Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Make Wikipedia:Requested moves/Closing instructions a guideline

 – Levivich (talk) 17:57, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Should WP:RMCI be formally elevated to the official status of a WP:GUIDELINE? 23:15, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Survey (RM closing instructions)

• Support as proposer. The idea that WP:RMCI is not vetted by the community is laughably inaccurate; yes, it has been. It's guided requested move closures for nearly two decades, its talk page (merged with the overall WP:RM talk page) spans thirty-four archives, and drawn-out discussions are common (I arbitrarily picked Wikipedia_talk:Requested_moves/Archive_25 and found... a LOT of discussion on the precise wording of WP:RMCI). It is a fully vetted part of Wikipedia. It's not purely advisory--it's literally the only instructions we have on closing move requests. It's not an essay, it has never been an essay, it bears none of the hallmarks of an essay, and its currently listed status as an essay is a mistake. It's not an inconsequential mistake, either; people feel like they can ignore it freely, and that's leading to chaos--you have a 50/50 shot of the person who closes your move request being someone who takes our well-vetted closing procedures (up to and including don't close a move request twice) seriously, or who views them as merely "good advice" that can be freely ignored. Red Slash 23:15, 22 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:16, 22 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom. The principles and concepts are tried and tested. -Kj cheetham (talk) 23:30, 22 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I am not saying it is perfect as-is, I'm just saying I support it becoming a guideline rather than remaining an essay. -Kj cheetham (talk) 10:23, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom. – robertsky (talk) 00:45, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support — if it looks like a guideline, quacks like a guideline, and is functionally considered a guideline, it should be formally treated as such. WhinyTheYounger (WtY)(talk, contribs) 00:53, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Established and widely followed de facto guideline. {{ping|ClydeFranklin}} (t/c) 01:14, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support to stop wikilawyering about whether something is "just an essay" or not. Best practices should be followed, regardless of where they are documented. But for the sake of clarity, let's make it official that this has the support of the community. HouseBlaster^talk 01:33, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom, I see no reason to oppose. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:41, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom. Tim O'Doherty (talk) 07:31, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. Most of RMCI are basic instructions. These exist all over Wikipedia, but none of them should be turned into guidelines because there is no benefit from doing so, and because doing so causes WP:CREEP issues. For example, there is no benefit of turning Wikipedia:Requested moves/Closing instructions#Bot considerations into a guideline.
  Other parts of RMCI may not have a consensus if considered individually; for example, the instruction to explicitly declare non-admin closures as such. This requirement does not exist for other discussions, even more impactful ones like RfC's, and discussions on the instruction have shown significant opposition to it on the grounds of WP:NOBIGDEAL
  Finally, this change won't address the specific issue discussed - editors closing the same move request twice in a row. Closing a discussion is an administrative role, and the current wording of WP:INVOLVED states that this does not make an editor involved: One important caveat is that an administrator who has interacted with an editor or topic area purely in an administrative role is not involved and is not prevented from acting in an administrative capacity in relation to that editor or topic area. Changing this essay to a guideline won't make the editor involved, because when a policy and guideline conflict editors should assume that the policy takes priority.
  I also don't believe it makes sense to make closers involved for RM's but not other discussions - if this is an issue then it is an issue in all areas, not just requested moves. BilledMammal (talk) 10:19, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  But WP:INVOLVED is dealing with administrators doing things in an administrative capacity (which does not include requested moves), and WP:RMCI is not. Closing move requests is neither restricted to administrators nor is it an administrative task. There's no overlap at all. See below for my more detailed take on why and how this is different. Red Slash 17:19, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Both of us cannot close this discussion because WP:INVOLVED forbids us from doing so, despite neither of us being admins nor the close requiring admin tools. INVOLVED applies to all editors who are acting in an admin capacity, and that includes closing discussions - if it didn't, either of us could close this discussion now. BilledMammal (talk) 23:19, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered. I think, perhaps, an explicit (though brief) delineation of why WP:RMCI is more expansive than INVOLVED would be appropriate. Thank you. Red Slash 23:43, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't believe that would solve the issue; the explanation won't remove the conflict, and it won't change the fact that when a policy and guideline conflict editors should assume the policy takes precedence. BilledMammal (talk) 00:00, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @BilledMammal: Is closing an RM an "admin capacity" or is it a "non-admin capacity"? - is there anywhere in which "admin capacity" is defined? - I had always assumed it to mean activities that only an admin is capable of, so, for instance, if an admin is closing an RM they are simply performing a non-admin activity as an admin, just as any non-admin closure is equally a "non-admin" activity. Unless we are using two different registers for 'admin' here on Wikipedia - one to mean "admin", as in the things formally restricted to someone appointed as an administrator, and then 'admin' diminutive form to refer to any activity that can broadly be construed as generally 'administrative' in nature even if it is not performed by an administrator. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:56, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Formal closures are an "admin capacity" or, to use the wording from WP:INVOLVED, "acting as an administrator". From a practical point of view any other interpretation is problematic as it would mean there is no restriction on involved closures. However, it might be worth clarifying that section of WP:ADMIN as I have had debates where editors have claimed that it is appropriate for them to formally close a discussion they were involved in because they were not an administrator. BilledMammal (talk) 11:13, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It is an essay also, but WP:NACINV says about non-admin closures: Closing editors must abide by the standard of being uninvolved as described at Wikipedia:Administrators#Involved admins. Vpab15 (talk) 11:14, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @BilledMammal: As Vpab15 notes, WP:NACINV specifically requires closing editors to abide by the standards of administrators as described at WP:INVOLVED, but none of this actually means that the original wording of WP:INVOLVED was necessarily meant to apply to anyone other than administrators in any other context. So I see this clash of policy/guidelines as a false one, with WP:INVOLVED not applying to non-admins or non-admins activities except in the very limited way outlined in WP:NACINV, which specifically applies the principles of WP:INVOLVED to closes. Iskandar323 (talk) 07:11, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  By using the phrasing editors should not act as administrators in disputes INVOLVED makes it clear that one isn't required to use the tools to engage in admin activity ("act as administrators"), and makes it clear that it applies to all editors, not just admins ("editors", not "administrators").

  This can be seen in how the community responds to involved closures of discussions; the closure is overturned, and sanctions imposed if the editor continues to insist that because they are not admins INVOLVED doesn't apply to then. Whether this was intended to be the original meaning is not relevant; it is now the meaning accepted by the community, and in my opinion the correct meaning. BilledMammal (talk) 09:10, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @BilledMammal: Fair enough. I guess that makes sense. Although the next paragraph (about the exceptions) is even more ambiguous, mentioning only administrators, not editors, and in fact contrasts administrators with editors, noting: "...acting in an administrative capacity in relation to that editor...", suggesting that it is worded more with a view to blocks etc. This, if anything, is a good example for the need for further clarity with respect to move closures. WP:RMCI is a more natural extension of the part in the third paragraph, where it states: "Although there are exceptions to the prohibition on involved editors taking administrative action, it is still the best practice, in cases where an administrator may be seen to be involved, to pass the matter to another administrator..." Iskandar323 (talk) 12:12, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support per nom. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 17:13, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  Withdrawn until the conflict with WP:INVOLVED is fixed. I consider closing to be an administrative action, as it theoretically does not involve the opinions of the closer on the content of the article, but does involve the interpretation of policy and guidance and their application to a discussion, as well as assessing consensus, and requires competence. Their are many experienced non-admin editors with the required competence in general, and fewer people with the required competence for closing any given discussion, as each topic has its own special circumstances, and we do not need closers who are ignorant of those special circumstances. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:03, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support This is a high stakes fundamental process. When any process is as established, accepted, and in-use as this one, then I am in favor of labeling it as a guideline. The guideline label carries weight both for users and to legitimize the activities of the Wikimedia editorial community and its governance process. Bluerasberry (talk) 17:25, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I'd rather have this become a information page. Also, this sentence: NACs are not discouraged for requested moves, as long as the non-admin is highly experienced with RMs and our closing procedures sounds pretty discouraging to me. How is someone supposed to become "highly experienced", if you're not allowed to do it? And is this actually different from what we hope for with admins? IMO thoughtful NACs should be strongly encouraged to handle RMs, and admins (who have no similar requirements about knowing how RM works?) should only be involved (in their admin role) if specific buttons are needed for technical moves. Page titles are basically content decisions, and admins get no special rights in content decisions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:22, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That could definitely be rewritten. Over the years, we've gone from prohibiting NACs, to discouraging them, to restricting them, to permitting them, and it might now be time to start explicitly encouraging them. I love it. I don't think that has much to do with the fate of this page as a guideline or not, but I love it. (BTW, having it be just an informational page, in my opinion, wouldn't solve the problem of people not taking a WP page seriously if it doesn't have a little checkmark next to it.) Red Slash 01:25, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree, if RMCI needs fixing, clarification and whatnot we can do that just as for any other page, should not affect the decision to make it a guideline imo. Selfstudier (talk) 06:27, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I dunno. Once a policy or guideline label gets slapped on a page, editors frequently tell me that it's more difficult to get substantive changes made. Also, it's customary to solve the more obvious problems before proposing guideline status.

  Let me pick on a few people: @Pppery, @Kj cheetham, @Robertsky, @WhinyTheYounger, @ClydeFranklin, @HouseBlaster: You were the first folks to support the proposal. The OP's primary concern is the tag that says it hasn't been vetted. How many minutes did it take you to read the page before you voted to support it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:34, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It is hard to quantify the time spent going through the page line by line, familiarising and refamiliarising the process in the last few months (somewhen between 4-6 months) when I decided to dive into RMs, as such it may not have been obvious to me. What's actually humourous is that those you have pinged are mostly non-admins ourselves, albeit some with pagemover rights, and we might certainly be censured by others if we had started out with this being the guidelines just by this line. Just recently, there is an editor, green in doing NACs, going through RMs, and no one is stopping them, but rather experienced closers are have been encouraging them and guiding them on their talk page. We can always have this tweaked to something more platable: i.e. NACs are acceptable for requested moves provided that the non-admin editor closing the request is familiar with the closing instructions. – robertsky (talk) 05:00, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I think your wording would be an improvement. Personally, I'd also discourage editors from handling RMs on pages that they are unable to move themselves. IMO some RMs should be left to admins and page movers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:51, 10 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Good question - I have no idea really. I have been involved with page moves for a while (mostly technical requests), and have looked over it multiple times in the past year or two. It's not something I read for the first time after seeing this RFC. I can't say I've fully analysed every part of it, or that it is perfect. Also, "discouraged" is not the same as "not allowed". -Kj cheetham (talk) 17:17, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Whatareyoudoing, I agree with Kj cheetham on a lot of this. I have no idea in terms of an exact number, but I have gone over it multiple times every so often, and I have in no means fully analyzed it. {{ping|ClydeFranklin}} (t/c) 23:22, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Well, at the moment, I seem to be confirming my long-standing belief that Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions. We guess what the WP:UPPERCASE might mean, and we look up little specific sections when we need to quote The Rules™ at someone or remember the name of a specific template (or similar detail), but we don't really read them.

  This RFC started because someone didn't want this page to have a tag at the top that says "it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community." It sounds from the responses here that even if it were to pass, that's still not happening. If your responses are typical, then the people who are voting for it haven't really read it (recently, or ever), and I suspect that the people opposing only read far enough along to find something they disagree with, and then stop. On a more general level, I wonder if WP:PROPOSAL should advise would-be promoters to tell editors that they really need to read the entire current version of the page, before voting to support the promotion. We don't get many such proposals in a year, and actually reading the page that you want to have marked as having been thoroughly vetted does not seem to me like an unreasonable expectation.

  BTW, if you have average reading speed for a native English speaker, it'll take you 20 minutes to read that proposed guideline from top to bottom. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:48, 10 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don’t really understand why this should be an information page, IMO it’s not factual or technical information but the community accepted procedure. Aaron Liu (talk) 14:16, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Aaron Liu, information pages provide information. This includes information about what the community's accepted procedures are. Consider, for example, the information page on the accepted procedure if you want to Wikipedia:Contact VRT. Or for Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia. Or if you need Wikipedia:Access to nonpublic information. Or if you want to follow the community-accepted procedure for Wikipedia:Requests for comment. Or, very relevantly, for Wikipedia:Closing discussions. Why should Wikipedia:Closing discussions be an information page, but not the move-specific version of that page? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:11, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose for now. The issues are (a) inconsistency in the way we use the terms (or apply the templates for) guidelines, information pages, explanatory supplements, essays, etc., and (b) letting time-wasting by wikilawyers determine those applications. We should be more consistent. Why would this need to be a guideline, but WP:AFD, Wikipedia:Bureaucrats, WP:MFD, WP:RFA, WP:AC, WP:RFC, and WP:DRV are content to simply be process pages, even though they also have a lot of rules/guidance? Why is Wikipedia:Reviewing good articles a guideline, but there's no such guideline for WP:FAC or WP:DYK? Why is WP:PROD a guideline, but WP:AFD and WP:DRV aren't? For all the wikilawyering over essays, our page on WP:ESSAYS is an essay, and WP:PAG lumps the various types of essays together despite practically being treated very different by the community. Maybe one step is to remove "information pages" from the essay of "header" and combine them with "administration" (or "process") pages to produce something that assumes guideline-like adherence, or maybe such is the state we're in that we should actually slap guideline templates on all of these pages just to stop people from extending "just an essay" to "just a page that documents a process for which there's broad support"... — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:14, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I appreciate your perspective. "we should actually slap guideline templates on all of these pages just to stop people from extending "just an essay" to "just a page that documents a process for which there's broad support"..." is actually probably the best solution, because otherwise, in practice, you get people who say "but it's just an essay!" In the meantime, though, I think the proposal is the best solution for the reasons I explained above. Red Slash 07:45, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Some of the pages you linked are discussion venues, not pages. AfD and DRV are discussion venues that have their process page at WP:DPR which is a guideline. Aaron Liu (talk) 14:21, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Rhododendrites: Apologies, I had to slightly modify your vote as to correct for the loss of context when the support and oppose sections were merged. BilledMammal (talk) 18:19, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support Seems like a good idea to give a bit of formality to existing practice. If this or that wording needs sprucing up, that can be done in the usual way and shouldn't affect the decision whether to make it a guideline imo.Selfstudier (talk) 06:32, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. I think there is one problematic sentence at WP:RMCI that needs to be fixed. It defines involved as: You have ever closed such a move request. That contradicts the wording at WP:INVOLVED and places an unreasonable burden on RM closers, who will have to remember all the previous RM dicussions they have closed. Per discussion below, it is not even clear if "such a move request" only includes the same article, or any article in the same topic. I have no objection to the rest of the essay. Vpab15 (talk) 10:23, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support this proposal, but clarity as discussed above needs to be added to the guideline page soon, and re-organizing non-policy pages via template as discussed below needs to happen also. GenQuest ^"scribble" 16:14, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, no-brainer.—S Marshall T/C 18:24, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom The Night Watch (talk) 02:41, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nominator. Additionally, I support robertsky's proposal below. echidnaLives - talk - edits 02:55, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as written, at least until contentious points with "involvement" and declaring NAC closes are vetted by the community, since they contradict broader policies. Some parts of RMCI have obviously been written out of one's whim at a time, and do not even enjoy local WP:CONLEVEL among the closers' "community". The case that apparently triggered this whole RfC was Palestinian exodus MR, and the "involvement" RMCI clause being used to overturn the close procedurally. I've closed hundreds of RMs and MRs, I'm fairly well-versed with RMCI, but that clause has slipped under my radar and I'm frankly baffled by its existence. No such user (talk) 08:37, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  "do not even enjoy local WP:CONLEVEL among the closers' 'community'" - can you be specific as to what you're referring to? Wikipedia is a wiki, there's nothing in WP:RMCI which has "snuck through" or exists without the community's support. The INVOLVED part, in particular, was extensively debated, even as small a point as whether or not an involved editor can "relist" a discussion. Everything has been vetted. Red Slash 23:00, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I missed that 2019 discussion, which did not have a terribly broad input. Even if I can agree there was a local consensus at the time, WP:CONLEVEL is clear that Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. As for NACs, I've been mildly annoyed at RMCI's insistence on declaring NACs (a thing that has been out of fashion elsewhere on Wikipedia for quite some time) and I'm on record stating that I'm not going to do that for my closes, ever. For the definition of "involvement", you can witness the community backlash right here. See also BilledMammal's objections above, which I fully endorse. No such user (talk) 08:59, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support: The 'explanatory essay' has already been discussed more than sufficiently to qualify as a guideline, which obviously would still not mean that it was as hard and fast and as ironclad as a policy, but would cease the confusion whereby some editors seem to think it is optional - a confusion that needs clearing up. There will still be exceptional cases, admins may still need to weigh in, and there will be still be need and scope for a human touch at Move Review, but there will not cause for actual confusion as to what the guidelines are, and what the basic expectations of the process are. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:03, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose mostly per No such user. I, as well, have serious problems that the NAC closure section is in clear contradiction to Wikipedia principles. Also, Rhododendrites makes some good points above. --Jayron32 13:34, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose for now. I'm not opposed to a guideline about moving pages but RMCI as currently written is not it. I don't agree with its instructions, such as the language about involved, as pointed out by others, and the page is too long as currently written. I think there is maybe an opportunity to either rewrite RMCI into a guideline, or rewrite it and promote it to an info page, or maybe split it into a guideline page and an instructions page. There is some possibility for something here, but I oppose putting the guideline template on RMCI as currently written. Levivich (talk) 14:20, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Reads like a "support with some copyediting" to me.—S Marshall T/C 14:26, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Copyediting doesn't change the meaning of the text; that's editing. But yeah, I might support if we changed the meaning of the text to something else. Levivich (talk) 19:35, 4 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose currently. I agree that the provision "You have ever closed such a move request" is contrary to WP:INVOLVED, which explains that administrative actions do not constitute involvement. Sandstein 16:24, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Temporary oppose. I think WP:RMCI should eventually become a guideline, but I don't think we're at that point quite yet. As other participants have stated, the "You have ever closed such a move request" provision should be removed from WP:RMCI before it rises to guideline status. Additionally, WP:NOTCURRENTTITLE has been added to the page very recently, and – while I agree with its inclusion myself – I'd like to see it receive more affirmative support from the community before letting it rise to guideline status. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 17:15, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  On further thought, switching to weak support. The involvement issues can be hashed out whether RMCI is a guideline or not, so there's no need to hold up an ultimately productive goal on those grounds alone. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 17:35, 5 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  WP:NOTCURRENTTITLE has been there since 20 February 2015: it is determined that the current title should not host the article.... Ofcourse, it has undergone several updates and clarifications over the years but the core remains the same. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 09:15, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support per nom --- Tbf69 P • T 17:22, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as needing more work, per points raised above (e.g. "You have ever closed such a move request"). Also, the NAC instructions differ substantially from our other procedures: to bring them in line with the spirit of NAC, I think admins and page movers should be allowed to close any RM, while other users should only close uncontroversial discussions. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 23:03, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support, the involved bit isn't prohibitive - for the general reasoning, the nom's covers it nicely. On the INVOLVED bit, my interpretation is that that sets minimum standards. It doesn't invalidate any guideline to have stricter rules. Now, whether the guideline should have stricter rules is really rather more dubious, but fundamentally, it's not so egregious as to undermine the guidelineification (to my concern, that isn't being flagged as a typo). Nosebagbear (talk) 23:24, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  INVOLVED also sets a maximum standard, by telling us when someone is not involved. The standard at RMCI exceeds this. BilledMammal (talk) 23:55, 8 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  An actual or perceived conflict of interest is what needs to be avoided, how that is achieved is the question. Selfstudier (talk) 00:09, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  If closing a discussion creates a perceived conflict of interest than that can only be addressed at WP:INVOLVED, as any editor who disagrees with RMCI can accurately cite WP:INVOLVED and WP:POLCON, and because if it is an issue at RM’s it is also an issue at AFD’s and other formal discussions. BilledMammal (talk) 00:13, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Which you did and is why this RFC exists. Many don't agree with that position though. It is of some interest that you only brought it up in order to support a !vote at an RM when most people pointed to an obvious conflict of interest. Selfstudier (talk) 00:21, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  If many don’t agree with that position then you should have no issue changing the policy that supports that position, and I encourage you to open an RFC proposing to do so.

  I brought it up to push back against the notion that engaging in administrative actions made an editor involved and have not considered the rest of the RM as most of the support for overturning was solely on that basis; how is it of some interest? BilledMammal (talk) 00:26, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  No need, as I said, discussion should start at RMCI talk per usual practice. Selfstudier (talk) 00:32, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Since this RFC is already open and at CENT, you can of course start a subRFC within it for anything that concerns you specifically (as per "Discussion on changing the wording" below). Selfstudier (talk) 00:34, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. As per Bluerasberry. This process is well-tested, it should be as streamlined as possible and such a formal tag contributes to this as well as provides legitimacy. Any contentious points (involvement, etc.) should be resolved before promoting this page to a guideline though. Any user in good standing should be allowed to close any RMs where they are not directly involved. We could set up some general conditions though that are not dependent on public voting, such as it has been done at WP:AFC. --TadejM ^{my talk} 06:22, 2 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Any contentious points (involvement, etc.) should be resolved before promoting this page to a guideline though. I’m planning to open an RFC asking questions about individual contentious points should this RFC pass, which should help resolve them. BilledMammal (talk) 00:00, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  First discuss them on the talk page as already suggested by the RMCI guidance so that there is a proper RFCbefore should it come to that. Selfstudier (talk) 00:07, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I was planning to discuss at WP:VPI for broader input. BilledMammal (talk) 00:09, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  RMCI talk first, just like we begin all other discussions regardless of the article. Selfstudier (talk) 00:23, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose per CREEP, among other arguments presented above. Lots of WP processes have instructions/rules and we don't make them guidelines. Guidelines are for content editing and for user behavior, not for internal bureacracy.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:26, 7 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose as BilledMammal, No such user, and others have argued.
  To comment in particular on the "involved" clause, the suggestion that RMs need a special rule above WP:INVOLVED is unpersuasive. Being "urgent" or not doesn't somehow uniquely distinguish RMs from other processes with formal closures. A typical RFC, AFD, RFD, etc. is no more urgent than a typical RM, with no acute consequences to closing it a couple days or weeks later. Similarly, seeking to overturn a closure at move review is not materially different in difficulty from seeking to overturn another type of closure at deletion review. I see the impetus of the RFC is the case of the 1948 Palestinian exodus RM closure and MR; it features a closer who previous RM closure had already been taken to move review and itself was so controversial that it got no consensus to endorse or overturn. That extraordinary set of circumstances does not justify the proposed broad rule of "You have ever closed...", nor have I seen any other case that does. ("Hard cases make bad law".) There should just be one uniform policy about what "involved" means, and fragmenting the definition is CREEP. Adumbrativus (talk) 06:46, 7 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. If following these over-long "instructions" leads to the kind of close the OP did here and the following extended drama at User talk:Red Slash#Mpox, then they should be burned with fire rather than elevated to a guideline. There seems to be a move afoot to make RM use a mandatory step as it's the place where "scores of editors who know Wikipedia very well" hang out. This is just pointless processology.WP:CREEP, WP:NOTBURO. Bon courage (talk) 04:06, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  A little ad hominem no? Addressing the OP more than the topic, with a dash of conspiracy. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:59, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Well, the evidence is that the apparent application of these "instructions" is an issue. The editor who wrote most of them[1] wants their work elevated to have WP:PAG force so that they can be used to 'forbid' things (as if guidelines do that). Bon courage (talk) 07:25, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Quite. A guideline doesn't enforce anything. It just elevates something away from being a mere essay, and, in this instance, dismissible as a mere nicety, even if it is established by consensus and decades of practical use. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:36, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose I fail to see why this can't be an Information page, and there seem to be too many contentious aspects currently. Suggest this idea is parked until the page is better. People will wikilawyer if they are unhappy with any process even if given guideline status. As other note, it is way too long. Well that's a problem with many guidelines and other pages too, but I think the step before attempting to elevate this page's status should be that you first request help to shorten it, trim the cruft, and remove contentious aspects until those have been thrashed out on talk. I get the need for "official guideline" for article content advice, but as a wiki, I think our processes and procedures should generally be described in as lightweight way as we can. Also, be careful what you wish for... making this "official" may make it harder for you to change the bits you want changed in future. -- Colin°^Talk 09:53, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose guideline, support information page if issues are dealt with. RMCI is useful, but I do have concerns with page as written. As the closer of the Palestinian exodus RMs, I was somewhat non-plussed at the "closing an RM makes you permanently INVOLVED" part being brought up at MRV as a gospel truth; it runs counter to how discussion closures go elsewhere on the encyclopedia, where INVOLVED is basically formalising the common-sense "don't close discussions you've participated and opined in" rule. And this RfC… I'll be honest, it feels less like codifying RMCI, and more like trying to redefine INVOLVED in without proper scrutiny at WT:ADMIN, where discussions about INVOLVED should be. RMCI should not be too prescriptive; it should just detail agreed best practice. If that's the case, I have no problem with it being an information page. Sceptre (talk) 18:48, 12 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Reluctant Support We really need another category like vetted approved "core essays"/"information pages" the best 10% of essays like these which do a good job of giving guidance of explaining how Wikipedia works or give good guidance but don't go to the extent of authoritatively say "this is what to do /not do" which in practice guidelines sort of do. The latter shouldn't creep larger because first, it is creep, it's hard to get the carefulness / perfection needed for give it that amount of clout. But I did support" anyway because I think this is an edge case where it could pass as a guideline given its history of scrutiny, tweaking, acceptance, usage, and being in good enough shape to be a guideline. Also it should be acknowledged that a "yes" here means only to make it a guideline, not an individual endorsement of every sentence in it. And knowing that it may need a few tweaks and changes to fully meet its new status. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 19:14, 12 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose in practice. Although I am sympathetic to the idea that this could be a guideline, I disagree that it has been clearly vetted by the community. In fact, for 15 or so years I have often avoided trying to sort out small changes to that page precisely because it was never necessary to do so; I could just continue closing as usual without needing to refer to instructions for new closers. In theory, I think we could start with a rewrite of that page, build up consensus, and then bring up the issue again, but I do not believe that the page as written reflects the best practices that have been developed at WP:RM over time, as reflected in my ongoing comments at WT:RM#Involved. Dekimasuよ! 17:19, 15 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Both in substance and function, this corresponds to a guideline, and has a clear niche in the systematization of PAGs: This page is to the move processes what Wikipedia:Deletion process is to the deletion process. —Alalch E. 20:16, 19 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose RM's are not so special they need their own definition of INVOLVEment, and I cannot support writing this clearly incongruous expanded definition of it into our policies. In the broader sense, codifying this as a guideline is an instruction creep problem. Courcelles (talk) 13:40, 20 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support tweeks that could result in a promotion to a guideline. If it fails to garner enough support to pass then Support classifying the essay as explanatory supplement. -- Otr500 (talk) 16:14, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: I have a concern, that may not be justified, that a failed proposed policy or guideline generally carries the scarlet banner N This is a failed proposal.
  The hierarchy of essays, according to Wikipedia, is that an essay is an essay as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. However, in these essays, there is an added level when an "essay" represents widespread norms over a "minority viewpoint". The template uses "Supplement" or "explanatory supplement" that renders an "explanatory essay". If there is an "interprets" parameter, especially if the page provides "additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements", more especially if the "essay" provides this information about policies and guidelines, it is not just a run-of-the-mill essay.
  "Following the instructions or advice given in essays is optional". If this were actually true nobody could ever be subjected to sanctions for not following the "optional" essay. I am sure most here know that in some cases that is a fallacy. I am sure any of our "techies" could pull up the record of how many editors have been blocked or banned for not being here to build an encyclopedia which is an "explanatory essay".
  Citation overkill has had 176 editors, 150 watchers, and 939 pageviews in 30 days and is an essay (but actually, and not really arguable except maybe from lawyers, an information page) on the Verifiability policy and the Citing Sources guideline.
  Pure essays are optional, but essays that provide a different aspect, providing sometimes valuable information on the "normal" communitywide practices usually go further.
  Essays have no official status and do not speak for the Wikipedia community because they may be created and edited without overall community oversight. Following the instructions or advice given in an essay is optional. Generally soft advice belongs in an essay, thus avoiding instruction creep in Wikipedia's official protocols. This is in direct conflict with the content of the "explanatory essay" Wikipedia:Here to build an encyclopedia. That "essay" carries multiple warnings. This page in a nutshell States: Users whose behavior suggests they are here for some other purpose risk being blocked or banned. The first paragraph after the quote states, Because Wikipedia is a collaborative community, editors whose personal agendas and actions appear to conflict with its purpose risk having their editing privileges removed. The only thing "soft" is the using of soft wordings "risk being" and risk having.
  I don't think it would be out of the norm or too big of an adjustment to classify certain essays as explanatory supplements. This would still be an essay, not a guideline, so will not violate those editors not wanting any instruction creep. -- Otr500 (talk) 16:14, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Otr500, when a proposal fails, sometimes we mark it as a failed proposal, but other times we just tag it as an essay. Some things are perfectly fine as essays. See, e.g., Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle, which has been proposed for policy or guideline status at least three times since I started editing, and still carries no badge of shame at the top. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:02, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Involved

Is the difference in wording between WP:RMCI and WP:INVOLVED a problem that should be fixed? IF so, why and how? Red Slash 16:34, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion on changing the wording

• Oppose- unlike admin activities, RM closes are never urgent, so there's time to make sure that we get someone who's never closed a request on it before. Also unlike admin activities, it's excruciatingly hard to overturn a page move close if the closer won't self-revert. Also unlike admin activities, if the closer does recognize "oops, shouldn't have done that", it's extremely easy to just self-revert--nobody needs to live in fear that they're too "involved", since a self-revert of a move (e.g., "You just closed the request on Kyiv, maybe don't close the one on Odesa" -> "oops, my bad, self-reverting") is very easy for a good-faith closer to do. Also, closing move requests isn't really an administrative task, and is more an editorial one. Without these guidelines as written, the same editor could literally just close the same exact move request over and over and over and over again, stonewalling "progress" in a violation of WP:OWNership. It's one thing to watch your beloved perennial proposal fail; it's quite another when it's one single editor over and over again who keeps closing the request to shut it down. Red Slash 16:34, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  the same editor could literally just close the same exact move request over and over and over and over again, stonewalling "progress". The flipside of that is an editor who raises the same request with same arguments over and over again until a sympathetic closer gets their turn. We would be basically encouraging WP:FORUMSHOPing. Vpab15 (talk) 17:56, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  How is that the flipside? The problem is conflict of interest in the first case and disruption in the second case. Are you saying that the wording should be changed to allow the first case or that the wording already allows it? Selfstudier (talk) 18:42, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Personally, I don't see the necessity of waiting for someone who's never closed a move request on the topic. Closing RMs is administrative in the same capacity that closing any discussion is: the closer's task is to identify and implement the consensus of other users, rather than acting independently to make content changes. A closer can analyze an individual discussion and its consensus without inherently being influenced by unrelated discussions on similar topics; there's no reason for them to recuse themselves from future closures in the topic area unless they've formed an opinion that would preclude them from being able to close impartially.

