were wrong, and Bob, coming from a culture that values indirectness, deeply feels that clearly and directly stating that anyone's actions were wrong is inherently, appallingly rude and that doing so is a loud, firm message from the community that they want him to stop editing entirely. If you don't have a lot of information about different cultures, you'll probably think that Bob flounced off. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:24, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
This seems exaggerated to me. There are going to be some differences in what people consider "uncivil" both across and within cultures. But I've only ever seen one instance of "this isn't a problem in my culture", and it was shut down immediately because it was a direct attack on people with mental illness. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:44, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
There are other possibilities, it's a bit like freedom fighter and terrorist, one person's uncivil is another's plain speaking. Selfstudier (talk) 21:58, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
It's not really exaggerated IMO. Seldom does anyone actually say "this isn't a problem in my culture" though. In my experience off Wikipedia, it's more likely that Bob would make a complaint about Alice to HR, then HR will spout some BS about making a "safe space for everyone" and threaten to fire Alice over it while ignoring how they're making an unsafe space for her. On Wikipedia, more likely is that Bob would feel chased off and nothing much else happen. But something like WP:FRAMGATE is also a possibility, particularly once the UCoC committee gets running. Anomie⚔22:30, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Some years back, we had at least two editors claiming to be Australian and insisting that using profanity was a core cultural value for All True Australians™. We had 800K registered editors last year. Finding a few people whose truthfulness you doubt a bit is to be expected.
(If you are interested in mental health conditions among editors, then you might be interested in the back-of-the-envelope estimate at User:WhatamIdoing/Editors are people. NB I left out autism – an obvious source of tension between "face-saving" and "plain speaking" disputes – because we have far more Autistic editors than average, so the usual calculations don't hold.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:59, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
We're focusing quite a bit in this discussion on "results." Skimming through my own contributions there (I don't believe I ever came in as a complainant or respondent) I see that true, sometimes the discussions that I participated in did not bear fruit. But people would come and I'd look at their problems and I'd say, "well this is uncivil and this isn't." Is that a bad result? We can't always box-score these things, folks. I was surprised when I learned, afterwards, that WQA had been closed. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 21:31, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
In your original post, you expressed concern about there being an uncivil environment on English Wikipedia. Thus I think it's reasonable to consider if a proposed change would help address this concern. What barriers are there now that keeps the community from looking at discussions and thinking, well, this is uncivil and this isn't? Is bringing back an old venue an effective way to remove these barriers? Is it worth the opportunity cost? isaacl (talk) 07:10, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Of course, and I appreciate your "reality check" comments. But as I go back to the archives and look at my participation in WQA as a volunteer (which I had pretty much forgotten as it was a 13+ years ago) I remember positive aspects that hadn't previously occurred to me, and which are at variance with how WQA is sometimes portrayed. I don't recall even once being flummoxed as to what was civil or what was not. Obviously the complainants and respondents had their own view, or it wouldn't have come to WQA. But as a volunteer, even a relative newcomer, it was always a slam dunk one way or the other.
Another point that I think needs to be made, which didn't previously occur to me, is this. Let's say Editor X is editing in an environment in which other editors WP:OWN the topic area or seek to do so. They engage in sarcasm, personalize discussions or otherwise contribute in a deleterious way. While WQA or something like it can't resolve the issue, it can certainly help with a subsequent resolution if a volunteer uninvolved in the topic area says "yes this is uncivil" or "no, this is not uncivil." It helps Editor X if he wishes to make a fuss going forward, or may discourage him from doing so. This kind of input is difficult to quantify. The volunteers are just ordinary editors with no stake in the matter under discussion, but their perspective matters. The fact they're not admins with the ability to block or topic ban does not detract from their impact. Such input may well make the subject area less toxic and more civil, easier for everyone, even if it does not resolve the underlying dispute. Making things more civil should not be underrated.
Incidentally we're not talking about resuscitating WQA, necessarily. The consensus back then, which of course does not bind us, is to create some kind of "intermediary" forum. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 12:15, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Sure, I just went with the concrete proposal you made in your original post. Like it or not, there was a consensus about the shortcomings of the previous noticeboard. I don't think you'll be able to overcome those views just by saying you disagree with them. A new proposal needs to identify a goal, which could be qualitative in nature, and demonstrate the value and effectiveness of the proposal in achieving it.
In practice, we don't get a volunteer saying "this is/isn't civil", and everyone saying, ah, OK. We get some uninvolved volunteers saying the behaviour is civil, and other uninvolved volunteers saying that it isisn't. We get editors disagreeing with the assessment and thus seeking broader and broader input, consuming more and more community time. A proposal for a new process would have to find a spot where it could add value without just becoming another cycle in this spiral. I'm not sure how to bypass this roundabout, other than my thoughts on fostering collaborative behaviour and thus making poor behaviour a losing strategy. isaacl (talk) 14:45, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
The fact that you don't recall even once being flummoxed as to what was civil or what was not either says something about WQA attracting only simple complaints (e.g., most reports were mere tattling about obvious misconduct), or your lack of awareness about the complexities involved in intercultural communication. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:29, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
No, I don't recall being flummoxed. Not once. Not a single time. Ever. The behavior complained about ("tattled" as you inappropriately put it) was always either civil or uncivil. The policy is simple and editors of any background or culture can go to WP:CIVIL and absorb what is there.
The purpose of an intermediary board, as I see it, is to provide a third opinion on these matters. the 30 suggestion below is not a bad idea. For the umpteenth time, I'm not suggesting we resuscitate the old WQA board but figure out in good faith a possible intermediary board as was the consensus in 2012. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 12:21, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Is it worth the opportunity cost? No, it isn't. There are enough rules and guidelines available to deal with this already. Selfstudier (talk) 12:28, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
As you know (as I assume you saw my ping there), ScottishFinnishRadish's talk page serves as an intermediary step in the I/P area that allows people to come to him rather than AE. There are plenty of "rules and guidelines" dealing with contentious topic areas but still it helps having his talk page as an intermediate, informal step short of AE. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 12:34, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Yes, and an admin has the power to engage in topic bans and worse. An intermediary board is just a fellow editor weighing in on civility alone. Nothing else. It's a nonpunitive way of an uninvolved editor telling another editor that he's either not being civil or that his incivility complaint is without merit. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 12:45, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
You mentioned above that civility complaints are often brought without merit. An intermediary board volunteer can make that same point in a non-punitive way. I know because that is what I did when I was a volunteer on WQA. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 12:47, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
I'm sympathetic to the idea of a new (or revived) method of dealing with incivility. But most solutions are going to run into the same problem that we see at ANI, in that it's ultimately cultural instead of procedural. If we want to fix this, we need to make cultural changes:
Crack down on victim blaming and "get a thicker skin" comments.
Abandon the toxic "more heat than light" philosophy. When this refrain or some variation of it is invoked, it tells the people affected that we either aren't able to help them or that we don't care enough to help them. It says that we'd rather let it be someone else's problem, even if it means kicking the can down the road and letting it get worse (which makes the eventual boiling point even more chaotic).
Challenge incivility tag-teaming. User A is frequently uncivil and eventually gets taken to ANI. They're causing harm everywhere they go and are a serious threat to editor retention. They've been given dozens of chances and a ban should have been implemented years ago. But then Users B, C, and D all show up and oppose any sanctions for whatever reason they come up with. Maybe they ignore the context and say that this interaction isn't sanctionable, or maybe they pick one mistake the reporter made and make it all about that. Their filibuster gets it closed without action. The next month, User B is brought to ANI for incivility. Users A, C, and D then show up to complain about "civility police" and ask that the discussion be closed as a frivolous report. And so on.
Unless someone has any creative ideas to fix this, the only solution is for everyone who's tired of Wikipedia's toxic culture to call out incivility when they see it and make their voice heard at ANI. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:40, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
I've been here a while and I don't find it toxic. Get a thicker skin is sometimes appropriate and there are different ways to say that. Maybe a bit cut and thrust time to time, at the end of the day it's just words not bullets. OK sometimes they can hurt too and egregious cases need to be dealt with as does persistently bad behavior. There's a lot worse places to be than WP. Selfstudier (talk) 22:03, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Getting a thicker skin is not something people can do on command, though, which makes it inappropriate.
@Thebiguglyalien, I might add something about us valuing dispassionate communication, and thus punishing the victims for expressing how emotionally affected they are by being victimized. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:02, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Sure, but it isn't necessarily only about the present moment. Surely a constructive, civil observation about someone's conduct can factor into their future self-reflection and ultimately help them out? That's often how these things seem to work. Remsense ‥ 诉11:21, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
I'm probably from the wrong culture to be offended / hurt on Wikipedia. I deeply value kindness and consideration towards others, but I also feel like if I make a lot of mistakes and generate a lot of work for others, I should be called out on it, and told why what I'm doing is a problem. Any cultural corrections we attempt to implement to improve our atmosphere also need to take into account that we're working on a project together, and the quality of our output does matter. We also need to take into account weaponization of civility policy used for removing frustrated / escalated opponents from content disputes. Folly Mox (talk) 11:15, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
I think the whole "culture" issue is a red herring. We have no way of knowing what "culture" an editor is from, and editors are obliged to follow Wikipedia policies regardless of background. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 12:27, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
That would make more sense if this were a content policy and not a conduct one. The concept of civility is mediated by culture, if explicated considerably in the policy body. Remsense ‥ 诉12:32, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
We sometimes used to get editors saying they were on the spectrum as a reason they were behaving contrary to policy. Usually the best approach was for fellow editors to calmly point out to them what the standards are. Likewise, if somehow one's claimed culture results in incivility, then the best approach is for a uninvolved volunteer to calmly point out what our civility policy says, rather than an administrator to impose sanctions or a formal warning. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 12:39, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
That's why an intervention by an ordinary editor is helpful if an editor gets carried away or has an emotional issue or is genuinely on the spectrum. If an editor is using incivivility as a tactic in a larger "battlefield" campaign, then obviously nothing short of a block or topic ban will deal with it. But if the civility aspect of a problematic editor is addressed by an uninvolved editor, and they reject that counsel, it establishes a record for future action if necessary. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 13:04, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Having an "ordinary editor" intervene is only going to helpful if that editor knows what he's doing. Imagine that you have an editor who is trying to fix something and unintentionally breaking something else in the process. It's generating a lot of work for other editors, and we need to do something to stop that problem.
However, the correct "something" depends on the editor's perception of what constitutes civil behavior. Here are three different ways to say the same thing:
For someone like Folly Mox, you might take a direct, informal approach: "Hey, you probably didn't realize it, but when you frob the widget, it breaks the glorkanfangle. I fixed one of them for you like this so you can see how to fix it. Ping me if you've got any questions."
For someone from a face-saving culture, you would make more of an effort to affirm the value of their efforts and your humble request: "Hello, and thank you for your helpful contributions to fix the widget. I appreciate you noticing and fixing that problem. When you are making those edits, would you please consider fixing both the widget and the glorkanfangle at the same time? It would save the community a lot of effort, because the glorkanfangle's operation depends on the widget's settings. Here is a combined diff that shows how to fix both at the same time. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you."
For someone who is autistic, your message should be direct, detailed, and comprehensive: "You have made many edits to articles containing the widget. Unfortunately, the changes you have made to the widget are interfering with the glorkanfangle on those pages. Please stop making edits that break the glorkanfangle. According to the template's documentation page, if you need to fix the widget, then you must also adjust the glorkanfangle settings. You should do this either in the same edit or immediately afterwards. If you don't do this, then the page will be in violation of the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility guideline, the readers will see a misformatted infobox, and your edits may be reverted without warning by any editor who sees them. Here is a diff showing the correct way to adjust the widget and the glorkanfangle at the same time, and here are pages showing what the pages look like before and after adjusting the glorkanfangle. When you make these changes, be sure that widget remains above the glorkanfangle in the wikitext code. As soon as possible, you should either self-revert all of your edits to the widgets, or go back and fix the broken glorkanfangles on all of those pages."
All three of these communicate the same three main points to their specific audience:
Stop breaking pages.
Here's the information you need to achieve your goal without breaking pages.
Go clean up your mess.
But:
For the first two, "Stop breaking pages" and "Go clean up your mess" are implied, rather than directly stated. For the last, everything is plain and clear. You don't need to guess what the message-writer might be thinking about your edits. You don't need to guess what might have been left unsaid. You only need to follow the written instructions.
For the middle one, the message emphasizes the editor's positive contributions and downplays the problems created. We are not saying that the editor did anything truly wrong, because that would be offensive. We are instead only making a humble request that the valuable editor make even better contributions. We are trusting that the face-saving editor will be able to infer from the information provided that their edits screwed things up and that we want them to fix it.
If you go to a face-saving person with the autistic-oriented message, the person is likely to feel like it is an offensively direct public rebuke. They will not feel like it is a civil message. But the face-saving message will confuse and stress some people on the autism spectrum, because it's so vague: Is this an optional extra? Do they want something specific from me? Is this just an interesting fact to know? They didn't tell me to take any action about this, so I didn't – why are they mad at me now?! The end result is that they will not feel like it is the kind of message that supports and builds up the community – which, depending on how you define civility, means they will not feel like it is a civil message.
