This is an archive of past discussions with User:Iridescent. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
I saw you passed on deleting this talk page archive from a deleted article. I saw others today that I also passed on deleting as I remember seeing somewhere on a policy page that they were supposed to be kept. But another admin chose to delete them. Sooooo, do I restore them? Can you or any of your TPSers recall where there is guidance about this admittedly rare instance? Thanks. LizRead!Talk!06:06, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Sorry if I've cauesd a bit of confusion over this. I've been considering this for a bit now, and if it seems G8 is too uncomfortable to be confident here, I'm perfectly fine with just leaving a notice that the archive isn't related to the existing title it's under. I mainly opted for G8 in the first place was because two of the three redirects where considered as "with possibilities", and an existing archive under that name for a since gone page would be confusing should they become articles. WP:G8 also says that archive pages shouldn't be deleted unless they are "article talk page archives where the corresponding article and main talk page have been deleted and the page is not otherwise useful to Wikipedia", so if this turns out to be wrong, I'd suggest checking the wording of that (or my interpretation is just poor). If you do plan to revert, the only other G8'd page is Talk:Business process improvement/Archive 1. Sorry for any problems from this. Aidan9382(talk)07:28, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Not a problem at all. @Liz, I'm not sure if there's a written policy anywhere; the policies were mostly drawn up at a time before "preserving the early history of Wikipedia" was seen as an issue. If there are any precedents, Graham87 is probably the person who'd know. ‑ Iridescent15:06, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
I'm not aware of any such direct precedents, except we have {{G8-exempt}}. I'd personally be OK with the page being deleted; the history of Talk:Christian wikis only goes back to 2005 and one could argue that it's a copyright violation to have unattributed comments without the history to fall back on. The other way to solve this issue would be to undelete the article and talk page history (the article history would sit under the redirect) and slap an {{oldafd}} template on the talk page to signify what happened ... I don't think there's any policy against this. I'll sleep on it but anyone can feel free to do what they like with the talk page archive without consulting me in the meantime. Graham8716:08, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
I went and speedy-deleted it. As I said in the deletion summary, it would've been deleted in due course if the main namespace redirect hadn't been created. Graham8708:03, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
It seems like in the above link I very much undershot re the introduction of a speedy deletion criterion about orphaned talk pages (we had no WikiBlame back in 2006 when I wrote that). The relevant speedy deletion criterion was added in April 2004! Graham8717:41, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
Content Assessment
Let me know if this sounds silly or unfeasible... I had an idea to kind of combine the process at Peer Review with A-Class and B-Class to create an entirely new process (this would utilize the existing PR resource rather than increase the burden). This would make A-class an official process, which fixes the issue of differing requirements and the resulting lack of trust in the article ratings. We also already have built in assessment criteria for B-class in talkpage templates currently and a B-class review icon at Template:Icon. This would also allow for a couple of stepping stones... One between GA and FA and the other between C (possibly start articles as well) and GA. I believe we would have three types of reviews, including: All-purpose (current PR), B-Class, and A-Class.
The B-class review would be the least strict and would only require the involvement of one editor (more are obviously welcome to join in). A person would list the article for review given that it is at least a start-class article. The reviewer would then review the article in its entirety against the 6 B-class criteria and provide advice to the editor to help them get the article to B-class. There would be no set time period for the improvement of the article as long as improvements are continuing to take place and both parties wish to continue. It would then be promoted to B-class if the reviewer believes the criteria have been satisfied. This would essentially be a less-strict review that would work to improve an article up to B-class. I think it would be helpful for newer editors to get them used to writing without expecting them to put in GA-level work immediately as is often the case of the current PR.
The A-class review would require two or more editors to review. A person would list the article as an A-class candidate. Other editors would then review the article against the A-class criteria (formal criteria would be somewhere between GA and FA). The process would be divided into two parts. The first stage would be initial reviews, kind of a workshop per se, where no support or opposes would be declared given that the article is reasonably close to A-class (obviously exceptions would apply). The reviewers would leave comments and work with the editor to improve the article. This workshop would last around 10-14 days or longer if it is constructive. If half of the involved parties (minimum either the two reviewers or one reviewer and the nominator) signal they are ready to move on to the next stage, a coordinator would open a subsection where people could either support or oppose the candidacy with their rationale. Once a sufficient period of time had passed, the coordinator would judge whether or not consensus exists for promotion to A-class.
The general purpose review would be similar to how PR is currently, but would focus on articles that are already at B-class or A-class and hadn't been reviewed for a while. What are your thoughts on this and changes we could make to content quality assessment? NoahTalk18:32, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
Another change I think that could be worth looking at is having a required user right to promote an article above B-class in order to prevent articles that aren't worthy of a particular status from being promoted. Obviously this would be an issue for GA and A class. GA has honestly been a joke in quite a few cases and many articles are promoted that shouldn't be due to inexperienced reviewers. I think a reviewer should have to request assistance if they haven't been granted the user right, which would be given to those who have written multiple quality works and/or conducted thorough, quality reviews. I believe it could be accomplished by transcluding article class parameters from another page that has a special page protection. This would serve as a safeguard to ensure that articles aren't promoted when they don't meet the criteria. Given that there would be numerous people with this right, the workload on any individual person checking the work of reviewers would be low, unlike that of FAC Coordinators. What would you think about this? NoahTalk23:26, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing:The ratings purpose is to show the development/quality level of an article to inform others of how reliable and complete the content may be and if more work is needed to improve it. If we have articles either being raised prematurely to higher ratings (occurs most often with B and GA) or a lack of trust in ratings (A-Class), then they are pointless. It would be deceitful to editors and the reading audience to list articles at higher ratings when they really shouldn't be. Many editors have been ostracized for promoting GANs prematurely. GA can be a joke unless you have a decent reviewer. We should have some safeguards in place like we do at FAC, albeit less strict. A-Class is supposed to be a rating with a quality level between GA and FA, but it's clearly broken considering many wikiprojects don't use it. It's about time we fix the issues we have with the system. Remember that B+ class used to be a thing and was deprecated. In the case of A-Class, it shouldn't share the same fate, but instead be given a purpose that restores trust in its rating. NoahTalk01:21, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
@Hurricane Noah, article ratings were created by the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team for the purpose of deciding which articles to put on a CD for offline use. The goal was to have a bunch of the really nice articles, plus some articles that various groups of editors (called "WikiProjects") said felt important to them, plus some articles that were really popular. They eventually ended up with a sort of formula, and then set the cutoff at whatever would fit on the disks (originally, 2K articles; eventually 40–50K articles).
Hope springs eternal, but the 1.0 team is basically defunct. The last release was more than a decade ago. We maintain the ratings out of habit, and a few groups glance at them occasionally (e.g., WP:MED tries to make sure that top- and high-importance articles aren't stubs), but they are really unimportant now. Also, there's an automated system for estimating article quality, which gives editors an objective reference if they think another editor has either over- or under-rated the article. But – and I say this as an editor who has assessed more than ten thousand articles – messing with quality ratings is really not an important use of anyone's time. If you want to do something more useful, I suggest pulling old "refimprove" tags out of articles that contain more refs than they did a decade ago. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:46, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
It may not be important in your opinion, but I honestly disagree. The way we use the ratings has changed over time and we have issues to iron out that could be useful. One example would be to standardize and emphasize the usage of Needed-Class (instead of having it as non-standard) so notable topics that lack articles will be categorized together and editors can find and create articles for them more easily. This would be easier than maintaining needed article lists at each individual wikiproject. NoahTalk02:00, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
We meaning this EN wikipedia community. I can say that many people in the weather project use the ratings quite frequently. The most useful thing for me to do would be to draft an official proposal and get feedback on it. NoahTalk02:19, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
Imagine that all of the ratings for WPWEATHER were already 100% perfectly accurate and fully updated. Now tell me: How do you use the ratings? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:29, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
It is great that you find a use. My experience is different. I have helped set up most of the assessments for WikiProject Germany 15 years ago. I never use them, and I am not aware of any work going on in WikiProject Germany for which they are beneficial. In theory we could look for important articles of poor quality, but in practice we lack the manpower to do anything about them. (There are far too many articles that fall under the project to be manageable). When I write new articles and wait for them to be assessed, the result is rarely more instructive than a random draw from the set {Start, C, B}, even for articles that soon after pass GA without many changes. —Kusma (talk) 14:57, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
↑ That. I can confirm that When I write new articles and wait for them to be assessed, the result is rarely more instructive than a random draw from the set {Start, C, B}, even for articles that soon after pass GA without many changes mirrors my experience, including for articles that have gone straight on to pass FAC with no or minimal changes. ‑ Iridescent03:57, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
WAID, re article ratings were created by the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team for the purpose of deciding which articles to put on a CD for offline use I don't believe WP:1.0 had anything to do with the FA designation, at least as I understand the history of the FA project. And I'm not sure about GA, as I know nothing of the history there. Just an insertion that doesn't affect the rest of the discussion ... carry on :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:05, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing, Hurricane Noah: This might be a controversial opinion, but maybe we need to do away with universal standards for ratings, at least below "good article," and let Wikiprojects come up with their own standards. If Version 1.0 wanted to come back, there's plenty of good and featured articles to choose from to put on an USB stick. When the community evaluates an article for DYK, GA, and FA, it'll provide an opportunity to glance behind a Wikiprojects curtain, anyway. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)02:53, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
@I dream of horses: That wouldn't really work well because if everyone had different ratings then nobody would understand what they all meant. It would be complicated and people would have to compare and contrast the ratings of different wikiprojects. NoahTalk02:56, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
Any proposal to link importance categories with user rights will make it no distance, as the trend has to slowly deprecate these ratings per WhatamIdoing. Wikiprojects are just too inactive, and the existing GA/FA processes are already understaffed. However, by the same token, if a specific Wikiproject wants to set about with an internal system that actually benefits them, there wouldn't be much opposition. This would for example be the utility of A-class, as an internal review by a group of people who presumably are familiar with the topic, before a FAC that invites scrutiny from those less familiar with the topic. CMD (talk) 03:06, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
A-class is supposed to be superior to GA, but many people do not trust the rating because it is done at the project level rather than for the whole site. Our options are pretty much either fix A-class by centralizing the process (using existing resources) and standardizing the requirements or deprecate it as a standard class at the wiki-wide level while allowing local projects to keep it if they wish. NoahTalk03:17, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
I couldn't name a single editor who distrusts (proper) A-class ratings. MILHIST is the only WikiProject that uses them, and their process was excellent, the last time I looked into it. If you mean that it's too easy for some newbie or vandal to change the ratings to whatever they want – well, that's the problem with storing them in a plain wikitext page. About once every year or so, I double-check WPMED's higher importance ratings, and I fairly often find that some inexperienced (or hopeful) person has decided that something the group doesn't care about at all is suddenly top-importance or high-importance. But that's not because editors don't trust the rating system; it's because nobody should trust information that can be changed by any passing editor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:27, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
The A-class is used outside of MILHIST as a rating, but Im unaware of any other project that has a great assessment process. That's why it isn't generally trusted for other areas. I believe we have room to make improvements to our systems and I will work on something concrete so feedback can eventually be collected. Disregard the user right since it likely wouldn't work anyways. NoahTalk03:34, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
A-Class outside of Military History is rare, and likely the result of drive-by tagging without actual assessment (see Talk:York Minster for an article that is classified as A, B and C-class). —Kusma (talk) 15:12, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
Only if it's a newer rating. Several WikiProjects had an A-class project ~15 years ago, and those ratings aren't necessarily updated later. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:31, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I favor only three ratings for articles: Start, Good, and Excellent. Start would be any article not checked for accuracy and other deficiencies; Good would be an article certified by a reviewer to be accurate and reasonably complete; Excellent would correspond to the FA rating with all the bells and whistles of an FA. The top priorities of the rating system should be accuracy and neutrality.
The length of an article should not be the major factor in the rating. An article of 300 words might be adequate for some subjects. 10,000 words may be needed for a few topics. Some articles might be deemed too long to get the highest ratings. Smallchief (talk)
With regards quality assessment, I agree 100% with Smallchief. To quote myself IMO the whole setup needs a complete rethink, and we should seriously consider scrapping the importance scale altogether and replacing the ridiculously unintuitive S–S–C–B–G–A–F quality scale with "inadequate–adequate–excellent".. I'm in complete agreement with what WAID says above. The micro-distinctions like Start→C-class made sense of our needing to decide what warranted inclusion in Printed Wikipedia, CD-ROM Wikipedia, and Internet-in-a-Box Wikipedia, but now those concerns are (effectively) irrelevant, it just seems to be a major time sink (add up all the time editors spend assessing and reassessing and it stacks up quickly). Wikipedia is there for the readers, not the editors, and readers don't care about the internal micro-gradations.
With regards importance assessment, I make no bones of the face that I think it (along with the ludicrous WP:Vital articles) should be deprecated altogether. As I've always said, the idea of a "high-importance article" is missing the purpose Wikipedia serves for most readers, which is to act as a backstop covering those topics which don't get good coverage elsewhere. That is, the highest importance articles are those for which Wikipedia is the top Google search result, not the articles on topics which get the most readers and still less the articles which some group of people have arbitrarily decided are "high importance".
A simple way to slightly improve on the biteyness without any measurable impact on anything else would be to just change all "low-importance" to "mid-importance". The low-mid distinction serves only to bite newbies and has no known practical use in projects looking after more than a hundred articles. Dropping the importance ratings altogether would probably also have far more benefits than downsides. —Kusma (talk) 08:48, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
The importance parameter is meant to indicate importance to a particular group of editors, e.g., Eleanor Roosevelt is important to people who care about women's history but not so important to people who care about New York. It was the invention of the 1.0 team, and the purpose was to make sure that small groups (e.g., people interested in a small country) could mark an article as important to them even if the article wasn't popular in terms of page views, and that would boost the chances that an article on a fairly basic subject, like History of Andorra, would be included in the set, despite getting fewer than 100 page views per day.
The easiest way to reduce the offense, I think, is to rename |importance= to |priority=, which is the alternate, and under-used, parameter name in the banner template (and, I think, technically incompatible, at least back in the day, instead of being a normal alias for the same thing). This would require some re-jiggering of templates and categories plus a major bot run.
Yes, that is the intent of the importance/priority parameters. My point is that I am not aware of any evidence that their existence is actually helpful to Wikipedia editors. —Kusma (talk) 17:53, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
Well, it was helpful back in the day, but presumably you mean helpful to someone editing during the present decade, rather than assembling a list of articles in 2008.
WPMED did use the importance parameters some years back as part of an effort to choose the ~100 most common/significant medical conditions (e.g., Asthma, Cancer, Tuberculosis), and then to improve those past the Start-class stage. This could have been done just as easily merely by making a list on a wiki page, however.
I use it indirectly now as a way of finding potentially promising editors (using RecentChangesLinked), but that's really dependent on a list posted to a wiki page, rather than using the rating directly. The importance/priority ratings could be deleted without affecting what I'm doing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:54, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
Some years back, some of the student programs tried to use article quality assessments. The idea was that you find an article, expand it, and then editors would notice your efforts and change the assessment. The problem was that you can improve an article in really important ways without the assessment rating changing at all. The Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/B-Class checklist would probably have been more useful to them than a cursory "Still looks like C-class to me" kind of review. (Now these projects have their own checklists, so they don't try that any longer.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:02, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
"Inadequate-class" and bot assessment
I think inadequate would also be BITEY since it implies substandard, poor work. I would recommend "Average", which largely reflects how the articles fall (most are below C). I think we should abandon the bottom part of the scale (remove start and stub entirely), but keep more assessments towards the top (rename of course) in order to help newcomers more easily move their work between the major steps. It might be motivating to a newcomer to see their work move up a tiny bit on the scale and change ratings. I will be working on a plan to help us move forward. NoahTalk12:14, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
The median assessed article is a stub. If you want to be more precise, of the pages assessed as articles (e.g., not lists, not redirects, not unassessed, not dabs, etc.), then:
almost 56% are stubs,
34% are Start-class,
7% are C-class,
2.5% are B-class,
0.6% are (currently listed) GAs (former GAs are generally B-class, but aren't tracked),
It should be noted that the ratings reflect the state of the article when it was last assessed, which often is ten years ago. —Kusma (talk) 17:57, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
Yes. In addition to wishing for an ORES-using bot to add |class=stub to tens of thousands of unassessed articles, I also wish for it to update |class=redirect and |class=disambiguation, and to produce a list, for manual review, of anything that is two classes off in the rating (e.g., a stub that should be marked C or vice versa). There is no need for human review on some things, and we should have a bot doing that work. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:57, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
(You presumably already know this, but it's worth putting in black and white.) There are good reasons to be very, very cautions about any kind of mass bot assessment run. When you're assesing 6,930,283 articles, then even if ORES is 99% accurate—which it isn't—then that means 69300 incorrect assessments; 69300 people potentially hurt and upset that their magnum opus has been flagged as 'start class'; 69300 people sneering that some obvious hoax article or piece of blatant spam has been rated as well-written and high quality; 69300 people whining to anyone who'll listen about how the WMF isn't just figuratively but literally run by impersonal drones more interested in the process than the product. A bot run of every page on the project—which by definition is going to flash up repeatedly on every single editor's watchlist—is a very good way to haemorrhage goodwill very quickly if not done perfectly, and the WMF does not exactly have a stellar record for getting things right on the first attempt.
I do question the point of the whole concept of 'stub' and 'start'. Back in 2006 they made sense, when the notability bar was higher and it could reasonably be assumed that when a page was only two paragraphs long, it was because it was incomplete. Nowadays we have (literally) hundreds of thousands of pages like Bray Cove Halt railway station where policy or custom dictates we have a stand-alone page, but there's literally no way it could ever be expanded. A useful article quality matrix nowadays would focus much more on "what is the potential that this article could be improved?", and that's something that can't be coded. If we're going to move to an ORES-based model, then to me the classes would be 'very high', 'high' and 'standard' (or in the old money, FA/GA/everything else), with ORES scanning the 99% for those things which are high enough quality to justify a human spending their time reviewing them. ‑ Iridescent04:10, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
I've spent some time with the ORES classification work. The only three classes I would trust for a bot are the three that I named. In particular, ORES tends to (in my opinion) slightly over-rate articles that contain large numbers of references and/or lists. (I'll call them biggish stubs, but ORES will call them smallish Start-class articles.)