  You mention the hypothetical example of an editor who closes the same RM repeatedly, but there are two possible scenarios this encompasses. First, that editor closes each discussion in line with the relevant protocols (fairly assessing consensus, waiting the full week, etc.); in this scenario, the closures are good, so there's no reason to prevent the editor from making them. The other scenario is that the editor flouts the protocols in their closures (closing against consensus, making inappropriate SNOW closes, etc.); this is disruptive for reasons beyond "they've closed RMs in this area before", so there's no need to maintain such a proviso in order to sanction people who perform these disruptive closures. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 15:40, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  While that may theoretically true in general, I think that in the specific case (referred to in the discussion as a "kerfuffle" but which actually need not concern us as it will be resolved in MR and not here) there is the appearance of a conflict of interest and as we all know, the appearance of a conflict can be just as bad as an actual conflict. So even if it may be theoretically true, I still think this is something that ought to be avoided, particularly in CT areas. Selfstudier (talk) 16:12, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That's certainly true for controversial proposals, and I can definitely understand where you're coming from in that regard, but I think a bright-line "you have ever closed such a move request" restriction would also shut down a number of productive and low-risk closures. It's not uncommon for someone to propose a series of RMs on a shared topic - RMs which could easily be bundled, but for one reason or another, are not - and forcing those RMs to all be closed by different people puts a lot of additional strain on that practice.

  I wonder if "you have ever closed a move request on this article" would be a good alternative restriction? In my view, it'd be nearly as effective at reducing the appearance of conflicts of interest, while also minimizing the added administrative burden on RM closers. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 16:48, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That seems like a good proposal, I would support that. Selfstudier (talk) 16:58, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  This is actually what it means, which I think a lot of people seem to be overlooking. The third (and second) points refer back to the first. They say "such a move request", referring to "a move request about the article in question" - but a lot of people seem to be looking at the third point in isolation and coming up with their own sense, out of context, of what "such a move request" means. So, "a move request about the article in question" would best be repeated thrice. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:44, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't think this is true: Also unlike admin activities, it's excruciatingly hard to overturn a page move close if the closer won't self-revert.

  Even if it were true, I think it's not an important thing to worry about because it's not a problem we experience. People don't post RMs over and over and over again; therefore, there aren't identical RMs for someone to close over and over and over again. If that becomes a problem, folks can ask at WP:AN for help. Most admins are very willing to let someone else take over, if they're told that their actions aren't resulting in editors feeling like they can trust the outcome.

  And frankly, if you've got someone who knows something about the correct nomenclature for some niche subject, you want that person involved in all RMs for that area. RMs, like any other discussion, would ideally be closed by people who can identify which arguments are stronger or weaker, and sometimes that means having domain-specific knowledge. Like any other discussion, an RM can appear to be evenly divided by superficial vote counting, but if one says X because Crackpots'R'Us uses that name, and the other says Y because reputable scholars use that name, then you should be going with the good sources – and that can only happen if the closer knows that the International Journal of Science is highly reputable, and the very similarly named Journal of International Science is not. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:51, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Wording should be changed to make it clear that the restriction on multiple closures applies to the same article (regardless of what titles it may have gone through} and not to other articles within the same topic area. A statute of limitations could also be applied, maybe a year. Contentious and persistent incompetent closing is a behavioural problem and can be managed by a topic ban if it becomes necessary.
  Also agree with what WhatamIdoing says. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:24, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Any change that allows an obvious conflict of interest. Selfstudier (talk) 12:20, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Well, obviously... · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:24, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Apparently not. Selfstudier (talk) 08:07, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Selfstudier, are you feeling like that if Alice closes a discussion on iPhone 5C, that she has a Wikipedia:Conflict of interest for closing a discussion on, say, iPhone 6SE? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:18, 14 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• A much more detailed conversation about some aspects of this is ongoing at WT:RM#Involved. Dekimasuよ! 17:21, 15 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose in essence; support clarification by WhatamIdoing. Agree with Red Slash about the first part. —Alalch E. 20:22, 19 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion (RM closing instructions)

• Comment. The objection to WP:RMCI was that it defines involved as You have ever closed such a move request, whereas the current policy at WP:INVOLVED says: an administrator who has interacted with an editor or topic area purely in an administrative role, or whose prior involvements are minor or obvious edits that do not show bias, is not involved and is not prevented from acting in an administrative capacity in relation to that editor or topic area. It does seem they contradict each other. Should the wording at WP:INVOLVED be changed if WP:RMCI becomes a guideline? Vpab15 (talk) 23:48, 22 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  INVOLVED is policy, so I think fixing this is better resolved the other way around. Updating RMCI so that it more closely matches INVOLVED seems like the solution, as ultimately that set of instructions are based off of the policy and not the other way around. Sideswipe9th (talk) 00:30, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  So, they're definitely different issues, and the RMCI "involved" stuff is different on purpose and for a reason. The TL;DR is that WP:INVOLVED prohibits involvement with the same user (or topic area), while WP:RMCI just prohibits it from having a certain pre-expressed position on a topic. Great question though.

  Why WP:INVOLVED is as loose as it is:

  1. Administrators interact with a LOT of users. If we prohibited any administrator from ever interacting with the same user twice even in an administrative sense, we'd have a complete clusterbomb of suckiness on our hands.
  2. Oftentimes, admin action is urgent; we have way too few administrators and way too many things to be getting done, and sometimes if you waited for someone who has never been involved, the issue would take too long to get resolved (say, Admin Joe finds a rogue user who's wildly vandalizing tons of articles, but Admin Joe has already sanctioned the guy once before; it would hurt the encyclopedia to say that Admin Joe needs to wait to find someone else to ban the dude).
  3. Administrators are very well-vetted in our rules and policies. They shouldn't need someone to hold their hand and tell them when they're too involved to be impartial. It's the same reason Supreme Court Justices in the United States (at least) don't need to be told to recuse themselves.

  On the other hand, move closers:

  1. Most move closers do not interact with most articles. I've been an editor for a looooooooooooooooooooooong time and have a loooooooooooooooooooooot of edits and have been involved in a loooooooooooooooooot of move requests, and I just looked through WP:RM and I could not find a single article listed there which I have ever interacted with. I could close literally any of those requested moves. I'd bet you that, of the fifty or so editors who commonly (once or more per month) close requested moves, probably forty-five to forty-eight of us could serve as impartial movers on any given requested move.
  2. There is zero urgency with requested moves. If Page Mover Tom sees a request on Talk:Foo that he could move, but, shoot, he's been involved in similar discussions at Talk:Foobar... well, it's not going to cause any problem for that move request just to sit tight for another few days until Page Mover Sally happens across it. Requested Moves are important, certainly... but definitely not urgent.
  3. The people who close move requests are almost never administrators. There's about four admins who regularly close move requests and about ten others who do it once in a blue moon, and I'd ballpark-estimate that 90% of moves closed are closed by non-admins. I highly respect my fellow non-admin page movers, of course, but let's be real: as a group, we obviously aren't as vetted by the community. In fact, this is why WP:RMCI's "involved" criteria is as explicit as it is. I pushed hard in the discussion for it to be painfully obvious where the bright lines were, because as a group, we needed those bright lines.

  So, no, I would absolutely not suggest following WP:INVOLVED's wording or vice-versa. Different rules for different reasons, just like how categories have different rules than articles. Red Slash 05:04, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Right now there is a move review about an article related to the Arab–Israeli conflict and another about a New Zealand term. Both areas have RM discussions relatively regularly. If we are saying that a closer can only close one discussion in either area, that goes against the letter and the spirit of WP:INVOLVED. I don't think that would be feasible, we would run out of RM closers in no time. Vpab15 (talk) 11:28, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  With love, no, I'm very confident there are plenty of well-informed RM closers who haven't committed themselves to either of those issues yet. I could list several of them who aren't involved at all. There's not THAT many of us, but there's not too few, either.

  Again, these are two separate issues. WP:INVOLVED deals with administrators performing administrative actions. WP:RMCI's "involved" section deals with neither. Red Slash 17:22, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Are you saying the same closer shouldn't close two RM discussions that belong to the same topic? For example Slava Ukraini and Odesa, both related to Ukraine? Because that's exactly what you did. Applying that rule would disqualify regular RM closers from closing most discussions. As a closer I would have to go though the hundreds of discussions I have closed to make sure I don't meet the new "involved" criteria. That is a huge burden and I can't see that working in practice. Vpab15 (talk) 18:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It already does work in practice! (FYI, these criteria are several years old and have worked for us for several years; they're not new.)

  The restrictions aren't "you've ever edited the article or anything like it". The restrictions are: "You have ever commented on any talk page in such a way as to make clear your position on the move request" or "Your editing on the page in question or about the page in question makes clear your position on the move request".

  For mine, the Slava Ukraini request hinged on WP:UE and WP:COMMONNAME about whether the slogan should remain translated into English or not; the way in which I closed it does not in any implicate how I would later close the Odesa request, which hinged on whether the one-S version or the two-S version were more common in English when referring to the Ukrainian city. The proof is in the pudding; I closed the Odesa request back in July, just three months after the Slava Ukraini one, and no editor even suggested that I had been too "involved" to close. (I would've painlessly self-reverted if someone would've brought a legitimate claim of violating those rules; again, there are no shortage of people who could've done a great job closing Odesa.) On the other hand, if I had been the one who closed the Kyiv/Kiev one, or if I had !voted on it, maybe I would've shied away from closing the Odesa one; if there's another Ukrainian city with a Russian name that's proposed to be moved to the Ukrainian name, I will avoid closing that one. I consider this common sense, which is why the discussion ultimately ended up where it did and the page reads how it reads.

  In short (too late!), the list of requirements on RMCI with regard to involvement were heavily discussed and meticulously crafted to avoid the sort of wacky prohibitions that you are correctly wary of. No worries, homie; it's not as scary as you think ! Red Slash 23:04, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Even on a per article level, are you sure that this is current practice? When looking at the CoI part, a closer is considered involved if You have ever closed such a move request. By a plain reading this means that if:

  • Some user proposes moving Foo to Bar
  • Bunch of editors support and oppose
  • 7 days pass, I make a determination of the consensus based on what editors have said. Article is not moved.
  • Significant amount of time passes, eg 6 months to several years, some other user proposes moving Foo to baz
  • 7 days pass, I cannot make determination of the consensus based on what the editors have said, because I closed another RM on the same page at some point in the past

  When we have 6.6 million articles, but only 130,000 active editors, at some point we will run out of editors who can close move requests on articles that have had multiple move requests. Sideswipe9th (talk) 00:33, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That is correct, that is current practice, you could not make that determination. We have 6.6 million articles, but I assure you, we don't have that many requested moves No worries, we've never even begun to come close to a situation where we've run out of possible closers. Red Slash 01:37, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Sorry to interrupt the thread here, but I do not believe there has ever been consensus to make that "common practice". Until 2019, the directive was to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest (which is good!), but there was no prohibition on closing a second move on the same page, and no indication that the very existence of a previous close itself would be considered indicative of a conflict of interest. Since that change (which I didn't know about, since I don't monitor that page, although I would have objected to it), the page has not had guideline status. I have closed subsequent moves on the same pages many times, sometimes so far apart that I couldn't even remember having closed a move request there previously. When the reading of consensus is clear and accurate, there is no appearance of a conflict of interest. When the reading of consensus is not clear or accurate, there is a problem regardless of whether there has been a previous close on the same page. Dekimasuよ! 17:34, 15 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Why is RMCI so much stricter in this regard when compared to how we handle INVOLVED at the admin level, or non-admin closures everywhere else on enwiki? The purpose of the closer of any discussion is to summarise the consensus that already exists, and doing so is usually not considered involvement by any other standard. What's special about move requests that make it so that we need this restriction? Sideswipe9th (talk) 02:11, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I explained it in much more detail above, but it boils down to A) administrative actions are far more urgent than RM moves, so we can afford to be choosier when it comes to involvement, and B) move request outcomes are much more difficult to overturn. Again, the part that you're concerned about--which I get, again, I understand your concern--was exhaustively discussed a few years ago when it was added to RMCI. Red Slash 07:49, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Red Slash: I'm really confused here. Doesn't WP:INVOLVED only apply to admins anyway? So WP:INVOLVED does not really apply to non-admin editors making closures; in fact, the only guideline for that is WP:RMCI. It's unclear to me if RM closures even count as activities conducted in 'an administrative capacity', since this seems to be a contradiction in terms for any activities that are specifically allowed to be performed by non-admins. I sense muddled logic. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:12, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  And then WP:NACINV just redirects back to WP:INVOLVED as the parallel standard being applied, but without implying that RM closure is administrative. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:15, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It seems really important to clear up whether RM closure is an "admin capacity" covered by WP:INVOLVED that makes the exception of allowing non-admins to perform it, or if it is a "non-admin capacity" that WP:INVOLVED does not fundamentally apply to, but which the WP:INVOLVED principles are overlaid back onto as applicable to participating admins and non-admins by virtue of the standards laid out at WP:NACINV. Iskandar323 (talk) 07:25, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Admin actions are not more urgent than RMs. There is no urgency to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, for example. Some admin actions are urgent, but most aren't. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:57, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Question. Should we include the bit about WP:Move review that's found at the top of WP:RM as a post closure section? This will lay out (or affirm ) the current dispute resolution path if someone wishes to contest the closure (before the interested party takes the case up to ANI). Duplicating the paragraph here for everyone's convenience:

  Wikipedia:Move review can be used to contest the outcome of a move request as long as all steps are followed. If a discussion on the closer's talk page does not resolve an issue, then a move review will evaluate the close of the move discussion to determine whether or not the contested close was reasonable and consistent with the spirit and intent of common practice, policies, and guidelines.

  – robertsky (talk) 00:52, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Not a bad idea. Red Slash 05:04, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment I don't believe the RfC statement or this notification meet the neutrality requirements. Red Slash, can you update them so as to not bias the RfC? BilledMammal (talk) 12:31, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Can you point to anything in particular? Red Slash 17:23, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Almost all of it; it is advocating for this change, and trying to present RMCI as more than an essay. I suggest you remove the second sentence from your notification, and reduce your statement down the concise and neutral statement Should WP:RMCI be formally elevated to the official status of a WP:GUIDELINE? BilledMammal (talk) 23:22, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  First paragraph:

  There has existed for eighteen years a set of instructions for how to formally close a requested move. It was initially titled as Wikipedia:Moving guidelines for administrators, later changed to Wikipedia:Requested moves/Closing instructions (hereafter WP:RMCI). Over the years, it has grown from a simple set of how-to steps to a comprehensive list of guidelines for determining consensus (which began as early as 2006 and has continued to expand through the years). It also has included instructions on who should close requests--first in 2009 when the authority to move pages was explicitly granted to non-administrators, then later in 2019 (following lots of discussion) we introduced rules on how editors who are involved need to not close requests.

  is completely factual and non-biased. The instructions have existed for 18 years. It was titled that way initially. Etc.

  Second:

  The instructional page wasn't classified as anything (guideline, policy, or essay) through 2021, even though it had been originally written as a guideline. Following a post on the talk page that saw no response, it was listed as an explanatory essay in 2021.

  Also completely factual.

  First part of third paragraph:

  Recently, at least one editor has asserted that, as WP:RMCI is "only" an essay, its procedures do not need to be followed; therefore, as one concrete example, editors may feel free to close move requests that they are fully involved in, so long as they think it's the right thing to do.

  A quick look at WP:MRV will show you that at least one editor has asserted that.

  WP:RMCI has been called "purely advisory", "not vetted", etc., leading to questions as regarding its authority--this in spite of the fact that it was written as a guideline and has guided literally thousands of move closures.

  The first part of this sentence is strictly factual. The second part is also true; are you perhaps upset at the fact that I said "in spite of"? I suppose that could be considered biased language, perhaps. How would you rewrite this without omitting any of the factual details contained in this sentence?

  This has unquestionably led to no small amount of chaos at Wikipedia:Move review following an editor who closed the same move request twice in a row (which is against the closing instructions), both with the same result, and who claimed that the closing instructions that forbid such a close by an involved user were merely "advice".

  "No small amount of chaos" is certainly an opinion, but I don't see how it's biased. IDK , you go look at MRV and tell me if you see chaos or not. Note: me saying that there is unquestionable chaos is not telling people how they should !vote. It is saying why they should vote: because there is currently confusion. If there were no confusion, there would not need to be an RfC.

  Everything from "an editor who" onward is completely factual.

  Should WP:RMCI be formally elevated to the official status of a WP:GUIDELINE?

  Gotta have the question we're !voting on listed in the RfC, don't we?

  All told, I can't see where you're seeing bias, or that I advocated for change in a specific direction in the RfC itself. All I did was provide factual context (though admittedly, perhaps that phrase "in spite of" is too loaded and pushes the reader in a certain direction) for why it is good for the RfC to be brought up. Trust me, this RfC being decisively rejected would have been much, much better than the status quo, where something that "looks, talks, and quacks" like a guideline is being treated by many editors as a guideline while others treat it as an essay. Red Slash 23:54, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Much of this is evidence for why it should be a guideline. It's factual, but that doesn't make it unbiased, because it doesn't include the evidence for why it shouldn't be a guideline. BilledMammal (talk) 23:57, 23 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  BilledMammal, I wouldn't worry about this. Sometimes an RFC needs an explanation, and sometimes a fair explanation is going to tip editors towards one side or the other. RFC questions, especially procedural ones, shouldn't necessarily try to give equal validity to all options. We can safely assume that Wikipedia editors are smart enough to figure it out. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:14, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't believe an explanation is needed here; the question is one that Wikipedia editors are smart enough to understand without explanation, and while the justification is more extensive the justification should be part of a !vote, note the statement. BilledMammal (talk) 00:19, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It might be unneeded, but I doubt that it's done any harm, even though you and I are the only editors who have voted against it so far. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:25, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  My advice for the future… when writing an RFC: At the top, just ask the question. Don’t add any explanation. If you think background or explanation is needed, add it to the comments section, or as a separate section entitled “Background” (or something) - By physically separating the question from the background of why you are asking it, you limit accusations of non-neutrality. Blueboar (talk) 02:44, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Yep, write anything else as part of a !vote (or a comment) after the RFC body so it doesn't clog up the RFC listing pages. As for neutrality, I don't think it is crucial for this particular discussion as this is not a contentious topic. Selfstudier (talk) 06:22, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I've written maybe six RfCs in my entire career, so this is something I'm definitely not super experienced in. Your advice--all y'all's advice--is well taken, thank you. Red Slash 07:50, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Procedural close for the non-neutral RfC statement and lack of RFCBEFORE (including poor format choice with separate supp/opp sections, not previously discussed AFAICT), first choice. Second choice: oppose per Rhodo. I do not believe it's really been vetted by the community, MR and RMs are a walled garden, and RMCI is its Bible. It differs in some major respects from standard practice elsewhere (e.g. NACs, interpretation of involved), and I think that's more due to the walled garden nature of it than any kind of community vetting. We need fewer policies and guidelines, not more. Also, it's noticeable that the impetus for this is a recent kerfuffle and I don't think it's a good idea to promote RMCI to a guideline in an effort to "win" an argument over RM/MR procedure. Levivich (talk) 14:37, 25 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  To some extent, the "kerfuffle" is the RFCbefore. If there are problems with RMCI then that needs to be addressed someplace, like, er...here? Two of three/four editors opining in a move review that RMCI has problems are here opposing so any issues are getting addressed in proper place and not in a move review. Selfstudier (talk) 14:44, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  A contentious RM followed by a contentious MR (aka, a kerfuffle) makes for a lousy RFCBEFORE and this very obviously non-neutral RfC statement demonstrates why. And contra to some surprising advice below, RFCNEUTRAL is for all RFCs, not just contentious topics. Also, this RfC doesn't comply with WP:PGCHANGE as it's not widely advertised, it's at the wrong pump (should be policy for a new PG), and not listed at WP:CENT. This ought to be shut down and restarted the right way: an RFCBEFORE at the PG page, followed by a neutral RfC at the policy pump listed on CENT. Otherwise, it's not really global consensus. Levivich (talk) 16:11, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Nah. PGCHANGE is for changes to policies and guidelines, this isn't that. Policy pump is for existing and proposed policies, isn't that either. No need to list this at WP:CENT afaics. The only procedural screw up was people not raising their disagreement with RMCI at move review talk instead of during a move review. I can do the same thing and just assert that WP:RFCNEUTRAL is only an information page and doesn't apply:) Selfstudier (talk) 16:24, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Oh come on man. WP:PROPOSAL is the policy for making new guidelines and it wasn't followed here at all. (And it has more requirements than PGCHANGE, and it explicitly talks about RFCBEFORE, and VPP, etc.). Please don't argue that a proposal to promote RMCI to a guideline doesn't have to follow the WP:PG policy. Similarly there can be no argument that this RfC question isn't RFCNEUTRAL. If you like the idea, that's fine, but the failure to follow our consensus procedure here is indisputable. Levivich (talk) 16:42, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The proposal, apart from some suggested wording tweaks, seems actionable to me. RMCI has been treated as a guideline in practice and the only issues that have been raised against it are the ones raised in an ongoing move review (by objectors to it). Selfstudier (talk) 16:59, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I've just double-checked, and WP:PROPOSAL, WP:VPP, and WP:VPR are all unanimous in saying that proposals for new PGs or to change PGs should be at the VPP and widely-advertised, so I've moved this from VPR to VPP and listed it at CENT. Levivich (talk) 17:58, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I've collapsed the initial statement and replaced it with a neutral one; if we are going to try and fix this RfC, rather than making a procedural close and opening a new one, then that issue also needs to be fixed - although I hope that the closer considers that prior to 18:05, 26 February 2023 (UTC) the RfC was lead by a non-neutral statement that might have biased the result.

  I am also wondering if we should merge the support and oppose sections, per WP:NOTVOTE? BilledMammal (talk) 18:09, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I've struck my !vote and moved it down to discussion, since it's all based on procedure anyway and the procedure is getting fixed. Yes, I think we should combine the support/oppose into one survey section as well. Levivich (talk) 18:14, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Done. BilledMammal (talk) 18:21, 26 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some editors are apparently objecting to the wording rather than the principle. So how to deal with this? Do we fix it now? (subRFCs?) Do we send this back to where it was to start with-proposals? Selfstudier (talk) 17:28, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Both shortcuts are within the bot policy and suggest that they apply for permission for their edits here. I suggest that the top 20 of the article creators are included in the denomination of masscreating editors and they should apply for permission there. In a RFC of 2009, (also at the village pump (policy)), the article number that classifies for masscreation was not really defined, but 25-50 was not opposed. Yet also the ones who created more than 25-50 didn't apply for permission, with one of the prominent cases being Lugnuts, which in my opinion is a deplorable loss, because his investment of time to wikipedia was huge. If his and also of others energy could have been guided to a calmer area, they'd likely still edit (under their original accounts).

They could anyway have been requested to apply for permission per WP:MEATBOT (about bot-like editing), but that policy doesn't seem to have been observed or enforced when the several discussions on masscreation began. Many of the masscreating editors are lost to Wikipedia, and I'd say it is not only their fault, but in part also our fault because we were not able not guide them to a more cooperative way of editing.

In order to prevent further very long discussions, I believe it would be good to just enforce WP:MEATBOT and amend WP:MASSCREATE to the top 20 article creators of the month. If one enters the top 20, they must apply per MASSCREATE, if one edits bot-like and is able to create several articles within a few minutes or two hours they shall apply per MEATBOT.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 09:08, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You are conflicting a few things here. WP:MEATBOT doesn't mean we treat all fast edits and lots of changes as being a bot. It talks of disruptive editing, and if it's done quickly, it makes no difference if done by a bot or by hand, and WP:MASSCREATE is talking about specifically using automated or semi-automated tools. If someone is making lots of articles with the use of tools, then they need to fill out at BRFA. If they are creating poor or disruptive articles, then they need to be raised at ANI or another noticeboard. We don't simply create policy to penalise good faith article creation, see WP:NOTBURO Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 09:29, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What do @you think of amending MASSCREATE to top 20 article creators instead of only the ones who create 25 - 50 a day? Paradise Chronicle (talk) 10:40, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What would be the point of that? Thryduulf (talk) 13:58, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

To prevent long discussions as we had with Carlossuarez and Lugnuts? Future examples might become Adamtt9 or Pvmoutside, both editors who are in the top 20. Adamtt9 creates articles contrary to

WP:NOTDATABASE, WP:NOSTATS or WP:NOTMIRROR, are poorly sourced with databases not independent to the subject. See here, sourced with that mirror/database, here sourced to that mirror/database, and here sourced to that mirror/database, all in the general references and not as inline citation. There is probably also no inline citation, I am not sure if a game between ATP number 180 with 150 is notable enough for any WP:RS. Pvmoutside creates technical micro stubs on species in danger, withholding the info that they are species in danger, see here, here and here. Nirmaljoshi is number 3 and created 19 stubs on dams in Japan within 2 and half hours after they were told to stop to create them here. Sakiv is another one, they create articles on football seasons usually full of tables contrary to WP:NOTDATABASE and WP:NOSTATS, see here, here and here. Why start an ANI discussion for each of them

?(talk) 19:12, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

? We could just formalize MASSCREATION and then there would be less discussions.16:21, 21 March 2023 (UTC) Paradise Chronicle (talk) 16:21, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Courtesy pings to Adamtt9, Nirmaljoshi, Pvmoutside and Sakiv. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 16:26, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the species in danger comment, I reviewed the three articles referenced. The first two are referenced properly and according to the IUCN are categorized as least concern, so I'm not sure what the editor is trying to say, the third article I did not create...Pvmoutside

You sure also created the third one, just check here. And least concern... ok and? they are still on the red list and the infobox should be a summary of the article in which you usually do not mention the red list as far as I have noticed.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 21:49, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The reference point has been corrected...Pvmoutside (talk) 01:26, 23 March 2023 (UTC).[reply]

Uhhh, I want to correct myself. I didn't know that least concern means no concern as I figured that if they are included in the red list for threatened species they are in danger. Apparently it's not like that and I apologize. I still see those articles as taggable, let's say for too technical as they are full of latin names and acronyms and would support the removal of autopatrolled from Pvmoutside. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 07:47, 23 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No? Where do we state a figure for how much one can create? MASSCREATE talks about using tools. If someone wants to create hundreds of articles that are all well cited, there is no issue. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 14:23, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Tools for semi-automation would include things like boilerplate text - a necessity for anyone who is creating dozens of articles per day. WP:MEATBOT would also apply, which doesn't require any tools to have been used.