When we look at human interactions, there are a few universals (e.g., condemnation of unprovoked murder), some commonalities (e.g., table manners exist everywhere, though they look different in different places), and some differences (e.g., approach to punctuality). Especially for ordinary communication, what's considered civil depends on the culture. That's true regardless of whether the humans are interacting in person or online. The end result is that what counts as "civil" to people from one culture is very obviously "uncivil" to people from another culture. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:10, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Agree with your points, and as an irrelevant aside, I actually respond best to being shamed and guilt-tripped, which – perhaps relevantly – I don't regard as incivil. (Nor do I practice those, nor recommend for the general case). I've been too well trained by toxic supervisors and partners. So I'm probably a bad example. Folly Mox (talk) 16:57, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
In terms of process, I feel like a step we could take would be expanding / forking WP:3O to include behavioural concerns alongside content disputes. Dropping a quick template transclusion in a conversation where you're looking for an uninvolved opinion on civility feels like a much more lightweight process, without all the visibility and unstructured commentary a noticeboard is likely to generate.Of course, any process without the power to impose sanctions is unable to deal with genuine problem actors, but if it's a case where someone is being inappropriate but willing to listen to a voice outside the immediate dispute, calling in a single busybody to have a look at the exchange might have some positive outcome. Folly Mox (talk) 11:07, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Having a third person provide an opinion works best when both sides are receptive to feedback. With a behavioural dispute, though, if both persons recognize there is a dispute regarding behaviour yet fail to agree on ways to mitigate the behaviour, then they're unlikely to be receptive to a third person weighing in. (If they were, it's likely they would have found a way forward on their own.) In the case of an unrecognized clash in cultures, a third person could help provide context, but that would depend on the two parties recognizing there is a clash, and that third person being able to recognize this as well and subtly learn through discussion with the two parties about their cultures to isolate the clash. isaacl (talk) 20:17, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Could you elaborate regarding point #2? I've never heard that idiom before, but after looking it up (neat!) I'm only a shade more sure what behavior was being characterized as such. Apologies in advance! Remsense ‥ 诉11:14, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
"More heat than light" usually used to mean "this comment is expressing the emotion of anger, instead of objective facts". The idea that expressing emotions is unhelpful or inappropriate is fairly common in Western culture, particularly in English-speaking or northern European cultures. It is odd and uncomfortable to people from cultures that are less fearful/more accepting of emotional expression. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:13, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Just to clarify, I'm referring to entire discussions getting shut down per this reasoning. My argument is that sweeping problems under the rug is dismissive to the people trying to bring attention to them, and it entrenches long-term issues to make things marginally easier in the short-term. And I'm not concerned by whether someone is from a given culture or not; civility isn't a matter of never saying anything imperfect ever, it's about being able to communicate these things and walk away with a mutual understanding. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:53, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
The analogy is with a light bulb, where the intended purpose is to provide light to an area, and the side effect is to generate heat. (If the reverse is intended, then you'd call it a heating element.) Ideally you want as much energy as possible emitted as light rather than heat, to be more efficient. A conversation generating more heat than light isn't providing enough additional insight into the topic to make it worthwhile. isaacl (talk) 20:24, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Most of the really vicious stuff done to other editors is not covered by wp:civility, in fact weaponizing wp:civility is a common way to "get" other editors. Most people would rather have us stop people from civilly sticking the knife into their ribs than stopping people from using swear words. North8000 (talk) 20:25, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Although I imagine there could be cases where it would help, as I discussed earlier, I think it would more often be disregarded as just one other person's opinion. In situations where two people have failed to find a way forward on their own regarding behaviour, I'm hard-pressed to think of cases where one uninvolved person joining the conversation has resolved the dispute. isaacl (talk) 12:13, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
Honestly, while I think that WP:CIVIL is extremely important, it's also probably the easiest of our conduct policies to enforce. When someone is persistently uncivil it tends to produce easy, obvious diffs that can be thrown up on WP:ANI, WP:AE, or even in an ArbCom and which will eventually get them sanctioned. I don't think we need elaborate mechanisms to encourage and enforce it. It's the opposite problem, WP:CIVILPOV, that is difficult to enforce, because it's something that has to be inferred from someone's extended edit history rather than producing easy at-a-glance diffs that can be used to show what someone is doing wrong in a few clicks, compounded by the fact that most CIVILPOV accusations involve multiple editors accusing each other of it while framing themselves as the selfless defenders of the wiki, in situations that tend to look like simple content disputes from the outside (and often just are.) But for CIVIL cases it's not hard to figure out which editor in a dispute is throwing around insult and aspersions, which is why we end up with situations like eg. Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Antisemitism in Poland, where a case premised on serious accusations of intentional distortions of the facts resulted in editors being sanctioned mostly for saying mean things to each other; even ArbCom couldn't untangle the underlying accusations (and to be fair to ArbCom, most of the editors didn't even try to make those accusations during the case, probably because they knew how hard it is to prove compared to pointing out obvious incivility.) If you think there are areas where incivility isn't being sanctioned, though, IMHO all you have to do is take it to ANI or AE - incivility tends to be easy to enforce when someone actually pulls it into the light. --Aquillion (talk) 17:38, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
I agree that the "easy, obvious" problems are easy to spot and obvious when seen. But I don't think that all cases of incivility are easy to spot, and I don't think that all accusations are true. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:17, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
There's no question that in instances in which civility is part of a long list of editor behavior issues, and in which a cohort of editors effectively reject WP:CIVIL entirely or abuse it, AE and Arbcom are called for. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 15:34, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
Getting Current With Cultural Trends
To keep up with recent trend to keep relationships defined as per their choice, there are partnerships such as Civil Partnership, Platonic Relationships, or just Girlfriend and Boyfriend etc... please change spouse to partner or any culturally relevant term thar reflects the current state of preferences on bio pages of individuals. DhawanMohan13 (talk) 16:33, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
DhawanMohan13, why change "spouse" to "partner" in the majority of cases where it is correct? I am married. I have a wife (gender-neutral term "spouse") and she has a husband (gender-neutral term also "spouse"). Many people that I know have partners or boyfriends or girlfriends. We should describe everyone, incuding those who have a spouse, accurately. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:18, 18 August 2024 (UTC)
The definition of spouse is (written) your husband or wife, I doubt it acknowledges people who are in a relationship they dont want to label. For example just boyfriend girlfriend, civil partnership, etc... DhawanMohan13 (talk) 05:03, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
I think what Phil is saying is that if someone is married, there is no reason not to use the word 'spouse' accurately. Otherwise, 'partner' is fine. – Joe (talk) 05:06, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
Or is the concern in the opposite direction?
@DhawanMohan13, it's not clear which problem concerns you:
"Mrs. Married" is legally married, but you think we should write "her partner" instead of "her spouse", to sound current and trendy.
"Miss Girlfriend" is not married, but you have found a Wikipedia article that talks about "her spouse", when it ought to say "her partner" or "her boyfriend".
Of course the article about Miss Girlfriend should be corrected, but we should leave Mrs Married as is, unless we have sources saying that she prefers not to use the term. Phil Bridger (talk) 07:14, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
If there is no legally defined relationship, there is no reason to list the person. We don't list every girlfriend/boyfriend, we list people who are joined in a marriage or civil partnership. For those relationships the terms are "spouse" and "partner". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:54, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia follows; it does not lead. The onus is on you to show that any such "trend" has become predominant in reliable sources; you have not even attempted to do so. I fervently oppose cultural activism at Wikipedia (repeal the "mankind" ban until such time as the word is widely considered archaic, etc.). ―Mandruss☎19:53, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Hello, I'm a new user and was wondering if we can have our username start with a small letter. Almost every website I use has my username as "brishtibheja" but only here it becomes "Brishtibheja". Brishtibheja (talk) 20:53, 20 August 2024 (UTC)
There are ways to make your username appear as brishtibheja in your signatures and on your user page and user talk page, etc. For help with that, I suggest WP:HD; it would be a misuse of this page. No proposal is in order. ―Mandruss☎21:04, 20 August 2024 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Sarbajeet Mohanty & Pooja Vijay's Article
Wondering why there are no articles on Sarbajeet Mohanty and Pooja Vijay? They have been a notable paranormal investigators for the last many years and are currently featuring on MTV India's Paranormal reality show, Dark Scroll as Paranormal Experts, streaming on a notable streaming platform Jio Cinema. Scareguy123 (talk) 19:32, 21 August 2024 (UTC)
The best way to prove notability is usually to show WP:THREE reliable sources discussing the subject in detail, to fulfill the Wikipedia:General notability guideline.Also, this is probably not the best place to ask this question, this is for large-scale proposals such as new policies or mechanisms. May I suggest you the Wikipedia:Teahouse, which is a lot more newcomer-friendly? If you want, you can write a draft yourself and submit it at Wikipedia:Articles for creation (and again, don't hesitate to ask for help at the Teahouse!) Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 19:38, 21 August 2024 (UTC)
I haven't looked at this particular case, but the usual reasons for a missing article are either that the subject is not notable or that they are notable but nobody has volunteered to write the article yet. The latter is particularly common for subjects based outside the Western Anglophone world. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:53, 21 August 2024 (UTC)
Currently if a user clicks "Add a topic" on an article talk page, a box appears which prompts them for a "Subject" and a "Description".
"Description" is somewhat cryptic in that context, and seems like a placeholder string that was never reassessed. A talk page message or question isn't really a description of anything. In some contexts (like Talk:ChatGPT and Talk:Google, talk pages which ended up locked in response to so many people mistaking "Add a topic" for a direct query to those services) asking for a "Description" may, to some users, look more like a prompt to communicate privately with a generative AI or web service, rather than the start of a human conversation with Wikipedia editors.
I raised the suggestion more broadly at the idea lab earlier in the year and was told that, regarding a change to this specific interface message, altering these strings will affect all pages. This change has to be very carefully considered. So here's a concrete proposal to change it. Will "Your talk page comment" make sense in all contexts where this string is displayed, and would we agree that it was an improvement on "Description"? Belbury (talk) 14:06, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
We can certainly improve on "description", and "Your talk page comment" would be such an improvement although I am not immediately certain it is the best we can do - especially if this appears anywhere other than talk pages? Perhaps something as simple as "Your message" would work? Thryduulf (talk) 14:13, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
I think our motivation behind keeping it so aggressively-generic was that we weren't sure what places were using the "new section" form that this takes over, and we wanted to avoid something like "start a new discussion thread" as being too specific to only talk-page workflows. (The thing to watch out for is places outside the talk namespaces, that use __NEWSECTIONLINK__ to get that behavior...) DLynch (WMF) (talk) 17:12, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
Thryduulf, oops, looks like the URL contained NEWSECTIONLINK, which caused it to be parsed as the prop and not as a URL. I've edited it to add "deletethis" — follow the link and delete those words and then it'll work, or just use Anomie's better method below. Sdkbtalk02:20, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
I don't know how to use the API or run db queries, but the special page worked. I've not got time right now to look in detail, but that reports there are a lot more uses in non-talk namespaces than I expected:
Many of these are going to be appropriate (e.g. on this page, the portal page titles suggest they are nomination spaces) but I wonder especially about the articles. Thryduulf (talk) 02:17, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
I suspect the articles will turn out to be either vandals being weird or people not knowing what stuff does and throwing a bunch of magic words on the page trying to get Google to index a new article. Of the handful I spot-checked, I saw one that seems like the former and a bunch that seem like the latter. Anomie⚔02:36, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
There were 9 remaining in article space, all redirects. I have removed them, along with other code. It seems it was often added with other magic words in a group (eg.), so perhaps your second theory, although I wonder where the collection of magic words is found. CMD (talk) 20:49, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
This is a smart suggestion; thanks for raising, Belbury! I'm inclined to support "Your message" for conciseness and to be on the safe side given Thryduulf's concern that it might be used outside of talk pages. Sdkbtalk15:15, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
I agree with the idea, but would be inclined to suggest "Your comment", given that "Your message" might still be mistaken for a ChatGPT/Google/etc. prompt query. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 18:06, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
"Your comment". Just based on widespread, almost universal Wikipedia terminology. Messages are for emails and texts—things that are sent, not posted. ―Mandruss☎18:22, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for the ping, @Sdkb. And thank you, @Belbury for prompting us to reconsider this message.
Generic enough to be helpful in the range of contexts it will ultimately appear
With the above in mind, what do you all think about starting with something a bit more specific like, Topic description and seeing if/how that proves effective? From there, we can consider whether further iteration is needed.
Meta: I feel moved to say: it's a delight to work on a project with folks like you all who consistently pay close attention to details of this sort in service of improving peoples' experiences contributing to our mission. Thank you to @NAyoub (WMF) for reminding the Editing Team of this point when discussing this offline earlier today ^ _ ^ PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
I like the idea, we can start with this! I still fear Topic description might still be a bit too abstract in a way, as it doesn't really indicate that the "description" corresponds to the message that will be posted on the page. Nonetheless, definitely an improvement over what we currently have. And yes, fully agree that details like this are much more important than people realize, happy to see the WMF team on board with this too! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 18:03, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
I agree with ChaoticEnby about being too abstract. To me, "description" is meta; it's about something but isn't the thing itself. Your message or Your comment or even Your post are less confusing. Schazjmd(talk)18:17, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
I agree with Schazjmd that "description" is meta; it's about something but isn't the thing itself. - it's a better fit for the edit summary than the main substance. An exception might be if it was paired with "Title" but then I'd be expecting a third box in which to post the details. Thryduulf (talk) 18:34, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the response! The range of contexts where the message appears is definitely key to any decision here, so it would be good to establish for sure what that range is. The Special:Pageswithprop search above shows that the __NEWSECTIONLINK__ magic word (which causes the "Add topic" tab to appear, creating a Subject/Description box when clicked) is being used across various different types of non-talk page, which seem to break down into:
Pages of sequential, titled conversations which are effectively functioning as talk pages (like Wikipedia:SVG help, Help:Books/Feedback), where a string of "your comment/message" would still work.
There's also some unusual niche usage of the magic word to, I assume, create a handy shortcut for starting a new section on a log-type user page (User:Fabrickator/questionable edits).
Should the second and third cases be something to bear in mind when crafting a message, or can they be regarded as misuse of the __NEWSECTIONLINK__ magic word, and not something to worry about?
And are there any other places in Wikipedia where the discussiontools-replywidget-placeholder-newtopic "Description" string would appear, unrelated to __NEWSECTIONLINK__ magic word? Belbury (talk) 18:53, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Those second/third cases are definitely the sort that we were concerned about when introducing the tool -- we thought that if we came in and took over the existing section=new behavior, we'd wind up stepping on the toes of people who had built up workflows around it (or at least, would be surprised by us auto-signing things). To that end we have a bunch of checks that determine when we actually take over from the old tool...
Summarizing here from the code that spells out whether following the ?section=new link on a page should open the new topic tool:
It must be an edit page (action=edit or veaction=edit) with section=new
It must either not be using any preloads (editintro, preload, etc) or have opted in via adding the `dtpreload` parameter to the URL
It mustn't be trying to preview / switch from some external tool via having posted a field named `wpTextbox1`
Then the new topic tool must be enabled for that page in general, meaning the URL has `dtenable=1` as a parameter OR
It's a wikitext content-model page (but not liquid threads)
It doesn't have the NOTALK or ARCHIVEDTALK magic words
It's in a namespage that wants signatures (any talk namespace, or $wgExtraSignatureNamespaces), or it has the NEWSECTIONLINK magic word
Finally, it must be available to the user, which is a combination of "turned on for that wiki" and the user actually having it turned on in preferences (Editing > Enable quick topic adding).
So! All that adds up to the challenging-to-search for part: pages in wants-signature namespaces that don't have NEWSECTIONLINK (we can probably assume that anything in an actual talk namespace is either really talk or won't be too offended if someone assumed it was), but which are somehow linking to the section=new tool as part of some on-page flow, perhaps even using the preload parameters so the user can fill out a form-template. Here on enwiki the extra signature namespaces are just Wikipedia (NS_PROJECT) and Help (NS_HELP) -- the question's much trickier if we were talking about some discussion/coordination focused wikis (mediawiki.org, metawiki, etc) which have their main namespace as an extra signature namespace.
For instance, if you follow this link to AfD with the right url parameters you'll get the new topic form, even though it doesn't have NEWSECTIONLINK. This is obviously not the way to interact with AfD specifically, but you can imagine some other process-page that does work this way...