Because the margins between the classes are porous, I've found it more effective to ask for a two-class discrepancy if I want to manually review things. The difference between a high-end Start-class article and a low-end C-class article is not important, but if the talk page says stub and ORES says C, then it's never yet been a stub when I look at it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:56, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
I've probably said this here before, but when there was a de-stubbing contest some while back, I found about 30% or more of the articles I looked at for it weren't stubs at all. Johnbod (talk) 05:22, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
You inspired me to click on Special:RandomInCategory/Stub-Class medicine articles 10 times. I found one redirect, six that ORES rated as Stubs, two that it called Starts (one I agreed with; the other is on the border between Stub and Start), and one that it called C-class, which I weakly agreed with. That seems to align with your experience pretty closely. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:39, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
I would not oppose ORES based bot runs, but I think a complete rethink of the system is a better use of resources. —Kusma (talk) 11:00, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
Impacts on editing
Going to the next level, if we were to hone in on the three-tier classification (excellent-good-start, roughly equivalent to FA-GA-everything else), what would be the impact on editor behavior? Would it inspire more editors to help clean up or clean out the GA/FAs that aren't (at least a third of FAs and probably 2/3 of GAs)? GA quality has not kept up without Geometryguy and Mally, for example, while a few valiant others (eg Ealdgyth) hang in there. Would it inspire more editors to work more articles towards FA/GA? I suspect we'd see more editors wanting to move more articles to the easier GA but not more to FA, and since GA classification is spotty enough already, depending on the reviewer, would GA be overwhelmed? I don't think FA processing would be hit. If more people engaged FAR, that would be grand. Thinking of my own area of editing, I'd be most happy to see all of the B-class medical articles (that aren't) sent to that lower group, as we'd have a clearer picture of how bad or dated most medical content is, and I suspect we'd see more editors push for GA there, meaning a smaller set of inflated ratings. A (side effect) use of article assessment is here (scroll up; that editor was disagreeing on medical content with all those other medical editors and appealing to authority ... oh, and that editor is now community banned I see). If I look at my own top edited articles, the three-tier scheme would send the huge former FA Hugo Chavez start class, which makes no sense, so it seems another name would be needed for the "everything else". Other than that, there would be no impact on my editing, as I won't put articles I've written through GA. Venezuelan presidential crisis (who cares) stays at the lower tier, so does the no-longer-a-thing Asperger, and there's nothing there worthy of working up to FA class. My question is whether moving to a three-tier system would result in overwhelm anywhere in the Project. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:16, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
@SandyGeorgia: Please see here for what I have been working on. I don't think a three tier system would exactly be friendly to the newcomers since it is removing assessment criteria and levels between the low end and the high end. It's a work in progress right now. NoahTalk12:49, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
If you wanted to encourage editors to improve articles, then it might make more sense to identify specific things to do, instead of a whole-article assessment. Imagine that instead of assigning an overall class, editors could assess categories:
completeness of the content (missing stuff–mostly there–has everything)
writing (needs work–appropriate and understandable–good)
sourcing (none–needs work–good enough–great)
The ratings would thereby give a hint about how to improve the article.
We could perhaps even merge some of the more boring maintenance banners into this.
This, of course, assumes that we believe editors are motivated by things like ratings and scoreboards. I'm not sure that's true for most content contributors. One of the difficulties in having these discussions is that the editors who talk about editing actually do relatively little content creation, so we're not very good at predicting what matters to the people who add content. We hear a lot of "as a patroller/AFD denizen/rule maker/general busybody, I think other editors should..." but not much "as a person whose primary (or even sole) activity is adding paragraphs of missing information to articles, I..." The end result is that we have don't always have rules made by the editors, for the editors; we have rules made by the busybodies (e.g., me – I am the all-time top editor of WT:EL, WT:PG, VPM, and VPIL, and among the top 10 for many other back-room pages), for the benefit of gnomes and patrollers, (sometimes) against the content contributors and readers. This is "just how it works", but maybe not "how it would ideally work". WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:12, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
Regarding I suspect we'd see more editors wanting to move more articles to the easier GA but not more to FA, I agree. The two are qualitatively different, however, and it's not just a case of one being more difficult. FA is the only part of the internal assessment scales that's reader-facing, owing to the permalinks to Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:About Today's featured article on the Main Page. GA, on the other hand, is effectively an internal process (yes we have the green dot, but literally no reader knows what it means or even notices it). An easier GA, as a halfway stage between the general sludgepile and FA, wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
I do agree with WAID that the assumption that most editors are motivated by ratings is likely a misconception. Of the editors who explicitly write (as opposed to those who review, correct, format etc) I'm certain the motivation of most is improving coverage of whatever their preferred topic happens to be, and at absolute most the assessment processes are just a mechanism for reassuring them that they're doing it right. FWIW, to the best of my knowledge Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts got rid of importance ratings there was literally no impact on editor activity and I'm not sure a single reader even noticed (there were certainly no "I'm confused, why can't I see an importance rating on this article?" comments anywhere). ‑ Iridescent04:57, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
the motivation of most is improving coverage of whatever their preferred topic happens to be <pipes up to confirm> Yes, I've been inactive for most of this year but that's mostly because a) the stack of work every December to update articles is beginning to scare me and b) I ran out of topics to write about. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:32, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
As a content creator maybe I'm typical of some. I don't care much about ratings -- except that I get pissed off when a drive-by reviewer looks at a recent creation of mine in which I have a certain pride and labels it "start" or even "stub." A few times I have complained, and usually found satisfaction. On the other hand I've never nominated an article of mine for GA or FA. It's too much trouble to go through that process. I doubt that I would change my mind with a new reviewing system. So, my advice to reviewers is don't insult the author -- spend more than 30 seconds on your review -- and justify your rating with a comment on the talk page. That comment might be as simple as "good start, but need more information"; or "good info, but too many typos"; or "you need better references to verify what you have said"; etc. It would be helpful to content creators to know how the reviewer came up with his rating. That additional burden on the reviewer would slow down the review process, but I don't care much whether an article I've worked on is promptly reviewed or not. In fact, I don't care whether they are ever reviewed. Better no review than one that is cursory. Smallchief (talk) 10:39, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
The greatest thing about the GA process is that you usually get a reader for your obscure article plus a decent amount of feedback. The green plus is a nice extra. Review processes without feedback are useless to me. —Kusma (talk) 11:40, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
This is my main use for DYK. It's nice to know someone else has looked at your work and found it passable. The review processes turn the solo activity of editing into something a bit more social. CMD (talk) 15:28, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
WAID's idea is intriguing; I doubt we have enough editors to make it work. Distinct, I think, from what both of you are getting at, I submit to the FA process as a way of showing what excellent content in similar topics should be. (When I wrote TS a gazillion years ago, there wasn't a single decent neuropsych article; after I wrote it, we got a proliferation of same from other editors.) An FA can be a roadmap to improvement. I don't much concern myself (obviously) with the 90% of the Project that is mostly unfixable crap that I hope no one is reading, since in the medical realm it can be dangerous. I'm interested in what impact a new scheme would have on encouraging other editors to produce better content, and FAs (when maintained) provide a guide to new editors. If one FA can guide 100 other editors to improved content at any level of assessment, it's worth the effort. Hence, my focus on how any proposed assessment scheme would impact editor motivation and content review. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:31, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
@SandyGeorgiaI don't much concern myself (obviously) with the 90% of the Project that is mostly unfixable crap that I hope no one is reading, since in the medical realm it can be dangerous. I'm going to burst your bubble rather bluntly, but please know I completely sympathize. I wouldn't want to edit war with Wannabe Doctor Randy from Boise, either. No one should count on [eople not reading inaccurate information, particularly if they lack 'common' sense. Hence, why there are (albeit rather hidden away) disclaimers about how one should see their general physician if they're concerned about their health. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)16:34, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
Yep, I tried (quite unsuccessfully) to get a more prominent dislaimer on our medical content. As my sister-in-law remarked when I explained the difference between my Wikipedia activity and other editors: "Louisa May Alcott is not malaria". I can't fix all the medical articles; I can try to show what they should be, and hope that inspires some editors towards cleanup. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:15, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
"I don't much concern myself (obviously) with the 90% of the Project that is mostly unfixable crap that I hope no one is reading" That's the crux of the whole problem with Wikipedia at the moment. If you step away from editing or admin areas and just try to use the encyclopedia to find out stuff, you can easily come across an unreferenced article that reads like a personal essay of the subject or contains completely speculative claims. To test this, I predicted The Searchers (band) would have these issues before I went to read the article, and I was not disappointed - except that the "more citations needed" tag was only placed two years ago. This is, incidentally, why I think FAC is something of a fool's errand unless it's on a very obscure topic that not many people would ever want to edit; you'll be forever fighting people who don't know or care about any quality standards on Wikipedia, and probably eventually lose patience and snap .... as Eric knows all too well. Ritchie333(talk)(cont)22:19, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
Ritchie333 we did it at J. K. Rowling quite a few months ago, and it's holding well because the FA star gives an article more watchers hence more clout to deal with disruption, vandalism, POV pushing and random dumbassery. On the other hand, if I look at the medical articles that have been defeatured (all because their main editors left), they just get worse and worse and worse as time passes, because nobody's watching them and no one cares. Constantly trying to keep crap out of what was featured content (like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease) IMO makes one equally likely to snap, because you have no help as you do with most FAs. Yes, FAC may be a fool's errand, but when some new editor is trying to do something stupid at Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, I can point them at dementia with Lewy bodies to explain how it should be done. Anyway, back to why bother with content assessment because it is 95% crap, I still think we need FAs if for nothing more than an example for other editors on similar topics (recognizing though that even at least a third of FAs aren't). I'm coming around to Iri's three-tier idea ... but wonder how it would impact most editors (we know how it would impact articles: it would be more honest, as we'd be acknowledging that 95% of the project is random junk). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:52, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
What constitutes 'editing', & which topics are yet to be covered?
I agree with SandyGeorgia's concern that a more content-oriented/thought-requiring assessment system would be time consuming.
This has also made me wonder about whether the tiny fraction of editors whom we choose to label "the community" at the English Wikipedia does as much content creation as we did when we were new editors. I've always been more interested what happens in the back end, but I have an impression that other experienced editors started off creating content and now edit articles in fairly superficial ways (e.g., adding maintenance banners or fixing typos instead of adding paragraphs and sources. Also, why is adding or removing a maintenance banner still "article editing", when the whole thing should be handled as proper metadata, as proposed about 15 years ago?). I've heard others hypothesize that this drift happens to some fraction of editors, but I don't think there has been any research on whether it's a real effect. It's not really a case of "those who can, do; those who can't, coach", because we can, but I suspect that inexperienced editors are more focused on content creation than those of us who spend our free hours arguing on the back pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:30, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
The drift is two-way. There's certainly a contingent of editors who come here to write about their pet topic, and then once the work there is done drift into behind-the-scenes tinkering; and there's a small but disproportionately influential cohort who start off as 'true' content editors, get some kind of special status (RFA, a job at the WMF, coordinator at one of the still-active projects…) and end up getting sidetracked in to that. I'd argue that in terms both of raw numbers and of impact, these groups are more than counterbalanced by the new editors who come here to correct a minor error or fix a typo, gradually do more and more minor maintenance tasks, and only after a few months develop the confidence (and the skills) to start making significant contributions.
To be honest I don't think trying to measure it would be a particularly productive exercise. Wikipedia editors aren't professionals, and the impact of reality probably has a hugely more significant impact than any number of changes to the editing interface, outreach programs, or tweaks to the assessment scheme could possibly have. Wikipedia has now existed for long enough that those editors who started off as schoolkids goofing around occasionally have become students with a lot of spare time, good access to source materials, and a strong practical reason for a space where they can practice their writing skills and have their efforts critiqued by others without real-world jeopardy; the students have become junior employees with little spare time but a keen interest in keeping involved in a community that distracts them from a grim real life; the junior employees have become married with kids and have virtually no time at all; the newlyweds with kids have seen the kids grow up and leave home, suddenly giving extended chunks of free time in the evenings; the employees who only had evenings and weekends free have become retirees with huge chunks of free time; the retirees who have always been a largely unacknowledged driving force behind Wikipedia have started to succumb to physical and mental deterioration and are no longer to take as active a role as they once did. ‑ Iridescent11:23, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
LOL. Your comment on the deterioration of the oldsters reminded me of the lyrics of a Toby Keith song. "I ain't as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I ever was." I'll let you imagine what that lyric refers to. Smallchief (talk) 12:42, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
What I'm about to say about that drift isn't particularly novel, but our needs for the creation of new content have changed over time. For the last several years, our needs for improving bad articles into better ones has come to far outweigh our need for new articles (although new ones will always be needed). The fact that experienced editors have trended towards article maintenance and improvement, from new article creation, is simply a natural progression. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:57, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
I'm not convinced that we don't need new articles. Thousands of notable new films, albums, and books are published each year, in addition to the tens of thousands of older works by artists outside English-dominant countries that we're missing. Each field could presumably say similar things: more than a hundred notable drug candidates enter clinical trials each year, thousands of new professional athletes each year, dozens of notable new vehicles each year, and so forth.
He's not saying we don't need new articles, just not as many as we used to. Never mind the new published/released crap, or young sportspeople, many basic encyclopaedic areas are still extremely poorly covered, just because we happen never to have had strong content editors interested in them. Economic history, Engineering (non-electronic), the decorative arts and so on. As I've been saying for over a decade, "Our “top level” topic articles are generally weak, especially on abstract concepts. Our articles on specific things, whether people, films, ships or species are often very good, and our coverage is usually very wide, even if many articles are pretty short. So the more general and abstract the article subject, the worse our articles tend to be. This is the reverse of the pattern generally found in published reference works. It also means that some of our weakest work within a subject area gets the highest number of viewers. This is not good." My own completely new articles on "old" subjects in 2022 are: Wilderness (garden history), Garden room, Woodland garden, Italian Renaissance sculpture, Jacopo da Trezzo, The Eight Great Events in the Life of Buddha, Life of Buddha in art. That French list is only showing a few French FAs with no English articles, & the ones it does show are pretty dodgy - instead of "Birka et Hovgården" for 2 Viking sites, we have Birka and Hovgården. One shouldn't expect to find the equivalent of Château du Petit Trianon at Castle of Petit Trianon, as any fule kno). We have a couple of screensfull on Petit Trianon. Not "hundreds" of missing articles, I think, maybe a dozen or two (a park in Rennes etc). Maybe more in German - they seem rather strong on cat medical matters - vetinary stuff is another weakness on en:wp. But I'm sure about half of them are just under other names. Johnbod (talk) 02:19, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
I think it's easy for a conversation about the relative weakness of articles on general subjects to turn into bashing the work of editors who would rather write about pop culture or commercial subjects or otherwise trying to pull up the ladder, so that today's newcomers don't get to experience the same freedom that brought us into the movement. I plan to die someday. I want another generation behind me. If they want to write about whatever passes for music these days, that's no skin off my nose. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:17, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. Updates on reimplementing the Graph extension, which will be known as the Chart extension, can be found on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
Number of English Wikipedia articles
"We no longer get as many new articles" is a myth. There was (as you'd expect) a spike during the mid-2000's Wikipedia boom, but other than that the net article creation rate has barely wavered; the "total number of Wikipedia articles" line forms the kind of near-perfect diagonal about which statisticians dream.
If anything the de facto creation rate for new articles has risen. Our increased tolerance for stubs means someone setting out to write about a new topic is more likely to be replacing a one-line microstub than a redlink, and replacing a 20-word stub with a 10,000-word article doesn't affect the article count but for all practical purposes is a new article.
(This is to repeat a tune I've played before, but even on the pop-culture topics which Wikipedia is caricatured as over-representing, there are gaping holes, particularly when it comes to topics that dropped out of popularity before the internet age. For some variety from my usual Enid Blyton bibliography example, take Robert Westall; he was a hugely acclaimed author about whom it's reasonable to assume every book he wrote was the subject of prolific commentary, but because he died in 1993 hardly any of his books have articles. Even things like List of works by Vincent van Gogh and Charles Dickens bibliography are a sea of stubs and redlinks.) ‑ Iridescent13:25, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
"and replacing a 20-word stub with a 10,000-word article doesn't affect the article count but for all practical purposes is a new article" Something I find particularly demoralizing is the fact that numerous standing articles on say, a music album, could possibly be expanded without violating content quality policies, but going through and finding the ones that need updating is a tortuous experience. Perhaps too much time at AfD and NPP has jaded me Thanks,L3X1◊distænt write◊00:09, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
This is not going to happen as it would hammer the server load, but I'd love a "purplelink" gadget that would highlight links to articles that aren't redlinks but are below a certain size. Back in earlier times, looking at [[List of…]] pages and skimming the redlinks was one of the easiest ways to spot topics which needed expanded coverage, but the mass stub creation and mass redirect creation has made that process much more hit-and-miss. ‑ Iridescent04:49, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
The effects of a less-than-wildly-popular gadget are not something any of us should worry about. Basically, if you can write it, and it seems to work okay for you, then you really shouldn't worry about the performance hit unless and until Ops tells you otherwise.
To give you an idea of the scale: Ops worries a bit about very complex (e.g., pages nearing the PEIS limits), high-traffic pages being edited more than three or four times per minute. It's difficult to get the changes rendered fast enough for most readers to see the current version; sometimes readers end up reading one that's a whole minute or two out of date. Ops does not worry at all about custom-rendering every single page viewed by the hundreds of thousands of logged-in editors. If you want to re-color your pages in rainbow stripes, Ops is very unlikely to ask you to turn it off. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:23, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
You might want to tell your colleagues in that case, who are currently over at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Deployment of Vector (2022) apparently under the impression that having a toggle option between "width of browser window" and "forced column width" will mean pages will need to be cached (swoons) twice, and consequently cause the servers to melt down so spectacularly they'll burn a hole down to the Earth's mantle and cause eqiad to be engulfed in molten lava. ‑ Iridescent18:05, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
This is about 500 characters wide. The original screenshot was taken on a screen that's a little less than a yard/meter wide. Does anybody fancy reading pages this way?If Ops says their current implementation will require double caching, then it will. Double caching of enwiki would indeed be a Very Bad Thing. We're talking about seven or eight billion page views per month. It's possible that Ops would be wary of this at some of the other large wikis, such as frwiki and dewiki as well (but then again, maybe not).
I hope that they will be able to come up with solutions that satisfy Ops. It's of course nonsense to think that people want to have a thousand characters per row on a wide display, but I hope they will be able to find a solution that makes it easier to be wider, even if it's not completely unlimited. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:09, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
I'd say "Does anybody fancy reading pages this way?" is a strawman question. As I said elsewhere, the fact that Wikipedia's interface is antiquated is a feature, not a bug; that we behave the way readers expect us to behave is one of the best things about this site. This is one of the most heavily-used websites of all time, and the world has had 20 years of "adjust your browser window so the width of the text is what suits you"; in the unlikely event that there is someone reading Wikipedia in a small font on a yard-wide screen, it's because they've chosen to view it that way. (Unlikely but not impossible; I can see a few circumstances when you'd actually want that.) All a forced width does from a reader perspective is inconvenience those people who wanted it wider whilst not serving those who find it easier to read websites narrow as they'll already have set their browser width to whatever they prefer. (Yes, some other websites do forced widths, but it's usually to benefit advertisers by forcing readers to scroll more and by freeing up more display space. Those other non-advertising websites that still use forced maximum widths - BBC News, I'm looking at you - are equally annoying.) ‑ Iridescent20:20, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
Since there is some maximum width whose limit won't even be visible to most users, why not pre-set that, and save the ones on wide monitors the trouble of re-sizing their browser windows? I hate anything that makes me take my hands off the keyboard. Re-sizing windows can't be done any other way (on that Mac, at least. If you have a fancy Linux gadget that lets you key in the number of pixels wide to make each window, then I'm jealous).
Now, I can't claim to have loved the original fixed width (which was narrower than what we're looking at now), and I believe that the Web team has not been under any illusions about my own opinion on that for two years now. But I suggest to you that the problem isn't technically the "fixed" part of their design; the problem is that the width was fixed to the wrong (i.e., too narrow) width.
A narrow width is actually easier for many people to read. I know that my personal preferences are outnumbered by millions of dyslexic people, who would be materially helped by what I'd call a too-narrow width.
It's also likely that the size of a sheet of paper is that size because humans generally find it to be a comfortable size for reading book-size characters We are so rarely tempted to turn the paper sideways just to make the lines longer. That, too, suggests that there might be some general range of text width that is comfortable for humans reading "small" text, and that it's rather shorter than a yard in width.