However, I agree that this proposal isn't the route forward; defining mass creation solely in terms of the most prolific editors is too inflexible and will likely exclude many mass creators, and may include a couple of editors who don't engage in mass creation. BilledMammal (talk) 15:35, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

At Masscreate it says any large-scale automated or semi-automated content page creation task must be approved by the BRFA. It is the first phrase. Since no-one seems to have been approved, no-one seems to have applied for the rights even though they surpassed the mentioned unopposed threshold and we are having very long discussions on stub creations, I thought it might help narrowing it down to the 20 most prolific ones. But if not even they can be included, who will, and then also what's the sense of having such a policy? To be included in the top 20, doesn't have to be seen as a punishment, and it is also not meant as a punishment, the amendment is meant to regulate the masscreation of articles, so the ones that are good at it, can be shown as the examples to follow to the ones who are not yet so good at it, and this before having created hundreds or even thousands of articles. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 20:10, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What are the actual problems with the individual articles that these editors are creating (ignoring how, when and by whom they were created)? If you cannot identify any specific problems that apply to at least the majority of the articles created, and explain how classifying them as mass-created would address those problems, then all this is a waste of time.

Looking at a random recent creation (Charles Connor (actor)) by the editor at the head of that list (Lord Cornwallis) I can't see any issues. Thryduulf (talk) 22:03, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It specifically says "automated". You are trying to make any user who creates a lot of articles need to fill out a BRFA, giving examples of people who create poor articles. All this policy is designed to do is make more work for someone actually making non-automated articles - and if they are making them badly, they'd hardly put in enough time to do a bot request form. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 22:15, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Lee Vilenski. It says semi-automated and underneath comes

WP:MEATBOT which includes semi-automated bot-like editing. You are not fit for crat-ship if you can't properly cite policy. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 23:33, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That simply isn't true. MEATBOT talks about disruptive bot like editing. It DOES NOT suggest that all edits that are done quickly are bot edits, nor that they are disruptive However, merely editing quickly, particularly for a short time, is not by itself disruptive. That is the bit where this falls down. This proposal suggests that all users who create lots of articles (regardless of quality) should in fact be treated like a bot, and made to fill in a form.

This is also something that is already easy to deal with with existing policy. Is the user using tools? Yes - get them to fill out the form. No? Well, are the articles disruptive, or of poor quality? Yes - report to ANI, other noticeboard, or their talk. They'll soon stop, or gain a block. No? Well, I don't really see the issue. If I wanted to create 30 articles tomorrow that were all well sourced? I don't really see what the issue is, nor would I expect someone to come along and tell me that I need to put in paperwork and become a bot.

Thank you for the personal attack, please refrain from doing these in future. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 07:09, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah I am not sure if that was a personal attack or a personal point of view. I'd be glad to learn what was you see as a personal attack. You are an admin and like a politician public figure you should be receptive to criticism.

Anyway, while you are right that it is mentioned that for a short while it is not disruptive some of the Masscreators edit high speed on long term. Some like Pvmoutside are editing high speed since years. And if the short term is the one where my suggestion fails, the opposite which would be long term is where I should have your support.

Then I'll also copy paste this part of WP:MEATBOT and then all can decide for themselves.

Editors who choose to use semi-automated tools to assist their editing should be aware that processes which operate at higher speeds, with a higher volume of edits, or with less human involvement are more likely to be treated as bots. If there is any doubt, you should make a bot approval request. In such cases, the Bot Approvals Group will determine whether the full approval process and a separate bot account are necessary.

It doesn't say the edits have to be disruptive in order to apply, just that they have to be high speed enough and their edits can be treated as bot-like editing which applies to several of the top 20 article creators. The title of the shortcut MEATBOT is Bot-like editing and that it is mainly focused on disruptive editing can be a point of view, but one I do not share.

And I don't believe to start an ANI discussion for each masscreating editor I do not agree with is a good idea,Paradise Chronicle (talk) 22:42, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You may want to peruse the recent WP:ACAS. Yes, our current rules don't address mass creation without problems and without the use of tools, and that's not ideal. A big problem seems to be some fundamental disagreements about what, exactly, the problems are when it comes to mass creation and how to define it... — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:48, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Rhododendrites I took part in that WP:ACAS discussion, which was one of the many discussions on masscreation and no satisfying solution came out of it. Discussions go on.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 19:41, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That was pointed out on my talk page, yes. I assumed you didn't see it because you referenced a 2009 RfC but not the one we just had on this topic (a long one that took a lot of time with, as you point out, no real solution). Not saying that should be the end of it -- it just seemed worth mentioning is all. NBD. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:16, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Rhododendrites Why does creation (mass or otherwise) without problems need addressing? Thryduulf (talk) 22:04, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know that it does, except insofar as there have been a lot of people who claim the existing guidance does apply, should apply in spirit, or otherwise operate as though we have rules that we do not have. My "not ideal" is just about clarity/common understanding. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:16, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The number one editor on this list produced an average of just over four articles per day. Any of us could sit down and spend 15-20 minutes sketching out a reasonable rudimentary article on a missing notable figure, and thereby create four articles in a day, with nothing even close to resembling mass-editing. BD2412 T 22:53, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Then if the two admins here stonewall my suggestions, how can we apply those policies? If it's not the top 20 or editors who perform semiautomated edits, then who? You are the admins, you should know. Or are you all hoping to block the next one instead of finding solution for them? Be a bit constructive here.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 23:54, 21 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if this adds to the discussion, but a few years ago the Tree of Life Project had a bot called Polbot which created many species pages, but was ended when many of those pages needed corrections....Pvmoutside (talk) 00:24, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The following question was proposed previously, but a discussion on it was never opened due to the cancellation of the ArbCom mandated RfC. It might be worth revisiting?

Which proposed definition of mass creation should we adopt?
Please rank your choices by listing them in order of preference from most preferred to least preferred. Preferences, weighted by strength of argument, will be resolved through IRV.
A: A single editor creating a large number of articles based on boilerplate text and referenced to the same small group of sources.
B: A single editor creating more than 100 articles based on boilerplate text and referenced to the same small group of sources.
C: A single editor, creating more than 10 articles per day, 20 articles per week or 50 articles per month, based on boilerplate text and referenced only to the same small group of sources.
D: None of the above

BilledMammal (talk) 00:26, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

C.

The large number of A is too vague.

In B 100 articles are meant in total or per minute? If this is not clarified the ones who prefer not to apply will find any excuse. And I doubt if boiler plate should be mentioned as then a possible answer would be that they edit micro stubs manually for days and then publish all at once within a few minutes like I already read before. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 02:38, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

100 means in total; previous discussion has suggested that boilerplate is necessary, both because it can be determined by reviewing the articles, and because there is agreement that mass creation isn't simply due to the rate of creation but what is created. BilledMammal (talk) 02:43, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the explanation and also the constructive suggestion. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 15:52, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Paradise Chronicle you still haven't explained what problem you want to solve. Until you can do that everything else is pointless. What do you want to achieve by applying MASSCREATE? What benefit will doing so bring to the encyclopaedia? It's worth noting that as far as I can tell from a quick glance, none of the suggested definitions BilledMammal would apply to Lord Cornwallis' articles because they are not based on boilerplate text. Thryduulf (talk) 00:50, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have explained above, but you probably didn't read. The aim is to prevent long discussions in the future as we had in the past with Lugnuts and other editors. I believe if editors apply at BRFA, we can show examples to the ones who create deficient stubs. I'd say Lord Cornwallis and I believe also Moonswimmer and Esculenta for sure (articles are rather good) could serve as examples to show to editors who also want to masscreate articles. But since no-one is interested in that I thought it would be interesting to know how the policies on masscreate and meatbot can be applied. If no-one knows we can also just abolish them, then also no-one will have the idea to bring them up. Either show a way how to apply it or abolish it. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 02:16, 22 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Thryduulf, I think the motivation is "drama prevention" rather than anything about the articles or the creation – like if we were to write down that "Mass creation applies to the creation of six or more articles per hour, except during a new moon, when the rate is lowered to one article per hour, unless you have reviewed five extra DYKs during the last 90 days, in which case the usual rate limits apply", and another rule that says "If someone claims mass creation when the creation rate is approved by this tool, then the first three editors who notice this are entitled to post 'Liar, liar, pants on fire' on the editor's talk page", then we won't have l-o-o-o-n-g discussions about whether creating two articles that I dislike is "mass creation" instead of "a violation of all that is right and decent".

However, given that I see editors who persist in claim "original research" for material that is both verifiable and cited, I am not convinced. Maybe if we give them another badname they'd switch to that eventually.

Paradise, the problem with "top 20" is that if editor #20 has created 1,000 articles ever, then:

• I can do whatever I want for the first 999 articles, including flooding the review queues with 999 articles in the space of 999 minutes, but
• if I create just one article per week, then after ~20 years, I'm going to have to get permission from the bot folks to do something that is obviously not bot-like editing.

You need to have a rate limit on it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:27, 23 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing, the Top 20 are only for 2022, not for the last 20 years. And also, Wikipedia can develop towards quality, as it happened in many areas of Wikipedia. I believe this development will also come to article creation but maybe I am just a bit ahead of time. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 07:01, 24 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Based on a rolling 12-month period or on the previous calendar year?

It doesn't make sense to tell someone that they were in the top 20 last time, so creating even one article now requires extra permission. And it might not make sense anyway, because what if I create hundreds or thousands of redirects, but someone expands those into real articles? Our tools detect that as being a real article (now), so it would count someone else's article creation "against" my limit, unless you did a manual review, which is not really helping.

And it doesn't address the practical problem with mass creation, which is flooding the review queues. It does not matter what the overall limit is, if you say I can do whatever I want for the first ____ articles, including flooding the review queues with ____ articles in the space of ____ minutes will always be a problem unless ____ is a sufficiently low number that the reviewers can handle the burst of activity (generally accepted as 25 to 50 per day). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:34, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Then let's turn it around. What kind of editor would have to apply at BRFA as suggested by MASSCREATE and MEATBOT? So far none seems to have applied for and none was given the rights even though they have created more than 25-50 articles per day or used semiautomated tools for their article creations. I have asked this already before but no answer so far. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 19:04, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Paradise Chronicle, I think the rule should be that you apply at BRFA if your future plans will produce a level of articles that the community expects to cause problems for the Wikipedia:New pages patrol. That level has been set at 25 to 50 articles per day for many years. I would personally reduce it slightly, to say something like "25 to 50 articles per day day, or a total of more than 300 articles per month", but other editors would probably choose other numbers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:26, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

300 a month only one has created in 2022, so this would just raise the level instead of reducing it. I'd support a WP:MEATBOT approach that if articles are seemingly faster created than for example video link for the worlds fastest typists (ca. 200 words per minute) like creating several articles within a few minutes or 25 per day its considered semi-automated editing and worth of a review. It's not supposed to punish editors, but much more to regulate masscreation and show editors who like to masscreate articles what the community believes is good for wikipedia and what kind of editing raised concerns. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 21:56, 3 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The classification for Mass creation (in which 100 created articles in total are seen as a sign for masscreation) produced by BilledMammal is also interesting and has also not received much feedback either.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 22:05, 3 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In re this would just raise the level instead of reducing it: Does the number of articles that individuals are permitted to create actually need to be reduced? Are there still any editors who like to masscreate articles around? If not, why should we write down a rule to ban something that nobody is doing any more?

It's not sensible to say "More than a decade ago, Lugnuts created ~100,000 articles. I think his quality was poor, so I decree that editors who want to create one thousandth as many articles as him must get special written permission first." WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:08, 7 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. I've been trying to compel them to request permission as required by WP:MASSCREATE, and in some cases I have been successful (with the result never being a consensus in favor of mass creation), but many ignore the requests. BilledMammal (talk) 18:11, 7 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

MASSCREATE requires people to request permission for >50 articles per day. 100 per lifetime would be a substantial reduction from that.

@Paradise Chronicle, I see that you have created more than 300 articles. That is more than 100 in total. Are you a mass creator? Do you think that Wikipedia needs to be protected from you? Should you be getting special permission for every article you want to create in the future? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:32, 7 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't call me a mass creator in the current meaning. But I support the 100 article bar and would apply for permission if it came through. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 19:30, 7 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I want you to imagine yourself explaining Wikipedia's processes to someone in your real life, and saying something like this:

"I want to create one article this month. Now, if I were a new editor and didn't know what I was doing, I'd just click here and do it. But I'm experienced, so have to jump through bureaucratic hoops first. I'll have to write up a description, identify my planned sources, and get written permission. By the time you consider writing the request and all the people reading and replying, applying will take more time from the community than creating the article. Of course, a newcomer wouldn't like this; we only impose this on people who have experience with creating articles."

Do you think they would consider that to be sensible or silly? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:41, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Today, it only concerns editors who crossed the bar of 25-50 articles a day or used semi-automated tools for their article creation. The semi-automated is mainly mentioned since the 25-50 was ignored in the past. I do not believe the result of the Lugnuts and the Carlossuarez discussions is the one editors hoped for when they began editing. The Lugnuts articles were sourced well enough when they were created, but not anymore later. I believe the rules and guidelines will eventually get enforced, as it's not really informative to have heaps of unexplained, unsourced statistics and micro stubs of a few words or phrases. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 06:25, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Paradise Chronicle, I think you would hold a different view if you had been around back in the day. Please click this link and open, say, 10 tabs: nostalgia:Special:Random. That's what editors hoped for when they began editing. That's what they were doing. If you'd like to see some of the best, then try the equivalent of Featured Articles. Clicking through the first five, I see: one with ASCII art but no references; one with a general reference; two with suggested sources but no refs; and one with no sources mentioned at all.

If you're interested in learning more about the early days, then nostalgia:What Wikipedia is not might also be interesting. Also, if you see a page title that says /Talk at the end, that's what turned into talk pages. Before that (and even concurrently with it), editors just dumped their comments in the article page, at the bottom of the page. Namespaces weren't a thing back when Wikipedia was started. Talk pages were invented by Wikipedia.

And, more generally, when you think about saying I do not believe the result ... is the one editors hoped for when they began editing, you might want to pause and consider whether that statement should be re-written as I do not believe the result ... is the one I hoped for when I began editing. Since you started editing (your prior account) in 2018, you likely have a very different view of what's reasonable than the folks who were editing in 2003, or even in 2013. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:21, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, your reply sort of proves my point in a way that Wikipedia developed for the better. I do not believe you'll find consensus to go back to 2005 where "FAs" were able to be unsourced. In small wikis this is still possible but the English one is sort of a reference for the majority of the world which makes it one of the first hits on google and similar search engines all over the world. My suggestion is that Wikipedia develops further from quantity to quality but at the moment, consensus will not be found for that. And no, I meant what I wrote, and I believe you agree as well. Nor I, Lugnuts, Carlossuarez and the majority of other the editors partaking in the discussions were expecting that such a heap of poorly sourced content was able to exist and grow on Wikipedia when they began editing.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 18:16, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It actually doesn't need to be reduced if the policies were enforced, but admins find any kind of excuses in order not to apply them. 25-50 a day most of the top 10 have created so far, very likely all use semiautomated processes. To apply for permission is not meant to ban masscreation, one can create 100 a day and for as long as they want, but please masscreate informative articles, not stubs with a few phrases or full of statistics.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 19:52, 7 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How frequently did the top 10 exceed 50 articles in one day?

(Note the NOTSTATS only bans "unexplained" stats.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:43, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Why don't you ask for Semiautomated? I just believe that Wikipedia guidelines will develop towards quality instead of quantity as it did in the past. There would be also other policies that would apply, like WP:NOTMIRROR or WP:NOTPROMO for statistics mainly or only sourced to databases (not independent of the article subject). But I see the resistence of applying MASSCREATE and MEATBOT, so I guess its a matter of patience.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 07:37, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Proving that someone exceeded 50 article creations on the same day is easy. Proving that they used an off-wiki tool requires either mind reading or intrusive surveillance, neither of which I'm good at. Consequently, I'm asking for the thing that really could be enforced (in software, if necessary). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:23, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Just came here to mention that a similar discussion was held here, where some standards were purposed for articles specific to the Dams. I think at the end, it boils down to the quality of article , not the quantity of article. Each project's articles should be discussed on the specific project group because you can find the concerned experts there and can decide on the quality, standards and overall assessment. After all one cannot be an expert in everything. Best regards!nirmal (talk) 02:11, 23 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My opinion is that the problem could be mitigated by banning the creation of stubs. If an article on a subject doesn't have at least, say, 250 words or an equivalent number of bytes then it doesn't belong in the encyclopedia. Maybe stubs should be relegated to the wiki dictionary or some other site. Smallchief (talk) 16:21, 24 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

An encyclopaedic stub and a dictionary entry are not at all similar, and suggest you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the purposes of Wikipedia and/or Wiktionary. That does not lend favour to your proposal. Thryduulf (talk) 16:59, 24 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Smallchief Great idea the one with the wiktionary. I have/had a similar idea. I thought that if one is not able to word out 10 phrases on a subject, it's not notable enough for wikipedia. As for me it's not enough to add a source, but also the information to the article that is in the source. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 17:43, 24 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes you are right. There @Nirmaljoshi was told not to create more stubs on dams but create Lists on dams in Japanese administrative divisions. Result? Nirmaljoshi created 19 stubs in 2 1/2 hours on the 1 March. That's the kind of discussions I'd like to prevent.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 17:54, 24 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No, there was not any clear outcome. Please read the discussion properly. Anyway, in the dam related article, one guy hijacked the process and I left on him to move forward.nirmal (talk) 01:28, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you that there was no proper closure, but as to me the replies with the strongest arguments were the ones that supported List of Dams articles (comparable to the Lists of Dams in the USA). And your suggestion of a certain professional criteria per ICOLD is good as well, but not one of your dams created on the 1 of March I checked fulfills your own criteria of 1 Million Cubic capacity. Or maybe you can explain how lower numbers still fit in the ICOLD criteria?Paradise Chronicle (talk) 02:31, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The top 20 article creators in that query generally have a volume of article creations (single digits of articles per day) that could easily be attained by someone hand-crafting and hand-typing individual articles rather than using any automation for these articles. That is not what MASSCREATE and MEATBOT are about. So this proposal seems to me to be missing the point. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:43, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Little update, Esculenta was now blocked for one month for using AI for article creation per MEATBOT. I have actually asked them to apply for article creation at the BRFA in March but they didn't apply. They were blocked without my direct involvement in the discussions and I would have preferred for them to apply at the BRFA instead of being blocked. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 07:47, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve read the entire thread above a couple of times. My feeling is I’d rather wait till individual editors do something disruptive and then take action against them if it’s needed. I don’t think we need a policy to cover everything anyone might do, and I think long discussions about individuals’ editing, if they’re needed, are absolutely fine. Mccapra (talk) 08:23, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed definition (MASSCREATE and MEATBOT)

As an initial draft I propose replacing the current text of WP:MASSCREATE with the following:

Any large-scale automated or semi-automated content page^[a] creation must be approved at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval.

For the purpose of this policy the use of any tools that replace, in part or in whole, the manual work required to create an article will be considered automated or semi-automated creation. These tools include, but are not limited to, the following: For the purpose of this policy use any of the following tools will be considered automated or semi-automated creation. This list is not exhaustive and it is possible to engage in mass creation without the use of any of these tools.

• Large language models (eg. ChatGPT)
• Boilerplate text
• AutoWikiBrowser

When determining whether creations are done at a large scale only the cumulative number should be considered; the rate of creation is not relevant. There is no set definition of "large scale", although anything more than 25 or 50 is likely to be so. Creating articles without the use of tools, regardless of the scale or rate, is not considered mass creation, although WP:MEATBOT still applies.

All mass-created articles (except those not required to meet WP:GNG) must cite at least one source which would plausibly contribute to GNG, that is, which constitutes significant coverage in an independent reliable secondary source.

As defined this won't affect the average editor who is manually creating articles. Further, clarifying and enforcing the definition will benefit the community in two ways.

1. For mass creation that is constructive and that the community would approve of, it will provide an opportunity for the community to suggest modifications to produce better articles; it is easier to improve an entire set of mass created articles at the start of the process than it is to do so after the articles have been created.
2. For mass creation that is not constructive, such as the mass creation of geostubs by Carlossuarez46, it will allow the community to intervene before the scale of the problem becomes a significant burden on the community.

We consider the cumulative number, not the rate, because the issues mass creation can cause are related solely to the number of articles created, not the rate they are created at. It is possible for mass creation done at a low rate to result in greater issues than mass creation done at a high rate because detecting low rates of mass creation is more difficult and thus can result in a greater number of pages that the community must deal with. BilledMammal (talk) 09:20, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There are multiple problems with this. Firstly, the rate of creation is relevant. If I create 51 articles in 365 days using one of those methods that would not cause anybody any problems at all yet would be prohibited by your definition, yet creating 1000 articles in 10 days without using "tools" might or might not be covered (see below) despite being likely problematic.

I say "might or might not" because the proposal is contradictory :

• Any large-scale automated or semi-automated content page creation must be approved and
• it is possible to engage in mass creation without the use of any of these tools., yet
• Creating articles without the use of tools, regardless of the scale or rate, is not considered mass creation.

The third bullet point contradicts the first two.

Finally, you seem to have ignored much of the discussion above regarding what is and isn't problematic. Thryduulf (talk) 09:37, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The third bullet point doesn't contradict the first two. If you aren't using any tools then you aren't engaged in automated or semi-automated creation. However, I've reworded the second bullet point.

For manual large scale creation, like your example of 1000 articles in 10 days, I don't believe we can or should address it. I don't believe we should because the issues caused are different, and because we can address those issues under other policies - the community can easily handle an editor manually creating 1000 problematic articles in 10 days under WP:DE.

I don't believe we can because any attempt to do so will make it more likely that this policy will apply to editors who have the reasonable expectation that it won't because they are not using any tools in their editing; per the discussion above, which I haven't ignored, this is something that must be avoided.

If I create 51 articles in 365 days using one of those methods that would not cause anybody any problems at all yet would be prohibited by your definition It wouldn't be prohibited; it would just require you to go through BRFA, where approval should be quick if no issues exist. However, issues can exist for even smaller levels of mass creation. For example if you want to create 51 articles with ChatGPT I think community oversight would be a very good idea.

I also think that such an example would be extremely rare or even non-existent; how many editors engage in semi-automated or automated creation of articles but stop at 51 or a similarly small number? Do you have any examples? BilledMammal (talk) 10:12, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Editors need to seek permission to upload files and create categories? I've seen some poorly thought out categorization schemes where I wish the editors creating the categories would have consulted somewhere about creating them. But requiring editors to seek permission to create more than 25 pages in their Wikipedia careers is ridiculous Are disambiguation pages and redirects included too? Plantdrew (talk) 16:31, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That aspect is taken directly from the current WP:MASSCREATE policy. It also would only apply to automated or semi-automated activities; as most editors create categories and upload files manually it wouldn't apply to them. In line with the current policy, it wouldn't apply to redirects but it would apply to dab pages. BilledMammal (talk) 17:04, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Notes (MASSCREATE and MEATBOT)

Alternative proposal: Move MASSCREATE out of BOTPOL

As I've looked at recent discussions around WP:MASSCREATE, I've become convinced that these are being hampered by that being a part of WP:Bot policy. It seems to me that the community wants to concern itself with mass creation in general, without regard for whether it's automated, semi-automated, or fully manual. WP:MEATBOT can help there, but that can only stretch so far—if you get to the point where "boilerplate text" might include Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout, you've probably gone too far.

Additionally, the bot policy can't legitimately say much about how non-bots should go about getting approval. MEATBOT is mainly about enforcement, not approval. In the recent RFC, a proposal to require BRFAs for mass-creation approval was rejected, and BAG does not seem to want it there either.

So how about it? Should the community move WP:MASSCREATE to some other policy, or to a policy page of its own? Mass creations by bot would still also be subject to WP:BOTPOL and WP:BRFA for the bot aspect, but the new policy would be freed from having to imply that all mass creations are somehow bot activity. Anomie⚔ 12:17, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Anomie Don't think it is big enough to be a stand alone policy, but it certainly doesn't need to be in BOTPOL (got somewhere else it could be merged?); botpol should reference wherever it ends up as a reminder to BAG/operators that bots that want to do that not only need to be approved as a bot, but ensure they have whatever community support is needed to exempt them from that policy. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:31, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It might expand a bit once released from the constraint of being ostensibly about bots. But my main goal is to establish a consensus to move it out of BOTPOL since it really no longer fits there, where exactly it ends up I'm happy to leave to others to decide later. I agree that WP:Bot policy#Mass page creation should remain as a stub. Anomie⚔ 13:59, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A layout guide can't be boilerplate text, but apart from that I think you make a good point - even if we decide to exclude fully manual mass creation from its scope it is better for MASSCREATE to be outside BOTPOL. We would need to replace the reference to BRFA; I think instructing editors to get community consensus at VPR would be a good replacement.

The best target I can see to merge it to would be Wikipedia:Editing policy, but I think it is better off as a standalone policy; it would be one of the shorter policies we have, but there are several of comparable or lesser length such as WP:IAR and WP:STRONGPASS. If it is made a standalone policy I think the best classification for it would be as a procedural policy; the same classification as BOTPOL. BilledMammal (talk) 13:50, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How should MOS:COMMONALITY be interpreted in relation to MOS:TIES?

A: Universally accepted terms should always be used, even for topics where TIES applies, unless the national variety is contextually important to the topic.

B: Universally accepted terms should only be used when TIES does not apply.

Using the examples from MOS:COMMONALITY, under proposal A topics with ties to Britain and America will use glasses rather than spectacles and eyeglasses respectively, and topics with ties to India will use ten million rather than one crore. An example of an exception where national varieties should be used due to being contextually important to the topic would be 100 Crore Club.

Under proposal B topics with ties to Britain and America will always use spectacles and eyeglasses respectively, while topics with ties to India will use one crore.

If there is a consensus for either option then MOS:ENGVAR will be updated to reflect this. 03:48, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Survey (MOS:COMMONALITY - MOS:TIES)

• A. Our goal is to write a global encyclopedia, accessible to all English readers, and using universally accepted terms contributes to this goal. We want a reader in India to be able to read an article about a Canadian topic and not be confused by the words used, and we want a reader in Canada to be able to read an article about an Indian topic and not be confused by the words used.