That said, I think there's a fair extent to which "how should these process pages and magic words work?" is a community question. Our default message choices were kinda based around not wanting to cut off options / break existing processes, particularly since they had to fit more than just a single wiki, and I think (not having talked to Product about it) that we wouldn't want to drift too far away from that for the default... but a particular wiki wanting to tighten it up seems fine, so long as you're aware of the trade-offs. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 20:13, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Yeah, separately from the question of exactly how talk-specific it should be, I agree that we might want to tweak the generic-default over to something a little more indicative of "this is the body-text of a message"... DLynch (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
It will need a fine-toothed comb to find any "existing processes" that are deliberately using __NEWSECTIONLINK__ in a way that would conflict with a change to referring to the text as a "comment". But from a superficial look through the Wikipedia and User namespace usages (where the pages aren't structured as any kind of signed log or conversation), the existing processes that I can find do just appear to be using the magic word in error, for whatever reason - none of the pages appear to need or use their "Add a topic" tab to create new, sequential non-talk sections.
Making those already-non-standard pages a little more cryptic seems a very small trade-off for the benefit of every talk page on Wikipedia clearer to new users. Belbury (talk) 13:23, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
Does the community still want moved pages to be unreviewed
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Back in 2017, the community decided in this RfC that moved pages should be unpatrolled. The feature was stuck in Phabricator purgatory and was never actually implemented.
I'm really surprised so many people supported that: it would create a substantial added burden for patrollers in exchange for maybe making a very rare problem slightly easier to detect. (Redirects from page moves already go into the queue, and even if they're retargeted elsewhere, a good reviewer should notice the suspicious history.) Unless this is a much larger-scale issue than I'm aware of, I don't think that proposal should be implemented. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 08:00, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
I have seen cases (e.g. recently at AT CBS This Morning) where a long-standing patrolled page becomes unpatrolled because a non-autopatrolled user moved the page - like from vandalism being reverted like CBS This Morning, or from requested moves like (709487) 2013 BL76. There can be quite a lot of these cases. Is this scenario also part of this discussion? thanks. Aszx5000 (talk) 09:36, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
@Aszx5000 That specific behavior is part of a bug that started happening recently and will be probably reverted. It's being tracked in T370593. The default behaviour is to not unpatrol page that are moved. Sohom (talk) 10:00, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
I think the RfC should be respected. Yes, WP:CCC but we really shouldn't overturn an RfC without an new RfC. Besides, this will help with detecting move vandalism in some cases so it is a useful change. Nickps (talk) 12:32, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
Oppose: If the RfC hasn't been implemented in 7 years, and it was only recently implemented by accident, it makes sense to revisit the discussion instead of implementing it by surprise so much later on in time. As one of the more active patrollers, I absolutely hate the idea of adding to the workload / massive backlog by adding pages to the queue just for being renamed. Really we'd want to just mark it as patrolled 99% of the time anyways. Hey man im josh (talk) 14:49, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
Oppose on the merits. I agree this is unnecessary and wasteful. But this discussion needed to be had and formally codified anyway to avoid unintentional cabalish behavior /WP:CONLEVEL problems. * Pppery *it has begun...15:19, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
FWIW, I attempted to figure out how much moving and patrolling actually goes on so I could see if making it necessary to re-patrol moves would indeed add a significant workload. I came up with 916 moves and 1225 patrols yesterday. My SQL is weak (and my understanding of the MediaWiki schema even weaker) so I don't know if these numbers are accurate or not. If they are, then it looks like this would almost double the patrolling workload. RoySmith(talk)15:33, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
Hmmm, maybe I should have restricted this to mainspace? But I'll let somebody with better SQL-fu than I have play with it. RoySmith(talk)15:34, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
Though, as usual, raw statistics are misleading. Neither of our queries, for instance, try not to count page moves by autopatrolled users, or pages moved out of the main namespace without leaving a redirect or where the redirect was later deleted. I can at least compensate for the small sample size by showing stats for all of July up to now, which are better: 7068 page moves starting in mainspace, 13519 mainspace page curations. —Cryptic16:55, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. I don't see much of a point in implementing this as it would unnecessarily double the workload of the NPP team. Redirects left behind from moves are already placed in the redirect queue (except for users in the page mover, autopatrolled, and redirect autopatrolled groups, including administrators). DannyS712 bot then automatically reviews a portion of them if the changes fit certain criteria, and the rest are reviewed manually. I feel like this system works just fine; it's not like we have a runaway page-move vandalism issue on our hands. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 17:50, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. To quote myself from 2017: Oppose pending more information. I'm concerned about rushing into something that will potentially hugely increase the load at the already hugely-backlogged WP:NPP. How many pages are moved per day? How many more reviewers would we need to handle the extra load? What's the scale of this problem? Are there other solutions we could explore (e.g. marking pages that have {{disambig}} removed as unpatrolled)? We have the answers to some of those questions above, and it's not looking good. Doing this would double the NPP workload in order to close a loophole that is apparently so small that nobody noticed it had been accidentally left open for the last seven years. Really bad idea. – Joe (talk) 21:35, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
Comment: the proposal as it developed in the 2017 RfC was not for all article moves but for those by non-EC users which I think was 40 a day at the time. Cenarium's comment is not clear to me but search for "40" (not pinging them because they have not edited since April). Pinging @Ivanvector: who initiated the proposal for their comments. We don't know if this is still a concern or if other mechanisms were put in place. S0091 (talk) 19:39, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
not for all article moves but for those by non-EC users which I think was 40 a day at the time. This somehow ended up not reflected in the 2017 RFC close and not reflected in the 2017 Phabricator ticket. We could go off on a tangent about whether that RFC was closed correctly or not, but I think it's a non-issue because we'll get a fresh consensus in this RFC that will override any lack of clarity about the previous close. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:58, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
??? I don't know that area that well because that not normally where I do my NPP work but I thought this was already happening. For example Extracorporeal procedure was in the cue. The community really needs for fix some things to help with the disaster at NPP but worrying about easy stuff like this really isn't it. North8000 (talk) 20:28, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
Oppose: Unnecessary. They will almost always be marked as reviewed immediately, so this just adds a pointless burden to the NPP queue. CFA💬22:15, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Proposal: Create quizzes on Wikipedia
I’ve always been disappointed that Wikipedia doesn’t offer this feature and would love for it to be put in to Wikipedia. Since we have AI around, we can easily create quiz questions on a larger scale for the most popular articles. We could start by implementing quizzes on the main page and going from there. I understand that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, but the question I came here to answer is that is it just an encyclopedia or is it more than an encyclopedia that includes features that are not just for encyclopedias as a general learning site. Britannica has something similar and I think it would be great not to copy everything it does, but have it as inspiration for creating quizzes. I would like to discuss if Wikipedia should have extra features that make the website more enjoyable rather than just reading and editing. I hope you will consider this suggestion. Interstellarity (talk) 21:33, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
The NY Times runs a weekly quiz, with questions about the previous week's news stories. It's kind of fun (even if I rarely score above 50%). My guess is if you pitched this to WP:SIGNPOST they'd be happy to run it. On the other hand, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from doing it in your own userspace and announcing it on WP:VP. If people like it, they'll vote with their mouse clicks.
I'm not too on board with including quizzes and other gadgets like this, that are a pretty heavy weight to maintain (especially with having to review all the AI-generated quiz questions), while not really being encyclopedic and probably being an uncomfortable distraction for a lot of readers (including me). However, having them on the Signpost would be cool, although I don't think them being AI-generated is a good thing. On a larger scale, I'm afraid of "feature bloat" where the core thing (here, the encyclopedia) gets buried under layers of gimmicks, ultimately making it much less convenient and not necessarily more enjoyable. Adding more for the sake of adding more isn't necessarily a good thing. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 22:43, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
The idea of quizzes was discussed in June 2022 and by you in March 2022. As I said in those discussions, anyone should feel free to start quizzes on a project page to establish a track record of being able to produce them regularly, and to figure out what audience exists for this feature. isaacl (talk) 04:03, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
Heh, I just looked up the March 2022 discussion (which I had long since forgotten about) and discovered that I said almost exactly what I said here :-) RoySmith(talk)14:45, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
I don't get why we need things like extensions and AI to run quizzes. Quizzes existed long before Mediawiki and AI. Just take a couple of minutes to ask a few questions each day/week/month in your user space and advertise it on one of the village pumps and/or Signpost. If the feature is popular then it can be formalised to the main page etc. Nothing will happen unless someone (most likely you) volunteers to do it. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:40, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia already has loads of extra features that make it more enjoyable, most of which are dramaboards 😉 The true "extra feature" that makes Wikipedia so great is how lightweight and on-mission it is. Even on a bad connection, on a slow device with an old browser, I can navigate to a Wikipedia article, and it will load the whole thing for me to read (certain restrictions apply).I don't have to stop the page loading before stylesheets are applied because it can't reach an advertising partner, I don't have to leave the tab open two minutes and go do something else while my phone wearily executes javascript routines, I just open the page and read the page, like how the internet used to be before it became total capitalism garbage.Any extra interactive features added to the default experience reduce our availability and usability for people on the lower end of computing resource / network infrastructure privilege. It feels important to preserve that equity.So I guess my position is: no, Wikipedia isn't just an encyclopaedia— it's also an online community; but also no, Wikipedia isn't a general pedagogical resource— it's pretty much just an encyclopaedia with an active editing community. Folly Mox (talk) 13:27, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
For sure! I probably could have done a better job in selecting a qualifier than the term "general" in general pedagogical resource, or maybe should have chosen different words altogether. I was attempting to communicate my personal opinion on the OP's question on whether Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia or is it more than an encyclopedia that includes features that are not just for encyclopedias as a general learning site.Folly Mox (talk) 09:47, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
Adding such pointless drivel would make the site much LESS fun to use. There is already too much silly game-like (ie barnstars) or extraneous (userboxes) crap here.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:29, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
Sure, why not! It's an education website. This is something many loose track of, we are in the business of a non-profit education resource. The best way to do this is start a Project and run the quizzes in project space. Once it has a following and support, which might take years and press exposure, then consider something on the front page. -- GreenC20:37, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
Oppose - this is an encyclopedia, not Facebook or TikTok. We do not need to degrade ourselves by turning ourselves into a host for social media games. --Orange Mike | Talk20:58, 20 August 2024 (UTC)
Hi everyone, sorry for responding so late. I don't check Wikipedia as often as I used to. Unfortunately, I don't have all the time in the world to be dedicating to making the quizzes all by myself. I'd be open to suggesting ideas that will help make the quizzes better. I feel that if I had help with the quizzes rather than alone (not saying I won't contribute, but I don't to put a heavy load on my editing and my personal life), I think it would be helpful to increase the chances of it being a successful feature on the site. Interstellarity (talk) 22:50, 20 August 2024 (UTC)
It's not necessary for you to do all the work, if there are other interested contributors. As the one who seems most interested in the idea, though, you are a good candidate to co-ordinate the work, or even to just create some quizzes on whatever schedule is convenient for you to try to figure out what might be a sustainable way of working. isaacl (talk) 17:32, 21 August 2024 (UTC)
...and the best way to find out who could be involved is for you to start with a few questions. I'm sure you will get people saying "I wouldn't have asked that" so you can ask them what they would have asked instead, and the second quiz will already be written. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:23, 21 August 2024 (UTC)
I think you (and Mike) are being a bit bah-humbugish here. Of course this shouldn't be an official™ part of Wikipedia, but there's no reason why someone shouldn't ask a few questions in their user space if that's what floats their boat. It will probably fail anyway. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:24, 26 August 2024 (UTC)
The proposal was to put it on the main page, so it merits being discussed (and, in this case I guess, opposed) as a serious proposal, not assumed to be automatically relegated to a userspace project (which can be done without a village pump proposal). Honestly, having it on the main page or articles directly would be bloat, but I'm down for having quizzes on the Signpost, and it would definitely be fun! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 19:54, 26 August 2024 (UTC)
Improve readability of hyperlinks in Dark Mode
The current dark blue color of hyperlinks in Wikipedia's Dark Mode can be difficult to read, especially for users with visual impairments. I propose changing the color of hyperlinks in Dark Mode to a brighter, more readable color, such as yellow.
This change would improve the overall usability and accessibility of Wikipedia for users who prefer Dark Mode. A brighter hyperlink color would provide sufficient contrast with the dark background, making it easier for users to navigate and read articles both on the website and the app.
Rationale:
Improved readability and accessibility for users with visual impairments
Enhanced user experience for Dark Mode users
Consistency with web accessibility guidelines, which recommend sufficient contrast between text and background colors
Implementation:
Change the color of hyperlinks in Dark Mode to a brighter color, such as yellow (#FFFF00)
Ensure the new color is consistent across all devices and browsers
Discussion:
I welcome feedback and discussion on this proposal. Please share your thoughts on the proposed change and suggest alternative solutions if you have any. Galilean-moons (talk) 14:53, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
If there is a standard colour for links in website dark modes we should use that (for the same reason we use blue as the standard link colour on light mode). I'm not a regular user of dark mode meaning I have little direct experience, so I looked for examples. Of about 20 websites with dark modes that were highlighted as good by various discussion forum contributors, only 3 were primarily text-based, had links of a different colour to the body text when not mousing over the link and had a dark mode that I could easily find and activate. Two of them used a pale blue (#3ebcf4 and #9eb1ff) and 1 used purple (#a667e4). A couple of git hub results were people commenting/complaining that yellow is not an intuitive colour for hyperlinks. Thryduulf (talk) 19:19, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
Further, it would probably be best if the color is set in same place where the light-mode link colors are set rather than us overriding them locally. That would likely be in the skin. Anomie⚔21:31, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
Light blue is good, although cyan could also be an option. It is visually brighter than blue at similar HSL lightness levels, while a light blue (higher lightness level, i.e. adding white) isn't visually as sharp, especially if we want to make it visually distinct from purple. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 23:03, 20 August 2024 (UTC)
I use dark mode and am (slightly) vision impaired. The difficulty for me is less the blue hyperlinks and more the difference between blue and purple (non-visited/visited). Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:47, 20 August 2024 (UTC)
@Gnomingstuff Yeah, unfortunately I don't expect much improvement there, especially considering how many websites style away visited link coloring entirely, forcing them to the same color as unvisited links. (Something that will always earn them a UserStyle in my browser, restoring the difference, because WTH is it with site authors just deciding that a useful browser feature isn't necessary on their site?) So I guess we should be happy there's any color difference at all.
