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The policy section of the village pump is used to discuss proposed policies and guidelines and changes to existing policies and guidelines.
If you want to propose something new that is not a policy or guideline, use the proposals section.
If you have a question about how to apply an existing policy or guideline, try one of the many Wikipedia:Noticeboards.
This is not the place to resolve disputes over how a policy should be implemented. Please see Wikipedia:Dispute resolution for how to proceed in such cases.

Please see this FAQ page for a list of frequently rejected or ignored proposals.

« Archives, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194

Media sources and WP:UNDUE

We have been having a lot of discussions recently about various media outlets and whether they pass WP:RS... but I think we could use some discussion about media outlets (in general) and how they relate to another policy provision: WP:UNDUE. Now, I know that UNDUE is really focused on putting viewpoints in proportion (and not blowing minor viewpoints out of proportion) ... but I am beginning to think that it is possible to give a media report UNDUE weight as well - especially when the event it is reporting on has just recently occurred, and we don't yet know the long term significance of the event. Thoughts? Blueboar (talk) 14:24, 12 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I am approaching the issue of recent/current political and ideological controversies and other topics in a draft of guideline I would like to propose at some point about how WP should be dealing with this topic area, where the application of UNDUE for the press as Blueboar alludes too happens too frequency. Mind you, I'm also focused more on us having awareness that the media is not as objective as they were went most of these policies were written, and when coupled with UNDUE, can swing the tone of political/ideological topics towards one side easily. It is far from complete, but the points of merit that would need to be addressed towards this I've got summarized as User:Masem/RSPoly. --MASEM (t) 14:32, 12 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Apart from rejecting Masem's claim about "more" bias, this is a severe problem in that we do write about "current events", and it is a terrible fit for this encyclopedia for multiple reasons, but beyond RECENTISM, NOT, and yes, UNDUE/the whole OR/NPOV/V triumvirate, I am not sure what magic words of policy could be added (Policy to not write things unless they have had widespread, coverage for say three months to six months? Specific policy more targeted on BLP and shifting burden and onus, more against additions in "breaking" areas?)Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:42, 12 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It's not about there being "more" bias, the bias of the press is the same as it 10 or so years ago; it is the lack of objectivity the press has gained since, which causes more bias to become visible and by nature of our policies, drive content creation towards that bias without considering the long-term picture. Look how many issues there have been and continue to be over the US election and people and topics related to it, mostly driven by a highly critical press. All the issues at play are magnified with this current situation. --MASEM (t) 15:20, 12 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Again this argument I have seen from you is without basis - it is your opinion. Now, it's not that 'they have more bias', its that 'they have less objectivity' - no, they do not - it is the same as it was, when these policies were written. Your somehow coming to this new realization of yours "recently", is just "the problem". Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:27, 12 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Masem. The traditional media have changed immensely in the last 10 years, as has their playing field. Much of the firewall between informative content and opinion content has disappeared. And a much more spontaneous form (the internet) has taken over much of what they were doing. North8000 (talk) 16:02, 12 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Another opinion? Really? How unhelpful. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:11, 12 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If you doubt that things have changed in the last decade or so, then perhaps you'd like to type something like "how has news reporting changed" in your favorite web search engine and see whether the reliable sources tend to agree with you. Here's what one says: "Fewer journalists are reporting less news in fewer pages....Reporting is becoming more participatory and collaborative....advocacy journalism is not endangered—it is growing. The expression of publicly disseminated opinion is perhaps Americans’ most exercised First Amendment right, as anyone can see and hear every day on the Internet, cable television, or talk radio. What is under threat is independent reporting that provides information, investigation, analysis, and community knowledge, particularly in the coverage of local affairs. Reporting the news means telling citizens what they would not otherwise know."[1] It's not hard to find sources like this one that trace the financial effects and its consequences.
Also, I'd like to point out that "when these policies were written", they were based on editors' experiences and long-term beliefs about what the news media was like, rather than an absolutely up-to-date understanding of the exact state of journalism in 2003. So I believe that journalism has changed a lot in the 14 years that have elapsed since those policies were begun (and the reliable sources agree with me on that point), and I think that when those policies were begun, they were based partially on a 1990s-era understanding of journalism. Also, Wikipedia itself has changed dramatically since then. Back then, the basic hope was to get people to please, please, please cite something; now, many editors are pushing for citing only high-quality sources. Rejecting a peer-reviewed article from a reputable scholarly journal because it's "not good enough" is an everyday occurrence now. Given that reality, it is hardly surprising that some editors are interested in reviewing the use of media sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:30, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

WhatamIdoing: That you cite an article from almost ten years ago that things have changed from ten years ago is just nonsense. Moreover, you respond with strawman. Your source does not say high quality or mainstream journalism, which is what NPOV, NOR V and RS value, is "more biased", nor does say it is "it has less objectivity." If you have literature reviews that compares say the front page articles of the New York Times 10 years ago with today and actually makes the currently unsupported conclusion than bring it forth, don't hand wave to 'things change'. Prove the unsupported assertion. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:18, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That particular article is 7.25 years old, not ten; furthermore, there are many more like it.

The discussion here is not specifically about "high-quality" or "mainstream" journalism. The OP's comment refers to "media outlets (in general)", and the comments you particularly replied to talk about "the press" and "the traditional media".

But... if you really want to convince people that the media haven't changed in the ~15 years since this advice was first talked about, maybe you could produce a suitable source for people to read and contemplate? So far, I see you asserting your personal opinion that the media hasn't changed during the last 10 years (an opinion that I, at least, can't find any reliable sources to support), while denigrating other people's views that it has changed for failing to provide sources ....just like you failed to provide sources to support your opinion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:26, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You cited an irrelevant article and ended up making a nonsense point, that is all (as I said, the source is almost 10 years ago). I take it you have other irrelevant articles, which just goes to show you have no proof that mainstream and high quality media is less objective or more biased than 10 or 15 years ago. This discussion is about "mainstream" and "high quality" because that is what all the central policies V/NPOV/NOR/BLP require (otherwise again your comments are irrelevant). We have to adhere to mainstream, high quality media because that is policy. If you say the mainstream, and high quality media has changed that it is now more biased and less objective (thus, no longer high quality, and mainstream) the burden is on you to prove it (not wave at "things change"). The person who asserts always has the burden not the one who denies. That's basic logic. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:10, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Policy is not a blood oath or a law, it can change, and consensus can override it. But really, it's not a change of policy that is needed but avoiding selective reading of it. UNDUE is used as a sledgehammer to eliminate viewpoints that aren't in RSes, or to demand we include subject statements from RSes as fact because many RSes report the same. That's not what the whole of policy and guideline sets out, but its how its used to shut down any consensus discussion. Further, it is not that today's media aren't mainstream or high-quality, just that relative to what they were 10-15 years ago, that measure has certainly gone down, but it has gone down across the board, so that high-quality sources from 10-15 years are still the same high-quality sources today because no sources have improved in quality otherwise. And policy/guidelines do give measures of how to handle that if we don't use selective reading of them. --MASEM (t) 19:52, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've been thinking that one of the fundamental issues underlying many wiki-problems arises from giving a common English term "reliable" a completely different/independent definition in Wikipedia. This inevitably leads to the falsehood of automatically giving a WP:RS the imprimatur of being actually reliable vs. taking it in the context of it's own limitations. In reality, even sources meeting wp:RS often aren't.....they contain factual errors, apply terms in erroneous or fringe ways, apply highly-POV terms as fact, and provide spun and distorted coverage. I think that Masem is onto something and doing excellent work in one area on this. That is to at least deal with this in the area where it is most often a problem. North8000 (talk) 14:53, 12 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think that there may be something to what you're saying about language. A little while ago, I was part of a long RSN-type discussion over a source, which some editors declared to be "unreliable". Problem: Professionals around the world, including some of the Wikipedia editors participating in that discussion, actually do "rely upon" that source in the exact way that the source was being used in the article. (I doubt that we will ever stop referring to acceptable sources as "reliable".) WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:30, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

IMO the solution is to strengthen two other criteria (expertise and objectivity with respect to the text that cited it), combine these and traditional wp:RS criteria together into a "strength of sourcing" metric, (thus taking the "magic bullet" from wp:rs criteria by itself) and then say that the strength of sourcing has to be suitable for the particular situation. North8000 (talk) 12:56, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Folks... we are wandering off topic... could we discuss media sources in terms of UNDUE and not reliability. Blueboar (talk) 10:40, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I would certainly agree with your paragraph that opened this thread. Except that newness of events is only secondary to the discussion. But under current wp:undue, you are going to have a hard time because what wp:undue sets up as the ultimate arbiter "a viewpoint's prevalence in reliable sources" is an un-usuable facade. I mean, has anybody ever seen that criteria actually truly implemented? I don't even know how it could possibly be objectively implemented. North8000 (talk) 13:06, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think if you want a more focused discussion you might want to quote the parts of NPOV and RS that you want discussed (we do have to read undue in context of other policy/guideline). Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:22, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

UNDUE is one of those things that needs a time consideration. UNDUE readily applies if we're talking a debate or controversy a decade ago: the dust has settled, and we can readily use reliable secondary sources to get a view of how that situation was viewed. But when we're in the midst of a controversy, where their might be a popular opinion but no clear "winner" of the situation, UNDUE has to take a back seat to staying neutral and document the controversy fairly, if we are going to allow editors to keep articles as up to the minute as we do now. Editors need to use UNDUE and think about how the article will be written many years down the road, not just what is prevailing in the media at the current time, and that's hard particularly for anything political now adays. UNDUE has to also reflect that the media more than ever is far from being "independent" sources in these controversies (eg the media cannot be independent in the situation around "fake news"), and UNDUE should be used to evaluate principally independent sources. --MASEM (t) 14:16, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Blueboar, I think that UNDUE is difficult. The usual approximation (as in "to a first approximation, the entire universe is made of Hydrogen") is "whatever the sources talk about the most, that's what's DUE".