Sometimes, confusion is unavoidable; there is not always a universally used term. For example, a car's trunk or boot. In such circumstances we need to compromise, and MOS:TIES and MOS:RETAIN is a good method to do so, but in circumstances we don't need to compromise, when we can use a word that all readers will understand without us needing to gloss it or without them needing to read another article, then we should use that word. BilledMammal (talk) 03:48, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• B, but explain - while I absolutely appreciate the desire to have articles all use consistent language, I can't reconcile that with the consequence that option A would mean we're treating certain varieties of English as "more English" than others. The "common" language will almost inevitably be either British or American in origin, while other varieties of English get progressively overwritten even when on articles which have a strong tie to that particular language. I think the best compromise here is to have MOS:TIES take precedent, with the caveat that when using a term specific to the relevant variety of English it should be explained at first mention, such as "Tramping (hiking) is a popular activity..." or "₹70 crore (₹700 million)" as suggested below. Turnagra (talk) 08:41, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I disagree we would be treating it as less English, any more than we treat informal English (given our preference for formal English) as "less English" - instead, we would be treating it as less useful for writing a global Encylopedia. However, even if it did treat it that way, I don't see an issue with that; is not English used by 100% of English speakers more English than English used by less than 100% of English speakers?

  This applies to words from all parts of the English speaking world; for example, the word we use for Soft drink is the most commonly used word only in Australia and New Zealand, with alternatives like fizzy drink (most common in Britain), pop (most common in the United States and Canada), and cold drink (most common in South Africa and India) rejected for lack of commonality. BilledMammal (talk) 23:29, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  BilledMammal, you are not entirely correct about the usage of "pop" in the United States, where that is a highly regionalized usage. "Pop" is the most common usage in Western New York, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and the upper Great Plains and upper Rocky Mountains states. I grew up in Michigan where everyone said "pop", and then I moved to California, by far the most populous state, where nobody says "pop" but instead everyone says "soda" or "soft drink". Otherwise, Michigan English and mainstream California English are quite similar to me. But even half a century after I left Michigan, occasionally someone will say that I sound like I am from Michigan. Take a look at the map in this article. Cullen328 (talk) 06:04, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Thank you for that correction, although I'm very surprised at the use of coke. BilledMammal (talk) 06:28, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  As am I, BilledMammal. But I have never spent an extended period of time in the Deep South. I have driven through and jetted into the area, staying briefly in hotels and motels. But I am like a tourist from Sydney or Paris when I am in that part of the U.S. Cullen328 (talk) 07:25, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Just so y'all know, the correct answer, when someone asks "You want a coke?" is "Sure, you got any RC?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:34, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  How about dope? Coke, dope, pop, soda Donald Albury 23:57, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose both. Both A and B are too extreme. It depends: How commonly understood is the supposedly universally accepted term? How strong is the tie? How confusing is a term to the readers who didn't get their most familiar term? These vary case by case. They're factors to be weighed as guidance, not rules with an absolute order of priority. For example, "filling station" is arguably a commonality, yet also few people's first choice. Even when there are weak ties, we should usually just pick gas station or petrol station, and even when there are no ties, we should retain gas/petrol/filling station as opposed to forcing "filling" everywhere. Similarly for the commonality "controlled-access highway". On the other hand, "glasses" is very widely understood; even in an article with clear ties we should ordinarily write "glasses". Still other cases will have their own unique considerations. Adumbrativus (talk) 10:01, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  A wouldn't require us to use terms like "filling station", because as you point out a good argument can be made against it being a word that is a commonality. It would only compel us to use words where there is a consensus that the proposed word is actually a commonality. BilledMammal (talk) 23:33, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose both A and B - Our goal is to serve [English-reading] users, not force everyone to accept one single format. While it is true that English is not a native language in many regions, it remains widely spoken and probably the most common language the populace can speak if they're multi-lingual (India, in this instance). As such, we have the MOS:TIES to incorporate the respective variety of English. MOS:COMMONALITY is a guideline and as the section header suggests "opportunities" not that "we must and should at all costs" as the proposals say. As such, I don't have any objection to use "100,000 xyz" instead of "1 lakh xyz" or "ten million" instead of "one crore" - non-currency figures (see my comment in Discussion for currency figures; 100 Crore Club is currency-related) - which is where the opportunity for a commonality lie. But we shouldn't force the wording in MOS to "should". — DaxServer (t · m · c) 12:24, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose the premise - It is a mistake to think that there is a conflict between TIES and COMMONALITY - a well written article will find a way to achieve both at the same time. On those rare occasions where we must choose, we need to examine the options on a case by case basis. Blueboar (talk) 13:28, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• A/false dichotomy. glasses is a British English word as well as spectacles, so it is not a TIES issue to use glasses. Universally accepted terms should be used if they exist. This is what COMMONALITY says. TIES puts forwards no contradiction. — Bilorv (talk) 16:36, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Neither This is a false dichotomy. Editorial discretion should be used to determine which is more relevant. The one place that I find TIES most annoying—the use of crore/lakh—is easily solved by a number of templates on point, or by good old fashioned typing out of both numbers. Editors are smart, I trust folks to make sensible editing decisions. CaptainEek ^{Edits Ho Cap'n!}⚓ 23:50, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Generally oppose as a false dichotomy, because we use editorial discretion and do not need a binary rule for everything. If I were pushed to pick a side, it would be A, because we are here to write a global encyclopedia, not pander to local dialect pecadilloes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:09, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Neither Deal with matters on a case-by-case basis. There's no need for a universal rule here. Weigh the evidence and make a decision based on the particulars of each individual instance as to which of the two sets of guidance is more applicable. --Jayron32 12:27, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• A in the general case, but for lakh/crore specifically, DaxServer points out below that "million" is legitimately harder to understand for them, which is enough to swing my viewpoint for that one case. Template:INRConvert seems like the way to go there. ℰmi1y_⧼T·C⧽ 21:31, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Neither A nor B - in most of the cases that this RfC seems likely to be used to officiate, the terms that are actually available are unlikely to be either truly universal or truly particular, but are rather situated on spectra or mixtures between these supposed pure forms. National varieties of English certainly do exist, but they do not each consist of a definitive assemblage of universal and particular language choices in the way this RfC seems to presuppose.

Selecting Option B would encourage TIES flag-planting and parochial deployments of local vernacular, while I expect Option A to be drawn upon by editors, often unintentionally, in service of language that seems universal to a particular editor in situations where the reality is more complex. There is no good reason to choose between these options as a policy matter, when the best practice will continue to consist in linguistic pragmatics carried on "on the ground".

By the way, the language with which the RfC options are actually described seems designed to prevent editors from supporting, for example, universal terms when they are judged equally appropriate when compared to language group-bounded terms in a specific context, without also supporting universal terms in any instance where they are available at all - this non-neutral presentation of a decision that more naturally falls into three preference zones may explain why so few editors to date have been able or willing actually to choose between A and B. Newimpartial (talk) 00:07, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What would you propose as an "option C"? My intent with option A was for it to only apply to terms that there is a consensus are a "universal term", and not to other situations such as when language only seems universal to a particular editor, but the wording may have fallen short of the intent. BilledMammal (talk) 00:51, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My understanding of the decision can't be added to the existing options IMO because of the way the terrain is already mapped in the first two.

My idea of a neutrality is better reflected in the following question and options:

(edit conflict) The current Option A seems equivalent to my 2., and your option B seems equivalent to my 5. From my point of view, then, not only NOTA (6) but also the middle option (3) are missing, and you have offered a more moderate A against a more extreme B (sitting at 2/5 and 5/5 if you imagine my options as a Likert scale). (And no, I am not actially proposing a 5-option RfC; I'm just trying to articulate why I see A and B as non-neutral in the spectrum of possible opinions.) Newimpartial (talk) 01:17, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For three, if I have understood it correctly that was the intent of my proposal; a term with recognizably issues under a specific ENGVAR is not, in my opinion, compatible with the requirements of COMMONALITY. However, it seems that this opinion may not be universal, which would explain some of the objections to this proposal.

B is equivalent to your 4; it doesn't apply to articles where the ENGVAR is there under MOS:RETAIN rather than MOS:TIES.

(And no, I am not actially proposing a 5-option RfC; I'm just trying to articulate why I see A and B as non-neutral in the spectrum of possible opinions.) If I understand you correctly, you would support #3 and would have proposed a 3-option RfC with the current two options plus that one? BilledMammal (talk) 01:28, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In this hypothetical I would be torn (as I believe would other editors, based in their !votes) between 3 and 6. Also, in an RFCBEFORE I would have tried to reach one option combining my 1-2 and one for 4-5, perhaps through the use of "require/prefer". I get that both of your options are "always", but I think the instrument needs to be sensitive to preferences away from the "centre" of the distribution, so I would avoid "always" in a 3-option format. (Also, I still see your A as closer to 2 than 3, given the use of "always", but if you see it as closer to 3 then you are making my point for me about A representing a moderate option favoring COMMONALITY AND B being a more drastic option favoring TIES.)

Newimpartial (talk) 02:16, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is too late to change the options now, but if this RfC doesn't produce a consensus for either option I will consider a second one along the lines of what you propose. BilledMammal (talk) 17:39, 6 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose both as being too extreme and lacking in nuance per Newimpartial and lacking any evidence of need for a universal rule. Thryduulf (talk) 16:28, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose both - Both options lack nuance. The current ambiguity allows editors to decide what makes the most sense in a given context. If the term with the closest MOS:TIES to a subject lacks MOS:COMMONALITY it can be perfectly acceptable to just explain what the term means, in the same way that articles will usually say "the building is 20 metres (66 ft) tall" it is also perfectly acceptable to say "there are estimated to be 10 crore (100 million) of these plants growing in India" or "the company also produces potato chips (crisps)". It's also worth noting that even where commonality does exist, the implication of a term in the context of a different variety of English may be different. For example, in an article written in British English, saying "the cargo was carried by truck" would generally imply the use of a smaller vehicle than "the cargo was carried by lorry", and in that case the best way to achieve commonality might be to say "the cargo was transported by road using a lorry" or something to that effect. HumanBodyPiloter5 (talk) 00:13, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose both – of course this depends on the word and on the article. For an article of strong interest to an international audience (e.g. Big Ben or Superman), there's a stronger case for using universally accepted terms than for an article mainly of interest to people from one country. A word like "spectacles" (which is understood by Americans even though they don't usually say it) is less of a concern than a word like "courgette" (which is generally not understood by Americans). Sometimes (like for "crore") a parenthetical gloss is useful. Some words ("vest", "subway") need extra caution because they have different meanings in different countries, which can lead to confusion. Some topic areas ("football", "college") have a lot of complexity around the differences in terminology. And so on. This needs case-by-case judgement, not a blanket rule. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 03:53, 31 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per WP:CREEP and the good points made by others above. Andrew🐉(talk) 23:02, 1 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose both per WP:CREEP. Demographics of India avoids the Indian numbering system, despite many of its references reporting data in lakhs and crores, because readers are likely to compare info between the demography articles on other countries. Implementing Proposal A is an unnecessary burden on new editors to definitively identify the article's audience and purpose, rather than this being established through an evolving consensus BluePenguin18 🐧 ( 💬 ) 18:10, 2 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose both. In most situations, COMMONALITY should take precedence over TIES, but I disagree with the phrase "always be used" in proposal A. That's too strong. There are a whole bunch of edge cases and sensible accommodations (such as defining a local term on first use) that can be used to reconcile both sections. Modest Genius ^talk 12:16, 5 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• A, especially for terms such as lakh and crore. While English speakers are commonly familiar with the term spectacles, meaning glasses, the terms lakh and crore are poorly known except by those with some connection to South Asia. Moreover, a synonym such as "spectacles," the terms require speakers of global English to engage in mental conversions. Lakh and crore may be appropriate on Indian Wikipedia, but for a global audience, they are unfamiliar and raise a barrier to comprehension. Wobblygriswold (talk) 00:28, 6 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Being from the UK, on this little Isles we have such regional differences, like a bread roll. In the South where I come from its a Roll, but we have regional variations, like Barn Cake! WP:CREEP also!Davidstewartharvey (talk) 06:12, 6 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• A The idea we would use regionalisms that are not commonly understood amongst the English speaking populace in an encyclopedia is silly. Lulfas (talk) 16:45, 6 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I support A since the options further fosters Wikipedia's globalness. Not·Really·Soroka 01:46, 8 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose picking either option per earlier described creep concerns. This is something that should be on a per-article basis. casualdejekyll 15:47, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Neither Too many issues with making a one-size fits all rule. Galobtter (talk) 02:41, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose both as instruction creep. Work on a case by case basis. Stifle (talk) 10:17, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion (MOS:COMMONALITY - MOS:TIES)

Previous discussion can be seen here. BilledMammal (talk) 03:48, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• A query, using Chennai Express as an example, as it seems the lakh/crore issue is at the heart of this. This article states in the infobox that the budget was ₹70 crore; wouldn't it be more intuitive and simpler to just do "₹70 crore (₹700 million)"? Curbon7 (talk) 06:04, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  In the context of currency, if we're going to add explanation, we might as well say "₹70 crore (US$12 million)", or whatever the conversion rate was at the relevant time. If a reader doesn't know what ₹70 crore means, then that reader (presumably not from India) probably has a better sense of what ₹700 million means, but in the end probably not a very good sense of that either. Adumbrativus (talk) 10:38, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  There's a subtle secondary point here though, in that the full conversion to USD may still leave a reader confused about what a crore is. The conversion from rupees to rupees makes it very clear that a crore is ten million. Loki (talk) 20:12, 6 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Linking to crore would make sense to address potential reader confusion while respecting MOS:TIES and providing a conversion that fits MOS:COMMONALITY. For currency, the quantity isn't as important as the value (unless for some reason you're saying something like "two lakh of ₹50 notes," in which case I'd lean towards converting two lakh to 200,000 per MOS:COMMANLAITY. —Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 14:08, 7 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I gather this is ultimately about lakh/crore. I would discourage a blanket change to ENGVAR; if we have to, add a note clarifying preferred approaches for that specific case.
  Going to broad overall changes like this can have unforseen consequences - "B" assumes that all local contexts would use the local term if not for standardisation, but in the example given, 'glasses' is probably more common than 'spectacles' in BrEng. The result would end up mandating an unrelated change that probably no-one actually wants, in order to settle a single specific dispute. Andrew Gray (talk) 10:28, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  "Glasses" is also more common than "eyeglasses" in American English. I'm somewhat baffled by the claim in the RfC statement that this would apparently mandate two less common terms ("spectacles" and "eyeglasses") instead of a term that is both more universal and more widely used in each of the countries mentioned. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 03:53, 31 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  This is because it is used - absurdly - as an example at MOS:COMMONALITY, which I've said elsewhere should be changed. Currently "For example, glasses is preferred to the national varieties spectacles (British English) and eyeglasses (American English); ten million is preferable to one crore (Indian English)." Johnbod (talk) 01:20, 7 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• An example from the earlier discussion regarding school terms that went unresolved: Should a page with U.S. ties be using freshman and sophomore instead of the understandable, but less common and more verbose, first-year and second-year student?—Bagumba (talk) 11:00, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Bagumba:, I think that case falls less under MOS:COMMONALITY or MOS:TIES and more under MOS:JARGON. I would suggest writing "the group consisted of freshman (first-year) and sophomore (second-year) students" on first mention if the article uses American English. HumanBodyPiloter5 (talk) 00:26, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  COMMONALITY itself already allows Terms that differ between varieties of English, or that have divergent meanings, may be glossed to prevent confusion. Still, in the case where multiple levels of education are sequentially mentioned on a page, it can appear unwieldy to repeatedly gloss, given Educational stage § Comparison of American and British English and the uses of grade, year and form. —Bagumba (talk) 04:32, 8 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Re the Indian currency numbering system, ~1.3 billion people - 1/7^th of the global population - uses it. If I were to read "₹700 million" because it is "universally accepted term", I'm lost and absolutely cannot comprehend. I've to mentally convert the figure to "₹70 crore" to understand the meaning. To alleviate the lakh/crore problem, we use {{INRConvert}} - example: ₹70 crore (US$8.8 million) or ₹70 lakh crore (equivalent to ₹290 trillion or US$3.6 trillion in 2023). And not the "₹70 crore (₹700 million)". The world we live in uses USD as the global base currency. If I were to read an article with ¥10,000 - I've no clue of the value, however using a {{YENConvert}} or a similar one, I'd have a reference point to USD (despite not being a currency I use except paying for international purchases - true for majority of the population). — DaxServer (t · m · c) 12:37, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The issue with INRConvert is that it still doesn't tell the reader how many rupees that it; the equivalent in dollars is useful, but it still leaves the reader lacking information. A MOS:COMMONALITY compromise could be to always type the full number out (₹700,000,000), at least for topics with MOS:TIES to India and Pakistan? BilledMammal (talk) 23:17, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  INRConvert is just a template that we can customize to whatever usefulness we determine it would provide. Or another template. But not a cover-all rule — DaxServer (t · m · c) 07:38, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Except that "70 crore" would apparently be written as 70,00,00,000, not 700,000,000, according to crore. Anomie⚔ 21:19, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Ties is to establish which variety of English is appropriate to the article. Commonality directs that, so long as it is sensible and reasonable, non-type specific terminology is (and subject to those provisos, always) preferred over type-specific. I don’t see the issue here? MapReader (talk) 14:43, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @MapReader: The issue is that it isn't seen as subject to those provisos, always preferred over type-specific, with some editors arguing that TIES should be preferred - see above, where an editor argues for the use of "tramping" over "hiking" in relation to New Zealand topics, a position which reflects current use in articles - I haven't looked into the subject, but I suspect that hiking meets all those provisos for New Zealand topics. BilledMammal (talk) 23:53, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  There is nothing in TIES that ‘requires’ variety-specific terminology if a commonly understood alternative exists; that would both be a nonsense and a direct contradiction of COMMONALITY. Nevertheless, in your example, if “hiking” (despite being clearly common to UK and US English) genuinely isn’t used as a word in New Zealand, the editor would have a point as it doesn’t meet the criteria for Commonality. Accepting that a word we might use every day really isn’t widely understood in another English-speaking country is sometimes difficult, but there are plenty of examples both ways between the UK and US that make the point. MapReader (talk) 05:11, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @MapReader: They were presenting it as an example where TIES should overrule COMMONALITY, so I assumed that the word was used in New Zealand; a google news search on New Zealand news websites confirms that not only is it widely used, it is used more commonly than Tramping; 49 results (excluding the 43 results for unrelated topics, such as "hiking taxes") vs 38 for tramping. BilledMammal (talk) 05:25, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Then clearly they are wrong, since TIES relates to the generic style of an article whereas COMMONALITY directs toward the word to be used in a particular sentence. MapReader (talk) 05:59, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @MapReader: The issue is that editors holding that position can and do argue that it is aligned with policy, and in the process block proposals to use commonality compliant words; this proposal is intended to address that problem. BilledMammal (talk) 06:30, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  You talk about a proposal, but looking back at the options referred to in previous discussion, A is essentially current practice and B clearly unhelpful and probably unworkable. In any event, COMMONALITY (and hence A) needs to be used sensibly and is generally a question of re-wording the whole sentence, since there aren't too many cases where are both single words particular to individual varieties of English and another word with the same meaning that is common to both. MapReader (talk) 06:48, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The issue is that A isn't common practice, hence this proposal. BilledMammal (talk) 07:08, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I think it's worth noting that many cases where there can seem to be a conflict between MOS:COMMONALITY and MOS:TIES are actually cases where MOS:JARGON is more relevant. For example, the solution to Americans not knowing what a saloon car is and Brits not knowing what a sedan is is to say "it is a four-door saloon car" or "the car is a four-door sedan", which is generally clear enough for most purposes, especially if the mildly-technical terms "saloon car" or "sedan" are wikilinked. HumanBodyPiloter5 (talk) 00:36, 29 March 2023 (UTC)HumanBodyPiloter5 (talk) 00:39, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• For what it's worth, there is, in real life, a systemic bias in favour of more formal and more Western flavours of English; every few weeks there seems to be some trending tweet making fun of Pidgin/Patois/Singlish. Of course, this is the English Wikipedia, so we are well within our rights to prefer a country's formal version of English, but we must be mindful that there are more variants of English than American and British (and Canadian, Australian and New Zealander, if you're feeling spicy), and we've always had a policy of neutrality on which variant to use. On the lakh/crore issue… I'd remove that example from MOS:COMMONALITY; there's just as many English speakers on the Indian subcontinent than there are outside it! Sceptre (talk) 12:35, 1 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have noticed that there seems to be a marked left-wing orientation within Wikipedia (in the United States, it corresponds to the Democratic Party). I would like an explanation as to whether this is really the case, or whether it is just my impression; furthermore, I would like to know, with proof, whether Wikipedia, according to its own laws, can have political orientations, or must, by necessity, always be neutral. I repeat: it would seem, in my opinion, that there is a not inconsiderable left-wing political orientation here on Wikipedia. JackkBrown (talk) 13:45, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• You are not the first to make such an observation. Officially, we are supposed to maintain a WP:Neutral point of view. Whether we achieve this (or not) often depends on the reader’s own neutrality… those on the right complain that we don’t give their view enough coverage, while those on the left complain that we give it too much coverage. Blueboar (talk) 13:59, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Blueboar: so (not Wikipedia's fault in any case), is there really a predominantly left-wing orientation on Wikipedia? Even on en.wiki? I would be very sorry if that were indeed the case, because the information itself would suffer greatly. JackkBrown (talk) 14:09, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • I would say there is a slight left wing orientation, but not a predominant one. Part of the issue is that we require reliable sources, and reliable sources tend to skew left wing. This is especially true with academic sources. Since academics tend to be left of center, this will impact our coverage a bit. Meanwhile, right wing sources tend to be considered unreliable (often for good reasons). As one experienced Wikipedian put it: “The fact is, Reality skews left of center… thus, so does WP.” Blueboar (talk) 14:35, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  "Left wing" - "right wing" is only one dimension of the political space. Note that Jimmy Wales, principal founder of Wikipedia, and under whom Wikipedia's core policies were developed, has described himself at various times as an objectivist and a libertarian, strongly influenced by Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead; and more recently as "center-right" and "centrist". The culture of Wikipedia is more libertarian than authoritarian (a political dimension that is orthogonal to left/right), and is very much bedded in building an encyclopedia free for all to read and edit, requiring all content to be verifiable from reliable sources, and presenting all content with a neutral point of view. Editing Wikipedia is open to all, with no political test, as long as an editor remains civil and abides with our policies and guidelines. Many editors have some sort of inherent political bias, but many of us, no matter what our political leanings, are dedicated to keeping Wikipeida based on reliable sources and presented with a neutral point of view. Donald Albury 16:22, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• As well as everything that has been said above, I would point out that this is a global encyclopedia, not just a United States one. Certain goods, such as universal healthcare, are accepted in nearly all of the world as beneficial (even by those on the right of politics), but not in the US. Even, and probably more so than in much of the world, universal education is considered to be a public good by right-wingers in the United States. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:01, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• In a Poli Sci class twenty plus years ago, the professor drew a line on the board and then placed one in the center and wrote Dem on left, Rep on Right. At that time, US politics was considered centrist and two sides of the same coin when it came to global politics. The 21st century has brought significant divergence from those positions and I wonder how the professor would define them now. As to Wikipedia, personalities play a far bigger part in being a productive editor and those who believe Wikipedia is hopelessly flawed are of no use to the project and generally fail to abide by civility and verifiability. In short, much of the US "far-right" winds up self-excluding themselves from the project through behavioral activites incompatible with the project as they mistake this for social media where unsourced debate is welcome.Slywriter (talk) 19:36, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Do you JackkBrown have any specific example where wikipedia is supposed to be left leaning towards the Democratic Party? That there exist certain Republicans who believe conspiracy theories like Qanon or that Obama is not an US citizen doesn't make Wikipedia left-wing but much more academic.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 22:43, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Using the US definition of left and right I think it clearly has a left bias on articles related to US politics, and I could come up with various slam dunk examples of that. I tend to not worry about that unless it gets so bad that it harms the informativeness of the article, which does sometimes happen. I think that the cause is a combination of systemic issues combined with people who want it that way. It would be good to fix the systemic issues enough to meet the lower bar of fixing those where it harms the informativeness of the articles. Those fixes would help in many other areas besides bias. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 23:25, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • It would be much more helpful for the OP and any other concerned people to provide a couple of examples—it's impossible to hold a meaningful discussion without something concrete. Johnuniq (talk) 05:15, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Wikipedia presents the facts as understood by the scholarly consensus in the democratic global west, because of our rules. This makes it "left wing" by US standards, but not particularly left wing by the standards of other advanced democracies. The "alternative facts" of the US right are unwelcome here.—S Marshall T/C 07:47, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• From the UK perspective, the Democrats are to the right of our Conservative party. And the Republicans off the chart. There is no equivalent of our left or even centre in mainstream US politics. So your view of left/right bias reflects a US idea of where the "middle" is. But to emphasise S Marshall's point, current political parties and commentators that lie on the right of wherever your spectrum is have adopted a "the facts are unimportant/inconvenient" playbook that is very much at odds with Wikipedia's values. A populist, reckless-with-the-truth, "strong man" political approach isn't necessarily right wing, it just seems to be the current fashion. This, and not economic beliefs, is I think the source of most of the complaints by right wing politicians and commentators about bias on Wikipedia. Why there should be this correlation between economic beliefs and honesty I don't know, and future generations of politicians might change. -- Colin°^Talk 10:43, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• To add to and emphasize something in my previous post, I don't think that overall left/right bias can even be defined much less measured and so I don't think that one can say that such exists. I think that you have to get more specific / granular to really say anything about it. My post was about US politics specifically using the US definitions of the two sides. By saying "US definition", I wasn't talking about where it sits in some large right/left measurement, I meant that even the metrics of the scale are different. For example, in some areas, "liberal" has a very different meaning in the US compared to Europe. Also, in the US the existence of the two "teams" dominates everything; even ideology and viewpoints are often subservient to / determined by team membership instead of the reverse. Also, the types of media where each side predominates in the US are different. Once side is stronger in the legacy media, the other on the internet and talk radio and Fox. Internet and radio are inherently less filtered which means the whackiest stuff comes from there. Also structurally, they are less likely to have an internal review layer which wikipedia policies lean towards. Which in turn, enables people to point to those things and with a broad overgeneralization brush deprecate or de-emphasize those sources. BTW, this isn't just about trustworthiness for wp:verifiability, more importantly here is that deprecation or de-emphasis snowballs into wp:weight which has large impacts. In that realm, it's not about verifiability, it's about which totally verifiable things and views do and don't get covered and get emphasized/de-emphasized IMO the bias in in areas like which aspects get emphasized / de-emphasized/ covered / not covered, existence/non-existence and titles of articles. For example, an article about a conservative figure or organization will be very heavy on what their opponents said about them. North8000 (talk) 12:08, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  With very few (unusually erudite) exceptions, people perceiving and commenting on a supposed political bias of enwiki in general are providing much stronger evidence about their own political standpoints than they are about enwiki and its culture. On specific topics, on the other hand, articles may indeed reflect various kinds of biases including left/right political ones, though outside of recent U.S. politics, political spectrum bias is seldom the most prominent among these, IMO. Newimpartial (talk) 13:27, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• 