I know at least for the light-mode skin, in the last round of design updates not too long ago, the decision was made to slightly lighten the unvisited blue, and massively lighten the visited purple. The focus was on increasing their contrast relative to the black body text (for some reason), though I pointed out that it came at the cost of decreasing their contrast with the background color, particularly in infoboxes and other non-white sections of the page, but the whole contrast-with-unlinked-text thing was a big priority for some reason. It was an unfortunate additional side effect that the change also brought the two colors much closer to each other, but I suppose contrast in particular is always a balancing act. FeRDNYC (talk) 15:00, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
A new color might be useful, but yellow seems to me to be a pretty poor choice, as it's quite an aggressive color. I think another shade of blue would be optimal, as up to now people have made things with yellow backgrounds but not with blue ones, and yellow-on-yellow situations would violate MOS:CONTRAST. — Alien333 ( what I did why I did it wrong ) 20:20, 24 August 2024 (UTC)
@Alien333 I can see the point of yellow, in that it's the complementary color to blue in many color models, and yellow links inline with white text (remember, we're talking about dark mode here) wouldn't really be that "aggressive", I don't think. I'm not entirely sure how easy it would be to detect yellow links in white text, particularly for users with color-vision impairments. Though IIUC, both the yellow/white and yellow/blue pairings would be good choices because the difference would remain completely visible to those with the most common form, deuteranomaly ("red-green color blindness").
Also, just for the record, there are a ton of blue-background elements on Wikipedia, particularly in the article space — including all of the standard infobox, navbox, and table styles. (Heck, even the standard background for inline <code>...</code> elements used to be a subtle blue, though it seems it's been changed to a neutral gray.) Yellow may reign in Talk page headers, but blue is very common elsewhere.
The prevalence of blue backgrounds on article pages is why I tried to point out that lightening the blue link text in the light mode palette was an especially poor choice, because links often appear inside those boxes, and quickly become combinations that fail the WCAG's thresholds for text contrast against background color. In dark mode, those background colors either get erased entirely, become a shade of dark gray, or (least commonly) become a much darker blue, so it isn't as much of an issue there. FeRDNYC (talk) 21:18, 26 August 2024 (UTC)
After some CSS tinkering:
Actual yellow would be nearly invisible, and certainly not legible. Some kind of inverted yellow, such as this one, could do the trick, but as long as we're going to do that we might as well just take a cyan of the same level, like that one. Also this green, maybe. I'd prefer the cyan or green because that is more logically linked to the light blue of unvisited links. — Alien333 ( what I did why I did it wrong ) 22:57, 26 August 2024 (UTC)
Reword "Publish" to "Save"
People keep becoming confused because they think clicking "Publish" means "Move my changes to article space". But they should think that! – that IS what "Publish" must mean to any reasonable person in their situation, and there's no good reason for them to think it might have the meaning it currently does. "Publish" means to make something generally available and accessible, to put it on public display – it doesn't mean "commit changes to upstream server" (or whatever is actually happening), and it certainly can't mean that to the average person editing Wikipedia.
The only potential good reason I can see to keep it as it is would be "We deliberately keep this process confusing" – and I don't agree with that kind of policy. TooManyFingers (talk) 17:09, 27 August 2024 (UTC)
I can see your point, but as far as editing Wikipedia goes, anything you 'publish' is both available and accessible by other people. Relabelling as 'save' could likewise be easily misunderstood. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:17, 27 August 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia's lawyers wanted the button changed to say "publish changes" to emphasize that all edits to any type of page are public. "Save" does not do that. 331dot (talk) 17:22, 27 August 2024 (UTC)
I think this is a case of 'fixing the wrong thing'. What is wrong is Drafts. It is an incomplete feature because it's just a public page in a public thing that isn't really 'public'. It could be fixed by making these particular cases "Publish draft" or something the like however, making every single control in MediaWiki super context specific is a bit difficult (it is designed on purpose to be a generic system after all). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:00, 27 August 2024 (UTC)
Someone creating a draft has to grapple with several things...
Writing some text in their draft
Saving (which is published publicly; which means both legally it can be reused/edited/scrutinized)
Even with all that, they need to transclude {{subst:submit}} which is when it is really submitted for review...and still then it's not published in sense of being visible in Mainspace (not to be confused with Wikipedia namespace)
Every control being context specific, sure. But having the text for a few select UI elements being namespace-specific (or namespace-overridable) may not be the worst idea for a future WMF developer project. ― novov(tc)12:36, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
Just a general comment: even very common words do not mean the same thing to everybody. A change you think makes things clearer may make things more confusing for someone else. It's one of the areas where we have to find a rough consensus, using language that makes general sense to most users without leading too many astray. Discussions like this are how we figure it out. Donald Albury21:03, 27 August 2024 (UTC)
We're unlikely to find a word that can't be misinterpreted. "Save" is more ambiguous than "Publish", in my opinion. Perhaps "Commit". The absence of anything else that might mean "put this in the page" might be a clue. But, ultimately, any uncertainty lasts as long as it takes to try it and see what happens. Are we getting a lot of complaints from newbies who can't figure out what to do? If not, it's the proverbial solution in search of a problem. People keep becoming confused - Show me, please. Operative phrase is "a lot". A few is not enough. ―Mandruss☎23:07, 27 August 2024 (UTC)
But what you write is public, even in draft space. That's the whole thing. The only potential good reason I can see to keep it as it is would be "We deliberately keep this process confusing" – and I don't agree with that kind of policy. Come on, that's an obvious strawman. The fact that the WMF already weighed on it, and that people gave it many thoughts before making this choice, should tell you there is probably a less dishonest reason for it. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 23:09, 27 August 2024 (UTC)
We do cause confusion when we say (accurately) that every edit is 'published' but also use the verb 'publish' to refer to moving drafts to mainspace. But as others have said, the problem lies with the drafts, which is a poor choice of words to begin with (people don't usually publish 'drafts'). I've never heard or been able to come up with a better phrase, though. – Joe (talk) 08:39, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
@Joe Roe A simpler change would be to change verb for move from Draft to Article as "Promote" to indicate it's a positive thing, without touching the thorny legal/technical side of publish. It's celebratory and fits other descriptions of being declined/rejected. The namespace bit is an implementation detail. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 11:55, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
I think it important that editors understand that when they click the button, they are “publishing” whatever they have written. Where it is published does not matter. It may be published in Mainspace, in Draftspace, in Talkspace, in P&G space, etc. … but it is all a form of “publication”. Blueboar (talk) 12:16, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
Long story short, it's gonna stay "Publish" - lots and lots and lots of prior arguments about this were already made, and the WMF is going to enforce that. The OP thesis is that editors are confused when editing in draft space. We could add additional guidance to Template:Editnotices/Namespace/Draft - which appears in the edit window for all pages in the Draft namespace if there is special guidance needed. — xaosfluxTalk13:33, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
And additionally... complicated processes will always cause confusion, not matter how much text you throw at the user. The whole process only exists because we didn't want Pending Changes/Flagged revisions in main space. Flagged revisions would have probably been simpler to understand for the users, even if it would have been more annoying to us editors. Its always a balance. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:03, 29 August 2024 (UTC)
Deploying Edit Check on this wiki
While attending Wikimania this year, Selena Deckelmann (User:SDeckelmann-WMF) demonstrated a new feature for Visual Editor, Edit Check in a session. Edit check introduces additional prompts in Visual Editor when an editor tries to insert a blacklisted URL as reference and also when they try to publish a revision without inserting a reference. This greatly helps with encouraging editors inserting references in their edits. If I recall correctly, the percentage of editors inserting references increased from 11% to 40% in their tests (do correct me if I am wrong as I am going off on my recollection).see #What's next? for corrected stats
There is certainly some benefits in enabling this, primarily on improving the verifiability and reliability of content that's on English Wikipedia. Most of the sister projects have already been deployed with this feature. English Wikipedia does not have this feature enabled yet. The only thing that is holding back this feature is that Visual Editor is not set as the default editor for anonymous and new editors.
Therefore, I would like to propose that:
Visual Editor be the default editor for anonymous and new editors.
The last time I checked, new editors are presented with a pop-up box that asks them to choose which editor they'd like to use, with the solid blue button pushing them a bit toward the VisualEditor.
This thread is rather underdeveloped. For a proposal of this magnitude, I think we should figure out relevant factual questions (like what the current default is) and then draw up a more formal survey that could be CENT-listed, etc. Sdkbtalk19:05, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
Another question is how does it work with edits that don't need references adding (e.g. creating redirects, adding links on disambiguation pages, fixing spellings, etc)? Thryduulf (talk) 19:08, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
In theory, this sounds like a great idea. I'm eager to try it out, but I think a first step would be to make it available as an opt-in on enwiki. Then after people have got some experience with it, let's come back and talk about making it the default. RoySmith(talk)20:09, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
There's a simpler option for userscripts that should work: window.MWVE_FORCE_EDIT_CHECK_ENABLED=true;
So long as that's there before VE loads, it should force you to have edit check. Either method also bypasses the account restrictions on edit check, so you're not quite getting the pure experience that people would if we just turned it on for enwiki. By default it only shows up for new users (defined as under 100 edits), and someone might want to edit the configuration on-wiki for that. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 21:26, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
The add-reference check is very conservative currently. You need to be a user with less than 100 edits who has added a whole new paragraph of at least 50 characters (configurable per-wiki) that contains no references before it'll pop up. This can all be loosened up in the future, whether by default or through community configuration, but we figured that those criteria had pretty low odds of being a false positive to start with.
It's quite interesting that this boosts the percentages so much, because I honestly thought that complete new-editors would be doing far more minor edits. But no, major new blocks of text are pretty popular.
It's actually turned on with the reference check everywhere but 8 of the wikipedias (bn, de, en, hi, id, nl, pl, ru), so it's pretty easy to try it out on another wiki if you don't want to jump through userscript hoops here. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 21:34, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
Not sure where ReplyTool will put this, but nothing I'm seeing in the documentation requires VE to be the default editing interface in order to deploy the new tool. So deployment doesn't seem contingent upon answering the larger question of whether VE should be default. Folly Mox (talk) 22:17, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
Unless things have changed in the last year, it doesn't need it to be the default, but editor does need to be in the visual editor, and that's somewhat more likely to happen (especially for the editor's first edit) when the visual editor is the default. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:29, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
The functionality is targeted towards new editors and anonymous editors, therefore the need for Visual Editor to be the default before the deployment of the functionality is considered complete. Also there are on wiki configuration options that we may want to adjust. As stated by Dlynch (WMF) above, the tool is configured by default for an user with less than 100 edits and making revisions of more than 50 characters. – robertsky (talk) 04:15, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
Minor quibble: enwiki has already got the prompts about blacklisted URLs for references/links. We rolled those out everywhere on the logic that any edits involving them were going to get blocked-on-save anyway so it wasn't going to disrupt any workflows. :D
It's a bit fuzzy because we called the project "Edit check", and we're developing a specific system called edit check (of which the "add reference" check is the first example), but we're also doing smaller edit-enhancement features along the way that colloquially get called checks just because of the project.
To use the famous quote: "There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors." DLynch (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 9 August 2024 (UTC)
Given the information you've provided.
Conduct a thorough analysis of the potential consequences of setting Visual Editor as the default for anonymous and new users. Consider factors such as user experience, editor retention, and overall editing patterns. If making Visual Editor the default is not feasible, investigate other strategies to increase Edit Check adoption. This could include targeted outreach to experienced editors, promoting the feature through in-editor messages, or developing incentives for reference usage. Regardless of the chosen approach, it's essential to closely monitor the impact of Edit Check on reference usage and article quality. This data will be crucial for refining the feature and measuring its overall effectiveness.
I'd support making Visual Editor the default, as long as they also leave wikitext editing as an option (which I'm sure they will). VE is much better nowadays than when it was first released. As a WYSIWYG editor, I suspect it is much more new editor friendly. It is unarguably better at things such as automatic citation generation and table editing (adding and removing columns and rows, moving columns and rows around). And for the few things it is bad at (such as complicated template syntax), power users can just switch to wikitext editing. Any logged in user can select their default at Special:Preferences (under "Editing mode"). –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:47, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
I totally agree that VE should be the default for new users. I use VE every day, and it's just fine for most stuff, and getting better incrementally. Folks who think VE should not be the default should go to edit-a-thons and try teaching new users. 20 years ago, wiki-markup was the new hotness and was miles ahead of editing raw HTML. Today it's just a barrier to entry for potential new editors. RoySmith(talk)12:24, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
When I first edited English Wikipedia as an IP editor, I found WikiText editing very difficult to understand. I’m sure that most new IP editors face this issue. I strongly support making the Visual Editor the default. New IP editors are often unfamiliar with Wikipedia and may not know how to cite a reference using the WikiText editor. They may also not know how to switch to Visual Editing. Frankly, I still have to check the preview before publishing edits using the WikiText editor because I sometimes make mistakes. GrabUp - Talk11:08, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
Potentially minor bugbear alert: The visual editor reference creator still hasn't figured out the basic functionality of allowing for an easily accessed and obvious use of an |author= field, instead forcing all authors into |last and |first. It's not a groundbreaking issue, but it's really disappointing that it's still around after so long, especially given the many words given over the years about attracting more diverse perspectives etc. The default reference tool that we are going to create a pop up asking all new editors to use should allow for sources from authors whose names don't fit into the common European name format. It may be hidden behind an additional field button, but at least the wikitext reference creator has the option. CMD (talk) 12:10, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
My biggest bugbear is the lack of ability to set a reference name. For example in this edit I switched from visual to source editing so I could reuse citations between prose and infobox. Although admittedly this is not something a brand new editor wants to do, being able to set a name other than ":0", ":1", etc would be rather handy. Thryduulf (talk) 12:28, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
Is naming references a policy? Or is it something you consider useful? I don't edit the code. I just reuse citations when I need them, directly from the citation insertion menu. Very convinient. 37.169.50.102 (talk) 12:52, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
I mostly work in VE; I'm not personally bothered by the opaque names (i.e. ":0") that VE invents because I never see them. But many people work in wikitext, where having human-friendly names is important. So, I agree that improving support for reference naming should be a high priority. RoySmith(talk)12:57, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
I just went looking, and I don't see a Phab ticket for this. I was a bit surprised there was no ticket, but then I thought about it a bit more. It's probably hard to come up with a wiki-agnostic way to generate good citation names. You'd have to program it with something very enwiki specific to get it to read our unique citation templates then extract the author last name and year from them. User:Nardog/RefRenamer is a good workaround though. –Novem Linguae (talk) 13:14, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
I thought we were talking about auto-generating good names. Those tickets are for something else. Maybe I am misreading this subsection though. Apologies if we are not actually talking about auto-generating good reference names. –Novem Linguae (talk) 13:20, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
When copy pasting named references to another page, you get false matches that are not obvious. If automatic named references were more unique (slugified title) this false collision would happen less often. I am all for hiding/abstract workflows where needed. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 13:03, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
All programmers should read Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, and then re-read it every few years to refresh their memory. People who design database schemas should re-read it every time they start a new project. I agree that it's not a showstopper for our purposes, but it is a surprising lack of cultural sensitivity from an organization which is so into i18n.