However, this isn't adequate, because there is material that is DUE even if sources mostly ignore it (e.g., birth and death years for biographies, what a notable company sells, prognosis for a disease, etc.). We don't really want an article about, say, a 19th-century university president to omit birth and death dates on the grounds that most sources don't include his birthday and those that do barely mention it in passing.

On the other end, news media over-emphasizes certain events. If you took raw news media as the standard, then 50% of Michael Jackson should be spent talking about child abuse, and 25% of Paris Hilton should be spent talking about drunk driving, because that percentage of news sources (across the entire spectrum of quality) seem to mention those subjects (at least in passing). But that percentage is really about what generates money, and not what you'd get from, say, a scholarly biography of the subjects.

I'm not sure how you'd write this into a policy statement, though. "Some stuff is inherently DUE, so include it if you can verify it at all, but other stuff is overemphasized in the media, so play that down" is not very useful. And IMO the real rule – which I might summarize this way: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a mindless regurgitation of whatever generates clicks on headlines – is not sufficiently instructive for the people who don't already know what to do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:54, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Related issue: assigning weight to primary source opinions

This seems like a recent issue that is possibly related to the subject of this thread. I second the need for more clarity on UNDUE, vis-a-vis new media kinds of sources. I am particularly concerned about what I think is an overly legalistic reading of policies and guidelines surrounding UNDUE in the context of this RfC. I think that the UNDUE policy should explicitly mention the need for secondary sources if it is unclear how to assign weight to an opinion. There is WP:BALANCE that does mention the need for secondary sources (and, surprisingly, that is the only place in NPOV where secondary sources are mentioned at all), but that's more in the context of discussing two opposed and widely-held opinions. The guideline as currently written does not appear to offer enough guidance on how to assign weight to published opinions that are not widely held. (I would have thought that a standard application of WEIGHT would be to exclude them, but I am being berated by a tag-team pair of relatively long-time editors that I and others "don't have a clue about policy".) Sławomir Biały (talk) 14:10, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Speaking of that, in the realm of undue weight, should we be required to disclose, in article text or citation markup, if a source's publisher has any direct relation (i.e. ownership stake or similar factors) to the subject of something being discussed? Obviously, coverage could be weighted in favor of that entity if they had a vested interest, and I think it should be a standard practice for use to disclose them whenever possible. ViperSnake151 Talk 03:11, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Is it much too easy to create Start and Stub articles of low importance on Wikipedia

Recently some graphs were updated on the Wikipedia page from 2015 to their current 2017 updated form. The graph seems to show that the fastest growing category is in the Start class articles of Low Importance, with all the other category breakdown growing at much slower rates representing much lower aggregate number of articles. Is this a concern; that the largest amount of editor time is being devoted to Start class articles of Low Importance, by a least an order of magnitude over other classes of Wikipedia articles? Is it much too easy to create Start and Stub articles of low importance on Wikipedia?

Quality-wise distribution of over 5.5 million articles and lists on the English Wikipedia, as of 29 January 2017^[update]

Statistics and Quality control

@Od Mishehu and Llywrch: Thanks to both editors for their comments in the section directly above. Although I opened that discussion there to try to get comments on the very lop-sided data provided by another editor in the pie-charts given above, the responses from several editors were instead very strongly oriented to Quality Control concerns at Wikipedia. The discussions and comments made in the above section go well beyond what is covered on Quality control and cover the topics of editorial improvement and editorial drift in quality of content in articles over time, sometimes over months or even years. Od Mishehu makes the strong point that there is a large discussion at the nomination pages at both of the very active FA-project and the GA-project pages about articles which become listed or de-listed over time (months or even years). Similarly, Llywrch makes the point of spending much time updating article evaluations which seem to have not always positive editorial drift in quality over the years. Neither of these important issues is dealt with effectively in the WP:Quality control article and possibly there is more to be said on this by way of comments or observations from other editors. We have not heard from many of the editors involved directly with the FA-nom and GA-nom pages, and possibly they might have some experience points to make. Does the topic of Quality control deserve more attention than it has been receiving in recent years, especially as reflected by the differences in emphasis seen in the new section directly above and the older concerns covered in WP:Quality control policy page? ManKnowsInfinity (talk) 16:43, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Quality Control and Wikipedia:Quality assessment are two very different topics. I think it is Wikipedia:Quality assessment you are interested in rather than WP:Quality control.

The alternative to a flawed quality assessment system is not necessarily an alternative quality assessment system. Many of us edit here quite happily with little to no involvement in the quality assessment system at all. I take the view that if I correct a particular typo across the whole of Wikipedia I have improved that aspect of Wikipedia quality. How much of an improvement in quality I leave it to others to measure. Ϣere SpielChequers 22:26, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@WereSpielChequers; There is a significant difference, I agree, between WP:Quality control and WP:Quality assessment. The editors responding in the section directly above this one were discussing many concerns which seem to overlap these two areas but are not covered in either one of these standard Wikipedia policy pages. There is likely a notable difference between Quality control when looked at from the standpoint editing content as opposed to observing and controlling editor conduct on Wikipedia articles. For example, the Quality control page seems to spend much time talking about protection from vandalism (an important topic on its own) though not directly related to maintaining and improving genuine article content over time. The issue of editorial drift is also not covered on either of those policy pages where, for example, the original editors of a page may have left Wikipedia and other editors get involved in partial and perhaps mistaken directions for further over-edits leading to the type of article deterioration in content quality over time which Od Mishehu seems to refer to above. None of this is covered on either the Quality control page or the Quality assessment page, though its a significant issue for articles as they are edited over months and often over years after the original top editors for a particular page are long gone. Then there are the other Editing content issues notably raised by the other editors here responding in the section directly above. Should the pages for Quality control and Quality assessment somehow be rewritten to cover all of these issues discussed in this thread, or, should they be covered under some other policy page not yet mentioned in this thread? ManKnowsInfinity (talk) 16:02, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

How article assessments actually work

ManKnowsInfinity, I think you need the whole backstory before you're going to understand any of this.

Once upon a time, when Wikipedia itself was only about two or three years old, a small group of editors looked around Wikipedia and said, "This is really cool, but what if you don't have access to the internet?" This affected schools, libraries, and people in developing countries. So they looked into the feasibility of burning Wikipedia onto CDs (yes, those big silver-colored discs that were created in the early 1980s). Even though Wikipedia was much smaller then, it was still too many articles to fit on a comfortable number of discs.

So they said, "How about we only burn the best and most important articles to the CDs?" Well, that obviously meant that someone would have to determine what the best and most important articles were. The first batch was done by a small corps of dedicated editors. After a while, though, they enlisted the WikiProjects (that's "groups of editors who want to work together"; there were a lot more small ones back then). Assessing articles (I've done tens of thousands of assessments over the last ten years, so I know a bit about this) became a way for interested groups to identify the best articles ("quality") and the articles that they cared about the most ("importance" or "priority"), and to increase the likelihood that those articles would be included in the offline/CD-based releases. The original corps devoted themselves to the infrastructure aspects, such as setting up the bot that updates the statistics. The WikiProjects used this as a source of motivation (you wanted your best stuff on the CDs, of course) and to prioritize the improvement of articles that mattered to them.

However: nobody really needs CD-based copies of Wikipedia any longer. It's an outdated media format. If you want an offline copy, then you're going to use a thumb drive or sideload articles onto a smartphone. The last use of these assessments for the original and main purpose was seven years ago.

