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The idea lab section of the village pump is a place where new ideas or suggestions on general Wikipedia issues can be incubated, for later submission for consensus discussion at Village pump (proposals). Try to be creative and positive when commenting on ideas.
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Add a bot/policy that bans AI edits from non-extended confirmed users

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I saw this thread yesterday and I wanted to chime in this idea I had, but I waited to long to act on it and now it's archived. So I guess I'll have to make a new thread.

It's clear that lots of new editors struggle making good content with AI assistance, and something has to be done. WP:G15 is already a good start, but I think restrictions can be extended further. Extended confirmation on Wikipedia is already somewhat of a benchmark to qualify editors to edit contentious articles, and I think the same criteria would do well to stop the worst AI slop from infecting mainspace. As for how this would be implemented, I'm not sure - a policy would allow human intervention, but a bot designed like ClueBot NG might automate the process if someone knows how to build one. Koopinator (talk) 10:50, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I do t see a practical way to enforce that. I also dont think that peoples skill level with AI can transfer to an assessment of their skill level in wikipedia. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:31, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding enforcement, I would suggest:
1. Looking at whatever process ClueBot uses to detect and evaluate new edits, and add a "extended confirmed/non-ec" clause.
1.1. I will admit I'm not entirely sure of how this would work on a technical level, which is why I posted this idea in the idea lab.
2. Look to word frequency as in User:Gnomingstuff/AI experiment to distinguish AI from non-AI edits. Koopinator (talk) 15:32, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
please don't use this in any kind of blocking enforcement capacity, it is not remotely ready for anything like that Gnomingstuff (talk) 17:41, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A person's willingness to use AI on Wikipedia is an immediate and absolute WP:NOTHERE, in my opinion. TooManyFingers (talk) 05:50, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Too sweeping an opinion in my opinion. First you would have to be talking about specifically using unsupervised AI to write articles. Secondly I think it would be "insistance" rather than "willingness". And thirdly it could well be a WP:CIR or user education issue rather than a NOTHERE one. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 18:03, 6 November 2025 (UTC).[reply]
Do you have any evidence that extended confirmed users create any better edits with AI than users who are not extended confirmed? Phil Bridger (talk) 14:33, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would say it's a reasonable inference. Here's what I can say:
  • We can expect that extended-confirmed users are more likely to be familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, by virtue of having been here longer.
  • Some anecdotal evidence:
    • [1] LLM edit with no sources, survived for almost 2 months. Was created by an editor who was neither confirmed nor extended confirmed.
    • [2] Personal project by yours truly, AI assistance was used, careful review of text-source integrity of every sentence as I constructed the page in my sandbox over the course of 59 days before airing it.
  • I admit none of this is hard evidence.
I do feel LLM has its place on the site (otherwise I wouldn't have used ChatGPT assistance in constructing a page), but if it's allowed, the barrier for usage really should be heightened. Wikipedia's content translation tool is also restricted to extended-confirmed users.
Koopinator (talk) 15:25, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The issue is raising the bar to prevent bots from editing Wikipedia using LLMs. LDW5432 (talk) 19:57, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
LLM detection for text is very hard and has far, far too many false positives, especially for non-native speakers and certain wavelengths of autism. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:41, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
^ This is my experience. Also, a lot of edits are too brief for the already-dodgy AI "detectors" to be reliable for.
@Koopinator, you've made around 2,000 mainspace edits in the last ~2 years. Here's a complete list of all your edits that the visual editor could detect as being more than a handful of words added.[3] It's 78 edits (4% of your edits) – less than once a week on average. And I'd guess that half of your content additions are too short to have any chance of using an anti-AI tool on, so the anti-AI tool would check your edits two or three times a month. Why build something, if it could only be useful so rarely? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:58, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, how would that tool's frequency scale across the entire Wikipedia community? I'd imagine it'd be used at least a little bit more often then. (or, I imagine, multiple orders of magnitude) Koopinator (talk) 05:55, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For brand-new editors, it might capture something on the order of half of mainspace edits. High-volume editors are much more likely to edit without adding any content, so it'd be much less useful for that group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:54, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
We could at least use a flagging system for vandalism review. LDW5432 (talk) 14:05, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It should be possible to detect low hanging fruit AI text, based on certain common features. Raw AI inference cut and pasted from a chat bot is going to be easier to detect. I agree that the type of user doing this probably has no reputation at stake, doesn't care very much, more likely to be newbie and/or a non-native speaker from another Wiki. I don't know about policy, but a bot that sends a talk page notice, or flags the edit summary with a "[possible ai]" tag. No one is already working on this? -- GreenC 17:10, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
mw:Edit check/Tone Check uses a Small language model to detect promotionalism. (See tagged edits.) I'd guess that it would be possible to add an AI detector to that, though the volume involved would mean the WMF would need to host their own or pay for a corporate license and address the privacy problems.
mw:Edit check/Paste Check is probably more efficient, though, as anyone copying from a chatbot is going to be pasting it into the article, and detecting a big paste is easier than checking the words that were pasted in. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:04, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think AI edits should be mandatory for everyone to disclose, both in articles and talk pages. There could be a box where you check it if your content comes from AI or is mostly AI, similar to how you can check minor edits. Bogazicili (talk) 18:40, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Having a UI element like that would work towards legitimizing LLM use in creating text for Wikipedia. Merko (talk) 00:41, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree: Either it will allow the material to be posted and thus legitimize LLM use, or it won't allow the material to be posted and cause people to tell lies so they can get it posted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:18, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Do we currently have a policy on LLM usage? This one seems failed Wikipedia:Large language model policy
My position is that if it's not banned, it should be declared. Bogazicili (talk) 10:45, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I thought the failed policy proposal was supposed to require people to declare it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:00, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Almost 2 years ago. Merko (talk) 22:09, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
LLM-generated content is a cancer on Wikipedia, and it will only get worse. "AI detectors" have many false positives, as do checks made by editors themselves, but just because we can't reliably detect something today doesn't mean we shouldn't implement a policy against it. I support mandating the disclosure of LLM-generated contributions by all users. We don't treat WP:GNG differently on articles created by extended-confirmed users or others, we shouldn't do it here either. Merko (talk) 22:21, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you think original content generated by a program is a negative to that extent, then I don't think requiring disclosure is the appropriate approach, since that would only be a prelude to removal. We should skip straight to requiring editors not to use programs to generate original content. isaacl (talk) 04:38, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia should first address LLM content from anonymous IPs. LDW5432 (talk) 19:56, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
IP editing actually isn't that much of a problem here -- in my experience almost all AI text I find came from someone with a registered account. Off the top of my head I'd say less than 10% of it comes from IPs.
This may change with temporary accounts in a few days though, who knows. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:56, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I came here to propose pretty much the same thing (policy, not bot). Having a blanket rule would be hugely helpful in dealing with editors, since it can get very tedious explaining why each AI edit they claim to have checked is in fact problematic. I might even go so far as to propose a separate user right (or pseudo-right?) called something like LLM user, for editors who can demonstrate they are sufficiently competent with content policies and have a legitimate use case. I don't think such a right should convey any actual abilities, but users found to be using LLMs without it could then be much more easily censured and guided towards other forms of editing. Applying exactly the same system but tying it to extended confirmation seems like it minimizes potential rule creep, but it's a blunter filter which might not be as effective, since I'm sure there are plenty of extended confirmed users who lack the requisite understanding of policy. lp0 on fire () 21:03, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That is probably a good idea, but I don't see any way to enforce it automatically and also do it well, as it would not be good if someone got flagged for using AI when they did not, and Wikipedia is so large it would happen a lot. I believe that AI should be used extremely rarely on Wikipedia, as it is known to hallucinate mis-information and drag on and on about things that don't matter (see: Grokapedia, or search up AI hallucinations). It has many chances to cause things to go awry, and should not be made main-stream as a way to enhance/speed up editing. I suggest it is done by humans. If a new user joins Wikipedia and is flagged or seen on talk pages, maybe give there edits a look, just to make sure there doing good. Some ways to spot AI writing is looking for constant pairs of 3's (like, LOTS, basically every sentence), un-usual use of Em dashes,(looks like a bigger hyphen, — Vs. -) as they are not on a normal keyboard and either take a copy and paste or a very unique keyboard shortcut to type, repeating info or full paragraphs that don't really say/mean anything. A lot of these are hard to give examples for and you just have to see them for the first time to start noticing. Overall, I agree that there should be restrictions on AI edits. Oak lod (talk) 15:49, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Renaming indefinite blocks

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This isn't the first time I've thought about how we could improve our blocking system (courtesy ping to Chaotic Enby who has been helping me with the unblock wizard). But I don't think the name of indefinite block really gets across to the average person that you aren't permanently banned. Obviously we don't want to never indef people à la Larry Sanger, but I do think it's probably better if we rename indefs to something like conditional block to make it clearer that you basically need to stop doing whatever it is that got you blocked to come back. I'm not sure if there'd need to be an additional "infinite" category when we already have arbcom blocks/community bans, but please let me know if I'm missing something obvious here. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 12:50, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think conditional block may be confused with Wikipedia:Partial blocks and/or a WP:TBAN. No comments on the proposal itself though. ~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 12:56, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, sockpuppetry is probably the big exception to why getting rid of infinite blocks entirely wouldn't work (even if the master gets unblocked the socks wouldn't). So keep indefinite as an option but encourage a new category of conditional in block templates etc? Because I really do think this phrasing change would be a gamechanger. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 12:56, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding conditional blocks, we already have WP:CONDUNBLOCK as a process, so that could work for blocks where a conditional unblock has been suggested (or similar situations such as username softblocks), but might be confusing for cases where there isn't a straightforward unblock condition the user can agree to.
I agree with the general spirit of making it clearer that indefinite blocks can be appealed, but the issue is that these blocks often exist on a spectrum of how feasible they are to appeal, and not all of them are as simple as "agreeing to not do the same thing again". Since there isn't a clear-cut distinction between these, we need to find a word that invites blocked users to work on learning from their block and ultimately appeal instead of giving up, but doesn't give false hopes to users in tougher cases, where a successful appeal might be months or years down the line. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 13:09, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Any ideas for how to go about doing that? I don't see expanding conditional unblocks as nessecarily being in conflict with the current process but I do want whatever we're coming up with to be practical yet helpful. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:17, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would tend to agree with Thryduulf's suggestion of making "indefinite is not infinite" more prominent. It is true that these two words are quite similar-looking, which might lead to some confusion otherwise. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 13:39, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's stated clearly in every block template that someone can appeal. If people see the word indefinite and stop reading the unblock template after that word, that's their problem. There will always be someone who finds something confusing or unclear. I'm not sure a change in terminology would fix any problems here. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:04, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Might be too far in the other direction, but maybe "appealable block" or "fixable block" or "curable block" to distance from partial blocks/tbans, and differentiate from blocks like sockpuppetry/community bans/timeouts after appeals have become tendentious. Tazerdadog (talk) 13:21, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
All blocks are appealable, so that doesn't work. Partial blocks, tbans and at least some full blocks of finite length are also fixable/curable so I don't think that terminology is helpful either. Rather than changing the terminology, I think we need to make Indefinite does not mean "infinite" or "permanent" (from WP:INDEF) a lot more prominent. Thryduulf (talk) 13:27, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The most practical way of doing that would be editing what's said in the Twinkle block templates. I think that would be a good idea and possibly easier to accomplish then renaming what the type of block is called. I wasn't expecting the idea to be controversial as it was. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:50, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Are we engaging in a euphemism treadmill here? I seem to recall that "indefinite" and "no expiry set" are already intended as an improvement over "infinite". Anomie⚔ 13:31, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think it's euphemism treadmilling to be clearer to people who are not experienced Wikipedians what their block actually means. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:33, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well we could call brief blocks: “Time out”…
longer blocks: “Sent to your room” or “Grounded”…
and permanent blocks: “F*€k off and Die”
But that may come off as a bit childish. Blueboar (talk) 13:43, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It may be treadmilling if we keep trying to come up with more "clear" language as newer people, only familiar with the latest language, become experienced and decide that the language they're used to isn't "clear" enough for even-newer people. Anomie⚔ 14:01, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you asked me 7 years ago what an indefinite block was, I would not have told you the Wikipedia definition of the term. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:10, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In this case, "7 years ago" does put you in the "only familiar with the latest language" group, as "indefinite" replaced "infinite" well before that.
I do see how 7-years-ago-you might not interpret "indefinite block" as "block of indefinite duration", instead struggling to make sense of it as meaning something like "block that is vague or uncertain" or "block designating an unspecified or identified target". Until you encountered terminology like "temporary block" or "36-hour block" that should have pointed you in the right direction, or clicked a link like the one to Wikipedia:Blocking policy#Indefinite blocks in {{uw-block|indef=yes}} or the like that explains it directly. Anomie⚔ 14:27, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My argument is that if you have to explain to someone that something does not mean what you think it does (indefinite is not a commonly used word and most people are going to assume they're blocked forever when hearing it), that's not ideal. I don't think we should give up trying to change things just because we've changed them before and have the survivorship bias of eventually learning what it means. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:50, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
🤷 "People are too dumb to know what 'indefinite' means, or to look it up, or to read the links explaining it" isn't a claim that's worth arguing over. Anomie⚔ 14:54, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, Wikipedians tend to be pretty great at givings words definitions that have little to nothing to do with their IRL definitions (see: WP:R3 "Recently created, implausible typos", our speedy deletion criteria for normal typos) - indefinite, however, means the same thing. I mean, there's no shame in not knowing a word, especially if you joined Wikipedia at a young age and perhaps had never come across it before, but this is one that I think most people should know how to look up in a dictionary. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 18:42, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Why would you look up something you are fairly sure what it means? I suspect the common understanding of indefinite for new people is infinite. Which is why we had to make that WP:INDEF. If most people are thrown by it, even if they are in the wrong, it is not ideal and creates unnecessary misunderstandings. 4.7.212.46 (talk) 19:00, 31 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, no, you wouldn't - grew up in an immigrant house, and was literally just ranting this morning about how monocultural people seem so loathe to look past their own idiolect. But, well, at least for "indefinite", the word is used the same way IRL as it is on Wikipedia - it means that something will stay in a condition until some factor changes. Yes, people will still misunderstand it - but many people also believe that something becomes their "own work" when they copy it or screenshot it - which is why we have Wikipedia:OWN WORK. Is that because we've chosen words that create 'unnecessary misunderstandings'? There's a point where, no matter how simple or monosyllabic the words are, you can't stop misunderstandings.
In this case, I actually don't suspect that "indefinite"="infinite" is a common misunderstanding, and nor do I suspect that most people are "thrown" by it. What I suspect that people get freaked out by the actual act of being blocked. And I'm not opposed to making that message clearer, but I don't see how. Adding more words? well, panicked people won't read more words - speaking as somebody with anxiety, the longer you make the block message, the less accessible it would be to me. (YMMV). Similarly, the longer and more complex a sentence is, the harder it is to read in your second language - for a simple example, I can pick up any dictionary and go "標準時"? Oh, that just means "time zone" - but replace it with "ある国家または広い地域が共通で使う地方時をいう" in a sentence, and now you've got to learn multiple grammar points and other words, then successfully push them together.
Again, I don't think our block messages are that great - the second line "If you believe that there are good reasons for being unblocked" is the major sticking point for me, though. What on earth does that mean, "good reason"? An unfair block? Well, let's say the block was fair. So, there's no good reason - so okay, time to leave forever. Ditto "appeal", the word everybody is using in this conversation as if it's the least bit applicable, but, IRL, you only appeal a decision if it is flawed. But what if the choice to block wasn't flawed, I (as the blocked user) really did create a sock account, or add content cited to unsuitable sources? Then what's the point of appealing? There's none. In wiki speak, reversing a block often just means undoing it, I think, but not in the vast majority of contexts. Removing a word because it's long and could possibly be confused with "infinite", and replacing it with a shorter Wiki-word that makes no sense to outside word... I'm not on board with that. I will save you from an even longer message, but I've had this "this word makes no sense in this context" response to all the alternatives. I mean, I don't know how to make the block message more clear. "You have been blocked [for OO time/indefinitely]. If you understand why you were blocked and promise not to break the rules again, you may ask to be unblocked. If you believe the block was unfair, you may appeal and your case will be reviewed by an uninvolved administrator" works for me, but would that work for other people? I don't know. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 19:54, 31 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Instead of trying to rename indef blocks, how about adding a big "Appeal" button in MediaWiki:Blockedtext that takes them to the unblock wizard? Many people have no idea how to add the unblock template and e.g. resort to legal threats instead. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 15:01, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If many people are resorting to legal threats because they don't understand what an indef block is, then it sounds like they don't have the temperament to edit here in any case and blocking them was a good idea. DonIago (talk) 17:36, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think legal threats are at all the majority that will be benefitted. I'd reckon they just leave. Aaron Liu (talk) 13:01, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps split indefs into 2 categories based on the actions needed to lift the block? a "quick-fixes block" for username issues, newbies who missed a memo on their first dozen edits, or veterans who need a rolled up newspaper, versus "introspection needed block" for when the community is at the end of it's rope, bigger issues, or where a simple acknowledgement of what went wrong and promise not to repeat it no longer suffices. Tazerdadog (talk) 14:37, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That could be a good start, and formalize what is already the case to some extent, although some blocks are on a continuum between the two. If a block for a minor issue (say, a username softblock, or a block to get a user to communicate on their talk page) leads to more serious issues being discovered, would the user be "reblocked"? Clarifying the situation (and new expectations) to the user would certainly be helpful either way, but the software block itself shouldn't have to be changed.
This does move the parameters of the block beyond the mere technical and towards the social (see Wikipedia:Blocks and bans, with community-consensus blocks being considered de facto CBANs due to their appeal requirements). However, this is already the case to some extent with the idea that blocks don't apply to an account but to a person, and this could serve to build a framework that could unify, alongside bans, the "social" aspect of blocking that a software block enforces, and sort them out in a more understandable way. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:50, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is it really so common to think that "indefinite" means "infinite" or "permanent"? "Indefinite" simply means "not for a definite period". I would have thought that anyone thinking it means something else would not understand English well enough to be writing an English encyclopedia anyway. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:20, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Maybe it's just because I follow Wikipedia-related hashtags online but yes, this perception is absurdly common. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:16, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I too would agree it is common and even more so with editors for who English is not their first language. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:48, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'd say people use it often enough as a euphemism for "permanent", as in "postponed indefinitely". I shortcut the definition in my mind to "without end" from "without any current plans for an end, although an end may be possible in the future". I know what it actually means, but I also know how people use it. If someone says "You're banned for the foreseeable future", it's easy to take that to mean you'll never be allowed back again, even if that's not what it literally means. 207.11.240.38 (talk) 15:46, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    But the notices do also present options for appealing blocks, which to me undercuts the idea that they're for the foreseeable future, unless one considers the possibility of a successful appeal to be unforeseeable? Now I'm mildly curious as to how many blocks get overturned on their first (sincere) appeal. DonIago (talk) 16:12, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes its exceedingly common. No, it is not a reason someone should not edit English Wikipedia? Seriously? 4.7.212.46 (talk) 19:16, 31 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • All of the suggested new names are less clear than the original name. The blocks for a dozen socks with abusive usernames are not particularly well described as "conditional", and making two categories of indefinite blocks is a massive complication with little demonstrated benefit (if any). —Kusma (talk) 17:32, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I think people can disagree on whether we should try this but I do believe that more people understanding that blocks aren't nessecarily in place for eternity has huge benefits with little drawbacks. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:20, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My initial thoughts on the different types of bans that are enforced with indefinite blocks:

  • conditional bans have a very specific, easy to verify condition for unblocking. A username change is an example.
  • behavioural bans are made due to behaviour that is counter to English Wikipedia policy. The blocked user needs to convince the enacting authority that they can behave appropriately if unblocked.
  • site bans are made when the user is no longer welcome to participate in the community, due to a lack of trust that they will be able to behave appropriately

An advantage to focusing on the type of ban rather than the technical mechanism used to block a user is that it should lessen ambiguity. Today sometimes users propose a community indefinite block, not understanding that this has the same effect as proposing a site ban. Using categories based on the difficulty of appeal would make the consequences of enacting a ban more evident. isaacl (talk) 17:41, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The blocked user needs to convince the enacting authority that they can behave appropriately if unblocked