For me, the biggest bugbear is that there's no good way to convert a {{cite web}} into another template without basically starting from scratch. It really should be smart enough to figure out that if {{cite web}} has a "first=" field, it can safely map that into {{cite news}}'s "first=" and so on. It won't be perfect, but it'll get you most of the way there. RoySmith(talk)12:57, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
@Chipmunkdavis @RoySmith Visual editor follows the definition of the template parameters at Template:Cite web#TemplateData (and so on for other cite templates). I think the developers would also wish that you didn't require the name to be split into two fields; it's a chore to fill it out this way. If you think this can be changed, please edit it there. Matma Rextalk13:58, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
@Matma Rex you are entirely correct that VE gets its field definitions from the templates. The first part of my comment about first_name/last_name ethnocentricity applies equally well to template writers.
But, the part about being able to convert one type of citation to another really is a VE issue. The "automatic" feature of the VE template editor is very handy, but it often can't intuit the proper type of template (that's not VE's fault) and falls back to using {{cite web}}. It would be really handy if you could say, "Please make that into {{cite news}}, and do the best job you can converting the fields". RoySmith(talk)14:38, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
|author= is already present in the existing template parameters, even if just as an alias of |last. Not presenting the alias in VE is a choice of VE, the buck should not just be passed to blindly following a particular table. CMD (talk) 14:56, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
It might be controlled by the WP:TEMPLATEDATA in something like Template:Cite/doc. I think VE reads the template data to determine the parameters it displays. If a parameter is omitted or set as hidden, perhaps it is not displayed. Not 100% sure but that is probably worth checking. –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:08, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
Assuming it is, then it would be really useful to have some statistics of how often VE (I know, I should really be saying Citoid or Zotero, or something else, but I'll just keep saying VE because that's what the end user sees) gets it wrong. I'm not entirely sure how we would define "gets it wrong", but a first pass might be "VE initially calls it {{cite web}} which is later corrected to a different {{cite xxx}} variant". Some of that might require instrumentation inside VE to detect when the user abandons a constructed citation before saving it. Some of it might require analyzing revisions to the page to see when template types are corrected after the fact. But let's assume one way or another, we could build a log of incorrect categorizations.
Then what we would do is take the full log of these reports, group them by top-level domain, and sort by frequency. If it came out that "bxtimes.com" was the most frequently domain which got mis-categorized, then it would be the highest priority for a human to go figure out how to fix and add that knowledge to the VE (Citoid? zotero?) database. After enough iterations of fixing the highest priority ones, we'd end up with a better system. If (total SWAG here) we could find the 100 top problems that accounted for 50% of the total errors, with a very small amount of human work to fix them, we could have a major win.
It sounds like a reasonable stab at the misassignment-of-citation-templates issue.
Caveat up front: I'm a developer, but I've never actually touched the internals of Citoid+Zotero, so I might be wrong about details here. That said, I believe you're right that the classification part happens entirely in Zotero, and further that if you want to teach Zotero about how to classify a new site there's some guidelines we have for that over on mediawiki.org. This coming from Zotero is also why we have vastly more classifications than we actually use on-wiki -- check out the mapping for that.
It's possible that some of the incorrect template-usage you see could be at the level of those mappings, as well -- I note that the `statute` type is just hooked up to the generic `Citation` rather than to {{Cite_act}}, for instance, though that's probably far from the most common one to need.
As for the specifics of working that list-of-sources out...
We do have some instrumentation inside VE already that could probably be looked at to work out how often someone gets all the way to the "presented with a citation-template" step and then abandons it, which would give us an okay up-front guess at the rate where something is wrong with the generated citation. Ignoring the question of other types of failure for now, the next problem is that our VE usage-instrumentation is carefully ignorant of content for privacy reasons, so it doesn't know anything about what URL was looked up when that happened. Looking for revisions which consist of just a citation template being replaced with a different citation template sounds doable, albeit slow.
I wonder if we could approach it another way. Assuming that Zotero has some internal logging of the translator it used when we make a request to it, or that it can be persuaded to tell Citoid this, we could perhaps add some logging for requests that fall back to the default-translator for unknown pages. That's not a perfect match for the misclassifications, but it's much easier to find. It does leave out cases where the translator exists but is getting it wrong, of course. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 01:46, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
it doesn't know anything about what URL was looked up when that happened does it know/track what type of template it chose? If so we can possibly work out what proportion of e.g. cite-news vs cite-web generations were abandoned? I don't think, ottomh, there would be any privacy issues with that? Thryduulf (talk) 01:53, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
Unfortunately not. All it tracks is that a citoid request happened, and then either that the "insert" button was chosen or that something was done to move away from the citoid results list. It doesn't even track what type was chosen if you go to the "manual" tab and explicitly pick one of the templates listed there.
I do agree it seems very unlikely to be a privacy issue. I mostly mentioned that was the guiding principle to explain why the case for so many questions like this turns out to be "we never needed this actually-very-innocuous content-related data before, so we weren't collecting it". DLynch (WMF) (talk) 02:09, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
Superb Owl has been maintaining a table of domain names where mw:Citoid has trouble producing a correct citation at User:Superb Owl/Community Wishlist § Automatic Citation Tool. As I understand it, Citoid's problems are partially due to how it scrapes target pages, and if domains are not putting all the information we need in <meta> tags then our only recourse is to improve Zotero translators directly.However, Citoid is understandably geared towards internationalisation and extension to all Wikimedia projects. En.wp has a considerably more complicated / sophisticated / mature citation framework than probably anywhere else. Little things like an automated citation using {{cite web}} instead of {{cite news}} or {{cite periodical}} don't bother me: User:Citation bot converts these, and the only template type it really struggles with is conversion to {{cite book}}, which has a pretty different parameter set.What does bother me about the automated citations output by the Visual Editor (apart from all the <ref name=":0">) is how often it just dumps out obviously incorrect information with no message to the user. Things like |last=B.C. |first=Sima, Qian, approximately 145 B.C.-approximately 86 (1); |last=Company |first=Rand McNally and (2); |last=Feb. 1 |first=the Office of Communications on |last2=2019 |last3=P.m |first3=3:06 (3); |last=à 00h00 |first=Par Le 2 avril 2008 (4); |first=Government of Canada National Research Council|last=Canada (5), etc, etc, etc, bonus consequence.A few days ago, I floated the idea to add a layer of error-checking into the VE citation generation interface. That's really all we need, I think. It shouldn't be the responsibility of WMF staff to ensure that every citation generated by their tools somehow makes sense for our project. But if there could just be one extra step for editors using the interface, where they could see the errors their automated citations are causing our community-maintained modules to throw, maybe they'd take the steps necessary to compare the output against the source and correct the problems before publishing.This won't fix every problem, obviously: algorithmically generated citations are only perfect when they draw on structured metadata that maps properly and completely onto our template parameters. But being able to get feedback during the edit should help editors in the VE environment clean up some of their own messes before they hit mainspace, unreviewed at the bottom of the article. Folly Mox (talk) 12:37, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
@RoySmith, @DLynch (WMF), @Folly Mox, speaking from experience from creating Zotero translators for a couple websites that I frequently use for citations, errors like this are more often than not a byproduct of missing specific Zotero translator rather than anything else. The default translator will interpret og:type = article as itemType = 'webpage', therefore citiod will use {{Cite web}}. This is unfortunate as even in the default translator's own test cases, vox.com is expected to return as 'webpage' for itemType. However, I would agree with this output, as in Open Graph Protocol, the last object type specified is 'article', and I am assuming that that's the fallback for Facebook as Facebook would use the embedded preview for articles if there's no og:type in the header (i.e. Facebook debugger on wikimedia.sg).
Therefore, what's needed to be done is to either have another translation layer on citiod to map generated citations from identified websites to use {{Cite news}} instead of {{Cite web}}, or write a specific translator for bxmedia.com, or investigate if the default translator in Zotero can be extended further so that the rework for specific websites can be minimal. – robertsky (talk) 18:16, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
Actually, passing Citoid's output directly to Citation bot before returning it to the editing interface – one specific implementation of another translation layer – sounds like a minimally effortful solution using tools already deployed and currently maintained. Citation bot doesn't fix everything (and breaks some things) but it usually does a good job in selecting which template type to apply to a citation, and in mapping data to appropriate parameters. Folly Mox (talk) 18:35, 11 August 2024 (UTC)
Yes. I have it enabled as an user script. It just won the Coolest Tool Award for improving the quality of edits. While I appreciate the work there, I also wish there is an easy way to translate the JSON files to Zotero translator format so that the work can be enjoyed by those who cannot use it out of the box on Wikipedia and everyone else who is using Zotero in general. – robertsky (talk) 08:36, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
65, I had heard of that tool, but wasn't previously aware of its functionality. It looks like a great idea, but for the fact that it is presented as an option to Citoid's output rather than a replacement of it (community generated translators for domains Citoid struggles with should – by definition – always be superior).I'm not interested in apportioning blame for Citoid's output: generalised parsing of html meta elements across the entire set of domains is a hard problem and a big task, with a lot of people involved in every step. But it remains true that for a significant portion of domains lacking structured metadata, Citoid's output ranges from suboptimal to unusable.Any additional translation layer that can be configured by the community would be superior to none, and that functionality should exist in Visual Editor so as to improve the quality of citations generated and reduce the maintenance burden shouldered by script maintainers and experienced editors on this project. Folly Mox (talk) 11:29, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
Please post corresponding Phabricator tickets for all mentioned "bugbears". 1) Having tickets for these things and 2) making noise in them is the best way to move these fixes forward. –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:31, 10 August 2024 (UTC)
Thanks all who have participated in the discussion above. I wil admit that this is my first time opening a proposal. Apologies if it is lacking in some details. While early, it seems that at this juncture, there a large support among the participants to have Edit Check deployed and/or Visual Editor be set as the default editor, keeping in mind that there are still some bugbears, or wishes to have some citations related issues resolved (honestly, I think belongs to another thread, but I appreciate the discussion nonetheless). I would like help in bringing this proposal to the next step of having it as a CENT discussion, be it by opening another thread/discussion here or elseswhere, or reformating the current one.
Impact report
In the opening, I presented a wrong statistics from the test that the product team conducted. Upon further check, I found the impact report on reference checks. Short of reproducing the whole report, these are the key numbers:
The number of constructive edits from newcomers increased from 19% to 42% (2.2 times more. As defined by newcomers with less than 100 edits and not reverted within 48 hours).
Breaking down the above number, this is consistent across all wikis with the test on. And on mobile, the increase was 4.2 times more.
Contributors that are shown Reference Check and successfully save a non-reverted edit are 16 percent more likely to return to make a non-reverted edit in their second month (31-60 days after).
10% decrease in edit completion rate for edits where Reference Check was shown
1.8% false nagative
6.6% false positive
From the report, we can see that Edit Check, in particular the Reference Check functionality, helps with improving the content contribution of newcomers and helps to improve the retention of newcomers as well. The 6.6% false postive rate may be a concern, but in my opinion, a minor one. Details from the report indicates that some of the dismissal is essentially WP:SKYISBLUE. Additionally, further finetuning of the configuration for the Reference Check may be made as well to attempt to reduce the false postive rate.
Questions asked
The following are some questions and answers summarised from above (feel free to add more):
Qn: Is Visual Editor is the default editor for newcomers on enwiki?
No. Newcomers are presented with an option to use Visual Editor upon first edit. Declining it will let editors to use source editors instead.
Qn: how does it work with edits that don't need references adding (e.g. creating redirects, adding links on disambiguation pages, fixing spellings, etc)?
The default configuration of needing 50 characters or more before the Reference Check kicks in means that most of the edits asked in the question will not have the Reference Check triggered. Further more, it is for newcomers with <100 edits, therefore it won't be presented to a majority of registered editors.
Qn: Must Visual Editor be the default editor for this to be deployed?
While the functionality is available through a JavaScript switch or through a query parameter, Edit Check is meant for newcomers. If it is not set as default editor, the effacies of Edit Check will definitely be reduced.
Having the user pick whether they want to use visual editor or wikitext editor their first time editing a page (the status quo) seems reasonable and it wouldn't hurt to leave that alone. Perhaps we should just RFC deploying edit check, and leave the visual editor issue alone? The two issues don't seem as strongly linked as I first thought. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:16, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
If Edit Check can be deployed without changing the default or not status of VE, it would probably sail through any approval process. If it works, then later someone will be able to pull up stats saying "New editors using VE put references in 80% of their edits but those using wikitext only put them in 15%" or similar to inform that second issue. CMD (talk) 06:45, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
I should also add that the other target audience is anonymous editors. Right now the experience is as screenshot. This may be a subpar outcome for Edit Check if the primary CTA button is 'Start editing', and the anon/new editors continue to edit in source editor.