So why do we maintain this? Well – mostly, we don't. People, including me, have generally stopped updating article assessments as often. I am still happy when the assessments are correct, but it's not urgent or even important. Readers almost never see this, and editors mostly don't change their behavior based on this. There are still a few uses, so we don't need to remove it: WPMED tracks some statistics (mostly for us to talk about, but also for use in presentations to non-Wikipedia groups). A list of top- or high-priority articles is a good way for a new editor to find articles to watch. A list of high-quality articles is handy when you need examples (e.g., to show people unfamiliar with Wikipedia's best work, or to use as models for articles that you're improving).

But does it truly matter? No.

Also, when you try to interpret stats related to article creation, then it's worth remembering this: We already have articles on nearly every recognized disease. We have articles on only a small fraction of notable medicine-related organizations (e.g., pharmaceutical companies, local hospitals, notable surgeons, health-related charities, etc.). So if you had a perfect list of all missing articles, and you randomly picked a missing article to create it, WPMED would very likely tag your article as |importance=low and |society=yes. That doesn't mean that your contribution is useless to the world; it means that the particular editors who focus on medicine-related articles don't really care about articles on that subject. Leonardo da Vinci had a hugely significant effect on anatomy – but it's a low-importance subject for us. And if we're the only group that provides an importance rating (which is very common for newer articles), then you're going to see our disinterest in those stats, even if the article would be normal or higher interest for a group that doesn't bother with ratings very often (such as WikiProject Organizations) or one that refuses to list importance on principle (like MILHIST).

The bottom line is this: You have found a flawed and outdated dataset that existed for a different purpose, and you should be exceedingly cautious about even attempting to (mis)use it for the purpose of trying to decide whether new articles were worth creating. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:47, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing; That is a very good summary of the Chapter in the book titled The Wikipedia Revolution from 2009 written by sysops User:Fuzheado, which I have read and I recognize your points in your good summary of his Chapter on this issue. The point remains, that editors and administrators who are spending truly large amounts of time upgrading and delisting articles for FA-review and GA-review feel that their efforts are highly important to Wikipedia and they devote very large amounts of time to the creation and maintenance of FA-articles and GA-articles. Many editors consider it a sort of badge to place their FA stars and GA stars on their user pages to indicate how important they feel their contributions to the FA-level and GA-levels of articles has been over their long editing time at Wikipedia. Yes, your summary is accurate above, but its also accurate to acknowledge the very large amount of time which even very experienced Wikipedia editors expend to produce FA- or a GA-articles throughout Wikipedia. Your comments on the med articles I also have to agree with almost in the entirety of all you say here; still the editors of those peer-reviewed articles also attach a good deal of importance to improving the quality of those med articles that eventually reach FA- and GA-status. It is a big deal to them.

My comment about the statistics comments you make is really very rudimentary since I only have an interest in the data itself represented in the graphs. Anyone, you or me or anyone, who takes an introductory statistics course or probability course is very quickly introduced to the fact that data sets of statistics are sometimes deeply skewed from medians and averages; that's just the way the real world works. However, the same professors who teach that also state that when statistical data sets are skewed or lop-sided, then its probably important to try to understand why the data sets are lop-sided. That was all I was referring to when I posted those two pie-charts in the section at the top of this thread as provided by User:Hanif as an update of the Wikipedia statistics for 2017. The statistical data represented there is very lop-sided and elementary statistics teaches that such things should be explained for the benefit of future study and analysis. The current article at Wikipedia for WP:Quality control and WP:Quality assessment do not cover most of the strong comments which you and the other editors have made already in this thread. Since so much time and effort is devoted at Wikipedia to creating and maintaining FA-articles and GA-articles (especially in the med articles) then should there be some improvements made to the apparently outdated policy pages for Quality control and Quality assessment at Wikipedia if only to make them better? ManKnowsInfinity (talk) 20:37, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I find that the stubs or starts can be helpful, and should be made (if notable), as they will be improved when someone who wants to improve it comes along. Sometimes they improve it a whole lot. My only real example of such is with "my" Iazyges page. Compare diff 722458881 with how it is now, or compare its beginning as a one sentence stub in 2001 to now. Sometimes articles lay dormant and low quality for a while, but if it's notable the potential for use is still there. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 14:58, 23 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@ManKnowsInfinity: I find the stats fairly helpful - see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Birds/Assessment#Statistics - as it gives me some idea of the state of play of the wikiproject. Many articles are inaccurately categorized but as a global ineact overview it is helpful. As far as buffing content and the proportion of stubs, I entirely agree, which is why I have run the Stub Contest and Core Contest. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:19, 25 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The state of the art at Wikipedia

This is a summary of the strongly lop-sided graph representing the statistics of the over one hundred to one ratio between the vast number of Start and Stub articles in comparison to the much lower count for High importance articles at Wikipedia. There are over 2.5 million Low importance articles compared to less than 40,000 articles each for articles of Top importance and High importance. As of April 2017, there are approximately forty thousand of the highest quality articles maintained by Wikipedia known as Featured Articles and Good Articles which cover the core topics and vital topics in the online encyclopedia. At present there does not appear to be any integrated plan to address this imbalance in quality of articles. ManKnowsInfinity (talk) 14:59, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There probably never will be an integrated plan because Wikipedia does not have that type of structure or management to implement such an idea, even if it were possible or desirable. While it remains open to anyone to edit any article then human nature dictates that most editors will edit what interest them rather than applying any arbitrary priority of importance. I don't see this as an issue. Nthep (talk) 15:12, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Should redirects be automatically created when moving to draftspace?

I was just looking at WP:CHECKWIKI error 95, and I was pondering why MediaWiki creates redirects to draftspace when articles are moved there (my understanding is that such redirects are instantly eligible for deletion under WP:R3). I would be far more inclined to move articles to draftspace if it did not leave even more mess behind and draftification would seem a far less WP:BITEy way of dealing with poor quality (but not WP:CSD worthy) articles than immediately PRODing. I've run across quite a few editors who seem to have good intentions but haven't got the required WP:COMPETENCE (yet) and have been thoroughly trodden upon by the CSD/PROD/AfD stampede. Thoughts? TheDragonFire (talk) 12:21, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you, TheDragonFire, but a redirect to an article moved to the draft namespace at least serves the purpose of indicating there is a draft of that article, and that would prevent recreation. If this is enough to keep such redirects, then it seems best to make them soft, so that readers are aware they're exiting the article space. – Uanfala (talk) 08:02, 31 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Uanfala: There is already a notice that displays when there is an equivalent article in draftspace (see Arts Project Australia for an example). TheDragonFire (talk) 01:16, 1 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

China/Taiwan issue at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)

(formerly "Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/China")

I invite you to discuss drafting the guideline update on Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese) regarding the China/Taiwan issue. The location is Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)#China and Taiwan naming issue. --George Ho (talk) 22:42, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

~~Update: the RfC discussion proposing the creation of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (China and Taiwan) is made. I invite you to comment there. --George Ho (talk) 11:49, 5 April 2017 (UTC)~~[reply]

Another update: superseded by Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/China, which is recently created. You are invited to discuss the matter there. --George Ho (talk) 04:40, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Clarifications about WP:BIO1E/WP:BLP1E and terror attacks

This is somewhat related to the recent discussion at Talk:2017 Westminster attack over whether to merge the suspect's article into the attack's article.

There are several questions here:

Do WP:BDP and/or WP:BLP1E apply to recently deceased criminals (or suspected criminals)? This one should be fairly straightforward. I've been convinced that the answer is no, but plenty of people do seem to think otherwise.
What constitutes a "significant event" as described in WP:BIO1E and WP:BLP1E? Does "significant" == notable, or is it more strict? If the latter, what would be a good bar of significance in relation to terror attacks?
Even if a subject passes the barrier of WP:BIO1E/WP:BLP1E, would they possibly still be better off covered in the article on the event (or vice versa, the event being merged to the subject's article) if there does not end up being coverage outside of the event and size permits? This is especially pertinent for deceased subjects, where there will not be a trial.

