Wikipedia talk:Third opinion

User FAQ

• See Wikipedia talk:Third opinion/User FAQ

Removed from list, but no opinion provided

A listing for Talk:Community care access centres § Removal of lists was removed, but no third opinion was provided for this dispute. Legend of 14 (talk) 16:12, 26 May 2025 (UTC)

It was accidentally removed by a new editor, per the page history. voorts (talk/contributions) 16:16, 26 May 2025 (UTC)

3O when WikiProject has also been notified?

I don't exactly see why this would be a concern, but does anyone feel that an editor requesting additional opinions at a WikiProject related to a dispute should have an impact on whether they can simultaneously request a 3O? I figure either way they're getting additional opinions, and I don't see how it can cause harm. DonIago (talk) 16:14, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Clarification requested on removed 3O listing

Hello,

I submitted a Third Opinion request on 16 July regarding a content dispute on Talk:Mir Ershad Ali#Dispute about unsourced political claims, involving the repeated re-addition of unsourced political claims by another editor.

The request was briefly listed but was later removed by User:Nemov with the note "There's no discussion." However, there is a section on the Talk page dedicated to this dispute, and the issue has persisted with multiple reverts despite prior consensus.

Could someone please review whether this was a valid removal? If needed, I can rephrase or re-list the request — but I’d appreciate confirmation first.

Thanks, – Syri0123 (talk) 03:00, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Good Morning,

I believe Nemov removed it because he correctly saw that there is no discussion on the talk page. There are your comments, but not a second person replying to you. WP:3O is primarily for breaking a deadlock when two parties are discussing a topic and can't come to consensus. What you are looking for is more related to arbitration. Squatch347 (talk) 11:55, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Backlog issues

For the second time in under a month I see a number of 3O requests are stale or are on the verge of becoming stale. I can't speak to whether they'd be easy enough to weigh in on, but I don't really feel any editor should be left feeling that if they don't respond to a 3O request then nobody will. Is 3O suffering from a shortage of editors willing to weigh in, or is there an issue that the disputes themselves have become more complicated? Could we suggest to filers that succinct summaries of disputes on their Talk pages may be more likely to be actioned? I know some other noticeboards have ways of notifying editors that there's a backlog; perhaps we should look into such an option? Sorry for all the questions; just trying to provide some food for thought, as I don't think it looks great when we start closing out a significant number of our incoming requests simply because nobody's picking them up, but I also don't think increasing the elapsed time before a request is considered stale is a great idea. DonIago (talk) 16:36, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Hi, came from DonIago's talk page. I'm pretty surprised to see this, because in the periods when I checked 3O regularly, there was rarely a backlog and the list was often empty. I do think it would be a good idea to extend the stale deadline beyond six days – after all, there is no deadline to Wikipedia and these disputes don't always go away simply because no-one gave another opinion. Other consensus-seeking areas like RM or merge requests have backlogs of weeks or months, so six days seems pretty short to me. I also suggested on DonIago's talk that we notify editors when their 3O requests are removed as stale and let them know that they're allowed to relist the discussion once.

In terms of getting more activity, I will personally be more active in the coming weeks and hopefully be able to provide more 3Os. Raising awareness could also be helpful: Perhaps re-posting a call for help at AN is warranted, and maybe someone could spin up a backlog template like the antivandalism defcon ones for editors to add to their userpages? Toadspike [Talk] 16:00, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

I have pretty low bandwidth right now due to some Life matters, and I'd like to hear from more editors in any case, but regarding the six day clause, if there was a discussion that led to the establishment of that policy, or if any editors who were present at the time it was enacted could speak to it, that could be useful in this discussion. DonIago (talk) 16:22, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

ETA: It's not much of a discussion, but I found this. If we're going to seriously talk about changing the staleness clause then it might behoove us to ping those editors. I'm not doing so at this time as I'm not sure whether we're seriously discussing that as an option (I'd currently lean toward opposing the removal of that clause). DonIago (talk) 16:32, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

I think it's up to us to figure this out; that discussion is stale in and of itself. My feeling is that notification of disputes should not go away due to lack of volunteers to handle them, and I don't see what removing a ticket and telling editors they can relist accomplishes either. Maybe "active" recruitment is an option: approach an editor you know to be considerate and fair and say "hey, maybe you could help these two editors out of this jam." Or drop by the talk page and say, "Hey I'm here from 3O and can't handle it, here are some other options you might try," where other options could be pinging the most recent/active editors on the article, or editors who were involved in a previous discussion about a related matter. Or if an article is of interest to one or more Wikiprojects, go there and solicit additional eyes on the dispute. Xan747 (talk) 20:00, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for digging up that old discussion, DonIago. I'm not really surprised that this was decided by one-and-a-half editors fifteen years ago. I'm not suggesting abolishing the time limit altogether, but maybe extending it to 14 days or so. Who knows, maybe running an RfC on the matter would get enough attention to fix the backlog issues for a while regardless of the outcome.

Xan747, those are some really good ideas. If/when I get back into providing 3Os I'll try these to get more disputes answered. Toadspike [Talk] 00:53, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm not really keen on extending the time limit at all, much less to that extent. A few reasons:

• Refiling is always an option, so right now the effective time limit is already 12 days. What closing a stale discussion and refiling accomplishes is that it lets the filer know what's going on (granted they may need to be paying attention) and that there may not be interest in here in getting involved, but also lets them try again if they wish to do so. As per my point below, just leaving the initial filing here arguably puts it more in limbo than closing with the option to refile. Additionally, the relisting may attract attention that the initial filing failed to capture for whatever reason, especially since it's noted that it is a refiling.
• ANI and other boards here typically auto-archive inactive threads much faster than that (e.g. ANI archives inactive discussions after three days); I feel 3O's timeout should be somewhat consistent with the other boards..
• The more we extend out our allowed inactivity period, the more we leave the editors in dispute hoping someone will weigh in 'in suspense', if they're waiting for a response from here before pursuing other forms of dispute resolution.
• Frankly, I don't think after six days that a dispute is likely to be picked up in any case, so I'm not sure what good is served by leaving disputes posted if they're significantly unlikely to be engaged with in any case.

Otherwise, I'm amenable to updating the instructions to say that when closing discussions for being stale it's considered "best practice" to let the disputants know at the dispute Talk page what's going on and advising them that they can refile if they wish to do so, but that they might want to consider other options as per WP:DR (which I believe already mentions notifying WikiProjects; frankly I'd be amenable to updating our instructions to recommend going that route before even opening a 3O case). DonIago (talk) 15:41, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

That's reasonable, I'll drop the time limit issue. I've made two edits to mention the things we agree on (notifying participants of 3O requests removed as stale; advise asking at WikiProjects as well) [1] – feel free to move things around or improve the wording. Toadspike [Talk] 16:37, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm good with the explanations by DonIago and Toadspike's changes to the project page. Xan747 (talk) 16:38, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

error adding request

Hi, I have been attempting to add a request, but getting errors. Dont know what I am doing wrong. Thanks! Jtbobwaysf (talk) 11:25, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

I added it for you. Katzrockso (talk) 11:31, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Can you please tell me what I did wrong so I understand next time? Thanks! Jtbobwaysf (talk) 11:35, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

I believe you have to put the # at the start of your 3O, because it seemed to want to take the # later on in your comment as the start and got confused. Not great with the technical stuff, though. I removed the diffs since they are unneeded. Katzrockso (talk) 11:56, 6 November 2025 (UTC)