Isn't that true for all blocks though? The main difference is which authority - cbans go to the community, arb bans go to arbcom, blocks by a single admin go to any random admin; the actual trust/welcomeness factor may not be all that relevant. For example, the blocks of editors like ClemRutter, while the actual editor is welcomed by many, are ultimately CIR blocks that aren't going to be undone again, likely ever. Creating a system that puts him in a lesser category than "idiot ten year old who made a bunch of socks, came back at age 13 and is trying to be a productive editor" just creates ambiguity, confusion, and false hope - putting him in a greater category is just going to cause needless offense and pain. (second is also real example, not linking because I had to forward that one to an OS, neither of us seemed to think a block was called for despite the ban evasion) GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 18:25, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
When you are saying that some editors aren't ever going to get unblocked, I was under the impression you mean that there are some bans where the banned user isn't ever going to convince the enacting authority that they can behave appropriately. Thus, I don't think it is true for all bans. An indefinite block is the tool for enforcing a restriction, not the actual restriction itself. I think the best way to communicate the route to return to editing is to explain the restriction and the reason for it, rather than focusing on the tool enforcing the restriction, which can cover multiple situations. isaacl (talk) 00:52, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I was under the impression you mean that there are some bans where the banned user isn't ever going to convince the enacting authority that they can behave appropriately.: Aside from self-disclosed pedophiles, criminals, etc, I'm of the mind that most bans involving on-wiki conduct are reversible given time and reflection. For example, Wonderfool, who deleted the Main Page twice here and several times on Wiktionary, was recently unblocked (now editing as Vealhurl). If Willy on Wheels somehow comes back and requests a convincing unblock, I'm sure the community would agree. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 01:04, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I also think that focussing on the reason for block or ban & discussing it with the editor is far more important than deciding what we're going to call any given rose, if you want to get the editor back.
To clarify the first point, no I do mean that it's easier to appeal certain bans than certain blocks or quasi-bans. I was disagreeing with your categorization system, specifically where you only applied the idea of "convincing the authority" to one type of block. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 01:11, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Conditional bans with a very clear condition don't need convincing. Site bans are ones where there is no foreseeable path to return to editing. Thus with this categorization, convincing the enacting authority plays no role with these two categories. (To clarify, what is currently called a site ban would end up being split across the behavioural ban and "never coming back" site ban categories.)
I think it would better to tell people they are banned for specific reasons, with pointers to how they might be unbanned for cases where that is feasible. "Block" should only be used afterwards to describe how they are technically limited from editing. isaacl (talk) 01:27, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What benefits do you see formalizing such as system as having? GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 06:05, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I apologize for being confused. In each statement I made I discussed how it would be better to focus on the restriction rather than the technical tool being used, and how this would clarify the route to being unbanned. You agreed that it would be better to focus on the reason for the ban. Perhaps you can let me know where additional clarification would help? isaacl (talk) 16:21, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, yeah, and I'm still mostly stuck back on the entire idea of dividing the blocks into categories like 'banned for behaviour' or 'banned for behaviour, but in a way that annoyed the community' or 'banned for technical reasons' - I think there's too many edge cases to actually formalize that (even username blocks can require some degree of convincing,), and the actual line between 'blocked for violating a particular policy' and 'annoying one too many people' is very subjective indeed. We already do tell blocked editors that they need to work on the issues for which they were blocked. We already do mostly focus on the actual reason for the ban far more than the technical side of things, at least from my perspective of watching the unblocks queue like a puma for the better part of a year & looking through historical blocks, so it's not a new idea. The issue is getting said user to actually understand what part of a very abstract set of rules they broke, why it's important, and how they can avoid doing so again - and I just don't see how creating a somewhat arbitrary classification of blocks system could help with that? GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 16:46, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You stated that we shouldn't give editors false hope about being unbanned. I think a lot of the arguing today over whether someone said "support indefinite block" means they supported a site ban is because people want an option where someone is banned from all editing but is given a path to return. But because we don't distinguish between different kinds of site bans, there is no option for this distinction. I think breaking down site bans into "bye for now" and "goodbye" bans would provide this distinction and help with the false hope problem. I appreciate this is more work to figure out, but the only way to avoid giving false hope is to do the work. In my view, it's not a question of the community being annoyed, but if it does not feel there a path to trust the editor again, whether due to repeated poor behaviour, or sufficiently egregious behaviour. I think conditional bans would just provide a simple descriptor for bans where admins say "any admin who verifies this condition has been met can unban". isaacl (talk) 17:11, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Alright, I think I see where you're coming from now - I can maybe see where you're getting at by saying that there could be benefits to creating two sites of site bans, the problem is that this would require the community taking such an option, and form an admin to be OK unilaterally lifting any form of block that had community consensus. After all, in cases with any degree of subjectivity (POV pushing, source-text integrity issues, promotional editing, close paraphrasing), who is to say that the condition has been met? In this hypothetical world, is the guy who promotes his video game, gets told off by an admin, takes to to AN/I only to find himself boomerang condition-banned OK to be unblocked when he agrees not to edit about his video game anymore? What if his example edit is making an edit to an article about a competitor? I'd argue that's still promotional, many other editors wouldn't. How about an edit to the article on a record label associated with the composer he hired? Nothing to do with the video game, of course - but there's a valid argument that this is promotional, and a valid argument that it isn't. An admin might, quite reasonably, think the condition to unban has been met - but oopsie, the community didn't agree. From their POV, is it worth jeopardizing their adminship on behalf of a new editor with NOTHERE/SPA tendencies? On the over end of the spectrum - let's just say that the community conditionally bans an experienced editor for making personal attacks or creepy comments to other editors. The editor has a lot of friends, so the closer did a little bartending and said that it was a conditional ban until the other editor agrees not to make any more personal attacks. Let's say they make an unblock appeal six hours later, agreeing not to make such attacks again- does that mean an individual admin friend , who didn't participate in the AN/I thread, can lift the ban, credibly claiming that they verified the unban conditions had been met? In my second example, there's a much greater incentive to risk adminship & hide behind the shield of "verification" (after all, you get your friend back) than there is the first example, which I'd argue is the type of incidental cban that occurs more often that neither you or I is entirely comfortable with. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 17:32, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My thoughts on categorizing bans weren't about changing the appeal process (just as I don't believe the initial post was about changing process), just better documenting the intent of the community. There is no change to who has authority to lift an editing restriction: it remains within the authority of who enacted the restriction, or within the scope of the governing policy (such as restrictions imposed as arbitration enforcement). So a community-imposed editing restriction has to be appealed to the community. isaacl (talk) 17:51, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
But you can't change one without the other? Any change to how blocks are categorized will impact appeals, just because the type of block is what most people with little to no familiarity with the underlying situation are going to look at. Formalize a category of conditional bans that can be undone the moment some criteria is met? Well, okay, who decides that? The community? You can't legislate community response. Any individual admin? Same issue, most people (especially our admins) are reluctant to go against community consensus (high risk) to unblock somebody who was a poor enough editor to get blocked (low reward). Somebody else? No matter which way you cut it, you're creating (whether intentionally or not) a new appeal system - and one that's a lot more confusing to non-Wikipedians (the average people) than it is to top AN/I and project space posters.
Also ditto Thryduulf - my brand new non-OS example of a "this is technically one kind of block, but the actual edits made it much more complicated" is Misterjamesveitch - softblocked to prevent impersonation of James Veitch (comedian). The AGF explanation for his edits is that it was actually him, but if he hadn't verified his identity that would have had to have turned into a hardblock for serious misconduct. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 18:20, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
We can add categories to articles without changing the process for writing articles. Categorizing types of site bans is for our convenience. It doesn't dictate process. We already have restrictions where the admin says that any admin can lift it if a given condition is met. The categories aren't inventing new types of restrictions. isaacl (talk) 18:28, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And I'm arguing that the actual act of introducing labels would impact the process - also, categories absolutely can impact the writing process. That's why we have categories for stuff like ENGVAR or dates. Yes, they are meant to be descriptors, but "I spent years switching all the spellings in this article to American because the categories told me I could" is a totally valid excuse to avoid being sanctioned, even if the only reason the article is in the category is because of subtle vandalism. Conversely, categories that have no impact are going to have no impact period - I don't see how trying to classify blocks is going to make solving the issue which lead to the block any different, which is what actually matters, and not hundreds of editor hours wasted over what exactly to categorize something as.
Also, the idea that we have "restrictions where the admin says that any admin can lift it if a given condition is met" is fictitious, ultimately. When an admin says that any other admin can lift a block once a condition is met, it means that they won't raise an objection or they themselves would unblock in such a case- they can't actually dictate that other admins not unblock. But we don't have a formal restriction system in place, and, given that admins are all fallible volunteers with minimal oversight, can never have one. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 18:45, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
We have the option to do either: we could change the process and have categories that reflect the changes, or we could not change the process, and define categories as we please to reflect current process. I'm looking at the latter, not the former. I was just laying out some initial thoughts on how, within the current process, bans could be categorized, rather than renaming a tool used to enforce many kinds of bans, with the goal of enabling the community to distinguish between site bans that aren't likely to get lifted versus those where there is a path to lifting the ban. So to me a discussion about how the process can be changed is a different discussion. It might be a fruitful one, but not one I'm trying to address with my thoughts. isaacl (talk) 01:14, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And I suppose where I'm at is that I don't think it's possible to change the process of blocking and the process of appealing - they're simply too dependent on each other. Change what you call a ban, and the appeals process changes to match, even if you don't mean it to. The actual act of labeling impacts it. So, at least from my perspective, you can't talk about one but not the other. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 18:24, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There are also blocks that are not clearly one or the other. For example editors who engage in promotional editing with a promotional username - especially when you need the context of the edits to see that the username is promotional.
More than one of my Oversight blocks have been of minors significantly oversharing while engaging in self promotion - sometimes they even spam their self-promotional material. While requests for unblock following oversight blocks are handled by arbcom rather than any random admin, the block log will typically just say "oversight block" and I'm sure the same applies to normal blocks too. Thryduulf (talk) 17:52, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The examples you raise are, using current terminology, site bans which the enacting authority is willing to lift in favour of a topic ban. Unless otherwise stated, the enacting authority is the one who evaluates the response of the banned user. Within the categorization framework I raised, they are behavioural bans that the enacting authority is willing to lift in favour of a topic ban. isaacl (talk) 17:59, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't consider this a problem and am perfectly happy with the current situation; however, if we need to make it exceedingly clear to those who may think that indefinite means perpetual, I propose calling indefinite blocks "blocks without a fixed duration". Everything else that's been proposed so far is liable to introduce even more confusion, in my opinion. Salvio giuliano 18:49, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with others stating that most of the ideas presented thus far seem like a step backwards with respect to the intended purpose. To be honest, I think "indefinite" is so well suited to this kind of situation that I've started using it in similar contexts outside of Wikipedia, to no confusion as far as I am aware. signed, Rosguill talk 22:53, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think what is getting at here, is that we have a single block "period" that encompasses two very different situations. What we call "indefinite" blocks are called "infinite blocks" in the database, so it is entirely reasonable for people who are blocked for a "curable" reason to believe that they have been banned forever. Realistically, there are a lot of indefinitely blocked accounts that we have zero reason to think will ever be unblocked. At the same time, we also have a lot of accounts that are indefinitely blocked because they need to assure the community that they understand the reason for their block and will not repeat the behaviour that resulted in the block. Quite honestly, I don't actually see any benefit in time-limited blocks. Our blocking policy says that we shouldn't be giving "cool-down" blocks, but that is exactly what a 24 or 36 hour block is. Arbcom stopped giving out time-limited blocks way back in 2009, and has since that time made unblocks conditional on behavioural change.
    I can't see any reason why "conditional block" would be confused with "partial block". Risker (talk) 23:05, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Respectfully, I don't think the average person has the slightest clue what blocks are recorded as in the database; I don't see how that could be a source of confusion. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 23:11, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The average person doesn't get blocked, either indefinitely or infinitely. I hold our administrators in high enough esteem that they can differentiate between making a block that can be cured by the account and one that cannot. Even if that opinion isn't a widely-held one, I think that all our dropdowns should not use the term "infinite" anywhere, or should be a separate alternative to indefinite/conditional. Risker (talk) 23:37, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Changing the dropdowns seems fine. However, this conversation started out with a claim that editors who got blocked were confused by the term "indefinite" (see OP:But I don't think the name of indefinite block really gets across to the average person that you aren't permanently banned, emphasis own); I don't see how changing the admin interface has much, if anything, to do with that?GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 23:49, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It's an idea lab, that means that we should iterate on the idea. There is no such thing as an idea that is fully formed on its first legs. Let's work on looking at the idea and talk about how we can improve on the idea, not just have knee-jerk reactions that something won't work. Some of the ways we can do that might start with "why did we choose these terms in the first place? when did we do that?" We've come up with lots of good ideas over the years, and improved on old ideas. Back in the day, there was no such thing as community bans, or blocks longer than a certain specific time, or admins handing out blocks longer than a month or so. It is good that we have given the space for people to come up with these ideas and helped them to develop them, and to figure out how to shut down experiments that haven't really worked. Please be charitable. The Wikipedia of 2025 is massively different than the one of 2002, or 2010, or 2015, and a lot of those positive changes have started out as seeds like this. Risker (talk) 00:16, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not trying to shut you down? You said that you thought the database could cause people who were blocked to think they were blocked forever, the OP was also talking about confusion for average editors, but when I asked you about that, you started saying that the average person didn't get blocked? I'm trying to follow your train of thought and see where you're going with this by asking you for clarification? GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 00:21, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Technically, people are blocked forever (with a duration of infinite) until someone decides to lift their block. The MediaWiki source code does not have any expectations on whether someone would come along and unblock a user. The problem here is a social one; most normal people don't seem to understand that they are able to appeal their indefinite blocks instead of engaging in sockpuppetry and/or making legal threats. The first thing most users see is Template:Blocked text, and the next is a Template:Uw-block placed on their talk page. Non-admins can't see what the dropdowns say, nor would most users worry about what's in their block log, so all changes, if any, must be made to these two templates. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 00:34, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    ...and, a quick look at CAT:RFU reveals that most new editors have the impulse to use LLMs to generate their unblock requests, which get declined almost instantly, leaving the users frustrated and unsure of what to do next. Keep in mind that most people use AI-powered tools daily, especially in the Global South, where people may not be confident in their ability to write in English on their own (even though many are actually pretty good at it.) A good first step would be to add clear instructions in the Unblock Wizard (do people even use that?) or elsewhere to refrain from using LLMs. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 00:53, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The unblock wizard is more of an idea than something that has actually been implemented at this time. Chaotic Enby created it after a discussion I started here expressing a desire for it because I've cared for a long time about how blocked users don't nessecarily understand the template/what they can do to get unblocked very well and I was inspired by the edit request wizard to see if we could maybe do something different. But an RfC needs to happen before it can be used in the way I envisioned. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 09:23, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The only dropdown I see that has "infinite" as an option comes from MediaWiki:ipboptions, of which Special:Diff/880298592 indicates it's that way because we can't have two options with the same label and says it still shows up as "indefinite" in the logs. Are there others? Anomie⚔ 00:08, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    So...it appears that "infinite" was added with no discussion, as a result of some sort of OOUI change? Why not simply change the dropdown back to indefinite then? There is no discussion that indicates why the word "infinite" was selected. Risker (talk) 00:16, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    "indefinite" is already at the start of the list. To have an indef option at the end too, some other name was needed. As to why "infinite", I have no idea. Anomie⚔ 00:19, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • We should be wary of introducing a second set of vocabulary. The names of blocks currently reflect their direct practical impact on the blocked user: partial, X-hour/day/month, indefinite. Naming blocks after the reason blocks were given, or the expected unblock path, or similar may make the jargon even more jargony. CMD (talk) 06:28, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • My view: If an editor thinks "indefinite" means "forever", they need to improve their vocabulary. "Indefinite" is the clearest way to say it—it literally means "not definite". See dictionary entry for "indefinite". Sure, clarify the PAGs as necessary. ―Mandruss ☎ 2¢ IMO. 06:46, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Except a not definite block is forever unless you successfully appeal it and a lot of people have no idea that you can, whether it's because the word isn't used that often, they assume it's something like "inflammable", or they don't understand the concept of a block being "indefinite" because other websites just permanently ban people and there isn't a block expiration time like there is for the other blocks. I hate to bring Larry Sanger up because I don't think his "9 theses" are practical and they're out of touch at best but stuff like "get rid of indefs" is one of those ideas people have been talking about elsewhere online. I've seen so many people discuss how they basically did stupid teenage things and don't have the secret arcane knowledge of Tamzin's essay because they think it means "game over forever". Given that Sanger describes that the practice as Wikipedia’s draconian practice of indefinite blocking—typically, permanent bans—is unjust. This is no small problem. Nearly half of the blocks in a two-week period were indefinite. This drives away many good editors. Permanent blocks are too often used to enforce ideological conformity and protect petty fiefdoms rather than to serve any legitimate purpose, he seems to think that too. I press x to seriously doubt that admins hand out indefs for "ideological conformity", but the fact the average person's reaction to that statement is not the Wikipedia line of "but it's not technically an infinite block even though it is until you appeal successfully" is a problem worth remedying imo. I'm going to refrain from commenting further because I don't want to bludgeon, but it took me awhile to figure out "how do I express what I'm trying to say here?". Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 09:44, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Haven't read this whole thread, but FWIW, I think the best way to bring policy in line with practice (the practice that's reflected in my mildly heretical essay) is to make it explicit that WP:CLEANSTART is allowed five years after an indefinite block, provided that the block was not to enforce a community or ArbCom sanction, and was not a block that no reasonable admin would lift without community consensus; and that post-block cleanstarts on shorter timeframes may be tolerated on a case-by-case basis if there is no continuation of the underlying disruptive behavior, but that this is not something anyone should rely on. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 09:56, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    ...and if we could trust the indef'd editor to correctly apply all of those provisional criteria to their own situation, they'd probably not be the kind of editor who got indef'd in the first place. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:44, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I repeat: Sure, clarify the PAGs as necessary. But don't mess with a widely-recognized, perfectly good word. ―Mandruss ☎ 2¢ IMO. 10:55, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I have to wonder whether any amount of renaming blocks would really make a difference to that sort of misconception, considering studies have also shown that many people also don't realize that it's possible for them to edit Wikipedia in the first place. Anomie⚔ 13:33, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I believe that editors should spend about as much time finding ways to simplify editing as we spend finding ways to complicate it. I'd estimate that this ratio is traditionally about 1-to-10. ―Mandruss ☎ 2¢ IMO. 14:35, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I wonder about the truthiness of statements like 'blocks drive people away'. Accounts are blocked. Wikimedia doesn't have the tools to block people. People come back with new accounts or as unregistered IPs or both. There is currently no way to stop them. If they are 'good' editors determined to edit Wikipedia and stay out of trouble they are likely have a de facto cleanstart of their own making. Sean.hoyland (talk) 10:51, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • For the standard "indef, not appealable for 1 year" sorts of blocks I think the current terminology is perfectly fine. I do think we should probably split off "indef immediate appeal" blocks for username issues or newbies doing something dumb from "true" indefs though. Loki (talk) 18:47, 2 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps instead of looking at the name used within discussions among editors, we should look at the templates posted to blocked users, and work on clarifying their messages. The name of the technical tool used to enforce the imposed editing restriction doesn't matter, as long as the message clearly explains the reason for the restriction, and the path to have the restriction removed. isaacl (talk) 17:18, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

+1. The same issues also apply for definite but long blocks (months to years). We'd prefer the editor to clean up their act instead of waiting out the block, no matter whether the block has definite or indefinite duration. —Kusma (talk) 17:59, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
+2 This is the best return on effort we are going to get. Tazerdadog (talk) 18:38, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
+3. A blocked editor who has sufficient competence with the English language to constructively edit the English Wikipedia should always be able to clearly understand why they were blocked. They can disagree that that should be something people are blocked for, and they can disagree that what they were saying/doing was an example of that reason for being blocked, but they should always understand what the reason given means. Thryduulf (talk) 19:11, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There is Wikipedia:Unblock wizard, which I recently discovered as it was mentioned in the nomination statements of one of the current RfAs. It's a pretty cool idea, and while I think there is room for improvement in its current form, it could make the process of appealing indefinite blocks much less daunting than it might currently be. Maybe something like this (User:Mz7/sandbox/uw-blockindef-wizard):
Stop icon
You have been blocked indefinitely from editing to prevent further vandalism.
If you believe that there are good reasons for being unblocked, please review Wikipedia's guide to appealing blocks, then use the "request an unblock" button below.
Request an unblock
Mz7 (talk) 04:27, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
How about something like "You have been blocked from editing for [reason]. This block does not have an expiry date set, but if you believe that there are good reasons for being unblocked you may appeal. If you do wish to appeal, please review..."? Thryduulf (talk) 11:09, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Speaking as an American, I prefer "does not have a set expiration date. If you believe...". Otherwise, while I still think it's a little silly that people misconstrue "indefinite" as "infinite", this wording probably is more easily understood. DonIago (talk) 14:21, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. Aaron Liu (talk) 14:37, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm fine with DonIago's suggestion, which reads fine in British English. Thryduulf (talk) 15:39, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I see where you two are going, but those sentences both rate as much more difficult on a bunch of the online grade level/text difficulty checkers I measured them against when compared w/ "You have been blocked indefinitely". Also, the new versions may register as easier in difficulty than they are. Most people learn what expiration means in the context of foot products remaining good to eat, while indefinite pretty much just has the one meaning. Again, I do get why people might confuse it, but indefinite was ranked as a elementary school level word, so you should really know what it means by the time you're twelve, or you should know how to look it up in a dictionary. It's a lot easier than other words we expect people to know, like 'citation', 'plagiarism', and 'consensus', all of which got ranked as college-level. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 16:41, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm admittedly surprised to hear that those alternatives would be considered much more difficult to parse. Is there perhaps a middle ground? "Indefinite" may be ranked as an elementary school level word (and as I've expressed, I personally don't see how it's all that ambiguous), but it's clearly tripping up a number of people, so it seems worth considering options that may trip up fewer people. DonIago (talk) 18:09, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

learn what expiration means in the context of foot products remaining good to eat

That should be enough to understand what an expiration of a block means. And "indefinite" is probably way more obscure than any of "expire"'s meanings (in fact it seems more a middle-school word to me).

know how to look it up in a dictionary

The concern is that scanning eyes will mistake the word as "infinite" far more easily than "expiration". Aaron Liu (talk) 18:31, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm also surprised that these are regarded as more confusing, although I also don't regard "indefinite" as problematic it's clear that some people do. If "expiry date" or "expiration date" are problematic, would "end date" be better? Thryduulf (talk) 18:34, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Readability tools tend to over-focus on the number of syllables in a word or the number of words in a sentence without regard to whether the words are familiar or make sense in context. (Different systems have different metrics.)
If you just split the middle into two sentences:
You have been blocked from editing for [a reason]. This block does not have a set expiration date. If you believe that there are good reasons for being unblocked, you may appeal. If you do wish to appeal, please review...
then that will make a big difference to some of the tools, though not so much to the reality. Expiration, with four syllables, will be rated as difficult by several tools, and you could change it to end, but unless you're expecting a younger child to be reading this, it probably won't make any actual difference.
Alternatively, just try a different reading tool. They're wildly inconsistent, with different tools producing a range of "correct" ratings that can differ by 10 years of education or more for the same text. If you don't like the answer you got with the first tool, then pick a different one until you get the answer you want. Wikipedia:Readability tools links to about 10, if you want to try them out. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:16, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I find the split to make a pretty big difference. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:49, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Aaron Liu, @WhatamIdoing I agree that the shorter sentences are much more clear. David10244 (talk) 03:47, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'll throw in the idea I had, how about "Appeal only block" or "Appeal required block". It gets the info you want right out front, that they can appeal, and that its the only way to remove the block. HypnoticCringer (talk) 02:39, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • Indefinite blocks are logical name for blocks of indefinite duration. We could call them permanent blocks, but indefinite works better than any other suggestion I've heard so far. If we want a change to the system I would rather look at the blocking of IP addresses when we hard block accounts. I think such IP blocks are permanent and it would probably make sense and greatly reduce collateral damage to make these "intelligent blocks" either a fixed duration or O/S dependent. ϢereSpielChequers 20:24, 31 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I think such IP blocks are permanent: Nope, underlying IP addresses are autoblocked for a duration of 24 hours, regardless of the block duration you apply on the account. That's why sockpuppetry is so common. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 20:27, 31 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

TL:DR. I got tagged...As a former user who deleted the main page (not sorry about that), I always thought "indef" wasn't quite right. "long-term block" would always make more sense Vealhurl (talk) 16:07, 1 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Long-term" wouldn't make more sense; an indef can be quite brief, if the editor appeals successfully. Schazjmd (talk) 16:29, 1 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
How about "Open-ended block"? All the best: Rich Farmbrough 13:54, 2 November 2025 (UTC).[reply]
One of the better options, though I'm a little concerned it might seem overly euphemistic. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:40, 2 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Clearer might be "Blocked until successful appeal" but too wordy. Schazjmd (talk) 16:29, 2 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I still like my original suggestion of conditional block. Simple yet concise. However, if nothing about the name of the block itself is changed, I agree that making the Twinkle templates as clear as possible is a good idea. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:06, 2 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes but indefinite is clearer and also includes asking for clemency. Appeals are for mistaken blocks, after 6 months you can promise to obey the rules as per the standard offer and in most cases that will get you unblocked. ϢereSpielChequers 17:25, 2 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Publicize WP:RSP ratings

[edit]

In the articles about Wikipedia's potential sources, such as The New York Times, mention the RSP rating in some fashion; e.g. "Wikipedia considers the Times a generally reliable source."

If it's permitted to link from mainspace to WP space, the article could even link to the RSP rating.

If this were placed in a separate section with a standard heading (similar to See also), that would make the information that much easier to find in the article. I know, many editors dislike one-sentence sections, and there's probably a guideline discouraging it. I think an IAR exception would be justified in this case.

If a citation |work= parameter linked to the article (I believe it should), a reader could see what we think of the source. That would support verifiability and improve transparency. ―Mandruss ☎ 2¢ IMO. 13:27, 28 October 2025 (UTC) Edited per discussion 23:47, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt this will gain acceptance (whether Wikipedia considers something a reliable source or not really isn't relevant to the topic in the majority of cases), but it'll be interesting to see how many bad policy and guideline references people use when opposing it. Anomie⚔ 15:01, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Alternatively, create a new CS1 citation parameter that produces an icon in the rendered citation, indicating its RSP rating. Green check mark, etc. That would be ideal, but it would require more work for both Trappist and general editors. ―Mandruss ☎ 2¢ IMO. 15:09, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That idea sounds like something better suited to a user script than a CS1 parameter. In fact, I'd be a little surprised if such a script doesn't already exist, as it seems like something people doing FA reviews and new article patrolling would find really helpful. Anomie⚔ 15:14, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A script run by a roaming bot. ―Mandruss ☎ 2¢ IMO. 15:16, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There is a user script somewhere, someone mentioned it to me the other day. Katzrockso (talk) 00:35, 1 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm leaning towards opposing this on the basis that "generally reliable"/"generally unreliable"/"deprecated" are Wikipedia jargon that most of our readers will misunderstand. signed, Rosguill talk 15:21, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think it's in the encyclopedia's interest to shield readers from understanding of Wikipedia content policy. If they "misunderstand", it's because they haven't been educated. Readers aren't stupid, for the most part. ―Mandruss ☎ 2¢ IMO. 16:34, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It’s not about readers being stupid, my concern is that it’s not possible to explain the nuances of how we treat this in practice while holding to WP:DUE. Anecdotally, RS tend to only discuss RSP when they’re talking about Wikipedia; I am skeptical that RS coverage of NYTimes, for example, is ever going to center Wikipedia’s assessment of it as a source. signed, Rosguill talk 16:56, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Rosguill.
Also, who says that readers actually want to spend any part of their life "being educated" about Wikipedia's content policy? Most people are just looking for a quick fact: What's the website for this company? What's the name of that actor in that film? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:02, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I admit that I am a little wary of RSP ratings, because folks treat them as a binary yes/no when WP:RSCONTEXT is still a guideline. The New York Times for example would not be a reliable source for medical claims. Even the most fake of sources are reliable sources for their own claims (although WP:DUE is then often a problem). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:49, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As a side note, I invite you all to Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Restructuring RSP.
In line with what Jo-Jo Eumerus says here, several of us have explicitly opposed a "cheat sheet" or "quick look up" that would give only the name of the source and its general category (this suggestion would have a link to further information, but we fear that most editors would only look for the color coding and not care about the details. For example, we've got one "GUNREL" and one "deprecated" news source whose explanatory text says that their sports coverage is okay – but you won't notice that, if you just look for the colored icon and believe that it applies to everything). No source is reliable for everything, and any source can be reliable for something. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:05, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I have contemplated writing a user script to indicate a media outlet's status from @Headbomb's WP:UPSD or RSP. (Just an idea at this stage. I haven't thought about how to implement it yet.) Due to the current PEIS issues, if I see an unfamiliar source mentioned in a discussion I am more likely to look for an article describing it than try to load the whole RSP. I agree that RS assessments generally shouldn't be included in articles as they could introduce more confusion or misunderstanding among non-insiders. ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 22:29, 28 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Have you looked at m:Meta:Cite Unseen? (Pinging @SuperGrey) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:23, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Of course, it's become indispensable for identifying problematic references just by glancing at a reference list, but it doesn't (AFAIK) tell me anything about a source when I'm reading an article about that source. ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 09:57, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Usually, by the time I'm looking at a Wikipedia article about a source, I want to know about the source, rather than about which discrete pigeonhole an RFC shoved the source in. We have many sources at RSP that are "generally reliable, except for X" or "generally unreliable, except for Y", and several sources that have to be divided up (e.g., there are three separate rows in RSP for Fox News – politics and talk shows aren't reliable, but ordinary, non-political news may be okay). WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:45, 1 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This sounds a lot like navel gazing. Wikipedia doesn't consider a source to be reliable or unreliable, they may be a consensus of editors that a source is unreliable or reliable for the purposes of Wikipedia. Although discussions tend to use the former wording, the actual meaning is always the latter. That some editors on Wikipedia considers a sources as more or less usable when writing articles doesn't seem like something that should be included in an article about the source. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 21:03, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think we're past inclusion in the articles. As the proposer, I am. ―Mandruss ☎ 2¢ IMO. 22:41, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you don't want people to respond to that part of your proposal anymore, I suggest striking it. jlwoodwa (talk) 23:41, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
that part of your proposal That's the entire proposal, but I am striking it. ―Mandruss ☎ 2¢ IMO. 23:47, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Consider putting the rating on the talk page instead? If we did that, then I bet some helpful person could make a script, so opting-in editors would see deprecated sources highlighted in %_colour, generally reliable ones in %_colour, and the ones in between in %_colour (hopefully user-configurable and thus colour-blindness friendly). Would be helpful for me to glance at an article's reflist and see that.—S Marshall T/C 22:40, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are at least 3 citation highlighter scripts. The one I made is User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/CiteHighlighter. This allows one to easily see a source's RSP rating in the article. It also pulls data from some more obscure sources, such as WikiProject reliable sources lists. Hope this helps someone. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:48, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • If Wikipedia's decision to report a source at RSP is itself commented on by reliable sources (e.g. Anti-Defamation League#Wikipedia determination of unreliability on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict), it does make sense. Otherwise, there isn't a reason to report on Wikipedia's decision in particular, and material for the benefit of editors can go on the talk page like S Marshall suggests. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 09:51, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    If Im skimming this correctly, the OP wants a mention on the source article page. I have thought about that for awhile, and thought maybe it could go on the talkpage. But this is yet another problem with RSPS. There is an RFC on that ongoing I think. ← Metallurgist (talk) 04:55, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I do think that reliable quality sources is at the heart of Wikipedia (vs. not in Grokopedia), and that rating / grading the best sources is a critical part of Wikipedia. In that regard, labelling the sources that Wikipedia think are quality and reliable (and have !voted on) should be a natural output of our work. It could even drive more engagement in Wikipedia as I often see that long RfCs about various sources have gotten coverage outside of Wikipedia. Aszx5000 (talk) 13:09, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Article wizard should impose a process

[edit]

I looked today for the first time at the article wizard. It seems to be no more than a set of warnings to ignore and click through, followed by free-form editing. That's not a wizard, it's just a slow-motion nag screen. A real wizard forces you to make appropriate choices in an appropriate order, and a real wizard would be nice to have on Wikipedia. In my opinion, probably the best thing it could do is disallow writing any text until you have cited several reliable sources, and then only allow you to type "under" the sources you've specified, so that you are required to attribute every word you type to one of your sources, and no freestanding sentences are possible. (With, of course, an "add new source" button easily accessible.)