These questions have arisen because there is no real consistency with which these policies/guidelines have been applied in this topic area. For example, the January 2015 Île-de-France attacks: the two in the Charlie Hebdo shooting (Chérif and Saïd Kouachi) do not have an article or individual articles, but the suspect in the Porte de Vincennes siege does (Amedy Coulibaly, and so does his wife Hayat Boumeddiene, who may have helped plan the attacks but did not participate). Similarly, the suspect in the 2016 Nice attack (Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel) has an article, but the one in the very similar 2016 Berlin attack (Anis Amri) does not. Of course, some of this may be chalked up to differences in coverage making some meet WP:GNG and some not, but in many cases, those who do have articles have little more than what is already present in the articles on the events, and would be better covered there in context instead of in a standalone article. ansh 666 22:38, 23 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment – Actually, per WP:PERPETRATOR: "A person who is known only in connection with a criminal event or trial should not normally be the subject of a separate Wikipedia article if there is an existing article that could incorporate the available encyclopedic material relating to that person." {MordeKyle} ☢ 23:33, 23 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Fair point, but I am uneasy about WP:PERP. The phrasing is weird - what does "The motivation for the crime or the execution of the crime is unusual—or has otherwise been considered noteworthy—" mean, exactly - and I'm not sure it copes with the passage of time: if we had it in 1963/4, would we still have the Lee Harvey Oswald article? Regards, Anameofmyveryown (talk) 13:06, 25 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure Lee Harvey Oswald is a good example, he assassinated the president of the United States. I would think that is a prime example of someone who would have their own article. He had enduring coverage in the media at the time. The coverage of this subject will not last beyond maybe a week at most, which we have seen over and over with these attack. Unfortunately, much like school shootings, these run of the mill terror attacks have become routine, and no longer cause continued coverage or extended notability. 2016 Ohio State University attack and 2016 Berlin attack are very similar. Their names have had no real lasting notability. The one recent one of this nature where the suspect has his own article was the 2016 Nice attack which was perpetrated by Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. It is quite arguable that he does not need his own article, as he has had no lasting notability, however, he kill nearly 90 of people and injured nearly 500. That's pretty extraordinary. I do however think he does not need his own article as the stand alone article does not really add much more than is covered in the article for the attack. You are right about the wording though, which is the same reason we are here talking about WP:BIO1E/WP:BLP1E. I've also had some rather large problems enforcing other parts of BLP, including WP:BLPCRIME. The wording in some of these policies are rather clumsy sometimes. A lot is left open to interpretation, which could be the intention. {MordeKyle} ☢ 19:36, 25 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment – I think this is asking the wrong questions (since the underlying question is "when should there be a seperate article for a perp.?"). As implied by MordeKyle, the question should be, "what useful purpose is served by a seperate article?", "is the reader likely to ever search for the perp., independent from the event", and "is the volume of info sufficient to justify a seperate article". There are notable exceptions to the general answer of "no" to this question. No one would ever have heard of L. H. Oswald were it not for one event, but the level of coverage subsequent to the event has made him "of interest" in his own right. It is nearly impossible for editors to assess the historical importance of an event as it is unfolding, but excuse me for being cynical, as any event unfolds, it inevitably appears to be the most important thing to have happened "since sliced bread". I'm UK, and affected by the "Westminster" attack, it is easy for anyone to come up with "most important event since ...." analogies, but I'm also old enough to remember all the IRA "events", which equally seemed unprecedented at the time (and which neither I nor most others can any longer remember very well). Having been involved with some of the examples of inconsistency above, I have to say that the inconsistencies lie far more with level of "emotional response" to the event than rational application of WP principles. My response to this question therefore is that there needs to be demonstrable NEED for a seperate article, based on volume of info available, rather than any evaluation of the seeming importance of the event as perceived as the event is unfolding. We also aren't meant to ask such mundane, practical questions, but it is worth asking, "which is more practical for editors?", my experience of being involved with some of the more notorious events of the last 12-ish months is that 'perp' articles often become the home of careless, PoV, speculative editing, while more experienced editors focus on the 'event' article. If perp. articles simply become the 'reject shop' for unqualified speculation that would never find its way onto the main article, what useful purpose are they serving? IMO there is no need to change policy, simply to apply it more consistently. Pincrete (talk) 02:04, 24 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- Responding to these, I'm just addressing concerns that came up during the discussion. If you think those are more important, feel free to introduce them there. ansh 666 02:34, 24 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Responding directly to the policy questions 1) I have always presumed that ALL BLP guidelines exist not only for the cynical reason that WP might get sued, but also because we understand that getting things wrong with BLPs can do real harm. We extend those to 'recently deceased' for similar reasons. Therefore IMO, it matters not a hoot whether the recently deceased is a Nobel prize winner, or a mass-murderer, if we get something wrong about Genghis Khan, we simply get something wrong, but living (or recently deceased), are entitled to more care (even if they appear to be unworthy of it at the time). 2) It really is impossible to gauge a 'significant event' as the event is occurring. That policy was devised to cover people like L.H.Oswald, and Princeps, but I doubt that anyone at the time could possibly gauge the significance of the event, neither should we with 'unfolding events'. 3) IMO there should not be a seperate article, unless there is a demonstable need for one, based on size, or suitability of content within the event article. A trial, or substantial inquest, might justify an article, but the default should be coverage within the event.Pincrete (talk) 03:38, 24 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

CommentFor perpetrators: It states that the perpetrator should have their own page if the crime is unusual—or has otherwise been considered noteworthy—such that it is a well-documented historic event. Masood was the main perpetrator and was especially unique in that he did not fit the typical profile of a terrorist due to his age, and the act was the largest terror attack in London in over a decade. Not every incident would warrant a perpetrator having their own entry, Masood does.MeropeRiddle (talk) 02:45, 24 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cynic's respone perhaps, but ...... There is always something unique about each event, each perp . 'Orlando' was the "biggest attack on gays since the Holocaust". But that still doesn't answer the basic question, "Why is the perp. noteworthy, independent of the event?" If there is not sufficient, reliable, non-trivial info about the perp., what useful purpose is served?. We may yet find an enormous amount about Masood, or (just as likely), there is nothing much more to know. The significance of the event is ultimately academic in relation to this if he himself is not the subject of study/research. Pincrete (talk) 03:07, 24 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think WP:RECENTISM needs to be kept in mind. After an attack like Westminster, emotions are high and people are looking for answers, so the dead culprit of the attack is going to be reported on heavily. But editors should be asking, in a few months after emotions have cooled down, is that person's detailed identity really separate from the incident itself? A lot of time, the answer is no. Hence, I would really suggest editors take caution with BLP1E, particularly related to terrorist attacks, and simply wait on creating the article on the perp until better rational analysis can be made if the person is really notable on their own. --MASEM (t) 16:53, 24 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment

I interpret both WP:BDP and WP:BLP1E as applying to recently deceased perpetrators. There is nothing to suggest that it does not apply so exemptions should not be implied unless explicitly mentioned.
I would interpret a significant event to be one that is more notable than the general notability guidelines. I'd consider a terror attack to be a significant event.
I'd agree with this. Most of the information relating to the perpetrator in the Westminster attack is going to be related to the investigation and aftermath of the attack, so would in my opinion be more appropriate in the article in question. If it becomes too big then a new article as usual would in my opinion be the step. Calvin (talk) 12:49, 24 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - BLP stands for Biography of living persons, and should not generally apply to the recently deceased. If you want to make it apply to the recently deceased then we need more guidelines on what falls into that category versus what doesn't. This is far too broad...

"Generally, this policy does not apply to material concerning people who are confirmed dead by reliable sources. The only exception would be for people who have recently died, in which case the policy can extend for an indeterminate period beyond the date of death—six months, one year, two years at the outside." (from: WP:BDP)

Extensions are then included in the next paragraph but just use the wording "particularly" when it comes to the example of "contentious or questionable material about the dead". This I can agree with if it is the only exception used. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:58, 24 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - User:Ansh666's third point is illustrative: "Even if a subject passes the barrier of WP:BIO1E/WP:BLP1E, would they possibly still be better off covered in the article on the event". Combined with that and the tone of the original points (Does it apply? If it does, can we redefine "significant" somehow? If we can't do that, can we just ignore it?) makes we think that we are actually talking about WP:PERPETRATOR, not WP:BIO1E/WP:BLP1E.

Given that, would it be more productive to put a reference to WP:PERPETRATOR into WP:BIO1E/WP:BLP1E as an exception and then talk about WP:PERPETRATOR here instead? It would be better than working out how to twist WP:BIO1E/WP:BLP1E.