There also isn't any real value in a yard-wide screen full of small text, with each paragraph straggling across one or two lines. Nobody loves it.
Consequently, if they can't get the toggle to work to Ops' satisfaction, maybe they should proceed with a "fixed" width – just one that is rather wider than it is now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:42, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
"It's also likely that the size of a sheet of paper is that size because humans generally find it to be a comfortable size for reading book-size characters" is pure bullshit (how often do you see an A4-size book?). The modern A4/US Letter paper standards are an artefact of the width of typewriters, not the other way around. (I don't believe "We are so rarely tempted to turn the paper sideways just to make the lines longer" either. I see people using tablets and phones turn them sideways to read pages in landscape view all the time.) ‑ Iridescent07:20, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
Arbitrary break: paper sizes and display widths
I'm not inclined to use landscape mode on my phone, but use it exclusively on my tablet; I'm sure other people are the opposite of me, and some people use both vertical and landscape mode. It can be surprisingly difficult to remember that we all have different taste. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)08:05, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
I see books that are approximately A4 or letter-size all the time, but works of fiction are usually about half that ("digest" paperbacks are exactly half ANSI letter size; mass market paperbacks are a bit smaller; hardbacks are a bit bigger). Humans have been using this size since before it was standardized and was called Quarto. This substantially predates the invention of the typewriter.
@I dream of horses, the viewable area of a standard iPad, placed "landscape", is about 9 inches. In other words, it's about the width of a piece of standard paper. That you prefer to have your reading surface about the width of a piece of paper tends to confirm my argument. I'm currently typing in a box that is almost exactly 9 inches wide. This is a comfortable width for me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:55, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: You know what's just occurred to me? When poking around the setting, I found you can make the font size to truly large sizes, for accessibility reasons. If you get the font size too big, it starts getting...ugly, since the width of an iPad is quite fixed. So, one group of people who'd prefer a wider screen is people with a low amount of vision. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)16:00, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
About 15 years ago, I spoke to someone with very limited vision, who connected his computer to a large television screen, and walked back and forth in front of the screen to read, until even that wasn't possible (a degenerative condition). About 30 years ago, I met a young woman who used something that looked like a jeweler's loupe to read on a normal screen with normal text sizes. She had to put the device up to one eye and lean forward until it was nearly touching the screen, and physically lean from side to side to read what was on the screen. I think she would have preferred a narrower width. I would not be surprised if she uses a screen reader now, but those didn't really exist back then.
Those of us with middle-aged eyes are much more common, but we don't seem to want extremely wide screens. We just want to zoom a bit, or to put in a minimum font size. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:30, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing:I think she would have preferred a narrower width. Not surprising you knew someone who would've wanted adjusted the non fixed width boundary downwards instead of upwards; that should've occurred to me as well. <lightHearted> I'm going to blame a lack of caffeine and leave it at that. </lightHearted> I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)00:16, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
Well, I could be wrong. Her system on a wide screen would have been impossible, but maybe she'd rather have a huge screen and walk back and forth in front of it. Design work involves a lot of tradeoffs, and the best-case scenario is usually that you help more people than you hurt. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:22, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
the best-case scenario is usually that you help more people than you hurt ...unfortunately. Conflicting access needs are a thing, and it's best everyone being to customize things to their needs. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)01:43, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
This is going way down a sidetrack, but I don't think Humans have been using this size since before it was standardized and was called Quarto is making the point you think it's making. Readers don't hold books flipped back like when reading a magazine, but always with two pages facing them; if quarto is actually the preferred size for a book, then that equates to the preferred dimensions being approximately 48 cm × 30 cm (19 in × 12 in).
To be clear, I'm not disputing that there are some readers who would prefer Wikipedia pages to be displayed in a forced-width narrow column. My point is that there are substantial numbers of readers who would actively not prefer this and substantial numbers more who might not oppose it but would be confused and annoyed that a site which has worked in a particular way for 20 years suddenly starts behaving differently. (I'm personally not particularly worried about the impact on editors—they'll get used to it eventually and in some ways might even benefit from images and tables behaving more consistently across various devices—but readers are a different matter. If we get a reputation for being unreadable, there's a genuine potential that we end up back in the situation c. 2005 when people routinely skipped/ignored us in the Google search results because they knew there was a high likelihood the page would be garbage.
I agree entirely with Design work involves a lot of tradeoffs, and the best-case scenario is usually that you help more people than you hurt. My point is that by not allowing some kind of toggle, we're going to hurt more people than we help. (If you want an illustration in the wild, the BBC News website is being held up as some kind of exemplar by supporters of the change. See the screenshot to the right—assuming an overzealous NFCC patroller doesn't delete it—for what articles on the BBC News website actually look like on my own, not particularly large, monitor.) ‑ Iridescent05:07, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
The lines of text on quarto paper don't extend across the full double-page spread. You only read one side at a time.
I find the fixed-narrow width of The New York Times to be annoying, but I still read it. I get about 10 words/50 characters per line. I doubt that typical readers will stop reading Wikipedia articles because of the line width. For one thing, as a general rule, once you make the switch and wait a while, people have trouble remembering what the old one looked like.
Besides, since reading comprehension is higher in narrower widths, then it would probably help them with the real point, which is for people to learn stuff, not for people to admire the design. This of course is one of the problems with design work. What works best for readers is not what is liked best by readers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:01, 18 October 2022 (UTC)
But what is liked best by readers is surely the point here, or there wouldn't be the "something must be done or WikiWand will steal our readers!" pearl-clutching from the devs? I personally think the concerns are wildly overblown—the assorted sites that mirror Wikipedia in an allegedly more readable form get a microscopic fraction of our readers—but if we make what appears to be an arbitrary change and it sufficiently annoys people, the goodwill is hard to claw back. You're better placed than me to know; of all the feedback and complaints the WMF receives, what proportion of it is actually "I find the articles too wide"? Certainly in all the time I've monitored the Help Desk and the Teahouse I've never (and I mean never) seen this complaint nor any variation on it. ‑ Iridescent16:06, 22 October 2022 (UTC)
From the devs? I searched Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Deployment of Vector (2022) for mentions of Wikiwand, and none of them came from any WMF staff, devs or otherwise. AFAICT the existence of mirror sites doesn't even make the top 10 reasons to update the skin. Making the skin responsive is probably the first, and making it easier to read is probably the second. Short lines contribute to that, especially if you have dyslexia.
I don't know if people volunteer that they would like the lines to be shorter, but I gather that when you show a bunch of people one width, and you should another bunch of people a different width, then the narrower width wins in terms of reading comprehension. What people say that they like is not nearly as important to me as whether they understand what the articles says. What people claim to prefer leads to a lot of "It's just what I asked for, but not what I want!"WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:12, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
Interesting discussion. I often self-assess depending on how long it took me to write the article and how deep into the sourcing I bothered to go; it's quite easy to decide whether the article could readily be improved by a quick internet search and a bit more perseverence (start), or would need a subject expert and a proper academic library (B). I think there's a great deal of merit to encouraging editors to improve microstubs to decent stubs, and stubs to decent start/C, and if ratings help to provide motivation for that, they seem worth it. (If anything I'd finegrain stub classification further; the difference between a couple of sentences and one not-very-reliable source, and something of 1200–1500 characters with 6 or 7 sources, most of which are at least passable, and possibly a relevant image, in terms of use to the reader, is huge.) It's my impression, though, that hardly anyone is bothering to work in that fashion these days. There are folk that create shortish articles (and sometimes get bullied for doing it too much), folk that work hard to get FAs/GAs, and folk that slap templates on things but rarely write a word, but hardly any drive to actually improve other people's work. I agree that having one's content assessed as stub/start & low feels like a slap in the face; a while back I got assessed as C for something where I'd spent weeks trawling the internet and bothering folk at the Resources Requests board to copy me bits of oop books, and was just a teensy bit put out. ORES ratings are pretty slapdash; it always marks mine down because I've said a calculated FU to the reference citation templates mob. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:11, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
Regarding hardly any drive to actually improve other people's work, in my experience this is generally the hardest thing to do on Wikipedia. Unless the article is either a microstub or in a truly sorry state, improving something that already exists runs a non-negligible chance of antagonizing whoever wrote it and provoking an irate response. Plus, if the existing article is long enough to have a defined structure, it means working within the structure that already exists even if one doesn't consider that structure appropriate (this is a particular issue with biographies, where we generally inherit a strict linear chronological structure even if that's not the best structure for a full-fledged FA-length article, but it also comes up routinely with things like military campaigns). Add on to that that WP:CITEVAR obliges authors to stick with whatever goofy citation format the original author used, even when it's some kind of eccentric format not used anywhere else on the project.
In my experience, it's usually easier to rewrite the article from scratch in a sandbox, overwrite the existing article, and incorporate any parts of the early article worth saving into the new article. This better serves both the editor and the reader, but decidedly does not represent the Wikipedia vision of collaboration and constant improvement. ‑ Iridescent16:51, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, Iridescent, it's always interesting to hear a different perspective. I don't recall ever experiencing pushback when rewriting articles, but many of my expansions would fall into microstub/truly sorry state, as I tend to find them at the G13, A7, prod, AfD & copyvio queues, or in the unsourced pages heap. I was thinking more of the drive to reference completely unsourced pages and the drive to destub 50k articles, neither of which is exactly oversubscribed, particularly the former, where two minutes' work with the Wikipedia Library will at least move them to a less-urgent maintenance category. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:02, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
The microstubs and unreferenced articles are to me the exception that proves the rule, as their creation is itself a violation of policy so the creators can't reasonably complain. When there's a stable and reasonably long existing article, improving it sometimes provokes howls of protest. (If you really want to see WP:OWN in its purest form, make a substantial change to something that already has GA/FA status.) ‑ Iridescent05:12, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
I tend only to do relatively minor edits to GA/FAs, though sometimes wade in with TFA when there are error reports. I think one would need to be a real expert to make significant changes when there's a (weak for GAs) consensus for the approved version, and if the approved version is so poor, perhaps it should be demoted first? Though I can see that annoying the original creator a great deal! Espresso Addict (talk) 22:53, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
Reluctance to make changes as a barrier to recruitment
It's good to be reminded of other people's experiences. I often recommend that new editors try to add a sentence, but the Wiki Ed folks tell me that some students find it incredibly stressful to meddle with "someone else's" article, so they would rather start a new article from scratch. I think this is a much more difficult task, but perhaps difficulty is another thing that's in the eye of the beholder... WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
I often find when editing or expanding a stub or a poor article that it's easier to start from zero and write the article as if I'm creating it and then integrate what, if anything, is worth saving from the original. I've had very few adverse comments from the creators of the articles I have demolished and recreated.Smallchief (talk) 20:33, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
(EC) I've experimented with various uncontentious early edits. The best session was probably one a couple of us ran about a decade ago with some wikimedia donors. We had a list of articles that had UK grid reference and no image, and we showed people how to search commons and add an image. At that time about half the articles on that list could be illustrated from commons. I don't recall any pushback at all to illustrating such articles. ϢereSpielChequers20:36, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
[Re WhatamIdoing] I wonder if the type of person who likes wading into someone else's work and adding a sentence is going to make a productive long-term Wikipedia editor, while the type of person who finds it too stressful is less likely to convert to regular editing? Though I suppose there are plenty of editors who churn out high-quality articles but rarely interact with other people's work. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:02, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
Maybe?
One of the profs speaking at Wikimania said that one student was so anxious about editing Wikipedia that they submitted an assignment privately, sort of as a "here's how I would have improved the article, if the whole idea weren't terrifying" piece. It's clearly not everyone's idea of fun. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:51, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
That's sad. I must admit, I've spent a decade and a half trying to convince cajole guilt various of my acquaintance to edit -- all highly educated computer-literate types, often with expertise that's underrepresented in our editor base, several of whom actually have articles -- and I'm not aware of a single person who actually made an edit. In fact, the best I've done to promote newbies editing, afaik, is an (as I recall, rather minor) error in an article about a grade-I-listed building that the owner of the property felt they had to wade in to correct. They were extremely aggrieved, and certainly not converted to the editing experience. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:11, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
My experience tallies with both of yours, in that even those people who would have something useful to add are usually very uncomfortable with the idea of editing. Plus, recent changes patrol tends to be quite enthusiastic, so there's a good chance that any given editor's first edit will be reverted, and anecdotally people whose first edit is reverted don't tend to make a second.
There's also an issue we don't talk about enough but which is definitely there—even though we have the "anyone can edit" link on the main page, most people don't understand what that means. When it comes to people who aren't regulars on user-generated sites, in my experience close to 100% of people I know aren't aware of what that actually means. Even among people who deal with websites or information for a living, I find that if people are even aware the "edit" button is there, they assume either that it's only to be used by those people who've been given 'editor' status, or that it takes them to the page where they can submit suggested edits to Wikipedia's panel of professional editors. (I suspect—and this is pure speculation—that part of the reason for this misconception is that the combination of Recent Changes Patrol, New Pages Patrol, and Cluebot is in some ways too efficient. Because there's such a high probability that somebody's first edit will be inappropriate in some way, and will be reverted within seconds, there's a correspondingly high chance that when the new editor refreshes the page, they won't see whatever edit they made as having gone live, and will assume that some kind of vetting process has held it up.) ‑ Iridescent04:45, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
Indeed. One the few people to whom I've owned up to being an administrator here assumed that I worked like a proper commissioning editor for an academic publisher, commissioning articles that fit within an outline I'd generated! I think the lack of real-time response is one of the major demerits of punting non-autoconfirmed editors to the Articles for Creation system: if a new editor does manage to submit their precious text successfully (and judging by the number of blanks, many don't), they expect it to go live soon, not get a formulaic rejection full of gobbledegook up to 3 or 4 months later. Espresso Addict (talk) 07:21, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
I'm wondering whether starting to edit was easier when I was a newbie (2004/5) because most articles were obviously unfinished or whether the attitudes and expectations of people coming to Wikipedia were different (I had heard that it was a wiki and a great free copyleft user generated project, and so I came with the expectation that I could edit it, not with the expectation that the articles were any good). —Kusma (talk) 20:57, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
When I was a new editor (meaning ~100 edits, so not all that new, either), I thought that Category:Cancer and {{Cancer}} were two ways of writing the same thing, so I randomly removed one or the other whenever I noticed them. Nobody ever yelled at me about this. They just quietly cleaned up the mess I made, and eventually I figured it out. Imagine what would happen if someone did that now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:14, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
That our standards are higher now seems entirely fair to me. Back in the day the readers didn't expect Wikipedia to be accurate so there wasn't such an onus to get things right first time. ‑ Iridescent04:44, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
Which unfortunately has the effect that the better class of newbie waits longer than those who pen obvious junk. Not the fault of the reviewers, but the entire system is not favourable to welcoming potentially productive newcomers. Espresso Addict (talk) 10:37, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
Yes, that. Quite a lot of Wikipedia's processes have the unfortunate side-effect of penalizing competence; we're much better at addressing things done incorrectly than we are at recognizing things done correctly. To me, the most glaring example of this is the use of block logs as a metric—an editor with 100,000 edits who loses their temper five times goes down as "that editor who was blocked five times" rather than "that editor who made 99,995 positive contributions".
We're also much better at pointing out to newcomers what they've done wrong, than we are at congratulating new editors on what they've done right, and are terrible at telling new editors that they're on the right track and giving constructive feedback as to how they can improve. To the 99.99% of the world who don't speak Wikipedia jargon, the set of article creation instruction pages to which we direct new editors (see right) might as well be written in Latin.
(It's not just the article creation instructions, for which one could at least make the—IMO spurious—argument that we want to discourage people with no experience from jumping straight in. Try getting any reasonably intelligent person you know to read Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia—which is basically the foundational text of all our "instructions for newcomers" pages—and see if they come away with any impression other than "Wikipedia is a weird bureaucracy run by obsessives enforcing a bunch of arbitrary and impossible-to-follow rules".) ‑ Iridescent16:23, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
That page also leads me to File:Evaluating Wikipedia brochure.pdf, which is credited to "Wikimedia Foundation" so I assume is official. If so, it's something of an insight into how detached our insect overlords are becoming from the peons. (Signs of bad quality: The discussion page is filled with hostile dialogue. If you have the time or the knowledge, please consider correcting the problems yourself by clicking Edit at the top of the article. in particular seems like a recipe for inviting well-intentioned newcomers to jump headfirst into snake-pits.) ‑ Iridescent16:48, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
Looking at the history, that's from the part of the WMF that became Wiki Education Foundation after Sue Gardner'sm:Narrowing focus project, so it would be the 12-year-old views of the people running student editing projects.
I don't imagine that the English Wikipedia would welcome professionally/top-down written documentation on how to edit. Smaller communities probably would, but here, I imagine that we'd be upset about how those so-called experts took out the thing that I like quote to to get my way in disputes. So we'd start off by saying everything can be re-written except the bits that I wrote (which must be treated as holy writ), plus the stuff you wrote (which are lucid and obviously helpful), and then the stuff he wrote (which isn't bad, but it's a little focused on discouraging pop culture and business-related content), and then the stuff they wrote (just to be fair) ...and then we've reënacted XKCD on standards in our basic documentation again. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:27, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
Obvious declines get declined pretty quickly. Like, within a few hours. It's the more complex cases, and accepted drafts, that wait 3-4 months. In my opinion, both obvious declines and obvious accepts get processed quickly. It's the difficult ones that are neither an easy accept nor an easy decline that linger. Also, I believe that AFC accepts usually get processed quickly, since they tend to be high quality, because 1) they're subject to AFC's slightly stricter rules, such as including GNG passing sources in the article, and 2) it's been checked by an experienced Wikipedian who confirms it doesn't have major issues. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:02, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
Some years back, maybe when you were a new editor, a bunch of experienced editors created new accounts and submitted articles on subjects whose notability they were fairly certain of. Some made "obvious" mistakes (e.g., badly formatted refs). Then they sat back and waited to see what would happen. I can't find the link right now, but the results were not especially encouraging. The comment that stuck with me was a reviewer saying that if he'd known, he would have been extra careful to approve everything. I wonder what we would expect a similar exercise to produce today. Several months in the review queues, as the articles would be neither obvious accepts or obvious deletions? (If memory serves, though, several of the originals were tagged for speedy deletion.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:48, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Newbie treatment at Criteria for speedy deletion was the experiment, and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive577#Concerns about NuclearWarfare and Wikipedia:Newbie treatment at CSD was fairly representative of the response to it. To say it was controversial would be something of an understatement; what-ifs are imossible to test, but it's hard to believe thatt it didn't mark some kind of inflection point in Wikipedia's arc, given that it prompted so many of Wikipedia's more experienced editors to withdraw from NPP and so many of Wikipedia's more experienced admins to withdraw from the deletion queues. Whether the switch it triggered from NPP and deletion being a communal task in which lots of people pitched in, to NPP being done by dedicated patrollers and CAT:CSD by just a small handful of specialist admins, is a positive or a negative is open to question, but I do think it was one of the big steps on the road to the silo-ization of Wikipedia editing. ‑ Iridescent06:45, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
God, I'd forgotten all about that. It was long before my days on speedies. Having clicked on a random selection I think some of them fared rather well; hardly any would last 5 mins in mainspace now, even if just moved to draft rather than actually speedied. Espresso Addict (talk) 09:17, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
My pie-in-the-sky 'formal instruction manual' proposal
I'm sure you're right that the community would instinctively reject anything that looks like top-down imposition of instructions; even if the instructions were perfect, there are understandable reasons not to want to set 'the WMF has the power to impose rules' as a precedent.