  Wikipedia tries to be neutral, but due to its reliance on published sources, it picks up some of their bias. It might be true that there is a left bias in certain topic areas, probably inherited from the sources that are useful for them. But the biases on here that are really significant IMO are the ones described at wp:systemic bias. None of these are about the left vs right debate, but about the general lack of coverage of topics in non-western nations, disproportionate lack of female biographies, the way articles are written to suit a certain demographic which isn't representative of wikipedia's overall readership, etc.. Compared to these issues, worries about subtle political biases are just a distraction. small jars tc 22:05, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  For example, many (most?) people believe in ghosts, and Ghost does not say what our overall readers believe. But as you say, that has nothing to do with a right–left political bias. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:47, 28 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Wikipedia is also affected by recentism. So political ideas of the last few years will be pushed harder over ideas from a few decades back. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:06, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  My personal opinion is that there certainly are some pages that do have a bias, but not too many have an extreme one. I think that we should further our efforts to inform newer users about the POV noticeboard for the most extreme cases. I've been a registered user on the site since 2018 and have read Wikipedia since I was 7; I haven't heard about it since January of this year. Maybe include noticeboards on some of the Welcome templates? InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 22:45, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I would just note that if you look at our thousands of articles on cricketers and pop albums and Pokemon, there is no discernible political bias. Even our thousands of articles on American state court and lower federal court judges tend to have no political dimension whatsoever. BD2412 T 20:24, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• As a global encyclopaedia we are going to struggle to cover some topics in ways that every country accepts as neutral. Just think for a second about the differing perspectives between Americans, Canadians and Brits re the war of 1812, or the contrasting views on gun control between some Americans and pretty much all Brits, Canadians, Australians, Indians, Kiwis and Irish. With US politics we have the additional problem that some of the litmus tests are ones where one party accepts the science and the other doesn't - Climate Change, Evolution and Geology being obvious examples. Of course a Young Earth Creationist Climate Change denier is going to think Wikipedia is biased against them, and such people are more common on one side of the US political spectrum than the other. But on scientific topics like those our aim is to summarise academic sources, not to try and work out where the mid point is between AOC and MTG. ϢereSpielChequers 20:54, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• @JackkBrown: Some of us have noticed a marked right-wing bias. Hey ho. DuncanHill (talk) 20:35, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Only a bit facetiously -- perhaps one could ask ChatGPT what Wikpedia's bias is? --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:46, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I am so incredibly tired of hearing that Wikipedia has a left-wing bias. In oint of fact. Wikipedia has a distinct and justifiable bias towards the accurate reflection of facts and reality. It's not Wikipedia's fault that -- generally speaking -- the American right-wing seems to have completely lost its hold on reality, while the left-wing has managed to hold on to a least a vestige of it. Beyond My Ken (talk) 09:06, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Wikipedia absolutely has a left-wing bias. That's not necessarily a problem, one just needs to bear it in mind whilst reading. Stifle (talk) 10:19, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Concern has been raised over the length and level of detail within individual tornado summaries. With direct access to the National Weather Service's Damage Assessment Toolkit, editors are able to obtain information on tornado impacts down to the street level. This also means the summaries are heavily reliant on a single source. We're mainly looking for guidance on how to best adhere to WP:MOS and WP:NOTEVERYTHING regarding what information is not insignificant and how detailed these prose summaries should be. The primary section prompting this discussion is Tornado outbreak of March 24–27, 2023#Rolling Fork–Midnight–Silver City, Mississippi but this same concern extends to many other tornado articles (including but not limited to 2011 Joplin tornado, 2021 Western Kentucky tornado, and Tornado outbreak of December 10–11, 2021). ~ Cyclonebiskit (chat) 05:44, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some concerns here. What is the definition of "too detailed"? That seems rather ambiguous. If it is decided that we should ease up on the detail, we are going to need specific guidelines to keep things within the range of what is considered reasonable. If the main issue is too much emphasis on "fluff" like tiny rural communities that even locals haven't heard of, and listing essentially every minor road the tornado crosses, I would say there is legitimacy to that, and I can work with it. However, if I'm being asked to do away with genuinely interesting, relevant tidbits of information, including contextual damage such as scouring and how far vehicles were thrown, debris patterns, debarking severity, names or types of businesses destroyed, and that kind of thing, I don't know how I can contribute meaningfully, and I don't know how I will be able to accurately portray the type and intensity of damage left behind by tornadoes. That is my main concern. I don't want any details regarding the damage itself left out. My other concern is, what about long-trackers like Mayfield? If we have a non-flexible cap on summary length, important info will basically be forced to me omitted, and don't think that's ok. While I do think we can cut down on informational fluff, I think summary length should be a case by case basis based on track length. Thoughts? I don't have anything else to add and will likely take a break after this. Ya'll can hash the rest of this out. TornadoInformation12 (talk) 06:05, 29 March 2023 (UTC)TornadoInformation12[reply]

I always thought all this detail was unnecessary. My only comment is that the longer these summaries are the less inclined most people will be to read any of it. This isn’t the place to preserve every minute detail of the storm. United States Man (talk) 14:22, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. I don't like article summaries having to rely on the Damage Assessment Toolkit, which often has minor errors (especially just following events), is difficult to archive, and is unintuitive for people trying to check citations. Rarely, if ever, should the summaries be as detailed as the actual survey narrative (though they usually are). Penitentes (talk) 14:57, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The level of detail in Tornado outbreak of March 24–27, 2023#Rolling Fork–Midnight–Silver City, Mississippi is utterly ridiculous. AndyTheGrump (talk) 14:31, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• ...this just makes me sad, because I was just trying to mirror what I saw in the past as well as the NWS summary as well. Maybe I did put too much information in this case, but the other ones I don't understand because those were tornadoes that did vast amounts of various levels destructions along long-tracks. In other words, the section in question can be a little shorter if need be, but I don't see the need to shorten any of the other ones. ChessEric 16:03, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Meh. I read the article at the center of the controversy, and I don't particularly mind the length. The source being used appears to be scrupulously reliable, and there's no requirement that multiple sources be used. As long as we don't run afoul of WP:LENGTH, I see no problem with the level of detail here. The language is not overly technical, there is, of course, some room for editing and tightening up of the language (perhaps by cutting out, for example, geographic references that are unlikely to be recognizable outside of the immediate neighborhood), but that's part of the normal editing process, and we don't need to set policy to handle that. One person writes something, later on someone comes and edits it a bit, we get to better writing overall that way. It's not really a length or detail issue for me, and we certainly don't need to create some kind of "one-size-fits-all" standard. Let people write, let other people write more, let still other people edit as needed. It's how the process works. --Jayron32 16:09, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Hey I'm not gonna be editing for about a week while I work on my mental health, but I still have some input after sleeping on it last night. How about these ideas? The Mayfield tornado summary was made easier to read because somebody broke it down section by section. It's a lot easier on the eyes, and not as overwhelming. How about doing that rather than putting a hard cap on summary length? I mean some day we are going to have another crazy multi-state long tracker, and a hard cap would create issues. OR another option is making stand-alone articles for particularly major tornadoes, so that if people want a short summary, they can just look at the brief version in the "Confirmed Tornadoes" section below the table, and if they want the full summary, they can click on the article above the paragraph that will take them to the page for that specific tornado (like Mayfield). I also do think we can cut down on the street by street SUPER-detailed analysis, or mentioning every tiny ghost town or rural community the tornado passes near. Like rather than explaining the damage in each neighborhood, just reigning it in to "neighborhoods in the eastern part of town sustained major damage, ranging from EF2 to EF3", plus maybe an extra detail if there is one particularly intersting damage point within that area. I'm willing to reign things in within reason, as long as no actual info gets sacrificed, and I think there's a way to appease both sides. What do you guys think? TornadoInformation12 (talk) 20:52, 29 March 2023 (UTC)TornadoInformation12[reply]

• Comment – It would be difficult to prescribe a precise level of detail for descriptions for tornado damage, but I think that these sections can be curtailed based on the nature of the data itself. Usage of the National Weather Service's damage survey viewer – a database of sorts – as a reliable source for tornado information is probably a valid use, though the ongoing RfC regarding the usage of maps as sources might be consequential here. Although there isn't necessarily a requirement to use multiple sources for information, the use of multiple sources would provide more context as WP:INDISCRIMINATE recommends. These would I imagine often be local news sources, which would provide context to the businesses and neighborhoods being impacted beyond a perhaps overly detailed play-by-play of street-level impacts. The motivating section for this RfC, however, has other issues with regard to its usage of the source. Many statements are not supported at all by the data available on the tool (e.g. the database, which only lists point by point damage severity, has nothing to say about the tornado being rain-wrapped wedge tornado [...] observed by multiple storm chasers). The section also makes judgements about the tornado weakening or strengthening or changing in size when the source does not indicate anything about the tornado's strength or size at a point. It also appears that the source is being used to reach conclusions that the source does not make. For example, the section states an old barn was structurally compromised when the source says nothing about an old barn, only that a structure was surveyed that falls into a category of small barns and farm outbuildings. The source often uses canned descriptions of damage and type of structure, providing no insight to exactly what businesses and neighborhoods were impacted. I'm worried that the source is being used to tell a story that, while possibly accurate, is not verifiable and may be more descriptive than what the source actually offers. It is also important to note that the survey tool only lists points of damage that the National Weather Service has decided to survey/upload, and should not be used to enumerate or describe the spatial extent of damage. —TheAustinMan^{(Talk ⬩ Edits)} 20:58, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  NWS often specifically says it is increasing strength or decreasing strength. Also per WP:CALC (even more specifically, an ongoing separate and un-related clarification RfC) basically says editors can do routine calculations. The clarification RfC seems to say the same general thing where it is routine still for editors to say 1 number is larger than another. So based on that, when NWS says EF3 damage points occurred here, but 1 mile away, EF2 damage points occurred, editors are able to say the EF3 damage was stronger than the EF2 damage, which means the tornado wasn't as strong (aka weakened). So that aspect will still be protected and the clarification RfC is heavily leaning that way it appears. Elijahandskip (talk) 21:29, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The "rain-wrapped wedge tornado" statement being inferred is understandable because I just left it there, although there are several videos and pictures that confirm that it was such. However, I do take issue with some of the other statements, which I will list below:

  • "tornado weakening or strengthening or changing in size"
    • This text is in the NWS Jackson survey:
      • "The tornado continued northeastward, producing tree damage as it crossed the Steele Bayou Canal then into Sharkey County. At this point, the tornado began to increase in size and intensity, and there was evidence of multiple vortices at multiple points along the path in Sharkey County."
      • "The first indications of EF3 to EF4 damage occurred along Pinkins Rd, where each structure along the dead end road, including several manufactured homes and a site built home, was demolished."
      • "As the tornado moved into the western side of Rolling Fork, the tornadic wind field was broad, encompassing the area from Race St where exterior damage occurred to the Sharkey Issaquena Hospital to Bear Lake Rd on the south end. The corridor of greatest damage on the west side of the city, up to EF3, extended from 7th St between Martin Ave and Joor Ave to 3rd St between Southern Ave and Lewis Ave to S 1st St near Wright Ave."
      • "After the tornado crossed Deer Creek into the eastern side of Rolling Fork, some intensification occurred, with additional EF4 damage noted. Two homes, one along Sharkey St and one along Collette Ave, had all walls collapsed."
      • "Another area of EF4 damage was along Mulberry St and Hunt St, where additional homes and businesses had all walls collapsed, Several other structures had roofs removed and some walls collapsed as far north as Lindsay St and Magnolia St. As the tornado approached US 61, several businesses were impacted, especially in the area between Walnut St and Rosenwald Ave. Several of these businesses were metal building systems that were nearly or completely destroyed."
      • "Around 30 mobile or manufactured homes at the Chuck's Dairy Bar property were destroyed."
  • "old barn was structurally compromised":
    • On the DAT, there is an EF0 point along Grant Road at latitude 32.84 longitude -90.99. This point says, "damage_txt Small Barns or Farm Outbuildings (SBO)" followed by "dod_txt Uplift or collapse of roof structure." The "comments" given were "much of roof removed and structure compromised - old structure." This is verification of that.
  • "canned descriptions of damage and type of structure, providing no insight to exactly what businesses and neighborhoods were impacted:"
    • See above comment on the NWS Jackson survey. As far as the specific businesses impacted other than Chuck's Dairy Bar, they were already in the summary, so I left them there.

  I should also note that on the DAT, the NWS Jackson has no info about what the tornado did after it hit Rolling Fork. Therefore, the damage points is what I used beyond that point and the only thing I noted besides that was changes in strength. Whether this is insightful or not is up for debate, but I just wanted to explain where in the information came from. ChessEric 23:18, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  NOTE: The NWS Jackson has released the rest of the damage survey. ChessEric 23:24, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @ChessEric: I appreciate the commentary provided on some of the examples. I see the statements are backed by the survey report published by the Jackson weather service office, but given that's the case, it should be made clear what's being sourced. Since those statements are not explicitly verified on the interactive data toolkit, then the <ref> should be near the relevant information. The frequent, consecutive use of citing the damage toolkit makes it seem as that information is coming from the tool when it is not. As for the old barn example, that's not necessarily verified by the source: it's an "old structure" and has been classed as a small barn or farm outbuilding, but that doesn't necessarily imply it's a barn. @Elijahandskip: WP:CALC would be relevant if the NWS listed the intensity of the tornado along its path, but that's not what they're doing. They are only indicating the degree of damage experienced by structures, which can vary based on the sturdiness of the structure or the density of structures independent of tornado intensity. For instance, a tornado doing EF5-rated damage moving over a rural area and striking a small chicken coop has not necessarily "weakened" simply on the basis that damage to the chicken coop could only be rated as EF2 at highest. —TheAustinMan^{(Talk ⬩ Edits)} 00:24, 30 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I've shortened the section now if anyone wants to go back and read it. I've archived the original section as well. ChessEric 00:46, 30 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Decide on a case by case basis, but base such case by caseness on the severity of a tornado. I believe that some tornadoes should have longer article leads, but not all of them. For example, a minor tornado that maybe killed one or two people shouldn't get a longer lead section than a stronger tornado which almost cost as much as some hurricanes. I think that our articles on mass shootings do a good job of exemplifying what should happen to tornadoes. Articles on major mass shootings like the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting have clearly longer and more detailed leads than the Mayfair Mall shooting, which killed zero people and injured only eight others. Case by case is the best action pace. InvadingInvader (userpage, talk) 22:51, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Meh. I don’t think the length is an issue here, and think it misguided to be “looking for guidance on how to best adhere to WP:MOS and WP:NOTEVERYTHING regarding what information is not insignificant” here. There seems a valid concern about mostly single source, but that would be to comply with WP:WEIGHT and to avoid WP:NOTMIRROR. Otherwise I think length might mean an issue with WP:INDISCRIMINATE, but not in this case because it has a connected narrative. Level of detail guidance seems more a WP:DETAIL topic than length per se. I would perhaps offer guidance that level of detail should harmonize with WP:WEIGHT, that greater WEIGHT should be given greater prominence of position and length, and items not present in multiple sources or in major sources should have little or no mention. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 01:59, 30 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  So what's the consensus here? Case by case? If so, before we make a summary, each time we'll have to agree an a length limit. That's fine with me as long as it keeps everyone happy. Thoughts? TornadoInformation12 (talk) 03:56, 30 March 2023 (UTC)TornadoInformation12[reply]

  Length limits aren't agreed on for any other topic. What is so different about tornados? Phil Bridger (talk) 05:52, 30 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  For me, my thoughts are do what you're best at. Some people are good at writing, but not at editing, which is to say some people may write and reference things great, but when deciding among the plethora of information on a topic, they aren't great at deciding which bits of information are vital, and which can be omitted without losing meaning for the reader. That's perfectly okay. We don't expect every contributor to be perfect at every aspect of good writing. If you're good at writing, but not at editing, it's okay to leave that task for someone else; so long as you understand that sometimes people will remove sourced information if its presence doesn't improve the article in question. That's a normal part of editing, and if you're okay with people editing your work down, no one should feel obligated to hold back on what they are good at. We shouldn't be setting policy saying ahead to try to stop you from contributing by your own means, so long as you also understand that people will make improvements to your writing, and sometimes removal is improvement. That's my whole point above. Writing too much isn't a problem at all. People can come along later and tighten things up. It's fine, so long as we're all obeying WP:CITE and WP:V and WP:NPOV and all the rest. --Jayron32 12:16, 30 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Agree with Jayron… trimming long articles is all part of the process, but we would rather have something to trim than not have enough. So… if you are not sure whether to include some bit of verifiable information… go ahead and include it. And if it subsequently gets trimmed out, no big deal.

  Finally, don’t take it personally. Remember that the goal is to improve the article… and improvement involves both adding and removing (or rewriting). Blueboar (talk) 13:00, 30 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It sounds like the decision is this; if you're working on the summary, put the information that you think is important and let other people come in and make the necessary changes. Now I've trimmed a lot of the Rolling Fork section (mostly removing DAT inferences), but I wouldn't mind it becoming longer again. Now someone tried to make an article for this tornado, and that was not necessary, but I see why there was an RfC for this topic. ChessEric 16:10, 30 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  if you're working on the summary, put the information that you think is important and let other people come in and make the necessary changes That's not an isolated decision on this topic, that is literally the entirety of how Wikipedia works. You've not described a special decision that applies just to tornadoes, you've described how every word of every article on Wikipedia got there. It's just what we do. --Jayron32 11:57, 31 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Gotcha! Thanks! ChessEric 19:22, 31 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Massive OR and NOT issues. Articles should be summaries of what secondary independent sources say about a topic, not a deep-dive into minutiae, and especially not an editor's interpretation of primary data, which is exactly what using a "National Weather Service Raw Text Product" text file or a dynamic, real-time ARCGIS map is! An organization reporting the results of a survey or uploading data for display on a graphical interface is even more primary than a research article is, since at least an article has to go through peer review and put its data into context by discussing other studies. These sections should be removed until secondary sources can be found. JoelleJay (talk) 01:36, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• It seems like there's a big difference between generating several paragraphs of text from this tool and generating several paragraphs of text from a summary like this. Using just that graphical interface to write from raw data doesn't strike me as desirable according to typical Wikipedia practice, but using it as a supplement for a few basic facts seems reasonable (fundamental aspects of the subject and/or filling in a key detail in material that has had its WP:WEIGHT established through other sources). I don't see an issue with using the NWS summaries, though, assuming it's public domain and/or basing a bunch of text on it doesn't present copyright issues, and think that should probably be handled on a case by case basis. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 11:46, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  NWS summaries are primary, often preliminary government reports providing exhaustive detail on the path and damage of a weather event. I don't see it as any more secondary than a research paper. JoelleJay (talk) 19:21, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Well then technically speaking, NOAA’s Storm Event Database would qualify as a secondary source since the following occurs: (1) NWS conducts preliminary assessment. (2) Info is quality checked and signed by the lead meteorologist at each NWS office. (3) Info is sent to the National Centers for Environmental Information. (4) NCEI writes their own report (sometimes and often including other info not mentioned by NWS) in their report. Since NCEI didn’t do the prelim information, that would qualify them as a secondary source would it not? Elijahandskip (talk) 19:45, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If there is consensus for such a statement, where the simply fact of not having a citation is grounds for removal even when the statements themselves aren't contested, why not codify that rather than leave it between the lines?

If there is not consensus for such a statement, what are the necessary conditions for someone to remove content citing WP:BURDEN?

Is there middleground? From my perspective, the middleground has traditionally been knowing that because of "The Wiki Way", nobody would try to use WP:BURDEN to try to remove statements just for lacking a citation. It would require a challenge to the content, judging it to be unverifiable, failing verification, failing NPOV, or something else which requires more than looking at the statement and seeing it lacks a citation. Over the last few years (maybe longer), I have begun to feel that my perspective may be outdated, which is to say there are more and more people who seem to view WP:BURDEN as an any-purpose tool to purge the 'pedia of unsourced content, regardless of the content. I suspect there's been an RfC about this, but I'm not seeing something conclusive. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:29, 8 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If there is consensus for this statement, we should write a bot and fire it up and remove every unsourced statement on this site, and delete every article with no citations.

But that seems irresponsible to me. And it is. --Rschen7754 22:32, 8 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

To put a number on "every article with no citations," this would entail deleting, as of right now, 126,401 articles. Many are on high-profile subjects that are unquestionably, beyond any shadow of a doubt, notable. (Some articles I have expanded/sourced are by authors including Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, and Italo Calvino.) Gnomingstuff (talk) 15:12, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Rschen7754 To challenge info per bot is a weird idea. There are four kinds of info listed under WP:BURDEN..

• all quotations,
• all material whose verifiability has been challenged,
• all material that is likely to be challenged, and
• all contentious matter about living and recently deceased persons.

As to me challenges should be made by editors and not by bots. and I support WP:BURDEN as it is for the moment. In the text editor, we are warned before every hit on the button publish that Encyclopedic content must be verifiable through citations to reliable sources.

Paradise Chronicle (talk) 19:41, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The thing I dislike about that text is that the Wikipedia:Verifiability policy does not say that content must be verifiable through citations. It only says that it must be verifiable, full stop. "Smoking tobacco causes lung cancer" is a verifiable statement regardless of whether it is followed by a citation. The text in MediaWiki:Editpage-head-copy-warn confuses Wikipedia:Glossary#uncited content with being Wikipedia:Glossary#unverifiable content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:32, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The most obvious and most directly policy-based exception is for material that is not likely to be challenged. I.e. WP:BLUESKY. Loki (talk) 22:42, 8 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The policy also says that if an editor thinks the text is verifiable, they should look for text. IOW, they should only remove material that they question.

So for example if you saw an article about a minor 19th century figure that had been created 20 years ago and had few edits, you could look for sources, but if chose not to, the best approach would be to leave it alone. OTOH, if someone added unsourced text to the article about Charles III, who is well covered in secondary sources and whose article is fully sourced, you might want to remove it.

Editors are supposed to use judgment and can be held to account for obviously disruptive behavior. TFD (talk) 22:45, 8 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Unsourced statements about a living person (WP:BLP) should be removed immediately. Statements can always be removed for lacking a citation. There is no reason in 2023 for anyone to add an unsourced statement to any article; that is automatically considered disruptive behaviour. The idea of leaving unsourced statements in is that they may eventually be sourced. (WP:PRESERVE) But the prospect of this decreases over time. There have been too many hoaxes perpetrated over the years, and too many cases of WP:Citogenesis and WP:Copyvio for leaving it alone rto be considered the best policy any more. If there is any doubt whatsoever about the factual accuracy of a statement, then it should be removed. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:13, 8 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agree! Donald Albury 00:12, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My third click on Special:Random brought me to Toyota Camry TS-01. Should we send it to AFD? --Rschen7754 00:17, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I just added {{unreferenced}} to the article. The next step would be removing any content for which you cannot find a reliable source after a reasonable search. If it looks like the subject is not notable after a reasonable search for sources, then you can take it to AfD. I personally prefer to find reliable sources to support existing and new content in an article, but I will prod or send to AfD an article that I cannot find reliable sources for. Donald Albury 00:33, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Several more clicks brings me to Denis Lazure, half of that article has to be thrown out. Same with Sallustio Bandini. Significant statements of Ali Kazemaini have to go. Half of Mario Fenech should be thrown out (that is a BLP, actually). So does the last part of Salvia 'Celestial Blue'. List of Malayalam films of 2004 is completely unsourced. Most of 7 Wonders (board game) has to be thrown away. The point is - I don't think that some of you realize the sort of impact that these interpretations of policy have. --Rschen7754 00:38, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't have to the thrown out... Nobody is forced to remove content, as you just proved by not removing that content. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:43, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hawkeye7's interpretation of policy very strongly implies that someone seeing unsourced content is obligated to remove it. You cannot both be right, hence this discussion to see where consensus lies. Thryduulf (talk) 00:57, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The way some are interpreting BURDEN, anyone can remove any uncited statement for any reason, and anyone reverting is immediately sanctionable for disruptive behavior. And no, nobody is forced to remove content, but everybody should remove that content if they are following the logical conclusions of what Hawkeye said. Rschen7754 01:07, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Of course not, if the person reverting sources the content there is nothing wrong with that. If they never source it yeah thats a problem. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 01:13, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Deleting content is much faster than finding sources. Rschen7754 01:15, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And reverting is faster still. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 01:18, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hawkeye7 is only talking about BLP and that isn't their interpretation, its pretty much a direct quote: "Contentious material about living persons (or, in some cases, recently deceased) that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—must be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 01:10, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What is "contentious", "poorly sourced" and "questionable" are all subjective metrics. And even where everybody agrees that this applies, it is always better to find a (better) source if you can than to just remove it. Thryduulf (talk) 09:49, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, they're all subjective which is why AGF applies. To revert such a removal is to question the good faith or competence of the person who removed it, thats a very serious thing... And unless you can source it no you aren't allowed to restore it, that is *not* subjective. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:25, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict × 5) If there is any doubt whatsoever about the factual accuracy of a statement but not every statement that is presently unsourced is of doubtful factual accuracy. The correct reaction to seeing something unsourced should be a series of questions to yourself, starting with:

• Does this need a citation? e.g. statements of a WP:SKYISBLUE nature do not need a source, if the answer is no then do nothing.

  If it does need a citation, then you should always try and verify it yourself first, adding the citation if you find one removing or tagging if a thorough search failed to verify it. If for some reason you cannot definitely state it is as correct or incorrect yourself, then deal with it by tagging, moving to the talk page or, only if no other action is suitable, removing it.

• If it's completely implausible then remove it without a second thought, if extremely plausible then tag it or discuss it.
• If an incorrect statement would be harmless then just tag it or leave it, if it would cause significant harm then move or remove it.
• If it's been tagged for years then the threshold for removal is lower than if it's never been tagged.
• How important is it to the article? Statements that are key have a much higher threshold for removal than those which are only a little more than trivia (statements that are trivia should be removed regardless of sourcing circumstances).
• How easy is it likely to be to find a source? Plot details of a Netflix original series are highly likely to be in an online reliable source that Google has indexed so just tagging it will lead to someone conclusively determining the veracity. Details of the traditional cultural practices of a southern African tribe as reported by an 18th century Portuguese explorer are something that is very going to require access to offline sources, probably not in English, to verify or not verify - this needs flagging somewhere that those with access to the relevant sources and subject expertise will know that verification is required. Thryduulf (talk) 00:55, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

BURDEN isn’t about removing material… it’s about returning material that has already been removed. Blueboar (talk) 00:23, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Of course it's about removing material. Any material lacking an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports[b] the material may be removed and so on. The wording of the section effectively says "I can remove anything that's unsourced and the burden is on you to find a citation", in other words "I can require everything to have a citation".... unless we choose not to interpret it that way. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:21, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the section says: ”…may be removed”, but that does not mean must be removed (or even should be removed). What it makes clear is: IF removed, it must be cited to return it. Blueboar (talk) 14:13, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't force it to be sourced, it just requires it to be sourced if someone wishes to restore it after its been removed in good faith. Nobody is forced to restore it, restoration is a voluntary and consensual procedure. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:42, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Force it to be sourced for it to continue existing, regardless of the reason for removing it. The question is more about whether it's appropriate to remove something just because it doesn't have a source. Once that's done, regardless of the justification, verifiability, etc., a conservative interpretation of WP:BURDEN closes the door. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:21, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't the question whether its appropriate to add something which doesn't have a source? If the answer is no then what's the issue with removing something which was never supposed to be there in the first place? Also note that removing is challenging, you treat them separately in your OP but anything which has been removed has been challenged, removal *is* a challenge to the content. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:32, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't the question whether its appropriate to add something which doesn't have a source? Not exactly. Another formulation would be "Is it appropriate to add something which doesn't have a citation". That's a fine way to approach the question, but the thing is, there's no policy that says adding a citation is required while we do have a policy that [by some interpretations] says that anything without a source can be removed just for not having a citation. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 17:02, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

These days people who go around adding volumes of unsourced content get blocked or banned, that hasn't been tolerated by the community for at least a decade (it does appear to have been highly tolerated during the first few years of the project). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:13, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know about WP:BURDEN per se, and other editors have already chimed in on what that specifically covers, but I think there's how one could technically interpret it, versus how it is and is likely to be interpreted by most editors in most cases...which is to say, sure, I delete a lot of unsourced content, but not all unsourced content I come across, and it's ridiculous and unenforceable to embrace the idea that any editor is obligated to remove unsourced content.

But as has been said before and will inevitably be said again, a lot of peoples' time would be saved if editors would spend less time focusing on whether or not it was proper to remove unsourced content and more time focusing on simply providing sources when unsourced content is challenged. DonIago (talk) 03:58, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

But as has been said before and will inevitably be said again, a lot of peoples' time would be saved if editors would spend less time focusing on whether or not it was proper to remove unsourced content and more time focusing on simply providing sources when unsourced content is challenged. Here Here!.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 06:11, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're missing the point. I could probably remove a few hundred statements within the timespan of 1 hour, but it will take a lot longer than that to restore those statements with proper sources. It puts unreasonable pressure on those who work in that subject area, when WP:NODEADLINE - just like sending a bunch of articles to AFD puts pressure on the article creator and others to defend that article. You want to burn editors out? This is a good way to do it. --Rschen7754 06:19, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If there's no deadline for restoring unsourced material then why is there any pressure being put on editors? They can restore it if/when they have the time to do so and can provide sources, or not, as they see fit. DonIago (talk) 14:42, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

When you write articles, do you go through the history just to see what someone removed in the past because it was unsourced? I sure don't. Once material has been removed and it's been a few days (i.e. fallen off people's watchlists), it's effectively gone. --Rschen7754 18:12, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

On the contrary, in my years of editing on many occasions I've found that when I reverted unsourced additions that either the person who originally added the material or another editor restored it with a source.