Regards, Anameofmyveryown (talk) 13:39, 25 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Not redefining "significant" - we aren't even clear on what it means in the first place, which leads to the strange inconsistencies I mentioned. And yes, part of it is how WP:PERPETRATOR seems to contradict WP:BIO1E/WP:BLP1E, and what we should do about it. ansh 666 18:44, 25 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

WP:PERPETRATOR cites an example of John Hinckley which would mean that the perpetrator of a notable incodent warranted having their own page. It also mentions that their own page is warranted if there are reliable secondary sources that devote significant attention to the individual's role. There are hundreds of news articles dedicated specifically to Khalid Masood which would further demonstrate that he warrants his own biography. The perpetrators of the London attack from 2005 all have their own biography page as well, and his was the largest attack since then. Masood also was unique in that his age was atypical and news reports are now saying that because of his, they need to adjust their profiling techniques, another reason why his biography should be seperate. I dont think every perpetrator warrants their own biography, but this attack was glibal news, and he was the main perpetrator, he clearly does. An example of people who currently don't would be any of the 8 people arrested following this incident, such as his girlfriend. 2602:30A:C0D3:4FA0:E4CD:DC03:3C8E:3F4F (talk) 20:06, 25 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Some thoughts:

Both BDP and BLP1E apply to the recently deceased. BDP should apply because the recently dead would have friends, family and associates that could be harmed by harmful information even if it doesn't explicitly mention third parties (e.g. a mistaken claim that someone was raised as a Neo-Nazi would negatively hurt that person's family members, a false claim that someone was radicalized after attending a place of worship would have serious consequences for that institution, etc.) Real people can be harmed by these mistakes, which are commonly made even by reliable sources in the frenzied aftermath of terrorist attacks/mass killings. Invalidating BDP would get rid of protections for a class of persons who are actually at high risk of being defamed and/or harmed by Wikipedia. The line in BLP1E about it not applying to dead people should be removed as inconsistent with BDP, because even though BIO1E and BLP1E are essentially the same, it could be taken as meaning that the dead people notable for one event are not subject to BLP protections.
Significant event at least be defined as meeting WP:EVENT/WP:GNG. However, for some events that meet our notability guidelines, it would be inappropriate to have individual articles spun out. Each case should be evaluated by the community on a case by case basis, based on how extensive coverage from reliable sources is, and especially coverage focused on the individual whose details might be spun out, which is what BIO1E/BLP1E suggests.
They could be, and BIO1E/BLP1E both give a test for when that's the case. Generally the quality and depth of the coverage from reliable focused on the individual, lasting coverage that exists past the event (e.g. particulars of a trial) and the size of the parent article would be the two main factors to consider. I would suggest pages for perpetrators should generally be kept in the main article until the amount of RS coverage means that they meet GNG and that the content should be split off, but this is likely uneforceable in practice. ---- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 23:48, 27 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Patar knight makes an excellent point about BDP. I would add, the subjects can be recently deceased, yes, but can also be long dead, and still their families can be affected. Grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc. There is currently a grandson of Napoleon Hill who has contested some of the edits in Napoleon Hill, and I had an RfC to determine if the sourcing he was especially objecting to, was a reliable source. The RfC unanimously concluded it was not a reliable source. So when revising this section, please consider that there are generations out there reading Wikipedia to see what it says about their ancestors. I think any source, even if it is in a publication that is normally a given for us as being reliable, if it is based on opinion, has sarcasm in it, in any way denigrates the subject of the article, living or dead, it should be removed as a source. SW3 5DL (talk) 20:14, 29 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I could not agree with you more. {MordeKyle} ☢ 20:34, 29 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad to hear that. I've seen it affect a living relative on that article. The article said Hill was a scam artist and had been cheating people, been arrested, all sorts of reputation damaging claims. The grandson was very upset. The source was totally unacceptable. This is an encyclopedia and it seems a standard must be maintained. Dead people should not be fair game for exploitative articles on blogs that are clearly there for click bait. The claims can easily be projected onto their living relatives. Link to blog here. Link to RfC here. SW3 5DL (talk) 00:02, 30 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think our primary concern should be amount of material here. If there exists, outside of Wikipedia, enough source material to write a reasonable-length article, we should have an article about that person. If there does not exist such source material, we shouldn't write it. For example, Lee Harvey Oswald is only famous for the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. The reason to have an article about him is that we have enough source material to support it. If a different person didn't have enough source material to reference to create a reasonably-long biography, we shouldn't have the article. It always returns to WP:42: If the source material exists to make a good enough article, do that. If it doesn't exist, don't write the article. --Jayron 32 13:56, 31 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

User:Jayron32, with respect, I don't think whether there is enough material is the only, or indeed the main consideration when talking about the key figure in a recent notable single-event (typically the perp of a violent act). No one would doubt the rightness of an Oswald article, the volume of info about LHW and the fact that it traces a long complicated story prior to Dealey Plaza, yet much of it possibly relevant to the assassination, not only justifies, it necessitates an article for him. Going further down the 'food chain', there is enough material on Abraham Zapruder, which would possibly not fit comfortably in 'his film' article and certainly not in the 'event' article itself.

What is a recurring situation in recent violent acts however, is that there appears to be enough material on the perp in the days/weeks following the event to qualify for an article, but IMO little purpose in having such an article, since the volume of info is insufficient to demand separation from the event, and little likelihood of it being added to if the perp is dead and there are no substantive official enquiries. My experience has been that the 'perp' article ends up a mess, while the 'event' article has the attention of experienced editors. Personally I would value the guidelines being stiffened, such that a need for an article about the individual, based on size or 'suitability of content' considerations be established, especially when we are talking about recent events, the 'significance' of which cannot possibly be gauged by WP editors in the days/weeks following the event. Pincrete (talk) 15:01, 2 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It's the length of the prospective Wikipedia article on the person's life story, that make the difference. Sorry if I didn't make that clear. If we have volumes of information about 3 days in a person's life, they don't deserve a Wikipedia article if that's all we have. If we have enough information to cover a person's life in reasonable detail, we write that article. It doesn't matter why that information exists in the world, that's not even a question we need ask. Just, do we have enough information to write a reasonably complete biography. You know, childhood, professional life, major life events, that sort of stuff. If we focus on that, we can avoid passing value judgments on people we thing are "worthy" based on whether or not they are criminals or nice people. --Jayron 32 01:30, 3 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

RfC regarding NACs

While not strictly a matter of "policy" per se, there is an RfC at Wikipedia talk:Non-admin closure#RfC regarding unregistered editors which may be of interest to those here. TimothyJosephWood 21:20, 31 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Who does article deletion for ToU violation of WP:PAID ?

An editor named Vipul created an extensive network of paid/sponsored editors using a pyramid scheme-style where he would give others a cut of the profits if they recruited more people. Discussion followed, eg. ANI discussion, Conflict of Interest noticeboard, Vipul Q&A, Jimbo's Talk discussions, "Conflict of Interest task force" discussions/planning, Talk page request.

I find that my inherent rights as a consumer and a reader of Wikipedia to be properly informed about my consumer choices, ie. prominently 'in article' about the paid/sponsored status of these articles, are not still being complied with despite considerable local community discussion.

WP:PAID read with the WMF FAQ is clear that edits on projects where additional mandatory disclosures are not possible in the article text itself are prohibited ab-initio.

Where legally-required disclosures cannot be made in a way that complies with community rules, the community rules take precedence. For example, if local laws require disclosure of sponsorship of an edit in the article text itself, and putting such a message in the article text violated community rules (as it likely does in most projects), then such edits would be prohibited.

My query is as follows:-

Is there any officer, body or authority for the English language Wikipedia who is presently empowered to speedily ensure WP:PAID compliance that either there is compliance with law applicable to WMF or the offending article(s) be deleted or an in-article PAID template be put on all such articles ? Inlinetext (talk) 22:13, 31 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The short answer is no, there is no specific person or persons who have to do this, but conversely, literaly any user can add the paid editing templates and/or nominate spammy articles for deletion, and any admin can perform those deletions and/or block persistent spammers. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:29, 3 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Bureaucrat rights

DONE

per below, we already do this. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:26, 3 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I think bureaucrats should be allowed to remove administrator status in emergency abuse situations. The subject of the removal should have the right to a hearing by ArbCom if they please. In that event, ArbCom should have the choice whether or not to reinstate the administrator privileges. CLCStudent (talk) 02:56, 1 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Seeing as "emergency abuse situations" would indicate a compromised account and the great compromises of 2016 had 'crats acting immediately to protect the project (along with stewards who did the locking) this is already in effect. --Majora (talk) 03:04, 1 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:LEVEL1 and WP:LEVEL2. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:48, 3 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Attribution when copying within Wikipedia

We're discussing this question over at WT:TFA#King_Kal.C4.81kaua.27s_world_tour. (Inserted: The thread was just moved to WT:TFA#Query regarding copyvio.) Let's start with the obvious: if we block everyone who has ever copied Wikipedia text to their sandbox without giving proper attribution, we won't have any Wikipedians left. The relevant policy page (WP:C) says "If you are copying text within Wikipedia, you must at least put a link to the source page in an edit summary at the destination page". Note that I just violated that policy by posting this ... just like everyone else does, because it's clear from my post where I got this text from. But other text, in WP:C, and the relevant guideline page (WP:Copying within Wikipedia), and the Terms of Service, refers merely to a hyperlink, and of course, a wikilink is a form of hyperlink. We have an editor over at WT:TFA who is upset because some of us have been copying parts of articles she worked on to a sandbox in preparation for the Today's Featured Article column of the Main Page (see WP:TFAA), despite two bolded, can't-possibly-miss-it links to the article in the quoted text. Is this a policy violation? Do we want to do something about the requirement for a link in the edit summary at WP:C? - Dank (push to talk) 13:56, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Attribution is usually only key for mainspace (eg quoting policy on talk pages is not an issue). And for that purpose, it usually is either a matter of including the URL with the oldid or last diff of the text content you used in the edit summary upon addition, or including a template ("copied from", I think) on the talk page. You certainly do not need to attribute by editor name directly.