Post at places like Wikipedia:Help Project and the Village Pumps asking for suggestions;
Email people who'd set up accounts and edited for a month or so but then stopped, asking why they'd stopped and if there was any particular difficulty that drove them away;
Take a random sample of newly-registered accounts asking them to volunteer to be tracked and to periodically give feedback on their experiences joining Wikipedia;
Collate the results of 1, 2 & 3 and use it as the basis for a set of instructions;
Post the result of 4 on-wiki, again widely publicising it and asking for feedback;
Rewrite it based on any constructive feedback received, and at this point bring in a professional writer with no experience of Wikipedia or similar sites, to ensure it all makes sense to those outside the Wikisphere;
Hold an RFC as to whether to give it 'official documentation' status.
Since the only people likely to participate in the RFC would be those who'd participated in the document's creation the result would likely be a foregone conclusion, but community consent is important to avoid the perception of orders being imposed by the WMF. If for any reason the RFC led to rejection, then the document could be rewritten based on whatever the reasons for opposition were, and re-submitted once it addressed those concerns. ‑ Iridescent05:11, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
If I were the WMF staffer charged with such a project (which is very unlikely, but not completely impossible), I'd tell them that the obvious solution is to beg User:John Broughton to write a new edition. Before we could reach that point, though, we'd have to figure out whether it was meant to be universal (which would suggest writing it at MediaWiki.org and getting translations) or if it was meant to be only applicable to the English Wikipedia.
2 was done some years back. One result was that editors we thought were "inactive" still thought of themselves as being active. A less-fun result is that many felt rejected, excluded, and harassed by what experienced editors would call standard operating procedures (like reverting unsourced content about living people).
3 is done by the Growth team as part of the Newcomer Homepage work.
7 would need clarification: What does it mean for something to be "official documentation"? Does that mean that all ~650 welcome templates here link to it instead of other pages? Or just that it gets a fancy tag at the top, and everyone ignores it after that? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:49, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
Addressing 2 would be my primary objective here. We ideally want editors to understand the SOP—and more importantly, why the SOP is what it is—before they fall foul of it, get reverted or warned, and give up in disgust. The rules circa 2007 were far shorter than they are now, and crucially were far less rigorously enforced.
I'd interpret 'official status' as following the rules included in this document is always treated as permitted. That is, our existing policies would continue to apply as usual and IAR would still operate, but provided one could demonstrate that they were following the written instructions than one wouldn't get in trouble even if there was a reason to revert that particular edit. It would need to be short enough and simple enough that we could reasonably tell any new editor to go away and read it, or at least go away and read a bullet-pointed executive summary with links to more details explanation of all the 'whys' and explanations of the detailed operation of policy.
If you want a suggested halfway house that would be a lot less work, I think a new version of The Wikipedia Adventure that doesn't look so obviously aimed at children (and which loses the bizarre zombie horse-cyclops!) would be a very productive use of some of the $231,177,536 currently burning a hole in the WMF's pocket. A way to illustrate quickly and in detail how Wikipedia actually works would hopefully both make newcomers better editors (and thus less likely to get in trouble), and also just as importantly discourage those people who won't be good editors before they waste their and everybody else's time experimenting before they decide Wikipedia isn't for them. ‑ Iridescent17:10, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
They could pay OUP for Wikipedia Library access -- before that expired it was my main recruiting drive incentive (Edit Wikipedia, get free Grove access!). The easiest way of creating useful articles I can think of was to find a Grove Music/Art/ODNB article on a deceased subject lacking an article and locate one other passable source. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:12, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
One problem with rewriting Wikipedia:The Missing Manual is that the format for much of the book is wrong - many of the chapters should be (mostly) screencasts, not text.
More generally, a "formal instruction manual" whose target is primarily new editors should, in my opinion, consist of a set of solutions - how do I edit an existing article, how do I add a source/footnote to an existing article, how do I add an image to an article, how do I replace an image in an article with a better image, what do I do if someone deletes ("reverts") my edit of an article; what do I do if someone deletes or tries to delete an article that I think should be kept, should I edit Wikipedia articles if my employer, or family member or close friend, asks me to, etc., etc.
And yes, there should be an overarching document, or perhaps a set of high-level chapters, that provides context, but these should (again, in my opinion) point primarily to various detailed screencasts and documents.
I personally think that it's absurd that the WMF, which is swimming in money (so much that it has moved more than $100 million "off-the-books" into an endowment) relies on volunteers to write most of the documentation for Wikipedia. It's absolutely right for the WMF to stay away from content (encyclopedic) creation, but how-to information? Really? That's particularly true because the underlying software and procedures for Wikipedia are often (and easily) changed, which is why WP:TMM was seriously outdated within a few years of its publication, so unless WMF can find and keep a dedicated (and not trivially small) group of editors focused on documentation (rather than editing the encyclopedia itself), anything that is a special project (major rewrite) is inherently fragile. -- John Broughton(♫♫)19:26, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
Screencasts have been made by various folks (Wikimedia Israel is supposed to be particularly good with documentation for new users), but I don't think anyone has yet set up a generalizable script for generating screencasts in multiple languages. Unless we're content to have documentation in English only, we'd need a script that can click the edit button, type some sample text, highlight the designated words, click the button to make the text bold, etc., in any language. This feels achievable in terms of basic editing actions, but it also feels like a substantial step forward from just making screenshots. John helped me a lot with mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide, which as far as I know, is the only WMF-generated documentation that can claim to have screenshots in 100 languages. However, that relies on the semi-defunct LanguageScreenshotBot, which hasn't run for two years. If very brief, visual-only screencasts would work, then animated gifs such as the ones seen here might be a little simpler. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:22, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
Screencasting and paying people to write documentation
Giving this its own subsection to avoid breaking the flow of the discussion above, as it's sprawled into a full-scale stream-of-consciousness essay.
@John Broughton, WhatamIdoing: There would be obvious advantages, but I can see quite a lot of disadvantages to screencasts when compared to the more traditional text/still image combination. They're more difficult to update when the interface changes (or just when 'the accepted way to do things' changes); they can't be printed out; they're harder to search if one's looking for a particular line; since they need to be accompanied by alt-text they essentially duplicate the work involved. That last one I'd say is particularly significant if we're talking about a resource aimed at editors rather than readers. It's not just people with visual/auditory impairments who need to be catered for (although obviously it's important we do so), but a very long tail of people with autism, ADHD, or other conditions that make it hard to process moving images; people with slow connections who have to wait for videos to load; people with metered connections who keep video blocked by default; and people who just prefer reading to watching. (I was always that kid at school who would happily read the textbook but didn't pay attention in class, I moved seamlessly into being the student who would happily research in the library but found lectures tedious, and again seamlessly into the adult who would rather read the instructions than watch the tutorial video. By their nature Wikipedia and the WMF ecosystem are based primarily on text and stills and will be for the foreseeable future. I find it hard to believe that "I'd rather read the book than watch the movie" types aren't hugely overrepresented when it comes to those who choose to become editors on Wikipedia or photographers on Commons—people who prefer getting their information from videos rather than from text and stills are more likely to end up at YouTube than here, and it's readers who go on to become editors.)
TL;DR summary of the above: Screencasts are great for "here's an illustration of what I'm talking about", but they should always be an accompaniment to the text not a replacement for it, and this is particularly true if they're being aimed at potential Wikipedia editors since the fact they're choosing a text-based site likely has a strong correlation with them either being unable to watch video or preferring text to video. Also, because they're harder to update there's an increased risk of them going out of date and/or out of sync with the accompanying text.
I think I'm largely on the same page as you (John) when it comes to an overall structure. My vision would be a three-level system:
A de facto written constitution summarizing the core policies;
A greatly improved and expanded FAQ/Help system taking the form "these are the ways to do X and this is why we do it that way even if it seems counter-intuitive".
Level 2 (the policies and guidelines themselves) would take primacy, and would continue to be created and curated by the community as they are now, so no fear of another Superprotect incident. The only difference from the perspective of Wikipedia's gpvernance would be that the existence of level 1 (the 'constitution') would create a more formal split between the existing All users should normally follow… vs Editors should attempt to follow… definitions, in that anyone who can demonstrate that they were complying with policy will always be treated as having acted in good faith even if the particular action in question ultimately ends up being reversed.
What I'd envisage the WMF paying people to do would be employing people full-time to constantly monitor Level 2 (all the morass of policies, guidelines, the ever-increasing subpages of the Manual of Style, etc), and to ensure Level 1 (formal policy) and Level 3 (documentation and help) are kept up to date to reflect Level 2 (community consensus). This is something better done by paid staff than by volunteers—we have 20 years of experience showing that leaving the documentation to volunteers will quite understandably mean the only areas that get decent documentation are those of interest to whichever volunteer is writing the documentation, even though that's not necessarily going to correlate with what potential new editors (or experienced editors looking to do something outside their usual area) are actually looking for. The paid outsiders could also point out those circumstances where the existing policies and guidelines are either unclear or contradictory, and RFCs (or whatever) could then be held to determine what consensus thinks they should actually say.
(If you want a concrete example illustrating how unhelpful Wikipedia's documentation is, imagine yourself in the shoes of someone with no Wikipedia experience who's concerned that something is a copyright violation and wants to report it. Assuming you fail to notice the small and easily-missed "contact us" link in the sidebar—which is going to disappear altogether once the redesign rolls out—you're presumably going to type "copyright" into the searchbar. If you do then manage to spot the link in the hatnote at the top of Copyright you'll get to Wikipedia:Copyrights which is written in the purest Wikispeak. Assuming you wade through all the sentences like You may only import text that is (a) single-licensed under terms compatible with the CC BY-SA license or (b) dual-licensed with the GFDL and another license with terms compatible with the CC BY-SA license., you'll eventually get to Wikipedia:Copyrights#Copyright violations, which gives the completely contradictory instructions Bring up the issue on that page's discussion page. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed. and that material–and the whole page, if there is no other material present–should be removed—i.e., "you shouldn't remove it yourself" and "you must remove it yourself". And this is one of our most fundamental policies, not some obscure guideline like Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Road junction lists.)
I imagine it would take two or three full time equivalent staff just to do English Wikipedia, although ideally it would be spread across multiple part-timers to reduce the risk of someone imposing their personal views. (Plus, doing nothing but read Requests for Comment, Arbcom cases, lower-case & upper-case administrative noticeboards, and the talkpage of the Manual of Style is about as soul-destroying a job as I can imagine, and I wouldn't want to inflict it on anyone full-time.) Even if it ends up taking ten times that, the WMF can easily afford it. The $231,177,536 currently burning a hole in the WMF's pocket wasn't plucked from thin air but is straight from the 2020–21 annual report. "We'd need to pay for translation" shouldn't be much of an issue—this is a proposal aimed at editors not readers, and when it comes to "number of active users" (WMF-ese for "editors") en-wiki is very much where the action is. If the model is rolled out on en-wiki and Commons and works, it could then be taken to other projects if they wanted it (I can safely guess that German Wikipedia at the very least won't want WMF staff touching their documentation), but I'd imagine in most cases local users would just translate the existing instructions from en-wiki themselves rather than re-inventing the wheel 317 times. ‑ Iridescent08:38, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
12 years and more than 50,000 edits later, and I still can't comprehend most Wikipedia documentation. Copyright and footnote instructions are especially obtuse. Right now I have a glaring red error message regarding footnotes on a page I'm editing. That error message would seem to tell me that I've done something seriously wrong but I don't know what the problem is--and I can't find a solution although I have resorted to looking at the help page. So, yes, instructions and guidance written by somebody who can write coherent English would be helpful. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Smallchief (talk) 10:38, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
@Caeciliusinhorto: – Thanks. I didn't have the objective of asking for help, but I appreciate it. The technical abilities you demonstrate in your brief message are impressive. I work at the level of pencil and paper 1.0.Smallchief (talk) 12:37, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
I'm not a video-oriented person, either, but I can see the advantages of a screencast, and if you have a script to make the video content, then re-running it when the software changes slightly shouldn't be that big of a deal. You could equally generate the same content for each skin in such a case. It probably shouldn't be a long video; it should probably be a handful of small ones – more at the "here's how to add a citation" level than the "how to edit" level. In the central help page for the visual editor, how to insert a template has about 10 screenshots. I think that could be replaced by one screencast.
More generally, why is documentation for how to edit English Wikipedia articles supposed to be the WMF's job specifically? Let's stipulate that we are dissatisfied with the current system and that if we don't change the system significantly, it will not improve and might get worse. What's are rationale for leaping straight from "we can't (or don't want to) do this well" to "so the WMF has to do it"? Try finishing a sentence that begins with "Of all the movement organizations, the WMF has the least emphasis on and experience with training new editors and also has the most legal reasons for staying strictly out of content decisions, but I believe the WMF should still write documentation that trains new editors and tells editors how to decide about article content because..." [1]WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:46, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
OK, I'll bite:
Of all the movement organizations, the WMF has the least emphasis on and experience with training new editors and also has the most legal reasons for staying strictly out of content decisions, but I believe the WMF should still write documentation that trains new editors and tells editors how to decide about article content because:
Although I don't think the question has been asked, I believe that were sentiment to be surveyed there would be a clear consensus that the existing documentation is inadequate;
Although I don't think the question has been asked, I believe that were sentiment to be surveyed there would be a clear consensus that the usual English Wikipedia community processes have proven themselves incapable of improving the documentation to the required standard and maintaining it once created;
It would greatly improve things were professional writers hired to maintain English Wikipedia's documentation (to the extent that improved goodwill and editor retention means professional writers would likely pay for themselves in terms of increased donations;
Professional tech writers who can write material suitable for readers with very limited technical knowledge don't come cheap;
The Wikimedia Foundation has around $300 million in surplus assets;
The Wikimedia Foundation may be disliked in some quarters, but there's a grudging acceptance that it has more authority than any other body when it comes to the wiki movement in general and to Wikipedia in particular.
As you know I'm not at all a fan of the WMF (to the extent that I'd probably support a formal disaffiliation of Wikipedia from Wikimedia), but this is the kind of thing it's supposed to take responsibility for. Nobody else has both the authority to hire a team of professionals and the cash to pay them. As long as there's some kind of oversight to ensure people are actually being hired because they'll do a good job and not the usual snouts-in-the-trough, I can't see who else could do it—I suppose we could set up some kind of latter-day WP:ACPD Wikipedia House of Lords if the WMF is genuinely concerned about being seen to take the decisions, but ultimately there's only one place the money is going to come from. ‑ Iridescent19:01, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
Your reasons sound to me like: 1, it needs to be done by someone; 2, it needs to be done by someone; 3, in needs to be done by people who know what they're doing; 4, it needs to be done by people who know what they're doing; 5, the WMF can fund it; 6, the WMF is our default way of thinking about work that we can't manage ourselves.
I'd like to separate the ideas of paying for the work and doing the work. I'm concerned about who is doing the work. We spent a couple of years slogging through the strategy process, one of whose main conclusions was that the WMF should do less and other groups should (be funded to) do more, and yet every time we want something done, we are still running straight to "Oh, have the WMF hire some more staff. (Also, have you seen how excessively bloated their staff rolls are? Why, between inflation and staff growth and no longer (usually) paying people in the bottom quartile, the budget growth has been absolutely exponential for the last decade. They should stop hiring people!)". The WMF had zero professional documentation writers for several years. Before that, it had one, and he only wrote technical documentation. There are now multiple writers of technical documentation, but there are still none that do user-facing documentation. If I were looking at an RFP bid from the WMF, they'd score very low for relevant expertise in writing user-facing documentation. Yes, some folks (including me) have done it. A few are even good at it. But IMO we shouldn't ignore WMUK, WMDE, WMIL, and the other chapters that actually have experience with user-facing documentation just because it's easy to pass the buck to the WMF. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:46, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
I was wondering when WMUK would come up! Speaking as an ex-Trustee of many years ago, you must be joking if you think they have the experience or expertise even to direct and steer hired professionals. I don't think German-written (etc) documentation would work at all for en:wp. Johnbod (talk) 03:57, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
I've seen some things used by WMUK trainers, and I think there's potential there. Of course, going from no staff to a team of documentation writers overnight would strain most organizations, but when you already have about ten, then adding just one more would be doable for most organizations. It is also possible to split the work into smaller pieces (e.g., have WMUK produce only GLAM-focused documentation). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:24, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
Whatever the solution, I believe that a deterrent to attracting good editors is the obtuseness of many of the instructions about the finer points of editing. In my case, a computer novice but an experienced writer, I began editing Wikipedia on obscure topics and nobody interfered with my amateurish efforts to learn painfully how to wikify my prose. Had I been 'buked and scorned about the poor quality of my wikify attempts, I probably would have abandoned Wikipedia -- and written instead the Great American Novel (just kidding!). Smallchief (talk) 09:48, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
Same here. When I was new, I thought that {{Cancer}} and Category:Cancer were two ways of writing the same thing. Eventually, I learned what a navbox was, but nobody yelled at me, or even gently told me that I'd made a mistake. They just silently fixed the mess I caused. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:12, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
I agree totally with Whatever the solution, I believe that a deterrent to attracting good editors is the obtuseness of many of the instructions about the finer points of editing. I know Visual Editor was a good-faith attempt to address this, but even if it worked perfectly it would barely scratch the surface of the issue; whatever the editing interface, there's still a huge mess of social conventions, poorly-documented templates, words that don't mean what they mean elsewhere, and just plain general weirdness, acting as a barrier to entry for new editors.
At least in this context I don't agree with the WMF should do less and other groups should (be funded to) do more, and if that's what the strategy process has decided I'd suggest that's an indicator of a fault in the process. If you're looking at things from the "Wikipedia is essentially a global tech company which happens to be operated by a non-profit" perspective, than your suggestion is equivalent to Microsoft outsourcing the creation/curation of the documentation for Office to the Chicago Excel User Group, or Meta tasking the staff of WhatsApp with writing the user instructions for Facebook and Instagram; if you're looking at things from the "The WMF is a major NGO which operates numerous projects of which English Wikipedia just happens to the be most important currently" perspective, than your suggestion is equivalent to the Salvation Army directing their Buenos Aires branch to write their global instructions for fundraising good practices.
Johnbod is correct about WMUK; there are some fine people associated with it (and some not-so-fine), but they're a small group with a fairly narrow remit which doesn't have the capability or the competence to commission significant work or to hire multiple employees/contractors and monitor their performance; they're also a fairly tight-knit group so handing them a large budget for a specific task would be a recipe for scandal since the people most likely to apply for the job would either be directly involved with the decision as to who to hire, or to have personal or business relationships with the people making the decision. (Of this at least, I know the WMF is aware, given that the WMF are the ones who took direct control of UK donations away from WMUK for precisely these concerns.) I don't see any reason to think any other local chapter would be different.
Besides, the money would presumably still need to come from the WMF, since any of the WMUK/WMDC/WMDE etc alphabet soup would quite reasonably ask "why should we spend our own small budget on a project where 99% of the beneficiaries aren't going to be the audience we're supposed to be serving?". The WMF is large enough to have the HR and legal departments to oversee contractors, as well as the name recognition to tempt qualified and competent people to come and work for it. (I might be tempted to switch from a secure job writing user manuals for Google, Facebook etc to a secure job writing user manuals at the WMF; I sure as hell wouldn't be tempted to give up my secure job to work for a small handful of people—at least one of whom is currently indefblocked in the case of WMUK!—running an organization which could be effectively shut down on a whim by the single external funder which provides 50% of its budget.)