The concept of writing an article "backwards" is often mentioned as a problem. The point of my suggestion is that the function of the article wizard ought to be to force people to write "forwards" - not to give warnings and advice and then turn them loose to do whatever. TooManyFingers (talk) 05:56, 1 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like good UI design. Well-designed wizards etc. can make various types of errors impossible, including the ones stated above. ―Mandruss ☎ 2¢ IMO. 06:00, 1 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A wizard that is giving blank pages to end users is not ideal. I would like one where you have sections per-arranged in a template and this template would also include a place to paste a reference. LDW5432 (talk) 03:46, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@TooManyFingers, it looks like you've never tried to write an article. Were you looking at the Wikipedia:Article wizard because you wanted to start Your first article? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:12, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No, I was looking at it to think of ways it could be made even more useful than it currently is, by actually compelling some good habits rather than just recommending them during the "click through and ignore" preliminary messages. (Of course I know no one ought to click through and ignore, but it's clear to both of us that that frequently happens.) TooManyFingers (talk) 05:20, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe you should create a couple of articles before you decide which the advice is helpful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:27, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think headings are barely even a concern. If someone gets them wrong, they're easy to change. IMO, forcing people to adhere to their source material - or else be shut out of writing until they specify the sources - could be extremely helpful.
If I see an article with no headings, I can often give it some semi-reasonable headings in just a few minutes of very light work (depending on its length and complexity of course). But an article that isn't written according to its sources is a discouraging, time-consuming, conflict-filled mess to sort out. TooManyFingers (talk) 05:39, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
meta:Research:Guided article and section creation has been studying this exact aspect, and their report was published last week! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 05:05, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

AI citation-checking bot

[edit]
Please note: this is not a proposal for AI editing of Wikipedia articles, but rather for AI annotation via templates to aid human reviewers.

Wikipedia has always had the priniciple of supporting material in articles citations to reliable sources. But do those sources actually check the content cited? It's asy to put citations into articles, but does anybody check them. This problem has also recently been exacerbated by the introduction of AI editing that generates pseudo-articles with bogus citations.

This is an ideal opportunity for the use of LLM technology. Here's the idea:

  • a bot reads a Wikipedia articles, and retrieves all the cited sources that are fetchable at that moment
  • point by point, it compares each paragraph/sentence in the article with the cited sources. If it's all fine, it just marks the article with a review template that states that the article has been auto-reviewed, and when.
  • If any material is either unsupported by the cited material or contradicted by it, it surrounds that material with some variation of {{citation needed span}}, with parameters that specify when it was auto-reviewed and what's wrong with it. Maybe from a small range of choices: "source disagrees", "source does not support", and with a free-text comment. Perhaps it also puts in a short checksum (say 6 hex digits) of the enclosed content, so that changes to that content are easily detectable in later scans. The article is also marked by an invisible template in the same way as above. It could also generate "source unavailable" annotations, or edit URLs if sources get moved.

And that's it for the automation. Now comes the human part. Once articles have been marked, they will automatically be put into categories by the template, marking them for human review. Human editors can then confitm whether the bot is right, by removing the bot metadata from the template, turning it into a human review, or by removing or amending the material, in the normal Wikipedia fashion.

So this is bot-annotation, not bot-editing: the bot should never make any changes to actual article text other than adding the templates. We can set the threshold for false positives quite high, so it should generate very few of them. And we can also make the bot respect human annotation: if it flags something as bogus, and a human editor disagrees and removes its annotation, the bot won't keep on making the same warning over and over again.

All this fits entirely within the existing Wikipedia ecosystem of bots, templates and categories.

Running this bot on millions of pages may work out quite expensive, but that's what grant funding is for. Even if it only costs $0.01 per article, that's still $70,000 to scan the whole encyclopdia - but the gains in reliability and authenticity should be well worth the cost. Whether this is a small amount of money or a large amount of money depends entirely which end of the telescope you are looking down.

Some extra comments:

  • Wikipedia Library access could provide access to references which are behind paywalls
  • Also, while it's at it, it can also check that the given citation template actually matches the content of the cited source - author, title, publication date, etc.
  • Writing the bot is the easy part

— The Anome (talk) 16:39, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is the holy grail, right? And if it can verify existing, why not also find sources for uncited material. People are working on this later idea right now. With human in the loop. But I think your idea makes sense, it only requires test cases to see how well it works in practice. If the false positive rate is low enough that editors trust it. — GreenC 17:01, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think putting sources for uncited material into articles would be dangerous. The bot should only flag, never edit. What it might perhaps do is to add suggested source recommendations to talk pages to allow human editors to review those sources themselves. There should always be a human in the loop, or it just becomes encyclopedia-slop, and that's all too easy to generate these days. — The Anome (talk) 17:05, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The Anome, "with human in the loop" is confirmed, what I said right. Nobody is advocating for fully automated AI anything, that's obviously a bad idea. — GreenC 21:38, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@GreenC I've had bad experiences with the latter. There are facts that I know are true due to first-hand experience, but when I've asked an LLM to find me reliable sources so that I can add them to Wikipedia, it confidently feeds me a bunch of links to websites that don't actually verify the statement. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 19:14, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No you can't do it that way. There are other techniques though that can work. — GreenC 21:44, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I am not confident in the ability of llms to handle verifying citations as citation use lies further from being a close paraphrase towards uses that require actual textual understanding. There would need to be a pretty convincing display to support editing articles directly, even if it is just adding a template. Marking this for human review risks creating a whole new backlog as long as the encyclopaedia, plus an explicitly bot template implicitly suggests to readers that llms are involved in the editing process. The way I've envisioned such a tool being most useful is something similar to WP:EARWIG, where a report can be generated on request for easy review, perhaps in two neat columns. This would help with things like GAN spotchecking. CMD (talk) 17:16, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You might be right: perhaps report generation is the right way to go, rather than direct editing of articles. But I think it should be a within-wiki process (perhaps on the talk page?) rather than an outside-wiki process. Putting it on talk pages would also mean that it could perhaps be flagged for the attention of relevant WikiProjects. — The Anome (talk) 17:28, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The talkpage might work for short articles the way some bots post there, but it would be unworkable for longer articles. If you intend it to be something that can be updated to take into account human review (eg. noting that source X actually does support text Y) I could see how it might function on an onwiki subpage that can be updated, but that brings its own set of additional coding complications that a one-off post would not have. CMD (talk) 17:45, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In early stages, you'd probably want to run it on a single ==Section== of an article at a time. Nobody's going to actually check hundreds of sources to see whether the AI got it right. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:18, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Given my experience with LLMs, I am not confident in their ability to understand and interpret sources well enough to have any use for this sort of project.
Recently Acrobat has incorporated a LLM that will summarize key points of a pdf document. I tried it on some reports from work and the results were less than inspiring. It did not understand what the most important parts of the document were, did not know the meaning of phrases, at times giving them the opposite of what they were saying, and was generally worthless in summarizing the document. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 17:46, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Based on my understanding of LLM function and architecture, I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that they are suited to directly do the operation proposed by Anomie; perhaps as part of a larger piece of software that incorporates LLM functionality alongside small language model heuristics, it could work. But as a general rule, LLMs don’t verify things, they extrapolate guesses. signed, Rosguill talk 17:50, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No. The sheer number of hallucinated references/references that do not support the content they are cited for in LLM-generated articles is convincing proof that LLMs cannot ensure source-to-text accuracy. The systems have no concept of "correct" and "incorrect", only "likely" and "not likely".
Besides, a similar verification idea has been rejected before; see WP:PADEMELONS. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 20:54, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I find merit in the idea of a bot which can identify and tag articles for bias by looking for emotional language. Then a human can review it and stop hallucinations. LDW5432 (talk) 03:41, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@LDW5432 assuming it wouldn't be too much of a stretch for me to interpret you saying emotional language above to mean "non-neutral language," I wonder if you might find value in the editcheck-tone tag.
In essence, this tag gets appended to edits a small language model trained on 20,000 Wikipedia edits thinks are adding non-neutral language to Wikipedia articles. You can |see it in action in Special:RecentChanges here and learn more about the Tone Check, the broader feature behind it here: wp:Edit check/Tone Check. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 22:56, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As mentioned above, LLMs are really bad at facts. It's not what they do. The law of pademelons shows that LLMs can very easily conflate similar things, to a greater extent than a careful human editor. Cremastra (talk · contribs) 15:47, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think, based on my recent real-world experience on other projects, LLMs might well do much better at verifying specific claims as they relate specific documents, rather than verifying it against their rather nebulous knowledge of the world. Using 'thinking' and asking them to explain their rationale for their decision, and then running a separate checker pass on verifying that explanation before coming to a final conculsion, should have very much better results than 'true or not?'. This because where they really excel is as language transformers, not as oracles. I've got API accounts on a variety of LLMs, and doing the Python coding isn't really hard - pehaps I should do some experiments, and see how well this works compared to human review, before people jump to conclusions about how well it would work. — The Anome (talk) 21:55, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think something like this is a good idea but I'm not super convinced by the specific implementation above.
In particular I don't want a bot adding {cn} tags to the actual article itself. If the point of this is to do bot-annotation not bot-editing, a {cn} tag is absolutely bot-editing. It's taken widely to mean that the content that is tagged is dubious, and for good reason. (Also I'd like to point out here that if we were going to do this the actual template we'd want to use is {failed verification}.)
Ideally we'd put this information into a separate list somewhere so a human can check it before any editing to the article actually happens. If that's not practical, the tag we'd actually want is a custom tag that says something like [a bot reviewed this claim and thinks it failed verification], though obviously shorter than that. Loki (talk) 22:53, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@LokiTheLiar: could you please say a bit more about what you can "see" this list looking like and being used for? Asked another way: what information can you imagine being available within this list? How/when would it get updated? Where could you imagine this list living? Who is looking at this list and what action(s) are they taking on each item within it? PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 22:59, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
While I'm not sure how I originally imagined this looking, right now I think a table like Ca did below for their experiment works well. Maybe with fields along the lines of claim, sources, verified?, explanation. Available to any editor, auto-updated by bot, on some sort of Wikipedia/ namespace page maybe linked from Template:Failed verification like Category:All articles with failed verification currently is. Loki (talk) 23:31, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Verifying specific claims is definitely something that would be interesting, and, while I'm not certain that this will work out, I do believe that it is absolutely worth a shot to try to develop it. "Is X sentence supported by Y text" is a much more specific task than "write a Wikipedia article about Z", and one for which LLMs could potentially be used (and even, if needed, fine-tuned). It will take some time before we have something that is ready (and trusted enough) to be run at the scale of the encyclopedia, and it might not turn out to be reliable enough to be worthwhile, but it might just work, and I would be glad to help with this project if you want to go forward! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 03:31, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. It's the specific nature of the problem that is interesting here, and makes it more plausible that this might actually work, by avolding treating the LLM as an oracle. Thanks for the offer of help, I'll see what I can do. — The Anome (talk) 03:39, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I was unaware of this discussion whe I vibecoded today a python script that pulls the text of a list of Wikipedia articles, inputs it into the chatgpt model of your choice (I used gpt-5 mini), looks for 1 factual inaccuracy, and spits out the results into a wikitext table. With an n of 4, I found no issues, including one article where it didn't find anything, 2 articles where it found clear in inaccuracies, and 1 article where it found something that while supported by a source may be incorrect based on the weighting of other sources. Because I wrote it to use the OpenAI API, I didn't run it too widely though my back of envelope calculations suggests it could be run fairly economically (especially if I adjusted the prompt to cut down on the verbosity of the output (which is the most costly part). Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 03:52, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There is someone in the Village pump who posted something similar: Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#c-86.33.69.28-20251015115200-Pilot project for GPT-5 powered article bias analysis WikiTool LDW5432 (talk) 03:58, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I am much less comfortable with using LLMs to measure bias, as it is less likely that they will correctly weigh dozens of RS, and they might just as well flag words that carry some emotional weight without checking whether sources justify them. Especially since sentiment analysis is a much more common task and one which the model is likely to mix up with bias analysis. Plus, it's much harder to get an AI to search for, retrieve and synthesize many sources vs to read one given source they get as input. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 04:04, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In addition to what CE said, the biggest issue with using LLMs for bias analysis is that what sounds neutral to an outside observer and what is actually demanded by our WP:NPOV policy can be wildly different.
So for instance, the last sentence of the first paragraph of Zionism:

Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.

is not neutral-sounding at all, but because the NPOV policy is about reflecting the balance of sources and not some kind of view-from-nowhere, it's not only in compliance with NPOV but NPOV basically forces us to say it like that. The number of scholarly sources that support that statement is more than I've seen for any other claim on the whole wiki, so there's really no way we could even hedge it.
And especially in articles in contentious topic areas we have tons of cases like this, where high quality scholarly sources agree on something that doesn't sound particularly neutral in a lay political context. Loki (talk) 04:18, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You don't even have to look at contentious topics. "There is no such thing as ghosts", which is not "neutral" to the billions of people worldwide who believe in ghosts.
I spent several years at Breast cancer awareness helping editors grasp the difference between what reliable sources said on the subject and what the popular opinion is. After all, neutral is what the best sources say, and while all significant viewpoints need to be represented, those viewpoints are best supported by scholarly sources instead of fundraising/promotional sources. (With Komen's near collapse a few years back, the pressure of Pinktober has decreased.)
Towards the end of every October, I check Poisoned candy myths, because we sometimes have people who are just sure that it's "not neutral" to plainly state that no child has ever died by because a stranger gave poisoned candy to trick-or-treaters. And almost every December, there's someone complaining that Santa Claus is not neutral, since it (gently!) says that Santa is "legendary" instead of "real". Most of them are afraid that their children will read the Wikipedia article and discover the facts (but kids who are capable of understanding that article are old enough that believing in Santa would be an age-inappropriate belief). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:46, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • As others have said, you cannot just ask an LLM for fact checks or reliable sources that are new (as in, external to Wikipedia's current text) using a pretrained model with its existing knowledge base and a limited tool ability to web search or call the Wikipedia API. It will provide the same old ones (from Wikipedia) or it will hallucinate new ones that don't exist. But what you can do and it works reasonably well is download a bunch of PDFs or web pages and upload them and tell the LLM to read them all and provide you with verbatim quotes and page numbers and authors and dates for everything alongside whatever new generated text it makes - a report, or summary, or fact checks or tasks, in a constrained mode. Then you can check those with non-LLM code or by hand to eliminate hallucinations. Some will even highlight the PDF to show and make checking easier, YMMV. You can also give a document to an LLM, along with a statement, and ask it if the document supports the statement, and to provide verbatim proof. This produces fewer hallucinations and they are caught. I think having a bot to do this is a good idea. It could leave messages on a talk page or in its own set of user pages or in an interface. It would speed up improvement of thinly patrolled and maintained articles and it's a way to use LLMs for good without actually generating the article text itself, which does not work well and shouldn't be done. Andre🚐 05:14, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Nope doesn't work that way. Even when given sources, AI "summaries" usually introduce their own interpretations of the material -- which frequently follow the same contours as the usual WP:AISIGNS slop, just in this case put in someone else's mouth.
Here's an example from Grokipedia (choosing it because we know unambiguously it's AI text, because it really likes to claim it "fact-checks" everything, and also to dunk on Grok) This sentence from their "Woman article" -- Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), drawing on the historical trauma of slavery, earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and contributed to her 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, emphasizing African American experiences through nonlinear storytelling -- is cited to this Reddit poll. Nothing after "Toni Morrison's Beloved" appears in that thread. Gnomingstuff (talk) 07:34, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • That is exactly what AI is incapable of doing: checking sources. Don't believe me. Pick a big topic on Crockipedia. Go through the "sources" at the bottom in the form of raw URL links. Start counting how many are inaccurate or utter fabrications. Have fun with it. We need to keep AI as far away from WP as possible as its enshitification of the internet proceeds apace. Carrite (talk) 08:47, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Pointing to one particular human editor who is doing a bad job on Wikipedia, to criticize the whole of the editors collectively, would be absurd. I believe it's similar to use Grok as an example and extrapolate the claim to all AI. Nobody here is saying Grok is good, and nobody is suggesting we use Grok. JezzaHehn (talk) 14:40, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

On the contrary, the motivation behind this is to avoid exactly the sort of errors found on Grokipedia. This is a bug detector, not an article generator. I've been experimenting with the following procedure:

  1. Select an article using 'Random article'
  2. Get Claude to perform a review of that article, giving it the article's wikitext as an input (Claude, and I imagine other LLM agents, has been blocked from accessing Wikipedia directly.)
  3. Based on that, tell it to perform a set of web searches to find sources to confirm or deny any factual errors it thinks it may have found. (It incorrectly 'believes' that it cannot access the web unless actually told to.) It is forbidden to use Wikipedia as a source. I may later add more stringent criteria on sources.
  4. Based on the output of those seatches, perform a review of the claims based on the evidence it has found
  5. Finally, based on that, select the single correction out of the remaining errors that it is most confident about.

This multi-stage systematic approach has worked very well. Among other things, it has successfully made Claude detect and correct its own initially mistaken error reports, on finding that the sources actually back the article, leaving only valid reports of minor typographical errors. I've hand-reviewed all the remaining error reports, and every one of them has been accurate.

This should work as well with any other LLM, and it would probably make sense to use different LLMs to perform reviews to eliminate common-mode errors. — The Anome (talk) 10:45, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This sounds promising, but I think it would be better if the prompt also included the full text of all of the available sources. Then you could ask it to verify each claim based off the citation and output chunks of the source which verify the claim. That would massively speed up the manual process of verification, but still leave it to humans to make the final evaluation. Hopefully including the sources would reduce the hallucinations as it would only be working with the prompt. SmartSE (talk) 13:41, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is an interesting process. You should create a flowchart for it. LDW5432 (talk) 13:57, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder if it's possible to compare the reliability of such a process to human reliability. AIs are error-prone, but more error prone than human reviewers? I am not so sure, especially when dealing with long articles where humans get tired/overwhelmed/eyes-glazing-over after a while. Granted, my personal idea of using AI would be to compare each claim to its reference, not the entire article as a whole. That denies us several benefits of whole-article comparisons but might (or might not) produce fewer hallucination errors. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:20, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
When it comes to the field of medicine, especially but not only radiology, AI is being used rolled out to the "real world" quite tangibly including GPTs and other LLMs, not just image analysis models. (citation for this claim) So assuming we do not consider the accuracy of Wikipedia to be more vital than the accuracy of medicine being practiced on humans, I'm confident LLMs can be used to increase the accuracy of human editors who are trying their best to add good citations. JezzaHehn (talk) 01:13, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure this claim really makes sense (even though I'm fairly positive about this idea in general).
By analogy, computers have been used to do math in all fields including medicine for a long time, and have been highly reliable at that since the 50s. However, despite this fact, computers have never been useful at writing encyclopedia articles.
Just because an LLM is good at one thing doesn't mean it's good at some totally different thing. We're not doing medical scans here, so proof that AI is good at medical scans isn't very relevant. Loki (talk) 01:35, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
To clarify my point, I bring up the distinction between "image analysis models" and "GPTs and other LLMs" because the use of AI in radiology is not limited to the analysis of the pixels in scans, but also includes textual summaries of medical information, intended to be read by medical professionals. The crux of my point is that if LLMs, when handled with an appropriate amount of delicacy, are good enough for medicine with the highest demands of accuracy, then we would have a great bit of hubris to claim that a well-handled LLM isn't good enough for Wikipedia. JezzaHehn (talk) 14:17, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The key part in that last sentence is well-handled. The community is hostile to LLMs mainly because poorly handled LLM-generated output is bad, and the vast majority of editors using LLMs do not properly check the output. More often then not, users just copy-paste raw LLM output to create articles; this page, which I preserved in my userspace, is an example of what this raw copy-pasted LLM output looks like, complete with communication intended for the user and Markdown formatting instead of wikitext.
If LLM output is properly reviewed, it can be useful. There are in fact editor-developed tools that use LLMs for recent changes patrolling, like User:Ca/Automated RCP and Wikipedia:WikiShield (developed by LuniZunie, pro-anti-air, and monkeysmashingkeyboards). The best way to try something out is to write a user script or gadget, as Wikipedians have strongly objected to LLM-powered tools on the server side. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 14:58, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Do we have a filter which detects phrases like "is there anything else"? LDW5432 (talk) 19:20, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Special:AbuseFilter/1325 SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 19:23, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That's intriguing.
LDW5432 (talk) 19:33, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I feel as if I should add onto this. I am the one who originally created Wikipedia:WikiShield and added the LLM detection. Firstly, there are actually two different LLM prompts being used: one that checks the edit, and one that checks for usernames that go against Wikipedia:UAA. Both have issues, and need to be fact checked. But, when used properly, they can be incredibly useful. There have been multiple cases where I have missed a username that the LLM caught, and there have also been multiple times where I would have missed some pretty obvious vandalism if it weren't for the LLM detection.
However, it still has a LOT of issues. One of the funniest ones is that the Wikipedia:UAA LLM flagged @Pro-anti-air (one of the co-creators of Wikipedia:WikiShield) not once, but twice. So, yes, LLMs can be useful; but they still require a lot of checking on the human's part.
My stance is this: The LLM should not directly change your mind on anything. There is a reason we have human editors and not a bunch of AI bots. What LLMs can be used for, is to present information you may have missed, which can then be taken into account and analyzed by the human editor. – LuniZunie ツ(talk) 01:59, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that some type of LLM add-on will increase neutrality on Wikipedia. And if a human can review what the LLM does then even better. LDW5432 (talk) 01:44, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No, that won't work because of algorithmic bias. Most LLMs are inherently slanted left on the left-right political spectrum. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 19:26, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
+1 – LuniZunie ツ(talk) 02:01, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Cross-linking the new Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Tools which might interest some of you here! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 06:27, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Neutrality policy for genocide

[edit]
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Brainstorming has continued on Wikipedia:Genocide. -- Beland (talk) 18:24, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Should Wikipedia have a neutrality policy that gives more specific guidance on how to describe genocide or alleged genocide? If so, what should it say? (A new WP:GENOCIDE was proposed on Talk:Gaza genocide, where many comparisons have been made to other genocide articles. I am not expressing an opinion on this question, just moving the conversation here.) -- Beland (talk) 01:43, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To clarify (and based on comments so far), this is not necessarily a suggestion that Wikipedia should come up with its own definition of genocide and just use that (but advocate for that if you want). It could instead be a guide that points editors to common definitions used in the field, documents technicalities and sensitivities of various terminology, helps identify expert sources, and helps editors apply NPOV and other policies to statements. On the reader side, we have some of this information in List of genocides and Genocide definitions. We could also make this broader than just genocide to include other violent or otherwise sensitive types of event, add some words to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch, or abandon this whole idea because instruction creep or some other reason. -- Beland (talk) 09:27, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]