As for attribution of the TFA blurb from the FA article it is based on - I really do think that it should be obvious that the attribution follows from linked FA page, but perhaps just added a null edit summary to the TFA blurb to indicate which oldid/diff that the text was taken from, which should resolve the issue cleanly. --MASEM (t) 14:04, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Do we want to edit WP:C? When a policy page says you have to do something that no one actually does, it can cause problems ... in this case, an editor felt that we were being very mean to her because we weren't following "policy", and I do see where she gets that from. - Dank (push to talk) 14:14, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Is a link in the edit summary to the source article, without an oldid, sufficient? The attribution can be determined unambiguously from that, after all. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:15, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hopefully others will read the discussion in full but I feel a couple of points need clarification: I have not asked for anyone to be blocked so I'm unsure where that part of the above comment has come from; I have not asked for individual editors names to be included - I have simply requested that attribution is correctly given. The policy/guidelines are quite clear that it applies to everywhere - not just main space. Diannaa deals with copyright etc all the time and has commented that attribution is indeed required. ~~"an editor felt we were being very mean to her ..." - really, what a snide comment to make.~~ SagaciousPhil - Chat 14:19, 4 April 2017 (UTC) edit to strike part of comment as issue has been amicably resolved. SagaciousPhil - Chat 20:02, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not going to reply to this. - Dank (push to talk) 14:47, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)Arguably yes, but imagine the case if the page is moved and a completely different topic put into that article's place (unlikely here in this case given the topic, but as a case). The article link, if no redirection was added, would no longer be sufficient, but the oldid/diff remains a valid point of reference since those are immutable. I really don't think it's too critical for a non-mainspace area, but if we have an editor asking for this, it can't hurt to add that. Alternatively, looking at the TFA approach where each day has its own page, you could use the talk page to include {{copied}} template to identify the oldid used as the basis for the text. --MASEM (t) 14:24, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(E/C) Of course anti-plagiarism applies everywhere, it would simply make no sense for it not to. The only way to change anything, here, would be to expand the written licence allowing for unattributed copying (also known as plagiarism) within Wikipedia but I am certainly not in favor of that, at present. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:29, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I believe there's recognition of the need to distinguish between attribution on main article content (the type of stuff that is reused outside WP, and thus would include things in Draft: space), and the internals of WP, which include Wikipedia, WP Talk, article Talk, User/User Talk, and other spaces, which, while can be copied, are less likely to be reused externally. Attribution when copying wikitext (and more importantly, creative wikitext rather than things like references, template blocks, etc.) between articles is very important due to that high chance of reuse. --MASEM (t) 14:34, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If you copy an article to your sand-box without attribution, the whole world now can take it from your sandbox. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:39, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me that people are taking a simple question and trying to make it complicated. Alan, if I check your contribs, am I going to find that, every time you pasted text from any Wikipedia page to your sandbox or to a project page like this one, you added a link to the page you copied from in the edit summary? Does anyone do this? If no one does it, is it a good thing to have a policy page saying it's required? Doesn't that 1. make people think less of the usefulness of policy pages in general, and 2. create situations like the one we have here, where it creates problems for a user because people aren't doing what the policy page says they should be doing? - Dank (push to talk) 14:47, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Alanscottwalker the whole world can take all Wikipedia content if it wants, not just the sandbox. I had my first FA lifted verbatim and published and copyrighted in a newspaper under someone else's name.— Maile (talk) 14:55, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that bit of non-news, Maile66, unless you are trying to argue that was ethical and correct, it makes no sense for you to mention, though - people plagiarize, but there is no reason for our policies to encourage it. As for me, every-time, Dank, since you wish to make it personal, I certainly do attempt to comply with the requirement for attribution, it is what ethical people try to do - whether I have been perfect I doubt (especially before I read the policy) but feel free to trawl and I will do what I can to correct it. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:42, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You read too much into this. Don't be condescending. I personally don't care what you do about anything. — Maile (talk)

No need, for you to be condescending, and I have no idea why you are bringing-up what you care about. I was not addressing you, when I was talking about what I do, I was addressing someone else, who brought it up. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:53, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

So since there are editors here who are familiar with the attribution rules, can someone explain the following to me. After a content dispute that did not end in an editors favour, they copied an article to their sandbox stating they wanted to preserve an unvandalised version. For more about the circumstances that led to this see here. Now as I understand it, this sandbox copy of a revision from a live article requires attribution to the specific revision it was copied from, otherwise the editor could cut and paste content back into the live article from their sandbox and no one would be the wiser as to where it originated from? The attribution chain is broken. Without a valid attribution to the (live) article revision, should it not be deleted as a copyright violation? Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:17, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- It technically is a problem, but one easily resolved by adding on the talk page the {{copied}} template with the oldid it was taken from. Then if the user should move content into mainspace, they should link the oldid or diff of their sandbox in the edit text or use the {{copied}} on the talk page. In that manner, the attribution chain is thus met; it may take a lot of work to trace down but it does exist. --MASEM (t) 15:29, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You want to ask them to put the template in? :) As the only reason I am aware of it is after the editor showed up at ANI and didnt get the answer they wanted. I doubt a request from myself to track down the oldid would go down particularly smoothly. (I have actually made an attempt a few times to track down the revision myself with little luck.) Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:37, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

At first blush it would likely be [10] , the last version that editor edited on the day they copied to their sandbox. A quick check shows that identical to the sandbox, save for the hatnote. (It would be nice if there was an on-wiki tool to compare revisions of two separate pages for things like this). --MASEM (t) 16:05, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

A couple of things. The guideline page Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia states that for proper attribution, an edit summary offering a link to the source ~~article~~ page is mandatory. It gives a sample edit summary of "copied content from [[page name]]; see that page's history for attribution." Providing a link in the edit summary to the version being copied is not required. Use of the {{copied}} template on the ~~article~~ page's talk pages is also optional. I usually only use the template when the amount of material moved is extensive and is no longer present in the source ~~article~~ page. @Masem: to compare two Wikipedia articles, use Special:ComparePages. (You can also do it using https://tools.wmflabs.org/copyvios/.) — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 20:23, 4 April 2017 (UTC) One more thing: It's possible to add the required attribution after the fact; I do it all the time in by copyvio work. Perform a tiny edit and use an edit summary such as "Attribution: content in this section was copied from Australian Overland Telegraph Line on April 3, 2017. Please see the history of that page for full attribution." — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 20:29, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I do wonder if just the link is sufficient, again taking the example of a moved paged. Let's say I've copied text from "Topic A", and used the "Topic A" edit summary when I did it. Now for some reason, "Topic A" is moved to "Topic B" (taking the history with it); normally that means "Topic A" should redirect to "Topic B" and the attribution chain can still be followed from my edit summary. But now someone comes along with a "New Topic A", and through consensus, determines that this should be at "Topic A". Normally, the redirect "Topic A" is then deleted and "New Topic A" is moved to "Topic A", bringing that edit history along. Now my edit summary is broken in terms of the attribution chain, since there is no requirement that anything at this new "Topic A" point to where "Topic B" (which was the Topic A when I copied things) now sits. This is why I think we should be more strongly encouraging the use of oldid or diffs, which are unaffected by changes in page names. --MASEM (t) 20:59, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I understand now that the argument is a little more subtle than I was making it; I hope whatever we wind up doing at TFA will work for everyone. - Dank (push to talk) 21:36, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Uploading certain government-created documents: copyright

The International Boundary Commission is not an agency of the federal government of either Canada or the United States, but is an international organization headed by two commissioners: an American and a Canadian. On its web site we find this:

Permission to reproduce Commission works, in part or in whole, and by any means, for personal or public non-commercial purposes, or for cost-recovery purposes, is not required, unless otherwise specified in the material you wish to reproduce.