I'd flip why is documentation for how to edit English Wikipedia articles supposed to be the WMF's job specifically? around on its head. Teaching people how to edit is pretty much the embodiment of empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content […] and to disseminate it effectively and globally. If the WMF isn't interested in recruiting potential new editors, making editing easier for existing editors, or helping readers and reusers make use of the existing content on the wikis, then what is the WMF for? ‑ Iridescent14:10, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
"at least one of whom is currently indefblocked in the case of WMUK" - if you mean who I think you mean, he hasn't had anything to do with WMUK for a decade or so. And without bothering to hunt down and check the latest accounts, I think WMF, "the single external funder" (more or less), provides a good deal more than "50% of its budget" - at a guess over 80%. Otherwise I agree. Johnbod (talk) 14:27, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
I don't know what the current situation is, but pre-pandemic, established chapters in the wealthier countries had been told to transition to raising at least 50% of their annual budget on their own. (Exactly what counts as "on their own" is unknown to me; for example, I have no idea how Gift Aid in the UK would be counted.)
As for Iri's last question, if were are to believe what an editor recently claimed, the WMF exists to pay a monthly phone bill, because the paying the bill for the server sites is all that is truly necessary to keep bare metal servers running forever. (Tech folks who want to know what's included in the hosting bill may find this 2013 RFP informative, but for normal folks, paying that bill gives us a few hundred square feet (~50 m2) of rackspace in a large, noisy room, our share of the building's utilities (especially the massive HVAC system), and the fiber headed out of the building, but none of those extravagant optional extras, like the server hardware itself, or a person to screw the server hardware into the racks.)
If we are instead to believe the relevant US federal tax agency, the WMF's purpose is "education", and more specifically "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
That could include things like "recruiting potential new editors", but it also could include not doing that, and instead doing something like "hiring lawyers to answer my questions about copyrights" or "hiring school teachers to rate content for age-appropriateness" or "putting Wikipedia articles on a thumb drive and mailing them to schools" or "running an after-school program to teach teenagers how to make videos" or "buying paywalled sources". There's a lot of scope in there, and they don't have to do every possible thing. They could resolve, and historically have resolved, that directly "recruiting potential new editors" is not their primary focus, and instead their main job is to "empower people" by developing software that they are willing to use and to take the collected information and "disseminate it effectively and globally" by offering it at no charge on the internet.
What that statement doesn't (can't) resolve is how the WMF vs the non-WMF organizations vs the non-organizational parts of the movement are supposed to relate to each other. The 2030 strategy work was supposed to resolve some part of that; whether you're happy about its decisions probably depends on where you sit in the movement. My general impression is that the larger affiliates are pleased, the smaller affiliates are hopeful, and the non-organizational folks (e.g., editors in the US) do not hold a single or coherent opinion. (This is to be expected, since many of them think that the Board members are supposed to represent the constituency that voted for them, rather than perform their legally mandated fiduciary duty, which is to support the WMF's charitable purpose. It's usually possible to do both, but when/if there is a conflict, many enwiki editors are shocked to learn that US law says the board members must support the mission instead of the volunteers. I understand that the situation is quite different for most chapters, which naturally do not have to worry so much about the details of US tax law.) The upcoming m:Movement Charter is meant to resolve more of these relationships. We'll see what happens. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:28, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing, nobody's saying the WMF should be directly recruiting new editors. (I can see some circumstances when a "have you considered editing Wikipedia?" ad campaign would potentially be useful, but I'd think that would be better left to people familiar with the topic or geographical area at whom the recruitment drive would be aimed.) Making things not suck for new editors—and for old editors trying to do something outside their comfort zone—is completely different. As I said above, I don't see how empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content […] and to disseminate it effectively and globallydoesn't cover telling people how to collect, develop and disseminate educational content. If people don't know how, they're not empowered to collect/develop/disseminate; if people can't find out how, they're much less likely to engage in the first place and much more likely to disengage sooner.
If there's a single editor on Wikipedia (or any other WMF project) who actually says "I wanted to do something but I couldn't find out how so I gave up" has never happened to them, that person is either lying or deluded. You and I had the luxury of joining in the old days when things were less complicated so we could pick this stuff up gradually. Our documentation—the broad help pages, the individual instructions for things like templates, and the explanation of Wikipedia's internal policies—generally sucks. (Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia is linked from the {{welcome}} template so is going to be the first back-office page anyone seriously considering taking up editing is likely to see. Look me in the metaphorical eye and tell me that page—let alone the pages linked from it—aren't confusing and misleading. I note that this page which is allegedly aimed at newcomers also points them to Wikipedia:Reward board, which is a good way for someone who isn't very sure of what they're doing to get themselves banned for disruption.) Plus, the proliferation of reversion scripts like Redwarn means that someone nowadays confusing {{Cancer}} and Category:Cancer is much more likely to find themselves summarily warned and blocked without ever interacting with a real person (and quite likely never even be aware of what's happened, if they're using the mobile interface with its effectively invisible warnings and notifications). ‑ Iridescent17:16, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
I agree that the English Wikipedia is much less tolerant of innocent mistakes than it was back in the day. I recently talked to a volunteer who trains newcomers who said the biggest problem with contributing to the English Wikipedia is the other volunteers, rather than the software.
Some of it is the effects of semi-automated scripts; we've known since 2010 that these tools drive away newcomers. Wikipedia:Snuggle was one attempt to mitigate some of those effects. The Newcomer homepage addresses it from the other perspective.
Some of it, though, is probably an unsolvable problem of human nature: we are more likely to see people patrolling RecentChanges who get a positive feeling from reverting warning, blocking, and demonizing as many people/edits as possible – it's fun, it's exciting, it's makes you feel powerful, if makes you feel productive. You really do contribute something positive to the world when you revert vandalism. When you use RedWarn to revert someone for not having formatted citations properly (an error I corrected a few days ago), you're harming the world. The kind of people who aren't excited by that generally can't be bothered to patrol RecentChanges.
There is a potential software-related role here for the WMF: One of the reasons that enwiki struggles with patrolling is the duplication of work. Dozens of people will look at a new article, and the reason they're looking at it is that none of them know that it's already been checked repeatedly. The same thing happens with RecentChange patrolling (although a couple of scripts keep their own internal lists), except that with RC it's easier for an edit by an IP to get checked a dozen times and an edit by someone who has made 15 edits or 105 edits or 505 edits to not get checked at all. Changing the software to make "looked at and chose to take no action" transparent could reduce unnecessary duplication of volunteer effort. It might even be possible to figure out the point at which duplication is unlikely to change the result. Google analyzed the data and concluded that having more than four job interviews was unproductive; maybe we would analyze the data and conclude that having more than n reviewers look at a diff is unproductive.
But... while I think it would work in terms of content, I also think it would upset some existing editors. We would end up with people spending less time reviewing RecentChanges (the goal of every "reduce wasteful duplication" program, right?) and this would inevitably be presented as evidence that the system ruined everything. (See also the introduction of ClueBot, the disappearance of people who did nothing other than reverting blatant vandalism, and all those years of handwringing about The Decline of The Community™.) A few things will get incorrectly accepted, and this will be presented as evidence that the entire system is net harmful (nothing on the Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia could be taken as evidence that the current system has serious failings, of course). It reminds me, in the end, of editors who insist that there must never be any firm rules for article content or article existence, because even if you write a rule that says "Absolutely no Wikipedia articles about a living person unless eight different university presses have each issued thousand-page scholarly books entirely about that person", somebody's going to game it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:34, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
I think we're on the same page as to what the problems are, the only point of difference is how we address them. My contention is that (1) people are less tolerant than they used to be of good-faith mistakes, (2) that the documentation to enable people to avoid those mistakes is of poor quality, (3) that the wiki model is inadequate to improve the documentation since people will only write about what interests them rather than what's actually important, and (4) that even though it's not ideal that the WMF get directly involved, nobody else has the requisite skills base and assets to commission high-quality writing. ‑ Iridescent16:26, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
I would expand your 2 to say "in the wrong place" (you have to search for it; you won't find it if you don't know how to search in a different namespace; even if you know how to search in a different namespace, you would probably search in the Help: namespace, but the information you need is mostly in the Wikipedia: namespace).
I'm not sure about your 3 (I've seen some excellent, newcomer-focused work done in this area), and I don't agree with your 4. Money is transferable, so its present location is basically irrelevant, but it's not clear that the WMF has the requisite skills base. What makes you think that the WMF has the skills needed for this? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:15, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
I stand by my 3; my point isn't that there's not good work being done (there is) but that the Wikipedia model means people write about what interests them, leading to vast swathes of important areas where there doesn't happen to be the intersection of "someone good at writing" and "someone who wants to write about this specific topic". This is true for all of Wikipedia, of course, but internal documentation is an area in which it's thrown into particularly sharp relief.
Regarding 4, re-read what I wrote. I'm not saying the WMF is the best placed to write these pages; I'm saying the WMF is the best placed to commission these pages. Groups like WMUK et al are well-placed to know what's important to a specific local area, or to a specific subject; they have no special skills at all when it comes to knowing how to assess applicants pitching for a grant to write a general instruction set that will be comprehensible to an audience of numerous ages, abilities, and cultural backgrounds. They also don't have the cachet of the WMF brandname (if I were a pro writer, I might be tempted to work for "the guys who run what's arguably the world's most important website"; I certainly would be unlikely to be tempted by a tiny group operating on a shoestring budget). Plus the WMF has the checks and balances in place (or at least after recent unpleasantnesses certainly should have the checks and balances in place) to reduce the risk of work being given to friends-of-friends on the basis of personal relationships rather than on the basis of who's best placed to do the job; and has the global reach to reduce the risk of "these pages were written for an American/British/Indian/whatever audience and don't relate to us" backlash.
(If any of the Wikipediocracy crowd are still watching this page, it might be an interesting exercise to ask for their input there. They spend so much time bitching about how unwelcoming we are, they might have some concrete ideas about how to make things better and who'd be best placed to do it.) ‑ Iridescent20:18, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
TBH my take-away from that (other than "I really don't like that new interface") is "even the WMF grudgingly concedes that our existing help pages are terrible and that the mythical god Community Consensus isn't capable of fixing them on its own". ‑ Iridescent16:31, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
Thanks and welcoming
[Re Iridescent]: The thanks button is a boon; it provides a positive metric to balance the block log. I do try my absolute best, when I've got my admin hat on, to AGF as hard as I can & explain patiently to newbies how to improve their articles in my own words, but it's time-consuming, often not productive of any further edits, and even on the rare occasions when the newbie tries to follow my advice, they rarely get it right enough to pass AfC/NPP. I despair sometimes. Women in Red will help out with any article within their purview, but for anything else, the newbie is swimming with sharks. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:00, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
I agree with the concerns above, but I also feel like there's a no-win aspect to this. I'm frequently annoyed to see "Welcome to Wikipedia" messages posted mechanically onto the talk pages of thoroughly not-here accounts, so that the welcome is followed immediately by sequential warnings and a block, just because the welcomer didn't bother to check whether the new account was just here to disrupt (but hey, if you keep copy-pasting welcomes onto new user talk pages, your edit count rises rapidly!). In no way do I mean that to take away from the significance of the problem of making good editors feel unwelcome, but I'm just saying that it's hard to solve this problem. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:07, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
@Espresso Addict, my impression is that getting out of AFC often requires the articles to be better than two-thirds of what's already in the mainspace. I have asked at Wikipedia:Request a query#Number of refs in the median article to see if we can get more information (RAQ may not be the best place, as it sounds like Quarry can't count the number of refs directly). In particular, I'm curious whether most current articles have two or three refs, but we require multiple times that to get out of AFC. Nobody wants to be the editor who approved a "bad" article, so our minimum requirements ratchet ever higher... WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:31, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing: Indeed! It's not the fault of the reviewers, the system Just Doesn't Work. I make myself very unpopular there by occasionally blundering in and trying to rescue something, but I've found spending prolonged time there so depressing, I have to take a wikibreak to recover. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:44, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
To be clear my comments are a dig at the process, not at either the reviewers trying to follow the process nor the people who in good faith designed the process. The ratchet effect mentioned—in which nobody wants to risk being the one who let the defamatory edit/the vandal editor/the fake reference go live—means that over time our processes get steadily more exclusionary.
@WAID, I'm not sure median articles is a particularly useful metric. Five minutes clicking on Special:Random makes it clear that the "56% of articles are stubs" claim is correct (and thus that the median is a one-paragraph stub, probably 'sourced' to a database rather than an actual source), but that doesn't mean Berquist Ridge, Cafe Mascot or Lisa Bertini are models to follow. The very-delayed fallout from the defenestration of LauraHale and Lugnuts, currently taking place at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Requests for comment/Article creation at scale, might shift the dial somewhat, but any cleanup will take years. As things stand, AFC is in a no-win situation. Either we say "most of this project consists of useless articles on barely-notable trivia, take that as a model and add more garbage to the pile" which means new editors are highly likely to see their contributions promptly tagged for deletion; or, (as currently happens) we say "do as we say, not as we do" which means new editors get the impression that Wikipedia is run by a gang of hypocrites who've self-selected themselves into positions of authority and then pulled up the drawbridge behind themselves. Unless and until we grasp the nettle of cleaning up the mess, this is always going to be an issue.
"Number of references" isn't always particularly useful either, unless it's a genuinely contentious topic where one needs to reflect multiple viewpoints. (If anything, a one- or two-sentence stub with half a dozen references is typically a warning flag of a spammer or POV-pusher.) Even at FA level, it's not all that unusual for articles on non-controversial subjects to be sourced exclusively to the works of whichever expert wrote the definitive book or books on the topic—for something like Petter's big-footed mouse or Nico Ditch it would be wilfully perverse to deliberately use a less-reliable source purely for the sake of being able to say "we're using multiple sources". (Some regulars have learned to intentionally mask this by using alternative sources for such things as distances and locations, so as to satisfy "multiple independent sources" whilst relying on the works of the leading expert for anything substantive, but that's very much process-for-the-sake-of-process.) ‑ Iridescent04:50, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
I've written at length elsewhere about scope creep in NPP, and I think that the enwiki-only PageTriage software is partially responsible. In particular, it is missing a feature that is needed: the ability to see how many other reviewers have already looked at the page.
The process is meant to be:
Alice looks at a new article, and tags it for deletion as a copyright violation. (Only touch it once – efficiency is important here, because experienced editor time is valuable.)
or:
Bob looks at it, sees that it's not a disaster, and moves it out the patrollers' collective queue.
What we actually get is:
Alice looks at a new article. She see it's not a copyright violation, which is her personal area of interest and expertise. There's no way to tell other editors that it's not a copyvio, so she silently moves on.
Bob looks at the same new article and sees it's not blatant vandalism. He silently moves on.
Carol looks at the same new article and sees it's got a source. They silently move on.
David checks the same article for copyright violations again, and then silently moves on.
Grace looks at the article, doesn't see anything wrong, but silently moves on because she doesn't know much about the subject area, so she doesn't feel comfortable publicly "approving" articles.
Heidi tags the article with two maintenance tags. She is our sixth reviewer to look at the article, but the first to take any action that can be seen by other reviewers.
Ivan notices that the article has been in the queue for 30 days, but he doesn't want to edit articles about people, so he silently moves on.
Judy checks to see that the article contains a source, but her interest is just in getting unsourced articles deleted, and this one has two sources, so she silently moves on.
Mike is the fourth reviewer to check whether this article is a copyright violation, but it isn't, and there's no way to record that it was checked for copyvios and found to be acceptable, so he silently moves on.
Niaj, our 11th reviewer, notices that the article has been in the unreviewed queue for 60 days. Niaj checks one of the references, which is an online magazine, but can't decide if this is a good enough source, so they give up and silently move on.
Olivia runs across the article. She can't think of any reason to get rid of it, but she thinks it's being used for self-promotion. She silently moves on.
Pat begins to panic about this article being overlooked before Google will index it (currently set by us to 90 days, and dependent entirely on Google's voluntary choice to respect this). Wow, the NPPers must be overloaded, if something like this hasn't been checked by anyone except Heidi in more than two months! Pat pulls up CSD and carefully checks each of the criteria. It doesn't qualify for CSD. The subject is a living person, though, and it doesn't say the person is bad. Pat, who feels proud of having a sixth sense for sniffing out hidden conflicts of interest, decides to add Template:Undisclosed paid. Pat can just tell that nobody would write about this subject unless they were being paid.
Rupert sees all the maintenance tags on the page and decides to reject the article. Rupert can't see any reliable path to getting the article completely deleted, so Rupert moves the page into Draft: space, where it will either become WP:AFC's problem or be deleted after six months anyway.
Most of the time, these articles just quietly disappear. In rare cases, they lead to drama about why someone would get rid of an article on such an obviously notable subject (e.g., Disney's new CEO [whose article was hidden in draftspace nine minutes after creation, despite a note saying that the editor was still working on it], politicians in developing countries, certain Nobel Prize winners), but mostly, these articles just disappear.
One of the flaws in mw:Extension:PageTriage is that it's set up to have a single "I approve of this article" action. It would IMO make more sense to structure page review according to the CSD requirements: Alice determined that this wasn't a copyvio, and clicks the 'not {{db-copyvio}}' button, so nobody needs to check that page's existence against copyvios again. Bob determined that it didn't qualify for {{db-vandalism}}, and nobody needs to check that page for vandalism ever again. And so forth, through the whole list. And when you get to the end of the CSD list, the page moves out of NPP's queue, because the other stuff (e.g., should we have an article about this album, or should it be merged up to the band's page?) isn't NPP's problem anyway.
That's not just an issue with the PageTriage extension. Admins have a wearily well-documented issue with the fact that there's no obvious way to flag an editor as non-problematic—thus, someone flagged as having a potential COI who has a perfectly good explanation, but doesn't feel comfortable making the explanation public and thus outing themselves (someone citing a pre-publication book, say) tends to end up blocked as a spammer even if they've privately explained themselves to half-a-dozen different admins. (The most notorious occasion this problem arises is probably with the self-appointed civility cops. Someone can make a talkpage comment which twenty different people see and conclude is non-problematic, but it only takes one admin to misinterpret it and the editor in question gets blocked. EEng is probably the most obvious example of this, but the problem is that most normal people aren't as sanguine as EEng in this situation, and either walk off in disgust or go down the "You want incivility? I'll give you incivility" road and the situation just escalates. ‑ Iridescent16:50, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
Yes, it's inherent in MediaWiki's design. FlaggedRevisions and its PendingChanges cousin can do something similar, by putting your name on the approval of someone else's edit, but MediaWiki fundamentally isn't a central-authority content management system. There's no way for you to mark something as cabal approved except by writing that in text on a page, and even if you do that, there's no way to make people read what you wrote.
Take a look at the page views for Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Venta. It's a new (2009) church building in a small town in Europe; the odds of it having been built without reliable sources taking notice of it is basically zero. The only real question is whether the amount of attention is enough to justify a separate article (e.g., vs adding to a list of churches in the region, or a paragraph in the article about the town). I don't have strong views on the ultimate disposition of the page, but I do have strong views that the ultimate disposition should not be the NPPers' problem. The page views demonstrate that people have looked at this, especially when it was quite new and now that it is approaching the 90-day mark. Its disposition during the next few days is likely to be essentially random: roll the dice or shake the Magic 8 Ball and see whether it comes up "PROD" or "Draftify" or "Approve" or "Merge" or "Ignore".