As for the statistics of how many new editors are using Visual Editor now, this is one which Foundation staff can help to answer since we do not have the access to user data. – robertsky (talk) 09:54, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
That information could be gleaned from an appropriate query, since Visual Editor tags its edits. quarry:query/84486 has the first edit for accounts registered in the first half of 2024; something similar and significantly less complicated could probably check for the "Visual Edit" tag. It would be a bit more difficult to include unregistered editors, but a basic usage ratio should be possible to estimate using public data. Folly Mox (talk) 10:32, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
@DLynch (WMF), I believe these stats are on a Superset dashboard. Can you pull them? If memory serves, there's one query for the first five edits and another for the first 100, but I don't know if one is set up for the first edit alone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:40, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
Edit check will work the same way for VE editors whether or not VE is default. Either way, any usage stats will be within VE users. The message given to anonymous editors who click edit, and the default or not use of VE, do not affect Edit check outside of absolute usage numbers. Generally for new features we have adopted small trials rather than immediate maximal pushses, so in that respect the current VE setup is more a benefit than an issue. CMD (talk) 11:42, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
@Chipmunkdavis, if the community thinks that an intermediate step to trial out this among the newcomers who enable Visual Editor first is required, we should explore the idea. This may simply mean that window.MWVE_FORCE_EDIT_CHECK_ENABLED=true; or the query parameter should be set in MediaWiki:Common.js (and maybe MediaWiki:Mobile.js as well), of course with account restriction criteria being set to limit the force enablement to newcomers of <100 edits.
letuserEC=mw.config.values.wgUserEditCount// wgUserEditCount: null for anon editors and non null value for registered editorsif(userEC===null||(userEC!==null&&userEC<100){window.MWVE_FORCE_EDIT_CHECK_ENABLED=true;}
I don't see how enabling edit check is an intermediate step, unless the plan is to later expand it to <500 or <1000 edits? CMD (talk) 03:42, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
It is intermediate step to see if Edit Check on enwiki does encourage an uplift in new/anon editors who are using VE adding content with references. Dependent on the result, we then can determine if it is beneficial to have VE to be the default editor with respect to Edit Check. – robertsky (talk) 05:30, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
@Robertsky: respectfully, I understand you've personally operationalized Edit Check deployment as involving making VE the default (which it may be recalled I thought was already the case), but these are two separate things. Linking them muddies the proposal and gives the impression of an agenda.I'd love for Edit Check to be enabled on this project, not necessarily for the initial check of adding a reference to a chunk of sufficiently long text (which sounds like a fuzzy test), but for all the stretch goals we could add to it for giving immediate feedback about identified categories of problem edits.Very little opposition should be expected if you disentangle all the Visual Editor stuff from this proposal, and if you wait until more kinds of checks are implemented – the kinds that save experienced editors from making the same kinds of corrections to newbie mistakes over and over – I think you'll see strong support for making Visual Editor the default when that separate question is revisited sometime down the line. Folly Mox (talk) 10:47, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
@Folly Mox you are mistaken that I am involved in the operationalizing of Edit Check with VE. I simply come across the feature and think that it is a good idea to have it enabled. Of course, there is also a strong desire to set VE as the default, but I am pragmatic. The immediate personal aim is to have Edit Check enabled and then we see if it is really beneficial for the English community. – robertsky (talk) 14:21, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
I must not know how to use the word operationalized correctly, which is actually something of a relief 🙃 I was trying to describe a comment of yours above where you explained the need for Visual Editor to be the default before the deployment of the functionality is considered complete. Anyway, glad you're embracing the stepwise pragmatism. Should be an easy pass for the simpler "enable Edit Check" proposal. Often mistaken, Folly Mox (talk) 17:58, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
The likelihood that newcomers will include a reference the next time they add new content
And while we are confident that enabling the visual editor by default for people who are new will have a net positive impact on volunteers across experience levels, the idea @RoySmith, @FollyMox, and @Whatamidoing raised about decoupling the decisions to enable the Reference Check and VE for newcomers and people who are logged out seems wise. [i][ii]
Reason being: doing so, as I think @CMDput well, seems like a relatively lightweight and low-risk way for us to work together to:
Further, as @CMD, @Thryduulf, @RoySmith, @Novem Linguae, @Shushugah, @Folly Mox have mentioned [iv][v][vi][vii][viii][ix], it sounds like there are some facets of the reference experience that would be worth us talking together in more detail about.
The Link Check evaluates all external domains people attempt to link to against the globally-defined meta:Spam_blacklist and the locally defined, en:MediaWiki:BlockedExternalDomains.json and MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist lists.
The Reference Reliability Checks evaluates the references people attempt to cite against the same local and global lists mentioned above.
Zooming out, I think you all are in the best position to decide what you think the most effective deployment sequence here is. And please know: the Editing Team is ready to support you in what you decide.
Alright, I think this is a good place for me to pause.
Please ping me as new questions about Edit Check and/or VE emerge so that I, or another member of the Editing Team, can try to help.
In the meantime, we're going to continue following this conversation and will chime in when we think there is helpful information we can offer.
iii. We'll be able to filter Special:RecentChanges for edits made with Reference Check. You can see this in action at wikis like fr.wiki, es.wiki, and ar.wiki where Edit Check is already enabled.
x. Please boldly add tickets/issues as you see fit
xi. There is an open task the Editing Team will soon address to ensure each time the Link and Reference Reliability Checks are activated, a log entry is recorded in Special:Log/spamblacklistPPelberg (WMF) (talk) 21:11, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
@PPelberg (WMF) in this case, we just need to have the site config updated to activate Edit Check for edits and settings be available at Community Configuration instead of using Common.js? – robertsky (talk) 01:25, 17 August 2024 (UTC)
@Robertsky, hi – would it be accurate for me to understand you as asking the following questions?
What steps would we (volunteers) need to take to activate the Reference Check at en.wiki?
How might we (volunteers) go about configuring the Reference Check? E.g. whose edits has the potential to activate Edit Check, where references are placed (before/after periods), the sections Reference Check should ignore edits to, etc.
Assuming the above are accurate, to activate reference check at en.wiki you all would need to:
Ask us to turn it on
Adjust the configuration on-wiki to reflect your preferences (e.g. example of frwiki’s ignoreSections)
And the Editing Team would need to then deploy a configuration-change patch to enable Reference Check on en.wiki.
Call me wary for a number of reasons. First off is the false claim (also posted at the linked Mediawiki page) that Visual Editor must be the default to deploy this, or the later made implication that it makes no sense to deploy this without making VE the default. If these are coupled in this way, with the bigger change used as a prerequisite for the smaller one, then it is a hard no.
Then there is my last (in a long line) experience with a tool that had been tested or even deployed elsewhere, and worked oh so well (makes me thing of Flow, may it rest in peace). A year ago, we were asked to help with a new tool for the Android App[1]. We were told that "During initial evaluation of the model, it was preferred more than 50% of the time over human generated article descriptions. Additionally, Descartes held a 91.3% accuracy rate in testing." and that it had been succesfully been tested in 15 languages already. When we actually tested, it turned out to be very, very buggy and not usable at all. The result was that in August they posted "We’ve officially received grades for all languages and are now finalizing analysis. We will share the outcomes in next month’s update as well as our recommendations for next steps based on the experiment." and then crickets. So from an A/B tested in 15 languages, successful tool with 91.3% accuracy rate to an abandoned project after one short test by enwiki.
And then I tried to test this new tool here. I added a paragraph of text without a source, published, and got the "add reference" pop-up. Choose "yes", got presented with the automatic reference option by adding a title, typed "Lord of the Rings", no luck, so tried "manual". Click on "Book", and get "thank you for adding a citation!" even though no citation is added. Same result if I manually try to add a website or anything. Perhaps it works in real life, perhaps not, but this certainly doesn't give much confidence. Fram (talk) 13:39, 13 August 2024 (UTC)
@Fram You may see it as a false claim, but it may simply that for the end goal of Edit Check to encourage better content submissions among all anon and newly registered editors can be met by having VE be the default editor.
Your experience in testing out new tools certainly tempers one's expectations on the viability of tools on the platform. With respect to using AI to generated short description, I would also have similar reservations (my cautious approach to/use of AI is known), and still I have to say that it is an unfair comparison given that we are not expecting 91.3% of the new editors to give references. The A/B test in the impact report shows a more modest uplift of ~x2 inputs. Of course, further detailed analysis on a roll-out (in whatever form) on a trial basis can be made if we can tap on the existing tags (i.e. possible unreferenced addition to BLP) or edit filters or even sorting through the raw data.
With respect to the patchdemo wiki, maybe a more updated wiki mirrors better the current real world setup? The demo was generated back in June 2023, more than a year ago. I would have expected bugs and issues between then and now. Furthermore, it might be a patchdemo for limited use? i.e. to show partially the progress of the work? When testing directly on here in enwiki (until before publishing the edit), the reference are being added as a citation be it automatic or manual mode. – robertsky (talk) 19:05, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
If you insist that statements that VE must be made the default for this isn't a false claim, then I think we're done discussing this. And I see no reason to trust the WMF on any test results, considering that coincidentally just now they posted the results of that other software thing I mentioned above:
" By the time most of you provided feedback the experiment was already completed, and we already received support from some of your fellow experienced editors of English Wikipedia ". Yeah, right, like you posted in the "January update" which you posted in, er, August. And which is completely unverifiable, is based on a very small number of edits apparently by unknown "experienced" editors. They claim on that page that "If users that see the treatment do not select a suggestion more than 50% of the time after viewing the suggestions, we will not expand the feature". Let's see:
How often were Machine Suggestions Accepted, Modified or Rejected?
Edit type
% of Total Machine Edits
Machine suggestion accepted
23.49%
Machine suggestion modified
14.49%
Machine suggestion rejected
62.02%
So why do they plan to continue with the feature anyway? Same as always, I guess, features aren't abandonded no matter how bad, no matter which promises were made, until after (usually) enwiki or dewiki find out how bad they really are, and even then only after an unnecessary, unwanted clash with WMF has been had and mutual distrust gets cemented for another 10 years. So yes, I don't trust WMF test results, I don't trust WMF promises, I don't trust WMF false claims and those defending them, and I don't support a rollout of such features without much better, verifiable (by us) testing or with added "requirements" which aren't needed but pushed by the WMF anyway. Fram (talk) 08:41, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
I don't support a rollout of such features without much better, verifiable (by us) testing sure. let's test Edit Check out, as what I have said in my previous replies to others. – robertsky (talk) 16:43, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Let's test it by first providing us with a correct test environment. Sending editors to a test environment which doesn't reflect the actual environment is useless. Step 1: test if it is technically working. This should happen on a testwiki, not a live wiki. This is not an unnecessary step, there have been too many rollouts of supposedly ready new software addons which turned out to be very, very buggy and were not at the beta-stage but at some pre-alpha stage. Step 2: after approval from enwiki, do a limited test on enwiki completely reviewable by editors here, not a test where we just have to believe the results in good faith, and automatically shut down the test afterwards. Step 3: after approval, do a further rollout (larger test or full rollout). For this, we are not at step 1 yet. Fram (talk) 11:13, 19 August 2024 (UTC)
It wasn't until about five minutes ago. Beta was left with an extremely-restrictive configuration since about April as a result of some validation testing our QA was doing for that configuration process. Specifically, it would only activate the edit check if your account had less than three edits made -- though you could have tested it as an anonymous user to get around that.
I just reset the config file to the defaults, so right now it'd be fair to test it there. I can also adjust any of the values if you want to see what the experience is like.
One thing that's not obvious from the config if you want to test it is that the "add a reference" check will only trigger when you add a completely-unreferenced new paragraph. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 03:51, 29 August 2024 (UTC)
Besides Beta Wikipedia, if anyone prefers an English-based example can have a look at simple.wikipedia.org. It is already deployed there and anyone can monitor the changes made when References check is shown to the user, as all edits are tagged (including rejections).
Reference check is deployed at all Wikipedias but 8. It is not deployed at these wikis because we haven't yet informed them that it is an available option. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:37, 29 August 2024 (UTC)
For an example at greater scale, I believe French Wikipedia is the biggest wiki with it enabled (#3 in edits). It's a bit trickier for native English speakers to judge the quality of the edits produced there, admittedly, but looking at the revert rates should be easy enough. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 06:05, 30 August 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. So, looking at the most recent 50 edits at Simple where editcheck was activated, it was declined 39 times, 4 times it was used but the edit reverted, and among the other edits where it was supposedly used we find cases without any reference either[2] or referencing Wikipedia[3], or of course a copyright violation from a Wordpress blog[4]. That's not really an impressive result... Fram (talk) 07:10, 30 August 2024 (UTC)
And at the French Wikipedia, 34 out of 50 were rejected, some others reverted (again e.g. for using Wikipedia as a source), others supposedly used the tool but didn't add a reference anyway[5][6]. This seems close to the results at Simple, and again shows no improvement over the baseline you gave at Mediawiki[7]: "Of all the new content edits newcomers make across Wikipedias, 12% of these edits include a reference." When this tool gives the same results, but also means that many more people are now confronted with a popup they don't want, it doesn't seem like a welcome change. Fram (talk) 07:22, 30 August 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for highlighting that 12% of users add a citation spontaneously, with no prompt to add one. When Edit Check is shown, you observed at Simple Wikipedia that 39 edits over 50 are declined. It means that 11 edits lead to a citation being added. If I'm not wrong, this sample shows that 22% of users now add a citation because we provide a reminder. I think +10 qualifies as an improvement.
Using recent changes and the current flows of edits, I took a larger sample set than the 50 last edits to find the number of Edit check declined edits. I also looked at more wikis. This gives me 309 declines over 500 edits at Simple, 267/500 at French, 197/500 at Spanish, 192/500 at Portuguese, 170/500 at Chinese, 175/500 at Arabic Wikipedia. The percentage of declines decreases, leading to more citations be added, respectively 38.2% (+26.2 points compared to the number given previous paragraph), 46.6%, 60.6%, 61.6%, 66% and 65%. What would be the percentage for English Wikipedia? Let's test it for a given period of time and figure out.
Regarding reverts, let's not forget that References check is an encouragement to add citations. We assume it is for good faith users. Users who have no intention of adding one will not add one. But we now have a good number of users who now add a citation, something never considered firsthand. References check will be improved and some minor issues identified will be fixed. I'm glad that you mention a copyright violation, because the Editing team is working on this as a new check.
Please read what I wrote. "When Edit Check is shown, you observed at Simple Wikipedia that 39 edits over 50 are declined. It means that 11 edits lead to a citation being added." No, as there were cases which weren't tagged as "declined" but didn't include a reference anyway. Of the 50 edits, I think 4 were actually acceptable additions of a reference (without checking in detail). That's 8% of acceptable reference additions with this tool, while 78% of edits confronted the editors with this popup and were declined, and the other 14% were either unacceptable edits or references, or people who didn't decline the popup but didn't add a reference anyway. Please, you can't simply look at the number of declines and think that the remainder is references being added, it's easy to check some of those to see that this isn't true[8][9][10]... Fram (talk) 11:17, 30 August 2024 (UTC)
In the case of this ABC News, there are hundreds of articles with broken links, such as LGBT rights in Afghanistan.
It is even more common for it to omit a link to the "work", either displaying it in plain Wikitext or not at all. This excludes important contextual information, and goes against MOS:UL which says that proper names that are likely to be unfamiliar to readers, which would include news sources as few have global recognition, should be linked.
In the case of this ABC News, there are thousands of articles with missing links, such as Joel Reddy.
Following a discussion with Robertsky, I proposed a bot that would be able to rectify one or both of these issues, as well as add additional information to the citation template that can be determined from the URL or other content already in the template, such as the publisher or publication location.
To minimize impact on watchlists, it can be configured so that only some errors or omissions will trigger an edit, with the rest being done only if the article is already being edited.
I am raising this in the community now to determine whether the community believes that this task is worth completing.
In addition, the bot uses a configuration file that I would need the communities help to expand. Currently, it addresses issues with the following sources:
Please provide details for the other sources that you wish to see corrected by leaving a comment on the configuration talk page, or if you are sufficiently familiar with JSON to understand the configuration file by editing it directly. BilledMammal (talk) 09:02, 25 August 2024 (UTC)
Overall, I support more frequently linking publication names. For an article that doesn't use them, though, it should be kept consistent. Sdkbtalk22:41, 25 August 2024 (UTC)
I’ve already touched on this, with the above reference to WP:UL, but to address it in a little more depth in regards to consistency:
First, I don’t think we want to follow the pattern of the majority of the article, as in most cases they will be unlinked solely because RefToolbar doesn’t add links rather than because of any deliberate editor choice.