A serious question: why create a guideline for this particular label and not others? What purpose would it achieve given that guidelines are superseded by policies that are usually diligently applied to contested labels? M.Bitton (talk) 01:54, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Would you prefer to see genocide, or some broader list of labels added to MOS:LABEL? Or if we're creating a new page, would you prefer it to cover a broader scope, like violence or government acts or something else? -- Beland (talk) 02:04, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose using a different standard for genocide than other events would itself be a form of bias, in favor of those who argue that genocide is exceptional rather than a recurrent theme in history. (t · c) buidhe 01:56, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
One option is to write up guidance that maintains the current policy, but just explains in more detail how it applies to genocide. Another option would be to write an explanatory extension with a broader scope - I think some editors suggested violent acts in general. Genocide and murder, for example, have technical legal definitions which make them different from mass killing and individual killing; it might help editors to have an explanation of the special considerations around those terms for that reason. -- Beland (talk) 02:06, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
From my conversations with genocide scholars, the legal definition(s) of genocide are highly criticized for a number of reasons. I don't know if enshrining these into Wikipedia policy is a good idea (and indeed, as buidhe notes may itself violate NPOV). Katzrockso (talk) 02:11, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It sounds like you're thinking the guidance would be "if it's not legally considered a genocide, Wikipedia can't say it's a genocide". That doesn't have to be the case. Given this concern, what would you advise editors on how to use the word "genocide" in Wikipedia's voice? -- Beland (talk) 02:15, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No different than the advice for editors on any other topic - through consensus-building and the weighted balance of reliable sources. That this topic area needs a specific guideline is not clear to me at all. Katzrockso (talk) 04:16, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Pointing to my own comment below as to what a guideline could do to help: we don't want a guideline telling us what is and isn't genocide, but one telling us how best to assess and weigh reliable sources in this area. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 04:20, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it would be a form of bias to pick and choose between the many definitions of genocide used in academic research. Relatively few genocide scholars besides the lawyers actually use the UN Convention definition. (t · c) buidhe 05:58, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's also possible to write a guideline that's biased in favor of those who argue genocide is not exceptional, depending on the wording, no? If you were going to advise editors on how to use the word "genocide" in Wikipedia's voice, given this concern, what would you say? -- Beland (talk) 02:52, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It should be treated the same as any other text, write what most of the scholarly sources say. (t · c) buidhe 05:59, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Support Emotionally charged words like "massacre" and "genocide" should have a NPOV guideline for the project. The resulting policies should be added to WP:WORDS and other relevant sections. LDW5432 (talk) 03:18, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would oppose having one specifying on a single term and giving our own definition of the term (which might not follow what reliable sources use), although a wider guideline about emotionally charged words would absolutely be helpful. I don't think it should be part of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch as these aren't words that should be avoided (and we don't want to introduce bias by toning down languages), but it could be a separate guideline cross-linked from there.
As for the content of the guideline, it shouldn't write our own definition for these terms, but give indication as to how we should best follow reliable sources. For example, how much weight should be given to experts vs media vs governments, what level of consensus (affirmative consensus vs silent consensus) is enough for these labels, when to attribute claims vs use wikivoice, or whether we should have separate guidelines for titles and prose (cf. Tamil genocide for an example where the title uses "genocide" but the prose clarifies it as a specific framing rather than a consensus). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 03:26, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with this take. There are cases where having a literal flowchart can be useful (see WP:DEATHS) but I don't think this is one of them. Instead we should have a more general guideline about what kinds and numbers of sources we need to have to justify charged terms. Loki (talk) 04:22, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As I questioned above (funny that you replied to me there as I was writing my comment here), what necessitates an extended guideline for this topic that isn't already covered by our existing policies and guidelines? All of the things you describe seem to be adequately covered by our existing guidelines, from what I have seen. At best, what you describe here seems to warrant an essay or a page on Wikipedia:WikiProject Genocide, not a guideline. Katzrockso (talk) 04:22, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
While I agree that it would proceed from our existing guidelines, there have been recurrent discussions about how exactly they should be applied to represent sources about possible genocides, and it could be good to have some reference points to avoid circling around the same arguments again and again. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 04:28, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that it would be useful to have somewhere to collect common thinking on the topic to avoid repetitive discussions, but this is when an essay is warranted, not a new guideline. Katzrockso (talk) 04:32, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The thing with essays is that they don't carry the weight of community consensus (anyone can write one), so it might not be especially helpful. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 04:33, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Community consensus on the application of our existing can be established through the discussions on each particular page in question, there is still no compelling reason for a new guideline on this topic area. How particular guidelines and policies are applied within particular topic areas is typically covered by essays (I only see topic specific guidelines for at WP:LGL for naming conventions - largely to the extent that these are formalized other non-Wikipedia guidelines, notability and style), which don't "carry the weight of community consensus", but still fulfill the rationale you provided for having a guideline. I worry about instruction creep and the fact that this seems like it might be the first content guideline that applies to a contentious topic area. Katzrockso (talk) 04:48, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Good information can be helpful no matter what tag is at the top of the page. For example, I suspect that many editors would benefit from a handy summary of the difference between various legal definitions of genocide vs current scholarly understandings. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:54, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I see both of your arguments, and agree that a guideline might be too heavy-handed for this, although I'm still worried that an essay might be ignored as, well, "just an essay" even if it carries broad community consensus. Instruction creep is definitely something to be careful of, so I'm absolutely open to non-guideline alternatives. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 05:01, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
So don't call it "an essay". Call it "an information page". Or consider {{Wikipedia how to}}, with the opening lines saying that the page tells "how to" handle disputes over this term. Make a custom tag with {{notice}}. Or put WP:NOTAG on it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:18, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's also possible for an essay to become a guideline if it's widely supported and followed. Just getting something out there that can be iterated may be more productive than arguing too long about what might be said in an abstract way. -- Beland (talk) 07:34, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I started writing something earlier about how I'd rather see specifically what we are talking about in order to evaluate whether or not it should be a guideline. It's very difficult to support such an abstract idea of a guideline, for me. Katzrockso (talk) 09:52, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Truthfully I felt we are really too close to this conflict and that everyone has their own biases in determining whether or not the Gaza War is a genocide. While the discussion on that talk page has raised examples of sources pushing back terms to describe the Armenian genocide and similar massacres/genocides, other scholarly content accessing these events are also made decades after the event, and with sufficient distance to discuss the event objectively. Right now, I felt there's really too much emotions across all parties (and potentially some antisemitic/anti-Israel/Islamophobic bias) to really properly access the conflict, especially since this is part of a broader contentious topic.--ZKang123 (talk · contribs) 04:03, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. I don't think it has been established that a guideline is necessary here vs the already existing guidelines and policies on this topic that address this adequately. Katzrockso (talk) 04:28, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose as its not really a good idea to treat genocide different from similar words like massacre, etc. Instead, what we should be doing is not trying to rush to name such events in Wikivoice until many years have passed and we can then judge what the academic consensus is, assuming their is one. It is the same approach to how we handle scientific topics (For example, we do not assert COVID-19 was zootrophic but instead say the scientific consensus is that it was zootrophic and did not have a lab origin). Masem (t) 04:49, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I am not opposed, but I expect the discussion over how to formulate the policy will be heavily weighed upon by the question of whether the Gaza genocide will make the cut. Additionally, I worry that the definition which comes out of this will be such that it is effectively impossible to call a genocide in Wikivoice until decades after the fact. There seems to be a group of editors (Jimbo included) which believe that the opinions of directly implicated governments and affiliated NGOs should weigh strongly against the designation. Such a policy would be very corrosive to our ability to describe objective reality. StereoFolic (talk) 05:04, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As you point out, I suspect that any such discussion will simply be the relitigation of every previous genocide discussion combined and multiplied. I am not sure how productive such a discussion could be or whether meaningful consensus could result it. Katzrockso (talk) 05:06, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes I worry about this too. There might be a push to adhere to strict rules, for example confining it to genocides that have been litigated at the ICJ or warrants issues for genocide at the ICC or other tribunals, which would ignore extensive studies into genocides of native Americans for example, just because the predated certain international conventions. Or there might be an appeal to constrict such calls to events that enough time has passed for consensus maybe putting into question something like the Yazidi genocide. If there is to be a consensus it will never be just custom made to exclude this one event, it will inevitably lead to more genocide denial down the line. Tashmetu (talk) 08:35, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
One way to resolve these worries would be to propose text you do want to see, and make some enlightened arguments. I think if a guideline has to cover all genocides and alleged genocides, it becomes difficult to argue for an unfair rule to favor a preferred outcome for a partisan fight without that becoming somewhat transparent as a tactic if as it fails to fit less controversial cases. Or if the drafting process goes off the rails and produces something unacceptable, there's always the option to vote against making it a guideline. -- Beland (talk) 08:53, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Beland: What would it cover that WP:LABEL and other guidelines already don't? Let me give a somewhat related example, there has been a liberal use of dictator being added to a lot of BLPs and otherwise without discussion, sources or the weighing thereof. But that is perfectly countered by extant guidelines like LABEL which I have argued for and used in discussion. Would we then need a separate WP:DICTATOR guideline, I think not.
But to add, I think both the genocide proposal and the dictator example given by me can be covered in use cases (for when and how to voice these) at the extant guideline pages. Gotitbro (talk) 06:35, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Are you voting for adding "genocide" and "dictator" as examples at MOS:LABEL, then? -- Beland (talk) 07:36, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think "dictator" is a good example of a value-laden label, but I disagree that "genocide" functions in the same way. Whether or not someone is a dictator is not typically the subject of significant scholarly analysis (there are exceptions here and there, especially in the historical literature), but whether or not an event is a genocide is. This makes "genocide" distinct in that while it may have value-laden implications, the actual usage of the term in Wikipedia should be governed by e.g. our other content guidelines that emphasize WP:RS. Another important distinction is that genocide refers to "events", while MOS:LABEL examples refer to people/groups. Part of the justification for MOS:LABEL is WP:BLP, which doesn't apply here for an event (genocide). Katzrockso (talk) 07:38, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, there are governments being accused of genocide, which are made of living people, some of whom have international criminal warrants issued against them, and some of whom are aghast what has been happening.
But it's true that events are just a different class of thing than people which may require different advice. For example, whether to describe an event as a death, killing, murder, manslaughter has to take into account whether the cause of death was indisputably another person, and whether a specific legal category has been assigned to the killing through a conviction. Labeling an shooting as a terrorist attack or militant action or liberation attempt may have similar considerations to labeling someone a terrorist. Is this transportation event a collision or an accident?
I can actually brainstorm a fair number of event-related words and phrases to watch: direct action, sabotage, protest, activism, eco-terrorism; civil war, rebellion, insurgency, terrorism, resistance; strike, supply disruption, work stoppage, lockout; occupation, liberation, invasion, annexation, reunification, restoration; coup, revolution, liberation, regime change, change in power; parade, protest, demonstration, riot, uprising, insurrection, rebellion.
There are also more people-related words we don't cover, but which are sensitive: refugee, asylum seeker, alien, immigrant; homeless, unhoused person; "discovery" of the Americas.
We could just expect editors to educate each other about the technical considerations and connotations and cultural sensitivities around various words and otherwise expect them to follow sources or common sense, or try to document terminology for sensitive events for reference and to guide discussions toward faster and more predictable consensus. We could also scope such an expansion broadly - whatever we can think of that's been the subject of e.g. a page move dispute or lede RFC - or narrowly, just for words where there's a burning need to ensure they are treated consistently across many articles, either because we are being inconsistent or we are just arguing too much and codifying where we always land would save time.
-- Beland (talk) 08:34, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
While yes, governments are made up of people and warrants have been issued for arrests, the application of the term "genocide" to events doesn't have such a direct implication on people in a way that is relevant to Wikipedia. From the basis of determining that any particular event is a genocide, I don't believe we have gone to attach these labels to individual people, but still keep the type of attribution requested by MOS:LABELS.
WRT the event-related words to watch, This is good pushback, I think many of those words could broadly construed as sensitive and value laden labels that are subject to the same sorts of disputes as the ones in MOS:LABELS, so parts of my argument aren't quite as strong there. I do think that genocide, ironically, is unique in its position that its extension is uniquely studied in academia - other than maybe terrorism, I can't think of any large body of academic research that consistently studies whether or not any particular event constitutes a type of event or not. In this case, genocide is if anything the one category of event that does not need a specific guideline to govern its use per MOS:LABELS or anything similar, imo. Katzrockso (talk) 09:38, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
LABEL is broad enough to cover insances beyond bios/orgs to including events. The reason MOS:TERRORISM to it for example. These to me are close enough to not warrant a separate adjudication.
@Beland: "Are you voting for adding "genocide" and "dictator" as examples at MOS:LABEL, then?" Yes. And if it is not considered bloaty most of the rest of the examples given by you above. Gotitbro (talk) 10:49, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose: We should primarily go with what the reliable genocide scholars say regarding each case, and follow the official standards in this world, not develop our own standards that go against them, especially as this can easily be abused to lessen said standards so much that we do not recognise serious crimes against humanity. David A (talk) 08:29, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Do you think it would be helpful to have a WP:GENOCIDE that documents various genocide definitions that should be referenced by articles? And maybe gives some advice about where to look for reliable genocide scholars or how to figure out which are and aren't reliable? Do editors need advice on how to evaluate statements made by scholars and what sort of sources to discount from "scholarly consensus" or to report with attribution (like governments involved in a conflict)? -- Beland (talk) 08:47, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That seems much more reasonable, yes. David A (talk) 08:49, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
OK, that's certainly well within the scope of what I'm asking people to propose. -- Beland (talk) 08:55, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My next question was going to be, what are the major definitions we should be highlighting? Then I thought, oh, maybe we could just link to Genocide definitions...but there are so many definitions there! It sounds like the 1948 Genocide Convention is almost universally used for legal purposes. Do scholars tend to only reference that, or are there other common definitions used in the academic literature? Or in other reliable sources, for that matter? -- Beland (talk) 09:00, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I am not a genocide scholar, so I am not sufficiently well-informed to be of much help for you in that regard. My apologies. David A (talk) 09:04, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, OK, perhaps some experts will chime in.
List of genocides may be a good anchor; that list is scoped to only include events "recognized in significant scholarship as genocides". Perhaps if it isn't on that list, it shouldn't be described in wikivoice as a genocide. That's partly just a matter of synchronization, but it could also serve as a public documentation of what our threshold for that is, with sources that can be used for easy comparison.
That list article also has a good summary of definitional controversies. It seems we now think of ethnic cleansing and politicide as distinct atrocities from genocide, and I'm not sure how "forced pregnancy, marriage, and divorce" is treated in modern times. The article also says: "The academic social science approach does not require proof of intent, and social scientists often define genocide more broadly." I find that a bit mysterious and it may help editors to clarify that, and help readers to explain how that relates to inclusion on the list.
-- Beland (talk) 09:15, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See my comment below on how it may be described outside of the legal definition. I was active in crafting the new inclusion criteria for that article. I would just clarify that while The academic social science approach does not require proof of intent most definitions from this area still have intention, and treat it with some primacy. -- Cdjp1 (talk) 09:25, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Spurred by your comments, I've tweaked List of genocides a bit as the cited source was actually closer to what you're saying. -- Beland (talk) 09:42, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
While the legal definition is engaged with regularly and thoroughly in the literature, it is also highly contentious, as the majority tend to view it as too restrictive (due in part to the political climate it was developed under), though a minority also view it as too broad. These views have existed since prior to the adoption of the Convention, and are not just "humanities and social science scholars" but are also expressed, again regularly, by legal scholars in literature. There are a couple of definitions (more aptly called frameworks, in my opinion) that scholars will gravitate towards, and these definitions come from the more prominent individuals in the field. But there is no singular standard alternative used instead of the legal definition. -- Cdjp1 (talk) 09:19, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Are those frameworks listed on Genocide definitions? -- Beland (talk) 09:43, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, there has long been a discussion around how Lemkin expended every last bit of him political capitol to get the UN to adopt a definition of genocide that gutted its meaning. Katzrockso (talk) 09:45, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - While I support the notion in theory, and have been mulling over the idea of starting one myself for a few years now (I do have a draft), I have not pushed forward with it as it seems as though we would ultimately end up in OR territory with it. If we do start working on an essay (with the view of it eventually becoming a guideline or policy) I will engage with the matter, but for now, I can not make a vote either way to it existing. -- Cdjp1 (talk) 09:14, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
OR because we'd be coming up with our own definition of genocide? That's not the sort of thing we really do; as David A and I were talking about above, I would expect it to be more about looking at existing definitions of genocide and helping editors navigate them and apply NPOV and other policies to them. -- Beland (talk) 09:18, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I understand that isn't what we (should or otherwise) do, as I said though, when I try to play out pushing and developing such an essay, I ultimately end up seeing us discussing the matter in ways I consider to be within OR territory. This view could (and hopefully) be ultimately wrong, but is the reason why I have not pushed forward on it. -- Cdjp1 (talk) 09:23, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Editors seem to be pretty good at yelling "original research!" and deleting as needed, so I expect we'd be able to distinguish between that and making better editorial decisions, which actually still requires some thinking and occasional guidance. I think we're at the point of working on this now...it seems better to be concrete and vanquish fears about what might happen by going ahead and not doing the wrong thing or demonstrating we can recover from it. So I'd welcome a draft even if we decide it's not a direction we want to go in. -- Beland (talk) 09:34, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There were suggestions of making up our definition/analysis of genocide in the other thread, I believe VPP suggested something like this. Katzrockso (talk) 09:40, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Very Polite Person:, I think this is referring to you. Are you interested in a guideline that says "if reliable sources say X, Y, and Z have happened, it can be called a genocide in Wikivoice", or something that references existing legal and academic definitions and helps editors look for reliable sources that reference those (and maybe documenting considerations and sensitivities around terminology, etc.)? -- Beland (talk) 09:50, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, this was in reference to Very Polite Person from this comment in particular and I hope I didn't mispresent their position (which is legitimate even if I disagree with it). Thanks for tagging them into this discussion. Katzrockso (talk) 09:55, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This topic is contentious and argued enough that at least an essay with some centralized guidance and summaries of previous discussions and community consensus would be useful. Not as a tool for winning arguments or forcing specific practices, but as a shortcut to common understanding. ~2025-31078-40 (talk) 12:23, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Support - My vision for such a centralized policy page would be a place to explain the synthesis of various Wikipedia policies related to covering the topic of genocide on Wikipedia. It should explicitly not be trying to define genocide. Instead, it should focus on addressing commonly raised issues. For example, it can explain that Wikipedia policy does NOT require that the ICJ declare that an action is genocide in order for Wikipedia to use Wikivoice to refer to it as genocide. It should clarify that genocide studies is an academic field and that the opinions of scholars in that field should be given more weight (per NPOV) than government officials asserting denial. It should explain that Wikipedia is not limited to only using the legal definition of genocide, and instead it is up to reliable sources to use the word, which we can then attribute. It should explain that Wikipedians should refrain from original research and avoid synthesis of facts to conclude genocide or lack thereof (and that talk pages should not be filled with such material of Wikipedians soapboxing their own assessment of events, such as "the low/high number of deaths means that it [is] [is not] genocide!"). These are just a few suggestions, but the general theme is that it should not be trying to (1) authoritively define genocide or (2) declare certain events as genocides. JasonMacker (talk) 15:03, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Those seem like good ideas. David A (talk) 15:21, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
i agree with this. it could also address "it's a war not a genocide" and "not enough people have been killed to count as a genocide" Rainsage (talk) 23:15, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Genocide is draft live with my notes inspired from that talk on Gaza genocide. Any of you are free to adopt and edit as needed. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 16:51, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It seems to me the root of the matter is that some folks don't understand that current enwiki consensus/practice is usually to weigh academic consensus higher than government and news sources. This can cause a lot of confusion and even indignance in topics where there are a lot of news and government sources saying X, and a lot of academic sources saying Y, and then we write our articles from the Y POV. The same thing happens constantly in WP:FRINGE topics such as COVID-19 lab leak theory. Perhaps the fix is as simple as strengthening the "academic consensus is always superior to other types of sources" wording in the various policies such as WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:FRINGE, etc. It is currently a bit weak, with only a sentence here and there (WP:SOURCETYPES, WP:BESTSOURCES). I say "academic consensus" instead of "academic sources" because we need to be careful not to elevate junk academic sources such as single studies (WP:SINGLESTUDY). What we're really interested in is review articles, textbooks, and policy statements from respected international organizations that summarize the academic consensus. WP:MEDRS does a great job of this for sciences. For humanities topics, we'd probably need to add to the list books by experts in the field. –Novem Linguae (talk) 03:40, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with this, I’m surprised WP:BESTSOURCES doesn’t explicitly say scholarship Kowal2701 (talk) 12:49, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There are lots of topics that do not get academic coverage, so that might be why. Katzrockso (talk) 13:43, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The thing is Academic sources are just as much an opinion as anything else. And recent scholarly assessments of genocide have been sorely lackluster and confounded by confirmation bias, railroading, and argumentum ad populum, among a laundry list of other issues. If an alleged genocide is disputed by sources other than the alleged perpetrator and there is a large number of uncertain or hesitant opinions, it shouldnt be considered a genocide. The credibility and reliability of sources should also be assessed, especially when some claim it is a genocide before a month has even elapsed in a conflict, or sources claim that the genocide started day one or two of a conflict. They simply have no credibility, especially when responding to a genocidal massacre is called a genocide.
.
It also would be worth looking at the largely undisputed genocides of history and see how they were decided as such and when. Darfur genocide wasnt even written until a decade after it ended. Maybe we need a moratorium on deeming a genocide for a period of years after the conflict has ended. That would not preclude coverage of those claiming something is a genocide, but that might be better written as "allegations" or "question". It also would be worth looking at why some wars are considered genocidal, but other wars that saw millions of deaths and disproportionality are not. Why is Anfal campaign not a genocide? Why were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not genocides? Why is the bombing of Dresden not a genocide? ← Metallurgist (talk) 04:47, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Anfal campaign is in Category:Genocide of indigenous peoples in Asia. The article mentions that some of those responsible were found guilty of genocide. Our articles Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Bombing of Dresden note that some people consider them genocidal acts. I added links from Genocide definitions, but the specifics of inclusion or exclusion under various definitions could use fleshing out in that article and the incident articles. -- Beland (talk) 05:05, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Why is Anfal campaign not a genocide? Why were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not genocides? Why is the bombing of Dresden not a genocide? Those sound like questions for those article's talk pages. Perhaps they have also had extensive discussions and RFCs on the topic, same as Talk:Gaza genocide. I imagine their talk page watchers went through a similar process and decided that the majority of their best sources did not call it a genocide. –Novem Linguae (talk) 09:22, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Good guess, though it was an RM with limited participation it's worth noting. One that focused on common name rather than scholarly consensus it seems. CNC (talk) 11:56, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Please visit Wikipedia:Genocide and discuss policy improvements. LDW5432 (talk) 14:36, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As for genocide articles and history of their discussions, see prior debates table CNC (talk) 12:07, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes I think there should be a neutrality policy for genocide. One that relies on a combination scholarly sources and general consensus from a wide variety of voices and viewpoints. I also think that things like population numbers should be taken into account--as in genocides normally show some commonalities such as a sharp drop off in birth and a steep rise in deaths--where deaths severely outpace population growth over a set period of time and those deaths can be directly connected to a campaign directed by a government or a people with the expressed stated intent of an elimination campaign--ie the Nazi's "final Solution" or the Rwandan government's calls for eradicating the Tutsis on state broadcasts and radio. Agnieszka653 (talk) 16:47, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support I think that a specific policy on this issue is desperately needed, particularly given how many people have voiced their criticism of the Gaza genocide page for potential violations of NPOV. There is not currently an objective standard that can serve as a guidepost to help editors manage this area that is rife with potential NPOV abuses. Designation as a genocide should come from legal and scholarly sources, I think everyone is in agreement there. However, this does not necessarily need to be in wikivoice, particularly if the genocide designation is even mildly controversial. It seems as though the lack of clear standards is causing unnecessary confusion that a clear policy could at least partially remedy. Gjb0zWxOb (talk) 18:03, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Genocide

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@Katzrockso: and @Beland: I have put my idea and notes here: Wikipedia:Genocide. Please feel free to run with that as needed. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 16:49, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for tagging me, I will take a look. Katzrockso (talk) 03:42, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm interested as well. LDW5432 (talk) 17:09, 5 November 2025 (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.

!Voting on sanctions at ANI

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Interested to hear what people think about this, I know there's been lots of discussion on reforming WP:ANI (like here and here) but I can't see that this has been suggested before from the archives. I think that when !voting on sanctions at ANI that are to be imposed by the consensus of the community, people who are involved in the underlying dispute should preface their !votes with something indicating that they're involved (like {{nacmt}}). This could be limited to the underlying dispute preceding escalation to ANI and historical disputes with that editor, or could be broadened to meet WP:INVOLVED (ie. disputes in the topic area). Reasoning is the same as at INVOLVED, involved [editors] may be, or appear to be, incapable of making objective decisions in disputes to which they have been a party or about which they have strong feelings; having some identifier makes it easier for newcomers to the report to analyse the discussion.

Imo the benefits of this is that it would encourage transparency and honesty, make it easier for newcomers to the report, and hopefully would make ANI fairer and slightly more functional (at the very least make it appear fairer, moreso to the reported editor). Whether closers ought to weigh involved !votes less or the same as uninvolved, idk. Downside is that it takes admin time to 'enforce' and could derail reports with people back-and-forth arguing about whether they're involved (maybe it could be written somewhere that this should be discussed on user talk pages instead). Thanks for reading Kowal2701 (talk) 19:05, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

First thought: I don't think we need a bunch of little discussion templates for this. I don't think we should make this "a rule". But I think that it would be an okay thing to model and to encourage, particularly in longer, more vote-like threads.
Second thought: It's sometimes difficult to decide whether you're involved or uninvolved. We see editors sometimes saying that they're "semi-involved", and there's the difficult case of an editor whose views are clear but who hasn't technically been involved in this specific dispute. For example, I had a userbox on my User: page for years that said I dislike comma splices. If Alice and Bob have a dispute at ANI about a comma splice, then am I "involved"? We might normally say that I'm not involved, but if someone's closing a contentious RFC, there is a preference for people who have never expressed an opinion on the subject, because we want people who are uninvolved. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:41, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As another unclear case, I was actively involved with an RFC about a topic, arguing strongly for one option, and have expressed similar views in related discussions, but did not participate in a second RFC about the same topic shortly afterwards (I wasn't aware of it). The closure of the second RFC was brought to ANI for review - am I involved or not? Thryduulf (talk) 21:50, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah it's probably better as a norm, that way people can do it at their own discretion, but idk how we'd encourage it without jotting something down in an essay/guideline like Wikipedia:ANI advice. WP:CBAN does say Discussions may be organized via a template to distinguish comments by involved and uninvolved editors, and to allow the subject editor to post a response, though I've never seen that done, maybe advice along these lines could be added there? Kowal2701 (talk) 17:03, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For community discussion of cbans, it would be nice to recruit uninvolved participants the same way we do for rfcs with WP:FRS. User:Bluethricecreamman (Talk·Contribs) 20:32, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds like a great idea Kowal2701 (talk) 21:08, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Banning policy#Community bans and restrictions says in part the community may impose a time-limited or indefinite topic ban, interaction ban, site ban, or other editing restriction(s) via a consensus of editors who are not involved in the underlying dispute (emphasis added). !votes on sanctions from involved editors shouldn't really be considered at all according to this. I agree with WhatamIdoing that disclosure probably shouldn't be "a rule" but if you notice it I wouldn't have a problem with mentioning it briefly, as we typically do with WP:SPAs. Ultimately though I think it's up to the closer to weigh consensus appropriately, especially in cases where an editor's involvement may be marginal. —Rutebega (talk) 21:55, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This makes me think about the role of reputation. You don't really want editors to be posting "This editor has previously supported ____ in many other discussions", because that kind of comment promotes drama, and yet if I were closing a dispute, I'd probably take the person's reputation into account, if I happened to know it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:15, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm surprised at that, I've seen very clearly involved editors even make CBAN proposals, and haven't gotten the impression their !votes aren't weighed. Yeah, little notes like WP:INVOLVED for unambiguous cases would probably be okay and hopefully uncontroversial, and help the closer out.
I was going to add to the OP that admin !votes should be weighed more heavily than those of non-admins. While we tend to stress consensus is based on quality of argument, I'm sure things like reputation and social capital contribute to weight. Like how WP:NHC says (bold mine) If the discussion shows that some people think one policy is controlling, and some another, the closer is expected to close by judging which view has the predominant number of responsible Wikipedians supporting it, not personally select which is the better policy. ("predominant number" seems to encourage vote-counting?) Kowal2701 (talk) 17:16, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If there was no vote-counting of last resort, 50% more of our disputes would result in no consensus.

Otherwise, there are decisions that could never be made at all, because there is no written rule saying that Image A belongs in the infobox and Image B in the first section or vice versa, or that editors should prefer to merge or split content that could equally be one long article or three shorter ones.
— User:WhatamIdoing 23:56, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

Aaron Liu (talk) 12:56, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's not really "their !votes aren't weighed" at all. It's more like "Of course this notorious WP:CPUSHer would say that, so I'll count that less (but not zero)". Consider a CTOP subject such as a geopolitical dispute. We know that some editors occasionally try to 'win' by getting editors who disagree with them kicked out of the community. If one of them turns up at ANI claiming that their opponent hates kittens, etc., then you need to take the context of their relationship and their POVs into account. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:22, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is a great idea. Most are unaware that "involved" !votes should be ignored, and those "involved" very often influence others with their arguments - you can't simply ignore them. In the real world it is sometimes called jury tampering or vote tampering, to use legal terminology, maybe call it !tampering in the same way it is a !vote -- GreenC 16:51, 8 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Please, let's not extend the programming logic negation (!) jargon to more words. It's already opaque to those unfamiliar with programming or the reason why it's being added in front of "vote". It doesn't provide any additional concision (almost every instance in this section, for example, could be replaced with "comment"). Additionally, putting a negation in front would, by analogy with "!vote", convey the meaning that "this is an opinion expressed in the form of tampering but is not actually tampering". Assuming for the sake of argument that tampering is an apt word, I don't think negating it helps. isaacl (talk) 17:41, 8 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with your view. It is a good suggestion. SophiaJustice59 (talk) 12:41, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Consistent display of coordinates

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When reading articles about geographic locations in desktop mode, I am slightly annoyed if the coordinates are not available in a convenient and predictable spot near the article title. This forces me to hunt for the coordinates in the infobox or article body. It also means that the article will not be correctly geotagged.