Would photographs created and published by the Commission during or before the 1920s be usable in Wikipedia articles? Michael Hardy (talk) 18:31, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't it say right there that permission is not required? Furthermore, something from the 1920's would most certainly be out of copyright even if copyright exists. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 18:59, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Sir Joseph: Actually, it says permission is not required for non-commercial use. Wikipedia requires its content be licensed for all use including commercial, so we cannot rely on that permission. Things created prior to the 1920s are out of copyright in the United States, but may not be in all jurisdictions, so it's a little more complicated than you are letting on. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 19:26, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Michael Hardy: See Wikipedia:Public domain. Things published before 1923 are in the public domain in the U.S.; but the country where it was originally published might not consider it public domain, so if it was published in another country, take that country's laws into account too. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 19:30, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@ONUnicorn: This is a report published in 1924. How did you arrive at "1923"? Is that the date of some particular statute? Michael Hardy (talk) 01:42, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The Copyright Act of 1909 set an expiration of copyright of 28 years, extendable once to a total of 56 years. This was replaced by the Copyright Act of 1976 in 1978 (blame the people who named it), and did not apply retroactively to anything already in the public domain, but did apply retroactively to anything else already published. Thus, anything published before 1923 had entered the public domain by 1978, and is still in the public domain today, unless an even more esoteric law applies. Someguy1221 (talk) 01:47, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The Copyright Act of 1976 was passed by Congress in 1976, and became effective in 1978. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:16, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Another wrinkle in this story arises: The 1924 Report of the Commission was (1) distributed to the public by the Commission (2) with no copyright notice. Is that sufficient to imply copyright is forfeited? There's a provision to that effect in the U.S. copyright statute of 1976, but maybe it has complications. I know nothing of Canadian copyright law. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:10, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Images of deceased discussed at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content

I invite you to discuss images of deceased persons at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content, where the idea of developing criteria is incubated. --George Ho (talk) 19:35, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Page history

I think we may need a new policy or policy section to make it clear when, why and how page histories need to be preserved.

See Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)#Importance of article history for the background to this, and in particular for a list of project, help and meta pages that perhaps should provide this guidance but don't seem to. Andrewa (talk) 21:04, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think existing policies very much cover this already. As explained in that discussion, the when, why, and how are best explained by the guideline Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia (the policy governing it being Wikipedia:Copyrights). The real problem, as indicated in the discussion, is that for new users Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia is really hard to find and neither the edit window or page history makes notice of users' obligation to attribute content when copying within Wikipedia. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 00:08, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It's a part of our policy that experienced editors and even a few admins don't know about. The easiest solution is to add wording to the edit screen about copyright where you agree to the terms of use and license. Not sure what it would take to do that, though. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:13, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Agree that neither the edit window or page history makes notice of users' obligation to attribute content when copying within Wikipedia is a problem. Suggestions?

Agree that for new users Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia is really hard to find is a problem. It's a bit hard for some admins too. Suggestions?

Disagree that the copying within Wikipedia (WP:CWW) guideline is adequate.

Firstly, this is important enough that it should be in a policy somewhere. And perhaps it is! I'm sure that when I first started editing Wikipedia, this requirement was very obvious to me, and quite simply explained somewhere, and I took it on right from the start. And I'm a bit surprised that when I became an admin, if the admin reading list was as deficient in explicit advice on the matter as it is now, that I didn't query it then. Perhaps it is just buried in subsequent instruction creep, or perhaps it somehow got deleted entirely. Or perhaps it was already lost and I didn't notice. But I am surprised.

Secondly, even if it were a policy, WP:CWW is wrong. It should not be permitted to do an enormous copy/paste from one article to another with only a link from an edit summary (which does not show on What links here, remember) to indicate that there's significant edit history left behind. The only templates available to use (optionally) on talk pages should not be those designed for article merges, unless other copy/paste operations are somehow controlled (or perhaps even prohibited).

Perhaps all of this is common sense, but I think there's a hole in our documentation which it would be good to patch. Andrewa (talk) 02:52, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Another angle on this... it's important enough IMO that wp:5P3 (Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute) should link to a clear explanation. Losing edit histories violates our copyleft obligations, and therefore puts this Pillar of Wikipedia at risk.

Template:Wikipedia policies and guidelines is another place that such an important policy should get some sort of mention. Currently the only helpful link that I can see is to Wikimedia:Resolution:Licensing policy.

The Wikimedia page is recommended reading as background to this discussion, but doesn't fill the gap IMO. Note particularly that any text for which we have lost the edit history is no longer content which is under a Free Content License. It's as black and white as that. Andrewa (talk) 03:25, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

At Draft talk:New York (overview)#Text copied from is an example of what I think needs to be on the target page at a minimum.

I confess I do not remember placing similar notices on the source pages, and I now think they should be there too. But there is currently no guideline to indicate this, AFAIK. Andrewa (talk) 23:03, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

A simple edit summary (even if it is a dummy edit) should suffice for copyright purposes. The reason for the talk page notices is because we don't want pages deleted after copying has been done. We have Template:Copied for that (you can see it in action at Talk:Foreign policy of the Donald Trump administration. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:16, 7 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

From a licensing point of view, a simple edit summary is sufficient. Attribution on Wikipedia is done on the page history pages (the very pages whose continuity this thread is concerned about), and not on talk pages or via the what links here feature. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 22:06, 7 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Our existing policies and templates are adequate if followed/used. Some copy/paste moves do get caught by the various efforts to identify copyright violations. But a lot less effort goes into making sure copying is properly attributed, and that the templates are used properly. As far as I know, there are also no checks in place to identify breaks in the chain of attribution caused by deletion. Hopefully the templates catch someone's attention and its dealt with, if the templates aren't there, there is nothing. Say I had a reason to delete Province of New York, I would have no idea that this would cause an attribution problem at Draft:New York (overview), even if I checked the talk page of the page I'm deleting, there is no indication. I don't see a good way to make sure the templates are being used when needed, but we probably should have a bot that tracks removals of the templates, or deletion of the pages they point at. Basically if a copied from template is removed before the copied to page is deleted, it should trigger alerts, same if the copied from page is deleted while copied to is still there. Monty ₈₄₅ 03:35, 8 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Another interesting scenario is what happens when you apply our copying rules to a site we don't control. So, suppose someone follows our standard, they copy content from Wikipedia, and provide a link to the page or page history for attribution. Some time later, we delete the page. To someone who is not an admin here, there is no way to see the authors, and so it violates the attribution requirement of the license. We can brush it off as not being our problem, but its certainly not respecting the spirit of CC BY-SA to disregard the share alike problem we contributed to. But what happens if I follow our attribution standard when copying something to Wikipedia, say from another Wikimedia site, like Simple, or even from some other CC BY-SA source. In theory, Simple should would probably restore an article for attribution purposes if asked but what would we do if a site refused? Would we need to treat the text as a copyright violation and purge it from the article? Basically a link isn't a reliable way to attribute, but it only manifests itself as obviously when we don't control both the source and destination. Monty ₈₄₅ 04:16, 8 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

RfC to adopt a default gender neutral style for policy, guidelines and help pages

An RfC for a policy on gender neutral language to become a default for Wikipedia policies, help and guidelines is open for votes at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/RfC to adopt a default gender neutral style for policy, guidelines and help pages. The proposed policy is limited is scope and so excludes articles, talk pages or any discussion by individual contributors. --Fæ (talk) 19:57, 7 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

RFC: Religion as a nationality in Template:Infobox Person

SNOW oppose. Unanimous consensus not to allow religions such as Jewish in the nationality= field of {{infobox person}}. Alsee (talk) 01:04, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

In light of the Religion in biographical infoboxes RFC and the Ethnicity in infoboxes RFC, should religions such as "Jewish" be allowed in the nationality= field of {{infobox person}} as has been done at Barbara Elefant-Raiskin? --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:50, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. The religion RFC made it clear that there is a strong consensus not to include a religion field in {{Infobox person}} (with obvious exceptions for sub-templates like {{Infobox clergy}}), and the ethnicity RFC made it clear that there was also a strong consensus to not include an ethnicity field. Furthermore, there was a sub-discussion at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_127#Ethnicity_as_.22nationality.22 where it seemed like there was a consensus not to include religion in these fields. Placing it in the Nationality field seems like an attempt to do an end run about the consensus not to include religion in the infobox by claiming that "Jewish" is neither a religion nor an ethnicity, but is a nationality. Wikipedia's own article on nationality defines it as the "legal relationship between a person and a state", which does not seem to me to describe a religious or ethnic classification. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:50, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose And this has gotten tiresome with editors not quite understanding that self-proclaimed religion is allowed in the body of an article, self-proclaimed nationality is allowed, but using "nationality" as a parameter to which a religion is attached makes for a poor addition to an infobox. Collect (talk) 20:22, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose The reason we chose not to include ethnicity was endless, unproductive and often inconclusive discussion. If implemented, this would most likely head in that direction too. Hawkeye7 (talk) 21:22, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - Religion is not a nationality, and shouldn't be used as one. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 21:23, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. What do you mean by "religions such as 'Jewish'? Do you mean "Religions such as Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, etc."? Then then answer is not just "no", but "why are you even asking if 'nationality=Lutheran' would be an appropriate?". If the question is "Should 'Jewish' be treated as a nationality (for the purposes of the 'nationality=' field)" that's a completely different and much more complicated question.