Second, a sufficiently expansive configuration file will be able to switch from unlinked majority to linked majority.
However, I would be able to alter the program to not include links under certain circumstances if that is what the community would prefer. BilledMammal (talk) 23:19, 25 August 2024 (UTC)
add additional information [...] such as the publisher or publication location. If that's done, it should be VERY selective, erring on the side of omission. Cites for The New York Times do NOT need to show that the publisher is A. G. Sulzberger or that the publication location is New York City. Et cetera. Bots should reduce work for human editors, not create work for them; we have too much of the latter already. ―Mandruss☎22:44, 25 August 2024 (UTC)
New York Times is actually a very convenient example, as it is already in the configuration file.
Not only will it not add the publisher or publisher location, it will actually remove them if it is already editing a page, in accordance with the specifications at {{cite news}}BilledMammal (talk) 23:09, 25 August 2024 (UTC)
I have often wished that there was a feature in the page protection options to assign a different protection to an already-protected article for a short duration, and when that different protection expires, it falls back to the original protection level. Whatever the current protection level is, it resumes when the temporary override protection level (which could even be "none") expires.
Use cases:
Content dispute between editors on a semiprotected article: I'd like to override that for a week and apply a higher protection (ECP or full as appropriate), and when it expires, the semiprotection resumes and runs it course as usual.
The current behavior is for the article to become completely unprotected at expiration.
Experimental unprotection: RFPP requests to unprotect could have the new protection level (none) override the current protection on a trial basis for a finite duration, after which the original protection resumes. This might be related to a past discussion Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 38#Temporary lifting long-term semi-protection of featured articles, but I would like to see just a general temporary override feature available for any article.
We currently have a pseudo-situation like this with PCP. Any protection other than "none" overrides PCP and when that protection expires, PCP goes back into effect. I am asking for temporary overrides to any protection level regardless of what it is. ~Anachronist (talk) 05:49, 31 August 2024 (UTC)
Not sure how technically feasible this is, but the first use case definitely happens all the time, and often leads to articles becoming unprotected that really ought not to be. So this is at minimum seeking to address a real problem. Sdkbtalk05:53, 31 August 2024 (UTC)
That would work too, except for the case of experimentally unprotecting, but that is low-priority compared to the first use case I described. I wasn't aware of that bot. I hope it can be approved. ~Anachronist (talk) 17:06, 31 August 2024 (UTC)
This appears to be a software feature request, mostly covered by phab:T41038. As such, it is not something that we can implement directly here on the English Wikipedia. Workarounds with a bot as described above are the most we can try in the absence of new software. You are welcome to follow, comment, or provide patches related to T41038. — xaosfluxTalk12:29, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
I don't know where to ask this, but why is it when I logged into Phabricator as my username "Anachronist" to make a comment, the username appears as "Amatulic", which was my username many years ago? ~Anachronist (talk) 16:49, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
@Anachronist, Phabricator accounts are separate from Wikimedia accounts, although the login process is now unified with Wikimedia accounts. So you likely made a Phabricator account under your old username many years ago, and attached it to your Wikimedia account, but while you updated your Wikimedia username, the Phabricator username has stayed the same. You can probably update it there too to keep it in sync. Sdkbtalk19:37, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
I don't recall ever making a Phabricator account. Did Phabricator even exist in 2006? It isn't a problem, I just thought it was strange. My VRT account doesn't do that. ~Anachronist (talk) 19:44, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
The Foundation has developed a new tool at Meta:CampaignEvents which is used by other editions of Wikipedia. Anyone who organizes an Edit-a-thon knows the event management tooling is quite limited and requires lot of behind-the-scene knowledge for promotion of events.
If you believe English Wikipedia should try this feature out, please support this proposal. It does not remove any existing options or require people to use this over other forms of event management. In order to set this up, we need to establish consensus to try it out and then file a Phabricator ticket request, which I am happy to do. See the recent talk from 2024 Wikimania about it here on Youtube and notes from the same session. Here are the slides.
In the past I organized edit-a-thons using the Outreach Dashboard which helped with tracking contributions, but not collaboration between editors (see here). I am also happy for English Wikipedia to try tooling that is used by other language editions of Wikipedia and contribute insightful feedback in order to make these tools useful. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:24, 29 August 2024 (UTC)
Has the support team been looped in on this? There are 3 projects using so far, and it would be useful to know any outstanding issues. Also note, this requires a permission group (c.f. meta:Meta:Event_organizers) that we'd have to determine how to deal with. (some options: WP:PERM, autopromote). — xaosfluxTalk22:44, 29 August 2024 (UTC)
The description says "enhance the management and visibility/discoverability of events within Wikimedia". That certainly sounds like a good thing.
But going off on a tangent, as a checkuser, one thing I'd love to see is some way for an event coordinator to register the IP address(s) which are going to be used at the event, and having that be visible in the checkuser tool (@Dreamy Jazz). One of my suckiest CU experiences was blocking a whole pile of socks only to discover after the fact that what I really did was stomp on a perfectly legitimate "Learn to use Wikipedia" event for 13 year olds. There would be much awesomeness if a notification about that could come up in the tool. RoySmith(talk)23:06, 29 August 2024 (UTC)
I have not yet, but will ask a WMF Staffer to come here for comments. There is a recent video recording from the 2024 Wikimania. Currently available on Youtube. Repurposing WP:Event coordinator sounds excellent. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 23:06, 29 August 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for bringing this up. Regarding this tool, what are the specific implications for en.wiki? Based on Meta:CampaignEvents, it currently has two tools, Registration and Event list. I would assume we would not want Registration here, as that seems to involve the creation of a new namespace (Event:) and is a task better suited for Meta. Conversely, the Event List seems like something people may want to casually have access to, and thus locking it behind the Wikipedia:Event coordinator perm (ie. at the same level as being able to generate unlimited new accounts on a single IP) feels limiting. CMD (talk) 06:28, 30 August 2024 (UTC)
You can directly edit as a user this event: Meta:Event:Sandbox/Shushugah/Testing without any special permissions on Meta. And same would be true for English Wikipedia if approved here
We should have the Event namespace in English Wikipedia. While only users with event creator can "register" the event, any editor can still edit the content and description with project updates. To-do lists etc..
Meta:Main might be better suited for multi-wiki events it also requires advanced knowledge of Help:Interwiki syntax and is not very new user friendly. Copying and pasting a list from enwp project page to Meta wouldn’t simply work and would require juggling two different accounts. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 15:00, 30 August 2024 (UTC)
Is there an advantage to adding the new namespace on en.wiki in the days of unified accounts when new users can post on meta too? CMD (talk) 13:57, 31 August 2024 (UTC)
I mentioned a few cons, namely that wikilink templates would break, templates are not usable across different Wikis, the watchlist is separate for each. For advanced users this might be acceptable but for new users explaining difference between Meta and enWP would be a very high hurdle and counterproductive. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:01, 31 August 2024 (UTC)
I think it would be technically possible to do this. I would suggest filing a Phabricator task, with the Campaigns and the Trust and Safety Product Teams tagged so there is visibility by both teams. Dreamy Jazztalk to me | my contributions14:08, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Hello, everyone! My name is Ilana, and I’m the product manager for the Campaigns team, which developed the CampaignEvents extension. Thanks for bringing up this topic, @Shushugah, and thank you for your responses and feedback, @Xaosflux, @Pppery, @RoySmith, and @Chipmunkdavis. I’ll respond to the questions and comments so far below, and I’m happy to respond to any other questions that come up:
Event Registration was first released to Meta-Wiki in November 2022. It has been used in 600+ events with over 10k participants. The Event List was released in April 2024, and we’re now expanding it to feature WikiProjects as well (see T368115). Invitation Lists is our newest feature. It is testable on the beta cluster (see video demo), and we’re planning to release to Igbo Wikipedia & Swahili Wikipedia soon.
The extension has two sides: an organizer side and participant side. The participant side requires no special rights for access. The organizer side requires the Event organizer right for access. Wiki admins set the criteria for and manage the right. We are open to comments on how the right can be configured or expanded. We love the idea of bundling it with the Event coordinator right.
The extension comes with two new namespaces: event and event talk. You can read our rationale for why the namespaces were created. Overall, we think that there are many advantages to keeping the two namespaces, but we’re open to other ways that communities may want to define event pages. So, we are curious to hear what others think on the topic!
In the near future, we are hoping to integrate Community Configuration (T370829). This way, wiki communities can choose to turn on the extension, and they can choose which tools to turn on and how they should be configured.
I have a question for you all: How do you feel about my team inviting some organizers and/or users of the CampaignEvents extension into the conversation? Perhaps they can provide some more context. Since the extension is enabled on Meta-Wiki, we already have users from many different wiki communities.
Is there a reason the invitation list is not listed as one of the features alongside the Event Registration and the Event list on the main meta page? Anyway, if the features are separately toggleable, it sounds like enabling the overall extension is only beneficial and separate discussions can be had on the existing and upcoming features. CMD (talk) 07:50, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Invitation list is a very fresh feature with some tickets still being worked on so that would explain why it's not mentioned yet. In any case, with Community integration coming soon, it will be easier for admins to automatically activate/de-activate features based on our wishes. I am quite curious whether embedding/transcluding the Event list in different namespaces is possible, e.g a Wikipedia Talk namespace for a WikiProject talk page. @IFried (WMF) what would be best way to test this assuming it's approved? I guess Admins/Event Coordinators would be the subset of people who could create events. Can you envision this tool being useful for backlog-drives? Is there any paper/findings about how Events have been used/evolved? ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:57, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Hi @Shushugah & @CMD! Great questions, which I will respond to below:
Why isn’t Invitation Lists on the CampaignEvents page? We just updated the page with information on Invitation Lists. We previously didn’t include this information, since Invitation Lists was not yet available to any live wikis. However, we just released Invitation Lists to all wikis with the extension (T373041), which means all such wikis can opt to enable it. It has also been enabled on Swahili & Igbo Wikipedia (T372582). For these reasons, the page has been updated, and we’re open to any feedback on the tool or interest from communities that would like to enable it.
Can we transclude the Event List onto a page in a different namespace?: No, there is currently no ability to do this. However, we’re interested in learning more about this request on the project talk page or in Phabricator. We’re especially interested in learning what problems would be solved by developing such a feature improvement. Thank you for bringing this up, and we look forward to learning more!
Can the tools be used for backlog drives?:
Yes, we think all three tools in the extension can be useful for backlog drives. With Event Registration, organizers can set the infrastructure in place for managing participation in the backlog drive. They can register participants, collect optional demographic information, and communicate with participants via mass email. With Invitation Lists, organizers can find people to invite who have demonstrated interest in the topics covered in the drive. With the Event List, organizers can promote the backlog drive to a wider audience. Overall, Event Registration can be used for many different types of activities, and we encourage organizers to use the tools in ways that work for them.
My colleague, @Astinson (WMF), an experienced editor on English Wikipedia, shared another use case: He signs up for backlog drives, but then sometimes he forgets to come back and work on them (like the Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Backlog drives/September 2024). He shared with me that the Event Registration tool could help organizers remind participants like him to participate in collaborative work.
Are there any papers/findings for how events have been used or evolved?:
We do not have an official paper like you mentioned. However, our work was initially inspired by the findings from the Movement Organizers study, along with other studies (see Evidence). Since the launch of our team, we have conducted regular office hours to collect feedback on our work. We have also launched surveys (for example, V0 findings). In the case of Invitation Lists, we conducted an experiment on its potential efficacy and published our findings (see April 2024 update).
Event Registration is being used for a wide range of event types, such as campaigns (example), edit-a-thons (example), training sessions (example), hackathons (example), affiliate meetings (example), office hours (example), and conferences (example).
Both Event List and Invitation Lists are quite new, but they’re focused on making events more discoverable on the wikis. We look forward to seeing what we can learn from them.
We have a survey: On the topic of continually learning, we have a survey that is going on now. We’re exploring how the toolset could be expanded for other collaboration tactics (i.e. WikiProjects, collaboration groups, tasks forces, etc). We want to see if and how the infrastructural pipeline in the extension (i.e., discovery of potential participants, registration, and communication) could be helpful to WikiProjects and other forms of collaboration on the wikis. In that case, we encourage folks to take part in our survey, and we’ll share our findings once the survey is complete: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKWHPjSjSqOmca8E-eQl1HHUxYRbB4QeEV3zR2bd1_tcwuMg/viewform?usp=sf_link
Invariably the first thing I want to do after landing at the Wikipedia home page is search for the article that I want to look at. I think it would be sensible to make the search field permanently visible. There is already room there at the top of the page, and although only a click away, it seems unnecessary to have to click on the magnifier. Why not just have the field there ready to type into? Am I right in thinking that it used to be that way? I wonder why it was changed. 2A00:23C8:7B0C:9A01:8A7:5D88:5F57:107E (talk) 19:53, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
I think the magnifying glass only appears when the window is narrower than some threshold (looks like about 1100 px). I'm not sure why they do that; there's plenty of space left at all but the most extremely narrow widths to allow for a full search box. But in any case, this is really a Vector 2022 skin issue, not something enwiki has any direct control over. Perhaps ask on meta:Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements? RoySmith(talk)20:04, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
You're right, it's dynamically controlled. I didn't realise that. When I lower the browser zoom level the search field becomes visible. It seems to me that all that needs to be done is adjust the "trigger" level at which it is displayed, so it is only suppressed when there is "obviously" not enough room to type a search query. 2A00:23C8:7B0C:9A01:8A7:5D88:5F57:107E (talk) 20:32, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
I have a proposal. Please can you consider to add two Kartvelian languages of Georgia and neighboring countries spoken as a minority, which are written in Georgian script and are missing on Wikipedia like there are Georgian and Mingrelian. I want from one of the admins to create two Wikipedia editions for Svan language and Laz language. These two languages belong to the Kartvelian language family and are written in Georgian script, however they aren't mutually intelligible with each other and also with Georgian and Mingrelian. If they will be added, each of these four branch speakers of the Kartvelian language will have a better opportunity to learn more these languages belonging to the Kartvelian language family, and also these two new Wikipedia editions will have their own articles which they will belong to the article scope of the regions where these languages are spoken. In addition, the other visitors from different parts of the world will learn about these languages. Please add these two Wikipedia editions as they are old languages spoken in Georgia, which is an ancient country with rich history and culture. I would be so happy if you will take my request into consideration.