For some examples of articles that have this issue, due to using {{coord}} with |display=inline alone, see Yerevan, Matera, Duluth, Minnesota, San Luis Potosí (city), and Shivneri Fort. Also note, for example, that Shivneri Fort will not show up when viewing Special:Nearby#/coord/19.199,73.8595.

Conversely, when browsing on mobile, coordinates added using |display=title alone aren't visible at all. For some examples of articles with this issue, see Islandmagee, Ostia (Rome), and Matthias Church.

To avoid both of these problems, I would tentatively propose that |display=inline,title should be preferred in most* articles about settlements or geographic features. It seems that it would be possible to use a bot or semi-automated script to enforce this rule.

Perhaps my proposal is already the accepted approach and the articles above have just unintentionally deviated from it, but I'm not sure. MOS:COORDS doesn't really seem to address this issue and I couldn't find any other relevant guideline. This issue has probably been discussed before; links to past threads would be appreciated.

* There are obviously cases where |display=inline is appropriate. For example, the article Extreme points of the United Kingdom discusses several different points and it would be wrong to geotag the entire topic to any specific one. There are likely other edge cases I haven't thought of. I'm only referring to how to format the "main coordinates" in articles about uniquely identifiable locations: villages, mountains, buildings, etc. ~2025-32085-07 (talk) 23:36, 9 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. In my opinion, the title is a goofy spot for coords and we should list them only in the infobox alongside all the related metadata about a place. It's a weird historical artifact and anachronism that the coords get such special placement and their special page placement has been a constant headache for years with different views and different skins, as you note. Is there a reason coords are so special that they can't be put in the infobox? The coords seem as relevant to Pittsburgh as its population. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:47, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Coordinates are still somewhat “special” in that they link to an external tool. However I personally don’t think that’s reason enough to separate them.  novov talk edits 00:02, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
They don't require this, we make a choice (we can also show them with the built in maps, but it's difficult to change something that has been around for as long as this. They are mostly special, in that they have to directly relate to the primary topic of the page and the page has to detail a specific spot that is not too large or otherwise vague. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:33, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would argue that a city's coordinates are a more defining property than its population. Population numbers change over time, coordinates generally don't. As for what's of greater value to readers, IDK.
Personally speaking, I find myself clicking coordinate links very frequently. The ability to view a location on a map is immensely useful. Even for articles that include a locator map image or embedded "Wikimedia Map", I find GeoHack useful because of the links it provides to external services.

Something else I'll mention, but which probably deserves its own discussion, is that WikiMiniAtlas now seems redundant to Wikimedia Maps. WikiMiniAtlas was great for its time but its design now feels outdated. The aesthetic recalls the early days of Web 2.0, there's no support for pinch to zoom, etc. The one area where WikiMiniAtlas shines is that it does provide links to other nearby articles. I'll admit that's a pretty major feature, arguably even the main feature.
(Also, is it just my imagination or is WMA's projection extremely distorted? WMA always seems to be stretched out along the east-west axis. Compare Iceland on WMA vs. OSM.) ~2025-32085-07 (talk) 07:10, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Coordinates do change over time if you give it enough time. 😀 Anomie⚔ 12:57, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
also wondering myself how people even find coordinates. I had to remove some from a page recently for being totally wrong. ← Metallurgist (talk) 04:51, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've also occasionally come across incorrect coordinates in Wikipedia articles. At least in the cases I've seen, the mixups sometimes arise when multiple nearby localities have similar names. ~2025-32085-07 (talk) 07:35, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've pointed this out on a few talk pages, but generally when it comes to coordinates, maps, and stuff like that all Wikipedia MOS goes out the window. Having coordinates without a source is original research. Having a locator map without a source for the boundaries is original research. There is almost no quality control, and rather rather then removing inaccurate or poorly sourced maps/geographic information, people argue they should be left until someone offers a better one. Really a huge issue, as a cartographer I'm a bit appalled. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 07:49, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:No original research defines original research as material for which the real word doesn't have a source saying that, which is importantly different from material for which the Wikipedia article doesn't cite an article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:41, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Idea for International Mentoring Day '26 & beyond

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Recently I have learned that there is an International Mentoring Day on 17 January. The UK and the US also have national commemorations to celebrate mentoring and thank mentors of all sorts (i.e. in corporate mentoring programmes; adult-led youth groups; and teaching). In the UK, this is 27 October; in the US, the entire month of January.

With this in mind, I would like to propose that Wikipedia:

  • Start an annual commemoration on January 17 of this coming year with notification about the day somewhat in advance, and encouragement to all editors to take a few minutes to thank their mentors whether current or past, as well as those who offer guidance as Teahouse, Help Desk, and Village Pump staff;
  • Share stories about how mentoring helped; and
  • Offer "Did You Know?" tidbits around and on January 17 about how the commemorations came about in the UK and the US.

As we are a little over 9 weeks away from January 17, there would be adequate time to plan for its commemoration on Wikipedia if the decision is taken to carry this idea forward. ~2025-33078-41 (talk) 17:52, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with days of X is that anyone can declare any day the day of X and these things die after a year or two when a few people forget about them.
Also I haven't really seen much active mentoring on Wikipedia, but that can be my fault because it is not the kinda thing I would notice. Polygnotus (talk) 03:42, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

History Viewer User group?

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Hello all. I've been working on a bit of a proposal with some admins, which I've included below.

While the viewdeleted bundle of three userrights: browsearchive, deletedhistory, and deletedtext are currently only accessible to administrators, that does not necessarily comprise the only group that would derive a benefit to workload in having access. For example, those working in copyright, edit filters, SPI, and many other areas dealing with content likely to be deleted due to disruption or other reasons would benefit immensely from having direct access to deleted revisions. It also includes a swath of people who simply do not wish to be an admin, for whatever reason, but would benefit from this in anti-abuse workflows. I propose that a process be established to grant some viewing permissions to those qualified to be able to view deleted revisions, but not necessarily needing the full admin toolkit. I'm aware this is unbundling, though I believe it avoids the perennial proposals of unbundling by not touching the delete, block, or protect tools at all, and instead focusing on its intended purpose.

Thus I propose that a History Viewer group be added, with the following permissions:

  • Search deleted pages (browsearchive)
  • View deleted history entries, without their associated text (deletedhistory)
  • View deleted text and changes between deleted revisions (deletedtext)
  • View log entries of edit filters marked as private (abusefilter-log-private)
  • Enable two-factor authentication (oathauth-enable)

The group would be grantable/revokable by admins and the process for requesting the permission would be to post onto a dedicated PERM page, with a request that remains for a period of at least one week. The discussion must be advertised to AN, VPR, and BN. If the administrator closing the request finds that there is consensus to grant, they will add the permission to the requesting user. Editors applying should have a minimum of 2,500 edits and at least 6 months tenure.

EggRoll97 (talk) 22:28, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

How is this compatible with the views expressed by our overloads the WMF at Wikipedia:Viewing deleted content? GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 22:54, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Archive_269#WMF_reply_about_userrights, particularly the response from Joe there, I think the general consensus is that the issue is trust. An RfA process with community votes implicitly proves that the user has this trust from the community. While the risk of deleted content containing extremely private information is low, it is not zero, and as such we'd not be comfortable allowing users access to this without first proving they have the trust of the community. I believe this process would be adequate to ensure trust of the community. EggRoll97 (talk) 23:31, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to view deleted content then you need to either pass RFA, pass an equivalent process (e.g. an admin election) or be granted the permission by arbcom. So a request for this new right would require the support of a majority of those commenting and at least 25 supporters. I don't see the benefit in creating a new process when we already have RFA and AELECT. Thryduulf (talk) 23:30, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Over the last few years, we have made relatively large strides in making adminship more accessible to more members of the community. I suspect that many of the people who could pass an RfA-like process which would be required to gain access to a permission like this could just go straight for RfA or AELECT and get the full toolset anyway. We want to encourage that too: I fear a permission like this could negatively affect admin recruitment if people feel like they need to go through this intermediate hoop first. Mz7 (talk) 23:48, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree, your argument could be applied to any user right because an admin has it. Most admin candidates have some form of advanced permissions anyway. Tenshi! (Talk page) 16:18, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, and this is mostly before my time, but I believe that there is a correlation between removing rollback from the admin bundle and an increase in RfA standards. I believe rollback was removed from the admin bundle in early 2008? Compare that to the chart at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship by year. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 21:16, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Possibly, but at that time we had more editors than we do now, which has also been dropping since 2007. Tenshi! (Talk page) 21:36, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, don't think you can deny the correlation- but yes, that in an equally valid hypothesis as well. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 22:44, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You made an excellent observation, and I think it is the correct response to Tenshi’s argument: indeed every user right that we have unbundled from the admin toolset over the years, from rollback to template editor to page mover, has made adminship a little less desirable for the people who would have benefited from the rights we unbundled. If we unbundle the ability to view deleted page histories too, then that too will also negatively impact admin recruitment efforts. Mz7 (talk) 19:06, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This permission is a core sensitive spot for why adminship is turning into a big deal. A while back, I tried to unbundle everything except this userright to make a patroller permission - IIRC the primary objection was that it wasn't technically possible. Tazerdadog (talk) 23:58, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
deletedhistory is security through obscurity. It's available to anyone through the API. (Example.) —Cryptic 00:12, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Without deletedhistory you can't add drvprop=comment to that query. deletedhistory also lets you see revision-deleted user names and comments. Anomie⚔ 01:02, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a reason why edit summaries are hidden but the rest of the metadata (including the sha1 of the wikitext) is shown? Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 00:38, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Comments in T51088 indicate that WMF Legal wanted them omitted because sometimes admins don't bother to revision-delete RD-able material if the page is being deleted anyway, since historically both had the same end result of hiding the content from non-admins. The sha1 doesn't tell you much unless you already have the content to compare to. Anomie⚔ 01:20, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
... and that's a bug, right? I didn't know this was a thing. I would be surprised if that were intentional. Otherwise why not write a user script to make deletedhistory trivially available to everyone? Mz7 (talk) 13:45, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There are already user scripts, User:SD0001/deleted-metadata-link and User:DreamRimmer/DeletedMetaData. Tenshi! (Talk page) 13:49, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No, it's not a bug. This goes back to 2019, bringing parity with access available in Toolforge since 2013. And as I noted above, you need deletedhistory to see comments (edit summaries) of deleted revisions and to see revision-deleted usernames and comments. Anomie⚔ 20:26, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, huh. TIL, I guess. Mz7 (talk) 01:01, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've been monitoring this section for a while. I for one don't think information about how to access metadata on deleted edits should be so obscure simply because it's so counter-intuitive as noted above). I knew that the limited info was accessible via Toolforge but not the other methods. To this end, I've made this edit to Wikipedia:Viewing and restoring deleted pages, incorporating comments mostly from this discussion by Cryptic, Anomie, and Tenshi Hinanawi. Any tweaks would be greatly appreciated, of course. As for the proposal at hand, I'm generally supportive of unbundling ideas, but I think more concrete examples of how this new right would assist affected users' workflows would be helpful, especially situations where the available metadata about deleted edits wouldn't be enough. Speaking strictly for myself, in my unique situation on enwiki as a non-admin importer who does wiki-archaeology, the usefulness of a usergroup like this would be greatly enhanced by adding the ability to delete/undelete edits (which I know is off-limits in this proposal because it touches on the "core" admin rights of block/protect/delete. For me 90% of my questions about deleted edits can be answered using available tools (or at least I can make educated guesses based on the information I have) and a very small percentage (maybe 1%?) of requests related to deletion/undeletion can be resolved by just checking deleted text. Graham87 (talk) 10:16, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Why the requirement to advertise at VPR? I don't think any other permission has required that. Tenshi! (Talk page) 12:33, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't particularly sure where to put advertisement requirements, since it would need to be widely advertised to satisfy the WMF. I guess maybe a watchlist notice would suffice, similarly to RfA? EggRoll97 (talk) 06:10, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't really seem clear about that part what the WMF wants, though it might be better to advertise at WP:AN and WP:VPM instead? Tenshi! (Talk page) 11:21, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think that would suffice, yeah. EggRoll97 (talk) 02:07, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Whom do you envision needing this ability, and whom the community says is trustworthy enough to have this ability, and yet is unable to pass WP:AELECT? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:13, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For example, those working in copyright, edit filters, SPI, and many other areas dealing with content likely to be deleted due to disruption or other reasons would benefit immensely from having direct access to deleted revisions. EggRoll97 (talk) 14:09, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If those people need access to deleted revisions they should stand for adminship. A demonstrated good track record that they would need for this new right will be exactly as good at demonstrating suitability as an admin. Note that being an SPI clerk, edit filter helper/manager, etc. doesn't require adminship and also aid chances when standing at RFA (and presumably AELECT but I don't recall whether anyone in those groups has stood using that process yet). Thryduulf (talk) 14:19, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Then you would have a single-purpose admin who only looks at deleted revisions? Tenshi! (Talk page) 15:28, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See also Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Carrite. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 15:42, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As for your comment about anyone in those groups standing in AELECT, I have. EggRoll97 (talk) 15:51, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Someone working in copyvio needs the delete button, too, so they really should be admins. I don't understand why someone "working in" Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations would need access to deleted materials (more than any other editor who encounters a suspicious editor).
viewdeleted is an incredibly sensitive user right. It allows people to see not just copyvios and vandalism, but sometimes things that should be oversighted (e.g., personally identifying information). We need to be able to trust people who have this user right to not spread what they see elsewhere. The real world struggles with this,[4][5][6] so we have to be careful here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:56, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Time to mark "Vital Articles" as historical?

[edit]

It seems to me that the whole Wikipedia:Vital articles concept, while probably useful in the early days of enwiki, has long since outlived its usefulness and is now just a timesink for a small group of editors, but without any actual current positive impact on the encyclopedia. It doesn't matter one bit whether an article is a Vital Article level 4 or 5 or not at all, readers and editors have their own priorities and don't need to be spoonfed which articles supposedly matter the most, as decided by at best the votes of a few people. Before starting a formal proposal / RfC, I would like to get some input on how others feel about this. I'll also inform the VA talk page of course. Fram (talk) 10:43, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't looked into this project before, but from a cursory look all I see is the elevation of topics to "vital" or removal thereof on a basis that seems to reproduce Eurocentric bias in Wikipedia. Katzrockso (talk) 11:01, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As mentioned below, I am the person who did a comprehensive survey on this matter for the fifth level strictly on people. Keep in mind this data is 5 months old (It would not be easy to update this as my parser was not airtight and I had to put some labels manually): -1ctinus📝🗨 01:34, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Broadly agree with your comments - it is currently a timesink with few benefits for the wider project. The way this could be beneficial is if it drove forward improvements to the articles which have been identified as vital, but I don't see any of that happening — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:31, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I guess the question is how much time does Vital articles actually take up? Like with wiki project assessments, there's editor-facing value in knowing (roughly) what level of quality articles are at, and (roughly) how important they are. Certainly after like Level-4 vital it's a random grab bag of kinda-important stuff that's pretty squishy, and I could see the argument it's so diffuse it's of limited utility at that level, but it seems browsing the talk page that it's not a world of edit conflicts and disputes that requires mothballing. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs talk 12:36, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The upper levels are used by the Core Contest, but I am unaware of other uses. I believe VA was originally linked to WikiProject importance ratings, which are not really used much either. CMD (talk) 12:38, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I guess VA could easily be replaced by "articles which are high or top importance for at least one project" or something similar, would be equally valid or invalid as a selection criterion. Fram (talk) 13:39, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There is e.g. right now WP:ANI#Voter intimidation, but also things like this 2022 discussion Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 193#Add top icons for WP:Vital articles, followed by this late 2023 RFC Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Archive 25#Proposal for a VA "top_icon", which people at VA intend to rehash yet again (Wikipedia talk:Vital articles#Add topicons to levels 1 and 2 vital articles). On e.g. Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Level/5/People, just one of the many subpages, there are between April and now 196 discussions, many with subsections, about which articles should be in or out VA5 level. That's a massive amount of discussion for very little or no benefit at all. E.g. at Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Level/3#Move Abraham Lincoln 3 from level 3 to level 4 we have 10 people discussing whether that article should be a level 3 or level 4 article, as if that has any importance at all for enwiki. Fram (talk) 13:38, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with the proposal. I do not see how labelling an article as "Vital" is a net-benefit to the project right now. The label is applied on the article talk page (a place few readers even know about) and the amount of time discussing an article's vital status could be better spent improving the encyclopedia. Z1720 (talk) 16:48, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I opened a proposal about creating a top icon for levels 1 and 2. The editors within the project seem to more or less support it, but there is apprehension that the broader community would oppose it. It feels like there are attempts to quarantine the project from being used in applications. The list itself is pretty fascinating from a purely scientific standpoint when you start looking at the trends and broader statistics. I would rather see attempts to brainstorm uses and improvements to the resource then closing it. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 21:10, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would support such proposal. There are so many layers of subjectivity in deciding whether a topic is "important enough". If no consensus arises for full deprecation, I would support deprecating level 4 and 5 at list. Ca talk to me! 17:35, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
4 and 5 at this point serve as a filter for higher levels, if nothing else. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 21:11, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I have the oppposite view: levels one and two are filler for the more important lower levels of three to five. Wikipedia is a project too big to have one hundred subjects to be the "most important". It only starts to make sense at a larger sample size of 1000+. Plus the vital articles contest doesn't use those higher levels IIRC. -1ctinus📝🗨 01:30, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@1ctinus Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5 has 11 sub-categories, Level 1 has 10 articles. If you look at which 10 articles we list, there is a fairly close correlation between the categories at level 5 and the articles at level 1. There are 29 sub-categories (At quick glance). I've been working to get the sub-category articles for geography to level 2 and 3, but you can see the main articles for these are mostly at high levels as well. The lower levels are going to be notable but not broad, the upper levels are going to be articles that are broad and highly interconnected with other articles on Wikipedia. You can see this a bit on the vital article stats I captured in the table below, where Site_links and Langauge_Links trend with vital article levels, but level 3 has the highest page views. At level 3, we start giving in to notable more then broad (I think we should wait till level 4 to do this, but that will take time). The upper levels hold articles that largely serve as umbrellas for the lower. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 17:53, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The list has been useful for me also in the maintenance of other language versions and other wikiprojects, such as Commons. --Thi (talk) 17:51, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Thi, are you familiar with m:List of articles every Wikipedia should have (a similar list on Meta-Wiki)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:15, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I am active in both projects. The VA list is more elaborated and it has more active participants. --Thi (talk) 14:37, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If we were to shut down the local one, perhaps some editors would move to the global one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:58, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The two projects have different goals, and I wouldn't be interested in moving to another project after the one I was interested was shut down by editors who were largely uninvolved. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 18:22, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Volunteer editors are generally free to spend time on whatever initiatives they like as long as it doesn't have an undue effect or burden on those not participating. In my view, this initiative hasn't met that threshold yet. An occasional interpersonal conflict arises with all collaborations. And although I think my reasoning against increasing the prominence of vital articles is compelling, I appreciate that there is a non-negligible number of people who disagree with me, so it's not unreasonable for a proposal to be made from time to time. isaacl (talk) 18:41, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
+1. I see very little value in the Vital Articles process, but "it's a waste of time" on its own is a meaningless argument. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 21:00, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Trying to find value in the project is difficult, It really feels like the broader Wikipedia is actively quarantining it. It's really challenging to find applications when people not only block applications, but follow that with calls to eliminate the concept. As a dataset, it is fantastic for seeing a subset of Wikipedia article statistics, if nothing else. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 20:36, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Value is relative. For example, Hockey Mountain has no inherent value to editors uninterested in improving ice hockey-related biographies, but it's a good place for those interested to track progress towards a goal. Editors can work on whatever they want, but they should bear in mind that same freedom means others may have different priorities than they do. isaacl (talk) 17:15, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Vital articles represent a very interesting qualitative dataset. I've been researching them for a while, specifically getting data for the articles in the project based on page statistics and creating a "vital index" (Read here, still in early analysis though). There are some interesting trends that emerge from a purely quantitative perspective. There are some major issues with western bias, and major issues brought about by lack of participation, but the dataset remains a unique resource to understand if nothing else the priority of Wikipedia:Wikipedians participating. Levels 1 and 2 are okay, level 3 needs some work, and levels 4 and 5 are in flux. They mostly serve as a filter for the higher levels though. Attempts to make more use of the dataset/project have generally not gone over well. For example, in a discussion titled How can we increase visibility of this page to readers?, and Add topicons to levels 1 and 2 vital articles were met with general acceptance from active project members but apprehension about the wider community. I had preposed merging it or partnering with Wikipedia:Articles for improvement, but got little feedback from anyone on the two projects. In the talk pages for articles, multiple projects rank an article "priority," but this is usually done by one editor and never looked at again in my experience. The Vital Articles at least have a system where people are giving votes before adding it. I think we should brainstorm how to use the resource of the Vital Articles before tossing it. Fairly unique dataset. Adding a table below that shows article statistics by level, there are some clear quantiatative trends that emerge showing it isn't complete poppycock.

Table showing the average value for each variable by level:

Vital Level Average of pageviews Average of watchers Average of revisions Average of editors Average of links_ext Average of links_out Average of links_in Average of redirects Average of Site_links Average of Language_Links
1 103985.4 1964.7 7997 2946.1 491 954.7 21432.5 28.5 242.5 195
2 54173.04396 1111.494505 5726.648352 2574.274725 281.4395604 891.4835165 43217.72527 27 215.9120879 178.4175824
3 77734.34928 960.7741935 6565.539488 2676.528365 252.6340378 938.6529477 24351.03337 32.23692992 170.9321468 147.0433815
4 38252.72648 404.2191289 3129.259553 1411.35162 150.0440223 637.4532961 4879.871285 22.02581006 92.55541899 82.97340782
5 18707.51983 188.1281954 1369.704412 632.0545436 91.26335762 389.9695153 1339.601422 11.6335762 43.39412568 39.57093706
Project average 23397.98551 249.7303966 1791.74712 814.2076883 105.258721 445.7424108 2479.189337 13.91943894 54.96170015 49.6614657
GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 20:59, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree we should just get rid, it has no practical use (or at least not comparable to how much community time it sucks up). Also look at this research done by 1ctinus. To say its Eurocentric is a huge understatement. Kowal2701 (talk) 01:09, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Makes me sad to see my work for a project I care deeply about and spent countless hours researching potentially go the way of the dodo. I agree that the state of the vital articles is flawed (and biased), but I don't see the purpose in archiving it. Most of the bias comes from a lack of diversity in penship, NOT the methodology. Most people editing come from the US or CANZUK; we naturally know more about our home countries than opposing countries.
In my opinion, it just needs better marketing somehow. I don't know what it would look like. This list is meant for editors, not readers, so it can't be mentioned into the main space.
I'd hate to see it go, mostly because I just think a list of 50,000 important things is interesting to read about and contribute to. -1ctinus📝🗨 01:25, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think Vital levels 1 and 2 are pretty useless. Its existence is mostly semantical. I don't see how having a list of the 100 most important articles benefits the encyclopedia—it's too narrow. -1ctinus📝🗨 01:27, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ideally, in my opinion, we should be using levels 1 and 2 to focus on the criteria "Essential to Wikipedia's other articles" and "Coverage." Essentially, at level 5 we have 11 categories: People, History, Geography, Arts, Everyday life, Philosophy and religion, Society and social sciences, Biology and health sciences, Physical sciences, Technology, and Mathematics. These are subdivided further into sub categories. Ideally, level 1 should have the parent article(s) for most of these 11 categories, level 2 should have sub-categories within them, with it becoming more general as it approaches level 5. The project sort of does this, but often times popular articles are elevated above the broader category. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 01:36, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Again, personally I don't have an issue with volunteers spending time on whatever they like, as long as it doesn't affect anyone else or impose a burden on others. That being said, my personal opinion is that the rigid numerical limits aren't a good fit for a scenario where there is no inherent reason for a fixed limit. It makes sense for physical media, where there are practical limits so a cutoff has to be made somewhere. On the web, though, there isn't a compelling reason to have a hard cutoff of 100, versus a more flexible threshold. Note, though, that a lot of the interest in such lists is in the debate itself regarding the selection of topics, rather than the end list. I'd be more interested in figuring out ways to capture different approaches for weighing and evaluating the relative importance of articles. In spite of "top ten X" lists typically being web click bait, something like that might be a better way to give readers and editors different ways of looking at articles that could bring some less-well known ones to the forefront. isaacl (talk) 02:04, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've been doing some basic data exploration on the vital articles and have a prototype "vital score" and "Article score:"
Where:
V = Vital score
S = Theme 1 + Theme 2 + Theme 3 + Theme 4
Theme 1: ((Percentile Watcher) + (Percentile Editors)) /2
Theme 2: ((Percentile Pageviews) + (Percentile Revisions)) /2
Theme 3: ((Percentile Links in) + (Percentile Project links)) /2
Theme 4: Percentile Language Links
l = level the article is at (Articles at Level 1 are multiplied by 5, Level 2 by 4, Level 3 by 3, Level 4 by 2, and Level 5 by 1. This makes it harder for articles at lower levels to replace higher respecting current concensus)
sq = Subsection quota for the articles section at level 5. (This prevents articles in small sections from being trimmed for articles in popular large sections. There are issues with it though.)
The V is limited to the vital article project, however the S value can be calculated for any set of articles. You could take all hockey-related biographies on Wikipedia, capture their page statistics, see how each fits in terms of percentile relative to every other article in the list, and calculate the score. The themes correspond to different things I've seen in the Vital articles list, and it's goals. Specifically, theme 1 is how interested editors are in the article, theme 2 is how active the article is (and how likely it should be on a watchlist to avoid vandals), theme 2 is how interconnected the article is in the project and with other English language Wikis, and theme 4 shows how many other language Wikis have an article on the topic (how popular it is out side the English speaking world). You could look at any of these value making up the themes independently, the themes themselves, or the composite index. The Python script to access the APIs could be made more general, and the calculations once the list exists are pretty straight forward. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 21:03, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If I understand correctly, this is an idea for calculating various article metrics. I think discussing it in a separate thread would garner more attention from interested people. If you are considering applicability beyond the vital article initiative, then perhaps it could be discussed at the idea lab village pump. If you are considering changing the vital article initiative to make use of it, then you can discuss it at the vital article initiative talk page. isaacl (talk) 23:09, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
More or less, it's a prototype Index (statistics). Using the public statics for each article, it puts them in a set, compares the articles value against the others by seeing what percentile it is in, and then groups those into themes, which then get added together into a composite index. I've only used it on the vital articles so far, and further weighted and normalized it to try and compare stuff between vital levels and categories. The reason I bring it up is response to your stated interest in "ways to capture different approaches for weighing and evaluating the relative importance of articles." It could be done on any list of articles, not just the vital article lists. It's already discussed on the vital articles talk page. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 02:43, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I was speaking of qualitative discussion about the importance of certain topics to readers based on their interests, not metrics based on non-reader focused considerations, page views, or predetermined weights assuming a certain importance level. Nonetheless, I think further discussion would benefit from a separate thread. isaacl (talk) 03:12, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Support abolishing both vital articles and any other meaningless subjective importance rating (i.e. “low importance” mid importance” etc). It’s outdated and the systematic bias and unscientific nature of the scale outweigh whatever use anyone’s getting from it. Dronebogus (talk) 04:37, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The Wikipedia:Content assessment was created for a specific purpose: To allow groups of editors (e.g., Wikipedia:WikiProject LGBTQ+ studies tell the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team that even if _____ doesn't get very many page views, it is important to include in offline releases anyway. This isn't "meaningless", though it is subjective in the sense that different groups will pick different articles as the ones that they'd particularly like to see included. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:19, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There's WP:Discord/Team-B-Vital which has gotten many articles improved over several years, although it sadly seems to have petered out relatively recently.--LaukkuTheGreit (Talk•Contribs) 10:53, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep as is. The editors working on the vital articles lists are dedicated to their task, and the list is an interesting and hopefully up-to-date "vital" part of Wikipedia. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:30, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have to say I'm pretty hostile to VA, especially level 3. It seems to me that it's a place to argue about why what's important to me is more important than what's important to you. That said, its mere existence doesn't seem to do any harm as long as it remains obscure; I'm mostly content to let the people who want to argue about that enjoy themselves. --Trovatore (talk) 23:56, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No matter how you look at it, the Vital articles list is one with a long history and plenty of interest and significance; abandoning it altogether would be going too far. It is far more meaningful to remove the list’s Western-centric bias than to remove the list itself.飞车过大关 (talk) 08:22, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep as is. Maybe this discussion spurs more involvement. Should be of blatant obviousness that this is an important historical effort on the part of Wikipedia, and can still serve conceptual use. Hyperbolick (talk) 08:40, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The "important historical effort" is why I suggest marking it as historical, not to delete it. It shouldn't be erased from memory, but spending any further effort on it and plastering it across 50,000 talk pages (which already have enough talk page banners anyway) seems futile and unproductive. Basically, it has become a WP:NOTAFORUM, we aren't a website for people to create lists of the most important X or Y in their opinion. We are here to build an encyclopedia, and VA no longer adds anything to that effort. Fram (talk) 09:00, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Isn't it also superfluous to projects importance assessments? I don't see why these aren't just a straight improvement over vitality, even if they have their own issues, they are much less detrimental to Wikipedia than vitality levels (e.g. fixed numbers of each vitality level, people wasting their time promoting/demoting articles from each status). Katzrockso (talk) 09:31, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Project importance assessments are really odd things. In my experience, one editor sets it, and rarely is any discussion ever had about it. I've set several for articles in projects and literally only had a few people say anything on talk pages, while in vital articles, we have layers of discussion, while in projects it's usually just one person declaring something is "mid" or whatever. We have quota at vital articles for level 5 in specific categories, we could partner with projects to fill those rather then the project assessments. Honestly, the project assessments seem to be pretty much worthless out side of declaring an article is within the scope of a particular project. Vital articles is among the most active Wikiprojects I've seen in terms of number of editors and discussion. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 05:41, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Agreed. Half the time, the project importance assessment is done by a random NPP who doesn't really know anything about the topic. I was going through the project importance ratings for WP:WikiProject Music Theory and there were some super niche articles in top importance and some that were extremely important concepts in low-importance. I know that wikiproject is only semi-active, but still. I've seen this even with active WikiProjects Shocksingularity (talk) 18:47, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I have also seen random editors set |importance=top for weird articles. One was marking articles top-importance for all WikiProjects. When I asked him about it, his answer basically amounted to thinking that if he set top-importance for subjects that interested him, then someone else would expand the article, and then he would have a long article to read. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:09, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Shocksingularity, @WhatamIdoing, I'm generally shocked at how unactive many of the Wikiprojects are. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geography has averaged 10 pageviews daily since we started collecting data in 2015, and History and biographies projects aren't much better if you check here. They have all been declining, with sharp drop off in some cases. Looking at various articles listed in Geography, it is clear little thought has gone into curating the list itself. For example, Richard Foster Flint is a "High‑importance" biography in Geology and geography, but the article itself looks like it would barely pass verification. Rather then deleting the vital articles, these importance rankings seem like a something that is more questionable in terms of utility. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 21:40, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Wikipedia:A WikiProject is a group of people, and groups of people come and go. At Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council (a sort of meta-group/noticeboard), we've talked about merging up inactive/former groups, in the hope that we'll get enough people looking at the talk pages that questions will get answered.
    The Wikipedia:Content assessment priority ratings aren't prioritizing articles already in good condition. They are intended to identify topics that are important, rather than articles that are well-developed. (The 1.0 team separately rates article quality, so it is accounted for in the final list, but that's the purpose of the |class= parameter, not the |importance= one.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:07, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I understand that people come and go. The importance parameter is not really checked much, there is little follow up, and the amount of checking is wildly inconsistent between Wikiprojects. The example I gave is a person who was probably listed as high priority by the page creator, and nobody ever cared to check. I understand they aren't identifying articles already in good condition, the Vital article project is trying to identify important topics as well. It is easier to get an article deleted (from a policy standpoint) then to get it added to vital articles. Vital articles is among the most active Wikiprojects I've ever seen. Look at the average page views and other stats for the various talk pages. The importance parameter is not really maintained, and little discussion is ever had about what an articles importance is. Vital articles has a quota system at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5, I believe these is a lot of overlap between this and many other Wikiprojects, and think that replacing the importance parameter would be better then the vital scores. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 00:32, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep as is. Worst case scenario, it doesn't harm anyone and there's no need to remove it. But that's underselling it. The Core Contest happens every year and brings large amounts of improvement to these vital articles, so it's clearly bringing some amount of positive effect. I see no reason to remove it outside of a general "I don't like it" and the argument that it doesn't lead to improvements, which is false as described above. QuicoleJR (talk) 12:48, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • The process could certainly use improvement, but it has led to very important articles being improved upon, especially the higher levels. There are users such as Phlsph7 who dedicate time to improving articles simply because they are vital, and like QuicoleJR said, there's also the Core Contest. Lazman321 (talk) 19:09, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep There is a whole lot of talk page activity that could be considered a waist of time on WP. I don't understand why people are objecting to VA. Sure every once in a while you might see someone decide he is being cute going on a toddler type rant that classifies a making a POINT. However, people disrupt WP all the time. What would the project be like if we shut down every time vandals decided to war with faithful editors?-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 22:17, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Couple of points: First, I agree with you that the "waste of time" argument is a non-starter. Our editors are volunteers; they can allocate their time as they wish, and there is no one who is entitled to view that effort as wasted if it doesn't match their priorities.
    Which leads into my second point: There's also no centralized metric for what topics are "important". Different editors will have different value systems for judging that, and they are entitled to them. I find it really somewhat objectionable to even attempt to extract a single metric for importance.
    Circling back around, while it does make me frankly a little angry that the VA project even exists, that's my issue and doesn't need to be taken into account. As long as it remains just navel-gazing among those editors who are interested, I suppose they are welcome to it. --Trovatore (talk) 06:58, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    But of course it isn't just navelgazing among these editors, it's a "badge" which is shown on the talk page of all these articles, and if it were up to some of the VA editors would be shown on all articles (similar to FA/GA badges) as well. Fram (talk) 10:46, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep as is. There are several reasons to consider. I find the vital article categorization useful as a heuristic to assess importance. Some article topics are more important or have more encyclopedic impact than others. In some cases, it is obvious. For example, the article Human is overall more important than the article SK 46. If we had to delete one of those two, the choice would be simple. However, it is not always obvious. We edit Wikipedia to make it better in some sense. An improvement to an important article has more value than a similar improvement to a less important one. An importance heuristic can help direct attention to where it matters more, even if the heuristic is not ideal. Phlsph7 (talk) 22:20, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, it's useful for picking out what articles need prioritized in editing.
    Shocksingularity (talk) 01:59, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Nobody here is really explaining why vital articles is actually beneficial enough to justify its citogenesis-like, bias-reenforcing feedback loop. Dronebogus (talk) 02:03, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The project has three listed purposes:
    1. Give direction to the prioritization of improvements of English Wikipedia articles (e.g. which articles to bring to WP:GA and WP:FA status)
    2. Provide a measurement of quality of overall English Wikipedia (e.g. what proportion of the most important articles are at GA and FA status)
    3. To serve as a centralized watchlist of English Wikipedia's most important articles.
    We could do more with the project to achieve these goals, but generally, it seems trying to get things going outside the project hits roadblocks put up by people who don't like it. Regardless, it does serve these purposes to an extent as it is listed on the talk page for editors to see. I've suggested a top icon on level 1 and 2 articles that would be beside a feature or good article icon, so readers would have a measure of quality for our most important articles. I follow all ten of the vital articles at level 1 on my watchlist, perhaps we could find a way to get more people to do the same with articles on the list to help prevent vandalism. Instead of complaining, people could brainstorm how to improve/use the rather unique dataset. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 02:39, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    1 and 2 are better served by project-level assessments or otherwise fall under the following issue and 3 does not provide a useful function, but serves to reproduce eurocentric bias (what is "most important"? An arbitrary conceptualization that merely collates the opinions of whatever editors decide to participate in the project, rather than any true reflection of "importance"). Katzrockso (talk) 00:41, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    As I've stated above, the project level "importance" parameter is not really screened or thought out. I've set several myself for articles, and rarely had anyone say anything or change it. Over all of Wikipedia, I suspect that the project level importance is set by one editor and never revisited again. Vital articles is among the most active Wikiprojects. Yes, there is bias, I have some particularly pointed critiques of that, but ultimately it is something that can be fixed with more participants. Importantly, the vital levels are actually discussed and voted on, demanding participation to add or remove something from the list. This is not true of the project level importance rankings. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 00:49, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That sounds like an argument to improve participation in discussions about project-level importance, rather than one to preserve the flawed vital articles concept. Katzrockso (talk) 00:55, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Or an argument to replace project level importance with vital articles, you know, where discussion is already happening in a central location rather then spread across more Wikiprojects then anyone can keep up with. The vital article rankings all required discussions and a minimum threshold of editors involved, anyone can change a project level importance parameter. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 00:58, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    "The vital article rankings all required discussions and a minimum threshold of editors involved" This may be the case now, but many entries were included without any discussion. Fram (talk) 10:31, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Still, any entry already on the list can be discussed for removal, and frequently are. I've almost never seen this happen for a project level importance parameter. Shocksingularity (talk) 17:03, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I suspect people like the project level importance parameters more then vital because there is no talking. They are free to more or less set these to whatever they want them to be, and no one checks. Vital articles doesn't allow them to just add the entire team involved with the Miracle on Ice  5 to level 4, or whatever their special interest is. I believe this is partially because of our poorly defined and loosely enforced project parameters. I think that within the project there are 5 or 6 different definitions of what "vital" is that people operate from. Someone who thinks of it as a top tenz listicle might struggle with the idea we don't list the top 10 most popular articles at level 1 (Based on that, United States and Donald Trump would be leading our level 1), while someone who is thinking the levels are nested, with broader articles at higher levels and more specific at lower, will struggle with us having biographies at level 3 (this is me and my struggle). I think we are approaching the point where stricter rules for what counts as "vital" and what is appropriate at each level need to be defined so people aren't mad that Kim Kardashian  5 isn't level 2, despite being the 22nd most viewed article. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 23:44, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Another consideration. Is it worth the timesink and watchlist disruption accompanying vital article status removal from tens of thousands of talk pages? or do we presume to shutter the project but leave talk page status intact? Hyperbolick (talk) 08:26, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    We could just remove the functionality from the module (banner shell, I guess): so "|vital=yes" would remain for now in the talk page banner, but it wouldn't output anything. It can then be removed slowly and combined with other changes, the same way other obsolete parameters are (or should be) removed. Fram (talk) 10:14, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Still a waste of effort compared to just keeping it. Hyperbolick (talk) 19:11, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • The main reason to keep it (apart from some handwaving or more philosophical points) is the Core Contest. This contest results in improvements to about 15 articles per year, or put differently, after 3000+ years it could have touched all vital articles once. The contest could just as well ask for improvements to Category:Top-importance articles instead, which would probably help to diminish the Eurocentric/Anglocentric focus of the selected articles, with e.g. articles like Tuareg people or Amhara people or Hutu, or Economy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (and of many other countries), or Government of Haiti, or... Fram (talk) 10:44, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • Nobody's stopping anybody from adding new editing contests, but by the same stroke you can't force editors who want to edit vital articles to instead edit some other top articles set in some top article contest. Deleting it will only have the real effect of demoralizing good editors. Hyperbolick (talk) 05:16, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I use it for myself to prioritise as a secondary metric (mostly going off pageviews). For the core contest, it's also easy to have multiple metrics of importance (pageviews, vital level and interlanguage links), to make the comparison between articles easier. We weigh improvements according to 'coreness', and all these three metrics have their own weaknesses. It's a shame that there is such a eurocentric bias, and maybe this discussion will act as a wake-up call to address that. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 22:17, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The editors within the project aren't happy with the bias either, and it's been (gradually) improving, especially with participation from non-Western editors. I think the project's eurocentrism ironically presents a tangible way to combat eurocentrism on English Wikipedia in general since it provides a straightforward format to observe what Western topics might be overrepresented and what non-Western topics might be underrepresented. Johnnie Runner (talk) 01:53, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal: Abolish the Watchlist

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Further discussion is unlikely to be productive. Ca talk to me! 04:51, 17 November 2025 (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.

The Watchlist, as it currently functions, has the potential to hinder the encouragement of working on multiple parts of the encyclopedia. It makes it easy for an attached editor to cling to a group of articles he or she considers their subject matter. It also allows them to oversee articles as a vigilante, reverting edits they consider a provocation to their worldview. This system can and is being abused for said purpose. As of today, it enables such behavior by offering a button that essentially spells: "Watch my article so it doesn't get tampered by others who don't agree with me".

Not everyone using the watchlist system has the same intention, of course. And yet the handful of users that do are harming the organic development of the encyclopedia as a whole. Even if not omnipresent, a "territorial mentality" can use the watchlist system as a means to its end. The end result is a sense of ownership and control.

In principle, I have no idea how to deal with the matter of vandalism. One can argue the watchlist helps repress it, but perhaps the function should be transferred to a bot. AI? It's dangerous territory, I'm aware of that. If you have an idea of an intelligent system that can mitigate the effect of a potential increase in vandalism if the watchlist system is abolished, write that in the comments. If I have one, I'll also write it. Only administrators, checkusers and the wikipedia employees should keep the default watchlist function after it's been abolished. Perhaps not even they should keep it.

If there is a better solution to solve the issue I raised in full - that I haven't thought of yet - write below. Deathnotekll2 (talk) 21:54, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This suggestion seems like it would undermine our process of implicit consensus: if editors are obstructed in keeping tabs on articles that they actively edit, then we can’t presume implicit consensus for intervening edits even if they go unchallenged. The likely result would be messier edit wars when editors do notice changes they disagree with, more acrimony, and more unresolved errors creeping into articles. signed, Rosguill talk 22:09, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Also, with all due respect you’ve made 45 edits to mainspace, all within the last three weeks, most of which have been rather small copyedits. Maybe get some more experience editing the encyclopedia before suggesting drastic changes to our infrastructure? signed, Rosguill talk 22:14, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
╮( ˘ ､ ˘ )╭ Deathnotekll2 (talk) 22:20, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The solution presumes the existence of a problem which has not actually been established. First, consider that editors are volunteers; we are not required to edit any particular area or thing that we don't want to. Second, your argument about the watchlist serving as a vehicle for vigilantism could have some merit. Some people do use it that way, but you haven't shown how often it's actually being used that way, and I don't think any hard data on it exists that could show the scope of that problem is sufficient enough to require the removal of a widely-used feature. Particularly one that's used for a lot of routine maintenance and countervandalism work. What you're attributing to being a problem with the watchlist itself is really a problem of it being a tool that is abusable by people set on bad behavior (in this case, WP:OWN-ing and battleground editing mentality). The better solution is to address the bad behavior directly, through the normal measures that already exist for these things. ⇒SWATJester Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat! 22:47, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Please give evidence that there is a problem, before offering a solution. Phil Bridger (talk) 23:00, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm. Yeah.
But this proposal tried to foster knowledge and cooperation to solve [the perceived problem] and to [maybe implement a better system].
I'm not talking about you specifically @SwatJester, but it seems odd some people would be outright offended by my proposal [that raised an issue or question], and in which I admitted was incomplete - and that I was willing to listen to further suggestions and ideas. You know what this sounds like to me? -> "Get angry with his proposal -> Don't finish reading the paragraph -> Jumps to keyboard -> Oppose + strike".
Did I commit heresy, oh, Wikipedia's Catholic Church? which again, sorry to disappoint those that like bossing people around - I find that really boring and unimportant. And I won't be bossed around. ╮( ˘ ､ ˘ )╭ Deathnotekll2 (talk) 23:51, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I just thought of something.
I remembered an analogy from a history teacher I had in which he said "the state is not concerned about individual behavior, but in how the mechanisms enabling this behavior can be prevented." He then mentioned the example of slavery, in which the domain of a State isn't psychology (i.e, what is an individual thinking or what are his intentions) but the removal of methods that allow such individuals to thrive and exert evil.
That... is the case here. Individually punishing the WP:OWners is time-consuming and bureaucratic instead of effective.
What would be most effective is the existence of a system that is resolute at removing the means from which bad behavior arises while also addressing the issue of vandalism.
The idea proposal was done mainly to bring the issue of WP:owners still being a concern, as well as their use of the Watchlist for that purpose.
But now I've developed it a bit more. Deathnotekll2 (talk) 00:40, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What a ridiculous suggestion. Not only does it appear to be attempting to solve a problem which has not been shown to be significantly influenced by the use of watchlists, but it wouldn't work anyway, since anyone can create browser tabs for articles they want to keep an eye on. All it would achieve would be annoying a whole lot of people, slowing normal contributor practices down, and filling people's browsers with otherwise unnecessary tabs. Deathnotekll2, I suggest you spend some time finding out how people actually use the system before you make any more silly proposals. AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:14, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@AndyTheGrump You know what I don't care the most? Answers like these that have a rude, condescending tone.
I don't care. Sorry to disappoint. Deathnotekll2 (talk) 23:40, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to contribute usefully here, You'll have to put up with being told that bad ideas are bad. AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:44, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Says the Wikipedia owner... Deathnotekll2 (talk) 00:00, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Even if you got rid of the watchlist functionality it'd be rather easy to build a third-party tool that does the same thing, due to how the MediaWiki software works; such tools would be very hard to restrict since Wikipedia's model is based on the idea that anyone can check page history and edits. So in the long run it'd just put more stress on the servers, since it'd be a third-party tool constantly checking page history, instead of a more direct query.
If it was possible to restrict this, I think it would actually do the opposite of what you've proposing though. The ideological zealots with a bone to pick or WP:OWNers will still be motivated to check pages by hand while less motivated people won't. It'd also incentivise drive-by edit warring, since it'd be a lot easier to keep spamming changes back-and-forth, making it difficult to slow down and have a more reasoned discussion about things.
As for why your proposal is getting so much negative attention, consider that a good portion of the editors have invested a decent amount of effort into Wikipedia and the watchlist is a reasonably important tool which they rely on to prevent vandalism etc.  novov talk edits 00:14, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Personal commentary: I'm indifferent if it's getting negative attention or not.
But yeah, I'm thinking about what you said.
Hmmmm... Deathnotekll2 (talk) 00:18, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
1) yes Wikipedia’s ownership problem is terrible 2) yes the watchlist is extremely easy to weaponize for this purpose 3) no, removing the watchlist would not solve this; owners are just going to go through the page history or use external tools and people using the watchlist for legitimate, essential work like vandalism prevention are going to be crippled. Dronebogus (talk) 04:43, 17 November 2025 (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.

Merging OSM and Pushpin and custom maps into one radio-button element

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Hi, I propose in articles like Bushehr or Dubai, OSM map and Puhspin and satellite maps be merged into one item, which can be set by an argument named "mergedMap", that its value is like value of pushpin map except it can accept OSM and custom maps, like this: 

| mergedMap = OSM#custom1#UAE#Persian Gulf#Middle East#Asia
| custom1 = Dubai_by_Copernicus_Sentinel-2_in_false-colour.jpg

or 

| mergedMap = UAE#OSM#custom1#Persian Gulf#Middle East#Asia
| custom1 = Dubai_by_Copernicus_Sentinel-2_in_false-colour.jpg

would create a radio-button which contains OSM, pushpin and satellite maps in the order mentioned. Zoom, marker, shape and other setting of OSM is like previous.

Using radio-button, we have fewer maps in Infobox. Please discuss. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 12:40, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Zackmann08@Joy Hi and sorry again for pinging. I think this idea would reduce much code about "onByDefault" parameter and codes such as "mapframe=yes". Additionally, it makes Infoboxes neat. Please discuss. I am a volunteer to implement that with a pretty design using interface. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 06:45, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
User:Hooman Mallahzadeh while I applaud the idea, I think you GREATLY underestimate how complicated such an endeavor would be. Recent work I've done with Module:Infobox mapframe has shown that the littlest change has enormous reach and affect. I don't object to the principal of what you are trying to achieve, but I am skeptical that such a feature could be implemented in an editor friendly way...
That being said, I'm 100% open to being proven wrong. My advice would be to try to create a working sandbox version of what you are talking about. A proof of concept (even if it has a few bugs in it) would go a LONG way to convincing me (and I would imagine others) that what you are describing can and should be done. Then you would definitely need an WP:RFC to enact such a major change... Just my 2 cents. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 06:51, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Zackmann08 You said:

I think you GREATLY underestimate how complicated such an endeavor would be.

To be honest, I believe that if Wikipedia follows "Software design patterns", and have a correct software design, then no need to worry about such coding. Even no need for much test them. Believe me! I try to create a "working sandbox version" as soon as possible. Thanks again for your response. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 07:06, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
To be clear, not saying it isn't possible, I just think you may find it to be more difficult than you image, but I certainly wish you luck with it! Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 07:09, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Even no need for much test them isn't a good idea, no matter how the software is designed. There are many experienced software developers, well-versed in modern software development techniques, who attest to the value of adequate testing. (Automated regression testing is a key strategy to facilitate software development.) isaacl (talk) 07:30, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, you are right! Even the best codes segments might have naughty bugs that may appear 1 to 100 billion times of running. But by Software design patterns, we can reduce the testing effort so much, because they improve maintainability and reduce rigidity of code. Additionally, even when we encounter bugs, we can correct that conveniently.
This is true for this code segment also. If it is implemented well, and according to patterns, we would need much less testing than rigid codes. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 07:46, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
To be frank, your comments make you sound inexperienced with production software development. (And there's no need to link to the design patterns article again, and really no need to repeat your previous comments.) Testing is about ensuring the specific specifications for which a component is designed to meet are upheld. Good software design (which is often aided by following design patterns) helps ensure that changes can be more easily made in a decoupled manner. Good design will make it easier to make changes that will pass testing. It does not reduce the amount of testing required. isaacl (talk) 08:09, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Isaacl Yes! Definitely, it "reduce the amount of testing required." If we have correct classes, then only Unit testing and an Integration testing would be required. Unit testing has been done greatly, but we need only integration testing.
In this case, I propose this scenario:
  1. Define an interface and a class for mergedMapClass
  2. Implement rendering function for mergedMapClass that is different for OSM, Pushpin and custom maps (this needs too much testing but it has been done previously, just copy and paste these rendering codes).
  3. Make a Radio-button element that recognizes mergedMapClass as the main item
  4. Force this radio-button to call different rendering functions for each text "OSM", "custom1", "UAE" etc.
And that's it! How much test would be needed? Only some mapframe settings like size may cause problem.
I think integration testing for such scenario would not be too much to finally reach a stable code. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 08:31, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't understand why you're continuing to argue against best software development practices, when it doesn't inhibit you from proceeding. Modern software development practices have increased the amount of testing, covering more levels of the software system, and focused on automating it. isaacl (talk) 17:23, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Dear @Isaacl . I was talking about reduction of Unit testing due to reusable components provided by good design. I am trying to implement the above scenario as soon as possible. When finished, I will ping you to together test that code segment as much as we can, and also do some automated testing, because I am not familiar with that. Thanks for your idea. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 11:46, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Please, no pings on this topic. It's not an area I'm interested in collaborating in. "I'm going to design this so well that less testing is needed" is an old fallacy in software development. A key reason for improving modularity is to design for testability, adding more unit testing than can be done without it. It's OK if you're not interested in gaining more understanding of software architecture, but if that's the case, I suggest not persisting in making statements that are counter to best practices. isaacl (talk) 18:18, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ideally we shouldn't overinvest in keeping the old location maps alive, and instead fix the equivalent functionality that's supposed to exist with mapframes, cf. Template talk:Infobox mapframe#switcher zoom/center?
I do see the sense in having a generic switcher template, though, that ability might be useful in general, potentially for any sort of content and not just maps. --Joy (talk) 12:36, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Joy: Yes, and thanks for your comment. A "generic switcher template" that is "queried simply" is very nice. For mapframe zoom switch, I propose this method for mapframe switcher: 

|mergedMap = OSM1#OSM2#OSM3#Asia#UAE#Custom1
|OSM1 = {{Infobox mapframe |id=Q4948020|geomask=Q30}}
|OSM2= {{Infobox mapframe |id=Q4948020|geomask=Q100}}
|OSM3= {{Infobox mapframe |id=Q4948020|geomask=Q120}}
| custom1 = Dubai_by_Copernicus_Sentinel-2_in_false-colour.jpg

That is rendered in radio button switcher in order. Do you agree? Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 14:37, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Replacing "Requested articles"?