It's a question to which I don't know the answer. Its a plain fact that "being Jewish" is sometimes treated differently than "being Methodist", in history and in the real world at large (and there are big and complicated reasons for this). The unadorned term "Ukrainian" puts the reader in the mind of a person who is probably Caucasian Slavic and even if not a believing Eastern Orthodox adherent, is from that general mileu and culture -- the dominant culture of the Ukraine; the term "Ukrainian Jewish" paints a different picture.

So it's an interesting question. One oblique way to approach it might be to ask another: Should African-American be a valid entry in the 'nationality=' field? If yes, than maybe "Ukranian Jewish" should be too; and if not, maybe not. For my part, I think that "Jewish Ukranian" and "African-American" are both opening a can of worms, so I voted Oppose. The article text, not the infobox, is where we want to delve into details like this. Herostratus (talk) 21:35, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose: I will echo Collect's reasoning entirely. Just absolutely wrong to even be entertaining this. Religions are not national under any good circumstances and I do not wish to glorify such a bifurcated equation. Fylbecatulous talk 23:01, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose - I believe that use of the nationality field in {{infobox person}} should be reserved for unambiguous cases such as "French", "Dutch", "British", etc. where a state such as France, Netherlands or Great Britain is clearly identifiable. Nationality is a relationship between a person and a state; and in the case of |nationality=Jewish could only make sense in defining the relationship of an individual to a Jewish state, in which case I suggest that |nationality=Israeli would be more precise. The moment that a piece of data needs further explanation, it is no longer suitable for use in an infobox. --RexxS (talk) 23:14, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose a rather odd attempt to reinsert info which consensus removed into a different field. The edit warring that would ensue over this scarcely bears thinking about. MarnetteD|Talk 23:40, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

WP:CANVASS

In Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Dane#Oppose, there was a debate whether pinging is canvassing. In the page , WP:CANVASS I couldn't find that pinging is canvassing, but in AFD or any other deletion discussion, one editor pinging other editors sharing the same POV is considered canvassing.

There should be a consensus whether pinging the Delete voters or Keep voters is considered canvassing. --Marvellous Spider-Man 15:00, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think pinging is canvassing. I also think that it can be acceptable sometimes in discussions. DGG is frequently pinged or asked to comment on things to see his view whether they pass WP:PROF. Diannaa is pinged or left messages for thoughts on copyvio situations. So long as the ping is neutral and is asking for an analysis of the situation by a user that might have something of particular value to contribute, I don't think it wrong, but I also think one should explain why the other user was pinged. I think pinging someone from either RfA side should probably be avoided, because it looks bad even if it isn't intended that way. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:57, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
If you are being brought to a discussion because you are trying to bring people that you know will agree with your point of view, that is canvassing. It doesn't matter if that is done via talk page message, ping, email, or smoke signals. If you are simply notifying people that such a discussion exists that is not canvassing. Seeing as RfAs are so widely advertised nowadays I don't see how that ping was anything but canvassing. --Majora (talk) 21:03, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Conversely, a ping is often used as a courtesy to inform an editor that you have mentioned them in a discussion. If that is the rationale for the ping, then the fact that RfAs are so well advertised makes it more likely that the pinged editor already knew about the RfA, so making a nonsense of any suggestion of canvassing. --RexxS (talk) 21:31, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- Without getting into criticism, as Coffee pointed out on the RfA talk, many users have the pings set up to email, and if it was a user who had not been active in a long time, pinging them when you reasonably suspect that they might feel a certain way does look a lot like canvassing. At things as contentious as RfA, the look isn't good, even if the intentions were. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:53, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Village notability

Are all villages notable? I've been seeing a lot of random villages with <500 people that don't seem notable to me(ex Niemojew). Elliot321 (talk) 21:16, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Generally, yes. See WP:NPLACE. --Majora (talk) 21:25, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Are amazon links spam?

The matter is currently debated at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Spam#amazon.com. Please participate. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:55, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It depends on the context in which we link to Amazon. It is quite likely that some links could be considered spam, but I don't think all are spam. Blueboar (talk) 22:17, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

One of Jimbo's recent article space edits was a link to Amazon as a reference [11]. It was eventually removed as unneeded in that article. My objections there were that it is a bit spammy, and generally if the subject is notable you can find an independent reliable source that will confirm it better than Amazon. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:22, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Links to Amazon are both spammy (like all links to sites where merchandise is being sold) and unnecessary. Commercial websites such as that exist to sell stuff, not to provide vetted, impartial third-party commentary. Jimbo was just being lazy. --Orange Mike | Talk 23:33, 13 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy

The handling of articles about current and future events is discussed at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy. Join in to comment. --George Ho (talk) 04:40, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

RfC: sister projects in search results

Please consider joining the feedback request service.

An editor has requested comments from other editors for this discussion. This page has been added to the following list:

Wikipedia proposals

When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the list. If this page is on additional lists, they will be noted below.

Which sister projects should appear in the search results on enwiki?

Background

User:CKoerner (WMF) announced in WP:VPT that Cross-wiki Search Results would be released soon: "The release date is expected to be near the end of April 2017 on all Wikipedias." [12] His post has further explanations and useful links to older discussions. The new tool can be easily tested by using this URL and replacing "rainbow" with the search term you want to test (remember to add the underscore for multi-word searches!).

When testing and discussing this further in Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Sister projects search results, the possibility was raised to use this selectively on enwiki, by disabling or hiding the search results from some sister projects for all searches. Reasons for this might be that the content returned by some projects is too often irrelevant, problematic, outdated, spammy, or in some other way contradictory to the aims and purposes of enwiki and not really what we want to send our readers to.

Some examples of common search terms (taken from the 100 most popular articles) with potentially unwanted results:

Other searches either gave no results (apart from enwiki) or at first glance no problematic results. Note that at the moment, this search has a serious layout bug when searching for a term which doesn't have an enwiki page, like this. Fram (talk) 10:19, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

RfC structure

As different arguments and end result may apply to each sister project, I have listed them separately, in alphabetical order. Please give a reasoned support or oppose or join the discussions!

General Discussion

I think this is too early. Why not first make sure people experience and then discuss it like 4 weeks in ? That will give people a much better chance for an accurate assessment. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:25, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Everyone can experience it with the links provided, everyone interested can search for whatever they like. This RfC will normally end weeks after the planned deployment of the tool anyway, so starting it now means that we can react relatively swiftly to the deployment, without having this RfC really prematurely. We have had too many instances of new tools being deployed where the problems were only found after months (the wikidata descriptions on mobile, or something like Gather). Here we can test it, we know it is coming very soon (before the normal end date of this RfC), and we have the ability to take action if necessary, so why wait? Fram (talk) 10:36, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Fram: Any objection to adding a section above those below that is simply should we enable Cross-wiki Search Results or not? That way, if there are individuals against the implementation of this as a whole, they don't have to oppose each individually. Then the other sections would be contingent on if we choose to enable this. — Godsy^(TALK_CONT) 12:26, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No problem. I notice you also added Wikispecies, I didn't include that one (nor Wikidata) because they never showed up in any of my tests, so I presume they are not included in the tool. We can disable some or all, but we can't add any technically... Fram (talk) 12:32, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Commons

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikibooks

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikinews

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikiquote

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikisource

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikiversity

Support

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Discussion

Wikivoyage

Support

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Discussion

Wiktionary

Support

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Discussion

@@ Line 443: / Line 443: @@
 ===Wikisource===
-====Support====
-====Oppose====
-====Discussion====
-===Wikispecies===
 ====Support====
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Wikipedia:Village pump (policy): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 12:36, 14 April 2017

Media sources and WP:UNDUE

Related issue: assigning weight to primary source opinions

Is it much too easy to create Start and Stub articles of low importance on Wikipedia

Statistics and Quality control

How article assessments actually work

The state of the art at Wikipedia

Should redirects be automatically created when moving to draftspace?

China/Taiwan issue at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)

Clarifications about WP:BIO1E/WP:BLP1E and terror attacks

RfC regarding NACs

Who does article deletion for ToU violation of WP:PAID ?

Bureaucrat rights

Attribution when copying within Wikipedia

Uploading certain government-created documents: copyright

Images of deceased discussed at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content

Page history

RfC to adopt a default gender neutral style for policy, guidelines and help pages

RFC: Religion as a nationality in Template:Infobox Person

WP:CANVASS

Village notability

Are amazon links spam?

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy

RfC: sister projects in search results

Background

RfC structure

General Discussion

Commons

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikibooks

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikinews

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikiquote

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikisource

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikiversity

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wikivoyage

Support

Oppose

Discussion

Wiktionary

Support

Oppose

Discussion

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