Of course, if unsourced information is longstanding I also tag it rather than outright deleting it. Nobody should be surprised if previously-tagged unsourced information is ultimately removed at some point down the line. DonIago (talk) 23:46, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A few hundred in 1 hour? Sounds dubious, it takes about a minute to check context and sourcing or a lack thereof in all except cases of obvious vandalism. I bet you could do 60 in an hour (if of course instead of sourcing ones you found to be sourceable you abandoned instead of sourcing) but a few hundred? Hard to imagine you could do that in good faith. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:43, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It puts unreasonable pressure on those who work in that subject area, when WP:NODEADLINE - just like sending a bunch of articles to AFD puts pressure on the article creator and others to defend that article. You want to burn editors out? This is a good way to do it.

WP:NODEADLINE would be the argument in favor of removing the uncited content, because there is no deadline to add content, but we should seek to address violations of core content policies and WP:BLP immediately, because these violations cause broad issues both on and off-wiki.

In regards to burning editors out, the best way to address that would have been to prevent the issue building up, by requiring all added content, unless WP:BLUE applies, be properly sourced, and immediately removing it if it is not. This would have kept the level of removed content at a managable level, and it would have increased the chance that the editor who added the content - and who hopefully had a source for the content - would have been able to provide the source with minimal effort. Instead, we allowed a huge backlog to build up - at the very least, we should be attempting to prevent this backlog increasing by removing all new unsourced content. BilledMammal (talk) 12:13, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The OP's statement does not represent consensus. This is easy to see if we consider the current featured article. This is found on the Main page which is Wikipedia's front window. The main page contains lots of statements and, by convention, none of them have any inline citations. Then, looking at the article, we notice that it starts with two substantial paragraphs and again, by convention, they have no inline citations. There's an infobox and most of its entries have an inline citation but one of them does not – that the parent range is Garibaldi Ranges. Why is this excepted? It's not clear but doesn't appear to be a problem. Reading on, one finds more inline citations but they seem sporadic rather than systematic.

Now, if some griefer or jobsworth were to attack this featured article and remove all such uncited material in a crude way, they would not find WP:BURDEN to be a strong defence, right? The key requirement for a citation is that the statement is controversial and so likely to be challenged. Mountains are not especially controversial.

Most of our readership does not care about this issue because they mostly use the mobile interface which, by default, only shows the lead of articles. They therefore see little of the references and don't click through to them even if they do. These things are niceties not necessities and Wikipedia mostly works fine without them.

Andrew🐉(talk) 07:28, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That articles shows how citations should work - that the next immediate citation covers all the material up until the last previous citation. In that case, each paragraph that has one final citation should be considered sourced to that citation. We absolutely do not want one citation per sentence, though there are cases where this is necessary, and a one citation per paragraph is as loose as we can go within policy. Masem (t) 13:21, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A griefer or jobsworth would not find burden to be a strong defence because burden is easily met. This is an example for in-line citations, which that article is chock-full of. CMD (talk) 13:43, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Our readership indirectly cares about this issue; they care that our articles are reliable and verifiability, including inline citations, is how we make them reliable. BilledMammal (talk) 11:59, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What's your evidence for this belief?

How do you square your belief that readers want citations with the fact that they don't click on any citations 99.7% of the time? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:35, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Content policies are written to help resolve disputes between good faith Wikipedians. Where you've got an editor doubting every single statement in an article, then either that editor is griefing, or the article's authors are hoaxers, or both. In other words, at the point where you're using CN on every statement, you need to move from content policy to conduct policy in order to determine what to do.—S Marshall T/C 08:14, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, and disagree with the statement in the section head. The sad truth is that unreferenced statements are in reality not much more likely to be inaccurate than referenced ones. Frequent citation taggers tend not to worry about how "good" an article is at describing its ubject; they just like to see lots of little numbers, whose quality or appropriateness they rarely check. There are of course many exceptions, who only tag when they have reason to doubt a particular statement. But most taggers are the other sort. Johnbod (talk) 14:55, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Citation needed for that last statement. :p DonIago (talk) 15:08, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Aren't we all taggers? An editor who doesn't use editing marks isn't much of an editor... Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:37, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, no one could accuse you of not being a tagger. Johnbod (talk) 14:39, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Why is it an accusation? Being a tagger is a good thing, to be a competent editors you have to know how to use and interact with tags. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:16, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think being a tagger is necessarily a good thing. If you can see a problem then I'd much rather you fixed it than tagged it.—S Marshall T/C 16:19, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

We all have our limitations; I'd rather an editor tag a problem if they can't fix it, rather than ignoring it entirely. While there's room to argue whether tagging ultimately leads to positive change, not tagging is far less likely to result in any change. DonIago (talk) 16:25, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Tagging is part of the fixing process, thats why tags exist and are a core part of our editing tool set. Like with all core parts of the editing tool set editors aren't required to use them, they are however required to understand how to use them in order to meet our basic competence requirements. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:29, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

IMHO, tagging should be a last resort for when someone tried to fix a problem with an article, and couldn't. It's basically a way of saying "I tried, but I need help to fix this". Given tagging the article actually degrades its quality even more, I'd argue that someone who fixes a problem with an article is doing more to build this encyclopedia than someone who tags 10 articles. Dave (talk) 16:39, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Tagging improves the quality of an article, an article with tags is higher quality than the same article without tags (both are lower quality than the same article but with appropriate sourcing). Someone who has tagged 10 articles has done more for the encyclopedia than someone who read the same ten articles but did nothing. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:13, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Trouble with that mentality is, it leads people not to fix stuff. They just skim an article, slap a tag in a couple of places and move onto the next one. That's a quick, simple way of editing that leads to insurmountable backlogs everywhere in the encyclopaedia. If only there was a way to make them put the effort into adding sources and properly copyediting one article, instead of tagging ten articles, this would be a better place.—S Marshall T/C 20:59, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It also leads people to fix stuff. Often a tag will inspire editing which wouldn't have happened otherwise, even if only because it forces people who hate tags for aesthetic reasons to put their money where their mouth is in terms of contributing positively to the project. If those ten tags from an editor with superficial experience in a topic area cause ten editors with deep experience in a topic area to either source or correct ten pages thats a major gain for the project and not something which that editor could do on their own without great effort. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 21:06, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It also leads people to fix stuff. Often a tag will inspire editing which wouldn't have happened otherwise

Why do you believe this? Do you have any evidence to support your belief? AFAIK nobody has ever demonstrated that maintenance tags make any significant difference in behavior, especially if you exclude simple fixes that happen as soon as the tag is added (e.g., the editors who spam in {{nocats}} as soon as a page is created, sometimes edit-conflicting with the person who's adding the cats). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:39, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The trouble with that mentality is that it discourages anyone who is not already a full-time, dyed-in-the-wool editor with full topic knowledge on any page he sees from being involved in Wikipedia at all. The goal should be for every edit to be an improvement, not for every edit to achieve perfection. Anything that moves the ball toward the goal should be considered good, and anything that stands in the way of that should be considered bad. Even those of us who put a lot of time into this project have times when we identify a problem where we may not have the time, skills, or knowledge to deal with it. A third of the page is in Portuguese? I can't translate that into English, but I can put a tag that will call attention to the problem and bring it closer to being taken care of. The amount of energy I've seen on this project misdirected by folks lecturing others on, say, bare URLs (which are a big improvement on no source) saddens me. The only thing needed to justify someone tagging a page is that it's an accurate tag. --Nat Gertler (talk) 21:21, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's interesting...at one point I'd started to inquire about the possibility of enabling editors to tag an edit "for review", in cases where they lacked enough confidence that there was an issue with it to revert it (or perhaps didn't have the time/skills to dig deeper into the edit), yet still had doubts that the edit was improving the article in question. I seem to recall there was some interest in such a feature, but not enough for it to gain traction. Unfortunately, without such a feature, editors who find an edit that tickles their spidey-sense but doesn't reach the level where the editor can confidently say "this isn't right" are faced with options of: 1) doing nothing, 2) reverting and seeing what may come, and potentially looking like a fool in the process, 3) starting a Talk page discussion that might also make them look like a fool and may not get a response unless the editor is willing to escalate the matter that they weren't even sure was a legitimate concern to begin with. DonIago (talk) 01:16, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For the first ten years I edited, I thought clicking the "watch this page" button in the edit box flagged my edit as needing scrutiny (because it's right there next to "minor edit"). By the time I discovered my watchlist I had hundreds of articles watched... JoelleJay (talk) 22:51, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

IMHO, these policies were intended for people who while reading a Wikipedia article stumble across something that sounds suspect, who then attempt to verify the claim using the given sources but can't. These policies did not anticipate people who go out looking for problems. If someone feels they are better suited to finding problems in articles than writing content, that's fine. We are all volunteers here and any help is welcome. However, policies should then clarified to encourage fixing articles over tagging or blanking content in them. IMHO blanking is appropriate for statements that are tangential or trivial details. However, for relevant details, an attempt should at least be made to find a source before blanking. IMHO, tagging should be a last resort after trying, but not succeeding, to fix an article. Someone who fixes one problem with an article adds more value to the encyclopedia than someone who tags 10. Dave (talk) 19:23, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The OP statement is really about wp:ver, not about wp:burden. It is basically a statement endorsing a potential mis-use of wp:ver which of course should not be added. Or, if they meant it as a devil's advocate statement, then it does point to am IMO needed fix with wp:ver....that a wp:ver "challenge" must include expressing a concern about the sourcability or veracity of the challenged statement. North8000 (talk) 15:16, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How many times have we gone round-and-round on this?… Removing material IS ITSELF a statement of concern about the material. You don’t need someone to explicitly say “I think this needs a citation”… you can assume it. Blueboar (talk) 16:40, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

So you're saying yes, anything can be removed just for not having a citation (that "it doesn't have a citation" is a valid reason for a challenge). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 17:02, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ultimately, yes… anything can be removed for not having a citation. That does not mean it should be removed. There are a LOT of nuances involved, and there are other options (such as tagging). But… we are allowed to remove any material we think is unverifiable.

And one thing is very clear… WHEN something is removed we both must and should provide a citation to return it. (Note… pointing out that it is covered by an existing citation counts as providing a citation). Blueboar (talk) 17:26, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Blueboar: Blueboar, yes, we've disagreed for years on this but let me argue my rationale. IMO your rationale is "when in doubt, provide a source" which in spirit I agree with. But we must look at more complex realities which a requirement to state a sincere-concern challenge would solve. That is when there is no concern about the veracity of the material and a source is provided. And with respect to the cited material, the expertise and objectivity of the source is sufficient to support the statement, but the source (as about 75% of sufficiently reliable sources are) is still wikilawyer-nitpickable as not having the trappings to 100% comply with wp:RS. And, in the example its hard to find an alternate unusually un-nitpickable source that makes the sky is blue statement, because sources usually don't make sky-is-blue statements. And so so the wikilawyer POV warrior uses the interaction of two two policies in tandem to knock out a sourced sky-is-blue statement. A requirement that the POV warrior look silly by saying "I have a concern about the veracity or sourcability of the statement that the sky is blue" would significantly reduce that type of a problem. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 19:27, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have to disagree. If you are having a problem finding a reliable source that verifies a “he sky is blue” statement… then I have to doubt whether it actually qualifies as a “sky is blue” statement after all. Such statements should be easy to verify. Can you give me an example of such a statement (BLUE SKY but difficult to verify)? Blueboar (talk) 19:43, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The example off the top of my head is not quite SKYISBLUE but similar. The first two types of Docklands Light Railway rolling stock were named P86 and P89, they were primarily maintained at Poplar Depot. All subsequent stock, named B92, B2K, B07 and B23, have been primarily maintained at Beckton Depot. Everybody assumes that The P and B in the type codes refers to the depot, and the article makes this claim, because it makes logical sense and nothing else does (although the B92-B07 were built by Bombardier, the P86, P89 and B23 stock were/are being built by Linke-Hofmann-Busch, BREL and CAF respectively) but nowhere have I ever been able to find a reliable source stating this. Thryduulf (talk) 21:19, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A nearly identical example to that is a frequent addition to the article California State Route 49, namely that the number 49 was deliberately chosen. However, the claim is not currently in the article, I removed it a month or so ago. It is well sourced and undisputed that historians lobbied for the creation of route 49 in an effort to preserve and promote the history of the 49ers and the 1849 California gold rush. It's also documented that the route of highway 49 was deliberately chosen to connect most of the relevant locations to the 1849 California gold rush. It's also well documented that the shape of the shield used to sign route 49, and all other California state highways, is in the shape of a minors spade to honor the 1849 gold rush. So it sure seems logical that the number 49 was deliberately chosen for this highway. But unless and until some state legislature from that era publishes the conversations he had with historian lobbyists, no source that meets Wikipedia's standards as reliable that I'm aware of today makes that connection, logical and obvious as it is. Dave (talk) 21:36, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds like a really good thing to strike from the article. If it's so obvious that "everyone assumes" it, then it should be obvious to the reader and not need to be stated... but by stating an assumption as an unsourced fact, not only are we overlooking the fact that unsourced assumptions are often wrong (I caught today an assumption I'd been making for years), but also putting it in increases the odds that someone will find it, use it in some seemingly RS article... and then when someone really does challenge the claim, hey, there's an RS to back it up! (WP:CIRCULAR can be hard to detect and should not be encouraged.) --Nat Gertler (talk) 21:41, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you've never been able to find a reliable source which says it then why do you feel that is DUE for the article? An IAR situation? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:18, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Blueboar, BTW by "sky is blue" I meant that nobody questions the veracity of it, not that everybody already knows it. The most common examples are boring details which sources with full wp:independent secondary sources don't buther to cover. Like this: "POV warrior A" does not like the XYZ organization. The XYZ organization web site says that they have a facility on 142nd street dedicated to saving orphaned puppies. "POV warrior A" doesn't want anything about them saving orphaned puppies in the article and so they delete it saying "Not a RS". So they have just used wp:Ver in tandem with RS criteria to knock out sky is blue sourced material. North8000 (talk) 13:35, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If the website has been cited, that’s not a BURDEN issue… that’s an RS issue. Somewhat different. That said, if the org really does operate a puppy rescue, then surely there is some independent source that mentions this. If not, it is probably UNDUE for us to mention it. Blueboar (talk) 14:18, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's a wp:ver issue because that's what was used to knock it out. And that's what would be solved by requiring an actual challenge in order to be considered to be a challenge. North8000 (talk) 14:56, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well this hasn't exactly cleared anything up so far. :) I wonder if it's worth trying to come up with a simple an RfC as possible. Perhaps "Do our policies permit material to be removed because it does not include a citation, without challenging the material on the grounds of WP:V, WP:NPOV, WP:NOT, or WP:BLP? If so, does WP:BURDEN prevent restoration of material removed for lacking a citation, absent a specific policy-based challenge beyond lack of citation?" I can't think of anytime I've seen a direct question like that put to the community (which isn't to say it hasn't happened). It might be for naught, but I see a whole lot of heated disagreement on the issue such that it might be useful to try to resolve. What issues am I not foreseeing? Updated: Added the second question because of course something can be removed per WP:BOLD; the question is whether that ends the conversation (i.e. not actually WP:BOLD). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 17:07, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I actually quite often have trouble finding a clear source for statements that are so obvious and fundamental to a subject that no RS bothers to state them clearly, applying a sort of expert's blue sky approach. And yet they certainly need to be explained to our readers. A recent example was at Lithophane. The whole and entire point of these decorative pieces is that the image only reads properly when lit from behind. But as you can see from the DYK nom discussion on the talk page, I could find no RS that clearly states this, & we had to settle for a mealy-mouthed & potentially misleading hook. Johnbod (talk) 14:39, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This happens all the time and is beyond frustrating. A recent example I came across: Pincer (biology). I know what these are. You know what these are. Everybody who is even slightly familiar with insects knows what these are. Yet I have been unable to find a single source that discusses them in a general sense -- i.e., not the pincers of scorpions or whatnot -- and so in unreferenced it stays. Gnomingstuff (talk) 04:13, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps there are military or other academic sources that use "pincer" terminology and go into some depth to explain the origin in broad terms? JoelleJay (talk) 16:53, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Biology isn't a subject I studied, even at high school, so I have no expertise. It sounds correct to the non-expert, but when I searched for it nothing turned up. Instead, I found a lot of books that referred to "pincer-like" claws. Whereas, when I look for the military term, pincer movement, it immediately turns up: "a pincer movement is a variation of an envelopment but instead of a single maneuver element it has two." I would therefore conclude that the biology article is probably incorrect, that "pincer" is not the term the experts use, and the article should probably be deleted. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:35, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I had a look at this the other day and came to the same conclusion. OED defines pincer as "Either of a pair of opposed hinged claws, mandibles, etc., with which an arthropod grasps or grips; esp. a chela of a crab or other crustacean". I'm also no biologist, but this suggests to me that pincer is a synonym for mandible or chela, or for any other animal body-part that resembles pincers (tool). In this case, it appears that "what everybody knows" is wrong (non-specialists like myself might call these body-parts "pincers" due to ignorance of the correct terminology, but reliable sources express themselves more accurately), so it's not unreasonable to request citations even for "obvious" claims like this. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 06:11, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This was my gut feeling, yeah, that there is some sort of merge or redirect target (and is also why I'm hesitant to use books for children, they're certainly not going to make those distinctions). But I don't actually know for sure -- basically it comes down to absence of proof versus proof of absence. Which seems to be the overarching point of this discussion. Gnomingstuff (talk) 08:13, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Just because a term is only used by non-specialists, does that really make it "wrong" or somehow non-existent? It seems like "pincer" is a non-precise grouping of appendages with a similar form and/or function that is sufficient and useful for most people in everyday life even if it isn't precise enough for specialists. Thryduulf (talk) 11:54, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't -- biology isn't really my lane, and with over 126,000 unsourced articles I don't want to obsess over something that's taking me a while.

This problem seems to be especially bad with common objects -- not brands or products, per se, but everyday, really common things or tools, where lots of people talk about specifics or research breakthroughs, but nobody just writes an overview of what a widget spinning machine actually is, what it's made of, and who invented it. The dream source would be something like the Object Lessons books -- in a way, this very problem is the whole reason that series exists! Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:38, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Chela is the biological term used the most for these structures. I had assumed the article on pincer was where chela redirected, I didn't realize it was an article itself. I think pincer should be merged there. JoelleJay (talk) 21:06, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If someone is going around making removals which are not policy based thats an issue with disruptive editing, not with the policies. There is no requirement to make a laundry list of applicable policies to your edit, that would impose a large burden on all editors which is massively disproportionate to the burden you claim exists due to unsourced content removal. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:18, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you made good faith research/effort and could not verify a statement, that’s a reasonable reason to remove it. Meatbot like behaviour that simply scours random articles to remove unreferenced inline content is another story. We make an explicit exception for BLP claims, so if there’s a codified policy it’s to NOT remove content for the sake of missing inline citation.

Often missing citations can be reincluded from present sources that are used elsewhere in the body. Should all new edits include inline citations? Definitely. I know the WMF team is making improvements to prompts to remind editors to include citations for bare text additions. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 17:43, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

mw:Edit check is the feature in development ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 20:45, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Removing material and citing BURDEN in order to win the edit war is highly inappropriate. Perhaps in order to use BURDEN in this way, the removing editor needs to cite an explicit reason why they are removing (stolen From Rhododendrites' list above): 1) they don't think it's true or can be sourced 2) the tone is inappropriate/POV 3) it is tangential/irrelevant (which I would argue is an inappropriate use of BURDEN) 4) BLP. No reason given = the use of BURDEN is invalid. This disincentivizes users from running through articles and mass deleting content. --Rschen7754 17:54, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

But the entire point of BURDEN is to prevent edit wars from starting. If someone removes uncited information, DO NOT return it without a citation. Period. That’s core policy. Follow this and there should be no edit war to “win”. Blueboar (talk) 18:44, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Removing material and citing Burden as a reason not to restore it is highly appropriate. Simply saying "if this is true and important enough to include, you should be able to find a source" is a reasonable response to someone wanting to restore an unsourced claim. As for the central question of this thread, Burden is not enough for deleting every unsourced claim, as mass removal like that would require to much attention from other editors to address, and thus someone using it to delete everything unsourced is being disruptive and likely WP:POINTy. But it is enough for deleting any unsourced claim, absent WP:BLUESKY. There shouldn't be more onus on the person for removing the statement than there was for putting it in. Assuming good faith is not the same as assuming competency. --Nat Gertler (talk) 18:53, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is an extremely narrow view of BURDEN. Supposing someone were to remove entries from a notable list citing BURDEN, and saying they are unsourced? Should they not be restored when most of these lists typically have entries linking to Wikipedia articles, and usually don't use citations? Huggums537 (talk) 07:51, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thinking it through: a "Yes" consensus on both questions would lead to no change to WP:BURDEN, while a "No" consensus would create a requirement that someone cite a policy if they want to remove unsourced material. If they don't, they can be reverted and must go to the talk page, all to remove material that's unsourced (and potentially unverifiable/false).

To me, this "proves" that Blueboar's view is right, since any other reading of WP:BURDEN would create a bias towards keeping unsourced content, which would weaken WP:V. Besides, when someone removes stuff with edit summary “rm unsourced”, usually they do have policy-based concerns, like accuracy, even if it's not stated. DFlhb (talk) 23:24, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Disagree on both points, DFlhb. A clear consensus either way would lead to clarifying language. We have a conflict between a single line of WP:BURDEN and the entirety of WP:PRESERVE, so "yes" to both would likely mean adding a pointer/clarification to WP:BURDEN pointing to the latter. "No" to both doesn't requiring citing policy, it would require basing it on policy (as opposed to just because it doesn't have a citation). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:27, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Editors should not have to have policy knowledge to challenge unsourced content. That could create situations where people edit war to keep incorrect information, rather than trying to find a source and discovering it's incorrect. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 15:07, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Then pretend I said "cite a policy-based reason" rather than "cite a policy"; when someone removes something due to a lack of citation, I interpret that as a challenge of the statement's verifiability even if it's not said explicitly.

And one might argue that currently, it's WP:PRESERVE that points to WP:BURDEN, since its WP:CANTFIX subsection links to WP:V for how to handle unsourced material. This implies that BURDEN currently takes precedence, therefore, no conflict. Though this point is admittedly quite wikilawyer-y. DFlhb (talk) 20:15, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's something like eighteen years since slim virgin added this to the page and I think in all that time it's been contentious but the consensus has always fallen into the realm of rules as intended rather than rules as written. Yeah there's a burden, but there's a burden on everyone. We all have different ideas on what kind of encyclopedia Wikipedia is, and burden is one of those where we need to recognise we don't all agree and that the consensus lies on a very wide path where the ideal is that we don't remove something without working really hard to source it first. Having sat through this discussion a number of times I'm remembering how much we balance everything with WP:BITE because it might be a first edit or WP:AGF because we need to balance harm against informing and so on and so forth. I do wish uncle g could just hash it all out for us like the old days. Anyway, my two pence, hasn't changed drastically in the last 18 years. Hiding T 21:59, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Deleting all unsourced material would be disruptive, however if something is challenged then it shouldn't be restored without sourcing. Also we should remember that many people editing don't have in-depth knowledge of Wikipedias practices, so there shouldn't be hoops for them to jump through to challenge something. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:03, 9 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear editors shouldn't be required to know a load of in-group word salad to challenge content. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 15:11, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The OP's initial statement lacks context. What specific unsourced statements were removed from what specific articles that led to the reductio ad absurdum tirade in question? Unless we know which specific statements were being challenged, we don't know if they were appropriately removed. Their characterization of the meaning of WP:BURDEN is of course silly, but they want it to appear silly because they're trying to make the actions that precipitated this thread to appear controversial. As already noted, some stuff does not need direct citations immediately following every sentence. Paragraphs with multiple facts all sourced to the same source. WP:BLUESKY information. WP:PLOTSUMMARY. Things cited elsewhere in the article already. And so on. If the OP were to tell us specifically what removed text sent them rushing to WP:VPP with the tirade in question, we can assess that. The question in the general, we cannot answer. --Jayron32 15:13, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Again, the policy provision that is the basis of this discussion is really (other) core parts of wp:ver not wp:burden. Burden also needs work per the 1/2 year discussion in 2022, but that is unrelated. North8000 (talk) 15:17, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think that simple answer to the OP is that there is no consensus for how you characterized it. It sort of raises questions on policy areas that might need some work but even then the result would not be the explicit guidance that, if taken literally, your comment is seeking. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 15:47, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My experience has been that the great majority of editors who remove text as "uncited" or break citations by moving text, have no idea whatsoever of what material is actually in the source. They don't bother to check the source, but are reacting on a visual level fueled by their own preferences. In the real world of academia and writing, a source is needed for statements which are someone else's thought. If that is relayed in multiple sentences, one does not redundantly cite the same source for each sentence. When someone else's thought is introduced, one cites that source. We don't need to make WP rules different than how sources are typically used outside of WP, as it is a mirror and not a platform for OR. SusunW (talk) 16:58, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Don’t disagree … and WHEN something is removed that IS cited (say at the end of the paragraph or section), it is perfectly appropriate to simply revert the removal with an edit notice saying: “cited at the end of the paragraph” (or something). BURDEN is met, as is the broader requirements of WP:V. Blueboar (talk) 17:45, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, being cited is necessary, but not sufficient for material to be kept. Lots of material with citations is still inappropriate, and positive, active consensus is still required for inclusion, even if a citation exists. A citation is not a magic bullet that means that what precedes it may never be removed. The onus to achieve consensus to include some contested text is on those who support keeping it in the article. You can't just add something to an article with a cite, and then expect it to remain forever. --Jayron32 18:20, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think that what you just described is that actual intended reason for ONUS ("reason" = includes why it was left in, not just why 1 person put it in) which is to say that being sourced is not a magic bullet for inclusion. This is further evidenced by where it is at..in a VERIFIABILIY sentence in a VEFIFIABILITY policy. But it backfired by getting severed in half; so not fulfilling that mission and instead we ended up with three bad things:

1. A widespread baseless urban legend / practice that merely being sourced is a strong argument for inclusion of that material in that place
2. That ONUS is a widespread argument that leans towards exclusion of material. There is no purpose for such a wide-ranging unlimited statement
3. ONUS often conflicts with other policies including wp:consensus

These were covered in a 1/2 year long discussion in 2022 which faded out. (partly my fault because I said I'd formulate a before-RFC and RFC but never did it) IMO all 4 problems would would be fixed by this one change: Replace ONUS with "Verifiability is a requirement for inclusion, not a reason for inclusion." Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 18:52, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In general I agree with you, but when the stated reason for removing something is only that it is unsourced then reintroducing it with a source/a note that it is already sourced is sufficient. Obviously there may be additional reasons for removal, but unless and until these reasons have been expressed somewhere appropriate and discoverable we cannot expect other editors to know what they are or take them into account in any way. The same is also true of removal of information for any other reason - other editors can only address the reasons for removal you mention, and once all of those have been addressed (objectively or in accordance with the appropriate level of consensus) then reintroduction is acceptable, regardless of any other objections anybody might or might not have. Thryduulf (talk) 20:23, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean objectively *and* in accordance with? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 00:37, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No, because not every reason for removal can be objectively determined, for example whether something is DUE or not is frequently subjective so consensus is required for restoration. However if the removal reason is something like "premature, wait until it's actually confirmed" then once it is objectively confirmed then it can be reinstated without need for a specific consensus. Obviously editors shouldn't go against consensus but that's a different matter. Thryduulf (talk) 07:54, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Whether or not a given source supports a given statement is subjective not objective. What's the objective part? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:48, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Huh? A source either supports what we say or it doesn’t. I don’t see how that is subjective. Could you give an example? Blueboar (talk) 15:55, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You've never seen two editors disputing whether a given source supports a given statement? In my experience thats the majority of content disputes. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:21, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that's the majority of editing, and I'm not sure that it's a majority of content disputes. I see more disputes that say something like "Sure, that source literally contains the words 'Dewey Defeats Truman', but that's a bad source and shouldn't be used". WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:49, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There will always be cases where the question of whether a source supports a specific content is subject to interpretation, and one editor may feel that the source does support the content, while another does not. The world is messy, and so are sources, even if we regard them as reliable. Consensus will often be able to resolve the question, but I can imagine cases where even a large collegium of editors will not reach a clear conensus (which, I believe, would keep said source out). Donald Albury 16:25, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Largely agree, but with the note that describing content as "unsourced" can reasonably be used for two different situations: "there are no sources whatsoever here" and "there are sources, but this information is not in any of them". Therefore, when addressing content removed as unsourced, one should keep in mind the possibility of an editor meaning "present source fails verification irt this content", rather than "I do not see any source at all", and good practice is to check whether the source stands up to verification (or ask the editor to clarify which meaning of unsourced was intended) prior to reintroducing the content simply because a footnote did exist somewhere near the removed content. AddWittyNameHere 02:27, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"There are sources, but this information is not in any of them", usually because it is incorrect. Because "unsourced" is justification for removal, but "incorrect" is not, since WP:FALSE is only an explanatory essay and not a guideline. I once removed an edit with my customary "rm unsourced" and another editor added a null edit just to comment: "NOT because it is unsourced but because it is BOLLOCKS". A good example is the mathematical article 0.999... where people routinely feel entitled to add "some stuff [they] believe to be true".[2] aka "bollocks". Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:27, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Hawkeye7 This seems like a broad extrapolation from a common Internet meme to every article. I'll bring up the example I mentioned earlier -- Pincer (biology). Is there anything in here you would characterize as "incorrect"? Because while there are sources, this top-level, general information does not seem to be explicitly laid out in them, unless the source is for young children and thus unusable. Gnomingstuff (talk) 16:04, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is no standard or practice which says that sources intended for use by young children are unusable. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:19, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

WP:CHILDRENSLIT is an essay and not policy, but based on my experience, everything in it is 100% accurate. (I copy edit children's nonfiction and textbooks for a major publishing company. The amount of egregious shit I've seen -- on the level of claiming the American Revolution took place in the 1800s -- is enough to make me never trust anything below a college level.)