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Requested articles seems largely abandoned. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears nobody is actively maintaining it, and it has gotten to a point where many of the entries are not suitable topics. Some sections are rife with spam. I would suggest that this entire model is unsustainable, and I think I have an idea on how we can do better.

I'm picturing a "Requested articles wizard". Within the wizard, the user is directed to provide an article title, a one-sentence description, and three of the best available sources about the topic. This request would then be posted on a message board for review, and if the subject is determined to meet notability, it can be added to the reformed list of requested articles. The wizard would automatically format the provided URLs into citation templates, so it can all be easily copied over to the list to make it as easy as possible for editors to create entries from it. This would also be an ideal channel for conflict of interest editors, and would be a more positive experience with Wikipedia than writing a draft that gets declined five times. I say we either blow up/mark as historical the current lists of requested articles and replace it with something functional.

Is this something worth exploring further? Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts. Thank you, MediaKyle (talk) 12:59, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For background, here's another recent discussion we had about what to do with RA: Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 68#Doing something about WP:RA. –Novem Linguae (talk) 13:35, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Scrap it. People are going to make articles they want to make, not articles somebody else asked for. Dronebogus (talk) 04:27, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It has the theoretical use of being a place to look for some inspiration on what to work on, but I don't know if it's actually used that way. I think some Wikiprojects have their own lists, don't know if getting rid of RA would mess with that. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:51, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
WP:VG has Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Requests, but that is a totally separate page AFAIK.  novov talk edits 03:58, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think some plausible/useful suggestions get taken up, and so get removed from the lists. What is left in my experience is un-notable stuff that sits around for years. Removing everything after say a year might help. Johnbod (talk) 21:16, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I see that Frank Dobson (sculptor) has been at Portal:Visual arts/Things you can do (transcluded at Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts) for 20 years... Ham II (talk) 22:05, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I should have said "ought to get removed from the list...." Johnbod (talk) 18:07, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think that might be a good idea. I'd support that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:06, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm game. I have on one or two occasions noticed that an article I created was listed on RA, but I've never looked there in the first place. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:11, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is Wikipedia:Education program a net benefit to the encyclopedia?

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I just came across an article that was the subject of a student editing program and the student, who I’m certain was acting in good faith, made an absolute mess of the article due to what had to have been simple ignorance of what a Wikipedia article is and how it is written. I think I’ve brought this up before, and I remember seeing this problem way back in my earliest days as an IP editor. The noticeboard has a concerning amount of evidence showing negative impacts of the program on the quality of the encyclopedia (mostly students creating junk articles). I also seriously doubt there’s any long-term editor retention from these projects. With all that in mind, is there any positive impacts of the program for Wikipedia that justifies keeping it? Are the students getting some kind of unique benefit that couldn’t be provided any other way? Or is it just a time sink for both parties? Dronebogus (talk) 02:31, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I can definitely say that there seems to frequently be little follow-through on these classes. I've seen a number of students put the WikiEd template on the talk page of articles I've made, worked on, or watchlisted and then...nothing. I've checked back in on their userpages and on the class pages for some a year or so later and it seems like the class started setting up to do things and then just...never did? No idea what happened with the Wikipedia part of those classes. Did the teacher give up before even having them do much of anything other than making accounts and choosing articles to work on, work that then never happened? SilverserenC 02:35, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'd imagine a fair amount of these cases stem from students signing up for a class, doing the first few homework assignments, and then dropping it right before the drop deadline a few weeks into the semester. signed, Rosguill talk 02:41, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Except it's not just the one student. Unless everyone in the class dropped it? SilverserenC 02:43, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Is there enough material for how to edit on wikipedia for folks? Especially students? The UI does take a bit to learn. User:Bluethricecreamman (Talk·Contribs) 19:06, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I had the same experience recently. They made a few small changes on Feminist views on transgender topics, put a template on the talk page, and then never responded to my questions. I wonder if there are some students who are just coasting through it or not doing the work. Katzrockso (talk) 02:42, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I mean, if I was a student in one of these projects, I probably would view it as something to get through for the sake of the assignment and not something I actually cared about. Dronebogus (talk) 02:43, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, but if the programs are encouraging/permitting students to exert such minimal effort, there is your original question of whether the program is worth it. I looked through the course [7] that was involved on that page and it raised more questions than it answered.
I think this whole question is a non-starter, though, from what I understand the WMF pushes this very hard and would not take kindly to community efforts to interrupt it, but that could be an incorrect perception on my part. Katzrockso (talk) 02:50, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Why is WMF pushing this so hard? Are they getting paid or something? Dronebogus (talk) 02:51, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think one of the ideas is that with more knowledge/experience of Wikipedia, the students might become editors later on. Katzrockso (talk) 03:01, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I’d like just one example of that ever actually happening Dronebogus (talk) 03:16, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm one! I originally created my account for a WikiEd course back in 2018. I didn't do much editing for a couple of years after the course ended, but then I dusted off the same account when I started getting interested in editing more seriously in 2021. I'd had some interest in Wikipedia even before taking the course in question, but I think going through WikiEd helped give me a baseline level of Wikipedia confidence that empowered me to come back later and start editing independently. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 18:22, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think another goal is also better understanding of Wikipedia by students. My gut feeling is that bad courses will produce (generally) bad results, good courses will produce (generally) good results. Designing/running a good course requires, among other things, the instructor (and course designer if different) understand what a Wikipedia article is, how it gets written, what talk pages are and how to use them, and at least a basic understanding of Wikipedia culture and basic policies. My experience as a trainer for Wikimedia UK has taught me that these things are not intuitive to everybody (possibly even most people), and also that (strange as it may seem to those of us here) not everybody is interested in being a Wikipedia editor - they don't care how the sausage is made.
I expect a lot of the poor outcomes are a combination of disinterested students, disinterested and/or clueless teachers and clueless course designers. We do need to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so (to mix a metaphor) we need to somehow separate the wheat from chaff. Unfortunately I don't have any good ideas how to do that off the top of my head. Thryduulf (talk) 03:18, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
[…] these things are not intuitive to everybody (possibly even most people) […] not everybody is interested in being a Wikipedia editor exactly. That’s why student editors seem to me a lose-lose for everyone since they don’t produce good work or become regular editors and I highly doubt they actually learn anything from these assignments. Dronebogus (talk) 05:22, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think the WMF "pushes" this at all. They're not really involved in it, except to the extent of funding some of it (Wiki Education Foundation for the US, and chapters for almost everywhere else). WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:31, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This question strikes me as a bit odd, because I don’t see WikiEd as the source of student editors; I see it as an attempted solution to student editors. (Rather like AfC is not a source of COI editing, but an attempt to contain and address it.) I personally do think student editors writ large are a net benefit (if nothing else, we have to convince the next generation they can edit if we want some to discover they like to edit), but we don’t really control whether student editors exist. Since they do, I think the net positive of WikiEd is clear. Given the many ways a completely well-intentioned class could get themselves into trouble, it is much better to have specialized resources and staff to guide and monitor their efforts. I see it as a sign of WikiEd’s success that most student editors are harmless to the encyclopedia, and a real triumph that some make genuinely valuable contributions. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 05:11, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Most student editors are harmless to the encyclopedia um, citation needed? My evidence that student editors are generally damaging to the encyclopedia may be purely anecdotal, but you can’t refute it by saying “actually they’re generally harmless and even useful” with zero examples of constructive work done by student editors. Dronebogus (talk) 05:18, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Honestly, I agree. The idea of student editors is great, but most don't know how to write in Wikipedia's style and their teachers don't encourage them to because they have their own requirements. Shocksingularity (talk) 05:41, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Does any newbie know how to write in Wikipedia's style? Were all of your first edits perfect? Mine weren't. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:23, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but student editors rarely if ever advance beyond newbie, and on top of that are tasked with making massive edits to articles immediately, with tight deadline, instead of starting slow and doing things at their own pace. Dronebogus (talk) 06:27, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Have you looked at the numbers in Template:Registered editors by edit count? All new editors rarely advance beyond newbie. This is why I've estimated that we need 100,000 people to go through Special:CreateAccount to replace me when I die. Student editors get further than most, but 70% new accounts don't make even the first edit, and half of the ones who do make any edit don't come back to edit on a second day.
Student editors are rarely tasked with "massive edits", and never "immediately" or with a "tight deadline". Most of them create an account in September, do WP:The Wikipedia Adventure in October, pick an article in October, write a draft in November, and (if they get that far) post it in December. The Wiki Ed Foundation has a step-by-step curriculum.
Another area in which we see a big difference is blocks:
  • Typical newbie: 15% chance of block in the year after their first edit.
  • Typical student: 0.2% chance of block in the year after their first edit.
I think the bottom line is that all newbies struggle, but student editors actually struggle less than the typical non-student newbie. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:43, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
1: How many of those new editors are trolls and people here just to goof around, vs. serious good faith editors? 2: of course students rarely get blocked, they’re here for a single purpose that doesn’t fall into any frequently blocked category (aforementioned trolls/goof-offs, POV warriors, spammers, etc.) Dronebogus (talk) 07:18, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, and that's part of what makes them better newbies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:00, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is a situation where confirmation bias is hard to resist, since of course you never see the harmless student editors. (Note that "harmless" is different from "positive".) The default curriculum for WikiEd guides students away from ever editing in mainspace at all (using draftspace instead), for example. Compared to the volume of programs being run, the traffic at Wikipedia:Education noticeboard is quite low, and it's a virtue that volunteer editors don't have to be on the hook to resolve the problems that do arise. As for positive examples, well, if you poke into one of the most recent problems on that noticeboard (a UC Davis class on fish), a previous student in that class went on to create multiple GAs. But confirmation bias also means that you're unlikely to know that a successful editor was originally a student, since that won't exactly be advertised alongside their good edits. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 16:07, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Cosigning @LEvalyn's comment above. There are hundreds upon hundreds of classes using Wikipedia every term. The fact that only a scant handful of them ever end up on your radar is all the evidence you need that most are not problematic. -- asilvering (talk) 11:35, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is my view as well. Unless we have indications that WMF is expending massive amounts of resources on this, it seems appropriate to provide a channel for educators to use Wikipedia for courses in a way that is easily monitored and which gently steers people towards less problematic activity. Anecdotally, outside this program I’ve seen professors with less than 100 edits think that they’re “experienced” and ready to teach a Wikipedia course, and then react poorly when their methods are challenged by the community. In general, they seem to respond much better to steering and guidance from the WMF than volunteer editors. signed, Rosguill talk 16:25, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The Wikimedia Foundation does not run education programs. That's mostly the completely separate Wiki Education Foundation. WikiEdu gets some grant money (as of a few years ago, less than half their budget and declining) from the WMF, but I don't think they're even technically an m:affiliate. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:03, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Notified: Wikipedia:Education noticeboard. Thryduulf (talk) 03:22, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Davidson College/Bio320 Plant Adaptations (Fall 2025): 52.5k words added and in a quick skim the quality seems legit. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:35, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi all, I'm LiAnna -- I am responsible for edits coming from m:Wiki Education Foundation's Wikipedia Student Program, in which we support college and university instructors in the United States and Canada to assign students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment. There are student projects here on English Wikipedia that aren't under our auspices (instructors who don't know our support exists, instructors in other countries supported mostly by Wikimedia affiliates in those countries, some secondary/high school classes), but most are part of our program. As a few of you have noted (thanks!), our program brings about 12,000 new editors to Wikipedia each year, so while there are definitely some students who we all agree aren't producing good content, the vast majority in fact are adding value to Wikipedia. Most of us supporting this program on the Wiki Education staff are Wikipedians, and none of us would do this if we felt like it was a net-negative (or even anywhere close to that) for Wikipedia.
Let me specifically address a few points in this discussion:
  1. Each term, we onboard around 300-400 courses who are planning to teach with Wikipedia see this term's here. About 20% of these will not actually do or finish the assignment, and there's myriad reasons for this. Sometimes a class is canceled by the university; sometimes once they get into editing they realize it's more work than they have time to give, so they stop; sometimes the students are unenthusiastic and the instructor doesn't want to force students who aren't going to do good work to edit; etc. Most of the classes that do complete the assignment also have one or two students who just don't finish the assignment (this is true in most college classes for all assignments, not just the Wikipedia assignment).
  2. We provide extensive training modules for student editors to complete; the specific ones are tailored to the assignment they're given. We also offer a variety of support for instructors, in assignment design, office hours, etc., such that we do our best to ensure their plan for the course will produce the right kind of content for Wikipedia. Instructors and student editors in our program get extensive guidance and support; we've been doing this for 15 years and have a very good sense of what works and what doesn't in terms of producing good content for Wikipedia, and we steer away anyone who is not following our best practices.
  3. Of course, not every student follows directions, and some will produce bad content. While you as a Wikipedian are of course welcome to interact with student editors as you would any other new editor, we do not expect any volunteer to clean up any bad work added through our program. Instead, please feel free to leave a talk page message for or ping User:Ian (Wiki Ed) or User:Brianda (Wiki Ed), our two Wiki Experts. Ian and Brianda are both experienced editors who will jump in and make the edits necessary while communicating with the student and instructor as needed. If there's a more class-wide problem, feel free to bring it to the WP:ENB, and we will intervene with the instructor.
  4. Our organization's focus is not on retaining student editors as long-term contributors (although a handful do stick around on their own). Instead, we focus on retaining good instructors, who then bring another group of students each year. For example, review this instructor, whose behavioral ecology students have made a huge impact on species articles for a decade. But given declining youth brand awareness of Wikipedia, I do think our work is a helpful effort to (as Thryduulf says) have students better understand Wikipedia, when to use it, and when not to use it.
  5. In terms of the specific article referenced above (I Am Not Your Negro), the instructor reached out to us yesterday about this case. The instructor agreed the student editor's work had some problems, including with tone, but felt like there was some good content in there. Both the student editor and instructor were taken aback that the edit was reverted without any comment on a talk page or indication in the edit summary of what was wrong. We recommended the student post on the talk page, and then add back in more fact-based and less essay-like information in smaller edits. If there is additional problems with their contributions, please engage with the student on the talk page about specifics of what they need to do to fix it.
As always, I'm happy to answer any questions about our work. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don’t really think “declining brand awareness” is a problem; if the top reason provided (“other sources are better”) is accurate, then that’s exactly what we want, because it’s true. Wikipedia (and all encyclopedias) are inherently inferior to other sources due to their tertiary nature. Obviously we should still improve content, but people should also be going to other, better sources anyway. We don’t need to maximize the number readers like a for-profit needs to maximize the number of customers. Dronebogus (talk) 19:09, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Tertiary sources aren't inherently inferior. They are worse for some purposes and better for others. If you want to get a quick summary of a subject is, then an encyclopedia is a better option than, e.g., original scientific journal articles.
We don't need to maximize the number of readers, but there are consequences to losing readers. One of those is that readers are the primary source of future editors. If the next generation doesn't read here, then they won't edit here either, and then Wikipedia will eventually die for lack of editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:03, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Most students editors don't understand WP:NOTESSAY (for fairly obvious reasons) and WP:NPOV (most humanities courses explicitly teach people not to be neutral with regards to injustice, etc.) Also keep in mind that most students are incentivized to pass the course, not actually contribute to the encyclopedia, which results in AI use and copyright violations.
As for getting younger people to interact with Wikipedia, social media promotion should help, especially short-form video content in platforms like TikTok or Instagram. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 17:27, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Some random WikiEdu contributions:
Juvenile incarceration in the United States: Fails WP:NOTESSAY, fork of Youth incarceration in the United States, WP:UNDUE content in lede (though this is mostly because it's written as an essay), broad generalizations (e.g. see #Daily life while incarcerated with https://worldschildrensprize.org/adayinthelifelockedup), unreliable sourcing (refs 2, 3). Better to delete this entirely since we already have an existing article about this topic.
Incarcerated firefighters: Has questions in lede What Do Incarcerated Firefighters Do?, cites a YouTube video. This article is mostly fine and can be fixed with some copyedits.
NoFilter: This hashtag is often misused, so it has been abandoned in recent years... fails verification, International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking is a predatory journal, However, now it is used as a trick. Many people do not believe the posts that use this hashtag; research shows that this hashtag is nothing but a lie because of being heavily misused. violates WP:NPOV and not supported by sources. It is no longer as impactful as it used to be in the 2010s and #NoFilter was used as a form of resistance. The goal was to encourage people to show their true selves and get rid of the pressure to be perfect. are not sourced at all. NoFilter started as a positive thing, inspiring people to be who they are. However, people started misusing the hashtag. They still used the hashtag on images that were tweaked and deceive others. [...] As a result, #NoFilter has become a gimmick and has lost its credibility. is the last straw: since nearly all the additions fail verification, this edit should be reverted.
Wenatchee High School: Adds promotional material about the school (providing long term benefits that will help students before they graduate, ...where they help students get a jumpstart by providing many opportunities in giving them a career pathway and academic journey... while citing primary sources or none at all. The encyclopedic value of this information is low to nonexistent. Their previous edit adds stuff like The College Mentor Program is also looking for Volunteer Mentors to help serve Seniors in Wenatchee High School to help them guide towards their future paths. The program is looking students who can volunteer as Virtual Mentors, Writing Editors, Guest Speakers, or Networkers and have forms for students to fill out. Overall, these edits are a net negative and should be reverted (and I fail to understand how this article relates to "Online Communities.")
Starbucks Reserve Roastery (Seattle): Most of their edits are fine, but they have edit-warred to add a "Sustainability" section when repeatedly told it was promotional. However, I think their contributions are a net positive here. Their report makes me think they may have used some AI help for this assignment, but the resulting content looks fine.
Women in the Middle Ages: No concerns, net improvement to the article.
Victoria Spivey: The majority of the content is unsourced (e.g. Scholars also note that she helped define the themes and vocal approach of classic female blues, and her recordings continue to be discussed in studies of African American music and women's history, The Black Perspective in Music notes that her lyrics reflected everyday life and the experiences of African American women, showing both independence and emotional depth.), duplicated (Victoria Spivey was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1986.) or fails WP:NOTESSAY. Some of the content is fine (e.g. most at #Recording Career (1920s-1940s)). The unsourced sections should be selectively removed from the article.
Lemonade (2016 film): Consists entirely of plot summary changes. Plot summaries don't need sources, but content like Being underwater is a crucial environmental factor of this portion of the video, for she is attempting to get rid of the weight that now lies on her because of her relationship, hinting as the transition from denial into greater feelings of anger, the ring of fire, more specifically the image of her sitting directly in the center of it, gives watchers a sense of the trapped feelings that she experiences being stuck within the fire of her rage., shifting the attention from solely on Beyoncé to other black women and girls., etc. veers into analysis. Transitions like Off into the next chapter of healing. are unencyclopedic. I've reverted this. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 19:22, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is the big problem I see in student edits: they frequently use Wikipedia as an essay host for their obviously very amateur essays and then almost inevitably abandon this essay-cruft in articles once the assignment is done, to the detriment of readers and other editors. If I have one constructive recommendation to give for WikiEd it’s that instructors need to teach students how to write Wikipedia articles or partner with people who actually can, and grade the results accordingly. Dronebogus (talk) 22:13, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Dronebogus, there's nothing any teacher can do to prevent the existence of poor students. Teachers can grade accordingly all they like, but that doesn't make a C-level student's work any better than C-level work. Part of teaching is that sometimes students fail. No amount of training, sternness, or support will eliminate C-level output. -- asilvering (talk) 01:49, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Asilvering: Agreed, but C-level output doesn't reach the outside world in most courses. The WikiEdu program is definitely improving some articles; perhaps automatically blocking anyone whose grades drop below an 80 would help refine this (they can do alternative non-Wikipedia assignments instead.) I also suspect that electives, especially ones in the humanities, are more vulnerable to having such students, but I currently don't have the data to substantiate this claim. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 03:22, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
perhaps automatically blocking anyone whose grades drop below an 80 would help refine this what. how on earth do you expect this to be enforced? Please remember that this is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, not the encyclopedia that only students with good grades can edit. People who aren't very good at building the encyclopedia are nevertheless part of our whole process. If any student is creating work so deranged that they need a WP:CIR block, we can simply CIR block them. -- asilvering (talk) 05:16, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Asilvering: The problem is that most regular people won't really be making these big edits for fairly obvious reasons. Let's take me for instance, I have limited experience with content work (I'm currently working away at Grammatical tense), so I were to create a 4000 word article about something, it probably won't look good, and of course, this will change with experience. However, these student editors have to write these articles and make these edits to get class credit, and while they generally do some great work here, there are always some who do not want to put in the effort and resort to using LLMs or plagiarizing minutes before the assignment deadline. And this is not unique to the Wikipedia Education program, this happens in every education institution everywhere around the world and I'm sure we've all seen (or been) people who engage in academic misconduct at some point in our lives.
As for WP:CIR blocking, that's not possible since most of them only edit a single article, and blocking someone requires chronic/persistent behavioral issues. The damage done by these types of students is inconsequential on its own, but may eventually add up. Even the people who run the education program revert some bad edits, and volunteers revert many more (see my analysis above). Incidentally, a similar initiative did get most of its participants blocked due to excessive gaming and sockpuppetry, so I think WikiEdu is doing a much better job vetting instructors in this regard.
In hindsight, I agree that automatically blocking anyone whose grades drop below an 80 would help refine this is not a good statement to make and was a bit of a knee-jerk idea to try to minimize the negative impacts of this program. I think we all should audit student editors' contributions and see which variables affect output quality the most (institution? course? instructor? subject area? training status?) and perhaps take it from there. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 06:09, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That report seems to be a student assignment, I've run into at least one course where all the students had to write/"write" something on that topic. Gnomingstuff (talk) 03:48, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Surely these reports fail WP:NOTWEBHOST. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 04:03, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'd argue that this isn't an issue exclusive to student editors; as a generalisation, all new editors are going to need guidance on MOS and tone, and the problem is just as great (or even greater) with non-student editors. Nil🥝 19:37, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I’ve said this already, but student editors have to jump into major edits relatively quickly whereas general newbies can take as much time as they need doing incremental work or learning rules. They’re also doing it because they have to, not because they want to. Dronebogus (talk) 22:08, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you haven't previously looked at it, you might find it interesting to examine the WikiEd trainings for yourself, or the assignments in one of the currently running courses. Personally, I think the program is appropriately incremental. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 22:47, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]


Apparently, Wiki Education is quite effective: Wikipedia and its little-known ally, Wiki Education, have quietly enlisted and trained more than 140,000 college students to build an army of activists Media Research Center, at your service. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:55, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Well, yes, one of WikiEdu's stated goals is to fix our systemic bias problem, which the Media Research Center mislabels as "activism." However, it is obvious that courses like these tend to be the most problematic, since they invite essay-like social critique and undue content in articles unrelated to social theory. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 03:38, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Effective at what? Owning the righties? Or building an encyclopedia? Because a bunch of anti-intellectual conspiracy theorists hating a collaboration between colleges and Wikipedia because they already hate collages and Wikipedia separately isn’t useful nor relevant analysis. Dronebogus (talk) 10:53, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Per source "building an army of activists" apparently. If you can do that with whatever Wiki Education gets in funding, it does sound pretty impressive. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:57, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
“Building an army of activists” per a bunch of anti-intellectual conspiracy theorists. These are the sort of people who think gonzo in a dress is woke indoctrination turning kids trans. It’s nothing but scaremongering to fuel the conservative hate on Wikipedia/higher education. Provide an actual reliable source that shows Wiki Ed is doing something useful and I’ll be more receptive. Dronebogus (talk) 11:04, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you were under the impression I was receptive to this... view of reality, that's wrong. But I think it's interesting and Wikipedians should know it exists, MRC writes this because they want people to believe it. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:55, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I never was under any such assumption, but MRC thinking it’s true/wanting people to believe it doesn’t mean anything. Anti-vaxxers want people to believe them and can cherry pick and exaggerate all they like, but that doesn’t somehow make vaccines as dangerous as they claim. Dronebogus (talk) 12:34, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A policy on 'Awards and recognition' sections

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One of my hobbyhorses here is cleaning up promotional articles, particularly of BLPs. One tell-tale sign I see frequently is an overstuffed 'Awards and recognition' or 'Awards' section, full of prizes no one has ever heard of given out by obscure webmagazines or societies. However, similar sections are often created or added to by good-faith editors, and sometimes BLPs should mention genuinely notable awards. As far as I know, there's no clear policy on these sorts of things beyond our general policies on avoiding puffery, overdetail, and trivia. This has occasionally led to editing conflicts.

I've been trying to think through a policy which could help us deal with these issues systematically. I think there are two key thing that might help:

  • Awards granted to BLPs should be mentioned only if the award is itself notable (such as a Nobel Prize or a IET Faraday Medal)
  • Except in exceptional circumstances, we should not allow standalone 'Awards and recognition' sections (similarly to how we like to avoid 'Criticism' sections). Mention of awards received should be distributed throughout the text in a sensible way, typically chronologically.