Yes, but, as WhatamIdoing says, there is a bureaucratic procedure that has to be followed on Meta, not the English Wikipedia, to get this proposal off the ground. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:22, 11 September 2024 (UTC)
It might be helpful to be clearer about that process: If you want Wikipedia articles in those languages, then 99% of the time, you will have to do the writing/translation work yourself. There is no secret group of people here that is skilled in those languages and just waiting for the opportunity to create the articles. If your hope is "I'll suggest this, and someone else will do all the work", then you will be disappointed. The process that is likely to work is the one that sounds a lot more like "I've got a dozen friends who speak these languages natively and would love to spend several hours per week, for the next decade, working on this". WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:21, 11 September 2024 (UTC)
Reducing strife about Talk page banner clutter
I have made a proposal at Module talk:Message box to add a class parameter to the module, so that users may opt to hide certain message boxes from view when logged in. The issue of banner clutter on Talk pages is one that perennially pops up and frequently raises tensions among those who support or oppose such banners. This proposal is *not* about arguing either side of it; the sole objective is to offer alternatives so as to reduce the strife, and as much as feasible, allow everyone to have the Talk page appearance they prefer. I hope this proposal may provide that. Your feedback at Module talk:Message box#Please add param class would be appreciated. Mathglot (talk) 20:43, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
Rename and re-theme ITN
The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Procedural closure. There is consensus to halt this RfC and continue the conversation in the workshopping thread. This closure is not a decision on the original proposal, nor does it preclude another RfC being opened at any time in the future using ideas from the workshopping phase. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 03:59, 17 September 2024 (UTC)
WP:ITN has long been a revolving door of editor-related and/or process-related issues. And I think a large part of it is merely due to the conflict between trying to feature current events on the main page, and WP:NOTNEWS.
I think we would go a long way towards fixing this if we simply remove the word "news" from the title of the section. It connotatively suggests that these are things one might find in newspapers or news sites, or even that this is Wikipedia presenting news items. When, as best as I can tell, that's not the primary intention of the section. I think the intro to Wikipedia:In the news states this pretty clearly.
In multiple discussions, the regulars there appear to be defending the process as a way for the encyclopedia to feature articles. Well, if that's the purpose, then let's call it that, and sidestep all the baggage that the word "news" can carry with it. - 12:17, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Conditional support – (involved as ITN regular) It's a good thing to have a section on the Main Page featuring current events-related articles, as it helps show that the encyclopedia is kept up-to-date and engaging, but the key criterion should be to feature quality articles about current events, not decide what to feature based on perceived newsworthiness. Noting that a name change alone without underlying changes wouldn't fix much of the issues, so I wish it would come along with a fundamental change in how the articles are selected. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 12:51, 12 September 2024 (UTC) Striking my vote, better to have an early close and to come up with a more fleshed-out proposal. See reasoning in the #Early close section below. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 07:38, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Weak support: Contrary to the others, I think that a name change—even by itself, only—could be a bit less misleading to newcomers, especially those who come to WP going "why isn't this news here?".I do feel like it would be better to just rename it to "Current events" if possible, as this name is indeed too verbose. To solve the conflict with the portal, just add a {{distinguish}}. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:55, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
WP:NOTBURO - "workshops" are RfCs too. I welcome discussion on this, whereever the discussion takes us. An RfC can result in more things than merely "support/oppose/no consensus" - WP:NOTAVOTE, after all. - jc3713:35, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
RfCs are meant to have a clear question that editors can answer. That's why the RFCBEFORE requirement exists: so that editors can talk it out, try to come to a consensus, and when all else fails, narrow the dispute so that uninvolved editors can help answer a clear-cut qurstuon via RfC. Citing NOTBURO to say that an RfC should be a free for all is ridiculous. voorts (talk/contributions) 13:37, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
A "RFC" = a "request for comment". no more, no less. It is a consensual discussion. So yes, NOTBURO applies. And a simple question of renaming? That's pretty clear cut. Alternate rename suggestions are proposed in rename discussions all the time. So I'm not sure what you find so "ridiculous". Anyway, this is a tangent to the discussion itself. - jc3713:43, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
The idea of doing some RFCBEFORE before launching a T:CENT RFC is a good one, I think. A smaller group discussion can help figure out what the most likely options to pass are in a big RFC, and then just present those, which is a nice optimization that reduces friction and saves editor time and reduces the chance of messy closes. –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:01, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. New name is more verbose, lacking concision. The idea of rebranding something to fix its problems is a bit questionable. For example on meta they tried this with the community wishlist this year and the community made it clear that they preferred the old name. Is the fundamental problem with ITN really its name and the fact that it focuses on topics that are "in the news", or is its core problem actually something else such as toxicity, which might not be addressed by a name change? –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:48, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
I think it could be said that at least some of that "toxicity" (to use your word) might be due to the unsaid expectations of commenters when they come to a discussion about topics "in the news". Changing the name can change that expectation and tone. And besides, the name "in the news" doesn't reflect what's said on WP:ITN - it makes it clear that this is about articles that are involved in current events in some way. So, similar to what we do with Article titles, shouldn't the name of this project page (and process) match the contents and intent? - jc3713:10, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose' per Novem Linguae. The problem is not the name, and even if it were the new name wouldn't resolve the misunderstandings about what the purpose of the section is (or trying to turn it into what they, but most other editors do not, think it should be). I also agree that this should have been workshopped first as there are very probably better alternatives to the one suggested (that still wouldn't solve the problems but would not introduce waffle). Thryduulf (talk) 13:00, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Maybe it's more of a British English thing but it means being excessively verbose in a non-meaningful way. Someone who waffles on talks a lot but says little. — Czello(music)13:20, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose I think the newly proposed name departs from the format of the ITN section. Note that "news" is information about "current events". We post blurbs that summarise news. To me, "Articles featuring current events" sounds like posting links to articles that document current events. That's not what the ITN is.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 13:15, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
The very first line of WP:ITN: "The "In the news" (ITN) section on the Main Page serves to direct readers to articles that have been substantially updated to reflect recent or current events of wide interest." - As you can see, that's exactly the stated intent. - jc3713:20, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Yes, but it's confusing as we don't precisify the way we direct readers to articles. "In the news" sounds simpler and clearer to my ear, and we really don't need to include "articles" in the name.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 13:39, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
If it's confusing, then I think we should probably fix that. Something typically done in either changing the mission statement or the name. I'm proposing changing the name to match the mission statement. - jc3713:50, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
The most precise wording in the spirit of the current name would be "From the current events". Anyway, the name change won't solve a problem because there's no problem at all. We have a section called "Did you know...", which "showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process". Shall we change it to "From the new and expanded articles" just to better match the mission statement of DYK? I think there should be some aesthetics on the main page, and "In the news" and "Did you know..." are names that provide it.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 15:03, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose as the page isn't called "the news" (as it seems OP framed that's how it's being presented), it's called "in the news"; as in, "here are articles whose topics are currently in the news". I think renaming the page would be a blunt instrument to fix policy issues (if it even does). — Czello(music)13:24, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. This is a CREEPy, bureaucratic cosmetic change that will do nothing to address the asserted issues. Frankly, Well, if that's the purpose, then let's call it that sounds pretty pointy. Editor time is valuable. In my view, the current proposal is a waste of it. James (talk/contribs) 15:06, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. With all due respect, nominator, to put it simply, I just don't believe a name change would actually do anything to improve decorum at ITN. Its issues are much deeper than a branding problem. DarkSide830 (talk) 15:49, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose per Czello. The problem with ITN is not the name or the theme, it's the fact that the discussions are too slow and rambling to produce punctual postings while things remain in the news. (It would also be good to get a clearer steer on subject matter - culture topics other than deaths are rarely nominated, and frequently opposed when they are, but sports get reasonably consistent coverage. Personally, I'd favour evolving some standards for a wider range of cultural stories to carry.) GenevieveDEon (talk) 16:37, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose Generally speaking, "current events" are "in the news". Almost everything nominated for ITN is already posted in that day's Current events section and the majority of what's posted to ITN (invariably undated) stays up well after its currency expires. If ITN storylinks should ever become as current as CE storylinks, such a similar name might make sense. InedibleHulk (talk) 17:19, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. I too share concerns about the process, or more specifically how certain regulars do things, but this proposal is half-baked to put it mildly. ~~ Jessintime (talk) 20:30, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. From what I can see, this doesn't really have any tangible benefit, but it makes the title of the ITN page substantially longer. I do think behavior at ITN could be improved, but this feels like, to put it bluntly, putting lipstick on a pig. – Epicgenius (talk) 02:15, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. Even changing the name to “Current events” is unnecessary, since the phrase “in the news” directly implies that the section is about current events. “Articles for current events” is an even worse name, since it’s unnecessarily long. 198.17.110.223 (talk) 18:45, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
"Anything WP:UNUSUAL shall be promoted to the main page in chaotic order." Plus, regardless of whether this will weed out everything, "Current events" already >> "In the news". News is a superset of current "newsy" events, and such a new title would at least weed out some stuff. I see no reason this could go wrong, except potential whiplash if the current WT:ITN discussions suddenly watershed into a radically different direction. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:50, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose - Like others, a name change/small proposal like this is premature imo. A comprehensive way forward for the main page section in question - including not only changes to processes/procedures/policies/etc. but to the name should be fleshed out before small changes like this are proposed. Trout the nominator because while it looks like this was in good faith, it was premature given RFCBEFORE discussion ongoing. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez | me | talk to me!23:00, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose. Superficial changes rarely ever work. It's better to actually focus on what to do to address the underlying problems. – Ammarpad (talk) 16:56, 15 September 2024 (UTC)
Oppose - We do indeed present links to articles with content about things are "in the news" on this part of the main page. We are highly selective and have unique criteria (much different than a traditional news source), but nonetheless. — Godsy (TALKCONT)16:40, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
Same, there's been RFCBEFORE discussions on the ITN talk page following the AN discussion about an RFC to reevaluate aspects of ITN which have been going on for a few days, and this seems to be jumping the gun. I recommend this be shuttered and ideas held off until the planned RFC is ready to go instead. --Masem (t) 12:56, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
This is a name change proposal, it in no way hinders whatever 'process proposals' people are working on. - jc3713:10, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Based on the results of this planned RFC, a different option for a new name may have fallen out from that. It goes back to raised concerns about workshopping an option first, and makes this premature. Masem (t) 13:24, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
I think that's incorrect. There's a wide ranging discussion about changing ITN right now and you should have weighed in there and helped to workshop instead of running here to start an RfC—which may very well become moot depending on what comes out of the ongoing discussion. I would boldly close this RfC to allow the RFCBEFORE discussion to finish but I'm not at my computer. Somebody else should. voorts (talk/contributions) 13:25, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
I appreciate seeing so many ITN regulars commenting here. It's interesting to see your (plural) comments. - jc3713:30, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
I'm not an ITN regular. If you'd read the two discussions that preceded this one, you'd know I tried participating in ITN once and was so turned off I've only commented there a couple of times since. I want this to go somewhere, hopefully to fix ITN for the better. Rushing into an RfC before the BEFORE discussion is finished and ideas are hashed out is a recipe for disaster. voorts (talk/contributions) 13:40, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
And I appreciate your comments as well.
And - in my opinion anyway - we should never shy away from asking the community to comment, to provide their thoughts, about something. Especially not out of fear that some individuals might come along and try to derail the discussion, rather than discuss the matters at hand. I have faith in the community. And regardless of how this discussion turns out, I welcome the community's thoughts. - jc3713:47, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Asking the community to comment and provide thoughts about something is a good thing, but (a) that's what's happening at WT:ITN, and (b) that's not what an RFC is - an RFC is a specific question with a finite number of answers with the aim of generating consensus for one them. Thryduulf (talk) 13:52, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
We should absolutely shy away from asking the community to comment, to provide their thoughts, about something, because people's time is limited and valuable. We should ask for that time sparingly. Not every idea we have deserves the formal attention of an RFC, and there are specific places to go to float or brainstorm ideas for those who are interested (like the idea lab, or, in this case, WT:ITN). RFC is an "expensive" process. Levivich (talk) 06:19, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Spending some time workshopping it might have come up with a better alternative title, too. This one is obviously going to fail because the proposed new name is incredibly clunky. --Aquillion (talk) 20:06, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
The toxicity of ITN is a legitimate concern, even if it's been given only minimal weight here. Anything having to do with formulating Main Page content should reflect a broad cross-section of the community. ITN is not that, but rather a small group of editors engaging in behavior bordering on WP:OWN, several of whom repeatedly show a frightening detachment from reality. I've repeatedly expressed concerns about the false notion of "article quality" WRT recent deaths that certain editors push down everyone's throats. It's yet another manifestation of Wikipedia as "The Emperor's New Clothes". Editors who show that they have tons of time for Wikipedia shouldn't expose themselves by saying that clearly deficient articles are worthy of being linked from the Main Page simply because the formatting has been prettied up. Yet, it's been going on for years and concerns fall on deaf ears. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 17:48, 15 September 2024 (UTC)
Yes. This proposal is ill-formed, will not result in any kind of useable consensus, and we should wait for a workshopped proposal regarding other reforms to ITN to be completed and put up for RfC before changing its name. This is putting the cart before the horse. voorts (talk/contributions) 15:19, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
But what if the proposals that come out of the WT:ITN discussion are to shift ITN away from "Current events"? Then we'll have wasted community time with an irrelevant name change. voorts (talk/contributions) 15:26, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Yes a RFC is highly likely to be forthcoming from revamping ITN and a new name might fall out of that naturally. Masem (t) 15:27, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Yes. I originally thought that this was an unconventional attempt at suggesting the re-scoping discussed in the RFCBEFORE, but I'm realizing that a title change that is only said to also thereby re-theme the process is way too vague of a proposed change, and that a much better and more precise proposal should've been workshopped. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:10, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Yes needs more discussion on WT:ITN about the scope of the proposal as per WP:RFCBEFORE. In a few hours since this started, the discussion has become long and confused about what is trying to be achieved here. Joseph2302 (talk) 16:33, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Wait This is what I was talking about, endless regulars sandbagging everyone with their/our endless badgering. Let a few outsiders weigh in first. Then wait for even more. InedibleHulk (talk) 19:47, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Okay. Regarding your comment about ITN regulars badgering/sandbagging, I'm not sure if you're referring to me, but if you are, I'm going to quote myself from above:
I'm not an ITN regular. If you'd read the two discussions that preceded this one, you'd know I tried participating in ITN once and was so turned off I've only commented there a couple of times since. I want this to go somewhere, hopefully to fix ITN for the better. Rushing into an RfC before the BEFORE discussion is finished and ideas are hashed out is a recipe for disaster.
Yes per Thebiguglyalien, Joseph2302, et al. This is a poorly-thought through, hasty, vague proposal that detracts from the constructive work being done at WT:ITN. Thryduulf (talk) 20:54, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Yes As voorts notes, this proposal "will not result in any kind of useable consensus," but in workshopping that future proposal, I agree with Aaron Liu that "Current events" is better than "In the news" because it refocuses the space toward Wikipedia's quality content on current events, rather than whichever Wikipedia content aligns with the news reporting. BluePenguin18 🐧 ( 💬 ) 19:20, 14 September 2024 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