That being said, you didn't actually answer the question. Gnomingstuff (talk) 17:01, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not Hawkeye7, you didn't ask me that question. That example would seem to be an error I catch all the time in academic work by academics for adults, when substituting years for century and vice versa errors are really really common. For example 18th century becomes 1800s instead of 1700s. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:17, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Apologies, mixed up the names. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:39, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The potential change I described handles this all in a logically clean manner. It leaves the verifiability-related stuff in wp:verifiability untouched (which is very strong including in the discussed area), fulfills the original intent of this otherwise-out-of-place wording and stops this out of place wording from conflicting with other wikipedia policies and interfering with other Wikipedia processes.North8000 (talk) 20:01, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My first edit in regard to this controversy was 11 years ago and the argument has continued on almost exactly the same terms ad infinitum with little or no progress almost continually (generally at the WP:V talk page where it's most appropriate, but with skirmishes in other places such as WP:RS, WP:CONS, and this) with occasional lulls. It seems to me that if no consensuses have been formed in that length of time, and in light of the current discussion going nowhere in the same manner as all the previous discussions, the current discussion should be closed as "no consensus" as well. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 17:38, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The reason there is no consensus in this case (or any other) is that people ask for generalized statements about what a policy means rather than by asking how a policy applies to a specific event. People want to win some conflict they are in, so rather than asking "How should we apply policy to this one case" they ask the question "Is my particular understanding of this policy universal". The answer to the second question is "No one particular understanding of any policy is ever universal. Every case is unique, and unless we know the particulars, we can never know how to apply this policy the right way". All applications of policy must have specifics. So, if the OP in these discussions just said "Hey, here's a case where me and someone else are in conflict over how to apply the verifiability policy to this statement" and we could have that discussion. Instead, they say things like "Does the verifiability policy means that we must always delete every statement without a reference as soon as we see it", which is not even wrong it's such a nonsensical understanding of what policy means. Instead, we get in endless loops of people saying "Well, if this is the case, maybe you should delete it on sight, but in this case I'd probably leave it, but if you deleted it, I would say that's an over-reach..." and yada yada yada. That's why we go around in circles. If everyone stopped doing that and instead just were honest about the specific dispute that they were just involved in that precipitated the need to ask people for their opinions on the policy, we could chime in on that one application and be done with it. --Jayron32 17:59, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. When needed. Short answer, but that is it. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:41, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

At the risk of stating the obvious, the community guidelines should strike a balance between the need to write stuff (which requires fewer barriers) and the need to write good stuff (which requires more barriers). That basic premise is roughly uncontested, and discussions about WP:V / WP:BURDEN are mostly about where to put the cursor. Some, above, argue that the current placement of the cursor makes writing hard, removing easy (and sourcing super-hard but that’s not fixable by policy), and that asymmetry discourages the "good" article creators and encourages the "bad" drive-by taggers/removers. The counter-arguments seem to focus exclusively on whether tagging/removing is in fact good, and not on the asymmetry argument. So here’s a story.

We have had an article about "Michael I. Wagner" since 2009. In 2022, an IP editor comes on the Help Desk and says the middle initial is wrong. I dutifully search the internet, find multiple instances of the "I" middle initial but nothing pre-2009. At that point, slapping one of the post-2009 sources and telling the IP user to come back with their own source would have been fine and dandy, but because yours truly fell prey to the sunk cost fallacy was not afraid of making others do grunt library work is a perfectionist, they posted a request for the original source on WP:RX. Lo and behold, two people searched for that source and others, and eventually found something corroborating what the IP editor said. I did the rest of the fixing (moving the page, changing its lead, citing the source, tagging the redirect).

Note: the above is a heroic story of how a WikiGnome with OCD digging deep enough can find gold... but the operative word is "can". Most of the ground is dirt, not gold. Sometimes, you find that the Wikipedia article was actually right all along even though the sources were conflicting. And sometimes, you believe you found a juicy citogenesis event, but in fact all was fine and dandy, and you look like an idiot and a jerk because you asked RX to "fetch me a source, no, not this one, it’s not shiny enough".

What's the lesson? Well, it took at least three hours of editor time to correct the mistake, whereas avoiding it would probably have taken five minutes, at most ten, of marginal time (for someone who already has all the sources open and is writing the content, vs. someone else reading the article years later). If you go by the asymmetry argument, that means extreme measures should be taken to prevent unsourced statements, because their cleanup is hard after citogenesis sets in. So for instance, you could argue that anything unsourced should be tagged or removed by a bot, because it’s too dangerous to have unsourced statements that can create citogenesis, and it costs way too much time to correct. That would an extreme position, and well out of the current Overton window, but not one I find theoretically untenable.

The more prosaic lesson is to consider the invisible costs along the visible ones in the calculation. We shouldn’t ask every source to be precisely cited to the exact span of the statement it supports, because that would be incredibly tedious and cost lots of editor time to avoid what are flashy but rare cases where errors/hoaxes survive for a long time.

Conversely, when you get reverted or asked to provide a source, it’s annoying, I get it. Maybe 95% of the time, you can actually provide a source; so it’s either a tremendous waste of everyone’s time to arrive at the same end text just to add a shiny footnote, or you give up and the text is lost even though it’s sourceable. That's the easily-seen cost. But the remaining 5% are incredibly expensive to fix if they are not detected quickly. I would guess that in fact, those usually go unfixed, and therefore unseen. It might be difficult to make a cost-benefit calculation that takes them into account, but that’s not a reason to assume they amount to a negligible amount.

Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 19:43, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

WP:BURDEN can stay as it is. It supports wikipedia being reliable. If something is challenged, provide a source, not that hard.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 06:46, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

+1 Donald Albury 16:15, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

IMO Burden really isn't used in relation to wp:verifiability. WP:Ver is very strong without it. It is mostly used to to tip the balance in debates/disputes unrelated to wp:ver. North8000 (talk) 16:24, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's complicated. WP:V says that All quotations, and any material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, must include an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the material. In theory, this allows someone to challenge literally every uncited sentence on Wikipedia indiscriminately. I think that doing so, though, clearly goes against the intent of the policy - if it was intended to have every statement require a citation, rather than just a subset that has been challenged or which is likely to be challenged, it wouldn't include those qualifiers! I also think that nailing down a concept of a "legitimate" challenge would be potentially harmful; being able to challenge things based on even a mere gut feeling is important (and is sort of required for WP:BURDEN to make any sense.) I think that the best takeaway is that it is generally not appropriate to challenge things completely indiscriminately, and that someone who does so is engaging in misconduct and should probably be asked to stop. (And, in particular, if they seem to be targeting a specific editor with challenges then it's likely a WP:HOUND violation.) I also think that there's a degree of reasonableness required in terms of how you go about challenging things - if you're dealing with an unexceptional, non-WP:BLP-sensitive statement that most people with even a passing familiarity with the subject would recognize as broadly true, and you still feel it needs a citation, the appropriate thing to do would be to add a citation-needed tag, not to remove it. This would be especially true if the statement is (in addition to all the above) central to the topic. But few things are so one-sided; to a certain extent the decision of how to deal with something that needs a citation is up to editorial judgment, at least provided it's not BLP-sensitive. --Aquillion (talk) 16:38, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Consensus can change. Today, FAC, GA, DYK, ITN and B-class all now require an article to be fully referenced. "Broadly true" no longer cuts the mustard; have a look a Template talk:Did you know if in any doubt. Adding a citation-needed tag doesn't help anybody or anything. There are millions of articles lacking citations; adding another to the list will not have any effect. It just adds to the workload of the editor who comes to resolve the issue. Uncited material adds unnecessary work at a time when we have fewer hands available to maintain the Wikipedia. It requires not only looking up the fact in question, checking that the results of the search did not take it from the Wikipedia, and then rewriting the text in question (since it assumed to be a copyvio). If, in your editorial judgment, the value of the statement does not justify the effort involved, by all means delete it. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:31, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The result would be editors battling because although the material was already cited, the cite wasn't found directly at the point of their POINTy eyeballs view, but perhaps at the end of the paragraph. A certain group of editors would demand the cite on every sentence, maybe even on key words. We'd have a constant edit war and the text would become so cluttered with cites it would alienate most readers. Blrgh. Jacona (talk) 12:32, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Jacona, I think that's a good point. The standard for FA is Wikipedia:When to cite and says that it's normally sufficient to cite a single fact one time per article. Editors might disagree over whether an article is "fully referenced" if there aren't repeated citations for the same fact, but they won't disagree over whether "An elephant is a mammal" has been cited once on the page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:57, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

These discussions are worded based on the mis-understanding that we're talking about uncited material. In reality, most of the questionable applications of this are for CITED material by using WP:VER in tandem with nitpicking the source. North8000 (talk) 20:51, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"WP:BURDEN can be used to force inline citations on absolutely everyany statement that does not currently have an inline citation". Fixed!
I believe there is a broad but implied community consensus distinguishing individual removals from mass removals. We want an explicit policy bias in favor the person challenging unsourced content. Anyone can challenge any piece of unsourced content for any reason, and they don't even need to disclose the reason. There are even policy cases where reasons cannot or should not be disclosed, such as OUTING and BLP. The burden is on the person wanting to restore the content, they need to provide sufficient justification for inclusion. In most cases at least one ref will be needed.
On the other hand, a pattern of indiscriminate or incomprehensible removals is considered a behavioral issue. Editors are expected to edit in a reasonable, competent, good faith, constructive manner, to advance the encyclopedia. Approximately no one consideres it appropriate to bulk delete content that is apparently good and sourcable content. A pattern of indiscriminate or incomprehnsible removals will surely result in explanations that such behavior is not considered constructive. I'm confident sanctions would be imposed if someone were persistent in such behavior. Alsee (talk) 05:20, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That is an absolutely horrendous "fix". If we're including "absolutely any statement that does not currently have an inline citation", then we would be contradicting other policies that actually require us to leave citations off the page (such as WP:DABs) as well as other huge conflicts with sitewide current practices such as creating notable lists with entries that have Wikipedia articles, but no citations. I think Aquillion descibed it best by saying the qualifiers in BURDEN are there for a reason, and I agree with North8000 that those qualifiers are about verifiability, not about inline citations. These discussions never seem to account for the fact that not everything has to be cited, and that lots of things have no need of being cited since it would be easy to verify them. The argument that if something were easy to verify, then it would be easy to cite is a non-sequitur that doesn't make any sense when it comes to DAB's or notable lists because being easy to cite doesn't even apply. Huggums537 (talk) 08:18, 21 April 2023 (UTC) Comment modified by Huggums537 (talk) 03:16, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. Sorry so critical. I'm just really frustrated because of dealing with this before. I have no idea how the editors who have been here for years are still sane. (Maybe they aren't, and we just don't know it yet...) lol Huggums537 (talk) 08:26, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Also, another problem with such a broad sweeping statement has already been brought up about how people will want every single sentence with an inline source even if it has already been supported elsewhere in the article just because your proposal says "absolutely any statement" can be "forced" to have an inline citation just by using BURDEN. This could even further be abused to require talk page statements to be sourced since your very broad fix does not distinguish what kinds of statements should be cited, or where on Wikipedia to use them. These kinds of ham-fisted approaches are seldom of any benefit, and are often more harmful than good. Huggums537 (talk) 03:57, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(moved to Wikipedia talk:Large language models) Prompted by some responses in the Wikimedia Community Discord to a query I had about using AI tools (such as LLM's or Alpha to generate content for wikis.

3 potential wordings of a policy/guideline on the inclusion use of AI Generated content, such as for example that from LLM's :-

1. " Wikipedia is a entirely work of collaborative human authorship, Use or contribution of material generated wholly or mostly in part from non human sources (such as LLM based generation) is prohibited."

2. "Wikipedia is a primarily a work of human authorship, Use of content generated from AI's s (such as LLM based generation) should be used sparingly and content generated with it's assistance should be clearly identifiable as such, with full attribution of the tools or models used."

3. "Wikipedia is a collabrative work, and users may make use of appropriate tools such as LLM's (with appropriate attribution), in order to further this aim."

This of course assumes that the generated content meets all other considerations for content that would apply irrespective of human vs AI generation.

I'm not going to argue for any specific position, but my concerns about AI generated content, are the lack of clarity and transparency about usage rights under compatible license, and the possibility of copyright material 'leaking' into an otherwise 'freely' licensed wiki.

English Wikipedia should have a clearly documented policy, on what 'AI/machine-generated' content can or cannot be included.

I also appreciate that there are plenty of passive bots on Wikipedia that assist skilled users in performing taks that would be time consuming to do manually. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:15, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@ShakespeareFan00, see WP:LLM. Its talk page also lists the various discussions on the issue. Schazjmd (talk) 12:22, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Can admins move threads, with a Courtesy redirect on Wikipedia currently? Further discussion should take place on the talk page of the 'draft' policy mentioned. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:25, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:25, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Please contribute. Cinderella157 (talk) 23:53, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is no guideline that states that incorrect information should be removed. Wikipedia:Verifiable but not false is an explanatory essay. Some of us have been treating it (explicitly or implicitly) as if it were a guideline and removing or correcting incorrect information but in the absence of an actual policy or guideline it is merely an exercise of editorial judgment. (Although WP:BLP talks about "contentious" information, which is defined as "challenged or likely to be challenged", which is generally considered to include erroneous material.) This is not an RfC; as a preliminary I am surveying opinions on whether a proposal to elevate it to guideline status would receive support. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:04, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The essay feels too redundant to be a guideline. I had not read it before now, and most of the principles feel like those that would naturally stem from existing guidelines and policies. For example, it is already uncool to make claims like those given in the essay (e.g. "All Americans think Hitler was evil") because those claims cannot be reliably sourced. The other principles are little more than restatements of WP:DUE, WP:NPOV, or WP:RSAGE. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 00:30, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

While they may seem to stem naturally, the whole point is that we have no commitment to accuracy or correctness. WP:RSAGE is a case in point; we ignore it at MILHIST in favour of WP:FALSE. That is because of the problem of errors being propagated from one (otherwise) reliable source to the next. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:24, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If this is elevated to a guideline, then what will change at MILHIST? If the problem is how an editor (or project) chooses to handle widely accepted guidelines, then address that directly. If it is not a problem, then we're all good here. If an existing guideline is a problem, then address that. BTW, with your note about no commitment to accuracy or correctness, I think you're getting at a much deeper philosophical problem that the existing policies and guidelines address: can we ever know what is accurate or correct? If not, we need a way to leverage the world's existing body of information to arrive at a largely consensual representation of a given subject, and I continue to believe that the existing policies and guidelines do that to the best of our ability. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 22:45, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What would change is that instead of edits being removed on the grounds that they are unsourced, undue or some other excuse, it will be explicitly stated that they are being removed because they are factually incorrect. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:02, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How would an uninvolved editor be able to verify that the statement is factually incorrect? If there are sources that indicate that, why couldn't normal editorial judgment be followed? Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 02:14, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This essay is not very well written. It's far too confusing as it stands to be elevated to be a guideline. I'd focus on improving the essay first. Jahaza (talk) 00:36, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Let me know what you find confusing and what you think could be clarified on the talk page and I'll have a go at it. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:24, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I do not think it provides anything not already in policies and guidelines. Certainly claims in sources can be removed if later sources contradict them or if we have information they are false. For example, that reliable sources show that some Americans adore Hitler disproves the claim that all Americans consider him to be evil. We could also counter with a source that said most Americans held this view.

This only becomes an issue in my experience when tendentious editors wiki-lawyer to include information they know to be false. For example, a secondary source may misstate what was said in a primary source. The solution is for editors to discuss in good faith. But if someone is determined to push their POV, more rules won't stop them. In fact, it can give them ammunition for wiki-lawyering.

TFD (talk) 00:56, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The argument in these cases tends to be that while it is false, it meets our criteria for inclusion based upon widespread use in reliable sources. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:24, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It would help to see a good example of an article that has information known to be false (not merely controversial) yet editors permit the information to stand. I am familiar with some BLP cases where someone claiming to be the subject says "my age is wrong" (or whatever) contrary to all available sources, but even those cases have an established path for resolution. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 23:01, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I have handled a case just like this. An athlete approached me and asked me to fix the incorrect date of birth on her article. To her, this was a big issue, because it was tantamount to an accusation of cheating. She showed me her passport and driver's licence as proof. Unfortunately, this ran afoul of WP:BLP, particularly WP:BLPPRIMARY, which says you are not allowed to use such sources. The origin of the error was easy enough to find: it was a simple typo, but one that had been spread widely by otherwise reliable sources that relied on the original erroneous but usually authoritative one. So what I did was invoke WP:IAR and elevate WP:FALSE over WP:BLP on the grounds that the latter does not improve the encyclopedia. I simply located a site that had the correct birth date and used that as the reference instead. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:18, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is super frustrating, yeah. Recent example I ran into was The Comfortable Chair -- pretty interesting band. (What's there in the article is a start, needs someone to go digging for the print sources.) Rob Fitzpatrick of The Guardian says Jim Morrison discovered them; he's a respected journalist and seems to be citing from aforementioned print sources. However, User:Midnight12 on the talk page, who says they are a member of the band, says this isn't true. Their contribs suggest that, at the very least, they're not a random drive-by poster. But obviously I have no way of actually verifying that they are who they say they are, or that they just weren't aware at the time. The best I could do was throw a "reportedly" into the copy since, if nothing else, it was reported. But obviously that's kind of a copout. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:46, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

As to an article with false information that has been allowed to stand, consider Albert Kesselring, footnote 1. His birth date. Somewhere along the line, a typo crept into a source, and this erroneous information was repeated by several otherwise reliable sources. (The joke among military historians is that history doesn't repeat itself nearly as often as historians do.) A long debate followed with other editors who felt strongly that the article should acknowledge both the correct and the incorrect dates since WP:FALSE is only an essay and we should adopt a neutral point of view on matters of fact. I did not believe that having two birth dates, one which we knew to be incorrect, would benefit the readers in any way. The footnote represents the resulting compromise. "Albrecht" as a first name derives from Kenneth Macksey, who erroneously believed that it was the German form of "Albert". Again, the error has been propagated to other sources. Kirsten von Lingen wrote that this was "plain wrong", but another editor felt that saying so was non-neutral, so that comment was removed. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:18, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I had a related experience in a death discussion about about Marilyn Monroe's sister Berniece Baker Miracle. As an aside, the Monroe page itself is a remarkable and featured work; related pages get special scrutiny, and rightly so. Based on less-than-reliable sources the BLP subject had died, but the only source we could present was Find-a-grave (with several photographs of her gravestone). This went on for some months and put Wikipedia in the awkward but never unique situation of hosting outdated, incorrect and potentially damaging information about a BLP. BusterD (talk) 08:57, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Editorial discretion along current guidelines seems better for such cases. Any guideline about truth is bait for RGW-style arguments, and we say verifiability not truth precisely to avoid those pointless quagmires. We can use editorial discretion to value more recent sources over older ones because they are more likely to be in line with what is currently accepted as correct knowledge, but that doesn't mean what we have is definitely true. CMD (talk) 03:44, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"That statement has been viewed as claiming Wikipedia is, somehow, not concerned with truth." -- Is there really a critical mass of people saying this in good faith? If not, what's the issue? Gnomingstuff (talk) 07:46, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A very, very, very good essay. Minor grips over wording, but it's vital. For example, recently, I found one book that said Steve Wozniak used 45 chips on a circuit board; another book said 42 (a magazine said 44...) Then I found a Woz interview where he says: I got it down to 42, but it went back to 45 before it ran well. I could have just flipped a coin and picked a number, but now the discrepancy has been resolved.

Secondary sources routinely publish errors; citogenesis proves that. We've run into peer-reviewed papers and scholarly books that saw uncited crap on Wikipedia, and repeated it as fact! The whole point of WP:NOTTRUTH was to dumb-down WP:OR so even fringe-pushers can understand it. But we have a huge audience, and it would be irresponsible to punt the accuracy question to our sources, without exercising nuanced editorial judgment. Bad-faith editors can misuse WP:FALSE, but they can misuse anything. Tracking down and reconciling potential factual mistakes in source is what any responsible, thoughtful editor "should" do, and "should's" are what guidelines are for. DFlhb (talk) 01:07, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Right now we basically have three categories of this type of thing. Policies and guidelines (which in shorthand are sort of "rules") and then thousands of essays which anybody can get lost in and usually remain obscure unless they have a short catchy name to link to within sentences. We need another category of highly exclusive highly vetted pages. Some will be guiding principles, too general to be specifically invoked in disputes (as guidelines and policies are) . I think that this would contain things like 5 Pillars and this proposal. The other group would be highly vetted explanatory essays that describe how Wikipedia is and operates. North8000 (talk) 19:33, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree there needs to be a level between "guideline" and "essay", because "essay" at this point can either mean "this is so frequently referenced it's effectively a guideline" (e.g. WP:BLUESKY) or it can mean "this is one editor's opinion" (e.g. Wikipedia:Avoid negative claims) or it can mean anything in between (e.g. WP:POSA, which by the very fact it can find so many examples clearly has not achieved wiki-wide consensus). Loki (talk) 23:51, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Good points, but they point to more fundamental changes needed. Your essay is a good start in some of those areas. In cases where objective accuracy exists, we need to modify folklore to say that wp:ver is a means to that end, not the end. The other folklore that we need to get rid of is that editorial judgement (within the guardrails) (e.g. to resolve dilemmas like you describe) is illegitimate or banned in Wikipedia. Finally we need to establish that source reliability is context-specific, that it relates to objectivity and expertise with respect to the text which cited it. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 13:52, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Someone asked above for examples of articles where information was verifiable but false; I can provide a couple:

• A source says Fallon Fox had surgery at "Bangkok National Hospital", but if you look for more information about that hospital, most of what you'll find is about Fox (parroting that initial source) or else unreliable miscellany, because AFAICT Bangkok National Hospital doesn't exist: the original source apparently made a mistaken assumption about what the full name of the national hospital in Bangkok that's called "BNH" is — the hospital is actually named Bangkok Nursing Home hospital. In that case, after another editor raised the issue on talk, I changed the article to just say "a hospital in Bangkok" since this is verifiable and the exact hospital name is unimportant trivia, but no reliable sources have the correct name. (Possibly even the detail that Fox had surgery in Thailand is removable trivia, but that's a separate issue.)
• Qasem Soleimani's article faced at least two such issues: some reliable sources said he was the first person in Iran honored with a multi-city funeral (but this is false, since other notable people were previously honored with multi-city funerals as discussed in other RS, but these other RS predate and weren't about Soleimani, so technically might be WP:SYNTH), so editorial discretion was used to drop that claim. And one US intelligence source said he was born in Qoms province, but other RS say he was born in Kerman province; he lived his early life in Kerman, and when he was buried in his birthplace, that was Kerman province, so I downgraded "Qoms" to a footnote, but the idea that he might've been born in Qoms still made its way citogenetically into some later news articles, so it might be better to just drop the wrong information.

I sympathize with the idea that it would be useful to have a note somewhere explicitly stating that Wikipedia strives to be accurate. But I share the concern expressed above that making an explicit guideline or policy besides WP:V would encourage edit wars ("sure, RS all say Trump / Xi / Kim Jong Un / Qanon / etc did X, but I know it's not true so I'm removing it per NOTFALSE!!"). -sche (talk) 22:22, 15 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I understand this concern, but the point is that in removing information simply because it is false, you are indeed removing it per WP:NOTFALSE! This is acting although WP:NOTFALSE already has guideline status. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:32, 16 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's permissible to remove information simply because it's false, and if we have a rule that says otherwise, then that rule needs fixing.

About a dozen years ago I fought tooth and nail to get "verifiability, not truth" removed from policy because it's important that we try to tell the truth. I also think that we block and ban people who lie. Oh sure, we have all these fig leaves about consensus and pretexts involving disruptive behaviour and advocacy and POV-pushing, but actually, underneath it all, there's a real distinction between people who're here to educate and inform on the one hand, and people who're here to propagandise, advertise and misinform on the other.—S Marshall T/C 08:10, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that one person's "truth" may be another person's "lie". How then are we to determine that content that someone wants to remove because they say it is false is indeed false? If there is no citation to a reliable source, such content can be removed. But, if we allow someone to remove content that is supported by a citation to a reliable source because they say it is false, how do we know that it is indeed false, and not just a mistaken opinion of the editor who wants the content removed? That is why I supported "verifiability, not truth", because, all too often, "truth" is in the eye of the beholder. Donald Albury 13:18, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose doing so. It's a fine essay. I see no reason it needs to be a guideline. --Jayron32 14:18, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. "Verifiability, not truth" is a powerful statement. It's the secret to avoiding a constant high-temperature flame war and has the not inconsiderable benefit of actually being better for favoring true content over false content, and honestly should be placed back on WP:V in big bold letters. Anyway, given that Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth is technically only an essay at the moment, it only seems reasonable that this kind of essay have the same status. Obviously, the truth is important, but the kind of stance suggested by NOTFALSE just gives a big bludgeon to the worst cranks & POV-peddlers who want to argue about whether their fringe theory is true or not. VNT refocuses the debate onto "fine, whatever, let's say it's true, who's actually published it in the mainstream. Nobody? I guess we can't have that on Wikipedia yet." The actually good faith editors interested in truth can work fine under both a VNT and a NOTFALSE system, but the fringe theorists tend to be deterred better by VNT and encouraged by something like NOTFALSE. SnowFire (talk) 05:49, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

VNT was deliberately removed from wp:ver after a gigantic RFC. Actually two gigantic RFC's with the same result. North8000 (talk) 19:23, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm familiar, yes. It was a mistake. SnowFire (talk) 04:04, 19 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. SnowFire says it better than I could. "True" and "False" are both loaded and subjective terms that get in the way of writing a verifiable encyclopaedia. Thryduulf (talk) 10:42, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. Don't try to ground rationales in underlying "truth". It's a problem. Truthwarriors often know full well that the article matches the sources, they want to push their POV in articles by ranting that the sources are biased or wrong. I have successfully brought peace to some of these hellholes by firmly explaining Wikipedia policy requires our content to be an accurate summary of what Reliable Sources say, explaining that they need to find sources to back up their claims, explaining that their truth-arguments simply do not work here, explaining that under policy we are required to ignore their truth-arguments.
We have abundant methods for keeping bad content out. One often noted method is simple editorial discretion to leave out anything we consider not useful to the reader. An often overlooked point is that a "generally reliable" source does not imply reliability for every individual claim in that source. Even the best sources apply a lower standard of care to minor incidental details, and available evidence can be considered when evaluating the care applied on that specific point. Something that appears to be a typo or simple mistake fails our Reliability standard, regardless of whether it's "true". Alsee (talk) 07:28, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is an RfC on joke AfDs about BLPs on April fools day at Wikipedia_talk:April_Fools#RfC:_Ban_joke_AfD_of_living_people. All are invited to participate. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:29, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There seems to be a discrepancy in text between these two pages (all bolding mine):

WP:NSUSTAINED: "If reliable sources cover a person only in the context of a single event, and if that person otherwise remains, or is likely to remain, a low-profile individual, we should generally avoid having a biographical article on that individual.