We have a technical solution for contract approvals that works in this manner:
Contracts officer signs off when contract written for approval, submits it and it proceeds to finance.
Finance officer checks figures and VFM and flags who needs to approve it depending on total value, proceeds to legal.
Legal officer signs off on legal clauses, proceeds to approval.
Approver checks other officers have approved and agrees/signs contract, goes live.
Essentially each person approves the part in line with their job role and only that part, instead of the previous situation where everyone assumed because its been signed by the person below them in the management hiearchy that its all right, then they get their PA to log in as them and sign off on it anyway. Delegated authority levels. Quite a simple concept to implement approval thresholds in a system that already has authority levels. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:33, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
This (WhatamIdoing's original post) really made me laugh. On drafts I tend to do very minor c/e and leave an edit summary of the form "Possibly notable?", in the hope that reviewers check the edit history. NPP reviewers could do a courtesy edit and state "Checked for copyvio", or whatever, in the summary. In the case of the church one could approve it adding a tag for notability and leave it to sink (when someone starts looking round for something to prod), or swim (when an expert comes around to say there are plenty of non-English sources).
[Re Iridescent] There's the speedy tag issue too, where 10 admins look at an A7 or G11 and think it isn't deletable but it isn't sufficiently within their comfort zone to decline, and then the 11th comes along and deletes it. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:59, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
@Only in death, that doesn't really transfer to the wiki environment, where except in a few niche use cases we don't have specialized reviewers. If the NPP process consisted of an article having to be signed off separately by "the copyvio guy", "the source checking guy", "the prose quality guy" etc, you'd be looking at a backlog of years rather than weeks. The only place I'm aware of in the Wikiverse where such a process functions is WP:FAC which deals with a relatively low throughput of articles; even there, articles regularly get held up for weeks because none of the handful of people who perform a check which requires a particular niche expertise (image copyright status, say) are available. I assume if applied to page creation and deletion as SOP, it would have the effect of freezing Wikipedia in aspic—in almost any situation, one would be able to say "object, nobody has yet reviewed for [criterion]" making it virtually impossible to get any new article approved or and existing article deleted. ‑ Iridescent04:41, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
@Espresso Addict, I assume what you actually mean is "where 10 admins look at an A7 or G11 and think it isn't deletable but it isn't sufficiently within their comfort zone to decline, and then the admin who periodically goes through CAT:CSD deleting everything without declining a single request comes along and deletes it". ‑ Iridescent04:41, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
I couldn't possibly comment, but I've edit conflicted trying to decline a deletion with an admin deleting it (not always the same admin, but usually one of ~five) enough times that I know my standards are far from universal. Espresso Addict (talk) 04:48, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
@Iridescent well chicken and egg. Do they not specialise in tasks because the software doesnt support it.... I know any number of editors who would be in their element if they could just concentrate on say 'does reference support content' and ignore pesky considerations like 'Does this paragraph even make sense?'. Naming no names, but I am sure you can think of a few quite easily who edit that way as a matter of course. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:30, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
Probably. In those niche areas like FAC where we do have separate queues for source reviews, image reviews, prose reviews etc this certainly decribes how people work. I reqularly will preface reviews with some variant of "This is purely a review for prose and formatting as I'm not qualified to assess the sources" or similar. ‑ Iridescent17:49, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
This idea of NPP having more queues (CSD queue, notability queue, gnoming queue, etc.) so that each queue requires less context-switching (therefore boosting efficiency) is a decent one, and one I've suggested before. My personal idea was to split the gnoming steps of the flowchart (maintenance tags, categories, WikiProjects, stub) into its own queue that wouldn't even need the NPP perm. But this must be balanced with the drawback of additional bureaucracy, such as having to click a bunch of check boxes, or one of the queues being ignored/falling behind. In the example in the original post, I think there'd be too many queues. In reality, NPP chose to deal with this a different way recently: we made the gnoming parts of the NPP flowchart optional, simplifying our one existing queue.
Also, I absolutely disagree with this idea of scrapping PageTriage. PageTriage is just a tool that adds features to things that already existed (Special:NewPagesFeed is a fancier Special:NewPages, the "marked as reviewed" button is a fancier patrolled edits), or unifies things that already existed into a one-stop-shop (deletion tagging and maintenance tagging already exist in Twinkle). If the process is broken, the process should be fixed, rather than deleting the tool that helps to execute that process more efficiently. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:31, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
I agree that basic gnoming shouldn't be part of NPP, and one of the reasons that I think it might be more efficient to scrap PageTriage and start over is because the PageTriage design puts so much emphasis on adding maintenance tags. The real point, which is to get copyvios and other CSD-worthy pages off the wiki ASAP, is lost in that design. This has IMO led to the idea that NPP is responsible for the weight of the world, which is completely unfair to them and unreasonable of us.
NPP should IMO be focused strictly on CSD. If it's not a CSD violation, then it is not NPP's problem. NPP shouldn't be stuck dealing with questions about whether or not this page is "good enough" to be in the mainspace. They shouldn't be trying to figure out whether this month editors are accepting or rejecting music albums from bands that don't already have an article. This should not be their problem, and disputes about those kinds of questions should never be their fault. The NPP options should look a lot like this:
db-copyviodb-vandaldb-attackdb-spamdb-a7doesn't qualify for CSD
or at least like this:
Mark as not copyvioMark as not vandalMark as not attackMark as not spamdoesn't qualify for CSD
– with buttons disappearing as they're marked off, until we reach the last CSD criteria and the page is no longer NPP's concern.
I can see the value of stretching the CSD-only idea so far as to include tagging unsourced BLPs with {{blp prod}}, but for the rest, including sending pages to AFD on grounds of doubtful notability, I suggest that ought to be clearly understood to be actions completely unrelated to NPP. NPP should be seen more like a First responder and less like the whole healthcare system. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:02, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
Interesting ideas. I hear ya. But I would be careful of proposing to remove notability checking from the NPP flowchart. If not NPP, who else would check methodically for notability? Without a system of checking thoroughly for notability and marking as reviewed, I predict a ton of non-notable, refbombed UPE would slip through the cracks to be indexed by Google for months, years, or forever. Any attempt to reduce NPP's role in notability checking should take this into consideration. So for example, I think a proposal to eliminate all notability checking would enjoy very little support at RFC, but a proposal to eliminate notability checking for non-UPE areas and only notability check BLPs and CORPs might have more of a chance of passing. Although perhaps our current system of checking notability for everything is best. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:24, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
Espresso Addict Nearly all the time, yes, or under G11, G12, or some combination of the above. One reason we even allowed paid editing at all is that, rarely, paid editors do, in fact, contribute something constructive enough to allow to stick around. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)02:44, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
(Pet peeve alert) You mean, the obvious paid editing articles nearly all the time fall into these categories. The overwhelming majority of COI edits are completely uncontroversial and consist of such excitements as the intern at a music management firm correcting an album release date. The fancruft like Michael Legge (comedian) is IMO far more problematic than most of the "Abilene Paper Mill is a paper mill in Abilene" fluff created by the spamfarms. ‑ Iridescent17:58, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
Yes, or updating for a 3-year old change in CEO, or the latest filed turnover, which a very high proportion of our articles on companies need. Johnbod (talk) 18:17, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
> If not NPP, who else would check methodically for notability?
Do we need to do that?
Sure, it's possible that there would be a ton of non-notable, refbombed UPE getting indexed by Google. But surely that's Google's problem, and not ours? Why should volunteer editors be expending so much time and effort on protecting Google? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:34, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
I suppose it's our problem if we get so flooded we develop a reputation for "they host any old garbage, and a lot of their pages are clearly biased or spammy". Reputations are hard to rebuild if we lose them. ‑ Iridescent06:54, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
The A7, A9, G11 and G12 CSD criteria deal with a lot of non-notable subjects (and quite a few notable ones), especially since we have a very ambiguous grasp of what constitutes "unambiguous advertising".
For the rest, I think we're at least two million articles away from any significant risk of people noticing any change. People mostly find Wikipedia articles from their favorite web search engines. If we have a basic stub, then they're unlikely to think it's spammy for the page to exist, because it's information they were looking for. It's not reasonable for us to worry that people will think less of us for having the information they were searching for.
The contents of the page could be biased or otherwise inappropriate, but that isn't a problem of notability (at all) and IMO shouldn't be NPP's problem at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:49, 18 October 2022 (UTC)
I don't think the point has been reached yet, but it could, at least hypothetically, be reached quite soon if the editor base shifts. The point at which Wikipedia becomes unmaintainable isn't an absolute number, but a function of the pages-per-active-editor ratio (1656 at the time of writing, using the WMF's generous "five or more edits" definition of "active"). The issue wouldn't be our having basic stubs—people have been used to that for 20 years, and I agree tend to take a "something is better than nothing" attitude—but if we ever get a reputation for biased or inaccurate stubs because we no longer have the resources to check them as they're created and people start to notice. We did a good job in convincing the press that Wifione wasn't worth their time writing about, but if it keeps happening eventually people will start to take an interest. ‑ Iridescent16:06, 22 October 2022 (UTC)
Draft:Author Rijhjham Raga CSD
Hey. I believe this falls under the CSD criteria. Please check the history of the page. The sole author of the page has created it to advertise their own books. It is an autobiography with COI issues, self-promotion issues, and questionable notability. Could you please revise your decision? Thoughts? Thanks! :) Silikonz (alt)💬03:09, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
The speedy deletion criterion is pages that are exclusively promotional and would need to be fundamentally rewritten to serve as encyclopedia articles (emphasis in the original), and is expressly to cover only pages which are unambiguously promotional. Contrary to popular belief, Wikipedia has no rule against either autobiographical content or writing with a conflict of interest, particularly in a {{noindex}}ed draft.
This page is obviously not ready for the mainspace, but it isn't in the mainspace. Either someone will bring it up to standard in which case there's no problem, or it will be deleted as a stale draft in due course. ‑ Iridescent03:16, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Good point. However, WP:AUTOBIO states that Self-created articles are often nominated for deletion... Autobiographies are generally not welcomed. I think a nomination would suit better. Thoughts? :) Silikonz (alt)💬03:21, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
"Nominated for deletion" does not equate to "Nominated for speedy deletion", and "should" does not equate to "must", both of which I'm sure you know perfectly well. (Speedy deletion expressly and explicitly only applies to the most obvious cases; if both the tagger and the patrolling admin aren't 100% certain that a page is eligible for speedy deletion, then by definition it isn't.)
The deletion policies are the result of literal years of discussion and CAT:CSD in particular is carefully worded to avoid even the slightest ambiguity. If you want them changed we have well-established processes for changing them, don't just make up a new deletion policy and ask admins to follow it. Certainly don't turn up on admins' talkpages to complain that they're enforcing what the policy actually says rather than what you'd like it to say. ‑ Iridescent05:43, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
This makes sense. I'm sorry if I may have come across as a bit aggressive/annoyed, I was merely attempting to know underlying reasons for what you thought of the CSD. 'Revise' may not have been the best word choice.
I wonder whether we need to reach a shared agreement about whether "unambiguously promotional" is based on the content of the page vs (our best guess at) the editor's intention in creating the page. For example, is "Alice Expert is an award-winning author" a promotional statement? To find out whether it's promotional, do you need to know whether I wrote it, or Bob wrote it, or Alice wrote it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:12, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing I think it depends only very slightly on intent. If I knew that Alice (or someone closely related to her, professionally or personally) wrote it, I'd scrutinize it more carefully, and would be more inclined to either remove the "award-winning" phrasing, putting an inline citation after the "award-winning," or accepting a source later on the article as also sourcing the introduction. However, I might be inclined to scrutinize that hard, anyways, depending on what I'm doing on Wikipedia. I guess I find context important, but it's something that will always vary among people. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)21:23, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
I think the first thing to evaluate, expanding on the "who wrote it" point, is whether who wrote the sourcing for the claim of significance is independent of the page subject. (And, absent any sourcing for such a claim, the question tends to answer itself.) --Tryptofish (talk) 22:07, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
I generally only consider the text of the page. Guesses about the editor's intention are just guesses, unless and until Special:ReadMind comes online I'd be very wary of making a speedy deletion decision on the basis of guesses. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:09, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
As the statement is about a BLP, then it would, of course, need suitable sourcing. I should have added {{dummy ref}} at the end of my example sentence.
Let's assume that the statement about winning literary awards is factually true and that at least one of the awards is counts under WP:ANYBIO. Is it still promotional to report this undisputed fact? I think there are many editors who would say this is promotional simply because an accurate description of the facts sounds positive. If it's not insulting the subject, then it must be promotional. (See also if it isn't a copyvio, then it must be original research.)
If we shorten it to "Alice Expert is an author[1]" without mentioning the awards, then it would qualify for speedy deletion as {{db-person}}. This tends to put the editor in a bind: I can write something that superficially sounds promotional, or I can write something that will get deleted because it doesn't explain why the subject is notable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:54, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
I'm not sold on there being a bind over, if it's not insulting to the subject, then it must be promotional. For one thing, one could make an even stronger case that, for BLPs, if it's insulting then it's a BLP violation. (I've recently been dealing with a BLP-dispute-from-hell, over an academic who is reliably sourced to have done misconduct, who socks at WP:BLPN, and whose socks have hoodwinked some well-meaning editors into thinking BLP-compliant content violates BLP.) I think present-day en-wiki culture is far more worried about negative content than promotional content, at least once the page gets past the stub stage. I can see how a stub could get into the kind of bind you describe, but it's really very easy to write something like: "Alice Expert is an author of romance novels. She is noted for her book Heaving Cleavage, which won the American National Romance Book Award in 2022.[1]" As long as the American National Romance Book Award is ANYBIO-eligible (or WP:AUTHOR), I think it would be pretty hard to make a case for deleting on the basis of being promotional. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:28, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing If I were to take your example of Alice Expert is an award-winning author very literally, and assumed that's all there was to the article, yeah, of course that'd be CSD-worthy. It's the sort of thing that heavily depends on context, so it can be hard to talk about hypothetically.
Yes, I agree that there is tension between BLP and promotional writing. I think it can be healthy when editors on both "sides" approach it collaboratively, but I sometimes see editors who are concerned most about BLP using it far too rigidly, as a bludgeon. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:08, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing If that's all that's in the article, and there's no source, it would be a microstub that qualifies for {{db-g11}} and almost but not quite a {{db-a1}}. The crux is the lack of sourcing in the article. Even if it didn't qualify for speedy deletion, it'd at least qualify for a BLPPROD, again, because of the lack of sourcing. Even if the information is positive and also, as you said, a plain, bare, undisputed fact, we don't want to get into a situation where someone writes an article about, for example, a non-existent Alice Expert, a real Alice Expert who was a victim of a scam 'award,' or a real Alice Non-Expert who's a scam artist herself. However, I must emphasize that a single-sentence, unsourced microstub is an extreme situation.
On the other hand, most situations aren't that extreme. Most of the time, if I see a new BLP article that states positive information, it's referenced and has enouhg context to a degree that I'd feel uncomfortable tagging it for deletion, but I might tag it. Same for BLP drafts, except instead of tagging I might decline. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)21:18, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
G11 (for advertising/spam) says "This applies to pages that are exclusively promotional and would need to be fundamentally rewritten to serve as encyclopedia articles, rather than advertisements. If a subject is notable and the content could plausibly be replaced with text written from a neutral point of view, this is preferable to deletion."
I'm not sure that needing to be expanded really counts as being an advertisement.
Imagine that I'd remembered to add a source in my initial statement. Imagine that I had instead written Alice Expert is an award-winning author.[1][2] and assured you that those were, in fact, independent reliable sources. My question isn't really about whether Alice is notable or whether we should have an article about here. (In fact, we already have an article about Alice and Bob, so she's already been judged notable.)
My question is whether it is inherently "promotional" for an editor to write the plain, bare, accurate, vague fact that a notable subject has won some unspecified awards. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:05, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing So, we're not evaluating if Alice is notable, we're evaluating if she's notable independent of Bob. This kind of evaluation needs to happen sometimes. For example, a lot of musicians who've played only in one band and don't have a solo career don't have their own articles (rightfully so!), but Tarja Turunen and every member of The Beatles do have their own article.
Anyways, back to being strictly on topic. How would we know if a fact is plain, bare, [and] accurate without independent, reliable sourcing that people can evaluate by themselves? If a source is offline, it would have to be accessed via a library or similar means; less than ideally, if it's online but paywalled, we'd need help from people with access to the the Wikipedian library. Things like that. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)07:23, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
Heh, I go away for two days and come back to this… @I dream of horses, I think you're missing the main point here; the "unambiguous" part of "unambiguous advertising or promotion". A page can't deleted under G11 if the text of the article is neutral regardless of whether or not the topic is notable (and that is written Wikipedia policy, not my personal interpretation of it). The very fact you and WAID are having this discussion means [[Alice Expert]] wouldn't qualify for deletion under G11. Speedy deletion is intended only for those cases where no reasonable third party would object to deletion, not "I don't personally think this article is appropriate" (that's what WP:Proposed deletion is for). ‑ Iridescent14:59, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
I'm confused, @I dream of horses. Are you saying that you are unable to determine whether the words in the Wikipedia article count as promotional without looking at sources? As in, if I write "Blue-green widgets are the most amazing widgets in the history of the universe, and they're on sale during the holiday season for the amazingly low price of just $5.99 each. Buy some from the internet's premier distributor of widgets today!", then you're going to have to check out some sources before you can decide whether that's an advertisement? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:39, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing Iri bought the point that lack of sourcing doesn't make or break articles in terms of qualifying for CSD; they are correct under nearly all circumstances. Perhaps I hyperfocused on a rare circumstance. However, your example crosses a line where sourcing wouldn't matter. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)23:05, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
For speedy deletion to apply, it either needs to be "unambiguously promotional" to be deleted under G11, or "no credible claim of significance" to be deleted under A7. I'm not saying I like this—if I had my way Alice Expert is an award-winning authorwould be deletable—but as the rules are currently written it doesn't qualify.