I do worry that for academics, there exist non-notable awards that are nevertheless relevant to summarizing someone's career - these things matter in academia but a lot of the prizes are pretty obscure. We might also consider mentioning awards given by notable organizations if those awards are mentioned in the org's article. Any thoughts on these suggestions? Improvements? —Ganesha811 (talk) 00:16, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think if an award received has received coverage in a secondary source, then that's another good reason to include the award in the Wikipedia article, regardless of whether or not that particular award received is notable. Say Sally Willis receives the Jon Brandt Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Jon Brandt award is not a notable award, but in a profile of Sally Willis, The New York Times lists that award amongst her accolades, I think that would be a good reason to include the award. Or perhaps Sally Willis lives in Athens, Ohio and local press The Athens Recorder runs a story on Sally Willis receiving this non-notable award because Sally Willis is the most notable person from Athens and everyone there is super proud of her accomplishments. I think that would be another good reason to include an award in an article. I think a good start to cutting out awards is to exclude the non-notable ones that are only mentioned on the recipient's CV / other personal website and sources from the body that bestows the award (e.g. website, award ceremony documents, etc). Katzrockso (talk) 00:27, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
We could make lists of awards we consider worth mentioning, like RSN. We can also make a list of fake awards that should definitely be removed. I started one over at User:Polygnotus/vanity. There are at least some awards that are notable and have an article, but are not worth mentioning (for example Superbrands). Another complication with requiring articles is that you can require a standalone article about the specific award, or an article about the organisation behind it. Awards and recognition' sections can make sense in cases like Quentin Tarantino who won like 4 trillion awards. See also List of awards and nominations received by Quentin Tarantino. Maybe an article should only be allowed to have a dedicated section for awards if you reach a certain threshold, like 10+ notable ones or if they have their own article. Polygnotus (talk) 03:38, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
 Comment: Way to much policy creep. Many of the major awards in my discipline barely have a presence on Wikipedia. I've gone through the effort to get some content for the bigger ones, but unless someone interested in the topic also thinks to make a Wikipedia page for it, they will slide through the cracks. If an outside source states the award was given, and the source is reliable, why would we default to excluding it from the article? GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 07:07, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@GeogSage I agree that if a truly reliable and independently written source thinks its worth mentioning then it is most likely worth including. The problem is that a lot of these claims do not have a reliable source attached, and often not even a source at all. Polygnotus (talk) 07:19, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Reliable_sources: "Wikipedia's sourcing policy, Verifiability, says that all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation; material not meeting this standard may be removed." You could always tag [citation needed][according to whom?][additional citation(s) needed][promotional source?] if you doubt it. I write a few biographies for academics, and I try to include an award section if applicable. Generally, getting the citation isn't hard if you know they got the award, the most extensive I've done was for Waldo R. Tobler so I'll use him as an example. Some, like the Andrew McNally Award, 1986, might not have made the transition to the digital realm but are mentioned in sources discussing Tobler. In another biography I'm working on right now (not of a living person), the award was won in 1947, and I'm not even sure the awarding organization is still around. It is noted in multiple peer-reviewed publications discussing the subject though. I feel like if you see an award that isn't sourced, you can try to find it online. If you can't find a source, you can tag it or delete it with an edit summary. I don't think we need to get more complicated then that about what counts for inclusion. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 07:36, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I know for film articles, to avoid overstuffing, we only include awards that have articles here. I see no reason why the same guideline couldn't be reasonably applied to BLPs. If one feels an award is notable enough to merit inclusion but it lacks an article, they can certainly undertake the effort to write the article at that point. DonIago (talk) 07:23, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Not a lot of the big academic awards have Wikipedia pages. The biggest award in American Geography is the Anderson medal of honor, and it is mentioned on the American Association of Geographers page briefly. If we limited it to only awards on the AAG page, most of the ones the AAG issues couldn't be included. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 07:39, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@GeogSage I think a section in a larger article, or a standalone article, is both fine. I redirected Anderson medal and Anderson Medal to the appropriate section. Polygnotus (talk) 07:49, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That is an example of the biggest award in the discipline. A better might be a University Consortium for Geographic Information Science Education Award, or fellowship. Those would be a pretty big deal career wise, but the pages for those topics are abysmal. These are referenced in literature on the subjects, why would we need a Wikipedia page to mention them as well? If that is the case, the pages can be made. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 08:00, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@GeogSage I added that one as well. I agree that Wikipedia's coverage of academic awards is... not perfect. But I don't think you have to worry about us deleting awards from articles about hardworking scientists. I can't speak for Ganesha811 of course but I think they are more interested in getting rid of fake and dubious awards on promotional articles. So I think the focus is more on CEOs not academics. Although I agree that if policy is written it is a good idea to take pre-internet and academic awards into account, and treat them very differently than, for example, the Best in Biz awards you can just buy for a couple hundred dollar. Polygnotus (talk) 08:10, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My rule of thumb is that an award etc should have a decent cite, preferably secondary, but if the award or at least the org behind it has a WP-article, a primary one may be acceptable, say Grammy etc.
I think awards without WP-articles can be ok to include, if there is a decent secondary cite who bothered to notice. WP doesn't know all. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:29, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
These sections are also common in sports articles (e.g. Michael Phelps#Honors and awards and Cathy Freeman#Awards (once I fixed it), and to pick some local examples that I've worked on, [[Bill Roycroft#Recognition and John Maclean (sportsperson)#Recognition. Ditto for music, like Luciano Pavarotti#Awards and honors, Blondie (band)#Awards and nominations, and Joan Armatrading#Honours. I agree with @GeogSage: that trying to police this area is guideline creep and could cause unintended consequences; some of the content in sections like this would disrupt the flow of pages if it was mentioned elsewhere. Graham87 (talk) 10:47, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In general, I think "Recognition" is a decent heading for this stuff. It can cover knighthoods, Grammys and "30 under 30" Time magazine lists etc. If I start an article, I always go with prose, not table, but that is a personal preference. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:01, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that musicians, athletes and actors/actresses seem like a decent exception, in that they should probably have standalone sections called 'Recognition', 'Awards', or similar, especially if they've won major awards. But I note that the Phelps page, for instance, does seem to generally follow Proposed Rule #1 - that all the awards seem to have their own Wikipedia page, and for good reason. Pavarotti, too, has many notable awards. But does it really matter to anyone, anywhere, that he received an "Eisenhower Medallion"? Does anyone know what that is? Or that Blondie got the 2022 BBC Longshots Audience Award?
@Polygnotus is right to infer that I'm mostly concerned about businesspeople/politicians and junky "online" awards, not academics and athletes. That's where I most frequently see problems. I wonder if we could shape a policy that applies only to those BLPs. I don't think that merely requiring a secondary, "independent", source would do much, because of the proliferation of junk/slop websites that copy press releases, publish paid notices without disclosure, —Ganesha811 (talk) 12:09, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Googles AI suggests two possible medals:
People to People International (PTPI) "Eisenhower Medallion": This is the highest award given by the organization People to People International, founded by President Eisenhower in 1956 to foster global peace and understanding. Notable recipients include Mother Teresa and Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, II.
American Nuclear Society (ANS) "Dwight D. Eisenhower Medal": Established in 2014, this award recognizes outstanding leadership in public policy for nuclear science and technology, or significant contributions to nuclear nonproliferation. It is presented bi-annually and honors excellence worthy of international recognition. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:28, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A source that is a copy of a press release isn't independent and just clarify that the secondary source is non-promotional and it's fine. Katzrockso (talk) 12:30, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
On secondary source for "prize" without WP-article, context matters. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:32, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Rejuvenating WP:Current events noticeboard

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Given the amount of disputes that arise from current events, I think it would be a good idea to start using it again. Perhaps disputes on ANI about current events could be moved there?

GarethBaloney (talk) 15:40, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see the logic of separating user conduct issues by subject matter. It probably would get some use for discussing template:current articles, but in my experience that usually gets handled on article talk pages just fine. When there are stickier disputes, they typically boil down to RS or BLP (or both) anyway. —Rutebega (talk) 22:50, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal language

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Should i add judeo-arabic and judeo-farsi Noam Elyada alt (talk) 19:27, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If you mean starting a Wikipedia in those languages, that's not something that the English Wikipedia can say yes or no to - see meta:Proposals for new projects. If you mean adding translations of names into those languages, that's something you should discuss on the talk page of the article you want to add it to. If neither of those are what you are asking, then I haven't understood you. Thryduulf (talk) 20:33, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict). Where? Phil Bridger (talk) 20:35, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
One of the lamgauges in lamguage button Noam Elyada alt (talk) 17:03, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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I just did some cleanup of Index of Belgium-related articles, but it seems to be that this is almost by definition a very incomplete, random "index" of some of the many, many articles that could be included, and as such has no real use. Making (and keeping) it complete is a Sisypus-task and would lead to a much longer page in any case. The same applies to all articles in Category:Indexes of topics by country I think. Presumably the same applies to indexes for other topics as well, but perhaps stick for now to the country ones as a first point of discussion?

Are these indexes something we should have or can they better be deleted or redirected to outlines (as sometimes happens) or to categories? Fram (talk) 10:29, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think these should be redundant to outlines (which highlight the most important articles) or categories (which list all articles). Indices seem to lie somewhere in between and are presumably less useful than either to readers. For instance, Belgium at the 2004 Summer Olympics is listed in the Belgium index, but it doesn't list any of the many, many similar pages for other years, for no reason I can discern. Toadspike [Talk] 10:38, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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I'm trying to depopulate Category:All articles with bare URLs for citations. As all experienced editors know, if you encounter a citation as a bare link in an article, You can use the visual editor, click on the citation number and a pop-up will appear with an option stating You can use the "Convert" button below to generate a properly formatted reference from the external link. That often works wonderfully, but sometimes fails. It's my observation that one of the most common reasons for failure is that the link is to a PDF. While the tool occasionally can handle a PDF it almost always fails.

I'd like to discuss a way to improve the tool to handle these cases. (I'm deliberately in "idea lab" as opposed to "proposals" because I think this idea needs some discussion before can be turned into a formal proposal)

Some background

The category had 69,000 entries when the initiative to depopulated was started. The current population is just under 14,000. This is great progress but it's my supposition that continued progress will be slow for the obvious reason that low hanging fruit was addressed first, and the remaining items are often a little more challenging.

I'm late to this initiative, but I've reviewed a few hundred items over the last few weeks. I made a point of assessing the last 50 items I looked at, and exactly 50% of them had one or more bare URLs linking to PDFs while the remaining 50% were something else. The automatic tool generally chokes on PDFs and the only option I know of is to manually create a citation. This can be done purely manually but if one attempted to use the automatic conversion tool and it failed, there is an option to choose "manual" which will generate a list of fields which can be populated. It's doable but it's tedious and mindnumbing. I'm fine with doing a few hundred but the thought of doing a few thousand is daunting.

There is a better approach.

Before I outline my proposed approach, I'd like to provide a little back story. It's my guess that if I simply outline the proposal, it will be summarily dismissed, so I would like to provide a rationale.

Why do we format citations the way we do?

Our desired format presentation is discussed in the guideline Wikipedia:Citing sources.

The guideline gives an example of a properly formatted citation:

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 1.

This format wasn't designed ab initio for Wikipedia, It was borrowed from academia, and style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style, all of which were developed over decades in a world before the Internet. The format is so ubiquitous, I daresay many have not given serious thought to why it's structured that way and whether that structure ought to be used everywhere.

Everyone reading something written by someone else ought to be a skeptic, and whenever encountering an interesting statement ought to wonder where it came from. In the non-Wikipedia world, some readers might rely upon the writer as being an expert. We can debate whether that's relied upon too much, but the nature of Wikipedia is that every single assertion is written by someone not deemed to be an expert, so reliance on backup for the statement is even more important.

Pre-internet use of citations

In the pre-Internet era, if you are properly being a skeptic you will look to the footnotes to find support for the claims. You will be confronted with a sea of properly formatted references and you have to decide which ones you want to track down and review. The properly formatted reference is going to help you track down the paper copy of the supporting material. You don't get to just click on a link, you have to track down a book in the library, a paper in a journal, an article in a magazine or newspaper etc. The references provide two types of information:

  • How to find it The citation will help you track it down,
  • Should I bother? The citation might help you decide whether you wish to put the effort into it. For example, the reference should identify the author, and you might know enough about the author to determine whether it's worth the effort to track it down. You might look at the date of publication and that might incentivize or de-incentivize you to track down that particular source. If what you are reading has 100 or so sources, it's highly unlikely you going to spend the time and energy to track them all down, so the information helps you triage, and determine which ones you're willing to spend the time to find.

Internet use of citations

The Internet world makes this process much easier. Instead of trekking to the library and pouring through paper copies of journals and old newspapers, you can simply click on a link in many cases and see the material. You might spend less time assessing the reputation of the author or the journal or the date of publication because it's easy enough to click on all of them and review the underlying material.

All of this is leading to the following suggestion:

While there is no harm in including all the elements of a properly formatted citation if gathering that information is easy, the bare minimum of a citation that is online is simply the link. Once you are at the linked source, you can assess the title of the material, the author the date the publication etc. to determine whether it's even worth reading the material but if it is, you can then read the material and see if it supports the claim.

It's my belief that the automated tool for creating properly formatted citations chokes when it tries to format a PDF because it is far from trivial to identify many elements such as the proper title. Some examples, such as a pdf of an image don't even have a title. Sometimes the date of publication is obvious to a human looking at it but it isn't machine-readable. Every proper paper in a journal has a well-defined title but I've looked at lots of PDFs when trying to manually create a citation, and determining what the title should be is surprisingly hard. I'm sure I have made some mistakes but I'm arguing that those mistakes aren't critical. If the citation has a link, it's trivial to look at the underlying material and assess it without sweating whether the title I chose is the best choice for the title.

I suggest that we ask the developers to change the algorithm for creating citations for PDFs.

If the existing algorithm can identify a title in the PDF, by all means use it, but if it can't simply define the title of the document to be "PDF". If the existing algorithm can identify other elements such as the author or date of publication by all means include it, but if it can't simply leave them blank. A citation that includes the word "PDF" and a URL will suffice.

It's my understanding that properly formatted citations are automatically saved in the Internet archive while improperly formatted citations might not be. If there is a bare URL pointing to a PDF and it is not converted, it may be subject to link rot and not available for future readers. Even if it is just a citation with the word "PDF" and a URL, which makes it eligible to be saved in Internet archive, it will be available for future readers.

Obviously, it would be nice if volunteers took on the task of manual creation of citation but I can tell you it's tedious work, and I would prefer to work on more interesting improvements. If the developers change the algorithm in the case of linked PDFs, my guess is half the remaining 14,000 problems can be fixed with a couple clicks (per citation). S Philbrick(Talk) 17:01, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's my understanding that properly formatted citations are automatically saved in the Internet archive while improperly formatted citations might not be.

I'm fairly sure that both are, that Wayback simply saves all external links present on articles (not just the external links section; anything MediaWiki adds the external link icon for). @GreenC Do you know things about this? Aaron Liu (talk) 18:14, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like to learn more about this. If it is the case that all links are saved then what's the rationale for cleaning them up? The category suggests it's because of potential link rot, but that's not an issue if they are saved. I've a lot of hours into converting bare links. Has it all open simply cosmetic as opposed to useful? S Philbrick(Talk) 18:24, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's still a better user experience for readers to know some basic information about a source without having to access a link to read it (particularly for sources that are large files that have to be fully downloaded to view). It's also more resilient to capture basic bibliographical information within the endnotes. A link to an archived copy might not be accessible at the moment (or permanently lost if the archive goes away), or inaccessible because the reader is using a hard copy. isaacl (talk) 19:16, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Relying on the Wayback Machine to have everything is a single point of failure. It's often better to find a mirror of the content elsewhere, like a journal being also archived on PubMed. When the link goes dead and there are no archives, the citation information is what's used to search for mirrors or tell readers with a copy of the information what to look for. In the case of the link content being replaced by something completely different, one can only realize that the link used to go to an appropriate source when the citation's information is filled out, instead of say a misinterpretation of what is now on the page. Plus it's better for readers to be able to have a gloss at the sources. Aaron Liu (talk) 20:17, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Internet Archive monitors the EventStreams API, which has an endpoint that posts real-time every URL added in all 900+ Wiki projects. It's normally not relevant if the URL was in a templated citation or bare URL. The API has bugs that can sometimes show up when a template with a URL is transcluded into many articles, it's edge case and a small percentage. Also, Internet Archive doesn't always capture URLs because the domain owner might use robots.txt to block crawling or otherwise have requested their content not be in the Wayback Machine. There can also be mysterious reasons why links are not saved, I don't have good information why that happens. But generally, yes most links are being saved. I agree that relying on the Wayback Machine for bare links is not a good idea they should be converted to full citations where possible. -- GreenC 20:47, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There are PDF tools and/or PDF libraries for Python that can extract metadata about a PDF such as title, author, date etc.. maybe that has already been done, and we are left with the remaining 20% of the 80/20 rule? Numerous people have worked on this bare link problem it's not easy for sure. -- GreenC 20:55, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If I'm understanding you correctly, I guess you want to automatically change bare URL citations of the form:
<ref>https://example.com/document.pdf</ref>
to be something like this instead:
<ref>[https://example.com/document.pdf PDF from example.com]</ref>
or possibly something more elaborately formatted, such as:
<ref>{{cite web|url=https://example.com/document.pdf|title=document.pdf|format=PDF|website=example.com}}</ref>
(If your idea is very different, maybe you could give a specific example.)
Anyhow, personally speaking, I don't see those as meaningful improvements over the bare URL reference. They provide no extra information.
I'd much rather see real metadata added, either by a human or by a sufficiently reliable (semi-)automated process. In the meantime, we might as well keep the {{bare URL PDF}} tag in place so that the wikignomes/bots will eventually get around to fixing it correctly.
In cases where the PDF itself does not provide any title, date, author, or publisher then I guess this solution would be acceptable (but maybe we shouldn't be citing random PDFs of unknown provenance anyway?). ~2025-32085-07 (talk) 22:23, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is troubling. On the one hand it's positive that virtually all links are saved in IE even if bare URLs but if that's actually the case, why on earth do we put up a big ugly splash screen letting people know there are bare URLs? (I'm very aware of the controversy over such screens and I am strongly in support of big ugly screens letting readers know if there are serious issues with the content but I feel differently if we sre talking about minor technicalities.) I'm not opposed to fixing them if someone wants to take it on but let's not suggest it's a big deal. However those and those of my off the top of the head reactions I want to mull this over while I think about next steps. S Philbrick(Talk) 16:00, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is a reasonable proposal, thank you for putting it forward. As a reader, I think PDF citations should contain an archive link at a minimum. Link rot is the main reason we avoid bare URLs of any kind. Similarly, an important feature of citation information is that it allows us to identify the source even if the link dies. I understand that citation information can be hard to find – recently I found (via web search) a PDF of a book chapter hosted on the Internet Archive, and it took me considerable time to find the book it came from and cite it properly (at Counts of Winterthur). But now readers know that this is a chapter of a book, and they can even go find the physical book if interested – the Internet Archive, or heck, the entire Internet can go up in flames and the citation will remain verifiable. If I had just left a bare PDF link, none of that would be true, and the reader would have no idea where this PDF came from. They wouldn't know that it was published by an expert as part of a book edited by an expert in a collection from a reputable publisher. Your proposal would have us give up on this problem, and cases where we can do a lot better than a bare link would go ignored, which I unfortunately cannot support. Toadspike [Talk] 09:37, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

MAGA civil war article

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Two days ago, The Guardian put out a very, very long and grand article: White nationalist Nick Fuentes is exposing a civil war among US Republicans: ‘We look like clowns’ | Republicans | The Guardian

The New York Times reported Nick Fuentes’s Rise Puts MAGA Movement in a ‘Time of Choosing’ - The New York Times

CNN wrote the article How a Holocaust Denier Sparked a MAGA Civil War - CNN One Thing - Podcast on CNN Podcasts

There are more examples like this. These sources, which are deemed by the community as reliable are all stating that this isn't just some minor thing, but a major event affecting politics.

There would not be enough room to only discuss this situation in articles such as Nick Fuentes or MAGA, neither do I think that it would be appropriate to do so, as this affects more than just one person or group.

Due to these reasons, I want to write an article about this ongoing conflict. Are there any objections, and / or suggestions for titles? How should we proceed?

Wikieditor662 (talk) 19:17, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's not actually a "conflict" in the sense they're using the term; it's just hyperbole. Back in my day the Democrats were the ones having a "civil war". Unfortunately for your idea, sensationalist headlines don't make it a real and definite "thing" that can be the subject of an article. That's even after you can say that you're writing about something other than the fickle passings of the news cycle. GMGtalk 19:38, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 19:40, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
But the sources state that this isn't just a passing headline, but that it's a major, longstanding event.
The Guardian states The result of that interview has been a bitter and widening civil war within the American right that has exposed longstanding fissures – between conservatives and populists, Zionists and Israel skeptics, mainstream Maga right and far right – as well as revealed the extent to which a Republican party that has been flooded in recent years by extremists now seems unable to contain them, or even agree if it should. A power struggle already under way inside many rightwing organizations, people familiar told me, has now spilled into the open.
According to Ms now, They [a pro-Hitler wing of MAGA] are, in fact, rapidly defining what MAGA will mean in the years after the nearly octogenarian Trump leaves the stage.
These sources, which, again, are deemed as reliable state that is having enormous impact, that it represents long standing issues, and will quite likely affect what happens even 10 years from now. Wikieditor662 (talk) 20:00, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe it will. It's happened before. But we can't really predict that based on a burst of news coverage. Don't get me wrong. You don't need anybody's permission to write an article, but the chances are probably better than even that it get's deleted, at least for the moment. GMGtalk 20:21, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
How longstanding or grand does it have to be? This goes years back.
Over two years ago, Newsweek reported MAGA Divides Grow as Israel War Intensifies - Newsweek (newsweek isnt considered fully reliable but you get the point)
For a more specific example, Politico reported all the way back in January, nearly a year ago: The MAGA split over Israel - POLITICO
Wikieditor662 (talk) 20:50, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It would be more productive to improve the Republican article. None of this is happening in a vacuum; these newer developments require the context of what the party is and has done over the past fifty (at least) years. Schazjmd (talk) 21:06, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Which kindof gets to the issue of the definite "thing" you're aiming for. If the underlying topic boils down to "people in x-group disagreeing about Israel" then welcome to the club. That pretty much describes every group down to families, friends, and marriages. When the Federalists got into their spat, it materially shaped the broad trajectory of the US government. In our story today, the left is supposed to be the pro-Palestinian character, and they still don't really move the needle on actual law/policy beyond the daily headlines. GMGtalk 21:14, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm, I suppose you're right about Israel-Palestine. Perhaps instead of sensationalist headlines like "civil war", it could be titled something like internal divisions within MAGA, or internal divisions within the Republican party, and then contain all of this material?
@Schazjmd the Republican article is over 12K words; there won't be room to add all of this to that article.
Wikieditor662 (talk) 21:23, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Meh… What would be surprising is if there weren’t any internal divisions within MAGA. All political parties and (factions within parties) have them. The question is whether they have a lasting impact… and in this case it is too soon to know. Blueboar (talk) 22:03, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe, but then you have a different issue all together. Are you now looking at an article topic which is so stupendously broad that it amounts to an indiscriminate list of information? What about those who support the ICE crackdown and those who see it as government overreach? What about isolationists and those who support foreign intervention? How do we even treat definite group membership as "a MAGA", instead of a loose coalition of conservatives more-or-less supportive of Trump and/or a particular slogan? Don't want to make the same mistake people do with ANTIFA and act like it comes with a membership card and monthly dues.
It's all silly hypothetical until folks show up to add content that was never intended, but technically meets the inclusion criteria. GMGtalk 22:39, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Rather than indiscriminate, the sources seem to suggest that there are two clear sides on this. The Guardian says Conservative institutions [...] are now squeezed between a strident Maga mainstream and a naked far right.
And it seems that how the two sides react to issues is also clear.
For the examples you gave, the groypers and the far right would be more approving of ICE crackdowns (and even wanting more crackdowns) and isolationism, while the mainstream right would be more cautious about these. But of course, we'd only use issues that the sources state are important to this.
As for MAGA, I see your point, perhaps this could center about something more specific, such as the GOP, right-wingism, or conservatism.
@GeogSage But again, there's no room in the bigger articles, many of them are too long already.
Wikieditor662 (talk) 23:50, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The MAGA article is only 4,777 words. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 03:11, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
True, but now I'm thinking MAGA might be a problematic area to center this around, as GMG said: How do we even treat definite group membership as "a MAGA", instead of a loose coalition of conservatives more-or-less supportive of Trump and/or a particular slogan? Don't want to make the same mistake people do with ANTIFA and act like it comes with a membership card and monthly dues. Wikieditor662 (talk) 03:17, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It sounds like you're really set on making an article on this. Looking at your page statistics, it doesn't look like you have a lot of experience making them, which is fine. You don't need permission to try to put a page together. If you think it will pass Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Notability, then you can just make a page for it. In this case, I would be surprised if it passed Wikipedia:New pages patrol, and even if it did, suspect someone would come and merge it with something. I won't step in to stop you, don't care enough about this topic to try and execute a merge, and wouldn't be the one reviewing it, so you don't need to convince me. Just be sure to explore all options, have a pile of sources, and don't be surprised if people are not convinced. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 03:49, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, this isn't really about convincing you, as much as it is to figure out the best way to go forward. Are you sure it's worth it to try and make a big article, with many sources, which can take hours, just for it to get deleted? Wikieditor662 (talk) 05:12, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I mean, that is a question to ask yourself. I'm not convinced, honestly I think this warrants maybe a sentence somewhere on one of the the pages in the Timeline of the Donald Trump presidencies, and would start looking for how I could use these sources to improve existing articles before creating a whole new one. However, if you think it will pass, go for it. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 05:29, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I mean, I think that perhaps it should pass, but whether it will, or if it's worth it even though it might be deleted, that I have no idea. But yeah, perhaps it is best to take on your suggestion, and only turn it into an article if it becomes big enough. Although I'm still on the fence over what article/s to add it to. Wikieditor662 (talk) 05:33, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Help:How to mine a source might help. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 05:42, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As stated, with this, I'd find another article and see if you can make a section on this topic using the sources. If that section gets big enough, then consider a split. It isn't a race. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 22:59, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See wP:10YT User:Bluethricecreamman (Talk·Contribs) 19:40, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In addition to above advice, it is in general a good idea to ignore headlines as sources of information (sometimes they help with common names etc.), as they have different editorial processes to article content. CMD (talk) 04:07, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Of course. If you look deeper into the conversation, you can also see I have specific quotes from these articles as well. Wikieditor662 (talk) 05:13, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

IP talk page blanking bots, now that we have temporary accounts

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Three years ago, an editor got consensus to create a bot to blank all stale IP talk pages. Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 190#RfC: Bot to blank old IP talkpages The main reason for this was that Stale warnings and other messages will confuse legitimate new editors editing from that IP seeing it apparently directed at them

Fast forward to 2025, and we have temporary accounts; new editors will never be directed toward talk page IPs. So we don't need to worry about scaring them off.

Given that, I would like to see what the community's attitude is toward this problem now.

Personally, this post was made because I'm trying to track down a Mississippi IP editor who inserted copyright violations into articles about American TV soaps, so I can remove the copyvios. Having their talkpages easily accessible, for searching and whatnot, would be very helpful. Speaking more generally in terms of my CCI work, non-obscured accessible talk pages allow me to more easily link to previous warnings, track copyright violations that were spotted at the times, and track older socks[8][9][10][11], especially if they were duck blocked at the time but not recorded at SPI. I also only have 24 hours in each day; time spent going back to previous revisions is time I'm not spending removing problematic content. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 09:35, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I support stopping the bot. It has served its purpose. Toadspike [Talk] 09:42, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I do too. Thryduulf (talk) 11:00, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
+1 ~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 12:25, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'd support stopping this. I looked quickly but maybe is faster (I'm not sure the best way to find this) to just ask if any non-blocked bot is currently performing this task? Skynxnex (talk) 12:33, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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