WP:BLP1E: "We generally should avoid having an article on a person when each of three conditions is met:

• If reliable sources cover the person only in the context of a single event.
• If that person otherwise remains, and is likely to remain, a low-profile individual. Biographies in these cases can give undue weight to the event and conflict with neutral point of view. In such cases, it is usually better to merge the information and redirect the person's name to the event article.
• If the event is not significant or the individual's role was either not substantial or not well documented. John Hinckley Jr., for example, has a separate article because the single event he was associated with, the Reagan assassination attempt, was significant, and his role was both substantial and well documented.

Basically, BLP1E sets a different and more permissive threshold; the second condition requires a person to both "otherwise remain" and be "likely to remain" a low-profile individual, and there is a third condition not mentioned in NSUSTAINED. Since the two seem to be in direct conflict, which applies? (For full disclosure, the AfD that prompted this question was Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jack Teixeira; I don't really have a strong opinion on that article, but both of these pages are being quoted at the same time, and there's some fuzziness as to how many conditions need to be met.) Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:58, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see these as being in conflict, instead they are complementary to each other. In my opinion, in order for an article about an individual whose notability is from a single event, you need to meet both NSUSTAINED and BLP1E. It's possible for coverage of a person to be focused on an event and sustained, but the volume of the coverage results in it being low profile. It's also possible for coverage to be high volume, but not sustained over a long period. Sideswipe9th (talk) 00:17, 15 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This would seem to override BLP1E then -- logically speaking, if both a stricter and more permissive threshold are in play, then the permissive threshold no longer applies. Gnomingstuff (talk) 17:28, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree it's weird for a policy and a guideline to give otherwise-word-for-word-identical criteria "if reliable sources cover [the|a] person only in the context of a single event [and] if that person otherwise remains, [and|or] is likely to remain, a low-profile individual" where the only substantive difference is that the policy says "and" while the guideline sets a more restrictive standard of "or". Was there a discussion and consensus somewhere to make NSUSTAINED more restrictive in this respect than BLP1E? Or is "or" a mere oversight in that paragraph of the guideline which seems to have been intended to simply quote the policy, and which it would be reasonable to harmonize with the policy's "and"? -sche (talk) 06:16, 16 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The diff for WP:NSUSTAINED is this one from 2010, referencing a proposal elsewhere (haven't dug up yet, sorry). At that time in 2010, WP:BLP1E had the same wording; the "and" was introduced here as part of an edit to "clarify writing." (The user who made this edit has since passed away, so unfortunately we can't just ask about it.) The "each of three conditions" language was added here as a response to this talk page discussion, with emphasis in the edit summary that "this reformat is NOT meant as a change in policy. Same policy, hopefully more clear."

So it looks like a series of rewrites that weren't intended to loosen the threshold but did in practice, and people have since run with one or the other for more than 10 years. Given how contentious BLP1E issues are I'm surprised this hasn't come up sooner. Gnomingstuff (talk) 17:47, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

To me, these sentences read like a difference without a distinction. This is not boolean algebra, this is plain English language, and words like "and" can be used to separate a list of possibilities, not only to mandate a set of requirements. I can say "The restaurant served chicken, steak, lamb, and fish" I know of zero English speakers who think the use of "and" there means that every dish arrived with all four proteins on it. The sentence is functionally the same as "The restaurant served chicken, steak, lamb, or fish", and we needn't wring our hands over misunderstandings of this nature. It's giving a menu of options, not a set of required conditions, and as such the use of "and" should not be viewed as establishing a different set of requirements than the use of "or" might. --Jayron32 17:58, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'd quibble with the example given: The restaurant served chicken, steak, lamb, and fish describes a restaurant with four meats on the menu. The restaurant served chicken, steak, lamb, or fish describes a restaurant whose menu the speaker does not remember precisely. That having been said, in the actual guidelines at-issue If that person otherwise remains, and|or is likely to remain the only scenario where their logical value differs is where "is-low-profile" is True and "will-stay-low-profile" is False, as P2 entails P1. BUT, it's worth noting that evaluating "will-stay-low-profile" is arguably a case of WP:CRYSTAL and something we should consider removing from the guidelines entirely. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 18:06, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, not exactly. A better analogy would be that if you say "the restaurant served chicken, steak, lamb, and fish," one would expect the menu to have all four of those, and if you heard that and then were handed a menu with just chicken, you'd probably wonder whether there was some sort of off-menu ordering system.

But more to the point, BLP1E is formatted more like a three-criterion legal test than plain English language, and if a policy is formatted like a legal test, then it's understandable that people will treat it like one. Not sure what they expected honestly when they made the edit. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:13, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It isn't formatted like a three-criterion legal test. Nothing at Wikipedia should be understood to be a formal legal test or anything of the sort. It should be understood to be a plain English description of best practices, no more and no less. WP:NOTBURO captures this spirit well. If we're treating policy like a checklist ever for anything, we're doing it wrong. --Jayron32 18:21, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This wording was originally the same. Gavin.collins originally added the following text to Wikipedia:Notability: In particular, if reliable sources cover the person only in the context of a single event, and if that person otherwise remains, or is likely to remain, a low-profile individual, we should generally avoid having a biographical article on that individual. This was clearly meant to mirror the text already present on WP:BLP in 2010: If reliable sources cover the person only in the context of a single event, and if that person otherwise remains, or is likely to remain, a low-profile individual, we should generally avoid having an article on them. However, the text on BLP would change after the late SlimVirgin tried to clarify its meaning via copy-editing which replaced the "or" in the policy with an "and" going forward. I can't tell you if anyone noticed the discrepancy between the two and was reverted while trying to fix them.
If you ask me, WP:NSUSTAINED should probably be changed to match WP:BLP1E for a variety of reasons. (1) It's a guideline while BLP1E is a policy, so the latter should win out in any discrepancy. (2) NSUSTAINED is a fork of BLP1E, so it should be made to match its parent. (3) NSUSTAINED only uses "or" simply from neglect rather than being intentional. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 19:05, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I've boldly tweaked the guideline to match the policy, since it seems like everyone who's commented either supports that or says they don't interpret "and" vs "or" as meaning different/conflicting things (which means they shouldn't object to harmonizing them, since they're saying they don't view the use of one word or the other as involving any change to the meaning or effect). -sche (talk) 19:52, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is a discussion on meta about establishing a global CheckUser activity policy. All are invited to participate at: m:Requests for comment/CheckUser activity RFC. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:37, 16 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is a discussion about the notability of disasters and mass casualty events at Wikipedia talk:Notability (events). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:01, 16 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Although rare, there are situations where the community has consensus that an administrator should be blocked indefinitely, or at least for a significant period. In those circumstances, this proposal suggests that administrators who have been blocked for more than 28 days do not hold the trust of the community and therefore the sysop userright should be removed procedurally alongside inactivity desysops. Worm^TT(talk) 14:05, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal: Procedural community desysop

The following section should be added to WP:Administrators

Procedural removal

Survey (Proposal: Procedural community desysop)

• Support as proposer. Recent events have brought home to me that we are still lacking in ways to handle poor behaviour by administrators. I believe that as a community, we have consensus that an indefinitely / long term blocked administrator does not hold the trust of the community. However, in those situations, the only place to remove the toolkit is Arbcom (or waiting 12 months). I see no reason why such a removal shouldn't happen more quickly, and no reason that Arbcom needs to be involved if it does.
  Instead, I'm suggesting that we have a 1 month period, which allows for cooling off, then removal as part of the next automatic removals, no request necessary, no fuss, no mess. Worm^TT(talk) 14:05, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I'm speaking as an admin here. If my conduct as an editor warranted any sort of long term block of a month or so, I should not be trusted with the admin tools any longer. RickinBaltimore (talk) 14:15, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Pointless. A blocked admin can't (since 2018) unblock themselves, and if they're blocked indefinitely, they'll just be auto-de-adminned when the time comes around. I find it difficult to think of a situation where this process would be useful. --Jayron32 14:17, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Actually, editing their own talk page would be enough to forestall the annual edit requirement. Courcelles (talk) 13:33, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support with revisions to clarify "blocked". In exceptional circumstances we might pblock a sysop from a small number of pages but still want them to continue as a sysop -- I feel that "blocked" in this case should mean "blocked from the entire mainspace".—S Marshall T/C 14:20, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm having a hard time picturing under what circumstances we might want to pblock somebody yet still trust them enough to hold a mop. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:33, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  People could want to have a pblock? —Kusma (talk) 17:06, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The community has rejected the idea of an admin being desysoped due to a partial ban. Don't see why a single page block should be any stronger in this context. Animal lover |666| 20:05, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Only sitewide block should be considered for the removal of administrators. Thingofme (talk) 14:09, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak support. The choice to only desysop on the first of the month concerns me as it could lead to some controversial situations; an admin blocked for 50 days on the 5th of March will remain an admin, while an admin blocked for 30 days on the 2nd of March will not. I find it hard to justify this, as for blocks of under two months whether an admin remains an admin becomes random chance. However, this isn't enough for me to oppose this proposal as I believe it is important to have a process to address situations where admins have so clearly lost the trust of the community. BilledMammal (talk) 14:21, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It appears to me from Worm That Turned's vote that it would happen during the normal automatic removals, I'm assuming that means the others happen on the first of the month, so no need to create extra work. But you have a good sentiment Happy Editing--IAmChaos 16:44, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support in principle but Oppose in its current form. I don't get why this needs to be tied to a specific day on the calendar. But more than that, it allows for stealth desysops. Let's say I block bradv. He's been inactive for 9 months, so he's not going to notice. If nobody else happens to notice, come June 1st, he'll get desysopped. I assume that's not your intent, but as written, it's what would happen. This could be fixed by adding a requirement that in addition to blocking brad, I would have to post a notice to WP:AN to start the clock ticking. Then it essentially becomes WP:PROD for admins. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:32, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  OK, it's been demonstrated to me that blocks do show up on watchlists, and I'm sure every admin's talk page is watchlisted by lots of people, so that satisfies my concern about stealth blocks. I still don't get why this needs to be tied to a specific day on the calendar (and if it must be, at least make it the ides) but that's not enough to me to oppose. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:07, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Interestingly, I did consider putting together a proposal about blocking administrators as part of this, which included a notice to AN. But I didn't feel it was necessary. That said, I really don't like the idea that administrators get an automatic AN review if blocked, creating a "class structure" - we already have supermario issues, which is something I'm trying to address.

  If you are concerned about blocking inactive admins, well, yes, it's possible, but most admins userpage's are watchlisted by multiple people - a stealth block would be noticed. Even if it wasn't, this is something that the appeals process would be quick to fix. Worm^TT(talk) 14:46, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Does watching somebody's user page generate a watchlist notice? Normally, a block is accompanied by a talk page notice, but it doesn't have to be. Could you please block User:RoySmith-testing without any explicit notice? I'm watching their user page. Let's see if I get a notice. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:53, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It does show up on watchlists. To show this, I have just pblocked your test account for 3 hours. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 14:57, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Yeah, I got:

  × Block log 14:57:29 Barkeep49 talk contribs block changed block settings for RoySmith-testing talk contribs blocking the page User:RoySmith/Three best sources with an expiration time of 2023-04-17T17:56:33 (autoblock disabled) ‎(requested for testing purposes by User:RoySmith) (unblock | change block)

  I'm actually kind of surprised about that, but, OK. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:02, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose in this form. (a) it isn't clear that 28 days is enough for a good-faith unblock request in complicated cases and we shouldn't let stalling an unblock turn into a desysop (b) why not just escalate to ArbCom after the 28 days? (c) would any block trigger this? —Kusma (talk) 14:38, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I also note that no discussion is required, meaning that the mechanism is - in theory - not implementing a "community desysop" but a "single admin PROD-like desysop". I know that this will likely play out differently in practice, but there should be safeguards against the proposed mechanism. —Kusma (talk) 15:09, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support If editor has been blocked for more than a month, especially if that block gets confirmed by the community which I suspect it would in a majority of these cases, they shouldn't be an admin anymore. This is true even if the block is for less than an indef or a year, to address Jayron's question about why not wait for the current inactivity to desysop. I see this as an important way for the community to take some control over the deysop practice, something I have long favored. The presence of this in policy would be an important way of combatting the super mario effect as there is now some incentive for an admin to block, as they would anyone else, an admin who has breached policy rather than just go "well it's for arbcom to sort out". As to the idea that it takes someone longer than 28 days to formulate an appeal, they can still appeal the decision: by re-running for RfA. If the community wants to be able to handle some desysops on its own, and it's my fervernt hope that it does, then we need to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and support reasonable proposals like this as first steps towards building community capacity around merit based desysops and showing concerned editors that the community can handle these issues, not just arbcom. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 14:55, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - I'm not quite sure why it's necessary to wait for 28 days. If we're going to go in this direction, then it seems to me that a CBAN of an admin should carry with it an automatic immediate desysop, which, after all, can always be undone if necessary - but, that being said, this proposal is certainly better than the situation we have now, where there's absolutely no way for the community to desysop an admin (despite the fact that it's the community which creates the admin in the first place, via RfA). Beyond My Ken (talk) 15:06, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Remove support in favor of Tony Ballioni's proposal below. Beyond My Ken (talk) 09:11, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• In the proposal, admins can desysop other admins. There is no community element. —Kusma (talk) 15:18, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't agree. A block of an admin would be reviewed by the community. It wouldn't happen based on a single admin's view - or rather, it wouldn't stick for over a month based on a single admins view. Worm^TT(talk) 15:20, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Only admins can initiate the desysop review by blocking. The community can't initiate this. —Kusma (talk) 15:53, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Admins are part of the community - what's more, if you have a consensus of non-admins at say, WP:AN, we can be confident that an admin would implement it. The only way this works is with consensus, and with our current practises. Worm^TT(talk) 15:56, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I am rather uncomfortable with how many implicit assumptions about the functioning of the community and the current practises are part of this proposal. —Kusma (talk) 16:42, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  +1 - it seems unclear to me why a community desysop process does not actually require the community to weigh in, and only assumes that it will. Galobtter (talk) 19:03, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose If we wish to devise a procedure for community-instituted de-sysop, we should devise a procedure for community-instituted de-sysop (with appropriate safeguards). The proposed process will only mean that editors will be encouraged to !vote at for a month or longer block at WP:AN when they believe that the admin should be de-sysoped (irrespective of whether they believe that a block itself is necessary) since that is the only procedural loophole they have been granted to achieve the desired end. Why introduce such a de-sysoping through wink-and-a-nod process? Abecedare (talk) 15:08, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  All editors have safeguards if they are wrongly blocked or they wrongly lose a permission. I do not believe administrators should get extra safeguards and I do not believe that someone who has had conduct worth a 28+ day block fulfills the administrator conduct policy and thus should not be an admin. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:12, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Sorry, if I was not clear enough. My argument is not that admins with long blocks should not be desysoped (frankly, I can't imagine a scenario, except for self-requested blocks, when they shouldn't be) or that admins need extra-safeguards from being blocked (they don't!). My objection is that a >28-day block should not be a necessary intermediate step for a community-instituted desysop. If the community wishes to desyspo an admin they should !vote for it explicitly rather than be forced/encouraged to !vote for a > 28-day block with the understanding that such a block would eventually lead to the desired end, i.e., a desysop. (I think I may be repeating myself, so if you or anyone wishes to discuss this separately we can do so at my talk-page w/o taking too much space here.) Abecedare (talk) 15:31, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Abecedare I would absolutely support a direct community desysop proposal, but as yet, we have not found one that can gain consensus (even though mor than one have had majority support). I am not sure that opposing something you agree with because you see a potential something tangentially better is a good idea though. Is that not the definition of perfection getting in the way of good? Worm^TT(talk) 15:52, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support I'm an admin. I got blocked. A lot of people asked me to appeal, so I did, apologising for bad conduct (I was going through a horrible time in my personal life, leading me to lash out completely unnecessarily in complete violation of WP:ADMINCOND) and I was unblocked, easily within a week. If you can't successfully file an appeal within 28 days, you probably shouldn't be an admin. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 15:23, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support I had a completely different comment, but Ritchie333 edit conflicted me and changed my mind. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 15:28, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I did also misunderstand on first reading, thinking that having a block imposed of 28 days or more triggered the desysop, rather than still being blocked after 28 days. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 15:32, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. Although I think this proposal does not go far enough. In practice this sounds similar to a community admin de-sysop process in two steps (Admins getting blocked - 28 day period for the procedural desysop) and I would like more discussion on a robust system based around considering it as a single process (but presumably higher thresholds to implement). That discussion does not have to be now or on this survey, but I think more community power to desysop admins is a good thing. Soni (talk) 15:31, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. If a desysop is needed, do it via ArbCom. That's what it's there for. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 15:34, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment Also @Worm That Turned: maybe this should be listed on WP:CENT or similar. Soni (talk) 15:33, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  It's already been on CENT :). Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:44, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Ah, I see how I missed it. I forgot links are marked as "read" on my browser if I follow it from anywhere, not just from CENT specifically. Thanks for clarifying. Soni (talk) 15:50, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support per Ritchie333. I agree that it's a fair assumption that if an admin stays blocked for 4 weeks then they don't have the community's trust. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 15:57, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. This proposal reminds me of the one linking desysops with community restrictions, which resulted in a clear consensus against.
  Despite the supporters' best intentions, this worsens the "unblockable" and "Super Mario" effects, given that the proposed policy increases the consequences of blocking an administrator and further discourages it. If the proposal prevents even one administrator from being blocked when they should be, then it is not worth it: administrators must be held accountable for their actions. We elect the Arbitration Committee so that it can handle requests for removal of administrative tools. That grave responsibility should not be borne by a single editor.
  When Special:Block is opened, one needs to be convinced that imminent or continuing damage and disruption to Wikipedia will be prevented. That is the main concern. That decision-making process, which is already clouded by the fact that a user with social capital is being blocked, should not be impaired by secondary questions over whether an administrator is fit to continue holding that access.
  Administrators must be held accountable. But this is not the answer. Sdrqaz (talk) 16:18, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure I agree with you on the top line but I really appreciate your well reasoned and concise argument. I think its so important that people look beyond just the question in front of us and try to fit the current proposal into the big picture. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:43, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• (edit conflict) Oppose This proposal allows admins to near-unilaterally desysop another one, unless a review of the block is brought up at AN/I which won't always happen even if a block is controversial. It also makes blocks of an admin greater than 28 days unnecessarily more contentious. I am willing to support a method for the community to desysop an admin, but it should unconditionally require community discussion. Snowmanonahoe (talk) 16:21, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Any admin who is blocked is able to make an unblock request and ask for a community review. I think 28 days is plenty long enough for them to do that. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:31, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Currently, a blocked admin would be subject to a standard block review. With this proposal, they will be subject to a community desysop review, a very different beast for which there is no precedent. It is quite a new ability for any single admin to initiate a community desysop review. —Kusma (talk) 16:47, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Question - Does anyone have a number for how many times an admin has been blocked >28 days and arbcom hasn't quickly and easily stepped in to remove permissions? Seems like a reasonable proposal, but has it ever been needed? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:23, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  This feels a bit like a chicken and the egg. Recently, for instance, Athaenara could have been desysopped under this proposal rather than the arbcom motion which happened. One virtue of this proposal, which I didn't mention above, is that I think it would save some time and community drama - even an ArbCom case request is high on both. Barkeep49 (talk) 16:44, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I reviewed the list of current admins; the only one who this would have affected would be Smartse, who was blocked for 78 days per their own request to enforce a wikibreak. BilledMammal (talk) 18:23, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  That was before my RfA. SmartSE (talk) 18:31, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  But raises the question of whether it's sensible to de-sysop for requesting a wikibreak. Imagine someone on a military deployment: "Thank you for requesting that your account be blocked while you know you won't be able to use it. By the way, we're going to de-sysop you." Thank you for your service, indeed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:06, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm unsure as to whether to support the proposal as a whole, but it would need an exemption for an admin in good standing who requested to be blocked. Certes (talk) 10:01, 25 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  ...especially as an adept wikilawyer would sidestep this measure by resigning their adminship before requesting a block, then re-request sysop when they return. Certes (talk) 10:07, 25 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Part of me wants to support this as a sorta-kinda community desysop process. Rather than "should this person be desysopped" it's "should this person be blocked for exactly 29 days? wink wink what I mean?" My concerns are (a) that the illusion of a community desysop process will lead arbcom to defer to the community for some cases, when it seems like arbcom is doing alright with the extreme cases already (such as those requiring a long block); (b) I'm not sure why it would reduce drama. Anytime someone with a lot of experience gets blocked for one day (nevermind a month or more), it leads to a ton of drama. It's the block more than the desysop, right?; (c) Isn't this easy enough to handle on a case-by-case basis? A desysop can be carried out by arbcom motion, and that should be relatively straightforward in the case of someone blocked for a month. On the other hand, requiring an action by arbcom means there's room for judgment to handle exceptional cases like a requested block. Not sure. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:51, 19 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. If an admin is indef/long-term blocked and has been so for more than 28 days, I don't think it could be read in any other way than they've lost the trust of the community. An ArbCom request in such a case would be little more than a rubber stamp (as I can't see ArbCom reversing such a strong community action), so this would really just save time and effort for the same ultimate result. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:26, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  @Boing! said Zebedee Or maybe they just needed a break or they rage quit? I'm not meaning to call you out on those (nor do I need to know the details), but we should consider if those events should have resulted in the loss of your mop. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:53, 19 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Voluntary relinquishment due to taking a break or leaving Wikipedia would still allow for requesting privileges to be re-granted without a request for administrative privileges, within the bounds of the activity requirements. isaacl (talk) 15:39, 19 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. The community appoints admins. If it can be trusted to do that, it can be trusted to remove them. The proposed conditions under which this would occur seem entirely reasonable. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:50, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  The community has been doing an absolutely terrible job at appointing admins (extremely conservative and unforgiving of small mistakes). —Kusma (talk) 16:58, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  I think that's true, yes. But I wonder if it's another side of the same thing - if theres no community way to get rid of an admin, does it make people at RfA a lot more cautious and demanding? (I really don't know, just pondering out loud.) Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 18:20, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  We've had years of people clamouring against "admins for life" and we have recently made it harder to retain admin status, offending a few low-activity oldtimer admins. It doesn't seem to have made people less cautious. I don't think admin-PROD is going to make any difference to RfA either. —Kusma (talk) 20:34, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  Hmm, yes, I think you're probably right - maybe the creeping intolerance at RfA simply goes hand in hand with general rule creep across the project. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 07:09, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Support If an admin needs to b e blocked, and the block sticks, they are obviously unfit to be an admin. We don't need a month-long committee case to make decisions this obvious. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:00, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - this accounts for appeals happening and so on, so is fine. For the sake of clarity, this can be taken to oppose any alternate standard that might be picked out from this discussion (obviously I'll amend if I see a good one, just to avoid missing a discussion). Nosebagbear (talk) 17:01, 17 April 2023 (UTC) Since we have broken out new ideas as they arise, !vote adjusted to just this one. Nosebagbear (talk) 14:58, 24 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Hesitant support. I have several concerns here. First, that this will raise the stakes for blocking an admin, which is already hard enough: but we don't do it very often, so perhaps it's not a concern. Second, per Abecedare above, that we're not going far enough; but I don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good either. Finally I'm concerned that the ARBCOM appeal clause defangs this proposal. If the intention is that a full ARBCOM case should not be necessary step to a desysop, we're making it to easy for this to end up in ARBCOM's lap anyway. I suppose the burden is shifted from the community to the admin, so perhaps it's a shift for the better; but I'm unconvinced this is going to be a big change in that respect. Ultimately, though, yes, an admin blocked for more than 28 days should likely be desysopped. So I land here. Vanamonde (Talk) 17:35, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support - (another admin here). I think Wugapodes and Beeblebrox have explained why. - Donald Albury 17:46, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. I'm a bit worried that this will incentivize admins/the community to make blocks that wouldn't otherwise need to be made, but I also strongly agree with what Ritchie333 is implying below: that holding out for the perfect proposal means we end up stuck with an even less desirable status quo. I believe this proposal will remove admins who need to be removed and will not remove admins who don't need to be removed, all while furthering admin accountability to the community, which is important to me. That means it's likely to be on net an improvement, and I support things that are improvements even if my ideal desysop proposal might read differently. And if this system doesn't work, I have no doubt that the community will be capable of revising or repealing it. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 17:52, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom. This doesn't seem likely to solve much since I can't imagine very many admins are blocked for a month, return to editing, and don't resign the tools. But as a few of the supporters have alluded to, even a miniscule tightening of the rules for administrators who have clearly lost community trust (and anyone remotely high-profile here who is blocked for a month has very clearly lost the community's trust) is a net-positive. Even if its only real effect is to show that we can agree on something. Ajpolino (talk) 18:14, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose Is this really a "community" desysop process? That is, if most of the power is with admins, can it even really be called a community process? The proposal ostensibly starts with a case where "the community has consensus that an administrator should be blocked indefinitely, or at least for a significant period". But the actual proposal doesn't require any sort of community consensus that the admin be blocked. Yes, any block that's in anyway not obvious will almost certainly go to the community within 28 days, but it still gives the power to admins to start the desysop process. I also note that WP:CTOP blocks can be unilaterally imposed and require a "clear consensus" to lift, so we could have a situation where 60% of the community disagrees with a block but that still results in a desysop. Imagine also being the closer of such a discussion and having the almost unilateral power to decide if someone gets desysopped. Yes, there's the safeguard of "may appeal the removal to the Arbitration Committee" but in a proposal meant to save time I only see more drama and time being wasted in any controversial case.
  I also think this makes blocking admins worse, both in them not being blocked and in them being unnecessarily blocked. As Sdrqaz eloquently explains, this makes blocking admins more troublesome. But I also think this could result in admins being unnecessarily blocked just so they can be desysopped. Someone brought up Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Neelix as one case where this could be useful. But I note that Neelix was never blocked for more than a few days until well after the case, and I don't think a block should have been imposed just to cause a desysop - often times, a community restriction is all that is actually needed. I think there's a case of Goodhart's law here - I'm not and I don't think anyone is disputing that an admin blocked for more than 28 days is unfit to be an admin, but I think using that as a the only measure will cause more problems than it will solve.
  To be honest, I'm not convinced there's any particular need this is addressing. ArbCom has only seemed more and more willing to de-sysop over the past few years (and I've generally seen this as a good thing). The main argument seems to be that this will save a full case in obvious cases, but ArbCom literally just de-sysopped by motion without requiring a case (after a lot of hemming and hawing to be fair). And that was in a case where the community even rejected an indefinite block, so less obvious than any case this proposal addresses. I honestly think all we need is ArbCom being more willing to desysop by motion in obvious cases and the community supporting that. Galobtter (talk) 19:00, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• Support because it's something. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 19:46, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• WeakSupportOppose "Support" reasons are those given by the nom and because it's something. "Weak" Oppose because this we need stronger more routine community reviews rather than focusing on desysop, and this one is for even rarer cases when they blew it as an editor rather than aqs an admin. We need to strengthen WP:Administrative action review and take the "poison pills" out of it. And add to it more admin conduct issues. And the most common results would be mere findings and guidance and maybe a few trouts. North8000 (talk) 20:18, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]