Admins who enforce the-rules-as-they-feel-they-ought-to-be rather than the-rules-as-they-actually-are are one of my pet hates, and as far as I'm concerned speedy-deleting pages in these circumstances is straightford abuse of the tools. It's not as if we don't have mechanisms for the deletion criteria to be changed; the reason some admins perform IAR deletions in these circumstances is because they know they don't have consensus behind them that this is the right thing to do. ‑ Iridescent04:22, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
In re If it's not insulting the subject, then it must be promotional: We see this line of thinking more often with businesses than with BLPs: "200-bed hospital that received the 2011 Lasker Award" is promotional; "200-bed hospital that is best known for allegations of unfair labor practices in 2011" is not. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:43, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
About businesses, I agree with you. It's an unfortunate result of too many people trying to use Wikipedia for promotion of businesses. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:00, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Which suggests that we care about (our perception of) the editor's intent more than about the article's content. We are concerned about "people trying to [ab]use Wikipedia for promotion", not about whether this is a notable subject that is being accurately described. Basically all modern hospitals are notable subjects under GNG (and if you ever subscribed to a local newspaper during the multi-year process of trying to build a new one in your local community, then I don't need to explain to you why I make such a sweeping statement), and if the hospital won the award, then, well, it's accurately described. But we care about "people trying to use Wikipedia for promotion", which isn't really about the article content at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:59, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
Myself, I'm quite jaded. I somewhat agree with WAID that this reflects what I would call the human frailties of real, living WP editors, rather than a dispassionate decision process based on objective criteria. I'm only bothered by it, however, when the result is to delete something that should not have been deleted. A hospital that has won a Lasker Award is obviously notable (although the awards aren't given to institutions, to my recollection). WP:PROF would always regard a Lasker as demonstrating notability, so a Lasker winner (person) should never be deleted at AfD, and no competent admin would ever CSD a page that asserts it. But if a new page about some WP:CORP-failing business catches an editor's attention because it just sounds promotional, it still is a page that fails WP:CORP, regardless of how someone came to notice it. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:34, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
The Lasker Award for Public Service actually did go to a 200-bed hospital in 2011.[2] It does not appear be mentioned in the Wikipedia article. The article appears to be tagged for promotionalism-related problems. I have no idea how to address those alleged problems. Looking at the diffs, the editor with the reported COI mostly added citations to previously existing text, and updated some older numbers. Adding citations to existing text should not produce complaints about an article reading like a press release. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:35, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
I see: a different Lasker Award. I took a quick look at the page. There's a connected contributor tag on the talk page, so I think the corresponding tag on the page itself should be removed. The page could probably do with a top-to-bottom copyedit, which I just don't feel like doing now, but that would take care of the other issues. I'm not seeing anyone saying the page should be deleted. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:53, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Rather than post the same comment twice, see the comment I've just made further up this thread, which IMO applies equally here. I don't personally agree with the existing deletion processes, which I think let far too much obviously inappropriate garbage either linger as zero-readership permastubs forever or waste the time of a lot of people having deletion discussions with obvious outcomes. However, on this one point I do agree wholeheartedly with the ARS hardliners; it's the job of admins to enforce the existing deletion rules, not to supervote and delete things they want deleted regardless of whether they meet the deletion criteria. ‑ Iridescent04:35, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
Although many admins would have deleted the draft per G11, I'm not challenging your decision to decline it. However, the article is growing daily. It is now up to about 240K bytes and the editor has not finished all of the seasons the club existed. The author has acknowledged that Sean McCaffrey is their deceased brother, although they have not declared the COI on their user page as required. I suppose I could block the user for being here only to promote their brother, but given that they have at least stopped editing the McCaffey article after my warning, I'm kind of reluctant to do that. Any ideas, or is your view that it's no big deal if the editor continues to spend all their time on Wikipedia working on a "memorial" draft that has no hope of ever becoming an article? (I don't think I've ever seen a user's Talk page indefinitely semi-protected because of "peregrinating harassment" before.)--Bbb23 (talk) 18:04, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
@Bbb23 Re: (I don't think I've ever seen a user's Talk page indefinitely semi-protected because of "peregrinating harassment" before.): I actually got my talk page temporarily semi'd because of an IP hopping troll. Blocking the IPs would've been useless. It's rare, but it happens. I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)18:52, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
As long as it remains in the draftspace I don't see any particular issue with it, unless and until it reaches the point of violating WP:NOTWEBHOST. It would be a singularly pointless piece of spam; few things are certain, but I'm as certain as I can ever be that nobody is ever going to change their preferred football team based on a Wikipedia article. I don't think WP:NOTMEMORIAL applies in this case; the editor in question is clearly making a conscious effort to base the draft on sources and to attempt to demonstrate notability, rather than memorializing deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others who do not meet Wikipedia's notability requirements.
Even if the article is never going to be viable (which to be clear I'm not claiming in this instance), it's generally best to leave these things be. The editor is gaining Wikipedia experience which they may one day decide to turn to something more appropriate (many if not most Wikipedia editors started off writing something that was wildly inappropriate, but learned from the experience), and since draftspace is {{noindex}}ed it's not as if readers are accidentally going to stumble across something inappropriate. If it proves never to be viable, the draft will duly be deleted when it reaches the "stale" mark.
This isn't a typical user talk page—AFAIK it's the most-read user talk page on Wikipedia. (Even including the dip this year owing to my having been virtually inactive, it still consistently averages more pageviews than Jimmy Wales's talkpage.) With that comes a significantly elevated number of cranks and crazies. Ideally I don't like to have the page protected, as I prefer to allow new editors whose edits I've reverted/deleted, and editors who are logged out for whatever reason, to have the right to participate, but it sometimes becomes necessary. I have absolutely no objection if you, or anyone else, wants to remove the protection and see if the lunatic fringe have got bored and moved on to annoy someone else. ‑ Iridescent20:33, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
I disagree with you on the purpose of the user's writing the draft, but that's neither here nor there at this point. Also, I've seen some users work on drafts for years, so it is never eligible for G13, which always strikes me as a poor use of Wikipedia resources. As for your Talk page, you don't have as many watchers as some do, including me, and I've never trusted the "page views" statistic. In any event, I wasn't criticizing the indefinite semi-protection, just commenting on the phrase that was used in the protection log. Nice chatting with you.--Bbb23 (talk) 20:44, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
This may be of interest to some here - the article had not been updated for years, but has been since the nom. More expansion would still be good. Johnbod (talk) 05:16, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
I don't feel strongly enough to comment at the AfD, but I think that's a virtually impossible topic on which to write a viable Wikipedia article. To the best of my knowledge, there's no books published on and no significant academic papers on the topic, so it's something that's virtually impossible to source appropriately. As it stands, the article is sourced entirely to contemporary news reports (which are generally awful sources except as primary sources for "what people said at the time"), and to the websites of the unions and TfL itself. (It also doesn't make it very clear that the "London Underground averages three strikes per year" statistic is misleading. When one sees "tube strike" it brings to mind a network shutdown, but it's more typically just a reduced service level or ticket office closures.)
TL;DR: I'd say this is one of those topics that we can't delete because it technically meets the guidelines, but on which having an article serves no useful purpose to readers and just creates a maintenance sink. If it's going to be kept it either needs to be expanded to get rid of the recentism, or retitled "London Underground strikes since 2010". ‑ Iridescent08:17, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
Um, hello. I am writing this to inform you that I have requested After the Deluge for TFA next year. Feel free to leave a comment on the request page. Regards, Vida0007 (talk) 16:00, 13 December 2022 (UTC).
Hi, Iri. I am writing again to you to let you know that I have renominated the Pig-faced women article to be run as TFA, this time on a nonspecific date between February 1 and March 3, 2023. Please leave a comment in the request template to let me and the coordinators (especially Jimfbleak) know if you support this nomination this time around, or if you still have any concerns about this.
Unsurprisingly, I've opposed this. As I said there, this is an article about misogyny and ableism rather than an article endorsing misogyny and ableism, but that's not a nuance that's easy to convey in a 975 character blurb. I can't see how you possibly thought running this as TFA would be a good idea. ‑ Iridescent07:54, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
Merry Merry!
Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2023!
Hello, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2023. Happy editing, Davidgoodheart (talk) 14:53, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
Wishing you and yours the best over the holiday season, and here's hoping 2023 won't bring as much global trauma as 2020, the worse 2021[3] & bloody 2022 Ceoil (talk) 04:53, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
Likewise to you… There seem to have been far too many years recently where "hope next year isn't as bad as this one" is the only appropriate comment, hopefully things are going to start being good again. ‑ Iridescent03:25, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
Well, that might be an issue, and the new catalogue sries hasn't reached it. Also very vertical and not very Christmasy; that tends to be the only thing I do individual paintings for these days. It should have an article though. Johnbod (talk) 03:49, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
I could probably find enough to write at least a stub on it; it must have had quite substantive entries in assorted exhibition catalogues. That said, I suspect this is one of those cases where Wikipedia's not having an article is actually a net positive, since it means people searching for it get this page on the National Gallery website as their first hit which is likely a better introduction to the topic than anything we could do. (The NG isn't bound by NPOV, so is allowed to say "this is what makes it interesting" explicitly.) ‑ Iridescent04:02, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
A couple of years wandering in the wilderness as an IP was informative and instructional, but there’s too much hassle having to continually justify your edits as an IP to do it for too long! Cheers - SchroCat (talk) 08:10, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
Tell me about it… When I was still vaguely active as an admin I used to try to periodically edit as an IP to get a feel for how new users were treated, and even back then it wasn't what you'd call welcoming. I can only imagine what it's like since the moral panic about sockpuppetry reached its recent levels of hysteria. ‑ Iridescent14:54, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
Wishing you and yours a Happy New Year, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free and may Janus light your way. Ealdgyth (talk) 13:51, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
I post this here in the hope that a talk-page stalker will take be interested and give me something new to read about choirs singing Christmas carols next Christmas. Wishing you all four calling birds, or whatever else your hearts desire, on (what I think is) the fourth day of Christmas, WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:47, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
Not that I ever heard of (and the British choral tradition fits squarely into a broader European tradition, it seems unlikely a choir in Lincoln is musically substantially different to one in Leipzig), but This Is Not My Field. You might want to ask around among the opera and musical theatre projects; we may not have a specific choral group of editors, but I'd imagine there's huge crossover between the fans of musicals/operas and choristers.
I wouldn't consider the NYT after c. 2010–15 ever to be a reliable source for anything to do with Britain. The inaccuracy of their reporting on the UK in recent years is legendary (there's a slew of Reliable Sources for their UK bureau just making shit up and hoping their editors on the other side of the Atlantic won't fact-check). ‑ Iridescent06:07, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
The chord—which is iii7ø (a b-minor half-diminished seventh chord)—doesn't have much distinguishable about it like say the Tristan chord or the Farben chord. That is, it's largely analyzable and explainable in traditional Western analysis, so there is probably no scholarship on it. I do like the chord sequence right after on "of the father. Now in the flesh appear...", which is a lovely backwards deconstruction of that moment (with tonicization) so that leaving the chord is much more gradual than its sudden arrival.
If you're looking for an explanation: the long held chord during "giv'n" (3:32) is setting up a return to the main chord of the piece (a perfect cadence) but instead ends on an unexpected chord (a deceptive cadence). Unlike typical deceptive cadences though, the "Word of the Father Chord" (on the "Word", specifically) is the combination of the "unexpected chord" and the "expected chord" (modal mixture-ish), which is part of its appeal, I'm guessing. Some of its awe might just be the sudden departure from the straight forward chorale harmonies preceding that moment.
The English choral tradition developed pretty independently after inspiration from Italian music (probably via the spy-composer (!) for Elizabeth I, Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder) in the 16th century and has always had its own special flare. Aza24 (talk)07:45, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Hi @Iridescent! I saw your decline of CSD for Elvira Yankovskaya and wanted to just say that page went through CSD two days ago through A7 and was immediately recreated, which is why I was hesitant as to whether I could even renominate it in the first place, though it does appear as spam attempt at this point. I wanted to ask your opinion and see if would you still advise AfD as the appropriate course of action? Thank you so much! Ppt91 (talk) 15:31, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
Looking at the original speedy deletion (courtesy ping to MelanieN), it shouldn't have been A7'd; given that it has a section listing the awards she's won, that's pretty much a textbook example of a credible claim of significance. (This is not a dig at MelanieN, who's one of our most competent admins; every admin working CAT:CSD—including me—occasionally fails to spot these things, especially in cases like this where the CCS is buried near the bottom of the article.) In those circumstances, I'd just see the re-creation as a slightly unofficial version of a deletion review.
Feel free to AfD it, as whether she's actually a notable topic isn't something on which I'm qualified to comment. Current Russian biographies are always tricky to judge, as Russian culture recently has gone down such an erratic course that topics which would be considered trivial elsewhere are sometimes a big deal there and vice versa. (Plus, for obvious reasons the number of Russian editors on Wikipedia has dropped significantly recently so there are fewer people in a position to comment on this kind of thing. A substantial part of the Russian-speaking editor base are now either expats who aren't necessarily familiar with current Russian popular culture, or hardline nationalists who see absolutely anything coming out of the country as inherently important.) ‑ Iridescent16:43, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
@Iridescent Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. As an NPP in this case, I should preemptively apologize to @MelanieN for causing this A7 confusion in the first place. Perhaps the awards were not explicitly listed earlier and, despite my very strong doubts as to their notability, I realize that the inclusion automatically eliminates A7 grounds.
With that in mind, I am quite determined to ensure the page doesn't slip into review approval without due process. Maybe it would be a good idea to give the author more time to establish notability but I am not even sure how WP:DRAFTIFY rules apply now given a previous CSD and another CSD decline? Otherwise, I am happy to move to AfD promptly. The article seems to be intentionally overcited with non-English sources in order to give it an appearance of WP:BIO verifiability and taking clear advantage (if not outright manipulating) of the criteria regarding WP:NOENG sources. As long as the notability can be actually verified, I'd be happy to move to mainspace, though in my opinion we are certainly not there yet.
I think what you said regarding Russian BLPs is important to keep in mind, although as someone who is deeply engaged in Central and Eastern European subjects on both academic and personal levels, I am particularly sensitive and committed to thoroughly verifying BLP pages from the region. In any case, I am sorry for this whole back-and-forth. I hope it's clear my motivations were only based on merit and, notwithstanding my error, proper NPP protocols. Ppt91 (talk) 17:16, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
Because of the harassment of Wikipedia in Russia itself—and because those people who are still active on Russian topics are obviously somewhat distracted right now—Wikipedia:WikiProject Russia is largely moribund right now, but it might still be worth asking there, to try to get a better idea of whether these are the kind of awards that confer notability by Wikipedia's particular definition, or whether these are the Russian equivalent of Fellowship of the Royal Society of the Arts.
My personal inclination would be to give it a month or so, and if nobody's improved it by then, then nominate it for deletion. Even if she is notable in Wikipedia terms, realistically there is literally zero possibility that any reader of English Wikipedia is ever likely to be interested in the topic, since she's exclusively of interest to Russian-speakers who will presumably be reading the Russian language version. As such, us continuing to host it just leaves a page that will gradually drift more and more out of date and be a magnet for vandalism and potential libel.
Re your last comment, I have absolutely no doubt you're acting in entirely good faith—as I say, this is a mistake everyone makes. When we designed our processes, Wikipedia was a much smaller site with a much smaller audience—it's an open secret that our processes for dealing with 'technically notable but nobody will ever care' ephemera are inadequate and confusing in the current situation where people actively want to get their name onto Wikipedia because they feel it helps with search engine optimization. ‑ Iridescent06:35, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Request For Bringing Back Article Knowledge Anywhere
Hello Iridescent,
I am reaching out to appeal about my article being taken down on Knowledge Anywhere. It had been approved by several users before as it details the history of an orginization. If you cannot restore it can you send me the deleted material and suggests rewrites to make sure it complies with Wikipedia standards in the future? --Booksmartandreadytowrite (talk) 21:56, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Random thoughts
Well, not completely random thoughts - they were prompted partly by the realisation that I had not posted on your talk page for a very long time (for good reasons, not bad, been very busy)!
Anyway, the random article-related vignette, which I thought you and your talk page watchers might appreciate, is that Patrick Barrington, 11th Viscount Barrington, the great-great-great-great-grandson (I think I counted right) of Robert Adair (surgeon) (the article I wrote yesterday and today) presented the portrait of his 18th-century ancestor to the Hunterian Museum (the one in London) in 1969. It got me wondering why he did this, after the portrait had been in the family for nearly 200 years. And then I read that he died childless and all his titles became extinct (he sensibly disposed of the portrait well before he died). That might seem a bit of a morbid comment, but I was struck by both the large-ish family tree at Viscount Barrington and the reason in his early career he did not find favour as a diplomat at the British Embassy in Berlin: "his unstoppable flow of conversation and untidy appearance" (it got me wondering if there might have been a medical or psychological reason behind the constant talking, one also associated with untidy appearance?).
The final thought was related to the family tree. I know this sort of thing is (rightly) discouraged on Wikipedia in article space (less so in project space), but I was wondering if (probably on Wikidata) there have been efforts to map all the family linkages between articles about people (and, more tricky, between people with articles and relations without articles)? It would be a Sisiphyean task, but probably quite doable with various computational approaches. Would produce some nice mappings of big data (some 'family trees' would be completely populated, many would not). One reason I am curious about this, is that it might help with a big project that I never managed to properly work out how to do. The other thing it might do is see how closely related you were to someone with a Wikipedia article. I am guessing nearly everyone would be only a few 'steps' away in their family tree, but maybe that is being optimistic, as most people don't have 'famous' relatives (either now or in the past). Carcharoth (talk) 22:51, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
I'd guess that the data set would be so fuzzy, the approach would break down within a couple of generations. All it takes is someone whose father is potentially one of two different people, someone who changed their name at Ellis Island, or someone whose family records were bombed out in a war, and the whole spiderweb unravels. (There are still real-world legal disputes over hereditary titles, and those are people whose lives are literally defined by tracking their ancestry and who live in countries with robust record-keeping systems.)
I can also see all kinds of legal and ethical issues with a de facto ancestry database which anyone can edit. There's the obvious issue of people trying to create spurious links between celebrities and of malicious editors trying to slip in (e.g.) a family relationship between the Trumps and the Putins. There would also be broader issues regarding profiling people who don't necessarily want to be profiled—remember the crazies a few years ago who were going through every BLP trying to flag every person they thought had Jewish blood? Wikidata doesn't have the administrative numbers nor the collective competence to monitor its own data on any kind of medium to large scale, and I presume the WMF doesn't have any particular desire to be implicated in a future pogrom or genocide. ‑ Iridescent14:13, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
(adding) Another thought: even if our dataset were based on the best possible data—which is decidedly not currently the case with Wikidata—we'd still be causing serious issues. Every time we refuted an article subject's claim to be one-eighth Cherokee, or a direct descendant of Louis XI, we'd be implicitly calling them a liar in Wikipedia's voice. I wouldn't want to be on the OTRS queue for that particular wave of complaints. ‑ Iridescent14:39, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for the thoughts. It probably works better the other way round, using reliably sourced and curated databases to check where Wikipedia is (sometimes) getting it wrong. I'm still a bit taken by the contrast between the professional life of Robert Adair (surgeon) (including the rather severe portrait) and the romantic context depicted at Robin Adair (bettter described here). Maybe Georgian times really were like that. :-) A (slightly) early Happy New Year to everyone. Carcharoth (talk) 23:07, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
@Carcharoth: The crowd-sourced genealogical database you are looking for already exists -- on Ancestry.com. It was there I discovered some determined soul's work allowed me to trace my paternal ancestors back to a Midlands community in 1635, which is not bad considering they comprised generations of "farm laborers". (My earlier attempts to trace my British ancestors failed due to some immigration clerk on the East Coast misunderstanding his British accent & adding letters to his last name that did not exist.) Then again, there are a number of warnings that some shared research is not as reliable as other -- as evidenced by contradictory significant dates for these individuals. -- llywrch (talk) 22:54, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
There's also FamilySearch - here which has the same issues as the trees on Ancestry.com - they are just about as reliable as wikipedia (perhaps less so, actually). Much like Wikipedia, ALWAYS check against the sources listed. Ealdgyth (talk) 23:09, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
All very true (and thanks for those thoughts). I do think there is a place for using Wikimedia linkage and data to cross-check and cross-reference. I might as well mention the 'project' I have been pondering for a while, as it is a subset of all this. It essentially involves matching known casualty details in the database of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (from both World Wars) to relevant Wikipedia articles. I have several excellent examples, some of which I shouldn't really mention as I may publish something elsewhere on that in the next few months, and some I can dredge out of my editing history (I think I used a standard edit summary enabling me to find them again later). Wikidata is actually set-up so it is possible to use it to generate suitable lists from properly referenced Wikipedia articles. The missing bit is the work to add the data to Wikipedia in a careful manner so it is actually correct (this often needs careful checks). The ultimate goal would be to be able to see how many people with Wikipedia articles could be considered to have been directly affected by the two World Wars in terms of either dying directly or by close family bereavement. The main problem is that the outcome is 'obvious' in the sense of "lots" (well, duh!), but there are nuances which are interesting. The main motivation for me is to link relatively unknown names in the CWGC database with the often more well-known relatives. Here is one example (and there you see the epitaphs that are sometimes heartbreaking in their poignancy) and another and another. Some pages, such as Pen Tennyson, give the CWGC reference for a relative (here, his brother, Julian Tennyson) but fail to give the CWGC reference for the article subject. I will give one final example that I came across more recently, the son of Labour politician Stephen Walsh, whose CWGC details are here. That is an example where the name is relatively common and the connection is not immediately obvious "Son of Stephen and Annie Walsh, of 8, Swinley Rd., Wigan.". When you look at the Wikipedia article, you only get the minimal information that one of his sons died. It took a bit of digging for me to uncover the name (rough-and-ready source, better ones available) and then the right CWGC entry. I have no idea what the numbers would be if all the possible links could be established. Lots of sons and brothers and fathers and so on (and some daughters and sisters and mothers as well). Carcharoth (talk) 03:15, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
My main issue here is with so it is actually correct, which is a huge issue when it comes to wikis in general and Wikidata in particular. As Ealdgyth says, any kind of ancestry database is only as good as the data that's fed into it; "anyone can edit" and "ancestry" aren't really a good fit IMO.
Creating correlations between military casualties and an ancestry database is probably more or less workable for the British and French officer classes, because we're dealing with people in a culture of good record-keeping (and who were generally wealthy enough to have wills). It gets a lot less straightforward with the lower ranks—there are people with similar names, people lying about their identities, people who got their date of birth wrong or whose name is spelled differently on their enlistment papers and their birth certificate… And those are the straightforward cases; once you start trying to disentangle colonial units, refugees etc it gets very messy. Because of mass migration in the immediate aftermath of both wars and in the 2004–2020 window, a huge proportion of the UK population has at least some family members whose history is literally untraceable because the records were destroyed in WWII.
(Directly affected by the two World Wars in terms of … close family bereavement would be problematic as well. We can establish that Alice had a brother named Bob who died at Gallipoli; without digging into a lot more detail we can't establish whether Alice and Bob were inseperable and Bob's death had a lifelong impact on Alice, or whether Alice had emigrated to Tasmania before Bob was even born and she'd never met him and was barely aware he even existed.)
I know this all sounds like I'm being negative-for-the-sake-of-negativity, and I'm not trying to be; if it can be made workable I can completely see how such a thing would be a valuable tool and one that could be rolled out to a lot more applications. (A tool that could take a name and generate-to-order a list of family members who'd benefited from slavery; who'd migrated from overseas; who'd perished at Auschwitz; etc etc etc would be a valuable teaching aid.) My issue is that in an "anyone can edit" environment the whole thing would be incredibly vulnerable to malicious misinformation and to good-faith errors, since the whole interlocking nature of family trees would mean any given error would propagate outwards through multiple families; and because of the incomplete nature of the dataset, it would be really difficult to stop errors creeping in. (And unless we're going to DNA-test the entire human race, the dataset is always going to be incomplete. The British royal family is literally the most-researched genealogy of all time, but all it would take would be for William and his kids to be involved in a car crash and about 75% of the family tree would have asterixes next to their names.) ‑ Iridescent07:07, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
That's possibly a US–UK cultural thing. In BrEng, "benefitted from slavery" typically means "can any family member be demonstrated to have been involved in the slave trade". (That's not an artefact of 21st-century Guardianism either; it's a distinction that goes right back to Victorian times.) ‑ Iridescent19:51, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the thoughts on the 'project' I described. I may return to that over the next year or so, depending how other (off-wiki) projects go. For now, I am wondering whether there is a real need to re-familiarise myself with Wikipedia if I am going to edit more again at some point (I am thinking probably not - I mean probably no need to familiarise myself, not that I probably won't edit more again!). It would only involve more editing in article space again (I seem thankfully to have turned away completely from the, er, unpaid management(?!) side of things). It is far more likely that I will stay in the same holding pattern I have been in for a number of years now (essentially dabbling an incredibly small amount, and mostly watching and lurking), but I have noticed with interest some of the more obvious recent changes, such as the interface/layout redesign. I wonder what else I have missed (I did see the Universal Code of Conduct discussed, so am vaguely aware of that). Penny for your thoughts (and those of anyone else reading)? :-) Carcharoth (talk) 21:04, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
Speaking as someone who's largely been in that same holding pattern since the pandemic started, I haven't noticed any change so substantive it would require a complete re-acclimatisation. The main change I'm seeing is that the culture is becoming much more rules-based; decisions seem to be being made much more on the basis of "can I dig out a precedent or a written guideline that permits/forbids this?" rather than "is this decision justifiable in terms of overall benefit?". One could certainly make the case that this is a strong positive and that IAR in practice meant rule by whoever could shout the loudest, but equally it's a massive cultural shift and is giving too much authority to the people who write the policies (the whole UCoC land-grab just being one incarnation of this).
The interface change, I genuinely loathe. Usually I try to keep my settings as vanilla as possible, in order that when I write something I'm seeing it as the general reader will see it, but the new design is so clunky and unusable I ended up having to turn it off. One gets the impression it was designed purely with tablets in mind, and they never even bothered to test it on phones or computers. It's not just the big unexplained changes like the forced column width which is too narrow for desktops but too wide for phones; there are so many little changes that unnecessarily confuse readers, such as getting rid of the TOC so there's now no visible cue for where the lead section ends and the body text begins. (I really don't think this is just me, either. I know this is pure anecdata, but since the change I'm consistently seeing people being confused by Wikipedia articles and moving on to the next item in the google search. Once the dust settles, I'd be interested to see if there's any shift in the reader engagement metrics such as how many people go on to click on links in the body text, and how many read to the end of the text.) ‑ Iridescent06:20, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
The forced width change is so unbeliveably stupid it is basically another symptom of how lacking in oversight and basic line management the tech teams operate under. Someone thought of this stupid idea, someone approved this stupid change, someone(or a team) coded the stupid change, someone tested the stupid change (I am going to give the WMF the benefit of the doubt and assume some UAT - in addition to standard unit/integration/system - was included at some point. But it wouldnt surprise me if there wasnt), someone then approved and deployed the stupid change. And now its fingers in ears time as usual. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:13, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Deletion of Ready Team One
Good afternoon,
I'd love to see the entry on Ready Team One back on Wikipedia - it's a ground breaking company with ground-breaking technology and it deserves an entry in Wikipedia. I'd like to help to bring it back online - how do I do that please? Lfrohling (talk) 09:10, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Looks like Iridescent isn't around at the moment, but the article Ready Team One was deleted per WP:G5 as a creation of a sockpuppet of Alypeters. G5 deletions can be controversial, but in this case I trust the tagger (Drmies) and Iridescent enough to believe the deletion was correct per policy without further evidence. As the deleted article was quite short, the easiest thing to do would be to write a new article on Ready Team One using your own words and sources. I'll caution you, however, that describing something as "ground-breaking technology" is rarely a good reason to have an encyclopedia article, which focuses on things that are well-established and have been extensively written about. Ritchie333(talk)(cont)15:15, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Hello, all. I'm looking for folks who do (or have opinions about ;-) ) RecentChanges and watchlist work to talk to the Editing team about Edit Check. Here's the basic information:
Date: Friday, 3 March 2023: 17:00–18:30 UTC (9:00 a.m. California, 12 noon New York)
Editing's planning to add a little nudge to encourage editors to add sources. Right now, they're thinking about how they can balance not nagging you every time you change a letter vs never suggesting anything at all. If you have views on that question, or if you want to talk to them about how you evaluate a diff (only a couple of them have spent much time reviewing others' edits), then please try to attend. If you can't join the meeting, please consider leaving them a note at mw:Talk:Edit Check.
Hello there, I recreated the article on Iranian actress Shadi Karamroudi based on fixing the errors Iridescent mentioned in its previous article deletion. I will be grateful if you could help on verifying the new draft article on Shadi Karamroudi. Airx V (talk) 13:11, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
Thank you so much for the reply and the verification. Could you help on how I can approve the draft since I have submitted the new version for quite a while now? Could I do something else to speed up the draft approval? Airx V (talk) 16:56, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) You'll just need to be patient @Airx V. This may take 3 months or more, since drafts are reviewed in no specific order. There are 3,101 pending submissions waiting for review.. Is there a reason you're in a hurry? StarMississippi17:58, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
Thank you so much! No, I'm just a new contributor and that's why I was curious if I'm doing anything wrong or if I should do something else to verify my articles. :) Airx V (talk) 18:13, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
Surprise links
I was idly browsing the notifications related to links created to articles I had created, and was somewhat surprised to find 1874 transit of Venus linked from Cannabis in Italy - I was even more surprised at the length of that 'start-class' article that (squints closely at page stats) is a great example of a single editor working in a dedicated fashion on a single topic. I wonder if there is a way to find out if it is the largest article in Template:Cannabis by country? Carcharoth (talk) 00:59, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
No, I tell a lie. It was more suprising to find The Great Pottery Throw Down linking to Sunda Island tiger (a redirect I created that later became a set index article). But to be fair, that is only because I have never watched the programme though it sounds alarmingly tantalising and I must confess to actually wanting to watch it now! :-/ Carcharoth (talk) 01:13, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
A potter told me once that she saves all of her "failures" so that she can smash them. She found it cathartic. But before you get to that point, you have to throw the wet clay on the pottery wheel. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:38, 27 March 2023 (UTC)
Hello Iridescent. I see that you're currently inactive, but if you do come back you should be aware of this. I noticed that an IP vandalized and removed a massive amount of prose from Lily Argent back in December, claiming that it had been plagiarized. After doing some cursory checks, I don't think that's the case, but it would still be best if you were to address this yourself, as you're the one who originally added the purportedly plagiarized content. 207.194.236.26 (talk) 15:26, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for flagging this. The article had been severely damaged; it was inaccurate as well as truncated. And the IP in question had previously been reverted;plus Johnbod had reverted the removal of the top image. So I have restored it and am about to write a note on the talk page for any discussion that might arise. Yngvadottir (talk) 09:01, 8 June 2023 (UTC)
Hello!
Hi, Iridescent,
I came across a comment you made on an editor's talk page and realized that I hadn't run into you in a long time. I hope all is well with you and you are just busy with off-wiki life. You are missed! LizRead!Talk!02:42, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
Liz I've put the {{not around}} template at the top of the page, so people are aware a response (at least from Iridescent) is not necessarily going to happen in a reasonable time frame. This comes after about ten weeks of inactivity, plus an unanswered message about an unanswered email below. However, I don't like the default text in the template - I don't actually believe Iridescent has quit Wikipedia, merely he's busy elsewhere. Ritchie333(talk)(cont)10:55, 9 June 2023 (UTC)
Hello Iridescent 2! This message is to inform you that due to editing inactivity, your access to AutoWikiBrowser may be temporarily removed. If you do not resume editing within the next week, your username will be removed from the CheckPage. This is purely for routine maintenance and is not indicative of wrongdoing on your part. You may regain access at any time by simply requesting it at WP:PERM/AWB. Thank you! — MusikBot IItalk17:21, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
Hello, talk page stalkers: Would some of you please look over User:WhatamIdoing/Grinnell 14 and let me know what you think? I'm not sure whether I should keep adding sources (which will mostly be newspapers from the 1960s), or move it to the mainspace as-is, or give up. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:13, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
Hello there, thanks for all of your contributions to Wikipedia! Wishing you a Very Merry Christmas and here's to a happy and productive 2024! ♦ Dr. Blofeld19:05, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
Keep in touch
Hey, you haven't been on wiki for six months. Please squawk and let your faithful talk page stalkers know that you're still alive. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:30, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
I'm thinking he's ok - the contributions had been tailing down for a long time, unfortunately, & we were mostly talking among ourselves here. Hope so, anyway. Johnbod (talk) 00:07, 30 August 2023 (UTC)
Realistically, Iridescent's RL activities have resulted in them largely disappearing for extended periods before (including a 4-year span where they only made a few contributions), and Occam's razor indicates that's what has happened again. Definitely missing their wise words, though. Risker (talk) 02:19, 30 August 2023 (UTC)
In the four-year span in question (July 2011 to May 2015 more or less), Iri made several hundred edits with only relatively short breaks. This is the first time they've gone six months without editing since 2006, before which they'd only recorded one edit with this account. I hope it's just real life getting in the way. Graham8716:53, 30 August 2023 (UTC)
Agreeing with everyone else...and wondering while we're all concentrated here if any TPWs might be able to identify the source of the recently-added image on Charles Domery? The source cites 'Twitter', without even a link to a tweet, and various reverse image sources have had unimpressive results. I'd imagine a well-known authentic-enough image would've been added long before, but don't want to rule out a recent discovery someone with more subject knowledge than me might be aware of. (Several more articles have had edits since Feb 2023 that might want a quick check, such as Tarrare and Daniel Lambert.) Vaticidalprophet06:05, 30 August 2023 (UTC)
It's been around on Commons as File:Polyphag.jpg since 2011, with added context that was cropped from the version now in Domery's article. Assuming the provided date and description (which stem from this now archived source) are remotely accurate, it wouldn't seem to pass the smell test. Dr. Duh🩺 (talk) 09:31, 30 August 2023 (UTC)
I trust the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas much more than I trust allthatisinteresting.com. The attribution to I. F. Leopold is just about visible on the image: this could be Joseph Friedrich Leopold [de], German engraver 1668–1727, which would line up with HRC's dating of the print to c.1701 and prove that it does not depict Domery, who was not born until 50 years after Leopold's death. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:06, 30 August 2023 (UTC)
just got an email from Iri saying they’re fine, just “insanely busy”, and that they’ll post here in a while when they get a chance and can find their login info. —Floquenbeam (talk) 02:24, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
How ambiguously boring. Couldn't you have twisted the truth a little; instead saying that Iridescent was insanely busy fighting his way out of the dark WMF dungeons after being kidnapped by evil cabalists, or that they were sent on a top secret mission by Jimbo himself to investigate the rumours of the reincarnation of a disappeared LTA? Where's the dramah, the tension, the action, in something so prosaic as "insanely busy"? 128.189.68.54 (talk) 04:59, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
Could he not be on a Bond-style mission to infiltrate the WMF offices, Blofeld's headquarters, and reprogram the UCOC to set free the wikis? Wehwalt (talk) 13:17, 5 September 2023 (UTC)
Hi Iridescent! I'd like to wish you a splendid solstice season as we wrap up the year. Here is an artwork, made individually for you, to celebrate. I always enjoy visiting your talk page and reading the discussions! Take care, and thanks for all you do to make Wikipedia better!Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}}talk
Solstice Celebration for Iridescent, 2023, DALL·E 3.
Wishing you and yours a Happy New Year, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free and may Janus light your way. Ealdgyth (talk) 14:37, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
Skunks in the doorway
In the early days of web commerce, Silicon Valley types told stories about the problem of a skunk in the doorway: If a skunk were standing in the doorway of a brick-and-mortar store, the store employees would notice that nobody was coming inside and would investigate why people were on the sidewalk but not coming in the door. Perhaps some supportive would-be customer would find a way to let you know that there was a problem, and if anyone managed to get past the skunk, it was likely to be mentioned in a small-talk kind of way. But in e-commerce, if there was a big, obvious, solvable problem, you might not find out about it.
I am here to ask a few talk page stalkers to please take a look at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/When there is no consensus either way and tell me if there's a skunk in the doorway. It's been listed as an RFC for two and a half days now, with zero responses. Yapperbot is no longer posting Wikipedia:Feedback request service messages, but I'm not sure that's a sufficient explanation for it going completely unnoticed. I can (and plan to) post the usual sorts of announcements, but I'd appreciate it if some folks would take a look and tell me if I've made it too complicated or irritating first. Thanks, WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:09, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
I noticed that in your signature in the RfC, it shows a timestamp but not your name. This (as you probably know) happens when you type five tildes instead of four. Maybe try re-signing with four tildes and see if that makes a difference? FWIW I think the fact that five tildes creates a name-less signature is a bug not a feature. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 17:47, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing Double checking, I noticed the same thing; you have a date, there's even fine print provided by a userscript that you created the page, but there's no signature.
@ClayoquotFWIW I think the fact that five tildes creates a name-less signature is a bug not a feature. I've used five tildes when noting when I've edited a talk page message. However, if this bug/feature were to disappear tomorrow, I wouldn't miss it much. I dream of horses(Hoofprints)(Neigh at me)01:48, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
Fun fact: Unsigned RFC questions were required back in the day. I'm not sure that it makes any difference, but I can add my name later. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:07, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
Hey Iri, I see you made a stealth edit in December, so you might still be skulking around. I'm thinking of running this one at TFA sometime in April; give me a shout if you've got a better idea. I see above that you've been busy lately; hope you're busy and happy. - Dank (push to talk) 03:18, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
Hello, all, today I am looking at Wikipedia:Rollback. guideline. In particular, I'm looking at this language:
Where the following text refers to "Standard" rollback, it means the usual form of rollback, which does not include the option to provide a custom edit summary. Standard rollback may only be used in certain situations – editors who misuse standard rollback (for example, by using it to reverse good-faith edits in situations where an explanatory edit summary would normally be expected) may have their rollback rights removed. Since rollback is part of the core administrator tools, an admin could be stripped of their administrative privileges entirely to remove those tools.
Administrators may revoke the rollback user right or impose a block in response to a user who is persistently failing to explain their reverts, regardless of the methods or means that are used to perform the actual reversions. However, they should notify or warn the editor sufficiently first, and allow the editor the time and opportunity to respond and explain their reversions before taking any action – there may be justification of which the administrator is not aware (such as reversion of edits made by a banned user). Similarly, editors who persistently engage in edit warring – especially those who have a repeated history of doing so – may have their rollback permissions revoked, regardless of the methods or means that were used to engage in the behavior. Additionally, administrators who persistently misuse rollback may have their administrator permissions revoked, and solely in order to remove the rollback user rights from them (although, in practice, such cases would require the intervention of the Arbitration Committee).
I am curious about how we came to have a software-specific set of rules, namely: that if I want to revert an unwanted non-vandalism edit without an explanatory edit summary:
I can click the MediaWiki rollback button, and I can lose access to MediaWiki rollback for failing to provide an edit summary, but
I can click the Twinkle rollback button, and I won't lose access to Twinkle rollback for doing exactly the same thing.
In fact, if you misuse Twinkle rollback, you can lose access to MediaWiki rollback, but not, apparently, to the tool you were actually misusing.
Since the page specifies that "standard" MediaWiki rollback does not allow a custom edit summary, I assume that the edit summary is available through some non-standard method (a gadget?).
It sounds like the actual rule is: If you persistently make high-volume unexplained (and non-obvious) reverts, we'll take away whatever tools are making it easy for you to do that.
@WhatamIdoing Twinkle is the non-standard gadget ("non-standard" meaning, for the moment, "not being turned on by default"). It allows you to add a comment explaining the rollback; in fact, at leat with AGF rollback, it's required (not providing an edit summary stops the rollback). I dream of horses(Hoofprints)(Neigh at me)16:01, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
Conflicting access needs are a thing, and it's best everyone being to customize things to their needs. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:43, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
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